On our way back through the city, a dreary, insistent rain began to fall, a rain more typical of January or February than June, and by the time we reached my workshop we were drenched. I lit a wood fire and hung our wet clothes over a rail. To keep Fiore happy while they dried, I gave her one of the smocks I wore when I was casting, a small lump of beeswax, and a few of my old tools. Some time later, I heard footsteps in the stable yard, and Stufa walked in.
I straightened up. ‘This is a surprise.’
Stufa wiped the rain off his face, then began to inspect the shelves that lined the walls.
‘I didn’t think you had any time for art,’ I said.
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘Obsession fascinates me, though.’
He had stopped in front of my pigments, but I doubted it was the pots of mercuric sulphide and chrysocolla that had caught his eye. On the same shelf, at head-height, was the thick glass jar that contained the dead girl’s skin. In a desperate attempt to distract him I asked if he wanted me to show him round. Either he didn’t hear me, though, or he ignored the offer.
‘People tell me you’ve been working night and day,’ he said, his eyes still fastened on the floating piece of skin.
Fiore spoke from the corner of the room. ‘What’s obsession mean?’
Stufa glanced round. He had assumed we were alone, perhaps. Also, clearly, he wasn’t used to being interrupted, least of all by a child.
‘This, Fiore, is Padre Stufa,’ I said. ‘He’s a very important man.’
Fiore stared at him, her mouth ajar.
‘She doesn’t appear to have any manners,’ Stufa observed.
‘She’s shy,’ I said.
‘Witless too, by the look of it.’
I felt my stomach knot with fury. ‘If you’ve seen enough,’ I said, ‘maybe you’d be good enough to let us get on with our work.’
Fiore had edged closer, and was gazing up at Stufa, as if some aspect of his appearance mystified her. Brought up short by my dismissive tone, however, he hadn’t noticed. I watched as Fiore arrived at a conclusion.
‘You’re not very important,’ she said. ‘You’re not important at all.’
Stufa lashed out with the back of his hand and knocked her to the floor. She was so shocked that she forgot to cry. Instead, she stared at him, wide-eyed, as if he had just swallowed a sword or pulled a white dove from his sleeve. Then her mouth opened, and she let out a piteous wail. I crouched down. Put my arms round her.
‘I don’t think it’ll do her any harm.’ Stufa calmly adjusted the emerald he was wearing. ‘Actually, I’m more concerned about my ring. It was a gift from the Grand Duchess. It’s rather valuable.’ He held his hand away from his body, the better to admire the stone, then turned and walked out into the drizzle.
‘My face feels different,’ Fiore said.
A sharp-edged dark-blue mark had appeared on her right cheek, below her eye.
‘You’ll have a bruise,’ I said.
‘For ever?’
‘No. Just for a few days.’ I stood up. ‘Wait here.’
I ran across the stable yard and out into the gardens. Stufa was ahead of me, on a path that led back to the palace. He was moving at a slow, almost ceremonial pace, like somebody in church.
I was only a few yards away when he sensed my presence behind him. Startled, he backed up against a high laurel hedge.
‘You think you can do something like that and walk away?’ I said.
Stufa laughed, his laughter no louder than exhaled breath. ‘Of course.’
‘She’s a child —’
I had been about to say that she was backward, but Stufa interrupted.
‘She’s meaningless,’ he said.
My knife was in my hand before I knew it, the sharp point probing the underside of Stufa’s chin. That flimsy membrane would offer little or no resistance. One swift upward thrust and the knife would pierce the soft tissue of the palate, then pass through the maxilla, or the nasal passages. After severing both the facial artery and the optic nerve, it would penetrate the spongy frontal matter of the brain. I could imagine the precise path that it would take. I could predict the damage it would do. Not without foundation was it sometimes said of me that I had studied anatomy in more detail than was strictly necessary for a sculptor.
‘You dare to threaten me?’ Stufa barely moved his lips, not wanting to disturb the tip of the blade.
‘If you ever do anything like that again,’ I said, ‘I’ll strip the skin off your body while you’re still alive and hang it on the back of your door like an old coat.’
He gasped. The air that came out of him had a fermented smell, like compost.
Stepping back, I put away my knife.
Stufa touched his chin, then looked at his fingers, which were delicately smeared with blood.
‘It’s only a scratch,’ I said.
His dark eyes lifted until they locked on mine. ‘I’m looking at a dead man.’
‘Then you must be looking in the mirror.’
As I walked back to my workshop, I realized I was trembling, not with rage or fear but with a kind of wild hilarity. Probably it had not been wise to draw a knife on Stufa, but I had had just about enough of his needless provocations.
It was the day after San Giovanni, and the sky was scorched and smoky. Doffo and Simone Guazzi had excelled themselves: the appearance of the dragon, an interlude they had called ‘The Defeat of Satan’, had been the high point of the firework display. I felt restless that morning, and slightly sick. Instead of making for the palace, I set off along the river, heading east. The air smelled of gunpowder, and also of burnt sugar, and I could hear a constant, thin whining, as if a mosquito were trapped inside my skull. Every now and then, I saw Stufa’s ring connect with Fiore’s cheek, or I remembered how the hilt of the knife had warmed in my hand as I held it to his throat, but beyond that, nothing. I couldn’t seem to think even one straight thought.
I crossed the river by the Ponte Rubaconte, then followed the road that ran along the inside of the city walls. Irises had flowered on the stonework, their fleshy petals mauve and purple. Near the Porta a Pinti, I stopped to watch a man throwing buckets of water over a horse. Its coat gleamed like glass in the summer sun. Further on, I saw people lying in rows under the mulberry trees at the edge of the road. These would be peasant families who had travelled in from the countryside for the festivities. I made sketches of a mother and her baby. They were asleep, but they could just as easily have been dead.
By the time I returned to Via de’ Serragli, it was past midday, and my feet hurt — I must have walked ten miles — but at least my head was clear. Then I heard iron-bound wheels behind me, and I understood why I had been feeling so unsettled. I stepped aside to let the carriage pass. It turned into my street, as I had known it would. Just before I reached the corner, I stopped and rested my forehead against the wall. I was thirty-seven years old, but, like a child, I wanted to make her wait. It even crossed my mind to walk away.
Dressed in a derelict black gown with a high collar and frayed cuffs, she was peering up at my house. Her hair was the stained yellow-white of old ivory, and she wore a pair of dark lenses held in place by weighted cords that looped over her ears and dangled on either side of her thin neck. Here she was, my mother, yet she seemed a hastily assembled and eccentric version of the woman I had visited so often in my head. Like the figures I had seen in the processions for San Giovanni the day before, she appeared to have been knocked together out of sticks and cloth.
Her maid spoke to her, and she turned and looked in my direction.
‘Gaetano …’
My name sounded fragile, wounded.