The Malice of Fortune (28 page)

My descent ended in a pit no painter of the Last Judgment has ever portrayed. A zodiac of illuminated globes appeared to hang in the air above Satan’s own banquet, the main repast the entire bloated corpse of a woman, set upon a trestle table and opened from throat to groin like a gutted sow. I shouted, “What the
cazzo diavolo
are you doing to her!”

“She was discovered this morning at a farm near Cantalupo, absent a single mark of violence upon her.” Through the glare of the floating globes, I observed the author of this pedantry: Leonardo da Vinci stood near the back wall of his cellar, attired in a butcher’s smock, upon which he wiped his hands.

Reluctantly, I renewed my examination of the corpse. A fleshy woman, entirely naked, her pale arms at her sides and legs spread a bit, she had been laid out on linen so stained and soiled an Englishman would refuse to dine off it. Her dark hair framed a somewhat livid face, yet even in the brilliant light her eye sockets were empty black pits. Evidently the violence had been done to her in this place, by means of the saws and polished blades that lay beside her. But no anatomist’s instruments could have metamorphosed my Damiata into this. For the first time since she had vanished, I was relieved to know I would have to look for her elsewhere.

“We have proved the cause of her mortality,” Leonardo said. He stood before a lead tub, which was shaped like a coffin and raised on a stone platform, so that the rim reached to the height of his waist. At each end of the metal tank a miniature sun rose atop a lampstand; the light source was a candle somehow enclosed in the center of a large
glass globe, despite the latter appearing to be filled with water. Evidently this medium rendered the brilliant light unnaturally steady.

“As you might expect in this capital of all stupidities,” Leonardo continued in his theater-organ tenor, “the wheat-field sages attribute her death to some demonic agent. With presumably every means of destruction at his avail, Satan instructed one of his minions to insert a large piece of dried apple at the entrance to this woman’s breathing tube. Giacomo. Show him.”

I turned to find Leonardo’s Adonis, Messer Giacomo, presiding over his own table, upon which had been distributed various organs that appeared to have been removed from the corpse. To my untutored eyes, this arrangement resembled a
zampogna
—a peasant bagpipes—although this instrument had but one pipe, as thick as a barge rope but only half as long as my arm, crowned with a sort of crest. At the other end of the pipe was a pair of glistening purple bladders that put one in mind of fresh ox livers. Messer Giacomo clutched the crest atop the pipe with one hand, while with the other he pressed down on one of these bladders.

“Ah! Ah! Agghh!”

Hence I came to the understanding that the bladders were lungs, the pipe a windpipe; Giacomo had been squeezing his inelegant notes from that poor woman’s dead flesh. Of the countless frauds and fables wherein a corpse speaks, no storyteller had ever imagined a truth such as this.

Finished with his playing, Leonardo’s maestro of lungs plucked something from his table and displayed it delicately between his thumb and finger. The brown chunk was hardly bigger than a Spanish olive.

“I think it reasonable to propose that the woman herself swallowed it,” Leonardo said. “As we have demonstrated, her lungs and larynx, indeed the whole apparatus of her breathing, remain entirely without damage. Had she spit out that single bite or masticated it more thoroughly, she might have lived another forty years.”

“Then Fortune was her murderer,” I said, regaining my bearings. “Maestro, I am looking for—”

I stopped, having noticed something that made the hair dance atop my head. “What do you have in that vat, Maestro?”

Not waiting for an answer, I made my way to the rear of the cellar, finding my suspicions confirmed even before I reached the long metal tub, which in fact was a coffin of sorts. A lead pipe ran in one end and out the other, conveying the water that both filled this vessel and coursed through it like a gentle brook.

Beneath the surface lay two alabaster objects. One was a single buttock cut just above the pelvis and through the crotch, with the thigh still attached, although I was able to orient myself to these anatomical features only by the remaining patch of pubic hair, which drifted in the current like moss at the bottom of a perfectly clear creek. The second object was the matching lower leg, severed at the knee.

I could not even begin to accept the dreadful defeat that lay before me. “Damiata was abducted out on the
pianura
last night. Did they do this to her?”

“We will see.”

“See?”

“If they are the same.” I had only a vague idea, if any, what he meant by “they,” or why they would not be the same. Leonardo collected a notebook from one of his tables. “You must demonstrate to me, as precisely as you can, her height.”

I knew where Damiata’s eyes were, relative to mine, when we faced each other. With a trembling hand I showed the maestro. With a great long stick he measured to my mark, then made notations in his notebook. “She was wearing her half-boots?”

I nodded stiffly. With his bare hands Leonardo hauled the remains out of his vat like a fisherman clearing his net, placing them both on the stained sheet that covered his third trestle table. When he placed a measuring stick alongside the glistening shank, I could no longer watch.

From time to time, I heard the scratching of Leonardo’s chalk, after which he noisily turned the sheets of his notebook like a court musician looking for a song. Here and there he also said things like “
g
is to
h
as the value
r
is to
s
 …” But mostly he mumbled in fits and starts.

The maestro was still engaged in this nerve-scraping
esperienza
when footsteps shook the wooden stairs. Down came the alchemist
Tommaso, although you could see nothing of him save his head—with all that black wool sticking out of his idiotic
berretta
—and his big black boots. He was otherwise obscured by one of those great wicker baskets used in the grape harvest, these being shaped like an urn so that they will stand up, but so wide at the mouth that even Tommaso, with a span like a pelican’s wings, could hardly get his arms around it. When he had conveyed his harvest basket to Leonardo’s table, he emptied the contents onto the sheet.

The butchered parts tumbled out like the fragments of a shattered marble statue, yet the almost rose-hued edges where these pieces had been cleaved from the whole were perfectly straight and even. Half a torso, absent the arm, which had been severed at the shoulder joint, the glassy, pale blue breast having no nipple, only what appeared to be a blackened, crusted areola where it had been sliced away. The two parts of another leg, the upper portion also having a fine dark fringe of pubic hair alongside the cut that had divided the trunk. The arm and hand, half clenched, that had evidently been sliced from the partial torso.

Nevertheless, it was not the sight of that flesh but rather its reek—the same bitter scent that still clung to me—that made my head light. The room around me began to wobble.

Leonardo had already begun to move the ghastly pieces about on the table, as if trying to reassemble the corpse. Distantly I heard him say, “Did you precisely ascertain the locations?”

“All excepting the arm,” Tommaso answered. “Some boys had passed it about.”

Here Leonardo paused to study the remains as if he were painting a fresco, musing over his pots of colors. After a moment I thought he muttered, “
Dimmi
”—Tell me—as though imploring the body parts to speak. Whatever his inquiry, the lifeless flesh did not reply, because the maestro knitted his brow, then turned away and rushed up the stairs.

I caught up with Leonardo in his studio. Here, too, several candle globes were lit, allowing me to see this immense disorder that Damiata has previously related. The maestro was already leafing through a
bound manuscript—Latin, as I soon observed—that he had snatched up from among several other volumes on the tabletop, all piled together as carelessly as if he intended to make a bonfire of them.

“Vitruvius determined that the members of the human body were in mathematical proportion,” Leonardo said, poking a great finger at a page in his book. “A man’s height is equal to twenty-four palms and the other members are multiples or fractions thereof—my dear friend Fra Luca Pacioli has an equation to represent this. Dottor Savonarola, the grandfather of the fanatic, made useful tables based on similar principles …” Trailing off, Leonardo wrinkled his brow and wrote a few more numbers in his notebook.

I was suddenly as frozen as at any time during the previous two days. He had seen something. “What is it?”

The maestro once again produced his chalk and notebook, making a final notation. He shook his head.

I shouted, “In the name of God who was the woman Tommaso brought in the basket!”

“Not her.”

My heart filled my entire chest. Yet I was only able to say, like a slow pupil, “So you are saying that those pieces of the body would not match someone of Damiata’s height.”

He looked at me as though I had just asked him how to empty piss out of a chamber pot. “Neither is proportionate. One of those unfortunate women was three-sixteenths of a
braccia
taller than Damiata. The other woman was one-eighth of a
braccia
shorter.”

I returned only the blankest of stares.

“They are not symmetrical,” Leonardo said. “The length of the lower leg is not proportionate with the section of the pelvis and femur.” He was referring to the two fragments I had seen in his tank, upon which he had evidently based his entire deduction. “When we measure the parts Tommaso has collected, we will find the same variation.”

I closed my eyes. “You mean—”

“They cannot have been obtained from the same body.”

I stood there, insane with hope. Damiata might yet live.

But in her place, two other women had been butchered:
Zeja
Caterina, I was all but certain, and the
strega
who had joined her; the
latter had appeared to be taller than Damiata. The taste in my mouth was suddenly as vile as the stink on my skin.

Having offered me this cold comfort, Leonardo began to sort through the vast accumulation on his tables, as if I were not present at all. If Damiata had been astonished to find amidst this chaos a clandestine order—those numbers and measurements that the maestro had imposed on all these models and devices—I had the fleeting but inescapable sense of something quite different: Nothing was ever completed. Every drawing had later notations or corrections in the margins. Every wooden model, be it of a fortress or a contraption of gears and wheels, sat among pieces that either had been taken away or were waiting to be added.

Like Damiata, I had no personal acquaintance with Leonardo da Vinci before I came to Imola; once there, I had only observed him, on a few occasions, coming and going to the Rocca. My interest in Valentino’s engineer general began only after I heard reports that he had collected the pieces of a woman dismembered in a peculiar fashion—this followed by rumors connecting the crime to the
condottieri
as well as to the pope. Whereupon I employed the boy, Lucca, to watch the maestro’s palazzo and inform me as to who—and what—went in and out. But I had never traded words with Leonardo until that afternoon in the olive grove.

Nevertheless, I was familiar enough with Leonardo’s particulars to regard his disordered studio as a metaphor of his life. Thirty years before, he had been exiled from Florence on charges of sodomy, from which the Medici who had sponsored him should have protected him. His subsequent labors came to naught when the Duke of Milan betrayed him as well as all Italy, after which the esteemed maestro was run out of Mantua and Venice. It was our republic that had welcomed him back, two years previously, the brothers of Santissima Annunziata having provided him a commission. Yet when Valentino took him on, Leonardo left the friars with nothing but an immense drawing—which crowds came to gawk at nonetheless, as if Botticelli had taken up the brush again.