by Linda Proud
Up on the scaffolding, the mason and his apprentice were standing with their hands clasped and eyes closed in the angelus prayer, but the apprentice couldn’t concentrate and moved to look over the edge to see what kind of idiot was singing scales during prayers. Did I see the hammer falling? Not that I can remember. I was sounding ti when suddenly the cupola was no longer there. In its place was the great, starry, limitless sky. I found myself rising, with wings unfolding, up through the stars to paradise. Holding my hand and leading me upwards, my lady.
I rose to meet her, and we rose together, embracing, into the starfields of heaven. Who was she? She was Elena, but she was also Beatrice, Venus, the Madonna. She was all of them, and the one.
I did not find heaven as I expected. Yes, there were the Elysian fields, the heavenly Arcadia. ‘Lower paradise,’ my lady told me, as we passed it by, rising ever upwards until we came to a great cathedral, so great that each step leading to its doorway was half my height. And yet we mounted them with ease, for always we were rising. The great door was partly ajar and we went in as if floating. The whole length of the vast nave, which disappeared into the far distance, was filled with desks; the walls of the aisles were lined with books.
‘Wise souls spend the afterlife in study,’ my lady told me.
‘The whole of eternity?’
‘Until the Judgement.’
I looked about in wonder, knowing the identity of those I saw without being told. I saw Homer and Hesiod, Virgil and Ovid, each of them writing, and I saw their words leave their pages to fall spinning to earth like aerial seeds. Searching the crowds, I knew all of them to be poets, and in one aisle I found the Tuscans side- by-side with the troubadours of Provence listening to Moorish singing girls who sang of love in a way to make your soul faint. There was song everywhere, layers of song, each layer in harmony with the rest. Dante was lecturing in song and in the audience were Petrarch and Boccaccio. Beside them, Poliziano and Lorenzo.
Angelo rose, left the group and came to me, his arms open, his face luminous as it had been on those rare occasions when he was without care.
‘What are you doing here? Are you not in the Piazza Santa Croce?’
‘I was a few moments ago.’
‘We do not have the plural form of the word moment here. Haven’t you noticed? No space. No time. Is it not wonderful?’
I looked about and for sure everything seemed to be happening at once, the air billowing with souls. There was certainly space, and much of it, but things did have a curious way of superimposing.
Angelo looked at me doubtfully. ‘You are not dead! What, would you be the soldier of Er who will awake on his pyre and tell of what he has seen?’
‘What shall I tell them?’
‘Tell them not to fear death. Oh, how much time and thought I wasted in that occupation! There is nothing to fear, except the Judgement.’
I was puzzled since we seemed to be in paradise, which must mean the judgement had already happened.
‘No, no. This is eternity. Heaven, hell and purgatory? Is that what you believe? I thought you were a good Pythagorean!’
‘Then…?’
‘After the Judgement, the Rebirth. Back to the prison of the flesh! But the soul may choose its prison, under guidance of the Three.’
Angelo beckoned to one of the companions of Boccaccio, a man with fair hair and pointed beard, and introduced me to Geoffrey Chaucer of England. ‘This is my erstwhile pupil, Geoffrey, a man signally incapable of seeing the obvious or putting his knowledge into practice. You tell him what he needs,’ Angelo said. ‘He never would listen to me.’
Chaucer took four books from a shelf nearby and handed them to me: Homer and Plutarch in Greek, Ovid and Virgil in Latin. ‘The tradition of poetry that I revived in England has been broken again,’ he said.
I have been teaching the wrong thing. You cannot force philo- sophy upon a young and unwilling mind; you cannot teach the theory of love if you do not know its practice. ‘Give the children poetry,’ said Chaucer. ‘Give them myths and stories, and they will be tomorrow’s philosophers.’
Even as I turned to Angelo to ask him where Pico was, I found myself in a cloister, sweet and serene. There were two main groups, one to the left, the other to the right. Each group was divided into many separate groups, each gathered round its own teacher; but the whole was governed by Plato on one side and Aristotle on the other. Here was no sound of disputation or debate, but a chanting as of monks. Aristotle’s group looked down towards the earth below and studied the laws of creation. Plato’s group looked up to the starry sky and from that group a staircase ascended, with a few souls rising to a place beyond view.
Ficino sat at Plato’s right hand. Pico, with his own group, sat in the centre of the cloister, and some of his students looked up and some of them down.
‘Both,’ Pico said, in answer to a question I had not yet asked. ‘Let your heart encompass both the worldly and the divine, for all is One. There is no division in truth.’
At this, Plato and Aristotle both turned and smiled at him.
That was what I learnt in paradise: there is no either/or. The answer is both. The identity of the One is All, of the All, One.
As I stood listening, enchanted by this dawn chorus of souls, I became aware that all the songs and sounds had one source, one voice. Angels were dancing in a circle of light, in the centre of which stood a lady with stars in her hair. She was singing a song full of semitones and harmonics, a song of simplicity, purity and loss, the song of the soul for God, in a voice that could dissolve hearts as it dissolved cupolas.
She was beauty. She was love. Was she Elena? No. It was who Elena had reminded me of. Someone I knew so well and had yet lost. She was what I had loved in all I had loved. And as I gazed on her, she filled with ineffable light, transfiguring. As I gazed on her, I filled with the same light, transfiguring. And then, just for a moment, a single, limitless moment, I fully understood Pico’s All. All this, this heaven, was not outside of me but within me, and this lady, this song, was my own soul. And with this realisation, spiralling stairs opened up before me, so that I might rise to a greater knowledge and a greater beauty still. As I stepped towards them, however, I found myself at the place of judgement, standing before a terrible figure, blackened by fire and thrown into shadow by the orange flames belching all around him. Although I could not see his face for the cowl pulled over it, I knew it was Savonarola.
‘It was the wrong love,’ I said, and knew then that I was the Judge, he a soul ready to return. ‘You preached love but your heart was closed to beauty. You taught love and created misery. How dare you presume to speak on behalf of Wisdom? Bare your head for the judgement!’
But when the soul threw back its cowl, I met my own beseeching eyes in my own haggard and miserable face. ‘Who will you become?’ I thundered.
‘He who I was born to be!’ I cried. ‘And not the antichrist!’
Suddenly I was being drawn backwards at a sickening rate, all the time becoming heavier and more gross, physical. With a thud to the brain, I rejoined my body where it lay on a stretcher, being shaken and jolted as it was carried at a run by two men through the streets of Florence. My eyes opened to a dizzying view of towers and tall houses, of overhanging eaves and balconies, of someone throwing out some slops that just missed my head, through winding lanes, under the vaulted arches that turned streets into tunnels. Shrines on the corner of houses. Striped black and white banding of stone windows. A dog running alongside, wanting my legs if they should be of no further use to me. Dull shapes of a grey reality, seen like ghosts.
I was so surprised by the stupidity of a beggar who tried to ask alms of me that I raised my head. She smiled at me, she with that strange goat’s beard, her eyes in her ravaged, grinning face penetrating, all-knowing. ‘Who are you?’ I demanded.
‘We are men of the Misericordia,’ said one
of the stretcher bearers. ‘We’re nearly there.’
‘That beggar – who was she?’
‘You’ve been hit on the head by a falling hammer. You have been crowned, lord and master of yourself.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Take no notice of him,’ said the other bearer. ‘Always quoting Dante. Lie back and rest. We thought we’d picked up a dead man. Nearly there. Nearly at Santa Maria Nuova.’
At that, the darkness returned. But within the darkness there was a light, the brightly shining flame of a candle in the centre of myself.
When I awoke again, Benivieni was examining my head. ‘A sharp blow,’ he said, ‘at the very place where you once wore a tonsure. I never did ask…’
‘My vows have been absolved by the Pope,’ I said, screwing my eyes shut again, feeling sick.
‘By the Pope, perhaps, but obviously not by God. You must rest,’ he said, ‘and not move. Can you see alright?’
‘The light hurts most painfully.’
Benivieni had one of his assistants bandage my eyes. ‘Where am I?’
‘At the hospital.’
‘Which hospital?’
‘Santa Maria Nuova.’
‘Oh, I’m to measure this place for the King of England.’ Benivieni laughed. ‘You have been, for the past three weeks.’
‘Oh? Yes, I remember now.’
‘Do you really remember?’
‘Yes.’
‘You left this morning.’
‘Yes, I went to paradise.’
Benivieni instructed a nurse to stay with me, to keep my head cool and to give me certain herbs to drink. ‘You must rest here for at least a week,’ he told me, ‘until we are certain there is no serious damage to the brain.’
And so I lay there like a corpse for many days, seeing nothing but hearing the place. Oh, what makes Santa Maria Nuova special cannot be measured. The sounds echo mysteriously in a place as big as a cathedral, vaulted and arcaded. Prayers are said frequently, incense burns in censers, a priest keeps the hours at an altar and sustains an atmosphere of holiness that heals. All would have been well but for my nurse. She was rough and heavy-handed with me, and never spoke other than the occasional tssh!
‘The oblates here are famed for their kindness,’ I told her as she slapped a freezing poultice on my head.
‘Tssh!’
She washed me as if I were a dead fish and straightened the sheets with a brutal efficiency.
‘Have I offended you in any way?’
‘TSSH!’
She gave me a compound to drink that tasted of vegetation rotting on the coast of the salty sea. I struggled to resist. ‘Who are you?’ I demanded. ‘Has Caterina Sforza sent you?’
‘Tssh!’
‘You are poisoning me!’ I cried, at which she pinched my nose until my mouth opened and then she poured the medicine in and left me gagging and choking.
I complained to Benivieni that the nurse he had assigned to me was an angry, cruel woman who would be better employed elsewhere, such as scrubbing latrines. Benivieni laughed until he wheezed like a donkey and told me that she was his finest assistant, a physician in her own right.
‘She does not seem to have the spirit of the place.’
‘Perhaps you annoy her,’ he said, and went away, still laughing.
This went on until two days ago. Hearing her familiar tread, I flinched.
‘Good morning, goddess,’ I said bravely.
Without a word she soaped my face and stropped a razor. ‘Oh, God…’ I whimpered. But for once she was quite gentle and I listened to her breathing as she shaved my chin. ‘Now,’ she said, as she towelled me dry. The next thing I knew, she was kissing me. It was not the kiss of eros, but neither was it a mere peck of affection. It was a long, concentrated kiss that infused my soul with a memory of itself. These oblates, I thought, will do anything to get a man well!
‘Vita osculi,’ she murmured as she withdrew.
I struggled with my bandage but, by the time I had it free, she had gone. I rang the handbell beside my bed frantically until an oblate came. ‘I want my nurse. Where is my nurse?’
‘She is off duty.’
I told her to get the doctor. ‘Antonio!’ I said, when Benivieni came, ‘what is the name of my nurse?’
‘How are your eyes? Still seeing double?’
My breathing was so shallow and rapid it must surely give him concern. ‘Tell me her name, man!’
‘You know it well enough: Maria Poliziana.’
She was still off duty the following morning when, with the help of two assistants, I stood up and took my first, staggering steps. Antonio had told me the story, how Maria had never left the convent of San Marco but had worked in the pharmacy and infirmary, even during the plague. But at the time of the sack, when she had gone to draw water from a well, she had been attacked by one of the Compagnacci: presumably that young man I had seen with his face smashed in by the well bucket. After that she had fled the monastery and sheltered in the house of the Benivieni family.
When I asked Antonio why she was so angry with me, he was surprised I had to ask. When she had seen me measuring the hospital, she had begged Antonio not to tell me of her presence. ‘She is happy,’ he said, ‘and does not wish to be reminded of the past.’
‘But why is she so angry?’
‘Because the ardent young friar who ordered her into the convent is now a layman, who has not thought to enquire about her.’
‘I thought she was dead! Why are women so irrational?’
‘Usually it’s a case of unrequited love,’ the doctor said.
In love? With me? I wanted to search the hospital until I found her, but my legs buckled after a few steps and I was taken back to bed. I lay there, waiting for her. A beam of winter light from an upper window lit the nave. I listened to the cadences of plainchant being sung at the altar and inhaled the cool air purified with incense while I rearranged the past into a new pattern. He who was blind can now see. The light absorbed me. I dissolved in that light, became that light. I am the Light. That light is love. I was born in that love and became that love. I am Love. Love: the fourth dimension. That which cannot be drawn, or painted, or sculpted, or written: that which draws, paints, sculpts, writes. Love. And now I understood that which Savonarola never understood: to love is enough. It is all that God asks of us. That ye love one another.
Then she was there, the woman clothed in the sun. To a worldly eye she was a round woman of forty or so, but years sit easily on nuns and her face was just as I remembered it, only with a radiance that shimmered, particles of light in a dance of divinity that no artist can capture. We call it a smile.
‘Salve,’ she said.
‘Salve, Maria.’
We meet as two great rivers in confluence, our speech tumbling to tell each other what we have done in the intervening years. In her cell, which is next to the one where they have put me while I finish my work, she has a little shrine that would not be considered holy by anyone but myself. Beneath a niche, in which there is a fine majolica vase containing a spray of evergreens, she keeps two medals wrapped in velvet, one bearing the emblem of Pico della Mirandola, the other the image of her brother, Angelo, both with her own portrait on the obverse. This is the shrine of her heart. ‘I had no image of you,’ she said, wistfully, then with a measure of spite, ‘not that I wanted one.’
I have been considering, of course, our future, and thought I would consider it for about a month, but last night, while she was telling me about the medicinal properties of common vegetables, I suddenly fell to my knees.
‘Maria, there is something I must say, but I fear if I do you will die.’
‘What do you mean?’ she cried.
‘I realise I am second best, that Pico was your love…’ I began hesitantly.
She l
aughed. ‘Pico was a radiant light and I a moth. I burnt myself in his light over and over again, loving him as Plato enjoins us to, as my educator, my guide to truth, but not as a maid loves a man. No, Tommaso, you are and always have been completely wrong in that presumption.’
To hear Benivieni’s diagnosis of her irrationality confirmed, I blushed like a boy.
‘Remember Dante?’ she asked. ‘How he convinced everyone that he loved another woman so as to keep Beatrice secret? Pico hid from everyone, even myself, the name in my heart. Now what do you mean, I am going to die?’
And I told her about the gipsy who, so long ago, told me that everyone I love will die before me.
‘If that’s the price I must pay,’ she said, ‘so be it.’
As a tertiary at San Marco and an oblate at Santa Maria Nuova, Maria has taken no vows. We are to marry tomorrow in the hospital’s chapel. And that is the story which Benivieni considers the best he’s heard from a living man, and not my trip to paradise, which he says was merely delirium consequent to a blow on the head. For myself, I think it is all part of the same story.
Palimpsest
A word from the Greek meaning to rub smooth again. Stone- masons know about it, as do brass engravers. And scribes. Vellum is an expensive material and sometimes, for want of it, a scribe will scratch out the words of an old book and make the vellum smooth again for the writing of a new one. In this way Roman codices were lost to Christian monks while, in my time, inferior works of faith have been scratched out and replaced by renewed works of antiquity. One thing on top of another.
When I was an apprentice scribe in the early 1470s, I was taught the tricks of trompe l’oeil by the man who decorated my master’s pages. It is the art of making things seem real so that you would try and brush away the bee that seems to have alighted on the vines of the border.
In a book I have seen of Aristotle printed by Nicholas Jenson, one page is decorated in such a fashion that it seems as if the paper is tearing into holes and curling back at the edges to reveal a temple in a landscape with fauns and putti. Such is the realism that it confounds the brain to touch a printed page, whole and complete, which the eye believes to be a torn fragment.