The Passion of Artemisia

  Shouts pulsed in my ears. Approval or outrage, I couldn’t tell.

  “However,” the Locumtenente raised his voice, “due to his interference with the true and honest testimony of witnesses, the defendant Agostino Tassi is banished from Rome.”

  Pardoned? Did I hear that right, buried in all those words? I was struck dumb. Whereas the plaintiff has consented . . . Had Papa withdrawn the charge now that he’d gotten his painting back? Had he allowed Agostino to be pardoned? Blood rushed up to my ears and fury seethed in me. I leveled at that man who was my father a hateful look he’d never forget. He had no conscience, no honor, no concern for anyone but himself. I’d never call him Papa again. He would never hear me say the word he loved.

  Numb, barely knowing what I was doing, I pushed my way through the crowd. My skirt was stepped on. I yanked it free. Stumbling out the door into an inferno of glare, I turned in the opposite direction from home and lost myself in unfamiliar streets. I kept hearing the Locumtenente’s words: The prisoner is pardoned. Heat waved up from the street. I passed the Campo Vaccino and the Palatino. Pardoned. Free.

  Banishment. That was ludicrous. Gratuitous. All Agostino needed was Cardinal Borghese to state that his ceiling was unfinished. Agostino could have sanctuary in the cardinal’s residence. Banishment meant nothing in this city run by the pope. All that humiliation for nothing. Not disputing the claim . . . Small vindication, unheard in the roar of the pardon. There had been no statement of my innocence, no reparation of any kind. In the public eye, I was still a stained woman. What had I thought? That I’d be able to walk out of there as pure as Santa Maria?

  Putting one foot dully before the other, I walked all the way to the southern edge of the city, to the Porta Appia, through the arch and out the Via Appia into the open countryside. Cicadas made their metallic scraping hiss, like an irritating ringing in the ear. Houses were abandoned. The stucco had fallen away, showing bricks and stones beneath. Arches led nowhere. Broken walls and sunken tombs were overgrown with anemone, blue cornflowers and orange poppies. It was a fantasy of ruin, a life lost in every stone.

  I sat on a crumbling wall under the shade of a tall umbrella pine and tried to rub the ache out of my back. A thundercloud billowed on the horizon. Oh, why didn’t it just come here and wash everything away—me, Papa, Agostino, the Tor di Nona, Rome itself. A smooth, white stone with a vein of sparkle glinted through the dust on its surface. I picked it up to throw, but I didn’t know where to hurl it. What would a single stone do against the universe?

  I kicked sand over an anthill and watched the blind frenzy of creatures of no consequence. Hundreds, thousands of ants—they reminded me of the thousands of nameless, hapless legionaries who had marched to war on this road centuries ago, had fought and lay waiting to die, their parched lips unnoticed in greater pain. They were persons of no consequence. Armies dying like ants, ants dying like armies—it was all pitiful. Bigger things than my own life had happened here, and smaller.

  I remembered a story Sister Graziela had told me about Christ walking here. Peter, fleeing Rome, had asked him, “Domine, quo vadis?” and Christ had answered, “I am going to Rome to be crucified a second time.” Shamed, Peter turned back to face his own martyrdom, maybe from this very spot. I’d have to turn back too. I closed my eyes and breathed slower to let the new truth settle and find a spot to live in me—how hard the world was going to make me.

  Graziela had said I might have to wait until my Susanna and the Elders would be famous for Rome to know my innocence. It might never be famous. I spat on the stone to get off the powdery film and started back, looking for Peter’s footprints on the dusty cobbles.

  I went to Santa Trinità instead of home, and found Graziela weeding in the herb garden behind the cloister. I bent down to help her, though I hardly knew which were plants and which were weeds. She didn’t make me tell her about the trial. Her calmness helped to settle me. Finally I asked, “In the story of Susanna, what happened to the old men? When Susanna resisted and they spread the false rumor about her adultery . . . ?”

  “She was brought to trial and convicted because the elders claimed they saw her fornicate with a young man in a garden.” Graziela sat back on a low wooden box and brushed the dirt off her hands. “She was sentenced to death, but at the last minute Daniel demanded to know, of each elder separately, under what tree in the garden had she committed adultery. One of the elders said it was an oak, and the other said it was a mastic. That proved that at least one of them was lying. They were both put to death for false testimony.”

  “And so Susanna was saved?”

  “Yes.” Graziela put the weeds in a pile and we rinsed our hands in the stone water basin. “And you? What has happened for you?”

  “There was no Daniel. I’ll have to wait until my Susanna becomes famous.”

  The tiniest breath of a sigh escaped her, and her dark eyebrows came closer together. Her mouth was puckered in an unpleasant expression, and her jaw protruded from her wimple farther than I’d ever noticed. We walked back through the cloisters, our heads down, thinking.

  I could say it. Right now I could say it—that I felt a calling. I wouldn’t have to go back. Graziela would tell Sister Paola and she would burst into song. I smiled inside at the thought of her excitement. But a life of painting tiny tendrils on the margins of prayer books—without boldness, without interpretation, without drama—that wasn’t for me.

  When the great bell rang for vespers, Graziela stopped and pulled back her shoulders. Her fist clenched the crucifix on her rosary. “Though it would pain me not to have you visit, you might have to leave Rome. If you do, don’t go out of any sense that you’re being hounded out of the city. Go because the city is too small for your genius.”

  “Here.” I put the stone in her hand with the crucifix. “I found it on the Via Appia. Maybe near where Peter saw Christ. It’s smooth enough to burnish the gold on the pages of the Psalter for your cardinal.”

  We stood in the darkened anteroom and held each other for a long moment.

  I went directly home.

  “I can’t live with you,” I said when I came in the door.

  “Artemisia, where have you been? I was worried. You can’t just go wandering around the city by yourself.”

  “What does it matter now that my reputation’s ruined?”

  He had already hung the painting in the main room and was sitting opposite it, drinking wine, his feet in velvet slippers on mother’s cushioned footstool.

  “I can’t live with you as if nothing has happened, the painting back on the wall in a happy household. You betrayed me! My own father. You took away any chance to restore my virtue.”

  He scowled. “No. I—”

  “Getting a painting back was more important to you than my honor. To you, I’m a person of no consequence.”

  “That’s not true.” His hand trembled. Some wine spilled on the table.

  “Agostino’s free now. How do you think I’ll feel here at home while you go off every day to paint with him for some cardinal who pays no attention to legal judgments?”

  “I thought you wanted it to be over.”

  “It won’t be over. Not with Agostino pardoned. That doesn’t exonerate me. It’s impossible for me even to stay in Rome.”

  “In time, Artemisia—”

  “Do you think I want to face neighbors and shopkeepers every day who believe that pack of liars in court? What kind of life will I have here being a target for chamber pots being emptied?” He reached out to hold my arm. I pulled away. “You think about that until the food runs out. Don’t assume I’m going to face ridicule and scorn every time I go out to shop for food for my dearest papa.”

  “Artemisia, don’t be foolish. It’s just a brief unpleasantness.”

  “It won’t be brief unless you do something.” I gave him a long, cold look. “You have some amends to make.”

  He looked shaken, and spread his hands out on the table. “I . . . I’ll arrange som
ething.”

  5

  Sister Graziela

  Pietro Antonio di Vincenzo Stiattesi, Giovanni Stiattesi’s brother from Florence, counted the coin of my dowry on the tavern table in the Borgo across the Tiber where Papa thought we’d be less known. I felt like a bartered goat. This stranger who was soon to be my husband didn’t even look at me standing at the edge of the room, so I stole a few glances at him. His boot hose sagged and his codpiece cords were leather, not silk. I had never seen a codpiece except in paintings. They weren’t in fashion anymore. What was he doing wearing one? If these marriage clothes were his best, I understood immediately why Father had been able to arrange this marriage of convenience. The dowry.

  It was borrowed from the state dowry fund, he’d said, and from someone else. He wouldn’t tell me who. If it were anyone else, he’d tell me. Like creeping ice in my veins, I realized that the money for the dowry must have been part of the negotiations behind closed doors while I and the Roman rabble had waited for a verdict. To be married with Agostino’s money turned my stomach sour.

  “My brother will be good to you. He is a painter,” Giovanni whispered next to me.

  “No proof of goodness in that,” I whispered back, then felt shame for my rudeness. I knew better. I should be grateful.

  With a hand calloused by the resting of a palette, Giovanni’s brother swept the coins off the table into his pouch, and finally looked at me. His face was not unpleasant, slightly pocked and longer than his brother Giovanni’s, with dark eyes set deeply in his head. I liked his dark curls. His small mouth had a tendency to move sideways. Perhaps in the years ahead I could take joy in such a mouth. I felt a small measure of relief. Some daughters, unwanted daughters, were married off to disfigured men, or old, crippled widowers. He smiled at me and I quickly smiled back. It reassured me for the moment. In such marriages as this, was love ever possible?

  I thought of my marriage cassone, packed and waiting in the carriage. Father had given me his tacking hammer and had told me to choose a few of Mother’s things. I’d picked her yellow and blue faience pitcher and washing bowl, her bloodstone hair ornament mounted in gold with a pearl drop, her small onyx perfume bottle, her carved wooden memento box, one of a matched pair with Father’s, and a brass oil lamp shaped with the figure of Diana whom the Greeks call Artemis, goddess of chastity. As an afterthought, I had packed Mother’s dagger. She’d always kept it under her bed for protection when Father stayed out late at night. I didn’t know what kind of a man this Pietro Antonio was.

  A year ago when I’d assumed I would marry Agostino, I had painted on the cassone a scene of a wedding feast—a celebration I wouldn’t have now. The impalmamento, the Mass of the Union, and the nozze were all to happen on the same day. There would be no banquet with crab apples, capons in white sauce, no tarts or marzipan, no wine, no toasts in our blushing honor, no music, no dancing, no happy friends bringing sweetmeats and wishing us well, laughing, teasing, saying pretty things, ushering us to the bedchamber and then reappearing at morning to learn that all was paradise. None of it. By noon my fate would be sealed.

  There was just enough time, if I took the carriage. I grabbed my cloak and sidled to the door. “I’ll meet you at the church. Santo Spirito.”

  “Artemisia! Where are you going? You can’t leave here,” Father said, but I was out the door.

  “The convent of Santa Trinità,” I told the driver.

  Under the cold wet breath of gray clouds, I waited at the convent door. A pair of mourning doves cooing softly went about their explorations together on the stairs. It was sweet how they pecked and explored but always stayed close to each other.

  Paola opened the door.

  “May I see Sister Graziela?” I asked with some urgency.

  “She’s in the church.”

  “Praying?”

  “No. Cleaning. Come through here.”

  I entered the church through a side door near the altar. The air was cool, still, and waiting. I found Graziela scrubbing the stone floor behind the altar. “Your way of life certainly keeps you on your knees,” I said.

  “Oh, Artemisia, you scared me. I thought I was alone.”

  “Do you have to do the whole church?”

  “Only behind the balustrade. Agility and humility go hand in hand, you know.” She moved the bucket away from where she was working.

  “I came to tell you—my father has arranged a marriage for me.”

  “As well he should. What do you know of the man?”

  “Only that he’s a painter. From Florence.”

  “And you will go there?”

  “Yes, today. They’re waiting at Santo Spirito right now.”

  “Better soon than later.”

  “I thought I wanted this, but now I’m afraid. All desire I’d ever imagined has been sucked out of me.”

  “Not forever. It doesn’t go away forever.”

  “How can I . . . I don’t even want to be touched.”

  “As long as you hold on to your pain, you’ll live a mean, bitter life. Leave it in Rome.”

  I felt uncomfortable standing while she was kneeling so I crouched before the sacristy steps. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You know you can ask anything. Softly. Someone may come in.”

  “What did you mean, abandoned by God and man?”

  She dried the area with a rag and moved back to do more. “I was married once, but my husband died.”

  “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “According to the law of forty days, the house we lived in was seized by my husband’s brother forty days after my husband died, so I had to leave. When I went back to live at home, my father said he had no money to keep me.” She scrubbed more vigorously. “He tried to find an old widower for me, but couldn’t.” Her voice dropped. “Because I wasn’t a virgin.”

  “What did you do?”

  “You can guess, can’t you? I wasn’t good enough for any man, so I was given to God.”

  Still on her knees, she scrubbed some more, talking to the floor and her scrub brush. “Piece by piece, I sold all I had for my dowry which I gave to the convent. All my clothes, some fine dishes and glassware, silver spoons and knives, pots, bed linens, pewter goblets, jewelry, a painting I loved.” She stopped and leaned back on her heels. “It was of Venus and Adonis in a garden. Not by anyone important, but I miss it. I pleaded with my father to use the money for my keep. He protested that it wouldn’t last my lifetime. So, when there were no more things to sell, I entered the convent as a postulant.”

  “You said once that you shouldn’t enter a convent unless you felt some calling.”

  “Yes. True. But I didn’t say when I learned that.”

  “Oh.” That changed everything I knew about her. “Did you have any children?”

  “No. We were married only five hundred and twenty-six days.”

  “How did he die so young?”

  “You will have me tell all, won’t you? Let it be a lesson, then.”

  She carried her bucket and scrub brush and rags to the sacristy step and sat down. She motioned for me to do the same. I was surprised because it was a disrespectful thing to do. The coldness of the stone seeped through my skirt.

  Her eyes, every shade of olive green and gray, with amber lights, seemed to deepen, as though they were seeing many things again. “I loved my husband, and moved in earthly heaven in his presence. He had a lover. I like to think, even now, that it was someone he knew before he married me, but that may not be so. I existed only when he touched me, and waited, breathing somehow, for the next soft word.”

  “Did you stop loving him?”

  “No. If it’s really love, it doesn’t change when you find out. Everything—eating, sleeping, waking, watching the rain—everything becomes shaded because you know. You still have walks in the country and nights of love, but they’re darkened by what’s unspoken.”

  “So what happened?”

  Graziela wrung out the wet r
ag into the bucket of dirty water, twisting the cloth with a force I’d never seen in her before. “The husband of his lover found out, and killed him. Dragged him into the Tiber, where all such men are bound.” She stared down at the gray scum on the water. “A loss as vast as Egypt,” she whispered.

  “I had no idea. You seem so . . . peaceful.”

  “One can achieve that.” She stood and lifted her bucket and brush and rags. “I’ll be right back. Wait for me in the third chapel on the right.” She pointed. “Volterre’s fresco of the Assumption is there. Take a good look. I just learned that the standing figure in the long red lucco on the right is Michelangelo.”

  She’d been married, I thought as I walked down the nave. I’d known her since I was twelve, yet this I’d never known. No wonder she was different from the other nuns.

  I looked through the wooden grating into the third chapel, and in the fresco there a man did wear a red cloak that hung straight to the ground. He had white hair, a white beard, and intelligent brown eyes. “Michelangelo,” I whispered. He was not looking up in astonishment as the Virgin in blue was taken up to Heaven as the other figures were. He was looking out at me with an expression of tender concern, looking into me even, giving me a kind of benediction. I was going to his city to live and learn among his works. Below his full sleeve, his hand was gnarled and scarred from chisels. Love surged up in me for those hands. Even a scarred hand can bring forth greatness. There was a connection between us, between our spirits, I dared to think. No man might ever see it, but there, in the silent church, God could, if He wanted to, bless a union of souls.

  Graziela found me. “Sister Paola is coming to say goodbye. I only have a minute.” She reached deeply into her sleeve and drew out a tiny muslin bag. She untied the drawstring and tipped into her palm two gold earrings, each with a large creamy perla barocca, the luster covering a gnarled surface like a whorled walnut. “Imperfect. Like humans,” she whispered. “I know it’s vanity. I should have sold them with the rest of my things to give a larger dowry to the convent. Marcello gave them to me on our wedding day.”