Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

  My heart wrenched open. The dark flame from within Geber’s distillate flask burned through me. It scoured open canals within my woven-together sense of “I.” It left me soft, wrung out, awash in sadness and loss and pain and my endless hidden yearning for love. It was raw and exhilarating, to be stripped bare in a way my nakedness at Silvano’s could never presage, because this was nakedness of the heart. I was reveling in the translucence of being undefended when a small, slender woman’s form approached me. She was dressed in a fine blue and orange cottardita and wreathed in silver light, but her face and hair were concealed by shadow.

  “You have a choice,” said a voice that was not hers. Indeed, the voice was neither young nor old, male nor female, Florentine nor foreign. It came from nowhere and everywhere and it simply spoke. In the voice’s resonance, I saw myself grown to be a man. I was still lean and of medium height, though I was well muscled. I approached the woman. I took her delicate hand, kissed the soft palm that smelled of lilacs and lemons as if she’d been gathering flowers in the clear light of morning. I embraced her. Her slender body melted into mine. She was my wife, my life, the sum of everything I had ever wanted: family, station, beauty, freedom, love. Unbearable aching happiness pulsed through me.

  “You can have the great love you long for, but she won’t stay—” and I saw, felt, myself alone. My throat was raw with anguish, the dark fire that had opened me now scorched my heart without mercy, and my own aloneness pressed in on me like spiked iron walls collapsing inward to crush me. Giotto’s paintings couldn’t soothe me, nor could the ravishing paintings by painters still unborn that had revealed themselves during my flight through time. It was suffering on a scale that even I had never imagined possible, and I knew suffering. My tongue felt bitter and shriveled from cursing God. My own nails excoriated the flesh on my palms. Then all was still.

  “—and your love will lead you into loss and a premature death. Or you can live without ever meeting her, and live hundreds of years longer,” said the voice. And the man that I became strolled casually, his expensive woolen mantello fluttering as if I were walking down a country road with a soft wind at my back. Gold florins weighed down my money purse, and I knew I was wealthy. Indeed, I was peaceful, content, expansive, but somehow incomplete. My hands felt cool and still. There was open space around me, a soft, expansive freedom. I would live to see with my own eyes the wondrous machines that had been shown to me earlier. The voice finished, “You must choose now.”

  “That’s no choice,” I heard myself say aloud. “Love, of course.”

  There was a rush, and then I was gagging again, choking, and vomiting onto Geber’s wooden floor. The Wanderer was supporting me while Geber wiped my face. I coughed and vomited some more. I wiped my face with my hand and was surprised to smell the fragrance of lilacs clinging to me out of my vision. The fragrance wasn’t subtle. It was strong, as if I’d dumped a vial of perfume on myself. It was a tangible artifact of an inconceivable journey, and it shocked me. I was disoriented, disquieted, unsure what to make of what had happened to me. Was it real? If so, then what, indeed, was real? My own bizarre agelessness, and the marvelous journeys I had made to Giotto’s frescoes to escape the horrors of the work at Silvano’s, had led me to question things that other people took for granted. This vision dissolved boundaries even I had believed to be firm.

  “Welcome back,” the Wanderer said cheerfully.

  “Good journey?” Geber asked, his thin, beardless face quizzical. I looked from one to the other, a thousand questions trembling on my tongue, then leaned over and retched again.

  “I’ve a donkey downstairs, I’ll get him home,” the Wanderer said. He heaved me up over his broad shoulder and trudged downstairs, his clogs clattering on the steps and making my head ache. Geber followed us with a rag to clean up the bile when I vomited again. A braying donkey was tied up at a bronze fixture outside the door downstairs, and the Wanderer threw me unceremoniously over the smelly beast with my head hanging down one side and my feet down the other. Waves of nausea rippled through my throat and belly and I threw up into the animal’s dusty gray fur.

  “Luckily my friend here doesn’t insist on cleanliness as Moshe’s pretty wife does, or you’d be wiping him up and apologizing for your bad behavior,” the Wanderer joked. “Get rid of it now, wolf cub, because if you puke on Sforno’s floor, his lady will beat you with her broom!”

  My head was lolling helplessly, but I picked it up to look at the two men. Questions clattered in my head like pebbles rattling against each other, but only one emerged. “Can I change lead into gold now?” I croaked.

  “Possibly,” Geber said, rolling his eyes. He picked up one of my hands and eyed it in the silvery moonlight, ran his finger over the lines graven into my palm. I noted with wonder that there seemed to be an extra crease radiating out from the mount of my thumb. In a pleased voice, Geber said, “Yes, very possibly. Not tonight, though, impatient boy.”

  The Wanderer snorted. “Real gold is understanding, and I doubt you’ve sublimated that!”

  “At least he’s persistent,” Geber said. “We have to admire that. He can fix on a single notion, minimal intelligence and all.”

  “I find much to admire in our young cub.” The Wanderer laughed. “The question is, can he find it in himself? Will he continue to see the enemy within, or will he finally see the Friend? Before his opportunity to repair the world is finished?”

  “Why must I repair the world?” I groaned again as I maneuvered myself around to sit astride the donkey. It craned its head and snapped at me. The Wanderer smacked its flank, but with obvious affection. I said, “After what the world has done to me, I don’t feel like I owe it anything!”

  “Just when I think he shows potential,” Geber snorted.

  “Wolf cub, it’s not what the world does to us that matters,” the Wanderer said in a kind tone. “It’s what we do to the world. We’re not taught that, but you’ve been given the grace of a life on the streets, so you’ve been taught little. There’s hope for you. We must become ignorant and be, instead, bewildered. That’s when eyesight becomes vision. Do you see yet?”

  I laid my head down on the donkey’s neck. “I don’t know what I’ve seen,” I confessed. “I don’t know if it’s real or shadows. I don’t know what’s real anymore.”

  “Then there is potential,” Geber said. He waved good-bye and the Wanderer led the donkey on, and the rhythmic clip-clop of the beast’s hooves on the flagstones lulled me into a state close to sleep. I surrendered, thinking that there would be time later for all my questions, time to get answers from Geber and the Wanderer about what had just happened to me and what it meant. I was wrong. Time is not what we imagine it to be. Its span is ungraspable, immeasurable, unexpectedly brief, even for a man whose life stretches many times what most men are allotted.

  Chapter 11

  AT DAWN THE NEXT DAY, Rachel flounced into the barn to rouse me for our usual lesson. I groaned and rolled over with my head wrapped in my arms. The gray cat screeched.

  “Get up, Bastardo, you’re going to read Aesop’s Fables today,” she commanded, poking me with the toe of her shoe. It was not a dainty poke.

  “Ergh,” I responded, burrowing my head deeper into the blanket and straw. My tongue was furry and swollen, my muscles ached, and the slightest noise instigated a vicious thudding pain in my forehead like footsteps stamping with iron-spiked clogs. I had buried Rosso, whom I liked. Then I myself had died. It all confounded me. The visions of the prior night replayed in my head and instigated strange notions and amorphous yearnings. Geber said I was to be ennobled by the philosopher’s stone, and I felt as if, in some way I didn’t quite merit, I had been. First I’d been shattered, and then I’d been bettered. It left me wanting to do loftier work, work in which I could take pride, work which would have an impact on the world. Work which would bring honor to the love who was promised me in the vision, if, indeed, the choice offered in that vision ripened into fact. Such an ambiti
on was far outside my purview, but it waxed rather than waned. I was at a loss about how to fulfill it. So I didn’t get up until late in the afternoon when Moshe Sforno came to get his street clothes. He pulled his lucco off a peg. An image leftover from the visions of the philosopher’s stone flashed in my head, and I saw myself trailing along behind Sforno as he went out to tend the ill.

  “Wait, signore, I have to go with you,” I said, struggling to sit up. “You’re going to tend someone who’s sick. Someone with the plague?”

  “Not this time. There’s a nobleman’s son with an infection in his arm from a sword cut.”

  “May I go with you?” I asked. “I could help you, carry your tools or something.” The idea was intriguing enough that some of the wool cleared from my head and I lurched to my feet.

  “Well, I never thought of you helping me out,” Sforno said in a musing tone.

  “I can’t go on as a becchino forever,” I pointed out. “The city doesn’t need them now that the plague is receding. And you have four daughters and no son to accompany you.”

  “No son to teach what I know.” Sforno sighed.

  “Besides, you’ll need help holding down the boy if his arm needs amputation.”

  “It’s true, you work hard, you’re strong, and you’re not at all squeamish,” he said. He smiled. “You would make a fine assistant, perhaps even a physico someday. Get dressed.”

  I shook out the brown woolen blanket I always slept in, folded it, and then patted my camicia to rid myself of hay and cat hair. My working clothes—hose, farsetto, and mantello—were hung on a wooden peg by the door. I pulled them on, saying “I never considered it before this moment, but I might like to be a physico. It’s good work.”

  “It’s hard work,” said Sforno. “There’s much to learn.”

  “I’m not afraid of hard work, and I’m ready to learn,” I said. In fact, I was more than ready. The months of lessons with Rachel and Geber had built up an appetite in me. And, after the philosopher’s stone, I wanted a new direction in my life. I said, “I’m hungry to learn!”

  Sforno perused my face, then nodded. “You’ll start off as an empiric, learning by watching me and then practicing while I oversee you. If you show talent, I’ll find Galen’s works for you to read, and of course Aristotle’s treatises, and I can send for a copy of Avicenna’s great Canon, too. He wrote about important medical topics, like the contagious nature of phthisis and tuberculosis, the distribution of diseases by water and soil, and the interaction between psychology and health. You’ll have to learn Latin. Most of the great medical writers were Saracens; some were Greek, and their work has been translated. I’ll find a tutor for you. You’ll learn quickly. Rachel says you do, despite yourself,” Sforno said with a wry smile. The autumn air was cool in the barn and he pulled his heavy mantello closer about himself. “But, again, I warn you, don’t imagine that being a physico is easy.”

  “No work’s easy, that’s what I’ve learned,” I said quietly. Being a physico had to be easier than prostitution or gathering and burying dead bodies. It surprised me how quickly my past came up for me, even after a night like last night. I was still haunted by my history. But I had to be comfortable with it, since it was what I had. The Wanderer had asked me if I would find the friend within. I didn’t know how to do that, other than to be that friend.

  Dressed, I went with Sforno along the stone path through his garden into his house. Inside we stopped at the kitchen, where I took a slab of cheese and a chunk of dark bread. There was a honey cake baking in the fireplace. Signora Sforno stood by the table talking with another Hebrew lady. Moshe gave me an amused look. “My wife is a ruthless negotiator, I love watching her,” he whispered.

  “I can offer you a large bowl of my dried apricots,” Signora Sforno was saying.

  “These apples are fresh and ripe, there aren’t many nice pink apples like this in the city, people were too ill to attend to their crops!” the other lady responded, indicating a basket of glossy-cheeked apples. She was plump with dark hair curling out from under her yellow headdress. “Besides, I accepted your dried apricots for the wheat flour yesterday, and Signora ben Jehiel told me afterward that she would have given me dried meat for it!”

  “What do you want, Signora Provenzali? What do you think I have left? Do you think people have been paying my husband for his services, when they die as soon as they see him? Meanwhile, your husband’s pawnshop has stayed open during these terrible plague times….” Signora Sforno let her voice trail off suggestively. She took two apples from the basket and tossed them to Sforno, who handed one to me.

  “My wife, she has some spirit,” Sforno said mirthfully as we went out into the hall. “She’s had to work so hard these last several months. But the serving girl will be back soon to help, I heard she survived. Anyway, as I said before”—Sforno crunched a bite of apple with some gusto—“this is not an easy profession. There are always ignorant village healers who think they know more than a trained physician, and who offer amulets and incantations instead of medicine. I think there would be more magicians now, preying on people’s fear and superstition, except that the plague has killed so many of them. And don’t forget you have to have the stomach to remove limbs and tumors, to cauterize wounds, and to cut out gangrene if that’s what’s necessary.” He plucked up a large calfskin bag from the stairs. He opened the drawstring and indicated his instruments: knives, razors, lancets, a silver cannula, a cautery iron, various needles, and grasping tools. He pulled out a bloodstained steel saw. I nodded, and with a grimace he replaced the saw in the bag.

  “People distinguish between medicine and amulets,” I said, following him into the street.

  “Never,” Sforno snorted, spewing white apple crumbs into his beard. “Sometimes. Worse yet, incantations work as often as anything else. Some priests offer exorcisms as medicine, and no Jew can gainsay a priest, or he risks burning! And there are barber-surgeons, for whom the cure to every disease is bloodletting, and I’m not sure that bloodletting ever cured anything.”

  “People die when they lose a lot of blood,” I commented. I had seen that myself, during Silvano’s demonstrations.

  “That’s what I think, too,” Sforno confided, tossing his apple core into a gutter. We walked out of the Jewish enclave and through the narrow bricked streets of the Oltrarno, where the new palazzi of nobles and wealthy merchants had been halted in mid-construction with the plague’s incursion. There were the usual bakeries and artisans’ shops, mostly closed—but not all of them. Three children followed a pair of women who were gossiping about the market; ufficiali on horseback trotted past; a man wearing the crimson of a magistrate strode in a hurry toward the blacksmith, from which arose a busy clanging. Sforno commented, “People are returning to the city, now that the plague is receding. But the Wanderer didn’t show up for breakfast. He’ll be back. He’s like a wart that never stays away.”

  “I thought he was your friend,” I said.

  “Is that troublemaker anybody’s friend?” Sforno asked, so sarcastically that we grinned. “He sets off Leah every time. He started in with Rachel and really got her going the other day. She’s a thoughtful kind of girl who doesn’t like to be challenged. I thought she was going to throw a cup at him.”

  “He’s some kind of trickster, with those questions,” I said slowly. I had no way to make sense of my experiences of the previous night, of the cave and the battle with Nicolo who turned out to be me and the vision of the future. I decided to do what I always did: focus on the work at hand.

  “The Wanderer will show up when it’s most inconvenient. Meantime,” Sforno said briskly, “you must learn about herbs. I know a woman in Fiesole who’s an expert herbalist. There are some excellent women healers,” he told me in a confidential tone of voice. “Most university-trained doctors dismiss them, but I prefer a woman healer to a bloodthirsty barber-surgeon. And every physician has to have a good midwife to work with; a doctor can’t be there for every popolo gro
sso cow who’s calving.” He clapped me on the back in good spirits. “There are few good Gentile medical texts, but a Christian woman named Hildegard wrote some very nice ones. That’s what I mean about women, don’t discount them in medicine.”

  We came to a new palazzo near the Ponte alla Carraia, where carts crossed into the city from the country, and I had a bittersweet memory of Marco from so long ago, and how we’d planned to meet on this bridge after escaping from the brothel. I rarely thought of Marco, or Bella, but on this day of memory after a night of foreseeing, I wondered if I would ever truly forgive myself for my part in their deaths. Perhaps, if I did actually find the love offered to me in my vision, I deserved to lose that love. I wondered how I would survive the loss of something I’d longed for my whole life. Perhaps I’d made the wrong choice at Geber’s. And why was I given this choice? Why had Geber singled me out for the fantastic journey of the philosopher’s stone? Because of my family’s connection with the Cathars? I knew Geber’s time was short, and I was determined to wrest from him answers about my parentage. Also the secret of turning base metal into precious gold. My musings were interrupted by Signore Soderini, who stood at the door, waiting.

  “I’ve been expecting you, Signore Sforno,” said the anxious nobleman, a stout, black-haired man. He gesticulated wildly with arms wrapped in voluminous gold sleeves. “You must help my son!” He led us through his richly appointed home to an upstairs bedchamber where a boy of about thirteen lay tossing on the bed. He was wiry and had his father’s black hair and high forehead. His oval face was pale with fever. His mother, a tiny, plump woman with a pale green headdress over her chestnut hair, bathed his face with rags dipped into a bowl of water.