Bitter Greens (25 page)

We were left on the beach, Sibillia leaning heavily against my arm. A man in a leather coat and breeches came to meet us, a kerchief tied around his mouth. We picked our way past open graves, where corpses in their hundreds lay tumbled. I saw one with maggots seething in the eye socket, another who sat upright, arms held out stiffly, leering at me. The stench made me retch. I was glad when we finally reached the long building in the centre of the island. Graceful arches all along one side led into a cavernous and shadowy space within.

It was worse inside, though. Straw pallets had been set up on the floor, with up to four people crowded on top. Others lay on the bare stone or sat against the walls, their heads hanging low. The sounds of retching and coughing and moaning filled the air. The smell was unbearable.

Men in plague-doctor masks walked about with incense censers filled with smoking herbs. Mostly, they did not touch the sick, just prodded them with their long sticks. One doctor nearby lanced the angry boils covering a young woman. Putrid black liquid oozed out. ‘She should be at the Old Lazzaretto,’ he said to a colleague. ‘Those who come here without the plague will soon catch it.’

‘There’s no more room at the Old Lazzaretto. As fast as people die, more get sick,’ the other replied. ‘At this rate, half of Venice shall die.’

I remembered the hot filthy little room where my mother had died and how I had ordered water for washing and smashed the cockroaches and fleas with the back of my scrubbing brush. There was no hot water here, and no scrubbing brush. I had sworn I would never live like that again, but the Lazzaretto was far, far worse.

‘I’m in hell,’ I whispered.

‘This is not hell,’ the doctor replied wryly. ‘This is purgatory.’

‘Is there not a bed where I can lay her down? Is there no medicine, no food?’ I held out my hands to him.

‘Have you money?’

‘Some.’

‘Find a Jew. They’ll sell you a mattress and something to eat.’

So I looked for the distinctive yellow scarf the Jews all had to wear and paid an outrageous amount for a filthy vermin-ridden pallet and a cup of thin soup.

Sibillia suffered all through the night, coughing till I feared she would retch up her insides. As the sky began to lighten, a jet of black blood gushed from her mouth. I ran, looking for help. Everyone was just as sick. I found a wooden hut with smoke trickling from a makeshift chimney. A man stood outside, a shovel in one hand. As I hurried towards him, he lifted his arm to press his wrist against his mouth and nose.

‘Help me, please … she’s dying.’

‘I know you, you’re the witch. Filthy witches and Jews, you’re what’s brought the wrath of God down upon us.’ He made the sign of the cross, with a hand whose nails were black and rotten, then went inside the hut and shut the door in my face.

I went back to Sibillia and sat with her head cradled in my lap, stroking back her white hair, until she coughed and wheezed no more. Soon, the corpse-bearers came, calling through their white-beaked masks, ‘
Corpi morti! Corpi morti!
’

One of them was the man who had spat at my feet. I recognised him by his blackened nails. He and his partner picked Sibillia’s body up by the arms and the feet and flung her into the cart. Then the man picked up a broken brick from the cart, wrenched open Sibillia’s jaws and jammed the brick inside her mouth. I cried out in protest.

‘She’s a witch,’ he said. ‘She’ll be chewing her way out of her shroud if we don’t jam her jaws.’

‘She’s dead,’ I wept.

‘Shroud-eaters feast on the flesh of the dead, then rise from the ground to infect us all. If we don’t jam her jaws, we’ll have to dig her up later and burn her heart and liver. We’ve got enough to do digging graves here without having to open them up again later.’

His partner leant in so close that I gagged on the foul gust of his breath. ‘You can hear the shroud-eaters down in the ground, chewing away. First,
they eat their way free of the shroud, then they gnaw off their own fingers, then they start on the bodies of the other dead. You can hear them grunting and snuffling and chomping away down there.’

‘They’ll eat their way out eventually, and then come looking for living flesh to gnaw,’ the man with the black fingernails said.

His partner leant in even closer, fondling my waist. ‘Don’t worry,
bella
, if you’re afraid you can cuddle up with me tonight. I’ll keep you safe.’

‘Don’t touch me.’ I shoved him away.

He laughed, and together they trundled the cart away down to the warehouse, stopping to collect other dead bodies, and I stood, my fists clenched, wanting to scream and rage at them. If I’d had a sword to hand, I would have run them through with pleasure, enjoying the spurt of their crimson life-blood. It was only then that I realised I had come to love Sibillia. She had indeed been a second mother to me.

I went down to the beach and waded into the lagoon, and I scrubbed the smell of that foul place off me, using handfuls of sand to scour my skin. As I scrubbed, I wept, and as I wept, I planned what I would do to that rotten-fingered man. I’d curse him till his fingers and toes all dropped off. I’d fill his sleep with nightmares. I’d raise Sibillia from the plague-pit and send her to haunt him till he gouged out his own eyes and tore off his own ears.

And then I would go and read every word of every book of Sibillia’s, till I found the spell to make sure I never grew old and died.

I knew curses and charms and cantrips aplenty, spells to bind and to banish, spells to enthral and to enfeeble.

Yet the one thing I could not banish was boredom. Not one of the men who crowded around my velvet chaise longue every night aroused even the faintest flicker of interest in me.

Until I met again the young artist who had kissed me during Carnevale so long ago. He appeared at the brothel one spring night, almost two years after Sibillia’s death. He came in, shabbier than ever, paint on his hands, his dark curls in wild disarray.

‘Look, it’s Tiziano Vecellio,’ a fat merchant said. ‘He must have returned from Padua.’

‘He’s probably looking for a new model,’ another man said. ‘No respectable woman would ever let him paint her.’

I stood up and moved towards him, smiling. He saw me through the crowd and came eagerly towards me. ‘It’s you, my beautiful redhead from Carnevale.’ A shadow flicked across his face. ‘I didn’t realise you were …’

‘I was not when I first saw you.’ For some reason, this seemed important for him to know.

‘You were certainly well guarded then,’ he answered with a quick wry grin. ‘What happened?’

‘The plague.’

At once, his eyes flashed to mine. ‘I’m sorry. I lost friends in the plague too.’

‘There are few in Venice who did not.’ I gestured to a servant for some more wine, then raised high my goblet. ‘To life.’

‘And beauty.’ His face was sombre. I was glutted with compliments, yet these words of his pleased me. I smiled. He picked up a lock of my hair, coiling it around his finger. ‘It is the colour of fire, of passion, of life itself. It’s a colour to warm the soul.’

My heart quickened, heat in my cheeks and in my loins. I wanted him to kiss me again – me, Selena Leonelli, who hated to be kissed. I let my clients slobber all over my body, but never, ever, on the mouth. My desire astonished me.

‘Can you stand very still?’ he asked me.

Once again, his words surprised me. I thought of how often I stood, cold as a statue, as I was looked over by prospective clients. The other girls flirted and giggled and wriggled their hips. Yet there was always someone who wanted me.

I nodded.

‘Would you let me paint you? I cannot pay much.’

I thought of some of the great paintings I had seen in churches and salons in Venice, the women in them immortalised, their beauty untouched by worms and maggots.

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘When?’

‘I need you to kneel here,’ Tiziano said, pushing me down onto a cushion on the floor. His hand was hot through the thin fabric of my chemise. ‘Lean forward, like so.’

I obeyed, bracing one hand on the floor, looking up at him.

‘Here, put your hand on this pot.’ He passed me a small round jar with a lid. When I leant my weight on it, it cut into my hand.

‘I was painting my neighbour’s daughter but she could not stand having to hold the pose so long and began to cry,’ he told me. ‘The tears were just what I wanted. My Mary needs to be weeping and in despair, but then
transfigured at seeing the resurrected body of the man she loves. It was wonderful when she began to weep. I got the first glimmer of how the painting should be. But then, when I finally let her go home, her mother said she could not come any more, that I was cruel to her. Cruel. Did she not realise I am trying to make a masterpiece?’

‘Do you wish me to weep?’ I was not pleased by the idea. I had not wept since Sibillia died, and I was determined to never do so again. Tears undermined your strength the way the sea washes away a sandcastle.

‘I want you to look up at me and realise that your beloved is not dead after all but alive,’ he said.

I remembered how my mother had looked when my father had come to the palazzo, how she had run barefoot across the hall and leapt into his arms. I reached up one hand to Tiziano.

‘Yes,’ Tiziano cried and bent over me, catching my hand. ‘That’s it! Don’t move.’

He hurried to his easel and swirled the paintbrush in paint. He looked at the painting, then at me, then bent his attention to the canvas again. Soon, my back was aching, my knees crying out in torment, but I did not move. I fixed my eyes on the ceiling and thought of my mother’s face, illuminated with joy. In all the horror of what had come after, I had forgotten how she looked then, how much she had loved my father.

‘I have been thinking of death a great deal since the plague,’ Tiziano said in a low voice, dabbing at the canvas with a brush loaded with red paint. ‘My friend Zorzi died, you see. Giorgione Barbarelli was his real name. He was a great artist. Almost as great as me.’ He cast me an impish grin. ‘I decided I wanted to paint the scene just before the Ascension, the moment when Mary Magdalene sees the Saviour risen from the cross and realises the gift of his sacrifice, that one day we too shall follow him and experience our own resurrection.’

My shoulders sagged. I had thought I sensed a wildness in him, a sensuality, a longing for freedom that matched my own. Yet here he was, mouthing the same empty platitudes I heard from the church pulpit. Then, once again, Tiziano surprised me.

‘I want to show how Mary loved Jesus as a woman loves a man, with all the force of her ardent nature, and how he too yearns towards her. He wants to touch her, he wants to feel the press of her flesh against his, yet he must not. It is time for him to leave such longings behind. Yet she is so beautiful and loves him so much, and he cannot bear to hurt her. And so he says to her, “Don’t touch me,” but it is a plea as much as a command.’

His words had been so soft I could hardly hear him. Unconsciously, I had turned my face towards him, to watch his face. He felt my gaze and looked up again. ‘Don’t move.’

I smiled at him.

He smiled back involuntarily. ‘Why are you smiling?’

‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m supposed to be weeping, aren’t I?’

‘I think I like smiling better than weeping.’

‘May I get up? I’m not used to spending so much time on my knees.’ I spoke with soft innuendo, but Tiziano only sighed and looked at his painting.

He answered courteously enough, ‘Of course. Get up, move around. I think I have you anyway.’

I straightened my back with a groan, then tried to get up, but my knees were so stiff that I staggered. Tiziano hurried forward to offer me his hand. It was so large and broad that my own disappeared inside it. He lifted me up effortlessly and held me steady till my legs were able to hold me up. Then he went back to examine his painting again with a cool frowning glance. I walked around, looking at other paintings stacked up against the wall, a little disconcerted. Any other man would have tried to kiss me, or made a lewd comment about what else I could do while on my knees, but Tiziano seemed utterly absorbed in his painting.

‘May I see it?’ I asked.

‘I suppose so. It’s not any good. The figure of Mary is beautiful enough, and I think I’ve caught some of your expression, but the rest is all wrong.’

I stood beside him and stared at the canvas. ‘I like the countryside.’

‘I tried to capture the view as it looks from the village where I grew up: Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno. The ground falls away into blue infinity, and you think you can see forever.’

‘You grew up in the country? Did you have a garden?’

‘The whole of the valley was our garden. You’ve never seen such flowers. When I was ten, I painted a Madonna and Child, with a little boy-angel, from juice squeezed from wildflowers and berries, on the walls of the Casa Sampieri. My family were so amazed that they sent me here to Venice, so I could be apprenticed to Zuccato, who made mosaics. It was not long before I realised it was painting I wanted to do, though, so I convinced the Bellini brothers to take me on and teach me.’

He scowled at the painting. ‘I want to be even better than they were, though. I want to be the greatest painter ever. Yet it never comes out how I see it in my head. Something’s wrong. The balance. Or the shape.’

‘Why is Jesus wearing a hat?’ I asked.

He glanced at me in surprise. ‘Well, it’s a gardener’s hat. When Mary first sees him in the garden of Gethsemane, she thinks he’s a gardener. See, he has a hoe too.’

‘I can see he might catch up a hoe to lean on, if he was as stiff and sore as I was when I first got up. But why a hat?’

‘Why indeed?’ he asked himself, under his breath, and laid one finger over Jesus’s head, hiding the hat, then drew it away.

I gazed at the depiction of myself. I was only a small presence in the painting, my face in profile, my figure concealed beneath flowing white sleeves. To me, the single tree that struck across the top half of the painting seemed to grab the eye much more than my figure, crouching at its base. And the figure of Jesus, rather than being tempted by my beauty, seemed to be fleeing away from it. I said as much, trying to conceal my pique beneath a note of warm teasing.

Tiziano just stared at the painting. ‘Would you kneel again, just as you were before?’

I did as he asked, with a flounce of my red skirt. I tossed back my hair, braced my hand painfully on the jar and fixed my gaze upwards again. Tiziano called one of his apprentices, busy grinding powders at the far end of the studio, and ordered him to come and stand before me, dressed in nothing but a sheet knotted loosely about his loins. The apprentice was
only young, a year or so older than me. He flushed at the sight of me kneeling at his feet and bent towards me, no doubt trying to peek down my bodice.

‘Yes,’ Tiziano whispered, and he began to paint furiously, sometimes throwing down his brush and smearing paint with his fingers. The apprentice stood frozen in place, holding his arm in front of him as if trying to hide his erection.

Soon, my knees were screaming with pain again. The ache in my lower back spread slowly up towards my awkwardly braced shoulders, but I did not move or speak. It was as if I was having a silent battle of wills with Tiziano.
Notice me. Notice I’m in pain. Notice that it’s dark outside, and I’ve been here for hours, and you’ve not even offered me a drink
.

At last, his apprentice gave a kind of moan and turned away from me. ‘I … I need to …’ he said and hurried away towards the door.

‘Poor boy. Do you think he needed to pee? He must’ve been holding it in for hours.’

Tiziano lifted his head and glanced at me, as if surprised I was still there. ‘Has it been hours?’

‘Hours and hours,’ I responded. ‘May I be permitted to straighten my back? Though I am not at all sure that I can.’

He lifted me to my feet. ‘I’m so sorry. Look, it’s dark. I had no idea it was so late. You should’ve said something.’

‘And interrupted the genius at work? I wouldn’t dare.’

‘You should have spoken earlier, reminded me what time it was.’

‘You seemed absorbed. I did not want to break your concentration.’ Despite myself, my voice had softened a little. The feel of his warm hands tingling on my shoulder and back, the earthy, outdoorsy smell of him, combined to allay my displeasure.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Not just for being so patient for so long. Come and see the painting.’

This time, I stood and stared in silence. The changes were small, but somehow the whole feeling of the painting had changed. The scarlet turmoil of my skirts showed I had flung myself down in some strong
emotion. The brilliant splash of colour drew the eye irresistibly to me. My hair was disordered, as if I had just risen from a restless sleep. And now the figure of Jesus bent towards me, as though he longed to reach down and catch my hand, drawing me up against his almost naked body. Instead, though, he drew away the folds of his shroud, afraid that the merest touch of my fingers would unman him. The hat was gone, and the face looking down at me with such tenderness was that of Tiziano himself.