Oil and Marble

by Stephanie Storey

  “There will appear gigantic figures in human shape,” Leonardo said in the cadence of a prayer. It was the same riddle he had told the old man before setting off for war. “But the nearer you get to them, the more their immense stature will diminish.” Leonardo never had the chance to tell him the answer. “The shadows cast by a man at night with a lamp,” he whispered as the sons carried the body around a corner.

  The procession was gone.

  Leonardo leaned heavily against the side of the building. There was no reason for him to follow the mourners. He had not been invited to the funeral. He stood on the stoop and listened as the wailing grew quieter and quieter until it faded completely.

  A word flitted through Leonardo’s head. It was a word he didn’t like to use, one he’d always wished would simply cease to exist, and it had been decades since he had applied that word to the old notary. But now he could think of nothing else to say. He opened his mouth and whispered to the wind, “Arrivederci, Father.”

  The sound of the wind hummed in Leonardo’s ears as he walked back to Santa Maria Novella in a daze. He ascended the stairs and strolled into his studio without acknowledging the two people waiting for him: Salaì and Lisa.

  How did Lisa know where his studio was? Had she waited there all day for him?

  “Sir. Are you all right?” Salaì grabbed Leonardo’s elbow and guided him toward a chair.

  Leonardo shrugged off his hand and kept walking past the front room, into the private chambers beyond.

  Lisa followed. “Why didn’t you tell me it was your fath—”

  Salaì cut her off with a cry. “Don’t!”

  Leonardo grabbed a lit candle and sat down at his desk.

  “Are you all right? Is the lady telling the truth? Is Ser Piero truly—” With a shaking hand, Salaì poured a glass of wine and set it down next to Leonardo. “Please. Speak to me.”

  Leonardo pulled out a sheet of fresh paper and a quill. He had been ignoring his finances for too long. He needed to catch up. Over the last few days, he had given three soldi to Salaì for a box of sweet fritters. Spent one florin on a new studio chicken. Ten soldi to Salaì for wine. Another fifty on paint supplies. Five ducats on Salaì’s newest wardrobe. He spent a lot of money on Salaì.

  “Leonardo …” Lisa sighed.

  He dipped his quill and, next to that list of mundane accounting, wrote, On Wednesday at the seventh hour Ser Piero da Vinci died, on the ninth day of July 1504.

  He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror hanging over the desk. For the first time, he noticed that he didn’t resemble his father nearly as much as his mother. He wondered, whenever Ser Piero had looked at his eldest son, had he seen the woman he once loved—but could never marry—staring back at him?

  A memory tickled Leonardo’s brain. He set down his pen and searched through a stack of loose papers. It wasn’t there. He flipped through another stack. Still nothing. He rifled through his desk, looking through compartments, drawers, and clutter. Where was it?

  “Can we help you find something?” Lisa asked, gently taking a stack of pages from his hand.

  “Leave us be.” Salaì grabbed the papers from her. “He doesn’t need you.”

  Crumpled in a back corner of a nook, Leonardo finally found what he was looking for. He carefully removed the letter and smoothed it out. There was his full name, written in that familiar hand. “Leonardo di Ser Piero da Vinci.” It was the letter Ser Piero had sent after the flood. Leonardo had never opened it. He turned it over. On the back, he had absentmindedly sketched a design for a flying machine.

  He unsealed the letter. Scanning it, he saw this was no summons or castigation for his crimes. The letter did not mention the flood or any of Leonardo’s failures. It was a short note, describing Ser Piero’s physical ailments and monetary concerns. It closed with a suggestion that Leonardo stop by the house for dinner.

  He dropped the letter to the desk. “Observe the flame of a candle and consider its beauty.”

  “Sir?” Salaì whispered.

  “Blink your eye and look at it again. What you see now was not there before.” Leonardo waved his fingers through the flames of the candle on his desk. “And what was there before is not there now. Who is it who rekindles this flame which is always dying?” He and Ser Piero would never make amends. It was impossible to go back.

  Impossible. Leonardo hated that word.

  He pushed his chair back from his desk, the legs screeching across the wooden floor. He crossed the room in three long steps and pulled back a tarp. Underneath was a pair of giant bat wings made out of cypress wood and linen.

  “Master? What are you doing?”

  Leonardo folded up the wings into a long tube and heaved it onto his shoulder.

  Salaì stepped in front of the door. “I won’t let you.”

  “Get out of my way.”

  Salaì folded his arms across his chest and widened his stance. “No.”

  Leonardo swung the long wooden wings around toward Salaì’s head. As the tube spun, it crashed against shelves, knocking off books and beakers. Salaì ducked. Leonardo dodged one way, then the other, and ran out the door.

  “Master, wait,” Salaì called. “Those wings aren’t finished.”

  Bat wings dragging in the dirt behind him, Leonardo stumbled to the top of a hill overlooking Florence. A full moon lit up the wilderness. The hill was covered in long, soft grass. Trees blew in the wind, bending like the backs of old men. In the distance, the Arno curved gently, and Florence glittered with candlelight.

  “Master,” Salaì called from a distance. Leonardo looked behind. Salaì and Lisa were chasing him.

  He had to work quickly. He dropped the wings near the edge of the cliff and unfolded them, carefully stretching each wing out to the side. When he designed the wings, he had expected Salaì to help strap them on. His fingers shook as he secured one leather strap to his right arm, and then fumbled to attach the left.

  “Master, stop!” Salaì was getting closer.

  The wings weren’t tied as tightly as Leonardo would have liked, but it would have to do. He was out of time. As he clambered to his feet, the wind whistled and caught in the wings. The fabric expanded. Arms bending backward, Leonardo pressed forward. At the edge of the cliff, he planted his feet and steadied himself. He stood under the full moon, wings billowing out wide, and gazed out over Florence.

  When he was a boy, he awoke one morning in his crib in front of a farmhouse he’d never seen before. Across the yard, he saw his father screaming and his mother sobbing. There was a strange man with them. He was tall and brutish, with a red face. “You can’t make me marry that man,” his mother cried, pushing herself away from the stranger. “I want to marry you,” she begged, grasping onto his father’s tunic.

  “I cannot marry you,” his father had said. “I have a duty to take a wife worthy of my station.” As his mother called, “You don’t love her,” Leonardo’s father walked away. Then the beastly stranger struck Leonardo’s mother across the face.

  Leonardo remembered looking up into the blue sky and seeing a large bird of prey circle the yard. He liked the bird. It was strong and powerful, and it floated up in the sky on expansive feathered wings, far away from the mud and the dirt and the screaming. Then the bird’s wide yellow eyes spotted him, and the animal dove toward his crib. He was so fascinated by the bird careening toward him that he didn’t scream, not even when the bird opened its hard, gray beak as if to bite him. The animal stopped midair, bent its body around, and smacked Leonardo’s mouth with its large, feathered tail. He could taste the earth and grime caked onto the feathers. The bird stopped and hovered over him. In that moment, Leonardo knew that one day he would fly high into the sky with the birds and never come back down.

  Finally, at fifty-two years old, Leonardo was fulfilling his destiny.

  He backed away from the cliff to get a running start.

  “Leonardo, no! You’ll hurt yourself.” Lisa and Salaì rounded the top of th
e hill and ran toward him.

  The time for thinking was over.

  Leonardo sprinted to the edge of the cliff and jumped. His feet left the ground. His wings caught the wind, lifting him like a leaf toward heaven. As the earth passed smoothly under him, he pressed his chest out, arched his back, splayed his fingers, and pointed his toes to mimic that soaring bird from his youthful memory. Years ago, he had finally identified the bird that had smacked his mouth with its tail: it had been a kite, a great bird of prey, the same form the Egyptian goddess Isis took when resurrecting the dead. Tonight, he was that kite.

  He was flying. His lifelong ambition, his waking dream. He wanted to twirl and spin joyously, diving, then climb back up into the clouds like a real bird, but he did not dare try. It was enough to glide along with the wind. From up there, he could soar through the air, move rivers, speak to the dead, make the impossible possible.

  His right arm shuddered.

  What was that? Leonardo looked over, but a cloud had passed over the moon. It was too dark to see anything.

  A tie on his left arm had come loose. He dropped a few feet, and his stomach lurched, but the wings caught wind again.

  A crack resounded as the wood frame split.

  Leonardo looked down. Falling now would be like leaping from a bell tower.

  The wings tore from their frames. Air screeched by his ears, up his nose, into his mouth. He was no longer flying. He was falling.

  “Leonardo!” he heard Lisa scream.

  Tattered fabric flapped helplessly around him. Wood splintered. Wind thundered. He flapped his arms, kicked his legs, anything to slow down, but the earth came closer and closer. He had been born too early, at the wrong time, in the wrong place, to the wrong people. One day, someone would learn to fly, but it would not be him.

  As he plummeted, Leonardo saw Salaì and Lisa sprinting toward him, but he knew they would never catch him. His deepest regret was that they had witnessed his final failure.

  Lisa was right. Some things were impossible.

  “Mio Dio,” Leonardo shouted. As he struck the ground, everything went black.

  Leonardo didn’t remember Salaì and Lisa running to his side or carrying him back to the studio. Salaì told him they tried to salvage the pieces of his wings, but there was nothing left to save. Leonardo vaguely recalled emerging from the darkness, lying in his bed, and screaming with pain, but it was a fleeting memory and probably best left unrecovered. Salaì, not Lisa, nursed him back to health. That he remembered. Leonardo’s left eye was swollen, his shoulder throbbed, and his right ribs ached constantly, except when he moved or breathed, at which time a sharp pain shot up his whole right side.

  Gradually, he healed enough to sit up and eat and ask Salaì to trim his scruffy beard and hair. After a couple of weeks, his bruised body stopped aching long enough for him to crawl out of bed and sit in front of his easel to work on Lisa’s portrait.

  He was sitting there, brush in hand, when he heard someone push open the door to his studio and creep inside. He turned to see Lisa standing in the doorway, wearing a forest green silk gown, a breeze of jasmine wafting in with her.

  Salaì hurried over and turned the easel around.

  “It’s all right.” Leonardo groaned as he tried to rise from his chair to greet the lady. “If she wants to see the portrait, she can.” Grimacing, he pressed a hand against his aching side.

  Salaì and Lisa rushed to his aid, each taking one arm. “Is it finished?” she asked, as they helped him into a more comfortable chair.

  “No.”

  “Then I’ll wait.”

  Salaì arranged a pillow behind Leonardo’s back, then backed out of the studio. “I will leave you.” He was even gracious enough to close the door behind him.

  Silently, Lisa walked around the studio. She ran her fingers along a metal scalpel, gazed at a wooden model of a giant underwater war ship powered by twenty oars, and stepped into and out of the eight-sided mirror box. “I’m sorry about your father,” she finally said, as she leafed through a notebook filled with drawings of his last, nearly fatal, set of wings. Leonardo wondered what she thought of those designs now that she had seen them fail.

  “There is nothing to be sorry for. I hardly knew him.”

  “That man we met in the loggia, who told you the news,” Lisa said, gently closing the notebook. “Your brother?”

  “Ser Piero’s first legitimate son.”

  She sighed, and he knew she was thinking of their night at the Baptistery. “I am sorry.”

  “There is nothing to be sorry for. I hardly knew him,” he repeated.

  “Men will fall from great heights without harming themselves. They will come upon unknown destinations in the sky, then flee in terror from the flames that pour down …”

  Leonardo was confused. What was she talking about? Why was his brain so muddled and cluttered these days?

  “They will hear animals speaking in human language,” she went on. “Their bodies will glide in an instant to various parts of the world without moving. In the midst of darkness, they will see the most wonderful splendors. What is it?”

  “What?”

  “The thing I described. What is it?”

  “You came here to ask me a riddle?”

  She nodded.

  “Well. Let me think,” he said, settling gently back in his chair, careful not to jar his aching ribs. “Men see wonderful splendors and hear animals speak?”

  “Yes.”

  “And fly, without harming themselves …”

  “That’s right.”

  There could only be one answer. “Dreaming.”

  “You should try it sometime instead of jumping off mountains,” she said wryly.

  He chuckled and pain shot up his side.

  She helped him adjust his pillow, and her expression turned serious. “You could have died.” She laid her hand on his. The feel of her fingers against his bare skin radiated across his body like a song echoing through a cathedral.

  “I did not fly.”

  “I saw that.”

  “And I never will.”

  Lisa knelt in front of him. “I know.”

  Forgetting his pain, he leaned toward her. “Thank you. For saving me.”

  “Thank you. For seeing me.” She sighed. “I cannot visit you again. I am a wife and a mother and I cherish those things about myself.”

  “I know.” He wanted to beg her to run away with him. He would take her to the Far East or to Rome or to France. “Some things are impossible.”

  Their eyes locked. Falling into the well of her pupils was like dropping into a bottomless cave. Suddenly, she put her hands on his cheeks, pulled him toward her, and pressed her lips onto his. Leonardo could think of nothing, could only taste her minty lips, hear her soft moan, smell the jasmine in her hair. In that moment, he was everything and nothing. He was of the world and beyond it. He was no longer his own; he was hers, and she was his.

  Lisa pulled away first. His lips parted from hers reluctantly. He opened his eyes in time to see her stand and square her shoulders like a ship righting itself after a storm. “Arrivederci,” she whispered and headed toward the door.

  Perhaps it was best that he was injured. He couldn’t chase after her.

  At the door, she stopped. Resting her hand on the knob, she turned back one last time. The sadness faded and the hint of a smile began to flicker across her lips; her eyes started to crinkle with happiness. He could see the memory of their brief passion in her expression. It was their secret. She would carry it with her forever, and in those moments when she remembered, she would be his again. She would always be his. He waited for the slight upturn of her lips to spread fully across her face, but that half-grin never broke into more. Instead, with the hint of a teasing smile still lingering on her lips, Lisa turned and walked out the door.

  Michelangelo

  Michelangelo rubbed David’s right hand with a cloth, rhythmically working from the palm all the way down to the ti
p of each finger. He spit on the rag and gave the knuckles one last wipe, and then stepped back to survey his work. Though the statue was hidden inside a dim shed, the marble gleamed. Imagine what David would look like under the bright light of the sun. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said. He planned to return every day until the unveiling, scheduled for less than a week away. He wanted the marble to be immaculate.

  Slipping out of the shed, he nodded to the guard, who was posted to protect the statue from vandals and keep curious citizens from stealing a peek. Florence was abuzz with rumors about the statue. Some were even attributing magical powers to the marble. Michelangelo tried to appear calm, but his nerves were growing in concert with the soaring expectations. The greater the expectations, the less likely his statue could meet them.

  Merely thinking about the unveiling made his neck sweat. All around him was a bustling construction site as workers rushed to finish the temporary stage, and men carried in more than twenty-five chairs to hold all of the dignitaries scheduled to attend.

  “Michel!” Granacci called, waving frantically as he hurried across the piazza. “Michel!”

  Michelangelo groaned. He couldn’t handle another crisis. Not now.

  “You might as well hear it from me.” Granacci climbed up onto the makeshift stage. His face looked grim.

  Michelangelo leaned against David’s shed for support. He feared Granacci had come to tell him his family was boycotting the unveiling. Michelangelo had yet to tell them about the payment he’d received for completing the statue. He’d planned to show them the sack of gold at the official ceremony, the ultimate cap to the celebrations. He’d invited them to the event, but they hadn’t told him whether they were attending or not. He’d asked them at dinner the night before and again at breakfast, but got no response. If his family did not show up, his triumph would be dampened.

  “It’s Leonardo,” Granacci said.

  Michelangelo frowned. Ever since the flood, Leonardo had practically disappeared. He had been spotted around town only once or twice. “What can that old man do to me now?”