The Birth of Venus (22 page)

As for my own home? Well, there was no warmth to be had there anymore. I was an outsider. It would be better for me to hunt down like-minded companions in pain to ease my loneliness.

“I know what I am doing, Erila,” I said, with quiet force. “I’ll call if I need you. I promise.”

She gave that little click of her tongue, which I love because it speaks so much while saying so little, and I knew she would let me go.

She set the tray near the entrance so the smell of the newly cooked flesh would creep under the wood. It brought back the echo of a thousand mornings as a child when I had fasted through mass, guilty because the prospect of God’s body on my tongue was less arousing than the aroma of roasting meats coming from the kitchen when I arrived home. What it must be like to smell it after days without food I could not imagine.

I stood back and signaled to her. She knocked loudly.

“Your food is here,” she said in a booming voice. “The cook says if you don’t eat this, he’ll stop sending it. It’s roast pigeon, spiced vegetables, and a flagon of wine.” She knocked again. “Last chance, painter.”

Then I signaled again and she stomped off down the stairs, her footsteps heavy on the stones. At the bottom she stopped and looked up at me.

I waited. For a while nothing happened. Then finally I heard a scraping noise from somewhere behind the door. The locks clicked and the door opened a fraction. A shambling figure came out and bent down to pick up the tray.

I stepped out of the shadows, just as I had that night in the house when I had sent his drawings scattering to the ground. He had been scared by me then, and so he was again. He backed into the room and tried to close the door behind him, but he was holding the tray at a strange angle and his coordination seemed to have gone. I rammed my foot in the gap and started to push myself through. He pushed back, but though I had been ill, he had been fasting and the door gave with my weight. As he staggered back, the tray and its contents went flying, an arch of red wine spraying the walls. The door slammed behind me.

We were both inside.

Thirty

H
E LEFT THE TRAY WHERE IT HAD FALLEN IN THE
DARK
ness and scrabbled away like a cockroach, through the sacristy and into the body of the chapel. I picked up the wooden platter and saved what I could of the food. The wine was lost as wall paint.

Then I followed him.

The smell inside the room was vile, excrement and urine. Even when you don’t eat you carry on pissing and shitting, for a while at least. Fearful of where I might put my feet, I hesitated until my eyes became accustomed to the gloom. The apse was cordoned off, the scaffolding still in place but tarpaulins and sheets up all around. The tables were laid out in working order: paint powder, pestles and mortars, and brushes, all prepared. Next to them sat a large concave mirror similar to one my father kept in his study, the better to reflect what remained of the daylight when his eyes grew dim. In a farther corner there was another bucket with a makeshift wooden lid on it. I assumed the smell was coming from there.

It was cooler than the rest of the house. And damp, the kind of damp that seems to ooze out of the stone when there are no human bodies to heat it. He had been brought up amid stone and cold light. What had my father said about him? That he had painted every space around him till there were no more walls to fill. But not now. Not here. Here, apart from the closed-off apse, there was nothing. I wondered again what was behind the tarpaulins.

Now I saw him. He was sitting in the corner, hunched over himself. He wasn’t looking at me. He didn’t seem to be looking at anything. He was like an animal cornered by the hunt. I approached him gently. Despite my brave words I was scared. Erila was right. With so much religion abroad, holy madness was on the increase: people who lived so much with God that they didn’t know any longer how to be with humans. You came across them in the streets sometimes, chattering to themselves, laughing, crying, their vulnerability vibrating like a halo around them. For the most part they were benign souls, more like lost hermits. But not all. When God was fermenting inside them they could be very frightening.

I stopped a few yards in front of him. The Madonna with my face and the bodies with their bowels unraveled between us. As I opened my mouth I still didn’t know what words would come out.

“You know what they call you in the kitchen?” I heard myself say. “Uccellino. Little bird. After the painter, in reverence to your talent, but also because they are scared of you. They think you wait till nightfall and then fly out the window. The cook is convinced you won’t eat his food because you have found better somewhere else. He is offended, as all good cooks are.”

He gave no indication that he heard me. He was rocking slightly, his arms crossed around him, his hands curled and cradled under his armpits, his eyes closed. I moved closer to him. It didn’t seem right, being so tall above him. I sat down on the ground, feeling the cold stone through the folds of my gown. He looked so alone and lonely, I wanted to warm him with the company of words. “When I was growing up and all the talk was of the beauty of our city, there used to be a story about an artist who worked for Cosimo de’ Medici. Fra Filippo was his name.” I made my voice gentle and even, as I remembered Erila’s when she used to talk me into sleep as a child. “You have seen his work. He paints his Madonna with such serenity that you would think his very brush was dipped in the Holy Spirit. He was a monk, after all. But no. Our good brother was so full of carnal thoughts that he would break off from his painting to range around the city at night, accosting any woman who would have him. The great Cosimo de’ Medici got so frustrated with him—as much because the paintings stayed unfinished as because of his sins, I think—that he locked him into his studio at night. But when he came in the second morning he found the window open, the bedsheets tied together, and Filippo gone. After that he gave him the key back. Whatever Filippo needed to do for his art he accepted, even if he didn’t understand or approve.”

I paused. Though nothing obvious about him had changed, I knew now he was listening. I could feel it in his body.

“To have such a fire inside oneself must be very hard sometimes. I think it must make you behave in ways that you only barely understand. When I have been at my worst I wonder later why I did the things I did. Except that they seemed necessary at the time. And I have no talent at all. Not compared with yours.”

I could see that his whole body was shaking. There had been times—like that first afternoon in his room—when the very physicality of him had made me shake, but not as he did now. This was a different kind of fear.

I put the remains of the supper between us and slid the plate toward him. “Why don’t you eat something?” I said. “It’s good.”

He shook his head, but his eyes flicked open. Not ready yet. I caught a quick glimpse of his face. His skin was the same color as the white on a Della Robbia ceramic. I remembered him crawling around the ceiling, flush with the heat of the flames as he sketched the grid that would become heaven. He had enough energy and vision then. Whatever happened to heaven?

“I have probably talked to you more than anyone in this house has,” I said. “Yet I don’t even know your name. You have been ‘the painter’ for so long that that is how I think of you. I know nothing about you, except that you have divinity in your fingers. More than I will ever have. I have felt such envy of you that I think I might have missed your pain. In which case I am sorry.”

I waited. Still nothing.

“Are you ill? Is that it? Has the fever come back?”

“No.” It was so quiet I could barely hear him. “I am not hot. I am cold. So cold.”

I reached out to touch him, but he jerked backward. As he did so, I saw a flash of pain shoot across his face.

“I don’t understand what’s happened to you,” I said gently. “But whatever it is, I can help.”

“No. You cannot help me. No one can help me.” Then another silence, and this time a whisper. “I am abandoned.”

“Abandoned? By whom?”

“By Him. By God.”

“What do you mean?”

But he only shook his head violently and clasped his arms more tightly around him. Then, to my horror, he started to weep, sitting there frozen with a slow flow of tears running down his face, like those miraculous statues of the Virgin that cry blood as a way to bring the doubting back to faith.

“Oh, I am so sorry.”

And now for the first time he looked directly at me, and as I stared into his eyes it seemed as if he, the painter, that shy young man from the North, was no longer there, and in his place was just a great pit of sadness and terror.

“Tell me,” I said. “Please. There is nothing so terrible it can’t be told.”

Behind me the door opened and I heard soft footfalls. It would be Erila. I had been in here too long and she would be beside herself with worry.

“Not now,” I muttered, without moving.

“But—”

“Not now.”

“Your parents are expected soon.”

It was a good lie, as much to warn him as to help me. I tilted my head toward her and the look she gave me contained a lecture within it. I nodded slightly in recognition of its advice. “Then come back for me. Please.”

I turned away. Her footsteps retreated and the door closed.

He still hadn’t moved. I took a risk. I pulled out the sketches from inside my gown and laid a few of them on the ground near to the plate, so the man’s innards sat next to the remains of the roasted meat. “I have known for a long time,” I said softly. “I have been to your room. I’ve seen them all. Is this what you can’t tell?”

A shudder passed through him. “It’s not what you think,” and his voice was a sudden growl. “I didn’t hurt them. I didn’t hurt anybody—” He broke off.

This time I went toward him, and if it was the wrong thing to do then I was not the one to judge. I was living in a world where a husband pokes his wife as if she were a cow and men embrace and penetrate each other with a passion and devotion that would make the saints blush. There was no such thing as correct behavior anymore. I put my arms gently around his body. He let out a sharp moan, though whether it was from pain or despair I could not tell. His flesh was cold and stiff like a corpse, and he was so thin I could feel every bone through his skin.

“Tell me, painter. Tell me. . . .”

His voice when it came was low and halting, the penitent searching for the right words. “He said that the human body was God’s greatest creation and that to understand it you had to go under the skin. Only that way could we learn how to bring it to life. I wasn’t the only one. There were six or seven of us. We met at night in a room in Santo Spírito hospital, by the church. The corpses belonged to the city, he said, people who had no family to claim them or criminals from the gallows. He said God would understand. Because His glory would live on in our art.”

“He? Who is this ‘he’?”

“I didn’t know his name. He was young, but there was nothing he couldn’t draw. Once they brought in a boy—fifteen, sixteen. He had died from something in the brain but his body was perfect. He said he was too young to have been corrupted. He said he would be our Jesus. I was going to put him in the fresco. But before I could paint him he came back with his Crucifixion. It was sculpted in white cedar. The body was so perfect, so alive, you could feel every muscle and sinew. I was sure it was Christ. I couldn’t—”

He broke off again. I released him and sat back so I could look at him, assess the damage that his words had caused him. “And the more God flowed through him, the more He drained out of you,” I said quietly. “Is that what happened?”

He shook his head. “You don’t understand. . . . You don’t understand. I should never have been there. It was all a lie. It wasn’t God in that room but something else. The power of temptation. After the army came,
he
went away. Disappeared. The corpses stopped coming. The room closed. There was talk of bodies being found in the city. A girl with her womb cut out, the couple, the man disemboweled. Our bodies . . . we didn’t know . . . I mean . . . I didn’t know. . . .” He shook his head. “It wasn’t God in that room.” He said again, angrily this time, “It was the Devil. Don’t you see? The friar says the more we paint man rather than God, the more we take away His divinity. The body is His mystery. His creation. It is not for us to understand it, only to worship. I gave in to the temptation to know. I disobeyed, and now He has abandoned me.”

“Oh, no, no! This is Savonarola’s voice speaking, not you,” I said. “He wants people to be scared, to think that God will leave them. That way he keeps them in his grip. This painter, whoever he was, was right. How can it be evil to understand God’s wonder?”

But he didn’t reply.

“And even if it were, He would not abandon you for such a thing,” I prodded, terrified that I might lose him again. “Your talent is too precious to Him.”

“You don’t understand,” he said again, and he had his eyes screwed tight shut. “It’s gone, gone. . . . I stared into the sun and my eyes are burned out. I can’t paint anymore.”

“That’s not true,” I said softly, putting out my hands toward him. “I have seen those drawings. They have too much truth about them to be godless. You are lonely and lost and you have frightened yourself into despair. All you need is to believe that you can see again and you will. Your hands will do the rest. Give them to me, painter. Give me your hands.”

He stayed rocking and sniveling for a moment, then slowly uncurled them from around his body and extended them toward me, palms down. I took hold of them, and as I did so he let out a sharp yelp of pain as if my touch had burned him. I shifted my grip to the ends of his fingers, cold as ice, and gently turned them over.

Oh! But all my gentleness could never be enough. In the middle of his palms were two great wounds, dark holes of caked blood, the flesh swollen around the edges where infection was setting in. The holes where the nails would have gone in. I thought of Saint Francis waking up in his stone cell filled with the ecstasy of God. And of my own intoxication that night, when the pain of my body had seemed like almost a relief to the pain of my mind. But mine had been an accidental self-mutilation, neither as deep nor as lost as this.

“Oh, dear God,” I breathed. “Oh, dear God. What violence have you done to yourself?”

As I said it I felt despair like a poisoned fog seep over him again, filling his mouth and his ears and his eyes, choking his spirit with its fumes. And now I felt really scared, because I could no longer be sure it wouldn’t leak into me too.

Of course I had heard stories of melancholy. How even pious men sometimes got lost on their journey to God and gave in to self-destruction to ease the pain. One of my early tutors had fallen into such a pit, wasted away with lack of hope and meaning, until even my kindly mother had dismissed him, fearful of the impact of his sorrow upon our young minds. When I had asked her about him she had told me that some believed such sorrow to be the work of the Devil, but that she thought it was a disease of the mind and the humors, and that while it did not usually kill, it could debilitate a soul for the longest time, and there was no easy remedy.

“You are right,” I said quietly, pulling myself away from him, working more on instinct now than reason. “You have sinned. But not in the way you think. This is not truth, it is despair, and despair is a sin. You cannot see because you have put out the light inside you. You cannot paint because you have been lured into self-destruction.”

I stood up.

“When did you do this to yourself? How far had you got with the frescoes?” I said, and my voice was fierce.

He sat for a moment, staring at the ground.

“If you don’t tell me I shall look for myself.”

I pulled him up. Roughly. I know I hurt him.

“You are too selfish, painter. When you had talent, you wouldn’t share it. Now you are without it you are almost proud of that too. You have not just embraced despair, you have sinned against hope. The Devil deserves you.”

I walked him up through the chapel to the left-hand wall of the apse. He came without resistance, as if his body were more under my control than his own, though it was my own heart that I felt thudding in my chest.