The Madonna of the Almonds (16 page)

Taste, taste, taste.

Simonetta shut her eyes and stopped her ears. For that one night she was inured to the pains of her heart. She would not strain to hear Bernardino’s voice whispering through the doomed almond groves as she walked them one last time in the darkening night. She would not seek his face in the form of an evening cloud, dark above and fiery below as the sun dropped. She went back into the house and sat down at the scrubbed board. She lit a rush dip candle and surveyed the apparatus before her. Her tongue would be her guide this night – her taste buds would lead her.

She had brought the still up from the treasure cellar, piece by piece, dismembering the copper skeleton to recreate it in her kitchen. She carried each dusty limbic or copper pipe singly, cradled in her arms like children. She set the thing together again and cleaned it carefully with a soft leather cloth dipped in vinegar water, admiring as she did so
the warm copper of the bowl and the green craquelure of the glass. At last, she poured
grappa
and water into the copper, adding at the last some ancient brandy. Then she took her taper and lit the brazier. As the fire died in the hearth the brazier burned merrily, making the liquid bubble and heating there instead with its flame and the heady scent of the brew. Only now did she add a handful of almonds, peeled to the white quick, as luminous and firm as bone. As the steam rose and settled into diamond drops, she tasted the water-clear juices that fell into the end vessel. They tasted of
grappa
and brandy, no more. She stood and fetched a mortar and pestle and this time ground the almonds down fine in a square of clean linen. She added virgin oil to the pounded ivory until the paste was thick and smooth. She then pushed the mixture through the cloth into the copper and poured in water to make a milk-white emulsion. Now after the boiling there was a definite hint of almonds.

Simonetta did not heed the bells of the sanctuary, brought on the breeze to tell her that it was now Vespers, now Compline. She could not hear or see, her taste told her that more paste was needed, so she added more, and yet more. Her pace became frantic – she felt that she raced the dawn. She pulled the great accounts ledger to her, and cut and split a new quill with her peeling knife. She dipped and wrote down all that she did, her carefully schooled hand becoming more and more erratic as the bells tolled the hours.

She stood and wandered the kitchen, opening Raffaella’s jars and adding a spice here, a herb there. In an inlaid box she found a brown rock of sugar, a delicacy that a wealthy guest had brought as a gift. She dropped it in too and watched the stone turn to golden gum, then honey, then suffuse the clear liquor with a beautiful amber brown. This bubbling smelled sweet and heady, and the resulting brew was sweet and bitter at once.

But still not right.

Simonetta had a fine palate, and had tasted the finest of wines since she was given her honey teat dipped in Venetian marsala as a babe. Then as a married lady, Lorenzo had expanded her experience as she tasted beers and brandies,
grappa
and
limoncello
. Their board had groaned with the best wine of Lombardy and beyond: the Sassella and Grumello of Valtellina, the Valcalepio reds and Oltrepò Pavese whites; San Colombano from Lodi and Chiaretto from the western shores of Lake Garda. She knew what pleased the tongue, and worked towards it now. All night she worked, invoking the Holy fathers of Chartreuse, who distilled their green brew in the name of God. She was sister that night to the Arab nomads that worked in the desert to distill their strong sweet Arrack. Again and again she tasted, until her head span and at last her senses began to creep back. Her eyes could not focus, and her thoughts, like homing doves, came back to Bernardino. In her befuddled state she thought that the brew she made was for him. She put all that lived in
her heart into the brew. She went out into the night and picked apricots from the espaliers in the fragrant dark, their flesh still warm from the sun, their skin like a mouse’s child. Apricots for sweetness, the drowning sweetness that she had felt when he had kissed her that one burning time. But then she added too cloves from a Chinese jar, black as his hair, and as bitter when crushed as the memory of his leaving, of the last time when he turned away from her and headed away into the hills. The curling peel of the greenest apple which slipped over her hands like eve’s serpent as she peeled, reminded her of the fortunate fall that had led her into his arms. But the yellow zest of a golden lemon stung the cuts in her knuckles, punishing the fingers that had clutched the warm hair of his head as she had pulled his face to hers. Only then, when she let the remembrance of him help her, when she combined the bitter and the sweet, the very essence of their entire encounter, did she know she was done. She drank deeply of the finished draught, while she wrote rapidly with her quill the exact proportions and ingredients she had used. Her head nodded over her ink black fingers and as her brow touched the creamy pages of the ledger she thought of sharing a cup with him, laughing, somewhere where the sun warmed their skin as they drank in a way she knew could never be.

She woke, cold and stiff, with the scrape of a boot. She raised her head and her brains pounded within. Her mouth
was ashes, and her eyes, fat with sleep, burned in her head. She lifted weighted lids to greet the sight of Manodorata, an amused smile lifting his patrician mouth. Her head was suddenly too heavy and she placed it in her hands. Someone was groaning – it was she. Manodorata cast his eye over the still. But did not comment. Instead he said: ‘The woodcutters are here. Shall I tell them to begin felling?’

His voice was different. Fuzzy. She barely knew what he said but nodded. He went to the door and barked a command to his men – far too loudly for Simonetta. He came back and sat before her. ‘You have been experimenting?’ No reply. ‘May I?’ He pointed to the willow cup. She knew it was not possible to nod so she merely shut her eyes which he took as assent. He raised the cup to his eyes. ‘
Shalom
,’ he said, and drank. Only his long silence could at last pull her heavy eyes to his face, and she found astonishment there.

‘Alchemy!’ he said.

‘In truth?’ she choked gruffly.

He raised his false hand. ‘As surely as those Florentine Jews turned flesh into gold, so have you done. What in the name of Jehovah is in here?’

‘Mostly almonds.’

Bloodshot eyes met steel grey, consternation grew as their thoughts chimed as one. ‘The axes!’

He rose at once. ‘Get you to bed. I’ll stop them.’

As she mounted the stair, which seemed today as spiral as
a castle tower’s, she heard him run into the grove. ‘Spare the trees!’ he shouted. She had never known Manodorata to run before; never heard him shout. He had looked like a crazed bear as he ran from the kitchen. As she fell on her bed and closed her eyes against the spinning room, Simonetta allowed herself to smile.

Bernardino began to feel that the monastery was his home. His cell held nothing but a bed, a cross and the Book of Books, but he had no need of more. He lay Leonardo’s
Libricciolo
sketchbook – his constant companion – next to the Bible; a partnership that made him smile: strange bedfellows indeed. His dress, while he lived here, was the simple habit of a lay brother: brown, rough, very soon covered in paint, but comfortable to his needs. His feet, clad only in sandals, were permanently cold, but soon he forgot to notice. His room, set at the southern end of the little cloister, looked onto a peaceful square of green grass butted by the fragrant herb garden. At the corner of the cloister was a round red tower which held the herbarium on the lower floor and the well-stocked library above the stair. His notion that he was in a prison had not entirely abated, for it had been made clear to him by Sister Bianca that to avoid his pursuer it was better that he did not go out into the city. The Cardinal had the reputation of a vengeful man,
so Bernardino hardly ventured into the city in which he lived, but he cared not for sightseeing anyway. He had spent many years in Milan in his youth, when his Master had been summoned here by the dusky-skinned Duke Ludovico Il Moro, whom Leonardo had charmed with a vision of the ideal city with automated bridges, elevated walkways, and other fantasies of machinery. Bernardino had studied under Leonardo at the inception of the Master’s greatest piece; the ‘
Cenacolo’
or ‘Last Supper’. The fresco was produced over three tortuous years in the nearby monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie, trying the patience of the good brothers and the Duke alike. Then, Bernardino had compensated for his monastic days with hot sweet nights with the goodwives and badwives of Milan. Now, his world was here in San Maurizio, his work was between the Hall of the Believers and the Hall of the Nuns, and he had no desire to breech the walls after curfew. His prison, if such it was, pleased him. He had already come to know and like his jailer, and he came to learn that the other inmates were all women of such good breeding and character that he marvelled – it was like being at court or summering in a great house. Several Sforzas, a brace of Borgias and an Este graced these cloisters. The chambress that laundered his habit was a Medici. The nuns were by no means uniformly ugly, nor crabbed by age. There were some lovely faces among them, faces that would have tempted him not so long ago, or at least make him mourn their calling. But his heart was done
with women, all save one, and if she could not be his he wanted no other. He needed only friendship, and here at San Maurizio he found it in abundance. He gradually came to know the nuns. Sister Ugolin ran the herbarium and brewed him sage tea when his head ached from hours of painting by candlelight. Sister Petrus brought food and ale to his cell each morning and night, for it was not seemly for him to eat in the refectory with the sisters. The old lady would sit and talk while he ate his simple meal of pasta or meat – tales of the outside world which she gleaned from the beggars who came to the gate for alms. Sister Petrus had a great taste for the macabre, and Bernardino chewed as the elderly nun waxed lyrical on the latest civic atrocity: a known plague-spreader had been burned alive in the Piazza Vetra behind the basilica of San Lorenzo. ‘San Lorenzo!’ she cackled, her toothless mouth opening wide as she good naturedly prodded Bernardino in the ribs. ‘Do you not see God’s humour at work? For was not Saint Lorenzo cooked to death on a grid-iron, and bade the Romans turn him over, as he was done on one side? I wonder if the foul spreader of the pestilence offered up a prayer to the Saint as he burned in brotherhood?’

Bernardino tasted the news and the food together. He smiled and nodded as the nun shuffled off, but the fate of the hapless plague-spreader seemed very far away.

More real to him were the stories he heard from Sister Conceptione, the librarian. Tall, androgynous and frighteningly
intelligent, the kindly sister allowed Bernardino to climb to the top of the red tower and, in her presence, look through the illuminated lives of the Saints. One book in particular he found invaluable: the ‘Golden Legend’ by Jacobus de Voragine. There, in that fabled book, there, in the airy Scriptorium with the silence broken only by the sound of the nuns’ industriously scratching quills, there in the perfect black letters and the jewel-like colours of the marginalia, he found inspiration for his work. Bending over the volume in the morning light, using the reading skills that Leonardo had taught him, he learned much of the ways of sanctity. As he read, he remembered what his old Master had said: ‘You must learn to read Latin, Bernardino. For it is the language of all the world’s secrets; sacred and otherwise.’ It was in this volume, the Lives of the Saints, that he learned the story of Saint Lucy. As he read of the unfortunate virgin’s descent into prostitution he thought of his mother. His own eyes stung as he read of Lucy’s eyes being plucked out of her head, and yet he snorted cynically when he read that God damped the faggots of her death-fire so that they would not light, and she had to be put to the sword.

‘May I ask,’ said Sister Conceptione’s dry voice from over his shoulder, ‘what you can possibly have read in
that
volume which prompted that peculiar noise?’ But she smiled, and he returned it, unsure what he could say without being insulting.

‘I wondered…that is…do you take these readings to be
the literal truth? Do you believe that God put out the fire under Lucy’s feet? Or did it just rain that day?’

‘Ah yes. The Martyr of Syracuse,’ Conceptione’s voice was as dry as the leaves of the vellum. ‘She was saved by the weather, but does not Our Heavenly Father make the weather, and decide on its moods?’

Bernardino shrugged. ‘Then why could God not save Lucy from the sword at the last? Why could he not save her eyes?’

‘Sometimes a soul is given in martyrdom so that we can learn from their suffering. Our Lord may have saved Lucy from one fate so that she may come to another, but Saint Apollonia,’ she leaned in and turned the page for him, ‘willingly leapt into her death fire rather than blaspheme the name of Christ.’

‘She did so?’ Bernardino was aghast. ‘Of her own free will? She was not forced?’

Conceptione shook her head till her black wimple crackled. ‘She suffered much at the hands of Decius and his soldiers – all her teeth were broken and she is often portrayed with the pliers that pulled them from her head. But she leapt into the fire of her own accord. And when you paint Apollonia with her broken teeth, or Lucy with her eyeballs in the chapel here, their suffering will lead others to God.’

Bernardino shook his head. ‘And Agatha?’ he said, turning the page as the gold leaf flashed briefly in the sun from
the casement. ‘Her breasts were cut from her chest! Why did not God save her from such a fate, the loss of the very essence of her womanhood?’

‘Signor Luini,’ the tall nun began. ‘
God
did not visit this suffering on any of these Holy women. These tortures were laid upon them by man. Come with me.’ Haltingly, with steps that betrayed a great age that no one would guess, the librarian led Bernardino down the stair and out into the cloister, and he turned back to look where she pointed, at the red round tower.

‘This tower was not built for this foundation. It is much older. It is the tower of the old circus, the Roman circus, which was built when the Emperor made Milan the capital of the Western Roman Empire. Here, where we now stand, and where we sisters read and worship, and grow our healing herbs, was an arena of bloody sport and death. The playground of the Godless Romans. Lucy suffered under the purges of Diocletian, Agatha during the Decian persecution. The sufferings that were visited upon them were done to them by mortal men and pagans, mighty men in their time, kings and emperors. This very tower was a prison for the earliest of Christian martyrs: Gervase, Protase, Nabor and Felix. Here in this circus, the chariots circled and the gladiators fought for the pleasure of Emperor Maximian.’

‘Maximian?’ Bernardino’s memory jolted him.

Sister Conceptione turned her rheumy eyes on him. ‘Yes. You have heard of the Emperor?’

‘Yes,’ said Bernardino, wonderingly, remembering the Abbess’s story. ‘He martyred Saint Maurice. He murdered the sixty-six hundred.’

Sister Conceptione bent her toothless smile upon him. ‘Exactly so,’ she said, and started to shuffle off to the tower again. ‘You are learning, Signor Luini,’ she said as she went, without turning back. ‘You are learning.’

He was learning. He revolved in the cloister like a top. Spinning with wonder at the connection. The stories of Saint Maurice, which had come alive for him on the chancel wall as the Abbess told the tale, were now given credence by the existence of the living, breathing, monster of an Emperor who had taken his macabre pleasures here in this spot. This very place which was now to be hallowed in the name of the man he had murdered. Bernardino lay down, dizzy, on the grass as the fat clouds scudded overhead. A change had come in him. He was learning.

He was beginning, despite himself, to believe.