Pasquale's Angel Read online

  After a while, the old white-haired man sitting beside Pasquale spoke up. A livid sheet of scar tissue stretched across the left side of his face, drawing down his eye and the corner of his mouth. He laid a finger alongside this scar and said in a thick Milanese accent, ‘You’re wondering where I got this, young fellow. Let me tell you I got it when I was building the waterway to the sea. The artificers used Chinese powder to blow through the solid rock at Seraville, and one of the explosions threw burning fragments amongst the tents where we workers was living. A lot didn’t get away from the fire, because it touched off a store of powder, but I was fortunate, you might say. More men were killed that night than in the Egyptian War, but I escaped with only a scar. All those factories there now, using the power of the water we channelled to make their goods…but what did I get out of it but a pension and a face to curdle milk? They say the artificers have freed men to be themselves, but their machines make men like me less than beasts, working to their pace until we can work no more, and when we have outgrown our use we are thrown aside.’

  The old man shifted a cud of tobacco from one cheek to the other, and spat a long liquid stream towards the brazier. Leaning forward to look past Pasquale, he said, ‘I know you, Signor Machiavegli. I seen you here before, and heard you talk, too. I know you’d agree with me.’

  Niccolò was cheerful and alert once more, Pasquale saw. The wine had done its work, its fire driving away his dolour as a torch will drive away mist.

  ‘We’ve always been free to be ourselves, in our heads, signor,’ Niccolò said, ‘But only a few can ever free themselves from the physical lot of the many. It can be proven mathematically that the work expended to produce material wealth can never enrich but a fraction of the population that must labour. Indeed, it is best for the Republic if it remains rich yet its citizens remain poor, for individual wealth engenders sloth. Think of Rome, which for four hundred years after it was built harboured the greatest poverty, yet those years were also the last happy times of the republic. Think of Aemilius Paulus, who with his triumph over Perseus brought much wealth to Rome, yet remained poor himself. Like conquest, work should not make a man rich, but keep him in active, not idle, poverty.’

  ‘Now, forgive me, Signor Machiavegli, but you sound like one of those Savonarolistas,’ the old man said. ‘I can’t say that I hold with them.’

  ‘I’ve had good cause to favour the followers of that grim prophet,’ Niccolò said, ‘but I thank God I’ve enough sense never to have done so.’

  Pasquale said, ‘All this talk. What good is talk.’ He was dismayed to realize that he was drunker than he had believed.

  A figure sitting in the shadows beyond the play of the firelight stirred. It was an immensely fat, completely bald man, wrapped in a much-darned woollen cape. ‘The last days are here, journalist. A beast sits on the throne of Saint Peter, and will soon die. The false towers erected by the pride and vanity of the artificers will be overthrown. Put that in your paper.’

  ‘It is well known that words and not bombs are my weapons.’ Niccolò drank off his wine and turned his cup over, shaking the last drops over the straw between his boots. ‘Pay the host, Pasquale, and we will be off. We must put our story to bed before we can think of bed ourselves.’

  5

  Pasquale returned to the studio at cock-crow. He was tired yet a long way from sleep. As he’d worked through the night on an engraving of the murder scene in the signal-tower of the Palazzo Taddei, Signor Aretino had treated him to several cups of thick bitter coffee, the new and expensive drink imported from the Egyptian Protectorate. Aretino had said that it cured all ills, and most particularly sleep. He was right in the last; although Pasquale was bone-tired, he felt a frail peculiar lucidity, as if he had just woken from a strange and wonderful dream.

  The artificers’ smog was lifting. In the veiled airy distance, beyond the swayback red-tiled roofs of the modest old houses along the narrow street, the traceries of lamps that limned the bulk of the Great Tower were fading into a watery dawn. Green and red signal-lights winked and glittered. Little arms swung to and fro on one pinnacle at the tower’s top. Flocks of messages on the wing, as invisible as angels.

  The city was waking with the light. Housewives were rattling open cane shutters of first- and second-floor windows and throwing slops towards the street’s central gutter—the artificers’ new drainage scheme had not yet reached this part of the city—and talking to one another across the width of the street like swallows chattering in the eaves of a barn. The bells for the first mass were tolling, here and there, far and near, a communion of bells across the roofs of the city. The high chimneys of the sleepless manufactories on the other side of the Arno were sending plumes of smoke high into the dawn air, each kinked at the same height by the westerly wind which had blown away the smog. The rumble of their engines and looms was faint and regular, the monotonous heartbeat of the city’s trade.

  Pasquale stopped a baker’s boy in mid-cry and bought a length of hot bread, its crust crunchily charcoaled. Two silver florins, payment for his night’s labours, nestled in his scrip, along with the flying toy, which Niccolò Machiavegli had charged him to keep safe, and a crisp folded copy of that day’s edition of the broadsheet, his two engravings anchored amongst the columns of Niccolò Machiavegli’s rhythmic, urgent prose. He felt at one with the city, as if he were a part of a great intricate mechanism poised an instant from happiness. He even welcomed the company of a scrawny yellow cur that joined him on his way home and trotted at his heels until it suddenly remembered some business of its own and loped off down an alley.

  The door of the studio was open at the top of the stairs; a light burned inside. Rosso was already at work. He was grinding blue pigment, seated astride the smoothing-block, his loose, colour-stained apron girdled at his waist, sleeves rolled back from his freckled forearms as he worked grainy vinegared copper back and forth across the surface of the block, reducing granules to fine powder with brisk strokes, pushing the powder into a pannier already half-full with skyey colour.

  Pasquale felt a surge of guilt and affection at the sight of his master at this humble task. He hurried in, apologizing, but Rosso brushed aside his excuses.

  ‘You do as you must,’ he said. There were smudges of blue on his forehead and cheeks; his fingers were dyed blue to the knuckles. It seemed that he had been working all night; at the work-table by the window, sections of his painting had been blocked in with washes shading to a deep, almost black umber, limning the volume which framed the figures.

  Pasquale showed his master the two florins, and then the broadsheet, which Rosso took to the window and looked at for a long time. ‘Poor Giulio,’ he said, at last. ‘No one knows who killed him?’

  Pasquale started to tell his master about Niccolò Machiavegli’s investigations, while Rosso stared out of the window in a distracted way. A blade of light fell between the shutters, illuminating precisely one half of his face. When Pasquale had finished, Rosso said, ‘I have it in me, Pasquale, to be a great painter. That fool of a hospital director—he knew nothing, nothing! They knew about painting here in Florence, once upon a time, but no more. It is all artificers and their devices, and trade, and talk of an empire to rival that of ancient Rome. But without art it is hollow, Pasquale. It is nothing.’

  So it was back to the business of the misunderstanding over the cartoon—the devilish-looking saints Rosso had sketched as a misfired joke, the director’s outrage at seeming sacrilege. Rosso turned from the window and added, ‘That fool of a monk shouted up to me a few minutes before you came in. He was asking if we had rats.’

  ‘He must take a census of his grapes every day.’

  ‘You will look to Ferdinand,’ Rosso said sharply. ‘He’s caused enough trouble, and I need no more distractions while I’m working. I tied him to your bed, Pasquale, so don’t go untying him.’

  He had Pasquale write up the two florins in the workshop’s leather-bound account book, weighed the coins in
his hand and then handed one to Pasquale. They were equals, he said, they had been so for some time. He could teach Pasquale no more, and soon enough Pasquale should make his own way in the world.

  ‘Master, I’ll never stop learning from you.’

  ‘That’s kind,’ Rosso said, with a vague sadness, although he smiled. ‘In better times, if things were different…More and more, it is not what we can do, but what we have done, Pasquale. We are fading into history.’

  ‘You know that isn’t true, master,’ Pasquale said, and suddenly yawned.

  ‘Get some sleep. A few hours. We have work to do today for that crazy artificer.’

  Pasquale fell asleep as soon as he lay down on his bed, hardly noticing that the Barbary ape was tied by a length of rope to the frame. He awoke to the sound of the ape screaming, and sat up and saw that it was gone. It had slipped the loop of rope around its leg. Men were shouting, too, Rosso in the next room, and the monk in the garden below. Pasquale sprang to the window and saw the ape cowering in a corner and chattering and screaming as the monk tried to dislodge it with a pole, and all the while Rosso hurled curses on them both.

  Pasquale cut the rope from the bed-frame with his knife and flung an end towards the ape. It saw its chance and swarmed up the grape trellis using hands and feet. As the trellis started to collapse under its weight the ape managed to grab the rope—and almost pulled Pasquale out of the window. The monk flung aside his pole and dodged backwards as vines and trellis collapsed around him.

  The ape climbed to safety, leaping across the sill and landing on the floor. Suddenly, Rosso was in the room, belabouring the ape about head and shoulders with a broom. Pasquale got between them, shouting that Rosso should stop, please, it was over. Rosso’s face cleared, and he flung aside the broom and buried his face in his hands. The ape jumped on to the bed and threw the blankets around its head.

  Pasquale didn’t know whether to comfort master or ape. The monk was shouting up from the garden, using words no man of God should know, let alone voice, shouting that he would call on the Officers of Night and Monasteries.

  ‘Pray for us, brother,’ Pasquale shouted back. ‘Show some Christian charity.’ He banged the shutters closed and turned to Rosso, who had calmed himself.

  When Pasquale started to apologize, for after all he had taught the ape to clamber up and down the rope, and to steal grapes, Rosso said simply and flatly that it wasn’t his fault at all. ‘It is the nature of the beast, Pasquale. I got it as a joke, you know, and here it is still, a burden around my neck like the old man of the sea, or a demon.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll call on the magistrates?’

  Rosso pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes. ‘Oh, no doubt he will. He has a narrow selfish soul. Remember that Dante reserved a circle of Hell for those pillar-saints who retreated from the world to enrich their own spirituality, as a miser hoards his coins. Monks are just the same, in my opinion.’

  The ape, hearing their voices, took the blanket down from its face, and they both had to laugh to see it looking at them like an old woman peering around a fold of her shawl.

  Rosso sighed. ‘There is still much to prepare for today’s work.’

  Pasquale helped Rosso grind the rest of the pigments they would need for their commission. The blue salt made by placing copper over vinegar, the new white lead pigment, red from crushed beetles, bright yellow sulphide of mercury. Each was suspended in egg-yolks thinned with water and vinegar (which turned the blue green), or in size (which kept the blue blue), mixed in the big wooden buckets reserved for fresco work.

  The commission was simple enough. They were to paint a fresco of primary colours in sinuous shapes on the wall of a bank in the Piazza della Signoria. The Pope, entering the piazza in the shadow of the Great Tower, would be confronted with this fresco, somehow changed by artificer’s trickery into a marvel. Or so the artificer promised: so far he had told the painters nothing about how the trick would be done, being a man who delighted in secrecy. Still, a commission was a commission, and the artificer paid well, and in advance.

  The façade of the bank had been given its first layer of plaster and the outline of the design had been drawn on it in charcoal under Rosso’s supervision two days before. Newfangled scaffolding had been erected, based on modular units jointed like the legs of an insect, with a regularity quite unlike the forest of props which underpinned the irregular wooden planking of traditional scaffolding. The artificer was waiting for Pasquale and Rosso when they arrived shortly after noon, with the little gang of labourers who carried their pigments and brushes and buckets and sponges and the rest.

  The artificer was a plump young man with a round, shining, olive-skinned face, watery blue eyes and a nearly trimmed beard. He was dressed in the usual artificer’s uniform of a many-pocketed leather tunic, loose black Turkish trousers and shiny black leather boots with iron toe-caps and buckles at the knees. His name was Benozzo Berni; he was a distant relative of the great satirist.

  Berni had been commissioned by the bank to create this spectacle, and was consumed with a high nervousness that he might, through some fault of omission, fail and be destroyed. He had already raised a great fuss because of the delay caused by the celebration of the Feast of Saint Luke, and now made a great deal of the fact that his apparatus was already in place. This was a device a little like a catapult, except that instead of a ballista cradle it held an array of acetylene lanterns, and a series of lenses and mirrors through which the light would be projected. It sat in front of the scaffolding like a skeletal goggle-eyed frog. Just how this device would combine with the big amorphous shapes of the fresco was, Berni said, still a secret.

  ‘You will see on the day. That is, if we are finished.’

  Berni did not treat Rosso as a skilled craftsman hired to carry out a task as best he might, but rather as a labourer, and insisted that he and his assistants, two beardless boys younger than Pasquale by at least five years, check every line of Rosso’s translation of the outline pattern on to the wall, using little brass sighting instruments hinged on a semicircular scale. The pattern was not complicated, and it only took an hour more to go over the charcoal lines with brushes loaded with red ochre, and then to brush away the charcoal to leave only the red ochre outline, the sinopia.

  Rosso and Berni then fell into an argument over the best way to proceed. Rosso insisted that he should work as he had always worked, from one area to the next, from top to bottom, but the artificer wanted each colour done in order because there must be no tonal variation, something he deemed impossible if different patches of the same colour were painted at different times. Rosso, slighted by this implication, pointed out over and over, his voice rising each time, that his skill would ensure that different patches of plaster could be painted to exactly the same hue, and at last Berni threw up his hands and stalked off, quivering, to light a cigar.

  ‘We’ll start at the top, as we always work,’ Rosso told Pasquale. If he was still upset by the behaviour of his ape, this small victory had done something to restore his self-esteem. ‘The fool needed convincing that otherwise drips would fall on finished work. We use the blue first, on the dry plaster. I’ve had them overplaster the arriccio for the blue yesterday, to save time. Let’s hope they’ve done it properly. It’s getting dark, and Berni promises light from his machinery, but I don’t know, Pasquale, I have never worked with artificial light.’

  Pasquale and Rosso worked with tacit agreement, quickly finishing the areas of blue, then supervising the labourers who mixed and applied the plaster to the remaining areas of the sinopia. The trick was to make sure that the plaster was thin enough to dry quickly to the right consistency, yet had enough tooth to take the pigment. They worked area by area, painting on pigments diluted in lime-water with quick sweeps of the largest hog’s-hair brushes once the plaster was at the right stage of drying. Halfway through the work, with daylight fast fading, the artificer had the big acetylene lamps of his apparatus lit, and its mirr
ors and lenses adjusted to cast diffused yellowish light across the face of the building, so that now Pasquale and Rosso had to work with the angular shadows of the scaffold-framing and their own shadows thrown across the face of the fresco.

  ‘This isn’t painting, but a race,’ Rosso grumbled.

  Pasquale said, ‘So now we’re house-painters, master.’ In fact, he was happy enough because of the sheer physical pleasure of slopping on pigment.

  ‘We will work as best we can, as we have always worked,’ Rosso said. ‘We are still craftsmen, first and last, no matter what the work.’

  Pasquale had worked on enough frescos to know about the problems. Rough walls had to be made smooth by applying a thick coat of plaster, arriccio, either directly to the brick or stone, or to thin mats of reed laid over it to protect the work from moisture, the greatest enemy of fresco. That was an art in itself: the arriccio had to be smooth, but not so smooth that it lacked the roughness necessary for the adhesion of the final layer of plaster, and its consistency had to be carefully controlled. The point of dryness at which you applied the paint affected not only the resulting colour, but also the life of the fresco: too damp, and the paint would sink too deeply and thinly into the plaster; too dry, it would not take properly, and flake. Blue pigments, mixed in size, could only be applied to dry plaster, and had to be patched and replaced every thirty years or so. For that reason, the fresco was divided into small areas by the sinopia, a quick sketch or a finished detailed drawing covered in turn with one more layer of plaster, the intonaco, put on in patches: small patches where detailed work was needed, as in a face or a hand; larger areas where little detail was required, such as the background drapery or landscape.