by Matt Rees
Your Lena.
The girl had made a mark that was something like the letter L beneath her name. Caravaggio heard her voice call from the stiff paper, and he wept. I wanted to protect her, so I left her behind, he thought. But without her I’m a mess. He had to get to her. He had to get the death sentence lifted, so he could be with her.
The letter had a postscript. He wiped his cuff across his eyes and read on.
Prosperino, the painter of grotesques, greets his dear friend, the greatest of Rome’s painters, Michelangelo Merisi of Caravaggio.
Michele, I do not tell the girl what I write here. She believes it is only a few words of friendship. She came to me just now to write to you, and I see that it costs her something to contact you. She is sure you wished to abandon her, though long ago I told her otherwise. But I have been in Venice on a commission and while I was gone others – the Tomassoni women and Fillide – tried to convince Lena that you never loved her.
Her health is poor, Michele. Her skin is grey, the colour of a chimney sweep’s spit, and darker than grey beneath the eyes and around her mouth. Her lips are like lead, though I am sorry to tell you that they are also flecked with blood which she coughed out as she dictated her letter.
I know you have tried to overcome the sentence against you. Such things take time. Onorio remains exiled in Milan, awaiting his pardon, and Mario too is in Sicily. Ranuccio’s brother is absent from Rome for the same reason. I hope for your sake he knows not where you are. I shall send this letter through del Monte and I shall not ask where it will find you.
I have begged del Monte to intercede on your behalf with Scipione. He was irritated by my request, because he says your case is constantly on his mind and the Cardinal-Nephew needs no reminder from a third-rate artist. I begged him to consider me no more than tenthrate, so long as he maintains your interests.
I shall do what I can for Lena, Michele, though I am not in the money these days. I have been supporting Onorio’s wife. She is most importunate, as our friend sends her no funds from his exile and she has five children to feed. Meanwhile, Baglione and his clique take all the commissions I might have had. You must come back to Rome, Michele.
Your friend who misses all the trouble you used to cause him,
Prospero Orsi.
Caravaggio looked up at his painting. The Virgin held a young Christ at the top of the canvas. He had given the boy Domenico’s features, but he had thought there was something in him of the child he might have had if Lena’s pregnancy had come to term. He dropped to his knees and pressed the letter to this heart. If he made a few more touches to her image, he wondered, would she step off the canvas, clasp his face between her palms and say, ‘Why couldn’t you have done that final stroke two years ago?’ She could have been with him if he had been artist enough to command her presence out of the paint.
He got to his feet. I will make her real.
In the Carità, on the edge of the volatile district of the Spanish soldiers and their whores, he entered an inn called the Cerriglio. Woodsmoke burned his eyes. He sat with a flagon of wine and drank quickly. He turned to the drinkers nearby and raised his cup. He had a letter from Lena. He was loved.
He ate from a basket of dough balls, each one wrapped around a leaf of seaweed to give it a salty flavour and then deep-fried. He called for another jug of wine. The whores at the corner table turned their heads when they heard him shout. One of them rose to approach him, but she was distracted by music in the street.
A sad-eyed musician entered, playing a tarantella on a short pipe, his fingers twirling on the airholes. A blind man came behind him, beating six-eight time on a tambourine and singing hoarsely in a dialect Caravaggio couldn’t make out. The whores got up to dance. They bounced on one leg. With the other foot they kicked the beat and tapped their clogs to the floor. The whore who had been on her way to Caravaggio’s table took his arm. ‘Come on, handsome.’
It was hard for him to pick out her features. The wine had struck him quicker than he had expected. The grey light from the windows caught her braid, tied across her head from ear to ear as Lena’s used to be. She was the same height as his girl and she had Lena’s heavy Greek eyebrows. He would be with Lena again soon. He would find a way to join her in Rome. He drained his cup, laughing, and stood for a dance.
They swept side to side, their arms above their heads. Lena. He drank another cup, his head spinning. I’m loved. The whore raised a leg and hooked it between his thighs, behind his knee, pushing her groin to him in the dance. Her breath was milky with mozzarella when she laughed. He drew back his knee to bring her towards him.
One of the whores brought out a triccaballacca, flicking her wrists so that its small mallets swung on their hinges, wood clicking on wood above the rhythm of the music. The dancers strutted and twisted, as if they were working off the poison of the tarantula, as the originators of the dance had done. Caravaggio sensed his body cleansing something he knew had been killing him as surely as a spider’s venom. He threw back his head, called out Lena’s name, and roared with laughter. The whore poured wine into his smile.
The night stuttered, cut into disconnected moments by the wine and the fervour of his liberation from fear and loneliness. He threw dice on a bench with a Spanish soldier and argued when they fell to the floor. He tossed down his cards in a game of Calabresella, cursing a fisherman for palming the Knave of Cups and bringing out a King of Coins from his sleeve.
He ate a focaccia which was so good he was compelled to bother the cook with such boundless encomiums about the recipe that the whore had to drag him away. Then he lay beneath her in her foetid room above the tavern, groaning and bellowing and grappling with her breasts. He wept and mumbled, not knowing why, as he wrapped himself to her back in sleep.
When he awoke, she was naked, plucking her hairline to keep it far back from her brows, as did all women who wished to be thought beautiful. She turned from the polished pewter plate she used as a mirror and smiled. ‘Morning, handsome,’ she said.
‘What’s your name?’ His stomach swung within him when he reached for his drawers.
‘Stella. At least you didn’t ask what you’re doing here.’
The snapping rhythm of the triccaballacca went on. He frowned, wondering how the tarantella could continue all night. Then he realized that what he heard was the pain in his head, so sharp it seemed to him like percussion.
‘I don’t need to ask your name,’ the woman said. ‘I’m going to call you o’ntufato.’
‘I don’t understand your bloody Neapolitan dialect.’
‘It means “the angry one”. You were up and down last night like the bit we call the “father of your children”.’ She mimed a penis engorging and deflating and growing once more. ‘One moment you’d be all over some fellow as though you were friends from childhood; next you’d be cursing him and hurling your cup at his head.’
‘Oh God. I can’t believe it.’ He put his legs into his breeches.
‘There were some rough types at the inn last night. You insulted so many of them, you’re lucky you came away with the nose on your face.’
‘No one cut it off, so now I can lose my nose slowly to syphilis instead.’
She kissed the top of his head. ‘Don’t worry about picking up the French disease from me. You aren’t going to be around long enough to die that slowly, o’ntufato.’
When he left the tavern, Caravaggio went down the wide boulevard laid out by an old viceroy from Toledo. A gang of Spanish musketeers grew silent at his approach. The tallest of them licked his lips and slapped his gloves against his hand. Caravaggio waited for them to come at him, without time even to wonder why they might attack him. They grinned with anticipation and relish for a brawl. Then their eyes flickered between him and something beyond his shoulder. In a moment he realized that they didn’t intend to fight him. They watched for the spectacle of another combat.
He spun to the side. His cloak twirled behind him. His attacker’s sword c
aught in its folds. He unlaced the neck of the cloak and drew his dagger.
Giovan Francesco Tomassoni untangled his rapier from the cloak. ‘Lucky for you, fucker, that you always wear black. They won’t even have to buy you a new suit to lay you out for your funeral.’ He lifted the point of his sword and lunged.
Caravaggio parried with his dagger, gasping as the long blade shuddered past his shoulder. A quick step and he was in close. He punched Tomassoni under the ribcage.
The hilt of the sword came down on his head. It would have cracked his skull had he not twitched out of its path. He felt his ear burning and numb and he knew the blade had caught him there. Caravaggio reeled away.
In his eagerness to strike again, Tomassoni slipped on the manure in the street and went onto his backside. The Spaniards laughed and mocked him. One of them tossed a half-eaten rum cake, catching Tomassoni in the mouth. Furious, he jumped to his feet, spitting cake and wiping crumbs from his moustache.
Caravaggio shoved past the Spaniards and rushed into a narrow side street. He dodged between the children who played naked in the muck and the sacks of produce outside the stores. He cut left towards the safety of the Stigliano Palace. He heard the shouts of Tomassoni clearing the way behind him and the voices of children and women cursing the man in return.
He stumbled through a dark, vaulted alley, striking himself against unseen objects, scattering cats and rats. In the wealthy quarters of Naples and down by the port, the sun would be bright, feeding the bay with shimmering opal and splattering the limestone villas with a glow like a young girl’s skin. But here in the Spanish Quarter the lanes were as dark as a gambling den. Abandoned by the light, Caravaggio went faster into the alleys. At the end of the street, he scrambled into a courtyard. Beneath a squat bell-tower, three high arches led into a church. He sprinted for the darkness and hid himself behind the altar of a side chapel.
When he heard footsteps through the door, he lengthened each breath to calm himself. He flexed his fingers around the hilt of his dagger.
‘You think I want to kill you, painter?’ It was as though Ranuccio’s ghost spoke in the church. The same accent, the timbre that brothers share. ‘If I intended to take your life, you’d have been dead a half dozen times already today.’
Tomassoni moved around the nave. ‘Next week, they’ll hold the parade to the cathedral. The sinners will walk on their knees behind St Gennaro’s blood, praying for it to liquefy again. You ought to join them, to atone for your sins. Ah, but that’s not the forgiveness you want, is it, you godless bastard. Well, don’t worry, I just got my pardon from the Holy Father for my part in the duel. Your cumpà Onorio is absolved of guilt, too. You’re the only one still on the run.’
Caravaggio heard the bass slap of heavy material thrown suddenly back. He’s searching for me behind the tapestries.
‘My family wants the Colonnas to pay compensation for the death of Ranuccio, because you’re their creature. I won’t kill you until we get the money. That’s not to say I can’t give you a sfregio, a scar of shame.’ A roar of frustration and effort, and a table turned over. Screaming with rage, Tomassoni called out, ‘Where are you, you bastard?’
A monk appeared at the entrance to the church. With a Spanish accent, he addressed Tomassoni. ‘You forget yourself. You’re in a house of God, my son.’
Tomassoni sheathed his sword and placed the table upright. ‘I beg your pardon, Father.’ His voice was husky and ashamed.
‘Leave a donation for St Mary Pilar and be gone.’
Caravaggio heard a coin fall into a metal plate and Tomassoni’s footsteps through the door.
The monk approached the side chapel and waited. Caravaggio came from his hiding place and lowered his eyes.
‘You’d better leave through the sacristy and go out the back of the monastery.’ The monk scratched his tonsure and put his hands inside the sleeves of his white habit. It bore the cross of the Trinitarians, whose mission was to redeem slaves taken by the Moors. ‘There’s a man outside the main doors, waiting for you.’
‘Perhaps I should just face him, after all. I’ll be all right, Father.’ Caravaggio went towards the entrance.
The monk held his arm firmly. ‘I don’t mean that thug. Another man is there, a knight.’
Caravaggio shivered. Roero had come for him.
‘This way.’ The monk led Caravaggio up a spiral staircase. As they passed along a gallery above the cloister of the monastery, he glanced out of the window. Below him, in the courtyard before the church, Roero leaned against a column in the red doublet of the knights.
Caravaggio felt a halting charge in his breast, as though a fist folded around his heart. He followed the monk to the rear of the monastery and went out into the streets.
He studied his unfinished Flagellation of Christ. Jesus wriggled before the great column to which he was bound as though merely being tickled. The two torturers, one at his side and the other at his feet, appeared no more involved in the infliction of pain than the reverent sponsor of the painting, one Signor de Franchis, who crouched on the opposite side of the suffering Saviour. Caravaggio sucked on his teeth and frowned. The painting owed too much to the work of previous artists. It was as if he were noting things down in shorthand that every art collector would already know. Things that weren’t true.
For several days, he had tried to change the tone of the canvas, barely moving from his studio. Roero and Tomassoni were both in Naples, so it was best to stay within the palace walls and work. He had succeeded only in compounding his aversion to the painting. He would have abandoned the entire piece, but there was a bare wall awaiting it in San Domenico close to the main altar and the Spanish Viceroy who ruled over Naples had ordered that he fill that space. The whole thing made him feel devoid of energy, constrained and bored. He wanted to be on his way to Rome, to Lena. His discontent made him reckless.
He tossed his palette down and shrugged his smock over his head. Pulling on his doublet, he shoved a purse inside and stuck his dagger in his belt. Then he went through the twilit streets to the Cerriglio Tavern.
‘Hello again, o’ntufato.’ Stella approached him from the table where the whores congregated. She had a graceless walk, her feet flat and splayed in her sandals and her hips stiff, so that she appeared to limp. Her arm flapped at her side as though she paddled through the air. A noblewoman’s poised step would have had a fraction of the beauty that Caravaggio found in Stella’s ungainliness.
‘I couldn’t work, couldn’t concentrate.’ Caravaggio called for a flagon of wine and something to eat.
‘Want me to take your mind off your troubles?’ She sat beside him, put her arm across his shoulders and pushed her breasts towards him.
‘Even you’d have trouble working that hard.’
She grinned. Something was wrong about her face. He stared at her mouth. Her teeth were tiny and uneven.
‘My baby teeth,’ she said. ‘They never fell out.’
The teeth of an innocent child in the painted face of a whore. He expected her mouth to emit the cry of a starving infant, but instead she gave a rough laugh and bit his neck.
The innkeeper brought a flagon of garnet-red aglianico and a plate of artichokes. He shared his meal with Stella. She raised her cup. ‘Let the blood of St Gennaro run like this wine.’
The miracle, Caravaggio remembered, the vial of dried blood from the saint’s veins which liquefies three times a year in the cathedral. He raised his glass with a doubting smile.
‘You’re sceptical, o’ntufato?’ Stella said. ‘If the blood doesn’t turn into liquid, it’s very bad for Naples. Whenever the miracle fails, Vesuvius erupts or some army invades or the crops fail or there’s an outbreak of the plague.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ Caravaggio said. ‘There’s always blood when I’m around.’
A shudder of fear trembled over her face.
He put down a few coins, touched his hand to the girl’s cheek and went to the door. ‘If the saint’s bl
ood doesn’t flow, you can take some of mine.’
The moon was the slightest of crescents. He tripped through a darkness that was close to absolute. He stopped to listen, in case he had been followed. It had been foolish to leave the safety of the palace so late in the day. He sucked the flavour of the wine from the end of his moustache and elected to make his way through the narrow streets of the Spanish Quarter. There would be fewer people and he would more easily notice if he was tracked.
He went uphill a couple of blocks and turned left towards Chiaia. A single torch burned a hundred paces ahead of him. He advanced carefully, feeling his way along the walls of the quiet buildings. In the torchlight the silhouettes of four men quivered. Angry voices resounded off the tenement façades.
As he came closer, Caravaggio saw that one of the men was bound and his shirt had been ripped away. Another man sat on his haunches by the wall, holding the torch. The other two manhandled the captive. They kicked him behind the knee and he stumbled. One of the men yanked at the rope around the prisoner’s wrists and pulled him backwards. The man cried out in a language Caravaggio didn’t recognize. It sounded guttural and breathy like the speech of the Maltese. Arabic, he thought. He’s a slave.
The man who held the rope lifted his foot and shoved it into the small of the slave’s back, pulling on the rope with one hand and gripping the man’s long dark hair with the other. In his snarl was an intensity so demonic Caravaggio’s teeth chattered with fear.
They laughed and taunted the slave. The man with the rope hauled the slave’s arms up and pushed against his back with his foot. A cry of agony echoed in the street.
Caravaggio went slowly to the corner, confused and fearful. He would have put a stop to this, but there were three of them and he had only a dagger.