A Name in Blood (11 page)

Onorio held up his hand to silence Mario. The little Sicilian was always heedless of the emotions of those around him. He watched the candle’s trembling touch over Caravaggio’s
immobile features.
His compassion endures even after a decade and a half in the Evil Garden
, he thought.
Michele can’t hide it from me, though the rest of Rome thinks he’s the
Devil himself.

Caravaggio rubbed his face and moaned like a man waking from sleep. Then he looked with disgust around the inn.

Onorio watched his friend close himself up. Still, the girl’s death had broken him open for just a moment and some softness had leaked out.
She meant that much to him. But he’ll
have to block it out now. If you can’t do that, you have to get out of the Evil Garden.
‘This quarter is crawling with whores who’ll pose for you,’ he said. ‘Find
another one, Michele. One with more sense, this time.’

‘May God bless her. He has taken her to His care.’

‘It’s only in stories that whores are redeemed, Michele.’

‘What about me? How am
I
to be redeemed?’

Mario giggled, but Onorio’s response was quick and wondering. ‘Your painting, Michele. Your painting is from God, and
it
will redeem you.’

Caravaggio’s eyes fixed on him. Onorio wondered at what he had said.
Can painting save a soul? Can the churches I design bring salvation? When an artist draws, does he create something
holy in his own mind?
Caravaggio returned the smile.
He’s pondering the same thing.

‘If some day I make just one painting that’s true,’ Caravaggio said, ‘maybe then God will take my soul and it’ll be clean. But how will I know when I paint that
picture?’

Onorio had an answer, and he was puzzled that it had come to him. ‘You’ll know. You’ll
feel
clean. Like you’ve been washed.’

Caravaggio rose. He put his hand on Onorio’s head. Then he went to the door.

He took some raw sienna and thinned it with linseed oil. Cecco grumbled at the light. ‘It’s the middle of the night, Maestro.’ The boy turned onto his side
and pulled the blanket over his pale back. With delicate strokes, Caravaggio laid a new shadow over Prudenza’s face.
They’ll wonder who you were
, he had said to her, when
she’d asked why he had obscured her features.
But I’ll know. I see through all this paint. I see what’s underneath. I see you.

He laid down his brush.

3

T
he Madonna of Loreto

In the weeks after Prudenza’s murder, Caravaggio withdrew from the whores in the taverns, even from his friends.

Impatient with this rupture, Onorio came to his house. ‘You need to get out. You need a woman,’ he said. ‘Much as it might go against the grain for me to say this, perhaps you
ought to try a girl who doesn’t sell it.’

‘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.’

Caravaggio 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.