The Enchantress of Florence

by Salman Rushdie

  It was in this period that il Machia submitted his little book to Lorenzo’s court. He never heard a word of thanks, appreciation, criticism, or even simple acknowledgment of receipt, nor was any copy of the book found among Lorenzo’s effects after his death. A story briefly made the rounds about how Lorenzo had laughed contemptuously when the book was handed to him and thrown it to one side. “The failure presumes to lecture the prince on how the prince should succeed,” he said with heavy sarcasm. “Obviously, this is a book I must commit to memory at once.” Then, after his courtiers’ laughter subsided he added, eliciting a second wave of deferential guffaws, “Of one thing we may be sure. If this Niccolò Mandragola’s name is remembered at all, it will be as a comedian, not a thinker.” This story reached Ago Vespucci’s ears, but he was too kind to repeat it to his friend. As a result Niccolò hoped for a reply for many months. When it became clear that no reply would be given, il Machia entered a steeper decline. As for the little book, he put it to one side, and did not offer it for publication in his lifetime.

  In the spring of 1519 Lorenzo made his move. He sent Argalia off to chase the French around Lombardy, where the Turk of Florence engaged François I’s men in battle in various parts of the province of Bergamo. In Argalia’s absence Lorenzo staged a great joust in the Piazza di Santa Croce, an event closely modeled on the joust in honor of Simonetta Vespucci at which the elder Giuliano de’ Medici had carried a banner extolling the loveliness of la sans pareille. Qara Köz was invited to sit in the place of honor on the royal platform, beneath a blue canopy decorated with golden lilies, and Lorenzo rode up to her and unfurled a new banner, this one bearing her likeness painted by del Sarto; but the words were the same. La sans pareille. “I dedicate these events to our city’s queen of beauty, Angelica of Florence and Cathay,” Lorenzo proclaimed. Qara Köz remained impassive, declining to throw him any sort of scarf or kerchief as a favor for him to wear, and the rising color in the Duke’s cheeks betrayed his humiliated anger. There were about sixteen jousters, soldiers who had remained behind to guard the city, and there were two prizes, a palio made of gold brocade and another of silver. The Duke did not enter the lists, but came to sit beside Qara Köz and did not speak to her until after the prizes had been won.

  There was a banquet at the Palazzo Medici after the games, at which there was zuppa pavese to drink, and peacocks to eat, and pheasants from Chiavenna, and Tuscan partridges, and oysters from Venice. There was pasta made in the Arab way with much sugar and cinnamon, while all dishes involving the flesh of the swine, such as fagioli with pork skins, were avoided out of consideration for the sensibilities of the guest of honor. There was quince jam from Reggio, marzipan from Siena, and good Florentine caci marzolini, that is to say, March cheese. Great heaps of tomatoes made the finest of table decorations. After the feasting there were orations by poets and intellectuals on the subject of love, as there had been at Agathon’s feast, which was recorded in the Symposium of Plato. Lorenzo concluded this part of the festivities by reciting certain choice words from the Symposium itself. “Love will make men dare to die for their beloved—love alone,” he declaimed, “and women as well as men. Of this, Alcestis, the daughter of Pelias, is a monument to all Hellas; for she was willing to lay down her life on behalf of her husband, when no one else would.” When he sat down with a thump Qara Köz asked him about his selection. “Why speak of death,” she said, “when we are in the midst of pleasant life?”

  Lorenzo shocked her by addressing her in the harshest language possible. He had been drinking heavily, and it was well known that he had no head for wine. “Death, madam, is never so far away as you imagine,” he said. “And who can say what may be asked of you before long.” She became very still and silent then, understanding that her destiny was about to speak to her through her loutish youth of a host. “Before a flower dies,” he said, “its perfume fades. And your aroma, madam, has faded considerably, has it not.” It was not a question. “There is little talk now of heavenly music playing in your vicinity, or of glorious healings, or wonderful pregnancies in barren wombs. Not even our most credulous citizens, not even the starving ones who eat bread flavored with herbs that cause hallucinations just to take their mind off their hunger, not even the beggars who eat rotten food and poisonous plants so often that they see demons every night, are talking about your magical powers anymore. Where are your spells now, madam, where now your intoxicating perfumes that turned all men’s minds to amorous thoughts? It seems that the enchantments of even the most beautiful woman may fade with, how should one put this?—with age.”

  Qara Köz was twenty-eight years old, but there was an exhaustion in her that had dimmed her light, and a tautness, too, for private reasons which Lorenzo identified correctly and brutally. “Even at home,” he whispered theatrically, “things may have dwindled, eh. Six years together in Florence and some before, and yet you have no children. People wonder about your own barrenness. Physician, heal thyself.” Qara Köz began to rise. Lorenzo II’s hand came down hard on her forearm, pinning it to the arm of her chair. “How long will your protector protect you if you do not give him a son?” he asked. “That is to say, if he even returns from the wars.”

  In that instant she understood that an act of treachery had been planned, that some individual or group under Argalia’s command had agreed to betray him in return for some promised preferment, which might turn out to be a secret knife in the ribs or a public execution. One betrayal often deserved another. “You will never kill him while his own men are around him,” she said faintly, and at that moment there rose up before her eyes, like a prophecy, the face of Konstantin the Serb. “What did you promise him,” she asked, “that after all these years of friendship he should agree to do so foul a thing?” Lorenzo leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “Everything he could imagine,” he cruelly replied. So she had been the bribe, and Konstantin, who had guarded her so closely for so long, had been corrupted by that proximity into hungering after a more intimate nearness, and there it was. She was Argalia’s doom. “He won’t do it,” she said. Lorenzo’s hold on her forearm grew tighter. “Well, even if he does, princess,” he said, “he need not get his reward.” Yes, she understood. Here it was then, her fate. “Let’s just suppose that the men come from battle bearing their dead commander on his shield,” the man beside her was murmuring. “Dreadful tragedy, of course, a burial among the city’s heroes, and at least a month of mourning. But just suppose that by the time of his return we had moved you and your lady-in-waiting and all your possessions from the Via Porta Rossa to the Via Largo. Just suppose you were here, as my guest, seeking consolation in your time of horrible grief. Imagine what I would do to the coward who murdered the champion of Florence, your beloved, my friend. You could describe to me the tortures you would prefer us to use, and I would guarantee that he would be kept alive until he had experienced them all to the full.”

  Music struck up. There was to be dancing now. She was to dance a pavana with the assassin of her hopes. “I must think,” she said, and he bowed. “Of course,” he said, “but think quickly, and before you think, you will be brought to my private rooms tonight, so that you may understand what it is you have to think about.” She stopped dancing and stood facing him. “Madam, please,” he chided her, holding out his hands until she began to step in time once again. “You are a princess of the blood royal of the house of Tamerlane and Genghis Khan. You know how the world works.”

  She returned home with the Mirror that night after demonstrating that she did indeed understand the workings of the world. “Angelica, what had to be done has been done,” she said. “Now, Angelica, let us be ready to die,” the Mirror replied. This was the code phrase which she and the princess had settled on long ago, and its meaning was that it was time to move on, to shed one life and find the next, to use the escape plan and disappear. To set the plan in motion, the Mirror in a long hooded cloak would have to slip out by the tradesmen’s entrance after the city was asleep, and
make her way down the narrow lane behind the Palazzo Cocchi del Nero, and then wind her way through the city to the Ognissanti district, until she found herself at Ago Vespucci’s door. But to her surprise Qara Köz shook her head. “We will not leave,” she said, “until my husband comes home alive.” She had no power over life and death, and was relying instead on a power she had never trusted before: that of love.

  The next day the river had run dry. The city was full of the news that Lorenzo de’ Medici was mortally ill, and even though nobody said it aloud everybody knew that the illness was the dreadful morbo gallico, which was to say syphilis. The lack of water in the Arno was seen as a dire omen. Lorenzo’s doctors were attending to him around the clock, but so many Florentines had died of this disease since it had first appeared in Italy twenty-three years earlier that few people expected their Duke to survive. As usual, half the city blamed the sickness on French soldiers while the other half held that Christopher Columbus’s sailors had brought it home from their voyages, but Qara Köz wasn’t concerned about such tittle-tattle. “This has happened more rapidly than I foresaw,” she told the Mirror, “which means it is only a matter of time before suspicion falls on me.” This would have struck many people as a strange remark, because Qara Köz was not syphilitic, as a medical examination would have proved, nor did she contract syphilis at any later date. But the fact was that nobody had suspected Lorenzo II of having been infected either, which made the sudden onset of the illness in its most aggressive form all the more remarkable. And so it was a suspicious case, and in such a case a suspect—or at the very least a scapegoat—had to be found. Who knows how things would have worked out, if Argalia the Turk had not come home alive.

  The night before he returned she slept poorly but when sleep did come she dreamed of her sister. On a blue carpet edged in a pattern of red and gold, with a red and gold diamond at the carpet’s center, inside a large tented pavilion of red and gold cloth, Khanzada Begum sat staring at a man whom she did not recognize, dressed in cream silk clothes with a pink and green shawl thrown across his shoulders and on his head a turban in pale blue and white and a little gold. I am your brother Babar, the stranger said. She looked into his face but her brother was not there. I don’t think so, she said. The man turned to a second man sitting a little to one side. Kukultash, he said, who am I? Sire, the second man said, you are Zahiruddin Muhammad Babar, as surely as we are sitting in Qunduz. Khanzada Begum answered, why should I believe him any more than you? I know no Kukultash. The brother and sister continued to sit in that tent, she waited upon by her maidservants, he guarded by soldiers carrying spears and bows. There was no emotion displayed. The lady did not know her brother. She had not seen him for ten years. Qara Köz understood even while she was dreaming that she was all the people in the dream. She was her sister who, having been torn away from her family, could not find the pathways of memory and love that would allow her to return. She was her brother Babar, who was both ferocious and poetic, who could sever men’s heads and extol the beauty of a woodland glade on the same afternoon, but who had no country, no land to call his own, who was still wandering the world, battling for space, taking places, losing them again, now marching in triumph into Samarkand, now into Kandahar, and now he was chased out of them again; Babar running, running, trying to find the ground upon which he could stand still. And she was Kukultash, Babar’s friend, and the maids-in-waiting, and the soldiers, she was floating outside herself and watching her own story as if it were happening to someone else, without feeling anything, without permitting herself to feel. She was her mirror as well as herself.

  Then the dream changed. The canopies and cupolas of the tent hardened into red stone. What was transient, portable, mutable was all of a sudden permanent and fixed. A stone palace on a hill and her brother Babar taking his ease on a stone dais at the center of a rectilinear pool, a beautiful pool, a pool without peer. He was so rich that when he felt generous he could empty the pool and fill it with money instead and let his people come and scoop up his largesse. He was rich, and at ease, and had not just a pool but a kingdom. But he was not Babar. He was not her brother. She did not recognize him. He was a man she did not know.

  “I have seen the future, Angelica,” she told the Mirror when she awoke. “The future is set in stone, and my brother’s descendant is an emperor beyond compare. We are water, we can turn into air and vanish like smoke, but the future is wealth and stone.” She would wait for the future to arrive. Then she would return to her old life, be rejoined to it, and made whole. She would do better than Khanzada. She would not fail to recognize the king.

  There had been a woman in the dream, seen from behind, a woman with long yellow hair worn loose about her shoulders, seated opposite the king, talking, wearing a long garment made up of lozenges of many different colors. And another woman indoors, who never saw the sunlight, who wandered the palace corridors like a shade, now fading, now strengthening, now fading again. This part of the dream was unclear.

  Qara Köz understood about suppressing the emotions. Ever since she had been taken to Lorenzo II’s private quarters she had permitted herself no feelings. He had done what he had intended to do and she too had carried out her intentions, in cold blood. After her return to the Palazzo Cocchi del Nero she remained perfectly cool and calm. The Mirror scurried about packing up a couple of cassoni, the large chests in which women normally packed their trousseaux, getting ready for a quick departure, even if her mistress was determined to stay. Qara Köz waited by an open window in the grand salon, allowing the city’s talk to drift up to her on the breeze. It was not long before she heard the word she had known would be spoken, the word that made it unsafe for her to remain. Still she made no attempt to depart.

  Witch. She bewitched him. He lay with the witch and sickened and died. He was not sick before. Witchcraft. She gave him the Devil’s disease. Witch, witch, witch.

  Lorenzo II was dead by the time the militia returned from the victory at Cisano Bergamasco, marching in good order in spite of the consternation caused in the ranks by Konstantin the Serb’s attempt to murder the gran condottiere General Argalia in the heat of the battle. Along with six of his fellow Janissaries, armed with matchlock muskets, pikes, and swords, Konstantin made a cowardly attack on the general’s position from the rear. The first bullet caught Argalia in the shoulder and unhorsed him, accidentally saving his life, because after that there were horses all around the fallen captain and the mutineers could not reach him. The three remaining Swiss giants turned away from the enemy in front to do battle with the traitors behind, and after strenuous hand-to-hand combat the insurgency was quelled. Konstantin the Serb was dead, with a Swiss pike through his heart, but Botho had fallen too. By nightfall the battle against the French had been won but Argalia took no pleasure from the victory. Of his original band of men fewer than seventy remained alive.

  As they approached the city they saw flames rising everywhere, as they had on the day of the Pope’s election, and Argalia sent a rider ahead at speed to find out what was happening. The scout returned with the news that the Duke was dead and the leaderless citizens were inclined to blame Qara Köz for having cursed him with a hex of such potency that it had eaten his body away like a hungry animal, starting with the genitals and working outward from there. Argalia instructed Otho, one of the two remaining, broken-hearted Swiss brothers, to lead the militia back to its barracks at a quick march. Gathering Clotho and the remaining Janissaries around him, and ignoring his wounded right arm in its sling, he galloped home upon the wind. For indeed there was a wind that night, and they saw olive trees uprooted by it, and oaks flung aside as though they were little saplings, and walnut trees, cherry trees, and alders, so that as they rode it seemed that a forest was flying through the air alongside them; and as they neared the city they heard a great tumult, such as only the people of Florence knew how to make. However, this was no tumult of joy. It was as if every man in the city had turned werewolf and was howling at the moon.r />
  What a short journey from enchantress to witch. Only yesterday she had been the city’s unofficial patron saint. Now there was a mob gathering at her door. “The back door is still open, Angelica,” the Mirror said. “Angelica, we will wait,” she replied. She was sitting in an upright chair by the side of a window in the grand salon, looking out at an angle, seeing without being seen. Invisibility was her fate. She remained calm. Then she heard the horses’ hoofs and rose to her feet. “He is here.” And he was.

  Outside the Cocchi del Nero palace the Via Porta Rossa widened into a little square around which the Davizzi palace and the tower houses of the Foresi also stood. Argalia and the Janissaries, riding toward the square, were slowed by the gathering throng of witch-hunters. But they were determined, and heavily armed, and people let them pass. When they reached the palace façade the Janissaries cleared a space and when they were sure it was secure the doors were opened. A voice in the crowd shouted out, “Why do you protect the witch?” Argalia ignored it. Then the same voice shouted, “Who do you serve, condottiere, the people or your own lust? Do you serve the city and its hexed Duke, or are you in thrall to the hag who hexed him?” Argalia wheeled his horse around to face the crowd. “I serve her,” he said, “as I always have and will.” Then with around thirty men he rode into the inner courtyard, leaving Clotho in charge of operations outside. The riders halted around the well in the center of the courtyard, and the silent palace was full of noises, the whinnying of animals, the clatter of weapons and clamor of men shouting orders and replies. The servants of the household rushed out to offer drink and nourishment to the riders and their mounts. And now Qara Köz, like a woman waking from sleep, all of a sudden understood her danger. She stood at the head of the flight of stairs rising up from the courtyard and Argalia stood below her looking up. His skin was as white as death.