The Italian Teacher(15)
“That’s just how you’re feeling, Mom. It’s not true.”
“Why not? Why does everyone have the right to tell me what I’m really feeling?”
“I wasn’t.”
“People always are,” she flames back. “Telling me: ‘You’re only sad. You’re just low. You’re only upset. It’s because you’re hungry. Or tired. Natalie, it’s just in your fucking head.’ What isn’t in your head? What isn’t?” She struggles to light the cigarette, ranting to the window now: “But, yes, yes: Discard any opinions of mine that are sad. Call me deluded.”
“I never said that.”
“Deluded because it’s not nice to hear. I’m not here to be nice and pretty and nice and pretty and nice and pretty.”
“Mom, I didn’t say any of that.” His pulse races, a sickening flutter, for Natalie doesn’t hear him anymore, as if his statements and hers were out of sync by minutes. “I never said that.”
1965
14
After quitting pottery, Natalie takes a full-time secretarial job at Olivetti, and socializes with a group of expats, none in the art world, mostly childless couples, the husbands old, the wives a younger version of old, perhaps with a parrot that’ll outlive them all. It’s a boozy circuit, so Pinch is often alone at night, when he takes to experimenting with Bear’s leftover art supplies. When Natalie returns late, she is often struck by his efforts. “You really are good,” she marvels, turning from the sketches to Pinch, as if he were someone new.
By age fifteen, he is painting seven days a week. Her potter’s wheel is heaped with paint tubes and spattered rags, as it was during the occupancy of Bear (who has given Natalie his old studio for as long as they care to stay). Outside their home, the warren of alleys is still inhabited by the same push-and-shove Roman working class, housewives, and boisterous kid gangs that don’t consider Pinch, a weedy blondish teen, one of theirs, much as their parents don’t quite get his Canadian mother. Beatnik tourists sometimes wander through their quarter, talking loud English, searching for street signs. Pinch wants to intervene and show that he knows their language—only to dash back inside, taking refuge among his paints.
Most evenings, he studies The Materials of the Artist by Max Doerner, a book of Dad’s that has become gospel, including revelations on intermediate varnish and underpainting, on the weight of pigments in Cremnitz white, sap green, Prussian blue. He mixes paints at length, deferring that frightful instant of decision. (As Bear once said, “What is art but decisions?”) Pinch hesitates at the brink—then kisses color to canvas, first a peck, bristles probing as he stoops to the easel, which he has not yet raised to his new adolescent height.
“Should I keep my bad pictures too?”
“Of course,” Natalie replies, a trifle forcefully, rising from her seat on the couch. “Sorry—I know I promised not to look. But it’s hard.”
“Why?”
“I’m excited. You pick up techniques so fast, Pinch,” she says. “So, yes: Keep everything. People will want to know how your style developed.”
“Oh, come off it, Mom!” he scoffs. “Art historians will be dying to see another painting of our door!”
“Maybe they’ll be researching the early years of Charles Bavinsky.” She grabs him. “Pinch?”
Chuckling shyly, he pushes back—then scans her face for reassurance. He is a wary teen, assuming that everyone mocks him. Kids at the international school, even in younger grades, treat Pinch as if he were toxic. Partly because he hasn’t once left Italy (poor?). Because his parents aren’t married anymore; a deadbeat dad who flew the coop, a kooky mom who smells of garlic and wears chunky colored jewelry. In gym, Pinch doesn’t sprint so much as lollop breathlessly after the pack, his fine hair always greasy, his chin and forehead pimpled constellations. He speaks little, so they think him dim. But it’s because silence is safer. Once, last year, he bumped into three boys from the grade above larking around Piazza Farnese. They knew a secret entrance to catacombs, and led Pinch down, all of them scouting for skulls while sipping from a bottle—risqué because wine is a peasant beverage for the locals. The excursion was memorable, unforgettable, and Pinch had friends! Later, when he approached those boys at school, one kicked him hard in the shins, pinned him, and burned his eyebrows with a match, while the others stood there, laughing away, ridiculing remarks that he’d made underground. (“Imagine you were trapped down here, Eric, but you weren’t really dead, but they closed the opening, but you were alive and nobody knew!”) As for artsy kids at school, they have nothing to do with Pinch either, because they meet after-hours, sculpting soapstone or silk-screening or nailing together the Guys and Dolls set under teacher supervision. But Natalie keeps her son away from all that—she mistrusts schoolhouse art instructors, who remind her of Mr. Fontaine. Her child can paint at home, safeguarded by her.
Before a canvas, he disappears, eliminating school indignities, even sweeping aside Natalie. He smirks in mumbled dialogue with Vincent van Gogh, as portrayed by Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life, which Mom took him to see at that cinema whose roof opens during the intermission; Pinch gazing skyward, expecting a swirling starry night, finding slate clouds. Ever since that movie, Pinch sees the red-bearded Dutchman overseeing every paint stroke, offering advice in Bear’s American accent.