The Enchantress of Florence (12 page)

“You’re just a kid like us,” il Machia reasoned with him. “Don’t you want to grow up before you get yourself killed?”

“Not me,” said Argalia, “I’m off to heathen lands to fight against strange gods. Who knows what they worship out there, scorpions or monsters or worms. They’ll die the same as us, though, I’ll bet on that.”

“Don’t go to your death with your mouth full of sacrileges,” said Niccolò. “Stay with us. My father loves you at least as much as he loves me. Or, think how many Vespuccis there are in Ognissanti already. They won’t even notice an extra one if you prefer to live at Ago’s place.”

“I’m going,” said Argalia. “Andrea Doria has almost driven the French out of the city and I want to be there to see the day of freedom when it comes.”

“And you, with your three gods, a carpenter, a father, and a ghost, and the carpenter’s mother for a fourth,” the emperor asked Mogor with some irritation, “you from that holy land which hangs its bishops and burns its priests at the stake, while its greatest priest commands armies and behaves as brutally as any common general or prince—which of the wild religions of this heathen land do you find most attractive, or are they all one to you in their vileness? In the eyes of Father Acquaviva and Father Monserrate, we are sure, we are all what your Argalia thought us to be, which is to say, godless swine.”

“Sire,” said Mogor dell’Amore, calmly, “I am attracted toward the great polytheist pantheons because the stories are better, more numerous, more dramatic, more humorous, more marvelous; and because the gods do not set us good examples, they are interfering, vain, petulant, and badly behaved, which is, I confess, quite appealing.”

“We have the same feeling,” the emperor said, regaining his composure, “and our affection for these wanton, angry, playful, loving gods is very great. We have set up a force of one hundred and one men to count and name them all, every worshipped divinity of Hindustan, not only the celebrated, high gods, but all the low ones too, the little spirits of place, of sighing woodland grove and laughing mountain stream. We have made them leave their homes and families and embark on a journey without end, a journey that will only end when they die, for the task we have set them is an impossible one, and when a man takes on the impossible he travels every day with death, accepting the journey as a purification, a magnification of the soul, so that it becomes a journey not toward the naming of the gods but toward God himself. They have barely begun their labors, yet they have already collected one million names. Such a proliferation of divinity! We think there are more supernatural entities in this land than people of flesh and blood, and are happy to live in so magical a world. And yet we must be what we are. The million gods are not our gods; the austere religion of our father will always be ours, just as the carpenter’s creed is yours.”

He was no longer looking at Mogor, and had fallen into a reverie. Peacocks danced on the morning stones of Sikri and in the distance the great lake shimmered like a ghost. The emperor’s gaze traveled past the peacocks and the lake, past the court of Herat and the lands of the fierce Turk, and rested on the spires and domes of an Italian city far away. “Imagine a pair of woman’s lips,” Mogor whispered, “puckering for a kiss. That is the city of Florence, narrow at the edges, swelling at the center, with the Arno flowing through between, parting the two lips, the upper and the lower. The city is an enchantress. When it kisses you, you are lost, whether you be commoner or king.”

Akbar was walking the streets of that other stone city in which nobody ever seemed to want to stay indoors. The life of Sikri took place behind drawn curtains and barred gates. The life of this alien city was lived under the cathedral dome of the sky. People ate where the birds could share their food and gambled where any cutpurse could steal their winnings, they kissed in full view of strangers and even fucked in the shadows if they wanted to. What did it mean to be a man so completely among men, and women too? When solitude was banished, did one become more oneself, or less? Did the crowd enhance one’s selfhood or erase it? The emperor felt like the Caliph of Baghdad Harun al-Rashid walking round his city at night to learn how his citizens lived. But Akbar’s cloak was cut from the cloths of time and space and these people were not his. Why, then, did he feel so strong a sense of kinship with the denizens of these braying lanes? Why did he understand their unspeakable European tongue as if it were his own?

“The questions of kingship,” the emperor said after a time, “concern us less and less. Our kingdom has laws in place to guide it, and officials worthy of trust, and a system of taxation that raises enough money without making people unhappier than is prudent. When there are enemies to defeat we will defeat them. In short, in that field we have the answers we require. The question of Man, however, continues to vex us, and the related problem of Woman, almost as much.”

“It is in my city, sire, that the question of Man has been answered for all time,” Mogor said. “And as to Woman, well, that is the very sum and matter of my story. For, many years after the death of Simonetta the first enchantress of Florence, the foretold second enchantress did indeed arrive.”

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Everything he loved was on his doorstep

E
verything he loved was on his doorstep, according to Ago Vespucci; it wasn’t necessary to go questing across the world and die among guttural strangers to find your heart’s desire. Long ago in the octagonal gloom of the Battistero di San Giovanni he had been baptized twice, as was customary, once as a Christian and again as a Florentine, and to an irreligious bastard like Ago it was the second baptism that counted. The city was his religion, a world as perfect as any heaven. The great Buonarroti had called the Baptistery doors the gates of Paradise and when little baby Ago emerged from that place with a wet head he had understood at once that he had entered a walled and gated Eden. The city of Florence had fifteen gates and on their inner faces were pictures of the Virgin and various saints. Voyagers touched the gates for good luck, and nobody starting on a journey through those gates did so without consulting astrologers. In the opinion of Ago Vespucci the absurdity of such superstitions only proved the folly of long-distance travel. The Machiavelli farm in Percussina was at the outer rim of Ago’s universe. Beyond that the cloud of unknowing began. Genoa and Venice were as distant and fictional as Sirius or Aldebaran in the sky. The word
planet
meant
wanderer.
Ago disapproved of the planets and preferred the fixed stars. Aldebaran and Venice, Genoa and the Dog Star might be too far away to be completely real, but at least they had the good grace to stay where they were.

As it turned out the Pope and the King of Naples didn’t attack Florence after the defeat of the Pazzi plot, but when Ago was in his early twenties the King of France did show up, and entered the city in triumph—a short little red-haired homunculus whose insufferable Frenchness made Ago feel like throwing up. Instead he went to a whorehouse and worked strenuously to improve his mood. On the threshold of manhood Ago had agreed with his friend Niccolò “il Machia” on one thing: whatever hardships the times might bring, a good, energetic night with the ladies would put everything right. “There are few woes in the world, dear Ago,” il Machia had advised him when they were still only thirteen, “that a woman’s fanny will not cure.” Ago was an earnest boy, good-hearted beneath his pose of a foul-mouthed rapscallion. “And the ladies,” he asked, “where do they go to cure their woes?” Il Machia looked perplexed, as if he had never considered the matter, or, perhaps, as if to indicate that a man’s time should not be wasted on the consideration of such things. “To each other, no doubt,” he said with an adolescent finality that sounded to Ago like the last word on the matter. Why should women not seek consolation in each other’s arms at a time when half the young men of Florence did the same thing?

The widespread popularity of sodomy among the flower of Florentine manhood had earned the city the reputation of being the world capital of the act. “Sodom Reborn,” Niccolò at thirteen renamed his hometown. Even at this early age he was already able to reassure Ago that the ladies were more interesting to him, “so you don’t have to worry about me jumping you in the woods.” Many of their contemporaries were of the opposite temperament, however—for example, their classmates Biagio Buonaccorsi and Andrea di Romolo—and as an answer to the problem of the growing fashionability of homosexual practices the city, with the full support of the Church, established a Decency Office, whose job it was to build and subsidize brothels and recruit prostitutes and pimps from other parts of Italy and Europe to supplement the local tarts. The Vespuccis of Ognissanti, spotting an opportunity, diversified their businesses and began to offer women for sale as well as olive oil and wool. “Maybe I won’t even be a clerk,” Ago gloomily told Niccolò when they were sixteen. “I’ll end up running a bawdy house instead.” Il Machia told him to look on the bright side. “Clerks never get fucked,” he pointed out, “but you’ll be the envy of us all.”

The path of Sodom never appealed to Ago either, and the truth was that underneath all his dirty talk Ago Vespucci was a youth of overweening modesty. Il Machia, however, seemed to be the reincarnation of the god Priapus, always ready for action, always chasing the ladies, both professionals and amateurs, and he dragged Ago to his damnation several times a week. In the early days of their adolescent potency, when Ago accompanied his friend into the raucous brothel night, he would always choose the youngest whore in il Machia’s preferred establishment, who called herself “Scandal” but seemed almost demure: a skeletal creature from the village of Bibbione who never spoke, and looked as scared as he did. For a long time he actually paid her to sit still on the edge of the bed while he stretched out and pretended to sleep until il Machia stopped heaving and grunting in the room next door. Then he began to try to improve her mind by reading poetry to her, which she kindly pretended to appreciate, even though she was secretly so bored that she thought she might die of it, and even a little repelled by what sounded to her like the noises men make when they tell accomplished lies.

One day she decided to change things. Her solemn features broke into a shy smile and she came to Ago and put one hand over his Petrarch-filled mouth and the other in another place. When she exposed his manhood Ago blushed violently, and then began to sneeze. He sneezed for an hour without stopping, and by the end of it there was blood pouring from his nose. The skeletal whore thought he was dying and ran for help. She came back with the biggest naked woman Ago had ever seen and the moment his nose smelled her it stopped misbehaving. “I get it,” said the giantess, who went by the name of La Matterassina, “you think you like them skinny, but in fact you’re a boy for flesh.” She turned to her bony co-worker and told her, in plain terms, to get lost; whereupon, without any warning, Ago’s nose exploded again. “Mother of God,” the giantess exclaimed, “so you’re a greedy bastard under all that terror. You won’t be satisfied unless you have us both.”

After that there was no stopping Ago, and even il Machia had to applaud. “Slow starter, strong finisher,” he said approvingly. “For a fellow who’s nothing much to look at you have the instincts of a champion.”

When Ago was twenty-four his love of the city was put to the test as never before. The Medici family was expelled, the brothels were all closed, and the stink of religious sanctimony filled the air. This was the time of the rise to power of the cult of the Weepers, the narrow-minded fanatics of whom Ago would say to il Machia, under his breath, that they might have been born Florentines but when the baptismal water hit their heads it must have boiled off before it could anoint them, because they were all blazing with hellfire heat. “The Devil sent us these devils to warn us against devilry,” he said on the day the long darkness came to an end. “And they bedeviled us for four fucking years. The cassock of holiness cloaks the codpiece of evil, every fucking time.”

He didn’t need to whisper anymore on the day he said this, because his adored hometown had just been reborn, like the fabled phoenix, thanks to a healing fire. The Head Weeper, the monk Girolamo who had made everyone’s life a living hell, was roasting nicely in the middle of the Piazza della Signoria, on the exact spot where his lachrymose crew had tried to turn beauty to ashes several years earlier, dragging paintings and female adornments and even mirrors out there and setting them alight, under the erroneous impression that human beings’ love of loveliness, and even Vanity herself, could be destroyed in hypocritical flames. “Burn, you shit-blood prick,” Ago yelled, capering around the burning monk in a manner that did not befit his imminent sober employment as a city clerk. “That bonfire gave us the idea for this one!” The musky stench of Girolamo Savonarola’s burning flesh did nothing to spoil Ago’s good mood. He was twenty-eight years old, and the brothels were reopening.

“Mercatrice, meretrice.”
The city of wealthy traders was also according to ancient custom a city of fabulous whores. Now that the Weepers’ day was done the true nature of that city of lubricious sensualists reasserted itself. The world of the whorehouse came flooding back. The big Macciana brothel, in the center of town near the Mercato Vecchio and the Battistero, took down its shutters and offered short-term discount rates to re-establish its preeminence, and in the Piazza del Frascato at the brothel’s heart the dancing bears and dwarf jugglers reappeared, the monkeys dressed up in uniform who were trained to “die for their country” and the parrots that remembered the names of the brothel’s clients and shouted them out to greet their owners whenever they showed up. And of course the women came back too, the wild Slav harlots, the melancholy Polish doxies, the loud Roman strumpets, the thick German tarts, the Swiss mercenaries as ferocious in bed as their male counterparts were on the field of battle, and the local girls, who were the best of all. Ago didn’t believe in traveling, even in bed. He found his favorite girls again, fine Tuscan goods, both of them: and as well as the whore called Scandal and her sidekick La Matterassina he took a shine to a certain Beatrice Pisana who took the name of Pantasilea, the Queen of the Amazons, because she had been born with only one breast which, by way of compensation, was the most beautiful breast in the city, which was to say, as far as Ago was concerned, in all the known world.

As daylight failed and the fire in the Piazza went out, its job well done, music rose up from the Macciana and its rival pleasure-zone, the Chiasso de’ Buoi or Alley of the Cows, and blessed the city like an angel pronouncing the rebirth of joy. Ago and il Machia decided to make a night of it, a great night which would also be the last night of their carefree youth, because while Savonarola was still burning the new ruling Council of Eighty had called Niccolò into the Palazzo and appointed him secretary of the Second Chancery which handled the foreign affairs of the Republic of Florence.

Niccolò immediately told Ago he was giving him a job as well. “Why me?” Ago asked. “I hate fucking foreigners.”

“In the first place,
furbo,
” il Machia replied, “I’ll fuck with the foreigners and just leave all the most tedious paperwork to you. In the second place, you’re the one who prophesied this, so don’t bitch about it now that your dream is coming true.”

“Fuck,
bugiarone,
you really are an asshole,” said Ago, unhappily, and rudely made a fig at his friend with his left hand by sticking his thumb between his first and second fingers. “Let’s go get a drink to celebrate my clairvoyant powers.”

A
furbo
was a fellow with street smarts. A
bugiarone
was a less complimentary and in Niccolò’s case also a less accurate thing to be called. It remained the case that neither Ago nor il Machia were sodomites, or not often, but that night, while Weepers were running for their lives or, if they couldn’t run fast enough, being strung up in side-alleys and horse-barns, the true Florence was emerging from its hiding places, and that meant that men were once again holding hands and kissing each other almost anywhere you cared to look. “Buonaccorsi and di Romolo can stop hiding their love at last,” il Machia said. “By the way, I think I’m going to hire them as well, so you can watch them going at it in the office while I’m away on official business.”

“There’s nothing those two sex maniacs can show me,” Ago replied, “that I haven’t already seen, and that includes the pathetic little prunes in their pants.”

Renewal, regeneration, rebirth. In Ago’s local church in Ognissanti, a building he only willingly entered when word got out that some great courtesan was present to advertise her charms, the faithful swore that Giotto’s stern Madonna spent the night grinning all over her face. And that evening outside the church of Or-sanmichele where the grandest courtesans were once again at prayer, once again wearing their finest Milan fashions and the jewels of their protectors, Niccolò and Ago were accosted by a
ruffiana,
Giulietta Veronese, the midget agent and some said also the Sapphic lover of the most celebrated night-lady in all of Florence, Alessandra Fiorentina. The Veronese invited them to the gala reopening night of the House of Mars, the city’s leading salon, named after the lost statue of the war god which used to stand on the riverbank until the flooding Arno bore it away. The House stood on the north bank of the river near the Bridge of the Graces. This invitation was an extraordinary event. La Fiorentina’s network of informants was unquestionably excellent and quick, but even if she had already heard about il Machia’s new position the rank of secretary of the Second Chancery scarcely merited his inclusion in that most select and exclusive company, and as for dragging the even less significant Ago Vespucci along, that was an unprecedented privilege.

They had seen Alessandra’s picture, of course, they had drooled over her image in a volume of miniatures, her long blond hair evoking the memory of the departed Simonetta, after whose death her deranged husband Horned Marco had unsuccessfully begged for admission to La Fiorentina’s salon. He had hired one of the city’s leading
mezzano
agents to negotiate with Alessandra’s
ruffiana.
The agent had written love letters on Horned Marco’s behalf, and sung serenades beneath Alessandra’s evening casement, and even had a sonnet by Petrarca written out in gold calligraphy as a special Twelfth Night gift. The door of the salon remained barred. “My mistress,” Giulietta Veronese told the
mezzano,
“is not interested to be a crackpot cuckold’s necrophiliac fantasy. Tell your master to go put a hole in a picture of his late wife and fornicate with that instead.”