The Painter's Apprentice

by Laura Morelli

  I turn and shoot her a searing glance but say nothing.

  Antonella sits on the edge of the bed and reaches her arm around my shoulder. I feel my body freeze under her touch, and I shirk her hand away. “You have not seen any blood yet? You are supposed to bleed at some point.”

  I cannot stay silent after all, and I turn to face her. “Maybe because it is not working!” I spit out the words in a loud whisper so that no one else in the house will hear. “Have you considered the possibility that your cousin is not what she claims?” All the anger that has been bottled up inside of me for days feels ready to burst from my body. I stand and yank the smock over my head and twist it around my body, fiddling with the ties behind my waist.

  She stands and crosses her arms over her chest. Her hair is wild like a bird’s nest, her linen nightshift a pile of wrinkles. “My cousin has helped many women; that is the God-given truth. They line up at her door to pay for her concoctions.” She gestures emphatically, as if she is putting coins in someone’s hand.

  “Your cousin did not help me at all,” I say. “All she managed to do was make me feel as if the pestilence itself had struck. And now the painter is wondering why I have been spending so much time in bed over the past days instead of working downstairs like I’m supposed to be.”

  “Bene.” She shrugs. “We told him you were not feeling well.” I do not think that is so out of the ordinary. People get sick all the time,” she says. She hesitates. “You did not tell him, did you?”

  I look at her incredulously. “What? Why on earth would I do that?” I feel like I am screaming even though I am trying my best not to raise my voice above a whisper. I move close to her and point my finger right under her nose. “If you tell anyone about this, I swear...”

  Antonella’s eyes close to near slits, and she glares at my wrinkled brow, then she cuts her eyes to the side.

  “Oh no,” I say, feeling my shoulders sink. “You have already told someone...”

  She raises her chin and shakes her head slowly. “Not to worry, cara. Your secret is safe. Trust me.”

  For a few moments, all we hear is the urgent cheeping of the birds as dawn breaks and light filters through the window. “You are the last person I trust,” I say.

  “Vedi,” she says. “You are the one who chose to drink the potion. I did not force you.”

  I sigh and say nothing, realizing that she is right on that count.

  She lowers her voice. “In case you are interested, I do know a medico who specializes in this type of thing. We can go to him and he can take more,” she pauses, seeming to search for the right word, “drastic measures.”

  I look at her incredulously. “Oh no,” I say. “I do not want you… influencing me… for one more second. Nor some kind of doctor who may not even be a real medico. Do not talk to me about it ever again. Hai capito?”

  Her lips purse.

  One floor below, I hear the painter’s baby send up a hurling cry, and then the painter’s son cries. “Mamma! Make her stop!” I hear rustling from the bedchamber below and the shushing sound of the painter’s wife.

  I give Antonella an admonishing look, then I open the door and walk with great conviction toward the stairway, hoping that no one can hear my heart thundering in my chest over the spine-tingling cry of the infant downstairs.

  The seconds seem to pass like hours as I wait outside the convent door where I have rung the brass bell. I cast my gaze away from the opening in the wall where women lay their swaddled packages, turn the wheel, then cover their faces and walk away. I cannot bear to think of it, much less lay my eyes on the opening under the benevolent gaze of the Madonna and child carved into the marble. Instead, I clutch my leather-bound sketchbook to my breast, study the cobblestones, and pray for one of the sisters to open the door.

  At my back, the market street unfurls with fruit mongers, butchers, cobblers, and clothing merchants calling out to passersby, their voices trapped between the high walls lining the narrow alley. Two men press their way past me, their long black robes trailing fox or weasel fur to ward off the damp. Their women clomp behind them in the high-heeled clogs that look stylish while allowing them to avoid soiling their feet in the filth of the street. I glance down sheepishly at my own scuffed leather mules, one of two pair I have owned since I have become fully grown.

  “Ladies, look at these ripe figs!” A brawny fruit-seller bellows to the two finely dressed women as they pass. “Mamma mia! I challenge you to find anything fresher in Our Most Serene Republic!”

  From across the alley, an old seller of straw brushes, his cheeks as gnarled as the trunk of an olive tree, roars back. “Fresher than your wife?” The ladies giggle, and one presses a lace-trimmed linen to her mouth as if to prevent anyone from seeing her smile. Then they follow their husbands, casting smiling eyes back at the bantering men.

  Mercifully, at that moment a nun appears at the door. She pulls me into the dark warmth of the convent corridor, and I hear the iron lock latch behind us. Suddenly, I am transported to another world. The bustling streets and dirty canals fall away as I follow the nun’s flapping habit down the dim corridor. Trevisan’s boatman, whittling wood as he waits for me in the gondola just the other side of the high convent wall, suddenly seems far, far away.

  From the corridor, I hear them singing.

  I do not know how many women are assembled in the choir high above the main altar, but their voices lure me toward the sanctuary. The nun summons me with a hand gesture and a warm smile. I follow her into the otherwise empty church and seat myself on a wooden chair alongside a great pillar.

  Above my head in the nun’s choir, the harmony of voices begins to fill me from my feet to the top of my head. I close my eyes, listening to their individual sounds become one, lifted up for the glory of God. I press the back of my head against the stone pillar, and for a few precious moments I feel my own burden begin to lift.

  After a while, I open my eyes and look across the church at the blank space where our new altarpiece will go. I thumb through the drawings in the small leather-bound book in my lap. My own ill-drawn sketches do not begin to convey what I think Master Trevisan will paint, but when I imagine the panel’s gilded surfaces sparkling in the candlelight, I feel peace. I send up a prayer for my father, my cousin, and my Cristiano, and I beg for them to be spared from the pestilence that has come to Cannaregio.

  I know I must see my aunt for, though cloistered behind these walls, she may hold more information about my father, my cousin, and Cristiano than anyone else. I need to know of their welfare and so I come to see her, praying that she will not see me so changed.

  But the truth is that I have delayed seeing her, for I feel that the moment she lays eyes on me she will know my situation. Surely a woman who has walked in my shoes, who has delivered a baby that she did not plan, will know immediately that I am with child. I do not know what to say. I do not know how I can begin to carry on a conversation without telling her my secret. My stomach has not yet begun to swell, but perhaps a woman like her could read it on my face?

  The song ends, and I listen to the quiet shuffle of the nuns retreating from the choir. I close the leather binding of my sketchbook and make my way across the cavernous and now deafening silence of the church to the visitors’ parlor.

  “Dolcezza! Finally. I expected you long before now.” I cross the threshold to see my aunt’s face behind the swirls of iron.

  “I am sorry, zia. The painter has kept me occupied with his commissions. It is only today that I could get away to draw some figures in the sanctuary. Master Trevisan has said it was important for me to sketch here so that I would feel the space.” I gesture to my sketchbook. “Plus, I have been ill,” I say, “but thankfully it has passed.”

  “Grazie a Dio.” She crosses herself and wags her clasped hands in my direction. “I have news.” My aunt produces a folded piece of parchment from the
pocket of her habit. “Our confessor tells us that several houses on the via San Marco have been marked with crosses,” she says. “We have heard that two ferries have lined up at the traghetto near Madonna dell’Orto to carry those from the quarter who are sick to the Lazzaretto Vecchio. Any family members without lesions are in quarantine at the Lazzaretto Nuovo. Father Pietro has written their names for me,” she says, holding the parchment sheet in her hand at arm’s distance and narrowing her eyes. “Bonito, Ozaki, Zen.” She refolds the parchment and meets my eyes. “That is all I know.”

  I feel my heart drop and a tingle run up my spine. “Zen. I know the family. Their daughter and I played together as girls. God save them.” Years ago, I crouched under the brick bridge near the bakery in the Campo Sant’Alvise with Daria Zen. Wide-eyed, she relayed the wondrous information she had learned from her older sister about what happens between a woman and a man. “It feels strange to be cut off from them completely when we are in the same city. I want so desperately to go and see them.”

  “I do not recommend it, cara,” my aunt says, shaking her head. “The last thing you want to do is expose yourself. Besides, the guardia will not allow you to pass through the barricade.”

  “You are right, of course. It’s just that... I cannot abide that they are there suffering and I cannot help them. My father has always been sickly. Poor Paolo, God bless him. But I am the one who cares for them, zia. How can they endure this horror without any help? Without me there to help them? Who else will do it?”

  My aunt nods. “We have been ordered to pray ceaselessly until the mantle of the pestilence has lifted. Our abbess tells us that the Health Office is doing everything it can to stop the spread of the contagion, and that vigils have been organized within the convents and monasteries across Our Most Serene City for continual prayer. We can only hope that that is true. We are divided into groups and we take turns going into the church so that we may pray without ending. I have just finished my turn in the nun’s choir. Of course I have put your father and all of you at the center of our prayers.”

  For a few long moments we sit together in silence on either side of the grille. I watch her finger the black glass rosary beads suspended from her waist.

  She stares at me for a long moment. “No doubt you feel the loss of your man,” she says.

  The words hit me like a kick below my ribs. I swallow to push back the knot that has suddenly formed inside my throat, but it is too late. A tear spills over onto my cheek. Panicked, I wipe it away firmly with my sleeve and resolve not to let another one fall.

  “O cara mia,” I hear my aunt say. “I am sorry.”

  I shake my head and take a deep breath, trying to rid myself of the image of his face, the smell of his neck that has just been conjured in my head. “I do not understand why Paolo fails to say anything about his welfare in his letters,” I say.

  “Paolo knows about this man?” My aunt pushes herself forward on the chair, and her brow wrinkles.

  I nod. “Yes. He is our battiloro. My father took him into our house in the spring.”

  “This man lives in your own household?”

  I nod again.

  My aunt pushes her back against the chair and sighs. “I see. Well. I can see how you... became involved.” She falls silent.

  I lean forward and lace my fingers through the swirls of iron that separate us. “I do not remember my life before him, zia,” I say. “I know it sounds absurd, for we have only known one another for a few months. But he is part of me.”

  “And your father surely knew all of this?” I see her brow wrinkle again below her veil.

  I shake my head and try to steady my voice, which sounds like a squeak. “He only recently discovered it.”

  “Let me understand,” she says. “Your father found this man fit enough to bring into his house and work alongside you. And then he discovered that you loved him, a man from your own trade, in your own household already. But he did not find this man fit enough for you to marry? To me it sounds like that might have been a logical solution for everyone, Maria.”

  I take a deep breath and sigh. “I know. But is more complicated than that, zia.” I meet her green eyes. “Cristiano is a Saracen. Well, half-Saracen.”

  I see my aunt’s mouth fall open, but no words come out.

  “You can see then,” I say. “It is not what my father would have planned for me,” I continue, when my aunt says nothing. “Besides, I do not even know if he is still in my father’s house. Perhaps he has sent him away, too.”

  “Well.” My aunt wrings her hands and tugs at the rosary in her lap. “This is indeed complicated. My dear, I do not doubt that your love for this man is sincere. But surely you do not hold out hope that you... I mean, you do not believe that your father will agree to your marriage with this Cristiano?”

  I feel the hot tears come again. As soon as she has spoken these words I know they are true. My father will never see it fit. I cannot begin to respond.

  “Does the painter know?”

  “Santo Cielo, no,” I say, wringing my handkerchief. “The painter and his wife... they have no idea. The story is that I have been sent to learn the pigments. And Master Trevisan needed a gilder for his new altarpiece. Our gastaldo helped my father organize everything.”

  “But otherwise all is well in the painter’s house?” My aunt changes her tone to one of happiness.

  “Yes,” I say, looking at my lap. “The painter and his wife are treating me well. I am beginning to learn the pigments, though truthfully, I am much more at home with the gold.” Suddenly I remember the painter’s gondola—and his boatman—waiting for me at the quayside. “I must get back to Trevisan’s studio.”

  “Wait,” she says. “I want to send you back with some of my chiacchieri. You must convey my appreciation to the painter and his wife for taking care of you during this... difficult time.”

  I watch my aunt’s small frame disappear into the dim hallway. In the silence I feel the weight of the small life forming inside my body. I cannot bring myself to tell my aunt. It is more than I can admit and I have already told her more than I ever intended. But I can no longer lie to myself. As much as I may have spent weeks in disbelief, I can no longer deny the reality of it. I am with child, and there is no turning back.

  Chapter 13

  “Maria Magdalena.”

  The boatman opens his wide, calloused palm and offers it to me as I lift the hem of my skirts to step into the gondola.

  “That is not my name,” I say, catching my balance and eschewing the boatman’s hand. I sit on the elaborately carved and lacquered wooden chair perched on the back side of the passenger compartment as the gondola sways gently. “Just Maria.”

  The boatman takes his place on the aft deck and presses the oar into the stone quayside, pushing the boat away from it. Then he presses the oar against the dark water and moves out from the narrow canal. The convent wall and the gaping opening of its foundling window fall from view as we move into the flat, open water of the canal.

  The boatman projects a wad of spittle into the water and tries again. “But people call you Maria Magdalena all the time. No? How could they not?”

  He is right, of course, but I do not concede that all my life people have likened me to that great sinner of the Bible, making the comparison either aloud or in their own heads. It is my fate that my hair falls down my back in waves the same way that Mary Magdalene is shown in thousands of altarpieces and painted miniatures. I keep it braided and neatly tucked into my cap as much as possible.

  We turn into the Grand Canal, and the vast shimmer of the Venetian lagoon comes into view, with its infinite variety of boats. From the quayside near the Doge’s palace, a consul is being escorted into a gilded gondola bedecked with golden birds and scarlet curtains. Beyond, several dozen cargo boats, private gondolas, and public ferries traffic the great basin that extends bet
ween the Piazza San Marco and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. In the distance, a cadre of men is rowing a large ferry between Murano and San Marco.

  “Maria Magdalena, just like her,” the boatman tries to provoke me again. “No wonder you are the painter’s new favorite.” Above my head the boatman’s paunch bulges over his leather belt, and he is chewing on something with gray, square teeth that make me think of the mules lined up near the docks where people travel to terra firma.

  “The painter is seeing to my education,” I say. I turn back to the vista in the canal, feeling the cool, damp air whip fine strands of hair across my mouth. I have been taught to distrust boatmen. Who has not heard their foul language echoing down the canals, seen them clapped in the stocks for smuggling goods or extorting passengers?

  “Well,” says the boatman, spitting again, “I would advise you to be cautious of that painter.”

  In spite of my better judgment, I ask, “Why do you say that?”

  “I should know,” he says, poking his thumb into his chest. “I have worked for the man for a long time. I tried to pry myself away from him for a while. Would not have come back at all if I had had any other choice.”

  “You left for another position?”

  The boatman puffs air loudly. “I am a guildsman, and therefore I am bound to work for others, am I not? I know how to steer a boat, not much else. I am good at it, too, by the way.”

  “You have worked in the Arsenale?” I ask, gesturing toward the part of the city where our Doge’s great shipyard lies. The Arsenale employs most of our men in the boatbuilding and related trades.

  The boatman shrugs. “It is not so easy as people think to convince them to hire you,” he says. I watch his fingertips brush the deeply burned scar in the flesh below his eye, a fleeting gesture of which I am not sure the boatman is aware. “Then there was no work at the ferry stations, and anyway, that painter would not agree to bear witness on my account, so...” He trails off.