THEY WERE EATING SAINT MARTIN’S pig. The smallest children, already full, were clambering into the laps of the adults. Lorentino wasn’t completely lost in his journeys, his memories, he was also enjoying the feast; but he felt ashamed, even though he was smiling at Angioletta as she served him, even though he told Bartolomeo to save some of his energy, they would have work tomorrow. The wind was still with them, was roaring incomprehensible words into the skies above. No, Saint Martin shouldn’t have done it; it was a joke at his expense. The sacred one should have taken pity on his art, not his hunger: and anyway, art, when it’s given to you, when you can execute it perfectly and that’s what they pay you for, art always gives you something to eat, at the end of the day. It fills you up in all sorts of ways. Angrily, Lorentino turned away from Saint Martin.
He dreamed of a fairer miracle. He thought about Saint Francis high above in his snowy retreat where the wind is from, where the stigmata are from, Saint Francis who loved those things that we all see, the birds and the flowers, the great garden, but who in the great garden also loved those things that we do not see, mischievous angels climbing trees, and above the trees, the spacious seats of paradise that await us with their invisible cushions of air, covered in flowers, which, says Saint Francis, will hold this body, notre frère le corps, upright when the trumpets will have sounded; Saint Francis loved this country in the spring and its blue voices, loved all these paintable things; and he’d had a special kindness for painters and for he whose pierced hand guided their hands across plaster, over walls; he who for a hundred years had been intervening on their behalf with the Almighty. Saint Francis wouldn’t have given him a pig, he had more tact than that. He would have called him frère Lorentino. He would have said that name in the sacred French language that he loved, that he never spoke, but sang. He would have approached little Lorenzo at midday in summer; he wouldn’t have had the face of some yokel, rather, those of fifty young monks in their blue frocks, or perhaps his very own face, unique, emaciated, and princely beneath tonsure, with Dame Poverty at one arm, beautiful as a lily, and at his other sa petite sœur la Mort, Dame Death, beautiful as a lily and whiter still, or perhaps out of modesty he would have come with the features of a wealthy commissioner, Sixtus, a Medici, or why not Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta returned from above in war harness with a handfull of gold, gold in his warrior’s grasp that he’d always kindly reserved for painters. And in the words of Saint Francis, his French song, or in the silence if he had said nothing, Lorentino would have suddenly seen and understood perspective, seen the mathematical skeleton that keeps bodies upright, understood anatomy, all thanks to the peeling back of the particular layers of body and soul, this obscure optical jumble out of which universals are born straight away, leaving this jumble behind, in the brightness of midday. Lorentino would have read all of this quite clearly; and with an understanding of the jumble, and a forgetting of that understanding, he too would have traced universal shapes into the plaster of San Francesco.
He looked at Diosa, Angioletta, Bartolomeo; he wanted to ask them why, how, but didn’t. There was nothing more to it: one masters these shapes by looking; they have nothing to say. Saint Francis or some other had done that for Piero. And so why not for Lorentino?
The wind doesn’t respond; Angioletta, her expression calm, her gestures calm, leaves the table and doesn’t speak; the fire burns down, you can’t hear it now so it feels as if the wind is picking up, is coming into the house, is within these masses of shadow in the corners; it’s he. These shadowy caparisons in the countryside aren’t olive trees; it’s he. Were Sigismondo Pandolfo not in hell, it would be he, but; it’s the wind. And le Chemin de Saint Jacques up above, the Milky Way, the standard of the world, the paused lightning bolt that travels the breadth of the sky, the long halo above what head — is it he? The farmer never looks so high; he recognizes his olive trees, his vines; the great horseman is hurrying him along; he speeds down the final slope and sees the little light in his house below, old Maria’s light, against which the black army is bridling. Sigismondo’s hounds, one black one white, stop. He finally pushes open the door, which swings open and clatters against the wall with all the wind, and this racket feels comforting to him. Old Maria sees that he no longer has the pig. He tells her his story and his ramblings aren’t confused, they understand each other well; he says that his painter is a fatso, is a rascal; they laugh. “Good Saint Martin” says the old woman while laughing. In San Francesco, armor is stirring: the wind has finally managed to open a door and has slammed it open against a wall, little silver objects tumbling to the ground. They roll on the ground and stop, unseen; Constantine doesn’t awaken, it seems that he is dreaming of angels, but it’s only plaster; below, in Arezzo, Lorentino who once mixed this plaster looks at the littlest of his sons, who is puffing out his cheeks, exhaling into the pig’s bladder. It sounds like a trumpet. Lorentino lies down and quickly falls to sleep.
During the night, Saint Martin came to him. The saint seemed angry; he was wearing a harness like that of Sigismondo Pandolfo but his face was that of the Ferrarese painter seen long ago in Sienna of whom Lorentino had been thinking only the day before. One hand was on the hilt of his sword, the other hand was holding his helmet, and his wrath seemed more formidable for its being contained within the poise of a horseman’s coat that fell smoothly to his ankles, flaring out around a chivalric stance — a gray-haired warrior distinguished by many battles. The wind had stopped. Lorentino wasn’t moving, was pretending to sleep; an animated light fell on his closed eyes. It didn’t surprise him that the saint had grown old, as old as his former bishopric in Gaul; it didn’t surprise him that the saint had come wearing the battle-dress of his youth. Martin remained silent for a moment, looking around irritably and moving his mouth without making a sound, like a man who has been insulted and who is deciding whether to reply with something even worse; but this anger was a maternal embrace, an embrace in which you could be a little boy with nothing to fear; you wanted to be with this fury, to be with her and to smolder with her in her great fire. Lorentino opened his eyes like a child who, sensing his mother at the foot of his bed, pretends he’s asleep to keep her from leaving. He stared at the heavy, gathered brows. “God,” said the saint, “has commissioned a painting from you. And you dare to haggle?” These words did not seem to mollify the holy one, but neither did they irritate him further: his holy anger burned pure as a star; it bore Lorentino no malice, it was as benevolent as the blue voices, although the saint spoke in the same tone as a captain who points out to his dull-witted horsemen both the hill to be taken as well as how to take it. Lorentino said nothing. And with that voice that had come to him across the layers of eternity, that each day spoke to God the Father but which nonetheless had the air of having just emerged from a grove where a captain was quartering his troops, the saint continued: “Those whom you call your masters, who do you think commissions them?” In a flash of lightning, Lorentino saw Piero. “And who has been yours these years and has never forgotten you despite your retard in executing his orders? They all knew the instant they first touched their brushes. But you, you think it’s Sixtus, Sigismondo, Piero, or a farmer who wants a painting. What do you think they would do with such things?” Lorentino, who heard these words clearly, who wasn’t afraid, thought about the look the old irascible Ferrarese had given him up in Sienna, who was now before him again but whose body then had housed the soul of an old gothic painter without a commission, not that of a saint: Lorentino had a better understanding of that look now. The saint had said what he had come to say, he was thinking about moving on, his anger was already burning elsewhere. Nonetheless he said: “Your painting is worth a pig, or the city of Rome, which is to say nothing.” He turned around, his impeccable coat not stirring, the pieces of his war harness grating against themselves but making no sound; the horseman turned to leave, neither walking nor floating, his spurs glinting. Lorentino, lying on his back and propped up on his elbows to watch him leave, found all of this peculiar, but it moved him. The saint donned his helmet as he passed through the door. The wind began again, Martin was back on his horse. Sigismondo’s hounds were at his heels, black and white, running through the countryside. Again Lorentino saw Piero in the dark, but he had never seen him this way before, as if Piero were his brother. As if he were going into San Francesco with Piero, as if they were passing through the door the wind had opened and lifting their candles high above them in the Bacci chapel so filled with paintings, as if together they were looking: he saw the little sign an emperor received in a dream, this little object not even so much an object, but which was held at arm’s length as one holds a candle and which manages to fluster both flanks of Maxence’s minions, all the sundered battlery, a thousand Moorish warriors to the left, a thousand Gaulish horsemen on the right. He wanted to see this sign in Piero’s eyes as well, but Piero had disappeared, Lorentino was all alone. The great patron was before him.