by Matt Rees
Caravaggio followed the squawking catcalls to the corner where his girl stood. Lena swayed, her hand against her brow. A trio of women, their heads covered in shawls and their faces behind veils, were berating her. One of the women struck her hard in the belly.
He barged into the back of the woman who had hit Lena. She stumbled and rounded on him. ‘Ah, it’s you, painter. My Ranuccio will finish you and your street whore.’
Sudden helpless rage trembled in him. He picked up a few of Lena’s onions and hurled them at the Tomassoni women. Each throw found its mark and the women rushed away, yelling and cursing. Lena sat on the cobbles behind her basket, rocking, her eyes squeezed shut.
He crouched beside her. ‘Let me take you away from here. This work will be the end of you, Lena.’ He thought of the happy moment when he had laughed with Menica and he decided to make his proposal. ‘Amore, I want you and me to—’
‘They didn’t attack me because I’m selling onions, Michele.’ Her face was light green and her hands were grey.
He touched her belly. In her condition, that blow from the Tomassoni woman could be dangerous. His eyes were wet and lost.
She frowned and groaned.
His hopes of fatherhood, even the possibility that he might marry Lena, were an illusion. Her connection to him brought her into danger. Ranuccio had surely sent the women of his family to attack Lena with the intention of goading Caravaggio into a duel.
‘Let me take you home.’ He tried to lift her.
‘Pick up the onions you threw at those women first.’
‘I can’t do that. It’s beneath my—’
‘Pick them up, Michele.’ She spoke sharply, winced and clutched her abdomen.
He gathered the vegetables, shame making him hot. He helped Lena up and felt her weakness as she leaned on his arm.
‘You missed one, Maestro.’ Baglione sat at the edge of the Triton fountain. He held up an onion, turning it in the light. ‘A little soiled. But that makes it perfect for one of your works. Still life with mildewed vegetables and rotten fruit.’ He rolled the onion to Caravaggio across the filthy cobbles.
He ran along the Corso the next day. He barely knew it, but he was calling her name as he went. His white smock, smeared with paint, billowed behind him. A gentleman on horseback made a gesture to a friend as though he were lifting a tankard. His companion whirled his finger beside his head.
At the house on the Via dei Greci, Menica dandled Lena’s nephew on her knee. Mother Antognetti muttered tearful supplications as Caravaggio went beyond the curtain where Lena lay in bed.
She slept with an exhaustion that recalled the sacrificed body of Christ on a crucifix. Her skin was the sickly Indian yellow of pasta water, her hair dry and dishevelled. One arm dangled off the bed board, the other lay on her distended stomach. Her red dress stretched across her torso. Her feet were swollen. The flesh below her neck was slack, where she had already built up a little fat for the foetus to feed from. Puffy folds gathered at her eyes, as if this was the first time she had ever slept.
He had imagined her like this when he dreamed of the birth – spent and depleted. He had pictured her propped on her elbow, cradling the baby beside her breast and resting while his friends came to admire the child. But the Lord had taken his child. My sins merited this penalty, he thought. The punishment was visited on Lena’s body, but it was intended as an affliction for his monstrous soul.
He watched her a long time. She opened her eyes once and smiled at him as if it took all the energy she possessed, then she went back to sleep. When he realized that he was committing her image to memory so that he might paint her as his dead Virgin, he stared down at his hands and wept because he knew his art wanted him to be as alone as God did.
Lena’s mother pressed his shoulder. He shrugged her off and stepped back around the curtain.
The boy reached out for Caravaggio from Menica’s lap. Menica glanced up at him. ‘Domenico, do you want to play with Uncle Michele?’
He went to the door. ‘I’ll be with Onorio,’ he mumbled.
Menica took Lena across the Tiber to see The Death of the Virgin at Santa Maria della Scala. Though she rarely left the Evil Garden, she knew the way through the narrow, impoverished streets of Trastevere. The Carmelites ran a home for fallen women in their monastery adjoining the church. Menica had sneaked over here with a few battered whores, when their pimps were in the taverns, and deposited them at the Casa Pia. She never stayed. She had no need of instruction from the Barefoot Fathers. She had experienced vices even the Church had yet to damn.
Lena walked slowly. Perhaps she was still weak from the miscarriage, but Menica thought it more likely the girl feared meeting Caravaggio. This morning he would be with the carpenters at the church, installing his painting. He had spoken no more than a few words to her in a month.
At the door of the church, Lena’s eyes were wet. Michele has a couple more weeks to make this right, Menica thought, then the tears will stop and she’ll turn hard.
The carpenters had set the backboards for the hanging: four rough planks at the top of the space and, ten feet below, four more to support the foot of the painting. The edges tapered a little, making the two ends of an oval. The workmen lifted the canvas under Caravaggio’s direction. His voice echoed through the church. Here he’s in command. She glanced at the tottering girl beside her. You’d think a man whose pictures are so unconventional, who seems to have so much strength and to be able to make his own path, wouldn’t be like other men. But he’s just as confounded as the rest of his sex by the needs of a woman.
As they approached the canvas, Lena put her hands to her face. The Virgin’s corpse was spread across the foot of the picture, lying as Lena had when she lost her baby.
Caravaggio saw the women. Menica thought he might have turned back to his workmen had Lena been alone. Instead he came reluctantly to the girl weeping behind her hands. He shifted on his heels before them, irritation twitching over his features.
Menica followed Lena’s eyes. The jade-green colour of death was on the Virgin’s face. She’s only seen herself as the tranquil Madonna of Loreto before. She won’t have expected this. ‘It’s the saddest thing you’ve ever done, Michele.’
Caravaggio glanced at the painting as if she had pointed out a quality he had neglected to notice.
‘It shows you still care about Lena, I suppose,’ Menica added.
An injured flicker in his eyes indicated that he wondered if she might doubt such a thing. ‘Let me show it to you.’ He reached for Lena, but she pulled away.
‘I thought you were going to paint me dead.’ She wiped her eyes with her sleeve.
Menica heard the rage behind her sobs. I was wrong. She’s already turned hard.
‘Instead you’ve shown me when I was worse than dead.’
‘It’s – it’s the Virgin,’ Caravaggio stammered. ‘She’s the embodiment of love. Menica, tell her. You see it, don’t you?’
Menica ran her hand across Lena’s back and shook her head. They went out of the church.
They rounded the refuge for fallen women and went down to the river. Crossing the Ponte Sisto, they shivered as they passed the freezing washerwomen scrubbing laundry on the sandbanks, and returned to the Evil Garden.
‘He has no beautiful ideas of his own,’ Baglione said, ‘so he must paint everything from Nature – at least, Nature as he sees it.’
The abbot of the Carmelite monastery pushed his hands into the sleeves of his cassock. ‘No beautiful ideas?’
‘Caravaggio depicts only the surface appearance of things.’ Baglione ran his disapproving glance over The Death of the Virgin. ‘My dear Father Abbot, what should be shown in the death of Our Lady Maria? The corpse of a woman whose soul has left her?’
‘Not at all. She should be filled with grace.’
‘Because?’
‘Because she’s ascending to heaven. Lifted by a force beyond life and death.’
‘You’re right, of c
ourse. Her glorious assumption of the mantle of heaven.’
‘Though one might add that the Church has yet to rule on whether the Madonna died before her ascension, or if she was transported while still living.’
Baglione looked displeased. He touched the ends of his moustache. ‘Would the apostles stand around the cadaver of a bloated whore?’
The abbot swivelled towards the nave of the church. A few dozen people had come over the river to Trastevere to see Santa Maria della Scala’s newest artwork. It was only a day since it had been hung. The abbot thought it a most impressive depiction, but Maestro Baglione didn’t agree. Recognizing the noted painter, the onlookers edged closer to hear his opinion. The abbot thought Baglione was vain and pompous, even compared to other artists into whose company he was occasionally thrown by his duty to maintain the frescos and statues in his church. But Baglione had received commissions from the Vatican. If he condemned a painting, it might cause trouble with the monastery’s patrons and endanger all the good work of his monks.
‘I’m not an expert on art, Maestro Baglione.’ The abbot hesitated. He couldn’t simply reject the work. That might offend the Cardinal-Nephew. Scipione had engineered the commission for Caravaggio.
The artist arched his brow. ‘Go on.’
‘Your theological points are worthily made, too.’ The abbot bit at the corner of his lip.
‘Indeed.’ Baglione advanced to within a few feet of the canvas. He gestured towards the dark spaces around the Virgin. ‘See how Caravaggio cloaks all his mistakes in shadow?’
‘Mistakes?’
‘There are many, here in the details.’ Baglione rose on his toes, as if he had just uncovered one more flaw in the painting. ‘The model, by the way, is a girl from the Evil Garden who is his –’ Baglione lowered his voice, but his hiss was loud enough to draw a shocked breath from the eavesdroppers behind the abbot ‘– his whore, a fallen woman to whom he is unmarried, though she recently carried his child.’
The abbot dropped down the single step beside the altar as if he had been shoved.
‘One of our great theologians wrote that prostitution serves the good of the public as do sewers, did he not, dear Father Abbot? It’s a conduit for wicked impulses which would otherwise pollute respectable women.’
‘Yes, yes, I know the passage from Aquinas.’
Baglione acknowledged the crowd that had gathered now beneath the painting, solemnly inviting them to join him in righteous indignation. ‘I never thought to find that one of our holy churches would be the cesspool into which such a sewer might deposit its filth.’
The abbot scratched his thin arms. He had brought a harlot into his church. He had befouled the house of God.
Something struck at his shoulder and clasped it. He moaned. Was divine vengeance already come down upon him? Quaking, he turned towards the altar and retribution. But it was Baglione, pinching him with his gloved hand.
The abbot stammered, ‘Help me, Maestro Baglione.’
Del Monte scented himself with ambergris from the stomach of a sperm whale to counter the anticipated reek of the tavern on Caravaggio. He regretted what he had to tell him. He had seen the sorrowing soul of his old protégé in every inch of The Death of the Virgin. That Holy Mother would never rise to glory beside Her Son; she was dead, and those around her grieved like people without faith. When will he be here? the cardinal wondered. How many inns can there be for my footmen to search? He dabbed a few extra spots of the scent along his lace collar and inhaled.
Caravaggio entered the study and weaved across the floor. It was evident that it cost him some effort to stay upright. His knee-length pantaloons were dusted with the lime innkeepers spread in their privies. Olive oil and gravy smeared his doublet. His whole body pulsated with tiny, seemingly uncontrollable motions. Yet his jaw was clamped so tight that del Monte thought he might hear the man’s teeth creaking like the boards of a ship in a storm. He caught a whiff of sweat as Caravaggio bent to kiss his ring. He inclined his nose to the ambergris on his collar.
‘I’m sorry to tell you that the Shoeless Fathers have rejected your painting, Maestro Caravaggio,’ he said.
Caravaggio grimaced and swayed. ‘Fine.’ He slurred even this briefest of utterances.
‘Maestro Baglione . . .’
A mumbled curse.
‘Maestro Baglione has been heard to say that you cover up your mistakes with shadows.’
A snort of contempt, his fist tight around the hilt of his sword. He used to have a servant to carry that for him, like a gentleman, del Monte thought. Now he wears it, as if at any moment he means to use it.
‘Cardinal Scipione has requested that I find a buyer for the rejected painting.’
‘Yeah?’ The artist’s lips barely moved.
I wonder he doesn’t belch at me. ‘I’ve some hopes of the Flemish fellow Rubens, who’s acting as agent for the Duke of Mantua in certain purchases. He’s an admirer of yours.’
To that, only a shrug and a queasy gulp, as if Caravaggio strove not to vomit in the cardinal’s study. Del Monte pursed his lips. At least he still has that much respect for me.
‘Michele, you understand the seriousness of what has happened?’
‘You mean the pregnant whore thing?’
‘Exactly.’
‘She’s not a whore. She’s not pregnant either. Not any more.’
‘The Carmelites – encouraged by certain artists – suggest that it would’ve been more appropriate to depict the Virgin carried heavenward by angels.’
‘When I see people flying, it’s usually because I’ve been too long in the tavern.’ Caravaggio stretched out his arms, flapped them and let them fall. His smile was forlorn.
‘For heaven’s sake, even Maestro Carracci painted the Virgin’s death as a joyful moment.’
‘I expect he regrets it. Anyway, Annibale’s good, but he’s not me.’
He has withdrawn from me before, del Monte thought, but never like this. Caravaggio was shut away behind this roughhouse façade, as if he were locked up with a courtesan for the weekend. Everything he painted aroused controversy – criticism of his work couldn’t be the only cause of this conduct. It must be that girl. ‘The art in our churches is not for our amusement. It’s supposed to be inspiring. If you don’t paint the Virgin ascending mystically into the sky, the worshippers at the church may fail to believe that it happened.’
‘The body doesn’t ascend. Haven’t you heard about such a thing as a soul? That’s what goes to heaven.’ Caravaggio closed his eyes, looking inward. He opened them suddenly, seeming to panic, scanning the room as if he feared his spirit had stolen away while he spoke. ‘What’s left is a bag of bones.’
Del Monte considered that Caravaggio may have deliberately presented himself in this condition, almost like a corpse, the living example of what he wanted people to see in The Death of the Virgin. A body, abused and wasting, meaning nothing, and a soul that made of itself the purest art.
‘I have, indeed, heard of the soul,’ the cardinal said. ‘I very much fear for yours.’
At the Colonna palace, Caravaggio crossed the secret garden on a path of stone chips. The early sun evaporated the night’s damp in wisps of vapour from the mossy side of the pines. A grove of mandarin trees made the air fragrant and spotted the stark light with bright winter fruit. His mouth dry from the last night’s wine, he craved their sweetness. But in the palace some servant would be spying. He didn’t want to embarrass the Marchesa by picking the prince’s produce. Her man must be well behaved. Here, at least, he thought.
Costanza Colonna rose from a granite table set among the mandarins. She wore a dark scarf bound across her head, arranged a fraction above her hairline so that a few delicate curls might protrude onto her brow. In front of her belly she held a flea fur, the pelt of a pine marten intended to lure vermin from her body.
She lifted her chin clear of the ruff at her neck and beckoned to Caravaggio. He kissed her hand, found it cold and, with a g
rin, rubbed her knuckles with his thumb to warm them. ‘My lady, what news of Don Fabrizio?’
Her face floated insubstantially in the flat light. Like the Virgin the Shoeless Fathers would’ve preferred me to paint.
‘I grieve as if my son were dead already, Michele,’ she whispered.
‘My lady, I pray you don’t. I’ve spoken of Fabrizio to His Illustriousness, the Cardinal-Nephew.’
‘Does the Cardinal-Nephew give you hope?’
‘It’s complicated. The fight between the Colonnas and the Farneses . . . You know.’
‘He’s waiting to see who wins?’
Caravaggio touched the hilt of his sword. The sweetness of the mandarins on the air made him bilious now. He wanted a drink to settle his stomach.
‘I must trust that the Colonna will win, for my son’s sake,’ Costanza said. ‘But who’ll win the battle over your new work, Michele, now that the Carmelites have decided it isn’t their kind of Virgin?’ She wrung her hands, her features taut and troubled.
‘Is it your kind of Virgin, my lady?’
Beneath its attempt at blitheness, his voice revealed a grim longing. Costanza frowned. He tried to reassure her with a smile, but he could only simper, his mouth bitter and crooked.
It was she who had set him on the path to art, when she observed him watching the painters fresco her hall in Caravaggio. He knew that she had recognized some light in his face that was illuminated only then. He remembered the sensation of the brush in his hand as the master of the fresco had given him a chance to lay in some burnt umber and Indian red, for the boot of a saint. The wooden brush handle had felt so natural in the crook of his thumb and index finger that it had seemed he had been cut from the same tree.