I might have plunged my threatening knife into my own belly when I saw how defiant she remained. “We want to speak with Zeja Caterina,” I said in desperation. “Nothing more. We can help her. The men who are looking for her will take more from her than a nose.”
“Angelo bianc per vostr santite! Angelo bianc per vostr santite! Angelo bianc per vostr santite!”
Pushing her against the brick wall of the palazzo, I shouted, “Now the saints of Heaven aren’t strong enough, are they? Now the Gevol is your benefator, isn’t he?” I stuck the tip of my knife between her nose and eye, drawing blood. “But neither Heaven nor Hell is going to save your face.”
Knowing what I had at risk—and had already lost—I had set my own soul to cutting her when Niccolò caught my wrist. “Wait.” He drew back my arm, pried the knife from my stiff hand, and took it in his. I hadn’t decided whether I should damn him or thank him when he shot the point of my knife straight at the girl’s neck. She screamed at the same moment I did.
In a single motion Niccolò cut the string of her bollettino and plucked it from her breast.
“Angelo bianc per vostr santite! Sant Antoni mi benefator!” The poor girl refrained her invocation of both Heaven and Hell until tears cut tracks in her ceruse.
She was still heaving when Niccolò quietly said, “You will have your bollettino back when you take us to Zeja Caterina.”
At last she shuddered violently and nearly belched up the words: “You come to fawn stone. Dmanansera.”
“What is this ‘fawn stone’?” Niccolò asked.
“To Bologna, three miles. To the fawn stone. You see it. Big stone. Fawn on it.”
“Go on the Via Emilia toward Bologna for three miles,” Niccolò said. “And she will meet us at the fawn stone? Tomorrow evening?”
“Sì. Dmanansera. They will come.”
Niccolò’s thin lips were nearly bloodless. “I hope Zeja Caterina won’t disappoint us. I intend to leave your bollettino with her. Otherwise I will use it to make a maleficia.” A curse.
She swallowed and nodded.
“We should untie this woman,” Niccolò said. “And pay her what she is due.”
As soon as the girl had wrapped herself in the cape and snatched up the pheasant, she fled like a shadow into the street beyond us.
I was suddenly so weary, sad, and frightened that I could not keep from saying aloud what my soul already knew. “Niccolò, I don’t like the turn this has taken. We are going to die out there.”
“Yes. I think it most likely that someone will try to kill us.” Niccolò was almost mumbling like Leonardo. “And I would very much like to know who.”
XVII
Niccolò took me home and sat on the bed beside me for a time, though we did not exchange a word. I believe he knew, as do I, that if this is to be the last night of our lives, our thoughts belong with those for whom we have lived and will soon die. Yet even as we sat silently side by side, I had the most peculiar and profound sense that in some fashion our souls had met long before this, perhaps in that Elysium where Plato says we determine our next lives. And there our souls had conspired to meet again here in Imola, to share the same fate.
After perhaps a quarter hour, Niccolò offered that he had dispatches to write before we departed the next day, and left me with instruction to bar my door.
My dearest, most darling Giovanni, I began this account even before Camilla and I left Rome, with the hope that some day you would be able to understand the circumstances of our separation. But I also recorded the pope’s instructions to me, and the subsequent events, knowing that powerful men would try to twist the truth against me, and I would most likely require a chronicle of my actions so complete and precise that none could doubt my honest intentions—and from which I could cite particulars I might well have forgotten otherwise.
But I did not intend for a little boy to read any of this. I was twelve years old when my dear mama left me in Madonna Taddea’s house, and for years it was easier for me to try to forget her than to remember her with confusion and anger, wondering why she did not come back for me. If I cannot return to Rome, you will grow up in the house of Borgia. And it will be far easier for a little boy to forget me than to defend a vague memory against accusations he cannot even understand. Yet I also know, from my own life, that the day will come when you will have questions, and the truth that has been buried will become a deep ache in your breast—and in your case, the lies you have been told may even become a threat to your security in that house. That is why I was comforted to believe that our beloved Camilla would survive, even if I did not, and somehow deliver you this truth, when you were ready to hear it.
But the bitch of fate had other designs. Now it is my intention to wrap up this bundle of pages and dispatch them by courier to the Fugger Bank in Rome, along with a letter of instruction that this parcel be delivered to you on 10 February, anno Domini 1518. Your twentieth birthday, when you will be a man, preparing to find his own way in this terrible and beautiful world. And perhaps you will also be ready to remember me.
So you see, my most precious, most adored son, I am writing these words with the entire faith that if you are reading them, by the grace of God you are already a man. And by the malice of Fortune I am bones and dust, already fifteen years dead.
That being so, here my story must come to an end. I can best finish by telling you its beginning.
My tale begins with a little girl, born in some village or farmhouse in the Po River valley, I think, though I have never been certain. Her mama, though she never said so, was probably left with bread in the oven and empty promises by some country scoundrel; if she didn’t want to throw her bastard baby in the Po or some ditch, she probably was no longer welcome in her own house or the village where she had grown up. Thus driven from their home, this little girl and her mama, who couldn’t have been older than fifteen, wandered from one village or town to the next, Mama selling the only goods she had to sell, which were usually made in that workshop between her legs, moving on when the village bitches chased her out with stones and curses. There was never much to eat, just chestnut polenta or beans with a piece of bacon or sometimes only what the country folk call snake bread—the root of the lords-and-ladies flower, boiled like a thistle. Can you imagine how much that mama must have loved her little daughter, when she might have left her on a doorstep—or worse—and gone off on her own, to become a pretty virgin again? Even our dear Lord doesn’t love us that much. Oh, I know He suffered on His Cross, but it was only for a day. What did that mama suffer all those years, every time some fat, farting oaf, with a beard like a porcupine and a mouth like a latrine, got on top of her?
There were a thousand adventures they had, going from tiny towns to places like Modena and Lucca, learning the turns of the streets, so to speak. By then the little girl had her basket of baked apples she carried on her head, selling them all around town while her mama was home selling herself. When the girl returned in the evening she could always smell the men, their perfumes and pomades, and she loved that scent, because often it meant more than bacon in the beans. Sometimes they had pork cutlets or thrushes, and the girl got her first wooden clogs, so that she could imagine she was one of those important ladies who clomp-clomp all over the cobbles in their tall pattens.
Then just after Carnival one year, it got worse. The same man came again and again—the girl never saw him, but she knew his smell, a bitterness like almonds. For months he came every day, until they were back to eating chestnut polenta and boiled thistles. Mama became a wraith, her skin like the scraped parchments used to cover windows. The girl cursed God because she believed her mama was dying.
But one day, when the girl came home with her empty basket, her mama said she had something to show her. Mama brought out this leather binding that seemed as old as a saint’s relic; you could see where the mice and insects had nibbled away at it. And then she opened up this ragged thing, to show her daughter the pages within. No doubt they wer
e the cheapest thrice-used parchment, covered with atrocious copying. But to that simple little girl, for the first time in her life looking at the pages of a book, those rough leaves were as wondrous as something you would find today in the printshop of Aldus Manutius. “Divina Commedia,” the girl’s mother said, pointing to the words on the first page. “Dante Alighieri.” She looked at her daughter and her gaunt face was like Beatrice’s when she first removes her veil, dazzling Dante with her radiance. “This is ours now. Almost as long as I carried you in my womb I have been learning how to read this book. And now I am going to teach you.”
So all those months, this mama had not only been selling herself to buy that book; she had also been buying a grammar tutor. The priests would say that she bought that book, and that knowledge, with the sinfulness of her corrupt flesh, but that is not true. She bought that book with love—pure, beatific love, a love beyond all understanding. A love as great as the infinite compassion that turns the eternal spheres. A mama’s love.
I am writing this over the speckles made by my tears, which will be dryer than old bones after fifteen years, but perhaps you can see where they have blurred the ink. As you now know, that same dear mama who gave up so much for me never came back for me. I am certain my mother died soon after leaving me with Madonna Taddea in Rome, but I cannot say exactly how she went to God, just as you will probably never know precisely how the journey of my life ended. But I believe in my soul that my beloved mama died in the ospedale, carried off in a delirium of fever, with my name on her last shallow breath: Laura, the name of Petrarch’s great love. Laura, who became Sancia, the bastard daughter of the Prince of Squillace, and then Damiata, the Aphrodite of the Vatican Curia. The name of a little girl from the dirt of the Po valley, who was loved above all things in Heaven and Earth by her sainted mother of eternally blessed memory. The same little girl who now writes her last testament from a cold room in Imola, in the middle of the frozen Romagna.
So I must go now, my darling Giovanni, my beloved little boy now become a man, who can only know his mama through a haze of memories of a tiny house in the Trastevere and these thin words, her last fitful dream before the final, endless sleep. But I beg you to drink these words into your soul, even if you find them a poor vintage. Then look into the eyes of those you most adore, and try to see the reflection of my love for you, which has no end.
Magnificent Francesco Guicciardini
9 January 1527
Here Damiata’s chronicle ends. Much as the Aeneid follows the Iliad, I now present, in three parts, my continuation of her account. Like Damiata, at the time of these events I understood the great importance of even small things I witnessed—hence I wrote down many of the conversations and incidents related here at a remove of mere hours or days. But not until several months ago did I endeavor to assemble those observations into a single narrative. Nevertheless, I did not attempt to fashion a tightly knitted summary of events; rather, I have provided you what Caesar in his Civil Wars described as the “new wool of history.” When you begin to write your own history of these times, it will be your task to shear my words, comb and spin them, and weave them into a fabric of your own design.
Plato believed that every child born is a soul returning to life. As I compiled these pages, so entirely was I absorbed into my memories that I believe I came back a lesser distance, to inhabit my own life as it was twenty-four years ago, when I was a young man and it seemed that new worlds awaited our discovery, that our republic might prosper, and that our Italy might yet be saved. Alas, as Seneca wrote, Sed fatis trahimur: But we are drawn on by the Fates.
Farewell,
Niccolò Machiavelli
Imola and Cesena: December 9–26, 1502
CHAPTER 1
It is much better to tempt Fortune when there is a small possibility she will favor you, if in not tempting her you face certain ruin.
The aforesaid dictum is cited from my treatise The Art of War. I offer it in place of a preface describing everything that ensues in this chapter, because the latter would make me a poor excuse for a dramatist. But as you read along in this account, you will understand why I ran toward certain perils, rather than choosing to barricade myself in my rooms, awaiting certain ruin.
When I left Damiata after our excursion to the brothel, I spent most of the night at my writing table. Once again, I exhorted the lords of the Palazzo della Signoria to send an ambassador with full plenary powers, in order to arrive at an agreement with Valentino, which, in light of the duke’s evident suspicion of the condottieri, might well encourage him to withdraw the treaty he had offered them—and have the useful effect of saving our republic. But I had little hope that the blind would soon see.
The next day I prepared for the possibility that I would not return from the evening’s journey, my foremost concern to ensure that my little Primerana and my wife receive my appropriation, which had yet to be sent from Florence. But I also had to provide for my mule and my pitiful manservant, who would need someone to look after them. These were no easy matters and I did not finish much before our departure.
Nevertheless, Damiata and I exited the city gate at the time we had appointed, some two hours before dusk, reasoning that this fawn stone was not much more than an hour outside Imola on the Via Emilia. We would arrive while we still had full light, the better to loiter nearby and see if anyone was laying snares in the vicinity—or determine if someone had followed us from Imola. I had rented a mule sturdy enough for two—not wanting to tax my own mule before he was ready—but I walked alongside while Damiata rode, in order to save this beast’s strength for later, when our survival might require it.
Outside the city, both the road and the surrounding pianura were entirely covered with a January snowfall that had arrived a month early, the snow heavy but dry, like coarse-milled grain. The north wind sweeping across the plain was bitterly cold, and icy specks still blew down from a sky that resembled a sheet of lead. But we had prepared as best we could. Damiata’s hood and cape were lined with sable; when she was seated on the mule, I could see that she was wearing thick woolen hose and an extra skirt beneath her black mourning dress. I wore most of my wardrobe, along with a farmer’s wooden shoes, these at least keeping my feet dry. Nevertheless, we would have to quickly finish our business with Zeja Caterina or the cold would mock—and make us forget—all our other fears.
With the rust-colored soil of the pianura freshly whitewashed, or so it seemed, one could see more easily the stamp the ancient Romans had placed so indelibly on this land. Not only was the straight line of the Via Emilia the testament of their surveyors, who possessed skills we have since lost; the entire plain to its east was divided into a vast checkerboard of fields, perfect squares of equal size, all precisely aligned with the Via Emilia like bricks against a mason’s plumb line. Over many centuries, the boundaries among these squares came to be marked by various means: irrigation ditches; narrow dirt and gravel roads; lines of mulberry trees or cypresses; rows of shrubs and hedges.
This vast grid was entirely different than the countryside I had known as a small boy. My father had owned a little land and a house at Sant’Andrea, near Percussina, about six miles outside the walls of Florence, from which he obtained nearly all his income and most of our food. There the fields, olive groves, vineyards, and forest draped the low hills in a patchwork that might have been sewn at a secondhand shop. On a glaring August morning, I could run through stalks of blue-flowered flax almost as tall as I was, and if I squinted my eyes I could imagine I was in an ocean; in the next moment I had vanished into the sunless woods where we cut our kindling, listening to the rabbits and pheasants scatter, only to emerge a moment later into a chicken yard or hog sty.
We had little company on the road that cold afternoon, aside from a train of several mules burdened with great baskets of charcoal and a small band of cape-clad peasants, one of them with a pair of dead rabbits over his shoulders. The scant traffic, like the hunters’ pitiful yield, evidenced
the scarcity of everything in this region, due both to the climate and to the army that had been living off the countryside. Seeing that we were foreigners, the peasants spit in the snow and made the corne against the evil eye.
The wind made conversation difficult, but it did not slow us much; I estimated that we had been gone barely an hour when I shouted, “I see our stone!” We had passed about a dozen crossroads, but these four corners were different, in that all were entirely exposed. Jutting from the earth at the corner nearest to us was a great slab of limestone, worn by time and probably half buried in the snow, although what remained was close to my height. I expected we would find that someone had carved a fawn on it, many centuries ago.
Yet when we came close enough to examine the carving, we discovered this was not so. The deeply cut letters were as tall as my hand, the Latin inscription still easy to read: SANCTISSIMIS FAUNIBUS, an ancient devotion to the Holy Fauns.
“Faun stone,” I said, wondering if this would be merely the most trivial of my mistaken assumptions. Across the road from this monument, in the far corner of the field, was a well, a gray masonry cylinder against the snow, beside it a wooden crane for the bucket hoist. “We’ll go over there and wait,” I said. “If we have to conceal ourselves, it will do.”
The road we crossed appeared to run beyond the flat horizon, perhaps going all the way to the Adriatic coast. This perfectly straight white path was bordered by endless rows of naked mulberry trees, their spiky limbs branching into delicate webs of twigs, these almost resembling black lace against the snowy fields.
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