Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

  “Wolf cub, what did you do after all that stabbing and slitting?” the older man asked. His eyes sparkled at me as if it was all an amusing anecdote, as if I hadn’t basked in a sea of warm coppery life essence.

  “Gave the children the money I found in the brothel and told the maids to care for them. I drove out the son of the proprietor. I told him I’d kill him if he came back. He knew I meant it.”

  “You must be hungry after all that,” the older man said. “Come have dinner.”

  “I should wash first,” I said.

  “Come, I’ll take you,” Sforno said. His wife started to speak, but he held up a warning hand. He took a lamp and led me through the foyer to another hall, and out a side door. “My Leah’s a good woman,” he said slowly. “Don’t judge her. It isn’t easy for us Jews.”

  “It’s not for me to judge anyone,” I said quietly. “Is that other man a relative of yours?”

  “Not that I know.” Sforno shook his head.

  “What’s his name?” I followed along a path lit by his lamp. The path led to a small crude barn of the kind people built in the Oltrarno, where not all the land was built up with homes.

  “I don’t know that he has one. He’s a wanderer. He knew my father. He seems to know everyone, and he brings news of my brother and cousins in Venice. He shows up and we feed him.” Sforno threw the sash to the barn door and motioned me to enter. Two bay horses whinnied and a cow lowed as we went in. Sforno led me to a trough filled with water and placed the lamp on a small three-legged stool. “Here’s a bucket and a brush, clean yourself, Luca.” Then he went out.

  First I took from within my red-spattered vestments Giotto’s precious small panel—the only thing I had brought with me from Silvano’s. I looked around for a hiding place, saw a small ledge above the door. I overturned a bucket and used it to climb up to the ledge, and then pried away a board and secreted the panel in a hollow between the barn’s outer shell and inner walls. The panel was wrapped in oiled calfskin, so I knew it would be safe from mice. I climbed back down and doused myself. The water ran onto the rough wooden floor in pink rivulets. I dumped a few more buckets over my head. I picked some horse hair out of the brush and then used it to scrub out the blood dried in my hair and the flesh caked beneath my fingernails.

  Sforno returned carrying a threadbare camicia, a patched woolen doublet, hose, and a short mantello. “We’ll have to have garments made for you,” he said. He sighed. “Leah won’t like spending the money, but it has to be done. This is an old farsetto of mine.” He swung the mended vestcoat doublet back and forth. “It’ll be large, but you’ll be decent.”

  “When I lived on the streets, I found clothes in the garbage, and I folded and rolled them and tied them to fit,” I said. They were old memories but still clear, perhaps more vivid now, with Silvano’s prison torn asunder. I found myself awash in the old images, Paolo and Massimo and the spot under the Ponte Vecchio where we had often huddled together for warmth in the winter, games of chance and skill and begging for coins for a meal and going to the market with an empty belly…Sforno’s voice severed into the past, and I realized he was speaking to me.

  “Before Silvano’s?” he asked. I nodded. “You don’t look like the usual street urchin,” he observed. “You’re not deformed, an idiot, or dark like a gypsy. The yellow hair, your features, your strength and cleverness—you could be a nobleman’s son. I’ll wager that you are, and there’s some strange twist in your history. There are probably people looking for you even now.”

  “I have often wondered about my history. But wouldn’t my parents have found me long before now, if they were looking?” I asked bitterly. I gave him a sharp glance and did not confess the secret abomination of my long youth and hardiness. Sforno was a physico, he would probably observe those for himself.

  “The world is strange and full of crooked paths.” Sforno shrugged. “You’re here now. Come back in when you’re dressed.”

  Cleaned and dressed and filled with anxiety, I made my way back into the house. Overwhelmed by how different I was from these people, by both blood and experience, neither of which I could ever wash from myself, I walked timidly along the hall. Wooden beams ran above my head, and paintings of the flowing canals of Venice were hung on the walls. Everything about the place sang with the ordinariness of a cozy family, something I had never known. Even among an exiled people, I stood out, a bruised fruit in an orchard of flowers. Moshe Sforno was taking me in out of a sense of obligation, but I couldn’t stay here forever. I would have to form a plan for myself. I didn’t want to go back to the streets, especially with the Black Death slaughtering more wantonly than I had this night. Nor would I ever go back to the work I had done at Silvano’s. I heard voices, high girlish timbres interwoven with Sforno’s resonant tones, and I stepped into a dining hall. The conversation ceased. Before me stood a tall wooden chest painted with faded grapes beneath an arching of strange letters. Beside it, the dining table was a long rectangle, with plain, columnar legs but made of well-polished walnut. There sat Sforno, his wife, four girlchildren, and the Wanderer. A plate was laid down between Sforno and the Wanderer. They all stared at me except for Mrs. Sforno, who studied the table, which was set with lit candles, silver goblets, a roast fowl, fragrant sautéed greens, a golden loaf of bread, and a carafe of plum-colored wine. Rebecca, the littlest daughter, slid down from her seat and skipped over to hug me. Her breath on my cheek was warm and milky.

  “Look at him, a Gentile through and through.” Mrs. Sforno threw up her hands. “What are the neighbors going to say? They’ll think badly of us for having him around our daughters!”

  “Whatever they say, you aren’t saying kaddish. Sit down, Luca.” Sforno’s resonant voice was kind. Rebecca led me to the empty spot on the bench next to her father.

  “Four daughters,” I murmured. The four girls inspected me in open fascination. They were unabashed and unashamed, completely unlike the cowed and beaten girls I had known at Silvano’s or the unheeding ones I had witnessed on the streets. I flushed and stood straighter, fidgeted with Sforno’s farsetto to pull it to a tighter, better fit.

  “Even the great Rashi had four daughters and no sons,” Sforno said, with an air of both love and resignation. The girls giggled. Their laughter was such an exotic sound that I gaped. For many years, I had not once heard the bright laughter of girls. The poet Boccaccio whom I’d met on the street earlier today was wrong: women were not trivial baubles. Even the young ones were far more than that. They had a special grace because divine music played in their laughter. Sforno stroked Rebecca’s cheek. He sighed. “One accepts God’s gifts as they are given.”

  “What’s a killer whore?” six-year-old Miriam asked in a lilting voice. Sforno groaned and slapped his hand over his eyes.

  “Hush, Miriam!” the serious eldest sister, Rachel, said.

  “Someone cruelly used, who decides to change his fate,” I answered grimly.

  “Change is the only constant,” the Wanderer said. “I think I’ll stay for a while, Moshe. I’ll make the kiddush, yes?” He held up his goblet of wine and sang some words in a language I did not understand.

  And so began my first meal with the Sfornos, and the beginning of my living in a family. It was tangential to real domestic intimacy, it wasn’t my family, and I was an alien thing still. But it was the closest I’d ever come.

  THE NEXT MORNING I AWOKE FROM A NIGHTMARE of fire and ache, dead patrons and freed birds, and a beautiful woman with a fragrance of lilacs sinking beneath black water. It was dawn and I lay on a pallet of straw. My heart was stuttering in my chest, which was no longer numb with submission, and an ordinary green garden snake was slithering away through the straw. I gulped air, and then, as the rhythms in my body slowed, I unwrapped myself from the woolen blanket Moshe had given me. The gray barn cat who’d slept purring in my armpit darted off after a field mouse, or perhaps after the little snake. I stretched and took a deep breath of earthy animal scents, sweaty fur a
nd dusty feathers and fresh dung, mouse droppings and insect carcasses and damp straw. Here the air was not scented with perfumes and there was no bed with fancy linens like at Silvano’s. I wondered when the smell of those perfumes and the luxurious hand of those fabrics would dissolve, or if they’d cloy my senses forever. I felt confusion and gratitude toward Sforno, and then the anguish of the dream reared up like an unruly horse. It reminded me of my promise to his wife, to be helpful. I grabbed a shovel and started cleaning out the horses’ stalls. I worked awkwardly, having practiced other skills these last many years. I hoped this new work would shatter the dream that encased me like dark glass. Then the Wanderer came in, his wooden clogs clattering on the unfinished timbers of the barn’s floor.

  “You look pale, Bastardo,” he said. He grabbed a brush, let himself into a stall, and briskly curried a donkey that was stabled with the Sfornos’ two horses.

  “Bad dream,” I said, trying to keep my voice from being surly.

  “I sleep little and dream less.” He shrugged. “Who can sleep when God’s creation is emanating all around us with such goodness?”

  “I’ve seen little goodness in God’s creation.”

  “So what kind of dream was this, that blinded you so?”

  “The kind that traps you even in the light,” I muttered.

  “A dog that is beaten will stay in his cage even if the fence is removed,” the Wanderer said. “Because the fence is inside him.”

  I stopped and rested my chin on my hands on the shovel. “I thought I was a wolf cub.”

  “You can’t be both?” he asked, and it was such an intimate question that some cool reserve within me dissipated, and I felt myself completely understood in his presence in a way I’d never felt before with anyone else, not even Giotto. The Wanderer stood in profile to me as he brushed the donkey, which nickered with pleasure. I was struck by the man’s huge, beaked nose and the way it dominated his craggy face but didn’t detract from it. Rather, it enhanced the intelligence of his mien and the seriousness that didn’t go away even when he was laughing.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “Your nose. It’s the biggest I’ve ever seen,” I said.

  “A man’s got to have something to distinguish himself.” He snickered, rubbing his nose proudly. “We can’t all be beautiful golden-haired wolf cubs!”

  “I thought I was a beaten dog,” I said.

  “Again, what seem like opposites aren’t. You need a new way of seeing, Luca, so your eyes reveal to you the goodness woven into everything, even what seems on its face to be evil.”

  “What eyes will show me goodness in a life where I was abandoned to live on the streets, then sold into a brothel by my closest friend?” I asked bitterly. “The only life I’ve known is one of cruelty and humiliation. What goodness is in that?”

  The Wanderer’s sharp eyes drooped. “I’m just an old man without a home, what do I know? But if I were to know something, I might answer that your life is teaching you. It’s a gift, a great education. And perhaps you suffer now so that great joy can come to you later in life, and the suffering makes you worthy of it. I might know this, if God were to whisper it to me.”

  “God doesn’t whisper, He taunts us. At best He laughs. Do you have a name?”

  “What do you want to call me?” He winked at me. “I’ll answer to whatever you wish. As long as you tell me more about this humorous God of yours.”

  “What do I know about God?” I rephrased his question back to him and returned to shoveling manure. “I’ve heard priests speak, but their pious lectures have nothing to do with what I’ve seen and felt.”

  “So your mind is empty. Good. Emptiness is a place to find the Master of Hiddenness.”

  “I always thought God was found in fullness,” I said slowly. “Like in the richness and beauty of a master’s paintings. God is found in that beauty, in that purity.”

  “Only in purity and beauty and fullness? God is not in stain and ugliness and emptiness? Why do you limit Him that way?”

  I stopped again and stared at him. “Why do you call God ‘the Master of Hiddenness’?”

  “What would you have me call Him?” The Wanderer shook his unruly mop of hair.

  “Don’t the Jews have a name for Him?”

  “How can Jews give a name to what is unlimited? Or Christians or Saracens?” The Wanderer straightened his coarse tunic over his barrel-shaped torso. “Names evaporate in that fullness and beauty you hung on the Lord like a mantello, boy-who-looks-like-a-boy-but-is-not.”

  “You speak in riddles,” I muttered. “It’s beyond me. I just want to live a new life, a good life, and someday have a wife and family of my own. God’s not very nice; I don’t want to worry about Him and His names. I just want to stay out of His way.”

  “Be careful what you wish for.” The Wanderer’s broad face creased into a teasing smirk. “In giving a name, we’re trying to enclose in form what is formless—a terrible sin. Original sin. Do you understand sin?”

  “I know about sin.” I looked with as much arrogance as I had ever mustered into the Wanderer’s face. I was a killer and a whore and a thief. If anyone knew about sin, it was me.

  “Wonderful, what a blessing! Soon you’ll be crowned! What need have you for names of God? Why go down a wrong path when you’ve had such a wonderful start to your journey?”

  “You think that naming God is a way of limiting Him, and so it’s wrong?” I puzzled.

  “We have a name for God. But we never speak it aloud. Words have magic and power, whether written or spoken, and names are the most sacred and powerful words of all!”

  The Wanderer gestured with the brush at the manure, which I’d managed to spread everywhere, not knowing exactly where I was supposed to put it. He said, “You’re not very good at that. You’ve made a big mess.”

  “I’m bad at this,” I agreed. I threw down the shovel. “I have another idea, for something that doesn’t require so much skill. I’ll talk to Sforno about it.”

  “You could probably learn to shovel manure, with lengthy instruction and a few weeks’ practice,” the Wanderer said dryly. “Collect the eggs from under the hens and take them in with you, eh? There’s a basket hanging by the door.”

  Inside the house, Mrs. Sforno in her voluminous blue dress bustled about the kitchen. She was seeing to the oil jars, pouring off luminous chartreuse olive oil from a large jar with a tap in its side into smaller jars. The piquant nutty scent of the oil wafted out from her hands. Her auburn-haired daughter Rachel stood at a wooden table, slicing bread. Rachel gave me a grave, searching look, then an ironic smile. I smiled back uncertainly. “I, uh, brought in the eggs.” I held the basket out to Rachel, but Mrs. Sforno quickly shut off the tap and took the basket from me. Miriam skipped in wearing a patched pink nightdress. She snatched a piece of bread from the plate at Rachel’s elbow. Rachel clucked and pretended to slap at her. Miriam’s long chestnut braids flew out as she spun around and saw me. Her impish face lit up.

  “Good morning!” she lilted. “Here’s some bread!” She tore her purloined slice in half and gave it to me with a grin. “Now that you live with us, are you still a killer whore?”

  “Miriam!” chorused Mrs. Sforno and Rachel.

  “No.” I flushed, though I didn’t mind the girl’s honesty. I preferred it, even, to the unasked questions. I fidgeted with the women all staring at me. “Is Signore Sforno around?”

  “Just returning from morning minyan,” Sforno answered, striding in. He wore a long white shawl which he playfully gathered around Mrs. Sforno as he embraced her. She smiled and pushed at him, but he kissed her with relish before he let her step away. He bussed Rachel’s cheek and tugged Miriam’s braid. Miriam giggled and flung herself up into his arms. Sforno staggered back as if bowled over by her weight, which elicited peals of laughter from her.

  “Luca brought in the eggs,” Rachel said.

  “Isn’t that kind!” Sforno exclaimed. He looked toward Mrs.
Sforno but she didn’t seem to notice, and he and Rachel exchanged a pointed glance. He clasped my shoulder. “How are you this morning, Luca?”

  “I’ve a plan for earning money,” I told him. “You and Mrs. Sforno can have my wages.”

  “I do well as a doctor,” Sforno said. “It isn’t necessary for you to give us money.” He took a piece of bread from the plate.

  “Papa!” Rachel chided. “There’ll be no bread left for breakfast!”

  “I have always worked,” I said. “Now the city is hiring becchini to cart away the bodies of the dead. I can do that. It takes no skill, and I have none. It just requires strength. I have plenty of that.” I shrugged. “And I never get sick. I can do this.”

  “He’ll have to be taught to read,” Mrs. Sforno commented, not looking at me.

  I gasped with surprised delight. “I could read Dante!”

  “He’ll need a trade,” she went on. “It’s the only way we’ll get him out of here.”

  “My Leah, you’re so practical.” Sforno caressed her cheek.

  “In the meantime, I can work for the city,” I said.

  “He mustn’t bring the contagion here,” Mrs. Sforno said. “But he could bank his earnings until he has enough to begin a life for himself.”

  “Leah’s right, the contagion spreads like fire.” Sforno frowned. “You’ll have to do what I do when I return from tending the sick: scrub yourself with lye soap and change clothes before you come indoors. Even clothes can transmit the plague.”

  “I can do that,” I said eagerly.

  “I can teach him how to read,” Rachel offered.

  Sforno was nodding, but Mrs. Sforno turned and gestured at her daughter. “I think not,” she said sharply. “His wages will hire a tutor!”

  A tutor, for such as me? I boggled at the thought. It was all too much. “I’ll go then,” I said, backing out of the kitchen. I turned and fled down the hallway, past the staircase where the other two girls, shy Sarah and little Rebecca, were playing with a doll, into the foyer and out the large carved door on which I had not been able to knock last night. I wasn’t sure what drove me at such velocity out of the Sfornos’ house. It had something to do with the way Mrs. Sforno averted her gaze from me while delineating a new life for me, and something to do with the way Miriam laughed in her father’s arms. It had something to do with the little green snake curving sinuously away. Perhaps most of all, it had to do with beaten dogs and the fences in their minds.