Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

  “The market is calm, people are gathered only to exchange news, I’ll be safe here,” Maddalena objected with a gesture that took in the swarms of people babbling with excitement.

  “Your life is my responsibility now, Maddalena mia,” Rucellai said, with an air of lordly determination that became him, with his height and his closely cropped gray beard and his white hair.

  “I’ll escort the signora home,” I offered.

  “I would be most grateful,” Rinaldo Rucellai said, gripping my arm in thanks. “And again indebted to you. I must attend to Lorenzo’s business, but you will join us for dinner soon, Signore Bastardo? To let us show our appreciation?”

  “Surely,” I said. Maddalena and I watched the three men scurry off. “Come, signora, let’s obey your lord and master.” Her mouth tightened for a moment, then relaxed. “I would not rule my wife with so heavy a hand,” I said blandly. “A man should allow his wife to govern herself.”

  “Then your wife might be hurt when there are riots in the streets,” she said lightly, with a flutter of her thick black lashes. “My husband’s love for me makes him protective.”

  “Love doesn’t include incarceration,” I said stiffly.

  “Signore Bastardo, it’s not incarceration for me, it’s my pleasure to do my husband’s will. His wisdom is apparent, these are uncertain times!”

  It’s not wisdom because he has white hair, I thought, and then was ashamed of my jealousy. I was glad that Rucellai took good care of Maddalena. It’s just that I longed to do that myself. But I said nothing. I didn’t show it, but I trembled inside as I took hold of her elbow to escort her. It was small and fine, a delicate birdlike notching together of bones, a delight in my hand. If I couldn’t touch her anywhere else, at least I knew what her elbow felt like, through her sleeve.

  “I WROTE A PLAY FOR MY CHILDREN,” Lorenzo was saying, as dessert dishes were cleared by servants, “entitled San Giovanni and San Paolo. They each have a part in it, as do I. It’s great fun to enact with them! We put on costumes and make their mother watch and laugh through the whole thing. I miss them terribly. A good wife and many children are the greatest blessing life and God can offer.” He took a draught of his wine and then gave me a long sardonic look across the table with his black eyes glittering over the rim of his silver goblet. “You must be getting ready to choose a wife, Luca. You’re wealthy, allied with the most excellent families.” He indicated Rinaldo Rucellai, who was pleased at Lorenzo’s attention and bowed his head in response. Lorenzo continued, “Isn’t it long past time for you to think of starting a family? You look young for your years, but a man must settle down and produce children eventually.”

  “I’ve considered it of late,” I allowed.

  “A man as handsome you, and as virile as you’re said to be, must want a wife,” Lorenzo continued, playing his familiar game of cat and mouse with me. “Is it true, as rumor has it, that you sometimes visit several ladies in a night? What marvelous stamina you have! I’m envious!” Maddalena, who sat next to her husband at the head of the table, knocked down her wineglass. A servant bustled over to mop up the garnet liquid.

  “Virility is common among Florentine men, who take their cue from their leaders,” I answered, with a level gaze at Lorenzo. “I don’t give any credence to rumors.”

  “Perhaps he intends to reproduce his name,” cracked Sandro Filipepi. “Florence will be overrun with bastards! Luca, you must be the son of a vigorous man and an insatiable woman!”

  “There are a few bastards around,” Leonardo replied. “But there is only one Luca.” It was late in the evening and we were a dozen guests in the dining salon at Rinaldo Rucellai’s richly appointed palazzo. The meal was over, and successful, having left us mellow and convivial with good wine. Since the dinner party was nominally in my honor, I sat near the head of the table, next to Maddalena, who was on Rucellai’s left. I was close enough to her that I’d been inhaling her lemon and lilac scent all evening, which eroded the edges of my reason into rags. Lorenzo sat at Rucellai’s right hand, across from me. It was the first time Lorenzo and I had been in the same room together, the first time we’d spoken, since the sack of Volterra six years ago. I was uneasy. Lorenzo with his cunning like a street rat could sense it.

  “How about it, Luca, are there marriage plans in the offing?” Lorenzo pressed me.

  “Eventually,” I said.

  “Any prospective brides in particular?” Rucellai asked. Matchmaking, with large amounts of money changing hands via dowries, was a topic of supreme interest in Florence.

  “Perhaps,” I answered.

  “I could introduce you to the mothers of some of the young women I’ve met in Florence, if you can be dragged away from your ladies,” Maddalena offered. Her long lashes were lowered, making her protean eyes unreadable. I struggled to keep my face from showing my revulsion at her words. Crafty Lorenzo saw something that made him sit up straighter.

  “I think caro Luca is far too busy endeavoring to turn lead into gold to worry about marriage right now,” Leonardo said easily, diverting the other guests’ attention.

  “I would love to study alchemy!” said Maddalena.

  “Luca would be the man to teach you,” Leonardo said, as if confiding in her alone. “He studies and works in his workshop until late every day. He reads and rereads Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticum. He has other alchemical works spread about his workshop. He is a man possessed with discovering the great secret of alchemy!”

  “I thought the great secret of alchemy was immortality,” said Lorenzo, smiling at me while playing with the stem of his wine goblet.

  “Your grandfather once told me that the only immortality we could hope for was in the love we felt for other people,” I replied, knowing how my reference to Cosimo would affect Lorenzo. He pushed the silver goblet back with a spastic motion.

  “I like to think my paintings will enjoy some sort of immortality, like the timelessness of nature,” Leonardo said serenely, again rescuing me from unwanted attention. “Since painting embraces within itself all the universal forms of nature. This is why it’s so important to paint from nature, to learn from nature. To this purpose I have hired a young peasant woman and her baby as models for recent sketches of the Madonna and Child. The peasant woman is physically beautiful, and I would like to capture the essence of her beauty so that it ravishes the viewer. And not just the beauty, but the mystery of femininity and grace!”

  “What is immortal is the soul, inclined toward God and propelled by love,” commented Sandro. “That’s grace, that propelling. Ficino says the soul is so responsive to beauty that earthly beauty becomes a way to access divine beauty, which is universal goodness and harmony.”

  “If anyone can paint universal beauty, it would be you, Signore Leonardo,” said Maddalena warmly, and I loved her even more for championing Leonardo.

  “So I shall account myself a second-rate draughtsman who is denied nature’s favors as a husband is turned away by a wife who locks her knees together!” exclaimed Sandro.

  “No, Signore Filipepi, that’s not what I meant; your works are full of grace,” Maddalena cried. “I love your Adoration of the Magi in Santa Maria Novella, with the radiance of the star pointing at the sweet haloed head of the Christ Child, held so lovingly in his mother’s lap, and the way you captured the emotional face of Cosimo de’ Medici as the wise man, and Signore Lorenzo here, and young Pico della Mirandola with whom Ficino is so taken—”

  “Signora, pay Sandro no heed, he is a great trickster and is playing upon your tender sympathies,” Leonardo said graciously, smiling at Maddalena.

  “Well, don’t spoil the joke for me,” grumbled Sandro, but he lifted his wineglass with good humor in a salute to Maddalena.

  “You know what a husband should do with a wife who locks her knees,” Lorenzo said, with a serious mien. “He should roll her over onto her belly!” Sandro burst into guffaws, Leonardo choked on his wine as he tried to contain a laugh,
and Rinaldo Rucellai with his neat gray beard colored and grinned. To her credit, Maddalena didn’t flinch.

  “Poor Clarice, I will offer her my sympathy if I see her limping,” she said in a deadpan tone of voice. Her comment elicited hoots and cheers around the table, and it was only when at the other end of the table the wives of Donati and Tommaso Soderini clapped and called, “Brava! Bravissima!” that she blushed and cast her eyes down. I couldn’t believe how adorable she was in that instant. It was all I could do to restrain myself from reaching out to touch her.

  “A toast to your wife, Rucellai, she is as good-humored as she is beautiful!” applauded Sandro.

  “She is a treasure,” Rucellai agreed, reaching his hand out to squeeze hers. “I would love to have Maddalena’s portrait, Sandro; perhaps we could discuss it.”

  It took away my breath to think of Maddalena painted by Sandro Botticelli, and I resolved at once that I must own that portrait. Thereafter I was absorbed in figuring out how to obtain it and didn’t listen to the dinner conversation. But I did watch Maddalena. Her expressive face reflected a dozen emotions and ideas over the course of a few minutes, like notes rippling off the strings of a lyre. Her fine hands were animated, too, illustrating her words, touching her husband’s arm, gesticulating for servants to refill wine goblets. I didn’t want to stare but couldn’t help it. I only managed to drop my eyes when Leonardo tread on my foot, warning me. After that I managed to confine her mostly to my peripheral vision. Mostly.

  LEONARDO AND I WERE THE LAST TO LEAVE. We stood at the large carved doors to the Rucellai palazzo and said thanks and good-bye to our host and hostess.

  “Signore Luca, I’ve spoken to my husband about studying with you. He’s amenable, if you have the time,” Maddalena said. She stood next to her husband in the doorway, with the melting yellow candlelight from the foyer dissolving around the curves of her form.

  “I’ll pay you for your time,” Rucellai said. I opened my mouth to tell him that I didn’t want money, I wanted his wife, but Leonardo grabbed me bodily and shoved me down the street.

  “It’s something to consider,” Leonardo said. “Thank you again!” They called their good-byes. I was still looking backward when the great door closed, leaving me on the outside and Maddalena on the inside with that man, her husband. I almost couldn’t bear thinking of her with him, even though I knew he was a good match for her, and that he adored her.

  “Stop it!” Leonardo said sharply. “Luca, you’re pathetic!” He grabbed my farsetto by the shoulder and shook me once as we walked down the street in the moonlight. “You are completely unmanned by that woman’s beauty.”

  “Do you think anyone else noticed?” I wondered.

  Leonardo laughed shortly, then shook his head. “Perhaps Lorenzo. He misses nothing.”

  “I’ll never have her,” I said sadly. How could I come so close to love and have it denied me? Was this the cruelest divine joke of all, and, if so, which God was laughing? I looked up at the sky, which was deep and indigo and spattered with milky stars.

  “No, you won’t! Is it so, what’s the word you used, Luca mio, ‘insupportable,’ that you’ll never have her?” asked Leonardo. He stopped short and I turned toward him. He reached his hand out and took mine in his, raised our hands together so that I was clasping his in the crisp night air. Moonlight silvered over his golden-red hair and gave him a fuzzy halo, like a saint. He was staring at me with an intense, rapt look on his sculpted face.

  “Leonardo?” I said uncertainly. He dropped my hand.

  “Do you not know how I feel about you?” he asked softly, staring down at me from his greater height. “How I’ve felt since the day I saw you, more beautiful than an angel, walk up over the crest of Monte Albano to where I stood by the cave? All these years I have loved you. Only you, Luca. Can you not imagine how it could be between us?” He was breathing hard and I felt his male presence, his erotic core. He was aroused and also tender; he brimmed over with the strength and vulnerability of a man who was offering himself as a man to me. After what I had endured at Silvano’s as a child, I would have thought that a moment such as this would nauseate me, enrage me, drive me to draw the dagger I kept strapped to my thigh. But this was Leonardo, whom I loved. Nothing he did could disgust me. I was moved by his honesty, which I valued, and his willingness to reveal himself, a willingness I almost never duplicated in my own life.

  “No, ragazzo mio, that is not who I am,” I said softly. I didn’t back away from him. I just stood there, feeling my own erotic core. That core was filled with Maddalena, as perhaps it had been since the first time I saw her. I understood her, and I realized that all along, these many decades, I had been waiting for someone who could understand me, too. Only a woman who had experienced similar atrocities, and survived them, could do that.

  “You are not like me,” he cried raggedly. “I love you and it is impossible because you are not like me, not at all!” His voice was full of raw pain. I nodded. He recoiled as if from a serpent. Then he straightened and set his noble head high on his neck. “It’s a waste of time. I have much work, painting, observation, the study of anatomy; sensuality would only hamper my efforts. Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.” His eyes were remote and detached.

  “Leonardo, you will love again,” I said quietly, feeling compassion for him.

  “I’ll leave Florence, anyway, in a few years. Perhaps for Milano, or Venezia. I’ve ideas for new weapons,” he said as if speaking to himself. He quickened his pace and I had to hurry to keep up. “Ideas for inventions. I’ll write a letter, seek new employment. But not right away.”

  “Leonardo, we will always be friends,” I said. I stopped for the turn down my street. He glanced back over his shoulder, saw that I was at the junction of my street, and paused.

  “Will you, Luca? Will you? Love again. Since you can’t have Maddalena,” he said with a bitterness that was never before, and never after, in his deep, melodious voice. I didn’t answer, because it was obvious to me. There was only Maddalena. From now on, if I couldn’t have her, there was no one. Leonardo nodded. “That’s what I thought! There’s one love, and it’s forever!”

  Chapter 21

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, Maddalena confronted me as I was entering an apothecary shop near Santa Maria Novella, whose facade had been redone some twenty years ago by Alberti. The renovation was financed by Giovanni Rucellai, cousin to Rinaldo. With his renovation, Alberti had achieved the aims of the humanists, and perhaps the rest of us, too: he had fully integrated the past with the present. He had pulled the rose window, intricate marquetry, and arched recesses of the church’s origins into a handsome classical design that was completely current.

  This particular apothecary shop, in the western part of town near the massive city walls, offered a selection of flasks and beakers, and I was still replacing the ones I’d broken in my tantrum. I turned to enter the shop.

  “Luca,” called a husky, beguiling voice. I closed my eyes and didn’t respond so she’d repeat my name and I could have the pleasure of hearing it again on her lips. “Luca Bastardo!”

  “Maddalena,” I said. She walked swiftly across the piazza. Today she wore a pale green brocade cottardita with yellow-and-blue silk sleeves and crimson embroidery; her thick woolen mantello was bright purple and lined with white fur. She crackled with color and texture, as did her being; her garb suited her.

  “Let us speak,” she said, stopping at the edge of the piazza. I went to her, unable to master my ragged breathing. I stopped at a distance because I didn’t trust myself to stand close to her. I might seize her and cover her face and throat with kisses and pleas and promises. She swallowed, then said, “I know how you feel about me, signore.”

  “You do?”

  “It mustn’t be spoken aloud. But it concerns me. I wish to study alchemy with you. My husband has agreed to it. He’s a good man, and I won’t dishonor him.” Her eyes were serious, and I saw slivers of gray in them today, the gray-green of t
he Arno when it surges out of its shores and washes away bridges. “He deserves my loyalty—no matter what. I owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for marrying me under circumstances which would have put off any other man.”

  “Not every man,” I interjected. “I wouldn’t have been put off.”

  She blushed but went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “I had no family and little money for a dowry. I had only myself to offer. Yet every day Rinaldo makes me feel as if he is the fortunate one. I am grateful to him and always will be. I hope to bear him many children and make him proud and happy.”

  But, Maddalena, I wanted to say, Rucellai is the fortunate one. In offering yourself, you’ve given him everything. An ache gnawed at my heart, but I pushed it away. “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to teach me and to strictly observe the proprieties. No more sending away my maid! I have a voracious hunger for learning; I want to be as worthy as all the Florentine women with their illustrious families and good education. I want you to teach me everything you know!” Impassioned, she took a step toward me with her lips parted. I could see the rosy soft tip of her tongue. I wondered what it would feel like in my mouth.

  “Education doesn’t make people worthy. People are born worthy, and they live their lives either to enhance that worth or not,” I said. It was the one essential thing I’d learned in my long life, and it was a gift I gave now to Maddalena, whether or not she received it.

  “I have something to prove to myself,” she answered.

  I shrugged. “I’m a failed alchemist.”

  “I have great respect for Leonardo; he’s an extraordinary man. He says you are the best alchemist around, barring Ficino, who’s too busy and too important to teach me.”