A Name in Blood

by Matt Rees

  ‘Come now, I observed you in your studio. I watched you circle his eyes for hours with many different tones. You sought to depict more than just the way the light fell on the Grand Master’s face. You looked for an inner light.’

  ‘It’s there for all to see, Sire. The challenge is to portray it.’

  ‘The essence of a man?’

  ‘The essence.’

  Martelli moved his pieces. To his surprise, Caravaggio saw that the knight had almost brought them all to their home.

  ‘When I was a young knight, I learned all the most elaborate techniques of the swordsman.’ Martelli held his right hand forward, en garde, though he gripped his rosary, not a rapier. ‘The cavazione, moving the blade from one side of the opponent’s sword to the other. Keeping always in misura larga, within lunging distance. Defending against the mandritto squalembrato with a falso dritto, so that when your opponent’s sword strikes at the left side of your head you cut from the right to the upper left, and instantly deliver your riposte.’ He mimed the moves as he spoke.

  Caravaggio murmured his understanding. He knew the terms. He had practised the techniques.

  ‘I based my swordplay on the chivalrous gestures of the courtier,’ Martelli said. ‘But once I’d been in a few skirmishes, I pared it down. In the Great Siege, I’d use my shoulder to knock the other fellow off balance, and I’d finish him with the most lethal blow there is.’ He pulled Caravaggio towards him by the shoulder and shoved a hand into the side of his chest. ‘A dagger in the armpit, like this.’

  Caravaggio quivered, such was the sudden economy of Martelli’s pretended blow. Now I know why he doesn’t have to guard against cheats at the gaming board.

  ‘On the seaward wall of our castle,’ Martelli said, ‘I took a blow from a Turk and lost my sword. He was about to finish me. I hugged him close, so that he couldn’t swing his weapon, and I bit into his neck.’ Martelli held Caravaggio and put his mouth beside his ear, whispering, hard and intimate. ‘We tumbled down a flight of steps, but I kept my teeth in his vein until he bled to death.’

  Caravaggio’s breath stuttered, as though the force of the old man’s memory drew him into the very combat of which he spoke.

  ‘I almost choked on his gore. Not very chivalrous, but it worked. I delivered him to his death. I didn’t try to make it appear nobler than it was.’ Martelli winced and drew in his lips. ‘A young man believes the world may be changed through his faith, through the way he wields his sword, even by the way he wears his clothes. But when you kill your first man, you know the world is as it is. Your illusions die with your opponent. It’s all you can do to hope that after the death of that man you at least may change.’

  Caravaggio felt himself soften as the old Florentine spoke. He seemed to have waited a long time to hear this voice. It was strange to feel joy when the talk was of death.

  ‘I learned not to glorify anything – neither the way I parried nor riposted. In turn I told myself not to make idols of the saints. Their ends were deaths like anyone else’s. The ultimate lesson is not to idealize yourself. Try to be a better man, but don’t worry about being a perfect man.’

  Martelli drew himself straight. ‘When you paint St John, don’t fake anything, Michele. Don’t let it be an exercise in technique. Find the way to paint what’s within.’ He reached out and bumped his fist against Caravaggio’s heart. Then he pushed the backgammon board away. ‘My game.’

  Caravaggio had four canvases sewn together to a width of six paces and a height twice that of a tall man. He fixed the size of The Beheading of St John after studying the blank limestone behind the altar in the Oratory from every vantage point. It had to be that big, so that the incident it depicted would be clear to worshippers at the back of the chamber. But not so big that the characters he painted would seem larger than life. When the Baptist’s head is cut away from his body, I want the novices to feel like spectators to something real, he thought. I want them to know what it’s like to kill, and to fear death, as I do under its sentence.

  He dressed the surface of the canvas with animal glue, pushing the brush into the whip-stitching between the lengths of material, enjoying the way the canvas bounced on its wooden stretcher with each stroke. He laid down an orange-red ground layer into which he mixed a little yellow ochre and yellow earth. Over this, he put a second layer of darker brown made with charcoal black and red ochre. These layers would show through the final painting, their undertones giving life and light to the dungeon in which the saint’s death would take place.

  As he waited for his models to arrive, his energy was high. He had to walk a little of it off, or he wouldn’t be able to hold his hand steady at the easel. He left the kitchen boy straining pigments through thin linen sacks and went into the street in his painting smock. He passed the Castilian Inn and entered the gardens where the knights practised their sword drills.

  Across the harbour, the standard of the Order fluttered on the castle battlements. The white cross flickered against its red background. He wondered if that was the spot where Martelli had bitten into the neck of the Turk.

  The agitation of the stiff wind seemed to make the colours on the flag mix. There were no clear lines. If I painted that way, I might give the impression of motion, of an event unfolding, he thought. I could capture life itself. It would mean less exact brushwork, because he would have to mimic the inability of the eye to nail down precisely where the flag stood at any moment under the surging breeze. As soon as he picked out the image on the standard, it was gone, fluttering forward or back, rippling like the surface of the harbour water.

  The bite to the neck, he thought, instead of the elaborations of fine swordsmanship. Martelli had called it a pure, unadorned conflict. Caravaggio smiled broadly. He would make no show in this new painting. Everything would draw the viewer into the very moment of martyrdom – unfolding, in motion. He would go straight for the blood.

  Caravaggio ran past Our Lady of Victories and into the Italian Inn. In the lower left of his canvas, he saw where he would place them. He could almost count the brushstrokes he would need. Someone entered the studio behind him. He didn’t turn. He was transfixed by the scene he would paint.

  De Ponte, the deacon of the knights, threw off his cloak. ‘Who’s going to be St John?’

  The kitchen boy put down the yellow ochre he was straining. ‘Maestro Michele says I’m to be the Baptist.’

  De Ponte drew his knife and stroked the scar that ran white through his beard. ‘Come over here and let me slaughter you, then.’ He slapped the startled boy’s back and laughed. ‘Don’t look so scared, son. I’m to pose for the executioner.’ The boy flinched and went back to his colours.

  Two women, three men. De Ponte as the executioner, a Sicilian knight named Giacomo as the jailer. The kitchen boy was the saint, and his sister was Salome collecting the Baptist’s head in a ewer. Their mother played an appalled bystander. They hovered in their poses, unused to the stillness Caravaggio required. He tried to persuade them to relax their muscles, but the scene displeased him anyway. The boy glanced heavenwards as if he were in one of the ill-done martyrdoms in the Inquisitor’s gallery. The old woman raised her hands, imploring God’s mercy like an actor in an oldfashioned morality play.

  ‘Let’s start before this.’ Caravaggio came towards them. ‘Relax.’

  They shook out their aching limbs.

  ‘Let’s act out the story of the death of the saint. Begin with the arrival of Salome and her maid.’

  He had them walk through the scene. The jailer issued the death sentence. The executioner shoved the saint to his knees, swung his sword to break the neck, and bent with his dagger to saw away the head. Salome lowered the ewer to receive it.

  ‘Again.’ Caravaggio watched them repeat the sequence three times, directing their reactions as they went. He urged them to look within, to be the person they represented. ‘It’s happening here. Don’t think about it. Don’t act out what was read to you from the Bible. Just feel
it. The story will let you in.’

  De Ponte took to it right away and it was he who fixed the moment. He struck the Baptist’s neck, and Caravaggio wondered if this might be the instant he would depict, the pleasure of the kill. Then he saw an unexpected flicker of regret on de Ponte’s tough features. That’s my scene, he thought. When I recall the way I killed Ranuccio, it isn’t the absolute conviction and hatred that comes back to me. It’s the guilt and contrition I felt when the dying man looked at me. He passed on all the monstrosity of the world to me, even as he went to his peace.

  Caravaggio drew them towards that instant. Another three runthroughs, each starting closer to the moment he had chosen. To the kitchen boy he said, ‘You’ve been cut down. What would your last thought be?’

  ‘That the Messiah is coming?’

  ‘No, no, not as St John – as you. You’re butchered in a dungeon. The last thing you see is the dirt floor.’

  Anguished acceptance passed across the boy’s face. It was the material Caravaggio needed for his art, but it was also the devastating face of his own shame. His excitement shuddered through every limb. He called out, ‘You have it.’

  Fabrizio came to the Italian Inn to see what progress Caravaggio had made with The Beheading. ‘You’ve changed your style, Michele. This is different from the works I saw in Rome.’

  ‘It doesn’t stop at the brush,’ Caravaggio said. ‘I’ve changed myself.’

  Fabrizio stood a long time, stroking his chin, his face puzzled and then illuminated – stricken, then joyous.

  Caravaggio, too, contemplated the scene. The Baptist was chest down on the ground. His executioner leaned over him with his fingers in his victim’s hair. From Fabrizio’s changing expression, Caravaggio understood that he had succeeded. He had depicted what went before and after this arrested moment. The painting was a whole episode, communicated in the swiftness of the brushstrokes and in the drama of the composition.

  His face half-lit by the lantern in front of the canvas, Fabrizio grimaced at the dying saint. ‘I think of that instant always, Michele.’

  Caravaggio knew what he meant.

  ‘I felt absolute justification, when I killed that Farnese.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘When you killed Ranuccio . . .?’

  I stepped into another world, Caravaggio thought.

  Fabrizio twirled his hand as though signalling the passage of time that seemed to take place on the canvas. ‘I often think of the moments before and after with regret. But the instant in which I killed him – I could never see it. Until now.’ He put his hand on the back of a chair and leaned heavily, as if he were exhausted. ‘You’re so good at showing us the moment of death. You seem to know it so intimately. But do you understand what it’s like to be alive? I’ve been pardoned for killing the Farnese. No one seeks my life. Yet when I look at your painting I’m suffocated by guilt and fear and foreboding. It must be terrible to be you, Michele.’

  ‘Is that my fault?’

  ‘Don’t be angry, Michele. There’s only one other time in my life that has meant as much to me as that instant when I became a murderer.’ Fabrizio’s pale eyes welled up, gleaming in the lantern light with an old longing. He reached for Caravaggio and put his hand to his neck, drew him close. Their lips met and the length of their bodies. Fabrizio moaned with the pure voice of a boy, all the raggedness of the man’s throat soothed.

  Caravaggio knew that sound from his boyhood. He recalled the feel of his friend in his arms. But he also tasted the fear that had come afterwards, the loneliness of leaving Costanza’s house, the poverty of his first years in Rome. He had paid for the pleasure he heard in Fabrizio’s voice.

  He pulled away. Fabrizio held on, but he shoved him in the chest. ‘Leave me.’

  ‘Michele, don’t.’

  Who’ll beat me this time? Caravaggio thought. Who’ll throw me out and tell me it’s for my own good? While this man goes on being a prince. ‘I said, leave me.’

  When he was alone, Caravaggio extinguished his lantern. He remembered Fabrizio’s question. Yes, he knew what it was to be alive. Only an artist or a killer or God could know it, those who make or who destroy. They’re the ones who can tell the price of every breath.

  Caravaggio was at his prayers when he sensed the temperature in his studio dip. He shivered and opened his eyes. The Inquisitor was examining The Beheading with a look of glowing calculation, like a cheating saint.

  ‘Is this how you’ll end up?’ della Corbara said.

  Caravaggio recited another ‘Our Father’.

  ‘I think it more likely that your body will disappear and never be found at all,’ the Inquisitor said. ‘What’s worse, do you think? To die like the Baptist in a dark dungeon? Or to be staring at the sky and the flowers and the sea when one’s head is taken from one’s body by a bounty hunter?’

  ‘Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.’

  ‘Amen.’ The Inquisitor folded his hands over his stomach. It seemed a gesture he had borrowed from a better-fed priest. His own body was meagre and the cord of his belt threatened to slip over his hips to the floor. ‘I hear you had a tussle with Brother Roero in the courtyard downstairs. As a churchman, I’m not subject to the rules of vendetta. Perhaps I might intercede between the two of you, so that the rancour doesn’t escalate.’

  ‘Surely you’d have to side with the knight. He’s a member of a holy order, just as you are.’

  ‘Roero doesn’t respect the Church. He carries out the will of the Holy Father in fighting against the infidels, that’s true. But I don’t count such murderers as true men of the cloth.’

  ‘An Inquisitor ought not to talk so lightly of murder.’

  ‘Before a man who profits from painting the slaughter of a saint, why not?’ The Inquisitor paced in front of the canvas.

  Caravaggio took up a dry brush to texture the ochre and burnt umber on the wall of St John’s dungeon. The sibilant stroking of the brush was loud in the stillness.

  ‘The Baptist on your canvas is dead,’ della Corbara said, ‘but you’ve yet to paint his blood. I wonder if you’ve finally reached the limits of your imitation of natural things.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Perhaps blood is too close to home. Too close to your own, which may be spilled like that of the Baptist on the orders of a king.’

  ‘The Pope is no king.’

  ‘Greater than kings. Making your fate even more sticky.’

  ‘I haven’t painted the blood yet. So what? I’ll get to it.’

  ‘Your St John is certainly dead. Dead on the floor of a dirty courtyard, pale and lifeless. He isn’t ascending to heaven, as the saints usually do in art.’ The Inquisitor rubbed his thumb along his lip. ‘If even the Baptist appears not to make it to the celestial paradise, you must doubt your own chances of salvation.’

  ‘If I concern myself with salvation, that’s proof I believe in God’s mercy. If I didn’t believe, I wouldn’t care about my sins or my soul.’

  ‘Then may He bless you.’ The Inquisitor lifted his hand in benediction.

  Caravaggio winced. He felt the man’s gesture, not in loving absolution, but as an unwanted intimacy probing him. ‘Why did you come here again? I’m not going to do what you want. I’m not going to give you information against the knights, even if you tell me this painting breaks the Church’s rules.’

  The Inquisitor examined his hands and slid them into the sleeves of his cassock. ‘Duels, such as the one you fought with Signor Ranuccio, are under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. I could have you extradited to Rome. Even the Grand Master couldn’t stop me.’

  ‘Then why don’t you have him extradited too?’

  Della Corbara whipped his hand from his cassock and slapped Caravaggio’s cheek. ‘Because I need a witness to his terrible crime,’ he yelled.

  Caravaggio tensed his fists, but held himself back. The blow had been out of rage, and Caravaggio knew it represented the Inquisitor
’s hopelessness.

  Della Corbara lifted his hands in apology. ‘Forgive me. The devil is more cunning than I am. He prepares traps for me.’

  ‘I thought you were working together.’

  The Inquisitor stepped close and dropped his voice to a rumbling whisper. ‘You want to be the dog who’s privileged to enter the great hall and eat scraps from the Master’s table. But these knights will never let you in – because you’re a wolf.’ He pointed to his thin chest. ‘And wolves hunt in packs. You’ll need me in the end. Remember that.’

  He left the studio. Caravaggio returned to the walls of the dungeon.

  Caravaggio was painting the black lead teeth of the jailor’s keys, when Martelli pulled back the curtain of his camera obscura. The knight carried a letter. He was immediately preoccupied by the canvas.

  ‘You’ve painted the executioner’s knife since I last saw this,’ he said. A thick, white highlight marked the edge of the blade. The Florentine had been cut many times. He scratched at his scars through his doublet.

  ‘You feel the executioner’s touch?’ Caravaggio smiled.

  ‘I don’t doubt I’d recognize it as my own. Actually I was thinking about you.’

  ‘Thus far, it’s I who has been the executioner.’

  Martelli brandished the letter. ‘You need be neither executioner nor condemned from now on. You’re to be a knight.’

  Caravaggio kissed the old man’s hand. ‘I feared that if the Holy Father declined . . .’

  ‘We’d ship you back to Rome in chains? Well, I have some influence with the Grand Master and I’m a determined old bastard. I suppose the Holy Father realized we wouldn’t let this go. Read it.’

  Caravaggio unfolded the letter.

  To our beloved Alof de Wignacourt Grand Master of the Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem.

  Pope Paul the Fifth.

  Beloved son, greetings. The merits of your special devotion to Us and to the Holy See induce us to favour you by acceding to such requests as will enable you to show gratitude to those who pay their obedience to you or whom you hold in grace and favour. Wherefore inclining to the request submitted to us on your behalf, in virtue of this brief and by our Apostolic Authority we impart and grant to you authority to receive as a Brother of the grade of Magistral Knight the person favoured by you, who is to be selected and nominated by you, even though he has committed murder in a brawl, and to present to him the habit of Brother of the grade of Magistral Knight so that you may keep him.