A Name in Blood (20 page)

‘Bring him in,’ Scipione said.

The door opened at the far end of the room. He watched the fire and listened to the footsteps advancing across the expanse of his study. He held out his hand. Caravaggio knelt to kiss it.

Scipione dropped the paper on his chair when he arose. He regarded Caravaggio as if he were an ancient relic dug from the soil of the Forum. The artist looked worn. His clothing was dirty and in
need of repair.
No
, Scipione thought,
it ought to be replaced entirely. He looks disappointed and hungry. Is that straw poking out of his hair behind the crown? If he
were
an
antiquity, I doubt that I’d add him to my collection.
He warmed his back against the fire.

‘I appreciate that at least on this occasion you didn’t pick a fight with a member of the Tomassoni clan,’ Scipione said. ‘You have my dispensation to make rude comments
to the night watch whenever you so wish.’

Caravaggio hesitated, then bowed. ‘I humbly thank Your Illustrious Lordship.’

Scipione held still. Something about the painter’s voice didn’t sound humble at all. It was resentful, even superior. He stroked his beard and took a deep breath of the jasmine oil
freed by his fingers. ‘People tell me you’re a killer. Or if you’re not yet, you will be soon enough. They say you bugger boys, too.’ He pushed down the ends of his lips and
raised his chin as if to acknowledge that he viewed murder and sodomy with equanimity. ‘They tell me one can find the proof in your art.’

‘All paintings are full of death and naked boys,’ Caravaggio said. ‘It’s just that no one ever noticed it before
I
painted dead men and young nudes.’

‘It seems not everyone wishes to be made to look.’

‘I’ll do
The Death of the Virgin
over again, if Your Illustriousness wishes it.’

‘I do not.’

‘The Shoeless Fathers—’

‘Shall remain tasteless, as well as shoeless.’ Scipione inclined his head towards the paper on the chair. ‘Unlike them, I’m a man of discernment.’

Caravaggio picked up the sheet and read it. He dropped to his knee before Scipione and kissed his hand, with fervour this time.

The cardinal plucked the straw from Caravaggio’s hair and rolled it between his fingers. ‘The Confraternity of St Anne of the Grooms will be pleased to purchase a painting from you,
as you see.’

‘For their church near the Vatican?’

Scipione liked to shock.
If only my position allowed me to use this power for surprises more often
, he thought.
For pleasant surprises.
He pursed his lips and made his moustache
twitch. ‘For the Holy Father’s own basilica.’

‘For St Peter’s?’

Scipione watched the ambition and exultation gleam out of Caravaggio’s eyes. St Peter’s was the most important location for a commission. An artist might measure himself against the
great masters whose work was displayed there.
To the glory of God?
Scipione mused.
Well, why not?

‘I believe the Confraternity will want some sort of repetition of Maestro Leonardo’s painting of the Virgin and Child with St Anne. Needless to say, I shan’t expect you to do
any such thing.’

‘I’m most humbly grateful to Your Illustriousness, most humbly.’

That’s better
, Scipione thought.
That sounds more like it.

The boy Domenico rolled a leather ball across the floor of packed earth. Caravaggio bounced it back, but his attention was not on the game. He watched Lena, uncertain, gauging
her face in the half-light of her mother’s home.

‘I was scared when I saw you throwing stones in the street, Michele,’ she said.

Resentment touched him like a cold breath. He had no way out but to beg her forgiveness for a fight in which he had been the insulted party. The ball dropped in his lap. He squeezed it.
‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered. The boy reached out, lifted the ball by a loose thread, and swung it towards his chin with a laugh.

‘You scare me when you’re angry. You shake like an old man.’ Lena bit at her knuckle.

‘It’s a matter of honour, Lena.’

She was crying. He reached for her shoulder, a hesitant touch, but she allowed his hand to remain.

‘What’d you have me do? Be a spineless peasant? I’m a gentleman.
Better
than a gentleman, because I have skills beyond the use of my sword. Yet the nobility talks down
to me as if I were paid to spread whitewash by the yard. I
must
be taken seriously.’

‘By men?’

‘What’s life without a little danger?’ He tried a laugh, but it was halting and sour.

‘Isn’t it a dangerous enough world in which we live?’

‘Dangerous, yes. But disease and accidents are like the food we eat every day. Danger that’s actively sought has the savour of a dish of rare delicacy.’

Lena’s hazel eyes probed him. He was sure she had heard the hollowness of his words. He felt as though he had been quoting Onorio.

‘What brings honour to men always involves the suffering of others. Eventually you’ll suffer for it, too. I fear for you, Michele.’ Lena drew her hands down her face as though
she were wiping away the dirt of the day. ‘There was a shooting star last night. Its tail pointed towards the Holy Father’s fortress as it fell. Everyone says it’s a sign that
evil times are coming.’ Her eyes were full of regret. Their frankness disconcerted Caravaggio. Fillide and Menica wouldn’t have allowed their heartbreak to be so visible. Lena
didn’t conceal hers.

It occurred to him that he was more like Lena than he had known, because he lacked the faculty of his friends in the Evil Garden to disguise what they knew. It was all there in his paintings.
The deaths witnessed in street brawls and the pitiful fear in the eyes of his self-portraits. He raised his head. His mouth opened in surprise.

‘What is it, Michele?’ Lena said.

A curious, slow smile. Lena was dangerous, because she didn’t carry her shame like the bandages on a leper’s sores, concealing but not curing. Menica and Fillide or gentle dead Anna
would have comprehended the honour which compelled him to attack Baglione. They might even have admired him for it. Lena saw it only as something that came between them.

‘I want to paint you again,’ he said.

She sniffed and wiped her nose on her wrist.

‘Lena, I painted
The Death of the Virgin
that way because I felt it deeply, when you lost the baby.’

She shook her head. A woman bore her scars buried beneath the skin – not as the livid mark of a blade, but like the soft fontanelle of a child’s skull before the bone bonds. An
unseen vulnerability that could only be detected with gentle exploration.

‘I saw you when you were almost dead,’ he said. ‘I felt responsible for the way those Tomassoni women attacked you. By loving me, you came close to death. People tell me
I’m a troublemaker who’ll end up killing someone. When I saw you, I wanted to keep all the dangers of my life away from you. Ranuccio hates me. He’ll try any way he can to hurt
me.’

‘There’re so many ways to die, Michele. Can’t we expect to be loved first?’

He dropped to his knees, held her waist, and put his head in her lap. He breathed as though he had just come from under the surface of water.

Domenico laid his head beside him, smiling, and put his thin arm across his back.

5

T
he Madonna with the Serpent

He painted them as a family. Lena as his Madonna, her skirts hitched up for work around the house, leaning forward to support Domenico, her bare foot on the head of a serpent, demonstrating how
to kill it. The naked boy represented Christ, and the viper crushed under his weight was the image of evil. Caravaggio set Lena’s mother beside them as St Anne, the Saviour’s approving
grandmother, pausing in her housework to watch the destruction of wickedness.

When he had painted Lena as the dead Virgin, Caravaggio had done with her as he wished.
As if she were a whore
, he thought.
Perhaps I behaved towards every woman I’ve known that
way.
The love between them seemed pure, cleansed now. She did things to please him, unbidden.

He had never been so happy. Something had been freed in him. He ascribed this to the liveliness the Antognettis brought to his studio and his love for them. The way Lena tickled the boy when
Caravaggio wasn’t watching, the boy’s fascination with the painter’s mirrors, the old woman’s pride in the talent of her daughter’s man. He could see his own
contentment in the paint too, feel it in his brush. On the canvas, every fold in the women’s skirts seemed entirely true to him. He wanted to step into the painting. He knew the Madonna would
welcome him. In spite of all the wrong he had done in his life, she would draw his head to her breast, just as Lena did every night.

He seldom stopped working or even left the house. He was glad that he didn’t. Onorio informed him of the tension in the streets, the crowds gathering outside the palaces to brawl or throw
stones. The conflict continued between the Farnese and the Colonna, the Pope prevaricating between the two sides. Each morning dogs chewed on the corpses in the open sewers.

‘I stand at the edge of these battles,’ Onorio said, one day when he had come with news of another street fight.

‘That doesn’t sound like you.’ Caravaggio glanced down from his stepladder, where he was texturing the ceiling above his Madonna, a rough green like oxidized copper.

‘Once in a while, someone just asks to have his head split open and I oblige. But mostly I don’t bother with it all. It’s no fun without you.’ The shame that racked
Caravaggio after his rages was alien to Onorio. He accepted his own furies. They were in the nature of things and confirmed that life was neither more nor less immoral than him. He was in tune with
the imperfect world. Those who believed in a better existence or who restrained what flowed through them were, he believed, the same blockheads who would sacrifice themselves for a lost cause. He
tossed back a mouthful of wine and swirled what was left in the bottom of his cup. ‘Ranuccio’s always there, when the trouble starts.’

Caravaggio put his brush between his teeth and worked at the paint with his fingers. ‘Is he?’

‘He asked me about you.’

‘Give him my regards.’

‘I shall insult him with grace and tell him it’s from you.’

Caravaggio bowed. ‘You’re too kind.’

‘He hasn’t forgotten the ten
scudi
you owe him.’ Onorio refilled his wine. ‘Or the duel you had at the Farnese palace.’

Caravaggio came down from the ladder.
I haven’t forgotten either
, he thought.
But the memory makes me quake with all that I have to lose now.
He nodded towards his canvas.
‘What do you think?’

He had done Lena’s hair with a touch of red in it that he hadn’t noticed when he painted her for the
Madonna of Loreto
. It made her look less Greek, gentler. Her face was wide
and delicate, tapering to the small chin he loved to hold between his thumb and forefinger. The skin around her eyes was grey with the exhaustion of hard labour. Her jaw was tinted to a shade of
charcoal too. Though she never complained about her health, he wondered how strong she was.

‘A commission for St Peter’s, the centre of Christendom.’ Onorio paced before the canvas. ‘Appropriate really, because you’ve been behaving like a monk since you
had that run-in with Baglione and the night patrol.’

Caravaggio shrugged.

‘But at the same time you’ve been preparing to drop your pants to the entire Church.’ Onorio pointed to the Madonna’s fingernails. They were ridged black with dirt.
‘Your work is amazing. Truly, I can smell the stinking little hovel where these peasants live. But how do you think the cardinals will like that? With their perfumed beards and their clean
linen every week?’

‘I expect it to elevate them.’

Onorio laughed and shook his head. ‘Come and have some fun. There’s boar-baiting outside the Colonna Palace.’

‘Also very elevating. But no, thanks.’

Shoving back the shutters, Caravaggio watched Onorio descend the narrow street to the Piazza of the Sainted Apostles. Beyond the end of the alley, a crowd was building. Its murmur of excitement
caught him and he almost cried out for his friend to wait. In the piazza four men climbed into the ring, their heads and torsos armoured. A massive boar scuttled through a trapdoor and sized them
up. One of the men dodged towards it in his bare feet and clubbed it on the side of the head. The crowd bellowed as the boar charged.

Caravaggio bound his arms across his chest. He was alone with his work, while the men below in the crowd were joined in camaraderie. He had been apart from others just like this ever since
things had gone wrong with Fabrizio. He thought of the moment when Costanza’s husband had heard the accusation of sodomy against Fabrizio and the young Merisi boy. He had demanded that
Fabrizio deny the lust and sin in which he had engaged with Michele. But Fabrizio had been silent. Michele had seen that this would be too much for the furious man and that his friend was about to
be disowned. He had been without a father and he wouldn’t allow Fabrizio to share that fate, so he had spoken up. ‘I made Fabrizio do it,’ he had said. The Marchese had beaten
Fabrizio for succumbing, but Michele had known that it was a cleansing punishment. Soon enough, the Marchese would act as if Fabrizio were unstained – and Michele would be gone.