A Name in Blood

by Matt Rees

  ‘She’s here in Rome now.’

  ‘Is she, sire?’ Caravaggio felt a cold touch on his cheek. Mention of the Marchesa brought so many memories. Yet he needed his emotions to be clear, so that they wouldn’t disturb his painting. He breathed deeply and went on. The bristles of his brush shivered rhythmically over the canvas. He worked at the scarlet highlights on the cape swooping across the pope’s chest.

  ‘When I entered, you were behind the curtain, Maestro. Now you’ve drawn it back.’ Scipione’s tone was relaxed and confiding.

  ‘With many of the details, I prefer to employ only my eye, Your Illustriousness.’

  ‘The curtain is a camera obscura?’

  ‘I use a curtain and a concave mirror, and sometimes a lens suspended in the gap in the curtain. Nothing more, Your Illustriousness. Some call it a camera obscura. Others call it items kept in any lady’s bedchamber.’

  ‘People make of it more than it is?’

  ‘An aid to seeing, that’s all.’ His brush filled the silence once more.

  ‘In the gallery of this palace,’ Scipione said, ‘you may observe all the previous popes, painted like gods. They might’ve had the power of gods, but they weren’t immortal. We ought to be able to read the life they led in their faces. But artists always make the pope into a saint. Some of them may have been; others certainly weren’t.’

  Scipione closed his eyes and quivered when he uttered the word ‘saint’. As if he were whispering to a lover, Caravaggio thought, some role he wanted to be played to arouse him. He loaded his brush with a pinkish white to edge the highlights of the cape. Prospero winked at him.

  ‘It’s only right that my uncle’s portrait ought to promote a different view of the Pope.’ Scipione spread his fingers wide and examined his nails. ‘We Borghese aren’t like the old Roman families who usually take the Throne of St Peter. Look at the Colonna. Their line runs from Julius Caesar, they say, which means they claim descent from the goddess Venus herself, as Caesar did. My uncle, the Holy Father, is the son of a clerk from Siena. Does that make him a less appropriate choice to wield the holiness of his office?’

  ‘Heaven forbid.’

  ‘Or its power?’ Scipione dropped his voice. He got up and went towards the door. He was in shadow when he turned again. ‘Maestro Raphael would’ve painted the face and had one of his assistants complete the robes.’

  ‘He would, Your Illustriousness.’

  ‘Raphael is treated as a god – infallible, perfect.’

  ‘So he is.’

  ‘But you’re no god. You’re a painter. So you do all the work yourself.’

  ‘A piece of cloth or a bowl of fruit takes just as much skill as a face, Most Reverend Lord.’

  ‘Do you see why I chose you to paint the son of the Sienese clerk?’ The Cardinal-Nephew didn’t wait for a reply. Silhouetted in the light from the corridor, he withdrew from the chamber.

  The door swung shut. Caravaggio dropped his palette onto his pigment trolley. It was exciting to hear from Scipione’s lips why he had favoured him. But I’ve never had a compliment that left me feeling so manhandled, he thought. I’m shaking like a girl who knows that fine words about her figure are the prelude to a rape. ‘Divest yourself, Your Holiness,’ he said to Prospero. ‘I can’t work any more.’

  Prospero removed his scarlet beret and the crucifix from around his neck. He gestured towards the door by which Scipione had left. ‘Princes always fill me with fear. But there’s something even more terrifying about that one.’

  ‘It’s because he told you he’s not a saint, and you know exactly how people behave when they forget the holiness in them.’

  ‘I do. For one thing there’s wrestling this evening. We won’t find any saints there, but it’ll be fun. I’m in the mood for a good fight.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The piazza in front of the Colonna Palace.’

  The Colonna. Caravaggio shivered as if at the touch of a forgotten dream. He picked up the papal crucifix and kissed it. ‘Let’s go. Surely tonight I’ll pick the winner.’

  Costanza Colonna pulled at the red lace cuff of her black dress and bit her lip. As she entered the reception room, her body was tight and her breath short. She always felt this constriction when she returned to Rome, to the palace where she had grown up and to the company of her relatives. They were descended from Aeneas, the Trojan who founded this Eternal City, and they still seemed essential to its power as they circulated with their jewelled goblets and their marten furs. In Milan, Florence or Naples, she was a respected woman of fifty-five, widow of a Sforza, inheritor of great estates, mother of six noble boys, Marchesa of the town of Caravaggio. Before the cold faces of these masterful Colonnas, she was once more a thirteen-year-old flouncing through the corridors because her father was sending her to marry a surly youth in a distant, misty province.

  Her brother, Cardinal Ascanio, clapped his hands and the Colonnas made for the balcony. He beckoned for Costanza to join him. She took his arm and went out above the Piazza of the Sainted Apostles.

  The square was packed with men who had come to see the wrestling. In the first darkness, the torches around the ring glimmered over the jostling crowd like the lanterns of a ship at anchor illuminating the lapping tide. Costanza scanned the heads below. Perhaps Michele will come, she thought.

  Ascanio’s fingers were firm in the crook of her elbow. She recognized the same calm and calculation in him that she had known in her father. She experienced a spasm of resentment, as if this had been the man who had arranged her marriage without consulting her, and a tremor of love and loss for the great prince now almost thirty years dead. She moved closer to her brother.

  ‘Your painter has a new commission,’ Ascanio said. ‘He’s doing a portrait of the Holy Father.’

  The crowd cheered the arrival of the fighters. The men lifted their arms. Oiled muscles flashed in the lantern light.

  ‘His commission could be important for us.’ Ascanio pursed his lips in disdain. ‘For the sake of Fabrizio.’

  ‘Fabrizio.’ Costanza whispered the name of her youngest son, though it seemed to her that she screamed it, so much tension did it awaken in her now. Her husband had shown little interest in his family once he had an heir. But her children had grown more special for Costanza with each birth and with her passing years. She had been a girl when most of her babies were born. By the time Fabrizio came, she had outgrown her childish tantrums, the longing for her birthplace, the frustration with her boorish husband. Though she had been still only nineteen, she had seen herself as a woman. Fabrizio’s delivery didn’t terrify her with new responsibility as her other births had done. Finally she had ceased to be a child; she had become a mother. It was as a companion for Fabrizio that she had brought Michele Merisi into the household.

  The cardinal’s hand pressed harder on her arm. She blinked, puzzled. He sighed, as if her inability to grasp the significance of what he told her was all that could be expected of a woman.

  ‘Your painter will be in proximity to the Holy Father himself,’ he hissed, ‘and to the Cardinal-Nephew.’

  ‘Yes.’ She shook her head. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Surely you see it? Your painter may beg the things that would be beneath our dignity to request. He may petition the Holy Father to compensate the Farnese with gold and land, instead of a life. He may ask for clemency – for Fabrizio.’

  Costanza took in a sharp breath. Michele might help free Fabrizio from jail. He’ll be sure to do it, she thought. Even after so many years apart, their childhood forged a bond Michele wouldn’t forget.

  Her older boys had been preoccupied with courting the favour of their father while he attended on dignitaries in Milan. Abandoned, like her, to the quiet, provincial life of Caravaggio, Fabrizio and Michele had grown close and conspiratorial, but they had allowed her to enter their play. They came to her chamber every morning and clambered inside the curtains of her bed, blowing raspberries on her neck to wake her. She had joined in ea
gerly, as if to recover the childhood cut short by her father’s order of marriage. The peace she had felt with them was disturbed only by her other sons. They teased Michele, called him an orphan, though he was not, and a commoner, which, because it was true, provoked him to attack them.

  ‘See to it, Costanza,’ Ascanio said. ‘Our family can’t afford a quarrel with the Farnese.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The Farnese will demand revenge for what Fabrizio did to one of their number.’

  Costanza’s tongue bristled with bitterness. She couldn’t bear to consider the actions of her son. It doesn’t seem possible that he . . .

  ‘If you can’t get your painter to secure Fabrizio’s release,’ Ascanio said, ‘we shan’t be able to help him. To do so would mean a war with the Farnese, a Roman civil war. We need the Holy Father to call off the Farnese.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Do you? Because if your painter can’t help, we must let them have Fabrizio.’

  One of the wrestlers dumped his opponent onto the floor of the ring. Costanza squealed in shock at the sound of his bulk hammering onto the canvas. She watched the pinned man struggle.

  Caravaggio came down the hill from the Pope’s palace and pushed to the front of the crowd in the Piazza of the Sainted Apostles. Prospero bought wine from a stall and guzzled a long draught. He wiped his beard on his sleeve, hitched up the thin belt which drew his doublet in below his heavy belly, and handed the flagon to Caravaggio.

  The wrestling ring was on a platform set at head height before the Colonna Palace. Craning his neck to watch the bout, Caravaggio saw her on the balcony of the palace with the family grandees. Costanza Colonna inclined her head to him. Some constraint froze her features. He bowed to her. When he looked up her eyes were elsewhere, but he sensed she was thinking about him. Not about his work or the life he lived now. She’ll be thinking about the old days, he thought. When I was her boy. His distraught mother had collapsed after his father had died of the plague. Costanza had brought the poor woman’s eldest child to her house out of love for his grandfather, who had served her as a surveyor. Michele had grown up chasing through the palace in Caravaggio with Fabrizio. Until she sent me away.

  A groan and a cheer from the crowd. He turned to the ring. A wrestler had dropped his opponent onto the canvas and now grappled with the wriggling man beneath him. The two fighters were thickly muscled, broad across the back, peasants bred for labour and combat. The pinned man hammered the floor with his hand. A herald wearing a scarlet surcoat with the golden column of the Colonnas’ crest lifted the arm of the victor.

  The winner doused his shoulders in water from a ringside pail to cool himself for the next bout. It was a pleasant May evening, but the exertion and the torches in each corner of the ring made the fighters hot. The wrestler took a wineskin and slung his head back to drink. He wore his hair long. His beard was thick and black. He held the wineskin at a half-arm’s length from his mouth as he poured so that it wouldn’t touch his lips, like one accustomed to drinking from a shared vessel.

  ‘Look at the size of his arms,’ Prospero said. ‘If that was the jawbone of an ass instead of a wineskin, we’d be looking at Samson himself.’

  The torchlight caught the wine, so that the man seemed to be sucking fire. When he lowered the wineskin, the wrestler shook his head and his sweat sprayed into the crowd. His next opponent climbed into the ring and flexed his chest, swinging his arms and loosening his neck. Wagers circulated in the crowd.

  ‘I’ll put my money on the new fellow. He’s fresh,’ Prospero said.

  A short man in a green doublet took him by the hand. ‘You’re crazy. You’d bet against that monster there?’

  ‘Who the hell is he, anyway?’

  ‘He works in the stables of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese. The new fighter’s a Colonna water-carrier. Two scudi on the Farnese man.’

  Prospero still had the man’s hand, though his enthusiasm appeared to have diminished now that he knew the families for which the men fought. ‘We have a bet.’

  The fighters circled each other.

  ‘Why can’t people just have a good old scrap?’ Prospero muttered. ‘Why does this have to be Colonna against Farnese?’

  ‘Better this than a real war,’ Caravaggio said.

  ‘The loser will start a war on the streets tonight. If the Farnese man wins, right here in front of the Colonna palace, your friends up on that balcony will have to strike back. There’ll be pride and politics at stake. It isn’t just two sweaty bruisers in that ring.’

  Caravaggio watched the nobles above them. ‘They’re not my friends.’

  Costanza’s glance caught him. Shame seemed to overcome an attempt at shrewdness in her face, like a wealthy market shopper forced to haggle over a few baiocchi. He felt an unease he had known before. She had looked at him that way long ago. When he was fourteen, he had been watching artisans repair a fresco in her hall. The foreman had shown him how to trace over the cartoon, pushing pinholes into the wet plaster to make a stencil. Michele had coloured a leaf with such pleasure that Costanza had asked him if he would like to be apprenticed to a painter. When he went to study in Milan, her expression had displayed a motherly sorrow at his departure. But he had also detected the calculation of a woman whose plan was accomplished. She wanted me gone. For the sake of peace in her house.

  The Farnese man found a hold on his opponent’s waistband and lifted him. He dropped the flailing fighter on his back and drove his shoulder into his ribs. The Colonna man retched. The crowd sucked in a breath, as though it felt the impact of that blow, then all set to calling for their favourite once more.

  The Colonna man’s body was dark and hairless. He reached for the other’s beard, gripped it, held it secure as a target. With a powerful contraction of his stomach muscles, he butted the Farnese fighter on the nose. Blood sprayed into the crowd as the Farnese groom shook his beard free. There was rage in his eyes. He flattened his palm over the Colonna man’s face.

  ‘He’s gouging him,’ Prospero shouted. ‘Stop him.’

  ‘It’s no holds barred, cazzo.’ The man who had bet against him laughed.

  The Colonna fighter squirmed. He might have conceded, but his hands were pinned; he could make no signal. When his eyeball came free, he screamed, and the herald grabbed at his tormentor to end the bout. The winner raised his fist. Blood ran down his forearm, tracking the protruding veins as though his lust for the fight had opened him up and laid bare the inner workings of his murderous physique. The herald knelt beside the losing Colonna man. He covered his mouth with his hand. His face turned a pale green. Even the torches glowed less richly, as though blanching in horror. The winner faced the Colonnas on their balcony and bellowed over the roar of the crowd. ‘Farnese, Farnese.’

  The faces of the aristocrats on the balcony soured in fury that a brutish groom should exult in his victory on behalf of an enemy as eternal as the stones across the way in the Imperial Forum. They hurried inside, until Costanza was the only one left.

  The tips of her fingers tapped the balustrade as she waited for Caravaggio’s eye. She jerked her neck, signalling to him to join her in the palace.

  Prospero disputed the legality of the Farnese victory with the man in green, refusing to make good his wager. Caravaggio laid his hand on the winning better’s face and lightly shoved at his eyes with his fingertips. So soon after witnessing a blinding, the man forgot his bet. In a panic, he dropped onto his backside, groping for a way to rise amid the press of the crowd. Prospero punched Caravaggio’s arm and made his escape.

  A groom led Caravaggio across the courtyard of the Colonna Palace and into the summer apartments. The ground-floor rooms faced the mandarin grove in the secret garden. A fountain shot pale blue splashes of moonlight through the fruit trees.

  Costanza entered the chamber. To Caravaggio, it was as though a familiar portrait had come to life. She stepped out of his memories. Her hair remained so black that it took her skin beyond whit
e into a realm of pallor that Caravaggio thought he might not be able to mix on his palette. Perhaps if he ground up pearls and dove’s feathers, he could match it, though that seemed more appropriate to a sorcerer than a painter. The texture of her skin was the work of a magician too, barely lined. When she came towards him across the terracotta floor, her eyes were a purple brown in the light of the double-branched candelabra.

  ‘Michele.’ She reached her hands towards him. They were scented with jasmine and he lingered over them as he kissed them. He had grown accustomed to women whose fingers savoured of filth and toil.

  ‘My lady, I’m delighted to see you back in Rome. It’s been a long while.’

  ‘My visit was not planned.’ Her voice was uneasy. ‘Since my last time here, I see that you’re no longer Signor Merisi. They have started to call you after your home town.’

  ‘I’m known as Caravaggio now, it’s true. Though that title really belongs to you.’

  ‘It does me honour, as Marchesa of Caravaggio, that your art should place the name of my town on the lips of everyone in Rome.’

  You mightn’t think so, if you heard what they said about me, he thought. ‘Your estates prosper?’

  ‘They do. And your sister Caterina has another child, a girl. Named Lucia, after your mother, God rest her soul.’

  ‘You were more of a mother to me.’

  She cleared her throat, like someone trying to cover another’s faux pas. Her breath shivered and the flames on the candelabra stuttered, as if her indecision sucked the oxygen from the room. ‘When you were a child, you were like my child. Now you’re a man, I love you still.’

  He squeezed her hand and rubbed the pad of his thumb on her knuckle. ‘I think of your generosity whenever Rome gets – oh, I don’t know – too wild.’

  She lowered her eyes. ‘I need your help.’ The candles glimmered on the gauze that covered her breast.

  ‘At your command, my lady.’

  ‘Fabrizio’s in trouble, Michele.’