Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [65]
What did my wife have to complain about? I had quit my job as a salesman of life insurance for Connecticut General. I was intoxicated most of the time not only by alcohol but by the creation of huge fields of a single color of Sateen Dura-Luxe. I had rented a potato barn and made a down payment on a house out here, which was then a wilderness.
And in the midst of that domestic nightmare there arrived a registered letter from Italy, a country I had never seen. It asked me to come to Florence, all expenses paid for one, to testify in a lawsuit there about two paintings, a Giotto and a Masaccio, which had been taken by American soldiers from a German general in Paris. They had been turned over to my platoon of art experts to be catalogued and shipped to a warehouse in Le Havre, where they were to be crated and stored. The general had evidently stolen them from a private house while retreating north through Florence.
The crating in Le Havre was done by Italian prisoners of war, who had done that sort of work in civilian life. One of them evidently found a way to ship both paintings to his wife in Rome, where he kept them hidden, except to show to close friends after the war. The rightful owners were suing to recover them.
So I went over there alone, and I got my name in the papers for accounting for the trip the paintings made from Paris to Le Havre.
But I had a secret, which I have never told anybody before: “Once an illustrator, always an illustrator!” I couldn’t help seeing stories in my own compositions of strips of colored tape applied to vast, featureless fields of Sateen Dura-Luxe. This idea came into my head uninvited, like a nitwit tune for a singing commercial, and would not get out again; each strip of tape was the soul at the core of some sort of person or lower animal.
So whenever I stuck on a piece of tape, the voice of the illustrator in me who would not die would say, for example, “The orange tape is the soul of an Arctic explorer, separated from his companions, and the white one is the soul of a charging polar bear.”
This secret fantasy, moreover, infected and continues to infect my way of seeing scenes in real life. If I watch two people talking on a street corner, I see not only their flesh and clothes, but narrow, vertical bands of color inside them—not so much like tape, actually, but more like low-intensity neon tubes.
When I got back to my hotel at about noon on my last day in Florence, there was a note for me in my pigeonhole. As far as I knew, I had no friends in all of Italy. The note on expensive paper with a noble crest at the top said this:
There can’t be all that many Rabo Karabekians in the world. If you’re the wrong one, come on over anyway. I’m mad for Armenians. Isn’t everybody? You can rub your feet on my carpets and make sparks. Sound like fun? Down with modern art! Wear something green.
And it was signed, Marilee, Countess Portomaggiore (the coal miner’s daughter).
Wow!
27
I TELEPHONED HER at once from the hotel. She asked if I could come to tea in an hour! I said I sure could! My heart was beating like mad!
She was only four blocks away—in a palazzo designed for Innocenzo “the Invisible” de Medici by Leon Battista Alberti in the middle of the fifteenth century. It was a cruciform structure whose four wings abutted on a domed rotunda twelve meters in diameter and in whose walls were half embedded eighteen Corinthian columns four and a half meters high. Above the capitals of the columns was a clerestory, a wall pierced with thirty-six windows. Above this was the dome—on whose underside was an epiphany, God Almighty and Jesus and the Virgin Mary and angels looking down through clouds, painted by Paolo Uccello. The terrazzo floor, its designer unknown, but almost surely a Venetian,