Across the River and Into the Trees Read Free

the road without either looking up or touching his handlebars. As they passed him, the Colonel tried to see what paper he was reading, but it was folded over.
    “I guess a man would do better now not to build himself a fine house or a church, or to get who did you say it was to paint frescoes?”
    “Giotto, I said. But it could be Piero della Francesca or Mantegna. Could be Michelangelo.”
    “Do you know a lot about painters, sir?” the driver asked.
    They were on a straight stretch of road now and were making time so that one farm blended, almost blurred, into another farm 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 speed, the Colonel thought. Brueghel would have been in a hell of a shape if he had to look at the country like this.
    “Painters?” he answered the driver. “I know quite a little about them, Burnham.”
    “I’m Jackson, sir. Burnham’s up at the rest center at Cortina. That’s a fine place, sir.”
    “I’m getting stupid,” the Colonel said. “Excuse me, Jackson. It is a fine place. Good chow. Well run. Nobody bothers you.”
    “Yes, sir,” Jackson agreed. “Now the reason I asked you about painters, is these madonnas. I thought I ought to see some painting so I went to that big place in Florence.”
    “The Uffizi? The Pitti?”
    “Whatever they call it. The biggest one. And I kept looking at those paintings until madonnas started to run out of my ears. I tell you, Colonel, sir, a man who hasn’t been checked out on this painting can only see just about so many madonnas and it gets him. You know my theory? You know how crazy they are about bambinis and the less they got to eat the more bambinis they got and that they have coming? Well, I think these painters were probably big bambini lovers like all Italians. I don’t know these ones you mentioned just now, so I don’t include them in my theory and you’ll put me straight anyway. But it looks to me like these madonnas, that I really saw plenty of, sir, it looks to me like these just straight ordinary madonna painters were sort of a manifest, say, of this whole bambini business, if you understand what I mean.”
    “Plus the fact that they were restricted to religious subjects.”
    “Yes, sir. Then you think there is something to my theory?”
    “Sure. I think it is a little more complicated, though.”
    “Naturally, sir. It’s just my preliminary theory.”
    “Do you have any other theories on art, Jackson?”
    “No, sir. That bambini theory is as far as I’ve thought it through. What I wish is, though, they would paint some good pictures of that high country up around the rest center at Cortina.”
    “Titian came from up there,” the Colonel said. “At least they say he did. I went down the valley and saw the house where he was supposed to be born.”
    “Was it much of a place, sir?”
    “Not so much.”
    “Well, if he painted any pictures of that country up around there, with those sunset color rocks and the pines and the snow and all the pointed steeples—”
    “ Campaniles ,” the Colonel said. “Like that one ahead at Ceggia. It means bell tower.”
    “Well, if he painted any really good pictures of that country I’d sure as hell like to trade him out of some of them.”
    “He painted some wonderful women,” the Colonel said.
    “If I had a joint or a roadhouse or some sort of an inn, say, I could use one of those,” the driver said. “But if I brought home a picture of some woman, my old woman would run me from Rawlins to Buffalo. I’d be lucky if I got to Buffalo.”
    “You could give it to the local museum.”
    “All they got in the local museum is arrow heads, war bonnets, scalping knives, different scalps, petrified fish, pipes of peace, photographs of Liver Eating Johnston, and the skin of some bad man that they hanged him and some doctor skinned him out. One of those women pictures