Signora Da Vinci

by Robin Maxwell

  “Point well taken,” Lorenzo agreed. “But one can always live in hope.”

  “Look!” Bisticci cried.

  We all turned back to the kerotakis to see a dark liquid dripping down the inside of the glass cylinder. With delicate fingers, Silio Ficino removed the small dome on its top and turned it over. We peered down at its concavity.

  There was an unmistakable black substance coating the inside of the dome.

  “We have achieved melanosis,” Bisticci intoned triumphantly. “First changed mercury into vapor, and that vapor changed iron powder into melonin. It is the first step toward transmutation.”

  Everyone was silent, awestruck. Even Pico held his sarcastic tongue.

  “This day we become brothers,” Silio Ficino declared, “in an extraordinary fellowship stretching back two millennia.” He closed his eyes. “Let the secrets of the universe open themselves to us.” Then he took the dome and held it under a torch on the wall window, examining it closely. “What is the next procedure, Cato?” he said.

  I moved back to the manuscript and followed my finger across the page. “Calcination,” I told them, looking up from the book. “The next color we wish to produce is white.”

  Lorenzo beamed at me and I found myself smiling back. Then our gazes locked and I knew suddenly that this joy was something more than the shared success of our experiment or even admiration for my skills. I grew flustered and turned away to watch Bisticci clap Ficino on the shoulder and embrace Pico.

  But the moment had seared itself into my mind and memory. It terrified me and thrilled me all at once. There was something between Lorenzo de’ Medici and Cato the Apothecary. It was comic. Tragic. Magnificent. Impossible. He was feeling something for me as I felt for him.

  And there was nothing, nothing in the wide world that could be done about it.

  “All right,” I said, willing myself to calm. “Someone go fetch the double-necked beaker.”

  CHAPTER 18

  I had never in my life straddled a horse, nor even sat to the side like a lady upon one’s back. After all, I had never been a lady, and once a man, was a pretended invalid. But Lorenzo, determined as he was to have me go riding with him, insisted on finding a way that I—with “the head of my leg bone still a feeble thing”—should find comfort on the back of a horse.

  He took it upon himself to consult both a physician and a saddle maker, and then one day, quite to my surprise and chagrin, presented me with a deeply padded contraption with a high back for support, and short stirrups in the Spanish Gineta school, which, the doctor had told him, would hold my injured hip at a painless angle. All Lorenzo wished was that I would try it. If it pained me, he would press me no more to ride.

  I was a weekend guest, once again, at Villa Careggi, though this time Lorenzo’s “first” family was in attendance, the members of the Platonic Academy nowhere to be seen.

  Even more delightful was the presence of Leonardo, who found great pleasure in Giuliano’s company. The feeling was mutual.

  It was hardly dawn when loud pounding woke me from sleep—I had again been given the room that let on to the loggia. In my nightshirt and bare feet I dragged myself to the bedroom door and, opening it, found Lorenzo and Giuliano bursting with lust for the day.

  “Dress yourself for riding!” Lorenzo cried. “Or shall we do it for you?”

  “I think I shall do it myself,” I said, feigning outrage and slamming the door in their faces. I heard laughter from without, and sagged with relief to be alone for the task. I quickly made water and re-bound my breasts, very tightly and all the way to my waist, as I had no way to know what the jouncing of a horse might do to those appendages. I put on breeches and sturdy boots that Lorenzo had provided me with, and a broad-brimmed hat, so that when I was done—though there was no looking glass in the chamber—I imagined myself as a very different young man than the tunic’d, red-capped scholar that I normally was.

  The sun had just peeked over the eastern hills when the three of us reached the stables. It was with the greatest joy to be greeted by the sight of Leonardo pulling tight the cinch round the belly of a stunning bay stallion, and dressed for the ride.

  A stable boy led out two horses that I quickly recognized—one was Morello and the other Giuliano’s favorite, Simonetta, whom he had named after his first mistress. Now that he no longer “rode the woman,” he would say, he enjoyed fond memories on the back of her equine namesake.

  A moment later an elderly stable hand brought out an old girl already wearing the special saddle that had been made for me.

  “It’s been a long time since you’ve ridden, Uncle,” Leonardo said. “Do you think you’ll remember how?”

  Frankly, I was terrified. I braced myself for both the lies I would have to tell and the experience of opening my legs to straddle a huge moving beast.

  “You will all forgive me if we go at this slowly,” I said. “Very slowly.”

  “No, no, Cato,” Lorenzo assured me and grew immediately compassionate. “We will pretend as though you have never ridden before.” He gestured to the old stable hand, who brought forward a step-up. “Is it your right or left leg?” Lorenzo asked.

  “My left.”

  “Good. Then you should have no trouble lifting your right over the back of the horse. Try that.” He came up the steps with me, and, guiding my left foot into the stirrup, grasped me by the waist and slid me up and over the saddle.

  I grunted once for effect and sympathy.

  “Are you all right?” Lorenzo cried with alarm.

  “Yes, yes. Just a tiny twinge.” But I was well settled in the contraption, and the high stuffed back felt wonderful. Indeed, the spread of my legs over the back of the horse, while an unusual posture for a woman, felt quite natural, even comfortable.

  The stable hand fixed my right foot in the other stirrup, and the steps were pulled away. I looked down from my mount to see three beloved faces beaming up at me with utter delight. Lorenzo and Giuliano were triumphant. Leonardo’s expression was priceless. I could not tell if he was on the verge of laughter or tears, but he was shaking his head from side to side, muttering, “Uncle, Uncle . . .”

  “Let’s be off then,” Lorenzo cried, and mounted Morello in a graceful sweep.

  Leonardo and Giuliano swung up into their saddles and, flashing a wickedly competitive grin between them, raced away together, neck and neck, leaving Lorenzo and me in the dust.

  “He’s still such a boy in some ways,” he said, putting the reins in my hand, “but having him rule at my side, that has been a real joy.”

  Lorenzo trotted away, beckoning me to follow. I felt the horse move under me, a rhythmical sway, and was surprised to feel hardly more fear than I did bouncing on the seat of my cart. I knew that the mount Lorenzo had chosen would do me no harm. I did my best to pretend I was learning to ride once again, and not for the first time.

  My old girl caught up to Morello. “Giuliano is a wizard with numbers,” Lorenzo continued. “Something I am most assuredly not. I’ve happily given over much of the banking business to him. As for the provisioning and organization of our feasts and spectacles, I leave that to him as well, and he thrives on it. Do you not agree he is the darling of Florence?”

  “Everyone does love him. It seems to me that you perfectly complement one another.”

  “That is true. Where I am weak, he is strong. Where I have neither interest nor time, he is fascinated and consumed with those details.”

  Morello picked up speed and my horse followed. I was proud of my steadiness and carriage on my first day of riding.

  “Best of all,” Lorenzo went on, “my brother is extraordinarily faithful to me. His loyalty is unimpeachable. To know that someone like Giuliano is at my back is the best sleeping draught that I could hope for. I think you should grind him up and sell him, Cato. You’d make a fortune.”

  “Speaking of potions,” I said, “my father has sent me a crateful of treasures from the East. Indecipherable books. Herb
s. Spices. Shriveled mushrooms. Small idols and textiles. Even a mummified cat he found in Egypt.”

  “I would like to meet your father one day. He must be extraordinary.”

  I smiled inwardly, knowing how true this was. “More fascinating than the material gifts are the letters he writes,” I said. “He has spoken to many wise men and scholars. Men who hold great traditions in their heads. Many secrets. They speak with great reverence of an intoxicant—Soma, they call it—that produces ecstatic visions. The visions upon which all of the Hindu religion is based. When drunk, it made poor men feel rich and free. Life became radiant, immortal. But the plant from which it was made is now lost. Just a memory.”

  “It reminds me of the Eleusinian Mysteries of the Greeks. For two thousand years they performed an initiation ritual in a temple outside of Athens. Some unknown spirits were drunk, not unlike your Soma, and this produced the profoundest of religious, mystical feelings, a kind of frenzy. But it’s all very unclear, for no one would speak of it or write of it . . . on pain of death. And knowledge of the spirit they drank—gone.” Lorenzo turned to me and smiled. “So here we are with neither Soma nor the Eleusinian elixir to excite ecstatic visions. Only the tantalizing memory of them.”

  “Sadly so.”

  “How is the ride so far?”

  “I haven’t a pain anywhere. The saddle is brilliant.”

  We had gone a distance north from the villa and out through a north gate in the city wall. As the path widened out into a wider road Leonardo and Giuliano—two of the most handsome and vital young men I had ever laid eyes on—came racing back toward us. We went on together, four abreast.

  “I had the strangest dream last night,” I told them. “It gives me chills remembering it. In it I am a woman.”

  “That’s odd in itself,” Giuliano said, though Lorenzo had fixed me with a fascinated gaze.

  “I gave birth,” I continued, “not to a baby, but to a demon that began devouring me, one body part at a time.”

  “That’s horrifying!” Leonardo cried.

  “Wait, I’m not finished,” I insisted. “I’m all but eaten, but before the monster can consume my head, I feel a surge of strength and purpose. I open my mouth wide—very wide, my jaws seem to unhinge—and I devour the demon in one bite! This wakes me up . . . and I find that I need to take an enormous shit.”

  Everyone fell apart laughing at that, and then we fell silent.

  “What is it, Giuliano?” Lorenzo asked. “You have a strange look in your eyes.”

  “I had a dream last night, too.” He began to recite it with great reserve and thoughtfulness that, for him, was unusual, as though it was of great significance. “I was walking on the Ponte alle Grazie during a fierce storm. The dream was so real I could feel the hard rain pelting my face and arms. Thunderbolts lit up the night like day. Clouds of sand, boughs and leaves were all flying around together along the river’s edge. Then it became a terrible whirlwind of sand and gravel that rose to a great height, broadening out at the top like a monstrous mushroom that caught up the roof of a palace and then carried it away!” Giuliano’s eyes were glittering, and it seemed he himself was caught up in the storm of his own storytelling. “While I was terrified by all this violent agitation, I decided, quite recklessly, to peer over the rail of the bridge. What I saw horrified me. The Arno—” Giuliano stopped, groping for words. “The Arno was seething, one monstrous mass of swirling water. I thought to myself, ‘Move away. Run. Run from this place!’ I tried, but my legs would not carry me. And suddenly . . .”

  I realized I was hardly breathing. I could not tear my eyes away from the boy and his nightmare.

  “. . . the bridge gave way beneath my feet! The next moment I was submerged. No, not submerged, for I was half in and half out of the water, being swirled and thrown about this way and that in a current that was wild beyond all imagining!” Giuliano went silent again for a moment, then whispered, “I died in the dream.”

  “That is impossible,” Lorenzo said. “You cannot die in a dream.”

  “I know,” Giuliano said very quietly. “I know. But I did die. I drowned in the deluge. Before I awakened—for I was shocked awake—all the world went black, and I knew, somehow, I was a dead man.”

  Leonardo looked stricken. He leaned over and placed a tender hand on his friend’s arm. I saw tears glittering in Lorenzo’s eyes. The moment was so terrible that I thought I must save it.

  “Don’t tell me,” I ventured in the lightest voice I could muster, “when you woke, you had to take an enormous piss.”

  Everyone roared with relieved laughter. Then the two younger men took off like a shot, perhaps to dispel the last remnants of Giuliano’s nightmare, leaving Lorenzo and me riding companionably side by side, the mounts walking at a leisurely pace. We were silent for a very long while.

  “I have always been a lover of women,” he said suddenly, taking me by surprise. “Of course I have ‘loved’ many men before. . . .”

  Everything screamed in me, “Look away! Do not meet his eye!” But here was my dear friend, making what I was sure would be a desperately difficult pronouncement. I turned and gazed directly at him. In that moment I learned how true was the adage that the eyes were the windows of the soul. For I fell deeply inside of the man, and he was joined with me likewise.

  “But I have never been in love with a man . . . before you, Cato.”

  Time stilled. All sounds around me were magnified—the horses clopping, insects buzzing, the air blowing past my ears.

  I knew I had to speak, answer him. All of those silent, heartfelt messages I had felt, but feared to admit had been sent, had indeed been real. I wished with all my heart to tell him that my feelings matched his perfectly. But how on earth could I?

  “I want you to know,” I said, trying to remain strong and sure in my inflection, “that I know the burden of finally understanding a thing that you want, desperately want, and realizing it is just out of your reach. It is a pain that has no description, yet is one that is keen as the pain of loss.”

  He was silent, but I knew he had heard my words clearly. Heard and believed me.

  “I love you, Lorenzo. You know that I love you very much . . . ,” I finally said.

  He smiled at me then, the smile that warmed me so. The one I adored. “But for the time being,” he finished for me with infinite grace and humor, “I should steer my course to the ladies.”

  I hoped that my relieved exhale was not too loud or insultingly pronounced.

  “I think that best,” I said, hating my words.

  We had never broken the gaze between us for the whole eternity of that exchange. But now it was best finished. He turned and looked ahead.

  “Are you up to riding a little faster? A trot perhaps?”

  “I would like to try,” I said. “I hope one day I can gallop apace with you.” I grinned at him. “Race you.”

  “Nothing would please me more.”

  Nothing would please me more than falling into your manly arms, I thought. Taking your dear face between my hands and kissing those cheeks, the chin, eyelids. The rich wide mouth. Running my fingers through your thick black hair.

  “Anything I should know about trotting?” I said instead, trying to lighten the mood.

  “You should push into your stirrups, putting weight into your feet to keep your bottom from hitting the saddle.” He was very brave in light of my rejection, and I loved him all the more for it. “There is a rhythm to it that is unexplainable. But you’ll learn it soon enough. It should prove natural. Move your knees forward more. Keep a tight hold on the reins.”

  He leaned over and laid open my hands, flattening them with his fingers. Into my outstretched palms he carefully laid the reins, and wrapping them around my fists once, closed them over the leather.

  “You will tell your horse what you wish by your carriage and the movements of your legs—squeezing and releasing, a well-placed heel on a rump. The animal wishes you to command her.”

/>   “If I trot, will I have had a proper ride?” I said, looking into his eyes.

  “Most assuredly. Very respectably.”

  “You give the signal then. If I fall behind you . . .”

  “I will be right there,” Lorenzo said, holding my gaze. “I will never let you fall.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “Let me get us some sfogliatella, Mama.” Leonardo whispered the final word with the utmost caution, though no one could possibly have heard him in the uproar around us in the Piazza Santa Croce. The Pazzi, a mighty family of Florentine bankers and one of the Medici’s great rivals, was taking great pleasure in publicly celebrating the betrothal of Carlo Pazzi to Lorenzo and Giuliano’s sister, Bianca. It had been a three-day circus of parades, fireworks, outdoor feasts, and dances, all of which the paterfamilia , Jacopo Pazzi—tired of always being outshone by the Medici—had insisted on paying for . . . every florin of it.

  “If I eat another bite I’ll explode,” I told my son.

  “The table with the pastries is right there,” he insisted. “I’ll get two and we can take them home for later.”

  He disappeared in the direction of the food, and I smiled to myself. Leonardo was as dear a man as he had been a child. So thoughtful. So loving to his mother. It was all I could do to keep myself from grabbing him and covering him with kisses, as I had when he’d been a baby. He retained a certain quality of that boyishness even now, that desire to please me.

  He returned with the delicacy wrapped in his handkerchief and opened it to show me the two-layered crusty baked pastries in the shape of a lobster’s tail, its creamy white filling oozing out the sides. I touched one. It was still warm.

  “You spoil me, Leonardo.”

  He towered over me now, having attained his full height. Leaning down, he said quietly, “That is what all good sons are meant to do. But you make it a pleasure.”

  A deafening blast of trumpets silenced the crowd. As I had seen on my day of entry into the city, now came a procession of the families of the betrothed—the Medici and the Pazzi—to sit in state under a gloriously fashioned tent of royal reds and blues, and embroidered with the families’ coats of arms.