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The Botticelli Secret

Page 30

by Marina Fiorato


  “But angry crowds broke open his tomb and the good friars exhumed his body and buried it near the gallows, in unconsecrated ground, to appease the people. But even there Signor Jacopo was not allowed to rest—he was dug up and a great throng of boys dragged the naked cadaver around the city, by the noose by which he was hanged. At the Palazzo Pazzi, the mob bashed the cadaver’s head against his own doors, shouting, ‘Open up! The Great Knight is here!’ “ She was enjoying herself—her voice was thickened with bloodlust. I could see her searching for my reaction, so I gave her none, but in reality I could have shit my stockings. What kind of man had I angered? The people loved him and hated those who crossed him.

  Madonna.

  Evidently Vero Madre had finished her grisly tale. I reflected that not once had she told me a fairy tale, as she dandled me on her lap at bedtime. But this monstrous story of blood and torture she was happy to recount. I shivered, not for the dull day and the cool breeze, and not for fear of my own skin, though I would not be returning to Florence anytime soon. I shivered instead for my one true friend, who was a prisoner still in that viper’s nest, perhaps even now in the notorious Bargello, where the unfortunate Jacopo had lain.

  “Do you see, now, the power and influence of the man your friend has insulted? For Lorenzo is light and dark, he is a great friend but a powerful enemy. He himself wrote a couplet to describe his dual character. ‘Orange blossom seen at dawn is bright, / Yet seen at dusk it holds the first of night.’ Our best hope for your future, and all of ours,” she went on, “is to remove you from that sin, from the offense committed—the disrespect to him and his family by the disruption of the wedding. To re-create you as a noblewoman, heir to the Serenissima and the bride of Pisa. Then we may once more join the greater plan, count ourselves in that number at the command of il Magnifico. Luciana.”

  The word sounded strange from her lips, from the lips of the woman who had given me that name. “This is your home now, until you marry. But it may not be so bad. There is much I can teach you.”

  “So my name is Luciana then.” I ignored the rest.

  “It is. But your family name is not Vetra—you were given that alias by virtue of your . . . mode of travel to Florence.”

  The light in the glass. Some of the first words he had ever said to me.

  “Your family name is Mocenigo, that of your lord and father.”

  Mocenigo. It would take some getting used to. “And are there any more in this happy family? Any doting brothers or sisters I don’t know about?”

  There was a tiny pause, perhaps half a heartbeat. “No. You are our only heir. You had a younger brother, Francesco, but he . . . died.” She did not invite sympathy.

  There was a sunburst of comprehension in my brain, as if that hapless orb had broken through the gray lid of the sky. I narrowed my eyes against the truth, as if against the light. “When?”

  My mother was silent.

  “When did he die?” Louder now.

  “When you were twelve.”

  I met her guilty eyes, hating her. I understood it all now. My loving mother had shipped me off to Florence, then clambered back into my father’s bed before my cot was cold and got herself another brat on his ducal bones—my brother. Rejoicing in their new male heir, my doting parents had forgotten me. A Florentine convent was quite good enough for me, a girl child, no more use than a marriage prize, a tool of alliance. They left me to rot till their beloved boy died and they suddenly needed an heir again.

  My mother’s agate gaze bored into mine, defiant, but our journey was ending and the subject changed with the landscape, to her visible relief. The canal had spilled into an open sea and a great domed church marked the end of the channel. Now we bobbed on the open tide, skirting the shore till our boat drew alongside a great square with pigeons and colon-nades and twin pillars reaching high into the mist. A great campanile, coral tipped, reached out of the lake like a sword, the blade red with gore. As a backdrop to the glory, a range of far-off mountains draped behind the city like a silver shawl.

  “And here”—a sweep of the green and gold sleeve—“is your new home.”

  I looked on the enormous white palace, huge and yet delicate, its snowy walls and slim pillars iced with pearly pinnacles and filigree traceries. The façade changed with the water like a very opal. How arrogant, thought I, how confident to build a palace of lace with your duke within, right on the lip of the sea. This was no castle or citadel; the doge’s power was such that he had no need to hide behind curtain walls and arrow slits.

  Crouching next to this snowy palazzo was an Eastern ba-silica like a guardian dragon of the Orient, hunched in golden domes and with a hide of jeweled frescoes, with golden spires reaching to the sky like Turkish pikes. I might as well have been in Constantinople.

  Home, my arse.

  The dogaressa’s servant moored the boat and handed her ashore, and my mother herself turned to do the same for me. For one mad moment I thought to sever the golden rope that held us with the neckrim knife of my green bottle, the piece of glass the sisters had saved for me, and take the boat wherever I could, to escape this watery prison. But I knew I could not get far, and I suspected that to pole and steer such a vessel was harder than it looked. Reluctantly I took my mother’s hand and stepped ashore, looking her full in her masked face as I did so, matching her defiance. Behind my mother the white frontage of the palace was a blank face and staring eyes, just like her.

  “Do you always wear that thing?” I asked, as we moved forward to the palace doors. “That lion mask?”

  “Outdoors, yes. The lion is the symbol of our great city, and the she-lion the head of her family.”

  I did not expect such honesty from her, such openness about how she stood with my father, an admission that she was the ruler of all. “You can hear her balls clang together like a ring o’ bells,” Don Ferrente had said.

  As if she had given too much away, she hurriedly continued. “It is expected. As my people see me, so they esteem me.”

  And I knew her then for what she was, a cold beautiful surface, deadly beneath, like this city that was once my home and was now again.

  30

  In the next few months I grew a mask too—I was given the veneer of nobility but my insides were frozen with misery; I had everything and I had nothing. I was pampered and preened and gentrified, yet I was unhappier than I had ever been.

  I spent my mornings a caged bird—in the beautiful apartments of the doge inside the white snow palace of the Palazzo Ducale. I never forgot that I was a prisoner—for I was soon assigned a guard. A plain woman named Marta was sent to attend me. She was a sullen creature with a small hairy wart riding her lip and eyes that looked in different directions but nevertheless both seemed to be watching me. The wench was introduced to me as my lady’s maid and certainly she did as I bid her, albeit with a grudging, sulky air that made me itch to slap her. I would have been within my rights to beat my servant, but I dared not, for lady’s maid she may have been though in truth she was my jailer and we both knew it. I had no doubt that every detail of my behavior reached the open ears of my mother.

  My days proceeded, each one, thus in a regimen of sameness: in the mid-morning I was bathed and combed and scrubbed daily by a gaggle of attendants. I was dressed in the richest cloths of green or gold or sapphire or ruby—silks and satins from the East and velvets and taffetas from the North. These glowing colors were always covered with a long black surcoat, to accentuate the whiteness of my noble skin. This coat gave me no comfort, for it was as thin as parchment, and the palace whistled with draft; I shivered from dawn till dusk. I was made up as was fitting for a young noblewoman, with wine must and red ocher to give blush to my pale cheeks, charcoal pencil to line my eyes, and pulverized malachite to color my eyelids. I was not used to such artifice. Of course, we whores had our tricks and I had been known, on feast days back in Florence, to use oxblood to color my lips and cheeks, but for the most part I left such things alone. I wonder
ed how much my mother depended on such arts for her youthful perfection.

  My hair was dressed by a Moorish girl named Yassermin, who spoke no Tuscan but knew how to curry my hair all right—her black fingers fairly flew as she braided, pinning priceless gems in my locks which cost more to buy than she did. After all this elaborate dressing, my hair was then covered with a black veil called a zendado—a light drape of black silk, attached to my hair with a small golden crown, designed to keep my skin pale. Golden bracelets were loaded onto my arms and a gold-handled fan of white feathers dangled from my wrist. The bells rang four quarters before I was even dressed.

  I was brought my breakfast in my chamber on a silver dish and would dolefully eat while staring out of my window onto the lagoon, watching the curracles and spiceboats and wishing I were traveling far like they. Then I was taken to one of the fresco-clad presence chambers—a great room with sea charts and maps covering every wall—for my schooling. A procession of tutors came to me so that I might learn the business of being noble.

  A stern Dominican monk, Fra Girolamo, taught me to read. I worked hard at his lessons, not for fear of his dour person but for a vow I had taken in the herbarium of Santa Croce that I would never again be graveled by the lack of letters (besides, I had plans of my own, which would rely upon this art—more of this later). A Flemish goodwife taught me needlepoint—daily I pricked my poor fingers and flung my frame across the room, much to the mouselike dame’s shock. A young and fancy Frenchman, Signor Albert, taught me how to dance the latest pavanes from the Continent, and this I enjoyed the most. I was privately surprised that my mother, in her determination to re-create my history, would leave me unchaperoned with the dancing master, who was frisky as a marionette and sleek as an otter, but soon realized he was as much of a finocchio as my dear intended. In fact, the only person that might have been a threat to my chastity was Signor Cristoforo, a young Genoese who had been engaged to teach me map reading, seacraft, and all the maritime arts that one could learn without going aboard ship. “Essential,” my mother said, for a young noblewoman from Venice to know all this, for the city, and indeed my father’s wealth, was built on the seafaring trade. Now, I knew naught of the Genoese as a people, but if all that city’s citizens were as ugly as Signor Cristoforo, I was in no hurry to see the place. I remembered then, of course, that there was a time once when I may have gone there, with he who filled my thoughts and preoccupied my mind, for all my waking and sleeping hours, as the conclusion to a quest that now seemed as far away as fairy tale.

  In the afternoons I would sometimes walk out into the city with my retinue, or take a gondola (for now I had learned the name of the blade-shaped boats), or even the doge’s personal craft, the Bucintoro. This last was a fantastical ship straight from the tales of fable, a great golden barge with a figurehead of gold and gilded waves and curlicues skirting the helm. I always felt uncomfortable in this floating crown, for there was no question of being able to travel about the city quietly—everywhere we went the vessel announced my presence and the people of Venice goggled to see the dogaressa’s daughter, back from her convent education to prepare for marriage. On my afternoon excursions my mother would always accompany me, talking constantly, but always of the city, never of us. I heard one phrase again and again—”Stato del Mar,”

  “Stato del Mar.” The phrase was forever on the dame’s lips, a musical phrase washing in and out upon her breath like the tide itself. She wanted me, it seemed, above all to grasp the concept of Venice as a State of the Sea, and to know that the sea gave everything to the city. We went everywhere in the city together, dressed almost alike in our fine gowns, cloaks of coney to keep out the freezing winds, and chopines, shoes built up from the sole to elevate the feet above the inevitable floodwaters. All that separated us was my mother’s gold mask. I learned that she had above a hundred masks in her chamber, made by the finest craftsmen in Venice. All different, but all gold, and all depicting the face of a lioness, with no mane. Though many of the citizens went about masked in the winter, I never saw another lioness and I wondered if it was my mother’s special privilege. The She-lion, rampant, showed me her city.

  She taught me first of our home, the Palazzo Ducale. I half listened to her description of this center of government, of the privileges and restrictions due to the doge for his short term of office, an office strictly rotated to deter corruption. Instead, I looked up at the white lace palace and was interested to note that when you took a closer look, the brickwork was not white but patterned with ornate diamonds of pale rose, inset with sapphire blue. Studded as if with the looted jewels on which the Stato del Mar was built. Like everything in Venice, if you look closer, nothing is as it seems. My gaze continued upward. Set in the middle of the loggia were two pillars that differed in color from their snowy neighbors, like wine-darkened teeth after a glass of good red. My mother followed my eye and explained that these twin pillars had been stained with years of blood as traitors to the republic were drawn and quartered between them. I understood her well, and the whisper of a threat built into such a beautiful façade.

  Obediently I learned the names of the sestieri, or “sixths,” that divided the city and repeated them as a child does her catechism—San Marco, Castello, Cannaregio, Dorsodoro, San Polo, and painfully, Santa Croce, a district named after a demolished church that shared the name of Brother Guido’s former home. In a few short weeks I began to know every calle, or canal, every palace on the Grand Canal, the great S-shaped waterway that cleaved through the city.

  S for Serenissima, S for Stato del Mar, said my mother.

  S for She-lion, thought I.

  At each great house I had to name its owners and their antecedents, following their families back to the Crusades, learning by rote as my mother instructed me. I knew every church spire and every bell that gave tongue. I could name the boats that crowded the mouth of the canal, their wares and whence they hailed from. I learned of trade routes as we visited the Arsenale and watched the ships under construction, each with a proud lion poised on the prow. My mother talked endlessly, as if she perversely enjoyed my company. As if she were cramming sixteen years of lost conversations into these first weeks together. Yet her discourse never strayed into the personal. She would speak of a particular painting or fresco that we were going to see, or the mass we would attend, or of the pointed shoes we were to buy in the best leather botteghe of the Rialto district. Once she got me up early to take me to the fish market, a place of strange dead shoals with staring glass eyes, and a stench like a rabbit warren. She showed me the Jewish quarter, where the infidels were sequestered for their protection and, she said, the city’s. She took me to the island of Murano, where Venice’s foremost export is made—glassware. There I watched leather-clad craftsmen working at their furnaces, and making miracles from hot amber globs of molten sand. With their long iron poles they blew bubbles of saffron glass that cooled to rose, to be pinched and pulled this way and that till a beauteous vase appeared as if by miracle. Coughing at the sulfurous fumes of that merry little hell, I was warm for the first time since I had come to this freezing city. We traveled thence to the island of Burano, where identical old ladies sat black clad in every doorway, catching the last warmth of a dying winter sun, tatting delicate froths of thread in their laps, not even looking at their hands as they created lace as delicate as the snowflakes that would soon come to these islands. Autumn bleached to winter and my mother continued relentlessly to teach me of my home. It was she who told me that in the winter months it is best to go about masked, with a posy of dried flowers and herbs stuffed beneath my nose, for the contagion of plague and lung fever swept in from the lagoon. It was she who taught me to keep hot rocks in my pocket, to warm my freezing hands as the days drew in. It was she who taught me that there is only one piazza in Venice, that of Saint Mark where our palace was placed, and that all other squares were known as campi, or “fields.” It was she who showed me round the great Basilica, numbered and named all the
saints, explained every fresco, showed me the priceless treasures within. It was she who told me that this gold-lined church was not the city’s cathedral but my father’s private chapel, and bade me then to understand the power of my family, the power of the Mocenigos. Marveling at the rich booty of this place, the golden Pala d’Oro altar screen, the richly jeweled icon of Saint Mark, the quartet of bronze horses stolen from the East, a growing impression of the last months clotted into certainty. I had heard every word of my mother’s instruction but, ignorant as I was, I could still draw my own conclusions. I knew this place for what it was—Venice was a city of booty. This pirate people had stolen everything that distinguished it from somewhere else. The treasures in the Basilica, the style and design of the windows on every palazzo, even the words in the Venetian dialect, were looted from the East.

  I learned, too, from my mother, what happened to enemies of my father’s rule—I walked with her through the sumptuous rooms of the palace, through a tiny doorway and down narrow darkwood stairs to the chambers of torture and imprisonment known as the wells, or pozzi, for they are so sunken and cold, set as they are below the waterline of the canal. One room will stay with me always, a gloomy paneled square, three stairs in the dead center of the room leading nowhere but to a cruel noose hanging above. I walked, too, around the damp cells of the notorious jail, where the imprisoned are watched every moment, for if a guard lets his charge escape, he finishes his prisoner’s sentence. No one had broken free yet, my mother told me with cruel pride and a warning. Petty criminals were kept at the roof of the palace, the piombi, or leads, where the heat of the roof tiles made their lives unbearable. In summer months their blood would boil, their flesh sizzle in preparation for hellfires. Hotter than coal or colder than ice was the choice for the unruly in Venice—I hardly knew which extreme of misery was worse. As I heard the drip of the walls and the cries of the inmates, I keened for Brother Guido, in his similar fate. Yet I could not share such thoughts. And still, in all this time, my mother would never refer to our relationship, nor our pasts, nor our meeting. She was tolerable company, accomplished, funny even—witty enough to make my frozen belly laugh, but never did I once feel that we were mother and daughter. I watched her, though, with reluctant admiration; she had a soft low voice which I tried to emulate. I began to curb my filthy tongue at her command. I watched her walk into a room and began to imitate her seamless glide—even on the awkward platforms of the chopines she had a graceful stride, while I lurched and stumbled like a newborn foal. I watched her stand as if a golden thread passed through her body and out the top of her head, holding herself as erect as a queen. I ate my food as daintily as she—watched her white hands pick at morsels or daintily cut with her trencher knife. I began to wipe my mouth on my sleeve as she did, not the back of my hand. I began to carry a silken kerchief to wipe my nose when I had the ague, rather than blowing it directly into my skirt or my hair as I’d been used. I admired her as a woman and her easy way of conversing with everyone with charm—from the man who rowed our gondola to the princes of the Orient who came to dine. I admired her, yes, but she was not a mother to me. She took her desire to reconstruct my past to its logical conclusion. She instructed me, in great detail, how a dollop of pig’s-trotter jelly inserted into my woman’s part the night before the wedding would form a skin o’ernight to be broken the next eve, and make me once again a virgin. I did not have to ask how she knew this jade’s trick—clearly she had gulled my father with such arts. This was the closest that we ever came to an intimate conversation. Even on the days when the sun shone near as hot as Tuscany, and we repaired to the roof with our sewing, we never spoke of what lay within our hearts, even though we were totally alone. At such times we wore wide-brimmed hats with holes at the crown, and spread our identical golden locks out in the sun’s rays, to bake to an even lighter gold. I would look at my mother, dignified even in this garb, from under the safety of the wide, wide brim and search her face while she did not see me. We were alike. But we could not have been more different.

 

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