The Secret Price of History. Gayle Ridinger
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to their knees. She isn't expecting the tingle that suddenly comes over her—that empathy for both the killed and the killers. If you feel in your gut the same fear that was in the gut of those of another generation, all this gets transformed into something more than play-acting. She wants to wrap her mind around that further—it's blog material—but now she has more photos to take.
She trains the camera on the Confederate color-bearer in a run, leading the others in their whoop-howl-cry. She expects a second one of those famous rebel yells but never hears it; as she's changing the zoom, unaware of any coveting envy in the air, she receives a heavy hot punch in her right upper arm that makes her drop the camera and recoil backwards against a wall of feet and legs. In a silent daze of sunlight and throbbing, she stretches her left hand towards the hole of heat—unable to reach it.
Then she falls into a lap of darkness.
Rome, Italy - May 15, 1845
Another magnificent afternoon, a sweeping view of blue sky, domes, noble palaces, and terracotta roofs, all the sunlight one could ask for, but American painter James Freeman was not satisfied with the way the sitting was going in his studio. During the morning session, Maria—a new pick of his at the Spanish Steps this morning, a thin girl with black eyes that danced more than those of the others and a recent arrival from Articoli Corrado, the village of models, whom he'd settled for as the more famous ones were engaged—had done fine enough; but now after lunch Freeman was beginning to regret his shift away from scenes of boy street urchins and beggars, the canvasses of which leaned against one wall in this work room and lined the length of the Persian rug in the adjoining parlour.
Maria was fidgeting, not keeping her basket of fruit still on her head nor her floral kerchief in place over her shoulders. He was rather surprised by this childish behavior. Experience told him that she had to be at least 16; he knew how to interpret the fact she had arrived this morning without any mother-chaperon.
"Hold still!" Freeman was good-natured in his complaint.
Maria's chin and shoulders settled obediently in place. Her eyes, however, skirted over Rome in the row of windows.
Something must be going on, he thought. He put down his paintbrush.
"Tell me, Maria. What's happening?"
"An execution."
"Who is it?"
"A boy from a poor family. He's very handsome, they say. But he won't make his confession. No bells this morning--didn't you notice, maestro? Now they have to wait till the Ave Maria at sunset." She shrugged. They'll kill him then even if he hasn't confessed."
"Why?"
"Ho ho, Madonna, Maestro, the boy has a sweetheart. A rich noble girl, Maestro. But one day a big important priest saw her and, Jesu, he wanted her. And you know what, Maestro? She refused him."
"Of course."
"Of course," Maria mimicked him under her breath, then giving in to her impatient nature; she took the fruit basket off her head, set it on the floor, and plopped down next to it.
So we're taking a break, he thought. He went over to sit on the small settee he kept in the studio for his visitors.
"What do you know about Rome?" Maria chided. "As far as I can see, you only paint pictures of poor people. We're talking about the rich. The boy shot a priest. And this priest is very important and influential. Some people say he's the Pope's nephew."
"Did he kill him?"
She dismissed his question with a wave of her hand. "Who knows? He stole a pistol and fired it. Whether the priest dies or not, you get put to death for that. Then the magistrate found out that the boy was part of the Republican movement, and that meant the boy would get drawn and quartered as well."
"Such barbarism." Freeman shook his head. "Didn't somebody, perhaps the girl's family, try to intervene?"
Maria made incredulous eyes at him. In her world there were no such appeals for clemency. At most there were appeals for cleanliness. For the umpteenth time Freeman's gaze fell on her dirty fingernails. Then he considered her head without the fruit basket; how thin and mangy her black hair is, he thought. And that bony breastplate. He'd chosen her for her eyes, of course. Her eyes and her erect back. The noble features that compensated for the rest. All his models had them.
He let her talk. He learned that the rich girl's important family considered her a hot head.
"She's known to say the same things they say up north," Maria confided with relish. "They say that we need to be free and that the Pope should just think about religion. Anyway, Maestro, after she'd refused this priest; he waited for her in a dark place and had his way with her anyway. Of course, she didn't say anything to her family" –here Maria rolled her eyes—"but then she got scared that she might be pregnant and she told the family doctor, who told her mother's confessor, who told her mother."
"What did the family do?"
"They caned her for being a hussy who shamelessly goes out alone after dark."
"Ah," he said, moved.
"Only then the boy shot the priest and they figured out where and why the girl was going out at night alone…and so now her family is forcing her to watch his execution, from their palazzo. It's near the turtle fountain and the Teatro di Marcello. The Pope in person granted permission for the scaffold to be set up there and not on the Bridge of St. Angelo. Then, they say, she'll get packed off to a convent."
"The boy was the only one condemned to death?"
"And who else were they going to condemn?"
Freeman let Maria go an hour early. It was pointless to go on; both of them heard the voices in the street and square below, talking of the drama at hand. She promised to be back promptly at eight the next morning, then left him with one last titbit—the news that the feared and infamous hangman Mastro Titta would be the one to snuff out the boy's life.
Freeman stood for a long moment at the center of what a painter friend called his 'sky parlour'. At first he wondered about Mastro Titta—how this hangman looked physically and whether there was some sign of awareness in him of being a licensed murderer that a painter like himself might discern. After that, he began to wonder whether Augusta, his fiancée, might be making her way here and what importance this possibility should have in the face of the opportunity he had to record this raw atrocity in his sketch book. It was mid May, which meant the sun would be in another couple of hours; and if he left now he would be able to get over to the neighbourhood indicated by Maria in time to be a—a witness.
A witness to what?
To tragedy or more than tragedy? He felt sorry for the Italians, stifled in their democratic aims—that were so close, he thought, to those of America—by the great powers of Europe and by the Papacy.
Since his move to Rome (from where he made his occasional trip to Ancona, where he was U.S. Consul), he had sold numerous paintings in both expatriate and Italian circles and acquired an interest in political affairs, especially in the budding movements for civil rights and national unity. On sporadic occasions, he had seen that the proverbial Italian fatalism was giving way here and there to seething indignation. To his American mind, this could provide the seeds for self-determination and national unity.
There would be indignation at the boy's bloody execution—but how much? Did he have the stomach for it?
Outside, he followed the stream of people headed in the direction of the Teatro di Marcello. Shouting urchins ran to burly men of the lowest classes—the lot of them dressed in blue cloaks, russet cloaks, or uncloaked rags—who were presumably their fathers. Freeman walked in their midst with his sketch pad under one arm. The moving crowd grew in number as they crossed the intersections with the impassable back streets of rotten or rickety houses, many built into or on ruins of solid Roman walls, which did not seem inhabited and certainly had never been built to any plan. At their end, or sometimes in their middle, there was a dump heap of vegetable refuse and pile of broken crockery.
Freeman's