Sins of the House of Borgia (67 page)

Then someone detected movement at the castle gate and the crowd turned to watch, their babble giving way to silence as yesterday’s cart, bearing today’s victims, lurched across the drawbridge and out into the piazza. There was no kicking of wheels or jostling of horses this time as the crowd fell back like the Red Sea for the cart to pass. Many of those closest to it clutched their hats off their heads and bowed and the women dropped ungainly curtseys. Their faces expressed shame and embarrassment, as though the wrong done by their rulers somehow put them in the wrong too. A boy too old for tears burst into noisy sobs; I wondered if he had perhaps been one of Ferrante’s lovers.

I was aware of Angela, seated next to me, drawing in her breath sharply. She had not set eyes on Giulio since Ippolito’s attack on him. Was she shocked, I wondered, or regretful? For Giulio looked magnificent. He was bare headed and his golden hair, which had grown long during his captivity in Mantua, blew across his face so you could not see his scars. Unlike Ferrante, he held his head high, the clean, graceful line of his jaw clearly discernible despite the untidiness of his beard. Whether or not he could see us, he remained steadfastly facing our balcony, keeping his back to the scaffold as the waggon swayed through the crowd.

When the carter dropped the tailgate, he jumped down unaided, in spite of the shackles fastened round his wrists and ankles, then turned to help Ferrante as best he could. Ferrante looked frail, and moved as though the weight of the chains was almost more than he could bear. I dare say he had not been as well cared for in the Torre Marchesana as Giulio had been in Mantua. Giulio had almost to push him up the steps to the scaffold, and he staggered when he came face to face with the executioner so I was afraid he would faint.

We saw the executioner kneel and ask each man’s forgiveness, and Giulio even seemed to share a joke with him. As the brothers knelt in their turn to receive absolution from the priest, Giulio once again doing his best to steady Ferrante, I realised he was doing it as much for himself as for Ferrante.
We are the same
, Ferrante had once told me,
both tolerated but not quite accepted.
I thought of madonna and her
conversas
, of Ferrante himself giving Catherinella back her human dignity, and understood how we all need outsiders to mark the boundaries of ourselves. Then I was distracted by Angela’s fingers creeping into my palm, and curled my fist over them to stop them shaking.

“How much can he see?” she whispered urgently. “It’s such a beautiful day. I want him to be able to see it.”

A young deacon with an unsteady hand had just begun to swing his thurible, casting wraiths of incense on the air, when the duke rose to his feet. He tried to command silence but his voice failed him. A quick-witted trumpeter came to his rescue and blew an improvised fanfare. The duke nodded his thanks.

“Let not the mark of Cain be upon this house,” he said, his voice strengthening as he warmed to his task. “I will not have my brothers’ blood on my hands, even though they would not have hesitated to have mine on theirs. Executioner, put up your axe. There will be no more deaths today.”

During this speech the brothers had risen and now stood facing the balcony with their hands linked, their chains entwined. I saw Ferrante begin to shake like a man with an ague and slump against Giulio, who staggered slightly but managed to keep them both upright. The executioner laid his axe on the block and a ragged cheer went up from some parts of the crowd, though others looked disappointed. Many had travelled a long way for the spectacle, and others had probably expected to make their year’s earnings out of the day. Quickly attuning himself to the uncertain mood, the duke went on, “Let us celebrate instead, an end to discord and bloodshed between brothers and the beginning of a new age of peace and prosperity. We will have bonfires lit and there will be music and dancing and we will have oxen and suckling pigs roasted in the piazza.” The duke sat down looking well pleased with himself. “Good,” he said, with the brutal compassion of a surgeon drawing the skin over an amputation, “now to dinner.” The cheering coalesced into a gleeful roar loud enough to scare up the buzzards from above the city gates. Smiles and murmurs of approval spread among the ducal party, though I noticed Donna Lucrezia neither smiled nor looked at her husband. Perhaps she had known all along what he intended.

***

Ferrante and Giulio were taken back into the castle, to separate rooms in the Torre Leone. The doors to these rooms were sealed and the windows bricked up until a space not much larger than one of the old duke’s cat doors was left in each of them. There they were condemned to spend the rest of their natural lives and it was forbidden ever to speak their names in the Duchy of Ferrara or the County of Modena though sometimes, in her sleep, my friend Angela disobeyed that command.

In that year of the Christians 1506, Ferrante d’Este was twenty-nine years old and his brother Don Giulio was twenty-six. I never saw either of them again, so they have remained that age for me, caught like those who die young in an aspic of remembrance.

T
HE
B
OOK OF
L
OVE

A brother is in me

Whose letters

Were like water

When my heart was thirsty

Now, when others’ come,

Not his,

The thought of him writing

Within me is fire.

Shmu’el Hanagid,
On the Death of Isaac, His Brother

The Head of Jupiter, Mantua, Sixth Day of Teveth in the Year Five Thousand Two Hundred and Sixty-Seven

To Esther Sarfati from Gideon da Quieto d’Arzenta, greetings.

I had promised myself I would not do this. I made myself a solemn vow never to try to contact you, but now they tell me Valentino is free and will return to Italy so there seems to be little to lose and everything to gain in writing you this letter.

I suppose you are very happy and I rejoice for you, truly, if you are. Yet I remember some of the things Don Giulio said to me during his exile, about you, and Valentino, and I wonder if you are happy, and then I feel the chink in my armour, the temptation to reach out to you and see if what I thought I saw in you was real or just the product of an imagination inflamed by loss and hunger and fear and hopelessness.

I will have to begin at the beginning, at the very point when I saw you hurrying away from me in Don Giulio’s garden. I watched your back until you came level with the glass houses, then suddenly the sun emerged from behind a cloud and its light on the glass dazzled me. When I could see again, you were gone.

Don Giulio had the grace to apologise for his indiscretion. He was angry; he was in pain and desperately worried for his future. He was so bound up in his own concerns he had failed to give sufficient consideration to the effect his words might have on others. And he did not blame me for having a weak spot for you because you were a very pretty girl, accomplished and amusing and a loyal friend to his beloved Donna Angela. He never stopped talking about Donna Angela; even after her marriage to Alessandro Pio part of him believed she would come round, and they would live happily ever after with their daughter. While another part of him grew twisted and plotted against the duke and the cardinal and seemed honestly to believe Don Ferrante could make an effective ruler. I did not know Don Ferrante at all, of course, but what I saw of him was a charming, lazy fop, quite incapable of running a hen house, never mind a state. At that time, Don Giulio’s powers of self-delusion seemed immeasurable.

I wonder now if that is why I continued to work for him, even after I became aware his interest lay not in my artistic abilities but in my knowledge of chemistry. I was attracted to the idea of self-delusion. I was living in a dream in which I was destined for the same kind of fame as Michelangelo or Leonardo or young Raffaele. I even thought I looked like Raffaele. I saw him once, when my master took me on a trip to Urbino, and he was thin, like me, with curly hair, though not so tall. Actually, his face was beautifully proportioned, which mine is not but, as I say, this part of my story is about self-delusion. You might also be interested to know our trip was fruitless because your Valentino had just taken the city and was not interested in commissioning artists. We could not gain access to the palace, so we stayed a night with Ser Santi, Raffaele’s father, and went back to Mantua the next day. The roads, I remember, were crawling with soldiers.

Self-delusion can also give rise to extraordinary, some would say, reckless, courage. Looking back now, I can scarcely credit the fact that Don Giulio stayed in Ferrara as long as he did, and experimented as openly as he did with the poison that was going to—without, of course, being in any way detectable—kill the duke and the cardinal and avenge his eyes. Perhaps he should have asked the advice of your Valentino about that. Is he not a great man with poisons?

Eventually, however, Donna Isabella prevailed with her brother and he set out for Mantua. He graciously invited me to accompany him, pointing out that at least one person at court—you, of course—had come across us together in compromising circumstances and that I would be safer back in Mantua. Among my own kind, he said, as though one Jew is much the same as another and I might blend effortlessly in, a goldsmith indistinguishable from a butcher, a candle dipper or a knife grinder. I was content to go. I had no further work in Ferrara and nothing else to keep me there, and as Donna Isabella had patronised me before, I had no reason to suppose she might not do so again.

Are the Borgias so good at poisoning because they are themselves made not of flesh but of some poisonous substance? It quickly transpired that Don Giulio was not an honoured guest in his sister’s house but a prisoner, albeit a comfortable one. As for myself, hearing that I had been “taken on” as she put it by her sister-in-law, Donna Isabella wondered if I would not find her own humble requirements insufficiently challenging for my great talents. And so on and so forth. Reason dictates that she was distancing herself from me because she saw me as part of Don Giulio’s conspiracy, but why not say so? Why couch it all in terms that made it sound as though I had been contaminated by association with Duchesa Lucrezia? Well, that has been the fashion, hasn’t it, since Valentino’s fall, and Donna Isabella was ever a slave of fashion.

So perhaps Valentino’s release—or did he escape? This has not been made clear to us here in Mantua—will signal an improvement in my fortunes. Perhaps the great man himself may look generously on me, for by all accounts he was very pleased with his masks. Have you seen them? Donna Isabella reported to me that he was so delighted with my gold skull he had hung it beside his bed, so I dare say you have seen that one at least.

The All-Knowing knows I need a break in my luck. Until the soldiers came to fetch Don Giulio, I managed to find work on a small scale, among less scrupulous patrons than Donna Isabella. I made a salt cellar of fabulous vulgarity for a man who has done well out of the current craze here for perfumed gloves. Do they have it in Ferrara also, or does the rivalry between the duchess and the marquesa preclude any common ground on fashions? I worked some small pieces of enamel jewellery for a sea captain who has four wives among the Indians of New Spain. I will come back to him. Don Francesco himself commissioned me, through a discreet third party, to make a silver cap badge with a large citrine for a boy chorister who had taken his fancy, though he has yet to make the final payment on it. I wonder if your lady Lucrezia knows how incontinent he is with his affections, or if she is used to that kind of thing in her family.

Since the trial, however, I am persona non grata everywhere. I have moved away from my father’s house because I am afraid my presence there might put my family in danger. I thought I might lodge in my old master’s studio, which has stood empty since his death while his widow and sons quarrel over what is to be done with it, but everything was locked and barred and I was loathe to break in in case I drew attention to myself and got myself arrested. You ask why I too did not leave Mantua? Well, of course you don’t, but you might. It would be a reasonable question. I will say this. If I had had to leave Mantua then, the only place I would have wanted to go would have been Ferrara. I would have been drawn there as Plato says the soul is drawn to beauty, but I would have been less sure of my welcome.

Well, winter was coming and I was beginning to wonder if I would have to cast myself on the mercy of the Franciscans who run a hostel here. At least Duke Alfonso’s men, if they came, would be unlikely to look for a Jew in a Franciscan hostel. Then I remembered the Jupiter. At the time of his death, old Sperandio was working on a bronze Jupiter so large it could not be cast all of a piece but was to be done in sections then dovetailed. A revolutionary technique, very difficult to achieve, but that will not interest you. What may interest you, given the address I have put at the head of this letter—oh, a fine pun, worthy of a courtier—is that at his death, Sperandio had completed only the head of the Jupiter and this was lying in his studio yard as it was too large to fit indoors. It had been cast using the lost wax method and was therefore hollow—and big enough to accommodate some kind of bed.

A new wife setting up her first home could not have been more delighted than I as I scrambled up Jupiter’s beard and through his open mouth into the empty dome of his head. A casting of this sort is like a moral tale converted into an image—though it is beautiful outside, within it may be rough, with craters made by bubbles of gas from the heating of the metal and sharp jags where the bronze has cooled around the plaster core. So my first task was to hammer and chisel and file until I had a space where I could lay my bedding without tearing it, or my own flesh, to ribbons. I was very pleased, though, with one outcropping I found, in the space between Jupiter’s nose and his left eye, which has made a very serviceable hook for my clothes.

I have been here two months now and I am quite cosy. I managed to scrounge some hides from the tanner to use as curtains to keep out the wind. They are heavy, which is excellent, though smell rather strongly of sheep’s piss. I have rigged up a shelf in Jupiter’s brow where I can light my Sabbath candles and a board across one side of his jaw where I eat, and where I am writing this letter. I remain undisturbed because when people see lights or movement inside the god’s mouth or eye-sockets, they think the head is haunted and keep away. I could, I suppose, stay here for as long as Don Giulio stays in his prison—until I starve or go mad. But Valentino is free, and that changes everything.

I have decided to leave Mantua as soon as the weather improves. I shall go first to Rome and from there to Ostia where I am going to meet the sea captain I have mentioned, the man with four Indian wives. Esther, I have decided to go to New Spain. There is no future for me here, no future for any of us I fear. You know, of course, of the massacre of the Jews in Lisbon.

I am a resourceful man, and though I still have ambitions to be a great artist, I now know they cannot be achieved quickly or straightforwardly. The skills I have learned in my craft are adaptable and can be put to good use anywhere—if it is His will I should be a blacksmith or a sword-maker, so be it. As I said to you once before, what my beliefs teach me is that I must hold myself ready, open to whatever plans He has for me.

The proposal I made you was no flirtation, though it surprised me at least as much as it surprised you. I love you, and there is nothing to be done about it. I have tried. Don Giulio and I both tried all those things men try when they want to forget women. We worked and drank and made love to strangers—and still found we talked about you and Donna Angela endlessly, and found the strangers we made love to just ended up looking like you.

Don Giulio told me something else about you during one of those long, maudlin, drunken conversations. I suppose he thought if I could not be put off by the thought of being the rival of the dangerous Valentino, then more drastic measures were called for. He told me you have a son, and that he is the boy’s godfather.

I will not describe to you how sick that made me feel, the thought of that living, breathing confirmation of your love for another, the way a child binds you indissolubly together. It conjured images in my brain and sentiments in my heart that shame me. Valentino has red hair, they say. Does your son have red hair? No, I don’t want to know. I shall find out soon enough.

Esther, will you come with me to New Spain? If not for your own sake, for your son’s. Even if Valentino can take back all he has lost, what chance does the boy have in Ferrara, with Don Giulio for a godfather? With the help of the Father of us all, I am prepared to try to be a father to him, and in the new world he can grow up free of the past and all its dangers. And a child might bring us together, who knows?

Well, if I am wrong, I will perhaps hear news of you from time to time in the great house your lover will set you up in, and I will rue the day I did not stay in Italy so I might have you as a patron. But do me the honour of thinking carefully about my request, in case what you think you want is not what you really want, or if you are no longer in love with Valentino and do not rejoice in his liberty. Though if I am honest, as I must be now, I realise this is more self-delusion for I always felt there was someone special in your life and chose to disregard my instincts.

I wish you had trusted me with the story of your life before, then I remind myself that everything you do is still you, even the lies you tell. Were you afraid to confide in me? Can you love a man who makes you afraid? No, that is not a fair question. It is late and my head aches with the cold. Did you celebrate Hanukkah this year, as we did last? Another unfair question. Write back. Ask me some unfair questions. I shall not leave Mantua for another month at least for my captain does not sail until the month of Adar. Tell me if you are a good sailor.

Your heart’s bondsman,

Gideon d’Arzenta