The Creation of Eve

by Lynn Cullen

  I was staring at the dun-colored rocks, trying not to think or feel, when I heard murmuring from the horse in front of me. Don Juan bent over the Queen as she reached Up to whisper in his ear. I saw his arms tighten around her, her closed-eyed smile. If only Tiberio and I could have had our chance together. He confessed his love for me too late, kept by pride from pursuing a woman he thought to be above him. It seems the Maestro purposely planted seeds of doubt in Tiberio’s mind about his worthiness to have me—how clever of him to Use Tiberio’s pride against himself. But cleverness is the recourse of a man bound by shame and fear to never be able to confess his love outright. No wonder Michelangelo chose to portray himself as Nicodemus. Like Nicodemus, fearful of the consequences of having an Unacceptable yearning, Michelangelo had been forced to hide his true feelings while teaching and caring for Tiberio, even giving him to complete what could have been his greatest sculpture.

  Yet even as I hated what the Maestro’s love for Tiberio did to me and our happiness, I began to pity the old man. What if Tiberio never knew Michelangelo’s great love for him, at least while Michelangelo was alive, mistaking the Maestro’s brusqueness as Unconcern, when in truth it was only roughly masked desire? How it must have tortured the Maestro to find Tiberio and me together that evening, the scene of his heartbreak lit by the candles flickering on his pressboard crown.

  “Let Us rest for a moment,” Don Juan called out.

  We stopped and went off privately to take care of our natural needs, then shared a wineskin and some cheese brought by Don Juan. No convincing was needed to return Us to our steeds. We rode on, single file, a small and weary train, Until the sun edged its silent way below the mountains to our right, leaving a pink-gold sky in its wake and burnishing everything—Francesca’s shoulders, the hills, the rocks, the brush—in gold. And then, like melancholy, a grayness felted over the golden light, Until at last all was blanketed by a velvet starlit darkness.

  Our mule stopped.

  I leaned low in the saddle, my heart thumping. Don Juan’s horse was not moving.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  Don Juan jumped down, leaving My Lady Upon the saddle. Taking the reins of his horse and our weary mule, he led Us Up off the trail, our mule braying in protest as it followed, to where Rojo sniffed at a stone hut.

  Don Juan let go of our reins and helped Francesca and me down. Then, with a sigh that could be felt more than heard, he reached Up for the Queen. She slid down into his embrace.

  They stayed like that for who knows how long, the throbbing cry of a nightjar breaking the still, cool air. He cradled her against himself, then, as if in pain, released her. Their heartbeats audible—no, perhaps it was my own—she lifted her chin. Slowly, he leaned down Until their lips met, trembling, to kiss.

  Francesca grabbed the reins of their horse, of our mule as well, then marched stolidly away. “I go to sleep,” she said gruffly.

  With a look over my shoulder—they were pressed together as one—I hurried away.

  I woke beneath an oak tree with a halberd at my throat.

  “Don’t move,” the soldier ordered me.

  Next to me, Francesca started from behind the halberd that pinned her down. “Do not hurt her!”

  “Shut Up, old woman!” the soldier barked.

  I eased back. My gaze darted wildly from the blade of the halberd shining silver in the growing light of dawn, to the red hairs in the beard of the soldier holding the halberd, to the single horse standing outside the stone hut with Don Juan’s dog, sniffing at its foreleg. Why had Rojo not barked?

  At that moment, the Queen ducked Under the rough wood door frame of the hut, her eyes flashing fire. She had on only a shawl thrown over her shift, and her cowl pulled over her head, but even in this simple garb, gone was the frivolous young girl who had come to play Queen those seven years ago.

  She angrily tugged at her shawl as behind her Don Alessandro stepped from the hut. She whirled around to face him. “I thought you were my friend!”

  “Kill him if he gives you any trouble,” Don Alessandro said over his shoulder to someone in the hut. “He is a dead man, anyway.”

  The Queen spit at Don Alessandro’s face.

  He blinked, his expression flashing from shock to rage and then, at last, to icy amusement. “You always did make bad decisions, Elisabeth. Do you think we would have gotten caught if you had chosen me?”

  “Why would I choose you?”

  “Come now, who could better help you cross the King? I was just a boy when Felipe took me from my home and made me his ward. Could he have thought of a crueler punishment for my father for starting a war? I think I might hate His Majesty just a bit more than you.”

  “I do not act out of hate!”

  “Oh. Lust, maybe?”

  She raised her hand against him. He grabbed it, then smiled. “So cold.” He took off his lynx cape and wrapped it around her shoulders. “There now. Better?”

  He ignored her look of hatred as he leaned down to pat Rojo’s back. “Oh, and My Lady, next time you decide to take a jaunt, don’t leave your gossip behind.” He shook his head at me. “She broke my concentration on my prayers at Mass.”

  A man pushed Don Juan out of the hut, his hands tied. Another man held a dagger to his neck. His left eye was swelling shut; his lips, so recently tender servants of his heart, were bloodied.

  “Elisabeth,” he said. “I am sorry.”

  And then, as a rooster called, My Lady’s face softened into something both pained and beatific, as if she had snatched a glimpse of heaven before falling to earth. Like shadows from a tree waving in the wind, across her calm features played desire and fulfillment, pain and joy, sorrow and peace; things not of this earth, yet part of the very air we breathe.

  I drew in a breath: I could see her fragile soul, trembling within her.

  A breeze picked Up, loosing a dark strand from her cowl. It flew free as My Lady herself would never be, as she lifted her chin proudly from the shimmering silver fur of the wrap. “My Lord,” she said, “I shall never be sorry.”

  ITEM: Painting is concerned with each of the ten attributes of sight, namely darkness and brightness, substance and color, form and place, remoteness and nearness, and movement and rest. With these in mind, the painter may seek to imitate nature, though she might never fully understand what she sees.

  ITEM: I grandi dolori sono muti. (Great griefs are mute.)

  —ITALIAN PROVERB

  30 APRIL 1568

  The Palace, Aranjuez

  There. I have put one more stroke on the painting. I have been working on it since I finished the portrait I had started after being placed in the King’s custody more than a year ago.

  It was that first portrait, of My Lady, that had given me courage. I was compelled to produce it, even if I’d had to scratch my vision Upon the dank, cracking walls of a dungeon. A glimpse of heaven had been etched Upon My Lady’s face as they had led her and Don Juan away that morning, and I had seen her delicate soul, yearning from within. And although the portrait that resulted had not the grandeur of a painting of Christ being taken from his Cross, or of Prometheus being chained to his rock, or the victory of Hannibal over Rome, nor a clever display of pattern, or of contrast, or even of warm color, it was honest, and true, and for that I deeply rejoice.

  Although it is odd to be rejoicing during one ’s imprisonment.

  We had been returned to the King immediately. The five of Us—Don Juan, Don Alessandro, My Lady, myself, and Francesca—stood before him in his study.

  The muffled roar of the river outside mingled with the measured taps of the King’s feet as he paced before the window. His voice was as controlled as his footsteps. “You are to act as if nothing happened. If anyone asks where you were, do not say. Invent something. And it had better be brilliant.” He turned to the Queen, all emotion chased from his face. “You may tell the condesa de Urueña and my sister that you were with me all the while. How they would love to see you fa
ll.”

  “What about the men who were with me?” asked Don Alessandro. “What do I tell them?”

  The King considered him calmly. “There is a galley ship sailing in three days from Valencia, with four new rowers.”

  Don Juan’s chest rose in a silent inhalation. My Lady lowered her face.

  “And Don Carlos?” said Don Alessandro. “He will be asking. I had a devil of a time trying to shake him before I set out. It cost me two good hoUrs—time I coUld have Used to keep these two apart.”

  The King’s wince was almost imperceptible.

  “Carlos must never know. It would break his heart.” He swung his gaze to the Queen. “He thought you were good.”

  A knock came on the door. All gazes went to it. Before we would be interrupted, I fell to my knees, my skirts spreading on the floor in a puddle of black. “Your Majesty, thank you for forgiving Us.”

  The King looked down his nose, studying me as if I were a new and possibly dangerous specimen from Peru. Into the long silence poured the sound of the river, rushing Urgently to lose itself in the sea.

  “I thought, señorita, that I knew you.”

  The knock came again. The King signaled to Don Alessandro to open the door. A guard entered and glanced at me on the floor.

  The guard straightened as if he had not seen me. “Your Majesty, the Infanta is here with her nurse.”

  “Send her in,” the King said pleasantly.

  He turned away. And for one moment, as the river roared and the wood doves called and the golden workings of the King’s German clock clicked and whirred on their endless rounds, His Majesty’s mask of cool civility dissolved into bleakest anguish.

  When he turned back to Us, his face was composed once more. “Get out. All of you. Except my wife.”

  Fifteen months have passed. As surely as a prisoner in the Inquisitor-General’s dungeon, I am held captive, though we may travel from palace to palace. My prison walls are hung with tapestries; my rack is an endless round of following My Lady from her chambers to Mass to her chambers once more; my fire is knowing that I might never leave Spain and see my family. All I have is time. A long, languidly Unwinding swath of it. Perhaps it is true; perhaps Time and the King truly are allies. Who better than he knows the quiet power it has.

  My Lady grows weaker by the day now, after giving birth seven months ago, in October, to her second child. The Infanta Catalina Micaela is a beautiful baby, though she looks not at all like her sister. She cries very little, Unlike her sister, who never holds back the smallest felt slight. It is as if she knows innately not to call too much attention to herself. The Queen’s new doctor suggested that the little Infanta was weakened at birth by the French Disease. He questioned My Lady at the delivery, asking if she herself had received the disease at her own birth, and if she had always been plagued by the fevers and sores associated with it. Incensed at such an idea, My Lady dismissed him before the day was out, but not before I heard his conjecture. That would explain the fevers, the rash, and My Lady’s growing weakness—but so does poison. Yet could something other than moonflower have caused her pupils to dilate, perhaps some other, well-meant ingredient in the King’s special elixir?

  I cannot dwell on this now. I cannot bear to think that because I judged the King wrongly and then spoke so rashly to Francesca I have ruined so many lives. Who would think that mere words could affect so many? I meant the best, and so did Francesca, who now drifts around our rooms, murmuring to herself and wringing her hands.

  “I make mistake keeping you away from the scultore,” she blurted one morning as I painted. “I make you leave fast that morning in Rome—I am afraid what people say. If he come, I want you gone.”

  “But he didn’t come, Francesca.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “Did he?”

  When she opened them, her eyes were pools of pain. “I did not want the signorina to make my mistake. I had give myself to the man I love, just like you. But he leave me, signorina, in the end he leave me, with the baby girl and no ring. He never make me a promise.”

  I stared at her, trying to digest what she was saying. “I Understand.”

  “No, signorina. You do not. My girl, they send her away from the convent when she is young. I have not see her for many years. Signorina, I do not know if she happy.” She took a shuddering breath. “A mother need to know if her child happy.”

  I took her in my arms. “Oh, Francesca.”

  “I never want you to feel this way.”

  “Shhhh,” I whispered, smoothing her hair. “La dimenticanza è il miglior rimedio dell’ingiuria.” The best remedy for an injury is to forget it.

  She pulled back, searching my face, then shook her head. “But how, signorina? How?”

  We could never have known what would happen to Don Carlos. Although we might have guessed that Don Alessandro would leak some of the details about My Lady’s unsuccessful escape from the King, and that Don Carlos, Upon hearing it, would fly into a fit, we could never have known he would swear to his father’s face—in front of a gathering of nobles in Madrid—that he would kill the King as soon as he got the chance. With the respect of his people and hence the security of his kingdoms hanging in the balance, the King acted on Christmas Eve. He entered Don Carlos’s chamber at midnight; the doors were sealed off by a team of German guards; the knife Don Carlos hid Under his pillow was pried from the Prince’s hand.

  Don Carlos now languishes in a tower of the palace in Madrid, a danger only to himself, one day imagining himself to be so hot that he begs to freeze himself on a bed of ice, another so cold that he demands to overheat his slight person with fire. His life does hang by the frailest filament of silk. Don Juan is no longer here to protect him. Soon after our capture, the King made Don Juan a knight, gave him a navy, and sent him to fight pirates off the Barbary Coast. Few return from such a mission.

  Often, my thoughts return to Tiberio and Michelangelo, to Don Juan, the Queen, and her King. Will I ever Understand the workings of the human heart? Will I ever know why we so often love those whom we cannot possess, and why we do not cherish those whose love we do possess? We are as thistledown twitching and turning in the current, captives to feelings we cannot control. How are we to Understand those persons who mean the most to Us, when we cannot truly Understand our own blind and hapless selves?

  Too late, it seems, I began to Understand Tiberio. Not long after our ill-conceived attempt at escape, the King, finding me painting on the Queen’s portrait, stopped to study my work. Alone and filled with the remorse and shame that his presence now evokes in me, I painted in silence, the hushed dab of my brush against canvas mingling with the moan of the river outside.

  I heard his pained swallow behind me. “You have captured her.”

  I turned my head, just enough.

  He held out his hand. My youthful image smiled from the miniature painting on his palm. I saw the emblem Tiberio and I had devised those years ago in Rome.

  “This was found by my agent in Tiberio Calcagni’s studio in Michelangelo’s house. It was the only item in a velvet-lined coffer, on a table next to an Unfinished statue.”

  I looked Up into his face, so calm with its mask of sosiego.

  “Take it.” He gave it to me, its smooth copper back still warm from his hand.

  And then he left, his fine kid shoes tapping quietly against the rushes.

  Now I know the power of the spoken word. Now I know how deeply it can ruin. For the consequences of my own ill-considered speech, I must make amends, and so I paint, here in my tower, with a purpose. I paint for my sisters. I paint for my Queen. I paint for all the women of the world who, burdened by caring for their families, by the expectations of others, by Unbreakable chains of love or gold, can never go in search of their dreams. How often we cautiously receive our lives, pale, Uncertain Eves, as in the Maestro’s painting. If only we can be so brave as to love and accept the fragile spirit residing within each one of Us, then, only then, we mi
ght take the gift of self-knowledge offered in its shy and trembling hands.

  I wish doctor Debruyne could see my efforts. I think of him often. He writes to me from the mountains of Peru, where he seeks precious herbs that can free man and woman from pain, from sickness, from the ebbing away of our lives with each breath that we take. I like to think he will find them, and will tell me of them someday.

  Now, here in my tower, my hands have calmed sufficiently at last. Once more I may return to my painting. Again I will lift my brush, and screwing my courage to the sticking point, peer into the mirror.

  This time, maybe this time, I will see the one inside who is me.

  Meanwhile, just the toss of an olive pit away, a man stands in another tower of the palace. As the river below his window roars on its painful journey to the sea, he tenderly shows an Unopened moonflower blossom to his darling. She touches the fragile closed trumpet, then looks Up, her chin tucked in, to see if she has done wrong. He shakes his head no and kisses her dimpled knuckle. How he does cherish her—his heart, his hope, the child Isabel Clara Eugenia.

  Author’s Note

  Sofonisba Anguissola became the governess to the two-year-old Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia and her one-year-old sister, Catalina Micaela, after Elisabeth of Valois died from a miscarriage in the fourth month of her fourth pregnancy, on October 3, 1568. In 1570, King Felipe (Philip) chose the thirty-eight-year-old Sofonisba a husband, don Fabrizio de Moncada—a Sicilian, since Sofonisba said that if she must be married, she was “inclined to marry an Italian.” She was allowed to leave Spain with her husband in the year of her marriage and was reunited with her family in Cremona. The couple traveled extensively in Italy and Spain, with Sofonisba painting at each stop, Until don Fabrizio died in 1579. Newly widowed at age forty-seven, she immediately set sail for Cremona.