A Name in Blood (13 page)

Anna was laying out anchovies to dry for a
puntarelle
salad when they reached Lena’s house. ‘Did you get the sprouts, my girl?’

‘No, I forgot, Mama. I’ll go back out for them.’

‘Better clean those tripes first.’ The old woman saw Caravaggio and wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Maestro, how good of you to pay a call.’ She curtsied. He glanced at
Lena. They smiled at her mother’s formality.

Lena unwrapped the grey tripes and slapped them onto the table. ‘I have to get to work,’ she said. ‘Unlike you, I never have to wait long for a commission.’

‘I didn’t say I
have
to wait a long time. I wait only for the
right
one.’

He was on his way through the door into the street. She rolled up her sleeves. ‘Maybe I should’ve been an artist.’

He lifted his chin, questioning.

‘It’s my inclination, too,’ she said, ‘to wait for the right one.’

Costanza Colonna determined to hide Caravaggio until the papal police had finished their sweep of the brawlers from the Piazza Navona. She called him to her rooms at the
Colonna Palace and told him he would find refuge at her son Muzio’s lodgings nearby.

Caravaggio shuffled before her and scratched at his beard.

‘What’s wrong, Michele?’ she asked.

His head dipped, side to side. ‘My lady . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Don Muzio?’

‘It’s a matter of convenience and urgency, Michele. The fight was in one of the most important public places in Rome. Blood was spilled. The police want to make some arrests. They
left you at large until you had made the final touches to the Holy Father’s portrait. But now you have to hide.’

‘But Don Muzio . . .’

Costanza recalled the tension between her eldest son and Michele. It had been years since the older boy had teased Michele for his low birth. They were grown men now. Surely their duty to her
would outweigh those old disputes.

‘I’d prefer to take my chances,’ Caravaggio said.

Costanza brought her hand down on the white leather cover of the armchair where she sat.
Why do men take nothing seriously, except their honour?
Men were trapped forever in their boyhood
relations. Michele would be wound tight by her son’s taunts, just as he had been when they were boys at her palace.
Plague orphan, that’s what Muzio used to call him.
Taking over
the Marquisate since her husband’s passing hadn’t reduced her eldest son’s eagerness to show his superiority to others. He goaded Fabrizio every time they met. Michele was even
more vulnerable.

Caravaggio glanced about the room as though he didn’t trust its silence.
Is he so hunted?
she wondered.
I see now that he has been helpless all this time.
An outsider in her
home, he had been reminded of it by her husband, by Muzio, even by the servants.
Only Fabrizio and I welcomed him. But the love we offered failed to mute the rage in him.

‘Don Muzio and I, my lady, have unfinished business,’ Caravaggio said.

‘What can you mean?’

‘You remember, in the Oratory . . . ?’

‘But that was twenty-two years ago.’

He shrugged.
Muzio wouldn’t have forgiven it, either
, she thought. The last time they had been together, her son had taunted Michele while they played in the Oratory of the palace
chapel in Caravaggio. Fabrizio had defended him, but Muzio had accused them of dreadful sins against nature. Her husband had overheard from the cloister. He had struck Fabrizio a fearful blow
across the head and given him a kick to the very buttocks he believed to have been defiled by Michele. Fabrizio told her later that her husband had looked at Michele the way the priests glared at
heretics who refused to repent in the fire. After her husband had left the Oratory, Michele had beaten Muzio with a candlestick until Fabrizio had restrained him.

She shivered as she had when her husband came to her chamber to order that Michele be sent away. She had resisted, until she saw Michele with the painters making the fresco some weeks later. It
had seemed an opportunity to restore peace to her household and to give the boy a chance at a career in which he wouldn’t be tormented by his past.

Did I send him away because of my own revulsion at what he did with Fabrizio?
She had always thought it a good deed she had done for her ward. Now she doubted herself. She rubbed her
fingers against her thumb, as if she counted the beads on a rosary.

She watched him shifting awkwardly on the flagstones before her, like the boy she had sent away. She saw it now. There had been love between him and Fabrizio, though she had never experienced
such feelings herself. Some part of her had failed to mature beyond the age at which she had been dispatched to be a bride.
I made him leave because their love exposed me as a child still. I
felt a mother’s love, but never a lover’s emotions.
She had put Michele on the mail coach and sent him to Milan, hoping never again to think of the love she had been denied.

‘Very well,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll hide you here at the Colonna Palace for a few days. I’m only a guest and I risk the displeasure of my brother, but I’ll see
that it’s done.’

‘Your Ladyship has always shown herself most gracious towards me.’ He bowed with a formality that seemed to mock her.

As he went towards the door, she whispered to him, ‘I’m sorry, Michele.’

He reached for the door handle. ‘The fault is mine, my lady. It always has been.’ Without turning, he left the room.

That summer of 1605, the conflict between the supporters of the French and Spanish monarchs escalated on the streets of Rome. Caravaggio had witnessed its spark, the defeat of
the Colonna wrestler by the groom from the Farnese palace. The bout in the Piazza of the Sainted Apostles had led to a night of brawling in the neighbourhoods each family controlled. In turn, every
animosity in the city ignited. It was as though someone had set fire to a tree at its trunk and now the flames reached out along the branches to the smallest twigs and to the buds of the fruit that
would be. The Farnese and the Colonna. The men who lived on the Quirinale hillside against those whose homes were near the Campo de’Fiori. Frenchmen versus Spaniards. And among the many
contentions coming into leaf that summer: Caravaggio against Ranuccio Tomassoni.

One afternoon, Costanza Colonna came with a message from del Monte: the police were no longer interested in the fight at the Piazza Navona; Caravaggio could come out of hiding. He went straight
to Lena. She was just home from work at the Madama Palace, removing her headscarf, when she saw him in the door and smiled. It thrilled him that the brightness moving in her features was for him.
He was accustomed to admiration, but he recognized something else in her face. She drew him away from the door, reached up and kissed him.

This would have been the moment to take her to the back of the room, to lead her behind the curtain to the padded board that served as her bed. But he found himself untroubled by lust and even
wishing to prolong this period of – of what?
Of innocence
, he thought. It was an unaccustomed sensation and it filled him with a curious energy.
Could it be this is what those
who’ve done no wrong feel?

‘Let’s go for a walk.’ He caught her around the waist.

She slipped away from him. ‘Is it really a walk you want?’

He looked down at her breasts, bit at his lip playfully, and nodded.

‘Take me somewhere you really like,’ she said. ‘I want to know more about you.’

‘That won’t take long. I’m a very simple man.’

‘That’s not what people say.’

‘What do they say?’

She spun her finger at the side of her head and they laughed.

He took her to the Piazza Farnese. In each corner of the square, bravos loitered, waiting for a fight. They flexed their fingers in their gloves, and they touched the hilts of their swords as
though they might, without noticing, have mislaid these blades of more than four feet in length.

For once, Caravaggio allowed himself to believe that the tension around him wasn’t his concern. He led Lena under the barrel entryway of the Farnese palace. She glanced up at the
family’s fleurde- lis carved into the ceiling coffers and touched the rose-marble columns at the side, plundered from the Baths of Emperor Caracalla. ‘Why’re you bringing me here?
Do they need a cleaning woman?’

‘I want to show you that I have my reasons for being a little crazy.’ He turned his finger beside his head as she had done.

‘You don’t need an excuse for that, but I’m willing to listen.’

They went towards a broad, enclosed staircase. Across the courtyard, another platoon of edgy swordsmen affected to lounge against the massive pillars. At the landing, a fountain splattered its
stream into an ancient sarcophagus. Lena splashed water over Caravaggio. She giggled at her own mischief.
She’s not accustomed to the freedom to be herself in a palace
, he thought. He
chased her up the steps, laughing.

At the head of the stairs was a gallery hung with the paintings of the greatest masters of the last century. When Caravaggio had been there before, there were always a few gentlemen and their
ladies admiring the art. Now the long hallway was empty. The swordsmen in the piazza had dispelled the art lovers. A chill of apprehension edged his happiness.

‘Who’s this cold fish?’ Lena smiled.

A portrait of a cardinal, distant and withdrawn, craning his thin neck.

‘Alessandro Farnese, painted by Maestro Raphael. See how his face appears to come out of the picture? This was something new in that time. It makes you feel as though you’re in
conversation with the painting, with the man himself.’

‘I don’t think I’d like what he’d have to say.’

‘Here he is again.’ He moved to the next canvas. A hunched pontiff on a throne, his nephews paying him homage. ‘Now he’s older. He’s become Pope Paul III. This is
by Maestro Titian. See how he painted everything in red tones?’

‘The Holy Father looks like an animal, frightened and ready to pounce at the same time.’

‘Everyone looks like that, if you examine them closely enough.’

‘That isn’t how you look.’

‘You barely know me.’

She touched her finger to the tip of his nose, stepped ahead and pointed. A Virgin and Child with St Anne and the Baptist, and at their feet a rotund cat. ‘I like this.’

‘It’s by Giulio Romano, a pupil of Maestro Raphael. He took his composition from Maestro Leonardo. At this time, every artist began simply to copy the finest elements of those
who’d been before. The Madonna is very well done, but a little empty, no?’

‘The best part is the cat.’

‘Let’s call it the
Madonna of the Cat
.’

She purred.

He spread his arm along the gallery. ‘All these works are full of symbols. They don’t just tell a story. You have to know the meaning of the bunch of grapes in the Baptist’s
hands to understand the
Madonna of the Cat
. You can’t just look and see it for itself.’

‘How am I supposed to know what those things mean?’

‘The artists and the men who buy paintings don’t care about
you
. Come, I’ll show you one man who wants to make it easier for everyone.’

They went along the loggia. He glanced into the courtyard and noticed that more swordsmen were moving in from the garden at the back of the palace.

He led her into a gallery facing the Tiber. It was narrow and only twenty-five paces long. The gods of myth wooed and battled each other across the ceiling.

‘There at the centre, see? Bacchus and Ariadne.’ He watched her eyes move slowly over the luxuriant colours. ‘You might not know the stories or even the names of the gods. But
you know what’s happening. They’re marrying. They’re experiencing the joy of love. It’s right there. You don’t need to know anything else. No need to read the
symbols.’

Pensive, she let her fingers rest delicately on her bust. ‘That’s why you like this room?’

‘That, and the way he uses space. Don’t you feel as though they’re all going to fall out of the ceiling and land on top of you? They have real bulk, even though they’re
actually painted on a flat surface.’