City of God Page 4

  “I say the problem’s the French,” one man said. “And Valentino is the man to deal with them.”

  “Valentino and the Pope are under the French heel. No, no, my friends—the hope of Italy does not sit on the Chair of Saint Peter. We must think for ourselves rather than hope someone else can save us.”

  Nicholas chewed a mouthful of crushed apple and cheese. He reached for his wine. He had remarked this before, that men belonged to either of these two camps, when they spoke of Valentino—in fact he had heard the same arguments, even many of the same phrases, used a dozen times before.

  “Italy is the firstborn of Europe. It is for us to take our place, to lead the rest of Christendom back to virtue.”

  “Ah,” Amadeo cried, rising in his place, “and here is Don Pedro himself.”

  Nicholas startled, his head jerking up and his gaze flying toward the door. Amadeo was striding around the table, his hands outstretched, to meet the two men coming into the room. One was much the older, but their faces were similar, long and dour, their beards trimmed to a point like Amadeo’s pointed chin. Amadeo did not have to announce, although he did, that they were gentlemen from Spain.

  They were introduced one by one to every man there, and took their places, sitting on the far side of the table from Nicholas. Amadeo went to his seat again.

  “Nicholas,” he said, as he was seating himself, and his servant was filling up his glass, “you have hardly spoken. What do you think of the problem of the French?”

  Nicholas’s glass was empty. He leaned back in his chair, sliding his hands into his lap. “The French are no problem to me, since they are allies of Florence.”

  “Come, come.” The man who had spoken out in favor of Valentino leaned across the table, his dark eyes intent. “Surely you must see that this is the very root of our crisis here. Italy is in pieces, in fragments, and each fragment obeys only the blind urge of its own advantage. In such wise does a backward nation like the French find a way to penetrate and destroy us.”

  “I cannot argue with you over that,” Nicholas said. “But the time to lock the door is when the wolf is on the threshold, not when he has come in and sat down at the table. Since 1492 the French have been dining at our table.”

  “They can be thrust out again,” said the man who had argued against Valentino. “By those with strong hearts.”

  The older of the two Spaniards turned to his son and said, in Spanish, “Would their Italian hearts were as stout as their tongues,” and the son laughed.

  “They can be more easily accommodated,” Nicholas said.

  Several of the other Romans booed and bahed at him like a flock of sheep. At his place, Amadeo smiled and smiled, his devilish chin on his fist and his eyes sliding from one man to the next.

  “We cannot fight the French,” Nicholas said. “Perhaps we can teach them the arts of civilization, innocent of them as their people are.”

  “I say we can fight for what is ours! And Valentino is the man to lead us.”

  The Spaniard turned his head again toward his son and murmured, “As the Devil leads his parade of fools. Do you mark this—how childish!”

  Nicholas put out his hand to his glass again. Amadeo had started this; it angered him to see Amadeo gloating over the tempest he had stirred up. His glass was empty. Putting it down, he knocked it over.

  “As for you,” the man supporting Valentino said, “you are not even of Italian blood!”

  “No,” Nicholas said, his eyes lowered. “And neither is Valentino, by half at least.”

  “The better half,” the Spaniard said.

  “Don Pedro,” Amadeo called. “What say you to this argument?”

  The Spaniard lifted his head, slick with oil, and said in measured Italian, “This is a matter for Italians—for you men, with your special knowledge and special concern. I can only listen and hope to understand better.”

  Nicholas lifted his gaze and caught the Spaniard’s eye. “Most graciously spoken, señor,” he said, in Spanish.

  Don Pedro was too dark to blush noticeably, but his head rose, his neck long as a chicken’s above his flat Spanish collar, and he coughed. His son fumbled with the napkins.

  “You have my apologies,” the father said, in Spanish, to Nicholas only. “But only for speaking what I think. For the thought, I make no apology.”

  “You do not know the facts,” Nicholas said.

  “The facts! I know this: while you in Italy waste your wiles on each other, we in Spain have fought the true enemy, now, seven hundred years.”

  “The true enemy, I surmise, is Islam? That depends on your point of view.”

  “No,” the Spaniard said curtly. “That, sir, depends on God. We are annoying our host, who speaks only Italian.” Pointedly he turned his head toward Amadeo, and in Italian said, “Your pardon, my friend. A private matter.”

  Just after dawn, Nicholas woke suddenly in a strange bed, not knowing where he was. He sat up. He was sweating and his sheets were damp. The air smelled of must and dirt. Above him, the ceiling sloped up steeply to a crossbeam; just under the peak was a little round window. He realized that he was in an attic room in the legation building.

  The round window showed a patch of white sky. The rest of the room was still quite dark, the fire having gone out in the grate. Juan slept in a low cot at the foot of Nicholas’s bed. He snored like a child, a murmur in the throat.

  Nicholas lay back on his pillow. He could not sleep now. He had been dreaming an old dream, familiar as the room was strange. He watched the small round window grow brighter in the wall. In the dream he was lying gripped in a surrounding mass that surged and pushed on him; he could not move, and the tight wall around him, alternately smooth and horribly crinkled, all but shut off his breath.

  He let the dream slip away from him and filled the space in his mind with new reveries. The round window held his attention. He had lain beneath such a round window once before, as a child, sleeping with his parents, in another country. He shut his eyes. A light sleep fell on him; he wakened in a few moments, uncomfortable in the warmth of the room, and cast off the sheet. Slept again. Woke.

  The boy who slept between his parents never lay abed after dawn. Up with the first light, he went out exploring the streets of that far-away village. In the stinking alleys and the markets he had enjoyed a fantasy of power and adventure. The town children hated him for a foreigner and took every chance to attack him. He lurked behind trees and walls, waiting until his enemies chanced by, and pelted them with stones or horse dung, and ran. It was the running he loved. The stones and shit were only to incite them to the chase, so that he could lead them here and there at his will, and finally lose them. They seldom caught him.

  He pressed his hands over his eyes. When he remembered those times he saw himself as he was now, but smaller: slightly built, with pale brown hair and dark brown eyes, small hands and feet, deep lines around his mouth and on either side of the top of his nose, like little misplaced horns, the marks of one who wrote by poor light. A middle-aged boy.

  Above him the round window whitened like a moon. Nicholas dozed again.

  It was raining by noon. Nicholas sat in his chamber making out the duty list for the next week. The rain beat against the shuttered windows and leaked in over the sill until he stuffed an inky rag into the crevice.

  Just before noon, Angela Borgia’s little page Piccolo came, a cloak over his rosy satin, to return Nicholas’s house key. The boy was shivering; his nose dripped. Nicholas sent him out to the corridor to wait while he read the note of thanks Madonna Angela had sent with the key.

  She had not written it; a secretary had. The fine chancery hand was almost identical to Nicholas’s. Nicholas folded the slip of paper and put it in a drawer of his desk. He opened the door to send the page away, but Piccolo had already gone, leaving a trail of waterdrops along the brown marble fl
oor.

  When the legation closed its doors for the afternoon, Nicholas and Juan walked through the city to the house behind the Colosseo. The wild-growing yard stirred and moved in the rain as if the vines and sprawling shrubs danced to it. Nicholas walked once around the yard, but the rain had blotted away any footprints.

  The house was cold. A dead fire lay half-burned on the hearth. The furniture in the main room was slightly rearranged; one of the lyre-backed chairs near the center of the room had been turned to face the other. In the little kitchen, two dirty wine glasses stood on the stone sideboard. Nicholas sniffed at the drying residue in the bottom of one glass. It was not his wine. Whoever had come here last night had brought his own wine.

  He went through the main room and opened the door to the bedroom. The bed had been pulled out from the wall, and the blankets tucked under the mattress. He wondered if anyone had actually slept there.

  Juan appeared beside him on the threshold of the bedroom. “They were lovers, you see.”

  “Perhaps.” The blankets tucked under the mattress whetted his suspicions. Soldiers did that.

  Juan put his head into the room; he turned his head from side to side, birdlike, and let out a chirrup of triumph. Going to the bed, he picked something from the pillow.

  “Proof final.” The old man held up a long pale hair, blond or gray.

  Nicholas turned back toward the sitting room. He did not want to believe that Angela Borgia had slept here with a lover. Something else she had said played on his doubts: Will you need some place to stay? I can provide one. Had she not meant that provocatively? He knew her for the kind of woman to whom his preference for his own kind was an irresistible lure. How could she have offered to entertain him elsewhere if she meant to be entertaining someone here? Yet when he considered the words he remembered her speaking, he found nothing really there but mild concern.

  He went back to the sitting room. His gaze traveled around the place, the painted walls and spindly furniture. All in a rush he loathed the way the place was appointed. He would have it changed at once, as soon as he collected his salary, to something classic and quiet. Tapestries perhaps. Something more solemn. He crossed the room to the hearth.

  Enough remained on the fire to reveal that it had been laid out in a cabin stack. Pleased with this new evidence, he knelt down to examine it. That was certainly a soldier’s work. The charred wood looked wet. The rain was soaking coin-sized patches in the deep bed of ash. Nicholas reached into the back of the fireplace. A long thin flake of ash crumbled at his touch. Had it been a piece of paper?

  Juan was going into the kitchen. Nicholas took down the heavy-bladed tongs from the rack beside the hearth and propped the half-burned logs up against one another and stuffed kindling from the bucket into the spaces. He lit the fire from his tinderbox. He allowed himself no more conjecture. When the fire was catching well over the logs he pulled the nearest chair over and sat down, his feet to the drying warmth, and waited for his dinner.

  With Valentino’s army eating up the countryside, the Florentines were forced by desperation into offering the Pope’s son a contract of employment as the Signory’s captain, as the Italian fashion was. In return for maintaining a certain number of armed men at the disposal of the Signory, Valentino would receive an extravagant amount of money. However, the Florentines carefully left out of the contract when and how the money was to be paid.

  Bruni sent for Nicholas one evening, just before the legation’s gate would close, and handed a slip of paper to him.

  “What think you of this?”

  The ambassador’s chamber was already dark except for the light of a large lamp on the polished oakwood desk. Nicholas held the paper in the light to read it.

  “Per Baccho,” he said. “Who sent this?”

  “It came from a Florentine merchant trading in Naples. What make you of it? Will the King of Spain respond?”

  Nicholas read the note through again. It said in only a few lines that the King of Naples, fearing the French, had asked his kinsman the King of Spain for aid. That single sentence could shake all Europe into a new shape and make a different Italy. He put the note down on the desk beside the lamp.

  Bruni was peering at him, expecting some answer. Nicholas cleared his throat. His mind flew to the mysterious use the Borgias had made of his house. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Find out.” Bruni poked his forefinger into Nicholas’s chest. “You are supposed to know these things. Everyone always congratulates me on having you—how valuable you must be, knowing everything—” the sharp finger dug into Nicholas’s chest again. “How will the Pope receive such interference? If Spain does come to fight the French, which side will the Borgias fall on?”

  “I don’t know,” Nicholas said.

  Bruni’s voice rose to a bellow. “Why did you not learn of this, Messer Nicholas? Why did I have to learn of it from a trader in salt fish?” He bent forward and shouted into Nicholas’s face: “Why have you failed me, Messer Nicholas?”

  It was unjust. Bruni never listened to him anyway. Nicholas closed his eyes, his skin burning, as if he were whipped.

  “The King of Spain is Aragonese! So is the King of Naples—so is the Pope! Is it so difficult for you to see these correspondences? What do you know of Ferdinand of Aragon? Nothing! What do you know of Gonsalvo da Cordoba? Nothing!”

  Which was untrue. Gonsalvo, who had shaped the Spanish army into the most modern in Europe, was even now in Sicily with the Spanish fleet. Nicholas bit his lips together.

  “God—God—” Bruni flung up his hands. “I must make such decisions that Florence may stand or fall by, and for your laziness or stupidity I have no information to base them on. You have my leave!”

  “Yes, Excellency.”

  Nicholas’s legs were quivering. He went quickly back to his chamber, where a scribe waited with a question about a minor document. Nicholas shut the door in the man’s face. Sitting down behind the desk, he raked his fingers through his hair, shaking from head to foot with rage and shame. He longed to go back to Bruni’s chamber and there say into his face what follies Bruni himself was guilty of. He wondered who else had heard. Bruni had shouted, at the end—the noise might have carried down the corridor. In the workroom, were the scribes and pages huddling together over this choice humiliation of the hated secretary? He pressed his fingers against his eyes until they hurt.

  It was easier to think about Spain. He knew more about Spain, in fact, than Bruni guessed, and that had led him into the error of dismissing the importance of the Spanish fleet to Naples. The war against the Mohammedans meant more to the Spaniards than being Spanish. They had been fighting with the Moors to control Spain for seven hundred years. Only eight or nine years before, united under a Queen of Castile and a King of Aragon, they had thrown out the last of the Moors, and Nicholas, like nearly everyone else, had supposed that by nature the Spanish would follow the Moors into Africa. It was the obvious step on. Sicily, more African than Italian, was the logical point to start from. So he had read it.

  He rubbed his hands against his face, wondering how, or even if, he could pay Bruni back. He longed to pay Bruni back.

  It was night and his chamber was completely dark. A chill draft crept in under the edge of the shutter. His coat was hanging in the workroom. He shivered in his shirt.

  He wondered who had received the key to his house at the Aragonese convent, the afternoon of that meeting in his house. He wondered why he could not stand against Bruni’s ranting. For a long hour he sat there in the dark until at last the cold drove him home.

  Two weeks later, in the sun of early May, Nicholas and the ambassador were summoned to the Leonine City. Pope Alexander received them in the garden behind the palace, where the old man was overseeing the work of a gardener. After the heavy rains of the winter, the grass and shrubbery were swarming upward in forests of new shoots; huge white
and yellow blooms weighted the stems of the exotic plants. In this opulence of nature, framed by the green fountains of the palms, Pope Alexander in his gold brocade and white ermine strolled from flower to flower, directing the gardener which bloom to cut.

  Nicholas followed a step behind Bruni, who followed a step behind the Pope; his hands tucked behind his back, Nicholas listened to them argue.

  “The agreement was honorably concluded,” Alexander said. He looked hot, and slightly out of breath, although he did no more than walk and talk.

  Bruni bowed in the elegant Roman fashion, his hands out, his knee flexed. “Your Holiness, I am devastated that circumstances force me into disagreement with you. Let me bring to the attention of Your Holiness that the contract to which you refer was wrung from Florence by threats and brutality—”

  The Pope pointed with one large hand to a magnificent trumpet-shaped bloom; the gardener cut its long stem with his shears. “Are you accusing our dear son, the Gonfalonier of Holy Mother Church, of such base usages? Tread carefully, Monsignor Bruni.”

  He smiled at Bruni. Alexander enjoyed these dramas. The ermine around his neck was damp with sweat. Bruni, bowing again, missed the smile, which passed instead to Nicholas. The Pope turned back to the flowers.

  “Your Holiness, His Excellency the Duke Cesare has led his troops into Florentine territory, threatened to sack a Florentine town—”

  The Pope inspected the scentless yellow blossom. “Our dear son needed fresh foraging for his troops. He is a captain of your Republic, is he not, and has a certain right to march in Tuscany.”

  “Because he has extorted a contract from the Signory.”

  “Which the Signory now refuses to honor.” Alexander glanced around again at Bruni. The coarse skin of his cheek was pocked with large pores like scars, and a pattern of red veins showed on either side of his bold Spanish nose. Jewish nose, said unkind rumor. He held the yellow ruffle of the flower against his cheek again. Its inner surface was flecked lightly with brown.