Signora Da Vinci

by Robin Maxwell

  Worse, we learned that the Holy Father himself had taken part in the assassination plot. Florentines felt such an unfathomable rage at their spiritual master that some eighty men died for the killing of one.

  But that was not the last betrayal. Sixtus, infuriated that his conspiracy had failed to bring our city under his control, had taken the diabolical step of condemning Lorenzo and the citizens for daring to hang the “ecclesiastical person” of Archbishop Salviati. Calling Florentines “dogs led to savage madness” he had, unbelievably, excommunicated them, one and all. He’d forbidden that mass be said. No baptisms or burials would be recognized. St. John the Baptist Day—the most sacred and beloved of all Florentine religious festivals—was to be canceled.

  There seemed to be no end to the savagery of Rome.

  For many months I saw little of Lorenzo, his limpid dream of Florence as “the New Athens” shattered with Giuliano’s death and Rome’s campaign to crush Tuscany’s will. The bullying pope insisted that Florence “atone for its sins,” and Lorenzo was ordered to appear in the Holy City.

  All of these edicts were defied.

  Don Ferrante of Naples proved an unfaithful ally, too willing to treat with Pope Sixtus against Florence, even sending his Neapolitan armies to join the Roman guard in open battle against Florentine troops.

  Then, in a display of diplomatic bravado that stunned even his staunchest admirers, Lorenzo stole away from Florence on a moonless night and laid himself—body and soul—at the mercy of the tyrant in Naples. “This war was begun in the blood of my brother,” he had written to the Signoria before he left, “so it may be that by my blood it must be concluded.”

  His friends were all sick with worry that the evil Don Ferrante would do him harm—imprison or even murder him.

  But in the end Lorenzo came home to us—happy, healthy, riding a magnificent gift horse from Don Ferrante—an honorable peace treaty with Naples in hand. The whole population came out in a riot of gratitude to welcome their hero. He had saved them from war. The shouts and trumpet blasts were deafening. Strangers embraced each other in the streets.

  It seemed as if all the affection heaped upon the two brothers now fell as an avalanche of love and pride on the one who still lived. From the moment he stepped through the western gate of Florence, my dear friend was ever after hailed as Lorenzo Il Magnifico. Even without a crown on his head all the world, it seemed, looked to him as a force to be reckoned with.

  And I had never before been so much in love.

  CHAPTER 23

  It was very late, but I had been inundated with demands for the remedy for a lung fever sweeping our quarter. Though its symptoms were thankfully not plaguelike, still there was terror of the plague, and the first few customers that had used my concoction of feverfew and mallow had seen miraculous relief.

  Several days earlier I’d gone to the herbal importers on Via Salvia and emptied their shelves of these dried flowers, then ground masses of them till my wrist hurt and my eyes were bleary. In my laboratory I’d distilled, then calcinated them into a fine powder. Now I was finally folding a few grams into paper envelopes and sealing them with wax. Tomorrow the apothecary would be mobbed with customers clamoring for the medicine.

  It was tedious work, this part was, and my mind strayed as it often did to thoughts of Leonardo. It was hard not to worry about my son, for he’d recently left Verrocchio’s protective wing and struck out on his own. He had taken himself to live in the bottom two floors of a house on Via da Bardi with little space, and even less good light for painting. Upon beginning his tenancy he’d immediately run afoul of his landlord, when, without permission, he had unceremoniously knocked out the front wall of the ground floor for a window.

  Then he’d brought to live and work for him Tommaso di Masini, the bastard son of Lucrezia’s brother. Now since the Saltarelli affair he was known as Zoroastre. He seemed a kindred spirit with Leonardo, clothing himself only in linen so he would not, as he said, “wear anything dead” on his body. Even after his public humiliation at the sodomy trial he had never abandoned his black attire and so was believed by many to be a magician of the Occult Arts. Leonardo had no money to pay the young man for grinding his colors and his excellent metalworking skills, but the young man seemed less interested in wages than friendship with another young eccentric man steeped in the dark side of Florence.

  Leonardo had become melancholy, and even refused a few small commissions Lorenzo had offered him, insisting nonsensically that this was charity. Instead he accepted a commission that had been arranged by his father—a large painting of The Adoration of the Magi for a city convent. There was no cash payment to be made. The whole ridiculous proposition reeked of Piero’s disrespect of his eldest son. Still, I expected that Leonardo, once at work, would produce a splendid painting.

  I could not have been any more surprised when I visited him at San Donato seven months into his contract to find him reclining lazily in front of the panel near a large pile of logs, staring up at his work and gnawing on a heel of bread.

  The painting could hardly be called more than a colorless cartoon, with its charcoal sketched figures—some sixty of them—that included not only the Virgin and baby Jesus in the center, but the three Wise Men, who appeared as ancient wraiths, gaunt and corpselike, and seemed to be groveling at the feet of the unfinished Madonna and child, clawing at them with bony fingers.

  When he saw me in the chapel he did not bother to stand, and greeted me with little more than politeness, which, along with the paucity of his work, worried me more than angered me, for I took these to be a measure of his depressed condition.

  “What is this pile of wood?” I’d asked, needing a start to the conversation.

  “Payment,” he told me in monotone, and sniffed sharply. “I painted the monastery’s clock. This is how I was paid.”

  That exchange had been the high point of our conversation. I had reason to worry about my son, but unlike Cato the Apothecary, whose potions alleviated his customers’ suffering, I had no way to heal what ailed Leonardo.

  I had just finished sealing the hundredth paper packet of the fever powder when I heard a tap on the apothecary window. I looked up to see Lorenzo looking in at me. He wore the strangest expression, one that was quite unrecognizable.

  I went around and unlocked the door. He came in, though hesitantly. Since Giuliano’s murder he, like Leonardo, had been bedeviled by the deepest melancholy. But Lorenzo was as disciplined as a soldier, trained to quash such emotion. Now I could see pain and discord splashed across the canvas of his features.

  I closed the door behind him.

  “Come upstairs,” I said gently.

  In my salon I pulled the front curtains closed, but when I turned back he was right there—inches from me. He was still. Hardly breathing. Yet his presence was large, his scent—musk and rosewater and wool damp with perspiration—made me suddenly lightheaded.

  “Cato,” he whispered hoarsely.

  With all the courage I owned I met his gaze and held there, unflinching. It seemed to unhinge him. His face crumpled. Tears welled in his eyes. Then he grabbed me and clutched me to him. The noise he made was a strangled moan.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “I cannot, I cannot . . .”

  My arms rose to encircle his waist. “Lorenzo . . .”

  “I have never ever been with a man,” he said softly in my ear, “nor do I believe have you.”

  “My friend . . . ,” I began.

  “I am your friend, Cato, but I have feelings for you that surpass every form of friendship I have known. Every form of love. I’ve tried to forget them since you rebuffed me that day in the country. I have lavished affection on my children. Been unerringly kind to my wife and my mother. Funneled all my passion into the Republic of Florence.” He laughed miserably. “I’ve been going mad, and nothing I do will banish you from my thoughts.”

  I was shaken body and soul by Lorenzo’s remarkable confession.

  “You nee
d to come with me, Lorenzo,” I finally said.

  I pulled out of his embrace. His look was pure confusion. “Just come with me,” I said, taking his hand.

  I led him up another flight of stairs. We stood then, face-to-face in my bedchamber, mingled love and fear, natural and unnatural yearnings rising in vapors around us like chemical steam in a glass beaker.

  He raised his hand to touch me, but I shook my head “no.”

  Then I lifted my tunic and threw it aside. My shirt was next.

  I saw him staring at my linen-bound chest, and without a word I began the unwrapping. His jaw fell open, for he saw at once what I had been hiding, and as the bindings dropped to the floor the look on his face changed from agony to amazement to joy.

  My breasts, freed from their long imprisonment, plumped into soft curves. He reached out. Touched them, wonderingly, proving them real.

  “My name is Caterina,” I said. “Leonardo is my son, and you, Lorenzo . . . I have loved you from the beginning.”

  He was silent for the longest time, just staring at my face as though seeing it for the first time. Recognizing it.

  Then he threw back his head and roared with laughter.

  The heaviness in my heart—the cumulus of all the years of secrets and lies—began to lift. Then it was airborne, like a cloud of black smoke from a chimney that rises and finally dissipates into clear air.

  I reached out and began to unbutton Lorenzo’s doublet. “So have no fear, Il Magnifico, we are not sodomites,” I said, suppressing my own smile.

  He barked another laugh. But then his expression changed. He grew serious. Taking my face in his hands, he drew closer and placed his warm lips over mine.

  I think I had waited my whole life for that kiss, so rich with tenderness and celebration, the kiss that pitched suddenly into wanton desire. I felt lost in a flurry of hands clutching, caressing . . . moans of hungry pleasure . . . clothes falling away . . . skin on skin. . . .

  We sought the bed and fell back on it together.

  “Caterina,” he murmured, trying the sound of my name in his mouth. His breath warmed the hollow of my throat. He brushed my nipple with his tongue.

  “Aaah, Lorenzo, Lorenzo, so sweet . . .” I lifted his face to mine. The hard lines of pain and loss had already softened. “You are my love,” I told him.

  He smiled his beautiful smile.

  “And you are mine,” he said. “You are mine.”

  Madmen and Holy Relics

  CHAPTER 24

  I had kept secrets in my life, most of them difficult, painful, or damaging. But the subterfuge of hiding the truth that Lorenzo de’ Medici was my lover was altogether delicious.

  I walked with a new spring in my step and customers asked me why I was constantly humming. Even Leonardo, who had, since the Saltarelli trial, worn his misery like a heavy cloak, found his mother so blatantly cheerful he emerged from the darkness long enough to inquire as to the reason.

  Of course I told no one but him. It delighted my son to an unaccountable degree, a fact I found baffling. I had in my safekeeping a growing hoard of his notebooks and folios, all of which he allowed me to peruse. And from the time I admitted my love affair with Lorenzo, more and more did I see evidence of Leonardo’s obsession with strange sexuality and even more with hermaphrodites. He filled pages and pages with them.

  That is how he sees me. The half man, half woman was a classic theme of the occult. It took its name from Hermes, the symbol of the masculine god, and Aphrodite, the penultimate goddess of femininity. When joined into one, the creature became a perfect blending of the male and female persona.

  One sketch he called Pleasure and Pain, but I saw it differently. The naked lower torso was male in every way, but the body split into two figures above—one old and frowning, the other young and limpid. He described them on the page in his left-handed scribble both as men, but the youth was a pretty girl, and the elderly man sprouted one round, womanly breast.

  In another drawing he depicted a cross-section of upright coitus. Here the soft-featured feminine figure with long curling hair to midback had a penis stuck erect into her partner, and the partner with a large bulbous breast herself seemed to have a cock as well. The Witch with a Magic Mirror was blatant—a male face on the front of the head, a female face on the back.

  More disturbing were his drawings of the female genitalia, which, uncharacteristically for Leonardo, were incorrect anatomically, and more than that, strangely grotesque. Lipless vulvas were black, gaping maws, flanked by tight, angry muscles of the groin.

  I once chanced to question him, having long before lost all embarrassment as his mother, and he answered me with barely a hint of emotion.

  “In general, the woman’s desire is opposite a man’s. She wishes the size of his cazzo to be as large as possible, while he wishes her parts to be small. So neither ever attains their desire. And do you not think, Mama,” he continued with the greatest sincerity, “that genitals are hideously ugly?”

  I laughed at that. “I never thought of them that way,” I admitted. “I believe if it were not for the faces and adornments of the actors,” he said, “and the impulses sustained . . .”

  “You speak of love?” I asked.

  “Love. Lust. Whatever you like. Without them and a pretty face I think the human race would die out completely.”

  “Leonardo!”

  “You asked.”

  “So I did,” I agreed.

  But I never asked again.

  Far from finding any part of Lorenzo ugly or the act of lovemaking futile, I had come completely alive in his arms. He had a strong, well-made body. His legs and buttocks particularly fascinated and delighted me. The muscles were plump and perfectly defined, the smooth skin tawny. His chest was firm under a mat of black hair, his nipples small and quick to answer my insistent nibbling.

  Leonardo would have thought it amusing that I found the shaft of Lorenzo’s sex a staunch and elegant creature. And that though he lacked a talent for painting or sculpting or working gold into masterpieces, he had truly perfected lovemaking into a fine art.

  In my bed, pleasure was his passion. Pleasure in every form and fancy. I’d known pain with Piero, but Lorenzo would never hear of it. Within weeks of our discovery of one another there was not a crevice, a surface, or a sweet spot we lovers had not explored and delighted in. There were French ways and Eastern ways, exotic unguents he provided, and herbal concoctions I had only, for the first time, prepared. We laughed as much as we moaned in ecstasy. We ate meals in bed. Read books in bed. Shared every secret and fear and every wild dream to which we had ever dared aspire.

  My male disguise, Lorenzo told me, made him hard. Now, to be in the public presence of “Cato” meant hiding an erect cazzo. He imagined me naked under my tunic and hose. Could barely wait for the moment we would stand in my private chamber and he would untangle me from my linen bindings, reveling in the moment my breasts would spring forth and he could take them into his mouth to worship my long-hidden womanhood.

  There were other explorations. My laboratory was our private playground. We would pore over the texts of the Corpus Hermeticum, deciding which alchemical experiments might interest us. We would busily gather the materials needed, then with one of us calling out the steps from the book, the other would execute the procedure with flasks and kerotakis and burners and descensories. Sometimes the step required more than two hands, so the reader would race from manuscript to workbench and back again for a word or phrase forgotten. There were explosions and failures and unexpected discoveries.

  Lorenzo endeared himself further to me with his nearly obsessive stoking of the alchemical furnace. He marveled that I, single-handedly, had kept the thing burning continuously since my coming to Florence. He loved my stories about keeping Papa’s fire alight as a young girl, and wept when I told him of the one time, that terrible night in Vinci, when I had let it die out. He would be a slave to the furnace whenever he visited me, he promised. Anything he
could do to help me he would do, he said, for I was an inspiration to him.

  I, an inspiration to Lorenzo de’ Medici, I mused. How extraordinary. But then I thought, I am four times blessed. Il Magnifico’s lover. Privileged mother of a genius. Beloved daughter of a kind and generous father. “Brother” to the finest minds in Florence, perhaps the world. After a painfully inauspicious beginning, life and all its graces had been bestowed upon me, as treasures are laid at the feet of a great queen.

  There was one final jewel held out to me by Lorenzo. One evening as I happily toiled in my laboratory he sat back on a stool, legs stretched out before him, his fine linen shirt white against his olive skin. He spoke my name, as always he did, with the warmest inflection of love.

  “Caterina,” he said. “Do you recall the night we were all here together, Silio and Pico and Vespasiano working with quicksilver?”

  “I do.”

  “We talked of the Great Work.”

  “Yes, and we all disagreed what the Great Work was, if I remember correctly.”

  “I have come across some books in my library,” he said slowly, “and some writings by Pico and Silio.”

  I found a stopping place in the sublimation procedure and gave Lorenzo my full attention. He spoke slowly, choosing his words with care.

  “They all seem to arrive at a similar conclusion. That true alchemy takes place within the confines of the human body. That the act of love is the bridge between heaven and earth. It is the highest sacrament possible, and that only through the sexual act can the soul achieve enlightenment.”

  “I think most would call those outrageous assertions,” I said.