Mesmerized by Savonarola’s rhetoric, the Florentine signoria declared Piero a traitor and banished him. That night his brother Cardinal Medici escaped the city hidden in a wagonload of hay. It took only two days to wipe out sixty years of Medici rule.
Within hours of the bloodless coup, a cadre of French billeting officers arrived from Fiorvizzano and took over the city of Firenze by the simple expedient of marking each house with the name of whoever was to be billeted there. Not a shot was fired, not a protest uttered. Rodrigo Borgia summed it up neatly: The French captured Firenze with a box of chalk.
I was at the Bonaventura house the morning the French advance party came to Jew Street. Without a by-your-leave, they entered every room, assigning this one to Baron so-and-so and that one to Count thus-and-so. They gave it to be understood that they meant to pay. But, as Isaachino predicted, when they offered to settle up, they paid for the horns and ate the ox, as the saying goes.
On my ride home, an eerie quiet pervaded the streets of the city. Not a sign nor sound of resistance. Only the jingle of spurs as the King’s men walked from house to house with their wands of white chalk. Was this a siege, a pageant, a quadrille, or what?
“The Bonaventuras are leaving for the Mugello tonight,” I told Judah, hunched over his burners and retorts as usual. “We must go with them.”
“Out of the question,” he muttered.
“The French are commandeering houses —”
“If you are apprehensive it is best you leave,” he interrupted. “Go along with the Bonaventuras if you wish.”
“And you? Will you come with me?”
“Certainly not.” He turned the burner up and began to stir the contents of the beaker furiously.
“You refuse the offer, then?” I pressed him.
Now he turned to face me. “Grazia, I hold the life of a desperately ill young man in my hands. Have I not made that clear to you?”
“You have, sir. And I tell you that we are in a precarious position here with the French at the gates.”
“Twaddle. Your friends the Bonaventuras are in a precarious position. They run the risk of having their fortune confiscated. You and I have nothing to lose. You forget that I am in high favor with the French king since I treated him at Asti. I am now his physician. His confidant. His savior.” He allowed a wry smile to crease his lips when he pronounced the word “savior.” “If you like, I will write to him in the field and ask him to place this house under his special protection. Still, perhaps you should go to the countryside with your friends.”
“And leave you here?”
“Medina will see to my needs.”
Medina take my place? Never. “I do not believe that a wife should leave her husband when danger threatens. My place is by your side.” I drew myself up to my full height and began to quote: “‘Entreat me not to leave thee and to return from following after thee. For whither thou goest I will go. And where thou lodgest, I will lodge — ’”
“Enough, Grazia.” He raised his hand as if to command me. “Spare me your erudition. If you wish to go, go. If you wish to stay, stay. But for God’s sake leave me to my work.”
The King’s billeting officers came into our street early the next afternoon. As they moved down the street closer and closer to our house, the blows of the halberds resounded against the portals as if struck by Thor’s hammer. When I heard them at the next house I smoothed my hair, stiffened my spine, and walked down, trembling, to greet them. I heard the clatter of their spurs on the cobbles as they approached our portal. Then: “Allons-y, Allons-y!” An order to move on. “Le médecin reste ici. Le roi commande.”
The doctor’s house was to be spared. No more than a just reward for saving the King’s life, I thought, and so remarked to the physician when I reported the day’s events to him on his return from Fiesole.
“Who says I saved the King’s life?” was the response I got.
“Why, everyone in Firenze knows he was ailing from the pox. The Bonaventura agent in Milano wrote in his report —” I began.
“The French king no more had the pox than you did.” He cut me off, impatient once again. “I tell you that and I am the man who cured him. Now whose word do you take? Mine or that of your mentor, Isaachino Bonaventura?”
“Yours of course, honored husband,” I answered quickly. Then I added, “But if you did not cure him of the pox, sir, then what did you cure him of? Please tell me, husband. For I long to know.”
“I cannot break my oath by disclosing a patient’s confidence, even though my little wife longs to know. However, I will tell you that the French king himself is the author of the fiction that he had a touch of the pox.”
“He invented an illness? Why?”
“Think, Grazia. Logic will tell you.”
I thought. “If the King had injured his bow arm or for some reason was unable to sit his mount he would be unable to lead his troops. And since he came to Italy to make war . . .”
“He would rather have it put out that he had gotten the pox than that he was rendered powerless in war. Is that your line of thought?”
I nodded. It was my reasoning exactly.
“Fine deduction,” Judah congratulated me.
“In that case, I will guess his malady to be hemorrhoids.”
“Wrong.”
“But you said . . .”
“I congratulated you on your deduction, not on your conclusion. You have left out a most important variable in this equation.”
“And what is that, sir?”
“You forgot that the King is also a man. And that a man does not only see his power in terms of his ability to make war.”
“How then does a man see his power?” I asked.
“How then?” Judah echoed.
“A man perceives his power in his cock,” I answered, certain as I spoke that I had it right. “At least an Italian bravo does.”
“And believe me, my dear, so does a French king,” Judah answered. “For a king to lose his potency strikes twice as deep as for an ordinary mortal. Being a man, his sexual prowess must support the pride of a man. But being a king, it must also support the line of succession to the crown.”
The King of France impotent. What a scandal!
“Now you understand that this information which you have ferreted out of me under duress is for your ears alone.” Oh, Judah, how well you knew me! “Swear to me that you will tell no one. Ever.”
“I swear. But honored husband, Diamante would keep the secret to the grave if I —”
“She must not know, Grazia.” From his tone I understood this prohibition was not to be breached. “Being my wife, you are a part of me as Adam’s rib was a part of him. But if the truth were to spread beyond that boundary, and this king who now holds me dear should find that I had betrayed his secret weakness, we would be finished, Grazia. Finished.”
“Does it really matter all that much?” I asked.
“More than you can imagine, little wife. Much as it pains me to admit it, my present position in this treacherous world depends almost completely on my secret cure for impotence.”
“But you are a scholar as well as a physician. You have other strings to your bow,” I pointed out.
“Italy is not what it was in the time of Lorenzo il magnifico,” he answered sadly. “Scholarship and learning are fast losing their luster. We are entering a new age of barbarism. Mark me, wife, this Charles the Eighth of France is only the spearhead of a barbarian assault that will equal the sack of Roma in the fifth century. By the dawn of the year 1500 the legacy of the past will have been spent up to its limit. The forces of reason will be routed and brutal power will constitute the law of this sweet land. In such times a strong arm and a potent cock count for all. Now then . . .” He took my face in his hands as he had used to do and added in a gentle tone, “Is that serious enough for you?
”
“Oh sir, I am ashamed.” No pretended modesty this. I truly did feel shame for my empty-headedness.
“No need to be ashamed, wife. But you must keep my confidence. My skill in this highly specialized branch of medicine will not only put bread but sweetmeats and melons in our mouths. Already the King rewarded me well for his ‘cure.’”
“How well?”
Judah smiled a self-satisfied cat’s smile that I had never before seen on his countenance. “Let us say, handsomely.”
“How handsomely?” I pressed him. “One hundred gold ducats?”
“Would you believe five times that much?”
“Just to help him fuck again?”
“And to swear on a bust of Hippocrates that no one would ever know from my lips the nature of his true ailment. I was also obliged to report to Piero dei Medici that I had cured the King of pox. Anything but the true malady.”
“Better a fatal disease than a soft cock?”
“Precisely,” Judah answered.
30
The French monarch’s reputation preceded him. Monstrous ugly, they said; so unlettered that at the age of twenty-four, when he came down into Italy, he could barely write his own name. Two passions fired the spirit of this royal homunculus: women and conquest. Judah explained to me that to Charles the conquest of Napoli would yield up a double prize because whoever is crowned King of Napoli also inherits the accompanying title of King of Jerusalem, meaningless though it is. Titles were like women to little Charles VIII. He could never get enough of them.
Two days before the King’s triumphal entry into Firenze, a communication arrived at our door via a liveried footman — a beautiful piece of rag vellum with the most extravagant rippled edges, composed by some traitor’s fine Italian hand — inviting Médecin Leone et femme to sit with the King’s party in the Piazza del Duomo to welcome le roi. Thus did we come to be seated under the canopy that sheltered the King’s most favored guests, between the exquisites of the French court and the Florentine traitors who followed Savonarola’s teachings, each group determined to outdo the other in their enthusiasm for the conqueror of the once-proud commune of Firenze.
The French gave us a spectacle to cheer: five thousand Gascon infantry; three thousand Swiss infantry; and three thousand cavalry in engraved armor with brocade mantles and velvet banners embroidered in gold. At the sight of the horses the French officer on my right exploded with such a forceful clamor that I feared he might rupture himself. Beside me Judah sat glum and unimpressed, impatient to be gone to his patient in Fiesole. But of course the King’s invitation could not be refused. Nor could his procession be hurried.
After the cavalry came the archers. Four thousand Bretons. Next, the crossbowmen, two thousand Scots, bows at rest but menacing all the same. It is truly a monstrous thing, that crossbow, equal in height and girth to its marksman, a veritable killing machine. And on this occasion the menace of these weapons was emphasized by the relentless beat of the drums, which did not stop nor vary until the King made his entrance.
Hail the conquering hero! The ugliness of Charles VIII was legendary, but nothing could have prepared me for the misshapen creature who passed before me that day, close enough almost to touch. His body was small, his head overlarge, with a beak nose even longer than Savonarola’s and thick lips that hung open like an engorged vulva. This obscene suggestion was intensified by his beard, a scraggly reddish mess more like pubic hair than the coarse whiskers that generally adorn a man’s face.
As he rode past us his head and hands twitched so that I whispered to ask Judah if the King did not suffer from some brain disorder. But Judah said no. “The king is not well coordinated,” was his quiet comment.
Not well coordinated! The poor man jerked around on his horse like a puppet on a string. He was everything they said and more. A botched thing. An abortion. But a king for all that. Glittering like one of Fra Angelico’s angels in his gold armor, he lit up the day. And when he passed from sight it seemed as if the sun had left the world, even though everyone knew him to be a mere mortal and a poor specimen of the breed at that. But I was given little time to reflect on the attributes of kingship. As soon as the King disappeared from sight Judah grabbed my hand and pulled me through the milling crowd into a nearby stable yard, where he had rented a pair of mules for the ride up to Fiesole. To escort me home would have robbed him of precious time with his patient. Willy-nilly I must accompany him to Count Pico della Mirandola’s villa on the Fiesole heights.
Midway up the path, swaying from side to side as one does on muleback, Judah turned to me and announced, “He is dead.” How he knew, I cannot guess. But his intuition was verified by the servant who met us at the portal. The brightest ornament in the humanistic diadem had lost his light that morning in the thirty-second year of his life. “Too young. Too soon,” Judah muttered as we passed into the sala grande where the body lay.
Savonarola was not present. No doubt he and his cohort were occupied honoring the triumph of their hero, the Sword of God, Charles VIII. So the members of the Platonic Academy had their Phoenix — as Pico was called by his intimates — all to themselves. They stood around the bier like a coven of Platonic witches dressed in black luccos talking of Pico, extolling his virtues and mourning his loss, while the flickering candles caught the glint here and there of the jewels that adorned their expressive fingers.
When Judah conducted me forward so that we might pay our respects, I noted that at the foot of the coffin stood a bust of Plato mounted on a plinth where the Count might contemplate it through his dead eyes.
Seeing his face — the noble forehead, the straight nose, the golden hair spread out on the pillow — I could not help but feel a pang. I had not expected him to be so young, nor so beautiful . . . nor so benign in death. But even as I sighed, a small voice in me inquired what this Pico della Mirandola was to me that I should weep for him. And I left the bier dry-eyed.
Once all were assembled, various members of the Platonic circle rose to give account of the dead man’s last days and of his great deeds. The first to speak was Marsilio Ficino, come from a distance to be with his beloved Phoenix in his final hours. It was his fourth bedside vigil in a year. First, Lorenzo il magnifico, dead at forty-three. Then, Barbaro. Then, only two months previous, Poliziano, age forty. And now, Pico. Humanists die young. Except for Ficino.
The revered graybeard spoke of the past sentimentally, of how this beautiful, good, and learned being had dropped into his studiolo one day like an angel from heaven. “He praised my translation of the Dialogues and urged me to crown my labors by performing the same office for Plotinus as I had for Plato,” the old man recalled in his deep resonant voice. “I was weary. But I felt that the visitation of this angel must be a divine monition and I undertook to begin a translation of Plotinus at once.”
He stopped a moment to clear his throat, then continued in his perfectly articulated Italian. “I was to him in years as a father, in intimacy as a brother, in affection as a second self,” he went on. “Now he is gone from us, our Phoenix of the Wits, as Poliziano truly dubbed him.” He heaved a deep sigh. “For he will rise from the ashes. He will never be forgotten as long as men treasure learning, wisdom, and goodness.”
Then he pronounced a long Latin benediction and sat down.
Next came members of Pico’s family and finally Judah, seeming much at home among the party in spite of the little Jewish cap which set him off as not one of them. He did not stand beside the bier as the others had done. He merely glanced for one poignant moment at the beautiful face and then looked away, as if he could not bear the sight. But what a world of love there was in that look.
“I sat at his side for three days before the end, I whose profession it is to sit at the side of the dying and to comfort them,” Judah began. “And I am witness that his dying was like no other I have ever seen. For he lay always with a pleasant and merry
countenance, embarrassed almost to be causing inconvenience to others by his leaving, as a gentleman would be who must make an awkward or precipitous exit. Not once did he cry out. Nor did he speak of pain except to reassure me that he felt none. How can one describe so kindly and modest a spirit? If there are words, it needs a poet, not a physician, to voice them. Even with the coming of those twitches and pangs which foretell the end, he never spoke of despair or fear but only the opposite. Yesterday, after an exhausting seizure, he whispered to me that he beheld the heavens opening to receive him. Today he is with the angels. But he is with us in spirit. He lives in our hearts, may God bless his soul.”
After that, someone said a prayer in Latin and then the group dispersed, leaving Judah to sit the night out in watch, as he had requested. I left him hunched over a slim morocco-bound volume of the Phaedrus, his lips repeating the words so dear to his young patron and himself, more shrouded in his black cloak than the bright figure on the bier in his white linen.
A maid saw me to my room, a chamber stripped bare of all excepting the essentials. There were no furnishings beyond the bed, a single cassone, and the candles. No furs, no hangings, tapestries, or wall decorations, not even rushes. But what little was there was of the finest quality, the coverlet woven of a linen thread so fine that it felt like satin to my hand, the candles pure white and smokeless, the crucifix on the wall facing my bed studded with large rubies and emeralds. The floor beneath my feet was bare. But it gleamed as wood will that is lovingly polished with beeswax. And the single pillow was stuffed to its limits with softest down — no feathers or other cheap stuff here. And I was brought two bricks wrapped in towels to warm my hands and feet.
In such a fresh, luxurious surround I ought to have drifted off at once. The silence all around told me that everyone else in the household had done so. Yet, much as I wished to lose myself in sleep, I could not. The body below haunted me. The rumors of Pico’s comeliness had not prepared me for the great beauty of that face. In every way this Pico had been the perfect model of a prince, a stunning contrast to the live king I had seen earlier that day propped up on his charger.
The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi Page 33
