The Birth of Venus (17 page)

Twenty-one

T
HE BODY ON SANTA TRINITÀ BRIDGE SPOKE AS MUCH OF
madness as blood lust. It was hanging from a post next to the small chapel, and by the time the monks discovered it the dogs were already halfway through their meal. Erila said the only mercy was that he would have been dead by the time his body was disemboweled, though it was hard to know that for sure, since even if he had screamed as his intestines unraveled, the gag in his mouth would have muted the worst of it. The scavengers must have arrived soon after the murderer left, because by the time we got there—the news reached the market soon after first light; all we had to do was follow the flow—what remained of his insides was already on the cobbles. The watchmen had beaten the dogs away by then, though the wildest of them were still loitering, heads down, bellies crouched to the ground, feigning disinterest, their paws twitching with energy. At one point as the crowd gathered, one of them streaked in from the side, snatching a piece of offal between his snapping jaws before a kick landed him, yowling but still attached to his prize, halfway across the bridge.

The watchmen were almost as rough with the crowd, but it was impossible to keep people away. Erila held us well to the back, her arm linked tightly with mine. While she found my curiosity alarming, that was more to do with the trouble it might get her into than any faintheartedness on her part; had she been there alone she would already have wormed her way to the front. As for me: well, of course the sight of that ravaged body turned my stomach—I had been so sheltered at my parents’ home I had never even seen a public execution—but I made myself get over it. I had not come this far in the pursuit of freedom to be sent whimpering home at the first sign of blood or violence. Anyway, despite the sweetness of my sex, I was indeed curious, if curious is the right word. . . .

“Don’t you see, Erila,” I said to her urgently, “this is now the fifth.”

“The fifth what?”

“The fifth body since the death of Lorenzo.”

“What d’you mean?” she said, clicking her tongue at me. “People die on the streets every day. You just have your head sunk too far into books to notice.”

“Not like this. Think about it: the girl in Santa Croce, the couple in Santo Spírito whose bodies were moved to Impruneta, and then the boy by the Baptistery three weeks ago. Each killed in or near a church and each mutilated in some awful way. There has to be a connection.”

She laughed. “How about sin? Two tarts, one client, a sodomite, and a pimp. Maybe they were all on their way to confession. At least whoever did this one saved the priests an earful.”

“What do you mean? Do you know him?”

“Everybody knows him. Why d’you think there’s such a crowd here? Marsilio Trancolo. Anything you want, Trancolo can get it for you. Or he could. Wine, dice, women, men, young boys—he had a stock of all of them ready, at the right price. Florence’s most prominent procurer. From what I heard he’s been working overtime for the last two weeks keeping the foreigners supplied. Well, he’ll be in good company in hell now, that’s for sure. Hey!” she yelled, taking a swipe at a man who had careered into us in his eagerness to get closer to the front. “Watch where you put your hands, scum.”

“Then move your black snatch out of the way,” he shouted, shoving her back. “Slut. We don’t need women of the Devil’s color on our streets. Watch your step or you’ll be next for his knife.”

“Not before your balls are hanging alongside the Medici crest,” she muttered, as she started to push me out through the back of the crowd.

“But Erila—”

“But nothing. I told you, this is no place for a lady.” She was angry now, so it was hard to tell her concern from fear. “If your mother found out she’d have me strung up on the post next to him.”

She maneuvered us off the bridge. The crowd thinned out along the river, then grew again as we crossed down into the Piazza della Signoria. In the days after the French left, the square had been heaving with citizens eager to vote in the new government, with Savonarola its ruler in all but name. Now his supporters were sitting grandly inside the Town Hall, formulating new laws by which they hoped to turn a godless city into a godly one. From the council chambers they would have a bird’s-eye view of Santa Trinità bridge. To have a lesson on the Devil’s punishment so close at hand would concentrate their minds wonderfully on the task before them.

OVER THE ENSUING DAYS, ERILA GREW IMPATIENT WITH MY HUNGER
for the streets. “I can’t be out with you every minute of the day. I’ve work to do in the house. And so have you if you are to become its mistress.” Of course, she was still angry with me for keeping my own counsel about my wedding night and was taking it out on me in small but powerful ways. She was not the only one. The servants watched me strangely now. In the opening days of my marriage I had playacted the role of the wife, inquiring about the accounts and ordering around anyone who would listen. But my lack of confidence betrayed me, and a household that had run for years without a wife did not take kindly to my childish interventions. There were times when I could almost hear them laughing at me behind my back, as if they knew about the tawdry game being played out for the benefit of my husband’s reputation.

To keep despair at bay I retreated to the library. Tucked under the loggia on the top floor, away from damp and flooding, it was the only room in the house that offered any real comfort. There must have been close to a hundred volumes here, dating back in some cases to the beginning of the century. The most extraordinary was a copy of the first translations of Plato by Ficino commissioned by Lorenzo de’ Medici himself, not least because inside I found a notation in an exquisite hand.

To Cristoforo, whose love of learning is almost as great as his love of beauty.

The date was 1477, the year before my birth. As the signature was a work of art in itself, who else could it have been but Lorenzo himself? I sat staring at the ink. Had Lorenzo lived, he would have been almost the same age as my husband. My husband’s knowledge of his court was greater than I had realized. If he ever came home, what conversations we might have about it!

I read a few chapters of the text, entranced by its provenance, but I am ashamed to say that while even a few months before its wisdom would have dazzled me, now such volumes of philosophy had the air of old men about them: venerable but having lost the energy to influence a world that had moved on from them.

From books I turned to art. Surely Botticelli’s evocation of Dante would still inspire. But the great cabinet in which my husband kept the portfolio was locked and when I called his servant for the key he denied all knowledge of it. Was it my imagination, or did he smirk at me as he said it?

He brought me richer news an hour later.

“You have a visitor, madam.”

“Who is it?”

He shrugged. “A gentleman. He didn’t give a name. He is waiting downstairs.”

My father? My brother? The painter? The painter . . . I felt a flush rise in me and got up quickly. “Show him into the receiving room.”

He was standing by the window, staring across the narrow street to the tower opposite. We had not seen each other since the night before my wedding, and if thoughts of him had ever strayed into my mind since then I had snuffed them out as firmly as altar candles capped at the end of mass. But now, in his presence again, I felt myself almost trembling as he turned to me. He did not look well. He was grown thin again. His complexion, always pale, was like goat’s cheese, and there were heavy circles under his eyes. His hands were stained dark with paint and I saw he was holding a roll of drawings wrapped in muslin. My drawings. I found it hard to breathe.

“Welcome,” I said, arranging myself carefully on one of my husband’s hard wooden chairs. “Won’t you sit down?”

He made a small noise, which I took to be a refusal since he stayed standing. What was it that kept us so nervous in each other’s company, the one as gauche as the other? What had Erila said to me once about the dangers of innocence over knowledge? Surely I was innocent no longer. And when I thought of the innards of the eviscerated man in his nighttime sketches, I knew that in some way or another neither was he.

“You are married,” he said at last, his almost sulky shyness back as his shield.

“Yes, I am.”

“In which case I hope I do not disturb you.”

I shrugged. “What is there to disturb? My days are my own now.” But I could not keep my eyes off the roll in his hand. “How is the chapel? You have started?”

He nodded.

“And? It goes well?”

He mumbled something I did not hear properly, then: “I . . . I brought you these,” he said, and thrust out the drawings awkwardly in front of him. As I put out my hand to take them I could feel it shaking slightly.

“You have looked at them?”

He nodded.

“And?”

“You understand I am no judge . . . but I think . . . I think that both your eye and your pen have truth about them.”

I felt a wild jump in my stomach, and though I know it is blasphemous to even think it, I felt for that moment as if I were Our Blessed Lady in the Annunciation, hearing news of such magnitude that it conjured up as much terror as joy. “Oh . . . you think so! . . . So you’ll help me?”

“I—”

“Oh, but don’t you see? I am married now. And my husband, who is solicitous for my well-being, would, I know, give permission for you to instruct me, show me techniques. Perhaps I might even assist you in the chapel. I—”

“No, no!” His alarm was as fierce as my excitement. “It’s not possible!”

“Why not? There are so many things you know, you—”

“No. You don’t understand!” His vehemence stopped me. “I cannot teach you anything.” And such was his horror that one might think I had propositioned him with some act of gross indecency.

“Is that cannot? Or will not?” I said coldly, looking directly at him.

“Cannot,” he muttered, then repeated it louder, each word broken, as if he were telling himself as well as me. “I cannot help you.”

I was finding it hard to breathe. To have had so much offered and then taken away. “I see. Well”—I rose to my feet, too proud to let him see the depth of my distress—“no doubt you have business to attend to.”

He loitered for a moment as if there was more to say, then turned and moved toward the door. But there he stopped. “I . . . there is something else.”

I waited.

“The other night . . . the night before your wedding, when we . . . when you were in the courtyard . . .”

But though I knew what he was going to say, I was too angry to help him now. “What of it?”

“I dropped something . . . a piece of paper. A sketch. I would be grateful to have it back.”

“A sketch?” I could hear my voice grow distant. Just as he had dashed my hopes, so I would do the same to him. “I’m afraid I don’t remember. Perhaps if you reminded me what it was of?”

“It was . . . nothing. I mean, nothing important.”

“Important enough to get it back, though?”

“Only because . . . it was done by a friend. And I . . . must give it back to him.”

It was such an obvious lie—the first and maybe the only one I ever heard him tell—that he didn’t dare look at me as he said it. The torn piece of paper rose up in front of me: the man’s body ripped open from neck to groin, his innards exposed as on a butcher’s hook. Only now of course it had a companion in my mind: the city’s most notorious pimp hanging from the chapel post, the dogs snapping at his entrails. While the drawing predated the body by weeks, the evisceration was almost identical. My brother’s words echoed in my mind. “Your precious painter was a mess, face like a ghost and stains all over him.” A gaunt face and bloodshot eyes could be the signs not just of a man who walked the streets at night but someone who even when he rested could not sleep.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my words in cold homage to his own. “I cannot help you.”

For a moment he remained frozen; then he turned, and I heard the sound of the door closing behind him. I sat with the roll of drawings in my lap. After a while I picked them up and threw them across the room.

Twenty-two

I
HAD PRECIOUS LITTLE TIME TO THINK ABOUT IT. MY
husband returned a few days later, his timing coolly precise. Savonarola’s Christmas sermons were due to begin the next morning, and the godly should be seen to go to church from the beds of their wives and not their lovers.

He even made it his business to take me with him out walking that same evening, so we could be noted together in public. It had so long been my dream: to wander the streets in that magic hour between dusk and dark, the life of the city lit by the setting sun. But though the light was beautiful, the streets were somehow lackluster. There were fewer people than I imagined, and almost every woman I saw was veiled and—to an eye fed by my father’s bright fabrics—drearily dressed, while the few who were unaccompanied had their heads down, intent on reaching their homes. At one point, under the loggia in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella, we passed a young cockerel of a man in a fashionable cloak and feathered hat who, I thought, tried hard to catch my husband’s attention, but Cristoforo dropped his gaze immediately and maneuvered me away and we soon left him behind. By the time we reached home in the dark, the city was almost empty. The curfew of the mind was making as much impact as any new law. It was the greatest irony that I had negotiated my freedom just when there was no Florence left to explore it in.

That night, we sat together in the drafty receiving room, warmed by a myrtle-wood fire, discussing affairs of state. While there was a wounded part of me that wanted to punish him for his absence, my curiosity was too acute and his company too interesting for me to resist him for long. I believe the pleasure was mutual.

“We should be there early to secure a good place. I would lay you a wager, Alessandra—except of course a wager itself would be illegal now—that the cathedral will be overflowing tomorrow.”

“Do we go to see or be seen?”

“Like many, I suspect, a mixture of the two. It’s a wonder how suddenly the Florentines have become such godly people.”

“Even sodomites?” I said, proud of my own courage with the word.

He smiled. “I do believe you get a rebellious pleasure from saying that word out loud. Though I would suggest you expunge it from your vocabulary. Walls have ears.”

“What? You think servants will betray their own masters now?”

“I think when slaves are offered their freedom in return for informing on their masters, Florence has become a city of the Inquisition, yes.”

“Is that what the new laws say?”

“Among other things. The punishments for fornication are made severe, for sodomy even more so. For the younger ones, flogging, fining, and mutilation. For older and more practiced sinners—the stake.”

“The stake! Dear God. Why such a difference?”

“Because, wife, young men are held to be less responsible for their actions than older ones. Just as deflowered virgins are considered less guilty than their seducers.”

So Tomaso’s inviting swagger would be classed as less damning than my husband’s quiet hunger for him. Though he was my flesh and blood, the cruel truth was I cared less for his welfare than for the man who lusted after him.

“You must be careful,” I said.

“I intend to be. Your brother asks after your welfare,” he added, as if reading my thoughts.

“What do you tell him?”

“That he would do better to ask you himself. But I think he fears to see you.”

Good, I thought. I hope he lies quaking in your arms. I found myself shocked by the image, which I had not let myself conjure up before: Tomaso in my husband’s arms. So my brother was the wife now. And I . . . well, what was I?

“It has been quiet with the house so empty,” I said at last.

He paused. We both knew what was to come. Savonarola might police the night, but in the end all he would do was drive the sins farther into the dark.

“If you prefer, you need not see him,” he said quietly.

“He is my brother. If he comes to our house it would be strange if I did not.”

“That is true.” He was staring into the fire, his legs pushed out in front of him. He was an educated, cultured man who had more brains in his little finger than my brother did in the whole of his soft coquettish body. What was this lust made of, that it made him risk everything for its consummation? “I don’t suppose you have any news for me?” he said, after a while.

Oh, but I did. That very afternoon I had felt shooting pains in my womb, but rather than an early baby I had given birth to streaming ribbons of blood. But I didn’t know how to say that, so I simply shook my head. “No. No news.”

I closed my eyes and saw again my drawing of our nuptial night. When I opened them again he was looking at me intently, and I swear the pity had something of affection in it. “I hear you have been using the library in my absence. It pleased you, I hope.”

“Yes,” I said, relieved to be back on the dry land of learning. “I found a volume there of Plato by Ficino with an inscription to you inside it.”

“Ah, yes. Praising my love of beauty and learning.” He laughed. “It is hard now to imagine there was a time when our rulers believed such things.”

“So it
was
Lorenzo the Magnificent! You actually knew him?”

“A little. As the inscription suggests, he liked his courtiers to be men of taste.”

“Did he . . . did he know about you?”

“What—my sodomy, as you so enjoy calling it? There was not much that Lorenzo did not know about those around him. He was a student of men’s souls as much as of their intellects. You would have been enthralled by his mind. I am surprised your mother has not told you of him.”

“My mother?”

“Yes. When her brother was at court she came sometimes to visit.”

“She did? Did you know her then?”

“No, I was—er, busy with other things. But I saw her a few times. She was very beautiful. And she had something of her brother’s wit and erudition when it was called upon. She was much appreciated, I remember. She has not told you anything of this?”

I shook my head. In all my life she had never said a word. To have such secrets from your own daughter! It made me think again about her story of watching the Medici assassins pulled through the streets, drowning in the blood of their own castration. No wonder the horror had turned me in her womb.

“Then I hope I haven’t spoken out of turn. I hear you also asked about the keys to the cabinet. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I think the manuscript will be gone soon.”

“Gone? Where?”

“Back to its owner.”

“Who is he?” And, when my husband said nothing, “If you believe I cannot keep your secrets, sir, you have made a bad choice of a wife.”

He smiled at the logic. “His name is Piero Francesco de’ Medici, Botticelli’s sometime patron.”

Of course. Lorenzo the Magnificent’s cousin and one of the first to flee to the French camp. “I count him as a traitor,” I said firmly.

“Then you are more foolish than I thought.” His voice was sharp. “You should be more circumspect with your words, even here. Mark me, it will not be long before those who support the Medici will go in fear of their lives. Besides, you know only half the story. There is reason enough for his disloyalty. When his father was assassinated, Piero Francesco’s estates were left in the care of Lorenzo, who leeched money from them when the fortunes of the Medici bank fell. His resentment is hardly surprising, but he is not a bad man. Indeed, as a patron of art, history may put him alongside Lorenzo himself.”

“I have seen nothing he has given to the city.”

“That is because as yet he keeps it for himself. But his villa at Cafaggiolo has paintings by Botticelli that the artist himself might live to regret. There is a panel in which Mars lies conquered by Venus, prostrate with such languor that it’s hard to tell whether it is his soul or his body she has just vanquished. And then there is Venus herself, rising naked in a shell from the waves. You’ve heard of her?”

“No.” My mother had told us once about a set of screen paintings of the Nastagio legend that Botticelli had done for a wedding, and how all who saw them marveled at their detail and life. But, like my sister, I was resistant to tales of woman’s flesh torn apart, however fine the artist. “What is she like, his Venus?”

“Well, I am no connoisseur of women, but I suspect you would find in her the chasm between the Platonic and the Savonarolan vision of art.”

“Is she beautiful?”

“Beautiful, yes. But she is more than that. She is a joining of the classical and the Christian. Her nakedness is modest, yet her gravity is playful. She both invites and resists at the same time. Even her knowledge of love seems innocent. Though I imagine most men who look on her think more of taking her to bed than to church.”

“Oh! I would give anything to see her.”

“You should hope that no one sees her for a while. If news of her were common, our pious friar would almost certainly want to destroy her along with his sinners. Let’s hope Botticelli himself does not feel bound to give her up to the enemy. From what I hear he is leaning heavily toward Savonarola already.”

“No!”

“Oh, yes. I think you would be surprised by how many of our great figures will follow. And not just the artists.”

“But why? I don’t understand. We were building a new Athens here. How can they bear to see it pulled down?”

He stared into the fire, as if the answer might be found there. “Because,” he said at last, “in its place, this mad and clever monk will offer them a vision of something else. Something that talks directly to all men, not just the rich and the clever.”

“And what will that be?”

“The building of the New Jerusalem.”

My husband, who seemed to have always known that he was bound for hell, looked for that moment almost sad. And I knew he was right.