by Matt Rees
Caravaggio had painted the saint in the moment before he raised his head to see the darkness lift. It had been so for me, he thought. These paintings were the extended hand of Christ to his art, calling him on to his vocation. He was still following it, wondering where it would lead – just as Matthew wasn’t saved when Christ called him; the saint had to wait years, work hard at his faith and keep the light in his sight. Until his martyrdom.
‘The darkness, Maestro Caravaggio. Yes, the darkness.’
He felt Scipione close, the cardinal’s breath on his cheek. It was sweet, like a woman’s.
‘We’re accustomed to biblical scenes with a delightful Tuscan landscape in the background,’ Scipione went on. ‘Yet when I saw your Matthew, enclosed in a basement room, I was unable to escape from the spiritual intensity of the moment. My eye had no opportunity to wander away from it into the accompanying scenery.’
Caravaggio inclined his head to show himself gratified. The slash in his hose caught his eye again. To whom do I owe?
‘May one find spiritual intensity in any subject?’ Scipione said.
‘It depends on one’s spirit, Your Illustriousness.’
‘Quite. Well, I’m sure you’ll find whatever there is to be uncovered in his face.’
To whom do I owe? Caravaggio looked up at Scipione. ‘His face? I beg your pardon, Your Illustriousness?’
‘I’m commissioning you to do something to fill the nice gilded frame that, I notice, made you frown even at mention of it.’
His face? ‘A portrait?’ Caravaggio cocked his head as though framing the cardinal’s features.
Scipione declined his chin. ‘Not me, Maestro Caravaggio. Since my uncle was elected to wear the Fisherman’s Ring and called me to Rome, I’ve had too much other business to which I must attend.’
‘Naturally.’
‘One such matter is to record the Holy Father’s features at the moment of his elevation.’
‘You want me to paint—?’
‘Do it at the Quirinale Palace. You may bring your materials when you wish, but you shall begin the sittings on Sunday afternoon.’
Caravaggio went onto his knee and took Scipione’s hand. With his face pressed to the man’s knuckles, he directed a speculative glance at del Monte. His old patron pursed his lips. He would know how much this meant. After years in which Caravaggio was shut out of papal commissions by more conventional artists, he had arrived at the peak of prestige and of financial reward. He had impressed the chief connoisseur of a new administration at the Vatican. He would paint Camillo Borghese, Pope Paul V, and it would be a signal to every church and cardinal, every charitable fraternity and nobleman, that Caravaggio was the greatest of all artists in the Christian world.
In the corridor, the servant girl’s wax brush rasped on the terracotta.
Caravaggio went along the Corso through the crowds of servant girls and gentlemen on their early evening promenade. The thrill of his meeting with the Cardinal-Nephew remained with him. He was to be face to face with the Pope. Could his work still be true? Would he be tempted to disguise some flaw in the skin, to make a grasping, avaricious eye seem benign and beatific? He stepped out of the path of a carriage that rattled close to his foot and stumbled against a pig in the gutter.
Work would take his mind off success and its possible corruption. He headed for the Tavern of the Moor to hire a model. He required a sister for the Magdalene he had painted back at his studio. The whores might be fortifying themselves with wine before the night’s carnal undertakings. He would find the face of the saint among them.
A single lamp dangled from a beam by the bar of the tavern. Illshaven, hostile, silent faces flickered out of the gloom. He had the impression of entering the sickroom of a much disliked relative. At each table hands withdrew beneath the board, ready to reach for weapons, everyone gauging the newcomer. By the door, a man snored with his head beside a flagon of wine, hair dusted white from a day in some stonemason’s workshop. The waiter passed with a plate of fried artichokes. ‘All’s well, Signore?’
‘Is Menica here, Pietro?’
The waiter set down the plate. A man in a broad-brimmed hat reached his thick, dirty hands for the artichokes, pulled away the ears, and rubbed them in the olive oil on the plate. He curled an arm around his dish, as though he expected someone to grab it from him.
‘Menica? Horny so early, Signore?’ the waiter said. ‘Wouldn’t you like to dine first? We’ve some nice ricotta and some boiled meat. It’ll set you up for your evening’s sport.’
A contemptuous snicker rolled from the artichoke eater. Pleased with himself, the waiter smirked into the dark where the man sat.
Caravaggio stepped close to him.
Pietro met his eye and the smugness was gone. ‘Just a joke, Signore. I know you well and I wouldn’t take you lightly.’
The door opened. It slammed into the table where the mason slept. He raised his head in shock, disturbing the dust on his scalp into a thin white cloud. Two men entered, supporting each other as though they were already drunk. The taller one wore a black doublet with sleeves striped scarlet and turquoise. He held a clay bottle and fed it to his companion. ‘Michele, where’ve you been, cazzo?’
Onorio Longhi wrapped his arm around Caravaggio’s neck. He was pale and freckled with a red-blond strip of beard in the centre of his chin. His hair lapped over his brows into deep, shadowed eye sockets. Even when he was cheerful, Onorio’s glance was a threat, and he knew it too. He took pleasure in the anxiety he created. He pulled Caravaggio close and kissed him on top of his head. ‘Mario whipped that big dickhead Ranuccio at the tennis court. Didn’t you, Maestro Minniti, my little Sicilian bugger?’
The man beneath Onorio’s other arm embraced Caravaggio, laughing. Small and slight, he retained the confident air and the wry lip Caravaggio had painted onto his likeness six years ago when he portrayed him as the dupe of a gypsy fortune-teller. He wore the same doublet of mustard velvet in which he had posed, though it was now patched at the elbows, stained with oil paint and wine sauce. Caravaggio rubbed Mario’s black hair.
‘I had Ranuccio running around like a greased pig with its bowels full of beans,’ Mario said.
Ah, Ranuccio. It came to him now. The money he had lost at tennis the previous day. A bad man for a debt.
The waiter went into the dark. Caravaggio knew there would be no work tonight, now that he had run into Onorio. He called after the waiter. ‘Pietro, bring me that ricotta, after all.’
They went to a table near the kitchen. Caravaggio would have taken the bench against the wall, but Onorio slid in there with his eye on the door, wary even in his wild state.
Caravaggio settled for the stool most in shadow. ‘I was looking for Menica,’ he said.
‘Saw her just now,’ Onorio said. ‘With Gaspare, the little poet. Your biggest fan.’
‘I have new admirers who make Gaspare look like a small fish.’
‘Do I smell a commission?’
The waiter laid the plate of ricotta on the table with a loaf of dark bread. Onorio unwrapped the cheese from the oily reeds in which it had matured. He sniffed it, called for wine, and pulled the bread apart.
‘Yes, a commission. But my new admirer will be just as inclined to steal my old works from their current owners,’ Caravaggio said.
‘By Jesu, you met the Holy Father himself?’
Caravaggio smiled. ‘Close enough. The Cardinal-Nephew.’
Onorio split the bread, passed a piece to Mario and to Caravaggio. ‘Be careful, Michele. That man’s dangerous. Even worse, he’s an art lover.’
Mario giggled. The wine found its way up his nose and choked him. Onorio slapped his back. Mario blew his nose onto the floor and picked up his bread.
‘I’m serious,’ Onorio said. ‘Cardinal Borghese has already told the Cavaliere D’Arpino he owes a ridiculous amount in backtaxes. It’s just to get him to hand over his art collection, in lieu of payment. Pure robbery.’
&nb
sp; ‘Lucky I don’t own a thing.’
‘Pietro, a candle, for God’s sake. I can’t see to pick the weevils out of the bread.’ Onorio spat into the corner. ‘You do have something of which he still might rob you.’
‘My genius? My freedom? Don’t be so dramatic.’
‘Your life, Michele. He holds it in that grasping little bureaucrat’s fist of his. Those well-scrubbed fingers will reach out for something they want and, when they do, you might slip between them and shatter in pieces on the floor.’
‘I can wreck my own life. I don’t need papal assistance.’
‘Is that why you insulted Ranuccio yesterday?’
‘Did I?’
The waiter brought a candle and another jug of Chianti.
‘You had one of your blackouts?’ Onorio said. ‘Yes, you lost a few points at tennis. Hardly surprising, because you were so drunk you could barely stand. Then you told Ranuccio that if he wanted the money he had won he’d have to sniff for it up your—’
Caravaggio laughed. ‘Did I?’
‘Sniff for your money right up here,’ you said. ‘Come and get it.’ You tried to bend over and show him your ass, but you fell and tore your clothes. I had to carry you away from there.’
Mario swallowed a bite of soft cheese. ‘And I had to hold Ranuccio back or he’d have killed you.’
‘You?’ Caravaggio slapped Mario’s shoulder. ‘He’s twice your size.’
‘I’m a Sicilian. I strike below the belt. The taller he is, the easier for me to deal the fatal blow.’
‘Cut off his rotten cazzo and toss it to the pigs for their lunch, my little southern neckbreaker,’ Onorio said.
They toasted Mario’s deadly blade. Mario wiped his sticky fingers on the bread and took up his goblet. ‘Cent’anni. A hundred years of health,’ he said. ‘Ranuccio’s cazzo to the pigs.’
A woman entered the tavern, unveiled. She was small and pretty and her dress was expensive, but it was torn at the shoulder and her gaze was ragged and frenzied.
‘Better still, toss his cazzo to her.’ Onorio waved to the woman. She passed between the tables, ignoring the men who seized at her breasts from out of the shadows.
‘Have you seen him?’ she said.
‘I assume you’re looking for your pimp?’ Onorio said. ‘We left Signor Ranuccio at the French tennis courts not long ago. But I believe he was on his way elsewhere.’
‘Where? I have to find him.’
Onorio pulled her into the seat beside him. ‘Prudenza, he’s probably with some strumpet. Stay here with us.’
Caravaggio reached out for the girl’s hair. A strand was plastered across her cheek. It stuck to the corner of her mouth when he pulled it away. She recoiled and lifted her hand to the spot. Her wrist was wrapped in a soggy strip of cloth. He held the hair in the light of the candle. A brittle, drying substance encrusted it, the same earthy shade as the ochre and umber pigments ingrained on his palm.
‘You’re bleeding, girl,’ he said.
‘Fillide came at me with a knife.’ Prudenza’s hair slipped loose from the braid that ran ear to ear. It dropped in long, russet arabesques among the breadcrumbs.
Onorio squeezed her shoulder. ‘You’re lucky to have come away with your life, if that bitch was in earnest.’
‘I am lucky.’ The girl’s breath was fast, as though she felt the threat still. ‘She came at me with a knife and I tried to fend her off, but she cut me here on the wrist.’
‘Was anyone with you when she attacked you?’ Caravaggio lifted the bloody hair to tuck it into her braid.
‘I was in my own house. She burst in and attacked me. She cut the corner of my mouth and when she saw that I was bleeding, she cursed me and ran off.’
He noted that she had answered a different question. He turned his cup of wine on the tabletop. ‘Why are you looking for Ranuccio?’
‘I need his protection.’
The girl was seventeen years old and had come from Tuscany just a few months earlier. Each man looked at the others in silence. They had been in Rome long enough to know that a whore needed more wits than this to survive.
Caravaggio spoke low, ‘I don’t think you—’
‘He’ll look after me, Ranuccio will. He loves me.’
The look, shared again by the men. It was as though an Inquisitor had called out a sentence on the girl. When a whore believed she was loved by her pimp, she was as lost as a heretic with his tongue in a clamp riding the tumbrel. They were both on their way to the flames.
‘I’ll talk to Fillide, my dear.’ Caravaggio knew better than to ask what had come between the two women. Ranuccio’s name was all the explanation he needed. The man was a procurer and a fornicator. Something about the girl disturbed him. At first he thought it was her fatal naiveté. He moved the candle in front of the girl’s face. No, he told himself. It’s that she wants love, and unlike other whores she sees no impediment to receiving it.
Prudenza wrinkled her nose. ‘What’re you doing with that candle?’
‘Will you come to my home?’
‘I’ve got to find Ranuccio.’
‘Not now. Tomorrow.’
The urgent surge of her breasts slowed. She’s going into professional mode. ‘I need a model,’ he said. ‘I’m going to paint you.’
A thought dawned in her eyes and she smiled with triumph. ‘You’re him, aren’t you? The one that painted Fillide. Onorio, why didn’t you tell me this was the famous one?’
‘Did you say “infamous”? You’re quite right, puttanella.’ Onorio pushed himself to his feet, ready to depart. He pinched her cheek.
‘I live on the San Biagio alley behind the Palace of Florence. Ask for Michele who rents from Signora Bruni.’ Caravaggio put a few coins on the table for the waiter. He opened Prudenza’s hand and rubbed her palm with his thumb. Here’s a girl most would say is unworthy of love, he thought. Just as I am. Those who chose a low path in life were denied its highest aspirations. But Prudenza dared to expect love, as if whoring hadn’t robbed her of innocence. She was still pure, without knowing how. He smiled. What about you, Michele? Can you find a last sliver of your unsullied core? With a shock that made him frown, he wondered if he would know how to recognize it, were he to come across it. He folded her fingers around a thin gold scudi. ‘Don’t show that coin to Ranuccio.’
2
Martha and Mary Magdalene
A trio of skinny harlots gyrated their hips at the corner of the Corso. They called out their crude welcome until Onorio emerged into the lamplight. Recognizing him as an unloved customer, one of the whores bent her backside towards him and suggested he kiss it.
‘I’ll bite it, you nasty little strumpet.’ He spoke with some humour, but the girl backed away, all her effrontery crushed and quailing. Onorio’s features went dead, like a painting in which the artist forgot to dab a spot of light on the eyeball.
Mario took the whore’s elbow. She flicked the tips of her fingers off her chin in Onorio’s direction. Mario squeezed her backside and took her into the alley, laughing.
Onorio lifted his head, swivelled and sneezed. He brushed a trace of mucus off Caravaggio’s shoulder. ‘Never mind. You already have the same diseases I have.’
Caravaggio gestured after Mario and the whore. ‘I hope I don’t have whatever she’s carrying.’
‘You will. Soon enough.’ Onorio wiped his nose on his cuff.
‘Mario and me? Not since he married.’
‘He has two wives. One cancels out the other, thus making him single and available.’
‘I hope that isn’t the kind of mathematics you use when you design your buildings.’
‘Don’t worry. My job is to make the façades look good. I rely on the stonemasons to keep them from falling down.’
Along the Corso, the Arch of Portugal glimmered in the torchlight. It marked the southern edge of the Evil Garden, where the whores lived by order of the Pope and where artists came to be among their own low type. Caravaggio halte
d beneath its pillars. He felt some force preventing him from crossing that border, as though he were unworthy of walking among the decent classes, away from the harlots and pimps and slumlords. Anyone who saw him outside the purlieu of the Evil Garden would shrink from him as if a wild beast had come down from the hills.
‘What’re you going to do about Ranuccio?’ Like a villain, Onorio measured his pitch to reach no further than his conspirator’s ears. ‘The money – the bet.’
Some shred of recollection told Caravaggio that Ranuccio had cheated. Or had he created that memory, moulding it from his rage? ‘It was a bad call. The ball was in. He didn’t beat me. The game’s void. I’m not giving a single, dirty baioccho to that bastard.’ His adrenaline pounded, that familiar sensation of abandon, always accompanied by an absolute conviction that he was right, no matter how his anger shocked those around him.
Onorio held Caravaggio’s hand. ‘Ranuccio’s family is tight with the Pope, Michele.’ The pulse in Onorio’s thumb was syncopated and uneven against Caravaggio’s palm. Nothing about him was regular or natural. ‘His brothers fought in the papal armies. His father’s head of the guard at Castel Sant’Angelo. You hear me? The Pope’s own fortress. They keep order for the Holy Father in this neighbourhood.’
‘Doing a great job, aren’t they? You can’t walk down the street without some thug taking a swipe at you.’
‘The Pope doesn’t care about crime. He cares about riots against the government. The Tomassoni family prevents such trouble. So what if Ranuccio plays the tough guy. So what if he cuts up his whores. When the Pope wants a sword to fight his corner, Ranuccio will lift his blade and say, “Hail, Holy Father, those who’re about to stab someone in the back salute you.” If the Tomassonis run this quarter like a bunch of gangsters, that isn’t the Vatican’s problem.’ Onorio leaned in close. ‘But if you don’t stay on Ranuccio’s good side, it’s your problem.’
