Machiavelli: The Novel

by Joseph Markulin

  Giuditta explained to Niccolo that, while the Jews were always being harassed to some extent or other, during the past year things seemed to have gotten much worse, especially for the moneylenders, and particularly for her father, who was often accused of being a leader and a sower of discord.

  “But why Spain?” Niccolo wanted urgently to know.

  “Our people are welcome there. And it’s one of the few places we can still go. We’ve been driven out of France and out of England. But in Spain we feel safe. We have communities there. Over 70,000 of us in Toledo alone!”

  “Is that where you’ll go? Toledo?”

  “Yes,” she said, sadness and resignation creeping into her voice and replacing the exuberance that had been there until now. “Toledo.”

  They reached the inn appointed for the rendezvous with no difficulty. It was a little before dawn, but already the small party of Jews could be seen in the courtyard, making their hasty preparations to leave. There were perhaps a dozen men and women, and a few children. Niccolo recognized no one except the ancient blind Hungarian, Magda, who sat stone-faced astride a mule, her head lifted into the wind, her white hair blowing back loose and disheveled.

  Giuditta spoke rapidly to the men in Hebrew. They greeted her tale with gravity and concern. Several times in the course of her story, they looked up gravely in Niccolo’s direction. They nodded.

  Less than a half hour later, the small caravan made its way out of the enclosed courtyard and onto the twisting road that followed the river down to the port. It was taking her away from him, to Pisa and far, far away, to Spain. The odd boy stood and watched it disappear into the distance. He stood there for a long time after it had vanished.

  “Addio,” she had said to him. “Good-bye—forever.”

  It rarely snows in Florence, and when it does, it rarely accumulates to any great depth. But Ash Wednesday in 1482 was an exception. Throughout the night, a fierce north wind had driven the wet snow down on the city. Now over a foot of it had been deposited in her streets and on her red roofs. By tomorrow, the unsullied white blanket would be churned to a brownish-yellow slush of straw and mud and animal shit, but for the time being, with a few fat, fluffy flakes still drifting down from the grey clouds, a soft, unnatural beauty had settled on the city. For a child, ensconced in a warm room, by a fire, and looking out over the scene, it would not be difficult to imagine what heaven must be like.

  Commerce was disrupted by the unexpected storm, and the usual flood of traffic had slowed to a trickle. Serious business had come to a standstill. The squares were transformed into playgrounds. An old man could be seen flailing at a fruit tree with a long broom, trying to knock the heavy snow off the branches lest they break under the added weight.

  One of the few citizens who had braved the weather and wished he hadn’t was young Niccolo Machiavelli. It was hard going for him in the snow. It stuck to his feet and impeded his progress. It transformed his usual energetic gait into a less-than-steady plodding. He cursed the cold that had turned his ears and hands beet red. He cursed the icy wetness that had seeped through the leather soles of his boots, through his thick woolen hose, through his skin, to the very bone. He cursed the sharp, tingling pain in his toes that made every step a feat almost beyond human endurance.

  But most of all, he cursed his nose. He had felt fine that morning and hadn’t even given a second thought to going out in the snow. By midmorning, however, he had succumbed to the most ferocious cold imaginable. His eyes were swollen and watery. From his nose ran a steady stream of fluid that he could not staunch, no matter how hard he tried. His handkerchief had long since been rendered useless.

  His nose had been rubbed raw, and he could scarcely bear to touch it. In his desperation, he had recourse to blowing it through his fingers, not into his hand, which would have been unspeakably vulgar, but he did it when no one was looking.

  Niccolo shook his head, and through his labored breathing, muttered to himself, “How? How can one man’s head be filled with that much fluid?” It was a thought that occurred to him frequently when he suffered from colds. And suffer he did. To make matters worse, his tutor, having perceived the acute discomfort of his pupil, had turned his merciless humor upon him. He tormented him with admonitions not to wipe his nose on his sleeve as loutish boys did. Rising to the full height of his wicked genius, he took down a small and little-used book on manners and gave it to Niccolo for the day’s translation exercises.

  To his tutor’s endless delight, poor, sniffling Niccolo was constrained to translate into Latin sentences that, by alluding to his predicament, made his suffering all the more unbearable. He began with this one from Bonvicino da Riva’s Fifty Table Courtesies: “When you blow your nose or cough, turn round so that nothing falls on the table.”

  Other lessons that Niccolo learned that day included valuable wisdom like the following, “A peasant wipes his nose on his cap and coat, a sausage maker on his arm and elbow.” The final, ignominious blow was an insulting passage from an anonymous sage on the proper use of handkerchiefs, “You should not offer your handkerchief to anyone unless it has been freshly washed. . . . Nor is it seemly, after wiping your nose, to spread out your handkerchief and to peer into it as if rubies and pearls might have fallen from your head.”

  “Why didn’t I stay home on this dismal, wretched day?” he thought. “Why did I go to all this trouble just to attend my lessons? To learn what? The Latin word for ‘snot’?”

  Although it was almost midday, it seemed to be getting colder, rather than warming up. Niccolo pulled his cap down farther over his ears and forehead, completely covering the black smudge there that reminded him and everybody else that he was dust and to dust he would return. With his head full of phlegm and the accumulated wisdom of the ages on the various ways of discharging it, Niccolo slogged along numbly through the wet snow, oblivious to everything in the outside world but the biting cold.

  A disturbance up ahead attracted his attention. What he saw was a friar who had slipped and fallen in the snow. To make matters worse, the hapless fellow was not only prostrate and apparently incapable of rising, but he was being pelted with snowballs. The source of this barrage was two ragged waifs who seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely at the unfortunate cleric’s expense.

  Niccolo’s sense of justice was outraged. This would never do. “Get off! Leave him alone!” he barked at the youthful offenders. His answer was a cold shot to the left side of the face that took him squarely in the eye. “You little shits!” he hissed, angry now. “I’ll kill you.” Oblivious to numb feet and hands, Niccolo rushed straight at them, scooping up handfuls of snow, packing it and hurling it in front of him all in one motion. Forgetting the monk they had been gleefully abusing, they turned to face the older boy, but their volleys could not keep him at bay. He was charging them headlong. They fell back, but Niccolo was on them. One, he grabbed by the scruff of the neck. The other managed to escape and stood hooting obscenities from a safe distance.

  The anger died in Niccolo as quickly as it had welled up. He could not bring himself to hit his dirty-faced little prisoner. “Go on, get out of here and leave him alone,” he said, releasing the smaller boy and giving him a sound kick in the rear to speed him on his way. Niccolo threw a half-hearted snowball at their backs as they beat a quick, disorderly retreat. Then he turned to offer his assistance to the victim of the unprovoked attack.

  The friar had struggled into a sitting position, but that was it. He thanked Niccolo for his help in beating off his assailants and gratefully took the hand extended to him by his deliverer. When he had regained his feet, he winced, sucking in sharply. A less holy man might have cursed. “I think I’ve bruised my hip,” he said.

  For his part, Niccolo was surprised to find how easily he had been able to lift the fallen holy man—he weighed next to nothing. And he noticed that the friar’s hand, which he now held in his own, was small and thin, with long fingernails like a woman’s hand.

  Yet,
despite the slightness of his frame and his apparent fragility, the man was not wearing heavy clothing and, most astonishing, did not seem to be bothered in the least by the penetrating cold. He was clad in the white habit and cowl of the Dominican order, but the cloth was thin and hung loosely on him—and it was soaked through with freezing water! The black mantle he wore over the habit was more of a badge or decoration—the sign of his order—than a proper piece of clothing, and would have as much effect against the cold as his rosary or his scapular.

  By contrast, with the heat of battle starting to desert him, Niccolo was shivering again. “You’re not cold, frate?” he asked incredulously. “You’re not freezing?”

  “The cold doesn’t bother me,” said the friar. “There are worse torments than those of the flesh. My small, unworthy sacrifices, I offer up to the glory of God.”

  “A zealot,” thought Niccolo, who had, by now, received a thorough indoctrination in the folly of zealotry from his skeptical and irreverent tutor. And shaking his head, he helped the friar brush off some of the wet, caked snow that still clung to his habit.

  “Well,” said Niccolo. “What are we standing here for? We should get you somewhere where you can dry off. You’re going to catch your death in those wet clothes.”

  “I was looking for the monastery of San Marco. Is it far from here?”

  “No, not far,” said Niccolo, and then out of pity and against his better judgment, “I’ll take you there if you like. It’s up this way.”

  Niccolo sized up the man he had saved from possible martyrdom. His voice was high-pitched, and distracted, as if it were coming from far away. His face—God, he was ugly! All nose and eyebrows. His long, wet hair hung in scraggly strands and, taken together with the wet clothing on his scrawny frame, made him look like an animal recently saved from drowning.

  They set off, the friar walking, or rather hopping, like a bird. Whether it was his hip injury or his habitual way of walking, Niccolo could not tell. To his horror, he discovered further proof of his charge’s zealotry. As they made their way up the narrow, snow-covered street, Niccolo discerned the monk’s feet occasionally peeping out from under his habit. Sandals! Bare feet in sandals! In the snow! He winced, trying to imagine the unimaginable pain. Better not to even think about it. Offer it up. He shuddered.

  “You don’t know the city?” asked Niccolo.

  “This is my first time in Florence. I was sent by the order to preach the Lenten sermons at San Marco, at the church there,” said the man in his reedy, uneven voice. This piece of information was the cause of some chagrin to Niccolo.

  That morning, he had faithfully promised his mother that, no matter what, he would accompany her to church in the evening. His father never went. “Church is for women and children,” he was fond of saying. Niccolo had already been thinking how miserable the evening was going to be with his runny nose, with his coughing and sneezing. The churches were cold, bone-chillingly cold. That was all bad enough. But now, it seemed that this awkward, drowned rat of a monk was the one his mother had been talking about, the “new priest sent to preach the Lenten sermons at San Marco.” He was going to have to stand there and occasionally kneel there on the cold stone floor, to listen to this Saint Stephen of the snowballs preach in his faraway, pious tones—a man who didn’t know enough not to go barefoot in the snow! “Oh well,” thought Niccolo resignedly, offer this one up too.

  “How did you wind up at the mercy of those two little monsters?” asked Niccolo, more for the sake of conversation than out of any real desire to know.

  “I’m afraid I lost my way and passed by them several times, first going this way, then that, then back again. I must have seemed a ridiculous figure to them, lost and helpless. They taunted me, and when I slipped and fell, they couldn’t resist making fun of me. Then the snowballs. But no harm was done, really, and I hold no grudge against them. It’s not their fault.”

  “Not their fault,” cried Niccolo, indignant. “They’re little animals! They’ll grow up to be criminals!”

  “Perhaps,” replied the friar, “without benefit of instruction, without moral guidance and direction, without examples of worthy behavior, but they are children of God . . .”

  “Children of God?” Niccolo interrupted him. “More like spawn of the devil. Blackguards!”

  “And you’re thinking you must be better than they?” The friar’s eyes turned on Niccolo. There was an unexpected sternness in them. A fierce glare flashed. There was a sudden power in those eyes, just as there must be steel in that slight body and those fragile limbs to be able to withstand the cold without quaking and shivering. Power or madness. Niccolo backed off from the argument.

  The monk raised a finger in warning to Niccolo, “Let he who is without fault cast the first stone,” he said in tones of dire, priestly reproach. “Or the first snowball, as the case may be,” he added, blithely, dissolving the tension between them. “Anyway, I should be thanking you and not preaching to you. So come now, accept my thanks.”

  “Accepted, Father,” said Niccolo, using the honorific “Father,” since he realized the friar was also a priest who had received holy orders.

  “You needn’t call me ‘Father,’ my son,” he corrected. “‘Brother’ will do. Call me Frate Girolamo.”

  “Alright, Frate Girolamo,” said Niccolo, “Here we are. That’s the church of San Marco, at the end of the piazza. The chapter house is just around the corner, in back.”

  The scrawny friar stopped, staring up in awe at the magnificent church. He had never before preached in a place so sumptuous, so grandiose, so big. “Are you sure this is San Marco?” he asked Niccolo, a little flustered. “I was expecting a more humble parish.”

  “This isn’t Venice, Frate. There’s only one San Marco here, and that’s it, right in front of you,” said Niccolo.

  “Why, the order must have made some sort of mistake, sending me here,” said the friar with a look of obvious consternation on his face. “I’m not accustomed to anything like this. It’s . . . It’s . . . so majestic.”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll do just fine,” said Niccolo, not believing it for a minute. He felt genuinely sorry for the pious, little man. That small, piping voice would never be able to fill the cavernous interior of San Marco.

  Niccolo led the dazed friar around to the monastery where the monks lived and showed him the entrance. He left him there, knocking feebly at the door. On his way back across the piazza, Niccolo turned and looked at the poor man, slumped in his humility, waiting patiently for someone to let him in. Then the door opened and the monastery swallowed him up.

  As Niccolo left the piazza and turned onto the Via Larga, he was greeted by a snowball that almost knocked his cap off. The two little monsters were blocking his way. That, in itself, would not have been cause for alarm, but with them were three considerably larger monsters, the kind of rough and sullen boys who made Niccolo edgy. Their ragged clothing revealed taut, bulging arms and chests. Their malicious grins showed many missing teeth. There was nothing dubious about their intentions.

  “Get him!” squealed one of the little monsters. “Get him! Get him! He kicked me! I want him.” Niccolo knew that if they did get him, it would not stop with snowballs.

  Seeing that the odds were overwhelmingly against him, Niccolo ran. But with wet boots, aching feet, and the snow, he knew he would not get far. Besides, there was the danger of slipping, and if he fell, they would be on him. He hated to think of the consequences. He was willing to bet those missing teeth were not the result of gum disease or natural causes. These people played rough. They would not listen to reason. “An eye for an eye, and yes, a tooth for a tooth. And then some,” he thought.

  The church of San Marco was right in front of him. He made directly for it. A vague notion of the ancient right of sanctuary crossed his mind. He would be safe in the church. Nobody could touch you in a church. They wouldn’t dare come after him. In a less excited frame of mind, Niccolo might have remembered
that some of the most treacherous and grisly murders in recent memory had taken place in the churches of Florence.

  He took the steps two at a time and prayed that the smaller door off to the right-hand side would be open. The monsters were closing in on him fast, and he knew he couldn’t make the main entrance. He pushed, the door gave, and he was inside. A volley of snowballs slammed into the door just as it closed behind him. Thump, thump, thump, thwack! The monsters were the kind of boys who put rocks in snowballs. But Niccolo had guessed right. Whether from piety or superstition, they had not followed him into the church. They had stopped short, at the foot of the steps, and were yelling at him. Vigliacco! Scoglionato! Chicken-shit coward! The snowballs, hurled in anger and frustration, continued to fly.

  When the noise had died down, Niccolo opened the door a crack and peered out. The monsters were still there, and their jeering began anew. Niccolo, feeling that he was out of danger now, stepped partway outside. Holding the door ajar with one foot, he made a fist with his right hand and brought it up sharply and defiantly, slapping his left hand into the crook of the arm. Up your ass! That was the only language they understood. A furious barrage of snowballs forced him back into the vestibule of the church.

  He kept watch through the crack for a few minutes, but the little monsters and their escort of thugs showed no sign of leaving. He would have to wait them out. Damn! He was tired. He was hungry. And he was freezing. His nose was running again. He looked at the boys outside who were effectively holding him prisoner, and he cursed them. Ragged animals—they probably wiped their noses on their sleeves—even worse, on the tablecloth.