The Birth of Venus (7 page)

“Because we met him, that’s why.”

“When?”

“Last night, sneaking back over the old bridge.”

“Did you speak to him?”

“I asked him where he’d been, yes.”

“And?”

“And he looked guilty as sin and said he was ‘taking the night air.’”

“Maybe he was.”

“Oh, little sister. You have no idea. The man was a mess. Face like a ghost, stains all over him. He was positively reeking of it—the stink of cheap cunt.” Though I had not heard the word before, I knew from the way he said it something of what it must mean, and while I chose not to show it, he shocked me by the contempt in his voice. “So. You had better be careful. If he paints you again, keep your cloak wrapped tight around you. He might take more than your likeness.”

“Have you told anyone else about this?”

He smiles. “You mean have I snitched on him? Why should I? I think he probably paints better on the juice of a good whore than he would on a diet of the Gospels. Who was that artist you so love? The one who plucked the nun for his Madonna.”

“Fra Filippo,” I say. “She was very beautiful. And he offered to marry her afterward.”

“Only because the Medici made him. I bet old Cosimo took a bit off the price of the altarpiece though.”

It is clear that Tomaso has inherited something of my father’s business acumen.

“So what bargain did you strike with the painter in return for your silence, Tomaso?”

He laughs. “What do you think? I made him promise to give Luca and me a good leg and a wide brow. Our beauty for posterity. And to give you a harelip—and a shortened leg, to explain your dancing.”

Though I am expecting it, of course, his cruelty still takes me aback. It always comes to this moment in our arguments: his need to punish me for the humiliations of the study room; my refusal to be crushed. I sometimes think the trajectory of my whole life was played out in my battles with Tomaso. That each time I won I also somehow lost.

“Oh, don’t tell me I’ve hurt your feelings! If you only knew . . . We’re doing you a favor, aren’t we, Luca? It’s not easy finding a husband for a girl who quotes Plato but falls over her own feet. Everybody knows you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

“You better be careful, both of you,” I say darkly, thickening my voice to cover my hurt. “You think you can do what you like. That Father’s money and our coat of arms give you license. But if you opened your eyes you’d see things are changing. The sword of God’s wrath is rising above the city. He stalks the streets at night in your footsteps and sees what evil you commit.”

“Whoa, you sound just like Savonarola.” Luca laughs nervously. I am good at voices when I put my mind to it.

“You laugh now”—I turn on him, drilling his eye as I have seen the prior do from the pulpit—“but you’ll be crying soon enough. The Lord will send plague, flood, war, and famine to punish the ungodly. Those who clothe themselves in righteousness will be saved; the rest will choke on the fumes of the sulfur.”

For a moment I swear even my lumpen brother can feel the heat of hell.

“Don’t listen to her, Luca.” Tomaso is harder to scare. “He’s a madman. Everyone knows that.”

“Not everyone, Tomaso. He knows how to preach and he quotes the scriptures well. You should listen to him sometime.”

“Ah . . . I do start listening, but then my eyelids grow heavy.”

“That’s because you’ve been out too late the night before. Look behind you and see the effect he has on those who have slept in their own beds. They have eyes as big as hosts. And they believe him.” I can see Luca is listening hard now.

“War? Famine? Flood? We see the Arno in the streets every other year, and if the crops fail people will be hungry again. It doesn’t have to be God’s will.”

“Yes, but if Savonarola predicts it and then it happens, people will connect the two. Think about the pope.”

“What? He tells us that a sick old man is going to die, and then when he does everyone calls him a prophet. I would have thought it would take more than that to impress you. Anyway, you should be more worried than most. If he’s suspicious of learning in men, he believes the Devil resides in women. He doesn’t even think women should speak. Because, if you remember, dear Sis, it was Eve who used her words to beguile Adam and—”

“Why is it when there are voices raised in this house it is always you two?” My mother sweeps into the room dressed for traveling, Maria and another servant trotting behind carrying a set of leather bags. “You brawl like street fighters. It is an offense to hear you. You, sir, should not taunt your sister, and you, Alessandra, are a disgrace to your sex.”

We all bow to her. Halfway down I catch Tomaso’s eye, and he gives my unspoken request for a truce some thought. There are still some moments when our need to help each other is greater than our differences.

“Dear Mama, forgive us, we were simply discussing religion,” he says, with a charm that might undress certain women but was lost on my mother. “How far we should pay heed to the good friar’s recent sermons.”

“Oh!” She let out an angry breath. “I would hope my children would follow God’s will without Savonarola’s words to sting them into action.”

“But surely you don’t agree with him, Mama?” I said urgently. “He believes the study of the ancients is a betrayal of Christ’s truth.”

She stops and stares at me, her mind still half on other things. “Alessandra, each day I pray that you will find a way to contentment by questioning less and accepting more. As to Girolamo Savonarola—well, he is a holy man who believes in the kingdom of heaven.” She frowned. “Still, I do wonder that Florence should have had to find a friar from Ferrara to hold a mirror up to her soul. If one has to listen to bad news, it is better to come from one’s own family. Like now.” She sighed. “I have to go to Plautilla.”

“To Plautilla? Why?”

“There is some problem with the baby. She has asked for me. I will almost certainly stay the night and send word back with Angelica. Alessandra, you will stop brawling and get ready for your dancing teacher, who apparently still believes that miracles are possible. Luca, you will go to your studies, and Tomaso, you will stay and speak to your father when he gets in. He is at a meeting of the Security Council in the Signoria, and it is likely that he will be late.”

“But Mother—”

“Whatever it is that you have planned to do this evening, Tomaso, it will wait until your father returns. Is that clear?”

And my pretty brother, who always has an answer to everything, remained silent.

Eight

I
STAYED UP LATE, EATING MILK PUDDINGS FILCHED FROM
the pantry—our cook adored me for my appetite, and such theft was viewed only as the sincerest form of flattery—and playing chess with Erila for gossip. It was the only game where I could ever beat her. At dice and cards she was a master gambler, though I suspect it was as much her skill in cheating as in playing. On the streets she could probably have made a fortune, though gambling was one of the sins that Savonarola was now breathing fire on from the pulpit.

When we had tired of playing, I made her help me mix up my ink washes and then pose for me in my Madonna’s silk Annunciation dress. I set the lamp to the left of her, so the shadows created came nearest to the effect of daylight. Everything I knew of such techniques came from Cennini. Though he was long dead, he was the nearest I would come to a teacher and I studied him with the devotion of a novitiate to the scriptures. Following his lore on drapery, I used the richest ink wash to create the darkest part of the shadow, then graduated the ink lighter until it reached the tops of the folds, where I added a streak of watered white lead so the ridge of cloth seemed to capture the shine of the light. But while it gave Our Lady’s costume a certain depth, even I could see it was crude, more a trickery of the brush than an expression of truth. My limitations made me despair. As long as I was both my own master and apprentice I would be forever caught in the web of inexperience.

“Oh, keep still. I can’t capture the fold if you move.”

“You should try standing here like a piece of stone. My arms are falling off, they ache so.”

“That’s from the speed with which you move your chess pieces. If you were sitting for a real painter you would have to be statue-still for hours.”

“If I were sitting for a real painter my purse’d be heavy with florins.”

I grinned. “I’m surprised they haven’t plucked you off the streets. Your skin shines so when the sun is on you.”

“Ha! And what story would they put my color in?”

Looking back on it now, I wish I had had the courage to make her my Madonna, just to capture that coal-black sheen. There were those in the city who still found her skin strange; they would turn and gawp at her as we walked together back from church, half fascinated, half repulsed. But she would have none of it, holding their stare until they broke first. For me her color had always been glorious. There had been times when I could barely stop my brush from tracing a line of white lead along her forearm just to marvel at the contrast between the light and the black.

“What about our painter? Mother says the chapel frescoes will be the life of Santa Caterina of Alexandria. There would be room enough for you there. Has he never asked you?”

“My likeness done by Skinnyboy?” She looked at me intently. “What do you think?”

“I . . . I don’t know. I think he has a great eye for beauty.”

“A young monk’s fear of it, too. For him I’m just another shade he wants to capture.”

“So you think he is impervious to women?”

She snorted. “If he is, he’ll be the first one I’ve ever met. He’s just rigid with purity.”

“In which case I wonder why you go to such lengths to keep me out of his company!”

She stared at me for a moment. “Because in the right hands innocence can spring more traps than knowledge.”

“Well, that shows how much you know,” I said, triumphant that for once my gossip was fresher than hers. “From what I hear he spends his nights with women whose souls are blacker than your skin.”

“Who told you that?”

“My brothers.”

“Pah! They don’t know their arse from their elbows. Tomaso loves himself too much, and when it comes to a woman’s body Luca couldn’t find a crow in a bowl of milk.”

“You say that, but I remember a time when he looked on you eagerly enough.”

“Luca!” She laughed. “He’s only got the stomach for sin when he’s halfway down an ale cask. When he’s sober I’m the Devil’s creation.”

“And so you are. Oh—Stop moving! How can I get the shadow right if you shift so?”

Later, when she was gone, I developed a throbbing in my belly that came and went in uneven rhythm, though how much that was a surfeit of milk pudding was hard to tell. The summer heat was upon us now, and it could curdle the brain. I wondered about Plautilla. Could it be her pain I was feeling? She would be at most only four to five months gone with child. What did that mean? Between Erila’s gossip and my brothers’ crudeness I probably knew more about the act of sex than most closeted girls of my age, but for every fact there was a small ocean of ignorance, and the growth of a baby was one of them. Still, I could read my mother’s anxiety enough to know when it was serious. The ache came back like a fist squeezing my bowels. I got up and started to walk around to try and ease it.

I could not get the painter out of my mind. I thought about his talent, the way he had captured my hands at rest, how peaceful he had made them seem, how full of soul. Then I saw him stumbling across the Ponte Vecchio with my brother’s gang splayed out in front of him, and try as I might I could not equate the two images. Yet whatever Erila’s doubts, the fact that he had been there at all was deeply incriminating. The old bridge had a fearful reputation: the butchers’ and candlemakers’ shops with their womblike interiors and thick smells of rotting meat and boiling wax drifting out onto the street. Even by day there were dogs and beggars everywhere, sniffing around for scraps or offal, while at night on either side of the bridge the city splintered into a maze of alleyways where darkness hid all manner of sins.

The prostitutes themselves were careful enough. There were rules as to how they should conduct themselves. The bells they carried and the gloves they wore were the law as well as props of enticement. But again, it was a law gently implemented. As with the Sumptuary Police, there was an accepted difference between the spirit and the letter. Erila was forever coming home with stories about how women accosted by officials for wearing fur or silver buttons argued their way out of a fine by a cunning use of semantics: “Oh no, sir, this is not fur, it is a new material which is only
like
fur. And these? These are not buttons. There are no buttonholes, see? They are, rather, clips. Clips? Yes, you must have heard of them. Surely Florence is the wonder of the world, to have such new things in it.” But from what one heard, such wit was now lost on certain of the new officers. Purity was coming back into fashion, and the blind eye of authority was getting back its vision.

I had only seen a courtesan once. The Ponte alle Grazie had been closed with flood damage and we had had to cross at the Ponte Vecchio. It was dusk. Ludovica walked in front of Plautilla and me, with Maria herding in the rear. We passed by an open shop door, a candlemaker’s, I remember, gloomy inside but with a window at the back looking out over the river, the sunset behind it. A woman was sitting in silhouette, her breasts bare, and at her feet a man kneeling with his head between her skirts, as if in worship. She was lovely, her body lit up by the setting sun, and at that moment she turned her head to look out toward the street and I am sure she saw me staring. She smiled and seemed so . . . well, sure of herself. I know that I felt both excited and disturbed and had to look away.

I wondered later about her palpable beauty. If Plato was right, how could it be possible for a woman of no virtue to have such looks? Filippo Lippi’s mistress had at least been a nun serving God when the call came to be his Madonna. And in a way she still served God afterward, her image calling others to prayer. Oh, she was beautiful! Her face lit up dozens of his paintings: clear-eyed, calm, shouldering her burden with gratitude and grace. I liked her more than Botticelli’s Madonna. Though Fra Filippo had been his teacher he had taken a different model, a woman everyone knew to have been Giuliano de’ Medici’s mistress. Once you knew her face you began to see it everywhere: in his nymphs, his angels, his classical heroines, even his saints. Botticelli’s Madonna, you felt, might belong to anyone who looked at her. Fra Filippo’s belonged only to God and herself.

My stomach stabbed at me again. My mother kept a bottle of digestive
liquore
in the medicine chest in her dressing room. If I took some now it might ease the pain. I left my room and moved silently down one flight of stairs, but as I turned toward my mother’s quarters I was drawn to something else, a flickering line of light coming from under the door of the chapel room to my left. The chapel was out of bounds to servants, and with my mother and father gone there was only one person it could be. I can no longer remember if that thought halted or spurred me on.

INSIDE, A FLICKERING WAVE OF CANDLELIGHT ILLUMINATES THE
apse, but immediately the light contracts, then eclipses altogether as the last candle is capped. I wait, then close the door behind me, deliberately letting its hinges moan, before letting it slam noisily shut. Whoever I am, as far as he is concerned I have left again.

For the longest time we stand in the dark, the silence so raw that when I swallow I can hear the sound of my saliva inside my ears. Finally, a pinprick of light appears where the candles had been. I watch as the concealed taper fires one wick, then another and another, until the apse is awash with tongues of orange and he comes into focus, his tall lanky body revealed inside the semicircle of light.

I take the first steps toward him. My feet are bare and I am practiced at night walking. But so, it seems, is he. His head lifts sharply, like an animal reading a night scent. “Who’s there?” And his voice is harsh enough to do damage to my heartbeat, though I know it comes from fear rather than anger.

I walk to the edge of the light. The glow of the candles throws shadows onto his face and his eyes glint, a true cat in the dark. We are neither of us dressed for company. He has no tunic on and his undershirt is open so I can see the ridge of his collarbone and the smooth bare flesh beneath, pearl-shiny in the candlelight. I am a frozen gawky figure in a crumpled chemise, my hair unbraided down my back. That same yeasty smell about him that I remember from our portrait sitting is heavy in the air around us. Except now I know where it comes from. What did my brother call it, the stink of cheap cunt? But if Erila is right, how could a man so frightened of women be so drawn? What if he is come here to confess?

“I saw the candlelight from the corridor. What are you doing?”

“I am working,” he says gruffly.

Now, behind him, I can see the
cartone
stuck to the east wall of the apse, a full-sized drawing of the fresco with the outline pricked out so it can be transferred to the wall in charcoal. The art of fresco: what I know so much about in theory he is now familiar with in fact. His new knowledge makes me want to cry. I know I should not be here. Whether he is profligate or not, if we were to be found together now both our lives would be torn apart. But my hunger and my curiosity override my fear, and I move past him to read the drawing better.

I can still see it now: the glory of Florence conjured up in a hundred deft pen strokes. In the foreground, two groups of people are gathered on each side, staring down at a stretcher on the floor on which a girl’s body is laid. They are marvelous, these spectators: flesh-and-blood men and women of the city, their characters captured in their faces—age, kindness, serenity, or stubbornness in turn. His ethereal pen has come down to earth. But his journey is most noticeable in the girl. She draws your eye in immediately, not just because she is the focal point in the composition but because of her intense fragility. With Tomaso’s obscenities buzzing in my head, I cannot help but wonder where he has found the model. Perhaps he only seeks them out to paint them. Were there really prostitutes so young? That she is a girl rather than a woman is obvious; under her night shift you can feel her breasts budding and there is a clumsy angularity about her frame, as if womanhood is coming too soon. But the singular most arresting thing about her body is its complete lifelessness.

“Oh!” I am speaking before I have given myself permission. “You have learned a lot in our city. How do you do that? How is it I know she is dead? When I look at her it seems so clear. But which are the lines that tell me that? Show me. Whenever I draw bodies, I can’t distinguish sleep from death. Many times they just look awake with their eyes closed.”

So there. It is out at last. I wait for him to laugh in my face or show his contempt in a million other ways. The silence grows and I am as scared as when we were both in the dark.

“I should tell you that this is not a confession in the face of God, sir, since He already knows,” I say quietly. “But it is a confession in front of you. So perhaps you might say something?”

I look past him into the gloom of the chapel. It is as good a place as any. Its walls will surely hear worse in years to come.

“You draw?” he says softly.

“Yes. Yes! But I want to do more. I want to paint. As you do.” Suddenly it seems as if it is the most important thing in the world to tell him. “Is that so terrible? If I were a boy and had talent, I would already be apprenticed to a master—just as you have been. Then I too would know how to light up these walls with paint. But instead I am stuck in this house while my parents look for a husband for me. Eventually they will buy one with a good name and I will go to his house, run his household, have his children, and disappear into the fabric of his life like a pale thread of color in a tapestry. Meanwhile the city will be full of artists constructing glories to God, and I shall never know if I could have done the same. Even though I don’t have your talent, painter, I have your desire. You have to help me. Please.”

And I know he has understood. He does not laugh or dismiss me. But what can he say? What could anyone say to me? I am so arrogant, even in my despair.

“If you need help, you must ask God for it. It is a matter between you and Him.”

“Oh, but I
have
asked. And He has sent me you.” His face shifts in the candlelight so I can no longer see his expression. But I am too young and too eager to bear his silence for long. “Don’t you understand? We are allies, you and I. If I had wanted to harm you, I could have told my parents how you attacked me that first afternoon.”