“We should replenish our supplies while we are waiting for our panels to arrive, Master Trevisan.” The journeyman examines the level of indigo powder in the bottom of a glass jar.
“A worthy observation,” says the painter. “The carpenters...” The painter raises his pen from the paper and scratches his head. “They are good, but they are slow. I waited months for the last set of panels we made for the scuola. You are right to think about preparing everything in advance so that we are ready to begin when they bring our panels.”
Alongside the hearth, the journeyman is putting the final touches on a boulder in the landscape of a small picture showing a miracle of San Rocco. Master Trevisan says that he has received three requests for pictures of the plague saint just this week. “Have you seen if we have enough of the red bole for the project?” Trevisan’s journeyman asks. “Maria?” It takes a moment for me to realize he is speaking to me. “Maria.”
“Forgive me,” I say, feeling my cheeks warm. “No. Yes. Yes, I did examine the containers,” I fumble.
For days I feel that I have been living inside of a dream, disconnected from my actions. I work on my drawings, practice mixing the paints, work on my trees and my drapery, but my heart and mind are not in it.
My mind is all focused on my body now. Surely my menses will begin. I must have retired to the latrines or the bedchamber to lift my skirts and check one hundred times today. But each time, there is no sign.
“I would estimate that there is enough for one or two panels,” I say, gesturing to the series of lidded ceramic jars on the shelf, “but not for the size that we need.”
Master Trevisan opens the lid of one of the jars on the shelf. “Hardly any left in this one,” he says, then addresses me. “Over the coming days you might visit the vendecolore for some new red bole. I am certain that you will know what to select better than I.”
“For years my father has patronized a vendecolore on the Zattere. Master da Segna,” I say.
Trevisan nods in approval. “Boatman can bring you there and help you carry the supplies back to us.”
“Of course.” I nod in agreement and turn back to my work, but my mind is far distant from the painter’s studio.
Cristiano.
The battiloro.
He is all that I can think of now.
The battiloro came into my father’s workshop as most people do, through the ties that bind us to our own guildsmen and those of our related trades.
Two narrow alleys away from our own lived an old goldbeater, Master Zuan. The Zuan name was already well-regarded in my great-grandfather’s time for the family’s fine sheets of beaten gold, free of all impurities and thinner than the most delicate autumn leaf. The bonds between the Zuan and our own workshop went back generations, my father had told me when I was a small girl. Master Zuan’s own father supplied my nonno with the gold leaf, and on before that as far back as anyone could remember.
Some Sunday afternoons, Master Zuan’s stooped figure would appear in our doorway. He would remove his felted wool cap and grasp my small shoulder in greeting with a wiry hand. I poured Master Zuan and my father small glasses of watery brew while the old goldbeater regaled my father with stories through his toothless grin. My cousin and I sat quietly at the men’s feet or under the worktable, rolling a roughly carved wooden ball back and forth while the men passed the hours in amiable companionship before the fire. Paolo and I shared secret smiles as we heard the goldbeater repeat the same stories over and over, and listened to my father respond as if he were hearing them for the first time.
Master Zuan had no sons of his own. His elder daughter was given in marriage to a maker of gold rings. The younger had died of a fever before she became a woman; sickness took the goldbeater’s wife soon after. Even as a small girl I suffered the old man’s loneliness as if it were my own, and felt his satisfaction in capturing the ear of a patient friend.
On one of these Sabbath visits the old battiloro told us that he had taken in an assistant to learn his trade. A half-Saracen, he told us, still a boy. The boy came to him by way of a wealthy patron who had just passed to the World Hereafter, Zuan said. The patron held a deep respect for the goldbeating trade and a longtime affection for the goldbeater himself, whom he had tasked with making gilded objects over several decades. According to one of the provisions in the man’s last testament, his house-slave was made a freedwoman, and her own son was apprenticed to Master Zuan as a token of the dying man’s appreciation. Old Master Zuan was teaching the boy to hammer the ingots into nearly weightless leaves, cut and package them between vellum sheaves, then compile them into small books. He showed promise already, Master Zuan told us. His name was Cristiano.
Years would pass before I laid eyes on Cristiano myself. By the time my father brought him into our own workshop, he was a man, as respected among our guildsmen as old Master Zuan himself.
From the day he appeared under my father’s roof, things would never be the same.
“I have a solution to your... circumstance.”
Antonella wipes down the wooden table in the center of the kitchen with a damp rag. Across from me, Trevisan’s little boy is licking a batter of eggs, milk, honey, and rice flour from a wooden spoon. The mixture makes splattered patterns across the table, the remnants of Antonella’s baking in preparation for Carnival. The aroma of the fritters we call chiacchiere lingers in the air. Normally I relish tasting the dough myself, but today I feel as though I will vomit. I know that I will need some energy, as the painter has asked me to visit the color-seller to select the gesso and bole for our panels. I select a pear from a bowl on the table, no doubt set aside in syrup in a glass jar before the winter. I taste its tangy sweetness as I push back another wave of nausea.
“Vale,” Antonella lifts the little boy under his arms and sets him on the tile floor. “Your mother is waiting for you upstairs.” Young Trevisan sets down the spoon, then races to the staircase. He clambers up the worn wooden treads on his hands and feet.
Above our heads, I hear a door slam. In my mind’s eye I see the half-dozen doorways on the main floor. They must lead to the private chambers of the painter and his family, but I have not seen these rooms, for the doors always remain closed, casting the stairwell into darkness.
“Mamma!” I hear the boy’s shrill voice fill the dark stairwell above our heads. Then there is the screech of metal hinges.
“Vieni, amore.” The muffled voice of the painter’s wife. Another door slams, then the clamor upstairs falls silent.
“Now.” Antonella puts the hand with the rag in it on her hip, then scrapes a chair across the floor and sits next to me. She lowers her voice. “My cousin Bartolomea,” she says. “She lives in Dorsoduro.” Antonella points to the back wall in the direction of the neighborhood on the other side of town. “She came before me from Sicilia with her parents. Now she is grown and works alongside the midwife to deliver babies, but she is also good with herbal remedies. She knows how to cure headaches, back pains, even make poisons. But she also knows how to make other... concoctions.”
I return her whisper. “Concoctions?”
Antonella rubs a sticky spot on the table with her rag. “Well. She has taken on cases of gravidness that were… inconvenient.”
I stare at Antonella silently for a few moments.
She shrugs. “Cavolo, you think you are the only one in Our Most Serene City carrying a child by accident?” She wags her hands at me.
“I never said that I am...” I feel my shoulders drop, realizing that it is futile to lie about such matters to a woman with whom I share a bed, who is aware of the monthly cycles of all the women in the house. “I never said it was an accident.”
Antonella snorts loudly into the air. “Pallini. You are not a wife, not even promised. You cannot convince me that you came into the painter’s house knowing that you were with child. I was not born yesterday. Fidati di me. I have seen it before. Young girls... old girls. There are certain circumstances when it is inconvenient. Undesirable. Dangerous.” She stops to consider my face but I say nothing.
“I even know of a woman who was impregnated by a Moor,” she continues, lowering her voice even further and leaning closer. “Do you not think she was the first in line for my cousin’s concoction? Ha!”
I feel my mouth open, but no words come out. I scrape my fingernail across a piece of dough stuck to the wooden tabletop.
“I do not know about you, but the last thing I would want to bring forth into this world is a baby like that. The poor child would have no chance. Better to end things and go forward with your own life,” she says.
I can no longer remain seated, and I begin to pace aimlessly around the kitchen. “You do not know anything about my situation,” I say, hoping that she cannot see the heat rising to my face or hear my heartbeat, which surely must be so loud that it is audible.
“I only know that you did not come into this house with an idea that there was… something… forming in there.” Antonella waves her rag toward my stomach, then crosses her arms. “Either you became pregnant before you came here,” she pauses and sets her black eyes on me, “or shortly after you arrived.”
“You are crazy,” I say in a loud whisper, my heart beating uncontrollably in my chest as I stare daggers into her black eyes. I cannot process what she is suggesting, and I feel I must leave the room or I will strike her. I make my way toward the door to the painter’s studio. “I am going on an errand for the painter. Perhaps he has already let the boatman know.” I begin to push the door with my palm, but Antonella grasps my sleeve and I stop.
“I do not mean to push you,” she whispers, her sour breath puffing on my neck. “But just... think about it.”
I press the door open with my palm and let it swing closed behind me.