The Colormaker’s Song
Within a day of her being there, swellings in Zorzo’s neck grow first to the size of walnuts, and then as large as crab apples. He can’t help fidgeting with them. Their presence inside his body, hard as shale, seems like a mistake, an impossibility, as death itself should be—and yet there they are.
The buboes replicate themselves and soon he has them growing under his arms and his groin, while dark purple, almost black, patches come up on his arms and legs. “What a devilish color,” Zorzo comments to his companion. He traces his finger around one of the abstract, cloudlike shapes. “There’s a reason some people are afraid of it. Purple might be the color of emperors and kings, but it’s owned by death. Everyone, everything, passes through purple on their way to black.”
“Don’t look at them, Zorzi,” says Leda, who’s on top of the cabinets, individually dusting every jar of paint. “It will make you feel worse.”
“Worse?” Zorzo chuckles. “Does it get worse?”
It does. The aches in his head, down his spine, in his chest, even in his feet, become unendurable. His skin becomes as brittle as thin veneer and the growths eat through it and turn to pus-filled lesions. More and more unnatural hues come up on the surface of his body: engorged veins are ice blue, bruises are fringed in sand yellow and gamboge, his fingertips turn dark verdigris green. Leda persists in breaking her own rule by coming over to the bed to clean them with hot water. When she’s close, for fear of contagion in his breath, Zorzo doesn’t dare open his mouth.
The day wheels into night and the light in the window evaporates. The temperature drops outside, sharply, and the glass panes film up against it.
“I think it might snow again,” Leda says, wiping away the condensation to peer out.
“It would be a mercy for this burning if it did,” Zorzo says.
Downstairs, the front door opens and Uggo calls from the foot of the stairs, “This is a warning. I’m coming up.”
“Tell him to go away.” Zorzo sits up on the side of the bed so quickly that it produces a new coughing fit. He longs to see his garzoni and has missed Uggo’s grinning face in particular, but for that very reason, he must stay away.
Uggo bundles in, snowflakes on his cap and shoulders, dressed up in a tangerine-colored costume. In one hand, he carries a pair of unlit lanterns, in the other a tambour drum, with a pie balanced on top. “Good evening, Signora Sitruk.” He puts everything down and does a bow. “I know, I’m not supposed to be here, but we’re missing one vital piece for our—” He finishes the sentence with a wink, before flourishing the pie. “And I needed to bring this from my mother. She’s been baking since dawn. Torta Pasqualina,” he calls over to Zorzo. “Your favorite, sir.” He puts his nose to it. “Smell that. Still warm. How are you, sir? On the mend?”
Zorzo is trying to get his coughing under control. “No visitors,” he splutters. “You have to leave. Kind as you are.”
“I don’t know if he has much of an appetite,” Leda murmurs to the boy, “but it was thoughtful of your mother.”
“Don’t worry about her, miss. She’ll do anything for the master, my mama. She’ll run ten miles for him, she will.”
“What’s the piece you’re missing?” asks Leda.
“It’s there,” Uggo says, going over to get Zorzo’s lute. “Do you mind if we borrow it, my liege? We promise to be careful.”
“What in the devil’s name—” Zorzo starts to say.
“I must go. I’ll see you in a moment, sir.” He picks up the drum and lanterns he came with and is about to rush out when he remembers something. “Sir, do you like my costume? It’s the color of fire. You’ll see.” He rushes away, thumps down the stairs and exits below.
“What will I see?” says Zorzo.
Leda goes over to the window behind his bed, opens one of the casements and invites him to look out.
Outside, the night sky over Venice is a matrix of falling white. Large, puffy flakes descend in a continuous reel, settling against roofs and pediments and architraves, making abstract, sharp shapes of all the buildings in the square, of the whole city. “All I can see is Uggo,” says Zorzo.
The boy is on the steps of the fountain in the center of the piazza, lighting the lanterns.
“There,” Leda says, pointing.
Many lights are capering up one of the side streets as a line of people advance. Uggo fastens the drum to his belt and starts to play, banging a forceful, steady beat. At first, Zorzo can’t see who the people are, just that their lanterns catch the color of their clothes—and all the colors are different. At the front, Paulino is dressed in a peridot green. Behind him, Azalea is in golden brown and Naples yellow and her brother, Tulipano, in cerulean blue. Teodor is in coral pink and Janek is in crimson and violet. All carnival costumes, in vivid fabrics, with wide brimmed hats, elaborate headdresses, feathers and ribbons—and each person carries a different musical instrument.
Behind this first group, more lights follow. Many more. The people file into the square, and Uggo—beating his tambour ever more resolutely—marshals them into lines. Zorzo begins to recognize them. There are fellows from the various paint shops of the city, folk that Zorzo has grown up with. There are watercolor makers, the ink and charcoal men, Zorzo’s suppliers of gesso, and of brushes. There are apprentices who used to work at the red house; and old colleagues from Zorzo’s time at Bellini’s studio, as well as ones working there still. There are boatmen Zorzo has befriended over the years and the two ladies from the bread stall. There’s Uggo’s brothers and mother, and Lorenzo Lotto.
Soon the square is humming with light, and with a hundred different colors. Uggo passes Zorzo’s lute to Teodor, who kisses its neck and gets ready to play. Alongside him Azalea has an oud, Paulino a little citole fiddle and even Janek—who has always claimed to be tone deaf, which no one disputes, having heard him humming—has a timbrel. Uggo stops drumming and holds his palm in the air. There’s silence for a moment, an enchanted quiet in which just a soft, Venetian wind blows and the snowflakes drift down. Teodor steps forward and announces, “‘I Go Before You,’ by Beppe Barbarelli of Castelfranco.” He counts the others in and they start up the song, just instruments for the first stanza—before everyone joins in singing, the group as one, a chorus. Zorzo’s hands shake, his mouth too.
“No, no,” he gasps and fat teardrops spill onto his cheeks. He opens the window as far as it will go, so he can lean right out, but it’s too narrow for him. “Let me see from here, let me see.” Balancing himself against furniture, he stumbles over to the door they use for winching heavy materials up from the street. He tries to open it, but the bolts are too stiff for his shaking hands. Leda comes to his aid, snaps them back one by one and the door springs open. Zorzo holds on to the edge of the casing, half leaning out, careless of the drop beneath, of the cold, of the snow pattering against him, his face beatific at the sound of the song.
A man in a dark cloak and hood has come into the square and halted. Zorzo notices him peering around at the buildings, looking for something. He’s distinct from everyone else: he hasn’t come to join the singing, nor is he dressed in carnival clothes. He’s somber. Hanging from his fist is a small but heavy-looking sack, of grain, Zorzo fancies. The man doesn’t wait until the song ends before asking one of the singers a question. The singer replies with a gesture toward the red house, the front of which the man studies, before noticing the figure leaning from the first-floor window.
Zorzo stares back, fear dropping through him like an ice rock, unable to see the man’s face below his cowl, but certain it’s Death himself come to fetch him away. Zorzo is terrified by the little heavy bag he clutches and tries to remember what purpose grain has for going down into the underworld. He looks away, tries to concentrate on his garzoni instead, on Uggo’s defiant, almost warlike expression at the front of the choir. But the moment of magic has passed for Zorzo. Death has ruined it, standing there, among Zorzo’s favorite people in the world, glaring up and waiting for his moment.
The song finishes and Janek calls out, “Three cheers for the master!” and everyone hurrahs.
“Get well. We’ll be back tomorrow,” Uggo shouts and Zorzo waves back, while his chest heaves because he knows that, by then, the stranger with the little, heavy sack of grain will have claimed him. The people start to drain from the square, lanterns zigzagging, everyone waving, some laughing, others carrying on the tune. The figure with the sack does not move or make a sound. He waits until the piazza is almost empty, then steps forward. For a moment he disappears from view, before there comes a firm knock on the front door.
Zorzo holds his breath.
“Let me in,” the man calls. “I have urgent business with Giorgio Barbarelli.” Zorzo shakes his head and stumbles back behind the bed. There’s a second, even weightier rap. “Giorgio Barbarelli, are you in?”
“Send him away,” Zorzo whispers. “I’m not ready for him. Please send him away.”
Leda goes out and he cocks his ear to the sound of her descending, and the conversation once she’s opened the door.
She returns up the stairs, into the workroom, looking alarmed, and says, “He insisted. He knows you.”
It’s not death that enters behind her, but Cardinal Soderini. He halts, surprised by the room, frightened by it even. “I’m sorry to appear unannounced—” he growls, puts the sack on the floor and lets down his hood. His hair, usually neat and slick, is disheveled and sticking up. He has dirt on his face. “I am sorry also to hear you are unwell.” His voice is trembling and he holds onto his neck as if to steady it. “What a state I am in. I fell over on my way from Cannaregio, down the steps of the Ponte Storto. They were covered in filth. My chain must have come off, the little gold crucifix my father gave me. When I realized, I hurried back to search but some thief had snatched it. I should have left Venice already. I should have been gone days ago. I’ve been holed up alone in Herr Fugger’s house. May I?” he asks, taking off his coat. “It stinks of whatever was on the steps of Ponte Storto.”
Underneath, his cardinal’s robe is so intensely red it’s as if a wave of pure blood has swept into the room. He motions to a stain on his coat. “Dog filth. The worst. They are not my creatures at all, and this city is beholden to them like no other. Do you have some water,” he says to Leda, “to clean it for me?”
Leda resents the request, the insinuation that she is a maid, but takes it. “As I told you, his condition is bad,” she says under her breath. “Really, this is not a safe place to be.”
The cardinal replies with a petulant wave. “I shall be safe. Do not fret about me. I am vouched for.” He touches his chest where his crucifix usually hangs. “Hold on a moment.” He motions at Leda. “In the pocket there, a flask.” She gives it to him and goes off to clean the stain. The cardinal peers around the room and finds Zorzo against the window, behind the bed still. “How are you, Signor Barbarelli?”
“I’ve been better.”
“Of course you have. Of course. And you will be well again soon. I will pray for your recovery. You will recover, Signor Barbarelli. And if you do not, that is God’s plan.” He clutches at his bare neck. “My father’s crucifix, I could weep. My most beloved possession. It was five hundred years old. It went in 1095 to Jerusalem on the first crusade and has protected its bearer ever since.”
“I’m sorry to hear it,” Zorzo manages.
Soderini undoes the cap of the flask and drinks. “For calm. You’ll pardon me, I shan’t offer any to you. So this is an artist’s workroom? I always imagined a place of dark magic and so I find it.”
Leda has returned with the cardinal’s coat. “Is there anything in particular we can help you with?” she asks.
Soderini steps over toward the bed and stops. He takes an envelope from his pocket. “Herr Fugger asked me to bring this to you before I left Venice. A note.” Despite the fact he has wished Zorzo well, his tone seems undercut with malevolence. “I was reluctant, I do not mind saying, Signor Barbarelli. For Jakob to be cordial with you after everything that happened, strikes me as...unnatural. Then again, anything related to Sybille Fugger and her brother is so. Edvard Artzi has always been a disgrace, the worst kind of scoundrel, maligning Jakob to anyone who’d listen, spreading vile rumors, but he surpassed himself this time. This story that he’s fallen in with a circle of Wittenberg intellectuals, that he’s grown a conscience, that he’s fighting against injustices. Nonsense. It’s jealousy, pure and simple. He hates Jakob. He can’t bear his success, and that he took his beloved sister from him. Beloved?” He lets out a mirthless laugh. “That’s a fine word for someone who inflicts almost perpetual abuse, has done so no doubt since the day she was born.” He takes another sip and does up his flask.
“Anyway, Edvard is one thing, Sybille another. She could have broken her ties with him but she always scurried back, like an ant to a dunghill. Jakob found out they’d met as Sybille was packing up to come here. It has always been my counsel that Jakob should annul their marriage, but my friend is too kind. He defends her, sees her side, has sympathy. The island and all that. He forgives, over and over again, but she knows what she’s doing. It’s all just a grand and spiteful game for her. She is a lie of a woman, to her very bones.”
Leda steps forward, not liking the direction Soderini has taken the conversation. Zorzo listens, jaw clenched.
“But he’ll carry on suffering her, until the end, no doubt,” Soderini goes on. “Excusing her transgressions. That she had an affair with her own kin. And do you know why? Why he forgives?”
All Zorzo can manage is a shake of the head.
“The poor fellow is still in love with her,” Soderini says and lets the notion settle a moment in the sickroom air. “In any case, I am not a man to deny my friend’s wishes, so here.” He tosses the envelope onto the bed and stands back again. “I saw your painting of her, in the chapel. It is—” He pauses, his face turns to a scowl and he says, almost with hatred, “It is, in its own way, a masterpiece.”
He takes his cloak, checks that it has been properly cleaned and puts it back on. “He said to give you this too. That you left it.” He kicks the bag on the floor. “Good night, signor. Really, it is a shame I had to come. I would still have my father’s crucifix if I hadn’t.” He gives Leda a terse nod. “I’ll see myself out.”
Once the front door has slammed shut behind the cardinal, Zorzo breaks the seal of the letter and looks at the note. He can discern two lines of writing, but they’re a blur. He tries to focus, but the words slant and swim away from him. He presses his eyes shut, tries again, but it’s no good.
“Shall I?” asks Leda.
“In a minute. What’s in the bag? I left nothing.”
Leda opens it up and takes out a heavy package with a waxed parchment wrapping, tied with string, and a battered label attached. She squints at the inscription on it, deciphering the heavy Gothic type before reading, “‘Contains mineral powder. Keep dry and warm. Prince orient.’”
Zorzo tries to stand, but falls back down. “Put it there, in the light,” he says, panting. “Open it.” She rests the bundle on the tabletop and tries to untie the string, but the knot is tiny and hard, hitched so long ago it’s fused into one. “Cut it,” Zorzo says. “A knife, there.”
Leda makes a single incision; there’s a pop, a little cloud of dust goes up, the string recoils into a ball, leaving clean white marks on the front of the parcel in the form of a cross.
This time Zorzo manages to push himself to his feet. He gestures at Leda to give him space and totters over to the tabletop. He cups his hands around the package. Inside is a mass of crumbled rocks, warm to the touch, as if it still carries heat from when it struck into the earth. And as it moves, it emits a scent that makes Zorzo swoon. “What odor is that?” He puts his nose to the parcel and a memory surfaces, one that’s never come back to him before, a moment he’d entirely forgotten, but that is now as clear and hard as a jewel. A day in his childhood, when he went with his mother to the pear orchard, the copse of fruit trees nestled just inside the walls of Castelfranco. It was late August, the sun was setting through the branches and that same odor—surely—was in the air: his mother’s scent and the heady smell of sap rising, and of eternal, golden days ahead. He pulls back the overlaps of wax parchment and is about to see what’s inside, when a thought comes to him.
“Is anyone still in the square?” Leda doesn’t seem to understand and he snaps, “My garzoni, are they there? Quickly, look.”
She goes to the window, cups her hands over her eyes and peers out. The weather has turned since everyone came to sing: a stiffer wind has picked up, and as it drives down the side streets and across the piazza, it makes the snow dance in raggedy tendrils. “The square is empty,” she says.
Zorzo thinks for a moment. “Will you go and fetch them? They can stay down in the hall and I’ll send this down to them. So we can look at the same time. We must share the moment, Leda. Are you sure they’ve all gone?”
“No one is there.”
“Fetch them, please. We must be together.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“Yes, it must be now.” For a while he says nothing more. He casts his eyes around the room very slowly, as if he is seeing it for the first time.
“Zorzo? Why don’t you sit down?”
She motions him toward a chair, but he waves her away. Inside, a curious change is turning through him. He feels light, poised, or rather the weight of sickness is lifting away. He’s clearheaded. The room is sharp. It gleams. Everything is in focus, like one of those meticulous paintings the northern Europeans are so good at, where every object, each detail of a room, has clarity and believable mass. There’s an order to it all. All Zorzo’s senses are piqued. He can pinpoint each individual odor in the room, plaster here, cut timber there, linseed, bone primer. He can hear the quiet roar of the fire, snowflakes patting crisply against the window, the crackle of candles. He can hear, in neighboring houses, going-to-bed voices, low and benign.
“Leda, I think—” He looks at her, amazed. “I feel better.”
“What?”
“Something is righting itself. I’m sure of it.” He keeps surveying the room, to be sure he’s not imagining the alteration. “We have won, Leda. Look at what we have. Prince orient. We are made. We may have lost the commission, but we have beaten them all in this. Prince orient is ours.” He looks down at the line of shadow beneath the flap of the parcel. All he has to do is lift it and see. “You must go and fetch my fellows.”
“Do you really feel better, Zorzi? Really?”
“Yes, in truth, yes. People get well from this, don’t they? Or a fair portion do. I wouldn’t be the first. I’m healthy, so why not? This treasure has done it.” He rolls up his sleeve and runs his hand along the side of his arm. “This lump here, at my elbow—it’s smaller, isn’t it? Hasn’t that dreadful color gone from it? It’s shrinking, no? And this on my neck. It feels like the life has gone from it. We have won, my darling. In the end, everything is as it was meant to be.”
Leda, disbelieving at first, is ecstatic now. “I shall get them, straightaway.” She bustles around, looking for her coat.
“And buy some wine to celebrate.” Another idea strikes Zorzo. “No, don’t buy it. I have it already. My special case. We must toast our success with that. Find it before you go. Downstairs, directly below us, you know the second storeroom. In the corner, there’s a tall trunk, inside it a wooden box, painted red. Bring that. It has sat down there for as long as I’ve been in the red house.”
Leda laughs, blows a kiss to him with both hands and goes down the back stairs to look.
Zorzo has had the wine hidden away for almost a decade. He’s always felt ashamed of it, embarrassed he was convinced to buy it, to spend as much as a tradesman or gondolier earns in half a year on four bottles of forty-year-old liquor that might, for all he knows, be undrinkable. He had just won the commissions to paint the doge and the altarpiece of his home cathedral and had become—he can see now, but couldn’t then—impressed with himself, enthralled by the fuss circling around him, the attention, finding himself invited to balls and dinners, into grand rooms. At once there were new coteries of people in his orbit, ones he didn’t realize even existed before, enablers, fixers for the rich, experts, lubricators of high society’s wheels, purveyors of luxury. There was one fellow—Zorzo can remember everything but his name—an equerry of some kind, a palace official, who would very likely have ignored him if he had not become notable, but very charming and amenable, who convinced him to buy the wine from a dealer friend. He told Zorzo it was from a vineyard planted by Eleanor of Aquitaine, a private estate on the banks of the Loire, tended by monks, and which produced a liquid that was honey sweet and the color of gold. He convinced Zorzo that owning some of these rare bottles would be a mark of his arrival in society, a bold statement of success.
“Have you found it yet?” he calls down through the floor.
“I’m looking,” comes the muffled reply.
Zorzo notices Fugger’s note on the bed and remembers he hasn’t read it yet. He takes it up and this time the words are entirely legible.
No doubt you are right—about the world. If I may choose what I am, I choose a Hadrian, not a Nero. Yours, JF
Zorzo’s first feeling is of surprise, that the man is far from the monster he believed him to be, that he has listened, and understood, and gone to the trouble to let Zorzo know. Then he realizes the note is more momentous than that. That Jakob Fugger, one of the most significant individuals in the world, could reasonably change his behavior, or the way he thinks, or become a force for good, just because of what Zorzo said, strikes him as incredible. And even if Fugger’s approach doesn’t alter, he has at least understood. He has listened. That alone is remarkable. In that instant it strikes Zorzo that humans have a willingness to comprehend each other, and to share what they learn. It is the combination of these things that makes societies, and civilizations.
All at once, he cannot only see the room as it is now, see it with astonishing clarity, hear, smell, feel it; he can see it throughout its existence, from when it was a new house more than a century ago. He can perceive the traces of everyone who has inhabited it, all the little steps of advancement they’ve made, which may have been tiny at the time, but add up to so much more. Then the walls of the red house seem to fall away and he can see across the city, from high, like in Barbari’s woodcut. He can feel the history of Venice, the majesty and success of it. He can fall back in time and wonder at the first settlers, the canal builders, the pile drivers, the visionaries; and all the men and women who have shaped it since: engineers, planners, politicians, artists and experimenters. And he knows the promise of what’s to come. He can sense the other city-states of Italy—Genoa, Milan, Rome, Naples—and he could burst with sheer excitement at the scale of human endeavor. He can see further afield—to Paris, Tours, Granada, Prague and Ghent, even as far as the English shore—and every place is a wonder, indisputable proof of human brilliance. He lays his hand on the package.
As suddenly as the elation came upon him, like a wave it begins to ebb away, to turn foul against him. Inside, something collapses, something vital and structural, and beneath are banks of pure pain. The room elongates, the ceiling stretches up, the walls turn red, then brown, as if paint were being poured down them. There are doors all around, behind which little vignettes of his life play. He tries to see inside the rooms, to relive those moments of another time, but the doors start closing, slowly to begin with, but soon slamming shut quickly, one after the other—and the closing doors spiral into darkness above him. He’s falling, into a vortex, down, down, toward an incontestable hardness, toward that unendurable pain. There is a sudden burst of pigment, like a firework in his head. The snowflakes outside are sparks of color hammering at the glass. He hears Leda come up the back stairs and tries to call out to her, but no sound comes. There is a void of power. He sees her shadow rise, stretch across the room, and her feet turn to him. Everything is dark purple. Then, like a candle being struck out, even that turns to black.
Leda sets down the box of wine and puts on her coat and hat. “I’m going to get them, then. I’ll be back soon. Zorzo?”
His feet are on the ground, his knees twisted and his top half lying diagonally against the mattress. Fugger’s note hangs from the fingers of his hand. No part of him moves. Only his hair shivers against the breeze through the window. When Leda realizes what has happened, her face turns to stone. She stands for minutes, not moving, before going to close the window. Below, a woman is standing alone in the square, staring up at the red house. All in black, she’d be well dressed were it not for the fact that her cloak is in tatters, her face dirty from traveling and her hair disheveled.
Sybille Fugger.
Leda’s eyes meet with hers and at once there’s an understanding between the two women. Tragedy has come.