“You’re the Hebrew physico who studied in Bologna,” she stated, giving Sforno a determined sideways glance. “My cousin Lanfredini speaks well of you. He urged us to return to the city and send for you to care for Ubaldo.”
“Your cousin is a good man,” Sforno said politely. “Signora, will you step aside so I may speak with the young signore?” She rose, clenching her lavender silk skirts together in one hand. Sforno set his calfskin bag by the bed and took the woman’s place at the boy’s side.
“He’s our last child,” she said in a low voice, her chin trembling. “Two other sons and a daughter died of the plague. You must save him!”
Sforno gave her a compassionate look. “I have children myself. I will do everything in my ability to save your son, signora.” He gestured for me to stand beside him. I watched as Sforno greeted the boy in a friendly voice. “I’m going to examine you, Ubaldo. This is my apprentice, Luca,” he said, pulling the boy’s lower lids down to look at his eyeballs. He placed his ear close to the boy’s chest, listening, and then grasped the boy’s swathed right arm. Ubaldo moaned and licked his lips. His black eyes, like his mother’s, sharpened, but he didn’t cry out. Sforno unwrapped the bandages.
“You’re a brave one, Ubaldo,” Sforno said, as the smell of rotting flesh reached our nostrils. He pointed at the festering slash mark on the boy’s forearm, but I didn’t need a physico to show me that it was infected. The wound was surrounded by purple-and bronze-colored skin that graduated into swollen reddened skin, and dark red lines radiated out from the swelling. Even as we watched, the boundaries of the infection spread farther down toward his wrist and up toward his elbow, and more of the bronze skin surrounding the gash deepened into purple. Ubaldo moaned and tossed his head.
“Ubaldo, I’m going to speak with your parents,” Sforno said gently. He gave me a significant look, which I understood to mean that the arm was lost.
“You’re lucky, your parents really care about you,” I whispered, when Sforno stepped away. I didn’t know if Ubaldo would or could answer.
He picked his head up and made a brave, agonized attempt to smile. “Don’t all parents? Yours must, too. You look about my age. I was playing at swords with my cousin. He didn’t mean to hurt me. He’s not more than a baby. I was careless, not expecting his strength.”
“Does it hurt?” I asked, looking at the wound. My hands tingled as they had last night at Geber’s. The dreamy images of the time to come flitted before my eyes, and yet I was fully awake. I felt heavy. My breath came slower.
“It only hurts when I’m awake.” He tried to smile but moaned instead. “You’ve probably never had something like this, you were probably never foolish enough to get cut this way.”
“I know pain,” I said. My hands burned. An uncontrollable impulse to touch Ubaldo swept over me. Of their own volition my hands went to his arm. I gripped his arm with one hand at his wrist, one at his elbow. The heat in my hands increased until they were flames of flesh. Then a streaming sensation like sweet water pumping up from an underground well flowed between my two palms. The purple-and-bronze flesh around his wound bulged like a bladder being inflated, and then it wept. Sweet-smelling reddish-brown goo leaked out and drained down his arm, staining the white linen bedclothes. Not knowing why, but trusting my intuition, I kept a firm hold on his arm and fixed my eyes on the wound. After some moments, the goo thinned into a milky liquid and then ran clear, and before my eyes the swelling receded, like a tide going out. The reddened skin paled, and the bronze-and-purple skin softened into red, then pink, like a sunset climbing backward out of night, or a river reversing its course to flow upward. “Ah,” said Ubaldo. His head lolled to the side and his black eyes closed.
“So this is why the arm must be amputated,” Sforno was saying, in the sad, firm voice of an experienced physico. He stepped back with Ubaldo’s parents and pointed to the boy’s arm. Then he gasped. “Luca, what are you doing? What is this?”
“Should I stop?” I cried in dismay, my grip on the boy’s arm loosening.
“No!” Sforno shouted. “Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it!” So I returned my attention to Ubaldo’s arm, where the deep hues were still dwindling, the swelling still ebbing, and the crimson lines retracting into the gash like thread being wound up around a spindle. Ubaldo’s mother uttered a soft cry. I focused on the arm, watching as it slowly returned almost to normal. The cut was still there, but the skin around it was pink and pliable.
“Holy mother of God,” Signore Soderini exclaimed. “Grazie Madonna!”
“A miracle,” the mother breathed. “A woman in Fiesole uses her hands to stop bleeding, and priests calm disturbed people with prayers, but I’ve never seen anything like this!” She kissed Ubaldo, who snored loudly. She pressed her cheek against his, and I felt envious that he would receive such gentleness. “No fever,” the mother cried. “His fever has broken!”
“You must be blessed by God,” Soderini exclaimed, “to have the power to do this! I’ve heard people claim you were in league with the devil—that verminous son of the brothel keeper Silvano has been spreading malicious tales about you, calling you a sorcerer—”
“Nicolo Silvano lies,” I said, alarmed. I backed away and angled myself toward the door, in case I needed to escape. I remembered all too vividly what had happened last time people called me a witch, at the Piazza d’Ognissanti: I’d almost been burned at the stake. “I’m not a sorcerer,” I said uneasily, but with a flicker of fear, because the journey of the previous night might have been brought on by sorcery. Geber would say that the alchemist’s art was not sorcery but careful methodology and application with the elements; I was not sure anyone but Geber would believe that. “I’m not a sorcerer!” I repeated.
“No sorcerer would heal a child this way, and I will proclaim that!” Soderini thundered.
“Maybe you shouldn’t talk about this,” I suggested.
“People will want to know,” Ubaldo’s mother said breathlessly. “Florentines talk, and things that have been said about Luca Bastardo are enough to get him hung or worse.”
“The less said about me the better,” I said tightly.
“Luca is right,” Sforno interjected. He was blinking rapidly and wore a bemused expression. “My young apprentice is very talented. Luca is no sorcerer, he does not engage in diabolical exchange. He’s an intelligent young man who’s had a difficult start in life.”
“I will support your wishes. If you wish us to be silent about Luca’s abilities, we shall be,” Soderini said, his voice breaking. “Physico, I can never thank you and your apprentice enough. We are so grateful that my son’s arm can be saved and he will be whole!” He grabbed Moshe Sforno in a strong embrace. Sforno grunted and struggled, and finally, a tearful Soderini released him. Soderini came at me, but I ducked beneath his arms and hid behind Sforno. I had no taste for the embrace of men. I looked for the door. I was ready to leave.
“We are happy to have been of service,” Sforno said, straightening his lucco. He bent back over Ubaldo and examined the arm. “There’s no need for a dressing on the wound now. You don’t even need an unguent for it. Just watch it to make sure it doesn’t get infected again.”
“Since you won’t let us defend Luca’s good name, you must take this.” Soderini pressed two gold florins into Sforno’s palm and then closed the physico’s fingers around the coins.
“That’s well above my fee,” Sforno demurred.
“Many physicos have profited handsomely from the plague, and they couldn’t save anyone,” Soderini said. “You brought your apprentice who cured my son!”
Sforno shook his head. “I have no wish to profit from the plague.”
“You must accept this,” Ubaldo’s mother said earnestly. “It’s small recompense for the life of our only remaining child!” She laid a quivering hand on Sforno’s arm. He bowed, acquiescing. Around his head she gave me an overly sweet smile. I cowered behind Sforno.
“Luca,” he said, “w
e should let these good nobles tend to their son.”
“We will speak well of you, as a Jew,” the nobleman said then, in the tone of giving a great gift. It was a generous concession, because everyone knew that Jews were blinded by the devil and so didn’t recognize the true faith. I decided in that moment that I was lucky to have lived on the streets. My life there, and in the brothel, with all its hardships and humiliations, had cultivated only the simplest notions of God, whose baleful grace I saw for sure only in paintings by the masters. I wasn’t encumbered with preconceptions and so I wasn’t required to denigrate other people for their beliefs.
“You are most kind,” Sforno said, quickening his pace down the steps.
“And we will always champion residence permits for Jews,” Soderini assured him. We had reached the foyer at the bottom of the stairs and Sforno turned to look at Soderini.
“Not every unusual boy is a sorcerer, and not all Jews are callous moneylenders with high interest rates,” Sforno said brusquely. He and Soderini stared at each other, a hard-eyed stare which encompassed both their similarities as parents and their different identities as Jew and Christian, outsider and city father, ambivalent Other and secure Florentine. Then there was me, who was both and neither, and always alone. It was a gift from my life on the streets that I could see both positions. The Wanderer was right: my humble origins were valuable.
“Of course not,” Soderini said quietly. He clasped Sforno’s hand. “Let me know if you ever need anything, physico. I am in your debt.” He turned and twinkled at me. “And you, boy who is not a sorcerer, are ever welcome here!” He opened the door and Sforno and I stepped out into the cool autumn afternoon. I looked at Sforno, but he wasn’t talking. He walked back along the streets we’d come, stroking his beard and wrinkling his brow. Finally he turned to me with puzzlement writ on his large-boned face. “Luca, how did you do that?”
“I don’t know,” I murmured. I was glad to help the boy, but unnerved again by the strangeness that kept coming forth from me, unbidden. I had seen nothing like this even in the visions of the previous night. But it felt related to them. I was transformed more than I realized by Geber and the Wanderer. I shook my head. “But I know who to ask.” Sforno scrutinized me intently, then nodded. I waved farewell and fled down another street.
GEBER’S DOOR SWUNG OPEN, and his room was back to its usual disarray. The wooden tables were again littered with objects strange and wondrous. I didn’t see the wineglass or earthenware cup from last night. And there was a disconcerting silence; the stills were cold, no vividly hued smoke tapped along the ceiling, and the profusion of objects was quiescent. Geber was not in the room, and when I called for him, there was no answer. I wandered about, and eventually saw a small flight of stairs in the corner that I’d never noticed before. I’d been in this room often, and I could swear that the stairs had not been here. I ran up and found a windowless room with Geber lying on a small pallet. He was covered by a thin cotton blanket, beneath which he was shrunken and collapsed into himself. His eyes were deeply sunken in a face marred by bubboni. His eyeglasses and a stack of papers tied with a purple cord lay next to a flickering beeswax candle on a small stand beside his pallet.
“Don’t just stand there, put out the candle,” Geber said softly, “the light is painful.”
“Signore, are you well?” I asked anxiously, kneeling beside him.
“That depends,” he said, opening his eyes. The sclera had yellowed and his pupils were hugely dilated in the shadows thrown over his sweaty face. “If you mean that by dying, I complete my purification and attain perfection and rejoin my beloved wife, then I am well. Otherwise, no, and you can see it for yourself. It’s obvious: I’m covered in bubboni and my flesh is withered. Don’t ask questions when you know the answer yourself, or can discover the answer yourself. Anytime you can learn for yourself, experience for yourself, apprehend directly and with no intermediary, you must do so! Remember that, boy, when I am gone!”
“Can’t it be undone?” I made a small disconsolate noise. “You have so many potions and elixirs, isn’t there one that will prolong your days now?”
Geber coughed and his small thin frame shuddered. “Even the best elixir finally fails.”
“I have so much left to learn,” I said, dismayed. “I have many questions for you!”
“At least you know that you have much to learn,” he answered with a weak smile. “That’s the beginning of knowledge. The questions, as I told you, you must pursue on your own. That will make the journey all the more intriguing, won’t it?”
“But you have the answers,” I said in dismay.
“I have my answers, you have to find your own.”
“How will I ever find out about my parents, my family?”
“When the time is right, you won’t be able to avoid discovery.” He turned his head toward the wall and coughed again, then turned back to me. “I would have you learn the zodiac, and the meanings of the constellations and lights. On your journey, astronomy will be important. I see you teaching it to someone who is dear to you, a beautiful woman…. You will find a few books on the subject among my things.”
“Your things?” I asked.
“Pay attention,” he commanded, with some of his old asperity. “You’re the inheritor. My possessions and the deed to this place go to you. I have notarized it so with a lawyer.”
I rocked back to sit on my heels. “I don’t want your possessions!”
“You want my secrets.” He laughed, a wheezy sound that dwindled into shallow gasps. After a few soundless moments, he said, with satisfaction, “You want my knowledge.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I want to know what the Cathars know about my family!”
“The Cathars have many secrets. We possess artifacts that the Church and others would kill for, powerful artifacts written about in the Bible. We are the guardians of alchemical secrets and treasures from the ancient world. Because we have guarded these artifacts with our very lives, we have also been entrusted with other secrets.”
“I’m not interested in the Bible,” I said. “I want to learn how to turn lead into gold! I want to know what happened last night, and what you know of my origins!” I gripped his shoulders in my enthusiasm, and when I saw my hands on him, I thought of Ubaldo Soderini, and why I’d come to see Geber. “Maybe I can help you,” I said with excitement. I held up my hands. They’d worked magic once today, they could again. I laid my hands gently on his chest. I stared expectantly, waiting, but nothing happened. They didn’t tingle. They didn’t burn. The sensation of water flowing didn’t pulse in them. Geber laughed again.
“Your consolamentum won’t help me,” he whispered. “And you won’t get to the consolamentum like this, anyway. It’s about surrender, fool, when will you understand that?”
“But I want to help you!”
“Help yourself, you mean,” he said. He smiled. “If you can invoke the consolamentum, you will be able to do what it is you aspire to. They are the same.”
“The consolamentum—is that the warmth in my hands that healed the nobleman’s son today?” I asked. “How did I do that, and how can I make it happen again?”
“The consolamentum surpasses warmth and healing. It encompasses completion and perfection.” Geber’s frame was wracked by coughs, and then he turned his head away and spat blood on his pillow.
“Is that why the Wanderer called you ‘perfect’?” It was easier to return to the give-and-take of our lessons than to watch him waning before me. And I had the silly, vain hope that I could coax him into staying, into living, if I refused to relinquish him as my teacher. “Because you can use the consolamentum, not just for healing, but to change lead into gold?”
“We don’t use the consolamentum, it uses us!” Geber spoke with a ferocity that blazed in his ragged eyes with their twin yellow reflections of the dancing candle flame. He pushed up on one elbow as if to roar at me, but only dropped back, overcome and spent. I was sad to see him so wea
k and reached out my arm to hold him up, but he pushed me away. “The Wanderer used a term from the Cathars’ beautiful faith, the faith of my wife, though she and I no longer lived as husband and wife when we took the vow to give up the world of flesh….”
“Why? I’ve seen the comfort a woman can give a man in difficult times,” I said.
“This realm of flesh is the realm of Satan,” Geber whispered. “The worst sin is to perpetuate the world of flesh. So we offered up the fleshly joining of husband and wife, to perfect ourselves. Our love remained, as love always does, but not the carnal dross that gives service to the king of the world. You see, boy who will live longer than I have, men are the swords fought in a mighty battle between good and evil, light and darkness, spirit and matter. These two sides are equal, and the God of light is pure spirit, pure love, untainted by matter, and entirely separate from material creation. The king of the world is matter itself, and is evil.”
“No, this realm has beauty,” I insisted. “It’s a sin not to enjoy the beauty that surrounds us! It may be the only good we know!”
“How like the Jews.” Geber smiled. “No wonder you’ve found your way to them; you were meant to. They would tell you that enjoying His creation is one of God’s most sacred commandments. ‘And God saw that it was good.’”
“God’s creation may be good, but what of God? It’s best just to stay out of His way,” I said, with some grumpiness because the secret to making gold was slipping out of my grasp with the expiring of this alchemist’s breath. And with that secret were going the answers to all my unasked questions, about last night, about my origins…. Under the grumpiness was a terrible ache, but I didn’t want to give it space. It might hasten Geber on his way. I said, “Chance led me to the Jews. I ran into a crowd that was stoning Moshe Sforno and his little daughter.”
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