Bianca didn’t fret but sat quietly in the verdant shade of the top level. She couldn’t see through the descending boughs, but she would hear the mare nicker and stamp, and she would run down with arms outstretched, gaining speed on each of the four slopes.
It was closing on evening by the time he arrived. She ran to him. “Papà,” she cried, for more-than-a-week had seemed to her little-less-than-a-year. She didn’t mean to complain of her fall, only to show him who she was, in case he’d forgotten.
But he turned and saw her, and shrugged away the mare’s nuzzling head. He didn’t notice his daughter’s bruise or the scab. Which seemed odd. He said merely, “What a fledge of your mother you are, and ever more so,” and he took her hand in his as he hurried her toward the house. He didn’t ask her about what had happened while he was gone. He had something on his mind.
The sun was a stout ball of glowing blood in the haze of thin clouds, and then broke through. The stones of Montefiore were copper butter. The windows that had glass winked blindingly back at the sun. Everything in the world had an eye and could watch. From beyond, the hoofs of another horse rang out.
She shuddered with a child’s pleasurable shiver of fear. She wanted her father to stop, hold her, attend to her. “Something is watching us,” she murmured. He thought she meant the moon, rising over the house on the other side, a silver sentinel, and she did. But she meant something dark as well as bright, and in that she was correct.
A pack of dirty thieves
is what they called us. They had no better words for it, not knowing whether we were beasts or men. We knew no better than they did what we were, for we had little language of our own—no names, back then, few habits of civilized living. But we didn’t steal. Dirty vagabonds, the lot of us, back then, but not thieves.
Back then, I say, meaning a past moment I can postulate must have existed, but can’t in truth remember for itself.
We might have become more human—sooner than we did, if indeed we ever have—did we move according to the rhythms of human beings.
We hear the bells of the chapel on the blossom-scented winds of May, and we realize it’s time to pray. If we are to be human we must pray as humans do. So we put down our tools and scour the muck from our nails, for we have learned you must not come to chapel smelling of corpses and shit and gold and blood and the juice of whores. We scrub and arrange what passes for our clothes, and mat down our manes to look more like human hair, and we tuck our cloven feet into sacks of soft leather called boots, and we traipse to the chapel to pray.
And when we arrive the candles are dark, the doors are closed and bolted, the crowds of faithful are snoring their lusty dreams under every swaybacked rooftop in the village. We think, oh, so this isn’t the time to pray, then. And we go home, trying not to laugh at the dreams of humans, which are draped like tattered clouds above their homes until the sunlight bleaches them invisible. As we trudge home, the snow crunches under our feet, the icicles dangle like white marble fringe on the pines. Time moves differently for us.
This happens again and again. After some decades I think—I think it was I who thought this, though the notion of an I is still a confusing one—I think this: When humans hear the bells of faith, they are there at once. When dwarves hear it, they arrive too late.
But our lives are longer than human lives. Just yesterday Primavera Vecchia was slipping off the lap of her grandmother and landing in the basket of onions and pissing on them. They made a better soup for it, those onions. Today Primavera is hairy of chin and tomorrow no one will remember who she was.
Our lives are more secret too. Humans shorten their lives by gossip, and dwarves can barely talk. Speaking uses us up, speeds us up. Without prayer, that act of confession for merely existing, one might live forever and not know it.
I was in the shadows on the night of the copper moon. I had been following her father to lay a bargain at his door, to spend my words in the hope of an exchange, to negotiate for the return of what we’d lost. But he was frightened of the coming dark and spurred his tired horse up the last slope before I could trudge into his path and confront him.
So I followed behind, and heard what I saw, and saw what I heard. As he and the girl-thing came down from the orchards, the moon and sun both witnessing, a horseman arrived on a stallion, caparisoned in black and red, and said, “Have you readied the house? He’s here.”
Trouble and his sister
IN THE shadows, I watched Don Vicente de Nevada hand his daughter to the housemistress and begin to shout orders. Some associate was on the road, following along behind with an entourage that included a noblewoman. They were making their way up the slopes at a slower pace, but would arrive in an hour or so.
If the bedding was rank with disuse, it must be aired at once. Mulberry twigs scattered under the bedsteads, to draw the fleas from the mattresses. Flowers gathered for the tables, floors swept, pastries prepared, wine decanted. Everyone at Montefiore must come directly to receive instructions. Is there asparagus in the ground, or has it gone by?
They ran to their work, as humans will, with vigorous shortsightedness. As if the presence of a fresh pastry can change how the world works. As if flowers might interrupt the flow of slow ire, or a better bottle of wine halt in its path the progress of verdigris upon a bronze statue of a horse and rider in some town square.
But I sat in the shrubs, biding my time and chewing the haunch of some boar that had crossed my path. I enjoy the spasmodic tics of human endeavor, the aimless urgency, the pride of it. The superbia. Hurrying feet, muttered curses, cross remarks sent winging about the estate. The child fled to keep out of the way, and hunched on the bottom step of the outer staircase, hugging her knees to herself.
I could make out the very lashes on her inky eyes, you see, I could smell her very purity.
Vicente was tersely chiding a maid about the unsavory state his better attire seemed to be in. From the kitchen, Primavera’s voice rang with impatience. Fra Ludovico kept himself safely out of the way, polishing the ornamental candlesticks to be used at Mass. So Bianca happened to be alone when the entourage rounded the last steep curve in the road and drew abreast along the stone wall that shored up the gardens hanging above. The urchin stood there with her chin dropped, studying the roof of the palanquin, until the mounted soldier said, “Run and tell the lord of the house we have arrived.”
“Who is it?” said Bianca, a reasonable enough question, as the man was only one, and we implied a pair at least.
“The Duc de Valentinois and his sister.”
A pale hand appeared in a seam of velvet drapes, as if considering whether or not to open them to the light. My eye fell on the jewel, an irregularly faceted ruby of uncertain clarity but with striking purple depths.
“Oh,” said Bianca, “a friend to play with.”
Then the hand disappeared—perhaps the sister had caught a glimpse of Bianca, or had realized that a voice so youthful wasn’t worth the effort of attending. The brother apparently knew his sister well and waved the bearers on. Sweating and grunting, the attendants pressed forward until the equipage had been lifted up the last rise to the villa’s front door, and set down on a length of tapestry laid out for the purpose.
“De Nevada. You rascal, we’re here,” shouted the man. “You’ll leave us languishing like a fishmonger and his prize salmon out here?”
The attendants stood back. As Vicente rushed out, in a robe of charcoal blue, the curtains in the palanquin parted and the sister emerged, blinking as if she’d just woken from a sleep.
Bianca moved forward from the shadows to see.
I am a girl
who did no wrong
I am a girl who did no wrong.
I walked this side of Gesù when I could.
I kept an angel in my apron pocket.
I do not think it did me any good.
Cesare
THE MAN was a young brute, one of those handsome men who knock mountains to one side in order t
o clear the view. Primavera was both smitten and on her guard. She saw how his feet gripped the ground as he dismounted, as if his boots were filled with bronze feet, as if he were in the act of being cast already as his own statue. His dark eyes were tigers, prowling to strike at threats.
“Vicente,” he said, “a basin of water for the face, a basin of wine. There are plans to arrange tonight, and little enough time.”
“That man has a storm of beauty in his face,” said Primavera, backstairs. “He looks as if he could easily wrestle any squid out of the water.”
“He is a monster sinner,” said Fra Ludovico, fussing at his vestments. “Don’t you know who it is? It’s Cesare Borgia, the son of the Spanish Pope. To plot a vendetta, no doubt, to lay waste to more of our homeland. Is he requisitioning troops again?”
“His campaigns cost me the lives of both my sons,” said Prima-vera. “They were fools to allow themselves to be conscripted, but they were my fools. I hope Don Vicente is cannier than they were, rest their souls.”
“He’s a guest of our master,” said Fra Ludovico. “Don’t get any ideas about dishing up vengeance or anything foolish like that, or we’ll all be slaughtered in our beds before morning.”
“I like a man who wears his implement so prominently,” said one of the maids. “It makes my work easier.” She rubbed her bosom as if polishing a knob of furniture.
“I like a man who needs forgiveness so obviously,” said Fra Ludovico primly. “It makes my work clearer.”
“He’s a young one, to have taken so many lives in war,” said Primavera. “Lives of his soldiers, lives of his enemies. Now, what cruel nonsense does his handsome head plot with our good master? Bianca, take this salver of cheese and fruit upstairs. Bianca! Where is the child?”
Lucrezia
I NEEDED the air, I needed freshness on my skin. I needed to see what was to be seen. I didn’t wait for the hand of my brother to prompt me from the carriage. I, the daughter of a pope, I, who had been the governatrice of Spoleto at the age of nineteen, I never waited for prompting.
“Vicente. The comfort of reacquaintance.” I used our common Iberian tongue, toying with his Christian name as a courtesan teases a drunken courtier, with malice and pleasure at once. “Vicente, before you are seduced into intrigues of state by my brother, be so good as to favor me with your welcome.”
I awaited a kiss but accepted his hand. It’s best to acquiesce to custom, at least when one is in the country. Avoiding his eyes, I trained my attention on the child instead, feigning an interest I didn’t possess.
“Who are you, who looks on a Borgia with impunity?” I said, though the child had hidden her eyes behind her father’s legs. I could examine Vicente’s form while pretending to play find-the-child. A tiresome pretense, but even a young Borgia had to observe some proprieties, as scurrilous spies are always lurking about to report on our deeds and misdeeds.
“Bianca,” murmured her father, “surely you remember my Bianca?”
“I haven’t taken her measure before,” I answered. “She was a shit-smeared froglet the last time I was by. Why, she’s turning into a person.”
“They do, you know,” said Vicente.
“Let me see the cherubina, then,” I said. “Come to Lucrezia, child.”
The child was wary. She didn’t obey me until her father nudged her forward.
And we looked at each other, that girl and I. She out of childish curiosity and caution, I out of the need to have something to talk to her father about. I had no native interest in this child. I attest to that now. I would have been happy never to see her again. She was no more than a saucer of spoiled milk to me.
Though she had her beauty, I’ll grant you that. She curved, rushlike, against her father’s well-turned calf. She had the face of a new blossom, a freshness and paleness one could imagine some sorcerer growing in a moonlit garden. Her hair was pinned up in a womanly fashion, despite her youth, and its blackness, under a net of simple unornamented cord, had a steepness to it, a depth. Odd how such things strike one. Her eyes were hidden from me; she wouldn’t look up. Her skin was white as snow.
I am a woman who slept with my
father the Pope
I am a woman who slept with my father the Pope.
They say I did, at least, and so does he.
And who am I to make of the Pope a liar,
And who is he to make a liar of me?
What I saw then
SOME OF us are born many times. Some are born only once. Primavera says that some are born dead and live their whole lives without knowing it.
I can’t say much about earlier childhood memories. One knows things with a complicated and unreliable conviction. The sky-blue sky is as blue as the sky. White beans in a brown pot are more delicious than milk. The purr of cats and the claws of cats are not the same thing. One can’t remember how one learned to breathe, at least the first time.
But then one is born anew, usually at the moment that the breath begins again after it has been held.
I released the air of my lungs, and breathed again, and looked at my father’s visitor. And I remember her with a vividness that strikes me, to this day, as preternatural. But surely this is true of all children?—that one day they come upon an awareness of themselves, of their own knowing, and in that moment they shuck their animal natures off and begin to hoard the treasury of knowledge that will make them capable of grief and remorse as well as pity and love?
In looking at Lucrezia Borgia, I was aware of myself looking: I was aware of myself. I was a dark twist of child hiding behind my father, and she was a coil of effervescent flame in the reception yard before the safehold of Montefiore.
She peered at me (I know to say this now) with the eyes of a child. For all her grandeur and hauteur she wasn’t as grown up as she thought. She had other things on her mind, and she wasn’t good at disguising her boredom. So I had an uninterrupted access to her, and saw the woman called the flower of her time, the Roman lily.
Lucrezia bit her lower lip, pretending to play with me, though I knew she was playing at something else. She tucked her small chin into her embroidered collar, then cocked her head and looked at me slantwise. She was displaying all her best angles—to her brother, to my father, to slack-jawed Fra Ludovico in the background for all I knew. She had the smooth forehead of a pale squash, and her hair spilled out of her bindings with liberty and energy. It was as yellow and crimped as dried tendrils of runner bean at the end of season. She loved herself, that much was sure. I didn’t have a vocabulary for beauty at the time. But she was bewitching: and I knew it right then, that moment too. In knowing that much, I began to grow up.
I am a rock whose hands have appetites
I am a rock whose hands have appetites.
I am a rock whose appetites have hands.
I am a thing unresolved into courteous shapeliness.
I am a creature excluded from limbo and hell,
A thing of which heaven prefers to stay well unaware.
Neither pet, nor beast of the fields, or beast of the woods,
Nor idiot kept, more or less, in the warmth of the hearth
For the sometime amusement of humans and sarcastic angels.
Nothing exists but it rests on me, at the start,
At the end; but I keep to myself, as no one will have me.
A moment ago
I watch the affairs of men from the penumbral sanctuary.
It is 1502. Vicente, the widower, tries to keep a low profile in his aerie. Lucrezia Borgia, with her hair newly dyed, is on her way from Rome to Ferrara. At twenty-one she is married for the third time, to Alfonso D’Este. Her father, wicked Pope Alexander VI, has only a year to live. Machiavelli won’t publish The Prince for a decade yet, but he is busy scrutinizing the life and pursuits of that splendid soldier, Lucrezia’s brother, Cesare Borgia. The discovery of Española by some adventurer put out from the court of Their Catholic Majesties, Isabella and Ferdinand, means that the whole pl
anet goes into a fierce wobble: tides sweep up into the front doors of St. Mark’s in Venice, earthquakes rock the Levant, pyramids are lost again in sandstorms, as every chin in Europe turns away from Byzantium and toward Lisboa and Castile. The East is about to sink into the dust of mystery—again—as the light of reason blinds the west. “The world is coming to its senses, as if awakening out of a deep sleep,” says Erasmus. And Bianca de Nevada, seven years old, aware of none of it, equally unaware of me, watches and listens to the people standing on the grass before her.
A stroll in the country
TRUNKS, PROVISIONS, caskets were unloaded, and Don Vicente kept trying to urge the guests in the door, but Cesare was too jittery to be housed, and he walked up and down in the forecourt, talking his political predictions aloud.
“It’s been a few years now since that viper, Savonarola, was put to death, and Florence regains her strength and vanity by the minute. He burned the vanities, but he couldn’t burn out the high regard Florentines have for themselves. And for that he was immolated. What a pure, savage end for him.”
Don Vicente, who had known something of roasting of conversos by Torquemada in Spain, flinched at the flippancy. But he stood like a Roman legionnaire, his fine shoulders thrown back. “We can discuss things over a libation,” he said soothingly. “Welcome, my lord.” His grip on Cesare’s forearm strengthened—in this case the handshake betraying its Roman origins: to assess whether a man might have a knife hidden beneath the sleeve of his tunic.