When he saw me, he gestured at me, crust in hand. ‘Ah, someone civilized at last!’
I sat down, grinning.
He leaned forwards, over the table. ‘The Grand Duke must be worried sick.’
It was three years since Ferdinando’s wedding to Violante, the Bavarian princess, he told me, and there was still no sign of an heir. Anna Maria was also married, of course – an
achievement
in itself! – but people were saying her husband had given her syphilis, and that she was now infertile. That left Gian Gastone.
‘Oh dear,’ I said.
Pampolini let out one of his explosive laughs. ‘It’s a disaster, isn’t it?’
Once he had poured me a drink, I explained my predicament and watched all the flippancy and mischief leave his face.
‘What do you need that for?’ he asked.
‘I can’t tell you.’
‘How do I know it’s legal?
I lowered my voice. ‘What if I told you it was for someone in a very high position?’
‘Bassetti?’
I almost choked on my wine.
‘Just a joke,’ he said.
He would see what he could do, he went on, though he warned me that I would have to be patient. What I was asking for – an archetype, a paragon – was rare in the extreme.
I nodded gloomily. ‘I know.’
The wine was finished. Pampolini ordered a grappa. I would have one too, I said. After that, I’d have to be going. But the first grappa turned into a second, and then the proprietor brought us another two, on the house. I noticed how Pampolini watched her walk back to the kitchens, her thick-waisted body twisting as she edged between the tables.
‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘if you can overlook the missing eye.’
I thought this was one of the funniest things I had ever heard. Slightly hurt, but with a half-smile on his face, the
barber-surgeon
waited until I had finished laughing. Then, in an attempt to get his own back, perhaps, he asked if I had been seeing anyone. No, I said. I’d been too busy, working.
‘Not even a little fling with that Spanish woman?’
‘No – and anyway, she’s not Spanish. It was her husband who was Spanish.’
‘But she’s a widow …’
‘So?’
‘You know what she wants, don’t you?’ He eyed me across the table. ‘Old chickens make good soup.’
I looked down, smiled. Shook my head.
‘Are you sure you haven’t?’ he said. ‘You’ve been living there for long enough.’
Two more grappas appeared.
‘I saw this girl once,’ I said, ‘in a shop window –’
But Pampolini wouldn’t let go of the Spanish theme. ‘Did you hear what happened to the husband?’
I repeated what Bassetti had told me.
‘That’s only the half of it,’ Pampolini said.
Signore de la Mar had become dejected and violent. He had taken to beating his wife. That was how she’d lost her front tooth. Then he died. It was thought to be an accident – death by misadventure – but they had quite a reputation as poisoners, the Florentines …
I stared at Pampolini. ‘You mean she killed him?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
The conversation lurched, veered sideways, and he began to discuss anatomy. He described a dissection which he had performed in front of an audience that included Francesco Redi – it was how they had met – and which he had conceived of as a homage to the anatomy lesson given by Dr Pieter Pauw in Leiden in 1615. Had I seen de Gheyn’s engraving of the event, with skulls circling the base of the operating table, and a couple of dogs waiting patiently for scraps? This was a subject for which we both had an inexhaustible appetite, and it was five o’clock before I managed to tear myself away.
Once outside, I found myself wandering in the maze of streets on the south side of the ghetto. Every now and then, in the gap between two buildings, or at the end of a dark alley, I would catch a glimpse of the rust-coloured dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, disproportionately large, like a grown-up playing a child’s game. Where, I wondered, was the girl I had mentioned to Pampolini, the girl I had seen only twice in my life, the girl whose existence was so vivid and yet so tenuous that I
sometimes
felt as if I had made her up?
I turned the corner and nearly jumped out of my skin, for there she was, no more than fifty yards away. Her wrists were thin, her black hair shone. There was an urgency about the way she moved. Something clear-cut too. Defined. To see her on the street, with people all around her, was like seeing a knife in a drawer of spoons. I had long since come to a standstill, and I was smiling, not just at her beauty, but at the beauty of
coincidence
. Who was it who wrote that chance provides us with exactly what we need?
When she noticed me, she slowed down, adjusting the basket she was carrying. She seemed startled, even a little bewildered, as though the possibility that I might appear had not occurred to her.
‘I didn’t expect it to happen like this,’ I said.
‘I’m sorry?’
Her voice, which I had just heard for the first time, was low and smoky. What would it sound like if she said my name? Or if she said she loved me? But what was I thinking? Was I drunk? Well, yes. Obviously.
‘To be honest, I didn’t expect it to happen at all,’ I said. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere, but I’d just about given up.’
‘So how did you find me?’
‘Pure luck – though, oddly enough, I was thinking about you when you appeared.’
‘Perhaps you’re imagining things. Perhaps I’m not really here.’ She seemed wistful, as if what she was saying might actually be true.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Faustina.’
We moved on along the street, past a place known for its fried fish. We crossed the Mercato Vecchio. The setting sun threw our shadows down in front of us, hers touching mine, though we were still strangers to each other.
‘You sent me a gift,’ I said.
‘I’ve never done anything like that before.’ She kept her face turned away from me, her eyes on the stalls. Spiky stacks of
artichokes
. A row of glossy aubergines.
‘You didn’t sign it.’
‘No.’
‘I liked the mystery of that.’
‘I didn’t need to sign it. I knew you’d know who it was from.’
‘How could you be certain?’
‘I just knew.’
I looked at her sidelong.
‘You say you like mystery.’ She had stopped at the edge of the square. The buzz and clatter of the market packing up – special offers, knock-down prices, dozens of last-minute deals being done. ‘I’ve got more mystery in me than –’ and she spun round, turning a full circle – ‘than all these people put together.’
‘We all have our secrets,’ I said gently, ‘don’t we?’
Her face tightened, and she lowered her voice until I could barely hear what she was saying. ‘Something happens, and in that moment you make a new person, another you, so there are two of you suddenly, and you believe in that new person with every fibre of your being, and you pretend that the other person, the person you left behind, you pretend she doesn’t exist, even though she might tug at your sleeve sometimes, and talk to you at night, and make surprise appearances in your dreams –’
I stepped in front of her. ‘You’re describing me. Here. Now. And for the last fifteen years.’
She didn’t understand. How could she?
‘Can you ride a horse?’ I said.
She looked at the ground and laughed. I asked if I had said something funny. She shook her head, and then apologized.
I was thinking of visiting a potter who lived in the country outside Florence, I told her. I wanted to see his work. If I borrowed two horses, she could come with me.
‘He makes animals.’ I tried to remember what Jack Towne had told me. ‘Wolves,’ I said uncertainly.
‘Wolves?’
‘Pigs too, I think.’
She was laughing again, more openly this time. She could probably be free on Friday, she said. I told her I would come for her. It would be early, just after dawn. Though it was reckless, even risky, I took her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. Then, before she could change her mind, I whirled off up the street.
‘Wait!’
I turned round.
She was standing where I had left her, but the low sun edged her face in gold, which made her difficult to see.
‘You don’t know where I live,’ she said. ‘How can you come for me if you don’t know where I live?’
In June, while exploring the wax workshops on Via de’ Servi, I had met a man who made votive images. During our
conversation
he had mentioned a type of gypsum that was quarried in the hills around Volterra. He claimed it produced a plaster that was more pliant and sensitive than any other. Thinking of the Grand Duke’s commission, I had put in an order for half a
hundredweight
.
The day after my coincidental encounter with Faustina, the sacks of gypsum were delivered to my workshop. I had been wondering how to get through the week. Now, all of a sudden, I had something to occupy me. I baked the gypsum for several hours, heating the rocks to a high temperature. Once I had purged them of all their moisture I let them cool, then I ground them into a fine powder. When the gypsum was ready, I sent for Fiore. I needed her for an experiment, I said. She arrived in the shoes I had bought her the year before, and a precarious
fontange
involving seagull feathers, a small rodent’s skull, and half a dozen bulrushes.
‘The height of fashion,’ I said, ‘as always.’
She grinned.
I rubbed hemp oil into her hands to prevent the wet plaster sticking to her skin, then I coated two short lengths of string in pig fat and attached them to her right hand so they started on either side of her wrist and met at the end of her longest finger. Once her hand was covered in plaster, I would take hold of the string, first one piece, then the other, and gently pull them
sideways
, cutting through the plaster as a cheese-wire cuts through cheese. Later, when the plaster had set, I would be able to lift the mould away in two neat halves.
I mixed tepid water into the kevelled gypsum. When it had achieved the correct consistency, I began to apply it to her hands.
‘It feels warm,’ she said.
‘It’s supposed to,’ I told her. ‘If it didn’t heat up, it wouldn’t harden.’
As I worked, the image of Faustina came to me, Faustina with the last rays of the setting sun behind her, Faustina edged in bright flame like a descending angel. I’ve found you, I thought. I’ve finally found you.
I glanced up to see Fiore staring at me.
‘Why are you smiling?’ she said.
Friday came. We left the city not long after dawn, and soon found ourselves on a sunken track that headed east. The
grass-covered
banks were planted with olive trees, their trunks stunted and flaky, silver-grey, while ahead of us sprawled a range of
sun-bleached
hills whose tops were concealed by cloud. It was the end of September, and the weather was humid; every once in a while, I had to take a deep breath so as to shift the air at the bottom of my lungs. We passed an abandoned farmhouse. A single peach tree stood on the land, a few reddish-orange globes clustered in its branches like a mocking variation on the Grand Duke’s coat of arms.
I had set out from my lodgings when it was still dark, afraid I would be unable to locate the apothecary, but when I led the two horses up the needle-narrow alley off Via Lontanmorti, I had the feeling I had been there before, and not just on the day of Fiore’s tour either. I was sure I had walked beneath its blackened arches, past its ulcerated walls, over its uneven, pitted paving stones. How could that be, though? I knocked on the apothecary door. A twitchy, dark-haired man let me in. Faustina was still upstairs, he said, but she would be down soon. When I told him his establishment was almost impossible to find, he nodded with a curious, modest complacency, as if I had paid him a compliment. There was no name, I said. There wasn’t even a sign.
‘If I might correct you.’ The man led me outside and
indicated
a number of stones set into the masonry some distance above the door. ‘That’s our sign. Over the years, it has become our name as well.’ He waited until I saw how the eight stones formed the rough shape of a question mark, then excused himself and withdrew into a dim back room, where he bent over a wooden box, sorting seeds with darting fingers.
As we rode eastwards, I turned to Faustina and asked who the man was.
‘My uncle,’ she said. ‘Giuseppe.’
‘I thought you must be related. You have the same quickness about you.’
She looked at me as if she thought I might be finding fault.
‘It’s a good quality,’ I said. ‘It makes you seem more alive than other people.’
‘You’ve got an odd way of talking.’
‘You mean my accent?’
‘No, the things you say.’ She hesitated. ‘Though your accent isn’t one I’ve heard before.’
I smiled. ‘That present you sent me …’
‘The oil or the fruit?’
‘The oil.’
‘Have you used it yet?’
I looked at her. ‘Not yet.’
‘It will keep your hands really supple – not just the skin, the joints as well –’
‘My hands?’
When I told Faustina what Beanpole had said, she covered her mouth.
Then, out of embarrassment, perhaps, she suggested I race her to a line of cypresses about a mile ahead. Without waiting for a response, she touched her heels to her horse’s flanks. I galloped after her, but she was already disappearing into the distance. By the time I caught up, she had dismounted, and her horse was drinking from a nearby stream.
‘You ride beautifully,’ I told her. ‘I didn’t stand a chance.’
‘I cheated – and anyway, I’ve got the faster animal.’
I had sensed this tendency in her before, when we first met on the street. She would invent half-truths that were detrimental to her. She ducked praise as others ducked blows.
I asked her how she’d learned.
‘A man called Sabatino Vespi taught me,’ she said. ‘My father worked with horses, though, so maybe it’s in the blood.’
She told me that when her father rode he seemed to float above the saddle, only connected to the horse by the most
intangible
of threads. His hands on the reins, his feet in the stirrups – but lightly, ever so lightly. They were like completely separate beings who just happened to be travelling in the same direction, at the same speed. It was a perfect understanding, harmony made visible.