The Madonna of the Almonds (10 page)

‘Goodbye, Signore. And thank you for my dove.’

‘’Tis nothing. But you may do something for me in return.’

‘Yes, Signore?’

‘You know that…phrase I used to those children?’

Elijah smiled, his small white teeth catching the moon. ‘You mean
vaffanculo
, Signore.’

‘The same. There is no need to tell your mother that you know such words. They are not very wholesome for children.’

‘Yes, Signore.’

‘Farewell then.’ Bernardino knocked on the door and saw the grille slide back. He waited till he saw the boy admitted, and enfolded in the glad and angry embrace of his mother, then took his warm heart home to his cold bed.

‘So you see, I smile because he speaks against his heart,’ finished Manodorata. ‘He is not the man that he presents to the world. He dissembles. ’Tis an art I know much about.’

‘He did such?’ Simonetta was incredulous.

‘Yes, all this and more. There is an end to the tale – but no scorpion’s sting; an ending of great sweetness.’

Elijah was playing in the courtyard of his house, for his imprisonment was to be total for a sevennight, in punishment. He mourned the loss of the black marble, made of volcanic glass, for the peddler must have moved on by now. He must be content with his own uninteresting marbles of Venetian glass. And he tried hard to be, as he was a good child. He thought at first that he imagined the soft knocking at the starred door. He fetched a stool and stood on it to slide back the peephole, and as he did so a tiny bag plopped through the grille. He jumped to the floor and unravelled the bag – it was in fact an old piece of canvas tied with a leather thong – and inside, round perfect and black as night, lay the glass marble he had coveted. Elijah gave a yelp and was about to cast the canvas away when writing caught his eye. He knew Christian characters well, for he was thoroughly schooled by his mother, so he spelled out incredulously:‘for Elijah’. He did not need his skills to read the one rune that was left, for it was a tiny drawing of a dove.

‘When will you finish?’

Bernardino did not look up from the fresco at Simonetta’s question. ‘Soon. I have a commission at the Certosa di Pavia. The silent monks of the Charterhouse will suit me very well after your incessant chatter.’ She smiled now where before she would have censured.

She was getting used to his ways. Then she nodded, suddenly sorry at the thought of his leaving. She felt that at last they had reached a truce, and were taking some small steps towards friendship. Ever since she had learned what he had done for Manodorata’s son, she had regarded him with new eyes. She saw him now as something of a boy himself, although he was much older than she. She saw through his swagger and posture – the persona he presented that was not his own, the words he spoke which he did not mean. He was as much of a presentation to the world as his work was; to Simonetta, who truly believed, she saw that the way he presented the human condition was not real. It was the
atre. Mary, that great Lady she represented, had suffered the pangs of love and the pains of childbirth and the loss of a son. She could not possibly have looked, in life, as serene as she was to be painted. The Saints too, who suffered and died, did not, she was sure, do so with such poise, such acceptance, however strong their faith. Like her own faith, theirs had been tested by tribulation, and pain, and torture of the soul. Then she gave a small smile at her own arrogance – she should not compare her own small sufferings to those of the Saints. She suffered in her grief, but had not undergone the physical tortures of a Saint Lucy with her eyes torn from her head, or a Saint Agatha with her breasts cleaved from her chest.

Bernadino saw only her smile and not the macabre thoughts. He had just made the delightful discovery that Simonetta’s nose wrinkled at the bridge when she smiled. It made her suddenly earthly and approachable; less limpid and moon-distant. He suddenly felt ridiculously happy and returned her smile with one equally brilliant. ‘Don’t tell me you wish to quit the place?’ he teased. ‘Don’t tell me you are not enjoying your sittings here?’ His voice was heavy with irony.

‘Of course, it is a great honour to be painted as the Virgin…’ she began.

‘Don’t tell me you believe in all this,’ Bernardino interrupted. His dismissive wave took in the whole series of emerging frescoes – the Marriage of the Virgin, the Adoration
of the Magi, Christ’s Presentation in the Temple; episodes in a life in which he did not believe.

Her gaze was straight. ‘Of course I do. It is
lapalissiano
.’ The word escaped her before she could catch herself, and her heart sank that she should have used it. For
lapalissiano
meaning ‘obviously true’, was a new word in the Lombard language, and it took its letters from the name of Maréchal Lapalisse, Lorenzo’s General. He was honourable and true – and dead like Lorenzo. She spoke rapidly to cover herself, ‘Don’t you?’

‘No. Not one single syllable or scripture.’

‘Why not?’ she challenged.

He turned his back and began to paint with furious concentration the diaphanous, heavenly glow of her blue cloak. Amid the tempest of his brushstrokes, the cerulean blue reminded him, and took him back, all the way back. ‘When I was little I lived on the lakeshore of Lake Maggiore. My father was a fisherman, and went out with the boats every day. It’s a big lake. Very blue and stretches as far as the eye can see. To a small boy it seemed enormous. I thought it was the sea. I used to go down there on summer days and sit on the shore.’ Bernardino let his brush hand fall to his side as he thought of his young self. ‘I used to think of all the lands that lay beyond this great ocean – all the sights there were to see in the world, all the alien beasts and foreign landscapes. I could feel the pebbles hard under my legs, but I didn’t mind – I used to get lost in the blue. When I
squinted against the sun the lake became the sky and the sky became the lake – they met at the horizon and were the very same blue. That blue – I’ve never been able to paint it.’ He turned then and looked at her eyes – the same blue was there, regarding him, but he did not say as much. He went on: ‘I used to watch the water lapping at my feet. In and out, as it washed over the pebbles. I asked my mother that night, why the water behaved like that.’ He drew in a lungful of breath against the pain. And released it as he spoke. ‘My mother had little time for me. She was always preoccupied with my uncles – I had so many uncles – they used to come over every afternoon when my father was out for the afternoon catch. My mother always told me not to mention to my father that they had been to the house. Said there’d been a family quarrel.’ Bernardino looked up briefly and his mouth twisted into a smile that was not a smile. ‘So many uncles, and none of them looked like my father.’ He turned abruptly back to his work, and carried on his tale in a tumble of words, before Simonetta could interject. ‘My mother told me that angels sat on the shore and breathed in and out, in and out, and their breath drew the waters in and caused the tides. I asked her why
we
couldn’t see the angels, and she said that it was because we were sinful. One of my uncles was there and he laughed when she said that; he said she was quite right and he kissed her shoulder. I didn’t like the way he laughed so I went down to the lake again to wait for my father.’ Bernardino unconsciously clenched
his brush. ‘All afternoon I tried to be a good boy and think good thoughts so I could see the angels. I was still there when my father came off the boats. He asked me what I was doing and I told him I was trying to see the angels that caused the tides with their breath. He sighed and sat beside me. “Bernardino,” he said, “there are no angels on the shore.” I was hot by now, and tired, and my head ached from the sun and concentrating all afternoon to try and see the angels. What he said made me want to cry so I began to shout. “There
are
angels, there
are
!” I yelled. “Who told you such things?” asked my father. I lost my head, and forgot what my mother had told me. “Mother!” I yelled. “And my uncle.” My father’s face froze. “Which uncle?” he asked quietly. All of a sudden I remembered the family quarrel, but I had gone too far to turn back. “I don’t know which one,” I said. “Lots of them come to the house. It was the one that was there today.” After that my father stood up and looked at the water for a long time as the tide lapped the shore. He turned round and his eyes were wet. “Bernardino,” he said, “your mother is a liar. She always has been.” He dipped his hand in the water, and came towards me. He pushed his finger into my mouth, quite hard. “Taste,” he commanded. “The water is sweet, not salt,” he said. “This is not the sea, Bernardino. There are no tides here, and no angels. And I have no brothers.” He took his finger out of my mouth and touched my shoulder, once, tenderly, before he walked away. “It’s just a lake, Bernardino,” he said. “Just a lake.”’

Simonetta waited, hardly breathing. Bernardino passed a hand over his eyes, leaving a blue streak on his brow. ‘That was the last thing my father said to me. When I got back to the house, he had gone. My mother blamed me. Her drinking got worse, and my ‘uncles’ stopped coming to begin with, but soon they were back. I began to draw with the charcoal I made on the beach, on bits of driftwood, old sails, anything. I decided that since angels didn’t exist I would invent them. Once, when I was fifteen, I drew over the whole of our wooden house with a huge charcoal fresco. Angels upon angels, cherubim, seraphim; the whole company of Heaven. My mother was furious. She yelled and cried and the ‘uncle’ that was there that day beat me with his belt. I waited till they were in bed then I stole his horse. I’d heard that the great master Leonardo da Vinci was in Milan working for Duke Ludovico Sforza, and I took my drawings and rode all night. I waited for a week outside da Vinci’s
studiolo
, making sure he all but tripped over me every day, until he agreed to an audience. He barely glanced at my drawings, but gave me some charcoal and made me draw a hand.’ Bernardino looked up at Simonetta’s splayed fingers and smiled at the memory. ‘He made me his apprentice that same day.’

Bernardino looked down at his own hand. He had clutched the brush so tight there were four red half moons where his nails had bitten his palm. As he watched the moons suffused with red. He looked back to the angels, his angels, that circled above his head, and blew trumpets
from the pilasters. ‘Leonardo didn’t believe either,’ Bernardino addressed the ceiling. ‘He said it was perfectly possible to inspire the faith of others without feeling it ourselves. He only revered the Magdalene, as I had only revered my mother, another fallen woman. What my mother had begun, my Master finished. My faith was gone. He set a greater store by human feelings, not religious devotion.’

Simonetta found her voice at last. ‘What feelings?’ she asked, gently now.

Love, thought Bernardino. He remembered Leonardo’s parting advice to him, that when he began to feel again he would be the better painter. And it was true. In his easy conquests, his tumbling of women and girls, virgins and matrons, he had never once emerged from the numbness of the loss of his mother. The day she had lied to him, and his father had left, he had lost his innocence – his picture of her as the ideal of all women. He had placed her on a pedestal as surely as if she had been a statue of the Madonna. But she had lied, and cried, and driven him from her house into the arms of the empty conquests he had sought but never enjoyed. All in the pursuit of that one thing, the Holy Grail of Love. He opened his mouth to say the simple syllable, the syllable that meant everything to him, and nothing, to the woman who meant more to him than she would ever know. But he found that he could not speak. His voice caught in his throat and tears threatened his eyes. Tears! He had not cried since the night he rode from the lakeshore
to Milan, the tears streaming backwards and away into the night as he galloped, his face dried by the hot night wind as soon as it was wet. Now, as then, he had the same instinct. He must go, now, at once.

He put down his brushes abruptly, most uncharacteristically leaving them to dry on his palette. The Virgin’s face was still a blank oval, but he could do no more today; he almost fell from his perch. As he passed Simonetta, without knowing what she did, reached out her hand to him. He turned his head away, and she heard him mumble – ‘
Noli me
Tangere
.’

So for the second time in his life Bernardino ran from a woman he loved. He climbed the stair to his lonely tower in a terrible hurry without looking back, and it was just as well, for he would have seen a sight that would have confounded and crushed him, the very sight he had been desperate to avoid. Simonetta’s lake blue eyes looked after him with an expression of unmistakeable pity.

It was not until much later in the evening that Simonetta realised what he had said to her, in that unhappy moment when she had reached out to him.
Noli me Tangere
. Of course. She reached for the family Bible that rested before her
prie-dieu
on the night table, and turned the yellowing pages till she found what she sought.
‘Dicit ei Iesus: Noli me
tangere, nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem meum: vade autem ad
fratres meos, et dic eis: Ascendo ad Patrem meum et Patrem ves
trum, Deum meum et Deum vestrum.’
There it was: the Risen
Christ’s exhortation to the Magdalene, the woman he had once loved and who loved him, the first person he chose to witness his resurrection. ‘Jesus saith to her: Touch me not: for I am not yet ascended to my Father. But go to my brethren and say to them: I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God.’

Touch me Not.

Amaria looked up at her Saint. She felt no awe or fear of this one, as she did of the others – the punctured Saint Sebastian, or Saint Bartholomew with his terrible coat of flayed flesh. No, this Saint was
her
Saint – Sant’Ambrogio, Saint Ambrose, her keeper, her father, her patron and friend. In the candlelight his eyes were dark, bovine and kind. She liked him, and she liked his image in this church of San Pietro in Ciel d’Oro.

Saint Peter of the Golden Sky.

She would repeat the name to herself, like a poem, so beautiful were the words. She thought of Saint Peter with his jangling keys living in the golden sky, and Saint Ambrose living there with him. Here too, in a stone casket with carved reliefs of his life, lay the bones of Saint Agostino of Hippo. The scenes of the tomb showed the casket being carried from Carthage by Luitprand the Longobard King, and Amaria ran her fingers over the little stone pallbearers. Their plight seemed so far away and Saint Agostino, with
his pierced, flaming heart did not really interest her. He was not part of her family as Ambrose was, he did not bear her name. Agostino’s bones, that had walked over the arid plains of Carthage and supported muscle, blood and organs, were less real to her than the two dimensional icon of Sant’Ambrogio. She knew little of her Saint’s provenance – just that he had been a great Christian in Roman times, who spread the word of God among the pagans. It was enough to know he had once been a man just like any other. She could smile at him without being disrespectful and she did so until she thought her cheeks would crack. For this year her heart was full with thanks. She lit a candle at the foot of the Saint’s image. ‘Happy name day, Sant’Ambrogio,’ she whispered. ‘And thank you for Selvaggio.’

Amaria walked out into the square pulling her hood over her hair. She had plaited and bound it in a new way today. Gone were her loose, tangled braids which had been used to gather moss and leaves as she romped through the woods. Selvaggio had made her a wooden comb at her request and she had used it every night, smoothing her tangled mane until it shone like ebony. For her name day she had plaited and bound her locks in the Milanese fashion, placing a red ribbon round her brow and tiny rosebuds in the heavy black coils gathered at the nape of her neck. She had worn her best russet gown, and rubbed red clay paste into her already rosy lips. She had wanted to look her best for her Saint, but
as she prayed in the church her conscience whispered soft as shrift that she had done all these things for Selvaggio. For it was he who had once picked a winter rose for her hair and told her how it suited her; he who had admired her russet gown when she had worn it at Michelmas, saying how he loved the colours of the earth; it was he who had said that her hair was best becoming to her worn away from her face, for then he could best admire her countenance. Despite the bitter cold Amaria felt a blush warm her cheek.

She watched her dragon’s breath swirl in to the frigid air, there to meet the snowflakes coming down. It was sunset, and late to be abroad – she would go to the well with the pail she had brought for the purpose, and go home to her Nonna and…him.

It was so cold she had to break the ice of the fountain. She filled the pail and turned away, to meet her distorted image in a shiny breastplate. Her face seemed cleaved in two by the seam of the soldering. She looked up and saw the heavy features of a Swiss.

She knew the look by now – the whole town knew it. The sparkling armour, the strange twisted language that sounded like a cough, and the insolence that came with the knowledge of being the best mercenaries in the world. They were not beautiful, these men from Swisserland – they were scarred; they were young, but had faces so weathered by war that they looked old. And they were a nuisance – there had been many complaints to the
Comune
that these
soldiers had molested the women of Pavia and fought with the men. They had all the frustrations of soldiers without employment, those who were trained for war but whose efforts had led to peace. They needed a battle to fight. They hated inaction, and looked for quarrels wherever they could, until they were commanded to their next frontline. They styled themselves the saviours of Pavia, for their service in the recent battle, and stayed on, bored and restless. Amaria had been bothered by them before – she knew not what they said to her, but could guess. They always performed the same pantomime with their hands to demonstrate their crude admiration for her curves. She had always had Silvana with her before…but Silvana had been dropped for Selvaggio, and Selvaggio she had not brought today. Why? Because she had wanted to thank her Saint for him, something he could never know. So today she was alone. And today there were three of the Swiss.

She looked about her – there were few citizens abroad in the cobbled square as the temperature froze and the sun was dropping. The soldiers surrounded her, talking, prodding and laughing. They knocked the pail from her hand and the water soaked her feet, turning them to ice. Before she knew what they did, she was forced to the ground, and she saw, in that instant, the snowflakes disappearing into the water she had spilled, as if by magic. From the corner of her eye she could see the few citizens that she had noted, disappear too. They would not oppose such men who wished to take the
maidenhead of one poor girl. It was not worth the trouble. Amaria felt hands on the back of her head as she struggled and cried out for help that did not come. Her cheek was pushed onto the freezing cobbles and she tasted blood. Then she heard a sword being drawn – was she to be beheaded? No, worse, for the sword dropped to the ground inches from her sight and she heard the soldier undo his belt. The other two held her arms – she was powerless. She stared at the silver blade of her assailant’s sword on the ground as the snow gathered there. The soldier fumbled with her skirts. Then she thought that she had turned mad with horror when she saw a familiar roughened leather shoe shove beneath the blade and kick it high in the air. She was released and raised her head, along with the three mercenaries, united in wonder as they watched the blade sing high above the tower of San Pietro into the snowy sky, and fall perfectly into the hand of Selvaggio himself. Taller than before, unbowed and with a fire in his eyes, he looked less like her dear Selvaggio than an avenging angel. Amaria watched as with one fluid stroke he slashed the throat of her assailant till the blood spewed and steamed on the cobbles. With the next thrust he forced the blade through the second man’s gut, expertly finding the gap between breastplate and baldrick. With the backswing he passed the blade under his own arm and buried it into the third man, without even looking at what he did. It was all done in the blink of an eye, with silence and dispatch, and the three lay dead around Amaria. The red
winter rosebuds had fallen from her hair and wreathed the scene like funereal flora. The snow fell on it all, white and red, cold and heat as the bright lifeblood ran away. Amaria stared at the butchery, and then at Selvaggio, who looked at her and then the sword, which hung now limply from his hand as if he had never held one before.

Amaria found her voice, for a moment as mute as he had been. But what came were no thanks. ‘You were a soldier, then,’ she said.

He was still looking at the sword as if dazed. ‘For the past I cannot tell,’ he said in his new, halting voice. ‘But today, I am a soldier.’ He looked at her directly then, with the gaze she had seen in the yard as he washed. She never knew whether the trio of deaths or eyes of her avenger caused it, but she lost consciousness and she did not know that Selvaggio caught her just as she fell to the ground.

He tipped his head back to the heavens as he held the girl in his arms, so beautiful in her name-day finery; and without knowing why he opened his mouth to let the snowflakes in. Selvaggio carried Amaria all the way home, rejoicing under the golden sky.