Signora Da Vinci

by Robin Maxwell

  “I second the nomination.”

  All eyes fell on Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, whose face was stern and impassive.

  Pope Innocent was looking from one to the other of his cardinals. Their nomination was preposterous. And yet . . .

  “Thank you, Your Graces, for your vote of confidence for my studious and deeply pious son,” Lorenzo said. “A boy who has, since his youngest days, desired nothing more than a life of religious devotion.”

  My Lorenzo, my perfect lover, I suddenly realized, is a blatant power broker, a political creature—one agreeable to familial sacrifices, even deception to further his broader objectives.

  The pope squirmed in his chair. “Giovanni is too young in years to wear the cardinal’s hat,” he objected, lacking all conviction.

  There were murmurs of agreement from Maximilian and Savoy, though Ludovico Sforza remained still, his gaze impenetrable.

  Though his eyes stared straight ahead, I could see the pope absorbing the approbation of his cardinals on either side of him. “But if he will go and study Canon Law at the University of Pisa,” Innocent continued, “three years hence he will be welcomed to Rome and be seated amongst his brothers in Christ.” The pope put his hands together and lowered his head.

  Each and every man, whatever his opinion, now bowed to the will and word of the Holy Father. It was done. Giovanni de’ Medici in three years’ time would become the youngest cardinal in the history of the Catholic church.

  “Lorenzo,” I began as we undressed together in his sleeping chamber.

  “Yes, my love.”

  “Before he started for home, my father sent me another chest of treasures.” I was quiet as I unlaced the back of his doublet.

  “I assume you’re going to tell me what was in it.”

  “Aside from the usual, there was a small wooden box, and inside were sticky black balls the size of a fingertip.”

  “Poppy?”

  “In his letter he told me this resin was from the cannabis plant. Hemp. In the East, rope is made from its fibers. But in this form it is called hashish.”

  “What does one do with hashish?” Lorenzo asked. Down to his shirt and stockings, he lay back on the canopied bed, nestled amidst silk coverlets and feather-stuffed cushions.

  “Well, prepared in myrrh and wine, it is used as an anesthetic.”

  “Do you think it would help my gout?”

  “It might,” I said. “But it is also a . . . euphoriant.”

  “A euphoriant?” Intrigued, he propped himself up against the gilded headboard.

  “Itinerant monks in India use it quite habitually. They claim it causes visions, wild dreamings. It gives them limitless powers of divination. Scythians used to gather in a tent around a pile of red-hot stones and throw the hemp seeds on it. Herodotus said the vapors transported them into paroxysms of joy.”

  Lorenzo smiled. “I hope you brought some of these sticky balls with you.”

  “No,” I said, and watched his features deflate. Then I turned away. “My father said I should bake the resin into some confections, with honey, for the stuff tastes very bitter.” When I turned back to him I wore a mischievous grin and held a small dark cake in one hand.

  “Caterina, you devil!” He grabbed me and pulled me down on the bed.

  I broke the thing in two and handed him a piece.

  “We eat this as a sacrament,” I said, becoming serious.

  “Should we pray?”

  “Perhaps so.”

  “But to whom?” Lorenzo asked with the innocence of a child.

  I thought a moment. “To all the gods of Nature,” I said.

  He laughed. “Very pagan for the holiest house in Christendom.”

  “My father said that in India, many believe Jesus lived there for a time,” I whispered, even knowing no one could hear me. “They say he is buried there. In a tomb. My father saw it.”

  Lorenzo, free of mind as he was, appeared shocked at such a notion. He took a deep breath. “To all the gods of Nature, and Philosophy and everything that is divine in man”—he smiled warmly at me—“and woman.”

  He placed the cake in his mouth and I did the same.

  “It is slow-acting when eaten,” I said.

  “Have we time to make love before the visions come?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” I bent over and whispered in his ear, “Perhaps the visions will come while we’re making love.”

  “What would your father say to this?” Lorenzo said as he laid his hand over my breast.

  “That he wished he had had a hashish cake to share with my mother.”

  He kissed me and we began the sweetest, most unrushed of all the joinings we had ever known. Every movement was soft, tender. The touch of our hands and fingertips light and glancing. Limbs glided over limbs as if oiled. Strange, how desire rose so slowly in us both. No urgency pressed us forward. Kisses were long and lazy, peppered with swift darts of the tongue and tiny bites. Our mouths pressed lightly together, the only movement the breath from our nostrils a warm even flow across our lips.

  Time stilled. No sight or sound outside our bodies existed. We floated on a warm cushion lighter than air. When finally he entered me it was slippery and luxuriant. I think that with our senses in such a state of exultation we had forgotten the intoxicant we’d taken, and it was only when I watched Lorenzo, in the simplest of movements, bring his hand to my cheek, that I saw the world had altogether changed.

  The arc of his movement had slowed to such a degree, and the shape and color of his fingers had grown so defined in my vision, I was instantly obsessed with them. I took his hand in mine and held it before my eyes. There on its back was a whole landscape—myriad crevices, bony ridgelines, a forest of fine black hairs. Veins like riverbeds in which suddenly I saw running blue floods beneath the skin. I looked at his face and found it wonderstruck. He opened his mouth to speak, to tell me what he saw, but he was speechless.

  Then all confinements of the flesh seemed to fall away, the form of my body lost in limitless sensation.

  We came slowly apart so we could lie on our backs and stare up at the chamber ceiling, a glory of painted cherubs in the clouds—all blues and pinks and purples and greens. But the colors were nothing we had ever seen before—they glowed and glittered like sun-struck sapphires and amethysts and emeralds and rubies. And they were moving, the cherubs were moving! I could swear I heard their laughter as they darted in and out from between the clouds.

  When I turned to Lorenzo this time I found he had risen from the bed, naked, and was standing stock-still, gazing at a wall torch. Moving was difficult—my limbs were heavy and lumbering, and every bare footfall on the carpet felt ponderous and important.

  But now at his side I saw what he saw. The flame was more than a globule of dancing luminosity. It was fluid gold, and its movement a sinuous, frenzied dance.

  We drifted helplessly in a sea of radiant light and all the color born of light. Fragments of images flew at us and receded, as did a confusion of sounds like angels singing from a long way off. Speech was impossible. Broken words and groans and sighs were all we could manage.

  We slowly came into each other’s arms, and like an answered prayer we melted one into the other. Melded mercury and sulfur. Alchemical eros. Our breath was the hissing of molten rock, our hearts pounding in one single rhythm. In the moment we climaxed together we were convulsing volcanoes. Great waves crashing. Stars exploding in the blackness of the heavens.

  At dawn we found ourselves lying across the bed, sunlight streaming across our mellowed flesh. We had never slept, but it felt as if all Lorenzo’s strength had flowed into me as, I imagined, mine had into him. I turned my head and found him gazing at me, a look of boundless triumph in his eyes.

  “So that is what they mean,” I said.

  He nodded and smiled with perfect rapture. “I think it is. I think that is what they mean.”

  The rest of the visit was wholly uncomfortable, for our blissful state di
d never entirely recede from us. We knew we’d profaned the sanctity of Christ’s bastion with our pagan and appallingly heretical rites. So Lorenzo and I kept our distance from one another and hardly dared to meet each other’s eyes.

  But much good had come from our journey to Rome. Roderigo Borgia’s and Ascanio Sforza’s enthusiastic forwarding of Lorenzo’s interests reaped handsome rewards. While Innocent would not retract his endorsement of Malleus Malificarum, he did finally agree to soften the church’s stance on the persecution of witches. More important, the cardinals’ incessant whispering in the Holy Father’s ear proved such a potent bridge to trusting Lorenzo that all the Curia business dealings thereafter would, it was announced, be directed to the Medici Bank.

  As we mounted our horses for the journey home, Roderigo Borgia came to bid us farewell. He and Lorenzo embraced heartily.

  “Good-bye, my friend,” Lorenzo said. “You have done me countless honors.”

  The cardinal smiled. “I’ve heard it whispered in these halls that now the pope sleeps with the eyes of Lorenzo the Magnificent.”

  Lorenzo swung up into his saddle and spoke to Roderigo. “May his confidence ever be well founded.” As we rode away side by side he turned and said to me, “Oh, that Innocent had seen what I had through those eyes.”

  “It would be a different world,” I said.

  CHAPTER 27

  Life in Florence resumed in a normal state for a brief time. Lorenzo worried himself endlessly on his decision of when and how to tell our brothers in the Platonic Academy of the shattering initiation he and I had experienced under the Vatican’s roof. There were still members intent on reconciling our esoteric beliefs with the Holy Scripture, and there were few, if any, who would openly blaspheme the Catholic church.

  “But is not the illumination we shared in Rome the very enlightenment we Platonists have been seeking all along?” Lorenzo demanded with rhetorical fervor again and again. “Incontrovertible proof of our own divine nature?”

  “It is, Lorenzo. Without a doubt it is. But you understand these men better than I. Only you know whether they can make peace with the truth.”

  “How do you define that truth?” he would ask me with the intensity of an inquisitor.

  “That neither prayer nor study nor meditation can so readily bring us into the presence of the Divine as ingesting a bit of sticky black resin from India.”

  “Uugh!” he would cry and pound his fist on the wall.

  While Lorenzo argued with himself, I quietly baked the hashish into small cakes and invited Leonardo to my home for a quiet dinner, just the two of us.

  I explained the substance that his grandfather had sent me and then I bade him eat the confection, though I did not partake. Watching his expressions—the gape-mouthed gasps of wonder and delight, the fleeting moments of fear, his spontaneous singing and laughter, and tears of grateful understanding of nature’s mysteries finally unveiled before his eyes—these were as gifts to me.

  He would later insist that besides life itself, the cannabis cake was the finest gift I had ever given him. And he begged me for all I could spare, for since that first initiation, he said, the visions and dreams had exploded, and now ideas and designs, colors and shapes and perspectives were running riot in his brain.

  “Even more intensely than before?” I asked incredulously.

  “If it is possible,” he said with a laugh.

  “I hope one day soon your grandfather comes back from his travels so you can tell him how well his gifts have been used.”

  “It doesn’t sound like he has any intention of returning, what with the new wife and another adventure every day.”

  Indeed, Papa had married, and his happy though infrequent letters had come from every corner of India.

  “Maybe we shall visit him there,” I suggested kiddingly.

  “When do we leave?” Leonardo said.

  It was market day, and needing a few things for my kitchen, I headed up Via Larga toward the Mercato Vecchio. I always enjoyed strolling past the Palazzo Medici, whether I was an invited guest or not. But as I strolled past the doors of the Monastery of San Marco, I stopped. It being Wednesday I was surprised to see a crowd spilling out the doors of the chapel. What could be happening on a Wednesday? I wondered.

  I went inside.

  I had never seen the place so full, nor had the audience ever been so silent. But a sound was filling the place—the sound of one man’s voice.

  It was the voice of doom.

  From so far back he could hardly be seen, he was just a dark figure punching the air with his arms, but the shrill voice was familiar, and the words were loud and clear.

  The preacher was Fra Savonarola.

  “Ye women who glory in your ornaments, your hair, your hands, I tell you, you are all ugly. The ancient literature and art your humanist husbands hold so dear are pagan! Those authors are strangers to Christ and the Christian Virtues and their art is an idolatry of heathen gods, a shameless display of naked women and men! I hold in my right hand the sword of the Lord!” he cried in a hard, high-pitched voice. “People of Florence, I tell you now and will tell you again and again that by your evil ways do you risk the black cross of God’s almighty anger!”

  I left shaking my head, incredulous that so many were flocking to listen to such nonsense from a mad young monk. Lucrezia’s warnings about the dangers he posed seemed impossibly exaggerated. Since our visit to Rome Maddalena and Cibo had wed, and Giovanni had begun the three-year study in Pisa that would guarantee his cardinal’s hat. The Medici ties to the Vatican were secure.

  Savonarola was quickly forgotten as I reached my shop and home.

  Many nights our Platonic friends would gather in my third-floor laboratory, as much for conversation as for alchemical experiments. Lorenzo and I had not yet revealed our experience with the resin cakes, and neither had we repeated our explorations into the Divine. He and I did, in the privacy of my home, experiment with remedies for his gout, which, despite my ministrations, was worsening. Never had I known a man to suffer pain with such dignity and good humor. I only grew to love him more.

  My age was beginning to show. My breasts lost their roundness and succumbed to gravity. Lines appeared at the corners of my mouth and eyes, and the face that peered back at me from the looking glass seemed someone else’s—not my own.

  Il Magnifico, meanwhile, was rising to the height of his diplomatic powers. European rulers sought Lorenzo’s advice. Turkish potentates sent him lavish gifts. And Roderigo Borgia kept his word, insuring that the Medici Bank in Rome oversaw the Curia’s substantial financial interests. Friends and rivals alike called Lorenzo de’ Medici the “needle of the Italian compass,” and all believed it was his repeated interventions that kept peace on the peninsula.

  Even Florence had regained some of its joy after Giuliano’s murder. Too, life was good in our circle of family and friends. My days were happily filled with family pleasures and dispensing healing remedies to grateful neighbors. Nights were for Lorenzo, studying, exploring, and making gentle love in the comfort of his arms. For the Platonic Academy there were heavenly weekends spent at Careggi’s Thinkery and sessions in my alchemical laboratory debating and experimenting with the best path to Divine Enlightenment.

  It was beginning to feel, again, as though all was well in the world.

  CHAPTER 28

  Fra Savonarola had continued his sermons, preaching of hell and damnation, but they were clearly the rants of a madman, one of whom the fickle citizenry would certainly tire. And there was gossip—unfounded and impossible to believe—that gangs of white-robed boys calling themselves “angels” were roaming neighborhoods, knocking on doors and relieving Florentines of their luxuries—books and tapestries, wine, and all profane paintings and sculpture.

  But these were nothing but preposterous rumors.

  One late afternoon I visited Leonardo at his studio, bringing with me a savory vegetable pie and quantities of herbs that he had requested to mak
e dyes—elder leaf for green, mignonette for yellow, and woad for blue. They were needed for the commission he had received to costume the entire Rucellai family for this year’s Carnivale. They would be arrayed as the whole pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses, complete with fabulously hued robes and gowns, masks, shoes, shields, gold and silver crowns and scepters.

  But when I arrived at the bottega, sun streaming in through the huge front window where Leonardo had knocked out the wall, I found he and Zoroastre—through whose Rucellai family connection they had received the commission—busily at work on costumes of far less frivolity and gaudy colors.

  “What is this?” I asked Leonardo of the subdued gray textile sleeve he was sewing. “What’s happened to the gods?”

  “I suppose they’ve absconded to Mount Olympus,” he said lightly and unperturbed.

  “My father changed his mind,” Zoroastre said, looking quite disgusted. “He’s requested a more biblical theme for Carnivale. Moses and Rebecca and all the silly ‘begots.’”

  I very much liked Zoroastre, who my son proclaimed was a rare combination of good-natured charm and dark mystery. He never whined or complained no matter how shaky their circumstances. I sensed the young man harbored a passion for alchemy, but he was sensible enough to realize such interests must be hidden from public scrutiny.

  “Our old friend Savonarola is finding more and more religious consciences to prick,” he said.

  “How this time?” I asked.

  “You know that flood on the Arno several weeks ago?”

  “A horrible tragedy,” I said, remembering the stories I’d heard.

  “Well, it wasn’t simply a freak deluge upriver from the city that swept a dozen children and some nuns to their deaths. . . .”

  Leonardo finished for him. “It was God’s punishment for the sinful extravagances of Florence. That ‘He’ would take children—orphans no less—and the Brides of Jesus was a sure sign of an anger so terrible that ‘He’ drowned even these innocents.”