Signora Da Vinci

by Robin Maxwell

  “How widespread is this plague of idiocy?” Gigi Pulci asked.

  “What we all until this evening ignored as rumors, we now know to be actual occurrences,” Antonio Pollaiuolo said. “So we must assume that the entire city is in the grip of insanity.”

  “And Pico’s account of yesterday’s sermon,” Poliziano added, “must be viewed as a threat to every one of us in this room.”

  No one could speak, so terrible was the thought to which, a moment later, Ficino gave voice.

  “We must temporarily suspend all meetings of the Platonic Academy,” he said in a tone so aggrieved it might have been the announcement of the death of a friend. But he went on bravely, ignoring the dolorous sighs and moans of his friends. “We must remember that the teachings of our masters can never be truly silenced. They will live in our hearts and the secret recesses of our minds, and in those thinking men and women who come after us.”

  “It is not enough, I’m afraid,” Vespasiano Bisticci said. Everyone turned to him to listen. “If we are to save our lives, our books, our art and antiquities, we must first of all hide them in safe places. . . .” There were murmurings of agreement. “But we must also . . .” Our friend paused as though he knew the words he was about to speak were unsavory. “. . . appear to Savonarola, his army, and the Florentines who take his words as God’s law, to be similarly converted to this reprehensible religious fanaticism.”

  There were shouts of disagreement and outrage.

  “Publicly disavow Plato?” Gigi Pulci cried. “The writings of our great classical teachers?”

  “If we mean to survive this mania, yes,” Ficino answered bluntly.

  There was silence again as everyone digested our leader’s proclamation as if it were the toughest gristle.

  “I have an idea,” Sandro Botticelli said slowly. “I will paint a spectacularly profane work and then make a very public show of sacrificing it. Each of us, as difficult as it may be, must do the same. Meanwhile, Lorenzo and Vespasiano should begin making arrangements to protect what is most dear to us—the books, the antiquities—from this army of demons.”

  “That is easily accomplished,” Lorenzo said, and Bisticci agreed.

  “It may still be insufficient,” Pico said. “We are philosophers. Savonarola will not be content with the relinquishing of material treasures.” He paused, as though gathering strength. “My writings, particularly those to do with the Cabala and Hebrew magic, are to these people among the most despised works that exist. It is true in Rome as well. I’ve been summoned by Innocent’s commission to answer their charges of heresy. My Apology brought me very close to the Bishops of the Inquisition.”

  “Let us be honest,” Ficino said with a much-needed touch of levity, “your Apology was nothing but a brilliant defense of your occult theories. It was bound to make Rome furious.”

  “In any event,” Pico insisted, “I will recant and repudiate my magical beliefs. . . .”

  “Pico, no,” Gigi Pulci pleaded.

  But Mirandola finished what he’d begun, “. . . then take my vows as a monk and retire from public life.”

  I saw tears glistening in Lucrezia’s eyes, and Lorenzo looked stricken. He set his gaze on me.

  “Cato,” he said gently. “For all these years your neighbors have seen the smoke from your laboratory’s furnace billowing up from your rooftop every single day, in the coldest winter and the warmest summer. They see me and all of us coming to your shop late at night. Some of them must know what goes on in your house. Till now they have chosen to ignore it, shown tolerance. But all that has changed. It will only take one person to inform on you. You are an alchemist. Not a title you’ll wish to own in the coming years.”

  I felt cold overtake me, and a subtle trembling that I hoped no one could see beneath my robes. “I must dismantle the laboratory,” I said to him.

  “If you wish to live to see your nephew grow full into manhood,” he agreed.

  The gathering dispersed with tears and embraces in the colonnaded courtyard. Promises were made of finding every surreptitious device for keeping informed of the others’ well-being. As Botticelli and Pollaiuolo huddled together making plans of their own, Lorenzo steered me into his library. I gazed around, wondering with a keen ache if ever in my life I would see again so magnificent a collection of mankind’s intelligence.

  “You have done so much in your life to protect Leonardo,” he said. “But I fear Florence is no longer a safe place for him. He is already far outside the bounds of acceptable society. The man is an avowed atheist. To the small-brained zealots he will prove to have the most dangerous mind of all.”

  “What are you suggesting, Lorenzo? Where could he possibly go?”

  “I will have to write to him, but I believe Il Moro would be delighted to have Leonardo at his court in Milan.”

  “Milan!” The thought of Leonardo so far from me tore at my heart.

  “Caterina,” he whispered urgently, “if he stays here they will burn him at the stake.” He peered out the library door. Everyone else had gone. He pulled me farther into the room and kissed me, but when he released me I pushed back into his arms.

  “How can this be happening?” I said. Of course Lorenzo’s plan would save Leonardo’s life, but how would I live without him? He had been my reason for coming to Florence and now, though my existence was a broad, many-limbed tree, he was still the rich earth into which my roots were deeply grounded.

  “There is no limit to fear that a mind can be induced to entertain,” Lorenzo said. “So few people understand they are good. The church has taught them too well that they are evil and need punishment for their sins. The friar plumbs the deepest of their guilt and terror. We are in for the darkest of times, my love. The darkest of times. We must dispense with ideals for the moment and look to survival.”

  Despite his outrage at my treatment at Savonarola’s hands, Lorenzo believed that any resistance in the current climate was futile. It must look as though my compliance was complete and altogether sincere.

  He sent a small cadre of house servants to help me with the disassembling of the apothecary and laboratory. I watched as my world was taken apart bottle by bottle, shelf by shelf. The most precious of my herbs and spices and tools of those trades were carefully crated and hauled back to Vinci, as any of the Medici palazzos and country houses might soon enough fall under scrutiny. But boxes and boxes of medicinals, potions, and poultices that might have been used to help my friends and neighbors were piled at the front door for their discarding.

  I carefully packed up all of the notebooks and folios I had been keeping of Leonardo’s, making sure that chest was never out of my sight.

  The belongings and furnishings of the first and second floors—bedchamber, kitchen, and salon—were trundled down the stairs and carted across the city to a pleasant house Lorenzo had bought for me on Via Tornabuoni, which we affectionately called Castella Lucrezia. It was small and sadly lacking a garden, but quite enough for me—without an apothecary or alchemical laboratory—to comfortably live.

  When the place on Via Riccardi was finally bare and Lorenzo’s servants had taken their leave, my grief was terrible but I refused to cry. I had loved my shop. The sight of it. The smell of it. The comings and goings of my friends and customers. The hub of harmless gossip. The potions invented. The healings accomplished. The advice and wisdom proffered, and just as often received. But most of all it had proven the place that perfectly expressed my being, my identity in the city of Florence—Cato the Apothecary.

  Who would I be without it?

  But there was no time for mourning. Lorenzo had written to Ludovico Il Moro in Milan and secured a position for Leonardo in the ducal court there. He himself was packing up his bottega, arranging for the release of certain of his apprentices to other studios, and making traveling arrangements for himself and Zoroastre, who would be moving north with him.

  Benito came to move me into my new home. Together we unpacked my dishes, he careful
ly handing each one to me to wash and dry before placing them on the shelf.

  “You know, Benito, you and your grandmother had best watch your tongues.”

  “Or what?” he asked. “Savonarola will cut them out? He is a little man with an even littler cazzo. That makes him a bully.”

  “But he is dangerous.”

  “That is why I’ll refuse if they come recruiting me for his new army.”

  “You’re a bit too old to be an ‘angel,’” I said.

  “And not nearly stupid enough.”

  “What have you told them?” I asked, alarmed but trying to remain calm. I had never admitted to Benito all I had seen and heard during my confinement in Savonarola’s Office of Night prison. Perhaps he was yet unaware of how serious a directive or summons from the friar had become.

  “That I will not serve him,” Benito said. “That I’ve a family to help support.”

  “You must take care with the Dominican.”

  “What would you have me do?” he said. “Work as one of his monkeys?”

  “No, of course not. But find a way to humor him. Even Il Magnifico is loath to openly defy the man.”

  “He drove you from your home, your shop,” Benito said, all levity gone. “We lost the best neighbor we ever had. I hate him. I’d like to see him burning atop one of his own bonfires.”

  A few nights later with all the stealth we could manage, Leonardo, Lorenzo, and those of the Academy who’d met at my house with some regularity gathered in the third-floor chamber. The curtains were tightly drawn so not even the faintest candle’s flicker could signify our presence there. The beakers and flasks, the ancient books and treatises, the stores of mercury, sulfur, and cinnabar were long gone from the tables and shelves. All that was left to distinguish the place as a laboratory was the alchemical furnace that, with its brilliant eternal fire, had illuminated our fumbling, stubborn perseverance to learn and discover the mysteries that Nature would allow her humble servants to know.

  Every heart was heavy, every mind awash with turmoil as one by one we threw handfuls of damp earth from my garden onto the flames. They struggled valiantly, as a dying man gasps desperately for the last few breaths of life.

  We were utterly silent in this, our unthinkable act—the smothering of the precious child we had together birthed and nurtured in the fecund womb that was Florence. I think part of everyone died as water and earth took their triumph over air and fire. The stove grew cold, its magic suddenly extinguished.

  Then wordlessly, each clutching a candle to see us down the steps, we left my house, and with angry hammer blows boarded up the broad apothecary window and door. In wrenching sadness, we went our separate ways.

  Lorenzo and I had gone to see Leonardo off to Milan. Standing together in his empty, echoing bottega, he gathered me into his arms.

  “Don’t cry, Mama,” he whispered, “please don’t cry.” But then his broad shoulders heaved and he pulled me tighter, and his own weeping began. “Look how you have watched over me. Protected me.” His voice broke with emotion. “All these years. And now Lorenzo. What friends you are. So beloved . . .”

  “My darling boy,” I murmured, trying hard to be brave. “I haven’t the words to express what I wish for you. For your future. Perhaps Hermes said it best.” I closed my eyes and saw the sage’s words as they had been written in the ancient text.

  “‘Contemplate the world and consider its beauty. See that all things are full of light. See the earth as the great nurse that nourishes all terrestrial creatures. Command your soul to cross the ocean, to be in India. In a moment it will be done. Command it to fly up to heaven. It will not need wings. And if you wish to break through the vault of the universe and to contemplate what is beyond, you may do it. Believe that nothing is impossible for you. Think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all—all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Mount higher than the highest height. Descend lower than the lowest depth. Imagine that you are everywhere—on earth, in the sea, in the sky, that you are not yet born, in the material world, adolescent, old, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thoughts all things at once—times, places, substances, qualities, quantities—you may understand God. The intellect makes itself visible in the act of thinking, God . . . in the act of creating.’”

  “Mama . . . ,” he said, tears glistening in his eyes. I knew that every word spoken had penetrated to his core. And I could see his love for me etched, with the pain of parting, in his beautiful features. Finally he released my hands, holding my face with the tenderest look. “Will you be safe? Perhaps you should come to Milan.”

  “I cannot leave Lorenzo,” I said. “His illness is growing worse.”

  Leonardo smiled. “You mean your love is growing deeper.”

  I nodded, my eyes wet, my heart threatening to burst with that truth.

  We walked outside together, where Lorenzo was waiting with the horses and wagon he had gifted Leonardo. Zoroastre finished tightening the canvas that covered the transport’s bulging load and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  From a distance I watched Lorenzo and Leonardo embrace. They spoke momentarily, words I could not hear. But such affection suffused their faces, and such sadness, that I was forced to turn away, lest I weep and draw unwanted attention to what was meant as a simple, manly farewell.

  Leonardo mounted the fabulous bay stallion he had named Giuliano and led the way down Via da Bardi, Zoroastre and the wagon carrying all that was left of my son’s material life in Florence rattling after him.

  Leonardo never looked back.

  Lorenzo came to my side then. “He will thrive under Il Moro’s patronage, Caterina. He will prosper. It has been hard for Leonardo to live in the same city with that blighted father of his. In Milan he’ll become a man in full.”

  “Defeat at the whim of a mad priest,” I said. “It is a hard pill to swallow. There must be something we can do. Something to pull that monster from his evil pulpit.”

  “I feel Florence as I do my own body,” Lorenzo said. “And she is very ill. She will grow sicker and weaker before she heals. But there is a cure for what ails her, and we will find it. I promise you that. I’ll give everything, anything—my last breath—to save this city. Out of that unsavory creature’s bonfires will come the spark of an answer. An idea. And we will bring him down, my love. We will bring him down.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Lorenzo’s promise seemed an empty one on the day I brought my apothecary wares to the Piazza della Signoria. A crowd, a large one, had gathered there. And it was strange and terrible to see. The Florentines I had come to know had merrily gathered for festival days, spectacles, and even High Mass in their richest, most colorful silks, taffetas, and brocades. Men affected long point-toed shoes and held their heads high in fabulous rainbow turbans. Women’s bodices were fantasies of embroidery, their hair intricately curled or braided with pearls and lace.

  This, today, was a sober gathering. A veritable funeral crowd for all the blacks and grays and browns they wore. Not a flash of red or green or peacock blue was to be seen. No cloth of gold. Nary a slashed sleeve, nor burnt-orange hose. I saw no one smiling, and the only sounds were somber, muted whisperings.

  But it was, after all, a funeral. A funeral pyre—Fra Savonarola’s “Bonfire of the Vanities.” The people had gathered round the largest one yet, a great pyramid twenty feet tall of their willingly sacrificed luxuries. As I drew my cart closer I saw a vast trove of treasures—fine Turkey carpets, antique tapestries, intricately carved chairs and mother-of-pearl tables. Books—there were hundreds of books. Paintings and statues. Adding my jars of herbs and unguents to the mountain, I could see masses of gold trinkets, silken shawls, Spanish lace mantillas, jeweled chains. There were dozens and dozens of mirrors, large and small, as though the friar’s call had gone out that not just the vanities themselves but the means by which to view them must also be put to the torch.

  Now from the direction of San Marco came a
company of singing angels in their flowing white garments, and behind them a double row of tonsured monks in brown robes, each of them bearing a simple wooden cross. Following behind came Savonarola himself, he carrying a torch burning with a dark, oily flame.

  The crowd silenced themselves further on sight of him and assumed a humbled, almost shamed demeanor. It made me more wretched, I thought, to see how this once-proud people now cowered and shrunk within themselves than even to have to lay the healing fruits of Nature on this terrible altar.

  The new Prince of Florence came very close to me as he moved to the pyre. In fact, his green eyes briefly fell on my face, but if there had been recollection of the sinful apothecary whose shop he had ordered shut down, there was nary a flicker of recognition. He stood with his torch arm outstretched and glared into the crowd.

  “Wicked, wicked, wicked!!” his voice rang out above our heads. “Piled before you are the symbols of your souls’ degradation. There are demons, tiny demons that skip along the threads of silver on your sleeve, incubi who hide in the folds of your silken gown, Devil’s familiars who lurk behind your looking glasses mocking your pointless vanity! Your evil ways shall be punished, people of Florence, and Satan’s minions will triumph if you do not heed the voice of God. Do you hear me?! I have come to help you hear Him, for He does speak to me. Oh, He speaks in my ear and what He says again and again is ‘Repent’!”

  With that, he thrust his torch into the pyre. By the smell of pitch and oil I knew that the pile of goods had been well doused, but the way the mountain of goods exploded so quickly and violently into flames was shocking even to me.

  “Watch how the fire burns!” Savonarola shouted. “See the demons burning before your eyes! Oh, repent, sinners! Repent or die like Satan’s minions in these flames!”