by Linda Proud
Ficino once had healed me of grief in an earlier time, when my brother was killed, but it was a different grief, one that was open to his philosophic balm. I remembered it well enough to wonder now that I felt no angel standing behind me, his hands resting on my head, warm and full of love. I wrested myself from the moment and looked away to the distant hills, outlined by the last light of the day. I was – I am – an exile from heaven, and must be content.
10
DOING THE WASHING
1484
WHEN ANGELO WAS BUSY, I WAS OFTEN DEPUTED TO VISIT his sister-in-law, Cammilla, at the house on the Via de’ Fossi. She was easy to look after, being a fully domesticated woman. She knew how to greet me, having her sons bow politely and her servants present me with refreshment and cakes. We would discuss arrangements in the house, what shopping she required, what bills to be paid. She spoke of her brother-in-law with gratitude; her affection she reserved for her sons. If Angelo was bedding her, she showed no sign of it.
Out of town, on the hill, was Maria; if she was domesticated it was only on her own terms. We had servants, whom she was supposed to command, but she was more likely to join them in their work, housekeeping a game she enjoyed but never won. After a session of preserving, she would leave the kitchen looking like an alchemist’s study after an explosion. Far from demure, she was always talking, and to anything in sight: the broom, the floor, the cat, the wild birds, the trees. She attacked her work with an energy so great that it was expended before the task was complete, so that the more she went about clearing up, the more mess was created. ‘Non finito,’ she replied when Angelo remonstrated with her, reminding him of the theory of poetry which Lorenzo upheld, that inspired work should be left unfinished. ‘As you are at your desk, so am I in the house.’ Her affection was confined to none but showered on all, including me. And the witches.
She told me of a prediction they had made, of great, momentous changes to our world, of a coming apocalypse. Having been left in charge while Angelo was in town for a few days, it seemed to be my role to bring sense and reason to the young woman.
‘Maria, I keep telling you, there are no such things as witches, except in your brother’s stories.’
‘What do you know, you who gather knowledge only from dead books? Come with me to the next bucato.’
‘Plato counsels us to withdraw from the world, and we have servants to do the washing.’
‘Either Plato is wrong, or your understanding is faulty. And why should servants get all the best work? Come with me tomorrow!’
Accordingly the next day I put aside my copying and went with her to the stream, helping the servants to carry the baskets of linen. The shallow ford was as busy as any market. A cheerful group of women, their skirts hitched up around their thighs, was standing out in the stream, engaged in merry banter, gossip and laundry. They lathered, rinsed and slapped their washing on to large stones in the stream, all the time talking as if they had not seen each other for years. Maria hitched up her own skirts and waded out to join them, greeting them all by name, asking after family and children, telling the news of our own home lightly, that one of our chickens had laid a black egg and that the housecat had had a litter of kittens.
‘Come on, Tommaso!’ she called, beckoning me in.
‘I’ll get wet!’
‘Take your hose off!’
I hesitated, feeling as shy and modest as she should have been. But if Maria could do it, then so could I. Accordingly I unlaced my hose, pulled them off and waded out after her. The stream was cold and made me cry out, whether in pleasure or pain it was hard to tell. The women laughed and made much of me, judging my legs like those of a horse at a race and finding me worth a bet. At first I was outraged, then discomfited, and finally enchanted and blushing like a boy. And of course I judged their legs, too, standing like Paris before a display of goddesses. To my surprise, Maria won the contest – she had good legs, not over- shapely but straight and strong, inducing admiration more than desire, but then I was not a fool like Paris. No, I gave Minerva the prize of a fish I had caught, tossing it at Maria. She squealed and ducked.
Handing me the olive soap, she showed me how to lather the washing. Then I became as a child, with my feet among the fishes and my hands slithering over the linen. Even the rinsing was no chore, with the running stream doing all the work. The wringing and tugging of sheets that we did between us ended in Maria falling backwards into the water.
‘You did that on purpose!’
I shrugged. ‘You should have seen it coming.’
The day was hot. She soon dried, sitting on the warm stones amongst the linens we had spread out. The company rested, eating bread and drinking wine, treating us without deference and making no comment on our relationship. That Maria was a spinster living with her bachelor brother and his friend was not something that was remarkable in the country.
At last the women departed, to go home to tell their husbands what a hard day they had had.
‘So much for the witches!’ I said to Maria as we returned to the villa.
‘Oh, they were not the witches. The witches were not there.’
‘Of course not, too busy eating naughty children.’
Maria rounded on me. ‘There are witches,’ she insisted. ‘Not ones from books or from your imagination, but real ones, ones that heal with plants, ones that read the heavens. Your Ficino would be called a witch if only he were a woman. There are witches, Tommaso, but they were not there today. I have seen them, I have spoken to them: they live further up the valley and are women of much wisdom. Of course they don’t take their eyes out! That’s just a scholar’s funny story made up to scare us. They are like you and me. And according to them, right now the planets are spelling out the doom of Florence.’
I scoffed and told her she was speaking nonsense.
11
THE WITCHES
1484
DECIDING TO LIVE IN FLORENCE AWHILE, GIOVANNI PICO della Mirandola rented rooms close to Ficino’s house in the city. The day he first came to the Villa Bruscoli, Angelo was absent, but Pico said he needed to borrow a book urgently and he was certain Angelo would not mind. Maria looked stiff and constrained as the Count of Concordia bowed before her.
‘You had hair like a boy’s the last time we met,’ he said. ‘You were fresh out of the convent.’
In the intervening five years she had become a woman and her waist-length hair was tied up. Where other young women indulged in a multitude of plaits or, more demurely, covered their heads with a light veil, Maria had devised a way of tying her hair in a simple knot that was very quick and practical. In her view, time spent on one’s appearance was time ill-spent. When the Count mentioned her hair, however, she began to pat and feel the knot on her head as if concerned for once with how she looked. Our Maria of the firm and unorthodox opinion was, in the presence of Pico della Mirandola, uncertain, unsteady and undone. As was I. Captivated, we were heliotropes to his light, tracking his every movement.
He told us that Angelo had invited him to come and see the villa, but this had been his first opportunity. ‘I hear there is a nest of witches close by.’
I laughed. ‘Angelo compensates for our poor position on the hill by converting our humble neighbours into characters from folktales. There are some washerwomen who use the stream; I have never seen any witches.’
‘They do exist, my lord,’ Maria told him earnestly. ‘Women of much wisdom, conversant with the gods of old. They can heal with herbs as well as Ficino can.’
Pico gazed on her, bright with interest.
‘Please my lord, it is the truth.’
‘I do not doubt it.’
‘What they say does not contradict our Faith – just precedes it.’
‘Ha!’ Pico seemed intrigued by Maria’s odd remark. ‘Precedes it. Yes, quite.’
I asked him to explain.
‘The truth is eternal, yes?’
‘Of course.’
‘Christ is the Truth?’
‘Without question.’
‘Christ was born fifteen hundred years ago. As a syllogism, there is a fault here. If Christ is Truth, then he too must be eternal, and not temporal. He precedes himself.’
Maria nodded in emphatic agreement. The next thing I knew, she was putting on her cloak and inviting Pico della Mirandola to visit the witches in the valley.
‘Maria,’ I said sternly. ‘This is most improper.’
‘There is nothing improper in my intention, or in the Count’s. Therefore it is not improper in itself, only in the imagination of petty minds.’
Pico and I exchanged a bemused smile. Neither of us had met a woman quite like this before. ‘I shall look after her,’ he assured me.
‘It takes two,’ I said, putting on my own mantle.
As we made our way, Pico told us of his studies, of how since a boy he had devoted himself to the cultivation of the soul and the acquisition of the knowledge of the liberal arts. ‘I have Latin and Greek and am now studying Plato with Marsilio Ficino. I mean to harmonise Plato and Aristotle – a task that has defeated all before now.’ His words tripped over each other, spilling from him in a torrent, and his gait was buoyant with enthusiasm. ‘I can learn anything, anything I set my mind to.’
Maria stared up at him. ‘You ride knowledge as Bellerophon rode Pegasus.’
I was about to remark that Bellerophon’s ride ended in a fall when Maria made us stop. We had come to Fontelucente and the spring with its statue of the Virgin. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace,’ Maria said as if greeting a friend, and dipping her hand in the basin of spring water, she crossed herself.
‘This is Angelo’s Helicon,’ she told Pico.
In wonder at these learned references that seemed to come so naturally from this strange young woman, Pico glanced at me over her head.
‘She is her brother’s sister,’ I explained.
We went down through the woods, the way strewn with pine needles that made a clear and fragrant path. Under the trees it was dead, no vegetation able to survive the close canopy of the umbrella pines. The darkness of the wood made me fearful but Maria seemed to enjoy it.
‘There is a place in the soul that is dark,’ she said. ‘It is the womb from which everything comes, all impulses that are creative, all good ideas. The dark woods remind me of it.’
‘Beasts and demons also dwell in the dark,’ said Pico.
‘That is a different kind of dark, a godless place.’
The path led down to a tributary of the stream in the valley. On its bank were growing some lovely white irises, the flower that is the emblem of Florence, the city of flowers; the emblem, too, of our florin. Pico stooped to pick some. They were magnificent, with three petals forming the shape of a flame and two petals curving downwards.
‘Such beautiful lilies,’ sighed Maria.
‘They are irises.’
‘But we call them lilies.’
‘They were called flos iridis by the Latins.’
I agreed. ‘They are sacred to Juno, since Iris the rainbow was her attendant.’
‘But these are white, not many-coloured, and to the Christians they symbolise the dove descending, and also the Trinity, and therefore the iris is the lily of the Madonna,’ said Maria.
‘The artists show the Madonna with the white waxy flower we also call “lily”,’ I said.
‘Then they are wrong,’ Maria insisted. ‘According to legend, the Virgin gave Clovis, King of the Franks, a lily at his baptism, and I am sure it was an iris.’
Along the river a few paces was a hovel of the kind dwelt in by woodcutters and charcoal burners. Smoke was rising from its roof and a great pile of pine logs was neatly stacked under a shelter. A tethered goat watched our approach with slitted yellow eyes. So devilish was its gaze that I stood fixed to the spot, staring back at it.
‘Go on without me,’ I told the others, ‘for I have no desire to meet a witch.’
Maria, demure and ladylike with Pico, jumped towards me with the face of a teasing cherub. ‘You have listened too well to your nurse’s stories – and those of my brother. Come along…’ She took me by the arm and pulled me forward. A glance at Pico and I could see that, in him, too, curiosity was at war with fear.
‘Who cuts the wood?’ he asked, his voice a little higher than usual.
‘They do it themselves.’
‘Women cutting wood? How unseemly.’
At the open door Maria called, ‘Monna Angelica?’
A young woman came out, blinking in the light after the gloom within.
‘Carmina, is your mother home? I have brought my brother’s friends to meet you both.’
The young woman, dressed in a fustian shift the colour of the forest floor, welcomed us in unsmilingly. The place was full of smoke and the unholy stink of tallow candles. Besides the large hearth, in which hung a cauldron stewing who-knows-what mess of ingredients, was a basket of pine cones to be used to add some fragrance to the acrid smell of the place. The earthen floor was strewn with musty rushes; an ill-shaped table and two chairs were the only furniture. Such poverty! My fear was overcome by compassion.
A rickety ladder was propped against a hole in the ceiling which led to a loft where presumably the two women slept, and down this ladder, gathering her foul skirts in one hand, came Monna Angelica. Her dark hair was streaked with silver and she wore it loose, a strange thing for an old woman to do and most fearful. My compassion evaporated. Her face was hard, her nose high and arched, her cheeks drawn in, her eyebrows heavy. Every inch a witch. My knees began to tremble.
Maria greeted her with an embrace. ‘This is Giovanni Pico, Count of Concordia, and this my adopted brother, Tommaso.’
The crone nodded to me briefly but concentrated her attention on Pico, and his flowers.
‘Why have you snatched these living beauties from my river bank?’
‘I would have them adorn my table, Madonna.’
‘And now they will die.’
‘They would die anyway.’
She looked at him keenly. ‘But not so young, and as nature wills it, not by the hand of man.’
I began to discern a softness behind her severity, or else it was the effect of the Count upon her.
‘Where was the sun at the time of your birth?’ she asked him.
‘In Pisces. I was born in March.’
‘When the chill winds of spring do blow, and a late frost kills the fruit in its bud.’
Pico blanched. ‘They say you are a witch, and I would know what that means.’
‘It means I am a widow who has not remarried and that I have knowledge of herbs, that is all.’ Her coarse laughter revealed teeth that had once been large and handsome but were now grown old, separated and blackened. If I squinted at her, I could just see the kind of woman she once was, and how striking a beauty she would have been, like her daughter. ‘It means people are suspicious of me because I succeed in living without a man and because I grind up iris bulbs for orrisroot.’ She spoke in the Tuscan dialect and was born of generations of this region.
‘There are no holy images in this house,’ Pico observed.
‘I have the Christ in my heart and I live in the church that He made and which He adorns Himself. The pine tops are the roof and the trunks the pillars of the many aisles. I have no need to go to your stone church and kneel down with hypocrites.’
Maria’s eyes shone with amusement as she watched Pico conversing with her friend.
I looked around. It was true that there were no holy images, but neither were there any demonic ones, no toads pinned live to the walls, no crows hanging upside down from the rafters, just a bunch of dried grasses in an earthenware pot.
‘Are you an astrologer?’ P
ico persisted. ‘Do you have the prophetic gifts?’
‘I am a widow, that is all. If I can see into people’s hearts, there is nothing supernatural in that.’ Here she turned her dark eyes on me. Her gaze was both haughty and terrifying, as if she were physically stripping the clothes from me. Then, as soon as I was naked, she went on to strip the veils from my soul. The sweat stood out on my forehead.
She winced, as if she saw the condition of my heart. ‘If you continue to bury your misery, it will fester within you like a splinter or a thorn. Pull it out, whatever it takes.’
The sweat began to run and my mouth was too dry for me to reply. So I croaked like a frog. Pico glanced at me with the expression Odysseus must have worn when his sailors were turned into pigs by Circe. I smiled nervously at him, to reassure him I was not a frog.
Monna Angelica’s gaze had returned to the white irises, which were already beginning to droop in Pico’s warm hand.
‘It will happen in the time of the lilies,’ she said.
‘What will?’
‘Everything you fear – for all of you – in the time of the lilies.
All will die – a long and agonising death by the hand of man.’
We glanced at each other, each of us silently willing the others not to be gullible or superstitious. She was just an old woman who spent too much time alone.
She offered to make us a meal of the food Maria had brought in a basket but we declined, saying that she and her daughter should make full use of it themselves.
When we went outside, our eyes adjusting to the light, we saw the daughter near the river, turning slowly in a circle, her head down and her hair covering her face. She began to move quicker, dancing to the music of the river and the wind. The dance grew more frantic and she threw her head back but her hair whipping from side to side continued to hide her face. One caught glimpses of chin, throat, closed eyes. This was no dance of the noble palazzo nor even of a peasant festa, but wild and ancient, a dance of Maenads in a bacchic frenzy, though eerily soundless. Her limbs obeyed no laws but bent and twisted in abandon, unpredictably. There was no pattern here, only chthonic rhythm. And as she danced she grew even more beautiful; my eyes fastened on her, lawless and insatiable. I was Actaeon to her Artemis. Reason was dethroned. The same frenzy was in my blood and beginning to arouse me. I snapped away, breaking her enchantment by turning my back. Her dance slowed – I could feel her coming up behind me, could hear her dress rustling, her arms reaching out to me.