Signora Da Vinci

by Robin Maxwell

  “‘The guilty sinners of the city must hold themselves accountable,’” Zoroastre added. “That’s what my father heard the friar say in Sunday’s sermon.”

  “That’s preposterous!” I cried.

  “Worse,” Leonardo said, “it was an orphanage supported by the Medici, so Lorenzo was, of course, personally to blame.”

  “You’d think Florentines were too smart to believe such rubbish,” Zoroastre complained. “My own father! But no.” He held up the shapeless gray robe he was stitching. “From Jove to Jehosephat.”

  I just shook my head, refusing to dwell on such idiocy, and went wandering about the studio—a smaller version of Verrocchio’s bottega, yet no less fantastical—to see the current commissions in their various stages of completion. A tombstone carved with angels; a gilt and prettily painted bedstead awaiting attachment of its scalloped blue velvet canopy; a pair of small bronze satyrs mounted atop marble pedestals.

  “Look at what I’m doing for Lorenzo’s library,” Leonardo called to me. “Just behind you.”

  I turned and found a smallish wooden panel painted with a scene from antiquity. Amidst Greek columns and cornices and Cyprus trees sat a white-robed older man, and a young man at his knee. I knew without asking that they must be Plato and his beloved teacher, Socrates. Their faces, as was the custom, were those of the patron’s family members. In this case, Cosimo de’ Medici as Socrates, Lorenzo as Plato.

  “He will love this, Leonardo.”

  “Do you really think so?” he asked almost pleadingly.

  It never failed to amaze me how much approbation a man of so much genius continued to require. “I’m sure of it. And what an honor to have a place in the library. It is his most beloved room in the palace.” Then my eyes fell on the bottega walls around the panel. They were tacked up with dozens of sketches—a subject to which I was no stranger, though I found them still somewhat shocking.

  They were human dissections. Limbs, skinned faces, skeletal spines, male genitals. Here was an elderly man, there a little girl.

  “Nephew,” I said, beckoning him to me. “Is this wise? Your studio is a public place.” I spoke more quietly. “Let me take them home and put them with the others.”

  He fixed me with a rare annoyed glare. “I’m tired of hiding who I am. This is what my mind has wrought in studying Nature.” He gazed at the panel for Lorenzo’s library. “Socrates spoke the truth of Nature. Is he so hateful a model to emulate?”

  “Of course he isn’t,” I answered, failing to add what we both knew had been Socrates’s tragic punishment for truth telling. I whispered now. “That is enough from your nagging mother. Why don’t we eat our supper?”

  The streets were quiet as I walked home. I thought about Leonardo. He was, more than any of us in the Academy, a profane and heretical man. My son was the epitome of all that the church feared most. More than the stylish clothes and ornaments that every Florentine affected, it was his secretest thoughts and his strange behaviors that set him most dangerously apart—his blatant refusal to hear the mass or take communion, his human dissections, his love of men as well as women, even his refusal to eat the flesh of animals.

  He enjoyed proclaiming on every Good Friday that “All the world is mourning today because one man died in the Orient,” and that he would rather be a philosopher than a Christian. He was obsessed and spoke loudly and openly about freedom of the mind, freedom from tyranny and repression, the freedom of flight. He had, of late, become famous in the Mercato Vecchio for strolling amidst the stalls, till he came to the place where a merchant sold caged songbirds.

  He would inquire of the cost for the lot of them, and whatever the price, he would pay the seller. Then one by one he would hold the tiny wooden cages to his chest and open their doors. They shot from their confines like tiny-feathered cannonballs, disappearing in seconds. Others—and he wept when he described these creatures—were dead and stiff in their cage bottoms. They had not been sick birds, he insisted. Their souls had simply succumbed to the torture of imprisonment, and only then had their bodies given up life. I could see the pain in his eyes, the terrible memory of how close he had come to losing his own freedom—a fate much worse than death.

  The sound of voices roused me from my thoughts, and up ahead I saw a flash of white disappear behind the corner house. I cursed myself for inattention to my surroundings with all the strange rumors about, true or not. I looked and saw that many more windows were shuttered, the streets more deserted than usual. Yet something, now that my awareness was piqued, was clearly and ominously afoot.

  When I turned the corner I saw at the door of a fine house a dozen barefoot boys in white robes tied at the waist with rope. They were carting out the front door a pile of women’s silk gowns, a fine painting, and a box of cosmetics, all the while singing “Hosannas.” I froze where I stood, staring at the scene quite disbelievingly. Then the “leader”—a pimply faced lad of sixteen—came out the door with a husband and wife in their nightgowns. In the boys’ frantic looting a silver-framed looking glass fell from the box and broke on the street. One angel picked up a stone and in a frenzy smashed it again and again till it was nothing but tiny shards.

  I could not fathom the expression on the faces of the man and woman at the door, for they stood watching the pillage of their lives without rage, or even resignation. They were nodding their heads in acceptance and then, to my horror, the wife began singing hymns along with the boys! As the ruffians left I heard the husband shout after them, “God bless!” The leader yelled back, “You are Godly citizens! You will be spared from the fires of hell!”

  I found myself staring not at the devilish boy brigade disappearing down the long street but at the couple, who, with sincerely beatific smiles on their faces, turned and reentered their house, shutting the door behind them.

  That is when I heard it. A woman, screaming.

  I froze where I stood, but the scream became a woeful wail and then pitiful sobbing. I hesitated a moment longer, knowing in some part of me that a dreadful future lay ahead with that wailing woman. But the future was inevitable. It must be faced. There was simply nowhere to hide from it.

  Around the corner I came upon the frightful scene. That same band of Savonarola’s white-robed angels were kicking and beating the still figure of a man lying on the cobbled street. Other boys restrained a woman. One of her hands outstretched to the man, trying to go to his aid. With her other hand she attempted to cover her exposed bosom. Yet another child with a gold braided headband, an obscene excuse for a halo, taunted her with a panel of lace that I recognized as the frontpiece of her gown—something they had certainly ripped from it moments before.

  I rushed forward and heard the boys now, chanting to the woman, “Harlot, filthy harlot!” and she pleading, “Let me help my husband!” To my horror I saw a pool of blood widening around the man’s head—his skull must have cracked upon the cobblestone pavement.

  So intent was the vicious gang on its prey that I was kneeling at the man’s head in the midst of them before they even noticed me. He had a terrible wound at his temple.

  “What’s this!” a boy screeched at me. “Who do you think you are?”

  “I can help this man,” I said, trying to stay calm as I felt the threatening crush of bodies around me—perspiring young flesh and a brush of white cotton on my cheek.

  “What business have you on the street at this ungodly hour!” one of the youths shouted at me.

  Blood and ire rushed to my head and I spoke as I felt, without fear but much fury. “I have every right to walk in Florence at any hour I please. It is you, filthy devils, who’ve no right to injure a man and harass a helpless woman!” I was gently turning the poor victim’s head, which appeared to be cocked at an unnatural angle. “Now move back, and if there’s one among you with a shred of decency, you will help me take this man to my shop, where I can help him.”

  The boys went quiet suddenly, and all I could hear was the terrified woman’s sobs.r />
  One of the boys hovering over my head ventured meekly, “Where is your shop?”

  “On Via Riccardi. It is an apothecary.”

  “Apothecary!” I heard another angel cry, and suddenly felt a stinging blow at the back of my head. Outraged, I turned finally to look up. It was the pimply faced leader. A fist flew, and knuckles met the bones of my cheek. I fell backward, stunned though not insensible.

  “You’re nothing but a sorcerer!” he shouted at me, then hauled off and kicked me in the side.

  I could hear the woman groaning with despair.

  “We’ll take this one in,” the ruffian announced. Then he grabbed the lace panel from the smaller boy who held it, and dipping it in the comatose man’s blood, smeared the woman’s face and bare breasts with it.

  “May God forgive you for your sins,” he hissed at her, gesturing for his friends to lift me up and follow him. He marched ahead of them singing the Te Deum as I was hauled, by the hellish angels, struggling and terrified, to a dark and uncertain destiny.

  There was a morbid irony that my place of incarceration was the same as Leonardo’s had been for his sodomy arrest. The Office of the Night had been appropriated by the new and even more vicious religious authority in the city—Fra Savonarola and his minions. Where before in the receiving chamber for vice offenders had sat two friars behind a table with at least a pretense of dignity, now there was nothing but row upon row of crude benches filled with dazed and bloodied “sinners.” Lining the walls were more of the appalling angels standing at attention. The air reeked of fear and desperation, and as my captors pushed me down on a bench and told me to keep my mouth shut, I heard shrieks of pain from beyond the door where I knew the prison cages to be.

  They were torturing people, I suddenly understood. This was far worse than anything I could have imagined. Not simply a rounding up of luxuries to be burned for proving a purer devotion to Jesus.

  The Inquisition I thought only in Spain had found its way to Florence.

  The gossip about Savonarola we had believed to be preposterous had been true. How blind and foolish and soft we had all allowed ourselves to become! It was not that we’d forgotten the friar. We had simply and dangerously underestimated him. With our heads and shoulders in the clouds, our minds grasping for the stars, we altogether failed to see that Florence had begun smoldering at our feet.

  I’d hoped that having been brought in last to a full room of the accused would have given me time to formulate a defense of sorts, but within moments I heard a gravelly voice call out, “Bring the Apothecary!” I was hauled to my feet and pushed through the doorway and down the corridor, through that second metal door and into the prison hall.

  With a shove I found myself sharing a cage with three other men and a woman. Unlike the prostitutes I had last seen in these cages, this was a cultured lady in an elegant velvet gown, with a gentleman I suspected was her husband. She sat on a bench staring and dead-eyed. Patting her hand in distracted consolation, the man himself appeared as a victim of rough handling.

  Two other prisoners sat with glazed expressions on the cell floor. As I sat down next to the beaten man he said without prompting, “All we did was object to their taking a masterpiece from our home. The boys, those terrible thugs, they began to rip hangings from our walls, smash our Venetian glass.”

  The two others were silent. Never did the sound of torturing cease, only quieting briefly before reaching a new crescendo of agony.

  No matter how I tried, I failed to direct my mind into any semblance of order. All I knew was that I would in no way draw Lorenzo into this horror. All his strength would be needed to hold Florence together in the coming years. Thoughts of how it would be when they discovered I was a woman disguised as a man came to me often, though I refused to dwell on them, too dreadful to contemplate.

  And so when a jailor came flinging open the door and calling, “Apothecary!” I stood to meet my fate with no more plan than a foolish boy setting out on his first night of drunken debauchery.

  I was taken down the hall to a small windowless chamber lit by a single torch, and tied tightly to a chair facing away from the door—strapped at the chest, my hands near the bend of my hips, and my calves to the chair’s legs. Restrained as I was, I suddenly thought of Leonardo and finally comprehended his mania for freedom. Clutching at any small comfort, I found some knowing that whatever became of me, Lorenzo would send my son away from this horror.

  Perhaps it was this knowledge that gave me a modicum of strength.

  I heard the door open behind me. I will meet my torturer now, I thought. Look into the face of the Florentine citizen or Dominican friar who, on the base and corrupt orders of his church superiors, through obscene practices inflicted upon me and other innocent prisoners, will lose his soul and the very essence of his humanity.

  But when my torturer came around to face me I saw to my great shock that it was Fra Savonarola himself.

  This close, he was truly hideous to behold. I cannot say which of his features inspired such revulsion in me—whether the large, liver-colored lips, the huge misshapen nose, the green eyes glinting with hatred, or the great bushy black eyebrows that seemed all of one piece. I smelled his putrid breath as he leaned down close to my face and began ranting a venomous sermon of God’s punishment for those who blasphemed him.

  When he paused to breathe after an endless vindictive monologue, I opened my mouth and spoke four words. “What is my crime?”

  He looked confused. Then he beckoned to someone behind me and a robed monk came and whispered in Savonarola’s ear.

  “You impugned the authority of my sacred brigade of angels,” he said.

  “Your angels had just beaten a man senseless. He may be dead,” I replied, using every iota of courage I owned. “And they pulled a frontpiece from a lady’s gown, exposing her breasts most immodestly. This did not seem to be the work of the God of whom you so righteously speak, Fra Savonarola.”

  He brought the lesser monk to his ear again. From his expression it was hard to know if the angels on the streets of Florence were acting within or outside the preacher’s orders. One last whisper in Savonarola’s ear.

  “So, you are an apothecary?” he accused.

  “That is my trade. I was not aware healing the sick was a sin. Is it not a reason why we so love Jesus? I thought he believed in one man easing another’s suffering.”

  His liver lips quivered with disdain. “So you dare hold yourself on a plane with our Lord and Savior?”

  “I love my fellow man as well as I love God.”

  “That is blasphemy!” he shouted, spraying spittle across my face. “Mankind is scum at the feet of Jesus! Unworthy of your love!”

  I thought to say, Jesus loved mankind enough to sacrifice his life for it! but I held my tongue. It was useless trying to best this mediocre mind in a senseless debate. It was more important to live another day.

  I began slowly and thoughtfully. I had, after all, become a master of deceit. I remembered Papa’s belief that it was better being a living hypocrite than a dead truth teller. “Perhaps you have opened my eyes, Fra Savonarola. Shown me another way of thinking.”

  This seemed to please him. I saw the slightest upturn of his lips. “Then you will henceforth leave the healing of men to Jesus Christ,” he said.

  I knew at once what he was suggesting, and I foundered for a sensible response. I had gone very cold.

  “So you will close your apothecary,” he said, more a command than a question.

  I looked into those eyes and saw behind them a demon lurking, one with not a shred of sanity.

  “Yes. I will.” I felt my throat tightening, my chest burning.

  He gestured to his assistant.

  “And you will tell this good friar the location of this devil’s den of yours so that within the month, when my angels come to call, they will find the place abandoned. Altogether.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the poisons you call medicines will
be deposited in the Piazza della Signoria, consigned to the bonfire’s flames.”

  I came close to breaking then. The words choked me. All I could do was nod.

  “Tell me,” he demanded, placing his face close to mine.

  “Consigned to the flames,” I whispered.

  “Better than this body,” he said, thumping me on the chest atop my breast bindings. He fixed me with an odd look, and I froze, terrified that he had felt an unusual thickening there. I strove to appear calm, to reveal nothing.

  “Have you English henbane in your shop?” he asked, and I nearly died with relief.

  “I have some,” I said.

  “Send that to me. I understand it keeps a man coherent while he is being . . . ‘convinced’ of his heresies.” Savonarola made for the door. “Let me not see you here again,” I heard him say behind me. “The next time it will not go so easy.”

  CHAPTER 29

  I asked Lorenzo to call a special meeting of the Platonic Academy at the Palazzo Medici. Lucrezia had by then become a regular member. Now, in the first-floor salon, everyone sat on the edge of their seats as I, pale and shaken, told my story.

  “What is happening, friends?” Vespasiano Bisticci cried when I had finished. “What is happening to our beloved city!”

  There was a general outcry in the room.

  “There is more.” Pico della Mirandola quieted everyone with a voice of dread. “In yesterday’s sermon at San Marco, but a few doors from here, Savonarola leveled his harshest criticisms against the Medici . . . and against us.”

  The room went silent.

  “He named Lorenzo as a tyrant, insisting that he and his ‘paganworshipping minions’ turn their backs on Aristotle and Plato, who were now, themselves, ‘rotting in hell.’ Lorenzo, he demanded, must repent his sins or God would surely punish him.”

  “My mother warned us,” a sober Lorenzo said. “Before we went to Rome she spoke to us about the power of fear. I do not myself understand how levelheaded people can so readily relinquish reason, scorn intellect and open-mindedness to replace it with a single man’s threats of eternal damnation.”