Light in the Shadows

by Linda Lafferty

  “Here’s Anna!” roared the drunk. “And what a terrific arse she has! Who in this tavern hasn’t had some of that?”

  The red-haired girl turned on him amid the lewd laughter.

  “Maybe you are the one with the terrific ass, Claudio. Not that it matters to me, but the pretty bugger boys certainly love it.”

  The drunken painter staggered to his feet and slapped the girl hard in the face.

  Anna put her hand to her cheek.

  “Serves you right!” said one of her female companions. She put her hand on her hip, turning toward the men. “These are our paying customers. Have some respect.”

  “Shut up, Doralice!” said Anna.

  “You cost us money, you stupid puttana!” said the third woman, her painted lips pinched.

  “Who are you calling whore, Livia?” screamed Anna. “Troia! You pig, you filthy slut!” She seized a handful of her companion’s black hair in her fist.

  Livia twisted, screaming. Her hand grabbed for Anna’s necklace, breaking it. Ceramic beads bounced on the stone floor of the tavern.

  “Dirty figa!” screamed Anna. “Cunt! My mother’s beads!”

  Doralice fumbled for a knife in her bodice.

  “Break it up! Put down that knife, ragazza,” growled the tavern owner. “Over here, sbirri! Arrest them!”

  Two guards shoved through the crowd. One grabbed Doralice by her forearm, wresting the weapon from her hand.

  “You three! Come with us,” said the other, grabbing Anna Bianchini by her hair. Her long red locks shook free of their pins, spilling down across her shoulders and face. “You puttane! Whores should keep to the streets,” said the guard, yanking the two apart.

  Anna winced, her eyes cast down at the stone floor strewn with her mother’s beads. A tear rolled down her left cheek.

  Caravaggio was riveted, his cup of wine suspended before his lips.

  That’s it!

  “Get your hands off me!” screamed Doralice, struggling to wrench free of the policeman’s arms. “You think I can’t feel you grabbing my bosom? You pay before you touch me!”

  “Desist, ragazze, or you’ll spend your days in Sant’Angelo prison!”

  Caravaggio set down his wine. He turned to his companions. “What’s her full name—this Anna? Do you know her?”

  “Anna Bianchini, one of Ranuccio Tomassoni’s string of whores,” said Onorio. “She and that Fillide Melandroni are from Siena, though Fillide is trading higher these days as a courtesan.”

  Longhi rubbed his thumb and middle finger together. Money.

  “Anna beds down most of the regulars here,” said Marino, gesturing with his cup. He laughed, tipping back the drink. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Including me on occasion. She’s a handful.”

  “I must have her,” said Caravaggio.

  As if he’d overheard the painter, the Maltese Knight stood. The sbirri backed away in deference as he approached Anna, his hand slipping down over her buttocks. He whispered in her ear and she nodded. They moved toward the door.

  As Roero crossed the threshold, he turned and looked over his shoulder at Caravaggio. He made the sign of the cornuto, horns of a cuckold, and slapped Anna on the ass.

  Cecco tied the waist string on his muslin trousers and put on a gray boiled-wool tunic, spotted stiff with paint. He still shivered as he went about his chores. He covered the mixed paints with moist rags and dipped the paintbrushes in a solution of turpentine in a wooden bucket. His fingers coaxed the paints from the hairs, careful not to dislodge any bristles.

  Caravaggio always inspected his brushes carefully each morning. He had boxed the boy’s ears before when he’d found a couple of bristles stuck to the edge of the bucket.

  The apprentice allowed himself a few minutes for a brief repast. He took hard salami off the shelf and a loaf of stale bread. He poured himself some wine, sour and rough, to wash down his meal. Even though he knew Caravaggio had left, he looked over his shoulder. From the art supplies, he took the jug of walnut oil and poured a liberal splash on his bread. The oil spread its nutty flavor throughout his mouth, coating his tongue with its richness.

  He closed his eyes and smiled.

  As he ate, he stared at the twisted bedsheet that had served as his toga for the master’s composition.

  The cardinals would laugh at this painting of me. My body thin, my cheeks pale. What is my master thinking? I am no Bacchus!

  Rag in hand, Cecco gave the greasy table a good scrub. The plank table was covered by an unfinished canvas Caravaggio had discarded. The grim face of a cardinal dressed in vermilion robes looked up at the boy. Cecco bent over his work, the painted double chin wobbling under the ministrations of the cleaning cloth. The portrait had long served as the dining surface for Caravaggio. Today’s capon grease had left an oily smudge across the cardinal’s face and left shoulder.

  Cecco looked down at his dirty cloth and sighed. Precious bits of pigment—lead white, yellow ochre, and a pale blush of vermilion—stained his cloth. The forgotten cardinal—probably one who had fallen from favor and could not pay for his portrait—had been fading over the past months, disappearing day by day into the old rag.

  After the master’s supplies were put away, Cecco looked for his scrap of gesso-prepared canvas stretched on a frame of splintery oak. The boy’s pigments were the cheapest form of color—charcoal dusts, ground-earth browns, and chalk white—but he focused as intently as if he were working with the most precious lapis lazuli, ultramarine, and gold.

  His hands, still wet from washing up, cradled an earthen jug half full of wine. He set it next to some peaches, not yet ripe. Their first blush of color would contrast well with the terra-cotta pitcher.

  Now I shan’t draw a line but do as the master does. A few marks in the canvas—an abbozzo—to set my composition, that is all.

  Vision! I must see the image.

  Cecco closed his eyes, summoning up a mental picture. He set about his work, his tongue held between his teeth, working the thin wooden end of his brush partway through the gesso on the canvas, a series of indentations. He thought of his master’s hands working and shivered.

  Hands of a genius. Hands of a lover.

  He was Caravaggio’s boy. He shared the artist’s bed, his thirteen-year-old body giving the twenty-nine-year-old pleasure when the master wasn’t occupied with the whores of Roma.

  But Cecco worried. He was growing older, an adolescent. Caravaggio reached for him less and less at night.

  Perhaps it is his rage that interferes with his love for me.

  Boys as sexual companions for older men—there were hundreds of people throughout Roma who thought it was a mortal sin, punishable by death. Cecco had the prestige of being the companion of Roma’s most promising artist.

  Sì. He gave his body to his master, a man with an insatiable appetite for life, art . . . and sex. He was Caravaggio’s boy.

  But Francesco Boneri—Cecco—was more than a model and a source of pleasure. He was also the maestro’s apprentice.

  Someday I will become a great artist too.

  Chapter 2

  VILLAGE OF MONTE PICCOLO, CHIANTI

  Her voice carried across the piazza, over the playful shrieks of the children and the murmuring of the nuns who stopped and turned when they heard her shouting.

  Hands flying, black hair electric with outrage, she was berating the driver of a taxi stopped next to her. The nuns hurried across the tiny piazza, seeking safe distance from the erupting volcano of her temper. And standing across the piazza, pulling his scarf tighter against the winter wind, Professor A. R. Richman watched, thinking he was glad she was shouting at the taxi driver and not at him.

  At seventy-five, Professor Richman was tall and thin, with unruly gray hair, worn a little long over his collar. He remembered all too well the last time a woman had yelled at him in public. It had been scarcely more than a year ago at the final departmental meeting before he’d retired after a career at Harvard focused on Akk
adian and Eblaite cuneiform tablets—which he had to admit was not as glamorous as it might sound. The woman had been an associate professor who had disagreed with him, almost violently, over details of daily life during the reign of Sargon of Akkad. He had found leaving such disputes behind to be one of the great pleasures of retirement.

  His retirement had so far been free of almost all disputes. It had been calm, placid—both delightfully and perhaps somewhat disappointingly.

  His wife of almost fifty years had died within a month of his retirement, and suddenly adrift, missing her terribly, he had spent most of the year since then like a toddler at the beach, seeking the safety of shallow waters. Without any responsibilities and with—thanks to a solid pension and years of careful investments—the ability to pursue whatever course of action caught his fancy, he had nonetheless stayed perilously close to the life and the world he had known for so long.

  He had focused his time and attention on a self-directed education in art history: reading deeply, auditing classes at the university, and spending his off-hours in the walnut-paneled confines of the faculty club, where he knew all the faces and felt no obligation to chat with any of them—which allowed him to neatly sidestep any concerns of whether they had any interest in chatting with him.

  He might have daydreamed of retirement as an opportunity to break free of the routines of the past half century, to travel widely and maybe regain some of the recklessness of youth that had propelled him careening through Europe and much of the Middle East in pursuit of the archaeological mysteries that had captivated him in his college years. But those mysteries had, in the end, narrowed down to five-thousand-year-old fragments of clay tablets, and now, for all his new freedom, Professor Richman felt as if he was still deep in the ancient dust of Mesopotamia.

  The sudden decision to attend a seminar in the tiny Chianti town of Monte Piccolo was his first determined attempt to shake off that dust and venture beyond the tidal pools where the toddlers played.

  It was hardly a radical change from his old life. He was still an academic, still sheltered in the world of books and intellectual discourse. But he was living in a foreign land, trying to speak a foreign language, and—if this perhaps counted as adventure—sleeping on a hard, narrow bed in a cold, drafty room in a kind of dormitory with questionable lighting and highly inadequate hot water.

  And now this.

  “Vaffanculo! Testa di cazzo!”

  The young woman’s voice rose, strong in the cold air, with an edge both sharp and somehow cheerful. She was enjoying herself.

  The professor didn’t understand precisely what she was saying. Despite the hopes invested when his mother named him Aristotle Rafael Richman—an unlikely flight of fancy from a woman so serious—he was never gifted at languages, and years ago he’d given up trying. He could read and write ancient Sumerian, but modern languages were a challenge. Still, he could get by almost anywhere in the world on what he considered—not too immodestly, he hoped—his charm, bolstered by the assorted scraps of half a dozen different languages he’d picked up in spite of himself.

  “Figlio di puttana! Pezzo di merda!”

  In this case, he didn’t need a mastery of Italian to get the message. The pitch and the tone of her voice made it clear. The expressions on the nuns’ faces were only added confirmation.

  “Pompinaro!”

  The taxi driver threw up a hand in surrender and drove off. The black-haired volcano turned, laughing in triumph, and then, catching sight of Professor Richman, instantly changed—expression, stride, the tilt of her head—into a wholesome, all-American college student. Her wolfish grin of triumph was suddenly a sunny American smile. She acknowledged Richman with a wave of her hand as she strode toward him across the piazza. He returned her wave with a nod. No smile.

  He wasn’t looking forward to the day’s expedition. He knew he had no one to blame except himself. And her: Lucy, as he still wanted to call her, even though she’d made it clear that her name was Lucia. Not Lucy. Definitely not Lucy. Fine. It was Lucia’s fault. Lucia and the annoying seminar leader who’d paired them up for the semester’s research project without any apparent thought beyond the fact that they’d both admitted they hadn’t found partners on their own. Richman’s excuse—though no one had asked—was that he was still feeling slightly awkward around the other students. Partly because he had just arrived in Monte Piccolo for the start of the January semester, while most of the others had been there since September, and mostly because the oldest of his classmates wasn’t nearly half his age. And although she didn’t offer any excuses, the young woman’s reason for not having a partner was—Richman was certain, after a career of facing thousands of American college students—that she’d been too busy partying to even think about the classwork.

  When the instructor had made the assignment official, Professor Richman, trying to make the best of their unexpected and unwelcome partnership, had offered an avuncular smile and said, “Well, Lucy—”

  She had cut him off right there, correcting him sharply. “Lucia. My name is Lucia.”

  It caught him off-balance. He’d heard her talking and joking with the other students, and she was obviously American—he might not be a linguist, but Professor Richman knew a New York accent—so he’d assumed the familiarity of a standard nickname would be an easy opening.

  He regrouped and tried again. “I’m sorry, my dear young lady, but—”

  “I’m not your ‘dear young lady’ either.”

  Richman was baffled. His marriage had been childless, and his relations with younger women had been strictly professorial. He was used to more respect and a lot more leeway.

  “Well, I suppose we—” he started again, but she cut him off.

  “Never mind. We’ll talk later.”

  She was looking over his shoulder, out the window into the piazza, where an absurdly handsome young man stood straddling a motor scooter, looking like a picture out of a fashion magazine in his black leather jacket and silk scarf. He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Lulu!”

  She shouted back, “Moto! Un attimo! Eccomi!”

  Her Italian was as natural as her English.

  “Got to go,” she said to Richman and ran past him out the door toward the young man on the Vespa.

  That was two weeks ago. They had met twice since then to discuss their project—both meetings cut short when she had to rush off for another engagement. Probably with the young man and his Vespa. But they had agreed on a project. It was her idea, actually. Someone she knew—“Zio Te-Te,” she called him, whatever that might mean—had a painting he thought was old. More than old, he was certain it was valuable. Examining it, tracing its provenance—its history—would be a perfect project, she insisted. And Richman had to agree. There was no question about her intelligence. She was smart, quick, incisive, and she knew her stuff. This seminar was the last credit she needed for her master’s in art history—and she was planning on using her time here to get a start on her thesis.

  That was all well and good, but now, standing in the piazza, Professor Richman was chilled and very certain that he would rather be in a warm café with a hot drink in front of him. She had told him her Zio Te-Te—by now he had worked out that “zio” meant “uncle” and “Te-Te” was some kind of nickname—lived a short drive from Monte Piccolo. Richman was wary.

  Lucia’s march across the piazza was interrupted when the same handsome young man on the Vespa—she’d called him “Moto,” was that a real name?—skidded to a stop next to her, threw an arm around her, and gave her an exuberant kiss on each cheek. Richman speculated whether the assortment of buckles on his black leather jacket absorbed any sunlight to add warmth. For the boy’s sake, the professor hoped so, since the scarf around his neck was more stylish than warm and he was apparently too fond of his hairstyle to crush it under a helmet—although Richman had to admit that if his own hair had been that thick and dark and looked that good tousled, he, too, would have gone hatle
ss no matter the chill.

  The young man leaned in and whispered something in Lucia’s ear. She pushed him away and flashed a look as good as a slap, with a dismissive laugh that could safely be given only among the best of friends. He threw his hands in the air and laughed right back at her. He was slim without being scrawny, handsome without being cute, and in his tight black jeans and his leather jacket, buckles and all, he made his Vespa, his moto, look dashing without being ridiculous. He even got away with the silk scarf. And unless you looked very closely, you might not notice that his smile was perhaps a little too quick, too eager to please, and his eyes too liquid for the rest of his hard-edged outfit. But Professor Richman wasn’t looking closely. And even if he had been, he might not have noticed. He specialized in objects—cuneiform tablets, works of art—not people.

  Moto was part of Monte Piccolo’s small, always shifting community of artists and art students and their friends and lovers, plus a steady trickle of college students drifting around Italy under the guise of a semester abroad. The art students accepted Moto as one of their own, even though no one knew what, if anything, he was studying. Or painting. Just as no one knew him by any other name than Moto. In the parties and the bars, people became friends too quickly to check names. No one ever asked. Not even his best friend, Lucia, who pushed him away now, threw back her tangle of black hair, and turned toward Professor Richman—becoming in that moment once again the perfect American grad student as her dashing young friend roared off across the piazza, scattering pigeons and nuns.

  “Hey, Professor,” she said, with another smile he didn’t bother returning. “My car’s a couple of blocks from here. Behind the church.” And she marched off, leaving Richman to follow.

  He did his best to keep up, cursing his damned knee, which still hadn’t recovered from the twelve-hour trip from New York, even though it had been weeks ago. And he fought to keep from wheezing, his lungs, like his knee, still struggling with the change from New York to Chianti. Sea level to two thousand feet wasn’t that much of a difference, but he was feeling it.