VINI SLOWS AS SOON AS SHE REACHES VIA SANTO STEFANO. SHE takes her time approaching the house, like someone slipping into a cold bath. Carefully, she closes the front gate. The ground, even the walls, are slick from this mornings rain, but the prodigal sun has turned the fountain at the center of the courtyard into a reflecting pool.
Vini does not spend long watching herself there, just enough time to smooth her hair, to tuck her scarf into the sleeve of her gown. Then she passes the kitchen and, as always, peeks in the window of her father’s workshop.
Today she does not see Prospero Fontana, only his students, perched around the long table they use for meals and for work. In the center is a dusty clay vase with two handles just above its swollen hips.
Even if he is not visible, her father is evident in the worshipful, anxious gaze all the young men direct toward a corner of the room Vini cannot see through the window. Some of the students nod, then lower their heads and begin to scratch their charcoal sticks across the thick papers in front of them.
No, she has not heard him. But Vini knows exactly what her father has just said, what he is forever saying. “Paint first with your eyes. Use them like hands, garzoni.” He calls them boys, though nearly all are men. “Caress every curve, every corner.”
And she knows, too, that the students who have already started drawing will soon be sorry. “You did not look first, did you?” her father will ask. “You think you know this vase just because you have seen others?”
And he will stand behind them, each in turn, leaving one hand on their shoulder while he points to their sketch with the other. “I found this amphora in Calabria. See where it has been oiled to hold the water? Did you show that in your drawing? And here, where one handle has thinned from being carried day after day, year after year? Have you shown this, too?”
Of course, those eager hares will shake their heads, will look shamefaced, while the triumphant tortoises will smile as if they’ve known the secret all along. A play Vini knows by heart, it is all happening the same way again today. Her father has moved into sight now, is walking purposefully toward Paolo Zappi, the new shop boy who is allowed to sketch with the apprentices. Prospero sweeps past the window; his great shoulders and broad back fill its frame, his dark mane trembles as he shakes his head.
Vini ducks under the window, listens to the familiar, reproachful growl. “Adesso, artiste, let us try again.” She knows how tenderly her father has draped his arm around Paolo, who is neither hare nor tortoise but more like a bumbling pony, with arms and legs he has not yet mastered. “Draw this beautiful form with your eyes, do not touch your paper.”
Paolo is a good-natured fellow, the sort Vini knows she can rely on; the sort Prospero makes a habit of singling out. “Do you see here, good Sir, where you have imposed your dream of a jar on what’s before you?” Paolo nods, and Vini feels in her own body the sting, the small poisoned barb of her father’s disapproval.
“We will not give up hope, however,” Prospero is saying. “Even the unlikeliest among us can learn to see. Begin at the bottom, there, then worship every inch, every change of hue . . .”
Vini shakes out her gown and scuttles back to the kitchen door, opens it as if she has just come in from the courtyard. Silvana is stirring something in the big soup pot, and Vini cannot resist tickling the old woman around her broad waist. The smells of saffron and stock-drenched rice rise off Silvana like a heady dew as she giggles, then turns from the hearth to threaten Vini with her spoon.
“For pity’s sake, do not bother Silvana.” Vini’s mother, Cesare nestled like a miniature sultan in her arms, hurries across the room and plants herself between Vini and the maid, as if she is separating lovers. “You know how she overseasons. Even without your help.”
Antonia Fontana, her daughter is sure, actually loves the thick, garlic-laced dishes their ancient maid always produces unless someone watches her closely. It is not for herself or for Vini, then, that Antonia is standing guard. It is to prevent another scene like the one last night.
“Subtlety, my soul mate,” Prospero told Vini’s mother as soon as he tasted the fish at dinner, “is not one of your virtues, it seems.”
“My dear?” Antonia had leaned across the table, her meal untouched, her eyes trained on his with the same expectant, anxious look his students always wear. Signora Fontana is a thin woman, with skin as white as the ruffs she wears at her throat, but whenever she looks at her husband, even after all these years, she blushes.
“There is an art to supervising the preparation of a meal,” Vini’s father announced, “just as there is to enjoying it.” He had looked at Vini then, had explained to her rather than to his wife. “It is my experience that people who pick at food the way your good mother does, have not the faintest idea how to make sure the taste of a dish is properly complemented. For them, it is always the same—garlic, garlic, garlic. Everything else is beyond them.”
Antonia had started to reply, then settled instead for busying her hands under the table, twisting them around each other as if she were trying to keep warm.
“It requires imagination and a certain hardiness of spirit,” Signor Fontana continued, sucking a fish bone already white as a fossil, “to appreciate the range of flavors sealed in each food.” He dropped the bone, not on his dish but on the cloth beneath, where it formed a small, damp print of itself, a shadow bone.
“Unfortunately, the lady of this house suffers from thin blood. She lacks energy and nerve. She lacks the juice of life.” He finally turned from Vini to stare at her mother.
Antonia braved his stern look for an instant, then dropped her head to watch her own hands scrambling, faster and faster, in her lap.
“Which is why, no doubt,” Prospero continued, “your three brothers dried up in her womb and I am without a son.” Son. The word is like a bell tolling across their lives. Son. Son. Vini hears its deep, sad peal behind all her fathers complaints. Behind the burnt roast. Behind the overpaid servants, the thin sauce, the chipped mirrors.
Vini had wanted to reach over then and grab her mother’s frantic hands, had wanted to hide them away. Other women—the ladies father paints—have plump, calm hands. They rest quietly, like contented pigeons, in the ladies’ laps or on their Bibles.
Those ladies have big families. Daughters and sons. Sons who make their husbands happy, their sisters proud. How Vini hates those fleshless, frightened hands of Mama’s. Every time she looks at them, she burns with shame.
Today, though, with just the three of them in this steamy kitchen, Antonia’s hands are not nervous and she is spending all the words she has squirreled away. She sets Cesare free, then reaches out to cup her daughters face as she chatters on. “Where have you been, minx? I was beginning to worry. Right, Silvana? And with good reason, too.” She races ahead before the old servant can answer. “Look at that face, will you.” She steps away, still holding Vini, smiling into her eyes. “So round and soft—just like a Madonna, is she not? Like a saint, no?”
Silvana nods, which is all the encouragement Antonia needs. “We should hire a guard to escort this treasure wherever she goes.”
“Mama, I was just in the garden. I fell asleep in the sun.”
Her head still full of the magic she watched in the square, Vini has no patience with her mother, with the desperate, needy words. Antonia wants so little—a hug, a laugh, a kiss beside her eyes. But Vini cannot give them to her. Not now. Not when she has to hold everything she has seen in her mind, every line, every shape. “If you do not need me until dinner,” she says, unwrapping herself from her mother’s embrace, kissing (she can do that much) the tips of Antonia’s fingers, “I could practice my music for a while.”
Bless the spinet. It is like a spell. Just mention it, and both her father and mother become easy and serene, as if the dainty instrument in the back room is the key to all their futures. As if Vini’s being able to play it will make her attractive enough, elegant enough to marry into luxury and out of their anxious care.
Perhaps she should feel guilty, then, when she has crossed the courtyard, Cesare at her heels. When she has abandoned the forlorn dog outside the carved door of the music room. (“No, no,” she says, her voice stern to let him know his claws and bouncing are not welcome.) When she is finally seated, not in the velvet chair by the spinet but at the drawing desk she has rigged up nearby.
Only a pair of rough boards placed over a chest, the desk is just wide enough for the vellum pages she “borrows” from Prospero’s studio. In minutes, she has finished the sketch. Weeks ago, she laid in the crowded square and the puppet stage, its heavy curtains drawn aside. Now she fills it with the duke and his wife, the duchess’s stick raised above her husbands head.
It is not a proper subject for art, she knows. Papa’s clients would never pay for such a thing. But if you squint and stand far enough back from the page, you can imagine that the figures are like the ones in paintings at church, that theirs is a sacred quarrel, full of biblical import. And if you look behind them, past the city and the houses, you can see God’s own handiwork, the hills, the sheep, and the sky. The sky Vini aches to paint the color of a thrush’s egg.