And then there was the matter of the memory palace, that beautiful girl, Angélique Coeur of Bourges, the angelic heart, who on account of what had been done to her mind and body had jumped through a window to her death. For obvious reasons this matter could not be raised in his wife’s presence, his wife being the jealous type, and himself being guilty of causing this fault in her character, of being an old man full of love, not for his wife, or not in that way, but, in point of fact, for the girl Barbera Raffacani Salutati, the contralto, who sang so sweetly, who performed so many things so well, and not only on a stage, yes, Barbera, Barbera, yes!, not as young as she once was but still far younger than he, and prepared, unaccountably, to love a gray man throughout the years of her beauty’s greenness…so, in sum, having considered the consequences of doing otherwise, it was better to concentrate for the present on questions of blasphemy and treason.
“Sir Pasha,” he greeted his boyhood friend, his bat-wing eyebrows crushed together in jagged disapproval, “what business can a heathen have here, on Christian land?”
“I have a favor to ask,” Argalia replied, “but not for myself.”
The two boyhood friends were alone in il Machia’s writing room, surrounded by books and heaps of paper, for more than an hour. The sky darkened. Many of the villagers dispersed, having their own business to attend to, but many stayed. The Janissaries remained motionless on their mounts, and so did the two ladies, accepting only an offering of water from the Machiavellis’ maid. Then as night fell the two men came out again and it was plain that some sort of truce had been made. At a sign from Argalia the Janissaries dismounted and Argalia himself helped Qara Köz and her Mirror down from their mounts. The soldiers were to camp on the property for the night, some in the little field near Greve, others in the poderi of Fontalla, Il Poggio, and Monte Pagliano. The four Swiss giants would remain at the La Strada villa, camped in a tent on its grounds, to act as guardians of the residents’ safety. Once the men had rested and refreshed themselves, however, the company would move on. But it would leave something of great value behind.
The women were coming to stay, Niccolò informed his wife, the foreign ladies, the Mogor princess and her servant girl. Marietta received the news as if it were a sentence of death. She was to be killed by beauty, burned at the stake of her husband’s interminable lustfulness. The most beautiful and desirable females anyone in Percussina had ever seen—the queen demonesses—were to be housed under her roof, and as a consequence of their presence she, Marietta, would simply cease to exist. Only the two ladies would exist. She would be her husband’s nonexistent wife. Food would appear on the table at mealtimes and the laundry would be done and the house kept in order and her husband would not notice who was doing these things because he would be drowning in the eyes of the foreign witches whose overwhelming desirability would simply erase her from the scene. The children would have to be moved, maybe into the house at the eight canals, along the Roman Road, and she would have to stretch herself between that place and La Strada, and it would be impossible, it could not happen, she would not permit it.
She began to scold him, right there in public, beneath the eyes of the whole village and the albino giants and the figure of Death who was Argalia returned from the dead, but il Machia held up a hand and for a moment he looked once more like the grandee of Florence he had so recently been, and she saw that he meant business, and fell silent.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s not a princess’s palace we have to offer, so they better not complain, that’s all.”
After eleven years of marriage to her philandering husband Signora Marietta’s temper had frayed, and now he shamelessly blamed her irritability for driving him away, into, for example, the harlot Barbera’s boudoir. That shrieking Salutati, whose plan was quite simply to outlive Marietta Corsini and then usurp her kingdom, following her into the master bedroom at the villa of La Strada, where La Corsini was mistress and mother to Niccolò’s children. It made Marietta determined to live to a hundred and eleven, to see her rival buried, and to dance naked on her pauper’s grave under a gibbous moon. She was horrified by the vehemence of her dreams but had stopped denying the truths they contained. She was capable of rejoicing in another woman’s death. Perhaps she was even capable of expediting its arrival. It might have to be murder, she reflected, because she knew little of witchcraft, and so her spells usually failed. Once she rubbed her entire body with a holy unguent before having sex with her husband, which was to say before forcing him to have sex with her, and if she had been a better witch it would have bound him to her forever. Instead he headed off to Barbera’s as usual the next afternoon and she swore at his retreating back, calling him a godless whoremaster who didn’t even respect the sanctity of the blessed oil.
He didn’t hear her, of course, but the children did, their eyes were everywhere, their ears heard everything, they were like the whispering consciences of the house. She might have thought of them as her holy ghosts except that she had to feed them and mend their clothes and put cold compresses on their foreheads when they had a fever. So they were real enough; but her anger and jealousy were more real than they were and pushed them, her own children, into the back of her mind. The children were eyes and ears and mouths and sweet breathing in the night. They were peripheral. What filled her vision was this man, her husband, so saturnine, so learned, so attractive, such a failure, this expelled, exiled man, who still hadn’t understood what was truly of value in life, even the strappado hadn’t taught him the value of love and simplicity, not even the repudiation of his whole life and work by the citizenry to whose service he had dedicated himself had taught him that it was better to give his love and loyalty to those close to home, and not to the public in general. He had a good wife, she had been a loving wife to him, and yet he chased after cheap young cunt. He had his dignity and erudition, and his small but sufficient estate, and yet he wrote degrading letters to the Medici court every day, begging in servile fashion for some kind of public work. They were sycophantic letters, unworthy of his dark skeptical genius, soul-lessening words. He scorned what he should have treasured: this humble patrimony, this soil, these houses, these woods and fields, and the woman who was the humble goddess of his corner of the earth.
The simple things. The snaring of thrushes before dawn, the burdened vines, the animals, the farm. Here he had time to read and write, to allow the power of his mind to rival that of any prince. His mind was the best of him, and in it he still possessed everything that mattered, and yet all he seemed to care about in his wild disappointment, his painful unhousing, was to find new lodgings for his cock. Or just to lodge in that one special resting place, that Barbera, the singing tart. When they performed his new play about the mandrake root in this town or in that one he made them give her work singing in the intermission to entertain the waiting public. It was a wonder the audience didn’t walk out with earache, in disgust. It was a wonder his good wife hadn’t put poison in his wine. It was a wonder that God allowed hussies like Barbera to prosper while good women rotted and aged.
“But maybe now,” Marietta told herself, “that howling cow and I have something in common. Maybe now we have to discuss this new question of the witches who have come to destroy our happy Florentine way of life.”
It was Niccolò’s habit to commune every evening with the mighty dead, here in this room in which he now stood face to face with his boyhood friend to see if he could set aside the hostility surging through his body, or if they were fated to be enemies for life. Silently he asked the dead for advice. He was on close terms with most of the heroes and villains, the philosophers and the men of action, of the ancient world. When he was alone they crowded around him, arguing, explaining, or else they took him away with them on their immortal campaigns. When he saw Nabis, prince of the Spartans, defending that city against Rome and the rest of Greece as well; or witnessed the rise of Agathocles the Sicilian, the potter’s son who became King of Syracuse by wickedness alone; or rode w
ith Alexander of Macedon against Darius the Great of Persia; then he felt the curtains of his mind part, and the world became clearer. The past was a light that if properly directed could illumine the present more brightly than any contemporary lamp. Greatness was like the sacred flame of Olympus, handed down from the great to the great. Alexander modeled himself on Achilles, Caesar followed in Alexander’s footsteps, and so on. Understanding was another such flame. Knowledge was never simply born in the human mind; it was always reborn. The relaying of wisdom from one age to the next, this cycle of rebirths: this was wisdom. All else was barbarity.
And yet barbarians were everywhere, and everywhere victorious. The Swiss, the French, the Spaniards, the Germans, all of them trampling over Italy in this age of incessant wars. The French invaded and fought the Pope, the Venetians, the Spaniards, and the Germans on Italian soil. Then in the blinking of an eye it was the French and the Pope and the Venetians and Florence versus the Milanese. Then the Pope, France, Spain, and the Germans against Venice. Then the Pope, Venice, Spain, and the Germans against France. Then the Swiss in Lombardy. Then the Swiss against the French. Italy had become a carousel of war, war played as a dance of changing partners, or as a game of “Going to Jerusalem,” which was to say musical chairs. And in all these wars no army of purely Italian troops had ever proved competent to stand against the hordes from beyond her borders.
This, in the end, was what had reconciled him to his revenant friend. If the barbarians were to be expelled then Italy perhaps needed a barbarian of her own. Perhaps Argalia, who had lived among barbarians for so long, and grown into so ferocious a barbarian warrior that he looked like the very incarnation of Death, would be the redeemer the country needed. There were tulips embroidered on Argalia’s shirt. “Death among the tulips,” the great dead whispered in his ear, approvingly. “Perhaps this Florentine Ottoman will be the city’s good luck flower.”
Slowly, after long thought, il Machia held out a hand of welcome. “If you can redeem Italy,” he said, “maybe your long journey will turn out to be an act of Providence, who knows.”
Argalia objected to the religious resonances of il Machia’s hypothesis. “All right,” il Machia readily conceded. “‘Redeemer’ is the wrong title for you, I agree. Let’s just say ‘son of a bitch’ instead.”
In the end Andrea Doria had persuaded Argalia that there was no point dreaming about going home to put his feet up and rest. “What do you think Duke Giuliano is going to say,” the older condottiere asked him, “‘Welcome home, Signor Armed-to-the-teeth Pirate Traitor Christian-Killer Janissary, with your one hundred and one battle-hardened fighters and your four albino giants, I believe you when you say you come in peace, and obviously all those gentlemen will be working as gardeners and butlers and carpenters and house painters from now on’? Only a baby would swallow that fairy tale. Five minutes after you show up looking ready for war he’ll send the whole militia hunting for your head. So you’re a dead man if you go to Florence, unless.” Unless what, Argalia was forced to ask. “Unless I tell him he should hire you to be the military commander-in-chief he very badly needs. It’s not as if you have many other choices,” the older man said. “For men like us, retirement is not an option.”
“I don’t trust the Duke,” Argalia told il Machia. “Come to that, I don’t fully trust Doria either. He was always a total bastard and I’m not convinced that his character has improved with age. Maybe he sent Giuliano a message saying, kill Argalia as soon as he sets foot inside the city walls. He’s cold blooded enough to do that. Or maybe he was feeling generous and he really did recommend me, for old times’ sake. I don’t want to take the women into the city until I know how things stand.”
“I’ll tell you precisely how they stand,” Niccolò bitterly replied. “The absolute ruler of the city is a Medici. The Pope is a Medici. People round here say that probably God is a Medici and as for the Devil, he’s definitely one, beyond any doubt. On account of the Medici I’m stuck here making a pittance raising livestock and farming this patch of land and selling firewood to make a living, and your friend Ago is out in the cold too. That’s our reward for staying in the city and serving it faithfully all our lives. Then you show up after a career of blasphemy and treason, but because the Duke will see in your cold eyes what everyone can see there, namely that you’re good at killing men, you will in all probability be given command of the militia that I built, the militia I created by persuading those miserly penny-pinching fellow-citizens of our rich city that it was worth paying for a standing army, the militia I trained and led into success in battle at the great siege and recon-quest of our old possession of Pisa, and that militia, my militia, will be your prize for leading a wicked, profiteering, and dissolute life, and it is difficult, is it not, in such a situation to believe what faith teaches us, that virtue is inevitably rewarded and sin invariably cast down?”
“Look after the two ladies until I send for them,” Argalia said, “and if I am fortunate and gain preferment I will see what I can do for you, and for little Ago too.”
“Perfect,” il Machia said. “So you’re doing me a favor now.”
Life had hit Agostino Vespucci hard, and he was different these days, less cheerful, cleaner-tongued, defeated. Unlike il Machia he had not been exiled from the city so he spent his days in the Ognissanti house or working in the oil, wool, wine, and silk businesses he detested so much, but often he made his way out to Sant’Andrea in Percussina to lie in the mandrake wood alone, watching the movements of leaves and birds, until it was time to join Niccolò in the tavern for drink and triche-tach. His shining golden hair had whitened prematurely and thinned as well, so that he looked older than his years. He had not married, nor did he frequent whorehouses with anything like the regularity or enthusiasm of old. If the loss of his job had destroyed his ambition, then his humiliation at the hands of Alessandra Fiorentina had ruined his sex drive. He dressed shabbily now and had even begun to be stingy with money, quite unnecessarily, because in spite of the loss of his salary there was plenty of Vespucci wealth to pay his way. On the night before il Machia left Florence for Percussina, Ago threw a dinner party, and at the end of it he presented each guest, even Niccolò himself, with a bill for fourteen soldi. Il Machia didn’t have that much cash on him, and only handed over eleven. Nowadays Ago still reminded him with quite unseemly frequency that there were still three soldi to pay.
Il Machia didn’t hold his friend’s new parsimoniousness against him, however, because he believed that Ago had been hit even harder than himself by the city’s rejection of their years of hard work, and the loss of the beloved could manifest itself in the jilted lover in all manner of strange symptoms. Ago was the one of the three friends who had never needed to travel, the one for whom the city had been all he needed and more. So if il Machia had lost a city, then Ago had come unstuck from the world. Sometimes he even spoke about leaving Florence forever, following Amerigo to Spain, and crossing the Ocean Sea. When he mused about such journeyings he did so without pleasure; it was as if he were describing a passage from life into death. News of Amerigo’s death deepened his cousin’s gloom. Ago seemed readier than ever before to contemplate a death under an alien sky.
Other old friends had grown quarrelsome. Biagio Buonaccorsi and Andrea di Romolo had broken up with each other, and with Ago and il Machia too. But Vespucci and Machiavelli had remained close, and that was why Ago showed up on horseback before dawn just to go birding with il Machia and almost died of fright when four enormous men rose up all around him in the morning mist and demanded to know his business. However, once il Machia, wrapped in a long cloak, had emerged from the house and established his friend’s identity, the giants became affable enough. In fact, as Argalia well knew, the four Swiss Janissaries were inveterate gossips, loose-tongued as any fishwife on market day, and while they were waiting for il Machia, who had gone back indoors to finish spreading birdlime on elm twigs in little cages, Otho, Botho, Clotho, and D’Artagnan gave Ago so mu
ch vivid information about the situation that he felt, after a long neutered time, the first renewed stirrings of sexual desire. Those women sounded like they were worth a look. Then Niccolò was ready, looking, with the empty cages strapped to his back, for all the world like a bankrupt peddler, and the two friends set off into the woods.
The mist was lifting. “When the thrush migration is over,” il Machia said, “the two of us won’t even have this to look forward to.” But there was a light in his eye which hadn’t been there for a while, and Ago said, “So, they’re really something, eh?”
Il Machia’s grin was back, too. “Here’s a strange thing,” he said. “Even the wife has suddenly stopped bitching about things.”
The moment the princess Qara Köz and her Mirror entered the Machiavelli home Marietta Corsini had commenced to feel foolish. A delicious bittersweet fragrance preceded the two foreign women into the house, and quickly spread along the corridors, up the stairs, and into every cranny of the place, and as she inhaled that rich smell Marietta started thinking that her life was not as hard as she had erroneously believed it to be, that her husband loved her, her children were good children, and these visitors were after all the most distinguished guests it had ever been her privilege to receive. Argalia, who had asked to rest for one night before leaving for the city, was to sleep on the couch in il Machia’s study; Marietta showed the princess the guest bedroom and asked, awkwardly, whether her lady-in-waiting would wish to occupy one of the children’s rooms for the night. Qara Köz placed a finger across her hostess’s lips and murmured into her ear, “This room will be perfect for us both.” Marietta went to bed in a strange state of bliss and when her husband slipped in beside her she told him about the two ladies’ decision to sleep together, without sounding at all shocked about it. “Never mind those women,” her husband said, and Marietta’s heart leapt for joy. “The woman I want is right here within my grasp.” The room was full of the princess’s bittersweet perfume.