Attenzione! What men and women do in bed was nothing new to me. Anyone who has grown up in a dyer’s cottage with two rooms and five children and a neighborhood latrine knows all the mysteries of the body by the time he is six. By nature and inclination dogs copulate and geese copulate and the dyer and his wife copulate, and do it again and again as their mortal essence spurts from them and they reproduce, and in a brief time grow tired of it all. That was no surprise. What surprised me was desire. This desire was a hard ache in the groin: it was relentless, stinging, a fire in my mind and body. By merely taking thought, sometimes with no thought at all, I would go hard, even at prayer, especially at prayer, and I would kneel straight up, my back stiff, my head bowed, and—engorged and erect—I eased myself against the prie-dieu. I firmed my mind with determination not to spill my seed, not in chapel, not at prayer, and mostly I succeeded. But at night on my straw pallet there was no escape. My hands were quick and deft beneath the covers and I spilled my seed with ease but—I was twelve—with a relief that was only momentary. Once more and yet again, and then at last sleep.
Confession was no help. I told my sins—the kind and number and the frequency—and my confessor shook his head and said again and again that I must promise to be pure with the purity of the angels. I must try. Purity is all. I promised and I tried, but angels are pure spirits unencumbered by this thing between my legs that had a passion and a will of its own, and I was not pure spirit.
This was my life, then, from age twelve to fifteen. Prayer and study and work in the fields all day, and my hands on my engorged cazzo in the night. My spells had ceased for a time. No more tingling of the leg, the great pain in my head, the flailing arms. I had grown out of spells and into private sin.
Father Gerardo, our superior, decided I should spend more time drawing. It would occupy my mind, he said, and my hands as well, and thus keep me from sin. This was not a matter of my ability. It was a matter of obedience. And who could tell? Perhaps one day I would paint, he said. Perhaps one day I would study with a master painter and thus bring great credit to our friary in Prato. And so I was assigned to make two murals in the refectory in imitation of those great paintings by Niccolò Gerini in the church of San Piero Forelli. The first was to be his pietà—that is, our Lord risen from the tomb with our Lady beside him—and the second, on the opposite wall, Saint Francis with the stigmata. In preparation I sketched a copy of the pietà on an oaken panel in a one-to-twenty proportion—a simple mathematical equation—and was surprised that my little copy actually resembled the original. Father Gerardo was more surprised than I and said he had great hopes for the painting and great hopes for my hands. Then I sketched the pietà in charcoal on the refectory wall, but after it was well advanced and I had painted in the faces and the hands, Father Gerardo assigned the other postulants to complete the work. He feared lest I commit the sin of pride in considering the painting my own. And so too I proceeded with the mural of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata, except that crouching at Saint Francis’s feet where Niccolò Gerini had painted in his patron, I sketched a likeness of the merchant who begat me and turned me over to the Friars. In this way no matter how many postulants completed it, I had made the painting my own. When the merchant saw the mural he recognized himself at once and, flattered, said, “The boy has gifts. Send him to Arrigo di Niccolò. He will teach him much.” He added, knowing the friars, “I’ll pay.” Father Gerardo nodded and smiled but I was not sent to study with Arrigo—causa superbiae again—lest I become proud. It was God’s will.
By the end of my postulancy year the murals were done—higgledy-piggledy in finish and design—and though I had escaped the sin of pride, I remained unchaste. Despite my prayers, despite fasting and nightly chastisement with the cord and the catena, I continued to commit the lonely sin. I told our Father Gerardo I had failed, that I was not meant to be a Brother of Saint Francis. But Father had boundless hope for human nature and great joy in prayer and he said that with God’s help and the help of the Virgin Mother I would change and become chaste, because this was God’s will and perhaps his mysterious way of keeping me humble.
In this way I became a novice in the Order of Friars Minor.
As novices we lived the true life of the friar. We prayed. We meditated on poverty and chastity and obedience. We learned the rule of Father Saint Francis, and what it means to be a servant of the poor. Chastity and obedience we took for granted, but poverty was the essence of our lives. When it was my turn, I begged from house to house—bread or a coin or whatever charity was offered—for Francis believed that the greatest poverty is to beg for one’s bread. “Poverty is having nothing and desiring nothing,” he liked to say. “Thus we enjoy all things in the freedom of not possessing them.” This was a paradox I found hard to understand at the time and impossible to understand now that I am a prisoner of the Fratelli. But it was all I knew. And I knew it was God’s will.
At the end of that year, though still unchaste, I was admitted as a Brother to the Order of Friars Minor, promising for the next three years to live as a monk who is pledged to God by temporary vows until he is admitted to solemn vows: that is, I was offered but not yet accepted.
CHAPTER 3
AS THE YOUNGEST of the new Brothers I was sent on trial to care for the aged and dying at our tiny mission house on the river. The Brothers of Saint Francis always dwell among the poor—they are our mission and our reason for being—and the poor live chock-a-block in mean and dirty streets where the gutter is very often the privy and where grueling labor wears down the body and the soul. Our mission house stood in the poorest section of Prato, near the fulling mill on the Bisenzio River. It was a small house for a small group of Brethren, seven old and dying monks, with myself and Brother Isaac to minister to them. Brother Isaac was nearly eighty. In his late years he had suffered flashes in his brain and then had lost much of his speech, but he continued to cook well and in any case our food was simple. He prepared the meals and I served them. Father Alfonso, our priest, though he was one of the dying seven, still managed to say Mass and hear confessions and to lead the morning prayers.
It was my office to look after the Brothers. I dressed the ones who could still get out of bed, I fed them and washed them and helped them to the privy. Some were not able to get up, and for them I brought the basin and emptied it each morning and night. The old are a race unto themselves. Their bowels are second only to God and the privy second only to chapel. Indeed, they would sooner miss the chapel than the privy. Our privy was a model of good order, always clean, always efficient. It was built on an ell extending just beyond the riverbank so that, after the office of Prime and before the office of Terce, the Brethren shat into a branch of the gently flowing river. It is true that further downstream the dyers washed their wool but by that time the shit had dissipated and no offense was offered. This green river, the very life of the city, has always been hard used. Once the Brethren were settled for the morning, it was my task to go to market for the fish and game. I bargained with the peasant women over baskets of leeks and beans, with fishmongers for tench or carp or eels, with farmers for cheese and milk and eggs. I bought bread from the baker and meat pies when he had them and, on feast days, a cooked roast pig with a Mary apple in its mouth. Each afternoon I begged for alms. These tasks, plus obligatory prayer, made up my day and, to some extent, controlled my thoughts and desires. But at night, on my cot, I remained Fratello Luca of the busy hands.
Prato is not like Florence. The first business of Florence is money and, after that, rich cloth and fine sculpture, whereas the sole business of Prato is wool. Prato is a merchant city of little houses with foul alleys between them and the noise and smells of a slum ghetto, with not enough air and sunlight and too much of the muck that comes from living close and working hard. There are canals with fulling mills and dyeing sheds leaning into them and the stench of the dyes and sulfur and alum, but there are gardens everywhere and in spring they perfumed the air. The streets are often too
narrow for a cart to make its way, and it is easier to get to market on foot than in a cart, which was well for me since our little mission house possessed no cart and no horse or donkey to pull it.
Cutting down back alleys and over canals, I had found a shortcut to market that took me through the tiny campos of the decaying Gualdimare quarter directly to the market square. In fact, that is not quite true. This route was not so quick but it was more pleasant since it followed the river where the children played along the banks, and took me past a world of kitchen gardens and backyard privies, and through the Camposino San Paolo where twice—my heart racing at the sight of her—I had seen the whore, Maria Sabina, drawing water at the well. The trip to market was my favorite duty.
It was May, a hot morning after a long spell of rain, and the air smelled freshly of green things growing, of primrose, lavender, tansy, and mint. Telling my beads, my mind wandering, I had passed the river and the kitchen gardens and was crossing through the Camposino San Paolo—not everything that happens is the will of God—when I heard a voice and stopped to listen.
“Eh, Fratello mio!” It was the low voice of Maria Sabina calling me. I had thought of her often, had summoned her image in the night as I lay on my cot, and now here she was, calling me in her low soft voice. I looked at her. A thin red scar ran from her brow to the corner of her mouth, but she was full-bodied and beautiful nonetheless.
“Signora,” I said, and nodded. “Signorina.”
She was leaning against the well-head in the Camposino, her black hair loose about her shoulders, and her hands folded modestly at her waist. She was smiling at me. A dirty white cat lay curled up next to the well and two speckled chickens were scratching at the sand near her feet. The scent of mint, thick and honeyed, hung in the air.
“I’ve seen you passing here before,” she said, and paused. I stood still, unable to move. I considered whether the reason I took this shortcut so often was the hope that one day she would stop me and say, “Eh, fratello mio!” If so, I was inviting sin. And it is true that at this moment I wanted to lie down with her, there, in the center of the Camposino next to the well. “You are much too pretty to be a Friar,” she said. “Yes?”
I could think of no reply and I knew I should leave at once but I stayed there, trapped by my desire. I had never lain with a woman.
“You should come with me.” She tipped her head to the right, toward the outside staircase that led up to the second floor. She came close and stood before me. “Don’t you talk? I think you would like to talk to me.” She looked at my face closely. “You are very handsome, very fair.” She put three fingers lightly on my chest. “And you are well made.” She let her fingers drift from my chest an inch or two down toward my waist. “Come with me,” she said.
“I have no money,” I said. “The money I have is for market.”
“Come with me,” she said, taking my hand.
I followed her up the staircase to a little gallery with three doors. All three had been left ajar, and she turned to smile at me as she pushed open the middle one.
Inside it was dark, with a low ceiling and only one tiny window covered with a wooden shutter. Two narrow cots stood end to end beneath the sloping roof and there was a small table with stools for sitting. I could smell the stale scent of frying oil.
I pointed to the two cots, questioning, and she said, “My sister. She is at the market.” She slipped a wooden peg through the latch of the door. “Now,” she said, “we are alone, my little Brother, and I will make you very happy.”
In seconds she had removed her surcoat and her gown and then her kirtle underdress. She stood there, gloriously naked, her arms open and extended toward me. I was slow about this new business. My scapular lay on the floor already but I was still fumbling with my cowl and hood. I stared at her. She seemed to shimmer in the dim light. Her breasts and her belly and the dark smudge of hair between her legs. She came to me and placed the back of her hand against my thigh. She moved her fingers lightly on the cloth, feeling for my cazzo. It pulsed hard against the gentle pressure and she took her hand away. “Good,” she said. She smiled and kissed me softly on the lips. She helped me lift the tunic over my head and then the undertunic and then she laughed. She had not imagined Friars wore undershorts. She tugged at the cord around my waist. It loosened and my undershorts fell away. “Eccolo, che bello!” she said. She put her hand around my cazzo and led me to her bed.
She lay down on the narrow cot—it was of feathers, not straw—and pulled me to her. And then, suddenly, it was as if I had always known what to do. I felt that I had entered another world where there was no sin, where everything was natural and right. I lay beside her and caressed her breasts. I let my hand explore her body, the tender spot at the base of her throat and the tiny line beneath her breasts and all the hidden places I wanted to seek out for my hands and my tongue. I gave myself up to her, easy, unashamed, and before it was too late, I entered her and expelled my seed.
The entire world went white. I thought I must be having one of my spells. When I came back to myself, I looked at her and she was smiling. There were no mysteries for her in what the body can achieve but she seemed pleased nonetheless. She arched her back, tossed her hair from side to side, and stretched, languorous, satisfied.
And so I had congress with a woman and it was good. This could not be sin. This was just us, a man of seventeen and a woman not much older, lying together because it was good to pleasure one another. How could this be sin? Suddenly I saw the waste and folly of all those years spilling my seed in secret, my hands hot, my body frustrate with desire. How perfectly we fit together and how easily. Only God could have found such a seamless way to join man and woman together, to reconcile Adam and Eve, if only for these few moments of perfect union. How could anyone ever have thought this sinful? I lay there praising God.
“Now let me,” she said, “fratello mio.”
“Luca,” I said.
“Luca mio,” she said.
She pushed me over on my back, and I felt the gentle weight of her great breasts as she leaned across me to trace the lines of my face. “You are too beautiful to live,” she said, and with her forefinger touched my brow softly, moving from the line of my hair to my eyebrows and then to the sockets below, her fingertips upon my eyelids, barely touching me but filling me again with desire. I took her hand and moved it down between my legs, but she said no, not yet, and returned to my face, the swell of my cheekbones and the straight line of my nose and then my lips. “Like silk,” she said, “like a baby’s lips.” She caressed them with her finger and caressed them again with her tongue. And once more I took her hand and said, “Let me do this to you, let me touch you like this, I want to touch you.”
“Later,” she said. “This is for you to remember.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t wait,” and I had her again, this time—with her assistance—slowly, patiently, prolonging the gentle agony of penetration.
We rested, wet now from our efforts, lying side by side. “Now me,” I said, but no, she was not done, and this time she caressed my arms and shoulders, my legs and my privy parts, the swell of my buttocks and the small lump of my navel, and again it was good. “Now me,” I said, and she said yes, and I began to explore the endless mysteries of a woman’s body and the special points of hers, the sweet and tender pink about the nipple, the fineness of the skin within the thigh, and the low mound of Venus, the soft hair, the tender rippling flesh that stands guard there. We made love once again, exhausted now but determined, and her flesh was like fire. In the end, it was time to leave.
“Why me?” I asked as I said goodbye.
She smiled, and adjusted my cowl and hood, and kissed me softly.
“It must have been the will of God,” she said. “Besides, you are very fair.”
The bells began to ring for the Angelus as I was about to leave the Camposino. I stopped where I was and made the sign of the cross. “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary. And
she was conceived by the Holy Ghost.” I was in a kind of daze, my mind reeling, but I said the Magnificat and the final Ave and blessed myself. Numb still, I watched while the white cat sat up, scratched beneath its chin, and settled down for another nap.
I leaned against the wall to void my bladder and, from old habit, said the Gloria to keep my mind away from sin.
CHAPTER 4
FATHER ALFONSO LISTENED to me, running his beads through his parched fingers, nodding now and then, but listening. He was an old man dying of some withering disease that had left him little more than a bag of bones held together by his leathery yellow skin. He gave off a vinegary smell that was not unpleasing. His eyes were clouded—he could scarcely see—but he listened with care to what I said. He leaned on one elbow and supported his bald head with the palm of his hand as I knelt on the floor by his side.
“I have been unkind and impatient and negligent in my prayers, Father,” I said. “I have eaten an oatcake out of the time of meals. And I have been hard in my heart against one of the older Brothers.”
“Yes.”
“For no good reason.”
“There is never a good reason to be hard of heart.”
“I kick against the goad, Father. I have not been a devoted Brother of Saint Francis.”
He said nothing.
In the silence the sharp smell of the oil lamp pricked at my nose. Outside in the dark the birds had begun their night murmuring. It was the hour after supper when we were allowed to read the lives of the saints or, if we were so inclined, the works of the Latin Fathers.
“What is it you want to confess, Brother Luca?” He knew me well.
He had grown tired of waiting and now there was no way but to say it straight out. “I have had carnal knowledge of a woman, Father,” I said, “Three times.” I paused, awaiting his response. When he said nothing, I was emboldened to speak honestly. “But I cannot see it is a sin. How can it be a sin when it is what we were made for? Here,” I made a gesture. “Why did God give us this and fit us so perfectly to a woman and not intend for us to use it? How can this be?”
The Medici Boy Page 2
