‘But I didn’t say it.’
‘You should have done.’ I didn’t intend to be cruel.
She seemed to acknowledge this because she walked round and sat down carefully in the chair again and said, ‘I know I should but I didn’t know how.’
We sat, unwilling to meet each other’s gaze, which was when I said, ‘D’you fancy a drink? I’ve got a bottle of Scotch in my drawer’, and she said, ‘Thanks, I’d love one. I wasn’t Bruno, you
see. At his trial he said, “Perhaps you, my judges, pronounce this sentence against me with greater fear than I receive it.” By the way, what time is it?’, and I got out the bottle of Famous Grouse, which I kept for my own private emergencies, and poured a couple of tumblers full and we sat and drank together in companionable gloom while I mentally dispatched the General Medical Ethics Council to perdition. I reckoned it was a legitimate prescription: we both badly needed something to lift our spirits. I didn’t bother to consult my watch: we were past such considerations by this time.
And I suppose because I couldn’t take any more emotion just then, and felt we could both do with a break, I said, ‘Tell me about the painting.’
‘Which painting?’
‘The one you were looking at when he told you.’
‘
The Death of the Virgin?
For the rest of my life I shall remember it.’
When I was last in Paris I visited the Louvre to see this painting and I could hear Elizabeth Cruikshank’s emotionless voice describing it to me all those years before.
‘It’s a scene which is usually called “The Dormition”, the socalled transit of the Virgin from this life to the next. Except that Caravaggio has dared to paint it as if it is the end and there will be no life to come.
‘She’s young, his Mary. White-faced and exhausted, worn out with sorrow, and laid out, dead, with big, veined peasant’s hands, and her feet, all ungainly, sticking out of her shift, with no attempt at elegant piety.
‘John, the beloved disciple, is standing at her head and all
the other disciples are shuffling up to pay their respects, and you can tell from their posture that they’re crushed with the profoundest grief. He took the story from
The Golden Legend, a
medieval book, popular then, of the lives of the saints and the legend was that, at Mary’s death, the Apostles were all miraculously transported to her bedside, though the real miracle in this scene is Caravaggio’s execution of it.
‘Mary Magdalene, who’s washed the dead body, is sitting beside the bed and he’s painted her folded over almost in two with the weight of her despair. It’s the second death she’s had to bear, you see, and you can tell it’s defeated her. I remember looking at her and thinking: Yes, I know how you feel.’
‘How did you feel?’
She pondered. ‘It was a kind of second death for me, too.’
‘Because you felt you were losing him again?’
‘Because I felt I was losing him again. You know, they hated Caravaggio, for that painting. He used his whore as his model for the Virgin. She wasn’t what they had in mind at all.’
‘What did they have in mind?’
‘Oh, you know, sweetness and light. Transfiguration. Certainly not some clapped-out prostitute. The picture of death wasn’t what they wanted either.’
‘I suppose death never is.’
‘No.’
‘What did “they” want for that, would you say?’
She considered again. ‘Hope. Hope that this isn’t the end. It’s not allowed to be, is it? I mean, people, even people who aren’t religious, don’t like to think that it is.’
‘I suppose not.’ I contemplated the plate empty of sandwiches
and the browning apple core she’d gnawed to next to nothing and felt a snatch of her wolfish hunger. ‘What did Thomas mean by repentance?’
‘“A difficult repentance” was what he called it. I’m not sure. Maybe…no, now you ask, I don’t really know. She was a prostitute, of course, Mary Magdalene; it was her he was referring to. But I doubt he meant that sort of repentance. He didn’t go in for that kind of thinking.’
‘Nor did Caravaggio, from the sound of it.’ The painter’s was clearly a nature which needed to rattle swords at piety and convention. ‘I imagine that’s why he didn’t let them have what they wanted for their image of death.’ It crossed my mind to ask if she shared the painter’s unsentimental view of the afterlife.
‘For me that’s its virtue.’
I didn’t need to ask the question. ‘And did he go? Did Thomas go to Milan?’
Her voice sounded kind, as if reluctant to speak words she knew might hurt me. ‘Oh yes, he went. People do go in the end. They get tired of waiting.’
A
CCORDING TO
G
US, THE PHILOSOPHER
D
IOGENES WALKED THE
streets of ancient Athens at night with a lantern searching for one honest person. He might have searched just as vainly for a trusting one.
It is hard to account for the common human resistance to happiness, unless it is that we would rather be crippled by what we lack than risk the pain that is one potential consequence of placing our secret selves in others’ hands. The desire to be loved is as basic a need as the desire for food or drink. But to take delight in being loved requires nerve. For where life is most ardently awakened it can be most excruciatingly extinguished and the fear of that possibility can tragically become the wet blanket which smothers the sacred flame.
That they were congruent spirits, these lovers, I didn’t doubt. There exist irresistible affinities in nature, and the human psyche is only a part of that vast pool of possibility. So it is not improbable that there are souls who, through some undetermined radar, recognise a natural rapport without recourse to the usual blundering empirical means. I have no explanation for this phenomenon. Freud’s most famed British disciple, the psychoanalyst
Ernest Jones, met his first wife a brief three times before he proposed to her; and when she died, and he married again, he married his second wife three weeks after their first meeting. Both marriages were counted unusually happy.
My patient’s account inspired confidence: confidence in the authenticity of this example of these incalculable confluences of affection. A confidence which, in her, had plainly faltered. She had told me that the mystery was the straightforwardness between her and her lover but perhaps it was the very straightforwardness which made for the complication. Unlike our animal cousins, humankind seems pitifully ill-constructed for simplicity.
Or love. Confidence,
con fides
, with faith. It takes faith to love. But perhaps it takes greater faith to be loved: beloved, the meaning of my own name.
‘David means “beloved” in Hebrew, I expect you know that.’
Her voice had echoed my unspoken thought. The sense of eeriness was underlined when she suddenly pronounced: ‘
And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!
’
A memory from schooldays surfaced. ‘King David’s lament?’ I wasn’t called after that David but I was much moved myself at the words she had quoted and, like my namesake, felt unusually close to tears.
‘Thomas recited it to me once. I learned it by heart.’
‘I was useless at scripture, I’m afraid, but I like what I remember of David. He struck me as reassuringly fallible.’
‘He committed adultery.’
‘Is that why Thomas recited it?’
‘No. It was when he took me to see Caravaggio’s
David.
Do you know it? You might like it, I think.’
‘Why would I like it, Elizabeth?’
At that moment there was a rattling of the door, we both started, and Lennie stuck his head round it.
‘Jeez, sorry, doc. I thought the light was left on by accident.’
‘It’s all right, Lennie.’ Instinctively, I glanced at my patient who had risen from her chair and was taking refuge by my desk where she had picked up Jonny’s bell again. I noticed that at no point did she show any interest in handling the lump of lava or the inkstand.
‘Don’t bother about the room this evening, Lennie. I’m working late.’
‘I can come back. No trouble.’ Lennie’s face was endearingly, and irritatingly, eager.
‘No, it’s fine. I’m not sure when I’ll be through.’
‘It’s no trouble, doc,’ Lennie repeated. I could tell he longed to be given trouble.
‘I know, Lennie. It’s good of you. But leave it for tonight. Maybe in the morning…?’
Lennie’s efficient receptors had homed in on something unusual and he was looming in the doorway still hoping to get a better view so I stood pointedly in his line of sight and gave him a firmly cheerful, ‘Goodnight, then!’ and shut the door rather close to his face.
‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said to Elizabeth Cruikshank. ‘Please, do go on.’
‘I’m being a trouble to you.’
‘No, you’re not. It was he who was being the trouble.’
‘He’s fond of you.’ I took this as requiring no response as she continued: ‘The
David
is almost Caravaggio’s last work. He was outlawed from Rome on a murder charge and it’s thought he painted this to butter up Cardinal Borghese who was one of his most influential patrons and a cousin of the Pope’s and could therefore help engineer a pardon for him. David is holding Goliath’s head at arm’s length by the hair and the face, Goliath’s face, looks monstrously sad. Both their faces do.’
‘All sadness has something in common.’
‘Yes.’
I remembered the burned-out look in the eyes of a Vietnam veteran I’d treated once. He’d won a Purple Heart at nineteen and when he returned from the war, a national hero, no one would employ him.
‘It’s through such pain that we learn to know ourselves.’
But the cost is steep and the knowledge not for the fainthearted.
‘Caravaggio painted Goliath’s head in his own likeness. His face had been badly wounded in the fight that led to the murder charge, and it’s as if he’s given the mutilation to Goliath. Thomas said that he had read somewhere that an artist is someone who knows he is failing in living and feeds his remorse by creating something fair, and that summed up for him both the painter and this painting.’
‘And David is the fair?’
‘Poor David. You can see in his eyes he’s already anticipating another death.’
‘He would have understood death from the moment he’d killed.’ My veteran still dreamed about napalm victims. ‘I’ve seen that look in the eyes of soldiers.’
Her own grey eyes looked into mine and she said again, ‘Poor David.’
‘Poor human beings,’ I acceded, somewhat awkwardly. The ambiguity made me uncomfortable and perhaps for this reason I resorted to Gus. ‘There’s no cure for being alive.’
‘Maybe your friend likes Caravaggio because he understands that.’
‘I’m sure that’s true.’ It had crossed my mind that Gus would like Thomas, too.
‘He was likeable.’ It wasn’t clear if she was referring to the artist, or if she had once again read my mind.
The two of them kept in touch, mostly by letter. In those days there was no email or mobile phone to enlist in the transport of love. Thomas wrote to her at the little house which he urged, even without his presence, she use as a refuge.
I insist you get away from the Russian Vine and the hideous ornaments
, he wrote.
I shall think of you, without ornament, naked as nature intended in our bed.
He returned for holidays when the closeness of their bond reasserted itself and harmony seemed to be repaired if not entirely restored.
And Thomas, anyway, was now absorbed in a project which might well have distracted him from any imperfections in his personal life.
Caravaggio, she explained—as I sat in my chair, with her sometimes sitting opposite, sometimes pacing about, or standing, her back pressed against a wall, gesticulating with her thin hands which, as the evening went on, seemed to acquire their own hectic life—died in dire circumstances. His, I was gathering, was always
an intemperate disposition, one which diced—almost as a necessary imperative—exuberantly with danger and I wondered, as I listened, what compulsion it is that some—women almost as often as men—have to mount an assault on life in order, perhaps, to feel more acutely for the blows it returns. For much of his life this need to provoke and deal out violence put the artist regularly in prison, and for the latter part of it he was on the run from the murder charge in Rome. But he was desperate, too, to be freed from the overshadowing threat he had almost deliberately placed himself under and return to the city that had seen the execution of his finest work and where, while his character was most reviled, his talent was most revered.
By this point in his career, at not quite forty, Caravaggio was widely celebrated as a genius and, on the strength of this reputation, was in high hope of a pardon for his alleged crime. In anticipation of what had been as good as promised, he travelled up the coast, from a safe retreat in Naples, on a felucca, onto which he’d loaded paintings intended as a further palliative offering for Cardinal Borghese, the most influential of his Roman patrons.
The felucca put in at Palo, a small port with a fortress, hard by the mouth of the Tiber, where for an unexplained reason he was once again imprisoned, possibly because the commander of the fortress believed he was still a wanted man, with a price on his head, or possibly because he was taken in error for some less distinguished malefactor. By the time Caravaggio had bought his way out of prison, the boat, with its matchless cargo, had set sail again, now in the opposite direction from Rome, back down the coast towards Porto Ercole.
In an effort to recover the precious paintings, Caravaggio set
after the boat, determinedly travelling nearly a hundred gruelling kilometres alone, in high summer, through long stretches of undrained mosquito swamp, where he contracted a fever, only to find on reaching Porto Ercole that the boat had already left, bound again for Naples with the irreplaceable cargo of his work still aboard.
Perhaps the second loss was the last blow to the seemingly indefatigable painter’s morale. With repeated friction, even the toughest tether will fray. Frustration and despair over the missing work dragged his spirit down, which, coupled with the effects of a raging fever, finally proved fatal. Caravaggio died, unaware he’d at long last been pardoned, far from his beloved Rome, unattended by anyone known to him, in the isolated Porto Ercole’s inhospitable and poorly appointed infirmary.
‘God,’ I said, when she finished this sorry account. ‘Another piece of foul luck.’
‘Yes.’
‘I could do with another drink. How about you?’
I all but clinked her glass. We seemed to have become allies not merely in her misfortune but companions in others’.
‘I can see why Thomas liked Caravaggio, the man, not simply the work.’
‘Yes.’
‘He was real.’
Caravaggio had killed so he understood remorse. Perhaps he killed in order to understand it.
‘Yes.’
‘He had courage.’
He had fashioned the image of grave young David to be his own nemesis.
‘Yes.’
‘And spirit.’
The artist’s spirit, for which a larger reality must always be a more considerable matter than his own puny existence.
‘Thomas loved those qualities in him.’
The story she told of Caravaggio’s lonely trek in pursuit of his lost paintings struck strangely at my own heart. The painter who appeared to know the subject of death most intimately had risked his own death for his work, the work which itself presents death in its most terminal and unredeemed light. And death bested him, as it must in the end, though in this case the defeat of such a determined will, at such a point, seemed to me a matter for more than common regret. I felt I wanted to reach out and clutch him to me, embrace this maddening, driven, troubled, troublesome person—shake some of the nonsense out of him, and try to shake some sense into him—question him, discover who he was, and why he was. And it hurt me, with an almost visceral pain, that he was gone and while he could speak to me still, through his, by her account, almost unbearably marvellous paintings, there was no means whereby the reverse could be the case. Or would ever be the case, because of death’s incorrigible asymmetry.
It was not known how many paintings were included in the original boatload. Only three turned up when the boat’s cargo was finally retraced to Naples. A
St John
, possibly Caravaggio’s last work, was recovered by Cardinal Borghese, after a dispute with other claimants, and hangs still in the Galleria Borghese. The other two, another
St John
and a
Magdalene
, disappeared, so far as I understood from her account, for all time.
But Thomas, she explained, had found a reference in a letter
which suggested that when the Cardinal’s emissary went to Naples to assert his claim to the recovered hoard, there was another painting that had been stored there, possibly the disputed
Road to Emmaus.
‘The same subject as ours in the National Gallery?’
‘Yes. And there’s another, later,
Supper
in Milan. But there are occasional references in various sources to a work known as
The Road to Emmaus.
It’s been generally assumed that this was merely a misnomer for the two
Supper
paintings on the same subject. But in a letter from the Marchesa di Caravaggio, the village from which he was named, who took Caravaggio in and put him up in Chiaia, near Naples, before his last journey, there’s mention of “figures on a road” in a painting still in her possession: one he didn’t have shipped to Rome.’
‘And it wasn’t known about before?’
‘There was speculation but, as I say, it was assumed the title was misquoted. What name a painting gets ascribed isn’t, as we tend to assume, set in stone. The painter, in fact, only rather rarely names it. More often the name is acquired by usage. Anyway, Thomas thought he may have a clue to the possible whereabouts of this other Caravaggio.’
‘He must have been over the moon!’ I felt quite elated myself.
‘He was. It absorbed him entirely.’
I caught something in her tone. ‘You minded that?’
‘I misread it.’
‘What did you misread?’
‘I suppose I thought he was tired of me, instead of just tired of waiting for me. I’d been sort of expecting it, d’you see?’