The Passion of Artemisia (33 page)

“I thought that finding a husband for you made up for it anyway. Considering your reputation—”

“
My
reputation. If reputation was on your mind, why didn't you look into the reputation of the man you were paying to take me?”

“He was Giovanni's brother.”

I squeezed the arm of the chair. “Giovanni's brother had a string of lovers before and after I married him. That's why I didn't reconcile, if you must know. And that's why he was willing to marry someone sight unseen. He had to go out of Florence to find a wife ignorant of his reputation.” I kept control of my voice, but only by a hair. “He married me for the dowry, which he used to rent a room to entertain his women. A closed box of a man, incapable of real love. Oh yes, Father, a careful choice you made.”

“Me. Always me to blame.” He stood up and walked away. “Just what I was afraid of,” he muttered. “I shouldn't have written you.”

“Do I still need to tell you how I might have been chosen by a man who loved me if I had not been exposed in Rome?”

“It was necessary.”

“Necessary that everything else come first? Your friendship with a bastard? Your sickly need for him?” Words I'd
said to myself a thousand times and promised I wouldn't say to him came gushing out. I leaned forward in the chair. “So necessary you couldn't stop yourself from inviting him to Genoa?”

“How many years does a man have to live in penitence? For twenty years you've treated me like a leper.” He was pacing now.

“And for twenty years, you never acknowledged that you betrayed me. Never said you're sorry. You want forgiveness but you're unwilling to say you're sorry.”

“There'll come a time, either here or hereafter, when you'll say that things just happened, not that I made them happen.” His fingers pounded his chest at the “I.” “You expect too much of me. Nothing less than what I did would have stopped Agostino. I know him, Artemisia.”

For an instant, I had the sense that he actually believed what he said. Still, I plunged ahead, my nails digging into my palms. “You send me a self-pitying letter asking that I come and forgive you. Can't you see how selfish that was? Can't you, for once, look at my life from my perspective? No family blood runs in your veins. I'll tell you what runs in your veins. Orazio Gentileschi, first, last, and always.”

His trembling hands grasped the back of his chair. “If you felt so bitter, you shouldn't have come. Do you think an old man wants to be slapped down again by hearing everything he ever did wrong? God will judge me, Artemisia, on my day of dying. Not you.”

I stood up. “But I can say—”

“No!” he bellowed and waved me away. “Leave me alone. Get out.”

I was dumbfounded. He wouldn't even look at me. “Get out.” He took a few steps toward me as if he would push me.

I couldn't move.

“Eh,
porca miseria.
” He grabbed his doublet and left.

28
Artemisia

G
et out.
Where? I stood alone in his room, shaking. After traveling for a month,
get out.
After dismantling my life again,
get out.
The ingrate. I shouldn't have come.

I walked around the room in circles. I wasn't going to get out. I had nowhere to go. I couldn't make anyone understand me even if I left. Let
him
spend the night somewhere else. Getting me to come here under false pretenses and then shoving me away. He'd become an embittered old man.

I gulped down some wine and flopped into the chair by the fire, feeling torn and drained. Only one thing Father had said made sense—that Agostino would have continued using me unless Father exposed him in court. Probably true. One dreary month of travel to learn that.

I ate an olive and looked around. The room was cluttered. A waistcoat and breeches hung on an easel. Books, plates of half-eaten food, jars of brushes, his worn copy of Ripa's
Iconologia,
small sketches on scraps of paper all lay haphazardly on a long worktable. Between a pair of oil lamps there
was a stack of large drawings. I was curious but too tired to get up and take a look. I tipped my head back against the tall chair and closed my eyes.

After a while I heard a noise. Maybe he was standing outside the door waiting for me to apologize. I opened it and walked through a few other rooms. Empty. And cold. I went back into his room and put more wood on the fire.

My curiosity was too much for me. On a portfolio cover he had written, “Allegory of Peace and the Arts Under the English Crown.” I looked at the whole stack of drawings. They were muses and allegorical figures holding their various symbols taken from the
Iconologia
—book, helmet, sphere, flute, palm frond, sheaf of wheat, laurel wreath, cornucopia. He still had a fine sense for composition and form. It looked like a huge project. I wondered how far along he was on it.

I picked up a small parchment page of profile and three-quarter sketches. To think that this late in life he was still studying how to do faces. I was moved by the humility in that. Like me still struggling to do feet. On the back of it was a letter, full of ink blotches and scratch-outs, addressed to il granduca Ferdinando.

If he had actually sent it, and this was only a draft, he had apparently received no answer. He'd probably yearned to
come home for a long time, yet was afraid to leave secure work. I understood that. It sprang from the same source as my own ache at being uprooted. His exaggerated self-abasement saddened me. To practically beg for a commission from a boy duke after a lifetime of painting for cardinals and queens. A knot swelled in my throat. He'd suffered humiliations too.

His
cassapanca
was open and clothes lay in disarray. A sick shock pierced me. His undergarments were all in shreds.

On a window ledge was his carved wooden memento box, the other one of the pair I had always kept with me. I went to the door and listened a moment but didn't hear anything, so I opened the box. My letters from Florence were on top, brittle and faded. I read them again—Palmira's birth, Cosimo's first acceptance of my work, my admission to the academy. The last one pricked my conscience. I'd barely thanked him for writing to Buonarroti, yet that had started my acceptance in Florence.

Underneath the letters were a few Roman coins, cold to my touch, probably kept in the hope of returning, and my mother's wedding ring. The large ruby I remembered had been removed. I didn't like to think what that meant. A child's drawing was folded to fit the box exactly and show the face of a woman. On the back was written,
Amore mio, Artemisia drew this portrait of me for you on her tenth birthday. See that she is happily married, as we are. Prudenzia.
How Mother would have grieved if she had witnessed the scene just past.

The pity of his life, his last thirty years without her, more than a decade outside his homeland, his communication always limited by language. How long has it been since anyone touched him, other than a slap on the back, a touch that would convince him that his heart was still alive? I marveled at the courage of his loneliness. Would I be able to command
it when I was alone at his age? If, for his time in France, Agostino had been with him, I could not begrudge him that.

I set my father's things back in his memento box the way I had found them, loosened my bodice laces, and finished the wine in my glass. I could not shake the humiliation and longing of his letter to Ferdinando, yet I'd written letters nearly as desperate. Both of our lives seemed to consist of piercing humiliations, some victories, and brief moments of sweetness. We both ought to count ourselves fortunate if, in the end, the sweet and the sour were of equal weight.

Coming here meant nothing if I had made him wish I hadn't. The journey I'd made was easy compared to what lay ahead—to complete the gesture, not just to come here but to enact the full measure of compassion, bigger than offering a blanket, as formidable to me as Christ touching the leper, Graziela touching the dying man. It was frightening, not because of what might happen, but because, if I were fiercely honest with myself, I would distrust my sincerity.

I put on my night shift, lay down on his bed and pulled his blanket over me. Maybe he'd come back tomorrow morning, ashamed, as I was.

No sounds in the neighboring rooms roused me until late in the morning. I stirred up the few embers to ignite a fire, and stood close to it. I was famished. I ate more artichokes and olives and the rest of the bread while standing there. I poured water from a pitcher into a washing bowl and dipped my hands in to wash my face. It was so cold I cried out at the shock. I managed to tie up my hair, dirty from weeks of travel.

I looked out the window. The rain had stopped. The sky was what I imagined English people took for blue. On the other side of an enclosed meadow stood the Queen's House
where the carriage had taken me first. From here I could see its classical lines, its fine sense of balance. It had a balustrade for viewing the countryside from the roof, and a loggia on the first story. There was nothing to do but walk across the meadow and see if he was there. I dug into my carpetbag to find Michelangelo's brush and tucked it in the inside pocket of my short cape. I found the stairway and a door. The long wet grasses soaked my shoes. I lifted my skirt to try to keep it clean and dry.

At the door of the Queen's House, workmen were carrying in a large unfinished wooden framework. “Orazio Gentileschi?” I said. They looked at each other, said a few words I couldn't understand and shook their heads.
“Sala grande?”
I waved my arms to convey a large room and pretended I was painting the ceiling. They took me inside past plasterers and carpenters working on a cornice and pointed to a grand staircase. Upstairs, the rooms had none of the flourishes and ornamentation common in Roman or Florentine palaces.

In the great hall, I recognized Father's dramatic figures already installed as coffered panels in the ceiling. It was an enormous project—nine panels and a central roundel of eleven women surrounding the figure of Peace bearing a staff and a leafy garland made of an olive branch. She was dazzling in power and beauty. I counted twenty-two figures so far, all female, even Pittura and Scultura, against a background of clouds and sky. Four panels were left to do. And him so frail and old.

A gorgeous ceiling except for one thing. The colors. Predominantly greens, pale violet, light blue, and gold, they were so subdued compared to the paintings he did in the bright light of Rome that it seemed as if the life of the figures was waning.

“English taste is more conservative than ours.” I twirled
around at the sound of his voice, edged with apology. His anxious eyes pleaded. “I still have four panels to do.”

“I'll help you.”

Slowly, tentatively, as if afraid to hurt me, he reached out his arms for me. I felt my body soften in his embrace, like Palmira's used to when she was a child just relaxing into sleep.

I pulled away from him and looked up. “These are exquisite, Father. You can't deny that they have given you joy. I see it in every face, even if it's only private contentment at what you've done. Haven't you ever felt like shouting, ‘Look! Look and let this beauty transform your heart'? A few practically split me with happiness. Hasn't it been so with you?”

He blinked at me with eyes the deep brown color of need.

“We've been lucky,” I said. “We've been able to live by what we love. And to
live
painting, as we have, wherever we have, is to live passion and imagination and connection and adoration, all the best of life—to be more alive than the rest.”

“Than who? More alive than who?”

“Than my own daughter, for one. I feel life more intensely than she does. I take its bite as fully as its beauties. I hope that means I'll come to die contented that I have really lived.”

“You don't have any regrets?”

It was the most dangerous thing he'd ever asked. I respected his bravery, his willingness to edge right up to the injury.

“Of how I lived after I left Rome the first time?”

“Anything.” I could see his jaw tightening, his shoulders preparing for what I would say.

Should I tell him I've too often felt like a bundle of false starts, like wet sticks being struck with fire only to burn out
pathetically when something goes wrong? Should I complain that I wasn't able to keep the man I learned to love? Should I explain to him Galileo's discovery that we are not what we thought—that our lives are made smaller by the unimportance of our dwelling place on the periphery, like a touch of color at the edge of a painting, contributing to the whole but unnoticed by most? Should I admit that my mark on the world means everything to me, but my work is a mere trinket to the Medici?

Holding onto the back of a chair, Father waited for my answer, an old man trying to fortify himself for the onslaught.

He'd had enough of his own humiliations. He didn't need to hear me whine about mine.

“No. No regrets.” I sucked in a long breath, in and out like the tide. “Only I've never been able to relax.”

A squeezing around his eyes told me he was trying to understand what I meant.

“There's been only painting, and Palmira. If I'd had a lover or a loving husband, there would have been something else—someone with whom to enjoy
la dolce vita
.”

He bowed his head in thought. “Only painting and a daughter,” he murmured.

Like him, I suddenly realized. He'd had the same two. Only I had denied him the joy of one in a way Palmira had not denied me. We looked into each other's eyes at the same instant, both of us awash with sorrow and recognition, seeing each other face to face. I felt the cords of connection tighten.

“I am my father's daughter.”

“How's that?”

“We have both chosen art over our daughters,” I said softly.

“Only time will tell whether it's been worth the price.” In a moment, he added tentatively, “You didn't find love?”