The Italian Teacher(7)
He watches Natalie prepare dinner, just the two of them because Bear is always working late. She cooks appallingly, which Pinch realized from dining occasionally with Roman neighbors who had invited him when Natalie was faring poorly with her nerves, as happens now and then—always presaged by explosions of anger about nothing. When Pinch perceives her plummeting, he talks fast, attempting to do something, not sure what, so recounts facts learned in class or makes up astonishing coincidences. “I passed these people on Lungotevere, and they were all talking about you, Mom, saying how much they like you.”
Natalie grabs him.
“What?” he asks in fright. “What, Mom?”
She holds on to him, almost violently. He pulls back in embarrassment, looking at his shoes.
When Bear returns, Natalie transforms, striving to mirror his mood. If he battled a painting at the studio, he enters in silence, a quiet that exudes across the apartment. On the other hand, if he completed a work, he marches in with a holler of “Where you reptiles at?” Doesn’t matter what time or who’s sleeping. And he’s right: They prefer to be awake for this. He tackles and tickles his son, hoisting and lowering Pinch like a squealing barbell in pajamas. More often than not, Bear recalls a flaw in his just-completed work, which compels him to rush back to the studio, leaving the scent of pipe tobacco and Natalie to sedate their hot-faced, wild-eyed boy. She races around until catching Pinch, who is forcibly soothed by the imprisonment of her embrace, his muscles twitching, then asleep.
8
Pinch waits beside his mother on the steps of their building, until she leaps up, shading her brow, waving to a malnourished fiftyish Englishman in tweed who lopes closer, hands clasped behind his back, supporting the weight of his canvas rucksack. Cecil Ditchley was her favorite instructor at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, which she attended straight out of high school, wanting to study among the British, who took pottery seriously. What she found were classes of chilly young men brooding over form. English pottery of the period, a critic remarked, had the elegance of “the tree trunk, the boulder, the flint block, if you like, the turnip.” But Natalie longed for more than turnips: to spin and raise and score in clay those expressionistic passions that had already transformed painting, sculpture, music. Why should art be beyond ceramics? But her classmates’ interest in her derived either from the hope of a cheap seduction or to request that she decorate their work—“Add something airy, Natalie.” It was Cecil who saved her, the solitary instructor to encourage that she throw her own pots. She loved Cecil for this, a connection without any hint of sex but only a wish (on her part, at least) to vault all intermediate stages and be devoted. They’ve corresponded in the dozen years since, growing closer in longhand. He was always too destitute to visit. But Bear intervened, sending a ticket.
Pinch runs toward their guest—only to turn shy upon reaching him. The potter presents a bony hand and Pinch shakes it, his grip sliding down long tapering fingers, yellowed at their tips from roll-your-own cigarettes. “You are Charles,” the Englishman notes, sweeping back blond bangs that flop over his brow and give him youth, or did so from a distance.
Natalie leads her friend inside, showing him around their grand shabby apartment. Pinch trails after, buzzing at the precise frequency of his mother’s high. She is proposing a thousand outings for Cecil and querying him about his trip here on various third-class trains, while Pinch interjects rapid-fire questions about the life of a hermit (he expected a graybeard in rags).
“Activities are somewhat lacking in my parts,” Cecil explains with surprise, as if only noticing this deficit. London artists who are aware that Cecil Ditchley today inhabits a stone cottage in the Eastern Pyrenees (snowed in for weeks each winter, no electricity) mull over this image, pondering whether the man is tragic. On balance, admiration wins out. Careerists always salute those who lack ambition.
Long ago, Cecil was a beautiful youth and celebrated for it, passing through the arms of various lovers, of various sexes. After Cambridge, he dedicated himself to sculpture, influenced by Archipenko and Epstein and Moore. Pacifism turned him against muscular sculpture, and he moved to St. Ives in Cornwall, taking up residency at the Leach Pottery. To his surprise, he found himself a natural craftsman. Art required explanation, converting the maker into a talker, and he found it deathly embarrassing to profess what anything meant. Pottery, by contrast, meant only itself: A pot is for honey, a jug is for water.
These days, at his isolated home on the French side of Catalonia, Cecil digs his own clay and fells timber for the wood-fired kiln, barely subsisting off the sale of domestic pottery to local peasants, even though a dozen Ditchley ceramics would constitute a modest show on Bond Street. An enterprising London dealer once drove to Roussillon to procure crates of Cecil’s work for a pittance. But the potter’s location proved so remote that the dealer merely wasted petrol, returning home with a trunk full of wine and a foul mood.
Whatever the cost, Cecil sticks with his French exile, like those Cambridge spies who traded dreary postwar Britain for Soviet paradise, only to find themselves condemned to being irrevocably English abroad. Except that Cecil drinks gallons less liquor than Guy Burgess et al. For him, the beverage is Assam tea, whose loose leaves he keeps in a suede drawstring pouch that he pulls apart with chipped front teeth, inhaling India, distracted for a moment—he lived in Bengal as a child—then here again, back among them, even if Cecil is never entirely among those he is with, his sight line skimming above their heads, as if someone else were expected presently.