But the Grand Duke was stepping forwards into the room. Despite the presence of several English dignitaries, the evening was to have a uniquely Sicilian flavour, he told me. It had been weeks in the planning, with every detail agonized over, right down to the violets which had been pinned to our breasts as we arrived, and which bore a close resemblance to those that grew in the lava-rich land around Catania. Even the waiters were Sicilian – or could pass as such. He waved an approving hand at a swarthy, stunted man who was dispensing drinks. ‘What do you think?’
‘It’s almost enough to make me feel homesick,’ I told him.
‘I trust we’re not going to lose you just yet.’ He had stopped in front of a fresco of an erupting Etna, which had been specially commissioned for the occasion. ‘You may find a master who is greater than me, but no one will ever value you as highly as I do.’
I said I couldn’t imagine a greater master.
Positioned throughout the room were various specimens of cactus, and a number of the English guests, predictably, perhaps, suffered minor injuries later on, when a good deal of wine had been consumed. Oh, how the English love to drink! Not for nothing were they known locally as ‘sponges’.
An envoy from Hampton Court, as yet still sober, complimented the Grand Duke on his flair for the exotic. The Grand Duke smiled. He was well-disposed towards the English. They had given him a warm welcome when, in an attempt to escape the violence and rancour of his marriage, he visited their country in the 1670s.
A man with a neat black beard was standing nearby. I asked if he was also a diplomat.
He shook his head. ‘Like you,’ he said, ‘my interests lie elsewhere.’
His name was Jack Towne, he told me, and he traded in rare drawings. He was fortunate enough to count the Grand Duke among his many clients. In most civilized countries, it seemed, there were people who shared his predilections … He left the sentence hanging, not quite complete. It was his habit to imply or suggest, I realized, but never to explain; he would be the last man in the room to incriminate himself.
‘I’m beginning to see how you might fit into a city such as this one,’ I said.
‘You’re a Jesuit, I take it.’
‘I was educated by the Jesuits. How did you guess?’
He shrugged. ‘It must be the way you express yourself.’
‘Interesting that you should notice,’ I said lightly, ‘when it’s you who have been doing all the talking.’
‘And there’s the proof.’ Towne smiled. His teeth, which were crowded and crooked, seemed at odds with his carefully trimmed beard.
Just then, we were called to the table, and he could say no more, though he slipped me his card before we parted.
Among the many ‘Sicilians’ who waited on us that night was a girl whose hair gleamed like the obsidian I had collected once on the island of Palmarola. Her skin had an olive-gold patina that would darken quickly in the sun. With that colouring, you would have expected her to have brown eyes, but they were a clear, translucent blend of green and blue, like seawater at midday when the light is at its strongest. Her forearms, bare to the elbow, were slender; I could have circled her wrist with my thumb and forefinger. My breath caught in my throat. Wasn’t she the girl I’d seen in the apothecary window?
I looked round, but she had disappeared – to the kitchens, most likely – and for one reckless moment I thought of following her. At the same time, I knew that since the entire evening was being staged in my honour people would be watching me. I sat back in a kind of daze.
Sitting opposite me was the Grand Duke’s younger son, Gian Gastone, his eyes watery and pink, his jaw-line lost in folds of fat. It was astonishing to think that he was only twenty. I watched him reach for his wine. He was so drunk that his hand described a semi-circle in the air and came back empty. He stared at it with bleary suspicion, as though it had played a trick on him. Before I could look away, he noticed me, and lurched forwards, over the table.
‘Are you a spy?’
Then, all of a sudden, the girl was standing next to me, leaning down. I turned my head sideways, my nose close to her hair, and tried to breathe her in. I thought I smelled cinnamon – or was it nutmeg? Once again, I remembered the afternoon of Fiore’s tour. Was this really the same girl? My hand was resting on the tablecloth, and as she reached past me to remove a plate the underside of her forearm brushed against the back of my hand, and I felt a shock go through me, all the way to a small, surprising place in my left heel, but she moved on without acknowledging that anything had happened, without even seeming to have noticed.
*
During an interval between courses, I walked over to Bassetti. He was talking to the Grand Duke’s librarian, Magliabechi, a man famed for his learning, his lack of interest in hygiene, and his love of hard-boiled eggs.
Bassetti turned to include me. ‘I trust you’ve settled in?’ In repeating the words I had used at our first meeting, he was mocking me gently.
I smiled. ‘Everyone’s been very kind.’
Magliabechi gave me a caustic look. ‘Remember what it says in the Politica. “Do they seem friendly and trustworthy? Watch out!”’
I was about to reply when Gian Gastone, who was sitting nearby, snatched his wig off his head and used it as the receptacle for a sudden, forceful jet of vomit.
‘Never a good idea,’ Bassetti murmured, ‘to try and keep up with the English.’
He covered his nose, and the two men moved away.
Towards the end of the banquet, the Grand Duke made a speech in which he described the profound effect my teatrini – my little theatres – had had on him. I was not only a visionary, he told the gathering. I was a moralist. I captured the spirit of the times.
Later still, when even the English were beginning to stagger, their eyes astonished and blank with wine, I excused myself, but instead of following the corridor that led to the front entrance, I set off in the direction of the kitchens, determined to track down the waitress I had seen earlier. Perhaps the English weren’t the only ones to have overdone it, though, for I somehow ended up in a part of the palace I didn’t recognize, and as I came stumbling down a wide flight of stairs, trying to make my way back to the banquet, I heard voices.
I crept towards the balustrade and peered over. Some thirty feet below was a large bare hallway, illuminated by a single iron chandelier. Two men stood facing each other. I was so high above them that I could only see their shoulders and the crowns of their heads, but I knew one of them was Bassetti. Nobody else spoke in such voluptuous tones. The second man was taller than Bassetti, with broad shoulders; his bald patch was ringed with black hair. Judging by the way they addressed each other, I would have said Bassetti was the more powerful, and yet the bald man didn’t sound particularly subservient.
‘– the documents tomorrow,’ he was saying in a voice that was quiet but slightly hoarse, almost as if he had been shouting.
‘Anything else?’ Bassetti said.
‘What about the Sicilian?’
The Sicilian? Had I heard him correctly?
Bassetti turned and walked over to the wall. ‘What about him?’
‘You mentioned him the other day.’
‘Did I? In what connection?’
‘You’re getting forgetful in your old age.’
‘And you, Stufa, are getting insolent.’
The bald man laughed. ‘You want me to look into it?’
‘Not yet. We’ve got plenty of other things to deal with.’ Bassetti said good night, then disappeared into an adjoining room.
Acting on an impulse I didn’t entirely understand, I unpinned my violet and dropped it over the balustrade. As I stepped back into the shadows, heart hammering, I heard the man let out a grunt of surprise. Perhaps the violet had spiralled past his face. I could imagine him staring at the flower, then glancing over his shoulder. I couldn’t imagine his expression, though. I didn’t even know what he looked like. At some point he would probably discover that v
iolets had been worn by people who attended the banquet, but it seemed unlikely he would be able to trace that particular violet back to me. I climbed the stairs again, on tiptoe.
His name was Stufa.
Since flowers didn’t fall all by themselves, from nowhere, he would realize that somebody had been watching him. Would he assume the violet was a love-token – that he had a secret admirer, in other words – or would he see it in a more sinister light? Though I didn’t know the man, and had nothing against him, I found myself hoping that the falling flower had sent a shudder through him. Of uncertainty, at the very least. Or, better still, of fear.
The howling of the wind hid the sound of the Frenchman’s somersaults. The strips of oiled cloth that hung against the window reached into the room; I felt damp air move over my face. Turning on to my side, I pulled the covers up around my ears. They had a name for these bitter, nagging gusts that blew out of the north, but I had forgotten what it was. Once again, I heard the bald man’s grating whisper. What about the Sicilian? That had to be me, didn’t it? Who else could he be talking about? You want me to look into it? Then Bassetti’s voice. Not yet. By which he meant that there would come a time – and, unfortunately, there was plenty to unearth.
I remembered a bright spring morning in 1675. Sunlight angled down into the courtyard in the middle of our house. I was having breakfast with my mother and her sister, Flaminia, when Jacopo appeared unexpectedly. I had thought he was billeted with a battalion of Spanish troops in Messina; in fact, we’d all thought so. Jacopo wasn’t alone. Lurking behind him, close as a shadow, was Padre Paone from Sant’ Andrea, the church opposite our house. Padre Paone had baptized me, and had given me my first communion. I had known him since I was a child.
I got up to offer him a seat.
‘Given the circumstances,’ he said, ‘I think I’d better remain standing.’ He would not meet my gaze.
‘I’m not sure how to begin.’ Jacopo’s tongue shifted inside his mouth, as if he had eaten something that had gone off, then his head lunged in my direction. ‘First your obsession with making parts of people’s bodies, and now these – these practices of yours …’
I had no idea what he was talking about.
‘What did I tell you, Father?’ Jacopo said. ‘Not even a flicker of remorse.’
The priest stepped forwards. He spoke quietly, and his face had curdled, like milk left in the sun. He used the word ‘abomination’.
I glanced at my mother, then my aunt. They seemed entirely passive, in a trance, perhaps because this was a familiar voice, a commanding voice, a voice that delivered homilies and granted absolution.
Jacopo took over. ‘He’s going to be tried, found guilty, and thrown into prison, and the good name of this family – this noble family – will be dragged through the dirt. Never again will we be able to hold up our heads in this town –’
‘But what is it?’ Aunt Flaminia broke in at last. ‘What has he done?’
Jacopo turned to the women with an expression of mingled horror and supplication, as though he had been entrusted with the most terrible knowledge, and was only keeping it to himself in order to protect them.
‘Father?’ he said in a cracked voice.
At times, truly, I thought Jacopo had missed his vocation. Forget the military: he should have pursued a career on the stage.
Once again, the priest began to murmur. This time, he was more specific. This time he mentioned carnal knowledge of the dead.
‘Jacopo,’ my mother said, ‘there must be some mistake –’
Jacopo leaned over her. ‘We have witnesses.’ He turned to me, the muscles knotting and flexing in his jaw. ‘You know, I could kill you for this. I could kill you right now –’ As he went to draw his sword, Padre Paone placed a hand on his upper arm.
I still hadn’t said a word in my defence. Maybe I sensed that things had already progressed beyond that point. Also, I was mesmerized by Jacopo’s performance. He had spoken with such conviction that I had even begun to doubt myself. Had I done something terrible? I touched my forehead; my fingers came away wet. And anyway, my innocence couldn’t be verified. How do you prove that something didn’t happen? It had been so clever of Jacopo to bring Padre Paone along. A stroke of genius, really. After years of studying with the Jesuits, I was hardly about to accuse the church of lying. All I could do was hold my tongue.
I stared at the wedge of sunlight near my feet until it began to resemble a crevasse into which I might disappear. If Jacopo were to do away with me, my guilt would become a fact, since there would be no one left to tell my side of the story. He would remove the need either to press charges or to provide evidence. He would be held up as the saviour of the family’s honour. A pillar of the community. I lifted my eyes from the ground, and all I could see for a few long moments was a pulsing triangle of violet and green. My only option was to flee.
I rolled over on to my back. I had eluded Jacopo, but now I had the likes of Bassetti to contend with – Bassetti, whose record of serving the ruling family for more than three decades testified to his statecraft, his guile and his resilience. Whenever I ran into Bassetti, he was pleasantness itself, and yet, even during our first meeting, I thought I had sensed something else in him – something slippery, reptilian. Then, on the night of the banquet, the façade had slipped. Gone was the avuncular Bassetti. And in his place? An impatient man. A fractious man. There was more than a hint of ruthlessness as well. We’ve got plenty of other things to deal with. I suspected that his career had been built on the misfortunes of others, misfortunes he himself engineered and would, at the same time, deny all knowledge of. I had to avoid drawing attention to myself – I should live quietly, work hard – but, like Ornella, I seemed to provoke people; I was often misinterpreted, misjudged. I would have to be ingenious, I realized, if I were to survive in this city, where scheming and machination were second nature. Though ingenuity might not be enough. I would have to be lucky too.
The wind rose again. Trees roared; roof-tiles rattled. Bracing myself against the cold, I got out of bed and had a last piss in my chamber pot.
Tramontana.
That was the name of the wind.
The following week, as I was leaving my lodgings, I heard somebody call my name. Cuif was peering out of his top-floor window, his face a distant, pale oval. He had been working on his comeback, he told me, then laughed the somewhat hysterical laugh of a person who doesn’t see anybody from one end of the day to the other. He had a new trick, he said. He wanted my opinion. I promised I would drop in later.
When I returned that evening, I found him perched on a high stool, scribbling in a ledger. It was damp in his room, and he had wrapped himself in a coat that appeared to be made from the crudely stitched skins of vermin.
‘I’ll be with you shortly,’ he said, his eyes fixed on the page, as if, like Galileo, he was engaged in work of great historical significance.
His voluntary imprisonment had mystified me at first. Now, though, I thought I was beginning to understand. In this tiny kingdom of his own devising, he could reconstruct himself. He was watching the world turn. Waiting for the ideal moment to make his entrance.
I wandered over to the shelf by the window. The Frenchman’s library dealt more or less exclusively with his craft. There was a copy of Rhetorical Exercises by the original harlequin, Tristano Martinelli. He also had A Choice Banquet of Tumbling and Tricks, The Anatomie of Legerdemain, and Wit and Mirth: an Antidote to Melancholy. I began to leaf through the Martinelli. In his short book, he claimed to be revealing the secrets of his profession. He followed his obsequious dedication to an imaginary patron with four pages of teasing chapter titles and a further seven of illustrations. He left the remaining fifty-seven pages blank. It was an exercise in mockery and obfuscation. On a more serious level, though, I thought he was saying, I’m not going to tell you – or even, It cannot be told.
‘Martinelli’s a big influence.’ Cuif was standing at my elbow, head inclined.
‘I didn’t hear you cross the room.’
Cuif smiled, then he opened a cupboard, took out two long-stemmed glasses with fluted sides and poked a forefinger into each of them in turn, removing the crisp bodies of dead insects.
‘Drink?’ he said.
We were halfway through a jug of rough red wine when I asked Cuif if he knew of somebody called Stufa.
He kept his eyes on his glass. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘No reason,’ I said. ‘I just heard the name somewhere.’
Cuif told me that Stufa acted as a spiritual adviser to the Grand Duke’s mother, Vittoria della Rovere. She was a daunting woman, he said. Always in black, of course. Eyes too close together. Ferocious temper.
I drew him back to the subject, asking how Stufa had acquired the position.
Vittoria had adopted Stufa when he was four, Cuif said. She had educated the boy herself, just as she had educated the Grand Duke, filling his head with stories of penance and martyrdom, and it was no great surprise when, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, he expressed the desire to enter the holy orders. She placed him in a Dominican monastery – in Bologna, Cuif thought, or Padua – where by a mixture of bribery and intercession he secured his master’s degree while still in his twenties. Every week he wrote to the Grand Duke’s mother – or his mother, as he now thought of her – and when he was in his thirties he returned to Florence so as to be of service to her. He joined the monastery of Santa Maria Novella as a librarian, but he also supplied Vittoria with religious texts, administered the holy sacraments and led her in prayer. It was said, in fact, that he was the only person who could handle her.
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