Read Online Pictures of Fidelman by Bernard Malamud - Free Book Online

out of me. That’s how it’s been all my life, don’t ask me why because I don’t know.”
    She grabbed his knees. “Help me, Father, for Christ’s sake.”
    Fidelman., after a short tormented time, said in a quavering voice, “I forgive you, my child.”
    “The penance,” she wailed, “first the penance.”
    After reflecting, he replied, “Say one hundred times each, Our Father and Hail Mary.”
    “More,” Annamaria wept. “More, more. Much more.”
    Gripping his knees so hard they shook she burrowed her head into his black-buttoned lap. He felt the surprised beginnings of an erection.
    “In that case,” Fidelman said, shuddering a little, “better undress.”
    “Only,” Annamaria said, “if you keep your vestments on.”
    “Not the cassock, too clumsy.”
    “At least the biretta.”

    He agreed to that.
    Annamaria undressed in a swoop. Her body was extraordinarily lovely, the flesh glowing. In her bed they tightly embraced. She clasped his buttocks, he cupped hers. Pumping slowly he nailed her to her cross.

3
     
     
    Fidelman listlessly doodles all over a sheet of yellow paper. Odd indecipherable designs, ink-spotted blotched words, esoteric ideographs, tormented figures in a steaming sulfurous lake, a stylish nude rising newborn out of cold water. Not bad at all though more mannequin than Knidean Aphrodite. Scarpio, sharp-nosed on the former art student’s gaunt left, looking up from his cards, inspects her with his good eye.
    “Not bad, who is she? One of the girls here?”
    “Nobody I really know.”
    “You must be hard up.”
    “I always am.”
    “Quiet,” rumbles Angelo, the padrone, on Fidelman’s
fat right, his two-chinned face molded in lard. He flips the top card.
    Scarpio turns up a deuce, making eight and a half and out. He curses his Sainted Mother, Angelo wheezing. Fidelman shows four and his last hundred lire. He picks a cautious ace and sighs. Angelo, with seven showing, chooses this passionate moment to relieve himself.
    “Wait for me,” he orders. “Watch the pot, Scarpio.”
    “Who’s that hanging?” Scarpio points to a long-coated figure loosely dangling from a gallows rope amid Fidelman’s other doodles.
    Who but Susskind, surely. A dim figure out of the past.
    “Just a friend. Nobody you know.”
    “It’d better not be.”
    Scarpio picks up the yellow paper for a closer squint.
    “But whose head?” he asks with interest. A long-nosed severed head bounces down the steps of the guillotine platform.
    A man’s head or his sex, Fidelman wonders. In either case a terrible wound.
    “Looks a little like mine. At least the long jaw.”
    Scarpio points to a street scene. In front of American Express here’s this starving white Negro pursued by a hooting mob of cowboys on horses.
    Embarrassed by the recent past Fidelman blushes.
    Long past midnight. They sit motionless in Angelo’s stuffy office, a small lit bulb glowing darkly over a
square wooden table on which lie a pack of puffy cards, Fidelman’s naked hundred lire note, and a green bottle of Munich beer that the padrone of the Hotel du Ville, Milano, swills from between hands and games. Scarpio, his major-domo and secretary-lover, sips an espresso. Fidelman only watches, being without privileges. Each night they play sette e mezzo, jeenrummy, or baccarat and Fidelman loses the day’s earnings, the few meager tips he has garnered from the whores for little services rendered. Angelo says nothing and takes all.
    Scarpio, snickering, understands the street scene. Fidelman, adrift penniless in the stony gray Milanese streets, had picked his first pocket. An American tourist staring into a store window. The Texan, feeling the tug, and missing his wallet, had bellowed murder. A carabiniere looked wildly at Fidelman, who broke into a run, another well-dressed carabiniere on a horse clattering after him down the street, waving his sword over his head. Angelo, cleaning his fingernails with his penknife in front of his