The Passion of Artemisia

by Susan Vreeland

  “Cara, the pleasure in painting is that hurting sense that you’re not getting it right, and so you try something else, and you try and you try until you get it. It may not be perfect, but it’s comfortingly better than when you started, and when that happens, it’s one of the grandest feelings in the world, because it’s earned.”

  Her expression turned pitiful, and her eyes were moist. Maybe she needed to stop for a while. I set down my brush and read the letter to her.

  “Grandpa!” she cried. The years dropped away. She grabbed the letter like a greedy child. “That letter you burned, that was from him too, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  She glared at me. “Why didn’t you show me? He says he’s dying.”

  “He didn’t say that in the first one.”

  “Still, you had no right not to show me.”

  “What are we to do? Give up everything we’ve worked for? What about Andrea? Leave right now when—”

  Palmira’s hands flew up to her mouth. Alarm shot through her dark eyes.

  “—when you’re so happy? I wouldn’t do that to you.” I laid my hand on hers.

  “There’s another side to your grandfather you don’t know. I thought maybe I’d never have to tell you. He isn’t thinking of us in that letter. He only thinks of himself.”

  Palmira’s face clouded. She had happy times with him in Genoa. “How can you say that?”

  I spoke softly, evenly, factually. “He agreed to pardon my rapist because he needed him. They became friends again. How do you think that made me feel?”

  She said nothing.

  “Now that you’re old enough to understand, I’ll tell you something else. When I was your age midwives examined my pudenda right in court and he let it happen—sat there and watched right along with strangers who came for entertainment, because he wanted a painting back. He was holding out for its return. Otherwise he would have stopped the trial sooner.”

  She said nothing.

  “Is this the man we’re going to give up everything for?”

  Nothing. She didn’t ask a question, didn’t even tighten her brow. Not a single sound or gesture.

  I scraped back my chair and stood up, still waiting for her to say something. I took the letter back from her, went into the other room and poured a glass of wine, sat there alone and drank it all, quickly, three gulps. My cup of bitterness. I had a daughter with no feeling for others.

  The letters and numbers of the date, 24 December, 163–, were smeared and crowded together at the right edge of the paper so that I could not read the last figure. That was a bad sign for a painter who ought to plan spacing better. There was something pitiful about those disfigured numbers.

  I read it again. I am lonely. I am dying. Forgive a foolish old man. Help me finish. Loneliness I understood. Dying I did not. Though I had painted it, and imagined it, I did not know it. Help him put a finish to what? It couldn’t just be the ceiling fresco.

  He wanted me there to help him die. It was permissible somehow for him, for anyone, to long to die in the presence of love, such as it was, such as he hoped it to be. I would want the same thing, to die in a daughter’s arms, or a lover’s. If a stranger were to be with me, that might be enough, if only for that person to hold Michelangelo’s brush and stroke my temples with its softness, to remind me that one man thought me worthy of such a gift. We prepare ourselves for death by treasuring such moments when we feel that even the least of us has been necessary for the full expression of God. Maybe Father needed someone to whisper that in his ear, in Italian.

  Let that man with the strange name, Ini-something, whisper it.

  I went back into the main room. “Let’s get back to work,” I said as gently as I could. I picked up my brush and tried to concentrate and let her work out her painting problems on her own. In a little while, Palmira slammed her brush down onto the table between us. I jumped at the noise.

  “I can’t do this. It’s too hard,” she cried.

  I looked at her Bathsheba. The proportions were right but the figure was wooden. Bathsheba’s gesture was meaningless. Palmira had been working on her face, but it conveyed nothing. My own daughter, and she had no gift for expression.

  “You need to convey her emotion by defining the shape of her cheek with—”

  “Lights and darks.” Mockery tinged her voice. She gave me a look I’d seen a thousand times—sharp, narrowed eyes, hardened jaw, throat stretched taut—the look I’d hoped time and teaching would dispel.

  “Well, then, you already know this.”

  “Yes, but I can’t do it. Not like you can.”

  “You will.”

  “When? When I’m thirty? I don’t want to be married to painting like you are.”

  “Think what you just said!” My voice turned shrill.

  She looked sheepishly at the bottom edge of her painting.

  “All right. Decide first what you want her face to convey, and then we’ll find a way to express it. You know the story. What kind of woman was she, displaying her voluptuous body to David? What has she just been thinking?”

  “I don’t know!” Her hands flew up like Cesare Gentile’s. “I can’t make up something like you can. I don’t care.”

  “Enough. You don’t care enough. But to be a painter, you’ve got to care for people, and for their feelings. You’ve got to understand human feelings in order to convey them. And—you—don’t.” I snapped my brush at her once for each of the last three words.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I tell you about the humiliation and pain of my life and you say nothing. Nothing! You have no sense for other people, for their pain or the drama of their lives.”

  “That’s different. It’s people in paintings I don’t care about.”

  “People are people whether they breathe now in front of you or lived a long time ago. You’ve got to care for each person you paint as if she were real, as if getting her expression right and true in that painting is the most important thing in the world at that moment. If you can’t care for a real person standing before you, then how can—”

  “Who said I don’t care?”

  “Your silence said it. Just now. When I told you what they did to me in court, what your grandfather let them do. It’s not that I want to open old wounds. That’s ancient history for me. I’m tired of thinking about it. But for you, you just learned this and yet you’ve said nothing.”

  “What am I supposed to say?”

  “Say what you feel.”

  For a moment, we just stared at each other, numb. I tried to swallow, but my throat seemed filled with sand.

  “See? You don’t show any feelings with words or with paint. But an artist’s feeling is the white-hot core of painting. Do you want to be limited forever like Agostino? He can’t paint people because he has no heart. That’s why he’ll never last. What’s inside you? A heart, or only dresses and dreams? What is a heart but the working of the imagination in behalf of another person? Think. What white-hot passion is going to make Bathsheba betray her husband? Feel it yourself.” I touched her belly. “Right there. What passion is burning in you for Andrea? You’ve got to use your own emotions and paint with your own blood if need be in order to discover and prove the truth of your vision.”

  “That’s crazy. No one would do that.”

  “Renata would!” I snapped. “She would have done anything to paint well.”

  “Renata was a little whore. Pleading ‘take me with you,’ like a baby as we left the house.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. Desperation. You’ve got to want it enough that the thought of it being taken from you would make you a little crazy. I should have brought her with us. She’d never give up, whining that it was hard. Of course it’s hard. If it weren’t hard every washerwoman would be painting. But they wouldn’t paint with their own hands bleeding onto the canvas. Like I did!”

  “When? You never did that!”

  I threw down my brush and splaye
d my fingers right in front of her eyes. “Take a good look, Palmira. A nice—long—look.” I said it slowly, separating the words. “Harder to look at than my nakedness now, isn’t it? What do you see?”

  “Lines.”

  “Yes, well, use your puny imagination and tell me what they’re from.”

  “You always told me they were age lines.” Her voice quavered.

  “Because I didn’t want you to see the ugliness in the world. That was my mistake. These are not age lines, Palmira. I got them when I was your age.”

  I moved toward her, bending forward, one slow step at a time, my hands still thrust in her face. She backed away.

  “They’re torture lines, scars from wounds inflicted in court the day a rapist called me a whore. So don’t you ever use that word lightly.”

  I grabbed her by the elbow and marched her over to stand in front of my Judith Slaying Holofernes. “That’s my blood on that mattress, and it’s my pain that started this career that kept you in bread and ball gowns, so don’t you dare say it’s crazy.”

  I stormed outside and slammed the door. Let her wonder whether I’d come back. Her life had been too easy, and in an easy life, the imagination doesn’t grow.

  I strode down the lane ripping leaves off bushes. Palmira. Oh, Palmira. What mistake did I commit in raising you that made you so unfeeling? Not even a murmur of condolence. Not a touch of your hand to mine. Not a ripple of compassion across your features.

  I remembered when I’d given her Michelangelo’s brush on her last birthday, telling her that of all the things I owned, that brush was the most valuable to me. She’d turned it over, stroked her wrist with the brush hairs, pretended she was painting with it, and then had passed it back to me saying, “You keep it, Mother.” I thought at the time that it was reverence that made her give it back to me. No. That wasn’t it at all. She had no feeling for the gift.

  Walking seemed my only comfort. Winter dusk came early, turning the houses inward. I came to the little rise where I knew I’d see a sliver of bay, and stopped to slow down my breathing.

  No, Palmira’s life wasn’t easy. That wasn’t completely right. She saw how the rich live and then went to bed cold. Four times she’d been uprooted. I swore I would not do that to her again. Now that she knew my whole history, would she forgive me for denying her a father for the sake of art? Or, in her mind, was the sacrifice I imposed on her too great? Why was it that art had to cost so much to achieve?

  I had to accept that the stories behind my paintings meant nothing to Palmira even though to me, those women were as real as sisters. At least there were some patrons in the world intrigued by a woman artist painting women. But if my own daughter didn’t care about the women I painted, who, beyond those few patrons, would? Down the sweep of years and centuries, would what I’d done matter? I had to believe that there was a purpose in painting every Bathsheba, every Judith, Lucrezia, Susanna. Not thinking so would mean a lifetime of futile work.

  I watched the oval moon rise over the bay, lighting a wavy swath of liquid pewter just beneath it. It lacked luster. Galileo’s night pearl, dull and flat as a dirty plate. Had he felt his work was futile when he had to recant his beliefs?

  I waited until I felt calm, and then I opened the door quietly. Palmira was staring at the tile floor, a piece of bread in her hand. Some cheese and two slices of sausage were left on a plate. She pushed the plate toward me. I poured more wine, took some cheese, and sat down.

  I stared into the ruby liquid. “What is it that you really want?” My voice sounded hollow.

  “I want to marry Andrea.”

  I tore off a piece of bread and sopped it in olive oil. “More than anything else in the world? It must be that, you know.”

  She nodded. Her rosy hands rested in her lap, palms up, curled like shells. They were, as yet, unmarked by work or pain.

  “Not just the idea of being married, any more than the idea of being a painter.”

  “I know, I know.” She sighed loudly, annoyed. “I want to be really married. To a man, not a job.”

  I couldn’t respond to that or we’d start all over again.

  “Andrea wants to, too. He told me so at the ball.” She spoke in the same petulant voice I remembered from our years in Florence.

  I thought of how Pietro and I had carried her as a young child into the great churches and galleries of the city. How we had breathed as one when we held her out to the bishop in the Baptistry. How the beauty of Pietro’s body had made me want love again. And how Palmira must be longing for the same. How could I expect her to choose my passion over hers? She had a chance for what I’d longed for—to marry out of love.

  “All I want is for you to want something so deeply you ache for it as I ache to paint well.” I took a sip of wine and smiled at her. “I will make inquiries.”

  “You will?”

  “Negotiations don’t usually start with the bride’s family, but Francesco will help us. Andrea’s father is a courtier to the countess. She owes me a favor, Francesco says. He’ll know what to say to make her think it’s her idea.”

  Palmira flung herself at me and hugged me on her knees.

  “That’s only part of it. There’s the issue of the dowry.”

  She let go and leaned back on her heels.

  “I’ll have to work a long time before I’ll have the money Andrea’s family expects,” I said. “You’ll have to work too. It might be easier for you when you’re working for a goal that’s important to you. You’re not too young to sell that Bathsheba, so tomorrow we’ll both get an early start.”

  We drank from the same glass and let the idea settle. I noticed Father’s letter on the table. I read it again. I could go to England alone, after the wedding, if there was one. It might be my only chance to . . . to do what? I didn’t know.

  I passed her the letter. “What do you think I should do about this?”

  “I think you should go.”

  “Disrupt my whole life here for him?”

  “Not for him. For you. To tell him he was selfish. Did he ever take responsibility for what they did to your hands? Or for humiliating you? Did he ever say he was sorry?”

  Surprised, I inhaled slowly and deeply, looking at the word Papa. “No,” I whispered.

  “You should go.”

  “It will only make your dowry even smaller. Your trousseau too.”

  “I know.”

  “That means fewer linens, dresses, night shifts. A simpler wedding.”

  “You should go.”

  25

  Palmira

  On Palmira’s wedding morning, I pinned a gardenia in her hair, and then stepped back to look at her. Delia had made a pale lavender overskirt of the sheerest silk I’d ever seen which floated over Palmira’s blue ball gown and trailed on the floor in the back as lightly as froth. Delia had replaced the white bows with lavender ones, and at one place in the front she had gathered up the overskirt to show the blue underneath matching her bodice.

  “The colors are lovely. You look like dawn in Heaven.”

  “Do you think Andrea will think so?”

  “Everyone will. I wish Pietro could see you. He’d be in awe, and very happy. And Father. He’d be so proud.”

  “Don’t get soft-hearted, Mother. You’re supposed to tell him I think he was selfish.”

  “A person isn’t all good or all bad, Palmira. He would still love to be here. Let’s have only happy thoughts today, so you’ll remember your day of days untarnished.”

  I sat on the edge of my bed and lifted the lid of my mother’s wooden box where I kept my few important mementos—her bloodstone hair ornament, Galileo’s letters, precious little notes from Palmira from when she was learning to write. Under the bottom one, there was the small drawstring bag. I held it to my nose. Oregano. Faint but unmistakable. They hadn’t been worn since Umiliana had posed for the Magdalen. That was good because Umiliana was loving. And Graziela’s love for her husband had surely erased any stigma of the imp
erfect pearls given to her as false love tokens.

  “Come here, cara.”

  She spread out her skirt as she sat next to me on the bed. “What, Mama?”

  I chuckled. “You haven’t called me Mama for years.” She blinked at me, smiling with high expectations of what lay ahead for her. “Open your hand.”

  She held her palms up.

  I let the little bag drop. She felt with her thumbs. Her eyes opened wide and she recognized the bag. “Mama! Really?”

  “Untie the string.”

  She let the earrings tumble out into her palm, and sighed at their beauty. She turned each one over, looking at their humps and hollows, and then held them up to dangle.

  “Put them on. They were Graziela’s, remember?”

  “She wants me to wear them?”

  I turned my face away so she would not detect the lie. “To have them.”

  “Truly?”

  “I already told Francesco to add them to your trousseau inventory. Put them on.” I brought over my table mirror. “See? They look beautiful on you.”

  She looked at herself, first one side and then the other.

  “Graziela would be so happy to see them on you today. She was married once too.”

  Palmira’s hands fell to her lap. “I didn’t know that.”

  “The earrings were a gift from her husband, a man named Marcello. Graziela . . .” I caught myself. I couldn’t tell her their story today, even as gentle advice to be wary. Only happy thoughts today. Besides, if Palmira couldn’t feel Graziela’s sorrow, that would be more than I could bear.

  “Graziela . . . what?”

  “Graziela has told me many things over the years, but of all that she told me, I want you to promise you will remember these words: Do not believe in illusion.”

  Waiting for Don Francesco to escort Palmira down the nave, I sat in the first pew looking at the small arrangement of red roses on the altar. The wedding wasn’t as lavish as Palmira had dreamed about ever since she was a little girl, but it was certainly grand compared to mine, stark and furtive in a nearly empty church. I looked behind me and smiled at the people I’d invited—a few artists, people for whom I had painted, my apothecary, my joiner, and Delia—but my contribution to the congregation was modest. I so wished Graziela and Paola could have been here.