The Madonna of the Almonds

by Marina Fiorato

  CHAPTER 17

  Gregorio Changes Simonetta’s Life

  Once Again

  Gregorio di Puglia had been drinking again. Since the winter had begun to bite, he had abandoned his outdoor tasks and spent much of his days sitting in the kitchens of the Villa Castello watching Raffaella work. The kitchens were the only warm place in the house as the great fire burned there all day. The huge brick ovens that once roared for hours to prepare the sumptuous feasts of the house were now blackened and empty; the homes to kites and cranes that nested there, riming the blackened bricks with their frost-white leavings.

  So Gregorio sat at the board while Raffaella scattered flour on the table to knead the meagre dough for the bread. Snow, it fell like snow – the snow he did not wish to remember. Gregorio drank again, deeply, from his ashen cup. There was still little to eat in the villa but Gregorio managed to make his own grappa using grape seeds and a primitive still he had constructed in the treasure cellar. The resulting brew was clear white, evil smelling and burned the throat, but Gregorio used it to numb his days.

  Raffaella helped too – she was a handsome girl and had comforted him well this year. But today not even the sight of her breasts juddering as she kneaded the dough could comfort him. He knew why of course. It was a year ago today that he had fought side by side with his lord, and his lord had died and he had lived.

  Had he but known it, Gregorio shared much with Simonetta, the mistress he knew little of. He too had felt a crushing guilt for the past year, and he too had doubted his own fidelity to Lorenzo. For could he not, by some different stance, a new action or displaced turn of the sword, have saved the man that he loved like a brother? Could he not have thrown himself in front of the salvo of lead that felled Lorenzo? In his cups he felt that he had done all he could by his lord, and became sentimental as he remembered that it was an arquebus that had taken him. But in the light of day, as his head ached in the grey dawn, his conscience pricked him, and he knew that by the rules of chivalry he should have laid down his life before Lorenzo expired. They had fought together so often, and joked together on the road many a time as their horses kept pace. They had shared their sups from the same bowl and even shared a bed in the field, rolling their mats together for warmth. There had been nothing of the great lord about Lorenzo – the two boys were the same age and they had grown together as brothers. Gregorio’s father had been the squire to Lorenzo’s father, and Gregorio had known Lorenzo longer than his young wife had known him. Lorenzo would admit no difference between them, and had taught Gregorio to read and write as he himself had been taught. His lady, on the other hand, had always had more of the aristocrat about her. When Lorenzo had married and brought Simonetta to Castello, Gregorio had been put out. In the rules of courtly love he knew that the love of squire and a lord was a bond that could never be broken, yet Lorenzo’s devotion to the beautiful willowy maid had ruptured their partnership for a time, replacing their knightly ideal with the sweets of earthly, marital love. And yet Lorenzo had come back; soon they were at war again, and back on the road, traversing Lombardy and beyond in the name of the cause, any cause, for Lorenzo’s love of warfare grew with the wealth his marriage brought. Soon the two young men were together as they always had been.

  Gregorio knew Simonetta only a little. She had seemed shy and distant, but in the wake of Lorenzo’s death he had found warmth in her, they had united in grief and anger and he respected her and began to like her as never before. With the object of their devotion gone, they came together, and Raffaella’s love for her mistress, which had blossomed in the absence of the men, had only served to improve his thoughts of her. Simonetta had shown herself to be brave and courageous in their new circumstances, and although Gregorio could not approve her new alliance with the Jew, she did seem to have some scheme afoot to save Castello and the family name – Lorenzo’s name. So today he thought well of the dame, and knew she suffered too.

  In his maudlin state, to block out the snow and the blood of his memory, he made a clumsy grab for Raffaella’s breasts and the comfort she knew well how to give. Raffaella, dividing the bread, slapped him away leaving a floury mark to frost his swordhand. ‘Leave me be. This must be done before my Mistress returns, or else there’ll be naught for the wake tonight.’

  For Simonetta had planned a vigil for the evening, for the three of them to sit up with candles and pray for Lorenzo. The bread, to be made in the shape of the cross, was to remember his passing and pray for his resurrection. Gregorio grumbled. He felt the need for bedsport to warm his bones and his heart. ‘Where has she gone, on such a day?’

  ‘Where?’ Raffaella wiped her hand across her brow and blew a strand of dark hair from her eyes. It settled across her forehead like a cut. Memory pricked Gregorio again – one such he had taken there, a cut to pucker his noble brow. ‘Where do ye think she has gone? To the church, you piss-pot, to pray for her dead lord. Mayhap you should do the same.’ Raffaella had no time for Gregorio today. He was testing her patience with his hangdog looks, and she tired of him. She loved him well enough but today she wished him out from under her feet.

  Gregorio rose unsteadily. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’ll go there too, and pray for the best man I ever knew.’

  Raffaella was sorry at once. For she knew he had loved his lord indeed. ‘Aye, go,’ she said more softly, ‘and bring our lady home safe, for it freezes outside.’

  So, once again, Gregorio took the Castello path. A year had brought its differences though. Last year he had headed towards the house, and this year he headed away from it. Last year he had known full well that he was about to change Simonetta’s life forever. This time he did not know. This year Gregorio di Puglia went to the church where he had stood up with Lorenzo to see him wed, to say masses for his beloved master’s soul. Again he found his Lady di Saronno, not to see her weeping at a window, but on the chancel steps of her marriage church, in the passionate embrace of another man.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Favourite Painting of the Cardinal

  of Milan

  Gabriel Solis de Gonzales, Bishop of Toledo and self-styled Cardinal of Milan, was a lover of art, when the casual cruelties of his calling allowed him the leisure to study it. He appreciated the composition of Fernando Gallego, the brush work of Luis Dalmau and the perspective skills of Pedro Berruguete in the cities of his homeland. And, since his arrival on the Italian peninsula, he had developed a particular fondness for the work of Paolo Uccello. But since Uccello had had the bad manners to die before the Cardinal himself was in a position to commission religious art, he had to bring to preferment the likes of Bernardino Luini. In execution Luini perhaps surpassed Uccello, even if he was less enlightened as regarded subject matter. Still, his style was certainly superior. The Cardinal amused himself with a self-important dissection of Luini’s influences; the lunar tints of Bergognone’s neo-Gothicism contrasted pleasingly with the full-bodied luminous realism of Foppa, with perhaps a hint of the archaeological Classicism of Bramantino? Yes, Luini had certainly been the author of some impressive works, notably at the Abbazia in Chiaravalle, where his skills had first been brought to the Cardinal’s notice. His work there made him just the man for a job that the Cardinal had in mind. It was no small task – that of bringing the faith back to a region that had sickened with accidia, the sin of idleness in religion.

  After the expulsion of the Jews from the kingdoms of Spain, given the choice of conversion or exile, it had been natural for them to settle here, in the newly Spanish province of Milan. This second invasion troubled the Cardinal and was part of the reason why he had wanted a fresco here in the heart of it all, to promote the devotion of the Lombards. Lombardy was a melting pot, and had been ever since the 1230s when the Lombards had given sanctuary to the Cathars and the place had become a stronghold of heresy. Now, centuries later, there was a crisis in faith because of the war – after human tragedy the ignorant always questioned God – but more of a concern to the Cardinal was this in
flux of undesirables. An ill wind had blown them from Spain along with the army. The Cardinal covered his mouth with his ringed hands at the thought, as if to keep the miasma out. They had come here on the winds like a pestilence; they had been carried on the ships like a plague. And the Church had not stopped them. Canon law allowed them here on condition that they would lend money to Christians. The Cardinal knew not whether Bernardino Luini was truly devout, but in point of fact the character of the artist mattered little so long as his work inspired devotion. His Master Leonardo was known in the court of the Sforzas, equally reputed as a visionary and a lunatick.

  So, on the way to the Inaugural mass of the frescoes of the Sanctuary church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli in Saronno, the Cardinal let his mind wander to another church in Urbino, where one climbed the hill to the great doors, and entered the incensed dark. In the spicy warmth one walked the nave to the altar, stopping to genuflect before the altar. And above the altar, a wonder of wonders. The Miracle of the Profaned Host, the Cardinal’s favourite painting. Uccello’s depiction, with its scene of Jews burning at the stake, was so striking, so elaborately painted in its presentation of the Host’s desecration that one could feel the heat of the fire and smell the scorching flesh of the Infidel. There as a young man and a foreigner, lately given preferment to the Vatican, he had gone to Urbino to look on this new masterpiece. As the colours and golds of the painting shone out of the dark, the young Cardinal Solis de Gonzales had had a truly religious experience. For in a barren, scorched landscape, under a black sky and a tree that grew stars, a Jew in a red hat and tunic and blue hose looked down in agony as the flames licked his feet. Lower in the flames, almost consumed, burned two golden-haired children dressed in black. Ten men and four horses stood and watched the conflagration with expressions as detached as that of the young Cardinal that looked on them now, straining his neck as he raised his head to see better, get closer. He tipped his head as if drinking it in, as if swallowing the blood, the very Transubstantiated blood that the Jews sullied. If he could have mounted a ladder, a black ladder like the one in the painting, the one that led to the tree and the angel that flew above to bear witness, he would have climbed it and pressed his face against the paint in an orgy of religious and sadistic ecstasy. (Later, analysing the moment as was his way, the Cardinal wondered if in the depiction of the auto da fe he had been reminded of home.) Depicted above the scene of burning Jews, Duke Federigo da Montefeltro and his entourage appear in the background of the altarpiece’s upper panel. The Cardinal approved of the Duke and his sense of the proper proportion of the relative challenges to the Christian way of life on the peninsula. For he placed external threats, specifically, the invasion of Ottoman Turks, below the concerns of internal adversary, the local Jews. A city purged of those elements would, in the Cardinal’s view, be a Utopia indeed. This pictorialized purgation should, in his view be reflected in reality in every city and town of the peninsula, just as it was in the old country. What was symbolic should become real, and the blasphemous act of the desecration of the Host should be revenged.

  He had seen the painting as a young man, and had never forgotten it. His hair and beard had silvered, his eyes grown weaker, but he could still see the predella in his mind’s eye. His younger acolytes revered him as he came to resemble a painter’s depiction of God, but in truth he had no goodness in him. Hatred of the Jews had consumed him, and painted his heart a darker hue. The Cardinal was no advocate of Martin Luther – the fellow had done as much harm as good in this so-called Reformation of his. But on one point at least Luther had been right – in a letter to the Cardinal’s friend Reverend Spalatin of Genoa he had written:

  ‘I have come to the conclusion that the Jews will always curse and blaspheme God and his King Christ, as all the prophets have predicted….’

  But he could not bring himself to agree with the continuing sentiments;

  ‘For they are thus given over by the wrath of God to reproba tion, that they may become incorrigible, as Ecclesiastes says, for every one who is incorrigible is rendered worse rather than better by correction.’

  Cardinal Solis de Gonzales believed in the correction of the incorrigible, and he meant to see it done.

  As it had been done in Spain.

  Such were his pleasing reflections as he entered Saronno in his litter, accompanied by his guards in their scarlet livery. He could expect no such invective in the frescoes here, but it still pleased him to see his faith reflected in fine painting, and he felt as satisfied with the work he had commissioned as if he had painted it himself. He waved his jewelled ring from the window of his litter in a limpid gesture at the citizens that lined the streets to see the spectacle it pleased him to create. Some cheered in a desultory fashion. He scanned the crowds negligently with pity and contempt. They could not resist a procession, ’twas an awesome sight in these times of penury; an almond to a parrot. He knew the Jews had settled here, but was satisfied there would be none on the streets today, as he had had it proclaimed that he wished to impose a curfew, that all Infidels were to stay indoors as he passed.

  One was there to witness his coming, though. He stood at the back of the crowd, silent as others cheered, under the disguise of a cowl. His light grey eyes, the grey of the cold sea he had crossed to come here, looked on the litter and at the face of its occupant. He knew the Cardinal, and the Cardinal knew him. Had the Cardinal examined the watchers with real scrutiny, instead of being lost in the imagined images of his favourite painting, he might have seen the cloaked figure turn away as he passed, and the cloak parted by the wind to display a glint of gold.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Faceless Virgin

  Simonetta’s senses failed her.

  She could hear the words of the mass being intoned but she barely heard what was said. She barely saw the Cardinal and his entourage as they made their jewel-encrusted progress up the nave. She could not smell the incense nor taste the moon-white Host as it was pressed to her tongue. She could not raise her eyes from the cup as she tasted the blood of Christ at the altar. She could still feel though, oh yes. She was not spared those sensations. The imprint of Bernardino’s hot mouth on hers lay on her lips like the bruise of red wine. She raised her long fingers to her mouth to wipe him away, to erase the stain of treachery. She was bowed under by shame.

  She had come here to pray, for her sins were great. How could she have let him kiss her – on the very steps where she had pledged her troth to Lorenzo? The remembrance that he had kissed her first was no comfort – she could not forget that her lips had opened under his, that their tongues had touched, that she had sunk into his embrace. She had held him hard and gratefully, feeling happiness that she had forgotten. Not even that – happiness which, if she was honest with herself, she knew she had never had. This realisation had made her break away at last. She had run from him then, sobbing, and would not go back. She had pushed past a figure in the doorway, but had not seen the worshipper’s face, blinded as she was by tears of mortification. Bernardino had followed her but she had ridden fast, heedless of the icy paths that threatened the legs of her horse. The snow flew in her face but could not cool the burning blush of her cheeks.

  Simonetta spent a long sleepless night of tears and regret, but reached a decision as dawn greyed the skies. She knew he would seek her out, and that she would not have the strength to send him away. So she must go to the church again, in the safety of numbers, to brave him one last time, and tell him that they could not be together. The notions of seeing him again and never seeing him again were equally painful. And to sit here, now, in the world of colour and holiness that he had created for the church, was torture indeed. To bear witness to his miraculous talent, and to know such a man wanted her, was almost more than she could bear. A huge reliquary had been placed before the figure of the Madonna – her figure – by the tactful Anselmo, who knew not of the incident but just that the Virgin was not finished. Behind the monstrance which held a fragment of the True Cross, s
at the Queen of Heaven without a face. Anselmo thought that only three people would know of this fact, but in fact there were four. Simonetta shivered. She knew that Bernardino was at the back of the church, prowling like a cur. She could feel his eyes on her, and tears burned her throat.

  He moved from one side of the apse to the other switching back and back on himself as a wolf weaves in a figure of eight. He was more than usually anxious for the mass to end. He must speak to her. He was consumed by impatience but also joy and anticipation. She must know, as he now knew, that she loved him. The kiss had told him, it had told both of them. Now he had found the centre of his life. His ills were healed. The discordant note that had sounded in his heart had found its true cadence and sounded a sweet chord in his soul. His head was full of poetry; his body was full of heat. He could not wait to possess her – all must give way before their love. Not for Bernardino the troubadour’s notion of courtly love; all sighings and moanings in vain for a distant lady-love who could never be truly possessed. Simonetta’s distress, her scruples, her husband and her God could be nothing to them. They would live as in the old days in the old ways, when the pagans could not hear the songs of Holy choirs but only the thrumming of their blood. There was no heaven to hope for, no afterlife. Heaven was here, and when they died their bones would be dust to lie together in the earth for eternity.