The Dream of Scipio (27 page)

Someone knew where he was; one of his letters had been received somewhere and had been passed on, in that mysterious way of organizations, into other hands, for in late February 1941 a letter was delivered to the post office at Vaison and was held there until he came in one day to see, again, if there was any soap; one of his neighbors had said there was some, and though he found the country life suited his temperament, he did like to wash properly.

He bought his soap, one precious bar of it, then called in at the post office and was given his letter. Marcel wanted him, needed him. The idyll was over; it was time to return to life. He was being asked to work for the new government. As he told Elizabeth when he announced he was going, he did not know when he would be back, or what he was wanted for.

 
 
 
 
A QUESTION OF civilized values, he told himself. A question of whether or not one is to take a stand and insist that, despite the times, barbarism must not hold sway. How do we justify calling ourselves civilized, after all? Is it the books we read? The delicacy of our tastes? Our place in continuing a line of belief and of common values that stretch back a thousand years and more? All this, indeed, but what does it mean? How does it show itself? Are you civilized if you read the right books, yet stand by while your neighbors are massacred, your lands laid waste, your cities brought to ruin?

Do we use the barbarians to control barbarism? Can we exploit them so that they preserve civilized values rather than destroy them? Was the old Athenian right, that taking any side is better than taking no side?

 
 
THE QUESTION CAME to Manlius’s mind as he sat on his horse and looked at the devastation all around. His farm, one of the outlying dependencies to the north of his villa, had been attacked two days before. A band of brigands had come, murdered some of the tenants, and carried off the rest.

So he told himself, for he clung to some hope. But he soon learned it was worse than that, much worse. As he sat and looked, he saw a movement in the copse to the left; he sent off some of his bodyguards to investigate and they swiftly returned, leading a young boy with a rope around his neck. He was about seven, and he was crying in terror.

“Stop that noise,” Manlius ordered. “Give him some food if he needs it, if it will shut him up. Then bring him back to me when he is quiet.”

He turned away, got off his horse, and continued to walk around the burned-out buildings. Already he was beginning to suspect the truth. The damage was too neat, too orderly. Too little had been destroyed.

The boy was still crying. Manlius became itchy with his impatience to have confirmed what he already knew. He took his whip off the saddle and prepared it.

It took a long time to get even the basics out of the whining, blubbering child. But eventually he confirmed the bishop’s suspicions. This had been no raid. His tenants had simply walked out, taking everything of use and value—his property, all of it—and marched off to the north, where softer conditions and better land had been promised them amongst the barbarians. They had had over a day’s start and would be hurrying. They’d taken oxen and carts and donkeys and goats, all the supplies and tools he had lavished on them.

The worst of it all was that he had, as always, most earnestly asked their leader at the last tax collection whether they had any complaint or wish. He had professed utter contentment; desired no better master.

He had not said, however, that he desired no master at all.

“This cannot continue,” the bishop said to himself. “It cannot go on.”

He was about to gallop off, when one of his bodyguards called him. “Sir, the boy . . .”

Manlius looked at him kneeling on the ground, quiet now.

“Cut off his hands and give them to him in a bag. Then let him follow his family. Let him be a burden to them from now on, not a help.”

He turned his horse, then hesitated. “No,” he said. “We cannot waste anything these days, however justly. Bring him with you and put him to work in the granary. There’s more than enough to be done there.”

 
 
 
 
PISANO HAD MADE progress, but his vision of the Magdalen was lacking, as empty and as vacuous as something concocted by Matteo. It infuriated him to be so delayed, as in all other respects his work was coming along well. He had been painting for nine months now, and was pleased with himself in all respects except for this one element. He had completed three frescoes,
Sophia Cures the Blind Man, Sophia Converting the Elders,
and
Sophia Turns Back the Invaders,
using the face that he had glimpsed once in the market in Avignon. Once only, a few seconds, but it was enough; the woman who so unsettled Olivier was so obviously Saint Sophia that her face was impressed forever in his mind. He did not need to see her again. And now he was hard at work on
Sophia in the House of Mary Magdalen,
and it was this that was causing him such grief. He journeyed to and fro, sometimes spending weeks at a time at work, often returning to Avignon and passing days or weeks in idleness, summoning the resources to go back once more. The work made him irritable, so did the idleness. Olivier began to find him tiresome, and longed for the day when he would once more pack his bags, load up his donkey, and head off, grim and determined, to do battle once more.

The Magdalen would not come. What he had, he had done from memory, and a strange forgetfulness came over him as he tried to recall her features. So he gave up once more and returned to Avignon. He was often to be seen wandering the streets. Pausing and making sketches of faces flitting past. Only once did anyone remark on this and draw attention to his strange behavior. It was in the open space near the ramparts, marked down for building but not yet filled up with new houses, the fruit trees still there, the little stalls where merchants sold bread and fruits to women of delicacy who were wont to parade in the evening with their maids and mothers even in winter, for the evenings were not so very cold. Isabelle de Fréjus was there, walking up and down, and there also was Pisano, sitting on the ground, pretending not to look, sketching away to get her face just so, pitched at an angle he had seen once before and which, he knew, would be perfect for the representation of the Magdalen descending from her boat with her entourage. It was not her face that he wanted, merely its expression, but he studied her carefully nonetheless, staring at her in a way that, sooner or later, was bound to attract attention.

By instinct he took the pose of his old master Lorenzetti, leaning against a wall, sheets of precious, expensive paper on a plank of wood, charcoals in his pocket where they could be found quickly if one broke. He did his best to be discreet, but it was impossible to remain there for long without being noticed. Too many young women and their chaperones passed by, sneaking a little look at the paper as they passed, then whispering to their friends. It was an event now; Avignon was a huge city, its streets normally full of entertainments, jugglers and dancers and penitents and musicians, vendors of all sorts of goods, beggars and mendicants, but the imminent threat of the plague had closed down most diversions. The smallest novelty was now seized on and subjected to ceaseless comment, and a young, handsome painter directing his attentions at Isabelle de Fréjus was too much of a curiosity to pass unnoticed.

In due course, Isabelle marched straight over and, with a boldness that often marked her, demanded to see what he was doing, together with an explanation. It was an encounter witnessed by everyone, who gathered around quite openly to hear what they hoped would provide much diversion. Pisano had his speech ready; he had prepared it for use many months before when he began his furtive thefts of other people’s faces, but had never before had occasion to use it.

“Dearest lady,” he began, “I must beg your pardon for acting in such a way. I am a painter, engaged in a work of the greatest importance, decorating a church with the lives of a saint and of the Magdalen. I wish to depict the Magdalen as she was, famed for her beauty, kindness, and sanctity, and yet have no model in my mind of how to do so. Then one day, a friend whose name I will not—need not—mention, told me of a lady he knew whose loveliness was such that heaven itself could scarcely contain anything of greater merit. I scoffed at him for a fool, and he led me into the street one day when you were passing.

“Once I had seen you, I fell on my knees before him, in the mud though it was, and begged his forgiveness for having doubted his word, rebuking him only for his restraint in his descriptions of you. For I saw in your beauty my Magdalen, and ever since, I have been unable to work. Your face appears in my mind whenever I try, and in my dreams I know that this lady must have had something of your charms.

“And so I have sneaked around like a beggar these last few days, with my paper and charcoal, snatching a little sketch here and a likeness there. It is unforgivable in me, I know, but a heavenly command cannot be ignored so easily.”

A little round of applause greeted these words, limited only by the fact that Pisano’s accent was so execrable that some of his phrasing was lost. It didn’t matter; he was playing with her, enjoying the attentions of a beautiful woman. It was meaningless; he would have said the same to any pretty girl he was caught sketching; someone whose face was worth sketching deserved such compliments, and would be forgotten the moment the next presented itself for study.

But Isabelle frowned, and tried to disguise her pleasure. “I would have thought, sir, that if my face was so much in your mind then you might have been able to remember what I looked like without following me around like a puppy dog. Or perhaps your mind is so weak it cannot hold an idea for very long?”

Pisano grinned at her. “This friend of mine tells me that the apprehension of true beauty is hard. We may approach it, and feel it, but we are too corrupted to keep it within us for long. This is my great tragedy, for however much I look, and however much I sketch, all I can take with me when I leave your presence is the palest reflection, as inferior to your beauty as man himself is below the beauty of the angels.”

An easy reply, for Olivier had once talked to him of his manuscript, and used such an example to try to explain what it meant—or what Gersonides thought it meant. From then on, however, Pisano was on his own and had to do the best he could. He disguised the sudden drop in the quality of his eloquence by deciding it was high time that he was overcome with remorse and shame at his impertinence. This allowed him to give ever shorter replies and pack up his paper.

“May I see this sketch you have done of me?”

He was ready for that, as well. He had worked up a little miniature in colors, a few inches square, and a fine thing; it was oval, and around the bottom he had carefully written her name. It ended up in the
Musée des Beaux Arts
in Lyon, eventually, after passing through many hands before it was acquired at a sale in Paris in 1885. Isabelle gasped as she saw it.

“Keep it, my lady, if you wish. For now I have seen the original close up, I realize how feeble my hand is and cannot bear even to look at it.”

Can anyone really resist the flattery of image-taking? Can, in particular, a young girl of scarcely eighteen, conscious of her appeal and disenchanted with her husband, remain cold when given a portrait that—despite Pisano’s false modesty—was remarkably good considering the primitive nature of portaiture at the time, complimenting at the same time it remained true to the original? She ran home and put the little picture in a missal, where it remained until long after her death, and every time she prayed she opened it at that page and gazed again.

Was it in any way surprising that, as she prayed and looked and remembered, all at the same time, imagining that this was how she existed in the young Italian’s heart, she was certain that at last she had fallen in love?

THE PLAGUE REACHED Avignon the following month, at the beginning of March 1348, when even near the Mediterranean there is little enough to be cheerful about, and when months of winds have already sapped the vitality of all those exposed to them, wearying their bodies and enervating their souls. The most likely direction was from Marseille, a sailor or a priest or a trader on a boat carrying the infection with him, then traveling inland, up the river to present a petition at the curia or hawk his wares around the market or merely return to his family. Had it not been this unknown person, it would certainly have been another the next day or the next week, for no place was immune; everywhere was touched sooner or later.

The records for the city are slim, but it is certain that almost everyone knew that the pestilence was coming. Travelers’ tales from the Levant, from Sicily, and from Genoa or Florence had traveled a little bit faster than the plague itself, just fast enough to frighten or alarm, but not fast enough to allow anyone to do anything. And there were many who felt that nothing should be done, in Avignon of all places. Such a visitation was manifestly the will of God, his chastisement to a worldly city, a sinful church, and a corrupt population. Some felt almost a satisfaction at the prospect of punishment, as confirmation of their condemnation; others even prayed for such an event to sweep away the foul stench of worldliness and bring men back to God and their senses. Every cataclysm is welcomed by somebody; there is always someone to rejoice at disaster and see in it the prospect of a new beginning and a better world. Equally, however much an act of God, there is always someone ready to take responsibility for any event or, failing that, to have blame thrust upon them.

As the plague first broke out in the rue des Lices in one of the poorest parts of town—a grim street of leaky hovels that the nearby monastery wished to demolish if it could evict the occupants—and the first victim was an ordinary day laborer, the arrival of the death initially passed largely unnoticed. Not until twenty were already dead did the first priest come to the scene, and it is to his credit that, though his flesh crept and he was stricken with terror, and even though he had to leave for twenty minutes to throw up in the street outside, nonetheless he returned to the bedsides of those within and did his duty. What he saw was so revolting he could not believe he was truly looking at a human being. The body was so covered with eruptions and pustules all its form had been lost, the face had disappeared, leaving only a gaping mouth streaming with pus and blood, that still managed to cry out in agony. The stench of corruption and decay was unlike anything he had ever smelled before, gripping his guts and making him retch. His name was Rufinus, and even though he was a man of no other virtue and, indeed, was generally hated in his parish for his idleness and greed, this one act should be recorded of him. It was a noble deed, and the better for being performed in abject terror rather than in tranquil confidence. For Rufinus conquered fear, and the example he set was not so often emulated in the weeks to come. Moreover, his courage would have been tarnished had it come from confidence in divine mercy, for such magnitude was denied him; within fifteen hours he felt the first hideous pain that announced imminent death to its victim. Twelve hours after that he was dead, having suffered such agonies that his final release was, at last, a true manifestation of mercy.