I duck under the rough-hewn wooden beams that line the ceiling of the root cellar under my father’s house. The health officials have neglected to bar the cellar door, perhaps overlooking it or not caring to take the time.
Looters, however, have already found it. I feel the crunch of glass shards under the soles of my shoes, and observe the circles outlined in dust where our winter provisions were once stored. A year’s worth of bounty from our garden—small glass containers of asparagus, cabbage, shallots, artichokes. All gone. Only the wobbly table in the center of the room remains.
The table. I feel a shock like a bolt of lightning run through my entire body.
The day my father discovered us here under the house, the battiloro and I had been sneaking away for several weeks already. In retrospect, I am not sure how we avoided notice that long. After all, we lived in close quarters all the time. We ate from the same pot, worked alongside one another, slept under the same roof.
My cousin must have realized it. But if he recognized the flush in my cheeks, the stupid grin on my face that would not disappear, my sudden distractibility, he said nothing of it.
When my father happened into the root cellar that day to discover me entangled against the wooden table with the battiloro, he said nothing. I dared not meet his gaze, but stood frozen, staring at his scuffed leather shoes and the bottom half of his worn breeches framed in the light of the cellar doorway. Then he turned and walked up the stone stairs.
When I returned to the house a few minutes after, flushed and staring at the floor, my father said few words but acted swiftly. As quickly as the battiloro had entered our workshop, I left it. It happened in a heartbeat, within a day. There was a hushed conversation between my father and our gastaldo, a mention of Master Trevisan’s name, a contract of eighteen months, a plan for learning the pigments, a new commission, and suddenly I was whisked with my trunk onto a fine gondola bound for the painter’s workshop with a promise to return home with newfound skills and a promised husband.
Cristiano and I only had one more stolen moment to exchange words. For a few precious seconds, we cleaved to one another in the courtyard next to his goldbeating bench. We consoled ourselves that we would lay eyes on one another for the Sunday midday meals. We hung our hope on the moments when we might slip away to meet in the monastery garden at Rialto on Friday evenings.
Neither of us imagined that it would end with a few hurried exchanges, a small golden token of affection now handed over to a crooked boatman in vain, and a cross on the door.
I lift the wooden hatch door that leads from the root cellar to the interior of my father’s house. I climb out and stand in the center of the grey, dusty workshop and take in the barrenness of the once-familiar space. I recognize the walnut beams of the low ceiling, the hearth with its single chain now devoid of a pot, empty of firewood. Only the wooden table before it remains, with its forlorn-looking chairs, one turned over on its side. All of the linens, rags, and cloth have been removed from the house, presumably burned. The sagging mattresses have disappeared, leaving the skeletons of the old oak bed frames in the bedchamber and the loft.
The house feels familiar yet strange at the same time, as if the entire world has fallen silent. I push the back door open and venture into the courtyard, where a few new green buds have appeared on the tree that shades the battiloro’s workspace. In the canal behind the courtyard the water stands stagnant and still. The old chicken coop stands empty and in need of repair, its door hanging sideways off the hinge. The hens have disappeared, and the small garden plot where we grow onions and root vegetables is dry, untended, and full of weeds. A tattered-looking cat, perhaps one who has wandered away from Signora Granchi’s upstairs rooms, lolls in the garden dirt and regards me through squinted yellow eyes.
I duck under the covered area along the canal and see the hammers still lined up on the worktable. The plunderers who rustled through our house neglected to reach the courtyard behind the house. In the drawer, I finger several gold sheets still intact in small vellum packets under the table.
It is as if the battiloro was here just a moment ago. I imagine that he has been sent out on an errand for my father and will return at any moment. I pick up one of the mallets, and in my mind I hear the noise of it ringing on the gold ingots. I stand at the table and place my hands on the plank of oak, full of knots.
Then I feel his presence as if he might walk into the courtyard where I stand. I feel filled up for a fleeting moment, then I feel only a void, only loss, for it is silent save for a bird rustling in the leaves of the tree branches above my head.