A Name in Blood (17 page)

‘Are
your
grandparents still with us?’ she asked.

He remembered his grandfather’s eyes when his father had closed them in death. His years at the Marchesa’s palace, the fights with Costanza’s sons, the chill of his family home
when he visited his melancholic mother. The hand with which he caressed Lena’s hair was the same one that had wrenched at Fabrizio’s hose and clasped his buttocks.
Everything is
different
, he told himself.
I’m not bound by the life I’ve led any more than my art is in thrall to works painted long ago
. He shook his head. ‘There’s no
one.’

‘No parents? No brothers or sisters?’

‘No one.’

He felt an extra pressure from her cheek on his breast.

‘Poor baby,’ she said. ‘Everyone you loved had to die.’

4

T
he Death of the Virgin

The bald heads of the apostles caught the light from a high window. For a joke, Caravaggio made Onorio model as St John, who was noted for his gentleness. In the foreground Menica bent double as
the tearful Magdalene. A red canopy was the only sign of richness in the poor dwelling where Caravaggio set the scene of his new painting.

He had worked for months on the canvas, but still he had only an outline cut into the underpaint with the handle of his brush where he intended the Mother of God to lie. He couldn’t bring
himself to paint Lena as a corpse laid out on a simple bed board. When he saw her, he was reminded always of life, not death.

As
The Death of the Virgin
progressed, so Lena’s pregnancy showed. He went to the market on the Piazza Navona to find her. She was wrapped against the winter damp in a heavy cape,
calling the price of the onions piled in the basket at her feet. The chill caught her throat and she hacked out a cough, her hands on her belly. A young trader pushed an empty cart past her. He
spoke a few words, leering at her pregnant stomach and thrusting his hips. She flicked the tips of her fingers off her chin to return the insult.

When Caravaggio reached her, the pallor of her skin alarmed him.
I waited all this time for love
, he thought.
Now I can barely feel it because I fear losing it. Perhaps that would be
just
. It was as if his feelings for Lena had to be weighed against all the bitter lusts of his past.

‘My feet are swelling up,’ she said. ‘Mama says it happens to women later in their term. You’d better hurry up and put me in your painting, or you’ll have to change
it to a Madonna and Child.’

He blew out a hot breath like smoke. He pictured her reclining dead in the void in his painting, her sufferings at an end. How could he depict her death? He had always painted from life. He
remembered Onorio’s macabre joke at the inn. He gasped and closed his eyes.

‘Michele? What’s wrong?’

He lifted her basket. He was frightened because the thought of her death terrified and satisfied him.
It would destroy me, but it’s what I’ve got coming to me for the life
I’ve lived.
‘I shouldn’t let you do this during the winter. You’re carrying my child. The market’s no place for a woman in your condition.’

‘Has something happened between you and Ranuccio?’ she said.

‘No, it’s nothing.’
I’m the only person who terrorizes me
. He hefted the basket out of the piazza.

When he left her at the house on the Via dei Greci, her mother gave him a spiteful look before she shut the door.
That’s what I deserve. She knows I’ll never marry her daughter.
I’m like all the other scum in the Evil Garden.
But as he hunched away through the cold, he imagined Lena rising from the deathbed he had painted for her. She illuminated his unworthy
canvas. He went to the Tavern of the Moor and kissed Menica with such enthusiasm that she giggled and blushed. ‘I’m going to be a father,’ he said.

He came back to the piazza the next day, determined to take Lena away from the market. He wanted to bring her to his studio, to light a fire to warm her, to paint her again. A mountebank
bellowed from a wooden platform, brandishing a pot of powder he claimed cured worms. The quack’s daughter stamped and played violin at his side. She was shivering and her skin was grey.
Lena looks as unhealthy
, Caravaggio thought.
Have I let her continue to sell her vegetables in this piazza just so she’ll appear sick enough to play the corpse of the Virgin in my
painting?
The conman raised his voice still more to be heard over the women arguing nearby. ‘I have here a radish whose magic cures toothache,’ he bellowed.

Caravaggio followed the squawking catcalls to the corner where his girl stood. Lena swayed, her hand against her brow. A trio of women, their heads covered in shawls and their faces behind
veils, were berating her. One of the women struck her hard in the belly.

He barged into the back of the woman who had hit Lena. She stumbled and rounded on him. ‘Ah, it’s you, painter. My Ranuccio will finish you and your street whore.’

Sudden helpless rage trembled in him. He picked up a few of Lena’s onions and hurled them at the Tomassoni women. Each throw found its mark and the women rushed away, yelling and cursing.
Lena sat on the cobbles behind her basket, rocking, her eyes squeezed shut.

He crouched beside her. ‘Let me take you away from here. This work will be the end of you, Lena.’ He thought of the happy moment when he had laughed with Menica and he decided to
make his proposal. ‘
Amore
, I want you and me to—’

‘They didn’t attack me because I’m selling onions, Michele.’ Her face was light green and her hands were grey.

He touched her belly. In her condition, that blow from the Tomassoni woman could be dangerous. His eyes were wet and lost.

She frowned and groaned.

His hopes of fatherhood, even the possibility that he might marry Lena, were an illusion. Her connection to him brought her into danger. Ranuccio had surely sent the women of his family to
attack Lena with the intention of goading Caravaggio into a duel.

‘Let me take you home.’ He tried to lift her.

‘Pick up the onions you threw at those women first.’

‘I can’t do that. It’s beneath my—’

‘Pick them up, Michele.’ She spoke sharply, winced and clutched her abdomen.

He gathered the vegetables, shame making him hot. He helped Lena up and felt her weakness as she leaned on his arm.

‘You missed one, Maestro.’ Baglione sat at the edge of the Triton fountain. He held up an onion, turning it in the light. ‘A little soiled. But that makes it perfect for one of
your works. Still life with mildewed vegetables and rotten fruit.’ He rolled the onion to Caravaggio across the filthy cobbles.

He ran along the Corso the next day. He barely knew it, but he was calling her name as he went. His white smock, smeared with paint, billowed behind him. A gentleman on horseback made a gesture
to a friend as though he were lifting a tankard. His companion whirled his finger beside his head.

At the house on the Via dei Greci, Menica dandled Lena’s nephew on her knee. Mother Antognetti muttered tearful supplications as Caravaggio went beyond the curtain where Lena lay in
bed.

She slept with an exhaustion that recalled the sacrificed body of Christ on a crucifix. Her skin was the sickly Indian yellow of pasta water, her hair dry and dishevelled. One arm dangled off
the bed board, the other lay on her distended stomach. Her red dress stretched across her torso. Her feet were swollen. The flesh below her neck was slack, where she had already built up a little
fat for the foetus to feed from. Puffy folds gathered at her eyes, as if this was the first time she had ever slept.

He had imagined her like this when he dreamed of the birth – spent and depleted. He had pictured her propped on her elbow, cradling the baby beside her breast and resting while his friends
came to admire the child. But the Lord had taken his child.
My sins merited this penalty
, he thought. The punishment was visited on Lena’s body, but it was intended as an affliction
for his monstrous soul.

He watched her a long time. She opened her eyes once and smiled at him as if it took all the energy she possessed, then she went back to sleep. When he realized that he was committing her image
to memory so that he might paint her as his dead Virgin, he stared down at his hands and wept because he knew his art wanted him to be as alone as God did.

Lena’s mother pressed his shoulder. He shrugged her off and stepped back around the curtain.

The boy reached out for Caravaggio from Menica’s lap. Menica glanced up at him. ‘Domenico, do you want to play with Uncle Michele?’

He went to the door. ‘I’ll be with Onorio,’ he mumbled.

Menica took Lena across the Tiber to see
The Death of the Virgin
at Santa Maria della Scala. Though she rarely left the Evil Garden, she knew the way through the narrow,
impoverished streets of Trastevere. The Carmelites ran a home for fallen women in their monastery adjoining the church. Menica had sneaked over here with a few battered whores, when their pimps
were in the taverns, and deposited them at the Casa Pia. She never stayed. She had no need of instruction from the Barefoot Fathers. She had experienced vices even the Church had yet to damn.

Lena walked slowly. Perhaps she was still weak from the miscarriage, but Menica thought it more likely the girl feared meeting Caravaggio. This morning he would be with the carpenters at the
church, installing his painting. He had spoken no more than a few words to her in a month.

At the door of the church, Lena’s eyes were wet.
Michele has a couple more weeks to make this right
, Menica thought,
then the tears will stop and she’ll turn hard.

The carpenters had set the backboards for the hanging: four rough planks at the top of the space and, ten feet below, four more to support the foot of the painting. The edges tapered a little,
making the two ends of an oval. The workmen lifted the canvas under Caravaggio’s direction. His voice echoed through the church.
Here he’s in command.
She glanced at the
tottering girl beside her.
You’d think a man whose pictures are so unconventional, who seems to have so much strength and to be able to make his own path, wouldn’t be like other men.
But he’s just as confounded as the rest of his sex by the needs of a woman.

As they approached the canvas, Lena put her hands to her face. The Virgin’s corpse was spread across the foot of the picture, lying as Lena had when she lost her baby.

Caravaggio saw the women. Menica thought he might have turned back to his workmen had Lena been alone. Instead he came reluctantly to the girl weeping behind her hands. He shifted on his heels
before them, irritation twitching over his features.

Menica followed Lena’s eyes. The jade-green colour of death was on the Virgin’s face.
She’s only seen herself as the tranquil
Madonna of Loreto
before. She
won’t have expected this.
‘It’s the saddest thing you’ve ever done, Michele.’

Caravaggio glanced at the painting as if she had pointed out a quality he had neglected to notice.

‘It shows you still care about Lena, I suppose,’ Menica added.

An injured flicker in his eyes indicated that he wondered if she might doubt such a thing. ‘Let me show it to you.’ He reached for Lena, but she pulled away.

‘I thought you were going to paint me dead.’ She wiped her eyes with her sleeve.

Menica heard the rage behind her sobs.
I was wrong. She’s already turned hard.

‘Instead you’ve shown me when I was worse than dead.’

‘It’s – it’s the Virgin,’ Caravaggio stammered. ‘She’s the embodiment of love. Menica, tell her.
You
see it, don’t you?’

Menica ran her hand across Lena’s back and shook her head. They went out of the church.

They rounded the refuge for fallen women and went down to the river. Crossing the Ponte Sisto, they shivered as they passed the freezing washerwomen scrubbing laundry on the sandbanks, and
returned to the Evil Garden.

‘He has no beautiful ideas of his own,’ Baglione said, ‘so he must paint everything from Nature – at least, Nature as he sees it.’