Immortal (42 page)

LEONARDO AND I WERE THE LAST TO LEAVE.
We stood at the large carved doors to the Rucellai palazzo and said thanks and good-bye to our host and hostess.

“Signore Luca, I’ve spoken to my husband about studying with you. He’s amenable, if you have the time,” Maddalena said. She stood next to her husband in the doorway, with the melting yellow candlelight from the foyer dissolving around the curves of her form.

“I’ll pay you for your time,” Rucellai said. I opened my mouth to tell him that I didn’t want money, I wanted his wife, but Leonardo grabbed me bodily and shoved me down the street.

“It’s something to consider,” Leonardo said. “Thank you again!” They called their good-byes. I was still looking backward when the great door closed, leaving me on the outside and Maddalena on the inside with that man, her husband. I almost couldn’t bear thinking of her with him, even though I knew he was a good match for her, and that he adored her.

“Stop it!” Leonardo said sharply. “Luca, you’re pathetic!” He grabbed my farsetto by the shoulder and shook me once as we walked down the street in the moonlight. “You are completely unmanned by that woman’s beauty.”

“Do you think anyone else noticed?” I wondered.

Leonardo laughed shortly, then shook his head. “Perhaps Lorenzo. He misses nothing.”

“I’ll never have her,” I said sadly. How could I come so close to love and have it denied me? Was this the cruelest divine joke of all, and, if so, which God was laughing? I looked up at the sky, which was deep and indigo and spattered with milky stars.

“No, you won’t! Is it so, what’s the word you used, Luca mio,
‘insupportable,’
that you’ll never have her?” asked Leonardo. He stopped short and I turned toward him. He reached his hand out and took mine in his, raised our hands together so that I was clasping his in the crisp night air. Moonlight silvered over his golden-red hair and gave him a fuzzy halo, like a saint. He was staring at me with an intense, rapt look on his sculpted face.

“Leonardo?” I said uncertainly. He dropped my hand.

“Do you not know how I feel about you?” he asked softly, staring down at me from his greater height. “How I’ve felt since the day I saw you, more beautiful than an angel, walk up over the crest of Monte Albano to where I stood by the cave? All these years I have loved you. Only you, Luca. Can you not imagine how it could be between us?” He was breathing hard and I felt his male presence, his erotic core. He was aroused and also tender; he brimmed over with the strength and vulnerability of a man who was offering himself as a man to me. After what I had endured at Silvano’s as a child, I would have thought that a moment such as this would nauseate me, enrage me, drive me to draw the dagger I kept strapped to my thigh. But this was Leonardo, whom I loved. Nothing he did could disgust me. I was moved by his honesty, which I valued, and his willingness to reveal himself, a willingness I almost never duplicated in my own life.

“No, ragazzo mio, that is not who I am,” I said softly. I didn’t back away from him. I just stood there, feeling my own erotic core. That core was filled with Maddalena, as perhaps it had been since the first time I saw her. I understood her, and I realized that all along, these many decades, I had been waiting for someone who could understand me, too. Only a woman who had experienced similar atrocities, and survived them, could do that.

“You are not like me,” he cried raggedly. “I love you and it is impossible because you are not like me, not at all!” His voice was full of raw pain. I nodded. He recoiled as if from a serpent. Then he straightened and set his noble head high on his neck. “It’s a waste of time. I have much work, painting, observation, the study of anatomy; sensuality would only hamper my efforts. Intellectual passion drives out sensuality.” His eyes were remote and detached.

“Leonardo, you will love again,” I said quietly, feeling compassion for him.

“I’ll leave Florence, anyway, in a few years. Perhaps for Milano, or Venezia. I’ve ideas for new weapons,” he said as if speaking to himself. He quickened his pace and I had to hurry to keep up. “Ideas for inventions. I’ll write a letter, seek new employment. But not right away.”

“Leonardo, we will always be friends,” I said. I stopped for the turn down my street. He glanced back over his shoulder, saw that I was at the junction of my street, and paused.

“Will you, Luca? Will you? Love again. Since you can’t have Maddalena,” he said with a bitterness that was never before, and never after, in his deep, melodious voice. I didn’t answer, because it was obvious to me. There was only Maddalena. From now on, if I couldn’t have her, there was no one. Leonardo nodded. “That’s what I thought! There’s one love, and it’s forever!”

Chapter
21

A FEW WEEKS LATER,
Maddalena confronted me as I was entering an apothecary shop near Santa Maria Novella, whose facade had been redone some twenty years ago by Alberti. The renovation was financed by Giovanni Rucellai, cousin to Rinaldo. With his renovation, Alberti had achieved the aims of the humanists, and perhaps the rest of us, too: he had fully integrated the past with the present. He had pulled the rose window, intricate marquetry, and arched recesses of the church’s origins into a handsome classical design that was completely current.

This particular apothecary shop, in the western part of town near the massive city walls, offered a selection of flasks and beakers, and I was still replacing the ones I’d broken in my tantrum. I turned to enter the shop.

“Luca,” called a husky, beguiling voice. I closed my eyes and didn’t respond so she’d repeat my name and I could have the pleasure of hearing it again on her lips. “Luca Bastardo!”

“Maddalena,” I said. She walked swiftly across the piazza. Today she wore a pale green brocade cottardita with yellow-and-blue silk sleeves and crimson embroidery; her thick woolen mantello was bright purple and lined with white fur. She crackled with color and texture, as did her being; her garb suited her.

“Let us speak,” she said, stopping at the edge of the piazza. I went to her, unable to master my ragged breathing. I stopped at a distance because I didn’t trust myself to stand close to her. I might seize her and cover her face and throat with kisses and pleas and promises. She swallowed, then said, “I know how you feel about me, signore.”

“You do?”

“It mustn’t be spoken aloud. But it concerns me. I wish to study alchemy with you. My husband has agreed to it. He’s a good man, and I won’t dishonor him.” Her eyes were serious, and I saw slivers of gray in them today, the gray-green of the Arno when it surges out of its shores and washes away bridges. “He deserves my loyalty—no matter what. I owe him a tremendous debt of gratitude for marrying me under circumstances which would have put off any other man.”

“Not every man,” I interjected. “I wouldn’t have been put off.”

She blushed but went on as if I hadn’t said anything. “I had no family and little money for a dowry. I had only myself to offer. Yet every day Rinaldo makes me feel as if he is the fortunate one. I am grateful to him and always will be. I hope to bear him many children and make him proud and happy.”

But, Maddalena,
I wanted to say,
Rucellai is the fortunate one. In offering yourself, you’ve given him everything.
An ache gnawed at my heart, but I pushed it away. “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to teach me and to strictly observe the proprieties. No more sending away my maid! I have a voracious hunger for learning; I want to be as worthy as all the Florentine women with their illustrious families and good education. I want you to teach me everything you know!” Impassioned, she took a step toward me with her lips parted. I could see the rosy soft tip of her tongue. I wondered what it would feel like in my mouth.

“Education doesn’t make people worthy. People are born worthy, and they live their lives either to enhance that worth or not,” I said. It was the one essential thing I’d learned in my long life, and it was a gift I gave now to Maddalena, whether or not she received it.

“I have something to prove to myself,” she answered.

I shrugged. “I’m a failed alchemist.”

“I have great respect for Leonardo; he’s an extraordinary man. He says you are the best alchemist around, barring Ficino, who’s too busy and too important to teach me.”

“I’m not important.” I smiled wryly, looking off at the green-and-white facade of Santa Maria Novella, because it was something other than her to focus on, and maybe it would keep her from seeing the naked hunger in my eyes.

“That’s not what I meant!” she cried. “I’m sure you’re very important. When I talk about you and ask people about you—”

“Why do you ask people about me, Maddalena? What do you want to know? I’ll tell you anything about myself. Anything. Just ask.”

“Please, signore, let me explain myself!” Maddalena shook her head, blushing furiously. “Ficino runs the Platonic Academy. People say you keep to yourself, other than to be with a few friends, that you stay out of politics, that’s what I meant about important.”

“I know what you meant.”

“The thing I want to know is, can you teach me, as a friend and only as a friend, remembering always that I am married and faithful to my husband?”

No,
my body and soul and mind and every dram of my being screamed. “Yes,” I said aloud. I retrained my eyes on her and vowed, in that moment, to always say yes to her. If I could not give her the love I wanted to, I could at least give her the spaciousness of knowing her desires would always be fulfilled by me. Whatever desires she brought to me, that is.

Her beautiful face glowed and she laid her hand on my chest eagerly. Then she saw what she was doing and removed it with alacrity. “Thank you, signore! Can we start tomorrow? I’ll arrive after breakfast at your home. Is there anything I should bring with me? My husband has told me to purchase whatever I need for my studies!”

“Bring yourself. That’s everything,” I said. Her wide, mobile mouth turned up in a smile. She skipped off like a little girl, but then, nineteen wasn’t so old, even if any Florentine girl whose family could afford her dowry was married by then. Just then a group of children ran by chasing a wooden wheel. They were well fed and well dressed in good wool and all were laughing. As they raced past, one little girl turned toward me with her plaited blond hair flying out around her and her eyes alight with giggles.

“It’s too funny!” she said, pointing, but at what I couldn’t see. Then I realized that it didn’t matter what she was pointing at. Her words were a sign; one of the Gods wanted me to know that the joke was in play. As usual, I was the butt of it. It didn’t matter if I prayed. Beneath the surface of everything lay a tightly woven fabric of meaning. That was the ultimate joke.

FOR A FEW YEARS,
Maddalena and I met once a week when she was in Florence. I didn’t see her when she went with her husband to his villa in the contado, a lonely time which could stretch to as long as a month. I started our work together with exercises in Latin, because most of the alchemical texts, including Ficino’s translation of the
Corpus Hermeticum,
were in Latin. Maddalena had a quick mind and within a year was better at the language than I was. If I fumbled with a declension, she teased me mercilessly. Of course, she had her rich old husband buying her manuscripts in Latin to supplement whatever I taught her, which was her secret weapon.

It was the same when I began to teach her about the zodiac, which I did even before Ficino completed my instruction. She grasped the metaphor of the signs, houses, and seven planets much more deeply than I did, literal as I was. We had a discussion about it one day while I showed her pictures of the constellations in an old bestiary Leonardo had given me as a gift.

“That’s Leo, the gorgeous lordly animal, it shows kingship,” I said, pointing. Maddalena stood at my elbow, leaning over my arm so I could stare at the soft white column of her slender neck. I was mesmerized by it, as I was by every curve and line of her flesh, and by the sweet eroticism which she wore as unthinkingly as a comfortable mantello.

“It shows the arena of life where the soul is magnificent,” she said. “You must think of what each sign and planet represents, Luca. The Archer shows where the soul is on a quest.”

“The Archer is a centaur with a good strong bow in his hands,” I said. “Mars, here, is the harbinger of war and destruction.”

“Mars is the principle of action,” she said, “whether that’s to build or to wreak havoc.” She tilted her head to look up at me out of the corner of her eyes.

“Venus is the goddess of love and beauty,” I said, trying not to sigh, because Maddalena herself embodied Venus for me. I grew erect and twisted my hips to hide it. I’d not been with a woman since Maddalena had reappeared. It wasn’t easy for a man used to frequent amorous interludes to find himself celibate, even if he chose that state. It was, after all, an unnatural state. Unlike the alchemist Geber, I believed that the flesh was to be enjoyed, with kindness and respect certainly, but also with appreciation. The earth was a feast full of delights, great paintings and beautiful women and succulent foods, and not to cherish those delights amounted to a great sin. After all, tragedy and suffering lurked around every corner, demanding their due.

“Venus speaks to the capacity for love and an appreciation of beauty,” said Maddalena.

“Too abstract,” I argued. “With that interpretation, you lose sight of the practical use of astrology: timing specific events! Venus strongly placed can show a love match occurring.”

“Luca, specific events are the least of what astrology signifies!” she said, straightening. Her silk dress sluiced over her like a sheet of water, skimming her lovely curves in a way that left me breathless. “The material world is under the rule of the stars, I mean astrological law, insofar as people are always seeking revelation, insight into the divine, and salvation!”

“If you want insight into the divine, go watch a boy tear the wings off a fly. If you want to know when specific events will occur, use astrology,” I said. “Astrology is significant insofar as it reads like a clock on a bell tower. The earth and heavens are woven together in a vast fabric, so it is below as it is above. But this is an impersonal phenomenon. Salvation for the individual is a big hoax with which one of the Gods teases us when He wants some amusement. If we’re lucky, it’s the kind God, and there is some gift for us amidst the suffering. If we’re unlucky, it’s the evil God, and only horrors follow.”

“No, Luca, you cannot believe that God is split this way, and mostly cold and uncaring!” Maddalena cried.

“How could I not?” I asked. “If there were one good God, how could He permit suffering and evil?” I moved to the other side of the table. Her fresh water and lilac scent aroused me almost to madness, and the desire would burn in me for hours, unabated. It was something I simply had to endure; only Maddalena could meet my need. I said, “How could you believe in one good God after what happened to you in Volterra?”

Somberly, she said, “I can’t fathom why events happen that ruin lives. I’m not that wise. But I know that this earth is impregnated with the divine in every instant. The earth lives and moves with God’s life, the stars are God’s living creatures, the sun burns with God’s power, and there’s no part of nature which is not good because all are parts of God.”

“Were you thinking that while the condottieri were raping you?” I asked, crudely and cruelly. I was ashamed of myself the moment the words had left my mouth.

Maddalena didn’t flinch. “Of course not,” she said. “I was a little girl hoping they wouldn’t kill me when they were done brutalizing me.” She stood out from the table and jerked her skirts up to her waist. She wasn’t wearing stockings and her slim thigh was bare. Her maid leapt up and shrieked in consternation. “Hush, he was there when it happened, he bound the wound!” Maddalena waved her to silence, then turned to me.

“I still have the mark from that day, where the condottiere carved into me as if I were a roast fowl, when he was finished using me.” She pointed and I stared at the thin, cruciform scar high up on her leg. Her beautiful leg. It saddened me again to remember little Maddalena cut into by the brutes who did Lorenzo de’ Medici’s bidding. I wanted to hold her and touch the scar with love and tell her how beautiful she was, how much I admired her for her honesty in revealing herself. My tenderness threatened to overwhelm my restraint, so I lowered my eyes. She dropped her skirts. She said, “I thought this mark diminished me.”

“It doesn’t. It couldn’t,” I said grimly. I understood what it was to feel demeaned.

“That’s what Rinaldo says, too,” she said softly. “I showed him this when he asked me to marry him. Tears came to his eyes and he said it only made me more beautiful to him, and that he loved me more because of what I’d endured.”

“Rucellai isn’t a stupid man,” I conceded.

Maddalena smiled. “He’s a good man, and this scar gave me further proof of it. So something good came out of my having it. I think of that, how good comes out of evil, and how God is in all things, when I’m praying, and when I’m remembering that awful day. Sometimes when I’m praying I can feel something, something that doesn’t have words or maybe can’t be said in words, about God’s perfection in every moment, even those moments that wear cruel faces. Grace is acceptance of the love of God within a world of seeming hate and fear.” She looked down at the bestiary and traced the lion’s golden mane with one delicate finger. A sad smile curved her lips. “When the worst happens, as it does in many lives—someone is raped, a parent is killed, a child dies, everything that matters is taken away—that’s when we need our faith the most.”

“That’s when the cruel God is laughing.”

“God isn’t cruel, Luca mio, and there aren’t two powers at work in the universe, good and evil. There’s only one great goodness always at work. It’s the task of an open heart to affirm that goodness; that’s what we can do for God. After all, if Volterra hadn’t been sacked and I wasn’t hurt by those soldiers, would I have met you?”

I was almost unhinged by the heartrending sweetness of her question and didn’t trust myself to answer. If I spoke of our meeting, I would declare my love for her, and she had made it clear that she didn’t want that. She was loyal to her husband. Perhaps he even deserved her loyalty. My silence didn’t matter because she turned the page in the bestiary and inquired about the condition of the moon, in dignity or in its fall. She would soon become a far superior astrologer to me. I had taken up the study of astrology because I thought the stars would tell me which day I would succeed in turning lead into gold. Maddalena used it as, perhaps, it was meant to be used—as a map for the soul.

Finally, after studying Latin and some Greek and astrology, I planned to turn to the great texts of alchemy: the
Corpus Hermeticum,
which Ficino called
Pimander;
Lactantius’s
Sermo Perfectus;
Raymond Lully’s
Ars Magna.
I brought them out one day before she arrived. When she came in with her maid, I said nothing. I stood on one side of my reconstruction of Zosimos’s keratokis and waited. Maddalena looked at me expectantly, and still I waited. Finally she said, “I see the manuscripts; what are they?”