Pictures of Fidelman [antikvár]

í Fidelman, a self-confessed failure as a painter, came to Italy to prepare a critical study of Giotto, the opening chapter of which he had carried across the ocean in a new pigskin leather brief-case, now gripped in his perspiring hand. Alsó new were his gum-soled oxblood shoes, a tweed suit he had on despite the late-September sun slanting hot in the Román sky, although there was a lighter one in his bag; and a dacron shirt and set of cotton-dacron under-wear, good for quick and easy washing for the traveller. His suit-case, a bulky two-strapped affair which embarrassed him slightly, he had borrowed from his sister Bessie. He planned, if he had any funds left at the end of the year, to buy a new one in Florence. Although he had been in not mnch of a mood when he had left the U.S.A., Fidelman picked up in Naples, and at the moment, as he stood in front of the Romé railway station, after twenty min-utes still absorbed in his first sight of the Eternal City, he was conscious of a certain exaltation that devolved on him after he had discovered directly across the many-vehicled piazza stood the remains of the Baths of Diocletian. Fidelman remembered having read that Michelangelo had helped in converting the baths into a church and convent, the latter ultimately changed into the museum that presently was there. 'Imagine/ he muttered. 'Ima-gine all that history.' In the midst of his imagining, Fidelman experienced the sen-sation of suddenly seeing himself as he was, to the pin-point, outside and in, not without bittersweet pleasure; and as the well-known image of his face rose before him he was taken by the depth of pure feeling in his eyes, slightly magnified by glasses, and the sensitivity of his elongated nostrils and often tremulous lips, nose divided from lips by a moustache of recent vintage that looked, Fidelman thought, as if it had been sculptured there, add-ing to his dignified appearance although he was a little on the