A Name in Blood (29 page)

‘You dare speak my name, you whore?’ Roero said.

The girl rubbed at the blood from her nose.
She looks as though she could say more
, Caravaggio thought.
It isn’t the only time Roero has touched her, I’d guess. She knows
his first name, after all, and I doubt his caress is much gentler than the blow he gave her.

Roero stalked through the gate. Martelli put a coin in the kitchen boy’s hand. ‘Take her to the apothecary.’

‘Carmena, come.’ The boy helped his sister to arise and took her away.

Martelli sucked in his lips. ‘You’d better go armed for now, Michele. Honour doesn’t prevent a knight like Roero from assaulting an unarmed man, as you see. You can’t
rely on his whore being around to shame him next time.’

Caravaggio went up the stairs to his studio and took his dagger from his trunk. He recalled the liberation he had known when he read the Grand Master’s letter in the Oratory.
It seems
I’m to be saved only by myself
, he thought. He slipped the dagger inside his doublet.

The dice rolled. Martelli tapped his counters around to the far side of the backgammon board, twisting a lapis rosary in his other hand. Caravaggio reached for the dice cup.
The old Florentine didn’t watch his opponent as he moved. In the lantern light his gaze was inward, reprising every wound and engagement with the enemy, every past encounter with God and the
one that was to come. Caravaggio smiled with some bitterness.
I’ve never played with someone against whom it’d be so easy to cheat
,
and yet I find myself wishing to give him
the victory.

He imagined Martelli was recalling a similar game on a lonely watch during the Turkish siege of the island. That had been more than forty years ago and Martelli would have been about
Caravaggio’s age.
What has he seen coming out of the dark?
He drank a cup of wine, while Martelli had his turn on the board.

‘You took great pains over the Grand Master’s face in the portrait, Maestro Caravaggio?’

‘No more than any other object on the canvas, Signore.’ Caravaggio couldn’t help the defensiveness of the professional who wishes every stage of his work to be credited.

‘Come now, I observed you in your studio. I watched you circle his eyes for hours with many different tones. You sought to depict more than just the way the light fell on the Grand
Master’s face. You looked for an inner light.’

‘It’s there for all to see, Sire. The challenge is to portray it.’

‘The essence of a man?’

‘The essence.’

Martelli moved his pieces. To his surprise, Caravaggio saw that the knight had almost brought them all to their home.

‘When I was a young knight, I learned all the most elaborate techniques of the swordsman.’ Martelli held his right hand forward, en garde, though he gripped his rosary, not a rapier.
‘The
cavazione
, moving the blade from one side of the opponent’s sword to the other. Keeping always in
misura larga
, within lunging distance. Defending against the
mandritto squalembrato
with a
falso dritto
, so that when your opponent’s sword strikes at the left side of your head you cut from the right to the upper left, and instantly
deliver your riposte.’ He mimed the moves as he spoke.

Caravaggio murmured his understanding. He knew the terms. He had practised the techniques.

‘I based my swordplay on the chivalrous gestures of the courtier,’ Martelli said. ‘But once I’d been in a few skirmishes, I pared it down. In the Great Siege, I’d
use my shoulder to knock the other fellow off balance, and I’d finish him with the most lethal blow there is.’ He pulled Caravaggio towards him by the shoulder and shoved a hand into
the side of his chest. ‘A dagger in the armpit, like this.’

Caravaggio quivered, such was the sudden economy of Martelli’s pretended blow.
Now I know why he doesn’t have to guard against cheats at the gaming board.

‘On the seaward wall of our castle,’ Martelli said, ‘I took a blow from a Turk and lost my sword. He was about to finish me. I hugged him close, so that he couldn’t swing
his weapon, and I bit into his neck.’ Martelli held Caravaggio and put his mouth beside his ear, whispering, hard and intimate. ‘We tumbled down a flight of steps, but I kept my teeth
in his vein until he bled to death.’

Caravaggio’s breath stuttered, as though the force of the old man’s memory drew him into the very combat of which he spoke.

‘I almost choked on his gore. Not very chivalrous, but it worked. I delivered him to his death. I didn’t try to make it appear nobler than it was.’ Martelli winced and drew in
his lips. ‘A young man believes the world may be changed through his faith, through the way he wields his sword, even by the way he wears his clothes. But when you kill your first man, you
know the world is as it is. Your illusions die with your opponent. It’s all you can do to hope that after the death of that man
you
at least may change.’

Caravaggio felt himself soften as the old Florentine spoke. He seemed to have waited a long time to hear this voice. It was strange to feel joy when the talk was of death.

‘I learned not to glorify anything – neither the way I parried nor riposted. In turn I told myself not to make idols of the saints. Their ends were deaths like anyone else’s.
The ultimate lesson is not to idealize yourself. Try to be a better man, but don’t worry about being a perfect man.’

Martelli drew himself straight. ‘When you paint St John, don’t fake anything, Michele. Don’t let it be an exercise in technique. Find the way to paint what’s
within.’ He reached out and bumped his fist against Caravaggio’s heart. Then he pushed the backgammon board away. ‘My game.’

Caravaggio had four canvases sewn together to a width of six paces and a height twice that of a tall man. He fixed the size of
The Beheading of St John
after studying
the blank limestone behind the altar in the Oratory from every vantage point. It had to be that big, so that the incident it depicted would be clear to worshippers at the back of the chamber. But
not so big that the characters he painted would seem larger than life.
When the Baptist’s head is cut away from his body, I want the novices to feel like spectators to something real
,
he thought.
I want them to know what it’s like to kill, and to fear death, as I do under its sentence.

He dressed the surface of the canvas with animal glue, pushing the brush into the whip-stitching between the lengths of material, enjoying the way the canvas bounced on its wooden stretcher with
each stroke. He laid down an orange-red ground layer into which he mixed a little yellow ochre and yellow earth. Over this, he put a second layer of darker brown made with charcoal black and red
ochre. These layers would show through the final painting, their undertones giving life and light to the dungeon in which the saint’s death would take place.

As he waited for his models to arrive, his energy was high. He had to walk a little of it off, or he wouldn’t be able to hold his hand steady at the easel. He left the kitchen boy
straining pigments through thin linen sacks and went into the street in his painting smock. He passed the Castilian Inn and entered the gardens where the knights practised their sword drills.

Across the harbour, the standard of the Order fluttered on the castle battlements. The white cross flickered against its red background. He wondered if that was the spot where Martelli had
bitten into the neck of the Turk.

The agitation of the stiff wind seemed to make the colours on the flag mix. There were no clear lines.
If I painted that way, I might give the impression of motion, of an event unfolding
,
he thought.
I could capture life itself.
It would mean less exact brushwork, because he would have to mimic the inability of the eye to nail down precisely where the flag stood at any moment
under the surging breeze. As soon as he picked out the image on the standard, it was gone, fluttering forward or back, rippling like the surface of the harbour water.

The bite to the neck
, he thought,
instead of the elaborations of fine swordsmanship.
Martelli had called it a pure, unadorned conflict. Caravaggio smiled broadly. He would make no
show in this new painting. Everything would draw the viewer into the very moment of martyrdom – unfolding, in motion. He would go straight for the blood.

Caravaggio ran past Our Lady of Victories and into the Italian Inn. In the lower left of his canvas, he saw where he would place them. He could almost count the brushstrokes he would need.
Someone entered the studio behind him. He didn’t turn. He was transfixed by the scene he would paint.

De Ponte, the deacon of the knights, threw off his cloak. ‘Who’s going to be St John?’

The kitchen boy put down the yellow ochre he was straining. ‘Maestro Michele says I’m to be the Baptist.’

De Ponte drew his knife and stroked the scar that ran white through his beard. ‘Come over here and let me slaughter you, then.’ He slapped the startled boy’s back and laughed.
‘Don’t look so scared, son. I’m to pose for the executioner.’ The boy flinched and went back to his colours.

Two women, three men. De Ponte as the executioner, a Sicilian knight named Giacomo as the jailer. The kitchen boy was the saint, and his sister was Salome collecting the
Baptist’s head in a ewer. Their mother played an appalled bystander. They hovered in their poses, unused to the stillness Caravaggio required. He tried to persuade them to relax their
muscles, but the scene displeased him anyway. The boy glanced heavenwards as if he were in one of the ill-done martyrdoms in the Inquisitor’s gallery. The old woman raised her hands,
imploring God’s mercy like an actor in an oldfashioned morality play.

‘Let’s start before this.’ Caravaggio came towards them. ‘Relax.’

They shook out their aching limbs.

‘Let’s act out the story of the death of the saint. Begin with the arrival of Salome and her maid.’

He had them walk through the scene. The jailer issued the death sentence. The executioner shoved the saint to his knees, swung his sword to break the neck, and bent with his dagger to saw away
the head. Salome lowered the ewer to receive it.

‘Again.’ Caravaggio watched them repeat the sequence three times, directing their reactions as they went. He urged them to look within, to
be
the person they represented.
‘It’s happening here. Don’t think about it. Don’t act out what was read to you from the Bible. Just feel it. The story will let you in.’

De Ponte took to it right away and it was he who fixed the moment. He struck the Baptist’s neck, and Caravaggio wondered if this might be the instant he would depict, the pleasure of the
kill. Then he saw an unexpected flicker of regret on de Ponte’s tough features.
That’s my scene
, he thought.
When I recall the way I killed Ranuccio, it isn’t the
absolute conviction and hatred that comes back to me. It’s the guilt and contrition I felt when the dying man looked at me. He passed on all the monstrosity of the world to me, even as he
went to his peace.

Caravaggio drew them towards that instant. Another three runthroughs, each starting closer to the moment he had chosen. To the kitchen boy he said, ‘You’ve been cut down. What would
your last thought be?’