Fresco work fixes your mind on a day at a time; all you think about is how you’re going to handle the next giornata. Obviously it was a lot easier for me because Tiepolo marked his giornata right on the cartoon. You have, let’s say, a section of fluffy cloud and a triangular chunk of blue sky between some clouds, and another lump of darker cloud, and that’s about all you can do in one day’s work-your giornata-on the wet plaster of the intonaco, or surface layer. We had modern scaffolds and lights, so no candle stuck on the head for Chaz. I just mixed my colors with lime water, set up the palette, and up I went. And Marco, or another one of the grandsons, helped pin up the cartoon and I pounced it with red chalk, and then we took off the cartoon and I incised the lines of chalk dust with a wooden stylus, and then they laid the intonaco and I painted on it wet, using the incised lines as guides.
It was like a gigantic paint-by-numbers, only in the style of Tiepolo; it looked clumsy from close up, but from the floor it looked like old Giambattista did it yesterday. It had that don’t-give-a-shit ease in it, true sprezzatura, total authority laying down the paint, like I’d been doing Tiepoloesque frescoes every day of my life. In the center, the Virgin exalted, the most important part; I took the liberty of giving her Lotte’s face, nice Jewish girl after all, or at least the Rothschild half, and why not, I’m sure Tiepolo stuck his honeys on ceilings all over Europe.
About three weeks into the project, say the middle of November, I got a surprise visit from my ex-father-in-law-I mean Lotte’s father, not the side-of-beef one. He was in Venice for a conference. Interesting guy, pushing eighty now but still active, had a long career in the UN diplomatic service, then moved on to art scholarship. Calls himself an amateur, but he’s written a lot, apparently quite respected in European art-history circles. Not one of those Rothschilds, as he likes to say, consequently went through a rough time as a kid, lost his family to the Nazis and survived by being sheltered in a convent in Normandy. Married an Italian woman; she had the one kid and then died, cancer, when Lotte was about twelve. He never remarried. Lotte had told him where I was and I sensed that this visit was in the nature of an inspection tour. I didn’t mind; I kind of wanted to know how I was too.
We had lunch at a little hole-in-the-wall place he likes near the Palazzo Grimani, a slow Venetian meal.
I asked him how Lotte and the kids were. He said, “The children are wonderful as always. They miss you. Rose believes that Big Italy, as she calls it, is on the subway somewhere near Little Italy. She has her own MetroCard now and threatens to come and visit you when she feels like it. Milo…well, what can one say? He is melancholy after this last relapse, but he has a tremendous brightness and courage that keeps breaking through. He said he hopes to live long enough to see you again.”
“Shit!”
“Yes, life is sometimes shit. Lotte is holding up despite…perhaps you haven’t heard. Jackie Moreau is dead.”
“What? Oh, God! How?”
“Murdered, in Rome. Stabbed and dumped in the river. The police believe it was a robbery gone wrong.”
“Christ! She must be devastated.”
“Yes. He must be her oldest friend, you know. As I say, life is sometimes shit, but we are obliged to keep living. Tell me about the work you are doing here.”
I was happy to change the subject, and we talked about Tiepolo for a while; he said it was a shame I’d not had a chance to see the frescoes in the prince-bishop’s palace in Würzburg, which were in his opinion the best things the artist had ever done.
“I suppose your next project will be something by the Guardis,” he said with a smile.
“Why the Guardis?”
“Didn’t you know? Tiepolo married Francesco Guardi’s daughter. His sons, Giovanni Domenico and Lorenzo, both became pretty fair painters. One of the few cases where talent bred true, and isn’t this one of the great conundrums of human existence? From whence it comes. I, for example, have a passionate love of painting, but it would never occur to me to try to paint, or rather it did occur to me, unfortunately. After the war I spent an unhappy year in art school, until it became clear that I would never amount to anything in that line. And Lotte too, as you know, tried her hand, and the antitalent was also inherited, poor child. And you of course are the counterexample.”
“I’d say the counter-counterexample. I inherited a load of talent from a man who never used what he’d been given properly, and guess what? I don’t use it properly either.”
“You are blocked.”
“I am blocked.” At that moment I almost spilled it: the whole horror of what had happened in New York, the fancy loft, the Enso Gallery, the loft door that wouldn’t open, the falsification of memory. Because of anyone I knew, Maurice Rothschild would have been the person most likely to understand it. But I didn’t. Why not, Chaz? Why didn’t you unburden yourself to this enormously charitable and knowledgeable man? Maybe there would have been a great vomiting out of the blockage then, he’d be my magician lifting the curse with a subtle word, but the truth is we love our dark stuff, we hug it to our inner hearts even as it corrodes our vitals. I confess it: just like with Slotsky, I was simply too fucking terrified to ask.
Instead I laughed a fake chuckle and said, “But what can I do? At least I’m making money.”
“Not to be sneezed at,” he said after a decent pause. “Let’s have some coffee and a little grappa and then we’ll go see your ceiling.”
Which we did in due course, and when he saw it, looking up with the spotting scope I use to check the paint from the ground, he laughed and said, “That’s marvelous! A little artistic joke. You have captured precisely my girl.”
“You think she’ll mind?”
“On the contrary, she’ll be delighted.”
“I thought she didn’t like artistic jokes.”
“That would depend on the joke and its context. Artistic jokes are amusing only against a serious background. Mozart wrote a musical joke, but Mozart is easily distinguishable from Spike Jones. This”-here he gestured upward-“is astounding. I see the paint is still fresh, but I would be hard-pressed not to call it the work of the master, and it’s not merely the composition, which of course you had from the cartoons, it’s the colors, that glorious shot-silk effect and the delicacy of the drawing in the details, that marvelous line he has. Or you have. It is a consummate forgery. In fact, I believe it is, all told, the very best artistic forgery I have ever seen. And I have seen a few.”
“Really? When?”
“Oh, it was something I did in my early career. I had the degree in art history, perfectly useless, I thought, for a diplomat-economics, political science far more the thing, and if history, one wants the history of rulers and their elaborate murders, wars and so forth-but someone in the ministry must have examined dossiers because I was picked to participate in the negotiations around returning artworks looted by the Third Reich. This was in, I believe, 1956. Of course, the great troves, the most famous works stolen by Göring and the big gangsters, had already been returned. But the scale of the looting was so vast…I mean, an enormous proportion of the cultured class in Germany and the conquered lands was despoiled, not to mention museums in places like the Netherlands and France and Poland. Not only the Jews, who of course lost everything, but liberals and socialists of every stripe. I mean to say, if you have a regime that is essentially lawless, anyone with a pretension to power can take anything he wants from anyone designated as an enemy of the state.”