by Lisa Rochon
A voice—her own?—called out in pain: “Mamma.”
The same voice: “Mamma.”
“Beatrice?” the patient asked. The question was followed by a declaration: “Beatrice.”
She did not stir. But the woman did. Beatrice heard blankets pushed aside, saw legs toppling, sliding to one side, feet appearing at the edge of the bed. Hands braced against the mattress, reaching toward her, fingers piercing the dark, finally landing on her bed. “Beatrice, I am here.”
The nurse appeared at the door with the oil, carrying a burning tallow in her free hand. “Signora,” she said, alarmed by the sight of the patient standing on her own. “Into bed with you.”
The patient put up a hand to silence the nurse. “Leave us,” she said, breathing hard now. “I can care for this girl. I have the right.”
“No, signora, you don’t. Not on my watch.” The nurse swept in to intervene.
The woman lifted her chin. Beatrice saw how her face trembled, and how she mustered the energy to speak defiantly: “Ask Agnella.” Gasping for breath. “I am Leda, mother of this girl.”
Another patient was wailing from down the hall. The nurse let out an exasperated sigh, crossed herself and set down the chestnut oil. “Rub her feet with this, if you like. I’ll be back before you can do any harm.”
Beatrice tried to make sense of what she had heard. Her vision was blurred again. She watched as the woman who called herself Leda collapsed to the floor and lay there awhile. It was impossible that this was her mother. The woman looked nothing like her, except for the auburn hair and the long neck. She watched as the patient hauled herself up by the bedsheets, arms shaking from the effort. Beatrice looked at her closely as she knelt by the edge of the bed. The woman floated her fingers above Beatrice’s face, above the gash, above the bruises. Her fingers were shaking, and still she held them above the horizontal marks on Beatrice’s neck, the outline of a man’s hand. She tracked the cuts on Beatrice’s arm, her wrist bandaged in a linen and plaster cast. “They’ve done a good job,” said the woman. “These strips of white linen around your chest are delicately, carefully arranged. They will help you heal, Beatrice.”
It was only when the patient said her name again that she recognized her mother’s voice. Leda had a particular way of extending the ch sound at the end of her name by pushing out her lips so that it sounded like Beatrishhhhay.
Beatrice felt very tired and agreeable to whatever came her way. Somebody had started to rub her feet, which was a great kindness. How warm the hands were! She remembered sleepily how she would bounce her feet on the branches of the great olive tree. She remembered the joy on everybody’s faces, the cascade of olives as black as ebony falling down into the big gathering circle of hemp blankets.
When the nurse came back and saw the woman rubbing Beatrice’s feet, she nodded approvingly. “That’s good,” she said.
Beatrice noticed how the patient looked over at the nurse, with eyes weary of life, as she slumped back to her bed. “I feel the opium scratching here,” said the patient, lifting a tired hand, “at the back of my eyes.”
“It’s a difficult time, to be sure,” said the nurse, with some softness in her voice.
“I gave myself over to the darkest of evils. I lay down with strangers to lose my mind—to destroy the pain. That’s the truth of the whore I became.”
Beatrice was having a hard time following. Was this woman really her mother?
“God will forgive you.”
“But I abandoned my child. I’ll be judged forever for my weakness.”
“There are plenty of us who were forced into the brothel to service the elites of the city,” said the nurse. “And who succumbed to the addiction of laudanum. Myself included. Do not think yourself an original.” The nurse moved beside Beatrice’s bed. “You want your daughter to live?”
“I do,” said the patient, and Beatrice watched her scratching at her arm.
“Allora, signora, do your best,” said the nurse. “A girl needs her mother.”
These were true, wise words, thought Beatrice. She felt regret when the nurse clogged away from her bed and out of the room.
Beatrice lay still for a long time, hearing the patient’s rhythmic scratching on her arms. She wondered why she was scratching and hoped Agnella could find a salve to help her heal. She heard the patient push aside her sheets and crawl out of her bed, then into bed with Beatrice. The woman moved carefully, so as not to place any pressure on Beatrice’s wounds, which was kind.
“Beatrishhhhay,” the woman said, and she cradled Beatrice’s fingers with her own, doing the holding for both of them.
Later that night—it must have been near dawn—a rooster crowed powerfully, and then another, until it seemed like all the roosters in the city had joined together in a fearsome chorus.
When she woke at dawn, Beatrice’s hand was warm, and it was doing some of the holding.
“Mamma,” she whispered, eyes closed, lips moving. “There you are,” she said. “I was looking everywhere for you.”
Chapter 40
Leonardo had gone to the Palazzo Vecchio to pick up his latest payment for his work preparing the battle scene. Fifteen gold florins a month for his labor. The city treasurer had treated him with disdain and paid much of his fee with quattrini, as if he were nothing but a penny painter. Machiavelli had also been on him, threatening to withhold payment if Leonardo missed the next deadline. Dazed and humiliated, he headed into the vast Piazza della Signoria. He pushed past the massive crowd gathered around the David, past the carriages of the rich that formed a circle around the sculpture, the better to enjoy a view of the colossus from the comfort of their leather seats. It was his first time truly looking at the statue. The copper leaves created an elegant covering of the bulge, he thought, and saved the women permitted into the streets from the alarming sight of male genitalia.
He took his time assessing the figure, walking from side to side, allowing his thoughts to brew. He studied the feet, the ankle bones, the muscular calves. He turned his back on the David and walked away from it, finally turning to face the sculpture from the edge of the loggia. All these months he had heard about this naked man, had discussed it, disparaged it, listened to others heap praise upon its grand, audacious scale. But this? This was art at its most fearless. It was sublime and monumental and wicked of Michelangelo to impose the colossus on the populace. This was subversion rendered in marble! Florence had been remade. It would never again be complete without the David. Looking at the crowd mesmerized by the sculpture, he realized that art had the power to elevate the way people thought about their city.
But there was something else crowding into his mind. He dropped his eyes to the piazza. The circle of carriages made him think of Hippocrates and his methods for squaring the circle. The math was difficult to follow. Leonardo had studied it and found a way: he had sliced the circle into thin triangular wedges. He had unrolled the circumference to discover its length, until he had come to an approximation of a circle squared. Over many years, he had devised 169 formulas for squaring a circular shape. But he could not square what had happened at the community picnic in Oltrarno. He understood that Michelangelo was now officially commissioned to paint a battle scene on the wall next to his own painting. His brain understood that well enough. But these last weeks he had been poking at an old abscess that he’d discovered was still inflamed and terribly painful. He found himself obsessing over the past, going back to his childhood, of being given up by his mother and labeled as illegitimate by his father. And later, of being charged by police for being a sodomizer, of failing to produce workable war inventions and cast a proper equestrian monument. He even chided himself for The Last Supper fresco that refused to stick to the wall. Standing there on the piazza, Leonardo struggled with this question: Why was he not enough?
Shouldering his way through the crowd, he turned blindly down a side street. The sun was low in the sky, and the tallow had been lit within the front windo
ws of some of the shops. Machiavelli’s rodent face floated in front of him. Being bullied by the chancellor and the treasurer. Leonardo felt the breath go out of him. He was too old to weather this.
He took the steps down to a tavern. It was dark inside and smelled of piss and crow pie left to rot in the sun. He bullied his way to the front of the bar and ordered some fortified wine. The crowd was a greasy lot, some of them bare-chested, with black leather jerkins. He had wandered into the Buco. His balls, not his brain, had led him there, and that was perfect for the moment. He ordered another glass. A battle of the lions. Was Soderini not a friend of Michelangelo’s family? Had he insisted on this competition of painters as revenge for making Michelangelo put a diaper on the David?
“Guarda!” The crowd was braying loudly, and with surprise Leonardo noted that Salaì was also at the Buco. A group of men were lifting him like an angel of desire, his luscious curls falling about his face. “Master. Be my master!” bellowed Salaì.
A serving wench approached, the pleats of her camicia pulled low against her breasts, then neatly stepped aside, her wooden clogs saving her feet from touching the beer and piss puddling on the floor. Somebody yelled: “Don’t spit on the table, spit on the floor!” As Leonardo watched, Salaì was placed back on the ground, one man tucked hard in front of him and another right behind. The dance of the florenzer—as the Germans liked to sneer—began, all three men gyrating and grinding.
Leonardo looked away from the stinking, fetid chaos, and lifted an edge of his cape to wipe his brow. He swayed, considered puking, something vile catching in his throat. He signaled for another drink as the crowd pressed in closer.
Part III
1504–1505
The soul operates principally in two places . . . in the eyes and in the mouth—it adorns these most of all and directs its full attention to creating beauty there, as far as possible. It is in these two places that I maintain these delights appear, saying in her eyes and in her sweet smile.
These two places may be called, by way of a charming metaphor, the balconies of the lady who dwells in the edifice of the body, which is to say the soul, because here, though in a veiled manner, she often reveals herself.
—DANTE ALIGHIERI, THE CONVIVIO
Chapter 41
Michelangelo visited Beatrice at the hospice often. When he learned that Leda had been found, he beat his chest hard, shouting, “Hallelujah!” A nurse appeared and told him to quiet down or face Agnella’s wrath, which made him hang his head and smile. As Beatrice floated in and out of consciousness during those first terrible days, he would sit on a wooden stool beside her and sketch versions of the girl standing up tall, holding a goldfinch in her hand. Other times, thinking on the battle scene he was commissioned to paint, he would press his pencil to paper and conjure a series of naked men by the edge of a river, making their fear of the enemy palpable, their eyes wild as they rushed to haul themselves out of the river and prepare for battle. Many of the women in the hospice, he realized, were doing the same: they were convalescing before having to face the world again.
“Why don’t you talk to her?” Agnella said one day, checking Beatrice’s pulse and gently lifting her eyelids to see how the healing was progressing.
“Talk to her? She’s sleeping. She can’t hear me.”
“How do you know for sure?”
He waited until Agnella had taken Leda for a slow promenade down the hallway before clearing his throat and starting to speak: “Beatrice, it’s time to wake up. For one thing, my olive oil has gone dry. For another, you’re a good artist and need to keep drawing. And you make me laugh when I start to act like an old crank. Actually, you help me to stay human.”
A couple of days later, when he was bent over his notebook singing one of his atonal songs, a voice, barely audible, joined his. It was Beatrice, looking over at him. “There you are,” he said, jumping to his feet. He kissed her on both cheeks and beamed a smile at her.
“Were you singing?” she asked.
“I might have been.”
“You have a terrible voice.”
The next day, when she was able to sit up, he spread a samite cloth over her legs and pulled a walnut and raisin pie from its paper wrapping. They called it “the picnic without a riverside.” She seemed to relish that morning, just the two of them.
* * *
“Talk to me,” said Beatrice, speaking hoarsely. All these weeks later, her throat was still raw from the strangling by the sentry.
“I’m working on the preparatory drawing for the Battle of Cascina.”
She nodded at him and lifted her eyebrows, signaling that he should go on.
“I’ve decided to draw the soldiers not in battle, but in the moments beforehand. It’s a hot day in July 1364, and they’ve removed all their armor. They are bathing and resting on the shores of the Arno when one of the soldiers sees the Pisans approaching and calls out: ‘We are lost!’”
“We are all lost,” whispered Beatrice, no doubt thinking of her murdered father, and the attack that might have killed her.
“When I draw or sculpt, I’m trying to think about all the energy that is burning inside a person,” Michelangelo said, leaning toward Beatrice. “Remember my David? His entire right arm hangs down passively, but I wanted to carve veins as if they were pulsing with life on the backs of his hands. His muscles are flexing in his right thigh. So that you believe in the potential of his power. It’s there, ready to be unleashed, but only at the crucial moment.”
Her eyes glittered with understanding.
“I’ll try to do that with the soldiers, as well. I know it’s the Battle of Cascina, but I’m calling it The Bathers. Their bodies will be twisting; they’ll look panicked, trying to buckle on their armor as they hear the trumpet blaring and shouts that the Pisans are nearly upon them.”
“Nude warriors?”
“Crossbowmen, soldiers, captains of the army.”
“They’re all naked?” Her voice was raspy, but her mouth twitched with amusement.
“As God designed us.”
“Leonardo is drawing, too.”
“His will be great.”
“A battle with horsemen,” she said, with a slight shrug of the shoulders. “You. Go work.”
“Are you all right?”
“She is tired,” said Leda, scratching one of her arms in the next bed over. “So am I.”
“They want the cartoon up on the wall in the next month.”
“Go,” Beatrice said. “Go work. I need to rest anyway, and so does my mother.”
He held her hand and nodded. But only when she closed her eyes and fell into a deep slumber did he leave her to walk back to his studio.
Chapter 42
There was another golden day when Leonardo walked into the hospice wearing rose-pink hose and his matching cap and handed posies of blushing roses to each of the nurses. Then he surprised Beatrice and her mother in their shared room, with its whitewashed walls and dark timbers crossing the ceiling overhead. Leda was hand-stitching cotton bolsters for other patients, and Beatrice was stuffing the pillows with goose down. “Come see,” he said, beckoning them to the window. He opened the pane and whistled low. A silver-gray horse appeared and thrust its noble head through the opening. Leonardo handed Beatrice a small apple. When it had been inhaled from her palm into the Andalusian’s velvety mouth, he produced another for Leda. They laughed every time another apple was devoured.
By then, other patients and nurses had gathered, and Leonardo seized the opportunity to entertain them with a small spectacle. He crossed the hall and thrust his hands into the basket of goose down. “Ladies, I present to you a bird of paradise,” he said, surprising everybody by flinging the feathers into the air.
Beatrice reached into the basket and threw more feathers into the air. Soon, everybody was laughing and digging into the basket. Beatrice said, “Mamma, come see,” but her mother had retreated to her stitching.
Later that day, when the falling
sun pierced the windows of the hospice, Leda and Beatrice sat on a stone bench next to each other and bathed in the dazzling light, saying nothing. In the stillness, Beatrice allowed herself to hope for a life of modest means and simple pleasures at their farm in Settignano. They could rebuild their family, she dreamed, leaning back on the warm stone wall. She would have a mother again.
Her mother sniffed and shifted beside her on the bench. After running from the brothel and leaving her regular supply of opium, Leda felt sick much of the time. Stitching one pillow a day was all she could manage before succumbing to nausea. Beatrice had to keep their conversations simple or be blamed for making her mother’s withdrawal worse. But that day, with the horse at the window, Leonardo had made her mother laugh. And she had smiled and shaken her head when he handed her the portrait he had sketched of her on the steps of the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata.
“I don’t think I deserve as much: a drawing from you, the great artist.”
“Please, signora, take it. It belongs to you, as you told me back when we first met.”
“My eyes, the dark shadows,” she said, dipping her face to try to understand the portrait. “I don’t recognize myself.”
“Ever a beauty,” he said, bowing. “As holds true for your daughter.” He took his leave with athletic grace.
“Always one for grand entrances and exits,” said Beatrice, feeling suddenly deflated.
“‘Ever a beauty,’” scoffed Leda, watching the artist walk away. “I could have done without ruining my life.”
Beatrice decided to risk asking the question. “Mamma, I need to know,” she began, head down, looking at her hands, clenched angrily in her lap.
