The Marriage Portrait(16)

As if the meaning and fervour of her words bore noxious fumes, everyone in the room reeled away from her. Her father spun on his heel and walked back to his lectern, Vitelli shadowing him, the hovering secretaries scurrying back behind their desks.

“This is intolerable,” she heard her father mutter, either to Vitelli or her or everyone in the room, and Lucrezia will never be sure, later, whether or not he intended her to hear what he said next. “There has always been something in her that makes me wonder if she is unsuited to marriage—it will be a miracle if they don’t regret the union, and return her to us within a month.”



* * *





Alfonso is keen for her to eat a good dinner but the thought of her impending death has stolen her appetite. He persists, however, encouraging her to try the venison baked in wine, to take one more mouthful, then another. She is, he tells her, looking thin—he wants her to regain her strength after her recent illness. Venison is good for the blood, he says: a person needs meat juices circulating through them. She eats a mouthful or two but most of her portion she cuts into small pieces and drops into her napkin. He tears off a hunk of bread and, carefully removing the crust, mops up the sauce and holds it, dripping, to her mouth. She doesn’t like to say that the fluid oozing out of the slab of venison, with its transverse fibres of muscle and fat, the way it stands in puddles of red, which could be either wine or blood, makes her stomach heave.

She opens her mouth, takes the sodden bread from his hands, and forces the muscles of her throat to swallow it down.

He tells her about a hunting trip here with his father, when he was young—“perhaps eight or nine”—and he came across a wild boar in a clearing. He had raised his bow but had been unable to fire an arrow.

“It was a female,” he says, “and she had three young ones with her. They looked quite different from her, small and pale brown, with stripes running down their backs. I knew I should do it, that I should let fly the arrow, that my father would be angry if he found out I’d missed the chance, but I could not. So I just watched them, from horseback, until they disappeared into the undergrowth.”

“And was your father angry?”

The lower part of Alfonso’s face is caught by a wavering circle of light. His lips are parted in a smile or a grimace—impossible to say which.

“He got his steward to beat me. I couldn’t sit down for three days. He told me it was so I should always remember that I must never let sentiment get in the way of necessary action.”

She considers this advice, dispensed by a deceased father: sentiment and necessary action. Could the two, she wants to ask, not coexist? Has necessary action ever been dictated by emotion? Could the heart not have a say? As she lifts her cup to take a sip of wine, she pictures him as a small boy, in a sun-shot clearing, watching transfixed as a boar truffles for food, trailed by three offspring, their tiny hoofs treading down the soil. Then she sees him being beaten while his father watches.

“My father,” Lucrezia hears herself say, “keeps animals—exotic creatures—at the palazzo. He has a menagerie in the basement.”

“Ah,” Alfonso says. “I have heard of this. Did you ever see them fight?”

“No. He never…That was only for visitors. And perhaps my brothers, I don’t know. He let us visit, my older siblings and me, when I was a little girl. I was very pleased to be included, that he considered me old enough—all my younger brothers were left behind in the nursery. There was a tigress, you see, and I—”

Lucrezia breaks off; she may already have said too much. And why is she saying these things? She never talks about the tigress; she never has and never will.

Alfonso, leaning forward into the light, is regarding her with interest, his eyes moving about her face in that way he has, gathering information and insights. What might this mean? he is thinking. She is sure of it. This story is about a tiger, yes, but what is she really telling me? And why the hesitation? What is she hiding?

She could tell him everything, she knows. From the fiery feel of the fur to the crack of the iron bar on her wrist as she was dragged away. She could describe for him the foetid air of the menagerie, the shackled ankles of the bear. She could tell him that a few weeks after their visit to the Sala dei Leoni she plucked up the courage to approach her father during a music lesson, which he sometimes attended, if he could spare the time, and ask him if she could see the animal again, and her father had ripped open her heart, with words like blades.

Unfortunately, he had said, with apparent unconcern, the tiger has been killed.

Killed? Lucrezia echoed, as if she couldn’t make sense of the word, as if it was from a language she hadn’t yet encountered. How could such a creature die, be extinguished, when it was the distillation of life itself? It was impossible.

The lion and lioness, her father explained, had set upon the tiger together. A careless servant left the interconnecting doors of their cages open. The beast fought bravely, he added, turning over the page of music he was looking at, injuring both lions rather badly. The tiger battled for life, but in the end the two lions were too much and they overpowered her. The servants were unable to separate them, he said, with a shrug of annoyance. And, what’s more, the pelt was ruined, so it couldn’t even be taken from the carcass, which had greatly disappointed Lucrezia’s mother.

She could confide in Alfonso that she was taken ill that afternoon. The physician was called; he bled her, he laid a poultice on her chest, he administered a sedative, and a tincture of valerian. He diagnosed a fever of the nerves and put her in quarantine on a lower floor. It was difficult to know, he regretted to say, whether or not Lucrezia would survive.