Chapter 1: Dreams
Cavaliere,
The dreams linger through my waking hours. No, not dreams, nightmares—terrible and beautiful all at once, full of rage, fire and blood. They tear me open, leave daylight scars and remake me in their image. They’ve set the course of my life.
My father was a violent man. It wasn’t his beatings of me, but his brutality to my mother that drove her to make an end of herself, then me to make an end of him. The world is a happier place for his absence. The next I murdered by accident, as you will see.
I’m two sides of the coin: artist first and foremost; dark instrument second. The world’s a tawdry, violent place and the a§rtist’s first duty is to translate onto canvas the rare flickers of beauty still to be found this side of life’s horizon. My Work’s incremental, each fragment a revelation in itself, and the apogee of this miracle will cut you to the quick.
Wicked seed has been sown, but you, Cavaliere, set the wheels of all that followed grinding into motion.
An hour after meeting you, my blood well and truly up, I made a solemn determination: I’ll bring you down; humble you; smash into pieces the pedestal upon which you stand preening before the world. I’ll place my foot on your neck and push down hard, but from now until then I’ll be the worm lodged in your ear, the subtle knife twisting in your side. Stars will fade to black and your world will smoulder. You’ll sniff at the corrupted air, bemused, and wonder how things can have plummeted down, down as far as this. How can it possibly be that you, the distinguished Latin nobleman, untouchable and long in the habit of success, pitted his wits against this anarch and inexplicably lost the war? I’ll chip away at your carapace; chip, chip, chip. I’ll reduce you. Among a tribe of brutes I’d be thought brutish.
But will I ever be truly appreciated? I can but hope. And you must take responsibility for much of what followed, Cavaliere. Sophia, your radiant girl, was a painted butterfly while you can only ever be a moth. Both brush lightly, wing on skin, yet she’s all beauty while you’re steadfast drab.
Do you recall our first meeting? No? For shame! We were introduced at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, recently made patent and altogether too full of itself. The reek of snuff, perfume and pretension hung heavy in the air. Was it our surroundings that made you decline to shake my hand? Perhaps you mistook me for a tradesman—I am no simple painter, sir!—but when you repeated your error at Enderby, gaffe became insult.
But let’s return to the Theatre Royal. You appeared puzzled that we were even inhaling the same air and then grew flustered by my polite bow; a gesture that you did not—would not?—reciprocate. You disobliged me. It’s one thing to entertain a private prejudice, Cavaliere, but then you played the scene up, up, up to the gallery; the Latin temperament’s much given to showing off. I observed them snickering behind their hands; everyone was drawn into the comedy. True, I’ve fallen on thin times and my clothes are a little passé, but had you possessed even a modicum of good manners, had you met decency with decency, then our conflict might well have died there and then. Serendipity, I suppose. But later you would compound your insult, feigning interest in my methods, enquiring as to how certain pigments are produced and what use I might then make of them.
Later again, in the course of a fretful night, I turned the trouble over and over in my mind until my anger grew Leviathan. There was no retreat after that. After that you stood condemned. Once past that line in the sand, had you fallen to your knees, begging for my mercy, I would have spat in your eye; I would have pissed upon you, Cavaliere.
