The Passion of Artemisia (3 page)

I didn't want to be there when he came back. I put on my short gray cape and, as I left, I pulled the hood over my head even though the heat shimmered up from the ground ahead of me. On the way down Via del Babuino to Piazza di Spagna, I kept my head down so our apothecary might not recognize me from the door of his shop. Going up the Pincian hill, I straddled the ruts and avoided loose stones as I made a wide arc around the shiftless men who always lounged on this steep course between city and church. They'd be the first to shout some epithet at me. Toward the top of the hill, I climbed more slowly, up to the twin bell towers of Santa Trinità dei Monti. Breathing heavily, I turned at the church and went up the long stairway next to it, which led to the convent. I pulled the bell rope.

I knew Sister Paola would come to the door. As one of the few Italian nuns in this French convent, it was her job to answer the bell, to sell the medicinal herbs the nuns cultivated, and to communicate with the outside world.

“Ooh, Artemisia! So good to see you.” Her smile always reminded me of Cupid's mischievous grin in paintings of
classical subjects, but now her face was drawn into worry lines.

“Have you been well?” I asked.

She opened the creaking wooden door to let me into the small anteroom. “As well as God wishes, which is good enough for me.” Her voice rose and fell like birdsong. An otherworldliness hung in the air of the convent. I felt myself breathe more easily.

“And the garden? How is it doing?”

“It's glorious this summer. Come and look. Sister Margherita's rosemary and chamomile are in bloom, and my San Giovanni's wort is just about to bud. Sister Graziela's oregano is thick on the stalks and stretching up to God.”

Walking behind Paola through the straw scattered on the flinty stone floor of the cloisters, I noticed her shoes worn down at the heels. A sadness outside my own difficulties made me feel ashamed. Papa should have paid the convent more while I lived here those few years after Mama died.

“We even have lavender hanging to dry in the kitchen. It smells like Heaven itself.”

We crossed the rose-colored stucco cloister and went through a corridor to the garden in back. Rows of herbs were in their leafy prime. A nun I didn't know was pinching off blossoms.

“It looks beautiful. Santa Maria must have smiled on it,” I said.

“And it's making a little money for the convent too,” Sister Paola added impishly, raising her shoulders and eyebrows and plump cheeks all at once.

“Beware of such dangerous forays into worldly enterprises,” I said, putting on a stern look.

She giggled. “Oh, I give away the medicinal herbs to people even if they can't pay. True recompense is from the
Lord.” She smiled sweetly. “Do you want to see Sister Graziela now? We must go to vespers soon.”

We went back inside. I knew how to find Sister Graziela in the workroom, but I let Sister Paola lead me there.

“Have you given up on me yet?” I asked.

“Certainly not,” she said with exaggerated forcefulness. “We believe in miracles here. Someday I'll come to the door and there you will be, saying, ‘I am ready now.' And I'll take you in to our holy sisterhood, and we'll all send up a
grazie a Dio
.”

It might be easy coming here forever, slipping out of the world unnoticed, letting the trial go on without me, never having to face that beast of a judge, that sneering notary who pretended he was just doing his job, never having to fear encountering Tuzia or Agostino on the street. And Papa—I'd make him miss me.

Sister Graziela was alone, sitting on a tall stool by the narrow window where a shaft of pale honey-colored light shone on her cheeks and the tip of her pointed nose. Dust motes floated around her in a golden swirl. Her black habit and white cowl framed her unlined, oval face, which glowed with contentment and absorption. Her downward gaze was fixed on painting the border of a page. She reminded me of Mary in Michelangelo's marble
Pietà
in St. Peter's. Like Mary, she was lost in peaceful thought, and, like Mary, she was beautiful to me.

She had placed the oyster shells I had given her years ago along the edge of her worktable. Each shell held pigments of the most glorious, pure, saturated colors—dark red madder, bright vermilion, the deep ultramarine blue of crushed lapis lazuli, the yellow of saffron, and a green as bright as spring parsley. It made me happy that she still used them.

She looked up. “Artemisia! Bless you for coming. I've longed to see you.”

She motioned for me to bring over a low stool. She was
illuminating a page with delicate vines and tendrils tied in intricate, loose knots and studded with bright red blossoms.

I could do that, sitting here with Graziela. If I lived here forever, I could do whole books. The convent would become famous for its illuminated manuscripts.

“It's lovely. I like the yellow bird.”

“It's a Psalter for Cardinal Bellarmino, that hammer of the heretics who crushes anyone with an idea of his own. People don't make these books by hand much anymore, but this is a gift from the convent. We're hoping he'll take a moment from his Holy Inquisitions to pay attention to our request for roof repair. For years we've had buckets in our upstairs cells to catch the rain.”

She waited for Sister Paola to leave. “I get so little done every day, just the smallest section.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Always, it seems, it's time to go to Office just when I get absorbed in the work. Sometimes from one week to the next, it seems I've done nothing.”

“I have something to tell you.”

She laid down the tiniest brush I had ever seen and placed her hand gently on my arm. “We have known it.”

“The trial?”

“Even though we're cloistered, the convent walls would have to be thick indeed for such a tale not to find its way in. We have been greatly grieved.”

“You know everything?”

“We know more than we need to. Are you all right?”

I brought my hands out from under the cape. They were still swollen and oozing under the stained bandages.

She gasped. “Poor lamb. Where was your father when this happened?”

“He let them. He said it would prove my innocence if I kept to my testimony while the cords were on. I don't know which was worse, my hands or . . . today. Today they had two midwives examine me, you know where, with a notary
watching. I know people could see through the curtain. They wanted to show me lying that way.”

“Dio ti salvi.”
She held me and I laid my head on her lap. “It's just another way to break any woman who accuses a man. They are without conscience.”

“They're beasts, all of them,” I wailed into her habit.

“They may be, but they cannot destroy you.” She cradled me, stroking the back of my head and my hair, letting me cry.

“My own papa let them.”

“Cara mia,”
she crooned. “Fathers aren't always fatherly. They may try, but many fail. They're only mortal.”

I turned my head to one side, and saw that my dress was smeared with the midwives' grease. I pulled it away from Graziela's black wool and noticed her shoes were as worn as Paola's.

“There is no way in to the fortress of the soul,” she murmured. “Our Heavenly Father is the guard thereof. He does not betray us. Remember that, Artemisia. Though they might make you a victim, they cannot make you a sinner.”

I could only sob.

“Paint it out of you,
carissima
. Paint out the pain until there's none left. Don't take on shame from their mockery. That's what they want. They want you to shrivel up and die, and you know why?”

I shook my head in her lap.

“Because your talent is a threat. Promise me—don't pray as a penitent when you have no need to be one. Don't plead. Approach the Lord with dignity, and affirm His goodness. No matter what.”

“He abandoned me.”

“Then love Him all the more. That will please Him most.”

“But everybody thinks—”

“Don't care a fig for what they think. The world is larger than Rome, Artemisia. Remember that. Think of your
Susanna and the Elders
. When that painting becomes famous, the whole world will know your innocence.”

“How?”

“Because in that painting you showed her intimidation at the lewd looks of those two men, her vulnerability and fear. It shows you understood her struggle against forces beyond her control. Beyond her control, Artemisia.”

“You remember all that?”

“I'll never forget it. Her face averted and her arms raised, fending off their menace? The night after you brought it here, her face was blazing in my dreams. By the way you had her turn from that leering elder shushing her so she wouldn't cry out and reveal them, I knew then that you were being threatened.”

“I painted that before it happened.”

“Yes, but I could tell you were suffering some menace just as Susanna was. That's the brilliance of your skill, to have a masterpiece reflect your own feelings and experience.”

“I can't even hold a brush now.”

“You will. Nothing can stop you from bringing your talent to fruition. You are young yet. Never forget that the world needs to know what you have to show them.”

“The world. What does the world care? The world is full of cruelty.” I touched the rough edge of one of the oyster shells. “If I stayed in here with you, the world wouldn't matter.”

“Artemisia.” The word rang with a tone of authority. “One doesn't live a cloistered life to get away from something. One lives here to serve God because one feels an undeniable voice calling. Any other reason is illegitimate.”

“I might discover a calling.”

“You already have. Your art.”

The bell rang for vespers, which meant I had to go.

She walked me out through the cloister, stopped at the
well in the center, and spoke softly. “You do not want to live where all you ever see is the same nine arches in each arcade, the same few frescoes, the same scraggly pear tree, the same crucifix every day for the rest of your life.” She walked toward the tree and twisted a yellow-green pear until it came loose in her hand. “Here. Remember what I said as you eat it. You have your calling already. Don't pray as a penitent over someone else's sin. See yourself as God made you.”

“Have you ever felt abandoned by God?”

Her chin pulled back a little, the only hint of her surprise. A disturbance passed over her face that I had never seen before.

“By God and man.”

Outside the convent at the top of the stairs, I stopped to feel the wind in my face. There was something light and purifying about being up this high. After a few moments I heard the sisters singing the Magnificat which I loved. “My soul doth magnify the Lord.” Sister Paola had taught me what the Latin words meant when I'd had my first lady's blood.

Before that, when Mother had told me I would bleed periodically, I thought she meant it would be God punishing me for pushing her away after I'd seen her in bed that way with Papa. Later, in the convent when my first blood came, I was sure it was God reprimanding me for my unforgiving nature. I prayed to Our Lady to forgive me for treating her that way. The blood still came, gushing like the Red Sea. I ran to Sister Paola thinking that I was dying, and told her everything. She said the blood was part of blessed womanhood just like forgiveness was, and that I didn't need to be afraid. She told me how the angel came to Mary and said, “Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found favor with God.” Sister Paola said I had found favor too, because I was
contrite, and then she taught me the Magnificat. Repeating the words to remember them, I had felt them all the way down to where the blood flowed. My soul doth magnify the Lord, just like Mary's soul. My soul, even my little soul, makes the Lord more magnificent by something I had to offer. Maybe that's what Graziela meant today by my calling.

This late in the day the
ponentino
cooled the leaden air and ruffled my hair, and I imagined it coming all the way from Spain, skimming across the Mediterranean and up the valley of the Tiber to bless me here, high above the city's pulsing heat. Here the coarseness of the city couldn't crush me. From the piazza at the base of the hill, streets spread out in three directions. The Via dei Condotti stretched straight ahead, lined with four-story buildings of pale peach and Roman ochre. Farther away the street did get narrower and the buildings shorter, just like Agostino had said they would when he taught me perspective, until street and buildings all came together at a vanishing point far away.