Jewel of the Moon: Short Stories

by William Kotzwinkle

  She put her arm through his, and felt his dizzy swaying. He was a young man already old, his hair and beard turned gray, his face graying too, like ashes in a dead fire. “Let us eat,” she said, nodding toward the cavern in the courtyard.

  “Later,” he said. “You can bring me something later.” He walked on through the courtyard, toward the cathedral.

  The heavy wooden door strained him, and he cursed the plague and Mantua and himself. They entered the familiar gloom in which souls prayed. A long aisle led to where he himself prayed, on a scaffold fifty feet above the altar. It repelled him, its platforms and ladders suggesting only difficult labor. He wanted to eat though he had no appetite, for if he ate a great deal he’d grow tired and his ambition would be drained. I’ll sit on this floor, with a large meal inside me, and I won’t be able to move. I’ll sleep then, quietly.

  His footsteps carried him up the aisle toward the scaffolding, and he felt the impossibility of exerting himself further. Through the network of planks and ladders, he saw his beautiful beings ascending the sides of the dome. The Virgin soared off into the very center, where a brilliant sun was receiving her. Its light streamed through the Virgin and illuminated a ring of angels rejoicing in space. Below them, on the lower slopes of the wall were the saints, on whom the light fell more gently, diffused by its long journey.

  He gripped the ladder, and began the climb. The odor of his paints grew stronger, held in the cup of the dome, and what strength he found seemed to come from them and the memories they stirred in his blood. With them he closed his fingers, and by them he pulled higher, into the loftier regions of his dome, among his saints and angels. Their faces and attitudes had revealed themselves to him slowly, and now he knew them intimately, these hidden aspects of himself—creatures of fever, dream, and vision, faces of the living and the dead, and the never-to-be.

  Slowly, in the very middle of the bowl of glorious color, he mixed his tints. The painted flesh radiated power; he felt his angels looming over him with their mysterious gestures, whose meaning he would never understand.

  “A shadow here—” he said to an angel hanging just beyond the edge of the highest plank. “It sets you free from your clouds, lightens your lovely goose feather wings . . .”

  He muttered to his creations, as he walked back and forth among them on his scaffold. They were mostly finished, and a sane man would have called it complete and gone home to bed.

  “He isn’t feeling well and he will not eat,” said the prostitute to Padre Dominic, a young priest of the cathedral, and the model for Saint John—a youthful and delicate John, his eyes a mixture of puzzlement and awe at a great mystery, which was indeed how Padre Dominic perceived the beautiful dome in which he himself was depicted ten times larger than life.

  “Come down, Antonio, you cannot work without eating!” The prostitute had gotten soup and bread for the painter, and for herself. She was required to stay the long day with him, for she was the model for the Virgin. “You know,” she said, turning back to Padre Dominic now, “until I took him home with me, he was sleeping on the stone floor there—” She pointed with her spoon. “—beneath his precious ceiling.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about him,” said Padre Dominic. “The way he has made all this appear shows great reserves of strength.” The young priest gestured toward the ceiling—to the living circle of flesh, arms and legs entwined, bare limbs of every size and shape in every possible position.

  “And what does the Canon say?” asked the prostitute.

  Padre Dominic cast a nervous glance toward the side door of the cathedral. “He doesn’t say a word.”

  “He is to pay Antonio another hundred gold ducats.”

  “Oh, I’m certain—” The young priest gestured again toward the ceiling. “Such beautiful work—”

  “Beauty is often cheated.” The prostitute turned back to the soup, stirring its steaming contents.

  “I’ll carry it up to him,” said the priest, and began the ascent of the scaffold, toward the tiny, shabby, human figure in among the gigantic angels. Padre Dominic, though young, had heard the souls of men in confession, but he did not claim to know the soul of this man, more solitary than a monk in his attitudes and, at times, demonic in his ambition. “I’ve brought you food,” said Padre Dominic, offering the bowl.

  The painter took the bowl and drained it quickly. The rich spicy liquid on his tongue dazzled him for a moment, and he felt the twinge of old longing, to lie down, to curl asleep in a mother’s arms, but he kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling.

  “Would you and our friend Mary please take your positions? Just for a short while . . .”

  The priest called to the prostitute and she climbed slowly up through the scaffolding, until she and the priest were on the heights of the staging, in the position to which the painter had trained them. Padre Dominic disrobed and raised his arms in saintly gesture.

  “The Canon is an honest man?” asked Mary, settling herself, so that her legs beneath her robe shaped the material into the outline of a great heart.

  “Without question, honest,” said Padre Dominic, trying to produce an air of confidence. But his tone lacked conviction; the Canon was known to be eccentric at times.

  “You look troubled, Padre,” said Mary, gazing at the priest, his young figure framed in the candlelight.

  He glanced at her, then looked away, back toward the dome. “In the presence of all this—” He nodded toward the soaring figures, so vital and so gracefully formed. “—I realize I have no gift.”

  “Every man has a certain gift,” said the mother of God. “But sometimes he needs a woman to bring it out.”

  “I’m a renunciate!” said the priest, looking quickly away, but not that quickly, reflected the prostitute. “It’s all so strange,” she said with a sigh.

  “Strange? What is strange?” asked Correggio from his ladder, then turned away from any answer. Of course it is strange, foreshortening of this degree. He descended the ladder, paced along the planks, and felt that his teacher would have approved. As always, when thinking of Mantegna, he thought of Rome, which he had yet to visit, where the greatest marvels of all were housed, and where his study would be completed. But a wave of dizziness interrupted his thought, and he was forced to grip the scaffold tightly. It will not do to have the artist plunge into his paintpots, not just yet.

  If I can get to Rome, he thought, laying his head against a strong crossbeam and closing his eyes till the dizziness passed. There the last refinement will come. I’m only forty. There’s still time.

  * * *

  They walked through the evening shadows of the street. The lamps were being lit and the window of the apothecary shop held the last streak of light the day had to offer. The prostitute followed him into the shop and sniffed among the bowls of dried herbs.

  “Can you make up my tea,” said the painter. “I’ll paint you another small canvas of your children.”

  “You’re not looking well, Signore,” said the druggist, mixing up the potion.

  “The rat of Mantua is nibbling at me,” said the painter. “But we have an agreement, the rat and I.”

  * * *

  In the night Antonio Allegri held her, fascinated by each golden thread of her hair, threads which he’d labored to match, drawing them out in fine strands. Perhaps they do it better in Rome, or perhaps not. It’s as fine as I can do, that’s certain.

  “Antonio” she whispered, rubbing her face on his broad chest. His pain was hidden, the way he hid anger, jealousy, most things, driving it all into his will and fingertips, but she knew his suffering anyway, had come to read it from his eyelids, his breath, his silences. He was a man who’d studied, whose thoughts were colors, but she understood him because he was lost, here in Parma, because he was alone and desperate. He didn’t need her, he’d sleep on stone, and for that reason she’d opened her sanctuary to him. He’d covered it with drawings of her, and the moonlight touched them now, transforming her yet again, into some
thing that only the moon and an artist’s hand could make of her.

  * * *

  At midnight, they rose for his medicine. He swallowed it, then took his sketchbook and began drawing a young woman, small and thin, with delicate features. Her face and figure were rendered quickly, as if it were an exercise he’d often performed.

  “Who is she?” asked the prostitute.

  “My wife.”

  “She’s very beautiful.”

  “She died in Mantua.” He turned the page, started another. “Here are the two children.” With equal swiftness, he pictured a small boy and girl.

  “Where are they now?”

  “In my village, in Correggio. I must go back there soon.”

  “Send for your children. I’ll care for them here.” “They’re with their grandmother. It’s better there.” She refilled his cup with the herbal concoction. He drank it slowly, knowing it was hopeless. But perhaps, he reflected, there will be a doctor in Rome.

  * * *

  They sat together in the front row of the cathedral, on a paint-spattered cloth. Antonio Allegri’s head was back and he was gazing at his dome. She worked, sewing a patch on his ragged coat. “You look like a beggar.”

  He didn’t answer her, his attention far off, on the giant curving bowl above him. “I see where I could put in another corps of cherubs, and opposing them a row of green-gold demons.”

  “Finish it, for the love of God.” She flopped his coat over, to a nearly severed sleeve.

  He closed his eyes. “A duck, a horse, a thousand riders. Whatever I wish to see, I see in perfect detail. Is this a blessing?”

  “I close my eyes and see us,” she said, “far from here, in circumstances that can never be. So what use is it? It serves only to torment.”

  He heaved himself up with a sigh, went to his ladder and began his climb. Padre Dominic entered quietly through the side door. “Good day, Padre,” said Antonio Allegri, as he climbed upward.

  “Good day, Maestro,” said the priest, and crossed in front of the altar, where he knelt, and then turned to where the prostitute was sitting. “Good day,” he said, coming to the pew beside her. “How is he today?” he asked.

  “Suffering, of course,” she said. “Tortured by his vision.”

  “I have no vision,” said the young priest. “I haven’t suffered enough, I suppose.”

  “Do you want to?” asked the prostitute, her eyes soft upon him.

  * * *

  Night was on the cathedral. Gazing through the narrow windows of the dome, Antonio Allegri stared across the darkened city, to the city walls. Beyond them a column of smoke was rising from the camp of the barbarians who had begun their threat upon the town. He studied the smoke and compared it with the painted clouds which played among his saints and angels. He worked through the night, laying new and more delicate veils of vapor on the ceiling. At dawn the campfires disappeared, and it was learned that the barbarians had moved on, deciding against invasion. Antonio Allegri sent word to the Canon that the dome of the cathedral was done and would the Canon be so kind as to authorize payment as agreed upon.

  * * *

  “A stew of frogs,” said the Canon, staring at the ceiling.

  Antonio Allegri lowered his head and looked at the floor. He did not want to look up and see his painting. He knew how suggestible he was, knew that he might look up and see exactly what the Canon was seeing, a mad jumble of legs, sticking out every which way from a smoking stewpot.

  “. . . stew of frogs . . . of frogs . . .” The Canon’s voice echoed in the great dome, reverberating among the angels.

  “Even so, Excellency, it’s three years’ labor and the stew must be paid for.”

  “Impossible. You’ve desecrated the House of God.”

  “An illusion.”

  “Signor Allegri, I’m afraid—”

  “Not nearly so afraid as you will be, Excellency, after I hire an old woman of Correggio to perform a certain ceremony in your name—” Antonio Allegri watched the blood leave the Canon’s face. “Some say she is a ridiculous old woman,” smiled the painter. “Others, who have lost certain valuable possessions, such as their noses, think differently.”

  * * *

  When he went to collect the money, he found that instead of gold, he had been paid in coppers, which were in a large sack. Padre Dominic stood beside it in the doorway of the cathedral, his face covered in sadness and shame. “I’ll call for a carriage,” said the young priest.

  “And who’ll pay for it, Padre?” asked the painter, giving the great sack a kick with his toe, measuring its weight.

  The young priest looked down at the floor. Antonio Allegri smiled at him and said, “You and I have taken the vow of poverty, Padre, because wealth is such a burden.” He bent over and gripped the sack in both hands, hoisting it upward. “You see me, while I’m wealthy, struggling with riches.” Padre Dominic helped him settle the sack onto his shoulders, and the painter swayed for a moment under the weight, but bending forward a bit he gained his balance.

  “I must go now, Padre. I have a distance to travel. Please tell our friend Mary that the Canon settled his debt. She was concerned for the condition of his soul.”

  Padre Dominic brightened. “Our friend Mary is going to take the veil.”

  “She’s lying,” said Antonio Allegri. “She’ll take your veil first.” He walked forward into the road, leaving the priest, the cathedral, the ceiling.

  After passing through the gates of the city, he was alone on the road. The sky was clear, the sun bright. The fields rolled on and away. So the Canon has had his little joke. Coppers! If only I knew an old woman.

  The day was hot and walking difficult. But I know how to balance a load. If shouldered correctly, a great amount of weight can be managed.

  The road went uphill and down. Antonio Allegri walked the miles slowly, and then more slowly. The sack is a tremendous thing, like a domed ceiling. When you first grab for it, it seems like an easy job, but it gets heavier. As time goes on it gets heavier.

  He felt the fever stirring in him again, accompanied by a dull ache in his bones. Someday, when I pass this way again, I shall paint that field there, for the effect of the sun on the grain.

  The sweat ran into his eyes and onto his lips. The fever grew brighter, until his ears were roaring with the flame of it. In Mantua, there was such a fire, when they collected the bodies and burned them. It’s just my blood, pounding.

  The Canon thinks I’ll lay my load down, and that he will come and claim it. But I don’t bend so easily.

  He watched his feet as they moved below in the dust, within his comfortable old shoes. Then suddenly he was staring directly at the dust, the tiny grains of earth only inches from his eyes. The sack of coppers was across his back, pinning him to the ground. He tried to move, but the sack held him. Surely I can move it . . . surely . . .

  His exertions fanned the fever in his brain; his head felt crowned with thorns and the sweat dripping past his eyes to the ground seemed like glittering beads of blood. He closed his eyes and the forms in his head swirled up, combining and recombining—bathers, Christs, and goddesses, sun, moon, and storm, the faces rich and perfect, without a brushstroke discernible. They melted and mixed, becoming a single masterful design.

  He struggled to rise, as the world of the mind shone before him. If only I hadn’t attempted to place the cathedral on my back. I’ve stumbled with it and it’s crushed me.

  He tried to open his eyes but the sunlight hurt him and he closed them again, seeing with great satisfaction The Fates—favorite of all the paintings he’d done. The three beautiful women of the painting smiled at him, but went about their work, the lovely Clotho holding the staff on which the thread of life was wound, her fair sister, Lachesis, drawing forth its determined length. The third sister, Atropos, holding the scissors of fate in her hand, became the rat of Mantua, who nibbled through the silver thread, severing it.

  * * *

  With great emba
rrassment, Padre Dominic presented himself to the heirs of Antonio Allegri, deceased painter of Correggio. Flushed and hesitant, he delivered the demand made by the Canon of the Cathedral of Parma, that the final payment made to the painter, equal to one hundred gold ducats, be returned.

  The Canon, it was pointed out, held an agreement signed by Antonio Allegri, which was the lawful contract for the painting of the dome, as well as the arcade, the pillars, the niches, and all the wall space down to the floor. Only the dome had been finished and it, the Canon declared, was an outrage.

  With great reluctance and still greater fear of the high offices of the Church, the grandmother of the two Allegri children gave up the sack of coppers.

  Several years later, the Canon conceived a plan to efface the painting that had so desecrated the place of worship. Charles V, visiting the cathedral at the time, had to step around buckets of white-wash with which the good friars of the church were preparing to cover the dome. Accompanying him was the great master, Titian. The two travelers and their host, the Canon, stood beneath the dome. Titian, after staring in silence for some time at the rim of human and divine figures ascending there, said quietly, “Turn it upside down, and fill it with gold; even so, you will not have paid its true price.”

  In this way, the painting was saved, but centuries of perfumed smoke from the frankincense burning daily on the altar below slowly covered the assumption of Mary among the saints and angels with a thick film of grease, leaving visible here and there only a hand, a foot, rising out of what seemed to be a dark smoking stewpot.

  Tell Her You Love Her with a Ring from DAVE’S HOUSE OF DIAMONDS

  Music Lake was at the top of Music Mountain, a few miles out of town. It was exclusive in that Jews and speedboats were not allowed on the lake, but it was not a rich man’s retreat. The fishing was poor and the water cold; the cottages that ringed it were modest summer dwellings belonging to a coal dealer, a furniture salesman, an undertaker, and other middle-class vacationers.