The Enchantress of Florence

by Salman Rushdie

  This statement went down well with the listening mob—which was also mightily impressed by the news that their new protector had been on the winning side in that already legendary battle—and loud cheers rose up in honor of the princess, making any further objections to her presence impossible. Duke Giuliano, recovering skillfully from his surprise and discomfiture, held up a hand for silence. “When such a great visitor comes to Florence,” he cried out, “Florence must rise to the occasion, and Florence will.”

  The Palazzo Cocchi del Nero possessed one of the most magnificent grand salons in the city, a room twenty-three feet wide and fifty-three feet long with a ceiling height of twenty feet, lit by five immense leaded-glass windows, a room in which to entertain on the most lavish scale possible. The principal bedroom, the so-called Nuptial Chamber, boasted a frescoed frieze on all four walls illustrating a romantic poem by Antonio Pucci based on an old Provençal love story, and was a room in which two (or even three) lovers might while away entire days and nights without ever feeling the need to rise or leave the house. In other words, this was a mansion in which Qara Köz could have behaved like all the great ladies of Florence, remaining apart from the common people, sequestering herself from all but the finest folks in town. This was not, however, how the princess chose to spend her time.

  It was plain that both she and her Mirror were relishing their new unveiled existence. By day the princess went out to walk the thronging streets, going to market or simply seeing the sights, with the Mirror as her companion and only Konstantin the Serb to protect her, deliberately making herself visible as no great lady of Florence had ever allowed herself to be. The Florentines loved her for it. “Simonetta Due,” they called her at first, Simonetta the Second, and then, after hearing the name she and the Mirror used for each other, interchangeably, “Angelica the First.” They threw flowers at her feet wherever she went. And slowly her fearlessness shamed the city’s young women of breeding into following her out of doors. Breaking with tradition, they began to come out of an evening to promenade in twos and fours, to the delight of the city’s young gentlemen, who finally had good reason to stay away from the bordellos. The city’s whorehouses began to empty, and the so-called “eclipse of the courtesans” began. The Pope in Rome, appreciating the sudden shift in the public morality of his hometown, wondered aloud to Duke Giuliano, who was paying a visit to the Eternal City, whether the dark princess, who claimed not to be a Christian, might actually be the Church’s newest saint. Giuliano, a religious man, repeated this to a courtier and then the pamphleteers of Florence recounted the anecdote to the whole town. No sooner had Leo X speculated in this fashion about Qara Köz’s possibly divine nature than reports of her miracles began.

  Many of those who saw her walking the streets claimed to have heard, playing all around her, the crystal music of the spheres. Others swore that they had seen a halo of light around her head, bright enough to be visible even in the hot glare of the day. Barren women came up to Qara Köz and asked her to touch their bellies, and then told the world how they had conceived children that very night. The blind saw, the lame walked; only an actual resurrection from the dead was missing from the accounts of her magical deeds. Even Ago Vespucci joined the ranks of the miracle-mongers, claiming that her blessing upon his vineyards, which she had graciously visited, had brought forth the finest vintage his family had ever produced; and he undertook to bring a free supply of the wine to the Palazzo Cocchi del Nero once a month.

  In short, Qara Köz unveiled—as “Angelica”—had come into the fullness of her womanly powers and was exerting the full force of those capacities upon the city, misting the air with a benevolent haze which filled the thoughts of Florentines with images of parental, filial, carnal, and divine love. Anonymous pamphleteers declared her to be the reincarnation of the goddess Venus. Subtle perfumes of reconciliation and harmony filled the air, people worked harder and more productively, the quality of family life improved, the birth rate rose, and all the churches were full. On Sundays in the Basilica of San Lorenzo the Medici clan heard sermons extolling the virtues not only of the heads of their mighty family but of their new visitor as well, a princess not only of faraway Indy or Cathay, but of our own Florence too. It was the bright time of the enchantress. But the darkness would come soon enough.

  People’s heads were full of imaginary enchantresses in those days, for example Alcina, the evil sister of Morgana le Fay, in alliance with whom she persecuted her other sister, the good witch Logistilla, the daughter of Love; and Melissa the enchantress of Mantua; and Dragontina the captor of the knight Orlando; and Circe of ancient times, and the unnamed but fearsome Sorceress of Syria. The witch as ugly old monster, the hag, had given way, in Florentine fancy, to these gorgeous creatures, their wild hair denoting their loose morals, their powers of seduction well-nigh irresistible, their magic used sometimes in the service of Good, at other times to do harm. After the arrival of Angelica in the city the idea of the good enchantress, the beneficent, supranormal being, who was both goddess of love and guardian of the people, took firm hold. There she was in the Mercato Vecchio, after all, large as life—“Try these pears, Angelica!”—“Angelica, these plums are succulent!”—no fiction, but a flesh and blood woman. So she was adored, and believed to be capable of great things. But the distance between enchantress and witch was still not so great. There were still voices that suggested that this new incarnation of the Woman-wizard through whom the occult powers of all women were unleashed was a disguise, and that the true faces of such females were still the fearsome ones of old, the lamia, the crone.

  Those skeptics who by virtue of their sour temperament resist a supernatural account of events may prefer more conventional explanations for the time of golden contentment and material prosperity that Florence enjoyed in those days. Under the benignly tyrannical aegis of Pope Leo X, Florence’s true master, and either a man of genius or a fatuous fool, depending on how you saw it, the city’s fortunes thrived, its enemies retreated, etc., etc., quite so. Were you a naysayer of such jaundiced stripe, the Pope’s meeting with the King of France after the battle of Marignano, his alliances and treaties, the new territories he carved out or purchased and gave into Florentine care, from which the city benefited greatly; or his naming of Lorenzo de’ Medici as Duke of Urbino; or his arrangement of Giuliano de’ Medici’s wedding to Princess Filiberta of Savoy, after which the King of France, François I, awarded him the Dukedom of Nemours, and perhaps whispered in his ear that Naples, too, would soon be his…all this would be at the forefront of your thoughts.

  Let it be conceded to such dry-as-dust quibblers: yes, undoubtedly the power of the papacy was very great. As was the power of the King of France, and the King of Spain, and the Swiss army, and the Ottoman Sultan, and all of these were constantly engaged in conflicts, marriages, reconciliations, renunciations, victories, defeats, machinations, diplomacies, purchases and sales of favors, tax levies, intrigues, compromises, vacillations, and the devil knows what else. All of which activity is, fortunately, quite beside the point.

  After a time Qara Köz showed signs of physical and spiritual enervation. Perhaps the Mirror was the first to recognize these signs, for she watched her mistress every minute of every day: so she would have noticed the faintest tightness in the corners of that sensuous mouth, seen the tension clutching at the muscles of her dancer’s arms, tended to the headaches, uncomplainingly suffered the moments of irritability. Or perhaps it was Argalia the Turk who first worried about her, because for the first time in their romance she started turning away from his advances, asking the Mirror to pleasure him instead. I don’t feel like it. I’m too tired. My sexual urges have ebbed. Don’t take it personally. Why can’t you understand that. You are already who you are, mightiest of warlords, you have nothing to prove. Whereas I am just trying to become what I have it in me to be. How can you love me and not understand. That is not love, it is selfishness. Love’s banal declension through squabbling toward an end. He did n
ot want to believe their love might be failing. He did not believe it. He put it out of his mind. Theirs was the love story of the age. It could not end in pettiness.

  Duke Giuliano also noticed something amiss in his magic mirror, into which he still stared every day, to the intense annoyance of his wife, Filiberta of Savoy. His union with Filiberta had been wholly political. The Savoyard lady was not young; neither was she beautiful. After their wedding Giuliano continued to adore Qara Köz from a distance, though it should be said, in fairness to that frail and godly man, that he never attempted to seduce her away from his great general, contenting himself with throwing, in her honor, a festa comparable only to the celebrations at the time of the Pope’s visit to Florence. Filiberta on her arrival in Florence heard the legend of the festivities for the princess of the Mogor and demanded that her new husband do at least as well by his new bride, to which Giuliano replied that such a carnival would be more appropriate when she gave him an heir. He rarely visited her bedroom, however, and his only son would be a bastard, Ippolito, who became a cardinal, as bastards sometimes do. After that rejection Filiberta hated Qara Köz deeply and when she learned of the existence of the magic mirror she hated that as well. When she heard Giuliano one day lamenting the ill health of the dark princess, Filiberta had had enough. “She isn’t well,” he said to her mournfully when she found him mooning into the magic mirror as usual. “Look at the poor girl. She ails.” Filiberta shouted, “I’ll make her ail,” and threw a silver-backed hairbrush at the magic mirror, smashing the glass. “I’m not well,” she said. “To tell you the complete truth, I have never felt so terrible in my life. Be as solicitous of my health as you are of hers.”

  The truth was that Qara Köz was overdoing it, that no woman could sustain so immense an effort for long. The enchantment of forty thousand individuals, month after month, year after year, was too much, even for her. There were fewer reports of miracles, and then they ceased entirely. The Pope no longer mentioned sainthood.

  And over life and death, unlike Alanquwa the sun-goddess, she had no power. Three years after she came to Florence, it was Giuliano de’ Medici who fell ill and died. Filiberta packed her possessions, including her entire, immensely valuable trousseau, and returned at once, without ceremony, to Savoy. “Florence has fallen under the sway of a Saracen whore,” she said when she got home, “and is no place for a good Christian woman to remain.”

  { 18 }

  The incident of the lions and the bear

  The incident of the lions and the bear had occurred during the festa for Qara Köz. On the first day there was the running of the palio and the fireworks. On the second day wild beasts were released into the Piazza della Signoria, bulls, buffaloes, stags, bears, leopards, and lions, and men on horseback and lancers on foot as well as men concealed inside a giant wooden tortoise, and a wooden porcupine also, did battle with them. One man was killed by a buffalo.

  At one point the biggest male lion seized a bear by the throat and was on the point of killing him when, to general astonishment, a lioness intervened on the bear’s side and bit the male lion so hard that he released his grip on the bear. After that the bear recovered, but the other lions and lionesses ostracized the lioness who had saved him, and she wandered the crowded square disconsolately, attacking nobody, ignoring the taunts and cries of the hunters, seemingly heartbroken. In the succeeding days and months there were many disputes over the meaning of this strange event. By general consensus the lioness stood for Qara Köz, but who was the bear and who the lion? The explanation that eventually found favor, and became established as the truth, was circulated in an anonymous pamphlet whose author, unknown to all but a few Florentines, was Niccolò Machiavelli, popular playwright, disgraced man of power. The lioness had shown herself willing to interpose herself between her own species and another in the cause of peace, wrote the pamphleteer. So also the princess Qara Köz had come among them to reconcile forces that might appear irreconcilable, even if she had to oppose her own people to do so. “But unlike the lioness in the Piazza, this human lioness is not alone. She has and will always have many true friends among the bears.”

  So she became a symbol of peace, of self-sacrifice in the name of peace, for many people. There was much talk of her “Eastern wisdom,” which she dismissed when it reached her ears. “There is no particular wisdom in the East,” she said to Argalia. “All human beings are foolish to the same degree.”

  Once Qara Köz and her Mirror had left his home il Machia felt the advent of a bitter sadness that would stay with him for all his thirteen remaining years. Friends had vanished when power evicted him from its mansions, and glory was a distant memory, but the departure of great beauty from his life was the last straw. Now that the enchantress’s spell over Percussina had been broken, he saw his wife once again as a waddling duck and his children as financial burdens. He would go on making occasional excursions to other women, not only to singing Barbera but to another lady in the neighborhood, whose husband had run off without so much as a word of farewell. These visits did not cheer him up. He thought enviously more than once about that runaway husband and seriously considered disappearing himself one night, and letting his family believe that he was dead. If he had been able to formulate any sort of idea of what to do with his life after such a desertion, perhaps he would even have gone through with it. Instead, abjectly, he poured his lifetime of thought and knowledge into the short book he was writing in the hope of regaining favor at court, his little mirror-of-princes piece, such a dark mirror that even he feared it might not be liked. But surely wisdom would be prized higher than levity, and clear sight would be judged more valuable than flattery? He dedicated the book to Giuliano de’ Medici, writing the whole text out in his own hand, and when Giuliano died he did the whole thing over again for Lorenzo instead. But in his heart it was the knowledge that beauty had left him forever, that the butterfly did not settle on the withered flower, that preoccupied him the most. He had looked into her eyes and she had seen his withering, and had turned away from it. It had felt like a sentence of death.

  He had spent twenty minutes alone with Argalia in his library when the new general of Florence came to fetch his lady love. “All my life,” Argalia told him, “ever since I was a boy, my motto was, do whatever you have to do to get where you have to go. I survived by learning what served me best and following that star, beyond loyalty, beyond patriotism, beyond the borders of the known world. Myself, myself, always and only myself. This is the way of the survivor. But she has tamed me, Machia. I know what she is, because she is still the way I was. She loves me until it no longer serves her to love me. She adores me, until the time not to adore me arrives. So it is my business to make sure that time is long in coming. Because I do not love her in that way. The love I have for her knows that the well-being of the beloved matters more than that of the lover, because love is selflessness. She does not know that, I think. I would die for her, but she would not die for me.”

  “Then I hope you do not have to die for her,” Niccolò told him, “because that would be a waste of your good heart.”

  He had had a moment alone with her too, or alone with her and her Mirror, from whom she was inseparable, and who might be, il Machia surmised, her real love. He did not talk to her about matters of the heart. That would have been inappropriate, discourteous. Instead he said, “This is Florence, my lady, and you will live well here, for Florentines know how to live well. But if you are sensible, you will always know where the back door is. You will plan your escape route and keep it in good working order. For when the Arno floods all those without boats are drowned.”

  He looked out of his window and could see the red dome of the Cathedral across the fields where his tenant farmer was working. A lizard basked on a low boundary wall. He heard a golden oriole crying whee-la-whee-lo. There were oak trees and chestnut trees, cypresses and umbrella pines punctuating and organizing the landscape. In the distance, high in the sky, a buzzard banked and wheeled.
Natural beauty remained, that was undeniable; but to him the bucolic scene looked like a prison yard. “For me,” he said to Qara Köz, “alas, there is no escape.”

  He wrote to her often after that day, but he never dispatched the letters, and he only saw her once more before he died. Ago, however—Ago who still had the freedom of the city—went to call on her once a month in the Palazzo Cocchi del Nero, and she did him the favor of receiving him in the so-called Room of the Orioles next to the grand salon, so named because of the birds painted all around its formally afforested walls. He sent the wagon with the wine to the tradesmen’s entrance down the narrow lane at the back of the house but he did not enter the house as a tradesman. He put on his finest clothes, his court clothes, for which he had little use nowadays, and he strode down the Via Porta Rossa like an aging beau visiting his sweetheart, his hair, once yellow, now white and thinning, plastered down over his head, and flowers in his hand. He looked a little ridiculous, he could see that fact reflected in her overly honest eyes, but it was the best he could do. He expected nothing of her but she did ask something of him, a secret. “Will you do this for me?” she asked, and he said, “Whenever you wish.” Only the Mirror and the orioles knew what had been said.

  Giuliano de’ Medici died, Lorenzo de’ Medici became ruler of Florence as Lorenzo II, and things began to change. For three years, however, the change was not apparent. Lorenzo needed Argalia as badly as his uncle had. It was Argalia who led the men of Florence into battle against Francesco Maria, the Duke of Urbino, whom Leo X was in the process of betraying. During the Medici’s time of exile it was Francesco Maria who had sheltered them, but now they had turned upon him to seize his dukedom. He was a powerful man leading well-trained forces and even with all Argalia’s Janissaries it took three weeks to defeat him. At the end of this engagement nine of his hardened Ottoman warriors were dead. D’Artagnan, one of the four Swiss giants, was among the fallen, and the wailing grief of Otho, Botho, and Clotho was terrible to behold. After that Argalia put down the revolts of a number of barons loyal to Francesco Maria in the Marches of Ancona; and then he, Argalia the Turk, was simply too powerful for Lorenzo to be able to move against him openly.