To Piero

Padre carissimo,

The hand trembles when I write of the R. Not because it is hard to form—though my fingers betray me—but because this consonant carries more weight than the others. It is the sound of the canal’s current resisting the lock, the rasp of the file against steel, the growl of the lion that is not yet drawn but is already in the chest. I hear it in the throat of the ox when it labors, in the creak of the well’s rope as the bucket descends empty and returns full. The R is a thing that resists and receives at once. It is the tongue pressed to the palate, then released in a rush, like the moment the wing beats before the bird is airborne.

You remember the R in my name, though you gave me another. Leonardo—Leonardo—the L smooth as water over stone, the O round as the moon’s first sliver, but the R is the stone itself, the thing that does not yield. It is the name you did not choose for me, yet it chose me. The R in Verrocchio is the same sound, though softer, as if the master’s workshop exhaled it like dust from old wood. I apprenticed under that R, under that resistance, and learned to make it serve the eye instead of the ear.

Here in France, the R is different. The French throat shapes it like a question, a thing half-asked, as if they are not sure they have the right to say it. It does not have the weight of the Tuscan R, which is a thing of certainty, of command. The canal here is slower, wider, and the R of its currents is a murmur compared to the Arno’s snap. Yet even here, the R finds me. In the red of the sunset on the water, in the rust of the locks, in the rattle of the carts on the cobblestones. It is the sound of time passing, of metal wearing thin, of the body’s own joints beginning to sing their complaints.

I dreamt last night of the R as a road. Not the straight path of the Via Francigena, but a road that curves and doubles back on itself, a thing that must be walked twice to be understood. The first time, it is just a road. The second, it is the shape of a question: Where are you going? The R is the answer’s echo.

The work goes. The Battle of Anghiari is still a ghost on the wall, though the wall is patient. The colors do not dry as they should. The oil and the tempera fight like two oxen under the same yoke. I have tried every trick—ground glass in the paint, the heat of the sun through the glass, the breath of the assistants held in check like horses at the starting line. Nothing works. The pigments rebel. The wall itself seems to sweat. Perhaps it is the R in Anghiari—the resistance of the name, the refusal to be captured.

The small things: The cat has taken to sleeping on the ledger of expenses. She kneads the pages with her claws and leaves her scent like a mark of possession. I do not scold her. The ledger is full of numbers that do not add up, just as the sky is full of clouds that do not form shapes until you look away. The cat understands this. She knows that possession is not the same as control.

The candle is low. The R in candle is a thing of flickers and whispers, not the solid resistance of the Tuscan R. It is the sound of a secret told and then withdrawn.

I think of you often, Padre. Not as the notary who gave me his name without his house, but as the man who saw the R in me before I saw it in myself. You sent me to Verrocchio’s workshop, and the R of his name became the R of my hands. For that, I am grateful, though I do not say it often enough.

vostro figlio affettuoso