The Madonna of the Almonds (24 page)

As Bernardino raised his face to the eyes that were so like Anselmo’s he had a sudden moment of resolve. Yesterday they had both been changed, they had both lost their innocence, and she had professed a wish to know more of the world. They had both professed a desire to seize each day of their lives in different ways. He did not wish her to leave the world without knowing that her brother lived in it.

‘I must go,’ he said. ‘But you should come with me. There is a man, a good man…the best friend that the world holds. He would be glad to know you, for though he is not yet your brother, he is your father’s son.’

Selvaggio and Amaria were married in Pavia in the church of Saint Peter of the Golden Sky. The gilded ceiling arched overhead and the priest’s solemn Latin rolled around the golden firmament and back to its children on earth. Never were two happier than those joined here, and the icon of Sant’Ambrogio witnessed the scene, and was glad.

Nonna sat at the front of the church, black lace on white hair. She leaned her forehead on her clasped hands as she prayed. She had known that Father Matteo would oblige with this ceremony, for he knew Amaria well as he had come to know Selvaggio. The priest had no hesitation to join two of the same name – Selvaggio was married under the name Sant’ Ambrogio too – for it was not the first time the priest had joined two of the Saint’s orphans. He knew the groom’s story and was comfortable that there could be no consanguinity in the case.

As the kind old man intoned the lesson that groom and bride had chosen for their own special reasons, Nonna
found the words imbued with new meaning as she saw her two dear children lock eyes and clasp hands.

The words seemed to be written for them, and the family they had become, the family they might one day have. During the prayers Nonna shut her ears to the words and thanked God in her own way, sincerely and reverently. She had ever been devout, even through the dark days of Filippo’s death. But today Nonna had been moved to cut a measure in the square where Filippo had burned. For God had given her Amaria, and now Selvaggio, and their children would grow like olive plants around her table. Her heart was full.

The bride and groom looked as shining as the Saints that observed from the walls. Amaria was in the new green of spring leaves, her dark hair twisted with seed pearls that Nonna had prised from the mouths of their suppertime oysters. Amaria’s erstwhile friend, Silvana, stood by as a
handmaid, with an expression as sour as the bride’s was joyful. Who would have thought that an orphan of the woods would have preceded her to the altar?

Selvaggio was in the dark red feast-day doublet of Filippo himself, and though it was a mite tight, no-one would notice, so handsome did he look with his beard trimmed and his hair slick. Yes, Amaria looked like the queen of May and Selvaggio was her king. Nothing, not the handfasting of the two with silver ribbons, nor the laying of hands on the Holy Book, nor even the Latin cadences of the lesson that the priest read regularly at marriage services, penetrated the groom’s memory; to prompt him, gently, that he had done all this before.

It was a peerless summer day when the Abbess and the artist reached Castello. Sister Bianca recognised the place from the fresco of the dedication of Saint Maurice, for Bernardino had painted this very house in San Maurizio down to the last window and gateway, the last tile and stone. The rose honey of the brick, the shady arches of the loggia, all were there before her eyes; just as they appeared on the great panel in the Hall of the Believers, providing an exquisite background for the story of Saint Maurice. Square, elegant and intensely separate; the house was at once welcoming and forbidding.

Bernardino, who had been in a jitter along the road these past few hours, stood at the gates almost exactly two years since he had been there last, the day Simonetta had turned away from him with his drawing in her hand. He found the place much changed.

The winter rose hedge from whence he had taken his leave of Simonetta was now green with glossy leaves and
bursting with coral buds. The almond groves were pollarded and ordered in their neat lines, the fruit trees now espaliered neatly on the garden walls. The pleasure gardens of old were restored, new trout ponds reflected the sky and even the little conical dovecot had been washed and whitened. The house itself had been improved, the arches of the loggia were repaired, the old ivy stripped and the faded lilac of wisteria twisted up the frontage. There were new gates on the new columns, and glass quarrels in the casements. Bernardino noted this new prosperity and his heart sank. Was it a new husband who brought new life to this place? Sister Bianca laid a hand on his arm to quiet him but he shook it off and strode up the path, unable to bear the suspense for a moment longer. He must see her, even if it were for the last time.

Sister Bianca followed and saw her at the same time that Bernardino did. Miracle of miracles; she wore the red dress of his picture, crossed with golden thread and fretted with seed pearls. Her hair was bound with a pearl cincture and glowed the red of carnelians. But she was so alive, so animate! She was no painting. Her white face was flushed with laughter, and her red curls escaped from their binding to wind about her neck and ears. Her skirts were kirtled to her waist as she ran round the largest tree in the grove in a scene of domestic felicity. But there was no husband in the case; just a pair of golden children, laughing, and tumbling, both holding a switch of green and white almond blossom,
chasing the lady. Cutting and thrusting with their harmless swords. At length she would catch one or other of them and kiss their little cheeks or necks in a picture of maternal love.

Bernardino was deeply moved – she could have been their mother, were it not for two things; their ages made the thing impossible, and the older one he recognised. Could it be true? It was Elijah, the Jewish boy for whom he had painted the dove, and bought the marble. Evangelista, the candle angel with the red wings that lived forever on the walls of San Maurizio.

Bernardino marvelled at this new Simonetta, the laughing, smiling
living
woman, not racked by the pains of love or bereavement, of disloyalty and disgrace. Not penurious, or proud, as she came to him for help in her husband’s clothes. Not chilly and remote as she sat for him posing as the Queen of Heaven, as far above mortal passions as the cold moon itself. She too had changed, and he had never wanted her more. Sister Bianca saw too – her good heart thrilled at the scene and she recognised Saint Ursula playing with the candle angel, but she feared for Bernardino – how could he forget a woman like this? This was not the distant, proud lady she had envisaged; the cold chatelaine who tortured her lover. Here was a warm lovely creature who could make a man’s life an earthly paradise. What would her friend do if she would not have him?

At last Simonetta tired of the game and fell in the groin of the roots of Rebecca’s tree, on the green grass above Manodorata’s grave. She leaned back, exhausted, on the trunk where her friend had breathed his last as his sons fell in her lap. She had seen to it that they played here, she had banished superstition and made it their playground, and she spoke openly of their father and mother until they did too.

She held the boys tight with one head on each shoulder and closed her eyes. The sun was so bright she could still see the almond leaves shifting above her like dark fishes that switch back and forth with the tide. When she opened them again she thought she had the sunblindness, for there stood Bernardino Luini.

Sister Bianca’s doubts vanished as Simonetta stood wonderingly and took him in her arms, both laughing and crying. Both said the other’s name over and over, and both thanked the God that they had each separately come to know in the dark days of their separation. Their mouths met in a long hard kiss, their eyes closed as they drank each other in; thankful, profoundly thankful, that all that had been wrong was now right. The Abbess, only human after all, strained to hear what they said, but could not understand what came next. For between kisses, Bernardino called Simonetta ‘
Phyllis’
, and she laughing, as if completing a password, replied, ‘
Demophon’
. The Abbess might have been shocked to learn that the two invoked a pagan myth from ancient Greece, where a woman who thought she had
lost her love was turned into an almond tree, but was saved by his return, and blossomed in his arms as he brought her back to life and to love again. But the Abbess did not understand the reference, nor was she in the mood for censure. Instead she took a little boy’s hand in each of hers, and drew them to her. ‘Could you show me the game you were playing just now?’ she said. ‘I would very much like to learn it.’

So as Bernardino and Simonetta plighted their troth under the almond trees as the blossom drifted across their lips and lashes, the Abbess of San Maurizio hoisted her habit above her knees, exposing her pale hairy legs to the sun for the first time in years, and ran round an almond tree chased by two little Jewish boys, laughing like a parrot and whirling like a dervish.

Simonetta di Saronno and Bernardino Luini married in the Sanctuary of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Saronno, the church of the Miracles. Simonetta decided that she must look the past in the face and be churched publicly in order to begin her new life in the open. In a change to her first marriage though, they married not at the main altar but in the Lady Chapel where the bride watched herself from the walls – peering down from the frescoes painted by the groom. They were attended by a brother and sister in Christ, and a brother and sister in blood, for Alessandra and Anselmo Bentivoglio met and forged a friendship at once; the bond of the same character and the same father
more than outweighed the division of a different mother and upbringing.

Even the townsfolk blessed the match – the Amaretto liquor had brought great prosperity to the area, and the mistress of Castello was a wealthy patroness of the vintner, the butcher and every other victualler in the town. Not the baker though – he had died mysteriously some weeks past; and only Father Anselmo, administering the last rites, had noticed a wicked dagger in the shape of a Maltese cross buried deep in the man’s chestspoon. The priest kept his peace though, and so did Simonetta; and if she knew that a large part of her popularity stemmed from her being a known anti-semite who had personally dispatched the vile Jew Manodorata, she did not question it. Better to be reputed as such and keep her little family safe.

For it was at home, with her family, that the real wedding took place. Under Rebecca’s tree, they said their vows again as the boys held an arch of blossom over their heads. Bernardino and Simonetta exchanged an almond, and this time she crushed it with her teeth, chewed it well and swallowed it down, tasting at once the full sweet flavour of the nut. Another difference: they toasted this wedding with Amaretto, the drink Simonetta had made for Bernardino. They drank from two sides of the same silver cup and Bernardino marvelled at this surpassingly fine liquor that his new wife had made. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, a small wrinkle of anxiety sitting atop her brow.

He smiled. ‘I think that true art is not only found on the walls of churches,’ he said.

They feasted there under the trees till the boys’ golden heads drooped. A strange feast indeed – attended by a nun and a priest who sat like bookends, for all the world a modern day Benedict and Scholastica. Also in attendance, drinking from the same flagon, were a Jewish tutor and his lady – a mute convert from Taormina – who nonetheless laughed and sang as readily as the rest. For their feast there were a mixture of Christian and Jewish dishes, and the songs that they sang as the Amaretto flowed came from the four points of the compass: folk songs of Lombardy, wedding hymns from Milan, Hebrew chants from the east and peasant airs from Taormina and the hot south.

At length Veronica put the boys to bed and Anselmo and the Abbess took their leave, to return to the priest’s house in the town. Bianca had taken a sabbatical of a sevennight from the monastery, leaving the business of the place in the hands of her trusted sub-Prioress. She intended to spend the week as the guest of her brother, in prayer and contemplation and joyous conversations to fill in their missing sibling years. Then she would return willingly to her home, refreshed and ready to implement the changes in her ministry that she had resolved upon on the day of the death of the Countess of Challant. She privily hoped that she could persuade Anselmo to come with her, for a short sojourn in
Milan, to be re-united with his father.

The newlyweds sat on as the stars came and the luna moths began to glow and flutter above them. Night was another country, and their discourse changed with the territory. The frivolity of the day was gone. Their joy remained, bone-deep, but with a new sobriety they talked of all that had passed in the last two years. Simonetta told Bernardino of her distillery, and the terrible story of Manodorata and Rebecca.

Bernardino recounted the tales of the Saints to whom he had given his wife’s face, and the awful and important death of the Countess of Challant; an event that had changed him forever. At last they fell silent and sat, just holding each other, glad that they had found the way home from where they had both been.

‘Did it need to happen?’ asked Bernardino at length. ‘Did we waste those two years? Might we not have begun our journey then?’

Simonetta’s head was on his chest, listening to his heartbeat as he spoke. He felt her shake her head. ‘No. Those years were not a waste. And our journey did begin then, it began the day we met. We just needed to travel our roads alone for a while.’

‘For what reason? I who am older than you, have less time left. Should we not have remained together?’

Simonetta was frightened by his heartbeats now; she knew they were finite in number and shifted her head so
that she may no longer hear them counting down. Yet she stood by her position. ‘I could not accept you then. There was too much to do – to atone for. Now enough time has passed– we both did penance for what we did, and we have both come to Faith at last. I, who was brought up in religion, turned my back on it for a while, when I thought God had forsaken me. But he was there all the time, watching. He gave me back myself and my house, he saved the boys, and I returned to Him again.’

‘And I,’ said Bernardino, ‘a faithless heathen, with no stomach for religion, found the true path in San Maurizio. You have returned to it, and I have found it anew.’

‘And how strange,’ went on Simonetta, ‘that my contact with those of another faith has brought me
closer
to God, not further from him. I have learned, at last, that God is God; he is the same for all of us, it is only our worship of him that differs.’

Bernardino closed his hands over hers, imprisoning them. Her long fingers steepled within his; a prayer within a prayer. ‘Might we not have learned this together?’

Simonetta shook her bright head. ‘I think not. We needed to heal, to be whole before we united. And from our sorrowful separation has come good things – you have done the best work of your life which will be admired for generations.’

‘And you have invented Amaretto, which will be enjoyed for just as long!’

Bernardino’s voice was teasing, and Simonetta smiled; but her face was soon serious again. ‘And yet these things were not the best of it. The best of it was the friends that we made and lost.’ Simonetta thought of Manodorata, and Bernardino of the Countess who Bianca mourned.

‘And the friends we have made and kept. The Abbess, Anselmo.’

‘And the boys,’ Bernardino smiled fondly.

Simonetta warmed at the thought of her sons, and how they had taken readily and unquestioningly to Bernardino’s presence. Elijah, already acquainted with the man who had once painted his hand, had noted, with his beady intelligence, how happy his mother had become since Bernardino had come to them. The boys missed their father enough to yearn for a replacement, but there was much here that was new. Bernardino had a lively humour, and a quick, teasing wit that Manodorata – an excellent father in so many ways had lacked. Bernardino’s accessibility and playful sense of the ridiculous, the very characteristics in which he differed so wildly from their dead father, only served to endear the children to him. Bernardino, in turn, set out with determination to make a friend of the boys. As Simonetta watched the three of them play – for all the world as if there were no difference in their ages – she pondered on the stories that Bernardino had told her of his lonely childhood. She sensed, now, that he was so
ready
to love them; he was ripe for it. The sluicegates had opened and his affection flooded
forth. She knew he intended to love them as he was never loved as a boy, and was heartily glad of it. Simonetta noted that already, in the short time Bernardino had been at Castello, he had kissed and held the children more than she had ever seen Manodorata do in a brace of years. She saw him looking at the boys with an air of revelation; and his next words echoed her thoughts.