Signora Da Vinci (10 page)

He might hold a petal up to the sunlight and study the pattern of veins, Some that he likened to rivers, and others to trees, how the petals glowed if they were alive, but lost the glow once they were dry and dead. And of course he wished to know the purpose of every part of the flower, and questioned us unmercifully.

The curves of a flower’s stamen fascinated him, and it was this that became the subject of his very first drawing. I had been unaware he had brought paper and a sliver of black charcoal from Papa’s house. I came up behind him and saw him lying on his belly on the rug, as he often did, the object of his passionate observation laid out in a patch of sunlight under his nose. But this day his shoulders were hunched, and his posture revealed an even fiercer intensity than usual.

When I came around I saw him staring at a single pale stamen on the end of a stem that he’d placed against a patch of dark red in the rug. The rest of the lily from which it had been taken lay in pieces nearby. The paper I recognized as a blank page from his grandfather’s apothecary diary. I wondered if Leonardo had asked for it, or appropriated it without Papa knowing.

The stamen almost completely filled the page, which in itself was a revelation to me. I had never seen this portion of a flower in such dimensions. But the simplicity of the subject in the drawing, and the perfection with which it was rendered by my son’s hand, took my breath away. The curve of the almost ethereal stem, the plumpness of its dark head, and the detail of a thousand minuscule dots of pollen covering it so astonished me I was struck speechless.

I sat down just next to him, but he was too intent to acknowledge me. He was making an attempt at shading the stem, giving it depth and a sense of roundness.
How does he know how to do that?
I thought.
No one has ever put a piece of charcoal in his hand and shown him how to draw!

“It’s very good, Leonardo,” I finally said, wishing to give praise and encouragement, but not so much as I really felt, which, I feared, might scare him or turn him away from his efforts. “Is that difficult for you?” I asked.

“No,” he answered, somewhat absently. “Not difficult. Interesting.” He never looked up from the drawing.

I smiled to myself. “Interesting” had become Leonardo’s favorite word of late. There were very few things under heaven he did not describe as such.

All at once a thick cloud blocked the sunlight over our rug, and his drawing was thrown into shade. It did not seem to perturb Leonardo, who continued, with great precision, to add more tiny dots of pollen to the head of the stamen.

“Do you think Papa would like it?” he asked suddenly but in the most matter-of-fact tone possible.

The question took me by storm. I stalled for time, even as I answered his question with another question—one whose answer I already knew. “Do you mean your grandpapa Ernesto?”

“No,” he said quietly. My
father
.”

There was no way to answer this truthfully without being hurtful. Piero had shown not the slightest interest in his bastard son since the day he’d been born. It amazed me that Leonardo even considered him. Now it was all too apparent that my boy had never forgotten his blood father and wished, as all children did, for his approval.

“Your father is very busy in Florence,” I said, trying for evenness in my voice.

“Is that why he never sees me?”

“It is,” I whispered.

Why is this happening now?
I thought. Leonardo had never raised such questions before. It always seemed that he was content with his lot in life. There were so many besides myself—Francesco and now Magdalena and his grandfather Ernesto—who loved him.

“Mama, look!”

Lost as I was in worry, Leonardo’s exclamation surprised me. He pointed to a spot just in front of our faces. A thin shaft of sunlight had pierced the cloud above and now illuminated the patch of meadow before us with an unearthly brilliance.

The purple lavender and orange mallow were overlit, and shone with incredible hues. The air itself, where before it had simply seemed transparent, was suddenly vibrating with sparkling motes of dust, its center a swarm of minuscule gnats that hovered in a frenzied airborne dance.

“How beautiful!” I cried and grabbed Leonardo’s hand. Silently and together we shared the miraculous, barely daring to breathe. A few moments later the shaft broadened and dispersed into normal light, and as quickly as the natural spectacle had appeared, it vanished.

My son turned to me with a look of transported joy, and smiled broadly. There were no words that attended the smile. None were needed. Then he turned back to his drawing with sheer contentment and said nothing more of his father.

 

Coming into his grandfather’s home became the crowning glory of Leonardo’s childhood. When he reached the age of reasoning, Papa took him into the apothecary to gain knowledge of plant medicine. When I’d left home at fifteen I had not finished my own studies, so I began learning again along with my son.

Together, joyfully, we dove into my father’s collection of books and manuscripts, and though none of the da Vincis knew it, Leonardo came to be well taught in Latin, and even a smattering of the Greek language. It used to make me smile to watch my father teaching my son the same lessons in philosophy and geography and geometry that he had taught me at the same age.

Leonardo showed himself to be left-handed, a tendency that—had he been more public a child—would have earned him the reputation of a heretic or a Satanist. The da Vincis provided only the most rudimentary tutors for him, and for only a few hours a week. For the benefits of these men Leonardo learned to write with his right hand, and so became ambidextrous.

Papa, Leonardo, and I would sit together for hours over a story from the
Odyssey
, Leonardo on his feet the whole time, acting out all the parts himself. He liked the monsters best, and using an imagination that was preternatural added and embellished Homer’s descriptions of places and creatures and fantastical phenomena so that I could never, thereafter, feel satisfied with the great Greek’s much paler and more restrained version of the tales.

Leonardo was a marvel in Papa’s apothecary garden. He never tired of tending the plants and watching how the changing of the seasons changed what grew there. His favorite thing was planting a seed and watching it spring to life. He would run inside to make glowing reports on the progress of growth. “Mama, Grandfather, come see!” he would cry. “The foxglove seedlings grew an inch overnight! If only I could stay here tonight I could take a candle and lay on my belly and watch it grow!”

But of course we all knew he would never be allowed to stay the night. Disinterested as his da Vinci grandparents were, they would certainly be furious to learn how great was our influence on Leonardo.

It was a magical day when my father opened to his grandson his clandestine third-story alchemical laboratory. Leonardo was fascinated that when I was hardly older than he, I had tended the furnace every day. The idea of secrecy appealed to his nature, and thus he acquired the habit in his own affairs. He found secret hiding places on every floor of my father’s house and, I suspected, one in the apothecary garden. He took great pleasure in them, squirreling away little treasures he had found on our outdoor adventures—a rodent skull or the skin of a snake—or odd gifts from the laboratory—nuggets of cinnabar or silver.

For all his extraordinary brilliance my son was also a silly prankster. The more he could terrify Papa and me the better. Once when the three of us were together in the laboratory Leonardo called out sharply so that we turned in time to see him standing over an open beaker of boiling oil with a cup of red wine in his hand. Before we could shout “No!” he’d heaved the wine into the beaker. Spectacular multicolored flames shot up to the ceiling, nearly setting the house on fire.

For that he was punished, being barred from Papa’s laboratory for a month. It had been worth it, he’d told me, repressing a grin, just to see the looks of horror on our faces.

Another time as I readied myself for sleep I pulled down the covers on my bed and shrieked, finding on my pillow a hideous moving monster with flashing red eyes. I jumped back so violently I crashed to the floor. Once I’d caught my breath I crawled on my hands and knees back to the bed with sure knowledge this “thing” had been created by my darling and utterly perverse child. On closer examination I saw he had fabricated most of it out of dissected and recombined bats, lizards, snakes, and geckos. These parts of the miniature “dragon” were stationary, but its midsection was very much alive—a clear glass jar containing a variety of crickets, beetles, and locusts—all jumping about with abandon. The beast’s two large “eyes” held similarly enclosed squirming centipedes, chosen, I deduced, for their bright scarlet color.

Papa came rushing in in his nightshirt, alarmed by my screeching. Despite my initial terror I found myself laughing, and he with me. Part devil, part angel—surely there was no one in the world like our Leonardo.

No punishment was levied for the monster in my bed, though this time we did elicit a promise that there would be no further pranks that could kill either his mother or grandfather by heart-stopping fright.

Meanwhile, Leonardo’s drawing, which had begun simply enough, became expert and even awe-inspiring. He was better able, and more likely, to draw things that were alive than inanimate objects, like houses or bridges. He drew insects with great precision, compelled by the strangeness and symmetry of their anatomy. The dogs and cats and horses he rendered were stunningly alive, and projected the love he had of all living things.

It was when Leonardo began studies of the human face, though, using his grandfather and me and his uncle Francesco as his subjects, that we fully realized the boy’s unlimited talent. The question, of course, was what should be done about it.

Francesco told us that whenever his brother deigned to come back to Vinci for a visit, he bragged about his new friends in Florence, some in the Notaries Guild, many merchants, and one artisan with a bottega that was getting more and more commissions from the new head of the Medici clan—a maestro called Andrea Verrocchio.

I had had little or nothing to do with Piero in the past ten years, and all that I knew of his paternal efforts with Leonardo made me despise him. It was true and customary that an illegitimate son was prohibited from attending university or taking up an apprenticeship in any legal field. Our son was therefore ineligible to become a Notary of the Republic. But in addition to ignoring the child almost entirely, Piero was making no effort whatsoever to find a trade of any kind for Leonardo. He was far too busy with his social climbing in Florence and in trying, still unsuccessfully, to impregnate—after Albiera had died—his new young bride.

This infuriated me. I knew the da Vincis would never allow Leonardo to train as an apothecary with his grandfather. It was barely acceptable that Leonardo spent time at the shop. I had dreams of running Piero through with a sword, that still-handsome face spurting blood from mouth and nostrils. I woke with my cheeks wet with tears, and my jaw sore from grinding.

One afternoon when Leonardo had taken his leave, my father came to sit with me.

“Caterina. I see how troubled you are, and I know the cause.”

“Then you know the solution is impossible,” I said, growing emotional.

“There is a solution. But it will mean going and speaking to Piero.”

I burst into tears of frustration. But Papa did not move to hold or comfort me. He just waited for me to calm.

“In order to face him you must harden yourself. This is a formidable task. You know very clearly the suggestion you will make on Leonardo’s behalf. Prepare a good case for it. But restrain every impulse you have to argue with the man—it will only anger him. Yet you cannot allow him to make you feel small. And you must succeed, Caterina. Your son’s future depends upon it.”

 

It was nearly six months later when Francesco alerted me to Piero’s upcoming visit to his family. By then I was prepared, but I had endured too much humiliation in the da Vinci villa to have such a confrontation there.

I showed up instead in front of the Vinci church the first Sunday Piero was home from Florence. As they filed out, the villagers stared at me as though being forced to clean scum from the bottom of a cattle trough. I stood tall, though, and I must say I drew pleasure from the shock on Piero’s face when he exited the double doors with his pretty new wife on his arm and found me blocking his way.

Before he had time to bluster I said very loudly, so the priest and all the nosy parishioners could hear, “I must speak to you about our son.” His wife went pale, but in order to prevent a scene he whispered something to her, and she grimly scurried down the steps.

Piero took my elbow and guided me away from the church and into an alley, looking every which way to be sure no one could overhear us.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded, his voice arching in anger.

I wasted no time and drew out from under my arm a folio of Leonardo’s drawings. I opened it in front of Piero and silently showed him one splendid example after another of our child’s brilliant artwork.

To his credit, Piero’s indignation at my audacity faded quickly. It would have been impossible, even for this ass of a man, to be unmoved by his own son’s talent. Still, he was determined to make things as difficult for me as possible.

“It’s very good,” he said. “But what do you expect me to do about it?”

I held my temper admirably and spoke in a soft, friendly tone.

“Francesco mentioned that you have been befriended by a well-known artisan in Florence.” Really, Francesco had told me that Piero was licking the heels of this man, whose fame was growing with every new Medici commission. “I think he called him Verrocchio.”