The Enchantress of Florence Read online

  After that there was no stopping Ago, and even il Machia had to applaud. “Slow starter, strong finisher,” he said approvingly. “For a fellow who’s nothing much to look at you have the instincts of a champion.”

  When Ago was twenty-four his love of the city was put to the test as never before. The Medici family was expelled, the brothels were all closed, and the stink of religious sanctimony filled the air. This was the time of the rise to power of the cult of the Weepers, the narrow-minded fanatics of whom Ago would say to il Machia, under his breath, that they might have been born Florentines but when the baptismal water hit their heads it must have boiled off before it could anoint them, because they were all blazing with hellfire heat. “The Devil sent us these devils to warn us against devilry,” he said on the day the long darkness came to an end. “And they bedeviled us for four fucking years. The cassock of holiness cloaks the codpiece of evil, every fucking time.”

  He didn’t need to whisper anymore on the day he said this, because his adored hometown had just been reborn, like the fabled phoenix, thanks to a healing fire. The Head Weeper, the monk Girolamo who had made everyone’s life a living hell, was roasting nicely in the middle of the Piazza della Signoria, on the exact spot where his lachrymose crew had tried to turn beauty to ashes several years earlier, dragging paintings and female adornments and even mirrors out there and setting them alight, under the erroneous impression that human beings’ love of loveliness, and even Vanity herself, could be destroyed in hypocritical flames. “Burn, you shit-blood prick,” Ago yelled, capering around the burning monk in a manner that did not befit his imminent sober employment as a city clerk. “That bonfire gave us the idea for this one!” The musky stench of Girolamo Savonarola’s burning flesh did nothing to spoil Ago’s good mood. He was twenty-eight years old, and the brothels were reopening.

  “Mercatrice, meretrice.” The city of wealthy traders was also according to ancient custom a city of fabulous whores. Now that the Weepers’ day was done the true nature of that city of lubricious sensualists reasserted itself. The world of the whorehouse came flooding back. The big Macciana brothel, in the center of town near the Mercato Vecchio and the Battistero, took down its shutters and offered short-term discount rates to re-establish its preeminence, and in the Piazza del Frascato at the brothel’s heart the dancing bears and dwarf jugglers reappeared, the monkeys dressed up in uniform who were trained to “die for their country” and the parrots that remembered the names of the brothel’s clients and shouted them out to greet their owners whenever they showed up. And of course the women came back too, the wild Slav harlots, the melancholy Polish doxies, the loud Roman strumpets, the thick German tarts, the Swiss mercenaries as ferocious in bed as their male counterparts were on the field of battle, and the local girls, who were the best of all. Ago didn’t believe in traveling, even in bed. He found his favorite girls again, fine Tuscan goods, both of them: and as well as the whore called Scandal and her sidekick La Matterassina he took a shine to a certain Beatrice Pisana who took the name of Pantasilea, the Queen of the Amazons, because she had been born with only one breast which, by way of compensation, was the most beautiful breast in the city, which was to say, as far as Ago was concerned, in all the known world.

  As daylight failed and the fire in the Piazza went out, its job well done, music rose up from the Macciana and its rival pleasure-zone, the Chiasso de’ Buoi or Alley of the Cows, and blessed the city like an angel pronouncing the rebirth of joy. Ago and il Machia decided to make a night of it, a great night which would also be the last night of their carefree youth, because while Savonarola was still burning the new ruling Council of Eighty had called Niccolò into the Palazzo and appointed him secretary of the Second Chancery which handled the foreign affairs of the Republic of Florence.

  Niccolò immediately told Ago he was giving him a job as well. “Why me?” Ago asked. “I hate fucking foreigners.”

  “In the first place, furbo,” il Machia replied, “I’ll fuck with the foreigners and just leave all the most tedious paperwork to you. In the second place, you’re the one who prophesied this, so don’t bitch about it now that your dream is coming true.”

  “Fuck, bugiarone, you really are an asshole,” said Ago, unhappily, and rudely made a fig at his friend with his left hand by sticking his thumb between his first and second fingers. “Let’s go get a drink to celebrate my clairvoyant powers.”

  A furbo was a fellow with street smarts. A bugiarone was a less complimentary and in Niccolò’s case also a less accurate thing to be called. It remained the case that neither Ago nor il Machia were sodomites, or not often, but that night, while Weepers were running for their lives or, if they couldn’t run fast enough, being strung up in side-alleys and horse-barns, the true Florence was emerging from its hiding places, and that meant that men were once again holding hands and kissing each other almost anywhere you cared to look. “Buonaccorsi and di Romolo can stop hiding their love at last,” il Machia said. “By the way, I think I’m going to hire them as well, so you can watch them going at it in the office while I’m away on official business.”

  “There’s nothing those two sex maniacs can show me,” Ago replied, “that I haven’t already seen, and that includes the pathetic little prunes in their pants.”

  Renewal, regeneration, rebirth. In Ago’s local church in Ognissanti, a building he only willingly entered when word got out that some great courtesan was present to advertise her charms, the faithful swore that Giotto’s stern Madonna spent the night grinning all over her face. And that evening outside the church of Or-sanmichele where the grandest courtesans were once again at prayer, once again wearing their finest Milan fashions and the jewels of their protectors, Niccolò and Ago were accosted by a ruffiana, Giulietta Veronese, the midget agent and some said also the Sapphic lover of the most celebrated night-lady in all of Florence, Alessandra Fiorentina. The Veronese invited them to the gala reopening night of the House of Mars, the city’s leading salon, named after the lost statue of the war god which used to stand on the riverbank until the flooding Arno bore it away. The House stood on the north bank of the river near the Bridge of the Graces. This invitation was an extraordinary event. La Fiorentina’s network of informants was unquestionably excellent and quick, but even if she had already heard about il Machia’s new position the rank of secretary of the Second Chancery scarcely merited his inclusion in that most select and exclusive company, and as for dragging the even less significant Ago Vespucci along, that was an unprecedented privilege.

  They had seen Alessandra’s picture, of course, they had drooled over her image in a volume of miniatures, her long blond hair evoking the memory of the departed Simonetta, after whose death her deranged husband Horned Marco had unsuccessfully begged for admission to La Fiorentina’s salon. He had hired one of the city’s leading mezzano agents to negotiate with Alessandra’s ruffiana. The agent had written love letters on Horned Marco’s behalf, and sung serenades beneath Alessandra’s evening casement, and even had a sonnet by Petrarca written out in gold calligraphy as a special Twelfth Night gift. The door of the salon remained barred. “My mistress,” Giulietta Veronese told the mezzano, “is not interested to be a crackpot cuckold’s necrophiliac fantasy. Tell your master to go put a hole in a picture of his late wife and fornicate with that instead.”

  A week after this final refusal Marco Vespucci hanged himself. His body dangled from the Bridge of the Graces, but Alessandra Fiorentina never saw it. She braided her long golden tresses at her window and it was as if Marco the Fool of Love were an invisible man, because Alessandra had long ago perfected the art of seeing only what she wanted to see, which was an essential accomplishment if you wanted to be one of the world’s masters and not its victim. Her seeing constructed the city. If she did not see you then you did not exist. Marco Vespucci dying invisibly outside her window died a second death under her erasing gaze.

  Once, a decade ago in the glory of her youth, Niccolò and Ago had worshipped Ales
sandra as she lounged at an open balcony, looking out at the Arno and leaning forward on a red velvet cushion so that the whole world could admire her noble décolletage, pretending all the while to read a book that was probably Boccaccio’s Decameron. The puritan years did not seem to have damaged her beauty or her standing. She had her own palazzo now, was the queen of the so-called House of Mars, and would hold court that evening on the piano nobile. “The lower orders,” said Giulietta Veronese, “are able to entertain themselves in the casino on the ground floor.” During the nine years of Weeper rule Giulietta the midget had been obliged to scrape a living as a hairdresser, fortuneteller, and concocter of love potions. She was rumored to have robbed graves and stolen the umbilical cords of dead babies, and cut away the hymens of dead virgins, and popped the eyes of the dead out of their sockets, for use in her nefarious spells. Ago wanted to tell her that she was scarcely the person to be talking about the lower fucking orders but il Machia pinched him just in time, hard enough to make him forget what he was going to say and decide to kill Niccolò Machiavelli instead. This, too, he quickly forgot, because the Veronese hag was giving them instructions. “Bring her poetry,” she said. “Poetry is what she likes, not flowers. She has enough of flowers. Bring her the latest thing by Sannazaro or Cecco d’Ascoli, or learn well one of Parabosco’s madrigals and offer to sing it for her. She is formidable. If you sing badly she will slap you in the face. Do not bore her, or some of her favored young gentlemen may toss you out of a window like a tiresome toy. Do not importune her, or her protector will have you stabbed in the heart in an alley before you get home tomorrow. You are being invited for one reason only. Do not trespass on territory that is not yours to walk upon.”

  “Why are we being invited, then,” il Machia asked her.

  “She will tell you,” said the Veronese crone spitefully, “if she feels like it.”

  Akbar the Great was informed of the rapid rise of the sex workers known as Skeleton and Mattress from lowly whores at the Hatyapul gate to fully fledged courtesans with a villa of their own by the lakeside. “Their success is being seen by the people as a sign of the ascendancy of the ladies’ favorite, the foreigner Vespucci, who prefers the problematic title of Mogor dell’Amore,” Abul Fazl told him. “As to the source of the capital needed to initiate such an enterprise, one can only speculate.” Umar the Ayyar independently confirmed the popularity of the so-called House of Skanda, named after the Hindu god of war, “because,” the saying went in the noblemen’s mansions in Lower Sikri, “when you grapple with those ladies it’s more like fighting a battle than making love.” Umar reported that the court’s musical genius Tansen had gone so far as to create a raag in the two courtesans’ honor, the raag deepak, so called because when he played it for the first time in the House of Skanda the sorcery of the melody made unlit lamps burst into flame.

  In his dreams the emperor himself visited the brothel, which in the night country stood on the banks of an unknown foreign river instead of the shores of his own lake. It was plain that Mogor dell’Amore was also in the grip of a waking dream, because it was he who had transported these whores across the world to the Arno in his tale. “All men lie about whores,” Akbar thought, and forgave him. He had more serious things to worry about.

  To dream of searching for love was a sure sign that a love had been lost, and when he awoke the emperor was perturbed. The next night he sought out Jodha and possessed her with a fury that had been lacking in their couplings ever since he returned from the wars. She wondered, when he left to listen to the foreigner’s story, if this wild passion was a sign of his return, or a gesture of farewell.

  “For a woman to please a man,” the emperor said, “it is necessary that she be able to sing. She should know how to play musical instruments, and dance, and do all three things together when requested: singing, dancing, and piping on a flute or fiddling a tune upon a string. She should write well, draw well, be adept in the giving of tattoos, and be prepared to receive them in whatsoever place the man should desire. She should know how to speak the language of flowers when decorating beds or couches, or even when decorating the ground: the cherry is for loyalty, the narcissus for joy, the lotus for purity and truth. The willow is the woman and the peony the man. Pomegranate buds bring fertility, olives bring honor, and pine cones are for long life and wealth. The morning glory should always be avoided because it speaks of death.”

  In the emperor’s harem the concubines were boxed in red stone cubicles softened by fat pillows. Around a central courtyard, above which a mirrorwork marquee shielded the harem from the sun and unworthy eyes, the cubicles stood in serried ranks, like an army of love, or livestock. One day Mogor was accorded the privilege of accompanying Akbar into this hidden world. He was followed by a slender eunuch whose body was undefiled by a single hair. This was Umar the Ayyar; he had no eyebrows, his head shone like a helmet, his skin was unwrinkled and soft. It was impossible to tell his age but Mogor intuited instantly that this silken boy would kill a man without a qualm, would cut off his best friend’s head if that were the emperor’s desire. The women of the harem moved around them in patterns that reminded Mogor of the journeys of the stars, the loops and swirls of heavenly bodies moving around—yes!—the sun. He told the emperor about the new, heliocentric model of the universe, speaking in a low voice, because it was a concept which could still get a man burned at the stake for heresy back home. It was not a thing to shout about, even though it was improbable that the Pope could hear him here, in the harem of the Grand Mughal.

  Akbar laughed. “This has been known for hundreds of years,” he said. “How backward your reborn Europe seems to be, like a baby throwing a rattle out of its bassinet because it doesn’t want the rattle to make a noise.” Mogor accepted the rebuke and changed the subject. “I meant only to say that Your Majesty is the sun and these your satellites,” he said. The emperor thumped him on the back. “In the field of flattery, at least, you can teach us a thing or two. We will tell our champion flatterer Bhakti Ram Jain to come and pick up some pointers from you.”

  Silently, slowly, like mind-creatures in a dream, the concubines circled and swayed. They stirred the air around the emperor into a magic soup flavored with the spices of arousal. There was no hurry. The emperor ruled over everything. Time itself could be stretched and paused. There was all the time in the world.

  “In the arts of staining, dyeing, coloring, and painting her teeth, her clothes, her nails, and her body a woman should be beyond compare,” the emperor said, his speech now sluggish with lust. Wine was brought in golden glass pitchers and he drank in large, unwise gulps. A pipe was brought forward and then there was opium smoke in his pupils. The concubines were closer now, circling inward, their bodies beginning to brush against those of the emperor and his guest. In the emperor’s company one was emperor for a day. His privileges became yours as well. “A woman should know how to play music on glasses filled to different heights with liquids of various sorts,” said the emperor, slurring his words. “She should be able to fix stained glass into a floor. She should know how to make, trim, and hang a picture; how to fashion a necklace, a rosary, a garland, or a wreath; and how to store or gather water in an aqueduct or tank. She should know about scents. And about ornaments for the ear. And she should be able to act, and to lay on theatrical shows, and she should be quick and sure in her hands, and be able to cook and make lemonade or sherbet, and wear jewels, and bind a man’s turban. And she should, of course, know magic. A woman who knows these few things is almost the equal of any ignorant brute of a man.”

  The concubines had blended into a single supernatural Woman, a composite Concubine, and She was all around the two men, besieging them with love. The eunuch had slipped away outside the circle of the planets of desire. The single woman of many arms and infinite possibilities, the Concubine, silenced their tongues, her softness touching their hardness. Mogor gave himself up to her. He thought of other women far away and long ago, Simonetta Vespucci and A
lessandra Fiorentina, and the woman whose story he had come to Sikri to tell. They were part of the Concubine too.

  “In my city,” he said much later, reclining on cushions, amid the melancholy of women after love, “a woman of breeding should be prudent and chaste, and should not be the object of gossip. Such a woman must be modest and calm, candid and benign. When she dances she should not make energetic movements and when she plays music she should avoid the brazenness of brass, and the drumness of drums. She should be painted sparingly and her hairstyle should not be elaborate.” The emperor, even though he was mostly asleep, made a noise of disgust. “Then your men of breeding must die of boredom,” he pronounced. “Ah, but the courtesan,” said Mogor, “she fulfills all your ideals, except, possibly, for the business about the stained glass.” “Never make love to a woman who is bad with stained glass,” the emperor said solemnly, giving no indication of humorous intent. “Such a woman is an ignorant shrew.”

  That was the night Agostino Vespucci fell in love for the first time, and understood that adoration was a journey too, that however determined he might be not to leave his native city he was doomed like all his footloose friends to walk down roads he did not know, the heart’s pathways that would oblige him to enter places of danger, confront demons and dragons, and run the risk of losing not only his life but his soul as well. He caught a glimpse through an idly open door of La Fiorentina in her private sanctum, reclining on a gilded chaise in the midst of a small group of the city’s very finest men, and idly permitting her patron Francesco del Nero to kiss her left breast while a little hairy white lapdog licked at her right nipple, and in that instant he was done for, and knew that she was the only woman for him. Francesco del Nero was a relative of il Machia’s and maybe that was why they had been invited, but at that moment Ago didn’t care, he was ready to strangle the bastard on the spot, yes, and the fucking lapdog too. To conquer La Fiorentina he would have to defeat many such rivals, yes, and make his fortune too, and as the road to his future rolled out before him like a rug he felt the insouciance of his youth slip away from him. In its place a new resolve was born, as sharp and tempered as any Toledo blade.