Sistine Heresy

by Justine Saracen

  “I have committed lewdness and fornication.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then, “Do you truly repent of this sin before God?”

  “I do, Father. Now and forever, with God’s help.”

  “If you are repentant, God forgives this sin too. If you open up your soul to receive the healing Grace, I will bear witness to your repentance, for I am the instrument of God’s mercy.”

  “I repent. In body and soul. I prostrate myself. Only tell me my penance, Father.”

  “You must renounce your partner in sin, the one who tempted you.”

  “Renounce…yes, I do renounce them. Yet the sin is mine and I take it upon myself alone. No other souls should be tainted by it.”

  “Souls? Have you sinned with several partners? Have you also betrayed one for another? This too is a sin in the sight of God.”

  Domenico hesitated again. “Yes. I have betrayed one for another. I let another person touch me because I felt a great affection. But I repent of the act, Father. I renounce it and seek forgiveness.”

  “With whom have you committed this sin? This person’s soul is also in mortal danger.”

  “I cannot tell you, Father. Each sinner must confess himself and not through another. As for me, I am weary of the iniquities of night and of secrecy.”

  Through the grillwork between them, Domenico could see the vague outline of the Cardinal’s head nodding. Then the priest raised his stole toward him. “What the priest determines on earth, God affirms on high in Heaven. Prostrate yourself before God and mortify the flesh when it rises against you. If your penitence is sincere, God will know it. I absolve you. Go in peace.”

  Domenico crept out of the confessional emotionally drained, but at peace. All that remained now was to tell Michelangelo.

  *

  The prisoner sat hunched in the corner of the coach, his tortured arms draped limply over his knees. He could move them again, but only feebly and painfully, for the interrogators had hung him by his wrists pulled up behind his back and dislocated his shoulders. Still, he was the lucky one, the one who had confessed and given information. The others arrested with him lay on the floor of their cells, flogged to unconsciousness.

  The coach was crowded, with Cardinal, Cardinal assistant, four of the guardians of morality, and their prisoner. It rumbled without light along the sordid and pothole-strewn streets of the Trastevere.

  “That’s the place,” the prisoner said weakly. “In the alley just behind the broken cart.”

  “By the lantern?” Cardinal Carafa signaled the driver to stop the coach.

  “Yes,” the prisoner replied. “It’s the boys in the doorways near the stable.”

  “All right. You know what to do,” the Cardinal said to the senior guardian.

  The four men leapt from the coach and crept past the upturned cart and into the alley.

  “You’ve been spared the flames this time,” the Cardinal spoke to the prisoner. “Now go and sin no more.”

  The tortured man seemed confused by the unexpected reprieve.

  “Get out,” the Cardinal assistant added. “Obey God and never come to this street again.”

  “Thank you, your lordships.” The prisoner lurched from the coach, stumbled, and cried out as he fell on an injured shoulder. He clambered awkwardly to his feet again and staggered like a drunken man along the street until he was out of sight.

  “It is despicable what the Borgias let flourish in Rome,” Cardinal Carafa muttered. “No matter how many of them we punish, more keep appearing, like worms from a carcass. His Holiness arms for military conquests and stares misty-eyed at foreign maps like some spice trader. And all the while this abomination dishonors the bones of Saint Peter and the Holy See.”

  “Some say the practice comes from the French,” the Cardinal assistant replied, lighting a lantern now that the raid was underway. “Others claim it began after the knights returned from Saracen lands. Foul influences from outside infecting the Roman spirit.”

  “It’s not just Saracens and Jews who threaten decency. Pagan voluptuousness is everywhere, painted on Roman walls and standing as statues in Roman gardens. Families like the Medici and the Piccolomini betray the old values by cultivating the wanton new fashions.”

  The Cardinal assistant raised the flame in the lantern, illuminating the bony skull of the Cardinal. “You’re right, Eminence. In matters of virtue it seems sometimes that the barbarians are at the gates.”

  “They are within the gates. And it is not only the foreigners who have physically intruded and now poison us. Even from afar they infect the Christian soul through that most dangerous of devices, the printing press.”

  “Ah, yes. The heretical writings that circulate. Very dangerous.”

  Cardinal Carafa watched the dark street for the return of his hunters. “Dangerous indeed. Burning John Hus at the stake has not stopped his words from spreading like vermin. And more recently this Erasmus fellow plagues us from Venice. Have you seen his latest, In Praise of Folly? A filthy attack on the traditions of the Holy Church.” He shook his head. “I tell you, Rome needs a scourge, and if God so wills, it shall be me. I am not without allies, as this Pope will discover.”

  The assistant lifted the curtain and peered again into the street. “They’re coming back. It looks like they’ve got a few. Eminence has been successful tonight.”

  The guardians dragged three men behind them on a single rope, all battered and bleeding from various head wounds. The one in charge attached the rope to the rear of the coach.

  The closest one, a well-formed lad in a red cape, lifted his hands toward the Cardinal. “Please, your lordship. I am a simple butcher, waiting for my brother to arrive this night. I have done nothing wrong.” He held his hands in prayer fashion before the face of the prelate and the Cardinal saw, to his disgust, that the index finger was merely a stump.

  “Shut this man up, Captain,” the Cardinal said, and the officer knocked the criminal with his fist on the side of his head.

  The Cardinal’s coach started up again, dragging the three felons along the pitted streets of the Trastevere. All fell silent as they made their way to the Castel Sant’ Angelo prison.

  Satisfied, as if after a hard physical labor, Cardinal Carafa let his thoughts wander. Well done, he congratulated himself. Three sodomites caught tonight. He would catch others in the nights to come until the city was rid of them. There was plenty of crime in Rome: theft, rape, brutality, murder, as in cities elsewhere. It seemed a part of human nature. But he took it as a personal defiling of the Christ when men—virtually under the papal windows—visited their lust upon each other.

  He could not imagine spending a single day in any pursuit other than service to Christ, who had suffered such agony for men. The suffering of sinners as they were made to repent, even on the rack and in the flame, was trivial before the suffering of the Son of God. As pain brought one closer to God’s Grace, so voluptuousness drove one away from it. And he could not fathom a more vile pleasure of the flesh than two men copulating. He would find them, every one of them, and burn the sin out of them.

  Yet there was one who eluded him, maddeningly, by his own contrition. The castrato.

  A curious dilemma, to have heard the boy’s confession in Church. He could scarcely arrest him after having given him absolution, and so he was torn on the question of which was more important, cleansing God’s holy city or keeping the sacrament of confession. Yet it was clear, the singer had relapsed at least once and was incorrigible in his sin. A devil was in him that had to be exorcised.

  It would be a sort of chess game, to isolate and catch him in his sin while he was protected. Not only by his own intermittent piety, but by the troublesome painter and the Borgia whore. Both of them caused bile to rise in him, for they were skillful at feigning piety while their contempt of him was clear.

  Like a candle suddenly igniting in the darkness it came to him. His Holiness should learn of the boy’s confession. Yes, Julius ne
eded to know that his saintly singer had given himself carnally yet again and, worse, by his own admission had gone from one man’s bed to another.

  That would bring matters to a head.

  *

  The housekeeper touched the dozing woman lightly on her arm.

  Slouched in an armchair in her chamber, Raphaela awoke with a start, dropping the sketches that had rested on her lap.

  “There is a gentleman in the library, Signorina,” Bruna said.

  “Did you tell him that Signor Bramante was not home?”

  “He wishes to speak with you, Signorina. He says he has your father’s permission to visit. Very odd.”

  Annoyed and intrigued in equal measure, Raphaela rubbed the sore muscles in the small of her back and followed the housekeeper to the formal sitting room. Only one candelabrum was lit, and so the high-ceilinged room seemed engulfed in darkness but for the spot in the corner where a young man paced excitedly.

  “Livio.” Raphaela recognized her visitor with annoyance. “Well, you are persistent. I give you that.” To the housekeeper she said, “It’s all right, Bruna. I know him, and he will not stay long.”

  Reluctantly, Bruna went into the next room, though Raphaela noted that she carefully left the door ajar.

  Livio Farnese was cheerful, in a nervous, tentative way. “I had to tell you the good news,” he said. “I’ve come into money and I’ll have even more soon. Now I can ask your father for your hand.”

  “Livio, you don’t understand—”

  “No, let me finish. It is a special position, a secret one, for the Curia. I already have my first assignment. The work’s a little dangerous, they said, but that’s why the pay’s so good. In a few months I’ll be able to afford you.”

  “Afford me?” Raphaela laughed softly. “You really don’t have any idea, do you? Look, Livio. I never gave you reason to hope. It’s not you, it’s just that I don’t wish to marry anyone.”

  “Don’t be silly. All women marry and in the end are happy. You’ll see. I’ve already talked to your father and he has no objection.”

  “Ah, that’s interesting. He neglected to mention it to me.”

  Livio began to pace again. “It’s just that, well, my current employment is secret, you see. I may have to be gone from Rome now and again, for certain periods of time. Just to let you know what you are in for.”

  “What I am in for?” Raphaela echoed. “I don’t see how I am part of your intrigues.”

  He seemed not to hear her and resumed his announcement. “It’s so secretive that I don’t know exactly who I am dealing with. There was just a messenger sent by someone in the Curia with no other explanation. I am to do a certain job, and when it’s done, I’ll receive the rest of the payment.”

  “It sounds pretty suspicious to me. Like something you might regret when you find out what is expected.”

  “It can’t be bad if it’s for the Curia. And I told you. It’s a lot of money. There’s just one thing.” He held out a note that Raphaela could see had been opened and then resealed with wax of another color. “It’s my assignment. They told me to burn it, but I want you to keep it for me. I’ve resealed it because it is a secret and you shouldn’t even know about it. But if something happens, you’ll have it.” He made the last remark with such sincerity and warmth that she almost felt sorry for him.

  “I’d rather not be involved in this, you know.” She sighed. “All right. If it makes you feel safer.” She drew out a book from the library shelf and tucked the letter between two pages.

  “I’ll return in a few days, and you can give it back to me. Then we can talk some more. About the future, and us.”

  “Fine. Go ahead and do whatever it is they’ve hired you to do. Please, just don’t think you’re doing it for me.”

  “We’ll see about that,” he said, then leaned over and planted a quick kiss on her forehead. “Good night, my dear Raphaela. Dream about me tonight.”

  XXXI

  Like the Villa Borgia, the Villa Medici di Careggi was a working farm. So although the fortified estate had the character of a small castle, it was not soldiers that Adriana met upon arrival, but a flock of goats.

  The day was well along, but there was sufficient light for her to admire the garden from the upper-story loggia. As she gazed out over the flowering bushes, it struck her that she was staying at the villa that Silvio had talked about, where Ficino had held his Platonic academy. She found it inspiring to know she was housed where Donatello, Bruntelleschi, and Michelangelo himself had exchanged ideas under the Great Lorenzo’s patronage. Did they ever quarrel? She smiled to herself. If Michelangelo was there, they probably did.

  In the first days she sketched out the ground plan of her “pagan” orchard. Between walks in the garden, she refined the details and calculated the costs. Now she needed only to know what the great Sangallo would suggest to add the last refinements.

  On the fifth day she rode into Florence, and as her coach rolled north from the Arno along the Via Roma she ruminated on the city itself. Having never been an imperial capital, Florence had never deteriorated from greatness as Rome had done. For all the bloodletting and the shifts of power, from Lorenzo to Savonarola to the Republic, Florence stayed the same, a prosperous city of cloth makers and bankers.

  The traffic was heavy and she was anxious. It would not do to insult Giuliano da Sangallo by being late. “Try going up the Via dei Angeli,” she called up to the coachman.

  She had sudden misgivings about the project. Was she perhaps treading on artistic territory reserved for men, introducing whimsy where they had created law? Was Raphaela’s original idea too wild, like Raphaela herself?

  Raphaela, whose hands had touched her and whose mouth tasted of wine. Adriana brushed the last thought from her mind, like a strand of hair from her face, but it returned, distracting her. As a sobering antidote, she thought of Domenico, wading in a stream near Tivoli and offering her his flask. Domenico and Raphaela. How she felt torn between them. One was water, cleansing water, and the other one was wine.

  Finally the coach arrived before a wooden double door with iron grillwork in its upper half and a brass plate that showed the name Sangallo. A servant opened and led her through an inner court and up a short flight of stairs into the studio. In a spacious, well-lit room were a single large table and a few chairs. On the wall behind it were shelves of leather-bound volumes and folders tied in neat bundles. On the far wall a handsome cabinet fronted with glass contained brass measuring instruments.

  Giuliano Sangallo strode into the room. “Ah, Madama Borgia. A pleasure.” The servant drew up chairs and the two sat down facing each other at the table. “If you don’t mind, we should come directly to the matter,” he began. “I’m expecting an important visitor this afternoon and am pressed for time.” He held out his hand toward the roll that lay across her lap. “Let’s see what you have for me.”

  “I appreciate how busy you are, Maestro Sangallo, and shall not take long.” She handed him the scroll and clasped her hands like a child waiting for approval. Without rising from his chair, he unrolled the drawing on the table, anchoring it at the corners with the inkpots. Adriana saw it now over his shoulder with unfamiliar eyes, realizing suddenly how eccentric it was.

  She had sketched out a light pencil grid of some hundred cells. At its center was the old beech tree, and radiating out from it on four transecting axes were fruit and olive trees. Four lesser axes were dotted with flowering shrubs, and between all the radii were classical statues, male and female. The grid seemed to provide an overlay of order through which the greenery and the statuary exploded in a star-shaped pattern. At the far end of the orchard a curving watercourse descended the hill and snaked among the trees. Stone nymphs interrupted its flow at intervals, causing the water to cascade around them.

  The architect squinted over the draft and stroked his neck under his ear with a single fingernail. Finally he cleared his throat. “I confess, Madama, I don’t know what to thi
nk. You seem rather to cross over into quite another world. May I ask what these are?”

  “Nymphs and satyrs, and pagan gods. Wild things amongst the fruit trees.”

  “Hmm.” He scratched again. “You will have peasants harvesting fruit among statues. That is putting fine art in vulgar nature. Art is not nature, but its opposite.”

  She did not reply.

  “Let me show you what I mean, from the plan of a similar estate which I designed.” Sangallo unrolled his drawing over her own and anchored it with the same inkpots. “You see? Balance and symmetry, illumination of the perfect laws of God.”

  The Sangallo plan began with a walled quadrant with square towers at its corners. The quadrant was exactly quartered and at its center stood a square house. The quartered land within the walls held gardens, each subdivided into squares of vegetation. She knew without asking that the number of squares counted in both directions would be the same and that the sum total would be divisible by four. The entire plan was a paean to geometric order. By comparison, her work was random and capricious. She bit her lip.

  His final judgment was inevitable. “Signora Borgia, your plan has a sort of recklessness. I must tell you, on purely aesthetic grounds, I would suggest significant changes.” Sangallo rolled up his drawing and retied it with its ribbon. He let a few moments pass for the lesson to take hold. “Madama—” The servant’s knock interrupted him.

  “What is it, Marcello?”

  “Maestro Sangallo, your other visitor has arrived. He apologizes for coming so early, but his first engagement was canceled and… Well, he waits in the anteroom.”

  “Oh, no.” Sangallo flushed with embarrassment. “Madam, I beg you excuse me. I must admit him. It is unfortunate. Very unfortunate. I do apologize, but it is necessary that I conclude our discussion.”

  “Of course, Maestro Sangallo.” She stood up from the table where her own drawing was still unrolled, mocking her with its amateurishness. Sangallo addressed his servant. “Well, what are you waiting for? Admit him at once.”