Pasquale's Angel Page 4

  The journalist said, ‘Allow me to look,’ and held the paper to his eyes, moving his gaze back and forth across it as if it were a text. He was slight yet straight-backed, with the clever, boyish face of a monastery librarian. His prominent cheek-bones were shadowed with stubble, and his hair, receding around a widow’s peak above a high forehead, was clipped short. He said, ‘I see Michelangelo Buonarroti brooding on which mortal to dispatch with a well-chosen thunderbolt. You did this?’

  ‘He’s the best of us,’ Pasquale said.

  ‘If you will, come with me—no, don’t drink up, you’ll need a steady hand and eye, and certainly not an inflamed memory.’

  It had stopped raining, and a yellow vapour was thickening the air. It smelt of wood-smoke and sulphur, and burned in Pasquale’s nose, made his eyes itch. Although the six o’clock cannonade that signalled the closing of the city’s gates had not yet sounded, the vapour had already brought on the night. People stumbled through it with their faces muffled; two artificers passed arm in arm, faces masked with pig-snouted leather hoods.

  ‘The artificers poison the air, and then must invent themselves a means to breathe it,’ Niccolò Machiavegli said. ‘A pity only a few can afford their cure.’

  It was one of the smogs that plagued Florence when the wind didn’t blow and the smokes of the artificers settled like a heavy blanket along the course of the Arno. The journalist coughed heavily, covering his mouth with his fist, and then apologized. He had once been locked up in the dungeons of the Bargello, he said, and had suffered fluxions of the lungs ever since.

  ‘But that was before I had taken up the pen in the cause of truth instead of the cause of the state. As for truth, now you are away from your fellows you can tell me truly whether you saw all.’

  ‘I was as close to Raphael as I am to you,’ Pasquale said, which was not accurate enough to satisfy an artificer, but would serve as commonplace truth.

  ‘And you can remember it well enough to draw it?’

  ‘I train my memory, Signor Machiavegli, especially for faces and gestures. If I can’t draw it I can at least remember it.’

  ‘Good enough. And please, I am Niccolò. Signor Machiavegli was another person, in another time.’

  A dozen years ago, Machiavegli had been one of the most powerful men in Florence: as Secretary to the Ten he had been privy to most of the secrets of the Republic, and had been a prime mover in much of its foreign policy. But then the old government had been overthrown after the surprise attack by the Spanish navy on the dockyards at Livorno. Half the Florentine fleet had been burnt at its moorings, and a regiment of the Spanish army had burnt and sacked its way to the walls of Florence before the Florentines had rallied and overwhelmed it. Gonfalonter-for-life Piero Soderini had committed suicide, and Machiavegli had fallen into disgrace. Despite his frequent republican proclamations, and despite the fact that his own family had been killed and his property destroyed by the Spanish raiders, his enemies put it about that he had always been a Medici sympathizer. In the chaos following the attack it was rumoured that he might form the nucleus of a movement to bring the Medicis back into power for the first time since the short but cruel and disastrous reign of Giuliano de’ Medici, who thirty years earlier had prosecuted a campaign of terror that had gone far beyond the summary execution of the assassins and their immediate families after the murder of his elder brother and his own lucky escape from a papal-inspired conspiracy. Even while Rome waged war on Florence, and after Rome’s defeat by the devices of the Great Engineer, Giuliano had purged every great family as God had purged the Egyptians to secure the escape of the Israelites. It was a brutal time that was still not forgiven.

  Thrown out of office, Niccolò Machiavegli had refused to swear an oath of loyalty to the new government, and for his pains—or pride—had suffered for two years in the dungeons of the Palazzo del Bargello. When he had finally been released, with no charges ever brought, he had become one of the new breed of journalists who worked for one or another of the stationarii competing to bring out daily broadsheets that proffered a mixture of sensationalism and scandal. After the fall of the old government, the artificers’ faction packed the councils of the Eight and the Ten and the Thirteen. Taking advantage of their creed that nothing truthful should be hidden—although taking care never to write anything that would contradict the government’s particular version of the truth—Niccolò Machiavegli had blazed a career as a political commentator.

  He worked for a stationarius who used as offices the shop where once Vespasiano da Bisticci had worked, an irony since this most distinguished of publishers had retired to his country estate rather than introduce the new-fangled printing-presses which had driven copyists out of business. Some said that this coincidence was an indication that Machiavegli was bankrolled by the Medicis, for Cosimo de’ Medici had once been Bisticci’s best customer, ordering a library of two hundred volumes which forty-five scribes had completed within a record two years. Florentines liked nothing better than to gossip, and much gossip was founded on association or coincidence with events long past, for Florentines were also acutely aware of, and acutely proud of, their city’s colourful and turbulent history. Men might struggle against fate, but they could not defeat the past.

  Even at this late hour, lights burned along the length of the broadsheet’s offices. Half a dozen men were lounging inside, sharing a meal of pasta and black bread and wine at one of the writing-tables. A blue haze of cigarette smoke drifted in the air above their heads. A couple of printer’s devils slept in a kind of nest of rags under the gleaming frame of the spring-driven press. Bales of paper were stacked in the back, and printed sheets hung from lines like drying washing. Candles backed with reflector mirrors burned here and there, and one of the new acetylene lamps depended on a chain from the ceiling. It threw out a bright yellow light and permeated the stale used air of the room with a garlicky stink.

  Machiavegli was greeted with cheerful cynicism by his fellows. The publisher of the broadsheet, Pietro Aretino, was an ambitious man half Machiavegli’s age, stocky and running to fat, with a full beard and black hair greased straight back from his forehead. ‘An eyewitness, eh?’ he said, when Machiavegli introduced Pasquale. He was puffing on a green cigar that gave off dense white smoke as poisonous as the smog outside. He peered at Pasquale with kind yet shrewd eyes. ‘Well, my friend, we only print the truth here, isn’t that right, boys?’

  The men around him laughed. The oldest, his bald pate fringed with fine silver hair, said, ‘Do the public care so much for a squabble amongst artists?’

  ‘There’s a deal more to it than that,’ Niccolò Machiavegli said. He had poured a measure of a yellow-green liquor in a tumbler of water; now he drained this cloudy mixture with a shudder that was half eagerness, half disgust.

  ‘Steady, Niccolò,’ Aretino said.

  ‘It’s good for my nerves,’ Niccolò said, as he commenced to mix another drink. ‘Now, as to this squabble, it is the visible symptom of something that underlies the whole state. The Spanish pox begins with an innocent-looking sore, not even painful, as I understand. I hope you realize that I’m not speaking from experience,’ he added, to laughter. ‘But the unfortunate who finds the shepherd’s golden coin on the end of his cock ignores it at his peril. I often think we’re like doctors, advising the best way of living, drawing off excess humours. This little incident seems a trifle, I know, but it’s diagnostic.’

  Aretino blew out a long riffle of smoke. ‘The public only cares about what we want them to care about. As long as we print it, it is news. If we print it big enough, it’s big news. Remember the war in Egypt? Well, there wasn’t a war until we reported it, and then the Signoria had to send in a squadron.’

  ‘There would have been a war anyway,’ Niccolò said mildly. Somehow, he had finished his second drink, and half-finished a third.

  ‘But not the same war!’ Aretino said. ‘You are too humble, Niccolò. You should enjoy your power.’

  �
��I know well enough where use of power can lead,’ Niccolò Machiavegli said.

  ‘Without risks there can be no gain.’

  Aretino rolled his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other with epicurean relish. Candle-light was blankly reflected in his eyes. He looked like the devil, Pasquale thought. On a night like this it was easy to imagine that these few cynical men really could manipulate the world with their words, as they so clearly believed.

  The elder journalist said, ‘But what makes this petty squabble significant, Niccolò? What’s the disease?’

  ‘Please read my report, Girolamo. It’s so late that I fear if I told you it over, I might contradict myself.’

  Aretino said, ‘It’s the old against the new, the artificers against the artists, the Medici Pope against our dear Republic. Our question should be, which side are we on? Who are the angels here?’

  ‘Whoever God favours,’ one of the others said.

  ‘That’s fine,’ Aretino retorted, ‘but we can’t wait on Heaven’s judgement, which is often slow and passing strange.’

  ‘This is hardly news,’ the elder journalist said. ‘Anyone with eyes knows the Pope is coming in two days’ time. Anyone with ears knows that this embassy could bury the ashes of the long war between Florence and Rome. Rome once tried to destroy the Medicis by assassination and war, and now a Medici is Pope, and comes to treat with the same artificers whose devices saved the government of Giuliano de’ Medici. A silly little squabble is a slender peg on which to hang something so weighty as a conspiracy to hide the truth from the citizens.’

  Niccolò said, ‘It’s well known that Raphael is an outrider for the Pope. All artists have eyes, eh, young man? And Raphael has the best of them all, to spy out the mood of the city. There’s also the matter of the wife of a certain important citizen, a woman with a personal interest in the arts—’ here all the men smiled, and even Machiavegli looked amused ‘—but we’d best not mention her name here, well known though it is.’

  Pasquale, wondering just who this woman was, said boldly, ‘The catamite Salai threatened to reveal her name, if Master Raphael would not keep his peace.’

  ‘An idle threat,’ Aretino said, ‘since your Master Raphael’s amorous exploits are amongst the most widely publicized in Christendom. Many husbands are eager to be cuckolded by that young genius, it seems, although I fear they mistake Raphael’s cock for his paintbrush, and believe that their wives are made more valuable by his amorous strokes just as pigment turns to gold when he wields his brush.’

  ‘Perhaps he should sign his women as well as his works,’ one of the younger journalists suggested.

  ‘There is a feeling,’ Niccolò Machiavegli told Pasquale, ‘that the Great Engineer has already made arrangements with the Pope, and that Raphael is the conduit for this commerce. Naturally, this would not be in the interests of Florence, for our empire is founded on the fruits of the Great Engineer’s genius. There is also the matter of the Spanish navy, at present on manoeuvre off Corsica under the command of Cortés himself.’

  ‘Cortés the killer,’ one of the journalists said.

  ‘Cortés of the burnt arse,’ Aretino said. ‘Greek fire saw to his fleet when he tried to invade the New World, and will again.’

  ‘The Spanish have ironclads now,’ the eldest journalist said, ‘and they have not lost their lust for gold and converts. Having rid their own land of the Moorish caliphate, they would take their Holy War to every corner of the New World. Imagine what would have happened if it had been Cortés, instead of Amerigo Vespucci, who first made treaty with Motecuhzoma!’

  Pasquale said, ‘And what of Salai in all this?’

  ‘Salai feels himself threatened by Raphael, no doubt,’ Niccolò said, ‘and hence the blustering attack that you witnessed. The Great Engineer has a penchant for pretty boys, and Salai has long lost his bloom.’

  ‘The bloom of the grape has replaced the bloom of his manhood,’ one of the other journalists said.

  ‘Raphael is a man whose taste runs only to women,’ Aretino said. ‘And the Great Engineer is an old man who eats leaves like a peasant, and he probably hasn’t managed to get it up since he erected his tower. But Salai lives by his cock, and so he’ll die by it too, one of these days. If he doesn’t have the Spanish pox, then no one deserves it.’

  ‘They say the Great Engineer has it,’ the elder journalist said. ‘They say he’s crazy. I’ve heard that he keeps birds in his apartments. They fly free there.’

  Aretino said, ‘That’s less fantastic than the story that he has reanimated a corpse. Or rather, a patchwork man sewn from the pieces of a number of cadavers. Even I do not believe that story, boys! As for birds, well, every man must have a hobby, eh? There’s no harm in birds.’

  ‘Unless you think you are one, and not a man,’ the elder journalist said. ‘They say he crouches on his bed-rail and caws like a rook, and flaps his elbows all the while.’

  One of the younger journalists sniggered and said, ‘I have it from a whore that one of the leading members of the Ten of Liberty and Peace likes to have in half a dozen wenches at a time and strut around naked with a feather up his arse, crowing like a rooster.’

  Machiavegli said with a smile, ‘If we believed all we heard, then, to give but one example, every man and woman in Florence would have died of the Spanish pox a dozen times over. Sex isn’t the issue here, despite its universal popularity. The issue is alliances. Salai’s the wild card who may force all to reveal their hands too soon. I do not believe that Raphael is here to seduce the Great Engineer—it would be too public a seduction. But if Raphael has come to bring the Pope’s terms to the Signoria, so that they may have their reply ready when the Pope arrives, then such a secret embassy would be embarrassing to the government if it were revealed. After all, their motto is that democracy lives only by discussion and honest debate. That’s why this incident is so important, and why we must run it as hard as we can, especially as not one of our rivals has thought to cover it at all.’

  ‘It’s the exclusivity that interests me,’ Aretino said. ‘Here’s something that combines sex and honour and high matters of state, and we have it and no one else does. That means money, boys.’

  ‘And that means you’ll run it,’ the elder journalist said, stiffly rising from his tall three-legged stool. ‘I’ll see what we can cut.’

  Aretino stubbed out his cigar, suddenly all business. ‘Everything else, if we have to. Gerino, kick those two young devils awake and have them break apart the type. We’ll need a two-column space fifty lines deep, and I’d like it as near to the top as possible. Leon, write up a hundred-word piece on Signor Salai, nothing gratuitous, but with enough exaggeration to flatter him and serve our purpose. He’s the villain of the piece, but a dupe too. As for you, young master painter, what do you know about copperplate engraving?’

  Pasquale took a deep breath. His head was still packed with the fumes of all the wine he had drunk and the marijuana cigarette he had smoked: everything seemed slightly blurred and inflated. He said, as steadily as he could, ‘I’ve practised it.’

  ‘Good. There’s a desk over there. Jacopino—drag it under the lamp, and turn up the gas, too. This young man will need good light to work by. Fetch—what will you want?’

  Pasquale drew another breath. ‘Paper of course, with as fine a surface as possible, and tracing-paper and stylus to prick a transfer for the outline. A good pen. Signor Aretino, I have practice of woodcuts, would that not be cheaper? Hollywood is almost as good as copper.’

  ‘But I have no hollywood, and I have a liking for copper plates because they can make very many reproductions. There will be hundreds of this edition produced. Let the last be as sharp as the first. How quickly can you do this?’

  ‘Well, perhaps three or four hours to get it right.’

  ‘You’ve an hour,’ Aretino said, and clapped Pasquale on the back and left him standing there.

  The youngest of the journalists helped Pasquale drag the
desk under the hissing circlet of gas, showed him how to turn the key that regulated the drip of water on to the white rocks in the fuel-pan; as more water trickled in there was a palpable hiss and the yellow flames blossomed, starkly lighting the white sheet of paper, and throwing shadows across the room.

  Pasquale lit a cigarette and shaped the scene in his mind, used his hands to block out the spaces on the paper. Space, Rosso had taught him, was the primary consideration in composition. The relationships of figures in the volume of space which contained them must draw the eye in the correct sequence, or else all was chaos. Salai at the left, then, foregrounded by Raphael who, in three-quarters profile, slightly turned from view, was the centre of the picture. Raphael’s followers ranged around him in a half-circle, and the masters behind them, made half-size because they were not important. Detail only for Raphael and Salai, generic postures and expressions of shame and horror for the others. To depict shame, draw a figure with its fingers covering its eyes; for horror, bent fists and shaking arms.

  When Pasquale had sketched in the outlines of the two main figures he worked in the background frieze of watchers, most prominent amongst them Giulio Romano, holding Salai in check, and the assistant who had feebly threatened Salai now transfigured into a loyal and fierce servant ready to. defend his master to the death, hand on dagger, face defiant. Then Salai himself, his eyes narrowed, his grin crooked, and his posture crooked too, twisted left to right. Raphael the proud upright centre, the column supporting the weight of the little picture, steadfast while others shrank from Salai’s bitter attack.

  Pasquale worked his cramped fingers, then laid the drawing on the block of soft copper and bent to prick first the outlines of the figures, then the necessary details. Once this was done he commenced to incise the main lines, working with the rapid decisiveness and delicacy that Rosso had taught him so well. Then work in the detail, dot and dash and cross-hatch, shade and highlight.