I shrug, still trying desperately to push down the lump that has risen into my throat. I push back the flashing images of Cristiano’s broad smile, his hands on my hips.
“I have said too much,” my aunt says. “Forgive me.”
Finally, the lump in my throat subsides. “No,” I say. “It is I who have spoken too freely of such things.”
Chapter 7
Through the narrow window I spy a sliver of pink. It resembles the light wash of vermilione that the painter uses to bring flesh tones to his delicate drawings. The dark swath of night sky lightens with each passing minute, silhouetting the tall chimney pipes of the houses on the opposite side of the canal. I wait for the orange light of dawn to appear before I dare to move a muscle.
It is clear now that I will not be going home, at least not for now. I must focus on my work in Master Trevisan’s studio or I feel I will burst.
I have lain still and awake in the darkness for what must be hours, reviewing in my head the steps that the painter has demonstrated for rendering drapery in paint. I have tested the method on at least two dozen pieces of scrap panel, thick with paint from countless past lessons. I feel stupid and fumbling, like a girl who tries diligently to copy her mother’s embroidery stitches and ends up instead with a tangled mess of thread.
We await the Baldi, one of Our Most Serene Republic’s well-respected families of carpenters, to deliver the large panels and battens that will be used for our new altarpiece.
In the meantime, I practice what will be my new trade. My eye is drawn naturally to the powdered orpiment, which, when mixed with egg yolk, imparts a glistening golden-yellow tone that resembles our familiar gilding. I have learned to swirl together bits of lead white with orpiment on my wooden palette to create a light golden orange—the color of the dawn sky outside our narrow window. But the reds are the most important, Master Trevisan has told me, for they are what our patrons want from us, even if they do not know it themselves. And so the painter has said I must master every shade from raspberry to ruby, from soft flesh to deep crimson.
The house is quiet save for the rhythmic breathing of Antonella beside me. I listen to her deep inhale and slow exhale. She is not an unpleasant bedmate. The regular rhythm of her snoring lulls me back into a calm state between wakefulness and sleep.
My arm begins to tingle, and I realize that I have been still for so long that it has begun to fall asleep. I flip myself over, and suddenly, on the back of my hand, I feel something wet. I push myself up and through the pale light beginning to illuminate the room, I see a dark patch of blood below where Antonella is sleeping. I gasp and push myself up from the bed with a start.
The sound of my gasp wakes her and she turns her sleepy gaze to where I am looking. She sits up with a start. “Oh,” she says. Both of us stand up from the bed simultaneously, and I see that blood has stained the back of her nightdress too. “Dio!” she says, flustered, then begins jerking at the bedclothes to remove them from the bed.
I stand and wipe the back of my hand on the bed sheet.
“I am sorry,” she says to me, fully awake. “I had not realized that it was time for my menses to return.” Heat rises visibly to her cheeks. “I will get these sheets boiled today.”
“Figurati,” I say, trying not to sound flustered, “it is normal.” I begin helping her roll the bedding into a ball. “Let me help you.”
“No. I can take care of it.” Antonella drags the bedding to the floor, then approaches the table with the water basin and begins wiping a damp rag between her legs.
I turn my back to allow her some privacy, then lean over the trunk where my meager clothing is stored. I open the planks of the lid and find my worn linen work dress and smock where I left them neatly folded last night. Underneath that layer is a nicer linen dress that I allowed myself the luxury of purchasing after my father and I got a commission to gild a set of small sculptures destined for the high altar of a convent church. I pull the linen work dress over my head and feel the gold ingot threaded onto its silk cord fall and settle near my heart. I loosen my braid, then reweave my hair into a neat package at the nape of my neck with the leather lash and small metal pins I have collected on the windowsill.
When I turn around, Antonella has removed her soiled nightdress and is buttoning the grey linen shift that she wears to clean the house.
“Santa Margherita, I must have given you a scare,” Antonella says, chuckling. “All that blood.”
I muster a smile. “Surprised, yes, but only for a moment until I understood.”
“I should have known it was coming. We women in the house are on the same schedule, the painter’s wife and myself, at least when she has not been with child.” She pauses. “But you...” An uncomfortable laugh makes her mouth twist. “You must be either barren or with child yourself.”
Antonella goes quiet and looks away, seemingly embarrassed to have aired her curiosity out loud. I want to say something to deny it, but the words will not come, for as soon as she has spoken, I feel the knot in my stomach tighten. Ever since I arrived in Master Trevisan’s house, I have been calculating the days. The last time my menses came, the leaves on the linden tree behind my father’s workshop had not yet turned yellow.
I have never missed my menses before, but with each passing week I have pushed the nagging suspicion away. Now, with Antonella’s words, there is no more denying the truth.
And now, it is no longer a secret.
Chapter 8
“We should replenish our supplies while we are waiting for our panels to arrive, Master Trevisan.” The journeyman examines the level of indigo powder in the bottom of a glass jar.
“A worthy observation,” says the painter. “The carpenters...” The painter raises his pen from the paper and scratches his head. “They are good, but they are slow. I waited months for the last set of panels we made for the scuola. You are right to think about preparing everything in advance so that we are ready to begin when they bring our panels.”
Alongside the hearth, the journeyman is putting the final touches on a boulder in the landscape of a small picture showing a miracle of San Rocco. Master Trevisan says that he has received three requests for pictures of the plague saint just this week. “Have you seen if we have enough of the red bole for the project?” Trevisan’s journeyman asks. “Maria?” It takes a moment for me to realize he is speaking to me. “Maria.”
“Forgive me,” I say, feeling my cheeks warm. “No. Yes. Yes, I did examine the containers,” I fumble.
For days I feel that I have been living inside of a dream, disconnected from my actions. I work on my drawings, practice mixing the paints, work on my trees and my drapery, but my heart and mind are not in it.
My mind is all focused on my body now. Surely my menses will begin. I must have retired to the latrines or the bedchamber to lift my skirts and check one hundred times today. But each time, there is no sign.
“I would estimate that there is enough for one or two panels,” I say, gesturing to the series of lidded ceramic jars on the shelf, “but not for the size that we need.”
Master Trevisan opens the lid of one of the jars on the shelf. “Hardly any left in this one,” he says, then addresses me. “Over the coming days you might visit the vendecolore for some new red bole. I am certain that you will know what to select better than I.”
“For years my father has patronized a vendecolore on the Zattere. Master da Segna,” I say.
Trevisan nods in approval. “Boatman can bring you there and help you carry the supplies back to us.”
“Of course.” I nod in agreement and turn back to my work, but my mind is far distant from the painter’s studio.
Cristiano.
The battiloro.
He is all that I can think of now.
The battiloro came into my father’s workshop as most people do, through the ties that bind us to our
own guildsmen and those of our related trades.
Two narrow alleys away from our own lived an old goldbeater, Master Zuan. The Zuan name was already well-regarded in my great-grandfather’s time for the family’s fine sheets of beaten gold, free of all impurities and thinner than the most delicate autumn leaf. The bonds between the Zuan and our own workshop went back generations, my father had told me when I was a small girl. Master Zuan’s own father supplied my nonno with the gold leaf, and on before that as far back as anyone could remember.
Some Sunday afternoons, Master Zuan’s stooped figure would appear in our doorway. He would remove his felted wool cap and grasp my small shoulder in greeting with a wiry hand. I poured Master Zuan and my father small glasses of watery brew while the old goldbeater regaled my father with stories through his toothless grin. My cousin and I sat quietly at the men’s feet or under the worktable, rolling a roughly carved wooden ball back and forth while the men passed the hours in amiable companionship before the fire. Paolo and I shared secret smiles as we heard the goldbeater repeat the same stories over and over, and listened to my father respond as if he were hearing them for the first time.
Master Zuan had no sons of his own. His elder daughter was given in marriage to a maker of gold rings. The younger had died of a fever before she became a woman; sickness took the goldbeater’s wife soon after. Even as a small girl I suffered the old man’s loneliness as if it were my own, and felt his satisfaction in capturing the ear of a patient friend.
On one of these Sabbath visits the old battiloro told us that he had taken in an assistant to learn his trade. A half-Saracen, he told us, still a boy. The boy came to him by way of a wealthy patron who had just passed to the World Hereafter, Zuan said. The patron held a deep respect for the goldbeating trade and a longtime affection for the goldbeater himself, whom he had tasked with making gilded objects over several decades. According to one of the provisions in the man’s last testament, his house-slave was made a freedwoman, and her own son was apprenticed to Master Zuan as a token of the dying man’s appreciation. Old Master Zuan was teaching the boy to hammer the ingots into nearly weightless leaves, cut and package them between vellum sheaves, then compile them into small books. He showed promise already, Master Zuan told us. His name was Cristiano.
Years would pass before I laid eyes on Cristiano myself. By the time my father brought him into our own workshop, he was a man, as respected among our guildsmen as old Master Zuan himself.
From the day he appeared under my father’s roof, things would never be the same.
“I have a solution to your... circumstance.”
Antonella wipes down the wooden table in the center of the kitchen with a damp rag. Across from me, Trevisan’s little boy is licking a batter of eggs, milk, honey, and rice flour from a wooden spoon. The mixture makes splattered patterns across the table, the remnants of Antonella’s baking in preparation for Carnival. The aroma of the fritters we call chiacchiere lingers in the air. Normally I relish tasting the dough myself, but today I feel as though I will vomit. I know that I will need some energy, as the painter has asked me to visit the color-seller to select the gesso and bole for our panels. I select a pear from a bowl on the table, no doubt set aside in syrup in a glass jar before the winter. I taste its tangy sweetness as I push back another wave of nausea.
“Vale,” Antonella lifts the little boy under his arms and sets him on the tile floor. “Your mother is waiting for you upstairs.” Young Trevisan sets down the spoon, then races to the staircase. He clambers up the worn wooden treads on his hands and feet.
Above our heads, I hear a door slam. In my mind’s eye I see the half-dozen doorways on the main floor. They must lead to the private chambers of the painter and his family, but I have not seen these rooms, for the doors always remain closed, casting the stairwell into darkness.
“Mamma!” I hear the boy’s shrill voice fill the dark stairwell above our heads. Then there is the screech of metal hinges.
“Vieni, amore.” The muffled voice of the painter’s wife. Another door slams, then the clamor upstairs falls silent.
“Now.” Antonella puts the hand with the rag in it on her hip, then scrapes a chair across the floor and sits next to me. She lowers her voice. “My cousin Bartolomea,” she says. “She lives in Dorsoduro.” Antonella points to the back wall in the direction of the neighborhood on the other side of town. “She came before me from Sicilia with her parents. Now she is grown and works alongside the midwife to deliver babies, but she is also good with herbal remedies. She knows how to cure headaches, back pains, even make poisons. But she also knows how to make other... concoctions.”
I return her whisper. “Concoctions?”
Antonella rubs a sticky spot on the table with her rag. “Well. She has taken on cases of gravidness that were… inconvenient.”
I stare at Antonella silently for a few moments.
She shrugs. “Cavolo, you think you are the only one in Our Most Serene City carrying a child by accident?” She wags her hands at me.
“I never said that I am...” I feel my shoulders drop, realizing that it is futile to lie about such matters to a woman with whom I share a bed, who is aware of the monthly cycles of all the women in the house. “I never said it was an accident.”
Antonella snorts loudly into the air. “Pallini. You are not a wife, not even promised. You cannot convince me that you came into the painter’s house knowing that you were with child. I was not born yesterday. Fidati di me. I have seen it before. Young girls... old girls. There are certain circumstances when it is inconvenient. Undesirable. Dangerous.” She stops to consider my face but I say nothing.
“I even know of a woman who was impregnated by a Moor,” she continues, lowering her voice even further and leaning closer. “Do you not think she was the first in line for my cousin’s concoction? Ha!”
I feel my mouth open, but no words come out. I scrape my fingernail across a piece of dough stuck to the wooden tabletop.
“I do not know about you, but the last thing I would want to bring forth into this world is a baby like that. The poor child would have no chance. Better to end things and go forward with your own life,” she says.
I can no longer remain seated, and I begin to pace aimlessly around the kitchen. “You do not know anything about my situation,” I say, hoping that she cannot see the heat rising to my face or hear my heartbeat, which surely must be so loud that it is audible.
“I only know that you did not come into this house with an idea that there was… something… forming in there.” Antonella waves her rag toward my stomach, then crosses her arms. “Either you became pregnant before you came here,” she pauses and sets her black eyes on me, “or shortly after you arrived.”
“You are crazy,” I say in a loud whisper, my heart beating uncontrollably in my chest as I stare daggers into her black eyes. I cannot process what she is suggesting, and I feel I must leave the room or I will strike her. I make my way toward the door to the painter’s studio. “I am going on an errand for the painter. Perhaps he has already let the boatman know.” I begin to push the door with my palm, but Antonella grasps my sleeve and I stop.
“I do not mean to push you,” she whispers, her sour breath puffing on my neck. “But just... think about it.”
I press the door open with my palm and let it swing closed behind me.
Chapter 9
Already there is blood.
As the painter’s boatman turns the gondola into a narrow canal, I see a stocky man—surely too old for such foolery—standing at the crest of a rickety wooden bridge with red streaming from a gash in his forehead. Strangely, he is smiling. The man stumbles backward, and the crowd that has gathered to cheer on the bloodshed heaves to catch him as he reels.
The Carnival brawling has begun.
They are not allowed, of course, not since the Council of Ten outlawed such bridge fights o
nly a few years ago. But the decree has only made the skirmishes more anticipated and more exciting to watch, at least so my cousin Paolo says. Now, more crowds than ever before gather to cheer on grown men who bloody themselves for sport.
On the left side of the bridge, I recognize the colors of the castellani, the men of the ship-building quarters of Castello, San Marco, and Dorsoduro. A few lanky boys lead the charge, coursing over the crest of the bridge and pushing back the nicolotti—their adversaries from the remaining quarters—including my own.
But I do not cheer on my own team of fishermen cast against the ship-builders. I find the fights distasteful, well-respected men acting like belligerents. The painter’s boatman seems to think differently. As we pass under the crooked wooden slats of the bridge, he lets out an ear-splitting roar that echoes across the water. I lean forward on my knees and cover my ears. I hear his loud cackle muffled in my head.
At last, we push through the boat traffic surrounding the bridge and leave the dispersing crowd behind us. Ahead, in the San Marco quarter, the aroma of fried dough is overwhelming. The air seems thicker than I can ever recall with the sticky-sweet smell of chiacchiere, the tiny twists of pastry made only at Carnival time. My mouth waters as I can almost taste the warm bread drizzled with honey melting on my tongue.
Even the sky has turned a happy shade of pink. The Carnival season is always like this, lifting the long shadows of winter that have cast their grey mantle over the façades along the canal. But I do not feel its brightness, its usual sense of hope and excitement. Not this time.
I run my palm over the green upholstery of the wooden chair set in the painter’s gondola, trying to derive some sense of comfort from the smell of dough and the plush texture of the velvet. For days I have felt on the verge of panic, trying to calm my frantic heart while at the same time trying to summon my menses through force of sheer will.
The Painter's Apprentice Page 6