The Painter's Apprentice

by Laura Morelli

  For years I had no idea about such things, for I have never had a mother or any other female in my house to tell me about them. When I was small, a mean older girl down the alley told me that the devil came to visit every girl once a month, and I was terrified. When blood appeared in my undergarments in my twelfth year, I thought I was dying or had surely been possessed. My father tried to explain it to me but did not have the words. A neighbor woman took pity on me and did her best to inform me about the way that babies came into the world. Only years later, in the deep envelop of Cristiano’s embrace, did any of it begin to make sense.

  I try to distract myself by counting the variety of boats trafficking the Grand Canal: a modest water-seller’s boat; a flat-bottomed skiff to ferry passengers from one side of the wide canal to the other; a fine gondola with gilded ornamentation on the prow. Behind me, the boatman presses the oar into the oarlock. I steal a glance at him, his woolen scarf pulled tight around his neck, his dark locks brushing against the crooked scar beneath his eye.

  The oar makes swirling patterns in the water, stirring shards of colored Carnival confetti. The multicolored scraps of paper are the detritus of parties that people insist on hosting even though the authorities of Our Most Serene Republic have warned us that congregating in large groups might spread contagion. I watch the shards of paper float and spin on the surface of the dark canal waters until their colors begin to blur through stifled tears.

  On the quayside, butchers, fishmongers, and fruit-sellers have set up makeshift tables in a neighborhood morning market along the bank of the rio San Lorenzo. A pair of men wearing masks runs past, grabbing handfuls of apples as the fruit seller yells at them. I contemplate a slimy trickle of yellow yolk on a pink façade, the result of naughty boys who throw spoiled eggs at one another and at well-dressed but unlucky ladies who walk under their windows at an ill-timed moment.

  Though Carnival season has begun to overtake Our Most Excellent Republic, I feel as though I am watching it unfold from far away, through the veil of a dream. Everything around me appears normal, but I am not really present. I feel as though I am floating above myself, watching myself go through daily activities. I cannot begin to grasp that there may be a living being developing inside my body, that I may be a vessel for human life.

  I feel the boatman’s eyes on me, and the back of my neck prickles. I am accustomed to people staring at me, of course. It is my hair. In the sunlight, the strands of red glint and sparkle like golden threads, at least so I have been told. I attempt to look the boatman in the eye. Usually this makes people look away, ashamed for having been caught staring at my reddish locks. But his eyes meet mine, and he does not waver. I do my best not to let it show, but I am unnerved.

  “You are not engaged to be married?” he blurts, cocking his head to one side. From under a new-looking rust-colored cap, his eyes stay steady, studying my face. Strands of greasy black hair hang across the boatman’s cheeks. I imagine that Trevisan has supplied the velvet hat and the brocade waistcoat to make his boatman look elegant, but no amount of dressing can change his unnerving presence.

  I do not answer but instead turn my gaze from the boatman’s face to the horizon. I do not like that I am the first to turn my face away. Surely I do not owe him an explanation?

  I implore you to keep your distance. You do not want to get yourself involved with him.

  The words of the painter’s wife ring in my head.

  “Your father has betrothed you to someone?” he tries again.

  “No,” I say, perhaps too quickly, but I ponder his query.

  In truth, the question of my marriage was delayed for longer than even my father might have imagined. I have lost count of the requests that my father’s colleagues in the guild have made of me. These men were intelligent enough to realize that the daughter of the indoradòr would be an asset in their own painting workshops. But as much as my father understood the potential for an advantageous barter, I believe he viewed keeping me in his own workshop as even more desirable. If I married, it meant that I no longer belonged to my father. It meant moving to another man’s house. My father would be left with Paolo to rely upon, and our workshop would suffer. All of us knew it, but it went unspoken for all these years.

  The truth is that they needed me. The truth is that they need me now. I feel the sting of my father’s rejection as if it were fresh. My stomach clenches into a knot again, and I feel that I might vomit.

  “Surely there is someone you want?” The boatman prods again, screwing up one side of his mouth in an exaggerated smirk.

  “I cannot see how that is any of your concern,” I manage to say, pulling my shawl tightly around my shoulders and turning away from his gaze. I feel his eyes on me, but he does not respond. I do not want to share any of this information with the boatman. I do not want to fall under his gaze any more at all. I duck into the passenger compartment, and the chaos of Carnevale falls away.

  As soon as I sink into the upholstered cushions, I feel the weight of the irony that my father has sent me to Trevisan’s house. After all the years of keeping me sheltered from a potential husband, love came to find me at home. And then I was the one who was pushed out of the house.

  “I have been negligent; please forgive me,” my father said. “Now I see that is past time for you to be married, Maria,” he told me as he helped heave my trunk to the canal-side mooring behind our workshop, his eyes heavy but his jaw set. “When you come back from your apprenticeship with your newfound painting skills, I will have found a husband for you.” It was supposed to make me feel better about leaving.

  As my father and I watched our neighborhood glide by from our seats in the painter’s fine gondola, I thought that surely any moment, my father would change his mind, tell me it was all a mistake. Instead, the façade of the painter’s house came into view, with its soft brick and lovely archways. Surely any minute Father would tell me that it was a cruel joke, that we would turn the boat around and go back home. Instead, my trunk was lifted onto the wooden dock outside Master Trevisan’s studio. Instead, a hand appeared to help me up out of the boat and onto the wooden planks. Instead, my father planted a dry kiss on my forehead and let me go.

  Perhaps I was naive to expect to stay in my father’s house forever. I do not try to imagine what my father would say to me now, or what the future will be like. I cannot imagine myself with a baby. More than that, I cannot imagine my life without Cristiano. I do not want a husband that my father cobbles together for me from amongst the men of our guild. I want him. Cristiano. Our battiloro.

  When I return, what will the man my father has chosen for me think of his disgraced fiancée? Women have been sent to the Doge’s prisons or banished to convents for lesser offenses. And what will my father think of me? I cannot begin to propose an answer to any of these questions.

  Inside the shadows of the gondola’s passenger compartment, I sink down into the damask cushions piled onto the bench. I close my eyes and push my face into one of the pillows, and wonder if I am capable of taking my own life.

  I imagine lowering myself over the edge of the gondola, feeling the cold water envelop me. The world would turn blue and green, the moss-covered pilings around me disintegrating into shimmering blurs. I imagine my hair floating out above my head, its tangled strands catching wet shards of Carnival confetti as I sink into the muted depths. The water fills my ears and quiets the noise of the outside world. I cross my arms over my chest and imagine sinking all the way down to the bottom of the lagoon.

  Chapter 10

  The color-seller’s shop lies near the tanneries along the Zattere, with a view to the Giudecca beyond the canal. The stench along the canal-side is overwhelming, the result of the carcasses of beasts sacrificed for the skin trade. Piles of hides are stacked beside a stone warehouse slung low along the waterside. Here, there is no sign of Carnival revel or misbehavior; only backbreaking work that continues withou
t ceasing.

  Even though it takes everything in me to stand and clamber out of the boat without vomiting at the stench, it is a relief to wriggle from beneath the oppression of the boatman’s stare. I press my palm over my nose and mouth, hurrying past the skins stretched across the wooden racks where they are scraped of their hair and cured in the sun. I rush past the tanneries toward the shop where my father has always sought the best gesso and red bole.

  My father has purchased raw materials from this particular vendecolore for as long as I can remember. He says he would not buy from anyone else, that the byproducts of these buffalo skins are the city’s best, that Signor da Segna’s materials impart a quality that accounts for the glistening of our gold that sets our work apart.

  In the alley alongside the vendecolore’s shop I pass the giant wooden vats where a poor young assistant has been tasked with boiling the tissue from the animal hides being stretched between the wooden slats of the racks in the tanneries further down the quayside. The skinny young boy stirs a stick slowly in a large metal cauldron over a fire, his wiry hair sticking up and his face smudged with dirt as if he has been living in the woods.

  When I cross the threshold, the baggy-eyed color-seller searches my face for recognition.

  “I am Maria,” I explain, “daughter of Bartolini the gilder in Cannaregio.”

  “Of course! Vieni, vieni!” he says, bustling his hefty frame around the counter to greet me. The buttons on his doublet seem as though they might burst, and his jowls hang in folds around his reddened nose.

  Signor da Segna’s shop is deceivingly modest. Little more than a cave in an alley littered with shops and workspaces, its dark interior is overwhelmed by shelves stacked high with glass and ceramic jars with various concoctions, a cluttered apothecary of pigments. Other guildsmen have told my father that Signor da Segna’s pigments are known as far away as London and Constantinople. They say that painters from far across the sea seek out his concoctions, especially those made of lead, which is not allowed to be traded outside the control of Our Most Serene Republic.

  “I was only surprised to see you here by yourself,” he says. “Normally you come with your father or his assistant.”

  “My cousin.”

  Signor da Segna clasps my hand in both of his. “Yes!” I feel the rough skin of his pudgy hand and see the coarse white whiskers on his jowl move with his smile. “But I hope this means that everyone is well?” he says, a concerned look in his bright blue eyes.

  “Truthfully, missier, I do not know.” I slide my hand from his grip and place my woven sack on the rough wooden counter. The empty containers from the painter’s studio rattle on the knotted wood. “My father, my cousin, and our battiloro are still in our family studio, but unfortunately the pestilence has come to the quarter and they cannot leave. Nor can anyone else enter.”

  The color-seller’s face falls, and he wipes his hand on his dirty breeches. “Yes,” he says hardly above a whisper. “I have heard of it, the ferries lined up to take people to the lazzaretti. God help them. But you are not there with them?” he asks, puzzled.

  “My father has placed me—temporarily—in the workshop of Master Trevisan the painter. I am tasked with the gilding for a church commission at the Vergini and the painter is also teaching me to use the pigments.”

  “Master Trevisan.” His eyebrows rise and he wags a finger at me. “Ah, you are fortunate indeed. One of our city’s best painters, if you ask me. I hear that he has done wonders with the paintings for the confraternity of the Misericordia,” he says.

  “I would not know,” I say. “I am only beginning to understand. Truthfully I am doubtful that I will ever learn the colors. Anyway, I have come for some gesso as we are beginning a new altar for the sisters at the Vergini in preparation for gilding. I convinced the painter that your buffalo skin gesso is the best.”

  Signor da Segna lets out a burst of laughter. “Your father has taught you well!” he declares. Signor da Segna puts a glass ring to his eye and pores over the rows of glass jars on the shelves. He pulls out a heavy jar and places it on the counter. With a wooden spatula, he spoons some gesso into my empty container. I watch the white material jiggle inside the jar.

  “I must ask you,” I say. “I have seen a most beautiful gilded box in the painter’s studio. It has white figures on it, molded from tin molds. I do not know what they use.”

  “Musk paste!” he exclaims without hesitation.

  “Pasta di muschio?”

  “It can only be,” he says, and runs his fingers along the shelves again until he selects another ceramic jar from the bottom shelf. “I have seen such boxes on terra firma. It is lead mixed with rice flour paste. We also add musk or civet to scent the boxes; the ladies like that.” He opens several sachets and puts them to my nose. “This one was developed to protect against the pestilence,” he says. “I can hardly keep up with the demand for it.”

  I bring the sachet to my nose and inhale its pungent mixture of sharp scents that seem to make the hairs of my nostrils stand on end. For a moment, I had forgotten my unsteady stomach. The musk paste begins it rocking again, and I place it back on the counter.

  “I have an arrangement with one of the spice merchants who brings things from the east on the merchant galleys,” he tells me, gesturing to the canal in view of his shop. “This one is a particular type of muschio,” he says. “It is concocted to help disinfect the air and to protect its owner from the pestilence. Some of my artisans are beginning to mix it with their materials.”

  I crinkle my nose. “It smells like animal urine.”

  Signor da Segna laughs as I fish out the coins that Master Trevisan has given me for the purchase.

  “You are alone?” he asks.

  “Master Trevisan’s boatman has brought me,” I say, glancing toward the door and dreading going back into the boat.

  “Here,” he says, placing three sachets in my bag. “I will give you some. At a minimum you can hold it to your nose as you ride around the city,” he says. “At all costs we must ensure that you ward off the pestilence.”

  I turn toward the door.

  “Wait,” he says. “I have something else for you. I have just received this.” The vendecolore brings out a small book of golden-colored sheaves set between slivers of vellum. “It is sold in sheets much like the ones your battiloro prepares for you. It is not gold, but it is made of a certain alloy that is much less expensive.” I hold up the small book and consider the brassy-colored sheaves. It is clear to my eye that it is not pure gold, but would one untrained in the gilding arts be able to tell the difference?

  “It looks like gold, but it is not,” I say.

  The vendecolore points at me. “Intelligent as well as lovely.” He looks over the top of his glasses at me. “I am certain that you can see the advantages.”

  On the way back to Master Trevisan’s house, I gather my courage to ask the boatman for a favor.

  “Would you pass by the rio della Sensa?”

  The boatman slows the movement of the oar. “A detour?” His eyes narrow into dark slits.

  “My quarter,” I say. “Cannaregio. I have not been home in some weeks.”

  “Ah,” he nods and raises his eyebrows. “I see. Well. Normally, signorina, there is a… surcharge… for such deviations.”

  I do not respond, but instead cross my arms to see if an uncomfortable silence might prompt him to yield to my request.

  “But,” he says, “it is not so often that I have a woman such as yourself in my boat. I will consider that payment enough—at least for today.” He makes an exaggerated bow and then his black eyes settle on mine. A shudder makes its way up the bones of my back, tingling and tickling beneath my linen undergarments.

  The boatman realigns the oar into the lower notch on the oarlock, and turns the boat into one of the narrow cut-throughs that lead from the banks of th
e Zattere toward the Grand Canal. I turn my face to the wind.

  For a while, I lose myself in the rushing sound of the craft creasing the still water. Billowing clouds and palace façades reflect in the canal waters, shimmering, wavering mirror images of life above the waterline.

  Near the turn into the Grand Canal, a mask maker’s young son stands at a table on the quayside, stacking newly made black baute and more elaborate faceplates decorated with color. A group of a half-dozen young noblemen wearing the patterned stockings designating their neighborhood association stop to banter with the mask maker. Shards of their conversation float through the air—a joke about a woman, the price of the masks, a stick fight that is being organized on a bridge in San Polo.

  The boatman makes another sharp turn northward toward my neighborhood. At the corner of the narrow waterway, a black gondolier is tying off a fine gondola to a mooring post. He smiles in recognition as we pass, and Trevisan’s boatman reaches out to clasp the other man’s hand in a brief greeting.

  This short, wordless interaction seems an unspoken doorway from one world to the next. As we make our way down the narrow rivulet, the bustle of the Grand Canal and its Carnival preparations fall behind us. Ahead, there are no market-goers, no shopkeepers, no stocking-wearing young men. The boats along the quayside lie covered and still. The quieter the canal becomes, the more wildly my heart seems to beat in my chest.

  When we finally turn into the confines of Cannaregio, I feel a deep pang—a mixture of anticipation, excitement, and trepidation—well up in my breast. Before I know it I am standing in the boat, planting my feet firmly to steady myself as I scan the familiar façades as they unfold along the canal-side. The canal should be full of barge captains selling vegetables and linens from the decks of their boats. Women should be rushing toward the Rialto markets for the ingredients of their midday meals. Instead, a vast silence hangs heavy in the still air. The stone quayside is devoid of life.