The Competition Read online

  It had become a habit of theirs, a lovely habit. Two widows taking the early morning air, strolling to the mercato, making the day’s purchases. Viviana often bought items for Isabetta—little indulgences Isabetta could not sacrifice a single lira to purchase herself. At first, Isabetta had argued, her pride a heavy weight. When Viviana returned to the market without her, she purchased the item, and had it sent to Isabetta’s home. Isabetta had laughed at her friend’s generous temerity; she no longer argued.

  “Is the day not exceedingly fair?” Isabetta said, as they stepped once more upon the cobbled street of Viviana’s prosperous neighborhood.

  “The rain has washed the air clean,” Viviana agreed. The night and all its wonders fluttered in her mind, in her stomach, and yes, even lower. It had been a night spent once more in Sansone’s arms. Their lovemaking had been a thunderous thing, bursting with flashes of blinding light as Viviana found herself more and more at ease—more and more of her own unbridled self—in his arms.

  “Well, where does that smile come from?” Isabetta asked, whisking away Viviana’s recollections as the rain had the humidity.

  Viviana felt the rush of heat upon her face. “Is it so very obvious?” Is it still necessary to keep it a secret? She asked herself.

  “Very. I—” Isabetta jolted to a stop. “You have been with a man.”

  Viviana’s lips spread wide; her skin tingled with the glow of his remembered touch as if it had branded her. With a laugh, she reached for Isabetta’s arm again, linked it with her own, and continued their walk as she told Isabetta of Sansone.

  As they reached the church of Santa Maria Degli, half the distance to the mercato, Isabetta, speechless throughout Viviana’s confession, though her mouth never closed, sat abruptly upon one of the many benches in the small piazza in front of the church.

  With her hand, she fanned herself.

  “I was wrong,” she said, “it is hotter than yesterday.”

  Viviana laughed at her friend’s particular brand of humor, sighed with relief that there was not the tiniest tone of censure in it.

  “How did you manage it? Such wanting, such desire, for all those years?”

  Viviana shrugged, but it was hardly dismissive. “I would not become him.”

  Isabetta snickered with a grin. “And now Heaven rewards you.”

  If it does, it rewards me with you as well, Viviana thought. Isabetta’s tender acceptance was a reward as great as any in her life.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Do?” Viviana pulled in her chin. “What need I do, save enjoy myself?”

  “Will that be—”

  They didn’t see the two men approach; hence, they did not see the glare of blatant anger on their faces until they hurled it at the women like a blast of fetid air.

  “You are a disgrace to all women,” the shorter of the two men harangued them.

  The women flinched in surprise, in defense. Viviana feared they had been overheard; an unmarried woman having sexual relations could warrant such a reaction.

  “Women cannot paint; they do not paint,” the tall, thin man said.

  Viviana looked at them, truly looked since they’d approached. Both wore long tunics; both tunics bore splotches of paint.

  The tall man spat at their feet, a giant glob of phlegm turning the gray stone black.

  “Return to your kitchens where you belong,” his short fellow declared.

  As quickly as they had come, they were gone.

  The men turned the corner of the Via Strozzi, and disappeared from sight. The two women held each other tighter in the vacuum of odium in which they had discovered themselves.

  “They know,” Viviana gulped, though she shook her head against the possibility of it. “The city knows.”

  How they knew was a mystery, but Viviana was quite sure of it; somehow, the fact that there was a group of women artists and that they had bid on a commission had become public knowledge. Quickly she rejected the idea of Fabia possessing the loose tongue, but her husband…

  As Isabetta scrutinized the street around them, causing Viviana to do the same, she simply nodded.

  If eyes could truly throw daggers they would be in pieces, such were the scornful stares piercing them from every corner of the street.

  “Do we go back?” Viviana asked. Back to their homes. There was no turning back from their challenge; neither would stand for that.

  Isabetta answered, lips pulled into a sneer, “There is no going back. That moment has long since passed, and good riddance to it.”

  Viviana snuffled at the woman’s wisdom. There truly was no direction to go but forward. They could not retract their bid without doing more harm than good. To hide within their homes would only be a surrender, a denial of their determination. It would be a fruitless one; now that word was out, they must brace themselves for such reactions whenever they were in public.

  Viviana stood. “Well then. I guess we best get used to it.”

  She held out her hand to Isabetta who stood and took it. Once more arm and arm, they continued on to the mercato.

  “So, tell me, Viviana, how big is Sansone’s…that is, I mean…” She laughed, as did Viviana. It felt good to do so beneath the deluge of disrespect.

  “Now, now, my friend,” Viviana giggled, “I am a lady. No matter what these cretins may think of me at the moment.”

  “Oh, please,” Isabetta begged, with the exuberance of a child. “It has been too long…I cannot…”

  Viviana understood her stuttering. Her husband, Vittorio, had passed away from his illness, one that had plagued him for years, not three months ago; it had altered the very course of Isabetta’s life. Whatever her desires, like Viviana, her honor was stronger.

  “Let me experience it through you. Tell me a little more,” Isabetta pleaded, with a glimmer of a salacious grin.

  “Perhaps,” Viviana teased her. “Perhaps someday. But not this day.”

  As they had stepped into the large square that housed the mercato, the number of stares and denouncements increased within the highly populated courtyard. Men called out cruel obscenities; more spat at them. They were suddenly ostracized strangers in their own homeland.

  They held their heads high.

  “Let us get what we need and return home,” Viviana muttered. “But do not rush.”

  If they must suffer the slings and arrows of venomous people, they would do so with dignity. Or so she thought. Never would she have expected how many farmers and vendors refused them service.

  As if they carried the plague, the crowd parted wherever they walked, space meant to divide and denigrate. Viviana and Isabetta stayed as conjoined as possible, shopping together whether they looked for the same things or not. As they passed before the pungent stall of the spice vendor—whose product they need not purchase, thanks to Viviana’s sons—the vendor’s wife jumped up from the small stool where she sat behind the rows and rows of chopped and powdered herbs.

  The plump but worn-looking woman gathered a handful of cinnamon sticks and wrapped them in thick velum. The woman finally met Viviana’s gaze as she passed the package to her.

  “You are very brave, madonnas,” she said merely with her breath, lips parted yet barely moving, as her eyes slipped sideways to where her husband waited on other shoppers.

  Viviana accepted the package, and the woman’s words, with the same wave of gratitude, straightening her shoulders. “Grazie, madonna.” She saw the first hint of a smile on this haggard woman’s face at being addressed so; it was all Viviana could give her in return.

  “You should see what flowers they have today.” The woman tilted her head toward a stall down the row, looking younger than she had a moment ago.

  “We will,” Isabetta replied with a resolute and grateful nod.

  The woman operating the flower stall stood as they turned her way, as if she lay in wait—in hope—for them to come.

  Her smile and the warmth of her greeting told them who—and w
hat—she was: another compatriot.

  “What is your specialty of the day?” Viviana asked the young, pale-haired beauty who stared at them as if they were the Madonna herself.

  “The primula are especially beautiful,” she replied, wiping her hands on her apron, tucking her chin and with it, her fey smile.

  Viviana looked to where she pointed, looking to the burst of life and color that was the five-petaled flower, these a royal blue with a delicate yellow center, a flower whose name meant “the first.”

  “I shall take them all, every one you have,” Viviana declared, raising her voice so those lurking around them, the far too many of them, heard every word.

  The bunch of flowers—bunches—were almost more than Viviana could carry, and she shared the load with Isabetta, insisting she take some to her own home. As Viviana reached out to place a gathering of soldi in the girl’s hand, the girl leaned toward her.

  “Do not let any stop you,” she whispered, serious whispers through the false front of a mouth wide with teeth. “There are so many of us that are proud of you and your courage.”

  The flower girl pulled back, pocketing the soldi, raising her voice. “Grazie, Mona del Marrone. Please come back again.”

  “Oh, you can be assured of it,” Isabetta answered.

  They did not obtain all they had hoped to purchase that day, but they received more than planned, things both brilliant and thunderous, espousal and evil.

  Isabetta and Viviana, arms now full of primroses and cinnamon, turned from the market stalls and headed back toward the Via del Corso.

  Just as they made to turn the corner onto the Via del Vecchitti, something hit Viviana in the back, a hard hit from something soft and squishy that thwacked against her. “Oomph!” Viviana cried out, stumbling as her body pitched ahead of her feet. Only Isabetta’s quick arm stopped her from tumbling headfirst onto the stones.

  Isabetta spun round, fury trembling in her fists; she could not tell who had thrown it. She turned Viviana around, finding the viscous, red, and pulpy remnants of a tomato, one that lay in smooshed pieces at their feet.

  With one finger, Isabetta scooped some of it off Viviana’s back and slathered it on her tongue.

  With eyebrows raised, an approving if menacing curve on her lips, she looked back at the multitude glaring at them from the square.

  “Hmmm, quite good,” she called out, as if she were supping at the table of a nobleman. “Come along, Viviana.”

  Isabetta linked her arm once more with Viviana’s and, with fear-tinged laughter bubbling from her, headed for home.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “It is one thing to travel beyond our boundaries, it is another altogether to expect companions.”

  The message from Milan had come yesterday. It lay upon the desk in his old room in Verrocchio’s studio. He ignored it, though it screamed out to him whenever he glanced its way. It was a nagging Leonardo wished to deny, yet he could only forestall giving in to it. Part of him longed to cede to it, longed for Milan.

  As he dressed that morn, it once more cried out to him. Or was it his own longing that pestered him? He commanded it to shut up as he left the room, shutting the missive within.

  The sounds reached him first. As Leonardo descended the wooden steps from the small rooms on the third floor of Verrocchio’s building on the Via Carnsecchi, just steps away from the Duomo, the voices and clatter of men at work rose up toward him like the voices of a choir, so soothing were the sounds of art’s creation.

  He stopped; voices caught his ear, the sound of them as familiar as the grinding of pestle on mortar, of hammer striking chisel. The notion, when it came, came as if from the heavens.

  “Buongiorno, Leo.” Verrocchio’s warbling greeted him before he had decended to the last step.

  “Good morning, maestro,” Leonardo answered. It had been years since Andrea del Verrocchio had been his master, but the man would forever be that to him. He had been Leonardo’s first and only teacher, the finest teacher one could hope to have.

  Verrocchio was still the bulbous-faced, portly man he had been when Leonardo’s father had brought him to the master’s studio to be an apprentice. Verrocchio was still as volatile, one minute decrying mistakes in a painting his apprentices produced, the next crying at its beauty. Though now, in his fiftieth year, the thick cap of black curls sprouted far more gray than black, and it seemed as if he had grown an additional chin or two with the sagging of his skin.

  “Now we will see,” Verrocchio bellowed to the man beside him as Leonardo approached.

  “Sandro.” Leonardo gave greeting to the man without kissing his cheeks, or even a handshake.

  “Leonardo,” the reply came in kind.

  The years had passed, but what lay between them had changed little.

  Both were products of Verrocchio’s studio, both brilliant. Leonardo had shone first; Botticelli had shone brighter. Each knew it was not a question of who possessed more talent—they both knew Leonardo held that distinction—but who put it best to use—that belonged wholly to Botticelli. For each man, the particular success of the other was a pebble in his shoe.

  For Botticelli, his most recent work, yet another commission from the Medici, The Birth of Venus, was talked of in artistic circles not only in Florence, not only across the Italian peninsula, but across all of Europe. Not only was it the first canvas of its size—nearly ten feet in width—it astonished with its sense of motion. Though Botticelli did not practice, as so many of his colleagues did, the realism at the core of painting at the moment, its lack marked its success, its monumental glory, as all the more glorious.

  For Leonardo, many viewed his move to the court of Milan as a retreat, if not a surrender, yet none knew of what he created there. Not yet. The duke’s letter, entreating him to return, to continue preliminary work on the mural of the Virgin, was beginning to feel like a portent, but one he must shelve, at least for a while.

  “Home again, Leonardo,” Botticelli said from between curved lips. Seven years younger than da Vinci, his youth still hovered around him, fell down his back in luxurious waves of almond crème–colored hair, and shone in the brightness of his large if heavily lidded cerulean eyes.

  “This is my home today,” Leonardo answered, but turned to Verrocchio. A purposeful dismissal if ever there was one. “What is it we shall see, maestro?”

  “Come, Leonardo, come,” Verrocchio stomped through the maze that was a studio at full production to stand before a large canvas in the last stages of completion.

  “Our friend here”—Verrocchio had always chosen to ignore the animosity between his two brightest pupils—“feels it is too austere.”

  Leonardo studied the painting, which depicted the Madonna with Saints John the Baptist and Donatus. His perusal was a silent one; even his footsteps made not a sound as he studied it first from one angle, then another, and yet another.

  “I can see why he might think so,” Leonardo finally spoke, but it was through the fingers of the hand that held his chin. “It has none of the brightness of his Venus.”

  Botticelli’s finely curved brows rose.

  “However,” Leonardo continued, “it is a masterpiece of modern techniques. The architecture and still life elements place it firmly in our time. The modulated tile floor creates an amazing dimensionality. I particularly like your use of the carpet’s fringe.”

  Over the step in the foreground of the painting, said fringe hung, making one feel as if they could walk through space, through the canvas, and into the painted scene. Of course, all three men knew the painting was not of Verrocchio’s own making, but of his workshop; he had not picked up a brush since Leonardo, while still young and unknown, had added his famous angel to Verrochio’s The Baptism of Christ. That angel had brought word of da Vinci and his talent to earth, a talent that broke the brush of Verrocchio.

  “It may not be to your taste, Sandro,” Leonardo addressed him directly, “but I am sure you can see the magnificence of the ren
dering.”

  It was an offering, a diffusion, as much as Leonardo could offer Sandro, and he must if he dare ask what he planned, what he hoped both men would accept.

  “Of course,” Sandro agreed, readily enough. “We are all individuals. My apologies, maestro, for any disparagement I may have cast on your astonishing work.”

  “No matter, no matter,” Verrocchio brushed away their compliments, but a wide grin smattered itself across his face, a rosy glow upon his plump cheeks. He bustled away from the painting and any disparagements that attempted to land upon it. “Let us celebrate with some wine.”

  The three men settled around a table in the middle of the chaos that was a studio at work, as solitary as an oasis in the desert.

  Leonardo passed words, pleasantries, talk of their work, somehow the words forming on his lips while others haunted his mind. He must bide his time; he must wait for the right moment.

  When Verrocchio patted his hand with an age-spotted one and said, “You will have your own studio, and soon, my son,” Leonardo saw it for what it was: not only a sign but a blessed one.

  “Well, in truth, I already have one.” He made the declaration as he threw back the rest of the wine in his goblet, two mouthfuls at the least.

  “You do?”

  “Where?”

  Leonardo filled his glass and began to talk. He capped off his tale with another chug of wine.

  “Women? You are maestro to a group of women?”

  Leonardo felt the pinch between his shoulder blades as they barged together. He fixed Sandro with a steadfast gaze, with all the fortitude he possessed. “They are not women when they hold the brush or the chisel. They are artists, incredibly talented artists. And they have submitted a bid on a chapel fresco.”

  Sandro laughed.

  Leonardo had never struck someone in his life; however, his life was not yet over. He buried the urge; instead, he silenced Botticelli with hard eyes and a curled lip.

  “And I will tutor them through it,” he said as if nothing had been said in between. “I had hoped to be here for the whole of the process, but the duke has called for me to return, though it shall be a hasty trip. Nor will I leave until the work is well underway.”