Immortal

by Traci L. Slatton

  When Sandro came for me the next morning, I was quite mad.

  I WAS NOT SANE for the burials of my wife and daughter. Sandro dressed me and held me still for the funeral service, so that I did not run naked and howling through the nave of the church. Then I abandoned my palazzo for the streets. Wealth and plentiful food and a beautiful home meant nothing to me anymore. As I had done as a child, I slept in piazze and alongside churches, under the four bridges across the Arno and beside the great stone walls of the city. I ate whatever I found or what was given to me. I was a beggar again, with ragged clothes and long, dirty hair and a wild matted beard.

  There was a brief lucid moment when a funeral pyre pushed back the veils in my mind into something more diaphanous. Fire lit up the Piazza della Signoria. In the place where Savonarola had held the bonfire of the vanities, a scaffold surrounded by tinder was erected. The body of Savonarola was burned with those of two other monks, after they’d been hung by Inquisitors. I was almost myself as flames licked up into the sky. In a state that bordered on both madness and reason, I could clearly see how the monk had erred. Savonarola had not perceived one essential fact. While it is true that things of the other world give meaning to this life, it is also true that things of this world give meaning to the other. The fundamental truth of the human heart is that, while we are gods, as Ficino believed, we are also dust and mud, the rich red-brown mud of hillsides and green forest underbrush and black fields furrowed for crops. We are creatures of both heaven and earth. It is not our purity that will save us, it is our richness.

  In a few hours the three monks were burned, and blackened legs and arms gradually dropped off. Parts of their bodies remained hanging from the chains that had bound them to the scaffold, and people in the crowd threw stones to make them fall. Then the hangman and his helpers hacked down the scaffold and burned it on the ground, bringing in heaps of brushwood and stirring up the fire over the dead bodies so that the very last piece of their bodies was consumed. Carts took away the dust to the Arno near the Ponte Vecchio so that no remains could be found and cherished by the fools of Florence who had brought their destructor to power.

  TIME WAS LOOPED UP into a meaningless knot for me, so I don’t know how long it was before the priest came for me. I spent my days down by the Arno, staring into its depths, which embodied the cosmos. The beautiful faces of my wife and daughter were spread out like the film of dissolved pigments, iridescent rainbows on the surface of the water. Sometimes, if I squinted my eyes, I could even see Marco. Marco my old friend who had given me candy and good advice. I remembered his long eyelashes and elegant gait. I spied other people in the waves, too: Massimo and his misshapen body and clever mind; Ingrid with her blond hair and bruised stare; Bella whose fingers had been cut off to punish me for trying to leave the brothel; Giotto who crackled with warm kindness and lively intelligence; the physico Moshe Sforno and his daughters, especially Rachel, who had taught me and teased me and loved me; Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici; Geber and the Wanderer and Leonardo. Always there was Maddalena with her haunting eyes and the thick, lush multicolored hair that I never tired of touching and kissing. Sometimes when I saw her looking back at me from the water, I could smell her, too: that scent of lilacs in the clear light with its lemony undertone. I woke on the muddy ground with her scent in my nose and on my tongue, as if I’d been loving her in my sleep. I did not want to wake. And I could not elude my sweet little Simonetta, for whom I cherished so many dreams. She was going to be a scholar and philosopher like Ficino and a painter like Leonardo or Botticelli and marry a king; with her beauty and charm and the huge dowry I could provide, there was no limit to her possibilities. And she would be young forever, as I was.

  A WOMAN APPROACHED ME on a warm spring day. She brought bread and I said, “Thank you, signora. But I’m not hungry.” I thrust it back at her, but she wouldn’t take it.

  “I don’t like to see people starve,” she said. “Please, eat.”

  “I’m not hungry now.” I smiled. “Almost two centuries ago, I was a boy who was always hungry.”

  “Two centuries?” she said, her voice startled. “Do you know what you’re saying? Or are you mad?”

  “Maybe. It doesn’t matter. I had a beautiful daughter with hair the color of mine, and a wife I chose in a vision, and God took them away. Nothing matters now.”

  “You must come with me!” she cried, suddenly distraught. Her bright violet eyes lit up, confusing me.

  “No,” I said. “I must stay close to the river, Maddalena is here, they are all here, everything!” The woman insisted and grabbed my arm, but I shook her off and ran away. The bread fell on the ground and a dog got it, but that’s the way of life: necessary things are lost.

  The next day the priest came. “It’s time, Luca Bastardo,” he said. He smiled in satisfaction. He was a man of about thirty, and there was something familiar about his face, but I couldn’t place it. The only faces I could interpret were those of Maddalena, my wife, and Simonetta, my daughter, who sang to me from the all-encompassing river.

  The priest smiled even more broadly. “It’s time.” I did not understand and he was little more than a shimmer above a hot flagstone on a broiling summer day, but I went with him willingly. Dimly I was aware that he led me to his refectory. A servant washed me, shaved me, dressed me in clean clothes. The servant took me to where the priest sat at a great desk, and I began to understand that he was important. I looked around and realized that I was at the monastery of San Marco, to which the Medici had contributed so much money. There was an exquisite altarpiece here by Fra Angelico, that reverent painter who wept before touching his brush to the holy figure of Christ. The altarpiece showed the Madonna and Child on a golden throne, with clarity of composition and a background of Tuscan cypresses and cedars.

  The mists in my head thinned to admit some light. I turned back to the priest, and carefully I perused his features: the dark hair, narrow face, jutting chin, and bladelike nose. I knew who he was: a Silvano. The welter of confused images and memories in which I had been living suddenly snapped like a tree struck by lightning, and everything came into focus for me. Sanity seized my core, and with it, the agony of loss. I cried out and dropped to my knees.

  “Yes, that’s right.” The priest looked pleased. “You know who I am, don’t you?”

  “Silvano,” I mumbled breathlessly, because the deaths of my wife and child were tearing a hole in my midriff. I couldn’t breathe and I was doubled over on the floor, retching.

  “Gerardo Silvano.” He nodded. “I am the grandson, many times removed, of Bernardo Silvano, of Nicolo Silvano. I have seen your face in a painting by Giotto, and I have been schooled since I was a child in the importance of your destruction. My family has waited a long time to wreak our vengeance on you. You are a freak, a blasphemous creature, a sorcerer of unholy long years, a murderer! The deaths of your wife and child have weakened your demonic powers and made you ready. I will now bring you to justice and fulfill the curse placed on you by my forefathers. And I will use you to this end. You will attract to yourself your doom. A cardinal who is marked to be Pope will pass by you, and you will declare yourself to him.”

  “I’m ready,” I said.

  “Do you understand what is required? What will happen?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I will declare my name and the length of my years, and the cardinal will have me executed for being a witch.” My worthless life without Maddalena would come to an end. I would be spared the agony of the loss of my wife and daughter. A vast relief flooded through me; I would finally be with them. It was beautiful to me, a joke worthy of Divine Providence, that a Silvano would be the agent of my deliverance. I looked upon Gerardo Silvano with reverence and gratitude. Hearing now with greater clarity the divine peals that had accompanied me for almost two hundred years, I realized finally, at long last, what my strange life had been trying to teach me: God laughs not with cruelty, but with love. In even the worst of situations, God’s grace i
s complete. It may not be easily articulated in the language of man, or apparent from the outside. It certainly isn’t logical. But it can be felt, sensed, understood, in that larger, wordless part of the human soul that belongs to Him anyway. God is one, God is good, God is love, only love.

  I STOOD IN THE PIAZZA DEL DUOMO with the shadow of Brunelleschi’s incomparable dome falling over me. There was a red feather tied under my lucco. Gerardo had carefully instructed me in what I was to do, and I understood. I was eager, even. Lorenzo’s son Giovanni, who was an important cardinal, was visiting Florence with members of the Inquisition. They would emerge from Santa Maria del Fiore after Mass. When they did, I would accost them.

  The day was warm and breezy, one of those delightful Tuscan days when the sky soars up in endless spiraling scrims of azure and white and the contado around Florence bursts into the bright hues of spring flowers. I stood on a small wooden box, trembling with eagerness. I was clean and well fed and I wore a good silk lucco. My heart beat freely in an open chest, and I felt a delirious happiness. Soon I would join Maddalena. Soon my love would merge me with her and sweet Simonetta in the great river of love’s beingness that was God. Congregants emerged from the immense cathedral, women in silk and velvet cottardite with their girlchildren clinging to their skirts, shopkeepers and wool-workers, a handful of mercenary soldiers, notaries and bankers and goldsmiths and blacksmiths and armorers and merchants and a few street urchins who sat in the back pews and then begged for coins at the end of the service, hoping Christian charity had been inspired by the Mass.

  The gorgeously attired Giovanni, son of Lorenzo de’ Medici, walked out of the cathedral. Prescient Leonardo had once told me that Giovanni would be Pope. All I saw was a tall, heavyset man with a pasty face, snub nose, and nearsighted squint. He looked like his Roman mother, Clarice. He moved slowly, surrounded by plainly dressed priests with serious faces who I knew were Inquisitors. Gerardo Silvano was among them, and I regarded him with affection.

  “I am Luca Bastardo!” I yelled. People stopped and turned to face me, including the somber group with the cardinal. I cried, “I have lived over one hundred eighty years! I worship the Laughing God, and Him only! I am Luca Bastardo!”

  EXCEPT THAT I MADE A SPECIFIC CHOICE, long ago during a night of alchemy and transformation, the story of my incarceration and torture is the same as that of any of thousands of other victims of the Inquisition. I was taken to a cell and questioned. Pope Innocent VIII had issued a papal bull against witchcraft in 1484, and the Dominicans maintained a set of procedures for handling witches which they followed with precision and seriousness of purpose. I was stripped and shaved and examined for the marks of the devil. Nothing was found on my body, so two priests jabbed me all over with needles, looking for insensitive spots that would prove sorcerous invulnerability. There was some discussion about whether to use the rack, which would have me tied across a board by wrists and ankles and then stretched until every one of my joints dislocated, or the strappado, which consisted of tying my arms together behind my back and securing the rope to a scaffold, then throwing me down off the scaffold repeatedly until my arms came out of their sockets and my shoulders dislocated. Gerardo Silvano favored using the turcas to tear out my fingernails, and then poking the quicks of my nails with heated needles. Giovanni, who came to watch for a while, grew impatient and had me horsewhipped: two hundred lashes. He didn’t have the stomach for more and left when pincers glowed red in the fire and were deemed hot enough to burn me.

  The end of the first day came, which was really the end of the second day, because I had been questioned through the night. Finally the Inquisitors tired of their sport and desisted. I wasn’t much fun for them, anyway. I readily admitted to whatever they asked. Yes, I was a witch and a sorcerer; yes, I worshipped the devil; yes, I practiced necromancy; surely I drank the blood of Christian infants in a satanic ceremony that mocked the Holy Communion. I was thrown into a small cell, bleeding from the whip-welts all over my body, pus oozing from the burns. My left toes had been broken in a thumbscrew, my left ankle had been shattered by a hammer until the bone was mush and the skin was in tatters. I lay on the floor breathing hard, not caring about the tears dripping from my eyes. In fact, I felt lucky to still have my eyes. Gerardo had wanted them put out with a hot iron.

  Time passed, a day, maybe two, while I was ignored. Water and moldy bread crusts were shoved through the bars of my door. Then I heard an urgent voice calling my name. “Luca, Luca mio!” Even through my pain I recognized Leonardo’s musical voice. I pulled myself up painfully to sit with my back against the stone wall of my cell.

  “Ragazzo mio, how are you?” I croaked.

  “Better than you are,” Leonardo said. He reached his arm through the bars of my cell to touch my head gently. His beautiful eyes filled with tears, his noble face twisted with grief. “I will do my best for you, caro. I will have Sforza send word to the Pope begging for your life, I will have rich noblemen intervene, anything!”

  “How is it you’re here?” I asked, blinking from the intensity of the pain, which came in vast palpitating waves.

  “Filipepi sent a messenger to Milano when you were arrested. It took a few days for the messenger to find me. I came immediately. I bribed the jailer and priests to get in to see you. Oh, Luca, how could this have happened?” he murmured brokenly.

  “I don’t care.” I sighed. “I don’t want to live without Maddalena and Simonetta.”

  “Why didn’t you send for me when they died?” he cried, agonized. “I would have been there to comfort you! I found out months after, and, by then, you had disappeared!”

  “I went mad,” I said softly, reaching to take his hand. “I’ve been waiting to be free so I could join them. I cursed my long life that kept me away from them.”

  “Life is no curse,” he said, weeping. “And you’re no witch, Luca. We must save you!”

  “Why shouldn’t I be a witch?” I asked. “I’m marked by this damned youthfulness that I’ve tried for so long to hide. Maybe the Dominicans are right, some evil sorcery keeps me unnaturally young, some evil magic that endangers the world.”

  “No! There’s an explanation in nature for your life! Your organs and fluids regenerate, something! I don’t know what it is now, but in the future, men of science would study you and discover how your anatomy functions!”

  “Who knows, nature is capricious, maybe it took pleasure in creating someone like me.” I shrugged. “Someone who lived longer than he ought, who lived too long. And ‘too long’ arrives for a man when his wife and child die.”

  He studied me for a moment, then nodded. “Maybe the Cathars were right, and your spirit has been imprisoned in your physical body. And nature wanted to watch it struggle with its longing to return to its Source.”

  “Now my spirit will be free.” I smiled despite the pain. “They’re burning me at the stake tomorrow.”

  THROUGH BRIBERY AND CAJOLERY, Leonardo received dispensation to bring me fresh clothes. He left and returned with clothes, with Petrarca’s notebook, Geber’s eyeglasses, and Giotto’s panel, the latter two of which I bequeathed to him. He was distraught and didn’t want to take them, but I pleaded. Finally he left, and as much as I love him, I was relieved to see him go. His sorrow weighed on me.

  I set to work chronicling my life, not one moment of which I regret, despite my suffering now. I do not even regret the horrors I endured at Silvano’s brothel because they made me yearn for love, to love. And I have loved Maddalena, so that is everything. That she loved me back was the grace of God. Some people go without such a love, and they seek the world over for a longevity like mine or for a wealth like the one I accumulated. They do not realize that the greatest treasure is that of the heart.

  I have been writing through the night on the fine vellum pages of Petrarca’s notebook. It is almost dawn of the day I will be led to the stake. I am sitting with my excoriated back against the stone walls of this cell. A pool of my own blood congeals
around me.

  There is a shuffling at the bars to my cell, and a brute of a guard looks in. “They’ve paid well to see you, witch, I hope you’re worth it!” He spits at me and then stomps away. My eyes close as I wonder who could have come to see me during my penultimate indignity.

  “Luca!” calls a brisk female voice. I look up, and a beautiful young woman with dark hair and intelligent violet-blue eyes stands at the bars. I stare at her, and then I recognize her as the woman who brought me bread as I sat by the river. At her side are a mature man and woman who look to be in their forties. They are fine-boned and handsome, well dressed in clothes that are not Florentine, and there are tears in their eyes. The woman has hair the color of mine, with some gray; the man’s features are shaped like mine. I know who they are even before they speak, and I put my hands against the rough stone surface of the wall and struggle to my feet. I am weeping, but not from the terrible pain, which is much worse than anything I could have imagined, even when I lived at the brothel. I plead with myself, will myself, to stay conscious. Soon enough, the pain, and everything else, will be gone.

  The older woman sobs as she reaches her hand through the bars. I lurch toward her on my broken and burned legs, fall most of the way, land on my knees, and cannot rise. “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  “Please!” she says, and there is a soft accent in her voice. She kneels down, running her hand down along the bars, stretches mightily, and finally grasps my hand. “I am your mother.”

  “I am your father,” says the man, with a catch in his throat. He kneels next to my mother, stretches his arm through, and grips my shoulder. Their touch is soft, kind, full of the tenderness I had always longed for and given up on ever knowing. I peruse them, and it gives me an incongruous happiness to see the similarities between us. God is kind to bring my origins to me when I am soon to come to my end.