The next morning I dove into Gabriele’s journal again.
I came into the world in the year that Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Maestà was carried through the streets to the Duomo by a great and reverent crowd.
I paused to look up Duccio—the Maestà was finished in 1311.
My father, spent from mourning the loss of my mother, died when I was still a babe, and my uncle took me into his household. On my fourth birthday, I begged him to make me a paintbrush. We cut a tuft of hair from our unwilling cat, and bound it to a slender twig. Thus began my career as a painter.
Until my apprenticeship, I was a difficult child. I used the yolk of an egg to decorate the wall behind my chair, and the sauce from our midday stew created the outlines of a Madonna on the table. When it became obvious that I wished to paint more than eat, my uncle sent me to study with Simone Martini. Under his tutelage, my mischief was bent into study. When Simone finally let me work at his side, he directed not only my hands, but my soul.
“Paint from the holy text, but let your soul give life to your brush,” he whispered, as I lifted my arm to copy the Annunciation he had set before me. In my fingers the feel of the brush faded, and I was filled with the fear of the Virgin at her uninvited angelic guest’s arrival. I took the Maestro’s words to heart.
Siena, June 28
Dear Nathaniel,
Sorry I haven’t written back to you for so long. I’m trying to finish what Ben started before that smarmy Signoretti gets there first, wherever “there” is. I still don’t know what Ben was looking for, but I don’t want to give it up—I want to do Ben justice now that he’s not here to finish the work himself. So I’m trying to map out what happened to Siena during the Plague, hoping to figure out what Ben was onto, instead of thinking about getting back to New York to repair aneurysms. I haven’t found anything yet. But if Ben did, it must be somewhere.
In the meantime, while you’re taking care of my apartment (thanks again) I’m enjoying hanging out in the fourteenth century with my very appealing fresco painter. It’s a safe obsession, since he’s been dead for over six hundred years.
The surgeon part of me seems to have gone dormant. Don’t tell the department head, since I’d like to have a job when I get back . . . though I’m not sure when that will be. A long-quiet part of me is waking up, the historian born in my brother’s study twenty years ago.
Would you like anything from Siena? Maybe something for the bookstore?
Love,
B
I didn’t write what I was thinking. I did not confess that I had begun to live as much in the pages of that journal as in the real world around me. I did not express the nagging worry that my empathy, so useful to me as a doctor, was now sparked by words written by someone dead for centuries. I’d been happily lost in a book many times before, but this was different. This, I had no control over. Even then, I think I sensed the possibility inherent in that profound immersion in the written word—the possibility, and the danger. But it did not make me stop reading.
* * *
Two days later, I found a note from Donata under my door inviting me for coffee. I felt a rush of warmth reading this personal invitation from my first Sienese friend. We planned to meet at the Fonte Gaia the following day before heading to her favorite café. I stuffed her letter in my bag as I headed out to the piazza.
Donata arrived in a flax-colored linen dress, looking effortlessly perfect. I suspected that she looked this elegant even in her sleep.
“We take it for granted, the presence of water here,” Donata said, sitting down beside me on the edge of the reflecting pool. “Water was scarce in medieval Siena, and its availability to the people of the commune changed lives. It took eight years to build the conduit to bring the water here, then the following year, 1343, the fountain was completed.”
Donata had pronounced the word commune with three syllables: co-mu-neh. I’d never heard it out loud before. In my head, I’d been imagining the word commune, the hippie 1960s version.
“Nobody knows exactly what the original looked like,” Donata said. “It’s one of those puzzles that keeps art historians like me up all night.” As we walked to the café, I looked back at the Fonte’s pool glittering in the sun and wondered what it had looked like back when my artist was alive.
We ordered two espressos, and I watched Donata sip hers slowly.
She spoke first. “How are you managing?”
“I’m comforted by picking up the work Ben left, as if he’s there inside me, telling me how I’m doing. The way he used to.” I looked away and was glad when Donata changed the subject gracefully.
“I’ve always loved the name Beatrice. Do you know how your parents chose it for you?”
“I never knew who my father was, and my mother died giving birth to me. Ben chose my name. He was reading Dante in the hospital waiting room.”
“He chose well for you,” Donata said.
I was silent for a long time, thinking.
“Have you seen the ospedale, Beatrice?”
“No, should I?” I must have sounded unenthusiastic. “I don’t really want to spend my free time thinking about medicine.” My response sounded more irritable than I’d intended.
“Beatrice, I meant the Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala—across from the Duomo. It hasn’t been a hospital for centuries.” Her gentle reprimand made me blush.
“I’m sorry. The thought of visiting a working hospital in Siena is about as appealing as amputating my own leg.” Donata snorted in a graceful, somehow Italian way. “I repent my brutish American manners—will you be my friend anyway?”
“Of course,” Donata said. “I like your brutish American ways—politeness can get tiresome.”
We walked companionably together back to the Piazza del Duomo, where the cathedral and the Ospedale faced each other. Donata stopped in front of the Ospedale entrance. “The facade of the Ospedale is another great mystery for art historians.”
“I don’t see any paintings.”
“Exactly. It is believed there were once five frescos here, depicting the life of the Virgin Mary. But it’s not clear who painted them. It was probably a collaboration among three of Siena’s greatest painters: Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti—the painters of the Sala della Pace in the Palazzo Pubblico—and Simone Martini.”
Martini—Gabriele’s teacher. Donata must have heard my intake of breath but misinterpreted the reaction.
“Yes, an extraordinary combination of painters, unprecedented and never repeated. Simone left Siena for Avignon around 1336, and did not return. The Lorenzettis died in the first year of the Plague. Four of the frescos—the birth of the Virgin, the presentation of the Virgin in the temple, the betrothal of the Virgin, and the return of the Virgin to the house of her parents—were probably painted by the Lorenzettis and Martini. But the paintings did not survive.”