by Lisa Rochon
“You are far too grand for all of them. But remember, I’m the one with the big feet!” She raised her arms and stomped on the wooden floor to the quick rhythms of the flute.
The servant walked tentatively into the room with Piera, interrupting the women’s banter.
“Madonna Lisa, she is very hot. Shall I call the doctor?”
“No, she needs her mamma, is all.”
Agnella was alarmed to hear the toddler wheezing heavily. She stepped forward to examine her, but Lisa waved her away, seemingly oblivious.
“Salve, my precious jewel! Shall we have some pie?”
Piera coughed and reached for the sweet pie. Would she be condemned to be a sickly child? Agnella had witnessed this with other families. Some toddlers sickened in the winter months, seemingly unable to bear the wood-burning fires. Others caught a cold that grew from something benign to a terrible inability to draw breath; then their lungs gradually shut down as they became too fatigued to go on. And she was powerless to change it. Her only role was to support mother and daughter and try to avert a tragedy.
She watched as Lisa lifted her daughter to the sky, heard the quickening of her voice, saw the manic smile on her lips. “God must see His marvel, this angel on earth!”
Chapter 6
Beatrice arranged her clay jars of olive oil before lifting the handles and heading down the lane in the direction of Francesco Granacci. He was not to be feared, though she wondered at how a grown man could doubt himself as much. It seemed he was unable to find his own artistic style. Once, he had even asked her if his painting of the Virgin Mary looked like a copy of an old master. Shaking her head at the petty obsessions of such men, she slapped a hand over her nose as she walked briskly past a makeshift latrine, marked by wooden boards framing a hole in the ground. Rats rushed across the dirt path and disappeared.
She knocked on Granacci’s door, once, and a second time. No answer. A group of men shouted for all to make way, and hauled across the square a large painting of three angels, their wings textured in gold, each of their faces individually, subtly human.
Instead of entering uninvited, she turned her cart toward the Santissima Annunziata monastery and the man who had freed the white bird.
A monk in a black cloak looked her over, examining her ragged guarnello and patched jacket. Only when he saw the carafes of olive oil did his face soften. Females were considered an enemy of men on their spiritual journey unless they were bringing food or medicine. Grudgingly, he pointed to a dirt path off the cobblestoned road.
Rising up next to the road, the stone walls of the monastery were tall and formidable, rounded windows punched into the facade. The monk was staring hard at her, gesturing past the arched entrance—wide enough for two carriages to pass—to the far side of the compound. She nodded and followed his directions, traveling alongside the monastery wall. When it turned a sharp corner, to her surprise there was a side entrance across the inner courtyard, a secret one that looked abandoned, as if it were a tattered cape left on the side of the road.
Within the vast courtyard, two monks disappeared into pear trees to prune the branches. Chickens wandered, pecking at the grass, skittering clear of two grazing cows. She had expected chanting men, prayers. Or the shuffling of feet, the sound of linen cloaks trailing on stone floors. Yet here on the ground, the hush of winter had erased all sound. Midmorning—had she come at the wrong time? She left her cart at the discreet archway and breathed in the absence of the crowd. It was at times like these when she felt she could make a patch of the city her very own. She found a stick of charcoal and withdrew it neatly from one of her pockets. She bent and dragged the black stick against the white stone wall, drawing two curving arcs—the shape of a bird’s wings lifting effortlessly. A mess of brutal lines to define the bones of the wings and, more brutal lines, the poetry of flight. There. She stood back and cocked her head to the side. Her bird finding freedom had been etched in less than one minute. Quick and raw, the way drawing in secret required. Satisfied, she wiped her hands on the grass to rub the charcoal from her fingers and started climbing a flight of stone stairs as the monk had directed, clutching a carafe of olive oil in her hands.
Another flight of stairs and the silence was broken. She heard the crack of laughter and clanging pots. Somebody shouted, and before she had time to turn away, she saw a young athlete running full speed toward her. She watched, astounded, as he turned a somersault before landing lightly on his feet, hands on his hips.
“A girl?” His eyes glittered with mischief. “What kind of a monastery is this?”
From down the hall, a man with a shock of black hair appeared, wiping his hands on a rag. “Girl, what’s your business?” he demanded.
“A few weeks ago, a man with a white beard—” started Beatrice. “At the gates he tasted my olive oil.” It sounded like she was lying, a desperate attempt to get inside the hallowed halls of a monastery. “He said I could meet him here with more—”
“Good oil, from the hills outside the gates?” the man interrupted, wiping his sweaty face with a linen pulled from his pocket. “Is that what you’re selling? I’m not interested in anything watered down,” he warned.
She handed the bottle to him. He uncorked the vessel, inhaled deeply.
“That’s the stuff!” Waving her forward, he led her into the kitchen. The room was lit by a large window with a deep sill crammed with earthenware pottery and pewter plates; copper pans hung from wooden beams and, within the stone-hooded hearth, an iron pot balanced from a chain above the lively fire. A long-handled pan set on a trivet next to the fire contained a massive omelet. The smell of basil and garlic wafted in the air, and Beatrice could see a copper bowl where a bean soup was cooling. Her stomach cramped with hunger.
“He’ll see you,” said the man. “He loves to meet with the local”—he hesitated, looking Beatrice over—“people,” he finished, with a definitive nod.
She watched the man lift a patch of cloth from a bowl and look inside. He pulled a perfectly formed mound of mozzarella onto a large ladle. “Now, this is a work of art!” he exclaimed, looking for her approval. She looked away, unsmiling. Her belly growled angrily.
“Not everybody has the honor of meeting him.” The cook was stirring beans, pulling fresh marjoram from a pot on the windowsill and sprinkling the soup with her olive oil. “Court artist for the duke of Milan. Come home to Florence. For now,” he said, cutting basil on a small slab of white marble, then the cheese and a hunk of bread. “This is a recipe for white soft cheese, more common in the south,” he confided, eyebrows raised in delight. “As for introductions, I’m Paolo, chef, studio manager and dispenser of free wisdom.” He gestured for her to remove her father’s old gambeson and hang it on a hook by the door. “We don’t just serve farro soup here,” he said, assessing her bone-skinniness. “Here, try this.” He handed her his freshly made creation.
She bit ravenously into the bread, stuffing the cheese into her mouth without shame. “Beatrice,” she said, through a mouthful of food.
“Welcome to our humble home,” he said, smiling with gratitude at her obvious appreciation of his food.
A door opened across the hallway. Beatrice braced for the worst. A great artist who had worked for the duke of Milan? She had made a terrible mistake following him here. She had presumed the man at the gates would be glad to see her, but now feared he would not remember meeting her. Worse, he might have her thrown out into the street.
She could hear the swish of velvet and silk. And then the man with the beard of a prophet was leaning against the doorframe. The cook handed him bread with cheese and nodded toward Beatrice. “Seasoned with olive oil from a Tuscan hill town.”
“So you have come,” he said, bowing gallantly. “Leonardo da Vinci.” He touched his hand to his rose-pink tunic. “Honored to meet you here.” He smiled. “In quieter circumstances.”
She took a step back into the kitchen and lowered her eyes. Leonardo da Vinci? The name gathered
force and threw its power at her thin body. Her father’s voice sounded in her head, the time he told her of the magnificence of Leonardo da Vinci and the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, the way he had captured not only her flinty teenage eyes but her inner self-possession. “Look,” her father had said, calling to Beatrice one afternoon from the modest stone hut. It had been when she was still innocent and young, maybe twelve years old. “The sun lights the tree from behind, as in Leonardo’s painting.” And he posed her next to their juniper bush, which had turned shiny black in the afternoon shadow. “There,” he said, stepping back to admire his daughter, his only child, given to him by the grace of God. “The tree of chastity. It becomes you.” She remembered every detail of that day, the way he pressed his rough, land-worn hands to her cheeks.
It seemed impossible that she was standing in front of Leonardo da Vinci, the mythic maker, who dared to paint women looking directly out into the world, not meekly in profile.
“The honor is mine, Maestro. Have you come to Florence to make another painting?” she asked shyly.
Somebody gave a loud shout from down the hallway. The gymnast—whose name, she learned, was Salaì—leapt into the room with arms outstretched, and hugged the old genius, then ran at full speed in the opposite direction. The master took a bite and chewed. Paolo handed him a linen cloth. Wiping his mouth, stroking his beard, he gazed down the hall as Salaì leapt into the air once again. Turning to Beatrice, he spoke with a confidential hush: “What I want to discover is how to fly like a bird.”
“Like the white one?” Beatrice whispered back.
“Like the white one, like the brown ones, like the ones with speckles of white on their black tails.” He extended his arms wide and powered them slowly up and down.
“But, signore,” she said, finding courage, “if they are frightened, like the white bird, they beat their wings like this.” She pumped her arms with childish energy. “Desperate to escape.”
“And are you escaping from something?”
“The castle up on the hill,” she said without hesitation. “All day they want me to work on my tombolo and playing”—she did not know the word for “harpsichord,” so she played her fingers in the air—“music, but I have escaped its walls with my olive oil so that I may see new people.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and her heart leapt with the daring of her story. It was better than saying her father was killed by Pisans, that her mother had vanished. “All the artists want to paint my portrait. I refuse, no matter how many florins they offer.”
Beatrice saw the great master glance at her dirty feet and sunbaked legs. Her toes looked nearly black. He could guess, no doubt, that she had been born to refugees who had eventually come north to live in the hills above Florence.
“Selling olive oil to pass the time?” he said gently.
“Anything to escape the castle.” She shrugged, wishing she had shoes on her feet.
“Ask your duke to buy you some boots, and come see me again in a week’s time.”
He ripped more bread from the loaf, piling it high with mozzarella. “We’ll need more of your hobby by then,” he said, handing the food to her, “to keep us in good cheer.”
* * *
The wintry days blurred into weeks of being hungry and alone. Beatrice began to curse her parents for their kindness, for making her feel that their family was whole and unshakable. Her father completed every poem he scratched in the dirt. Her mother finished every tombolo pattern, every cotton thread wound into place and snipped tight to the cloth. Their love might have been imperfect—Beatrice wondered at times after they argued passionately—and yet it thrived just as the cypress and olive trees did. Now the covenant had been broken. Their lives ripped apart.
With nothing to do and nobody to talk to, she often cried her bewilderment, hiding her tears in the feathers of her rooster, even howling her rage without shame, without fear that other villagers could hear. Exhausted, her throat sore, she would drop onto the patch of land where once her father’s body had lain and claw at the dirt below the great olive tree, turning her fingernails black.
She had always been protected by her parents. They had never taught her how to protect herself. She knew she could find food and good company at Leonardo’s studio, but without a pair of boots to wear on her feet, there was no way she would return and humiliate herself.
She made the long journey to Florence twice a week, sometimes three times, depending on the condition of her feet. Mornings, if her hunger was bad, she would stop at a small manor in a hamlet not far from her own and ease her cart into a juniper bush. She knew the boy who lived there—at least, she used to. Noiselessly, she hoisted herself over a low stone wall, her body light and her arms sinewy with muscle. The henhouse was an abandoned water well with a pitched roof and a narrow wooden door set between two crumbling columns. There was a warmth and peace to the cramped interior, with its pine shavings on the floor. Steadying herself, she would feel her heart pounding inside her rib cage, racing with the birds’ tiny heartbeats. She would stretch her hands toward the bed of straw, lift one of the birds quickly and slip an egg out from the warmth. Sometimes she dared to reach below a second bird. Then she would turn away, rolling over the wall and back to her cart. Standing alone in the predawn dark, she would crack the eggs on her head and suck the sweet liquid into her mouth. The yolk and the white ran as sweet as freedom down her throat.
At the end of one particularly difficult day, she pushed on up the hill toward her empty home. The narrow road twisted sharply, and stone huts pressed their facades among the rose and cedar bushes. The smell of peas and hock brewing over a fire salted the air. Ahead of her, she could see the village healer, Agnella, chopping wood while chickens rooted for grubs in her yard. The road pinched in hard next to her manor, but Agnella seemed a woman of bounty, never poverty. She was wearing fine leather boots, and her long blond hair was tied back with a bow. Rumor had it that she worked often for the wealthy merchant families in the city.
Beatrice slowed her pace, aware of the sweat clinging to her back even as her breath blew puffs into the cold air. She felt the wolves of loneliness driving hard at her. Seeing Agnella chopping wood in her garden patch cut her breath short, for she could not bear to witness somebody else’s peace with themselves and their little patch of domestic comfort engraved on the earth. She felt she must be close to death, for what was the point of surviving without a home, without people who knew everything about you, even all the stupid things you said and did? She rested her cart, unsure of what she wanted, wary of showing any weakness.
Agnella was considered by some to be a witch. At least, that was the dark gossip of the village. Taller and fairer than most Tuscans, with eyes flecked with violet and hooded like a secret, she enchanted Beatrice. Her mother had exchanged candles with Agnella for tinctures of oregano and each time returned with stories to tell. When she had been little, hair wildly decorated with gilliflowers and silver olive leaves, Beatrice had pressed her mother with relentless questions about the woman. Did she come from another place, a faraway land or distant stars? Did she travel sometimes on the backs of bears? Were her eyes real or made of colored glass?
Beatrice’s mother had explained that Agnella was an acquaintance, somebody from the village, cursed by being barren. That her late husband was a stonemason and lime-burner whose lungs gave out far too young. She spoke of this to Beatrice with a shake of sorrow at a time when their own family was free of troubles and birds flew clean through their carefully pruned olive trees. But if Agnella had known terrible personal pain, it never showed. She cracked her whip against the backside of anybody who stood in her way. Beatrice had always admired her for being a woman of few words, and tough—possibly even as tough as a man.
She stood her ground, feeling herself tremble, and waited for the chopping to finish.
“This winter has been hard,” said Agnella, finally looking up, letting the axe swing loose in her hand. “Though summers do their T
uscan best to suffocate us all.” She had been one of the villagers who had paid her respects after the murder of Beatrice’s father, setting a mass of red roses wrapped in a wool blanket down on the front stoop.
“Everything is hardship,” Beatrice replied. She held her head up high as if to ward off the dark humiliation of being abandoned by her mother, with a murdered father buried in the church cemetery. Her throat felt dry and parched.
“True. There are more wolves than asses in Florence.” Agnella looked at her for a long time and finally added: “Beatrice.” Then: “Are you coming from the city?”
“These last months I’ve been selling olive oil to the artists.”
“They pay you well enough?”
“They are not silk merchants. They pay what artists can.”
The woman shouldered the axe and considered. “Their hands on their paintbrushes, not on your young ass?”
“I can handle myself.” Beatrice shrugged. She examined Agnella’s hair, its golden-blond length cut through with dark streaks, likely dyed with walnut oil, and tied with black leather. Such luxury—the leather stitched with gold thread—a sin for this time and place.
“Signore da Vinci has come back home, which pleases Florentines well enough.”
“I met him. At the gates. At his studio. An old maestro in fancy shoes. A great painter, as you may know.”
“Have you met Michelangelo?”
Beatrice wondered at the lines Agnella was drawing between people, like traces between the stars.
“You mean the sculptor? With the farm on the far side of the village?”
“He is an ugly man to look upon,” said Agnella, raising the axe and swinging it down hard to cleave an oak log in half. She kicked the wood into a chopped pile and set another log on the block. “But he has a kind and generous heart.”
It was true that Michelangelo did not possess a noble profile. Wrestler’s cauliflower ears, a brooding forehead. He had smelled like vinegar, as if his sweat was brining in his woolen underclothes. Beatrice remembered it all from when they had loaded her father onto her cart. But there was an intensity she had liked about his face. And his body had looked as if it were made from stone warmed in the hot sun. There was something to that.
