Sistine Heresy

by Justine Saracen

  Adriana looked back at the floodwaters where now a multitude of bodies floated, and at that moment a wave rose from the side and washed ice-cold water over her.

  Heavy rain still clattered against the wooden shutter when she woke. The sound of the servants working downstairs told her it was morning, but she could not get out of bed.

  Christiano Ferri, the house physician, stood over her, removing the leeches from her forearm. “A serious catarrh, no doubt of that,” he observed.

  It was the second time she’d been bled, and she noticed little difference in the heat that poured from her body. The honeyed rice and wine with a drop of opium made her sleep, but when she woke, she was wracked with a painful cough that only grew worse. Her fever, she could tell, was mounting, and each day she felt weaker.

  Maria dutifully tended her, and Jacopo the housemaster, who berated himself for failing to protect her from herself.

  As Ferri placed the seal over the leech jar, Adriana asked, “What’s next, if I am not recovered?”

  “There are other interventions, but first let us wait and let the leeches do their work. We can, if necessary, double the amount of opium. Rest is the best thing, Lady. That and all our prayers.” He pulled the sheet up to cover her already over-heated body and took his leave.

  *

  A week passed and she was no longer lucid, but babbled hoarsely during the day and had fever dreams at night. Domenico came, when he got word, and then Michelangelo, but in her delirium she did not know them. On the twelfth night Domenico took the watch and sat praying at her bedside. Finally, in the early morning hours, a priest was summoned from Tivoli to give the last sacrament. When the priest left, the entire household stopped working and waited numb with dread, for the fate of every servant and field worker was tied to hers.

  The servants sat in the kitchen, talking quietly among themselves, letting disorder accumulate. Then in the early afternoon three men arrived, two in a cart and one on horseback. Jacopo opened the door and recognized Silvio Piccolomini. He did not know the visitor’s two companions, but one of them, he noted with misgivings, was a Jew.

  The man’s head was covered by a fringed blue cloth, which was twisted once across his chest and thrown over his shoulder. Older and taller than the other two, he had a trim white beard, massive shoulders, and the bulk of an ox. Although he held his gaze down and kept a certain distance from the others, his very mass dominated the group. The third man was nondescript, but stood adjusting his clothing and affected an air of authority, which did not quite convince.

  Jacopo, as housemaster, blocked the doorway, reluctant to admit them. “My Lady is mortally ill, Signori, and the priest has already given the rites. Master Raggi keeps the vigil now.”

  Silvio nodded. “Yes, I know, Jacopo. Michelangelo has informed me. These two men are physicians. Dr. Ligori has assisted my father through dire illness, and Dr. Salomano brings Moorish knowledge from Spain. I believe they offer hope.”

  At the word “hope” Jacopo relented. Without remark, he led them up the stairs to the bedchamber where Domenico and the maid Maria kept watch over the unconscious woman. The room was rancid with the smell of soiled bedclothes, and the fire burning in the fireplace together with the candles gave off a stifling heat. As the four men entered, the singer stood up, his face ashen and his eyes red-rimmed. Next to him the maid Maria wept quietly.

  “Signor Piccolomini has brought two physicians,” Jacopo said. Domenico hesitated for a moment, then stepped aside.

  Dr. Ligori placed his hand first on her forehead and then at the center of her chest, which rose and fell slowly. “Morbid fever. How long has she been thus?”

  “Two days, my lord,” Maria replied. Jacopo nodded. “And since yesterday we have not been able to give her any water.”

  Ligori stood up and the two physicians conferred in whispers, although it seemed the Jew spoke more and the other man listened. Finally Ligori addressed Jacopo.

  “Have a wash tub brought up. Large enough for the lady to be set in. And fill it with cold water.”

  Maria looked astonished. “But Signor Dottore. Surely a bath…at this time—”

  “To lower her fever. Don’t waste time. Do as I say.” The Jew whispered in his ear again, and Ligori added, “Have the kitchen make her a strong tea of red pepper and lemon peel. Do you have these things?”

  “Yes, my Lord,” she replied, wiping her hands on her apron, as if she were about to cook.

  “Bring it up as soon as possible. Please,” Salomano added quietly.

  Domenico spoke from the foot of the bed where he had stood. His black doublet was wrinkled and unbuttoned halfway down his chest, for he had watched through the night. “Do you have hope, Signore?” His voice was hoarse.

  Ligori, bending over the patient again, did not respond. Standing behind him, Salomano said, “While the heart still beats there is hope, my son.” Then he extinguished the fire in the fireplace and all the candles save those by the bed. The dimming light seemed an ominous sign, and Domenico pressed his fingers against his lips. Tears flowed again from his swollen eyes.

  Jacopo located the wooden laundry tub and with the gardener dragged it up the stairs into the bedchamber. Servants followed with buckets and pitchers, and in relays they filled the tub with the frigid water. At Ligori’s instructions, the Jewish doctor wrapped the unconscious woman in the sheet she was lying on and with massive forearms lifted her from the bed.

  Jolted by the plunge into the freezing cold the mistress resisted feebly and her eyes fluttered open. As she was lifted out again, she seemed to respond to their voices and their touch when they dried her. Maria placed a cup of some sour fluid at her mouth, and she swallowed a mouthful obediently, then tried weakly to push the cup away. Then she lost consciousness once more.

  “You must immerse her again in two hours,” Dr. Ligori instructed Jacopo. He seemed well pleased, having determined that the patient was capable of response and thus not moribund. The dramatic gesture of her awakening had impressed her servants, who now gazed at the unconscious woman with hope. Wiping his hands dry on a towel, the doctor accompanied his colleague Baldassare Salomano down the stairs to the reception hall to accept lunch.

  In the sickroom, Domenico and Maria resumed their vigil.

  XIV

  As his cart came down the slope toward the Villa Borgia the next morning, Baldassare Salomano looked out through the mist at the line of cypress trees and the land they bordered. He hadn’t noticed the serene beauty of the villa the day before, the well-kept garden near the house and the lush vineyards and olive groves farther out. For the thousandth time, he gave thanks for his good fortune in being expelled from Spain and forced to begin a new life in Italy.

  Memories of his final months in Seville still haunted him, though sixteen years had passed since he fled the land of his birth.

  Their Most Catholic Majesties had aligned themselves with the extreme ascetic faction in the Spanish church, and together they undertook to purge all of Spain of doctrines that were not identical in word and letter to their own.

  His family was not immediately affected, but other lax Jews, who felt no particular piety or allegiance to any dogma, had converted. Ironically, these were condemned, though it seemed illogical for the Church to persecute those who were lukewarm rather than, in its eyes, heathen. Or maybe not. Maybe the doubters were the most dangerous of all.

  In any case, it was the conversos who were accused of fraudulent oaths or hidden practices of the old religion. It might have been true; he did not know the personal stories of all those condemned. Those he knew who had converted had done so as a matter of convenience. If they were bad Catholics, it was not because they were secretly good Jews.

  He had no idea what the Inquisition sought and had wondered even in those days how the church could see into the soul of a man and know which image of God he feared, the one of the Trinity or the one of Moses. Didn’t Christians also revere the Old Testament? And certainly they were i
gnorant of the quarrels about God in the Jewish community itself.

  Whatever criterion they used, the agents of the Inquisition rounded up people from all over the city and surrounding towns. A few weeks passed and he heard nothing. He assumed they were in prison, a horror in itself. But then the terrified whispers began; there was to be an auto-da-fé.

  Morbid fascination drew him to the square and to the platforms that had been erected. Twenty of them, with central posts, and to each one four penitents were chained. Eighty men and women in long white gowns. While he watched, priests went to each group of four and read their sins to them. Those who repented and begged for mercy were garroted on the spot. Only a few, scarcely a dozen, refused. Ironically it was the truly pious who were prepared to suffer for their beliefs, whatever they were. And suffer they would, burned alive.

  He should have left the square then; he would have kept his peace of mind. But the urge to bear witness to the depths of depravity to which the Church would sink obsessed him, and so he watched while they lit the fires, one by one, and the overawed crowd fell silent.

  For a long while all he could hear was the crackling of the flames on the straw and kindling. Soon it became difficult to see through the thick greasy smoke that carried the smell of roasting flesh. Then, though he could not see, he knew the flames had reached the living, for the screams began.

  Normal screams at first, such as he would expect, but then they became more frenzied, animal-like. He heard sounds he did not know the human throat could make, that made him retch with revulsion and fear. Then the smoke seemed to choke them too as the shrieks became ragged and then weakened. By then the crowd was excited too, and their screaming combined with that of the burning victims.

  He would never forget drawing the airborne residual of the dead into his lungs and tasting the horror in his mouth. That day marked him for the rest of his life.

  No man had ever seen God. No man knew whether the Creator of the universe was one or three, and yet one set of believers tortured and burned alive another over such trivialities. The thought made him more than a religious skeptic. He did not have a word for what it made him.

  The auto-da-fé, the “act of faith” was, ironically, the final ruination of his own. All the way home, smelling human smoke on his clothes, he asked himself how the absolute law of the Jews—with its vast list of regulations in Leviticus—was any better than the absolute law of the Church. How was God supposed to “favor” a people by making them suffer? He tried to imagine a world without God and realized that it would look just like the world in which he lived.

  Then in 1492 came the great migration, when their Most Catholic Majesties drove the unconverted Muslims and Jews out of Spain. The Christians called it the Expulsion, but for him it had been deliverance.

  Jewish travelers coming from the East had raved about the prosperity that Jews enjoyed in Constantinople. The Ottoman emperor was trying to rebuild his capital. He needed money, skill, talent, and Jews were invited along with Muslims and Christians, if they had these qualifications. The young doctor was tempted to seek refuge there, but he had children and a wife fearful of long travel. Fortunately, Rome offered similar rescue and was closer.

  Pope Alexander, though whispered to be personally corrupt, had nonetheless wisely decided that Rome, filled with foreign pilgrims and their diseases, needed physicians more than converts. And so Baldassar Saloman romanized his name and moved with his family to the Holy City. In a short while, at the age of forty-five, he began a discreetly prosperous life as the Jewish “assistant” of a Christian doctor fifteen years his junior.

  To be sure, he was scarcely a Jew any longer. Although he still covered his head, identifying himself as a Jew rather than a converso, he no longer believed in anything. And that was the problem.

  For while Rome had a certain tolerance for Jews, it had none whatsoever for nonbelievers. He learned to be silent about his lack of faith in a way he never had to be about his Judaism. He still thought of Constantinople and wondered if the Turks scrutinized their Jews the way the Spanish and Italians did.

  Salomano was startled back to the present as his carriage pulled up before the entrance of the Villa Borgia.

  Although the morning rain had stopped, a cold dampness filled the air and the sky remained dreary. He had come alone, while Ligori tended other patients, and he was unsure of his reception. If the patient had died during the night, he, the foreign Jew, would surely be blamed. He had no idea whether the ice bath and the red-tea cure would help. The treatment could bring down a fever, but little else. In this, as in all other sicknesses, the patient’s inner resources would make all the difference.

  As he stepped down from the cart, someone came out of the house and a groom was just bringing a horse from the stable. Salomano tasted the bile of rising dread. The lady must have died; Signor Raggi was pale and bent with exhaustion. Briefly they stood face-to-face in silence and each took the measure of the other. With old eyes he looked anxiously into tired young ones, waiting for accusation.

  “You have saved her, Dottore.” The young man held out his hand to be swallowed up in Salomano’s muscular grasp. “Whatever you gave her, it was miraculous. The fever has broken and God’s mercy has sent her back to us.”

  Salomano released the breath he held. “That and her own strength. A physician cannot call upon the divine, sir. Only upon experience.”

  Puzzlement flickered for an instant across the exhausted face. “In any case, we are most grateful for your skill and kindness.”

  It was only at that moment that Salomano realized he was speaking with a castrated man. The high soft voice. The wide chest and slender, elongated physique. Of course, the singer from the Vatican. He had heard of him. What monstrous things the Christians did, even to their own.

  “You are most welcome. But experience also teaches that recovery is not instant, and I must attend the patient still.”

  “Certainly, and I will keep you no longer. I have overstayed my leave and must return to my duties, but Signor Buonarroti sits with her.”

  Domenico clasped his old hand again in departure. A stable boy held the singer’s horse while he mounted with difficulty. Slouching in the saddle, he pulled his cloak around him and rode down the avenue of cypresses.

  *

  In contrast to the day before, this time the maidservant admitted Salomano with deference and warmth. The housemaster came hurriedly, called him “Signor Dottore” and led him upstairs to the bedchamber. The lady still lay feebly against two pillows, but she was lucid and could hold the cup of medicinal tea without assistance. A wiry, bearded man stood up from his stool at her bedside. The housemaster addressed him.

  “Maestro Buonarroti, this is Doctor Salomano. He is one of the physicians who saved Lady Borgia’s life yesterday.” They shook hands.

  The housemaster slid a chair behind Salomano and he lowered his great bulk onto the seat. He found himself directly across from the painter, who watched him as he attended the patient. He laid a hand on her forehead and noted that the fever had indeed fallen and some color had returned to her face.

  “Have you eaten anything yet, Lady Borgia?”

  She turned her head weakly toward him. Her long dark hair was damp and clung to her face in limp strands. “No. I’ve only drunk this vile tea.”

  He laid his ear on her chest and listened to her cough. “Mucus. That’s very good. But Madama is obviously still very weak.” He took the empty cup from her hand. “Vile or no, you must keep drinking the tea for two more days at least. And you must also have your cook prepare you a special broth. I have a list of ingredients.” He drew a roll of paper from the pouch and held it while he spoke. “Have your servants wake you every two hours for the tea and for the soup. It is time to return to life, Madama.”

  “It looks as if God has given her a second chance. Though I wonder if it was your God or hers.” Michelangelo glanced meaningfully at the blue cloth that covered Salomano’s head, but the tone of his voice
was light, as if he attempted banter.

  Salomano was not used to banter. “The God of the Jews is not much inclined to heal the sick,” he replied cautiously. “Jews try more to understand God than to call on his medical skills.”

  The artist folded his arms across his chest and asked very softly, in the same tone as before, “How can you know God’s will, having no priest or sacraments?”

  Salomano frowned. “It seems impolite to argue theology at the bedside of a sick woman.”

  “Not at all.” Adriana glanced over at them through half-closed eyes. She still couldn’t raise herself from her pillows, but her mind seemed to have cleared and her spirits much improved. “I don’t mind. Salvation seems to be Michelangelo’s current obsession. Next year it may be love poetry.”

  Salomano thought for a while, stroking his white beard. He would not be drawn into an argument, but this Christian artist seemed more interested than hostile. “Rabbis and scholars have debated God’s will for centuries, but they do not so much mediate between man and God as do your priests. They simply interpret scripture and advise. Maimonides, one of our greatest, did set out basic principles, but many Jews disagree with him.”

  “You mean you don’t all believe the same?”

  “The basic ideas, yes. But there’s always a dispute—in your religion too—of how literally to take scripture. Maimonides said that God and the afterlife are intellectual events and the Bible is only symbolic.”

  “But you’ve got all those laws.”

  “Yes, more than six hundred. But Maimonides argues that most are just meant to fulfill the first two, belief in God and rejection of idolatry. Otherwise, God is unknowable.”

  Michelangelo’s gaze became more intent. “An unknowable God. A dangerous idea.”

  Salomano rolled up the paper he had been holding and weighed his words. “It shouldn’t be dangerous. Not being able to define God opens the way to focus on the world and discover His reverberations here. It’s the ‘God’s backside’ idea.”