then on across the flat country. I hired a good driver and was able to relax in the front seat while watching the country roll by…the land I had known as a boy.
It looks quite different now, I thought. Maybe it’s because the distances have changed due to the construction of better roads and no more gravel rattling against the frame of the car. Everything is so much smaller when you’re older. I remember, the only times I used to ride through it was while in Camion, and the rest of the time we walked. I suppose what I looked for then was patches of shade whenever we fell out and the taste of sweet cool water from fresh wells on the farms, and ditches too…I remember looking for the ditches.
The driver made a curve and crossed the Tagliamento River on a temporary bridge. It was green along the banks of the river and men were fishing along the shoreline, were the river ran deep and cool with rocks for the big fish to hide. The brown bridge was being repaired and we could hear the sound of ratchets and hammers. However, less than a thousand yards away, the towns bombed out buildings and outbuildings of what remained of a once lovely country village stood as a reminder of the legacy of war. Replaced now by the sounds of a new economy, driven by war, were once the country-folk struggled but now they simply watch and remember the insanity of it all.
“Look at it.” The young driver exclaimed. “In this country you can find a bridge on a rail-spur.”
“I guess the lesson is,” I said, “Don’t ever build yourself a country house or hire Giotto to paint any frescoes, if you live a hundred yards from the bridge.”
“I knew there must be a lesson in it, sir.”
We had passed the ruined villa now, and into the straightaway were the willows grew by the ditches, still dark with water from the winter rain and snow and the fields, painting a beautiful landscape of Mulberry trees sure to be cut down. Just ahead a man was peddling a bike and using both hands to read the morning news.
“If there are heavies, the lesson ought to say a mile.” The driver remarked. “Would ... be about right sir?”
“If it’s a guided missile,” I said. “Better make it two hundred miles and you’d better give the cyclist a toot.”
The driver did so and the man moved over to the shoulder of the road without either looking up, or touching the handlebars. As we passed I tried to see what paper he was reading, but the name was hidden in the fold.
“I guess a man would be better off now to build a house or a church…or to get…who did you say? To paint the lovely pictures on the walls?” The driver asked.
“Giotto, he was a great painter from Firenze, his full name was Giotto di Bondone. He was also a skilled sculptor and architect who lived around the end of the fourteenth century. I saw two of his paintings in the church of St. Francis of Assisi.
They were of St. Francis and the life of Jesus Christ, though I dare not say how he connected the two of them since they lived at different times. But as great as his paintings, I thought his work as the architect of the Duomo in Florence, the design of the campanile and the façade was truly an inspired work, the most spectacular I’ve seen.”
“Sir, please forgive my stupidity, but what is this…how you say, camp…something?”
“The only stupid question, my son…is the one which isn’t asked…so please just ask. It is impossible to ask too many questions. Remember, once I had to ask as well. A campanile is a bell tower, a freestanding bell tower.”
“You must love and know a great deal about art?” It was more a statement than a question.
**************
We were on a straight stretch of road now and were making good time. One farm blended, nearly blurred into another and you could only see what was far ahead and moving toward you. Lateral vision was just a condensation of flat, low country in the winter, I’m not sure I like the speed, I thought to myself.
“Art,” I answered the driver, “I know quite a bit about painters and art.” I remembered how little I knew or cared to know before Bonnie. Besides medicine, art was her passion and I always told her, painting was her lover and I, its apprentice. She was such a brilliant and talented person, everything I know, which was worth knowing, the gentle side of life…I learned from my sweet Bonnie, my greatest love and my greatest joy in life.
The paintings she created, hang now in my apartment. They are reminders of what she may have reproduced those sounds of music in a woman’s world of a child crying to be changed and fed, music to her ears.
“I’m called DeNeri, sir.”
“Excuse me DeNeri, but there is a fine place at Cortina, excellent food, well run by an old family and nobody bothers you, lets head over there for a meal.” I said establishing my command.
“Yes, sir, Colonel…now, sir, the reason I asked you about the painters, is these Madonna’s. I thought I ought to see some painters, so I went to some big museum in Florence.”
“The Uffizi, or was it the Pitti Palace?”
“I’m not sure sir; I just remember it was a great long building, which ran in front of the Arno River. I am quite certain a person could stay in a building for more than a month and still not see it all. I kept looking at those paintings of the Madonna until they all started running together. I tell you Colonel, sir, a man who hasn’t checked out on this painting, can only see so many Madonna’s…and they get to him…You know my theory?”
“I’d like to hear it.”
“You know how crazy they are about bambinas, and the less they get to eat, the more bambinas they got…and have coming” Well beggin your pardon sir, I think these paintings were probably big bambini lovers, like all Italians. I don’t know these ones like you just mentioned now, so I don’t include them on my theory, and I’m hoping you’ll put me straight anyway.”
“Well, DeNeri…you must first understand. The Italians are mostly devout Catholics and the bambini of which you speak are the representation of the Christ child, whom no one has ever seen. There is a deep, unabiding longing to get a glimpse of God.”
“But it looks to me like these Madonna’s, whom I really saw plenty of, sir…it just looks to me like these straight ordinary Madonna painters were sort of a showing, say, of this whole bambini business…if you understand what it is I mean, sir?”
“DeNeri, have you heard the word manifest?”
“Can’t say I ever ran across it, sir.”
“While the vast majority of those interested in art, like yourself, indulge themselves with the visual impact of the face of the Madonna. What the great artist were doing in the Madonna, which you witnessed at the Uffizi, was a manifest. A plain way of showing and giving you the capability to readily and instantly perceive through the senses, most essentially through sight, not what the Madonna looked like DeNeri, but why was she chosen to deliver in a virgin birth, the Son of God.”
“Dude that is really heavy.”
“DeNeri, wrap your mind around this thought. All of the paintings you have seen of the Madonna shows her as a young woman, very beautiful, but what you must remember is there is a law among painters, which is called ‘artistic license’. It essentially says what the artist can imagine as a subject is his right to paint.”
“Oh! Are you saying that she may not look like these paintings?”
“Bingo, you are catching on, and I have a theory on this age issue.”
“I am all ears…and nose.” DeNeri said laughing at himself.
“Here is the drill, Mary had a sister whose name was Sarah and when the angel appeared to Mary, she was informed that her older sister was with child as well. It is said Sarah was 90. Someone is going to write a book in the future which capitalizes on this issue, and make a fortune.”
“Why not you, Colonel?”