Damiano's Lute (19 page)

Now Damiano wished heartily that they had stipulated the meeting more exactly, both in time and space. The Pope's Door probably meant the main door into the Papal enclosure, but one could not be sure.

Gaspare and his friend had set down stools, courtesy of their employer, near the station of the right-hand pikeman at the gate. This pikeman was a tow-headed northerner, very tall and quite amiable. He was glad for their company because Damiano had brought his lute.

Of course they had come at dawn, because dawn was part of Palm Sunday. Damiano had left this station of waiting long enough to attend mass, but otherwise the two of them sat like toads on a log, as hour followed hour.

It was not hard on Damiano, for this day was mild, and coincided with one of his periodic spells of lethargy, brought on perhaps by daily performance and practice. And it was quite gratifying to find how many out of the Sunday crowd already knew or recognized him, stopping for conversation and compliments.

“Already you're making a name for yourself,” whispered his youthful manager. “Not seven days into Avignon and people of the better sort recognize you.”

Damiano grunted sheepishly as the most recent well-wisher departed: a fellow whose embroidered tabard signified that he served a cardinal. “I was born with a name, just like everybody else. And by what criteria do you judge that these are people of the better sort, other than by the fact that they recognize me?”

Gaspare did not answer. His repartee was not at its best, today. He was not happy: torn between an expectation too strong for comfort and a fear that fed upon that expectation. His face was sweaty and his hair (despite much attention) lank. He could not sit still—not for a moment—but neither would he let himself stir from his post of waiting. The result was an itching agony.

Damiano did not wonder at the boy's distress. If he had had family of any sort (he thought) he would cling to them like glue. Had Damiano a sister, he would have used any means, whether force of persuasion or force of arms, to prevent her fluttering off to a foreign country with a scapegrace conniver like Jan Karl.

Had Damiano a sister, of course, she would never have had to start selling herself on street corners. His fingers ceased to move on the strings as he became lost in reverie on the subject of his nonexistent sister.

Life would have been different, certainly. This sister (without doubt she would have been younger than he. He could not imagine an older sister, bullying him and calling him a dirty boy…) would have been the natural playmate of Carla Denezzi. Damiano would have then had far more occasions to meet with the lovely Carla, for whom he still had a sweet and somewhat painful regard. Perhaps he would have proposed marriage to Carla in better times. Perhaps she would have accepted.

How strange that would have been! He would by now be a different person entirely. Certainly a man with a wife could not have left the Piedmont for Lombardy, seeking the greatest witch in the Italies, nor subsequently wandered down into Avignon and sat in the sun by the Pope's Door, to pass the time of day politely with a cardinal's functionary.

Would he have ever met Raphael, had he had a sister?

Damiano was beginning to regret the existence of this imaginary sibling. She would be a girl of problems. If she had proven a witch, as was likely, she would have had a difficult time finding suitors. No simple man wanted to marry a witch, and even the sighted were just as happy with a simple wife. (And it was not too much easier for the male witches, for no father wanted to give his daughter to a man who might, in fit of irritation, turn her into a snake. Guillermo Delstrego had had to search all the way to France to find a suitable helpmate.

Of course Delstrego Senior had had problems of visage and temperament as well as livelihood. Damiano was always grateful that he had taken after his mother in all ways but one.)

By the crowded calendar of saints, what if Damiano's sister had looked like her father? Oh, it was much, much better that the girl had never been born.

Reverie and sunlight together filled his head with sweet, amber adhesive honey. He could not think anymore. There was no need to think anymore. His right hand nestled into the strings over the soundhole. His left hand fell away from the lute's neck.

Damiano had no idea how long he had been asleep when either the shadow on his face or the rough voice woke him up. He opened his eyes and started in terror, for it was the tall, narrow-chested guildsman who had come so near to assaulting him (“beating the pulp out” of him, to quote) on his first day at work.

This time the fellow had no club, but he looked angrier than ever. His langue d'oc was far too rapid for Damiano to follow, so the Italian made the universal I-do-not-understand-you gesture with both hands. The response to this was a grimace of disgust, and then the fellow began again, more slowly.

“It is bad enough that you crash into the city of Avignon, and I am forced to watch you receive what better men than you have waited years to have. This is shameful, and if we had a Provençal for the Mayor of our Guild, as we should, this would not happen.

“But you are not content with one of the most honorable and lucrative positions in the city; you must also ruin the livelihoods of poor men by playing them off the street. I must assume, monsieur— and your misshapen nose confirms me—that you are some Jew whose lust is for money, and who strides through Avignon with the idea that the protection of the King, the Pope and the Mayor is everything…”

Since it is not pleasant to have someone yelling abuse six inches from one's face, Damiano squirmed in his seat, and turned his head to the side. There were so many recriminations in the man's tirade that he could not keep track of them, let alone answer.

And this last, accusing him of being Jewish, was only confusing. In Partestrada there had been no Jews dwelling, but only old Jacob benJacob, who was Swiss as well as Jewish, and who came through once every three-month, selling, among other things, thread. It was from him that Damiano had purchased his first little lute. No one had suggested to him that Jacob was rich.

In Torino there was a Jewish quarter, certainly, and it was also from a Jew that he had purchased the gold-embossed volume of Aquinas which he had given to Carla. This had struck him as odd at the time, since if the man was Jewish he by definition could not be a Christian, and so what was he doing with a book of theology?

But for the most part, Damiano had never thought about the Jews for good or evil.

But his nose, now. He
had
thought about his nose, having at least the average share of vanity. And he had just been congratulating himself at having escaped the physiognomy of Guillermo Delstrego. This was disheartening.

Gazing resolutely across the avenue which was never for a moment empty, and where the Sunday garb of the strollers gave only the slightest nod toward Lenten repentance, he spoke. “Monsieur Guildsmember, you do me wrong. I am not trying to steal the brass sous of the street musicians (although I must say I would not regret them, being not as well paid as you think). I am only practicing, for I must play this evening. You notice no bowl?”

The fellow did not look down, except to spit. “Worse. Who is going to pay for music, if you give it to them for free?”

Damiano's fingers drummed on the spruce face of the lute. He was losing his patience. And where was Gaspare, anyway? Wasn't it a manager's job to keep him from this kind of disturbance?

He searched the street as he replied in his slow, careful langue d'oc, “Monsieur, I do believe it is you who are the mercenary one, for I was sitting here quite content to play for myself, in quiet practice to which no one, as far as I can tell, was listening. And in further answer to you, no, I am not Jewish, though it was necessary for me to learn to read Hebrew as a child, along with a small nibbling of Greek. But in fact, I have just come from mass, and with the communion in mind I hesitate to trade insults on…”

The words froze on Damiano's tongue and his tongue itself clove to the roof of his mouth. For as he stared across the busy street where butchers and bishops came and went, one passerby stopped to stare back at him with the face and hair of Raphael.

Damiano's expression flashed through stages of confusion, welcome and again confusion. The pedestrian stood stock-still. He was dressed in an elegance of gray and scarlet. If only he were closer.

Damiano stood, squinting, and shoved past the belligerent musician. “I… I… I mean, that is…”

And the ruddy, arrogant face came into focus. Satan smiled at Damiano, flourished and bowed, and then disappeared behind a wicker cage on poles filled with chickens and carried by two boys. This utensil swayed by as ponderously as the sedan chair of some dowager, and when the squawking affair had passed, so had the apparition.

Damiano swallowed. “That was… someone I know,” he whispered, feeling both frightened and foolish. The guildsman then grabbed Damiano by the arm and spun him around. The lute banged alarmingly against the wall.

“You will not ignore me, you black-faced peasant!” the fellow bellowed, and swung his bony fist at Damiano's face.

He ducked, but even before the fist passed above his head the gleaming length of a sharpened halberd sliced the air between them. The guildsman blinked at it, his arm still cocked for the blow. Damiano followed the wood and iron length back to its wielder, the gate guard both musicians had forgotten was there.

“Enough,” growled the guard. “No fighting around the Papal Palace. Haven't you any respect for the Holy Father?”

The guildsman evidently did have respect, either for the Holy Father or for the instruments of war, for he backed off, cringing and snarling together, like a dog.

“Hah!” grunted the guard, once he and Damiano were alone. “That was one of the few amusing moments of my day.” His weathered blue eyes twinkled down at Damiano, who had sunk strengthless back onto his stool. “That and your pretty playing, of course. Don't mind that fellow. I know him: he's usually here, with a hurdy-gurdy out of tune, playing the same five songs. He's got at least a dozen children, and his wife leaves them with him while she takes in laundry. Quite a racket, they make.”

Damiano smiled his gratitude, as he reflected to himself—they protect me. The strangest people protect me: guardsmen, Irishmen, horses. Dogs. Why? And then he thought, The Devil. He is in Avignon. What does that portend?

Gaspare returned in late afternoon, looking worse than ever. Damiano put down the lute. “Where did you go?” he asked, offering the boy some of the bread and dates he had paid a child to buy for him.

Gaspare wanted nothing. “Around. To every other gate into the enclosure. And then to each of the outer gates.”

“All around the city?”

The boy threw himself upon the ground against the stucco wall,

regardless of his exquisite new mantle. “I thought… I thought perhaps we had the place wrong. I wanted to see if they were waiting elsewhere. They weren't.”

Damiano said nothing, for there was nothing he could say, except that he had seen Satan on the streets of Avignon. And that was not something Gaspare would want to hear right now. So he spent another hour improvising quietly on the treble strings, and when it could no longer be avoided, he said, “I'll have to go now. I have to work.”

Gaspare glanced up at the setting sun and flinched as though he had just received a blow. His arms, nothing but skin, bones and twisted tendon, were wrapped around his knees and he buried his head between them.

Damiano bit down on his lip. Poor child: his sleeves did not come within three inches of his wrists, so fast he had grown in the past winter. Damiano for a moment had the feelings of a father. He put the lute behind his stool and considered what he might say or do to help.

But Gaspare was beyond easy consolation. He rocked stiffly back and forth, his dusty boots soiling the velvet of the cloak. “Perhaps she never reached Avignon,” he said in a strangled voice. “Perhaps she has been dead the greater part of a year!”

Damiano grunted. “We have no reason to…”

“She is dead! I feel it. I have felt it for a long time!” Now Gaspare raised his head, and, yes, as Damiano suspected, the boy was weeping, reddening his protuberant gooseberry eyes. His nose was as pinched as an old man's, and indeed, Gaspare looked very aged right now, aged and in despair. “She was all I had. All I had. No father, no mother, no name of our own, and she was only a dirty slut, but she was all I had! And now she is dead and I have nothing!”

It was on the tip of Damiano's tongue to say that Gaspare still had him, but that seemed such a conceited thing to say.

Evidently the guard had some Italian, for bending at the waist and pushing his steel helmet back from his forehead, he whispered in Damiano's ear, “What a shame. How did she die?”

“We don't know that she
did
die,” hissed the lutenist back. “She simply did not show up for an appointment.”

Raphael knew where Evienne was. Damiano was tempted to tell Gaspare as much, to allay his fears. But how could he reveal that, without being therefore obliged to ask the angel for more specific information, which the musician did not want to do. Besides—was Raphael's knowledge a comforting thought after all? The fact that Raphael knew where the girl was did not mean necessarily that she was alive. For all Damiano knew, angels were on close terms with the dead. He remembered the little ghost of Macchiata, half hidden by Raphael's robe, and he decided not to mention Raphael's words to Gaspare.

Damiano crouched down in front of the boy and with both hands forced Gaspare to look at him. “You are being very unreasonable, Gaspare. Think whom we are dealing with. Evienne has no more sense than a kitten—I doubt she even knows how to read a calendar, and Jan… well, Jan Karl would not get out of bed to save his mother's life. Not if the bed were comfortable.