Pasquale's Angel

by Paul J McAuley

  ‘In the Cappella Brancacci, yes. I admit there is a certain despair conveyed in the attitude of the figures of Adam and Eve, but they are somewhat crudely rendered—poor Adam will never straighten his leg, which is curved inward. I have also seen Mantegna’s allegory in which Pallas expels the vices from the garden of virtue. But I am interested in the angel himself. I wish to paint only him, yet in such a way that the viewer at once knows what is happening.’

  ‘They would know that by his burning sword.’

  ‘Then perhaps I would omit the sword, too. I want to make something new…’ Pasquale was embarrassed. Ordinarily he enjoyed talking over the problem he had set himself, yet this was no tavern brag about a commission, but a personal truth. He confessed, ‘I do not yet know how to begin.’

  Niccolò said, ‘I suppose that, like writing, the beginning is always the hardest part of a painting. Ah, here now. What is this?’

  A carriage had pulled up at the gate of the Palazzo. It was one of the new designs. Pulled by a single horse, its black body was taller than it was long, an enlarged upright coffin set between two large wheels. The driver leaned down from his high seat to have a word with the guard, and then the leaves of the circular door grated back, and a man stepped out.

  It was the fat assistant, the painter of animals, Giovanni Francesco.

  He clambered into the carriage, and at once it started off. As soon as it had driven past their doorway, Niccolò rushed out into the street, waving at a vaporetto with an empty load-bed. He shouted to the driver that if he could follow the carriage there was good money in it, and waved Pasquale over.

  ‘Show this good fellow your purse.’

  ‘Niccolò—’

  ‘Hurry! We’ll lose him.’

  The driver, a gnarled ruffian with a sacking hood cast over his head, seemed convinced by the florin that shone amongst the little slew of clipped pennies, but told them they’d have to ride in the back and started up his machine even as they clambered aboard.

  The little vaporetto trundled down the Via de Ginori and swung around the symmetric church in the Piazza San Giovanni, which shone a pure white in crossed beams of light thrown from lensed lamps burning at its base. The vaporetto’s boiler, fired with soft Prussian coal, sang a dreary unvarying note; its exhaust waved a vast smut-laden plume of steam in the night air like a banner. Pasquale and Niccolò clung to the rail of the load-bed, jounced and buffeted as the unsprung wheels rattled over bricks and Roman paving-flags. They jolted down the Via Romana, tangled in traffic going east and west across the Mercato Vecchio where carriages, carts and vaporetti threaded around each other in a clangour of bells and hooting of steam-whistles, and the shouts and curses of the drivers.

  Niccolò leaned out and shouted to their driver to go as fast as he could, and the man said sharply, ‘That’s just what I’m doing, signor. Don’t think I don’t know my own business.’

  ‘Of course not, my dear fellow.’

  ‘Any more than this and the gears will strip. The new models have gears rimmed with beaten iron, you see, but this is one of the first made, nothing but wood in her drive-train. And besides, the road will do for her axle-trees.’

  ‘A horse would go faster. I’m minded to find one.’

  ‘You do that if you want, but I’m your man that will take you where you want to go without delay. I still have sight of your carriage, don’t worry. Looks like he’s heading for the river.’

  ‘We can’t run all that way,’ Pasquale said.

  Niccolò told the driver, ‘Your cursed smoke-stack hides my view. I trust you to follow correctly.’

  ‘I’m your man,’ the driver said again. ‘There he goes, see, straight down the Via Calimara. Don’t you worry, he’s going to cross the river at the Ponte Vecchio.’

  ‘If I could see him, I’d be a great deal happier,’ Niccolò said.

  Pasquale leaned out and, sighting around plumes of steam, glimpsed the high profile of the black carriage only a little way ahead of them. The driver’s guess was right. They entered a queue of traffic that was slowly making its way past the little shops that lined both sides of the bridge. Lamps strung high above the roadway cast a cold glare; the doorways of the shops, most of them butchers’ or tanners’, threw patterns of warmer yellow light. Frescos on their stone façades were faded under soot and grime. People were threading amongst the slow-moving single line of traffic, offering food or drink or machine-made trinkets to the drivers and passengers. Once, the line of traffic stalled entirely, and the driver of the vaporetto took the opportunity to stoke his vehicle’s boiler. Pasquale leaned out again and saw the top of the black carriage half a dozen vehicles in front and told Niccolò.

  ‘He’ll turn left at the end of the bridge,’ Niccolò shouted at the driver, who nodded.

  There was a gap in the buildings at the middle of the bridge. As the vaporetto passed, Pasquale could look down at the central channel of the Arno’s tamed braided flow. Far off, a great two-masted ship, lights burning on every spar, was making its way upstream towards the new docks across from Sardinia. It was the Our Lady of the Flowers, towed by a wood-burning tug with churning paddles, at the end of its long voyage from the New Florentine Republic of the Friendly Isles. Pedestrians had stopped to watch her approach out of the darkness. Pasquale felt a great stirring in his breast. Then the vaporetto edged forward with a hiss of steam and he saw her no more.

  At the end of the bridge, the carriage turned left, just as Niccolò had predicted. ‘He would hardly be going to the Palazzo Pitti,’ the journalist said, ‘and there’s little enough up-river but the shanty slums of manufactory workers and the manufactories themselves. If our man was going there, he would have stopped at the bridge and walked, so as not to draw attention to himself.’

  The carriage turned left again, on to a dark dusty road which, with cypress-trees on either side, climbed the side of the valley towards the southern city wall. Crickets made their chorus; a full moon stood low at the head of the valley, made red by the fumes of the manufactories. The vaporetto followed the carriage at a respectful distance, its boiler labouring.

  At last the carriage drew up at a gate leading to the extensive walled grounds of a large villa. A crest of a lion rampant was set in the arch over the barred gate. The driver of the vaporetto drove on without slowing, and at the last moment Pasquale managed to get Niccolò to crouch down. Fat Giovanni Francesco was leaning at the window of the carriage, talking to a uniformed guard.

  ‘For the sake of Christ, we must keep out of sight,’ Pasquale said to Niccolò, who tried to stand up again. ‘If they see us, the game is up.’

  ‘I want to see what he is doing.’

  ‘Going to the villa, I should think. Stay down!’

  ‘You must learn never to assume anything,’ Niccolò said, but he stayed where he was.

  As soon as they were safely out of sight, Pasquale told the driver of the vaporetto to stop and turn around. Niccolò jumped down, and told Pasquale to give all his small coins to the driver. ‘Wait here for us,’ he told the driver, ‘and you may exchange that money for the florin we have.’

  ‘I’m your man, signor.’

  ‘See that you are. Come, Pasquale.’

  They walked back down the road in cricket-filled moonlight. On one side were the walled gardens of the villa; on the other, a grove of wide-spaced olive-trees where the wooden bells of goats grazing in the moonlight made a random clattering. Pasquale protested mildly that Niccolò was very free with money that wasn’t his.

  ‘I was responsible for your commission, if you remember. I know that even if you spend that florin, you’ll have one left over.’

  ‘And to think that I started out with two this morning,’ Pasquale said, remembering his act of generosity when he had given both florins to Rosso, remembering how glad he had been to receive one back. But he could not have seen how things would have fallen out, and besides, there would be a little money from the fee for painting the fresco for the artificer. />
  Niccolò said, ‘You’ll earn more from this. This is just the beginning. A story like this, in episodes, will keep the populace buying the broadsheet for days. They would rather waste their time reading idle gossip and speculation than Plato or Ariosto, and I am in no position to deny their wishes. Well, but do you know whose villa this is?’

  ‘He’s a Venetian, by the crest over his gate.’ Pasquale was thinking that he’d earn little enough from this: there were no dramatic images to be had from sneaking up on a walled house at night, even by moonlight. Or rather, if there were such images, he would be in no position to draw them.

  ‘That’s very good,’ Niccolò said with approval. ‘In fact it is the villa of Paolo Giustiniani, a writer and mystic, a nobleman of Venice, and a disciple of Marsilio Ficino. You know of that last gentleman?’

  ‘I know that he was a magician.’

  ‘He was a priest and philosopher first, but his studies led him to the black arts, and astrology. And into trouble with Rome. He took his magics entirely too seriously.’

  Pasquale took Niccolò’s arm, halting him. ‘We can’t just walk up to the gates,’ he said. ‘Giovanni Francesco will know at once that we followed him. I’m not certain that we weren’t seen as we went past. You were standing as plain as the Gonfalonier in a procession.’

  ‘They would have thought us honest labourers on their way home from a hard day’s toil.’

  ‘Labourers don’t ride vaporetti, Niccolò. And even if you might pass for one, no labourer has ever dressed like me. If we want to learn what is going on, I think it will be best if we skirt around the wall, and climb it well away from any lights.’

  It was not, of course, as easy as that. Wild thorn-bushes grew in the ditch at the base of the high rough-dressed stone wall. Niccolò’s cloak kept catching in their canes or amongst tuffs of rank grass, and to his vexation Pasquale’s best hose was torn in two places. He climbed to the top of the wall easily enough, but then had to haul up Niccolò.

  They jumped down, landing amongst dusty laurels. Beyond was a long formal lawn crossed from several directions by gravel paths which met at a big sea-shell fountain standing in its centre. An avenue of cedars bordered one side. The branches of the trees, black in the moonlight, each seemed to float at a different level. This part of the garden was higher than the villa, so that Pasquale could see, beyond its tiled roof, the night-time city spread in the valley below. The largest buildings caught the light of the rising moon—the golden dome of the Duomo, the Great Tower and the smaller tower of the Palazzo della Signoria beside it, the towers of churches, the private palazzi. A scattering of small lights limned the main streets, while the green and red lamps of signal-towers made a radial pattern converging on the Great Tower’s constellation.

  ‘We must beware,’ Niccolò said in a hoarse whisper. ‘I hear that Paolo Giustiniani is accomplished in his arts.’

  ‘Surely a rational man has nothing to fear from magicians.’

  ‘Magicians have kept pace with the artificers. They are science’s black reflection, and should not be underestimated. Or better, magic is science’s shadow, for surely where light is cast there must also be shadow.’

  ‘Not if the light is directly above the object, or if the light comes from all directions equally.’

  Niccolò said with asperity, ‘I should not suppose that I could argue optics with an artist. It was merely a figure. Come now. We will learn little here but how diligently the gardeners attend to their labours.’

  ‘Not diligently enough outside the wall. My clothes are ruined. If I had foreseen this, I would have left them behind, and brought my sword instead.’

  ‘I’m not unprepared,’ Niccolò said. ‘Keep close to me, and do as I say.’

  They started towards the house, keeping to the shadows beneath the cedars. Pasquale fumbled in his scrip and drew out the square of black glass. He said simply, ‘While you were talking to Raphael I was given this.’

  Niccolò held the glass up to the moonlight, sniffed it, then scraped its friable coating with a fingernail, which he put in his mouth. ‘It may be nothing, or it may be something.’

  ‘It was in Giulio Romano’s possession,’ Pasquale said, and explained about the box that Raphael’s boy servant Baverio had also found.

  ‘Then it may well be something. I think you may have learned more than I, Pasquale. You must keep it safe, together with the flying toy.’

  ‘Venice is in alliance with the Pope, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, but Paolo Giustiniani is an unlikely representative. He was forced to flee Venice in disgrace after an incident involving a virgin and, I believe, a black cockerel.’

  ‘Perhaps he wishes to return to favour.’

  ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps Giovanni Francesco is also a practitioner of the black arts. Or perhaps they are simply friends, who enjoy each other’s company. Speculation can be useful, but it is always better to learn. Quietly now, Pasquale, and carefully. There may be traps, and there will certainly be guards.’

  The single-storey villa was built of white-painted stone, with a roof of red, ridged tiles, and a square tower at one corner. Lights blazed from every one of its tall arched windows, and Pasquale and Niccolò slipped from one to the other until they came upon one which looked into a room where fat Giovanni Francesco stood. His back was turned to the window as he faced an older man who sprawled carelessly in a high-backed throne-like gilded chair. Dressed in a black robe, with a square black cap on his long straight grey hair, he rested a fist under his chin as he listened to Francesco expound some argument.

  The window was closed to keep out the night’s chill—a fire burned in the grate of the room’s fireplace—and Pasquale could only hear the murmur of Francesco’s words, not their sense. Beside him, Niccolò took out a short hollow wooden rod. It had a kind of trumpet at one end, to which he applied his ear after setting the other end against the glass. ‘A trick I learned from a physician,’ he whispered. ‘One must master all of the arts and sciences, to be a good citizen. Keep watch, Pasquale.’

  They squatted there for several minutes, Niccolò listening through his hollow rod, Pasquale dividing his attention between the dark garden and the lighted room. Then the voices of the two men inside rose, and Pasquale heard Giovanni Francesco shout something about pictures. He brandished a small wooden frame that held a picture done on glass.

  The grey-haired man, without doubt Paolo Giustiniani, rose from his high-backed chair and snatched at the picture. Francesco stepped back from Giustiniani’s advance, then bowed and handed it over.

  Black-robed Giustiniani, his face showing a cold contempt, listened to what Francesco had to say, then threw the picture into the flames. Francesco waved his hands and protested in his high, slightly hoarse fat man’s voice that as there was another made at the same time, it would be well to keep to the agreement, and Giustiniani said, in a loud clear voice that made the glass in the window shiver, ‘I’ve no more need of our agreement!’ He snatched his cap from his head and pressed it to his face, and dashed something to the black and white tiles of the floor.

  Brown vapour boiled up, and Francesco stumbled back, choking, as the other man made for a door, slamming it shut behind him. The room was dim with brown fumes. Francesco was on his knees, then on his belly. The fire guttered, sending out black smoke to mix with the deadly vapour.

  Niccolò threw off his cloak, wound it around his left arm and smashed in the window with his elbow. Vapour poured out, a vile acrid stink worse than any artificer’s smog. Pasquale pulled Niccolò out of the way and said, ‘Francesco is surely dead.’ He was frightened that the noise of the breaking glass would alert the guards.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Niccolò said, ‘but the worst has blown out—look, the fire burns again.’

  He knocked out the rest of the glass and clambered over the window’s low sill. Pasquale took a deep breath and followed.

  At once his throat started to bum, and his eyes stung and filled with tears so that he co
uld hardly see. Groping together, he and Niccolò turned Francesco’s heavy body over, but it was clear from his bulging eyes and the froth on his blue lips that he was dead. Pasquale remembered the picture and managed to snatch the charred frame from the rekindling fire. The effort was almost fatal. His whole chest was filled with a burning pain; his mouth and nose flooded with watery mucus.

  Then Niccolò got his bony shoulder under Pasquale’s arm and helped him to the window. They tumbled through it together, and Pasquale promptly vomited as cold fresh air strong as heart of wine hit his face.

  He still had the charred picture-frame in his hand.

  Niccolò got him to his feet, and together they made a stumbling run for the shadows beneath the avenue of cedar-trees. Pasquale’s throat was parched, and a band of iron had tightened around his brow, but with every step he felt his strength return as the magician’s poisonous smoke was purged from his lungs.

  Just as they reached the trees they heard the clamour of several voices raised in alarm. Pasquale threw himself flat and Niccolò dropped beside him. The grass was wet with cold dew. ‘I am too old for this,’ Niccolò groaned.

  Pasquale pointed to the three men silhouetted in the light from the broken window. He said, ‘They’ll think that Francesco brought friends with him. There, see!’

  The three guards, each carrying a lit torch, set off in different directions. Somewhere else a dog barked.

  Two more figures broke out of the shadows at the corner of the villa and sprinted across the lawn towards the high wall. A cloak flapped around the taller of the two as he ran with clean strides; the other ran bent almost double, with a curious loping gait. The guards saw these two and shouted and gave chase, their torches hairy stars streaming sparks.

  ‘Francesco had friends after all,’ Pasquale said, astonished.

  Niccolò said, ‘We will go towards the gate.’

  ‘It is already guarded!’