Muse

by Mary Novik

  We sat near some pilings at the river’s edge until the city quietened and we heard the Pope’s trumpet shout the curfew. From now on, the city watch would be vigilant. The moon was rising and the night sounds began—an angry squirrel, or a nightjar flying with its mouth open to capture clicking moths?

  “The gates are closing,” I said, “but we can walk around the wall to the Cheval Blanc.”

  “I cannot stay there overnight again.”

  “You’ve stayed there often enough. No one in the tavern cares.”

  “I care. I wish it were otherwise, Solange, but it is this way.”

  We stared at the drunken eel in the glass jug and listened to the slap-slap of a boatman’s punt about to slip its rope and escape downriver. A pouch dangled from the zona at Francesco’s waist. Bitter rue, I guessed. So he did want to bed me, but where?

  I caught an idea, leapt up. “Let’s go out on the Rhône.”

  We scrambled through the swamp grass, almost sinking into a quagmire before we reached the punt, which was filled with green rushes. He untangled the rope and I climbed in with the jug, wedging it so it would not roll, then stood on the till to pole us out of the mud. After a few shoves, Francesco got aboard as well, wet to his middle. He felt around his waist for the pouch, but it was missing since I had untied the laces to rid us of it.

  Soon the river was too deep to pole, so we sat beside each other, taking turns with the single oar to keep the craft moving in a straight line. From the poplars alongside the river came the chink-clink of roosting blackbirds. The river seized the punt and drew it into the channel faster than we wished.

  “The current is too strong,” he said. “Unless we steer towards the bank, we’ll get carried down to Arles.”

  Eventually, by rowing and drifting, we approached an island about a quarter league downstream. We aimed at a poplar overhanging the river, went past it, and missed three of its fellows, until only a single tree was left, the last on the island. As we approached the tree, I stood on the till to pole us to shore. With a tremendous lunge, Francesco caught a low branch and pulled us into the shallows, knocking leaves over the water’s surface.

  “We’ll moor here,” he said, his hair sticking to his forehead in sweaty clumps, “and make our way back at dawn.”

  While we were fighting the current, the light had dimmed from twilight to evening to full night. Once we had secured the rope, we lay back in the punt as if this was where we had been aiming all along. The moon was high, the air mild and warm. How many more nights would Francesco spend with me? Even now, winter clouds were moving in. He extracted the dead eel, sliced some rounds, then squeezed the rest back into the jug. After we had eaten, he drew me into his lap, and cradled me in his arms while I traced his ribs with my fingertips. As my fingers crept lower, his belly tightened. Each breath rising to his chest was quicker than the last.

  He stopped my fingers with a kiss. “Why can’t I master my lust? Even before I come to you, I imagine how we will be, together. And you can no more restrain yourself than I can. I believe you thrive on it. Saint Augustine would say …”

  I leaned over the gunwale, already knowing Augustine’s low opinion of women. “I want more than desire from you, Francesco. I want to be one with you in spirit as well.”

  “I can never give you everything you want from me.”

  Perhaps this was true. I let my hand trail in the river, and inhaled the scent of weeds and marshland. Slow, black—but far from still, the water was sucking down the fallen leaves. A whorl of spume drifted past, got caught, plummeted into the depths. “This whirlpool is making me dizzy.”

  “It is the autumnal equinox today. Stare at the circling water until you feel its pull.”

  He had said the words too eagerly. I knew now what he was after. “I don’t wish to incite more visions, Francesco, for they are troubling beyond their worth.”

  The whirlpool forgotten, I somehow had got upon my back, my spine nestling in the soft rushes. Francesco bunched up his mantle and tucked it beneath me. In his eyes, I saw our unborn son. My skin pricked, my skirts rode up, and my thighs fell open, begging his hips to push against my own. My indwelling spirit rose, arched upwards to the night, and fell upon the sharpness of desire. An owl shrieked, a child quickened, a tear shook from my eye. A feral scent drifted past—fox, or more likely stoat.

  We lay quietly afterwards, unwilling to be parted. Then, cajoling and caressing, he began to speak the Italian of his native soil, the same words over and over, guiding me into illimitable darkness, into my mind’s fecund whirling loam. An idea arrived, but I could not grasp hold of it—too slippery and dark it was for me. But I had spoken aloud, for I could see by his face that I had brought out of that furtive depth a daimon phrase that pleasured the poet in him. Beneath the sheltering branches, I uttered a stream of lyrical nonsense, muddled with the old tongue. What did I say? Enough, for his brow furrowed with the strain of remembering until he could capture it in verse.

  He rolled on his back beside me, his fingers still holding mine, but his mind transported elsewhere, probably to a new poem. As the branches sagged into the river, the boat swayed, and the eel sloshed in the vernaccia. It made me think of the eel pie that Francesco had fed me in the cemetery. Had he intended tonight’s eel as a stimulant also? He knew that strong food elicited disturbing visions in me. He so seldom allowed impulse to guide him that I suspected that he had planned this séance for the equinox, when day and night were of equal influence, because he needed raw ideas for verse.

  Still, what did I mind? I, too, had taken what I most desired and I was now carrying Francesco’s seed. I would bind him to me with a son who carried the Petrarch name, for in Francesco’s eagerness to get a poem from me, he had forgotten the necessity for the pouch of rue that had dropped into the murky shallows. Instead of the bitter herb crumbled in vernaccia, I had savoured the slippery and most fertile eel.

  Twenty-eight

  RICH WITH LAND, the convent of the Cordeliers was sheltered from the Sorgue canal by a thick wall of trees, where I had arranged to meet Francesco on this wintry day, the shortest of the year. The sacristan walked past me, ringing a hand bell to call the nuns to prayer, without violating the rule of silence to ask if I had lost my way. The gardener turned the soil cleanly with her spade, drove it into the ground, scraped the earth from her hands. Here, in this chaste peace, I was overcome with longing for Clairefontaine and the faith that had comforted me as a child. Here, like Luke’s sinner, the Magdalene, I might be forgiven for conceiving a child out of love.

  I entered the chapel so I could listen to the nuns chanting their psalms in the adjoining church. The old Avignonnais buried their dead in private chapels like this, while in the cimetière des pauvres, pigs rooted up corpses too shallowly interred. As I crossed myself for my two babes and Conmère, boots scuffed behind me—Francesco, his eyes adjusting to the poor light, his palm resting on an eight-pointed sun cut into the wall, as if it had rested there before. I recognized the bold mercantile crest of one of Avignon’s wool companies. This was the chapel of the de Sades.

  The gardener’s shoes knocked along the gravel path until her round face appeared in the chapel doorway. “Madonna Laura?” she addressed me. “Ser Petrarca?”

  I cringed at the gardener’s mistake. After her pupils dilated, she would see my hair—the colour of Rhône wine and as untameable as the river when its currents were winter-fierce.

  “It’s all right, Sister,” he said. “This is my scribe. We won’t disrupt your midday prayers.” He gave me a sharp push into the garden, steering me towards a stone bench in the trees alongside the canal. “This is where I intended us to talk.”

  “You’ve been meeting Laura in that chapel.”

  “She has been gracious enough to meet me in this convent. I know you do not understand, Solange, but if I do not glimpse her or hear her voice, my poems have no substance. You told me yourself that they were trite.” He unfurled a sheet of paper. “Be honest—i
s this one any better?”

  I read the poem while he waited, eager for my opinion. The vigorous new canzone praised a woman’s eyes that sounded like mine, except they were not blue but tantalizingly vague in colour, soavemente tra ’l bel nero e ’l bianco, neither black nor white. In short, they were dull grey, like Laura’s.

  “It’s a fine poem,” I said, “but you’ve rushed the words together. You have enough here for several poems, not just one.”

  He read the lines aloud, rehearsed metaphors, asked for my advice on vowels and rhymes, even admitted that my trance had given him the heated distillate from which he had extracted phrase after phrase of purest song. Having stolen an alchemist’s word-hoard from me, he saw nothing wrong in using this plunder to clothe and feather his bella donna. The praise was nauseating, but these days everything nauseated me. The cloth-dyers’ vats. The odour of the haunches crackling on the tavern’s spit that wafted up through the floorboards. Even the cheap ink that I used to copy documents for everyone except Francesco. Because I was several weeks with child.

  “You will soon have something else to occupy your mind. Like half the prelates in the city, you have fathered a child out of wedlock. I am carrying your son, Francesco.” I was expecting an argument, but got none. He reached over to hold my hand. Having lost one son, he seemed more willing that I might bear him another.

  “How do you know it is a boy?”

  “I felt his soul enter his body on the fortieth day. He was conceived the night we took the punt out on the Rhône.”

  He sat quietly a moment, taking the news in. “I hope this child lives longer than the last one. I would be loath to know another son of mine had died.”

  My son arrived in cherry time. He was big and I laboured at his birthing. His cry was strong, his soul very much his own. Overjoyed, I sent for Francesco, eager to share the perfection of our child, from his spiky black hair to his small wrinkled feet. Francesco scrutinized him, as if searching for the Petrarch lineaments in his olive skin and prominent nose. Satisfied, he lifted his son to the window, so he could hear the angelus. “We will call him Giovanni,” he said.

  I agreed, hoping my son would soon receive the surname Petrarch, although Francesco was deeply troubled about the birth, afraid it would sully his reputation. Indeed, a few weeks later, Gherardo tumbled into my chamber to look for Francesco, announcing, “I have been at Saint Agricol’s, where the talk is that the grand Petrarch has fathered a child on a common mistress.” Then, noticing that I was as distressed as my crying son, he added, “I am sorry, Solange, but that is what they are saying.”

  A look of torture creased Francesco’s features. “Who was there, Gherardo?”

  “Cardinal Colonna, for one. He defended your honour, denying that such a thing had taken place. However, others came forwards, the poet Jean La Porte amongst them, who were happy to confirm the rumour. The worst of it was that Hugues de Sade was there with Laura, who was startled by the revelation.”

  Francesco’s shoulders knotted and he rubbed the back of his neck. Word would travel through the nobility, the upper clergy, even the papal palace, until Avignon herself laughed at her favourite poet for no more fault than being human. Hope leapt inside me, in spite of the humiliation, in spite of Francesco’s pain. This pressure—this fear of public opinion—might speed him towards acknowledging his son, and I wanted nothing more than for Giovanni and me to live under the same roof as Francesco.

  The months passed and Francesco visited us infrequently. Sometimes he did not even remove his outer garments, staying only long enough to check that Giovanni was healthy and to dry himself at my hearth. It was not so much that Francesco scorned us—for his letters were kind and apologetic—but that Laura was furious and he was distraught.

  “No man can be content,” he wrote, “until he rests in his grave.”

  How had his distress swelled so quickly to thoughts of self-murder? As the months passed, the poems he sent me to copy showed Laura’s ill humour growing, verse by verse. She refused to see Francesco, and not even the beauty of his son, for Giovanni was thriving, could distract Francesco from that wounding blow. The whole fantasy he had created—how he had met Laura, admired her from afar, spied on her combing her golden hair, returned her glove—was now forced to embrace her jealous wrath.

  From this came a canzone frottola, blistered and fretted with pain, which he sent to me to copy. Chi non à l’auro, o ’l perde, spenga la sete sua con un bel vetro … If a man cannot have gold, then he must quench his thirst with a glass of something cheaper. I was bel vetro, an insult so vulgar I refused to copy, even read, his poetry for days. But when I was able to face the canzone again, I found myself admiring the raw, scalding lumps of twisted feeling. I could imagine the blottings, re-visionings, cross-outs, and additions—the number of sheets devoured! He had unleashed a creative force so tortured that he needed a different glass to pour it into. He had progressed beyond Dante’s dolce stil novo to stony rimes about a stony-hearted woman. I took up my pen to tell him so, praising his poetry as rime petrose and encouraging him in this important new direction.

  With Laura shunning him, his aversion to the city grew. According to his letters, it was full of cutpurses, coinsmiths, foreigners, the begging poor and the arrogant rich. At Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, near the rock pool we had bathed in, he found a house where he could write in silence. His letters praised the healthy diet, the noble peasants, the salubrious atmosphere. I wrote to tell him that when Giovanni was a little older, we wished to live there also, so Giovanni could flourish in the country air, as I had done at Clairefontaine. Some of my hopes I kept to myself for the present. In the Vaucluse house, out of reach of the city’s guilds, I would be able to set up a scriptorium. With Francesco’s help, I could earn commissions from other learned men to create belles-lettres that I would be proud to sign.

  Even in Avignon, even without Francesco, everything gave me pleasure: the morning coolness after a summer night, the scent of clean pressed linen, the jabber of children at play. I nursed Giovanni to sleep in my arms, dreaming of his chasing geese and finding berries in the straw. When he cried, I stroked the fontanelle on his skull where the bones did not yet meet, or held him at the casement to watch the paddlewheel, or walked along the canal jiggling him over my shoulder so he could see the cloth-workers at their trade.

  Francesco sent letters from the Vaucluse for me to copy—dangerous, embittered letters in which he urged Benedict XII to return the papacy to Rome. I made the copies in haste, warning Francesco that Benedict was sending roots deep into foreign soil. I told him that I sometimes carried Giovanni as far as Doms rock so he could peer down at the hundreds of workers demolishing the Pope’s old palace and rebuilding it, wing by wing. The tour du Pape was growing from the dungeon, with its nine-foot-thick walls, to the treasury, the camerlengo’s chamber, the Pope’s own bedchamber, the library, and the châtelet at the top.

  I, too, was building—a bastion of love—for I knew that Francesco must soon acknowledge his son and his son’s mother. Giovanni could now push a stool to the window to watch men pulling hand-carts, boys riding donkeys, and friars crossing the plank below us to seek refreshment in the tavern. He was not quick to learn but grew into a happy child, eager for a romp, who wanted only to be fed and pampered.

  Twenty-nine

  ONE AFTERNOON when Giovanni was three, I returned to my chamber, coated with the mud and stench of the city, to find my servant Des-neiges lying on my bed, fingering some coins. Francesco must have given them to her, for he was reading Augustine’s Confessions to Giovanni, who was pretending to listen, his eyes big and round, though he could not understand a word.

  “Maman!”

  Giovanni jumped down on his chubby legs to point at his doll, perched on a shelf high above his head. I guessed that Francesco had put it there, since he thought it an unsuitable toy. I lifted Giovanni to rescue it, and kissed him under his ear as I set him down. The child had borne enough and so had I. For three year
s, I had been coaxing Francesco to share his country house with us, but we still lived in the filth of Avignon. Whenever I asked, Francesco would reply that it was too hot, or too cold, or too windy for the boy to come just yet.

  “Des-neiges,” I said, “take Giovanni along the canal to play.”

  After they had gone, I tried to find a soft beginning. “Why don’t you discuss your poems with me anymore? You used to be so eager for my ideas that you put me into trances to steal them from me.”

  “A man cannot think in such a noisy chamber.”

  “Giovanni is now talking. He needs a father who will listen to him.”

  “We will become better acquainted since it is time for him to learn his letters.”

  “You scarcely know his age, Francesco.”

  “Giovanni must be weaned and have his curls cut off. He must learn his rôle in life.”

  “What rôle? The love-child of a poet and his mistress?”

  Francesco adjusted the hang of his silver zona. “He’s destined to be a canon.”

  This hit me sidewise. “Even if he’s as little suited to it as you are? You, who beget children you will not acknowledge?”

  “He will be suited to it if he is my son.”

  “Who else’s would he be?”

  “Men go in and out of the tavern as if it were a stable.”

  “For the new harlot in the next chamber, as you are well aware!”

  “My son cannot be raised in a brothel. You know the truth of it, though you feign otherwise.”

  This pierced like a shard of glass. I had been betrayed by Francesco, by this city of men, by this church that turned honest women into courtesans because canons were forbidden to marry. “He lives here because you have provided us no other home. You have made him a bastard.”

  “That’s a hard name for a little boy, Solange.”

  “You have given me no better name to call him by.”