The Birth of Venus (21 page)

Twenty-nine

T
HE OLD SERVANTS WELCOMED US AS IF I WERE THE
prodigal daughter returned. Even Maria with her beady eyes and mean little mind seemed pleased to see me. No doubt the house had got quieter since my leaving. I may have been trouble, but I was also life. I must have looked different in some way, too. Everyone who saw me told me the same. I think my face might have changed with my illness, its shape starting to show more through the pillows of my cheeks. I wondered what my father would say—his younger daughter with the face of a woman rather than a girl.

Well, I would have to wait to find out. Both he and my mother were at the hot springs taking the waters and unlikely to be back for some weeks. I should have sent ahead to tell them I was coming.

The house felt strange to me, like somewhere I had visited only in a dream. Maria told me Luca was home eating lunch and would I like to join him? I got as far as the entrance to the dining room. He was hunched over a plate, stuffing his face. For an Angel he looked terrible. Plautilla was right; the haircut was a disaster. It made his face look huge, like a lump of porous rock, his pockmarks speckled like tiny water holes over the surface. He was chewing with his mouth open, and I could hear the sound of the food squelching.

I crossed to the table and sat down beside him. Sometimes it is worth knowing your enemy. “Hello, brother,” I said, smiling. “You have changed your clothes. I am not sure that gray suits you as a color.”

He frowned. “I am in uniform, Alessandra. You should know I am in God’s army now.”

“Oh, and a great thing it is. Though I think you should probably still wash occasionally. When white gets too dirty it can tend toward black.”

He sat with the words for a moment, separating out the wit from the meaning. If I had a florin for the time wasted in lessons waiting for Luca to arrive at a place I had already left, we would be a richer family than we were today. “You know what, Alessandra? You talk too much. It will be your damnation. Our life is but a short walk to death, and those who listen to the sound of their own voices rather than the word of the True Christ will rot in hell. Is your husband with you?”

I shook my head.

“Then you should not be here. You know the new rules of our godly state as well as I. Wives without their husbands are vessels of temptation and must stay behind closed doors.”

“Oh, Luca,” I said. “If only you had always had such facility for remembering things that matter.”

“You would do well to watch your tongue, sister. The Devil is in your false learning, and it will bring you to the flames faster than a poor woman who knows nothing but the Gospels. Your precious ancients are an outlawed caste now.”

I had never heard my brother so fluent. Still, he was itching to make words into deeds. I could see his fist clenching on the table. His cruelty to me as a child had always been more physical than Tomaso’s. My mother hardly ever caught him red-handed and the bruises only came up later. Tomaso was right. He had always been a thug. The only difference now was that he was less beholden to his elder brother. Though what problems his changed loyalties might cause us all had yet to be tested.

I got up from the table, my eyes to the floor. “I know,” I said sweetly. “I am sorry, brother. I will go to confession when I get home and ask the Lord’s forgiveness.”

He stared at me, wrong-footed by my sudden meekness. “Hmm. Very well. If you do so humbly enough, He will give it.”

Before I got to the door he had his face back in the plate again.

WHEN I ASKED ABOUT THE PAINTER, MARIA GOT FLUSTERED.
“
WE
don’t see him anymore. He lives in the chapel.”

“What do you mean, he lives in the chapel?”

She gave a little shrug. “I . . . I mean he lives there now. All the time. He never goes out.”

“What of the frescoes? Are they finished?”

“No one knows. He sent the apprentices away last month.” She paused. “They seemed eager to leave.”

“But . . . I thought he went to church. That he had become a follower. That’s what Mother told me.”

“I . . . I don’t know about that. He used to go, I think. But not now. He hasn’t been out of the chapel since the thaw.”

“Since the thaw? But that’s weeks ago! Why hasn’t my father done something?”

“Your father . . .” She paused. “Your father has not been quite himself.”

“How do you mean?”

She glanced at Erila. “I . . . I can’t really say any more.”

“And my mother?”

“Er . . . she is looking after him. And then there’s Tomaso and Luca. She has no time to be dealing with tradesmen.” Maria, like Ludovica, had never been one to champion the elevation of art. Too much fuss over a few colored scribbles. Better to say your prayers with your eyes closed and not let your imagination get in the way.

“I wonder that she didn’t ask for my help,” I said quietly, but I already knew the answer. She had, but I had been so angry I had shunned her.

Maria was looking at me, waiting to know what I would do. Everybody had seen me as the baby of the family, precocious, maybe, but barely able to look after myself, let alone anyone else. What could have happened to make me change? I am not sure even I knew.

“I will see the painter,” I said. “Where are the keys?”

“They don’t work. He bolts the door from inside.”

“How about the other entrance, from the sacristy?”

“The same.”

“What about food?”

“We leave a plate outside once a day.”

“The main door or the sacristy?”

“The sacristy.”

“How does he know it’s there?”

“We knock.”

“And he comes out?”

“Not while anyone’s there. The cook waited once, but he never came. No one bothers now. We’ve got better things to do.”

“So no one has seen him?”

“No. Though at night sometimes he makes a noise.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t know, but Ludovica—she doesn’t sleep so well—said she’s heard him crying.”

“Crying?”

She shrugged, as if it was not her place to say any more.

“And the boys? Have they tried?”

“Master Tomaso is hardly ever here. And Master Luca . . . well, I suppose he thinks he’s in church.”

Which I suppose in a way he was.

In the upstairs kitchen the cook was phlegmatic about the whole business. If the man didn’t want to eat, he didn’t want to eat. The last four days of food had been left untouched. Maybe God was feeding him. John the Baptist had lived on locusts and honey for months, after all.

“I bet it wasn’t as good as your pigeon pie, though,” I said.

“You always ate well, Miss Alessandra.” He grinned. “It’s quiet around here without you.”

I sat for a while, watching his fingers dice a dozen fat cloves of garlic faster than a moneylender divvies up his coins. My childhood was all here in the smells and tastes of this kitchen: black and red pepper, ginger, cloves, saffron, cardamom, and the pungent sweetness of our own crushed basil. An empire of trade on the chopping block. “Prepare him a plate of something special,” I said. “Something whose smells will make his juices flow. Maybe he’ll be hungry today.”

“Maybe he’ll be dead.”

He didn’t say it cruelly, more as a matter of fact. I thought back to my father’s careful chivalry toward the painter when he first arrived on that cold winter night years ago. I remembered the excitement we had all felt: a real live artist living under our own roof, capturing our family for posterity. Everyone had seen it as a mark of the family’s prestige, a statement of our status, our future. Now it just seemed to be about the past.

I left Erila and the other servants in the kitchen gossiping with the cook and made my way down the stairs and out across the back courtyard to the painter’s quarters. I had no idea what I was looking for. The journey was filled with my younger self skipping out in front of me, sneaking her way down from the main house during the heat of the siesta to confront the new arrival in his den with her boundless enthusiasm and curiosity. If I met her now what advice would I give her? I could no longer work out at what point it had all gone wrong.

The door to his room was closed but not locked. Inside, the atmosphere was musty, a whiff of neglect in the air. The exuberant figures of the Angel and Mary on the wall of the outer chamber had peeled off the unprepared plaster like a relic from an earlier age. The table on which he had kept his sketches was empty and the crucifix gone from the wall. Inside the inner room, the bed was a wad of tossed straw with a grimy cloth thrown across it. Whatever few possessions he owned had gone with him to the chapel.

I’m not sure I would have even bothered with the bucket if it hadn’t been for the smoke stains above it. It was sitting in the corner as I turned to leave, and at first I thought the marks might be a rough painting of sorts: a mass of dark curling shadows crawling up the wall and onto the ceiling. But when I got closer and put my hand out to them my palm came back covered in soot, so I turned my attention to the bucket positioned underneath.

The fire had not been successful with the crucifix. Though it was smashed in two, the wood was barely burned at all and it was hard to tell whether he had broken it first and then tried to incinerate it or, irritated with the failure of the flames, had taken it out and smashed it against the wall. The cross was fractured and Christ’s legs had broken off, the nails still attached to the feet. His upper torso hung painfully from the T of the cross. I held him carefully in my hands. Even in its damaged state, the sculpture carried passion.

Part of the reason it hadn’t burned was that the fire in the bottom of the bucket hadn’t been strong enough. He had fed it with paper but carelessly, the leaves too packed together to allow enough air in. There was a feeling of haste to the whole affair, as if something or someone had been nipping at his heels. I scooped my hands in and pulled out the charred remains. The pages at the bottom fell apart in my fingers, bits of feathery ash breaking loose and floating through the air like gray snow, their content lost forever. But the pages nearer to the top were only partly damaged or, in some cases, simply charred around the edges. I carried them into the outer chamber where there was more light and laid them gently down upon the desk.

They divided into two kinds: the drawings of me and the drawings of the bodies.

The ones of me were everywhere, practice sketches for the Madonna, my face repeated one, two dozen times, variations of the same grave, quizzical look that I didn’t quite recognize as my own, partly I suppose because I was never that still or silent to myself. He had been searching for the right angle for my head, the right focal point of interest outside the frame, and in passing he had drawn one with me staring straight out at the watcher. It was only a matter of a few degrees in the shift of the eyes, but the effect was enormous. This young woman seemed so—I don’t know—so aggressive, almost as if she were challenging the viewer. I think if the face had not been my own, her look would have been almost improper.

Then came the bodies. First the man with no stomach who I had already seen, half a dozen further sketches with his innards more exposed. Next came another torso: this one had been strangled, the body laid out flat on the ground, as if it had just been cut down, the ligature still buried in his neck and the face bloated and bruised, with a trail of what might have been shit dripping across his legs.

After that there were the women. One was old, again naked, her stomach muscles slack and sagging, lying sideways with one arm curled over her head as if she was trying to protect herself from death. There were wounds all around her body and the other arm lay at a strange angle, the elbow pointing the wrong way, like a broken doll. But it was the younger one who scared me most.

She was stretched out on her back, naked, and she too I had seen before. Her body was that of the young girl laid out in the fresco design for the chapel, lying on her stretcher. But in these sketches, not only was she dead, she was also mutilated. Her face was caught in a rictus of agony and terror, and the whole bottom half of her stomach was ripped open and exposed. Among the mess of gobbets and blood was the small but unmistakable form of an early fetus.

“
COOK SAYS THE MEAL IS READY, MISS ALESSANDRA.
”

Maria’s voice sent my heart colliding into my rib cage. “I . . . I’ll be there in a moment,” I said, folding the sheets of paper hurriedly into my skirts.

Outside in the sunlight Maria and Erila stood waiting. Erila gave me a look of blunt suspicion. I refused to meet her eyes.

“So what was it you found in there?” she asked, as we climbed the narrow staircase leading to the sacristy door, she going first, holding the tray in front of her.

“Er . . . a few sketches, that’s all.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said gracelessly. “Half the servants think he’s twisted round his own charcoal. They say he spent most of the winter drawing animal carcasses they had thrown out. In the kitchen they think he’s got devil eyes.”

“That’s as may be,” I said. “But we still can’t let him starve to death.”

“Well, as long as you know you’re not going in there alone.”

“It’s all right. He won’t hurt me.”

“And what if you’re wrong?” she said firmly, turning to me as we reached the top. “What if something’s gone wrong in his head? You’ve seen them on the streets. Too much God brings on brain fever. Just because he’s seduced you with his paintbrush doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous. You know what I think? I think this is not your business. You have a home of your own now and enough trouble there to occupy an army. Leave this to someone else. He’s just a painter.”

She was frightened for me, of course, remembering that night of my own madness when for a moment my blood had become my paint. And because she is not stupid, my Erila, I did consider what she said. Of course the pain and terror of that young woman’s face had clawed its way off the page into my brain. That she and the others were drawn from life there was no doubt. Or rather, drawn from death. But where he had been when the one state turned into the other was the real question. I thought again about his mix of panic and sweetness. I remembered my taunts to him that first day and his clumsy fury back. I remembered also his slow, shy unfolding when I had sat for him, and the way he talked of God crawling into his hands as a child. Somehow I knew that—however lost and crazy he might be—he wouldn’t hurt me.