by Matt Rees
The second man struck the slave a series of blows behind the neck. With each impact, the victim’s twisted torso jumped out of the darkness into the strong glow of the torch. The muscles of the slave’s chest and belly pulsed in the light.
The man who held the rope handed it to his companion. ‘My stomach’s killing me,’ he said. In the wavering shadow of a doorway, he pulled down his breeches and groaned through a noisy burst of diarrhoea.
His companion giggled and pointed to the slave. ‘You’ll be dead of the shits even before this heathen goes down to Hell.’
The man came to his feet and tied up his breeches. ‘I may shit myself to death, but I’ll be damned if I don’t outlive this bastard.’ He lifted the slave against the wall and pressed his hands to his neck.
Caravaggio felt his own throat constrict as if he were the one throttled. He pictured the Flagellation in his basement studio. What would he have done, had he been in the dungeon where the legionaries tormented Our Lord? Would he have risked himself to save Christ? Was this his moment to redeem himself?
He was about to come forward into the light of the torch, when he heard footsteps from the other corner of the street. A cloak billowed as the newcomer closed upon the group. His arm lifted, a rapier catching the orange glow of the fire. ‘Leave that poor soul, you scum.’
Caravaggio recognized the anger and the arrogant tone.
‘Get lost,’ the strangler said.
Roero cut the man’s hamstring with a neat motion of his wrist.
One of the thugs fled right away. The younger one, who held the torch, made to go. But Roero halted him, the tip of his weapon at his chest. ‘Give me that light. Pick this man up and help him to walk.’
The young man handed the torch to Roero. He looked down at the slave, slumped against the wall, and at the man who had been his tormentor, writhing in the dirt, clutching his ruined leg, breathless with pain. ‘Pick him up?’ the young man said. ‘Which one do you mean?’
‘Let me make it easier for you.’ Roero stabbed down with his rapier through the wounded strangler’s heart. ‘Clear enough now?’
Roero went towards the boulevard with the torch. The young man followed, supporting the shuffling slave.
If Roero hadn’t been distracted by the violence against the slave, it would have been Caravaggio who lay dead at the point of the knight’s sword. Relief carried him to the Stigliano Palace so fast through the dark he seemed barely to touch the mud and the cobbles. In his studio, he set to work right away.
He opened out the canvas, extending it with a fold that he had made behind the original frame to allow a little extra material in case he wanted to change his composition as he worked. He widened the frame by a foot and filled in the holes from the original tacks with stucco. It would give him room to add another torturer for Christ. He painted out the reverent, kneeling patron who had been on the right of the picture.
Caravaggio worked through the night and all of the next day. He concentrated the light on Christ’s torso, calling up the shock he had felt as each blow landed on the slave in the Spanish Quarter. On the face of the torturer at the left of Jesus, he painted the frightening viciousness of the man who had died on Roero’s sword. The second torturer shoved his leg against Christ’s calf, compelling him to take a painful, off-balance stance, as the other pulled his hair and prepared the next blow.
In the last light of the afternoon, he sat on a stool in his studio, slugging wine from a flask. There were still many touches he would need to make, but he had it now. The Flagellation was awash with cruelty and pain. It stank like a killing in a backstreet. He stared at the malicious pleasure on the face of the man at Jesus’s shoulder. He wondered if this was what people saw on his own face when rage overcame him. The thought shamed him.
9
The Denial of St Peter
Costanza brought a letter to Caravaggio in his studio. She found him reclining on his bolster, as if he were watching the oils dry on the Salome with the Head of John the Baptist he had been working on for a week. He intended to ship it to Wignacourt, hoping it would so please the Grand Master that he would order Roero back to Malta.
‘Good news from Cardinal del Monte in Rome.’ Costanza tried to read Caravaggio’s expression in the half-light. She found apprehension there, pure and animal. ‘You’re to be pardoned.’
He blew out his cheeks as though he had feared to breathe until this message arrived.
‘The cardinal writes that Scipione is to pay off the Tomassonis. In return, they won’t seek your life.’
He took Costanza’s hands and kissed them.
She felt the pressure of his grip as if he had touched her all over. She put her palm to his beard. ‘You’re not in Rome yet, Michele.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ he said. He kissed her hand once more and ran up the steps to find someone who would be happy for him.
In the doorway of the Cerriglio Tavern, he touched his fingers to del Monte’s letter tucked inside his doublet. He went through the first room and under the arch to the inner chamber of the inn, where distinguished people came in by a side door to avoid being seen entering such a low place. He went straight out to the rear courtyard whose walls were decorated with proverbs celebrating the pleasures of food and wine. Stella sat at the edge of the small fountain, bleaching her hair in the sun. Mahogany highlights shone in the long russet strands spread over the brim of her wide, crownless hat. She saw the joy on his face. ‘O’ntufato,’ she said, ‘I’m going to have to find a different nickname for you.’
Stella opened the shutter. The sun lanced through Caravaggio’s eyeballs into the pulsating dryness in his head. He rolled onto his side in the bed, stifling a retch.
Stella was already in her purple gown. ‘I’ll go and tell Ugo to put aside a focaccia for you. It’ll calm your stomach.’
He frowned at her. She shook her head. Her smile was touched with bitterness. ‘If I had a ducat for every time I’ve seen that nervous “What did I do last night?” look on a man’s face, I’d have a dowry big enough to make me a duchess.’
‘I don’t see you as new nobility. You’re more the type to endow a convent.’
‘You’re still sarcastic. So you can’t be too hungover. I see you’re wondering, so let me fill you in: you didn’t get into any fights last night and you fell asleep while I was undressing. I couldn’t wake you no matter what I did. It was as though you hadn’t slept deeply in years.’
He would have told her it was true, but he couldn’t find the spit to lubricate his tongue.
‘Come down when you’re ready to eat.’ She shut the door.
After he had dressed, his sluggishness left him in a moment and he was alert. Del Monte’s letter was missing. He went around the room, wrenching Stella’s few items of furniture across the floor, turning over the dresses in her trunk. It wasn’t there. His nausea made him dizzy. He had to get some food, to settle himself, so he could think straight enough to find the letter. He went down to eat.
The focaccia tasted gummy and bitter. He sat back to chew it and hit his head against a big round of cheese, hung up to mature. The cook noticed his frown. He rolled out another ball of dough, sprinkled it with rosemary and laid it in the oven. ‘Hard to get it down, right?’
Caravaggio rubbed his head and stared accusingly at the cheese. ‘What’s wrong with the focaccia, Ugo?’
‘The sirocco blew up during the night. I could tell as soon as I awoke. It makes me feel a pressure in my ears. Drives me crazy. But it isn’t only people who get irritable when the damp wind comes. It changes the way the ingredients in the focaccia react with each other.’
‘You’re kidding?’
‘It’s true. Watch out today, Michele. Everyone misbehaves when the sirocco comes to Naples – even my dough.’
Caravaggio drank a cup of wine and went out onto the slope in front of the inn. The clouds carried in by the sirocco seemed to press the sun down low. It glared off the roofs and the damp cobbles. He bl
inked and tried to get to the shaded side of the street.
In the impenetrable Neapolitan dialect, every voice around him sounded like a threat. He was suddenly aware of his vulnerability.
The silhouette of a man approached him from his right. The man flicked his fingers off the tip of his chin. Caravaggio went for his dagger, but someone who had come up on his left grabbed his hand.
Two other men held him from behind. Their breath strained as he struggled. The sun dazzled him.
Something cold drew down his right cheek. A glint of sunlight caught the edge of a dagger. He had been cut. The men who held him kicked at his legs. When he dropped, they thrust their knees into his ribs, laughing quietly.
Another blow to his face. He didn’t see the weapon, but he knew the wound was deeper. It rang through his skull. The blustery air entered the gash and froze the bone.
He remembered the letter, the freedom that was soon to be his. He searched for Roero or for Tomassoni – whichever of them led this attack. Get him and the others will fade away. The glare blinded him. He butted the man directly before him. The man went down, falling into the low shadows where Caravaggio could make out his features. Giovan Francesco Tomassoni snarled as he came to his feet, the point of his dagger at Caravaggio’s gullet.
A terracotta chamberpot struck Tomassoni full in the face. The pot smashed to the ground and Tomassoni dropped back, out cold. The other men let go their hold and dragged Tomassoni away. They cursed at someone, though it wasn’t Caravaggio.
‘O’ntufato, you forgot your letter.’ Stella leaned from her window on the upper floor of the Cerriglio with a parchment in her hand. ‘Why did you drop it in my pisspot, anyway?’
Caravaggio sat in the street, wondering if he was dying. The girl came down to him. She pressed a cloth against the wound in his cheek.
‘How bad is it?’ he asked.
She hissed and grimaced.
‘Bad enough to shut even your mouth, eh?’
‘Let’s just say, you’ve painted your last self-portrait,’ she said. ‘Unless you really want to turn people’s stomachs.’
Cardinal Del Monte’s hairline had receded beneath his beret since Caravaggio had left Rome. Good living coloured his face almost to the shade of his scarlet robes. When he stepped from his carriage outside the Prince of Stigliano’s palace, he saw the wounds beneath the painter’s right eye and turned away with a wince.
They climbed the steep steps to the Church of San Domenico, guarded by a half dozen men in the Stigliano livery. Costanza had forced them to take bodyguards from among the palace grooms who had been cutting the grass in the gardens to sell for hay. She was sure Tomassoni would attack again.
‘In Rome, it was reported that you were dead.’ Del Monte paused outside the door of the church to recover his breath from the climb.
Caravaggio scanned the piazza, the palaces of the Dukes of Velleti and Casacalenda and of the Prince of San Severo. He’s watching for Tomassoni, del Monte thought. Or someone else, for all I know. He never was short of enemies.
‘Did they send you to Naples to work a miracle and bring me back to life?’ Caravaggio blinked, as if his eye were obstructed by some detritus.
‘No one is likely to mistake me for the vehicle of Our Lord’s wonders.’ Del Monte went into the church and crossed the nave to a chapel beside the main altar. He stood before The Flagellation, his fingers in his white beard and his weight on one hip. ‘The thought that you might be dead caused the Cardinal-Nephew to make haste, finally. As Scipione sees it, this sort of art –’ he held out his palm towards the tormented Christ ‘– ought to be in Rome, not in Naples. Actually it ought to be in his personal gallery, not in a church.’
‘Does Lena think I’m dead, too?’
Del Monte felt himself taken up into the canvas. The life it depicted was so precarious that he sensed Caravaggio’s desperation even before the man stepped towards him and took his arm in an insistent grip.
‘Does she believe me dead?’
Del Monte hesitated. He was unwilling to admit that he had concerned himself with a maid who washed the floors of his palace and dusted his picture frames. She was Caravaggio’s woman, which made her someone whom he reckoned into his plans, but his dignity prevented him from further contact. ‘I sent her a message that I’d travel to Naples to investigate.’
‘I made a mistake. I should never have left Rome. She’s not in good health – she needs me. Take me back there, to Rome.’ Caravaggio laid his fingertips on the wound across his cheek. ‘Surely you see what’ll become of me here.’
‘If it was only your soul that was required to do penance, I might grant you an indulgence from the Holy Father and all your sins would be paid. But, as you point out, it’s also your body that’s in jeopardy.’ Del Monte extended a finger towards the livid scar below Caravaggio’s eye. ‘Even a document from the Holy Father is no amulet against harm, unless all the political arrangements have been well made.’
Caravaggio’s eye wavered, drifting to the side as though the dagger blows to his face had damaged some controlling nerve inside the socket. He cursed and cupped his hand over it.
Del Monte recalled the early days of Caravaggio’s triumph after the Matthew canvases at the Church of San Luigi. The painter’s rages had been filled with pride and contempt, but del Monte had forgiven these flaws. He had known them to be a screen for fear and loneliness. Now his protégé was stripped even of these defences. Caravaggio’s arrogance had been voided, as though his years on the run had exhausted the gland in which it was produced and siphoned it away.
The cardinal examined the brushstrokes in Christ’s calf, where the muscle strained as the foot twisted. ‘It’s a shame we can’t just take this Flagellation back for Scipione.’
‘Take me instead.’
‘Some excellent art would be better received – as an appetizer, if you like. You can be the main course.’
‘Then I’ve got something for him.’
They went back to the Stigliano Palace. In the studio, Caravaggio pulled away the cloth that covered a painting of a bald, bearded man, a woman and a soldier. The man turned his hands to his chest and pulled in his chin, denying some accusation. ‘St Peter.’
Del Monte went close to the canvas. He glanced sidelong at Caravaggio. The man makes so many bad decisions, he thought. How can he produce such judicious art, such insight into the way people are, and yet not be a saint? ‘It’s so immediate, Michele.’ He let his hands follow the lines of the brush like a musician conducting an ensemble. ‘Peter almost looks as you might, when you’re an old man.’
‘I hope to live so long.’
Michele gave his own face to Peter at the moment of his guilty denial of Christ, del Monte thought. The saint pointed at his heart to show sincerity, but it was the lying manoeuvre of a desperate man. In his expression, del Monte saw that he was guilt-ridden. His eyes didn’t quite rest on the face of the soldier interrogating him. They were distant, looking over the soldier’s shoulder.
Del Monte turned to Caravaggio in surprise. He’s ashamed of himself. ‘St Peter overcame his guilt. Remember that, Michele. He went on to found the Church in Rome.’
‘Where he met his death.’
In the dark studio, Caravaggio’s face was shadowed. His wounds marked him as an insulted man. They glinted like silver highlights on black cloth.
The cardinal beckoned to his page and ordered him to roll up the St Peter. ‘I’ll take this to Scipione when I leave Naples. Write me a letter for him now. Promise him another three canvases like this. He’ll be so relieved that you’re alive, he’ll want you back in Rome right away.’
‘What about Fabrizio? The Marchesa’s son, in jail in Malta.’
Del Monte saw the guilt in Caravaggio’s face, just as he had read it in the depiction of St Peter. Is it only the loyalty of a family retainer that makes him speak up for this Colonna? There’s something else . . . ‘Unfortunately for Don Fabrizio, his talents are of a less decorati
ve nature than yours. But I’ll do what I can.’
‘He saved me in Malta.’
Del Monte adjusted his beret. ‘Let’s just write the letter now.’
Caravaggio knelt beside a linen trunk for a desk. He scribbled out the letter as del Monte dictated. The pageboy removed the tacks from the edge of the St Peter. When the boy started to roll it, Caravaggio looked up. ‘Not that way,’ he shouted, ‘God damn it.’
The page dropped the canvas.
‘Roll it with the paint outwards.’ Caravaggio’s voice was savage. ‘If you roll it with the paint in, it’ll compress the oils and damage the work.’
Del Monte laid a gentle hand on the page’s shoulder and spoke the final line of the letter. ‘Your most humble, devoted and obliged servant and creature, Michelangelo Merisi of Caravaggio. Can you put your name to those words?’
Caravaggio glanced in apology at the boy. ‘Humble, devoted and obliged,’ he said, as he dipped the quill again. ‘Your creature.’
Del Monte drew a paper from his sleeve. It was bound with a red twine and sealed with the imprint of his ring. He handed it to Caravaggio. ‘Here’s your safe-conduct to Rome. I’m going to leave it here with you. It’ll get you through the port inspection when you arrive. Don’t use it until I tell you it’s all right to return.’
Caravaggio balanced the document flat in his hands, his features amazed and wary. To del Monte his touch against the paper seemed as delicate as a man caressing his lover’s face.
10
David with the Head of Goliath
Caravaggio pulled away as Costanza touched his wounds with the cloth. Tomassoni’s dagger still hummed inside his head. But I’ve beaten its summons, he thought. He had the letter of safe passage from del Monte. He would return soon to Rome and to the one woman for whom it was worth living. He had signed his name to a humiliating letter for Scipione, but it would merit the humbling if it brought him to Lena. Your creature. He was tired of life in the basement of Costanza’s cousin.