The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (7 page)

He stood there, chin in hand, tilting his head right and left. He walked away from her a short distance, then came back. “Well, I must say, I don’t see that much of a resemblance to your famous ancestor.” All the while he spoke, his eyes kept studying her. “What do you do, by the way, if I may ask?” Manship said.

“Do? What do you mean, do? You mean for a living?”

She seemed on the verge of lashing out again, then appeared to draw back. “Some acting. Some modeling. But, professionally, I’m an actor.” She said it proudly, almost defiantly. “That is, when I can find work.”

“Is that often?”

“Not often enough. There can be some thin times.”

“Are they thin now?”

“For the moment, I’m between roles. In all truth, however, it’s been a fairly long moment.” She laughed ruefully.

Her laugh lingered on the air, but when Manship took out his wallet and started to peel off bills, she looked mortified.

“What in God’s name are you doing?”

“Oh, come—it’s nothing, really.”

“Absolutely not. I’m not in the habit of begging.”

“This is hardly begging. Just a small advance on your salary.”

“What salary? I haven’t, accepted your offer. And what’s more, I don’t intend to. I have one or two prospects here that look quite promising …”

Her voice trailed off as if she knew her boast conveyed little conviction. She went on now in a more conciliatory vein. “It’s awkward for me right now.” She looked uneasily up at one of the leaded windows. “There are things pressing.”

His eyes followed hers to the window. “Have you ever been to New York?”

She shook her head no.

“Despite the fact that it’s a bit crazy there, it’s a wonderful place,” he said. “Much theater, and lots of people who can move you ahead in that area. I know some of them.”

Her mouth fell open and she gaped at him. “You can’t really believe I would agree to come for that reason?”

For the first time during their conversation, he sensed her pride and realized what a crude enticement he’d offered. It made him feel shabby.

He put his cup down on the cast-iron table and rose with a sigh. “I’ll be with our restorer all day tomorrow. Don’t answer now.” His manner was contrite. “Sleep on it. Then have dinner with me and we’ll talk again.”

She made a wary face. “What does this mean—‘sleep on it’?” She pronounced the words as though he’d proposed something indecent.

In spite of the tension of the moment, he laughed. “An idiom. It means don’t rush to judgment. Think about the offer a while before you decide anything.”

Outside in the narrow streets, the sky was brushed with streaks of russet. A soft violet dusk had rained down like wine decanted slowly through water. It cooled the air and brought with it the scent of heliotrope and fennel. The shuttered windows of nearby dwellings had been thrown open as if to breathe in the approaching cool of evening. Lights twinkled everywhere and darkness carried with it the sounds of supper being prepared in countless kitchens—the clatter of pots and pans, cutlery and dishes being laid out on tables, mothers at the open-shuttered windows, calling tardy children home for the night.

He was looking for a taxi stand, but his movements through the narrow, winding street seemed aimless, desultory, like a man who felt he’d mislaid something but wasn’t quite sure what.

Over and over, he replayed in his mind the scene in. the villa, trying to analyze what had happened. He couldn’t escape the thought that he’d committed some awful gaffe—brandished money, treated her cheaply. He knew he’d gone there with the hope that the woman would decline the offer he’d been ordered to propose. Now his greatest fear was that it seemed she might.

“T
HE MOMENT WE HAD
your wire we knew something was amiss.”

“It was only intended as a warning. I didn’t want to alarm you.”

“Surely,” said Signor Torelli. “We understand. As for the Pallavicini
Transfiguration,
we can handle it.”

“You can?” Manship felt hope leap in his heart.

“Surely. When I first saw it, I tell you, my heart sank. When we examined it, we saw that the slashes are not as bad as they look at first. The cuts run with the grain. We can sew them. They will be hardly noticeable;” Signor Torelli looked at him uneasily. “Unfortunately, I wish I could say as much for the
Centurion.
”

“When did it get here?”

“They had the Pallavicini Virgin here that same day. With the St. Stephen’s canvas, the Lloyd’s people carried the
Centurion
by hand from Istanbul the day after.” Torelli wiped his brow with an immense handkerchief.
“Tragico,”
he grieved.

Signor Torelli was a small man with elaborately curled mustaches and droopy dark eyes that had the look of overripe muscat grapes. He had a disconcerting habit of starting most of his sentences with the word
surety.

“Can I see them now?” Manship asked.

“Of course. We’ll drive over to the shop together.”

“
Is it
far from here?”

“Oh no. Fifteen, maybe twenty kilometers. We’re there in twenty minutes, or a half hour.” Torelli skipped spryly round the office, picking up papers, struggling into his jacket.

Manship had been standing near a pair of French doors, staring out into the courtyard. Now he turned and gazed at the hyperkinetic little Tuscan.

“When do you think I can have the paintings?” Manship asked.

It was then the Friday morning of what promised to be a very warm day. Signor Torelli had already melted visibly through his seersucker suit. His tongue flicked out serpentlike over white parched lips. He tilted his head and studied Manship warily.

“As you know, Mr. Manship, restorers are pathological liars. Lateness is a matter of principle with them.”

“I understand,” said Manship.

Torelli raided on, “I’ve been on the phone to them a dozen times in the past two days. One day they tell me one thing; the next day it’s another.”

“I must have them at least one week before the show, Mr. Torelli.”

For some odd reason, Torelli glanced at his wristwatch. “One week.” He swallowed hard. “Surely. I promise it, Mr. Manship. Believe me,” he muttered. “Surely, you shall have them. This time no ifs or buts.”

Manship feigned satisfaction, but years of dealing with restorers, as well as gallery owners, had made him skeptical. “That gives us ample time to fetch the drawings and paintings and have them on the plane with me by noon to New York.”

Manship rose abruptly and stretched his legs. “Then everything’s settled. I should like now to go out to the shop to look at the paintings for myself.”

“Surely—with great pleasure,” said Torelli.

The old gentleman, visibly relieved to have done with the ticklish part of the meeting with the “Metropolitan fellow,” dialed three numbers on a private telephone. Then, leading Manship out through the shadowy high-ceilinged gallery and locking the doors behind him, he opened the door of a gleaming white vintage Daimler parked just outside on the graveled drive and invited Manship to enter. That done, the old man scurried around to the driver’s side and, with much huffing and puffing, maneuvered his paunch in behind the wheel. “Don’t worry, Mr. Manship,” Torelli said, expanding his chest. “Monday morning. Bright and early. Surely, it’s a promise. And when Torelli promises …”

They set off with a lurch.

They drove north from the city over a landscape of green terraced hills dotted with the umber-colored silhouettes of ancient family palazzos. Patches of vineyards and groves of olive trees scattered bright splashes of green over the brown undulant humps. They wound through tiny villages, with empty streets and squares, where all the shop windows were shuttered against the blinding noonday heat and the ubiquitous clock towers, like the hands of sundials, cast their long needle shadows across the vacant, broiling piazzas. Out once more on the narrow lanes of countryside, the only hints of habitation were the occasional drowsing goats tethered beneath trees, or the eerie tinkle of cowbells clanking through the scorched afternoon. In less than a half hour they reached the restorers. Accompanied by the chief conservator, a Ligurian by the name of Panuzzi, they toured the shop, a series of large interconnected work spaces where various craftsmen chiseled at statuary and daubed and matched paint onto fraying canvases. A workforce of nearly a dozen young men attired in plaster-dusted jeans and denim aprons shouted back and forth, chain-smoked, drank endless paper cupfuls of coffee and Pelligrino water, laughed raucously above the chink of hammers and chisels, and hurled good-natured insults at one another as they labored over their appointed tasks. To Manship, they seemed boyish and inexperienced, inattentive to the rigors of their highly demanding work. But after even the briefest inspection of the final product, he had to admit they were masters.

Seeing the paintings had a tonic effect on Manship. For the first time in several days, his spirits lifted. The work already done was more than anyone could have reasonably hoped for. They’d moved quickly, particularly with those things most damaged. Moreover, the restoration was first-rate, flawless, without looking unnaturally new.

As his eye wandered over one of several versions of the Madonna, Manship waved a hand lightly through the air above it, as if to whisk away some barely perceptible mote of dust. For a moment, he permitted his finger to linger with a slight tremor over the surface of the canvas. Withdrawing a jeweler’s loop from his pocket, he carefully inserted it into the socket of his eye.

Torelli and Panuzzi hovered breathlessly behind him. “Note the line running along her throat, Signor Manship,” the chief conservator remarked. “And the shading defining it. Exquisite, no?”

Manship had just been studying that same area. He wondered how long it had taken Botticelli to render just the right balance of line to shading. Did it require hours and hours of exasperating trial and error, or had the old master dashed it off with an effortless twist of the wrist? Manship tended toward the latter opinion. His loop ranged up and down the canvas, then swung horizontally left and right. “The reds down in the lower right …”

“Yes, yes, I know.” Signor Panuzzi was crestfallen. “They appear pallid now. That’s because of the age and condition of the material beneath. Botticelli’s reds by no means. But when I finish with them, Mr. Manship, I swear to you by the ghost of my dear departed mother, Botticelli himself could not tell the difference between Panuzzi’s red and his own.”

Torelli laughed nervously and dabbed his immense handkerchief at the back of his neck.

When they came to the Pallavicini painting, it was a different matter entirely. Far more grave, but Manship was pleased with the work that had been done so far.

“Not bad, ay, Signor Manship?” Torelli asked hopefully.

“I think it will be fine,” Manship said after a moment, spirits rising.

But later, standing before the
Centurion,
he was bereft, like someone who’d come to a morgue to identify the body of a loved one brutally violated. No one spoke for some time, awestruck by the degree of rage inflicted on the work. And yet, beneath the long, jagged gashes, within the very tatters and ribbons of canvas spilling out from beneath the frame, vivid glimpses of the glory of the painting still endured.

“Tragico,”
old Torelli murmured again.

“What can you do for it?” Manship asked after a while. His mouth dry as cotton, he stood with his back to the two men, staring up transfixed at the destruction. But he knew the answer already.

Both of them cleared their throats, but it was Signor Panuzzi who spoke. “We can sew it back, match threads and paint to the original canvas. But I must be honest. It will never be right. Too much of the material is destroyed. The eyes—just look at the eyes.”

Manship gazed up at the gaping holes in the canvas where the eyes had once been.

“I can repaint the eyes, Signor Manship,” the voice stammered behind him. “But they will never be Botticelli eyes. The same with the Pallavicini. I can’t replace those eyes. I’m merely a restorer. Botticelli was a god.”

They finished off with some minor details, then walked out of the shop. At the moment, the workmen were outside, having their lunch at a long stone table in a grove of lemon trees at the back.

Manship grew suddenly grave. “You will promise me, Signor Panuzzi, and you, too Signor Torelli, never to let the paintings out of your sight while they’re here in your possession.”

“That, I can assure you, Signor Manship,” Panuzzi said.

“Surely.” Old Torelli nodded, touched by the solemnity of commitment.

“If someone comes nosing about, asking questions,” Manship went on, “you will notify the carabinieri at once. And call me.” He pressed his personal business card into Panuzzi’s big paint-spattered hands.

At the conclusion of their business, Panuzzi invited him and Signor Torelli to sit down and join him and the work crew for lunch. There were flasks of ice-cold Frascati, loaves of crusty round Tuscan bread, bottles of mineral water, plates of hard, tangy goat cheese, black and green olives. Over a small fire nearby, the men were roasting chunks of sweet fennel sausage. The savory odor of burning fat and apple wood made Manship hungry.

“I
WAS SURE YOU
wouldn’t come.”

“I didn’t intend to.”

“But you did all the same.”

“To be perfectly frank, I was fiendishly hungry.”

He looked at her as if to gauge the depth of her seriousness, then laughed out loud. “Well, you’re nothing if not blunt. Let’s order.”

The place he’d chosen was on the left bank of the Arno in that vaguely arty section of narrow alleys clogged with cafés, boutiques, and craft shops, lying between the river and the Boboli Gardens.

Recalling how she had bridled the afternoon before when he’d tried to tempt her with a hint of influential friends, he was careful not to select anything too flashy or imposing. Small, cozy, informal, warmed by a large woodstove on which bread was baked, the restaurant was what the Florentines call an
enoteca.
They offered good wine, better-than-average Tuscan fare, and the waiters were friendly.