“Not yet,” I said. “But I’m thinking about it.” That provoked gales of laughter, and the group, with Maddalena in their midst, moved away toward another bridge.
We never spoke of the moment during our lessons, because such feathery things as transpired during carnevale were not meant to be addressed. And Maddalena wasn’t the only person I saw wearing feathers during that fantastical night. On another bridge, later, when the stars tumbled out of an indigo sky as if they’d been shaken from a blanket, after I had imbibed too much crude wine, I came face-to-face with a boy. I had seen him once before. His sharp nose and thrusting chin were instantly recognizable. He was about ten years old now, a little older than I had been when his ancestor had made me a captive in his brothel. He wore red feathers sewn onto his camicia, and he recognized me, too. He looked back at me with open contempt.
“Luca Bastardo,” he said, and saluted me.
“Gerardo Silvano,” I said.
“Until soon.” He nodded, fingering one of the red feathers, and stepped away. My blood ran cold, but I could never bring myself to regret going out that night, because the few minutes of holding Maddalena would make death itself worthwhile.
ALL THINGS END, even me, and endings are also beginnings. Here in my cell, awaiting my execution, I don’t know what beginning I will have after they burn me, but I know there will be one. My precious time as Maddalena’s teacher came to an end, also. Not long after the carnevale, there was a pounding at my door. It was late and I was dressed only in a camicia, which hung open. The servants weren’t around, so I descended the stairs, cracked open the door, and peeked out. It was Maddalena, alone, wearing only a plain pink gonna. I’d never before seen her so intimately dressed. Sweat beaded up on my back and forehead. I shivered. I saw the outlines of her breasts and the lush dark points of her nipples through the gonna’s sheer fabric. She’s come to be with me, I thought, suffused with joy. A lightness I’d never before experienced spread through me, dizzying me. I had never known happiness until that very moment, I realized. I threw open the door, heedless of my undress and the erection springing forth to greet her. My arms spread wide to pull her inside the palazzo and sweep her close to me.
“Luca, come quickly. Rinaldo is sick, he is going to die! You must give him the consolamentum and save him!” Maddalena cried, as her scent ravished me.
No, I thought, dropping my arms. Everything inside me went cold. Let Rinaldo die.
“Please, Luca.” She grabbed my arm. Her long soft hair flowed down around her face and neck, and even in the candlelight, it glimmered with red and purple and gold. She cried, “The doctors can’t do anything. But you can! Don’t let him die. He’s been good to me!”
No. Don’t ask this of me.
“You’re my only hope, Luca, my last hope! You’re my friend. Please, come with me to save my husband!” she begged. Tears like polished crystal enlarged her limpid eyes, those amazing eyes that stayed with me long after she left my workshop and the lessons in alchemy. She pleaded, “Get dressed, and come on! Hurry! Won’t you come?”
“Yes,” I said. I had promised myself that I would always say yes to her, and a man is only as good as the promises to himself that he keeps.
RINALDO RUCELLAI WAS IN A BAD WAY. He was pale and sweaty as he lay in his bed, the bed he shared with Maddalena. His white hair was unkempt, his gray-bearded face slack. I took his pulse, which was thready and erratic. I watched how shallowly he breathed, and I knew he was at the end. Rucellai was dying. I would finally have Maddalena. These two years of teaching her, of staying at the distance her loyalty demanded and the proximity her friendship allowed, had been purgatory. Now, at last, I was climbing into heaven. I’d earned it. I’d waited for the woman promised me in my vision. She was mine by divine right, I felt that as surely as I knew that the evil God laughed cruelly and the good One enjoyed His reflection in Giotto’s frescoes.
But Maddalena wanted me to save him. I sat down heavily on the edge of the bed, rested my head in my hands. Everything inside me, organs and bones and blood, was quaking, dissolving. Maddalena had asked me to help her husband live.
“Be good to her,” whispered Rucellai.
“What?” I jerked up my head. He looked at me out of dark, compassionate eyes set in a linen-white face. His breath came even more shallowly. He smiled slightly, knowingly.
He knew how I felt about his wife and he was giving his blessing. Maddalena could come to me happily, with a clear conscience, her loyalty appeased. But she wanted me to save him. I looked at Rucellai, thought of all the people whose deaths I had witnessed: Marco, Bella, Bernardo Silvano, Geber. I was no stranger to death, even if Death and his brother Decrepitude had left me alone for a hundred sixty-some years. I was not afraid to watch Rinaldo Rucellai die.
But Maddalena wanted her husband to live. A blue-and-gold Venetian vase on the chest at the end of the bed held a dozen blossoms, red, pink, yellow, and white roses. It looked like a bouquet Maddalena might have set there to brighten the room for her husband. It bore her signature: the profusion of colors both strong and delicate, but not fragile; petals in all states of maturity, from closed in the bud to drooping with senescence; the sweet scent; the thorns.
What was love, if not surrendering the self for the beloved? I felt how deeply I wanted to take her, to let my desires rule over hers. I knew how selfish I was. My life was still a battleground between the good God and the evil one. I could only hope to effect a truce by committing to love and surrender.
I laid my hands on Rucellai’s chest. I didn’t know if I could save him; he was far gone. And I had never completely mastered the consolamentum. It streamed forth from me when it chose, not when I did. But I would try. What had Geber said? “It’s about surrender, fool, when will you understand that?” I closed my eyes and surrendered. I gave up my own desires. I allowed myself to melt. I felt despair at losing Maddalena again—it felt like another loss—and my heart throbbed with pain, with longing, with love. I swelled with those immortal twin guardians of human life, love and loss, and almost couldn’t contain myself.
A gate within me banged open. The consolamentum gushed out with such force that my whole body shook. I would have to tell Leonardo about this; he was always interested in questions concerning force. It was a deluge that poured through me and out of my hands into Rucellai’s chest. He gasped, arched his belly high up into the air to make a bridge with his spine, and then dropped back down onto the bed. He gasped again. Color washed over his face. He gave a third gasp, and this time, he inhaled deeply into his abdomen. He exhaled and it was the sound of waves breaking as the living river coursed past.
Rucellai would live. The consolamentum surged through the desperate vessel of my body until it slowed to a stop, like a tide flattening. I removed my hands and rose, a hollowed man, and stumbled out into the hall where Maddalena waited. I nodded. She understood. She threw her arms around me, murmuring words of thanks. It was agony to have her body pressed into mine and I pulled her arms off me, pushed her away before I could be provoked to madness.
“I can’t see you anymore,” I said harshly, not looking into her eyes. Because I was mortal, I was only a man, and there was a limit to what I could bear. All of my years weighed down upon me as if I stood at the bottom of a well with stones pressing upon me. “Find another teacher.”
I went back into the streets and my face was wet with tears. Never in my life, not even at Silvano’s brothel, had I felt as alone as I did on that midnight walk back to my palazzo. Always before I had dreams to comfort me. Now they were gone, my dreams of love and the promise of it from the night of the philosopher’s stone, all the deep treasures of the heart that I had clung to with stubborn hope, now blown away like chaff in a strong Tuscan wind. It was a damp spring and too cold and foggy even to see the stars.
I let myself into my palazzo and went upstairs. I intended to retire immediately but stopped at the door to my workshop in amazement, because a finger of green smoke stretched out
of the open door and tapped along the ceiling. I pushed open the door and saw everything in my workshop rattling with animation: stills dancing, flames licking up from candlewicks, hunks of metal glowing, salt chafing in its pot, and liquids gurgling with laughter and bubbling as if molten, as if filled with swimming creatures. Curious and bemused, I crossed over to my latest round of experiments with sulfur and mercury. I cupped the flask with my hands, which still tingled from giving the consolamentum. A swirling mist appeared in the middle of the flask. I stared into it. A black light flashed out, making the dark objects in my workshop appear like forms of milky light while the candlelit empty space in the room thickened into solid darkness. A sharp crack like lightning split the room, and then the light reverted. In the center of the flask was a shining nugget of gold.
I GREW USED TO LIVING WITHOUT MADDALENA. It wasn’t easy. Despite the many decades that had been my portion, I’d never before noticed how empty my life was. For months I was inconsolable. Then I was angry. Then I was listless. I dragged myself around the city with no appetite for my old pursuits. In my mind’s eye, I kept seeing her fine-boned face alight with love of learning, or radiant with laughter, or focused on some knotty problem of linguistics. In the market I heard a laugh like hers, but it turned out to belong to some other woman. I looked in the windows of carriages that rolled past for her face, I peered inside bottegas and restaurants, hoping to spy her small, slim form. I flagellated myself for remembering her. Nothing else mattered. Even turning lead into gold had lost its allure. I went out to my vineyard in Anchiano and moped there for several months until I couldn’t stand myself anymore. Basta, I told myself; it is enough. I rode Ginori back into Florence.
It was the spring of 1482 and Florence enjoyed an uneasy peace, if not a prosperous one, after the war with Calabria that had followed the Pazzi conspiracy. Lorenzo had paid a huge indemnity to the Duke of Calabria to thwart Pope Sixtus’s ambition for his nephews to rule Tuscany. The city was quiet but brisk with business. Shops were open, wool factories were operating, smithies clanked and hammered, markets bustled. Horses trotted through the stone streets pulling carriages and everywhere there were carts with goods from the contado. I was pleased to be back. My palazzo was shuttered because I hadn’t sent word ahead for the servants to open it, but I didn’t mind. I settled Ginori in the stable and went inside. I opened windows and lit lamps, then climbed the stairs to my workshop, which I hadn’t set foot in since the night I had succeeded in turning lead into gold. The room was quiet, cold, and still, as my heart was, I thought wryly. Surfaces were sueded with dust, because I never let servants clean in there.
“I saw the lamps glowing and let myself in,” said Leonardo. “I thought you’d be back sooner.” There was curiosity in his mellifluous voice. He came to stand beside me. “I expected you a month ago. You didn’t come, so I planned to ride out to Anchiano to see you this week.”
“Ragazzo mio, how are you?” I said, embracing him happily.
“Well.” He nodded. “I’m leaving Florence. I’ve been welcomed to the court of Milano, and Lorenzo is eager that I should go and cement Florence’s relations with Lodovico Sforza.”
“Everyone works for Lorenzo’s ends,” I commented dryly.
“It suits me.” Leonardo shrugged. “I’ll be playing the lute. And Sforza has written of giving me a commission for a bronze horse; it’s an intriguing project.” He gave me a cool smile. “I thought I’d use my old sketches of Ginori. There’s no more nobly built steed!”
“His heart is still noble, but he’s getting a bit long in the tooth,” I commented.
“Aren’t we all? Everyone except you. You’re eternally young and beautiful. But I won’t be. I’m turning thirty. I’m no longer a ragazzo, professore, not even for you. Time consumes all things.” He walked to the nearest table, dragged his finger across the surface to leave a thick line in the dust, then twiddled with the beakers on Zosimos’s still, aligning them. “I sometimes think about the Cathar legends we used to discuss, how my mother’s people believed that our souls are divine sparks that have been entrapped in a tunic of flesh. Do you remember, Luca?”
“Angelic souls captured by Satan, the Rex Mundi, King of the World.” I smiled. “As if Satan could be anything other than God’s favorite jester!”
Leonardo was in a rare melancholy mood and didn’t smile back. “Perhaps the Cathars’ view held some truth. Perhaps we must perfect ourselves to free the angel within. Lately I’ve come to think that if we don’t curb lustful desires, we’re on the level of the beasts. Mine has been curbed by the unavailability of my beloved, so I hope for some reward.”
“You will find love, Leonardo.”
“So I have, thanks to the impossibility of being with you: I love nature and her laws. I will pursue her with single-minded determination for the rest of my life. And she will surrender her secrets as a whore does his sweet round rump!” Leonardo grinned now, but I winced. Surprised understanding spread over his face. He was always perceptive. He spoke with his customary kindness. “Luca mio, have I unwittingly hit on one of the secrets of your dark past?”
I walked to the other side of the room and looked out a window. “I was imprisoned within a brothel for many years as a child.”
“That explains so many things,” he murmured. “I’m so sorry, Luca—”
“How long will you be in Milano?” I asked brusquely.
“I don’t know. I think in the long run Sforza will be a better patron than Lorenzo. People say Lorenzo’s fortune is disappearing.”
“Never underestimate a Medici,” I said. “Lorenzo may yet increase his fortune tenfold.”
“He’s a wily statesman, but when it comes to money, he’s no Cosimo,” Leonardo said.
“Then cultivate Sforza. I’ll come to Milano to visit, it’s not far,” I said, with my heart aching again. Long ago, it was Rachel; then it was Maddalena; now Leonardo; I was destined to lose those I loved most.
“Won’t you be busy here?” he asked, sounding puzzled.
“I don’t know, I’m not much interested in alchemy anymore.” I laughed. I sat down on a stool, stretched my legs out in front of me. “I’ll stay in Florence until the summer heat gets unbearable, then maybe I’ll go to Sardegna. There’s a fishing village called Bosa…”
“A fishing village? Maddalena wants to go to a fishing village in Sardegna?”
“Maddalena? What does she have to do with anything?” I asked, confused.
“I just thought she’d be with you….” His voice trailed off uncertainly. Then he laughed. “Oh, you haven’t heard! Isn’t that funny? I thought you were waiting out in the country to allow a decent interval of time to pass, so people wouldn’t gossip!”
I leapt to my feet. “Heard what?”
“Rinaldo Rucellai died peacefully in his sleep a month ago. Maddalena is a widow now.”
SHE SAT WITH HER MAID in her parlor when I arrived. She was holding a book. She wore a black damascene cottardita of watered silk that emphasized her creamy skin and the protean depths of color in her eyes and hair. She looked up, startled at my arrival. “Signore—”
“Go,” I barked at the maid, who took one look at my thunderous face and dropped her embroidery. She scampered out of the room as fast as her short, rotund legs allowed. I stayed where I was because I didn’t trust myself. I didn’t know what would happen if I got too close to her. I was capable of violence, not toward Maddalena but toward this palazzo, because she hadn’t sent for me as soon as her husband had died.
“I thought you’d forgotten me,” she said breathlessly.
“As if that’s possible? Do I look like my memory fails me?”
“No, I meant because you couldn’t be with me—”
“I know what you meant. Marry me.”
“Luca—” Maddalena said, coloring. She looked very young and vulnerable.
“Marry me now,” I demanded. “I don’t want to be away from you for one more minute!”
A slow
smile spread over her face. “When you didn’t come, I thought I was just a passing fancy. That you were spending your time with other women.”
“There hasn’t been another woman since I saw you on the day they tried to kill Lorenzo,” I said. “I haven’t touched another woman in four years!”
“I don’t know if I can keep the inheritance from Rinaldo’s estate,” she said. “We never had children, and he had male cousins. I don’t know what kind of dowry I can bring to you.”
“I don’t need a dowry. I’m rich, richer than Rucellai. You’ll have a beautiful palazzo. I’ll build you one bigger than this one, as big as the Duomo. I’ll give you everything and anything.”
“I’d marry you if you were poor,” she said softly. “I’d live on the streets with you!”
“I’d die before I let us get that poor,” I said. I covered the distance between us as if I had wings. I crushed her into me, reveling in her warmth and the hum of life twanging in her like the well-tuned string of a lyre. When she took my face in her hands and touched her soft lips to mine, it was worth it. It was worth the long wait. It was worth the surrender. It was worth everything.
But now I couldn’t wait any longer, and she led me upstairs. Evening was beginning, with violet and green shadows outlining the edges of things and dissolving them from the inside out. Maddalena led me into a different bedchamber than the one in which I had given Rucellai the consolamentum. I knew at once that it was her private room. Texture and color were everywhere. Curtains that alternated sheer emerald panels with strips of heavy crimson velvet fluttered at the side of the windows, and several of Botticelli’s pretty paintings hung on the walls, as did a worn old tapestry showing St. Francis with the birds. She pulled my head down so my lips met hers, and I kicked backward to knock the door closed.
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