‘I was.’
‘You took my place?’
‘He was as a father to me. He asked me to tell you that he had never loved anyone as he had loved you. When I had finished the Psalms he asked me to stop speaking so that he could imagine you by his side, holding him, telling him that all would be well. Even if you were not there, he died by your side.’
Sofia nodded, as if oddly satisfied. ‘I would like to lie down now. I will let the darkness fall. Then I will light the candles to welcome the Sabbath.’
She stood up. ‘Visit me again. Tell me old tales. But do not fear. This is the world. I will not anguish about its ways.’
Paolo stepped back. ‘You have shown me the beginning of mourning. You have taught me how love can outlast death.’
Sofia looked out from the gloom. ‘It is only the beginning. This world passes. But my husband would have been glad to know you. I am happy that you were with him. This is my comfort in my affliction …’
Paolo reached out and she took his hand, clenching it in hers, so tightly that even in the gathering darkness he could see the veins rise.
‘Go now,’ she said. ‘Travel well. And trust in love.’
Paolo took a boat across the lagoon and felt the rhythm of the water beneath him once more. Soon his sandolo passed the scattered shipyards of the Arsenale.
The frigates, galleys, and brigantines lay stilled in the docks. Paolo remembered the last time he had set out: a confusion of masts, cables, sails, anchors, rudders, and oars; the striking of iron, the heaving of ropes, and the dragging away as the sails were hoisted above him.
Again he thought of Aisha. Perhaps it was absurd to live so extensively in the past, to let the thoughts circle, but such was the strength of desire. Once more he remembered her eyes half closing as she kissed him, the way her breathing changed, the moistness on the upper rim of her lips.
The boat now began to head out towards Murano. He tried to anticipate the joy of his return, to make the memories disappear but they crowded in: the curve of Aisha’s back, the splay of her chest, the sudden and desperate feel of her arms pulling him in, and then the rounding, surging, sheer pulse of living. It would never leave him, he thought, and there would never be such intensity again – the undulations of touch, and smell, of taste, and sight, and sound.
He thought of her caress, in the half-waking, half-sleeping darkness, the great joy of life defining hereness and the knowledge that it was the only thing that mattered; that this was all he wanted: closeness, safety, the utter feeling of belonging. It is for this, he thought, for love, that people hope and dream, risk their lives and die.
As he returned to his parents, he wondered how they could ever know what he had seen and done. He tried to imagine what his mother would be doing: gathering wood, preparing food, or sewing, outside, in the street.
Seeing the details of the buildings in the distance, the clarity of the light on the water, and the crowds of people made him anxious. He was frightened by a swift starting up in front of him, saddened by the age lining the face of a beggar, and surprised by a blind man coming round a corner. Everything appeared equally important: the distant chimneys, the stone palazzi, the wooden bridges. He no longer looked through an early-morning mist. The veil of the city had been lifted and here it stood, louder, clearer, brighter than he had ever remembered.
Paolo walked slowly past the boatyard, taking in the colours of the stone, the hard reflections on the water. He turned into the street of furnaces. Everything was so clear that he did not know if he could continue. His head hurt; his eyes felt heavy, tired by the weight of looking. Then he saw the balcony of his home, jutting out above the street, and the light of the flames within.
He stood in the doorway and watched. The stizzador was stoking the furnace. In the distance his father was blowing glass, twisting it at the end of a rod. Now that Paolo saw Marco clearly he was no longer as large and as swarthy as he had been in his imagination, but older, sadder, and more tired.
The man looked up briefly and then returned to his work.
‘Father,’ said Paolo.
Marco looked up again and squinted. His shoulders were hunched in defeat and the smoke on his besmirched face looked more like carelessness than defiance.
‘Father.’
‘Paolo? Is it you?’
‘It is.’
‘Teresa,’ Marco called, putting down his blowpipe as if he had been declared guilty of crime. ‘Come down.’
‘Not now,’ she called.
‘Now.’
Paolo could hear his mother on the stairs. He saw her feet, then her skirts.
‘What is it?’ Teresa called.
As soon as he heard her voice Paolo felt his childhood return.
Teresa stopped at the foot of the stairs, irritated to be interrupted. She looked at her husband and brushed the flour from her hands.
‘See,’ Marco announced.
Paolo noticed the sweep of hair across Teresa’s forehead and the pale blue of her eyes. Even at a distance he could tell the sadness.
‘Mother.’
She walked slowly towards him, stretched out her right arm, and touched his cheek. ‘Is it you?’ She took a step back, as if checking every part of him.
‘Yes.’
‘And you are alive?’
‘I am. This is no dream.’
Teresa threw herself around him. She embraced him so fiercely that Paolo wanted to push her away but his mother held on tightly, speaking fast and low, telling him how she had longed for this day, that she had never thought it possible that he would ever return, that she had feared for him, daily and nightly. She had dreamed of storms and tempests, starvation and drought, war and famine, imagining his death, attending his funeral. She had filled her life with fear and had found no rest. All had been anxiety and suffering for she was nothing without his love; nothing without the knowledge of his safety. Life without him had no meaning; it was like a cold furnace that could never be re-ignited.
‘I am home now,’ Paolo said simply.
‘Never leave me again.’
Teresa looked at him once more, and touched his spectacles. ‘What are these? Do they make you see?’
He looked at the wrinkles on her forehead. ‘They do.’
Teresa stood back, touching a wisp of her hair, oddly embarrassed. ‘Now you can tell how old I am.’
‘You are still my mother.’
Teresa paused, struck by the memory of his first discovery: the boy in the water. ‘I am, I am.’
She kissed Paolo’s cheeks, his forehead, and then his lips.
Now Marco spoke. ‘You have changed, Paolo. You are a man.’
‘I do not know what I am, but I know that I am not the same.’
‘And you can see?’
‘Clearly.’
Marco stretched out his hand. ‘Can I look?’
Paolo took off his glasses and handed them to his father. The world softened once more. The glass-workers moved as shadows in the darkness, lit only by the light of the furnace.
This was how he remembered it all.
He looked back at his parents, standing side by side, examining his spectacles.
‘I never thought you would return. Never,’ said Teresa. ‘But I always hoped, and I prayed. Now such prayers have been answered.’
‘And you can see through these?’ asked Marco.
‘I can.’
‘But the world turns. It is like being underwater. Is this how you saw before you had them?’
‘I do not know.’
Marco handed the glasses to his wife. ‘Look.’
Teresa looked through the lenses at her son.
She could see several faces, all smiling at her. ‘Paolo.’
She clasped him to her once more. ‘Now I am happy. Now I can die.’
‘Do not say that.’
‘It’s true. All that I have hoped for has come to pass.’
That night, as Teresa prepared their evening meal, Paolo
found that his glasses steamed up in the heat. He had to keep taking them off and polishing them clear with his shirt. Each time he did so, Marco slapped him on the back and laughed, miming the way Paolo blinked in order to see.
‘Like an owl,’ said Marco, pretending to be a bird.
‘Don’t tease him,’ said Teresa as she washed the clams for their fettuccine.
‘Why not? I am happy. For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’
When they began their meal, Paolo stopped for a moment, as if trying to remember where he was. He looked down at the antipasti set out before him: pomodori coi gamberetti, insalata di mare, trota marinata all’arancio. This was home. What it was to see once more a basket of lemons or a plate of olives, the simple pleasures of the life he had left behind.
‘Tell us,’ said Teresa, ‘tell us of your adventures.’
But how could he tell? Where to begin? Should he start with life in Simone’s workshop and the search for colour? Or should he begin with what he had learned? When should he tell them about Aisha, Chen, or his new-found sight?
‘I have seen the driest deserts and the highest mountains. I have seen distances so great that I have thought the world must have no end. I have seen the most precious stones, the darkest waters, and the clearest skies. I think I have known love and seen death.’
‘Tell us,’ said Marco.
‘There is so much.’
‘We have time,’ said Teresa, taking his plate.
But Paolo spoke as if there was no time; and the more he said, the less they appeared to believe him. He spoke too fast, desperate to explain everything he had experienced; and his parents would tell him to slow down, eat his fettuccine and drink the wine from Verona. He did not need to say everything at once.
Perhaps they thought he was mad.
And yet this is also what happened outside, in the streets. Paolo wanted to speak as if he had been silent for years, but the people to whom he spoke could not comprehend the vitality of his experience or the power of his memory. He could not understand why people first longed to hear the excitement of a traveller’s tale but then so quickly lost interest; as if they were so content with their own lives that they could not contemplate the threat of adventure. How slow people seemed, how little they had changed. In only two years his friends had been apprenticed, found their trade, married. They thought that they had grown and developed beyond recognition; but they had not altered as Paolo had done. Nor could they see it. They only remembered him as he had been before.
The less they listened, the more Paolo wanted to set forth once more, to live only as a traveller. The skills and the knowledge he had acquired were not applicable; the wisdom he had gained appeared irrelevant. Everything he had done, every risk he had taken, trade he had made, sight he had seen, or conversation he had undertaken carried no meaning. People listened to him as an exotic but distant traveller who could entertain but who had no value or importance.
He was a stranger, and he knew that he could feel more at ease in Constantinople, Herat, or Badakhshan – anywhere other than here.
‘You are restless,’ Teresa observed at last.
‘Everywhere I go I feel I must leave,’ Paolo replied. ‘I can never stay still. And I must return to the painter in Siena.’
‘Why must you go?’
‘Because I have made a promise.’
‘When will you leave?’
‘In the next few days.’
‘And you have nothing more to tell me?’ Teresa smiled.
Paolo realised that she had guessed. ‘How do you know?’
‘I think I am your mother.’
Paolo was so used to being defensive that he could not think how to tell his story. How would Teresa ever understand? And yet if she could not, then how could anyone?
And so he told her how he had found a love which he refused to forget; a love which gave his life its only meaning.
‘And you will return to her?’
‘I must. Although I know that I should say I am happier with you.’
‘It is not a choice between us. I am older. And I have seen you again.’
‘You would let me go back?’
‘If I knew that you could be happy. And God meant it to be.’
He looked at his mother and then felt, for the first time, the cost of her love and the price she had paid. Perhaps he had been able to leave in the past because he had never been able to look closely into her eyes as a child, or see her clearly. But now, with age and spectacles, Paolo recognised how vulnerable Teresa had become, and that he loved her more than he had ever done before. He wondered if perhaps Aisha had taught him this – to love his own mother. ‘I do not want to upset you.’
‘Perhaps you hurt me by staying, denying your own happiness.’
‘I do not know that I would be happy. But I know that I will have no rest until I see Aisha again and learn what this love has meant.’
‘Then you need only my blessing.’
‘And I have that?’
‘Always.’
SIENA
Paolo had become so familiar with travel, arrival, and departure that his life still possessed the quality of dream. He took a horse and rode south through Padua, Ferrara, and Bologna, and over the foothills of the Apennines. The farmers had begun to cut away at the wheat and the barley as women looked to gather the second crops of olive and lemon. Grapes lay fermenting on the rooftops throughout the route south and he was offered wine wherever he travelled: Moscadello, Vernaccia, and Vin Santo poured from barrels of Slavonian oak. Vintners told him that there was nothing finer than the sangiovese grape; held up to the light, in a fine glass, the colour was richer than rubies. Paolo studied the blood-red liquid, drank, and rode on, looking out over long vistas of hill, farm, vineyard, and settlement. The land was more fertile than any he had known, replete with olives, vines, and cypress trees.
He was proud of the sheer fecundity of the countryside, far from the arid heat of the desert or the endless expanse of the ocean. He savoured the air and the breeze as he rode, the scent of wild garlic, myrtle, and lavender; and he loved the way in which the spread of the pine trees echoed the contours of the hills above them. Each time he stopped to rest he would examine the faded silver of their bark, yearning for light. Under the topmost canopy of sharp green leaves, the branches thinned into a filigree of lace, supporting each cluster of cone, arching away like all the generations of the world.
He rode through valleys and vineyards, crossing the River Arno to the east of Florence until at last he could see the city of Siena clearly in the distance, rising on the hillside as if it were a part of the landscape. Paolo felt strangely at ease, benevolent on seeing such a home once more, as if no danger could touch him.
He could see the cathedral and the tower of the Palazzo Pubblico standing proud against the skyline and remembered the great Campo, its slope and rise, the horses tethered by the market stalls, the hammering of blacksmiths, the shouts of children, and the mountebanks hawking miraculous cures. He stooped to take water from a well and began to think what the city had meant to him in the past: its strength and elegance, its trade, its people, and its faith. He remembered the gold altarpiece dedicated to the Virgin in the cathedral and the sad-eyed devotions of widows praying in the candlelight, their gnarled hands clasped together as tightly as those of children trapping butterflies.
He remembered the pride of young men parading through the city, hoisting the flags of each district and throwing them into the air on the feast of the Assumption, the cloth unfurling against a clear blue sky to the sound of the drums below.
In the evening light Paolo could see women calling to their children from high windows as the swifts circled over the Campo. He knew this place: the resolution of its stone, the smell of earth and paint, wood smoke from the blacksmith’s forge, sweat on the horses, the crowded streets emptying as night fell.
And then, as he approached the workshop, he remembered the ab
surdity of Simone’s velvet doublets and the way he would scent himself with rosewater against the stench of the streets, his head held proudly high; and he recalled how easy it had been to forgive such vanity because of Simone’s zest for life, his sudden smile, and the upturned corners of his mouth before he laughed. Now, with his spectacles, he would be able to see that smile dawn.
As he neared the narrow courtyard of the workshop, Paolo realised that if there was one person he had looked forward to seeing again it was Simone. The painter would be pleased, proud even, without ever knowing what such a journey had meant.
Paolo stopped and breathed out slowly, savouring the moment, wanting this sense of achievement to last, journey’s end. He realised that he was happy, here, now, in this city, carrying the lapis lazuli to his friend.
Now he could see the panels of poplar stacked under the eaves, the sacks of lime, the barrows, buckets, and bottles, work in progress.
He thought he could hear a voice calling for pigment, and woke from his reverie, frightened that he might be discovered waiting, as if he had done something wrong. He unlatched the door and pushed it open to reveal his former world, a workshop of paint and gold.
To his right he could see Simone hunched over a series of small bowls, inspecting their contents, examining each grain. ‘What a fine vermilion,’ he cried.
Paolo saw that Simone’s hair had grown almost ridiculously long, that there was a splash of pigment on his right cheek, terre-verte perhaps, and that his hands were more delicate than he had remembered.
He watched and waited. Then one of the apprentices cried out.
‘Paolo.’
At last Simone looked up. Distracted from his concentration, he was almost annoyed, as if, for a moment, he had entirely forgotten his former pupil. Paolo put down his bag and opened his arms. Simone rose from his chair without a word, and walked across the room to embrace him.
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