Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

Then, on a frosty January morning, the Grand Duke’s head gardener, Navacchio, appeared in the doorway to my workshop. He was a diligent, thoughtful man with thinning hair and abnormally large ears; whenever I saw those fleshy lobes, in fact, I was tempted to reach out and give one of them a playful tug. He was sorry to disturb me, he said, but he had been growing fruit out of season, in a glasshouse of his own design, and he would appreciate my opinion. He handed me a peach from the basket he was carrying.

I cut the peach in half, and as I stared at the dark-red stone at the heart of the fruit I felt something skip or catch inside me. I found myself thinking once again of Faustina’s scandalous conception. What had her father said? A small seed growing … I stood back, the halved peach lying on the table. Of course. Yes. That was it. I would place a baby in the belly of the girl . On the outside, she would be everything the Grand Duke was hoping she would be — an archetype, a beauty, a kind of Eve. Inside her, though, there would be a child that had grown to full term, and was ready to be born.

Navacchio was fiddling with the handle of his basket. ‘You’re not going to try it?’

I took a bite. The flesh was much crisper and more tart than I had expected.

‘Interesting,’ I said.

‘You don’t like it.’

‘I do. But it reminds me of an apple.’

If Navacchio was disappointed by my response, he gave no sign of it. He just nodded gravely, thanked me and turned away.

I should have been thanking him. For the next two weeks, I worked on the new idea, adapting a mould I had brought from Naples. Though the child would be hidden, and might never be seen, by anyone, it would have to be as beautiful as the girl who was going to carry it. I gave it flawless skin and sleek black hair. Its hands were tucked beneath its chin, its knees drawn up towards its chest. The umbilical cord, whose blood vessels were visible as strands of turquoise and orange, coiled under its left wrist, then over its upper arm, and vanished behind its back. Its gender would be concealed, indeterminate. I modelled the lower half of a uterus, its dusty purple-red inspired by Navacchio’s experimental peach, then I placed the child inside. What thrilled me most about what I was doing was the contrast between the girl’s flat belly and the fully grown baby it contained. An anatomical impossibility. Unnatural. Just plain wrong. Perhaps I had learned from Marvuglia after all! And yet … Though the work might appear to contradict itself, both the size of the baby and the shape of the girl’s belly were authentic, true. They were simply taken from different stages of her existence. I was showing the present and the future in the same breath. I was collapsing time.

Was I worrying too much? Was I including too many layers of protection and defence? I didn’t think so. As I had said to Cuif once — and it had made him laugh out loud — I’d never lived in a place where paranoia was so completely justifiable. What’s more, this wasn’t only about protecting myself. This was about meaning . To the Grand Duke, the baby would symbolize his family’s immortality, the continuation of his blood-line. His heir. To me, it represented the child his wife had already given birth to, in secret. The child no one could ever know about. To me, the baby was Faustina. Here, at last, was the kind of ambiguity I had been looking for.

On March the first I left my lodgings at dawn. It was a humid, stagnant morning, and I was glad I had not been drinking. I passed the Uffizi and set off across the Ponte Vecchio. I was eager to look once again at the commission, which I had finished only a few hours before. I had spent the previous day removing flaws and runnings, disguising joins, and applying a final layer of varnish. At midnight I had left her in the back room, under a sheet of muslin. I looked to the west and saw birds spiralling in the grubby air above Sardigna. What an unlikely journey, from that savage wasteland to the Grand Duke’s palace … A sudden yawning in the pit of my stomach. A kind of vertigo.

I slipped past Toldo, who was dozing by the gate. Dew blackened my boots as I walked down the track. The ancient myrtle trees, the distant fountains. The clarity of the air. Always a sense of sanctuary, of entering a sacred space. In the stable yard I stopped and listened. Nobody about. It was too early even for Navacchio.

Once inside my workshop, I locked the door behind me, then took the dust-sheet and lifted it away. She looked so solid — so human . She was carrying a child, of course, but I had also filled the other hollow spaces — thighs, chest, skull — with a loose weave of burlap, which I had cut into strips and soaked in wax. The scrim, as it was known, behaved like ballast: it gave her substance, integrity. In the white morning light, her stillness was unnerving. She reminded me of a game we used to play as children, where we pretended to be dead.

I moved closer.

Her dark-brown eyes, opaque and yet intelligent, had been made by a glass-blower in Murano. Her lips had been painted with two coats of Parisian lacquer, and around her throat she wore a string of imitation pearls. Though the idea for the necklace had originated in Fiore’s story about the murdered countess, it also had a practical function, which was to conceal the place where her head joined her body. Her hair was her own. One shade lighter than her eyes, with suggestions of bronze and copper, it tumbled in a loose, lustrous rope past the polished curve of her right shoulder, coiling over ribs that were more hinted at than visible, through the gate formed by her thumb and forefinger, and on to her upturned palm. What pleased me most, though, was her skin. It wasn’t white or rose or cream, nor was it gold or ochre, yet all those colours were involved. The tones altered in the most delicate and elusive of ways, from the cool ivory of her forehead and the milk-blue of her armpits to the hot coral of her nipples, as if blood were circling inside her, real blood, sometimes rising to the surface, sometimes holding back, staying deep. I had paid attention to the most obscure and seemingly insignificant details — the particular hue of an eyelid or a fingernail, the special pallor of the parts of her that rarely saw the light. I had worried she might be too much of an aphrodisiac, and I had been right to worry. The way she looked off to one side, inviting my gaze while averting her own. The way her lips parted a fraction to reveal her teeth. The way her left leg lifted to afford a glimpse of the supple inner thigh. Even in the stark spring light, her beauty was carnal. Had I gone too far?

Hardly having slept the night before, I lay on my divan and closed my eyes, only to be woken what seemed like moments later by a loud knocking. I hauled myself over to the door. It was the men from the local lumber yard, delivering the wood I had ordered. The girl would need some kind of plinth or platform if I was to show her to her best advantage.

As I paid for the timber, I was aware of her behind me, and my stomach tightened with apprehension, but I knew what I would do should I be challenged or attacked. I had allowed for that eventuality. I would open the lid of her belly. I would unveil the child. I would tell the Grand Duke that I had been influenced and moved by his constant agonizing over the succession. What I was giving him, I would say, was what he had been missing — at every level. Not just a woman, but a child. Sometimes you have to picture what you wish for. Will it into being. What I had made was a petition. It might be art, but it was also prayer.

*

I wrote to Bassetti the following day, requesting an audience with the Grand Duke, but it was almost a week before he sent for me. As I approached the apartment, the doors swung open, and Vittoria della Rovere emerged. It was the first time I had seen her close up. A great, bristling galleon of a woman with at least three chins, she had servants on either side of her to help her walk. According to Borucher, she seldom appeared at court; her legs simply couldn’t take the weight. She seemed to survey me as she drew level, her eyes cold, almost brazen, and then, without addressing me at all, she moved on.