The throne, p.35
The Throne, page 35
“You served the Republic.”
“I served Florence and, as I mentioned, I would do it again if the Medicis offered me the chance.”
“You’re intelligent; you must have realized that they have isolated you because they don’t trust you.” The judge has gone back to his usual monotone voice.
“There is no reason to think that.”
“Perhaps there is. Boscoli wanted to bring back the Republic.”
“That’s his problem.”
“Not yours?”
“No.”
The judge taps his finger on his name on the page. Two words on that piece of paper are like nails on a cross. “So why did the traitor think he could count on you?”
“You’ll have to ask him.”
“He won’t reply. Do it for him.”
“He wrote my name down without me knowing about it. I would never plot against the Medici family. I challenge you to find a witness that has heard me say a single bad word about them.”
Niccolò knows that they could easily invent witnesses. But he’s such a small fish that they won’t bother going to the trouble.
“So you refuse to reply.”
“I do not refuse. I did reply.”
“But you do not admit anything.”
“I cannot confess to a crime I did not commit.”
EPILOGUE THREE
They take him to the same torture chamber they have been using for decades. Many of the jailers are the same, too; they have gone from working for the Republic to working for the Medici family, except for one, who chose to go into exile. The head executioner has not changed: he’s a fifty-year-old man chosen by the lords of the city from among their most trusted men.
A physician has him undress, examines him to make sure that he has no wounds, palpates him to verify there are no hernias and to avoid the risk of his intestine coming out. Niccolò feels the man’s cold fingers on him and knows there’s no escape. His breaths come short and fast. He is troubled by the fact that his beloved city now has their hands on him—hands that are actually claws.
The physician finds him fit for the rope.
The judge asks him again if he wants to confess.
He doesn’t reply.
With a nod from the head executioner, a jailer grabs his left hand and holds it firmly behind his back, then uses his free hand to grip Niccolò’s shoulder. With help from a second jailer, he then grabs Niccolò’s right arm and yanks it behind his back, too, at which point he ties the two wrists together.
“Don’t fight it; just let yourself go,” they advise him.
Niccolò hopes that the executioner knows how to do his task well, otherwise he will be maimed for life.
“How long have you been doing this?” he asks the man.
“Twenty years. I have a great deal of experience,” the executioner replies.
He feels the man come up behind him. His wrists are positioned so that one is on top of the other. They are then wrapped with a strip of leather. He then feels the men tying some ropes around the leather in a ligature. He starts to sweat, despite the fact that the room is freezing cold. He is at the complete mercy of a power that is far greater than him, but he must force himself to rely on reason. He has nothing to confess and yet, under that kind of torture, people often admit to anything. If he doesn’t speak, they won’t be able to condemn him to death. That’s the first step he must take. He needs to get out of the labyrinth into which he’s been thrown. Will he succeed?
A thick rope descends from the ceiling and hits him in the back.
Even if he can’t see, he perceives what’s going on: they’re wrapping it around the ligature and tying it in a knot.
“Pull him up slowly,” the executioner says. He has a Roman accent.
The jailer who tied Niccolò’s wrists together now grabs his thighs and lifts him up, while the other man secures the rope to his wrists. He is yanked high off the floor. He hangs in the void: a pain the likes of which he has never felt before rages through his shoulders. The weight of his body pulls his arms out of their sockets.
It’s even worse when they let his body swing back and forth. With every single movement, the pain gets more acute, always increasing. It’s a lacerating pain and it makes him tremble and shake. He yells, screams, and pants. He, who always used irony and reason to separate himself from the rest of the world, now lacks both. All his thoughts are reduced to brief, disconnected flashes. His entire history, memory, and feelings are gone. They no longer exist. All he understands is that he is mistreated by the city of Florence. He cannot ignore or detach himself from this aggressive act. If he had something to confess, he would; not having anything is now the worst condemnation. He screams louder and urinates on himself.
“Will you talk now?” the judge calls out from below.
He hears himself scream but says nothing.
They lower him and place him face down on the ground.
He feels the icy pavement on his chest and cheek.
The physician slaps his arms back into their sockets. “You can go again,” he says.
They lift him to his feet.
Once more, a jailer wraps his arms around Niccolò’s thighs so his feet do not touch the floor. Before he is raised up again, the executioner asks the physician, “How long can we go on?”
“No more than an hour. If necessary, we can continue tomorrow.”
An hour. Tomorrow. Quantities of time that seem impossible to tolerate.
EPILOGUE FOUR
Large black insects crawl between the cracks in the cell wall. Lice chew on his scalp. Niccolò lies curled up on a dirty and hard cloth. He has no strength. He has lost count of how many days it has been. At least twenty. His shoulders, dislocated six times and six times pushed back into place, hurt a little less. He can at least move them now.
Senza pietà Fortuna qui mi serra . . . 25
Now I really know what you meant, Dianora, for I have experienced it on my own flesh. They’ve been violent with me, as they were with you, and now I’m in prison. And like you, I have no way out. How strong you were to write poems in this condition! I will never be able to do so again. Will I ever fall lower than this?
That’ll be hard, a little sprite says from somewhere deep inside him. You’ve already fallen far.
A person can always sink further, he replies darkly. The fetid air in the cell, the foul smell of his urine and excrement fills his nose. And to think he was once afraid that Valentino would have tortured or killed him . . . when actually it was Florence that reduced him to this state.
It stinks down here like the gully of Roncisvalle, full of putrefying cadavers of Palatine dukes and counts, the sprite says with a smile, or like parts of Sardinia where the brambles are full of guano and boar feces.
He imagines the places that the sprite suggests, and for some unknown reason he starts to laugh wildly, the way people in great desperation often do.
It’s nighttime, but the prison is wide awake. There’s the sound of slamming and banging on the railings from cells nearby; he hears locks bolting and keys turning in rusty keyholes.
Jupiter spews its lightning bolts and Etna erupts, the sprite says with amusement.
That’s when Niccolò realizes what this little voice is trying to say: reality must be dressed with images and words to make it tolerable.
The sprite is irony, which abandoned him when he was afraid but which has now returned. Dianora sent him the sprite, as a kind of medicine.
He laughs again and feels his strength begin to return. He gets on his knees and then to his feet, tugging on the leather cord that ties him to the wall, knotted like the jesses used by falconers to tie off their birds’ talons. He can only take three steps but his mind moves both far and fast. They won’t kill him, but they could keep him in prison for life. Does he know of anyone who could intervene on his behalf with the Medicis? No one comes to mind, no one he knows would take such a risk. He can only beg for mercy. Giuliano? He didn’t even reply to his letter. But what if Niccolò sent him a poem? Giuliano’s a poet, too, after all. And there’s a shared feeling between poets. He won’t beg; he’ll write a sonnet. A light caudate sonnet, born out of this filth. A-B-B-A. He thinks of some early rhymes: poeti, geti, Giuliano, io, ho io . . .
Io ho, Giuliano, in gamba un paio di geti con sei tratti di fune in su le spalle . . . 26
The tone is right, I’m not commiserating, nor am I hiding anything . . . -eti, -alle . . .
L’altre miserie mie non vo’ contalle, poiché così si trattano è poeti!27
A cry of pain and the sound of chains clanking come from the cell next door. “Stay down!” one of the jailers screams.
Luckily they didn’t chain me up. But they could if they wanted to. The noises are making it hard to concentrate. I need to think: -alle, -eti
Menon pidocchi queste parieti . . . 28
Now something that rhymes with alle.
Bolsi spaccati, che paion farfalle.29
There’s the deep, dark sound of chanting from outdoors. It comes to him through the metal grill, which has the shape of a wolf’s mouth and leads to the inner courtyard. He stops composing the poem to listen. It’s the friars from the Confraternità dei Neri, they’re leading a condemned man to his death. He raises his head and sees the light that precedes dawn, the glow of torches. The gallows is in the courtyard. Whose turn is it today?
He hears a voice. It’s Pietro Paolo Boscoli. He sounds more desperate than he recalls and yet also firmly resolved; he refuses to kiss an image of the Redeemer. Someone, the confessor probably, urges him to repent, to say he believes in the rules of the Church.
There’s whispering. He can’t hear what the condemned man and priest say to each other.
There’s silence.
Niccolò visualizes the executioner raising his axe.
There’s a heavy thud.
Then more silence.
And finally, the sound of the friars chanting their psalms.
He confessed, but I will not. I am alive and a poet. A poet! Niccolò holds onto this word with all his strength.
EPILOGUE FIVE
When they open his cell door, he fears they are going to take him back to the torture chamber. At the mere thought of it, he feels a sharp pain in his shoulders.
Two officers place a bucket of water and a dirty rag on the floor.
“Wash up, and do it quickly.”
“What?” That’s all he can say.
“You’re being released,” Dino Gherardi says, entering the cell. “You will now go home, pack up your things, and by the end of the day you must move your family to your farm in Sant’Andrea in Percussina. You are not allowed to leave the farm. If you need to come to Florence for some important matter, you will have to ask permission. You may never leave the Republic; it is a crime punishable by death.”
The sunlight that shines through the grating in the ceiling of the prison is blinding. He is forced to shut his eyes and wavers unsteadily on his feet.
Gherardi grabs him and has him sit down.
“It will pass,” he says. “Stay seated until you get your strength back. You haven’t been maimed and that’s what counts.”
The road home is inconceivably long. He’s exhausted, he has to walk slowly and stay close to the wall so he can lean on it now and then. He helps himself along with his hands, step by step.
He notices how people in the street look at him and move away. Everyone has heard about what happened to him.
After what seems like an endless amount of time, he reaches the street where he lives, or rather, where he used to live.
Bernardo and Lodovico are playing with other children near the front door.
Bernardo notices him first. “Babbo! Babbo’s home!” he says, running toward him, followed by his brother. But then the boy stops and hesitates, as if he’s afraid of him, as if something obscure and dangerous has taken his father’s place. Lodovico does the same.
Niccolò smiles to reassure them, but they keep their distance.
Marietta rushes out of the house and to his side. Her eyes are shiny with tears and she hugs him. Niccolò flinches with pain but holds her tight.
EPILOGUE SIX
He’s wearing a used black tabard that he bought at the market after haggling over the price. It’s old but warm enough to protect him from the first chills of September. He wanders between the trees on his farm in the afternoon light, noticing how his neighbors have started to encroach on his land.
He smiles to think that he, just like the city of Florence, has enemies at all cardinal points. His neighbor to the west worries him most. Spacagna is a slimy delinquent who, with each passing season, has been trying to carve out more space for himself with his hoe. I will plant oaks to stop him, Niccolò thinks. But the bitterness remains. Even if he manages to block Spacagna, others will follow suit. “A man who has land has war,” his father used to say.
He will fight them all, day after day. When he was first released, he could do nothing. After the rope torture, everything scared him, and for a long time. He couldn’t deal with even the smallest problems. Things are better now but still not perfect.
He bends down, picks up a clod of earth, crumbles it, and lets the soil spill between his fingers, testing its consistency. He notices it needs fertilizer. He will have to find a way of obtaining some because the few animals he owns simply don’t produce enough.
He goes into his woods and looks around, choosing new places to spread moss so he can capture thrushes. He can catch from two to six a day but needs more than that: he uses them to barter for food and to give as gifts when someone does him a small favor.
The cords of wood are all there, stacked in their place. When the north wind starts to blow, buyers will step forward. He has already spoken with Batista Guicciardini, Filippo Ginori and . . . one other person. Who was it? Why can’t he recall names as quickly as he used to? The cousin of the priest; Giovanni, no, Jacopo. Jacopo del Bene. The extra money will help them through the winter. Will it be enough?
He leaves the woods, looks at his small stone house, faded amber in the evening light, and walks toward it slowly.
Niccolò’s desk, once an old dining table, measures three arms’ length by two. He has pushed it up against a window and piled it high with his papers and books. He closes the door behind him. The sound of his children’s voices fades until it is just a background noise.
He hangs his tabard on a peg and puts on the only decent clothes he has left. It is already cold indoors, and sitting still for long periods of time makes him even colder, but he has to save the wood until real winter comes.
He sits down and rubs his hands together. The sun sinks down even further. He thinks of Dianora and she appears before him. He is glad to have put on his best clothes to receive her.
She often comes and visits with him, and always does so with tenderness, though she comes to him less frequently than she once did. Today she smiles at him warmly. It looks like she is glowing. The passing years have not diminished her beauty or the light in her eyes.
She reminds him that Borgia is dead and that the two of them are still together. One day, she says, he will be known as a poet, it’s only a matter of time. She repeats the lines he recited to her on their last night: “Oh dolce notte, oh sante ore notturne e quete, ch’i disiosi amanti accompagnate . . . ”30 If he managed to write those, he will write others.
He repeats the words out loud and feels the warmth of her hands and cheeks; he is moved to tears, something that happens ever more frequently. He never completed that poem.
A sound at the door makes him jump. It’s just the children playing outside, Bernardo pushed Lodovico against the door. They bicker and run off.
Dianora has disappeared but she will be back, he’s certain of it.
He reaches out for a piece of paper. The suffering he experienced at the hands of the authorities have led him, almost as a kind of reaction, to rediscover hope. He has started writing again. This time it does not feel like it will be for naught. He’s finishing a pamphlet that he would like to dedicate to Giuliano de’ Medici. Niccolò is almost certain that he was released from prison thanks to him; perhaps he was moved by Niccolò’s sonnet. Maybe Giuliano will allow him to return to service. If Niccolò is given the chance, even if only for some menial task at the beginning, he knows he will be able to prove his worth. And if he can get the pamphlet that he has almost completed into Giuliano’s hands, the leader of the Florentine State will surely realize the wealth of experience that Niccolò has, and it won’t matter that he acquired it when Florence was a Republic. Niccolò needs to get back to work, he needs it desperately. His family is falling into the most ignoble poverty imaginable.
He has given the pamphlet the title De principatibus. Valentino was right: a Latin title lends gravitas to the writing. Niccolò has poured everything that Cesare taught him into those pages. He was never as close to real power as he was in the months he spent with Borgia, excluding when he was given the rope six times.
What the duke confided in him about leadership provided him with a framework for this new piece of writing: by understanding how you can fall into the depths of hell, you can also avoid ending up there.
The next time Dianora returns to him, he will explain why it is neither bad nor wrong of him to write about these things. On the contrary, showing people what hides behind the deception of power, stripping away all the gold crowns and laurel wreaths, opens people’s eyes to the truth. She, a victim of power, ought to understand that better than anyone. And he, a victim in his own right, has it carved in his flesh.
