A Name in Blood

by Matt Rees

  Concentration replaced the smile on Caravaggio’s face. Maestro Leonardo had written that a fleeting moment reflects the inner spirit and impulse of man. A painter must capture such things, more than the mere details of physical form. Memorize them right away, the great Florentine had said. As surely as if he held a sketchbook, Caravaggio traced the line of the girl’s neck, etched the set of her foot with its ankle turned out, and shaded the soothing quiet of her eyes.

  He took out his purse and counted his coins. Ten scudi. The exact amount I’m supposed to pay Ranuccio. He fed the coins, thin as shavings of Parmesan, into his chamois purse and tied the top. He put the money bag into the old beggarman’s palm. It’s a ridiculous sum to give in charity. One scudi buys two dozen chickens. Ten scudi is three months’ rent. Still, I’ll tell Ranuccio that I gave the money to a homeless peasant, rather than let him have it.

  The girl in the doorway regarded Caravaggio with astonishment and suspicion. He smiled at her wariness. She’s a Roman for certain.

  The beggars kissed Caravaggio’s hands and hobbled away. The girl turned to go back into the dark room to finish the boy’s bath.

  Caravaggio caught her wrist with a light touch. He felt as though he had reached up into an altarpiece and caressed the Holy Mother. Yet he had never seen Maria painted with such force and verity, not even the sweet Virgins of Raphael or the ambiguous maidens of Leonardo. ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

  She stroked the child’s chin with her forefinger. ‘What’s my name, little one?’

  ‘Auntie Lena.’ The boy clapped his hands, delighted to have answered correctly. She kissed his forehead.

  Caravaggio sensed the touch of her lips as if her kiss had been bestowed upon him. ‘I’ll come back, Lena.’ He went down the street, singing to himself the song he had played at Fillide’s party:

  You are the star that shines

  More than any other lady.

  Do not leave me.

  ‘Keep looking up there. Don’t turn towards me.’ Caravaggio came through the black curtain and lifted Prudenza’s chin.

  ‘There’s nothing there, though, nothing to look at. Just a hole in your ceiling.’ She shook her hands. ‘All the blood’s gone out of them, holding them like this. What’re you doing behind that curtain, anyway? How long is this going to take?’

  ‘A while. You’re accustomed to business that’s concluded in about ten minutes?’ He repositioned her, feeling her shoulders through her thin white shift.

  ‘Don’t be cheeky, Michele. I know how to make them finish in less than two minutes.’ She crooked and poked her finger. The whore’s trick of jabbing into the rectum to hasten a client’s ejaculation.

  He laughed as he arranged the earth-brown cloth across her back, folding it over her extended arm and spreading it across the table. ‘Now, see here? Where my hand is, focus there.’

  She held her neck still, angled upwards. He went through the curtain, tying it behind him to leave only a small, round gap at head height.

  Through that space, the bright light falling on Prudenza showed clearly in the mirror set behind Caravaggio. The mirror projected an image of the girl onto the canvas, a technique he had learned from the men of science at del Monte’s palace. He marked in the key points of her features quickly, tracing them from the projection, so that he could set her precisely in place at the next sitting. He turned his brush around, holding it with the bristles towards him, and carved through the underpaint with the end of the handle. In single strokes, he cut into the ground layer the outline of her ear, her forehead, her jaw and her hands. He would fill in the details later, knowing that the shape and the perspective would be natural, just as seen in a looking glass.

  ‘Why do you need a mirror in there?’ she called.

  ‘It makes my job simpler. It allows me to concentrate on what’s really important.’

  The mirror couldn’t account for the genius with which he animated a face in pain or devotion, but it set those emotions on a replica of reality so exact that viewers marvelled at his virtuosity. Few asked how he did it – except for del Monte’s scientists, who already knew. Others assumed it was pure mystery, like a Virgin standing on a cloud at the top of an altarpiece.

  Prudenza opened her mouth to ask another question, but he hissed for her to be quiet. The mirror was a secret he didn’t wish to share, and not only because he wanted to preserve his technical advantage over other artists. He was wary of the Inquisition. Projecting images was heretical magic.

  The bark of a dog came from the loggia.

  ‘Cecco,’ he called. ‘I want the lamp higher.’

  His assistant came in from the loggia and hauled at a rope. The pulley squealed and the lamp rose towards the broken boards of the ceiling. The contrast between shadow and highlight sharpened on Prudenza’s face.

  ‘Just there,’ Caravaggio said.

  ‘All right, Maestro?’ The boy was twelve years old, but he gave Prudenza a saucy smile and winked at her. ‘Ciao, amore.’

  She puffed out her cheeks and giggled. Both of them, only children, Caravaggio thought. He felt a moment of goodhumoured condescension towards them, then he found he had to suppress a sob. He wondered at this strange vulnerability in him. Children, yes, but they don’t live as children.

  ‘You want anything else, Maestro? If not, I’d like to play with Crow. I took him to the inn yesterday and had him walk on his hind legs. Everyone asked me how you taught him to do it.’

  ‘What’d you say?’

  ‘That you’re a master of illusion who can make a poodle dance, just as you can make the Lord Jesus Christ himself appear before you on the canvas.’

  ‘You’ll get me burned at the stake. Find us some lunch.’

  Cecco went down the stairs for bread and cheese.

  Caravaggio mixed ochre, white and a little crimson on his palette to match Prudenza’s skin tone. He loaded the bristles of a medium brush and stroked the rounds of her ear onto the canvas.

  Though she kept her head still, the girl’s eyes took in the room beyond the immediate radiance of the lamp. ‘You haven’t got much stuff here, have you, Michele?’

  ‘I told you to look ahead, as if the Magdalene stood before you.

  You’re talking to her, not me.’

  She’s right, though. Other painters of Caravaggio’s age and with lesser reputations took small palaces with the earnings from their altarpieces. A mere storekeeper might live in a house like this one, which Caravaggio had rented only a month earlier. A single, long room downstairs and one above. Behind the house, a garden with its own well, and upstairs a loggia that ran the width of the house, though that was barely five paces.

  The studio was almost empty of anything but props for his work, apart from a bed for him and a folding cot for Cecco. Rags for preparing canvases and cleaning his brushes brimmed out of an old chest. A halberd and a breastplate with which he gave atmosphere to his history paintings leaned against the wall beside his sword and dagger. A messy, medium-sized canvas lay across a trunk. He ate his meals from it, because he had never bothered to purchase a tablecloth.

  ‘Who am I supposed to be?’ she said.

  He paused to take in the canvas. On the right, a soft-faced, smooth-shouldered young woman – Fillide. She turned her unrefined features in a melancholy gaze upon the figure Caravaggio painted now. ‘You’re Martha, the sister of Mary Magdalene.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She sounded doubtful. ‘Who?’

  ‘The Magdalene was a loose woman. Her sister convinced her of the wrongs she had done. I’ve already painted Fillide as the Magdalene. What I’m painting now is the moment when your insistence gets through to her. She starts to repent.’

  ‘I could tell you all sorts of things Fillide’s done wrong. I’d like to give her a piece of my mind about it.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why I want you in particular to be chastising her,’ he said. ‘In the picture, at least.’

  He pulled the easel closer to the mirror to change the fo
cus. He wanted a clear image of the details in the braid at the crown of her head. He worked at them. Then he laid down his brush on a trolley beside his pigments.

  ‘Can I have a look?’ she asked.

  ‘Come on.’ He ran the curtain back along its rail.

  As she studied the canvas, her weight rested against his chest. ‘Dio mio, I wouldn’t have thought it possible. That’s really me, Michele. I don’t even mind that you painted me next to that bitch.’

  ‘It’s a good likeness, that’s true.’

  ‘So many shadows. You can only see part of my face.’

  ‘It may be even darker once it’s finished.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. I know it’s me. You painted me just as I am.’ She smiled. ‘Your eyes are dark, and your face and hair too, Michele. And so are your paintings.’

  ‘It’s lucky I’m not blond or my work would be bright and ridiculous like the rubbish Baglione produces.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘No one important.’

  ‘Are you really going to make me darker still? You won’t be able to see me. You’ll just see Fillide.’

  ‘The shadow makes you more prominent. People will see Fillide’s face right away, but they’ll have to look hard to see you. They’ll wonder who you were.’ He caught himself. ‘Are, I mean, who you are.’

  She made a puzzled face, wondering at his stumble. Her neck craned long and pale towards the painting, a few auburn strands of hair tickling across it.

  He wished he had the words that would help her survive longer than he surmised she would. I could protect her, he thought, but that would end with me loving her. He shivered with fear. Love was the preliminary to abandonment. He painted the love of the martyrs for the Lord. Look what they get in return. ‘It’s obvious that you’re the most beautiful thing in the painting.’

  She responded lightly, unaware of the intensity with which he had spoken. ‘Am I, Michele? Thanks, amore.’

  At the Mausoleum of the Emperor Augustus, the Pope’s bailiffs were whipping a whore. She was tied to the back of a donkey, her hands bound behind her, her dress ragged and fallen around her hips to expose her torso. A crowd surrounded her, exulting in the woman’s humiliation. Lena stepped into a doorway to let them pass. Growing up in the Evil Garden, she had often seen such punishment. Familiarity made it no less oppressive. It was as though a cloud of hatred passed before her, noisome and crackling with viciousness.

  The whore lurched forward as the bailiff gave another stroke of the cane across her shoulders. Lena winced. The donkey jumped through the crowd. Someone must’ve stuck it with a knife to make it buck, she thought. The whore arched her back and swayed, exhausted, silent, eyes vacant. Her breasts were striped with dung and offal thrown from the crowd.

  These same men gambolling beside the donkey were the ones who harassed Lena when she stood in the Piazza Navona to sell her vegetables. A woman couldn’t be alone in the streets of the Evil Garden without hearing shameful words directed at her. Lena knew how to give it back to them, how to mortify them before others so that they rushed away. Even in those small exchanges, she understood that men’s lives were dictated by their honour, by the figure they cut before others, by their mastery over women.

  Another knife went into the donkey and it galloped out of the piazza with the swaying whore. It towed the crowd towards the water mills moored in the Tiber.

  Lena headed across the Evil Garden for her mother’s home. Most of the whores were girls from far away, not like her. They came from Siena, where a plague a century ago had devastated the city and forced its young people to seek a living elsewhere, even now. Others were from the poor south of the Italian lands, or from Greece. They had grown up thinking that Rome was a better place, with opportunities for a good and prosperous life. Lena had always known this was not so. As a girl she had played in the streets where the whores worked, seen them beaten and scorned. She had watched their corpses swirl under the bridges with the city’s refuse. She had recognized the desperation and fear in their raucous laughter before she had even been old enough to understand what it was they did.

  She was twenty-three and had she lived elsewhere in Rome she would have been married by now. But the Evil Garden disturbed all the order of life. The son of a rich family had seduced her before she was twenty. He thought himself unbound in honour towards her, because she was from the Evil Garden. To those who didn’t live there, the roughest part of Rome contained nothing but whores and criminals. It was a place for dangerous games, but not for marriage. Later Lena had tried to warn her sister of this, but Amabilia also was taken in by a gentleman and ended dead on the birthing bed. Death was the one rite of natural life not barred to the people of the Evil Garden.

  When Amabilia died, Lena had taken her sister’s baby as her own. Domenico was the single illumination in all the hatred and sadness and death around her. She sighed as she waited for a gap in the carriage traffic so that she might cross the Corso. She felt herself withdrawing from the world. The pressure of the relentless ugliness weakened her. Sometimes a strange melancholy brought her to tears while she cleaned the floors of del Monte’s palace. She found herself staring at Domenico as he slept and suddenly she would weep, or she would lie in bed like a hibernating animal while her mother berated her for laziness.

  She went quickly across the Corso and up towards the Via dei Greci. She thought of the artist who had spoken to her at the palace. He had approached her at first like any other lowlife gallant in the Evil Garden, though she had detected an instant of hesitation that made her wonder if it was his true character. She had rebuffed him with a good humour, because to do otherwise might cost her job. But when he appeared at her door beside the two old beggars, he had looked into her with a gaze that invited her to look back, to see what was within him. It hadn’t been the proud face of a man of honour. He had signalled to her somehow that she might discover who he really was.

  As she stepped through the doorway into her home, she touched the crumbling travertine of the column. He noted this blemish in the stone, she thought, and it gave him some kind of pleasure. She gazed at the spot where he had stood. Maestro Caravaggio, the footman at the palace had called him. She wondered what his first name was.

  Prospero slouched on a red velvet chair in the papal robes. Caravaggio rearranged the folds of the crimson cape and spread the white lace gown. Returning to his easel, he checked the image in his mirror. With his first sittings he had outlined the pose and worked on the Holy Father’s face. He had built the subtly hostile expression, the contemptuous, acquisitive eyes. Now he had no need of the impatient pontiff’s presence.

  ‘Hold yourself as if you were about to get up,’ he told Prospero. ‘Press your hands on the arms of the chair. You’ve no time for anyone.’

  Prospero glanced behind Caravaggio and murmured.

  ‘That’s it,’ Caravaggio said. ‘Now I see more of the tension I got from him when he was in that chair.’

  Without moving his lips, Prospero whispered, ‘I’ll bet you do. I’m tighter than a Turkish bowstring.’

  ‘Relax. Perhaps they’ll make you an Archbishop for posing in the Holy Father’s robes. You’ve all the qualifications: a criminal inclination and an ugly face. You might even develop an appropriate taste for altar boys.’ Caravaggio set himself once more to work, bent close to the canvas, filling in the projection from the mirror. He thought of the way Lena had watched him as he had left her home with the beggars. He smiled privately behind his curtain.

  ‘I can think of certain other benefits to the status of an Archbishop.’

  ‘I’m sure you can, Your Ridiculousness. Now shut up.’ Caravaggio laid in a few more strokes with his brush before he realized that it hadn’t been Prospero who had spoken. He adjusted the angle of his mirror and saw his friend’s face, grimacing for him to be silent. He stepped out from behind his curtain.

  Cardinal Scipione stood a few paces away, his chin between his thumb and forefinger. He leaned through t
he curtain to see the portrait of his uncle. His eyes glittered. ‘You’ve captured the wariness in his expression, Maestro Caravaggio.’

  It was I who was wary, the whole time I stood here with him, Caravaggio thought. He had felt as though the Holy Father were judging each stroke of his brush with those sharp, umber eyes. He went down on his knee and kissed Scipione’s hand. ‘Most Reverend Sire,’ he murmured. ‘My apologies. I thought—’

  Scipione clicked his tongue. ‘Don’t interrupt me. His lips,’ he went on, ‘they’re pursed, as though his temper drew close to the boil. One gets the impression that he’ll soon deliver some withering reproach.’

  ‘Your Illustriousness wishes me to request another sitting with His Holiness? To change the expression?’

  ‘All my life, twenty-six years, I’ve been trying to understand what was in his face. But you’ve got it in a matter of hours.’

  ‘I don’t pretend to understand it. I just looked at it.’

  Scipione brushed his moustache with his thumb. ‘The papal vestments become you most fittingly, Signore.’

  Prospero jolted to his feet. He came towards Scipione, his skirts rustling. He went onto his knee and bowed his head.

  Scipione laid his hand on the papal beret and licked his lips. Caravaggio saw that it amused him to have the pope genuflect before him.

  The Cardinal-Nephew gestured towards a divan. Caravaggio pushed it over the floor tiles to the place Scipione indicated.

  ‘Do carry on.’ Scipione reclined on the long chair.

  Caravaggio sensed the essence of power in the room. Prospero responded to it too. His face revealed a quiet strain.

  ‘I’ve come from the Colonna Palace,’ Scipione said. ‘You’re well liked in that household.’

  ‘The Marchesa of Caravaggio is of the Colonna family, Your Illustriousness. My grandfather was in her service. As I grew up, she was most magnanimous towards me. I’m always in her debt.’