“That is ever the trouble with human beings,” snapped Bitter. The other dwarves looked at him with surprise. “Well, what of yourself do you see?” he continued, “if you must go on about it so?”
“Not very much,” said Michelotto, “and that’s the sorry truth. There’s not all that much of me to see.” He smiled at himself, though, forgivingly, and with a touch of his mother’s self-admiration.
“May I open the box and view the corpse?” said Michelotto after a while. “Are these the remains of a saint, like Lucy of Narni? Perhaps a necessary holiness would be conferred upon me, and my mental slowness would be corrected. I’m surer of thought than I used to be, but even so, I could do with any blessing.”
“She has the innocence of a saint,” said Gimpy, “but she’s only a young woman who has slipped sideways a few feet, into another realm.”
“Still, I’d like to have her blessing, even if she is dead. Will the body stink after all this time?”
“Little offends us,” said Tasteless, shrugging.
“Is it time?” asked Heartless. “Is it time already? We have been here only since morning, surely! I’ve hardly had a chance to contemplate.”
He lifted his nose and sniffed and listened. Several tears tracked into his beard, which was now more white than red. “The old threat is hearing the knell of bells calling for a funeral Mass,” he said. “The next danger may be kneeling here before us, for all I know. The only way to be kept from danger is to be kept dead, and all we decided to do was to try to keep her from the one who would destroy her then. Let life go ahead and destroy her now, in a new and novel way. We have no right to forbid it.”
Michelotto took this as permission to continue, and with more dedicated efforts, he worked at the clasps and hasps that secured the lid to the coffin. The dwarves didn’t help. They stood back. Deaf-to-the-World backed into the fiery mountain of ivy, and yelped.
Michelotto laughed—silly little men!—and wrestled the lid, at last, away.
He leaned over and looked at Bianca de Nevada, and his breath stung in his chest.
“She hasn’t changed a day,” he said. “And I remember her now, and the fate that befell her. She was my friend, my Bianca, my good true friend. How has she come to rest like a painted marble beauty in this box of wood and glass?”
“Your mother took every step she could manage to destroy her,” said Blindeye. “Here she lies, though, rich as rain. Isn’t she delicate?”
Michelotto leaned over the box. The girl was unblemished and incorruptible. Her hair had grown in the box, and made for her a sort of black pool of netting, in which her pale face and her pale hands floated. The clothes in which she’d been put to rest may have rotted away; it was impossible to tell, for the hair covered her as respectably as a nun’s habit. Her eyes were closed, but the face appeared unsunken, unblanched. She looked as if she were asleep.
“May I kiss her?” he asked.
“No, no. No, Michelotto.”
The gooseboy turned to argue with the dwarf, who had professed to be excused from responsibility, to find that it wasn’t the dwarf speaking. It wasn’t any of them. It was someone else, pressing through a clot of undergrowth.
The dwarves thought it was Vicente, for he was the only one, besides them, who had come to sit with the girl. It had been some years since he’d shown up, and they had presumed his bad lungs, bad legs, bad eyes, had gotten the better of him at last, and death had allowed him some peace that life had withheld from him. But Vicente could only have gotten older, that much they were sure of, and this was a younger man, one they had never seen.
Michelotto had seen him before, but he couldn’t remember his name. They hadn’t known each other well. But he remembered the stride. The face was older, the beard and the temples flecked with early silver. The eyes were like knotholes into a deep and complicated tree.
“I came upon her just as you did, but held back, hardly believing my eyes,” he said. “Neither that she was there at all, nor that you opened the casket. But in any case, she’s not there for you to kiss.”
“Who are you to say?” asked Michelotto.
“The one who put her here,” he answered. “Not knowing what I was doing.”
“I had heard you were slaughtered like a pig,” said Michelotto.
“I just disappeared. That’s all.”
Heartless drove his thick fingers into his beard and fished out, one after the other, a stack of florins. “These,” he said to Ranuccio, “I believe are yours.”
“I didn’t want them before and I don’t want them now. Give them to the poor,” said Ranuccio.
“Ah, I’m poor enough,” said Heartless, and put them back in his beard. “You were the one who brought her to us. Did you know that?”
“I don’t know where she’s been, nor, hardly, where I’ve been. And I’ve never seen you in my life.”
Ranuccio Vecchia had confessed his deed in the forest not to Fra Tomasso, but to his grandmother, Primavera, who hadn’t been able to keep her tongue still, and for her gossip had lost it. To protect what was left of Primavera’s life, he’d disappeared from the district. He housed himself, for his penance, under the tutelage of the abbot at Cirocenia, reading what could be found of the Alexandrine and Coptic monks and the desert fathers.
The abbot has released him at last, divining that it was time for him to request forgiveness of the girl’s father. Ranuccio had been making his way to Montefiore across the spines of the hills, trying to avoid the temptation of villages and farms. The smoke on a promontory attracted his attention as he approached, though. It was in his path, so he decided to steal up and peer at what was happening.
“It is hardly possible that the Signorina de Nevada lies here in perfection,” he admitted. “Perhaps I’ve died, and my soul makes its last perambulation about the world, to face its sins and to accept its punishment.
“I might have kissed her in the forest, but she was a child, and it would have been a kiss of Judas, leaving her to her fate,” said Ranuccio. “And so, Michelotto, as far as I can determine, you have no right to interfere. A kiss now cannot kill her further.” He knelt at the coffin’s edge and put his hands beneath Bianca’s shoulders, and pulled her up a few inches. Her head fell softly back and her mouth opened. The teeth were pearls and the breath, if breath it could be called, smelled thinly of apple blossoms. Ranuccio put his mouth to hers and apologized.
The heart of the matter
SHE WOULD have what she wanted, at last.
She passed without impediment into the mouth of the Grand Canal, and the gondolier silently worked the boat between the cliff faces of Venetian palazzi and scuole, churches and shopfronts. The dawn sky was a clever silver, not unlike the water, and it felt as if she were slipping away between sheets of purest silver silk. She leaned back in an ecstasy of release. The fullness of knowledge she had always craved was within reach.
Rome and Ferrara had often been at war with Venice, or at least worried about Venetian interests in the north of the peninsula, but who could not love that principality built on blocks of water, its buildings fringed with Moorish fretwork and stone lace? Its marble facades had a grandeur and dignity that no duomo in Italy could imitate, streaked as they were by the reflective play of sunlight or moonlight upon the canals.
It was odd, she thought, to arrive in a busy municipality like Venice and find it empty. It must be one of the innumerable saints’ days. Or perhaps an invasion had come from the sea, and the armies and the merchants and the beggars and friars and painters had gone lurching toward the Lido to watch the battle. Uncharacteristically, the approach from the south had been left unguarded, and while dozens of gondolas tipped smilingly by, and hundreds of dark windows were unshuttered, no citizen gazed across the water at Lucrezia. No shy girl looked down from a cloistered aerie to spy the Duchessa de Ferrara. No awkward new-bearded soldier, distracted by her beauty, tripped upon his halberd and plunged into the canal, to the roaring laughter of his companions.
It was like lying between sheets of mirror, that was it: the water reflecting the high scoured-kettle gray of the sky, the sky rippling with ribbons of light tossed back by the shallow tidal canals.
She knew the city enough to recognize the gentle S curve of the Grand Canal. She recognized the Albergo del Leon Bianco, its asymmetric arched doorways at gondola level like so many separate mouths into which a corpse might slip. What did the Venetians do with their dead, when there was no place to bury them? She had known this once but couldn’t recall the answer.
Slavs, Mamluks, Levantine and Spanish Jews, Africans, Greeks—the city of a thousand nationalities, its canals like a sieve allowing Asia and Africa to flow into Europe, and Europe to flow out—how could Venice be empty today? And silent. The crash of barter, that noise louder than war, was silent today, as if it were the Nativity. But no bells tolled, and the church steps were empty of the unwashed hoping for alms.
She passed under the Rialto bridge, which was as clear of crowds as if plague had wiped its bloody bottom on both approaches. The Grand Canal made its last turn south and sliced east again, toward the Bacino di San Marco and the Doge’s palace. San Giorgio Maggiore, like a virtual headland of religious reassurance, mounted its domes in the light that seemed dustier than common sense might allow. The details were less firm, though the light was still strong.
And the gondola made its single ceaseless step beyond the Punta della Dogana, to where the water widened with the merge of the Giudecca Canal, and the greatest piazza in Europe spun wheelingly to her left, and the winged sentry opened its mouth and roared from the top of its pillar.
But we stop here, she said, or meant to say, though her words didn’t reverberate in the air. We go to the Doge, to reclaim what is ours. Have you forgotten your instruction? We are not to head toward the open water. Are you mad?
Her mind began to race, though in a slow heavy way. With effort she brought herself to an elbow and managed to turn around. The gondolier must be woolgathering; he needed a sharp reminder.
She gasped, or tried to gasp, but her lungs gave forth no air, and no sound. She clutched the hem of her robe, as if to rend her garment and her skin if necessary, to expose her lungs to air. They must need it. She couldn’t breathe without air. What nonsense was this? Her hand was caught in a rosary of grey-silver pearls.
You must deliver me to the Apple, she cried.
The gondolier paid her no mind. He kept plying the waters with his pike. In the stiffer breeze blowing in from the open sea to the southeast, the cloak that he wore against the morning chill pushed back from both sides, just as she had tried, but failed, to do with her own garment. His hood fell back.
The gondolier raised his rack of horns. The hide on his chest was sliced open, and through the aperture a small cavern was revealed, about the size of the cavity that his heart must have once required. He had no heart, though. Within his chest burned the final Apple, a delicate condensation beginning to form upon it as the cold wind strengthened off the most endless sea.
Montefiore
OFTEN I have traveled the road to Montefiore in memory. Today I travel it in true time, true dust, true air. When the track lends me height enough, I can glimpse the villa’s red roofs above the various ranks of poplars, cedars of Lebanon, pines, across the intervening valleys.
Ranuccio doesn’t say much. A habit of silence still obtains from his days in the abbey. But he tries to break it, naming the things of the world for me as if I have lost language. Perhaps I have. By cataloging the road we introduce the world to each other. Newborns in a new world.
But when I ask after my father—or Cesare—or Lucrezia—or garrulous Primavera—or sweet dim Michelotto, and why we left him weeping in that circle of stones on the hill—or vain and frightened Fra Ludovico—Ranuccio has no answers. He will only squeeze my hand. He will not let go—he won’t let go! Not unless I need to escape into the bushes to relieve and cleanse myself.
I won’t let go of him, either, for reasons I don’t yet understand. But there is time. Again, there is time. It rushes like a cloud of insects, an aeration of instants fluttering up from fissures in the ground, against my face; I brush them to see through them, beyond; but I try to see them as well, the instants. Each leaf, whether she be like her sister or not. Each creak of the brother timbers of the world. Each moment of rot and blossom, by turns and simultaneous, and the world in colossal panorama behind, ninety billion instants flying up like snow blown in my face.
We turn at the bottom of the final slope. The world seems emptier than it once did, as if the Four Horsemen have done their job too well, and I have lived on into an afterlife. But no afterlife could smell as sweet as goose shit, could ring with nonsense hammering as of someone most mundanely fixing a warped window casement just out of sight.
We begin to rise. I am hardly equal to the task, after my long rest. Ranuccio would carry me, but I refuse the offer. We pass a flooded field. We cross a stone bridge. We study a green lake for its secrets. I stop to rest on a rock wall I had forgotten—how dear even simple rocks can be. A bit of thornbank I remember from long ago, wilder now, overgrown, grips with all its might to its life.
I see a priest in a soutane and a straw hat against the sun, making wide gestures in the roofless chapel, preaching, for all I can tell, to a gaggle of geese. I see a stout figure on a low stool in the kitchen garden, pulling up radicchio and flecking the dirt off it with a vigorous motion. I see a figure beside her helping—man, woman, I cannot tell—who puts one hand to a hip, and straightens up.
The hand goes up to the eyes, shading them, to study me as I approach out of the shouting light. Then both hands go up, the gesture, in all the dark places that we humans live, of surrender. He suffers what is inevitable. He surrenders to the impossible. He can’t get breath at first, but then he does. He calls my name.
Note
I’ve taken certain liberties with the life stories of historical figures Cesare Borgia and Lucrezia Borgia. I’ve omitted details that didn’t serve (the other Borgia siblings, for instance). The Borgia involvement with a de Nevada family is fictional. However, I have used selected scraps of history to lend credence to the narrative.
The glamour of the Borgias rests on the rumors of incest, poisonings, adultery, conspiracy, murder, striking physical beauty, vigorous sexual appetites, hedonism, nepotism, and papal fallibility of the most egregious sort. That the Borgia family is also credited occasionally with bouts of wise and just governance, with art patronage, with interest in the scientific developments of their day, makes less good copy.
Bayezid did send the spear of Longinus, or something purported to be such, to Rome, which suggests that artifacts with biblical credentials, whatever their provenance or their imputed spiritual pizzazz, had some political value.
Prince Dschem was believed to have been murdered through a slow-acting poison administered by Cesare before the Bull of the Borgias escaped from the custody of Charles VIII.
Paracelsus spent time at the university in Ferrara while Lucrezia was Duchessa there. It’s unlikely she ever attended lectures, but she was said to have a lively mind about all manner of things and, like many highborn women of her day, took license to do as she liked whenever she could get away with it.
A bridge on an aqueduct spans the gorge beside the castle at Spoleto, where Lucrezia, at the age of nineteen and newly married for the second time, was governatrice.
During the High Renaissance, the medical use of mercury (to treat syphilis among other ailments) was accompanied by the growing awareness of a side effect of what we might now call paranoia. And grand Spanish families a few generations earlier did bathe in pools coated with mercury. I have imagined the transplanted Borgias might have brought that old custom to Rome with them.
The identification of Cesare Borgia as the model for Machiavelli’s The Prince is well known. And Lucrezia Borgia’s coloring of her hair with lemon juice was a venial sin at best. The most egregious examples of corru
ption in the Vatican aren’t my invention, though some of them may well have been exaggerated, the result of a public relations campaign that plagued the Borgias while they were in power and besmirched them further when they lost it.
The Borgia family reputation hasn’t been helped by Victor Hugo’s sensational Lucrèce Borgia, the basis of the Donizetti opera. However, Montserrat Caballé comes closer than anyone else to redeeming Lucrezia Borgia’s reputation as an amoral murderess simply by singing the aria “Com’e bello!” in a voice of silvery purity. (A recording of her 1965 performance is available on cassette or compact disc.) Recent biographies of Lucrezia and the Borgia family by Rachel Erlanger, Ivan Cloulas, and others will supply more information for readers interested in separating verifiable fact from fiction—either mine or that promulgated by the Borgias’ enemies.
May I be excused for embroidering upon the history of a dynasty whose career has already entered into legend? Cesare Borgia might have had my head for it, and Alexander VI recommended the eventual disposition of my soul, but I like to hope that Lucrezia Borgia, who commissioned Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, would have understood some of the licenses I’ve been bold enough to take.
And wherever they are, those Borgias, may they rest in peace.
Acknowledgments
With thanks:
to Jane Langton, Jill Paton Walsh, and John Rowe Townsend; roaming about Lucignano, Arezzo, Siena, and Cortona together gave me a golden week to remember;
to Mei-Mei Ellerman for opening Il Vallone to us;
to Mary Norris for her companionship in Spoleto;
to Ann, Sid, and Heather Seamans for company in Castiglione del Lago, and to Anna Tapay for hospitality at Villa Elianna;
to Paolo Chiocchetti for help in Florence;
to Joseph Maguire for helpful conversations about the possible effects on dwarves of having an eighth sibling;