“Forget it.” He stalked away again.

I hurried after him. “I’ve been a painter since before I could walk, so if you’re having trouble, I can help . . .” He was wearing his satchel across his body. Maybe my notebook was still inside. Could I open the flap and grab my sketchbook before he could stop me? “But you have to tell me what . . .”

He whirled on me, that vein in his forehead thumping teal. “My marble sings. It cries and speaks and tells me how to carve. Each block has a different voice, but it’s always there, guiding my hand. But paint won’t tell me anything. No matter what I try— wooden panels, canvas, walls, tempera, oil, fresco . . . It won’t say anything. How can I make it speak?”

I looked past the hanging corpses—telling myself they were only fish, down by a port, dangling on lines—and said, “The beauty of paint is its silence.”

He shook his head—with denial or bewilderment, I wasn’t sure.

I went on. “When you paint, sounds and smells recede, all thoughts drift away. Worry, fear, fires, floods, war, sickness, death . . .” I put my hand on his shoulder, over the leather strap of his bag. His muscles were hard from years of pounding into marble. If he hit me, it would hurt. “The reason I love to paint isn’t because of the noise; it’s because of the silence.”

“I can’t do this,” he groaned. “I’ll die painting that chapel. The pope might as well have sentenced me to decorate my own tomb.”

My breath caught. “Are you saying that you don’t want to paint the Sistine ceiling?”

“No, I don’t want to paint that blessed ceiling. I’m a sculptor.”

This changed everything. I took out my father’s old paintbrush and began to twirl with excitement. “Che grande,” I replied with a grin. “That means you can give me the ceiling to paint, and you can go back to carving the pope’s tomb and . . .”