Immortal (7 page)

I knew where I was going because I had run an errand there once, back when I lived on the streets and would do anything for food. Anything except what I was doing now, that is. But once, a stoneworker ambitious to move up in his guild had sent me to a distant part of the city. He’d taken what I’d returned with, smiled, tucked a few soldi into my palm, and told me to forget I’d met him. Within a day, I’d heard that his competitor was dead.

It was a mild winter day with a speckled, milky sky like fragments of a broken robin’s egg shell, so I walked along the banks of the Arno with its wool-washing houses to the Ponte Vecchio with its small wooden shops and sweeping views up and down the river. I crossed there to the Oltrarno, the other side of the Arno. I took a circuitous route to throw off Silvano’s watchers, walking around the church of Santa Felicita and doubling back over the Ponte Vecchio, then back to the Oltrarno over the Ponte Santa Trinita. I wandered past silk workshops and goldsmiths, past the monastery of the monks of San Romualdo, through narrow streets until I came to a small bottega deep in the southern environs, the
camoldoli
where wool carders, beaters, and combers kept their slum shops and where the foreigners and Jews lived. The shop was marked as if it were simply one of the dozens of tailors’ shops in Florence, though I knew it was not, and it was shuttered, but I knew it was open. I rapped on the door impatiently.

A tall blond man opened the door. He saw me and his eyes narrowed, then his square-jawed face changed. He was a man from the distant north with a good memory, and he remembered me. He ushered me into his shop. He slid a heavy bolt into place behind us as I scanned the room. It was empty of the assistants who should have been sitting on the floor with laps full of fabric and thread. There was no long table for cutting cloth and no wooden mannequins, no clasp knife and scissors and needles, no bolts of the coarse linen cloth that tailors used for fittings. There was only a small rough-hewn table for conducting business and a few chairs. The northerner turned to me with a sharp look.

“That thing I came for once before, I am charged to obtain more,” I said softly.

“You have payment?” he said, in his slow, heavily accented voice. I pulled the small panel from my shirt. My heart felt a pang of reluctance and would have held on to the Madonna, so I brought to mind the image of little Ingrid, cut and burnt, and the torture that had led Marco to demand his own death. Ingrid had called me good, the only person in my life to have done so. I had promised myself not to let anyone hurt her. I had to keep my promise. My hands thrust the panel at the northerner. The man exclaimed and sat down at the table, examining it. He ran his fingers over it as if he couldn’t restrain himself. He murmured, “This will do.”

It will more than do, I thought fiercely. It will buy you out of your unspoken business and send you back to the cold land you came from with a fortune in your hands. I thought about him returning to his distant homeland and remembered that the monk Pietro had told me to ask in the Oltrarno about my own origins. “Sir,” I asked politely, “you’ve been in Florence for a long time?” He nodded, unable to tear his eyes from the panel. I continued, “I was wondering if you’d ever heard of someone losing a child. Years ago. Foreign people, nobles maybe.”

He looked up with obvious reluctance. His pale blue eyes fixed on me sharply. “You think you were such a child.” I shrugged. He nodded. “There was something, five years ago, maybe. A tale floating about the market. Something about a lost child, lost by the Cathars maybe. I didn’t pay attention.”

“Who are the Cathars?”

“Heretics, they believe in a good God and an evil God, so the Church kills them.” He shook his head. “The parents weren’t Cathars. I remember that. They had a secret that kept them in the company of Cathars. But I don’t know where they came from or if they have any relation to you.” Cradling the panel, he disappeared into a back room and then returned with a small vial.

“I have been told to ask if it can be mixed into a sweet,” I said. I looked into the dark doorway beyond which lay my exquisite painting. A part of me mourned. I knew I would prize the remaining panel twice as much.

“It’s best that way, it’s sweet also,” he said. He thrust the vial into my hand. “Use it all. It’s one application, painless and undetectable.” He unbolted the door and pushed me out onto the steps, into the cold evening of winter in Florence, with a moonless sky rippling into violet and plum clouds and a biting breeze promising a colder day tomorrow. I walked back through narrow streets overlooked by the tower houses and fortified residences, all the private dwellings where happy people lived lives of peace and safety with their loved ones.

At noon the next day Silvano summoned me. He sat at his dining table, sucking the marrow out of veal bones. “I am having a visitor today,” he said. My eyes darted around the room, seeking the heavy silk bag. I didn’t see it. Silvano tossed down a bone and scratched the underside of his pointy, bearded chin. “An important visitor. Unfortunately, the visitor will be disappointed. In fact,” he continued, his tones growing acid, “I must return to him a substantial deposit.” He turned his face toward me and his bladelike nose quivered, as if trying to sniff some truth out from me. “That does not please me!”

“Sir?” I said. I clasped my hands behind my back, gripping my palms tightly together, so I could feel myself in my body, alive and still Luca.

Silvano leapt up, pointed his face toward the ceiling, and screamed like a dog at the moon. “One of my girls was found dead this morning! A girl who had been paid for!” He threw his plate of bones at the wall. He howled again and threw a bowl of soup at my head. I ducked so that the bowl missed me, though the hot soup splattered all over me. Panting, Silvano held up his knife and shrieked, “Do you know anything about this girl’s death, clever Bastardo?”

“How could I, sir?” I shook my head so hard that my chest rattled, or maybe that was fear batting around my heart the way a cat slapped a mouse before consuming it.

“Perhaps the frescoes at Santa Croce told you.” Silvano waved his knife. His face was red with rage. “Perhaps someone at Santa Felicita told you! I think you know all kinds of things. I think you hide things. I think you stay awake at night and think things. I think you have secrets!”

“No, sir,” I whispered, backing up to stand in the threshold so I could run, if necessary.

He slammed everything off the table with a sweep of one arm. As dishes clattered, he leapt toward me and held his knife to my throat. I held very still. He dug the tip of his knife in beside my Adam’s apple. I felt something wet, a drop of blood, travel down to the hollow of my throat. I wondered if I was about to join Marco and Ingrid, after all; I was surprised at how calm I was. Silvano growled, “I am a very good judge of people, Bastardo, that’s why I’m successful.”

“Yes, sir,” I whispered again.

“I would slit that white throat of yours, maybe gut you like the little pig that you are, even if you are the unholy get of some fancy foreign aristocracy. But I don’t want to lose any more of my workers. We can’t have our tender family destroyed, can we, Bastardo?” He threw back his head and snarled, his mouth drawing back around his teeth like a rabid dog. His blade shook in my flesh. He screamed, “I have lost a small fortune because of this child’s death! It is unacceptable! My reputation for providing whatever my patrons want has been threatened!
Somehow you have caused this!
I know that you snuck into her room. I can’t prove anything, but I am going to watch you. Closely. You’re to stay inside. No more going out!”

He stepped away, still brandishing his knife. “I don’t know where you went after Santa Felicita, but you won’t go back for a while.” I dipped my head, hiding my eyes so he couldn’t see the tears of anger and contempt in them. I pulsed with fury, and with gratitude for still being alive. I also ached for Ingrid, whom I would never again see; something about Silvano’s accusations gave her death finality. He didn’t say anything else and I backed out the door.

“One more thing, Bastardo,” he called. He slammed his fists on the table. “I already know about your parentage. But I’ll find out more. I’ll know what you know, and what you hide. I’m going to uncover your secrets. All of them!”

Chapter
4

DAYS CRAWLED BONELESSLY INTO MONTHS,
which eased like a slow-acting soporific into years, and Marco’s words bore fruit. I got used to the work. People get used to anything, if it continues for long enough. It was more than growing accustomed, though; there was also the way I numbed parts of myself to survive, and the way I focused on the tiny shards of grace that came my way: the journeys to great paintings, the freedom to go out when Silvano again granted me that privilege, the good food, the warmth in the wintertime. I thought little about the work itself. It was palatable only once.

A regular patron, a high-ranking member of the guild of furriers, banged open the door to my room, looked at me with lust, and then grabbed his thick left arm. He fell to his knees, groaning and panting. His eyes were wild and foamy spittle wet his beard. Curious, I watched from the bed. The pores on his broad face opened and rivulets of sweat ran down to where his cheek was pressed against the floor.

“Help me,” he gasped. “Help me, boy.” He had a thick country accent and I shrugged as if I didn’t comprehend. I rose and drew aside the heavy crimson, cut-velvet curtain, the fabric of which had been meant for export to a harem in Turkey, but which Silvano had acquired for this establishment. After all, a brothel was the perfect place to flout the sumptuary laws. A triangle of brilliant yellow light bisected the patron’s face. It was a late-summer afternoon, after the markets had closed and before dinner; a voluptuous time of day much in demand in this work. The furrier gagged a few times and vomited a small pool of green bile. His pale lips moved in the light, motes of dust spinning above his head, but his voice was no longer audible. I seated myself on the floor near him, drew up my legs, and clasped my knees with my arms, waiting. I was on friendly terms with Death and knew his approach.

I watched the triangle of light creep across the furrier’s body until its tail like a scorpion’s curved up on his torso and its head rested on the floor. Finally it lazed into a honeyed slant on the floor.

I searched the body. He had a purse with some silver coins. I reached inside his fine silk doublet, snapping off his neck the gold chain with its pearled crucifix that I had seen when he’d once bared his chest. I didn’t take his rings; Silvano, who missed nothing, would have noted them. So I took some of the soldi, not all, and hid them with the chain in a hole mice had made behind the chest of drawers. Then I opened the door and called for Simonetta.

She came quickly, in her slow-seeming way, with a question in her eyes. Her glance fell on the furrier and she clucked her tongue and uttered some invectives interspersed with prayers. She turned the body over onto its back and laid her soft hand over the mouth.

“Trouble,” she said. “I don’t want you hurt, Luca!”

“I didn’t kill him,” I said, stroking her blond braid.

“Will that matter?” She made the sign of the cross and went to get Silvano. I sat on the bed to wait for him. This waiting wasn’t as easy. The passage of time, though shorter, was frozen by the anticipation of pain. I wondered if I could send myself to Giotto’s paintings while I was being beaten. Usually I couldn’t muster the concentration when Silvano was swinging his sack of florins. But I had new hope: Giotto was in Florence, overseeing the campanile of Santa Maria del Fiore. The cathedral was meant to crown our glorious city, and everyone was excited that purpose had come to it again, after thirty years of lackadaisical construction. So I got to see the great Master every few days, though I didn’t speak with him so often. He was busy with matters far more important than a scrap of street trash like me.

“You’ve killed a patron.” Silvano’s sly voice interrupted my reverie. He came down the hall in front of Simonetta, who had a fresh bruise under her eye. She kept her gaze on the floor. Her fingers twined together and jerked apart in her full blue silk sleeves. “How clever of you to get out of working! Did you enjoy it? Did you revel in the God-like power to take a life? I find it better than carnal climax. You’re like me, Luca, one of the elite, without the qualms that weaken other people.”

“I didn’t kill him.” I stayed where I was on the bed, out of reach of his hands, which could wield a knife faster than I could blink. There was still a tiny white mark on my throat from where he’d insinuated his knife into it when Ingrid had died.

“Too bad, I might have been proud of you emulating me, I might have rewarded you with money to spend in the mercato, you so enjoy that.” Silvano bent over the furrier, examining him with quick, dispassionate poking. “You watched him die for the better part of an hour, I’ll wager,” he said. “And I always win my wagers.” He opened the furrier’s purse and took the remaining soldi, then slid the rings off the furrier’s fingers, leaving only the signet ring, which the man’s family would claim. Finally he straightened and looked at me. I met his eyes for a few beats, but it was too much like staring into the frigid jaws of hell, so I turned away.

“Oh, you’re not squeamish, Bastardo,” Silvano mused, stroking his chin.

“My work doesn’t allow it,” I said. He laughed, a wheezing sound like bat wings against an icy wind, and it was more terrifying than his words.

“You have an answer for everything,” he sneered. “You’ve been with me for more than four years, haven’t you, boy?”

“Yes, sir.” I nodded. Was four years too long? Did Silvano mean to dispose of me now?

“Yet you look exactly as you did when you arrived: like a boy of nine years,” Silvano said. “You haven’t aged a day. It’s not from lack of feeding. You eat almost as much as you earn.” He stepped over the furrier’s body and grasped my chin. He tilted my face up and bent close, as he had the first day I’d met him. Then he pulled out my camicia and stared at my chest as if searching it for something. I focused on the gray in his beard, steeling myself not to quail as his perfume assailed me. In all the years that followed, because of Silvano and the patrons, I could never bring myself to wear perfume, even when I had the riches to buy the best of it.

“You should be maturing. You should have wisps of a beard and a creaky voice. But no, you look exactly as you did when I first took you. I know that you’re the boy from my document, your hair color is so distinctive, Bastardo, but maybe it’s not that you have special blood. Maybe you’re just a sorcerer. Do you know what we do with sorcerers?”

“They’re imprisoned,” I said flatly.
But prison would be better than this,
I thought.

“We burn them,” he said, mirth in his voice. “A slow process to melt the skin and fry the brain in its skull, to extract every tiny bit of agony…. It’s not pleasant to be a sorcerer, Bastardo. Lucky for you that I employ you here. Be sure you continue to please my patrons. If I put you back out on the street and give that document to the Church fathers, they’d burn you as an abomination and a witch.”

“I’m not a sorcerer, sir. I’m just different,” I said.

“Different? You’re a freak who doesn’t age as the rest of us do.” His thin lips curled in a sneer. “And the rest of us do age. Like Simonetta here, she’s aging. Isn’t that right, Simonetta? You’re getting old and you’re worried you’ll never have children? Isn’t that what you said to Maria the other day?” He tossed the questions out without looking at her and she shrank back against the wall of my room, her mouth like a gash in her pale face.

Silvano turned my face from side to side. “Unlike you, I am getting older. Age makes a man think, if he’s not a wastrel. I’ve been thinking. I would like a son, an heir. A son who will marry into one of Florence’s best families and enhance the luster of the Silvano name. A son who will ascend to great social heights, when you finally do come to look like a man, and I sell you to the Pope for the social station I deserve!” He released me abruptly and stepped away. “My son will be respected. He won’t be a freak whore and sorcerer like you, Bastardo. He will see to my old age.” He turned to Simonetta. “There’s an ufficiale, Alberti, who is a frequent patron, send for him. I’ll explain the situation. And send for a doctor, one of the Hebrew doctors who can be persuaded to agree with my story. Promise him a florin if he says what he’s told to. If he tries to refuse, threaten to have his family put out of Florence.”

ALMOST ANOTHER YEAR PASSED,
and still I hadn’t changed. I took to examining myself in the dark mirrors around Silvano’s palazzo into which patrons liked to look to tidy themselves before they left. My face remained boyish, unfuzzed, unaltered. What was wrong with me, that I wasn’t maturing the way other boys did? Was Silvano right, was I a freak? An abomination? What did his document say, and why was he sure it spoke of me? I knew I wasn’t a sorcerer. Was this why I’d been put out on the streets in the first place? Even Giotto commented on it, one day as I walked with him.

It was a summer morning, enlivened by good weather, and thick with the welter of sights, sounds, and smells of the Florence that I loved in those days: flowers blooming in window boxes and piled high on wooden carts from farms in the contado, the outskirts; pretty women in colorful dresses carrying baskets filled with produce like sweet figs and young beans or goods like swaths of our excellent Florentine wool; odds and ends with which regular people with families—whole people—defined their lives. Close to the front of the church of Santa Maria del Fiore, stones were being laid for Giotto’s bell tower. The clanging rose up along with the clatter of horse hooves, the chiming of church bells, the creaks and rumbles of wagons, and the distant sussuration of the flour mills and wool-washing shops along the river. Giotto and I were headed for the construction site of Santa Maria del Fiore when the Master stopped, panting from our brisk trotting, and pointed to a stone.

“Do you know what that is, Luca Cuccolo?” His voice was affectionate as he called me “Luca Little Dog,” but I knew the affection wasn’t for me. It was meant for the flat gray stone in front of us. There were black letters painted on the stone, but I didn’t read, so I just shook my head. “That is a timeless place of reverence, a sacred holy place like an altar,” Giotto said. “I call it
Sasso di Dante,
Dante’s stone. He would sit here for hours, watching the construction, writing his immortal
Commedia,
and thinking.”

“Dante the great poet, who was your friend.” I nodded. “So this stone is sacred because a great man, a perfect man, sat here often.”

“My old friend sinned. In his great work
The Inferno
he admits to lust and pride—”

“Hell must be more crowded than Florence, if everyone who sins with lust and pride confesses it,” I commented. A grin split Giotto’s homely, wonderful face.

“We’re all human. You’ll be prey to lust, too, when you grow into a man.”

“It isn’t my lust that will damn me,” I murmured, thinking uneasily of Silvano’s insinuations that I was a sorcerer.

Giotto laughed, a deep resonant laugh from his belly that only he could produce. Passersby smiled. “Me neither, pup. That’s what the grace of purgatory is for: purification.”

“If you believe in purification,” I countered dryly. It would take more than purgatory to fit me for heaven.

“I do,” Giotto said. “It isn’t perfection that makes this stone holy. Dante was a good man, but flawed, as we all are. Dante was even exiled because of corruption, though he wasn’t guilty of what they accused him.”

“It’s about his genius,” I reflected, running my hand over the rough surface of the stone. “His mastery as a poet. That’s what makes the stone holy, even if he wasn’t a perfect man.”

“Exactly.” Giotto clapped me on the shoulder. “There are no perfect men. Just men with sublime parts. You have good understanding, Luca.”

“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I thought only things the Church anoints were sacred and holy. Like the bread and wine of communion.”

“That’s an instance of holiness,” Giotto acknowledged. “The deeper mystery of the sacrament, that moment of heaven entering earth, makes it so.”

“I don’t think heaven ever enters earth, the earth is too full of cruelty and ugliness. If heaven comes here, it must take on the taint of evil, like fabric dipped in dye. But then I haven’t had any catechism. I don’t even know that I’ve been baptized,” I confessed, with a short laugh.

“Surely your parents had you baptized!” Giotto responded.

I shrugged. “I don’t remember them or the life I might have lived before the streets.”

“Luca, you must have some idea about your origins!”

I glanced around to make sure no one was eavesdropping. “I heard a tale about foreigners, traveling with Cathars, who lost a child.” I had asked around in the Oltrarno about this, but Silvano had caught wind of my queries and made fun of me, so I seldom spoke of it.

“I’ve heard of the Cathars,” Giotto said slowly. “They were a devout group full of Christian virtue. They cared for the sick and the needy, tried to live pure lives that reflected the most basic teachings of Jesus. I never understood why the Church called them heretics and tried to eradicate them. Perhaps because they had a strange idea about the Christ and baptism, that the Lord made the river Jordan flow upward, in reverse. It’s a beautiful poetic image, but why destroy a people because of it?”