by Lisa Rochon
Leonardo tapped his conté against the table to bring her mind back to the room. He realized that, despite the light he had seen in her eyes, the woman’s mourning still imprisoned her. He reached forward to soften a piece of beeswax, producing a tiny cube, which he set down on the table. He gestured for her to leave off sitting and come closer. When she stood next to him, he pressed a thumb on the wax cube and flattened it into an oval. “People can change, too,” he said, lifting the wax from the table and placing it in her hand. “A mighty flame followeth a tiny spark.” He smiled gently at her. “Men, and women—there are many rules about how we should behave.” Then he added, “Of course, your security and mine are subject to unpredictable displays of ego by men seeking to acquire more wealth and status.” He plucked a pear from a bowl and handed it to her, and she gripped it in her hands. “Does it please you to be a woman?”
“Leonardo, what bedevilments spout from your lips! My husband would never utter such thoughts. Such candor. Honestly, I’d rather be a man. Women are sexual pets and property.”
He looked over at her and shrugged. “Now I know.”
“You were employed for many years as the duke’s court painter, were you not? You must know what it is to feel like a pet.”
The biting accusation pleased him. “Men invade foreign lands, plunder other people’s castles, seize all the gold and melt down bronze that does not belong to us,” Leonardo offered. He wanted to entice her to express more of her thoughts.
“Is this conjecture, signore, or do you speak of an experience lived?”
He had witnessed the ransacking of castles led by Cesare Borgia and his troops, husbands and wives dragged by their hair to slaughter in the public square. Not suitable conversation for a woman struggling with grief. He reminded himself that he must proceed carefully. Lisa Gherardini was a woman of shifting emotions, like water, like the moon reflecting the light of the sun. “I once painted the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani,” he said instead. “In Milan. She was the duke’s mistress. About sixteen.” He gestured for Lisa to return to her seat. “She was known for her musicality and her sharp tongue.”
Neither captured his fascination. What had intrigued him—what he wanted to paint into her portrait—was her face frosted with the ice of rejection. He had bound her neck with tiny dark beads and placed a sleek, creamy ermine in her arms, her long white fingers caressing the rodent. The animal was a signal that she was capable of plotting revenge. The duke had cast her aside after she gave him a child. In the portrait, she was a woman who looked but did not tell.
“I must admit to my penchant for difficult emotions—feelings of outrage and injustice that have to be repressed. To keep your husband happy, or your place in society.”
“My tears shock you, is that right?”
“Not at all,” he said, looking gently at her. “I am learning, is all.”
“Perhaps, over time, you might admit to the importance of expressed human emotions.”
He nodded and glanced at his work. In his sketchbooks, while she was away from the studio, he had established that Madonna Lisa would be sitting on a chair in front of a stone balcony. But what world should lie beyond still perplexed him. He’d considered a cityscape, buildings from Florence, possibly the Basilica of San Lorenzo from Lisa’s own neighborhood. But he fretted about choosing architecture—replicating something that might soon enough be demolished. Maybe he should paint nature instead. The question was, which landscape? Lake? River? Craggy cliff?
When he looked up at his subject, he knew her thoughts were back with her daughter Piera. She was beyond time, edges blurred; there was an ambiguity about where her smile began and ended. The shadow of death had seeped into the room. He saw the sorrow, held her feelings, their weight and their feathered texture, as if a sparrow lay dead but still warm in his palm. He continued to gaze at the woman with the same attention he would give an acorn or a bat. He smelled her loss, its putrid odor, her sadness.
For him, the human experience was mirrored in nature. She was on a journey, feeling everything: the rain squalls, the shadowy caves, the bitterness of wormwood.
Chapter 25
Salaì burst into the studio. He had been playing baletta in the open grasslands of San Marco monastery. Hot, sweaty, he discarded his red beret and his purple tunic, hauled off his linen shirt with balloon sleeves, then pulled off his stockings, which clung stubbornly to his skin, finally hurling them into the air. Stripped to his underclothes, he lifted a carafe of wine and downed half of it, then stuffed a wedge of cheese into his mouth. “Artists against goldsmiths,” he said, his voice muffled by the food. “It was agreed last night at the Buco. But just before the match started, a whole crew of silk workers showed up to play with the goldsmiths—”
“Representing the Arte della Seta,” said Leonardo, looking with despair at the tossed clothing on the floor.
Beatrice was walking around the studio, looking at the drawings pinned to the wall.
“And Giovanni, who is supposed to be on our side—who works for you under this roof—agreed to the extra players.”
“Were you inclined to rush out and recruit some doctors for your team?” Leonardo could imagine Salaì at the center of the mayhem, turning various shades of purple to match the rise of his temper.
“Exactly! Painters and doctors—all of us part of the same guild, so why not?”
“How about we invite them next to a dinner party and share food instead of baletta balls?” Leonardo rose, needing air, wanting more from his exchanges with Salaì, but unable to see his way clear to something sweeter.
“I’m exhausted,” said Salaì, flinging himself down on the straw mattress, legs split wide, wiping a sheet over his sweaty torso.
Beatrice was lingering in the room, as she always did after making her olive oil delivery. “It seems your life of luxury exhausts you,” she said, looking sideways at Salaì. She treated him much like an annoying older brother, one full of antics and rudeness, and it was clear she had no patience for the way Leonardo indulged him.
“Who’s talking?” He laughed, still prostrate on the bed. “Didn’t you say you lived in a castle up on the hill?”
Beatrice kept her eyes on a conté sketch of a woman with disheveled hair. Leonardo heard her murmur how beautiful and sorrowful the woman was, head bent as if she were succumbing to the weight of her life. He could see Beatrice taking in the way light played delicately across the face. “I’m still standing. You’re the one lying down,” she said, looking up at Salaì at last, her eyes flashing.
“Oh, the olive oil girl is getting high and mighty,” sneered Salaì, sitting up on the bed, ready to spar. “Is it because you’re wearing fine boots these days? Do tell—you’re here among friends—where did you steal them from?”
“In truth, they were a gift from Madonna Gherardini. She is a beloved patron, and I owe a debt of gratitude to her.”
Leonardo turned toward the girl, suddenly interested. “How is she?”
“I cannot speak to that, Maestro, as her interior thoughts are her own private matter.”
Leonardo knew Beatrice felt fiercely protective of Lisa and did not wish to divulge anything of their relationship to her portrait painter—and especially not to Salaì, whom, he suspected, she thought a thuggish pretty boy. Though she was still staying at Agnella’s, in the village, he knew she saw Lisa often, sometimes twice a week, mostly to listen to stories of Lisa’s happy times in Chianti, her favorite horse, whose name was Dante, the harvesting of grapes to make glorious, rustic red wine with her family. Lisa herself had told him they usually talked in the courtyard garden while pulling weeds and pruning the rosebushes, allowing the children to spill over each other and make forts of old worsted blankets. There were many signs that Lisa was slowly coming back to herself. He could picture them in the garden. They would sit cross-legged on the grass and Lisa would braid the hair of one of her daughters while Beatrice did Lisa’s, decorating the tresses with lavender and gilliflowers.
He watched as Beatrice sifted through his drawings on the studio table, turning over page after page, and wondered if her own troubles could be healed.
“Maestro!” A cry of anguish leapt from her throat. “Maestro!” she shouted at Leonardo, hands gripping her head. “This drawing—who is this woman? Where did you find her? Tell me, where is she?”
He registered her anguished cry, the intensity of her emotion. Raw, without the gloss of fine manners that belonged to the privileged circles he typically frequented. He needed to pay attention. Lisa had taught him to do so. He stood up and faced Beatrice. Looking over at the drawing she was holding in her trembling hand, he remembered: “In the piazza.” The scene from the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata flashed through his mind—the woman’s suggestive gamurra and long, graceful neck, but also the dull, vacant look in her eyes. He recalled the bells on her ankles, the yellow triangle on her sleeve, how she had stolen his ocher-colored cape. Maybe she’d come to the city from a hill town in search of a better life and ended up a prostitute instead.
“Tell me. Listen to me.” Beatrice gripped Leonardo’s arms hard. “What color was her hair? Was it—”
“Auburn, with curls,” he said, nodding, wanting to be helpful. “But it was two years ago when I saw her.”
“She looks like my . . .” Beatrice’s voice was strangled. “I have been trying to find her. Oh, please, take me to her,” she said.
He held her in his arms while she sobbed. Salaì stepped next to them, silenced by her anguish. He reached over and gently smoothed her hair back from her face.
“I think this is my mother,” she whispered, all energy gone out of her body.
Chapter 26
That night, Beatrice refused to go home with Agnella. She twisted her arm away and ran as fast as she could to the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, where Leonardo had sketched the portrait of the woman she believed to be her mother.
A group of men were cavorting in the square, drunk on cheap wine or, more likely, alcohol made from pine needles. One pulled hard on his companion’s shirt and both crashed to the ground. The larger man ripped free of his tattered blouson, displaying a body muscular from stonecutting. He reared to pummel the other man, splitting his cheek open.
Behind the front arcade of the Ospedale degli Innocenti, feral cats hissed at each other. Beatrice cleared the animals and put her back against one of the hospital’s Corinthian columns. She laced her father’s gambeson tight around her neck and pulled her hood over her head, ready to watch for her mother.
Long after night fell and streams of people had passed by with no familiar face among them, her fervor had quieted. With the market vendors gone to make their suppers of trencher bread and sops over open fires outside the city, Florence became subdued and hushed. Beatrice gazed at the hospital’s terracotta rondels of babies in swaddling clothes. For the first time, she noticed they were not all the same, each sculpture a different essay on an individual life, and she scoffed at the kindness of the artist, trying to pay tribute to orphans left in a basket at the hospital’s front door.
Listless and cold, she watched as a distinguished-looking man rushed past her. She did not recognize him, but found his head remarkable for its resemblance to a rodent. As if heeding a sign from above—from Diana or the Virgin Mary or God, she did not know or care—Beatrice had a sudden jolt and decided to follow the man. Keeping a safe distance, she hurried along the cobblestoned streets in his shadow until they reached the Ponte alle Grazie. The Medici owned most of the brothels in Florence, that much she knew. Where else would a man be going at this time of night?
On a side street before the bridge, she watched as the man eased open a discreet door with a lily carved into its panel. The building was low-slung, without any windows facing the street. She wondered if her mother could be confined there without the right to look down into the street for fear of poisoning the people who passed. Did she dare enter such a place? When she considered her fear, particularly her fear of being flogged in a public square for invading private property, her feet stayed on the ground. When she considered that a flight of stairs and a stone wall might be the only barriers to a reunion with her mother, she felt invincible.
She pushed the door open. A guard blocked her way. “Idiota,” she muttered, cursing her stupidity.
“It’s late for a girl to be wandering the streets,” said the man. “After the last tolling of the Angelus.” He had an unhealthy, fish-scaled complexion, and eyed her hungrily. “Looking to pass the time?”
“No, I only hoped to know . . .” She tried to think of a lie, to no avail. Fighting to stand, feeling the animal weight of her exhaustion, she whispered the truth: “I’m looking for my mother.”
“Aren’t we all?” He chuckled softly in the grim light and stepped forward.
“She might be here. Curly auburn hair, a long neck. Her name is Leda.”
“Nobody here calls themselves that. Though she sounds like a looker. Do you ever do tricks together?” He reached out a hand to grab her neck, but Beatrice ducked. Swiftly, he kicked her into the street.
“Please help me,” said Beatrice, falling to her knees, hands clasped tightly in a wretched prayer.
“Go ask Machiavelli. He might know.” The man laughed before closing the door hard in her face, thickening the air with his scorn.
* * *
For three days, Beatrice slept rough in the city, searching for her mother, finding no trace. She hid from the city’s night officers and the sbirri with their daggers unsheathed. In the stifling Tuscan heat that plagued her night and day, she wandered the streets of the convents and circled back to the lane of brothels, finding peace from the harassments of men, young and old, near a small lemon orchard at the Ripoli convent. One afternoon, the heat twisted into an unbearable humidity—the promise of a thunderstorm that never delivered. She sat in a laneway behind Santa Spirito, using a stub of charcoal to draw an angel plunging upside down on a stone wall. Her clothes were damp with sweat. From a distance, a cabal of Servite priests walked slowly toward her, their black hoods pulled low over their heads, their tunics shifting slowly around them. Maybe her mother had quit the city to finally go home, she thought. She dropped the stub and struggled to her feet.
Love is painful and lonely, but it is also an exercise in hope. She picked up the handles of her cart and moved east, head down, passing through the city gates to trudge listlessly up the hills to Settignano. Her mind had fogged over with hunger, and her cart was empty. But the dream of her reunion with her mother kept her mind focused and her legs moving. As she passed the oak forests toward the towering cypresses, she convinced herself that she’d been a fool. It was obvious that her mother had been waiting for her to come home all this time. Pushing forward along the craggy path, she regretted the time she had wasted in the city. And staying with Agnella had been all wrong; she had come under her spell and grown soft in her warm kitchen with the aromatic smells.
She crested the hill and pushed through a final stretch of forest to the family clearing. At last, after waiting for so long, their time to reunite had finally come. She would be sure to celebrate by drawing a pair of birds alighting in their family nest, the mother feeding a babe from its mouth.
Years had passed since she had last seen her mother. What if the naked eye could see time, up close, in all of its dimensions, she wondered. Would it turn up as male or female, object or animal, rich or poor? How would it travel? Would it float as something delicate and rarefied, like a golden thread in olive oil, or swim like a fish blading its fin past an old rowboat?
She could not understand why the door to her home was swung open on its iron hinges, why the charred mattress lay brutally on the ground. She dared to look tentatively inside, but it was black with fire, scorched beyond recognition. Even the iron cauldron in the open hearth, where her mother would lovingly tend to stews and soups, had been stolen.
Beatrice walked to the pen where the hen hutch had once stood
and found only a rat scrounging for forgotten kernels of corn. The sun had sunk low, shading the hills matte blue, and night fell over the olive grove. Crawling like an animal, she slunk to the base of the old olive tree. She took off her leather boots and hurled them into the darkness. Reaching into her satchel, she took out the piece of sanguigna that Michelangelo had given her. Slumping on the ground, she wiped the chalk across her forehead, below her eyes, down her cheeks. A girl without papyrus, without family, her home destroyed by marauders. Once a warrior, her heart shattered, she lay down and prayed she might never see the dawn.
Chapter 27
Beatrice’s mother had washed her in the summertime waters of the river the day after she was born, immersing her fully. She didn’t bawl, just lay there, floating happily in the shallows. Leda had told Agnella this, confiding in her when they were washing clothes at the river one day. They had walked past the willows and dark, shadowy ivy hanging from the tree branches to settle their laundry baskets at the edge of the river, where the water ran clear. Beatrice was young, maybe eight years old. She liked to stalk fish, amazed at their perfect symmetry when they were still, waiting for the tail to curve, softly angling to one side. “How easy it is to catch a brown trout,” she would whisper, her body naked, and she would bring a fish back and silently drop it into the basket, delighted by the work of her bare hands.
* * *
Now Agnella held Beatrice below her shoulders and watched the warm bath waters loosen her hair.
“Michelangelo, some more hot water.”
She heard him set the iron cauldron above the fire as she bent over the large wooden tub, supporting Beatrice in her arms. The girl was immersed in the water, eyes closed in sweet resignation, lips upturned. All the anger and bitterness that had pinched down on her face had gone. Knowing Beatrice, she was probably dreaming that she was a creature of the river.
