Immortal (8 page)

“Why destroy a people at all?” I asked, enjoying our discussion, as I always did. “Why not leave people alone to follow their own faith as they see fit?”

“There’s a truly heretical belief: tolerance.” Giotto laughed. Then he shrugged. “I considered many times this river flowing in reverse. I thought it was a demonstration of the Lord’s mastery over nature, which is a great primal force, an original source. I go to nature first to find what is sacred and holy.”

“The priests don’t say things like this,” I ventured.

“You’re too clever to believe what priests tell you.” Giotto laughed again. “You’ve been around for enough years to have your own thoughts.” He tilted his grizzled head, stared at me with his keen eyes. “Though your years don’t show in your face. You’re like a painting, unchanging and timeless. There’s a mystery to you, Bastardo,” he said. “You have the face of a boy but the words of an old man who has spent too much time stewing in his own thoughts. Be careful that you don’t burn for it. The Church doesn’t much like those who think for themselves.”

“No one does,” I said, recalling Silvano’s threatening words. But after all I’d seen and done, I didn’t know how I was going to stop myself from stewing in my own thoughts. They were like the flotsam tossed about by a river, bobbing up and down within me, differentiating me from other people, and from the other whores, even more than my work or my youthfulness.

“Be careful who you confide in. I’d hate to see harm come to you,” Giotto said, his mouth drooping as a rare air of sadness enveloped him. Then his stout body twanged like a viola string, and his jovial nature returned. “Come, pup, let’s see my bell tower. The tribunal fathers complain about the cost, but beauty doesn’t come cheap, especially beautiful marble inlay!”

Chapter
5

GIOTTO DIED IN 1337,
and all of Florence mourned. People who had merely heard of him went about with woeful faces and dark vestments. He was buried in Santa Maria del Fiore, whose walls were finally complete, under a slab of white marble. I did not attend the lavish public funeral procession or the long Mass. I went a few days later and stood near the white marble with Giotto’s small panel of the Evangelist and his peach-colored dog hidden in my shirt. I didn’t pray, I just remembered Giotto’s paintings. I thought of his homely face and the way he loved to laugh and how his cheerfulness drew people to him. And I recalled, and savored, each of our conversations over the years. My friendship with Giotto had been the sweetest thing in my life. It made me feel worthy. It inspired me with hope for other friends, better circumstances, a better self, and even, perhaps, one day, a wife of my own. It was a lofty ambition for one such as me, who probably wouldn’t make it out of childhood. I didn’t even hope to free myself from Silvano. I had tried once, two years previously, partly as a result of a conversation with Giotto. The painful memory came up unbidden and unwanted, and showed how sorrow was woven into even the brightest tapestries of my life.

It had been an entirely spontaneous attempt at freedom. One afternoon I was out trailing Giotto from a small distance, ducking furtively behind people and rocks and carriages so I didn’t bother the Master, when a tall man with a sweet face and lively eyes suddenly pounced up.

“See here, boy, why do you slink around after the Magnus Magister? Are you planning to empty his pocket?” The man’s dark eyes danced as his hands held my shoulders firmly.

“No, sir!” I yelped. “I like to watch Master Giotto. I learn things.”

“You learn things? What is it you want to learn?” the man asked, releasing me abruptly.

“Everything, I guess,” I said, shrugging.

“Everything? A lofty peak to scale. What would be your motive for such an ascent?” He had a faint accent, as if he had come from Florence but didn’t live here.

“Why does anyone climb a mountain?” I responded, with some asperity because Giotto had moved on and I wanted to follow him. “To see the view!”

“To see the view indeed!” The tall man burst out laughing. “But don’t you think most people climb mountains simply to cross over them to the other side?”

“How would I know what most people do? I’m not most people, I’m me.” I straightened my mantello. “May I go now?”

“Yes, by all means, and I shall ponder your desire to ascend a great height merely to see what it has to offer!” He waved me on. I darted after Giotto. I didn’t find him at first, and when I did, he was standing with the tall man. Giotto spied me and waved me over.

“This young pup is a friend of mine,” Giotto said, clapping me on the shoulder. “Luca, this is my friend Petrarca.”

“A fine protégé”—Petrarca winked at me—“whose great desire is to learn everything!”

“I thought your great desire was for freedom, Luca,” Giotto teased.

“Yes, that is what I want,” I said, softly. “More than anything!”

Giotto laughed and ruffled my hair. “Go on about your rascally ways, then, and pursue freedom with all your heart! The Lord knows you deserve to have what your heart longs for.”

Something about Giotto’s affection, and his words, and Petrarca’s approval, set me mindlessly ablaze with thoughts of freedom. Heedless of the consequences, I threw myself onto a peddler’s cart going out of the city. Two condottieri who frequented Silvano’s saw me right away. They hauled me out of the cart and dragged me back to Silvano’s, hoping for a reward.

“Take your choice of my workers, on the house.” Silvano waved, though he never offered his wares for free. He smiled. “This was very naughty, Luca! Simonetta, bring me Bella. And my knife.”

“What do you want with Bella, sir?” I whispered, fear hardening my stomach.

“She’s a pretty child, isn’t she, Luca? Rather like little Ingrid who worked here years ago, with the big blue eyes and milky white skin. Though Bella’s not blond. There she is.” Silvano nodded. We stood in the carpeted foyer. It was daylight outside, but the windows were sheathed in heavy brocades, so the only light came from candles set in sconces on the wall. Bella was about seven years old, dressed in a sleeveless yellow camicia with her slender white arms bare and her brown hair unbound, as if she’d been sleeping.

“Bella, Luca here has done a very bad thing,” Silvano said, taking his knife from Simonetta. Bella peeped at Silvano out of her sky-blue eyes. “He must be taught a lesson.” Silvano raised Bella’s hand to his lips. Then he held her hand out and extended her index finger. With his other hand, swiftly, he swiped his knife into her finger, and it popped off. Bella and I shrieked as blood spurted from the stump at her knuckle. Simonetta bowed her head, covering her face with her hands as her shoulders shook.

“No, no,” screamed Bella, thrashing, trying to pull free from Silvano’s grasp.

“Yes,” Silvano said, holding out her thumb. “See, Luca doesn’t care so much about his own life and limb.” Silvano swiped his knife again, and Bella’s thumb flew off. “He cares about other children, though, don’t you, Luca?”

“Please, stop hurting her,” I begged, sobbing. “Hurt me instead!”

“Wouldn’t work, and I need you whole to sell to the Church,” Silvano said, panting like a man in the throes of lust. He extended her middle finger, though she tried to curl it and begged pitifully for him to stop.

“Please kill me.” I writhed on the ground in a pool of Bella’s blood. “Bella, I’m so sorry!”

“This is tiresome,” Silvano muttered, and a quick slash of his knife left a gaping hole in Bella’s throat. It was a relief to watch the blank hand of death wipe her soul out of her eyes. “Luca, learn from this. If you ever try to escape, I will kill another worker, and I won’t go easy on her, the way I did with Bella.” He stepped away, wiping his blade on his lucco. “Simonetta, clean this mess. And you can go back out, if you wish, Luca,” he called airily.

It was the one memory concerning Giotto that held anguish for me, and Bella’s murder led me to forbid myself the whole notion of escape, of freedom. I even stopped inquiring about foreigners with a Cathar connection who might have lost a baby. It wasn’t Giotto’s fault, of course, and I found great joy in all my other recollections of him. Only a few months before his death, he’d shown me a panel he’d painted for the nuns of San Giorgio. He’d ushered me before the painting and said nothing until I yelped with delight.

“He has my face! That’s me!” I said, pointing to a boy in the corner, a reverent onlooker.

“A man who knows himself will go far in life.” Giotto laughed.

“I’m not worthy,” I murmured.

“Of course you’re worthy. Better your face than that of any of my children or grandchildren. We’re not a lot that God has blessed with beauty, my wife and me least of all.” He rolled his eyes in mock despair. “At least we’re a good match for each other, eh? I don’t know what you’ll do for a wife, Luca. There are few women whose beauty will match your looks. It’s a great blessing you’ve been given, though you don’t seem to value it.”

“You have a greater blessing: you create beauty,” I had replied softly, happy to hear him mention a wife for me, as if I were as worthy as anyone else in marriage-obsessed Florence. So I’d started to think about how I might one day earn the love of a wife, what I could do to deserve her. It became a secret motivation of mine.

In our last meeting, Giotto and I walked in the heart of Florence around the octagonal Baptistery with its colorful robe of bright marble. He recited from Dante’s
Paradiso
: “That which dies not and that which can die are nothing but the splendor of that Idea which our Sire, in Loving, begets; for that living Light which so streams from its shining Source that…of its own goodness gathers the beams, as it were mirrored, in nine subsistences, remaining forever one.”

“That’s beautiful, but I don’t understand it, how three or nine can be one,” I said. I stopped to admire the facade’s geometrical green-and-white patterns. They were encrusted with the finest white Carrara marble and with green serpentine stone that Giotto had told me was “verde di Prato.”

“My old friend admired this ancient building, which was a Roman temple devoted to Mars. It’s so exquisite that we can’t let it alone, but keep making changes to it.” Giotto smiled and stroked his beard. “Arnolfo di Cambio added the striped facing to the corner pilasters, and its precise forms are perfectly in keeping with the rhythms of the wall surface.” He ran his hand along a stripe, then turned to me. “Don’t fret over Dante’s poetry, pup. You’re intelligent, you can think about it, and much will reveal itself to you; that’s the beauty of his art. He’s talking about the nine orders of angels, and how all creation, everything, whether mortal or immortal, is a form of love streaming like light from the mind of God. Dante thought of God as light.”

“But how can creation, the world, be so filled with evil, if it’s a form of love? Unless the evil is God’s joke. You told me that God laughs, remember? That day on the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, when I held a broken stick to fight the noble boys,” I said, earnestly. “The day you told me about ingegno. I never forgot that, and have always tried to live up to your advice.”

Giotto’s gray brows rose. “My words made a great impression, though they were scant.”

“They were nourishing words!”

“They fell on fertile ground,” Giotto replied swiftly. He gave me an inscrutable look, and then, as if a haze cleared, I knew what kind of look it was: one of respect.

“Dante’s ideas about light make more sense to me than what he says about love,” I said, coloring. “I think it pleases God’s merciless humor to be reflected in beauty and art, and those are the brothers of light. Like light glows in the marble of St. John’s Baptistery, and you render light in your paintings.”

“Dilemmas, God’s humor, art as the brother of light…you come out with the strangest ideas. Keep them to yourself, pup. A man with these notions could run into trouble. At least you’re getting taller. You don’t look so obviously different, though people will always notice your beauty. I don’t want people talking about you.”

I was taller, and I finally looked older, like boys who were eleven. My body hadn’t matured enough to match my years, but even a little aging allayed my alarm. Silvano still taunted me with “sorcerer” and “freak,” and he inspected my chest regularly for something that never showed up, which irritated him. But Giotto had noticed me changing, and I was pleased by it. As I stood at his grave, I remembered the flush of pleasure his notice had brought. I repeated aloud the words he had quoted from his friend’s poem. I hoped they were together in paradise, laughing and joking as Giotto was wont to do. If there was any good in God, He would prize beauty and light, and Giotto’s rendering of those things should admit him directly to heaven.

A few months later, after the harvest had been brought in, when the small second figs were being served on tables and the city was cooling into autumn, Simonetta bore Silvano a son. He called a priest who frequented the establishment to baptize the infant, which was proof that enough florins gifted to the Church would buy anyone anything, even a solemn baptism of the bastard son of a murderous brothel keeper. The babe was called Nicolo, and even as a newborn his features mimicked his father’s: he had a narrow, thrusting chin and a tiny sharp nose.

Simonetta was much weakened from a difficult confinement, and Silvano was so pleased with her that he retired her to quarters of her own in the private wing. He would never let her leave, of course; the only way out of his brothel was death, we all knew that. He brought in another woman to take her place. She was a taciturn foreigner with high cheekbones, slant eyes, and thick arms and legs. She spoke little of the language and that only badly, and I didn’t like her. She grabbed roughly where Simonetta had always directed with a quiet word or gesture. Still, I was happy for Simonetta. She had left the work without being killed. I snuck to her room to visit her, though it was forbidden for us to enter the private wing. I relied on my senses to alert me to Silvano’s approach. Those senses were increasingly, unnaturally keen. I always knew where in the palazzo Silvano was. As time went on, I even knew where in the city he was. I would simply get still and empty, and an image would shimmer into my mind like a reflection coming onto the river as it calmed. I would see a piazza or a bottega or a mercato, and I would know with certainty that Silvano was there. It was as if my fear and hatred linked me to him so palpably that I could always perceive him, no matter where or how far away he was.

So the years continued. The work stayed the same but I seemed immune to it, as I was immune to time and illness. I lived in a kind of abeyance that felt natural to me because it was all that I knew. I was infirm only when I’d been beaten. Even then I recuperated rapidly. Once I was attacked outside the brothel. It was in the midst of the bankruptcies of the London branches of the Bardi and Peruzzi companies and the collapse of the smaller banks, which caused many merchants and small manufacturers of woolen cloth to go out of business. To add to the unrest, Tuscan crops were sparse. Florentines grew surly, angry, and fearful. Business was bad for everyone except Silvano, whose trade always flourished. I went one day to the church of Ognissanti near the Arno to look at the altarpiece, a Madonna and child painted by Giotto. The beautiful Madonna exuded a palpable spiritual gravity, while the baby Christ with his hand upraised in blessing was tender and sad, regal and graceful and open. Giotto had used colors of fabrics from the markets of Florence, which gave the Madonna a sweetly everyday feel. I stumbled out of the Ognissanti church as if my heart had been pierced, so powerful was Giotto’s art. I bumped into a man, who snarled and shoved me away.

“Mi scusi, signore,”
I murmured, and then recognized him as one of my early customers, a merchant who traded in the silks of Cathay.

“Wait! I know you,” he snapped. He was a lean man with a stoop whose black hair had grayed since he’d left off giving Silvano his business. His eyes narrowed. “Are you still at Silvano’s? That’s been ten years…. you’ve barely aged! You should be a man now, long since discarded by Bernardo Silvano!”