whispered in his ear. “Those years in Naples, didn’t you see out of the corner of your eye my unhappiness? You were forever watching me.” She kissed him and laid her head against him.
“What can I tell you about my life? That I paint from dawn till dark. I paint at night by poor light. I dream of commissions, chapel walls, the walls of great churches. But ever more I find that faces are what I want to paint, the rich and the poor, all those who are making such a fashion of me, and others I find sometimes in the street. Is that so hard to understand? A life like that?”
His hands could not stop touching her, stroking her, drawing back her rippling yellow curls only to have them tumble gently down again.
“Do you know what I am?” she said with the most lovely smile. “I have known such happiness in the Piazza di Spagna, that I have become a simpleton.”
He laughed.
But very quickly his expression altered as he became absorbed. “A simpleton,” he whispered.
“Yes, an idiot of sorts.” She frowned. “I mean that rising I think of painting, and going to sleep I think of painting, and for me there is only the slight difficulty of getting enough hours in the day….”
He understood. In his worst moments, when he could not stop thinking of Carlo and Venice, when it seemed the very walls of the Palazzo Treschi had descended upon him and the light was Venetian light, he longed for that simplicity of which she spoke. And it would have been his, save for all that. Guido had it, a divine simplicity because music was his consuming passion, his work, his dreams. And in the last seven days as Guido had worked night and day beyond the point of exhaustion, his face, in that simplicity, had been curiously blank.
“But for love and loneliness,” she was saying now and her voice had become distant and poignant, “…but for love and loneliness, my life as it is would be a gift from God.”
“Is love all it takes, then?” he whispered. “Is my love all it takes to make it God’s gift?”
She rose up, slipping her arms about his neck and the light flickered behind her, golden and green and then dark, and he shut his eyes, clasping her, holding her all over with his long broad hands and he felt her smallness and her softness and it seemed to him that if he had ever known such happiness before he’d forgotten it, and would never forget this no matter what came after it.
* * *
There was a lightness and a swiftness to all they did as the morning moved towards noon.
To a series of shops they went, Christina in search of old paintings for which she bargained as fiercely as any man. She knew the proprietors and in some instances they were expecting her, and through a clutter of dusty treasures she made her way confidently as if she’d forgotten for the moment that Tonio was there.
He was delighted with these dark and crowded places. He looked at old manuscripts, maps, swords. He found a sheaf of Vivaldi’s music and other more ancient folios which he purchased at once.
But most of the time, he watched Christina in abject fascination as the art dealers haggled and pleaded with her only to give in finally to her price. She bought fragments of Roman sculpture, which Tonio helped the coachman wrap carefully in old bedding and secure to the carriage, as she explained she would paint from these models. She bought portraits, cracked and darkening, but still full of rich and lively detail.
There was an ease to being with her. Her self-possession excited him; and without realizing it, he loved this sense of her life as full of substance; he listened to her talk of her treasures, how she must learn better to paint hands and feet, how she must study the flowers, the drapery, how this was good and that was poor.
He had that wondrous sense of having always known her, been with her, enjoying this gentle companionship with her, and yet she was new to him so that every gesture, every toss of her yellow hair, quietly astonished him.
The carriage moved out of Rome, going south through the open country full of ruins, a great aqueduct here swallowed in vines, and now and then a column standing erect to mark some moldering sight. She talked softly of the beauty of Italy