IT IS LIKE EATING A PEACH, LIKE BITING INTO A CHICKEN LEG after you have been sick. After you have done nothing but sip wine and broth for days. The colors Paolo steals for her, the small tin cups he leaves every morning on the lowest shelf in the old gardener’s shed, fill Vini up.
She makes excuse after excuse, tells countless lies, and spends more and more time in the small, abandoned cubby where Silvana’s husband used to keep seedlings before he died. For weeks she has been shut away in the close, tight room with the smell of oils and the heady scent of her own sweat.
Today it is cold, and the wind is rattling the strawberry pots by the fountain, sending the spray of water first in one direction, then in the other. Vini ignores the pathetic yelps coming from the kitchen; she cannot let Cesare follow her, cannot let his barking give her away.
The shed has no place to build a fire, but Vini is more concerned with finishing her picture than with keeping warm. She has swept a tiny space clear and set a stool there, made another drawing table of old boards. Now she studies the painting where she left it to dry yesterday. She has transferred her drawing to one of the canvases Paolo has brought. She needs only to lay in the colors in a few more places. It is almost alive.
She likes the shadow, the tongue of purple she has added behind the pair of walking men, and the mist from the fountain in the foreground, each drop of water like a pearl. The drawing of her father, only partly painted, she approves, too. It is familiar, the way he gestures broadly and strides ahead, bending only slightly toward the shorter figure beside him.
But something is wrong with the way she has shown Paolo; she has made his legs too short, and his body, turned toward Prospero, does not match the full profile of his face. Then there is the shadow of Prospero’s arm across the younger man’s shoulder—Where is the sun? It cannot be in two places at the same time, garzoni.
But it is more than these things; they can be easily fixed. There is something else, something about the way Paolo moves. Or doesn’t move . . .
Vini frowns now, sits down, and works without lifting her eyes from the picture. She tries a layer of chalk under Paolo’s face and hands, hoping to nurse him to life, to find the gift he can bring to the painting. She adds more linseed oil, as Paolo has taught her to, managing to keep the paint moist, moving. It is like a language she has always known, this play of light and dark. She does not create the mud-colored minestra, the soupy porridge Paolo has warned her about. (He even showed her the dark thicket he made when he first tried to mix colors. “I know it is foolish to save such a thing,” he told her shyly, rolling up the small canvas sheet and hiding it in his vest. “But it is the first painting I ever did.”) Instead, her colors swell and fade just as she wants them to, like the high and low notes on the spinet.
And so long as she works on the larger figure, who moves like a stately giant, or the bricks in the courtyard, where they disappear into the touches of green that sprout between them, all goes well. It is the slender young man beside the giant who gives her problems.
There is a noise outside, a scurrying that is probably only the wind chasing its tail across the courtyard. But it is enough to make Vini look up from her work at last. She notices how far the sun’s shadow has crept across the dirt floor. She sighs and stands, kicking the door to the shed open further, letting the light flood her makeshift drawing table. She steps away from the half drawing/half painting and looks at it from a distance. Aghh! That is not Paolo. His body is stiff, as if there is no blood in it. Even with the light the chalk adds to his skin, he is like a figure on a Greek frieze, a puppet with no life of its own.
A puppet! Her family has been to church twice since the last puppet show. Surely the troupe is back in Bologna by now. Back with a new performance, more magic. Vini works for a while longer but finds herself thinking not of how the courtyard tiles must diminish as they move toward the horizon, but of the piazza just a few streets away. Of the great city bustling under hundreds of towers, of the afternoon noises and smells that fill it, and of that tiny, glowing stage at its heart.
Soon she has torn off her apron and filled a jug of water to scrub her hands. She is careful, wiping away all the telltale blotches of paint. Except for one. She leaves a touch of greenish blue, like a peacock’s eye, on her wrist. She will be able to roll up her lace cuff later and smell the color she has used on the fountain and for her father’s vest. Whenever she needs to, at lessons or at the table tonight, she will be able to breathe in deeply and remember who she is. Adesso, pintrici. Pay attention, painters. This is your life.
Already there is a chill in the breeze. The fields at the edge of town are picked clean, leaving large tawny patches on the green hills. Soon shepherds will move their sheep down from summer pasture and blackbirds will build their nests near chimneys to keep warm. Today, though, there are more people pushing toward the stage than there have been all summer. Some have given up their midday meal to come; Vini can smell the roasted pork and oranges that vendors are hawking in the square. And something sharper, nastier, too: the scent of dung. There must be a tanner in the press of bodies around her.
Vini has a better view of the audience than she does of the puppets onstage. Slowly, weaving through the crowd—“Scusi, scusi, per favore”—she manages to work herself halfway to the cleared area where the puppeteers have opened their magic cabinet. Now, unable to push any further forward, she resigns herself to standing on her toes to see the tops of the warriors’ heads.
This afternoon, at last, they are presenting more adventures of Orlando and his brave knights. Already a bloody battle is under way, and Saracens’ plumes clash with Crusaders’ helmets in a furious blur of noise and color. Vini clasps her hands and sucks in her breath as bodies are tossed everywhere, one spilling offstage and dangling by its strings in midair.
Then she feels it. Not a sound, exactly, nothing she can see. It is only a hint, a sensation as insubstantial as the conviction that someone across a room is talking about you.
Ever since she turned off Santo Stefano, Vini has had the feeling that someone is watching her. Twice on the way to the square, in fact, she whirled around on the high platforms of her shoes, only to find herself alone in the street. But now, in the middle of all these townspeople, she feels it again; someone’s eyes are on her, someone’s breath is close and warm. She looks behind her, but everyone there is intent on the stage, watching the marionettes.
She turns back to the show just in time to see a silver-clad figure stride onto the stage. It is Bradamante, the female warrior, cousin of Orlando. All the scrambling and bloodshed stop when this heroine raises her sword, her armor glinting, her hair spreading from under her helmet in a yellow cloud. Her voice, of course, is not a woman’s, but a whispery falsetto contrived by one of the puppeteers. “Help me,” the lovely puppet sings, holding her hands out to the audience, mangling a high note. “I beseech you to lend your strong arms to our just cause.”
“We are with you, my little beauty,” a man beside Vini yells. Other men, too, cheer her on.
“All you who love justice,” the puppet sings, “and hate wickedness.”
“Sonno qui!” Someone answers her. “Right here!”
“Trounce these destroyers of the faith,” Bradamante urges in her thin, ugly voice. “Show the unfaithful whose might is supreme.”
A vendor near the stage throws a head of lettuce at the Saracen puppets. Next a squash and then an onion bounce off the helmets of infidel warriors. Soon the crowd is cheering and the vegetables are flying, tossed onto the stage as the enemies of the Cross fall, one by one.
Later, when Bradamante is giving her thanks to the audience, Vini feels it again. She whirls around, leaving the bright stage behind her to search the audience. At last she catches her shadow, sees a familiar figure fall back too late into the crowd.
For the first time since she has been coming to the puppet theater, Vini fails to watch the puppeteers take their bows. She is too angry, too full of hurt. She dives into the packed bodies behind her and confronts her pursuer.
“How dare you, Paolo!” She has grabbed his cape and is shaking with fury. She has shared one secret with the Pony; now he has stolen another. “How long have you been following me? Have you done this before?” Whom have you told, sly Pony? Who else knows where I go?
“Little One.” Paolo holds up a hand and backs away from her. He trips into an old woman with a basket on her head. Flushing, he bows to the woman and tries to take Vini’s arm. “Listen to me, Little One. It is not what you think.”
“But it is what I think,” Vini tells him. She does not turn to help the woman pick up the laundry she has dropped. Instead, she advances on Paolo, one finger poking his chest. “I think you are no true friend. I think you are a sneak and a spy.”
She sees the hurt on his face but cannot stop. “I think if you breathe a single word of this to anyone . . .”
“No, never.” Paolo keeps trying to back away from her, but as he does, he takes her by the elbow and drags her after him out of the crowd. “I would never betray your trust.”
“Then why?” Vini stops, refuses to move further. Ignoring the people around them, she cannot keep from yelling. “Why are you following me?”
“To keep you safe.” Paolo stops, too. His glance falls from her eyes to the cobblestones at their feet. “Just yesterday, a fellow put someone’s eye out in a fight on this very spot.” He glances up to see Vini’s reaction to this news, then rushes on. “A week ago Tuesday, my uncle’s neighbor was robbed in an alley off Piazza Maggiore.”
His voice drops. “It is dangerous for a woman to go out alone.”
“I am not a child,” Vini says stoutly, though she is disconcerted by what he has told her, by his hand tightened over the handle of a dagger in his belt.
“And I am not a spy, Little One.” He stands beside her, only half a head taller than she, his expression a mix of courage and adoration. “I mean only to keep you from harm.”
Vini sees it all at once, as if she has walked from shadow into sunlight, and she is humbled by the discovery. Paolo’s stance, his voice, his drive to protect—they all show her what she has failed to notice before. The Pony is a man. Short but sturdy. Gentle yet strong. She has been leading a man around by the nose!
“Perhaps you meant well,” she says. “But do you understand what my father would do to me if he found out about . . .”—she turns, gestures into the throng around them—“. . . this?”
Paolo seems to sense a corner has been turned, that he is no longer in danger of losing her friendship. A grin, along with a hint of dimples, lightens his face. “It was a fine show, no?” he asks, steering them past the vendors at the edge of the piazza. “The little armor, those tiny shields? Did you see how perfect they were?”
Vini cannot help smiling, too. “Yes,” she admits, calling back the flash, the sparkle. “Did you notice the serpents carved on the hilt of Bradamante’s sword?” She laughs, taking his arm instead of resisting his lead. “Why, if someone were small enough to use those weapons, I warrant they would serve in a real battle.”
“Orlando’s soldiers were astounding. I forgot they were only puppets fighting, I was cheering them on!”
They turn toward the street, leaving the square. “I always forget,” Vini confides. “And I am always sorry to remember.”
Paolo grabs the moment like a sword. “So I am forgiven?” he asks. “My Little One will allow me to serve her again?” He stops in the street to bow. And though when he straightens, he is smiling broadly, Vini can see that his cheeks are bright as apples in the sun.
She responds in kind and curtsies low, holding her gown out behind her. “It will take only one small favor,” she tells him, “to win back my goodwill.” Because now she understands. Now she knows what she has been missing.
“And that would be?” He is still smiling, assuming dispensation.
Vini crosses her arms, her expression like Father Anselmo’s at Christmas confession. “You must pose for my new picture,” she tells him. That will right what is wrong. That will make the smaller, thinner figure in her drawing come into its own.
Paolo coughs, loses his composure. “You mean?” Though it hardly seems possible, he grows redder still. “You mean pose like the models in the . . . ?”
“Ma, no!” When she realizes what he is asking, Vini is embarrassed, too. Her eyes drop, though she cannot help smiling just a bit. “You will be fully clothed.” But it will work, she can see that now. The way Paolo’s hair is caught in the wind, the way his cape is opening, closing, breathing as he moves. There is music about him. Why hasn’t she seen it until now? How will she put it into paint?
“Well, then.” He straightens, takes her arm again. “Of course.” He has reassembled his world, his idea of the young girl beside him. “What is this painting of?”
“Two men,” Vini tells him. She does not add that the drawing is of Paolo and her father. She does not tell him she is certain that when Prospero sees it he will know who the artist is, will realize that Paolo could not have painted it.
She refuses to let Paolo see the picture, even when he comes to pose for her the next day. Or the day after that. Or the one after that. Each afternoon, while the house sleeps, Vini does tiny charcoal sketches of her father’s new favorite. Each day, after Paolo leaves, she transposes what she has learned from the sketches to the painting: the movement, the shy grace, the energy that is like a newborn colt, wobbly but beautiful.
Of course, Paolo knows exactly who the two figures are when the painting is finished, when four days later she shows it to him. He is astonished and pleased, but he is quiet. As he studies her work, it is the same as before. He does not speak at first, just drinks and drinks. He holds his breath and does not look at her. “It is a masterwork,” he says at last.
Vini sees what he sees. The two men walking in a garden, one turned to the other like a pilgrim, both loved by the sun. The water shimmering in front of them like a curtain of sheerest lace, and the wind following them, playing with the young man’s hair, with the cape that cannot hide his sturdy shoulders or the slender hand that rests on the handle of his weapon, ready to serve. “No,” she says. “Not a masterwork. A work that needs the touches a master can bring to it.”
“But . . .”
“I want you to take this to my father. I want you to ask him.” She knows Paolo will protest, and she knows he will do it at last.
He lifts his gaze from the painting. He looks at her with the old hunger, the hopelessness of an exile. “Ask him what?”
Vini does not look at his face, sees nothing but the picture. There, by the fountain, that stone is not right. And the wall behind the men, it is much too large.
“Ask him what, Little One?” Paolo repeats.
Vini turns to him. Stares at him as if he is a stupid child. “Why, how to make it better, of course.”
And then she is lost again: Here, where the taller man’s hand swings back, the light is wrong. How could she have missed that? And on top, where she has let the sun break through, those clouds look like a hedgerow, not God’s breath. Where is the glory? Where is the fire?