“I see you have a good heart, madonna. And an honest tongue. So I will not turn you over to the captain for questioning as my orders direct me to do.” At the mention of the captain I felt Medina’s arm grow weak beneath my hand and I gave him a quick kick in the shins to bolster his courage.
“Your kindness marks you as a compassionate man and a true Christian, sir,” I replied. “May I see the woman?”
“You may for all I know. But not in this jail.”
Was I too late? “Is she dead?” I asked.
“Ought to be after what she’s done. But she’s one of those who step in shit and come up smelling roses. Her Christian client turned out to be a Turkish Mussulman, so she’s free, sent back to her house with a warning to leave Firenze at once. You’ve seen the last of her, lady, and just as well for you. A nice little lady like yourself needs have no traffic with a slut. It doesn’t do. Tell your servant to see you home.” He turned to Medina. “See your lady home, lad. On your way now.”
And before I knew it Medina was fairly dragging me along the street toward the Ponte Vecchio and home. But I could not let the matter rest. Calling up all my strength, I turned the wretch around toward the Bonaventura house so that I might learn from Diamante where I would find “the Jewish whore.”
When I told her my mission she warned me that I was on a fool’s errand. But her loyal heart could not long withstand my urgent pleas for help, and I left her accompanied by two armed porters to show me the way to the house of whores and to watch over me if I insisted on entering.
“But beware, Grazia, these places are not filled with the betrayed and the innocent as you seem to think. There isn’t one of those sluts who wouldn’t slit your throat for the scarf around your neck.” This firm judgment was followed by a final warning from my friend to her bravi that if any harm should come to me they would pay dearly for it.
The street they led me to was not more than a hundred small steps from the Bonaventura mansion. But what a distance we traveled in that hundred steps.
From the outside the house seemed no worse than the house of any Florentine silkworker or artisan — three stories high and four braccias wide. Not until we stepped inside did the truly hellish character of the place emerge. Normally in these narrow Florentine houses the ground floor serves as a shop or bottega, stuffed with hides or woolens or statuary or tinware as the case may be but rarely used by more than three or four persons at one time. In this infamous den the tiny area had been divided by thin curtains into cribs. There must have been twenty of them, no one larger than was absolutely necessary to accommodate the thin straw pallet that along with a metal pitcher and a stool constituted the totality of the furnishings of each cubicle. By comparison, the most austere monk’s cell is a palace.
All this came to me in a glance, for many of the cribs were open to reveal the human merchandise offered for sale in this infamous bottega — women in various states of undress, legs splayed, breasts flopping down to their knees, many sucking on bottles of wine like babes on the tit.
And the stench!
“Watch your feet, madonna,” one of my escorts warned just in time to save me stepping into a pile of feces. Apparently the denizens scattered their leavings around like animals. No. Not like animals. Animals do not befoul their own nests. Not even the despised and unclean pig.
Everything in me wanted to bolt, to run back to my friends in their fine clean house. But I had gone too far to turn back.
“Ask who is in charge here,” I instructed my escort.
Behind me a strong husky voice spoke out. “I am, madonna.”
Then the curtain was drawn and out stepped a veritable giant (or giantess) almost a head taller than Lord Pirro, with fluttering hands and a full purple mouth, opulently dressed in a jeweled turban. “How can I be of service?”
“A woman . . . a Jewess . . .” I barely knew where to begin.
“You wish to enjoy a woman?” The heavy voice took on a musky flavor.
“I wish to find someone,” I replied in a voice I had never heard myself use, a tight prissy voice cut off from feeling. “I saw this woman yesterday in the piazza in the custody of the bargello. They tell me she stays here.”
“Ah, the Jewish whore. The little dancer with the taste for wine. Believe me, madonna, we can do better for you than her. I have one from Alexandria with a tongue like a snake and hands to turn your body to water.”
“I want the Jewess.” Where I got the breath to speak I do not know, for the stench was choking me.
“We have better, believe me . . . sweet and young and juicy with hot little mouths . . . big ones with arms like pillars to lift you up to paradise.”
“I want the Jewess,” I repeated. “Is she here?”
“Answer the lady’s question, pander,” my escort prodded the giantess (by her gestures I now took her for a woman).
The purple mouth, pursed up until then, oozed out into the face, loose and vulnerable. “I was only trying to serve the lady, sir.” The deep voice quavered. “But the Jewish wench is gone, with her pimp and her wine bottle. And good riddance too. She’s a wild one. Always laughing. Life is not a dance, you know.”
“She had a good heart,” I heard myself say. In spite of my resolve not to speak to this scum, I could not let an insult to my old friend pass unchallenged. Of course the gesture was futile. What place have hearts in these so-called palaces of love?
I cannot write further of Zaira tonight. The shame of each word as I lay it down on the page burns into me like a branding iron. Madonna Isabella would disdain that sentence as a wallow in Jewish guilt. Her Christ forgives her everything. But my God, whatever little piece of Him I cling to, offers me no such comfort. We have only one obligation to God and man: to act up to the best that is in us. When I turned my back on Zaira, I succumbed to the weakest part of my nature. In betraying her, I betrayed myself, an act that has diminished me forever in my own eyes.
As I pronounce this harsh sentence, Sappho whispers in my ear the words she wrote to Athis, who had loved and betrayed her:
. . . the memory is still dear.
Look deep into my eyes
And keep the dead past clear
of all regret . . .
To keep the dead past clear of all regret is a piece of advice that might have issued from the mouth of Zaira, that generous spirit who, I know, forgives me everything. But although I have learned with the years to forgive those who have done me ill, I still have not achieved that high and confident state of forgiveness for my own transgressions.
29
In his history of Firenze, Francesco Guicciardini proclaims the year 1492 as the last of Italy’s good years. Above all other things, he attributes the subsequent decline of the city to the early death of Lorenzo dei Medici, eulogized by the poets as the laurel that sheltered the birds who sang in the Tuscan spring.
I too mourn that cultivated, wise, and generous heart. But with due respect to Lorenzo’s diplomacy, I tell you that it was not the loss of a good man but the active presence of a bad one that plunged Italy into shame and misery. If you would know how this villain affected my life and your own, I beg you to come back with me to 1493, the first of the bad years for Italy.
Lorenzo il magnifico is dead. His son Piero rules in Firenze as the first among its citizens. In Lombardia, Lodovico Sforza has usurped the dukedom of Milano from his nephew Gian Galeazzo. This piece of treachery is in itself no cause for alarm. It is a family matter between the Sforzas. However, Lodovico happens to be married to the granddaughter of the King of Napoli. And the King of Napoli is a touchy Spaniard who does not take kindly to having his granddaughter unseated.
Meanwhile, in faraway Paris, the scion of the house of Anjou has come to the throne of France. Named for Charlemagne, he is the eighth Charles to rule France. Small and bent over, with a huge nose, huge feet, and a convulsive twitch, his extreme
ugliness is matched only by his appetite for women and victories.
There you have the main characters in the Italian drama — Charles VIII of France, mad for glory; Ferrante, King of Napoli, intent upon revenging his granddaughter’s humiliation; Piero dei Medici of Firenze, a pale counterfeit of his magnificent father; and Lodovico Sforza, Duke of Milano, a usurper. They comprise a volatile group, proud, ambitious, quick to take offense, every one sly. And the slyest of all is Lodovico Sforza, the Duke of Milano.
Casting about for a way to deflect the ire of Napoli, Lodovico Sforza happens on the idea of distracting King Ferrante with a new enemy. In Charles VIII Lodovico sees a willing pawn. Perhaps the impetuous French boy can be persuaded to attack Napoli rather than Milano. After all, the house of Anjou does have an ancient if groundless claim to the throne of Napoli. Lodovico sends ambassadors to invite the young French king to come to Italy and press his claim to the kingdom of Napoli.
Perhaps Lorenzo the Magnificent — the peacemaker and diplomatist — could have persuaded Lodovico Sforza away from his shortsighted ploy. But Lorenzo was dead, and without his presence, the Florentine delegation that rushed to Milano hoping to dissuade the Duke carried less weight than a feather.
In vain they warned against the danger of inviting foreign troops onto Italian soil. Remember what happened to us in the year 410 when the barbarians swept down over the Alps, they reminded him. But Lodovico Sforza was fixed on using the French as food for the consuming wrath of Napoli.
In a final appeal to Lodovico’s better nature, the Florentines unfurled the tattered flag of the motherland.
“Think of Italy,” they begged him.
His answer rings in my ears as I write it, resonating the dim-sightedness and arrogance not only of Lodovico Sforza but of all the other tin-pot Italian princes.
“Italy? Italy?” Lodovico looked here and there about the room as if pursuing a phantom. “Where is this Italy you speak of? I have never looked her in the face.”
Thus was the stage set for the first foreign invasion of Italy in a thousand years.
By the end of the summer of 1494 word came to us in Firenze that Charles VIII of France had crossed the Alps with a force of twenty-two thousand infantry and eighteen thousand cavalry and was gliding over Piemonte and Monferrato like one of God’s angels. Before we knew it, the French king had reached Asti and settled in as guest of the Duke of Milano and his wife, Beatrice (whom I always thought of as Madonna Isabella’s mean little sister). Two weeks later he was felled by a mysterious ailment. Noblesse oblige. Piero dei Medici ordered Judah del Medigo to Asti to minister to the King, which I took to be a high honor. Not so, Judah.
“It is never an honor to be ordered about like a lackey,” he advised me as he tossed his garments angrily into a cassone.
“How long will you be at Asti?” I asked.
“Until the King gets well. Or dies, I suppose.”
“Is he so unwell then?” I asked.
“Who is to know? He took to his bed two days ago with a mysterious ailment — maybe the pox, says Lodovico Sforza’s astrologer, who seems to be serving as the King’s physician. Possibly the monarch has worn himself raw with sexual exertion. I understand that Lodovico’s notion of hospitality is to provide a new lady of the court every night for the King’s pleasure, with a substitute standing by should one partner prove insufficient to satiate the satyr. A regimen like that could kill a man. Mind you, it would not stop the gossips from crying poison as they always do.”
“In that case you had better make certain to cure your patient, maestro,” I joked. But the jest died on my lips. We knew of physicians who had literally lost their heads in punishment for the death of important patients.
With Judah gone, the notion of writing a ricordanza seemed at worst a harmless way to pass the time, at best intriguing. In Firenze even a shoemaker felt entitled to take some moments of each day to enter the events of his life in his libro segreto. The merchants did so as a matter of course. Isaachino Bonaventura, the least poetic of men, would not have dreamed of settling into his bed at night without making a daily entry. If he could write his life, so could I.
Thus began my first efforts toward literature. In no time I found myself composing the occasional passage in terza rima. Then one day a whole poem. After not too long I was producing a poem a day, all of them pallid echoes of Virgil, all sentimental, flowery, mushy as a rotten peach. I must have filled thirty quarto pages while Judah was absent. When I learned he was on his way home I quickly burned the lot. But I had made a beginning.
It was a pale and haggard Judah who staggered into our house after an absence of twenty days at Asti. Nonetheless he refused tea and a warm bed, taking time only to bathe before he was off again, this time to Fiesole. Lord Pico had taken ill again, he explained as I scrubbed him down. To my questions about Charles VIII he replied coolly that there was nothing to tell. Reports of the King’s ailment had been greatly exaggerated. “All his Majesty needed was a physic and some hand-holding,” was how he put it, and then he turned away from me and called for Medina to assemble a list of necessaries for his visit to the ailing Count.
After that the subject of Asti was closed, much to my disappointment and that of Diamante, who had counted on hearing all the details of the French court at first hand.
“How otherwise will we know what transpired at Asti?” she pressed.
“We may not, my friend,” I replied.
“But I shall die if I don’t have every single detail. How do the French ladies dress? Do they cut their necklines down their navels like the Venetian ladies do? Does the King really kiss everybody of both sexes that he meets? You must ask your husband these things, Grazia.”
“I tried to but he yawned and patted me on the head and went to bed.”
“Ask him again. Pinch him if you must.”
“I could never pinch Judah,” I replied. “Never.”
In the end, Diamante and I did discover many of the details of the French king’s stay at Asti, but not from Judah. The Bonaventura agent at Milano was our source. From him through Isaachino we learned that Lodovico’s Duchess, Beatrice d’Este, brought eighty beautiful young women and forty musicians with her to Asti to welcome the French king and keep him amused; that she obliged the monarch by dancing for him in the French manner; that he, flattered by the delicate compliment, had her portrait taken on the spot by his own painter, Jean Perreal, to send to his sister the Duchess Ann; that even though the King called Lodovico “cousin,” he had the keys to his residence delivered into his own royal hands each night after lockup and the gates to his palace guarded by twenty of his own French hussars.
I made a few feeble attempts to use these details to start Judah reminiscing about his sojourn in the King’s entourage. But they came to nothing. All of his attention was reserved for the ailing Pico della Mirandola.
Everything else, even his work at the Medici library, was forgotten. When I mentioned one day that he had not visited the library since his return from Asti, he replied irritably that the library would doubtless be there long after we were dead. It was a shocking statement from a man who treasured books and scholarship above all else. I watched, mystified, as each morning before the matins bell he shook himself awake in the dark to spend hours locked in his laboratory concocting new remedies for his patient. After dinner he would mount a horse — a pair of them was kept at a stable in the next street — and travel up to Fiesole, accompanied by Medina. Most nights I was asleep by the time he returned, worn out, to fall into bed beside me.
I feared that he would collapse from exhaustion. But he seemed to gain strength from his exertions. His eyes burned with an almost manic zeal when he spoke to me of his fight to keep the Count alive. And one night I awoke to find him kneeling on the cold floor praying, “Find me a way, God. Lead me to the remedy.”
Had I been forced to depend solely on Judah for m
y view of events I might easily have supposed that the fate of the world hung on the survival of Pico della Mirandola. Only the reports passed on by Isaachino told me that the fate of our city — and perhaps of all Italy — hung on an equally precarious balance: the mercurial relationship between the King of France and Piero dei Medici.
Three times that summer King Charles sent ambassadors to Firenze to request safe conduct for his army through Toscana on his way to Napoli. Three times Piero forced the Florentine Council to refuse. Having thrown in his lot with Napoli early in the game, Piero now felt he could not move from the position for fear of being judged weak. His bella figura was at risk.
After that the storm clouds gathered over Firenze with amazing speed. In a series of quick moves, Charles and his troops decamped from Asti, passed Genova, and began to move south toward Firenze. Unopposed, the French army sped over the desolate Garfagnana and made camp in the little town of Fiorvizzano, as close to us as cheek to jowl.
“The occupation of our city is now a certainty,” Isaachino told me. “Only the moment of it remains in doubt. You must prevail on Maestro Judah to leave town with us.” But when I told Judah that the city might be under siege any day, he ridiculed me. “The Florentines are not stupid enough to get into a pissing contest with the King of France. If he does come they will pacify him. It is good for trade. And the Florentines always do what is good for trade.”
He was not entirely wrong. One fine day Piero dei Medici came to his senses and galloped off to Fiorvizzano to pacify the King. Too late. Piero emerged from the audience room stripped of Livorno, Pisa, and Sarzana. What it had taken his father, Lorenzo, a lifetime to amass he gifted away in a day.
Back in Firenze, Fra Girolamo Savonarola publicly cursed Piero and extolled the French king as the living incarnation of the Sword of God, urging him to come quickly and scourge the wicked Florentines for their sins. With a savior like that, who needs a devil?
The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi Page 32
