'I can always tell when someone wants something,' Federico said. 'They praise me as if I was Jesus Christ Himself. But you, Ugo? You disappoint me.'
'It is only because I wish to serve you in an even greater way that I ask you to consider my request.'
'What is it?'
'As a food taster I serve you twice a day. If, however, I were a courtier I could serve you every moment of the day.'
'But what would you do?' Federico replied. 'Piero's my doctor, Bernardo is my astrologer, Cecchi my chief administrator, Septivus my scribe and tutor.'
'Perhaps I might assist Cecchi—'
'He does not need assisting. And besides,' he frowned, 'who would be my food taster?'
'I could train someone. It would not—'
'No,' he laughed. 'Tu sei il mio gustatore. You will always be my food taster. Let us hear no more about it.'
'But, My Lord—'
'No!'
I could not stop myself and after a moment I said, 'Your Excellency—'
'No,' he roared. 'Leave me!' I was never invited into his carriage again.
We had just passed the village of Arraggio, south of Bologna. A fine mist covered the hills and the smell of rain was in the air. The wind slipped through the trees, disrobing them of their red and brown leaves. Chestnuts clothed in their green, bristly armor stabbed at my feet. Across the valley a flock of sheep clung to the hillside. A shepherd and a girl huddled together beneath a tree. Michelangelo can have his thousand florins, I said to myself, all I want is to live here on a small farm with a flock of sheep and my Helene. I will love her. I will take care of her. We will sleep together at night and together we will wake in the morning. I made this promise to Helene, to myself, and to God, and I carved our names in a tree as a sacred covenant.
It was cold and wet when we entered the valley of Corsoli, but when I saw the jagged hills, the trees bunched together like broccoli tops, the palace rising like a sepulcher from the mist, I was so overcome that I kissed the ground, thanking God for returning us safely. Halfway up the valley the Duomo bell began to ring. We sang to encourage our weary feet, boys rode out to greet us, and no sooner had we entered the city than we were besieged by wives, husbands, and children. I wondered where Miranda was when suddenly, as I climbed the Weeping Steps, a woman ran out of the crowd, and threw her arms around me, crying, 'Babbo, babbo!'
Oh, what joy to feel her in my arms again! 'Mia Miranda, mia Miranda!' I barely recognized her. Her hair was in a coif revealing her elegant swanlike neck. She wore earrings and a necklace lay on her soft white bosom. When I left she was a girl and now she was woman!
'Is that your amoroso?' said a voice behind me. I turned around. It was Federico. His carriage had stopped and he was looking out of the window at us.
'No, My Lord,' I bowed. 'This is my daughter, Miranda.'
Federico stared at her in a way that made me feel uncomfortable. Miranda blushed, bowed her head, and said, 'Welcome back to Corsoli, Your Excellency. Each day without you has been like a summer without a harvest.'
Federico raised an eyebrow. 'Did you hear that, Septivus?'
Septivus poked his head out of the carriage. 'A summer without a harvest.' Federico repeated. 'Write that down. I like that.'
The carriage moved on. I took Miranda's hand and we entered the courtyard. As Federico climbed out of the carriage I saw him turn around as if looking for us.
I gave Miranda a comb, some rose water, and false hair made of blonde silk I had bought in Firenze. I did not tell her about the ring Federico had given me for I had given it to Helene. Miranda sat on my lap as she had done when she was a child, and I told her all that had happened to me. She looked at me with horror. 'But what if Onionface had eaten the berries and nothing had happened to him?'
'I trust God would have taken care of me.'
She put a finger to her chin and asked thoughtfully, 'Since I am your daughter, will God take care of me, too?'
'Of course,' I cried, 'of course.' I told her about Helene and how one day I would marry her and that we would all live together in Arraggio.
Miranda pursed her lips. 'I would not marry a food taster.'
'And why not?'
'Because I would always fear for his life.'
This thought had never occurred to me and after my disagreement with Federico I did not wish to think about it, so I said, 'And who would you marry?'
'A prince.'
'A prince, indeed. Is he anyone I know?'
'In Corsoli?' she said with wide eyes.
I smiled. 'But it is good to aim high, Miranda. Birds that fly too low to the ground are the first to be shot out of the sky. How is Tommaso?'
'I neither know nor care,' she shrugged, but I could hear mischief in her voice.
It was more complicated than that, which I discovered when I went to the kitchen. Tommaso, who was skinning some eels to put into a torta, barely nodded his head when he saw me, but Luigi and the other boys crowded round, wanting to hear about the journey, and especially the story of Onionface, from my own lips. When I had finished I looked for Tommaso, but he had slipped away. Luigi said that two weeks after I had left, Tommaso had suffered a change of fortune.
Not content with seducing a merchant's wife, it was his first such conquest, Tommaso had boasted about to it his friends. Knowing how easy he was to tease, and also because he sometimes stretched the truth from here to Roma, they pretended to disbelieve him. 'E un impetuoso!' Luigi said to much laughter.
So Tommaso had insisted the boys follow him the next time his lover's husband was in Arezzo to prove he was not lying. Unfortunately, he had not warned the woman's chambermaid that he was coming and so was unaware that the husband had returned. When Tommaso arrived in the dead of night, the husband and his brother were waiting with cudgels. They beat him, stripped him naked, locked Tommaso's balls in a chest and placed a razor in his hand. The husband said that if Tommaso was still in the house when he returned in an hour he would kill him. Fortunately, Tommaso's friends had heard the commotion, and when they saw the husband leave, they broke in and rescued him.
'He was in the hospital for more than a month. By the time he came out everyone in the valley knew what had happened.'
Tommaso returned to his duties in the kitchen but when he was not working he sulked in his room. He refused to go outside because he could not stand to see the other boys pursuing Miranda through the palace. Since the four years to their betrothal passed without Miranda knowing, I saw no reason to tell her, and after what had happened even Tommaso could not insist upon it. As I had foreseen all along, God in His wisdom had known what was best.
As indeed God had known what was best for me. I turned my disappointment at not being given another position into good use, grinding down leaves of poisonous plants and taking small amounts to see what effect they had on me. Indeed, recording those effects was how my writing improved, and, watching Cecchi scurrying about at Federico's bidding, I was relieved Federico had not granted my request. I spent so much time with my experiments I resented each moment away from them. I did not tell anyone about them, and although Miranda and I shared the same room, she was too concerned with making her lips redder, her hair straighter, and her skin softer to notice. She cried when she thought boys did not look at her and acted aloof when they did. She practiced her lyre one day and the next refused to leave her bed. Within the space of a sentence she could be as sweet as sugar or as bitter as wormwood and many were the times I was glad there was a screen between us.
Federico's invitations to the painters and sculptors went unheeded, but pota! Some wit must have posted them in every piazza in Italy, for that summer artists swarmed over Corsoli like mosquitoes! They came from Roma, Venezia, and every town in between: students thrown out by their masters for laziness or thievery, beggars looking for free meals, debtors running from creditors. Half of them had never heard of a poem, did not know which way to hold a brush, and the only thing they had ever carved was a piece of bread. The
y spent their time drinking, fighting and pestering the women.
Miranda and her friends walked arm in arm around Corsoli while these idiots wrestled one another to walk beside her. Sometimes she sat in the window, remaining there all morning, neglecting her lessons and duties, while the louts stood below serenading her. 'They are like cats in heat,' I said, and pissed out the window on them.
When Federico was told the artists were living for free he said, 'Have them killed.'
Instead Cecchi ordered the gatekeepers to forbid any more artists from entering Corsoli. He also announced a competition to design a new crest for Federico; the winner would stay but the rest had to leave. The first drawing showed Federico holding two cheetahs on a leash. He dismissed it with a wave of his hand: 'Too tame.'
I was there when the second drawing was submitted. This time Federico's lip dropped to his chin. 'Why,' he asked the mealy-mouthed artist from Ravenna, 'am I sitting next to a cow?'
'That is not a cow,' the artist said, a little too haughtily. 'It is a bear.'
Federico had the man tied to a cow for a week to show him how mistaken he was. The competition was interrupted when a caravan arrived from Levantine carrying a lion and a giraffe — a gift from the sultan Federico had served. All of Corsoli thronged the streets singing and dancing. A great feast was held to which I wore my first silk shirt.
'Even the Medici did not have a lion and a giraffe,' Federico boasted at the table.
Finally, another painter, Grazzari from Spoleto, designed a crest of Federico strangling a lion with his bare hands. Federico loved it. He ordered the other painters to leave before nightfall and commissioned Grazzari to paint a fresco of him. The fresco, which is in the main hall, shows Federico, as handsome and young as Michelangelo's David, sitting astride a white horse in the middle of battle. The horse is rearing on its hind legs while Federico, his black armor shining in the sunlight, leans over the horse's left flank to plunge a sword into a soldier's chest.
'Grazzari is a master,' Federico said. 'He captured me in my youth.'
Federico took an interest in the plans for the library, the hanging gardens and even in a castle Tommaso was making out of sugar and marzipan. 'Make a drawbridge,' Federico said. 'And make the turrets a little bit bigger.' Like the fool he was, Tommaso resented Federico's suggestions.
One evening, I was standing in the courtyard before the evening meal. I had sipped a little too much henbane juice and my head was spinning. I swore the clouds lying on the horizon were really sleeping dogs and I was about to warn everyone in the palace not to wake them for fear they might attack us, when Tommaso came and stood next to me. He was almost eighteen in years and as tall as I. His hair, which had been cut into bangs, still refused to obey his comb, but his mouth had grown and his teeth now looked as if they belonged there rather than as if some devil had switched them with someone else's while he was asleep. But it was his eyes that had changed the most. They were melancholy and made him appear older than he really was.
He said he knew that God had punished him for the way he had treated Miranda and that he was more sorry than words could say. 'I still love her,' he said quietly. These were the most words he had spoken to me since I had returned and very unlike the old Tommaso. He raised his head and, looking me boldly in the eye, said, 'I beg you to find it in your heart to forgive me.'
I said I forgave him. 'Then please, speak to Miranda for me.'
'You must speak to her yourself.'
He shook his head. 'I cannot.'
'Then you should find yourself another girl. There are plenty of girls in Corsoli. You are a fine young man—'
'No. I love her more than life itself.'
Perhaps it was the henbane, but his sorrow reminded me of the loss of my Helene. 'I cannot promise you anything,' I replied, 'but if the time is right and the occasion presents itself, I will press your suit with her.'
He thanked me and wanted to kiss my hand, which I might have allowed him to do except that I felt, because of the henbane no doubt, that it would float away if I gave it to him. He said although we no longer had a contract, he would look out for me in the kitchen again. He was now assisting Luigi, and if I ever wanted any special food he would be happy to make it for me. Then he started boasting how he knew better than anyone else what was going on in the kitchen, and even though he was no longer a spy, he was in Federico's favor once again, and so on and so forth till I had to tell him to shut up! He was the same Tommaso after all!
The artists, the wild animals, the promise of new buildings gave Corsoli a festive air. Each day brought some new surprise, and so when Tommaso came to my door waving his arms in excitement, saying, 'Come quick, there is someone you must see,' I pulled my robe over my silk shirt, put on my new hat since it was raining, and followed him out of the palace.
'He has been to the Indies,' Tommaso said breathlessly, as we hurried to the Piazza Del Vedura, 'and seen men with three heads!'
The day was gray and the wind and rain spattered their marks all over it. As we entered the piazza I was surprised at the number of servants who were silently standing in a circle. Pushing my way to the front, I saw a tall thin man, with long gray matted hair covering the right half of his face. The part of his face I could see was deep brown and wrinkled like well-worn leather. His clothes were rags, his feet encased in old boots. A mass of charms and amulets hung from his neck and I could smell him from where I stood.
He dug his long grimy fingers into a pouch hanging from his waist and pulled out a piece of dark root. He raised it in the air, the rags falling away to reveal a thin, muscular arm. He lifted his face to the rain and cried out strange words in a hoarse, raspy voice. Then he opened his left eye and, looking us over, said, 'Whoever places this root beneath their pillow will capture their heart's desire as surely as the fox captures the hare.'
He walked to the half-blind washerwoman, placed the root in her hand, covered it with his own, and muttered in her ear. She clutched at his chest crying, 'Mille grazie, mille grazie!
'I want some,' Tommaso blurted.
Ignoring the driving rain which was beating down, the magician placed his hand on Tommaso's brow. 'I have more powerful potions for you.' He pulled out a dove from inside his shirt. 'Give this to Duke Federico and he will reward you with a long life; for this bird is descended from the one which brought the olive branch to Noah.'
Tommaso thanked him over and over and promised to feed him and arrange for an introduction with Federico. 'I can take you now,' he said eagerly.
The magician smiled. In a moment he had gathered up his charms and potions and was striding toward the Weeping Steps.
'Are you not coming?' someone asked me.
I shook my head. Bile had risen in my stomach, phlegm had formed in my mouth. My knees trembled. I stood in the rain clenching my fists and asking God why He had yet again raised me up only to tear me down. Blood of the Antichrist! Just when my life was floating like a feather in a breeze, my brother, Vittore, had to show up!
CHAPTER 26
'I thought about you often, little brother,' Vittore said. He had not been granted an audience with Federico yet, but he had been fed, and bathed, and given new clothes and was now lying on my bed eating an apple and stinking of perfumes. Even though I was the one who lived in the palazzo, who worked for Duke Federico, dressed in velvet, and was admired and respected all over Italy, and Vittore was just a thieving, lying tramp, the old fears still welled up in me.
'What do you want?' I snapped.
'Me?' he said, with the innocence of Christ. 'Nothing. A roof over my head. A meal.'
'I could have you hanged.'
'Oh, Ugo. Is this still about those sheep?' In the light of the candle it was difficult to see his face — his hair still covered most of it, except for his one good eye. 'Ah, my poor little brother.'
He rose like a snake from the bed and began snooping about my room. 'You should thank me. If it were not for me you would have spent your life running up and dow
n Abbruzi chasing your flock. Now look at you. A silk shirt, a dagger with a bone handle. A fine room. A reputation. What is this?' He poked his finger into a cabinet. 'Henbane?'
I snatched the leaves from him.
'And aconite? Who else knows about this, little brother?'
'No one,' I said, pulling my knife.
'Ugo.' He raised an eyebrow in mock surprise. 'You would kill me for this?'
'No, but for killing my best friend Toro on the way back from the market.'
Vittore sank to the floor in front of me. 'Ugo, please!'
'Please what?' said a voice. The screen was moved aside and there stood Miranda, her dark brown hair mussed up, her small white teeth shining in the pale light of the candle, her soft plump feet sticking out of the bottom of her nightshirt.
'Miranda?' Vittore said, rising immediately. 'Che bella donzella! Remember me? Your uncle Vittore?' He opened his arms as if to hold her and the thought of that bastard just touching her made me crazy. I stepped between them.
'Go to bed, Miranda!'
'Ugo, let her stay! Aside from our father there are only us three DiFontes in the world. We should cherish these moments. Tomorrow we may part forever.'
'Are you Vittore, my father's brother?'
Vittore bowed. 'At your service, my princess.'
Miranda saw the knife in my hand and her eyes widened in alarm. 'What are you doing, babbo?'
'He was showing me his knife,' Vittore smiled. 'As I was showing him mine.' A long thin dagger appeared in his hand as if by magic. He smiled. 'Two brothers showing one another how they keep the devil away. Nothing more.'
I put my knife away and his dagger disappeared up his sleeve. Miranda sat on my bed.
'She is as beautiful as Elisabetta,' Vittore smiled.
'You never knew her mother.'
'Well, she does not get her looks from you.' He winked at Miranda. 'I remember when Ugo used to hide in his mother's skirts whenever there was a thunderstorm.'
The Food Taster Page 18
