The Malice of Fortune (56 page)

He turned away, leaving this prophecy to ring in my ears. But Giovanni, no longer clutching Valentino’s hand, remained for a moment, still staring at the majolica floor tiles, as if fascinated with the Borgia crests and emblems intricately painted upon them. At last he looked up.

I could not even silence my gasp. If moments before I had imagined Damiata’s embrace, here I saw her
ultramare
gaze so clearly that she seemed to plead with me from within this little boy’s desperate eyes.

CHAPTER
27

O
ften Fortune keeps the good beneath her feet, while she lifts up the wicked
.

I exited the Vatican into a dusk that seemed brighter than many recent afternoons; the ever-present rain clouds had briefly vanished and the sky had a faintly luminous, murex tint. I did not return to the inn where I had a room, this in the Borgo that lies between the Vatican and the Tiber, a region of newer buildings. Instead I walked parallel to the Tiber, entering the Via Sancta, a road pilgrims take from the Vatican to the Trastevere. In the same manner that Pope Alexander had previously broadened and repaved the road between St. Peter’s and the Tiber, the late pope had also begun to remake the Via Sancta; for perhaps a few hundred
braccia
, the old houses beside the road had been torn down and new flagstones put in place. Then the road narrowed again and the houses crowded in, though behind these ancient brick dwellings, shops, and stables were nothing but orchards and pastures. I smelled the
contado
instead of the city, the odor of wet earth and livestock.

In the little time it took me to reach the Trastevere, the dusk seemed already to have fled into darkness; nevertheless, I was able to rely on a familiar path through the narrow alleys, arriving at the old Santa Maria basilica, which towered over the surrounding tenements. Walking beneath the church’s immense portal, I peeked inside, to find vespers in progress, a priest reading the psalm, the words seeming
to rattle around the distant altar. Blazing candles burnished the immense marble piers, looted from some ancient Roman temple, to a gold almost as brilliant as the tesserae that framed the giant mosaic figures of Christ and the Saints, the shimmering heavenly host that appeared to hover in the lofty half dome. Had I believed our Lord was in fact present, I would have invoked His assistance.

But in a world God has abandoned to
Fortuna
, I could only think that this goddess now faced an enemy whose implacable will was more than a match for her cruel caprices—and who stood to profit from the very chaos his adversary had sown throughout Italy. Amid the widespread disorder in the wake of his father’s death—and the stunningly brief reign of his father’s successor—Valentino would have little difficulty playing one faction against another, subverting friendships and sowing suspicion, until he alone could be trusted to lead us forward. The only man who stood in his way was God’s new vicar; Pope Julius II had been a lifelong enemy of Rodrigo Borgia, and he had both the experience and the native caution to distrust his predecessor’s son. But the new pope was under immense persuasion, by means of both threats and promised rewards, from Borgia allies in the Curia to reappoint Valentino as captain general of the Church. It did not seem he would be able to resist, if he wished to preserve his power—and perhaps even his person.

I lingered at the portal of the Santa Maria church, to consider an offering I might present the new pope: testimony regarding Valentino’s crimes. But I quickly lost this faith; I could scarcely begin to prove my case, having at present only my obscure theories—and nothing at all a reasonable man could hold in his hands. The salt mound at Cesenatico, which did not point to any particular man’s guilt regardless, had been swept into the Adriatic; the page of a schoolboy’s geometry, whatever it might reveal, had vanished along with Damiata—whose unfortunate son still remained hostage in the house of Borgia.

And even were I able to produce a “confession” of some sort, I also had grave doubts that Pope Julius would make use of it. In truth, the new pope could serve his own aims far better by directing attention to Valentino’s aggression against the great families of Italy—the Orsini,
the Sforza, the Montefeltro of Urbino, and a litany of others—than by attempting to condemn Valentino for crimes against his own family and a few dozen nameless women.

In sum, it no longer mattered what I—or any other man—suspected of Valentino’s crimes, or whether he was guilty or not. His political ambitions were brutal enough. And all too soon he would require a
mappa
of the entire world to circumscribe them.

There is a fountain in front the Santa Maria Trastevere, an ancient, eight-sided marble basin; those who credit miracles believe an anointing oil bubbled up here the very day and hour our Sinless Lord was born in the Holy Land. I paused and listened as the gurgling spouts struggled to produce more water than an old man in the latrine. And here I could not help but pause and reflect on the miraculous births in my own household.

As I have written, at the time I returned from the Romagna, Marietta had to be coerced into returning to our house. Nevertheless, we had shared the same roof for only two weeks, when we shared the same bed. I had given my wife neither encouragement nor instruction to do so; she roused me from a sleep in which I had imagined she was someone else. And even when I was certain who she was, I made love to her as if I expected the most extraordinary metamorphosis: that on waking, I would behold Damiata’s face.

Well before that dawn, however, I literally leapt from the connubial bed, already pregnant, let us say, with a dreadful understanding of Marietta’s motives: If she had been gotten with child by her “cousin” during my time in the Romagna, she could now reasonably claim that I was the father. And she might reasonably expect this
favola
to be found credible, because, of course, she had previously told it.

On that occasion, I got silently dressed and said nothing. Even when Marietta began showing her second pregnancy, I did not betray my suspicions to her. And I had scrupulously maintained that forbearance when I left Florence months later, with Marietta already complaining bitterly about her prenatal confinement, this prescribed by
the physician the Corsini had sent to look after her. Instead, I had departed for Rome certain that the new baby’s birth date would present a clear resolution to all my questions.

But now another child had set other questions, no less familiar and tormenting, clamoring about in my brain. Was Damiata wasting in a prison somewhere—or already a moldering corpse? Had she been thrown into the sea or arrested as she tried to enter the Vatican? Had her life already ended on a rack in the Castel Sant’Angelo? Or was she somehow hiding here in the Trastevere, still waiting for the opportune moment—or constructing some scheme—to free her son?

Desperately pursuing this last possibility—or miracle, as it were—I left the square in front of the Santa Maria church and ventured far deeper into the Trastevere, down winding alleys seemingly constructed to baffle a compass, the passages sometimes so narrow that my shoulders touched on either side. During my weeks in Rome, I had searched these filthy, trash-strewn warrens an unreasonable number of times—but never before at night. Now the doorsteps and tavern porches that had seemed strangely deserted by day came ominously to life, filled with the click of dice or sudden eruptions of chatter in a dozen incomprehensible tongues and dialects. And the silences that followed were all the more sinister.

Lost among the Trastevere’s twists and turns, amid one of the silences I heard a little chiming. The hair at my neck bristled. Unable to distinguish whether the source of this sound was before or behind me, I went forward, within a few steps finding a doorstep where, if unable to hide, I could at least secure my back. The stoop was so shallow that even as I flattened myself against a creaking door, my toes remained in the alley.

All at once, with a sound like a thousand Carnival noisemakers—this din far obscuring the chiming of their bells—a herd of bleating sheep frantically squeezed and stamped through the alley as if fleeing the beast of the bottomless pit. When they had passed I stood there breathless, certain that I had witnessed some omen—and almost as certainly not an auspicious one.

A moment after I watched the gray rumps of the last few sheep recede into the blackness—followed closely by their shrouded shepherd—I saw something that resembled a pale mask, hovering in a doorway the flock had just passed. For a moment I had to assure myself that I had witnessed the Licorn’s death. And then I wondered, with far more reason, if Valentino had sent someone to follow me. Perhaps he thought I would lead him to Damiata.

This watcher was a woman, however, evidenced by both her height and the vague contours of her oval face. A stature and a shape so familiar that like a fool who never learns, I ran toward her.

She was probably younger than Damiata, but her face was covered with pustules of the French pox. The words she spit out were unfathomable to me, except that I knew they were an invitation. This oration concluded with a smile, her teeth so black that it seemed she was a creature wrought entirely of darkness, visible only because of her hideous mask.

No sooner had I turned from this woeful countenance than the tenor of her address became angry, the words strangely clicking and screeching. Inside the lining of my mantle, I carried silver coins to offer as gratuities to the myriad Vatican functionaries, without which I could not get from one room to the next. I threw these pieces of silver into the mud behind me, not so much as a kindness, but in the belief that she would busy herself digging them out instead of following me like some evil fate, shouting curses and spells.

I must have run all the way back to the Borgo, because when at last I unlocked the door to my room and sat on my little bed, sweat trickled from my brow even as tears coursed down my cheeks. I did not weep for myself or Italy, and what we had both certainly lost. I wept for my Damiata and the little boy Valentino had snatched away, not only from his mother’s loving embrace, but also from the very hands of defeated and envious Fortune.

The sheep were in fact an omen of sorts, because the next day the rains resumed, heavier than before, as if another Deluge were beginning—and a courier knocked on my door with a letter from the
Ten of War, instructing me to conclude my business in Rome and return to Florence. I was only too grateful to comply, the city on the Tiber having become nothing more than a vast sepulcher of my hopes.

I spent the next few days paying calls on various cardinals who had business interests with private Florentine citizens, as well as performing errands for our own Cardinal Soderini, who would not let me get away without some final services on his behalf.

Yet as my departure approached, I slept no better. In part, this was because I had known, for nearly a month, that the question waiting for me in my own house would never be answered. My second child and first son had been born on 9 November, after I had been in Rome less than a fortnight—nine months after Marietta had come to my bed. The doubts I was evidently not alone in entertaining would be assuaged, my colleagues in Florence joyously wrote me, when I saw the
fanciullo
, who was “the image” of me. Marietta herself was among these correspondents, her fawning letter seasoned with sentiments that had never dropped from her lips.