Secrecy (7 page)

‘I’m not sure how to begin.’ Jacopo’s tongue shifted inside his mouth, as if he had eaten something that had gone off, then his head lunged in my direction. ‘First your obsession with making parts of people’s bodies, and now these – these
practices
of yours …’

I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘What did I tell you, Father?’ Jacopo said. ‘Not even a flicker of remorse.’

The priest stepped forwards. He spoke quietly, and his face had curdled, like milk left in the sun. He used the word ‘
abomination
’.

I glanced at my mother, then my aunt. They seemed entirely passive, in a trance, perhaps because this was a familiar voice, a commanding voice, a voice that delivered homilies and granted absolution.

Jacopo took over. ‘He’s going to be tried, found guilty, and thrown into prison, and the good name of this family – this noble family – will be dragged through the dirt. Never again will we be able to hold up our heads in this town –’

‘But what
is
it?’ Aunt Flaminia broke in at last. ‘What has he
done
?’

Jacopo turned to the women with an expression of mingled horror and supplication, as though he had been entrusted with the most terrible knowledge, and was only keeping it to himself in order to protect them.

‘Father?’ he said in a cracked voice.

At times, truly, I thought Jacopo had missed his vocation. Forget the military: he should have pursued a career on the stage.

Once again, the priest began to murmur. This time, he was more specific. This time he mentioned carnal knowledge of the dead.

‘Jacopo,’ my mother said, ‘there must be some mistake –’

Jacopo leaned over her. ‘We have
witnesses
.’ He turned to me, the muscles knotting and flexing in his jaw. ‘You know, I could kill you for this. I could kill you right now –’ As he went to draw his sword, Padre Paone placed a hand on his upper arm.

I still hadn’t said a word in my defence. Maybe I sensed that things had already progressed beyond that point. Also, I was mesmerized by Jacopo’s performance. He had spoken with such conviction that I had even begun to doubt myself.
Had
I done something terrible? I touched my forehead; my fingers came away wet. And anyway, my innocence couldn’t be verified. How do you prove that something
didn’t happen
? It had been so clever of Jacopo to bring Padre Paone along. A stroke of genius, really. After years of studying with the Jesuits, I was hardly about to accuse the church of lying. All I could do was hold my tongue.

I stared at the wedge of sunlight near my feet until it began to resemble a crevasse into which I might disappear. If Jacopo were to do away with me, my guilt would become a fact, since there would be no one left to tell my side of the story. He would remove the need either to press charges or to provide evidence. He would be held up as the saviour of the family’s honour. A pillar of the community. I lifted my eyes from the ground, and all I could see for a few long moments was a pulsing triangle of violet and green. My only option was to flee.

I rolled over on to my back. I had eluded Jacopo, but now I had the likes of Bassetti to contend with – Bassetti, whose record of serving the ruling family for more than three decades testified to his statecraft, his guile and his resilience. Whenever I ran into Bassetti, he was pleasantness itself, and yet, even during our first meeting, I thought I had sensed something else in him – something slippery, reptilian. Then, on the night of the banquet, the façade had slipped. Gone was the avuncular Bassetti. And in his place? An impatient man. A fractious man. There was more than a hint of ruthlessness as well.
We’ve got plenty of other things to deal with.
I suspected that his career had been built on the misfortunes of others, misfortunes he himself engineered and would, at the same time, deny all knowledge of. I had to avoid drawing attention to myself – I should live quietly, work hard – but, like Ornella, I seemed to provoke people; I was often misinterpreted, misjudged. I would have to be ingenious, I realized, if I were to survive in this city, where scheming and machination were second nature. Though ingenuity might not be enough. I would have to be lucky too.

The wind rose again. Trees roared; roof-tiles rattled. Bracing myself against the cold, I got out of bed and had a last piss in my chamber pot.

Tramontana
.

That was the name of the wind.

The following week, as I was leaving my lodgings, I heard somebody call my name. Cuif was peering out of his top-floor window, his face a distant, pale oval. He had been working on his comeback, he told me, then laughed the somewhat hysterical laugh of a person who doesn’t see anybody from one end of the day to the other. He had a new trick, he said. He wanted my opinion. I promised I would drop in later.

When I returned that evening, I found him perched on a high stool, scribbling in a ledger. It was damp in his room, and he had wrapped himself in a coat that appeared to be made from the crudely stitched skins of vermin.

‘I’ll be with you shortly,’ he said, his eyes fixed on the page, as if, like Galileo, he was engaged in work of great historical significance.

His voluntary imprisonment had mystified me at first. Now, though, I thought I was beginning to understand. In this tiny kingdom of his own devising, he could reconstruct himself. He was watching the world turn. Waiting for the ideal moment to make his entrance.

I wandered over to the shelf by the window. The
Frenchman
’s
library dealt more or less exclusively with his craft. There was a copy of
Rhetorical Exercises
by the original harlequin, Tristano Martinelli. He also had
A Choice Banquet of Tumbling and Tricks, The Anatomie of Legerdemain,
and
Wit and Mirth: an Antidote to Melancholy
. I began to leaf through the Martinelli. In his short book, he claimed to be revealing the secrets of his profession. He followed his obsequious dedication to an imaginary patron with four pages of teasing chapter titles and a further seven of illustrations. He left the remaining fifty-seven pages blank. It was an exercise in mockery and obfuscation. On a more serious level, though, I thought he was saying,
I’m not going to tell you
– or even,
It cannot be told.

‘Martinelli’s a big influence.’ Cuif was standing at my elbow, head inclined.

‘I didn’t hear you cross the room.’

Cuif smiled, then he opened a cupboard, took out two
long-stemmed
glasses with fluted sides and poked a forefinger into each of them in turn, removing the crisp bodies of dead insects.

‘Drink?’ he said.

We were halfway through a jug of rough red wine when I asked Cuif if he knew of somebody called Stufa.

He kept his eyes on his glass. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘No reason,’ I said. ‘I just heard the name somewhere.’

Cuif told me that Stufa acted as a spiritual adviser to the Grand Duke’s mother, Vittoria della Rovere. She was a daunting woman, he said. Always in black, of course. Eyes too close together. Ferocious temper.

I drew him back to the subject, asking how Stufa had acquired the position.

Vittoria had adopted Stufa when he was four, Cuif said. She had educated the boy herself, just as she had educated the Grand Duke, filling his head with stories of penance and
martyrdom
, and it was no great surprise when, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, he expressed the desire to enter the holy orders. She placed him in a Dominican monastery – in Bologna, Cuif thought, or Padua – where by a mixture of bribery and
intercession
he secured his master’s degree while still in his twenties. Every week he wrote to the Grand Duke’s mother – or
his
mother, as he now thought of her – and when he was in his
thirties
he returned to Florence so as to be of service to her. He joined the monastery of Santa Maria Novella as a librarian, but he also supplied Vittoria with religious texts, administered the holy sacraments and led her in prayer. It was said, in fact, that he was the only person who could handle her.

‘So he’s a Dominican,’ I said.

Cuif nodded.

Not a bald patch, then. A tonsure.

‘I sometimes think it might explain why he’s so prickly,’ Cuif said.

Ever since Savonarola had made an enemy of the Medici family, he went on, the Dominican order had been out of favour in Florence. When judges or inquisitors were needed, it was the Franciscans who were called on. To be a Dominican was to be in a minority of sorts, and vulnerable as well, to some extent, no matter how many influential friends one might have.

‘You know a lot,’ I said, ‘for somebody who never leaves his room.’

‘You think you’re my only visitor?

I smiled. ‘Before I go, would you show me your new trick?’

‘I already did.’

‘Did you? When?’

‘You missed it. You weren’t paying attention.’

‘Show me again.’

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Not now I’ve been drinking.’ He eyed me over the rim of his glass. ‘You’ll just have to come back, won’t you?’

One morning I found Signora de la Mar at the foot of the stairs, holding a package that was addressed to me. Some idiot had left it outside the back door, she said, and she had almost tripped over it on her way out. As I turned the package in my hands, I thought of the pistachio-coloured ankle-boots I had bought Fiore a month or two before, and how her face had lit up when she put them on.

‘How is Fiore liking her new shoes?’ I asked.

The signora rolled her eyes. ‘She practically sleeps in them.’

I didn’t open the package until I reached the privacy of my workshop. Inside, in a simple wooden box, was a halved
pomegranate
, the red seeds facing upwards. A thin glass bottle lay next to it. There was no note, no card – nothing to indicate the sender’s identity. To a Jesuit, the pomegranate had a symbolic value, since the seeds were believed to represent the drops of blood Christ shed when he wore the crown of thorns, but in a secular context it alluded to the tension that existed between secrecy and disclosure, and I knew instinctively, as soon as I saw it, that the package had come from the girl in the
apothecary
. What was in the bottle, though? I removed the stopper. I thought I could smell roses, but there was also a pungent element, something almost fiery, like a type of pepper. On returning to my lodgings that evening, I asked the signora if she could tell me what it was. She put her nose to the bottle, then straightened up. She had no idea. She had never smelled anything like it.

A day or two later, I called at an apothecary located in a shabby arcade on the south side of the Ponte Vecchio. The three men sitting by the window fell silent as I walked in.

‘Beanpole?’ one of them called out.

The woman who ran the place was so short that the top of her head was on a level with the counter. When I put the bottle down in front of her, she had to look round it to see me. I asked her if she’d be kind enough to identify the contents.

‘Is it yours?’ Her eyes were a bleary blue-black, like unwashed plums.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was a gift.’

I sensed the men behind me, craning to catch a glimpse of what I had brought.

The woman removed the stopper and inhaled once or twice. She muttered to herself; a smile drifted across her wrinkled face. She poured a few drops into a spoon, touched a finger to the clear, oily liquid, and tasted it.

‘Who gave it to you?’ she asked.

I hesitated.

‘Was it a woman?’

‘I think so.’

She nodded. ‘I can’t say I’m familiar with this particular recipe, but when I prepare my own concoctions, which are much in demand, especially among men of a certain age –’ she peered over the counter at her three clients, who shifted and chuckled on their chairs like chickens in the presence of a fox – ‘I tend to favour nettle seeds. Musk too, just a pinch. And –’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but what’s it
for
?’

She knocked the stopper back into the bottle with the heel of her hand. ‘In my opinion, it’s to increase your potency.’

This was so unexpected that I couldn’t, for a moment, think how to respond.

‘You anoint your parts with it,’ she said.

‘My parts,’ I said faintly.

‘Your root. Your yard.’ She paused. ‘Your pego.’

‘All right, Beanpole,’ one of the men said, laughing. ‘I think he’s got the point.’

I pocketed the bottle and made for the door.

‘She likes you, whoever she is,’ the man added as I left the shop.

‘Careful,’ said another.

On a dark February afternoon, I was summoned to the Grand Duke’s winter apartment. The wind was blowing hard again, and as I hurried across the courtyard at the back of the palace I thought I could smell the river, dank and green. I climbed a flight of stairs to the first floor. It was draughty up there as well; the tapestries, though heavy, were shifting on the walls.

When I was ushered into the Grand Duke’s presence, he was standing at the window, hands clasped behind his back. By his feet was a cockerel, a leather strap running from one of its legs to the leg of a nearby chair. Its comb trembled in the shadows like a small red flame.

‘I haven’t seen you at court,’ the Grand Duke said, staring out over the city. ‘At least, not recently.’

I told him I was sorry. I talked about my work, and how I tended to get lost in it.

‘I understand.’ He sighed. ‘I sometimes find the whole
business
rather tiresome myself.’

Only a few days earlier, while visiting my workshop, Pampolini had launched into a series of scurrilous jokes about the Grand Duke, jokes that referred to his Austrian lips, his sexual proclivities, and so on. Later, though, he had become more serious. In Pampolini’s opinion, Cosimo would have made a superb cardinal, but he didn’t have what it took to rule a duchy. It wasn’t his fault, Pampolini said. When he was growing up, his mother had surrounded him with priests – bigots like Volunnio Bandinelli – who taught him to treat the secular world with disdain.