“Here is my last duchess painted on the wall, as if she were alive.” The dramatic monologue of Robert Browning is a narrated poem in which in a few lines the Duke of Ferrara tells the story of his first marriage to the special envoy who negotiates the terms of the second. Oscar Wilde he wrote that Browning would be remembered as a supreme author of fiction who used poetry to express himself in prose. Lucrezia, silenced by her husband who hints at her murder, was also silenced once more by Browning. Maggie O’Farrell brings it back to life in a splendid novel that follows in the wake of “Hamnet,” his previous work, critically acclaimed and celebrated for its good sales. Since the poem is about a portrait, albeit improbable, it is natural that the painting is the protagonist of the pages of the book. In “El retrato de casada” everything flows in the middle of a luxuriously imagined suspense; O’Farrell is generous with images, and her prose exudes a certain intoxicating perfume; the story we already know does not worry her too much and she intends to tell it in another way: through the eyes of a precocious girl, a woman with a wild and defiant spirit, endowed with extraordinary artistic talent, whom they intend to subdue.
The Renaissance as background decoration is carefully described with powerful yet delicate visual figures: fire, water, honey, food, horses, beasts and embroidery. Details emerge, nothing is spared. Exceptional novels tend to keep their hidden keys in full light. The color of the hair of a cloak, the interiors of the rooms and the silk coverings of the windows of a palazzo. No sensation or light effect is left unreflected. O’Farrell writes in a near third present tense and the reader, at times, comes to the conclusion that this Irish fictional author has not yet received the adjectives she deserves: witty, inventive and ironic. Even truthful.
Everything is sewn well in “El retrato de casada”: one of the opening passages tragically marks the beat of the story. Seven-year-old Lucrezia di Cosimo de’ Medici, destined to marry Alfonso, heir to the Duchy of Ferrara, at thirteen, and die only three years later under strange circumstances, follows her father, the Grand Duke of Florence, into the basement of the palace that houses his menagerie of exotic creatures. The girl has prepared for her visit: she has heard that her parent ordered the capture of a tigress and longs to see her. The duke leads his sons up narrow stairs and through heavy doors, guarded by soldiers, toward a group of wild animals, monkeys, wolves, a bear, two lions, who pace restlessly roaring back and forth. In the last cage, they tell him, is the tigress, hidden in the shadows. While her father and her brothers continue on, Lucrezia stays behind, clinging to the bars. The tigress emerges from the gloom: it is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen in her life. “She was looking into Lucrezia’s eyes, fixedly. For a moment, the girl had the feeling that she was going to pass by, like the lioness. But she stopped right in front of her. She wasn’t thinking about anything else, like the lioness. I had seen her, she was there with Lucrezia; they had many things to say to each other. Lucrezia knew it… and so did the tigress” (p. 51). He reaches out to brush up against her but is pulled from her with his hand still outstretched. She later finds out that the door between the tigress’s cage and the lion’s cage is left open and she is mutilated to death. The sequence is short, strange and dreamlike, it doesn’t seem destined to stand out in the whole since there is still a long way to go until the end. However, as the pages turn and the atmosphere takes shape and condenses, we see how it enters the heart of the novel, foreshadowing its recurring images – the feeling that the girl protagonist, a vulnerable being, feels caged just as much. that the beast; the oppressive spaces and overwrought characters; the flashes of bright color that pierce the darkness – but also the main facts that are described.
Everything flows amid luxuriously imagined suspense.
In “El retrato de casada”, the author narrates the brief and unhappy life of Lucrezia de’ Medici, from her birth in Florence and her education in her father’s court, to her forced marriage with the wealthy Alfonso, a union that in At first it seems to offer freedom and little by little it reveals itself as a sinister and terrifying trap. It is precisely the wedding portrait that the Duke of Ferrara commissions for his bride that reveals the desire to control not only what she does, but also who she is. He chooses her dress, her jewelry and accessories, her poses. She tells the painter that she wants it to be known who she is from the first moment: a regal, refined and untouchable figure. He does not count on the fact that Lucrezia, also an artist, knows how to seek the complicity of those who have the mission of immortalizing her. The result is a portrait that, like her own paintings, proposes conventionality in the superficial layer and subversion in a second glance. The duke only sees in him what he wants: the transformation of the woman she thinks and feels into one more symbol of her power, another beautiful object for the collection. Marveling at the work, Lucrezia realizes that the painting will assume what should be her role in the life of her husband. The love that ran through the hypnotic pages of “Hamnet”, the previous historical recreation of it, is in Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel a constant threat, a stalker that does not let up. Life suspended by a thread.
The intrigues can be heard through the walls and in the corridors. Restlessness grows. What will happen now to the woman the duke once, in a menacing lapse, referred to as his first duchess? In reality, Alfonso II would remarry twice, none of them with children. Browning himself was wrong, claiming that he had ordered Lucrezia executed or locked up in a convent. The Irish author of “El retrato de casada” proposes a resolution to the mystery posed by the poem in a single version. Looming danger, tension, and suspense accompany the reading as Lucrezia, caged like the tigress brought to Florence by her father, tries to escape her amid a shuddering helplessness of her mortal fate.
The married portrait
Maggie O’Farrell
Translation of Concha Cardeñoso
Asteroid books, 400 pages, 23.95 euros