The Enchantress of Florence (23 page)

The man whom Ceva did not yet recognize as Argalia had positioned himself before the mast of the Rhodes ship dressed in the spreading turban and flowing brocade robes of a wealthy Ottoman prince. His Janissaries were behind him, fully armed and at the ready, and standing beside him, appearing to draw all sunlight toward themselves so that the rest of the world seemed dark and cold, were the two most beautiful women Ceva had ever seen, their beauty unveiled for all to behold, their loose black locks blowing like the tresses of goddesses in the breeze. As Ceva came aboard the Rhodes transport ship with a detachment of the Band of Gold right behind him the women turned to face him and he felt his sword drop from his hand. Then there was a gentle but inexorable downward pressure on both his shoulders, a pressure he discovered he had no desire whatsoever to resist, and suddenly he and all his men were kneeling at the visitors’ feet and his mouth was uttering unaccustomed words of greeting.
Welcome, good ladies, and all these who watch over you.

“Be careful, Scorpion,” said the Ottoman prince in perfect Florentine Italian, and then, imitating Ceva’s own speech, “’cause if a fellow don’t look me in the eye I tears their liver out and feeds it to the gulls.”

Now Ceva understood who was standing before him and began to rise, groping for his weapon; but found that for some reason he was stuck down there on his knees, and so were all his men. “But then again,” Argalia went on, thoughtfully, “right now your eye is only high enough to stare at my fucking cock.”

The great
condottiere
Doria, his beard and mustache flooding down from his face in mighty waves, was posing as the sea-god Neptune for the sculptor Bronzino, standing naked on the terrace of his villa holding a trident in his right hand while the artist sketched his nudity, when to his considerable consternation a heavily armed band of scoundrels marched up from his private jetty to confront him. At their head, quite amazingly, was his own man Ceva, the Scorpion, behaving like a lickspittle toady, and in the center of the group, wearing hooded cloaks, were what appeared to be two female persons, whose identity and nature he could not at once determine. “If you think a bunch of brigands and their whores can take Andrea Doria without a fight,” he roared, grabbing his sword in one hand and brandishing the trident in the other, “let’s see how many of you leave this place alive.”

At this point the enchantress and her slave threw back their hoods and Admiral Doria was suddenly reduced to blushing stammers. He retreated from the advancing group in search of his breeches, but the women appeared to pay his nakedness no attention at all, which was, if anything, more demeaning still. “A boy you left for dead has returned to claim his due,” said Qara Köz. She spoke perfect Italian, Doria could hear that, though plainly this was no Italian girl. This was a visitor for whom a man could lay down his life. This was a queen to worship and her associate, who looked like a mirror image of the royal lady, only faintly inferior to the original in pulchritude and charm, was also a beauty to adore. It was impossible to think of battle in the presence of such wonders. Admiral Doria, clutching a cloak around himself, stood open-mouthed as the strangers approached, a sea-god in thrall to nymphs arising from the waters.

“He has returned,” said Qara Köz, “as he promised himself he would, like a prince, with a fortune to his name. He has cleansed himself of the desire for revenge, so your safety is assured. However, he asks you for that reward which, in the light of his past service and his present mercy, must plainly be his due.”

“And how much might that be?” Andrea Doria asked.

“Your friendship,” said the enchantress, “and a good dinner, and safe conduct through these lands.”

“Safe conduct in what direction,” the Admiral asked. “Where does he propose to go with such a cut-throat band?”

“Home is the sailor, Andrea,” said Argalia the Turk. “Home is the man of war. I have seen the world, had my fill of blood, made my packet, and now I’m going to rest.”

“You haven’t stopped being a child,” Andrea Doria told him. “You still think that home, at the end of a long journey, is a place where a man finds peace.”

{
16
}

As if all Florentines were cardinals

A
s if all Florentines were cardinals, the despised poor of the city pre-empted the red-clothed eminences sealed in the Sistine Chapel and lit bonfires to celebrate the election of a Medici Pope. The city was so full of flame and smoke that from a distance it seemed to be burning down. A traveler coming this way at sunset—this traveler, coming this way now, along the road from the sea, his narrow eyes, white skin, and long black hair giving him the look not of a returning native but of an exotic creature out of some Far Eastern legend, a
samouraï,
perhaps, from the island of Chipango or Cipangu, which was to say Giapan, a descendant of the redoubtable Kiushu knights who once defeated the invading forces of the Chinese emperor Kubilai Khan—might believe himself to be arriving at the scene of a calamity, and might very well pause in his tracks, reining in his horse and holding up a general’s imperious hand, a hand accustomed to being obeyed, to take stock. Argalia would remember that moment often enough in the coming months. The bonfires had been lit before the cardinals’ decision had been taken, but their prophecy proved to be correct and a Medici Pope, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, Leo X, was indeed elected that night to join forces with his brother Duke Giuliano in Florence. “Considering that those bastards were back in the saddle, I should have stayed in Genoa and gone off sailing with Doria on his fighting ships until the world came to its senses,” he told il Machia when he saw him, “but the truth is I wanted to show her off.”

“A man in love becomes a fool,” the emperor told Mogor dell’Amore. “To show your beloved’s beauty bare-faced to the world is to take the first step toward losing her.”

“No man ordered Qara Köz to bare her face,” said the traveler. “Neither did she order her slave to do so. She freely made her own decision, and the Mirror made hers.”

The emperor fell silent. Across time and space, he was falling in love.

At the age of forty-four Niccolò “il Machia” was playing cards in the tavern of Percussina in the late afternoon with Frosino Uno the miller, the butcher Gabburra, and Vettori the innkeeper, who were all yelling insults at one another, but, carefully, not at the lord of the hamlet, even if he was sitting down boozily at their raucous table and behaving like their equal, thumping his fist twice when he lost a hand and three times when he won, using bad language the same as the rest of them, drinking as hard as any man there and calling them all his beloved lice, when Gaglioffo the foulmouthed good-for-nothing woodcutter came in at high speed, wild-eyed and pointing and badly out of breath. “One hundred men or more,” he shrieked, pointing through the doorway and gulping down air. “Fuck me twice in the rear if I’m a liar. Heavily armed, with giants on horseback, and heading this way!” Niccolò rose to his feet, still holding his cards. “Then, my friends, I am a dead man,” he said. “The great Duke Giuliano has decided to do away with me after all. I thank you for these evenings of pleasure that have helped me scrape the mold from my brain at the end of a hard day, and must go now and say goodbye to my wife.” Gaglioffo was doubled up, panting and holding his sides to ease the pain of the stitch. “Sir,” he gasped, “perhaps not, sir. They do not wear our livery, sir. Fucking foreigners, sir, from fucking Liguria, maybe, or even further away. And there are women along for the ride, sir. Women with them, foreign women, sir, that when you lay eyes on the pair of witches the desire to fuck them comes upon you like swine fever. Fuck me if I lie. Sir.”

These people were good people, thought il Machia, these few people of his own, but in general the people of Florence were traitors. It was the people who had betrayed the republic and invited the Medici back. The people whom he had served as a true republican, as secretary of the Second Chancery, traveling diplomat, and founder of the Florentine militia, had betrayed him. After the fall of the republic and the dismissal of the
gonfaloniere
Pier Soderini, the chief of the republic’s governing body, il Machia too had been dismissed. After fourteen years of loyal service the people had shown that they did not care about loyalty. The people were fools for power. They had allowed il Machia to be taken down into the underground bowels of the city where the torturers waited. Such a people did not deserve to be cared for. They did not deserve a republic. Such a people deserved a despot. Perhaps this was what all people were like, everywhere, always excepting these rustics with whom he drank and played cards and
triche-tach,
and a few old friends, Agostino Vespucci, for instance, thank God they had not tortured Ago, he was not strong, he would have confessed to anything, everything, and then they would have killed him, unless he died during the torture, of course. But they had not wanted Ago, who was il Machia’s junior. It was il Machia they had wanted to kill.

They did not deserve him. These rustics deserved him but in general the people deserved their cruel beloved princes. The pain that had coursed through his body was not pain but knowledge. It was an educative pain that broke the last fragments of his trust in the people. He had served the people and they had paid him in pain, in that lightless subterranean place, that place without a name in which nameless people did nameless things to bodies that were also nameless because names did not matter there, only pain mattered, pain followed by confession followed by death. The people had wanted his death, or at least had not cared if he lived or died. In the city that gave the world the idea of the value and freedom of the individual human soul they had not valued him and cared not a fig for his soul’s freedom, nor his body’s integrity neither. He had given them fourteen years of honest and honorable service and they had not cared for his sovereign individual life, for his human right to remain alive. Such a people were to be set aside. They were incapable of love or justice and therefore did not signify. Such a people no longer mattered. They were not primary but secondary. Only despots mattered. The love of the people was fickle and inconstant and to pursue such a love was folly. There was no love. There was only power.

By slow degrees they had taken his dignity from him. He had been forbidden to leave the territories of Florence, and he was a man who loved to travel. He had been forbidden to enter the Palazzo Vecchio, where he had worked for so many years, where he belonged. He had been interrogated by his successor, a certain Michelozzi, a Medici lickspittle, a toady of toadies, regarding possible embezzlement. But he had been an honest servant of the republic and no trace of wrongdoing could be detected. Then they found his name on a piece of paper in the pocket of a man he did not know and locked him up in the nameless place. The man’s name was Boscoli, a fool, one of four fools whose plot against the Medici had been so foolish that it was crushed almost before it had begun. In Boscoli’s pocket was a list of two dozen names: enemies of the Medici in the opinion of a fool. One of the names was
Machiavelli.

Once a man has been in a torture chamber his senses never forget certain things, the wet darkness, the cold stink of human ordure, the rats, the screams. Once a man has been tortured there is a part of him that never stops feeling the pain. The punishment known as the
strappado
was among the most agonizing torments that could be inflicted on a human person without killing him outright. His wrists were fastened behind his back, and the rope that bound them passed over a pulley hanging from the ceiling. When he was lifted off his feet by that rope the pain in his shoulders became the whole world. Not just the city of Florence and its river, not only Italy, but all God’s bounty was erased by this pain. Pain was the new world. Just before he stopped thinking about anything, and in order not to think about what was about to happen, il Machia thought about the other New World, and about Ago’s cousin Amerigo, Gonfaloniere Soderini’s friend, Amerigo the wild man, the wanderer who had proved, with Columbus, that the Ocean Sea didn’t contain monsters that could bite a boat in half, and didn’t turn to fire when it reached the Equator, and didn’t become a sea of mud if you sailed too far west, and who, even more importantly than all of that, had had the wit to realize what that dolt Columbus never grasped, namely that the lands on the far side of the Ocean Sea were not Indies; they had nothing to do with India, and were, in fact, an entirely new world. Would that New World now be denied by order of the Medici, would it be canceled by decree and become just another ill-fated idea—like love or probity or freedom—to fall along with the fallen republic, dragged down by Soderini and the rest of the losers, including himself? Lucky sea-dog, il Machia thought, to be safely in Seville, where even the Medici’s arms could not reach him. Amerigo might be old and sick but he was safe from harm and at least he could die in peace after all his wanderings, il Machia thought; and then the rope hoisted him up for the first time and Amerigo and the New World disappeared, and the old world too.

They did it six times and I confessed to nothing because I had nothing to confess.
After they stopped torturing him they locked him in the jail cell again and pretended they would forget him and let him die there slowly in the rodent dark. Then, eventually, and unexpectedly, release. Into ignominy, oblivion, married life. Release into Percussina. He walked in the woods with Ago Vespucci and looked for mandrake roots but they were not children now. Their hopes lay behind them in ruins instead of luminously up ahead. The time for mandrakes was past. Once Ago had tried to get La Fiorentina to fall in love with him by dropping mandrake powder into her drink but smart Alessandra was not going to be caught that way, she was impervious to mandrake magic, and devised for Ago a dreadful punishment of her own. On that night after drinking the mandrake potion she broke the fastidious habits of a lifetime and let Ago the lowly wretch into her haughty bed, but after he experienced forty-five minutes of the undiluted bliss of Paradise she had him thrown out unceremoniously, reminding him before he left of the secret curse of the mandrake, which was that any man who made love to a woman under the power of the root would die within eight days, unless she saved his life by allowing him to stay with her for a whole night, “of which,” she told him, “there is simply no possibility, my dear.” Ago, the superstitious scaredy-cat, as obsessed by magic as everyone else in the world, spent eight days convinced that the end was imminent, began to feel death creeping through his limbs, caressing him with cold fingers, squeezing slowly, slowly around his testicles and heart. When he woke up alive on the ninth morning he was not relieved. “A living death,” he told il Machia, “is worse than the death of the dead, because the living dead can still feel the pain of a broken heart.”

Niccolò knew something now about living death, because although he had narrowly avoided the death of the dead he was a dead dog now, as dead a dog as poor Ago, for they had both been dismissed from life, from their jobs, from grand salons like Alessandra Fiorentina’s, from what they had had every reason to think of as their real existence. Yes, they were broken-hearted dogs, they were less than dogs, they were married dogs. He stared at his wife over the dinner table every night and found nothing to say to her. Marietta, that was her name, and here were his children, their children, their many, many children, so, yes, he had certainly married and had children like a proper person, but that was in another age, the age of his neglectful grandeur, when he was fucking a different girl every day to stay vigorous and alive, and fucking his wife too, of course, six times, at least. Marietta Corsini, his wife, who sewed his undershirts and towels, and knew nothing about anything, who didn’t understand his philosophy or laugh at his jokes. Everyone else in the world thought he was funny, but she was a literalist, she thought a man meant whatever he said, and allusions and metaphors were just the tools men used to deceive women, to make women think they didn’t know what was going on. He loved her, that was true. He loved her like a member of his family. Like a sibling. When he fucked her he felt faintly
wrong.
He felt
incestuous,
as if he were fucking his sister. As a matter of fact that notion was the only thing that could arouse him when he lay with her.
I am fucking my sister,
he told himself, and came.

She knew his thoughts, as any wife knows her husband’s mind, and they made her unhappy. He was courteous to her and cared for her deeply in his way. Madonna Marietta and her six children, his mouths to feed. Absurdly fertile Marietta: touch her and she ballooned with child, and popped out a Bernardo, a Guido, a Bartolomea, a Totto, a Primavera, and the other boy, what was his name, Lodovico, it seemed there was no end to fatherhood, and these days the money was so tight. Signora Machiavelli. Here she was coming into the tavern in a hurry, looking as if her house was burning down. She wore a frilled mob-cap and her hair hung down in uncontrolled ringlets around that egg-shaped face with its small, full mouth and her hands flapped like the wings of a duck; indeed, on the subject of ducks, it had to be admitted that she waddled. His wife waddled. He was married to a waddling wife. He could not imagine touching her private places ever again. There was really no reason to touch her anymore.