The Second Mrs. Giaconda

by E. L. Konigsburg

  Leonardo read the letter and chuckled. He never copied it into his notebook. Salai knew he would not.

  SALAI missed Isabella after she left; it was like losing both the player and the audience. In the weeks that followed he and Beatrice often shared again the events of Isabella’s visit. Beatrice never began such a discussion; Salai always did, and he did so eagerly. He could do a complete imitation of Isabella’s conversation with Lorenzo da Pavia, the maker of musical instruments. He would take both parts, switching chairs and voices as he became first Isabella asking for a clavichord and then Lorenzo refusing.

  He missed Isabella as a source of material for his comic act. He came to look back on her visit as the climax of something shared between Beatrice and him as a view is shared by two people alone on a mountaintop, seeing the whole and seeing it the same.

  Following the birth of little Maximilian, II Moro added a large measure of pride to his love for his young wife. By the following May that pride had grown into admiration, and he decided to send Beatrice to Venice as his personal ambassador. Both Milan and Venice were wealthy and powerful; they had been rivals for many years. At times that rivalry had flared into warfare. Now, however, Ludovico considered it necessary that Venice become his ally because the King of France was threatening to invade Italy. The threat was a more immediate danger to Milan than to Venice. II Moro knew that he needed peace on his right before he could make successful war on his left. So he decided to send Beatrice to Venice. She would be his representative. She could, he was certain, beguile even his own old worst enemy and make Venice the friend of Milan.

  Beatrice was thrilled to be chosen as her husband’s ambassador. She announced to Salai that she would be accompanied by her mother and an entourage of five hundred.

  Salai reported the progress of preparations to Leonardo. “Today Beatrice’s mother learned that each of the Milanese ladies will wear a long gold chain worth two hundred ducats, so Madama has supplied each of the ladies of Ferrara with a chain worth two hundred and twenty ducats.”

  Later Salai reported, “Beatrice has given some of her ladies strings of pearls for their paternosters, so Madama has given some of her ladies rosaries made of larger pearls still. Now Ludovico has decided that not some but all of our Milanese ladies should have pearl rosaries.”

  Only a few days passed before Salai again reported, “Beatrice’s mother has given some of her smaller pendants to her ladies and has had gowns of green satin with broad stripes of black velvet made for all of them, so our Beatrice has sent for Caradosso, the goldsmith, and ordered him to bring an emergency supply of rubies and diamonds. She is having them strung into necklaces for the ladies of Milan. Beatrice hardly has time for anything but standing for fittings for her new gowns. At last count it will take ten chariots and fifty mules to carry her belongings.” Salai realized that his idol, his Beatrice, was reacting to her mother more like a duchess than a daughter.

  “Does she think she will impress her mother most if she is more like Isabella than like Beatrice?” he asked.

  Leonardo laid down his notebook. “Our Duchess Beatrice does not want to impress her mother, Salai; she wants to hurt her. She wants to show her mother that she should not have neglected her poor, plain second daughter. She now thinks she can do battle with a weapon sharper than a sword. She’s discovered that wealth can buy not only pleasure but also pain. Beatrice will use her money to try to cut out old wounds. It will be a while, Salai, before your dear friend Beatrice learns that the past is never entirely quiet within us. It will be a longer time still before she learns that the only way to conquer an unhappy past is to learn to live with it.”

  “If my past had been unhappy,” Salai replied, “I would have been able to smother it with anise cookies alone.”

  “Some, even many, would consider that your past was unhappy.”

  “Not me. I wouldn’t say that. I just say, What was, was; what is, is; what will be, will be.’ Why can’t Beatrice do that?”

  Leonardo shook his head. “Some of us simply cannot. Some of us have to strain all of our present actions through past pain. Others of us merely learn to coat bad thoughts with silence and good manners. Not everyone can be a Salai.” Leonardo then placed his hands on his chair and pushed himself up. “Anyway, Salai, it will be a while before your old friend is your old friend again. And perhaps it is good that our duchess shall have less need of you, for I shall have more. Besides finishing the horse, II Moro has asked me to paint the end wall of the refectory of St. Maria delle Grazie. I suggested to him that our Lord’s Last Supper would be an appropriate work to put on a wall the monks will face as they dine.”

  AFTER BEATRICE returned from Venice Salai kept track of all her activities. She was acquiring more gowns and more jewelry. Her collections of glass and silver and musical instruments grew. Her gowns grew fancier. Her confidence grew. Her conversation and her laughter grew louder. Everything grew, and she outgrew her need for Salai.

  Salai missed her, missed what they had had between them. It was inevitable that what they had had between them would become stretched thin as each took up a firmer footing in life. Beatrice outgrew her need for Salai before he outgrew his for her; that, too, was bound to happen. What they had between them was a bond whose threads were spun in childhood. Those threads were stretched as their positions moved farther apart, as their ages dragged them farther and deeper into their life roles. Beatrice moved farther and faster because she was older and was Beatrice. Salai lagged partly because he was younger and mostly because he was Salai. He was never anxious to nudge the future.

  Salai had done some growing up. He had put his childish thefts behind him. He had stopped stealing silverpoints and money and Turkish leather hides. But he had not stopped stealing. What he stole now were ideas, Leonardo’s ideas, those thoughts that burst like star sparkle in all directions from the master’s incandescent mind.

  Leonardo could not have a thought without putting it down on paper. How to draw a pair of hands. How to show the folds of a gown. How to arrange a group of people. It was those ideas that Leonardo sketched, and Salai’s new business was this: he would borrow those sketches from the studio and sell them to church artists and to artists in other workshops. Milan was full of people who had skill to draw or to paint, to fill in the lines, but who did not have Leonardo’s eye to see something new or to see something old in a new way. All over Milan there began to appear works in the manner of Leonardo da Vinci, pale imitations that had the characteristics but not the character of the master’s work.

  Salai never thought of his new enterprise as stealing. It was a rental business. He always shared his profits with Dorotea and with his father, who was now an invalid. And he almost always returned the used sketches. Salai still could not regard the ideas of others as personal or as property.

  In November, following Beatrice’s trip to Venice, Ludovico II Moro’s niece married Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor. II Moro wished to have all his worldly goods displayed and all his worldly friends impressed. He requested that Leonardo construct a model of the horse. At last Leonardo made a clay form out of ten years’ worth of study.

  The horse stood twenty-six feet high, the largest statue of a horse ever attempted. It took tons of clay and of steel reinforcements to make.

  Salai, who loved the stupendous, loved the horse. He thought that II Moro had chosen a wise way to impress the visitors to Milan. “Well, boss,” he said, “that is the biggest, best horse I have ever seen. It’s the biggest, best horse anyone has ever seen. To cast it will take enough bronze to make cannon for a whole army.”

  Leonardo, who loved to astound, loved the horse. “That it will take much bronze is a worry, Salai. The duke has promised me the bronze before Christmas. I shall be ready to cast it, and I shall be ready not to. There is always the possibility that the duke will have to make a choke. If he must choose between honoring the memory of his father with a bronze horse or fighting for his honor with bronze cannon, I know whi
ch he will choose.” Leonardo looked at his creation, muzzle to hoof, hock and fetlock. He stroked its underbelly, smiling.

  Before the horse was moved to the castle courtyard, Beatrice came to see it. Salai was delighted. He had not visited with her for a while. Sometimes weeks now passed without their seeing each other, but they were always glad when they did. Sometimes it took a minute or two before there appeared the flash of their former selves, a flash of the joke shared between them.

  Beatrice studied the horse a long, long time. Salai followed her gaze eagerly, expectantly. She said nothing. She walked around the monument slowly, looking slowly. Finally, Salai could stand it no longer. “Well!” he burst out, “isn’t that the greatest damn horse you have ever seen?”

  “Yes,” Beatrice answered. “It is great in that it is large. I would guess that it is the largest model of a horse ever made in Milan or anywhere.”

  “You bet,” Salai replied.

  “It will serve its purpose. Whereas delicacy impresses the French, largeness always impresses the Germans. Maximilian will love it.”

  “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you love it too?”

  “No, I don’t love it,” Beatrice answered. She looked over at Salai. “I am sorry that I do not. I wanted very much to love it.”

  Salai said nothing. What was the matter with her? Had her head become too filled with dresses and jewelry? Had gewgaws crowded out that great measuring rod by which she always knew the good from the mediocre and the great from the good?

  “The horse is not the master’s best,” Beatrice continued. “It is not so much a work of art as it is a labor of art. I think Messer Leonardo impresses more when he tries less. One cannot look at the horse and keep from seeing the effort that has gone into it. A person looking at a work of art should not be slapped to attention; he should be wooed.”

  “You would never have said that three years ago.”

  “That is true. I never would have said it three years ago, but I would have thought it. Three years ago I would not have told you what I am about to tell you now. Listen to me,” she said. “Listen now, Salai. We have not nearly enough time to talk anymore, and I want to tell you this.” She paused and riveted her eyes on her young friend. “Your master Leonardo needs something from you. He needs your rudeness and your irresponsibility.”

  “I think I’ve come a long way—” Salai protested.

  “You have. You have. Let’s not waste time arguing. I’m trying to tell you that you must not go all the way. If you ever become totally tame, Leonardo will have no need of you.”

  Salai smiled. “Please continue.”

  Beatrice returned his smile, relaxed at his reaction. “It is no mystery to me why Leonardo has put up with your stealing and why he puts up with your selling his ideas.” Salai gasped when she said this; Beatrice shook her head. “I know all about it, Salai, and I’m sure that somewhere in that monumental mind of Leonardo’s is an awareness of what you are doing.” She looked up at the horse momentarily, then she looked at Salai a long time before she continued. “He needs a wild element,” she said at last. “All great art needs it: something that leaps and flickers. Some artists can put that wild element into the treatment itself, but Leonardo cannot. He is too self-conscious. When he has an important commission from an important client on an important subject, he ties up all his instincts. He strives, not to let himself go, but to be perfect. Even in outline, the work on the wall of the refectory has the beginnings of greatness in it. The audience, a poor bunch of monks, is not important, and Leonardo has allowed his mind to idle a little and let in something fresh and wild. Salai, I ask you to see to it that Master Leonardo keeps something wild, something irresponsible in his work.”

  Salai was quiet. He allowed her thinking to sink in, and then he asked, “What shall I tell the master? He will not directly ask your opinion, but he is certain to hint that he wants to know.”

  “Tell Leonardo da Vinci that the Duchess of Milan congratulates him on giving form to tons of chalk.”

  “Mountains also give form to tons of chalk.”

  “Well, that’s all right. God gave form to that chalk. Leonardo will not mind being classed with God. It is only when he feels that he is no man to match mountains that he is plunged into melancholy.”

  Salai studied the horse a long while. Then he focused on Beatrice. “Is that why you will not have the master paint your portrait? Are you afraid that you are too important a client, too important a subject and too important an audience? Are you afraid that his treatment of you will be too heavy?”

  “That is only part of the reason.”

  “What would you have the master do for you, my lady?”

  “He has already done it. He has shown my husband that I am worthy of his love.” Beatrice paused a minute. “I am grateful to Leonardo for that. For showing II Moro the interesting whorl of leaves beneath the plain flower of my face. You must keep my thoughts about the horse to yourself, Salai. That great mound of talent and intellect called Leonardo da Vinci has a very thin skin. Very thin. He deflates at the tiniest prick.”

  Beatrice left, waving goodbye to Salai and saluting him with a wink. Salai was left alone with the chalk horse and with his thoughts.

  So Beatrice thought that the horse was great in size only. It lacked an element that raises a work of art from good to great. Something wild. Something that leaps and flickers. Like lightning? Leonardo had called the festivals lightning. They were altogether wild, and the horse was altogether refined, and neither was great. A great work needed a sense of the important touched with something wild. Beatrice ought to be listened to; she had not lost that invisible measuring rod in her head.

  Beatrice was asking Salai to be responsible for Leonardo’s keeping something wild in his work. She also told Salai what his street urchin instincts had told him long ago: that Leonardo da Vinci needed him, the untalented, rude, irresponsible Salai; that he was completing Leonardo da Vinci. Beatrice had put words to it.

  He wished she had not. He didn’t want the words; he didn’t want to be responsible for Leonardo. He had his father and Dorotea, and that was enough. Enough. Of course, his responsibility for them was much less serious. Whatever he did for them changed only the outside of their lives. Giving them money was not helping something that was inside them.

  For all these years Salai had understood his role, but he had always avoided its definition. But now Beatrice had put words to it. She had charged Salai with (dreaded word, more dreaded thought) responsibility. And worse, she had made him responsible for being wild, for being, in effect, irresponsible.

  SALAI saw even less of Beatrice in the months following the completion of the clay horse, the months when Leonardo continued working on the wall of the refectory. Most of Salai’s knowledge of Beatrice was now official news. They almost never had private meetings. She was busy being wife and mother and diplomat.

  He learned that the King of France came on a visit, and Beatrice danced for him, and II Moro was pleased. A second son was born to Beatrice, and of the fifteen names the child received at his baptism, they chose to call him Francesco. II Moro was pleased. She continued to amuse her husband.

  She had shown him the world as a theater, and he continued enjoying her performance.

  Every now and then as she was going to or coming from the chapel of St. Maria delle Grazie, and as Salai was going to or coming from its refectory, they would exchange a few words.

  “On what is our Lord now feasting?” she would ask.

  “Judas has just spilled the salt,” he would call back. Or another time he would answer, “St. Peter has just finished whispering into his neighbor’s ear.” Salai always enjoyed these brief encounters.

  There were days when Leonardo would stand from dawn to dusk on the platform before the Last Supper. On those days the master would work furiously, never laying down his brush or stopping to eat or drink. Then three or four days could pass, and he would not touch the wall at all. Instead h
e would sit and look at it for an uninterrupted hour or two. There were other days when he would take Salai with him to the courtyard, where he continued working on preparations to cast the horse in bronze, and he would suddenly leave and race over to the refectory, where he would add a dab or two to the wall and then rush back to pick up again his work on the horse.

  Leonardo’s habits did not allow the usual procedures for fresco. Usually the entire wall was prepared with a rough plaster. Then an assistant laid down fine plaster, in the amount that the artist could finish in a single day. The artist would apply his colors to the wet plaster; the colors dissolved in the plaster, and when it dried and hardened, the color, the painting became part of the plaster. Once laid down, the colors and their shapes could not be scraped off and could not be changed.

  But Leonardo never chose to work fast. Time was his enemy, and he never wanted to be at its mercy, so Leonardo had prepared the wall in the refectory by sealing it with mastic and varnish, a mixture of his own invention, to keep salts and moisture of the walls from seeping through.

  Leonardo’s notebooks had become filled with faces and poses. He had chosen to paint the moment when Christ said to his disciples, “One of you will betray me.” And he had wanted the look and the pose of each of the twelve disciples to expose the man’s character. Leonardo had walked the streets of Milan looking for faces that could represent St. Peter or St. John or Thomas or James.

  When the prior had complained to II Moro that Leonardo’s work was taking too long and that his monks needed their refectory, II Moro had passed the complaint along. Leonardo had answered, “Tell the prior that I have not yet found a face to serve as a model for Judas, but I am becoming convinced that his will do.” II Moro had been amused at Leonardo’s reply and repeated it to everyone at court.