"What's your Master going to think of this, Amadeo?" she asked.
I removed my arms and looked to find her voice. She dressed behind her painted paneled screen, a gift from Paris, if I recalled, given her by one of her favorite French poets. She appeared quickly, clothed as splendidly as before in a dress of pale spring green, embroidered with the flowers of the field. She seemed a very garden of delight with these tiny yellow and pink blooms so carefully made in rich thread over her new bodice and her long taffeta skirts.
"Well, tell me, what is the great Master going to say when he finds out his little lover is a veritable god of the wood?"
"Lover?" I was astonished.
She was very gentle in her manner. She sat down and began to comb out her tousled hair. She wore no paint and her face was unmarred by our games, and her hair came down around in a glorious hood of rippling gold. Her forehead was smooth and high.
"Botticelli made you," I whispered. I often said this to her, because she was so like his beauties. Indeed everyone thought so, and they would bring
her small copies of this famous Florentine's paintings from time to time.
I thought on it, I thought on Venice and this world in which I lived. I thought on her, a courtesan, receiving those chaste yet lascivious paintings as if she were a saint.
Some echo came to me of old words that I had been told long ago, when I knelt in the presence of old and burnished beauty, and thought myself at the pinnacle, that I must take up my brush and I must paint only "what represented the world of God. "
There was no tumult in me, only a great mixing of currents, as I watched her braid her hair again, stringing the fine ropes of pearls in with it, and the pale green ribbons, the ribbons themselves sewn with the same pretty little flowers that decorated her gown. Her breasts were blushing, half-covered beneath the press of her bodice. I wanted to rip it open again.
"Pretty Bianca, what makes you say this, that I'm his lover?"
"Everyone knows it," she whispered. "You are his favorite. Do you think you've made him angry?"
"Oh, if only I could," I said. I sat up. "You don't know my Master. Nothing makes him lift his hand to me. Nothing makes him even raise his voice. He sent me forth to learn all things, to know what men can know. "
She smiled and nodded. "So you came and hid under the bed. "
"I was sad. "
"I'm sure," she said. "Well, sleep now, and when I come back, if you're still here, I'll keep you warm. But need I tell you, my rambunctious one, that you will never utter one careless word of what happened here? Are you so young that I have to tell you this?" She bent down to kiss me.
"No, my pearl, my beauty, you needn't tell me. I won't even tell him. "
She stood and gathered up her broken pearls and wrinkled ribbons, the remnants of the rape. She smoothed the bed. She looked as lovely as a human swan, a match for the gilded swans of her boatlike bed.
"Your Master will know," she said. "He's a great magician. "
"Are you afraid of him? I mean in general, Bianca, I don't mean on account of me?"
"No," she said. "Why should I fear him? Everyone knows not to anger him or offend him or break his solitude or question him, but it's not fear. Why do you cry, Amadeo, what's wrong?"
"I don't know, Bianca. "
"I'll tell you then," she said. "He has become the world to you as only such a great being can. And you are out of it now arid longing to return to it. A man such as that becomes all things to you, and his wise voice becomes the law by which everything is measured. All that lies beyond has no value because he doesn't see it, and he doesn't declare that it is valuable. And so you have no choice but to leave the wastes that lie outside his light and return to it. You must go home. "
She went out, closing the doors. I slept, refusing to go home.
The next morning, I breakfasted with her, and spent all day with her. Our intimacy had given me a radiant sense of her. No matter how much she talked of my Master, I had eyes only for her just now, in these quarters of hers which were perfumed with her and full of all her private and special things.
I will never forget Bianca. Never.
I told her, as one can do with a courtesan, all about the brothels to which I'd been. Perhaps I remember them in such detail because I told her. I told her with delicate words, of course. But I told her. I told her how my Master wanted me to learn everything and had taken me to these splendid academies himself.
"Well, that's fine, but you can't linger here, Amadeo. He's taken you to places where you'll have the pleasure of much company. He may not want you to remain in the company of one. "
I didn't want to go. But when nightfall came, and the house filled with her English and French poets, and the music started, and the dancing, I didn't want to share her with all the admiring world.
For a while I watched her, confusingly conscious that I had had her in her secret chamber as none of these, her admirers, had or might have, but it gave me no solace.