Light in the Shadows

by Linda Lafferty

  “Lucia, back before that damn painting, everything was simple. I thought you would finish the seminar and go home. And then you would always be my wonderful American friend and I’d come visit you. It was perfect. I love happy endings.”

  He stopped. Straightened his jacket.

  “And once everything . . . started, I was only trying to look out for you. Keep you safe. And I did, didn’t I?” His expression changed again. No more puppy dog. “They did. They kept you safe. And with the murdering bastards that were after us, we were very lucky to have those friends.”

  He took a breath.

  “They were looking out for you. I was looking out for you. Even Vittore was looking out for you while he was writing his parking tickets. It was all family. Here. Rome. Naples. Sicily. Maybe I didn’t tell you everything—but maybe you ought to thank me.”

  Angry as he suddenly sounded, she matched him and spat it right back at him.

  “Why, Moto? Why were you looking out for me?”

  “Because you needed it.”

  “That’s not an answer. Why did they care about me?”

  His face stayed hard, lips tight. “I don’t know.” His lower lip tucked in and he bit down on it for an instant. “Family. That’s all I know. It’s always family. Cosca.”

  She knew that word. Cosca. Sicilian for “artichoke”—densely packed, spiny leaves, clinging together to protect the core. And the way he said it, she heard the echo of a lifetime of knowing he could never really be part of the family, the clan, the cosca.

  She wanted to hug him, but she shook it off. He’d been lying to her from the moment they’d met. She thought his secret was that he was gay—and that wasn’t a secret. But his real secret was his Mafia family. And he hadn’t trusted her with that. She couldn’t feel sorry for him now. But she didn’t want things to get any worse.

  “Moto, let’s stop all of this right now. Let’s just say I’m already gone. OK? The seminar is over and I’m flying home. The happy ending you expected. I’m gone. You can move back to wherever you were when whoever he was suggested you might enjoy a little time in Chianti.” Her voice softened a little. “And maybe someday you will come visit me in the United States. Just not anytime soon.”

  There was an awkward pause.

  She managed a smile. “It’ll be all right. It’s not as if I’m carrying your baby.”

  They almost laughed—almost—and he left.

  If the blossoming trees and birdsong in the mornings were the signs of spring in Chianti, drunken singing late at night and taxi horns in the morning were the signs of the changing seasons in Rome.

  Moto’s departure from Monte Piccolo had been followed the next day by a postcard from Professor Richman saying he was ensconced in a “more than merely deluxe” hotel in the Castello di Guarene, a former summer residence of the counts of Roero with “glorious views and magnificent cuisine” and assuring her that his research was “proceeding brilliantly.”

  Lucia couldn’t stay in Chianti one more day. She packed a suitcase and took a bus to Siena and then the train to Rome.

  The tiny apartment she found—three long flights up from the street, tucked under the eaves of an aging building in the Campo Marzio, Caravaggio’s old neighborhood—undoubtedly fell far short of the professor’s suite at the castello, but it would do. There was a table and a hard wooden chair where she could sit and work on her dissertation. There was one almost comfortable armchair. And a window large enough for light by day and noise at night, when she would consider whether to throw something breakable and shout for silence, or get dressed and go downstairs to join the party. She never actually threw anything, but sometimes she shouted. And sometimes she went down to join the nightly celebrations.

  She had been spending time every day with the handful of Caravaggios scattered right there within a few blocks of the apartment. After a week or so, the paintings began to feel like friends from around the neighborhood. So far, they were the only friends she had in Rome. Which was about as many as she needed.

  She’d start every morning early, with the Madonna di Loreto, at the Basilica di Sant’Agostino, tucked away a tight dark squeeze off Piazza Navona. The painting was famous—scandalous when Caravaggio painted it—for the dirty feet of the two pilgrims kneeling in front of the Madonna, but from the first moment she saw it, Lucia could only think of it as “the Woman with the Giant Baby.” Genius and realist though Caravaggio had been, he’d painted the infant Jesus several times larger than any real baby could have been. Filled with religious fervor and Holy Glory though it most certainly was, Lucia thought the image had a tang of the sideshow, a woman displaying her freakishly large infant to the adoring multitudes—though apparently only two at a time. Lucia wondered if her feet hurt, having to constantly rush to the door to meet the next wave of adoration. And the kid must have been heavy.

  Sometimes, if she got there at the right time, there would be only the three of them—Lucia and the two kneeling, dirty-footed pilgrims—staring up together in astonishment. And when that happened, Lucia forgot her little jokes about the enormous baby and surrendered to a sadness, deep inside, a lance of loneliness at the vision of a loving mother cradling her child.

  From Sant’Agostino, she’d take a brisk walk to the grander landscape of the Piazza del Popolo, to visit Peter and Paul. As she got to know them, they seemed an odd pairing, mismatched roommates facing each other across an altar for more than four centuries. She was always moved by the pain and fevered concern of Peter’s martyrdom—and then, turning her head, she’d be struck by the sheer violence of God’s Ecstasy that had knocked Paul sprawling. But the two saints were actually part of a trinity: Peter and Paul and Paul’s Horse’s Butt, which was at least as prominent as his owner’s holy seizure.

  And then she would walk back through the neighborhood, past the military guards with assault rifles, to San Luigi dei Francesi, to visit what she thought of as “the Three Matteos.” The Calling, with its majestic grace, the Martyrdom, with its violent energy, and between them the Inspiration, with the holy man at his writing desk, deep in conversation with an angel, perhaps debating which of the other two paintings was the best of the three.

  Lucia felt she ought to prefer the Calling. But it was the Martyrdom that still caught and held her full attention, as it had on that first visit, that night in the dark. With Moto.

  And every day she thought about that night, standing alone with the Martyrdom, feeling a rush of life from the flashes of faces and bodies, arms and legs, that showed in the near total dark of the church. And then she’d remember sprinting through the street, lost in the dark, with Moto running in a blind panic ahead of her—his version of looking out for her, keeping her safe. Certainly not a young prince in his family. She had to smile. He was telling the truth about that. But he’d hidden the truth from her too much and she wasn’t ready to forgive him.

  She spent the most time at the Francesi every day, working to see those paintings—to see the Martyrdom as it really was. Right there. She had to get rid of the memories of that earlier visit that were splattered all over the painting, bad varnish that she couldn’t see through. She wanted to get back to what she’d felt at first, alone with the painting, before everyone started running and everything spun out of control.

  And she needed that because, after all she’d seen, especially after the time in Malta standing in front of the Beheading, she was hammered by doubts that their painting—Te-Te’s Judas Kiss—could really join these works of dangerous genius.

  Now, suddenly alone, the chase ended, the deaths permanent, her two companions gone, she wondered how she had found the nerve to declare that, yes, she absolutely knew the painting—“their” painting—was by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

  She needed to rally her convictions, to recapture what she’d felt alone in the long, terrifying night in the warehouse with The Judas Kiss. The feeling had been strong enough to make her certain the painting was a Caravaggio. Strong enough to kee
p her going through everything that had happened since then.

  She needed to test that feeling again if she was going to move on.

  So she needed to find her way back to Caravaggio’s painting. This painting, here in the chapel. She had to find her way past all the varnish: the awe of Caravaggio, the centuries of history, the gold leaf and grandeur of the churches. Thick varnish. And she had to see past all the great tales of Michele the Maniac, the tipo tosto of the art world. And see past her own experience. Thicker varnish yet.

  Clear away the varnish, clear away the gossip, and maybe she could get back to how she felt when she saw the Martyrdom that night. The frenzied power she had felt flooding off that painting. The whites of the arms and the robes, the muscular body, the screaming face that emerged as her eyes adjusted to the dark. Those strokes of light in the shadows were less a painting and more a lightning storm.

  And then, if she got there, back to that powerful moment, could the feeling she had from The Judas Kiss stand up to the torrent?

  Lucia started every day with those three visits. She got to know the guards and the beggars at each church, the days when she would be jostled and days when she might be alone.

  And as spring in the ancient city deepened into the sweetest days of the year, she felt as if her life was becoming a prolonged sigh of relief. She spent her mornings with Michele and her afternoons working on her dissertation. The frustration with the paper was fading; she’d reached a point where the tangles were dissolving and the heart of the matter, the true pursuit of the painting, was becoming clear.

  She was slipping into the rhythm of life in the neighborhood. She began to recognize faces in the shops, in the street, in the restaurants. The man who made her caffè doppio every morning. The woman at the cash register in the grocery store. Her daily rounds were filled with smiles and nods. And when the neighborhood got noisy late at night, more often than not she’d head down and join the throng.

  One day in late April, to her great surprise, she found that she had finished the dissertation. It was all there: it had been read, reread, and proofread half a dozen times. She had accepted that there was no grand conclusion. No final proof. She—they—had traced a reasonable connection from the painting in Te-Te’s orphanage chapel to a man who had perhaps sailed in the same felucca with Caravaggio from Naples to Palo—and then onward, without Caravaggio, but perhaps still with his paintings, to Porto Ercole. That’s what she had found, and that was enough. Enough for this dissertation, anyway.

  She waited two more days before she had it printed. She had to be sure—sure of what, she didn’t know, but she knew she had to wait. Then, with a hollow feeling, as if she was saying goodbye to a friend for the last time, she mailed it to the professor who had run the Monte Piccolo seminar and who had now returned to his position at UniMi, the Università degli studi di Milano.

  And that night—and the nights that followed—she didn’t wait for the crowds in the street to get raucous before she joined them. She headed down as the day drew to a close and fell in with new friends from the neighborhood per il vino e la cena, musica e risate. For wine and dinner, music and laughter.

  But no matter how late she stayed at the party, she was out early every morning, visiting Peter and Paul, the Matteos, and the Lady with the patient smile and the aching back. Lucia knew the model for that Madonna was Lena. Caravaggio had painted her so many times. Though history portrayed him as a man incapable of love, Lucia wondered if maybe he had found it in himself to love Lena.

  Then she found herself more and more often home at night. She sat in her almost comfortable chair, stared out across the rooftops, and thought about The Beheading of St. John the Baptist, Decollazione di San Giovanni Battista.

  Flooded with darkness, churning with violence, it was Michele’s best, she was certain. The prison courtyard embraced by darkness, the handful of figures flickering in the light. The saint at the edge of death. The executioner reaching for his knife to finish the beheading. The jailer. The girl. The old woman, there because someone had to show horror. And off to one side, almost lost in the shadows—but persistent in Lucia’s memory of the painting—the two prisoners peering out the barred window at a fate that might soon enough be theirs.

  The genius of that masterpiece was the genius she claimed she had seen in the Kiss.

  She knew that what she thought about the Kiss didn’t matter. It was in the hands of the experts, and they would declare who was the fool. She was hoping it wasn’t her.

  After too many long nights threaded by nightmares of that dark scene, Lucia needed to clear her mind. Right now, the Beheading obsessed her, it swept all the other paintings away. She needed something new. Something strong. So after a doppio at the café on the corner, she headed off across town through the morning bustle, working her way through the crowds, dodging taxis and Vespas, and thinking how pleasant the city was in the morning sun—though that might have been by contrast with the dark painting that haunted her nights.

  She was on her way to the Palazzo Barberini to see Giuditta e Oloferne—Judith Beheading Holofernes—a Caravaggio painting of a very different beheading, a bloody slaughter: Judith, the heroine, sword in hand, saving her people by severing the head of Holofernes, general of the invading Babylonian army. Lucia hadn’t seen the painting before. She had limited her Caravaggio visits in Rome to that small circle of friends in her neighborhood. And that meant that now she could have a fresh experience to clear her mind.

  She crossed the wide-open courtyard into the Barberini Palace, bought her ticket, stuffed her coat and backpack into a locker—all the things that have to be done—and then marched up the stairs and through the galleries until she was standing in front of Judith Beheading Holofernes. This was a museum, not a church. No shadows. No ornate gilding. No flickering candles. Clean, well-lit spaces. For the moment, she was almost alone in the room: just her, a guard slumped, dozing, in a chair—and the bloody horror on the wall.

  Still a little bleary-eyed, despite the doppio and the brisk walk across town, she felt the painting slap her across the face. The spurt of blood on the canvas popped her eyes wide open. Michele had watched executions. He had seen how blood spurted. He had studied his art.

  But painting the blood was mechanics. The mechanics of a genius, to be sure, but the faces that filled the canvas above the bloody gash of Holofernes’s ruined throat were genius beyond mechanics. The terror and pain on the face of Holofernes as he hurtled into death. The intense, strange calm of Judith, concentrating on the task, sword in hand. And the deadly glare, the lizard eyes of Judith’s servant, holding a sack, ready to catch the head.

  The painting didn’t have the majestic power of The Beheading of St. John the Baptist in the Malta cathedral, but it had an edge as deadly as the blade in Judith’s hand. And Lucia could feel that sharp edge slashing through her mind as she locked eyes with the terrifying stare of the servant. She knew that lizard stare. Those eyes sliced into her heart. Her balance fled. The planet spun beneath her. In a panic, she looked away from the servant, back to the doomed Holofernes. But his face had changed somehow. It was the same, but different. Entirely different. Two faces in one image. Her heart was pounding. Her eyes darted to Judith, but she had changed too. Her white arms stretched out—a woman reaching for her lover, but no, she was an executioner, reaching only for death, one hand grasping her victim’s hair, the other wielding the sword.

  Lucia’s eyes jolted sideways again, fleeing back to the servant. That face was unchanged, but there was no relief there—it was already somehow the worst of them all as the crone hovered at the edge of the violence and watched eagerly, a vulture waiting to snatch the carrion.

  Lucia’s eyes went back to Holofernes. Then Judith. The servant. The faces whirled, tangled. Terror, concentration, the pitiless stare.

  A scream surged inside her, but before she could make a sound, she was knocked sideways, staggered by a massive explosion, the sound of shattering glass. Surrounded by a wave
of flame, she was engulfed in darkness. She could feel herself screaming at last, but she was lost in silence.

  Chapter 48

  Roma

  1609

  News reached Roma that Caravaggio had been murdered. Then fresh reports came to Scipione Borghese’s ears that the artist was not dead but lay on the brink of death.

  “He is unrecognizable,” said a messenger reporting back from Palazzo Colonna. “His sight is severely compromised—”

  “Can he paint?” demanded Borghese.

  The messenger made a futile gesture, his palms turned upward. “I do not know. He lives.”

  “He is useless to me if he cannot paint,” said the cardinal with a sweep of his arm. “Send a reply to him—and to Cardinal Gonzaga—that any further steps toward clemency will be suspended until I know my investment is worthwhile.”

  “Sì, Your Excellency.”

  “What the devil was he doing at midnight in the heart of Napoli? He is a wanted man! Not only under bando capitale in Roma but by the Order of Malta.”

  The messenger shook his head. “Forgive me, Your Excellency. I do not know.”

  “He is a madman, chasing his own death. Go! Send my message to Napoli.”

  The Marchesa Costanza Colonna saw that Caravaggio received the best care and nursing. For eight months, the artist convalesced in the palazzo overlooking the Bay of Napoli.

  She insisted her guest take tea with her in the afternoons on the terrace.

  “I despise the light,” said Caravaggio, blinking at the Mediterranean sun. “It hurts my eyes.”

  “You need light to heal,” said the marchesa. “As long as you are my guest, Michele, you will indulge me this.”

  “Sì, Marchesa,” he muttered.

  The marchesa regarded the artist’s face. “The butchers!” she said. “You know it is a miracle you survived.”

  “I have only survived if I can paint. Scipione Borghese has made that clear.”