The Enchantress of Florence (24 page)

“Niccolò mio,”
she cried in that voice that, yes, did sound just a little too much like a quack, “have you seen what’s coming down the road?”

“What is it, my dear spouse,” he replied, solicitously.

“Something bad for the neighborhood,” she said. “Like Death himself on horseback and his ogres too, and his queen demonesses by his side.”

The arrival in Sant’Andrea in Percussina of the woman who would become famous, or perhaps notorious, as
l’ammaliatrice Angelica,
the so-called enchantress of Florence, brought men running from the fields, and women from their kitchens, wiping doughy fingers on aprons as they came. Woodcutters came from the forests and the butcher Gabburra’s son ran out from the slaughterhouse with bloody hands and potters left their kilns. Frosino Uno the miller’s twin brother Frosino Due emerged floury from the mill. The Janissaries of Stamboul were a sight to behold, battle-scarred and leathery, and a quartet of Swiss albino giants on white horses was not a thing seen every day in that neck of the woods, while the imposing figure at the head of the cavalcade, with his white, white skin and his black, black hair, the pale captain whom Signora Machiavelli had identified as the Reaper himself, was undoubtedly alarming, and children shrank from him as he passed, because whether he was the exterminating angel or not he had plainly seen too much of dying for his own good or anyone else’s. But even if he was the Angel of Death he also seemed strangely familiar and spoke perfectly the dialect of the region, and that made people wonder if Death always came in a local manifestation, so to speak, using your slang and knowing your secrets and sharing your private jokes even as he carted you away to the shadow world.

But it was the two women, Marietta Corsini Machiavelli’s “devil-queens,” who quickly captured everyone’s attention. They were riding as men rode, straddling their mounts in a manner that made their female audience gasp for one reason while the watching men’s gasps were of another kind, and their faces shone with the light of revelation, as though in those early days of their unveiling they were capable of sucking light in from the eyes of all who looked upon them and then flinging it out again as their own personal brilliance, with mesmeric, fantasy-inducing effects. The Frosino brothers, twins themselves, acquired faraway expressions as they imagined a double wedding sometime in the near future. In spite of their delusions, however, they were keen-eyed enough to see that the astonishing ladies were not quite identical, and probably not even related. “The first lady is the mistress and the other the servant,” said flour-dusted Frosino Due, adding, because he was the more poetic of the two brothers, “They are as the sun and the moon, the sound and the echo, the sky and its reflection in a lake.” His sibling was the direct type. “So I’ll take the first lady, and you’ll have number two,” said Frosino Uno. “Because the second, she is beautiful, sure, you won’t be getting a bad deal, but next to the first one she becomes invisible. You have to shut one eye, to blind yourself to my girl, in order to notice that yours is pretty too.” As the older twin by eleven minutes he assigned to himself the prerogative of having first pick. Frosino Due was about to protest, but just then the first lady, the mistress, turned to look directly at the brothers and murmured to her companion in perfect Italian.

“What do you think, my Angelica?”

“My Angelica, they are not without their certain simple charms.”

“It’s forbidden, of course, my Angelica.”

“My Angelica, of course. But maybe we will visit them in their dreams.”

“Both of us, visiting both of them, my Angelica?”

“My Angelica, the dreams will be better that way.”

They were angels, then. Not devils but mind-reading angels. No doubt their wings were folded away neatly beneath their clothes. The Frosino brothers reddened and cringed and stared wildly around them, but it seemed that only they had heard what the angels on horseback had said. That was impossible of course and so it was further proof that something of a divine nature had occurred. A divine or an occult nature. But these were angels, angels. “Angelica,” the name they apparently shared, was no handle for a demon. They were dream angels who had promised the millers joys of which men like them could truly only dream. The joys of Paradise. Their mouths suddenly full of giggles, the brothers turned away and ran toward the flour mill as fast as their legs would take them. “Where are you going?” Gabburra the butcher called after them, but how could they tell him that they needed, with great urgency, to lie down and close their eyes? How to explain exactly why it was so important, why it had never been more important, to sleep?

The procession came to a halt outside Vettori’s tavern. A silence fell, broken only by the neighing of tired horses. Il Machia was staring at the women like everyone else so when he heard Argalia’s voice coming out of the mouth of the pale warrior he felt as if he had been dragged from a place of beauty into a stinking cesspit. “What’s the matter, Niccolò,” the voice was saying, “don’t you know that when you forget your friends it means you have also forgotten yourself?” Marietta clutched at her husband in fright. “If Death has become your friend today,” she hissed in his ear, “then your children will be orphans before night falls.” Il Machia shook himself as if shrugging off the effects of an intoxicating draft. He looked the rider in the eye, steadily and without warmth. “In the beginning there were three friends,” he said softly. “Niccolò ‘il Machia,’ Agostino Vespucci, and Antonino Argalia. Their boyhood world was a magic wood. Then Nino’s parents were taken by the plague. He left to seek his fortune and they never saw him again.” Marietta looked back and forth from her husband to the stranger and a slow comprehension spread across her face.

“Then,” Niccolò concluded, “after long years of treasonous deeds against his country and his God, which damned his soul to Hell and rendered his body deserving of the rack, Argalia the Pasha—Arcalia, Arqalia, Al-Ghaliya, even his name became a lie—came back to what was no longer his home.”

He was not a deeply religious man, il Machia, but he was a Christian. He avoided mass, but he believed all other religions to be false. He held popes responsible for most of the wars of the period, and thought of many bishops and cardinals as criminals, but cardinals and popes liked what he had to say about the nature of the world better than princes. He would rant to his tavern companions about how the corruption of the Curia had driven Italians away from faith, but he was not a heretic, certainly not, and though there were aspects of the rule of the Mussulman Sultan that he was prepared to learn from and even to praise, the idea of entering such a potentate’s service was a nauseating one.

And then there was the matter of the memory palace, that beautiful girl, Angélique Coeur of Bourges, the angelic heart, who on account of what had been done to her mind and body had jumped through a window to her death. For obvious reasons this matter could not be raised in his wife’s presence, his wife being the jealous type, and himself being guilty of causing this fault in her character, of being an old man full of love, not for his wife, or not in that way, but, in point of fact, for the girl Barbera Raffacani Salutati, the contralto, who sang so sweetly, who performed so many things so well, and not only on a stage, yes, Barbera, Barbera, yes!, not as young as she once was but still far younger than he, and prepared, unaccountably, to love a gray man throughout the years of her beauty’s greenness…so, in sum, having considered the consequences of doing otherwise, it was better to concentrate for the present on questions of blasphemy and treason.

“Sir Pasha,” he greeted his boyhood friend, his bat-wing eyebrows crushed together in jagged disapproval, “what business can a heathen have here, on Christian land?”

“I have a favor to ask,” Argalia replied, “but not for myself.”

The two boyhood friends were alone in il Machia’s writing room, surrounded by books and heaps of paper, for more than an hour. The sky darkened. Many of the villagers dispersed, having their own business to attend to, but many stayed. The Janissaries remained motionless on their mounts, and so did the two ladies, accepting only an offering of water from the Machiavellis’ maid. Then as night fell the two men came out again and it was plain that some sort of truce had been made. At a sign from Argalia the Janissaries dismounted and Argalia himself helped Qara Köz and her Mirror down from their mounts. The soldiers were to camp on the property for the night, some in the little field near Greve, others in the
poderi
of Fontalla, Il Poggio, and Monte Pagliano. The four Swiss giants would remain at the La Strada villa, camped in a tent on its grounds, to act as guardians of the residents’ safety. Once the men had rested and refreshed themselves, however, the company would move on. But it would leave something of great value behind.

The women were coming to stay, Niccolò informed his wife, the foreign ladies, the
Mogor
princess and her servant girl. Marietta received the news as if it were a sentence of death. She was to be killed by beauty, burned at the stake of her husband’s interminable lustfulness. The most beautiful and desirable females anyone in Percussina had ever seen—the queen demonesses—were to be housed under her roof, and as a consequence of their presence she, Marietta, would simply cease to exist. Only the two ladies would exist. She would be her husband’s nonexistent wife. Food would appear on the table at mealtimes and the laundry would be done and the house kept in order and her husband would not notice who was doing these things because he would be drowning in the eyes of the foreign witches whose overwhelming desirability would simply erase her from the scene. The children would have to be moved, maybe into the house at the eight canals, along the Roman Road, and she would have to stretch herself between that place and La Strada, and it would be impossible, it could not happen, she would not permit it.

She began to scold him, right there in public, beneath the eyes of the whole village and the albino giants and the figure of Death who was Argalia returned from the dead, but il Machia held up a hand and for a moment he looked once more like the grandee of Florence he had so recently been, and she saw that he meant business, and fell silent.

“Okay,” she said. “It’s not a princess’s palace we have to offer, so they better not complain, that’s all.”

After eleven years of marriage to her philandering husband Signora Marietta’s temper had frayed, and now he shamelessly blamed her irritability for driving him away, into, for example, the harlot Barbera’s boudoir. That shrieking Salutati, whose plan was quite simply to outlive Marietta Corsini and then usurp her kingdom, following her into the master bedroom at the villa of La Strada, where La Corsini was mistress and mother to Niccolò’s children. It made Marietta determined to live to a hundred and eleven, to see her rival buried, and to dance naked on her pauper’s grave under a gibbous moon. She was horrified by the vehemence of her dreams but had stopped denying the truths they contained. She was capable of rejoicing in another woman’s death. Perhaps she was even capable of expediting its arrival. It might have to be murder, she reflected, because she knew little of witchcraft, and so her spells usually failed. Once she rubbed her entire body with a holy unguent before having sex with her husband, which was to say before forcing him to have sex with her, and if she had been a better witch it would have bound him to her forever. Instead he headed off to Barbera’s as usual the next afternoon and she swore at his retreating back, calling him a godless whoremaster who didn’t even respect the sanctity of the blessed oil.

He didn’t hear her, of course, but the children did, their eyes were everywhere, their ears heard everything, they were like the whispering consciences of the house. She might have thought of them as her holy ghosts except that she had to feed them and mend their clothes and put cold compresses on their foreheads when they had a fever. So they were real enough; but her anger and jealousy were more real than they were and pushed them, her own children, into the back of her mind. The children were eyes and ears and mouths and sweet breathing in the night. They were peripheral. What filled her vision was this man, her husband, so saturnine, so learned, so attractive, such a failure, this expelled, exiled man, who still hadn’t understood what was truly of value in life, even the
strappado
hadn’t taught him the value of love and simplicity, not even the repudiation of his whole life and work by the citizenry to whose service he had dedicated himself had taught him that it was better to give his love and loyalty to those close to home, and not to the public in general. He had a good wife, she had been a loving wife to him, and yet he chased after cheap young cunt. He had his dignity and erudition, and his small but sufficient estate, and yet he wrote degrading letters to the Medici court every day, begging in servile fashion for some kind of public work. They were sycophantic letters, unworthy of his dark skeptical genius, soul-lessening words. He scorned what he should have treasured: this humble patrimony, this soil, these houses, these woods and fields, and the woman who was the humble goddess of his corner of the earth.