Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

  “Let go, I won’t follow him,” I snarled in frustration. Sforno released me.

  Petrarca was staring at me raptly. “If you good gentlemen will excuse us, walk with me, young man!” He placed his arm around my shoulders and led me off toward the Baptistery. He said nothing until we stood in front of Giotto’s bell tower, and the silence allowed me to calm myself. By the time I stood looking at the beauty which Giotto had created at such great expense to the city fathers, I was almost smiling, remembering Giotto’s humor and kindness.

  “You look like a man caught in memory,” Petrarca observed. “I have a memory, too. A memory from a dozen years ago, when I stopped in Florence on my way to Roma.” He scowled and fingered his mantello. “I remember a boy of eleven years, being readied to burn at the stake. A boy who was clearly indentured to an evil man. Would it be possible for such a boy to be only eighteen now, all these years later? Even if this boy doesn’t bear some mark on his breast?”

  His words were ones I feared but, this time, I didn’t contract with fear. I stayed soft in my chest, undefended. “My life is a tribute to God’s cruel humor, starting with my residence on the streets of Florence, continuing with my life in a brothel of perversions, and then as a guest of Jews, who themselves hold a precarious place in Florence. As for my origins, I only know a few fragments of a story, and some of the pieces don’t fit. I don’t know for sure.”

  “You have the aura of the elect. Surely you are the son of refined people. You are too intelligent not to be!”

  But of course, I would sound intelligent. The doors of my mind had been opened by the likes of Master Giotto and Moshe Sforno, Friar Pietro and the Wanderer and Geber the alchemist. Even Bernardo Silvano, loathsome as he was, had managed to impart something to me. “Of my origins, I remember nothing except begging on the streets of Florence.”

  “It matters naught. ‘Memory brings forth not reality itself, which is gone forever, but the words elicited by the representation of reality, which as it disappeared impressed traces upon the mind via the agency of the senses.’ Augustine said that. I agree,” Petrarca said seriously. “Through our thoughts and our writings, we give form and meaning to our journey. You will tell your story one day, Luca Bastardo. In telling it, you will find meaning. That’s how you will uncover who and what you are.”

  He reached into a leather pouch hanging from his shoulder by a strap and took something out. “Here,” he said, tossing it. “A gift for you. For your memories. I wish I were going to be around to read them!”

  I caught Petrarca’s gift in midair. It was a lavish gift for a stranger: a calfskin bound book with blank white vellum pages. It was thick and beautiful, the calfskin soft and supple, a pleasure to hold in my hand. It still is, as I sit in my small cell with the walls pressing in again. The pages are nearly full now; I have filled them as I await my execution. The time here, though short, would have crawled if it weren’t for Francesco Petrarca’s gift and Giotto’s small panel of St. John, both of which were brought to me by Leonardo il Maestro himself, after the soldiers of the Inquisition dragged me to this cell. Back then I thanked Signore Petrarca profusely; such notebooks were rare and costly. He laughed off my stammered words of gratitude in his mercurial way.

  “We stand before Giotto’s brainchild, and were you not his protégé? I knew the Master only briefly, but his was an honorable friendship, and I have cherished it faithfully. If you were beloved of him, that more than suffices for me.”

  So he remembered me from Giotto’s side, too. I swallowed. “You know my secret, and you don’t think me a sorcerer? You aren’t tempted by Nicolo Silvano and his confraternity?”

  Petrarca shook his head. “He is, ah, rather unappealing, with that heavy perfume and superstition.” He shrugged. “If the Author of all times and ages permits you to wander for a longer time than most, who am I to question that? Who are you to gainsay the grace of His gift?”

  It was the first time my agelessness had been presented to me in the light of God’s grace, and I stared at Petrarca, unable to speak at all. I saw myself whole in an entirely new way. He laughed again and took my arm and told me that we must now be good friends, since we had both been befriended by Giotto.

  LATER, AS EVENING WAS COMING ON, after I had spent a few hours grimly ruminating on what Nicolo had meant about a gift, I went to the brothel. I was reluctant to do so, but also, with the contradictory logic of the heart, I wanted to. I wanted to see my old prison from the perspective of freedom. And I had to face whatever it was that Nicolo had left for me. So I sped off toward the city walls on the eastern end of town, running through twisting streets where chasms created by tiny cottages wedged in between massive towers let small dapples of light onto the damp and dark cobblestones. Finally I came to the palazzo that I had promised myself I would never again enter. The front windows were bare and let the light in; I had pulled down the drapes all those years ago. The place seemed deserted, as so many buildings still were, four years after the first onslaught of the plague that had devastated Florence. As I slowly ambled toward the door, the tiny responsive hairs on the back of my neck lifted and pulsed. Something was terribly wrong. As I pushed open the door to the brothel, my hand trembled.

  Inside it was silent, as it had been during Silvano’s long dominion. I had not left it thus. When I walked out with the blood of eight men on my arms and chest, children openly milled about and talked and the maids gossiped as they cleaned up the bodies. In killing, I had brought life to the palazzo. Simonetta hugged me and wished me well in my new home, and I assured her that Nicolo would not come back, because I’d threatened him with dire consequences.

  I called out, but no one answered. I went through the foyer into the hall and became aware of the sickly sweet smell of rotting flesh. All the doors were closed, and when I opened the first one, I saw a small form on the bed. “No!” I shouted. My heart thumped as I ran to the bed. It was one of the small, delicate children from Cathay, one of Silvano’s last acquisitions. She hadn’t been in the palazzo long before I’d liberated it, and her spirit hadn’t yet been broken. She had a sweet laugh like little bells trilling. She had barely grown in the years I’d been gone, and now, her slanted eyes stared unseeing out of her triangular yellow-skinned face. Her throat had been cut.

  I vomited, then lurched out of her room. Next was the room of a young blond boy and he lay crumpled in a heap, facedown, on the floor. His throat, too, had been slit. I was crying as I ran upstairs into the private wing. I banged open Simonetta’s door, saw her plump form on her bed. She lay as if asleep, her long blond braid trailing off the luxurious velvet pillow that was one of the features of this palazzo. Her chest wasn’t moving, and her eyes with their engraved crow’s-feet were peacefully closed. There was neither blood nor mark on her neck, but she was dead. Her sweet seamed face with its red birthmark was rolled to one side, and her worn hands were folded at her breast. Nicolo must have given her poison. I collapsed on the floor. Simonetta had been kind to me, and now she was dead for it. Nicolo, vile thing that he was, had killed his own mother. It was an unthinkable atrocity. If I hadn’t left to live at the Sfornos’, perhaps she would have been saved. I should not have abandoned her. Regret and rage wouldn’t save her now. I didn’t try to stem the tears that dripped down my face.

  Night fell with its sticky plum shadows arching out of alcoves. A cold wind wheezed at the windows. I went through the palazzo, lighting lamps and candles. In almost every room a child lay dead, either on the floor or on the bed. The throats of most had been slit, though some were stabbed. None had resisted; I knew from bitter experience that they had been taught not to, and even years of liberation were not enough to remove the fences in their minds. I saved my own room for last. There was a shape in my bed. It was a small reddish-brown dog, a mutt of the kind often seen scampering about the city, begging for food. The muzzle of its severed head hung open, its long pink tongue lolling out, and the head lay next to its torso, which had been stabbed through several
times. Its legs and genitals were missing. It was a clear warning to me. Instead of frightening me, it angered me. I should have killed Nicolo when I had the chance. If I had been the sorcerer he said I was, I would have killed him with my thoughts in that moment.

  There were almost fifty bodies here to bury, a few days’ work were I to do it alone. But I was done burying the dead; my time as a becchino was over. The Laughing God, seeking a new joke, had batted me as a cat does a mouse into another place in life. It was a while of sitting in contemplation on the bed next to the mutilated dog before I knew what to do. Then the answer came to me in all its crimson simplicity. It would require a huge sacrifice from me—exile—but it was the only fitting response to this moment. I took a torch out of a wall sconce and held it to the heavy drapes that had blocked the light from this little room, my prison of so many years. They lit quickly and orange flames raced up them to lick at the ceiling. I held the torch to the bed with its horsehair mattress and the linens whistled as they caught fire. A small trickle of flame ran along the dog’s muzzle, and I ran upstairs and set Simonetta’s bed on fire. I watched for a while as the flames wrapped tenderly around her body like a blanket for sleeping. I left before the smell of roasted flesh could nauseate me.

  I entered into room after room, setting fire to the linens and drapery. I didn’t pray because I was angry at God again for allowing Nicolo to commit so many murders. I simply trusted the fire to guide the children into a better afterlife, whatever that afterlife might be. I doubted it was the boring heaven vaunted by priests. But there was probably something. Better men than me, baptized men, had been certain in their faith of a heaven.

  Soon the palazzo crackled, groaned, and shrilled with fire. Black smoke poured in flumes along the ceiling and fierce hot blasts of air struck my face. A golden glow suffused walls and ceiling and it reminded me of the radiant, expressive halos in the work of Giotto’s master Cimabue. Cimabue had painted the exquisite altarpiece of the Madonna at Santa Trinita. The Madonna was shown as a queen upon a rich and monumental throne, with eight adoring angels attending her and four stern prophets below her. She existed in the gold that was the ground of her divinely maternal being, holding on her knee the Christ child with his hand upraised in blessing.

  Perhaps it was the smell of smoke and burning meat that confused my senses, or perhaps it was Cimabue’s powerful Madonna that exalted them, but I was thrown back, for a moment, into the unbounded state of the philosopher’s stone. Time spun loose like a wheel rattling off the axle of a cart, and scenes from the past sprang to life before my eyes. The flames vanished like clouds scattering from the surface of a river and I saw myself, a scrawny, dirty boy, being led through the door by a sneering Bernardo Silvano. I saw the first patron walk into my room, and the countless other patrons who had followed him—I saw each and every one of their richly hated faces. I still hated them. I still felt the fire of anger scorching through me at what they had done to me. It tormented me and I felt violated all over again.

  Suddenly time stopped gyrating and the forty-eight children whose bodies I had consigned to the fire stood around me in a semicircle. They were quiet, solemn, reverent. They wore plain blue silken camicie and golden halos, like Cimabue’s angels. The little girl from Cathay stood nearest me; when I met her eyes, she nodded. Ingrid, to whom I had fed poisoned candy to save her from the ministrations of a cardinal, joined the children. Blue-eyed Bella appeared, with her hands mercifully whole, and then Marco stepped into the semicircle. He was as he had been before Silvano had brutalized him: handsome, elegant, radiating kindness. I was so happy to see him looking well and luminous that I called his name. He winked at me with his old esprit. A sound like a song went up from the children’s throats, exalting me, and Simonetta stood among them. She was young again, but without the stripes from Silvano’s whip that she had often worn. She smiled at me and pointed—

  Crack! A falling beam landed close enough behind me to throw blue sparks at my face, startling me out of my reverie. I laid the torch on the carpet and turned and strolled out the door. I walked some distance, making sure I could still see the palazzo’s scarlet umbra reflected in the night. I scaled the wall of an abandoned palazzo near the Porta Santa Croce, which, like all of Florence, was closed for the night. Heedless of the curfew and any passing ufficiale, I shimmied up onto the roof to watch the spectacle of Bernardo Silvano’s brothel burning to the ground. It was, after all, my life that was also burning. I wasn’t sorry to see it go. A better life, a better Luca, would emerge from the ashes. Perhaps for the fence to finally leave the mind of a beaten dog, the fence had to go up in flames.

  It was worth it, though I now had to leave Florence. The city fathers would disregard Nicolo’s slaughter of innocents, but they would never forgive my act of arson. Arson was a hanging offense. Florence’s buildings were precious, far more valuable than fifty familyless children and an old woman who took care of them. In fact, the Signoria would probably be grateful to Nicolo that he’d rid the city of pestiferous outcasts, embarrassing reminders of a vice in which too many city fathers had participated. But burning a building which could have been reclaimed for civic purposes: that was an unpardonable outrage. Knowing this to be so, that neither God nor men would avenge the children whose funeral pyre I had set, I could no longer believe in any God at all. Even a cruel God must harbor tenderness for enslaved children and for a sweet soul like Simonetta. Clearly there was no God apart from the evil in men.

  Dawn broke cold and damp. The first tentative rays of sun shattered the indigo horizon, and the city gates opened. In came peasants from the contado with their carts laden with produce for the markets. Mingling in the streets with the carts and pack animals were devout folk hurrying to early Mass. I had to return to the Sfornos’ home to pack my things, and by the time I arrived, a light rain was falling. I went quietly through their house and out to the barn to wash myself. Rachel was waiting. She sat on the hay where I had slept for so many years, but would never again. Her knees were curled up against her chest and wrapped in my woolen blanket.

  “I’ve been worried about you, Luca, I didn’t see you come home last night,” she said. Her full pink lips were drawn in concern, and her long auburn hair spilled around her shoulders in a glossy sheet, wisps of it curling around her face. Her large eyes were smudged under with purple crescents. Strong-minded Rachel seemed oddly vulnerable, even to my exhausted eyes. She had grown very beautiful over the last four years, with her high cheekbones and fair skin and eyes that shone with intelligence and spirit.

  “Rachel, your mother doesn’t want you alone with me,” I said softly. I stopped in the doorway and pulled over the little tripod stool to sit on, to wait for her to leave.

  She asked, “Where were you?”

  “Out. I think you should go, so your mother doesn’t get angry with me.”

  “You disappear sometimes,” she murmured, hugging her knees closer to her chest. “Where do you go, Luca Bastardo? Do you go to the market, to visit friends from your past, to look for the parents you’ve never known? Mama says we’re not to ask you questions about your life, that someone who’s done what you’ve done has secrets that the rest of us must never learn.”

  “I’m leaving,” I said, looking away. “Something has happened. I can’t stay in Florence. It isn’t safe for me. Or for your family; ufficiali will come here looking for me.”

  “No! Luca, why?” She jumped to her feet, dropping the blanket, standing in front of me in her plain peach-colored gonna, the sheer undergarment women wore. I wanted to look away because it wasn’t at all appropriate for me to see her thus. A woman wore her gonna only in the most domestic settings, with the most intimate family members. But the dawn threw a soft luminescence that made Rachel’s gonna diaphanous, revealing the lift of her full breasts and the indent of her small waist underneath the sheer silk. I was aroused, and stunned and shocked to find myself so. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

  “Luca, what’s wrong? What’s h
appened? You must tell me! We can help you, I can help you!” Rachel cried. She ran over and pulled me up off the stool. I was breathing heavily, almost shaking. “You’re not alone anymore, you have us!” She grabbed my shoulders, shaking me, and as she did, the silk of her gonna was sucked inward to outline the curving shape of her body. A strange lassitude coursed through my being. I went slack though my blood was boiling. I knew all about desire, of course, having had it wielded against me during those years at Silvano’s. But I had never before experienced it in myself. I had not expected it to feel this way, insistent and luscious and warm. My cheeks burned. I felt ashamed. Desire was cozening my brain, as I had seen it fool men with wives and children of their own into despicable acts of rape and abuse. So what difference was there between them and me? It was a galling question. I did not want to hurt Rachel as I had been hurt, especially not this day of new self-possession. I hung my head.

  “Luca?” Rachel asked. Softly she placed her hand under my chin and tilted up my face. She searched my eyes with her own.

  “You have to get out of here,” I said hoarsely. “Now!”

  I stood to the side to let her pass. Instead, before I could react, she clasped my face in her hands and kissed me. I noted that she was as tall as me and didn’t have to stretch up on her toes, and that her lips tasted sweetly of butter. Then she parted her lips to let me feel her soft, lush tongue, and all thought left my head. After a few moments, Rachel pulled her head away from me.

  “You’re so beautiful, Luca,” she murmured. “I’ve wanted you for so long!”

  “Really?” I asked hoarsely, surprised and grateful. “You wanted me?”

  “But only if you want me, too,” she whispered, and right then, I knew the difference between me and the patrons: Rachel wanted me as much as I wanted her. I had never invited patrons into my room, I had submitted to them with anger, despair, and contempt. There was no submission in Rachel, just reciprocal tenderness. I couldn’t speak, so I kissed her some more.