‘So he’s a Dominican,’ I said.
Cuif nodded.
Not a bald patch, then. A tonsure.
‘I sometimes think it might explain why he’s so prickly,’ Cuif said.
Ever since Savonarola had made an enemy of the Medici family, he went on, the Dominican order had been out of favour in Florence. When judges or inquisitors were needed, it was the Franciscans who were called on. To be a Dominican was to be in a minority of sorts, and vulnerable as well, to some extent, no matter how many influential friends one might have.
‘You know a lot,’ I said, ‘for somebody who never leaves his room.’
‘You think you’re my only visitor?
I smiled. ‘Before I go, would you show me your new trick?’
‘I already did.’
‘Did you? When?’
‘You missed it. You weren’t paying attention.’
‘Show me again.’
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Not now I’ve been drinking.’ He eyed me over the rim of his glass. ‘You’ll just have to come back, won’t you?’
*
One morning I found Signora de la Mar at the foot of the stairs, holding a package that was addressed to me. Some idiot had left it outside the back door, she said, and she had almost tripped over it on her way out. As I turned the package in my hands, I thought of the pistachio-coloured ankle-boots I had bought Fiore a month or two before, and how her face had lit up when she put them on.
‘How is Fiore liking her new shoes?’ I asked.
The signora rolled her eyes. ‘She practically sleeps in them.’
I didn’t open the package until I reached the privacy of my workshop. Inside, in a simple wooden box, was a halved pomegranate, the red seeds facing upwards. A thin glass bottle lay next to it. There was no note, no card – nothing to indicate the sender’s identity. To a Jesuit, the pomegranate had a symbolic value, since the seeds were believed to represent the drops of blood Christ shed when he wore the crown of thorns, but in a secular context it alluded to the tension that existed between secrecy and disclosure, and I knew instinctively, as soon as I saw it, that the package had come from the girl in the apothecary. What was in the bottle, though? I removed the stopper. I thought I could smell roses, but there was also a pungent element, something almost fiery, like a type of pepper. On returning to my lodgings that evening, I asked the signora if she could tell me what it was. She put her nose to the bottle, then straightened up. She had no idea. She had never smelled anything like it.
A day or two later, I called at an apothecary located in a shabby arcade on the south side of the Ponte Vecchio. The three men sitting by the window fell silent as I walked in.
‘Beanpole?’ one of them called out.
The woman who ran the place was so short that the top of her head was on a level with the counter. When I put the bottle down in front of her, she had to look round it to see me. I asked her if she’d be kind enough to identify the contents.
‘Is it yours?’ Her eyes were a bleary blue-black, like unwashed plums.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was a gift.’
I sensed the men behind me, craning to catch a glimpse of what I had brought.
The woman removed the stopper and inhaled once or twice. She muttered to herself; a smile drifted across her wrinkled face. She poured a few drops into a spoon, touched a finger to the clear, oily liquid, and tasted it.
‘Who gave it to you?’ she asked.
I hesitated.
‘Was it a woman?’
‘I think so.’
She nodded. ‘I can’t say I’m familiar with this particular recipe, but when I prepare my own concoctions, which are much in demand, especially among men of a certain age –’ she peered over the counter at her three clients, who shifted and chuckled on their chairs like chickens in the presence of a fox – ‘I tend to favour nettle seeds. Musk too, just a pinch. And –’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but what’s it for?’
She knocked the stopper back into the bottle with the heel of her hand. ‘In my opinion, it’s to increase your potency.’
This was so unexpected that I couldn’t, for a moment, think how to respond.
‘You anoint your parts with it,’ she said.
‘My parts,’ I said faintly.
‘Your root. Your yard.’ She paused. ‘Your pego.’
‘All right, Beanpole,’ one of the men said, laughing. ‘I think he’s got the point.’
I pocketed the bottle and made for the door.
‘She likes you, whoever she is,’ the man added as I left the shop.
‘Careful,’ said another.
On a dark February afternoon, I was summoned to the Grand Duke’s winter apartment. The wind was blowing hard again, and as I hurried across the courtyard at the back of the palace I thought I could smell the river, dank and green. I climbed a flight of stairs to the first floor. It was draughty up there as well; the tapestries, though heavy, were shifting on the walls.
When I was ushered into the Grand Duke’s presence, he was standing at the window, hands clasped behind his back. By his feet was a cockerel, a leather strap running from one of its legs to the leg of a nearby chair. Its comb trembled in the shadows like a small red flame.
‘I haven’t seen you at court,’ the Grand Duke said, staring out over the city. ‘At least, not recently.’
I told him I was sorry. I talked about my work, and how I tended to get lost in it.
‘I understand.’ He sighed. ‘I sometimes find the whole business rather tiresome myself.’
Only a few days earlier, while visiting my workshop, Pampolini had launched into a series of scurrilous jokes about the Grand Duke, jokes that referred to his Austrian lips, his sexual proclivities, and so on. Later, though, he had become more serious. In Pampolini’s opinion, Cosimo would have made a superb cardinal, but he didn’t have what it took to rule a duchy. It wasn’t his fault, Pampolini said. When he was growing up, his mother had surrounded him with priests – bigots like Volunnio Bandinelli – who taught him to treat the secular world with disdain.
‘Take a seat,’ the Grand Duke said.
Dipping his hand into the barrel that stood next to the window, he scattered a few bits of grain, which the cockerel fell on with a kind of mechanical ferocity. I was curious to know what it was doing in the room, but couldn’t think how to phrase the question. When I looked at the Grand Duke again, he was studying me with his usual glum expression, which always gave me the feeling I had disappointed him.
‘I’ve just come from the chapel,’ he said.
I waited for him to go on.
‘As a rule I find some comfort there, some consolation, but these days –’ He faltered, then pushed out his lower lip. ‘I’ve been having the most frightful dreams.’
I murmured something vaguely sympathetic.
‘My sleep is broken every night. No, more than broken. Shattered. Demolished. Smashed to smithereens. I’m tired all the time.’ He collapsed into the chair beside me and gave me another long look from beneath his drooping lids. ‘I’ve been dreaming about my wife.’
In one dream, he said, he had been laid out on a catafalque. Though dead, he had been acutely aware of his surroundings. There was a ring of jagged, brown rocks above him, as if he were lying in a grotto in the palace gardens. He could also see some arum lilies and a disc of bright blue sky. Then his wife’s face appeared. ‘At last,’ he heard her murmur. And then again: ‘At last!’
‘The cruelty of that.’ The Grand Duke shuddered.
I didn’t think he expected me to comment. All he asked, it seemed, was that I listen.
‘When I woke,’ he went on, ‘I was drenched in sweat. I had to call for Redi –’
The rooster crowed, making me jump; I had forgotten it was there. It looked at me with one eye, the iris a shiny, tawny colour, like polished teak.
‘When I wake, it’s always the same,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘I have the feeling she’s in the palac
e, and that she’s planning another attack on me.’ Like the cockerel, he looked at me sidelong. ‘She used to attack me, you see? Physically. Once, she kicked me – right here, on the shin. I’ve still got the scar. Another time, she threw a vase. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but I had to have guards stationed outside my bedchamber – to protect me from my wife!’ He let out an eerie, astonished laugh. ‘Even then, I couldn’t sleep. She was so clever; she could talk her way round any man. Can you imagine what it’s like to fear your own wife? Can you imagine what it’s like to love someone who wants you dead?’ He stood up and moved back to the window. Rain slithered diagonally across the glass. ‘Eventually, of course, I realize she’s no longer here, and that she left for Paris more than fifteen years ago – that she’s gone for ever, in fact – but there’s no relief in that. I just feel alone – more alone than you can possible envisage …’
I joined him at the window. We both stared down into the bleak, wet square.
‘You know what pains me most of all, Zummo? I can’t see her in any of my children. Two sons and a daughter, and none of them has her beauty or her spirit. Ferdinando’s charming, I suppose – at least, he was charming as a boy – but now he seems determined to follow in the footsteps of that bestial, sacrilegious, fornicating brother of mine, Francesco Maria, who has transformed our noble family’s villa in Lappeggi into a den of debauchery and filth of every kind, God forgive him.’
The Grand Duke had delivered the sentence without drawing breath; his face had flushed, and the corners of his mouth were white with spit. I thought it best to remain silent, especially as I had never met his brother.
‘Gian Gastone?’ The Grand Duke shook his head. ‘I see nothing of his mother in him, except for a certain wiliness, perhaps, and the occasional glimmer of intelligence. But he has become a shambling drunk, old before his time. Did you witness his behaviour at the banquet in November?’
I nodded.
‘He’s an embarrassment. I’m thinking of sending him to Germany. Lord knows what they’ll make of him. And then there’s Anna Maria. I adore her, of course, but – well – she’s strange. That mannish laugh, that frizzy hair. Still, at least I’ve managed to find her a husband …’
The cock crowed again.
The Grand Duke sighed, then reached into the barrel and threw the tethered fowl another fistful of grain.
‘No, Marguerite-Louise left precious little of herself behind,’ he said, ‘and I find it selfish of her, if that doesn’t sound too irrational. I almost feel she might have willed her absence in her children. Is that possible, do you think?’
I told him there were those who believed that babies in the womb were as malleable as wax, and could be shaped by the imagination of the mother.
‘Though I’m not sure I go along with that,’ I added.
‘Still, if anyone could do it, she could,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘She tried to kill them, you know – before they were born.’
I stared at him.
‘I only found out later. She took all sorts of abortifacients – everything she could lay her hands on: pennyroyal, squirting cucumber, lozenges of myrrh. She rode her thoroughbreds flat out. She danced all night. She walked up every hill she could find. With hindsight, it was a miracle any of our children survived.
‘And when she left, she left without them. What kind of woman abandons her children? It’s not natural. But perhaps she saw too much of me in them. Perhaps she couldn’t bear to be reminded of her dreaded marriage …’
Once again, I thought of Ornella Camilleri. In Naples, two years after my flight from Siracusa, I had started writing to her. I must have sent a dozen letters, but I only ever received one brief reply. She thanked me for thinking of her, and said she regretted that our friendship had ended. She admitted she hadn’t stood up for me; she hadn’t been strong enough, she said, to swim against the tide. Then came the news I suppose I should have been expecting all along: she was going to marry my brother, Jacopo. I crushed the letter. Dropped it on the floor. She was going to marry Jacopo. I walked out on to my terrace. It was summer. The sea showed as an upright strip of blue between two salt-stained buildings. Further to the east, the dusty slopes of Vesuvius lifted against a hot white morning sky. Behind me, I heard the letter crackle as it began to open out; it hadn’t finished with me yet. Back indoors, I spread it flat on the table. Searching between the lines for traces of what she might once have felt for me, of what she might still feel, I realized she had believed the story that had gone around. Everybody had believed the story. I rested my forehead on her short, cold sentences. That was as close as I would ever get.
Looking up, I saw that the Grand Duke had also retreated into himself, and I decided to take a risk.
‘It seems to me, Your Highness,’ I said, ‘that we’re not unalike, you and I. We’ve not been treated kindly.’
He appeared to wake from a deep slumber. ‘Really, Zummo? You too?’ He gripped my shoulder. ‘I knew it all along, somehow.’
The rain had stopped. A pink light filled the square.
‘I have a proposal,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘Well, actually, it’s more of a request.’
I told him I was at his disposal. He only had to ask.
‘This is highly confidential,’ he said. ‘It must remain between us.’
‘You have my word.’
‘I want you to make a woman.’
‘A woman?’
‘Out of wax.’
I was reminded of the dream I had had on my first night in the city. That long walk through the gardens, the sudden accusation. The mysterious closed hand. I stared at the Grand Duke’s profile, then down at my shoes. Why would he ask such a thing?
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘This isn’t where your talent lies. This is beneath you.’
I tried to keep my face expressionless. Don’t reveal anything. Let him talk.
‘Forgive me,’ he went on, still looking out into the square. ‘I shouldn’t be asking this of you. You’re a great artist. You have enough ideas of your own.’
‘A woman,’ I murmured.
‘Yes.’ Encouraged by the fact that I had spoken, he turned to me. ‘Life-size. Reclining. In her natural –’ His right hand began to caress the air. ‘A kind of Eve. Don’t you see? This is a chance for you to create something of extraordinary beauty.’
I could think of nothing to say. My thoughts had scattered, like sheep startled by a thunderclap.
‘Who knows, you might even find it a challenge. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it – a woman – and yet …’
Stepping away from the window, the Grand Duke began to talk faster, and more persuasively. As an artist, he said, surely it was my duty to push at the boundaries of my talent, even if it involved neglecting what I might think of as my strengths. I should dare to venture into territory I had not imagined. Come face to face with the unknown. He had happened on the kind of argument he had been looking for, one I would find it hard to take issue with, and one that would also, conveniently, free him from any awkwardness or embarrassment. With the lightest of touches, he had managed to transfer all the responsibility and pressure to me – and he knew it. As he moved back towards me, the corners of his mouth curved a little, then hid in the soft pouches of his cheeks. His hand reappeared on my shoulder, more stealthy now.
‘Make her,’ he murmured. ‘You won’t be sorry.’
I told him I would do my best.
As I turned to go, he spoke again. ‘Take all the time you need. But remember –’ And he placed a plump, jewelled finger against his lips.
Not until I was walking down the slope that led away from the palace did it occur to me that I had forgotten to ask about the cockerel.
A few nights later, I left my lodgings and set off towards the river. The temperature had dropped sharply; the cold air scalded my lungs. Crossing the Piazza del Gran Duca, my boots crunched on dozens of irises that had been dumped on the ground, their purple petals frozen, crisp. I came ou
t on to the Lung’Arno. The top of the embankment wall was encased in ice. The river lay beyond, flat and dark and still.
I turned to the west. My thoughts circled back to my conversation with the Grand Duke. My first instinct had been to view his proposal as a test or a trap, and even now that several days had passed I still felt I might have blundered by not saying no. It would have been so easy. The Grand Duke himself had provided me with the perfect excuse. All I had to do was to agree with him: I just don’t think I’m the right person for the job. Or craftier, and less obstructive: It’s not beneath me, Your Highness, so much as beyond me. And then I could have looked for someone who could take the work on in my place. To have disappointed the Grand Duke, though – that would also have had its consequences.
It was a delicate situation.
The Grand Duke hadn’t felt the need either to explain or to justify his request, but, knowing what I knew about his marriage, I thought I understood. He wanted me to provide him with a woman who would not despise him, or torment him, or wish him dead. A woman he could worship with no fear of ridicule or rejection. All the same, the idea teetered on the brink of the illicit – and this from a man who visited six or seven churches a day, a man who, if the gossip was to be believed, spent so many hours in prayer that the prints on his fingertips had worn away … In the end, though, I didn’t think I could refuse. I was in Florence at his personal invitation. He was paying me more than I had ever been paid before. He had even given me a workshop, free of charge. I was in his debt – in every sense. He had talked to me openly, and I had listened. As a result, he was drawing me deeper into his private world. And yet …
While I no longer suspected him of trying to tempt me into activities that were dubious or unlawful, I kept returning to the dream. What had the Grand Duke been holding in his hand? What could he have been holding? I simply could not see the whole of the picture. For that reason, perhaps, I still felt the commission was fraught with danger. If I made this woman for him – this Eve, as he had called her – would I not be putting myself in a vulnerable position? He had emphasized the need for absolute discretion, but what if the whole thing came to light? I knew what I would do if I were him: I’d act the innocent. It was Zummo’s idea. I’m not sure what he was playing at. Trying to corrupt me, I suppose. I should have known. Those Sicilians, they’re not like us. I would be held responsible, and in the current climate, which was so repressive, so quick to judge, I would be lucky to escape with my life.
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