The Cat's Table - Michael Ondaatje [75]
It was busy and difficult work at the institute. Paintings and tapestries and sculptures were arriving at a fast rate, all to be catalogued. There was also the work to be done on the re-invention of the gardens, with Mrs. Johnson attempting to transform them back into their original Medici structure. So there was much scurrying about in the halls and terraces, with huge arguments among the gardeners, who had been plucked from estates all over Europe—so we, the translators, rushed in to help communicate the opinions and the irritations.
Horace and Rose Johnson appeared now and then like gods. They strolled into our offices, or were suddenly off to Naples or even the Far East. They came into our work spaces in a very different way from how Clive, their son, would visit us. His entrance was more like a small shell rolling in accidentally, so he’d be there for some time before we were even aware of his presence. Once I came down the staircase in the Grand Rotunda and saw him crouched, brushing the image of a dog in the foliage that was in the lower half of one of the hanging tapestries: Verdura with Dog, it was called. From sixteenth-century Flanders. I loved the piece. It warmed up and humanized the great circular hall. Anyway, the boy had got hold of a dog brush and he was brushing very tenderly the coat of the hound. It was a delicate tapestry, a classic of provincial weaving from the Netherlands.
“Be very gentle, Clive,” I said. “It’s valuable.”
“I am,” he said.
It was summer, the boy had no dog of his own in this villa, even with those vast grounds. The parents were away, one of them attempting to get to Khartoum, who knows why, or for what piece of art to be attained. I thought that for the seven-year-old boy the father’s absence must have felt like centuries, and I wondered what the surroundings meant to him. A child looks at a vista, or a painting, and he sees something entirely different from what a father sees. The boy saw a dog he did not have. That is all.
Most of the tapestries in the villa were symbolic, the religious ones weighted with icons and parables. The secular ones (of which Verdura with Dog was one) were versions of an Earthly Paradise, or about the dangerous or blissful powers of love—depicted usually by hunting scenes. So the dog in the tapestry was in fact a boar-hunting dog. Other tableaux showed a hawk overpowering a dove in a cloudless blue sky—an example of the “conquering” that comes with love. Love as murder then, or annihilation of the weaker party. But when you saw those works hanging in the Grand Rotunda or in the spacious but cold rooms, you saw their true purpose, which was to bring a garden into a bare stone house. These were tapestries that had been woven in cold attics in some northern country—places that may never have seen a wild boar or a dove or the lush greenery that was found in them. They were beautiful in this new context. They had a dignity. The colours used were humble, background colours, so that a live Florentine beauty who walked a few paces in front of one might appear somehow distinguished by it. Or they would be at times political, to do with ownership or status. They showed the Medici crest—the five red balls of the solar system as well as the blue one added after the Medicis and the French aligned their families.
“This art feels safe, doesn’t it?”
Horace and I were in the Capone Room, surrounded by its frescoes, when I realized he was talking directly to me. I had been working there for over a month and he had never acknowledged me. His hand reached