The Secret Price of History. Gayle Ridinger
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flow of people converged with several other jubilant throngs into a central grassy meadow spotted with stone rubble—a sort of overgrown cemetery of civilization. He had met at a dinner the two English aristocrats who were financing the last of a long line of excavations of the mysterious ground, which, amidst popular indifference, had revealed chunky pedestals and curved rocks to be imperial columns and triumph arches. Bells tolled on the far side of the meadow, where the first mounted parties of the Pope's dragoons appeared. The reaction of the crowd indicated to him that the soldiers were directed towards the execution site. The people around him were accelerating, he noticed, but he refused to do so. When the crowd followed the dragoons past a Baroque church with a sign on its closed door, he was the only one who stopped to read the appeal to the population to pray for the handsome boy's soul.
Finally, in the square with the fountain out of which climbed four bronze turtles, teasingly held in check on the rim by four boy sprites, Freeman located a knot of his peers: foreign-looking individuals in bourgeois dress, the men in tall hats and the women in dark bonnets. A surge of elbows and torsos propelled him over to them. He thought he recognized a white-haired, bearded Englishman, and then he was sure: there's Dickens. He'd met the famous writer just two days ago at a reception at the British Embassy.
"Mr. Freeman! I wish I could say it is a pleasure to see you but the circumstances make it otherwise." Charles Dickens made a nod at his sketch pad and added, "Planning to record it?"
"To make some…visual notes. Maybe. We'll see."
"It's a sickening spectacle—you'll soon desist. Look at the huge crowd. They make it as gory and horrible as possible so that it'll stick in people's minds and they won't ever be able to forget it. All these children will remember it their entire lives."
"I imagine so," Freeman reflected.
"Their fathers, I am told, will give them a slap or punch at the moment that the blade drops." Dickens eyed him closely for a moment, as if assessing his sensibilities not as an artist but as a man. "By the way, there's also a drawing-and-quartering on the bill today. It's an act of mercy that they are not going to proceed to burn the body. The rest is apparently deemed a lesson enough. They say the poor devil tried to kill a papal prelate."
"So I've heard."
"And here he comes now, Mr. Freeman, look to your left at the heftiest man in your field of vision. That's Mastro Titta, the executioner, crossing the square on that wagon. We'd best follow along—the guillotine is set up two blocks from here. Titta's an umbrella-maker, you know. Apparently, he usually offers the condemned man a sniff of tobacco beforehand. My man-servant tells me that Titta lives over near St. Peter's. He's under the protection of the Papal guards there. He only crosses the Tiber when there's an execution on. Too dangerous for him here otherwise."
"Pope Gregory XVI is definitely keeping him busy at the moment," Freeman muttered darkly. Dickens' air of informed, scientific interest made his own stance seem timid and nebulous, and though he walked with Dickens and his party to where the guillotine scaffold had been set up, he quickly lost sight of the illustrious English author in the mass of people. Whether this was by accident or not did not change his sense of relief.
Dominating the small square was a magnificent three-storied white palazzo. A lovely girl, with a twisted crown of honey-colored hair, was positioned on the long balcony over the central entrance. Even from a distance she looked terribly unhappy.
It was her. The girl.
The gloved hands of a tall, long-faced man, no doubt her father, gripped her shoulders from behind.
Freeman was horrified. She could do nothing but wait to watch her lover die.
The Papal Guards—there looked to be fifty or so of them—stood at ease in clusters, while their officers walked up and two in twos and threes, chatting together and smoking cigars. A pastry-seller sold his wares to customers, mostly women. Priests and monks elbowed a passage for themselves among the people and stood on tiptoe for a sight of the guillotine knife, then went away. Two artistic types of eccentric inclination (whom fortunately Freeman didn't know) mulled around in odd hats reminiscent of the middle-ages. Over an hour went by.
The wait played a small trick on him: for a moment, half aware that he was deforming reality for a higher purpose—the way he did when he composed his 'fancy pictures'—Freeman made a mental sketch of the scene. It was the first and last he would feel like making.
To the sound of trumpets, the foot-soldiers marched up to the scaffold and formed a circle. The guillotine became the centre of a thicket of bayonets and sabres. The people pushed nearer, making way for the cart with the condemned boy. Flanking the cart were the slew of men and boys that had accompanied it from the prison, followed by three impassive monks, the last of whom hoisted an effigy of Christ on the cross, canopied in black.
When the monks had positioned the cross at the foot of the scaffold, the boy reappeared on the platform. Freeman got a good look at him now. He was bare-footed, vigorously made and well-shaped, with dark hair and eyes. It was right to call him handsome. His hands were bound; a handkerchief was tied over his mouth, and the collar and neck of his shirt were cut away almost to the shoulder.
Titta appeared alongside of him, enormous in his black armless tunic. He pulled the gag off his mouth, and the youth began to shout and yank his arms. Freeman could not make out his words. Pacifically, Titta offered him a bit of tobacco from the drawstring pouch hanging from his massive belt.
The boy spat at his executioner. Then he turned to the white palazzo and smiled up at his girl.
She was held by the arms of her father and two others, presumably male-kinsmen.
The boy kneeled down so promptly that it was heartbreaking. His neck was fitted into a hole in a cross plank. Below him was a leather bag. The silver blade sheet fell, and into it his head rolled instantly like a melon.
His sweetheart on her balcony shouted incomprehensible words. Despite the serpent coil of six arms she managed a half-rise, enough to launch her spit.
The executioner held up the boy's head by the hair.
After a minute, he paraded with it round the scaffold. The eyes were turned to one side. In the direction of the balcony, Freeman was sure. The face was already dull wax.
When the head had travelled round the four sides of the scaffold, Titta stuck it like an orange on a standing pole—to be stared at and for the flies to settle on. There was a rivulet of blood draining from the scaffolding. Two men were throwing water over the planks. Next Titta hoisted up the headless body and showed this to his public too.
There was no manifestation of disgust or pity in the people around Freeman. None of the indignation he expected either. They were quiet—that was all that could be said for them—and many had their mouths open. The boy's body was laid back on the platform so that Titta could take a club to it. His hacking made the body jerk and its limbs turn askew; for a moment it seemed that the boy might still be alive and resisting. A small puff of smoke emerged as Titta pulled the hot intestines from their cavity. They spilled over the edge of the platform as Titta wiped their grease off his hands on his apron in his sole gesture of annoyance. The bludgeoning continued. To Freeman, Titta's efforts began to resemble those of a woman beating a carpet. When the parts of the pounded body were finally separated, they also were put on display.
Freeman felt exactly how Dickens had said he would. His horror was paralyzing. He wondered where the writer was and what words he was finding for this moment. Next to him, a woman pointed out to her neighbour that the staring, shouting girl on the balcony was being pulled by her shoulders back through the French doors.
"Who is she? What's her name?" Freeman asked the woman abruptly.
He learned that girl's name was Eleonora Serlupi. Her family owned the white palazzo. They were nobles who'd been loyal to the Pope for centuries. Through a fog of numbness, he listened to the woman call Eleonora a disgrace to her family. He walked away as she was blaming the boy's crime on the changing times—all thanks to Napoleon.
A few days later, while Freeman was finishing the painting, Italian Beggar Girl,