by Lisa Rochon
“Is there gossip in the market about him, his work?” Agnella tightened her grip on the axe. “Michelangelo is like a son to me, from years back.”
“But he lives in Florence.”
“He still hikes from the city to see me, and afterward to visit his family farm.”
“Dolce, the root vegetable vendor, says his David will have a massive sweet potato hanging between its legs,” Beatrice offered. It was a village custom to exchange gossip with your neighbors, and she warmed to the conversation.
“I know the woman,” said Agnella, chopping another log clean in half. “Has a growth the size of a rat on one side of her neck. No doctor would ever go near that.”
Beatrice laughed loudly, hissing like a hyena. She wondered why Agnella was looking at her with concern clouding her face.
“How long have you been living alone?” Agnella asked.
“That is not your affair.”
“Six months? Ten?”
“I don’t know or care,” said Beatrice. “My mother will be returning soon enough.”
“I see.” Agnella hesitated, then went back to chopping oak. She waited before speaking again. “Your mother and I were not kin, but we knew each other well enough.”
“But not enough to care about where she has gone.”
The woman narrowed her eyes as if sheets of rain had closed them. “We had a bond, as women often do. I wish we had spoken more often.”
“I asked her to go see you, or seek counsel from the priest. When she was—” The memory of her mother cutting her arms with the lace needle came flooding back to her. She needed to choose her words carefully so as to not humiliate herself, her family name. “When she began her wanderings.”
Agnella turned her face to the road, and back to Beatrice. “The priest is useless.”
“As is the man at the olive mill.”
“An ass in a man’s skin.” She raised the axe and cut another log clean. “I will do your bidding for you from now on.”
Beatrice felt her mouth crack open into a half smile. “Why do you want to help me?” She suspected that Agnella wanted to use a girl from the village to enchant some of her wealthy clients in the old ways of healing. Beatrice had heard of how healing women—even beauties like Agnella—lay down with the Devil. If this was the wicked secret that Agnella was hiding, she would run from this place and condemn her to the village priest. “Are you a witch?”
“No,” said Agnella. She looked startled by the question.
“Can you heal broken bones?” asked Beatrice, taunting.
“Yes.”
“Bleeding?”
“Sometimes. Not always. For sick stomachs, I make elixirs, poppies mixed with bitter almond oil and fresh river water.”
“I have a pain in my gut, too,” said the girl, hunger clawing at her insides. Agnella set the axe into a log and gestured toward the house.
“Come inside.”
Beatrice walked with her, feeling fresh with power now that she had gained the woman’s attention. Inside, the roasted chicken cooling on a long wooden table was a miracle. Agnella nodded. Using both hands, Beatrice ripped a leg from the bird. She bit into the taste of rosemary mixed with fat; she closed her eyes and fell into a time little more than a year ago when her parents were alive and together they enjoyed a simple, rich life. That boy with the henhouse she stole from; his smiles would warm her for months. They used to swim in the river together and lie on sleeping pigs, giggling, to dry their skin. Once his fingers had touched hers and they had held hands. But when his voice had changed, he’d walked out of the village and gone east. Maybe, like so many others, he’d joined Cesare Borgia along the cliffs of Romagna. They considered themselves mercenary soldiers, though their mothers called them lost boys and watched for their return every day from the olive groves.
When she opened her eyes, Agnella was sitting across the table from her. “I see you have a great appetite. You could earn enough money to have chickens of your own. In time, I could teach you some of my remedies,” she said. “Maybe you could live here for a while.” Her tone was coaxing.
“I like the comforts of my home,” said Beatrice, thinking darkly of her loneliness. “I have some birds. They’re my family now.” How easy it had become to spin golden cloth on her rotten loom. She chewed and considered this healing woman, sitting with her head held high, shoulders thrown back, as if she were some kind of Medici princess. Once, it seemed a very long time ago, Beatrice had stood at the base of the church steps with her parents, and she’d heard Agnella say: “The true way to go to Paradise is to learn the road to Hell.” The air had been hot and thirsty, and the sun had turned the gray stone of the church fish-belly white. Beatrice remembered everything about that day, especially the way Agnella flicked her eyes wide, saying: “Learn the road to Hell so as to avoid it.”
She wiped her mouth with her sleeve, looking restlessly at the roof timbers and polished stone floor of the woman’s house. It was glorious to feel nourished again.
“Here,” said Agnella, handing her a cloth she had soaked in a pitcher of water. “Your face. Wipe off the mud.”
“Mud?”
“Do not listen to city folk and their fear of bathing. Make a habit of it in the village river—even cold water will do you good.”
Beatrice pressed the linen against her face and rubbed. “My mother said the same.” She inhaled. The cloth smelled of lavender and lemons.
“Tomorrow we’ll go to the city together,” said Agnella. She pulled the long leather ribbon from her hair and offered it to Beatrice. She had noticed how it had attracted her attention. “I’ll knock at sunrise. No walking. The donkey will be pulling the cart.”
Beatrice accepted the ribbon and nodded, and together they stepped back out into the garden. She glanced at the Duomo in the distance. Once, she’d thought of the domed cathedral as an orange blossom rising miraculously in the valley. Today, the Duomo assaulted her senses. She thought it resembled a turnip. Turnips belonged in the ground, not bursting into the sky. If God was interested in meeting her, he could come down to the banks of the River Arno or find her cradled in the branches of her old olive tree. He would not find her in the hallowed halls of the lofty church.
“I’ve been learning all about the road to Hell,” she said to Agnella. “Though I can’t say I’ve avoided it.”
As she walked to her cart, Agnella called after her. “We will bring fennel soup to Michelangelo. He has been suffering from stomach pain.”
Beatrice laughed. She felt unhinged, like her old wooden wheel. Agnella was trying to make a match of her and the sculptor, she realized. The man who had prayed over her dead father. Who had invited her to visit him in Florence. Michelangelo was no fool. He did not desire her. She was nothing to him.
“A domani,” she said, wiping her greasy hands on her skirt, remembering the touch of his hands. The light dusting on her skin. The way he had been, the way he had held her, the way he had taught her a new word: scultore.
Chapter 7
Damn them to Hell.” Michelangelo half walked, half ran along the back alley behind the Duomo, released from an elaborate dinner thrown by the Rucellai family in their Renaissance palazzo by the River Arno. Their wealth came from wool, and Giovanni Rucellai had financed the completion of the marble facade of the Santa Maria Novella church in exchange for having his family name emblazoned on the front. Rumor was that he was happy to pay for grand architecture in order to serve God, honor the city and commemorate himself.
The party had been crowded with women dressed in several layers of taffeta silk edged with gold and silver brocade, all of it made across the river in the San Frediano silk district. Their husbands, mostly bankers and cloth merchants, wearing expensively dyed crimson coats lined with the fur of foxes’ breasts, had patted him with their gloved hands, whispering urgent requests that he sculpt their garden fountains and tombstones, that he join them at their estates in Chianti for the spring deer hunt.
Thei
r sixteen-course dinners, their wine stewards, their sugar sculptures of baby doves, all of the pretension of the fat popolo grasso made him feel alone and drowned, washed up on the banks of the river. “Damn them to Dante’s Inferno,” he muttered.
He turned into a narrow alley and spied the glow of a burning torch. “Attilio!” he called to the guard of the Duomo alley. “Waiting for the stars to touch the River Arno?”
The barrel-chested man, wrapped in a horse blanket, looked up and smiled. “And you, my brother. Riding the women like a good horseman?”
Michelangelo laughed loudly. He had been celibate for years, though male models obsessed him and fantasies about making rough, evil love to the goldsmiths and woodworkers down the lane haunted him. Always, there was the memory of that kiss in the monastery. He clung to its softness, its passion. Would there ever be another like it? He pushed away the thought, rubbed his crooked nose. “It was a prenuptial party tonight,” he said, banging his boots together as a cooling wind swept through the laneway. “The women painted bright white, even their teeth, the fashion of Milan. They looked unreal, like ghosts at a funeral.” He hoisted himself up to sit on the stone wall next to his friend.
“You arrived late, ate little and hid so nobody could find you?”
Three men dressed in colorful jester costumes and silk hats appeared in the alley before Michelangelo could answer. A ferret clung to the shoulder of one of the men, who was staggering and gripping the sleeve of one of his companions. Another man blasted a horn twice and threw a bottle to the ground. He attempted a third blast, but one of the buffoons called for silence. In front of Michelangelo, he bowed deeply.
“Blessed are we,” gushed the man, pointing to the moody sky, “to encounter a great artist tonight. This night of celestial”—he paused to find the right word—“embellishments.”
“An artful night!” bawled his fellow entertainer, brandishing his horn.
“Away with you,” Attilio said, pushing the men forward. They clapped arms around each other, bowed low and doffed their hats.
“God’s grace. And we are away to the Buco,” said the one with gold ringlets framing his handsome face. He slapped his companions hard on their backsides.
“Salaì, oh, Salaì, harder, and harder!”
“More of that at the Buco!”
“The place for men with hungry appetites!” called the jester.
Michelangelo knew the Buco—it was known to locals as “the asshole”—a tavern near the Ponte Vecchio that attracted sodomites. He had been there himself, had tasted enough flesh to know his craven desires needed to be repressed or they would govern his life. He watched the men as they stumbled away. The pull of the Buco was strong; he felt himself physically resisting as their drunken song echoed in his ears.
The alley grew quiet again.
“I hear that Leonardo da Vinci came home,” Attilio said, caution in his voice. “Dressed and decorated like a true court artist. Hosting parties below the lemon trees at the monastery. Indulged, of course, by the Servites.”
“I’ve heard the same,” said Michelangelo, shifting on the stone wall. “He’ll expect to be handed the grandest commissions. Taking work from the rest of us,” he added. “Given him free rooms, have they?”
“At least half a dozen is what I heard.”
The men trained their eyes on the sky, observing the moon flicking silver behind the clouds. Attilio pulled a tall crock of hippocras from his leather satchel and handed it to Michelangelo, who uncorked it and raised the spiced red wine to his lips. “Ginger?” he asked.
The guard nodded.
“Cinnamon?”
“Ginger and nutmeg.”
They passed the liquid between them, and Michelangelo felt the warmth of the wine liberating his soul. He toasted Attilio, his long-time gentle friend, older, silver-haired, happily married for two decades. “To my night guardian,” he said. “Thank God for the wise men of Florence. I have abandoned all hope, you know.”
“Agnella came by today.”
“Agnella. Here?”
“Yes, with a girl. Maybe fourteen or fifteen. Marrying age.” Attilio laughed and stuck an elbow in Michelangelo’s side.
“Did you get a name?”
“Interested?”
“I could be.”
“Somebody from your village. Wears a black leather ribbon in her hair. Unusual girl. Lots of fight in her.” He looked over at Michelangelo, enjoying the lightness of the moment. “A real beauty, by the name of Beatrice. Mean anything to you?”
Michelangelo sniffed, scuffed the wall with his boots. “I met her a year ago. Her father was murdered by a sick band of Pisans.”
“Those people living outside the city walls are sitting ducks.”
“But it’s great Tuscan country. I still go to visit my father’s farm and the people—Agnella—who raised me there. It’s where I escape when I need some peace.”
A moment of silence passed between the men. “Is it the marble that once defeated di Duccio that troubles you?” said Attilio, changing the subject.
“Sculpting it, that massive rock. I believe the colossus will eat me alive.”
“Michelangelo—make the move and God will look after the rest,” urged Attilio.
“Seventeen feet,” murmured Michelangelo, shaking his head. “You’re right, of course, but . . .”
The stone had secrets of its own. He had discovered bubbles and stains, crystals reflecting like snow on the surface, and black seams of iron hidden like traps below.
“Sculpt David. Give him life. Give the city a great new symbol.”
“I say as much every day.” Michelangelo looked down the alley, toward his studio. The work haunted him.
“Here, my friend, something for you,” said Attilio. He rummaged through a potato sack on the ground and pulled out a narrow length of deer hide, its fur smooth-stitched to a backing of fine gray wool. “From my wife. To keep your body warm when the women have run away.”
Michelangelo wrapped himself in the fur and surfaced from his melancholy. “Attilio, before I came upon you tonight, I was condemning people, the ones who demand so much from me. I was condemning them all to that place in Hell where all flatterers spend eternity. You have given me great comfort.” He gripped the deerskin in his hands. “Please give my thanks to your wife.”
He draped the fur around his neck and walked down the back alley; umbrella pine trees rose from a neighboring courtyard, their trunks creaking in the coolness of the evening above a low stone wall. Soon the alley widened, and he passed a small sheep corral. Against the darkness, he saw black shadows, possibly the veils of a thousand Virgin Marys dropped from the heavens into the dirty street. What sacrilege! Praying to God for forgiveness, he crossed himself and kissed his fingers.
Michelangelo turned right and walked toward a clearing where slabs of white Carrara glowed in the dark. He ran a hand over the largest, acknowledging the marble, then drew a large key from his pocket and unlocked the iron bar extending across a thick wooden door.
Inside the studio, he swept a hand into the blackness, like a blind man, knocking aside a roll of parchment and a butt-end culo of bread as hard as the stone he liked to carve. He muttered obscenities until he seized upon a candle of goat’s tallow affixed to a leather strap. He pulled it onto his head and lit the wick with his flint.
The cavernous room warmed to the candlelight; walls of buckling plaster and high ceilings of cypress wood came into view. On the floor was a straw mattress heaped with worsted blankets; he’d left his trussing-bed in Bologna or Rome—which it was he no longer recalled or cared, such was the extent of his fatigue and despair. Sleep was best shunned, like sins against God. He sat on the mattress and pulled one of the blankets around his shoulders. Attilio was right. The pride of Florence depended on the new work. Hunched over, he muttered a prayer, his voice half-strangled in the dark: “Oh, God, forgive me my sins, for I am imperfect and unworthy of your love. Bless me, in the name of the Father, t
he Son and Mother Mary. Help me to sculpt the David, for I am merely a man with little value.”
He stared at a samite tablecloth—silk interwoven with gold threads—rolled into a heap and splattered with marble dust. The Medici had given it to him with instructions to use the cloth often for festive gatherings. In five years, he hadn’t used it once. Half smiling, feeling his mind relaxing, he reached for a stick of coal. On the wall he drew from memory some sacred angels he had seen earlier at the Palazzo Rucellai. He sketched these putti, giving some lively attention to their chubby bodies and their angelic curls.
Now his mind turned to the girl in Settignano. He hesitated, then set the sharp end of the coal on the wall to draw Beatrice from memory, her arms spread wide as if flying above a gaping hole in the ground. She seemed to him a girl on fire. An angel resisting death. Leaning closer, his nose almost touching the plaster, he brightened the shape of her neck, her full lips, defining the light glowing from her large almond eyes.
Satisfied, he doused his light, returned to his mattress and pulled the deer hide over his body. He wondered whether she might visit him. Thinking on this, he turned onto his stomach and slept.
Chapter 8
In the milky darkness, Leonardo blinked awake. Late to bed, up twice to piss. The smell of his own urine wafted over to him from the clay pot in the corner of the room.
There was a time, he thought, admiring the strokes of the broad axe on the oak beams, when he cared not about the quality of slumber but about what he had enjoyed the night before. He glanced at the naked body of beautiful young Salaì, his bell’uomo, asleep next to him. This exquisite creature who cost him a small fortune: a black leather jerkin with a blue silk lining, pink velvet hats, all the leather boots he had ordered immediately upon arriving in Florence. Without Duke Ludovico Sforza to cover his expenses, money suddenly mattered to Leonardo.
