Immortal (5 page)

“Do they so move you, boy?” asked a kindly voice.

“Oh!” I was startled out of the rapture and sat backward, foolishly. I twisted around. A few paces back stood a stout and homely old man. He regarded me as curiously as I did him. Then I yelped with recognition. “That day at Santa Maria Novella—you’re the ingegno man!”

“An honorific I hope to be worthy of,” he answered dryly. “And I recognize you. You’re the boy with the broken stick and the bastard dagger….”

“The boy God laughs at.” I nodded, scrambling to my feet.

“Don’t take it personally,” he said. “God laughs at all of us. Life is a divine comedy, and this is how we show our reverence for it.” He indicated the paintings.

I nodded again. “They’re holy, because they come from the beautiful place.”

One of his graying brows lifted. “The beautiful place, eh? What is that?”

“You told me that Florentines had great souls, that there were qualities inside us that made us who we are,” I said. “The beautiful place is where whatever is beautiful comes from; it isn’t inside us, but we can get to it from the inside. It’s not from this earth at all.”

“If the beautiful place isn’t within us, how do we express it like this?” The older man waved at the frescoes as he trudged up to stand beside me. “Don’t you think it must be within?”

“No,” I said, but softly, so as not to offend him. “It’s separate from us. The earth is full of ugliness. Like God’s laughter is. But beyond that, there’s beauty.”

“What does a young hound like you know of ugliness?”

I thought of the patrons who opened the door to my room. I remembered the blank faces of people who’d walked past me when I was starving and begging for a penny, a scrap of food, anything. I recalled how I myself had silently willed Marco not to reveal my part in his escape attempt. Experience had shown me that there was more ugliness in most men than beauty. I wasn’t going to say that to this man who crackled with quick intelligence, though I thought he would understand. “Ugliness is what we get for being human. It’s the sin that stains us since the Garden of Eden. The beautiful place is God being kind to us.”

He stroked his chin and stared at me. “I had a friend who would have agreed with you. He would have said that beauty expresses the grace of God, and that we see beauty when we are purified enough to see all of God’s creation as one seamless unity.”

“I’m not purified. I see a lot of evil.”

“I daresay my friend Dante is spending a bit of time in purgatory himself these days.” The man smiled and it was a soft illumination from his heart, a smile of love and loss that encompassed everything and rejected nothing. I marked it well, resolving immediately that I would one day smile like that.

“So he’s dead. Was he a good friend?” I asked, turning to look at St. John ascending.

“Oh yes, a dear friend. A remarkable man and a poet like none other. I miss him still.” He sighed. “More than I would miss my family, I think. They’re a noisy and expensive lot.”

“These are my family and friends.” I stretched out my arms as if I could embrace the frescoes. “These will stick with me.”

For a time we contemplated the frescoes in silence. Finally he turned to me. “I have an appointment to buy some pigments, boy. Then I must return to work in another city.”

“I have work, too,” I said, and the words were like ashes on my tongue.

He nodded. “I will return to Florence in a few months. I would like to bring you something. You remind me of one of my children, with these ideas that are bigger than you are, and far too old for your age…. If my paintings are going to be your family—”

I gasped. “You’re
him
? You’re the artist who painted these holy frescoes?”

“Giotto di Bondone, at your service, and almost worthy of this much adulation,” he said dryly, shaking his grizzled head.

I fell to my knees. “Master, I didn’t know, I would have been more respectful!”

“Nonsense, you silly pup,” Giotto said gruffly. He pulled me to my feet with surprising strength in his liver-spotted hands. “Where do I find you, when I return?”

Not at the brothel, no, that would be unbearable. More than anything, I did not want this man whose smile bore a hint of the Lord’s grace, this artist of miracle paintings, to know what I was. He would loathe me. I shook my head. “I’ll find you, Master.”

“See that you do, pup,” he said. He cuffed my head playfully and took his leave.

A while later I stumbled out of the chapel, transported with joy at having been spoken to by Giotto himself, master of the frescoes that gave me solace while I was working. He had treated me with kindness and even interest! My feet skipped down to the shining river, under a bridge where I had often slept. I was standing close to the water, which was suddenly dappled and blue, full of mischievous currents and surprising peaks of winter light. Sometimes the Arno rose and washed away the bridges and carried away screaming people, but today it was peaceful in its playfulness, and laughter floated down from the bridge above.

After a while, I came to myself. I was being hailed. “Bastardo,” a weak voice was calling. Propped against one of the bridge struts, his useless legs stretched out before him, was Marco.

“Marco!” I ran to him and hugged him tightly. He was pale and dirty, the scrapes on his face were full of pus, and he was much thinner. But he was alive. I asked urgently, “Are you hungry? I’ll get food!”

He shook his head. “Not anymore. I was the first few days.”

“I’ll get you bread and meat!” I scrambled up, prepared to run off and get him something.

“Stay and talk with me, Luca. I always liked to talk to you.” Marco made a weak gesture with his muddy hand. I sat down beside him. “He let you go outside. Our plan worked. For you.”

My throat constricted, but I forced out the words. “Marco, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know this would happen to you!”

“At least I’m not working anymore! That’s something. You may be able to walk, but you still have to work.” He laughed bitterly.

“Are you surviving out here? How is it?”

His long lashes fluttered down. “The streets of Florence are not kind to cripples.”

“I know. But I’ll bring you food every time he lets me out,” I promised.

Marco opened his sunken eyes and smiled. “You would do that, I know. Bring me food and talk to me as if I mattered, as if I was still special.”

“Of course you’re still special! You matter a lot!” I said hotly. “Just because you live on the street doesn’t mean you don’t matter!”

“You’re the special one now. You learned from me. You’re keeping that thing alive inside you that would have you be kind.”

“You were the kind one,” I said. “You gave me candies and teased me so I’d laugh and told me how to take a beating so it wasn’t as bad as it could be!”

“I did little things for you and the other children because it kept me alive in there. You have to do those things now. Help the other children. Give what you can. Don’t hold back, give everything, anything! That’s how you save yourself!”

“I want to save
you
now!” I cried.

“You can save me, but not with food.” Marco’s black eyes were like spears into me.

“Water? Wine?” I asked. “Tell me!”

“Freedom.” He smiled as he said the word, then pushed himself upright with his bony arms. “Help me into the river.”

“No!” I rocked back on my heels, shocked and understanding. “Don’t ask that of me!”

“You owe me, Luca Bastardo,” he said, with finality. “I didn’t tell Silvano about you.”

“This is no escape, Marco! You’re alive! You said yourself, at least you’re not working!” I grabbed his shoulders. “Marco, you have to try!” The words poured from my mouth in ragged pleas, but despair filled my gut. Marco’s eyes were set and void. I didn’t know why I hadn’t noticed that before; Marco, who had found a way to survive the brothel, had now yielded to his mutilation. In some way, he’d already left himself, already died.

“I’m not alive,” he said, his face distorted with savage anger, his voice like the weighted silk bag swinging at me. “This is a worse prison than Silvano’s. The other beggars spit on me, because they know what I used to be. At least the patrons wanted me, even if it was disgusting!”

“You get used to the street. It’s better than Silvano’s, you’re free out here!”

“I was freer at Silvano’s! At least there I could command my own body, sometimes, when the patrons weren’t using me.”

“You can still command your thoughts!” I cried. “Like you told me, think about things that make you feel better! You can travel to wondrous places—”

“I’m a cripple on the streets with no way to get food for myself and no friends out here. I will die, slowly and suffering. You will do this mercy for me,” he said coldly. “It’s what I need. I would do it myself, but my strength has been gone for two days; in the cold, it won’t return. Pull me to the edge and slide me into the river. If I bob up, hold me under.”

“It’s too terrible!” I cried. “I can’t do it!”

Marco glared, holding my eyes with his empty, inscrutable ones. “Yes, you can. I know you, Luca Bastardo. You’re the kind who can do whatever he has to. You won’t pull back from the edge. That’s how you survived out here for so long. That’s why you didn’t die the first week at Silvano’s. Plenty do, you know. Not you. I have a feeling you’ll be the only one of us to make it out of Silvano’s alive! And not crippled. I can see it in your eyes. You’ve got something inside you, some quality that makes you endure!”

“You’re asking me to kill you,” I whispered. And would it matter if I did? No one but me in this world cared about Marco. In the next world, God was snickering; if I fulfilled Marco’s request, it would only enhance His joke. There was a hard knot in my chest as we argued, but now it collapsed into waves of sadness.

“I’m asking you to save me! It’s what you have to do to save yourself,” he returned, in a tone both triumphant and bitter.

I’m not proud of it, but I did it. It was easy, in fact. Marco had only a sparrow’s weight and it was nothing for me, strong and well fed as I was, to drag him to the water’s edge. It was but a few minutes’ labor.

“Go with freedom,” I said to him, which was a kind of prayer for forgiveness.

So I rolled him over into the sun-stippled water. Life has a will of its own and wouldn’t be denied so easily. Marco’s arms splashed and propelled him to the surface gasping and sucking in air. I pushed down firmly on his black-haired head. I held him down until his thrashing stopped and his arms eased out. Marco was right: I was capable of doing whatever needed to be done, no matter how appalling. I had picked pockets and stolen fruit and extorted money for fake injuries on the streets, and I had submitted to degradation by patrons at the brothel, but this was different, in magnitude and in kind. I willingly became a killer. I could steel myself to anything. To this day it is a characteristic of mine, whether for good or bad or both, and I’ve lived long enough to understand that a man has to reconcile all sides of his nature. It’s not that I don’t weep later, just that I will pay the toll that the moment demands. Marco taught me this about myself, and I’ve never forgotten it or his kindness.

I let go of his head and sat watching the Arno carry his body away. I wondered if I would end similarly, a husk lapped by the river as it floated off. It might be soon; there was no predicting Silvano’s whims. I wished with all my heart that someone who meant me well would be nearby, so that I did not die scorned and alone, as I had lived. Perhaps some friend would return the service I had just performed for Marco and yield me to the river. I did not know then that life had other plans for me, and that my end would come not through water, but through flame.

Chapter
3

AFTER MARCO’S DEATH,
I took on more of the liberties that had been accorded him. I also took on his pastimes, stealing into other children’s rooms to befriend them. Perhaps it was my way of keeping him alive, because I missed him; perhaps it was about assuaging my guilt and sorrow over his death; perhaps it was just that the longer I resided at Silvano’s, the more I hated being trapped, and I was determined to wrest as much freedom from my situation as possible. I called on my old skills from the street, my quickness of foot and my ability to fade into the background as I snuck around the palazzo. I was largely undetected, except for once when Silvano caught me inside the room where he kept track of his business accounts. A large wooden desk sat atop a Saracen carpet along with a chest with painted doors that locked.

“Bastardo, you clever boy! You’ve found your way to the money place!” Silvano’s gleeful voice rang out. “In all the years I’ve run my beautiful establishment, I’ve never once found a worker here. You’re the first. You are like me, smarter than most! Hungry for wealth.”

“I’m not like you, sir,” I whispered.

“I think you are. Otherwise, why are you here in the
abbaco
room, my accounting room?” Silvano came up and caressed my neck. The room wavered in front of me like the air above a scorching hot flagstone on a summer day.

“Why is this room so important?” I asked.

“This is where I keep my abbaco book that records payments and expenses, of course.” He smiled. “And my important documents. I even have one that concerns you!” He reached around me to pull out a large book. He opened it and withdrew a sheet of vellum paper. “If you can read it, since you’re so clever, I’ll let you run away to your room without feeling the kiss of my florins.” He thrust the paper into my hands. “Go on, read it!”

I had never before held a sheet of paper, which was far too precious for a street urchin. It was soft and white and covered with strange markings. “What is this?”

“This is a letter that came to me when my condottieri robbed a messenger. Silly messenger was bearing far too much gold. It slowed his horse. My men relieved him of that little problem. And they took this. They couldn’t read it, of course, but I could and I was delighted to have it in my possession. Can’t you see how important it is? Why, the Pope himself would want to read it! Then hide it where it wouldn’t be found for a thousand years! Someday I’ll sell it to him. Not just for money, since I have that, but also for a full pardon, for a title, for influence! The Pope will want you enough to pay whatever I ask! I’ll let him have you, for a fortune. But not until you grow to manhood. They can’t use you before you’re grown.”

“Why would the Pope want me?” I whispered.

“You can’t read it?” he asked, in fake dismay. “When you’re so clever as to make your way to my abbaco room? Sneaking around like your old friend Marco? Well, don’t worry, a whore like you is valuable for other reasons.” He reached out to ruffle my hair. “You are a beautiful commodity, this orange-blond hair and those big dark eyes that are lush and almost purple, like plums, yes? Thank God for other men’s lusts, for they make my business thrive.” He released me abruptly. I went limp against the desk.

“I’ve heard other Florentine businessmen, noblemen of wealth and status, say that by exercising caution and vigilance over our affairs, by caring for even the slightest detail, we can avert disaster.” Silvano walked around the room to the chest, withdrew a key from his
lucco,
and opened the lock. “I agree with them.” He pulled out a lumpy silken bag, and I quailed. His narrow face twisted into a sneer. Then he swung his bag of florins with such force that it made the first beating he’d given me seem tame.

“Don’t let me catch you in here again!” he said when he was done. I lay on the floor in a pool of urine, vomit, and tears. I felt pain and shame, but also vast rage. I knew Silvano cared less about my explorations in the palazzo than about the opportunity to beat me, so after a week of recuperating in my room with the walls closing in on me, I was at it again. Silvano’s beating only strengthened my resolve to take what liberties I could.

The beating also sharpened my senses, or it taught me to pay exquisite attention to them, because I grew supernaturally alert to Silvano’s approach. The lift of a few hairs on the back of my neck told me he was moving toward me. I learned to fold myself into a dark alcove or to twine myself behind the heavy drapery that shrouded all the windows. There were times when I could have sworn he was thinking about me, because my stomach would tighten and feel light all at once, as if his very intent was a clawed thing reaching for me through the silent, dark palazzo.

As I explored, I looked for the little blond girl who had clung to my hand in the cellar, seeking comfort. I spied her one day when a door in the long hall opened and a big-bellied man, richly dressed, came out. I remembered seeing him at the market with his wife and children and servants. Behind him on the bed sat the little girl. She wore a torn white dress, her little face sagging into numb creases that a thirty-year-old would have worn better. I began to buy her sweets at the market when I went out. I would listen to make sure she was alone, and then I would crack open her door and toss in my offering. Her blue eyes would light up as her fingers closed around the sugared date or the pastry filled with
frutta di bosco.
Patrons often brought sweets to us children—something about a child licking sugar made them wild with lust—but I knew the little girl prized what I brought because I didn’t want to do anything to her.

In the meantime, when I went out into Florence, I sought information about Master Giotto. He had said he would return and wanted to see me, and I believed him. He had an honor about him that was obvious even to a mongrel like me. When he came back I wanted to impress him with my knowledge of his incomparable work. On a cold day after Christmas, I went to the monk Friar Pietro, who had once taken me into the Church of Ognissanti to show me the glorious Madonna panel that Giotto had painted there.

“Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor: lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor. Misere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam,”
I called brightly, when I spied him sweeping the path outside the austere stone facade of the old church of Santa Maria Maggiore. I had no idea what the words meant, but I remembered hearing them at a Mass, and it amused him when I recited the liturgy back to him.

“
Salve,
Bastardo, it’s been a long time.” Pietro lifted his shaved head and smiled at me through a crowd of passersby. “I don’t see you around anymore. It’s been weeks since you tried to coax the leftover communion bread from me, or followed me around reciting the Mass.”

“Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum,”
I responded. I skipped toward him, winding my way through a perfumed quartet of laughing women who wore fur-lined mantelli that fluttered open to reveal shimmering
cottardite,
full-cut gowns of lavish fabric embroidered with pearls and appliqués. They stopped across the street from the church at a table of dyed wool swaths in the cluster of booths tended by merchants from the Oltrarno, the other side of the Arno, where enclaves of foreigners and Jews lived. I said, “I have some questions for you, Friar Pietro.”

“What does an old monk like me know?” He sighed. “Not enough to advance in my order. I’m so incompetent, I’m lucky I can sweep the walk in front of a church on a cold day. I’m not even good enough to work at the monastery at San Salvi, with the other brothers of our worthy Vallombrosan Order.”

“You’re learned like a
professore.
You know a lot about Master Giotto,” I said.

Pietro leaned on his broom, his breath making white fog in the air. His rheumy eyes stared into me. “Master Giotto? What do you want to know about this painter? He’s too good for a filthy street cur like you!”

“Of course,” I agreed, thinking that I wasn’t so filthy anymore, at least on the outside. I wondered if he would notice how polished and plumped up I was, and take in the implications. “But I want to know about Giotto. You said his master was Cimabue. What else do you know?”

“Come.” Pietro motioned. He leaned the broom against the wall of the church.

“Eh, monk, that’s a pretty boy!” called a condottiere from a hulking pack of them by the church wall. He touched his dagger, hollering, “Look at all that silky yellow hair!” The others laughed raucously and another one whistled.

“Give me a nice tight boy anytime,” another leered. “They’re cleaner than women! I like ’em even better!”

“That’s because no woman would have you,” I yelled, even though they were but a short distance from us. He growled and lunged at me, but I darted into the church after the monk.

“Leave the soldiers alone,” Pietro chided. “They’re a brutish lot, but the city fathers think we need them.” We settled into a back pew. “Giotto, eh? Why Giotto?”

“I like the frescoes at Santa Croce,” I said.

“You should see the frescoes in Assisi,” he said. “He painted a cycle of St. Francis—extraordinary. I hear the paintings in Padua in the chapel on the site of the old Roman arena are splendid, too: the
Last Judgment,
the
Annunciation,
the
Life of the Virgin,
all magnificent, with a physical presence that moves the spirit. But what do you like about the frescoes at Santa Croce, Bastardo?” he pressed. I shrugged. “The naturalism, the composition of his figures, the inventiveness of his allegory?” Pietro chuckled, not expecting me to understand. The language was difficult for me, but because of all the time I’d spent with the frescoes lately, I caught the gist of his meaning. My face must have stayed blank, though, because Pietro put his hand on my shoulder. “You think they’re pretty?” he crooned. I nodded.

“I know a few good stories about Master Giotto,” Pietro said. He rubbed his chin with a plump hand covered in sagging pale flesh. “I’ve seen him a few times, never spoken with him. He was born to a poor family in Vespignano, fifty-five years ago.”

“Fifty-five!” I gaped. “He’s lived a long time!”

“Well, time is different for everyone,” Pietro said, his face puckering. “Master Giotto has aged well. Me, not so much, though I was born the same year.” I looked at the droopy seams on the monk’s face and agreed, though silently. “Of course, I have no vanity; our dear Lord would not want that of the humble monks who serve Him,” Pietro added in a pious tone. “When Giotto was sheep-herding for his father, he would draw on flat rocks with a sharpened stone. He drew whatever he saw around him, or what he imagined. The great artist Cimabue happened by the pasture one day and was amazed! The untutored shepherd boy was a draughtsman the like of which Cimabue himself could not equal. He asked Giotto’s father at once if the boy could come to live with him, to be instructed and developed as an artist. Just like that, Giotto’s life was changed, his destiny set!”

“I’ve only ever known bad things to change people’s lives,” I whispered.

“Oh, accidents, catastrophes, yes, those alter lives forever, but miracles happen, too. Do you not think that the lepers healed by our Lord had their lives changed for the better?” Pietro asked. “Or the sick whose demons He cast out? Or the blind to whom He restored sight?”

“I never thought about it,” I admitted.

“You need more catechismal instruction, boy,” he said, in a tone of indulgence mixed with annoyance. “When you come around, I’ll try to teach you. If a street rodent like you can be impressed by Giotto, there’s hope for you. Just don’t end up like your old amico Massimo.”

“Massimo? What?” I jerked upright. Pietro surveyed me curiously.

“You didn’t hear? He fought with some lout of a condottiere over possession of a florin. The condottiere said no deformed street urchin could own a whole florin and stabbed him. In the neck, here.” Pietro tilted his head and indicated a pulsing spot on the line between his shrunken earlobe and his clavicle. “Poor ugly bastard spurted blood like a pig at the butcher. I put him on the cart to be taken out for a beggar’s burial myself. A few months ago.”

I closed my eyes and remembered all the times I’d huddled somewhere with Massimo, sharing a scrap of bread or inventing a game to keep ourselves warm in the winter. I wondered if those same memories had struck him when he sold me to Silvano. My stomach clutched up as if I’d eaten bad food, and I couldn’t tell if it was because I felt badly for Massimo, or because I didn’t. Didn’t I owe him grief, after the time we’d shared?

“Don’t dwell on it, boy,” Pietro said, touching my shoulder. “Did you know that the Holy Father himself sent a courtier here to see what kind of man and painter this Giotto was? The courtier arrived at Giotto’s workshop one day as he was hard at work. The courtier requested a drawing to take back to the Pope, and Giotto took out a sheet of paper and a brush with red paint, held his arm close to his body like so”—Pietro demonstrated—“and then, without any help from a compass, he drew a perfect circle! By his own hand!”

“What’s a compass?”

Pietro snorted. “An instrument used to draw a circle, Luca Stupido. That’s the point; Giotto so excels that he didn’t need one. The courtier thought he was being made a fool of, and argued, but at Giotto’s insistence, he sent the circle to the Holy Father, along with an explanation of how Giotto had made it. The Pope at once sent for Giotto. Giotto painted such beautiful works for him that the Pope paid him six hundred gold ducats!”

“So much money.” I gaped. I tried to imagine a fortune like that, and the freedom and beauty it could buy, but my mind flitted out from within me as if I were trying to contemplate the boundless blue limits of the sky. I wondered if even Silvano could conceive of wealth on that scale.

“Indeed.” Pietro patted my shoulder. “That’s enough for today, Bastardo; you will strain yourself under the heavy burden of this knowledge.”

“I have another question,” I said, thinking of how Silvano hinted that he knew my origins. “I’ve been wondering about my parents. You hear what goes on in Florence, and you’ve been a monk here for a long time, do you know anything about them? Or where I came from?”