Authors: Javier Sierra
“Rumors are rife,” he said ironically.
“And reach further than your wooden birds.”
“All right, Father Prior. I won’t deny it. But before you become annoyed with me, you must know that I only used the girl to give certain touches to the Beloved Disciple.”
Brother Giorgio recognized Leonardo’s acid humor.
“So it’s true.”
“John was a sweet creature, Father Prior. You know he was the youngest of the disciples and Jesus loved him like a brother. Or even more, like a son. And you know I haven’t been able to find among your friars one who would evoke to me the innocence with which he is described in the Gospels. What does it matter if I used an innocent young girl to complete his portrait? What evil can you see in it, since this is the result?”
“And who is the girl, if I may know?”
“Of course, you may know.” Leonardo bowed toward his patron. “But I doubt that you’ve met her. Her name is Elena Crivelli, and she’s from a noble Lombard family. She visited my bottega accompanied by Master Luini not many days ago. As soon as I saw her, I knew God had sent her to me to finish my Cenacolo.”
The Father Prior gave him a sideways glance.
“If you could only see her!” Leonardo continued. “Her beauty is enchanting, pure, perfect for John’s face. She gave me that air of beatitude that is now apparent in John’s features.”
“But there were no women at the Last Supper, Master Leonardo.”
“And who can be certain of that, Father Prior? Anyway, I only took her hands, her look, the twist of the lips and her cheeks. Only her most innocent attributes.”
“Reverend Father—”
Brother Giorgio had been waiting impatiently for a break in the conversation, and his interruption did not allow the Father Prior to answer. After a quick genuflexion, the monk whispered the bad news about Brother Benedetto’s health.
“You must come with me,” he told the Father Prior. “The doctors say that he’s not got long to live.”
“What is the matter with him?”
“He can barely breathe and his skin grows paler by the minute, Father Prior.”
Leonardo, observing the old brother’s bandaged hands, deduced that this must be one of the monks who had been assaulted outside the city walls.
“If you care for my opinion,” he said, “I believe that what ails your brother is tuberculosis. If you wish, I can put my medical knowledge at your disposal to alleviate his suffering. I know enough about the human body to suggest an efficacious treatment.”
“You?” the Father Prior interjected. “I thought you hated him—”
“Come, Father Prior. How could I wish ill to someone in whose debt I am? Remember that Brother Benedetto sat for my Saint Thomas. Could I hate Elena, who helped me to paint John? Or the librarian whose face inspired my Judas? No. I owe your brother one of the most important faces in my Cenacolo.”
The Father Prior thanked him with a bow, not detecting the irony in Leonardo’s words. Certainly Saint Thomas had all the characteristics of a rejuvenated Brother Benedetto, and Leonardo had taken the trouble to paint him in profile, so as to hide his missing eye. But it was also true that for a long time now, Leonardo and Brother Benedetto had not been on friendly terms.
With the Father Prior’s blessing, Leonardo quickly gathered his brushes, closed his various jars of paint and headed toward the hospital. On the way, they were joined by Father Zessati, who was carrying in a small bundle a flask with holy water, a jar with consecrated oil and a silver sprinkler.
They found Brother Benedetto lying alone on a cot on the second floor, in one of the few independent buildings. A large linen cloth hung from the ceiling. At the threshold, Leonardo bade the two monks to wait for a moment in the garden. He explained that the first stage of his treatment required a certain privacy, and that there were few men like himself, impervious to the fatal effluvia of the disease.
When Leonardo found himself alone by the bedside, he drew aside the linen curtain and observed his wrathful patient. Why had he not yet invented a machine to free him of his enemies? he wondered. Gathering his courage, Leonardo gently shook the one-eyed man to wake him.
“You!”
The surprise made the old man sit up in his cot.
“What the Devil are you doing here?”
Leonardo observed the dying man with professional curiosity. His aspect was worse than he had expected. The bluish hue spreading over his cheeks was an ominous sign.
“I was told that you were attacked in Santo Stefano, Brother. I’m truly sorry.”
“Don’t speak like a Pharisee, Master Leonardo!” He coughed, spitting out more bloody phlegm. “You know as well as I do what really happened.”
“If that is what you believe—”
“It was your brethren from Concorezzo, wasn’t it? Those bastards deny God and reject the divine nature of the Son of Man…Out of here! Let me die in peace!”
“I decided to come and speak to you as soon as I learned about your illness. You’re making a rash judgment, as you always do. Those people you refer to do not deny God. They are pure Christians, who venerate the Savior just as the first Apostles did.”
“Enough! I won’t listen to you! Don’t say anything more! Leave!”
The one-eyed monk became livid with rage.
“If you think about it for a minute, Brother, by pardoning your life these ‘bastards’ have shown infinite mercy toward you. Especially since they know that you’ve killed several of their brothers in cold blood.”
The friar’s anger turned suddenly to astonishment.
“How dare you say that!”
“Because I know what you’ve become. And I also know that you’ve done everything possible to banish me from here, so that the faith of all these people would be left in the dark. First you killed Father Alessandro. Then you pierced the heart of Brother Giulio. You clouded the spirit of your brothers who were on the path to purity—”
“To heresy, rather,” the old man answered, his single eye wide open now.
“And you sent apocalyptical messages to Rome, anonymous letters signed Augur dixit, merely to instigate a secret investigation against me, leaving you in the shadows. Am I not right?”
“Damn you, Leonardo!” The monk’s chest heaved with a new fit of coughing. “Damn you forever!”
Leonardo, impassive, undid from his belt the white linen pouch that never left his side and deposited it on the cot. It seemed larger than usual. Leonardo pulled it apart ceremoniously and extracted from it a small book with blue covers which he placed by the old man’s pillow.
“Do you recognize it?” he asked with a knowing smile. “Even if you curse me now, I’m here to forgive you. And to offer you salvation. We are all God’s children and deserve to be saved.”
The monk’s eye glittered as he saw the volume so near his grasp.
“This is what you were looking for, isn’t it?”
“Inter…rogatio…Johan…nis…” Brother Benedetto deciphered the title on the spine. “John’s final testament! The book with the answers that the Lord gave to his Beloved Disciple at the Secret Supper, in the Kingdom of Heaven!”
“Exactly. The Secret Supper. The book I’ve decided to open to the eyes of the world.”
Benedetto stretched out a thin hand to touch the cover.
“You will annihilate Christendom if you do,” he said, trying to catch his breath. “This book is cursed. No one in this world deserves to read it…And in the other, at the feet of the Eternal Father, no one has need of it. Burn it!”
“And yet there was a time when you wanted to make it yours.”
“There was a time, yes,” he rasped. “But I realized that I was falling into the sin of pride. That is why I abandoned your project. That is why I ceased to work for you. You filled my head with mad ideas, as you did with Father Alessandro and Brother Giberto. But I caught on to your stratagems in time—” He gasped for breath. “And I managed to free myself from you.”
The one-eyed monk pressed a hand against his breast before continuing in a broken voice.
“I know what you’re after, Leonardo. You came to Catholic Milan full of extravagant notions. Your friends Botticelli, Raphael, Ficino filled your head with vainglorious ideas about God. And now you want to give the world the formula for speaking directly to Him, without intermediaries and without the Church.”
“As John did.”
“If the people believed in this book, if they knew that John spoke to the Lord in the Kingdom of Heaven, and that he returned to Earth to write of it, why then would anyone need the ministers of Peter?”
“I see that you’ve understood.”
“And I also understand that Ludovico has supported you all this time because—” He coughed. “Because by weakening Rome he himself will become stronger. You wish to change the faith of all good Christians with your work. You are a demon, a son of Lucifer.”
Leonardo smiled. The dying monk could barely begin to imagine his meticulous plan. For many months, he had been inviting artists from France and Italy to come see the Cenacolo in order to copy it. Marveled by his technique and by the novel disposition of his figures, masters such as Andrea Solario, Giampietrino, Bonsignori, Buganza and many others had duplicated his design and were beginning to spread it throughout Europe. Also, his debatable painting technique a secco, never intended to be long-lasting, lent urgency to the copying project. The marvel that was the Cenacolo was destined to disappear by express wish of the Master, and only a continuous, meticulous and carefully planned effort to reproduce it and make it known would save it. And in this way, he would disseminate the secret further and wider than any other work of art in the whole of history.
Leonardo made no reply. What need was there?
His hands still reeked of varnish and solvent, the same that he had used on the brushes with which he had finished the face of John, the man who had written the Gospel that now lay by the dying man’s side. The same book that the Visconti Sforza, Dukes of Milan, had caused to be pictured enclosed in the hand of the Priestess on the card, the same one that appears on the lap of the Virgin above the door of Santa Maria dei Fiore in Florence. The same heretic book that Leonardo now intended to reveal to the world.
Without a word, Leonardo took the book and opened it to the first page. He asked Benedetto to recall the scene of the Supper in the refectory, in order to begin to understand his plan. Then, very solemnly, he placed the volume before his eyes and read:
I, John, who am your brother and share in the affliction so as to be allowed into the Kingdom of Heaven, as I rested on the bosom of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I said unto him: “Lord, who shall betray Thee?” And He answered thus: “He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish, the same shall betray me. For Satan hath entered him, and he seeketh the manner to betray me.”
Benedetto shuddered.
“That is what you have painted in the Cenacolo—dear God!”
Leonardo nodded his assent.
“Cursed serpent!” Benedetto coughed furiously.
“Do not deceive yourself, Brother. My work is much more than a scene taken from this Gospel. John asked the Lord nine questions. Two were about Satan, three about the creation of body and spirit, three on John’s baptism and the last one on the signs that will precede the Second Coming of Christ. Questions about light and shadow, good and evil, the two opposing forces that hold sway over the world—”
“And all that conceals a secret charm. I know.”
“You know?”
Leonardo’s face registered his surprise. This old man, fighting against death, still had his wits about him.
“Yes—” he gasped. “Mut, Nem, A, Los, Noc…And also in Rome they know. I told them. Soon, very soon, Leonardo, they will fall upon you and destroy all that you have so patiently constructed. On that day, Master Leonardo, I will die a satisfied man.”
45
Milan, the twenty-second day of February, of the year 1497.
“Mut, Nem, A, Los, Noc…”
I heard that strange phrase for the first time on the feast day of Holy See. Almost two weeks had gone by since Brother Benedetto’s soul had been called to God’s Judgment in the hospital of Santa Maria, while he was in the midst of a violent coughing fit. God had punished his pride. The Soothsayer had not lived to witness the wrath of Rome falling on Master Leonardo and shattering his project. His decline was swift. The doctors who attended him night and day gave up the fight when they saw that he had lost his voice and that pustules began to cover his body.
Brother Benedetto died on the afternoon of Ash Wednesday, feverish and muttering my name obsessively in a desperate attempt to bring me before him to fire me against Leonardo. Unfortunately for him, it was many days before I was released from my captivity among the “pure.”
Now I believe that Mario Forzetta waited for that precise moment to return me to Milan. Never, during the weeks I stayed in Concorezzo, did Mario speak to me of Brother Benedetto’s illness, nor did he predispose me against him, or insist that I inform the Holy Office of Benedetto’s breaking of the fifth commandment; much less induce me to hate him. Mario’s attitude astonished me. His training in the secrets of occult writings had helped us unmask the old man and his complex signature, but his strange moral standing prevented him from seeking revenge for the murder of his companions. Mario’s was indeed an odd faith.
I came to believe that the men of Concorezzo would hold me there forever. I realized that their extreme respect for life did not permit them to kill me, but I was equally aware that everyone in the town knew full well that, if they set me free, their own lives would be in danger.
I toyed with the question for many days, during which I lived among them and learned their customs. I was surprised to discover that they never entered a church to pray. They preferred to do so in a cave or in the open air. I also confirmed many of the things I already knew, such as their rejection of the Cross and the repudiation of holy relics, since they considered them memories of the impure, and therefore satanic bodies, which, one day, had been home to the soul of great saints. I noticed many things that made me marvel. For example, their rejoicing in death. Every passing day was celebrated because it brought them closer to the moment in which they would shed their mortal coil and ascend to the luminous spirit of God. They, who called themselves “True Christians,” looked at me full of pity, and made great efforts to have me join their rituals.