The Medici Boy (39 page)

“I am tethered to him like a goat at the stake. But I am all he has.”

“You are a great artisan. You have created . . .” Tears pricked at my eyes.

“I have created nothing. It is all straw. The heart alone survives.”

I wept then as my sense of betrayal overflowed in tears. He got up and poured me a cup of wine.

“Drink this,” and after I calmed down he said, as if he were merely thinking aloud, “We love where we must, not where we choose.”

* * *

I
T WAS A
cool evening for June and the frogs had not yet begun their croaking when I arrived at the
bottega
. A thorn bush grew near the
bottega
door and bluebells poked in from behind it and a soft breeze moved the flowers back and forth. It was the start of a new and gentle season. I sighed for all the fallen things in my life as I raised my hand to knock at the door.

Pagno opened to me with his hopeful, “Come in, come in,” and I saw that he had been in conversation with Agnolo when I arrived. No one else was there. Pagno excused himself and went out back to the privy. There was nothing for it but to engage with Agnolo.

“You’re out of prison,” I said. “It was a short stay this time.”

“Any stay in prison is long. Too long.”

“But you were gone a single night.”

“A single night of—as they call it—interrogation.”

“Did they torture you?”

He placed his hand on his privy parts and nodded.

“But you are well. And free.”

He nodded once again.

“Can it be true that you played the man with my son?”

He was not surprised I knew this. “It was not what you think, Luca.”

“He was but twelve years old. And you had him in that way?”

“It is true, but only that once. And he was willing.”

A picture flared up in my brain then: Franco Alessandro at twelve years of age with Agnolo working him from behind, thrusting hard and harder, again and again and again. My mind clouded and I lost balance for a moment and when I came back to myself I realized Agnolo had been saying, “I pray you for pardon,” over and again. I steadied myself and sat down at Donatello’s work table. We were silent then. There was a great abiding pain in my head.

It grew dark and Agnolo lit the torch that stood by the table. The flame flickered and caught and there was the sudden smell of burnt reeds. The pain grew stronger. I lowered my head to the surface of the table and felt against my face the chisels Donatello had been using for the Virgin and Child. Some sliver of an idea lodged in my brain, but I shook it away and said, “You are a great corrupter of the young, Agnolo.”

“For which I beg pardon . . . of you and of God.” He was silent then and I rested, my eyes shut against the sight of him.

“It is a greater wrong they ask of me now,” he said. I was silent, waiting.

“They ask that I embarrass Donatello.”

I opened my eyes and gave him a hard look.

“It is why they let me free. It is the condition on which I stay from prison. It is this or life behind bars. And torture. And death. I cannot. I cannot.”

After a long while I asked, “And how are you to embarrass Donatello?”

“It is nothing. It would come to nothing. The whole world loves Donatello. They wish only to get at Cosimo through him.”

“Who wishes it? Who are
they
?”

“The Albizzi of course.”

“Working through the Ufficiali?”

“Of course.”

“And they ask of you exactly what?”

“It is a small thing. That as I sleep with him they arrest us both for sodomy. He would be accused but he would be fined only and let go free. And I would go free. But the scandal would be public and a great hurt to the Medici.”

“They would do so much for so little? For a scandal?”

“They believe that such scandals will topple the Medici before too long.”

“And you would do this? Be taken in his bed?”

“Tonight. At the fourth hour after curfew.”

“Like Judas.”

“It is arranged.”

“And you tell me this, why?”

“That you may know I do him no permanent wrong. That you understand and forgive me . . . as a brother.”

“As a brother.”

“Because I know that you alone have loved me . . .”

That sliver in my brain lodged deep and I felt a tingling in my leg that I recognized from old. My foot began to tap tap tap of its own accord and a wet gray mist clouded my vision. I could not catch my breath. I made as if to rise but blood rushed to my head and I fell back in my chair. I tried to cry out but no sound came. And then the pain exploded in my head and I set up such a shout as could be heard throughout all of Padua. It was a roar, wordless, the cry of a beast without tongue, and even before the sound had ceased I snatched up one of Donatello’s pitching tools—long and sharpened to a point—and, rising from the table, I lunged at the stuttering Agnolo and drove it in his throat, his chest, his heart until the blood gurgled from his mouth and I stood above him, breathless both of us, the chisel clutched to my bloody breast.

Pagno was there of a sudden, pressing me back against the table, hushing me, calming me. Quickly, deftly, he took another pitching tool and I shrunk away as he cut me with it on the neck and placed the tool in Agnolo’s dead hand. He turned to me and said, “He attacked you first. You were defending yourself.”

And then the pain in my head overcame all my senses and my left arm fluttered uselessly and my leg gave way and, glad of the oblivion, I fell to the floor beside the body of Agnolo Mattei, brother to no one any longer.

1467

CHAPTER
41

F
OR TWELVE YEARS
now I have been held prisoner in the monastery of Santa Croce. In truth I am a prisoner in name only. I am allowed, if I wish, to follow the daily schedule of the Frati Minori. I wear the simple gray gown of the Franciscan novice. I make morning meditation and attend daily mass and sing as many of the liturgical hours as please me. I can gaze upon Donatello’s Christ crucified—the one Brunelleschi called a peasant—and I can marvel at the frescoes of Giotto celebrating the life and miracles of Saint Francis. In the morning and evening I walk in the monastery cloisters. I am living the life I would have lived had I never met Maria Sabina and discovered the joys of sexual congress. This is a pleasant incarceration, the only penalty being that I know I am not free. But which of us is free in this life?

My oldest son, Donato Michele, is the Father Superior of the monastery and he is my jailer, a kind, good man without imagination and without malice. He sees me for the murderer I am and the brain-wrecked husk of a man I have become. I believe he loves me and feels sad for my imprisonment, but he has given his heart to God and there is little human love left in him. Mine is a good life, quiet, harmless, silent as the grave that awaits me.

After the murder of Agnolo I thought to find that grave in Padua. I was taken at once to the
stinche
where for six months I awaited trial. The
stinche
is a true prison where brutalized men—some fresh from the rack, some yet unbroken—feed on hatred and anger and guilt till they cease to be men and are merely vessels for pain. I was spared this. My brain was yet addled from the seizure and my left side remained for a time in paralysis, and so I was allowed a cot and a night jar of my own. I was fed on bread and gruel and given two cups of water each day, but the filth and the stench of the prison made me long for death. Nonetheless, as these things will happen, I survived. My strength returned and my brain-fog cleared and I could move about again and even walk. I was able to stand during the long hours of my trial.

I was sentenced to life imprisonment. I had spent six months in the filthy
stinche
before my trial and I spent a year there following it. Before my trial I survived on hope that Pagno di Lapo would continue to perjure himself and swear that Agnolo had struck first, that I had acted in self-defense. He was true to his word, lying boldly before the court, and so my life was spared. Cosimo de’ Medici, who had promised he would not forget me, remembered me a year later when the political winds had turned and he was able to have my sentence in Padua commuted to Florence and a lifetime in prison commuted to a lifetime with the Frati Minori of Santa Croce.

And so the death of Agnolo Mattei became for me only a painful memory. For Donatello, however, it was catastrophe. He lapsed into a kind of trance, as if life was too much to bear and only death would satisfy him. It was not like early times when Agnolo would leave him for a passing soldier, nor like later times when Agnolo fled to another city or, worse still, disappeared into prison on some dark night. This was a different kind of trance. Donatello was unable to eat or drink or work. He had no interest in marble or bronze. He prayed each day for a quick death. Michelozzo called for medical help and saw that Donatello was well bled and thoroughly purged but still he did not return to his old self. And then Michelozzo turned to a Doctor Chellini who was famed for his skill at relieving the burdened soul. This doctor gave Donatello herbs and potions and looked into his mind to see why he preferred death to life. He found there only gloom and lost love and anger and so he prescribed work. He commissioned for himself a
tondo
of the Virgin and Child, in bronze, to be executed within the year. And thus he brought Donatello back to life.

In little more than a year Donatello presented him the
tondo
as a gift and with that he returned to his old self and at once set to work. He sculpted—again in wood—his Mary Magdalene in penitence. She is gaunt and terrifying, wasted by fasting and abstinence, a woman who has loved much and whom much has been forgiven. But her face and body are the face and body of Agnolo Mattei. Donatello lost himself in work. He sculpted then the great Judith and Holofernes, in bronze and gilt, and there too you see the face of Judith is the face of Agnolo . . . and Holofernes is Donatello himself.

He would never recover from the life and death of Agnolo and he would never lay eyes on me again.

Nor did Pagno di Lapo. Nor did my wife Alessandra. Only Michelozzo was willing to look again upon me. Pagno, having lied at my trial and thus saved my life, left Padua for Florence and within the year left Florence for Bologna. He wished me well. He sent me a note upon my transfer from the
stinche
of Padua to the monastery of Santa Croce. He said he would pray for me and asked my prayers for himself. He was my true friend—who could have guessed it?—but I fear his compassion is more than human and in the end will prove the death of him.

Alessandra petitioned entry to the convent and, with her dowry of forty gold florins, the price of a slave girl, she was admitted to the Dominican nunnery at Santa Maria Novella where she prays for me. She became Sister Adriana, O.P., a lay sister, allowed to live the spiritual life of the convent and to perform the work duties of a layperson: washing floors, cooking meals, spinning wool. This she saw as the will of God. I think of her often as I lean away from my writing, my eyes tired and my hand stiff. I call up her dear face and body—the young Alessandra when I first knew her—and I pleasure myself as in the old days, but not often and always with a sigh of regret. Sex is not for old men. We are tethered between life and death and sex is unseemly. But then life itself is unseemly and, old or young, we let it pass from us with difficulty and with regret.

Michelozzo alone remains a constant in my life. His eight children—four boys and four girls—are a joy to him. He has designed a new cloister for the Frati Minori of Santa Croce and I see him daily as he executes his plans. It is Michelozzo who by night stole me from my prison here and took me—in a dark cloak, a midnight monk—through the streets to the church of San Lorenzo that I might visit Donatello’s tomb. But I get ahead of myself.

I have been here twelve years, writing, copying. While he lived it was the will of Cosimo that I transcribe manuscripts for him and he arranged that Michelozzo bring me the originals and take away the finished copies. At his death, the care of his business and in particular the care of his library was taken up by his son Piero, called
Il Gottoso
for his gouty feet. I copy for him as once I copied for Cosimo. My final brain seizure left my body in large part a wreck. In truth my left side is nearly useless, my hand flopping about of its own accord, but my other side is dependable with a good right hand that is sturdy with a quill and parchment. Indeed my script has grown more fluid and more elegant with the passage of time and I have moved on from Latin texts to the rarer and more complicated Greeks: Plato and
sequaces ejus
, I know them all. In the matter of transcription I have more than satisfied the Medici and it is pleasing to know that many of the rare manuscripts in Cosimo’s vast new library have been copied by my hand.

Cosimo died in 1464 and at his great funeral procession—the entire city was in mourning or pretended to be—the Signoria proclaimed him
Pater Patriae
. . . in shame for having sent him into exile and in acknowledgment that he had been friend to philosophers and poets, patron of sculptors and painters and architects, and founder of the greatest library since the fire at Alexandria. He had sponsored the work of Ghiberti and Brunelleschi and Michelozzo, of Fra Angelico and Filippo Lippi and Verochhio, and above all Donatello. He had loved him faithfully to the end and at his death he directed that Donatello be buried in San Lorenzo in a crypt next to his own so that he could be near his friend in death as he had been in life. Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici has seen to that.