I, Mona Lisa (51 page)

The loss of the spring crops devastated Tuscany. Farmers and peasants left the barren countryside and swarmed into the city seeking food. Men and women lined the streets, begging for scraps and alms. They slept on the steps of churches, in the doorways of the
botteghe;
Francesco went to his shop one morning to find a mother and two children propped against his door, all dead. As the nights grew colder, some froze to death, but most died from starvation and plague. Each morning brought so many new corpses, it was impossible to remove them all. Florence began to stink.

Despite Francesco’s wealth and connections, we felt the lack. Agrippina ran out of bread first, then flour, so we went without our
customary pasta in broth; the hunters brought us fowl, which we ate until we could no longer bear the sight of it.

By winter, even we rich had grown desperate.

Christmas passed, then the New Year. Carnival came—once a time of celebration, with parades and parties and feasting, but under Savonarola’s guidance, the new Signoria outlawed such pagan displays.

At last word came that the Signoria had elected to allow stores of government grain to be sold at a fair price to the people at the Piazza del Grano on the morning of Tuesday, the sixth of February, the last day of Carnival. Lent began on the morrow.

The cook, Agrippina, had lost a nephew to plague only a few days before. For fear of bringing
la moria
back to the house, she had not attended his funeral—but she opined, loudly, that she would find comfort if only she could go to the nearby Duomo to light a candle and pray for his soul.

Of course, it was her duty to go buy grain and bread for us. It made sense that she should go to the Duomo and offer her prayers, then go the short distance to the Piazza del Grano and make her purchases.

And I, restless as I was, presented to Francesco my argument for accompanying Agrippina to the Duomo. It was not far at all; there would be few crowds; I was anxious to pray. To my delight, he relented.

And so, on the appointed Tuesday, I climbed into the carriage with Agrippina and Zalumma, and Claudio drove us east, toward the orange-brick dome.

The sky was clear and fiercely blue. The air was still, and as long as I could sit motionless in a pane of sunlight, I felt its feeble warmth; but any shade brought bitter cold. I stared outside the carriage at the shops, the houses, the churches, the people moving slowly through the streets. Before Savonarola had seized the heart of Florence, Carnival had been a beautiful time; as a child, I had ridden through the streets and gaped at the façades of the buildings—formerly bland and gray, they had been transformed by red and white banners, by gold-shot tapestries, by garlands of bright paper flowers. Men and women had danced through the streets wearing painted masks adorned with gold
and diamonds; lions and camels from the Medici menageries had paraded past for the amusement of the citizens.

Now the streets were again quiet and dull, thanks to the prophet’s hatred.

Zalumma and the cook did not speak. Agrippina was a gray-haired woman of peasant birth, not given to conversation with those she considered her betters. She was squat, with a broad face, thick bones, and few teeth. One brown eye was clouded and blind, but with her good one, she gazed out of the window, like me hungry for new scenery.

We had agreed that it would be best to pray later and buy the food first, before supplies ran scarce. And so we rolled past the Duomo and headed south, toward the great toothy battlements of the Palazzo della Signoria’s tower. The Piazza del Grano, a modest-sized square, stood behind the palazzo, on its eastern side. Abutting the palazzo’s rear wall were large bins of wheat and corn, behind sturdy wooden fences; in front of those stood makeshift stalls, with scales for the transactions. In front of the stalls was a low gate, which remained locked until there was business to be done.

Claudio pulled the carriage up to the outer perimeter of the square; we could go no farther. I had expected a crowd, but I had not expected what I saw: The square was crammed with bodies, so many that not a speck of ground was visible. There were hundreds of bareheaded peasants with dirt-smudged faces and blackened hands, their shoulders wrapped in shreds of wool as they cried out for mercy, for alms, for a handful of grain. Beside them recoiled noblewomen in furs and velvets, who had not trusted their slaves to bring home food, and grim-faced servants, elbowing past the equally determined poor.

I leaned my head out the carriage; from my high perspective, I could see several men inside the stalls, heads pressed together, conferring in front of the still-locked gate. They had sensed the growing unease, as had our horses, who began to pace nervously. None of us had expected such a crowd so early.

Claudio swung down from the driver’s seat and put his hands upon the carriage door, but did not open it. He was scowling.

“Perhaps I should go,” he said. “Agrippina is small; she’ll never be able to fight her way to the gate.”

She snorted and looked down her nose at him with her good eye. “I’ve seen this family fed for forty years. No crowd can stop me.”

Claudio kept his gaze on me. “Both of you go,” I said. “That way, your chances are better. Zalumma and I will wait in the carriage.”

Claudio gave a curt nod and opened the door for Agrippina, who clambered out with some difficulty; only half his height, she turned and walked toward the crowd beside him and he rested a hand on the hilt of his long knife.

I watched them disappear into the throng—until a face appeared abruptly in the carriage window, startling me.

The woman in the window was young, no older than I; her uncovered hair was matted, her blue eyes bulging, wild. Her sunken cheeks were streaked with soot. A silent infant was slung in a scarf at her breast.

“Pity, Madonna,” she said, in a thick rustic accent. “Have pity, for the sake of Christ! A coin, a bit of food for my baby . . . !”

Zalumma’s face was hard; her hand went to her bodice. “Go away! Get away from our carriage!”

The beggar’s red-rimmed eyes and nose streamed from the cold. “Madonna, God has sent you here to me! For the sake of Christ . . .”

Had it not been for the baby, I might have been more wary. As it was, I fumbled for the purse at my waist; I pulled out a soldi. I meant to put it in her filthy, ungloved hand, but the thought of Matteo and the plague made me instead toss it in her direction.

She tried to catch it with numbed, clumsy fingers; it fell just outside the window, and she dove to find it. She was not alone. Another nearby peasant had seen, and fell on her; she started shrieking, and soon others were attracted to the row.

“Get away!” Zalumma shouted. “Leave us be!”

Still others came, men and young boys. One began to beat the young beggar woman until she squalled, then fell abruptly, ominously silent.

“She had one coin—there are more!” someone said. Our horses shrieked and lunged forward; the carriage jerked and began to rock.

“Death to the wealthy!” a man shouted. “They take our food and leave us nothing!”

Dirty faces filled the window; arms reached through, strange hands plucked at us. Someone pulled open the door.

Beside me, Zalumma reached into her bodice and withdrew a slender, two-edged knife. She slashed out at the flailing arms; a man yelped and cursed.

And then, from the direction of the crowd came thunderous shouts, the lightning crack of wood splitting, and a rumble that sounded like the earth heaving. The beggars assaulting our carriage turned like flowers to sunlight; in an instant they, too, were running toward the sound, leaving us quickly abandoned.

I clung to the frame of the open carriage door and stared out.

The crowd had broken through the locked gate and rushed past the stalls; as I watched, they swarmed the fence that guarded the bins of grain and tore it down. Two men—one still a lad—scrambled up the sides of the bins and scattered handfuls of grain onto the desperate crowd below.

A tide of starving indiscriminate flesh surged forward; countless hands clawed at the sky, grasped at the succoring rain. Screams rose in the midst of the madness, as the swift and strong trampled the slow and infirm.

And as the laughing men on the pinnacle pelted the sea of pinched faces below, I heard a low, rhythmic chant, soft at first, then growing louder and louder, spreading swift as fire through the frenzied crowd:

“Palle, palle, palle . . . !”

I seized Zalumma’s arm and gripped it hard; I sobbed aloud, but shed no tears.

That day, dozens were killed—trampled or suffocated—in the rush for food. Every soldier, every gendarme, was called out to quell the riot
and send people back to their homes—if they had them. Agrippina’s chest and legs were crushed; Claudio came limping back to the carriage with her in his arms. Amazingly, he had managed to collect some of the pilfered grain in a pouch. I half expected Francesco to demand that he return it—it was, after all, stolen—but my husband said nothing.

News of the crowd’s call for the Medici was everywhere, even on our servants’ lips, and when Francesco returned from his shop that afternoon, he was stone-faced and uncharacteristically silent. Upon learning of Agrippina’s injuries, he went straightaway to her bed, murmured a few sympathetic words, then sent for his own physician.

But I had never seen him in such foul temper. When Elena dared ask timidly whether he had heard about the cry of
“Palle!”
he turned to her and said, quite nastily: “Utter that word again in this house, and you will find yourself on the street!”

That evening, my father failed to come for supper and Francesco chose to forgo it, instead leaving—he claimed—to meet with the Signoria.

Zalumma and I spoke little. But when we had retired for the night in the bedchamber—when she lay on her cot, and I on my bed—I said softly, in the darkness:

“You had a knife. I would like one, too.”

“I will give you mine,” she said.

And in the morning, she made good on her promise.

The following day was Ash Wednesday. At noon, Francesco, my father, and I went to San Lorenzo to hear Fra Girolamo deliver a sermon open to all.

I looked up at the prophet in the pulpit, at his gaunt, homely face with its hawkish nose, and wondered whether he understood that his inspiration did not spring from a heavenly source.

He said nothing about Pope Alexander, but he spoke of “those vile prelates who mewl about God yet adorn themselves with jewels and furs.” And he vehemently denounced women who paraded about in
“immodest” gowns made of fabrics so fine that the sale of even one would feed many of the starving beggars who were, at that very instant, dying of hunger in Florence’s streets.

I shot a sidewise glance at my husband. Francesco seemed to be listening intently, his brow furrowed in sympathy, his eyes soft with calculated innocence.

At sunset, Zalumma dressed me in a drab gray gown with a plain headdress. I eschewed all jewelry; I had not worn any in months for fear of the
fanciulli
. These were the members of Savonarola’s “army”: boys ten years of age, perhaps younger, who dressed in white robes and patrolled the streets of Florence looking for women who flouted the laws prohibiting immodest dress. Any bodice that hinted at the presence of breasts, any glint of gold or gems, was a crime. Necklaces, earrings, brooches, all were confiscated as “offerings” for the poor. In the preceding months, the unforgiving cherubs had gone from house to house throughout the city, seizing paintings, statuary, curios—anything that might serve, on this Ash Wednesday, as a lesson to those who indulged in ostentatious displays of wealth.

But they never came to our palazzo.

Once I was dressed and ready, I waited until Francesco called for me. As I came down the stairs, he studied my dull attire, my unremarkable coiled braids, my modest black veil, and said merely: “Good.”

Then he handed me a painting the breadth of my arm from elbow to fingers. “I would like you to offer this tonight.”

I glanced at it. I had seen it before, on the wall in the corridor near the nursery. Rendered on a wooden panel was a portrait of Francesco’s first wife, Nannina, costumed in the guise of Athena. Her bust was shown in profile; on her head, she wore a small silver helmet from which spilled long, carefully crimped black locks. The artist’s style was crude, lacking any depth. Her skin was unnaturally white, her eyes lifeless, her posture stiff when it was intended to be dignified.

We had many paintings in the house with pagan themes—one in
Francesco’s study portrayed a nude Venus—yet he had chosen this innocuous one, perhaps to suggest to the public that this was the most sinful item we could find.

And he had taken it out of its wrought silver frame.

I took it without comment, and we rode in silence—Francesco was still in ill sorts—to the Piazza della Signoria.

It was a starless, moonless night, thanks to the clouded sky, but I could see the glow as we approached the crowded piazza. As our carriage rolled in front of the Signoria’s palace, I saw torches everywhere: torches next to the high platform where the prophet and his army of white-robed
fanciulli
sat; torches flanking either side of the entry to the Palazzo della Signoria; torches in the hands of the onlookers; torches flanking, on all four sides, the great Bonfire of the Vanities. Every window in the palazzo, every upper-floor window of the surrounding buildings, glowed with candlelight as people gazed down to watch the spectacle in the square.

Francesco and I climbed from the carriage and joined the crowd standing before the pyre. My husband was an important man in the government; those who recognized him made way so that we could join the innermost circle.

The bonfire was a massive wooden structure—almost the height and breadth and depth of a two-story
bottega
, or a humble merchant’s house—consisting of eight tiers hammered together like a great makeshift open staircase, so that the children could easily make their way from the bottom level to the top. At its apex stood a straw-stuffed effigy of fat King Carnival, with a painted canvas head. His face was not that of the benevolent monarch I had seen in Carnivals past, but rather that of a gruesome demon, with fangs protruding from his mouth and blood-red eyes.