by David Perry
Lee put down his book and thought about it. Adriano shrugged and disappeared into the tiny kitchen.
Adriano is right. That is strange.
The Anglicans might get by with that, or maybe even a remote Catholic church in the hinterlands, but here in Italy, less than an hour from Rome in one of Europe’s prime pilgrimage sites? Plus, Peg said that the funeral was packed, so it wasn’t like the deacon who jumped to his death was given a private, small-time send-off. And a cardinal. Peg said that a cardinal came from Rome for the funeral. That would seem an odd choice, given that the Vatican had so summarily put the kibosh on Andrea’s vocation—by fax no less. Was the cardinal there out of guilt, to observe, or something else?
“Oh, I almost forgot,” Adriano said, popping his head out of the kitchen. “I checked that Arabic script we found next to Floriano’s chapel.”
“What did it say?” Lee propped himself up on the couch.
Adriano brought the laptop and turned the screen toward his husband. Lee looked up and met Adriano’s gaze.
“Google Translate doesn’t lie.”
كراب: مكيف هللاايردنأ. Andrea: May Allah Bless You.
Adriano closed the laptop and returned to cooking. Lee tried to steer his interest back to his puzzle. No such luck. Why would a Catholic deacon be eulogized in Arabic? Suddenly, acrostics and the reigns of Medici Popes Leo X and Clement VII seemed much less intriguing than the suicide of Deacon Andrea Bernardone, the young man from Orvieto who shared his birthday.
CHAPTER XII
The Swiss Guard
December 10, 1527 (Julian Calendar), later that evening, Orvieto
“Enter and be blessed,” Clement said upon hearing the secret knock—six sharp evenly spaced raps on the door frame (one for each ball of the Medici coat of arms) and three staccato taps (one for each Person of the Holy Trinity) on the door itself—that bespoke one of his guardians. Cousin Giovanni had devised the code to identify his boyish lovers for discreet admittance to his Vatican apartments after he became Pope Leo X.
Dear cousin, Clement thought, you got by with murder, figuratively speaking, and the people loved you for it! I had to sneak out of Rome dressed as a peasant and they’re burning my effigy in the streets! Life was so unfair. Clement unlocked the door, then seated himself in the unsuccessful semblance of a throne in this godforsaken burg.
“Your Holiness.”
A young man entered and fell to one knee, head bowed.
“Arise, my son. Speak.”
The Swiss Guard stood, revealing the already classic colors of his uniform, the blue and gold of the late Pope Julius’s della Rovere family crest, on top of which Pope Leo had added a dash of Medici red. The effect was formal but rumpled after six months without a wash and a muddy flight from Rome.
“I am your servant, Holy Father.”
The youth rose. Cousin Gio would have liked this one, Clement pondered in that corner of his mind where resided his most secular and distracted thoughts. If he had a sister Clement might be interested, but she couldn’t be any prettier than this. Oh well. Sodomy and consensual debauchery weren’t unique to Cousin Gio, before or after his ascent to the Throne of Peter. Yes, dear cousin, you would certainly have found pleasure in the handsome physique of this one, worthy of one of Raphael’s models, I dare say. Poor Raphael. Clement was sure every fresco in which a Medici or one of their lovely consorts had artfully cavorted had been marked by the vandal’s torch after The Sack. He did hope the rabble at least didn’t desecrate Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon the way they did to the burial chamber of Pope Julius. A mental shudder. Defacing the tomb of a pope he could live with, but the Divine Raphael was another thing, he—
The Switzer coughed.
“Ah yes.” Clement smiled, snapping out of his reverie. “I have a job for you.”
“Yes, Your Holiness.” The strapping soldier started to genuflect again.
“Oh stop, please,” admonished Clement, and waved him up. “You’ll be doing that all night at this rate.” He chuckled while he said it.
The guard smiled back.
My God, even his teeth are straight, such a novelty in 1527. Ah, youth. “How old are you?”
“Seventeen, Your Holiness.”
Clement sighed. Seventeen… At seventeen Clement was gallivanting around France and the Netherlands with Cousin Gio—sorry, Su Eminenca Cardinal de Medici di Firenze—waiting out the reign of that wretched Borgia, Pope Alexander VI. Oh well, as forced exiles went, that one had been pretty good. Gio/Leo had had his fill of willing French boys, and a plethora of Dutch girls had seemed pleased with Clement’s largesse, as well. The Emperor Maximilian and his son had been divine hosts, certainly better than this new Holy Roman Imbecile, Charles. Ah, where was I?
“We must secure ourselves from future troubles. I need a discreet messenger to our Most Catholic Prince, Henry VIII of England. Will you undertake such a charge?”
“Your Holiness,” gasped the young man. “Your wish—“
“Yes, yes, I know. My wish is your command. Would that his most vaunted and pernicious Excellency the Holy Roman Emperor had felt the same and we’d both still be in Rome inside the Vatican wall. Charles, the Borgias, nothing good has come out of Spain since the time of Hadrian.”
“His Majesty, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles was born in Flanders, Your Holiness.”
“What?” Clement didn’t know whether to be more shocked by the impudence of this teenaged correction or the fact that he had made a mistake.
“Your Holiness”—the guard once again sank to his knees—“I beg your forgiveness, I was merely—”
“Sacred Heart of Christ, please think nothing of it. You are quite correct. The King of Spain he may also be, along with seemingly everything else under heaven including this ‘New World’ at the end of creation in whose thrall Portugal and Spain seem so bewitched. But you are correct. Born in Flanders was ‘Our Protector,’ Holy Roman Emperor Charles V née Charles I of Spain. You are forgiven.” Clement laughed, waving the lad to his feet yet again during this suddenly most casual and unusual of audiences. Most people trembled in front of a pope, especially a Medici one. This one seemed, well, uniquely self-assured.
The guard smiled.
Those teeth again, and that dimple. Where had that been hiding? “Do you have a sister?”
“I beg your pardon, Holiness?”
“Nothing, I-ah…You were with me in Rome…on the steps when Charles’s troops stormed St. Peters?”
“Yes, Your Holiness.” The smile disappeared from his gloriously dented chin. And then, quite quietly he said, “We all were.”
Silence.
“One hundred forty-six?”
“One hundred forty-seven, Your Holiness. My best…One of our comrades died as we fled en route to Castel Sant’Angelo.”
One hundred forty-seven out of one hundred eighty-seven Swiss Guards, dead on the steps of Christendom’s holiest of holies, yards away from the bones of St. Peter himself, the very Rock on which Christ’s Church had been built. They had died so that Clement might live. They had fought, almost to the last man, just to give Clement and his ragtag curia time to escape Charles’s troops as they scaled the Vatican walls to begin a debauch of rape and pillage. And Clement had let it happen. He should have seen it coming. How could he have been so foolish as to think that mere religion would prevent thousands of mercenaries from looting the world’s richest city when they hadn’t been paid or properly fed in months? They were hungry, they were poor, and they were constantly fighting to defend a corrupt and bloated aristocracy of faith. Perhaps Luther had been right after all.
“Why does the pope, whose wealth today is greater than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the basilica of Saint Peter with the money of poor believers rather than with his own money?”
Oh, how the Medici have fallen.
“I am sorry.” Clement heaved a great, groaning breath, escaping in a chilly haze in the frigid air of Orvieto’s Papal
Palace. He was sorry for so, so many things. “I, too, have lost my best friend.” Would that Gio, Pope Leo, still be alive. He would have known what to do.
“Your Holiness did everything that he could,” the guard offered quietly, starting to step closer to his pontifical sovereign, but then stepping away.
“Maybe. Maybe not. It is in God’s hands now.”
“You are God’s hands.”
The Pope looked up to find the teenager’s face streaked with tears. More to his surprise, so was his own. “My son.” He reached out to the young man, who knelt and kissed the Pontiff’s ring.
They stayed that way for a while, a minute, maybe five, saying nothing in the cold winter evening of Orvieto. Outside, the Tower of the Moor clock chimed five times. Finally, Clement patted the young man on the head and then reached under his chin to pull his face up to look at him.
“You know, my son is about your age.” The Pope looked directly in the eyes of the young man at his feet.
The guard pulled his chin from the Pope’s hands and turned away, his jaws working in silent consternation as if desperately searching for something to say, before finally offering, “Your cousin, you mean, Il Moro, the Noble Alessandro, the son of your nephew, Lorenzo the younger—”
“My dear boy, enough lies. We all know whose son he is, don’t we?” The Pope knew that honesty, not often the realm of conversations between Pope and subject, hung unconfessed in the air.
“Yes, Your Holiness,” the young Swiss Guard finally whispered. And then, a bit louder with a cheeky grin. “Who am I to contradict the Vicar of Christ?”
“Ha!” Clement let loose with a great guffaw of such not heard since before the horrors of the previous year. Before The Sack. “For such impertinence I will take away any indulgences hitherto granted to you or your kin.”
“Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa,” said the guard, bowing with exaggerated mock reverence tainted with a natal affection.
The Pope laughed and the boy followed.
“What is your name?”
“Giovanni, Your Holiness.”
Clement gasped. “My dear Gio, you share the name of our late, great cousin, the ablest Pope of the Age, Leo X.”
“Yes, Your Holiness.”
“Very well, Giovanni…”
“My friends call me Gio.”
“And so shall it be. Let us be friends. Arise, young Gio. I hereby confer on you the Knighthood of the Golden Spur.”
“Holy Father, I am not—”
“You are worthy, by action and by my authority.” The Pope stood imperiously, grabbed his crozier, and laid it gently across each of the young guard’s shoulders. “So shall it be written, so shall it be done.” Clement loved that phrase.
“I offer my life to your service, to the point of death.”
“Let us have no more talk of death. There has been enough of that this year. But, ride you must. In truth, you will earn your ‘spurs.’ Ready a horse and send for that wretched cardinal secretary of mine. The Pope still has friends between here and God’s outer most reaches of Britain’s realm, nay, to Hadrian’s Wall along Scotia. His Eminence will give you what you need as far as contacts and my letters of request to the Tudor Court and our ‘Defender of the Faith,’ King Henry VIII. Let’s see if he is willing to help his pope during this most urgent hour of our need.”
With that, the Pope opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a tightly rolled parchment, leather-bound and wax-sealed, with the imprint of his pontifical hand, the Ring of the Fisherman.
“I will not fail you, Your Holiness.” With a bow the newly minted Knight of the Golden Spurs turned to leave, grasping the document firmly in his hand.
“And Gio?”
“Yes, Your Holiness.”
“Let this be just between us.”
“It will be our secret.”
“Go with God.”
Clement stood, making the sign of the cross while the young knight backed out the portal, and listened as the door locked into place. Only then did the Pope look out over Orvieto, surprised to see that during their conversation a heavy snow had begun to fall. The city seemed to glow, briefly, made clean by the weather’s sudden transformation. Even the cathedral looked better with its frosty mantle.
“Alessandro.” He whispered his son’s name. “I wonder where you are tonight. Please forgive me. You, too, are now an exile. Because of my failures, how many mothers’ sons are exiles this night?”
And now, thought the Pope, we wait. He sat down in the wooden chair, hitherto reserved for Orvieto’s bishop, but like so many things in this desolate hilltop fortress in the Etruscan wastes north of Rome, hastily requisitioned for the Papal Court in Exile. Clement leaned back and suddenly a potent crack echoed across the chamber as the throne’s rotten frame collapsed beneath his weight. Before he knew it, his papal bum was splayed out on the cold stone floor in a most undignified manner.
Despite himself, the Pope laughed, picked himself up, dusted himself off, and started all over to contemplate the future, this time settling on the stone casement of the window overlooking Orvieto’s vast, imperfect cathedral. That seemed solid enough. Lit obscurely from behind by the frozen illumination of the snow, he stared at and through his sanctified reflection.
He was Giulio de Medici. By birth son of the murdered Giuliani and nephew of his brother, the Magnificent Lorenzo, by law his heir. Cousin and confidant of Giovanni, by Grace of God and Apostolic Succession, Pope Leo X, by whose hand Clement was elevated to the purple and by cardinal election four winters ago, now Supreme Pontiff, Bishop of Rome and Lord of the Papal States, His Holiness and Holy Father, Clement Septicemic.
Indeed, it had been a bad year, but Christmas was coming and the decision had been made. Yes, the decision had been made. Next year, things would be better. The year 1528 would certainly bring him news from Henry VIII, news that would change everything. He just knew it.
CHAPTER XIII
Fall from Grace
Tuesday, December 3, 2013, breakfast, Orvieto
It didn’t take long to find the story. Adriano .googled “Deacon Suicide Orvieto” and his laptop lit up.
“Lee, listen to this.”
Adriano read.
Orvieto, Saturday, 1 December 2012. AKI. A twenty-nine-year-old man committed suicide by throwing himself from the city walls in the medieval central Italian city of Orvieto, apparently because the Vatican refused to ordain him as a priest. In a printed suicide note found in his room, typed on his computer, Andrea Bernardone said he killed himself because the Vatican had blocked his ordination that was to have taken place a week from today, next Saturday, December 8, the first anniversary of his having become a deacon.
“I wanted to be a priest, and dedicated my whole life to this goal, but it was denied me,” typed Bernardone, who had been born in Bagnoregio. The note continued. “I am fragile and I ask for forgiveness.”
Adriano looked up to see his husband’s ashen face, a blank and distant look to his usually clear and cheerful blue eyes. “Shall I go on?”
“What?”
Lee seems far away, Adriano thought. This whole story is beginning to give me the creeps. Worse, I’m sure, for Lee. Adriano waited and shrugged.
“Yeah, yes, go on,” Lee said. “I need to hear it all.”
“Need?” Adriano pushed back, but only a bit. These were seas he’d rather not swim in, and certainly hadn’t expected here. Orvieto was supposed to be an escape from death, not a reminder of so much they had both already seen—especially Lee.
“Read,” Lee said simply. An order.
Adriano continued.
Bernardone took his own life late last night by throwing himself from the walls of Orvieto after the Holy See intervened directly to stop his ordination from going ahead.
The body was found by an elderly Orvieto resident during her early morning walk. His body showed injuries consistent with having fallen thirty meters, but with no signs of foul play. Magistrates were du
e to decide today on whether to order an autopsy.
“Wait,” Lee said, grabbing his husband’s arm. “An autopsy. You usually only order autopsies for suspicious deaths.”
“Lee.” Adriano gave his husband a quizzical look over his nerdy-chic glasses. “You’re reading too much into this.”
“And you need to keep reading. Humor me.”
Adriano sighed. Some vacation. He didn’t like where this was going. Lee’s obsessions always became work, social work, for him. He continued to read.
The Vatican on Friday, November 30, informed Bernardone that his ordination had been stopped “due to the direct intervention of the Holy See.”
“The reasons for this will soon be subject to clarification,” the Right Rev. Giovanni Sancarlo, bishop of Orvieto–Todi, had commented shortly after receiving the news from Rome. “We—I—pray that don Andrea may soon recover from this great test.
Bernardone had been Bishop Sancarlo’s deacon for one year and was in charge of the diocesan offices as well as overseeing the day-today operations of the Bishop’s residence in Orvieto.
Local media reported there had been “murmurings” that Andrea might be gay, but Orvieto Bishop Sancarlo refused to comment or speculate.
“There were only some issues about a friend—ah, friends—of his,” said Bishop Sancarlo in an emotional interview. He then added, “For me, he was ready to be a priest, but the Vatican said he wasn’t ‘mature’ enough.”
The bishop related his last conversation with his deacon, just before what would prove to be his final service on the altar of Sant’Andrea, a service that coincidentally was the deacon’s twenty-ninth birthday. “Over and over again he kept asking me, ‘Bishop, what have I done, tell me what I’ve done.’”
With that, the Bishop ended the interview, clearly moved. His closing words to the press were “May God forgive all of us.”
“There’s a picture too, with a caption.” Adriano turned the laptop around for Lee.
“Bishop Sancarlo?”
“No, some young cardinal. Not bad looking, actually, for a Vatican apologist.”