“Silvia,” says Caterina, coming from the music room. “What a surprise.”
I don’t even know what is said after that. I cannot pay attention. I sense nothing but the object inside my dress.
Silvia and Alberto leave in a hurry. Tomorrow is Christmas, after all. They need to be with Silvia’s family.
The day goes on and on, and I am never alone, never able to find out what Silvia delivered, until finally finally it is night and Bartolomeo is asleep beside me and I can be once again who I am, who I must be, Giuliano’s Monna Lisa. By candlelight I find the parchment that I managed to slide into my sleeve as I undressed in Caterina’s presence. I remove it now. A letter from my beloved. Folded in three parts. I break the seal and unfold. It is too brief.
Monna Lisa, you possess my heart. But I relinquish yours. For I cannot offer you what I know you deserve. And I will not offer you less. Forgive me. And then forget me. Giuliano.
I reach under my bed for the hidden paper box that Silvia, ever true, managed to sneak to me as Papà stuffed me into the coach that bitter morning we came here. I rip it apart and dash the glass giraffe against the wall. Graceful, delicate, beautiful, and gone. I drop backward onto the bed and fling my head from side to side, harder and faster and on and on. My brain scrambles and still I fling my head violently until there’s nothing left of me. I lie spent. Yet tears continue to leak out my eyes and soak my hair. But then they, too, stop.
After a while I sit up. I touch my hands, my arms, my neck. I feel the beat of my heart. I hear my breath. I let a globule of hot wax drop on my wrist and it burns. I am alive. That doesn’t make sense. For there’s no reason to live.
I reread the letter, such as it is. Not really a letter. A message. Delivered less than two weeks after we were together. He lost faith fast. Or maybe he just faced reality fast. Giuliano understands this world. Savonarola will never relent on this banishment.
But I could have gone with Giuliano somewhere else. Anywhere else. It’s Mamma who wanted a noble life for me. I want love. I’ve always wanted love. It should be my right to choose whether or not to join Giuliano in exile. Giuliano shouldn’t have made that decision for the two of us. He has betrayed me. For all his talk of loyalty, he has betrayed my heart. And his own.
I set the letter aflame, then blow it out before the fire gets too large. Then set it aflame. Then blow it out. Continuing like that until nothing remains but ashes.
The next two months are frozen. It’s as though the weather emanates from my heart. No one can remember a cold like this, a blizzard like this, a freeze so hard you can walk on the Arno River. To me, though, it just seems natural. I slide over the icy days toward the end that I feel has been inexorable from the beginning—from when I was born a girl. I don’t fight anyone. There is no reason to. There is no reason to do or not do anything. I agree to marry Francesco. I do not know if I am hostage to my love for my mother, Papà, and Caterina, or whether I simply have given up. I don’t try to make sense out of it. Life has no sense.
My wedding feast is on 5 March 1495, a month short of two years after Papà and Caterina’s, and a month short of the anniversary of Camilla’s death, just as Papà and Caterina’s wedding was a month short of the anniversary of Mamma’s death. I wear Caterina’s gown, which has been taken in considerably for me. It’s funny, but white for weddings has become the rule. Savonarola says bright colors are to be eschewed, and what Savonarola says becomes the law of the day. The only color on me is from the yellow crocuses Caterina weaves through my hair, but we don’t dare to add her pearls, for Savonarola decries jewelry. We have a short procession. Then a small and simple wedding feast at Francesco’s home. That’s the new word of the day in Savonarola’s Florence. And it suits me fine. I have nothing to celebrate.
Silvia comes to the feast. This time Papà was the one to object to Silvia’s presence. I drew on my one and only source of power: I simply answered that if she wasn’t invited, I would tell Francesco about Giuliano. Silvia dares to wear the beautiful green dress that I wore to my party in October. She doesn’t worry about being denounced, for who cares about a peasant girl, she reasons. And I cannot dispute her reasoning. For all Savonarola’s talk about the people, his eye seems focused on the nobility.
This is the favor Silvia wanted of me. The favor that pays her back for helping Giuliano and me that night in the old silk shed, that night she took Uccio home with her. She wants nothing more than to be a guest at my wedding, dressed splendidly, looking for the last time upon a society she will never enter. In a month she weds Alberto.
At one point during the evening I stand beside her and she takes my arm with a small laugh. “You and me, it’s happening to us just how they wanted,” she says. “Ah, well. At least Alberto is decent.”
That he is. I’m grateful for the little play he put on with Silvia when they delivered Giuliano’s letter to me. Yes. It’s happening just how they wanted.
So much of what Mamma and Papà and Caterina wanted for me turns out to be as irrelevant as I expected. But I learn that Caterina was right about one thing: my new life is better with a child to love from the start. I don’t know where the well of delight resides in the human soul. I thought mine had dried up. But Bartolomeo manages to plumb it.
I remember when I sat on the bed and read Giuliano’s letter and decided there was no reason to live anymore. I have changed in the months since then. Life may indeed have no meaning, but therein is the secret to it. For now I am free to watch it happen without rancor, without the least desire to change it.
And I am free to enjoy the pleasures that it offers. I give up cooking—for Jacobo, Francesco’s cook, is a master, as I knew already. Instead, quite gradually, the pleasure of loving Bartolomeo becomes the focus of my life. And when my son, Piero, is born the next spring, I am grateful. I nurse him, pierced by the power of such tenderness. How can anyone turn over her child to a wet nurse?
Choosing the name Piero was the last dying ember of my old anger. A girl should name her firstborn son after her husband’s father. But since my husband already had a son with Camilla, one might have expected I’d name this child after my own father. Instead, I chose the name Piero. Papà objected strenuously at first, thinking the naming was after the cursèd Medici brother. I had the satisfaction of telling him it was after Leonardo da Vinci’s father. He spluttered, like a giant procession candle going out. What tie did I have to Leonardo, that his father’s name should be bestowed on my son? But he resisted asking. He still admires Leonardo. Perhaps he didn’t dare know the answer.
It’s just as well he didn’t ask. I would have told him that sometimes fathers are chosen—and I’d have chosen a father who fostered freedom of thought and spirit in a child, as Leonardo’s father had, rather than the father I was born to. It was a little speech he didn’t need to hear, for all it would have done is wound him, not change him.
Rumors come often about Piero de’ Medici, who now lives with his in-laws in Rome. They say he wakes at noon, in time for the big meal, then closes himself away in his room with a courtesan or a boy. He eats dinner up there alone with them, then goes out in the evening drinking and gambling, returning to his wife near dawn. He is hateful, and so he is hated. Some want him murdered.
But about Giuliano no news comes. I used to listen hard. I became excellent at discerning who might know about the Medici family and masterful at eavesdropping on their conversations. In those moments I was nothing but a receptacle, waiting breathlessly for their words to fill me. But it was as though the world conspired to erase Giuliano from my sphere of existence. Or perhaps my need cast a contrary spell on everyone, so that Giuliano disappeared from their spheres of existence when they were in my presence. Not once did I hear his name. And I never indulged myself in asking. I know Giuliano only at night; he is my dream lover.
We live right in the city, in Francesco’s home. But it’s not the Florence I was just beginning to know with Giuliano. It changes around us.
Wome
n wear veils on the streets, if they go out at all. Many stay indoors almost all of the time, since God wants us home with our children, as He has told Savonarola, and as Savonarola has accordingly preached from the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore. The monk doesn’t even allow women into his cathedral anymore.
This, actually, is fine with me. I prefer the company of my children. And when they sleep, I read. Caterina is only too happy to bring me a book whenever she visits, taking away the one that I have finished with. While I do not revel in books the way she does, finally I have learned to find solace in them. They hold reflections of struggles within myself, struggles I lacked any coherent method of dealing with. Right now I am working my way through a Latin translation of a book by the Greek scholar Plato about how people live together in a society. My old visiting tutor’s eyes would pop from his head if he were to hear me say that. I admit to not understanding everything I read—oh, how I long for a Florentine translation—but I have no doubt that Plato would despise Savonarola, who I now think of as the enemy of true justice. For that reason alone, I persist in reading. Francesco expresses surprise at first. But then he leans over the book and gets engrossed. Soon we read together in the evenings, an act of quiet rebellion that makes partners of us at last. Perhaps all of Florence is filled with people reading steadily behind closed doors. Quietly ferocious.
And so we women stay sequestered mostly and, if we must emerge, we go veiled. But it isn’t only women Savonarola wants covered. He closes communal public baths. Nudity must be guarded against for all. Nudity—that most natural of states.
Savonarola’s war against colors results in an abundance of white, not just in bridal gowns. Everyone wears white, gray, or brown in public. His war is so successful that Papà, like other silk merchants, now leaves much of his cloth undyed.
Religious zealots stand on corners and shout, or, more and more frequently, cry.
There is no gambling in Florence, no tournaments, no parties, no chess games, for these things excite temporal interests. A curfew helps to ensure that, since nighttime makes man more susceptible to such temptations. The Florence whose continual noise I once marveled at is now silent after dark. There is no more art or scholarship, except that deemed proper by the myopic eye of the monk. Every breath of joy leaves the city.
This is no longer a place where passion can find purchase.
Boys dressed in white carry baskets through the streets. They sing hymns and knock on doors and accost people walking by. They collect what Savonarola calls “the vanities.” Jewels, vases, extravagant clothing, money.
And then books. Alas, books! But of course books. Especially those by the ancients. Savonarola preaches it is dangerous to read pagan trash by Plato and Aristotle. The very writer who’s befriended my soul is now outlawed. Francesco and I agree, for we are completely aligned in our views by now—Caterina’s tome must be returned to her, rather than land in the hands of the monk. He will smuggle it back to her in the bottom of a toy chest. It is a small act, but in these days one full of risk. I am both proud and terrified as his coach rolls away. When he returns, our marriage experiences a rush of sensuality for the first time. It is an irony against the monk, one we both appreciate. And I cook for him such a magnificent meal that the children and servants, the only others we can invite safely to such an extravagant table, gasp in wonderment. After that, Francesco and I make clandestine visits to the library at the Santissima Annunziata monastery. We have a ready answer when anyone asks where we’re going, for Francesco’s family owns a chapel there. Another irony against the monk—a monastery offers sustenance to our hunger for reading.
But there are not many victories over Savonarola, and they are short-lived, indeed. The monk now turns his attention to paintings. His boys enter homes and bare the walls.
All of them—books and paintings—go up in flames, in a gigantic public bonfire in the piazza. Who knows what great pieces of art, what triumphs of the human spirit, turn to ashes and smoke under Savonarola’s iron hand. The bonfire takes place during one of Caterina’s visits. She stands beside me and emits a little shriek as the flame catches hold. She quickly claps her hand over her mouth and looks around in fear to see who has noticed. Francesco puts an arm around each of us and draws us close.
Inside my head I hear the keening wail of the writers and artists.
I watch it all. And I know Savonarola has lost his mind.
His only act of sanity is when he stops the people from burning the Medici library. I don’t know why Savonarola saves that one library. Perhaps the hand of God rests on the monk’s hand just long enough to keep it immobile at the crucial moment. Or maybe it is something prosaic—a lapse of evil due to a headache or gas.
All those things that go into animating a person, all those ineffables, they suffer under one assault after the other. The people of Florence suffer. Until they can no more. They rebel.
But it isn’t as clean as that—it isn’t as decent as that.
First, nature conspires; this, of course, is beyond the monk’s doings. Plague returns. In 1497 it plucks a child here, a father there, all your brothers here, your niece there. Though it is brief, and the general memory, which is not memory at all but mere rumor, says it is not as virulent as it was in the last century, these deaths break our spirits.
And then Savonarola makes a mistake, the one mistake he has made from the beginning, but it finally catches up with him. He cannot contain his righteous indignation at human frailty. He points his finger at too many and makes enemies of the Franciscan monks and other holy men, including the Pope, who forbids him to preach.
But only God has the right to silence Savonarola.
Over and over, Savonarola offends a pope who has no real sense of shame, having brought his mistress into the Vatican to live and dispensing favors to his illegitimate offspring, even appointing them as cardinals. A competition between shameless men who consider themselves agents of the Lord is a terrible thing to behold. And when one of those men is Pope, the winner is predetermined. For the Pope can excommunicate.
Savonarola is accused of heresy and schism. At first his innocence and integrity are to be put to the ordeal by fire. But that is foiled in too many ways to recount. Then the monk is tortured, and confesses his crimes, then recants, and is tortured again, and confesses his crimes, and so it goes. It seems interminable.
Yet when the end actually comes, it feels swift: On 23 May 1498 Savonarola and two of his supporters are stripped of their monks’ gowns and walk across the piazza in front of the Palazzo Vecchio, barefoot, in undertunics, with pinioned arms. People spit and shout vile words, but the clerics hold their chins high. Some say they look beatific, transported into a state of exaltation. One by one, they ascend the ladder of a scaffold erected just for them. One by one, they are garroted with a chain. Savonarola is last. He looks out over the crowd, then presents his neck to the hangman. Minutes later the wood under the scaffold is set aflame and the three bodies burn to ashes in front of the public.
Inexorably hell-bent.
Most of Florence’s nobility witnesses the scene, Francesco among them, hence the details are known to all. I decline to attend, however. There have been too many burnings in the piazza. Instead, I close myself away with my wonderful Bartolomeo and Piero; I shut us off from the pervasive stench of rot that this city emits, and I cry. For everyone.
And I persuade dear Francesco to take us away from Florence.
PART Three
CHAPTER Twenty-three
SUMMER IN THE HILLS of Chianti wine country is a luscious blur—blue mist in morning, gold haze in afternoon. The month is August; the year, 1503. I lie in the grass and let insects crawl on me. When I was a girl, ambling around these hills, I brushed off insects with disgust. But Bartolomeo taught me better. He captures insects and studies them before freeing them again. So now the feel of these creatures’ multiple feet simply tickles me gently. I would laugh—another thing Bartolomeo has taught me to do, since somewhere
along the way I lost that ability—only I mustn’t make noise right now.
Silvia lies beside me in a sleep so sound, she appears totally vulnerable. The sight of her almost frightens me.
“Mamma, close your eyes.” Camilla, my precious daughter, skips over and showers us both with wildflower petals she has carefully plucked, one by one, from even the tiniest of flowers. Her four-year-old fingers are agile.
The petals fall on my face like poetry. I open my eyes and smile. Like me, Camilla was born on a Tuesday. Tuesday is the day of warriors. But not just infantry and cavalry. One can be a warrior in the name of science or humanities. Tuesday’s child is generous and wise, self-reflecting, and susceptible, especially to passion. Tuesday’s child has the capacity to love intensely, and to suffer from abandonment profoundly.
I believe Camilla will be a warrior for the highest of the humanities, the fine arts. She adores colors. In a literal sense. She makes piles of green things, piles of red things, piles of yellow things. She dances around them and sings her magic songs and waves her wispy arms. She is the definition of grace.
Her father thinks I named her after his previous wife, out of respect and deference, as a following wife will often do. But I am hardly a deferential sort. No, I named this daughter out of love for my stepmother Caterina—whose sister’s name was Camilla. It just so happens that my husband’s previous wife and my stepmother’s sister are one and the same, so my husband need not be disabused of his belief. Besides, this misperception makes him happy, and he is a man who deserves happiness.
I think of how Caterina imbued Villa Vignamaggio with rainbow colors when she first came to live there. It’s fitting that my Camilla should share this proclivity for colors.
Andrea, my eight-month-old, throws blades of grasses and mutilated flowers he wrests from the earth with his pudgy paws. He does everything Camilla does. Or he would, if he could. A most lovable and loving child. He is still a mystery to me, however. He hasn’t yet begun to talk and reveal the inner workings of that brain. Neverthless, his eyes are already loquacious. He will never be a liar. Or not a successful one. In my more hopeful moments, I imagine him turning out thoughtful and steady, like his father.
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