The Inquisitor's Key (24 page)

AVIGNON
1335

SIMONE GASPS WHEN THE BOAT ROUNDS A BEND IN
the Rhône and the city comes into view. Seven years earlier, he had thought that Avignon could not possibly grow bigger or more glorious, but the mighty stone towers rising from the dome of rock prove him spectacularly wrong. The cathedral, which once held pride of place atop the rock, is now dwarfed by a mighty tower, which looms so close to the nave that the two structures all but touch. Wooden scaffolds surround three other towers in various stages of construction. “
Bellissimo,
” Martini breathes, partly because the city truly is beautiful, but also because he feels such secret relief: His painful decision was surely the right one after all.

On his previous trip to Avignon, in the fall of 1328, Martini had come to scout the city, to see what prospects and commissions it might offer one of Italy’s most talented and respected painters. Avignon was indeed thriving then, but as he made the
rounds of potential patrons—mostly the flock of wealthy cardinals who were descending on the city, trailing clouds of architects and decorators behind them—he was frustrated to find that most of the cardinals, and therefore most of the commissions, were French. For an Italian artist to move to Avignon on the strength of mere talent and brio would have been a foolish gamble in 1329. But now, in the fall of 1335, Martini’s been begged to come by a newly hatted Italian cardinal, and he knows now that his family won’t starve.

He has already landed a most unusual commission: a secular painting, a small picture of a young married woman, commissioned not by her husband, but by a poet who’s madly in love with her. A simple assignment, really—the face of a lady, nothing else in the picture—and yet Simone has never done such a painting before, nor, for that matter, has any painter he knows of. Oh, it’s common, and even crucial, to shoehorn the faces of rich patrons into chapel frescoes—to give one of the Three Wise Men, for instance, the craggy good looks of Count Corsino, if Corsino’s the one who’s piously paying for the fresco. But a picture of a woman—a woman as her real, true self, not masquerading as some saint or martyr, some spectator at a miracle? It’s unheard-of! Simone’s not sure how much demand there might be for such paintings, but who knows? If he does an inspired rendering of this heartbreaking beauty, portraits might actually catch on.

The lady’s heartbroken mad poet, needless to say, is Italian.

On his prior trip Martini had traveled light. Now he’s ponderously laden, freighted with so many tools of his trade that even he—who packed everything himself—finds the sheer quantity incomprehensible: boxes and jars of pigments, oils, solvents; cases of brushes and chalks and charcoals and easels and palettes; rolls of canvas and huge folios of paper; parchment envelopes containing gold leaf beaten thin as a day’s layer of dust; a carpenter’s shop worth of woodworking tools, needed to saw boards and build frames. The working gear is only the half of it, because he’s
traveling with his beloved wife, Giovanna, and all their clothing and household goods. Rounding out the party is his brother, Donato, also a painter—a wonderful man but a mediocre artist, the meagerness of his talent exceeded only by the meagerness of his earnings.

It wasn’t easy, pulling up roots and setting sail to Marseilles and then upriver to Avignon. Twenty years of hard work, judicious flattery, and crowd-pleasing paintings had forged a solid career and a sterling reputation for Simone in Siena and as far away as Naples, where he’d been handsomely paid for his work—and knighted, too—by Robert, King of Naples. Moving to Avignon would require proving himself again, which now, at age fifty-one, was a daunting prospect. The move also meant uprooting his wife from her close-knit family—a leave-taking nearly as painful for Simone as for Giovanna, for her family is like his own, only better.

The good fortune of his marriage still fills Simone with gratitude. At forty years of age—and a homely forty, his discerning artist’s eye had forced him to admit—he’d given up on the idea of marriage. Then a miracle occurred. He and another Sienese painter, Lippo Memmi, worked together and became friends, and bit by bit, dinner by dinner, Lippo drew Simone into the circle of his family. Simone fit there as naturally as if he’d been born into it. Lippo’s father, uncle, and brother were painters as well, and dinners at the family’s table were lively, raucous, joyous occasions. The other family member, Lippo’s young sister, Giovanna—eighteen years Simone’s junior—astonished Simone with her glances, her smiles, her blushes, and—eventually, astonishingly—her love. They married and moved into a cozy house Simone bought from her father, and for ten years they were happy in it, except for their occasional spats and their dwindling hopes for children. But the work was slowing down, not through any lessening in Simone’s skill or reputation, but simply because Siena’s building boom—and therefore its fresco boom—had peaked. The
paint on his last major commission there, an Annunciation scene for the cathedral, had been dry for two years now, with nothing much on the horizon. So when Simone had sighed and told Giovanna that Siena’s sun was setting, and that the future of art lay not in Italy but in Avignon, she’d cried…and then dried her tears and started packing.

As the late-afternoon breeze begins to calm, the boat tacks lazily up the final river-mile to the wharf beside the bridge. The twenty-two arches of the monumental span are the crucial links joining southern France to the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Savoy, the papal territories, and the great Italian city-states. Above its nearer end, the turrets and spires of Avignon seem illuminated from within, glowing with a golden light that soon deepens to orange and then to rose as the sun sinks. The effect—stone set ablaze by light—is dazzling; Simone has never seen its equal in any painting, not by himself nor even by Master Giotto, one of the few painters he acknowledges as his better.

Standing there in the bow of the boat, he feels Giovanna nestle up behind him, her arms burrowing beneath his to wrap around his waist. “
Così bello,
” she murmurs. “So beautiful. And you, Simone—you will make it even lovelier.”

ASIDE FROM BEING MAD WITH LOVE, THE YOUNG
Italian poet Francesco Petrarch is a charming and intelligent fellow. A thirty-year-old wonder boy whose family was exiled from Florence and ended up here, Francesco is a cleric of some sort, but his chief duties seem to consist in being eloquent, indignant, intellectual, poetical, moody, or whatever suits his fancy at any given moment. He loves to rail against the city and the papacy—“the Whore of Babylon,” he calls it, when he’s not busy feeding at her breast. He’s been posted at some godforsaken village in the dry, dull west of France for the past few years, but he’s currently maneuvering to return to Avignon, or some loftier place
nearby, from which he can keep closer watch on the city he hates and the woman he loves.

The story, which Francesco clearly loves to tell, is this: During a Mass on Good Friday, nine years ago, he glanced to one side of the church and saw a beautiful young woman, with whom he fell instantly and forever in love. Pursuing her after Mass, he learned that her name was Laura de Noves—and that although she was only seventeen, she was already married, and to a French nobleman, a count. She refused to listen to Francesco’s words of love, and so he began writing them down instead, and publishing them: hundreds of love poems dedicated to a woman he spoke to for half a minute, nearly a decade ago. Now, he’s commissioning Martini to paint a portrait of her—an image he can gaze at whenever he needs to rekindle the flame of his love.

But perhaps “love” is not the right word. Martini has a sneaking suspicion that Petrarch cultivates his pain—a child picking at a scab—because it pleases him in some perverse way to carry an unhealed wound on his heart. It is his own version of the stigmata, Martini realizes, the wounds that proclaim, “Behold how I suffer!” Martini has been married to Giovanna for nearly a dozen years now. The two have fought, they’ve made up; they’ve laughed, they’ve cried; they’ve cooked and cleaned and pulled weeds together; they’ve made tender love and half-hearted love and primal, grunting animal love. Martini’s pretty sure that since Petrarch has done none of these things with Laura—has done nothing at all with her, in fact, and furthermore knows nothing about her except that he can’t have her—what the poet’s really in love with is not the woman, but in fact himself and his own sense of heartbreak. The man is writing a never-ending tragedy, and casting himself as the tragic hero. What’s more, it’s beginning to make him famous; other poets have started to copy and circulate Petrarch’s verses; some are even imitating his writing and his heartbreak.

No, Martini’s got no starry-eyed illusions about this goddess:
She’s doubtless a pretty and privileged Frenchwoman of twenty-five, a knight’s daughter who married up and became a countess at age fifteen. She certainly wasn’t the first pretty girl whose youth and beauty were sold for a title and a life of ease, and Martini doesn’t begrudge her the good fortune. Martini’s got no illusions about his own role, either. If Petrarch wants him to immortalize his muse in paint, and is willing to pay well for the job—fifty florins!—Simone’s happy to unpack his paintbrushes and start mixing his reds and greens and golds. “I’ll get started right away,” he tells the poet. “When it’s finished, you must write a poem immortalizing my picture of your lady.” Petrarch nods gravely, as if he doesn’t realize that Simone is just joking.

IN ALL HIS THIRTY YEARS OF PAINTING, SIMONE HAS
never worked this way before; has never had to squint and strain and sneak to snatch furtive glimpses of the face or figure he’s painting. Often, in fact, he’s had the opposite problem: a model whose ripe lips or plump breasts were offered not just to his artistic eyes but to his strong hands; a woman—or occasionally a man—whom Simone had to push away, but gently, so as not to spoil the sitting and hinder the painting.

At first, he hated watching the young woman, hated following in Petrarch’s pathetic shoes—lurking in doorways near her house on Sundays; trailing her to Mass, or lying in wait inside the church to snatch a glance at her forehead or eyes; lurking across the aisle or behind a column as he studied her profile; dashing to his studio after the benediction to sketch and paint before the details of her face fade from his memory for a week. Gradually, though, Simone has been forced to admit that he likes the chal
lenge—painting someone he can scarcely see—and he looks forward to studying her each week.

One Sunday as she kneels, he sees her head slump and her shoulders slacken; then, with a jerk, she awakens, wide eyed, and suddenly he hears her laugh—in church!—when she realizes what she has done. The matron beside her gives her a sharp, reproving look, and she forces her face back into its mask of composed piety. But Martini has now seen something else behind the church-face mask, and his curiosity is aroused.

That night, as he lies beneath the covers before going to sleep, he plays a painter’s game with himself, imagining how he might paint her face in various scenes, with various expressions and emotions: worry, gratitude, tranquility, terror, irritation, delight, lust. And then, when Giovanna rolls her body against his in the dark, and her fingers seek him out, stroke him to hardness, and guide his flesh into hers, it is Laura’s face, and Laura’s breasts, and Laura’s moans that he imagines and that make him gasp and shudder with a fiery passion that Giovanna’s simple honest love has never managed to ignite.

THE NEXT SUNDAY, SHE IS NOT THERE. HE CHECKS HER
usual stations—the side chapels where she always pauses to light candles—scanning the congregation with confusion and growing dismay. Somehow, because she has always been here, he has taken it for granted that she always would be here.

His surprise gives way to another feeling, one he recognizes as fear—no, as panic! What if she’s gone for good—moved away to Paris, or killed by a sudden fever? How can he possibly finish the portrait until every detail of her is etched in his mind? How will he explain his failure to Petrarch? And then: How will he fill his Sunday mornings, and the other hours of his days and nights that she has come to occupy?
Good God,
he thinks,
I am worse than the poet. I have a good wife, a sweet and faithful woman
who loves me, and yet I am turning into a schoolboy over this woman—this girl—who is thrice forbidden to me: She is married, I am married, and she is beloved by my friend Petrarch.
In a state of consternation, he stumbles over the feet of the other worshipers in his pew, turns up the side aisle of the nave, and makes for the door.

Just before he reaches it, he feels a tug on his sleeve. He turns, and there—hidden by a pillar—is the woman herself, a sight so unexpected he almost cries out in surprise. She watches him regain control of himself, then says, “
Monsieur, vous me cherchez?
”: Sir, are you looking for me? Working with French painters and seeking French patrons, he has mastered much of the language by now, but he is so taken aback by her sudden appearance and blunt question that he resorts to a well-worn ploy, shaking his head and shrugging to indicate that he does not understand her, and adding “
Sienese
” to make sure she gets the message.

“
Ah, Siena, una bella città,
” she says, switching to his own language so fluently and effortlessly, she might have grown up next door to him. “A beautiful city,” she repeats. “If you are Sienese, sir, I envy you.” She glances down briefly, then looks up at him again, and when she does, the intensity with which her eyes probe his is almost palpable: as if she were a blind woman, exploring his very soul with her fingers. She lays a hand on his arm. “Come. There is a garden in the cloister. I would speak with you.” She leads him out a side door, through an archway, and along a loggia to a far corner of the cloister, to a bench tucked into an alcove of boxwoods. She sits, and motions for him to sit beside her.

“Now, sir. Tell me why you were looking for me. Don’t pretend you weren’t.” Again he shrugs—not, this time, to feign incomprehension; this time, to acknowledge that he’s been caught, and has no defense. “I’ve noticed how you watch me. Not just today, but for weeks. Every Sunday I feel your eyes on me. Why?”

“You…you are a beautiful young woman, my lady. What man could resist looking at you?”

Slowly she shakes her head. “Many men look at me. Some with contempt, some with longing. But no one else looks at me the way you do. You study me; you examine me, as if I were a flower or an insect whose parts you wish to catalog. Why?”

He opens his mouth to speak, but he can find no words. If he lies, she will see through it; if he tells the truth, she will hate it. He looks away, fixes his eyes on a statue of the Blessed Virgin, and sighs. “Forgive me, my lady.”

“Sienese.” She says it slowly, musingly, turning it over in her mind as she turns it over in her mouth. She looks down, then she reaches down, taking his right hand in hers, lifting it, examining his rainbow-tipped fingers. “You are a painter. The Sienese painter. Simone of Siena.” He bows slightly in awkward confirmation. “I have seen your frescoes in Siena. They are wonderful. I was glad to hear that you had come to Avignon.” He bows again, more deeply, and when he straightens up, he meets her gaze frankly for the first time. Her eyes continue to bore into him, but there is no anger in them, only curiosity, as well as the glimmer of something else crystallizing in her mind. “Why do you study me with your painter’s eyes, Simone of Siena?” How can he even begin to explain? He does not have to. “Do you paint me, Master Simone?” He hesitates, then nods slowly. She looks away, and when she looks at him again, her expression has changed. “Do you paint me for him—for the poet who puts me on a pedestal?” He nods again. She looks down, and when she looks up, tears are beading at the corners of her eyes: dewdrops on a gray autumn morning. “I did not ask to be his goddess, Master Simone. I do not want to be his goddess. Why do I not have a choice? He has pinned me to the pedestal, in view of everyone, and now, no matter what I do, I cannot get down. With his eloquent and unrelenting insistence, he has made me into what he imagines. I’ve heard a story, Master Simone, about a Greek sculptor long ago
who managed to turn a statue into a woman. This poet is transforming me from a woman into a statue.”

“Forgive me,” he says again. “I did not know—did not consider—how his…attentions…might affect you. I should never have accepted the commission. I will destroy the picture this very day.”

“No!” Her eyes widen, and she puts a hand to her throat. “No. Wait.” Her breath is rapid now, her cheeks flushed. “First, you must tell me about this picture. How are you painting me, Master Simone? What scene am I in? What biblical figure do I portray?” The corners of her mouth twitch. “I cannot be the Virgin Mary. Am I the woman caught in the act of adultery?”

The question makes him blush; can she read his nighttime thoughts? “Of course not, my lady,” he says, perhaps a bit too swiftly and loudly.

“Am I Elizabeth, the withered old wife of Abraham, who finally conceives at age ninety?” Her eyes twinkle, and he’s both shocked and delighted by the boldness of her teasing.

“Old and withered? Far from it, my lady. In my painting, you are young and beautiful. In my painting, you are no one but your own true self.”

She smiles. “I knew you were a fine painter, Master Simone. I did not know you were a skilled flatterer, too.”

“No. I have no gift for words. Only my brush can speak, and it says you are lovely and luminous.”

She pinks. “And in this secret picture, what does your brush say that I am wearing?”

“You are wearing your green silk gown with the collar embroidered in gold, the one you were wearing when Petrarch first saw you. The one you were wearing when I first saw you. Pearls—the choker, not the long strand—encircle your neck. Your hair is pinned up, as it is now, but it is the cloisonné comb, not this tortoiseshell, just above your left ear. Your head is turned a little to the right, which is why we can see the comb, but your
eyes are looking straight at the viewer. Straight at me.” As he says the words, her eyes are indeed locked on him, just as in the portrait; just as in his imaginings. He continues, “The irises are mostly green—almost emerald at their edges—but flecked with gold, especially near the center, where the iris meets the pupil.” He is leaning closer now, staring at her eyes, talking almost in a whisper, almost to himself. “I wish I could paint the way the pupils pulsate in time with your heartbeat: larger, smaller; larger, smaller. But even at their smallest, they are large. I have never seen pupils so large as yours. They are quite…remarkable.”

Her eyelids close, and her breath whistles slightly across her lips as she breathes in deeply. Then her eyes reopen, glazed for just a moment before they refocus and fix on him again. “I do not wish for you to destroy the picture, Master Simone. I want you to finish it. But I want you to grant me one request in return.”

“What is your request, my lady?”

“I want to see it. When you have finished it—before you give it to him—you must show it to me. Will you?”

“Yes. Yes, of course. When? Where? Shall I bring it to your house?”

“By all means—if you wish for both of us to be killed!” She smiles. “Where is your studio, Master Simone?”

“It’s not much of a studio. More of a shed. Right behind the Carmelite church—the one with the open bell tower. Follow the smell of turpentine.”

“When do you expect to finish?”

“I had thought it was finished, my lady, but I was wrong. I need to fix your eyes.”

“Fix them? What’s wrong with them?”

“I have not made them luminous enough.”

She laughs. “See, such a flatterer. The courtiers in Paris should take lessons from you.”

He holds up a hand. “God’s truth, my lady. I had them right, but then I doubted myself. ‘Simone, you fool,’ I told myself, ‘eyes
cannot possibly be so green and also so gold.’ So I changed them, made them more ordinary. Now, I must put them back as they were. As they are. As they must be.”

“I will bring my looking glass with me, Master Simone, so I can inspect your repair work,” she says. “When may I see it?”

“Perhaps next Sunday morning? Before Mass? Or after Mass?”

“Instead of Mass,” she says. “I will be there.”

“My lady? I, too, have one request. So that I can be sure I have it right, is it possible for you to wear the green silk gown?”

She bows. “Yes, Master Simone. And the pearl choker. And the cloisonné comb.”