“It’s a sad one, my lady.”
“She died,” Giulia said. “I was assuming it was sad.”
“There’s those say her own man did her in. Jealous of the servants, all strong and handsome, you know the way they work in the fields.”
The house was made from golden stone and brick columns buried in the masonry; the porch had partly collapsed, and a willow sapling spronged from its corner. Ivy lounged on the roof.
“They never charged him,” Giulia said.
“The wealthy don’t commit crimes. And looking at it, doesn’t it make you want someone to love you so much?”
A crow flapped to a stop on the roof, its talons screeching on the tile. To say love was pain was too simple; the ache was waiting to see who would disappear first. And wasn’t being disappeared by your own lover the pinnacle of intimacy? [No; it’s being forgiven. Imagine loving someone who builds His universe on the idea that no repented crime is damning, who scourges His own son’s body so his wounds will suck up all the sin of every sinner, but when you crawl to His feet and touch His dry heel with your dry lips, so gentle, He says, “Except you.”]
She stumbled as she turned away from the tomb. When Paola reached out, she swatted at her. Who thought picnicking among the dead was a good idea. This twist inside, this squid, was still inseparable from her, and she was alive, and she wouldn’t let love burn any scrap of her; the world would be only too glad to see another woman succumb, and she wouldn’t give anyone the goddamn satisfaction. May men take the shit from their mouths and shove it back in their arses. Teste di cazzo.
Out of the river valley and back on the main road, the two women didn’t speak; the footman led the way. Her cheeks felt some burn on them by the time they found the carriage again, but she was already married, so what did complexion matter. The stones rattling the wheels made a song in her teeth. Country became city again, and the bleared women were deposited in front of the palace, Paola’s apron wrapped around a collection of pinecones and river rocks.
“Wine and biscuits?” she said hopefully, rubbing one eye.
But Giulia retreated to the library and shut the door. Every rented palace had a history and itinerarium for the early empire. It was true, the mausoleum of Annia Regilla had been built by her husband, who maybe killed her, though the manservant was the one condemned. Regilla herself was as well connected as Giulia, kin to Hadrian, though she accomplished more. Fearfully rich, a priestess, a builder, the only woman allowed at the Olympic Games. Her own tomb was built on lands that belonged to her. But an untethered woman is attractive to no one but herself; at eight months pregnant, she was kicked to death in the stomach. Everyone knew it was her husband, but he wailed at his trial, and his old pupil Marcus Aurelius couldn’t fathom how a creature of refinement could harm a flower of femininity. So much for a philosopher king.
Annia Regilla, dead art thou amongst women, and dead is the fruit of thy womb.
Giulia had fallen asleep in the last square of sun when Bernardetto found her, her head lolling on the red tufted chair, her neck exposed. She felt his hand on her shoulder, and she curled awake. She offered her hands to be dragged up. When he kissed her cheek, she didn’t balk, but moved into him, wrapping her arms first around his back, then dropping her hands so they grazed his bottom. She felt his confusion. She licked the salt from his neck.
As his hands trembled for her hair, Paola knocked on the library door and called out the news of supper. They had a brace of cardinals dining, including Giulia’s own. She hoped he wouldn’t ask in what treasured place she’d stored her fishhook.
“The pope won’t last the night.”
“They’ve been saying that since spring. All for a little rebellion.”
“The stuff that comes up is red now. Doctors don’t invent details for the fun of it.”
“Who performs last rites on a pope?” Giulia asked.
The men at the table turned politely toward her, and then looked to her husband.
“Well, there are priests,” Bernardetto said. “Every pope has priests. Just like, well, like these cardinals. Each of them has the authority—that is, they all took orders. I imagine, frankly, it’s whoever His Holiness likes best, isn’t that so?”
His guests, trained in graciousness, inclined their heads.
“He’s not deserving of the treatment he’ll get.”
“You’re burying him before he’s dead! Wait till God calls him back, and then pass judgment.”
“He set us back a generation, from what I’ve witnessed. I won’t blame those who dance to see him go.”
“You’d like the Jews to run rampant? Heretics and fornicators willy-nilly in the streets?”
“Some tolerance in the new age wouldn’t be amiss. We’re driving people to Luther’s gang. And if you think the fornicators ceased their rutting in the last four years, more fool you.”
“He was still the father to us all.”
“I’ll be grateful to read my books again in peace,” Giulia said.
They were like owls, the way they rotated their heads in unison.
“I had to bring my contraband from Florence; there wasn’t a good novel to be had in this city. My guess is old Paul never learned to read himself and hated to see others enjoying themselves.” Her libel was met with silence. “Can any of you swear you’ve never dipped into Rabelais? Never swooned over Abelard and Heloise? We had Machiavelli performed just last week! You there, friend.” She pointed at her own cardinal. “Your weak eyes give you away.”
Father Lorenzo had been silent so far, but he smiled now at her rowdy finger. “He is my holy father. It’s not my place to account for either his wisdom or his frailty.” He stood and folded the napkin from his lap with a slowness that transfixed the other guests. “If the reports are true, I’m afraid I must return. Coughing up red? The Camerlengo will require my presence.”
Giulia too pushed back her chair and met him as he crossed toward the hall. She leaned down to give Bernardetto a kiss on his forehead, from which the other priests averted their eyes, and said, “I’ll accompany him to the carriage. Forgive me a brief absence.”
“The Camerlengo?” she asked at the door.
He took off his red cap to scratch at his hair. “A change is unsettling for everyone. There wasn’t a man born who can read the future.”
“They spoke of riots. You don’t think that’s likely?”
“I’ve got to get the papers out of his apartments before they seal him up.”
She put a hand on his arm. “Tell me what’s coming.”
He blinked quickly, clearing his sight. “Rest easy, madam. I won’t let anything happen to your property. Which includes, now, my own home! Fancy that. You could mow the fields of wheat and replace them with Indian pumpkins, and here you’re the one worrying what harm my tribe could bring.”
“I’d never plant Indian pumpkins.” She thought of her almost-child; she’d made her something to inherit.
“It’ll all go quickly now, I suppose. The Camerlengo—the chamberlain, he’s the one in charge at the end—will ask His Holiness if he’s sleeping. Gian Pietro, he’ll say, wake up. He may push him gently. Gian Pietro, Gian Pietro.”
“His name is Paulus.”
“But if he was asleep, he wouldn’t know his papal name, only the name his mother cooed to him in the cradle. And the Camerlengo, who now is Guido Sforza—a distant relative, I believe, of your own Milanese Sforzas—he will take the fisherman’s ring from the pope’s finger and smash it with a silver hammer, so that no more decrees may be made in his name.”
“Wait,” Giulia said.
“And then the body will be carried out, and I will take the papers, and the door will be sealed with wax.”
“The Sforzas. What fisherman’s ring?”
“A little seal,” he said, tracing a circle over his own knuckle. “St. Peter with his nets, and the pope’s name above. They’ll make a new one for the next. With us, it’s all about catching the soul, by n
et or by bull. Or by hook!” He winked.
She shook her head; she smiled. Somewhere across the river a horrid old man was in his death throes, blood staining his handkerchiefs, and while he was waiting for a sainted touch, that holy bait, she had thrown away the hook of Christ like a piece of trash. You had to save yourself first.
As Pope Paul IV was dying, Giulia de’ Medici shed her bodice and her gown, her sleeves and her shoes, and relieved of the increasingly tight laces around her middle, swam to her husband’s room down the hall in a cloud of loose linen. She didn’t bother to knock.
He was at his desk in his own undergarments, finishing a letter to his uncle outside of Naples, undoubtedly complaining about the trickeries of his wife and the dull heat of Rome. She climbed on his bed and sat in its center, cross-legged. He must have banished his valet, for a pile of clothes sagged in the corner like a deflated man, and the drapes had not been pulled against the night. At a distance through the window a lantern saluted her.
Wiping his nose, he leaned back in his chair and regarded his wife. Only a few weeks, and she had trained him so well to coldness that he was frightened rather than inflamed by her presence. If he weren’t set up to be her master, he could’ve been her friend. She wasn’t nauseous, as she was the first night of her first marriage when the old whitebeard heaved himself atop her, for appearances’ sake, and kindly fell asleep. That wasn’t true; she was nauseous. She patted the bed beside her.
He approached slowly, that cautious boy face, full-cheeked, under the shag of curls. He pulled himself onto the bed in front of her, crossed his legs too. In their flowing sacks of linen, they looked sexless: two indeterminate creatures of varying tone, neither old enough to know what to want, both cruel. She reached for his thigh, inched her hand up. Her deception began in earnest now. She could stop. She could swallow the juniper powder. (And get the child leached out of her.) She could confess. (And get the child kicked out of her.) She could pray to God, who would bless her with a miscarriage or else make of her an adulterous example, pillory her, damn her, turn his back on her like on every other broken woman. Or she could lift her husband’s cloth and lean into the heat at the center of him, climb into his lap with her own cloth raised and sink upon him, dig her fingers into his back so he could read her pain and be eased by the sweetness of her innocence lost.
And she would not grieve when he flopped to his back and snored, and did not sow her skin with kisses, or marvel at the smoothness of her arms or the hills of her hips, or lose himself in the hollow at her neck. She gathered up the ends of her tunic and retreated to her room, where she washed herself with vinegar.
The stampede in the street woke her. She dressed quickly, threw a cloak over her shoulders and a black veil over her face, and snuck out of the house before the servants had organized themselves for breakfast. The pope was dead.
She stayed close to the wall as she walked, pressing against the boarded windows of shops and skirting open doors, and in the confusion no one was surprised at a noblewoman wandering alone. She might have fit in better if she’d tossed the veil, become another tawny face in a crowd of merchants, peasants, Arabs, Jews. By the Carafa Palace, a new flurry of obscene poems had been posted on the Pasquino statue, each ridiculing the pope. She should compose something to add—an ode to the morality of the faithless. As she neared the Forum, the crowd began surging with a renewed sense of direction; someone had remembered the statue in the Piazza del Campidoglio. She climbed the steps of the Capitoline with them, not because she wanted to see, but because turning around could only mean going home. A teenaged boy little larger than a monkey clambered up the marble pope and stuck a yellow hat on his pate. The crowd roared. Near Paul, Marcus Aurelius waved from his horse. Ancient women should’ve pulled him down. It wasn’t long before the newly Jewish pope was put on trial, and a few men shouting profane prosecutions sentenced him to decapitation. As the ropes were lassoed around the cold stone limbs, Giulia found herself satisfied.
She weaved her way past Santa Maria in Aracoeli and through the alleys leading to the Pantheon. She was anonymous; her power was not in competition with her color, or her sex. Her power was located in her feet, in her ability to keep moving, like all these people were moving, as alive as the baker next to her, whose hands were still white with the morning flour. The pope is dead! The structure of the world, which chafed, had fallen.
A left turn, and there was Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the blue-heavened church where she’d mocked the stars. A smaller crowd had built a pyre in its open door. Two priests took turns carrying water to douse the flames, but more wood was brought. A crowd was trapped inside for mass, and someone near Giulia suggested they be killed.
“Why aren’t they in the streets?” the man said.
“They pray because they mourn the pope.”
“His death is a grace! They go against God, those shit-pantsed knaves.”
“Up the river, they’ve stormed the Palace of the Inquisition.”
“And killed?”
“Why wouldn’t they? Set the prisoners free. If God allows it, it’s his penance.”
“God can’t will man’s sin.”
“Who’s counting the wrongs of old Paul?”
“The killing is where I’d put a stop, and those in church, they be in sanctuary.”
“Let the prisoners come and decide the punishment, then. Grab more wood.”
She had wanted to see the stars again. The man who may have been her grandfather in that twisting lineage of bastard sons and bastard daughters was buried there, his papal bones under a stone, undisturbed only because no one had known to take offense. The smoke snaked in her hair. She pulled the veil closer. Rome had never smelled so nice.
Across the river, the Camerlengo had arranged for the quiet shift of the pope’s body from his chambers to the Pauline Chapel, where the final office was sung in a whisper, and then to the Sistine, so the corpse could find its lasting peace under Michelangelo’s sky. The guards had barricaded the doors to the Apostolic Palace; no looters would seize the holy limbs.
Was her own cardinal sequestered in those chambers, helping the chamberlain prepare the official papers, shatter the ring, call the conclave, box the body in a trinity of coffins—cedar, iron, elm—so that ritual and order would push out the darkness of the truth, which was that Pope Paul IV himself was a shit-pantsed knave? Was he afraid? It was easy to turn away from the crowds, but her legs wanted to carry her not home but to the river, that long and languorous slide out of the city. Was she afraid? [I was with you last night. I held your ears as he cried out, I slid my arm around your waist as he turned away, I pulled your heavy head against my neck so it needn’t hold itself. Goddess of my heart, I’d never blame you.] Halfway across the Ponte Sisto she pivoted to look back at the city, thin plumes of smoke scattered across its horizon, and saw the chubby shape of Paola bouncing toward her.
“My lady! My lady!” She was in tears. She must have retraced all the walks they’d ever taken. “The pope is dead!”
The palace was an anthill. Servants scattered across the courtyard, two butlers argued in the front hall, and Bernardetto sat alone at the table, waiting for his breakfast. She passed through the room on her way upstairs. She thought he’d say something about the night before, but it was done; he’d acquired what he had a right to.
“They can’t even cook an egg,” he said, his head leaning on one hand. “I told you we should’ve brought the staff from Florence. They’re animals here.”
“The pope is dead,” she said. Now she enjoyed the joke.
Upstairs in her room she loosened the cords of her bodice so she could breathe and bend, allow her belly a little room. She opened the window to hear the song of chaos, even if for today she’d laid down her sword and shield. She crouched by the edge of her bed and reached in beneath the mattress. It wasn’t a weakness to admit she was lonely. It wasn’t a fault to have nearly been in love.
Her fingers touched the edge of the paper. Sh
e shoved the mattress back so she could push her arm deeper and grab the corner of the note. It looked smaller in her hands. She took it to the window, took it back to the bed, held it up to the light in case she could justify not opening it at all. She was breathing fast again, which she pretended was a symptom of her condition. She took off her dress, stepped out of her skirts, was still hot. She pulled her undergarments over her head. She was naked now, and the smoky draft through the window tickled against her small hairs. She felt like a bird, or an angel—something bare and winged. She breathed big enough to turn her lungs to balloons. Lord, soothe her. Cover her in tender words.
She sat on the red rug like a child and opened her last letter from Allori. A single sheet of vellum, his spidery hand in a line across the page. Madam de’ Medici, he wrote. Your portrait is complete.
The Grave
[ 896–897 ]
The rain halved the size of the market. The man with cows would never abandon his post; he was a pile of stones under a coarse wool cape. His calves nuzzled around their ropes, not minding the wet. One tried to weave his leash through the others like a maypole. A peasant from out of town stood at the edge of their stall, clearly reading the rain as a bad omen for commerce but not wanting to return to his farm empty-handed. Perhaps if one of the calves gave a lucky kick, he’d commit to a trade. Around them, columns reached up white to the clouds.
The drizzle ran off the relic vendor’s hat in slim silver chains. He pulled back the tarp to show the new stock.
“You still have the fishhook?” Felix asked.
The Everlasting Page 24