All this I learnt when Francesco brought the letter to the Cheval Blanc with a request for a fair copy. He insisted that I read it while he sat opposite, observing my face.
“Why do you ask me to copy such a vexing letter?”
“Because your bâtarde is superlative. You know I will pay you the going rate.”
But it was more than that. It was a coward’s way of telling me that, like Augustine, he wished to put his carnal past behind him. I shoved the sheet beneath my other copy work and let Francesco find his own way down the stairs.
Spring arrived, then summer, with its jeering heat and constant whine of cicadas. It cheered me that in spite of Francesco’s resolve to tame his flesh he could not stay away from the Cheval Blanc. He would slip in before curfew to lie in my arms, then talk long hours into the darkening night. As soon as curfew ended at dawn, he let himself out, invisible even to the dyers along the canal. Our lives had fallen, once again, into a comfortable pattern, but I wanted more. Sometimes, I could scarcely breathe from the fierceness of my love for him.
All his talk about Saint Augustine had given me an idea. I knew that before Augustine had converted, while he was still a slave of passion, he had fathered a son on his mistress. He had such regard for the boy that he raised him in the church. All men wanted sons to carry on their family line—why not Francesco? His lust was wholly mine and I would make it serve me. I had grieved for my dead twins long enough and desired another child—a son who would bear the Petrarch coat of arms. In such a way, I would latch on to Francesco Petrarch, man of letters, so firmly that he could never shake me. The closer I could ally myself with his growing fame, the more I would secure my future.
But how could I conceive? Ludicrously cautious, Francesco now brought rue to crumble into my wine against conception. Autumn arrived, but I was no closer to becoming a mother and my frustration was acute. On the day of little Saint Dionysius, who was always getting himself confused with Dionysius the god, I was in the nave of Saint Pierre singing vespers when Francesco whispered in my ear, “Come with me. You say these same psalms every week.”
We walked along the rue de la Balance towards the river and the odour of fish entrails, stopping to raid a tree for some green figs the size of a baby’s fist. He went into a shop, emerged with a jug of vernaccia, pulled out the stopper, and took a long pull. We sat on a low wall side by side. It was the rich hind part of the day, with a sky like yellow cream fresh from the cow.
“These are the figs that are ripe when green.” I bit into one, fed him the rest, then bit into another.
“The shopkeeper saw you and asked me whether you had seen any more visions. He was as unkempt as a neglected horse. You are too well known by such men, Solange. You must be more discreet.”
“These men are harmless. I am often recognized in the low streets along the river and canals.”
Was he ashamed of me or fascinated? He seemed unsure himself, vacillating from one to the other. He took another pull, splashing the drink over his mantle.
“This is unlike you,” I said. “What is wrong?”
“I have made no progress on the anthem to Italy that Cardinal Colonna insists that I compose. All I have is a title,
Italia Mia
. I am desperate to see Rome, but the cardinal will not send me there. I have written so few lyrics that I will be forgotten before the decade is out. You have seen the most recent ones. What is wrong with them?”
Were his ears drunk enough to hear the truth? “They are trite, Francesco. Even Mont Ventoux was not large enough to wedge itself between Laura and your sterile passion for her. A glimpse of her at a window, a brush with her at an assembly, a nod or a glare—they feed your lovesickness. The sky lights up when she smiles, darkens when she frowns. Does the sun have so little to do in poetry? Doesn’t it need to ripen crops or cure the hay?”
“My poetry does sound foolish when you sum it up like that.” With his mouth on the jug again, he looked like his brother.
“Give up Laura,” I ventured. “She is drying up your verses and you as well. Do you think drinking that will help?”
“It might help engender poems.” At last, a smile from him. “After all, it stimulated Dionysius, the god of wine and fertility. And vernaccia is the favourite drink of popes.”
Who father many sons
, I thought. I tipped the jug to drizzle some of the spirits down my own throat, warmed by the thought of children being fathered. Since Francesco would never give me permission to have a child, I must act on my own and ask forgiveness later. Tonight he was mine, by what miracle I did not know, but how to get him near a bed? We walked towards the Rhône with frequent stops to lighten the jug. Near the bridge, we found a fisherman selling live eels from a basin.
Francesco dangled a thick one by its tail. “This size?”
I pointed to another, giggling. “That one will fit better.” Francesco inserted the eel head first into the half-full jug. “It won’t take long to drown,” I said.
We sat near some pilings at the river’s edge until the city quietened and we heard the Pope’s trumpet shout the curfew. From now on, the city watch would be vigilant. The moon was rising and the night sounds began—an angry squirrel, or a nightjar flying with its mouth open to capture clicking moths?
“The gates are closing,” I said, “but we can walk around the wall to the Cheval Blanc.”
“I cannot stay there overnight again.”
“You’ve stayed there often enough. No one in the tavern cares.”
“
I care
. I wish it were otherwise, Solange, but it is this way.”
We stared at the drunken eel in the glass jug and listened to the
slap-slap
of a boatman’s punt about to slip its rope and escape downriver. A pouch dangled from the zona at Francesco’s waist. Bitter rue, I guessed. So he did want to bed me, but where?
I caught an idea, leapt up. “Let’s go out on the Rhône.”
We scrambled through the swamp grass, almost sinking into a quagmire before we reached the punt, which was filled with green rushes. He untangled the rope and I climbed in with the jug, wedging it so it would
not roll, then stood on the till to pole us out of the mud. After a few shoves, Francesco got aboard as well, wet to his middle. He felt around his waist for the pouch, but it was missing since I had untied the laces to rid us of it.
Soon the river was too deep to pole, so we sat beside each other, taking turns with the single oar to keep the craft moving in a straight line. From the poplars alongside the river came the
chink-clink
of roosting blackbirds. The river seized the punt and drew it into the channel faster than we wished.
“The current is too strong,” he said. “Unless we steer towards the bank, we’ll get carried down to Arles.”
Eventually, by rowing and drifting, we approached an island about a quarter league downstream. We aimed at a poplar overhanging the river, went past it, and missed three of its fellows, until only a single tree was left, the last on the island. As we approached the tree, I stood on the till to pole us to shore. With a tremendous lunge, Francesco caught a low branch and pulled us into the shallows, knocking leaves over the water’s surface.
“We’ll moor here,” he said, his hair sticking to his forehead in sweaty clumps, “and make our way back at dawn.”
While we were fighting the current, the light had dimmed from twilight to evening to full night. Once we had secured the rope, we lay back in the punt as if this was where we had been aiming all along. The moon was high, the air mild and warm. How many more nights would Francesco spend with me? Even now, winter clouds were moving in. He extracted the dead eel, sliced some rounds, then squeezed the rest back into the jug. After we had eaten, he drew me into his lap, and cradled me in his arms while I traced his ribs with my fingertips. As my fingers crept lower, his belly tightened. Each breath rising to his chest was quicker than the last.
He stopped my fingers with a kiss. “Why can’t I master my lust? Even before I come to you, I imagine how we will be, together. And you
can no more restrain yourself than I can. I believe you thrive on it. Saint Augustine would say …”
I leaned over the gunwale, already knowing Augustine’s low opinion of women. “I want more than desire from you, Francesco. I want to be one with you in spirit as well.”
“I can never give you everything you want from me.”
Perhaps this was true. I let my hand trail in the river, and inhaled the scent of weeds and marshland. Slow, black—but far from still, the water was sucking down the fallen leaves. A whorl of spume drifted past, got caught, plummeted into the depths. “This whirlpool is making me dizzy.”
“It is the autumnal equinox today. Stare at the circling water until you feel its pull.”
He had said the words too eagerly. I knew now what he was after. “I don’t wish to incite more visions, Francesco, for they are troubling beyond their worth.”
The whirlpool forgotten, I somehow had got upon my back, my spine nestling in the soft rushes. Francesco bunched up his mantle and tucked it beneath me. In his eyes, I saw our unborn son. My skin pricked, my skirts rode up, and my thighs fell open, begging his hips to push against my own. My indwelling spirit rose, arched upwards to the night, and fell upon the sharpness of desire. An owl shrieked, a child quickened, a tear shook from my eye. A feral scent drifted past—fox, or more likely stoat.
We lay quietly afterwards, unwilling to be parted. Then, cajoling and caressing, he began to speak the Italian of his native soil, the same words over and over, guiding me into illimitable darkness, into my mind’s fecund whirling loam. An idea arrived, but I could not grasp hold of it—too slippery and dark it was for me. But I had spoken aloud, for I could see by his face that I had brought out of that furtive depth a daimon phrase that pleasured the poet in him. Beneath the sheltering branches, I uttered a stream of lyrical nonsense, muddled
with the old tongue. What did I say? Enough, for his brow furrowed with the strain of remembering until he could capture it in verse.
He rolled on his back beside me, his fingers still holding mine, but his mind transported elsewhere, probably to a new poem. As the branches sagged into the river, the boat swayed, and the eel sloshed in the vernaccia. It made me think of the eel pie that Francesco had fed me in the cemetery. Had he intended tonight’s eel as a stimulant also? He knew that strong food elicited disturbing visions in me. He so seldom allowed impulse to guide him that I suspected that he had planned this séance for the equinox, when day and night were of equal influence, because he needed raw ideas for verse.
Still, what did I mind? I, too, had taken what I most desired and I was now carrying Francesco’s seed. I would bind him to me with a son who carried the Petrarch name, for in Francesco’s eagerness to get a poem from me, he had forgotten the necessity for the pouch of rue that had dropped into the murky shallows. Instead of the bitter herb crumbled in vernaccia, I had savoured the slippery and most fertile eel.
Twenty-eight
R
ICH WITH LAND
, the convent of the Cordeliers was sheltered from the Sorgue canal by a thick wall of trees, where I had arranged to meet Francesco on this wintry day, the shortest of the year. The sacristan walked past me, ringing a hand bell to call the nuns to prayer, without violating the rule of silence to ask if I had lost my way. The gardener turned the soil cleanly with her spade, drove it into the ground, scraped the earth from her hands. Here, in this chaste peace, I was overcome with longing for Clairefontaine and the faith that had comforted me as a child. Here, like Luke’s sinner, the Magdalene, I might be forgiven for conceiving a child out of love.
I entered the chapel so I could listen to the nuns chanting their psalms in the adjoining church. The old Avignonnais buried their dead in private chapels like this, while in the cimetière des pauvres, pigs rooted up corpses too shallowly interred. As I crossed myself for my two babes and Conmère, boots scuffed behind me—Francesco, his eyes adjusting to the poor light, his palm resting on an eight-pointed sun cut into the wall, as if it had rested there before. I recognized the bold
mercantile crest of one of Avignon’s wool companies. This was the chapel of the de Sades.
The gardener’s shoes knocked along the gravel path until her round face appeared in the chapel doorway. “Madonna Laura?” she addressed me. “Ser Petrarca?”
I cringed at the gardener’s mistake. After her pupils dilated, she would see my hair—the colour of Rhône wine and as untameable as the river when its currents were winter-fierce.
“It’s all right, Sister,” he said. “This is my scribe. We won’t disrupt your midday prayers.” He gave me a sharp push into the garden, steering me towards a stone bench in the trees alongside the canal. “This is where I intended us to talk.”
“You’ve been meeting Laura in that chapel.”
“She has been gracious enough to meet me in this convent. I know you do not understand, Solange, but if I do not glimpse her or hear her voice, my poems have no substance. You told me yourself that they were trite.” He unfurled a sheet of paper. “Be honest—is this one any better?”
I read the poem while he waited, eager for my opinion. The vigorous new canzone praised a woman’s eyes that sounded like mine, except they were not blue but tantalizingly vague in colour,
soavemente tra ’l bel nero e ’l bianco
, neither black nor white. In short, they were dull grey, like Laura’s.
“It’s a fine poem,” I said, “but you’ve rushed the words together. You have enough here for several poems, not just one.”
He read the lines aloud, rehearsed metaphors, asked for my advice on vowels and rhymes, even admitted that my trance had given him the heated distillate from which he had extracted phrase after phrase of purest song. Having stolen an alchemist’s word-hoard from me, he saw nothing wrong in using this plunder to clothe and feather his bella donna. The praise was nauseating, but these days everything nauseated me. The cloth-dyers’ vats. The odour of the haunches crackling on the tavern’s spit that wafted up through the floorboards. Even the cheap ink
that I used to copy documents for everyone except Francesco. Because I was several weeks with child.