The Botticelli Secret

7
Leaving Florence in search of sanctuary was perhaps the hardest part of the whole night. Under a gray smear of a sky, we made our way through the slums of Ognissanti and began to climb the hill to Fiesole. Ognissanti, as I already told you, is a shithole. And the former home of Signor Botticelli. A fitting home for the bastard, if you ask me. Shanties and shacks cramp together, grays and browns, assorted in size and shape like a grin of bad teeth. And the residents! More than once the sight of a monk and a girl together elicited a leer or a gesture from one of the hideous citizens, who seemed to have been belched up from Signor Dante’s hell. The whole place stank, too, of the numerous tanneries and their attendant sludge. Everywhere eviscerated animals were stretched out in unlikely starshapes like guilty souls on the rack. I lost my shoe in a suck of mud where the Arno had burst its banks in spring, but was too tired and terror shredded to care. My fine shoes with the golden points had already had to contend with piss and blood tonight; meet it was that the mud should take one. I threw its fellow after it and saw the monk eyeing me.
“What?”
He shook his head. “That may not have been wise, signorina. The way is long and hard.”
I narrowed my eyes. “How long?”
“Above five miles. And upward.” He made a weak gesture up the hill, to where an indistinct skyline was a silver thread emerging from the dark. I shrugged, with a bravado I did not feel, and trudged after him barefoot. My feet stung on the path, proving the brother’s point—but I had already lost one shoe before I flung the other; what was I to do, walk the hill with one foot shod and the other bare? I raised my chin and caught him up—no mean feat for he was tall, his stride was long, and his pace quick.
“Where exactly are we going?” I puffed.
He did not turn. “To Fiesole. There is a Franciscan monastery on the hilltop there—they will offer us sanctuary and sustenance until we may calculate our most expeditious course of action.”
I garnered three things from this speech.
Qualcosa Uno: Brother Guido no longer had the notion of ditching me. His use of “we” and “our” warmed my chilled heart. But,
Qualcosa Due: he was angry with me. And I could not blame him. One minute he was safe at Santa Croce, with nothing more to worry him but what volume he would read in the morning, and the next minute he was running for his life with a prostitute who had needlessly placed him in mortal danger. Oh, yes, and,
Qualcosa Tre: his style of speech was somewhat different from mine; he would never use one syllable where three would do.
I trudged beside him in silence for a spell, but as the ground began to rise behind the city I had to ask him to stop as my feet were blistering. The look he gave me was not unkind, and he helped me to sit in a broom bush for a little. I wiggled my sore toes, thinking that these poor members were not designed for such expeditions. I had always had such pretty white feet—even that fiend Botticelli had remarked upon them as I had held my pose as Flora. I remembered, too, soaking my feet in a golden bowl of rose water at the house of a minor Medici, when the silver Turkish slippers he liked me to wear in bed had rubbed them raw. Now they were a mess, and fat tears of self-pity swelled in my eyes. The monk swam into view as he knelt before me. “Signorina” he said, haltingly. “May I offer, that is . . . in an effort to alleviate your suffering, to offer you present relief . . .”
To my surprise he was holding out to me his own sandals, rough leather paddles with a simple thong apiece to hold them on. But I only had to try one against my foot to know that I might as well have worn a pair of twin shrimp barges from the Arno, they were so large. The difference in size between the monk’s feet and mine elicited the first smile of the evening. My grin broadened with the thought that he must have a big cock.
Below us the kites wheeled around the great dome of the cathedral, the striped marble turning it to a great tiger sleeping in the half-light, sated by the hunt and waiting for dawn. Beside it the lantern tower of the Medici palace, home to Florence’s greatest family, stood crowned with teeth like a crocodile’s gaping jaw. Brother Guido hauled me to my feet and I could sense him softening toward me—gaining an understanding that I had not wished for what had happened, that I had fallen into this pass by foolishness, but now wished it away, like someone who has jumped headlong into a well and realizes his mistake on the way down. I thought of saying somewhat of this to the brother, but then remembered that my metaphor might have unfortunate recollections for the fellow; I saw again his friend’s head bouncing down the well shaft in Santa Croce, and heard the attendant splash. So I kept my peace and let him speak if he would. And at length, he did.
“Well, Signorina Vetra, you’d better tell me exactly what happened today. Try to leave nothing out, for there may be important circumstances which might mitigate our culpability when we attempt to clear ourselves of this business.”
I turned wide eyes upon him. “You think we’ll be able to get out of this?”
He nodded beneath his cowl. “I’m certain that if all is explained, the thing can be put to rights.”
I saw that his confidence had risen with the terrain, and felt it in myself too. The road snaked ahead, and pointed black cypresses pierced the sky, like a rank of spears defending us. Regiments of vines stood in serried ranks, hiding our progress and providing a pathway. The vine leaves were glossy in the fading moon, night purple with a bloom of blue chalk. I craved the sweet globes of the grape harvest, but it was too early in the year; the vines were naked. My stomach was light but my shoulders were heavy with the burden of secrets. If I recounted the entire story to the monk, he would share the weight with me. The field mice, roused by our step, scuttled over my bare feet, making me giggle. Our breath smoked as we panted, but I was warmed by my miniver and the exercise. I even forgot my poor feet for a spell. Aye, as we climbed up the blue hill away from Florence, the sleeping tiger and the tower of teeth, I began to feel safer, and wondered, briefly, if we were mistaken to feel so.
But my companion, too, sounded positively chirpy as we climbed into the lightening sky. “Yes, Miss Vetra, we are not entirely friendless. The abbot of this monastery we seek now is an old friend, and my family, of course—” He broke off. But not before I had divined that he was very well connected, and might be of some influence. He waited, and I plunged into the silence with an account of what had passed that day, the commission to become Flora for Botticelli, the glories of the painting in progress, the artist’s sudden anger. I told him of my thievery of the smaller painting from the panel, and, somewhat shamefacedly, of my mischievous replacement of it with the pamphlet Brother Guido had given me. I then told, in muted tones, of the murder of Enna and Bembo, that in the first instance my identity was mistaken, and in the second, I was wanted for murder. The tale was long, and by the time I had told it, my throat was as raw as my feet. But we had come some considerable distance in the telling, and were now among the lush villas that sat on the hill, where, as at San Miniato, the rich roost loftily above the city. The way had improved, and I peered curiously through the high gates and arches to elegant, peaceful courtyards with shaped trees and ornamental lakes.
Once—I had to look back to make sure—I glimpsed a giraffe, striding slowly in the blue predawn, bending its long neck to nibble at a myrtle hedge. I turned to Brother Guido, to share this fantastic sight, but the monk was thoughtful once again. I thought at first that his anger had returned, but a glance at his noble profile told me that he was considering carefully what he had been told. I considered the tale myself—and concluded, with a sinking heart, that it sounded like a tale told by an idiot; a fantasist and lunatic. But the brother, who had seen the evening’s conclusion to the day’s beginnings with his own eyes, seemed in no wise inclined to doubt my story. Continuing his steady pace, he eventually broke his silence. “Even the most judgmental listener would have to concede that, but for a moment of madness and mischief on your part, the sequel to your transgressions was far in excess of the relative proportions of a fitting punishment.”
His bookish language was beginning to irritate—only when I looked at his handsome countenance could I begin to forgive. “Meaning?”
“In short, signorina, these forces that pursue you are clearly concerned with a greater crime than a stolen painting.”
I digested this in silence. “What crime?” I asked, truly be-mused, but before he could reply I spied a monastic mass of gated high walls and a steeple, and grabbed the brother’s arm. Our journey was surely over.
“Vero Madre be praised!” I cried. “Is that the place?”
He shook his head no. “This is San Domenico, the great Dominican monastery and spiritual home of their order.”
I had had enough. “Could we not beg sanctuary here?”
The perfect profile hardened as the head shook again. “No. They would no more shelter a Franciscan than they would shelter one such as yourself . . .” He blushed in the dawn-light, and hurried on to cover his mistaken slur. “That is to say, their order is the only one they recognize, and they follow their rule with strict observances. Our destination”—he pointed skyward again—“sits there, at Fiesole.” I followed the finger to a small golden building above us, crazily perched on the crown of the mountain, with a hundred steps leading to the cloister.
F*ck.
I’m afraid I was not the best of company on the final climb. I was so convinced that San Domenico was our destination, I could not bear even a short distance beyond. My feet bled, I groaned and bellyached, and begged to stop at every step. Our plight and my story were both forgot as we trudged to our goal, and the brother was merciless in his pace. “The dawnlight begins to spread in the valley,” he explained, “the umbra of night is retreating up the hill—we are more visible with every second. Onward.”
But neither his poetic speech nor his warning could move me farther. I had neither energy nor will to complete the final climb. As we reached the stone staircase of the little hilltop monastery I collapsed, weeping, on a stone bench at the foot.
“Just a moment,” I begged. “At least let me put myself to rights before I meet your abbot. You must see the sense in that?”
He let me sit then and rub my feet, moaning with pain as I once again examined their cuts and blisters, magnified a hundredfold from when we had stopped before. After a moment the monk sat beside me, but only when he gasped did I look up and see what he had seen.
And I ceased my bellyaching.
For there below us Florence was laid out like a glittering carpet of gold, wrought by a thousand Persian infidels. The Duomo was now no tiger sentinel, but a warm copper bell, the Arno a twisting ribbon of gilt. A city of fable and infinite beauty in the brand-new light of the day. We stared in silence, shoulder to shoulder, while a feeling of escape and companionship warmed us with the sun at our backs. I began to pat my wild mass of hair into place in preparation to meet the abbot. I rose before my friend, but he held my sleeve. “Don’t you think it’s time you showed me?”
My filthy mind ran the gamut of everything about my person he might be asking to see, before my middle brain reminded me that never, with look or gesture, had he shown any interest in me beyond the irritation of my presence. No, I knew him to be truly devout, so had to ask further. “Show you what?”
“What this is all about.” He half smiled. “The painting.”
I sat again and drew the rolled canvas from my bodice. It was warm from my breasts and somewhat besmottered with sweat, for which I blushed. But he did not seem to notice and unrolled it tenderly in his long, ink-stained fingers, fingers that were clearly used to handling documents of great price. I looked, not at the painting but at his face as he took in the figure of Flora, Venus, the beauteous trio of dancers, the martial figure with the sword, and orange grove encompassing all. He looked for a long, long time in silence, with an expression of almost religious revelation. Saint Paul cannot have looked more ecstatic on the road to Damascus. I found myself, once again, thinking about what he would look like in bed. (Brother Guido, I mean, not Saint Paul; from what little I know of Scripture, I am convinced that that apostle would certainly have been resistant to my charms.) Then he turned and looked at me with his startling blue eyes, full in the face for the first time that night.
“It’s beautiful,” he said. He looked back at the picture in his hand then Florence below him, and then the picture again. “Beautiful,” he repeated. “I don’t know which is more so.”