by Lisa Rochon
Verrocchio and some of the older boys, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and Botticelli, had rushed out after lunch to supervise the installation of a piscina over at the Old Sacristy of San Lorenzo. Being made of marble, it was a delicate washing basin, and the boys didn’t trust the men on the installation crew. There Leonardo was, in a rare moment of quiet at the studio, just himself and his dead ball of clay. Beyond the open doors of the studio, children were shouting loudly and playing hoops, and he could smell meat roasting, likely the goat that had been dragged on a rope past the studio earlier that morning. It was starting to rain and he felt lazy. He spied a roll of linen resting on one of the tables, fine cloth ready to be stretched as canvas. (Verrocchio told him sternly later on that it was the very best linen from Rheims.) He liked the weight of it in his hand, and suddenly, in one gesture, he had slipped out his knife and cut a length. What he wanted was to bring that dull little figure to life. He dipped the linen in a pail of wet clay and softened it with the mud. He worked the cloth around his sculpture, draping it generously over the shoulders, pleating it at the waist and allowing it to fall all around the feet.
Now he could draw what he had sculpted.
It was raining hard by the time he found his silverpoint and prepared a wooden tablet to draw on. He mixed some bone ash with his saliva to rub over the surface and held the pen tightly in his left hand. He wasn’t sure if what he was drawing was an angel or a human—the draped cloth seemed to invest his lines with something imaginary and immortal. He liked the feeling of silverpoint on the abrasive board, the invented movement, and he was thinking that this was the way to challenge the Flemish pictures with their perfectly round trees dotted on the landscape. He shaded the deep creases of the fabric by building a density of lines and, with a single stroke, traced the line where the cloak fell from her breast to her knee to the earth. The figure, formless and lifeless, became a young woman. And suddenly he thought of the blanket he used to wear at night as a little boy in Anchiano. He felt the weight across his shoulders, and he remembered his mother—her olive skin, her eyes black as stallions. The drawing was still wet, and he remembered everything. She spoke to him: “Don’t go.”
All those years of gradually erasing her voice from his mind. That day in the studio, her words came hurtling back to him. He could feel her fingers gripping his arm, their cheeks pressed together, and he could hear the way she kept repeating: “Don’t go. Don’t go.”
He wished now that he might speak of his wall painting—his failure—to his mother. She might wrap him in a coarse blanket and soothe him. His beard felt wet and he didn’t like that feeling.
He opened his eyes and he was back on the grass, a young woman bending over him.
“Can you let go of my wrists?” she said.
It was the olive oil girl. Beatrice. He released his grip.
The evening came back to him. The sound of laughter from inside: more braying of donkeys. He pulled tufts of grass from the ground and held them to his nose. They were sweet and cool to the touch. Where would he go now? And Michelangelo? The young, brilliant bastard. Without a doubt, he would triumph and carry on. He would seek work in Rome. Maybe Pope Julius could arrange a grand commission for him. There had been talk of refashioning the dull interior of the Sistine Chapel. But he, Leonardo, what of him? “Must I toil for fresh laurels?”
“My lord, you are unwell.”
He smiled at Beatrice and reached for her hand. She leaned close, smelling like springtime. Touching his forehead, burning up with fever: “Water, to begin with.” She returned with a large carafe from her garden cottage and helped him to sit up. He drank long from the jug and, after she had patted his face with a cool cloth, lay down again, resting comfortably, spreading his hands over his heart.
At last, he eased himself up on one elbow and turned to Beatrice. The water filled his body with goodness, clearing his senses, clarifying his thoughts. He had forgotten to drink anything during the stifling hot day. Looking up at the stars, he raised a hand to the sky. “The heat will lift, and they’ll brighten as the night goes on.” He patted the ground beside him, ever the elegant host. “Come see for yourself. Tell me, are you fully recovered now?”
She lay down on the cape beside him, smoothing her skirts over the grass. “I am,” she said. “As well as can be.”
The velvet dark eased the patter of his heart. They lay still for a long time, gazing at the stars. A slight breeze, imperceptible at first, blew across the courtyard, bringing some relief from the stifling heat. He felt his body relax against the moist ground.
“Do you remember when you taught me about juniper?” he asked. The deep timbre of his voice recalled their first meeting at the city gates.
She smiled in the darkness. “Let me remember this,” she said. “The year 1505. When Leonardo da Vinci told me that I, Beatrice from Settignano, had taught him something.”
“You taught me that we are all cut from the same tree,” said Leonardo, rummaging through his leather satchel to fish out a dried sprig of juniper. “That the tallest trees are made up of their branches, and their branches are made up of tiny, feathery needles. All of the patterns repeat in nature, as in life.”
“Go on,” she said.
He held up the juniper, a little withered but still holding its feathery shape, for Beatrice to see. “I am the father and Michelangelo is my brother. Isn’t that what you said? We may not be the same. We may be broken pieces. But we are all a part of each other.”
She nodded and smiled again. “Leonardo, may I ask you something?”
“So long as it has nothing to do with painting a very long wall.”
“What do you do with all of your knowledge?”
Another breeze, stronger and cooler, passed over them. He was reminded of a similar conversation with Lisa. She had accused him of sounding like the pope after he had declared it important to live honorably.
“Beatrice, you tell me. What do you want to do with it?”
She sighed deeply. “Signore, I would say that, compared to those stars, we are as tiny as ants.”
A dog barked, setting off a rooster that shrieked in the night. Loud voices and laughter drifted out from the party. The guests were only across the courtyard, inside Mona Lisa’s palazzo, but they seemed as far away as the heavens above.
“Have you ever loved someone?”
He was relieved she had asked the question. “Yes,” he said. “My mother.”
“This is the first I have heard you speak of her,” said Beatrice. Perhaps she had expected a clever answer about the flowing river or the greatness of the stars. “Does she live here in Florence?”
“I don’t know. But I will have to find out.” He sighed and was cheered by the thought. “And, you, dear Beatrice? Have you loved somebody?”
“Such a big word,” she said, scoffing, pulling out a handful of grass and throwing it back down. “Yes, I have,” she added at last. “Very much, though it hasn’t always been easy.”
He waited for her to go on.
“I have been thinking recently of my father. He would set me against the juniper bush, writing poetry in the dirt by our hut. And my mother. The other day, when I visited her at the hospice, she had plucked a lemon and held it to her nose. With every day, her clarity has been returning. Perhaps she can soon return to Settignano. We will rebuild our little home and prune the gnarly olive branches. Return to our ordinary lives.”
They were quiet for a moment. She noticed a brooding around his lower lip, the jutting of the chin like the old men in the market.
He took another deep drink of water. Wiped his mouth with a patch of linen. “Don’t lose yourself in all of this splendor,” he said, gazing across the courtyard to the palazzo. “The city can be confusing. I came here as a refugee from Milan and, though this is my hometown, I’ve never really felt at home here. Go back to your village when you feel homesick, whenever you need to feel that you belong. Keep your mother close, in a way I was not allowed to.”
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br /> He eased himself to standing. She shut her eyes for a moment, as if not wanting him to go, and listened as he brushed the grass from his clothes.
“I have grown old, but you have time on your side. Use it well,” he said.
He straightened, looked slowly to the stars in the sky and walked toward the gate of the courtyard. But then he lifted a hand in the air, as if to signal that he had forgotten something. Not his cape or his satchel, but words he wanted to say. “And grazie mille, my friend. I believe you will achieve much in your life. Into the wolf’s mouth you go.” He smiled. “That’s what Florentines say for good luck.”
Without missing a beat, Beatrice gave the traditional response: “Crepi il lupo!” May it die.
Chapter 46
He placed the Communion host on his tongue and bowed low in front of the priest, thinking: There, done with the old man. Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, the Florentine notary. My father.
Incense and smoke, the glow of the wax figures crowding around the Virgin Mary, melting slowly, the drone of the liturgy. Leonardo looked around at the faces aligned in steely expression, men and women, high society, people on their feet. He stepped back from the altar, nodding grimly at his seven half-brothers, seeing his uncle next to Salaì and Paolo, his studio assistants shuffling anxiously on their feet, hot and uncomfortable. All of the concerned, Lisa and Francesco, the curious and the disinterested, snapped into focus in one all-seeing moment. He walked with head held high. His father had left him nothing from his estate. That sealed the tragic nature of their relationship. Actually, it allowed for an unbroken line of disappointment.
He had never gone to his father’s deathbed. It seemed unforgivable to some, to want to be separated in their last hours, and Lisa had begged him to reconsider. Death was not something to dance around; it needed to be seized, drawn inside the body. How she had clung to Piera as she passed from Earth to a better place in Heaven!
Beatrice stood in a niche by a side altar, observing the crowd. He could see it written all over her face: the shame, the anguish, the pain of erasing pain. Did she hear it, too? The sound, the splitting, the opening, the crack down the middle of an ancient oak tree. He watched as she put a hand on her father’s old jacket, which she had switched for her cape today, clearly finding a measure of comfort in its threadbare quilting. Maybe she was losing her father all over again. Reliving her lonely treks to the city at dawn. The scourge of being an outsider. The assault. God, give her peace. Let it all wash away.
Released from my duty as grieving son, he thought, picking out familiar faces in the assembled crowd at the Basilica of Santissima Annunziata. There were his business acquaintances, clients, all of them gazing at him, beseeching him to remember the work he had promised to do; Machiavelli raising up his arms, as if to launch into a speech, and Soderini pulling on his cape to subdue the urge. Leonardo breathed in the heady frankincense, devoured the perfumed smoke in his mouth and staggered from the church.
The sun was hanging low, clouds bruised, any sign of the morning’s first blush obliterated. What he thought of then were blackberries and flowering anemones, chartreuse against the purple hues of rushes and reeds. He remembered his chalk drawings of star of Bethlehem and Job’s tears—simple, tender sketches with red conté—and the love he felt not for his father, but for the meadows and woods that edged his village of Vinci. He felt the blessing of his mother. The shadow of loss.
He walked into anonymity in the crowd at the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata. He crossed to his familiar seat on the stone steps next to the Ospedale degli Innocenti, sat down heavily and put his face in his hands. Pathetic, he thought. I am a grown man and yet I feel like a child, mourning—not his loss, no, but the scorn.
The arrival of men pushing toward a crowd gathered for a cockfight made him rise. A short walk along the cobblestones to the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, and he retreated inside, moving past patients tottering uneasily on their feet, babies screeching, the hoarse scream of a young woman, down, down the steps to the subterranean cave of the hospital.
“My lord!” a voice called out. “Maestro! It was too much to bear. The church filled with stink and heat. All those people.”
Leonardo turned and saw a strange apparition: Michelangelo. He wiped his eyes and looked again.
“I don’t blame you for hiding.”
“Salve, Michelangelo. Welcome to my secret world,” said Leonardo. “I’m sure you have one of your own.” He opened a heavy wooden door and lit two large tallows. A windowless room, stripped naked, came into view; its only furnishings were a wooden table and a large ceramic basin set on the floor. The bare minimum—no art, no artifice.
The familiar smell of old blood assaulted their noses.
“Dissections?” Michelangelo asked.
“Whenever somebody is volunteered.”
They looked at each other, treading uncertain ground.
“You walk here unnoticed at night, do the work and return before sunrise.”
“Yours?”
“Across the bridge at Santo Spirito. The friar obliges.”
“An excellent library,” said Leonardo, remembering. What the hell was Michelangelo doing here? He was aware of the stink of the airless room. White cotton soaked in ammonia. He looked down at the basin. Old, hardened blood.
“I saw you rush from the funeral,” Michelangelo began. “It’s not my style to stalk people. My legs just started moving in your direction.”
“Full moon, I suppose.”
They looked at each other again. There was no room for a quarrel.
“It is hard, isn’t it?” Michelangelo’s eyes shone with grief.
Exposing himself, thought Leonardo—there’s a brave man. Drunk or pumped high with opium? “To be an artist? Always.”
“Every gesture requires . . .” Michelangelo looked at his hands. “You have to risk everything to make a work of art matter.”
Leonardo felt a crack of empathy, lightness. The dark, mysterious room at the bottom of Florence invited him to leave behind insults and humiliations. “Trust what’s coming out of your head. If young artists can’t do that, well, then—”
“I want to speak with my heart, and stop the battle of words,” said Michelangelo. “I didn’t welcome you home to Florence and that was wrong of me.”
“I was an arrogant ass.” Leonardo crouched and then lay down fully on the stone floor, relishing the cold of the vault. “I feel exhausted. Today was my father’s funeral, and nothing I could do ever made him proud.”
“My father cares only about how much I earn.”
“Your mother died in childbirth?”
“When I was six.”
“Mine abandoned me—or my father stole me. My father specialized in the drafting of wills,” said Leonardo, looking up at the old timbered ceiling. “With a stroke of his pen he might have allowed recognition that I was his son.”
“He was a capone, a fathead,” said Michelangelo. Then, “How am I to produce something worthy to fresco? You have a thirty-year lead on me.”
He said the words as though he was a victim, but Leonardo suspected he did not feel that way at all. The rumor was that his preparatory drawing for the Battle of Cascina was nearly done, ready to be transferred by pinpricks to the wall of the Great Council Hall.
Leonardo looked over at the younger man and felt a tiny thrill claw through him. Should he seize on that vulnerable look in Michelangelo’s dark eyes and twist it to his advantage? He thought of the woodpecker bashing its head repeatedly against tree trunks to seize tiny insects. Over many days of study, he had discovered that the tongue of the bird measured three times the length of its bill, allowing it to retract into a soft bolster to protect the bird’s brain whenever the pounding began. To any other creature—to a human being—the force exerted on the head would be lethal. All of this he had written down in one of his notebooks.
The very thought of it, the thought of banging heads with Michelangelo, exhausted him. He d
id not have a soft bolster to cushion the blows. “You have youth on your side. Take a risk; the battle is what you imagine it to be, what you fear most.” He wrapped his cape around his knees to fend off the stale damp of the morgue. “There doesn’t have to be a beginning, or an end. One remarkable moment. That’s all.”
There, he had offered a truce. Words of encouragement. Had he imagined that this young talent represented the enemy? This conversation could never happen again. “There are many who possess technical skills. But rare is the man who can invent something new.”
His mind flitted to the hills and valleys of Caprese, where his first flying machine had already been tested. He must return to paring down the weight of his mechanical bird, to be certain it could fly free in the air when pushed from the ground. Flying. My God, he obsessed over it, scribbled in secret, mirrored script, desperate to test that a substance offers as much resistance to the air as the air to the substance. There was still life in him yet. He needed to remember that.
Leonardo rose to his feet, ignoring the stiffness in his knees, and extended a hand to Michelangelo. He wondered why the young sculptor had not mentioned Leonardo’s failure with his wall painting. “Do what you feel is right. Too many people live the unlived life. They could have been someone.” He looked at the plaster walls, stained yellow with age. “So could anyone.”
He hesitated and looked over at the young artist, at his wild hair, his brow furrowed with obsessive thoughts. “The best thing about coming back to Florence?” The revelation came hurtling toward him. “Knowing you were here, biting at my heels, making me run when I’d tired of walking.”