The Malice of Fortune (58 page)

Damiata’s hands shook and again she gave me a pleading look. I could believe we shared a soul, because at once I understood. Regardless of her own fate, she wanted me to save the boy.

“You presented my father a lie.” Valentino’s complexion was again as pale as ever, but a slight hoarseness remained in his voice. “In his illness, he could not understand what he was reading. You cheated him, just as you cheated Juan of his life. As you believe you will cheat me. I brought you Giovanni in good faith. But there never was an honest whore, was there?”

“You tried to cheat Fortune.” Damiata took a heaving breath, like a woman standing on the scaffold, the black hood already over her
head. “You could not wait for your opportunity. Instead it was you who betrayed your father the same day you betrayed my poor, dear Juan. And me.”

“The truth about you is here,” Valentino said, holding the folded page with one hand and swatting it with the other. As if he were a madman with a violent tic, abruptly he turned to me. “This is the instrument with which she murdered my father—just as with a few carefully placed words to Vitellozzo Vitelli, this serpent killed my brother.”

His arm shot out and I believed he would finish wringing my neck. Instead he merely offered me the folded parchment. “She murdered my father with half-truths, which in his reduced state he could not understand.” He composed himself and for a moment looked at me as searchingly as he had on the rampart at Sinigaglia. “Read it. You of all men will see the truth.”

Damiata clutched her son, her hands still quaking. I placed my plank cudgel back atop the trestles. As carefully as if I were feeding a hunting leopard a scrap of meat, I accepted Valentino’s offering.

My own hands trembled as I brought the folded packet closer to the lamplight. I fumbled to open it; the parchment, still partly layered with wax, seemed as stiff as bark. But when I had the page entirely unfolded, I could see that the inner edge had been scored with a knife. The Latin text was in the same copyist’s hurried hand as the Euclid’s
Elements
Vitellozzo Vitelli had shown me, although the broad margin did not have any geometric shapes drawn in it. Instead this space had been filled with script in good, learned Italian, yet so hastily scrawled that it spilled over onto the original text.

I needed only to read a few lines before I was certain as to the author of these words.

When I had finished reading Valentino’s record of his own
traget di capra
—goat ride—I looked up at him. He nodded meaningfully at me, then snatched the page away, his hand darting like a viper.

I turned to Damiata. For a time we stood silent, requiring only our eyes to exchange sad and anxious words. At last I said to her, “You didn’t know it would be this.”

She shook her head, tears welling in her eyes. “I know you did, Niccolò. But I refused to see it. That is the sad truth. We do not give ourselves to the Devil because we love evil. We love him because he is so beautiful. Without your science, Niccolò, I could not have believed it, even after reading that.”

For a moment, the only sound was the hollow rushing of the muddy water far above us. Then Damiata addressed Valentino. “They always say that His Holiness was in league with the Devil, that his last words were to Satan. But the only devil your father knew was the one in his own house. He favored Juan, against all reason, because he knew that if you became the instrument of his ambitions, he would surrender himself to the son he feared more than the Devil. And I better than anyone know why he feared you. Why the entire world should. Because he knew he would come to love the devil in his own house. A love beyond reason. As I once loved you. As we all did. Beyond all reason.” Tears clogged her voice. “
Cercar Maria per Ravenna
. When your father sent me to Imola, he knew in his own corrupt soul that I would only find Maria in Ravenna.”

Valentino cocked his head at Damiata, with yet another sudden, tic-like motion. “Come here.”

I had never seen this brave lady so frightened. But our children make cowards of us. And the Devil knows what we fear most.

“Come here!”

She looked at me, her eyes pleading.

I understood the sacrifice demanded by the beast of this Labyrinth. And I nodded that she should go to him.

“Go to Messer Niccolò,” Damiata told her son. “He is our dearest and most trusted friend. Do what he says.” Only when the boy had reluctantly shuffled to my side did she take her first step.

I clutched Giovanni’s hand tightly.

When Damiata was close enough to Valentino to die at once, she stopped.

Again I saw that strange teeming in Valentino’s eyes, as if all the lost souls in Signorelli’s
Last Judgment
were trapped within them. “Put up your hood,” he said.

She could hardly do it, her fingers were so palsied with fear. Finally,
she was able to conceal her dyed, raven-hued hair and settle her hands at her side. And then she offered her former lover a smile so luminous that it almost buckled my knees. In a heartbeat, she had become the same beautiful, spirited courtesan a bitter, forgotten young cardinal had seen those years ago in Ascanio Sforza’s garden.

Valentino raised his hand and held it close to her face, trembling. When at last he was able to touch her, it was not even a carnal gesture, only the merest fingertip caress, as if to convince his stunned senses that his goddess stood there in the flesh. He returned her smile with an awkwardness and desire I had never seen among his many masks. Perhaps he imagined she was his sister—as perhaps he had on the day he first saw her. But for the first time, I saw a sincere hope on the face that had so often mirrored the hopes—however false—of so many.

In the blinking of an eye, he threw off this mask. “Take your son. When I look at him I see nothing of me. I see only weak, cowardly Juan. He could never be my son. Take your bastard and the whore’s cunt that spit him out. Get away from me before I cut you open and pull out your diseased womb!”

“Climb!” I barked at Giovanni, shoving him toward the ladder, certain that Fortune had given us this one moment and would offer no other. I would never make a more difficult choice, save one, because I had to turn my back on Damiata at her moment of utmost peril. Yet I knew she would never forgive me, in this life or the next, if I sacrificed her son to the false hope that I could save her.

Little Giovanni was no coward, because when he had climbed just a few rungs of that towering ladder, he turned and called out, “Mama, you must come! Mama! I won’t leave you!”

Damiata had played her previous role as skillfully as the immortal Roscius, because now her eyes were wide with utter terror. “You must climb up to the top, darling,” she told her son, her voice quavering. “Messer Niccolò will follow you.” Again her doomed eyes pleaded with me.

I looked at Valentino. You could not say I observed a single transformation, the exchange of one mask for another. His entire face appeared to twitch and convulse, not merely his eyebrows or his lips, but his forehead and even the taut flesh about his jaw, a thousand
metamorphoses taking place at once, yet to no resolution. As if this infinitely mutable mask could no longer decide among the many illusions it had always so effortlessly created.

To speak at all was to taunt the Devil—not to mention Fortune. Yet I said to him, “You spared me twice, Excellency.” At the same time I reached out, grabbed Damiata, and pulled her to my side. “Once on the
pianura
and then at Sinigaglia. Now you have summoned me here to bear witness yet again. But I do not believe you want me to witness another murder. You must let them go.”

He did not seem to understand or even hear, because the remarkable palsy of his face continued without interruption. But I took this opportunity to push Damiata behind me and whisper frantically to her, “If you hope to save your son, climb now.”

When the ladder creaked beneath Damiata’s weight, I stepped quite deliberately to the plank table, as if it were a rostrum. “You saw something in me,” I told Valentino. “Something I could not see myself. You knew that I would become your apostle. I better than anyone could understand that you fear no mortal enemy, that instead you have set your lance against Fortune herself. No man will ever see more clearly than I the Italy you intended to create for us, a perfection greater than any design of God. Excellency, I give you my oath upon the souls of my mother and father. I will go among the nations and tell them the wonders I have seen. The works you alone have wrought.”

His twitching face again offered no indication that he had heard. But I intended to wager my life on my conviction that he had. I turned my back on Valentino, knowing that at any moment on my short journey to the ladder he could fly at me and snap my neck before I could even think that I was about to die.

When I put my hands on the first rung, I believed I had already been granted a miracle. I looked up at Damiata and Giovanni, who had scrambled almost to the opening in the lofty ceiling. Like Dante, I armed my soul against a perishing dread, and began to climb from Hell.

The hand that grasped my ankle froze my limbs, instantly poisoning me with a paralysis as deadening as the goat ride. Yet neither did
Valentino struggle against me. Having seized my leg in the vise of his grip, he did not attempt to pull me down.

“Niccolò. You know as well as I that Fortune imposes on us a pace the merely good cannot match. I will not deny to you that there have been necessary evils. But do you imagine your republic would have prospered under the Vitelli? Do you expect the French king’s soldiers will honor our women, when all Italy lies stripped and splayed before them?” He paused but did not loosen his grasp. Above me, I could hear only the rattle of water in the rotunda. “I gave you and my engineer general the means to examine your own souls. An opportunity Fortune could not provide you in a hundred lifetimes. To look into my eyes and find the reflection of your own ambitions. Maestro Leonardo, who believed he saw all the things other men could not, was forced to look away.”

“I will never look away,” I whispered with the fervor of a prayer. “I have given you my oath.”

The Devil beneath me issued the most exquisite sigh, as if, far better than God, he understood our human sorrows. “Then go.” I truly wondered if this was his command or mine, instructing my frozen limbs to save my life. “Tell all who suffer in slavery and lawlessness that I alone am the way. Tell them what you alone have seen.”

I pulled myself up hand over hand. Although it was the last thing I should have done, when I neared the top of the ladder, I could not help but look down.

Valentino still ruled his pit, gazing up, lit by the guttering lamp. I had only a fleeting image of his face. But it was utterly composed. A face with the features of a man, a man of great beauty, yet it seemed as empty and inhuman as the scarred visage of that tortured creature he had loosed upon the Romagna.
Now see the face of Dis
, I thought, citing Dante.
This is the terror that cannot be told
.

Because it is a blank page, upon which we can create whomever and whatever we wish.

CHAPTER
29

W
hom we love once, we love always
.

I will now reveal what I had read, while still in that pit: a witness of a different sort, written in the margin of a schoolboy’s
Elements
. I believe I offer it here correct in every word, having copied it from memory shortly after.

As I have said, the words were Italian, in a well-tutored but hasty hand.

Papa, tell me why you accepted Abel’s offering and not Cain’s. Was not Cain more worthy? Was not Cain a lion of courage? Was not Cain a warrior king? Was it not Cain who took your armies into the field and won victory upon victory after Abel brought you only humiliation and defeat? Was not Cain the savior of Italy condemned to a cardinal’s cap—to watch his brother parade his vanity and whores? Was not Cain the learned and gifted pupil and Abel a drunken whoring fool? Yet you my father accepted Abel’s offering and rejected Cain’s. And now you ask me—you ask—Where is Juan, your brother? I hear you asking me, your eyes never stop asking. Why do you ask me, Papa?—why do you say to me, What have you done? Why do you tell me my brother’s blood cries out from the ground? If you know the truth—if you say you know that I led the Vitelli to him that night, if you say you saw me cut his throat to seal with blood my compact with fate—if you know all this, then make me cursed of the earth and a fugitive and vagabond. Then mark me and drive me out into the land of Nod—no more this silent suspicion that fouls your every glance. Drive me out of your house, but first tell me why my brother’s offering was acceptable to you and mine was not. Tell me how many victories Abel would have brought to you. Tell me why God will surrender all his kingdoms to me and you will not accept my offering
.