“They did,” he said. “They told me many things that I didn’t understand.”
“Fascinating and marvelous. What secrets do geese know?”
“Who they like and who they dislike. Among the other geese, I mean.”
“I see. A hierarchy among the gaggle. I’m sure that was spellbinding to listen to. Look sharp, you clot, you’re trampling in the mud.”
“They also mentioned who they liked among the humans. They didn’t care much for you, for instance.”
“Well, I cared for them dearly, especially when braised with red wine and currants from Corinth.”
“They said you will listen to no one but yourself.”
“Well, you listen to the geese and the wind and the farting of frogs; you do the hard work for me.”
“They said you would listen to them someday.”
“Have they anything interesting to tell me?”
“I don’t know,” he said, but in a complicated tone, as if he might have meant I don’t know if they do, but he might also have meant I don’t know whether you will find it interesting, but others would.
“It was Bianca,” he then said. “Bianca de Nevada, who used to live with us.”
“Is that so.” But I didn’t care to speak about Bianca, nor to allow the memory to take hold in his usually incurious shell of a mind. So I took his hand, and I let my middle finger trail across the center of his palm, as faintly as I could manage given we were lighting out cross-country. He took a swig of breath, being startled in a new direction, and my efforts were fruitful. I turned to smile at him and said, “You have grown to such a man, my Michelotto. If we knew each other better I might be a better mother to you.”
In this light vein I dragged him away from the subject of Bianca and turned several keys in that ill-regulated apparatus of a human being that had not been turned before. Raising a child is hard work, I’ve found; and this is why I’ve seldom kept myself to the task. But moment by moment, as a responsible parent is able, one must help the young fledgling to encounter more adult arenas of engagement.
The house was still empty. The pagan rites that attended the sowing of the fields were well under way and, I understood, would last into the night, when a bonfire of last year’s rubbish would announce the satisfactory preparation of this year’s crops. I pulled Michelotto into the house and tutted him for the barnyard smell. “You are old enough to perfume yourself with something more redolent than goose shit,” I said. “Oh, it falls to me, I see, to teach you how to clean yourself up for a woman. Take off those filthy clothes and throw them out the window to be burned. Your days as a gooseboy are over, my dear.”
I was busy watching him, though he seemed wary enough—and that was a good thing; it suggested he hadn’t been initiated into the holy mysteries of sex by the sluts and bored soldiers’ widows in the hamlet below.
I have always liked to watch a man remove his clothes. The faint modesty that all men evince—once or twice in one’s career with them anyway—makes their bodies the more beautiful to behold, when at last the tunic is hauled over the shoulders and the loin wrapping is untucked and kicked away. I made to give him a semblance of privacy, and turned to fuss over the heating water. But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don’t lie about men, only women.
It was then that I saw the mirror was gone. Michelotto’s emergence from the clothes of his childhood had distracted me. I wailed from a rage I didn’t understand. Maybe it was simply that I’d been denied the right to hear from the mirror that she was dead. It was all I would have wanted, to look at the mirror and see nothing but myself.
Michelotto worried himself over me, and came forward to calm me in my distress. I suppose I was keening, and it made him uncomfortable. He didn’t know what he was doing. Anyway, there was no mirror to see.
Vigil
HE WAS out in the forest, higher up than usual, and the plains of Umbria stretched below in their pulsing washes of green and gold, brown and blue, beyond. He looked to the west, to see if he could find the roofs of Montefiore glinting in the noon sun, but the trees, on the slopes where he guessed his house should be, had come into the full leaf of late spring.
He came upon the casket first. Its top was clear as water. He looked down at it, and wiped away a scattering of spring pollen. The smeared powder gave the glass a greenish tinge, and for a minute he felt he was looking into a box of ice, or the clearest river water, for the figure inside seemed to float in a current. Then he realized this was merely a trick of the glass, the way that glass plays with and distorts light.
He wasn’t surprised to see that the figure resembled his daughter, Bianca, for in the months and years since his escape from Agion Oros, most of the people of the world reminded him of her one way or another, either by startling contrast or by painful similarity. He had never seen a corpse in a glass-topped coffin, and that was surprise enough for the day. That the corpse should imitate his daughter seemed only fitting; what other more crucial business had a corpse to attend to, when you come right down to it?
He hauled part of a fallen tree trunk to a convenient place and settled himself upon it. He had nothing better to do; he had been able to decide no other course for his life to take. He hadn’t been able to return for any length of time to a Montefiore without Bianca, and the rest of the world lacked savor. So he came and went, an itinerant on a quest without shape. He didn’t mind resting for a while, keeping an eye on the figure in a coffin.
He rested, and couldn’t decide to move on. In the hours or days that followed, he began, slowly, to realize that he wasn’t alone. Seven small men and a rather large dog began to be seen about the coffin. He couldn’t always tell when they came or went, but he had a sense that even when he couldn’t see them, one of them was always present. They didn’t talk to him, but from time to time they bowed and shuffled in his direction.
The dog came up and put its head in Vicente’s lap. He scratched it behind the ears, courteously enough, but in time he shooed the mongrel away. He had never liked dogs much.
• 1519 •
Thaïs
THE YEARS had shunted past, and life had never resumed in the way it ought to have done. When she was thirty-three, Lucrezia Borgia d’Este ordered an inventory of her ornaments. Rosaries, enameled buckles, hundreds of pearls, broaches of finely wrought silver, clasps and combs beyond figuring. And a single stem as if from an apple tree, made in what appeared to be the finest silver, though in three places where rubies as large as apples might once have hung, dots of black tarnish proved resistant to any means of removal.
In 1514 Lucrezia suffered terrible wounds with the birth of Alessandro, who entered the world with a huge head. It was a mercy that he died a year or so later. Anyway, he was survived by his new sister, Eleonora, and was replaced by another son a year later. Lucrezia paid a call on one of her favorite lovers, Francesco Gonzaga, to find him supine and withered, attended by several greyhounds and a pet dwarf upholstered in brocade. She showed him her new baby—named Francesco—but she wondered if she had named the baby precipitously, for Francesco Gonzaga was troubled by the French pox. Though he was being treated with mercury, taken internally, he seemed in danger of losing his handsome nose to rot. He wasn’t interested in her new baby. She didn’t visit the sick man again.
Another new pope was elevated, in time. This one cast his lot with the resurgent Medici. The campaigns in northern and central Italy swept back and forth with the usual shifting of allegiances, granting of concessions, revocations of treaty, accusations of betrayal. The winds from the north, the tramontana and the sirocco, had anyone the nose to detect it, carried the first whiffs of Protestant objection to papal vice and corruption. In 1517 Martin Luther nailed the ninety-five theses on the door of Wittenberg Castle Church. Strong stuff.
In Lucrezia’s repose at the Belvedere on an island in the Po near the Castel Tedaldo, intimates and prospective lovers and her husband discussed these matters ov
er the fine strong broth known as chocolate, the beans for which the Genoese navigator had discovered fifteen years earlier in the spice islands in the seas weeks west of Lisbon. The sun seemed as secure in the sky as ever. It wasn’t, though.
Lucrezia became qualmish about everlasting life, which, as her energies began to fail her, was of increasing concern. How had her obsession with an ignorant farm girl brought her to such grief? How had she squandered the very Apples of Eden—if such, indeed, they were—on an act of revenge and hatred? The convents and hospitals she had founded, the pious works tediously entered into and sometimes completed—these works of mercy seemed insufficient when posted against her crimes. Acedia chief among them.
Pregnant for the eleventh time in 1518, she spent her autumn nourishing the fetus with pastries, sugared fruits, honey by the spoonful, roasted nuts seasoned with salt from the Venetian suppliers at Cervia. She grew plumper than usual and feared that the next baby would have the same large head as Alessandro, or even larger, and that the force of its passage would split her asunder.
Within a matter of months she lost not only Francesco Gonzaga, as expected, but also her mother. Lucrezia had never been close to Vannozza Cattanei, and so the shock she experienced at the news of her mother’s death was unexpected. She found herself lighting candles in chapels whose adornments she had commissioned but whose doors she had seldom darkened. She remembered leaving her mawkish mother when she was only eleven, and the mean-spirited glee she’d felt about it. She recalled succumbing to the lure of Vatican Rome, the mobs, the ceremonial parades, the glints of color, the pageantry of power—how drab all that seemed, considered now against the tears her mother had bothered to shed at Lucrezia’s breezy departure.
As Lucrezia’s confinement neared the end, she removed herself to Belriguardo, one of her luoghi de delizie, pavilions of delight. It wasn’t a score of miles from Ferrara, but when she arrived and inspected the frescoed chambers, the cloistered gardens, the choice meals laid out to tempt her appetite, she turned away. She decided she would go to Montefiore instead, and settle in to give birth there, and pretend to be the widow of a farmer, with another kind of life.
She lay beneath sumptuous trappings of cobalt blue and gold, tossing and turning in her sheets of silvery silk. The physician would not allow her to travel. She was too near to term, she had had too many problems in the past. I have had problems in the past, she replied in her own mind, and they all center around my appetite to know everything.
Had she been a farmer’s wife—had she been Vicente’s wife!—instead of the daughter of a pope, she might have had humbler tastes. She dashed the wine upon the floor and asked for clear mountain water instead. She laughed at the sight of the hefty haunches of the chambermaid who had to wipe up the mess.
I saw one bite of the Apple turn a headless dog into a squat man-cub, she remembered, a creature who took the Apple when offered and left with it into the chimney wall. I nibbled one small bite myself—and it hasn’t changed me dramatically. I have had no immunity from illness or sorrow, and I hear the doctors murmur in the antechamber. Maybe I needed more of the thing—with my wretched past, one small bite was too little. I need more.
Then she raised herself up on an elbow and recalled that one Apple remained. It was in the protection of the Doge of Venice, someone who had professed, from a distance, an admiration for Lucrezia Borgia. That was sensible enough, for Venice was within striking distance of Ferrara, scarcely a day’s travel if the roads were good, the brigands busy elsewhere, and the weather helpful.
She had always meant to return to Venice, and now she realized it wasn’t Montefiore but Venice that called her. The final Apple would heal her, would kill the child within her womb if such were needed. It would grant her some measure of fuller life than she, even with all her advantages of beauty and birthright, had ever managed.
She called upon the midwives, the surgeon, her confessor, and, an afterthought, her husband, and declared her intentions to take a retinue to Venice. The heat of the summer was almost upon them, she said, and the breezes off the Adriatic would calm her, would sing her new baby through the canal on easing tides.
“Yes,” said Alfonso, looking down his strong hooked nose at her, eager to be elsewhere. He glanced at the confessor and made a motion: Confer the appropriate blessings and administer the sacrament of Extreme Unction. If she continues to fail, we’ll petition the Pope to send a more senior prelate, as befits her station.
She tried to flail at them, to rip the dressings of her bedstead.
Alfonso patted the pillow and blessed her mildly and without conviction, and withdrew his hand before she could bite it.
Her labor pangs began shortly thereafter, and the death knells sounded on her horizon. They weren’t immediate but they were imminent; they were nextday. She wouldn’t give in, though, until she had risen from her bed and made her way through the watery highways of Venice, to greet the Doge at his palazzo and bargain or beg or steal that Apple that rightly belonged to her.
Decades earlier, some hack of a poet seeking to make a reputation of his own by sullying hers had called her a Thaïs. He’d embellished beyond recognition her appetite for venom, lust, and vengeance. A Thaïs, a Roman harridan, a maenad, a murderess, a corrupt and unforgivable harpy. Once she had laughed in delight at the sound of her fierce reputation. But she wouldn’t be unforgivable; she would see to that. She would find the final Apple and lunge at it before it was too late. Learning all there was to know at last, she would find a good reason to forgive herself her random sins and well-cloaked crimes, and ensure she would be forgiven in the afterlife as well.
She was thirty-nine.
Fire and ivy
STUCK AS we all are in the maw of time, the dwarves learned to age, and discovered a new variety of patience, one that required effort. Around the glass-lidded coffin they kept their vigil, even after the eyesight of Vicente de Nevada began to fail, and his memory to falter, and he returned to the hilltop bier with infrequency, and then not at all.
Springs came and went, interspersed with sequences of summer, autumn, and winter, in a regular pattern that, the dwarves decided, wasn’t all that hard to follow. Their beards grew longer and grayer, and Gimpy showed up once with a pair of black scissors.
“Where did you get those?” asked Deaf-to-the-World.
“I bargained for them from a shoemaker,” he replied. “I did hard labor for a week, tanning leather in a foul warehouse, and for my efforts I was repaid with this implement.”
“What is it for?”
“Our beards are growing into the soil. Haven’t you noticed?” Gimpy wandered about the clearing and snipped off the beards at waist height. Indeed, some of the dwarves had been rooting in the soil. The dog alone seemed impervious to hair growth, or maybe it was that he shed.
“What else are scissors good for?” asked Heartless.
“Oh, well,” said MuteMuteMute, looking around. “I suppose we could cut back the ivy growing over the coffin.”
No one could not think of a reason to protest, not even Bitter, so the dwarves, enjoying the mobility they hadn’t realized they’d been lacking, gathered about the bier. Deaf-to-the-World, Tasteless, Heartless, Blindeye, and Bitter clutched handfuls of ivy and hauled it back. Gimpy and MuteMuteMute took turns snipping. Once they’d been accustomed to breathing through solid stone, and now they found gardening strenuous work. Well, they were aging too. Tasteless was losing his black-and-gold teeth, one by one, and Blindeye complained that white smears were beginning to cloud his vision.
When they had finished, they laid to one side a pile of dead ivy the size of a small house.
Midsummer day was approaching, 1519, and more of the world’s timelessness was evaporating by the hour. MuteMuteMute fished from his pocket a tin box with a hot coal inside, and used the coal to light the older, browner parts of ivy. Within a short time the burning vines became a beacon on the hill, and they smoked all day, until by sunset they had attracted attenti
on.
The gooseboy, Michelotto, came thrashing through the summer growth. He was still a gooseboy, though he was twenty-two now. His shoulders were less hunched. Perhaps due to having enjoyed a hearty if belated introduction to the joys of the flesh, Michelotto was pleased that his right leg no longer trailed. Indeed, he was a specimen of surprising beauty. He had Lucrezia’s aquiline nose and shapely chin, and his eyes were a liquid gray, water in a pewter goblet.
“You make a fire to call me here?” he asked.
Away from the farms and villages, the dwarves were rarely addressed by a human. It took their ears a short time to remember how to decipher syllables.
“We make a fire to burn the ivy,” said Heartless.
“Oh, but look,” said Michelotto. “It doesn’t seem to be burning.”
Michelotto seemed to be right. Anyway, he was more human than they, so the dwarves paid attention. They could see that the fire was burning. The leaves of the ivy seemed green as ever, though perhaps it was merely that they hadn’t burned long enough. Leave it to a human to fiddle over such minute distinctions as burned or not burned in a matter of so few moments.
Michelotto went down on his knees before the coffin and leaned across it. He breathed on the glass and rubbed it with his hand.
“Is the box full of someone?” he asked. “I can’t rub away the mist.”
Stoneheart said, “She waits in our time, while we have moved on into hers.”
“It’s a maiden, then,” said Michelotto, more or less approvingly. The dwarves nodded.
Michelotto pressed his hands against the lid and felt as if for a spring lock release. “But the glass is very pure,” he said. “I can’t see what is inside, for something like breath clouds the inside of the glass. But the breath makes a silvery beaded backing, and the oval glass does the work of a mirror. Try as I might, all I can see is myself.”