TWO
It ought to have been one of the most exciting moments of my life. There I was, high on a ridge, looking down on Florence for the first time. Late afternoon. April the eighteenth, 1691. A burnt-orange sun dropped, trembling, from behind a bank of cloud, like something being born. No more than an hour of daylight left. Gazing at the buildings clustered below me, the jutting, crenellated towers veiled by the mist rising off the river, I felt a piece of paper crackle in my pocket, a letter of invitation from Cosimo III, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and yet – and yet what?
Even as my eye was caught by the tilt and swirl of birds above the rooftops, I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder. Nothing there, of course. Nothing there. Only the quiet grass, and the pines, austere and dense, and the mauve vault of the sky, soaring, vast … More than fifteen years had passed, and still I couldn’t forget what lay behind me, what followed in my tracks. I had always feared there would come a time when, as in a dream, I would discover I was unable to run, or even move, as though I were up to my waist in sand, and then it would be upon me, and all would be lost.
I had left my hometown of Siracusa in 1675, the rumours snapping at my heels like a pack of dogs. I was only nineteen, but I knew there would be no turning back. I passed through Catania and on along the coast, Etna looming in the western sky, Etna with its fertile slopes, its luscious fruits and flowers, its promise of destruction. From Messina I sailed westwards. It was late July, and the night was stifling. A dull red moon, clouds edged in rust and copper. Though the air was motionless, the sea heaved and strained, as if struggling to free itself, and there were moments when I thought the boat was going down. That would have been the death of me, and there were those who would have rejoiced to hear the news. Rejoiced! Porco dio.
I was in Palermo for a year or two, then I boarded a ship again and travelled north-east, to Naples. I hadn’t done what they said I’d done, but there’s a kind of truth in a well-told lie, and that truth can cling to you like the taste of raw garlic or the smell of smoke. People are always ready to believe the worst. Sometimes, in the viscous, fumbling hours before dawn, as I was forced once again to leave my lodgings for fear of being discovered or denounced, such a bitterness would seize me that if I happened to pass a mirror I would scarcely recognize myself. Other times I would laugh in the face of what pursued me. Let them twist the facts. Assassinate my character. Let them rake their muck. I would carve a path for myself, something elaborate and glorious, beyond their wildest imaginings. I would count on no one. Have no one count on me. I was in many places, but I had my work and I believed that it would save me. All the same, I lived close to the surface of my skin, as men do in a war, and I carried a knife on me at all times, even though, in most towns, it was forbidden, and every now and then I would go back over the past, touching cautious fingers to the damage. It was in this frame of mind, always watchful, often sleepless, that I made my way, finally, to Florence.
I gazed down on the city once again. Set among the palaces and tenements was the russet dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, like half a pomegranate lying face-down on a cluttered dining table, its thick rind hollowed out, its jewelled fruit long gone. I could hear no cries, no bustle, but perhaps that shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. I thought of the land I had travelled through, the farmhouses unpeopled, roofless, the highways and footpaths overgrown, the unpicked olives staring like blown pupils from their branches.
Ghost country.
Up on that ridge, I dropped to my knees, not in reverence or wonder, but because I wanted to contemplate the world I was about to enter, to give myself a few moments to prepare.
By the time I passed through the southern gate, a bell was tolling the night hour, its notes insistent and forlorn. The gatekeeper said I was lucky. Another minute, and I’d have had to sleep outside the walls. He seemed resentful; maybe I had deprived him of one of the clandestine pleasures of his job. I showed my papers to a guard. He yawned and waved me through. I found myself on Via Romana. Buildings crowded in on either side, the high grey-and-yellow façades bristling with barred windows, the eaves so exaggerated they almost met above my head. A thin dark ribbon of sky. I heard the gate crash shut, and a woman swearing. Locked out, presumably. The gatekeeper would be enjoying that.
I came to the Ponte Vecchio, its jewellery shops closed up for the night. Halfway across, I stopped and leaned on the parapet. The breeze lifting off the river smelled of duckweed and wet mud. Sixteen years of tentative arrivals and sudden, improvised departures, all my pleasures snatched, all my promises overlooked or broken. I remembered an afternoon spent with a young widow during my last visit to Rome. Her eyelids pulsed and fluttered as she lay beneath me, and her neck glistened with sweat, and I had been reminded of Maderno’s daring, exquisite sculpture of St Cecilia. Stay with me, the woman murmured. We’re so well suited … But here I was again, with everything before me, everything unknown.
A few minutes later, as the sheer, blank wall of the Bargello loomed above me, I was brought to a standstill by the sight of several round objects mounted on the battlements. In the gloom I could just make out bared teeth, clumps of hair. A bald man stepped out of a doorway and saw where I was looking.
‘Sodomites,’ he told me.
Only the other day, he said, a crow had set down just where I was standing with a human eyeball in its beak. Shrugging, he turned back to his meagre display of herbs and drupes.
I asked if he knew of an inn called the House of Shells. I had come too far, he said. It was on Via del Corno, behind the Palazzo Vecchio.
Rain fell, but not heavily, and I hurried on through the damp, curiously muted streets.
When I found the inn Borucher, the Grand Duke’s agent, had recommended, I passed beneath an archway and into a cramped courtyard. Soiled grey walls lifted high above me, the sky a black lid at the top. I doubted the sun would ever touch the ground, not even in the summer. Was this the right place? It didn’t look like much.
I was about to knock on the door when a girl of eleven or twelve appeared.
‘Is this the House of Shells?’ I said.
Her pale, square forehead reminded me of a blank sheet of paper, and she had threaded plants and bits of straw into her long, lank hair. Her shoes were the size of rowing boats.
‘This is the back entrance,’ she said. ‘And anyway, we’re full.’
‘I reserved a room.’
‘Who are you?’
‘The name’s Zummo.’
She led me down an unlit passageway that smelled of vinegar.
‘My mother will know what to do with you,’ she called out over her shoulder.
If her manner was grand, her gait was awkward and ungainly. Her whole torso heaved ceilingwards with every step, then slumped back again, as if, like a puppet, she was being manipulated from above by hidden strings. It occurred to me that she might have a club foot, or that her legs might not be of equal length.
We passed through another doorway and into a second courtyard, where a middle-aged woman in an orange shawl was bent over a flapping guinea fowl. She gave its neck a sudden, brutal twist, then straightened up and faced us, the dead bird dangling limply from her fist like a flower needing water.
‘You’re the sculptor,’ she said.
‘That’s right.’
‘I was expecting you a week ago.’
‘I walked from Siena. It took longer than I thought.’
She gave me a searching look, as if my words were a code that had to be deciphered. Her ash-coloured hair, which she had drawn back tightly over her skull, hung down like a rope between her shoulder blades. One of her top front teeth was missing.
‘Your luggage arrived,’ she said. ‘A mountain of stuff. I had it taken to your room.’
I thanked her.
Her eyes narrowed. ‘I’ll be charging you for those extra nights.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m Signora de la Mar, by the way.’
‘That’s Spanish, isn’t it?’
‘My husband was Spanish, God rest his worthless soul.’ She crossed herself in a desultory way, then handed the guinea fowl to the girl. ‘Put this in the kitchen.’ When the girl had gone, she turned to me again. ‘Her name’s Fiore. I hope she doesn’t bother you.’
‘Is she your daughter?’
‘Yes.’
She showed me to my room, which was on the fifth floor, with dark beams on the ceiling and walls painted a dusky shade of rose. There was a writing desk, a fireplace, and a bed with a black metal frame. My luggage had been piled into an alcove, behind a brown velvet curtain.
‘The chimney works,’ she said, ‘but wood’s expensive.’
That night I slept fitfully. My chest felt tight, and there was a tangling inside my head, my brain made up of thousands of bits of string that were being knotted randomly, and at great speed. In the small hours I left the bed and parted the strips of oiled cloth that hung against the window. A view of towers and domes, and beyond them, darker than the sky, the ridge where I had stood a few hours earlier.
As I leaned on the sill, a dream came back to me. I had been climbing a steep staircase in the dark. When I reached the landing, I stumbled towards a door that opened as I approached. Inside the room was a man sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. I knew him to be the Grand Duke, though he lacked the ripe lips and protruding eyes the Medici family were famous for. In fact, with his ruddy cheeks and his fair hair, he resembled my brother Jacopo – Jacopo the source of all my hardship and misfortune. The Grand Duke acknowledged me, but appeared preoccupied. He was gazing at his right hand, which had closed into a fist. I thought he might have caught a fly in it, and listened for a faint, furious buzzing. I heard nothing.
Later, he led me out into the garden. Though it was evening, the sky glowed with a pale intensity. We walked side by side, at ease in one another’s company. I didn’t feel obliged to speak, and nor, it seemed, did he. It was as if we had known each other all our lives.
We came to the end of a path, and it was then that he spoke for the first time. He had been told, he said quietly, that I had betrayed him. Was that true? I stepped over to a stone balustrade, hoping to appear untroubled, innocent. On the other side, the land dropped hundreds of feet, the view pure vertigo. In a panic, I asked him what he was holding. His teeth showed in an unnerving smile. I felt I had fallen into a carefully laid trap, and yet he didn’t answer my question, nor did he open that conundrum of a fist.
I turned from the window. As I got back into bed, a man began to talk somewhere close by, his voice lowered to a growl, and though I couldn’t make out any of the words, I thought I heard defiance and regret. In the morning, when I mentioned the episode to the signora, she told me it sounded like her husband, though he had died a long time ago, the year the ostrich escaped from the Grand Duke’s menagerie and ran over the Ponte Vecchio, a crowd of people following behind and copying its jerky movements. She was smiling at the memory and shaking her head, and it was too late by then to offer my condolences. Actually, she went on, it might have been Ambrose Cuif, the Frenchman, whom I had heard. He lived above me, on the top floor, and suffered from insomnia – though, come to think of it, his voice was light and high-pitched, almost like a girl’s. Perhaps, in the end, I had been dreaming.
‘Perhaps,’ I said.
During that first week I was woken one morning by a tapping on my door. When I asked who it was, there was no reply. I opened the door. Looked out. The stairwell was empty; voices floated up from the tavern far below. On the floor only inches from my toes was something long and papery, fragile as a strip of worn grey silk. Bending down, I saw it was a skin shed by a snake. Somehow I knew the signora’s daughter, Fiore, was responsible, and when I saw her next, in the parlour by the front entrance, I thanked her for the gift. She blushed and ran from the room, knocking a small table with her hip on the way out. A vase rocked on its base, but didn’t topple.
The signora glanced up from her accounts. ‘She seems to have taken a shine to you.’
That afternoon, I asked Fiore if she would consider showing me the city. She bit her bottom lip, then turned and moved towards to the window. Outside, a drizzle fell, as fine as pins. There might be a couple of places, she said at last, which she could take me to.
By the following day, the weather had cleared, and we set out beneath a hot blue sky. Fiore led the way. Her lumbering walk, her oddly decorated hair. But she had a queenly air about her – she was flattered, I thought, to have been put in charge – and several shopkeepers bowed ironically as she passed by. Outside Santissima Annunziata, I told her that until recently the church had housed wax effigies, some propped in niches in the walls, others suspended from the ceiling. Sometimes the ropes would snap, and figures would plummet feet first on to the congregation worshipping below. People had been killed by people who were already dead.
Fiore put both hands on her hips. ‘Who is showing who the city?’
I was quiet after that.
Our first stop was the Duomo, or Santa Maria del Fiore – named after her, obviously – then we climbed steep steps to a tower belonging to the Guazzi twins. Simone and Doffo Guazzi made fireworks, and their enthusiasm was childlike, infectious. After exploring an abandoned fulling mill, we crossed the river and visited another church, Santa Felicità. Halfway down the aisle, Fiore turned her back on the altar and pointed to a metal grille set high in the wall above the entrance. This was the passageway the Grand Duke used when he wanted to move through the city unobserved. She had seen him once, she said, peering down into the nave. Lastly, she took me to an ornate but grimy building in the Jewish ghetto. It was here that a countess had been stabbed to death by one of her many lovers.
Dusk fell. As we walked back to the House of Shells, through the labyrinth of streets that encircled the ghetto, Fiore went into more detail about the murder. The lover’s knife had severed both the woman’s throat and the necklace she had been wearing, and on certain nights, if you listened carefully enough, you could hear the click-click-click of loose pearls bouncing down the stairs. Though Fiore was still talking, I had become distracted. Most of the shops near the Mercato Vecchio were hung with sheets of oiled paper or sealed with a single wooden shutter, but I had stopped, by chance, outside an establishment whose window was made of panes of glass. Judging by the many jars and bottles on display, it was an apothecary, though it didn’t appear to have a name, or even a sign. I moved nearer. As a boy, I had spent hours in apothecaries. Whenever my mother was taken ill, which happened much more often after my father’s death, one of my duties was to collect her medicines. While waiting, I would listen to the men who gathered in the shop – they talked about their families, their careers, and about religion and politics as well – and I soon realized that if you wanted to take the pulse of a city and learn the shape of its secrets, there was no better place to be. As I bent close to the glass to examine an array of herbs used against pregnancy – I recognized mugwort and juniper – a slender hand reached down and placed a new jar in the window. Looking up, my eyes met those of a young woman. Perhaps it was the pane of glass between us that gave me licence, or perhaps it was the unlikely marriage of her black hair and pale green eyes, but I remained quite still and stared at her until, at last, with the suggestion of a smile, she lowered her gaze and withdrew into the dark interior, and I was left to turn away and walk light-headed along the damp, shadowy gorge of an alley whose air in that moment, unaccountably, had filled with the seed-heads from dandelions, fragile, transparent, and whirling downwards in their thousands, like insubstantial, half-imagined snow. It wasn’t until I reached the corner that I remembered Fiore. I looked over my shoulder and saw her hurrying after me in her derelict, ill-fitting shoes.