Short Story | Mario's Painting

Mario Chiosi hung the painting above his desk when he became manager of the call centre at Digbeth Communications, thirteen years ago, but it had been in his life since he was born. The 39-year-old dad-of-two had an interview with with a potential new member of staff at 9am, and was in work early looking at it.

Mario had won the respect of all the old-timers at work. New staff might describe him as scary and aloof, although the odd one noticed that unlike most managers at call centres, he didn’t interfere unless he had to, and that was a good thing.

Sometimes Mario's lack of action on small things frustrated staff. If there were issues with someone being overly loud on their calls, kitchen cleanliness, a worker arriving at their desk late, Mario hardly ever did anything. That’s one for you, buddy! he would say to the person complaining across his desk, in the massive sixties building, which looked more like a warehouse than an office from the outside. Other mornings, if he had a kick in his step, and sat down to find an email from a disgruntled member of staff, say, Jenny, he might open his door and shout, I have a fiver for the first person who’ll take Jenny for a coffee this morning! He would stick the fiver to the doorframe with a piece of Blu Tack. Whoever the person was would take an hour or so off and walk up to the Bullring and sit in Starbucks with Jenny. Sometimes people invented grievances in the hope that Mario would stick the fiver on his door, but he didn’t always do that.

For the consistent late worker, Mario’s tactic was to pull up their calls and listen to their voice. Sometimes he would send them an email to ask if they needed anything. Sometimes, he would ask them what took so long when they put the customer on hold. Occasionally, he would invite them into his office and he would let them go, but at that point the inevitability of the outcome surprised no one, although there flourished a mythical association between getting called into Mario’s office and getting fired. Old-timers such as Ron, who started just six months after Mario, hardly ever gave an opinion on him. For Ron himself, that was quite miraculous. Years spent on a bar stool after work meant he had become a man expert at creating and holding resentments.

The directors of Digbeth Communications, the bothers Philip and Simon Pollard were wary of Mario. He did a good job, customers were happy with the service, staff were, on the whole, reserved in their opinions of him, things ran smoothly, but there was something that did not make sense. He was a man who behaved as if he lived far more prolifically outside work than was possible with his pay check and daily routine. He hadn’t gone to university, and hadn’t really proven himself anywhere other than in his consistent, but not stellar record in the company. He didn’t seem ambitious, unlike the managers of other Departments. Dave, manager of Processing, although he was quiet, had made far more demands for advancement and eventually left for a better paid job two buildings away. For a while, when they appointed Mario to manager, Philip and Simon were sure the ‘young Italian’ had a cocaine habit. The painting was hung in his room, from God knows where, and he was often at his desk an hour earlier than he needed to be each morning. They never understood what he was doing. Nor did they ask.

Mario had a belly laugh which was quick to hit the air. His parents were from Naples and had come to Birmingham in the fifties. In his thick Birmingham accent, Mario did wonderful impressions of his family. Ron liked the way Mario shook his head and slapped his knee when he delivered a punchline. He liked it because somehow Ron understood from that slap that Mario was always on the side of the person he was taking the piss out of. Mario didn’t have an opinion on Ron, he was good guy, he was from work, he did his thing. He had very few opinions on anyone.

Over the years, Mario’s wife, Michelle, often told him to apply for senior positions in different call centres, or to branch out, to create a career, that he was only young. True enough, by the time Mario had been the manager for thirteen years he was still under forty and his two children, Alba and Bruno, who was named after his father, were only seven and four. Michelle and Mario knew, whenever she began the conversation about finding another position that they were both in acting mode. Yeh, Chichi, Mario would say, I really should just look for something, just spread my wings a bit, get a bit more cash running through our fingers. Ro, Michelle would say, you never know what possibilities are out there. Then they would both carry on with whatever task they were doing together; cooking, putting one of the kids to bed, washing up.

As soon as Mario met Michelle when he was twenty-five, he had needed to share activities; even at the beginning, it wasn’t so much as planning a weekend away together, as many of his mates did with their girlfriends, as actually doing things together whenever they met up. Michelle had found this strange to begin with, but she also knew it was the low sense of his own importance which gave Mario the ability to ask her to do things most of her previous boyfriends hadn’t. Even the night they had met, his humility has a strange effect on her. They had met on a night out in Brindley Place. She had begun a conversation with him as they stood at the bar. You from Birmingham? she said. Acocks Green, Mario had replied. What do you do? she said. Oh, nothing very important, but I love it. Later that night they kissed.

The first time Mario invited Michelle over to his small flat in Mosley for dinner, he asked her to prepare the salad from the stuff in the fridge. It was their third date and Michelle wore her white shirt, black mini and heels. She had presumed they would go out. When he asked her to help him, and asked if she wanted to take her shoes off, she had felt herself go red, not with anger as much as shame and disappointment that he had not wanted to do everything for her, to show her off. Some of her mates had told her to dump him on that basis. But to Michelle, who had been there, it didn’t seem to make any sense to connect the fact that he asked her to make the salad with something negative in him. Still, she didn’t sleep with him that night, even though she wanted to. Once she had told a few friends about that night, and got the same adverse reaction, along the lines of Michelle, he couldn’t even be bothered to spend £50 on a date? I’m glad you didn’t do it, you’re not a slag, she became more sure she liked him. She began to keep the story of her and Mario to herself. Within a year they were living together.

Now after fifteen years, Mario came to Michelle’s side without a thought, and where Alba and Bruno began to form interests and try and accomplish things, Mario would begin them too, in earnest. His parenting seemed at times a strange exchange of information between him and the children. Michelle tried to do the same, although it didn’t come as easily for her. She sometimes avoided her husband when he was on a gardening spree, for example. Always after winter, in their house in the suburbs of Birmingham, Mario would become passionate about what might blossom. Cici, we all have to get into the garden, he would say, God, it could be really fabulous this year! And Michelle would have to stop their quiet journey together, Ro, that one is for you, I’ll do something nice in the house while you do it, take Bruno and Alba, she would say. And he would shake his head. She had learnt to hold the space of his silences because silence was not a closure between them. He had taught her another language for when their new moods might sink into old words if they were spoken, and nothing was exciting anymore. Sometimes, when they felt close in their separateness, and often silent, Mario would suddenly pull her onto his lap, and press his head into her body.

When Mario was able to take Alba and later Bruno outside with him, they would sometimes just count the number of flowers in bloom, and try and remember if the number was higher then the day before. Michelle would ask if they had done any work in the garden, and Mario would reply, si, Cici, tanto, tanto, tanto!

Michelle often felt they should be doing better, that they should have more, that their small house in Olton should be bigger, that the facts of her life – she was child-minder, her husband worked in a call centre, should speak louder for them. None of this bothered Mario. She could get angry with him, and then angry with herself and things would slip, she wouldn’t bother to do something she loved. Sometimes if they got into a funk Mario would leave earlier and earlier in the mornings to go to work until suddenly they were doing things together again; planning a trip to Naples or a dinner with her sister and her gang, and Mario wouldn’t care so much about getting into work and they would have a spell of making love in the mornings. There was no doubt that he loved her and the family, and her family, and was present for her. In fact, when she felt irritable about the story of their lives, she needed only rest a moment on that feeling and it disappeared.

A year or so after appointing Mario to manager, the Pollard brothers, who dabbled in cocaine and extramarital flings themselves, as a sort of right of passage into the business community that mingled in the bars in Summer Row, asked Mario to come out for drinks. Mario went to Summer Row on more than a few occasions, and the brothers, who were intrigued to see him operating outside work, bought him drinks and slapped him on the shoulder when he cracked a joke. One night Mario spoke to a girl called Lila, who worked at the call centre. The brothers were delighted. Lila had worked for a couple of summers and then just at weekends for extra cash during university. Mario had always liked her. He saw her a lot on these nights out, and felt his heart quickening if she walked in after he and the Pollards arrived. He found himself listening to her calls on Mondays, he noticed her ritual, Hello there! to customers. She laughed a lot.

Soon he noticed a longing for Lila in himself that was making his own laugh run out. He began to resent her for making him feel at sea. And he could not feel the warmth of Michelle's love in this state. It was as if it had been swallowed by something stronger. He felt a longing deepen into a sharp slice into his flesh. He was moody and erratic for weeks, which became months. He and Michelle fought, he spent hours in front of the TV. He decided to tell Lila how he felt and leave Michelle. But he couldn't tell Michelle and in trying to avoid her he found himself coming into work early again, then earlier and earlier. He had let the ritual slip once he started drinking with the Pollards. He stared at the picture. He felt his skin prickling with desire. Within two weeks he was making excuses to avoid Summer Row. By September, Lila was no longer working in the week, and his heart began to settle. Soon it seemed that the summer he had spent drinking with the Pollards on a Thursday night had been lived by somebody else, and now, as he sat at his desk, waiting for the interviewee to arrive at 9am, the summer passed through his mind and reminded him how close he had been to losing the reigns.

Mario had hung the painting which his grandfather had given his father and his father had given him after he was promoted, on the wall opposite his desk. The artist was unknown. Mario’s grandfather had been from a family of fishermen in Naples, and the painting, it was said, was hundreds of years old, stolen during the Masaniello Revolt. The night Mario had been presented with the painting, his father had called him and spoken in a low, slow, serious voice.

‘Mario, can I come to your place this evening? I have something very important,’ he said as Mario sat on the sofa, relaxing after his third day with an office of his own.

That night his father came over in suit, a white shirt, blue silk tie and a dinner jacket underneath his grey BHS anorak. His shoes were polished and his hair perfectly combed. Mario opened the door, the evening was already dark. The cold Birmingham air seemed to glaze his father’s dark skin as if they – his father and the north European air – were from two different worlds which refused to mix, like oil and water.

‘Papa, dov’é vai?’ Mario asked, as he opened the door and looked at his father’s clothes.

‘Nowhere, I am coming here, with this,’ Mario’s father lifted the painting which was now wrapped in a black cover. They hugged.

‘Come in, come in,’ he said, smiling and shaking his head. It wasn’t unusual for his father to be taken by a moment and to suddenly instil some lost meaning, some unearthly gist into it.

Inside, his father went straight into the small television room and sat on one of the arm chairs. Mario turned on a standing lamp.

‘Dad, you look like you are going to a funeral, do you want a coffee? A coke?’

‘No, no, Mario. I am very proud of you.’ The washing machine from the flat next door, raged into its final cycle. ‘I want to explain something to you.’

Mario’s father pulled the cloth from the painting. Mario looked at it. It had been hanging in his parents' bedroom their whole lives. He already knew its history. The Revolt. It came from Italy. In all honesty though, apart from a naked woman and the deep red of the wine, he had never really looked at it.

‘Dad, you don’t have to give me this, you and mum have it in the bedroom, that is where it belongs.’

‘Mario, I don’t need it anymore.’

Mario smiled, it seemed so familiar, so much a part of his life, that it came easily for him to accept it, almost as if it was his own already.

‘Thanks.’

‘Mario, do you know who you are?’

‘What?’

‘Son, do you know who you are?’ Mario’s father held his hands out as if he held the question. He had come from Naples to Birmingham to work as a cook, but had done scores of different jobs. He had been the caretaker for the Humanities Building at Aston University for the past ten years.

‘Is this a trick question?’ Mario’s father shook his head. ‘I am Mario Chiosi, son of Bruno Chiosi and Loredana Raucci, I am from Acocks Green and Italy, I got a promotion three days ago…’ he threw his arms up. ‘Dad! Ma che fai?’

Mario’s father took the painting and held it up. On the wall in front of them Mario had hung a framed poster of the White Stripes.

‘Mario, may I take that down?’ his father said. Mario nodded. His father was a very gentle man, but this level of considered movement made Mario feel like they were not alone, that there was more in play around them than the sum of the light from the lamp, the faded blue carpet, worn sofa and IKEA coffee table. His father hung the painting in front of them and came to sit beside Mario on the sofa.

‘Look, look at this, Mario, look as if for the first time.’ The washing machine, beeped and fell silent. Mario raised his head. ‘I want you to look at it properly and see what is in it. What do you see?’

‘Well, I see a naked woman beside a guy that looks like a king, I see his red robes,’ Mario glanced at his father who was nodding at the painting. ‘I see the window, the crazy blue of the sea and the sky, the gold, I see the people eating, fighting, it’s basically a feast isn’t it?’

‘What food do you see?’

‘I see an orange in segments, pineapples, watermelon, apples, lemons, peaches, pears, apricots, I see meat, fish, chicken, wine, lots of wine, oh and another woman, I hadn’t seen her before, on that guy’s lap, his head is buried in her chest.’

‘Lei, lei,’ Mario’s father nodded, and pulled his mouth into an expression as if to prevent it falling into something else.

‘Dad, thank you for the painting, thank you for being so kind, and like, making such a big deal of the job. You know you've always been an inspiration to me, I just... are we..? What are we doing?’

‘Just keep looking, and tell me what you want first.’

‘What?’

‘If you could work your way through this painting, to enjoy everything, look, see the lemon tree, see the mosaic, see the dog, see the instruments, the violin, that trumpet and the books, Mario. What do you want first, what desire comes first?’

‘I want to make love to that woman.’

‘And then?’

‘I would like to take a boat on that sea.’

‘Then?’

‘I would like to, I don’t know, the orange, the orange in segments, it looks delicious.’

‘Mario did you know your passions have to serve your heart not destroy it? We are ok when we are like this, but once we lose out hearts, Mario, think of Peppe.’

‘Yeh.’ Mario looked at the carpet.

‘Mario, a man without vices is as boring as a soup without salt, yes, this is true, that is what we said in Napoli, but here, alone, without your people, to feel peace, to know yourself, as we have always done, I have to tell you this secret. It is the source of all my joy.’ Mario smiled uneasily. ‘Look at all of these things and do them. Sit and contemplate each one when you need it. Do you see that guy pointing at the other one, they are fighting, they need to fight, a pugni! Fino in fondo! Magari si mazzano! When you need to fight come home, and do it here. As you feel the words leave your mouth, as the rage holds you, l’arrabbia!’ he held his fist up, ‘Remember it is no more yours than the rage of this man in the picture.

‘Fliglio mio, peel the orange, feed it to la meraviglia beside the king, watch her mouth open for it, pull her close, far’amore sul tavolo. Some days you will be angry at her, you will come and stand in front of her and look at her and hate her. I don’t know why, at the beginning, she was everything, then I moved onto other things, the feast, imagine yourself as all these men.’ Mario was silent. His father, released a breath that sounded words he couldn't speak. He shook his head. ‘Some days you can walk the dog, eat the watermelon, play music. But do it here, inside this.’

‘Dad – ‘

‘Wait, wait, this is the important part,’ Mario’s father put his arms around his son, ‘Mario I have lived like this, my father showed me this in Napoli, we have all had it explained to us, so you know now. You have power, you have met la meraviglia, Michelle, she is this now,’ he pointed to the painting, ‘but it won’t always be that, will it? And now you have been recognised at work, go lightly, lightly with them all, touch it all with the lightest of hands, serve, even when it seems people want you to take, it makes more sense for them to see you take. They want you to take so they can do it too! Don’t, Mario, leave people alone, or come alongside them, when the mad horses that draw your carriage – these mad horses Mario, we have them, we are made of the earth above the lava of Vesuvió - when the mad horses fly off, come back to the painting, run with them and then take the reigns and turn back out to the world.

‘This is the secret of a good life - la bella vita. To serve, servire il mondo - it will make you feel.. dolce. Calma. All the rest is as real as this painting.’

Mario’s father closed his eyes. Mario studied the painting. His father suddenly slapped his son on the knee. He was relieved. He had managed to say what he needed to say, and he would leave his son alone.

‘OK?’ he said with a different voice.

‘I’m not sure,’ Mario knew what he had said, but he couldn't grasp it with his mind.

‘Azzuppàrse 'o ppàne qui!' Mario's father said loudly signalling at the painting with his arm. 'Be free. One day you won’t need it anymore, live the painting for a while, live it more when you feel your heart is weak.’ Mario’s father smiled and offered his hand to pull his son up.

Thirteen years later, Seamus Callaghan, arrived at 9am in Mario's office looking for a job. When Seamus came into the room, in a shiny black pullover and pointy loafers, he stood in front of the painting for a moment before sitting down. He was so white, his skin appeared translucent. He was no more than twenty-five.

'That's incredible,' he said, in an thick Irish accent. 'I haven't seen anything like it for a long time. I don't know if I'd concentrate with that in front of me all day.'

'You don't think so?' Mario said. 'No one ever really sees it. They only ask me where it's from.'

'We had one in the home house in Galway, those mad feasts,' Seamus said smiling. 'This is stunning.' He turned his chair at an angle to look at it again.

'What would you do first, if you could do anything?' Mario said, with relief.

Seamus Callaghan soon had Mario's job, and the painting on condition of a promise. Mario needed to give it away in order to change again. He went somewhere else, with a little more money, a little closer to his house. When Michelle asked him why he had suddenly decided to find another job, he just said, 'Seamus needs mine, so I have to go.' She had forgotten about the painting. Mario's father just nodded, chin first when he told him what he'd done. I made the crossing, you are here now and you have to live, Mario's father said. I gave it to someone like us, Mario said, I guess I was waiting for him, I didn't know it, but I guess I was.