Duchess of Milan (42 page)

Il Moro looked into some abstract middle distance between himself and Tuttavilla and nodded thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said, “you are certainly correct about that.”

Beatrice listened to the faint whisper of his breathing beside her, the only sound she had heard. The passion she had always dreamed of had been an exquisite inner music, a chorale of erotic angels. This had all been silent, an unspoken poetry of touch. His fingers and lips had roamed over her with the patience of a sculptor, reshaping and transforming her, polishing her skin with the luminescence of the night. Nothing in their previous sexual history had led her to imagine that his true expertise, which she had always believed to be the game of deceit, was actually this game of the senses.

She tried to reconstruct the events that had led to this, to analyze where she had lost control, but she realized that even her memory had changed in the last few hours, that just as her baby had forever altered her perception, so too had this night. After she had put Ercole to bed she had dined alone with her husband in his rooms. And at first they had seemed so evenly matched, the clever banter and innuendo, actually joking about the irony of seduction after more than two years of marriage and one child. She had been able to see more clearly what she desired, and she could even recognize the element of revenge in it. On Eesh, of course, by taking as her lover Eesh’s mortal enemy. But also revenge on him. In making him want her like this, she would wrest back the power he had taken from her every time he had used her like a brood mare. And then perhaps he would find himself at the mercy of her power.

The first long kiss had seemed like a choreography of mutual desire, a dance to which she knew all the steps. But then she had become lost, swept off so quickly that she’d scarcely had time to acknowledge that in all but the most technical sense she had been a virgin until this night. The only assurance left to her had been knowing that in her heart she held a secret that he needed more than he needed her. Don’t tell him, she had pleaded with herself as she drowned in her own senses, don’t ever tell him. But in the end she had not even been certain what it was she must never tell him.

He shifted his body, and the moonlight shimmered over his flesh. His fingers traced lightly over her ribcage, a lightning strike inducing an instant of near paralysis. God, she heard herself say. Every pore was an exposed nerve. Her hair tingled, and she felt as if it were floating around her.

“I want to make love to you again,
amore.”

Love. The word was an alarm deep in her soul. “Wait,” she told him, sitting up and clutching his hands. “Wait.” She looked into his hot black eyes. “Don’t tell me that. Don’t tell me that you love me until you love me more than you loved Cecilia. Don’t tell me until you can call me
anima mia,
your own soul, until I am everything to you, until you would give up everything for me. You cannot say you love me until you would walk into Hell like Orpheus to bring me back.”

He folded her hands tightly in his. “I cannot tell you that now,” he whispered. “I cannot promise you I will ever be able to tell you that.”

She kissed his hands. “That is all I ask. The truth. I don’t care if you cannot say it now or if you can ever say it. I only care that in this one thing you respect the truth.” She looked into his eyes to seal an unspoken agreement, then settled back onto the cool silk sheets and anticipated his touch.

Extract of a letter of Leonardo da Vinci, engineer at the Court of Milan, to international traveler and raconteur Benedetto Dei. Milan, 1 September 1493

...
I
offer you this brief inventory without recourse to further consideration or opinion, as you will understand how pressed we are to complete to our satisfaction and that of others the aforementioned endeavors:

Word received here that German Emperor Frederick died 19 August. To be succeeded by son Maximilian, Archduke of Austria. Great rejoicing here--as of 10 July Duke of Milan’s sister betrothed to Maximilian. Wedding by proxy in our Duomo in November and the bride to be conveyed to Germany thereafter.

News of said betrothal occasions great relief among the more prudent gentlemen of France, who cannot finance and do not wish to sanction their King’s adventure and are now afforded compelling cause to discourage him.

The Duke of Bari in ardent pursuit of the woman to whom he has been married for near three years. Always to her rooms-- he has the hollow-eyed look of a man recently wedded to a much younger woman.

The Duchess of Bari has become Milan’s new muse, the projects under her aegis too many and variegated to mention--hence the haste with which we write. The poets proclaim Milan the New Athens.

The Duke and Duchess of Milan not seen at all--she is said to be with child.

Rumor that Duke of Bari will be invested as Duke of Milan when new German Emperor takes his Milanese bride. If so, why make present Duke’s sister an empress?

My assistant, the boy Salai, has stolen from me again. . . .

CHAPTER 35

Ferrara, 11 October 1493

Her children were in the next room, and she could not open the door to get to them. Screams came from the courtyard, vague as if issuing from within a stone crypt. She turned and said, “I’m not finished.”

The light, white like sunlit snow, led her to another room. When she went in she could not recognize the woman’s face at first; it floated in the light. The woman was dressed in glowing white brocade and sat in a white satin chair.

“Mother?” It was her mother, and the joy and anger were stunning, like emerging from absolute darkness into the most intense sunlight. “Mama, you’re alive.” She reached out and touched her mother’s face. “Oh, Mama.” Then she turned and looked back. “Mama, I can’t stay here. I’m not finished. I have so much to do.”

Her mother drew her back, and she was ten years old again, the year her mother died. She rested her head on her mother’s airy thigh.

“Eleonora,
mia fanciulla,“
her mother said, stroking her hair, her glowing hands lifting it like sticky gossamer. “Look at me,
fanciulla.”

Eleonora looked into her mother’s eyes and realized that Mama knew everything. “Mama, why did Father hurt me after you left?”

Her mother shushed her, and the anger came back. “Let me go. I’m not finished, Mama.”

“We never finish,” her mother said. “That is the tragedy of life. But that is why our lives never end. Did you leave them your dream?”

Suddenly she struggled furiously, the panic like an immense weight on her chest. They were in danger. She hadn’t told them. . . .

“Yes, you did. You left them your dream. That is the only substantial thing you can leave behind, a creature of air, unclasp-able, to lead your children to their own dreams.”

Now the weight was gone, and her own words were white light. “Mama, don’t ever leave me again.”

Her mother took her in her arms.

Milan, 11 October 1493

“As starlings in wide and shrieking files
Are driven by winter’s icy tempest
So were tossed these sad damned souls . . .”

Ser Antonio Grifo, Milan’s foremost Dante scholar, paused in his reading and looked up to see if the Duke or Duchess of Ban wished to comment.

“These are the souls of carnal sinners,” Beatrice said, with a sly glance at her husband. Il Moro sat beside her on the cushioned bench, opposite Ser Antonio’s chair. “In life they abandoned will to lust, and so are condemned to be blown hither and thither as rapidly as birds in a whirlwind. By this device the poet emphasizes that when we choose to surrender our will in this life, so in the next we shall have neither will nor choice.”

“Or perhaps,” Il Moro said dryly, “the lovers are still swept along by the tempest of their lust and are condemned eternally to repeat their sin.”

Beatrice let out a high-pitched laugh, and Ser Antonio looked down to hide his own amusement. “Go on, Ser Antonio,” Beatrice said drolly. “We shall ask Francesca da Rimini and her lover if my husband’s interpretation is correct.”

Ser Antonio began to read again. His practiced voice gave Dante’s vivid images a harrowing realism; the black whirlwind of tormented souls almost seemed to wail just outside the window of Beatrice’s bedroom. In the narrative, two of the storm-tossed sinners were permitted to pause from their eternal flight and identify themselves to the poet. They were Francesca da Rimini and her husband’s brother Paolo, both murdered by the jealous husband and now inseparable in their eternal woe. Ser Antonio’s voice shifted to a beautiful, lilting tenor as he voiced Francesca’s lament:

“Love, which cannot pardon the beloved,
So strongly possessed me with delight
That even now we share our first embrace.

“Our love has led us two to one death
...”

“You see, they embrace one another still,” Il Moro said. “And surely with all the turning and whirling through the air, they are able to vary this embrace and enjoy various
invenzione.”

Beatrice blushed and laughed, thinking of her husband’s own amorous
invenzione.
“Read on, Ser Antonio,” she said. “My husband will soon see that the lovers’ position is not enjoyable at all.”

Again Ser Antonio took on Francesca’s voice. She answered with a heart-piercing preface Dante’s request that she tell how she came to this place: “ ‘No sorrow is greater in this eternal woe than to remember in pain that moment of happiness. . . .’ “

Beatrice nodded smugly, and Ser Antonio went on to finish the tale. Innocently amusing themselves with a French romance based on the legend of King Arthur, Francesca and Paolo had come across the passage where Lancelot kissed Guinevere. They impulsively exchanged their own kiss, and then, as Francesca recalled with graphic allusion, “that day we read no more.” Ser Antonio somberly concluded the canto in Dante’s narrative voice:

‘And while the one spirit told me thus, the other wept so that out of pity I fainted as if dead. And as falls a lifeless corpse, so fell I.’“

Beatrice’s eyes glistened, and Il Moro took her hand. “This day we read no more,” he said.
“Milkgrazie,
Ser Antonio. When you read, I feel we are arm in arm with Dante and Virgil, swatting the embers from our hair.”

When Ser Antonio had left the room, Il Moro pulled up Beatrice’s heavy damask skirt and put his hand on her thigh. “Shall we pretend you are Francesca da Rimini?”

“Then you will have to pretend you are not my husband.”

Il Moro swept her up and carried her to her bed. He dumped her unceremoniously but then lay down beside her and tenderly caressed her and removed her clothes. They made love in a complex orchestration of passion and practice, at times athletic and abandoned, at times with exquisite deliberation. But each respite was followed by a more fevered pitch, their breathing becoming rasping and frantic.

“No! Stop!”

Il Moro instantly pulled away. “Did I hurt you? How . . . ?”

Beatrice lay back and clutched her arms around her torso. “I don’t know. . . . No. It wasn’t ... it wasn’t you. It felt inside me, but it wasn’t. A moment of such cold ... I have never felt anything like it.”

“I should remind you that as husband and wife we are not committing a carnal sin,” Il Moro said lightly. “But perhaps we should confine our evening readings of Dante to the
Paradiso.”

She smiled weakly. “I’m still cold from it.”

He pulled the feather quilt up over them, and she fell asleep in his arms.

Extract of a letter of Ercole d’Este, Duke of Ferrara, to Beatrice d’Este da Sforza, Duchess of Bari. Ferrara, 12 October 1493

My beloved daughter,

. . . having been informed by your most illustrious lady mother that this condition had further weakened her, I returned from Belriguardo on the night of 8 October to discover that her gastric distress had now spread to the lungs, where it occasioned a pleurisy and most grievous cough. . . . On the evening of 11 October Our Lord God summoned his angelic host to convey your most illustrious lady mother to His Heavenly Throne. We can only be comforted in the knowledge that at the Highest Tribunal our Lord God will bestow on your most illustrious lady mother the rewards her exemplary virtues have most certainly earned. . . . Her last words were for you children. ... I know that this news, unexpected as it is, will cause you the most abject sorrow, but your mother would doubtless concur in my wish that you conduct yourself with a dignity and dominion over your emotions that will credit both the Este name and your most illustrious lady mother’s blessed memory. . . .

Letter of Isabella d’Aragona da Sforza, Duchess of Milan, to Beatrice d’Este da Sforza, Duchess of Bari. Pavia, 17 October 1493

Your most illustrious Highness,

We have received the news here of the most untimely and undeserved death of Madame your mother, my own most illustrious lady aunt. Perhaps it will be of little consolation to you to know that I loved her more than my own mother, but she was a woman of uncommon strength, virtue, and compassion, and Italy can ill spare her to this terrible caprice that has taken her from us. I know that my own grief can only be the smallest fraction of the pain you feel, and I pray that the healing hands of Time will soon find you and soothe and heal you.

Isabella d’Aragona da Sforza, Duchess of Milan With my own hand

Milan, 25 October 1493

“Carissima,”
Il Moro whispered. “I can see nothing,
carissima.’“
After a moment the room materialized in the light of a single candle, a wavering hallucination of light and shadow racing across darkness. The walls as well as the windows were draped in black and indigo satin. Beatrice’s bed looked like a catafalque; it was covered with a black bedspread, the four columns and the canopy wrapped in black crepe. The motionless figure stretched out on the bed was attired entirely in black.

Il Moro sat beside his wife.
“Carissima,
you must come out of here. Come only for a quarter of an hour. We’ll go up to the gallery and watch the sun set.” He could not caress her hair because it was tucked away beneath a black silk cap, so he stroked her chilly, dry cheek. “Oh,
carissima,
you have to come out of here. You have to eat.”