One Illumined Thread, page 24
Sit and wait for the morsel tossed to your paws.
Sit down and shut up. Sit down. Sit, you dumb cunt.
Tris’s hand on my arm. The only part I can feel of my body. Whatever she is saying is drowned out by the noise in my head.
But her warm hand on my skin anchors something inside me.
‘Get out.’ The quietest of words from my lips.
‘Excuse me?’ he says, his mock surprise is persuasive. But he is challenging me to repeat what I’ve said.
‘Get. Out.’ I raise my voice. I am calm, like it’s somebody else speaking. But there’s his sly grin, the one that enjoys watching me unravel. The rage in me surges. ‘Get out of my life!’
I am heaving and panting and hot with the effort. Sharp, stabbing pains flare in my stomach. But with Tris’s touch burning through me I charge over to him, shove him with both of my hands to his chest, and he stumbles.
But now I am unhooked from Tris and I flounder. Wet down my legs. Now that I’ve pushed him aside there’s a straight line through the door, a door between worlds.
I run. I run. Always this running. Even when I am still.
Tris is calling my name. Following me out the staff door, down the university paths, over the footbridge. I’m sprinting and sobbing. The blue-ribbon schoolgirl from every sports day. Because if you can run, then you are safe. And I will myself to beat her because the last thing I need is to see how I’ve failed her. Her glazed look of disappointment that will haunt me forever.
But I can’t run anymore. My stomach slashed through with cramps. I stop near the footbridge and she pants beside me, unable to talk while she catches her breath.
When she does speak, it is gently.
She doesn’t say how could you embarrass me with that appalling behaviour? Says nothing like your outburst cost me more than you could imagine, you silly bitch, worthless cunt who might as well use her hole as a drainpipe.
‘I will fix this,’ she says. Her chest rises and falls, teardrop earrings swinging. ‘Tell me what I can do. I’ll drop the deal in a second.’
I am confused by her sincerity. What does she owe me? Why take my side without explanation?
‘Who is he? Did he hurt you?’
And I almost surrender. Almost fall into her strength, into her warmth, to soak in her safe touch. But I must shut people down. I must shut people out. I must do whatever it takes to keep the shameful secrets inside me.
‘Mind your own business,’ I say, backing off. ‘I need nothing from you.’
Cramps flare through my belly, my shoulders. It’s hard to stand straight, harder to walk.
‘I think you’re bleeding,’ says Tris, coming towards me. Her eyes are frightened. Not the eyes that I know to be hers.
I hold out my flat palms to keep her away, my cramps now like contractions.
‘Call an ambulance!’ she shouts to passersby, reaching for me, tucking her arms under mine.
‘I’ve got you,’ she says, as I let myself be held, nausea sweeping, thighs leaking my warmth.
I can’t run anymore. Can’t resist. My legs buckle beneath me.
She cradles me against her. Paramedics are running towards us.
The hospital bed is narrow, the mattress rustles like cellophane. The doctor is explaining complications of miscarriage. Haemorrhage. Infection. Laceration. Scarring. Depression.
‘Let her rest,’ says Tris.
The doctor is miffed, but leaves us alone.
And I want to say sorry.
But she says it for me. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, her warm hand inside mine.
Those words I once used to begin every weak sentence, now a spell-breaking poem. Perhaps hearing it, not having to say it, is enough. Or at least a beginning.
Then, inside me, an unravelling. Thread loosening, unspooling. Pieces detaching. Every frail stitch, sewn to keep me together, near to bursting.
I feel them, words releasing. I can’t stop their escape. And then it comes, all of it. Although she hasn’t asked.
You should have seen them together. Him and his dad. By sixteen, when Jonathan walked into a room, I’d look up from my stitching and catch my breath. The exact image of his father. In photos of Paul at that age, you could barely tell them apart.
He wasn’t meant to be on that train at that time in that city. He was never on time. But that day he’d been early. It was luck, they said, that there were not more people aboard. How I’d trembled with rage at their version of luck. The bomb took four lives. And for the life seated closest, it left nothing intact. Save for a camera bag left in the toilets. Always losing things, mislaying things. It drove me mad. And I drove him mad by complaining. And always late. But not that day.
Not. That. Day.
And my heart wants to explode and leave nothing intact.
But all I can feel is my hand being held.
Tris holding my hand. Holding me together while I fall apart.
23
Florence, 1516
I wake sodden and shivering with fever, grasping my belly. Am I in Rome? Back in Florence? The effort of moving a limb is like hefting a slab of stone. My hands find it. This small mound of my flesh, taut and hot. I wonder if I am dreaming or if I can feel it, my child, throbbing like a second heart beneath my palms.
I let my arm drop from my belly back to the bed. I try to open my eyes, crusted and hazy. I don’t know where I am. I roll onto my right side and fumble my hand across my nightstand. My fingers find the glass vial I keep by my bed. This is my bedroom. I am in Florence.
A creak of floorboards. The room swims in a blur. The bed shifts with weight, a hand on my brow. And while I was certain that I woke in my room, home in Florence, and not in the many fever-dreams of the last days, now I am unsure. Because of his voice.
‘Sei tu, morte?’ My dry lips crack and sting as I speak. Is that you, Death?
I try to focus my eyes. Try to reach my hand for him, this unwanted visitor, to push him back from myself. From my child. His voice in my ear.
‘Sono io,’ says the voice. ‘Sono io.’ It is me.
‘Vai via lasciami, morte!’ Get lost, Death!
‘Dormi. Dormi,’ says the voice. Sleep. Sleep.
Again, I slip into fever.
The chills come and go as if the angel of death comes to brush its wings across my body, to see if I will stir. I can feel my limbs lifted to wipe me down, sips of water poured into my mouth. How many days pass I cannot tell. But one morning I can move without struggling: the sweats have subsided. I think about the familiar voice in my ear that lulled me to sleep. If Death has come calling, I have not answered. Nor has my baby. Tears slide from my eyes at the thought, but I have no will to cry.
Soon I can sit up and take a thin broth. When I am able to rise from my bed long enough to wash my own face, it is a small victory.
‘The mal ‘aria in Rome causes illness. It’s the filth of the river,’ the physician tells Fredo, pressing his fingers deep into my belly. ‘But who knows the effect? If she delivers an imbecille it will be no surprise.’
It is clear he is unimpressed that I journeyed so far in the early stages of my pregnancy. I am too weak to care. I hear the chink of coins from the merchant’s son into the hand of the physician.
‘He’s ill-mannered, but one of the best,’ says Fredo, whose recent shift into adolescence makes his voice wobble. His father is pleased with reports from Sarto and Michel, that his son has talent for fresco and has given permission for him to stay longer.
I lift my hand to let him know it doesn’t matter what has been said.
The door closes and I hear him taking the stairs down to the kitchen. I feel myself drifting.
A gentle tap at the door; it squeaks open. I don’t try to respond, but I open my eyes, not so heavy this morning.
He stands in the doorway, leaning hard on the stick in his shaking left hand. I am already crying, reaching for him, expecting him to wash away in some shifting dreamscape. But he limps slowly towards me. I can smell bread baking downstairs. If this was a dream, could I still smell the bread? With great effort I push myself to sitting, opening my arms to him. He is warm against me, not like a dream. I bury my face in his neck. Feel his ribs at my chest. A hardness, a frailness, a greyness about him. But still him. My Eugenio. Awake from his sleep.
‘Where did you go?’ I ask through my tears.
He lifts a shoulder as if to say what does it matter? ‘Sono qui,’ he replies, his speech slow and awkward. I am here.
I embrace him even more tightly and take in the smell of his skin, my body heaving with the grief I have refused to allow. When I can bear to release him, I sit back and take my hands to his hollow cheeks, my fingers through his long hair. I can see half his face does not move like the other. And he lifts a kerchief to blot the spittle that leaks from the side of his mouth.
‘Il bambino?’ he asks with slow, laboured speech.
‘Tutto bene,’ I reply, taking his hand to my belly.
‘But Rome?’ He shakes his head slowly, looking pained. It is clear he, too, does not approve of my journey.
‘I have so much to tell you,’ I say, summoning optimism and trying not to look alarmed as he struggles to coordinate his body and mind.
‘Lucia?’ The single word with its question comes out in extra syllables, quavering and indistinct.
A sense of deflation almost overwhelms me. I’d visited the places the abbess suggested in Rome. And quite a few more. Neither their books nor their memories held any clue. Not a trace. Not even a suggestion for where to look next.
‘Not Lucia,’ I say. ‘But something else, quite unexpected. I found the name of a woman, Bianca di Biagio di Bindo. Plain as you like in black ink on white paper. I’m certain I’ve found a distant relative of Mariotto’s. Di Biagio was his father’s name. You understand what this could mean?’
Eugenio’s expression is doubtful.
‘I have an address on Via Santa Margherita, here in Florence. Can you imagine her face to discover she might be related to a painter of Florence who once worked for the Medici? We must visit! Please don’t deny me.’
‘Soon,’ he says, trying to bring his handkerchief to his mouth to blot his lips.
‘Not soon enough,’ I say, pushing my head back to his chest to hear for myself the aliveness inside him.
He stays by my side. Sometimes I wake and watch him sleep in the chair placed next to my bed. When fatigue comes again I do my best to remain awake, terrified that I might emerge from a sleep and find the chair empty.
He practises his walking back and forth across the bedroom while I tell my stories through tears. I tell him about the sketch that came in the box. About the pig, Alessio, who resented having to take me to Rome. About Fredo and his talent for fresco. About Baccio’s apprentice, Giulio, who was my patient guide in Rome. About the home for unmarried mothers and the widower, Alberto Cabibe, who started the place with his wife. About the leather-bound book with the names of women and children, and the name of Bianca. That perhaps he was right all along and I should let Zia Lucia fade into the past and vanish, since it seems clear that’s what she wanted.
‘Bianca,’ he says, the effort of three syllables too much for us both.
I press myself inside his arms, against his thin body, making him promise to never again leave my side. He covers his face with a trembling hand and silently weeps. Both of us falling asleep with exhaustion.
Once the physician reports I can venture out for a walk, I announce to Eugenio we will head the next morning to Via Santa Margherita. To see the woman, Bianca, whom I pray is Mariotto’s relative. A branch for my new family tree.
My heart swells with emotion when I open the door to see Eugenio in his finery. Fitted Perpignan hose, a tailored brocade farsetto cut close to his now smaller chest, a blue velvet doublet, and over this a fine black wool mantle, pleated to fill out his frame. On his beautiful curls, a black velvet berretto. To dress and groom himself like this will have taken all morning. Even leaning hard on his stick, he cuts a fine figure.
‘You don’t approve?’ I ask when he frowns.
I’ve changed from my cornflower-blue gown back into my plain shift and apron. I tried my masticot-yellow gown with beaded sleeves. Took it off, put it on. Settled on a frock, once my mother’s, that I felt looked proper.
‘Di chermisi,’ he says, waving an unsteady hand to shoo me upstairs to change into the fine red velvet gown I had made when Mariotto sold a painting to a merchant in Venice.
‘But I don’t have a cloak or hat to match it,’ I say, in truth feeling the dress is excessive.
‘Sbrigati!’ he says, telling me to hurry, leaning his weight against the wall so he can point his stick to emphasise his impatience.
‘Irascibile,’ I say, heading up to my room to change.
‘But not deaf,’ says Eugenio, less slowly than usual.
My chermisi skirts swish under my cloak as I walk; they took almost eighteen braccia of fabric dyed with a red powder brought in from the East. The one pair of shoes Eugenio approves, chopine, slip back and forth on my feet with each step. I am grateful for how slowly Eugenio moves. At his usual pace I could never keep up in these wedged heels.
As I walk Via Santa Margherita, my stomach churns in the way it would if I was meeting a lover. And although I have been certain that myriad unforeseen obstacles will hinder my progress to the house of Bianca di Biagio di Bindo, sooner than I am ready I stand at her door.
A woman with a tight bun that pulls at the skin on her temples answers my knock. Spoon in hand, spattered apron: she is clearly a cook. But even her overdress is made of brocade and fine linen, and I feel a rush of relief for Eugenio’s good taste that saw me change into this dress. If the cook wears such fine clothes, Bianca’s are certain to be finer.
From somewhere inside comes the piercing squawk of a bird.
‘If you’re seeking il padrone di casa, we don’t expect him before the Feast of the Baptist,’ the cook says.
‘Forgive me for arriving unannounced,’ I say, already tongue-tied with what I rehearsed.
The woman looks me over, top to toe, toe to top.
‘Bianca,’ Eugenio interrupts, his need to articulate slowly, carefully, making him sound derisive. Bee-ANH-kah. As if talking to someone hard of hearing. Or stupid. She taps out her impatience with the wooden spoon to her palm.
‘We are friends of the family,’ I say.
The woman appears unmoved, and I expect the door to be thrown shut. Instead, a great bird, wings splayed in dazzling green and turquoise, flies towards us screeching, landing its sharp claws onto the woman’s ample shoulder.
‘Malachite!’ A younger woman appears in the hallway, shimmering embroidered violet-red skirts lifted to reveal dainty bare feet as she walks. Silver brocade drapes from the hems of each sleeve. A figure so dreamlike in its vivid colour and poise it is as if she has walked out of a painting. ‘Rascal bird!’ she says, nuzzling her face in the bird’s emerald feathers, taking it from the woman’s shoulder and onto her forearm. ‘Are you bothering Monna Catalina?’
The bird gabbles objections while Monna Catalina, tight-lipped, swipes a round dropping from her shoulder and leaves us without hiding her displeasure.
‘You are here for Marcello?’ the young woman asks. Her pale skin is framed by a tangle of black curls; her eyes are bright as blue glass.
‘Bianca?’ I ask this woman, who could less be Mariotto’s distant cousin and more his younger sister.
‘I am she,’ replies Bianca, stroking her bird. Its eyes closed and now purring like a satisfied kitten.
‘Bianca di Biagio di Bindo?’ I can think of nothing else to say.
‘Until last year,’ she replies, smiling. ‘Now it’s Fratelli.’
‘Sì, sì,’ squawks the bird, bobbing up and down in a frenzy.
‘We have come . . . I have come . . .’ I stammer over my words.
Eugenio pokes at the back of my leg with his stick.
‘I went to Alberto’s place in Rome, the hostel, and saw your name in his register.’ I try to explain, but my thoughts are a mess. ‘We thought, myself and Eugenio here, he came with me, you see, that you might be related to Mariotto di Biagio di Bindo Albertinelli.’
‘Does he owe you money?’ asks Bianca, her delicate brow spoiled by a wrinkle. The bird flaps its wings.
‘No, no! Not at all,’ I reply, and Eugenio groans with impatience. ‘Mariotto was my husband. An only child. He lost touch with his family and once spoke of relatives. And, well, now he is gone, I have no family of my own . . .’ My voice trails off while Bianca, like Signora Catalina, looks me up and down. Seems to study my clothes without obvious disapproval. Casting a glance at Eugenio beside me, wiping spittle from his mouth. I imagine, with shame, what a peculiar pair we must seem.
‘Take the biscuit,’ says the bird, spreading its wings to full width. Their undersides are vivid blue, unlike the top of the wings, which are green as the stone after which it is named.
‘Malachite, shut your beak! Mind your business!’ says Bianca.
‘Sì, sì, mind your business,’ the bird screeches without heed, batting its wings hard, the air rushing as it lifts from her arm and takes flight down the hallway.
‘Ignore the bird,’ she says, as if excusing a drunk uncle. ‘He’s being punished today for eating Cook Catalina’s bread dough.’ She brushes a green feather from her shoulder. ‘Mariotto was my father.’
The feather sails back and forth to the floor in a time that takes a moment. In a time that takes forever.
Lucia once told me there are two kinds of truth. The one that you know and the one that you tell. I’d been seated cross-legged before her on Nonna’s old cot, rapt by the serious and grown-up conversation.
‘The trick,’ she said, drinking the tavern’s best wine straight from the flask, ‘is in knowing what must be told.’
She sat back and examined me, and I tried to look as if I understood.
‘Allora, exempli! Where is the truth in a painting?’ she asked. ‘Is it in the mind’s eye of the artist, her first vision of an image?’
