The Painted Room, page 5
Since in his own arrangements the action always followed hard on the heels of the thought, Piccolomini became a cardinal in ’55 and in ’58 made his entry into Rome as Pope Pius II; in his suite were his wives, clad in white, and Lucia similarly dressed in white, and mounted on a dapple-gray horse with a sky-blue harness.
This child, truly a creature of wonder, created a greater sensation than any Pope, and Piccolomini was proud of his family and happy about the reception they had been accorded.
Even though most people knew better, it was decided that the three women should from now on be presented as the Pope’s sisters. Officially it was determined that inside the papal residence they were to conduct themselves as men in a man’s world. They were not supposed to change sex but, aside from this, they were in every way to be regarded as men and should, as far as it was possible, receive an education, pass the necessary tests, and remain at the Pope’s disposal for special assignments.
Of course this was all on the condition that such norms should prove compatible with the Pope’s wish for a private life.
Yes, he wished for a private life. But as to whether it should be lived in the company of the Maria sisters, he was as yet undecided. Over the years he had cultivated a longstanding acquaintance with many women, and he wondered what effect it would have on them if he now returned to them as Pope.
It is said he summoned the Congress in Mantua in 1459 in order to incite the indolent princes against the Turks. Certainly this was his sincere intention, but it was an intention he settled upon first and foremost because it was consistent with two of his most urgent plans. The first was Piccolomini’s wish to see the son he had put out to nurse immediately after birth, and whom he knew he could find at the home of Baldassare Mancinelli, the devout gardener and nature lover. Second, he wanted once more to meet and love Lodovico Gonzaga’s wife—she was the woman who had made the deepest impression on him. This was not only because she had loved him so naturally, calling neither heaven nor hell to witness, but equally as much because of her egalitarian ideas—humanistic rather than God-centered. This had been the strongest motivating force in his fight, first against the Pope, then against the Antipope, and lastly against the competing cardinals.
The boy disappointed him. Maybe this was because he had expected to find in him the face of one of the Marias, but instead found his own, so exactly copied that the mere sight of it alarmed him. The gardener had called the boy Piero after his grandfather, and he never had grounds to complain because the boy was through and through as sensible as anyone could wish and had skills that would surely take him far.
Pius II said nothing, but reflected on the lively, intractable child he himself had been.
Most possibly the damage done could never be repaired, but by arranging a really good match for his son he could at least give him the opportunity to extend himself, even if it turned out that he didn’t have the skills for it.
It was that afternoon that Baldassare and Piero had gone to visit the tearful Nana. At that point the wedding day had been already determined for nine years later, the 23rd of May 1468.
4
Just as Nana was being dressed for her wedding the peacocks arrived. Because of the vine leaves two of the birds may have thought she was a tree, for they flew up and sat on her shoulders and managed to eat several of the crown’s juicy leaves before Marsilio and his helper chased them off.
The birds, for the time being, were placed in what was later called “The Ghost Room,” where Mantegna had plans to paint a spreading peacock tail as the frame around each volute of the ceiling. It was for this purpose the birds were purchased, although they were never used for it. The only peacock Mantegna got into his mural was without a tail.
The tail was hidden behind a balustrade which he had painted in such a way as to leave the open sky showing through the ceiling. There under the blue-painted sky the peacock came to roost, eternally stretching its neck out towards the butterfly in the center of the sky.
But when the day arrived, the peacock cried incessantly with the six others and fanned out its tail feathers, especially adapted for this purpose, in order to win a suitable portion of “The Ghost Room” which it could call its own.
Only when Nana stole away from her wedding and spoke with the seven bird guests did a stillness fall over them and they swept the floor with their peacock-tail trains and cackled like barnyard fowls.
Of course that May day these peacocks were the object of countless conflicting auguries. Nonetheless, for the moment this day belonged to the angels. These human birds, nonexistent though they might be, impressed the guests with their concentrated lightness, their delicate femininity, and their defiance of death, and for a long time after Piero and Nana’s wedding, when women complained about their earthbound fate, it seemed almost right and proper that they should.
Only from Nana was there never a whisper of complaint to be heard, for all that she was sad that Piero was not willing ever to talk with her intimately about life and death, about dreams for the future. He tended to roam about the countryside beyond the river; but when he was at home, he was easy enough as a companion; he ate her food, slept in her bed and let her play on his lap.
She found nothing strange in his inability to settle straight into a peaceful domestic routine or to decide on a specific employment. What did puzzle her was why he returned at all each evening and behaved just as if he had been anybody else.
Had the angels not told her that she could expect something out of the ordinary? They had told her that Piero was the Pope’s son and as such he was predestined for something great through her. Even though time passed and nothing happened, she was quite comfortable with her expectations. All her life she had been hoping for a miracle, that God would let her grow and become a human being like others. Now, once Piero had come into her life, she felt that such a sudden development was more imminent than ever before.
Most of the day, and during the summer in the evening as well, as she waited for her dreamy Piero to come home, she sat and read “The Angels’ Book,” as she called it, because she had been given it as a present from the youngest of the angels, the one who had looked at Piero with such longing that for a moment Nana had feared the worst.
But this book really was about the worst. Maybe that is why she read it over and over again in an attempt to search through the worst and find the hidden meaning, the ultimate purpose of life, the very thing which she longed to discuss with her beloved Piero when she lay awake at night moping over their nice, ineffectual household.
The book had been written by Piero’s father seven or eight years before the boy was born. It was impossible to imagine that it was written by any ordinary father, but of course it was far more impossible to imagine it being written by a Pope—unless it was simply an enigma, and Nana was determined to crack it.
The book was called De Duobus Amantibus Historia, the story of two lovers, and was about Eurealus and Lucretia and their elated despair. In 1432 Eurealus comes to Siena as one of the many noblemen in Kaiser Sigismund’s retinue, and there he falls at once so deeply in love with Lucretia that he is quite simply unable to respect her marriage to the wealthy Menelaus.
His passion is promptly reciprocated, but it is only after numerous love letters and sundry obstacles that the lovers eventually succeed in uniting in the bed that awaits them.
However, in order to get Menelaus to leave his town and abandon his pursuits, they find it necessary to contrive a small border war; and for Eurealus to put up with living disguised as a servant if he is to partake of the only life that he craves—Lucretia’s.
This lasts for one year; then the Kaiser sweeps off northwards with his retinue, Love’s bondsman leaves Siena, and Eurealus’s devoted mistress dies of grief.
Menelaus returns to a corpse that is more visibly Lucretia than she had been whilst still alive.
In the back of the book in a lined leather pocket Nana found about a dozen folded pages of poetry which she could only decipher with the greatest difficulty.
One of these poems was about angels in the fire of earthly feelings; about an angel who burned with a light so intensely white there was hardly any ash from the fire and therefore nothing with which to fertilize the fields and humankind, although possibly there was enough for the invisible plants in the garden of paradise—plants that presumably have had to wait an eternity to obtain a definitive ruling on the question of their pictorial effect.
Another poem, and the one Nana was most fond of, was called “Song to My Peacock,” and even though it was not a proper song because it was filled with complex thoughts, she was very fond of singing it as she fed the peacocks. It could not be said that her voice gave the song wings, rather it formed a cozy little nest in which two never fully incubated eggs—irascibility and love—lay side by side and waited. The peacocks listened quietly and once in a while there came a cry from their songless throats:
How beautiful to pull the sky around on a string
and tug it open for all those who stand staring.
What was my peacock without its gaudy train?
How I love these silly birds so big and sly
dragging around the whole celestial plain,
revealing what they ought to hide,
that the sky is an underground cave deep and wide
at the bottom of an even bigger land that’s spinning.
How beautiful to pull the sky around on a string.
It spreads its tail for anyone to behold
who seems childish in the peacock’s eyes,
while furling it for those who’ve grown old
and take no pleasure in the world’s exquisite lies.
Truth’s many hours continue naked as they fly
through life and like a bewailing chorus they sing.
How beautiful to pull the sky around on a string.
So hard to coax the truth from ice,
so hard to hatch from earthly cold,
dragging your beauty around like a scythe,
dreaming of heads that have to roll
until patterns of meaning start to unfold.
Be meaningless and your nature’s king!
How beautiful to pull the sky around on a string!
That one cannot is as obvious as it seems
and thus we feel the greatest ease
when the sky shakes then we ourselves must laugh and beam,
blowing all explanations away with the breeze.
The universe offers a crutch that we seize
and on it alone we leave our markings.
How beautiful to pull the sky around on a string
listening to the peacock’s hoarse words ring.
5
Then one day Piero was gone, and Nana warmed up the meal each hour and cried as silently as the water that for centuries seeps through the mountain rocks.
But she did not complain, and when the others asked after Piero, she covered up his absence with all possible excuses and explanations. He was probably hunting for hare or he had gone to Florence to buy jewelry or new doormats, or he had taken up with a party of artists and gone with them to the mountains in search of inspiration.
Most people thought that he had gone to Venice or Milan to seek excitement and to perish in the unknown. What a young peasant!
But Nana knew better. Either he had sought refuge with his sister Lucia and her openhearted love, without knowing who she was, or else he had entered a religious order to follow in his father’s footsteps. The latter was unquestionably the less painful choice and, as soon as she received word from him, she would take up residence close by and support and encourage him in his new life.
But word never came.
*
One year passed, and people began to consider Piero lost to this world or, in any case, to Mantua, and when at last Nana bore a son, one thought immediately that he was most likely the work of the angels and decided to rejoice in it. Nana said nothing, but felt a little lonely now and then when she rocked the sleeping cherub.
What the old women whispered was neither good nor evil. In fact, it is an ill wind that blows nobody good, and it could all have easily gone much worse when you considered that the bridal wreath was never thrown away, but lay withering in the chest along with the bedding and the embroidered covers. All things considered, it verged on the miraculous that the little Gonzaga dwarf had conceived a child to nurse. She could probably manage without her husband. He was just the gardener’s son, and in the Gonzaga family they have always been so brimming with ideas and discussed politics and played cards in the master’s vineyard. No, it was just as well she got rid of him! And the fact is, she had grown into a little tiny bit of a beauty once she was on her own and no longer had to cudgel her brains over what she was going to make for dinner. Nana herself never breathed a word to anyone about Piero, only to the peacocks that she loved to be with at midday when everything was so quiet she could clarify her thoughts and tell them to the clucking birds.
One day she was caught deep in conversation with them by her mother, who had lain in wait and who had heard her mention Piero as being the son of Pius II.
Barbara was furious, and Nana was immediately brought in to be questioned about it.
Here she told everything that she knew, which was more or less what the angels had said in the revelation at the wedding. She ended by explaining that the angels had forced her to make a promise she could not understand, to reveal nothing of what they had told her. Now of course she regretted she had kept that promise for so long, but she had never stopped to ponder what it could mean.
And when now and then she had felt the urge to share the secret with her mother, it had been because she thought that it would please her and serve to make her still more devout.
Now Barbara no longer knew if she should laugh or cry, but in any case, the time had come when Nana ought to hear all of her story. And Duchess Barbara told it:
“It was all so long ago that it seems like a story that never happened, a story I once read, about a number of people I barely knew, then forgot as I was reading. But it has actually happened.
“It was in 1442 when Federico was a baby and his life was the most wonderful one that has ever been lived on earth—that was how I felt. At that time Frederik III came to Mantua and his retinue broke over the town like a wave, lifting us up and throwing us down again on the surface of the water that had risen in a flood tide.
“At the crest of this wave was a man my own age. The moment his eyes met mine he signaled silently that he loved me, and that this love had to come to fruition. And it did.
“Of course, although we exchanged letters and poems, I hesitated, but the fact is, not much time passed before I was thinking more about this foreign lover than I did about my husband Lodovico; yes, I even forgot about little Federico for hours on end. There was no preventing it.
“My lover was apparently aware of all this from the start. From the very first day, amidst the confusion surrounding the plans to accommodate the visitors, he had made himself invisible, so he was never introduced in his real person but adopted the guise of a servant so as to gain free access into our house day and night.
“Nevertheless, I could not receive him as long as Lodovico was in Mantua, but, as always, he found a solution, and quickly fomented a conflict on our northern frontier which Lodovico and his liege men had to take care of.
“During this interval we lived happily together in a union which in every respect developed and deepened even after Lodovico had returned, so much so that eventually I was on the point of asking Lodovico for a divorce. But suddenly one morning my faithful servant was gone and even if I had had the courage, I would never have found the energy to track him down because a month later you were born, and we called you Nana.
“You were so little and wrinkled and shriveled, it defied understanding, and from day to day it was a wonder to me how you survived at all. But after fourteen days you smiled, and very quickly your face showed such a quantity of messages and expressions that we realized your mind had begun to develop at such an unbelievable speed that the body could not possibly keep up.
“Lodovico was inconsolable when our doctors confirmed that you were a dwarf and gave it as their opinion that the fault lay with him. As a youth Lodovico was extremely shy because he had always stayed in the shadow of Carlo. When for years and years you have to look up to a brother who is younger than you, then it takes you a long time to accept yourself. If you ever do.
“In any case I have never told him—that he was not to blame.”
“That I am a dwarf,” said Nana, “is my own fault.”
“No, it can only be mine,” said Barbara. “Or the Pope’s.”
“The Pope’s?”
“Yes, your father’s name is Pius II.”
“Piero’s father?”
“Yes, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, father to quite a few children, and he has apparently done all he could do to marry them off to each other.”
“What a sublime idea! Maybe it was his plan to make a better world,” said Nana.
“You always side with your father, no matter what his name is. Be happy that his son left before you had children together,” said Barbara firmly. And there was an end to the discussion.
Nana held her peace, but the following year she bore two more little angels, whom the old women of Mantua praised as the most beautiful boys they had ever seen. One of them had thick blond hair and looked like a hero. The other one had dark hair and busily turned thoughts over in his mind even as he slept.
*
Nana also pondered. While the boys slept, she speculated on the mysteries of life and tried to make plans to foster them as they should be.
“All that I think and say happens!” This is probably the way her father lived. Perhaps this was what is called faith. Perhaps he had written his story about Lucretia and Eurealus in order to pluck up the courage to enact it in his own person.
Of course it was necessary to give the story a different ending. Lucretia died, but it was the type of effect that a storyteller necessarily has to turn to, so as to create in the reader such a heightened terror that he would take everything else in the story on trust.
This child, truly a creature of wonder, created a greater sensation than any Pope, and Piccolomini was proud of his family and happy about the reception they had been accorded.
Even though most people knew better, it was decided that the three women should from now on be presented as the Pope’s sisters. Officially it was determined that inside the papal residence they were to conduct themselves as men in a man’s world. They were not supposed to change sex but, aside from this, they were in every way to be regarded as men and should, as far as it was possible, receive an education, pass the necessary tests, and remain at the Pope’s disposal for special assignments.
Of course this was all on the condition that such norms should prove compatible with the Pope’s wish for a private life.
Yes, he wished for a private life. But as to whether it should be lived in the company of the Maria sisters, he was as yet undecided. Over the years he had cultivated a longstanding acquaintance with many women, and he wondered what effect it would have on them if he now returned to them as Pope.
It is said he summoned the Congress in Mantua in 1459 in order to incite the indolent princes against the Turks. Certainly this was his sincere intention, but it was an intention he settled upon first and foremost because it was consistent with two of his most urgent plans. The first was Piccolomini’s wish to see the son he had put out to nurse immediately after birth, and whom he knew he could find at the home of Baldassare Mancinelli, the devout gardener and nature lover. Second, he wanted once more to meet and love Lodovico Gonzaga’s wife—she was the woman who had made the deepest impression on him. This was not only because she had loved him so naturally, calling neither heaven nor hell to witness, but equally as much because of her egalitarian ideas—humanistic rather than God-centered. This had been the strongest motivating force in his fight, first against the Pope, then against the Antipope, and lastly against the competing cardinals.
The boy disappointed him. Maybe this was because he had expected to find in him the face of one of the Marias, but instead found his own, so exactly copied that the mere sight of it alarmed him. The gardener had called the boy Piero after his grandfather, and he never had grounds to complain because the boy was through and through as sensible as anyone could wish and had skills that would surely take him far.
Pius II said nothing, but reflected on the lively, intractable child he himself had been.
Most possibly the damage done could never be repaired, but by arranging a really good match for his son he could at least give him the opportunity to extend himself, even if it turned out that he didn’t have the skills for it.
It was that afternoon that Baldassare and Piero had gone to visit the tearful Nana. At that point the wedding day had been already determined for nine years later, the 23rd of May 1468.
4
Just as Nana was being dressed for her wedding the peacocks arrived. Because of the vine leaves two of the birds may have thought she was a tree, for they flew up and sat on her shoulders and managed to eat several of the crown’s juicy leaves before Marsilio and his helper chased them off.
The birds, for the time being, were placed in what was later called “The Ghost Room,” where Mantegna had plans to paint a spreading peacock tail as the frame around each volute of the ceiling. It was for this purpose the birds were purchased, although they were never used for it. The only peacock Mantegna got into his mural was without a tail.
The tail was hidden behind a balustrade which he had painted in such a way as to leave the open sky showing through the ceiling. There under the blue-painted sky the peacock came to roost, eternally stretching its neck out towards the butterfly in the center of the sky.
But when the day arrived, the peacock cried incessantly with the six others and fanned out its tail feathers, especially adapted for this purpose, in order to win a suitable portion of “The Ghost Room” which it could call its own.
Only when Nana stole away from her wedding and spoke with the seven bird guests did a stillness fall over them and they swept the floor with their peacock-tail trains and cackled like barnyard fowls.
Of course that May day these peacocks were the object of countless conflicting auguries. Nonetheless, for the moment this day belonged to the angels. These human birds, nonexistent though they might be, impressed the guests with their concentrated lightness, their delicate femininity, and their defiance of death, and for a long time after Piero and Nana’s wedding, when women complained about their earthbound fate, it seemed almost right and proper that they should.
Only from Nana was there never a whisper of complaint to be heard, for all that she was sad that Piero was not willing ever to talk with her intimately about life and death, about dreams for the future. He tended to roam about the countryside beyond the river; but when he was at home, he was easy enough as a companion; he ate her food, slept in her bed and let her play on his lap.
She found nothing strange in his inability to settle straight into a peaceful domestic routine or to decide on a specific employment. What did puzzle her was why he returned at all each evening and behaved just as if he had been anybody else.
Had the angels not told her that she could expect something out of the ordinary? They had told her that Piero was the Pope’s son and as such he was predestined for something great through her. Even though time passed and nothing happened, she was quite comfortable with her expectations. All her life she had been hoping for a miracle, that God would let her grow and become a human being like others. Now, once Piero had come into her life, she felt that such a sudden development was more imminent than ever before.
Most of the day, and during the summer in the evening as well, as she waited for her dreamy Piero to come home, she sat and read “The Angels’ Book,” as she called it, because she had been given it as a present from the youngest of the angels, the one who had looked at Piero with such longing that for a moment Nana had feared the worst.
But this book really was about the worst. Maybe that is why she read it over and over again in an attempt to search through the worst and find the hidden meaning, the ultimate purpose of life, the very thing which she longed to discuss with her beloved Piero when she lay awake at night moping over their nice, ineffectual household.
The book had been written by Piero’s father seven or eight years before the boy was born. It was impossible to imagine that it was written by any ordinary father, but of course it was far more impossible to imagine it being written by a Pope—unless it was simply an enigma, and Nana was determined to crack it.
The book was called De Duobus Amantibus Historia, the story of two lovers, and was about Eurealus and Lucretia and their elated despair. In 1432 Eurealus comes to Siena as one of the many noblemen in Kaiser Sigismund’s retinue, and there he falls at once so deeply in love with Lucretia that he is quite simply unable to respect her marriage to the wealthy Menelaus.
His passion is promptly reciprocated, but it is only after numerous love letters and sundry obstacles that the lovers eventually succeed in uniting in the bed that awaits them.
However, in order to get Menelaus to leave his town and abandon his pursuits, they find it necessary to contrive a small border war; and for Eurealus to put up with living disguised as a servant if he is to partake of the only life that he craves—Lucretia’s.
This lasts for one year; then the Kaiser sweeps off northwards with his retinue, Love’s bondsman leaves Siena, and Eurealus’s devoted mistress dies of grief.
Menelaus returns to a corpse that is more visibly Lucretia than she had been whilst still alive.
In the back of the book in a lined leather pocket Nana found about a dozen folded pages of poetry which she could only decipher with the greatest difficulty.
One of these poems was about angels in the fire of earthly feelings; about an angel who burned with a light so intensely white there was hardly any ash from the fire and therefore nothing with which to fertilize the fields and humankind, although possibly there was enough for the invisible plants in the garden of paradise—plants that presumably have had to wait an eternity to obtain a definitive ruling on the question of their pictorial effect.
Another poem, and the one Nana was most fond of, was called “Song to My Peacock,” and even though it was not a proper song because it was filled with complex thoughts, she was very fond of singing it as she fed the peacocks. It could not be said that her voice gave the song wings, rather it formed a cozy little nest in which two never fully incubated eggs—irascibility and love—lay side by side and waited. The peacocks listened quietly and once in a while there came a cry from their songless throats:
How beautiful to pull the sky around on a string
and tug it open for all those who stand staring.
What was my peacock without its gaudy train?
How I love these silly birds so big and sly
dragging around the whole celestial plain,
revealing what they ought to hide,
that the sky is an underground cave deep and wide
at the bottom of an even bigger land that’s spinning.
How beautiful to pull the sky around on a string.
It spreads its tail for anyone to behold
who seems childish in the peacock’s eyes,
while furling it for those who’ve grown old
and take no pleasure in the world’s exquisite lies.
Truth’s many hours continue naked as they fly
through life and like a bewailing chorus they sing.
How beautiful to pull the sky around on a string.
So hard to coax the truth from ice,
so hard to hatch from earthly cold,
dragging your beauty around like a scythe,
dreaming of heads that have to roll
until patterns of meaning start to unfold.
Be meaningless and your nature’s king!
How beautiful to pull the sky around on a string!
That one cannot is as obvious as it seems
and thus we feel the greatest ease
when the sky shakes then we ourselves must laugh and beam,
blowing all explanations away with the breeze.
The universe offers a crutch that we seize
and on it alone we leave our markings.
How beautiful to pull the sky around on a string
listening to the peacock’s hoarse words ring.
5
Then one day Piero was gone, and Nana warmed up the meal each hour and cried as silently as the water that for centuries seeps through the mountain rocks.
But she did not complain, and when the others asked after Piero, she covered up his absence with all possible excuses and explanations. He was probably hunting for hare or he had gone to Florence to buy jewelry or new doormats, or he had taken up with a party of artists and gone with them to the mountains in search of inspiration.
Most people thought that he had gone to Venice or Milan to seek excitement and to perish in the unknown. What a young peasant!
But Nana knew better. Either he had sought refuge with his sister Lucia and her openhearted love, without knowing who she was, or else he had entered a religious order to follow in his father’s footsteps. The latter was unquestionably the less painful choice and, as soon as she received word from him, she would take up residence close by and support and encourage him in his new life.
But word never came.
*
One year passed, and people began to consider Piero lost to this world or, in any case, to Mantua, and when at last Nana bore a son, one thought immediately that he was most likely the work of the angels and decided to rejoice in it. Nana said nothing, but felt a little lonely now and then when she rocked the sleeping cherub.
What the old women whispered was neither good nor evil. In fact, it is an ill wind that blows nobody good, and it could all have easily gone much worse when you considered that the bridal wreath was never thrown away, but lay withering in the chest along with the bedding and the embroidered covers. All things considered, it verged on the miraculous that the little Gonzaga dwarf had conceived a child to nurse. She could probably manage without her husband. He was just the gardener’s son, and in the Gonzaga family they have always been so brimming with ideas and discussed politics and played cards in the master’s vineyard. No, it was just as well she got rid of him! And the fact is, she had grown into a little tiny bit of a beauty once she was on her own and no longer had to cudgel her brains over what she was going to make for dinner. Nana herself never breathed a word to anyone about Piero, only to the peacocks that she loved to be with at midday when everything was so quiet she could clarify her thoughts and tell them to the clucking birds.
One day she was caught deep in conversation with them by her mother, who had lain in wait and who had heard her mention Piero as being the son of Pius II.
Barbara was furious, and Nana was immediately brought in to be questioned about it.
Here she told everything that she knew, which was more or less what the angels had said in the revelation at the wedding. She ended by explaining that the angels had forced her to make a promise she could not understand, to reveal nothing of what they had told her. Now of course she regretted she had kept that promise for so long, but she had never stopped to ponder what it could mean.
And when now and then she had felt the urge to share the secret with her mother, it had been because she thought that it would please her and serve to make her still more devout.
Now Barbara no longer knew if she should laugh or cry, but in any case, the time had come when Nana ought to hear all of her story. And Duchess Barbara told it:
“It was all so long ago that it seems like a story that never happened, a story I once read, about a number of people I barely knew, then forgot as I was reading. But it has actually happened.
“It was in 1442 when Federico was a baby and his life was the most wonderful one that has ever been lived on earth—that was how I felt. At that time Frederik III came to Mantua and his retinue broke over the town like a wave, lifting us up and throwing us down again on the surface of the water that had risen in a flood tide.
“At the crest of this wave was a man my own age. The moment his eyes met mine he signaled silently that he loved me, and that this love had to come to fruition. And it did.
“Of course, although we exchanged letters and poems, I hesitated, but the fact is, not much time passed before I was thinking more about this foreign lover than I did about my husband Lodovico; yes, I even forgot about little Federico for hours on end. There was no preventing it.
“My lover was apparently aware of all this from the start. From the very first day, amidst the confusion surrounding the plans to accommodate the visitors, he had made himself invisible, so he was never introduced in his real person but adopted the guise of a servant so as to gain free access into our house day and night.
“Nevertheless, I could not receive him as long as Lodovico was in Mantua, but, as always, he found a solution, and quickly fomented a conflict on our northern frontier which Lodovico and his liege men had to take care of.
“During this interval we lived happily together in a union which in every respect developed and deepened even after Lodovico had returned, so much so that eventually I was on the point of asking Lodovico for a divorce. But suddenly one morning my faithful servant was gone and even if I had had the courage, I would never have found the energy to track him down because a month later you were born, and we called you Nana.
“You were so little and wrinkled and shriveled, it defied understanding, and from day to day it was a wonder to me how you survived at all. But after fourteen days you smiled, and very quickly your face showed such a quantity of messages and expressions that we realized your mind had begun to develop at such an unbelievable speed that the body could not possibly keep up.
“Lodovico was inconsolable when our doctors confirmed that you were a dwarf and gave it as their opinion that the fault lay with him. As a youth Lodovico was extremely shy because he had always stayed in the shadow of Carlo. When for years and years you have to look up to a brother who is younger than you, then it takes you a long time to accept yourself. If you ever do.
“In any case I have never told him—that he was not to blame.”
“That I am a dwarf,” said Nana, “is my own fault.”
“No, it can only be mine,” said Barbara. “Or the Pope’s.”
“The Pope’s?”
“Yes, your father’s name is Pius II.”
“Piero’s father?”
“Yes, Enea Silvio Piccolomini, father to quite a few children, and he has apparently done all he could do to marry them off to each other.”
“What a sublime idea! Maybe it was his plan to make a better world,” said Nana.
“You always side with your father, no matter what his name is. Be happy that his son left before you had children together,” said Barbara firmly. And there was an end to the discussion.
Nana held her peace, but the following year she bore two more little angels, whom the old women of Mantua praised as the most beautiful boys they had ever seen. One of them had thick blond hair and looked like a hero. The other one had dark hair and busily turned thoughts over in his mind even as he slept.
*
Nana also pondered. While the boys slept, she speculated on the mysteries of life and tried to make plans to foster them as they should be.
“All that I think and say happens!” This is probably the way her father lived. Perhaps this was what is called faith. Perhaps he had written his story about Lucretia and Eurealus in order to pluck up the courage to enact it in his own person.
Of course it was necessary to give the story a different ending. Lucretia died, but it was the type of effect that a storyteller necessarily has to turn to, so as to create in the reader such a heightened terror that he would take everything else in the story on trust.
