Mirror Mirror (8 page)

In looking at Lucrezia Borgia, I was aware of myself looking: I was aware of myself. I was a dark twist of child hiding behind my father, and she was a coil of effervescent flame in the reception yard before the safehold of Montefiore.

She peered at me (I know to say this now) with the eyes of a child. For all her grandeur and hauteur she wasn't as grown up as she thought. She had other things on her mind, and she wasn't good at disguising her boredom. So I had an uninterrupted access to her, and saw the woman called the flower of her time, the Roman lily.

Lucrezia bit her lower lip, pretending to play with me, though I knew she was playing at something else. She tucked her small chin into her embroidered collar, then cocked her head and looked at me slantwise. She was displaying all her best angles—to her brother, to my father, to slack-jawed Fra Ludovico in the background for all I knew. She had the smooth forehead of a pale squash, and her hair spilled out of her bindings with liberty and energy. It was as yellow and crimped as dried tendrils of runner bean at the end of season. She loved herself, that much was sure. I didn't have a vocabulary for beauty at the time. But she was bewitching: and I knew it right then, that moment too. In knowing that much, I began to grow up.

I am a rock whose hands have appetites

I am a rock whose hands have appetites.

I am a rock whose appetites have hands.

I am a thing unresolved into courteous shapeliness.

I am a creature excluded from limbo and hell,

A thing of which heaven prefers to stay well unaware.

Neither pet, nor beast of the fields, or beast of the woods,

Nor idiot kept, more or less, in the warmth of the hearth

For the sometime amusement of humans and sarcastic angels.

Nothing exists but it rests on me, at the start,

At the end; but I keep to myself, as no one will have me.

A moment ago

I watch the affairs of men from the penumbral sanctuary.

It is 1502. Vicente, the widower, tries to keep a low profile in his aerie. Lucrezia Borgia, with her hair newly dyed, is on her way from Rome to Ferrara. At twenty-one she is married for the third time, to Alfonso D'Este. Her father, wicked Pope Alexander VI, has only a year to live. Machiavelli won't publish
The Prince
for a decade yet, but he is busy scrutinizing the life and pursuits of that splendid soldier, Lucrezia's brother, Cesare Borgia. The discovery of Española by some adventurer put out from the court of Their Catholic Majesties, Isabella and Ferdinand, means that the whole planet goes into a fierce wobble: tides sweep up into the front doors of St. Mark's in Venice, earthquakes rock the Levant, pyramids are lost again in sandstorms, as every chin in Europe turns away from Byzantium and toward Lisboa and Castile. The East is about to sink into the dust of mystery—again—as the light of reason blinds the west. “The world is coming to
its senses, as if
awakening out of a deep sleep,” says Erasmus. And Bianca de Nevada, seven years old, aware of none of it, equally unaware of me, watches and listens to the people standing on the grass before her.

A stroll in the country

T
RUNKS, PROVISIONS,
caskets were unloaded, and Don Vicente kept trying to urge the guests in the door, but Cesare was too jittery to be housed, and he walked up and down in the forecourt, talking his political predictions aloud.

“It's been a few years now since that viper, Savonarola, was put to death, and Florence regains her strength and vanity by the minute. He burned the vanities, but he couldn't burn out the high regard Florentines have for themselves. And for that he was immolated. What a pure, savage end for him.”

Don Vicente, who had known something of roasting of
conversos
by Torquemada in Spain, flinched at the flippancy. But he stood like a Roman legionnaire, his fine shoulders thrown back. “We can discuss things over a libation,” he said soothingly. “Welcome, my lord.” His grip on Cesare's forearm strengthened—in this case the handshake betraying its Roman origins: to assess
whether a man might have a knife hidden beneath the sleeve of his tunic.

“There are strategies to consider,” said Cesare, confirming Vicente's worries, but the famous sister yawned ostentatiously and pulled at her brother's tunic.

“Later for all that, later,” she said. “I've spent a good part of these hours behind curtained views. We've been on the road from Rome three days already. I need to stretch and to see something. Don Vicente, let me ask for your arm. I'm faint as a dowager who has taken Madeira at noon.” She looked about as faint as a lightning bolt. “Conduct a tour for me; show me some rural interest. Take me for a stroll. Show me something, anything. The views. The geese. Yes, show me the geese.”

“I can loan you the arm of Fra Ludovico,” said Vicente. Fra Ludovico looked terrified and began to busy himself with his sleeves.

“My father is the Pope of the universal Church,” said Lucrezia. “I have more spiritual companionship than I can bear. Leave Fra Ludovico to his hours. My brother can spare you for a while, Don Vicente. I insist, Cesare, I will have my exercise.”

“Very well; I'll stay and pose questions of state to the de Nevada daughter,” said Cesare, pointing at Bianca and making her nervous.

Vicente had no choice but to be courteous. “A stroll, then,” he said to la Borgia, and to his daughter, “but you, come with me. The Duc de Valentinois has no interest in talking to an infant. He is only being kind.”

Bianca fled to her father's side. “Oh, we are to be a walking nursery?” said Lucrezia. “Very well then. I ought to have brought my own babe, Rodrigo. He is four. Beware the cliff edge, my babe; a childish foot can make a misstep and the rocks below—you see them?—look sharp and unwelcoming.”

Bianca ran ahead of her father and the noblewoman. She was glad to be out of harm's way, since harm seemed coiled in the military man left behind in the courtyard of Montefiore.

The path, this side of the bluff, sloped down in a gentle zigzag to
some outbuildings: a croft, a lean-to for the shepherds; the diminished Lago Verde beside a vigorous and well-pruned olive orchard. The walls were littered with the leavings of goats, who liked to leap over any obstacle. And below, the bridge that Bianca was forbidden to cross.

Though she was prohibited from the world beyond the farm, she loved to hear the noise of village life scraping beyond her confines. As she fell asleep, on nights when the wind was still, she could sometimes hear tenants singing, joking, building their cooking fires and banking their sleeping fires, leaping up at threats real or imagined. They were safety to her, the vinemaster, the gooseboy, the shepherd, the ostler, the hunter, the smith, the girls who did floor washing and laundry, and the lads who organized the haying and cured the hams and pressed the olives and then cleaned the stones and pressed the grapes when they were ripe. Life on a farm was a universe in itself, but, since the cows had long since been moved out of the bier in the ground floor of Montefiore, Bianca felt she had only a distant relationship with the
contadini
who came and went to work, and who thrived on the farm's yield.

“The news from Rome,” said Vicente after a time, to avert attention from the expressive pressure of la Borgia's arm upon his.

“Oh, Rome,” said Lucrezia, “my brother will call it a circus of toadies, my father a nest of vipers. To a noblewoman it's all private chambers. We women work by gossip and innuendo. A man is a cock in armor, a ridiculous proposition; a woman is a hen in veils. Less vivid to see but no less ridiculous to consider. But indulge my appetite for a view, Don Vicente. That long line of hills there—is that Cortona?”

“Nothing like Cortona,” said Vicente. “Nowhere near it.”

“Understanding how the land chooses to spread itself about isn't my strength. What I long for is the sea. Can we glimpse it from here?”

“We can't. We're as inland as we can be, between the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian Seas.”

Above a crumbling bank by the side of the path Lucrezia found
an old stone sill that had been set upon an ancient protruding root. It would make a good seat. She tried to lever herself up, but her gown kept catching on the fringe of smaller exposed roots. She pouted meaningfully, and Vicente, who didn't care to touch her, obligingly came forward. He gripped her by the waist as if she were hardly lighter than his daughter, and he set her down. His hands stayed on her waist to secure her there.

“I can see everything,” said his guest. “Goats and geese, hills and meadows, vines and laborers, the gooseboy and the gamekeeper. It does my heart good.” She sighed, and Vicente, who found her canny and alarming, relaxed a little. Though so often after an effect—and who wasn't?—she had a reservoir of genuine feeling, it seemed.

“Cesare would give you the news from Rome in one manner,” she said, continuing the conversation from before, “and I another. You know his motto—
Aut Caesar, aut nihil
—either Caesar or nothing. Well, I tire of it. He has his game to run, and I mine. The old pepper can't keep on forever, you know, and when he goes, the fight to succeed him will be intense.”

Vicente raised an eyebrow.

“My father,” she said curtly. “My dear father. The most roundly defamed Bishop of Rome in the history of our holy Church. You know what lies the Orsini spread about him? The
infessura.
It's no secret that people credit the so-called
infans Romanus
as being the fruit of a monstrous union between my father and me. And the august Bishop of Rome allows such nonsense to circulate. He believes it unnerves his enemies to think him capable of such wickedness. He doesn't think of the cost to my reputation.”

“I can have no opinion about such matters; I'm a country farmer—”

“The things they report. Simony and nepotism the least of it. They whisper about whores taken on the floors of the ducal apartments. Whores stripped of their clothes and required to pick up chestnuts with their nether lips, while bishops make ready the available crozier for penetration.”

“My child is present,” said Vicente desperately. “She is a young girl, and even more innocent than most.”

Lucrezia breathed in and out in sudden anger, and muttered, almost under her breath, “They weren't chestnuts, anyway, they were jewels.” But it wasn't clear to Vicente whether she was jesting or not.

“The truth,” she went on, “the truth, dear sir, is that I'm a young woman, and these times frighten me. Do you remember a few years back, when a monster was dug up from the mud of the banks of the Tiber? It was huge and deformed; it had the head of a woman and its behind was bearded. The peasants of Rome went mad for fear that God was signaling the end of civilization. At the close of the third set of five hundred years since Gesù's birth. But I think civilization isn't ending, just changing. And the power to change it belongs in the hands of the mighty.”

She held out her hand, a pretty delicate thing, pale as pounded leather.