The Passion of Artemisia (15 page)

Early one morning months into the work, I took Palmira with me across the Arno to Via Maggio, the street of the antiquarians which I knew she would love, and in a used-goods
shop I bought an old, square metal table mirror in a wooden stand-up frame which had a tilting mechanism. I set it on the table at home and studied my neck and my Judith's neck, Vanna's neck actually, since I had hired her to model again. Vanna's neck as I had painted it was too delicate. Judith couldn't be that feminine and lovely. I was right in telling her to skip a day, even though she had still demanded to be paid. I set to work painting over Vanna's neck my own thicker neck and the first signs of my coming double chin.

When Vanna came the following day, Pietro hadn't left yet. She took one look at the painting and shouted, “What have you done? You've ruined it. That's not me!”

“No, it's Judith. But the eyes will be yours, and the mouth and hair.”

She sniffed in a pouty way. “That neck is ugly.” With big, watery eyes and a pitiful expression, she appealed to Pietro. “Don't you think it's ugly?”

“It's David's neck,” I said before Pietro had a chance. “In the Piazza della Signoria.”

“You expect me to be proud of that? People won't know it's me with that man's neck. Pietro, how could you let her ruin me?”

Caught between us, he shrugged and lifted his hands sheepishly.

“Vanna, please, blow your nose and take your position. I only need you for a few more days.”

She thought a moment. “Double pay. I'll only stay if you give me double pay.”

We all stood looking at each other, waiting for someone else to make the first move.

“Give it to her,” Pietro muttered.

“All right, all right.” I handed her Graziela's earring. “Put this on so I can see the shadow it makes.”

I dismissed her as soon as I could, and used my own features in profile.

Painting the sheen and nap of Judith's brown velvet dress, the gold and black onyx beads sewn onto the intricate double panels of Florentine braid, Mother's bloodstone hair ornament edged in gold, the pommel of Judith's sword hilt shaped as a Gorgon's screaming head—all of it satisfied me, but when I got to Holofernes's head in Abra's basket, I had more trouble. Though I had in mind Caravaggio's Goliath, I couldn't make the greenish gray face look like anything other than Agostino's. That bothered me. I didn't want to paint out of hate. That would be cramped and mean-spirited and would limit my art and my expression forever. I worked and worried and it delayed my progress, but I could not let it go. I didn't want to be linked with Agostino's likeness forever, hanging among all those paintings created out of love.

I wrote to Graziela and told her I was paralyzed. How do I get rid of hate, I asked. I was restless until her answer came.

A burning sensation behind my eyes blurred the words. I had not realized how much I missed them.

I wrote her back right away and described Michelangelo's first
Madonna and Child
in bas relief, his thick-muscled
David
, Donatello's winsome, youthful
David
, the Duomo, Masaccio's
Adam and Eve
, Botticelli's
Venus
. I felt inadequate to put into words the adoration these works of art stirred in me. I gave up and took a walk with Palmira and drew several little drawings of what I had tried to describe and one of Palmira chasing pigeons, and tucked them into the letter.

In between times at the easel, there was always food to buy, food to cook, one meal so soon after another, dishes to wash. I never knew when Pietro would be home and when he wouldn't. After he finished the fresco repair, he moved an easel and some of his painting things out of the house, I didn't know where. “So you'll have more room,” he explained. A secret part of me withered like grapevines preparing for winter. He began to live like my father did, dressed more flamboyantly, and painted, ate, and caroused with his friends elsewhere than at home, missing the joy of Palmira's growing up. I remembered Father singing with Agostino or
Caravaggio in the street as they staggered home near dawn all cock-a-hoop about what big things they'd been doing and what great painters they were, and Father banging his way through the rooms, knocking over a chair and falling, stinking, onto his bed. Was this to be my future?

The winter was particularly cold; it even snowed. Our well water froze and some mornings we had to strike it with an iron rod to break up the ice. Palmira had a fever, chills, and cough, and I was terrified. I stopped painting while she lay sick for a month. At first she cried a lot, choking on her sobs, and then she grew too weak for that. The thought of losing her haunted me day and night. Pietro stayed home more often to crack the ice and haul up water for me to dampen rags to cool her fever. He made endless, worried trips to the apothecary, and tended the fire while Palmira's wracking cough held me to her bedside. One night Pietro paced the room, picking up objects, setting them down, not knowing what to do.

“Sit here with us,” I said. He hesitated. “It might help.”

He brought over another straight-back chair with straw seat, sat down, and put his hand on the quilt over Palmira's leg.

“I remember once when I was sick as a little girl. I drifted in and out of sleep, and heard the soft murmurs of my parents' voices floating in a fog. I didn't know what they were saying, but it didn't matter. The blending of their voices sounded natural and loving and it comforted me.”

A lock of Palmira's hair was plastered to her temple and lay near her eye. Pietro lifted it away and stroked her leg, awkwardly at first, and then laid his head on her bed. It was the tenderest gesture I had ever seen him make.

“Say something, so she can hear your voice too.”

He turned his head sideways on the bed. Inadequacy flooded his eyes. “Palmira, your papa's here,” he said. “You're going to be all right.” I nodded encouragement. “I love you, little dove.”

My heart swelled as if he'd said the words to me, and I returned the feeling, my offered cup of love full and running over. Wanting to make the moment last, I combed my fingers through his hair, which always soothed him. His eyes closed. When his breathing became deep and rhythmic, I leaned down next to him and laid my head on his shoulder and pulled my shawl up around us both.

We must have slept there awhile, a family, as close as on the day Palmira was baptized. When she stirred, we both woke up, and the stiffness in our necks and backs was nothing compared to the stiffness aching between us once again. Pietro looked at me with his dark, secretive eyes, astonished at his own affection. I kissed him just below his temple. One side of his mouth smiled in a soft, bewildered way.

Palmira's sickness finally let up in the spring, and Pietro was gone more often again. I didn't know where. I didn't dare ask. A new heartsickness welled up in me. I was a month behind in painting and still had Holofernes's face to do. Paint hard, I told myself.

But I didn't. Palmira was all the more precious to me because of the threat of losing her, so I spent more time with her. I felt unutterable comfort in her small, smooth hand in mine as we walked along the river. “Look, Palmira. Look at the light on the water. See how it dances? It's not just green. It's blue and brown and gray. Look at the colors move.”

“I can't see it.”

“Stand still and you will. Just look at one place.”

But she couldn't stand still in her joy to be outdoors.

Across the river stood a three-arched crenellated tower. I made up stories about a princess imprisoned there whose sad lover was turned into a long-necked white bird that lived along the grassy bank below her tower, devoted still in his love to her. In summer when the water was shallow, we held
hands and waded out on the diagonal dam. She loved to feel the cool water rippling across her ankles and to play at fishing with a reed.

I told her about Graziela and Paola in the convent on a Roman hill. In an open market I bought two wooden bowls and rigged them with twigs and paper sails. We fashioned dolls out of paper which Palmira colored black with a piece of charcoal from the fire, except for their faces and hands. She named them Sister Graziela and Sister Paola. I taught her the letters of their names and she wrote them on the backs. She would not say their names without the “Sister” first, as if they were titled ladies. I tied strings to the bowls and we floated them in the water and watched the nuns bounce and slide downriver as we walked along the bank, supremely happy in our play. Watching her tug Graziela's string, I realized that because Palmira got well, Graziela's words were true. I had not been separated from the love of God.

Only a couple of weeks before the painting was due, without even thinking, I widened Holofernes's face and lengthened his nose. He became an Assyrian, and only an Assyrian. I took the greenish tinge out of his face so that it looked like smooth gray stone, or metal, the same color as the screaming head on the sword hilt, suggesting that's what he had been doing a moment earlier, though now he was peaceful. I let him rest in peace.