And the colors! Rich golds, bright greens, blues the color of the Aegean—below the kitchen grease and candle smoke, the colors I was recovering were as vibrant as the day they were painted.
And here and there I’d find a flourish, not quite a signature, but a certain swirl that I was beginning to recognize as the scenes flowed one into the next. Had it been an artist, there may have been an actual signature, but back then this kind of work, beautiful and technically sound as it may be, would have been the work of a tradesman. Someone who wouldn’t have been afforded the luxury of an actual commission, but certainly an artist in his own right, whoever he’d been. Hence, the flourish. I’d found it on day one while restoring a particularly festive scene of a butcher and his wares.
Some of the original paint had faded so significantly that it was only under a fine light and a pair of strongly magnified glasses that I could see the intention behind the lines, and recover it as best as I could. Between the hog being hoisted above the boiling cauldron and then the bristles being scrubbed off, there was a curious swirl of blue mixed into a scene that was composed entirely of reds and browns, yellows, and a bit of green to depict the hayfields in the background.
This swirl of blue appeared again in a scene of a gaggle of geese walking before a maid on their way to market, and once more in the corner of a field of ripe dusky olive trees. I’d begun to look for it, wondering about who it was that made his presence, however small and inconsequential it might have been, known to anyone who cared to look for it.
Who was he? What did he like? What did he love? Did he love his job, spending his days in some rich man’s villa composing scenes of country peasant life? Did he dream of someday painting in a grander house, in a church, or even in the Vatican across town? Or was he simply a tradesman, happy to be working and putting food on his family’s table and unable to conceive that a twenty-first-century woman dressed in denim overalls and pigtails with a device strapped to her arm linked to two tinier devices embedded near her eardrums would smile to herself as she uncovered another blue swirl as she hummed along to the tune of “Sure Shot” by the Beastie Boys.
Setting my tools down and stretching my back, I took a step back and regarded my work. Three quarters of the frescoes had been recovered and restored, and looked damn fine if I did say so myself. I was covered in drippy lime, fingers aching, skin cracked from the wet plaster drying repeatedly and taking every ounce of moisture from my hands along with it, and I couldn’t remember a finer day.
“Why haven’t you been doing this longer?”
Startled, I whirled around, finding Maria standing next to me and regarding my frescoes with a confused look on her face. I tugged the earbuds out, asking her to repeat what she’d said.
“I say, why haven’t you been doing this longer? Or rather, all along?”
“Oh,” I said, hitting pause on my music and scrunching up my nose. “Um, well, I took some time off after college and, well, got married, and I always planned to go back to work but there just never seemed to be a good time to go back and then—”
“Mmm-hmm.” She nodded, stepping away from me and toward the work I’d been doing today. She scrutinized the colors, the depth, where I’d had to embellish and where I’d had to re-create almost entirely. She leaned close to the plaster, closer, so close I was afraid she’d come away with a coat of green on the tip of her nose.
It’d match the one I was sporting. I also liked to lean in.
“Mmm-hmm,” she said once more, mostly to herself. I wanted to rock on my heels. I wanted to chew on my braid. But instead I stood up straight and waited for her critique.
“Very good, Avery.” She nodded, casting me a sideways smile. “Very good.”
I beamed! I’d come to realize that a good from Maria was the equivalent of an American awesome! A very good? I’d kicked some serious fresco ass today . . .
She began to walk away, but then turned just before she left. “You get married again if you want, but you don’t stop doing this.” She gestured to the wall. “Yes?”
“Yes,” I answered, butterflies springing to life inside my belly. But right now wasn’t the time to celebrate, it was time to get back to work . . .
* * *
“. . . AND THEN SHE SAID, ‘Very good, Avery,’ in that quiet, stern way she has; you know how she can sound.”
“I do. A very good is high praise from her,” Marcello said, echoing my thoughts from earlier.
“I know!” I chattered, threading my arm through his as we walked down the street outside the concert. People were already lined up, mostly couples, but a few families here and there, and some tourists.
Tourists. I could spot them now.
“She told me I should keep on doing what I’m doing.”
“And will you?”
I pondered this as he led me into the courtyard. “I don’t know; I mean, I’d like to. I don’t know if I can.” He steered us toward the ticket line, but I patted my pocket. “Don’t need to stand in line there, mister, I’ve got it covered.”
“Covered?”
“Yep,” I said, pulling the tickets out of my pocket. “I stopped by earlier this week and picked them up. I didn’t want us to have to wait in line.”
“You bought the tickets, yes?”
“I did,” I answered, nodding toward an attendant who was tearing them and showing people to their seats. “Anyway, if the opportunity came up to do some more restoration work I would definitely be interested, but we’ll have to wait and see what she says afterward. If she’d recommend me for another job.” We arrived down toward the front, and I was pleased to see our seats were in the third row, pretty much right in the center. “Wow, I got us great seats, huh?”