The Malice of Fortune

by Michael Ennis

  In equal measures stunned and rapt, I listened as Valentino went on in this triumphant vein for some time, describing how he had deceived the condottieri, first with treaty negotiations in which he had given the appearance of weakness, then by dispersing his troops in small units throughout the countryside; almost all the campfires I had seen on my way to Pesaro had evidently marked the locations of his soldiers. Without a hint of apology, the duke told me that he had not felt obligated to respect a treaty he had made while under threat by men who had no intention of keeping their own pledges—a maxim I continue to regard as entirely just, however much it has outraged those who believe The Prince is the Devil’s handbook. Any man who under all conditions insists on making it his business to be good, will surely be destroyed among so many who are not good.

  “Secretary, their plan was to lead me here, see to my assassination even before I entered this house, take command of the pitiful remnants of my army, and march against your republic. They are all confessing the particulars down there.” He straightened a bit and tapped his toes on the floor. “But I had already envisioned their plan even before they had conceived it. I allowed their own natures to lead them to destruction. Had you been there this morning, when I met them outside the city, you would have seen their false faces, the kisses and embraces these conspirators offered me, as if I were some fool. These masters of deception did not believe that anyone could deceive them, simply because they were blinded by their own evil ambitions. Men are never content with what they have, Secretary.” Tilting back his head, Valentino emptied his cup and set it on the floor beside his stool. “Yet a man must never aspire to more than he can seize with his own hand.” His pale hand, now empty, appeared to close around an invisible object. “Whoever depends on another man’s armies depends on that man’s goodwill and good Fortune. But I resolved long ago to rely only upon my own will. Now I have rid myself of the condottieri. By my efforts alone, Italy has been saved.”

  Having offered this instruction in statecraft, which is also cited in The Prince, the duke turned with equally artful phrases to another subject. “Surely you recall, Secretary, that months ago I invited your government to come forward and declare its friendship for my person and our enterprise here. And if they would not, to understand that I would have difficulty in distinguishing the Republic of Florence from my declared enemies. Your government, it seems, decided to wait and determine if those enemies would absolve them of that decision, even though the men who conspired against me were the greatest threat to your own state. Now your lordships can plainly see how the success I have had against our mutual adversaries has benefited their interests. I have no doubt that your lordships, when you so inform them of my gesture, will acknowledge their obligation by offering their immediate assistance in my campaigns against Città di Castello and Perugia. By such means they will declare themselves friends.”

  He rose abruptly, went to the fireplace, and stood before it with his back to me, as if our expected display of gratitude was not to be a matter of further discussion.

  I could not breathe. Of course I knew the duke to be a demanding negotiator, and no man who had risked everything to obtain such a victory would be content to offer the spoils gratis to those who had merely sat on their thumbs. But he wanted my government to finance immediate attacks far into central Italy—conquests that would, if one were to plot them on a map, almost draw a noose around Florence herself.

  Valentino’s mortal enemies had been vanquished, but where was this peace he had so desperately required, so that he and Leonardo could build a new world?

  “I will write my government,” I said, struggling for words. For once I was grateful that I had no power to negotiate; I could even appreciate the wisdom of the Ten of War in sending a mere intermediary.

  Valentino turned to face me once again, a leisurely motion, as if he intended to soften his demands. Yet my heart remained stuck in my throat.

  “You know that Vitellozzo intended to accuse me of my brother’s murder.” His tone was more subdued. “That was to be their pretext to break the treaty.” As I had thought. “They intended to use the book. I obtained it from Vitellozzo. Along with the page he cut out of it. I will show you.”

  Valentino walked quickly to the table littered with documents. From among these he plucked a page folded over twice, judging from its size; most of one side was occupied by an enormous medallion of red wax, impressed with a seal I could not make out because Valentino so quickly put it down again. “Vitellozzo intended for Damiata to deliver this page to the pope.”

  I had to ask: “Where is Damiata now?”

  He shook his head. I did not know whether to be relieved. “But I believe she will come to me. To beg for mercy.”

  “Will you …?”

  “I can’t know yet. We are still determining the truth.”

  “I presume you expect at least one of your prisoners to confess, in the matter of your brother’s murder.”

  Valentino glanced at me, his eyes narrowed and mouth pinched. “I know who murdered my brother, Secretary.”

  I could not read this. Did he mean that Oliverotto and Vitellozzo had already confessed? But his look forbade me to inquire further, even as a panic rose inside me: Had they also confessed to Damiata’s complicity?

  Again Valentino gestured at the sealed packet. “Do you know what is written here, Secretary?”

  My tongue was thick. “I haven’t seen it, Excellency.”

  He lifted his eyes but did not see me. I knew at once where he was.

  “Some were whores. Some were not. The women we took captive at Capua.” Valentino’s nostrils flared wide, as though a hand were over his mouth and he was gasping for air. “I had one of them. One of the innocent. Entirely so, a girl of perhaps fifteen. A virgin. But she was willing—as a servant girl is willing when the master taps her shoulder at night.” As Marietta had been willing on our wedding night, her uncles banging kettles outside the half-open door. “Hoping to save herself from worse. And so I wallowed in the same cess-trench as those Germans and Gascons. I disgraced myself entirely.” His complexion had paled. “I shamed myself forever.”

  Like my question regarding Damiata’s fate, I did not want to ask. “What happened to this girl?”

  He nodded weakly, still not seeing me. “I gave her to Oliverotto.”

  I was cursed to envision Oliverotto’s huge hands encircling the poor girl’s neck, her face a ghastly purple. It was obscene even to think that she had found a moment’s pleasure in the strangler’s hands, as Oliverotto had boasted; little more than a child, she could have known nothing but fear since she had been wrenched from her home. And I prayed that in the heartbeat in which she had known she would die, she had seen the Mother of God’s outstretched arms.

  “You must go now, Secretary,” Valentino whispered. When he blinked, only once, his eyes glittered. “Go and write your government. We will talk later.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Everyone sees what you appear to be, few truly know what you are; and those few dare not oppose the opinion of the many.

  I was not returned to my room in the Venetian quarter. Instead, Valentino’s soldiers escorted me to a palazzo nearer the center of the town, where many of the ambassadors were lodged. Installed in a small, windowless room, at once I composed my dispatch to the Ten of War. I wrote with the presumption that the duke’s people would read this report, having provided me pen, ink, paper, and a waiting courier. Valentino understood, as had no prince before him, that victory itself is less important than the speed and thoroughness with which news of a triumph is communicated throughout the world.

  When I had finished my writing, the small bed beckoned. But on a night when I might have celebrated the deliverance of my family, Florence, and all Italy, I found myself too troubled for sleep. Instead I began to pace the scant floor of that little room like a caged beast, tormented by the thought that perhaps my “rare man” was not so rare at all. We Italians had made warfare our most
estimable and lucrative profession, and in so doing had created a state of perpetual chaos, because whoever profits from war would be a fool to value peace. In our Italy, the immortal Cincinnatus, who stepped from behind his plow to lead the Romans to victory and then returned to his little farm, would be thought a risible lunatic. Where war goes on without end, all men are inevitably corrupted by its brutality—and the worst horrors are visited upon the most innocent. Capua was becoming the rule rather than a dreadful anomaly.

  And now I feared that Duke Valentino had wallowed in the sty with these evil men so long that he could only with the greatest difficulty rise and build his new Italy. Far more distressing, I also saw the likelihood that throughout our discussions, the duke had secretly coveted bella Firenze, perhaps as much as any of the condottieri.

  At last I got beneath the comforter, only to toss about, cursing myself for failing to anticipate the duke’s deception. I had become obsessed with the face of a murderer, when in truth he might well be as faceless as his apprentice—because he could be any man who grasped for power in today’s Italy.

  Yet for all this, only a single question at last kept me from crossing the threshold of sleep: Where is Damiata?

  The brief slumber into which I nodded, hours later, was feverish and filled with visions. The last came just before I awakened. I held my father’s hand, which seemed marvelously real to me, and walked with him to the Piazza della Signoria. We crossed the Ponte Vecchio and had passed beneath the towering faces of the wool factories, the banner-like bolts of cloth hanging from rails high above, when all at once the sky appeared again, framing the great tower of the Palazzo della Signoria, its crenellated battlements like some Titan’s teeth. Spread out over the piazza before me, as teeming as a battlefield, was this immense choir comprising every sort of man I could imagine and some I never had, all of them roaring away. I could not understand their words but I could clearly see that each conversation, whether among two men or twenty, was a stage for the most remarkable display of gestures, nods, smirks, glares, and shrugs. I was terrified; nothing in my life, in large part spent tied to my mother’s apron strings, had prepared me to grasp this baffling vocabulary of words, gestures, and expressions.

  Suddenly I was returned to my house on the Via di Piazza, to the little room that was still my own, before I began to share it with my brother, Totto. It was dark, the house around me and the street outside entirely silent. I slipped from beneath my coverlet and stood beside my bed. Moonlight pierced the shutters. In that faint silver light I began to make grand rhetorical flourishes, thrusting out my arm, holding up both palms, nodding wisely—these and dozens of others that I repeated again and again, silently in the dark.

  What are you doing?

  My skin crawled. There was another boy in the room with me. I could scarcely see him in the darkness, but from his size, I judged he was several years younger than I; nevertheless, he was too old to be Totto.

  I watch the men in the piazza, I answered him. I watch them so carefully and mimic them so closely, that they will take my gestures for their own. They will never know I am nothing but an ignorant little boy.

  I had done exactly this as a child, often getting up in the night, just as in my dream, to practice this mimicry. Soon, I also began to listen to the words that shot back and forth among those men, but as I did, I watched more keenly than ever their hands, eyes, nods—even where a man’s feet pointed and when he lifted one shoe or another. The faces and gestures of men eventually became books I could read, no less important to me than the words of Dante and Cicero.

  The little boy who had joined me in my dream began to whimper. I hate their faces.

  In an instant, I was inside this boy’s head, seeing through his eyes. I was hardly surprised at this, because it had been my waking practice to similarly enter the minds of history’s great men; this was no different than surveying the wreckage of a great Roman army through Hannibal’s eyes, so that I might ask him where he would go after Cannae. But now I found myself in the mind of a small, frightened child, looking out on the Piazza della Signoria as I had when I was his age. And what he saw was infinitely more terrifying than anything I had ever beheld.

  They had no faces. Among the hundreds of men in the piazza, not one resembled anything more than a lifeless plaster mask, with dots for eyes and slits for a mouth and nose.

  I bolted awake.

  Sitting up in bed, I knew I had returned to the room Valentino’s people had provided. Yet as I blinked into the darkness, I was equally certain that the author of this dreadful vision had come with me. He was standing beside the door. And he was no longer a little boy.

  “I understand you now,” I addressed the icy presence. “You were born entirely indifferent to those feelings that animate our souls and bring our faces to life. In your eyes, our faces are nothing but death masks. And now I know what you had to do, in order to live in our strange realm of souls and sentiments. Because I, too, was once a little boy who desperately wanted to appear to be a man.” My teeth were chattering. “And I can only imagine the infinitely greater labor required of a small, bewildered monster, who knew with every animal instinct that he must appear to be human, or he could not survive.”

  I heard a rustle of clothing, then a grating sound. Near the end of my bed, flames flickered in the brazier.

  “Who are you?” In truth, I had no notion of what stood over that brazier: Man, woman, shade, creature of a dream that had not ended?

  “The Duchess of Ferrara.” The voice was so warped by anger that still I could not say for certain that this “duchess” was man or woman. But I could see a dress and a gauzy white veil. A gown that glimmered with gold embroidery. And then my reeling mind registered that the Duchess of Ferrara was Duke Valentino’s sister, Lucrezia—who could not have been within a hundred miles of this place.

  She began to strip off these raiments with such sudden vehemence that I grasped about my bedclothes for something I could use as a weapon. The veil, gown, and then a blond wig were cast down on my bed as if they carried the plague, yet almost at once the “duchess” snatched back the gown and held it before her like a phantom partner in a ballo. I saw the knife just as she began to thrust it again and again into the empty bodice, ripping the velvet with a sound that recalled all too much a butcher removing a fresh hide.

  I leapt up.

  “Don’t, Niccolò. Don’t come near.” Damiata’s voice remained scarcely recognizable; only the unveiling of her face, her dark hair pulled back, convinced me. She threw the flayed dress upon the bed and turned to me, the knife still in her hand, staring as if she had seen me for the first time.

  “I was still deliriously in love with Juan when Cesare began to seduce me.” Damiata spoke as if she were dreaming. “Or I began to seduce him. I don’t even know. That is how skillful he is. You see him now, the conqueror of the Romagna, feared throughout all Europe, the hope of all Italy. To me he was a lovely bird in a cage. So sad, so forgotten. His melancholy little songs.” She heaved with a sob. “In all this, I believed one thing. That on the day we betrayed Juan, we were truly lovers. Cesare loved me.” Again her shoulders heaved. “Tonight I surrendered even that slender faith.” She glared at the dress on the bed as though she would resume her assault. “Tonight he forced me to mime the only bride he has ever really desired. The same bride he embraced on that afternoon, when in my foolishness I imagined he held me. Tonight he dressed me in his sister’s wedding gown.”

  “Tonight?” I said stupidly.

  “I went to him, Niccolò. Tonight.”

  To beg his forgiveness, I presumed. Yet the price of her absolution, as unbearable as it had been to her—and to me—did not seem sufficient. What else?

  “I saw his prisoners. In the room next to his. He showed them to me through a hole drilled in the wall, like a camera obscura. Oliverotto and Vitellozzo. Tied together, seated back to back. The same garrote around both necks. At the end they pleaded for mercy like women. I heard them die.
And then I had my wedding night.” She blinked furiously. “Your monster is dead, Niccolò. And your city is saved.”

  “Damiata.” I spoke sharply, rousing her from this sleep. “He isn’t dead.” I halted there, wishing I could not see the face that still floated before me, a materialization of my dream. “Tonight I saw the face of evil.”

  She shook her head in angry disagreement. “When it was over, he had me look through that little hole again. Their faces were purple. A puddle of piss beneath each chair.”

  I took a step to her and she raised her knife, warning me to stay back. Clad only in her chemise, she shivered. But then she said, more calmly, “When I was still a girl, I was taught how to steal things from gentlemen’s rooms.” She smiled as if fondly remembering someone who was dead. “Niccolò, my cioppa is also on the bed. I put something in the lining. Will you get it out?”

  When I had found the opening in the fur lining, I brought the little packet into the light of the brazier. “I saw this only hours ago,” I said, looking up at Damiata. “In Valentino’s room. The same page that was sliced out of Euclid’s Elements.” It seemed so heavy it might have been gilded. But now I could see that the large medallion of red wax, which almost entirely covered one side of the twice-folded page, had been impressed with Duke Valentino’s seal.

  “When I left you in Cesena I went to the condottieri, on my own. I knew they had taken the book, that night on the pianura. The book I believed would prove my innocence and save my little boy. Niccolò, I left without a word to you because I didn’t want you to come after me. I had no doubt that Vitellozzo would kill you at once.” Damiata looked at me warily.