The Florentine Emerald: The Secret of the Convert's Ring

by Agustín Bernaldo Palatchi

  “Enough, Mauricio. I will hear no more superstitions related to the emerald. You shall come out acquitted from this trial. Resist: do not plead guilty. With everyone’s help, you will get out of here. I promise you.”

  Lorena heard the guard placing his heavy key into the lock and turning it. Her time in the cell had come to an end. She embraced her husband with tears in her eyes, stroked his hair, and bade him farewell with a kiss she wished would never end.

  113

  Lorena came down the steps of the tower and followed the chamberlain down the corridor that crossed the second floor of the Priors’ Palace, without paying attention to the paneled ceilings or the statues and frescoes that decorated the route. The hallway was lined with doors, every one of them firmly shut. Perhaps behind one of these, she thought, the priors might be gathered, deliberating on her husband’s fate. Sadly, she could not talk to any one of them to defend the innocence of her husband. Or could she? The gaunt chamberlain, dressed in his green livery, opened one of the doors and ushered her in with a wave of his hand. Once they were inside, the servant indicated with another gesture that she should wait and left, shutting the door behind him.

  The chamber was windowless and the only light came from a small candle flickering on a fine walnut table covered with a slab of green veined marble. Two black angels cast in bronze supported the table. Distributed around it were four wooden-slatted folding chairs that did not seem to fit in with such luxurious surroundings. A great chimney piece, decorated with bas relief, stood conspicuously against one of the walls, but showed no trace of ashes or wood, which seemed very odd considering how cold it was at that time of the year. A few worn out old iron buckets were piled up carelessly in one of the corners. Lorena concluded that nobody normally used this room. And yet, she had been brought here for some reason. Whatever for?

  The door opened and Luca Albizzi appeared, dressed in his prior’s scarlet giornea.

  “Good day, Lorena,” he greeted her, quickly shutting the door behind him. “Take a seat,” he continued.

  “Thank you, I prefer to stand,” answered Lorena suspiciously.

  A meeting with Luca was potentially dangerous and she preferred not to find her freedom of movement limited by sitting down. She resolved that the best way of not letting herself be intimidated was to adopt an aggressive stance.

  “I had understood that you priors were not allowed to meet with the family of the accused,” said Lorena, trying to look confident.

  “There are certain people, like you, who must abide by the rules, and others, like me, who are not subject to them. I set the rules of the game. Never forget that. The fact you were able to visit your husband and find that he was well was because I authorized it. Had it been otherwise, you would never have been able to see him. By the same token, if I were to so desire, Mauricio could be absolved of his crime.”

  “My husband is innocent!” declared Lorena.

  “You will never convince me with words, only with your actions,” answered Luca drily.

  “What can I do to persuade you?” asked Lorena, not guessing what he wanted of her.

  “Undress,” demanded Luca, as if giving an order.

  “What?” gasped Lorena, hardly able to believe her ears.

  “You heard me. Undress. In other words, take off your clothes,” said Luca, drawing out his words slowly. It seemed that her sister’s husband was enjoying this perverse game.

  “You are mad!” answered Lorena with contempt.

  “No I am not. If you want to save your husband from death, you must obey me without answering back. You will like it. Just wait … ”

  “What about your wife? Have you thought about her?” Lorena asked, trying to put a pause to Luca’s sinister behavior.

  “This has nothing whatsoever to do with love. Let us say that this is simply a well-deserved punishment.”

  Lorena’s whole body was trembling with fear and indignation. What was Luca really looking for? To have sex with her? Humiliate her? She was prepared to suffer any sacrifice in order to get her husband out of prison. However, surrendering herself to Luca guaranteed absolutely nothing. That man’s blood was boiling with revenge and nothing would stop him from voting against Mauricio once he had finished with her.

  “If you take one more step toward me, I shall scream with all the breath I have in my body. How, then, will you justify having brought me here to this abandoned room? However much you boast, a prior must respect certain rules if he does not want his reputation tarnished. Something that could be very dangerous indeed in these times we are living in … ”

  Luca’s face became contorted with contained rage, but he did not move.

  “I shall order a steward to escort you to the door. Two days from now you shall get a new authorization to visit Mauricio. If by then you still persist with your stupid, haughty attitude, your husband will be condemned.”

  114

  Mauricio could feel his feet had lifted off the ground. His hands had been bound and his arms placed behind him. The rope that held his wrists passed through a grooved ring anchored to the ceiling and served as a pulley. A brawny man turned the blades of a wooden device onto which the rope was coiled. As a result, Mauricio started rising slowly and very painfully. His back started curving forward as his head looked down toward his feet. The whole weight of his body fell onto his shoulders, obliging him to tense his arms and back muscles in an effort to alleviate the pressure.

  Minutes before, Lorena had made an unexpected visit and filled him with hope. Yet soon after, two armed guards had taken him to the torture chamber, a veritable hell on earth: human beings inflicting maximum pain on their defenseless fellow men. He did not want to die or suffer, but if he gave in under torture, execution would soon follow. A confession, even obtained through violent means, was proof of unquestionable guilt. If he wanted to stay alive, he would have to face the kind of suffering he had never known before.

  The wheel turned again and Mauricio was lifted even higher off the ground. His body broke into a sweat, excreting all the fear that was filling him. The pain in his wrists and shoulders grew worse. Looking between his legs, with his head hanging forward, he could glimpse the executioner who was turning the wheel, a completely blank expression on his face, utterly indifferent to the pain he was inflicting. Mauricio knew with absolute certainty that it was all the same to this coarse man whether he was gathering olives in a grove or torturing a person. These were merely mechanical tasks that had to be done. Meanwhile, the robed notary who was observing proceedings, comfortably seated at a table, was definitely taking a personal interest: he was waiting to certify Mauricio’s confession of guilt.

  On reaching the height of the pulley, he felt a sharp pain running down the length of his spine. A few drops of spittle trickled from his mouth and took what seemed to him an interminable amount of time before they hit the ground. Although he was only fifty feet off the ground, it was high enough to break every bone in his body if they were to let him fall. The rope suddenly went slack and Mauricio was cast into the void. His stomach lurched. The moment he hit those cold flagstones it would all be over.

  The fall was abruptly halted just a few inches from the ground. The first sensation was one of relief, followed nearly immediately by the most atrocious pain in his shoulders and wrists. Without having time to assimilate what was happening, he was hoisted up again to the pulley in the ceiling. With his hands bound and defenseless, he had no option other than to face a pain that was becoming more than he could bear.

  “Do you wish to make a confession?” asked the notary in a velvety voice.

  He was far too weak to answer, but simply refused by shaking his head. The notary made a small gesture and Mauricio once again felt the vertigo of the fall, followed by the sudden jerking halt just as he was about to crash against the ground. He screamed until his voice disappeared into an inaudible mumble. He would never have thought it possible that such pain could even exist. Thousands of nerve ends in his sh
oulders and wrists were stabbing him mercilessly. Then everything went black around him before he fainted.

  A pail of ice-cold water thrown at his face made him regain consciousness. Lead weights had been attached to his feet and he was being hauled up again.

  “Have you thought it over?” asked the notary, mellifluously. “We are in no hurry, but perhaps you could save yourself a lot of unnecessary pain. Just a few words would do.”

  Mauricio wanted to confess anything that would put an end to the torture. However, his love for Lorena and his children was greater. He was not disposed to confess to a crime of high treason and then permit those bastards to confiscate all his properties, leaving his loved ones as sole inheritance a handful of debts and a ring that would prove difficult to sell. Mauricio swallowed his pain, although well aware he would never get out of this alive.

  The drop was repeated for a third time. It was then that he realized that his wrists and shoulders had broken. His head exploded in a flash of lightning and he disappeared into a void, affording him at last the release he so desperately craved. Mauricio woke up in a dream. He seemed to be flying over the same chamber in which he had been tortured and contemplated his own manacled body: the jailer was hurriedly throwing a pail of water over his face while the notary had risen from the chair and was walking nervously up and down. As Mauricio flew he felt no pain. Nor did he seem affected by what he was witnessing. Not very long ago, he had been that person down there, but that was in the past, because now he was dead. All his problems and yearnings were now a thing of the past. He was filled with a great feeling of lightness, to such an extent that in this new translucent form he swept through the crenellated tower of the Priors’ Palace in search of the light coming from the heavens. And as he rose, he felt lighter with each passing moment and less earthbound. Up on high, far above the clouds, a new destiny awaited him. He certainly had no wish to inhabit that broken body they were trying to reanimate in vain with water.

  What about Lorena and their children? What would become of them? How would their lives be without him? A ruined widow with four fatherless children and no economic means with which to forge a future. She would suffer so much. A feeling far stronger than his craving for peace started to fill him: love. He had to return to his family, although this meant having to go through the suffering described by Dante in the seven circles of the Inferno.

  Mauricio came out of his dream lying on his back and free of shackles. A man was kneeling beside him shaking him forcefully. He then leant over him and prodded his left wrist gently with his fingers. Afterward he delicately pulled back his eyelids, carefully examined his pupils and pronounced in a serious voice, “If you continue subjecting him to the strappado, the prisoner is sure to die.”

  “You are the doctor,” the notary said. “I think we all need a rest today. We shall continue with this interrogation as soon as the accused has recovered a little.”

  115

  Mauricio was one mass of agony. His ankles were on fire, his shoulders seemed to have blazing torches inside them, and his wrists were so painful that he would have preferred not to have any hands at all. He could find no position to alleviate the pain and he was incapable of thinking. Suffering had completely flooded his consciousness. How many hours had he been like this? It was impossible to tell. Time under these conditions had lost all meaning.

  It was nighttime when hallucinatory dreams started to haunt him. He seemed to be contemplating a solitary rose, budding in the desert.

  “Oh vain shadows save for their appearance,” said the rose, talking to him in a voice without words but resounding in his mind.

  Two crows appeared out of nowhere and pecked out his eyes. Mauricio lay his head on the palm of his hands and covered his face. When he removed them from his empty sockets, the cell was suffused in a golden light. The ground, the iron window bars, and the walls all gave off a glow more brilliant than the shiniest gold. All things vibrated and at the same time lived in God.

  “To travel far, there is no need to go from where you are,” said the rose. “You only have to change the way you look at things.”

  As if a bandage had fallen from his eyes and he could see for the first time in his life, Mauricio suddenly understood, without any need for words or reasoning.

  “Light, light, more light,” whispered Mauricio. “The light of God is everywhere but we do not see it. Since we were small we have always managed to seclude ourselves in a room and cover up the windows. As time goes by, we grow accustomed to the darkness and the Devil encourages us to go through life accompanied by this obscurity.”

  Mauricio remembered how many times he had been afflicted by a nightmare in which he brutally murdered a faceless woman. On other occasions he had woken up in alarm with the image of a beautiful young woman bleeding to death. Finally he had discovered that the dead woman he used to dream about was his mother and he was her murderer. Why had this macabre dream constantly haunted him?

  “Because it was a shadow, the shadow you must follow like Ariadne’s thread, if you want to get out of the labyrinth and escape death yourself.”

  Mauricio plunged fearlessly into the depths of his interior ocean before voicing his thoughts out loud.

  “Did I keep the fact I had killed my mother inside because I preferred to feel that I was bad instead of impotent, incapable of avoiding her death? Did that dreamlike fantasy respond to a desperate attempt on my part to maintain control of something that was slipping through my fingers? Or did I simply think it was unjust that she should die so that I could live?”

  “Guilt, Mauricio, is the great pitfall that isolates us from God. To assume one’s own errors and try and improve is one thing: children do it naturally when they learn to walk. To feel guilty is something totally different, because it implies hating oneself. Especially when it is about something for which one is not responsible.”

  “Light, light, more light,” muttered Mauricio.

  “Yes, that is what the ring says. But it can only be seen by those who cast aside the fear of change, of death, and of God. The majority of humanity lives in darkness and prefers to stay that way, for with the apparition of light, their shadows would be revealed and they would discover who they truly are.”

  “Are we not who we think we are?” asked Mauricio.

  “We prefer to disguise ourselves with a false personality so that our true selves, who yearn to love, gather knowledge and create, remain hidden. We have become accustomed to live with our anxieties and suffering, vaguely fearing that if the light were to rip the curtain asunder, it might reveal the most horrible monsters. However these monsters are none other than mistaken judgments and decisions that one would expect more from immature and insecure children. Behind that vague fear lies hidden the dread of dying. What remains of anyone when the light has revealed that the person with whom one has identified all one’s life turns out to be a fiction?”

  “The terror of being unmasked,” admitted Mauricio, “is always with me, even in my dreams.”

  “Because your body is like a receptacle, accumulating all the tears shed by your ancestors, whether they were of joy or pain, also all their desires, frustrations, and fears. Together with your individual soul coexists a veritable family constellation. The Hebrew blood running through your veins has suffered endless persecutions since the beginning of time, and in order to survive has often had to hide its faith and identity. Imagine the terror of someone who has to live constantly hiding his true countenance from his masters, neighbors, clients, and even family members. This anxiety eventually becomes a second skin that suffuses all the deeds and words of someone who has to protect themselves constantly, without letting up for a moment. It is not strange, therefore, that you have inherited a great fear of being discovered. You have to find the courage of a seed that has left its protective shell, goes into the earth, and is reborn into a flower. All that is born must die. Everything that dies is born. You are me. I am you. It is only the illusion of time that separates
us. I know that you will heal not only your personal history, but also that of the family tree from which we originate, for while it is sick you will be unable to be reborn within me.”

  “My parents and grandparents are dead! The task you propose is impossible.”

  “This is untrue. There is something you can do: give back the ring you brought from Barcelona and your family history will be cured.”

  Mauricio felt that everything that surrounded him grew dark before waking up in the cell. The lacerating pain in his body reminded him that it had all been a dream. However in the midst of his agony, a sweet premonition in his heart filled him with a conviction that there was still some hope. “If I ever manage to get out of this, I promise to return the ring,” he said to himself.

  116

  Lorena gave a sigh of relief when Antonio Rinuccini let her know that he would take on the defense of her husband. His fame as the most eminent lawyer in Florence was well deserved and he only accepted those cases he was sure of winning. His expertise, together with his unsurpassable sources of information, had earned him the reputation of being invincible, to such an extent that the majority of his opponents preferred to negotiate out of court rather than face certain defeat at the hands of this legal eagle. In exchange for his skills, he only demanded a small fortune from his clients.

  “The fact that I am risking my reputation by defending your husband against the all-powerful Signoria is because we have a good chance of winning. I have managed to find out that the only evidence against Mauricio is a letter, supposedly addressed to Piero de Medici. This document is a forgery and we shall prove this with the opinion of the most skilled calligraphic experts in Florence.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Lorena taking on the role of the devil’s advocate, “I fear that the members of the Signoria have already decided beforehand that Mauricio is guilty.”