Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

  Somehow she was soon lifting off her gonna, and I was scrambling out of my camicia. All those years at Silvano’s, I had never imagined that I would be in a hurry to remove my undershirt! I fumbled and Rachel giggled, and then she stroked me and I could only groan. Over the next hour, she took pleasure in my body, as so many had before, but she also unstintingly gave pleasure to me, with her hands, and her mouth, and all of herself. Something was healed that had been damaged by my prior work. I would never be unscathed by what I had done, but I could let myself be a man now, with all that implied. It was a great gift that Rachel gave me.

  “You’re not going to leave now, are you, Luca?” Rachel asked, after a while. We were lying in each other’s arms in the hay. I was nuzzling her, marveling at her beauty and sweetness and strength. Somehow I knew she wasn’t the woman promised to me during the night of the philosopher’s stone, but I still felt grateful and tender toward Rachel.

  “If I don’t leave, I put you in danger,” I said, and guilt assailed me as I took in the full import of my words. Now more than ever, having loved Rachel, I couldn’t bring harm to the Sfornos. Jews were only grudgingly tolerated in Florence. My heart sank as a second recognition seized me: what Rachel and I had done would not be condoned, not by Jews, not by Gentiles, and most of all, not by her parents. “Not just because of what I did last night, but because of this.” I stroked her breast softly. “Your parents will kill me when they find out. And you!”

  “They won’t find out, we won’t tell them,” Rachel said, her tone pleading.

  “Your parents aren’t stupid, they’ll know at a glance what we did,” I said. I rolled away from Rachel and gazed up into the rafters. My heart ached. I had discovered this wondrous thing with Rachel, and it was already lost. We’d betrayed her parents’ trust and broken a great taboo. This on the heels of my setting fire to a building, which would bring the city’s wrath upon me. I couldn’t bring myself to be sorry about our lovemaking, because it felt whole and right, but others would judge and condemn us, her more than me. She could even be killed. I took a deep breath. “Moshe and Leah will be shamed. They’ll feel that you’ve brought dishonor to them, to your family, and to your community. Your family could be ostracized.”

  “No one will ever know,” Rachel repeated, stubbornly. I kissed her forehead.

  “People always find out,” I said. It hurt me, but I had to leave her, for her own sake. I scrambled up and searched for my camicia. “And men will come here looking for me, and I don’t want your family to get in trouble. I did something last night—the ufficiali will hang me! They won’t wait for a trial. They already don’t like me because of Nicolo Silvano and his new Confraternity of the Red Feather.”

  “Did you kill Nicolo Silvano?” Rachel stared at me with round eyes.

  “I wish I had!” I said. “I wish it was that simple.” I was finished dressing and I stood on the stool to retrieve my Giotto panel from its hiding place. Rachel watched me with curiosity in her intelligent eyes. I packed the panel with Petrarca’s notebook and Geber’s eyeglasses in a portmanteau I’d bought recently at the market, and then shrugged into my mantello.

  “You don’t have to go, Luca,” Rachel said. “Please, don’t go! I love you!” She leapt to her feet and clung to me.

  “I want to stay, Rachel,” I said, running my hands through her luxuriant auburn hair. Just for a moment, I let myself imagine remaining here. I could hold her…but her parents would hate me for shaming them in the eyes of their community. And then ufficiali would come here looking for me, holding me accountable for arson, a far worse crime than the murders Nicolo Silvano had committed. And what if the city fathers blamed the Sfornos for sheltering me? What if harm came to Moshe and Rachel because of me?

  “I have to go, Rachel, because I care about you,” I said, my voice cracking. “If I don’t, the ufficiali will hang me, and they may well punish your family. You know how they treat Jews. You could be kicked out of Florence, or worse! Just like your mother has always feared. I won’t endanger you.”

  “Please, Luca, stay,” she whispered. But I kissed her one more time on her full red mouth, and then I walked out of the Sfornos’ barn. I left Florence and went into exile.

  PART 2

  Chapter 13

  IT WAS A LETTER that brought me back to Florence. Not one of Petrarca’s letters, though he wrote regularly until he died in 1374. Somehow his letters always found me wherever I was: captaining a pirate ship on the Adriatic Sea, supporting Edward the Black in Spain, battling Tatars at Kulikova, transporting luscious fabrics and exotic spices over the Silk Road traversed by the Venetian Marco Polo, salvaging ancient texts from monasteries in Greece, helping expelled Jews escape Spain and resettle, fishing in Portugal. I worked first as a physico, that being a skill I possessed that was valuable enough for other men to pay me for. I was also curious about other professions. I worked as a condottiere, though I stringently avoided killing anyone, as I’d seen too much of that already. Instead, I fought for the pleasure of knocking a man off his horse. I was also a bandit, a merchant, a fisherman, and a dealer in antiquities and forgeries and in anything else I could buy and resell for a higher value. There was no limit to what I could do except my own conscience, because I was unencumbered of notions of heaven and perdition.

  So, for the decades between 1353 and 1400, I lived from my caprice, exercising all the prerogatives of a free man. I did what I wanted and went where my fancy took me. I traveled the world. I saw its wonders both natural and artificial, met great men, and bedded beautiful women. It seemed unnatural to deny myself pleasure when pain and suffering hovered nearby, ready to pounce and demand their due. So I responded to women’s invitations and cherished each of them, though none were The One from my vision. I was no longer certain that I deserved to have the woman from my vision. But I knew I would recognize her instantly, smell her lilac and white light scent, and never again want to touch another woman. There was an underground awareness in my reveries that wouldn’t go away, a knowing that whispered across my skin like a warm breeze, that I would find her someday. I had made a choice that fate would honor. What I didn’t know was if I could honor fate. I didn’t realize until later that the time I spent waiting was empty. Nothing tethered my heart into life. I was floating, dreaming, half asleep, because love is what wakes us up.

  DURING THIS TIME I made and lost fortunes, though I never let myself become penniless. I was scrupulous about banking part of my proceeds. Through his Church contacts, Petrarca knew of a bank in Florence run by a young but capable man named Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici who came from an old Florentine family. I liked about this Giovanni that he had the common touch. He was sympathetic toward the rebel poor of the city, probably because his father had eked out a living from a modest patrimony and from the interest on loans to peasants in the contado. He was at home on the streets of Florence and was well liked by the general populace, though his political leanings were usually out of favor with the elite. In burgher-laden, florin-conscious Florence, to be rich was to be honorable and virtuous, and to be poor was to be subject to misery. I was also impressed by the way this shrewd young man diversified his family business and took on the management of farms, the manufacture of silk and woolen goods, and international trade. I regularly sent agents to the Medici bank with funds to deposit.

  I took Petrarca’s advice about banking, but I did not discipline myself to study as he suggested. I sent him ancient manuscripts as I recovered them in Greece and Egypt, but I did not peruse the classical authors as he urged me to in his missives. There were some romantic poets I liked because they appealed to my secret nostalgia for the woman to come, and I learned to play a viola da gamba badly. I practiced sword-fighting and knife-play with any man who had a good, strong arm. I also sought out artists to examine their work. I had a notion that someday, when I returned to Florence and married, I would collect paintings.

  I made discreet inquiries about Cathar-connected people who had lost a son.
I also asked casually about people with unusual longevity and a mark on their chest. No answers were forthcoming. I confess that my efforts were halfhearted. In this uncomplicated in-between period that passed without the presence of any deity, I did not want to question myself or my origins. Questions were contrary to the simple life of pursuing my pleasure. When they cropped up, they drove me onward, as if I could silence them by traveling to the next town, the next occupation. I wanted only to keep gainfully employed and to keep moving, both because my native curiosity prompted it and because the appearance of my unending youth inevitably aroused comment and consternation. I looked to be a man of twenty-five years and did not age past that, nor did I fall ill, and any wounds I received healed with a rapidity which did not characterize other men. I accepted that I was different, as I always had been, and I left it at that.

  However, if I tarried too long in one place, people gossiped about me. Their words drew the attention of the growing but secretive Confraternity of the Red Feather, which considered itself a covert arm of the Holy Roman Inquisition. Members tied a small red feather onto their clothing and greeted each other with secret gestures. It was always my experience that fear and the instinct to scapegoat were more contagious than the plague. Sometimes the aging Nicolo Silvano and his son, Domenico, a red feather sewn onto their farsetti, would follow the rumors to me, whether I was in Roma or Vienna or Paris, as if they possessed the same strangely acute senses that used to tell me where Bernardo Silvano was—only now those senses were fixed on me and my whereabouts. I learned to slip out of town the moment a Silvano arrived. And soon the very first whisperings about witchcraft were the call for me to move on, so I could avoid Nicolo, and eventually his son, Domenico, altogether.

  Throughout those years, I kept abreast of what was happening in Florence. The year before he died, Petrarca wrote me that Boccaccio had read The Divine Comedy in the chiesa of Santa Stefano, and that educated men in Florence raged against him for serving Dante to the masses as if it were common crusted bread. The Black Plague struck again in 1374, and a few years later the Ciompi, wool-workers who wore clogs in the factories, revolted after being given impossible production quotas. In the same year, 1378, an antipope was elected, which caused anxiety in papist Florence. The rich Albizzi family controlled the city through a network of friends and nominees in the Signoria. They acted with typical Florentine ingegno in expanding Florentine territories. And Pisa and Milan threatened Florence at the end of the century.

  At that time I was living on the northwest coast of Sardegna, in Bosa, a little fishing village on the banks of the Temo River. There I had taken up again my old skills as a physico. I had sailed in with a Genoese merchant ship to trade for coral, and discovered many Bosans ill with dysentery. The local physico had died of it. I pitied the Bosans and made them as comfortable as I could. By the time the town recuperated, I was enchanted with Bosa: with the luxuriant orange and olive groves and sweet berry thickets; ancient cork-oak forests and rich vineyards for the delicious amber Malvasia wine; the griffon vultures and peregrine eagles soaring over high volcanic cliffs; the red-, yellow-, and blue-painted fishing vessels; and the way the pink-stoned city hugged the hill above the sparkling blue sea in a sweeping crescent, climbing upward in narrow lanes and stairs toward the rosy-colored fortress of Castello Malaspina. I bought a small home off the city center, which was an intricate web of alleys, porticoes, and small squares where women worked busily at their looms and embroidery. One hot afternoon in early summer a familiar voice boomed in through my front door.

  “Is this the abode of a wolf cub?” called the voice.

  “I could not prevent him from coming in, Luca,” whispered Grazia, my maid, assistant, and bedmate, appearing in the doorway. She was a small, pretty woman, dark-haired and with a Castilian mien. She had a lively charm and quick intelligence and her menses had ceased at a young age, so pregnancy wouldn’t be a problem. I’d let her initiate the bedding, of course, and then I’d enjoyed her without guilt and paid her well for her work around my home.

  “It’s fine, Grazia.” I smiled. “There’s just no keeping the Jews out of anywhere!”

  “Why would anyone try?” she sniffed, flouncing her skirt. “They bring education and commerce wherever they settle!”

  “True,” I murmured. I had just finished stitching up a cut a young fisherman had sustained on his arm when a fish thrashed unexpectedly, causing his knife to slip. That was his tale, though I suspected he had been arguing with another young hothead. I was about to warn him to stay away from the other youth, but Grazia pointed behind herself.

  “Come in unless you fear getting bit,” I called. The Wanderer strode in and I leapt up, whooping with joy, and hugged him. He squeezed me and then stepped back to examine me.

  “A cub no longer,” he observed, grinning. He pinched my biceps. “Look at these muscles, grown hard from use. Luca Bastardo the wounded blond cub has grown to be a dangerous animal!” But he looked the same: big burly shoulders carrying a bulging sack, thickly muscled arms and thighs, a long, wild, gray beard, and deep crow’s-feet radiating out from dark eyes that luminesced with play, sadness, and time lived too long.

  “You look the same, Wanderer,” I said, and I was glad to see it. I wasn’t the only one with an oddity when it came to age.

  “I always will,” he returned lightly. “As will you, now that you’re a wolf fully grown.”

  “Strange quirk to have as a trait, like an arrow with too many feathers in its quill,” I commented in a low voice, to keep our words private.

  “Some people have unusual gifts,” Grazia said airily, to no one in particular. “Tommaso, go, and don’t argue with Guglielmo anymore! Next time it may be more than your arm that’s cut!” The young man protested as Grazia took him by the arm to usher him out. She was useful as an assistant this way; she was practical and firm and the Sards respected her.

  “What is time, that we should be mindful of it? What seest thou in the dark backward and abysm of time?” the Wanderer asked, spinning his old questions like a net that would capture me. I was so delighted to see him that I just grinned and shook my head.

  “It’s something you and I have a lot of that other men have less of. Why should that be?”

  “Why shouldn’t it be? Because you fear it? Fear that we’re from the land of fairy, of heart’s desire, where nobody gets old and godly and grave, where beauty has no ebb and decay no flood, and time and the world are ever in flight,” he chanted, with his particular grin that I had missed more than I realized.

  “Riddles about things I haven’t thought about in years.” I chuckled.

  “You don’t want to,” he replied crisply. “So they’ve come knocking at your door. What did you do with my donkey, eh? Did you eat it, wolf?”

  “That donkey was kept in high style in Florence, and damned if the stubborn, sordid old creature wasn’t still alive when I had to leave!”

  “So that’s what you do with my gift, you abandon and denigrate him?” The Wanderer laughed. “And here he’s one of us, cursed by God to outlive his usefulness! You should have brought him with you. He’s loyal and dependable, a good ally to have at your side in a fight!”

  “He’s a prince among asses,” I said, rolling my eyes, “but I’m sure he’s dead now.”

  “Don’t you ever question your certainties?” the Wanderer asked. “What are you doing in this little fishing village in the middle of nowhere, anyway?”

  “The finest fresco cycle in all of Sardegna is here, painted by a Tuscan from the papal court in Avignon. It boasts an Adoration of the Magi that will make your heart stop beating—”

  “You’re joking, yes? A fresco cycle? Listen, I have a story to tell you—”

  “A story?! I haven’t seen you in, what, fifty years? And you want to tell me a story?” I exclaimed. “If I’m going to listen to one of your infernal stories, we’d better be drinking good wine! Come upstairs and I’ll ask Grazia to prepare us a meal.”


  “That woman is small but formidable, she’s as pretty as Moshe Sforno’s wife, and probably faster with a knife,” the Wanderer said. “I wouldn’t want to cross her!” I laughed and agreed, then led him upstairs. We sat at my dining table. Grazia brought us a jar of wine.

  “Are you the first of your people to come to Sardegna?” she asked. “I hear the Jews are looking for places to settle. Bosa’s a good choice; there are open-minded folk here. Perhaps smarter than open-minded. Many Bosans see the advantage of a community of Jews here.”

  “Jews are always looking for places to settle,” he said gravely. “It’s God’s will for us.”

  “How can anyone know God’s will?” she challenged him. He grinned widely at her.

  “And you, what are you looking for?” he replied, answering a question with a question, as always.

  I didn’t expect Grazia to answer. She had a lively charm that was all her own, but she was a typical Sard, courageous, hardworking, and remote, wary of revealing too much of herself, suspicious of strangers. To my surprise, she grew still. She tilted her small head and her fiery eyes softened. The Wanderer could have that effect on people, of course; I’d seen it before, decades ago. “Love,” she said softly, “a child. Myself. What do you want, Jew?”

  His craggy, bearded face took on a rare pensive expression. “Peace for my people,” he said softly, surprising me for the second time. “Peace for the earth.”

  “Then our wishes are brethren,” she said. “If everyone had what I want, there would be peace.” Her fine Castilian face shuttered over with its usual Sard stoicism. “I’ll get food.”

  I was silenced by the grace of Grazia’s response; I’d never thought to ask her about her longings. Longings were inconveniences I’d avoided these past decades. She hurried about gathering food with her cheeks slightly pink. I poured a glass of wine for the Wanderer and myself. He lifted his cup in a silent toast to me, and we both drank a long draught. I plunked my cup on the table, so that some of the fine amber liquid danced up inside the brim. Then we both sat in the silence. I grew aware of the myriad sensory impressions around me: Grazia clattering about in the kitchen, the fragrance of nearly ripe apricots from the tree outside my home, the shrill call of a gull winging down toward a rock on the coast, the distant laughter of men working in a field, the bleating of a herd of sheep crossing along the street in front of my door. I settled into a fuller, richer moment than I had experienced in many years, as if all the time spent diverting myself was only a flickering shadow of what life could be. I felt my kinship with the Wanderer, who sat with me, alert and still.