The Botticelli Secret

Venice, August 1482

29

Water, light.

I was a babe again, rocked in the watery sac of Vero Madre’s womb. I was a child, rocking in her arms. I was a woman, rocking in a boat. Water beneath me. Light above. I opened my eyes and the world spun around me like a top. Light below me, water above. I was propped against velvet cushions in a golden boat. The prow of the boat was curved and slatted like an executioner’s axe. Behind, a servant pushed us along with a pole, betraying the fact that the water was no more than waist deep; there were no countless fathoms below, just a shallow ditch. As I was to learn, many things in this place were not what they seemed.

The sky above was dull silver, the sun a white lunar orb, hanging low trying and failing to burn through the thick gray arras. Around and about me was a city made of glass. On both sides of this channel of water were great crumbling silver palaces rising directly out of the water. Hundreds and thousands of skinny windows were crowned with roundels of glazed panes that watched me like eyes. The houses dissolved into the lagoon and their reflections carried on with no interruption—they were one continuous mirror image broken into mercury by the wake of our boat. In my altered state I knew not what was real and what was not. There was no horizon where the water met the sky, and fine white mist swirled around us to further befuddle the senses. After the hot Tuscan sun ‘twas quite a sea change. I was in a looking-glass land, an isle of smoke and mirrors.

I was in Venice.

And the sovereign of this waterland sat before me in the boat, her masked face turned to the prow like a ship’s figure-head, her sumptuous form still as an effigy. I felt sick and closed my eyes again. I knew from the bitter gritty taste in my mouth that I’d been drugged, for however many days it had taken to get me here.

I was not ready to wake. Not yet.

And now, before I wake, while I am in limbo for a few moments, a babe waiting to be born, while I am suspended in glass once again, it is time. I must tell you at last the story of how I came from Venice as a baby in a bottle.

Most of it I got from the nuns who took me in, for I was too young to be sensible of my fate. I have thought of my journey many times, though, as if seeing it through my own infant eyes: a tiny babe is wrapped in swaddling bands and placed gently into a bottle—a huge green jar, a fishbowl of a thing with a thick-lipped rim. The baby lies still at the bottom, soothed by the swaddle, looking calmly at the light scattered by the glass, with little eyes as green as the bottle. Then soft, white bread is packed around the baby, the sweetest warmest dough, pulled from the center of the loaf by dexterous hands as white as the flour. The baby is packed comfortably now in the white bread, like a cherub on a cloud. The woman that does all this opens her robe, and pulls at her milky breasts till the bread is soaked in her juices. She squeezes her dun nipples as if she milks kine, the full breasts giving forth milk the pale blue of the veins that map the rounded flesh. The baby smells the milk and puts out her little tongue and wriggles around to suck the milk from the soaked bread, as she will have to do for the entire journey. Slim white hands caress the baby’s forehead once. The bottle is corked with a flat round porous stopper, tight enough to stifle sound, loose enough to allow the passage of vital air.

The bottle is carried gently to the boat by the woman who does all this. She herself puts the bottle with its fellows, twelve in all to make a tun. The others contain the finest Veneto wine, a Valpolicella that will be a most welcome gift to the sisters. The boat leaves its mooring with a jolt and the baby in the bottle is on her way, the infant sleeping as the waters of her native lagoon rock her. In the port of Mestre the bottle and its fellows are transferred to a cart and the long round south to Florence. The baby wakes, screams, suckles the sour milk, and sleeps again, and at long last the wine reaches its destination.

The Ospedale della Innocenta in the Santa Croce district of Florence is used to receiving foundlings. Most of them are left on the great cartwheel that is set into the wall, one side within the convent, one half outside. Hapless deformed or unwanted infants can be left, with no question or censure, on the half of the wheel that protrudes from the wall. The wheel is rotated and the babe is taken by kindly hands within. But the sisters were not used to their foundlings arriving in a gift of a tun of Venetian wine. Only the abbess knew to follow her exalted instructions and look in the twelfth bottle. There, against all expectation, but in answer to her prayers, she lifted out the babe alive. Passive, floppy, so thin her swaddles had fallen from her body and the bread she had suckled covered in evil-smelling, mustard-colored shit. The abbess cared not for this—a truly good woman, she warmed the filthy baby in her own habit and wiped the feces away with her own vestments. Until, from the warmth and smell of female flesh, and the touch of feminine lips on my forehead, I awoke.

So, now that you know, I was ready to come out of my bottle, like a djinn, to return to myself and the present. I stirred, and the woman in the prow turned to look at me. My mother wore her half-lion mask again. I could see her eyes only: serene, green glass. Unconcerned, as if she knew I would wake, that this day and this moment would come when we were together again. I knew what my first question would be, and I’m sure that she did too.

“Are you my Vero Madre?”

“I am.”

There was a small smile in her voice. She found the phrase, the childish name I had given her, the fantasy that had been my spine, held me upright through the years of whoring, been my bread to sustain me, nothing more than a joke. “And you sent me from Venice as a baby in a bottle?”

“I did. For your own safety.”

I narrowed my eyes. I was afraid of her but not afraid to ask the question. “Did you send me from you because I was a bastard?”

She did not flinch. “No. I sent you from me because you weren’t. You were and are the true-born daughter and heir of Giovanni Mocenigo, the present Doge of Venice.”

I was silent, taking in this amazing statement.

Madonna.

I was the dogaressa’s daughter!

She took my silence as a question and was coaxed into explanations. “When you were born there was a crucial maritime law to be passed in the council. The ruling party needed my husband’s connivance, but he would not support them. Your life was threatened as a bargaining tool so I sent you away, said you’d died and we had overlaid you.”

“Why did you not come for me?” It was little more than a whisper.

“This city was a caldron of poison. As well as the threat to you, there were alliances to be made with those whom we did not wish to adjoin. But we had already promised you to the Prince of Pisa for his son, forming a critical maritime alliance. You were safe with the nuns—they taught you Scripture and kept you chaste. We thought it best to leave you be for the time being.”

The time being. Twelve years I was at the Ospedale. My mother blithely removed me from her life and missed all of the landmarks of my youth. She was absent while I began to walk and talk, take my First Communion. Best for whom? For her. My heart began to harden—to mirror hers.

“Then, at twelve, you disappeared.”

And did she know why? Because I fell in with Enna, whom I met on the way back from mass when I’d dawdled behind the others; the sisters’ white wimples disappeared round the corner as I admired Ennas’s pretty dress. Because I’d thought her a beautiful vision, perhaps my Vero Madre come for me—for then at thirty Enna was already old enough to be my dam. Because she’d told me I could earn five florins for an act that would take a moment, that if I could suck on a man’s cock and pretend it was a honey teat, I’d have three coins for myself and two for her, and I could buy a pretty dress of my own. Because I’d gone with her to a palazzo in Tornabuoni and sucked off one of those minor Medicis, got my three florins as promised. Because I’d gone into business at the age of twelve and never looked back. Because I’d whored for four years till I stole a painting and met a monk who changed my life.

“We kept your disappearance secret from the Pisans; spread tales of your great beauty, your convent education. I told everyone you were the image of me, and you are. I prayed that you would be found, and you were. Benvolio Malatesta, the pearl merchant, told our spies of a girl he was . . . seeing.”

Bembo gave me away? Huh.

“He knew her to be the right age and the image of myself.” The masked head inclined graciously. “So we took steps to verify your identity.”

“You got Botticelli to paint me so you could see if it was really me?” It sounded incredible.

“No, not that. We knew who you were by then, that is why you were asked to be in the painting. It was no accident. But before we could claim you, you were gone. You led us quite a dance, and we were not able to recover you until now. Granted, it was not done in the best way, thanks to your betrothed—you collapsed from the shock of the events of the wedding and have been insensible ever since. We gathered you up and brought you here.”

Betrothed. She uttered the word oddly, in the present sense, as if Niccolò della Torre and I were still intended. Lord Silvio had betrothed me to Niccolò in the cradle. He had known of me before Brother Guido and I had even met.

Brother Guido. I asked now the question that should have been my first, but I had been afraid of the answer. “What happened to Guido della Torre?”

“Who?” The faceless voice was impatient.

“My . . . companion. The Pisan lord.”

“Ah, yes, the monk who would be nobleman. Cousin to Lord Niccolò. He was taken away by the Medici guards. He will no doubt be dispatched for his insolence.”

I near fainted again. “Executed?” The fly-blown Pazzis dangled from their nooses in my mind’s eye. The hanged man turned in the Arno, holding his eyeless face above the current.

“Of course. He impersonated his liege lord, a matter of treason in Tuscany. And moreover he disrupted a ceremony of the Florentine state. He is in many kinds of trouble.” She waved at a passing barge, and the company that rose there bowed to her reverently. “Lord Niccolò may decide to be clement, if he is in a merciful mood.”

My heart thumped in my throat as I remembered Niccolò’s corrosive, competitive hatred for my friend. If Brother Guido’s fate was in his cousin’s hands, he was as good as dead.

“But he will be tried first?”

She shrugged, delicately. “Perhaps. Here—yes. Our system of justice is well regulated. But in the barbaric middle lands? I think in Tuscany you are used to more . . . summary justice?”

Prickles of sweat broke from my skin despite the killing cold. My heart raced in a panic. “Then I must return. I must seek him—help him!” I stood and the golden barge lurched, my head spun, and I lurched with it. I fell back on the cushions, but not before my mother’s white hand closed on my arm in an iron grip.

“If you stay and do my bidding as my dutiful daughter, I shall do all I can to hear news of him. Perhaps I could use my connections to mitigate his fate. My considerable influence could certainly ease his path to the gallows, at the very least.” I began to protest, but she held up her hand. “If you disobey me, I will do nothing; so choose.”

I shut my trap and we both sat down again as one—I had no choice and she knew it. I had handed her the shackles with which she could bind me to her and keep me here.

“There can be no question of you returning to Florence just now,” she continued, more calmly. “You, also, have angered il Magnifico.”

Il Magnifico. I remembered, sharply, the ring I’d seen on Lorenzo de’ Medici’s thumb at his ward’s wedding, and with it, the realization that this great man, with the aid of his leprous henchman, was cooking something up with the rest of the Seven. I could not resist the chance to have the riddle solved once and for all, if only my mother would give up the answer.

“Signora?” I began meekly.

“You can call me ‘Dogaressa.’ ”

I thought she would have said “mother,” but clearly we were not at such a pass just yet. “The Primavera—the painting—do you know what it means? The purpose of it all, the riddle it contains? Do you know what il Magnifico intends? The war that he hopes to wage?”

The eyes were now hard as chips of jade, but a merry laugh trilled from behind the mask. It was a musical, charming sound, like a carillon of golden bells. It was also entirely false.

“What can you mean? What riddle? What war? The Prima-vera is naught but a fine gift that the groom made to his lady, by his favorite artist. It serves no purpose beyond a celebration of the greatest beauties that our land has borne, with the bride the queen of them all. You should count yourself lucky to be among them, as do I.”

“You, Dogaressa?”

The noble head inclined again. “I am depicted as the nymph Chloris.”

Of course. I thought back to the night in Santa Croce’s her-barium, which now seemed worlds away, when we had concluded that Flora and Chloris were cities close to each other. Flora and Chloris were connected, not by distance but blood. They shared the same features and the same lineage. And I did “hold the secret” after all. We had been right, too, when we thought that the secret was to do with the bearing of a babe or a child; now I knew I was that child. My forearms were clothed in fish scales to connect me to the sea; I was a child of the sea, the greatest sea republic ever—Venice.

But as to the rest—the cities, the Seven, the alliance—could my friend and I have been wrong all along? Was there no more to the painting than a celebration of beauty—myself, my mother, Fiammetta, Simonetta, Semiramide—and Botticelli’s presence as Mercury as an artist’s joke? I looked at my mother’s hands. She wore a huge beryl ring carved with arms, presumably of the Mocenigo family, but there was no golden ring bearing the golden balls of the Medici palle—or otherwise—on her thumb. Doubt doused my flesh like the salt spray. “But . . .” I began, and was frozen by a stare as green as a frozen sea.

“Ask no more of that, it is a request, a warning, and my command as your mother.”

And my doubts vanished—there was something hidden here, else she would not threaten me so. The dogaressa leaned forward in a sudden fluid motion which upset the boat not at all, as if she were at one with the craft and the sea itself. “Let me be rightly understood. Your father and I will require your complete cooperation if we are to help you in the matter of your . . . unfortunate friend. Your actions have already embarrassed our family in the eyes of the Florentine court, perhaps worse. And that is why we thought it expedient to leave before the celebrations at Castello—my Lord Doge, of course, stayed for the feast to appease our exalted friend and smooth the diplomatic waves, and will return soon.”

My heart plummeted in my throat at the notion of meeting my father—that dour, colorless man I had seen in his bizarre ceremonial weeds. Odd that during all these years of missing my mother, I had never contemplated the identity of my father. My impression of Venetians was formed from the ones I had screwed, so naturally I had assumed I was some brat got by a sailor in a quick shoreside jump, only for my father to leave the next day for some distant port. If I had ever pictured him, his image could not have been further from the reality. I could not believe that my father ruled all this.

I sullenly stared at a fantastical city emerging fleetingly from the mists, at once grandiose and crumbling into dust. To illustrate this dual identity, we passed a smaller tributary, a little canal leading off between two palaces, where on the bridge over every inch of the balustrade dangled dozens of pairs of breasts belonging to the working girls that were showing their wares to passing trade. The sign above the bridge was clearly visible before the mist swallowed it and them—PONTE DELLE TETTE—Bridge of the Tits. As in Florence I looked upon those girls remembering that I had once been like them, but this time I felt not pity but envy. To have such a life again, to think only of your next jump and your next crust, such a life seemed simple and beautiful to me now. I was so lost in the notion that it took me some time to realize that my mother was speaking again.

“. . . must lie low and winter here,” she finished.

Madonna.

I looked at the glass city with dismay—winter, here? It was barely August; I could not spend a year’s half here in this place!

She missed nothing. Noting my expression, she went on. “My dear, great things are at stake, things that I—we—must be a part of. Your wedding will take place next summer when you turn seventeen, as ratified in our treaty with the Pisans. And by God, you will be a very different creature before you meet Niccolò again. I know how you spent your teenage years, and it is . . . regrettable. We have some history to rewrite, ‘tis true. But it can be achieved. When spring comes, you will be a princess of the Serenissima, not some little Florentine trollop.”

The words dropped from the mouth of her mask like blocks of ice.

For the last hour on this floating blade I had been struggling to find something to like about my mother—to forgive her desertion, to transform her coldness into warmth, to mitigate her complete lack of interest in the fate of my one love and the only person who had ever looked after me. When she poured her scorn on my profession—the one she had forced me to by her desertion—I gave up trying abruptly. I remembered what Don Ferrente had said at his Neapolitan court—that she was an upstart courtesan—and found all this talk of transformation a little rich for my palate. She was no more noble than I; I was one of a succession of worthless whores.

I spat neatly on her golden-masked cheek. “Fuck you, you evil bitch. Don’t think I don’t know how you rewrote your history—you’re no better than an upstart courtesan.” I repeated the phrase with pleasure. “I’ll bet you were dangling your tits over that bridge a few years ago, back when they were nice and firm and juicy, like mine.” I leaned in and whispered my last shot. “You fucked your way to my father’s side and everyone knows it.”

I was tingling, alive again with the scent of blood, and waited, not caring, for her response.

“Ah, yes. Undoubtedly the language of a Torcicoda tart. No matter. We have a number of months to correct your tongue, among other things.”

I could tell that the impossible woman was now smiling behind her mask, and that she liked me more, not less, for my outburst. She liked a fight too, and I was ready for one. “I don’t give a shit what you say; I’m not marrying that Pisano toad. And I am going back to Florence as soon as your back is turned.”

“How?” she asked simply. “Venice is a hundred islands surrounded by water, and all waterways are controlled by your father. His eyes look from every window. And if you did leave here, what welcome could you expect from Lorenzo’s city? We spoke of summary justice just now. Let me tell you a tale of Lorenzo’s revenge in action. You have heard, I suppose, of the Pazzi conspiracy?”

Madonna. Not the fucking Pazzis again. They were ever at the root of all of this. I was sulky and silent.

“All the Pazzis paid for their crimes, but none more so than Signor Jacopo de’ Pazzi, the head of that unfortunate family. After he betrayed il Magnifico he fled the city, but was soon found and dragged back by Lorenzo’s men, thrown in the Bargello jail and tortured. Only then, when he could take no more and still live, was he brought to the Palazzo della Signoria, and stripped and bundled out of the window to hang, writhing with his fellow conspirators . . .”

The archbishop, as Brother Guido had said.

“His remains were cut down to be buried in the Pazzi Chapel in Santa Croce . . .”

The very place Brother Guido and I had hidden the night I first asked for his help. Why did every sentence recall him to mind!

“But angry crowds broke open his tomb and the good friars exhumed his body and buried it near the gallows, in unconsecrated ground, to appease the people. But even there Signor Jacopo was not allowed to rest—he was dug up and a great throng of boys dragged the naked cadaver around the city, by the noose by which he was hanged. At the Palazzo Pazzi, the mob bashed the cadaver’s head against his own doors, shouting, ‘Open up! The Great Knight is here!’ “ She was enjoying herself—her voice was thickened with bloodlust. I could see her searching for my reaction, so I gave her none, but in reality I could have shit my stockings. What kind of man had I angered? The people loved him and hated those who crossed him.

Madonna.

Evidently Vero Madre had finished her grisly tale. I reflected that not once had she told me a fairy tale, as she dandled me on her lap at bedtime. But this monstrous story of blood and torture she was happy to recount. I shivered, not for the dull day and the cool breeze, and not for fear of my own skin, though I would not be returning to Florence anytime soon. I shivered instead for my one true friend, who was a prisoner still in that viper’s nest, perhaps even now in the notorious Bargello, where the unfortunate Jacopo had lain.

“Do you see, now, the power and influence of the man your friend has insulted? For Lorenzo is light and dark, he is a great friend but a powerful enemy. He himself wrote a couplet to describe his dual character. ‘Orange blossom seen at dawn is bright, / Yet seen at dusk it holds the first of night.’ Our best hope for your future, and all of ours,” she went on, “is to remove you from that sin, from the offense committed—the disrespect to him and his family by the disruption of the wedding. To re-create you as a noblewoman, heir to the Serenissima and the bride of Pisa. Then we may once more join the greater plan, count ourselves in that number at the command of il Magnifico. Luciana.”

The word sounded strange from her lips, from the lips of the woman who had given me that name. “This is your home now, until you marry. But it may not be so bad. There is much I can teach you.”

“So my name is Luciana then.” I ignored the rest.

“It is. But your family name is not Vetra—you were given that alias by virtue of your . . . mode of travel to Florence.”

The light in the glass. Some of the first words he had ever said to me.

“Your family name is Mocenigo, that of your lord and father.”

Mocenigo. It would take some getting used to. “And are there any more in this happy family? Any doting brothers or sisters I don’t know about?”

There was a tiny pause, perhaps half a heartbeat. “No. You are our only heir. You had a younger brother, Francesco, but he . . . died.” She did not invite sympathy.

There was a sunburst of comprehension in my brain, as if that hapless orb had broken through the gray lid of the sky. I narrowed my eyes against the truth, as if against the light. “When?”

My mother was silent.

“When did he die?” Louder now.

“When you were twelve.”

I met her guilty eyes, hating her. I understood it all now. My loving mother had shipped me off to Florence, then clambered back into my father’s bed before my cot was cold and got herself another brat on his ducal bones—my brother. Rejoicing in their new male heir, my doting parents had forgotten me. A Florentine convent was quite good enough for me, a girl child, no more use than a marriage prize, a tool of alliance. They left me to rot till their beloved boy died and they suddenly needed an heir again.

My mother’s agate gaze bored into mine, defiant, but our journey was ending and the subject changed with the landscape, to her visible relief. The canal had spilled into an open sea and a great domed church marked the end of the channel. Now we bobbed on the open tide, skirting the shore till our boat drew alongside a great square with pigeons and colon-nades and twin pillars reaching high into the mist. A great campanile, coral tipped, reached out of the lake like a sword, the blade red with gore. As a backdrop to the glory, a range of far-off mountains draped behind the city like a silver shawl.

“And here”—a sweep of the green and gold sleeve—“is your new home.”

I looked on the enormous white palace, huge and yet delicate, its snowy walls and slim pillars iced with pearly pinnacles and filigree traceries. The façade changed with the water like a very opal. How arrogant, thought I, how confident to build a palace of lace with your duke within, right on the lip of the sea. This was no castle or citadel; the doge’s power was such that he had no need to hide behind curtain walls and arrow slits.

Crouching next to this snowy palazzo was an Eastern ba-silica like a guardian dragon of the Orient, hunched in golden domes and with a hide of jeweled frescoes, with golden spires reaching to the sky like Turkish pikes. I might as well have been in Constantinople.

Home, my arse.

The dogaressa’s servant moored the boat and handed her ashore, and my mother herself turned to do the same for me. For one mad moment I thought to sever the golden rope that held us with the neckrim knife of my green bottle, the piece of glass the sisters had saved for me, and take the boat wherever I could, to escape this watery prison. But I knew I could not get far, and I suspected that to pole and steer such a vessel was harder than it looked. Reluctantly I took my mother’s hand and stepped ashore, looking her full in her masked face as I did so, matching her defiance. Behind my mother the white frontage of the palace was a blank face and staring eyes, just like her.

“Do you always wear that thing?” I asked, as we moved forward to the palace doors. “That lion mask?”

“Outdoors, yes. The lion is the symbol of our great city, and the she-lion the head of her family.”

I did not expect such honesty from her, such openness about how she stood with my father, an admission that she was the ruler of all. “You can hear her balls clang together like a ring o’ bells,” Don Ferrente had said.

As if she had given too much away, she hurriedly continued. “It is expected. As my people see me, so they esteem me.”

And I knew her then for what she was, a cold beautiful surface, deadly beneath, like this city that was once my home and was now again.