Secrecy (27 page)

But Earhole was standing in front of me, his hands quite still. His lips had turned blue. ‘He knows me now. He knows who I am.’

I asked if he wanted to spend the night in my house. He said no. If he didn’t go home, his mother would fall asleep at the table – or, worse still, on the floor – and his niece would go hungry.

‘At least let me look at that leg,’ I said.

His right ankle had swollen to twice its normal size. I dressed it in a poultice of arnica and ice, and bound it tightly.

‘Can you walk?’

He put his weight on the injured foot and winced. ‘I’ll manage.’

I went out to the street with him. Toldo had been replaced by a soldier I didn’t know. A brooding feeling to the evening: a sky of soot, a red vent near the horizon. I watched Earhole hobble off up Via Romana, then I closed the gate and returned to my workshop.

Towards the end of February, I went to visit Cuif. It was a long time since I had seen the Frenchman, and I had missed his jaundiced opinions and his sardonic wit. There were several matters I needed to discuss with him. I had been thinking about Faustina’s description of her father riding – not literally, but as a metaphor. A perfect understanding, she had said. Harmony made visible. You had to harness yourself to the times you lived in. That was the secret. For every hidden thought or action, there had to be a corresponding thought or action that was apparent – and not only apparent, but harmless, mild. You had to wash over people’s minds as water washes over rocks, leaving them unchanged. This, I felt, was where I might have fallen down. Cuif, too, had made mistakes, though he might not be prepared to admit it. If pressed, though, I was sure he would have plenty to say on the subject. I also wanted to seek his advice. Without being too specific, I wanted to suggest that I had acquired certain information that could be used against Stufa. Did one need hard evidence in a city like Florence? Or would inference and
suspicion
be enough?

I crossed the small courtyard at the back of the House of Shells and climbed the stairs to the sixth floor. As usual, the last flight felt claustrophobic, and I was breathing hard by the time I arrived outside Cuif’s room. To my surprise, the door was open. I knocked anyway, then stepped inside. There was no sign of him in the first room, so I moved on through the archway. The second room was quite as monastic as the first, with a single round window and a straw pallet pushed against the wall. The cage holding the cricket hung from a hook above Cuif’s bed, but the mulberry leaf was gone, and had not been replaced. Though both rooms were unoccupied, I called his name. After all, this could be part of the act he had been working on: an open door, an empty room – a temporary invisibility … But no, he wasn’t there. I began to laugh. He wasn’t there! His moment had come at last, and he had gone out to take his rightful place in the world – and judging by his wash-bowl, which was overturned, and a dropped piece of clothing, he had left in a hurry, excited by the prospect of a new, untrammelled life.

Downstairs again, I found the signora sitting by an unlit fire, her back to me, a black shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Cuif wasn’t in his room, I said. Did she know where I could find him? She looked up. Her eyes were swollen.

‘He’s been arrested,’ she said.

I stared at her. ‘What for?’

‘Adultery.’

‘But that’s ridiculous –’

‘That’s what I said. They didn’t listen.’

If the Office of Public Decency was behind the arrest, as seemed likely, Bassetti would be involved. Stufa too. I hadn’t forgotten the box-like carriage with its barred windows and its soiled floor. Since I was employed by the Grand Duke, and had become part of his inner circle, they would find it difficult to target me directly, but they might have decided to make life uncomfortable for the people I knew and cared about, people who were far less well protected.

In ten minutes I was standing outside the Bargello, where the majority of civil offences were tried and sentenced, its high, blunt tower tilting against the sky, its walls dauntingly sheer and bristling with iron bolts. Two soldiers guarded the entrance. I asked if the Grand Duke’s secretary was inside. They didn’t answer, or even move, but merely regarded me with supercilious curiosity. When I repeated my question, the taller of the two men took a step towards me. ‘What’s it to you? Who are you, anyway?’

‘My name’s Zummo. I work for the Grand Duke.’

The tall soldier looked at his colleague. ‘Did you hear that? He works for the Grand Duke.’

‘Impressive,’ the second soldier said.

The tall soldier turned back to me. ‘You sound foreign.’

Cool air swirled out of the courtyard behind the two men, and I thought I smelled blood. I shivered at the implication.

The tall soldier addressed his colleague again. ‘Do
you
think he sounds foreign?’

‘He’s not from round here, that’s for sure,’ the second soldier said. ‘What did you say your name was? Zugo?’

The tall soldier guffawed. Zugo meant ‘simpleton’ – among other things.

‘Is the Grand Duke’s secretary here?’ I said patiently. ‘If he is, I need to see him. It’s urgent.’

‘We’re under strict instructions not to let anyone in,’ the tall soldier said.

‘I have to see Bassetti. Or Stufa. Whoever’s in charge.’

‘Didn’t you hear me, Zugo? No one’s allowed inside.’

‘Tell them I want to see them,’ I said in a loud, clear voice, ‘or I’ll go straight to the Grand Duke himself.’

Sighing, the tall soldier spoke to his colleague. ‘Tell them Zugo’s here.’

‘Zummo,’ I said. ‘The name’s Zummo.’

The second soldier set off across the wide, paved courtyard.

‘Satisfied?’ the tall one said.

I stood facing the street. The day brightened suddenly, the sky bleak and stringent, like the light on the blade of a knife.

Two more soldiers arrived. Scruffier and more thuggish than the pair on duty by the entrance, they marched me across the courtyard, through a door, and down a steep flight of stairs. The stone walls gleamed with damp, and greasy black fumes uncoiled from the tallow lamps. I began to cough. The deeper we went, the clammier it became. I had been in the Bargello for no more than a few minutes, but the idea that a sun might be shining outside already seemed fantastical.

At last, when we were far underground, in a labyrinth of galleries and recesses that resembled a catacomb, one of the soldiers opened a door that was reinforced with horizontal metal bands. In front of me, on the far side of a wide room, Cuif was suspended in mid-air, his arms forming a triangle above his head, and it seemed for a moment that I had walked in during the execution of a daring somersault, a somersault so new he hadn’t showed it to me yet, but then I saw a burly, bald man in a leather apron stationed nearby, holding the end of a rope, and my stomach lurched. Cuif’s hands had been tied behind his back. A rope had then been looped through his bound wrists, and he had been hoisted to a height of about ten feet. His head hung limply on his neck. He appeared to have fainted.

Stufa lifted his eyes from the ledger he was studying. ‘This particular technique is known as the
garrucha
. Are you familiar with the
garrucha
?’

His abrasive whisper matched the surroundings perfectly. I didn’t answer.

‘It’s Spanish,’ he went on. ‘You make sure the rope is taut, then you jerk it suddenly, which causes instant and often severe dislocation of all the joints in the upper body.’ He smiled. ‘Would you like a demonstration?’

‘Not necessary,’ I said.

‘Is there anything you can tell us that might spare him further pain?’

‘About what?’

‘About his immoral behaviour. Why else would he be here?’ Stufa exchanged a look with the bald man in the apron. Their faces were smooth, comfortable, expressionless.

‘But that’s a fabrication,’ I said. ‘What’s the real charge?’

Stufa’s head came up sharply. ‘Are you saying he’s guilty of something else?’

‘I’m saying he’s not an adulterer.’

‘You think our intelligence is false?’

Once again, I didn’t answer. Probably I had already said too much.

‘You look a bit off colour.’ Stufa turned and signalled to his crony. ‘All right. That’s enough.’

Rather than lower Cuif to the ground, the bald man simply let go of the rope. Cuif dropped through the air and landed in a crumpled heap. The bald man bent down and freed Cuif’s wrists. Cuif cried out every time he was touched.

‘I don’t know what it is about the French,’ Stufa said. ‘They don’t seem to have any backbone.’ He closed his ledger. ‘You can take him away.’

I crossed the room. Cuif lay in a pool of blood and urine. It was obvious that he couldn’t stand, let alone walk. Bending over, I took hold of one of his arms and heaved him up on to my back. His shriek was so loud that it rebounded off the wall like something solid. Shocked at how little he weighed, scarcely more than a child, I had no choice but to ignore his groans and whimpers as I carried him up the stairs and out into the open air. The soldiers on duty at the entrance smirked as we passed. Ignoring them, I set off along the street. The sky had a strange, muted dazzle to it, the winter sun lighting the white cloud cover from behind; I felt as if hours had gone by. I talked to Cuif in a low voice, telling him that he was with me now, and that he was going to be all right, but he lost consciousness several times on the way to Santa Maria Nuova, even though it was close by.

When I laid him on the slab in Pampolini’s operating theatre, his face was paler than the marble, and I was afraid he might already be dead. Pampolini used a pair of scissors to cut off the jacket, shirt and breeches. Cuif’s shoulders had been wrenched out of their sockets, and his right kneecap was shapeless, a mass of congealing blood and shattered bone.

‘Can you do anything for him?’ I said.

‘Not much. Even if he lives, I doubt he’ll walk again.’

‘I don’t want to live,’ Cuif murmured.

I leaned down close. ‘Don’t say that. You’ll be fine. You’re in good hands.’

Pampolini asked Earhole to fetch the dwale. It was a tincture made from henbane, mandragora, hemlock, mulberry juice and pape, he told me. It would put Cuif to sleep. After that, he would see what he could do. He filled a spoon with the brown liquid, lifted Cuif’s head and tipped the contents into his mouth.

I glanced at Earhole. ‘How’s the ankle?’

‘Much better, thanks.’

‘This man was one of the great entertainers of his age,’ I said. ‘His somersaults were legendary. I was lucky enough to watch him once, rehearsing in his room. But now they have destroyed him …’

‘They?’ Earhole said. ‘Who?’

Pampolini frowned. ‘Never you mind.’

I left Cuif with Pampolini, asking that the Frenchman be given the best available care and promising to cover all expenses. On my way home, I called in at the House of Shells to let the signora know what had happened. She began to cry again, her face buried in one of her elaborately embroidered shawls.

By the time I opened my front door, I was close to tears myself. A lighted candle wavered in a red glass lantern, and dark pink roses floated in a bowl that stood on a low table by the wall, but the air still smelled of my mother’s poultices and potions. My house had become a shrine to her distress.

‘Who’s that?’ she called out.

I put my head round the door. ‘It’s me.’

She was sitting up in bed, shuffling a pack of miniature cards.

‘Where’s Jacopo?’ she said.

‘He died, mother. In the earthquake.’

Her face emptied; the cards fell still between her fingers. The simplest exchanges were fraught with confusion and
misunderstanding
.

Then a brightness flooded back into her face, and she looked younger, almost girlish. ‘How’s your work going?’

‘I didn’t work today,’ I said.

She reached for her tumbler of
acquerello
. When she had taken a sip, she put the tumbler back on the bedside table and looked at me again, a smile precariously balanced on her lips, her eyes an eerie, bewildered pale-brown.

‘And what about your work, Gaetano? How’s it going?’

She could ask the same question three or four times in a single conversation, but since she seemed unaware of the fact that she was repeating herself it made no sense to point it out, and I tended to treat each new repetition as an original remark. I told her my work was going well. She needed to be reassured that things were stable.

That week I had trouble sleeping. One night, I was woken in the small hours by a terrible screaming. What a wind, I thought. I couldn’t remember hearing anything like it, not even on Ponza in 1688, when I was trapped on the island by a storm. It occurred to me to go outside and inspect the damage – I
imagined
trees uprooted, shattered roof-tiles, boats ripped from their moorings – but just as I was about to leave my bed a silence fell, and I heard the murmur of voices in the distance. These would be people like me, I thought, people who had been woken by the gale.

The next morning, as I walked down the track to my
workshop
, I came across Navacchio, supervising the trimming of a hedge. When I talked about the wind, he looked nonplussed.

‘You couldn’t have slept through it,’ I said. ‘No one could.’

Navacchio pinched a large, flat earlobe between finger and thumb.

I looked past him, into the gardens. There were no fallen branches, no flattened shrubs. There was no debris of any kind.

‘Did you hear the news?’ Navacchio said.

‘What news?’

‘The Grand Duke’s mother’s dead.’

Though Vittoria della Rovere had never been popular, Florence plunged into an orgy of sorrow, remorse and penitence. The palace was draped in black silk, which snapped and rippled in the raw March breeze, and noble families hung tapestries from their windows, the rich fabrics dimmed by strips of funereal ribbon. The streets leading to San Lorenzo were choked with endless candle-lit processions, which brought that part of the city to a standstill. Church bells sounded at all hours of the day and night. The Grand Duke, who had rarely felt confident of his place in his mother’s affections, and who had been
ambivalent
, to say the least, about her constant interference in affairs of state, wept openly, refused to eat, and spent so long in prayer that both his knees swelled up and he could barely walk. Her passing also revived his anxieties about the succession. ‘No births,’ somebody heard him moan, ‘only death, death, death!’