At the same time, I couldn’t ignore the fizzle of excitement in my belly. The apparent simplicity of the commission was deceptive. To create something that was pure surface. To make it vivid. It was diametrically opposed to the work I usually produced. Not a trace of putrefaction or disease. Only youth and health. Only beauty. My skills would be tested as never before, just as the Grand Duke had suggested.
I kept veering – now this way, now that …
All thought of sleep blown from my head as if by some internal gale, I plunged down into the alleys on the south side of the river and stopped at the first tavern I saw, a dingy place with a boar’s hide nailed to the outside wall, the blunt, bristly head and oddly dainty trotters still attached. I pushed the door open. The place had brown walls and a floor of beaten earth. It was almost empty. I walked up to the bar and ordered wine. I still couldn’t get over the ease and deftness with which the Grand Duke had manipulated me. He was more of a politician than I had taken him for, and I doubted I was the first person to be wrong-footed by his vague, morose demeanour.
‘Zummo?’
I looked round. Sitting at a table in the corner was the Englishman I had met in the palace the previous November.
‘Towne,’ I said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I could ask the same of you.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. It’s just that I wasn’t expecting to see anyone I knew.’
‘Me neither.’
We both laughed.
He invited me to join him.
When I was seated, I asked him how he came to number Cosimo III among his clients. They had met many years ago, he told me, when His Highness was travelling in England. The occasion was a banquet in the Earl of Pembroke’s house in Wilton. Did I know Wilton?
‘I’ve never been to England,’ I said.
‘Well, it’s an exquisite house.’
‘You certainly seem to go to all the right banquets.’
‘One should embrace everything life has to offer,’ he said, ‘don’t you think?’
I smiled and drank.
The Grand Duke wasn’t a typical collector, he went on, but then again he – Jack Towne – wasn’t a typical dealer.
‘He’s a complex man,’ I said. ‘More complex than he appears to be.’
Towne looked straight at me. ‘He’s a fox.’
It suddenly occurred to me that the commission might have been in the Grand Duke’s mind for quite some time. Could that have been the real reason why he had invited me to Florence?
‘Is something wrong?’ Towne asked.
‘No, it’s nothing.’ I glanced over my shoulder. Apart from us, there was nobody in the tavern. ‘When we first met, in the palace, you said all sorts of people shared your taste. How would you define that taste exactly?’
Towne began to talk about the liminality of many of the works he bought and sold. Their meaning shifted, he said, depending on the nature of your passion and the angle of your approach. He offered an example. In a village east of Florence there was a man called Marvuglia, who modelled life-size animals out of clay. I should visit Marvuglia one day, he said, if I could spare the time. He spoke about my plague pieces too, heaping praise on them, but, in a way I couldn’t quite put my finger on, he seemed to be including me in a club to which I wouldn’t have said I belonged, and this gave me an unnervingly removed feeling, as if, by virtue of talking to him, I had become somebody else, somebody I didn’t recognize. I didn’t argue the point, though, or even interrupt – not, that is, until he told me that he would very much appreciate the chance to watch me working.
‘No,’ I said.
The word came out louder than I had intended.
‘No?’ He leaned forwards, hands clasped on the table in front of him.
‘I’m sorry.’
I didn’t think I needed to explain that my working methods were a private matter. I was sure he understood the impulse towards secrecy – its attractions, its demands – and, judging by his easy, slightly knowing smile, I was also sure that my response had not surprised him.
Later, as I headed along Via de’ Bardi, my thoughts took an intriguing turn. What I would have to do, I realized, was to build an element of what Towne called ‘liminality’ into the commission. I had to make a piece of work that functioned on at least two levels. How, though?
I walked the streets for hours, nothing concrete in my head, just a possibility, a riddle – a dilemma. All the inns and taverns had long since closed. As I approached the Ponte Rubaconte, I met a man pushing a handcart heaped with ghostly, gleaming blocks. Part of the river had frozen, he told me. Higher up, beyond the Pescaia. He was hoping to sell his load to the ice house in San Frediano. Near the Duomo, I came across two police officers, recognizable by their swords and their grey jackets. They were rousing a man who was slumped against the gates of a palazzo. Sleeping on the street was illegal, they told him. He should go to the Albergo dei Poveri – the Paupers’ Hotel – where he would be given a bed. Not long afterwards, as I passed behind San Lorenzo, I saw a woman leaning against a wall, one hand propped on her hip, a jaunty yellow ribbon in her hair.
‘You look sweet,’ she said, her breath like smoke. ‘Not Jewish, are you?’
A whore could be flogged for sleeping with a Jew. This was one of the Grand Duke’s recent initiatives.
‘I’m Sicilian,’ I said.
‘Cristo santo, I’m not sure which is worse.’
I don’t know whether it was her smile, which was charmingly crooked, or the slight catch in her voice, a kind of huskiness, but I followed her across the street and up a creaky flight of stairs to a small back room with an unmade bed and a brazier of hot coals in the corner.
‘Nice and warm in here,’ she said.
She took off her clothes and lay on the bed, and I could see from the smooth, faintly concave stomach that she was young, no more than seventeen. I leaned down and kissed the mossy darkness of her armpits.
‘No one ever did that before,’ she said.
I drew back. With her arms flung behind her head and a sheet twisting down between her legs, she reminded me of Poussin’s ‘Sleeping Venus’ – she had the same boldness and sensuality – and I decided there and then to reacquaint myself with the Frenchman’s paintings before I started work on the commission.
The young woman asked me, lazily, what I was looking at.
‘You’re giving me ideas,’ I said.
She laughed.
I leaned down again and ran my tongue from her belly-button to her clitoris, taking my time to connect the two. Her skin tasted of rose-water, and also of saltpetre, and I was reminded, incongruously, of the Guazzi twins.
‘No one ever did that either,’ she murmured.
‘Maybe you should be paying me.’
‘Cheeky bastard.’
She twisted round and took me in her mouth. Unlike other women I had known, she didn’t hurry. It felt more like an exploration than a rhythm, her lips still, only her tongue moving. She understood how to make the pleasure last, and swallowed everything that came out of me.
‘Aren’t you going to penetrate me?’ she said. ‘I like to be penetrated.’
An hour later, as I walked back to my lodgings, a woman opened a first-floor window and leaned out. I jumped backwards, thinking she was about to empty a chamber pot. She laughed and offered to lower her price, seeing as how she had given me such a shock.
‘You’re too late,’ I said. ‘I’ve already been with someone.’
The woman looked back the way I had come. ‘I hope it wasn’t Cristofana. She’s got every disease under the sun.’
Her cackle followed me as I moved on.
Dawn was a slit of rose in a brown sky. The streets creaked in the cold. I was no closer to solving the conundrum I had set myself, but I felt I had learned something, both from the Englishman and from the whore, and as I climbed into bed I comforted myself by repeating the Grand Duke’s words: Take all the time you need
.
At the end of a day’s work, I would often wander in the palace grounds. Sometimes I would pass the modest garden that backed on to the convent of San Giorgio, attracted by the perfume of its many exotic plants. Like the Vasari Corridor, it was reserved for the Grand Duke and his immediate family, and I wasn’t allowed inside. Other times, I would visit the menagerie, where monkeys swung fluidly through the upper reaches of their cages, frowning like old men, and vultures shifted and sulked, their plumage the stiff dull black of widows’ weeds. Crevalcuore, the man who tended the animals, made himself scarce whenever I appeared. Like me, he guarded his privacy fiercely. Or perhaps he was just shy.
One evening in March, I found myself on the Viottolone, a grand sloping avenue lined with laurel trees and cypresses. Halfway down the hill, I turned left, making for the circular maze near the eastern wall. I was thinking about the girl who had waited on me at the banquet. I couldn’t forget how her arm had grazed the back of my hand, igniting that secret place in my left heel. She had chosen not to look at me, it seemed, and yet the atmosphere between us had thickened and crackled, like the air when a thunderstorm is coming. It had been months since I had seen her last, and the interval between the two encounters had been so long that I had begun to think I might have been mistaken. There might be two entirely different girls. If that was the case, though, which one had left the package at the House of Shells? With its blind alleys and its dead ends, the maze seemed to embody my frustration.
The sun dropped behind the trees; light drained from the gardens. I was following a path that led back to the gate on Via Romana when I sensed that I was not alone. I stopped. Looked round. A man stood at the entrance to a covered walkway, his glittering eyes perched on ledges of bone, his complexion sallow, damp-looking. I had the curious impression that he was there because of me. That something in me had summoned him. Brought him forth.
‘Did I scare you?’ His voice was quiet but scratchy, harsh.
My vision darkened and began to pulse, a black flower slowly opening and closing its petals.
‘No,’ I said.
‘You’re lying.’
I stared at the man. He seemed familiar, and I couldn’t work out why.
‘I can smell it on you,’ he said.
That rasping whisper – I had heard it before, on the night of the banquet, when I was hiding on the stairs.
‘I know who you are,’ I said.
It was dusk now, and his face hung like a mask among the leaves, his high square shoulders hunched, the rest of his body invisible. ‘Oh? Who am I, then?’
‘You’re Padre Stufa.’
‘And you are?’
I felt sure he knew exactly who I was, but I told him anyway. His thin-lipped mouth stretched sideways. I thought of Tacitus, and his famous description of the emperor Domitian, who was never to be more feared, apparently, than when he smiled.
‘You’re the artist,’ Stufa said. ‘You make those sculptures.’
He took a step forwards and peered at me as if I were half in shadow. He was wearing a white scapular and a black hooded cloak. The emerald on his left hand hoarded the last of the light.
‘Not that I have much time for that sort of thing,’ he added.
Though his features were gaunt, almost starved, his body was big and hollow-looking. His ribcage would be the size of a barrel.
In the distance one of the Grand Duke’s peacocks screamed.
‘I mean, what can you show me,’ he went on, ‘that I can’t see every day, out on the street?’
‘Maybe I can show you yourself.’
Before he could speak again, I walked away. Perhaps I should have been more diplomatic, but there was an abrasiveness in him that provoked retaliation, and I began to understand why Bassetti had snapped at him on the night of the banquet. Even as I approached the avenue of cypresses and laurels, I could feel his gaze on me, the inner canthus of his eyes unusually sharp and curved, like the knives used in the harvesting of grapes. Only then did I realize that he was the man who had brushed past me, the morning of Bassetti’s visit to the House of Shells.
Spring brought rain and grey skies, the redness of the poppies startling the fields. I paid Ambrose Cuif another visit. When he had poured us both a glass of wine, I told him I had finally met Stufa.
Cuif’s mouth twitched. ‘What did you think?’
I described the scene in the palace gardens.
‘I wouldn’t take it personally,’ Cuif said. ‘He’s like that with everyone.’ He paused. ‘It’s almost as if he’s got a grudge against the world.’
I didn’t follow.
The Grand Duke’s mother had found him on her way to Pisa, Cuif told me. It was around the time of the Epiphany, and the boy was standing by the roadside. His face had turned grey with the cold; his eyes were black, opaque. He would only say one word – stufa, or ‘stove’. Was he referring to the burns on his arms and legs, or was he seeking warmth? No one could tell. In any case, Stufa became the name he answered to. He had no other.
Cuif sipped his wine. ‘He probably made the whole thing up. To make himself sound more interesting.’
‘Or to make people feel sorry for him.’
‘Exactly.’
But I could see it somehow – the winter landscape, the boy with the blank eyes at the edge of the road. The carriage approaching …
‘They call him “Flesh”,’ Cuif said suddenly. ‘Did you know that?’
‘Flesh? Why?’
‘Why do you think?’
I couldn’t square the nickname with the man I had talked to in the gardens. ‘Have you got any evidence?’
‘Of course not. There’s never any evidence against people like him.’
‘So it’s all just hearsay.’
‘You sound as if you’re taking his side.’
‘I’ve had rumours spread about me too. I know what it’s like.’
‘All right. Here’s an example. Given his qualifications –’ and Cuif was unable to resist a snort of derision – ‘he’s entitled to hear confessions. Which he does. But apparently he often withholds absolution from young women until they’ve granted him – well – certain favours –’
‘Apparently,’ I said.
‘Well, if you’re determined not to believe me.’ Cuif directed a sour look at the ceiling. ‘I’ve always thought that Stufa thinks he’s unassailable. Judging by the way you’re springing to his defence, maybe he’s right.’
I sat back, toying with my glass.
‘You’ll see,’ Cuif said.
The heat descended at the end of June, not dry and fierce like the heat of my childhood, but languid, cloying, muggy. Dog days. Dog nights as well. I followed the Grand Duke’s example and decamped to Pisa, where the weather was more bearable. I attended court again, hoping to catch a glimpse of Stufa, only to discover that he had stayed behind in Florence, with Vittoria. Instead, I witnessed a bizarre, impromptu performance by an armless man from Germany. Much to the delight of the Grand Duke and his entourage, the German used his feet to doff his hat, thread a needle, write a letter in his native language, and finally – his pièce de résistance – to sharpen a razor and give himself a shave. While on the coast, I attempted to model a life-size woman out of clay, but the results were disappointing, and I destroyed them all.
In August I moved to Fiesole, where I stayed in a house belonging to Borucher. It was in those cool green hills that I came to a decision. If I were to create moulds that were sufficiently authentic, I would have to cast directly from a woman’s body. In working with the dead, I would be taking a risk – the ghosts of Jacopo and Father Paone rose up before me, one sun-blasted, the other skulking in the shadows – but the alternative, I felt, was still more perilous. The Grand Duke had emphasized the need for confidentiality. If I used a woman who was alive, how could I be sure that she wouldn’t talk?
I returned to Florence in the middle of September. That same week I called on Pampolini. I found him in a crowded tavern ro
und the corner from the hospital. A long, low place with a vaulted ceiling, it was run by a stout blonde woman who only had one eye. Pampolini was sitting over by the wall. In front of him was a plate of pig’s-blood fritters known as roventini, a few chunks of bread and a carafe of wine.
When he saw me, he gestured at me, crust in hand. ‘Ah, someone civilized at last!’
I sat down, grinning.
He leaned forwards, over the table. ‘The Grand Duke must be worried sick.’
It was three years since Ferdinando’s wedding to Violante, the Bavarian princess, he told me, and there was still no sign of an heir. Anna Maria was also married, of course – an achievement in itself! – but people were saying her husband had given her syphilis, and that she was now infertile. That left Gian Gastone.
‘Oh dear,’ I said.
Pampolini let out one of his explosive laughs. ‘It’s a disaster, isn’t it?’
Once he had poured me a drink, I explained my predicament and watched all the flippancy and mischief leave his face.
‘What do you need that for?’ he asked.
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘How do I know it’s legal?
I lowered my voice. ‘What if I told you it was for someone in a very high position?’
‘Bassetti?’
I almost choked on my wine.
‘Just a joke,’ he said.
He would see what he could do, he went on, though he warned me that I would have to be patient. What I was asking for – an archetype, a paragon – was rare in the extreme.
I nodded gloomily. ‘I know.’
The wine was finished. Pampolini ordered a grappa. I would have one too, I said. After that, I’d have to be going. But the first grappa turned into a second, and then the proprietor brought us another two, on the house. I noticed how Pampolini watched her walk back to the kitchens, her thick-waisted body twisting as she edged between the tables.
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