The Enchantress of Florence Page 16

  Il Machia sometimes saw the world too analogically, reading one situation as an analogue of another, quite different one. So when Caterina refused his proposal he saw it as a bad omen. Maybe he would fail with the palace of memories as well. Soon afterward, when Cesare Borgia attacked and conquered Forlì exactly as predicted by Niccolò, Caterina stood on the ramparts and showed the Duke of Romagna her genitals and told him to go fuck himself. She ended up a prisoner of the Pope in Castel Sant’Angelo but il Machia interpreted her fate as a good sign. That Caterina Sforza Riario was a prisoner in Pope Alexander’s castle made her like a mirror of the woman kept in a darkened room at Queen Alessandra’s House of Mars. That she had exposed herself to Borgia meant that maybe the palace of memories would agree to do the same to him.

  He returned to the House of Mars where the ruffiana Giulietta grudgingly agreed to let him have unrestricted access to the memory palace, because she, too, hoped he could wake that somnambulant lady up, so that she could start acting like a proper courtesan instead of a talking statue. And il Machia’s reading of the omens turned out to be accurate. When he was alone in the boudoir with her he led her gently by the hand and laid her down on the four-poster bed with its suitably French draperies of pale blue silk embroidered with golden fleurs-de-lys. She was a tall woman. Things would be easier if she was lying down. He lay beside her and caressed her golden hair and whispered his questions in her ear while he unbuttoned her seraglio inmate’s bodice. Her breasts were small. That was all right. Her hands were clasped at her waist, and she made no objection to the movements of his hand. And as she recited the memories that had been buried in her mind she seemed to be unburdening herself, and as the weight of the memories lessened the lightness of her spirits rose. “Tell me everything,” il Machia whispered in her ear while he kissed her newly exposed bosom, “and then you will be free.”

  After the child tribute had been gathered (the memory palace said) it was taken to Stamboul and distributed among good Turkish families to serve them and to be taught the Turkish language and the intricacies of the Muslim faith. Then there was military training. After a time the boys were either taken as pages into the Imperial Seraglio and given the title of Ich-Oghlán, or else they entered the Janissary Corps as Ajém-Oghlán. Raw recruits. At the age of eleven the hero, the mighty warrior, the Wielder of the Enchanted Lance and the most handsome man in the world, became, God be praised, a Janissary; the greatest Janissary fighter in the history of the Corps. Ah, the feared Janissaries of the Osmanli Sultan, may their renown spread far and wide! They were not Turks, but the pillars of the Turks’ empire. No Jews were admitted, for their faith was too strong to be altered; no gypsies, because they were scum; and the Moldavians and Wallachians of Romania were never harvested. But in the time of the hero the Wallachians had to be fought, under Vlad Dracula, the Impaler, their king.

  While the memory palace had been telling him about the Janissaries il Machia’s attention had wandered to her lips. She told him how the cadets were inspected naked on arrival in Stamboul and he thought only about the beauty of her mouth as it formed the French word nus. She spoke of their training as butchers and gardeners and he traced the outlines of her moving lips with his index finger as she said the words. She said their names were taken from them and their family names as well and they became Abdullahs or Abdulmomins or other names beginning with abd, which meant slave and indicated their status in the world. But instead of worrying about the deformation of these young lives he only thought that he didn’t like the shapes her lips made when she spoke those Oriental syllables. He kissed the corners of her mouth as she told him of the Chief White Eunuch and the Chief Black Eunuch who trained boys for imperial service and told him that the hero, his friend, had begun as chief falconer, an unheard-of rank for a cadet. He knew that his lost friend, the boy without a childhood, was growing up as she spoke, growing up in her telling of him, having whatever it is that children have instead of a childhood when they don’t have a childhood, changing into a man, or into whatever a child without a childhood becomes when he grows up, maybe a man without a manhood. Yes, Argalia was acquiring martial skills that caused other men to admire and fear him, he was gathering around himself a coterie of other young warriors, child-tribute cadets from the far frontiers of Europe, as well as the four albino Swiss giants, Otho, Botho, Clotho, and D’Artagnan, mercenaries captured in battle and auctioned off in the slave markets of Tangier, and a wild Serb named Konstantin who had been captured at the siege of Novo Brdo. But in spite of the importance of this information he found himself drifting into a reverie as he watched the small movements of the memory palace’s face as she spoke. Yes, Argalia had grown up somewhere, and achieved various feats, and all of this was information he should have, but in the meanwhile here were these slow undulations of lips and cheek, the articulate movements of tongue and jaw, the glow of alabaster skin.

  Sometimes in the woods near the farm in Percussina he lay on the leaf-soft ground and listened to the two-tone song of the birds, high low high, high low high low, high low high low high. Sometimes by a woodland stream he watched the water rush over the pebbled bed, its tiny modulations of bounce and flow. A woman’s body was like that. If you watched it carefully enough you could see how it moved to the rhythm of the world, the deep rhythm, the music below the music, the truth below the truth. He believed in this hidden truth the way other men believed in God or love, believed that truth was in fact always hidden, that the apparent, the overt, was invariably a kind of lie. Because he was a man fond of precision he wanted to capture the hidden truth precisely, to see it clearly and set it down, the truth beyond ideas of right and wrong, ideas of good and evil, ideas of ugliness and beauty, all of which were aspects of the surface deceptions of the world, having little to do with how things really worked, disconnected from the what-ness, the secret codes, the hidden forms, the mystery.

  Here in this woman’s body the mystery could be seen. This apparently inert being, her self erased or buried beneath this never-ending story, this labyrinth of story-rooms in which more tales had been hidden than he was interested to hear. This toothsome sleepwalker. This blank. The rote-learned words poured out of her as he looked on, and while he unbuttoned and caressed. He exposed her nudity without compunction, touched it without guilt, manipulated her without any feelings of remorse. He was the scientist of her soul. In the smallest motion of an eyebrow, in the twitch of a muscle in her thigh, in a sudden minuscule curling of the left corner of her upper lip, he deduced the presence of life. Her self, that sovereign treasure, had not been destroyed. It slept and could be awakened. He whispered in her ear, “This is the last time you will ever tell this story. As you tell it, let it go.” Slowly, phrase by phrase, episode by episode, he would unbuild the palace of memories and release a human being. He bit her ear and saw a tiny answering tilt of the head. He pressed her foot and a toe moved gratefully. He caressed her breast and faintly, so faintly that only a man looking for the deeper truth would have seen it, her back arched in return. There was nothing wrong in what he did. He was her rescuer. She would thank him in time.

  At the siege of Trebizond it rained every day. The hills were full of Tartars and other heathen. The road down from the mountains turned to mud, so deep that it reached the bellies of the horses. They destroyed the supply wagons and carried the bags on camels’ backs instead. A camel fell and a treasure chest broke open, sixty thousand pieces of gold lying on the hillside for all to see. At once the hero, with the Swiss giants and the Serb, drew swords and mounted guard around the Sultan’s fallen wealth until he, the emperor, arrived on the scene. After that the hero was better trusted by the Sultan than the king’s own kin.

  At last the stiffness had gone from her limbs. Her body lay loose and inviting upon the silken sheets. The stories she was telling now were of recent date. Argalia had grown up and was almost as old as il Machia and Ago. Their chronologies were united once again. Soon she would have finished and then he would wake her up. Th
e ruffiana Giulietta, an impatient creature, goaded him to take her while she slept. “Just stick it in there. Get on with it. No need to be gentle. Give it to her good. That’ll open her eyes.” But he had decided not to ravish her until she awoke of her own accord, and won the assent of Alessandra Fiorentina in the matter. The memory palace was an exceptional beauty and would be handled delicately. She might be no more than a slave in a courtesan’s house but she would receive this much respect.

  Against Vlad III the voivode of Wallachia—Vlad “Dracula,” the “dragon-devil,” the Impaler Prince, Kazikli Bey—no ordinary power could have prevailed. It had begun to be said of Prince Vlad that he drank the blood of his impaled victims as they writhed in their death throes upon their stakes, and that drinking the living blood of men and women gave him strange powers over death. He could not die. He could not be killed. He was also a brute of brutes. He cut off the noses of the men he killed and sent them to the prince of Hungary to boast about his prowess. These stories made the army fear him and the march into Wallachia was not a happy one. To encourage the Janissaries the Sultan distributed thirty thousand gold pieces and told the men that if they won they would be given property rights and regain the use of their names. Vlad the Devil had already burned down the whole of Bulgaria and impaled twenty-five thousand people on wooden stakes, but his forces were smaller than the Ottoman army. He retreated and left scorched earth behind him, poisoning wells and slaughtering cattle. When the Sultan’s army was marooned in desolation without food or water the Devil King launched surprise attacks. Many soldiers were killed and their bodies stuck onto sharpened sticks. Then Dracula retreated to Tirgoviste and the Sultan declared, “This will be the devil’s last stand.”

  But at Tirgoviste they saw a terrible sight. Twenty thousand men, women, and children had been impaled by the devil on a palisade of stakes around the town just to show the advancing army what awaited them. There were babies clinging to their impaled mothers in whose rotting breasts you could see the nests of crows. At the sight of the forest of the impaled the Sultan was disgusted and withdrew his unnerved troops. It seemed that the campaign would end in catastrophe, but the hero stepped forward with his loyal group. “We will do what must be done,” he said. One month later the hero returned to Stamboul with the head of the devil in a jar of honey. It turned out that Dracula could die after all, in spite of the rumors to the contrary. His body had been impaled as he had impaled so many others and left for the monks of Snagov to bury as they pleased. This was when the Sultan understood that the hero was a superhuman being whose weapons possessed enchanted powers and whose companions were more than human also. He was accorded the highest honor of the Osmanli Sultanate, the rank of Wielder of the Enchanted Lance. In addition, he became a free man once again.

  “From now on,” the Sultan told him, “you are my right hand as my right hand is, and a son to me as my sons are, and your name is not a slave name, for you are no longer any man’s mamlúk or abd, your name is Pasha Arcalia, the Turk.”

  A happy ending, il Machia thought drily. Our old friend made his fortune after all. As good a place as any for the palace of memories to conclude her account. He lay down beside her and tried to picture Nino Argalia as an Oriental pasha fanned by bare-chested Nubian eunuchs and beset by harem lovelies. Feelings of revulsion arose in him at the image of this renegade, a Christian convert to Islam, enjoying the fleshpots of lost Constantinople, the new Konstantiniyye or Stamboul of the Turks, or praying in the Janissaries’ mosque, or walking without a care by the fallen, broken statue of the emperor Justinian, and reveling in the growing power of the enemies of the West. Such a treasonous transformation might impress a good-natured innocent like Ago Vespucci, who saw Argalia’s journey as the kind of exciting adventure he himself was not interested in having, but to Niccolò’s mind it broke the bonds of their friendship, and should they ever meet face to face they would do so as foes, for Argalia’s defection was a crime against the deeper truths, the eternal verities of power and kinship that drove the history of men. He had turned against his own kind, and a tribe was never lenient with such men. However, it did not occur to il Machia then, or for many years afterward, that he would ever see his boyhood companion again.

  The midget Giulietta Veronese stuck her head round the door. “Well?” Niccolò nodded judiciously. “I think, signora, that she will presently be awake and restored to herself. As for me, for my small part in the renewal of her personhood—of the human Dignity which, great Pico tells us, stands at the very heart of our humanity—I admit I feel a little glow of pride.” The ruffiana blew exasperated air through a corner of her mouth. “It’s about time,” she said, and withdrew.

  Almost at once the palace of memories began to murmur in her sleep. Her voice strengthened and Niccolò realized she was telling the last story, the story that was embedded in the very doorway of the memory palace that had colonized her brain, the tale that had to be told as she passed out through that doorway and reawakened to ordinary life: her own story, which unfolded backward, as if time were running in reverse. With growing horror he saw rising before him the scene of her indoctrination, saw the necromancer of Stamboul, the long-hatted long-bearded Sufi mystic of the Bektashi order, adept in the mesmerist arts and the building of memory palaces, working at the behest of a certain newly minted Pasha to commit that Pasha’s exploits to this captive lady’s memory—to erase her life to make room for Argalia’s no doubt self-aggrandizing version of himself. The Sultan had given him the gift of this enslaved beauty and this was the use he had made of her. Barbarian! Traitor! He should have died of the plague along with his parents. He should have drowned when Andrea Doria cast him into that rowboat. To be impaled on a stake by Vlad Dracula of Wallachia would not have been too harsh a punishment for such misdeeds.

  Il Machia’s mind was full of these and other angry thoughts when from nowhere there rose up an unwanted image from the past: the boy Argalia teasing him about his mother’s porridge cures for sickness. “Not the Machiavelli but the Polentini.” And Argalia’s old song about an imaginary porridge girl. If she were a sin then I would repent her. If she were to die then I would lament her. Il Machia found tears running down his cheeks. He sang the song to himself, And if she were a message then I would have sent her, singing softly, so as not to disturb the flesh and blood damsel he had brought back from the palace of distress. He was alone with the memory of Argalia, with only his new sense of outrage and the old, sweet memory of childhood for company, and he wept.

  My name is Angélique and I am the daughter of Jacques Coeur of Bourges, merchant of Montpellier. My name is Angélique and I am the daughter of Jacques Coeur. My father was a trader and brought nuts and silks and carpets from Damascus to Narbonne. He was falsely accused of poisoning the King of France’s mistress and fled to Rome. My name is Angélique and I am the daughter of Jacques Coeur who was honored by the Pope. He was made captain of sixteen papal galleys and sent to the relief of Rhodes but he fell ill on the way and died. My name is Angélique and I am of the family of Jacques Coeur. While my brothers and I were trading with the Levant I was abducted by pirates and sold into slavery to the Sultan of Stamboul. My name is Angélique and I am the daughter of Jacques Coeur. My name is Angélique and I am the daughter of Jacques. My name is Angélique and I am the daughter. My name is Angélique and I am. My name is Angélique.

  He slept beside her that night. When she awoke he would tell her what had happened, he would be gentle and kind, and she would thank him like the lady she had once been, a girl of well-bred mercantile stock. He pitied her for her bad luck. Twice taken by Barbary pirates, once from the French, a second time from the Turks—who knew what assaults she had been subjected to, how many men had had her, or what she would remember of such matters, and even now she was not free. She looked as refined as any aristocrat but she was just a girl in a house of pleasure. But if her brothers were alive they would surely rejoice to have her returned, their hidden sister, their lost beloved Angéli
que. They would buy her back from Alessandra Fiorentina and she could go home, to wherever home might be, Narbonne or Montpellier or Bourges. Maybe he could fuck her before that happened. He would discuss that with the ruffiana in the morning. The House of Mars was in his debt for increasing the value of its formerly damaged asset. Lovely Angélique, Angélique of the sorrows. He had done a fine and almost selfless thing.

  That night he had a strange dream. An Oriental padishah or emperor sat, at sunset, under a little cupola at the apex of a pyramid-like five-story building made of red sandstone, and looked out over a golden lake. To his rear there were body-servants wielding large feathered fans, and beside him stood a European man or woman, a figure with long yellow hair wearing a coat of colored leather lozenges, telling a tale about a lost princess. The dreamer only saw this yellow-haired figure from behind, but the Padishah was plainly visible, a big, fair-skinned man with a heavy mustache, handsome, much bejeweled, and tending a little to fat. Evidently these were dream-creatures he had conjured up, for this prince was certainly not the Turkish Sultan, and the yellow-haired courtier did not sound like the new Italian Pasha. “You speak only of the love of lovers,” the Padishah said, “but we are thinking of the love of the people for their prince. For we have a great desire to be loved.”