Then one evening (he still could tell day from night, mostly, thanks to the high window), the thing suddenly shook itself violently, like something belabored with a whip, and straightened up. Its lumpy brow elevated slightly, with a bestial sort of intelligence. Though there were no discernible sensory organs, Vicente had the impression he was being observed.
He began to speak in Spanish—most of his thoughts had reverted to the tongue of his mother. As well as he could remember, he told the thing how he had come to be here. The act of speaking brought words back to his tongue and thoughts to his head. Fra Ludovico. Fra Ludovico, for instance, of all ridiculous men! He’d been a figure of some ridicule, but how nice to find him around in the memory, capable of being mentioned.
The creature stretched its legs and shrugged its headless shoulders. A fruity, indecent odor emerged from somewhere, but it didn’t last long and at least it smelled warm. And that was something.
Vicente said, “I’ve come to this miserable scrag-end of the world to find the food that fed the beginning of our race. I’ve come to find the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.”
The creature betrayed no surprise at this, though perhaps it didn’t understand Spanish. Or perhaps it had no way to demonstrate surprise except by curling its sort-of-toes, which it did from time to time expressively.
Vicente was undaunted by the creature’s taciturn nature. He found that he was standing and swinging his arms with exhilaration as he recalled the excitement of seeing Montefiore for the first time. His lord and tyrant, that scandalous Cesare Borgia, had seen to it that Vicente was accompanied to the new home with a small party of mercenaries sporting the Borgia pennant and equipped with an iron-spiked battering ram. “In any event, there was no opposition to my taking possession of Montefiore,” said Vicente. “I came upon a place in mild disrepair, with sullen and uncommunicative contadini and house servants more or less attached to the property. They resented us at first. But they were won over. They took us in, and as time passed . . .”
He paused and looked at the stone beast, and several things happened at once.
“My Bianca, my sweetest Bianca. María Inés was dead, but she left me Bianca.”
As Vicente spoke her name, the beast straightened up for a moment, alert and, it even seemed, respectful. If it is courteous to bow before royalty, it is courteous to honor the humble who deserve it. The behavior of the stone beast—its rough brow elevated—gave Vicente de Nevada his first experience of acknowledgment in years. A response to something he said.
“Bianca de Nevada,” said Vicente. “My daughter.”
He had come here, those years earlier, as a way to protect her. He was to have secured the limb of a tree, history’s most ancient tree, out of duty toward her. He had forgotten. He had let his imprisonment overwhelm his memory and his duty, not to il Valentino but to his daughter.
“I need to leave,” he said to the beast. “I need to claim that talisman and return. I can’t tell if I’ve been gone for a year or a decade, but I’ve been gone too long. Let us finish this job, then, and away to Italy.”
The stone beast lowered its brow and turned (by which action Vicente decided the lower beveled side was the front, and the higher side approximated a cranial hump rising behind). It began to crunch its way into the hole from which it had been disgorged. A sound of scrunching and grinding. Small dry streams of sand and pulverized gravel spat out. The beast didn’t merely reclaim its stone womb, though. It kept going, apparently. To judge by the noise, the creature was burrowing through rock. In its wake was a tunnel.
In his prime Vicente couldn’t have fit through such a narrow passage. But he had wasted into a reptilian slip of a thing. Having nothing to claim as his possession, he began to make his escape from the dungeon cell of Teophilos.
The stone beast carved out a sharply angled turn. It started to burrow upward. The detritus slipped down and backward and hit Vicente in the face. With every passing moment of effort, Vicente felt a bit more awake. He was aware of his breathing. Of the trembling inefficiency of his muscles. Of the sand in his lungs. He was aware that his flesh hung on his arms like rotting cotton cloth, and that his clothes were encumbering as a winding sheet. But his mind felt sharper and sharper. He began to feel affection for the stone beast, and to think the simple thoughts that he had once had for his hunting dogs. Good dog, he thought. Good boy. You have a nose I don’t have, and eyes that can see through stone. Apparently. Good boy. And on we go.
When the beast had made another soft turn and begun to rise again, scrabbling, eating, bullying the rock aside—Vicente couldn’t imagine how it was done—it occurred to him that they were following a path within the thick walls of the monastery itself. They were twisting around the soft curves of the building’s grand and massive salient. They were following the straight line of the wall of an interior chamber. They might emerge any minute in a wine cellar, a laundry room, a chamber for storing herbs and root vegetables, an apothecary.
The stone beast paused at last and made a final exertion, and then pushed through. Vicente followed into a well of light that burned like pitch against his eyes.
It was probably a mercy that he cried in pain, for his tears moistened, cleansing his eyes of grit. The outlines of lighted things shivered. In time, he could sit up and look about himself, and clutch his knees in astonishment. He had forgotten how convincing the world could look, how sure of itself: its outlines and edges; its gradations, recessions, protrusions; its startling and vulgar colors.
They had come into a room of prayer, with four high windows in a cupola overhead, shafting hot broiled light yellowly down from the sides of a high thin dome. Cristo Pantocrator was figured in gold leaf upon a wall, staring with massive cold love and patience. The Paraclete was opposite, serrated tips of fire crowning its head, seven olive branches in one claw and seven laurel bows in the other. Between the two, on an altar, stood a tabernacle. The corners were pillars of solid Persian lapis lazuli. The lintels and struts were knobbed with dusty jewels. Each wall was a piece of glass about as large as a man’s chest. Inside, resting on a golden armature specially carved to support the thing in a natural arc, was displayed the bough of the tree of Eden, with silver leaves, and three well-formed Apples in their first blush of ripeness.
Vicente felt little by way of awe. Whether the artifact was an object of profound theological implication or an exquisite work of art didn’t matter. The whole room, with its motes of dust dancing slowly in the shafts of possessive light, seemed miracle enough. Gesù Cristo Himself, waving from beyond the glass, couldn’t have made Vicente feel more staggered, joyous, alive.
The stone beast put out its two forward limbs. Easily it balanced on its hind ones and reared up. It raised its digitless arms and laid them with a soft clipping sound against one of the glass facades. It knows, thought Vicente, why I’ve come here. It’s been dispatched, or it has dispatched itself, to be my guide. Was it a calcified angel of some sort, or a friendly stone dog? No matter. It did the duty of friendship. It raked its limbs gently across the glass. The tips of its limbs, where there ought to be paws, or hands, puckered and settled. One limb gently swept the glass out of the air, into a ball, as neatly as a film of morning hoarfrost can be scooped up and rounded.
Then the creature fell back. The bough stood ready for taking. It wasn’t the beast’s job to take it. It was Vicente’s, and he knew it.
Tremblingly he reached in and detached the bough from its stand. He held it with no more reverence than he had held Bianca, when she had been a spray of eternity in his arms. Perfection of bone, breath, and blossom.
Vicente set the artifact on the floor while he looked around for a sack or a casket in which to carry it. He didn’t need to bother. With its strange limbs the beast secreted the thing somewhere in the folds of its stone form. It disappeared, harbored in stone.
They turned and left the treasury. From a distance Vicente could hear the soft keening of monks at prayer. Possibly they were on dut
y, guarding the doors. He wished them well and was sorry for their loss.
Back into the flank of the wall they crawled. The stone beast had to go first, being able to intuit the way somehow, and Vicente to follow. Since Vicente couldn’t rebuild the wall behind him, their mode of escape would be obvious. Who knew how long it would be before an alarm was raised and a party dispatched to reclaim the stolen relic? Perhaps quite a while, Vicente thought, and hoped, and, yes, prayed. Perhaps the monks looked in on their most precious possession only on the highest of high holy days, or on the ascension of a new bishop or prelate.
Or perhaps they checked on it on the hour; it was impossible to know.
The stone beast burrowed. Vicente followed. They traced a long tunneled route through stone as cold as ice. In time they emerged on a beach of broken shale. All about them burned stars, making a spangled mess in the sweet black sky.
Al-iksir
THE SLIGHTEST poem of my dear Pietro Bembo, smuggled into my chambers when the dreadful Duca de Ferrara is away, and I tremble before unfolding the page. It might be anything. It might say anything. It might contain the secret that will make me more alive. I open the page. It’s a poem, it’s a thing of beauty, it’s a testament of love, it is everything a woman could want. It isn’t enough.
I can hear the legend they make of my life already. I can hear the scoundrels practicing their slanders and half-truths about my vices. Donna Lucrezia, they say, in voices falsely honeyed: a patroness of the arts, a whore of Babylon, a murderess and a communicant, a mother and a mistress, a daughter and a Diana. They exaggerate my romances. They miss the point. Gossip serves some purpose. May their purposes fail in the end.
Sometimes I dream of the water. I saw the sea in Naples, of course, and I am no stranger to views of our cold alexandrine Adriatic, of the more limpidly turquoise Tyrrhenian Sea. But I’ve not sailed out beyond the sight of land, out between the slipping thumbs of waves and the shapely varnished disc of the heavens. I’ve never been beyond reach of father or brother or husband or lover. I should like not to turn my back on my life, but I would be grateful for an escape from the tyranny of family.
I was in Ferrara when I heard that Cesare had died in Navarre. Died as a common soldier, fighting naked in a senseless campaign, one morning before dawn. He still thought he might regain some foothold of power from his wife, or threaten the family de Nevada until they came up with an army or funds to hire one. I took to my chamber. For a month I relived our childhoods. By day I honored our family devotion through my penances of grief and guilt. By night I remembered our crimes of love in dreams that came without cost or consequence, the only regret being to awake from them.
I loved my brother. He had held my hand during the investiture of our father into the See of Rome. I admired his ambition and his cruelty. I collaborated with him in campaigns against the world, against our father, against our respective spouses. He could look at me and make me smoke with need just by angling a glance in my direction from beneath a single raised eyebrow. My insides felt as if singed and sanctified with frankincense from Araby.
What more does one ask of life, really, but to stagger from moment to moment with a reason to wake and wait for the next reason to wake? This Cesare had given me, and this, in dying, he took from me.
His death occurred perhaps a year after I had sent that child out to the forest. In that vicious year nothing had gone right—perhaps as a punishment to me, perhaps just as proof of how callous the world could be. Cesare’s career being ended, horribly, I had my third husband, Alfonso d’Este, Duca de Ferrara, as an occasional visitor to my bed; and Ariosto to sing me his epic romances; and to tease me with sonnets, Pietro Bembo. But it was with the death of Cesare that my world began to end too. For what could my husband, my lovers manage to mean to me?
With what ferocity did I push my court into diversions, though. Masques and balls, operas and recitations, feats of valor and feats of humiliation, lectures on alchemy, lectures on theology, lectures on the art of lecturing. And from each distraction I learned two things. There was always some small nugget to please or perplex me, accompanied by the larger and tired knowledge that nuggets of pleasure couldn’t alter fate nor massage the broken heart into working properly again.
Niccolò Machiavelli would come and talk to me about Cesare. We drank wine in tall red goblets. We remembered Cesare’s ambitions, his strengths, his loves. I think Machiavelli loved Cesare as much as he admired him, though I think he rightly feared him more than anything else. We talked about Florence, about the Republic; we remembered Savonarola and the bonfire, and how sad that the Medici themselves hadn’t been included among the baubles to be scorched.
Machiavelli would leave. Darling Bembo would come, the love, and try to disarm my grief with the attention of his hand, his sex, his nibbling lips. The coy code names we had, the pretense at pretenses. As if my husband knew nothing, or, if knowing, as if he might care at all.
But I had a mind as well as a heart, and a curiosity as well as an ambition. And I paid attention. Ferrara has its university—perhaps not on a par with Bologna or Paris, Württemberg or Oxford, but it attracts eager students. Once, eager to try a student again, I cloaked myself beyond recognition and slipped into the galleries. It happened that an alchemist was speaking in the scholarly language of Latin, and it had been too long since I’d heard the Latin of Rome, of my childhood. I listened with grave joy as a slip of a thing, a lad, asked questions about the Elixir of Life.
“Elixir,” said the sage, “is derived from a term of the Moor—al-iksir, though they steal that root word from the Greek xieron, meaning a dry and powdery substance. A tincture.” I listened with keener interest. The Borgia family has always had a fondness for what can be accomplished by the judicious application of a particular tincture in a particular glass of wine.
The young lad persisted and asked questions about quicksilver. One of the three elements on which the universe is based, said the lecturer. In days long gone by, wealthy Spanish families used it to coat a shallow basin, large enough for bathing in.
Not just in Spain, I wanted to say. Perhaps remembering stories of his grandfather, Pope Alexander VI had such a basin created in the gardens at Tremante. A sumptuous afternoon was to be had, as the sun heated the water. One could shuck one’s heavy clothes and step in, as if descending into a mirror. The many times I sported myself therein, heedless of opinion. Cesare with me once or twice, more often than not my father looking on . . .
A foolish notion, continued the lecturer, as quicksilver has many dangerous effects upon our species. It can provoke drooling, and lassitude, and lapsing into a mental state of sharp terror, in which one can believe that conspiracies against one are being whispered in every quarter.
A Borgia doesn’t need to bathe in a quicksilver pool to believe this, for it is always true and always has been.
“The more common term is mercury,” continued the alchemist, “and the mineral is derived from cinnabar. The celestial body that we call Mercury is red, as the poison of quicksilver. The lost chapter of The Secret of Secrets by Rhazes, the Persian alchemist, concerned itself with the bodies of the world—the metals, stones, and salts—and the volatile liquids, or spirits. Though Rhazes couldn’t complete the transmutation of base metals into gold, as the Emir of Khorassan had required, and was fatally thumped on the head with his own Secret of Secrets, there is much we learned about how the world is arranged, in its secret inclinations.”
I listened, for secret inclinations are of abiding interest to a woman. In sometimes being able to determine the secret inclinations of others, woman has her signal advantage over man. I left with instructions to my attendant to summon the curious student.
In due course he presented himself at court and, without tedious delay, in my bed. He wasn’t personally possessed of any Secret of Secrets, to my mind, and my attempt at spiritual corruption was an uncharacteristic failure. I couldn’t induce in the young man anything approaching physical ecstasy.
Oddly beardless, perhaps he was deficient in the manly properties. But he did chatter engagingly about the nature of quicksilver, and I learned from him much that would prove useful. He styled himself Paracelsus, though in his adoring letter of thanks and apology he signed his name Theo. Bombast von Hohenheim.
I gave what I could, in those years, and waited out my days. My father was gone, my dear brother was gone, and who was there to promote? My husband would always be an Este, not a Borgia. My young Rodrigo was being raised apart from me, as I in my day was raised apart from my mother. I had one miscarriage after another, and nothing worthwhile to occupy my time. I even considered becoming devout, in some benighted homage to Cesare’s flares of faith.
Then at the age of thirteen Rodrigo died. We’d lived apart for eight years, and he died apart from me. I had imagined, eventually, he would grow old enough to deserve my company, strong enough of character not to be corrupted by me. I was anticipating that day with joy. It wasn’t to be.
So more and more often I took to repairing to Montefiore. It pleased me for its obscurity. There, without courtiers to entertain or ignore, I pretended at being the widow of a farmer, and nothing more. I sat at the window and watched the laborers at their jobs. I berated the ancient Primavera, who no longer saucily answered back. I invented false confessions for Fra Ludovico. (“Father, there were three beautiful brothers, each untutored in love, and their own father dead from the famine, so how were they to learn with no whore to teach them? Out of the mercy for which I am so well known, I took them to my bed, Father, at the same time, and in the following way . . .”) I enjoyed trying to talk him into an occasion of sin beneath his robes.
I was in the salone one afternoon, considering the range of alembics, the crucibles of ground minerals, and herbs I had Primavera gather by the roadside. A dog began to bark in the field beyond, and there was something urgent in its barking. Sometimes a cinghiale will lurch from the woods and stray too near the farm, and I always had the gooseboy on my mind, for he was slow of wit and liable to wander into the jaws of a wild boar without noticing. I stood and looked out the window to see the commotion.