At the ferry dock near Rialto, I scan the quayside for the Saracen boatman. Has he been successful in relaying my message?
The traghetto is quiet, with two boatmen sitting idly in their gondolas, waiting for passengers to exchange a bagattino for a ride to the other side of the Grand Canal, or more for a specific destination. One of the boatmen has stretched his feet up onto the aft deck of a grubby gondola, his head pitched forward, napping. In the shadows, before a rickety wooden hut, the scrawny station master whittles a piece of knotted wood with a small knife.
I have walked all the way from the painter’s house, trying to banish the image of the boatman and Antonella from my head. I wish I had never seen them. Perhaps I have been naïve not to realize that the two of them were more than collegial house servants. Now I see how she shared my secret, and I understand that nothing I do or say is protected under Master Trevisan’s roof.
“You need to go somewhere, signorina?” The station master stands and ambles down toward the edge of the canal. I reach my hand into the pocket of my cape and finger the parchment sheets folded tightly together, along with a long missive that I have written to my father and my cousin.
“No,” I say. “I am looking for someone. A man, a Saracen boatman who brings food from the market into the rio della Sensa in Cannaregio. I want to deliver a message.”
“Alfredo,” the man says.
I shrug, realizing that I do not know his name.
“The only Moor I have.”
“Where could I find him?”
The station master coughs and projects a wad of spittle onto the stones. “You cannot.” He turns his pale green eyes and grubby face toward me.
“What do you mean?”
He shakes his head. “Gone,” he says. “To the lazzaretto.” He gestures out in the direction of the far islands of the lagoon. “Alfredo… I told him he was crazy for going in there… beyond the barriers,” he says. “But he was lured by the soldi.” He presses his fingertips together as if rubbing together coins.
“He is sick?”
“Came down with a fever two days ago,” he says. “Loaded onto a ferry yesterday.”
A long silence falls between us under the weight of this revelation.
“Is someone else bringing food into Cannaregio?” I ask finally.
“Not from this traghetto,” he says. “Not anymore. I cannot risk another one of my men.”
The gastaldo’s workshop lies on the outer edge of Cannaregio. It is large and light, much nicer than my father’s. The studio sits on a well-trodden thoroughfare overlooking a small square with a carved wellhead in the center of the cobblestones. It is the abode of the man our guild has elected as its leader no less than three times. If there is one person from our guild who might be in a position to help me, it is Aureo dalla Stava.
I have never asked anything of our gastaldo, but with the barriers closed and the Saracen boatman from the ferry station gone to the pesthouse, what other choice do I have to reach my family and my battiloro? Surely Pyramus and Thisbe risked more than this for love.
Through the shop window I see the gastaldo sitting with his legs spread wide, his hands on his knees. On the workbench before him stand several tools in disarray and a litter of gold shavings. His spectacle, secured with a leather strap, sits oddly at a skewed angle atop his head.
After a moment, I see the gastaldo sigh and stand, pressing himself behind one of his tall sons at a back worktable. All three of the man’s strapping boys work with their father, crowding into the space. Each of his sons is an attractive man, well made, two light like their father, one dark-eyed and olive-skinned like their mother, who died years ago as a fever overtook the quarter. They have been taught well under their father’s tutelage. All of them are quiet and respectful men, all married well to the daughters of our city’s best painters and gilders.
I open the creaking door.
“Maria!” the gastaldo exclaims. “Che sorpresa! You are the last person I expected to see here.”
“I know,” I say. “I realize I am not supposed to be here but I am dying for news, gastaldo. I feel helpless and I have so little information about my family.”
He grasps my hands. “I am in daily contact with the men the Sanità has assigned to the quarter. They report to me at the end of each day if anyone has fallen ill or has been removed from the neighborhood.”
“My cousin? The battiloro?”
He shakes his head. “I have no news of any of them, Maria, which means they are well, as I have already told you. You must trust in that and be thankful for it.”
“I am going to try to get in. Will you come with me?”
He huffs, then shakes his head vigorously. “I am afraid that visiting them is out of the question, my dear. The street is blocked and the Sanità has stationed at least three signori di notte to guard the barricades. If it brings you any solace, I have not been able to see them myself. They will not let us enter, I promise you. Only the priests and health officials are going in.”
I feel my shoulders drop. I sigh audibly and nod. “I smell smoke,” I say.
The gastaldo gestures in the direction of a nearby square. “They have established a burning place in the Campo Sant’Alvise,” he tells me. When someone with lesions is removed from their home, the belongings are brought out of the house and put on the pyre. It has been burning like that for weeks now.” I feel a shudder run through my body and am not able to rid my nose of the smoke, which seems to infiltrate my entire body.
I feel the gastaldo’s light eyes settle on me for a few moments. “I see for myself that you are fit. All is well in the painter’s workshop?”
I nod. “Truth be told, I am not sure I will ever master the pigments but I do my best. Master Trevisan is experimenting with painting on canvas. He says it is the way of the future.”
“Canvas?” The older son scoffs from the back of the workshop. “That’s only for festival banners, stage props. If the painters of this city are painting religious pictures on canvas rather than on wooden panels, then we are finished,” he says.
The gastaldo shakes his head. “Absurd,” he calls to his son. “It will never happen. We have been gilding wood for many centuries and you all will continue doing so long after I have gone to the World to Come, I can assure you of that. But now, cara, you must get back to San Marco. It is not a good idea to be out on the street alone once the sun begins to sink.” He sets his eyes on me. “Maria. If there is any news of your family at all, I promise I will come deliver it to you myself. Now, let me walk you back at least as far as the baker’s bridge.”
“No, thank you, gastaldo. I do not want to take any more of your time. I prefer to walk alone.”
From the gastaldo’s workshop, I take a familiar shortcut under a low passage and over a narrow wooden bridge. I cross just as a gondola slips silently through the water beneath me. Its black bow parts the water like an arrow, then a hulking figure appears. A young gondolier emerges on the other side of the bridge. A thick leather belt cinches tightly around his strong frame, and breeches with vertical stripes hug his muscular thighs. A feather springs from his close-fitting cap. He turns and nods at me. The man’s body sways rhythmically as he rows away, a natural movement that makes him seem as if he were part of his craft.
As the boat slides around the corner and out of view, I am racked with guilt about the poor Saracen boatman, Alfredo, whom I tempted into exposure to the pestilence. I am sorry for him, but I think of all the thousands of boatmen in Our Most Serene Republic, and a selfish, desperate part of me wonders if there is another one out there who would be willing to take such a risk.
Along a street on the other side of the bridge, I slip into a small door in the façade of our parish church. The familiar dank smell of the building fills me, taking the place of the smoky aroma from the bonfires in the campo that still lingers in my hair. I sink into the solitude of the space, its quiet familiarity filling me, and I make my way to a small chapel along one of the side aisles.
I settle myself before a large gilded altarpiece that I have known my entire life. My father says that my great-grandfather and several other painters collaborated on it many years ago. It is an image of the Virgin and Child surrounded by saints. Saint Luke, the protector of painters, gazes out passively from the center panel, his halo punched and decorated with tools we probably still use in my father’s studio. I can picture each tool they used to punch the gold, and admire the particular indigo pigments sourced from the east and no longer available to us today.
The panel is still beautiful, though old and warped from years of enduring cycles of dryness and moisture. I see a new crack in the surface near the top of the picture, and I wonder if anyone else who sits in this spot has noticed it. I wish that I could scrape the dulled paint, sand and fill the cracks, and bring it back to its original luster. I wonder if there are small insects already eating the panel from the inside.
Before the gilded altarpiece, more candles have been lit than I have ever seen. I take a fresh taper from the box and light it with flame from a nearby candle, then press it onto one of the metal stakes fashioned for that purpose. Then, I lower myself until I feel my knees press on the hard, cold wood. In the candlelight the gold glows brightly, and I feel the slight warmth of the flames in the drafty cold of the old church.
I look at the image of the Virgin and Child, their passive faces and halos glimmering in the candlelight. I send a prayer up to her, to her son, to Saint Luke, to the other saints painted on the panel. In my heart I send up a silent plea for my Cristiano and for the child growing inside my body, and I wonder if anyone is listening.
Back on the canal, in the waning daylight, I see that the main street that leads into my family’s block has been barricaded. There is a formidable enclosure and a notice painted on a wooden panel over a doorway, a warning of contagion. I cut through an alley to the quayside along a narrow canal where I can make out the misty silhouettes of several moored gondolas, their boatmen absent. The shutters of all the houses bordering the canal-side have been battened closed.
When I turn the corner into the alley leading to the bridge where our workshop lies, I see that another wooden barricade has been erected across the entrance to the street. One of the signori di notte, sleek in a dark blue waistcoat, leans against the wall, checking his fingernails. On the other side, an older official stands by, dislodging something from the crack of a cobblestone with the toe of his shoe. Ignoring the men, I put down my head and hike my leg over a jumbled part of the wooden barricade where a board has already been loosened by someone else trying to cross.
“Signorina!” the younger man springs to life, his low voice echoing across the square. “You cannot enter. This section of the quarter is under a ban.”
“I live here,” I say. “My house is just there.” Through the cracks in the wooden barricade I point in the direction of my father’s house.
“Which house is it?”
“My father is the indoradòr Bartolini… beyond the bridge,” I say. “We make gilded panels. It is my father, my cousin, and myself, plus a battiloro.”
The younger man looks to the older guard for a response, and the older man shakes his head. He walks over.
“Signorina. You left home? How did you get out of the quarter?”
“My father brought me out. I am apprenticed to a painter in San Marco. Please, I must see my family. My father is ill.”
“How long ago did you leave home?”
“It was before Epiphany.”
“And you have not been home since?”
I shake my head.
“Signorina, you must understand that this barricade has been placed here for good reason. You cannot simply travel in and out of the quarter. It is under ban. I suggest that you return to San Marco. You will not be allowed back into the quarter until the ban is lifted.” The younger man squeezes my arm firmly and presses me back away from the barrier.
Reluctantly, I walk back to the painter’s house.
Heavy, wet snowflakes have begun to fall, a rare March event. The dusting of white casts the covered boats in the canal into silhouette. Snow fills the crevices of the leaded panes with small drifts and piles. Dusk has come earlier than usual and the oil lamps in the painter’s studio flicker and dance. I watch a small brown bird land on the windowsill and ruffle his feathers against the chill. I stoke the flames in the hearth, feeling the heat warm the front of my dress. For a fleeting moment, I allow myself to place my palm across my swelling midsection and feel the hardness there.
New life.
I send another silent message to my battiloro, willing it to travel across the snow-dusted alleys to Cannaregio, and I wonder if he has any inkling of it.
I feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, but it is not the cold. I turn to find the painter standing behind me, watching me with an intense gaze. When I meet his eyes he turns back to the table and appears to scrutinize his wooden palette. He clears his throat.
“Now that we have the panels for the Vergini commission prepared we can turn our attention to them in earnest.”
I nod, feeling grateful and excited that it means I will be able to turn back to the gold.
“We must get moving on this commission or it will end up here on my wall,” he says, gesturing to the pictures hanging from floor to ceiling.
“You have many,” I say. The painter’s studio is filled with pictures. Some of them are old and gilded. I run my hands over one gilded panel that my grandfather or great-grandfather might have made. Alongside it there is another picture that has captured my attention, that of a young woman reclining, with her head lolling on her arm. “Who is she?” I ask.
I hear the painter chortle. “Yes,” he says. “That one has a story.” He comes to stand beside me, enlacing his fingers behind his back. “A failed commission.”
“I did not imagine you would have such a thing,” I say.
He waves his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “It happens to all of us.”
“And so all of these pictures...” I begin, and the painter nods.
“Many of these are commissions that have failed for some reason—either for me, my father, or his father before him.” He shrugs. “The patron abandons them, changes his mind, or turns out not to have the money to pay. Sometimes patrons die before I finish their commission. More rarely,” he says, running his finger along the top of the frame to remove a layer of dust, “as in this case, the love affair runs its course before the portrait is finished.” He smiles, then turns back to the picture.
“The patron lost interest.”
The painter nods. “Alegreza Antelini,” he says, gesturing to the painting. “This one falls into the category of a love affair that ended badly before I could finish the portrait.”
“You did not have a contract?” I ask.
“I did, as always,” he says. “More importantly than that, I had a verbal promise from one of the most upstanding men in Our Serene Republic. A member of the Ten.”
“And he never paid you?” my eyes widen.
The painter shakes his head. “I was still very young, naïve enough to think that the signor would come to claim the picture, or at least compensate me for the many hours I had spent observing the woman’s face and body, and replicating it in paint.”
I imagine the woman in the painter’s studio, shuddering against the cold. I blush, but thankfully the painter does not seem to notice. Somehow the picture does not fit in the great space of the painter’s studio. It is a private painting, a cabinet picture meant to be savored, consumed. Consumed by one pair of eyes.
“And so,” the painter continues, “eventually I became resigned that this picture would end up hanging on the walls of my own house. In retrospect, I should have finished the picture before things went sour. I should have seen it coming.”
“What do you mean?”
“The young woman was… encumbered,” he says. I feel my stomach turn. “I saw it as soon as she disrobed to sit for the picture. I should have finished it that day and whisked it to the patron and asked to be paid before he discovered it.” He chuckles. “He was not the father.”
“What happened to her?”
The artist scratches his beard and shrugs. “You can imagine her father was not pleased. They did what parents in this situation do. They decided that their daughter was best suited for a life devoted to God. I heard from a reliable source that she took the veil and her vows. She was escorted to a cell at the convent of San Giovanni Evangelista on Torcello. The parents made a respectable donation of jewelry and religious paintings, which of course could be resold to offset the cost of housing their daughter for the rest of her days.”
Trevisan runs his fingers lightly over the textured surface of the paint, tracing the hourglass outline of the woman’s narrow waist and full hips. “Alegreza Antelini,” he says again. “She was one of our city’s great beauties, the envy of countless women, object of desire of countless men.” I try to imagine the curves of her body now obscured under the black habit of the Benedictines.
Trevisan stands back and observes his work. “This is a good one, if you do not mind my saying,” he says, tapping the panel with the back of his hand. “Too bad no one will see it.” He turns and smiles at me, the creases of his eyes wrinkling.