Milan

Madathil Narayanan Rajkumar

1

It is one of the happiest of days, still he was humping

to climb the steps to catch the electric train at Egmore station. Two lines converged in the routeway where the steps ended and it was chock-full of men and women of all colours and contours.A mixed malodor of sweat and perfume pervaded the atmosphere with an incessant bustling that came from the footsteps and chatter. He was contented like an artist who had accomplished a great canvas and has come out of his solitary studio to breathe fresh air.

He looked sideways. He saw his wife walking beside him,steadily, though weak, due to all those days in the hospital. The dry-nurse who walking in front of her held a new born baby swathed in blanket to protect it from the morning breeze. He looked into the innocent face of the baby girl with disbelief. Lord, it is his own child. His first born. He looked again and smiled..’Happy New Year’, some stranger from the crowd wished him. He wished back and pondered, where was he last New Year and quailed before the thought.

2

Milan. He was touring all Italy with a heuristic group selected by the government that included educationists, emissaries ,artists and priests bound for Rome. That was his first trip to Europe. And he felt that his long cherished vision is fulfilled…

He reached Milan on December 7th, which was St. Ambrose Day. The celebration devoted to the holy benefactor of the town.. O Bej! O Bej!.. Food, wine, and merchants around Piazza Sant’Ambrogio. He had no time to see everything and went to Bologna to meet his buyer…

He travelled many places sometimes alone, at times with the group. He preferred train but some others opted for alternative ways of transport and so there was a little dissension as for the modus operandi of the entire getaway. Still the leader who was a retired legate solved those problems in his sui generis style. In the end, everybody seemed more or less satisfied or a bit stressed.

He came from Emilia-Romagna after visiting his punter in Bologna. It was as if he were coming from eleventh-century. The Adriatic coast with its effulgent Byzantine mosaics was pleasant and haunting. He wanted to travel the Apennine still could not do so as his old aunt in India persisted with a message to reach home faster.

Still he visited Botticelli in the Duomo Basilica and later the Uffizi Gallery. He desired to meet the master further at Ognissanti but could not .

At last Uffizi . The members of the band were already there taking another drag. He preferred to walk solo with his colour crayons and the thick notebook..He stood for a long time near Botticelli’s largest altarpiece, the San Marco Altarpiece , the only one to remain with its full predella, of five panels. She was another onlooker to these paintings, and for a brief moment was behind him.

She had Sicilian blue eyes and red hair and wore a loose Stygian caparison with a pale hue on midriff and thick froufrou. When she

talked, she looked from the corner of her eyes. Her name is Rosanna and her father is American and mother Italian. She came all the way from Fogg Museum to Milan during that season. An art collector and denizen to shows, that was how she introduced herself.

‘What are you into?’, her voice was guttural.

He said that he is a copy painter by profession.

‘Is it a profession’?, she asked.

‘Anything is a profession if one is honest and confident’, he said echoeing his dead dad.

Then the palaver mutated to Medicis , Vasari, Amerigo Vespucci, Savanarola and many other things..

Maybe under the ligature of great art, some orations became personal. He narrated the story of accident that took away the lives of his parents and sister. In turn, she voiced the tale of her husband’s self immolation.

She asked him(and he was meanwhile trying to locate the main group to which he belonged) –

‘Will you paint a picture for me?’, she asked finally.

‘I do not draw for free’, he said casually.

‘What is your price ?I will pay it anyhow’.

Then he said- ‘Get me a New Year eve party in one of the star hotels’.

‘Why star hotels?,’ she inquires.

He said, ‘After my dad's passing, I had not been to one’. His father was a filmmaker and with him he had dined in many five star hotels, before the disaster.

‘Agreed’, she said, ‘ I have a lot of money’. He knew that he is not the only cockalorum in the entire world.

That was how they met in Milan Central and later under speculum

vaults of a hulking hotel.

3

They celebrated the New Year Eve at a hotel located near the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele passing the 19h-century glass and iron charpente. Crossing the rectangular mastaba ,she told him--

‘I have not uncloaked myself to this extent to anybody’, she said that evening in that albergo in Milan, in the midst of a euphoric crowd preparing for the New Year, and a table full of culinary delights,wine and goblets.

They talked on an array of topics over the tavolo.

‘In a way I prefer the real machismo type’, she bore down on. 'As they say- caballerosidad in Spanish, or cavalheirismo in Portuguese, a noble man to the core, demonstrating admiration to women, in other words manliness and chivalry’. Courage with benevolence. That was perhaps her idea of manhood. However, he was not such a one. Or he had neither of those virtues. He was a simple painter who copied masterpieces for a livelihood. One can even say that he was conformable with few aspirations except certain sempiternal sectors of mind which he hoped to fathom in a lifetime..

‘What are your other interests?’, he asked just to carry on with the conversation.

‘Jacobian drama, rose gardens and Dōgen Zenji of the Sōtō school’.

She said on that eve. Most of the canon was new to him.

‘I am not an actor. But once I was the Duchess in ‘Duchess of Malfi’ in school days. ‘I married later the boy who played Ferdinand’, she said.

He was partially shocked.

He said, ‘I know somebody like that’,

‘Who is that?’, she asked.

He said- ‘My aunt. Who later identified with the character she played in real life, at least in seasons.’

His aunt was a university professor and in the free time, she acted in plays. When she took a role, she became that character. She played Duchess of Malfi many times in her life. That was her favourite role.

‘A good actor while acting, should give her imprint which nobody can give to the character she portrays and still remain aloof.’ , his aunt told him once. But the last part of her rede was difficult for her to follow.

‘And what happened to your aunt?’, she queried after a breather.

‘She lives ‘, he said, ‘and has FTD and also other worriments ‘.

She seemed relieved. He thought-

He had not been to war front nor had he engaged in combats and

borne injuries. Instead,he had his console loaded with craft books and chess sheets and pamphlets of pet outlets and addresses of vets.

‘I loath such a life’, she said.

And after a brief pause added- ‘I lean toward machismo. Not at all in negative sense’,she clarified again.

He grinned. That was her uncommon notion of common things , he thought . However, he did not desire to be judgmental, and was attempting to view things every now and then in new perspectives.

‘My subjects are remarkable,’ he said in his rather genetically biggety tone, as if he were seizing a decent arrow from his ancient quiver. ‘You are one of those celestial ones.’ Death of his father was a great blow to him. After that ,he had a habit of emphasizing things with extra energy or using extraneous words.

‘Religion explains, art shows ‘,she said when the talk started coursing intellectual spillways. He chose not to counter.

Definitely she was not his type and in any gathering he would have avoided her company, but here in this evening in Milan, all were a bunch of trifling dingus. It ended with a midnight toast at the Golden Lounge with oysters and Super Tuscan. And she kept her word,she neither tripped the light fantastic nor shared boudoir. But she gave him something that she had not bargained, a strong embrace, more galvanizing than the goblets of wine and a kiss too on his left cheek, (his right cheek had a razor smirch)that left an indelible and ambrosial mark on his memory than the dinner affair. When he looked into her eyes, an undercurrent was beginning to burgeon. Then they both took private passages.

His group was near the Tiber river from the Cavour bridge, to see the new year fete . But he yearned for a little time to be alone.

After she had left, he expended a long time in Milan Central, figuring out his life. A vacuum began shaping up in his soul, which loomed larger at every nanosecond…The next day, he took a train to Florence and joined the main group as had planned. Though he was travelling in Frecciabianca and was supposed to reach in less than two hours, that was perhaps the longest train commute he took in that decade.

4

Coming back to India, he hitched soon. He married his aunt’s daughter. ‘Joshi, you take care of my daughter,’ his aunt told him in her death bed.

He married that girl, his cousin. Marrying aunt’s daughter was not a

far-out phenomenon within his folks. In the earlier matrilineal eras, it was a confident move for the property not going away to a stranger cum son in law. Now he did it out of necessity. There was no property to share. Only common stifling memories. Perhaps that works a stronger bond in trying times.

During that season, he made several attempts to contact Rosanna. Her phone was out of reach..

Finally he could find her friend at Stanford .

‘You mean Rosanna Vespucci,’ asked the female voice.’The art critic turned actor?’

‘I mean Rosanna , the art collector who studies zazen under a Soto teacher’.- He replied.

‘Yes, she was my student and I am her teacher’.

The woman told in the calmest tone.

She added- ‘It is great honour for an actor to die on stage. In her last play, she played the Duchess of Malfi and I was Cariola’, and he heard the voice waning into a sob.

5

The crowd at the Egmore station, moved on to various platforms for the electric trains and for the suburban routes. In this ocean of forms, he vexed to visualize himself, his being as a disparate entity having echelons of hopes and contradictions. Here is his wife walking with him slowly and confidently and the dry-nurse hugging the baby in snuggly sheets and holding the little body close to the bosom. He queried himself, where is he, and what is he?

What were Rosanna Vespucci’s parting words? He suddenly harked back. She had divulged on that eve, that all she was searching was not art or culture or appreciation of masterpieces, but a no - trouble moment in life. Did she discover that ?. He wondered. Maybe.

But his doubt was something else-

Did Botticelli himself reappear in person and painted his Madonna and Child in real life? If art is immortal, the artist also should be. At least, he has to believe so.

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