“I can assure you that I have done nothing to lure him,” I say. I sink my back into the mattress and press my forearm over my closed eyelids. Suddenly my mind is flooded with the sketches I discovered in Trevisan’s notebook, dozens of small renderings of my hair, my hands, my face.
“Well. Whether he is lured or not, the important thing is that the painter’s wife thinks her husband is being tempted. She has told me that much herself.”
“What?” I sit up in bed and turn to look at her incredulously. “When?”
Antonella shrugs. “We spend a lot of time together, the painter’s wife and I. And, as you have seen, she is not very good at keeping things to herself.” Antonella reaches out to finger a strand of my hair again. “She has asked me to keep an eye on you.”
Chapter 18
Over the San Pietro canal, the heavens hang low and heavy like a great blanket of grey. Winter’s chill has disappeared, replaced by an atmosphere both still and stifling. The ominous swath of sky seems to press down from above, as if the heavens themselves have announced the end of Carnevale and the ushering in of the Lenten season. It is the type of calm that spreads out languorously just before the rending of the clouds, the silence before the storm.
In the eerie stillness, all of us—the boatman, the painter, the journeyman, and myself—remain silent, too, as the gondola slices the still waters toward Church of San Vidal, where Trevisan wants us to see the work of his father. His father, he has told us, painted this same subject of the Lamentation years ago. We must make a pilgrimage to the church, Trevisan has said, in hopes that it might spark inspiration. I watch the striped façades clip by as if for the first time, reflected upside down in the mirror-like canal as slick as glass, wavering and shimmering in the wake.
Inside the passenger compartment the painter and his journeyman speak in whispered tones. Through the curtain I see Trevisan’s leather sketchbooks propped on the seat beside him. I have positioned myself outside the passenger compartment, choosing to perch on the wooden seat near the aft deck. Above my head, the new lantern, gilded with my own hands, swings gently with each push of the oar. Trevisan was thrilled with the result, he told me. It made the gondola seem complete, thanks to my contribution of this finishing touch.
The boatman presses his feet into footrests so that he can better counteract his weight against the oar. Here, on the wooden chair outside the passenger compartment, I feel that I can breathe. Over the past week my undergarments have begun to tighten across my midsection. I have stretched some of the stitching, while at the same time I have bound the swaths of linen more tightly around my middle. I feel that if I move behind the curtains of the passenger compartment, pressed with the stifling air, my nervous energy will overflow.
There is no putting it off any longer.
From deep inside the pocket of my felted wrap I pull out a small woven drawstring bag, one that carried the last of the coins my father gave me, and I have now emptied to make room for the sheaves of gold leaf I have packaged neatly in a cloth. I feel the rough weave of the bag in my palm, nearly weightless in contrast to the value inside.
I set my gaze on the boatman’s stubbled face, but it takes a few moments for him to realize that I am trying to catch his eye. When he finally looks down from the horizon to my direction, I wave my fingers slightly and cut my eyes to the bag in my fingers. He nods, a silent acknowledgment. The painter and his journeyman, who I can see from the corner of my eye, remain placid inside the passenger compartment, ignorant of the impending transaction.
I reach up and place the bag in the open tracework of the gilded lantern. It remains there for only a second. With one swift motion, the boatman snatches it from the lantern. With one foot, he slides back a board on the aft deck to reveal a small under-deck compartment. He drops the package in, then closes the compartment.
It is done.
I turn my back to the boatman and cross my arms over my chest. I return my attention to the reflections of the façades in the water. In this wordless exchange I feel as dirty as the canal waters. I wish to leave the boat and return home to wash myself.
As we turn into the wide basin of the lagoon, a soft breeze emerges from the stillness and stirs my hair. Through the haze at the horizon, the outline of the old plague island comes into view. I recognize the hazy, cragged outline of the walls on the small island they call the Lazzaretto Vecchio. The pesthouse stands on what appears from this distance to be nothing but a shifting piece of land in a vast basin of water. Narrow funnels of smoke swirl upward from the tall chimneys, dissipating and collecting with the expanse of grey sky.
In the distance, a handful of merchant ships and galleys are moored in the lagoon. It is as the carpenter has said. Our Most Excellent Prince, Doge Leonardo Loredan, has already declared a quarantena. The poor souls on those boats must remain in the lagoon, within sight of our city’s rooftops, for forty days before they are allowed to disembark. If anyone on one of the ships breaks out in black boils or evinces fever, they are transported to the lazzaretti and may never set foot in the city they can see from the decks of their ship.
I thank God that I have a place on our waterlogged land and not on a crowded merchant galley. I watch the line of sails, still against the murky sky, and I cannot imagine what it must be like to be confined to a galley for forty days, in sight of land but not able to feel it under my feet.
I feel my heart begin to pound as malaise rises up within my core. Beyond the silhouette of the islands on the horizon, I cannot turn my gaze away from the quarantine lineup of grey sails and ship hulls, a great and horrifying armada of death.
“She is a quiet girl. Guarded, you might say.”
The painter’s voice. I stop in my tracks, my hand on the door to the studio. I press my ear to the wood and the voice continues.
“It is difficult to know whether she is content to be here with us. However, she has been diligent in practicing everything I have shown her. She shows promise.”
“I assure you, Master Trevisan, that Maria possesses intelligence and a high level of skill with the gold. Her father, as you know, is one of our guild’s most esteemed gilders.” I suck in my breath. I recognize the second man’s voice, too. It is our gastaldo, the head of our guild, a lifelong friend of my father’s. “I am certain that her skill with the pigments will only be a natural outcome of her training.”
The painter’s voice again. “She is young and I believe you are right in attesting that she will be an asset wherever she settles after my contract with her father is finished.”
“She has met Pascal Grissoni.” The gastaldo’s voice again.
“Yes,” Trevisan says. “We invited him for dinner. They did not spend much time together. She was feeling ill that night.” I feel my heart begin to race.
“Good. Grissoni is one of our guild’s most promising members. He learned well under our Master Titian and has established his own workshop.”
“Perdona?” I open the door with a tentative push. The two men turn toward the door.
“There she is! Maria.” The gastaldo’s eyes light up. Aureo dalla Stava is an old man, perhaps in his fifth decade, with a swath of grey hair that frames his fleshy face. At a younger age he was no doubt strong, and he remains sturdy and broad across the shoulders. He is a kind soul who has been reelected several times because he has proven himself to do what is fair for the members of our guild. All of the painters and gilders respect him. He is diplomatic and knows all of us who work in the related trades of gilding and pigments.
“Gastaldo,” I say. “I thought I heard a familiar voice.”
He grasps my hands. “I have come on your father’s behalf.”
“You have seen him?” My heart surges.
“No,” he says. “The streets between the Misericordia Canal and Madonna dell’Orto remain blocked, I am sorry to report. But I have spoken with the neighborhood representatives.
I asked specifically about your father and your cousin.”
“And Cristiano?” I ask. The gastaldo looks momentarily confused. “Our battiloro? Did they see him?”
The gastaldo scratches his head. “I did not think to ask. But if we have not heard otherwise, Maria, then there is nothing to fear. I am in regular contact with the officials assigned to our quarter by the Sanità. Of course it is difficult for them to transact business under the circumstances, but the important thing is that they are well. Some of the convents, bakers, and market vendors are donating food.”
“But… how are they getting food into the quarter? There are barriers.”
The gastaldo nods. “Once a day the guardia allows a small barge into the rio della Sensa. They are paying a Saracen boatman from the ferry station near Rialto to deliver the supplies. They will not go hungry, I assure you.”
If the gastaldo can hear my heart leaping in my chest, he shows no sign of it. Instead, he sets his sincere blue eyes on me and grasps my hand again. “I pray your father, your cousin—and your battiloro—will keep in health until you may see them again. In the interim, I am gratified to see that you are in good hands here with Master Trevisan. It sounds as though you have a promising future ahead.”
Chapter 19
Friday evening. The vendors of the meager Lenten rations at the Rialto markets are covering their tables and turning the locks on their wooden battens. With Carnival behind us, Our Most Serene Republic has returned to grey, its façades dull in the waning light.
This time, I have not ventured into the quiet garden behind San Giovanni Elemosinario for I know that Cristiano is not there.
Instead, at the ferry station, I place a nearly weightless sheaf of gold leaf into a Saracen boatman’s hand.
Yet another sheaf of gold from the stash I have brought from my father’s house. I am loath to part with it, but if this boatman from the ferry station is successful in reaching Cristiano, then it will have been a small price to pay.
Yes, the black boatman tells me. He is the one who is being paid to bring food behind the barriers into Cannaregio. Yes, he will do his best to relay my message to the battiloro whose workbench borders the narrow canal behind my father’s house, which I describe to him in detail.
The boatman stretches out his palm to me, and I observe his muscled forearm the color of amber. An image of my Cristiano flashes in my head. I entrust my message to him and press the sheaf of gold into his palm.
The first thing I noticed about Cristiano, I think, were his forearms. At his workbench behind my father’s house, he rolled up his sleeves to reveal skin the color of oiled olive wood. Cord-like veins and muscles rippled under the surface of the flesh, like those of a cat, the result of a lifetime of hammering metal into fine sheets.
“Can I try?”
The corner of his mouth turned up then, and he said nothing, but met my gaze and placed the iron mallet in my hand. Goldbeating, I soon discovered, seemed simple until you tried to do it yourself.
Watching him work was much more satisfying. Cristiano stood at the large wooden table behind our house and turned the small ingots into flat, uniform sheets with hammering and cutting tools. From the tanneries, the battiloro told me, he procured hundreds of sheets of vellum made from ox intestines. These, too, would be cut into small sheets to place in between each square of gold leaf so thin that it could blow away in a breeze.
The more I watched, the more I asked questions, the more I realized that as different as we looked on the outside, we shared a common passion for working the gold. For Cristiano, as for me, the gold was not only the work of his hands but also the work of his heart. It needed not be expressed in words, for I understood it somewhere deep inside.
With the battiloro in our workshop, my father could turn out gilding commissions faster and could also sell sheets to his colleagues: those making jewelry, mosaics, and gilded threads for the ornamentation of ladies’ clothing and hair.
Cristiano said little at first. He was quiet, perhaps reticent and doubtful of how we might treat him. Perhaps shy. I thought he was beautiful.
Slowly, over days in the workshop and evenings around the table, we learned more about him.
“Who brought you here?” I dared to ask one evening.
He turned his dark eyes on me. “I was born here, just like you,” he said, and I felt remorse for assuming anything else. But then his face softened toward me and the words began to flow. “It was my mother who was put on a ship. I suppose that it is thanks to God that she has little memory of it. When she arrived she was first placed in the service of a family in Santa Croce, but then she went to live with old man Piasentin the banker in San Marco. His wife asked for a tiny girl as black as they could find, my mother told me.” He turned his face toward the fading light of the window. “He was my father.”
It takes me a moment for me to process the information. “Your mother’s master?” I feel my mouth form a large circle.
He nods. “It is the first time you have heard of such a thing?” he says, flashing his teeth in a fleeting smile. Again, I feel embarrassed to have asked. Of course it is the fate of most of the mixed people in Venice, those who traverse our streets with skin in every shade of boiled sugar cane.
“What happened to him?” my cousin asked.
“The old man?” Cristiano shook his head. “I never knew him. He died before I was born. In his testament he gave my mother her freedom. She always told me that she would have found a way to get out from under the old man’s wife anyway. My mother did not want me raised there, dressed up like some kind of pet and paraded around on the end of a chain for the benefit of that ugly woman’s friends.”
I feel a shiver run down my spine. “It is a blessing that the two of you were able to find your way to a new life.”
He shrugs. “A blessing and a curse, at least for my mother. It was her home for fifteen years, the only place she knew. She was free and yet we had nowhere to go. I did not realize it at the time of course, but now, looking back, I see that we had nothing.”
On subsequent evenings around the dinner table, we heard more of Cristiano’s story. We learned that he was apprenticed to the old Master Zuan the gilder when he was very small, and that he had been brought up having only seen others of his race in the trades where they were most valued, as gondoliers or house servants. At least they were not like the Jews, he said, and that he went to bed grateful that he and his mother were not locked up at night. He said he had never seen anyone else of his race placed as a battiloro. Nor had we.
Over a plate of steaming rice and peas, I learned that the battiloro may already be spoken for. The old Master Zuan had his eye on a girl for marriage, he told us, a young half-Saracen who worked as a servant to a well-known jeweler in San Marco, a girl who might even be the jeweler’s own daughter, Master Zuan suspected. The girl was still young and had not begun her menses yet, Cristiano told us, so old Master Zuan had not put the arrangement in writing before he died. My father, I am certain, would not be in a rush to arrange such a marriage, as it might mean losing the battiloro or bringing a young girl into our house, when we barely had enough to feed ourselves.
Still, even though I hardly knew the battiloro in those days, my heart already sank a little to think of him with someone else.
Signor Baldi the carpenter has delivered a raw alder wood box to Master Trevisan’s studio. It is almost exactly the same size and shape as the unusual box on Master Trevisan’s mantelpiece. “No charge, signorina,” the carpenter said, tipping his hat to me with a grin.
Running my hand over the smooth wood of the box, I consider the feast of San Giuseppe, when the whole city stops to march in celebration of fathers. Every year I make something for my own father, which is why I have asked Signor Baldi to make this box for me. I have sanded and coated the box with several layers of gesso, and am determined to make it as beautiful as the one th
at glints and reflects the fire in the hearth across the room. I am certain that Father has never seen one like it. With the fashioning of this gift, I feel the presence of my father begin to draw near. I imagine his lively brown eyes and kind smile when I finally have the chance to place the box in his hands.
Mostly, I am excited to share my newfound knowledge with my father and Paolo when I go back home. I will try to apply the alloys that the vendecolore has given me, the ones that imitate gold leaf. I smile, thinking about what my father and cousin will say about these new materials. I thrill to think that they might find delight in it, that they might praise my skill.
I feel the skin on the back of my neck tingle and I look up to find the painter staring at me in an odd way. My face warms, and I look down to make sure he does not see my flushed cheeks. From the corner of my eye, I see the painter fidget with his hands.
“You are making a box,” he says.
“It is for my father,” I say. “The vendecolore has given me some metal alloy sheets that imitate gold leaf.”
His eyebrows raise. “Ah!” he says. “Much like the blue smalto pigments we grind to imitate the more expensive lapis lazuli.” I nod, thinking of the deep blue pigments that the vendecolore showed me, made from luminous ground glass. “That is our job—is it not—to deceive the eye?” the painter says.
“My father has always said so, yes.”
The painter stands back and regards me intently, his finger poised across his lips. “Signorina Maria,” he begins. “May I ask you something?”
I nod. I hope my face has returned to its normal color.
“Your hair... It is the most remarkable shade, almost the same as your gold.” He walks over to the table where I am working. Self-consciously I run my palm over my braid and twist it around my hand like a rope. “It is not the first time someone has made that observation,” I say.
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