The Medici Boy (31 page)

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D
ONATELLO AND
M
ICHELOZZO
worked together cleaning the bronze pieces, getting rid of all traces of holes and stems left by the gas vents, and then welding the clean bronze pieces into the finished statue. They patched the hole in the left thigh and the smaller hole beneath the chin. They disguised the imperfections in Goliath’s head. They tested the statue for weight and balance. This took over a month. The raw bronze was then hand polished and ready for the patina.

Applying the patina took a matter of weeks. It was a shade so dark that in the shadows it seemed nearly black and it lent to the bronze a luster and a warmth that seemed like flesh itself and made the viewer want to lean forward and touch it.

During all this time Agnolo never appeared in the
bottega
. Donatello worked with his usual concentration, lavishing all his care on the bronze boy he was daily bringing closer to perfection. And then one day it was done.

Donatello stepped back and for a long time gazed at what he had accomplished.

Cosimo too gazed—in wonder and gratitude—at what he had accomplished.

Agnolo came to the
bottega
and looked upon the statue and smiled. “A whore,” he said, “and no doubt stupid, but he defeated Goliath, didn’t he.”

Agnolo would not forget and he would not forgive.

Before the week was up he left Donatello’s house and bed, vowing never to return. And, to my astonishment, Donatello did not seem to care. It was as if having captured the boy in bronze, he had no further need for him in the flesh. Such are the limits of love and art, I told myself.

1437–1443

CHAPTER
30

O
N THE SECOND
day of July in the year 1437, my two youngest sons were carried off by the Black Pest. Renato Paolo was ten years of age and Giovanni Carlo a tender eight. Oh my sons, my sons! What did they ever do to merit such a cheerless end? Or what did I do to cause it? Even now in my oldest old age I weep for them. One day they were fine young boys—stout and sturdy and of a sweet nature—and the next day they were racked with fever, their armpits and groins purple with buboes, and the deathly smell! In the night they died, even before the Pest had begun to sweep through the city.

I held Agnolo to blame, for he had visited them earlier that week and brought the Pest with him. Two years had passed since he left Florence for Prato, vowing never to return again. He pretended then that he had been betrayed by Donatello who had called him whore before his entire
bottega
but in truth he had been betrayed by one of his patrons, a known sodomite, who saved his own neck by naming Agnolo to the Ufficiali di Notte. Brought before the
magister
Agnolo claimed to be seventeen years of age and so not responsible, but this was his third appearance in court and so they fined him fifty florins—Donatello paid—and urged him strongly to leave Florence for a more benign climate. Two years had passed and he was back in Florence . . . in need of family, he told Alessandra, but as always he was in need of money. He was more than twenty-one years by my reckoning and still able to trade on his youthful looks but he was beginning to see his empty future and—I know him—he hoped to insert himself in my family. He had the good sense, and the wiliness, to approach me through Alessandra.

“I’ve come to see you,” he said. “And to flee the Pest in Prato.”

“Who is the pest this time?” I asked. “Another soldier?”

“The Black Pest,” he said, though he paused to smile at my little jest. “There have been many deaths.”

I had come in from work on commissions for the sacristy of San Lorenzo and found him sitting on a stool next to my wife with my two youngest, Renato Paolo and Giovanni Carlo, seated one astride each knee. I did not like the look of this and said, “Get down!” and to make my chiding seem less angry I tousled their curly hair. They climbed down, obedient as always, and went to stand beside their mother. Franco Alessandro, who at twelve was attentive beyond his years, sat cross-legged on the floor looking up at Agnolo. Franco had grown into a vain young man, concerned always with his shirts and his stockings and the length of his yellow hair, so it displeased me that he was much taken with Agnolo. My oldest, Donato Michele, already half-Franciscan, sat at the table, watching.

“I trust you’ve not brought the Pest with you,” I said.

“Agnolo has been ill,” Alessandra said, and it was true he looked even thinner than I remembered and he had an annoying cough. I had only lately seen the bronze David in Cosimo’s garden and marveled that such a skinny wretch could have inspired so perfect a statue. I breathed a silent curse, for which may God forgive me, though I meant it and mean it still.

“What illness?”

“In my breathing. I cannot well breathe.”

“You had best learn how or your life will be short indeed.”

“I am well once again, thank you.”

There was an awkward silence.

“Does my lord Donatello know you are in Florence?”

He said no.

“And do the Ufficiali di Notte know?”

There was another awkward silence, which I made worse by asking how much money he needed this time. He lowered his head and looked into his empty hands. He coughed and muttered something I could not hear and I asked him to repeat it.

“Our mother has died and I owe burial fees,” he said.

“She was never my mother.”

“She is dead all the same. And buried.”

“Luca,” Alessandra said, pleading for him.

“And I am apprenticed to a wool carder. In Prato.”

“Apprenticed? At your age?” Nonetheless I was impressed.

I went to the other room where we kept the money box and took out ten florins. Donatello paid me nearly ninety gold florins a year, but our two older boys were at school with the Franciscans and the cost of food was ever higher and it is an accepted truth that you spend however much you earn, so I felt I could not well afford this. Nonetheless I gave him the money and, cheered by such easy wealth, he accepted Alessandra’s invitation to share our supper.

Less than a week later my two youngest sons were carried off by the Pest. They were so young and so tender, loving in their innocence, and they would have been a comfort for our old age, for Alessandra and me. Instead they were taken away, cruelly, on a dark day. I cursed Agnolo and I must allow that for a time I cursed God as well.

I have said before that I cannot imagine God sending me to hell—I am not important enough for him to notice—but cursing God is another matter. He does not wait for death to catch you up. I know, since this day marked the end of all comfort in my life and I began to glimpse now and then—in tiny flashes, caught by candlelight—the narrow cubbyhole prepared for me in hell. This cannot be, I thought, and turned my mind away. I had a wife still, and two fine boys, and I knew—for my two youngest—that it is natural to die.

Yet even now I blame Agnolo for their deaths, just as I blame him for betraying Donatello and corrupting Franco and driving my wife from our marriage bed into the convent. And for my own discomfortable imprisonment,
miserere mei Domine
.

CHAPTER
31

S
EPTEMBER THAT YEAR
was a long patience. The days were hot and the nights airless. We lay abed, unable to sleep and unable to stop thinking of our two youngest boys carried away by the Black Pest. We still had our oldest, Donato Michele and Franco Alessandro, and they were a great consolation to us, but the loss of our two youngest was still very much with us and, instead of bringing us together in grief, seemed to thrust us apart. I blamed Agnolo for this, as I blamed him for everything, and Alessandra seemed to blame me.

“You are unjust to him,” Alessandra said. “It is wrong to wish him ill.”

“I don’t only wish him ill. I wish him dead.”

At that moment it came to me: some day I will kill him. At once I put the thought from my mind, but of course it would not go easily. A mortal sin, an eternity in hell. But he has done me great harm and Donatello much harm and it was right that he should die. And then, No, I thought, I could never do such a thing.

“He would be better dead.”

I felt Alessandra go rigid at my side. For a moment I wondered if she too thought that some day I would kill him.

“It is the death of your own soul to wish him dead.”

“Our sons are gone. I lay the blame on him.”

“Did I blame you for my sister’s death? And yet you made love with her that same afternoon she lay dying.”

I was silent then thinking of Maria Sabina.

“But I did not bring the Pest to her.”

“Nor did Agnolo bring the Pest to us. The Pest is in the hand of God and he strikes where he will. We must accept.”

“So Agnolo is the agent of God? I would think he was rather the agent of the devil.”

“Is it not bad enough our sons are gone? Why make it worse by such sinful thoughts? They are with God.”

I wanted to say, ‘There is no God. Death is the only God we all obey,” but the thought frightened me and I said nothing. For a second I saw again that cubbyhole in hell reserved for me. I began to tremble with fright and I reached out for safety.

“Alessandra,” I said, and put my hand to her breast the way I did when we were to make love, but she pushed my hand away and turned from me.

“It is too soon,” she said.

I turned my back to her. Two can play at this game and I would show her that I would not be first to ask for love. In this I was mistaken. I asked again, repeatedly, and was refused. She had taken against me, like God. Never again in our married life did we make love.

CHAPTER
32

T
IME PASSED AS
it does whether you are happy or not and by my fortieth year I grew more bitterly silent as Alessandra grew fatter and more distant from me. She worked at her weaving and gave herself over to frequent prayer, perhaps because Donato Michele at seventeen years had chosen to enter the Order of Saint Francis and she wanted to be a worthy mother. Donato was a bright boy and virtuous and his Father Superior told Alessandra that perhaps one day he would make a priest.

Perhaps one day, I thought, Alessandra will again be a wife to me.

She had little time for me and no patience with my ongoing anger at Agnolo or my disappointment that Pagno was permitted to carve marble and I was not. With Donato Michele now a Franciscan novice, Alessandra grew more impatient with me and more indulgent with Franco Alessandro who at fifteen years was impossibly vain and lazy. He was apprenticed to a carpenter and was away from home much of the week but his requests for new things remained ever the same: a belt, a money pouch, new parti-colored stockings with one leg red, the other green. Worse than this, though he was a sturdy boy with a strong manly face, he fussed with his long yellow hair more than any young girl. He has never recovered from Agnolo’s visit, I thought, but I refused to let myself think what this might mean.

What it meant was clear to everyone when in October of that year he was arrested and accused of sodomy. His was a first offense and so he was fined ten florins and released. He did not name his partner; he claimed not to know him.

Alessandra was in tears beyond comfort and I was in a rage that I thought might bring on my first fit in years. There was that familiar roaring in my brain and then I seemed to lose control of my arms and legs and my eyesight went dim. I will kill him, I thought, and for a moment I did not know whether I intended my son Franco Alessandro or that devilish spawn Agnolo whom I held responsible for all things ill. I will kill him, I said to myself, and for a second, as the pain thrilled through my brain, I wondered if I might some day—in just such a fit—kill him indeed. The roaring passed and the pain diminished and I realized that Franco is my son and I his father and it was Franco’s foolish vanity that had brought him to this, not Agnolo, and so I determined on a calm but firm talk with him. I would be fatherly and forgiving. I would not rage at him.

“Franco,” I said. “This is not good.”

“It was not my fault,” he said.

“Then let us reason together. How did it come about that you were arrested?”

“It was all a mistake. It was all meant to be a jest.”

I composed myself to listen to a string of lies.

“We were acting the fool, Giovanni and Marcantonio and I, pushing and shoving one another, when two older men stopped us in the street. They were not soldiers but they were dressed like soldiers and they told us to stop and spend a minute with them. All on a sudden one of them snatched Giovanni’s hat and said he would not give it back unless he, you know, surrendered to him. I said, “Let’s go. Let’s get away from here.” We were on the Via tra’ Pellicciai and we knew it was a bad place to be after sunset. But the soldier would not give back Giovanni’s hat unless Giovanni went with him. Marcantonio tried to snatch back Giovannni’s hat but the other soldier—he only looked like a soldier—caught him by the arm and led him off to the old convent where there was a shed that opened onto the street and they went inside the shed. Then the first soldier took Giovanni to the shed. I was alone in the street and I was afraid, so when another man came along—this one was a soldier truly—I told him what had happened to my friends, and he listened carefully, but then he snatched away my hat and said I had to go with him. I said I wouldn’t go and he began to shout for anyone to hear that I had just serviced an old furrier but that I would not service him though I had taken his money. So I went with him down the alley where we ran into two officers from the Ufficiali di Notte and, while the soldier made his escape, they arrested me for sodomy. And that is the full story.”