I, Mona Lisa (17 page)

My father saw it and recoiled.

“Kneel,” Domenico echoed softly.

My father’s chest rose and fell so hard, I thought it might burst. And then, covering his face with his hands, he sank to his knees beside Pico.

Domenico smiled and closed his eyes.

But I would not bow. Zalumma would not bow. I did not understand what had transpired between the big monk and my father; I only knew that my father had let himself be broken.

Clinging to my mother’s body, I had never despised him so much as I did that moment. Indeed, I could not say whom I most hated at that instant: God, Savonarola, Fra Domenico, or my father, and so I decided to hate them all.

A
fter she received Last Rites from San Marco’s priest, my mother was taken to our carriage. Most of the crowd had dispersed by then—but even in my grief, I noticed that the sharp-featured stranger who had helped me to my feet stood on the church steps, watching.

We rode back over the Ponte Santa Trinità. Swaddled in bloodied ermine and emerald velvet, my mother lay limp in my father’s arms during the ride. He would let no one else touch her. Pico insisted on accompanying us. The Count’s presence offended me, but Ser Giovanni’s distress was unfeigned. The turn of events had sincerely devastated him.

But my father would not look at Pico, and sat rigidly beside him so that their legs, their elbows, did not accidentally touch. He prayed softly, rapidly, for my mother’s soul, alternating between the
Ave Maria
and the Lord’s Prayer. When Pico joined in, he hesitated—as if reluctant to accept his friend’s prayers—but then he relented and continued.

Unable to bear the sights inside the carriage, I looked out the window. It was an insult that the exterior of San Marco, that the Via
Larga, looked the same. People walked gingerly down the icy streets, their faces wrapped against the cold, but there was no sign of mourning, no respect for the omnipotence of Death.

I felt both pity and anger toward my father. At the same time, I was overcome by a sense of responsibility, and it was that which directed my actions when we at last arrived home. When the carriage rolled to a stop behind our house, I was the first to rise.

“Ser Giovanni.” I addressed Count Pico as if we were both adults and I his peer. “Arrangements must be made for a gravedigger today, and a priest for the morrow; she would want to be buried at Santo Spirito. Could you be so kind—”

Before I could finish, Pico answered solemnly. “It would be my honor, Madonna Lisa. In the meantime . . .” He turned to my father, who still cradled my mother’s body. “Let us carry her inside.”

“Up to her chambers,” I said. “Zalumma, go before them and cover her bed so that it is not soiled, and have servants fetch towels and water.”

My father pressed his dead wife tightly against his breast. “I will carry her myself.”

“Come now,” Pico soothed. “You will need help, at least, getting out of the carriage.”

My father remained distant toward Pico, refusing to meet his eyes, but he at last nodded. The men lifted my mother from the carriage; but the instant she was free, my father seized her from Pico. “I have her now.” He would not be cajoled, so Pico left for Santo Spirito. Zalumma hurried ahead of us into the house.

I walked a few steps ahead of my father, who muttered frantically:

“Ave Maria, gratia plena Dominus tecum, benedicta tu
 . . . Almighty God, let her soul rise swiftly to you. Such hell, and all my doing, from the start . . .”

Madness gave him strength. He entered the house without breaking stride and negotiated the high, narrow stairs.

At my mother’s chambers, Zalumma, red-eyed but tentatively composed, waited at the open door. “The water to bathe her is coming,” she said, “but I have readied the bed.”

With infinite care, my father laid my mother down on the bed, covered with many old linens.

“Here,” I said. “Let us take this away.” I reached for the beautiful emerald velvet cape, its ermine trim stiff with darkening blood. Zalumma helped me pull it from beneath my mother. When we were done, my father dropped to his knees, clasped his wife’s hand, and kissed it.

Wails emanated from downstairs as the driver began to tell the other servants. The water and towels soon arrived. “You must go now,” I told my kneeling father. “We must wash her.”

He shook his head, clinging firmly to my mother. “We must pray for her. Pray until we receive a sign from God that she is in Heaven and suffers no more.
Adveniat regnum tuum.
Thy kingdom come.”

“Enough has come of praying today! Leave!” Zalumma’s eyes were stark with fury.

I moved between them. “Father, if you want, you can continue in another room.” I gently pried his hand from my mother’s, then gripped it firmly and helped him rise to his feet.

“We will not be long,” I told him. I led him to the door, and firmly shut it behind him.

Then I turned back to face the bed. As I did, I caught sight of Zalumma, looking down at her mistress with a grief mixed with the purest love. In an instant we were both clinging to each other, sobbing.

“How can this be?” I gasped. My chin pressed into her shoulder. “How could God author such a terrible thing?”

“God gives the power of choice to men to do good or ill,” Zalumma murmured. “All too often, they accomplish the latter.”

I had loved my mother more than anything in all the world; as for my father, whatever love I possessed for him was now tainted. There was Zalumma now, only Zalumma. My mother and her need for care had always united us; now we would have to find a new purpose.

Zalumma patted my back as gently as she might an infant’s. “Enough, enough,” she said, sighing. I withdrew and calmed myself.

“Look at you,” I said, with an incongruous surge of humor, looking at her wild halo of hair, at the brown-red smears on her face. “You could frighten the most stalwart hero.”

“I could say as much for you,” Zalumma said, with a weak smile. “We had best wash our hands first, but then we must hurry.” Her expression darkened as she fought tears. “She will grow stiff quickly now.”

We moved to opposite sides of the bed and set to work. The unlacing of the extravagant brocade sleeves, with their gold embroidery, came first; then my mother’s heavy overgown, also of green velvet. The close-fitting dress, the
gamurra,
was next, and last was the spattered, stained
camicia,
the undergown of ivory silk. We removed it all from her, until she lay naked; then Zalumma removed her emerald ring and presented it solemnly to me. Earrings and necklace, all had to be removed; no adornment was permitted.

Out of respect, Zalumma handed me one of the towels and let me have the task of cleaning the blood from my mother’s battered face. I dipped the towel into the basin again and again, until the water turned cloudy.

Zalumma noticed. “I will fetch more water,” she said, for though I had almost finished my mother’s face and Zalumma her hands, there was still more blood on her neck and breast.

After she had left, I took my mother’s best white woolen
camicia
from the cupboard, and a white linen veil—for the laws were such that she could wear only a simple white garment, and plain wool and linen only were permitted. Then I found her comb and did the best I could to unfasten her hair. It was pitifully tangled, but I was as gentle as possible, drawing the comb first through the ends, then carefully working up toward the scalp. Her hair smelled of rosewater and iron.

As I combed her tangles, I cradled her head in one hand in order to reach those locks at the back of her neck. As I proceeded, gently shifting the position of her head, I felt the teeth of the comb dip, then rise slightly as they ran over her scalp.

The sensation was odd enough that I stopped, set down the comb, and, with unsteady fingers, found the indentation in my mother’s skull, between her temple and left ear. I parted the hair there, and found the depression and the scar.

My mother had always insisted that Zalumma, and none of the
other servants, be allowed to arrange her hair. Even I had never been permitted to touch it.

At that instant Zalumma returned, walking circumspectly so as not to spill the fresh water. At the sight of my stricken expression, her own eyes widened; she set down the basin on my mother’s night table and closed the door.

“There is a wound on her head,” I said, my tone rising with emotion. “A wound, and a scar.”

I followed her with my gaze as she deliberately wrung two towels out in the water, then walked over to hand me one.

“You knew,” I said. “You always knew. Why didn’t you simply tell me? You only hinted at it—but you knew it for a fact.”

The towel hung limp in her hands; she lowered her face, overwhelmed. When she raised it at last, it wore a look of bitter resolve. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could utter the first word, a pounding came at the door.

My father opened it without being bidden; at the sight of his dead wife upon her bed, he winced and averted his eyes. “Please,” he said, “let me pray for her in here. I want to be with her now, before she is gone forever.”

Zalumma turned on him, her fists balled as if ready to strike. “How dare you!” she seethed. “How dare you, when you are the one responsible for this!”

“Zalumma,” I warned. My father had been foolish and wrong to take her to Savonarola, but his intention had been for a happy outcome.

“It’s true!” she hissed. “You have finally finished what you started so long ago. So leave—leave now, and let us care for her!”

My father withdrew and closed the door behind him without a word.

Zalumma still stood facing the door, her entire body taut and trembling. I put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it away, then wheeled on me. Years of repressed loathing tumbled from her:

“He struck her! Do you understand? He struck her, and I was bound so long as she lived not to tell!”

I
felt like Saint Sebastian—pierced by a hundred arrows, wounded beyond surviving. I could not respond.

Instead, I moved heavily, silently, as Zalumma and I finished cleaning my mother’s body, then dressed her in the woolen
camicia,
and affixed to her loose, unplaited hair the linen veil.

We left, and I called for the servants to come for her with words I do not remember.

During her burial in the churchyard, my father proclaimed loudly that Savonarola was right,
Adveniat regnum tuum,
the end of the world was coming; a good thing, for that meant he and his beloved Lucrezia would soon be reunited.

Afterward, when evening had fallen, my father came to call on me.

I was alone in my mother’s chamber—prompted by an odd determination to sleep in her bed—when a knock came on the door. “Enter,” I said. I expected Zalumma to entreat me again to have something to eat.

Instead, my father stood in the doorway still dressed in the loosefitting
black robe, the
mantello,
of mourning. “Zalumma,” he said, his tone timid, unsure. “She was quite angry. . . . Did she say anything more to you? About me and your mother?”

I stared at him with contempt. “She said enough.”

“Enough?” The anxiety in his eyes made me hate him all the more.

“Enough,” I said, “to make me wish I had never been born your child.”

He lifted his chin and blinked swiftly. “You are all I have now,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. “The only reason I draw breath.”

My cruel reply had apparently given him the answer he sought, for he turned and went quickly away.

I slept fitfully that night, awakened by dreams of my mother—that we had made a mistake, that she had never died at all, that Fra Domenico had not killed her. During one dream I was wakened not by emotion, but by the sound of stirring in the room. I lifted my head and made out Zalumma’s tall, familiar form in the darkness. She was moving toward the mattress on the floor, where she had always slept beside my mother. At last she realized I was awake, staring at her.

“I am your slave now,” she said, and with that she took her place on the floor by my side and settled down to sleep.

O
urs was an unhappy home. While Zalumma and I became inseparable, our time was taken up with domestic chores, empty of meaning. I continued my routine: going to market on gray winter days in my mother’s stead, buying meat from the butcher, and doing other errands necessary to maintain the smooth running of the household, accompanied always by Zalumma and the driver. But this time, I had no one to instruct me; the decisions were now mine.

I avoided my father as much as possible. We ate uncomfortably when we supped together; many nights he lingered late in the city under the pretense of work, and so I dined alone. Despite my desire to be loving and forgiving, like my mother, I could not hide my resentment; I could not be kind. Not once did it occur to me to ask forgiveness for my vicious remark, for it remained the truth.

In his misery, he clutched at the teachings of Savonarola: He often repeated the friar’s contention that the end of the world was nigh, for only this—or death—would bring him closer to his beloved Lucrezia. I suppose he had no choice but to believe that God had taken his wife in order to spare her suffering; otherwise, he would have to accept a large measure of guilt for her death. Otherwise, he would have to
deem Savonarola and the dullard Domenico murderers. Twice a day, he attended Mass at San Marco, with Giovanni Pico always at his side.

Pico became a frequent visitor to our home. My father and he began to dress alike—in simple black clothing which could have been taken for priestly garb were it not for the fine tailoring and the exquisiteness of the cloth. Although my father treated the Count with the greatest hospitality—making sure he received the finest morsels from our kitchen and the very best wine—there was a reticence in him, a coolness toward Pico that had not been there before my mother’s death.