Immortal (47 page)

I finally caught a glimpse of his face. Instantly I recognized him. He was the thin, fiery-eyed monk who had watched Maddalena and me make love on the Ponte alle Grazie years ago, who had torn her dress and denounced us. All of my old instincts for danger screamed: I still remembered the way that he’d looked at her. I remembered his threats to us. I should have killed him when I could. The flesh on the backs of my arms and neck prickled and my stomach roiled. “Maddalena, we have to leave!” I said urgently. “Right now!”

She couldn’t hear me. A ruckus was erupting to our left, as someone with a Venetian accent screamed out offers of twenty thousand
scudi
for all the artwork in the pile. An intelligent man among beasts, I thought, but an ugly roar of disapproval spewed forth from the crazed crowd. The Venetian’s voice was abruptly silenced. I hollered again for Maddalena, to no avail. Trumpets blew, bells rang, and drowned out my words. I leaned over, but Simonetta dropped my hand. She pointed at something and ran, pulling Maddalena along behind her. I tried to follow but got caught behind a raging group of people who had laid hands on the Venetian, stolen his coat, and were mocking up a broomstick and straw effigy of him. I kicked and punched, but I couldn’t get clear of the group for several minutes, until the effigy of the Venetian had been thrown onto the pile. By that time, there was no sign of Simonetta and Maddalena.

I looked around in a panic and shouted their names, but guards were pouring into the piazza to surround the bonfire, and I couldn’t even hear myself over the din of the crowd and the ringing of all the bells in the city. All one hundred thousand people living in Florence at the time seemed to be in the piazza and the streets surrounding it. I kept pushing through people, frantically searching faces. I called out for my wife and daughter until my throat was hoarse. The guards set fire to the pyramid of vanities with the hapless Signoria watching from their balcony. I climbed walls and gates and peered into the crowd from above, to no avail. After a few hours I headed home, knowing that Maddalena and Simonetta would return there, if they hadn’t already.

I wended my way against the flood tide of people heading toward Savonarola’s bonfire, which blazed orange and red, a funeral pyre for Florence, illuminating the heavens. When I finally reached my palazzo, Sandro Filipepi waited in front of my door. I knew something was wrong the moment I laid eyes on him. Sandro, that good-humored man, was weeping.

“Don’t go in,” Sandro said brokenly, embracing me. His face was wet against my cheek.

“What happened?” I cried. “Where are Maddalena and Simonetta?”

“Prepare yourself, Luca,” Sandro sobbed, gripping me by both arms. “I thought Savonarola would cure the Church of her excesses, that he offered some kind of resolution for us, but now this!”

I ran in through my open door into my foyer, where there stood a small circle of silent people, my servants, Maddalena’s fat maid, two of Maddalena’s friends, and a few strangers. They were all weeping. I wailed with dread and knowing. They cleared a path for me. Spread out on the floor lay Maddalena and Simonetta. They were waterlogged, their dark dresses fanning out around their pale incandescent bodies like inky spills from a black river. A glance told me they were dead, but still I checked them for a pulse. I knelt first beside Simonetta, because Maddalena would have wanted that. Our daughter’s blondish-orange hair, the same color as mine, was soaked, as was the plain brown cottardita mandated by Savonarola. Her mantello was missing and I moved a thick lock of hair from her face before my trembling fingers could alight on her neck. Nothing. Nothing at her wrist, either. The same for Maddalena. I went back to Simonetta, picked up her small, sweet head and tilted it back and blew air into her. I don’t know how many times I breathed into her, willing her to wake up, before Sandro pulled me off her.

“Basta, enough! They’re gone, Luca,” he cried, his face wet with tears. “But I will paint your daughter’s pretty hair and your wife’s sweet face until the Lord calls me to Him, so they will live forever that way!”

“How did this happen?” I asked numbly. There were torches blazing in the sconces, but it was hard to see. Everything was melting in front of me, the people and the walls bleeding into each other, a heavy kaleidoscope of color collapsing down like a stone wall to press on top of me. I could barely focus. My body was airless, breathless, locked in.

“I saw it, by chance,” whispered Maddalena’s maid tearfully. “Savonarola himself pointed at her through the crowd. Some men lifted her up on their shoulders so the monk could see her, and he denounced the book that she was holding, a book she had tried to save from the bonfire. It must have been a book about astrology, because he was screaming ‘Whore! Astrologer! Heretic’s wife!’ She fell off the men’s shoulders and a crazed mob chased Maddalena into the Arno. They were screaming at her about being a whore and about the blasphemy of astrology and how she had to be cleansed. Simonetta was chasing them and she ran into the water to help her mother, and a giant swell came over the surface of the water and they both went down! A little while later, they washed up.”

“The little girl kept up, even though Maddalena kept trying to get her to fall away and save herself,” Sandro added sadly. “Simonetta was determined and wouldn’t listen.”

“She would be determined,” I said hoarsely. “She was devoted to her mother and me.” Stricken faces ringed me, and I waved for them to leave. I sent them out, even Maddalena’s maid, who howled with pain and had to be led away by the other servants.

When I was alone, I lay down on the floor between Simonetta and Maddalena. The heavy, wet fabric of their clothes made squishy sounds around me as I scooted in. I took each of them by the hand. The river water had made a puddle on the floor that seeped into my clothes, into my skin and bones, as if to dissolve what was left of me after my love had been taken away: my empty, useless physical body. I lay in silence, waiting for death, praying for it. I prayed as I had done only two other times: standing in front of Giotto’s frescoes of St. John the Evangelist in Santa Croce, and after burying the burly, red-haired Ginori in the hills of Fiesole. I envied Ginori for dying soon after his family had died, and that’s what I prayed for. I prayed to die. I prayed to join my wife and daughter, wherever they were. I begged God, pleaded, promised Him anything, if only He would bring the joke to its end.

My prayers weren’t answered. It became clear that I wouldn’t die that night, so I talked to Maddalena and Simonetta. I told them how much I loved them. I told them how much they meant to me, how important they were, how I was infinitely grateful for the chance to love them. I had told them those things many times before, there was some comfort in that. And then I told them my secrets. The secrets that I should have told my beloved Maddalena when I had the chance, but had failed to, because of the fear within me.

“My name is Luca, and I am something like immortal,” I said to them. “I am over one hundred seventy-five years old. I do not age as other men do. I knew Giotto, and I was sold into a brothel by my best friend, Massimo. I have killed many people.” As my voice spun shadows on the torchlight-stained walls, they seemed to sit up beside me, and to listen.

When Sandro came for me the next morning, I was quite mad.

I WAS NOT SANE
for the burials of my wife and daughter. Sandro dressed me and held me still for the funeral service, so that I did not run naked and howling through the nave of the church. Then I abandoned my palazzo for the streets. Wealth and plentiful food and a beautiful home meant nothing to me anymore. As I had done as a child, I slept in piazze and alongside churches, under the four bridges across the Arno and beside the great stone walls of the city. I ate whatever I found or what was given to me. I was a beggar again, with ragged clothes and long, dirty hair and a wild matted beard.

There was a brief lucid moment when a funeral pyre pushed back the veils in my mind into something more diaphanous. Fire lit up the Piazza della Signoria. In the place where Savonarola had held the bonfire of the vanities, a scaffold surrounded by tinder was erected. The body of Savonarola was burned with those of two other monks, after they’d been hung by Inquisitors. I was almost myself as flames licked up into the sky. In a state that bordered on both madness and reason, I could clearly see how the monk had erred. Savonarola had not perceived one essential fact. While it is true that things of the other world give meaning to this life, it is also true that things of this world give meaning to the other. The fundamental truth of the human heart is that, while we are gods, as Ficino believed, we are also dust and mud, the rich red-brown mud of hillsides and green forest underbrush and black fields furrowed for crops. We are creatures of both heaven and earth. It is not our purity that will save us, it is our richness.

In a few hours the three monks were burned, and blackened legs and arms gradually dropped off. Parts of their bodies remained hanging from the chains that had bound them to the scaffold, and people in the crowd threw stones to make them fall. Then the hangman and his helpers hacked down the scaffold and burned it on the ground, bringing in heaps of brushwood and stirring up the fire over the dead bodies so that the very last piece of their bodies was consumed. Carts took away the dust to the Arno near the Ponte Vecchio so that no remains could be found and cherished by the fools of Florence who had brought their destructor to power.

TIME WAS LOOPED UP
into a meaningless knot for me, so I don’t know how long it was before the priest came for me. I spent my days down by the Arno, staring into its depths, which embodied the cosmos. The beautiful faces of my wife and daughter were spread out like the film of dissolved pigments, iridescent rainbows on the surface of the water. Sometimes, if I squinted my eyes, I could even see Marco. Marco my old friend who had given me candy and good advice. I remembered his long eyelashes and elegant gait. I spied other people in the waves, too: Massimo and his misshapen body and clever mind; Ingrid with her blond hair and bruised stare; Bella whose fingers had been cut off to punish me for trying to leave the brothel; Giotto who crackled with warm kindness and lively intelligence; the physico Moshe Sforno and his daughters, especially Rachel, who had taught me and teased me and loved me; Cosimo and Lorenzo de’ Medici; Geber and the Wanderer and Leonardo. Always there was Maddalena with her haunting eyes and the thick, lush multicolored hair that I never tired of touching and kissing. Sometimes when I saw her looking back at me from the water, I could smell her, too: that scent of lilacs in the clear light with its lemony undertone. I woke on the muddy ground with her scent in my nose and on my tongue, as if I’d been loving her in my sleep. I did not want to wake. And I could not elude my sweet little Simonetta, for whom I cherished so many dreams. She was going to be a scholar and philosopher like Ficino and a painter like Leonardo or Botticelli and marry a king; with her beauty and charm and the huge dowry I could provide, there was no limit to her possibilities. And she would be young forever, as I was.

A WOMAN APPROACHED ME
on a warm spring day. She brought bread and I said, “Thank you, signora. But I’m not hungry.” I thrust it back at her, but she wouldn’t take it.

“I don’t like to see people starve,” she said. “Please, eat.”

“I’m not hungry now.” I smiled. “Almost two centuries ago, I was a boy who was always hungry.”

“Two centuries?” she said, her voice startled. “Do you know what you’re saying? Or are you mad?”

“Maybe. It doesn’t matter. I had a beautiful daughter with hair the color of mine, and a wife I chose in a vision, and God took them away. Nothing matters now.”

“You must come with me!” she cried, suddenly distraught. Her bright violet eyes lit up, confusing me.

“No,” I said. “I must stay close to the river, Maddalena is here, they are all here, everything!” The woman insisted and grabbed my arm, but I shook her off and ran away. The bread fell on the ground and a dog got it, but that’s the way of life: necessary things are lost.

The next day the priest came. “It’s time, Luca Bastardo,” he said. He smiled in satisfaction. He was a man of about thirty, and there was something familiar about his face, but I couldn’t place it. The only faces I could interpret were those of Maddalena, my wife, and Simonetta, my daughter, who sang to me from the all-encompassing river.

The priest smiled even more broadly. “It’s time.” I did not understand and he was little more than a shimmer above a hot flagstone on a broiling summer day, but I went with him willingly. Dimly I was aware that he led me to his refectory. A servant washed me, shaved me, dressed me in clean clothes. The servant took me to where the priest sat at a great desk, and I began to understand that he was important. I looked around and realized that I was at the monastery of San Marco, to which the Medici had contributed so much money. There was an exquisite altarpiece here by Fra Angelico, that reverent painter who wept before touching his brush to the holy figure of Christ. The altarpiece showed the Madonna and Child on a golden throne, with clarity of composition and a background of Tuscan cypresses and cedars.

The mists in my head thinned to admit some light. I turned back to the priest, and carefully I perused his features: the dark hair, narrow face, jutting chin, and bladelike nose. I knew who he was: a Silvano. The welter of confused images and memories in which I had been living suddenly snapped like a tree struck by lightning, and everything came into focus for me. Sanity seized my core, and with it, the agony of loss. I cried out and dropped to my knees.

“Yes, that’s right.” The priest looked pleased. “You know who I am, don’t you?”

“Silvano,” I mumbled breathlessly, because the deaths of my wife and child were tearing a hole in my midriff. I couldn’t breathe and I was doubled over on the floor, retching.

“Gerardo Silvano.” He nodded. “I am the grandson, many times removed, of Bernardo Silvano, of Nicolo Silvano. I have seen your face in a painting by Giotto, and I have been schooled since I was a child in the importance of your destruction. My family has waited a long time to wreak our vengeance on you. You are a freak, a blasphemous creature, a sorcerer of unholy long years, a murderer! The deaths of your wife and child have weakened your demonic powers and made you ready. I will now bring you to justice and fulfill the curse placed on you by my forefathers. And I will use you to this end. You will attract to yourself your doom. A cardinal who is marked to be Pope will pass by you, and you will declare yourself to him.”