The Passion of Artemisia (29 page)

Graziela shook her head apologetically. “The hardest thing for me is the confinement. Not to see the beauties of the world. Oh, I remember cypress trees and sunset on the Tiber—vaguely, as a blind person would remember them. But the beauties made by man are harder for me to conjure. They're made by God too, you know.”

She tried to dry her tears on her wide, coarse sleeve, but they kept coming.

“Beautiful art is all around me, and I'm destined never to see it. To die without . . .” A burst of sobbing shook her.

Paola stood up in front of her, so that no one might see.

“Would it be such a crime for a nun to . . . It wouldn't take away one dust mote of my love for God for me to see a carved fountain, or a loggia of marble figures, or a painted ceiling.”

Delicately Palmira put her hand on Graziela's knee, just as Graziela had done to me. Her hesitant, soulful little gesture stopped up my throat.

“What I would do to see the view from that tower, or Eve wailing in the garden.” Graziela's voice rose and trembled. “To feel the cool smoothness of a marble thigh, or the glide of a gondola. Just once before I die.”

The pity of her longing and deprivation made me feel I had been insufficiently grateful for all that I had seen.

The Mother Abbess and another nun came toward us
under the arches. I uttered a warning. Paola turned, opened her arms to spread her sleeves, and walked toward them to divert their direction.

“What would happen if you just did it?” I whispered. “If we, the three of us, just took a walk? You'd come back, of course. Paola would unlock the door. What would happen?”

“I don't know. Confinement and enforced silence for a while.”

“So? What's more confined than you are already?”

A bitter chuckle. She sniffled and wiped her face with the back of her hand. “I'll think about it.”

I took her hand in mine. “In the meantime, I have a task for you. I have a friend in Florence, a scientist, Galileo Galilei.”

“Oh yes. We've heard of him. Women in convents are not unaware of the controversies of the outside world. Cardinal Bellarmino—”

“Galilei needs your prayers, Graziela. For his protection. He is a learned and honorable man, and he does believe in God, regardless of what they say.”

She sniffled again. “I understand. I will.”

I kissed her on her forehead as I stood to leave, and when Palmira came to stand in front of her knees to say goodbye, Graziela kissed
her
on the forehead. Palmira tugged my arm for me to bend down, and, grinning, she aimed a noisy kiss on
my
forehead.

Outside the convent, Palmira and I stood on the high platform before going down the stairs.

“Do you think she will? Take a walk with us someday?” Palmira asked.

“I don't know. I hope so.”

We looked down the Via dei Condotti and at the city's
rooftops. “Look, Palmira. That dome in the distance, the big one, is Saint Peter's in the Vatican. This view is all Graziela ever sees.”

Apparently it was not enough. It wouldn't be for me either.

“It's so high up here,” Palmira said. “I love it.”

I was seized with regret for not having taken her up Giotto's bell tower. I undid her braids. “Shake out your hair and feel the breeze. It comes all the way from Spain.”

I took the pins out of my own hair and let the wind loosen it.

“Look and look and don't ever forget. Now, close your eyes. Here, give me your hand. And just feel. Can you feel the Earth move?”

“No.”

“Hold onto the balustrade and lean forward. Imagine us speeding through the sky like sparrows at sundown, like the bats over the river in Florence. Wooosh!”

“Yes! Yes, I can!”

I knew right then that no matter what happened in her life, she would be all right.

As for Graziela, I began to worry.

23
Naples

T
he stonecutters first, signora. The bishop's orders.”

“But why must a painter wait until every lowly stonecutter has his due?”

“They have families to support.”

“And I don't?”

The priest's polished ivory fingernails fluttered just beyond his wide sleeve, as if to discount my claim.

“Have you forgotten, Monsignor, what the Apostle Paul declared? In Christ there is neither bond nor free, Jew nor Greek,
male nor female
.”

“I'm sorry, signora. Come again after All Saints' Day.”

I wasn't going to beg. I turned to Palmira, whose dark eyes burned, and gestured for her to go through the door. Outside, the Naples sun glared down on us.

“Mother, how could you just let him—”

“Ssh. Wait.”

I marched across the piazza leaving the church behind me, and snapped my hand over my shoulder at it as though
shooing a fly. “Priests!” I said with a puff of air on the
p.
“Four years building a strong reputation among the patricians of this city, and this lowly priest thinks he can treat me like a common laborer.”

Palmira hurried to catch up. “What will you do?”

“I'll have Francesco write to the bishop. Or I'll write to him myself.” I addressed the air in front of me. “What do they want? Sackcloth and ashes? Repentance that I was born a woman? I'm glad I'm a woman, and I want you to be glad you are too.” I raised my voice with bravado. “Living as a painter would be too easy if I were a man.”

“Now how will we pay for my ball gown?”

“Little by little. Delia can keep the dress until I pay it all.”

“But Andrea's
ballo
!”

“Andrea. Andrea. All I've been hearing lately is Andrea, as if he arrived fully formed and gorgeous, a mortal Adonis standing naked on a seashell.”

One look at her young face drawn into desperate worry, and I softened. How pure and lovely it must be to be swept away by uncomplicated desire, dreaming of a fancy ball.

“All right. We'll get the dress today and eat bread and broth until the bishop makes that churl of a priest pay.” I smiled at her wryly to let her know we wouldn't starve. Her face relaxed.

We turned up a narrow lane that kept changing direction, threading up the crevices of rocky hills of the squalid neighborhood where Delia, our seamstress who charged less, lived. Tall mean houses were piled askew on top of one another, and yellowed bed linen flapped from balconies. We held our sleeves to our noses against rank odors issuing from puddles and doorways.

Neither of us liked Naples as well as Rome, where we had enjoyed four good years before the commissions ran out. Yet Naples was where Don Francesco Maringhi lived, my clerk
and agent. He had secured commissions for me from the Duke of Modena, Don Antonio Ruffo in Messina, and the Spanish Count of Monterrey who was ruling Naples. Francesco was even negotiating the sale of my first
Judith
. He was a valuable aide and had become a good friend, and so we stayed.

An old crone whose flaccid yellow wrinkles were grooved with grime slumped on a stool under an arched passageway milking a goat. She would be a good model for some allegorical figure of age, but no one wanted realism now. Buyers saw no courage in age or unpleasantness. They didn't understand that ugliness caught in real emotion would speak through the centuries. They wanted only ideal beauty. In another time I might have been able to paint her, but I had no more courage for
invenzione.
I had learned to bow to what paid for ball gowns and bread.

Delia's house up a narrow stairway was cleaner than I imagined the others to be in this neighborhood. A doublet lay in pieces on a trestle table, and someone else's unhemmed skirt hung from a ceiling hook. Palmira looked around quickly for hers.

“It's ready and waiting, child. Don't fret,” Delia said, and went into a rear room. She came back holding high a billowy silk gown the color of the Bay of Naples on a sunny day. It had slashings in the full sleeves to show puffs of white satin. Palmira's enraptured expression was priceless. Delia turned it to show a row of small white satin bows down the back.

“How will we tie those bows just like that?” Palmira asked.

“You don't need to. They're sewn that way. Put it on.”

Palmira hurried to get off her bodice and skirt and stand in her shift with her arms up to let the skirt float down around her. Delia helped her on with the bodice, attached it with hidden hooks to the skirt, and pulled tight the laces. It fit perfectly.

“You're an artist, Delia, as fine as they come.” I slapped the money on the table and Palmira kissed me on the cheek.

Walking up to our own doorway, both of us carrying parts of the dress, I saw the corner of a letter sticking out from the bottom of the door. It had the seal of the Lyncean Academy.

Astonishing courage. I set the letter down to keep it from shaking and read it again. The handwriting was not Galileo's usual smoothly arched script. On the first line, ink had dripped sideways. Was he writing this in bed? The issues of Palmira's gown and a nobleman's coming-of-age party were inconsequential when Galileo was in such jeopardy. I could do nothing. The black hand of the Inquisition would have its way. And where that stopped, the other black hand, the plague itself, was ripe with horrors.

It had taken four months for the letter to reach me, because of the blockages to contain the plague, I surmised. Judgment of his case was imminent, if not already executed. I sat down to write what encouragement I could to him.

I sent it to the Tuscan embassy in the Villa Medici in Rome.

On Sunday I went to church with dread. At mass the monsignor announced with arrogant glee that the faithful need not fear the erroneous claims of Signor Galilei, that the Holy Office justly convicted him of heinous crimes against the sacred Canons, that he abjured, denied, and cursed under oath his former theories as errors and heresies, and that he now detested such claims and would willingly do penance daily in mitigation of his crime.

A stroke as swift and inexorable as the plague itself. I thought I would be sick. I left Palmira with Andrea in the church, went straight home and lay down in my darkened bedchamber. It was all bigoted treachery. His recanting had to be false. He would never willingly betray his passion unless he was threatened with torture. I knew the hot-to-the-bone panic of that, and I didn't judge him. That loathsome priest had smirked through the announcement. Trying to control my imaginations of Galileo's suffering, I spent the afternoon in feverish restlessness.

The next few days I was sullen and sick. Palmira paid me quiet attentions, took over the work in the kitchen, and urged me to eat. She fretted that I would still be morose at Andrea's ball that Saturday.

“I'll pull myself out of it by then. I promise. Just leave me be for a while,” I said.

On the sweltering, breathless night of the ball, we got ready together like sisters, tying the side laces of each other's bodices and winding each other's hair. When I finished hers, I touched her on the shoulder. “Wait.” I found my mother's bloodstone and pearl hair ornament in my memento box.

“Don't you want to wear it?” Palmira asked.

“You wear it.” I fastened it on the back of her head. “There. Mother would be pleased.”

“Do you think he'll notice it there?”

“Silly. His dreamy eyes will caress every morsel of you, from every angle.” She giggled, and the melody of her anticipation helped to lift my spirit. “Stand up.”

She stood and performed a dance turn. Her skirt swirled out around her like a shimmering wave, and the bows on her white satin shoes peeked out from under her hemline.

“You look stunning.”

Francesco Maringhi called for us in his carriage. I had never seen him so elegantly dressed—black velvet doublet with white satin sleeve inserts and an understated white ruff. He bowed and kissed first Palmira's hand and then, lingeringly, mine, his eyes looking up at me.