Date: Sat, 14 Sep 1996 17:08:11 -0400 From: Apache Subject: The Second Sitting (Janette) This story picks up on Janette's remark when Nick insisted on keeping her portrait at the end of their 97-year 'marriage.' this is a birthday story for Susan, a month late The Second Sitting Chateau de Cloux, near Amboise, spring 1518 The tall woman followed the servant only a little way into the great room King Francis had given to the old Italian master for receiving. It was a room for the evenings only, not open to the light as were the grand studios with their uncommonly huge openings at the top of the castle, and all the light in the room came from flames that flickered and swung with the little winds that blew through. The old man looked up in irritation. "Battista, what is this? I gave no permission--" The old Villanis, for decades his most intimate servant, answered with uncommon dullness, "you wish to see this lady." The old man stared in frank disbelief, snapping "*Che...?* But the servant simply spun on his heel and walked out of the room without waiting for leave. The woman remained, but did not move forward. "*Ti reconosco,*" said the old man, peering through the torchlight. "I have seen you...." he began shaking his head gently. "*Non, non, piu ci posso vedere... me despiace, signora.* Forgive me, it could not be so." "*Si, maestro, e vero,*" the woman said softly. "It's true; your eyes are still faithful." "*La donna della notte* -- the lady of the night-time," he said wonderingly. "But that was sixty years..." "*Si, maestro,*" she repeated. "You made me paint you as if in sunlight," he recalled. "And with... was it flowers? It was not what I saw, not the truth. But you paid so much." "*E ancora, e vero.*" She smiled a little. "Right again. It was what he wanted." "*Ah, ricordomi di lei. Il bello cavalieri sirvente,*" he smiled too. "Your beautiful young man, I do remember him." His gaze blinked away from her and his mind summoned the image: the dark beauty posing, the young man pacing around the studio, his golden hair catching glints from the candles. "Such a reckless expense, all those candles," he said aloud. "And beeswax, too, every one of them, not a single dip of lard. The smell was so sweet..." The woman nodded, recalling the same scene. "So why do you come? Has the painting...?" "No, not at all," she said. The slight gesture of dismissal her hands made was her first motion since entering. "All is well with the canvas. But I have come for the truth." The old man looked at her intensely now, and she permitted it, allowing herself to compare memory with the figure before her. The lustrous brown hair was now a wild white fringe around a disturbingly naked scalp; the eyebrows had come out in long, thin white hairs, and his forehead sagged over his eyes with the laxity of old-age skin. Framed under the ragged white brows, his eyes burned out at her, though they were not bright with the desires of youth, as she had once known them, but instead fierce as the embers of a fire that has burned to its heartwood. This was why, she knew, she disliked seeing mortals at more than one period of their lives; it was too easy to be seduced into sorrow at the failure of their beauty, too dangerous to find oneself moved to pity or, worst of all, a sense of loss, of splendor slipping away. She was free from time, but it cost her constant care to avoid falling into the snare of its emotions: melancholy, wistfulness, despair. "Yes?" said the old man gently. "Yes. I, too, shall insist on the truth now." He stood up, using his hands to help lift himself from the chair. The woman remembered seeing him spring down from the armature of a sculpture fully seven feet above the floor. She forced that image out of her mind, focussing on the man approaching her. He came right up next to her and set his rough, blunt fingertips on her face, used them to lift her chin and tilt her head this way and that, moving different parts of her face into the brightest light from the sconces, dipping his fingers into the glossy black hair. She restrained the urge to throw him across the room, but all her muscles tensed with the effort it took her to be still and let these unbidden touches continue. They were nearly of a height, and he ducked down to look under her chin at her throat and neck. He picked up one of her hands and played with it lightly, splaying the fingers, feeling the musculature, the reflexivity. He tapped the center of her palm hard to set off the clenching reflex, and frowned. "*Si gelato,*" he murmured to himself. "So frozen." She lifted her chin with self-protective arrogance. "Perfection," he muttered, turning away from her. "*Santissima Madonna,* such a perfection." He walked back to his table and sat down again, his head lowered in thought. An extended silence played itself out before he looked up again. "Not long since, I have opened a lioness and seen her heart and lungs and kidneys," he said. "What would I find if I opened you?" She smiled. "A heart," she said easily. He cocked his head to the side. She shrugged slightly. "One that does not beat as hastily as yours, but a heart." His eyebrows lifted. "One that feels, maestro," she added, and he smiled back. "I believe this," he nodded, looking unblinkingly into her eyes. A note of humor crept into his voice, an old man's flirtation. "One that feels, but not the same as mine." She smiled again, a wide smile that had more than a dash of warmth in it. "*Mon cher maitre,* no woman's heart has ever felt the same as a man's," she returned lightly. "Not since time began." He laughed. "True enough." But the laughter did not quite reach his eyes, and the smiled folded back into a serious expression. His left hand reached out to the sketching paper and stick of charcoal that lay to one side of his table. "Now step further into the light, signora, and we will begin again." ******** Apache comments always welcomed at lf@cais.com Leonardo spent the last couple years of his life as the guest and pensioner of King Francis I of France. A King of France at one point did send him a lion to dissect, but I think it may have been earlier than I have it happening here. His sketches of the anatomy of its head have survived in his notebooks, published by Penguin.