The Passion of Artemisia (20 page)

I sat down on the cold stone floor and began to work, musing that the sculpture I chose was one depicting rape. When had my own rape ceased to hurt me so that I would choose this to draw? I suppose it was when Pietro and Palmira came to teach me how to love. I could study this Sabine woman who lived nineteen centuries ago and feel empathy for her, but now her struggle did not devastate me, did not make me wince as I had the first time I'd seen her. I had walked by this sculpture a thousand times on my way to the vegetable market and I had not become rigid with anger. Those atrocities against women had not ceased to exist in the world, but life marches on. Onions and white beans must still be bought.

Palmira watched me through round, fearful eyes. “Why don't you paint anymore?”

“Oh, I'd rather just draw.”

“That's not the reason.” It came as an accusation.

“No? How do you know, my little worrier?” I pinched her nose and she backed away. “Here, let me teach you something.”

She shook her head, and ran out into the piazza in the rain.

“Palmira, come back.”

She did, but not before she got drenched.

A woman in a full-length hooded cloak dashed into the loggia and lifted off her deep red-violet hood to shake off water.

“Vanna!” I hadn't seen her for years.

She was more startled by my presence sitting on the floor than I was by hers. In an instant her beautiful face turned surly.

“Why did you use a common wool washer with rough hands instead of me?”

“What do you mean?”

“For your Mary Magdalene. Some tart from the vats with raw skin. And other women for Diana and Persephone and Aurora. Four Medici commissions, four chances for me to be in his palace and you didn't use me once.”

“How do you know whom I use or what I paint?”

“Pietro told me. He tells me everything,” she crowed, her nose in the air. She hesitated an instant, caught in her own gloating. “He knows about your bad reputation. You and that greasy coachman. A commoner! You don't know two nuts' worth about being a painter,
or
a wife.”

In that instant, I knew. She was Pietro's lover.

When she saw I was speechless, and realized what she had revealed, she lifted her hood and darted out through the rain and into the corner entrance to the Uffizi. In a gorgeous ruby cloak no model feeding two children could afford, her phantom figure passed before the marble loins of David. A specter.

Surreptitious looks. Hot clasped hands. Clandestine meetings. Pietro had a mistress who was going right now into the Uffizi. Pietro drew with his friends in the Uffizi, more frequently of late. Right this instant, she was rushing to him in the blaze and swell of passion, unsettled by this chance meeting with “the wife.” And the little girl. Grown older now, and pouty. Should she warn him that the wife knows? No. He might renounce her. Not with the woman and her child just outside. Think about it later. At his studio. After trailing fingers down his spine, his muscled sides, the twin valleys of his loins meeting in a dark tangle, kissing his loins, trailing her tongue, making him arch and rise and rise again, delirious with desire for her.

Stop! I told myself. Think rationally.

I couldn't be here when they came out of the Uffizi. “Palmira, come. We're going home.”

“We just got here.”

“Get your ball.”

I held my pencils, album, and her doll beneath my cloak, grabbed her hand and ran. “Count the puddles,” I shouted, to give her something to think about. I yanked her around them, past the vats, empty but for rainwater, the dyers inside on such a day, and through our gate. We collapsed together out of breath in our stairway.

Upstairs, I took off her wet clothes, dried her briskly, wrapped her in my dressing gown, spooned hot broth into her mouth, and cut for her a few wedges of apple. “Are you a little sleepy? Sometimes broth makes you sleepy.” I made up her bed and tucked her in. “This is how to get warm,” I said, rubbing her body through the quilt.

“Why did we run, Mama?”

“The rain, sweetheart.”

“But we were already wet.”

“Ssh, now. Take a nap. I'll be upstairs at Fina's. You can come when you wake up.” I hummed a lullaby, and when she finally fell asleep, I went upstairs. Fina was washing her few dishes.

“Awful day,” I said.

“Where's Palmira?”

“Sleeping in a warm bed. We got soaked today. We never should have gone out.” I felt my chin quiver.

“What's the matter? What happened?”

“Oh, Fina, you know, don't you, that mine was a marriage of convenience?”

She dried her hands on a scrap of towel. “I surmised as much.”

“And that he has a mistress?”

“Yes,” she said quietly after a moment.

“More than one?”

“Are you sure you want to know?”

“Yes.”

“He's had a string of women. I haven't kept track. It's a blessing that his poor mother did not live to watch it.”

“Do you think he keeps another residence?”

She closed her eyes and lifted her shoulders. “It's possible. Anything is possible.”

“Why did he marry me in the first place? Do you know?”

She took a long breath that raised her chest. “Because he was in debt. The dowry.”

“Yes, but why else? Why not someone in Florence?”

“Because of his reputation. Women claiming that he was the father of their children would have issued objections if he posted any banns in Florence. The only way he could get a wife was to find one out of Florence.”

“A fool! Fina, I've been an utter fool.” I slumped on her sad velvet chair and fought back tears. She pulled up a stool next to me and drew my head onto her soft bosom. “Would he have been mine if I had given up painting, do you think? He's never done or said anything that suggested he wanted more than what I was to him already. He let me in only so far.”

She stroked the back of my head. “He can let any woman in only so far. That's why he leaves them and goes on to the next when he's uncomfortable. It isn't your fault.”

I chuckled gravely. “Maybe his mistress will discover that.”

We were still awhile and I felt the comfort of her heart thumping softly against my cheek. When she stirred to light an oil lamp, I thanked her and went downstairs. Palmira was sound asleep.

Graziela had said that when I felt abandoned by God, I had to love Him all the more. I had to affirm God's goodness.
I'd do that later. Tomorrow I'd affirm His goodness. Give me one night of bitterness, one night of self-indulgent pity, one night to get it all out.

I didn't know two nuts' worth about being a wife? Was Vanna right? Those times when Pietro and I were most together, in bed, his need had entered me and found a likeness, like a looking glass in a dim room, yet neither of us spoke of the inner place where this need dwelt. If I had, would it have been any different?

I knew I shouldn't write to Graziela in such a state, but I couldn't help myself.

As I was sealing the letter with candle wax, Pietro came home wet to the bone.

“Nasty weather,” he grumbled, and hung his dripping cloak on a peg. “Writing to someone?” He sat down at the table.

“Just to Sister Graziela.” I moved the letter to the edge of the table and put an apple on it from the basket. “She wanted
me to describe more art.” I dried his hair with a towel. The black curls I loved smelled of unfamiliar hair oil. “Do you think it'll stop raining tomorrow?” I asked. An inane comment.

“No.”

I heated the broth and added onions and stale bread. He cast furtive looks at the letter while he ate.

“What did you do today?” he asked, reaching for an apple, choosing the one I'd put on the letter.

“I tried to teach Palmira how to read and write better.” I showed him her notes. “She's been terribly restless, but she's sleeping now.”

He smiled as he read them, and then he touched the edge of my letter to Graziela, either absently or intentionally, testing me, knowing why I'd written it. I froze, staring at his fingers resting on the letter.

A sudden burst of rain beat against the closed shutters and seeped in along the window frame. It diverted us for the moment. We packed the leaking places with paint rags.

“At least it's washing the streets and buildings,” he said. “When it's finally over, the city will look cleaner.”

I grabbed at an idea.

“Is it possible to go up to the lantern on top of the Duomo?” I asked.

“I don't think so.”

“What about the bell tower?”

“What for?”

“To look at the city. To see it clean.”

“It's a long way up.”

“All the better.”

“I suppose there has to be a staircase inside for the bell ringer,” he said. “If we give him a couple lire, he might let us up.”

“I want to see if up that high we can feel the Earth move.”

Pietro looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

“You know that philosopher mathematician, Galilei, in Cosimo's court? He said that the Earth moves around the sun, and other planets do too.”

“He'll find himself in trouble someday. Once a priest at Santa Maria Novella preached against all mathematicians as the devil's workmen. Everybody knew he meant Galileo.”

“Recently?”

“No.”

“If we're moving, maybe we can feel it that high up. Let's do it. Tomorrow. Sunday.”

“It will probably rain.”

“That doesn't matter. If we don't do it now, then we may never.”

He looked at me in the strangest way—as if he realized I might know, or that our arrangement of convenience might come to a crashing finish. For an instant, I thought I might have seen pain in his eyes.

Could I actually be fully his? Every day? Every hour? Him the only focus of my life? A painter or a wife. A wife or a painter. Which did I really want to be? Going up there might tell me.

“I want to get above all this. . . .” I waved my hand vaguely. Let him decide what I meant.

“Palmira too?”

“No. Let's leave her with Fina. Tell her we have some painting business.”

One side of his mouth lifted in a soft, sad half-smile. “Like our excursions when you first . . . came here.”

“Yes, just like that.”

“Do you still want to go?” he asked, opening the shutters in the morning.

I got up to look. The rain was lightly pocking the river. “Yes.”

We didn't tell Fina where we were going, and she gave me the most uncomprehending look. It made me giddy inside, as though
we
were doing something clandestine. I put on my hooded cloak and we walked quickly with our heads down. We waited in Piazza del Duomo under the loggia of the Brethren of the Misericordia for the bell to chime noon. Rain pelted the stones in the piazza harder now. The marble facing of the square tower shone wet like polished gemstones.

“I wish Giotto had lived long enough to see it finished,” I said, “to climb to the top just once before he died.”