He thought more about the Ferrarese, about pure anger, youth. He thought he remembered leaving early in the morning from Sienna on foot as they had come, walking and not painting, passing through the suburbs, Diosa buying some grapes for the road; he liked grapes, and while buying them Diosa had looked at him, him, with that air both intrepid and imploring that the poor have when they’re a little extravagant at the worst times. This poverty had exasperated him. Dawn was bright at the outskirts of the city, then across the countryside; he was walking in front of Diosa and was violently quiet; he walked quickly along the red footpath, Providence before him with its back turned, just as today. And when far from Sienna he had wanted those grapes, when his thirst had added to his bitterness at not being the best of painters, at being unworthy of seeing the dawn and not even being able to count on Melozzo — Diosa, the scatterbrain, had taken these grapes out of her bundle where she had carelessly stuck them, crushed, inedible, as if when she was trailing behind Lorentino, thinking about her love for Lorentino, she hadn’t had enough room left over to tend to what was becoming proof of her love, in her bundle, this fruit bought to console Lorentino. She had tried to smile, but not for long: perhaps she too had thought then that Providence couldn’t suddenly decide to deceive us. Lorentino relived the penitent shock that had erased this smile. She had wanted to sort through what remained, he had snatched them from her hands; in this fruit, which he had brutally thrown to the ground, he had seen the world and had cursed it. In this ravaged bunch of grapes that was as vivid as memory, he saw the world: bells over a city that wants you to leave; Piero painting too well and nonetheless dying, who moreover was dead, because his eyes had filled with those spots that were white on the outside and black within, that had arrived instead of the trumpets of Judgment, a little valet leading him by the arm and helping him walk, sitting him in the sun in a street of Borgo, his theological hand extended before him, so as not to run into the walls, blind; it was a world where Piero’s hand worked and nonetheless you worked with a different hand; it was a world that made you want to paint even when you weren’t the best, where you still had to paint since you hadn’t learned how to do anything else, no matter that the only reason you had tried was to become the best; it was a world where the skies part in order to give you a pig instead of Pope Sixtus’s chapel in which there’s a great ceiling to paint: it was a world in which you are born and you have to die, something that manifests for an instant, in a little object, in a little something to eat; there was a world in those burst seeds, and in their bright pulp that the sun was already withering, under the ants. Lorentino had heard the black bells of hell; and in a moment of bedazzlement, a drunkenness straight from hell or perhaps even from this world when it shows itself too clearly and then blinds us, Lorentino had insulted Diosa. He might even have hit her. She deserved it for having come with him to Sienna in her prettiest dress, the only one that was presentable, for having waited all alone near the communal palace and for having rushed forward when he had come out with his head bowed, for putting a bold face on things with these grapes that were boldness, when he himself hadn’t any boldness left. That was it, a trip to Sienna; and it was the only trip they had made to Sienna; and when later they spoke about it, when they remembered, they recalled the beauty of the city and the fineness of the weather, the youthfulness that had since left their legs, but they hadn’t spoken of Melozzo, nor of the scorn the magistrates had reserved for Lorentino d’Angelo, nor of the bells of this hell whose very sound is black, nor the grapes on the red footpath, nor the little ants that were eating them. Because you have to go on. No, he never returned to Sienna. He hadn’t traveled very much. Florence, he’d never dared go there, he’d held on to the dream until he was thirty, perhaps forty, but only on the days when he had succeeded with a detail, a bit of a city, a blend of colors, but he didn’t think about it any more, only good painters go there. Good painters have to prove themselves. Lorentino hadn’t proven himself in too many places. But once, he had gone to Borgo, to his master’s.
The meat was cooking, it was now a matter of time. While remembering all these little trips, Lorentino was also watching these figures moving around him, a man, women and children, his disciple, his family. They were casting shadows on the walls. These shapes are said to resemble God, and yet He casts no shadows. The wind whistled outside, shadowless, arriving from the Verna, this wind that long ago, high up in the snows, had surely pierced the hands and feet of Saint Francis, this wind has its piercing rays too, like ice but invisible, and one could perhaps paint it with a halo as well, a very long halo for such a wind, but over what head? He moves through the countryside, strong and irascible, arming battalions in the trees, a cavalry of lances in the poplars, walking on water, caressing it, spurring it on, holding it back, like a horse. He has dogs, one black, one white. The farmer is running along near the Tiber, afraid of this great horseman riding across water. “Saint Martin, good Saint Martin,” he says. And old Maria who is somewhere waiting for him says the same words, she hears the same wind. Behind the walls of San Francesco, Constantine’s horsemen are at peace in the black, are invisible, no more real than the wind. Constantine has only a little cross, he isn’t afraid in all this black. He doesn’t hear the wind.
He had gone to Borgo. It’s not as far as Sienna; but it was well past Sienna in time; Lorentino had grown fat, he grew easily winded when he walked, and so greedy had he become with his breath that he ranted and raved no more, and cried less and less. It was neither ambition nor legitimate aspiration that had pushed him to make this trip, but perhaps a little Hope despite it all, although not for himself: he had brought along his oldest son, whom he had named Piero and of whom he wished to make a painter. Piero di Lorentino. And Piero di Lorentino, already a painter in a way, was working in Foligno for an illuminator, he copied the same old motifs that had been copied for centuries, he drew big uncials on which he made ivy grow, lilies, and all around the old texts he carefully scattered good young kings in the springtime of their reigns, little rabbits we hunt and that seem happy we do, that gambol right under the hatchet; he scattered fortunate martyrs dancing together in great rounds, gamboling into their pots of boiling oil, onto their stakes, their crosses; and angels, with trumpets. Yes, little Piero was making his living as a painter, but not quite how Lorentino had hoped when the child had begun to paint. So he had brought him to Borgo to see what a master was, have him get a sense of it, and so the theological hand could settle upon the ten-year-old head of curls and perhaps do with live flesh what it had done with dead pigment, which is to say ennoble it, make it real at last and sure of its reality, and though that flesh would still walk on two legs and fill with varied desires, it too would fill with the triumphant certitude that we are made in the image of God. And of course he also wanted to show him, his eldest son, that Lorentino d’Angelo — his father who looked like a nobody, whom the princes didn’t call and whom the prelates took on only when three others had canceled on them, who painted patron saints in country churches — that his father made informal visits to great men, stood with and chatted with a man as famous and better paid than Saint Francis, although without the pierced hands or the halo around his head. He was awaiting a mix of many joys from their visit, something difficult to put to words. And he did it out of pride, in other words, Hope. He had been told that the old master was blind, but that’s a misfortune like any other when you have a body of work behind you like his. It had been at least fifteen years since he had seen him.