The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  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.

  As for my own home? Well, there was no warmth to be had there anymore. I was an outsider. It would be better for me to hunt down like-minded companions in pain to ease my loneliness.

  “I know what I am doing, Erila,” I said, with quiet force. “I’ll call if I need you. I promise.”

  She gave that little click of her tongue, which I love because it speaks so much while saying so little, and I knew she would let me go.

  She set the tray near the entrance so the smell of the newly cooked flesh would creep under the wood. It brought back the echo of a thousand mornings as a child when I had fasted through mass, guilty because the prospect of God’s body on my tongue was less arousing than the aroma of roasting meats coming from the kitchen when I arrived home. What it must be like to smell it after days without food I could not imagine.

  I stood back and signaled to her. She knocked loudly.

  “Your food is here,” she said in a booming voice. “The cook says if you don’t eat this, he’ll stop sending it. It’s roast pigeon, spiced vegetables, and a flagon of wine.” She knocked again. “Last chance, painter.”

  Then I signaled again and she stomped off down the stairs, her footsteps heavy on the stones. At the bottom she stopped and looked up at me.

  I waited. For a while nothing happened. Then finally I heard a scraping noise from somewhere behind the door. The locks clicked and the door opened a fraction. A shambling figure came out and bent down to pick up the tray.

  I stepped out of the shadows, just as I had that night in the house when I had sent his drawings scattering to the ground. He had been scared by me then, and so he was again. He backed into the room and tried to close the door behind him, but he was holding the tray at a strange angle and his coordination seemed to have gone. I rammed my foot in the gap and started to push myself through. He pushed back, but though I had been ill, he had been fasting and the door gave with my weight. As he staggered back, the tray and its contents went flying, an arch of red wine spraying the walls. The door slammed behind me.

  We were both inside.

  Thirty

  HE LEFT THE TRAY WHERE IT HAD FALLEN IN THE DARKness and scrabbled away like a cockroach, through the sacristy and into the body of the chapel. I picked up the wooden platter and saved what I could of the food. The wine was lost as wall paint.

  Then I followed him.

  The smell inside the room was vile, excrement and urine. Even when you don’t eat you carry on pissing and shitting, for a while at least. Fearful of where I might put my feet, I hesitated until my eyes became accustomed to the gloom. The apse was cordoned off, the scaffolding still in place but tarpaulins and sheets up all around. The tables were laid out in working order: paint powder, pestles and mortars, and brushes, all prepared. Next to them sat a large concave mirror similar to one my father kept in his study, the better to reflect what remained of the daylight when his eyes grew dim. In a farther corner there was another bucket with a makeshift wooden lid on it. I assumed the smell was coming from there.

  It was cooler than the rest of the house. And damp, the kind of damp that seems to ooze out of the stone when there are no human bodies to heat it. He had been brought up amid stone and cold light. What had my father said about him? That he had painted every space around him till there were no more walls to fill. But not now. Not here. Here, apart from the closed-off apse, there was nothing. I wondered again what was behind the tarpaulins.

  Now I saw him. He was sitting in the corner, hunched over himself. He wasn’t looking at me. He didn’t seem to be looking at anything. He was like an animal cornered by the hunt. I approached him gently. Despite my brave words I was scared. Erila was right. With so much religion abroad, holy madness was on the increase: people who lived so much with God that they didn’t know any longer how to be with humans. You came across
them in the streets sometimes, chattering to themselves, laughing, crying, their vulnerability vibrating like a halo around them. For the most part they were benign souls, more like lost hermits. But not all. When God was fermenting inside them they could be very frightening.

  I stopped a few yards in front of him. The Madonna with my face and the bodies with their bowels unraveled between us. As I opened my mouth I still didn’t know what words would come out.

  “You know what they call you in the kitchen?” I heard myself say. “Uccellino. Little bird. After the painter, in reverence to your talent, but also because they are scared of you. They think you wait till nightfall and then fly out the window. The cook is convinced you won’t eat his food because you have found better somewhere else. He is offended, as all good cooks are.”

  He gave no indication that he heard me. He was rocking slightly, his arms crossed around him, his hands curled and cradled under his armpits, his eyes closed. I moved closer to him. It didn’t seem right, being so tall above him. I sat down on the ground, feeling the cold stone through the folds of my gown. He looked so alone and lonely, I wanted to warm him with the company of words. “When I was growing up and all the talk was of the beauty of our city, there used to be a story about an artist who worked for Cosimo de’ Medici. Fra Filippo was his name.” I made my voice gentle and even, as I remembered Erila’s when she used to talk me into sleep as a child. “You have seen his work. He paints his Madonna with such serenity that you would think his very brush was dipped in the Holy Spirit. He was a monk, after all. But no. Our good brother was so full of carnal thoughts that he would break off from his painting to range around the city at night, accosting any woman who would have him. The great Cosimo de’ Medici got so frustrated with him—as much because the paintings stayed unfinished as because of his sins, I think—that he locked him into his studio at night. But when he came in the second morning he found the window open, the bedsheets tied together, and Filippo gone. After that he gave him the key back. Whatever Filippo needed to do for his art he accepted, even if he didn’t understand or approve.”

  I paused. Though nothing obvious about him had changed, I knew now he was listening. I could feel it in his body.

  “To have such a fire inside oneself must be very hard sometimes. I think it must make you behave in ways that you only barely understand. When I have been at my worst I wonder later why I did the things I did. Except that they seemed necessary at the time. And I have no talent at all. Not compared with yours.”

  I could see that his whole body was shaking. There had been times—like that first afternoon in his room—when the very physicality of him had made me shake, but not as he did now. This was a different kind of fear.

  I put the remains of the supper between us and slid the plate toward him. “Why don’t you eat something?” I said. “It’s good.”

  He shook his head, but his eyes flicked open. Not ready yet. I caught a quick glimpse of his face. His skin was the same color as the white on a Della Robbia ceramic. I remembered him crawling around the ceiling, flush with the heat of the flames as he sketched the grid that would become heaven. He had enough energy and vision then. Whatever happened to heaven?

  “I have probably talked to you more than anyone in this house has,” I said. “Yet I don’t even know your name. You have been ‘the painter’ for so long that that is how I think of you. I know nothing about you, except that you have divinity in your fingers. More than I will ever have. I have felt such envy of you that I think I might have missed your pain. In which case I am sorry.”

  I waited. Still nothing.

  “Are you ill? Is that it? Has the fever come back?”

  “No.” It was so quiet I could barely hear him. “I am not hot. I am cold. So cold.”

  I reached out to touch him, but he jerked backward. As he did so, I saw a flash of pain shoot across his face.

  “I don’t understand what’s happened to you,” I said gently. “But whatever it is, I can help.”

  “No. You cannot help me. No one can help me.” Then another silence, and this time a whisper. “I am abandoned.”

  “Abandoned? By whom?”

  “By Him. By God.”

  “What do you mean?”

  But he only shook his head violently and clasped his arms more tightly around him. Then, to my horror, he started to weep, sitting there frozen with a slow flow of tears running down his face, like those miraculous statues of the Virgin that cry blood as a way to bring the doubting back to faith.

  “Oh, I am so sorry.”

  And now for the first time he looked directly at me, and as I stared into his eyes it seemed as if he, the painter, that shy young man from the North, was no longer there, and in his place was just a great pit of sadness and terror.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Please. There is nothing so terrible it can’t be told.”

  Behind me the door opened and I heard soft footfalls. It would be Erila. I had been in here too long and she would be beside herself with worry.

  “Not now,” I muttered, without moving.

  “But—”

  “Not now.”

  “Your parents are expected soon.”

  It was a good lie, as much to warn him as to help me. I tilted my head toward her and the look she gave me contained a lecture within it. I nodded slightly in recognition of its advice. “Then come back for me. Please.”

  I turned away. Her footsteps retreated and the door closed.

  He still hadn’t moved. I took a risk. I pulled out the sketches from inside my gown and laid a few of them on the ground near to the plate, so the man’s innards sat next to the remains of the roasted meat. “I have known for a long time,” I said softly. “I have been to your room. I’ve seen them all. Is this what you can’t tell?”

  A shudder passed through him. “It’s not what you think,” and his voice was a sudden growl. “I didn’t hurt them. I didn’t hurt anybody—” He broke off.

  This time I went toward him, and if it was the wrong thing to do then I was not the one to judge. I was living in a world where a husband pokes his wife as if she were a cow and men embrace and penetrate each other with a passion and devotion that would make the saints blush. There was no such thing as correct behavior anymore. I put my arms gently around his body. He let out a sharp moan, though whether it was from pain or despair I could not tell. His flesh was cold and stiff like a corpse, and he was so thin I could feel every bone through his skin.

  “Tell me, painter. Tell me. . . .”

  His voice when it came was low and halting, the penitent searching for the right words. “He said that the human body was God’s greatest creation and that to understand it you had to go under the skin. Only that way could we learn how to bring it to life. I wasn’t the only one. There were six or seven of us. We met at night in a room in Santo Spírito hospital, by the church. The corpses belonged to the city, he said, people who had no family to claim them or criminals from the gallows. He said God would understand. Because His glory would live on in our art.”

  “He? Who is this ‘he’?”

  “I didn’t know his name. He was young, but there was nothing he couldn’t draw. Once they brought in a boy—fifteen, sixteen. He had died from something in the brain but his body was perfect. He said he was too young to have been corrupted. He said he would be our Jesus. I was going to put him in the fresco. But before I could paint him he came back with his Crucifixion. It was sculpted in white cedar. The body was so perfect, so alive, you could feel every muscle and sinew. I was sure it was Christ. I couldn’t—”

  He broke off again. I released him and sat back so I could look at him, assess the damage that his words had caused him. “And the more God flowed through him, the more He drained out of you,” I said quietly. “Is that what happened?”

  He shook his head. “You don’t understand. . . . You don’t understand. I should never have been there. It was all a lie. It wasn’t God in that room but something else. The power of
temptation. After the army came, he went away. Disappeared. The corpses stopped coming. The room closed. There was talk of bodies being found in the city. A girl with her womb cut out, the couple, the man disemboweled. Our bodies . . . we didn’t know . . . I mean . . . I didn’t know. . . .” He shook his head. “It wasn’t God in that room.” He said again, angrily this time, “It was the Devil. Don’t you see? The friar says the more we paint man rather than God, the more we take away His divinity. The body is His mystery. His creation. It is not for us to understand it, only to worship. I gave in to the temptation to know. I disobeyed, and now He has abandoned me.”

  “Oh, no, no! This is Savonarola’s voice speaking, not you,” I said. “He wants people to be scared, to think that God will leave them. That way he keeps them in his grip. This painter, whoever he was, was right. How can it be evil to understand God’s wonder?”

  But he didn’t reply.

  “And even if it were, He would not abandon you for such a thing,” I prodded, terrified that I might lose him again. “Your talent is too precious to Him.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said again, and he had his eyes screwed tight shut. “It’s gone, gone. . . . I stared into the sun and my eyes are burned out. I can’t paint anymore.”

  “That’s not true,” I said softly, putting out my hands toward him. “I have seen those drawings. They have too much truth about them to be godless. You are lonely and lost and you have frightened yourself into despair. All you need is to believe that you can see again and you will. Your hands will do the rest. Give them to me, painter. Give me your hands.”