The Enchantress of Florence Page 12
According to her cousin-in-law, the best vampire hunter in the city, a certain Domenico Salcedo, was summoned to Giuliano’s chamber and ordered to find a member of the blood-drinking undead. The following night Salcedo brought the vampire to the room in the palace where the sick girl lay, and the vampire bit her. But Simonetta refused to face eternity as a member of that sad, pale tribe. “When she realized she was a vampire she jumped from the top of the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio and impaled herself on the pike of a guard at the gate. You can imagine what they had to do to hush that up.” So, according to her cousin-in-law, perished the first enchantress of Florence, perished beyond hope of a return from the dead. Marco Vespucci lost his mind with grief. (“Marco was a fool,” Ago said unkindly. “If I was married to a piece of hot stuff like that, I’d keep her locked up in the highest tower where nobody could do her harm.”) And Giuliano de’ Medici was stabbed to death by a conspirator on the day of the Pazzi plot, while Filipepi the little barrel went on painting her, over and over, as if by painting her he could raise her from the dead.
“The same as Dashwanth,” the emperor marveled.
“This may be the curse of the human race,” responded Mogor. “Not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.”
The three boys were in the woods most days now, climbing trees and masturbating for mandrakes and telling each other insane stories about their families and complaining about the future to hide their fear, because right after the crushing of the Pazzi conspiracy the plague came to Florence and the three friends had been sent to the country for safety. Niccolò’s father Bernardo stayed in the city and caught the disease, and when he became one of the few people to have had the plague and lived his son told his friends it was on account of his mother Bartolomea’s magical way with cornmeal. “Whenever we get sick she covers us in porridge,” he pronounced solemnly, whispering so that the wood-owls couldn’t hear. “Depending on the sickness she uses the regular sweet yellow polenta but if it’s something serious she buys the white Friuli kind. For something like this she probably puts kale and tomatoes into it as well and I don’t know what other magical stuff. But it works. She makes us take off all our clothes and she ladles the hot porridge over every part of us and never mind the mess. The porridge sucks up the sickness and that’s that. Seems even the plague was no match for Mamma’s sweet polenta.” After that Argalia started calling il Machia’s crazy family the “Polentini” and made up songs about an imaginary sweetheart called Polenta. “If she was a florin, I would have spent her,” he sang, “and if she was a book, then I would have lent her.” And Ago joined in, “If she was a bow, then I would have bent her, and if she was a courtesan then I would rent her—my sweet Polenta.” In the end il Machia stopped being annoyed and joined in. If she was a message I would have sent her. If she was a meaning I would have meant her. But when news came that both Nino Argalia’s parents had caught the plague all the polenta magic in the world proved useless. Argalia became an orphan before he was ten years old.
The day Nino came to the oak wood to tell il Machia and Ago that his parents were dead was also the day they found the mandrake. It was hiding under a fallen branch like a scared animal. “All we need now,” said Ago sadly, “is the spell that turns us into men, because without that what’s the point of having ladies besotted with us, anyhow?” Then Argalia arrived and they saw in his eyes that he had found the spell of manhood. They showed him the mandrake and he shrugged. “That sort of thing doesn’t interest me anymore,” he said. “I’m running away to Genoa to join the Band of Gold.” It was the autumn of the condottieri, the soldiers of fortune with personal, mercenary armies who rented out their services to the city-states of Italy, which were too cheap to maintain standing armies of their own. All Florence knew the story of the city’s own Giovanni Milano, who had been born Sir John Hauksbank in Scotland a hundred years before. In France he was “Jean Aubainc,” in the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland he was “Hans Hoch,” and in Italy it was Giovanni Milano—“Milano” because a milan was a hawk—leader of the White Company, erstwhile general of Florence, and victor, on Florence’s behalf, of the battle of Polpetto against the hated Venetians. Paolo Uccello had worked on his funerary fresco and it was in the Duomo still. But the age of the condottieri was coming to an end.
The greatest remaining mercenary fighter, according to Argalia, was Andrea Doria, leader of the Band of Gold, who just then were busy with the liberation of Genoa from French control. “But you are Florentine, and we are allied with the French,” Ago cried, remembering his relatives’ mission to Paris. “When you are a mercenary,” Argalia said, feeling his chin to see if any hairs might be growing there, “the allegiances of your birth go by the board.”
Andrea Doria’s soldiers were armed with “hook-guns”—harquebuses or arquebuses—which you had to support on a tripod when you were shooting, like a little portable cannon. Many of them were Swiss, and the Swiss mercenaries were the worst killing machines of all, men with no faces or souls, invincible, terrifying. When he was done with the French and had gained command of the Genoese fleet, Doria intended to take on the Turk himself. Argalia liked the idea of sea battles. “We never had any money anyway,” he said, “and my father’s debts will eat up our house in the city and our little bit of property out here, so I can either beg in the street like a pauper’s dog or die trying to make my fortune. The two of you will grow fat with power and fill a couple of wretched women full of babies and you’ll leave them home to listen to the little bastards scream while you go off to the whorehouse of La Zingaretta or some such pillowy high-class tart who can recite poetry while you bounce up and down on her and fuck yourselves silly, and meanwhile I’ll be dying on a burning caravel outside Constantinople with a Turkish scimitar in my gut. Or who knows? I might turn Turk myself. Argalia the Turk, Wielder of the Enchanted Lance, with four huge Swiss giants, Muslim converts, in my retinue. Swiss Mohammedans, yes. Why not. When you’re a mercenary it’s gold and treasure that talk, and for that you have to go east.”
“You’re just a kid like us,” il Machia reasoned with him. “Don’t you want to grow up before you get yourself killed?”
“Not me,” said Argalia, “I’m off to heathen lands to fight against strange gods. Who knows what they worship out there, scorpions or monsters or worms. They’ll die the same as us, though, I’ll bet on that.”
“Don’t go to your death with your mouth full of sacrileges,” said Niccolò. “Stay with us. My father loves you at least as much as he loves me. Or, think how many Vespuccis there are in Ognissanti already. They won’t even notice an extra one if you prefer to live at Ago’s place.”
“I’m going,” said Argalia. “Andrea Doria has almost driven the French out of the city and I want to be there to see the day of freedom when it comes.”
“And you, with your three gods, a carpenter, a father, and a ghost, and the carpenter’s mother for a fourth,” the emperor asked Mogor with some irritation, “you from that holy land which hangs its bishops and burns its priests at the stake, while its greatest priest commands armies and behaves as brutally as any common general or prince—which of the wild religions of this heathen land do you find most attractive, or are they all one to you in their vileness? In the eyes of Father Acquaviva and Father Monserrate, we are sure, we are all what your Argalia thought us to be, which is to say, godless swine.”
“Sire,” said Mogor dell’Amore, calmly, “I am attracted toward the great polytheist pantheons because the stories are better, more numerous, more dramatic, more humorous, more marvelous; and because the gods do not set us good examples, they are interfering, vain, petulant, and badly behaved, which is, I confess, quite appealing.”
“We have the same feeling,” the emperor said, regaining his composure, “and our affection for these wanton, angry, playful, loving gods is very great. We have set up a force of one hundred and one men to count and name them all, every worshipped divinity of Hindustan, not
only the celebrated, high gods, but all the low ones too, the little spirits of place, of sighing woodland grove and laughing mountain stream. We have made them leave their homes and families and embark on a journey without end, a journey that will only end when they die, for the task we have set them is an impossible one, and when a man takes on the impossible he travels every day with death, accepting the journey as a purification, a magnification of the soul, so that it becomes a journey not toward the naming of the gods but toward God himself. They have barely begun their labors, yet they have already collected one million names. Such a proliferation of divinity! We think there are more supernatural entities in this land than people of flesh and blood, and are happy to live in so magical a world. And yet we must be what we are. The million gods are not our gods; the austere religion of our father will always be ours, just as the carpenter’s creed is yours.”
He was no longer looking at Mogor, and had fallen into a reverie. Peacocks danced on the morning stones of Sikri and in the distance the great lake shimmered like a ghost. The emperor’s gaze traveled past the peacocks and the lake, past the court of Herat and the lands of the fierce Turk, and rested on the spires and domes of an Italian city far away. “Imagine a pair of woman’s lips,” Mogor whispered, “puckering for a kiss. That is the city of Florence, narrow at the edges, swelling at the center, with the Arno flowing through between, parting the two lips, the upper and the lower. The city is an enchantress. When it kisses you, you are lost, whether you be commoner or king.”
Akbar was walking the streets of that other stone city in which nobody ever seemed to want to stay indoors. The life of Sikri took place behind drawn curtains and barred gates. The life of this alien city was lived under the cathedral dome of the sky. People ate where the birds could share their food and gambled where any cutpurse could steal their winnings, they kissed in full view of strangers and even fucked in the shadows if they wanted to. What did it mean to be a man so completely among men, and women too? When solitude was banished, did one become more oneself, or less? Did the crowd enhance one’s selfhood or erase it? The emperor felt like the Caliph of Baghdad Harun al-Rashid walking round his city at night to learn how his citizens lived. But Akbar’s cloak was cut from the cloths of time and space and these people were not his. Why, then, did he feel so strong a sense of kinship with the denizens of these braying lanes? Why did he understand their unspeakable European tongue as if it were his own?
“The questions of kingship,” the emperor said after a time, “concern us less and less. Our kingdom has laws in place to guide it, and officials worthy of trust, and a system of taxation that raises enough money without making people unhappier than is prudent. When there are enemies to defeat we will defeat them. In short, in that field we have the answers we require. The question of Man, however, continues to vex us, and the related problem of Woman, almost as much.”
“It is in my city, sire, that the question of Man has been answered for all time,” Mogor said. “And as to Woman, well, that is the very sum and matter of my story. For, many years after the death of Simonetta the first enchantress of Florence, the foretold second enchantress did indeed arrive.”
{ 11 }
Everything he loved was on his doorstep
Everything he loved was on his doorstep, according to Ago Vespucci; it wasn’t necessary to go questing across the world and die among guttural strangers to find your heart’s desire. Long ago in the octagonal gloom of the Battistero di San Giovanni he had been baptized twice, as was customary, once as a Christian and again as a Florentine, and to an irreligious bastard like Ago it was the second baptism that counted. The city was his religion, a world as perfect as any heaven. The great Buonarroti had called the Baptistery doors the gates of Paradise and when little baby Ago emerged from that place with a wet head he had understood at once that he had entered a walled and gated Eden. The city of Florence had fifteen gates and on their inner faces were pictures of the Virgin and various saints. Voyagers touched the gates for good luck, and nobody starting on a journey through those gates did so without consulting astrologers. In the opinion of Ago Vespucci the absurdity of such superstitions only proved the folly of long-distance travel. The Machiavelli farm in Percussina was at the outer rim of Ago’s universe. Beyond that the cloud of unknowing began. Genoa and Venice were as distant and fictional as Sirius or Aldebaran in the sky. The word planet meant wanderer. Ago disapproved of the planets and preferred the fixed stars. Aldebaran and Venice, Genoa and the Dog Star might be too far away to be completely real, but at least they had the good grace to stay where they were.
As it turned out the Pope and the King of Naples didn’t attack Florence after the defeat of the Pazzi plot, but when Ago was in his early twenties the King of France did show up, and entered the city in triumph—a short little red-haired homunculus whose insufferable Frenchness made Ago feel like throwing up. Instead he went to a whorehouse and worked strenuously to improve his mood. On the threshold of manhood Ago had agreed with his friend Niccolò “il Machia” on one thing: whatever hardships the times might bring, a good, energetic night with the ladies would put everything right. “There are few woes in the world, dear Ago,” il Machia had advised him when they were still only thirteen, “that a woman’s fanny will not cure.” Ago was an earnest boy, good-hearted beneath his pose of a foul-mouthed rapscallion. “And the ladies,” he asked, “where do they go to cure their woes?” Il Machia looked perplexed, as if he had never considered the matter, or, perhaps, as if to indicate that a man’s time should not be wasted on the consideration of such things. “To each other, no doubt,” he said with an adolescent finality that sounded to Ago like the last word on the matter. Why should women not seek consolation in each other’s arms at a time when half the young men of Florence did the same thing?
The widespread popularity of sodomy among the flower of Florentine manhood had earned the city the reputation of being the world capital of the act. “Sodom Reborn,” Niccolò at thirteen renamed his hometown. Even at this early age he was already able to reassure Ago that the ladies were more interesting to him, “so you don’t have to worry about me jumping you in the woods.” Many of their contemporaries were of the opposite temperament, however—for example, their classmates Biagio Buonaccorsi and Andrea di Romolo—and as an answer to the problem of the growing fashionability of homosexual practices the city, with the full support of the Church, established a Decency Office, whose job it was to build and subsidize brothels and recruit prostitutes and pimps from other parts of Italy and Europe to supplement the local tarts. The Vespuccis of Ognissanti, spotting an opportunity, diversified their businesses and began to offer women for sale as well as olive oil and wool. “Maybe I won’t even be a clerk,” Ago gloomily told Niccolò when they were sixteen. “I’ll end up running a bawdy house instead.” Il Machia told him to look on the bright side. “Clerks never get fucked,” he pointed out, “but you’ll be the envy of us all.”
The path of Sodom never appealed to Ago either, and the truth was that underneath all his dirty talk Ago Vespucci was a youth of overweening modesty. Il Machia, however, seemed to be the reincarnation of the god Priapus, always ready for action, always chasing the ladies, both professionals and amateurs, and he dragged Ago to his damnation several times a week. In the early days of their adolescent potency, when Ago accompanied his friend into the raucous brothel night, he would always choose the youngest whore in il Machia’s preferred establishment, who called herself “Scandal” but seemed almost demure: a skeletal creature from the village of Bibbione who never spoke, and looked as scared as he did. For a long time he actually paid her to sit still on the edge of the bed while he stretched out and pretended to sleep until il Machia stopped heaving and grunting in the room next door. Then he began to try to improve her mind by reading poetry to her, which she kindly pretended to appreciate, even though she was secretly so bored that she thought she might die of it, and even a little repelled by what sounded to her like the noises men mak
e when they tell accomplished lies.
One day she decided to change things. Her solemn features broke into a shy smile and she came to Ago and put one hand over his Petrarch-filled mouth and the other in another place. When she exposed his manhood Ago blushed violently, and then began to sneeze. He sneezed for an hour without stopping, and by the end of it there was blood pouring from his nose. The skeletal whore thought he was dying and ran for help. She came back with the biggest naked woman Ago had ever seen and the moment his nose smelled her it stopped misbehaving. “I get it,” said the giantess, who went by the name of La Matterassina, “you think you like them skinny, but in fact you’re a boy for flesh.” She turned to her bony co-worker and told her, in plain terms, to get lost; whereupon, without any warning, Ago’s nose exploded again. “Mother of God,” the giantess exclaimed, “so you’re a greedy bastard under all that terror. You won’t be satisfied unless you have us both.”