“What if you went to Florence . . .” His pause was long and very grave. “. . . disguised as a man?”
“A man?”
“A young man.” He was thinking as he spoke. “You are thirty-one. As a male you would look twenty, perhaps. Luckily, men are clean-shaven these days.” He was regarding me intensely as he spoke. “And you are tall, so your height alone will not give you away. Of course you would practice lowering your voice.”
I was staring at him gape-mouthed, but my excitement was rising as the possibilities became clear to me. “Twenty is young for a fully trained apothecary,” I reasoned, “but I might say I was setting up shop for my uncle and master . . . who is soon to follow.” The rest seemed suddenly logical. “My uncle could grow ill and die . . . but by then my customers would trust me.”
I saw him begin to waver, as though he suddenly realized how insane was his idea. I sat down next to him on the bench and took one of his hands in mine.
“How can I approve of this?” he said solemnly.
“Do you approve of me being separated from my only child?” I asked. “Do you approve of my wasting away before your eyes? Do you approve of my endless grief ?”
“Caterina . . .”
“It is the only way. I cannot ask you to leave Vinci. And you’re right, it is madness trying to live a free life in Florence as a woman alone.”
He closed his eyes, comprehending the enormity of it all. Then he said quietly, “I own a house in Florence.”
“What?”
His brows furrowed. “Poggio’s bequest. It’s been so many years, I’d almost forgotten. When my master died, he left me his already deceased father’s apothecary in Florence, and the residence above it. It never passed through my mind either to inhabit or sell it. The place has been sitting idle for years. If it is still there, it will be a rattrap.”
“Will you write and discover its condition?” I said, hardly believing this stroke of luck.
He did not answer immediately. But now my determination had taken hold.
“Papa, please. You love me as I love Leonardo,” I said. “How can you say no?”
Of course he had not said no, and our mad plan began immediately to take shape.
The guise we had chosen for me was that of a young city scholar. This meant a round-necked robe, pleated at the shoulders, hanging straight and untied at the waist to below the knee. Beneath were a shirt and hose. On my feet would be round-toed felt slippers with a strap across the instep. My breasts would have to be bound.
With the suffering of three years past having rent from me all appetite for food, the female curves had melted from my body. My cheeks were gaunt, and only the muscles in my limbs, worked hard in everyday labor, remained firm and healthy.
The small risings that had once been breasts the size of large Spanish oranges needed little in the way of hiding. Aunt Magdalena had wanted to help me, but I’d refused, saying that I would have to learn to do the binding and unbinding of them with a broad strip of cotton myself, for it was alone that I meant to live.
Of my womanly functions I was, ironically, free. My menses had stopped, as if to say, “What use do you have of me anymore?”
It was strange and rather awful having to cut my hair. My father did it for me, shaping it into the pageboy’s length and style just touching my shoulders. This was how scholarly boys wore it, having borrowed it from the courtly lads of fashion. But the high, rounded, flat-topped cap required to finish the costume of a scholar ruined the stylishness of the haircut. It was a small price to pay to carry off my ruse.
In the end I made more than a passable young man. If you had put me in a brown robe and tonsured my head I would have been taken as a proper religious ascetic.
Perfect. Except that I was a heretic.
It was my day of leavetaking.
By candlelight, as I was making my final preparations to leave, Papa placed before the front door a good-sized casket. It had, in fact, been my mother’s wedding chest, beautifully painted, as the custom was, with birds and flowers.
I looked at him questioningly and he lifted his chin to say I should open it. Inside were the most precious of his hand-copied manuscripts. Books that had educated him. The same books that had educated me, and Leonardo as well.
“You cannot mean to do this, Papa,” I said, my eyes filling with tears I had so far refused to let fall.
“I’ve read them all. A hundred times. I can recite them in my sleep. And I’ve kept enough for myself. But you will need the books, Caterina. To continue your studies. And when you are in the company of the great men of Florence . . .”
“I, in the company of great . . . ?”
“When that happens,” he insisted, “these manuscripts will be your currency, more valuable than a pile of gold florins.”
That he believed in me so profoundly—his skinny, shorn, pitifully flat-hatted boy-scholar—wrenched a sob from my throat.
“None of that,” he said sternly. “The only men in Florence who allow themselves to weep are rich men felled by cupid’s arrows, ones who write poetry to their unrequited loves. You are a tradesman. ‘Cato the Apothecary.’”
We had agreed on my old nickname, as much for the similarity to my own name as by his fondness for the Roman statesman and philosopher.
I wiped the wetness from my cheeks and put on the red hat. When he straightened it I saw tears brimming in his eyes, but he held them back. He stooped and picked up the casket of books.
I peeked out the front door and found the street as deserted as the church cemetery at midnight. He placed the chest in the cart and said good-bye to his mule, who had served him well for so many years.
“Go on,” he said to me, “before the light comes.”
We did not embrace. After all, I was no more than a young scholar passing through the village who had visited the local apothecary. An elaborate scheme involving a sick aunt in a distant village had been devised to explain my sudden absence from Vinci. Caterina, daughter of Ernesto, had been an outcast, a persona non grata, for so long that no one would have cared anyway.
“I will write,” I said and, taking up the donkey’s reins, turned, catching the last glimpse of my father.
“Beloved daughter,” I heard him say before clattering hooves drowned out his voice.
That morning I stole away from the only home I had ever known. Left behind my father, the house I was born in, a mountain village that had showered me first with love, then with scorn . . . and my sex. There was no doubt that of all of these I would miss my father most. The house was a house. Vinci, like any other small town, was filled with men and women quite as willing to be cruel as be kind. As for my sex, aside from getting Leonardo from it, when had it ever brought me joy?
I was very grateful, though, on a day of such deep severing that Nature had gifted me with warmth, just a few wispy clouds and enough breeze to cool my brow. As I made my way down the steep path away from the hilltop church, the castle with its ancient wall, and the houses that called themselves Vinci, I questioned my own sanity. Had melancholy so unbalanced me that I would do such a thing as this? No. That was impossible. Papa would have taken me in hand and stopped me.
But this elderly mule pulling the cart, were he to have an opinion, might have thought otherwise. Poor old Xenophon, trussed to the rickety carriage and led by the mouth by me, groaned with his heavy load. When the sun finally rose and I was visible to him, I thought he was eyeing me oddly. “Who is this stranger with my mistress’s scent but the look of a lad?” I imagined him thinking.
My male disguise was a misery in two parts. The first was how cloistered I felt in the coarse gray wool tunic, with a fringe of white shirt beneath showing through at the neck. Second, and worse, was the fear of my disguise’s failure—discovery that a Tuscan village woman was daring to deny her very sex and take up residence in the great city as a man, and a businessman at that.
But here I was. There was no turning back. And in truth, the adventure
of it all was just beginning to dawn on me.
The road east from Vinci to Florence hugging the south bank of the river from Empoli to La Lastra was better than the north, which was hardly a horse trail. The farmers with their summer crops, and merchants bringing their cargos of raw wool and silk from the seaside port of Pisa to the city of fashion that Florence was, clogged the by-way, so I was never alone.
Some fellow travelers were friendly, the farmers especially. They wished for conversation, gossip mostly, news from whatever town you’d just come from. Still nervous and unprepared to launch myself into the wide world as a man, I pretended shyness, and instead of talking waved and smiled and quickly lowered my head as though I had a great deal on my mind.
By my calculations and my father’s map I was roughly two-thirds of the way to Florence when night fell. I pulled my cart and mule from the road and under a tree I made a crude bed for myself, with no fire. Though exhausted, I was barely able to sleep, and when the first rays of sun fell on my face I was up and moving.
As my grunting beast rounded a river curve I received the greatest shock of my life—first sight of the city of Florence, its enormous cathedral dome and three high towers squarely centered in a sea of red rooftops. Even the mule was stunned into stopping, his weary eyes fastened on this odd vista.
I prodded Xenophon to go, as my excitement had in that instant multiplied tenfold, so much so that my terror subsided a fraction. As we hurried on, more features of the great city revealed themselves. The river as it passed through it, more congested on the left bank than the right, was encircled by a wall of red ochre, its thickness ten feet or more, with a dozen stone guard towers remaining, placed all along its length.
Now I could see a few huge castles in the hills on the south side of the river, and to the north in Florence itself, amidst what had seemed at a distance an even mat of rooftops and churches of which there were more than a hundred, giant edifices that dwarfed even a three-story house. These must be the city palazzos of the wealthy families, the nobles and the famous merchants, bankers and lawyers whose true religion, Papa had told me, was commerce, not the Catholic church.
It was not until I passed a portion of the outer wall and came to the westernmost bridge crossing the Arno that I realized my time of reckoning had truly come. I could still turn back, spare myself the humiliation, and the jail sentence, and perhaps even torture I would suffer if I was found out to be a woman living as a man.
I admit I did pause at the brink of the Ponte alla Carraia. I watched the traffic fascinated, as I had never seen a bridge wide enough for two carriages to pass each other. Realizing the moment had come, I gave Xenophon a tug, and the cart lurched after us. We joined the procession of commerce and thus entered our new life in “the city that ruled the world.”
CHAPTER 8
Once I had left the bustle of the bridge I found to my great surprise that the streets, both wide and narrow, were strangely quiet, almost altogether deserted. The houses, I could see, had been built many years before of gray or honey brown sandstone, and were attached, one to the other. Many of their third or fourth stories jutted out farther over the thoroughfares than their street or first floors, and the upper windows and loggias were, almost every one, gaily decorated in some way. There were brightly colored banners and flags, tapestries and family crests, long garlands of flowers, and even long braids of cloth of silver or gold. Yet there were no young ladies sitting in the covered balconies flirting with young gentlemen below in the streets, as my father had told me was the custom in Florence.
But as my mule and I clattered the cobbles of Via Borgo Ognissanti, past the church of Santa Trinita and along the river road, a sound was coming clearer and louder to our ears. While it slowed the beast, it only made my heart beat faster and pulled me ahead with excitement. It was a sound I had never heard in my life—the sound of human voices screaming and cheering, what must have been an enormous crowd, and the clattering of hundreds of hooves on stone, all of it at once.
As we approached even closer the mule’s eyes went wide, and with a final ungainly rearing he sat down on his hind legs. He had had enough. I was close to the piazza and desperate to behold its excitements, but I was certain I could not make the animal budge from his terrified posture. Everything I owned was in the cart. Did I dare leave it unattended in this strange city, surely teeming with thieves and ruffians?
I made my decision. I had seen barely a soul since I’d left the bridge. I surmised that if there were thieves and pickpockets, they would be wandering amidst the crowds doing their dirty work, not roaming deserted streets. I would count on the gods of good fortune and leave my possessions only long enough to catch a glimpse of what lay up ahead in the yard of Piazza di Santa Croce—the city’s largest square. I tried soothing Xenophon with a gentle hand on his snout and a look into his bugged eyes, then hurried forward, turning the last corner.
The spectacle before me was more wonderful than even my florid imagination could have conceived.
It appeared that every inhabitant of Florence was in the square, some sitting in risers on two sides, and the whole of the piazza, with the exception of a horse track around its perimeter, was jammed cheek by jowl with people in their Sunday best. The horses of the pallio, judging by the rising crescendo of voices, were in their last lap of the famous race, and as the roar of the hooves came closer I actually caught a glimpse of the horses’ heads—mad eyes and foaming mouths, their riders arrayed in gaudy guild and neighborhood colors, slung low along their mounts’ necks, whipping them or whispering encouragement.
A moment later a roar of both triumph and defeat rose to a deafening roar and the crowd surged madly, moving to fill in the racetrack and surround the winner of the pallio.
I found myself shaken, paralyzed, my heart thumping hard against my chest.
I was dearly tempted to stay and join the celebration, but I desired more to find my new home. Seeing the way there congested with revelers, I found that I could only move west again before moving north. My father’s map, admittedly rough—he had not been to Florence in so many years—proved to be true.
I presently found myself in the Piazza della Signoria, where, unlike the largely deserted street, there was much activity. It was being prepared for some other large celebration. None of the workers—carpenters hammering a platform under the long loggia of the Palazzo della Signoria, the seat of Tuscan government, nor the men hanging gay banners, or the ones upending tall flagpoles into holes set into the perimeter of the stone square—took any notice of the wide-eyed young man, his donkey and cart, as they passed. They all talked or shouted to each other as they worked, exchanging good-natured insults and witticisms, a trait that my father had told me was common to Florentines. They were proud to be intelligent, well-spoken and shrewd. Even to people of the lower classes, the greatest sin of all was stupidity.
I saw near the piazza’s edge a pile of hay, and taking pity on Xenophon, I led him to it. As he began to eat I found myself suddenly squirming. I steeled myself and went to a man lifting a heavy board onto the risers he was building.
“I’m new to the city. I have to relieve myself,” I told him quietly.
“Piss?” he said.
I nodded.
“Over there.” He was pointing to the alley wall. I cursed myself, worried that I had sounded like a woman.
I walked to the farthest end of the wall and turned my back on the man, whose suspicious eyes I imagined were boring into me. Then, lifting my tunic, I unhooked from its lace around my waist the small horn-shaped device that my father had fashioned for me. Cupping the large end over my naked vulva, I held my breath and urinated. The water I made moved blessedly and without leakage from the catch-cup to the smaller spigot, allowing for the stream of piss to shoot in a manly fashion against the wall.
The carpenter must have been satisfied, for when I turned back to my cart the man was back at work. I went to my contented-looking mule.
“You have eaten,”
I whispered to him. “And I have publicly pissed. Do you not think we’ve done well for our first hours in Florence?”
As if in answer he made a grunting sound deep in his throat, one that made me smile. The beginning of a great adventure, I thought. I was in Florence, and somewhere amidst the teeming throngs was the reason I had come.
Leonardo. My darling son.
In the cathedral square, the Duomo’s enormous cupola boggled my imagination. I could see the Campanile and across the way the famous Baptistery, which had stood in that spot since Julius Caesar built it in Roman times. These sights called out to me to stop and stare at their awesomeness and importance. But I wanted desperately to find my new home and some privacy.
Moving out the Via de Servi and turning right on the Via Riccardi, I found myself on a long block of four-story houses, the street very narrow but clean. Nowhere so far had I found sewage running in gutters, nor pigs and dogs rooting around in kitchen garbage thrown from upper windows. Like all the other buildings I had seen since entering Florence, the houses were of light brown and gray stone, and their façades were uniformly modest, as though their inhabitants wanted no one to know whether what lay inside was rich or poor. It was a preposterous Florentine pretension of humility. For it was always said, “Better to be a Tuscan than an Italian. Better yet to be a Florentine than a Tuscan.”
I reached the spot my father had marked on his map, and sure enough, just in the middle of a long block, set between a prosperous-looking bakery and a residence with a stout metal-studded door, was a gray stone building, its storefront nailed up with rotting boards. Its first-story windows were boarded as well, and the jutting second- and third-floor wooden loggias looked ready to fall down on my head.
Wasting no time, I went back the way I’d come, carefully counting the number of houses from the corner, then led my animal to the alley behind it. “Almost there, my friend,” I said. There were stone walls interspersed at every house with a back gate, and I remembered to count, as a mistaken entry into the wrong garden would result in an unwanted commotion.
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