The Malice of Fortune

by Michael Ennis

  I nodded, feeling almost as if I were seven again and had not properly prepared my lesson for Ser Battista.

  “You see, Secretary, His Holiness declared his preference for my brother long before he made him captain general of the Church, years before my father even became pope. Duke of Gandia was by right my title. It went to Juan …” He blew out a scoffing breath. “I could give you a litany, Secretary. But it means nothing now.” He swept his arm toward the sea. “During the goat ride, I wrote on that page myself, as if I were addressing my father. I confessed to him that on the night we found Juan’s body, I offered a prayer of thanksgiving to the God who had abandoned me until then. The indifferent God who in some fit of mercy or justice—or simply cowardice—had surrendered Juan to the designs of Fortune and the Vitelli. So that, Secretary, is this ‘confession’ Damiata wishes to take to my father: I wanted my brother to die. Had I grown up with any faith in the power of the Lord, I would have prayed for it every night since I was a boy. But even God knows I had nothing to do with Juan’s murder.”

  Burning with a hiss that seemed equal to a hundred scoppietti preparing to fire, the fuse of a bombard illuminated the gunners almost like day. Presumably they had found the range by their own devices. The initial explosion of the powder, however, was almost muted. But a great long flame erupted from the bombard’s blunt iron snout and the echo that followed it out over the water rattled my bones, such that the sound of the ball splashing harmlessly into the sea—to my great relief—seemed little more than a stone tossed into a pond.

  “Secretary, do you know what my father will do when he reads this so-called confession? My words, though merely babbled in a state of delirium, will rip open wounds that have never healed. His Holiness is an old man. I now regret that I even allowed Juan’s amulet to be dispatched to Rome after we found it on that woman … It nearly killed him. Just as we feared for his life in the days after Juan …”

  Valentino shook his head bitterly, blinking away snowflakes as if fighting tears. I scarcely thought he was envisioning the loss of a beloved patriarch. But I little doubted the duke’s sincere concern for the merchant of forgiveness, whose sale of indulgences and Church offices had so liberally funded his conquests.

  “Get up on the parapet,” Valentino said abruptly, as though only from that vantage could I truly comprehend the catastrophe that would follow, if the barge escaped. “I want to show you something.”

  The pale stone parapet beside me rose to my chest, the flat top less than two braccia wide.

  “Get up there.”

  Placing my hands on stone so cold that it seared my flesh, I hauled myself up and knelt atop the parapet. Far beneath me, a silver-foamed fringe of the black Adriatic lapped against the rocks. All at once the blood drained from my head and I could not rise from my hands and knees. Every fiber of my will was suddenly devoted to clinging to this perch.

  “Stand up, Secretary.”

  I lifted my hands from the icy stone and rose unsteadily from my crouch. The sea, although nearly calm, appeared to roil with black swells; the wind, although merely a breeze, seemed almost a tempest.

  It was as if Valentino were Lucifer falling from the sky, so swiftly did he land on the parapet in front of me, having leapt with an almost unnatural strength directly from the platform below. But this must have been a more challenging feat than he had expected, because his body gyred as he straightened up. Being only an arm’s length from me, he held out his hands.

  I thought for an instant that I should let him fall. But I reached out and we clasped each other as if we were playing the “little owl,” where you wrestle with only the hands touching. Here, instead of trying to throw one another down, we steadied ourselves.

  “You see what we can do together.” It was as if Valentino had intended all along to make this demonstration. “I need to work with Florence. Your lordships must be persuaded that our concerns and objects are mutual. And you are the man best suited to lead them into the light. Your merchants and bankers sent you here only to make a perilous art of their craven, ceaseless vacillation. You know that, Niccolò.” This was the first time he had ever used my name. “And I know what it is to have one’s abilities unacknowledged. You are capable of far more than providing the Florentines a mere mouthpiece. I have come to value your keen observation of events, your deep understanding of men, your gifts of anticipation. Help me convince your countrymen. Let us build this new world together.”

  At that moment I saw two nations: the Italy we have at present, the prostrate victim of the most foolish men, if not also the worst men; and an Italy that might yet hope to live in peace and prosperity, free of foreign domination, under some sort of pax Caesareus imposed by Valentino. And for another moment, one that was less madness than a triumph of reason over sentiment, I glimpsed the new world that I would help him build.

  He saw this in my eyes more clearly than I could see it in my own heart. “Look to the sea, Niccolò. Look beyond it.”

  The black horizon appeared infinite, a dark mirror to the vast prospect of Heaven I had seen in Damiata’s arms. Yet after a moment, I had the sense that a great windstorm rushed across this distant realm, so far away I could hear only the merest sibilance, whispers in a dream. Telling me something I had dimly perceived in my conversations with Hannibal and Caesar, a truth that lay out there like some undiscovered world. A new age. I began to fly across that night sea, racing beyond the borders of love and hate and all the lesser sentiments that we believe animate our souls, the tempest now singing of a new life I had never imagined, not even in Damiata’s arms. A life of such power and majesty that my feet no longer required a tenuous purchase on that parapet, because I was no longer a man bound to the earth. I was an immortal flying to my place in the stars.

  I have never felt anything like it since.

  “You know now, Niccolò, don’t you? This is what life means when you throw aside your human frailties and challenge Fortune, every day and in every thing. You of all men know that if we wait on other men and on events over which we have no control, we Italians will not be free again in our lifetimes.” His hands were as hard as iron ingots. “Come with me, Niccolò, and help me defeat Fortune.”

  “No man sees farther than you, Excellency.” My voice trembled. I was so far from the shore, free of all the tethers that might hold me back—family, home, our republic. Even Damiata had slipped from my arms.

  He leaned closer and shifted his gaze slightly, as if locating some cranny in my soul where I had hidden my own secret. “But you, too, think you see something, don’t you, Niccolò. Something no other man has ever been able to see. You believe you can see me.” I would not call the exquisitely subtle expression on his lips a smile. “Tell me. What do you see?”

  Valentino did not part his lips at all, yet it appeared that a little steam issued from them. And with hardly more effort, he pushed my hands so that my feet lifted from the stone and I knew I was going into the abyss. Then just as quickly he held me fast, to demonstrate how easily he could win this game. “I want you to tell me what you think you know.” Again he pushed, moving both my hands and my feet. “If you have an accusation, make it.”

  These were almost the same words that had humbled Oliverotto da Fermo. But on that occasion Valentino had left Oliverotto the choice to retreat—to postpone his death, as it were. Here, still holding me fast, he was not offering me even that Devil’s bargain. I could plunge silently into the cold black sea, or I could declare my own wavering faith in my untested, unproved, and perhaps worthless science of men.

  I began my tale at the beginning. “I believe … you started watching us when you were very young …”

  I had to halt. Looking down, I imagined my body falling upon the rocks. Strangely, only then was my frozen dread overtaken by a profound calm.

  “From your earliest years,” I said, my voice now steady, “you carefully observed the language of our gestures, our laughter and tears, even our smallest expressions, always perf
ecting your craft, until you could fashion these masks of yours as skillfully as Leonardo paints his portraits—more real, more true to Nature, than life itself. A simulacrum of life so convincing that only you could know there was nothing behind it.”

  Another fuse hissed and I could see the flare and feel the heat at my back as flame shot out over the sea.

  “But as your intellect matured, you were no longer content simply to mimic us. You began to look inside us, just as keenly observing the desires, fears, and expectations that we believe we keep locked within our breasts. And from the secrets of our own souls you fashioned a mask so malleable that it is no longer a mask, is it, Excellency? It is a mirror in which each of us beholds his loftiest hopes. And deepest fears. When we peer into your illusion of a soul, we see only ourselves. That is the brilliance of your deception. When we look at you, we want nothing more than to deceive ourselves. Only when you turn away from us can we begin to glimpse your true face.”

  Flames again lit the sky and I could feel the percussion that followed in the stone beneath my feet. Yet Valentino did not even blink. His eyes as much as his hands demanded that I finish.

  “Now I understand why you must kill us,” I continued, soaring on the wings of my science—and waiting to fall into the sea like Icarus. “Our terror, our pain, the desperate hopes we cling to at the end, the moment when we surrender our souls—these things you see on our faces as we look into the face of Death, are all that bring you life. You, who were born dead in all but the flesh, can only live at the moment we die. Your riddles, your figures of geometry, your shrine of skulls—these amusements only remind you that once you lived and will briefly live again, when you can kill again. You will always have some new disegno, a new rebus of human flesh. New massacres. Yet your mound of skulls will never rise high enough to fill the emptiness within you.” Something might have flickered in his eyes. “I wonder, Excellency, when you began. Did servants disappear even when you were a boy?” I took in a breath that burned my lungs. “Or did it begin when you murdered your brother?”

  Our hands still clasped, Valentino inexorably brought his greater strength against mine, even as I exerted every fiber of my body and will to save myself. With each frantic heartbeat I came less than a fingernail’s width closer to my death—a progress far more terrifying than if he had thrown me down in one motion. Yet my adversary never blinked throughout. He did not want to miss the moment when my soul surrendered.

  The distant windstorm roared in my ears. But in truth, all I had heard was a single contemptuous exhalation, sighing from Duke Valentino’s lips.

  “Go, then,” he said. “If you wish, inform your lordships of the crimes you believe God has witnessed. Go and publish your lies and nonsense, send your letters and accusations throughout all Italy. This slander will gain you and your republic no profit, nor will you stain my honor any more than have the lies my enemies, to their eternal shame, have already told. The entire world can see that I have obtained justice for my brother, as well as for those unfortunate country girls and the women of Capua, who are no less worthy of it. Their murderers died tonight.”

  Valentino released my hands. “Go now, my little secretary,” he whispered. “Go and tell the world what you think you know.”

  Before I came down from that high place, I looked a last time out to sea. The blackness that had moments before seemed infinite, promising everything, now appeared to be nothing more than a single dark room, the sanctum sanctorum of a small, forgotten god who was not even present behind the veil of snow. Nothing moved save the fleeing barge, its sail little more substantial than a snowflake blowing past my face, a speck upon the dark water.

  Florence and Rome: January 23–December 14, 1503

  CHAPTER 26

  Men have by nature the power to desire everything and from Fortune the power to achieve little.

  Within days of Valentino’s victory over the condottieri, word of this signal triumph had spread throughout the courts and capitals of Europe. All Christendom could not but admire the courage and cunning Duke Valentino had exhibited at Sinigaglia; the duke’s brilliant ruse was soon widely lauded as il bellissimo inganno—“the most beautiful deception.” And no longer could any sovereign or state feel safe from him.

  As for the “little secretary,” to cite Valentino’s parting address to me, I returned to Florence on 23 January, anno Domini 1503, to an empty house on the Via di Piazza, the modest home where I grew up, bequeathed me by my father. The day after my arrival, Albertaccio Corsini, Marietta’s guardian, dragged her to my doorstep—if not by the hair, then certainly by the arm. I did not play Agamemnon and interrogate my wife as to what she had done in Piero del Nero’s house, with the “cousin” with whom she was in love. Marietta’s sorrowing eyes only mirrored my own longing, as every day a life with Damiata rose anew in my imaginings, infinite in its variety and splendor. Having my own “most bitter new tears born from old desires,” as Petrarch wrote, I was content to let my wife pine in peace.

  But Marietta did not return alone. She brought our little girl back to my father’s house, and there my doubts regarding Primerana’s paternity melted like September frost. It was enough for me simply to go into her nursery, scoop up the fanciulla, and hold her to my breast, to watch her little hands clutch and her tiny mouth pucker, babbling and casting her doe eyes about in wonder and amusement. I fell so deeply in love with her that I could hear the wind rush past my ears as I soared, deliriously, to the very zenith of the Heavens.

  So Marietta and I resumed our lives, bound only in our love for our daughter and our sorrow for our lost loves. After that night at Sinigaglia, hardly another passed that I did not wake in the dark, wondering if Damiata had been killed by a bolt or a ball just moments after I last held her. The entire credence of my science rested on my belief that the sealed page she had carried onto that barge held Valentino’s confession to his brother’s murder. And were that true, and if Damiata could reach Rome with the damning document, she would deliver the one blow the empire of Saint Peter and Caesar could never withstand.

  Instead, in the months after Sinigaglia, the pope’s son was given an entirely free hand to resume his conquests. As I had feared, Valentino quickly abandoned even his lip service to peace, assaulting fortresses and cities throughout central Italy with relentless fury. And Pope Alexander continued to provide his captain general the unceasing torrent of ducats required to conquer both Fortune and the Kingdoms of the World.

  By midsummer of 1503, Duke Valentino had determined to discard his alliance with the French king, who alone stood between the new Caesar and the great prizes he had long sought: Bologna, Venice, and, of course, our Florence. At Sinigaglia, I believed, Valentino had not only begun the conquest of Italy; he had already set his acquisitive eye upon the rest of Europe.

  As I watched, with dreadful rapture, the rise of Valentino’s new empire, I found my sole consolation in ever more desperate conjecture: Even if Damiata’s barge had reached Venice, she would not have risked going to Rome by the shortest route; in fact, aware that the vessel’s destination was common knowledge—Valentino had known it even as the ship fled from his guns—she might well have disembarked elsewhere along the coast and hidden herself for weeks, if not months. And once Damiata had carefully made her way to Rome—assuming she had—she could not simply have walked into the Vatican and demanded her son.

  But such reasoning could not contain my fears. Despite her promise that I would see her again, Damiata had left me with only one certainty: month after month, as Valentino conquered territory after territory, I heard nothing from her or of her.

  Neither did I hear anything more from the murderer who had briefly whispered his secrets to me. In Florence, we received rumors of atrocities that had followed Valentino’s campaign in central Italy, among them reports that young women had been abducted, raped, and murdered. But such rumors always accompany conquering armies; in this case most men credited the abuses to Spanish mercenaries. Having heard n
o accounts of dismembered and beheaded corpses, even I could hardly speculate that one rare man was responsible for these crimes. Try as I would, I could no longer enter the Labyrinth of his mind; eventually I could not help but suspect that his singular nature was perhaps more a creature of my own imagination. Perhaps the murderer had in fact died at Sinigaglia, as Valentino had insisted and Damiata had believed.

  Yet as much as I feared that my science had already been proved fraudulent, I feared all the more I would soon see Valentino again. And before that bitter day ended, I would be forced to witness my bella Firenze perish in flames, the horrors of Capua in her streets.

  Fortune, however, had her own inscrutable designs. In August 1503, at the very summit of his son’s success, Pope Alexander VI fell ill with the tertian fever common to that hot season. For a time the pope’s recovery was expected, but after a sudden reversal, he died on the eighteenth. Rodrigo Borgia’s demise, like his election as pope, was widely credited, even by learned men, to a contract with the Devil, which had allotted him eleven years—and eight additional days, as it turned out—on the throne of Saint Peter, this in exchange for his immortal soul, which he yielded up with his last breath, all witnesses present attributing to him the words, “I come, it is right. Wait a moment.”

  Thus Valentino lost his essential partner a year before he might have completed the conquests necessary to preserve his power long after his father’s death. Worse yet, at the time his father died, Valentino had been on his own deathbed of the same feverish malady; only his proverbial strength and endurance had saved him. These blows notwithstanding, Valentino recovered sufficient health, and secured enough of his father’s vast treasury, to ensure that the new pope, Pius III, was elected to serve at his pleasure.