In some ways I had been shielding myself all my life.
Chapter Eight
It was dark when Emilio and I finally returned from Fiesole. The kitchen was empty; and from the pantry came the strong smell of almonds. Nonna must have made tarts for dinner.
The saliva gathered in the corners of my mouth, and Emilio and I raced to the oak table where two meat pies and a flagon of wine were sitting. We finished these, licked our thumbs, and foraged for more. By the time we were done eating, we had consumed three meat pies apiece, one full joint of lamb (bone and all), four loaves of soft white bread topped with olives and seared onions, and one basket of juicy red strawberries.
Everyone was gone for the night, but Domenica and Captain Umberto were sitting in the darkened courtyard, being revolting. We could hear them easily through the open door. He ran his hands through her hair and told her there was never a time he didn’t love her.
“And what about the future? Will you always feel the same?” She spoke in a voice just barely above a whisper, but I heard every word: both the ones she spoke and the ones she didn’t. My sister was testing him. What she was really asking was: will you follow me to my husband’s house and whisper to me in the courtyard when he is away on business?
“Sempre, amore,” he whispered. Always, my love. Then he kissed her face, with the stinky goat’s-milk paste and all.
I heard gagging noises coming from behind me. Emilio crossed his eyes and pretended to choke. “Thank God we’ll never be like that,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“Grazie a Dio,” I agreed. The truth was: I hadn’t ever thought about Emilio and me kissing, but that moment when he brought it up I wondered what it would be like. I imagined his breath would smell like old cheese. The salty, stinky kind. Captain Umberto would have the good sense to chew a clove before kissing anyone.
Behind me, Emilio tore into a ham hock. He had the table manners of a mongrel. He was most definitely not my swain.
The next morning Emilio was in the courtyard even before I was, holding a bun in one hand and a wooden sword in the other. He jabbed at a straw man. “Did you hear the news?” he said. “Cesare is dead.”
“Cesare?” I tried to remember which one of the guards Cesare was, but I couldn’t. I remembered Giovanni and Piero and Ludovico . . .
“You know,” Emilio urged. “The one who called you a trollop?”
Then it occurred to me I didn’t know which one he was because he wasn’t ours.
“You mean Riorio’s giant with the ax? The one who pushed me?”
Emilio nodded.
“That was sudden,” I said. He had been alive yesterday, glowering in the street along with his fratelli opposite the palazzo.
“I know.”
“What happened? Was there a wench? Did he get in a brawl?”
Emilio shook his head. “No. He died in his bed in a lot of pain. Bit his tongue clear through, he was in such a fit. They’re saying it was either poison or the plague.”
“The plague?” I covered my mouth and nose with my hand.
“Tranquilla, Flora. No one knows anything for sure. They’re billeted with our troops and now they’ve locked the building. No one may come out. After three days, if everyone else is alive and healthy they will rejoin us.”
“Grazie a Dio we slept here,” I said. “I hate to think what that billet will smell like.”
A thought seemed to occur to Emilio and he stopped jabbing at the straw man long enough to express it. “Flora, if everyone else is locked in, who’s guarding the palazzo?”
My eyes flicked to the street. I was used to seeing three or four men, their spears crossed, sporting the Pazzi delphine on their uniforms. And now there was no one between the outside world and us.
“I suppose . . . we are.”
We stared at each other with wide eyes, grinning broadly. Madonna! This was going to be fun.
The next three days were paradise to me. Not the paradise of my past, alone in my garden, encouraging things to grow — but the paradise of spending time with someone who wanted to be with me. I tried to remember when I had ever had a friend before. The answer was never. Unless you counted Domenica, which I didn’t.
During the day, Emilio and I clambered to and from the roof, being lookout. Emilio said he saw pirates. I said: who needed pirates when we had foot traffic? Below us, people quarreled and haggled and drank and exchanged gossip. Once, a drunken harlot in the building across the way exposed her buttocks to the window and pooped on the street below.
I thought this was highly entertaining. The poor soul passing underneath her did not.
We capered with our wooden swords and laughed so hard, Mamma looked up to the roof and turned away, and Domenica looked up from where she was posing for Signor Botticelli and shook her head in disdain.
Signor Botticelli was the worst. He would paint a couple of strokes, then look at us, then look back down at his subject. We were making it hard for him to focus on his work. After two days of this he threw a jar of blue paint from the balcony.
“Bah! I cannot concentrate with this racket!” He grabbed something from his backpack and strode up the roof toward us. Emilio and I sat in a corner and tried to look as though we were well-behaved.
When he was at the top of the ladder, Signor Botticelli called me over. “You two!” he said loudly. “Do you want me to have you thrown off the roof? Fie on you! I can’t work like this!”
He pulled a jug from his cloak and handed it to me. “Here, hide this up here,” he whispered. Then he scurried back down the ladder, all the while swearing about what troublemakers we were.
Once he was gone, I showed Emilio the jug. We hid it in the eaves under a loose tile. “That is one strange man,” Emilio said.
“He’s an artist. Artists are like that.”
Emilio shrugged and the two of us went back to playing lookout.
There was an easiness between the two of us that I had only felt before with Nonna. Perhaps even more so, because one day as we sat there watching the foot traffic below, I even told Emilio of my plan to get to Venice. I told him about the fourteen flawed diamonds sewn into my pillow.
“I thought about giving them back after Riorio came,” I said. “Andrea says we need every florin. But now I don’t know. I know what Papa would say, and I know what Father Alberto would say, but I also know what I feel.”
“And how is that?” Emilio asked, sipping from a skin of water (he said we shouldn’t eat while we were on duty).
I thought hard. “Cheated,” I said.
Then Emilio, my new and only friend, laughed at me. He laughed so hard I thought his brains would spew out through his nose.
“Cretino!” I said. “Who do you think you are, making fun of my misfortune?”
“Come, Flora. You must admit this is funny. What can you possibly feel cheated out of ?”
“A life of my own?” I said. “A husband? A man who isn’t a wastrel like you?”
Emilio wiped tears of laughter from his cheeks and his mood settled. “I can see you are sorely abused, you who have a nonna who loves you and looks after you. Sometimes, Flora, I forget that you are like Domenica.”
“I am not!” I said, poking him in the chest with a wooden sword. “You take that back!”
Emilio just pushed the sword point away. “You may not want to hear this, but it’s the truth. Look around you, Flora.” He pointed to the Bargello prison, but three houses away from us down the Via dei Balastrieri.
“For the past hour some poor soul has been screaming nonstop. His cries curdle my blood, but you don’t hear them. Look below, at all the activity going on. These people are scrambling for their daily bread. To you it’s just entertainment. Very few in this life get what they want, Flora. The rest are used to it. Why not you? Why do you keep asking for perfection? I think you are very spoiled indeed.”
I thought of the prisoners’ screams and the beggars scrambling to earn their bread, not to mention the endless line of
patients benched outside the kitchen, waiting for Nonna. How could I tell him I was used to them? The suffering of others was part of the landscape. It didn’t affect me. Not here, safely inside this guarded castle, doubly cocooned by strong walls and my capable nonna.
He was right: I was spoiled. But I didn’t tell him that. “I ask for perfection because I am not a coward,” I said instead. “Is it not bravery that urges me to pursue a better life?”
Emilio shook his head. “You dream big, I grant you that. But dreams are funny things. I always dreamed of being a soldier.”
“Bene,” I said. “You should understand then. You are a soldier. You changed your life. You could have stayed in the country, but you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t have stayed, Flora. There wasn’t enough food,” he said. He looked out over the rooftops to the hills of Fiesole. “You’re right, I did change my life. Being here? Of use to a lord? This is all I ever wanted. I should be happy, but when I’m at my happiest I’m also at my worst.”
I didn’t understand. “Why is that?”
He looked at me as though I were simple. “Because I never would have had this were my sister alive. Don’t get me wrong — I loved her dearly. But had she lived I would still be working the fields. If I had taken a wife, I would have had to work harder still to feed my family. And no matter how hard I worked, there would always be some winter like this last one when there was not enough food.
“Instead my belly is full and I play on a rooftop with the daughter of a wealthy man. No, Flora. For Alessandra’s sake, I must never forget that my happiness is built on a grave.”
This seemed dire even for him. I had no quip ready on my tongue. We were no longer playing.
Finally, Emilio looked up and spoke. “You would never make it to Venice. You wouldn’t even get as far as Bologna,” he said. “There are men on the roads waiting for girls just like you. Girls who have spent their lives in palazzos and carry Papa’s diamonds.”
I understood the thrust of Emilio’s words. I would not be able to present my real face while on the road. I would have to be someone else. “Then I won’t travel as a girl,” I said.
His eyes popped and then narrowed. “You would get caught.”
I examined myself. I could almost pass for a youth now, with my arms and face red from the sun, the dirt under my fingernails. Perhaps I wouldn’t be like that other girl, the one in the piazza separated from her nose. “Maybe I wouldn’t. Look at me, Emilio. I’m already half man.”
Emilio’s eyes traveled up and down, taking me all in. When he was done, he shook his head. “You’re not half man,” he said. Then repeated: “You would get caught.”
Another scream ripped the air, coming from the Bargello. This one I heard. Someone must have abused the Medici terribly to deserve such a fate. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it was just someone like Emilio who had to do something drastic to eat. Whoever he was, I said a silent prayer that he was not in too much pain to dream.
“Those poor souls,” Emilio said, crossing himself. “Signor Valentini will be laughing for sure.”
“Signor Valentini doesn’t exist,” I said. “He’s just a tale made up to scare children who don’t eat their supper.”
Emilio just shrugged. “Alessandra used to tell me that there was a real Signor Valentini who lived in the Bargello and that he was the cause of all the suffering in the world. But maybe you are right. Maybe he’s just something people made up to scare children into behaving.”
He jumped to his feet. “Allora, it’s getting late. We should help Nonna,” he said. He started away but then turned back. “Keep your diamonds for now. Your plan is flawed, but perhaps there is another way.”
I shut my eyes tight against the screams. The lights in back of my closed lids looked like a million cramped white stitches in a bed of lace. Then I opened my eyes and stood up to join him.
This is what I knew: I did not want to go to a convent, thank you very much, a threat Mamma made yearly but thus far I’d escaped. I’d been to My Lady of Fiesole: it was dark and cramped inside and the sisters smelled like overcooked fruit and went blind embroidering undergarments.
I also knew that I liked my nose where it was — not in the gullet of some mongrel. I sincerely hoped Emilio was right, and that there was another way. Maybe if I served my family well enough they would see my true worth. Maybe I would be allowed to stay. Not marry — that was too much to hope for. But maybe I could take over Nonna’s place and be a cook and a healer. That might not be so bad. Especially if I could reclaim my garden. Nonna’s existence was hard work, but at least she had a measure of freedom.
Chapter Nine
That night, when the guests had departed and the stacks of dirty plates were mountainous, Nonna told us the story of my namesake.
She was standing by the kitchen hearth, whacking burnt logs into embers, when Emilio asked if Flora were a family name.
“No more than Lorenza, which is the name her mother gave her. I was the one who called her Flora, because for as long as she has lived, she always preferred to be outside. But I’m not sure I did the right thing. The legend of the goddess Flora — it’s not a pretty story.”
I wondered: how could a story about the Goddess of Flowers not be pretty?
Meanwhile Nonna, satisfied with the state of the fire, sat heavily on a chair by the oak table and peeled herself an orange.
“Go on, Nonna,” Emilio said.
“Like my granddaughter here, Flora is not the original name of the Goddess of Spring. Flora is just her Roman name. In Greece, before she was Flora, she was a human child named Chloris.”
I plunged dishes into dirty water, trying not to act too interested. Chloris. An ordinary name. I liked it. In my household the stories were usually about other types of girls — the pretty ones. They met good ends or bad, depending on how meek they were. Only rarely was someone like me the hero.
“Chloris’s mother, Niobe, was the Queen of Thebes,” Nonna went on. “She was a proud, vain woman with seven daughters and seven sons. She was so puffed up with importance she bragged about her fine children to the gods, who were dreadfully angered. Especially Leto, who had but two children, Apollo and Diana.”
I searched my memory. Apollo, God of the Sun, and his twin sister Diana, Goddess of the Moon and the Hunt. Not meek, those two. Especially Diana. She liked to turn people into stags and set her vicious hounds on them. Nonna was right: this story was not going to be pretty.
By now there was one long thin spiral of orange peel on the table. Nonna planted her thumbs in the middle of the fruit and broke it into sections. Instantly, the air around us tasted sweet and tart.
“Fourteen children,” Nonna said, shaking her head. “Slaughtered before their mother’s eyes. But I find it hard to pity Niobe. She was a silly woman, more concerned with her station in life than her real flesh-and-blood family.”
“So how does Chloris come into this?” Emilio asked as he scraped tiny bones from dirty plates into a bucket.
“Chloris was the youngest. She asked Diana to spare her just before Diana let her last arrow fly.”
“It must’ve worked, if she went on to become a goddess,” Emilio said.
Nonna shrugged. “Her end is different depending on who you ask. Some say she was killed along with the rest. But most believe that Diana took pity on her and spared her life, then banished her from sight, doomed to wander the earth forever, chased by Zephyrus, God of the West Wind.”
I thought of Fiesole and how the wind made me eat my own hair. I could easily believe in a gale strong enough to keep someone running for years. I pitied Chloris in her plight: confused, exhausted, just wanting to sit down, but every time a moment of stillness comes over her the wind whips her to her feet and the chase begins anew.
“What changed?” I asked. “What turned her into Flora?”
Nonna leaned back in her wooden chair, savoring this detail as if it were the freshest honey. “There can be only two answers. The first is t
hat the gods finally took pity on her and turned her into a deity. Or else she herself finally developed the courage to stop running and confront her fate.”
Nonna finished the last section of her orange. Emilio stood wiping the same plate he’d wiped when the story began. “She must have been very brave to stand up to a god,” Emilio said absently.
“Exactly,” Nonna nodded, wagging an orange peel at us. “That girl had coraggio. But a different kind of courage from those other heroes. The rest of them sought their glory, always rowing off to this island to kill the minotaur, that one to capture a golden fleece. They rained their heroism down on them. But Flora? She invited nothing. All she did was stand tall in her tragedy. That takes real strength of will.”
Nonna looked me in the eye, sending some message I didn’t quite understand. But I think it was this: I know what you suffer. I know about your diamonds. Stay put. Stand tall. You will emerge divine.
Nonna sighed and tossed her orange peel into the fire. “I am weary. Be a good boy and help me up the stairs,” she said to Emilio, who was already at her elbow.
With the two of them gone, I attacked the rest of the dishes, trying to bring the mountains of dirty plates down to hillocks. I plunged a pile into a basin of water and had soap up to my elbows when I heard someone cough.
I turned around. Signor Botticelli was sitting on the bottom step holding an empty goblet studded with rubies. Sweat was pouring from his forehead, and he mopped it up with a pristine white handkerchief.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Getting away from your dinner guests. I needed to breathe,” he said. “That Riorio likes to make speeches. Long ones. Tonight I thought about braiding my own nostril hairs to quell the boredom. Which reminds me: where’s the wine? That should help my disposition.”
I nodded toward the pantry. “Help yourself,” I said, and went back to the dishes, hoping that now that he had what he wanted he would be on his way.
Instead he came back and placed two full goblets on the table. One for him, and another for me, presumably. He then picked up a clean rag, and without another word, wetted it and ran it over my face.
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