I asked him to give me a couple of new stretched canvases in the same dimensions and texture, because I figured I’d be better off easing into it, do a test run, as it were, get comfortable with the paint and the style. And the model. So I started looking at Sophia and she started looking at me, you know, a little discreet flirting around dinnertime, smiles, increasingly warmer, little jokes. It turned out Franco wasn’t that interested, not that he would’ve kicked her out of bed-nor would I have-but not interested. That was all I needed now, given the thing with Lotte. I’d called her cell phone half a dozen times but she never called back.
Which pissed me off, and so I asked Sophia out for a drink after dinner, and she took me to a bar, Guido’s, over by Santa Maria, full of local people now in winter with most of the tourists gone. She was known there, she chatted with friends in the Roman dialect that I could barely follow. We spoke to each other in English, mainly, and I got her story. She’d done art at La Sapienza; there was a guy, an Australian she’d gotten involved with; then she became pregnant and he split, and there she was with little Enrico, dropped out of school with no degree and no prospects for a job. She was working as a madonnaro, drawing holy pictures on the sidewalk in front of churches for tips. Then her mother had called Baldassare, a cugine, it turned out, and he’d brought her into the family business.
She did mainly seventeenth-century drawings-Cortona, the Caracci, Domenichino-and helped out with paintings on fake Italian provincial antiques. I asked her whether it bothered her, the faking, and she said no, why should it? Romans had been faking art for bàbbioni tourists since BC. She was good at it, used only the best materials, genuine paper from old books and the right inks, and she had the style down. She’d done a Cortona Christ on the Cross that’d fetched thirty thousand euros at a German auction, and that kind of wage certainly beat some low-end curatorial job at a provincial museum.
A little defensive there, I thought, but it turned out that she wasn’t abashed at all, but envious. I was the big-time gunslinger brought in for this gigantic coup. Baldassare had told her all about it, but, she said, he doesn’t think you can do it. I asked her if he’d actually told her that, and she said yeah, he said you don’t have le palle sfaccettate. That’s what you need in this business. You know what that means? I didn’t. It means balls with hard edges, like a crystal.
I said, we’ll see, and then I asked her if she ever modeled, and she said not really, but Baldassare thought that she’d be right for this picture and asked her if she’d do it, and of course, what could she say? And the boy too, he said they’d need a child. I said that was right and asked her why she thought she’d do for the figure, and she said, you want someone like the Rokeby Venus, don’t you? With which she got up and walked slowly away and then back again and into her chair, grinning like a cat. Bellesponde, as they say. A narrow waist and a pear-shaped bottom, longish legs. Her face was what they call “interesting,” the features a little over-large for real beauty, nose too long, chin a little small, but she had a mass of thick, dark hair with coppery highlights, and in any case I was going to make up the face, for obvious reasons.
We drank some more and then some friends of hers came by and started in with the Romano chatter, and I got my pad out and started futzing around, and then as usual they saw what I was doing and I made drawings of each of them. Everyone was impressed, as usual. If this didn’t work out, I thought, I could always become a madonnaro myself.
We stayed late and got pretty oiled, and we walked back home through sleeping Trastevere in a light rain. When we got to the house it was clear that she was available, but I begged off, and that raised her eyebrow and produced a shrug. Whatever, signor. In fact, it was not Lotte mainly, but that whole thing seemed a little too planned, another way to inveigle me deeper into the circle of Krebs.
I told her I wanted to start in the morning; she said okay and went off to bed, and I did too. I woke up at first light. Or someone woke up, but it wasn’t in the bed I’d gone to sleep in and it wasn’t me.
I awaken in a different bed, a huge thing with four posts and heavy velvet hangings. I smell cooking and a kind of incense, and underneath a sweet, unpleasant smell, maybe sewage-that’s what the world smells like. I have to piss, and I use the chamber pot I pull out of a little box by the bedside. I’m wearing a white embroidered night-shirt and a cap. I push the curtains aside.
A huge room with high, coffered ceilings and wall paintings, Zucchis mainly, the usual Roman unclothed nymphs; they make me irritable every time I see them. I have not slept well. I’ve dreamed again of being in hell, vast cliffs with eyes, iron streets populated with gargoyles, half-dressed harpies, and in the streets chariots going of themselves, spitting the stench of pitch and sulphur.
Servants attend me while I wash and dress. Pareja is sullen as usual, although I have permitted him to paint, in contravention to the codes, and why not? This is Rome, where everything is permitted, especially that which is prohibited.
I eat something-I forget what-in a large room overlooking the famous gardens. This is the Villa Medici. The duke allows me to stay here, as he did during my first visit, although as an honorary ambassador to His Holiness I should be lodged at the Vatican. I cannot bear to stay there, however; the food does not suit me-far too rich-and the meals formal and at set times. Here I can eat what I want, when I want, and I can work.
After my meal, I go down to the Trinitá to hear Mass, then return to my studio and work on a view I have made of a gate to the gardens. It is a small thing, but it gives me a particular pleasure, as it has no connection with a patron but is for myself alone, a landscape in the French manner, or the Dutch. I have never done such a thing before, and it makes a kind of cleansing after the Pope’s portrait.
At noon I eat again, this time at a table with some of the other guests, all people of rank, and none of them think it disgraceful to dine with a painter.
Now I command Juan Pareja to call for a carriage, and we leave the villa for our appointment at the house of my lord Don Gaspar de Haro, Marqués de Heliche, a great man among the Spanish in Rome, who favors me above all others of my profession. During the journey I am much engaged with my pocket book, where I list all the worrying arrangements I must make to fulfill His Majesty’s commission: gaining permission to make casts of famous sculptures, supervising the artisans making the casts, making sure they are properly crated, paying for the shipment, making sure the carters do not steal everything, viewing paintings for sale, making appointments for portraits of the notables who favor me and whose friendship is desired by His Majesty-never enough time and never, never enough money, the Titians alone cost over a thousand ducats and the majordomo at the embassy says there is no money. There is no money in all of Spain, it seems, or so I am told. Although it is the king’s will that these treasures be bought, every petty clerk defies me. As they say, too much meat on to roast and some will be burnt.
At the palazzo I am announced and led to a hall full of paintings. The paintings are very fine, but I have no chance to study them, for here is my lord of Heliche and his train. They are merry and an odor of wine and perfume floats above them. They are Romans in the main, and of a type that my lord’s father, far less his uncle the count-duke, would never have thought to entertain. I am introduced, I bow, they bow, the marqués takes my arm, and we go off privily to tour his gallery. We talk of paintings: he is passing knowledgeable, for one so young, and avid for more treasures; he condemns me for driving up the market by my visit and my gold from Madrid, although there is hardly any. We stop before a Venus with a Mirror, a copy after the Titian that hangs in the Alcázar. He says, I want one like that. A copy, my lord? No, a painting, a new painting. But we will speak of this further. First I wish to show you a prodigy. You will hardly believe this, Don Diego, there is nothing like it in Spain.