by Sarah Bower
“We would still sleep on the roof and I would still get in beside him, but sometimes he would turn his back on me and get impatient with my chatter. Then one night my hand brushed against…”
“Please, madonna, I am sure I need not hear all the details.” But I could not stop her telling them, either as a way of reliving them or of seeking atonement, or perhaps something of both.
“I was shocked,” she said, “but he grabbed my wrist and held my hand there, and then I was curious. I was always curious, you see. Not a very feminine attribute. And then I was content, because I realised whatever I was doing gave me some power over him. I didn’t feel left out any more. It restored us to the way we had been, me and Cesar together and Juan and Jofre on the outside.
“And that’s the way it stayed, despite the cost. Perotto, Pantasilea, Djem…”
The first two names meant nothing to me; they sounded like characters in a comedy, but Djem. I remembered Cesare doing impressions of Djem, of madonna begging him to stop because of the pain of laughing with her breasts engorged. “Djem?” I queried.
“You know my father inherited Prince Djem, as it were, when he became pope? And we children took to visiting him in his apartments. Oh Violante, it was like stepping into another world. Perhaps that is why Cesar and I felt so at home there, even though it was Juan Djem always wanted to see most. Even the air. He used to burn incense all the time, but it never had that cold, righteous smell it has in a church. It was spicy, hot, like breathing in the sun on the desert Djem came from. And he had no chairs, just cushions all over the floor, so we all sat together, the Sultan’s brother and we three parvenu marrano bastards, eating sweets. Real gipsies we felt like there, in Djem’s ‘tent.’
“Before very long at all, Djem had seduced Juan. He used to dress him up in Turkish robes and turbans and…touch him. And because we would be full of wine mixed with poppy it seemed quite hilarious to us.”
I wondered if this was why madonna, for all her piety, had always accepted Ferrante’s inclinations with equanimity.
“So hilarious we would imitate them, with Cesar taking Djem’s part and me Juan’s. Well by then Cesar was about eighteen. He had been to university; he was a man of the world, even if he had just been admitted to the Sacred College and made to wear a tonsure.” She burst into giggles. “God in heaven, how he hated that. He was forever letting it grow out and being given penances. Anyway, yes, for myself, there was much talk of betrothals, and Aunt Adriana had given me her little speech on the duties of wives. Though the duties of wives vary quite a lot, I think, from the duties of young women who are in love with their brothers.
“So I cannot say we did not know what we were doing, or that it did not mire us as deep in sin as it’s possible to be, yet it felt…right. It was the inevitable end of the path we had embarked on from birth.”
Djem let us be ourselves, he had said to me.
“But that is why he had Djem killed.”
I will never forgive the French for Djem. “Cesare?” I queried.
“He didn’t die of a fever, not Djem. He was never ill.”
“But I thought Cesare was fond of Djem.”
“Not so fond as he was of me or his own reputation.”
I tried to console myself with the thought that at least his body had not lied, that his desire for me had been real. Then I remembered his unflawed skin, the clean grace of his bones and sinews, the beautiful deceit with which that body had contaminated mine with its disease.
“He saw to everything,” said madonna, “but he could never control his jealousy.”
You used to be so jealous of Sancia, he had written on another page. You accused her of being my first love. Hah! You are my first and last and only love and you know it. You were just being disingenuous, weren’t you?
“He would not come to my wedding, you know, my first wedding to Giovanni Sforza.”
I was very young. I confused lust with love as the young do. There was perhaps a day when I believed I could not live without Sancia (probably the day she gave me the white velvet suit. Remember?)—a day of relief and despair. But I have always known I couldn’t live without you. That is a constant, like the sun rising in the east or my having five fingers on each hand. That is love, Lucia, and it doesn’t go in for showy swooning or pretty phrases or extravagant gifts. It is plain and deep, like the sea when no one is looking at it.
“He came in the morning, to my room in Santa Maria where my maids were dressing me. I was so cruel. I wouldn’t let him embrace me. I was all covered in lemon juice, you see, for whitening my skin, and I was sticky. I sat there in my shift, with it clinging to my body, and watched him suffer. He said he had brought me a gift.” She picked up the filigree box, wearily, as though it was a great weight. “There was nothing inside but a rolled up vellum, tied with a plait of gold and copper wires. When I lifted it out, he said, ‘There, now, inside that box is my heart, empty without you.’ At that I burst into tears and stopped all my play-acting and coquettishness. I was terrified, of Giovanni, of going away, of losing Cesar. He comforted me.” She gave a sad laugh. “Got his soutane covered in lemon…”
“He said you wouldn’t be like the calf, didn’t he, said you wouldn’t die of the separation? And scored the soles of your shoes for dancing.”
“How did you know that?”
“He spoke to me honestly once, when he was delirious.”
“I am so sorry.”
“What was written on the vellum?”
“Oh nothing much, just some verses from a Catalan poet we used to like.”
She fell silent. I stared at the scattered letters, phrases emerging from the scrawled lines as images sometimes form themselves from clouds. There is a gipsy girl…I would like to pluck her songs from the air and press them between cards for you, like flowers...I woke in the night with the taste of raspberries on my tongue…I had to tell you about the sunset…the earth burned with the sorrow of parting…always, when I dance, I am dancing with you. I wondered if anyone else would ever read these words, and how they would know if they were true. I looked at madonna, clutching her empty box, her hands folded over it the way a pregnant woman’s hands lie on the rise of her belly.
“Tell me about Giovanni,” I said.
She blinked and looked bewildered, like someone woken suddenly from a deep sleep, then put the box aside. “When I realised I was pregnant I went to San Sisto. I knew it was Cesar’s, and even a dolt like Sforza would have been able to work out it wasn’t his if he could count to nine. He and I had been content enough in Pesaro, but once we came back to Rome things became difficult. Cesar had the perfect excuse to keep us apart, as it was obvious by this time the marriage was serving no useful political purpose and Papa was keen to arrange a divorce. I needed time to think, somewhere I could keep away from my family. I took one maid with me, my favourite, a girl called Pantasilea, and refused to communicate with the family except through messengers. Papa used to send Perotto Calderon because he knew I was fond of him.
“This made Cesar even angrier and eventually he burst in one day, scattering the sisters like a fox among the chickens, and accused me of having an affair with Perotto. I calmed him down and made him walk with me to a far corner of the convent garden where I knew we would not be overheard, and told him I was pregnant and that he was the father.” A soft light came into her eyes. “He was so excited, and so ridiculously solicitous. It mortified him that he had shouted at me. He was worried I had walked too far, started fussing about the convent food and the hard beds and a thousand other silly things. The food and the beds at San Sisto were little different to what I was used to at Santa Maria.” She flashed me a mischievous smile. “Sister Osanna would have felt at home there. You know I have sent her back to Mantua, the old fraud? Isabella is welcome to her. I have a mind to put Fidelma into Santa Caterina as abbess, and make Fra Raffaello their spiritual adviser. What do you think?”
But she went on without waiting for my reply. “For a b
rief moment, in that neglected corner full of nettles and white butterflies, Cesar and I were like any other couple who loved each other and had just discovered we were expecting our first child. I was happy all through that pregnancy, thinking about that scrap of love, that magical second of union growing into a whole life inside me. It was as though I was protected by a carapace of contentment, even when Juan died and Cesar cried when he told me and then was angry with himself and broke a stool. He always missed him, I think, because he had always measured himself against him. Even when I had to go before the College of Cardinals and lie to them about my marriage to Sforza, I kept my eyes locked on Cesar’s and made myself believe there was no one else in the room, that my elegant little statement was really a hymn of love to my beautiful brother.
“I was about the same age you were when Girolamo was born, so you see, for me, watching your child grow in your belly, being with you at his birth, I was re-living that time. I measure all my subsequent joys by it. None has ever come close, and now none ever will.”
I wondered about her second marriage, to the Duke of Bisceglie, but I held my peace because I knew she would come to that. She would have to. As I waited for her to continue with her story, I picked up another of Cesare’s letters.
I have been trying to think of a moment when I was truly happy, I read, and had the uncanny sense he was guiding my actions from whatever place he now was, as a way of carrying on his lifelong conversation with his sister from the other side of death. I expected to find it in my memories of you, but I didn’t. Nothing was ever simple for us, was it?
“Open the shutters,” she said, “or you will damage your eyes.”
As I obeyed her command, I looked out on to the segment of garden visible from her window, roses just coming into bud, silvery rosemary bushes starred with tiny blue flowers, the vine walk where I had once sat to read Cesare’s only letter to me. Dusk was falling, soothing my strained eyes, wrapping the garden in a furze of forgetfulness. A pale sliver of moon fine as a nail paring, holding the ghost of its former fullness in its slender arms, hung just above the city walls in a sky the colour of aquamarine. Swallows looped and dived past our oblong of window, skimming the moat then soaring back up towards their roosts.
“It’s going to be a lovely evening,” I said.
“Is it?” She patted the bed. “Come and sit down again. I still have much to tell you before I send for Giovanni and I do not want to keep him up too late.”
Making a space for myself once more among the letters, I resumed my place at her side and she resumed her story.
“Time passed and we still had not decided what we would do when the baby arrived. Cesar was all for going back to his old notion of my having had an affair with Perotto. I would have to ‘confess’ to Papa and Papa would see the child was taken care of. But I disagreed. For one thing, Perotto would have to be punished for something he hadn’t done, but far worse was the fact that Papa would certainly have taken my baby away from me. He was heavily involved by then in negotiating for Alfonso of Bisceglie’s hand for me, and I was to be presented once again as virgo intacta.” She gave a laugh of bleak irony. “I couldn’t bear the thought of losing my child, and I think Cesar felt the same way, underneath, which might explain why he hesitated, even though it seemed the only practical suggestion.
“Then Fate took a hand, almost as though the gods had despaired of us making our own minds up and felt they had to intervene to save us from disaster. The same day Giovanni was born, Giulia Farnese also gave birth to a little boy. There was our solution. Giulia was quite poorly and her baby had been given straight to the wet nurse. A sum of money and the co-operation of Perotto and Pantasilea were all that was needed to effect a swap, and Giulia would be none the wiser. Or so I thought. Cesar decided…more caution was needed.
“Giovanni was given to Giulia’s nurse as planned, but Cesar thought it needed more than money to buy her silence. He had Pantasilea and Perotto killed, and made sure the bodies were found, in the river, close to the Sant’Angelo bridge. Our stretch, you might say. That way the woman would be sure to get the message.”
“And the other baby?”
She paused before replying, then said, “I was told it died.”
I saw again Cesare stepping on to the ravelin by the castle drawbridge, emptying the contents of Ser Torella’s silver basin into the moat. I saw the face he had turned on me and finally understood its absence of expression. I went to the hearth, struck a flint on the hearthstone, and began to light the lamps.
“So there you have it, Violante. Will you go and fetch Giovanni now?” She began to gather together Cesare’s letters and bundle them back into the satchel. As she did so, one slipped on to the floor and I stooped to pick it up.
You always held it against me that I left Nepi without saying goodbye, I read along the top line before handing it back to her.
“Madonna, I have listened with patience and not a little personal suffering to what you have told me. Perhaps you would permit me to ask you a question?”
She looked as though she would have preferred to refuse but, like her brother, she had a sense of honour, however peculiar. “Of course,” she said.
“What happened at Nepi? Why were you so distressed by Cesare’s action against Urbino?”
“That is two questions, but you are right to link them and I will answer. We will have to go back to the Jubilee year, when Cesar finally came back from France. He had been away for more than a year. We had written of course, almost daily, as we had always done, but much had happened to change us both during that time. I had discovered in myself, with the Duke of Bisceglie, a capacity for love and happiness outside my relationship with Cesar, and I had another son to dull the pain of being forced to watch Giovanni brought up as another woman’s child. Cesar also had a wife in whom he had expressed himself well pleased, and now a daughter, though he had never seen her. But more than that, he had begun to build his state. And his reputation.
“When we met again, we tried to be as we had been before but it didn’t work. I took no joy in him because I felt guilty about Alfonso, and then guilty about him because I had hurt him. After France, he found our ways silly and parochial, he said. He would sit among us like a raven in his black clothes and bore us all senseless with his plans for his court at Cesena once it was established and how it would all be French this and French that. And the more he extolled the virtues of France, the more convinced I became he loved his wife and the more I cleaved to my husband. What do you make of this?” She riffled through the satchel and pulled one of the letters back out of it; I marvelled at the sure way she had distinguished it from the rest, as though she knew every curlicue, every crease in the parchment the way a mother knows her child.
I find myself thinking about Charlotte, though I can scarcely remember what she looks like. Do you know what won her to me? My knowing the names of wild flowers. By the time I left France, I had only to whisper in her ear the Italian name for coltsfoot or mallow and she would be all over me like a clambering rosa gallica. I never told her that I know wild flowers because their presence or absence can tell you the nature of the terrain you are marching into. A politician must read men’s faces, a soldier must consider the lilies of the field.
“It seems very…true, madonna.”
“Yes. There is something about it that troubles me. Well, I have all the time in the world to wonder about it now, don’t I? Where were we? Ah yes.
“You know, of course, how everything came to a head between our family and that of Aragon? It was not only Alfonso and Sancia who rankled with Cesar, but the fact that their sister, Carlotta, had refused to marry him and her father had done nothing to make her. His pride could not endure it, even after King Louis gave him Charlotte, who was just as well born and much prettier. He was inconsolable, and terribly lonely, everywhere surrounded by people who were getting on with their lives. He was getting on with his too, of course, but he had so much less patience than the rest of us.
He could never wait for anything to take its course but must be hurrying it along.
“Suddenly he had decided my marriage to Alfonso was an obstacle to his alliance with the French because of their rival claim to Naples. Or so he said. I knew he was jealous, not just of Alfonso but of all of us and the cosy family party he believed we had become without him. He thought Sancia had seduced Papa and was trying to undermine his position with his own father.
“Then the roof fell in, literally.”
I remembered this. During a particularly violent summer storm, a chimney on the Vatican roof had been blown through the ceiling of a room where the pope was sitting. For several hours, it was believed he had died, until his guards managed to dig him out of the rubble, unscathed except for a cut on his head.
“After that,” madonna continued, “there was no longer any reasoning with Cesar. It was as though he had but one thought in his mind and that was of the need to secure his future while our father still lived. He was seventy years old by then. Anything might have happened. Cesar didn’t even bother to discuss his plans with me any more. He never sought out my company for any reason. Slept with that whore of his, La Fiammetta, because he said it was easier to pay than to waste his effort charming women into bed. I wasn’t surprised that he sent Michelotto to finish off Alfonso, but I was horrified by his callousness and scared witless by his brazenness.
“They say I went to Nepi to grieve for my husband, and I did, but it was more complicated than that. I was grieving for two loves, for Cesar as well as Alfonso. And I had to think. Clearly Cesar could not be trusted any more where my future was concerned because of this jealousy of his, yet my future was vital to his, and to our son’s. Thinking of Giovanni, I had a sort of epiphany, you might call it. You know Heraclitus?”
I nodded. I had heard of him, of course, but knew little of his philosophy.