The Watercolourist (2 page)

She emerges from the bath, enjoying the shivers that run down her clean body. She takes a dry linen towel, wraps it around herself, and goes back into her bedroom. A tray has been positioned on
a little table with crooked legs. There is some milk, two white rolls, a cold chicken wing and three plums. She sits on the soft carpet and dines, clean and half naked, like a goddess, the wind
billowing the curtains as if they are the sails of a ship at sea.

She meets Don Titta for the first time two days after she has arrived, in the afternoon. Before this, she has been uncertain what to do with her time.

‘For that, you need to speak to him. He’s the one who summoned you here, isn’t he?’ Donna Clara remarked drily, giving Bianca the impression that she disapproved of the
entire project.

So Bianca takes walks in the park, intent on measuring the extent of its wilderness and discovering where it turns into moorland, which she has heard can be somewhat dangerous.

‘There are wild dogs out there,’ the housemaid warned as she brushed, or rather pulled at, her hair.

Bianca, fighting the urge to cry out in pain, imagined the moorland filled with extraordinary creatures like shaggy, ferocious bears. In reality, the only creatures that cannot be ignored are
birds. Thrushes, skylarks, blackcaps and thousands of other tiny unidentified creatures fill the sky with their baroque songs.

As she bends down to examine an unknown flower, focusing on the pale green-veined striations on the white petals, she doesn’t notice him approaching. At the sound of snapping branches she
turns around sharply and freezes. She doesn’t know what to do next.

To say that they have met then, though, is an exaggeration: she has simply seen him. He doesn’t even notice her. He continues striding on, at a rapid pace. He looks like a giant: tall,
thin, bony – sickly even. His head is bare, he wears no frock coat; he looks more like a villain than a gentleman. His shirt is not even fully tucked into his trousers. His clothes cling to
his body with the same sweat that drenches his hair, making it appear darker than it probably is. He walks briskly, his arms swinging wide and his hands spread. He mumbles to himself. A poem,
Bianca thinks. Perhaps this is how he composes them: he wanders through the woods and allows himself to become transfixed by divinity. Maybe it’s even in Latin.

‘So you saw him?’ Armida asks the next day, in the matter-of-fact way of the domestic help, who see and know everything, as she brushes her hair, pulling a little less this time.
‘He roams around like a vagabond, talking to himself. He calls out plant names. Blah blah blah here and blah blah blah there. He does it for hours on end. Gentlemen are truly
strange.’

He isn’t present for lunch.

‘My son has gone to Milan to attend to urgent business,’ explains Donna Clara, before starting her soup. ‘Be sure to make yourself available when he’s ready to speak to
you.’

Bianca would have enjoyed chatting with Donna Julie, but after just two spoonfuls of soup, the younger lady pushes herself away from the table and rises.

‘I have to attend to little Enrico,’ she says apologetically. ‘He’s got a fever again.’

And just like that she disappears up the staircase, followed by a maid carrying a tray of treats for the ill child. The little girls come in from the nursery in single file in search of their
mother, awaiting their after-lunch ritual: a sweet and a kiss. But she is gone. So they stand there like lost ducklings. Their governess hurries them away, paying no attention to the youngest
one’s shrill screech.

Bianca still confuses the girls’ names. Even though there are only three of them, they all look alike. Pietro, on the other hand, sits at the table with the adults. His eyelids are heavy;
he has prominent dark brown eyes. They are almost black, opaque and unreadable.

‘Does the little red pony belong to you?’ Bianca asks now, trying to make conversation with him. ‘What’s his name?’

But he just looks down at his plate in silence.

Bianca spends the rest of the day reorganizing her clothes, going back and forth to the laundry, and freshening the items that need to be aired out, which is pretty much all of them. When she
comes down that evening, the only person at the dinner table is Donna Clara. She gives no explanation for the absence of the others and limits herself to glaring at Bianca impatiently. The cook
serves stewed quail. Donna Clara throws herself at the frail little bodies rapaciously, sucking on the bones and drawing out the tender, dark meat. Bianca hates game. It is meat that was once so
alive and is now sentenced to rot. She eats two slices of white bread then peaches with lemon juice for dessert.

‘You’re a delicate little thing,’ observes the elderly lady, licking her lips.

The next day, Bianca sees the master of the house approaching from afar and gives a hint of a curtsey. She is worried that she is wasting both her time and his being here. With
her standing there, in his way, he has no choice this time but to look at her, the pale thing that she is. But instead of stopping, he walks on. He isn’t any more composed than on the first
day she saw him. Again, he is mumbling his strange botanical rosary. She watches him grab hold of a large buzzing insect with a swift movement of his right hand and hears as he squashes it between
his index finger and thumb. And then he is gone, his mumbling and rustling footsteps gradually receding. She imagines the bug’s cartilage cracking and squirting its thick and greasy fluid
onto his fingers as if they are her own.

Enrico recovers and goes back to bickering with Pietro. The two boys are very similar, with Enrico being the more timid. He always has a sullen look, as though expecting defeat.
Instinctively, Bianca prefers him. She watches him chase after Pietro, who has taken possession of the pony and cart and is now flogging the animal mercilessly. The pony runs and runs, as though
fleeing from the pain, kicking up wings of gravel down the driveway. When Enrico realizes that he is never going to be able to catch Pietro or the pony, he throws himself down on the grass in
frustration. Bianca walks over to him, pretending to have seen nothing.

‘What’s the pony’s name?’ she asks.

‘My brother says you’re a foreigner and we don’t like foreigners,’ he replies defiantly.

‘Listen to me. Do you hear what I am saying? I’m not a foreigner.’

‘I’m not going to listen to you. You’re a spy. You’ll spy on me and then tell Mamma everything, even if it isn’t true.’

‘What could I possibly tell her? That I saw a little boy chewing on a blade of grass?’

‘My brother is horrible,’ Enrico continues bitterly. ‘He always wins because he’s bigger. When I get big . . . do you think I will grow up to be bigger than
him?’

He finally looks up at her. In the light of day she sees that his eyes are greenish-grey.

‘I think so, yes,’ answers Bianca, looking him up and down. ‘You may be smaller now, but if you eat lots and exercise, you’ll end up taller than him, I’m
sure.’

It could happen: Pietro has a fairly solid build with robust, sculpted legs but Enrico has the long, delicate bone structure of a foal.

‘Then one day I’ll beat him and get the pony back, since it belongs to both of us. That’s what Papa said. But Pietro always keeps it to himself.’

‘Do you want to tell me his name?’

‘Furbo. I named him. Do you like it?’

‘It’s nice. It suits him.’

‘Well, I’m leaving,’ says the little boy, standing up and smoothing out the wrinkles in his trousers. He wanders off without saying goodbye. But after a few steps he turns
around. ‘I guess you might not be a spy.’

Five days after her arrival and she has still yet to formally meet him. She doesn’t know what to do any more. His mother keeps saying he is in Milan, but now and then he
emerges from the woods and startles her, only to quickly disappear again. And so, Bianca decides simply to start working.

The little girls, all dressed in white cotton, are playing Ring-a-Ring o’ Roses on the great lawn, their brown hair gleaming in the sunlight. She sets up her easel near the poplar tree,
places a pad upon it, and opens the mahogany box that holds her pencils on one side and her charcoal sticks on the other. The sight has reminded her of a Romney painting she saw in England, on one
of the stops along her reverse Grand Tour.

In that painting, three little girls and a boy, dressed in summer sandals and tunics, dance like tiny deities while an older sister plays on the drums, an annoyed look across her face. The older
child is clearly from another marriage, while the four dancers are siblings. And undoubtedly this bothers the older girl tremendously.

‘Lady Anne looks as though she’d rather be somewhere else,’ Bianca said to her father, as they stood contemplating the painting in one of the sitting rooms of the estate, which
was located in some idyllic corner of the English countryside that was itself a work of art.

‘You are right,’ he agreed, without lifting his eyes from the painting. ‘One can only hope that she eventually married well.’

‘What on earth do you mean?’ Bianca cried.

‘I’m only teasing,’ her father said firmly. ‘I only said it to see if you were listening. Although really, do you think that she had any other option?’

That memory is fading fast. She is here now, and the colours of this reality are different and fiercer than any painting. The whiteness of the little girls is almost too painful to look at
against the full greens of the forest and meadow.

Donna Clara comes up behind her quietly, announcing her arrival by clearing her throat. Bianca is always startled by how thin she is. Once it might have been considered a virtue but now her
figure seems almost comical. Bianca gives a slight curtsey without interrupting her pencil strokes.

When you are working
, her father said,
never stop what you’re doing just because someone tells you it’s teatime.

This echo lasts only a second; short but penetrating. And when she comes back to her senses, as if emerging from a trance, she readies herself to respond to a circumstantial comment with a
circumstantial smile. Instead, Donna Clara just coughs.

‘You’re quite talented. My son has chosen well. He and his eccentricities . . .’