She comes early, just after dawn, in the same black cloak, again naked beneath it.
“You must not think, Don Diego, that I travel through the city of Rome like this ordinarily,” she tells me, “but if I am dressed I must bring a woman along to undress me, and dress me again, my stays and laces and the rest-it is a disability of us women-and we wish to keep this painting our secret. Unless you would care to do that service?”
She sees my face and laughs. “I observe that it would not please you to serve me so. Therefore, let me take my pose.”
She does so and I paint. In the morning light her skin glows like pearl, and I brush in thin tints of lake mixed with flake white, always thin so that the white of the underpainting shows through, and plenty of calcite for transparency, tiny blended strokes so that the surface is perfectly smooth, as it would be to the hand’s touch. My fancy is that the light comes from within her, and I paint in the image in the glass, her face plain enough, and then I darken it and change it so that it could be any girl on the couch.
I work without stopping-I have lost count of the bells-until she complains of stiffness and the need to use the jakes. The figure is nearly done, and I say, a moment longer, I say, a few more strokes then, a little more modeling on the upper thigh, a bluish-gray, very thin. I put my brush down and gesture to her that she can move. She rises, groans, laughs, and with the cloak about her shoulders, she comes around and looks at the canvas.
“That arm is out of the drawing,” she says, “but I see why you did it, yes, the line of the back is made bolder, a desperate move, but it works. Look how thin the paint, the fabric shows through, what a miser you are! There is almost nothing there, but also everything, you compel the eye itself to make up the difference. Yes, my narrow waist, I am as proud as Satan of it, yet she is not much of a goddess, I think, but a mortal woman. I thank you for disguising my face, but you have my big culo to the life, and I believe some men would recognize me from that alone. Oh, Madonna, I am speaking like a whore again, I offend your Spanish sensibilities.”
She looks me in the face, smiling, showing her teeth like a peasant. She says, “I do it only because I hate you. This, seeing this work, makes me want to break my brushes. I would give my soul to be able to make flesh shine like that. Heliche will die when he sees it; it is just the kind of thing he likes. I imagine he will find some way of looking at it while he enjoys his new mistress.”
“Are you sure he has one?”
“Oh, yes, in that realm I am an expert, as you are as a painter.”
“And have you been fobbed off upon one of his train, as you foretold?”
“Indeed, I have,” she says.
“Who is it?” I ask, stupidly.
“Why, it is you, Velázquez,” she says. “Who else?”
She slips out of her cloak and comes to me, pressing her hot body against me, her mouth against my mouth, her tongue darting in like a little fish.
“And what do you think of love, Velázquez?” she says between kisses. “Do you think it is an art, like painting, or a mere craft that any churl or whore may accomplish well enough, or is it even less, a spasm of the flesh, akin to what the beasts do, that we inherit from the sin of Eve?”
I don’t know what to answer. I am dizzy. My knees shake. We fall upon the couch. She is upon me now, naked, her skin giving off a heat I can feel on my face, as from a brazier. She plucks at my clothes, her hands under my shirt, sliding down my body. I should try to break free, I know, but I have no strength in my hands or limbs.
“But let us suppose,” she continues, “that such an art exists, and that it is as far above the coupling of the mass of mankind as your art is above a painted sign hanging before an inn, or the music of the divine Palestrina above a street boy’s whistle. Do you think it possible? Let us now explore this interesting question.”
So was I taught about love, but I did not love the learning. Never before had I been imprisoned by my own flesh, and I found therein a harsh jailer, one who never slept, whose eye was always on me, whose hot goad was crueler than the instruments of the Holy Office, for they were used for the gaining of hell rather than heaven. What tricks she had of finger and mouth, and she gave me potions and salves so that I was as a boy of eighteen upon the couch-not that I ever did thus even as a boy of eighteen. She was like a cat in season, on me everywhere, in my studio, in my apartments, in hallways, in carriages, in the fields and amid the ruins of old Rome, in her house at Trastevere all night long. And still I had my duty to do, the buying, the shipping, the meetings with notables, my painting.
I painted her again, two more Venuses, as my lord of Heliche demanded, one standing in the pose of Medici’s Venus and another with Mars discovered by Vulcan. I aged ten years in that year.
In bed, in her passion, she called me Velázquez, and I told her no one calls me that and she must not either. She asked, then, “What do they call you in Spain?”
I answered, “They call me El Sevilliano, or Señor de Silva, or Don Diego.”
“Even your wife?”
“What my wife calls me is not for you to know,” I say, “but not Velázquez, at any rate. That is my name in painting.”
“I know,” she says, “and that is why I call you Velázquez in my bed, for were you not Velázquez you would not be there.” And starts her damned caresses again.
I think that she believed in nothing but painting, certainly not honor, nor station, nor the truths of our Holy Faith, or but a little. She treated me sometimes as a god for this reason, and other times as a slave. I was a slave with her, I admit, and a god too.
I will say she knew paintings. She would look at what I bought with a keen eye and inform me about what paintings were to come on the market, or which cardinal would part with some prize to curry favor with my king. I showed her once an Annibale Caracci I was thinking of buying, a Venus Adorned by Graces, and she laughed and said, “That is no Caracci. It is that wretched boy in Naples again, at his tricks. He is very good.”
“What boy?” I asked.
“Old Giordano’s son, Luca. The father is a nothing, a sign painter, but the boy is a prodigy, another Giotto perhaps, if he can stop his crimes to make a style for himself.”
“And why is this forger not brought to book?” I asked.
“Because he signs his work with his own name and paints it over. Look,” she says, and goes to my table and soaks a rag in turpentine. She rubs at a corner and there is a signature revealed. We both laugh at that. I think I have not laughed so much in my life as when I was with her. And we fought too.
Once she took me to Santa Maria in Trastevere to the porch of the basilica where the cripples gather, the deformed and the naturals, to seek alms, and she asked me if I wanted to paint these as I had painted the royal dwarfs and fools.
“Why should I?” I answered. “Those I painted because they were in the king’s service and part of his household. I painted his dogs too.”
This answer I saw did not please her, and she asked me, “Does the king love you?”
And I replied, “Assuredly he does, for he gives me honor and appoints me to noble posts in his house.”
She said, “Well might he honor you, for you do him honor with your brush and paint the magnificence of his daughters so they may be married off to kings and emperors. But does he love you as Velázquez, as I love you? Or are you a sport of nature, as are these miserable ones? The infantas of Spain have dwarfs around them so that their beauty is magnified by comparison, and so the king has the greatest painter in Europe by him, to magnify his own glory. It is all they care about, the kings of the earth.”