A Name in Blood (12 page)

He waited for more swords to be drawn, but as far as he could tell the fighting was with fists, bottles and stools from the nearest tavern. Then he saw steel flash between the bodies of the men
before him. Onorio came to his side with a broad smile and his teeth outlined in blood.

‘Ranuccio gave me a good one right in the mouth.’ Onorio was as exhilarated as a child wrestling with his father. ‘But I cut him up a bit.’ He raised his dagger. They
left the mêlée and rested against the massive bowl of the Fountain of Triton. Onorio dabbed at his mouth with a white handkerchief and spat blood into the pool.

‘You must be cut inside your cheek,’ Caravaggio said.

Within a few minutes, the fight broke up. Ranuccio’s brothers led him away from the brawl. He was bleeding from his hand, his wound wrapped in the tail of his shirt. He grinned at the
blood on Onorio’s handkerchief. Ranuccio pointed his injured hand at Caravaggio and made some joke to his companions. They smirked and trotted past the Church of San Giacomo. Caravaggio
thought that if Ranuccio had seen his dead body propped against the fountain, he would only have laughed harder.

An usher showed Caravaggio along the broad, high corridor of the Quirinale Palace towards Scipione’s chambers. The scent of damp plaster was on the air.

‘That smell . . .’

They came to an open double door. ‘Maestro Reni from Bologna has been frescoing the Chapel of the Annunciation. That’s what you can smell.’

The fresco was almost complete. A couple of fat cherubs swung a censer. The Virgin lay on her bed, pregnant. Joseph was holding off some bearded fellows at the door. Everything was done in
pastel shades like a washed-out Raphael. Caravaggio grimaced. He was sure everyone would love it.

The usher went to the first pew. Scipione was on his knees in prayer. He rose and came towards Caravaggio swinging his rosary. The artist bowed low. Scipione tugged his hand away almost before
the kiss. His cheeks were flushed with wine.

The Cardinal-Nephew led Caravaggio out of the chapel, his hand on his shoulder. It was the barest of touches and yet it seemed to reach deep beneath the skin, like an unwelcome caress.
‘Keep away from the Tomassonis, Maestro Caravaggio.’

‘Most Reverend Lord?’

‘They’re powerful in their part of town. That makes them very useful to me. There’s some dispute, I gather, between Signor Ranuccio Tomassoni and you.’

‘Sire, it’s of no importance. A matter of—’

‘Ten
scudi
. I know. But blood has been drawn now too – at the Piazza Navona.’

Caravaggio was about to say that it had not been him who cut Ranuccio, but he was reluctant either to make excuses or to admit that he had been present at the brawl in the piazza.

‘It seems unlikely that you and Ranuccio will conclude such a conflict with a polite apology. I wish for you to cease this dispute.’

‘Will Ranuccio . . . ?’

‘This shall be communicated to Signor Ranuccio too.’ Scipione crossed to the window overlooking the courtyard of the papal palace. ‘You’ll have to go into hiding. The
police must make a show of arresting those involved in the fight. But only when you finish the portrait of the Holy Father. After that, I wish for some frescos in my new palace, Maestro – for
the loggia outside.’

A fresco? He might as well ask me to sew him a nice scarf or give him a haircut
. ‘Why don’t you ask Maestro Reni to do it?’ he said, imparting as much scorn as he might
to the artist’s title.

‘I might ask him, of course. He didn’t do badly with this chapel. And I haven’t asked
you
to do it yet. But why not?’

‘I work in oils.’

‘Fresco is the greatest test of an artist’s skills. You have to complete the painting before the plaster dries on the walls. There’s no time for corrections or touch-ups.
Isn’t that true?’

‘In a fresco, one can’t control the light.’ As he talked about his work, Caravaggio’s resentment of the banal daubings in the chapel left him and he became expansive.
‘No doubt your loggia is beautiful, Your Illustriousness. The sunlight streams over it all day.’

‘It does.’

‘That’s why it’s so pleasurable for you to be there.’

‘Quite so.’

‘My paintings are made with a single source of light. To create shadows that bring out the features of my models. In so doing I illustrate their emotions.’ He held his hands in front
of Scipione’s face as though they carried the beam of a lantern. The cardinal’s eyes followed his fingers. ‘If the light came from here, I would see a different Cardinal-Nephew
than if I were to put the source of light down here.’

Scipione nodded, understanding.
He doesn’t bother to argue that it would only be a trick of the light
, Caravaggio thought
. He knows that he wears many faces, and they’d all
be worth a portrait.

Caravaggio gestured at the sunny courtyard. ‘In the loggia, all faces are flat and dull, because the light is uniform. If I look at you this way, you’re just the same as if I stand
over here. What am I to search for as an artist when every perspective is identical? How can I show that what
I
see is different, when it isn’t? The sun gives life to everything, but
not to painting.’

He caught himself and frowned.
What is it that
does
give life to painting? Is it only the light?
Lena’s face came to him and he smiled.

Scipione patted at Caravaggio’s wrist. ‘That’s how you capture the character of a man?’

Caravaggio shrugged. ‘When a painter looks at a man, the man thinks, “How will he make me look? Will I recognize myself? What if he sees me as I really am?” The painter’s
eye draws out every man’s guilt. That’s why it’s hard to paint a saint from life.’

‘Very hard, indeed. But what if the guilt is the painter’s?’

Caravaggio’s easy feeling left him. He shuddered and looked at his hands. ‘Then the painting would show what even the artist didn’t know.’

Lena saw him as she left the Thursday meat market behind the Madama. He kept to the shadows under the wall of the palace as if he wished not to be noticed. She came to his side
and caught his arm.

‘I’m waiting to model for you, Maestro Caravaggio.’ Her voice was light and playful. She set her basket against her hip. The tripes packed inside it slopped towards her.

‘I’m still painting the Holy Father,’ Caravaggio said. ‘I’ll come to you as soon as I need a—’

She wondered that he stuttered before her. He didn’t seem like the kind.
Is he having second thoughts about revealing himself to me?
she thought.

‘As soon as I need a—’ he repeated.

‘A Virgin,’ she said.

He smiled with an embarassed shrug.

‘I’m going the same way as you, it seems,’ she said. ‘Will you accompany me?’ She started to walk and he caught up beside her.

She looked at him sidelong and pursed her lips, pretending to be affronted. ‘Is it that you don’t wish to paint me anymore?’

He shook his head, reached for her basket. ‘Let me take that.’

‘It’s not heavy.’

‘Really, give it to me.’

His hand on her wrist, he took the basket. He examined her fingers. She wondered if he was thinking about the gloves he had bought her. ‘I don’t wear them when I’m
working.’

He didn’t register that she had spoken. He rubbed his thumb against her knuckles.

‘My hands
do
get dirty, don’t they? Look at them now. They’re an awful state,’ she said. ‘This morning I was cleaning the grooms’ waiting rooms at the
palace. A big mess those gentlemen make.’

His touch was very hot. He let her go.

They went into the Via della Scrofa. She took longer strides as the market crowd thinned, holding her hands before her belly and swinging her shoulders.
A man who spends his days with the
Pope himself
, she thought,
walking beside me.
She glanced at his features. They seemed feverish, as if he actually did see her already as the Virgin and were wrestling with the presence
of God.
Perhaps you have to be a bit odd to do what he does. The Pope might even expect it. If a man arrived to paint him wearing stockings without holes in them and a jacket that wasn’t
spattered with oil paint, the Holy Father might throw him out as an impostor.

‘You have some pigment on your chin.’ She pinched a lock of his black beard between her index finger and thumb. She ran her fingers to the end of the beard, but only yellowed the
entire strand with the oils. ‘It hasn’t come out.’

‘It won’t. If you get oils in your hair or on your skin, you might as well leave it there. You can try to clean it, but you’ll just spread it around and rub it in.’

‘I bet I could get you clean.’ Her daring made him laugh.
With relief
, she thought,
as much as with amusement.
‘You didn’t change your mind? About me
modelling?’

He shook his head and sucked in his lips. ‘Lena, I may not be able to see you for a while. I have to hide. The police . . .’ She waited for him to look at her, preparing a coquettish
smile to encourage him. But he stared at the dirt where his feet fell.

‘Even so, I’ve already seen you in the pose in which I’ll paint you, as soon as I’m free again.’ He closed his eyes. ‘I’ve seen you as the Virgin.
Standing at your door with Domenico. And then also when you were playing with him, walking his feet on yours.’

‘That sounds like me, not the Virgin.’

He whispered, ‘You’ll see. There’s no difference.’

He’s not like the others in the Evil Garden
.
He’s not just after my honour.
Understanding and amazement suffused her chest like warmth from a brazier.
He really does
see the Madonna in me.

‘I have to wait for the right commission, of course.’ He looked up, noticing the awe in her face. ‘What?’

She blushed. ‘Nothing. Go on.’

‘That’s how I work, you see. Someone, a cardinal like del Monte, pays me to do a canvas for him, and only then I get my models together for the painting.’

She rocked on her heels, as they waited for a gap in the flow of carriages so that they might cross the Corso.
If he sees the Madonna in me, what do I see in him?
He carried a sword and
lived in the roughest neighbourhood of Rome. No doubt he mixed with bad sorts – all artists did. But he was gentle; she felt it.
That’s why he’s come to me. I’ve never
been like the other girls round here, either. We’re different, him and me.

She lost herself, as if she were dreaming. He took her arm to go across the street, and she jumped as though she had been woken from a sleep. ‘You can call on me in the meantime,’
she said, ‘while you’re waiting for a commission.’

‘What will your suitor, the notary, say about that?’

Her gaze drifted to the other side of the street. She hadn’t expected him to remember the papal notary who came every week to press her to marry him. She would have liked to explain that
the man was two decades older than her, that she hated his arrogance, his assumption that she would want him simply because of his position and wealth. It was hard to find the words now. It was
difficult enough for
her
to understand her resentment. She ought to have welcomed the man’s attention. She was a menial at a palace, who supplemented her income selling vegetables in
the Piazza Navona, and he was an employee of the Holy Father. The notary could have tried to buy her honour for a night. Perhaps it was the fact that he hadn’t done so that made her dislike
him. It would have been more honest than the pomposity with which he declared that he would have her only on the terms decreed by the Church. She felt disdain in his declarations. By making a show
of his refusal to buy her, he indicated that he believed her to be for sale. Like most men, he saw a poor girl as a whore who had yet to find a pimp.

‘He’s just someone my mother knows.’ She flicked her hand in dismissal. ‘When you paint, how long does a model have to stand in the same pose?’

‘Three or four hours at most. In one day, that is. You’d have to come back again and again.’ He held her glance. She felt their faces drawing closer, the slow, bewitching
course to a kiss. She moved towards him. The tripes slopped to the side and the basket tipped. Caravaggio took a step to rebalance, so the innards wouldn’t fall to the floor. He laughed,
shyly, with her.