Читать книгу The Secret Price of History - Gayle Ridinger - Страница 5

Another magnificent afternoon, a sweeping view of blue sky, domes, noble palaces, and terracotta roofs, all the sunlight one could ask for, but American painter James Freeman was not satisfied with the way the sitting was going in his studio. During the morning session, Maria—a new pick of his at the Spanish Steps this morning, a thin girl with black eyes that danced more than those of the others and a recent arrival from Articoli Corrado, the village of models, whom he'd settled for as the more famous ones were engaged—had done fine enough; but now after lunch Freeman was beginning to regret his shift away from scenes of boy street urchins and beggars, the canvasses of which leaned against one wall in this work room and lined the length of the Persian rug in the adjoining parlour.

Maria was fidgeting, not keeping her basket of fruit still on her head nor her floral kerchief in place over her shoulders. He was rather surprised by this childish behavior. Experience told him that she had to be at least 16; he knew how to interpret the fact she had arrived this morning without any mother-chaperon.

"Hold still!" Freeman was good-natured in his complaint.

Maria's chin and shoulders settled obediently in place. Her eyes, however, skirted over Rome in the row of windows.

Something must be going on, he thought. He put down his paintbrush.

"Tell me, Maria. What's happening?"

"An execution."

"Who is it?"

"A boy from a poor family. He's very handsome, they say. But he won't make his confession. No bells this morning--didn't you notice, maestro? Now they have to wait till the Ave Maria at sunset." She shrugged. They'll kill him then even if he hasn't confessed."

"Why?"

"Ho ho, Madonna, Maestro, the boy has a sweetheart. A rich noble girl, Maestro. But one day a big important priest saw her and, Jesu, he wanted her. And you know what, Maestro? She refused him."

"Of course."

"Of course," Maria mimicked him under her breath, then giving in to her impatient nature; she took the fruit basket off her head, set it on the floor, and plopped down next to it.

So we're taking a break, he thought. He went over to sit on the small settee he kept in the studio for his visitors.

"What do you know about Rome?" Maria chided. "As far as I can see, you only paint pictures of poor people. We're talking about the rich. The boy shot a priest. And this priest is very important and influential. Some people say he's the Pope's nephew."

"Did he kill him?"

She dismissed his question with a wave of her hand. "Who knows? He stole a pistol and fired it. Whether the priest dies or not, you get put to death for that. Then the magistrate found out that the boy was part of the Republican movement, and that meant the boy would get drawn and quartered as well."

"Such barbarism." Freeman shook his head. "Didn't somebody, perhaps the girl's family, try to intervene?"

Maria made incredulous eyes at him. In her world there were no such appeals for clemency. At most there were appeals for cleanliness. For the umpteenth time Freeman's gaze fell on her dirty fingernails. Then he considered her head without the fruit basket; how thin and mangy her black hair is, he thought. And that bony breastplate. He'd chosen her for her eyes, of course. Her eyes and her erect back. The noble features that compensated for the rest. All his models had them.

He let her talk. He learned that the rich girl's important family considered her a hot head.

"She's known to say the same things they say up north," Maria confided with relish. "They say that we need to be free and that the Pope should just think about religion. Anyway, Maestro, after she'd refused this priest; he waited for her in a dark place and had his way with her anyway. Of course, she didn't say anything to her family" –here Maria rolled her eyes—"but then she got scared that she might be pregnant and she told the family doctor, who told her mother's confessor, who told her mother."

"What did the family do?"

"They caned her for being a hussy who shamelessly goes out alone after dark."

"Ah," he said, moved.

"Only then the boy shot the priest and they figured out where and why the girl was going out at night alone…and so now her family is forcing her to watch his execution, from their palazzo. It's near the turtle fountain and the Teatro di Marcello. The Pope in person granted permission for the scaffold to be set up there and not on the Bridge of St. Angelo. Then, they say, she'll get packed off to a convent."

"The boy was the only one condemned to death?"

"And who else were they going to condemn?"

Freeman let Maria go an hour early. It was pointless to go on; both of them heard the voices in the street and square below, talking of the drama at hand. She promised to be back promptly at eight the next morning, then left him with one last titbit—the news that the feared and infamous hangman Mastro Titta would be the one to snuff out the boy's life.

Freeman stood for a long moment at the center of what a painter friend called his 'sky parlour'. At first he wondered about Mastro Titta—how this hangman looked physically and whether there was some sign of awareness in him of being a licensed murderer that a painter like himself might discern. After that, he began to wonder whether Augusta, his fiancée, might be making her way here and what importance this possibility should have in the face of the opportunity he had to record this raw atrocity in his sketch book. It was mid May, which meant the sun would be in another couple of hours; and if he left now he would be able to get over to the neighbourhood indicated by Maria in time to be a—a witness.

A witness to what?

To tragedy or more than tragedy? He felt sorry for the Italians, stifled in their democratic aims—that were so close, he thought, to those of America—by the great powers of Europe and by the Papacy.

Since his move to Rome (from where he made his occasional trip to Ancona, where he was U.S. Consul), he had sold numerous paintings in both expatriate and Italian circles and acquired an interest in political affairs, especially in the budding movements for civil rights and national unity. On sporadic occasions, he had seen that the proverbial Italian fatalism was giving way here and there to seething indignation. To his American mind, this could provide the seeds for self-determination and national unity.

There would be indignation at the boy's bloody execution—but how much? Did he have the stomach for it?

Outside, he followed the stream of people headed in the direction of the Teatro di Marcello. Shouting urchins ran to burly men of the lowest classes—the lot of them dressed in blue cloaks, russet cloaks, or uncloaked rags—who were presumably their fathers. Freeman walked in their midst with his sketch pad under one arm. The moving crowd grew in number as they crossed the intersections with the impassable back streets of rotten or rickety houses, many built into or on ruins of solid Roman walls, which did not seem inhabited and certainly had never been built to any plan. At their end, or sometimes in their middle, there was a dump heap of vegetable refuse and pile of broken crockery.

Freeman's flow of people converged with several other jubilant throngs into a central grassy meadow spotted with stone rubble—a sort of overgrown cemetery of civilization. He had met at a dinner the two English aristocrats who were financing the last of a long line of excavations of the mysterious ground, which, amidst popular indifference, had revealed chunky pedestals and curved rocks to be imperial columns and triumph arches. Bells tolled on the far side of the meadow, where the first mounted parties of the Pope's dragoons appeared. The reaction of the crowd indicated to him that the soldiers were directed towards the execution site. The people around him were accelerating, he noticed, but he refused to do so. When the crowd followed the dragoons past a Baroque church with a sign on its closed door, he was the only one who stopped to read the appeal to the population to pray for the handsome boy's soul.

Finally, in the square with the fountain out of which climbed four bronze turtles, teasingly held in check on the rim by four boy sprites, Freeman located a knot of his peers: foreign-looking individuals in bourgeois dress, the men in tall hats and the women in dark bonnets. A surge of elbows and torsos propelled him over to them. He thought he recognized a white-haired, bearded Englishman, and then he was sure: there's Dickens. He'd met the famous writer just two days ago at a reception at the British Embassy.

"Mr. Freeman! I wish I could say it is a pleasure to see you but the circumstances make it otherwise." Charles Dickens made a nod at his sketch pad and added, "Planning to record it?"

"To make some…visual notes. Maybe. We'll see."

"It's a sickening spectacle—you'll soon desist. Look at the huge crowd. They make it as gory and horrible as possible so that it'll stick in people's minds and they won't ever be able to forget it. All these children will remember it their entire lives."

"I imagine so," Freeman reflected.

"Their fathers, I am told, will give them a slap or punch at the moment that the blade drops." Dickens eyed him closely for a moment, as if assessing his sensibilities not as an artist but as a man. "By the way, there's also a drawing-and-quartering on the bill today. It's an act of mercy that they are not going to proceed to burn the body. The rest is apparently deemed a lesson enough. They say the poor devil tried to kill a papal prelate."

"So I've heard."

"And here he comes now, Mr. Freeman, look to your left at the heftiest man in your field of vision. That's Mastro Titta, the executioner, crossing the square on that wagon. We'd best follow along—the guillotine is set up two blocks from here. Titta's an umbrella-maker, you know. Apparently, he usually offers the condemned man a sniff of tobacco beforehand. My man-servant tells me that Titta lives over near St. Peter's. He's under the protection of the Papal guards there. He only crosses the Tiber when there's an execution on. Too dangerous for him here otherwise."

"Pope Gregory XVI is definitely keeping him busy at the moment," Freeman muttered darkly. Dickens' air of informed, scientific interest made his own stance seem timid and nebulous, and though he walked with Dickens and his party to where the guillotine scaffold had been set up, he quickly lost sight of the illustrious English author in the mass of people. Whether this was by accident or not did not change his sense of relief.

Dominating the small square was a magnificent three-storied white palazzo. A lovely girl, with a twisted crown of honey-colored hair, was positioned on the long balcony over the central entrance. Even from a distance she looked terribly unhappy.

It was her. The girl.

The gloved hands of a tall, long-faced man, no doubt her father, gripped her shoulders from behind.

Freeman was horrified. She could do nothing but wait to watch her lover die.

The Papal Guards—there looked to be fifty or so of them—stood at ease in clusters, while their officers walked up and two in twos and threes, chatting together and smoking cigars. A pastry-seller sold his wares to customers, mostly women. Priests and monks elbowed a passage for themselves among the people and stood on tiptoe for a sight of the guillotine knife, then went away. Two artistic types of eccentric inclination (whom fortunately Freeman didn't know) mulled around in odd hats reminiscent of the middle-ages. Over an hour went by.

The wait played a small trick on him: for a moment, half aware that he was deforming reality for a higher purpose—the way he did when he composed his 'fancy pictures'—Freeman made a mental sketch of the scene. It was the first and last he would feel like making.

To the sound of trumpets, the foot-soldiers marched up to the scaffold and formed a circle. The guillotine became the centre of a thicket of bayonets and sabres. The people pushed nearer, making way for the cart with the condemned boy. Flanking the cart were the slew of men and boys that had accompanied it from the prison, followed by three impassive monks, the last of whom hoisted an effigy of Christ on the cross, canopied in black.

When the monks had positioned the cross at the foot of the scaffold, the boy reappeared on the platform. Freeman got a good look at him now. He was bare-footed, vigorously made and well-shaped, with dark hair and eyes. It was right to call him handsome. His hands were bound; a handkerchief was tied over his mouth, and the collar and neck of his shirt were cut away almost to the shoulder.

Titta appeared alongside of him, enormous in his black armless tunic. He pulled the gag off his mouth, and the youth began to shout and yank his arms. Freeman could not make out his words. Pacifically, Titta offered him a bit of tobacco from the drawstring pouch hanging from his massive belt.

The boy spat at his executioner. Then he turned to the white palazzo and smiled up at his girl.

She was held by the arms of her father and two others, presumably male-kinsmen.

The boy kneeled down so promptly that it was heartbreaking. His neck was fitted into a hole in a cross plank. Below him was a leather bag. The silver blade sheet fell, and into it his head rolled instantly like a melon.

His sweetheart on her balcony shouted incomprehensible words. Despite the serpent coil of six arms she managed a half-rise, enough to launch her spit.

The executioner held up the boy's head by the hair.

After a minute, he paraded with it round the scaffold. The eyes were turned to one side. In the direction of the balcony, Freeman was sure. The face was already dull wax.

When the head had travelled round the four sides of the scaffold, Titta stuck it like an orange on a standing pole—to be stared at and for the flies to settle on. There was a rivulet of blood draining from the scaffolding. Two men were throwing water over the planks. Next Titta hoisted up the headless body and showed this to his public too.

There was no manifestation of disgust or pity in the people around Freeman. None of the indignation he expected either. They were quiet—that was all that could be said for them—and many had their mouths open. The boy's body was laid back on the platform so that Titta could take a club to it. His hacking made the body jerk and its limbs turn askew; for a moment it seemed that the boy might still be alive and resisting. A small puff of smoke emerged as Titta pulled the hot intestines from their cavity. They spilled over the edge of the platform as Titta wiped their grease off his hands on his apron in his sole gesture of annoyance. The bludgeoning continued. To Freeman, Titta's efforts began to resemble those of a woman beating a carpet. When the parts of the pounded body were finally separated, they also were put on display.

Freeman felt exactly how Dickens had said he would. His horror was paralyzing. He wondered where the writer was and what words he was finding for this moment. Next to him, a woman pointed out to her neighbour that the staring, shouting girl on the balcony was being pulled by her shoulders back through the French doors.

"Who is she? What's her name?" Freeman asked the woman abruptly.

He learned that girl's name was Eleonora Serlupi. Her family owned the white palazzo. They were nobles who'd been loyal to the Pope for centuries. Through a fog of numbness, he listened to the woman call Eleonora a disgrace to her family. He walked away as she was blaming the boy's crime on the changing times—all thanks to Napoleon.

A few days later, while Freeman was finishing the painting, Italian Beggar Girl, which Maria had posed for, Augusta arrived without warning.

She often did that when she was in the phase of sketching but not yet sculpting a figure. She claimed that she couldn't stay put, that she had to be out and about and see as many faces as possible. One day she'd be interested in recording noses, the next day it would be chins. She'd stop in at her brother Eugenio's art studio, too. When she turned up at either place, she'd often be without her scarf, or gloves, or spare change—having given them away to some poor woman or bought medicine for some sick child.

"James?" she called, giving his door a short knock; then opening it with wifely, proprietary rights.

From over the top of his easel he smiled at her.

"Hello there."

"Hello, darling." She kissed the air between them.

Behind her stood a girl in a coarse peasant skirt, her face half-covered by a grimy hood, and her dirty feet in half-broken sandals.

"She asked me for help in the middle of the street, James. I couldn't just leave her there. At the very least, she needs a wash and something to eat."

"I know, Augusta, they all do. But—and I say this because we're speaking English and the girl can't understand—you really have to start being more careful about who you decide to help out. What if this girl has contacts with the young revolutionaries in town, the carbonari? What if she's being followed? Do you know how much trouble we could find ourselves in?"

While he was speaking, the girl had started circling the room and looking at the paintings. The careful attention she gave each canvass surprised him, as did the dainty step she took as she moved on to contemplate the next; he took a closer look at her as she lowered her hood, the vague impression forming in his mind that he'd seen her before.

"Come," said Augusta gently, crossing over to the girl.

It was Eleonora Serlupi. It just had to be. The same thick blondish red hair braided round her head.

Augusta announced that she was going to buy some cheese, and bread, and fruit. "Once we've fed her, I'll take her to my place for a bath. Isn't she pretty under all that dust, James? You could use her as a model," she suggested. "I'm sure you could pay her less than those girls from Abruzzo who collect on the Spanish Steps."

When Augusta had left, Freeman went back to his easel. He could feel the girl's eyes on him. Gesturing politely at his painting he told her in Italian, "The girl in it is named Maria. It was Maria who told me your story, Eleonora."

She was silent.

Wanting her to speak, he added, "I thought you were shut up in a convent somewhere."

"I nearly was," she replied. "But some of Luigi's friends…"

He noticed that her eyes had started to water and blink, and he amended that to: "Yes, of course, Luigi."

"His friends assaulted the carriage that was taking me to the convent. It was easy. There were just some old family servants with me, and it was enough to threaten them with an old pistol."

"Why aren't you with these friends now? There are a lot of rebels and agitators in Rome. There must be a lot of good hideouts."

"A coachman recognized one of the boys."

"And now the Swiss Guards are looking for you."

She nodded. "That's why we split up. They had false papers and wanted to try to get to Milan. Word is that discontent is growing there too," she added, sounding quite informed. "As for me, I'm hiding out here because I have a job I have to finish….even though it isn't easy."

"A job?"

"To kill that bastard."

Freeman's face reddened. One didn't expect to hear such words from a girl like her. She didn't have an intense or burning look. On the contrary, her eyes were a soft brownish green and she had an open gaze, congruous with her young age. And yet, he intuited, there was something deep inside her that would not be commanded. The picture of her being retained by force on that balcony came into his mind, and he said, "I saw that you didn't cry."

"No, I didn't cry."

"I'm a foreigner," he said suddenly. "I'd like to help you."

Eleonora rewarded him with a smile of trust. "Where do you come from?" she asked.

"From the United States of America. A place very far away and not very important."

"I know where it is. I've studied your country. I know that you threw out the English, who'd invaded your land.

"Well, yes, more or less," Freeman replied, surprised at her knowledge. "But we are really very far from Europe," he insisted. "We carry no weight here." In a light voice he added, "And we don't have a pope but a president…if we don't like him, we change him."

"We have a philosopher here who says we should have a president," Eleonora replied gravely. "His name is Giuseppe Mazzini. He's from the north… from Genoa. He says that Italy must become a united Republic and that even we women must be granted rights. He also says something strange—he says that we must all 'progress.' I don't understand this."

"The world's changing," Freeman explained. "People are starting to understand that they don't owe anything to any emperor, king, or pope…that there must be established rights. For over fifty years in America we have had a Constitution."

"What is that?"

"It's a bit complicated to explain. In essence, it consists of laws that regulate a State. It says what a State can or can't do.

"So in your country the Pope would have to obey laws—human laws, I mean, and not divine."

"Exactly."

As she was rubbing her eyes, he suggested that she take a rest on his sofa until Augusta returned with some cheese and bread. Without taking off her cape, Eleonora settled herself in a corner, leaned her head on a cushion in the crick between the sofa's arm and back, sat up suddenly and without a second thought unpinned the braid of hair getting in the way of her comfort, and sank into the velvet softness with closed eyes.

He knew that there had to be twelve or fifteen years difference between them but he found her ever so lovely—the sort of beauty that abides with a man. He started to fantasticate on the moment when Luigi had first kissed her, and from that, on how they had met, on how such a girl and such a boy could fall in love, on the intoxicating effect of politics and revolutionary talk. He picked up a sketchpad and charcoal pencil from the lamp table and started to draw her head.

Her eyes fluttered open at the infinitely soft sound of the pencil.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Practising my profession. I'm the American Consul in Ancona and a painter in Rome."

"Shouldn't you be in Ancona?"

"Theoretically, that's true. But you see, we consuls don't receive a salary. We just get to keep a percentage on passport application fees and the like. I'd hoped that in Ancona, being a seaport, there'd be more passports to process and I'd have more paintings to sell. But it wasn't like that. We didn't see very many ships. And so I came to Rome."

"Where there are more people to paint?"

"No, more people to sell paintings to. There's a circle of English and American painters here and we all use the same models. The best don't even have a name—we just call them the Sad Model, the Happy Model, and the like…" Freeman's voice trailed off; he couldn't quite think of a proper way in Italian to render the idea of the fancy picture genre he worked in, which aimed at moving viewers' hearts towards the poor and dispossessed, with sentimentalism but with humour. In particular he was afraid she wouldn't understand its political worth: the intention was not to be exploitive or disturbing but to alter viewers' behaviour. Finally, embarrassed, he added, "You're different. You have a fire inside you, whereas the models have only hunger." In the space of a breath, he changed the subject: "There are quite a lot of Americans living in Rome. At least a hundred. And most of us are artists."

Eleonora sat up. "Show me what you're drawing."

"Your head." He flashed the sketch pad at her.

"Why?"

"Because it seems to me that someday your head will go with a story. I mean, with a scene or theme. I'll keep it till then."

She yawned broadly in answer.

"Let me finish it. Sit back and sleep," he urged.

She did so with the natural immediacy characterizing her person. He returned to his sketch, deepening the lines of Eleonora's Greek nose, making her hair curl more down her back. He had in mind putting her in a picture that rival his Italian Beggars that had caused a sensation at the Annual Exhibition at the National Academy of Design a few months before. Critics had rightly cited Titian as his 'master' in color and glazing and nature's touch, and Murillo for his unglamorized depictions of common people. He struggled daily with ideas for how to make an allusion to classical myth and at the same time say something about the Italy that seemed to finally be in the making. He had no clear idea for now on what would be the subject of the painting with Eleonora, but he could sense that it would come to him. She was too delightfully authentic not to paint. He might not even put another figure in the scene with her, or at most an animal. As Giovanni Ferrero, their teacher at the drawing sessions he attended at the American Academy, kept saying: non troppo confuso—no complicated handling of the scene, and keep the backgrounds simplified. Character, pure character. Eleonora's character was there in her features for him to get at. He was intent at rubbing and blurring the charcoal lines of her hairline, when suddenly a small pistol slipped out from under her cape and fell with a rattle on the floor.

He kept still, surprised and yet not surprised. It was the confirmation that what he thought about her: what she said was what she did. And yet she might do too much. When a few minutes had gone by and she remained asleep, he picked up the gun quietly and went with it to the bedroom, where he hid it at the back of the wardrobe.

It was only when he re-entered the room that she woke with a start. Her soft green-brown eyes fixed on him, the indomitable part of her temperament giving a pulse to them.

"I no longer have a family. I live for revenge, Mr. Freeman," she said.

"Quite understandable. But we still need to consider where you can stay...where you are safe." Then he added, "Of course, your friends are out of the question."

"Then I will live in the street. I—I will be a model. Like that Maria."

He smiled as he reminded her. "Your family and their emissaries are looking for you. You must be in some protected place."

She refused to submit to any authority, as he'd imagined. But 'authority' presumably meant the Papal State, and so he tried a different tack; he told her there was a religious community hostile to the Pope, and affiliated with the Anglicans, with an abbey a short distance from Rome where she could take refuge.

"All right," she said after a moment.

"I feel much relieved. But do stay on till Augusta gets back so I can introduce you properly."

"I'd prefer to go immediately." She rewound her braid and raised her hood.

"But you must come back. I—and Augusta—would like to see you again. You are always welcome. I would like to finish my drawing next time. Or maybe begin a painting."

Annoyance passed over her face.

To make amends, he asked, shaking her hand at the door, if there was anything she wanted.

Eleonora thought for a moment. "Yes, there is," she replied. "I want…..a CONSTITUTION."

Then she was gone.