The Creation Of Eve (50 page)

Don Carlos now languishes in a tower of the palace in Madrid, a danger only to himself, one day imagining himself to be so hot that he begs to freeze himself on a bed of ice, another so cold that he demands to overheat his slight person with fire. His life does hang by the frailest filament of silk. Don Juan is no longer here to protect him. Soon after our capture, the King made Don Juan a knight, gave him a navy, and sent him to fight pirates off the Barbary Coast. Few return from such a mission.

Often, my thoughts return to Tiberio and Michelangelo, to Don Juan, the Queen, and her King. Will I ever Understand the workings of the human heart? Will I ever know why we so often love those whom we cannot possess, and why we do not cherish those whose love we do possess? We are as thistledown twitching and turning in the current, captives to feelings we cannot control. How are we to Understand those persons who mean the most to Us, when we cannot truly Understand our own blind and hapless selves?

Too late, it seems, I began to Understand Tiberio. Not long after our ill-conceived attempt at escape, the King, finding me painting on the Queen's portrait, stopped to study my work. Alone and filled with the remorse and shame that his presence now evokes in me, I painted in silence, the hushed dab of my brush against canvas mingling with the moan of the river outside.

I heard his pained swallow behind me. "You have captured her."

I turned my head, just enough.

He held out his hand. My youthful image smiled from the miniature painting on his palm. I saw the emblem Tiberio and I had devised those years ago in Rome.

"This was found by my agent in Tiberio Calcagni's studio in Michelangelo's house. It was the only item in a velvet-lined coffer, on a table next to an Unfinished statue."

I looked Up into his face, so calm with its mask of
sosiego
.

"Take it." He gave it to me, its smooth copper back still warm from his hand.

And then he left, his fine kid shoes tapping quietly against the rushes.

Now I know the power of the spoken word. Now I know how deeply it can ruin. For the consequences of my own ill-considered speech, I must make amends, and so I paint, here in my tower, with a purpose. I paint for my sisters. I paint for my Queen. I paint for all the women of the world who, burdened by caring for their families, by the expectations of others, by Unbreakable chains of love or gold, can never go in search of their dreams. How often we cautiously receive our lives, pale, Uncertain Eves, as in the Maestro's painting. If only we can be so brave as to love and accept the fragile spirit residing within each one of Us, then, only then, we might take the gift of self-knowledge offered in its shy and trembling hands.

I wish doctor Debruyne could see my efforts. I think of him often. He writes to me from the mountains of Peru, where he seeks precious herbs that can free man and woman from pain, from sickness, from the ebbing away of our lives with each breath that we take. I like to think he will find them, and will tell me of them someday.

Now, here in my tower, my hands have calmed sufficiently at last. Once more I may return to my painting. Again I will lift my brush, and screwing my courage to the sticking point, peer into the mirror.

This time, maybe this time, I will see the one inside who is me.

Meanwhile, just the toss of an olive pit away, a man stands in another tower of the palace. As the river below his window roars on its painful journey to the sea, he tenderly shows an Unopened moonflower blossom to his darling. She touches the fragile closed trumpet, then looks Up, her chin tucked in, to see if she has done wrong. He shakes his head no and kisses her dimpled knuckle. How he does cherish her--his heart, his hope, the child Isabel Clara Eugenia.

Author's Note

Sofonisba Anguissola became the governess to the two-year-old Infanta Isabel Clara Eugenia and her one-year-old sister, Catalina Micaela, after Elisabeth of Valois died from a miscarriage in the fourth month of her fourth pregnancy, on October 3, 1568. In 1570, King Felipe (Philip) chose the thirty-eight-year-old Sofonisba a husband, don Fabrizio de Moncada--a Sicilian, since Sofonisba said that if she must be married, she was "inclined to marry an Italian." She was allowed to leave Spain with her husband in the year of her marriage and was reunited with her family in Cremona. The couple traveled extensively in Italy and Spain, with Sofonisba painting at each stop, Until don Fabrizio died in 1579. Newly widowed at age forty-seven, she immediately set sail for Cremona.

During the voyage home, Sofonisba met and fell in love with the ship's captain, Orazio Lomellino, a Genoan more than a decade younger than she. By the journey's end, she had promised to marry him. Sofonisba married, at last, for love.

The devoted couple moved to Genoa. Sofonisba kept in touch with Isabella Clara, Catalina Micaela, and King Felipe, who, Until his death in 1598, granted Sofonisba a generous income. In Genoa, she inspired the many young painters who sought her out, among them Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. She lived Until the age of ninety-three, painting, always painting, Until blindness finally stilled her brush.

All these things are true, yet the story of
The Creation of Eve
, while based on a solid foundation of research, is a work of fiction. However, the most fantastical elements of the story tend to be the true ones.

After Michelangelo abandoned it, his beloved and talented follower, Tiberio Calcagni, worked on the Unfinished statue now called the
Bandini Pieta
or
Florentine Pieta
, Until his own death (cause Unknown) in 1565. It is likely that Tiberio and Sofonisba met when she visited Michelangelo in Rome, as Calcagni, Tommaso Cavalieri, and Daniele da Volterra, the self-sacrificing friend who painted loincloths on the nudes in
The Last Judgment
, were in frequent attendance to the great artist. These three men were at Michelangelo's side at his death in 1564.

As for Michelangelo himself, although during his lifetime he was known as Il Divino, the Divine One, and was sought out by the most powerful men in Italy to decorate their palaces and churches in works of stone and paint, it is true that the only traces he left of himself in his art were as the flayed skin in
The Last Judgment
and as Nicodemus in
The Florentine Pieta
. Neither depiction is flattering. When the sculptor Leone Leoni was to strike a commemorative medal of Michelangelo in 1561, the artist asked to be portrayed as a blind pilgrim leaning on a staff and led by a dog. One wonders whether Michelangelo was deeply humbled by the irony that while he was a revered figure of superstar proportions for his emotional rendering of religious themes, he was attracted to men at a time when homosexuality was a crime against the Church, punishable by death. He must have been very much aware of how his public would hate him for his sexual nature, even as he penned poems to or about the men he loved, including one that he wrote in the 1550s about being shot with the arrows of Cupid at his advanced age. At times he loathed himself for his feelings. He wrote:

I live in sin, dying to myself I live;
Life is no longer mine, but belongs to sin;
My good is from heaven, my evil I give to myself,
From my own unbound will, which has been stolen from me.

Yet he also asked:

For if of our affections none find grace
In sight of Heaven, then wherefore hath God made
The world which we inhabit?

That he wrote poetry to men was not a great secret in the exalted circles in which he moved, but soon after his death those who wished to protect Michelangelo's reputation in a climate Unforgiving toward homosexuality altered his poetry and claimed it was addressed to women. Only relatively recently have historians acknowledged that the subjects of his love poetry were men.

On to the facts about another tormented soul: Don Carlos. It is true that the Prince, always high-strung, became Unstable after a head injury that required trepanning. His Unpredictable and sometimes violent behavior culminated in threats on his father's life, which brought Felipe to put Don Carlos Under house arrest in December 1567. The prince died in a tower of the Alcazar of Madrid in July 1568, after months of rash behavior such as swallowing large gems and freezing himself on blocks of ice. Some readers will be familiar with Don Carlos through the eponymous play by Friedrich Schiller, or through the opera of the same name by Giuseppe Verdi. Both works romanticize the relationship between Don Carlos and Elisabeth, taking great liberties with the historical record.

From what I have read about Don Carlos, I have a difficult time picturing him as a romantic lead. Sickly and erratic, he was hardly a ladies' man. His love for Elisabeth is a matter of record, though, and given that she died a few months after he did, I can Understand how a fiction writer might fantasize about them sharing a fatal love. I, however, preferred to take my liberties in imagining the Queen with Don Juan of Austria. As Don Juan was known to be charismatic in real life, and the Queen spent as much time with him as she did with Don Carlos, I thought their romance more believable. I was also intrigued that when Elisabeth died, Don Juan, distraught, raced back from the Barbary Coast (where he had been tucked away by Felipe) and publicly quarreled with Felipe at Elisabeth's funeral. Contemporaries often observed the friction between Felipe and Don Juan. It does not seem a far leap to imagine the jealousy Felipe must have felt when he watched his handsome young half brother interact with the vivacious teenaged Elisabeth. Nor is it implausible to think that Felipe may have noted the startling resemblance between Don Juan and the younger child, Catalina Micaela, and wondered why that might be, as I did, as I wrote our story.

But back to the record: Elisabeth of Valois's father, Henri II of France, did indeed die from wounds received at a tournament celebrating her wedding to Felipe. Several years before the event, the famed soothsayer Nostradamus had warned Catherine de' Medici:

The young lion will overcome the older one,
On the field of combat in a single battle;
He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage,
Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.

When Nostradamus repeated his prediction at the tourney, Catherine was frantic for her husband's safety, but in spite of her pleas for him to stop, Henri ran at the lists three times against a young Scot named Montgomery. The third time, Montgomery's lance broke, sending a splinter through Henri's golden visor and into his eye.

Almost every other bizarre thing I wrote about Elisabeth's mother is true, also. Catherine de' Medici is a figure whose life defies belief, from her consultations with Nostradamus to her Use of sorcery to Undermine her husband's mistress Diane de Poitiers. The "hole in the floor" recorded in Sofi's notebook is a matter of record, as is Catherine's clear preference for her third son, who later became Henri III. It has been recorded that Catherine de' Medici warned Elisabeth to keep hidden from her husband her "condition," possibly the disease that plagued French kings since Francois I--the Great Pox, or syphilis.

Contemporary rumor held it that Henri II's father, Francois, quite the connoisseur of women, suffered from the disease; hence Europeans called it the French Disease. (The French, on the other hand, called it the Italian Disease.) Then, as now, syphilis could be passed to children of infected mothers at birth. This would mean that Catherine de' Medici had the Great Pox, contracted from her husband, Henri II, who had gotten it from his own mother, Claude, the long-suffering wife of Francois. I leave it to medical historians to decide whether Catherine and the others might have had latent cases that developed into tertiary-stage (final-stage) syphilis late in their lives. I myself wonder about the cases of "gout" from which Francois I, Henry VIII of England, and Felipe II died; all three of these kings ended their days with terrible abscesses on their thighs--a symptom found in tertiary-stage syphilis. Elisabeth herself was weakened by some chronic physical ailment, be it syphilis or otherwise. She suffered from fevers and weakness her entire married life, and had episodes of hemorrhaging through the nose, as in the true-life incident when she saw Eufrasia de Guzman in advanced pregnancy, an incident recorded in contemporary accounts. No matter the cause of her fragile health, Elisabeth's repeated pregnancies, so necessary for orderly succession of the crown, Undermined any chance for her recovery.

It is true that Don Juan de Austria was plucked from his quiet life as a country boy when his father, Emperor Charles V, the most powerful man in the world, decided to legitimize him, although the Emperor already had a faithful son in Felipe. The relationship between the brothers was predictably prickly--had the Emperor never heard of Cain and Abel when he commanded that Felipe treat his newfound brother well? Don Juan went on to become the most famous war hero of his time, leading the Spanish to an important naval victory at Lepanto. He was also known to have an affinity with animals, even adopting a lion as a pet. He never married.

Felipe, meanwhile, was stuck in his office with the unglamorous task of plowing through mountains of paperwork, thus earning from his contemporaries the title "The Paper King." Always conscious of the impossible amount of money needed to maintain an empire that stretched around the globe, he avoided war whenever possible--hence his association with the Inquisition, which he allowed the Roman Catholic Church to conduct in Spain, as it had done since the time of Isabella and Ferdinand three generations earlier. Felipe followed his father's line of thinking that stamping out protest early saved loss of lives (and money) later, and indeed they both were inflexible in prohibiting the practice of Protestantism in their realms. Yet Felipe is always associated with the "Spanish" Inquisition, when in fact most European countries had their own, even more virulent, Inquisitions at the time. More lives were lost Under the forms of the Inquisition in France, Italy, and England (Under "Bloody" Mary Tudor's rule) than Under the Spanish Inquisition. Protestants such as Elizabeth I of England practiced their own purges of heresy, persecuting Catholics and racking Up death tolls higher than those in Spain Under Felipe II. Our modern-day horror of the Spanish Inquisition and its association with a vilified Felipe are the products of a smear campaign waged against him by the Dutch and the English. Their effort at defamation is still effective today, more than four hundred years after his death, each time he is depicted in books and movies in English as a half-crazed despot. The image of him as an avid gardener, devoted father, and devotee of art, science, and architecture is much more in line with the actual man. His relationship with his daughters, Isabella Clara Eugenia and Catalina Micaela, was exceptional in its tenderness, particularly with Isabella Clara, who as a child liked to work with him in his office. Proud of her intelligence, he renounced his rights to the Netherlands in favor of her just before he died. She ruled the Spanish Netherlands with her husband from 1601 to 1633. Don Carlos, kept from ruling by a father who knew exactly the depth of his son's failings, would have been envious. Catalina Micaela married Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, and bore ten children before she died in childbirth in 1597, having just turned thirty.

About Sofonisba's place in the court of Felipe II: It is a matter of record that she was invited by the King to the Spanish court to teach the teenaged Queen to paint, and to attend Her Majesty as a lady-in-waiting. Less verifiable is the contemporary rumor that Sofonisba accepted her position at court after a betrothal offer had fallen through. Could this be when she first developed her stated preference for Italian, perhaps Roman, men? She was accompanied on her trip to Spain by two ladies, two gentlemen, and a staff of six servants. I like to think that once at court, she kept the same faithful servant she had recorded in
The Chess Game
and in
Self-Portrait at a Clavichord
, our Francesca.

Soon after her arrival in Spain, Sofonisba was sought out by others at court to paint their portraits, and she found herself in the Unprecedented and Uncomfortable position of being both painter and lady-in-waiting. Authenticating her works today is especially difficult; because she was a lady-in-waiting, it was not proper for her to sign her works. Her role as the Queen's lady always took precedence over her role as a painter, so her high position as one of the Queen's favored ladies was likely a mixed blessing to her.