Immortal (46 page)

“He’s not an idiot, though he’s even uglier than I am. He claims that God speaks through him, and his sermons have become so popular that San Marco can’t hold his congregants. He’s moved to Santa Maria del Fiore. The friar criticizes us Medici continually. He wants Florence to frame a new constitution, based on the Venetian constitution, without the office of the Doge!”

I shrugged. “I’m not worried. We Florentines are who we are: pleasure-and-money-and food-loving folk who produce great artists, thinkers, and bankers. No monk, no matter how fiery, can reform the basic nature of Florence and her people.”

“Not in the long run,” Lorenzo whispered. “But he’s fired the imagination of the people, so he’ll wreak havoc for a few years, watch and see. I know how people are. I know what people want. He’ll seize on the Frankish advance to remake Florence in his own mold. He’ll cast out the Medici. His sermons will reach into the Church to shake it; he’s already called the Church a prostitute; he’ll bring the wrath of Roma onto Florence. He wants reform, in the Church and in our city. Between him and the Frankish, Florence will lose her power. She’ll never again be the fifth element, the greatest city on earth. If I were to live, I would exile this monk, or, better yet, have him murdered in his sleep. Watch him and beware, Luca. You possess a singular gift, and when a Silvano calls his attention to it, Savonarola will suspect you of demonism. Fear him, Luca. If I were you, I would fear for you and yours.”

“I already know about fearing people who call me a witch,” I said dryly.

Lorenzo lifted his head up. “It’s not demonism, though, Luca. I know that. You asked me before how I know about your family and I told you about a document that Ficino translated. It’s called the
Last Apocalypse of Seth,
and it’s a forbidden gospel, a Cathar holy book. It speaks of a secret race of men fathered by Adam’s son Seth. These people have lives of fantastic longevity, but not because they’re evil. It’s because they hid themselves and kept their blood pure.”

“Pure blood won’t endear anyone to the Church,” I said.

“No, it won’t.” Lorenzo shook his head. “The story is that these pure-blooded people have been persecuted and killed throughout history, especially by the Pope’s armies. They’re living proof of a history the Church doesn’t want revealed. But, Luca, the real threat to the Church is greater than you, and this is my gift to you.” He paused and I watched him carefully, wondering what he was going to reveal. He smiled. “You’re not the only one of these people left. There was a recent note written on the manuscript that Ficino translated. It says a large group of them have a community hidden in distant mountains. They’re waiting until their numbers grow strong, then they’ll reveal themselves. Your family will come for you, Luca. Avoid trouble if you can, and you’ll be reunited with your own kind.”

Chapter
23

LORENZO DIED A WEEK LATER.
I did not attend the funeral, though I did send a letter expressing my condolences and asking for a copy of Ficino’s translation of the
Last Apocalypse of Seth.
I received a curt response that Lorenzo had left explicit instructions that the only thing to be given to me upon his death was an old saddle, which was duly delivered to my home. It was, of course, the same saddle he had given me decades earlier, which I had returned to him after the sack of Volterra. I was left with the uneasy knowledge that Lorenzo had known more about my origins than I did, which did not bode well for me, and that he was still playing games with me from whatever purgatory had received him.

And Lorenzo’s words to me from his deathbed ripened into fact. After Lorenzo’s death, Savonarola’s sermons grew more intense and apocalyptic. The friar was determined to stamp out the immorality and corruption in Florence that he claimed was encouraged by the Medici. He prophesied doom and the scourge of war. In 1492, Savonarola predicted that Lorenzo and Pope Innocent VIII would die, and when they did, he was emboldened. He thundered from the pulpit of the Duomo: Florence would be cleansed at the hands of the Frankish army. As he predicted, and as Lorenzo had told me would happen, in 1494, King Charles led a vast Frankish army into the peninsula. The army crossed the Alps bearing white silk banners that read
Voluntas Dei.
Lodovico Sforza, the ruler of Milano, saw a means to realize his own ambitions and welcomed them, despite Milano’s alliance with Florence.

The army marched south and Piero de’ Medici, Lorenzo’s son, tried to make peace with Charles by handing him Pisa and some other fortresses on the Tyrrhenian coast. Florence, which prided itself on its dominion over Pisa, was outraged by this craven behavior. Lorenzo de’ Medici would never have permitted such a thing. The Signoria closed the doors on Piero and expelled the Medici. Mobs broke into the fabulously appointed Medici palazzo on Via Larga and looted it. Savonarola used his influence with the masses to form a new republic. He outlawed gambling, horse racing, obscene songs, profanity, excessive finery, and vice of any kind. He instituted severe penalties: tongue-piercing for blasphemers, castration for sodomites. The monk then welcomed the Frankish army as liberators. On Florence’s behalf, he pleaded with King Charles to stay outside of the city’s strong stone walls. But on November 17, 1494, Savonarola’s persuasion proved unconvincing; King Charles marched twelve thousand troops into Florence.

Maddalena and I stood together on the balcony of our palazzo, watching. Stamping hooves and footsteps reverberated through the city as a vast army entered into its narrow winding stone streets. King Charles rode at the head.

“Look at him in his steel armor, a tiny little man astride a war horse so big it makes him look like a girlchild’s doll,” I commented. I put my arm around Maddalena and discovered that she was shivering. “Carissima mia, are you cold?” I pulled my mantello off and wrapped it around her, tucking it up around her pretty chin to protect her from the wind and chill.

“Not cold,” she whispered. “I don’t like the sight of an army marching into a city.”

“Maddalena, it’s not like Volterra,” I said, pulling her close to my chest.

“You must think me silly to be afraid.” She laughed, but her voice trembled.

“Never,” I said, kissing the top of her head. Her vulnerability made me love her more. Maddalena turned in my embrace and looked into my eyes with candor, letting me see directly into the heart of the scared little girl who still lived inside her. That little girl was so achingly real and vibrant that it brought my youthful self to the fore, also. Luca as an abandoned, betrayed, brutalized child was present with her young, hurt, terrified Maddalena. My pain and her pain, and my joy and her joy, my love and her love, my fear and her fear, all existed together like wave peaks on the same bittersweet river, and there were no barriers between us. We didn’t speak for a long time. An army tramped into the city and shouts rang out everywhere, but we were streaming into a deep communion of selves. Then Simonetta ran out with her reddish-blond plaits flying around her head. She wriggled herself in between us until Maddalena and I laughed and linked arms around her.

“What pretty costumes they wear, Papa,” Simonetta observed. She was seven and had an endless supply of questions, and now she scrunched her nose and tilted her head. “Do soldiers stay so pretty when they fight?”

“No, darling, in a real fight, their costumes won’t stay fancy,” I answered.

Maddalena winced. She whispered over our daughter’s head, “I know what soldiers do to children!”

“I would fight an army for you two,” I responded with vigor.

“You would win!” Simonetta said. She gave me an adoring look that made me melt all over again. Something about the way a daughter loves her father made me determined to protect my wife and child at whatever cost to myself. My life meant nothing except as it served their lives.

Simonetta asked, “Will you have to fight, Papa?”

“I don’t think so,” I said, tugging her braid. “The army won’t stay long. Florence let in the Frankish army, but Florentines won’t consent to be treated like a captured city. Charles will threaten and the Florentine delegates will call his bluff; Charles won’t want to fight in this city. The streets are so narrow that his army can’t get a purchase to unfold itself in strength. Florentines who know the city have the advantage. Charles risks having his army stopped on the banks of the Arno. He won’t let that happen. He’ll take money and be on his way.”

“I hope you’re right,” Maddalena said in an anxious tone. It was an uneasy time for all of Florence, with Savonarola assuming power and then the Frankish army occupying the city. Even after the Frankish marched back out ten days later, Florence was unsettled. Her taverns and brothels were closed, her young men sang hymns instead of ribald ditties, and unruly gangs of children who called themselves “Weepers” roamed the city, enforcing Savonarola’s harsh laws. Trade suffered, crops failed—and Florence, the city of bankers and merchants, went broke.

Somehow the tensions of those days did not affect Maddalena and me. We lived simply and quietly to avoid attracting attention. We were encapsulated in our love for each other and in our pride in our beloved daughter, which shielded us. Maddalena submitted easily to Savonarola’s strict dress codes though she did not attend his sermons. Privately we both thought his severity was unbalanced, and we stayed away from him and his entourage. Then, one day in February 1497, Maddalena came home and asked Simonetta and me to attend one of Savonarola’s carnevales of sobriety and abnegation.

When she arrived, Simonetta and I were engaged in the study of Latin. I declined to hire a tutor, preferring to spend the time myself with my daughter. I was a worthy teacher. I had taught this intelligent child’s mother. I had been professore to no less a personage than Leonardo, about whose work in Milano we heard great things. He’d sent me a letter and a sketch describing a fresco, the
Last Supper,
on the wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie. I planned to go to Milano to see it. Sandro Botticelli had seen it, and he’d wept as he described it, an overwhelming and masterful expression of a single dramatic moment, the moment after Christ has said “One of you shall betray me.” Each of the different disciples was completely revealed in his expression, from Andrew’s astonishment in his open mouth, to Peter’s pugnacious, knife-gripping eagerness to declare his innocence, to the swarthy, staring Judas leaning away from Christ in guilt and isolation. Leonardo himself had written me, “The painter has two objectives, man and the intention of his soul. The first is easy, the latter hard, because he has to represent it by the movement of the limbs.”

But Leonardo had depicted every soul perfectly in his fresco, including a Christ whose serenity and beauty were deeply moving. Leonardo had added to his virtuoso portrayals a sublime composition of hidden triangles and a ravishing tension among the ordinary, yet transfigured, items of this last meal and first Holy Communion: the wineglasses, forks, bread loaves, and pewter dishes. The bread of life foreshadowed death. But immanent in the
Last Supper
was the sanctity of Communion, an ongoing blessing for believers. And thus is death implicit in life, and the most common moment holds both redemption and tragedy.

One of those common moments found Simonetta and me upstairs, in the workshop that had been converted to a playroom for Simonetta’s use. We were working on a translation of Cicero. It was heavy going for a ten-year-old girl, but bright Simonetta was managing. There was a bustle at the door and we ran downstairs to see who it was.

“Mama! I’m so happy to see you!” Simonetta laughed, leaping to embrace her mother.

“Simonetta mia.” Maddalena hugged the little girl. “How are your lessons?”

“The hour we spent over Latin was torturous for the ragazza,” I said. I leaned over the young blond head to kiss Maddalena, to inhale her lilac and lemon scent and run my hand over her soft cheek. I never missed an opportunity to touch my wife, which comforted me later.

She said gaily, “Luca, Fra Savonarola is holding another carnevale.”

“Carnevale, is that what he’s calling these dreary events? Carnevale is when a beautiful woman in a costume kisses a man on a bridge and makes him feel like the only man alive!”

Maddalena laughed. “This one is worth seeing; the whole city is outside today, listening to his sermon and taking part in the procession. Why don’t we all go?”

I had avoided the monk ever since shrewd Lorenzo had warned me about him, but I had long ago promised myself to say yes to Maddalena. So I agreed, put on my dullest, soberest lucco and mantello, and the three of us went out.

Fury scorched the streets of Florence, the fury of purity, of perfection, of unthinking obedience to a madman, the self-appointed voice of God. I should have known that this kind of insistence on purity must inevitably lead to tragedy, death, and grief. Masses of people dressed in drab clothing surged toward the Piazza della Signoria. A gang of the young thugs who were Savonarola’s enforcers ran up to us just as we turned onto the Via Larga.

“Give us a vanity!” a black-haired boy of about twelve demanded. “Some material possession which keeps your heart from righteousness!” A dozen children, all dressed in white, clamored and pressed in on us, causing Simonetta, who was ten, to eye them with curiosity. The boy threatened, “We won’t leave until you surrender a vanity, we are collecting them for holy Savonarola himself!”

“Here.” Maddalena laughed. She shrugged off her mantello and detached and then pulled off her sleeves, which were emerald green and made of the finest silk. She had put them on thinking her mantello would hide them. The children cheered and grabbed at the sleeves. I smiled at Maddalena’s fine slim white arms, which elicited within me warm licentious thoughts of which the pious Savonarola would never approve.

“You’ll have your reward in heaven!” the boy cried, and the children ran off.

“You are too generous, Maddalena,” I said dryly, helping her put back on her gray mantello.

“Mama is always wonderful, but I don’t think she had a choice just now,” Simonetta said in her piquant way. “Those children were very determined! Do you think if they were reading Cicero they would have better manners?” Of course her words made us laugh and hug her, and the three of us clung together as we moved on toward the piazza.

Even the outskirts of the piazza were tightly packed with people. The murmuring throngs had a sinister air of purpose which made my chest tighten with anxiety. I knew from experience that large groups of people too easily whiplash into cruelty. I remembered the crowds who would have burned me for being a sorcerer and the mob that stoned Moshe Sforno and little Rebecca during the first outbreak of the plague. I thought of the army that plundered Volterra. Something in man’s nature allowed wanton destruction to flourish unchecked when enough people were present. I thought of turning around to go home, but the swarm of people was too thick and importunate. Maddalena, Simonetta, and I were pressed forward by crowds behind us. I held Simonetta’s hand tightly on one side, and Maddalena clung to her other hand.

In the center of the piazza, we beheld a horrifying sight: a vast pyramid of jumbled objects reaching ten stories into the sky. As we were slowly pushed forward to the edge of the pyramid, the objects resolved into their specific forms as the beautiful products which made Florence so rich and full and hungry: books, wigs, paintings, carnevale masks from Lorenzo’s time, mirrors, powder puffs, cards and dice, pots of rouge, vials of perfume, velvet caps, chessboards, lyres, and countless other items. Some were silly trinkets, others were precious. In the heap I saw paintings by Botticelli, some by Filippino Lippi, another by Ghirlandaio, and one that was definitely an early work of Leonardo’s, which made my heart clutch inward in my chest. I saw rich cottardite and fur-lined mantelli, painted chests, gold bracelets, silver chalices, and even jeweled crucifixes. The masses were throwing more items into the pile, dispensing with the precious, artful vanities the desire for which had made Florence the shining queen of the cities on the Italian peninsula. If Lorenzo de’ Medici had lived, he would have rallied the Florentine army against Savonarola and this mob to prevent such a desecration of Florence and all things Florentine. I wondered to what extent I had a hand in this obscenity because I hadn’t given Lorenzo the consolamentum, which might have extended his life.

“Down, down with all gold and decorations, down where the body is food for the worms!” cried a voice, and I realized it was Savonarola himself. I had never seen him, had never been interested in attending his sermons, had wanted nothing to do with him, and neither had Maddalena, but now I angled myself to get a view of his face. After all, this friar was turning Florence inside out. His speech created an uproar that almost drowned out his next words: “Repent, O Florence! Clothe thyself in the white garments of purification! Wait no longer, for there may be no further time for repentance! The Lord drives me forward to tell you, Repent!”