by Matt Rees
‘You mean a . . .’
‘An honest woman.’ Onorio laughed. ‘I’ll concede that without my good wife’s influence, I’d be out of control.’
Caravaggio recalled Onorio’s brawls, his couplings with street whores, the insults he yelled at the bravos in the piazzas. ‘I’d hate to see you without your wife’s restraining influence.’
He went to the Corso and bought a pair of gloves to fit a woman. They were red silk. He thought red would look well on her. He stared north to the gates beyond the Piazza del Popolo. Prudenza was interred there among the whores and heathens.
He could barely bring himself to admit that he sought love. A girl who isn’t a whore, he mused. Each stroke of his brush linked him eternally to the women he painted. He suffered for them, even after they were gone. Because I come to love them, I can’t deny it. When they’re taken from me, it’s as though my work were destroyed, too.
Lena’s door was open. She held the boy under his arms. He stood on her feet and she walked him around the room, giggling. An old woman in the corner applauded. Lena peered down at the boy’s feet to see that they didn’t slip from hers. Caravaggio wondered when he had last seen such calm and unaffected goodness as he beheld in Lena. His chest expanded and his breath deepened.
The boy saw him and flattened himself shyly against Lena’s skirt. I should’ve brought something for the child, Caravaggio thought. When I come again. It surprised him that he should wish so fervently for a next time. He stepped through the door and held out the gloves.
Lena took them. ‘Are they special gloves for scrubbing floors?’ She showed Caravaggio her hands. The dirt was grained in her knuckles and thick under her nails like a clumsily outlined sketch in charcoal.
‘Perhaps I bought the wrong thing?’
She smiled at his embarrassment. ‘They’re lovely.’
The girl’s mother drew him into the room by his elbow. ‘Come, Signore. Will you have some wine?’
‘Thank you, Signora . . . ?’
‘Antognetti, Anna Antognetti.’ She poured wine into a thick wooden cup.
The boy grizzled. Lena put her hand to his forehead. ‘You’re hot, little one. Still sick?’ She fed the boy a sop of bread soaked in water and wine.
Caravaggio drank. ‘Your sister’s boy?’
‘What makes you think he’s not mine?’ she said.
‘He called you Auntie Lena, remember? When I was at your door with the old beggars.’
Lena’s mother reached for Caravaggio’s hand and whispered, ‘The Lord took my Amabilia as she gave birth to this little one.’
‘His father?’
Lena concentrated on the bowl of diluted wine before the child. Her mother worried her lip with a few grey teeth. ‘In this quarter of the city, Signore, the father could be anyone.’
‘Mama.’ Lena clicked her tongue. ‘Take another sip, Domenico.’
Anna shrugged. ‘I brought eight babes into the world, Signore, but Our Lord carried them all away through sickness and bad childbirths. Except for my Lena. I fed them all myself, after my husband Paolo passed on. I used to buy vegetables from peasants and resell them in the Piazza Navona. It’s not a good trade and men treated me as if I wished to sell myself. My legs and my back allow me to do it no longer. Lena has taken over, when her work at the cardinal’s palace allows it.’
So Lena was a treccola, calling out her wares in the piazza, as well as a maid. Such work was often a cover for a whore, an excuse for her to be out in public when decent women were kept at home. He wondered if that was Lena’s game. Another whore? Even when I think I’ve found an honest woman.
‘What’s your trade, Signore?’ the old woman asked. ‘The gloves you gave her are expensive. Your own clothing was once fine, too, though now they look like you’d been beaten and robbed.’
He grinned at her frankness. ‘More than once, my lady. I’m an artist.’
The friendliness receded from Anna’s face. An artist presented no way out of the whore’s quarter for her daughter. ‘She has another suitor.’
Lena dropped the bread into the bowl and glared at her mother.
‘A notary. He works with the Holy Office. He carries out commissions directly from the Holy Father.’
‘Perhaps I’ll run into him,’ Caravaggio said.
‘Around here? He lives in a nicer part of the city.’
He reached out to squeeze the boy’s chin. ‘If he works for the Holy Father, it’s possible I might see him at the Quirinale.’
‘The Pope’s palace?’
‘I’m there every day. I’m painting the Holy Father’s portrait.’
The old woman scrutinized him with the shrewdness of the street. The same expression I painted on the Pope, Caravaggio thought.
‘I’ll have other commissions soon. When I do, I’d like to paint your daughter.’
‘Me?’
The old woman touched her daughter’s leg. ‘When by the hands of God and Blessed Maria I should be removed from this life to a better one, you’ll need something more than a housegirl’s wage, Lena.’
The girl popped another piece of dripping bread into the boy’s mouth. ‘I’m not as reluctant as you think, Mama. I like this gentleman.’
Caravaggio inclined his head in mock courtliness.
‘What’ll you paint me as?’ she asked.
He rocked his head side to side. ‘Oh, probably the Madonna.’
She caught her lip in her teeth. ‘Me?’
‘Don’t laugh, girl,’ the mother said. ‘You’re pretty. You’ll look as good as those Madonnas in the churches.’
‘Oh, Mama.’
‘And the Maestro’ll clean you up.’ She reached for the girl’s soiled fingers. ‘So you’ll look like the Madonna, not a skivvy.’
‘The priests will think they’ve seen the Madonna for the very first time,’ Caravaggio said. ‘Just as if she had come up and touched them.’
Lena lifted the boy onto her lap and fed him the last of the bread.
Anna showed Caravaggio to the door. ‘There’re plenty of priests who’d like to be touched by my Lena. But if the Virgin appeared to them, they’d die of guilt.’
He heard her giggling as he went towards the Corso.
In the time of imperial Rome, Emperor Domitian’s stadium was used for foot races, while chariots ran at the bigger Circus Maximus. When a fire damaged the Colosseum, the stadium hosted the blood sports of the gladiators, too. Its marble cladding was pillaged to build churches and palaces for the popes, for the Pamphilij family, the Orsini and the Colonna. But the brick and concrete of the lower arcades, where the ancients had visited prostitutes after the day’s competition, were incorporated into the ground floor of the buildings on what became one of Rome’s central public spaces. Because the stadium had been modelled on a Hellenic design, the Romans referred to it by a Latin corruption of the Greek words meaning ‘the place of competition’ – in agones. In the later dialect of the city, the phrase contracted and mutated, so that the piazza was called ‘Navona’.
It was still a site of competition, as intense as the confrontations between the gladiators and almost as vicious. The games of football played across its cobbles were for money. There were few rules. The results were disputed with as little finesse as the ancient games.
Caravaggio came down to Navona from the French tennis courts with Onorio. A heavy football arced through the air beyond a crowd of cheering spectators. It dropped at the feet of a tall figure in a loose white shirt.
Caravaggio peered into the twilight. ‘Is that Ranuccio?’
Another player charged, lunging for the leather ball. The tall man put his foot on top of the ball and rolled it to the side. At the same time he reached down and swung a fist straight into his opponent’s nose.
‘Definitely Ranuccio.’ Onorio laughed.
A bookmaker in a heavy cloak stood at the edge of the play. Onorio called out to him. ‘I’ll lay a scudo against Ranuccio’s team.’
Caravag
gio hesitated. He didn’t want to revive the old antagonism with Ranuccio.
The bookmaker turned. ‘Onorio, I’ll take that bet. Hey, you’ve been at the tennis courts?’
‘For some fencing. A Spanish gentleman and a soldier from Urbino.’
Ranuccio came out of the game to drink from a flagon of wine. He seemed to have taken a blow, because his right leg gave way a little with each step.
‘The Spanish swordsman was good,’ Onorio shouted. ‘He’d have you tied up in knots, Ranuccio.’
‘That’s what you say.’ Ranuccio swilled the wine. When he saw Caravaggio, he spat onto the cobbles.
‘I’d have put ten scudi on him to beat you,’ Onorio said.
‘The ten scudi your friend still owes me?’ Ranuccio waved the flagon towards Caravaggio. ‘I know the swordsman you mean. Contreras, right?’
‘That’s him.’
‘I’ve seen him fight. I’d take your money and shove it up his ass, before he’d score a hit on me.’
Onorio moved forward. ‘No chance. Dickheads like you are worth a penny each. Right, Michele?’
Caravaggio held up his hands. I know where this is going. Neither of them can stop now. He couldn’t fail to back his friend. Even Ranuccio would have been right to disdain him, had he done so.
Ranuccio threw the flagon at Onorio. He grabbed a sword from one of the spectators to the football game. A crowd closed around the two fighters. Caravaggio pulled one of the football players off Onorio’s back and put his knee into the man’s ribs.
He waited for more swords to be drawn, but as far as he could tell the fighting was with fists, bottles and stools from the nearest tavern. Then he saw steel flash between the bodies of the men before him. Onorio came to his side with a broad smile and his teeth outlined in blood.
‘Ranuccio gave me a good one right in the mouth.’ Onorio was as exhilarated as a child wrestling with his father. ‘But I cut him up a bit.’ He raised his dagger. They left the mêlée and rested against the massive bowl of the Fountain of Triton. Onorio dabbed at his mouth with a white handkerchief and spat blood into the pool.
‘You must be cut inside your cheek,’ Caravaggio said.
Within a few minutes, the fight broke up. Ranuccio’s brothers led him away from the brawl. He was bleeding from his hand, his wound wrapped in the tail of his shirt. He grinned at the blood on Onorio’s handkerchief. Ranuccio pointed his injured hand at Caravaggio and made some joke to his companions. They smirked and trotted past the Church of San Giacomo. Caravaggio thought that if Ranuccio had seen his dead body propped against the fountain, he would only have laughed harder.
An usher showed Caravaggio along the broad, high corridor of the Quirinale Palace towards Scipione’s chambers. The scent of damp plaster was on the air.
‘That smell . . .’
They came to an open double door. ‘Maestro Reni from Bologna has been frescoing the Chapel of the Annunciation. That’s what you can smell.’
The fresco was almost complete. A couple of fat cherubs swung a censer. The Virgin lay on her bed, pregnant. Joseph was holding off some bearded fellows at the door. Everything was done in pastel shades like a washed-out Raphael. Caravaggio grimaced. He was sure everyone would love it.
The usher went to the first pew. Scipione was on his knees in prayer. He rose and came towards Caravaggio swinging his rosary. The artist bowed low. Scipione tugged his hand away almost before the kiss. His cheeks were flushed with wine.
The Cardinal-Nephew led Caravaggio out of the chapel, his hand on his shoulder. It was the barest of touches and yet it seemed to reach deep beneath the skin, like an unwelcome caress. ‘Keep away from the Tomassonis, Maestro Caravaggio.’
‘Most Reverend Lord?’
‘They’re powerful in their part of town. That makes them very useful to me. There’s some dispute, I gather, between Signor Ranuccio Tomassoni and you.’
‘Sire, it’s of no importance. A matter of—’
‘Ten scudi. I know. But blood has been drawn now too – at the Piazza Navona.’
Caravaggio was about to say that it had not been him who cut Ranuccio, but he was reluctant either to make excuses or to admit that he had been present at the brawl in the piazza.
‘It seems unlikely that you and Ranuccio will conclude such a conflict with a polite apology. I wish for you to cease this dispute.’
‘Will Ranuccio . . . ?’
‘This shall be communicated to Signor Ranuccio too.’ Scipione crossed to the window overlooking the courtyard of the papal palace. ‘You’ll have to go into hiding. The police must make a show of arresting those involved in the fight. But only when you finish the portrait of the Holy Father. After that, I wish for some frescos in my new palace, Maestro – for the loggia outside.’
A fresco? He might as well ask me to sew him a nice scarf or give him a haircut. ‘Why don’t you ask Maestro Reni to do it?’ he said, imparting as much scorn as he might to the artist’s title.
‘I might ask him, of course. He didn’t do badly with this chapel. And I haven’t asked you to do it yet. But why not?’
‘I work in oils.’
‘Fresco is the greatest test of an artist’s skills. You have to complete the painting before the plaster dries on the walls. There’s no time for corrections or touch-ups. Isn’t that true?’
‘In a fresco, one can’t control the light.’ As he talked about his work, Caravaggio’s resentment of the banal daubings in the chapel left him and he became expansive. ‘No doubt your loggia is beautiful, Your Illustriousness. The sunlight streams over it all day.’
‘It does.’
‘That’s why it’s so pleasurable for you to be there.’
‘Quite so.’
‘My paintings are made with a single source of light. To create shadows that bring out the features of my models. In so doing I illustrate their emotions.’ He held his hands in front of Scipione’s face as though they carried the beam of a lantern. The cardinal’s eyes followed his fingers. ‘If the light came from here, I would see a different Cardinal-Nephew than if I were to put the source of light down here.’
Scipione nodded, understanding. He doesn’t bother to argue that it would only be a trick of the light, Caravaggio thought. He knows that he wears many faces, and they’d all be worth a portrait.
Caravaggio gestured at the sunny courtyard. ‘In the loggia, all faces are flat and dull, because the light is uniform. If I look at you this way, you’re just the same as if I stand over here. What am I to search for as an artist when every perspective is identical? How can I show that what I see is different, when it isn’t? The sun gives life to everything, but not to painting.’
He caught himself and frowned. What is it that does give life to painting? Is it only the light? Lena’s face came to him and he smiled.
Scipione patted at Caravaggio’s wrist. ‘That’s how you capture the character of a man?’
Caravaggio shrugged. ‘When a painter looks at a man, the man thinks, “How will he make me look? Will I recognize myself? What if he sees me as I really am?” The painter’s eye draws out every man’s guilt. That’s why it’s hard to paint a saint from life.’
‘Very hard, indeed. But what if the guilt is the painter’s?’
Caravaggio’s easy feeling left him. He shuddered and looked at his hands. ‘Then the painting would show what even the artist didn’t know.’
Lena saw him as she left the Thursday meat market behind the Madama. He kept to the shadows under the wall of the palace as if he wished not to be noticed. She came to his side and caught his arm.
‘I’m waiting to model for you, Maestro Caravaggio.’ Her voice was light and playful. She set her basket against her hip. The tripes packed inside it slopped towards her.
‘I’m still painting the Holy Father,’ Caravaggio said. ‘I’ll come to you as soon as I need a—’
She wondered that he stuttered before her. He didn’t seem like the kind. Is he having second thoughts about reve
aling himself to me? she thought.
‘As soon as I need a—’ he repeated.
‘A Virgin,’ she said.
He smiled with an embarassed shrug.
‘I’m going the same way as you, it seems,’ she said. ‘Will you accompany me?’ She started to walk and he caught up beside her.
She looked at him sidelong and pursed her lips, pretending to be affronted. ‘Is it that you don’t wish to paint me anymore?’
He shook his head, reached for her basket. ‘Let me take that.’
‘It’s not heavy.’
‘Really, give it to me.’
His hand on her wrist, he took the basket. He examined her fingers. She wondered if he was thinking about the gloves he had bought her. ‘I don’t wear them when I’m working.’
He didn’t register that she had spoken. He rubbed his thumb against her knuckles.
‘My hands do get dirty, don’t they? Look at them now. They’re an awful state,’ she said. ‘This morning I was cleaning the grooms’ waiting rooms at the palace. A big mess those gentlemen make.’
His touch was very hot. He let her go.
They went into the Via della Scrofa. She took longer strides as the market crowd thinned, holding her hands before her belly and swinging her shoulders. A man who spends his days with the Pope himself, she thought, walking beside me. She glanced at his features. They seemed feverish, as if he actually did see her already as the Virgin and were wrestling with the presence of God. Perhaps you have to be a bit odd to do what he does. The Pope might even expect it. If a man arrived to paint him wearing stockings without holes in them and a jacket that wasn’t spattered with oil paint, the Holy Father might throw him out as an impostor.
‘You have some pigment on your chin.’ She pinched a lock of his black beard between her index finger and thumb. She ran her fingers to the end of the beard, but only yellowed the entire strand with the oils. ‘It hasn’t come out.’
‘It won’t. If you get oils in your hair or on your skin, you might as well leave it there. You can try to clean it, but you’ll just spread it around and rub it in.’