IT IS RAINING. AGAIN. VINI’S SHEETS FEEL STICKY, MOLDED INTO ridges that send shivers of irritation through her legs and arms. The curtains around her bed hang limp and spiritless. She will not get up.
“Vieni, Vini!”
She will not open those curtains on another dull morning, on her mother’s pale face.
“Come on, Lavinia!”
She turns over, muffling Antonia’s voice and the hollow splatter of drops in the cistern outside the window. But it is too late. Her dream, like someone she knows but whose name she has forgotten, cannot be called back.
She peeks through the curtains at the floor. Her mother and her aunt wove the rug by her bed during the “waiting months” before she was born. On one side, the head of a huge, snarling griffin, its eyes the color of fire, looks back toward its tail. Or perhaps toward the small dove nestled comfortably under its scaled wings. At the bottom, a small scroll clutched in the griffin’s talons announces the year of Vini’s birth, 1552.
She supposes that the dove was once white, but ever since she was little, she has gotten out of bed in the middle of the rug. The small bird is now slate colored, nearly worn away from hundreds of her groggy, morning footprints. Over and over, Vini has considered changing her waking ritual to spare the vanishing bird. But even at fourteen, she cannot bring herself to step on the griffin’s blood-colored jaws or tangled fur.
“Vini, my love.” Antonia’s tone is awkward, suppliant. She has come into the room now, and Vini can see her slippers under the curtain, the hesitant way they are set, just inside the door. “Do you want to read Latin on an empty stomach?”
Dry lessons. Wet rain. And a dream that is now as faded and colorless as the poor little dove on her rug. Vini sits up, listening for her mother’s sigh, her retreating footsteps. Cautiously, she draws the bed curtains apart and finds that someone is still in the room.
“Cesare!” She laughs as the tiny dog, named after Julius Caesar, digs its claws into her sheets and scrabbles onto her bed. “Cesare, you will have to eat less to spare my linens.” The dog rolls onto its back, wriggling in ecstasy as she scratches its fat belly. “These sheets will be in shreds unless you lose weight or learn to fly!”
Then, with Cesare dancing around her ankles, Vini gets out of bed and takes the chamber pot from her close-chair. She has no inclination to expose herself to this cold and unpromising morning. She slips the pot under her nightshirt, holding it close. If things go on this way, she thinks, there will be no puppets in the square again today. It was just after Saint John’s Day she saw them last. Unless the sun finds its way back to Bologna, she will never finish her picture.
She pulls a green woolen dress over her shirt and scowls into the mirror while she combs her hair. Soon, though, she remembers the puppet show and uses her comb for a sword, slashing the air in a frenzy. “Ha! Infidels!” she says, checking the curl of her lip in the glass. “I will defend Christendom to the death!”
Cesare is delighted with her performance, yelping his approval and whirling on his back feet in tight, crazy circles. But Vini, instead of encouraging his dance, whispers morning prayers and hurries downstairs to the kitchen.
Between bites of porridge, and later during her lessons with Anatole Riggio, she checks the sky. Before each conjugation, she notes with despair that the heavy drops are still falling. As they begin Virgil, she listens hopelessly to the sound behind her tutor’s reedy voice, the weary, constant hammer of rain.
For weeks now, Vini and her teacher have been translating the scene where Lavinia, Aeneas’s second wife, learns of the blood that has been shed in her name. Perhaps Signor Riggio thinks Vini will yawn less if her lessons involve a namesake. Or maybe the old scholar, his hands trembling as he turns the pages, the lead weights of his glasses shivering behind his ears, fancies flying limbs and gouged sides.
But for Vini, reading about battles and romance is not the same as seeing them. Not the same as sneaking out of the house, a scarf tied around her head like a maid on errands. Not at all the same as standing with the crowd around the puppet stage where princesses and warriors, kings and flying serpents come to life.
And so it seems the answer to a prayer she has not dared speak, when the sun comes out after the midday meal. To ask God to stop the rain, when you are not a saint and can too easily confuse your will with His, would be wrong. But to slip out during riposa, when the whole house is napping, to hurry down the street, glorying in the new light, feels as right as anything Vini has ever done.
By the time she ties Cesare up so he cannot follow her and walks to the square off Piazza San Francesco, the play is already under way. She works slowly through the hundreds of bodies packed around the stage until she can see. Clearly this show is not a continuation of the romantic legend the puppeteers performed last time they were in town.
Today two elegantly dressed puppets, bent on destroying each other, race up and down in front of a backdrop painted to look like the reception hall of a great palace. One of the puppets is at a distinct disadvantage, and when they stop their mad scramble for a moment, Vini sees that it is the man.
The hapless duke tries once again to escape his lady’s temper. But his wife, despite her long brocade gown and jeweled robe, is too quick for him. She is on him in an instant, pummeling him with her fists.
All around her, Vini hears the laughter. Like a wave gathering force, it lifts her, tugs at her until she too begins to smile, then to laugh out loud with the rest of the audience. Onstage, though, no one is laughing. A courtier rushes out from behind the velvet curtains to help the beleaguered duke. “Signore mio,” he calls, “I am coming. I will save you.”
But the duke has decided, apparently, to save himself. He drops to his knees and, in a highly ignoble whine, makes one promise after another. “I will give you my finest horse,” he tells the duchess. “I will send you to Rome to visit your mother. I will have your portrait painted in gold leaf and your image struck on a medal to wear around my neck.”
His wife stops her attack for an instant, and that is all the time the crafty duke requires. Suddenly he is on his feet again, tearing across the stage, his tormentor in hot pursuit. Back and forth the two of them run, the woman carrying a stick now and a fresh scene unscrolling across the painted backdrop behind them. Instead of the duke’s grand palace, this new painting features a landscape, tumbling green hills with small houses and grazing sheep clustered on their slopes.
“You’d better run fast, fellow,” a man yells from the crowd. His voice has an edge, a harshness that almost makes Vini turn to look at him. But she cannot leave the colors on the stage: the sky on the silk backdrop is as blue as a thrush egg; the duchess’s necklace and the gold trim on her gown flash as she runs; the glass emeralds on the curtains catch the sun and throw patches of light, like fluttering butterflies, across the stage.
“If your wife is anything like mine,” the same man cries out again, “she’ll run you into the ground, you poor dumb fox.”
There is more laughter, and others begin to yell, too. “Courage, brother!” a second man says. “Don’t let us down,” cries a third.
The curtain closes and the laughter turns to applause. Stamping and clapping erupt behind her, but Vini is still watching the stage. The puppeteers come out in front now, and each holds the strings of the marionettes he worked during the performance.
As usual, Vini is too stunned to clap. She stands, watching the four men who loom like giants beside the tiny stage that, only seconds ago, was big enough to hold the world. It is always the same, this shock, this coming down—as if a bird has fallen from the sky and landed at her feet. The duchess, that savage, sparkling woman with cloud-colored hair, is actually no longer than Vini’s arm. Her noble husband the duke lies crumpled and spineless against the ankles of the man who holds his strings.
“Thank you, ladies and gentlemen of Bologna.” One of the puppeteers, older and stouter than the rest, shouts after the crowd, which is already drifting into the streets that fan like wheel spokes from the cobblestone square. “Even in Ravenna,” the man tells them, his hands cupped around his mouth, his voice louder than any of the puppets’, “there are no more generous souls. If by chance you have neglected to feed my hungry hat, and if you enjoyed our little play, let your lire speak for you now.”
A few people near the stage drop money into the wide-brimmed hat that lies, half full, at the man’s feet. One woman smiles and curtsies like a shy child as she tosses in her coin. But Vini has neither smiles nor coins to contribute. She turns from the stage, brimming with a sweet, not unpleasant sadness, which she nurses all the way home.
Look at me, she scolds herself. I am nearly fifteen, too old to cry. But the magic is over and now she must go home. Home to the dreary, full-size world. To her mother, who would never argue with her father, much less take after him with a stick. To her father, who has never, so far as Vini knows, given her mother a gift. What would Mama do with one of Papa’s horses, anyway? They are all trained to respond to his hand and his alone. And why on earth would Prospero Fontana paint a portrait of his own wife, when he is paid so handsomely to paint the wives of others?