Secrets of the Tower

by Debbie Rix

  ‘I know that,’ said the Operaio, ‘but is it not beautiful?’

  ‘It is indeed the most beautiful campanile that I have ever seen,’ pronounced the younger man.

  ‘And we can build it, do you think?’

  ‘If the Capo Magister believes it can be built, then we will build it.’ Gerardo was determined not to be drawn.

  ‘Good, good,’ said the Operaio, ‘then let us proceed with the oath.’

  All those involved in the creation of any new building – the master masons, labourers, painters, even the capo magister himself – were required to take an oath of loyalty to the project.

  Gerardo stood erect, one arm across his chest, his hand feeling the quickening heart beneath his linen shirt.

  ‘I, Gerardo di Gerardo,’ he declared, ‘pledge to be solicitous and attentive in the building of the campanile of the cathedral, in accordance with the means of the Opera.’

  The two older men embraced him. It was now the Operaio’s turn to speak: ‘I, Benetto Vernacci, declare this site open and ask for God’s blessing on this campanile on this, the Lord’s day of August 9th 1173.’

  * * *

  Six days later, on Ferragosto, the Feast of the Assumption, Gerardo and Aurelia were married in the Duomo.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  August 1173

  For Aurelia, her marriage to Gerardo was both the beginning and the end. It was the end of her life in service and of her years of longing and waiting for Gerardo to give her his love. It was the beginning of a new chapter: as wife to a lapicida, a respected member of the city, and of her elevation to the ranks of the elite of Pisa.

  Once they were married, Aurelia and her mother took charge of Gerardo’s tower house. The family acquired the property next door to make the living arrangements more comfortable for the household. The maid Fabricia and page Antonio were not considered sufficient for the new extended family, and Aurelia made discreet enquiries amongst some of Berta’s past employees. Massoud had found a good position with the Archbishop of Pisa, but Berta’s housekeeper Maria was unhappy with the family who had taken her on after Berta died. Hearing of her troubles, Aurelia offered her the job and Maria quickly accepted.

  ‘There is no better housekeeper in Pisa than you, Maria,’ Aurelia said generously.

  ‘Well that is true,’ Maria said proudly, ‘but I shall have to remember who you are now; not the little maid anymore, signora, but the mistress.’

  Gerardo was happier than at any other time in his life. For, while he had adored Berta and found her exciting and stimulating, his love for Aurelia was more complete. It had a gentleness and naturalness about it. It felt right. When she fell pregnant six months after their marriage, he believed himself the most fortunate man alive. And so it remained until the Feast of the Assumption on the 15th August, one year to the day after they were married.

  The first evening of the fiesta, they, along with every other family in Pisa, had taken part in the Festival of Light. Thousands of people carrying candles processed through the town from the Arno to the Duomo for a celebratory Mass. All along the route, houses were decorated with candles, placed in the windows to shine out in the darkness.

  The following day dawned bright and sunny. Aurelia and Gerardo spent a quiet morning at home and then, after lunch, she suggested that they walk down to the Arno to watch the regatta. Aurelia tired easily and Gerardo was concerned that she should not have to rush, or battle with crowds.

  ‘Carissima, do you think that is wise? It will be so busy down there, and you are already tired.’

  ‘Oh Gerardo, stop fussing. It will be fun. It’s our wedding anniversary. Are we to spend the entire day indoors? Besides, it’s a beautiful day, I’d like some fresh air.’

  The banks of the Arno were busy. The fine weather had brought out the crowds and they stood four or five deep on either side of the river to watch the regatta that took place each year between the four quarters of the city.

  Finding a small gap some two or three hundred yards from the Ponte di Mezzo, Gerardo manoeuvred his way between two large ladies who were cheering excitedly, and found a space for Aurelia to stand.

  All the bridges were marked with flags indicating which lane each team should start in. The crowd waited. As the bells of the city struck three times, the race began. The four boats, beautifully decorated, each bearing the standard of their area of the city, charged off through the water. One boat quickly took the lead, and headed straight for the left hand side of the river to steal the advantage. As it crossed the finish line, one of the rowers boarded a boat anchored nearby and climbed one of the four cables leading to the top of a mast. Grabbing a blue banner attached to the top, he cried out in triumph and the crowd went wild. As the second boat arrived, one of their rowers climbed the mast, claiming the white banner, the third one claimed the red and so on. As the last crew crossed the finish, they hung dispiritedly over their oars. When they finally climbed back onto dry land, they were presented with a pair of goslings, the traditional reward for the last boat.

  The race over, la grande processione began. Hundreds of people marched down the banks of the Arno, playing drums and horns – some on horseback, others walking.

  Aurelia, hot and uncomfortable between the two fat ladies, began to feel a little faint, and looked around for Gerardo to help her. But he was nowhere to be seen. With difficulty, she extracted herself from between the two women and made to cross the road. A large grey horse, a young man in the saddle, and a boy, no more than eleven or twelve, leading the horse by a bridle, trotted towards her. The horse, made skittish by the noise and the crowds, reared up as Aurelia rushed in front of it. It stumbled sideways, crushing Aurelia against a wall. She felt nothing, just pressure. No pain. Then blackness. Until she heard Gerardo’s voice. ‘Aurelia, Aurelia.’

  She woke up to find herself at home in bed, Gerardo lying next to her. She was in terrible pain. She felt down and touched her skirt. It was wet. She looked at her hand. It was covered in blood. Later that night she gave birth to a tiny stillborn girl.

  The months that followed were difficult for them both. Nothing her mother nor Gerardo could say could comfort Aurelia. She felt the loss of her beautiful baby daughter, and guilt at her recklessness in attending the regatta. ‘Why did I go? Gerardo told me not to.’ She could not forgive herself, and sat in her room rocking back and forth holding the tiny dress that she had been making for the baby. Her mother was unable to comfort her. Nothing in her apothecary’s armoury had prepared her for such torment. She could only sit with her daughter and try to convince her that she would have another child, that Gerardo had forgiven her, that all that mattered was that she, Aurelia, was safe and well.

  Gerardo too was wracked with guilt that he had not protected his wife, and grieved for the child they had lost. But the pain they each experienced could not be shared. And being unable to provide comfort for one another, they suffered in separate agony, a deep divide opening up between them.

  Over the next few months Gerardo lost himself in hard work. The foundations for the new tower had been laid the previous year through the summer and autumn of 1173. In fact, work had begun on the very day he had taken his oath of fealty. Measuring more than three braccie and filled with a concrete mix of crushed quartzite stone, the foundations had been left to settle and harden in the soft, alluvial soil over the winter. But the site was never idle. The masons and sculptors were already hard at work carving the columns and corbels of the building, which would later be pieced together, like a vast jigsaw puzzle.

  In the spring of 1174, the build began. First, a base wall measuring thirteen feet thick – according to their calculations, strong enough to support the weight of the seven upper storeys and the seven bronze bells that would one day adorn the top of the tower. Above the base, they began to construct the open galleries, from which visitors would be able to stand and admire the city, and half columns: Gerardo building the first one and the masons then copying his work exactly �
� there being no detailed plans or working drawings, merely the example set by the lapicida on the build.

  All through the summer and autumn of that year they worked tirelessly, building as they went the wide marble staircase. Never before had a tower been built that contained such a revolutionary design, wide enough to allow illustrious visitors to ascend it in pairs, or, it was even said, to take a man on horseback. On the exterior of the tower, individual masons created bizarre and strange figures, symbols and inscriptions. On either side of the main door, wild beasts gave chase to a winged serpent. Nearby, Gerardo himself carved two galleys entering the port of Pisa with its harbour towers – a reference both to its nautical and architectural heritage, and a personal tribute to his grandfather, Carlo. Deotisalvi, of course, took it as a tribute to himself – a reference to the sea towers that he had built at the entrance to the harbour. What no one else recognised was that it was also a symbol of his love and respect for Berta, the person whose generous legacy had made the tower possible, and the trading ships that had provided her wealth.

  In the Spring of 1175, Gerardo visited the marble works at Monte Pisano with Deotisalvi, searching for the white and grey marble with which to face the Campanile.

  He was reluctant to leave Aurelia, but could delay the trip no longer. Aurelia, who had now been grieving for many months for her lost child, found herself distraught at the departure of her husband. By day she fretted about him, imagining all manner of harm befalling him; by night she had recurrent nightmares in which Gerardo was killed – devoured by strange monsters… or crushed and broken after falling from a great height to the ground.

  Gerardo returned to Pisa at the beginning of June, and for a few days, the relief that she felt at his return made her genuinely happy once again. But her joy was short-lived. Within days it was clear that he had contracted a terrible malady, and he began to suffer from raging fevers night after night.

  Aurelia was frantic. ‘What if he dies, mamma? How will I live? A year ago I was the most fortunate of women, with a wonderful husband and pregnant with our first child. Now the child has been taken away, and maybe Gerardo too. It is too cruel. To have had so much and lost it all. Oh please, please, mamma… make him well.’

  Violetta, who had lost both her own husband and Lorenzo to the self-same malady, could not bring herself to make false promises to her daughter. But she nursed him devotedly, taking it in turns with Aurelia and Maria to sit with him, changing his sheets and his nightshirt every few hours as he lay bathed in sweat. The maids washed and scrubbed and dried the linen, heating water constantly on the open fire in the kitchen, sweat pouring down their own backs as they worked in the terrible summer heat. For weeks, Gerardo lay ill, hardly eating, drinking just enough to keep him alive. He grew gaunt and thin, his beard long and straggly, until he resembled one of the disciples that Aurelia had seen in paintings in the Duomo.

  One afternoon, as Aurelia sat by his bedside, she nodded off, her head lolling on her chest. When she woke, she saw Gerardo smiling at her.

  ‘Hello, little flower,’ he said. He reached out her hand and pulled her towards him. His straggly beard prickled her delicate skin, but she allowed him to hold her close, and gazed into his sea green eyes.

  ‘Oh caro, thank God. I have been so worried that you would never come back.’

  ‘Well I have; I am back and I will not go away again.’

  In the weeks that followed, Gerardo grew stronger. A week after the fever subsided, he began to sit in a chair in their bedroom. Maria cooked him little rice puddings, made with almonds and milk, to coax him to eat. Although he protested at first, he allowed Aurelia to shave off the beard, and relished the feel of his smooth skin beneath his hand. He was soon able to leave his room, and go downstairs to read in the sitting room and eat with the rest of the family. Within a month, he was taking short walks to the Campo, and could see the progress that had been made in his absence on the Tower.

  Deotisalvi was pushing the men hard. ‘I am glad to see you, Gerardo; we have missed you here.’

  Gerardo was touched by the old man’s comments. ‘Thank you, magister. I hope to be back at work within another week or so. I just need to get my strength back. It is fortunate that you did not fall prey to the same fever as I did on our journey.’

  ‘Oh, I have had the fever many times, on trips to the Holy Land, so it affects me less. I remember a terrible fever that kept me in Damascus for many months. So I know what it is, and you have my sympathy. But we are strong, you and I, no? It will take more than sickness to topple us.’

  And the two men laughed. It was the first time, Gerardo realised, that he had ever seen the magister do so.

  By the autumn, the Tower was completed up to the first storey, but the foundations, Gerardo was alarmed to notice, had shifted slightly on the southern side, causing the Tower to lean in that direction. He met with Deotisalvi to discuss a solution.

  ‘Oh this often happens; you should know that,’ Deotisalvi said calmly. ‘It’s a problem with most tall buildings in Pisa. It’s the soil. But it will settle again, I am sure.’

  ‘Are you? I’m worried that the building will be so tall, and its base is so narrow. We may need to intervene. Could we not weight it somehow, on the north side, to pull it back to the vertical?’ Gerardo asked anxiously.

  ‘Mmm, well we could, I suppose. We could add some weight to the cornice on that side. That should do the trick.’

  And so the cornices of the first open gallery were duly ordered to be made heavier on the northern side.

  By the spring of 1177, the second storey was complete. One day in early April, Aurelia came to see her husband and to check on the progress of his work. She brought him a picnic, much as her mistress had done all those years before when visiting Gerardo at the Duomo. Her basket was filled with with ham, cheese and bread and a little rice pudding made especially for him by Maria.

  Delighted to see her, and grateful that she had emerged finally from her terrible sadness, Gerardo guided her carefully up the ladders and onto the scaffolding. He proudly showed her his work, walking her around the graceful gallery on the second floor, from where she could already get a view of the Duomo and Baptistery and the city beyond.

  ‘It is beautiful, Gerardo, you must be so proud.’

  ‘I am, cara. It is all that I could have wished for.’

  ‘I have something else that might make you proud.’

  ‘And what is that, little flower?’

  ‘I am expecting another child.’

  Gerardo picked her up in his arms and swung her round, until she begged to be put back down safely on the ground.

  Their son was born in October of that year. He was named Gerardo after his father, and his father’s father, and his father before him. Now, it seemed, Aurelia and Gerardo had everything they had ever desired.

  Chapter Thirty

  June 1999

  Grey rain clouds glowered above the city early on Tuesday morning. The intense heat of previous days had given way during the night to torrential rain. Falling in sheets, the water poured onto roofs and out of gutters, and filled up the drains, causing them to overflow.

  Sam woke early, momentarily confused by her surroundings. Her dreams, just before she woke, had been filled with such clear images of Michael playing with the children in their garden at home. He had been a jolly Michael, a fit Michael – running round the garden, giving the children piggybacks, rolling on the grass, laughing and shouting. As the grey dawn light filtered through her closed eyelids, the reality of her situation seeped into her brain, as she recognised the now familiar room in the pensione.

  Sam had spent the previous day with Michael, trying to be as positive as possible. Carrie’s unannounced appearance had had the surprising effect of creating a bond between her and her husband. His obvious distress at Carrie’s visit was as clear a demonstration of his determination to finish the affair as she could have hoped for. And it brought out Sam’s protective streak. She had spent
the whole day with him, virtually camping out in his room, ready to defend him should the need arise.

  Finally, at ten o’clock in the evening, he had woken from a nap and found Sam sleeping in a chair by his bed.

  ‘Sam,’ he’d said, ‘Sam, go back to the hotel, darling. It’s OK. I’m OK.’

  * * *

  She had left, but reluctantly.

  Now, her first thought was whether Carrie had materialised overnight in her absence. She showered and dressed quickly, before hurrying over to the hospital.

  She was relieved to find Michael sitting up in bed, sipping a bowl of coffee that the nurses had made for him. She put the now redundant cappuccino down on the bedside table.

  ‘Any sign?’ she asked him.

  ‘None… I think she’s gone,’ he said with an almost palpable sense of relief.

  ‘I’ve got to go out this morning, Michael. Professor Moretti is meeting me at Signor Visalberghi’s shop this morning. He’s got something rather exciting to show him.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘and what’s that?’

  ‘Are you just being polite, or do you actually want to know?’

  ‘I want to know,’ he said.

  And so, she filled him in on the details of Visalberghi’s extraordinary image of the Tower, and of her theories about Berta.

  He leant back on his pillow, stunned by her story. ‘My God. I think you might have something rather interesting there – well done. Have you told Miracle Productions?’

  ‘No, not yet – I’m waiting till after this meeting. I want to be sure.’

  As she left his room half an hour later, he grasped her hand. ‘Sam, if nothing else comes out of this bloody experience, you getting back to work, showing the world how clever you are, is worth every minute I’ve had to spend in this bed.’