As Above, So Below Page 2

  “You are the other artist from Antwerp,” said the monk in Latin. He was a portly man with sharp eyes. Bruegel knew a little of the international language, and he answered “Sane” for “Yes.”

  The monk topped off a mug whose foam had been settling, and handed it to Bruegel. “Your companion’s already paid for your food and lodging. Sit down anywhere you like, and one of the novices will bring you some bread, cheese, and radishes.”

  Bruegel walked towards a long table with some men who were talking a Low German dialect which was close enough to Flemish for Bruegel to understand. Seating himself, he recognized one of the men. It was the young merchant Hans Franckert, a fat, powerful fellow with a wide, slitlike mouth. Though Franckert was originally from Nuremberg, he’d moved to Antwerp and become a citizen several years ago.

  Franckert was a convivial man known for carousing with artists. He was often seen, for instance, at the gatherings of the Violet Chamber of Rhetoric. The so-called Chambers of Rhetoric were street-theater groups—they performed plays and skits at festivals, using their own scripts, costumes, and backdrops. As a matter of pride, nearly every crafts guild had an associated Chamber of Rhetoric—no less so the St. Luke’s Guild for artists. The Violet Chamber’s meetings were fecund with wordplay and creative ferment—small wonder that Franckert enjoyed them. The more calculating of the artists viewed the meetings as a good place to scout for patrons—or for friendly women. Though Bruegel would have liked to be one of these fishers of men—or of women—he inevitably ended up at the fringes of the Chamber’s gatherings—watching. Though Franckert was only five years older than him, he’d never actually spoken to Franckert before. Somewhat to Bruegel’s surprise, the merchant knew him.

  “Peter Bruegel!” exclaimed Franckert, raising his beer. “You were the apprentice of Master Coecke, were you not? He was a mighty artist; may he rest in peace.”

  “I’m an apprentice no longer,” said Bruegel. “I’ve been a Master of the St. Luke’s Guild for over a year.”

  “Congratulations,” said Franckert. “Meet my bookkeeper, Klaua, and my teamsters, Max and Moritz. We’re on our way to Antwerp! My new hometown. Max here is a native of the Low Lands as well, the good Max Wagemaeker, my guide in all things Flemish. We’ve got two wagons filled with colors, spices, and Venetian silks. Whither are you bound, Peter?”

  “I’m out to fill my eyes with the Alps and the treasures of Italy. I sketched my first mountain today.”

  “Show me,” said Franckert. So Bruegel took his drawing out from inside his coat, holding it a careful few inches above the beery table. Franckert leaned forward, studying the image. “It’s a mountain all right,” he said presently. “Like looking out a window.” He gave Bruegel a friendly clap on the shoulder. “Well done.”

  “I could sell it to you,” said Bruegel. “I’m short of funds.”

  “The artist’s fate,” said Franckert. “I’m not averse to helping out a son of Antwerp. How much might you charge?”

  “Could you pay a gold piece?”

  “Not out of the question. I’m having a good trip.” Franckert patted his heavy double-walled silk purse, which rested on the bench at his side, attached to his belt by a leather cord. The purse clinked fatly. “But let’s enjoy each other’s company a bit before pushing matters to a head.”

  “So what was your cargo to Venice?” asked Bruegel, stowing away his drawing. If conversation was what was wanted, he’d provide it. He’d learned from Master Coecke that some patrons were as interested in knowing the artist as they were in owning the art.

  “German copper and quicksilver. We went down through Austria. I sold twelve big flasks of quicksilver to the Venetian mirror makers.”

  “I’ve never seen any large amount of quicksilver,” said Bruegel, intrigued.

  “The metal of Mercury,” said Franckert. “It’s wonderful stuff, as unexpected as amber or a lodestone. I keep a little sample of it with me.” He fished in the folds of his leather coat and came up with a thick-walled, tightly corked bottle of heavy, shiny liquid. “Look,” said Franckert, spilling a little puddle of the quicksilver onto the table. “Touch it, Peter.”

  Bruegel poked the puddle and it shuddered. The room was partly reflected in it. The great room’s patterned ceiling, which Bruegel hadn’t noticed before, was clearly visible, a tessellation of red squares and yellow octagons. The edges of the silver puddle dropped off steeply; the long lines of the windows were mirrored with abrupt bends. Now Franckert tapped the puddle hard, and it splattered into dozens of little balls, each of them a miniature round mirror.

  “How wonderful!” exclaimed Bruegel. “And we can join them back together?”

  “Just push them,” said Franckert. “They melt together when they touch, unless there’s dirt between them.”

  A tonsured boy appeared with a plate of food for Bruegel. Franckert used a scrap of paper to scoop up his puddle of quicksilver, pouring it back into its little bottle. He splashed a little water onto his hands and rubbed them on his shirt.

  “Mercury harbors evil humors for the unwary,” said Franckert. “Few of the men in the cinnabar mines live past thirty.”

  A few tiny balls of the mercury remained wedged down in the cracks of the table, peeping up at Bruegel like sly silver eyes.

  Bruegel munched his bread and cheese, thinking first about the quicksilver, and then about the meal. The monks’ bread was coarse and friendly on the tongue; the soft, shiny cheese was ripe and salty. Delicious.

  It was pleasant to sit in the company of Franckert and his party. Their slurred, guttural speech, though not quite Flemish, was homey and comforting. For over a week now, de Vos had been Bruegel’s only conversation partner, and the man’s many peculiarities and character flaws had become galling.

  Franckert was likable, with a manner less pompous than expected from a merchant. Back in Antwerp, Bruegel had regarded Franckert only from a distance, usually carousing and shouting with other, better-known artists. As Franckert’s noisy jests and drolleries had never included Bruegel, he’d imagined that Franckert was a vain man who looked down on him. But now that fate had thrown them together, Franckert showed every sign of friendship and interest. Far from being a braggart, he was perfectly ready to share a laugh at his own expense. He seemed, if anything, more eager to impress Bruegel than Bruegel was to impress him.

  Bruegel asked for some advice about the roads ahead, which got the teamsters talking not only about the highways but about the adventures they led to. The leather-faced Max told a ribald story about an amorous interlude in a Venetian stable, the tale embroidered with comments by the others. For Moritz’s sake, Max was speaking in a low German that Bruegel found hard to follow, but his broad gestures and onomatopoeic grunts filled out the picture. The very haziness of the tale thus heard made it the more universal. Warmed by the beer, Bruegel found himself laughing easily and making his own remarks, fully part of the group.

  The bookkeeper Klaua mentioned that they’d passed the gallows on their way down the mountain. The villagers had been gathered there in great numbers, making it hard to get one’s wagons through. Franckert’s company hadn’t stopped to watch, lest some of their cargo be pilfered by the boisterous crowd.

  As they ate and talked, Bruegel noticed de Vos repeatedly nipping into the eating hall for more beer to take outside—two mugs at a time. It was getting dark now, and a monk moved about lighting torches in the dining room and in the courtyard. Bruegel went outside to see what had become of his companion. De Vos was sitting on the same bench as before, drinking beer with a local woman who loudly used a few words of Flemish. Though it was hard to be sure in the torchlight, the woman was no longer in the flower of her first youth. She was plump rather than wrinkled; she had a fixed smile and a missing front tooth. Her name was Lisette.

  “She wants me to spend the night in her cottage, Peter,” said de Vos. “I can meet up with you in the morning.” His earlier gloom had given way to cheerful abandon.

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p; “Leave your purse and other valuables with me,” muttered Bruegel in Flemish.

  “Yes,” hissed de Vos. “I’ll do it as we piss together.”

  “This Lisette, this well-aged prickpocket, was she at the execution?” asked Bruegel as the two of them wetted the wall of the monastery.

  “Indeed,” said de Vos. “She said it put her blood all in a fever.” He passed Bruegel his purse, his pocketknife, and the small brooch he wore on his cape. “She said the hanged man got a magnificent cock-stand, and that the buried woman screamed for nearly an hour. Yes, yes, Lisette wants me on top of her, as heavy as a fathom of earth.”

  “And you’re done with raging at Rome, Martin?”

  “We have but this one world to live in,” said de Vos with his old cheerful grin. “It pleases God to test us.” He persuaded the tapster monk to draw him two more mugs of beer, and then he and Lisette toddled off into the night.

  Franckert appeared in the courtyard, checking up on his covered wagons. Their sides were made of lapped-together boards like a boat’s hull, and they had big springs and huge spoked wheels. Hoops held the covers slightly domed up over the wagons, making room for extra storage. “Did I tell you I’m bringing painters’ colors to Antwerp, Peter? They fill half this wagon. Look.” Franckert loosened a corner of the covering canvas and prodded some bundles. “These packages hold a pigment called Indian yellow. Do you know it?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” said Bruegel. “But Master Coecke never used it. He preferred a yellow massicot made of roasted white lead.” Bruegel peered closer, trying to make out the tint in the half-light of the flickering torch.

  “The Indian yellow is remarkably rich and intense,” said Franckert. “It’s made from dried cow piss! A special kind of Calicut cow, fed only on mango leaves. And look here, see my blues? The most precious of the lot. I have both azurite and the true ultramarine, made of ground lapis lazuli, painstakingly separated from its gray matrix, twenty guilders per ounce.”

  “Peter Baltens got the chance to use some ultramarine for a chapel triptych I helped him on this past year,” said Bruegel. “His contract with the sponsoring guild specified a full four ounces. We had a lot of sky.”

  Bruegel didn’t mention that Baltens had hogged all of the color painting, limiting Bruegel to the monochrome underpainting of the landscapes on the front of the panels. At least Baltens had let Bruegel fully execute the gray-tone grisaille images on the backs of the triptych wings. Baltens had been able to make the rules, since it was he who’d obtained the commission from the guild steward. Bruegel still hadn’t managed to obtain any commissions of his own, and sometimes it felt like he never would.

  “You’re lucky to be an artist,” Franckert was saying. “If I hadn’t inherited my father’s business, I might have been one too. And, oh yes, it would have helped if I had the eye and the hand for drawing.” Franckert laughed self-deprecatingly. He really was a very pleasant man.

  “What other colors are in the wagon, Hans?”

  “Since I knew I was heading for the artists of Antwerp, I brought along some vermilion made of Austrian quicksilver ore, so bright it pricks the eye. If that’s too sharp, I’ve a rosier sort of red from the roots of the Venetian madder plant. I’ve laid in a full palette of Italian earth colors: burnt Sienna, raw umber, a mossy green, Verona brown, deep reds and ochers. The very soil bursts with tint in sunny Italy. I’ve an exquisite green malachite as well, azurite’s sister. Have you finished many paintings since leaving your Master, Peter?”

  “It’s only been a year now,” said Bruegel. “So there’s been but the one triptych I just mentioned. The chapel piece for the Mechelen glove-makers’ guild. Figures in a mountain landscape. Only now it occurs to me that Baltens and I had never seen a real mountain! We paint pictures of pictures; we repeat twice-told tales.”

  “I’m sure the triptych was every bit as fine as any Flemish painter’s, my good Peter.”

  “I dream of a higher level of mastery,” said Bruegel, responding to the encouragement. “I’ll paint what lives and breathes and thinks—not what you see in dusty lesson-pictures. God’s world, we creatures in it, and the world as mirrored in the phantasmagoria of our souls—that’s my theme. Oh yes, Hans, someday I’ll come into my own. In Mechelen, for instance, I made the backs of the triptych panels a grisaille of grotesques.”

  “Such as?” inquired Franckert.

  “The creatures before the Flood. I put in a great number of man-lobsters.” For emphasis, Bruegel made pinching motions with his fingers as he said the Flemish word for lobster, that is, kreeft. Franckert laughed and clapped Bruegel on the back.

  Back inside, the monks had laid out pallets on the floor of the great room; the dining room was the inn dormitory as well. Cheered by the evening’s good companionship, Bruegel slept soundly, his pack under his head.

  In the morning, over their breakfast porridge, Franckert asked Bruegel to take out his drawing and show it to him again. He was actually acute enough to comment upon the way Bruegel had used the pockmarks and bumps of little shrubs to build up the long, shaggy curve of the mountain’s edge. “It’s like your hand was just pecking away at it,” said Franckert. “So much pecking deserves a grain of corn! I’ll buy it, my friend. But—hmm—I wonder if you could add some human figures in it? Perhaps some travelers?”

  “Actual travelers?” said Peter, getting out his pen. “No saints or kings? You’re a man to my liking, Hans. Real people for a real mountain.” Working quickly, he put a few men in the corner, and signed the picture.

  They completed the exchange out in the courtyard. Bruegel had made his first independent sale. His heart rose to the high blue heavens.

  Franckert’s party clattered off down the slope. A bare-legged little local girl who’d been standing around watching them suddenly began to shout. “Pee-ter Bruu-gel! Pee-ter Bruu-gel!”

  “I’m your man,” said Bruegel. “What is it?”

  But the girl spoke a dialect which Bruegel couldn’t understand.

  “Do you come from Lisette?” asked Bruegel in halting French.

  The little girl nodded vigorously and repeated the name Lisette. She seized hold of Bruegel’s cape and pulled him forward. “Pee-ter Bruu-gel!”

  “Wait,” said Bruegel and ran back into the monastery to get his satchel. No point leaving it here to be pillaged. The noisy urchin led Bruegel through the village streets at a trot. The slowly stirring locals watched them going by. Some of them smirked knowingly. Finally on the uphill side of the village they came to a stop.

  The sun was peeping over the high green ridge of the mountain and the sky was a luminous blue. It was peaceful in the heavens, but there was strife below, here at Lisette’s little cottage. De Vos was lying on the ground nude, smeared with shit and feathers. A red-faced peasant stood over him with knife and a scythe. Lisette was in the cottage door, looking more sly than sorrowful. A few more feathers lay at her feet.

  “Thank God you here,” she said in broken Flemish. “My man want cut off you friend’s sausage!”

  “Help me, Peter,” groaned de Vos.

  Bruegel looked at the agitated peasant. He was toothless, and his chin was a grizzled knob right up under his nose. He gestured menacingly with his knife and sickle, looking for all the world like a lobster.

  “You’ve riled a kreeft,” chortled Bruegel. With Franckert’s coin in his pocket, the world was a merry jape. “Martin de Vos, beshitted and befeathered for his sins.”

  De Vos managed the ghost of a smile. “A red kreeft, yes. He emptied the night pot upon me and slashed the pillow. I suppose he wants money for Lisette. Give him some.”

  “We want to go on our way,” Bruegel told the toothless peasant. He pointed up the mountain and then, seeing no reaction, he made a gesture of handing out coins. “I can pay you a little bit.”

  The kreeft-man’s eyes glittered, and his chin worked back and forth. He made an encouraging gesture with his knife.

  “Here,” said Bruegel
, holding out some of the small coins de Vos had entrusted to him yesterday. Lisette skipped over and counted them. She said something to her man, who seemed prepared to back off. But now the little messenger girl piped up with new information. She’d been there to witness Bruegel’s sale to Franckert, alas.

  “We want the gold coin,” announced Lisette. “If you no give, then off come you friend’s sausage.” The kreeft leaned over de Vos, rubbing his knife along his sickle. The clashing metals made an unsettling, slithery sound.

  “You stupid, clumsy pig,” said Bruegel to de Vos, all his good humor gone. But there was nothing for it but to draw out his fine new coin. When the kreeft saw the gold, a streamer of saliva flopped down from one corner of his mouth. These were very simple people. Lisette tucked the coin into her bosom, then brought out a basin of water for de Vos to clean himself a little. His clothes appeared next. And then they were on their way up the mountain, with Lisette calling a sweet “Au revoir!”

  “Where did you get the gold piece?” asked de Vos presently.

  “I sold my drawing of this mountain to Hans Franckert,” snapped Bruegel, his humor still spoiled. “You’re an idiot.”

  “Franckert? He was at the inn?”

  “Yes,” said Bruegel. “Didn’t you see him? He had wagons of Venetian spices and colors for Antwerp. Too bad you didn’t stay with us. Did you enjoy your night with the trull?”

  “Nothing special,” said de Vos with a rueful smile. “Push push, squirt squirt. We were drunk. And then this morning that man came crashing in. Yes, yes, he was very like a lobster. I’m sorry for the gold coin, Peter. You’re a noble friend.”

  Bruegel didn’t answer. They walked on in silence for a while. The morning sun was burning off the clouds; birds were singing all around them. Slowly Bruegel’s anger faded away. “You’re noble, too, Martin,” he said, finally. “We’re all noble. Even with the coin gone, I still have the memory of making the sale. Franckert was quite taken with my drawing. He wasn’t the usual run of customer, expecting to see the same things over and over again. I sold my drawing and now I’m hiking up the very Alp I drew. What a fine day it’s turning into.”