The Passion of Artemisia

by Susan Vreeland

  In his black velvet doublet with lace collar and cuffs, Francesco appeared at the back of the church and held out his arm for Palmira. As they came down the aisle, he looked as proud as if he were her father. I felt a surge of gratitude. He had managed the negotiations masterfully. Affirming that Palmira’s purity was without question, and promising that I would give Andrea’s parents a painting when I returned from England, he had gotten them to accept a modest dowry. The important thing was that she had had a proper impalmamento with the banns published three times at parish masses. Now, in the Mass of the Union, the organ left its last powerful chords suspended under the stone ceiling as Francesco gave over the bride to Andrea, whose young face shone with love.

  When the priest invited the bridal couple to the altar, Palmira’s gaze was fixed on Andrea, her eyes dewy with adoration. I felt a warmth radiate through me as unmistakably as though I were the one to be wed and loved tonight. She repeated her vows in a voice that rang with innocence. When the priest intoned, “Ego jungo vos in matrimonium,” and joined their hands, she swayed under the heady weight of love. And so did I.

  The prayers and responses of the mass seemed interminable. All I wanted to do was to hold her in my arms and whisper some sage advice, but what? Think every day of some new way to please him? Ignore any indications of infidelity and go right on loving him? Keep peace between you by obeying your mother-in-law? I felt a sharp pang. Now Palmira was more that mother’s daughter than mine.

  At the supper afterward, Francesco, looking down the table to the bridal couple, leaned toward me and asked in a low voice, “Wouldn’t it be nice to think they’ll always feel about each other as they do at this moment?”

  “They might, if she’s clever enough to keep him tantalized and feeling manly, and if she doesn’t demand too much.”

  “And if she’s not?”

  “If not, she’ll survive. There’s always painting.”

  Feeding me an artichoke heart on the tip of his fork and grinning, he said, “And so, my lovely, talented, gracious lady, you are, from this time forth, free of motherhood. Free to be completely you. Free to—”

  “Never free of motherhood. She will always be my child, to me. Grazie a Maria, she has had the privilege of choice. Tonight and always, I pray that she’ll remain mindful of that.”

  “And to whom else are you grateful, tonight, that she could marry the man she chose?”

  I rolled my eyes sideways toward him and touched my glass to his. “To you, Don Maringhi, my brilliant negotiator.”

  “Negotiator? Only that?”

  I closed my eyes, smiled, and lifted my shoulders.

  “Just so you don’t forget while you’re in England on that fool’s errand that I await your return . . . to serve you faithfully.”

  “Not a fool’s errand.”

  “Then what? A filial obligation?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Then why go?”

  “To find out what I’m capable of, for one thing.” I took a drink of wine, turning my shoulder to him slightly. “Don’t forget it was my father who taught me the skill that you benefit from.”

  The priest came downstairs from the bedchamber above the dining hall where he’d gone to sprinkle holy water on the marriage bed. “It is ready,” he announced.

  Andrea’s friends became suddenly boisterous, teasing Andrea and Palmira, singing rousing love songs and holding glasses of wine aloft. Young women, not permitted at the nuptial mass but present now, laid red rose petals up the stairs to their bedchamber. I realized with a start what they stood for: the blood of Palmira’s purity. The young people gathered around Palmira and Andrea to whisk them upstairs. I rushed to Andrea’s side and took his elbow. He bent down so I could say in his ear, “Take her gently, Andrea. Such a flower bruises easily.”

  I only had an instant to hug Palmira and whisper, “It’s easier if you relax. It’s all right to ask him to go slowly.”

  “Don’t worry, Mama. He loves me.”

  “Laugh a little together every day, no matter what.”

  “Sì, Mama.”

  In a moment, Palmira and Andrea were hoisted aloft on young men’s shoulders and borne high above the crowd up the stairs. Palmira looked back at me with her gardenia hanging loose and her face marked by exhilarated trepidation. My throat constricted in a spasm of happiness. I blew her a kiss.

  26

  Paola

  The coach delivered me to the central livery station in Rome. Only two weeks, and I was already missing Palmira fiercely. Until her wedding, there had not been a day in all her life that we’d been apart. I stored my trunk and carpetbag at the station, and from there, I walked to Santa Trinità.

  Paola answered the bell. Her face turned white. She didn’t step back so I could enter.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I have something to tell you.”

  “About Graziela?”

  She nodded and looked to the right and left. “There’s nowhere we can go,” she fretted. Apparently she wanted a place where Graziela wouldn’t discover us.

  “To the church?”

  “No. Over here, I guess.” She pointed to the cloister and we sat on the L-shaped bench. She inhaled deeply, as if gathering energy or fortitude.

  “Just tell me.”

  “She died.”

  I was stunned. I couldn’t comprehend it. Nothing prepared me for this.

  “When?”

  She waved her hand backward over her shoulder.

  “How?”

  Paola’s whole face puckered. “She went outside.”

  “And that killed her?”

  “Out of the convent. More than once.”

  “How often?”

  “Many times. Usually between matins and lauds. To see Rome.”

  My part in this crept into my consciousness like a snake. Come, taste the forbidden pleasure. Disobey your holy order.

  “But how did that kill her?”

  “The pestilence.”

  “I can’t believe it. The plague? Didn’t she know?”

  “She knew. But her need outweighed her fear. Once she went out the first time, she couldn’t stop. She saw things that made her happy.” Fear that I wouldn’t understand flooded Paola’s eyes. “She was always better for a while afterward.”

  I felt dizzy, and braced myself with my hands on the bench. I tried to comprehend the magnitude of her yearning, and the effects of my feeding that passion.

  “Why didn’t you write me?”

  “My shame, Artemisia. I couldn’t.”

  “How did she get out?”

  Paola fingered her rosary. “I heard her weeping at night. Such gasping, choking sobs. She tried to muffle them. I couldn’t bear to hear her.” Her voice took on a tinge of defensiveness. “She was my dearest friend for twenty years. The purest spirit I ever knew. How could I deny her?”

  “So you let her out?”

  Her head tipped forward. “I prayed every minute she was gone.”

  “And stayed awake to let her in again?”

  A cry burst from Paola’s pale lips. “I did penance the very next day, and haven’t missed a day since.”

  “The plague—and you didn’t get it from her.”

  “Not by my own will or wishes. I would rather it had been me,” she cried.

  “I didn’t mean that as a recrimination,” I said softly, put my arm around her, and let her weep against my bosom. “Just the strangeness of it.”

  “Our Father has seen fit to chastise me with sleeplessness, and a festering conscience.”

  A weight bore down on my chest. “You are not the only one responsible.”

  “She saw Michelangelo’s Pietà,” Paola said with a hint of her usual brightness, lifting her head. “And Bernini’s new altar canopy in Saint Peter’s. Imagine, as tall as an eight-story building. And your father’s ceiling.”

  “Bless her, that she wanted to see that too, for my sake. Then she had to go in the daytime.”

>   “Between tierce and sext.”

  “Was she punished?”

  “For a long time no one knew, as long as she went at night, but when she went in the daytime she was caught. The punishment of confinement and silence only allowed her the privacy to think over every detail of what she saw. She was always calm afterward.”

  “That’s good. At least we have that.”

  “The last time, she stayed out all night and walked all the way out the Via Appia. It was a full moon. She thought she found the spot where Peter saw Christ. She said her feet felt the warmth of his love. On the way back she saw a dying man under the Arch of Constantine and crouched next to him to say the Lord’s Prayer in his ear and touch him with the sign of the cross.” Paola’s voice rose high and thin as a thread. “I think that’s what killed her. Her own charity.”

  All the air leaked out of me and I felt crumpled in on myself, like a dress in a hump on the floor without me in it.

  “Did she suffer horribly?”

  “Just three days.”

  “Wasn’t she treated by a doctor?”

  “For the first two days I kept the buboes covered so Mother Abbess wouldn’t see.”

  “And then?”

  “I had to tell her. Mother Abbess feared any doctor coming into the convent would bring the plague with him. Besides, if a doctor knew, he’d have to report it. They would have quarantined us, and might even have boarded us in.” She spoke more quickly and softly. “If Graziela were the only one to die in the convent, we could call it a natural death by divine will and bury her here and not have to give her up to the House of Plague—or the trench.” Her voice cracked on the last word, and she squeezed her eyes shut.

  “No priest gave her last rites?”

  “The Mother Abbess did. We buried her between matins and lauds. Within the hour. On her straw mattress. By lantern light. Ourselves. I didn’t let anyone else touch her.”

  “So she’s here? In the cloister?”

  “No. In the herb garden. Unmarked, in case inspectors come.”

  “Show me where.”

  Silently we walked under the arcade, through the ground floor corridor to the enclosed herb garden in back. Paola’s hands covered her mouth and pressed palm to palm. “Forgive us, Artemisia. She’s under the oregano.”

  I knelt down and smelled its earthy, spicy scent, an aroma I knew I would never smell again without grief. I stroked several of the spade-shaped leaves with my thumb, picked off a sprig, and tucked it into my bodice lacing. My tears bounced on the leaves.

  “See? I planted a row of rue all around her.” Paola knelt down next to me. “I’ll never forgive myself, even if Our Gracious Lord does.” Her voice was a mere squeak. “Never.”

  “You acted from compassion. Remember that. And she always advocated forgiveness. Graziela told me once not to pray as a penitent. I think she meant not to pray in abject self-hatred. Don’t punish yourself with this, Paola. She wouldn’t want that. She did what she wanted, knowingly.”

  Paola nodded, her round face pinched. “She would have touched the leper’s hand just the same as the Virgin’s.”

  “Remember what you taught me when I was young? ‘Charity suffereth long’ . . . ?”

  “ ‘And is kind . . . Charity beareth all things.’ ”

  “It just takes a lifetime to learn how.”

  The world seemed to stop, and we were quiet for a long time.

  “Maybe she did touch the Virgin—in marble. Michelangelo’s Pietà. You should have heard her describe it.” Paola smiled sadly at the memory. Then words poured out in a flood. “ ‘A Heaven ordained sculpture, the Passion of Christ. The deep, sad, helpless love in Mary’s face looking down at him on her lap. His smooth, unperturbed cheekbone bearing all selflessly. The stiffness of his marble arms so freshly taken from the cross. Her tender, strong fingers supporting his riven side. The sweet, small folds of cloth at her neckline.’ Graziela was so full of rapture describing it, she could have been lifted to Heaven right then.”

  Paola’s thinking made me smile. A certainty settled over me. “That’s what great art is supposed to do—help us to live in the spirit and die at peace.”

  After a long pause, Paola murmured, “Thank you for saying that.”

  “What about the letters I wrote to her since?”

  “I read them to her. Right here, just before I go in to vespers. Beautiful letters. I read them more than once. I’ve saved them all.”

  “Then I’ll keep writing.” We stood up and stepped out of the garden. “I’m going to England. I’m on my way now. To see my father.”

  “You have forgiven him?”

  I lifted my shoulders. “How can I be sure?”

  “By going. You’ll know when you see him.”

  “I hope I won’t disappoint you.”

  “You won’t if you remember the rest of what Paul the Apostle said. Charity is not easily provoked. It comes naturally with the putting away of childish things so we can see face to face.”

  I nodded, still doubtful that I could achieve that.

  She tipped her head toward the herb garden. “Tell her, cara.”

  “I’ll leave that to you.”

  We took a few steps back toward the building and she stopped. “One thing Graziela wanted you to know. She prayed for Signor Galilei.”

  “I knew she would.”

  “He was kept just there,” she pointed over the wall, “in Villa Medici, except when he was in a cell in the Holy Office of the Inquisition. And later he was at the Convent of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva.” She lowered her voice. “Don’t worry, Artemisia. I have taken over praying for him.”

  “Thank you.”

  Putting one foot in front of the other was never so hard as now, walking out through the cloister, seeing again every crack that Graziela knew like the veins in the back of her hand. Slowly, to the door, and the dark key in Paola’s hand, the instrument that let Graziela love the world, and leave it.

  “One more thing,” Paola said at the door. “When she died, she passed silently into the Lord’s arms. With ease, at the last. I do believe at that moment she saw the city of God and she thought it beautiful. Full of domes and spires and loggias with marble angels.”

  “How do you know?”

  Paola’s chin quivered. “There was a tiny, lovely gasp, hardly a breath. Her eyes opened brightly, and then she was gone.”

  27

  Orazio

  For the second evening I lay down with strangers on a single-deck packet boat at anchor off Calais waiting for fog to lift so we could cross the British Sea. A faint flicker of light from a refuge tower brooding over the ashy gloom made me conscious of the frailty of human craft. There was no certainty in this world. Shrouded forms emerged and then retreated, playing wicked tricks. Across the deck, was that a stanchion or a crouching nun? A mast and spar or a crucifix? Was this vagueness the way Graziela remembered Rome before she took her nocturnal walks? Did one dear thing after another become hazy until the oppression of blank, foggy sameness grew too much for her? The creak and wallow of the vessel and the clanking of wooden blocks against the rigging were the most melancholy sounds I’d ever heard.

  I wrapped my cloak around me, but still I shivered in the dampness. A man emerged from the fog and came toward me. With words I couldn’t understand, he draped his blanket over me. Or was it only the trick of the fog? The feel of the wool against my palms and its weight on my shoulders were real enough. Were we enacting a parable from the Bible urging me toward Christly charity in a time to come?

  The third day was clear enough to make the crossing, but night descended so early it seemed only half a day. How could Father paint here at all after midday meal? Despite my fear of the passion that might boil up in me when I saw him, I felt pulled across the water by an invisible bloodline, a vein strong enough to tow the boat.

  The next morning I boarded a river craft to sail up a broad, muddy estuary. The land lay flat and uninteresting, the trees leafless, th
e air thick, heavy, and cold. This, the great Thames River of a proud nation with a glorious history, was foul-smelling and sluggish in brown and gray. The croaking of monstrous ravens did nothing to welcome me. Raw wind cut through the threads of my cloak. The craft beat up the river against all impulses of the land to repel it. Now that I had come this close, I faced a wind, a river, a nation that did not want me to enter.

  Ships and barges moved slowly past brick warehouses and shipbuilding yards. Farther inland, sheep grazed in meadows surrounding country estates. Where was the famed city that ruled the seas? Only a single man-of-war was anchored opposite a tall, brown, heavily turreted palace on the south bank, dark and forbidding, more like a fortress than a residence.

  “Greenwich, madam,” the steward said.

  Was Father in there? Maybe I was too late.

  “Is that the Queen’s House?” I asked in the only language I knew.

  The steward stared at me, not comprehending. I showed him the outside of Father’s letter where he’d written in English, “The Queen’s House, Greenwich.” Wind threatened to snap it out of my hand.

  He pointed beyond the dark, turreted palace to a small white building upon a rise, the only white building visible. While my trunk was being unloaded onto a dock, it started to rain. The steward carried my carpetbag weighted with jars of olive oil, artichokes, olives, and a bottle of wine. I followed him down the gangplank and he showed the letter to a hackney driver, spilling out words I couldn’t understand.

  A short carriage ride on a glistening cobbled street took me past the brown stone palace, up the rise to the white building. I leaned out the carriage window, and showed a guard the letter. He nodded and pointed to the white building behind him. “Orazio Gentileschi? Pittore italiano?” I asked. He shook his head and directed the driver back to the brown palace near the river.