SILVANA IS CERTAIN THAT VINI’S EYESIGHT WAS RESTORED BY THE scorpion sting. “My grandmother drank a potion of powdered scorpion tail,” she announces. “She lived to be eighty-four.”
Antonia is convinced the miracle is a direct result of her prayers to Saint Lucy. “I will light candles for her,” she promises, “until I die.”
Vini herself, however, credits something more worldly. “As soon as you kissed me,” she whispers to Paolo, while Betta and Giorgio and the other servants crowd into the kitchen to witness her recovery, “I could see.”
“It was not me.” Paolo stands close to Vini, his arm laced through hers, forgetting that she can find her way without him now. “God needs your eyes, Little One. Who else can celebrate His world with such skill?”
Coming back to God’s world, Vini thinks, is like opening a treasure chest, rifling through precious keepsakes that have been stored away for much too long: her mother’s beautiful face; Paolo’s russet curls; sunset coating the surface of the fountain; Cesare begging crumbs, twisting in the air like a miniature acrobat; Betta’s round, brown arms; Vini’s favorite dress with the pearl bodice. It is intoxicating to see them all once more, to savor every curve, every color and texture. And under the delirious thrill of seeing again is a sacred trust, a bond between herself and each thing on which she sets her new eyes: Pay attention, pintrici. This is your life.
After Vini has been hugged and fussed over, after Silvana has handed round a clear honey wine with cinnamon and lemon, after Giorgio has drunk to her health so often his speech slurs, Paolo pulls her aside. “Let us go and tell your father now, Little One. He will want to share your miracle.”
But Vini makes him promise not to mention the news to anyone in the studio. Not yet. “Let it stay kitchen gossip for now, Paolito,” she begs. “I want to tell Papa in my own way.” She knows, without being able to say how, that her recovery will be a shock, a surprise only the two of them must share.
So Paolo returns to work by himself, and only after all the apprentices have gone, does Vini visit the bottega. She stands at the door, watching her father work in the last light of day, and for a minute she is stunned. He looks so much older than she remembers, moves more slowly and heavily. “Papa,” she says, fearing he may be too tired to talk. “Shall I come in?”
Prospero glances up, sees that his daughter is alone. “Wait,” he tells her, laying aside his brushes. “I will help you. There is a table in the way.”
But before he can meet her, Vini has navigated across the room. She stops a few feet in front of him. “That is not necessary, Papa,” she says, unable to hide her joy. “I can see.”
He pushes himself up from his stool; standing, one hand still on the easel, he looks at her in silence. It is as if she is a ghost, a vision, something he cannot believe.
“It is true, Papa.” Vini turns in a playful circle, curtsies to the portrait of a church elder beside her. “I can see again!”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.” And then, “Great God.”
Father does not rush toward her, or press her to him, as the rest have done. But in the face he turns to her, Vini sees such change, such a peeling away of shadow, that he is years younger in an instant. He stares at her as if his eyes could drink her up. His expression is new to Vini. It is not relief or even happiness. It is gratitude.
“In all my life, I have asked the Lord for only two things,” he says. “Perhaps that is why he saw fit to grant me this.”
Father prayed for her! Maybe it was not the scorpion, after all. Or Mama’s prayers. Or even Paolo’s kiss. It was Father humbling himself to ask God for something. That was the miracle.
Prospero seems shamed by his revelation, stands silent and awkward, as if he has forgotten who they are to each other. He is better alone, Vini realizes, only a little surprised. He was not meant to have a household, a troop of servants, a wife and daughter. He was meant to live like a scholar, existing on words and air.
“Come here.” It is not a command or a request. It is the assumed intimacy of one colleague to another. “I want to show you something.”
Vini stands beside him, looks over his shoulder at the large canvas on which he has been working. It is a sketch of Christ with the woman at the well. Behind the two figures, hills rise into a crystal sky.
Other men, other fathers, might welcome their daughters back. They might smile, might weep, might talk of miracles. But Prospero Fontana is not like other men. What he can talk of is not miracles but art.
“Carracci drew this fig tree.” Papa points to a small tree clinging to the nearest hill. But he does not look at the tree as he talks. He is looking at his daughter, watching her eyes. Watching her see. “It is not right.”
Vini studies the tree: its leaves are too broad, its trunk too smooth and straight. Her lessons with Ulisse have included more than twenty kinds of trees, each with its own leaf shape and bark, its own way of opening to the sky.
Her father speaks without taking his eyes from her, though he still points to the offending flora. “Perhaps you could”—his smile is slight, but unmistakable—“improve it, eh?”
Vini slips off her cloak and steps into the apron he offers. He helps her tie it around her waist, something he has never done before. Vini welcomes this gesture in the same spirit she has accepted the others’ hugs. It is the closest he can come.
She sits on the stool he draws up beside his. As soon as she looks at the painting, only half done, Vini comes home. Home to a world where she knows colors before they are born, where she moves without walking, traveling from the picture plane to the background, feeling the light change, the scale diminish.
When her father hands her the palette he has been using, an old excitement threatens to explode like a fireworks constellation in her chest. They are there waiting for her, more delicious than any meal she has ever eaten, headier than Mama’s flowers: each color begs to be swept up, mixed, and pressed onto the canvas; each shade will become something new, something never to be repeated, when she has blended, scraped, dreamed it into being.
It will be this way from now on, Vini knows. Every day, she and Papa will work together. He has prayed for her. He has willed this moment into being. Look how, as she coaxes the little tree into bloom, he leans toward her, watches solemnly. Yes, they will work side by side; he promises it with each nod of his great head, each grunt of surprise, each barely discernible smile.
The chain of sweet, full days that follows is doubly blessed. Every afternoon now, after she has painted with her father in the studio, Vini works beside her mother in the little sitting room off Antonia’s bedchamber. It is as if she is determined to make up for the time she missed when she could not see; she sews with a fury, turning out blankets and shirts and tiny hats for the baby.
“Not so fast,” her mother cautions, laughing. “Your brother can never wear so many!”
One day, they tear sheets into strips for swaddling cloths; the next, they resurrect the wooden walker Vini used when she was an infant, dragging it from a storage closet, straightening its wheels, rubbing it with walnut oil until it shines. They drape the cradle Ulisse has given them with pennyroyal pomanders to keep away fleas, and lay the puppet prince on the tiny satin pillow to see how the baby will fit. “Just right!” Antonia says, holding her belly and rocking the cradle at the same time. “Perhaps we should make Ulisse a godfather, no?”
Some days, Zia and Ginevra visit, and the four of them spend hours in Mama’s sewing room, joking, talking, bent over intricate, tiny seams and hems. Before she was sick, Vini was certain there was nothing she would hate more than being forced to sew and gossip. But now every stitch, every word is precious. Her aunt’s purring chatter, her cousin’s dreamy plans, her mother’s silver bell of a laugh; the heaps of linen between them, the spindle, the embroidery hoops, the dying sun angling across their laps. How could she have moved among such things, day after day, and never noticed how beautiful they are?
On one of Zia’s visits, Mama remembers the game she and Vini played in the garden. They all take turns tying bright-colored squares of silk over one another’s eyes, trying to guess which scarf they are wearing when it is their turn to be blindfolded, while the others yell hints that hardly help at all:
“It is the color of my darling’s eyes,” Ginevra offers.
“Not at all,” insists Zia. “It is exactly the color of the new coat I saw on the widow Cortese last Sunday.”
But when it is Vini’s turn, she needs no hints, guesses correctly every time. It is as if she is back in the garden again, using her nose, her hands, her silent, waiting heart. She touches the scarf, breathes in, and then it comes. “The gold,” she says. “With the grape leaves.”
Finally, exasperated, Ginevra calls a halt. “You are much too good!” She unties the scarf from Vini’s eyes. “The three of us cannot match your painter’s knack.”
“Speak for yourself, Daughter!” Zia Beatrice closes her eyes, sits straight and still as a statue. “Try me again. I am sure I can do it now.”
Ginevra winks and pulls out a swaddling cloth. Antonia wraps the strip of sheet around her sister’s eyes, and Vini invites Zia to tell them what color it is.
“I know! I know!” Beatrice is smiling triumphantly, sure of her guess this time. “It is the blue with the cypress and parrots, no?”
Ginevra and Vini giggle.
“Very well. It is the yellow with the oranges and tigers. I am certain now!” She points to her nose and sniffs loudly. “I can smell the oranges!”
They are all four laughing hysterically when Prospero appears at the sewing room door. He looks in consternation at Vini, Ginevra, and Antonia, then at Zia with the sheet around her eyes.
“Papa,” Vini calls to him. “Come try.” She sorts through the pile of scarves, hides a green one with angels behind her back. She runs toward her father. “Close your eyes,” she commands.
But before she can tie the scarf around his head, Prospero bats her hands away from his face. “I have work to do,” he says, his voice brusque, alarmed. His confidence, his calm are dissolved by this roomful of women. “I have no time for foolishness.” He hurries out the door and down the hall.
Vini looks after him. For the first time in her life, she feels sorry for Father. For the lovely foolishness he has missed, the silliness, the jokes. All the joy he has pushed away.
Ulisse begins taking Vini on field trips again. As spring turns to summer, her teacher’s specimen bottles and Vini’s sketchbook fill to overflowing. While it is decided that Cesare is too disruptive, flushing rare birds from hedges before they can be identified, eating leaves and flowers even as Vini is drawing them, there is one companion who is more than welcome to accompany them whenever he can steal a few hours from the studio.
Paolo and Vini do not mean to take advantage, but Ulisse is so deliciously absentminded! He is forever wandering off in search of rocks, then happening on a stream full of mollusks or a meadow of pheasants eye. Each time, he is gone long enough for so many stolen kisses, tender words, and loving promises that Vini begins to feel as sentimental and lovelorn as her cousin.
She presses flowers between the pages of her anatomy text and saves locks of Paolo’s and her hair twined together. She even finds herself, like Ginevra, mooning over her sweetheart when she is not with him. She calls up Paolo’s every word and gesture, reliving each moment of their outings with Ulisse, their chance encounters, and their secret meetings in the garden or the music room.
These meetings, though, are rare. Father has taken on five new commissions and has hired more apprentices. He has pulled out the long table in the studio to make work space for a growing army of artists. And if Prospero is this army’s leader, Vini and Ludovico are surely his lieutenants.
They work together all the time now, Vini and the Ox. More and more, the two of them are called upon, not only to sketch backgrounds, but to block in central figures in the foreground as well. Though she will never entirely trust the Ox, Vini knows he is among her father’s most talented students. She knows she can learn from him. The graceful angles at which he places the people he sketches, the way they turn toward the viewer or come in from outside the picture, as if they are barely contained by the canvas—none of this is lost on Vini. Take note. Remember this. Never forget.
Ludovico, in turn, seems to have no more time for cruel jokes or angry words. He is too busy rushing from one canvas to another, his small eyes narrowed, sweat glazing his face. It is hardly even a surprise, then, when one day he comes to her for help. “Signorina,” he asks, without a trace of irony, “can you show me how you did those ferns in the saints cave?”
In between her nature studies and her father’s commissions, Vini still uses the little garden shed. But now the hours she steals, the colors she “borrows,” are not for a project she hides from her father but for a gift she keeps from her mother. At first, only Paolo sees the birthing tray she is painting, a shallow wooden serving dish with a picture of two women in a garden. “It is lovely, Little One,” he tells her. “It will bring the sun inside.”
“I know it is not a holy subject, Paolito,” she says. “But it is something I have wanted to paint ever since I found Mama’s garden.” She studies the two figures she has drawn, one standing, the other playing with a tiny dog in the grass. “I want to be the one to bring her first meal after the baby comes. And I want to bring it on this.”
It is less than a week after she has finished the tray, after she and Silvana have hidden it away behind the grain sacks in the kitchen, that Betta rushes into the studio. It is much too early for supper, and all the servants know better than to interrupt the workday. But Betta opens the door without knocking and hurries to Vini’s side, her face flushed, her hands kneading her apron. Everyone in the bottega looks up, sees her, and realizes it at once: Mama’s time has come. Father glances only briefly from his work, nods at Vini, then, his face set and stiff, turns back to his easel.
Vini does not even clean her brushes. She races with Betta out of the studio and into the kitchen, where Silvana is feeding the midwife’s husband. He has accompanied his wife here twice before when Mama felt pains. Twice before, he has wolfed down their food, then returned home with the midwife when it was not Mama’s time, after all.
This afternoon the man is so busy stuffing himself with soup and rolls, he does not even look at Vini. But Silvana does. And as soon as the old Gypsy’s eyes meet hers, they fall away. That is when Vini knows. Something is wrong.