Machiavelli: The Novel

by Joseph Markulin

Michelozzi hesitated and then decided to tell his friend the news: “Not only that, but I’ve gotten a promotion. They gave me your old job.”

  Niccolo’s ears burned with envy. “That’s great, Michelozzi. I suppose I should congratulate you.”

  “I suppose you should, but it’s not like when you were chancellor, Niccolo. There’s nothing to do in the Signoria these days—no militia to superintend and all the real government business is done at the Medici Palace. I write a few letters. That’s all.”

  “A few letters.” Although Niccolo was glad for Michelozzi—he told himself he should be at any rate—he could not suppress his jealousy. Michelozzi! He was a nice guy and even a decent friend. But secretary! His old job! He could never do it! He wasn’t up to it! And he tried to imagine Michelozzi—the sincere but mediocre Michelozzi, a man who was guided by his cock instead of his brains, a man with one foot in two shoes even as they spoke—he tried to imagine poor Michelozzi face-to-face with Caesar Borgia.

  “Niccolo, if you were there today, you’d be dying of boredom. I mean it. It’s not the same job anymore.”

  “Dying of boredom, right.”

  “Look, the only reason I told you is that if something ever does come up, I want to be able to come to you for advice. Is that alright?”

  “Pathetic,” thought Niccolo. “He’s trying to cheer me up. Come to me for advice. Indeed!” He said, “Oh, feel free, I’ve got plenty of advice these days, more than enough advice to give out.”

  Suddenly Michelozzi stood up. “Come on. I’ve got an idea. Something to draw you out of this torpor.”

  “Forget it, Michelozzi. I don’t want to go to any whorehouse,” said Niccolo irritably.

  “This isn’t a whorehouse. It’s something different. There are some people I want you to meet.”

  “People? Shall I wear my leper’s bell so they don’t get too close?”

  “Niccolo, please. Trust me.”

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “It’s a kind of . . . association.”

  “What kind of association?”

  “You’ll see.” With that, Michelozzi skipped down the tiered benches and landed lightly on the ground. Morosely, Niccolo followed. “No wonder he’s so happy,” he thought, “he’s got my old job. Messer Michelozzi, secretary in the Second Chancery! And a gay blade of a secretary in that outfit! Smart grey hose, smart satin pumps, smart black velvet doublet, smart white linen shirt rakishly open at the neck . . .” Niccolo knew he was being unkind. He couldn’t help it. His own heavy riding boots still had mud on them—the mud of the country, where he dawdled and doodled while the world ignored him and elevated smartly turned-out fellows like Michelozzi in his place. . . . Under the vast, now-empty portico, oblivious to Michelozzi’s gaiety and Niccolo’s jealousy, oblivious to their departure and lost in the world of his own nonsense, the idiot prattled on.

  “Here, this way.” Michelozzi steered Niccolo to the left, into the Via della Scala. They marched past the forbidding faces of several buildings and along a high, severe stone wall—more monuments and expressions of the stony Florentine temperament and, at the moment, ample reflection of the temperament of the brooding Niccolo Machiavelli. There was a discreet door in a hole punched in the silent mask of a wall, and when Michelozzi knocked and identified himself, they were admitted. From the street, they stepped through the grim, unforgiving facade and into another world.

  The clatter of the crowds of people and animals was shut out abruptly as the door closed behind them. There was a rush and a whisper of fountains, of trees being gently stirred in the early-evening breezes. There was an intense scent of cypress and pine and laurel that suffused this secret place. They had entered an immense garden of delights, an unlikely earthly paradise, here in the heart of the cramped city. Lush vegetation was everywhere. Cascades of cooling water spilled and tumbled from rocks in little grottos where benches were arranged around clear, sparkling pools. Paths and walkways wound through the luxuriant, abundant greenery and lost themselves. But most of all, there were the trees—conical trees and scrubby trees that smelled of the sea, huge fan-shaped trees and towering maritime pines, drooping willows and mighty oaks and chestnuts and olive trees, pear trees and apple trees and fig trees and cherry trees, some so heavily laden with fruit that their branches almost touched the ground.

  Momentarily overpowered by the charms of the garden, even Niccolo surrendered to the cool, soothing, perfumed breezes. Whatever was going on in the world, this place was not part of it. This place was insulated. Eden before the fall of man.

  “What do you think?” asked Michelozzi.

  “It’s astounding, another world.”

  “I thought you might enjoy it,” said Michelozzi with satisfaction.

  “Who created it?” asked Niccolo. “Who’s God in this little, private world?”

  “Would you like to meet our host then? Come on.” Michelozzi guided Niccolo through the verdant maze. They encountered little groups of men who chatted unconcernedly, like philosophers of days gone by. Everywhere there were statues and pieces of statues, some apparently of great antiquity. Greek and Roman. In fact, the whole place had a Roman air to Niccolo—not contemporary cesspool Roman, but lofty, ancient republican Roman, Rome before the fall of man.

  “Where’s Cosimino?” asked Michelozzi of one of the intimates of the garden.

  “He hasn’t come down yet, but he sent word that he’ll be here shortly,” came the reply.

  Niccolo looked around while Michelozzi drifted from group to group, exchanging greetings, kissing and shaking hands. He seemed to be on intimate terms with these people. Most of them were a generation younger than Niccolo. Here and there, he read in the eager young faces around him the unmistakable features of some ancient Florentine family—a Strozzi or a Nardi or a Nerli—but he didn’t know any of them personally. They were, he surmised, the flower of Florentine youth. Like Michelozzi, they were well turned-out, smartly clad. Unconsciously, he shuffled in his heavy boots. Uncomfortably, he shoved an errant strand of uncombed hair up under his cap and pulled it down firmly on the back of his head.

  Michelozzi had said this was some kind of association, and looking around him, Niccolo began to suspect just what kind. Preciosity was in the air. He greatly feared that before the night was out, poetry would be read aloud.

  To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven. . . . A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down and a time to build up.

  —Ecclesiastes 3:1–3

  It wasn’t long before their host appeared. He was carried out in a box. It was gilded and carved and inlaid with ivory and lined with plush velvet, but it was undeniably a box. His arrival was greeted with effusions from the others present as they crowded around him. Niccolo kept his distance and examined the contents of the box. The little man reposing therein was grotesque, but not ugly. His head seemed huge, but it was no larger than Niccolo’s own. It was the deplorable, shriveled condition of the rest of his body that made the head seem out of all proportion, Still, he held it erect.

  He was simply dressed in a lucco, and the ends of little useless legs projected from the bottom of the gown. His chest was sunken and his arms mere spindles. His skin was pale, but he was very much alive. His teeth flashed as he joked and smiled. He did expressive things with his eyes and mouth. Occasionally his handsome features were distorted in a fierce, momentary grimace of pain, but then it would pass and he would return to his animated exchanges and disputes.

  While Niccolo watched, Michelozzi finally engaged their host. When they both turned in his direction, he was obliged to shuffle over and submit to the polite, obligatory introduction.

  “Niccolo, this is Bernardo Rucellai, Messer Rucellai, Niccolo Machiavelli.”

  “It’s my pleasure, Messer Rucellai,” said Niccolo with the requisite degree of deference.

  “And mine as well. But call me Cosimino. Everyone here knows me as Cosimino. We’re a very informal s
ociety.”

  “Cosimino, then,” said Niccolo. “Although that’s an odd nickname for Bernardo.”

  “Ah,” sighed the little man, “Cosimo was my father’s name. He built this place, and I inherited it. To his friends I was never Bernardo, just Cosimino—Little Cosimo. I’ve always lived in his shadow, but I can’t complain. It’s been a pleasant life here, in the gardens. By the way, how do you find them?”

  “Utterly disarming, a miracle.” Niccolo was on his best behavior.

  “Do you know the Aeneid, Niccolo?” asked Cosimino.

  “I’ve read around in it from time to time.” It was a decided understatement. Niccolo had nearly memorized the entire heroic epic.

  “Then you’ll be pleased to know that here in the Orti Orcellari, my gardens, I have had planted at least one specimen of every tree mentioned in the Aeneid. Every one.”

  Niccolo coughed. “That’s . . . that’s remarkable,” he said. “You must have a tremendous admiration for Virgil.”

  “For Virgil and for all the classics! For all things Roman!” said the little host. “And your tastes too, run in that direction?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then later, let me show you some of the statuary I’ve managed to collect. It’s genuine. Of Roman origin. You’ve probably seen it strewn about here and there. Some magnificent pieces . . . Oh but look, here’s Luigi. Luigi’s going to read tonight. Shall we listen?” With a gracious smile for Niccolo, Cosimino turned his attention to a callow youth who had mounted a dais and assumed a position behind a lectern. The thick sheaf of papers in his hands announced that the evening’s reading was going to be a protracted one.

  Niccolo took up a position as far from the center of the crowd as he could, vowing all the while to himself to wring Michelozzi’s neck for getting him into this. A poetry reading! And among people who planted their gardens with all the trees named in Virgil’s Aeneid! Such scholarship! Such an understanding of the Romans! Oh, how they were to be commended on their intellectual attainments, these lovers of antiquity! These collectors of fragments of old statues! Virgil worshipers! The superstitious who, because they were too ignorant to understand anything about Virgil, made lists of all the trees he mentioned in his epic!

  Niccolo knew only too well this brand of pedantic reverence for antiquity. They had all their lists together. Lists of all the rivers and all the bodies of water, lists of all the animals, all the birds, all the ancient cities, and on and on. These flaccid flowery fluffy Florentines! What did they really know about the Romans? What could they understand! What did they know about virtue and commitment and courage and self-sacrifice? What did they know about the struggle for liberty? What could they ever feel when they read the line, “Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem—How tremendous an effort it was to found the Roman race!” What could they know about that effort? Did their breasts ever heave with such an effort? With the effort to establish a race of new Romans? Did they know how hard it was? Did they have any idea how hard it was? How many turns of the rack could they stand? What did they care about the struggle for freedom and justice—these pampered slaves in their artificial paradise? They knew the names of all the trees in the Aeneid.

  Once again embittered—it didn’t take much—Niccolo settled into an obscure spot in the groves of Virgiliana and tried to make himself comfortable. It was going to be a long night.

  “Sed parva licet, to use the words of the master, if I might compare small things to great, I’d like to read from a poem I’ve been working on patterned after Virgil’s Georgics. I call it, ‘On Cultivation,’ and it’s a celebration of the country life.” And with that introduction, Luigi began to read. His voice was a little nervous at first, but by the time he got to the simple rustic pleasures of shepherds and shepherdesses, he was reading with more confidence. He read through the planting and tending and harvesting of crops and described in minute detail the changes of season that accompanied each of these farmerly activities. He waxed poetic on heroic feats of animal husbandry and was fairly glowing when he forged into the section on cheese making.

  Through it all, Niccolo regarded the youthful poet with a practiced and cynical eye. The joys of country life indeed! The golden age indeed! What this poetaster didn’t seem to know was that out there in the golden age, the streets were paved with mud and manure. Niccolo fancied the young man out in the fields with his simple but elegantly cut and exquisitely tailored clothes. In Florence they might pass for “country attire,” faux rustic, or whatever, but out there they would peg him for an urban dandy a mile away. The thought of those brilliant lacquered boots caked with horseshit brought a smile to Niccolo’s lips. Ah, youth! Ah, Florence! He sighed inwardly. These young Florentines took up the example of the ancients, they read the classics, not to learn about valor and liberty and justice, not to learn how to organize a government and an army, but to learn how to make cheese and herd sheep! For that they applied to the Romans, when any illiterate peasant in San Casciano could give them an infinitely better lesson in the muddy pursuits of the pastoral ideal.

  When the reading was over, Niccolo thought only of escape, but Cosimino caught his eye and beckoned him. He would have to say something nice about Luigi’s poem.

  “Well, you’re new to our little circle, what did you think?”

  Niccolo, to whom flattery never came easy and who was incapable of an outright lie, gave a neutral reply: “Imitation of the ancients is always a laudable undertaking.”

  Cosimino smiled, eyed him with curiosity, and said nothing. He chuckled softly to himself. “Ah, Machiavelli, you damn by faint praise. Imitation? Don’t you think Luigi is a competent imitator of the classics?”

  “I think our young friend should walk in mud up to his ankles for a few days and share a shed with the pigs and cows at night, if he wants to learn about the country life.”

  “Is that all you think?”

  “I think that there are a number of different ways of imitating the ancients. Young Luigi is certainly a competent stylist.”

  “But you apparently don’t think much of that sort of competence?”

  “May I speak freely?”

  “And if I said you couldn’t?” There was a crafty expression on Cosimino’s face. His dark eyes gleamed.

  “Very well. Since you asked, we all know how much honor is attributed to antiquity these days. Your little circle here is proof enough of that. But what are we honoring? Luigi is writing about shepherds. You yourself spend enormous sums of money to acquire pieces of statues, statues with no arms or legs. And our artists and sculptors, if they can produce a slavish copy of one of these statues, they can get a good price for it. That’s the value we place on antiquity. That’s the use we put it to.”

  “But you know better? You think we dabble in the effete and the useless.”

  “We honor these empty forms, but we do nothing but degrade the men and the culture that inspired them—the captains and the citizens and the legislators and judges whose example we ignore. Not the slightest trace of their ancient nobility of spirit remains alive today. And there’s nobody trying to revive that, to imitate that.”

  “Except you, of course?”

  Niccolo looked down. He thought he had gone far enough. Memories of the rack told him not to go any farther. He knew where his opinions could land him these days.

  Cosimino continued, “I came across a little pamphlet of yours, a pernicious little pamphlet about princes and principalities. I had it from Lorenzo Strozzi, who got it from his brother Filippo in Rome, who got it from your old friend Vettori. It’s quite provocative.” He waited. Niccolo said nothing.

  “I seem to recall that you ended your tract with a call to arms and a citation from Petrarch: ‘Che antico valore / nelli italici cor non è ancora morto.’ That’s a rousing ending and an optimistic one: Ancient valor in Italian hearts is not yet dead.”

  “That was six years ago, when I wrote that.”

  “And it doesn’t hold any longer?
Our ancient valor has expired in the meantime?”

  “If it’s not dead, it’s sleeping soundly.”

  “And who will awaken it?”

  “I doubt it can be awakened. The moment is passed.”

  “And the struggle is over?”

  “You can see for yourself the times we live in.”

  “Perhaps you underestimate the times? Perhaps you underestimate these young ones like Luigi. Perhaps you underestimate me.” Cosimino paused. “Perhaps you underestimate yourself?” He left the question hanging.

  “Perhaps.”

  “I’d like to make you a proposition. Why don’t you read us something of yours some time?”

  “Nobody’s interested in the sort of writing I do,” said Niccolo. “There’s no meter and no rhyme and no happy shepherds.”

  “Ah! How you resemble our patron Saint John the Baptist,” said Cosimino facetiously. “Vox clamantis in deserto! The voice crying in the wilderness! And no one is listening. How sad. You feel sorry for yourself, don’t you, Machiavelli?”

  Niccolo glared at him. He did not like being made the butt of jokes.

  “Do you think I was always like this?” Cosimino swept a frail hand across his collapsed chest and down in the direction of his crippled legs. “No, I was a whole man once, but the excesses of youth, the ravages of disease, and the incompetence of doctors has reduced me to an atrophied shell, a cripple who has to be carried around in a box. Do you think I don’t know self-pity when I see it? I can spot self-pity at a distance from here to Fiesole!” Again he paused and fixed Niccolo with his unflinching gaze: “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Machiavelli. And come in out of the wilderness. There’s work to be done.”

  The spell was broken by the arrival of Luigi, the flushed, triumphant poet. Cosimino congratulated him and then said, “Luigi, there’s somebody here I’d like you to meet. Luigi Alamanni, may I present Messer Niccolo Machiavelli.”

  Luigi’s mouth dropped open. “Machiavelli? Machiavelli of the militia?”

  “The same,” said Cosimino.