The Birth of Venus (4 page)

We watched her go. I got the impression it made my mother rather sad. She sat for a moment before she turned to me, which meant I caught the glint in her eyes too late.

“I think I’ll join her.” I got up from my chair.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You hate the sun, Alessandra, and anyway your hair is black as a crow’s. You would do better to dye it if you were so inclined, which I doubt you are.”

I saw her eyes slide to my ink-stained fingers and curled them up hastily.

“And when did you last treat your hands?” My appearance was one of many things about me that tested her sorely. “Oh, you are impossible. I will send Erila out this afternoon. Do them before you go to bed, you hear? And stay now. I want to talk to you.”

“But Mama—”

“Stay!”

Three

I
BRACED MYSELF FOR THE LECTURE. HOW MANY TIMES
had we been here before? We would never sort it out, she and I. I had almost died at birth. She had almost died giving birth to me. Eventually, after two days of labor I was hauled out with tongs, both of us screaming all the way. The damage done to her body meant there would be no more children, and long before she began to see something of herself in me there was a powerful bond between us. I asked her once why I hadn’t died, as so many others I had heard about. “Because God willed it so. And because He gave you a curiosity and spirit that made you determined to survive, come what may.”

“Alessandra, you should know your father has started talking to prospective husbands,” she said now.

I felt my stomach curdle at the words. “But how . . . I am not even bleeding yet!”

She frowned. “You are sure of that?”

“How could you not know? Maria checks my laundry. It’s hardly a fact I could keep secret.”

“Unlike other things.” Her voice was quiet. I looked up. But there was no sign that she would go any further. “You know I have shielded you for a long time. I cannot go on doing so forever.”

Such was the seriousness of her voice that it made me almost frightened. I looked at her for guidance as to how we should continue this conversation, but she gave me none. “Well,” I said moodily, “it seems to me that if you did not want me this way, you should not have allowed it.”

“And what would we have done otherwise?” she said gently. “Kept you from books, taken away your pens? Chastised it out of you? You were too loved too early, child. You would have taken such treatment badly. Anyway, you were always so stubborn. In the end it seemed easier to keep you occupied by sending you to your brothers’ tutors.” She sighed. By this time she must have realized that the solution had proved as troublesome as the problem. “You were so eager in their place.”

“I doubt they would thank you for it.”

“That’s because you have yet to learn the power of humility,” she said, more sharply this time. “As we have discussed before, such a lack sits loudly in a young woman. Perhaps if you spent as much time in prayer as you do in study.”

“Is that how you did it, Mama?”

She gave a short laugh. “No, Alessandra. In my case my family put a stop to any temptations of vanity.”

She seldom referred to her childhood but we all knew the stories: how the children, male and female, had been educated together at the order of a scholastic father committed to the new learning. How her eldest brother had grown up to become a great scholar himself, favored by the Medici and living off their patronage, which allowed the sisters to be married well to merchants who accepted their unusual education when sweetened by generous dowries. “When I was your age it was even less acceptable for a young woman to have such learning. If my brother’s star hadn’t risen so far, I might well have had trouble finding a husband.”

“But if my birth was God’s will, then you must always have been meant to marry Papa.”

“Oh, Alessandra. Why is it you always do this?”

“Do what?”

“Push your thoughts further than they need or ought to go.”

“But it is logic.”

“No, child. That is the point. It is
not
logic. What you do is more irreverent: questioning things so deep and coherent in God’s nature that human logic is imperfect to understand them anyway.”

I said nothing. The storm, which was not unfamiliar to me, would pass quicker if I demurred.

“I do not think you have learned that from your tutors.” She sighed, and I could feel her exasperation with me was acute, though I still did not quite know why. “You should know that Maria has found drawings in a case under your bed.”

Ah, so that was it. No doubt she had come across them while searching for hidden blood-soiled rags. I skimmed the case in my mind, trying to predict where her wrath was going to fall.

“She is convinced that you have been wandering the city without a chaperone.”

“Oh, but that is impossible! How could I? She barely lets me out of her sight.”

“She says there are sketches of buildings that she has never seen and images of lions devouring a boy in the Piazza della Signoria.”

“So? She and I went together for the feast day. You know that. We all saw the lions. Before they killed the calf they had a tamer who stood in the cage with them, and the lions never touched him. Then someone told us—maybe it was Erila—how a little boy had got in the cage the year before, after everyone had gone home, and been mauled to death. Maria must surely remember that. She swooned at the news.”

“That is as may be. But the fact is she knows you could not have drawn all of that then and there.”

“Of course I didn’t. I made some sketches later. But they were awful. In the end I had to copy the lions from an image in the
Book of Hours.
Though I am sure their limbs are not right.”

“What was the lesson?”

“What?”

“The lesson. In the
Book of Hours . . .
around which the lions were woven?”

“Er . . . Daniel?” I said lamely.

“You remember the image but not the lesson. Oh, Alessandra.” She shook her head. “What about the buildings?”

“They are from my own head. When would I get the time to draw them?” I said quietly. “I just bring bits that I have remembered together.”

She stared at me for a moment, and I’m not sure that either of us knew what she was feeling. She had been the first to recognize my facility with the pen, when I was so young I barely understood it myself. I had taught myself to draw by copying all the votive paintings in the house, and for years my passion was a secret between the two of us, until I was old enough to appreciate the nature of discretion. While it was one thing for my father to indulge a precocious child in an occasional sketch of the Virgin, it was quite another to have a grown daughter so possessed that she raided the kitchen for capon bones to grind for boxwood dust or goose feathers for a dozen new quills. Art might be a way to God, but it was also the mark of a tradesman and no pastime for a young woman of good family. Recently Erila had become my accomplice in deceit. What my mother thought, I no longer had any idea. Two years before, when I was floundering in the skill of silverpoint—the stylus so fine and hard that it leaves no room for mistakes of the eye or the hand—she had asked to see my attempts. She had studied them for a while, then handed them back without saying a word. A week later I found a copy of Cennino Cennini’s
Treatise on Technique
in the chest under my bed. My hand has grown much steadier since then, though neither of us ever referred to the gift again.

She sighed. “Very well. We shall talk no more about it.” She paused. “I have something else to discuss. The painter has asked to sketch you.”

I felt a small explosion of fire somewhere inside me.

“As I said, he has been visiting churches. And as a result of what he has seen he is ready to continue. He has done your father’s likeness already. I am too busy with Plautilla’s marriage to waste time with him now, so he must move on to the children. He has asked for you first. You have, I presume, no idea why?”

I looked directly at her and shook my head. It may sound strange but it made a significant difference to me then, not using words to lie to her.

“He has set up a temporary studio in the chapel. He says he must see you in the late afternoon when the light is right. He is most insistent about this. And you will take Ludovica and Maria with you.”

“But—”

“There is no argument, Alessandra. You will take them both. You are not there to distract him, or to debate the finer points of Platonic philosophy. In which subject I think anyway there might be some difference of language.”

And though her words were strict the tone was gentler, which made me feel comfortable with her again. Which of course meant that I misjudged the risk. But who else could I talk to about it now, when the matter was becoming so imminent?

“You know, Mama, I have this dream sometimes. I must have had it maybe five or six times now.”

“I hope it is a godly affair.”

“Oh, yes, indeed it is. I dream . . . well, I dream that, strange though it may sound, I don’t get married after all. That instead you and Papa decide that I should go into this convent—”

“Oh, Alessandra, don’t be a dolt. You don’t have the capacity for a convent. Its rules would shrivel you in a moment. Surely you must know that.”

“No . . . yes, but—but you see in my dream
this
convent is different. In this convent the nuns can celebrate God in different ways, by doing—”

“No. Alessandra Cecchi, I am not listening to this. If you think your bad behavior will force us into any change of mind about a husband, you are gravely mistaken.”

Here it came, the beginning of her anger, like the jet of a hot spring erupting from the earth.

“You are a willful and sometimes deeply disobedient child, and despite what I said, I wish I had broken it out of you earlier because it will do none of us any good now.” She sighed. “Nevertheless, we will find a way. I will use the word we have spoken about often: duty. Your duty to your family. Your father is a rich man now, with a record of public service to the state. He has money for a dowry that will bring our name much honor and prestige. When he finds the right man, you will marry him. Is that clear? It is the greatest thing a woman can do, marry and have children. You will learn that soon enough.”

She stood up. “Come, child. We will have no more of this. I have much to do. Your father will speak to you when we have made a choice. Then for a while after that nothing will happen. For a while,” she repeated softly. “But you should know that I cannot keep him talking forever.”

I grabbed the olive branch greedily. “In which case make him choose one that will at least understand,” I said, and I looked directly into her eyes.

“Oh, Alessandra.” She shook her head. “I am not sure that will be possible.”

Four

I
POUTED MY WAY THROUGH SUPPER, PUNISHING MARIA
with my silences, and went early to my room, where I pulled a chair fast against the door and dug into my wardrobe chest. It was important to keep one’s treasures scattered. That way if a single haul is discovered another still remains. Rolled away under my shifts at the bottom was a full-scale pen-and-ink drawing on tinted paper.

For this, my first sustained work, I had chosen the opening moment of the Annunciation. Our Lady is taken unawares by the Angel, and her awe and distress show in the way her hands flutter around her body and her torso twists half in flight, as if both she and Gabriel are being pulled by invisible threads toward and away from each other. It is a popular subject, not least because the strength of their movement offers such a challenge to the pen, but I identify with it most because of Our Lady’s palpable disquiet—though the later stages of submission and grace are the ones my tutors always press upon me for spiritual study.

For the setting I had used our own grand receiving room, the window frame behind to emphasize the perspective. It was, I thought, a good choice. The way the sun refracts through the glass at a certain time of day is so beautiful that one might indeed believe that God is carried in its shafts. I had once sat there for hours waiting for the Holy Spirit to reveal Itself to me: eyes closed, my soul warm in the light, the sun like a beam of holiness piercing through my eyelids. But instead of divine revelation all I got was the thud of my own heartbeat and the incessant itch of an old mosquito bite. I remained stubbornly—and now I look back on it almost excitedly—unblessed.

But my Madonna is more worthy. She is rising from her seat, her hands flying up like nervous birds to defend herself against the rushing wind of God’s arrival, the perfect young virgin disturbed at prayer. I have taken the greatest care with both of their garments. (While much of the world was closed to me, the fabrics and fashions at least I could study at will.) Gabriel is dressed in a long chemise made from my father’s most expensive lawn, its soft cream falling in a thousand tiny pleats from the shoulders and gathered loosely at the waist, the material light enough to follow the speed of his limbs. Our Lady I have made quietly fashionable, her sleeves split open at the elbow to show her chemise poking through from underneath, her waistline high and belted, and her silk skirt falling in a waterfall of pleats around her legs and across the floor. When the outline drawing is complete, I will begin work on the shading and the highlights, using various degrees of ink solutions and a wash of white lead paint applied by brush.

Mistakes at this stage are not easily corrected, and my hand was already unsteady with nerves. I was becoming decidedly more sympathetic to the plight of the apprentices in Bartolommeo’s workshops. To gain myself a little time I was filling in the receding floor tiles to practice my skill at perspective when the door handle moved and the wood rattled against the chair.

“Not yet!” I grabbed a sheet from the bed and threw it across the drawing. “I am . . . undressing.”

Once, a few months before, Tomaso found me here and “accidentally” knocked the bottle of linseed oil, which I use for making tracing paper, into a pestle of white lead powder that Erila had managed to find for me in the apothecary’s shop. His silence had been bought at the cost of my translations of the Ovid poems he was struggling with. But it wouldn’t be Tomaso now. Why waste his evening tormenting me when he could be prettifying himself for the fallen women of the streets with their regulation bells and high-heeled shoes calling young men to attention? I could hear him upstairs, the boards creaking under his footsteps as he no doubt procrastinated over which color hose would go best with the new tunic the tailor had just delivered to him.

I unhooked the chair top and Erila swept in, a bowl in one hand and a pile of almond cakes in the other. Ignoring the drawing—though she is my accomplice, it is better for her to pretend she is not—she settled herself on the bed, divided the cakes, and pulled my hands toward her, stirring up the paste of lemon and sugar and applying it thickly to my skin. “So. What happened, did Maria snitch on you?”

“Lied, more like. Aah. Careful . . . I’ve got a cut there.”

“Too bad. Your mother says if they’re not white by Sunday she’ll make you wear chamois gloves for a week.”

I let her work for a while. I love the feel of her fingers pushing their way deep into my palms, and even more I love the fabulous contrast of her jet-black skin against mine, though it always taxed my charcoal supply when it came to sketching her.

She says she remembers nothing of her homeland in North Africa except for the fact that the sun was bigger there and the oranges tasted sweeter. Her history might be the stuff of a modern Homer. She was brought to Venice with her mother when she was, she thought, five or six years old, and sold at the slave market there to a Florentine merchant whose business later collapsed when he lost three ships from the Indies. My father took her in lieu of a debt. I was still a baby when she came, and she was given charge of Plautilla and me at times, which was easier than the manual work that otherwise would have crushed her. She has a keen intelligence mixed with common sense and from my earliest years could both rule and amuse me. I think my mother saw in her an answer to her prayers when it came to the molding of her singular daughter, so from early on she had become mine. But no one could really own Erila. Though in law she was my father’s property to do with as he wished, she has always had the independence and stealth of a cat, wandering the city and bringing back gossip like fresh fruit and making money on its resale. She has been my best friend in the house for as long as I can remember, my eyes and ears for all the places I cannot go.

“So. Did you get it?”

“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.”

“Oh, Erila!” But I knew better than to rush her.

She grinned. “Now here’s a good one. Today they hanged a man at Porta di Giustizia. A murderer. Chopped his wife’s lover into bits. After he’d swung for half an hour, they cut him down and put him on the death cart, whereupon he sat right back up again, complaining of a great ache in his throat and demanding a drink of water.”

“He did not! What did they do?”

“Took him to hospital, where they’re feeding him bread soaked in milk till he can swallow and they can hang him again.”

“No! And what did the crowd do?”

She shrugged. “Oh, they yelled and cheered him on. But then this fat Dominican with a face like a pumice stone barged in with a sermon about how Florence was a cesspit so overflowing with evil that the wicked flourished while the good suffered.”

“But what if it wasn’t evil? I mean, what if it was an example of God’s boundless mercy, even for the grossest sinners? Oh, I wish I had been there to see it! What do you think?”

“Me?” She laughed. “I think the hangman got the knot wrong. There, you’re done.” She held my hands, surveying her handiwork. They were clean for the first time in days, the nails shining and pink, but how much whiter my skin was was hard to tell.

“Here.” From her pocket she fished out a small bottle of ink (what my brothers use on their studies in a month went on my drawings in a week) and a thin brush of miniver tails, delicate enough to add the highlights to Our Lady’s face and costume. I flung my arms around her neck.

“Hmm. You’re lucky. I got them cheap. But don’t use the ink till after Sunday, or I’ll be the one in trouble.”

AFTER SHE HAD GONE I LAY THINKING OF THE MAN
AND THE NOOSE
and how one could tell the Lord’s mercy from a mistake in knotting, or if perhaps they might be the same thing. I asked God forgiveness, in case such thoughts are impure, and then appealed to the Virgin to intercede on my behalf to make my hand steadier as I capture her goodness for the page. I was still awake when Plautilla opened the canopy and crawled in, reeking of hair oil, liberally applied to counteract the drying power of the sun. She said her prayers under her breath, a rapid litany that seemed more about words than feelings but perfect nevertheless, and settled down, pushing me to the side so she could get the larger share of the bed. I waited until her breathing was even before pushing her back again.

After a while I heard the massing of mosquitoes. The smell of her oil was everywhere, like honey to the bee. The burning herb pomade hanging from the ceiling would be overwhelmed by it. I reached for the vial of citronella I kept under my pillow and smeared it over my hands and face.

Zzan
.
.
.
zzan
.
.
.
zap!
A mosquito landed on my sister’s plump white wrist. I watched it making itself comfortable before pricking her skin. I imagined it drawing up her blood like a long draft of water, then unsucking itself from her body, zooming out of the window, and flying across town to Maurizio’s house, where it would enter his bedchamber, find an exposed limb, and pierce deep into his skin, whereupon the blood of the two lovers would instantly be mingled. The power of the idea was almost unbearable, even if it was only the lumpen likes of Plautilla and Maurizio. But then if such a thing were possible—and having made a study of mosquitoes, it seemed to me it must be: I mean, what could that be but our blood? When you killed them at the beginning of the night their bodies were just black smears, yet later they splatted the reddest of red juice—if such a thing were possible then surely it might also be capriciously done. There were a thousand windows in the city. How many ill-suited gouty old men had already mingled their blood with mine? I wondered. It made me think again that if I were going to have to have a husband, I would want one that would come to me, not with a fine leg and pearls on his brocade but in the shape of a swan, wild wings beating like a storm cloud, as in Zeus and Leda. And that if he did that I might indeed love him forever. Though only if he would let me draw him afterward.

As so often happened on such nights, the activity of my thoughts drove me further awake until eventually I slid out from under the sheets and made my way out of the bedroom.

I love our house in the dark. There is so much blackness and its internal geography is so complex that I have learned to measure it out in my mind, knowing where to find the doors and which angles of turn are necessary to avoid intrusive bits of furniture or unexpected stairs. Sometimes as I glide from room to room, I imagine I am out in the city itself, its alleyways and corners unfolding like an elegant mathematical solution in my mind. Despite my mother’s suspicions, I have never walked the city alone. Of course there have been moments when I have escaped the clutches of a chaperone to move down a side street or loiter at a market stall, but never for long and always in daylight. Our few evening excursions for festivals or late mass showed a place still wide awake. How its atmosphere might change when the torches went out I had no idea. Erila was a slave, and yet she knew more of my city than I ever will. I had as much chance to travel the Orient as I did streets alone at night. But I could dream.

Below me the main courtyard was a well of darkness. I made my way down the stairs. One of the house dogs raised a sleepy eye as I passed him, but he was long used to my nocturnal wanderings. My mother’s peacocks in the garden were more to be feared. Not only had they sharper hearing but their shrieks were like a chorus of souls in hell. Wake them and you woke everyone.

I pushed open the door into the winter receiving room. The tiles were polished and smooth under my feet. The new tapestry hung like a heavy shadow and the great oak table, my mother’s pride and joy, was laid for ghosts. I curled myself onto the stone windowsill and slipped the catch carefully. From here the house looked out over the street and I could sit and watch the nightlife. The torches in their great iron baskets on the wall illuminated the front of the house. It was a sign of the new wealth of the neighborhood that there were households rich enough to light latecomers home. I had heard stories of how on moonless nights in the poorer parts of town people died from falling down pits in the cobbles, or drowned in overflowing gutters. Though their blindness was probably made worse by the wine.

No doubt my brothers’ sight would be similarly impaired by now. What they lacked in vision they make up for in noise, their drunken laughter hitting the cobbles and bouncing in exaggerated echo up to the windows above. Sometimes the racket woke my father. But there was no such excitement tonight and my eyelids were beginning to droop when I noticed something down below.

From the side of our house a figure emerged into the main street, his body briefly illuminated in the glow of the torches. He was long and lanky, with a cloak pulled tight around him, but his head was bare and I caught that certain flash of whiteness in his skin. So. Our painter was going out into the night. He would see little enough art at this hour. What was it my mother had said? That he was finding the city raucous after the stillness of the abbey. Maybe this was his way of sucking in silence, though there was something in the manner in which he walked, head down, eager to lose himself in the dark, that spoke more of purpose than of atmosphere.

I was torn between curiosity and envy. Was it that simple? You wrapped yourself in a cloak, found the right door, and just stepped out into the night. If he moved fast he could be at the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in ten minutes. Then cross by the Baptistery and head west toward Santa Maria Novella or south to the river, from where you might be able to hear the chatter of the women’s little bells. Another world. But I did not like to think of that, remembering his Virgin, so filled with grace and light she could barely keep her feet upon the ground.

I set myself to keep watch until he returned, but after an hour or so I grew sleepy and, not wanting to risk being found there in the morning, I went back upstairs to my room. I slid under the sheet, noticing with uncharitable satisfaction how the bite on Plautilla’s wrist was starting to swell. I curled myself round her warm body. She gave a whinnying little snort, like a horse, and slept on.