Death in the Palazzo by Edward Sklepowich

of art was limited to the great Leonardo and Michelangelo and the obscure painters of the portraits of the Da Capo-Zendrini family that hung in our portrait gallery. Neither did he care for its possible value. He wanted to hang it in the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini.
    In due course the painting was cleaned by the monk. Then through his contacts in Florence and Rome, it was authenticated as a Caravaggio. Many impressive offers to buy it were made but my father refused them all without a thought and did as he had originally intended. The painting was installed in one of the bedrooms on the second floor.
    I remember the excitement in the house. Family and friends came to look at the famous picture of the mandolin player in his makeup and wig. One old man said that it would have been more appropriate if it had been hung in our former palazzo in San Polo, since this building was near the Bridge of Teats. There, during the days when the city was a Sodom of the sea, courtesans often dressed as boys in doublet and hose to attract Venetian men into their rooms when they had no success exposing their breasts.
    My brother Amerigo and I were the first to sleep in the room. We sneaked in late that night after the party was over and had our own fun. To say we slept, though, is not exactly true. We spent most of the night laughing and making up stories about the boy in the painting, and during some friendly fisticuffs broke a Chinese vase. Perhaps one of the maids noticed next morning that the coverlet had been disturbed, but no one ever said anything to us, and because we had broken the vase, we kept our silence.
    When Amerigo died three years later of a disease of the kidneys that made his body swell, I looked at his bloated face in the coffin and thought of the boy in the painting. The mortician had even put a faint coating of rouge and lipstick on his face. I have often wondered if my father noticed the faint similarity in his profound grief over having lost his eldest son.
    Perhaps I was the only one to make an association between my brother’s death and the painting in what had by then come to be known as the Caravaggio Room. Certainly it was a childish fancy.
    The room was put into occasional service and no one complained of anything more serious than a night of tossing and turning.
    Then, two years later, Nonna Teresa, my father’s mother, slept there. Her regular room needed to be repaired because of water damage.
    Her maid, Giuseppina, found her dead in bed the next morning. The doctor said her heart, which had troubled her for the previous twenty years, had given out during the night and that she had died peacefully in her sleep.
    Just because Nonna Teresa had died in the room was no reason not to use it again, of course. Death in those days almost always took place at home. Families couldn’t become overly sentimental about the rooms where their loved ones breathed their last breaths. With rare exceptions they were put into use as soon afterward as was decent, given the demands of mourning.
    A year after Nonna Teresa’s death, my cousin Flora slept in the room. She chose it herself, precisely because of the Caravaggio, which she had heard so much about.
    Flora was a beautiful girl of fifteen, a year younger than I was at the time. She was my father’s grandniece, thus my second cousin, as such things are calculated. An only child just as I had become since the death of Amerigo, Flora lived with her parents in Naples. She would visit us for several weeks most summers, when her parents were obliged to make a circuit of the spas with an aged, wealthy relative. Flora was an asthmatic, and Venice, though subject to its own malaria , was within occasional reach of the cool breezes from the Dolomites.
    Whenever Flora visited, my mother, who loved her like the daughter she hadn’t been blessed with, would take her to her friend Don Mariano Fortuny’s studio. There Flora would select whatever patterned fabric