Signora Da Vinci (39 page)

I thought to say,
Jesus loved mankind enough to sacrifice his life for it!
but I held my tongue. It was useless trying to best this mediocre mind in a senseless debate. It was more important to live another day.

I began slowly and thoughtfully. I had, after all, become a master of deceit. I remembered Papa’s belief that it was better being a living hypocrite than a dead truth teller. “Perhaps you have opened my eyes, Fra Savonarola. Shown me another way of thinking.”

This seemed to please him. I saw the slightest upturn of his lips. “Then you will henceforth leave the healing of men to Jesus Christ,” he said.

I knew at once what he was suggesting, and I foundered for a sensible response. I had gone very cold.

“So you will close your apothecary,” he said, more a command than a question.

I looked into those eyes and saw behind them a demon lurking, one with not a shred of sanity.

“Yes. I will.” I felt my throat tightening, my chest burning.

He gestured to his assistant.

“And you will tell this good friar the location of this devil’s den of yours so that within the month, when my angels come to call, they will find the place abandoned. Altogether.”

“Yes.”

“And the poisons you call medicines will be deposited in the Piazza della Signoria, consigned to the bonfire’s flames.”

I came close to breaking then. The words choked me. All I could do was nod.

“Tell me,” he demanded, placing his face close to mine.

“Consigned to the flames,” I whispered.

“Better than this body,” he said, thumping me on the chest atop my breast bindings. He fixed me with an odd look, and I froze, terrified that he had felt an unusual thickening there. I strove to appear calm, to reveal nothing.

“Have you English henbane in your shop?” he asked, and I nearly died with relief.

“I have some,” I said.

“Send that to me. I understand it keeps a man coherent while he is being . . . ‘convinced’ of his heresies.” Savonarola made for the door. “Let me not see you here again,” I heard him say behind me. “The next time it will not go so easy.”

CHAPTER 29

I asked Lorenzo to call a special meeting of the Platonic Academy at the Palazzo Medici. Lucrezia had by then become a regular member. Now, in the first-floor salon, everyone sat on the edge of their seats as I, pale and shaken, told my story.

“What is happening, friends?” Vespasiano Bisticci cried when I had finished. “What is happening to our beloved city!”

There was a general outcry in the room.

“There is more.” Pico della Mirandola quieted everyone with a voice of dread. “In yesterday’s sermon at San Marco, but a few doors from here, Savonarola leveled his harshest criticisms against the Medici . . . and against us.”

The room went silent.

“He named Lorenzo as a tyrant, insisting that he and his ‘paganworshipping minions’ turn their backs on Aristotle and Plato, who were now, themselves, ‘rotting in hell.’ Lorenzo, he demanded, must repent his sins or God would surely punish him.”

“My mother warned us,” a sober Lorenzo said. “Before we went to Rome she spoke to us about the power of fear. I do not myself understand how levelheaded people can so readily relinquish reason, scorn intellect and open-mindedness to replace it with a single man’s threats of eternal damnation.”

“How widespread is this plague of idiocy?” Gigi Pulci asked.

“What we all until this evening ignored as rumors, we now know to be actual occurrences,” Antonio Pollaiuolo said. “So we must assume that the entire city is in the grip of insanity.”

“And Pico’s account of yesterday’s sermon,” Poliziano added, “must be viewed as a threat to every one of us in this room.”

No one could speak, so terrible was the thought to which, a moment later, Ficino gave voice.

“We must temporarily suspend all meetings of the Platonic Academy,” he said in a tone so aggrieved it might have been the announcement of the death of a friend. But he went on bravely, ignoring the dolorous sighs and moans of his friends. “We must remember that the teachings of our masters can never be truly silenced. They will live in our hearts and the secret recesses of our minds, and in those thinking men and women who come after us.”

“It is not enough, I’m afraid,” Vespasiano Bisticci said. Everyone turned to him to listen. “If we are to save our lives, our books, our art and antiquities, we must first of all hide them in safe places. . . .” There were murmurings of agreement. “But we must also . . .” Our friend paused as though he knew the words he was about to speak were unsavory. “. . . appear to Savonarola, his army, and the Florentines who take his words as God’s law, to be similarly converted to this reprehensible religious fanaticism.”

There were shouts of disagreement and outrage.

“Publicly disavow Plato?” Gigi Pulci cried. “The writings of our great classical teachers?”

“If we mean to survive this mania, yes,” Ficino answered bluntly.

There was silence again as everyone digested our leader’s proclamation as if it were the toughest gristle.

“I have an idea,” Sandro Botticelli said slowly. “I will paint a spectacularly profane work and then make a very public show of sacrificing it. Each of us, as difficult as it may be, must do the same. Meanwhile, Lorenzo and Vespasiano should begin making arrangements to protect what is most dear to us—the books, the antiquities—from this army of demons.”

“That is easily accomplished,” Lorenzo said, and Bisticci agreed.

“It may still be insufficient,” Pico said. “We are philosophers. Savonarola will not be content with the relinquishing of material treasures.” He paused, as though gathering strength. “My writings, particularly those to do with the
Cabala
and Hebrew magic, are to these people among the most despised works that exist. It is true in Rome as well. I’ve been summoned by Innocent’s commission to answer their charges of heresy. My
Apology
brought me very close to the Bishops of the Inquisition.”

“Let us be honest,” Ficino said with a much-needed touch of levity, “your
Apology
was nothing but a brilliant defense of your occult theories. It was bound to make Rome furious.”

“In any event,” Pico insisted, “I will recant and repudiate my magical beliefs. . . .”

“Pico, no,” Gigi Pulci pleaded.

But Mirandola finished what he’d begun, “. . . then take my vows as a monk and retire from public life.”

I saw tears glistening in Lucrezia’s eyes, and Lorenzo looked stricken. He set his gaze on me.

“Cato,” he said gently. “For all these years your neighbors have seen the smoke from your laboratory’s furnace billowing up from your rooftop every single day, in the coldest winter and the warmest summer. They see me and all of us coming to your shop late at night. Some of them must know what goes on in your house. Till now they have chosen to ignore it, shown tolerance. But all that has changed. It will only take one person to inform on you. You are an alchemist. Not a title you’ll wish to own in the coming years.”

I felt cold overtake me, and a subtle trembling that I hoped no one could see beneath my robes. “I must dismantle the laboratory,” I said to him.

“If you wish to live to see your nephew grow full into manhood,” he agreed.

The gathering dispersed with tears and embraces in the colonnaded courtyard. Promises were made of finding every surreptitious device for keeping informed of the others’ well-being. As Botticelli and Pollaiuolo huddled together making plans of their own, Lorenzo steered me into his library. I gazed around, wondering with a keen ache if ever in my life I would see again so magnificent a collection of mankind’s intelligence.

“You have done so much in your life to protect Leonardo,” he said. “But I fear Florence is no longer a safe place for him. He is already far outside the bounds of acceptable society. The man is an avowed
atheist
. To the small-brained zealots he will prove to have the most dangerous mind of all.”

“What are you suggesting, Lorenzo? Where could he possibly go?”

“I will have to write to him, but I believe
Il Moro
would be delighted to have Leonardo at his court in Milan.”

“Milan!” The thought of Leonardo so far from me tore at my heart.

“Caterina,” he whispered urgently, “if he stays here they will burn him at the stake.” He peered out the library door. Everyone else had gone. He pulled me farther into the room and kissed me, but when he released me I pushed back into his arms.

“How can this be happening?” I said. Of course Lorenzo’s plan would save Leonardo’s life, but how would I live without him? He had been my reason for coming to Florence and now, though my existence was a broad, many-limbed tree, he was still the rich earth into which my roots were deeply grounded.

“There is no limit to fear that a mind can be induced to entertain,” Lorenzo said. “So few people understand they are good. The church has taught them too well that they are evil and need punishment for their sins. The friar plumbs the deepest of their guilt and terror. We are in for the darkest of times, my love. The darkest of times. We must dispense with ideals for the moment and look to survival.”

 

Despite his outrage at my treatment at Savonarola’s hands, Lorenzo believed that any resistance in the current climate was futile. It must look as though my compliance was complete and altogether sincere.

He sent a small cadre of house servants to help me with the disassembling of the apothecary and laboratory. I watched as my world was taken apart bottle by bottle, shelf by shelf. The most precious of my herbs and spices and tools of those trades were carefully crated and hauled back to Vinci, as any of the Medici palazzos and country houses might soon enough fall under scrutiny. But boxes and boxes of medicinals, potions, and poultices that might have been used to help my friends and neighbors were piled at the front door for their discarding.

I carefully packed up all of the notebooks and folios I had been keeping of Leonardo’s, making sure that chest was never out of my sight.

The belongings and furnishings of the first and second floors—bedchamber, kitchen, and salon—were trundled down the stairs and carted across the city to a pleasant house Lorenzo had bought for me on Via Tornabuoni, which we affectionately called Castella Lucrezia. It was small and sadly lacking a garden, but quite enough for me—without an apothecary or alchemical laboratory—to comfortably live.

When the place on Via Riccardi was finally bare and Lorenzo’s servants had taken their leave, my grief was terrible but I refused to cry. I had loved my shop. The sight of it. The smell of it. The comings and goings of my friends and customers. The hub of harmless gossip. The potions invented. The healings accomplished. The advice and wisdom proffered, and just as often received. But most of all it had proven the place that perfectly expressed my being, my identity in the city of Florence—Cato the Apothecary.

But there was no time for mourning. Lorenzo had written to Ludovico
Il Moro
in Milan and secured a position for Leonardo in the ducal court there. He himself was packing up his bottega, arranging for the release of certain of his apprentices to other studios, and making traveling arrangements for himself and Zoroastre, who would be moving north with him.

Benito came to move me into my new home. Together we unpacked my dishes, he carefully handing each one to me to wash and dry before placing them on the shelf.

“You know, Benito, you and your grandmother had best watch your tongues.”

“Or what?” he asked. “Savonarola will cut them out? He is a little man with an even littler cazzo. That makes him a bully.”

“But he is dangerous.”

“That is why I’ll refuse if they come recruiting me for his new army.”

“You’re a bit too old to be an ‘angel,’” I said.

“And not nearly stupid enough.”

“What have you told them?” I asked, alarmed but trying to remain calm. I had never admitted to Benito all I had seen and heard during my confinement in Savonarola’s Office of Night prison. Perhaps he was yet unaware of how serious a directive or summons from the friar had become.

“That I will not serve him,” Benito said. “That I’ve a family to help support.”

“You must take care with the Dominican.”

“What would you have me do?” he said. “Work as one of his monkeys?”

“No, of course not. But find a way to humor him. Even
Il Magnifico
is loath to openly defy the man.”

“He drove you from your home, your shop,” Benito said, all levity gone. “We lost the best neighbor we ever had. I hate him. I’d like to see him burning atop one of his own bonfires.”

 

A few nights later with all the stealth we could manage, Leonardo, Lorenzo, and those of the Academy who’d met at my house with some regularity gathered in the third-floor chamber. The curtains were tightly drawn so not even the faintest candle’s flicker could signify our presence there. The beakers and flasks, the ancient books and treatises, the stores of mercury, sulfur, and cinnabar were long gone from the tables and shelves. All that was left to distinguish the place as a laboratory was the alchemical furnace that, with its brilliant eternal fire, had illuminated our fumbling, stubborn perseverance to learn and discover the mysteries that Nature would allow her humble servants to know.

Every heart was heavy, every mind awash with turmoil as one by one we threw handfuls of damp earth from my garden onto the flames. They struggled valiantly, as a dying man gasps desperately for the last few breaths of life.

We were utterly silent in this, our unthinkable act—the smothering of the precious child we had together birthed and nurtured in the fecund womb that was Florence. I think part of everyone died as water and earth took their triumph over air and fire. The stove grew cold, its magic suddenly extinguished.