Immortal (44 page)

Rucellai would live. The consolamentum surged through the desperate vessel of my body until it slowed to a stop, like a tide flattening. I removed my hands and rose, a hollowed man, and stumbled out into the hall where Maddalena waited. I nodded. She understood. She threw her arms around me, murmuring words of thanks. It was agony to have her body pressed into mine and I pulled her arms off me, pushed her away before I could be provoked to madness.

“I can’t see you anymore,” I said harshly, not looking into her eyes. Because I was mortal, I was only a man, and there was a limit to what I could bear. All of my years weighed down upon me as if I stood at the bottom of a well with stones pressing upon me. “Find another teacher.”

I went back into the streets and my face was wet with tears. Never in my life, not even at Silvano’s brothel, had I felt as alone as I did on that midnight walk back to my palazzo. Always before I had dreams to comfort me. Now they were gone, my dreams of love and the promise of it from the night of the philosopher’s stone, all the deep treasures of the heart that I had clung to with stubborn hope, now blown away like chaff in a strong Tuscan wind. It was a damp spring and too cold and foggy even to see the stars.

I let myself into my palazzo and went upstairs. I intended to retire immediately but stopped at the door to my workshop in amazement, because a finger of green smoke stretched out of the open door and tapped along the ceiling. I pushed open the door and saw everything in my workshop rattling with animation: stills dancing, flames licking up from candlewicks, hunks of metal glowing, salt chafing in its pot, and liquids gurgling with laughter and bubbling as if molten, as if filled with swimming creatures. Curious and bemused, I crossed over to my latest round of experiments with sulfur and mercury. I cupped the flask with my hands, which still tingled from giving the consolamentum. A swirling mist appeared in the middle of the flask. I stared into it. A black light flashed out, making the dark objects in my workshop appear like forms of milky light while the candlelit empty space in the room thickened into solid darkness. A sharp crack like lightning split the room, and then the light reverted. In the center of the flask was a shining nugget of gold.

I GREW USED TO LIVING WITHOUT MADDALENA.
It wasn’t easy. Despite the many decades that had been my portion, I’d never before noticed how empty my life was. For months I was inconsolable. Then I was angry. Then I was listless. I dragged myself around the city with no appetite for my old pursuits. In my mind’s eye, I kept seeing her fine-boned face alight with love of learning, or radiant with laughter, or focused on some knotty problem of linguistics. In the market I heard a laugh like hers, but it turned out to belong to some other woman. I looked in the windows of carriages that rolled past for her face, I peered inside bottegas and restaurants, hoping to spy her small, slim form. I flagellated myself for remembering her. Nothing else mattered. Even turning lead into gold had lost its allure. I went out to my vineyard in Anchiano and moped there for several months until I couldn’t stand myself anymore.
Basta,
I told myself; it is enough. I rode Ginori back into Florence.

It was the spring of 1482 and Florence enjoyed an uneasy peace, if not a prosperous one, after the war with Calabria that had followed the Pazzi conspiracy. Lorenzo had paid a huge indemnity to the Duke of Calabria to thwart Pope Sixtus’s ambition for his nephews to rule Tuscany. The city was quiet but brisk with business. Shops were open, wool factories were operating, smithies clanked and hammered, markets bustled. Horses trotted through the stone streets pulling carriages and everywhere there were carts with goods from the contado. I was pleased to be back. My palazzo was shuttered because I hadn’t sent word ahead for the servants to open it, but I didn’t mind. I settled Ginori in the stable and went inside. I opened windows and lit lamps, then climbed the stairs to my workshop, which I hadn’t set foot in since the night I had succeeded in turning lead into gold. The room was quiet, cold, and still, as my heart was, I thought wryly. Surfaces were sueded with dust, because I never let servants clean in there.

“I saw the lamps glowing and let myself in,” said Leonardo. “I thought you’d be back sooner.” There was curiosity in his mellifluous voice. He came to stand beside me. “I expected you a month ago. You didn’t come, so I planned to ride out to Anchiano to see you this week.”

“Ragazzo mio, how are you?” I said, embracing him happily.

“Well.” He nodded. “I’m leaving Florence. I’ve been welcomed to the court of Milano, and Lorenzo is eager that I should go and cement Florence’s relations with Lodovico Sforza.”

“Everyone works for Lorenzo’s ends,” I commented dryly.

“It suits me.” Leonardo shrugged. “I’ll be playing the lute. And Sforza has written of giving me a commission for a bronze horse; it’s an intriguing project.” He gave me a cool smile. “I thought I’d use my old sketches of Ginori. There’s no more nobly built steed!”

“His heart is still noble, but he’s getting a bit long in the tooth,” I commented.

“Aren’t we all? Everyone except you. You’re eternally young and beautiful. But I won’t be. I’m turning thirty. I’m no longer a ragazzo, professore, not even for you. Time consumes all things.” He walked to the nearest table, dragged his finger across the surface to leave a thick line in the dust, then twiddled with the beakers on Zosimos’s still, aligning them. “I sometimes think about the Cathar legends we used to discuss, how my mother’s people believed that our souls are divine sparks that have been entrapped in a tunic of flesh. Do you remember, Luca?”

“Angelic souls captured by Satan, the
Rex Mundi,
King of the World.” I smiled. “As if Satan could be anything other than God’s favorite jester!”

Leonardo was in a rare melancholy mood and didn’t smile back. “Perhaps the Cathars’ view held some truth. Perhaps we must perfect ourselves to free the angel within. Lately I’ve come to think that if we don’t curb lustful desires, we’re on the level of the beasts. Mine has been curbed by the unavailability of my beloved, so I hope for some reward.”

“You will find love, Leonardo.”

“So I have, thanks to the impossibility of being with you: I love nature and her laws. I will pursue her with single-minded determination for the rest of my life. And she will surrender her secrets as a whore does his sweet round rump!” Leonardo grinned now, but I winced. Surprised understanding spread over his face. He was always perceptive. He spoke with his customary kindness. “Luca mio, have I unwittingly hit on one of the secrets of your dark past?”

I walked to the other side of the room and looked out a window. “I was imprisoned within a brothel for many years as a child.”

“That explains so many things,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry, Luca—”

“How long will you be in Milano?” I asked brusquely.

“I don’t know. I think in the long run Sforza will be a better patron than Lorenzo. People say Lorenzo’s fortune is disappearing.”

“Never underestimate a Medici,” I said. “Lorenzo may yet increase his fortune tenfold.”

“He’s a wily statesman, but when it comes to money, he’s no Cosimo,” Leonardo said.

“Then cultivate Sforza. I’ll come to Milano to visit, it’s not far,” I said, with my heart aching again. Long ago, it was Rachel; then it was Maddalena; now Leonardo; I was destined to lose those I loved most.

“Won’t you be busy here?” he asked, sounding puzzled.

“I don’t know, I’m not much interested in alchemy anymore.” I laughed. I sat down on a stool, stretched my legs out in front of me. “I’ll stay in Florence until the summer heat gets unbearable, then maybe I’ll go to Sardegna. There’s a fishing village called Bosa…”

“A fishing village? Maddalena wants to go to a fishing village in Sardegna?”

“Maddalena? What does she have to do with anything?” I asked, confused.

“I just thought she’d be with you….” His voice trailed off uncertainly. Then he laughed. “Oh, you haven’t heard! Isn’t that funny? I thought you were waiting out in the country to allow a decent interval of time to pass, so people wouldn’t gossip!”

I leapt to my feet. “Heard what?”

“Rinaldo Rucellai died peacefully in his sleep a month ago. Maddalena is a widow now.”

SHE SAT WITH HER MAID
in her parlor when I arrived. She was holding a book. She wore a black damascene cottardita of watered silk that emphasized her creamy skin and the protean depths of color in her eyes and hair. She looked up, startled at my arrival. “Signore—”

“Go,” I barked at the maid, who took one look at my thunderous face and dropped her embroidery. She scampered out of the room as fast as her short, rotund legs allowed. I stayed where I was because I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t know what would happen if I got too close to her. I was capable of violence, not toward Maddalena but toward this palazzo, because she hadn’t sent for me as soon as her husband had died.

“I thought you’d forgotten me,” she said breathlessly.

“As if that’s possible? Do I look like my memory fails me?”

“No, I meant because you couldn’t be with me—”

“I know what you meant. Marry me.”

“Luca—” Maddalena said, coloring. She looked very young and vulnerable.

“Marry me
now,
” I demanded. “I don’t want to be away from you for one more minute!”

A slow smile spread over her face. “When you didn’t come, I thought I was just a passing fancy. That you were spending your time with other women.”

“There hasn’t been another woman since I saw you on the day they tried to kill Lorenzo,” I said. “I haven’t touched another woman in four years!”

“I don’t know if I can keep the inheritance from Rinaldo’s estate,” she said. “We never had children, and he had male cousins. I don’t know what kind of dowry I can bring to you.”

“I don’t need a dowry. I’m rich, richer than Rucellai. You’ll have a beautiful palazzo. I’ll build you one bigger than this one, as big as the Duomo. I’ll give you everything and anything.”

“I’d marry you if you were poor,” she said softly. “I’d live on the streets with you!”

“I’d die before I let us get that poor,” I said. I covered the distance between us as if I had wings. I crushed her into me, reveling in her warmth and the hum of life twanging in her like the well-tuned string of a lyre. When she took my face in her hands and touched her soft lips to mine, it was worth it. It was worth the long wait. It was worth the surrender. It was worth everything.

But now I couldn’t wait any longer, and she led me upstairs. Evening was beginning, with violet and green shadows outlining the edges of things and dissolving them from the inside out. Maddalena led me into a different bedchamber than the one in which I had given Rucellai the consolamentum. I knew at once that it was her private room. Texture and color were everywhere. Curtains that alternated sheer emerald panels with strips of heavy crimson velvet fluttered at the side of the windows, and several of Botticelli’s pretty paintings hung on the walls, as did a worn old tapestry showing St. Francis with the birds. She pulled my head down so my lips met hers, and I kicked backward to knock the door closed.

“You are so beautiful. I’ve thought of this for so long,” she whispered.

“I thought I was the only one!” I took the pins from her hair. I didn’t hurry because I wanted to anticipate watching her thick hair fall down around her beautiful shoulders.

“I couldn’t let you know how I felt. I was married! And Rinaldo was a good man!” She reached to pull my lucco off over my head. I let her and then I went back to her hair, which was supple and heavy in my hands like the finest satin. Her hand trembled as she unfastened my farsetto, and I shrugged it off to fall on the floor. I finished with her hairpins, and her hair slid down in a brown-red-black sheet, wafting out the scent of lilacs and lemons and dew and every good thing that God or man had ever created. I was happy and I was intoxicated. My knees buckled, my tongue went dry, and the room spun around me.

“It’s too much,” I said hoarsely. “You’re too much.”

“You want to stop?”

“No! I didn’t mean that, I meant because you’re so beautiful!” I cried.

“I know what you meant.” She smiled, which nearly undid me.

“God must be kind if I am touching you, I can almost believe that now,” I murmured, reaching for the buttons on her cottardita. “One God, a kind God.”

“Believe it,” she answered, helping me pull off her silk gonna. Finally she stood before me, tiny and luminous, as I’d imagined for the last four years. The scar on her thigh stood out, white on white, her past writ on her flesh in the way of frail humans, made in God’s likeness to embody all of time at once. I carried her to the bed. Her skin was inconceivably soft and fragrant. I ran my tongue over her curving shoulder. She smiled. “I always told myself that if we ever came together, if I was ever blessed to hold you, I would always say yes to you. I would never hold back anything from you, never deny you anything. So I’ll say it, yes, Luca Bastardo!”

She said yes again eleven months later, when we were married. And she always said yes during the happy years of our marriage, the happiest years I ever knew.

Chapter
22

TIME FLOWED
as sinuously as the Arno itself for Maddalena and me as the brilliance and strength of Florence under Lorenzo de’ Medici came to an end. Our marriage was celebrated at the crest of Florence’s power and influence, and then we lived together in ignorant delight as everything around us unwound. I didn’t apprehend the Laughing God’s signs until it was too late. Tragedy struck, and everything I held dear was lost. Now my own life will soon be forfeit; such are the costs of ignoring the strains of divine laughter. Perhaps I was always meant only to look and pass on. Perhaps I was not meant to be embedded in the textures of human life the way other people are. I was, after all, a freak, seemingly generated by the gray stones of Florence and her cruel river, the inscrutable Arno. Perhaps the gift of my longevity was simply about observing for a little while longer than other people.

Maddalena gave me what I had always wanted most: a family of my own. In early 1487, she bore me a fine daughter. We didn’t know why it had taken so long, five years, for her to conceive; we theorized that the rape in Volterra had hurt her generative faculty. We were thrilled to find her pregnant at last. Because I was a physico, I was present in the room when the midwife delivered our beautiful, squalling baby girl. We called her Simonetta. She had my peach complexion and reddish-gold hair but had her mother’s marvelous variegated eyes. I wondered if she would have my long life span, which I had not discussed with Maddalena. We were too happy for me to cast a shadow by dwelling on that freakish quirk of my nature. Nor did I want to precipitate loss by delving into unsolvable riddles. So I kept silent about important matters which I should have discussed with my wife, who had the right to know everything about me.

I was confronted by my secrets as I went out into a carnevale one spring night under a full moon whose silver light cast mysterious shapes on the cobblestone streets. There seemed to be more and more of these wild, licentious nights as Lorenzo de’ Medici stoked Florence’s lust for revelry. It was a few months after Simonetta was born, and I was walking with jovial Sandro Filipepi, who had dropped by our home and insisted that I come out and enjoy the festivities.

“You can’t allow your beautiful wife to tie you to the bedpost every night and give you a good figa whipping,” he was teasing me. “You have to spend some time with men!”

“Go on, you’re always poking fun at me.” I laughed.

“You’re besotted with your wife, it’s a good joke on a man,” he returned.

“A joke I bear willingly.”

“Eagerly, I would say.” Sandro chuckled. “With a filly that gorgeous, who wouldn’t? Might as well ride her while she’s young and sleek. Their looks don’t last, you know. Neither does a man’s horsemanship. Nothing lasts forever.”

“Change is the only constant,” I murmured. The bright sweetness of life couldn’t last. I was uneasily reminded of the imminence of the other half, the cruel half, of the choice I had made that night of the philosopher’s stone: that I would lose Maddalena. That would be losing everything.

“Life doesn’t change you,” Sandro said. He took a draught from the jug of wine he carried and then elbowed me in the rib cage. “Is there any truth to those whispered rumors, that you don’t age like the rest of us?”

“Only little girls believe gossip,” I grumbled. A crowd of screaming, laughing youths raced by, drunk and intent on mischief. Tomorrow there would be graffiti and litter everywhere in the city, stolen horses and broken shop windows, some despoiled young women with blighted marriage prospects, and headaches for both hungover revelers and the city fathers, who would have to clean up Lorenzo’s mess.

But Sandro was fixed on another topic. “You better hope you age, Luca, if you wish to keep your wife.”

I turned on him so sharply, jabbing my finger into his chest, that he jumped back. “Why do you say that?”

“Easy, easy, man. I don’t care about rumors. I know you. You’re Luca Bastardo, a purchaser of art who doesn’t haggle too much with an honest painter, a good physico, a great drinking buddy, a man crazy in love with his wife. It’s just that I also know women, how they are all imbued with the vanity of Venus, though we wish they had the virtue of the Madonna.”

“What about women?” I said, turning on my heel and resuming my pace. We passed a band of musicians who were haggling with a group of prostitutes. The former wanted their fun for free, and even during carnevale, money must be made.

“A beautiful woman fears age more than death,” Sandro said, combing his long hair back off his shoulders. “And your Maddalena is very, very beautiful.”

“Maddalena will be beautiful to me with white hair and a dowager’s hump!” I said.

“I believe that’s true.” Sandro grinned. “But she won’t be beautiful to herself.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said with some asperity. But it was true, Maddalena had discovered a wrinkle under her eyes. She didn’t like it one bit. She had gone in search of creams and paints which I assured her that she didn’t need. With her quick mind, she would soon wonder why she was aging and I wasn’t. I should have had this conversation with her long before now. But there was too much joy in the present for me to excavate the past and ruminate on the future. The discussion could wait. Anxiety rose up in me and I tried to quell it with denial. “You speak nonsense, Sandro. My Maddalena is a practical woman.”

“You’ll see,” Sandro said with an air of smugness. We had reached the Ponte alle Grazie, which glowed with silver as if the bridge’s stones had absorbed the moon’s light and were radiating it back out, multiplied. The Arno gleamed and swirled like a river of white gold beneath the bridge, and the fragrant air from the contado breezed through the streets. Sandro inhaled mightily and said, “Such a beautiful night for a carnevale! Better than the one last month. Tell me, how is your baby? Doing well?”

Instantly I was all smiles. Simonetta was the incarnation of my joy with Maddalena. “She’s so amazing,” I gushed. “She smiles now. She’s ten weeks, so intelligent and beautiful!”

“First children always are,” he sang. “By the third, parents are a little less impressed with their own offspring. Are you planning more babes? Have you set to work getting them?”

“A husband has to wait awhile after childbirth before he returns to his wife’s embraces,” I said with more severity than I intended.

“Really? You’ve been deprived for a few weeks? How do you manage?” Sandro teased. “Are you visiting every courtesan in Florence?”

“I’m faithful to my wife,” I protested. “There’s no woman for me but Maddalena!”

“Well, tonight is carnevale, the ordinary rules don’t apply! And the more of these Lorenzo holds, the freer people are! You can indulge yourself, there are no consequences. Even decent women lose themselves during carnevale. Like that woman over there, coming up on the bridge, she must look pretty good to you right now….”

I sputtered about my loyalty to my wife, but I couldn’t help looking over to where Sandro pointed. A group of boisterous costumed people paused before me, obstructing my view. When they left, I saw one of the goddesses Sandro painted, haloed with the brilliant moonlight. She was small and curvy, and her breasts were so voluptuous that they strained against her sheer gonna, which was clearly visible under her wispy silken mantello. Then I looked at her long thick hair, in which were tied many small ribbons, streaming down her shoulders and back. Black, chestnut, red, gold, all shimmering together in the platinum light of the full moon. Sandro laughed. “I believe your wait is over, friend. And how I envy you!”

Sandro drifted away and the woman floated toward me. Her fragrance reached me first: lilacs, lemons, vanilla, white foam on the sea, and something else, something muskier. The scent of a woman who wants her man. I reached for her but she paused just beyond my fingertips.

“Maddalena, there are things I must tell you,” I said, stifling a groan of desire. But it wasn’t just desire I felt. I loved this woman completely, with all of my soul. “I don’t want to keep secrets from you. I don’t want to hold anything back from you, ever! It’s time for me to tell you some dark things about myself.”

“I think the time for talking is later, after carnevale,” she said, her husky voice full of laughter. “Come, let’s enjoy the evening! Don’t you remember that carnevale night when I was still married to Rinaldo, and you kissed me? I so wanted to be with you! Now I can be!”

“But wait,” I said. “You must know…I have traits that differentiate me from other men, and they say I am a sorcerer! The people I believe were my parents kept the company of Cathars, a sect the Church eradicated for heresy. There is a letter about it that was in the Silvanos’ possession, and then Lorenzo de’ Medici acquired it, and I think he’s given it back to them….”

“Lover, this is not a time for conversation about secrets and letters,” she murmured. Slowly, provocatively, she slipped off her mantello and let it flutter to the ground. I shivered. She moved closer, letting me caress her heavy rich hair. I was filled with heat. Then she sort of skipped up into my arms, and I caught her with my hands under her round bottom and lifted her. She wrapped her legs around me and her skirt rose up around her waist; she wasn’t wearing anything beneath the gonna. I cried out, urgently.

“Are you well enough?” I asked hoarsely.

In response, she pulled my head down and kissed me. Her tongue was on me, on my lips and tongue. One of her small clever hands stroked my face, the other held my shoulder. She arched so that her breasts thrust toward my face, and all reason left me. I turned and shoved my wife against the wall of the bridge, tore down my hose, and made love to her where I stood. We weren’t the only ones doing this, of course. This scene was played out all over Florence tonight.

We didn’t see the cloaked figure standing in the shadows until after I had set her down and reached a hand out to smooth her luscious hair, which was tousled, its many colors shining riotously in the moonlight.

“They’ll arrest us for public lewdness, but it was worth it.” I sighed.

“You should be arrested!” the figure cried then, emerging from the shadows.

Maddalena grabbed up her mantello and struggled to cover herself. I faced the man. It was a monk, a Dominican, thin and ugly with a hook nose and overly bright eyes. He looked shocked and inflamed. His eyes were glued to Maddalena’s face with the same greed I had seen at Silvano’s. I had the bizarre thought that the monk wanted her, that he would never forget her.

“This is my wife, Friar,” I said coolly.

“And you treat her like a common whore, rutting out here in the open on this bridge?” He shook his head, still glaring at Maddalena. “I come to this city in which I once preached, wanting to see for myself one of these wild carnevales of which people everywhere are whispering, and what do I find? Immorality and indecency. Whores, ribaldry, debauchery, evil of every stripe and texture; God will smite this place with terrible scourgings!”

“It is carnevale, Friar!”

“It is Satan’s folly!” he screamed. “Lorenzo de’ Medici has gone too far!”

“We will return to our home immediately, you need not be concerned,” I snapped.

“All of Florence is my concern, the tainted soul of the body politic is my concern,” he hissed, approaching. Maddalena shrank into me. I put my arm around her. The priest speared me with his eyes. “You were about to confess to some dark things, sinner. Confess properly, to me, and I will give you harsh penances so that God might forgive you your evil!”

“The dark things in my life are between me and God,” I said.

“What of this letter I heard you mention? What is the connection between your parents and Cathars? Were your parents Cathars, a galling and heretic people who deserved to be burned? Are you such a blasphemer as well as a…a fornicator?” He stepped closer, too close, and I put my hand on his chest to stop him. He wasn’t deterred but kept talking, almost rabidly. “I have been told by young Gerardo Silvano, who will go far as a cleric, of an abomination living in Florence. Are you that one? Has God arranged divine justice for you through me?”

“We will be on our way, Friar, you may forget you ever saw us,” I said tightly.

“I command that you confess to me!” the man shouted, spitting in my face with his fury. I took Maddalena’s hand to pull her around him. The monk blocked my way, shouting about Cathars and the scourge of sorcery and fornication. I kept trying to move around him. He kept thrusting himself in my face. Then he turned to Maddalena. “Whore, Satan’s mistress, you fornicate with a sorcerer!” He ripped her mantello through to her gonna, exposing her breasts.

“Enough!” I roared, shaking with anger. I slapped the man with my open palm so hard that he dropped to the ground. “Do not lay hands on my wife!” I drew my sword.

“You have unholy strength,” the monk panted. “You practice a sorcery that would undermine all that is good and orderly about this world!”

“There’s not much that’s good and orderly about this world, monk,” I replied. “My wife is the best thing about it!”

“Your wife is a whore, rutting in public, and married to a satanist!” he spat. I held the sword to his throat. I thought about using it. I wanted to kill him. I could have easily in that moment. I would get away with it. Lorenzo’s carnevales increasingly left some dead in their wake; this act would not even be questioned. But even if the monk’s faith was spiteful, I did not want to be like the Confraternity of the Red Feather, hurting people who differed from me. I had become reconciled to a good God in the last few years. Killing a monk would surely undermine the delicate balance of my truce with heaven, would surely provoke the kind of divine snickering that I no longer heard, and never wanted to again, especially now that I had Maddalena and Simonetta. I withdrew the sword. I have often wondered since then what would have happened if I had used the sword instead. Would my wife and child still be with me? Would Florence still be the greatest city on earth? Or was the wheel already set in motion, would it still have turned through some agency other than this virulent monk?