upper arm, and vanished behind its back. Its gender would be concealed, indeterminate. I modelled the lower half of a uterus, its dusty purple-red inspired by Navacchio’s experimental peach, then I placed the child inside. What thrilled me most about what I was doing was the contrast between the girl’s flat belly and the fully grown baby it contained. An anatomical impossibility. Unnatural. Just plain wrong. Perhaps I had learned from Marvuglia after all! And yet … Though the work might appear to contradict itself, both the size of the baby and the shape of the girl’s belly were authentic, true. They were simply taken from different stages of her existence. I was showing the present and the future in the same breath. I was collapsing time.
Was I worrying too much? Was I including too many layers of protection and defence? I didn’t think so. As I had said to Cuif once – and it had made him laugh out loud – I’d never lived in a place where paranoia was so completely justifiable. What’s more, this wasn’t only about protecting myself. This was about meaning. To the Grand Duke, the baby would symbolize his family’s immortality, the continuation of his blood-line. His heir. To me, it represented the child his wife had already given birth to, in secret. The child no one could ever know about. To me, the baby was Faustina. Here, at last, was the kind of ambiguity I had been looking for.
On March the first I left my lodgings at dawn. It was a humid, stagnant morning, and I was glad I had not been drinking. I passed the Uffizi and set off across the Ponte Vecchio. I was eager to look once again at the commission, which I had finished only a few hours before. I had spent the previous day removing flaws and runnings, disguising joins, and applying a final layer of varnish. At midnight I had left her in the back room, under a sheet of muslin. I looked to the west and saw birds spiralling in the grubby air above Sardigna. What an unlikely journey, from that savage wasteland to the Grand Duke’s palace … A sudden yawning in the pit of my stomach. A kind of vertigo.
I slipped past Toldo, who was dozing by the gate. Dew blackened my boots as I walked down the track. The ancient myrtle trees, the distant fountains. The clarity of the air. Always a sense of sanctuary, of entering a sacred space. In the stable yard I stopped and listened. Nobody about. It was too early even for Navacchio.
Once inside my workshop, I locked the door behind me, then took the dust-sheet and lifted it away. She looked so solid – so human. She was carrying a child, of course, but I had also filled the other hollow spaces – thighs, chest, skull – with a loose weave of burlap, which I had cut into strips and soaked in wax. The scrim, as it was known, behaved like ballast: it gave her substance, integrity. In the white morning light, her stillness was unnerving. She reminded me of a game we used to play as children, where we pretended to be dead.
I moved closer.
Her dark-brown eyes, opaque and yet intelligent, had been made by a glass-blower in Murano. Her lips had been painted with two coats of Parisian lacquer, and around her throat she wore a string of imitation pearls. Though the idea for the necklace had originated in Fiore’s story about the murdered countess, it also had a practical function, which was to conceal the place where her head joined her body. Her hair was her own. One shade lighter than her eyes, with suggestions of bronze and copper, it tumbled in a loose, lustrous rope past the polished curve of her right shoulder, coiling over ribs that were more hinted at than visible, through the gate formed by her thumb and forefinger, and on to her upturned palm. What pleased me most, though, was her skin. It wasn’t white or rose or cream, nor was it gold or ochre, yet all those colours were involved. The tones altered in the most delicate and elusive of ways, from the cool ivory of her forehead and the milk-blue of her armpits to the hot coral of her nipples, as if blood were circling inside her, real blood, sometimes rising to the surface, sometimes holding back, staying deep. I had paid attention to the most obscure and