The Smile (29 page)

Should I be embarrassed not to have recognized her? Her red robe and green mantle should have given her away. And I was right to think of it as I did—for Santa Anna was Maria's mother. I walk to the next easel. Here's the Virgin and Jesus again. She's got a spindle and Jesus is playing with it. “Spinning. That's a theme I know well.”

“I wish you'd served as my model for it.”

I let that comment pass. Flattery means nothing to me.

The walls have quickly done frescoes—experiments with different methods, I would guess. And here the walls are covered with scribbled studies of animals. Birds again. Caterina would love to see this wall. “Your head must be full of birds.”

“My head is full of everything.”

An immodest, if true, remark. The next easel holds something I don't take to. The one after that is equally unmoving. Now there's a whole series of paintings I don't like. “The styles aren't uniform,” I say, using a diplomacy motherhood has taught me.

“Most of these are by my pupils.”

I laugh. This man really does think the world of himself.

One easel stands apart from the others. It's empty. But leaning against it on the floor is a poplar wood panel, about as tall as my leg is long. “A new project?”

“Exactly. Come.” Leonardo leads me to a larger room that clearly serves as his bedroom. I stand in the doorway, unwilling to enter. “Please.” He walks across the room and opens the door to an adjoining room that is not accessible from the central corridor.

What's the point in not seeing what he has to show me? I kiss the very top of Andrea's head for a boost of boldness. I cross the room and enter a smaller space full of wheels and gadgets and things I do not recognize and want to look at more closely when I come face to face with Giuliano. I sit. Right there on the floor, with Andrea in my arms. I don't know if I could have remained on my feet, but I wasn't willing to risk it. My bones seem to have turned to water. Andrea crawls away from me and picks up a wheel.

Giuliano is tall. It's as though someone took both ends of him and pulled. His neck is lengthened. Even his face seems longer. His mustache and beard are trimmed, but thick. His clothing hangs loose and floppy, but I can tell he is thin, though broad across the shoulders.

“Did you get my letter?” he asks.

I am burning it again in my head. “It came on Christmas Eve, like an unwanted present, an unbirth, if you will. You gave up on us quickly, don't you think?”

“It hasn't been the kind of life I wanted to give you.”

“I didn't ask for any particular kind of life.”

“It hasn't been the kind of life you deserved.”

“Passionate love. A rare thing in this world. Did I not deserve that?”

He looks stricken.

Against my will, my heart goes out to him. What does it matter after all this time, anyway? And my life is filled with so many kinds of love. I look at Andrea and I know I wouldn't undo these last nine years even if I could.

Giuliano sits and closes me in his arms. At first I don't know what he's doing, why he's doing it. But then I feel the hot tears from my own eyes drop on my chest. I'm crying, and I didn't even know it. I'm sobbing. And he's rocking me, like a small child.

It is Andrea's tears that bring me to my senses. He's such a funny child. Whenever anyone else cries, he cries, too. Overly empathetic. Perhaps he won't be the even-keeled man his father is. No, I think he'll be an artist. Or a poet. I ease Giuliano away and take Andrea into my arms. I smother him with kisses, till he laughs. Then I wipe his face and mine with the hem of my skirt. And I look straight into Giuliano's black eyes. “So how have you been?”

Giuliano looks startled. Then he laughs. “Are we to try to have an ordinary conversation at this late point?”

I'm laughing, too. “Piero once said you think of laughing and naught else.”

“He was wrong. But you do make me laugh. I'm grateful.”

“I married a man named Giocondo—‘jocular.' It should have been your name instead.” I shake my head and start over. “You look well.”

“And your beauty is abiding.”

My beauty. My matronly beauty. But he's serious. To him I am still beautiful. I smile. “Tell me all about yourself.”

“I will. But first—” Giuliano beckons to Leonardo, who's been standing nearby the whole time.

That artist witnessed our private encounter!

“That's it,” says Giuliano. “That's the smile I want you to paint. The most beautiful smile in the world. Paint it so that no matter where I stand, she's smiling at me.”

CHAPTER Twenty-six

IT TAKES FOUR YEARS,
this painting. It starts with drawings. To me it feels like thousands of drawings. And then the sittings. I sit, while Leonardo just looks. I sit in morning light, in daylight, in moonlight. I sit in summer light, autumn light, winter light, spring light. And then the cycle of seasons all over again. And again. And again.

I agree to all this not for Giuliano's sake. No. Giuliano left me. And, no matter the reason for his act, my present life will not bend to his desires. I agree because Leonardo tells me he's been waiting to paint my portrait, waiting since that day at Lorenzo de' Medici's funeral, before my thirteenth birthday, waiting for me to be ready. He says he needs to do this. How he became seized with this idea, how he has decided I am now ready—these things I don't understand. But he is fierce in his declaration, and I am seduced. He has appealed to a vanity that runs deep: I could be important to the artistry of this incredible mind. I could persist in Leonardo's painting.

And so, I sit. With my hair down. Leonardo won't allow a headdress. Nor even a ribbon. He says he wants nothing to distract people from my face.

On and on I sit. Placid and resolute.

Thank the Lord for my children. Without their demands, Leonardo would have me in his studio for hours at a time. Instead, I can come only briefly. But I come often. A couple of times a month. Year after year.

He never asks my opinion. But he always has me look at what he's done when we finish a session. And he studies my eyes to see what parts of the painting they linger on. He studies my lips, the setting of my jaw. He reads my face to discover my opinion.

It's just as well. I have never felt entirely comfortable talking about art. Not like Francesco and my stepmother. Let Leonardo glean my reactions in his own way.

Besides, I wouldn't want him to know exactly what I think. He is making a background from spinning together my answers to his questions about my childhood. But the image my words have created in his head, the image that he has painted on this poplar panel, has little to do with Villa Vignamaggio and the countryside around there. I would have preferred a familiar field with the hills I love beyond it.

No one knows Leonardo works on my portrait except Francesco and Silvia—he, because he needs to know in order not to have false worries, and she, because I need to tell her. No one asks what I do when I come to the monastery. If we do cause confusion among the rumormongers, I never hear of it. Leonardo seems beyond suspicion; besides, he stays busy with so many projects. And I am an unimpeachable mother. And, apparently, a particularly pious one, a regular visitor to the monastery chapels.

Many things change in these four years. Italy is besieged with wars. Milan and Venice and Ferrara and Naples and Lord only knows where else. On top of that, the bellicose French have caused more misery than all the Italian states put together.

The Republic of Florence has somehow managed not to be attacked, but more by luck than anything else. The government may be responsive to the will of the populace, but it is nonetheless inefficient and equivocal. It has been criticized openly by the rather haughty political thinker, the secretary of the government's inner circle, Niccolò Machiavelli. The only good thing that has happened is that Pisa is once more under Florentine control.

Oddly enough, though, the city of Florence is growing ever more beautiful. The artists whose work was so stunted during the reign of Savonarola have emerged again in full glory. But why should I be surprised? Ashes make fertile ground. Michelangelo's enormous statue of David, entirely stunning in his nude beauty, was completed in 1504. It stands in the piazza in front of the Palazzo Vecchio. I imagine Savonarola turning over in his grave every time an admiring eye falls on it.

Fra Bartolomeo has been working on a giant painting of the Virgin appearing to San Bernardo. It should be completed soon. And a new artist from Urbino, called Raffaello, has come to study with Leonardo. Leonardo likes to show me his drawings—he believes the young man has promise.

It's a torrent of art. And I'm part of it, whether anyone knows or not. Leonardo says I will be his best portrait, for he has studied me the same way he studies animals. From the inside out. He knows my loves: my passions and my solaces. He says I am the soul of the Republic—countryside and city all in one—and he will give the world that soul, in my portrait.

I don't respond to that kind of talk. The abstraction of it leaves me floating like the smallest dust mote. I know he believes it sincerely—I remember how he spoke to me at Lorenzo de' Medici's funeral, how he called me a scintillating point of light. But in a sense, I think he may be fooling himself. This portrait may be more about him than it is about me. For he is melancholy, unfulfilled. Despite his talk about being loyal to science, he is more like the rest of us than he will ever admit; he, too, has been helpless in the face of the powers that be.

But because Leonardo believes what he says, I have forgiven him the indiscretion of not leaving the room when Giuliano and I were together.

Today I climb the monastery stairs laboriously. My pregnancy slows me down. My thoughts are heavy, too. Lately I have dreamed of Giuliano.

Piero de' Medici joined the French army the winter after I last saw Giuliano, when Leonardo started my portrait. He was on a boat with French troops bound for a battle in Naples. It was overloaded, and it sank. He drowned in the Garigliano River, and was buried near there, at Montecassino in his brother Cardinal Giovanni's abbey.

I don't know how Giuliano took the news. I have received no communication from him since our meeting in this monastery in the presence of Leonardo. But I can imagine his grief.

As for Cardinal Giovanni, people say he lives a modest life for a Medici. He is consistently cheerful and reliably practical. He has managed to win the favor of important clergy. They say someday he'll be pope. I don't doubt it.

Of Giuliano I know nothing new. But I count on him to be who he has always been.

The fool, the wise one, and the good one.

Their father was right. Giuliano is good—the best of the three. Someday he will come back to Florence in victory. For if I am the Republic's soul, he is the Republic's will. Giuliano is destined to lead. Anything less would be a travesty.

I arrive at the top of the stairs and Leonardo greets me. He takes my hand and guides me to the studio where we work. But his paints are not scattered all over like usual. The room is clean. The only thing in it is the easel, with my painting.

“It's complete,” he says. A declaration.

He told me it would be finished the next time I came, but I'm taken by surprise anyway. There have been so many times when I thought it was complete. But at the last moment he insisted on changing a fold of cloth here, a shaft of light there. Somehow I'd come to believe it would never end.

I'm almost sad.

“Do you see it?” asks Leonardo, rubbing his palms together.

I see what I have always seen on that panel.

“Look in the eyes. Giuliano wanted the portrait to smile at him, no matter where he stood. I made that happen through the eyes. They observe whoever passes. They see the truth. They are constant. This is my gift to him. To you.” He shrugs. “Maybe even to myself.”

And I no longer see anything for the blur of tears.

“What shall I call it?” He walks around behind me and looks at the painting from a distance. “Monna Lisa? Or La Gioconda?”

The first name came to me from Giuliano. The second name came via my marriage. Which is the woman in the painting? “Neither.”

“What? Have you got a better name for it?”

I shake my head. “Don't put a name on it.”

Leonardo seems taken aback. But then he nods. “As you wish. It's your choice.”

A woman's choices are limited.

The baby inside me kicks. My child, my choice. Gratitude floods me.

I smile.

POSTSCRIPT

MANY BOOKS
in both English and Italian, as well as museums in Italy, give reliable information on the time period of this novel, from the fauna and flora (including the remarkable assemblage in nobles' gardens) to historical matters of politics, religion, and culture. I have drawn on them for details about the death of Lorenzo de' Medici, the developments leading to the exile of Piero de' Medici, and the rise and fall of Girolamo Savonarola.

Likewise, much has been written about the painting by Leonardo da Vinci known as
Mona Lisa
in America and as
La Gioconda
in Italy. With regard to this material, however, there are many points of confusion and ignorance. The books I consulted disagree on the identity of the woman in the portrait and disagree, as well, on things as basic as dates of birth and death of less famous and/or more peripheral members of the Medici family and who did what when.

These confusions are understandable.

Leonardo did not sign, date, or title this famous portrait.