The Everlasting

by Katy Simpson Smith

  “You haven’t been in love,” he said.

  There was no time to look stern. She couldn’t tilt up her chin with pride because something heavy was keeping her head still.

  “And yet you’ll marry and marry—which is not a talent—and still no one will have your heart, though it’s nearly the best part of you.”

  She opened her mouth, but he held up a blue finger and pressed it against her temple. “This is better,” he said. “Don’t tell the other women I said so.”

  He started to turn, but she grabbed his wrist and kept him there, her eyes sharp, with nothing at all to say. To have his wrist in her hand felt like holding Hispaniola. A sweat broke out in the short tendrils behind her neck, but the painter stood still, waiting. Men were not friends but lions. They could be tamed and put to some use, but were more likely to harm you in lasting and invisible ways, from her rough stepbrothers to the leering priests, from the men who used their hands to the men who wouldn’t listen.

  In the mirror of Allori’s face, she saw her anger. She let his wrist go.

  The front wall of the Sistine Chapel was an eruption of bodies, so violent and unexpected that Giulia had to put a hand over her mouth. Beside her, Bernardetto was giddy.

  “Oh, I remember the panels, but this!” To prove his good breeding, he admired indiscriminately.

  The fresco—glorious, rude—galloped up the wall. Closest to the altar, men and women churned toward Hell, pulled by devils from their opening graves into the gray muck and banking flames. They howled, they scrabbled. But the trumpeting angels carried her up, where the bodies facing their final judgment flew pitiably toward Christ, beseeching. Limbs, muscles, sacks of skin, penises like tiny clovers, breasts like globes cut in half. Bernardetto was glued to the grotesque: the man beset by three devils, one with a serpent head gnawing his thigh. “Here,” he said, pointing up. “That man seems to be giving St. Catherine a bit of a chuck.” The saint was bent over her wheel, as nude and muscled as any man who’d had his laundry nabbed, with St. Blaise hunched up behind her. “It’d be sacrilege if it wasn’t Il Divino,” he said. Michelangelo, with his aura of filth and abstention, could do no wrong.

  It wasn’t the accidentally copulating saints that captivated her, but the two figures on the left being pulled to safety with a rope: a black man, dark as Africa, and a redheaded spice-colored man, who looked almost like her father, and like her. They stared up at the white angel as if to say, Really? Are we going to heaven? With you? She wanted to fetch the pharmacist from his musty old shop and drag him here, shove his face in the paint, and ask what it meant that Michelangelo himself had dropped her a rope. She would’ve asked Bernardetto if he thought the man looked like her father, but the darker man was there too, and she didn’t want him to mistake which one she was pointing at.

  But the Judgment was not what she came to see. For years, Leonor had put her to bed with stories of Cosimo’s grandmother, Caterina Sforza, who waged valorous battle and dared her enemies to slaughter her own children and outmaneuvered abbots and the generals. “As if she were a man,” the duchess said. Even Botticelli fell in love, and in the pope’s own chapel, she said, was a painting of the purification of the leper, in which Caterina herself carries cedarwood to cleanse him. Giulia trailed down the wall to her left in search.

  She was still looking up, her neck beginning to ache, as she passed through the marble screens and approached the back wall, so she mistook the small grunt as being her own stomach growling. She pressed her belly and glanced down. There in the last pew was a man hunched up in a white robe. She was suddenly aware of the floor, a dizzying spiral of mosaics, and she clutched a bench to steady herself. He had his hands in his lap, not in a clear position of prayer, and so though his head was bent, she felt at some liberty to address him.

  “It’s a lovely room for thought,” she said.

  He looked up with a savage bewilderment. “No,” he said, shaking his head, making his great white beard tremble. “One can get no peace here.”

  She heard the quick patter of her husband’s slippers on the tile.

  “Your Holiness!” Out of breath, he tumbled to his knees, eyes averted, and held out a hand.

  Giulia looked more closely at the robes; stains yellowed the armpits, and a chain of mustardy islands across his lap suggested spilled soup. No one had combed his beard that day.

  He turned to the man prostrating himself, considered his open palm. He was probably supposed to present his own hand to be kissed, but he didn’t. “Your maid has a mouth on her,” he said.

  Bernardetto dropped his hand and stood. “Your Holiness, the cardinal-nephew invited us to admire some of your great bounty. In our most fervent hopes, we had no expectation of an audience. Allow us to inquire after your health and excuse ourselves from your meditations.”

  What a dotty old mess of a man—yes, with crumbs of Parmesan in his hair. Who would care if she gave his beard a tug, or mocked his nightgown? [I would. I would fall in love with you twice over. Go on; let’s see if Jesus strikes you down.]

  “Who is it?” said Pope Paul IV.

  “Bernardetto de’ Medici, of Ottaiano, and wife.”

  “And wife?” she said.

  “It’s not enough,” said the pope. “They’re coming on floods of sin.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I’m the only one left, and God’s given me no weapon.” The old man began to rock slightly in his seat. “The Devil is riding them all like horses. Heretics.” He looked up, his voice rising. His teeth were red with wine. “What are you doing to the women? Where are you whipping them? Is one hand on your own sword as you mete penance? God is taking me, and who will ask the questions?”

  Bernardetto, with rare chivalry, inched sideways until his body was between the pope and his wife. “Bless Your Holiness, and for your kindness may God preserve you.” He put a hand behind him on Giulia’s stomach and began guiding her backward.

  On the other side of the screen, they looked back to see whether the shock of their intrusion had killed the pontiff, but he’d resumed his hunched state, eyes on the ground. Somewhere a handler was desperately searching the halls of the palace.

  He wanted to leave right away, but she whispered no, she hadn’t seen the Botticelli, so he chewed his thumb while she scanned the frescoes along the right side. Hoisting a cord of wood, there she was: Caterina Sforza gleaming like an animal in a sea of unsmiling men. They were still; her robes billowed. Their feet were socked and slippered; she dug her bare toes into the grass. An unseen wind flounced her hair. But it wasn’t her strength as she carried a small forest over her head that arrested Giulia. It was her belly—bowed out like a sail, one hand beneath to hold the weight. Caterina Sforza was pregnant.

  He crept into her dreams sideways. She woke thinking he was in the room and went to pull the drapes aside so the moonlight would better illuminate his canvas, but when she turned at the window in her nightgown, the room was empty. She spent too much time at the mirror, touching the curls around her head. She voiced both sides of their imaginary conversations because she couldn’t remember what he sounded like. It wasn’t that she forgot to eat; she forgot to taste.

  When Leonor and her maids pulled the trunks into Giulia’s room to begin loading what she wouldn’t need in this heat—the winter furs, the blankets with nun-embroidered trim—the widow was stuck to the window, her nose smushing in and out against the glass. “You’re having hesitations,” Leonor said. She waved a hand at the servants to excuse them.

  Giulia wiped away the smudge of grease her nose had left.

  “Not everyone gets a second one so young and symmetrical.”

  “Callow,” Giulia said.

  “He laughs at your morbidity. Help me fold the linens.”

  The window seemed very thin, and the ground two stories below quite far. Why was she allowed to press her face to it? Why weren’t there bars to protect her? [Because romantics aren’t suicidal; depressives are. Romantics are chiefly in l
ove with themselves, so they mistake themselves for depressives. Depressives mistake themselves for nothing. You won’t die for another twenty-nine years.] She watched her breath make silver puddles on the glass that grew and shrank, grew and shrank. The duchess, probably thinking she’d gotten her menses, left.

  Giulia pulled the blankets and furs from the bed and kept going, yanking off the quilt and the sheets wrapping the mattress, pushing everything to the floor, until there was nothing but cotton sacking over feathers, and she bent at the waist and let her top half collapse on the bed. It smelled faintly of a farm. A dim procession of nuns tiptoed through her, the stern ones from her childhood who shoved apples in her mouth. When they spoke of love it was for Christ, the unmatched lover: present always in the heart and mind, with no tormenting physical form but the one already tormented, memorialized in wood above the door to every cell, his body as abused as a woman’s. A fellow feeling buoyed the love—it was self-love, it was the love of women for a womanish man who saw strength in all their parts and could do them no harm. It was a reckless, circular, unceasing embrace, and that’s why their eyes rolled back and they fell to their knees and wept when they heard the Song of Songs, because the only way to experience untrammeled love, as a woman, was to love yourself.

  With her head in the feathers, it was hard to breathe. She moved to her desk and pushed aside the bottles of perfume and small casks of pink powder and stack of books to make space for a single sheet of paper. It smelled of citrus. She sat straight-backed in the chair and dipped the quill and wiped its edge along the rim of the pot. She paused long enough over the blank sheet that the quill dried out and she had to dip it again.

  Allori, she wrote. Now. In that case. Therefore. She wrote, I cancel the order given by His Grace Cosimo I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his consort, Her Grace Leonor Álvarez de Toledo y Osorio, for a commissioned portrait of their ward Giulia Romola di Alessandro de’ Medici.

  In ant-sized letters at the bottom of the page, she added, She is Afric, and unlovely.

  Bernardetto didn’t believe it was Caterina. He craned his neck back. Sometimes Giulia was surprised by how boyish he still looked, as fresh-faced as when they’d first been introduced as cousins years ago. It was at a family wedding, and all Cosimo’s children were there, the girls in matching red capes at Leonor’s fancy. She only remembered him because she’d asked if he’d seen the duchess and he put her in a headlock.

  “Someone’s having a prank with you,” he said now.

  “If only I could climb on your shoulders, I’d touch her.”

  He squatted with a smile, but stood up quickly when a cardinal appeared at the door to the chapel and hurried past them, looking for his lost ward. They kept their heads down as the pope was dragged out of his hiding place behind the screen.

  “They’re coming for us,” he cried. “All the devils. You’ll read yourselves into the grave, and God won’t lift you.”

  The cardinal gave them a look indicating their visit had reached its end. Bernardetto waited until the men had left and squeezed Giulia’s waist. “Even if it’s so,” he said, “she’s no ancestor of yours.” He started after his host. “Pay your respects and come on.”

  How did churches conspire to make her feel so insignificant? [Because none were designed by women. Scratch that; the third chapel on the left in San Luigi dei Francesi, where a placid marble woman stabs a marble savage in the neck, was whipped up by our old friend Plautilla Bricci, who will in a hundred years carry a similar set of curls, a similar insouciance, will wear an apron not to catch flour dust but plaster. Her work was attributed to her brother. In four hundred and fifty years, the witchy wild-haired Odile Decq will craft the cutting spacey planes of the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, and there are some who’ll say it’s a kind of church. Her earlier work was co-attributed to her husband. In seven hundred years, St. Peter’s will be due for another redesign; twelve of the thirteen bids will come from women. You’re welcome. Did you forget I was Eve’s original friend?]

  A room of men, and no one recognized her. Caterina Sforza, who once brought armies to their knees. And whose belly here was full—not of roast pig or gassy ale, but of life. Giulia had never heard a convincing reason why women didn’t rule the church. Leonor had told her of Pope John of Mainz, of course, born Johanna in the ninth century. Giulia always imagined her as a cat, prowling through the halls of men, devouring the rotten mice of the Vatican. She ruled with grace and wisdom until one day on public procession she gave birth to a boy, and instead of marveling at her sacred Marian powers, the cardinals stoned her to death. They’d been tricked. They buried her under a curse, Leonor told her, the stone reading Petre, pater patrum, papisse prodito partum. O Peter, father of fathers, betray the childbearing of a popess. When Bia was still alive, she and Giulia would dress in robes of purple scraps and take turns reigning; they’d sit on their potties and make another of the girls reach up and test them for manhood, the way the later bishops did. “Senza palle!” she would cry, and the popess would run shrieking around the room until caught and stoned with pillows.

  But here Caterina Sforza, who ruled the central Italian plain with an iron spine, was reduced to a barefoot nymph, hair tossing lovely in the wind. And though Giulia had heard all the stories—including the one in which her enemies threatened to kill her children, only for Caterina to flash them her bare privates and yell, “Here I’ve got all it takes to make others!”—she too was most struck by her beauty. She looked like one of the dancing graces in Botticelli’s vision of spring—which also hung in the Medici villa—and maybe she was.

  She could very nearly imagine herself in that forebear’s body, posing fire-eyed for a haughty Sandro while her hand cupped the growing shape of her child.

  Raise your right hand higher, he’d say. You’re reaching; you’re a dancer.

  If you want me carrying wood, give me wood, she’d say.

  He’d come to her, tucking the linen of her gown so it draped just so, adjusting the cord beneath her breasts, the ties of her sleeves. An artist in his mid-thirties feeling his way across the shape of an eighteen-year-old girl, and her holding her fourth child. Did he put his hand on her belly, did he hold her neck to show just how to tilt the head, did he drag his fingers through the knots of her golden hair, did he stare at the curving cheekbones of that fine white face until he couldn’t separate his paint from her skin? [It wasn’t the whiteness, baby; it had nothing to do with the whiteness.]

  Giulia had her hand on her own stomach. Her face flushed, and when she closed her eyes, a rain of comets scattered across the back of her lids. She felt his mouth—dry and soft—on hers, and the first hint of wet on the inside of his lip as he leaned closer, the warmth off his skin like a banked fire, though all she could feel was his mouth, that inch of flesh, and suddenly a sharp pang in her abdomen, and she bent over, her eyes shooting open, and she was alone in the pope’s chapel, the alien in her writhing. The child Caterina was carrying in this scene had not survived. A ghost had passed through Giulia, bitten her, and now she sucked in double breaths. She reached up to feel her hair—still coarse. The decades had sprung together, sprung back.

  She didn’t want to be pope. She wanted to be the cardinal who feels beneath the throne to check the Bishop of Rome for testicles. How easy it would be to add a mustache and hide her hair in a cap, slide a small knife down her sleeve until it pressed against the dangling parts. All she wanted was to be left alone, all she wanted was to be beautiful, all she wanted was to be touched with sweetness and never, never abandoned.

  She could ask a pharmacist or a midwife or a barber or her mother—except she didn’t have a mother.

  She could hire a witch to wrap nine beans and a gram of salt in a cloth tied with rosary beads.

  Aristotle believed an embryo’s soul progressed from vegetable to animal to rational.

  If found out, she’d be fined—twenty-five florins or five hundred—or jailed, or separated from her head.


  She could wander in the wilds of the Quirinal Hill and find aristolochia growing untended.

  The doctors could tell if she was pregnant: by sticking a finger into her cervix, which would clamp shut to protect a fetus; by determining if she was pale, freckled, sleepy, yellow-eyed, or moody; by measuring her appetite for ash.

  She might not have a fetus, but a mole—a hard lump that mimicked an infant’s heft in the wombs of whores.

  She could sit in a bath with artemisia.

  She could hide plugs of calamint and scammony in her privates.

  She could put a syrup of hellebore or mandrake on her morning bread.

  She could eat an electuary: all the poisons mixed with honey.

  She could climb stairs; she could fall down. She could expel too much gas.

  She could fornicate.

  She was in the garden of the Villa di Castello, nose-deep in jasmine and listing the names of the nuns she could remember as a game to keep her mind scrubbed clean—Sister Beatrice, Sister Simonetta, Sister Maria Magdalena—when Paola came trotting out with her mistress’s veil trailing like a gold cloud.

  “He’s arrived,” she said, her chest heaving. She leaned on a potted lemon. Giulia thought she recognized the band wrapped around her bodice.

  “Is that my ribbon?”

  “You had extra, remember?” Paola said, and then waved the veil as proof of her fealty. “The girls had taken it for dress-up, but I found it in the trunk of the card room.”

  “Oh, let them at it.”

  “But it’s the last session, and you’ve got to match.” Paola had very firm ideas about art. “I’ve laid out the dark gown on your bed and the fichu.” Her breathing had finally slowed, and she was rubbing a hand across the purloined ribbon atop her bosom. Giulia admitted the light yellow suited her complexion. What was the woman saying? [Your lover, your lover. Would that I could slip into his body. Did you know I once had golden limbs, could wrap them around God for hours without Him shrugging me off? You make me think of Him less. But I’m not a shape now—not in your world, though I have bunions in my own. I’m just an exhalation.]