Signora Da Vinci (33 page)

Leonardo had become melancholy, and even refused a few small commissions Lorenzo had offered him, insisting nonsensically that this was charity. Instead he accepted a commission that had been arranged by his father—a large painting of
The Adoration of the Magi
for a city convent. There was no cash payment to be made. The whole ridiculous proposition reeked of Piero’s disrespect of his eldest son. Still, I expected that Leonardo, once at work, would produce a splendid painting.

I could not have been any more surprised when I visited him at San Donato seven months into his contract to find him reclining lazily in front of the panel near a large pile of logs, staring up at his work and gnawing on a heel of bread.

The painting could hardly be called more than a colorless cartoon, with its charcoal sketched figures—some sixty of them—that included not only the Virgin and baby Jesus in the center, but the three Wise Men, who appeared as ancient wraiths, gaunt and corpselike, and seemed to be groveling at the feet of the unfinished Madonna and child, clawing at them with bony fingers.

When he saw me in the chapel he did not bother to stand, and greeted me with little more than politeness, which, along with the paucity of his work, worried me more than angered me, for I took these to be a measure of his depressed condition.

“What is this pile of wood?” I’d asked, needing a start to the conversation.

“Payment,” he told me in monotone, and sniffed sharply. “I painted the monastery’s clock. This is how I was paid.”

That exchange had been the high point of our conversation. I had reason to worry about my son, but unlike Cato the Apothecary, whose potions alleviated his customers’ suffering, I had no way to heal what ailed Leonardo.

I had just finished sealing the hundredth paper packet of the fever powder when I heard a tap on the apothecary window. I looked up to see Lorenzo looking in at me. He wore the strangest expression, one that was quite unrecognizable.

I went around and unlocked the door. He came in, though hesitantly. Since Giuliano’s murder he, like Leonardo, had been bedeviled by the deepest melancholy. But Lorenzo was as disciplined as a soldier, trained to quash such emotion. Now I could see pain and discord splashed across the canvas of his features.

I closed the door behind him.

“Come upstairs,” I said gently.

In my salon I pulled the front curtains closed, but when I turned back he was right there—inches from me. He was still. Hardly breathing. Yet his presence was large, his scent—musk and rosewater and wool damp with perspiration—made me suddenly lightheaded.

“Cato,” he whispered hoarsely.

With all the courage I owned I met his gaze and held there, unflinching. It seemed to unhinge him. His face crumpled. Tears welled in his eyes. Then he grabbed me and clutched me to him. The noise he made was a strangled moan.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I cannot, I cannot . . .”

My arms rose to encircle his waist. “Lorenzo . . .”

“I have never
ever
been with a man,” he said softly in my ear, “nor do I believe have you.”

“My friend . . . ,” I began.

“I am your friend, Cato, but I have feelings for you that surpass every form of friendship I have known. Every form of love. I’ve tried to forget them since you rebuffed me that day in the country. I have lavished affection on my children. Been unerringly kind to my wife and my mother. Funneled all my passion into the Republic of Florence.” He laughed miserably. “I’ve been going mad, and nothing I do will banish you from my thoughts.”

I was shaken body and soul by Lorenzo’s remarkable confession.

“You need to come with me, Lorenzo,” I finally said.

I pulled out of his embrace. His look was pure confusion. “Just come with me,” I said, taking his hand.

I led him up another flight of stairs. We stood then, face-to-face in my bedchamber, mingled love and fear, natural and unnatural yearnings rising in vapors around us like chemical steam in a glass beaker.

He raised his hand to touch me, but I shook my head “no.”

Then I lifted my tunic and threw it aside. My shirt was next.

I saw him staring at my linen-bound chest, and without a word I began the unwrapping. His jaw fell open, for he saw at once what I had been hiding, and as the bindings dropped to the floor the look on his face changed from agony to amazement to joy.

My breasts, freed from their long imprisonment, plumped into soft curves. He reached out. Touched them, wonderingly, proving them real.

“My name is Caterina,” I said. “Leonardo is my son, and you, Lorenzo . . . I have loved you from the beginning.”

He was silent for the longest time, just staring at my face as though seeing it for the first time. Recognizing it.

Then he threw back his head and roared with laughter.

The heaviness in my heart—the cumulus of all the years of secrets and lies—began to lift. Then it was airborne, like a cloud of black smoke from a chimney that rises and finally dissipates into clear air.

I reached out and began to unbutton Lorenzo’s doublet. “So have no fear,
Il Magnifico
, we are not sodomites,” I said, suppressing my own smile.

He barked another laugh. But then his expression changed. He grew serious. Taking my face in his hands, he drew closer and placed his warm lips over mine.

I think I had waited my whole life for that kiss, so rich with tenderness and celebration, the kiss that pitched suddenly into wanton desire. I felt lost in a flurry of hands clutching, caressing . . . moans of hungry pleasure . . . clothes falling away . . . skin on skin. . . .

We sought the bed and fell back on it together.

“Caterina,” he murmured, trying the sound of my name in his mouth. His breath warmed the hollow of my throat. He brushed my nipple with his tongue.

“Aaah, Lorenzo, Lorenzo, so sweet . . .” I lifted his face to mine. The hard lines of pain and loss had already softened. “You are my love,” I told him.

He smiled his beautiful smile.

“And you are mine,” he said. “You are mine.”

CHAPTER 24

I had kept secrets in my life, most of them difficult, painful, or damaging. But the subterfuge of hiding the truth that Lorenzo de’ Medici was my lover was altogether delicious.

I walked with a new spring in my step and customers asked me why I was constantly humming. Even Leonardo, who had, since the Saltarelli trial, worn his misery like a heavy cloak, found his mother so blatantly cheerful he emerged from the darkness long enough to inquire as to the reason.

Of course I told no one but him. It delighted my son to an unaccountable degree, a fact I found baffling. I had in my safekeeping a growing hoard of his notebooks and folios, all of which he allowed me to peruse. And from the time I admitted my love affair with Lorenzo, more and more did I see evidence of Leonardo’s obsession with strange sexuality and even more with hermaphrodites. He filled pages and pages with them.

That is how he sees me
. The half man, half woman was a classic theme of the occult. It took its name from Hermes, the symbol of the masculine god, and Aphrodite, the penultimate goddess of femininity. When joined into one, the creature became a perfect blending of the male and female persona.

One sketch he called
Pleasure and Pain
, but I saw it differently. The naked lower torso was male in every way, but the body split into two figures above—one old and frowning, the other young and limpid. He described them on the page in his left-handed scribble both as men, but the youth was a pretty girl, and the elderly man sprouted one round, womanly breast.

In another drawing he depicted a cross-section of upright coitus. Here the soft-featured feminine figure with long curling hair to midback had a penis stuck erect into her partner, and the partner with a large bulbous breast herself seemed to have a cock as well.
The Witch with a Magic Mirror
was blatant—a male face on the front of the head, a female face on the back.

More disturbing were his drawings of the female genitalia, which, uncharacteristically for Leonardo, were incorrect anatomically, and more than that, strangely grotesque. Lipless vulvas were black, gaping maws, flanked by tight, angry muscles of the groin.

I once chanced to question him, having long before lost all embarrassment as his mother, and he answered me with barely a hint of emotion.

“In general, the woman’s desire is opposite a man’s. She wishes the size of his cazzo to be as large as possible, while he wishes her parts to be small. So neither ever attains their desire. And do you not think, Mama,” he continued with the greatest sincerity, “that genitals are hideously ugly?”

I laughed at that. “I never thought of them that way,” I admitted. “I believe if it were not for the faces and adornments of the actors,” he said, “and the impulses sustained . . .”

“You speak of love?” I asked.

“Love. Lust. Whatever you like. Without them and a pretty face I think the human race would die out completely.”

“Leonardo!”

“You asked.”

“So I did,” I agreed.

But I never asked again.

Far from finding any part of Lorenzo ugly or the act of lovemaking futile, I had come completely alive in his arms. He had a strong, well-made body. His legs and buttocks particularly fascinated and delighted me. The muscles were plump and perfectly defined, the smooth skin tawny. His chest was firm under a mat of black hair, his nipples small and quick to answer my insistent nibbling.

Leonardo would have thought it amusing that I found the shaft of Lorenzo’s sex a staunch and elegant creature. And that though he lacked a talent for painting or sculpting or working gold into masterpieces, he had truly perfected lovemaking into a fine art.

In my bed, pleasure was his passion. Pleasure in every form and fancy. I’d known pain with Piero, but Lorenzo would never hear of it. Within weeks of our discovery of one another there was not a crevice, a surface, or a sweet spot we lovers had not explored and delighted in. There were French ways and Eastern ways, exotic unguents he provided, and herbal concoctions I had only, for the first time, prepared. We laughed as much as we moaned in ecstasy. We ate meals in bed. Read books in bed. Shared every secret and fear and every wild dream to which we had ever dared aspire.

My male disguise, Lorenzo told me, made him hard. Now, to be in the public presence of “Cato” meant hiding an erect cazzo. He imagined me naked under my tunic and hose. Could barely wait for the moment we would stand in my private chamber and he would untangle me from my linen bindings, reveling in the moment my breasts would spring forth and he could take them into his mouth to worship my long-hidden womanhood.

There were other explorations. My laboratory was our private playground. We would pore over the texts of the
Corpus Hermeticum
, deciding which alchemical experiments might interest us. We would busily gather the materials needed, then with one of us calling out the steps from the book, the other would execute the procedure with flasks and
kerotakis
and burners and descensories. Sometimes the step required more than two hands, so the reader would race from manuscript to workbench and back again for a word or phrase forgotten. There were explosions and failures and unexpected discoveries.

Lorenzo endeared himself further to me with his nearly obsessive stoking of the alchemical furnace. He marveled that I, single-handedly, had kept the thing burning continuously since my coming to Florence. He loved my stories about keeping Papa’s fire alight as a young girl, and wept when I told him of the one time, that terrible night in Vinci, when I had let it die out. He would be a slave to the furnace whenever he visited me, he promised. Anything he could do to help me he would do, he said, for I was an inspiration to him.

I, an inspiration to Lorenzo de’ Medici,
I mused.
How extraordinary
. But then I thought,
I am
four times
blessed.
Il Magnifico’s
lover. Privileged mother of a genius. Beloved daughter of a kind and generous father. “Brother” to the finest minds in Florence, perhaps the world.
After a painfully inauspicious beginning, life and all its graces had been bestowed upon me, as treasures are laid at the feet of a great queen.

There was one final jewel held out to me by Lorenzo. One evening as I happily toiled in my laboratory he sat back on a stool, legs stretched out before him, his fine linen shirt white against his olive skin. He spoke my name, as always he did, with the warmest inflection of love.

“Caterina,” he said. “Do you recall the night we were all here together, Silio and Pico and Vespasiano working with quicksilver?”

“I do.”

“We talked of the Great Work.”

“Yes, and we all disagreed what the Great Work was, if I remember correctly.”