Meanwhile dawn had passed, it was daytime, the sun was already hot, and afraid that the heat might bother their strange skins, Fra Giovanni sheltered one side of the cage with twigs; then, after asking if they needed anything else and telling them if they did to please be sure to call him with their rustling noise, he went off to dig up the onions he needed to make the soup for lunch.
That night the dragonfly came to visit him. Fra Giovanni was asleep, he saw the creature sitting on the stool of his cell and had the impression of waking with a start, whereas in fact he was already awake. There was a full moon, and bright moonlight projected the square of the window onto the brick floor. Fra Giovanni caught an intense odour of basil, so strong it gave him a sort of heady feeling. He sat on his bed and said: ‘Is it you that smells of basil?’ The creature laid one of her incredibly long fingers on her mouth as if to silence him and then came to him and embraced him. At which Fra Giovanni, confused by the night, by the smell of basil and by that pale face with the long hair, said: ‘Nerina, it’s you, I’m dreaming.’ The creature smiled, and before leaving said with a rustle of wings: ‘Tomorrow you must paint us, that’s why we came.’
Fra Giovanni woke at dawn, as he always did, and straight after first prayers went out to the cage where the bird creatures were and chose the first model. A few days before, assisted by some of his brother monks, he had painted, in the twenty-third cell in the monastery, the crucifixion of Christ. He had asked his helpers to paint the background verdaccio, a mixture of ochre, black and vermilion, since he wanted this to be the colour of Mary’s desperation as she points, petrified, at her crucified son. But now that he had this little round creature here, tail elusive as a flame, he thought that to lighten the virgin’s grief and have her understand how her son’s suffering was God’s will, he would paint some divine beings who, as instruments of the heavenly plan, consented to bang the nails into Christ’s hands and feet. He thus took the creature into the cell, set him down on a stool, on his stomach so that he looked as though he were in flight, and painted him like that at the corners of the cross, placing a hammer in his right hand to drive in the nails: and the monks who had frescoed the cell with him looked on in astonishment as with incredible rapidity his brush conjured up this strange creature from the shadows of the crucifixion, and with one voice they said: ‘Oh!’
So the week passed with Fra Giovanni painting so much he even forgot to eat. He added another figure to an already completed fresco, the one in cell thirty-four, where he had already painted Christ praying in the Garden. The painting looked finished, as if there were no more space to fill; but he found a little corner above the trees to the right and there he painted the dragonfly with Nerina’s face and the translucent golden wings. And in her hand he placed a chalice, so that she could offer it to Christ.
Then, last of all, he painted the bird creature who had arrived first. He chose the wall in the corridor on the first floor, because he wanted a wide wall that could be seen from a good distance. First he painted a portico, with Corinthian columns and capitals, and then a glimpse of garden ending in a palisade. Finally he arranged the creature in a genuflecting pose, leaning him against a bench to prevent him from falling over; he had him cross his hands on his breast in a gesture of reverence and said to him: ‘I’ll cover you with a pink tunic, because your body is too ugly. I’ll draw the Virgin tomorrow. You hang on this afternoon and then you can all go. I’m doing an Annunciation.’
By evening he had finished. Night was falling and he felt a little tired, and melancholy too, that melancholy that comes when something is finished and there is nothing left to do and the moment has passed. He went to the cage and found it empty. Just four or five feathers had got caught in the net and were twitching in the fresh wind coming down from the Fiesole hills. Fra Giovanni thought he could smell an intense odour of basil, but there was no basil in the garden. There were the onions that had been waiting to be picked for a week now and perhaps were already going off, soon they wouldn’t be good enough for making soup anymore. So he set to pick them before they went rotten.
Past Composed: Three Letters
I
Letter from Dom Sebastião de Avis
,
*
King of Portugal,
to Francisco Goya, painter
In this shadow world I inhabit, where the future is already present, I have heard tell that your hands are unrivalled in the depiction of carnage and caprice. Your home is Aragon, a land dear to me for its solitude, for the geometry of its roads, for the quiet green of its courtyards hidden behind bellied gratings.
There are dark chapels with sorrowful portraits, relics, braids of hair in glass cases, phials of real tears and real blood; and small arenas where lithe men stalk the captive beast with the agile steps of dancers. Your land embodies some quintessential virtue of our peninsula in its lines, its faith, its fury. From these I shall choose some images for the symbol which, as heraldic emblem of a unique nation, you shall inscribe in the borders of the painting I hereby commission from you.
So then: On the right you shall paint the Sacred Heart of Our Lord. It will be dripping and bound in thorns, as in the images sold by pedlars and blind men in the squares outside our churches. But it must faithfully reproduce man’s real anatomy, since to suffer on the cross Our Lord became a man, and His heart burst like a human heart and was pierced like any muscle of flesh. You shall paint it like that, muscular, throbbing, swollen with blood and pain, showing the lacework of the veins, the severed arteries, and the intricate latticework of the surrounding membrane open like a curtain and folded back like the peel of a fruit. It would be well to thrust the spear that transfixed it into the heart, the blade being shaped like a hook so as to tear open the wound from which His blood pours freely down.
On the opposite side of the painting, halfway up, and therefore level with the horizon, you shall paint a small bull. Paint him lying on his haunches, his front legs stretched out before him, like a pet dog; and his horns must be diabolical and his countenance evil. In the physiognomy of this monster you shall demonstrate that flair for the fantastical wherein you excel. Thus a sneer shall twist the animal’s muzzle, but the eyes must be innocent, almost childlike. The weather shall be misty; the hour, dusk. The merciful, soft shadow of evening will already be falling, veiling the scene. The ground will be littered with corpses, thousands of corpses, thick as flies. You shall depict them as only you know how, incongruous and innocent as the dead always are. And beside the corpses, and in their arms, you shall paint the viols and guitars they took with them to their deaths.
In the middle of the painting, high up, amidst clouds and sky, you shall paint a ship. Not a ship drawn from life, but something from a dream, an apparition, a chimera. For this must be all the ships that took my people across foreign seas to distant coasts or down to the bottomless depths of the ocean, and again all the dreams my people dreamt looking out from the cliffs where my country runs to meet the sea, the monsters they conjured up in their imaginations, and the fables, the fish, the dazzling birds, the mourning and the mirages. And at the same time it shall also be my own dreams, the dreams I inherited from ancestors and my own silent folly. The figurehead of this ship shall have a human form and you must paint its features so that they seem alive and distantly recall my own. A smile may hover over them, but it must be faint, or vaguely mysterious: the incurable, subtle nostalgia of one who knows that all is vanity and that the winds which swell the sails of dreams are nothing but air, air, air.