Kerry Postle - The Woman in the Painting

I looked at Giulio. In my naivety I hoped that he might be able to do something, say something, that would save me: it was clear he could not. Invisible ropes had already started to pull him back to his place of work. His eyes looked on me with sympathy but his work-worn hands were securely tied. He had no choice but to watch as Sebastiano dragged me to the heavy oak door of the workshop and cast me outside. He threw my jacket after me.

‘Think yourself lucky I don’t get you locked up for this. The money you’ve lost me! Now clear off! Talentless dog that you are!’

As the door slammed shut behind me, I imagined my father’s knuckles cracking.

I could not believe what had just happened. The injustice of it burned the backs of my eyes. What would Father say? What would he do to me? I lay there sprawled across the street, too afraid to move.

Passers-by walked round my fourteen-year-old body as I allowed Sebastiano’s taunts (preferable to those I anticipated from my father) to still ring in my ears. Some walked over me, tripping as they went. But I remained there, eyes shut tight, not knowing what to do next.

I must have been lying there for ages by the time someone gave in to temptation and decided to have some sport at my expense. A full-blown hammer foot made its way into my side. Winded, my eyes shot open. I spluttered, gasping for air and feeling like a pig’s bladder. ‘Look at you in your yellow hose!’ a cruel voice mocked. ‘You look like a g—’ But before he could finish someone had pulled him back, causing him to thud, backside first, on the ground. Laughter rippled all around. The disturbance was attracting quite a crowd.

‘Get off him! What are you doing, you filthy worm-head? Leave the poor devil alone!’ It was the girl in the painting, the one with the basket, she of the flour-hemmed skirt, and she was yelling and pushing my attacker away. ‘Get off with you! Get away! Kicking a lad when he’s down. Some brave man you are!’ People’s sympathies changed direction like ears of wheat as this feisty girl vented her rage towards my attacker. Shouts of agreement came from people in the street. The brave man who’d kicked me when I was down scrambled to his feet.

‘If you was a man and not a girl you would not be able to speak to me so,’ he snarled, half standing and wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

‘Well I am a girl,’ my saviour announced, ‘and I will shame you all the same!’

Sounds of approval rustled all around.

The man who’d used me as a kickball looked at the angry faces. The fear that what he had done to me might be done to him was etched deeply on his face. He turned heel and took flight.

The girl stooped down.

‘Thought I’d come back and make sure you were all right. Lucky I did! Here, let me help you.’ Careful not to let her basket out of sight she dragged me up to sitting. I reached out for my jacket and pulled it to me. ‘Feeling better?’

I nodded that I was, though that I couldn’t bring myself to speak told her that I wasn’t. I felt as though I’d received a stunning blow to the head and a crippling kick in the ribs, probably because I had. And I was now in shock, unable to comprehend what had befallen me. Yet my faithful, unwanted friend, humiliation, was slowly spreading across my body like a rash as the whole sorry experience came back to me. I hoped she hadn’t seen everything. Her hand on my shoulder, gentle and caring, told me she had.

‘You’re not like all them – them inside.’ She gestured to Sebastiano’s workshop with a tilt of her head.

The girl with the soft brown eyes had a soft, sweet voice, and although she intended for her words to comfort me, instead they thrust the knife in, gave it a turn. ‘You belong out here in the real world.’ I rubbed my side, a reminder of how painful the real world could be. Understanding flickered across the girl’s face. ‘Oh, that’s not what I meant!’ She laughed. I winced. ‘No! It’s just, well, I could tell when I saw you in there. You’re well, you’re more like, well, more like me, I suppose.’ I looked at her. She was pretty enough, certainly prettier than Sebastiano’s portrait of her, but her clothes, I saw for the second time that day, gave away her rank; no matter how clean they were, no amount of care could stop flour from clinging to the edge of her skirt, and patching only drew one’s attention to well-worn cloth. My hand went to brush some of the dust off my brightly coloured hose.

‘It’s better to be honest and have your self-respect intact than allow another person to treat you like an animal.’ She patted me on the arm as she chatted on about the virtues of being what I could only presume was like her. This repelled me at the time. But in my defence, upbringing had a large part to play in how I was thinking that day. As well as fear. I had been brought up by a father who constantly told me how he had married beneath himself and had lived to regret it. He’d got married for love, to a lowborn woman who had gone and died. She’d brought him no dowry, given him seven sons. ‘And then she died, giving birth to you!’ My father had shouted this at me often enough to make me realise he’d never forgiven either of us for that. My mother for leaving him, and me for staying alive.

I looked at this girl with the passably pretty face and the dress that she’d made good and kept washed. And I imagined my mother. I quickly pushed the thought away. That way danger lay. The woman was dead. No good would come of softening towards a memory, nor towards a girl with little to her name.

But she had saved me from the ruffians; that much was true. ‘Thank you … for chasing off those thugs.’

‘Oh, that was nothing. And there was only one of them. Besides, did you not see how we all came together to support you?’ The crowd had now dispersed but with a flourish of her hand this girl presented every passer-by to me as if each one of them was a saint or an avenging angel. ‘It’s the likes of Signor Importante in there that we both need to be wary of. The great maestro .’

An old woman walked by, and, overhearing our conversation, shouted out, ‘ Si , ragazzo , no shame in being one of us. The people of Rome are the best in the world.’

Then, as if to prove it, a man with a donkey smiled at me, his weather-beaten face as brown and shiny as well-used leather. I waited for him to offer himself up as one of the self-righteous rabble. He did not disappoint. ‘ Si, ragazzo , plebeian.’ He chuckled. ‘That’s what we are.’ His voice was as gravelly as the dirt roads he walked along, albeit streaked with a pride that, in my newly fallen state, I was far from understanding. For me it was as if I had been expelled from the Garden of Eden, while plebeian was a word my father used when describing my dead mother – and he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

I stared with longing at the large oak doors, now firmly shut behind me. The thought that Paradise was on the other side and that there was no longer any place for me there bored a hole in my heart. That Sebastiano should be cast as God was one of life’s little ironies – earthbound paradises had their drawbacks.