Signora Da Vinci

by Robin Maxwell

  “I cannot feel my legs. I cannot move them.”

  I went round and knelt before him and took one bare foot in my hand and rubbed it briskly, then up and down the calf. I did the other, noting how alarming was the color of his skin—bruised and purple brown in places, deathly white in others. His knees were so swollen I dared not touch them.

  I willed myself not to weep, to stay strong and calm, while inside I was wild with terror. I managed a smile up at Lorenzo. He had a strange look on his face, as though he were listening for a sound from a long distance away.

  “Continue, Caterina. What you are doing . . . I feel something, just a little, in my right foot.” I rubbed it more vigorously. He nodded, then smiled weakly. “Yes. It’s pain.” There was a choked laugh. “I have never been happier to feel pain.”

  I worked in this way until all sensation had returned. In no time he could move his toes, his ankles, his knees. Nothing was said of the sickly colored skin that remained.

  “I think you should rest, Lorenzo. Get back in bed.”

  “No, I must walk.”

  “Please, my darling.”

  “I need to know if I can walk, Caterina.”

  With his arm around my shoulder I pulled him up, and quite miraculously he could walk with help, albeit slowly at first. Then he bade me step back. I was loath to let go of him. Wished in that moment I could cling to him forever.

  But I released my grip. He straightened his back and with great effort took a step on his own. Then another, and another.

  “Lorenzo,” I said quietly. He turned. “Will you sit down now? You’ve proven you can walk. Do not tire yourself.”

  He shuffled to the morning table and with great agony of his bending knees, sat down. He was quiet for a long while, thinking, making plans. I knew that look so well.

  “Caterina,” he said finally. “Send for my chests.”

  “What do you mean? Lorenzo, you cannot mean to travel to Pavia today. Not in your condition.”

  “I’m not going to Pavia. I’m going home, my love. To Florence.”

  “Florence!”

  He was silent again, collecting his thoughts while mine were racing, pounding inside my head.

  “I must be back in Florence so that I am able to complete my part of our plan. You know what that part is.”

  I was shaking my head no. I did not wish to hear it. But he was determined that I would.

  “My part is to die, Caterina.”

  “No,” I said and began to weep where I sat, unable to go to him, paralyzed as he had been before.

  “If I cannot say what must be said to Savonarola on my deathbed, our conspiracy will come to nothing. I thought you understood this.”

  “But you’re not dying!” I cried. “You cannot be dying!”

  “Come here,” he said in his gentlest voice.

  I went and sat at his feet. He pushed the damp hair back from my brow and stroked my head. I was grateful he could not see my face.

  “My body is failing,” he said. “My joints and limbs are the least of it. Inside I can feel the collapse. You know this is true.”

  “Why has nothing I’ve done helped?” I wailed.

  “It is in my blood. My father and grandfather were not the only Medici men with the affliction. Their brothers died of it. If Giuliano had lived long enough, he would have succumbed as well.” I heard a crack in his voice. “I can only pray for my sons.”

  “Must you go today? Surely you can stay . . .” I looked up at him to find his face as wet with tears as my own.

  “I cannot stay. God knows I do not wish to leave you. You are my heart, Caterina. I share my soul with you. But if I do not go . . . Florence is lost.” He stroked my cheek with the back of his hand. “I will make you a promise, and you know very well that I keep my promises.”

  “I do.”

  “We will see one another again, in this life. When the time comes I’ll send for you. And you will ride as quickly as you can. No carriages. They’re too slow.” He looked away. “I will need you at the end.”

  “Will you leave me enough time?”

  “That is my promise.”

  I wiped my eyes with the palm of my hand. “Lorenzo, oh, love . . . how will I live without you?”

  “With memory, Caterina,” he whispered. “Twenty years of riches. It is more than most lovers have.” A smile split his face then, sincere, as though he were remembering.

  “Tell me,” I demanded.

  “Your first weekend at Careggi. The Academy.”

  I nodded. “You opened a door for me . . . to the whole of the universe.”

  “And you?” he asked.

  I knew the answer at once. “The expression on your face when Cato’s breast bindings first fell away.”

  He laughed then, and I could see real joy in his eyes.

  “You will survive, Caterina. I’m depending on you to survive. You and Leonardo and your father. This must be done. How long it will take is yet unclear. The prior is clever, but he deludes himself as to how clever he really is. As Roderigo said, the chink in his armor.”

  The time for indulging our pain and sadness had passed. I stood. “I’ll tell Leonardo.” When I turned to go Lorenzo grasped my hand and held it to his cheek.

  “An embarrassment of riches,” he said, then let my hand slip from his.

  I closed the door behind me, and the sound it made, so strong and final, became a memory itself. Lorenzo. How the Fates had blessed us.

  Now memory would have to suffice.

  CHAPTER 34

  In the coming months Lorenzo’s fortitude inspired me to perform no less nobly than he had done. The soul of Florence was at stake, and I steadfastly held to that thought, for it was imperative to be strong. There was no place for sentimentality in our task, nor the luxury of squeamishness.

  A week after our small band of conspirators had moved into the Pavian villa, Leonardo arrived in the night with the corpse of a young man in the back of his cart. He was very tall with oddly long arms, legs, and fingers. He was deeply packed in Alpine ice—paid for handsomely by Lorenzo.

  No one had the heart to ask who the poor fellow was, but we knew Leonardo’s dissection privileges at Milan’s hospital were making such a sacrilege possible at all. Zoroastre, Leonardo, Papa, and I were all needed to carry the body into the studio. We laid it out on the long table we had prepared beside the huge camera obscura box that had been erected under the large south-facing windows, stuffing as much of the remaining ice around the man as we could to see him through the night.

  The fixing agent for the cloth was yet in question. By the light of the alchemical furnace, Papa, Zoroastre, and I had, for weeks, experimented with every substance from bitumen to chromium salts. The salts seemed most promising. When ferrochromite ore was roasted with soda and lime, a chromite salt was produced. The same ore heated with potash and lime gave us potassium salt. The residue, when mixed with acid, allowed for differing brightness and clarity of image on the cloth. It was a heated argument about which would be the best acid to use, and the precise proportion of either substance for mixing with egg whites.

  Every few hours that first evening Leonardo would come to the laboratory and interrogate us of our progress or lack of it. In one of his notebooks he recorded everything.

  During a late evening meal it began to rain and Leonardo grew more worried with every passing hour. Fully eight hours of bright sunlight were needed for exposure, he told us, staring straight ahead and not touching a morsel of food.

  That night as I lay in bed I staved off my thoughts of dread with what sweet memories I could cull from the past. In the end, so that I would be strong and well rested for the day ahead, I mixed myself a potion of poppy and valerian and slept like the dead till Papa woke me at dawn. We were thrilled to see the rain had abated and the sun had blessedly complied.

  Together we descended into Leonardo’s studio and found the tall corpse facedown on the table, his arms tucked beneath him. Somehow—an
d I did not wish to know the method—his back had been horribly torn in a hundred places, as though by a whip used by flagellants. The wounds were dark red but bloodless. I silently blessed the herbs that had helped me sleep so peacefully during whatever the night’s mayhem must have been.

  “Uncle Cato, come help me here,” Leonardo said when he saw me at the studio door.

  I steeled myself and went to him. He handed me a large cotton puff like one he was holding.

  “We’ll make half the length of the shroud today—only the back view. We must dust the body with this,” he told me, holding out a bowl of bright white powder. “The subject needs to be white for the image to fix dark on the linen.”

  He smiled at me. A hopeful smile. We were partners in this. A Great Work shared with my son. We had to succeed. So much was at risk.

  As I powdered the man’s flayed back Leonardo began arranging eight tall mirrors attached by hinges to each other. I thought to ask the reason for this, but then he gave a signal to his apprentice, who beckoned Papa and me into the alchemical laboratory.

  “We need to work quickly,” Zoroastre told us.

  With great efficiency we mixed up a large enough batch of the egg and fixing solution we’d finally agreed would be the best—ferrochromite—to soak one end of the linen. Then we fixed it to a frame, where it dried. Urine, we had discovered just before we’d gone to bed, was the best of all substances for a scorching agent.

  It took the four of us to carefully slide the framed linen into the camera obscura.

  Leonardo and Zoroastre now positioned the octagonal mirror between the windows and the corpse. Finally Leonardo stood at the aperture, adjusting over it a finely crafted lens he had ground especially for the device.

  In the last moments before the sun shone in through the windows, Leonardo’s concentration reached such a furious pitch that, blazing with a bright terrible fervor, he seemed hardly present in the room with us.

  At last the light came streaming in and struck the mirrors. With a few final adjustments to them—perceptible only to Leonardo—the exposure began. I could see instantly how the mirrors intensified the sun’s rays, but it was clear, too, that such strong light and heat might accelerate the corpse’s decomposition.

  With a great heaving sigh, Leonardo herded us from the studio.

  “All we can do is wait,” he said. “Best we can do is take ourselves away. Eight hours will seem like a lifetime if we stay.”

  We did go, taking food for a lunch al fresco, blankets and pillows. We found a lovely spot on a hilltop with full sun and the shade of a tree. Leonardo had brought his notebook and scribbled furiously, sketching from memory the camera, the corpse, and the octagonal mirrors.

  Zoroastre wandered about aimlessly, unused to being away from the constant work of the bottega, and nearly driving Leonardo mad. “Can you not sit still?” he asked his assistant.

  Finally, Papa intervened. “Let me show you some autumnal plants,” he said to Zoroastre, “whose properties will help you speed the process of putrefaction.”

  By late afternoon the wait had become intolerable for us all, and we barely spoke as we walked the distance home.

  There was hardly a breath among us as we examined our handiwork. But there, to our relief and amazement, was a dark, ghostly image on the shroud. The back of the head and neck could be seen, the shoulders and shape of the back, the marks of the whip darker than the rest. The buttocks, thighs, and calves were there as well, the left more faint than the right.

  Leonardo was ecstatic. It was more than he had dreamed possible. He hugged us each with joy, and once we’d laid the shroud out to dry, he pushed us into the kitchen, where he served us a cold supper, calling out to Zoroastre to open a new flask of wine for the celebration.

  We had, he told us, accomplished a miracle that day. A feat of wonder. Alberti, if he could see us now, would be toasting us, and Nature herself blessing her divine children.

  The next morning when I came into the studio I found the corpse lying faceup. It had been positioned with his hands crossed over his genitals. Again wounds had been made in the body. His wrists and feet looked as though they’d been impaled with spikes, and a gash in his side approximated the Roman centurion’s lance wound. His thumb-nails had been tied together with thread to keep the arms from flopping to his sides, and his legs were set parallel to one another. His legs were so long it was decided they must be bent slightly, so to fit on the table. Leonardo rigged them from below to prevent slippage, the last gruesome task I hoped my tenderhearted son would be forced to do.

  But in fact the sun shone too strongly for that days-old body. By the time the mirrors were set in place, a stink was already rising from our poor Jesus. Zoroastre wondered if we could do without the mirrors, but Leonardo worried that the front image would then not match the back.

  This time we stayed on vigil at the villa. Each hour one or the other of us would leave the dining table where we sat making nervous conversation to see how the body was holding up. At dinner hour we all barely picked at our food, and once Leonardo had returned with the news that all was still well, Papa—knowing how bad was our desperation—began to talk.

  “I married the most beautiful Indian woman.” His features softened and his lips tilted into a smile. “She was a widow of some age, not as old as I, but neither was she a girl. I had already traveled for several years before I came to the village where she lived. Mina was her name.” He stared down at his hand as though it were one side of a locket and he could see her face there.

  “She was already an outcast when we met. Not one of the ‘untouchables,’ as some are. She had been born high into the Brahmin caste and as an eleven-year-old girl had married a man of her own station. But he had been a cruel husband, beating her unmercifully, abusing her in every way, and threatening that if she did not obey his commands he would have his mother set her on fire.”

  My eyes went wide. Papa noticed. “It is custom there—wife burning. Mothers-in-law who disapprove of their sons’ wives will oftentimes throw oil on an unfortunate girl and set her alight.”

  My father’s story had the hoped-for effect. So riveted were we to the horrors he was describing in India, there was no thought for our conspiracy or the dead body lying in the studio before a camera obscura.

  “Does the mother-in-law pay for her crime?” I asked.

  “No. It is forgiven. You see, women are quite disposable in India. Another more docile wife can be found for the widowed son.”

  “A known murderer goes unpunished!” I cried.

  “Only the murderers of women,” he corrected me. “The Hindus believe that females are born without souls and only acquire them after marriage.”

  “That is preposterous,” Leonardo said. “I thought the Indian pantheon included several goddesses.”

  “It does.” Papa shook his head. “There is much complexity on the Indian continent. So much I was never able to comprehend.”

  “Why was your wife an outcast?” I asked him.

  “I’m afraid you will not like my answer.” He smiled, and I thought I saw a hint of pride in it. “Mina’s husband died of a fever that, after having nursed him and contracting it herself, nearly killed her. She barely survived, but when it came time for his body to be cremated—the mode of dealing with remains in India—his family insisted she commit suti.”

  None of us asked the obvious, knowing that Ernesto was eager to shock us further.

  “During cremation, good wives there throw themselves onto the funeral pyres.” Now he smiled broadly. “Mina was not against the custom itself. She would have gladly gone on to her next incarnation, she told me, if her husband had not in this lifetime been such an ass.”

  We found ourselves laughing at the macabre tale.

  “In refusing to die in the flames she acquired the scorn of her husband’s family as well as her own. She had disgraced them all. When I met her, Mina was living alone on the outskirts of town, barely surviving by selling goat�
��s milk to women who were secretly sympathetic to her plight.”

  “Did she let you take her away from that terrible place?” Zoroastre said.

  Papa nodded. “She became my traveling companion, my guide, and after I taught her Italian—and with my smattering of Hindi—my translator as well. She was very bright, and as you must now realize, quite spirited and willful.” He smiled at Zoroastre. “She reminded me of my dear daughter—Leonardo’s mother. My wife and I traveled the length and breadth of India,” Papa continued. “I have never had such a friend as she.”

  I saw his chin quiver. “Mina was younger than I. It never crossed my mind . . .” He paused and looked down at his hands again. “. . . that she would go before me.”

  Papa did not look in my direction, but I knew that his strength and love, like two swift arrows, were aimed directly at my own breaking heart.

  He smiled at Leonardo. “I wish you could have done her portrait. In the East they do not often paint pictures of mortal men and women. Only their gods—with eight arms, or elephant trunks, or feet stomping upon human skulls.” He chuckled. “I think you would like India very much, Leonardo.”

  I found I was suddenly near tears, so I offered to take my turn next in the studio. What I saw depressed me further. While the body was whole, the face had begun decomposing. The man’s lips were shriveling back in a grim rictus of a smile, and the skin around the bony part of the nose was falling away. I was no expert, but even I could see that too many hours were yet left of exposure in the bright sunlight for success.

  I returned to the dining room and made my report.

  Zoroastre stood. “I’ll pull the linen out.”

  “No,” Leonardo said in a decisive tone. That mind of his was churning.

  He rushed from the dining room and we all followed him into the studio. He had climbed to the top of the camera obscura and was very carefully peering inside.

  “I don’t believe any chemical change has occurred on the linen yet. Zoroastre, bring me a piece of cloth two feet by two feet. Quickly.”