by Kate Forsyth
‘I do not. How dare you? I’m no street whore, fucking ten men a night in a back alley. I’m a courtesan of honour.’
‘So sorry. Such a difference, fucking strangers in the street or in a silk-hung bed. You’re still a whore.’
‘I’m a courtesan, that’s how I make my living. Just like you paint endless paintings of cherubs and saints, when what you really want to do is paint real people doing real things. You prostitute yourself to make a living. You just do it with a brush and I do it with my body.’
So once again we had a parting of ways. I went back to my white immaculate house and sat in my white immaculate bedroom and wept. Tears of rage, nothing more. Would I grieve for a peasant painter with hands like a market gardener? I think not. Let him have his pretty little powder puff. Let him see how much her paintings brought. He would crawl back to me in the end.
In the morning, I woke, my face stiff with dried tears. I staggered to my dressing table, to splash water on my face. I saw myself in the mirror, haggard, with swollen eyes and blotchy skin. My breath snagged in my throat. I looked old and worn and weary. I looked from my mirror to the painting of myself looking into a mirror, and I was frightened. I spent all of that day and the next and the next and the next reading through Sibillia’s stone chest. When a bill needed to be paid, I plastered my face with white lead and went to Angela’s salon, where I fucked whoever had the fattest money roll. I drank too much and ate too much and laughed too much, and spent all day searching for the secret to eternal youth. Sibillia had never been beautiful; she had only wanted to trick time into allowing her to live longer than the natural span of years. I wanted more. I wanted to stay beautiful forever.
I found one clue in a fragment of scorched parchment, and another in a rambling philosophical treatise in Ancient Greek (it took me a while to learn to translate that one). An old spell in a scroll, combined with notes scribbled in Sibillia’s own secret code (which was harder to crack than the Ancient Greek), and I began to have an inkling to the secret. Blood. It was always blood.
Sibillia was right when she said it was hard to find a virgin in Venice. All the little girls were locked up either in convents or behind the high walls of their families’ homes, or were already whoring on the streets. And I wanted someone clean, uncorrupted, with skin as white as lilies and hair as red as flame. I wanted someone who looked like me, before that dreadful night had charred my soul.
I found her eventually, a foundling child living at the Ospedale della Pietà. Her name was Abundantia. I adopted her and brought her back to my home. At first, she was gloriously happy, her grey eyes starry, her thin face lit up with joy. But though I was kind enough to her and she had plenty to eat, all the light died out of her once I began to bathe in her blood. It was only nine drops; it hardly hurt her at all. I cannot understand why she hated it so much. I had been happy enough to let Sibillia suck on my wrist. And it was only once a month. The rest of the time, she was free to do as she pleased, as long as she did not go outside my walls. I knew what men were like; it wasn’t worth the risk. The silly girl did not see it that way, however. She kept trying to escape. Once, she even got so far as the Calle Tiepolo before Magli found her and brought her home.
My spell worked, however. I had never been more beautiful. I often saw Tiziano in the streets and salons, and although I ignored him I was always at my most brilliant and amusing when he was present.
In the spring of the year 1514, Tiziano came to see me at Angela’s salon and dropped to his knees before me. ‘Selena, I need you.’
I arched one eyebrow (an art that took me a long time and a great deal of practice in the mirror to achieve). ‘Indeed? Bored of Violante?’
‘She never meant a thing to me. She was just … a consolation.’
‘Really? I heard she got the pox and is sadly disfigured.’
A shadow crossed Tiziano’s face. He looked away, his broad chest rising and falling rapidly as if he fought some strong emotion.
‘So, what do you want of me?’ I spoke coolly.
‘Selena, I’ve been offered a commission … it’s incredibly important. I need the most beautiful woman in the world to sit for me.’ His intense gaze was fixed on my face, his rough peasant hand grasping mine tightly.
I laughed. ‘And I am the most beautiful woman in the world to you now, am I? I thought simpering little blondes were more to your taste.’
He shook his head. ‘Please, Selena, no one else will do.’
The painting was to commemorate the marriage of Niccolò Aurealio, secretary for the Council of Ten, to the young widow Laura Bagarotto. Signor Aurealio did not just want a painting of exquisite beauty, which celebrated love; he also wanted a painting that would subtly restore the reputation of his bride. For Laura was the daughter of the traitor Bertuccio Bagarotto, who had been hanged between the columns in the piazza five years earlier, before the eyes of his wife and children. Laura had lost her dowry and her status; her husband-to-be wanted both reinstated.
So Tiziano painted me twice. Once, clothed and demure, my hair bound up with myrtle like a new bride’s, with one red sleeve to symbolise my hidden sensuality. The second time, on the opposite half of the canvas, he painted me naked except for a tiny wisp of white cloth, red draperies billowing behind me. Once as Earthly Love, once as Heavenly Love. Once as Innocence, once as Experience. Once as Virgin, once as Wife. The possible interpretations were endless. Tiziano was nothing if not clever. Perhaps that was why he was the only man to make my pulse beat faster, the only man I ever met with the wit to match me.
We were lovers again, our passion deeper and more desperate than ever. I even made excuses to my procuress, going to her salon only when I had to, and making up the deficit in my income from love spells and curses, grinding up roots and berries in my stillroom, the memory of Wise Sibillia always etched in acid before my mind’s eye.
It was a dangerous time to make a living as a witch. The Roman Inquisition had sent Dominican friars out into the countryside, searching for heretics and sorcerers. More than sixty so-called witches were burnt to death in Brescia, and many hundreds more were investigated. I don’t think many had any real power, though I managed to buy a few tattered old handwritten manuscripts, passed down through generations of some of the families who died. The Grand Inquisitor had even prevailed upon the Council of Ten to lock up all the Jews of Venice on a dirty little island, called Ghetto Nuova as it had once been used as a foundry. No Jew was permitted to leave the island without wearing a red hat to mark their race, and all had to be back within the high walls of their island by nightfall.
Mindful of my own safety, I cultivated the Grand Inquisitor as a client, though I disliked the stench of smoke that hung around his hair and clothes, and his cold bony hands on my body. He took pleasure from pain and always left red marks on my neck and breasts, and bruises between my thighs. I did not mind the pain so much – pain is proof that you’re alive – but the smell was unendurable. He was one of those men who think sanctity is found in dirt.
Giovanni Bellini, Tiziano’s teacher, died in the winter of 1516 and was buried in the Basilica di san Giovanni e Paolo, where the doges were always buried. This plunged Tiziano into melancholy for weeks. He did not paint, he did not drink and he did not want to make love. The signing of a treaty with the Holy Roman Empire, which brought to an end two decades of war and sent La Serenissima into a delirium of relieved decadence, hardly lightened his mood. He was a man who felt things deeply, my lover Tiziano. Misery and despair; passion and exultation: there was no fulcrum between the two. He was afraid he would die before achieving anything great, that he would be snuffed out like a candle, leaving nothing but a frail wraith of smoke that soon drifted away into darkness. I understood this terror. It shadowed my life as it shadowed his.
One night, when the moon was full, I went to him naked under my velvet cloak, with a vial of Abundantia’s blood hanging between my breasts. In my basket, I carried a leather bottle of freshly pressed apple j
uice, mixed with apple cider at the peak of its strength, and apple brandy, mellowed and old. I ordered a bath to be poured for us both, then banished his brother and all his apprentices and servants – I never could understand why he must always have such a crowd around him. Then, by the light of the full moon, I carefully dripped nine drops of red blood into the warm water in which we wallowed, and I spoke the words of the spell, and I made him drink.
I had never had to rouse him to make love before, but that night he was shrivelled and limp. I worked as hard as I ever had for the oldest and most impotent of my clients, and at last brought him to climax, the bloodied waves of the bath surging about us.
I will keep you safe, we shall both live forever, together, I exulted.
I woke in the morning, stretching like a cat, fulfilled and content. Normally, I didn’t stay, unable to bear the dirt and chaos and noise of Tiziano’s studio. I had wanted to stay that night, though, bound close to my lover by blood magic.
The bed beside me was empty. Sleepily, I looked around. Tiziano was painting, bent over his canvas like a miser over a chest of jewels. I got up, wrapping the sheet about me, and padded silently over to the canvas.
He had been working on another portrait of me looking into a mirror, because demands for one like the original kept pouring in from all the duchies of Italy. In the painting, I was dressed in the same loose green gown and white camìcia as before, my hair bound back with a translucent scarf. Tiziano had not included himself in this painting, however. I stood alone, holding my own mirror.
I stood close beside Tiziano, leaning my head against his broad shoulder, and gazed at the painting. My eyes swept the canvas with sleepy pleasure. Then they widened, my pupils dilating, my heart surging into a rapid staccato beat. For a moment, I could not breathe, I could not speak, then rage swept through me. I pummelled him with my fists, shrieking, ‘Why? Why? Why?’
He had painted an image of a bent old woman in the mirror. Her face was hollowed and wrinkled, her hair grey, and she could only stand with the help of a distaff. In my hand, instead of a pot of perfume, I held an extinguished candle, smoke wreathing upwards.
‘I shall call it “Vanity”,’ Tiziano told me, his face graven with deep lines, his eyes bloodshot. He looked as if he had not slept.
‘Do you seek to curse me?’ I cried. ‘Change it. Change it, or I will curse you!’
His mouth set in a stubborn line I knew all too well.
‘Change it, or I’ll curse you,’ I said, in a low steadfast voice.
Slowly, he raised his brush and swept it across the haggard old woman, extinguishing her. With a few deft daubs, he painted in a spill of coins and jewellery where her face had been. He did not look at me.
I wrapped myself in my cloak, gathered up my empty vial and went towards the door.
His voice stopped me. ‘I am going to Ferrara. The Duc d’Este wants me to paint pictures for his Camerino d’Alabastro. He wants it to be the talk of all of Christendom. I don’t know how long I’ll be away.’ He did not look at me as he spoke, all his attention on gilding the coins on the canvas.
I laughed and went on my way.
He was afraid of me, the coward.
He should be.
TIZIANO AND HIS MISTRESS
Venice, Italy – 1516 to 1582
There was no escaping time in Venice.
Every square had its church, with bells that tolled out the passing of the hours.
At the clock tower in Piazza San Marco, the Moors swung their hammers at the great bell every hour, and a gilded ball showed the waxing and waning of the moon. I went to the Piazza San Marco only when I had to. The clanging of that bell made me feel dizzy and sick. My heartbeat accelerated, as if I had run up all the stairs to the top of the clock tower, when I was only standing in its shadow. I wanted to get away, but my legs trembled so much I could scarcely walk.
One day, the Grand Inquisitor brought his new toy to show me. Of all the men who bought my favours, the Grand Inquisitor was one I never dared to turn away, even though he was in Venice only under sufferance from the Council of Ten, who had told him dryly that they thought the poor peasants of the Veneto – suffering greatly under the scourge of the Roman Inquisition – were in need of a good preaching rather than persecution. The Grand Inquisitor was a tall spare man with a pale ascetic face, who relished the heavy dark robes of his Dominican order since they hid any erection the sight of a young devout girl in church might bring. His new toy was a portable clock, an incredibly tiny mechanism no larger than the size of my clenched fist, which he wore on a chain around his neck. It ticked loudly the whole time he jerked in and out of me, each brutal thrust marking off the seconds of my life. I could not breathe, my lungs cramping with panic. I could not pretend to enjoy what was happening. Indeed, I cringed and flinched and whimpered and bit back sobs, wishing I could seize that little clock and smash it to the floor and stamp on it and stamp on it and stamp on it till nothing was left but bent metal, mangled cogs and wheels, and smithereens of glass. And silence.
The Grand Inquisitor seemed to like my whimpers. He finished sooner than usual but came back the next day, and the next, so a new torture was added to my life: the caustic tick-tock of a clock.
Tiziano came back to Venice but did not seek me out. In fact, he must have gone to some pains to avoid me. I soon heard that he had taken his housekeeper – a conniving young woman called Cecilia – as his mistress. She was the daughter of the village barber from Tiziano’s home town of Cadore, come to Venice for the sole purpose of serving him. I never met her, though I soon knew her face, for Tiziano painted her as he had once painted me, with single-minded obsession. She was pretty enough, I suppose, though nothing could disguise her thick peasant neck and ankles. She must have been disgustingly healthy too, for she delivered him up two strapping baby boys in the next few years and did not seem to suffer from any of my ill-wishing. All that happened was she got sick and almost died, and Tiziano hurriedly married her to legitimise his sons. It made me grind my teeth in annoyance. I could not cast a stronger curse without being able to get hold of some of her hair or fingernails, but it seemed the barber’s daughter from Cadore was an efficient housekeeper, if nothing else.
I told myself I did not care, and, indeed, I truly believed I did not. I luxuriated in a life of semen-stained silken sheets, priceless perfumes, rare delicacies, glittering jewels and, in defiance of the sumptuary laws, the most luxurious clothes Venice could produce. I surrounded myself with the most vicious and depraved rakes in Venice, all eager to buy what I could sell. Apart from maintaining my perfect never-ageing body, I concocted all kinds of spells from the plants in my witch’s garden. Tea made from mandrake roots, powders ground from angel’s trumpet, potions made from nightshade and black hellebore, wine made from juniper berries and fennel, anything that would bring delirium and desire. I bought opium from sailors returned from the East China coast, wild mushrooms plucked from the Black Forest, strange-tasting powders carried to Venice along the Silk Road, and tobacco brought back from the New World by Spanish soldiers. Angela’s salon became renowned for being the wildest, the most debauched and most expensive in Venice. Fathers warned young men away from me, which only made them flock to me in greater numbers. I became very rich.
One winter’s night, our carousing lasted till dawn. I had dismissed my gondolier hours before, and when I came staggering out of Angela’s palazzo it was to find torrents of rain sweeping over the plaza, and not a gondola in sight.
‘What’s a little rain?’ I slurred. ‘It’ll wash away our sins. Come on, Magli, let’s walk.’
My eunuch rarely spoke, hating the sound of his high squeaky voice, so he simply put up the hood of his cloak and offered me his arm. My chopines were so dangerously high that I could not walk without assistance. Together, we sloshed through the square, my velvet dress wet to above the knees in moments. Gaunt palazzos loomed above us, shuttered against the driving rain. Damp crept up from their foundations, the sto
nes stained with mould. Water surged from the overflowing canals and poured from the gutters and drainpipes. Venice looked like it was about to sink below the waves, all its palaces and churches and squares drowned beneath the sea. On fine days, people would peer down from boats floating over our heads and point to see fish swimming through the clock tower at Piazza San Marco. They would cup their ears, listening for the tide to rock the great bells, tolling through the shadowy fathoms. Venice would drown and be nothing more than a memory, a myth, a vanished dream. Such sadness overwhelmed me. I felt tears catch in my throat. So I laughed and flung up my arms and danced a few wobbly steps, pretending I felt no fear and no grief. ‘Drown me if you can,’ I challenged the gloomy sky, and I almost fell. Only Magli’s strong hand saved me.
I was giddy with opium smoke and wine. In a few hours, I’d be sick and in pain, my head throbbing cruelly, my body hurting from the pounding it had taken, but just now, in my mingling of sorrow and defiance, I felt completely and utterly alive.
A man hurried past us, his hood drawn over his face. I saw a quick glimpse of a strong hooked nose, a jutting beard, a flash of fierce black eyes.
‘Tiziano! Are you on your way home too? You old devil. I had thought you all settled in smug domesticity. What does your dear little wife think of you being out all night?’
He turned on me, rage twisting his face. ‘My wife is dead,’ he managed to say, his voice raw. ‘She died last night.’
I laughed.
In a flash, he struck out at me, but Magli caught his hand and bent his arm back till Tiziano was on his knees before me, the icy water up to his waist. ‘Witch! Whore!’ Tiziano spat.
‘I had nothing to do with your wife’s death. You of all people know that death can strike anyone down at any time.’
Tiziano bent his head. Tears were mingling with the rain on his face.
I bent down and took his bearded chin in my hand. ‘What will you do now, without your simpering little wife to paint? Will you have to put your brushes away?’