The Painter's Apprentice

by Laura Morelli

  At last, we turn into the rio della Sensa and the first wooden barrier comes into view. The boatman stills his oar, seemingly struck as silent as the stone quaysides. We drift alongside the entrance to one of the alleys that snakes back into the tangle of streets surrounding my father’s house. What they have said is true. Men have erected a solid wooden barrier across the opening to the quarter, and a large black cross has been painted over it. A banner hanging above the cross announces the ban handed down by Our Most Excellent Prince.

  Trapped. They are trapped behind the barrier. That is the only thing that fills my mind.

  My father. My cousin. My Cristiano. If I worried before that I might not find a way to reach them, there is no longer any doubt.

  Chapter 11

  “I have something for you.”

  Antonella peers through the doorway between the kitchen and the painter’s studio, and gestures for me to follow.

  I find myself alone in the painter’s studio again, as Master Trevisan and his journeyman have left the studio to meet with a patron who is paying for a portrait of his wife. On the table before me, I have opened a large, leather-bound book of engravings. I spent the morning trying to copy several figures using the silverpoint pen as Master Trevisan has instructed me. Dust puffs into the still air as I close the book and leave it on the table. I follow Antonella reluctantly into the warmth of the kitchen.

  Antonella has stoked the fire in the hearth and a pot of water roils over in the heat. On the table in the center of the kitchen, she has been chopping beets, the blood-red juice trickling down the veins of the wood.

  “Yesterday during my trip to the Rialto market I went to see my cousin,” she says. “She gave me the concoction I told you about.”

  In absorbing myself in Master Trevisan’s book of engravings, I had momentarily pushed the image of the wooden barriers of Cannaregio and my missed menses back into the far reaches of my mind. Now I feel a strong twist in my gut.

  Antonella produces a small woven bag from her apron pocket. She pulls opens the drawstring with her beet-stained fingers. “I will mix it for you,” she says in her thick, Sicilian-accented tongue. “It will make the kitchen stink; best to do it while the family is out.” She makes a fanning gesture with her hand as if she is already trying to get rid of the smell even before she has boiled the dried ingredients.

  “I... I have not decided,” I say.

  Her black eyes widen into large circles. “Madonna mia. Surely you are not considering the alternative? If I walked in your shoes I would have taken care of it weeks ago, cara, as soon as I learned I was encumbered. The last thing you need right now is a babe. It will ruin you.” She pauses, and I see a shadow pass over her face. “Trust me.”

  When I do not respond right away, Antonella sighs and heaves herself down on a stool. “I shall tell you what happened,” she says, waving her hands and strong forearms in my direction even though I have not asked her to tell me anything. “Five years ago I found myself a young man apprenticed to a silk merchant in Santa Croce. Not so beautiful to look at,” she says, wagging her hand from side to side as if to weigh the man’s beauty, “but passing. He had a future. Since that time he has become one of the most important men in the trade.” She shakes her head. “But I run ahead of myself. I managed to turn his head.”

  “You did?” I say.

  “Why do you look so surprised?” she asks, placing her hand on her hip. “He was smitten, I swear it. Of course, my father was thrilled. What dealer of secondhand goods would not want to see his daughter married to a silk merchant? It was perfect.”

  “You did not marry him?”

  She shakes her head. “I was stupid. I threw it all away. Too full of myself for my own good. I fooled around with one of the fruit-sellers in the market, and well, I found myself encumbered.”

  My jaw drops.

  She nods. “As you might imagine, once my budding silk merchant discovered that I was with child, the marriage plans evaporated. Ecco! Just like that.” She swipes her hands together as if dusting flour from them. “Then my parents locked me away in their house for the remaining months. I am lucky my father did not murder me with his own hands.”

  “And where is the baby now?”

  She shrugs. “As soon as I gave birth in the house my parents whisked it off to the steps of the foundling hospital.”

  “It?”

  “I never knew if it was a boy or girl. They refused to tell me. After that, I left,” she snorts. “Never spoke to them again.”

  For the first time I register vulnerability on Antonella’s face. She rubs her eyes vigorously with the heels of her hands.

  I turn my gaze away from the intensity of her emotion, as I feel that I too might crumble under the weight of the circumstances.

  Antonella shakes her head vigorously as if shuddering off the pain, then huffs a loud sigh. “So. Here I am.” She gestures grandiosely around the kitchen. “Servant to the painter and his runny-nosed children. Not married to a silk merchant, not even married at all. No husband or children of my own. And I spend my day wiping the fat culàte of those children anyway. I could have had a house of my own, servants of my own. Instead, I am stuck in this life, working for others. A reversal of fortune. And all because of a gravidanza that I did not want.”

  “I am sorry.” I struggle for better words to say.

  She shrugs. “I have never told anyone before,” she says. “I share it with you only so you know what can happen. Unless you have some fine gentleman to pick you up in a boat and whisk you away to a better life, I promise you will thank me later.” For a brief moment I allow myself to imagine Cristiano arriving outside the painter’s house in a fine gondola, before the weight of such preposterousness falls upon me.

  No. Pestilence or not, there is no hope for us. Ever. I feel my shoulders fall, as if the weight of this truth might press me to the wooden planks of Master Trevisan’s kitchen floor.

  Antonella upends the small cloth bag and a series of tiny paper packets falls out onto the table. One by one, she unfolds the packets, each one revealing a different-looking dried herb. One has flat, purple leaves. Another, spiky green sprigs.

  “What is it?”

  Antonella has regained her composure. “A mixture of several things. The most important one is birthwort; here is what it looks like.” She grasps the edge of the paper between her finger and thumb and shows me a small cluster of leaves. “It’s what gets the contractions going. Then there’s pennyroyal; we use that for bleeding. The rest is a mixture of pine resin, white wax, and myrrh. Some people add bdellio and glabano and mix everything with olive oil. You can make a paste out of it and spread it around your... down there,” she says, gesturing to my groin, “and over the belly, but it’s more effective if you make a tea out of it and drink it.”

  “How do you know all of this?”

  “I studied the plants a bit myself,” she says. “My aunt—my cousin’s mother—she is the master. I did not want to do it as my profession. Back home I have seen too many healer women accused of things they did not do. They take the blame for too many mishaps that arise for other reasons.”

  I nod and sit on a wooden stool at the knotted table in the center of the painter’s kitchen, watching Antonella walk to the shelf and grasp a ceramic cup. She plunks it down before me.

  “Ready?” She looks me in the eye.

  I hesitate for a moment, revisiting the fantasy of Cristiano rescuing me in a gondola. I force myself to push the image from my head.

  “All right. Yes. I’ll do it.” I place my palms flat on the knotted wood and stand.

  She smirks, a side of her mouth rising. For a fleeting moment, her black eyes flash. Antonella walks to the pot over the flame and dumps the packets of herbs into the water. After a few moments, the vapors rise into the air, and an acrid odor fills the room.

  “It smells t
errible.” I put my palm over my nose.

  “But it works,” she says. “A small price to pay and much better than the alternative.” Antonella stirs the concoction with a wooden spoon. She dips a ladle into the pot and fills my cup, then places it in front of me. The vapors rise up into my nose and sting my nostrils. It is steaming hot; I wait. I peer down into the dark liquid. Small flecks of herb float and spin on the surface.

  “Drink up,” says Antonella.

  I pinch my nostrils closed and sip the sharp liquid from my cup. “Santa Maria!” I gag and press the inside of my elbow over my mouth. I take a deep breath and down the rest of the hot liquid, then fold over with a sputtering cough that wracks my body.

  Antonella, unfazed, refills my cup and moves on to another topic.

  “Now. My next task for today is to replicate your aunt’s pastry recipe. She would not give it to you, eh?”

  I shake my head and regain my voice. “She said it was a convent secret. They cannot afford to have it spread to the other institutions. People come from all over the city to buy the pastries, and their donations help fund the convent and their charities,” I say.

  Antonella huffs. “Stingy rather than charitable if you ask me,” she says. “Filling their own coffers instead.”

  I do not respond. In a great ceramic bowl under the window, Antonella has made a large ball of dough. She pinches a bit and puts it on her tongue. She shakes her head. “You must press her for details about the ingredients. Perhaps I must add more nutmeg,” she says, wagging a finger at me. “I have not given up hope.”

  The pungent steam of the mixture has filled the kitchen with a foul chemistry. I inhale the vapors from my cup again and make a sour face.

  “Hurry up and drink it,” she says. “We must get the smell out of this kitchen before that painter returns.” Antonella walks over to the window and pushes open the leaded pane. A whoosh of February air rushes into the kitchen from the canal, fresh and briny. Then she walks over to the great hearth and stokes the fire. The wood crackles, and the smell of smoke fills the room. She takes the pot of water and opens the door to the boat slip. I hear her footsteps on the stone stairs, then I hear her pitch the saturated herbs into canal and rinse the pot with the salty water.

  “Cin cin!” she says, reentering the kitchen. “Bottoms up!”

  I pinch my nose again and down the rest of the cup.

  “Good girl.” She claps her hands together and flashes a wide grin. “You will thank me later.”

  I take a big gulp of air. “So now what happens?” I ask.

  “Bene. You should start to feel different, maybe cramping. And then you will bleed. Your body will take care of the rest.”

  I nod. I realize only then that I have not thought beyond drinking the foul concoction.

  “My cousin says that it worked for a lady that she served, a noble lady who made a poor choice for a lover. She says the lady only bled for ten days. After that she could get out of bed and resume her normal routine.”

  “Ten days?!” I feel my eyes widen.

  Antonella shrugs. “What is important is that it worked.” She begins to chop the beets on the table again. I watch the red juice slide through the cracks.

  “But I cannot afford to be in bed for ten days!” I stand up. “The painter... I... We have work to do.”

  Antonella wipes the remaining leaves of the herbs off the wooden table and into her palm. “Maybe for you it will not take that long.”

  “Has your cousin ever had anything go wrong? Like a woman who went on to deliver a baby anyway?” I realize now that I should have asked a lot of questions before trusting Antonella and her concoction.

  “I would not know. She does not deliver babies.”

  “What?!” I feel my chin drop. “You told me that she delivered babies. I thought you said she was a midwife. She is not a midwife?”

  “Well, sometimes she works along with the midwife. During the day she is in domestic service as I am. She works for a noble lady in San Polo.”

  “O Dio, I have made a giant mistake.” My words barely come out as a whisper. My palms fly to my mouth.

  “Nothing to fear,” says Antonella, raising her palm to me. “As I told you, she has special knowledge of herbs. Her mother, my aunt, had an herb garden and was known as a healer. She learned from her as well as her grandmother. Trust me. You will see the result.”

  As soon as the words come out of her mouth I feel my heartbeat begin to race, then the contents of my bowels liquefy. A wave of nausea overtakes me, and I feel I will vomit or empty my bowels right there in the kitchen. I gather up my skirts and stumble toward the back stairway that leads to the latrines. I fling open the door and run toward the two holes cut into a plank of wood behind the painter’s house. While my bowels are voided uncontrollably, I press my palm over my mouth to prevent myself from vomiting at the same time. I feel foul-tasting saliva emerge from my cheeks and finally, I cannot hold it back anymore. The vomit spills onto the ground over and over, my body wracked by convulsions.

  I have been told that I am an intelligent girl. So how could I have been so stupid? I do not even know the woman who made this concoction. And now I know she may not even be a midwife, only a house servant. I should know better than to trust Antonella, and I swear to myself that I will never trust her again.

  For the better part of a half-hour I am in utter agony. During that time a thousand thoughts race through my head. What will happen to me? Will I die? Will my father send me to the convent where I will sit behind the iron grille with his sister? Will my baby—if he or she comes into the world after this horrible torture—be born with no limbs or a deformed head like the poor souls we see begging on the streets? Or be given up on the steps of the Hospital of the Innocents? My baby wrapped in a package, drawn into the walls of the convent of Santa Maria delle Vergini on the great turning wheel?

  When I emerge from the latrine I feel as though I have been through a battle. My hair falls loose and frizzy, with strands stuck to the sweat on my neck. My skin feels pasty and damp. My eyes must be sunken and dark.

  As far as I know, I am not bleeding.

  When I appear at the top of the stairs, back into the kitchen where Antonella is rolling out the dough, her eyes widen in alarm.

  “You should go lie in bed now,” she says tentatively. I make a move toward the back stairway. When I pass Antonella I see her flinch, and it takes all my strength not to strike her.

  Chapter 12

  I wake at dawn to the sound of the cock crowing from the courtyard that adjoins the painter’s house, a scratchy, vexing sound that works its way under my skin. The poor creature is trapped with a scattering of hens in the hennery where we gather our eggs to mix as a binder for the tempera pigments. The sky remains dark, but a rim of pink begins to outline the tall, narrow brick chimney pots of the house across the canal, framed by the narrow rectangle of the window.

  I turn over in the bed gingerly, listening to Antonella’s deep, regular breathing.

  As far as I can tell, the concoction I drank four days ago has had no effect except to make me feel as though I have been flattened by a donkey cart full of mounded earth. All the energy has drained from my body. In the small hand mirror in our bedchamber, my reflection looks sallow, my eyes sunken, my lips parched and cracked. I look like death.

  There has been no blood. My breasts are swollen and sore, my stomach constantly upside down with nausea. To be fair, little has happened. At times I have felt my abdomen heave and contract, but I have seen no red streaks in the undergarments that I have lined with layers of linen just in case. I have resumed my work in the studio as best as I can. If the painter, the journeyman, or the painter’s wife has noticed my sunken eyes or my greenish complexion, they have said nothing.

  As for Antonella, she looks worried. Each time I have passed through the kitchen, Antonella has pleaded with
me in loud whispers to go see her cousin in Dorsoduro so that she can check me. I ignore her poisonous whispers in my ear.

  I wonder what will happen next. The images and scenarios run through my brain like horses running in a hundred different directions.

  I have heard about women who become pregnant in inconvenient circumstances. Some disappear for months, some forever. If the mother, or the child’s father, is married to someone else, they may even be sent to the hell of the Doge’s prisons. It happened to Carlo Crivelli, one of Our Most Serene Republic’s most gifted gilders. I cannot imagine what my own future holds.

  The cock in the courtyard has fallen silent, his awkward screeching replaced by the gentle chirping of what must be dozens of birds. I know I am supposed to get up and go to the church with the painter today. I wonder if I will be able to sit up without feeling like I will vomit. Slowly, I press my palm against the straw-stuffed mattress and push myself into a sitting position on the edge of the bed. Antonella stirs and runs her palms over her face as if to force herself to waking.

  I remove my work dress and smock from the wooden chest that lies under the window. Turning my back to the bed, I remove my linen nightdress. I pull my work dress over my head, then push the black cord with the gold nugget into the front of my dress.

  All I can think is that I must hide the reality of my situation. It is bad enough that Antonella knows of my predicament. I must not let anyone else know about it.

  “What is that thing you wear around your neck?” Antonella leans up on her elbow in bed and attempts again to open a conversation.

  “Nothing,” I say, addressing her for the first time in three days. There are no words I could use to describe what it means.

  She nods. “A gift from your man?”