Free The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra

community since, other than the prior, I doubt whether any of the brothers took heed of my presence. I did notice, however, that the Father Prior gestured sternly toward my guide, who then awkwardly moved to the other side.
    Not only that: as soon as the prior had given us his benediction, Father Alessandro urged me to leave the company and follow him into the hospital ward.
    In those early hours, the few sick who had spent the night there were still asleep, lending the red brick courtyard a lugubrious aspect.
    “Yesterday you said that you knew Master Leonardo quite well…,” I began. I was certain that the truce he had allowed me before showering me with questions was about to come to an end.
    “And who doesn’t know him here! That man is a prodigy. A strange prodigy, God’s most singular creature.”
    “Strange?”
    “Well, let us say that his behavior is somewhat anarchic. You never know if he’s coming or going, if he’s going to paint in the refectory or if he merely wishes to reflect on his work and look for new cracks in the overlay, or errors in the features of his characters. He spends the day carrying his small notebooks everywhere, making observations of everything.”
    “A meticulous man—”
    “Not at all. He’s disorganized and unpredictable, but he possesses an insatiable curiosity. Even as he’s working in the refectory, he’s imagining all sorts of crazy devices to better the daily life in the monastery: automatic spades to dig the garden, water pipes leading to the cells, self-cleaning pigeon towers—”
    “The painting he’s working on is a Last Supper, is it not?” I interrupted.
    The librarian stepped up to the magnificent granite water well that adorned the center of the hospital cloister and looked at me as though I had just fallen from the skies:
    “You haven’t seen it yet, have you?” He smiled, as if well aware of my answer and pitying my condition. “What Master Leonardo is finishing in the refectory is not a Last Supper, it is the Last Supper, Father Agostino. You’ll understand what I mean when you see it with your own eyes.”
    “So he’s a strange but virtuous soul.”
    “You see,” he corrected, “when Master Leonardo arrived at this house three years ago and began his preparations for the Cenacolo, the prior didn’t feel that he could be trusted. In fact, in my role as archivist of Santa Maria and as the person responsible for our future scriptorium, he ordered me to write to Florence to find out if Leonardo was an artist one could trust, someone who kept his deadlines and was meticulous in his work, or whether he was one of those fortune seekers who leave everything half-finished and whom one must bring to court to get them to complete what they have started.”
    “And yet, if I’m not mistaken, he had come recommended by the duke himself.”
    “That is true. But, for our prior, that was not enough of a guarantee.”
    “I see. Pray continue. What did you discover? Was he precise in his work or was he careless?”
    “Both!”
    I made a gesture to indicate my puzzlement.
    “Did I not tell you he was a strange man? As a painter, he’s no doubt the most extraordinary we’ve ever seen, but he is also the most rebellious. He finds it enormously hard to finish a project on time; in fact, he’s never done so. And what is worse, he cares nothing for the instructions of his patrons. He always paints according to his whim.”
    “That isn’t possible.”
    “It is, Father. The brothers of San Donato’s monastery in Scopeto, close to Florence, commissioned from him a Nativity fifteen years ago—and he has still to finish it! And do you know what’s even worse? Leonardo made alterations in the scene to the very limits of what can be tolerated. Instead of painting an ordinary Adoration of the Shepherds, come to make homage to the Christ Child, Leonardo started painting something he called The Adoration of the Magi and filled it with twisted characters, horses