by CHARLES HENNEBERG
These are not just the ramblings of an old condottiere.
There are more things in this terraqueous universe, and under heaven, than the priests talk of; and I wasn’t always the leathery old soldier who sits here, spinning his yarns over a mug of mead.
I’m telling you of the Florence of yesteryear. Not that anthill scorned by the Signory and a blushing Gonfalonier, but the leonine City of the Red Lily, that was daughter and mistress of the brave. The town that astonished all Italy, and drew foreigners like a lodestone.
1490 ... a year that seems so far away, yet comes so near as soon as I close my eyes! I was young then, a little mad, as we all are at twenty, and well pleased with my person, which the ladies often found to their liking. I belonged, you know, to the noble family of the Pazzi, which had yet been spared its exile and its illustrious misfortunes; one of my uncles was a cardinal, the galleys of another traded as far as the shores of Algeria. My widowed mother and I lived in a charming pink palace in Fiesole. Yes, it was destroyed, later on; like so many things. But that has nothing to do with my story.
You have heard men speak of those matchless years, when a divine breath passed over Italy. It came from the snows of Olympus, from the violet sea, from golden Byzantium under the barbarian’s heel; in our hearts and in the soil of our hills, it awoke old sleeping gods, the Graces, and the arts. In every mountain spring, a timid naiad awoke, parting the green strands of her hair; at dawn, on the trampled grass, one saw the dancing trail of a satyr. Artists began to paint and carve, women were proud and beautiful, and science, abandoning its alchemist’s alembics, looked to the skies. Afterward, we had Girolamo Savonarola and the Inquisition. . . . Let us pass on.
For me (O marvel!) those years corresponded to my youth. I wasted little time in the counting house of my merchant uncle, selling Greek velvet and the incense of the Axumites. I composed sonnets, like Cornazano, music—like Lorenzo de’ Medici—and I numbered among my friends the master Perugino. This famous artist had once painted the portrait of my parents, and my sainted mother held him in great esteem.
It was in this studio, in fact, that I met Nardo—you know, Nardo, the youngest of his students, whom the master used as model for his angelic musicians? You can still see him here and there among the frescoes, playing on the harp or the rebeck—his pearly skin, blond curls, and his strange, empty eyes. . . . “Half his soul always seems to be absent,” said the master, with a laugh. Anyhow, Nardo—see, his name escapes me (it’s old age, or that wound from Agnadel). It matters little; it will come back to me. He was an inn servant’s bastard, but legitimized by his father, a country squire. Afterward, he made his own way. . . .
I went often to the studio of Messer Perugino. His nature was happy, his genius limitless. It was he, no other, who endowed Italy with those misty twilights, between darkness and day, broken by a ray of supernal dawn; to him, too, we owe those first heads of youths and pensive virgins, the velvet-smooth faces, the eyelids half closed on some ravishing secret. Later, artists understood and defined these things, but none was able to copy that silent expectation of a miracle: it belonged to our era.
Messer Perugino was then at the zenith of his fortunes, and he surrounded himself with brilliant young men. Being rather vain, he had also launched the fashion among artists of wearing a long purple or black velvet cloak, which became him very well, and a Florentine beret tilted over the ear.
To entertain his friends and their merry companions, the “honestae meretrix” of Florence, the master had rented and redecorated a huge shack on the Arno; it had formerly been part of a row of grain warehouses, deserted since the Great Plague; it adjoined the Alley of the Old Jews, but Perugino liked it. Outside, this vast structure still looked run-down, but the interior was like a cathedral vault—many rooms had been made into one, and the walls were covered with extravagant drawings. We took much pleasure there, drank deep, and sang bacchic hymns in Latin, while the little tradesmen of the neighborhood trembled in their beds, and their chaste spouses hastily snuffed out the candles, crossing themselves ... or got up to shoot the bolts on their daughters’ doors.
Their daughters . . . We’ll come to them.
One evening when I was at Messer Perugino’s, and he had taken it into his head to paint me as Saint Sebastian pierced with arrows (as Mantegna did with one of his friends), a strange personage came to visit the master. Tall, thin, dressed in black, with his leathery complexion and his crooked features, he might have been mistaken for the Wandering Jew himself, were it not that he wore a sword like a gentleman.
The visitor introduced himself: Messer Deodat Lazarelli, which was, he informed us voluntarily, a corruption of his Arab name of Al-Hazreh. You say there was a scholar of that name? I know him not. The Deodat in question explained to us that his ancestors had been barbaric kings in Cathay, living on herbs and mares’ milk, and offering their wives to passing strangers in token of friendship. Our Deodat had been converted to the Christian faith, and, leaving that plateau where his spiritual advancement made it impossible to stay, he had made his fortune and retired to Florence, “the city,” he said, “which has become the center of the universe.” And he asked the master of Perugia to paint a portrait of his daughter, whose name was Noemi, or Nahema.
The master had other commissions in hand, and the prospect of painting a mud-faced girl little pleased him; he declined the offer, recommending certain colleagues of lesser renown to Al-Hazreh. But the old rascal knew how to make himself heard; he wasted no time in discussion, but emptied a long purse of red Morocco leather on the table.
The painter’s eye gleamed—not that Perugino was in the least avaricious, but he could already see all the beautiful things he might bring into being from that golden heap. In a toneless voice, he told the Arab that his daughter might come to pose on the morrow.
“No,” said the other dryly, in a changed tone, as if he had bought the right to be insolent. “My daughter cannot leave my house, nor appear in public. You will come to me. Don’t think I am wasting your time: I live behind your house, just inside the Alley of the Old Jews, in the seed merchant’s house, which I have purchased.”
“But,” said I, “nobody could live in that ruin! The place has been abandoned for a hundred years or more!”
(I thought I knew Florence—unforeseeable, inexhaustible city!)
“I live there,” retorted the man haughtily. (With my chest bare and daubed with “dragon’s blood,” no doubt he took me for a hired model.) “As for the rest, I shall send a slave to conduct you there, master.”
Without a glance for me, he bowed to the master and left.
“What think you of that pismire, Guido?” Perugino asked me.
“That he lacks courtesy, and that my hand itches. . . . But he’s a stranger; we must make allowances for his barbaric habits. What will you do?”
“I know not,” answered the artist. “Bah! Gold is always good to take! If the wench be not too ugly, I’ll botch it together in three sittings and leave the background for Nardo to finick at. He’ll give a good account of himself—won’t you, my chick, my swan?”
Concealed behind the tapestries, Nardo gave us a hint of his charming, drowsy smile.
I left the studio supposing I should never see or hear again of the unpleasant Al-Hazreh.
* * * *
But destiny toys with men, and that same evening—out of idleness, and to try out my new black sorrel—I wandered down the Alley of the Old Jews. There I surprised a singular activity: a facade was being covered with mortar, the metal-work of the shutters was being polished; giant Negroes were carrying bundles of golden cloth, ebony furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, jade and onyx vases, and those astonishing screens of cloisonné enamel which were beginning to reach us from the Orient. Others were spreading a deep-piled Mirzapur on the steps, still others were sponging the flagstones of the entry with aromatics, burning incense and benzoin there.
The installation of a prince, if such he was! I stayed there, surprised and charmed: in a few days and without commotion, these diligent servants had transformed the ruin into a fairy palace. But porters were springing up afresh, bent caryatids carrying chests in the sinister form of coffins, made of pale lemonwood enriched only by its grain. A fantastic thing: while they were setting them on the ground, a chorus of thin and discordant voices reached me, as if from a flock of hungry sparrows; I turned, thinking a crowd of children had followed me, but the Alley was deserted, the gabled houses dark, the doors closed.
Nevertheless, a yellow rose, with a peppery scent, fell on the neck of my sorrel.
After that, I had no rest because I had failed to enter that house of Barbary. Youth is so fashioned: if Al-Hazreh had been less secretive and jealous, never would I have found myself under his windows. And if the rose had been white and of a less piquant perfume ... It is natural to invent one’s own chimeras: already I was imagining that beauty in the robes of a Empress of Cathay, with tilted eyes and a skin of yellow satin.
... In which I was mistaken.
The next morning, meeting Nardo accompanied by an enormous black who carried brushes and canvas, I fell into step. Nardo made me a present of his angelic smile. The morning was mild, the sky of an exquisite mauve; silvery carillons fell from the campaniles, and mist floated on the transparent river.
I was apprehensive of meeting the gallows bird Al-Hazreh, but he had the good grace to absent himself, and we went up, through all the enchantments of the thousand and one nights. One room succeeded another, each with its lintel of lapis-lazuli and its ivory door; on each doorsill slept a black; a fountain pulsed in each lotus-shaped basin.
One immense room, which had been part of the warehouses, was now transformed with exquisite taste into a studio: daylight entering by a window of colored crystal was softened by turquoise veils; it gave things an aspect aquatic and strange. An ebony screen, pierced in the form of lilies and swans, marked off the space of a choir. There was little furniture, save for some armchairs and small tables garlanded with mother-of-pearl, now mauve, now pink, according to the light. In the center of the hall, masses of iris lay in a basin carved of blue opaline. I also noted the lemon-wood chests, disposed here and there on a little platform. An orchestra hidden behind the screen began a soft canzone.
On the platform sat a girl. I know not how to describe her, save by comparison with the rare and precious things she evoked: moonlight, the shivering of willows, pearls, mist floating on the water. Angelic, androgynous, mysterious, without a past, without a country, sprung perhaps from an alien universe. ... I believe she was dressed in mist and azure. I believe ... At the first glimpse, I fell under an unaccountable spell; I was powerless, turned into an automaton.
I let Nardo go through the necessary motions, unfold the easel and prepare the colors, always keeping behind him where I could see my fair unknown. Nardo, by contrast, was vivaciously selecting his charcoal sticks.
I promise you I did not follow the progress of his work; I was plunged into an abyss of vertiginous sensations, and I saw, I remembered, beings, things, whole sequences of time—strange, magnificent, or dreadful—all of which bore some relation to the adorable creature who sat before me.
Two series of images were blended: first a black gulf, shot through with nebulous gleams, stars, like the pearls of a necklace spilled on velvet—and windings, spirals of flame, emerald and purple explosions (such as, I know now, no artificer can produce). A dazzling light burst through the colored window —and it was the face of a giant globe.
Then, like a traveler who contemplates the valley of the Arno from the summit of the Apennines, I saw another Earth come toward me, with its sharp reliefs, its frosted peaks, and its craters of night among the great luminous plateaus; phosphorescent oceans beat upon their shores, and a gloomy light chilled the ruins of magnificent cities. And these landscapes at the same time were a song and a music, mounting by stairs of silver toward the vast heavens.
“Can you paint that?” asked the girl, addressing herself equally to Nardo and me. I would have pointed out wherein lay her error, but my voice died away on my lips. Nardo was already drawing with his native ease and swiftness, darting a tangle of spidery lines onto the canvas. A glance at his sketch made me turn pale: without exchanging a word with me, he had just copied my visions.
We were so absorbed that we did not hear Messer Perugino enter the studio, then withdraw on tiptoe.
* * * *
I asked the master’s permission to be present at the second sitting, and Perugino, who had just sunk a new arrow into the biceps of Saint Sebastian, looked up in surprise. “Do you really want to?”
“Per Bacco! If not, would I speak of it?”
“Good,” he conceded, spreading a bloody highlight across the pectorals of my double, “but don’t swear: it sits ill with the expression of a martyr. I grant you that the arrangement of milord Al-Hazreh’s lodgings is ingenious, and his ambition to have me paint his wax doll is amusing. . . .”
“His-what?”
“His automaton,” said the artist. “His demon, queen of the vampires. His giant homunculus.” And taking my indignation at its height: “You haven’t looked upon her closely, then? It’s true that with all the lights dimmed, you might be excused.”
Breathless, I could only form the words; “But that girl spoke to us!”
“Really? After all, the thing is possible. Such astonishing engines have been made! In France, it appears, some angels were constructed of gilded wood, with a mechanism so perfect that they walked, shook their wings, and even spoke a compliment, at the coronation of the young queen, Ysabeau de Bavière. But Paracelcus maintains that not only the mandragores, but certain bulbs of the white lily, grown in jars and buried in dung at the full of the moon, with appropriate incantations, give birth to living beings a cubit tall. These sprats, though very devoted to their masters, are of a vicious and malignant humor. Certain alchemists relate that they live on air, like the fish of Cathay, but it is generally conceded that they feed on a blood jelly. Parenthetically, it would interest me to know how Al-Hazreh procures this, since it is compounded of human blood. ... At any rate, automaton, homunculus, or mandragore, whether your Signorina Nahema belongs to one species or the other, it is certain she is no Christian creature, and I shall not paint her! I shall not let Art itself, in my person, be abased!”
“But,” I protested again, “what you speak of is impossible, senseless! Nardo, who has painted her, will certify—”
Exasperated, the master interrupted. “Nardo! What a witness! A stripling who never has dared lift his eyes to a living woman! An automaton is just the sort of toy that fascinates children. Well, let Nardo paint her, since he understands her so well, and he can also gild a few tavern and cookshop signboards, to earn sweets for his serving-wench mother!”
This unjust judgment confirmed my suspicions: to wit, that the master was jealous of Nardo’s progress.
* * * *
I went to the second sitting with the firm intention of assuring myself that Signorina Al-Hazreh was no statue of wax. I found the same blue paradise, the same enchantment, and an attentive Nardo, bent over his canvas.
We were hardly settled when a black wench brought the girl an elongated silver lute. Dwarfs served us rose and lemon ices, and poured heavy date wine, cooled with snow, into rainbow-colored murrhines. (I wondered later if some philter in it had not stirred up my senses.) Nahema played and sang, in a voice of crystal; her melodies spoke of a dead world, once delightful; of stars and glaciers, or of lost souls wandering in search of one another. And as she sang, there appeared to us (I can speak of Nardo as for myself) throngs of dim shadows that invaded the hall, danced along the hangings, wrung their hands, lovingly appealed for an impossible joy, while their long hair mingled with the iris in the basin.
We met Al-Hazreh no more; but we breathed the mustiness of his jealousy. Sometimes a curtain moved without a breath of air; something like a giant spider scurried about the dark corners; we sensed a discordant echo. ... To be sure, no one worried his head about it.
The third day ...
The fact is that I lived only for those hours: the rest of my life shaded off into somnolence. I was seen no more at banquets, and I avoided Perugino’s studio. For long intervals I barely subsisted, like a plant with its roots out of the ground: then, suddenly, I would be plunged into my native humus, or rather into a watery space where all was strength and life. Nardo waited for me on the bank of the Arno, and we went up silently toward the Alley.
The third sitting was devoted, then, to what I shall call “natural magic.” Nahema spoke to us of sciences lost to the western world: they had been destroyed by the great incendiaries—Omar had burned the Alexandrian, and in the Ming Library the Mongols’ shaggy little ponies had trampled the precious papyri. Other knowledge lay in the depths, on submerged continents. . . .
She told us of beings who had lived in those deep waters, moving about in disk-shaped vessels, or with their heads protected by helmets of crystal. Later she described other creatures to us, rising in the air like smoke above the stubble, gliding like birds on their extended wings, or else (this is too complicated for me) traversing the sidereal ether, solely by virtue of an incredible vitality that overleaped sound, light, and time itself. “Thus,” she said, “energy endures; for proof: the light of a star, dead for millennia, brings us its radiant, living image. The temporal no longer exists: we enter into eternity.”
She proved to us that the ancient alchemy was nothing but a pallid reflection of true chemistries, for which the transmutation of elements would be child’s play. “Some day,” she promised, “men will harness the thunder, the chaos of exploding suns, the light of nearby stars, all at once. Then perhaps they will hold the Secret between their hands. They will create new materials—priceless, extraordinary, resistant as iron or satiny as a baby’s skin—and who knows—”
She paused, and Nardo asked if scholars were already imagining such things. Nahema’s lips curved, in a smile that belied the sadness in her eyes.
“There are the empirics,” she said. “But it is not at all the same.” Seeing that we did not understand, she explained: “Those whom you call sorcerers. They manipulate great natural forces blindly: there is the danger.” As she spoke, she attentively studied her own hands, their tapering fingers, their delicate modeling. A white flame ran beneath the texture of her skin.
We spoke no further that day.
Here falls an incident of which I am a little ashamed, and which I would put aside if it did not lie so close to my story. I have already told you that, in the blissful consumption in which I lived, I no longer counted the days, nor visited my usual companions; I forgot even my loves. The word is not too strong, for that evening, encountering Mona Chiara Salviati, at a turning of the Alley of the Old Jews, under the very porch of Santa Reparata, I did not recognize her.
This pretty banker’s widow had been kind to me; she was white and brown, she was approaching a stormy age, and she threw herself upon my neck, petulantly. I lifted her and deposited her carefully on the curbing of a well. She stood there petrified, alarming with her cries some tradesmen issuing from vespers, and a scullion who sat on the sill of a cookshop. Thus I was able to dive into the first street I saw, felicitating myself on being rid of her at such a fair price, and without recalling the ancient adage: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
* * * *
At our fourth meeting, Nahema spoke to us of myths and mysteries. Ever and again she returned to the Platonic account which declares that all beings were originally made double. “Your Bible,” she added in passing, “confirms that truth in its Elohist version. ‘And Elohim created man in His own image: male and female He created them.’” These perfect beings who were force and beauty, energy and intuition all at the same time, were nevertheless separated, “just as a woman halves an egg with a knife,” and flung solitary into chaos. Ever afterward they wandered, with the indestructible memory of their lost companions, with a desire and anguish that nothing could appease. ...
“Sometimes they find each other,” Nahema finished sadly, “but not always with happiness, for they seek an impossibly deep and intimate union; and, chained to unremembering bodies, their souls bruise and wound each other in vain.”
“Does it never happen,” asked Nardo in his crystalline voice, “that the meeting is happy and the union as perfect as the fusion of two metals? Did Laura not love Petrarch, and Paolo his Francesca da Rimini?”
“Yes,” answered Nahema, “but death is there in wait. No true immortality exists for any but a whole being: that is to say, for twin souls, fused into a single body. Moreover, it’s by that faculty of fusion, of receptivity, that the elect distinguish one another: that is the sign of perfect lovers.”
“I would have liked such a union,” said the child, lowering his long eyelashes. Then he painted in silence.
* * * *
It is time, since the occasion offers, to speak of Nardo’s painting. I have said that I considered Perugino an unjust master: small as my knowledge might be in matters of art, I could foretell that we had a great painter in that apprentice. A Botticelli or a Mantegna—who knows? His line was firm without crudity, soft without daintiness, and his knowledge of perspective was exceptional for his age. But this portrait of Nahema was the first in whose presence I had felt that faint chill at the heart, that sacred shiver, which comes from the contemplation of a masterpiece.
The girl appeared at the bottom of the mysterious landscape of peaks and trails of stars that she had suggested to us. Her face, of an inhuman serenity, smiled at some inner vision, reproachless, faultless, hopeless. It was a music of which Nahema formed the principal motif—Nahema ... or some distant star. Yes, the work was beautiful. But later on, it seems, Nardo did better ones; so it is said.
Have I mentioned that during these reeling and unreeling conversations in the hall of blue magic—platonic dialogues beside which the talk of any woman, even the charming Chiara, was no more than an insipid and vulgar babbling— we sometimes dared to approach the platform? Nardo lay at the girl’s feet; she gave me her dangling hand, and I savored its perfume, its satiny softness, and its warmth. She granted us no other liberty.
Sometimes Nahema’s glance lay heavy on us; it seemed to me that her eyes cried out, demanded a response. What could I say to her? Yes, truly, I loved her! My most ardent wish was to steal her away from the evil renegade. . . . Only once I spoke the same of Al-Hazreh with hatred in her presence. Her penciled eyebrows rose.
“Do not arouse him,” she said. “He has his suspicions. Like Ugolino, he foresees the moment when, with his sons dead of hunger, he must go to meet his Master. Let us not envy the fate of apprentice sorcerers. . . . What, you didn’t know that Deodat Lazarelli is one of them?”
She passed a too-perfect hand over a smooth forehead, where neither age nor human afflictions had left any trace, and let it fall. “Yes. He is a sorcerer. To the despair of soulless beings—and of wandering souls.”
It was the last time that I saw her in Nardo’s presence.
* * * *
The next evening—was it really the next morning? I had lost the notion of time, as I told you. In any case, it was the night before a storm. The city swooned under a ceiling of lead, and over the Ponte Vecchio the sun went down in a tragic purple. From the old quarters arose a heavy stench of carrion, roses, and incense. Uneasiness haunted the Alley of the Old Jews, whose inhabitants had gone to ground; even the servants of Al-Hazreh were nowhere to be seen. On a bridge, at the exact spot where Dante saw Beatrice and fell instantly in love with her, I met milord Perugino, in the midst of his court of students in paint-spattered velvet, sword-hung bravos, and courtesans. It was an eternity ago that I had deserted his studio. Doubtless he was just now risen from the banquet table; he was not drunk, but overexcited, and he drew me aside from his noisy group.
“Well then,” he began, “what news? How goes your love affair with the wax doll? Guido, Guido, I’ve always known you were too handsome for a simple cavalier of Florence, and that your gift would play you a bad turn! Is it true, as they say, that yon statue is as wise as the Queen of Sheba, and more seductive than Helen of Troy? Has she really cured an emperor of leprosy, and driven Pope Callixtus Borgia mad? Beware the toils of Hell, my son,” he resumed, adopting clerical language; “is she not called Nahema? Well, it’s a demon’s name, as much as Lilith is!”
“Messer Perugino,” I retorted, controlling myself, “it ill becomes a cavalier to hear his lady spoken of in that tone, but you have ever been as an elder brother to me. I beg you therefore to make an end of these spiteful pleasantries: if not, let us cross steel, and may God be our judge!”
He looked at me, his eyes so wide that the pupils swallowed up the corneas. “So it stands thus!” he cried. “How sorry I am to have put you in their way! But as God is my witness, until this very moment I thought of it just so, as a pleasantry. Well then, Guido dei Pazzi, you are a man of sense and no idler, nor one of the Piagnoni, one of the weepers’ of San Marco. How you could stray into the toils of a cleverly painted automaton—!”
“She is no machine, but an adorable girl.”
“You are truly in love with her?”
“Yes,” said I, weighing each word, for the truth was in them: “and to the point, I know she is no wax statue—I see her every day, in Nardo’s company. I breathe her perfume, I kiss her hand, she talks with us. Her breath is that of a morning in May. ...”
“Always in Nardo’s company?” demanded Perugino, with a malicious air. “Never alone together?”
“You know our habits.”
“Nevertheless,” said he, “there is one way for you to assure yourself that the idlers of the ghetto lie, that the Genoese and Venetian merchants lie, that the Legate himself lies! All these persons are persuaded that Master Al-Hazreh, who is the Wandering Jew, Ahasuerus, or the Devil, is displaying before us all an effigy modeled from a substance of which he is the inventor, having used it for this end certain solar or other radiations! She moves (I mean the statue) by the aid of an ingenious mechanism—at least, if that marvel be not due simply to the presence of a demon. He did not succeed in producing that creature without divers experiments, of which the resulting homunculi feed on fresh human blood. Numbers of children have disappeared in the neighborhood, and we expect the tribunes of the faith to be seized of a formal complaint, which cannot be long delayed. As for this Nahema, demon or mysterious entity, come from another world by way of the shadows, you have only to read the cabalists to have her to the fingertips: she reigns over the vampires, leads men to foreswear themselves, to guilty passions, to catastrophes, and to suicides, and marks those whom she leads astray with an infernal star between their eyes!”
“Lies, all of it!”
“In any case, her powers are great. You have but to look at yourself—all Florence is talking of you.”
“Master!”
“There is one single way to prove all this idle talk and madman’s tales—”
“And that, if you please?” I demanded, white with rage.
“Faith,” said Perugino, laughing, “the damsel likes you, does she not? Take advantage of it. Then you’ll see.”
* * * *
Evil words are like the bad seed, like the tare that springs up wherever it falls: they sprout, even in a soul full of anger.
I have already told you that the sky was overcast. The violet night blotted out the Campanile, and the Marzocco, the heraldic lion of Florence, furiously roared in its cage. Silent flashes of lightning lit up the clouds. Leaving Perugino, I walked aimlessly; children fled before me and women quickly closed their doors; I was that sort of leper—the enchanted one, the possessed! Over the Arno, the air was intoxicating as sage wine. Without knowing how, I found myself again in the Alley of the Old Jews.
There was no one in the house of Al-Hazreh: neither in the entry nor along the corridors. All the portals were open; the servants had fled. I stood motionless on the sill, when I heard a groan or a sob—so weak that it might have been the sigh of a breaking lute string. Then a squalling: it sounded like a flock of birds invading the rafters. The noise came from the blue hall, and I had recognized the voice—I rushed toward it.
All the hangings were drawn; a suffocating darkness filled the studio, where a single torch glimmered at the corner of the platform. Its feeble gleam made the shadows impossibly large, and in that liquid dark I saw Nahema standing, white as wax, and Al-Hazreh on his knees. He was pricking her wrist with a stiletto—the sacrificial knife—and the blood fell drop by drop into a goblet. Without sparing time to draw my sword from its sheath, I fought him with my bare hands in the darkness. The curved blade glittered, but I was younger and stronger. ...
“Don’t kill him!” cried Nahema.
The renegade fled. And we were left alone—or almost. With a handkerchief, Nahema made me a tourniquet. Her own hand was no longer bleeding. Then I saw around us the open lemonwood chests; and standing on the floor, crystal flagons a cubit tall, in which a blue phosphorescence floated. Their tops were sealed with membranes, each pierced by an alembic tube.
In each jar wriggled a living creature, monstrously human —a horror.
There was a king, and a queen. A mitred bishop; a condottiere. A Hospitaler, on his horse. A gorgon whose every red lock writhed. What else do I remember? There was even one dressed in scarlet, and provided with a sword no bigger than a pin, with which he was attacking the jar—a Satan, sprung from the cogitations of a Doctor Faustus. . . .
All of them squalled and clamored with an incredible arrogance; only a few inches tall, nevertheless they had a damnable reality. And they held out their arms to us, their minuscule lips avid, pursing toward our wounds, toward the alembic tube from which would drop their manna, their red dew—our blood. ...
I was on the point of knocking over the jars and trampling these tiny monsters underfoot, when the girl seized my wrist and thrust forward a bloodless face, pathetic with anger.
“Stop!” she panted, in a voice unrecognizably harsh. “Why kill these unhappy creatures? It’s not their fault if they exist, if they tremble with fear and die of hunger! Al-Hazreh alone is responsible. I offered myself to feed my brothers— the non-humans!”
“No!” I cried, maddened, “I can’t believe it! You’re not of that race of mandragores! Your blood flows, you are living, I love you!”
“Do you really love me?” she asked hungrily. “Do you alone understand the meaning of that word: love? No, listen, touch me not. Indeed I am no machine, nor any magical root, nor was I hatched from the husks of a white onion. Imagine that all your dreams are true. Better: picture to yourself that sidereal abyss in which your earth is only an atom. Look: in that black sky, among the pearls of Orion’s Belt, there is one that is a dead sun, around which icy globes tirelessly revolve. One of these is my mother world, which once was beauty itself. If you love me, Terran, believe that I am really human—more human than you, for I belong to the same race, only more ancient, born on a planet that no longer exists, save as a cadaver in the void.
“But indeed, death did not come at one stroke. Our species was advanced and powerful; we struggled long to keep up a semblance of life among those craters of ice and those frosty peaks of which you have dreamed. When all was lost, a few survivors dared the supreme adventure: they knew that somewhere in the cosmos other worlds existed, peopled with creatures who resembled themselves, bodies in which they might awaken. They tried to join those far-off mother-worlds. I—
“Only by accident, I was cast away on Earth: it is new, crude, it is unready for these experiences. But Al-Hazreh seized me in the meshes of his mad incantations. . . . He drew me here. . . . No, I should not accuse Al-Hazreh: there must have been a predestination—there can be no effect without a cause; perhaps this globe was a haven. . . .
* * * *
I wander from my story. Al-Hazreh gave me this body for a prison. No, it is not of wax (I read your thought), but I am chained in it, and suffering. You say, do you not, that you love me? Even though I am a creature from the stars? . . . You love me—and truly wish to accept me?”
“I love you. It matters little whence you came.” So saying, I took her in my arms, with the headlong passion of my first youth. The lace of my doublet crushed into her delicate bosom; I wanted to squeeze her, bruise her, drown myself in her, and be her master. And with all my strength I strained against a thin flame, an enveloping softness that invaded my nerves. It seemed to me that an incredible flood of energy lifted and pierced me, driving the blood back to my heart—and it was such terror, and such delight! We struggled thus, silently, mouth to mouth, until she seemed to melt in my arms, and then—only physical sensations remaining—with a vertiginous, stabbing clarity, I realized that that petal-like skin which I caressed, those honeyed lips, the living waves of her hair wherein I was held as in a net, were not the hair, the lips, the flesh of a human being. . . .
An insurmountable horror overtook me. I thrust away that cosmic foe who was about to subdue me. Or did she herself perhaps break away from my embrace? She flung in my face: “No. You are not the one I seek. Get out!”
* * * *
All that night, I wandered through the streets, trying to deal logically with my nightmare. Very well, Al-Hazreh was a sorcerer. He had tried—the folly was current—to create life. To begin with, following the teachings of Albertus Magnus and Paracelsus (I was not completely ignorant!)—from this came the homunculi, fascinating, imperfect monsters. Finally (by what procedure?—”by radiations,” Perugino had said), he began to reconstitute living matter and to give it a seductive form. Each time, he had learned that his statue still lacked that divine spark: the soul, or the spirit. So he had gone on with his search. Was it Plato, or the Ophites, who told him of the survival in the Cosmos of wandering spirits, seeking new bodies to inhabit?
“Animula vagula, blandula . . .” The Emperor Hadrian had said on his deathbed. The patient madness of Al-Hazreh flung itself into the search for these aliens, and he had found Nahema—exiled, lost, irresponsible. ... I shuddered. Perugino had been right: her admirable body was nothing but inert matter, serving as a prison. And yet she had shuddered and wept in my arms. She was waiting for a miracle: I was not worthy of it.
At dawn I ran aground, exhausted, in the studio of the master, who dressed my wounds and watched over me as if I were a prodigal son.
* * * *
I understood now that since my first visit to the Alley of the Old Jews, my soul had really been absent, drawn into the limbo where Nahema lived, out of space and time, far from this century and the town called Florence. I knew nothing of the troubles that were shaking the Medicis’ throne, nor of the first sermons of the young Savonarola, nor of the first halting steps on our soil, once more free, of that frightful machine from Spain: the Inquisition. My way of life had so altered that my kinsmen were disturbed. The most anxious to intervene, indeed, was Mona Chiara Salviati. That lady had extensive connections, but she resorted simply to her confessor, a novice friar, animated by zeal, who was none other than our old and well-loved Fra Giorgio da Casale.
Yes, that is what I said: the Bludgeon of Sorcerers; he who had lately burned four hundred in a single day. In short, the Grand Inquisitor of Tuscany.
My convalescence was long. My mother had taken me to Fiesole, and watched jealously over my bed. I spent hours lying flat on a terrace covered with climbing vetch. My pretty cousins played on the rebeck or the viol. Summer came; the vines were heavy with grapes, plundered by drunken thrushes. In the morning mist, the Arno shone like a sword blade. I experienced a phenomenon well known to exorcists: withdrawn from the presence of my dear demon, I forgot her, while still keeping her imprint in my flesh.
But there came a day when by chance a Florentine friend spoke the name of Al-Hazreh in my presence.
“The magician of the Alley of the Old Jews,” he explained. “What, you have not heard? It’s true, he was arrested the day after Messer Perugino gathered you in with that nasty wound. The Inquisition was seized of a complaint, and moved. But the nub of the affair is that the guards could not subdue the sorcerer, because he performed miracles: a fire that burned in the very stone, serpents on the steps of the staircase ... in short, the whole bagful. So they locked the doors and shutters, and put sentinels down below. They chanted exorcisms; they burnt a pyre of Agnus Castus soaked in aromatics; it poisoned the whole of Florence for three days. Meanwhile shouts and frightful noises could be heard inside the old house. . . . Oh, no—he was alone, his servants had run away. It was a screeching like an immense aviary ... but he had no birds. Finally all was quiet. Four days later, the guards read their proclamation and broke down the doors.”
“And then?”
“Then he was dead. It seems he had pierced his wrists with fragments of crystal. There were pieces of broken jars around the corpse, which was curled up and all black.”
“And that was all?”
“Oh, yes—there was also a red, quivering jelly.”
“Then it wasn’t the Wandering Jew,” said my mother, who had approached during the conversation. She crossed herself. “Why do you tell of such horrors? Guido is still so weak!”
So, I thought, Al-Hazreh had died in the attempt to destroy his creatures? Or had they killed him to drink his blood? A recollection lit up the blank spaces of my memory. I stiffened and cried out, “The Jew—didn’t he have a daughter, or a ward? What became of her? Speak, in God’s name!”
My comrade looked at me, surprised by such vehemence. “I know not,” he said.
No one had heard any report of her. ...
Recovered, I left my house, Florence, and Tuscany, to engage myself, as a condottiere must, under many standards. I served under Alviano, “married to the Republic of Venice”; under Da Fermo; under the great Vitellozzo Vitelli, the Strategist. I served—from 1502 to 1507—the Tiara and the Keys, under Monsigneur de Valentinois—and may God pardon me: I would have served under the Devil himself!
The story would be ended if I had not learned, on the first day I returned to Perugino’s studio, that he had dismissed Nardo.
“The boy was becoming impossible!” grumbled the master. “He changed from one day to the next; he discovered new laws of perspective! Invented colors, and painted with them! And submarine vessels—and flying machines. . . . The air, according to him, has weight and can hold up solid bodies. . . Pure folly! How many ounces, sir, in the morning breeze? I showed him the door for one ultimate insolence: he aspired to sign that portrait of Al-Hazreh’s!”
“Then the portrait exists?” I demanded fervently.
“Certainly not! I destroyed it: an unspeakable daub. The colors decomposed before they were dry!”
I wished to see Nardo again: it was not easy. I learned that the Duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza, had taken him under his protection, having regard for his birth, and probably for his talents. He should be leaving for Lombardy; perhaps he was already on the way.
Drawn irresistibly, I wandered into the Alley of the Old Jews. It had just been ravaged by a terrible fire; dogs prowled among the beams and the calcined debris; a whole section of the warehouses, that which had enclosed the grain merchant’s house, had burned: in a single night, and no one knew the date. Nor the causes of the disaster. No fire smoldered under the cinders. . . .
Then this befell me:
The night came over Florence: soft, cold, and blue, as it is at the beginning of autumn. Every lungful of air was laced with a minty coolness. At the corner of a street I made out a familiar silhouette: the black mantle and the painter’s beret. I called, and the man turned about. It was Nardo. He had grown taller; his body balanced itself with exquisite grace, and his features seemed to glow. Magnificently dressed, he confirmed that he was in the favor of His Highness. While he spoke, I heard the music of his voice, I followed the gestures of his hands and his fringed eyelids. It was Nardo —and it was not.
“Come and see what I am painting now,” he proposed with a sort of gaiety. “I can do so many things, you see! Come.”
At the inn where he lodged at the duke’s expense, he showed me some ravishing sketches of aerial creatures, of angels and demons equally beautiful, of lunar landscapes, here and there the outline of an unknown monster, or a giant wing. They were no more than studies, gropings, but it was impossible to doubt: under his tapering fingers a world was being born. He had visited the stars and the depths. ... What he had brought back to Earth belonged to another scale of values, to a domain and an art unknown to humankind. The execution was perfection itself. I observed also that through all the sketches, haunting the dreams and work of the artist, drifted the same face, androgynous and angelic, with depthless eyes.
At length, “Nahema!” I cried.
Nardo gazed at me calmly. “Yes,” he said. “We part no-more. Look here, this is the model of her silver lute which I have reconstructed. I have noted down the tunes of her songs. Here are the engines that she draws by my hand—I do not understand as yet what purpose they serve, but soon I shall understand. Soon, when the fusion is complete, Guido. For I loved her, too, you see, I was ready to give her my being and my life, when her hour had struck. I asked to receive her. She acknowledged me. Since then, she is present everywhere, she lives through me—in me.”
His features were stamped with an inhuman serenity.
Another mug of mead, landlord, for the old condottiere! Ah—Nardo’s name comes back to me: he took that of his village—Vinci. He called himself Leonardo da Vinci.
* * * *
AUTHOR’S NOTE
For many years Andrea del Verrocchio was da Vinci’s master, and many people know of no other. But one day Verrocchio, grown jealous, showed him the door, and for a time Leonardo, not knowing what to do, is said to have frequented “the studios of the most illustrious painters of Florence.” Well, the most illustrious of these painters was Perugino.
Perugino represents exactly for the dawn of the Renaissance what Leonardo is for its high noon. I thought it would be interesting to put the two men face to face, since Perugino’s influence is evident in the early works of da Vinci.