Pilgrim (21 page)

I didn’t touch myself. I only made an adjustment. It was uncomfortable.

Are you going to smoke that cheroot?

Yes. Absolutely.

Jung reached out, placed the cheroot in his mouth and lighted it.

To paraphrase your famous friend—ex-friend—Doctor Freud:
sometimes a cheroot is just a cheroot.

Stop that. This is not phallic.

That’s what I said.

You were implying…Listen. I am not aroused by the seduction of young men. End of insinuation.

But she’s not a young man. She’s a young woman.

I’m still not aroused.

Then you’re not normal.

“Oh, please shut up!”

There you go, talking out loud again.

Very well. Since you won’t leave me alone, I shall now continue reading and I will discover exactly what’s going on in this god-damned journal—and why!

Silence.

Except for the riffling of pages.

Then, a sound of satisfaction.

Here.

A gown of sorts—more than likely a costume…

A gown of sorts—more than likely a costume—was thrown in her direction. She was told to put it on and reminded in a tone that verged on disgust that Leonardo had no interest in her body unless he chose to study it for anatomical reasons.

Wear that.

The girl stood up as best she could and turned her back on him. She had never been exposed in such a fashion to a man’s gaze.

The gown perhaps had been worn by one of Leonardo’s young men at Carnival before the advent of Savonarola. It was blue and covered with stars—the stars cut from paper, silvered and pasted on the fabric in patterns that echoed the constellations: Orion’s belt at the waist, the Pleiades across the breast, Cassiopeia’s Chair all down the back and around the hem, the Milky Way. If she had not been so afraid and so tired, she would have admired it—spoken, even, of its apparently joyful nature. But not now.

Instead, once she had draped herself in this unlikely garment, she turned and directed her gaze at the figure who now stood, rigid, staring out of the window.

Finally, she lifted her head.

Will you allow me to speak?

Silence.

Let me tell you who I am. Why I have come here as I have…

Her voice faltered. Her hands held the gown more tightly.

Leonardo neither moved nor spoke. The only sound came from the fireplace. An angry crackling.

I beg you, let me try, at least, to explain. And to tell about Angelo.

Finally, one word was uttered, tight-lipped.

Speak.

And the story was told.

Angelo was my twin brother.

Our father…

It doesn’t matter why—but I hated him. There’s no point trying to disguise the fact or to hide it. There it was—my hatred. It remains. It became a kind of stone in my hand. All my life, I hated men. Hated them—all but one. My Angelo.

My Angelo. My angel.

An angel from Hell! And how I loved him for it. Worshipped his wickedness. His wildness. His delight in mischief.

That was really all it was. A delightful—a delicious sense of mischief.
Let’s have some fun!
he would say.

And one of our ways of having fun was dressing up in one another’s clothes. He was—oh!—so beautiful. He made a lovely girl.

Not
lovely
. No. That isn’t good enough. His beauty was so remarkable, he could sit dead still in a group of other “girls” and command a whole roomful of men. He delighted in this game. He made a far, far better girl than I—and I made a far, far better boy than he.

It is true. It was true.

There was something in the way we played the game that brought the perfect other into focus. Perhaps it was not even conscious. It was just the way we were.

It was not until we started wearing one another’s clothes that I understood the liberty men must feel wearing hose and doublet. I could move, at last!

And, oh! To see oneself! Not to be hidden. Not to be masked.

To be seen!

There, before me in the glass, were my legs! My feet!

They were beautiful—elegant, shapely—and
visible!

Whereas, from Angelo’s point of view, when he dressed as me it gave him an opportunity to hide, and to move at his own pace—not to feel compelled to run in order to keep up. Not to be forced to adopt
a manly pose
.

At first, it was only a game—and truly a game. No one saw us but the looking-glass. And no one knew but the clothes themselves.

And then, one day when we were dressed as one another, a kind of craziness took possession of us. It was as though the game itself was daring us to play it before an audience. It was springtime—the wild time when anything mad and wonderful can happen. The swallows were returning and the air above Florence was alive with them—thousands—thousands of them, all of them circling above our heads and all of them calling down:
come out! Come out and dance with us in the sky!
All the windows had been opened and all the trees in the gardens were in bloom and Angelo said:
it is time for us to show ourselves in the streets.

“But people will notice,” I said. “They’ll know.”

“How? How will they know? Most of them will be
strangers—and anyone who’s met us will assume I’m you and you’re me.”

He pulled me towards the glass and made me stand beside him.

“Look,” he said, “and tell me. If you didn’t know—would you know?”

This made me laugh. And it became the motto of our game:
if you didn’t know—would you know?

I confess. It was true. Even I could believe I was seeing myself beside myself.

And when I saw myself that day—whenever that day was—I felt a waking-up—a surge of self-assurance I’d never known before. A surge of
swagger
, if you like, that I’d never felt as Betta. Never. But as
Angelo
, inside myself I felt myself become my
self
as never before. It was here—just here in the solar plexus—and it made a knot and it gave off waves of power that as a girl—a woman—I had never known.

Our palazzo is on one of the steeper hills looking down on the city. It was an easy walk to the Campo di Santa Maria Della Salute, where everyone tended to gather and from which we could see the river. Angelo kept telling me to slow down. I was so excited, I could barely contain myself.

The streets, whether wide or narrow, were always crowded, but now there was such an abundance of people, dogs and horses it seemed the whole of Florence was suffering spring fever.

“You’re walking on the wrong side,” I told him. “You should be on my left and two paces behind me.”

Angelo turned to me and curtsied. “Forgive me, Signor,” he said. “It will never happen again.”

We made the adjustment just as we entered the Campo.

There were street musicians playing on the porches of Santa Maria Della Salute, but we could barely hear them for the choirs of swallows and the festive crowd. All the dogs had decided to bark and the sound of this was joyous instead of alarming.

I never, never, never wanted to return to womanhood. I could run, if I chose. I could leap on the balustrade and shout out verses. I could clap another man on the back and receive his hand in return. I could show my leg and lift the skirts of my doublet to expose my backside to the world—and none would know I was not a man.

Presently, I became aware of a voice that was near enough behind us to make itself heard above the others.

“There’s a back for you,” it said. “A Donatello back. A David.”

A man was speaking.

“Yes,” said another voice—a younger voice. “A good back and decent shoulders. Enticing.”

“You know him?” asked the first voice.

“I might, if I could see his face. He does have a certain familiar look about him.”

Both voices fell silent.

Who had they been talking about?

Whose back? Whose
Donatello back?

I glanced to my left, past Angelo’s profile—my
mirror-self—and I saw that a small knot of men and youths was gathered there.

Amongst them—and seemingly the centrepiece of their group—was a tall, red-headed and bearded man in a velvet hat. He was staring right at me.

I had never felt the impact of such a glance before that moment. Clearly, he was smitten with me—but with a hint of danger, somehow, playing through his gaze, as if one moment he wanted to bed me and the next to strike me—in the way a person might strike an insolent youngster.

I felt a shiver go down my back. My neck froze. I could not look away. It was both astonishing and dreadful—thrilling and frightening. I couldn’t tell what I was feeling, because no single feeling except a sense of awe would settle. My mind flew into pieces and I seemed to have no knowledge of how to recollect them.

The man was surrounded by six or seven youths of extraordinary beauty and arrogance, who glanced at me and forced themselves to look away. It was enough that their master had seen me—for the man was, undoubtedly, somehow their master. They were like graceful Borzoi hounds—long-legged and maned with luxuriant, curling hair. Three or four older men—though younger than the master—stood closest to him and one of these was known to me. Antonio Pelligrini, who was the son of one of the merchants in my father’s guild.

Would he recognize us in our reversed roles—or would he simply remark on our similarity to the children of a certain silk merchant?

I took a step away from the iron rails and sought the shadows of the arches. But to no avail. He had seen us both and he knew us.

Yet, it was me he named.

He gestured in my direction and I heard him say to the master: “that is young Angelo Gherardini. He is with his sister, Elisabetta.”

I wanted to shout out:
I am his sister! That one there is Angelo!

And I wanted, too, to shout at the master with the hungry eyes:
stop looking at me like that! I want to be left alone!

But of course I said nothing. Not a word.

Antonio Pelligrini turned his back on me in order to speak more privately to the master, but this did not prevent the master from continuing his perusal of my whole being—inch, I could see, by inch.

I saw him finger his beard—consider his answer—then shake his head. When this was done, he took Antonio’s arm and led him away. They were followed by their clutch of brilliant youths. “Who were they?” I whispered to Angelo. “Who can those men have been? And the man in the hat—who was he?”

I was shaking.

Angelo had paid no attention throughout the whole scene and could not answer.

But a friar who had overheard me, smiled and said: “you may never look on his like again, young man. That was Leonardo—the greatest artist of our time.”

Leonardo.

Yes.

You. You had seen me. Your eyes had eaten me alive.

He died, my Angelo. He died of the plague that followed last year’s flood.

And when my beloved Angelo was dead, I vowed that I would take his place in the world and become what he might have become—an artist, a great horseman, a musician—even a soldier! I didn’t care, so long as I wasn’t relegated to the role demanded of my sex. To be less—to be commanded—to be forever degraded and never heard was intolerable to me. You must understand, it was my curse to be born a woman. I always, always wanted to be a man.

In my room, I would put on my brother’s clothing. My cat, Cornelia, would lie on my bed and watch me transform myself from Betta to Angelo. I would stuff my hair down my back and put on one of Angelo’s caps. I flattened my breasts and wore red hose as a sign of rebellion and put on boots that reached my calf.

I was shameless. I secured a cod piece inside my undergarments to give the impression of total masculinity. It was glorious.

And Cornelia would purr and purr and purr until she was singing. And in the night, while the others were in their beds, I would go out into the streets and walk like a man, unencumbered by the weight of skirts and free to move my arms however I pleased.

And it was in this garb—I refuse to call it a disguise—it was in this garb that I decided to encounter
you for a second time. But I needed help. And I remembered hearing that one of Angelo’s boyhood friends had become one of your…young friends. I was still naïve enough not to understand that men could love men. It was simply something I’d never been told. So I dressed in Angelo’s clothes and I sought this young man out—Alfredo Strazzi. I did not inform him of Angelo’s death and he accepted me as my brother. I think he truly believed. That was my impression. And he also accepted that I did not want to come alone to your studio. I understand now that he must have known about you and Angelo—but he said nothing. He must have assumed that there had been an estrangement of some kind—and that what I wanted from you was reconciliation—if I had been Angelo—but I am not.

I don’t really know why I felt compelled to achieve this meeting with you. All I can say is, I had never been able to completely erase the sight of your hungry eyes—and the awe in which others held you as if you were a god.

Jung stared at the page.

It was now one-thirty in the morning.

A bird sang. Once—and then again. A nightingale?

Jung stretched his arms above his head, wiped his eyes, adjusted his glasses and bent again above the book.

Leonardo had fallen into an impersonal, almost clinical mood, cold and devoid of emotion. He spoke
without inflection, questioning her almost in the manner of a doctor, or perhaps a lawyer enumerating statistics.
Your name? Your age? How old was your brother Angelo when he died?

Betta Gherardini.

Eighteen now, and nineteen in June.

Eighteen.

Are you betrothed?

No. But there are suitors.

Are you a virgin?

This was said meanly, with a smile, as if to be a virgin was the lowest one could sink.

Of course.

Of course? What a curious thing to say at your age—given the times we live in.