The Passion of Artemisia by Susan Vreeland Page B

I’d want hanging in our bedchamber, but very fine. A difficult composition.” I caught his fleeting, astonished smile.
    â€œDon’t worry. I hope to sell it as soon as I am known.”
    He tipped his head to one side, as if to indicate the thought of me earning money hadn’t occurred to him, but the deliberateness of that action seemed to be pretense.
    â€œOr maybe I’ll give it to Cosimo de’ Medici.”
    â€œNo! Don’t do that.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œYou don’t just give away a painting.”
    â€œAs a means of announcing the presence of another artist in the city? And to be hung among the great paintings that he must own?”
    I could see he didn’t like the idea. Be wise, Graziela had warned. “No need to decide now,” I said. “It isn’t even finished.” I rolled up the canvases loosely. “I just want you to know that as soon as I am able, I intend to earn my own way.”
    â€œFine with me.”
    We rode until dusk and finally stopped for the night at an inn. My back and shoulders ached from hours of tightening them against the damp. He helped me down from the coach and I was stiff from not moving. His cool palm was firm under mine. I liked the feel of it—at least on my hand.
    The inn was filled with olive harvesters, vineyard workers, carters, farmers and their families. The sweat of their labors mixed with the smells of smoke from the fireplace,wet wool drying, and dung on their boots. I stood before the fire and let the warmth spread deliciously over my palms and creep up my throat. An ash flew into my eye. I turned around. In the blurred room, two squealing, giggling children and a dog ran around the tables and no one seemed to mind.
    A young mother with her hair wrapped in a cloth was nursing her baby next to a weathered crone slumped against the wall in a nest of blankets, wearing heavy socks but no shoes. Her gnarled fingers moved as though still performing some task while the rest of her sat dully blinking, oblivious to the boisterous talk and laughter around her. The spit and crackle of the fire lit only the right sides of the women’s faces and necks. The whole human scene moved me. Rome seemed far away.
    When the serving girl began to ladle something from an iron kettle, I squeezed between Pietro and another man on a bench before the trestle table. She passed bowls, tin cups, and earthenware pitchers of pale Umbrian wine down the line of people. The meal consisted of rabbit stew with onions, white beans and turnips, simple country food that smelled of sage and basil and garlic. With his head ducked low, Pietro ate fast, swallowing even before he chewed, and following with a gulp of wine. “Buono,” he said.
    I couldn’t cook like this. It would take half a day—all that gutting and skinning—and then how could I paint? Lavishing all that attention on a meal that wouldn’t last seemed to be squandering life.
    I looked at the rough, tired, noisy Umbrian folk, and let their wine warm me and the stew fill me with things of the countryside. Pietro tore off a hunk of bread from the loaf.
    â€œGood bread, eh?” I said. “The innkeeper’s wife probably used grain from her brother-in-law’s farm ground by her husband’s father and baked this morning in a stone ovenheated with wood from a forest owned by her own father and carted here by her cousin.”
    He laughed softly. “You know that for certain?”
    â€œNo. I just made it up.”
    Sitting opposite us, a scruffy man whose front teeth were missing said, “She’s not far wrong. You better listen to her, young man.”
    â€œIs that so?” Pietro turned to me with a skewed smile.
    â€œThat’s what my wife’s been telling me for years. If men would only have ears like the jackasses they are, she says. So I say to her, that’ll happen the day wives have mouths like jack rabbits.