Machiavelli: The Novel

by Joseph Markulin

  Niccolo continued his inspection. Arranged in a row next to the Lucretia was a series of studies for a Pieta—the Madonna holding the broken body of Christ after it had been taken down from the cross. Michelangelo was just as skillful in depicting a limp and lifeless body as he was a robust, breathing one. He was a master of life and death.

  It couldn’t be!

  Niccolo gaped at the Madonna, then the next one, then the one after that. He began to shake. It was at once obvious and unintelligible—completely obvious and absolutely unintelligible. Niccolo was stunned speechless. He was stricken. He was spellbound. Was he hallucinating? Was he taking a plunge into madness? He could hardly catch his breath. His eyes flew back and forth from Lucretia to the Madonna, from Madonna to Madonna, from Madonna to Lucretia. The faces were all the same. And it was not the face of any imaginary Lucretia or any imaginary Madonna. It was a face he recognized. Tears were streaming down his face.

  His unbelieving eyes told him who it was at the same time as his mind was breaking apart on that impossible knowledge. Giuditta.

  Michelangelo returned a few minutes later with a large clay jug of wine to find his guest oddly rooted to a spot in front of some old cartoons, his head jerking wildly from drawing to drawing, his mouth moving, but no words coming out.

  “When you’re done admiring my work, we can have a drink over here,” he said, busying himself clearing a small space on the tabletop and setting out two cups.

  “Machiavelli?”

  Niccolo persisted in his bizarre pantomime without showing any sign that he was aware of Michelangelo’s return. The latter, curious now, picked his way across the cluttered studio and tapped his guest on the shoulder. Niccolo spun around with unexpected violence and grabbed the little artist by his stained shirtfront. “Who is that?” he said, shaking him.

  Taken aback, Michelangelo blurted, “A Madonna. It’s supposed to be a Madonna.”

  “No,” screamed Niccolo, “I mean the model!”

  “How should I know who the model was? You think I ask their names? You think I’d remember if I did? And Jesus Christ, Machiavelli, Put me down.”

  Coming to himself for a moment, Niccolo released his startled host. “When did you do these drawings?” he demanded in an emotional voice that, to Michelangelo, seemed out of all proportion to the question.

  “A long time ago, I don’t remember exactly.”

  “How long ago,” roared Niccolo. “Think back! How long?”

  “A year, maybe?” Michelangelo took a step back to avoid being collared and shaken again.

  “A year!” The wildness in Niccolo’s eyes seemed to grow with this revelation. “Where did you find her? Where? I have to know.”

  “At the Trinita dei Monti. On the steps going up to the church. There’s always a crowd of prostitutes and pretty boys there who are willing to pose for artists. Why?”

  But Michelangelo’s question and his observation went unanswered and unremarked. Niccolo was already gone. He was running, and he was aware of a sharp pain in his side. He held it with his left hand and kept running. With his right, he clutched the folds of his dignified citizen’s gown up around his waist to give his legs clearance. He made his way running up the Via del Corso, where horse races were often held and where, during Carnival, the Jewish community was required to provide old men to run naked in an antic footrace all the way to the foot of the Testaccio. Niccolo, at fifty-six years old, was running as desperately and as painfully as any one of these unwilling racers ever did. His insides rebelled; his lungs screamed, but his legs kept churning. Sweat was pouring from his forehead when he was finally forced to stop for a minute. He plunged his head into the tepid waters of a fountain, and, as soon as he was able, when his riotous breathing had calmed down, he drank deeply. Determined, he set off again, this time limping, dragging himself at a half run.

  The wide-open piazza in front of the church was full of people utterly indifferent to his frantic concerns. They lounged on the steps in the sun; they loitered in clusters, talking and laughing. Niccolo dashed about like a madman, but Rome was full of madmen, and no one bothered to take any special notice of him.

  Here were the beautiful people who earned a few pennies a day posing for the legions of Rome’s painters and sculptors. The men were vigorous and handsome, the women, fetching. Nearly all were studied in their nonchalance, cool and indifferent, waiting for something better to come along. Niccolo went madly from group to group. The sight of a mane of long dark hair was enough to send him scurrying across the piazza to investigate. More than once, he came up breathlessly behind some raven-haired beauty and spun her around in his excitement. More annoyed than shocked by these intrusions, they would give him an odd look, shake their heads, and return to their loitering.

  He had crossed and recrossed the piazza to no avail. He had looked into the faces of nearly everyone there before collapsing on the steps. Overheated in body and spirit, he needed a rest. He calmed himself as much as was humanly possible under the circumstances and took up his vigil. From his vantage point, he ran his eyes ceaselessly over the little knots of people and the stragglers, keeping track of their comings and goings, noting new arrivals. Still nothing. He was formulating a plan in the back of his head. It consisted of staying in the piazza on those steps until the trumpets sounded on the Last Day—or until she came—whichever came first.

  Someone touched him on the shoulder, and Niccolo, utterly absorbed in his feverish search, jumped at the unexpected contact. “You want to make a few lire?” A gap-toothed, paint-spattered individual was grinning down at him. “I’m doing a big scene of the damned cast down into hell. I need desperate-looking men.” He was laughing at his own joke. Niccolo fixed him with a look of such intensity that the man backed away, carefully, apologetically—the way one backs away from a man with a dangerous weapon or from a mad dog.

  People came and went. His desperate hopes were raised and dashed, raised and dashed, raised and dashed. Slowly, he began to question the sanity of his enterprise. The light of reason began to break through, here and there. How many times since he had been in Rome had his heart thrilled because he thought he saw her? And every time it had been an illusion. A wish. Because she was dead and had been for twelve years. But Michelangelo’s drawings!

  The he began to doubt himself, doubt the evidence of his own overworked, overwrought senses. He was suffering a severe disappointment, he was breaking down, he was falling prey to the dementia of old age. Wearily, resignedly, he decided to make his way back to Michelangelo’s studio. He would have another look at the drawings—maybe he was wrong. He would have a talk with Michelangelo (after apologizing for his rudeness), see what he could remember about the model . . . He put his head in his hands, put his thumbs against his aching eyeballs and pressed hard. And then she was just there.

  There was something wistful about her. Age had softened her, but not robbed her of her beauty. She was standing with a small group of women and talking. She stood erect, not with the haughtiness of youth, or the cocked-hip defiance of an ageless prostitute, but with the dignity of a woman, the dignity and sorrow of . . . of . . . a Madonna—just like Michelangelo had drawn her.

  Then she turned, and the turn was graceful. She smiled to herself, a sad little smile, but to Niccolo the smile was beatific. Someone called to her and she looked up. She began walking toward that someone when something about a crumpled, disheveled figure sitting on the steps caught the corner of her eye.

  Her astonishment was no less overwhelming, the shock no less severe, than was Niccolo’s at the discovery of the cartoons. He watched as waves of contradictory emotions washed over her face. And then there were the tears and the rush of choked-off, incoherent phrases and the halting, stammering protestations of incredulity. And then the rest of the world disappeared, as if by magic, and they were the only two people in all of Rome, on all of God’s earth. Without even knowing they were moving, they moved toward each other and they reached out for one another,
seeking in the solidity of touch, some confirmation of this mad and impossible dream.

  Who can say what they talked about that day? Who can say if they talked at all? Who can say where their footsteps led them? Were they aware of the path they traced through the streets of the Eternal City? Were the aware of following in the footsteps of Dante, on a journey to some spot high above the Empyrean, to some sphere where they could look down upon the tiny sun and the fixed stars. They were caught up in a rapture, blinded by the light, not of those heavenly bodies that were already far away and receding, but by the power that turns them all and binds them in their orbits, by the love that moves the sun and other stars. And as the poet was forced to admit, conceding defeat, “A l’alta fantasia qui manco possa”—there is no way to describe that lofty fantasy.

  When the realms of bliss finally released them and they fell to earth again, or rather drifted back languorously through the haze of delirium that had engulfed them, Niccolo found himself tracing the lines of her radiant face, lingering lovingly over each feature—her long nose, her full lips—touching them, assuring himself that they were real. “I thought you were dead,” he kept muttering over and over again to himself. “I thought you were dead.”

  “Shhhsshhhh,” She put her finger to his lips, and he stopped talking, and the magic swallowed them up again.

  It wasn’t until the next morning that the time for explanations came. “Why did you leave?” asked Niccolo.

  “I thought you were dead.”

  “Who told you I was dead?”

  “Michelozzi.”

  “I thought you were in prison?”

  “I was.”

  “Then how did you get out?”

  “Michelozzi.”

  And so it continued. At every critical juncture of their overlapping stories, at every unlikely twist and turn of the plot, one name cropped up again and again—that of Michelozzi. As Niccolo and Giuditta talked, as they tried to untangle events, it became clear that it was Michelozzi who had engineered, for whatever reason, their separation.

  “But then he saved your life?” asked Niccolo, puzzled. “He got you out of prison?”

  “And he hid me,” confirmed Giuditta.

  “Why would he do that and tell me you were dead?”

  “Because I ran away from him.”

  “And why did you run? If he saved you?”

  Giuditta hesitated for a minute, then steeling herself, she said, “Because he tried to rape me.”

  They were going to have to have a long talk with Messer Michelozzi, secretary in the Second Chancery. But not now, because as soon as something dark or unpleasant came up, they could both feel themselves withdrawing from it, back into their cocoon, back into a heedless love and each other and ecstasy, back after so many years . . .

  It would be cruel to interrupt our lovers’ bliss, but Fortune does not wait on the preparedness of any two individuals before dealing out her indiscriminate blows. Her wheel turns unrelentingly. One morning, perhaps a week after they had been reunited, Niccolo and Giuditta were awakened by a distant, piercing wail. Although incomprehensible, it was unnerving in its high-pitched, hysterical insistence. Soon enough, though, the cry was taken up by others, and, in a matter of minutes, it reached their ears. There was no mistaking the frenzied message that suddenly reverberated throughout the city, passing frantically from household to panicky household: “‘A pistolenza! ‘A pistolenza! The Plague!”

  There was only one way to successfully avoid the ravages of the plague, and that was to flee before them. Niccolo and Giuditta, like thousands of others, therefore, made hasty preparations to leave Rome. Out of an impulse to protect himself, either medical or magical or a little of both, Niccolo gulped down two of the big blue pills before stepping out into the dangerous streets. It couldn’t hurt. Already people were going about with bouquets of flowers and bundles of herbs shoved in their faces, breathing through these aromatic talismans, hoping to sweeten the air they took in and stop the stench of infection from entering.

  Niccolo retrieved his horse, and Giuditta climbed up behind him. They had been unable to find a horse for her. The price of horses in Rome had suddenly risen to the stars. They joined the plodding stream of traffic that was flowing in one direction only—out of the city. Already the corpses were piling up in the streets.

  “Niccolo, look,” said Giuditta. She pointed across the little piazza in front of the hospital for incurable diseases. The square was crowded with the unwanted dying. Brought there by relatives and friends to assuage their own consciences—we can’t do anything for them at home, the hospital’s the place for them—the infected were dumped unceremoniously and left to their final agonies out there in the open, alone. Alone except for one bizarre, solitary figure that moved among them. It looked not so much like a man as a giant bird, a black bird with black gloves and a black hood and a big yellow beak.

  Niccolo and Giuditta pulled out of the stream for a minute and stopped to watch. The bird was doing what he could to alleviate the hellish suffering of the condemned—mopping feverish brows, applying compresses, lancing painful buboes. It was not enough. It could never be enough, but it was all he could do. When he saw his two old friends on horseback, Callimaco stopped and straightened up. He stood erect and forlorn in that sea of writhing bodies amid the cries of the damned. Without removing his great prophylactic mask, he waved to them, a solemn wave, a final good-bye. And then he bent once more to his endless, futile labors.

  “I’ll miss him,” said Giuditta as Niccolo turned the horse to go. “I owe him a lot.”

  “Oh?” There was a hint of jealously in Niccolo’s voice.

  “When you were in jail and I thought you were dead, Callimaco hid me until we could get out of the city.”

  “Not in the bottega where you were both working?”

  “No, that would have been stupid, and that was the first place Michelozzi looked.”

  “You never told me how you got away from Michelozzi of evil intent in the first place.”

  “Michelozzi came and got me out of prison. I was grateful.”

  “Then the whole story he told me about you having been torn apart by dogs in your cell was a complete fabrication.”

  “Not complete! Someone was torn apart, but it wasn’t me; it was his accomplice, Pasiphae.”

  “His accomplice! Faustina!”

  “Whatever. The two of them came to see me in my cell, and she was gloating, telling me how you were having your arms and legs wrenched from your body on the rack and telling me what was in store for me—the dogs. She laid everything out. This was her revenge for our having tried to poison her and for Don Micheletto.”

  “Then she told you that he was her father?”

  “She told me everything. She couldn’t stop talking. She was starting to go into the details of how Michelozzi had helped her all along, how he had been with the Medici and Don Micheletto from the very beginning. It was Michelozzi who warned Don Micheletto that I was setting a trap for him in Rome.”

  Niccolo cursed under his breath, “Michelozzi.”

  “She was bragging and enjoying herself. She was getting shrill, taunting me. Then Michelozzi did the unexpected. He knocked on the door to signal the guards that they wanted to leave. When the door opened, he grabbed me by the arm, thrust me out into the corridor, pushed her back into the cell, and slammed the door shut.”

  “The guards didn’t do anything?”

  “They were in on it with him, I suppose. I was stunned. Michelozzi told me to be quiet, he’d explain later. And he led me out of the prison, just like that.”

  “Why?”

  “You may find this hard to believe, Niccolo, but I think he did it because he was in love with me. He was gentle with me—at first. He took me to his house and said he was doing everything in his power to get you out of prison. He said that Pasiphae was only a pawn, and that he had been playing her along all the time, pretending to be on her side, gathering information, fraternizing with
the enemy.”

  “What did he say would happen to her?”

  “He said the Signoria wanted her imprisoned. They would hold her for a while, question her, and then probably release and banish her. He thought it would be best for me to stay with him for a few days, keeping out of sight, until he got word that she was safely out of town.”

  “Was she released then?”

  “That’s when I started to have my doubts about my savior, Messer Michelozzi. One night someone came, and they were closeted in his study. Michelozzi had a lot of late-night visitors. I just happened to be in the next room—I thought it might be news of you—and I overheard them talking. The stranger said, ‘You won’t have any more trouble with her and the money’s all yours.’ Michelozzi said, ‘Are you sure?’ ‘I saw it myself,’ said the other man, ‘she was hanging by one ankle and the dogs had torn her to shreds. Funny thing though, both of the dogs were dead too, just lying there all bug-eyed and swollen and dead.’”

  Niccolo let out a long, low whistle—the final revenge of the poison-woman.

  Giuditta continued, “A few days later, we were eating, and a messenger arrived with the news of your death. He was out of breath, he made a very dramatic delivery, for my benefit, and there were tears in Michelozzi’s eyes.”

  “And in yours?”

  “I’ve seen too much to cry,” she said unconvincingly.

  “Michelozzi took to comforting me in my desperation. After a day or two, I told him I wanted to leave, and I would take my chances with Pasiphae, but he insisted I stay a little longer. He said I needed a friend. Then he started to get friendly, edging closer to me at the table, breathing on me, finding too many opportunities to touch me on the hand or the shoulder.”