Muse (23 page)

“You will soon have something else to occupy your mind. Like half the prelates in the city, you have fathered a child out of wedlock. I am carrying your son, Francesco.” I was expecting an argument, but got none. He reached over to hold my hand. Having lost one son, he seemed more willing that I might bear him another.

“How do you know it is a boy?”

“I felt his soul enter his body on the fortieth day. He was conceived the night we took the punt out on the Rhône.”

He sat quietly a moment, taking the news in. “I hope this child lives longer than the last one. I would be loath to know another son of mine had died.”

My son arrived in cherry time. He was big and I laboured at his birthing. His cry was strong, his soul very much his own. Overjoyed, I sent for Francesco, eager to share the perfection of our child, from his spiky black hair to his small wrinkled feet. Francesco scrutinized him, as if searching for the Petrarch lineaments in his olive skin and prominent nose. Satisfied, he lifted his son to the window, so he could hear the angelus. “We will call him Giovanni,” he said.

I agreed, hoping my son would soon receive the surname Petrarch, although Francesco was deeply troubled about the birth, afraid it would sully his reputation. Indeed, a few weeks later, Gherardo tumbled into my chamber to look for Francesco, announcing, “I have been at Saint Agricol’s, where the talk is that
the grand Petrarch has fathered a child on a common mistress
.” Then, noticing that I was as distressed as my crying son, he added, “I am sorry, Solange, but that is what they are saying.”

A look of torture creased Francesco’s features. “Who was there, Gherardo?”

“Cardinal Colonna, for one. He defended your honour, denying that such a thing had taken place. However, others came forwards, the poet Jean La Porte amongst them, who were happy to confirm the rumour. The worst of it was that Hugues de Sade was there with Laura, who was startled by the revelation.”

Francesco’s shoulders knotted and he rubbed the back of his neck. Word would travel through the nobility, the upper clergy, even the papal palace, until Avignon herself laughed at her favourite poet for no more fault than being human. Hope leapt inside me, in spite of the humiliation, in spite of Francesco’s pain. This pressure—this fear of public opinion—might speed him towards acknowledging his son, and I wanted nothing more than for Giovanni and me to live under the same roof as Francesco.

The months passed and Francesco visited us infrequently. Sometimes he did not even remove his outer garments, staying only long enough to check that Giovanni was healthy and to dry himself at my hearth. It was not so much that Francesco scorned us—for his letters were kind and apologetic—but that Laura was furious and he was distraught.

“No man can be content,” he wrote, “until he rests in his grave.”

How had his distress swelled so quickly to thoughts of self-murder? As the months passed, the poems he sent me to copy showed Laura’s ill humour growing, verse by verse. She refused to see Francesco, and not even the beauty of his son, for Giovanni was thriving, could distract Francesco from that wounding blow. The whole fantasy he had created—how he had met Laura, admired her from afar, spied on her combing her golden hair, returned her glove—was now forced to embrace her jealous wrath.

From this came a canzone frottola, blistered and fretted with pain, which he sent to me to copy.
Chi non à l’auro, o ’l perde, spenga la sete sua con un bel vetro
 … 
If a man cannot have gold, then he must quench his thirst with a glass of something cheaper
. I was
bel vetro
, an insult so vulgar I refused to copy, even read, his poetry for days. But when I was able to face the canzone again, I found myself admiring the raw, scalding lumps of twisted feeling. I could imagine the blottings, re-visionings, cross-outs, and additions—the number of sheets devoured! He had unleashed a creative force so tortured that he needed a different glass to pour it into. He had progressed beyond Dante’s
dolce stil novo
to stony rimes about a stony-hearted woman. I took up my pen to tell him so, praising his poetry as
rime petrose
and encouraging him in this important new direction.

With Laura shunning him, his aversion to the city grew. According to his letters, it was full of cutpurses, coinsmiths, foreigners, the begging poor and the arrogant rich. At Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, near the rock pool we had bathed in, he found a house where he could write in silence. His letters praised the healthy diet, the noble peasants, the salubrious atmosphere. I wrote to tell him that when Giovanni was a little older, we wished to live there also, so Giovanni could flourish in the country air, as I had done at Clairefontaine. Some of my hopes I kept to myself for the present. In the Vaucluse house, out of reach of the city’s guilds, I would be able to set up a scriptorium. With Francesco’s help, I could earn commissions from other learned men to create belles-lettres that I would be proud to sign.

Even in Avignon, even without Francesco, everything gave me pleasure: the morning coolness after a summer night, the scent of clean pressed linen, the jabber of children at play. I nursed Giovanni to sleep in my arms, dreaming of his chasing geese and finding berries in the straw. When he cried, I stroked the fontanelle on his skull where the bones did not yet meet, or held him at the casement to watch the paddlewheel, or walked along the canal jiggling him over my shoulder so he could see the cloth-workers at their trade.

Francesco sent letters from the Vaucluse for me to copy—dangerous, embittered letters in which he urged Benedict XII to return the papacy
to Rome. I made the copies in haste, warning Francesco that Benedict was sending roots deep into foreign soil. I told him that I sometimes carried Giovanni as far as Doms rock so he could peer down at the hundreds of workers demolishing the Pope’s old palace and rebuilding it, wing by wing. The tour du Pape was growing from the dungeon, with its nine-foot-thick walls, to the treasury, the camerlengo’s chamber, the Pope’s own bedchamber, the library, and the châtelet at the top.

I, too, was building—a bastion of love—for I knew that Francesco must soon acknowledge his son and his son’s mother. Giovanni could now push a stool to the window to watch men pulling hand-carts, boys riding donkeys, and friars crossing the plank below us to seek refreshment in the tavern. He was not quick to learn but grew into a happy child, eager for a romp, who wanted only to be fed and pampered.

Twenty-nine

O
NE AFTERNOON
when Giovanni was three, I returned to my chamber, coated with the mud and stench of the city, to find my servant Des-neiges lying on my bed, fingering some coins. Francesco must have given them to her, for he was reading Augustine’s
Confessions
to Giovanni, who was pretending to listen, his eyes big and round, though he could not understand a word.

“Maman!”

Giovanni jumped down on his chubby legs to point at his doll, perched on a shelf high above his head. I guessed that Francesco had put it there, since he thought it an unsuitable toy. I lifted Giovanni to rescue it, and kissed him under his ear as I set him down. The child had borne enough and so had I. For three years, I had been coaxing Francesco to share his country house with us, but we still lived in the filth of Avignon. Whenever I asked, Francesco would reply that it was too hot, or too cold, or too windy for the boy to come just yet.

“Des-neiges,” I said, “take Giovanni along the canal to play.”

After they had gone, I tried to find a soft beginning. “Why don’t you discuss your poems with me anymore? You used to be so eager for my ideas that you put me into trances to steal them from me.”

“A man cannot think in such a noisy chamber.”

“Giovanni is now talking. He needs a father who will listen to him.”

“We will become better acquainted since it is time for him to learn his letters.”

“You scarcely know his age, Francesco.”

“Giovanni must be weaned and have his curls cut off. He must learn his rôle in life.”

“What rôle? The love-child of a poet and his mistress?”

Francesco adjusted the hang of his silver zona. “He’s destined to be a canon.”

This hit me sidewise. “Even if he’s as little suited to it as you are? You, who beget children you will not acknowledge?”

“He will be suited to it if he is my son.”

“Who else’s would he be?”

“Men go in and out of the tavern as if it were a stable.”

“For the new harlot in the next chamber, as you are well aware!”

“My son cannot be raised in a brothel. You know the truth of it, though you feign otherwise.”

This pierced like a shard of glass. I had been betrayed by Francesco, by this city of men, by this church that turned honest women into courtesans because canons were forbidden to marry. “He lives here because you have provided us no other home. You have made him a bastard.”

“That’s a hard name for a little boy, Solange.”

“You have given me no better name to call him by.”

“When the time is right, I will have Giovanni legitimized.”

This was what I had been wanting, for Giovanni had need of his father’s love. “Will you take us to the Vaucluse then?”

He glanced towards the door, eager to be gone. How much longer would he make us wait to share his pastoral retreat? I recalled our
excursion to Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. A day hot and windless, a night cool and full of odd, compelling sounds. In the neglected chapel, we had exchanged our sacred promise.

I tried again. “Why do we speak in anger, our best selves forgotten? I only wish to see more of you, Francesco. Put your vanity aside and take us with you. In the quiet of the Vaucluse, our betrothal will be as good as a marriage. We won’t be subject to scrutiny as we are here. With your help, I could set up a scriptorium. Perhaps we could have a daughter …” An unattractive pleading had crept into my voice. “I know you love me, Francesco.”

“With my flesh, but not with my soul. That belongs to Madonna Laura.” He looked tired, as if he had explained it many times before without me hearing. “If I’m to pursue fame, it must be now. I have received an invitation from the Roman Senate to be crowned poet laureate in Rome.”

“You have much craved this recognition! Remember my predictive dream so many years ago?”

“How can I forget? It was the day we bathed in the pool at Fontaine-de-Vaucluse. Now I must return to my house there to write my coronation speech in solitude. This is the greatest task I have yet faced. You must see that this comes first?”

Yes, I did see. All else was secondary to this great ambition, which I cursed myself for fostering. He would rise so high that he could never reach down his hand to pull me up beside him.

He was rubbing his neck, trying to find the words he needed. “I must turn my back on the past. I have been weighed down too much of late.”

He meant Giovanni and me. Eyes stinging, I escaped down the stairs, but tripped part-way and rolled head over heels. I picked myself up to stumble across the plank and along the canal, my skull ringing from the fall as I searched for Giovanni.

I could not find him—not near the paddlewheels, or moat, or anywhere Des-neiges might have taken him to play with the dyers’
children. I ran down the alleys, checking the impasses and open doorways in the quarter, believing that I saw Giovanni in every begging, motherless child, until I had no will to deceive myself any further. When I returned home, hours later, sodden with rain and blasted by cold, my chamber was empty. Des-neiges’s corner had been cleared of her few worldly goods.

I did not understand until I noticed something else—something that caused me to collapse on my knees in bottomless despair. Giovanni’s little mattress was lumpy, although I had smoothed it that morning with my own hands. Before Francesco had taken Giovanni, before Giovanni had been torn from everything he loved, he had escaped from his father long enough to hide his doll beneath his mattress so that his father could not find it.