On the mantel in the painter’s studio there is a small, exquisite gilded box of a kind I have never seen. We make gilded boxes in my father’s workshop, to be sure. From my workbench in the corner of the painter’s studio I can make out the decorative patterns across the lid, the kinds we make with metal stamps that have been handed down to us over generations.
But this box is different. Nearly all its surfaces are decorated with delicate, white molded figures and animals in relief. Women in flowing dresses, men in exotic costume, a lioness, an elephant.
Beneath the box on the mantel, I watch the servant woman, Antonella, sweep ashes from the great stone hearth. She gathers the gray powder into a pan, then pours the ashes into a copper bucket. The fire has been out for nearly an hour. Winter’s breath sweeps through the cracks around the canal-side door. I draw my woolen shawl tightly around my neck. Upstairs, the children have been tucked beneath a pile of blankets. The painter and his wife have also retired to the upper floors. The house is silent except for the gentle brushing of the broom on the stones. Flickering light comes from a pair of flames dancing in the draft near the door and a large bronze lantern on the worktable. In the candlelight, the gilded box above the hearth glints like a dull beacon.
I wipe my paintbrushes clean with a rag and I feel desperate to sing. In the foreignness of the painter’s studio, I do not feel at liberty to lift my voice. I have not anticipated this problem, for it has never occurred to me that I would not feel at ease to sing while I work. It is a popular frottola in my heart now; I feel like a muzzled hound, as if the song that has welled up inside my throat will burst out of me. My hands and my voice have always worked together as one. Singing is such an integral part of my gilding work that I doubt if I will be capable of fashioning the gold with my hands without lifting my voice at the same time. Sometimes my voice hums quietly, sometimes the words come out loudly, but I make a noise all the same.
Now I have fallen silent.
Some of my melodies are the ones we hear on feast days, those melodic chains that echo through the streets once a year and become lodged in our collective minds. Others are songs repeated over years in our parish church. Still others come out of me, sequences of notes of my own invention from someplace inside me that remains uncharted.
My father says that I sang even before I could talk, inventing melodies from the time I was able to open my mouth and make a noise. “To the joy of your mother’s ears,” he told me, before a shadow passed over his face and he fell silent.
Outside the painter’s studio, the boughs have been laid in the stalls and the convent choirs fill with the melodies of the Christmas season. I wonder if they have seen or heard any of it back home.
“Master Trevisan has agreed that you may come home every second Sunday for the midday meal,” my father had said to me as I closed the latch on my trunk and prepared to board the painter’s gondola. It was no consolation. “A presto, amore,” my father had said when he squeezed my hand and helped me step into the rocking boat. Only fifteen days ago. It feels like a lifetime.
“Are you coming up?” Antonella straightens her plump body, one hand on the small of her back as if it aches. I judge that she is not many years older than I, but her hands are dry and cracked, and she moves as if she is already an old woman.
“I have almost finished,” I say.
“Extinguish the lamps by the door before you leave the studio.” She gestures toward the canal before picking up the pail of ashes and pressing the door with her other hand. “You will need the one on the table to find your way upstairs.” She walks crookedly from the room.
As soon the swinging door to the kitchen comes to a halt, I feel the song well up in my breast. Quietly, I begin to hum. At first, the lyrics stay inside my head, a story about a man who tries to capture a woman’s heart by luring her with a small, soft dog. The words then begin to fall quietly from my lips in the flickering light. The knots in my shoulders and neck begin to unfurl. My hands seem to move effortlessly now, returning the small pots of pigment to the shelf.
As I hum, I imagine Antonella in the servants’ quarters tucked high up under the roof of the painter’s tall house. She is trading her worn housedress for a nightshirt and tucking her aching body under the stack of woolen blankets spread across the narrow, straw-stuffed mattress I will share with her. The family—the painter, his wife, their young son and their infant daughter—are asleep in a large room on the piano nobile, a gracious floor overlooking the bricked façades on the other side of the canal.
The rest of us—the painter’s journeyman, the maid, and now I, too—are lodged in rooms cramped under the eaves of the tile roof. I suppose my father discussed this arrangement with Master Trevisan, for he would not have wanted me in a room by myself on a floor filled with men, especially under the circumstances.
I share a well-stuffed mattress with Antonella in a small room with a single window overlooking three crooked chimneys. At first, something in her flashing, dark eyes made me crawl under the covers with her only with trepidation. But my unease has lessened, as Antonella has proven an agreeable bedfellow. She rarely tosses in her sleep and only snores a little.
I wait a few moments to make sure that Antonella is upstairs, then I lift my voice a little higher in song, a tune that I have known since I was a girl. It sounds loud and hollow in the giant candlelit room. The painter’s studio is several times larger than my father’s. A hundred pairs of eyes—those of saints, nobles, satyrs, nymphs—peer out at me from the painted panels hung on the walls and propped on the floor, a still audience for my reticent song.
It is these colored pigments that I have come to Master Trevisan’s studio to learn. I am to practice how to mix them on a palette, how to apply them with various brushes to the poplar surfaces, to fashion trees and rocks in the background of the great holy figures reserved for Master Trevisan himself to paint.
But the gold has brought me here, too. That is another story.
Before the painter and his wife came to fetch me from my father’s workshop, my father reminded me that we have worked together already for years. That is, the picture-maker Master Trevisan and my father, the gilder, have worked together for as long as anyone can remember. My father is a master of gold, while Trevisan the picture-maker is a master of the brightly colored pigments that magically transform into the serene faces of saints, into drapery, into fantastic landscapes. Put together with the carpenter and armature maker, all of us guildsmen make and restore some of the most beautiful altarpieces in Our Most Excellent Republic.
The timing was perfect, Master Trevisan told my father. He had just been given a commission for an altarpiece in the abbey of Santa Maria delle Vergini, the very convent where my aunt has spent most of her life. The patron asked for a large amount of pure gold leaf. Master Trevisan would need a gilder to work with him on the altarpiece for several months. The notary scrawled a brief contract, and the next day I was handed into the painter’s gondola with my trunk.
In addition to my meager belongings I have brought a large stash of gold leaf, stored in a dark wooden cabinet in my corner of the painter’s workshop. The nearly weightless sheaves of gold were flattened by the battiloro’s own hands.
My lover’s hands.
In my mind, I see him hammering the gold ingots in the courtyard behind my father’s house. I close my eyes and feel a tremor run through my body. It is his hands that I miss the most. I wonder what he is doing right now, if he is thinking of me as I am of him.
I bring my lantern to the hearth and raise it to get a closer look at the gilded box on the mantel. Though I have never seen one like it, it brings me comfort to see the familiar glistening gold patterning around the raised figures. I run my fingers across the figures. There is a woman in a roundel, a man with a sword, and two elephants in a procession. I try to raise the lid, but it does not budge. I press the small iron protrusion where a key must fit. It is locked.
My song comes to an end and my heart feels lighter than it did just minutes before.
From the empty hearth, a cold draft swirls around my ankles. I extinguish the flames by the door and grasp the lamp, heading to the creaking stairs. As I pass the hearth, my single flame makes the gilded box flash for a fleeting moment before disappearing into the shadows. I push the hinged door open into the kitchen then find my way through the dark to the back stairway that leads to the upper floors. I feel my way up three flights of the sagging wooden stairway to the long narrow hallway at the top of the house.
When I step into the room, Antonella is already snoring, a soft, rhythmic wheeze emitting from her mouth. I blow out the flame in my lantern and creep across the planks so I will not wake her. In the darkness, I feel for the wooden trunk wedged under the window. My fingers lift the lid and run over the two work dresses, the two smocks I wear to protect the dresses from stains, two nightdresses, and a comb that is nearly useless in my tangled mass of curls. I brought along a pile of gold leaf books, enough for the altarpiece that we will make at Santa Maria delle Vergini. That was the agreement with my father. Apart from the small collection of my own gilding supplies now downstairs in the painter’s workshop, this trunk holds everything I own.
My trunk is a failed marriage chest, a fitting container, I think. My father, and his father and grandfather before him, were applying gilded decoration to these marriage chests long before I was born. This one was abandoned in my father’s studio years ago, left behind after an engagement did not proceed for a reason that was never fully explained to me. When I had asked, my father, a man of few words, had only shrugged. My father never felt that it was his best work, but as a girl I loved to run my hands over the glittering repetitive designs that decorated the sides.
For my entire life this trunk has sat in the room of our house that serves as my father’s workshop as well as our dining, cooking, and gathering space. Until the day I left, it held the meager table linens made for my mother’s dowry. As a child I loved to pull out the lace-trimmed cloth and careful needlework to examine them. We never used them for they were my only connection to the mother I barely remembered and could no longer visualize in my head. It seemed the most sensible thing to put my own things in the trunk, so my father and I had emptied its contents onto a shelf and repacked the chest for my transfer to the painter’s house.
I run my fingers across the bottom of the trunk to feel for one of the nightdresses, an old linen shift that I have worn ever since the summer when I grew taller than my cousin. In the darkness I pull my smock and work dress over my head and push my arms through the nightdress. Then I slide into bed alongside the housemaid.
Above the sound of Antonella’s breath moving in and out, I can hear my own heartbeat. I close my eyes and immediately I see his broad face, feel his hands on my hips, inhale his musky smell. It has been less than a fortnight since he pressed my forearms in his palms and said, “I will wait for you.” It feels like years.
Tomorrow. Friday. It feels like it will never come.
In frantic whispers, we promised to meet every Friday night when the marangona bell rings. “There is a small garden behind the church of San Giovanni Elemosinario,” he had whispered quickly. “The one with the tower near Rialto market. I used to live near there with my mother before I was apprenticed. Halfway between here and San Marco,” he said. “The monks never use the garden. Open the back gate on the market side.”
Then my father entered the room and both of us cast our eyes back to the worktable littered with tools and shreds of gold leaf.
The moment I arrived in Master Trevisan’s house I looked for an excuse to leave the house on Friday evening. With some finesse, I convinced the painter’s wife that a certain baker on the edge of the Rialto market made the best yeast rolls, but only on Fridays. The painter’s wife raised her eyebrows and nodded. “Antonella will go with you,” she said. “Much safer than walking alone. Besides, you should make a friend of Antonella. She is capable and will help you in many ways. I trust her with my own children, after all.”
“Thank you, signora,” I said, and I was left to consider how I would break away from the maid in order to meet Cristiano in the garden behind the church.
If only my father knew.
My father. God help him. I press my palms to my face and the back of my head to the pillow. How are the men managing without me? It is during the winter months that my father’s ailment strikes with a terrible fury, when his breath comes raw and ragged, and he wakes us in the night coughing and gasping for air. I am the one who rises to boil water in the hearth, to mix the concoction of honey and thistle. I am the one who rubs his back and sings him back from the panic that fills his eyes when he struggles for breath. My cousin Paolo means well, but what can he do, with his lame leg and his weakness? How will he take my place?
My father tried to assure me that they would get on fine without me.
“Maria,” he said, grasping my shoulders, “I see now that I have been selfish in keeping you here for longer than I should have. When you return to us I will have secured a proper betrothal for you.”
I feel my heart sink now, just as it did when he spoke those words.
“Go,” he had said. “Learn all you can about the colored pigments, my daughter, for ultimately if our trade is to have any future it is in your hands, not mine.”
Mercifully, I begin to drift into sleep, but an image of a man with oozing black boils all over his legs suddenly appears in my mind. Fear grips me, and I sit up with a start, my heart racing in my chest. Antonella’s snoring stops.
“Stai bene, cara?” she asks in a slurred voice.
“Yes, I am all right. I am sorry,” I say. I press my head back on the straw-stuffed mattress. Antonella turns over, and the soft wheezing resumes. Inside my head, the pounding of my heartbeat is deafening. I feel perspiration form on the back of my neck even in the cool night air.
I know that every measure is being taken to combat the contagion, and that I am safe here in the painter’s house. But no amount of reason can calm my fear.
I want to see them, to see for myself that they are all right. More than anything, I want to go home.