by Rice, Anne
“Don’t you leave me, either of you, you can’t!” I said to the angels.
They seemed perplexed, their lovely folded gossamer robes unstained by rain, the hems clean and shining as if they had not touched the street, and their bare feet looking so exquisitely tender as they followed at our pace.
“All right,” said Setheus. “Don’t worry so, Vittorio. We’re coming.”
“We can’t simply leave our charge like this for another man, we can’t do it,” Ramiel continued to protest.
“It’s God’s will; how can it be otherwise?”
“And Mastema? We don’t have to ask Mastema?” asked Ramiel.
“Why should we ask Mastema? Why bring care to Mastema? Mastema must know.”
And there they were, arguing again, behind us, as I was hurried through the street.
The steel sky gleamed, then grew pale and gave way above to blue as we came to an open piazza. The sun shocked me, and made me sicken, yet how I wanted it, how I longed for it, and yet it rebuked me and seemed to scourge me as if it were a whip.
We were only a little ways from San Marco. My legs would soon give out. I kept looking over my shoulder.
The two lustrous, gilded figures came on, silently, with Setheus gesturing for me to go along.
“We’re here, we’re with you,” said Setheus.
“I don’t know about this, I don’t know!” said Ramiel. “Filippo has never been in such trouble, he has never been subjected to such temptation, such indignity—.”
“Which is why we have been drawn off now, so that we do not interfere with what must take place with Filippo. We know we were on the very verge of getting into trouble on account of Filippo and what Filippo has done now. Oh, Filippo, I see this, I see the grand design.”
“What are they talking about?” I demanded of the men. “They’re saying something about Fra Filippo.”
“And who would that be, who is talking, may I ask?” said the old man, shaking his head as he escorted me along, the young madman in his charge with the clanking sword.
“My boy, be quiet now,” said the other man, who took the larger burden of supporting me. “We can understand you only too well now, and you are making less sense than ever, talking to people that no one can see and hear.”
“Fra Filippo, the painter, what’s happening with him?” I demanded. “There’s some trouble.”
“Oh, it is unbearable,” said the angel Ramiel behind me. “It is unthinkable that this should happen. And if you ask me, which no one has and no one will, I believe that if Florence were not at war with Venice, Cosimo de’ Medici would protect his painter from this.”
“But protect him from what?” I demanded. I looked into the eyes of the old man.
“Son, obey me,” said the old man. “Walk straight, and stop banging me with that sword. You are a great Signore, I can see this, and the name of the Raniari rings loud in my ears from the distant mountains of Tuscany, and the gold on your right hand alone weighs more than the dowry of both of my daughters put together, not to mention the gems, but don’t shout in my face.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. It’s only, the angels won’t say precisely.”
The other man who led me so kindly, who helped me honestly with the saddlebags in which was my fortune, and did not even seek to steal anything from me, began to speak:
“If you’re asking about Fra Filippo, he’s deep into trouble again. He’s being put to the torture. He’s on the rack.”
“No, that can’t happen, not to Filippo Lippi!” I stopped dead and shouted. “Who would do such a thing to the great painter?”
I turned, and the two angels suddenly covered their faces, as tenderly as ever Ursula had covered hers, and they started weeping. Only their tears were marvelously crystalline and clear. They merely looked at me. Oh, Ursula, I thought with excruciating pain suddenly, how beautiful are these creatures, and in what grave do you sleep beneath the Court of the Ruby Grail that you cannot see them, cannot see their silent secret progress through the city streets?
“It’s true,” said Ramiel. “It’s all too terribly true. What have we been, what sort of guardians, that Filippo has gotten himself into this trouble, that he is so contentious and deceiving, and why have we been so helpless?”
“We are only angels,” said Setheus. “Ramiel, we do not have to accuse Filippo. We are not accusers, we are guardians, and for the sake of the boy who loves him, don’t say such things.”
“They can’t torture Fra Filippo Lippi,” I cried out. “Who did he deceive?”
“He did it to himself,” said the old man. “He’s into fraud this time. He sold off a commission, and everybody knows that one of his apprentices painted too much of the work. He’s been put on the rack, but he didn’t really get hurt.”
“Didn’t really hurt him! He’s only magnificent!” I said. “You tell me they tortured him. Why was he tortured, how can anyone justify such a stupidity, such an insult, it’s an insult to the Medici.”
“Silence, child; he confessed,” said the younger of the two mortal men. “It’s almost over. Some monk if you ask me, Fra Filippo Lippi; if he isn’t chasing women, he’s in a brawl.”
We had come to San Marco. We stood in the Piazza San Marco right before the doors of the monastery, which were flush with the street, as was the case with all such buildings in Florence, as if the Arno never overflowed its banks, which it did. And I was glad, oh, so glad to see this haven.
But my mind was rampant. All memories of demons and horrid murder had been swept clean from me in an instant by the horror that the artist whom I cherished most in all the world had been put on the rack like a common criminal.
“He sometimes … well,” said Ramiel, “behaves like a common … criminal.”
“He’ll get out of it, he’ll pay a fine,” said the old man. He rang the bell for the monks. He patted me with a long, tired, dry hand. “Now stop crying, child, stop. Filippo is a nuisance, everybody knows it. If only there were a little of the saintliness of Fra Giovanni in him, only a little!”
Fra Giovanni. Of course, by this man, Fra Giovanni, they meant the great Fra Angelico, the painter who in centuries to come would bring the awestruck to all but kneel before his paintings, and it was in this monastery that Fra Giovanni worked and lived, it was here that, for Cosimo, he painted the very cells of the monks.
What could I say? “Yes, yes, Fra Giovanni, but I don’t … I don’t … love him.” Of course I loved him; I honored him and his wondrous work, but it was not like my love for Filippo, the painter I had glimpsed only once—. How to explain these strange things?
A surge of nausea caused me to bend double. I backed away from my kindly helpers. I heaved up the contents of my stomach into the street, a bloody stream of filth from the demons who had fed me. I saw it drip and flow into the street. I smelled the putrid stench of it, and I saw it spill from me into the cracks between the cobblestones, this mess of half-digested wine and blood.
The whole horror of the Court of the Ruby Grail seemed manifest in this moment. Hopelessness seized me, and I heard the whisper of demons in my ear, witless and scorned, and I doubted all that I’d seen, all that I was, all that had transpired only moments before. In a dreamy woodland, my father and I rode together and we talked of Filippo’s paintings, and I was a student and a young lord and had all the world before me, and the strong good smell of the horses filled my nostrils with the smell of the woods.
Witless and scorned. Mad when you might have been immortal.
As I rose up again, I leant back against the wall of the monastery. The light of the blue sky was bright enough to shut my eyes, but I bathed in its warmth. Slowly, as my stomach settled, I tried to gaze steadily before me, to fight the pain of the light and love it and trust in it.
My vision was filled with the face of the angel Setheus right in front of me, only a foot from me, peering at me with the deepest concern.
“Dear God, you are here,” I whispered.
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“Yes,” he said. “I promised you.”
“You aren’t leaving me, are you?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
Over his shoulder, Ramiel peered at me closely, as if studying me at leisure and with commitment for the first time. His shorter looser hair made him seem younger, though such distinctions made no difference.
“No, none at all,” he whispered, and for the first time, he too smiled.
“Do as these gentle people tell you,” said Ramiel. “Let them take you inside, and then you must sleep a natural sleep, and when you wake we’ll be with you.”
“Oh, but it’s a horror, a story of horrors,” I whispered. “Filippo never painted such horrors.”
“We are not painted things,” said Setheus. “What God has in store for us we will discover together, you and Ramiel and I. Now you must go inside. The monks are here. Into their care we give you, and when you wake we will be at your side.”
“Like the prayer,” I whispered.
“Oh, yes, truly,” Ramiel said. He raised his hand. I saw the shadow of his five fingers and then felt the silken touch of his fingers as he closed my eyes.
10
IN WHICH I CONVERSE WITH THE INNOCENT AND POWERFUL SONS OF GOD
I would sleep and deeply, yes, but not until much later. What came was a hazy, dreamlike wonderland of protective images. I was carried by a burly monk and his assistants into the monastery of San Marco.
There could be no place better for me in all of Florence—other than Cosimo’s own house perhaps—than the Dominican Monastery of San Marco.
Now, in all of Florence, I know of many exquisite buildings and so much magnificence that even then, as a boy, I could not catalogue in my mind all the riches that lay before me.
But nowhere is there any cloister more serene, I think, than that of San Marco, which had only recently been renovated by the most humble and decent Michelozzo at the behest of Cosimo the Elder. It had a long and venerable history in Florence, but only in recent times had it been given over to the Dominicans, and it was endowed in certain sublime ways in which no other monastery was.
As all Florence knew, Cosimo had lavished a fortune on San Marco, maybe to make up for all the money he made by usury, for as a banker he was a taker of interest and therefore a usurer, but then so were we who had put money in his bank.
Whatever the case, Cosimo, our capo, our true leader, had loved this place and given to it many many treasures, but most of all perhaps its marvelously proportioned new buildings.
His detractors, the whiners, the ones who do nothing great, and suspect all that isn’t in a state of perpetual disintegration, they said of him, “He even puts his coat of arms in the privies of the monks.”
His coat of arms, by the way, is a shield with five protuberant balls on it, the meaning of which has been variously explained, but what these enemies actually said was: Cosimo had hung his balls over the monks’ privies. Eh! That his enemies would be so lucky to have such privies, or such balls.
How much more clever it might have been for those men to point out that Cosimo often spent days at this monastery himself in meditation and prayer, and that the former Prior here, who was Cosimo’s great friend and advisor, Fra Antonino, was now the Archbishop of Florence.
Ah, so much for the ignorant, who still to the day five hundred years from then tell lies about Cosimo.
As I passed under the door, I thought, What in the name of God shall I say to these people in this House of God?
No sooner had that thought popped out of my sleepy head and, I fear, my drugged and sleepy mouth, than I heard Ramiel’s laugh in my ear.
I tried to see if he was at my side. But I was blubbering and sick again, and dizzy, and could make out only that we had entered the most tranquil and pleasing cloister.
The sun so burnt my eyes that I couldn’t thank God yet for the beauty of the square green garden in the center of this place, but I could see very starkly and sweetly the low rounded arches created by Michelozzo, arches which created gentle colorless and humble vaults over my head.
And the tranquillity achieved by the pure columns, with their small rolled Ionic capitals, all of this added to my sense of safety and peace. Proportions were always the gift of Michelozzo. He opened up things when he built them. And these wide spacious loggias were his stamp.
Nothing would erase the memory for me of the soaring dagger-tipped Gothic arches of the French castle in the North, of the filigreed stone peaks everywhere there that seemed to point in animosity at the Almighty. And though I knew I misjudged this architecture and its intent—for surely, before Florian and his Court of the Ruby Grail had taken hold of it, it had been born from the devotions of the French and the Germans—I still could not get the hated vision of it out of my head.
Trying desperately not to heave up my guts again, I relaxed all my limbs as I saw this Florentine enclosure.
Down around the cloister, down around the burning hot garden, the large monk, a bear of a man, beaming down at me in habitual and inveterate kindness, carried me in his burly arms, while there came others in their flowing black and white robes, with thin radiant faces seeming to encircle us even in our rapid progress. I couldn’t see my angels.
But these men were the nearest to angels that the world provides.
I soon realized—due to my former visits to this great place—that I was not being taken to the hospice, where drugs were dispensed to the sick of Florence, or to the pilgrims’ refuge, which was always swarming with those who come to offer and pray, but up the stairs into the very hall of the monks’ cells.
In a glaze of sickness in which beauty brought a catch in my throat, I saw at the head of the stairway, spread out on the wall, the fresco of Fra Giovanni’s Annunciation.
My painting, the Annunciation! My chosen favorite, the painting which meant more to me than any other religious motif.
And no, it wasn’t the genius of my turbulent Filippo Lippi, no, but it was my painting, and surely this was an omen that no demon can damn a soul through the poison of forced blood.
Was Ursula’s blood forced on you too? Horrid thought. Try not to remember her soft fingers being pulled loose from you, you fool, you drunken fool, try not to remember her lips and the long thick kisslet of blood slipping into your own open mouth.
“Look at it!” I cried out. I pointed one flopping arm towards the painting.
“Yes, yes, we have so many,” said the big smiling bear of a monk.
Fra Giovanni was of course the painter. Who could have not seen it in one glance? Besides, I knew it. And Fra Giovanni—let me remind you one more time that this is Fra Angelico of the ages—had made a severe, soothing, tender but utterly simple Angel and Virgin, steeped in humility and devoid of embellishments, the visitation itself taking place between low rounded arches such as made up the very cloister from which we had just come.
As the big monk swung me around to take me down the broad corridor—and broad it was, and so polished and austere and beautiful to me—I tried to form words as I carried the image of the angel in my mind.
I wanted to tell Ramiel and Setheus, if they were still with me, that look, Gabriel’s wings had only simple stripes of color, and look, how his gown fell in symmetrical and disciplined folds. All of this I understood, as I understood the rampant grandeur of Ramiel and Setheus, but I was blubbering nonsense again.
“The halos,” I said. “You two, where are you? Your halos hover over your heads. I saw them. I saw them in the street and in the paintings. But you see in the painting by Fra Giovanni, the halo is flat and surrounds the painted face, a disk hard and golden right on the field of the painting …”
The monks laughed. “To whom are you speaking, young Signore Vittorio di Raniari?” one of them asked me.
“Be quiet, child,” said the big monk, his booming bass voice pushing against me through his barrel of a chest. “You’re in our tender care. And you must hush now, see, there, that’s the library, yo
u see our monks at work?”
They were proud of it, weren’t they? Even in our progress when I might have vomited all over the immaculate floor, the monk turned to let me see through the open door the long room crowded with books and monks at work, but what I saw too was Michelozzo’s vaulted ceiling, again, not soaring to leave us, but bending gently over the heads of the monks and letting a volume of light and air rise above them.
It seemed I saw visions. I saw multiple and triple figures where there should only be one, and even in a flash a misty confusion of angelic wings, and oval faces turned, peering at me through the veil of supernatural secrecy.
“Do you see?” was all I could say. I had to get to that library, I had to find texts in it that defined the demons. Yes, I had not given up! Oh, no, I was no babbling idiot. I had God’s very own angels at my assistance. I’d take Ramiel and Setheus in there and show them the texts.
We know, Vittorio, wipe the pictures from your mind, for we see them.
“Where are you?” I cried out.
“Quiet,” said the monks.
“But will you help me go back there and kill them?”
“You’re babbling,” said the monks.
Cosimo was the guardian patron of that library. When old Niccolo de’ Niccoli died, a marvelous collector of books with whom I had many times spoken at Vaspasiano’s bookshop, all of his religious books, and maybe more, had been donated by Cosimo to this monastery.
I would find them in there, in that library, and find proof in St. Augustine or Aquinas of the devils with which I’d fought.
No. I was not mad. I had not given up. I was no gibbering idiot. If only the sun coming in the high little windows of this airy place would stop baking my eyeballs and burning my hands.
“Quiet, quiet,” said the big monk, smiling still. “You are making noises like an infant. Hhhhh. Burgle, gurgle. Hear? Now, look, the library’s busy. It’s open to the public today. Everybody is busy today.”
He turned only a few steps past the library to take me into a cell. “Down there …” he went on, as if cajoling an unruly baby. “Only a few steps away is the Prior’s cell, and guess who is there this very minute? It’s the Archbishop.”