Machiavelli: The Novel

by Joseph Markulin

  Borgia had coaxed and wheedled, trying to tease an admission out of him. He had offered huge sums of money to have the boys turned over to him. His intentions, of course, were innocent, humanitarian—he wanted to reunite them with their mother. But everyone knew better.

  The only reason Caterina was still alive is that the pope hoped to entice her children to Rome as well, using her as bait. To the Borgias, the Sforzas were a dangerous symbol of defiance in the Romagna. They represented unwillingness to submit to the yoke of the papacy. They were the spirit of independence and rebellion incarnate. As long as the Sforzas were alive, their name would be a rallying cry for the forces of sedition and a threat to Borgia hegemony. So the pope wanted them. He had more than once referred to the Sforza family as a diabolical brood of vipers, and it was an open secret that, when he got his hands on them, he had every intention of killing them, every last one.

  The realization that he was being played came crashing down on Niccolo, and he stalked furiously out of the Hall of Mirrors. “Borgia! Borgia! Borgia!” he fumed under his breath. He had eaten and slept Borgia for months, waited on Borgia’s pleasure, played Borgia’s games. And now for the space of a few brief hours, he had found relief from the overwhelming, demonical presence of Borgia in his life. And what happens? The little pleasure he had hoped to take, the small consolation—where did it come from? Who was his sultry, distracting would-be lover? A whore! A Spanish whore, paid by Borgia! A Spanish whore sent by Borgia to do Borgia’s work!

  A light rain was falling outside as Niccolo stomped across the piazza. He was filled with outrage. The fact that he was also quite drunk only added to his hostility and his inability to reason. Entering the little park in front of the palace, he tore the stupid satin mask from his face and threw it angrily in the dirt. He crushed it underfoot. Borgia’s mask.

  For about twenty minutes, Niccolo pounded up and down the gravel pathways, his hot anger gradually giving way to cold contempt. The air and the rain, too, served to cool him down and bring him back to himself. So much the better. He wanted a modicum of sangfroid to deal with this whore Borgia had sent to do his dirty work.

  Finally, he saw her coming across the deserted piazza. “She still looks good, the way she moves . . .” He shook the thought out of his head. It was the drink talking. He had resolved to deal with her brutally if need be. After all, “this is no game,” he told himself. “This is politics.”

  Stepping out from behind a tree, Niccolo blocked her path, and the shock of his sudden appearance caused her to utter a stifled cry. She recovered in an instant. He started up the path, and she followed. He rudely rebuffed her attempt to latch onto his arm. When he spoke, there was an icy viciousness in his voice: “Now tell me about your concern for the Sforza children. Or should I tell you?”

  He had stopped to face her in the torchlight. He was aware of sneering his most disdainful sneer, of radiating bitterness and scorn from every pore in his body. As he began his harangue, his posturing had its desired effect, for she stood speechless before him, paralyzed. There was not a sentence in Niccolo’s scathing verbal assault that did not contain the word, “whore.” She staggered under the weight of his unexpected indictment and stumbled back against a tree, clinging to it for support.

  She gasped and seemed to be having trouble breathing, but Niccolo did not relent. With a trembling hand, she grabbed at the mask she was wearing and pulled it down around her neck. Niccolo saw for the first time that her eyes were full of fierce emotion. Then with a dawning sense of horror, he realized why. The face staring up at him, wild-eyed with disbelief, was the dark face of his dreams, of a thousand dreams and a thousand sleepless nights. It was Giuditta.

  “You!”

  “You!”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “Holy Father Abraham!”

  “By the blessed saints in heaven!”

  “By all the Patriarchs and Prophets!”

  “You!”

  “You!”

  The conversation was at an impasse. Both stood stock still, seeking in each other’s thirty-year-old faces the outlines and ghosts of younger features. Hers had softened; his had hardened. Yet Giuditta was able to discern in the narrow face, the long, sharp nose and chin, the high cheekbones and tight mouth, an image of the boy who had once saved her life. Niccolo recognized in her the large, round eyes, full lips, and jet-black hair of the girl he knew only briefly as a child, but who had come to represent so much more to him in his lonely imagination. Only now she was an ally of Borgia. Now she was his enemy.

  That knowledge brought him no consolation, nor did it bring any ready words to the lips of the usually clever diplomat. She, too, seemed to be in the throes of utter consternation, and they might have stood there staring for a long time if the rain, which had been falling steadily and with increasing violence, had not started turning to hail. The immediate and urgent necessity of finding shelter from the storm put off, in Niccolo’s mind, at least, the decision as to whether he would conduct himself as an old friend or as a new enemy.

  The park itself was devoid of buildings, and the leafless winter trees afforded little cover. The hailstones were growing alarmingly in size and their impact on Niccolo’s hatless, recently shorn skull was beginning to prove painful. The fugitive couple had reached the extreme end of the low-walled enclosure and found not even a gate by which they might escape into the city streets beyond. It was Giuditta who first spotted the shelter, really only a roof and two walls leaning against the outer stone wall of the enclosed park. They stumbled in, tripping and picking their way over the dark objects that littered the floor of the shed, as the storm outside seemed to redouble its fury. The place was small and seemed to be almost entirely occupied by some sort of low, open cart or wagon.

  They could not see each other in the darkness, nor hear each other’s labored breathing, since the air around them was filled with the crashing of thunder and the rattling of the hard, stinging balls of ice on the clay-tile roof. A remarkably bright bolt of lightning gave Niccolo an instantaneous glimpse of her, hugging her bare shoulders and shivering in the cold blue light. Instinctively, he moved toward her and gathered her into his arms. She offered no resistance, and suddenly Niccolo forgot about treachery and the implications of politics. In his mind, in the anonymity of the darkness that surrounded them, they were the two people back at the dance again, two masked strangers willing to trust each other—if only for a little while.

  She clung to him and they both stared outside, speechless, hypnotized by the awesome spectacle of natural fury that was being unleashed. God’s wrath. Even Caesar Borgia seemed puny by comparison.

  As the warmth they generated between them rose through the wetness of their clothes, Giuditta’s shivering subsided. As her perfume reached Niccolo’s nostrils, mixed now with the smell of her hair and skin and sweat, he was aware that the storm outside had abated as quickly as it had blown up. They could go back out now. But they didn’t move. They only tightened the grip they had on each other and stood there for a long time, welded together in the darkness by the loneliness and the uncertainty of the night.

  Niccolo remembered the last time he had been this close to her, close enough to feel her breath on his face. He could almost smell the thick, sweet vinegar with which the barrel had been impregnated and feel the way he wrapped his legs around her in the cold water to keep her from drowning. When their lips met, it was not in the spirit of playfulness, like the pecking and teasing of earlier, at the dance. They were trembling the way men and women tremble in the face of something momentous and incomprehensible. Every doubt, every caution, was swept away in the wave of blind and desperate passion that engulfed them both.

  The morning brought the cold grey light of dawn, as well as the memory of ecstasy, to Niccolo Machiavelli. Like a man who has died and discovered himself in heaven, he felt no particular compulsion to stir, to open his eyes, to awake, or ever to move again. But shortly after sunrise, chased out by an irate groundskeepe
r, he found himself evicted from Eden and wandering listlessly through the still-shuttered streets of Ferrara. Wrapped half around him, as he was around her, and appearing to be sharing in his feelings of boundless goodwill was a tousled Giuditta.

  Niccolo found himself buoyed by a lightness, a giddiness that left him completely untroubled by the conflicts that had tormented him only the night before. All was calm, beautiful, and voluptuous. The ill effects of the alcohol he had consumed could not touch him. The stiffness of the joints that should have been troubling him after a damp night in the open were banished beyond the threshold of consciousness. In the back of his mind, though, a little alarm bell was going off. He ignored it, but he knew it was there. He knew that, sooner or later, reality was going to impinge on this dream and the nagging question would have to be asked—and answered: What will you tell Borgia?

  But for the time being, they strolled aimlessly through the still-deserted city. They ducked into doorways and kissed with rapturous, greedy abandon. When the shops began to open, they bought sweets and popped them into each other’s mouths—in public! Following nothing but the tug of their mutual passion, they took a tiny room and surrendered once again to each other in sweet delirium. They vowed never to leave that room until the end of time and sent out for food and wine. It was an embarrassing moment for Niccolo when the boy arrived. He had no money, and Giuditta, laughing at him, was forced to pay.

  “They keep their envoys hungry in Florence, don’t they?” she said, digging into the covered basket and extracting a mound of rich decaying, blue-veined cheese.

  “And thirsty,” said Niccolo, grabbing at the flask of wine. There were meat pies and crisp apples among the provender that had been delivered, but before discovering them, Niccolo and Giuditta’s lips and tongues met, and all thought of food was forgotten as they melted into each other’s arms to make love yet another time. It was dark when Niccolo awoke. He lay still and breathed in the intoxicating smells that were the product, not of the perfumer’s art, but of their own desires. He wound his fingers idly in the confusion of her hair. He knew the taste of her tongue, the smell of her breath. He knew the way her back curved down into her buttocks; he knew the soft weight of her breasts and her dark, swollen nipples. But what else?

  He knew she was a Jewish girl who had fled Florence many years ago and gone to Spain. And now she was in the service of the antichrist and his children. Niccolo lit a small lamp and watched her sleeping. He stared at her for a long time and he wondered to himself—“Who is she?” The flesh and blood were real, but other than that, he was sleeping with a fantasy, one that he had constructed all by himself, over the years. It occurred to him for the first time that perhaps she was doing the same. At the risk of losing all the magic and the happiness they had stumbled into, Niccolo knew it was time to talk.

  He was the first to bring the conversation down from the lofty realms of happy lovers’ babble, with its cooing and purring and pet names—tesoro, picconcina. It was a precipitous drop from, “little treasure,” or “little pigeon,” to “What business did you have with the Florentine envoy the other night? You never said.” They were seated at the table, partially clothed, eating cheese and apples.

  Giuditta did not appear to be flustered by the abruptness of the question. She went on eating cheese, crunching on an apple. “I said it was about the Sforza children,” she managed between bites.

  “But you never finished.”

  “I didn’t get a chance to. You carried me off and ravished me,” she pointed out, licking the soft cheese from her fingers in an undeniably provocative way.

  “Finish now,” he said bluntly. “What about the Sforza children?”

  “I have a message for them.”

  “And for that, you apply to the Florentines. I don’t understand.” It was the Florentine envoy talking now, not the demon-lover.

  “Well, to whom should I apply? The children are in Florence, aren’t they?”

  “No.”

  “You’re lying to me, Niccolo. How can I ever learn to trust you if you lie to me?” She said it almost impishly. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter whether you admit the children are there or not. I have a message for them. You’re the envoy. You deliver the message. It’s your duty, isn’t it? It’s as simple as that.”

  “Is that what Caesar told you?”

  “Oh, Caesar!”

  “Did he tell you to seduce me too? So the message would be more convincing?” Anger edged into Niccolo’s voice.

  Giuditta was amused by his remark, and she showed it. “You’re jumping to conclusions, aren’t you, Niccolo? At any rate, Florentine envoy, will you deliver the message? Tell them their mother wants to see them.”

  Niccolo’s eyes narrowed. “For two months, I’ve been hearing that she wants to see them. Caesar tells me almost daily how she pines for them and how everything would be so beautiful if only they would join her in Rome. They could be one big happy family again.” Flushed, Niccolo concluded, “One big happy family in the clutches of a satanical pope!”

  Giuditta laughed at him, “You don’t speak very highly of the head of your religion.”

  The remark only served to further infuriate Niccolo. “How did Caesar think you could help?” he said disdainfully. “What trap were you supposed to spring that he couldn’t? What bait were you supposed to use?” Again the word “whore” was on his lips, and he might have used it if Giuditta hadn’t interrupted him.

  “Niccolo, the message is from Caterina,” she said with a beguiling smile.

  “So that’s the new angle? A brilliant ploy! Caesar didn’t send you. She’s the one who sent you to plead personally with the Florentines! What else did Caterina say?”

  “That you were an enthusiastic, but nervous lover.”

  Niccolo’s jaw dropped.

  “I really did come from Caterina, brontolone! Not Caesar. Do you believe me now?”

  “I want to, but it doesn’t make any sense. Why does Caterina want the children to come to Rome? She knows as well as anyone, they’ll all be killed once they get there. She knows Borgia wants to wipe out her whole line.”

  Giuditta shook her head. “Niccolo, I told you you were jumping to conclusions. I didn’t say anything about trundling the children off to Rome. She wants to see them in Florence!”

  “But how . . . ?” Recognition finally dawned in Niccolo, and so it was that over the next few days, between reckless bouts of lovemaking, they began to plot the escape of Caterina Sforza from the pope’s fortress in Rome.

  As they talked and the intimacy and trust between them grew, Giuditta’s story also emerged. She had indeed gone to Toledo in Spain after her escape from Florence and had been quite happy there. She picked up the rudiments of medicine and the apothecary’s trade, skills for which her people were rightfully famous, and was expanding her knowledge by delving into the mysteries of Arabic medicine when the edict was issued.

  “The Edict of Expulsion,” she said bitterly. “A whole people, a whole race, uprooted. Cast out.”

  “And so you decided to return to Italy.”

  “I didn’t really decide. It just happened. A girl without family, without too much money. I found myself in Rome. It’s as good a place as any for us. Or as bad.”

  “What did you do when you got there?”

  “You remember the little book I showed you—my father’s book? I went to one of his friends, one of the people listed in the book, and he took me in. They were kind, but it wasn’t long before they began pressing their eldest son on me, telling me that I should marry, that I was getting old.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I was saving myself for you,” she said brightly, but with a trace of sarcasm. Niccolo looked unconvinced.

  “That was when I met Caterina. She was married to one of the pope’s sons at the time, and living in Rome part of the year. Even back then, she was dabbling in philters and potions. She was intrigued by what I knew, my ‘Moorish science,’ so she took me in.r />
  “I was with her until her husband died. Then a new pope came in, and she was no longer welcome in Rome. She left. I stayed on. Even then, the Borgias were already powerful in the city and what could be more natural than for a ‘Spanish girl’ to find employment among them? They have a huge entourage—servants, cooks, maids, musicians, astrologers—all from Spain. I spoke the language. I understood their customs. I was one of them.”

  Niccolo pointed out that her thick Spanish accent, the one she was using the night before, had completely disappeared. She laughed, “It was part of the masquerade. You know what they say, Paese che ve, usanza che trovi—When in Rome . . .”

  “But the Borgias knew you were a Jew?”

  “Jews. Christians. Turks. The Borgias don’t care. They use whoever is at hand, whoever suits their purposes.”

  “And how do you suit their purposes?

  Giuditta gave him a coy smile. “I serve Monna Lucrezia. Or served. Now that she’s a lady of Ferrara and the house of Este, she no longer needs her Spanish retinue.”

  “You were discharged?”

  “Duke Ercole let it be known that he was less than enthusiastic about having a lot of ‘those people’ around. In private, he says the Spaniards are all spies.”

  “Are they? Are you?”

  “A spy? I suppose in some ways I am.”

  “And whom do you spy for?”

  Again, the coquettish smile. Giuditta made no reply.

  “So, do you feel any sort of loyalty to the Borgias?”

  “To the Borgias, no. But to Monna Lucrezia, yes.”

  “And if you had to choose between Lucrezia and Caterina Sforza, which side would you choose?

  “I don’t have to choose, and I won’t have to choose. Lucrezia’s interests and Caterina’s won’t come into conflict, not anymore. Even if it isn’t the greatest love match of the century, at least this marriage gets Lucrezia away from Rome and away from her father and her brother.”