The Passion of Artemisia (4 page)

Why had I thought of him? I plunged down the steep path into the thick of streets and people.

When I turned onto Via della Croce, a woman I didn't know stood waiting near our house. She was as stiff as a Vatican guard, dressed in deep green with a black sash. As I came abreast of her, she said in a hoarse whisper, “Do not love him.”

Another scandalmonger. I turned my shoulder to her and she followed me to my door. I walked with a straight back, looking ahead only.

“I am Agostino's sister,” she said behind me. “Listen to me.”

I stopped.

She came up next to me. “I saw what they did to you today in court. I'm sorry.”

I looked around to see if anyone heard.

“Do not love him,” she said again.

“
Love
him!”

“He's been a scoundrel since the day he was born. He raped a woman in Lucca so that she was forced to marry him.”

“He's married?”

“That didn't stop him from making a mistress of his wife's sister. And now he's hired two murderers to kill that same wife so he could marry you. As one woman to another, do not believe a word from him.”

3
Agostino

O
ne night when Papa was out, our neighbor Giovanni Stiattesi and I left the house after dark. We traveled without a torch and took only small streets, avoiding Piazza Navona and any torchlit doorways where music poured out. Papa might be in any of them.

Giovanni and Porzia had convinced me to see Agostino in the prison of Corte Savella. I thought maybe I could find out whether what his sister said was true. “You could tell him to his face,” Giovanni had said with narrowed eyes, “he's a son of a whore.” That was exactly what I needed to do, to see if I had the strength to kill him with words. Then I could trust myself to paint Judith killing with a sword.

We crossed the Tiber at Ponte Sisto in utter blackness, smelling the river beneath us. Giovanni held onto my wrist so as not to hurt my hands, which I'd left uncovered for Agostino to see, and with his other hand, Giovanni felt the stone balustrade.

“Why are you doing this for me?” I asked. Papa had told me once that Giovanni himself was a jilted lover of Agostino
and his anger would serve our cause. He meant in pleading our case in court, though, not in a clandestine errand like this.

“I have no love for that man. You've been wronged. Reasons enough.”

He led me through streets he knew to the back of the prison, and slipped the guard a coin. I waited in a stone corridor under a torch. The dank passageway smelled of burning tar. No one came for a long time and I began to pace. Finally, Agostino ducked through the door at the far end and swaggered toward me with his broad shoulders, open arms and exaggerated smile, like a warm host greeting an old friend.

“Artemisia, you've finally come! I've been waiting, dying for you a little every day.” His voice echoed in the corridor with false sweetness. “
Amore
, I will marry you if you recant. I promised you then, and I will do it now.”

“You think I came here for that? To marry a man who dishonored me?”

His dark eyes widened in arrogant surprise. “There would be no dishonor if you marry me. It will save you.”

“You mean it will save
you
. Do you think I want to be married to a lecher? A scoundrel? A reprobate?”

“You know I love you. Remember all I taught you? You owe me something.”

“Don't deceive yourself. I learned nothing from you I couldn't learn with my own eyes.”

“How can you say that?”

“Because you can't paint people. You'll never last. You'll be forgotten the day you die, which won't be soon enough.”

That got him. He was searching for what to say. “Then at least blame someone else. Say I wasn't the first so they'll drop the charges.”

“I could slice your neck in two and the Holy Virgin would clap her hands.”

“Say it was Quorli. He's dead now. How can it hurt?”

“What do you know of hurt?” I held up my hands with crusted blood lines around the base of each finger and raw, festering wounds between them. “These are the wedding rings you gave me. You sat there and let them do this, and yet you say you love me?”

He winced at the sight. “Believe me, I didn't want to hurt you.”

“Or the woman you married? You didn't want to hurt her either? Just strangle her kindly? With a rope and an apology?”

Agostino backed away in shock. Ridges formed across his forehead and his eyes sprang wide open. It was true, then.

“You're a monster and a murderer.”

“Artemisia—”

“Bastard!”

I whirled around to leave, feeling blood surging to my fingertips, energizing me.

The next morning, I started
Judith Slaying Holofernes
. I could barely bend my fingers to grasp the egg-shaped muller to pulverize the pigments on my marble slab. Pain is not important. I have to ignore it, I told myself. Only painting is important. Paint out the pain, Graziela had said.

I couldn't keep my thumb in the hole of the palette so I put a stool on top of a chair to have the palette up high and close by. The smears of color made me breathe faster. Steeling myself against the pull of my skin when I held a brush, I swirled the shiny wetness of pure ultramarine onto my palette and added a touch of soot black to darken it for Judith's sleeves. Then, awkwardly, I took a stroke to rough it in, sketching with paint. My heart quaked. I felt alive again.

Every day as soon as I woke up, I threw on my painting gown over my night shift, thrust my feet into my old mules, and painted from the first light, before hawkers shouting behind their creaking carts and old men arguing in the street distracted me. I loved those quiet morning hours stolen from the spectacle in court and I dreaded Papa telling me it was time to stop on the days I had to go.

I was frustrated that my hands wouldn't do what I needed them to. Holding the brush between straight fingers, I tried to work by moving my wrist instead of my fingers. Sometimes I lost control and the brush slipped out of my hand. For weeks, after court each day, Papa went to Cardinal Borghese's Casino of the Muses to work on the ceiling fresco, and I raced home to paint again until the late dark of summer evenings, fired by the thought that both Judith and I were involved in an act of retribution.

One day I painted two vertical furrows between Judith's brows, like Caravaggio had done to show that it was hard for Judith to kill, but then in court the next day, Agostino glared at me threateningly now that I knew he was a murderer. Back home that afternoon I painted the furrows out.

I wanted to catch Holofernes the instant he knew he was about to die, like Agostino's face when I had called him a murderer. I wanted ridges across his forehead, his eyes wide open, fixed in shock, but still conscious, the white showing below his pupils. I loaded my brush with sable brown. I had to bend my fingers to hold the brush tighter in order to have the control to do the fine edge around the pupils. Scabs cracked open, but I kept on working, loving what was appearing on the canvas—those dark, terrified eyes pleading at me.

When I drew my hand away, a few drops of blood had landed on the white bedcovers of Holofernes's bed. The deep brilliant red against the white thrilled me. I squeezed
out more blood, feeling pleasure in the pain, and let it fall below his head, mixed vermilion and madder to match the red, and added more. Streams of it. A deep crimson waterfall soaking into luxurious, tufted bedcovers. Like the blood soaking my sleeve in court. Or the blood I had tried to stanch after the first rape. A smear of blood across Judith's knuckles too. If Rome craved spectacle, then I would give them spectacle.

4
The Verdict

T
he morning the verdict was to be announced, I opened the door to the street to buy bread from the baker's boy, and there, leaning up against the house, was a painting wrapped in a dirty cloth. I brought it inside and unwrapped it. “Papa! The stolen painting!”

“Are you sure?” He rushed into the room and grabbed it from my hands. “It could be a copy.” He took it into the light, scrutinized the brush strokes, and saw something he recognized. “The very one. This changes everything. Hurry. We've got to get there early!” He threw on a sleeveless doublet over his shirt as he strode out the door.

We arrived at the Tor di Nona before the doors were open so we had to wait outside under that horrible noose, smelling the foulness of the Tiber's stagnant water. All summer and into the fall and not a drop of rain. Clouds of mosquitoes billowed up from the river.

Once inside, Papa demanded to see the Locumtenente. He pressed a coin into the bailiff's palm. “Before court convenes, if you please.” Without a change of expression, the bailiff
left. “You'll see now how things are done,” Papa said. His pacing irritated me. The bailiff returned and ushered him down a corridor. I tried to follow but a guard stepped in my way and directed me back to the courtroom where people were being admitted. I took my usual seat.

The notary arrived, so prim and cold it made me sick. With his lips pursed, he began trimming his pens. Agostino was led in, and then immediately called back. Then the notary was called out too. People in the courtroom murmured and grew restless, arguing their predictions. I tried to shut out their gloating voices.

Only Porzia and Giovanni Stiattesi in the front row were silent. Porzia lifted her chin to give me courage. Giovanni picked at a sore on his lip. When he had testified a few weeks earlier, he revealed all that Agostino's sister had told me. Agostino had denied it, saying that his wife had disappeared. Giovanni insisted. Porzia testified the same. Nevertheless, the trial had gone on, sucking in more witnesses—other neighbors, Papa's plasterer, the apothecary from whom we bought our pigments, and a host of Agostino's friends all claiming to have had me. I'd had to deny each testimony, pierce the charade of one falsehood after another that tried to make my character the issue and not Agostino's deed. And Rome enjoyed it all.

A mosquito kept buzzing near my ear and I couldn't get rid of it. The room was stifling with all those people, and the wooden chair I sat in seemed much harder than it had before. Someone in the back shouted for court to begin. Others joined.

“Guilty. Hang him,” someone shouted.

“Hang the whore,” another voice bellowed.

“Hang them both together.”

The whole room laughed. My face flushed hot, and I felt dizzy and faint in the airless room.

A door opened and the bailiff entered, then the Locumtenente, Papa, Agostino, and the notary. The court fell silent. Sweat dampened my shift.

I held my back rigid as His Lordship spoke. “In the foregoing case of Orazio Gentileschi, painter, versus Agostino Tassi, painter imprisoned in Corte Savella, not disputing the claim and testimony of the girl Artemisia Gentileschi that she has been raped repeatedly by Signor Tassi, whereas the missing painting has been returned, and whereas the plaintiff has consented, and whereas the accused has already served gaol for eight months during the proceedings, the prisoner is pardoned. Case dismissed.”

Shouts pulsed in my ears. Approval or outrage, I couldn't tell.

“However,” the Locumtenente raised his voice, “due to his interference with the true and honest testimony of witnesses, the defendant Agostino Tassi is banished from Rome.”

Pardoned? Did I hear that right, buried in all those words? I was struck dumb.
Whereas the plaintiff has consented
 . . . Had Papa withdrawn the charge now that he'd gotten his painting back? Had he
allowed
Agostino to be pardoned? Blood rushed up to my ears and fury seethed in me. I leveled at that man who was my father a hateful look he'd never forget. He had no conscience, no honor, no concern for anyone but himself. I'd never call him Papa again. He would never hear me say the word he loved.

Numb, barely knowing what I was doing, I pushed my way through the crowd. My skirt was stepped on. I yanked it free. Stumbling out the door into an inferno of glare, I turned in the opposite direction from home and lost myself in unfamiliar streets. I kept hearing the Locumtenente's words:
The prisoner is pardoned.
Heat waved up from the street. I passed the Campo Vaccino and the Palatino.
Pardoned
. Free.

Banishment. That was ludicrous. Gratuitous. All Agostino needed was Cardinal Borghese to state that his ceiling was unfinished. Agostino could have sanctuary in the cardinal's residence. Banishment meant nothing in this city run by the pope. All that humiliation for nothing.
Not disputing the claim
 . . . Small vindication, unheard in the roar of the pardon. There had been no statement of my innocence, no reparation of any kind. In the public eye, I was still a stained woman. What had I thought? That I'd be able to walk out of there as pure as Santa Maria?

Putting one foot dully before the other, I walked all the way to the southern edge of the city, to the Porta Appia, through the arch and out the Via Appia into the open countryside. Cicadas made their metallic scraping hiss, like an irritating ringing in the ear. Houses were abandoned. The stucco had fallen away, showing bricks and stones beneath. Arches led nowhere. Broken walls and sunken tombs were overgrown with anemone, blue cornflowers and orange poppies. It was a fantasy of ruin, a life lost in every stone.

I sat on a crumbling wall under the shade of a tall umbrella pine and tried to rub the ache out of my back. A thundercloud billowed on the horizon. Oh, why didn't it just come here and wash everything away—me, Papa, Agostino, the Tor di Nona, Rome itself. A smooth, white stone with a vein of sparkle glinted through the dust on its surface. I picked it up to throw, but I didn't know where to hurl it. What would a single stone do against the universe?

I kicked sand over an anthill and watched the blind frenzy of creatures of no consequence. Hundreds, thousands of ants—they reminded me of the thousands of nameless, hapless legionaries who had marched to war on this road centuries ago, had fought and lay waiting to die, their parched lips unnoticed in greater pain. They were persons of no consequence. Armies dying like ants, ants dying like armies—it
was all pitiful. Bigger things than my own life had happened here, and smaller.

I remembered a story Sister Graziela had told me about Christ walking here. Peter, fleeing Rome, had asked him,
“Domine, quo vadis?”
and Christ had answered, “I am going to Rome to be crucified a second time.” Shamed, Peter turned back to face his own martyrdom, maybe from this very spot. I'd have to turn back too. I closed my eyes and breathed slower to let the new truth settle and find a spot to live in me—how hard the world was going to make me.

Graziela had said I might have to wait until my
Susanna and the Elders
would be famous for Rome to know my innocence. It might never be famous. I spat on the stone to get off the powdery film and started back, looking for Peter's footprints on the dusty cobbles.

I went to Santa Trinità instead of home, and found Graziela weeding in the herb garden behind the cloister. I bent down to help her, though I hardly knew which were plants and which were weeds. She didn't make me tell her about the trial. Her calmness helped to settle me. Finally I asked, “In the story of Susanna, what happened to the old men? When Susanna resisted and they spread the false rumor about her adultery . . . ?”

“She was brought to trial and convicted because the elders claimed they saw her fornicate with a young man in a garden.” Graziela sat back on a low wooden box and brushed the dirt off her hands. “She was sentenced to death, but at the last minute Daniel demanded to know, of each elder separately, under what tree in the garden had she committed adultery. One of the elders said it was an oak, and the other said it was a mastic. That proved that at least one of them was lying. They were both put to death for false testimony.”

“And so Susanna was saved?”

“Yes.” Graziela put the weeds in a pile and we rinsed our
hands in the stone water basin. “And you? What has happened for you?”

“There was no Daniel. I'll have to wait until my Susanna becomes famous.”

The tiniest breath of a sigh escaped her, and her dark eyebrows came closer together. Her mouth was puckered in an unpleasant expression, and her jaw protruded from her wimple farther than I'd ever noticed. We walked back through the cloisters, our heads down, thinking.

I could say it. Right now I could say it—that I felt a calling. I wouldn't have to go back. Graziela would tell Sister Paola and she would burst into song. I smiled inside at the thought of her excitement. But a life of painting tiny tendrils on the margins of prayer books—without boldness, without interpretation, without drama—that wasn't for me.

When the great bell rang for vespers, Graziela stopped and pulled back her shoulders. Her fist clenched the crucifix on her rosary. “Though it would pain me not to have you visit, you might have to leave Rome. If you do, don't go out of any sense that you're being hounded out of the city. Go because the city is too small for your genius.”

“Here.” I put the stone in her hand with the crucifix. “I found it on the Via Appia. Maybe near where Peter saw Christ. It's smooth enough to burnish the gold on the pages of the Psalter for your cardinal.”

We stood in the darkened anteroom and held each other for a long moment.

I went directly home.

“I can't live with you,” I said when I came in the door.

“Artemisia, where have you been? I was worried. You can't just go wandering around the city by yourself.”

“What does it matter now that my reputation's ruined?”

He had already hung the painting in the main room and was sitting opposite it, drinking wine, his feet in velvet slippers on mother's cushioned footstool.

“I can't live with you as if nothing has happened, the painting back on the wall in a happy household. You betrayed me! My own father. You took away any chance to restore my virtue.”

He scowled. “No. I—”

“Getting a painting back was more important to you than my honor. To you, I'm a person of no consequence.”

“That's not true.” His hand trembled. Some wine spilled on the table.

“Agostino's free now. How do you think I'll feel here at home while you go off every day to paint with him for some cardinal who pays no attention to legal judgments?”

“I thought you wanted it to be over.”

“It won't
be
over. Not with Agostino pardoned. That doesn't exonerate me. It's impossible for me even to stay in Rome.”

“In time, Artemisia—”

“Do you think I want to face neighbors and shopkeepers every day who believe that pack of liars in court? What kind of life will I have here being a target for chamber pots being emptied?” He reached out to hold my arm. I pulled away. “You think about that until the food runs out. Don't assume I'm going to face ridicule and scorn every time I go out to shop for food for my dearest papa.”