I scarcely knew how to address this silence, much less my own feelings. Yet from somewhere in the seat of my own memories, I found a parable of sorts, certainly prompted by our present surroundings. “I remember when I was a boy, how my father’s library humbled and awed me. In truth, it was only a tiny study on the second floor of our little house. A window, a lectern, and three chairs—it probably held no more than a dozen or twenty books at a time, because Papa sold or traded them so often. But I would go in there even before I could read Latin, to touch the pages and smell the ink and new leather bindings, to try to make sense of the words.”
Damiata drew herself closer, the succubus of my fevered dreams.
“Papa had books that no one else in Florence had. Books of ancient Roman law. He would say to me, ‘Niccolò, the truth is not in a man’s breast or even in his goodwill and good intentions. The truth is in these pages. And men can make even these books lie. But our printing presses will make these laws available to everyone, the better for all of us to see if the words are employed for good or evil. Only with good laws, and the fair application thereof, can we reclaim our libertas from the Medici and the oligarchs.’ ”
Papa had been gone for two years as I spoke; for a moment my sorrow flowed from a deep spring and my words halted.
“So my father cherished the hope,” I said, coming to the point of this reminiscence, “that lead type and presses would convey the truth everywhere—and men would recognize it. And certainly today we have at least thirty times as many volumes available to us as we did when my father was a boy and copyists were the only means of production. Yet if the truths and wisdom men have accumulated are multiplied countless times by our printing presses, so are the lies and deceptions. A truth can no longer be credited by its mere publication—or by how often one hears it.”
Damiata understood my meaning: I could no longer trust her. She turned to me, her eyes wet. But her subtle lips hinted at a smile. “Then in our modern world,” she said, “the best lie would be true ninety-nine times. Only on the hundredth telling would it prove false.”
Now I had to smile, despite everything. “And the best truth would be ninety-nine parts a lie and only one part true.”
She waited for me to elaborate, but finally I forced her to ask. “Why, Niccolò?”
“Because it would require all our faith to believe in that single sliver of truth.”
Damiata squeezed my hands. “Niccolò, have you had enough of your ancients? I think we should go for a walk.”
Before we stepped onto the street, Damiata drew her fur hood against her face; as long as she did not raise her eyes, even I would not have known her from any of the courtesans who often enough passed by. Our steps led us to the central piazza, where the rochetta that had witnessed so much the previous night had already turned gray in the swift-falling dusk. Beneath the stone massif milled a great conclave of townspeople, traders, monks, and streetwalkers, their aggregate mood striking me as more anxious than usual. I saw two clerks I knew from the Ferrarese embassy, both of them pale-faced functionaries who might have been me in a mirror—except that they would consider my wardrobe fit only for the rag shop. “Tell me the army is not going south again,” I said when we had exchanged greetings.
“Ramiro da Lorca is a guest at his own inn.” My respondent nodded toward the rochetta tower. “The duke is now jailing his own household.”
Damiata tightened her grip on my arm.
I asked, “Is Oliverotto da Fermo also a guest at that inn?”
One of the men shrugged. “I would think not. Signor Oliverotto and His Excellency appeared more than companionable last night.”
As we moved on, I said, “You didn’t know about Ramiro?”
She shook her head. This news boded even more poorly for her than for me, because it meant that Valentino had put further distance between himself and his father. For my part, I had considered Ramiro under arrest when Valentino dispatched him into the tower; perhaps what he had been forced to reveal later that night had resulted in a formal charge of treason. But we were hearing only rumors.
“I was there when Valentino decided to confine Ramiro,” I confessed as vaguely as I could. “Oliverotto was also present. A complicated tale. I’m still not certain what I saw. Or what it means.”
Damiata didn’t press me for particulars. Instead she said, “I should have been honest with you. About Valentino. He told you, then, that I betrayed Juan on the last day of his life.”
“He says that was the second occasion you and he … were lovers.” I was surprised at my difficulty in simply saying this. “He insists that he told you Juan’s itinerary for the evening, which he fears you revealed to his brother’s assassins. Presumably the Vitelli.”
She bit her lip. “But Niccolò, on that last afternoon it was I who told Cesare …” I could feel her shrug. “I won’t argue with Valentino over who told whom Juan’s expected route that evening. But I am sorry he doubts me for the same reasons I could doubt him.”
We entered a busy street that flowed into the piazza from the south; Damiata stopped and faced me amid the jostling passersby. “I swear to you by the Holy Virgin’s veil and the Cross of God that Valentino is mistaken about me. Just as his own father is mistaken about him.” Her eyes narrowed a bit. “Perhaps you don’t know, Niccolò, but the pope suspects that Valentino himself was involved in Juan’s murder.”
Even at dusk, Damiata’s coloring, her eyes and carmine lips, did not seem real; it was as if a single ray of empyrean light had shot down like an arrow from the highest Heaven to illuminate only her face. Yet her expressions remained as unfathomable to me as the mystery behind Valentino’s jade-hard eyes. In short, I did not believe I could ever read the truth of that lovely face, unless she wished me to. And even then, how could I be certain she was not merely showing me a single truth, in order to disguise a host of lies?
“Then I think you should go to the duke,” I said, “and allay his suspicions. While the guilty are gathering strength, we cannot afford to have the innocent divided by mutual distrust.” I had to wonder if I could ever fully accept Damiata’s innocence, unless Valentino also endorsed it.
Damiata pressed herself to me, her breast pillowing my arm, as again we crunched across the icy, crusted pavement. “No. Valentino can harbor his suspicions a bit longer. As yet I have no proof to offer the pope and ransom my little boy. And I have no assurance that Valentino would not use my information to acquire the book and then bury it, if only to secure his treaty.”
“I think he would use the evidence provided by that book against the condottieri,” I said. “He has intimated as much to me.”
“And you believe him?”
Because Papa had been a lawyer, I had known even as a boy how words could be sharpened or shaded—an education that had been much advanced by my service in the chancellery and my diplomatic missions. Nevertheless, I required Damiata’s prompting to see that Valentino had sworn nothing to me, nor had he even stated his aims in firm and undeniable terms. He was a man of honor, I was certain, but his intentions toward the condottieri had been merely—and carefully—“intimated,” to cite my own usage.
Damiata listened to my silence. “For the time being, Niccolò, I think I am better off dead to the pope and his duke.” She tugged her hood closer around her face, pulling me to her as well, as if she could hide behind my arm. “To fully establish my innocence I need the book. Just as you need it to preserve your republic.”
“But where is it now?” As easily as Damiata had resumed her seduction of my will and reason, I still had to suspect she knew the answer.
“I would believe Ramiro’s account,” she said. “Someone found that man and his dog before Ramiro’s spy did. And you saw for yourself that Oliverotto da Fermo was following me on the street.”
“You believe he also followed us into the pianura.” I was hardly inclined to sound a skeptical note, having suggested this theory to Valentino the previous night. “But if Olivero
tto had already obtained the book, then why was I spared? I had no use except to lead him to it.”
“Perhaps he knew he would require you as a witness.”
This took me entirely by surprise. “To what?”
“Perhaps to testify to the book’s authenticity. To say you observed these witches employ it for a divination.”
I was still attempting to peer into a dark glass. “Let us presume that Oliverotto obtained the Elements that night,” I said. “His name is in it, along with that of Vitellozzo Vitelli, his mentor and patron. Certainly he would have burned it before the sun rose.”
“There is another name in it.”
“You mean another condott—” I stopped both my words and my steps. “Are you saying …”
The reluctance in her eyes spoke more convincingly than any furious accusation. “Valentino himself attended one of these Gevol int la carafa,” she said in little more than a whisper. “His name also appears in the witch’s book.”
“Yes, he already knew about the Elements and the gioca when I told him.” And now I could see why Valentino had been compelled, as Ramiro had told me, to “protect” Oliverotto da Fermo. “Valentino believes that his own familiarity with that gioca could be used to inflame his father’s suspicions of him. Valentino, Vitellozzo, Oliverotto … they are all damned by the same connection to Juan’s amulet. Any one of them could have butchered the first strega and stuck the amulet in her charm bag, certain that it would eventually be delivered to the pope. But only one of them conceived this dreadful game …” I trailed off, for a moment struck dumb by my worst fear, before I could give voice to it. “And now it is all the more likely that this game will end with Florence in ashes. If the condottieri have the Elements, they will not even require superiority of arms to coerce Valentino’s cooperation. God’s cazzo …”
Damiata offered nothing in response, as if only her silence could comfort me. Instead she took my arm again and led me along the street for a short while, before stopping beside a palazzo in the Venetian style, the stonework light and lacelike.
“I have a little room here,” she said. A faint, sad smile flickered at the sharp corners of her mouth. “And a little bit to share for supper.”
I stood there in the icy street, thinking of something Boccaccio wrote: It is better to do and repent, than to forbear and repent.
We entered through the pedestrian door to find a ballo under way in the central court. Hardly as decorous as the dance I had attended the previous evening, this more resembled a calcio game played by a dozen teams at once. Woodwinds shrilled and a trombone blared over the shouts of men and squeals of women. You could not distinguish the whores from the good wives of the town, except that the latter had the better jewels and more lascivious disguises. Although Epiphany was still nearly two weeks away, half these people were masked, not a few of them with that great long nose intended to resemble Priapus’s half-erect cazzo. Others wore the same white skull—the face of Death—I believed Giacomo and I had seen on the street.
The palazzo had been divided into apartments. We ascended the stairs to the third, uppermost floor, wandering through rooms stripped of everything save the most ponderous old cupboards. When it seemed we would run out of house we stopped at a final door. Damiata produced a key and unlocked it, saying to me, “Wait.” I watched from the doorway as she lit several candles, placing them in ceramic lamps.
She beckoned from a small bedroom—or a large closet—that in comparison with my own lodging appeared to be a little Paradise: a large bed with an Oriental carpet hanging behind it and a cassone at the foot, painted with a scene from Orlando Innamorato—the lovers in the forest, drinking their potions of love and hate from Merlin’s Well and the Stream of Eros. The lamps had been set on a small table, along with a knife, some Parma cheese, a salami, and a bottle of wine.
Gesturing that I should sit on the bed, Damiata stirred the brazier. She removed her cioppa and laid it beside me, revealing her gown of gray-green satin, her bared neck and shoulders nearly as white as the thin band of chemise that framed the top of her bodice. She poured us each a cup of good Sangiovese, cut some pieces of salami, then sat beside me. “I cautioned you that it was a little bit,” she said.
“It would not be the first time you have cautioned me.” I was not thinking of her confession after she had offered herself to me, half mad; instead I recalled our night on the pianura, when to my mind she had warned me of her desire, should we survive. But now I was less certain of what she had meant—and less so that she even remembered.
Damiata nibbled on the salami like a careless little mouse. But then she said, “I know what I said.” Finishing her bite, she cradled her cup in her lap. “Niccolò. Do you truly believe that I would use the life of your little girl to redeem my own son?”
She did not look at me as she asked this—and I looked away from her. Nevertheless I saw her more clearly than ever.
“No. I do not believe you would,” I said. “You would not want your son to live with the shade of another child.”
She sighed as if my answer had eased a great pain. “When I warned you …” The wine in her cup rippled from the slight tremor of her hands. “I warned you because I wanted you to love me. Not with some brief act but entirely … But that is the most cruel love, isn’t it? Condemned like poor Psyche to endlessly suffer Aphrodite’s unbearable burdens.”
“How did Petrarch describe love?” I said. “ ‘A death having the appearance of life.’ ”
“ ‘A Hell of which fools make their Heaven.’ ” I could feel her looking at me. “I think we already love one another, Niccolò. As friends who have seen and suffered the most dreadful things together. And who are so much alike. We both love reading the ancients, we are both little people who have spent our time among great men—and know as few do that they are merely ordinary men. You have your science of men’s natures, and I suppose I had my own, at one time, though I did not find it in Titus Livy or Tacitus. But as I told you, there is something more. Something that draws us … Perhaps if you believe Plato …” Now I could feel her shrug. “Niccolò, we should go down there and dance.”
No longer concerned that I had been bewitched, I could scarcely contain the sense of longing and regret I had previously felt only in Damiata’s absence. When I left this room, ending this moment of intimacy, perhaps I would escape Aphrodite’s torments. But I feared I would leave my very soul behind.
Damiata got to her feet, taking my hand so that I could do nothing but stand alongside her, although I might have been putting my own head in a noose. Yet I knew that in condemning me in this manner, she believed she was granting me clemency.
She slipped her arms around my back, as though we would dance in her room, and placed her burning cheek against mine.
“Niccolò … Will we even be alive a week from now? Will we ever hold our children again?”
I could only say, “I have hope.”
“You know what Petrarch says about hope.”
I had to laugh a bit. We were similar in this respect as well; we could smile at one another even as we stood on the gallows. “ ‘Truly all hope is false.’ ”
Her laughter echoed mine, but with a sound like little bells. She nuzzled me with her cheek and nose, before her lips wandered over my face and found my mouth. This kiss deepened in a way even the first had not, our teeth lightly touching, the merest hint of tongue.
“Did I melt your limbs?” she whispered, mocking her own charms.
In truth she had made my legs weak.
She breathed these words against my ear: “I feel it, my darling. Deep down there. In waters deeper than you or I can fish. Something more than Fortune’s design or Aphrodite’s desire. A secret our souls share.”
“Perhaps it is just as Plato says,” I whispered, completing the thought she had begun moments before. “I began this life with a choice. Yet only at the end of it did I discover I had chosen you.”
Her next kiss was nothing like the tw
o that had preceded it. It was the kiss of Lethe, extinguishing whatever memory of my previous life I still possessed.
CHAPTER 13
Men are driven principally by one of two things: either love or fear.
There are images of that night I will see in the moment before my eyes go dim for the last time. Her lace chemise, as beautiful as any gown, falling from her shoulders and hips as softly as snow. An alabaster form that would have made Michelangelo Buonarotti weep because he had not made her. The fine, wheat-colored hair between her legs; nipples as dark as wine, standing like the tips of fingers. But her skill was not to make love as a hetaera or harem slave, practiced in every technique. It was to make love like a girl who had never been touched but was equally untouched by guilt, or fear. Amante, carissimo, anima mia: these words, whispered and gasped next to my ear, caressed me no less than the fingers that explored me entirely. There were moments so wholly feral that it seemed we would begin to consume each other’s flesh like bacchantes—and moments when it seemed there was not even flesh between us, as if I were embracing the Scirocho.
I opened my eyes the next morning to find Damiata still sleeping beside me. I studied every detail of her face, the down at her temple, the few tiny freckles and moles that flawed the perfection of her skin, the delicate scrolling of her moist upper lip. My new life had already begun.
We spent the first day entirely in Damiata’s little room; now that Ramiro had been arrested she feared that Valentino, who was already looking for her, might find her connection to the pope similarly inconvenient. Yet we also embraced the hope that events were not what they seemed, or that Ramiro would be exonerated and released.
It was probably noon before we ate the rest of the cheese and salami, sitting up in bed, Damiata as innocent of her nakedness as Eve in Eden. “All those years in the Trastevere,” she said, “I didn’t go out during the day, except into our garden. I had to go out at night to make my living.”
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