by Giulio Leoni
AN UNUSUAL number of men in armour seemed to be busy around the Palazzo del Capitano del Popolo. Dante recognised the head of one of the three compagnie del popolo of San Piero and stopped him on the steps of the building.
‘What’s happening, Maestro Menico?’
‘One of the patrols at the walls has signalled the presence of groups of men marching towards the city, on the road to Prato. They’re telling us to be prepared for any eventuality.’
‘What kind of men?’
‘Who knows, perhaps pilgrims making for Rome, acrobats perhaps, or disbanded soldiers from the Imola militias. Apparently the troops there haven’t been paid for months and have deserted, sacking the countryside and heading for the Apennines. But there is a great deal of concern,’ the man added, confidentially bringing his lips to the poet’s ear, ‘that they might be gangs of heretics and intriguers travelling down the Peninsula intent on loot and plunder. We must remain alert.’
‘Heretics? And where would so many godless people come from?’
‘Apparently plague has broken out once again in the Languedoc,’ the other man replied, still in a low voice, ‘and it was the enemies of God who put it there, Cathars and Jews with their poisoned tinctures. It is feared that some of them may already have entered the city, as a vanguard for their shady companions. Besides, how could they be kept out with all the gates open, and these vagabonds arriving from the countryside in search of some kind of livelihood?’
Dante could only agree, observing the chaos all around them. Dozens of strangers were thronging in, searching for a space where they could lay out a cloth for such goods as they had to sell, or loafing about waiting for adventures. Only a few years before, he could have identified by name every single inhabitant in his district, and many of the people in the whole of Florence. But now, after the expansion of the city over the last decade, a gigantic force seemed to have risen from the gorges of the countryside, a deluge that was engulfing houses and roads, flowing beyond the old circle of walls like the Arno when it broke its banks.
‘They call it progress,’ Menico continued, ‘but for me it’s just corruption. The world is getting old, and as time passes it brings nothing but new misfortunes. Vulgarity and infamy. Look at them, for example!’
He pointed at three young women dressed in vibrant colours, their dresses cut so low as to reveal almost the whole of their breasts, smiling coarsely at the passersby, trying to attract their attention.
‘Just a few years ago, in the days of Giano della Bella, they’d have been thrown into the Stinche for wearing clothes like that. And now …’ he observed.
Dante merely nodded. Such complaints were utterly pointless. They bored him.
‘And now not even this is enough. Now it’s the men who have started pursuing the profession.’
‘Sodomites?’
‘Bloody shirt-lifters, Messer Durante. Like the ones who fill Ceccherino’s tavern every night.’
Dante smiled sardonically. It wasn’t the first time he had heard that name. But it wasn’t the only meeting place of its kind. The city was full of places where discreet encounters occurred, indecent relations were set up, bodies that Nature had built as a temple were subjected to the most awful perversions. ‘They say, in fact, that our city’s name is spreading as a byword for such things, and not just for the quality of our fabrics.’
‘But they aren’t all Florentines, you know,’ Menico replied. ‘At Ceccherino’s most of them are outsiders, and they’re still turning up in droves.’
‘Who are they? Where do they come from? What are the sestiere guards doing about it?’ Dante asked.
‘What do you expect them to do? They’re ashamed even to touch the door,’ Menico sighed with resignation. ‘Now no man worthy of his good name ventures near the place, not even armed. But it isn’t just shame that keeps the guards away. Because you mustn’t think we’re just talking about effeminate men. No, they’re often the kind you could best imagine rowing a galley or yoking two pairs of oxen one-handed. And it takes guts to stand up to people like that.’
The man went on talking, endlessly abusing corrupt and corruptors alike. But Dante was no longer listening.
From the very first he had had a sense that the source of recent events lay somewhere far away. His city was like a stage-set, like the canvas cloths used by strolling players as a backdrop to their farces, but in this case it was the setting for a tragedy that had been written elsewhere.
All the actors had come from outside the city. And others might yet be on their way. And if this was all to be done in secret, might not Ceccherino’s tavern be the very place?
The words of young Colonna echoed around his mind. ‘When we’re all there together,’ he had said. And those men he was waiting for – where better for them to meet than in a place that not even the local guard dared enter?
HE TOOK the road leading to the Prato Gate, the main thoroughfare of the first Roman settlement. The buildings flanking the paved route, which had grown from the ruins like mould on an animal’s decomposing body, were mostly crude one-storey constructions, unornamented, with little narrow windows at street level, barely screened off by a simple cloth cover. Increasingly often, as he went away from the centre, Dante saw between the houses gardens and vegetable plots, most of them reduced to sun-scorched brushwood.
There was no one along the road apart from a few stray dogs sniffing about the place. But from within the buildings he could just about hear all the muffled sounds of humanity confined behind those humble doors, shipwrecked sailors clutching at floating wreckage.
At last he reached his destination. In the distance he could already glimpse the dark shadow of the boundary walls, dotted at the top by the torches of the sentries. A little way away from the road there stood a series of marble columns, at least five ells high, some still topped by their capitals. In front of them were the shattered remains of a flight of stairs, only two steps of which remained above ground. That ancient space, where once the rites of a forgotten god had been celebrated, had been closed off by a rough wall of volcanic ashlars, producing a large enclosed space extending all the way to the building at the back.
It could have been a priory, the poet said to himself. Or the chapterhouse of a convent. Or the hall of an aristocratic tribunal. Or the court of a barbarian king. Instead it was the place where Ceccherino’s tavern had found refuge. The shame of Florence.
At the front, between the two central columns, a low, wide door opened, reinforced with nails and strips of iron. Through the wide chinks at the bottom and the top a flickering light shone, as if many fires were burning inside. Dante pushed the door and walked in.
He sat down on a free seat at the long table. He waved to attract the attention of a waiter, who was wandering among the regulars with a leather bottle of wine over his shoulder, and gestured to him to fill an earthenware goblet in front of him. Dante threw him a coin and picked up the goblet.
Slowly sipping the slightly sour wine, he studied the scene. The room was full of men on their own, an unusual crowd even for a big, well-known tavern like this one.
He had been expecting something of the kind, and yet it was odd that there were no women. None of those women in brightly coloured dresses that you normally found in such places. Not a single female face or voice. And not so much as a skivvy or a waitress, as if by magic everything had returned to the first days of Creation, when the fairer sex still dwelt in the unfathomable mind of God.
He pushed back the bench and leaned against the wall. From there, hidden behind a pillar, he could calmly observe most of the room without drawing attention to himself, pretending to be absorbed in the contemplation of his own goblet. The tavern lived up to Maestro Menico’s words.
Great excitement seemed to have taken possession of everyone, a whirl of voices and laughter, a fluctuating motion of wandering bodies like waves on a sea that is only apparently calm, but beneath whose surface unknown depths are seething.
All thos
e men, coupled in twos and sometimes even in obscene threesomes, were groping one another without restraint, groaning and murmuring sweet nothings. An incessant stream of men was going erratically and convulsively up and down the staircase at the end of the room.
Dante was feeling increasingly repelled by what he saw. It was then that he noticed something. Little clusters constantly formed and dissolved as if demonic messengers were shuttling back and forth between the tables, embroidering the weave of evil. But seated at one corner of the long table was a group of four customers who maintained a strangely apathetic attitude. They seemed indifferent to the obscene exaltation of the flesh that exploded all around them. They sat decorously talking in low voices, apparently intent on draining a small leather bottle that had been set in front of them.
Even their clothing didn’t seem to match their surroundings. They were wearing ordinary clothes, without the showy colours and without the vents and openings that the others used to expose parts of the body normally concealed from view. Their jerkins, too, were of the normal size, just long enough to cover the lacing of their flies, and not very short like those worn by the others, which ostentatiously displayed their groins, barely hidden by the fabric.
Their faces betrayed no sign of the more or less explicit perversion that marked the features of the other customers. But something in their gestures, more than in the words that did not reach the poet’s ear, identified them as outsiders. Perhaps they were the outsiders that Menico had talked about.
All of a sudden the poet heard excited shouting, interspersed with insults. A couple sitting next to him, who until a moment ago had been busy hugging and kissing, had leaped to their feet, arguing furiously. As the tone grew shrill, the two men started pulling each other’s hair as they edged towards the far side of the tavern.
Dante picked up his goblet and quickly, slipping along the wall behind the group, approached the seat that had now been vacated beside it, sitting down as if he had just come in.
They didn’t seem to notice his arrival, busy as they were following the movements of the two brawlers and exchanging muttered, derisory comments. Dante leaned against the wall once more, taking little sips from his drink.
He managed to catch only a few words here and there, drowned out by the hubbub of the tavern. But however much he pricked up his ears, the meaning of their conversation continued to elude him. Rising within him he felt a growing irritation with the crowd of perverts that whirled around him. How could they go on obstructing the work of justice with their lustful words? When would the hand of God descend to destroy the whole of their kind?
He had instinctively raised his eyes to the sky, as if hoping that the tavern ceiling might split asunder beneath a sudden shower of fire. Otherwise he would see to it himself and would soon order the bargellini to clean the place up, and it wouldn’t be pretty. He wouldn’t leave a single stone of this hovel standing and Ceccherino, burned to a crisp beneath the smoking ruins of his lair, would be a terrible warning to all the remaining pederasts.
‘So he still doesn’t know anything …’ one of the four men was saying.
The man sitting in front of him interrupted the sentence with an angry gesture. ‘It doesn’t seem possible that a whole ship could vanish like a ghost. And after it had been seen inshore.’
‘But at least what’s left is in our hands. And iron is more use to us than light,’ the first man replied with a shrug.
‘And gold more than anything!’ the third man butted in with a laugh. ‘I’ll choose the third part of this trinity. As to light, it all belongs to the Emperor. Isn’t that what he’s looking for?’
‘I knew about the others. They will all be at the abbey.’
Dante listened as hard as he could to pick up every detail of this cryptic conversation, fearing that the noise might flare up again, making his efforts useless. He almost failed to notice the hand delicately stroking the back of his neck.
The man who had been sitting beside him must have mistaken the poet’s distraction for a sign of encouragement. He repeated the gesture more resolutely. ‘So, my fine lad? New here? It’s the first time I’ve seen you.’
Dante turned towards the source of the voice and found himself engulfed in pestilential breath. He saw a long, yellow face with a soft, blond beard and a pair of wild, burning eyes. The man was holding a cup of wine from which he had just drunk. In fact, a thin crown of red drips still soaked the corner of his fleshy lips.
‘Leave me alone, my friend. I want to drink on my own,’ he murmured, looking away and leaning over his cup. He was still trying to catch the conversation of the four men who had started chatting again.
‘On your own? Don’t you know that the root of vice and sin lies in solitude?’ the newcomer insisted. ‘It plants in the soul the seeds of melancholia obscura, and puts our humours out of balance, predisposing the body to illnesses and miserable decadence, as Aristotle asserts in De anima. Perhaps you want to grow old before your time, shut up behind your armour of pride?’
Dante studied him with surprise.
‘You didn’t think I was a man of logic!’ the fair-haired man exclaimed, clearly satisfied at having attracted his attention. ‘I immediately saw from your manners and your clothes that you’re a man of letters like myself.’
‘Aristotle says nothing of the sort. And certainly not in De anima,’ the poet declared, trying once more to catch what the four men were saying. He thought he heard a reference to the temple …
‘Oh, then it must be someone else,’ the man snorted, touching Dante’s neck with his hand again.
Dante instinctively recoiled, furiously pulling the man’s hand away. He must have hit him hard, because the man shrieked, turning to his companions asking for help, his small eyes filled with sudden hatred. Attracted by the noise, people started looking in the poet’s direction. Some of the customers at the back of the hall had risen to their feet and were advancing menacingly.
Dante struck the fair-haired man violently with his free hand and hurled him against the tripod in the middle of the room. The big copper brazier toppled over and crashed noisily to the floor, throwing sparks all around. A chorus of cries of pain rose up from the group of customers closest to it, the ones who had caught the full force of the fire.
The men seemed to perform some infernal dance, as they desperately tried to shake the fragments of burning embers from their hair and clothes. Cursing and swearing, they waved their limbs around, ignoring Dante. But the rest, having got over their bewilderment, still approached, and other customers were joining them.
Dante felt he was lost. A colossus with a cuirass was now only a few feet away, and hurled himself at the poet, trying to grab him by the throat, but lost his balance and crashed to the floor. Dante had the feeling that he had tripped over the foot of one of the men whose conversation he had been listening in on – the foot having been deliberately stretched out between the giant’s legs.
The prior took advantage of this to reach the door. He stopped for a moment in the doorway, looking behind him. He brought his thumbs and index fingers together above his head. ‘You cursed sons of whores, unnatural wretches! This is the fire that awaits you, the fire you will know sooner or later.’
The whole tavern had become an infernal madhouse. Only the four strangers had remained motionless in their seats, watching the scene like spectators in a theatre.
As soon as he was outside he began running, afraid that someone might come after him. But the door of the tavern stayed shut, as if it were a kind of inviolable boundary for those who had found refuge inside. As a precautionary measure, however, he flattened himself against the wall of a nearby hut, hiding in the shadow of a doorway.
It was at that moment that he saw two silhouettes emerging from a side-alley and approaching the door of the tavern, after checking with a furtive glance that no one had noticed them. From his hiding place Dante could clearly see their faces outlined in the bright light.
Cecco Angiolieri a
nd young Colonna.
Cecco was the kind of man to frequent such a place. By now his descent along the slope of vice could easily have taken him beyond the bounds of nature. He suppressed a smile at the thought: the hero of Campaldino, with his purple leggings! He really seemed made to pass through that door. But Franceschino didn’t seem the kind, it wasn’t the image the poet had of him. No, they must be there for some other reason, one that had something to do with the four men perhaps.
He stayed close by the door, unsure what to do. There was no question of going back. Waiting for the strangers to leave and confronting them might mean losing precious time, with no guarantee of honest replies. The two men could have a thousand possible explanations for being in that place, and he had no proof against them.
Perhaps it was better to exploit the little that remained of the day and go back to Maestro Alberto, in the hope that he might have managed to understand something more about the contraption taken from the ship.
THE MECHANICUS welcomed him with an expression of disappointment that told him more than a thousand words could have done.
‘Still nothing, Maestro Alberto?’
The man shook his head. ‘Not really. I think I’ve worked out some of the connections. And I’ve rebuilt one of the damaged gear-wheels. Look.’
He held out a gleaming circle of gilded metal, the teeth of which still smelled of the file.
Dante tested the quality of the design, with a quick observation in the light from the window. ‘It doesn’t look as if your work is in any way inferior to the work of the pagans. But behind the perfection of the form you must now be able to grasp the soul of what you have in front of you. And soon, because the time that this machine is supposed to measure has already been set in motion.’
The maestro stared at him, struck by his anxious tone. ‘But nothing whatsoever is unknown about its nature …’ he murmured.
