He lowered the body on to the slab and stood back, rubbing the palm of one hand slowly against the other, then he fetched a bottle and two glasses, poured large measures, and handed one of the glasses to me. I downed the contents in a single gulp. An oily fire spread through my belly.
‘Quite fitting, really,’ Pampolini said. ‘It was an omen of the plague, wasn’t it, the constellation of the dog?’
‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘There’s no evidence of disease, though, is there?’
‘None.’ He looked down into his empty glass. ‘So — are you interested?’
‘How long’s she been dead?’
‘I told you what the dredger said. She was warm when he found her. And there’s no stiffening in the eyelids yet, or in the fingers. I don’t think she’s been dead for more than about three hours.’
‘All the same, there’s no time to lose.’
He said he could have the body delivered to my workshop immediately.
‘On this occasion, though,’ he added, ‘since these aren’t what you might call normal circumstances, I might need a little reimbursement.’
I looked at him steadily. ‘How much?’
He mentioned a price.
‘That’s a bit steep,’ I said.
He yawned, his jawbone cracking. ‘But then again, she’s exactly what you’re looking for, isn’t she? Just think how thrilled your client is going to be.’
I shook my head. ‘You’re such a Florentine.’
‘Actually,’ he said, with the smugness of a card player who is about to display a winning hand, ‘I was born in Padua.’
The black geraniums I had planted outside my workshop bent in the wind as the porters carried the stretcher down the track, the girl’s body blurred by the threadbare cloth that covered it. The dark shapes of the overhanging myrtle trees swirled above our heads, the flesh of the night sky peeled back to reveal the white bone of the moon.
Before leaving Santa Maria Nuova, I had come to an arrangement with Pampolini: I had agreed to pay what he was asking, but only on the condition that I could borrow his assistant. With rigor mortis looming, I would have to work fast, and I didn’t think I could do it on my own. Not only was Earhole accustomed to the dead, but he had also been party to the irregular circumstances in which I had acquired the corpse. In hiring him, I would be ensuring that the circle of confidentiality stayed closed. Earlier that night, he had asked me to trust him. This was his chance to prove himself worthy of that trust.
Once the porters had lifted the girl’s body on to the dissecting table, I asked Earhole to escort them back to the gate. As soon as they were gone, I removed the covering. Pampolini had put coins on the girl’s eyelids to keep them from sliding open. He had also fastened a piece of rag around her head to hold her jaw in place. I reached down and gently wiped away the mucus that had seeped from her mouth during her journey across the city.
Earhole reappeared. I showed him the metal-lined drawers I had built into the dissecting table. When packed with ice, they helped to slow the process of decomposition. I plucked the key to the Grand Duke’s ice house off the wall and gave it to him.
‘Take the handcart,’ I said. ‘Bring as much as you can manage. And hurry. Every second counts.’
While he was away, I cut off the girl’s hair and laid it in a wooden tray, then I shaved her head and removed the hair from her armpits and her groin. That done, I coated her body in a thin layer of hemp oil. She gleamed in the candle-light as if she had just broken out in a sweat, but I was the one who was sweating. I tested her fingers. Still no sign of stiffening.
In fifteen minutes Earhole had returned. Rigor mortis occurred four to six hours after death, depending on the temperature. In Pampolini’s opinion, the girl had died between seven and eight o’clock. It was now midnight. Even with the doors wide open and the ice-filled drawers, I didn’t think I had more than an hour to prepare the body for casting. After that, manipulation would prove impossible.
I propped my notebook open at the relevant page. Guided by drawings I had made during the summer, I bent the girl’s left arm at the elbow, leaving her hand resting on her belly. I liked the elegant, elongated diamond of air that opened up between her arm and her waist, and there was a kind of tenderness about the hand. A subtle sensuality as well. To keep the arm from moving, I fitted a small right-angled cushion filled with sand against the outside of the elbow. Walking round the table, I straightened the girl’s right arm so it lay flush against her body, her palm and the inside of her elbow facing upwards. Casting the delicately curling fingers wouldn’t be easy, but they were an integral part of the image I had in mind. I placed the hand in a three-sided wooden box, which would lock it in the chosen position. As for her legs, they needed to mirror or complement the arms. Leaving her left leg extended, I eased her right knee outwards a fraction, then brought her foot back in so that the sole almost touched the left ankle. I wedged more sand-filled pillows between the legs to stop them straightening, then I stood back. The girl looked natural, relaxed and — strange, this — solitary. The angle of her head was wrong, though. If I turned her face towards her left shoulder — if she appeared to be avoiding the viewer’s gaze, in other words — it would leave her poised between modesty and invitation, and I would be combining the dreamy grace of Poussin’s ‘Galatea’ with the boldness of his ‘Sleeping Venus’. That, at least, was my intention. I was conscious of Earhole in the shadows, watching.
‘Are you tired?’ I said.
‘A bit.’
‘Why don’t you sleep?’
Covering two lengths of string in pig fat, I fixed them to the girl’s left leg, one on either side, so they stretched all the way from her hip to her ankle, then I reached for the sack of powdered gypsum and heaped several scoops into a bowl. When casting Fiore’s hands, I had used lukewarm water, and the plaster had set too rapidly. This time I would use cold water and a sprinkling of grog — a pulverized burnt clay — which would slow down the chemical reaction and give me a little more control. I stirred the mixture until it formed a creamy paste, then started to apply it to the leg, careful not to dislodge the bits of string. I worked fast, methodically. My mind, unanchored, floated free.
I hear you’re making something special for the Grand Duke …
Stufa’s words.
That night in the carriage, I had thought at first that he was taking an interest. How naïve of me! All too soon, he had become dismissive, if not openly contemptuous. What had he called my work? Histrionic. Gratuitous. And it didn’t bother him if he upset me. Not in the slightest. In fact, he seemed to want to upset me.
Did I scare you?
His cheekbones sticking out like knuckles, a sharpness to his mouth, his tongue. That black flower again, its petals opening and closing …
My eyes grew heavy. I let my head rest on my arm and found myself returning to Siracusa. I was on horseback, the volcano behind me, its slopes the colour of a pigeon’s wing. I passed white convent walls, the air keen with ripe lemon and wild sage. Below me, far below, the soothing lap and flop of waves. The sea.
I came round a bend in the road and the town appeared ahead of me, the pink dome of my old college rising out of the clustered buildings, the wide bay of the Porto Grande glittering beyond.
My throat tightened.
I rode across the shallow harbour, then past a group of fishermen and up Via Dione, high-sided, sunk in shadow. I stopped outside our house. Someone had dropped a melon, and it had split open, a gash of crimson showing in the dark-green rind. I climbed the steps and went inside. The smell of dried roses, beeswax, flaking plaster. The tiles earth-brown, vein-blue. The doors ajar, the rooms peaceful, cool.