My son offered the seat at the head of the table to Lorenzo, who declined.
“This is your home, Leonardo, and you are the man of the house.” He looked around, smiling. “The king of your own palazzo. You must sit at the head of your table.”
I could see how proud Leonardo was. He had come so far. “Who is joining us?” I asked.
“Salai.”
“The Limb of Satan?”
The confused expression reasserted itself on Leonardo’s face. “I must tell you about him before he comes to the table.” He went silent for a long moment. Then he said, “Salai is my natural son.”
I sat stunned, speechless, though not unhappily so. It was quite a large matter to comprehend.
Leonardo has a child. I am a grandmother.
“How did it happen, Leonardo?” Lorenzo asked. “You’ve never spoken of him before.”
“I only learned about his existence this year.” Leonardo took some time before he went on. “When I first came to Milan,
Il Moro
was very kind to me.” He turned to Lorenzo. “I have you to thank for that. One of the duke’s ‘kindnesses’ was a visit to one of his courtesans.” Leonardo rarely looked embarrassed, but now he did. “I had not been with anyone, man or woman, for a long time. This girl—her name was Celeste—was very beautiful. She had a temperament much like yours, Mama.” He smiled, remembering. “I began to use her as a model for one of my Madonnas.” Now Leonardo looked down at his plate. “She fell in love with me, and for a time, while I painted her, she refused all her other customers. Even
Il Moro.
” Now my son smiled. “I think I might have risen somewhat faster in the duke’s favor if Celeste had not ceased giving him her favors. But finally the Madonna was finished. In truth, I was not in love with her and”—the shy revelatory look reappeared—“Zoroastre was insanely jealous. Celeste left Milan shortly after, and my life went on.”
Leonardo sat back in his chair and sighed a long sigh. “Last year a short, squat man I had never met came here and asked to see me. I thought he had come to give me a commission.” Leonardo smiled ruefully. “In fact, this man brought me one I never expected. He said his wife, Celeste, had recently died. She had been a great beauty in her day. So great, that despite her having once been a courtesan, and despite her having a young child—she called him Giacomo—he felt lucky that she would accept his proposal of marriage. They had lived quite happily at first, he said, and he’d refrained from asking who the boy’s father was. She never offered to say, and he thought perhaps, because of her previous trade, she did not know his paternity.”
Now Leonardo turned his eyes to the ceiling and a bemused expression crossed his face. “The peace in their marriage began to shatter as soon as little Giacomo began to walk. He was a terror—as beautiful as his mother, but wholly unmanageable. Celeste indulged him and refused to let her husband punish him. He grew more and more willful. Spoiled. Husband and wife fought constantly over him. Much as the man tried, he could not bring himself to love the boy. Then Celeste grew ill. A cancer in her breast. On her deathbed she revealed
me
as the father. Of course, by that time I was a well-known figure in Milan. So her husband came to me. Told me the story. I knew it was true.”
Leonardo looked at me then with the warmest of smiles. “He was my
son
.” His eyes filled with tears and he shook his head. “I adopted him. Paid the man for him.” Now Leonardo barked a laugh. “Giacomo was even worse than he’d been described. I’ve never known a child like him. He is so beautiful to look at. In that way there’s much of his mother in him. But he lies. He steals. So far he seems to have neither interest nor talent for the arts. He is very loud . . . and exceedingly rude.”
“What are his good qualities?” Lorenzo asked gently. “Even the vilest of children have one or two.”
“Besides his physical beauty . . . ?” Leonardo thought a moment. “He is loyal to a fault. Keeps a secret well. And in his way”—he pressed his lips together as though to hold back emotion—“he loves me. Recognizes me as his father.”
I put my hand over his and smiled. “When can I meet my grandson?”
Leonardo wiped at his eyes. “For now, of course, he will be your ‘grandnephew.’” He sniffed sharply, and picking up a bell, jingled it.
A door opened and a plump, rosy-cheeked woman peeked her head around it. “Julia, meet my Uncle Cato and Lorenzo de’ Medici.”
“I’m honored to meet you both,” she said, quite matter-of-factly. “Are you ready for your supper, Maestro?”
“Will you call Salai first?”
Julia rolled her eyes heavenward. “The last I looked he was out in the yard up to his elbows in muck.”
“Please tell him to clean himself and come in,” Leonardo told her with a pleasant resignedness I would come to recognize in all of his dealings with his son. “But I think we three can begin with the soup.”
By the time Salai arrived at the table we were halfway through our antipasto. He fairly ran into the dining room, and with an odd combination of boredom and affection planted a kiss on Leonardo’s cheek before taking the empty place next to Lorenzo. I was seated across from him, so I could easily look at the boy’s face. Though his clothes had been changed, his forehead retained a smudge of dirt. While he had lips more full and pouty than Leonardo’s, the long, straight nose and the pretty hazel wide-set eyes were clearly his father’s. The mop of light curls was reminiscent of Leonardo’s, too, though by the standard of the day for a young boy was now cut short.
The child was staring hard at me.
“That is your great-uncle, Cato,” Leonardo told Salai. “And beside you sits a very important man from Florence, Lorenzo de’ Medici.”
He gave me a brief, insolent look and then turned to Lorenzo. “Are you very rich?” he asked.
Lorenzo controlled his smile. “Perhaps the richest man in Italy.”
“They say
Il Moro
’s treasury is filled with chests of gold and diamonds and pearls and rubies, and a pile of silver coin so high a stag could not leap over it!”
“Salai . . . ,” Leonardo began.
“But I wish to know who is richer!” the boy cried.
“Why does it matter?” I asked him.
“Because,” he said, turning to me, “I must know to which man I should go for patronage when I am grown.”
“But the maestro tells us you have no interest in the arts,” I persisted.
“No matter,” Salai replied chirpily, “I’ll seek patronage for some
other
talent.”
“Court jester perhaps?” Lorenzo suggested.
Salai looked at his father with open-mouthed wonder. “I could be a jester!”
“You would make a marvelous fool, Salai,” Leonardo said, straight-faced.
“Did you know,” Lorenzo continued to the boy, “that fools are the only people at the courts of kings who can say exactly what they want on any subject whatsoever—as long as it is humorously put—and not be punished?”
With a loud whoop Salai was suddenly out of his chair and dancing around the table in a wild
tarantella
, accompanying himself with a song far too ribald for one his age. He was making such a racket that Julia pushed her head through the door and watched as he danced. Salai ended with a set of whirls and a quite spectacular somersault, landing at Lorenzo’s feet, grinning up at him.
“You’re hired!” Lorenzo cried.
Everyone roared at that, all but Julia, who shook her head, muttering, “A mistake to encourage him,” before disappearing back in the kitchen.
“Sit down and eat your supper,” Leonardo instructed Salai.
The boy took a few bites of his
insalata
, then looked at me long and hard. I held his gaze very frankly. He tried to outstare me. Made a few faces. Crossed his eyes. Pulled his cheeks into a fish mouth. I refused to smile. Finally he gave up, but not before announcing, “He’s a sour one.”
I turned to Leonardo. “You’re right. He is rude.”
Salai made a farting sound through his lips.
Leonardo closed his eyes. “Take the rest of your supper in your room,” he told his son.
“I’m finished anyway,” Salai said, jumping out of his chair. He grabbed a heel of bread from the table, and with an exaggerated bow to Lorenzo, a fish face in my direction, and a peck on Leonardo’s forehead, he darted from the room.
We all sat there a bit stunned.
“Remember the dragon on my pillow?” I finally said. “Perhaps he takes after you more than you’d like to admit.”
“Was I that bad?”
“There were times . . .”
Then Julia came in with a steaming plate of savory mushroom ravioli. As we tucked into it with gusto, I regaled Lorenzo, to Leonardo’s sundry amusement and mortification, with stories of his youthful escapades. By the end of the evening he had concluded that, after all, fruit did not fall so very far from the tree.
Next morning I explored the east wing of Corte Vecchio. It was a warren of small, interconnecting chambers, each possessing one or two overlarge windows, and each a feast for the senses. Embroidered tapestries that must once have hung on royal walls now hung here. Paintings and sculptures—gifts from his friends, the Florentine masters—were everywhere present, though some of the works were Leonardo’s own. A series of four of his sketches stretched the length of one room, all depicting a catastrophic deluge—like the one Giuliano de’ Medici had described as a dream that day in the country so many years before, with hurricane winds and monstrous curling waves that were washing away a mountaintop castle and the whole city beneath. On a chalk wall were scribbled mathematical diagrams and equations that I found completely baffling.
Underfoot, where there might have been one Turkey carpet, Leonardo had laid
three
, artfully, so that a piece of each showed through. Every possible surface was piled with treasures: a necklace of cinnabar hanging from the dismembered marble hand of a classical Greek statue; a wood carving of the goddess Isis displayed prominently in a niche, a garland of tiny living orchids encircling her neck.
In a music room were myriad stringed instruments and horns. There was a violin I recognized, one he’d designed with a fabulous silver sounding box molded into the shape of a horse’s head. On his arrival at the Milanese court he and his unique instrument had been thrust headlong into a musical competition and won! After that, for some time, Leonardo had been strangely cast in the role of a talented musician and not a painter. Here, too, were piles of written music and charts that, to an untrained eye, would make no sense. There were sketches tacked on the wall of “musical waves” traveling through the air toward a perfectly rendered human ear and the inside of the listener’s head.
I finally arrived in the main corridor and stepped into the ballroom studio. Leonardo saw me at once and strode toward me.
“Good morning, Uncle Cato!” he called out cheerfully. “Look, don’t come any closer. Let me show you something.” He came over and guided me back toward the workshop archway.
I saw four apprentices move to four points of a square around where Leonardo’s flying contraption stood. They began working, hand over hand, tugging on an intricate system of pulleys, weights, ropes, and heavy chains. Suddenly, with a loud grinding and creaking of gears, the square of wood upon which the flying machine stood began to rise! As it ascended on the ropes and chains, another floor was rising from the story below to take its place. Then with the sound of heavy clanking, the new floor locked perfectly into the place of that which was now suspended high overhead. On this newly risen platform were five sheet-draped easels.
The operation complete, the apprentices returned to their various tasks, as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred.
“What on earth have I just seen?” I inquired of the massive machinery.
“I think it should be the
work
, not the master, that moves up and down. Every night now I am able to put my paintings away and close them up, safely.”
I moved amidst the easels, nosily lifting the sheet corners to peek at the subjects. Each one was more astonishing than the last. A profile portrait of a woman Leonardo identified as Beatrice d’Este. A wildly costumed Ludovico, who appeared as an overweight wood nymph. There was a somberly dressed physician, and a Madonna holding a vase, the Christ child clutching a delicate flower. In each and every one shone Leonardo’s unique genius.
“I wish you would sit for me one day,” he said quietly. “As the person you are under those men’s robes and bindings.”
“Why would you want to paint an old woman?” I said, amused.
“When I look at you,” he replied, “I see you as you were when I was a boy his age.” He gazed across the room at Salai, who was pounding with mortar and pestle at chunks of blue stone with so much ferocity that bits of its powder were flying up and spraying his face and doublet. He looked fondly at me.
“Madonna Mia,”
he said.
“Perhaps one day,” I said, strangely embarrassed and shy. “But we’ve so much to accomplish here and now.”
“Lorenzo is very ill, is he not?”
“He is. But there’s a strength in him. Fathomless strength. As long as there is a Florence to save, that man will live forever.”
In the next moment Salai, all gangly legs and blue-flecked cheeks, approached us. “I’m going out with my friends,” he announced.
“You haven’t finished grinding the cerulean,” Leonardo said. He was met with an insolent pout.
“Alessio can do it.”
Maestro and apprentice locked eyes. Salai’s sparkled with mischief, past and future.
“Then you must finish when you return,” Leonardo instructed, trying for sternness in his voice. But this was a clearly outrageous indulgence.
With a nod the master gave the boy leave to withdraw. He swiveled on his heels to go.
“Salai!” Now there was steel in Leonardo’s voice. He motioned toward me with his eyes. The boy turned back and deposited a perfunctory kiss on my cheek. Then, grabbing a feathered cap and tying closed the front of his doublet, he was gone.