A Name in Blood (6 page)

Their love-making was soon done and the curtain drawn back. Ranuccio drowsed contentedly. Fillide arranged her breasts and her neckline. Menica spooned out bowls of meat for Gaspare and Caravaggio. The stew steamed with the aroma of nutmeg and cloves and cinnamon.

‘I have a mind for some poetry now,’ Fillide said.

Gaspare bowed. ‘Your heart lies on the bed, but your soul deserts it, following love and poetry to me, my Lady Fillide.’

‘I meant some of
your
poetry. Not a codswallop rehash of Petrarch. I hate that weepy old milksop.’

‘Hear, hear.’ Ranuccio slapped his hand against the wall.

Discomfited that a mere courtesan had noticed his plagiarizing, Gaspare cleared his throat. ‘You recall the painting our friend Michele did a few years ago?
Love
Victorious
?’

‘The little Cupid smiling like he was game for anything?’ Onorio twisted the cork from a new bottle and set it to his lips.

Gaspare took up the pose of an actor declaiming, and recited his madrigal. It warned that Caravaggio’s representation of love was so true that it was like the real thing – in its
most extreme form.

‘Don’t look, don’t look on Love,’ he concluded. ‘He’ll set your heart on fire.’

‘Not bad.’ Onorio belched. ‘You ought to publish it.’

‘It was published in Venice two years ago.’ Gaspare put a hand on his hip, affronted. ‘I presented you with a copy of the book.’

‘I don’t recall it.’

Prospero nudged him. ‘It’s the one you put on the table in your bedchamber to make your pisspot just the right height.’

Gaspare raised his hand, but Menica caught at it.

Onorio’s pout quivered with vicious humour. ‘Michele, does love turn
your
heart to ashes, as in the words of our companion, the great poet of the Most Serene Republic of
Genoa?’

Caravaggio put the guitar on the floor. His eyes were wide and staring, as though he observed the phantom of something dead approach him. ‘Love?’ He reached for the wine and took a
pull. ‘Do you really think that’s what sets me on fire?’

The morning light found its way deep into his brain, as if it were the stiletto of the stealthiest assassin. Caravaggio groaned.

‘Time we were going, Michele.’

He opened his eyes. Vermilion slivers of the dawn shimmered through the motes of dust. Rubbing his face, he stood, caught at his head, and gasped.

Onorio slapped his cheek lightly. ‘A good night, wasn’t it,
cazzo
?’

The curtain on the bed was only half drawn. Fillide’s pale breast bore a livid scratch, no doubt from her companion’s attentions during the night. Ranuccio snored beyond her.
Prospero rose from his couch, picking at his scalp and wiping the lice against his hose.

‘Come on.’ Onorio gestured for haste. ‘Let’s be off.’

The air of the early morning was clear, free of the foul odours that would rise from the littered ground in the day’s heat. Prospero blew a kiss at an old woman hauling a basket of figs
towards the market in the Campo de’Fiori. ‘Who can be unhappy in Rome?’ The little man was missing a few teeth from tavern brawls. Those that remained shone through his ginger
beard. ‘Well, late sleepers don’t catch any fish. I’m off,
ragazzi
.’ He shambled towards the Corso.

Onorio picked up a fig that had dropped from the old woman’s basket and rubbed it against his doublet to clean it. As he chewed, he put his arm across Caravaggio’s shoulder.
‘You didn’t pay him.’

Caravaggio took the remainder of the fig and ate it. ‘Once I started on the wine, it slipped my mind. Anyway, maybe he forgot.’

‘Michele, this isn’t you. You get carried away by your anger sometimes. God knows I wouldn’t crucify a man for that. But don’t pretend that you want a fight with this
thug.’

Caravaggio’s smile was reluctant. ‘If I’m to take advice on my comportment from you of all people,
cumpà
, I must be way off track.’

‘Stay at home and work.’ Onorio slipped his hand under Caravaggio’s arm. ‘Is it money you need? I can lend you the ten
scudi
for Ranuccio. To get him off your
back.’

‘I’m not short.’ Caravaggio pulled a leather purse from his doublet and shook it. ‘Plenty in here.’

‘Then in the name of the Blessed Virgin, pay the bastard.’

Caravaggio’s lips tightened, as though he felt a familiar pain. He gripped Onorio’s forearm and his grin opened up. ‘You’re right. I’ll find him at the tennis
courts this afternoon and give him the money.’

‘I’ll see you there.’ Onorio wagged a finger and shook his head with relief. ‘You know I wouldn’t have stood by and let you fight the Tomassonis alone,
bello.
’

‘I know it.’

‘I’m going to Santa Maria della Consolazione. The masons are coming in to replace some of the stonework. I’d better be there to oversee it, or they’ll be dropping marble
down the hill as if it were the criminals who used to be tossed off the Tarpeian Rock there. Come and see the work.’

‘No, I have a model coming to my place.
Ciao, cazzo.
’

Caravaggio’s mouth was dry and his belly grizzled at him for food. Below the Trinità dei Monti, he stopped in the Tavern of the Turk. He drank off a mug of thin beer and took a hunk
of dark bread and half an onion. He came out onto the piazza at the foot of the slope under the Trinità, rubbing the cut surface of the onion on the bread to flavour it. He chewed hard as he
went up Via del Babuino.

Rome roused itself around him. A heavy-set old carpenter who had modelled for his St Peter crossed the street, on his way to his workshop in the Via Margutta. He hefted his toolbox against his
thigh and waved to Caravaggio. ‘Michele, what’re you painting now?’

‘
Salve
, Robbè. I’m doing a Magdalene with her sister Martha.’

‘You don’t need an old bald fellow with a white beard and a big strong chest to model for you again?’

Caravaggio pointed beyond the piazza to Santa Maria del Popolo, which housed his
Martyrdom of St Peter
. ‘Everyone knows I already crucified you.’

His appetite was satisfied and he wanted to get home to prepare his pigments for Prudenza’s arrival. On the right of the canvas, he had painted Fillide as the Magdalene in the moment of
her conversion. He wanted to balance his composition with Prudenza as Martha, inquiring and cajoling her immoral sister. He looked forward to telling Fillide that she would be displayed in the
gallery of the great Aldobrandini family alongside the woman whose face she had tried to scar. He would paint until the afternoon, then take the money he owed to Ranuccio – at the tennis
courts or at Fillide’s rooms.
I’ll throw the money at him,
he thought,
so he knows I don’t believe he won it fairly. He’ll understand that it’s beneath me to
fight a man such as him. That alone will be worth ten
scudi
to me.

At the burnt sienna towers of the Church of Sant’Atanasio, he cut onto the Via dei Greci, into the Evil Garden. The low morning sun struggled to drive the night from the narrow street. A
pair of beggars knelt at the rough grey step of a small house, their fingers steepled, beseeching charity. The young woman in the doorway held a three-year-old boy on her hip. The boy was naked,
half wrapped in a towel, as though the beggars’ call had interrupted his bathtime.

Caravaggio approached, watching the girl. The house was dark behind her. Daylight seemed to penetrate the street just for her, illuminating the eggshell clarity of her neck and chest. She
crossed her bare feet and lifted onto her toes, pivoting from her hip to swing the boy as she listened to the old woman’s story. She let her head drop to her left so that her chin touched her
collarbone, as she looked down upon the kneeling woman with compassion and reassurance.

He recognized her. It was the maid who had been cleaning the floor at del Monte’s palace.
She’s turning her hips the opposite way to her shoulders
, he noted,
as though she
knows about the
contrapposto
pose. She has found the grace of classical form without anyone having to teach her an academic term for it.

Caravaggio leaned against the wall by the threshold. The plaster had come away beside the chipped travertine of the doorway, exposing the brick beneath. He smiled and was surprised by how little
calculation there was in his open look.

The girl seemed confused, recognizing him from the palace and wondering no doubt how he came to be at her door. The boy in her arms reached out for her sleeve. She kissed his brow and whispered
to him.

Concentration replaced the smile on Caravaggio’s face. Maestro Leonardo had written that a fleeting moment reflects the inner spirit and impulse of man. A painter must capture such things,
more than the mere details of physical form. Memorize them right away, the great Florentine had said. As surely as if he held a sketchbook, Caravaggio traced the line of the girl’s neck,
etched the set of her foot with its ankle turned out, and shaded the soothing quiet of her eyes.

He took out his purse and counted his coins. Ten
scudi
.
The exact amount I’m supposed to pay Ranuccio
. He fed the coins, thin as shavings of Parmesan, into his chamois purse
and tied the top. He put the money bag into the old beggarman’s palm.
It’s a ridiculous sum to give in charity. One
scudi
buys two dozen chickens. Ten
scudi
is three
months’ rent. Still, I’ll tell Ranuccio that I gave the money to a homeless peasant, rather than let him have it.

The girl in the doorway regarded Caravaggio with astonishment and suspicion. He smiled at her wariness.
She’s a Roman for certain.

The beggars kissed Caravaggio’s hands and hobbled away. The girl turned to go back into the dark room to finish the boy’s bath.

Caravaggio caught her wrist with a light touch. He felt as though he had reached up into an altarpiece and caressed the Holy Mother. Yet he had never seen Maria painted with such force and
verity, not even the sweet Virgins of Raphael or the ambiguous maidens of Leonardo. ‘What’s your name?’ he said.

She stroked the child’s chin with her forefinger. ‘What’s my name, little one?’

‘Auntie Lena.’ The boy clapped his hands, delighted to have answered correctly. She kissed his forehead.

Caravaggio sensed the touch of her lips as if her kiss had been bestowed upon him. ‘I’ll come back, Lena.’ He went down the street, singing to himself the song he had played at
Fillide’s party:

‘Keep looking up there. Don’t turn towards me.’ Caravaggio came through the black curtain and lifted Prudenza’s chin.

‘There’s nothing there, though, nothing to look at. Just a hole in your ceiling.’ She shook her hands. ‘All the blood’s gone out of them, holding them like this.
What’re you doing behind that curtain, anyway? How long is this going to take?’

‘A while. You’re accustomed to business that’s concluded in about ten minutes?’ He repositioned her, feeling her shoulders through her thin white shift.

‘Don’t be cheeky, Michele. I know how to make them finish in less than two minutes.’ She crooked and poked her finger. The whore’s trick of jabbing into the rectum to
hasten a client’s ejaculation.

He laughed as he arranged the earth-brown cloth across her back, folding it over her extended arm and spreading it across the table. ‘Now, see here? Where my hand is, focus
there.’

She held her neck still, angled upwards. He went through the curtain, tying it behind him to leave only a small, round gap at head height.

Through that space, the bright light falling on Prudenza showed clearly in the mirror set behind Caravaggio. The mirror projected an image of the girl onto the canvas, a technique he had learned
from the men of science at del Monte’s palace. He marked in the key points of her features quickly, tracing them from the projection, so that he could set her precisely in place at the next
sitting. He turned his brush around, holding it with the bristles towards him, and carved through the underpaint with the end of the handle. In single strokes, he cut into the ground layer the
outline of her ear, her forehead, her jaw and her hands. He would fill in the details later, knowing that the shape and the perspective would be natural, just as seen in a looking glass.