The Enchantress of Florence (11 page)

The next few years in the life of little Lady Black Eyes were an unsettled, wandering time, during which her brother and protector Babar galloped back and forth, winning battles, losing battles, gaining territory, losing it again, being attacked by his uncles, attacking his cousins, being rounded upon by his cousins, and attacking his uncles again, and behind all these ordinary family matters there waited the figure of his greatest enemy, the savage Uzbeg orphan, soldier of fortune and plague of the house of Timur, Wormwood—which is to say “Shaibani”—Khan. Dashwanth painted the five-, six-, and seven-year-old Qara Köz as a supernatural being cocooned in a little egg of light while all around her the battle raged. Babar captured Samarkand but lost Andizhan, then lost Samarkand, then recaptured it, and then lost it again, and his sisters with it. Wormwood Khan besieged Babar in that great city, and around the Iron Gate, the Needlemakers’ Gate, the Bleachers’ Gate, and the Turquoise Gate there was much hard fighting done. But in the end the siege starved Babar out. Wormwood Khan had heard the legend of the beauty of Babar’s elder sister Khanzada Begum and sent a message saying that if Khanzada was surrendered to him then Babar and his family could leave in peace. Babar had no choice but to accept, and Khanzada had no choice but to accept Babar’s choice.

Thus she became a sacrificial offering, human booty, a living pawn like the slave girls of Akbar’s pachisi court. However, in that last family gathering in the royal chambers of Samarkand, she added a choice of her own. Her right hand fell upon her little sister’s left wrist like the claw of a roc. “If I go,” she said, “I will take Lady Black Eyes to keep me company.” Nobody present could decide whether she spoke out of malice or love, because in Khanzada’s dealings with Qara Köz both emotions were always present. In Dashwanth’s picture of the scene Khanzada cut a magnificent figure, her mouth wide open as she cried her defiance, while Lady Black Eyes looked at first like a frightened child. But then those dark eyes drew you in and you saw the power lurking in their depths. Qara Köz’s mouth was open, too—she too was crying out, lamenting her misery and announcing her strength. And Qara Köz’s arm was extended also; her right hand, too, was fastened around a wrist. If Khanzada was to be Wormwood Khan’s prisoner, and she, Qara Köz, was to be Khanzada’s, then the little slave girl, the Mirror, would be hers.

The painting is an allegory of the evils of power, how they pass down the chain from the greater to the lesser. Human beings were clutched at, and clutched at others in their turn. If power was a cry, then human lives were lived in the echo of the cries of others. The echo of the mighty deafened the ears of the helpless. But there was a final detail to be observed: Dashwanth had completed the chain of hands. The Mirror, the slave girl, her left wrist captured in her young mistress’s firm grasp, with her free right hand had seized hold of Khanzada Begum’s left wrist. They stood in a circle, the three lost creatures, and by closing that circle the painter suggested that the clutch or echo of power could also be reversed. The slave girl could sometimes imprison the royal lady. History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

As Dashwanth painted Qara Köz growing into the fullness of her young beauty during her captivity, it became plain that some higher power had captured his brush. The beauty of his canvases was so intense that Birbal, looking at them for the first time, presciently said, “I fear for the artist, for he is so deeply in love with this bygone woman that it will be hard for him to return to the present day.” The girl, the adolescent, the lambently beautiful young woman Dashwanth brought, or rather restored, to life in these masterpieces was, Akbar suddenly realized as he examined the work, almost certainly the
qara ko’zum,
the dark-eyed beauty celebrated by the “Prince of Poets,” the supreme versifier of the Chaghatai language, Ali-Shir Nava’i of Herat.
Weave a nest for yourself in the depths of my eyes. O your slender body that resembles a young tree growing in the garden of my heart. At the sight of a bead of sweat on your face I may suddenly die.
Dashwanth had actually painted a part of the last verse into the pattern of the fabric of Qara Köz’s garment.
I may suddenly die.

Herat, the so-called “Florence of the East,” fell to Shaibani or Wormwood Khan soon after his capture of Samarkand, and it was where Khanzada, Qara Köz, and the Mirror spent most of their captive years. The world was like an ocean, people said, and in the ocean was a pearl, and the pearl was Herat. “If you stretch your feet in Herat,” Nava’i said, “you are sure to kick a poet.” O fabled Herat of mosques, palaces, and flying-carpet bazaars! Yes, it was a wonderful place, no doubt, the emperor thought, but the Herat which Dashwanth was painting, irradiated by the beauty of the hidden princess, was a Herat which no actually existing Herat could match, a dream-Herat for a dream-woman, with whom, as Birbal had divined, the artist was hopelessly in love. Dashwanth painted day and night, week in and week out, neither seeking nor accepting a day of rest. He became even scrawnier than usual and his eyes began to bulge. His fellow painters feared for his health. “He looks so
drawn,
” Abdus Samad murmured to Mir Sayyid Ali. “It’s as if he wants to give up the third dimension of real life and flatten himself into a picture.” This, like Birbal’s remark, was a piece of sharp observation, the truth of which quickly became apparent.

Dashwanth’s colleagues began to spy on him, because they had begun to fear he might do himself harm, so profound had his melancholy become. They took turns to watch him, and it wasn’t hard because he only had eyes for his work. They saw him succumb to the final madness of the artist, heard him pick up his pictures and embrace them, whispering
Breathe.
He was working on what would turn out to be the final picture of the so-called
Qara-Köz-Nama,
the Adventures of Lady Black Eyes. In this swirling transcontinental composition Wormwood Khan was dead in a corner, bleeding into the Caspian Sea, which swarmed with finny monsters. In the remainder of the picture Wormwood’s conqueror Shah Ismail of Persia greeted the Mughal ladies in Herat. The face of the Persian king bore an expression of wounded melancholy which reminded the emperor of Dashwanth’s own characteristic way of looking, and he surmised that this dolorous countenance might be the artist’s way of inserting himself into the tale of the hidden princess. But Dashwanth had gone further than that.

The simple fact was that in spite of the almost constant scrutiny of his peers he had somehow managed to vanish. He was never seen again, not in the Mughal court, nor anywhere in Sikri, nor anywhere in all the land of Hindustan. His body did not wash up on the shores of the lake, nor was it found hanging from a beam. He had simply disappeared as if he had never been, and almost all the pictures of the
Qara-Köz-Nama
had vanished with him, except for this last picture, in which Lady Black Eyes, looking lovelier than even Dashwanth had managed to make her look before, came face to face with the man who would be her destiny. The mystery was solved, inevitably, by Birbal. A week and a day after Dashwanth’s disappearance the wisest of Akbar’s courtiers, who had been scrutinizing the surface of the last remaining picture of the hidden princess in the hope of finding a clue, noticed a strange technical detail which had thus far gone undetected. It seemed as if the painting did not stop at the patterned borders in which Dashwanth had set it but, at least in the bottom left-hand corner, continued for some distance beneath that ornate two-inch-wide frame. The picture was returned to the studio—the emperor himself accompanied it, along with Birbal and Abul Fazl—and under the supervision of the two Persian masters the painted border was carefully separated from the main body of the work. When the hidden section of the painting was revealed the onlookers burst into cries of amazement, for there, crouching down like a little toad, with a great bundle of paper scrolls under his arm, was Dashwanth the great painter, Dashwanth the graffiti artist, Dashwanth the palanquin bearer’s son and the thief of the
Qara-Köz-Nama,
Dashwanth released into the only world in which he now believed, the world of the hidden princess, whom he had created and who had then uncreated him. He had pulled off an impossible feat which was the exact opposite of the one achieved by the emperor when he conjured up his imaginary queen. Instead of bringing a fantasy woman to life, Dashwanth had turned himself into an imaginary being, driven (as the emperor had been driven) by the overwhelming force of love. If the borderline between the worlds could be crossed in one direction, Akbar understood, it could also be crossed in the other. A dreamer could become his dream.

“Put the border back,” Akbar commanded, “and let the poor fellow have some peace.” When this had been done the story of Dashwanth was left to rest where it belonged, in the margins of history. At the center of the stage were the rediscovered protagonist and her new lover—the hidden princess Lady Black Eyes or Qara Köz or Angelica, and the Shah of Persia—standing face to face.

{
10
}

A hanged man’s seed falls to the ground

A
hanged man’s seed falls to the ground,” il Machia read aloud, “and there the mandrake will be found.” When Nino Argalia and his best friend Niccolò—“il Machia”—were boys together in Sant’Andrea in Percussina in the state of Florence they dreamed of having occult power over women. Somewhere in the woods of the region a man must have been hanged sometime or other, they decided, and for many months they hunted for mandrakes on Niccolò’s family property, the Caffagio oak wood and the
vallata
grove near Santa Maria dell’Impruneta, and also in the forest around the castle of Bibbione a little way away. They found only mushrooms and a mysterious dark flower that made them come out in a rash. At some point they decided the semen for the mandrake didn’t necessarily have to come from a hanged man, and after much rubbing and panting they managed to spill a few impotent drops of their own upon the uninterested earth. Then on Easter Sunday in their tenth year the Palazzo della Signoria was festooned with the swinging dead, eighty of the defeated Pazzi conspirators hanged from its windows that weekend by Lorenzo de’ Medici, including the archbishop in full regalia, and as it happened Argalia was staying in town with il Machia and his father Bernardo at their family house across the Ponte Vecchio, only three or four blocks away, and when they saw everyone running they could not be restrained.

Bernardo ran with the two boys, scared and excited at the same time, just like they were. Bernardo was a bookish man, boyish, sweet, and blood was distasteful to him, but a hanging archbishop was different, that was a sight worth seeing. The boys carried tin cups with them in case of useful drips. In the Piazza they ran into their pal Agostino Vespucci blowing loud raspberries at the murderous dead and making obscene masturbatory gestures at their corpses and shouting “Fuck you! Fuck your
daughter
! Fuck your
sister
! Fuck your
mother
and your
grandmother
and your
brother
and your
wife
and
her
brother and
her
mother and
her
mother’s sister too” at them as they twisted and stank in the breeze. Argalia and il Machia told Ago about the mandrake rhyme and he grabbed a cup and went and stood under the archbishop’s dick. Afterward in Percussina the three boys buried the two cups and recited what they imagined to be Satanic verses and then began a long, fruitless wait for the burgeoning of the plants of love.

“What begins with pendant traitors,” the emperor Akbar said to Mogor dell’Amore, “will be a treacherous tale.”

In the beginning there were three friends, Antonino Argalia, Niccolò “il Machia,” and Ago Vespucci. Golden-haired Ago, the most voluble of the trio, was one of a throng, a jostle, an argument of Vespuccis living cheek by jowl in the crowded Ognissanti district of the city, trading in olive oil, wine, and wool across the Arno in the
gonfalone del drago,
the district of the dragon, and he had grown up foul-mouthed and loud because in his family you had to be like that to get heard over the racket of all the fire-breathing Vespuccis yelling at one another like apothecaries or barbers in the Mercato Vecchio. Ago’s father worked for Lorenzo de’ Medici as a notary, so after that Easter of stabbings and hangings he was relieved to come out on the winning side. “But the fucking Pope’s army will come after us now because we killed the fucking priest,” Ago muttered. “And the fucking King of Naples’s army too.” Ago’s cousin, the wild twenty-four-year-old Amerigo or Alberico Vespucci, was soon packed off with his uncle Guido to get help for the Medici government from the King of France. From the light in Amerigo’s eyes as he set off for Paris it was easy to see that he was more interested in the journey than the king. Ago wasn’t the traveling kind. “I know what I’m going to be when I grow up,” he told his friends in the Percussina mandrake woods in which there were no mandrakes. “I’ll be a fucking sheep salesman or a booze merchant or else, if I get into the public service somehow, I’ll be a fucking ledger-scribbling no-account no-hope no-future fucking clerk.”

In spite of the bleakness of his clerical future Ago was full of stories. His stories were like Polo’s adventures, they were fantastic voyages, and nobody believed a word he said, but everybody wanted to listen, especially to his tall tales about the most beautiful girl in the whole history of the city, or possibly since the earth was formed. It was just two years since Simonetta Cattaneo, who married Ago’s cousin Marco Vespucci, known behind his back as Horned Marco or Marco the Fool of Love, had died of consumption and plunged all Florence into mourning, because Simonetta possessed a pale, fair beauty so intense that no man could look at her without falling into a state of molten adoration, and nor could any woman, and the same went for most of the city’s cats and dogs, and maybe diseases loved her too, which was why she was dead before she was twenty-four years old. Simonetta Vespucci was married to Marco but he had to share her with the whole town, which he did, at first, with a resigned good grace that only proved his lack of brains to the citizens of that conniving, crafty locale. “Such beauty is a public resource,” he would say, with an idiotic innocence, “like the river, or the gold in the treasury, or the fine light and air of Tuscany.” The painter Alessandro Filipepi painted her many times, before and after she died, painted her clothed and naked, as the Spring and the goddess Venus, and even as herself. Whenever she posed for him she called him “my little barrel,” because she always mistook him for his older brother, whom people called
“Botticelli”
—“Little Barrels”—on account of his bulbous shape. The younger Filipepi, the painter, didn’t look like a barrel at all, but if that was what Simonetta wanted to call him it was all right by him, and so he started answering to the name.

Such was the effect of Simonetta’s powers of enchantment. She would turn men into whatever she wanted them to be, gods or lapdogs or little barrels or footstools or, of course, lovers. She could have ordered boys to die to prove their love of her and they would have done so gladly, but she was too good-natured for that, and never used her immense powers for ill. The cult of Simonetta grew until people were secretly praying to her in church, mumbling her name under their breath as if she was a living saint, and rumors grew of her miracles: a man struck blind by her loveliness as she passed him in the street, a blind man given sight when her sad fingertips were placed in a sudden gesture of pity upon his troubled brow, a crippled child rising to his feet to chase after her, another boy suddenly paralyzed when he made obscene gestures behind her back. Both Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici were crazy about her and held a jousting tournament in her honor—Giuliano carried a banner bearing her portrait, painted by Filipepi and bearing the French legend
la sans pareille,
proving that he had beaten his brother to her hand—and they moved her into a suite of rooms in the palace, at which point even stupid Marco noticed that something was wrong in his marriage, but he was warned that if he protested it would cost him his life. After that Marco Vespucci became the only man in the city capable of resisting the beauty of his wife. “She is a whore,” he would say in the taverns he began to frequent to drown the knowledge of his cuckolding, “and to me she is as ugly as the Medusa.” Total strangers would beat him up for impugning the beauty of
la sans pareille
and in the end he had to stay home in Ognissanti and drink alone. Then Simonetta fell sick and died and it was said on the streets of Florence that the city had lost its enchantress, that a part of its soul had died with her, and it even became a part of the common parlance that one day she would rise again—that Florentines would never truly be themselves until her second coming, at which time she would redeem them all, like a second Savior. “But,” hissed Ago in the
vallata
wood, “you have no idea what Giuliano did to try to keep her alive: he turned her into a vampire.”

According to her cousin-in-law, the best vampire hunter in the city, a certain Domenico Salcedo, was summoned to Giuliano’s chamber and ordered to find a member of the blood-drinking undead. The following night Salcedo brought the vampire to the room in the palace where the sick girl lay, and the vampire bit her. But Simonetta refused to face eternity as a member of that sad, pale tribe. “When she realized she was a vampire she jumped from the top of the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio and impaled herself on the pike of a guard at the gate. You can imagine what they had to do to hush
that
up.” So, according to her cousin-in-law, perished the first enchantress of Florence, perished beyond hope of a return from the dead. Marco Vespucci lost his mind with grief. (“Marco was a fool,” Ago said unkindly. “If I was married to a piece of hot stuff like that, I’d keep her locked up in the highest tower where nobody could do her harm.”) And Giuliano de’ Medici was stabbed to death by a conspirator on the day of the Pazzi plot, while Filipepi the little barrel went on painting her, over and over, as if by painting her he could raise her from the dead.

“The same as Dashwanth,” the emperor marveled.

“This may be the curse of the human race,” responded Mogor. “Not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.”

The three boys were in the woods most days now, climbing trees and masturbating for mandrakes and telling each other insane stories about their families and complaining about the future to hide their fear, because right after the crushing of the Pazzi conspiracy the plague came to Florence and the three friends had been sent to the country for safety. Niccolò’s father Bernardo stayed in the city and caught the disease, and when he became one of the few people to have had the plague and lived his son told his friends it was on account of his mother Bartolomea’s magical way with cornmeal. “Whenever we get sick she covers us in porridge,” he pronounced solemnly, whispering so that the wood-owls couldn’t hear. “Depending on the sickness she uses the regular sweet yellow polenta but if it’s something serious she buys the white Friuli kind. For something like this she probably puts kale and tomatoes into it as well and I don’t know what other magical stuff. But it works. She makes us take off all our clothes and she ladles the hot porridge over every part of us and never mind the mess. The porridge sucks up the sickness and that’s that. Seems even the plague was no match for Mamma’s sweet polenta.” After that Argalia started calling il Machia’s crazy family the “Polentini” and made up songs about an imaginary sweetheart called Polenta. “If she was a florin, I would have spent her,” he sang, “and if she was a book, then I would have lent her.” And Ago joined in, “If she was a bow, then I would have bent her, and if she was a courtesan then I would rent her—my sweet Polenta.” In the end il Machia stopped being annoyed and joined in.
If she was a message I would have sent her. If she was a meaning I would have meant her.
But when news came that both Nino Argalia’s parents had caught the plague all the polenta magic in the world proved useless. Argalia became an orphan before he was ten years old.

The day Nino came to the oak wood to tell il Machia and Ago that his parents were dead was also the day they found the mandrake. It was hiding under a fallen branch like a scared animal. “All we need now,” said Ago sadly, “is the spell that turns us into men, because without that what’s the point of having ladies besotted with us, anyhow?” Then Argalia arrived and they saw in his eyes that he had found the spell of manhood. They showed him the mandrake and he shrugged. “That sort of thing doesn’t interest me anymore,” he said. “I’m running away to Genoa to join the Band of Gold.” It was the autumn of the
condottieri,
the soldiers of fortune with personal, mercenary armies who rented out their services to the city-states of Italy, which were too cheap to maintain standing armies of their own. All Florence knew the story of the city’s own Giovanni Milano, who had been born Sir John Hauksbank in Scotland a hundred years before. In France he was “Jean Aubainc,” in the German-speaking cantons of Switzerland he was “Hans Hoch,” and in Italy it was Giovanni Milano—“Milano” because a
milan
was a hawk—leader of the White Company, erstwhile general of Florence, and victor, on Florence’s behalf, of the battle of Polpetto against the hated Venetians. Paolo Uccello had worked on his funerary fresco and it was in the Duomo still. But the age of the
condottieri
was coming to an end.

The greatest remaining mercenary fighter, according to Argalia, was Andrea Doria, leader of the Band of Gold, who just then were busy with the liberation of Genoa from French control. “But you are Florentine, and we are allied with the French,” Ago cried, remembering his relatives’ mission to Paris. “When you are a mercenary,” Argalia said, feeling his chin to see if any hairs might be growing there, “the allegiances of your birth go by the board.”

Andrea Doria’s soldiers were armed with “hook-guns”—harquebuses or arquebuses—which you had to support on a tripod when you were shooting, like a little portable cannon. Many of them were Swiss, and the Swiss mercenaries were the worst killing machines of all, men with no faces or souls, invincible, terrifying. When he was done with the French and had gained command of the Genoese fleet, Doria intended to take on the Turk himself. Argalia liked the idea of sea battles. “We never had any money anyway,” he said, “and my father’s debts will eat up our house in the city and our little bit of property out here, so I can either beg in the street like a pauper’s dog or die trying to make my fortune. The two of you will grow fat with power and fill a couple of wretched women full of babies and you’ll leave them home to listen to the little bastards scream while you go off to the whorehouse of La Zingaretta or some such pillowy high-class tart who can recite poetry while you bounce up and down on her and fuck yourselves silly, and meanwhile I’ll be dying on a burning caravel outside Constantinople with a Turkish scimitar in my gut. Or who knows? I might turn Turk myself. Argalia the Turk, Wielder of the Enchanted Lance, with four huge Swiss giants, Muslim converts, in my retinue. Swiss Mohammedans, yes. Why not. When you’re a mercenary it’s gold and treasure that talk, and for that you have to go east.”