At Signore Antonio’s gesture the guards closed the door of the dining room, and we had a measure of quiet in which Signore Antonio began to speak.
“LET ME BEGIN MANY YEARS AGO, WHEN I WAS A young student in Florence and had enjoyed myself to some considerable extent at the Court of the Medici, and was not at all glad to see the fierce Savonarola come into that city. Do you know who this is?”
“Tell us, Father,” said Niccolò. “We’ve heard his name all our lives, but don’t really know what happened at the time.”
“Well, I had many friends among the Jews in Florence then as I have now, and I had scholarly friends, and one very grave teacher in particular, who was helping me to translate medical texts from Arabic which he as a great teacher of Hebrew knew very well. This man I venerated much as you boys have come to venerate your Hebrew teachers at Padua and at Montpellier. His name was Giovanni and I was deeply in his debt for the work he did for me, and sometimes felt that I did not pay him enough, for every time he gave me a beautifully prepared manuscript, I took it at once to the printer’s and the book went into circulation for all my friends to see and enjoy. I would say that Giovanni’s translations and annotations for me were circulated throughout Italy, as he worked very hastily and in fair copy most of the time without the slightest mistake.
“Well, Giovanni, who was my good friend and my drinking companion, depended upon me for protection when the friars would come and preach their sermons working up the populace against the Jews. So did his beloved and only son, Lionello, who was as good a friend and companion to me as I have ever had. I loved Lionello and I loved his father with all my heart.
“Now you know every Holy Week in our cities, it is the same. The doors are shut on all the Jews from Holy Thursday through Easter Sunday, as much for their protection as for anything else. And as the sermons are preached in which they are castigated as the slayers of Christ, the young ruffians make for the streets and hurl stones at any Jewish house they can find. The Jews remain indoors, safe from this onslaught, and seldom is more than a window or two broken, and when Easter Sunday is over and the crowd is quiet once more and people have gone back to their business, the Jews come out, repair the glass and all is forgotten.”
“We all know this, and we know they deserve what they get,” said Fr. Piero, “as they are indeed the murderers of Our Blessed Lord.”
“Ah, let’s not try the Jews here on fresh charges,” said Signore Antonio. “Surely Vitale here is respected by the Pope’s physicians and he has many members of his family in the employ of rich Romans who are glad to have him in their service.”
“Will you tell us please what Holy Week has to do with the ravings of this spirit?” Fr. Piero shot back. “Is he some Jewish ghost who imagines himself wrongly accused of the murder of Christ?”
Signore Antonio glared at the priest scornfully. And quite suddenly there came a racket from the cellar like none that had been heard before.
Signore Antonio’s face was very grave. And he stared at Fr. Piero as though he despised him, but he didn’t answer right away. Fr. Piero was shaken and enraged by the noise. So were the other priests who were with him. In fact, everybody was shaken, even me. Vitale sat flinching at every new assault from the cellar. And doors throughout the house began to slam as if in a powerful draft.
Raising his voice above the sounds, Signore Antonio spoke again:
“A terrible thing befell my friend Giovanni in Florence,” he said. “A thing that involved Lionello whom I so loved.” His face grew pale, and he turned to the side for a moment as though averting his eyes from the very memory he was about to report. “I only now as a father who has lost a son can begin to grasp what this meant for Giovanni,” he said. “At the time I felt too keenly my own pain. But what befell Giovanni’s only son was more miserable than anything even that has happened to my Lodovico under my roof.”
He swallowed, and in a strained voice went on.
“You must remember these were days unlike the days we now enjoy in Rome,” he said, “where the Holy Father keeps a check on the friars that they won’t work the populace into a frenzy against the Jews.”
“It’s never the friars’ intention to do these things,” said Fr. Piero. His voice was as patient and gentle as he could manage it. “When they preach in Holy Week they mean only to remind us all of our sins. We are all the slayers of Our Blessed Lord. We are all responsible for His Death on the Cross. And as you said yourself, it is no more than a drama, this throwing of stones at the houses of the Jews, and everyone returns to normal intercourse within a matter of days.”
“Ah, listen to me. In Florence in that last year that I lived there, during such a happy time with my friends at the court of the great Lorenzo, a dreadful accusation was made during Holy Week against Giovanni’s beloved son, Lionello, and it was an accusation that could not have contained a particle of truth.
“Savonarola had begun his preaching, he had begun insisting that the populace cleanse itself of sin. He had begun recommending the burning of all items that had to do with licentious living. And there was at his behest a group of young men, toughs all, who went about attempting to enforce his will. It was always this way with the friars. They had what were commonly called the friar’s boys.”
“Nobody approves of such things,” said Fr. Piero.
“Yet they congregate,” said Signore Antonio. “And a mob of them brought their fantastic charges against Lionello, accusing him of profaning the images of the Blessed Virgin publicly and in three different spots. As if a Jew would have been mad enough to do such a thing once. And here they put a triple charge against him. And at the behest of the friars and their ravings, a triple punishment for the young man was decreed.
“Now, mark my word, the young man was innocent. I knew Lionello! I loved him, as I’ve told you. What would have driven a man of intellect and polish, of love of poetry and music, to mock the Madonna and before others in three different places? And to show you how very preposterous all this is, imagine that he had committed some blasphemous act in one spot. Would he have been allowed to seek out a second and a third for the same crime?
“But these were mad times in Florence. Savonarola was gaining power. The Medici were losing their grip.
“And so this sentence was decreed on the luckless Lionello, whom I knew, you understand, knew and loved as I did Giovanni, my teacher, knew and loved as I do my son’s friend Vitale, who sits with us here.”
He paused as if he had no taste to go on. No one spoke. And only then did I realize that the ghost was quiet. The ghost was not making a sound.
I didn’t know whether anyone else realized it, because we were all looking at Signore Antonio.
“What was this sentence?” asked Fr. Piero.
The silence continued. Nowhere in the building did anything rattle or shatter, or break.
I wasn’t going to draw anyone’s attention to this. I listened instead.
“It was decreed,” said Signore Antonio, “that Lionello should be taken first to the corner of the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, at San Nofri, to an image he had supposedly defaced, and there have his hand chopped off, which in fact took place.”
Vitale’s face was rigid but his lips were white. Niccolò was plainly horrified.
“From there,” said Signore Antonio, “the young man was dragged by the mob to a painted Pietà at Santa Maria in Campo, where his remaining hand was chopped off. And then it was the intention of the populace to drag him to the third scene of his supposed transgressions, the Madonna at Or San Michele, and there to have his eyes put out. But the mob, some two thousand strong by this time, did not wait for this last act of abomination to be committed on the hapless youth, but grabbed him from those accompanying him and mutilated him on the spot.”
The two priests were downcast. Fr. Piero shook his head. “May the Lord have mercy on his soul,” he said. “The mobs of Florence are altogether worse than the mobs of Rome.”
“Are they?”
asked Signore Antonio. “The young man, with stumps for hands, his eyes torn out, his body mutilated, clung to life for a few days. And in my house!”
Niccolò lowered his eyes and shook his head.
“And I knelt beside him with his weeping father,” said Signore Antonio, “and it was after that, after the beautiful young man who had been Lionello was laid to rest, that I insisted Giovanni come to Rome with me.
“Savonarola appeared unstoppable. The Jews would soon be driven from Florence altogether. And I had my abundant property here, and my connections at the court of the Pope who would never stand for such barbarity in the Holy City, or so we hoped and prayed. So my Maestro Giovanni, shaken, shocked, barely able to speak or think or take a taste of water, came with me for safe refuge here.”
“And it was to this man,” asked Fr. Piero, “that you gave this house?”
“Yes, it was to this man that I gave the library I had accumulated, a study in which to work, luxuries which I hoped would comfort him, and the promise of students who would come to him to seek his wisdom as soon as his spirit could be healed. Elders from the Jewish community came to set up the synagogue on the top floor of this house, and to gather in prayer there with Giovanni who was too crushed in spirit to go out the front door into the streets.
“But how, I ask you, can a father who has seen such barbarity done to his son ever be healed?”
Signore Antonio looked at the priests. He looked at Vitale, and at me. He looked at his son, Niccolò.
“And remember my wounded soul,” he whispered. “For I had loved young Lionello myself very much. He was the companion of my heart, Niccolò, as Vitale has always been to you. He had been my tutor when my teacher didn’t have patience for me. He had been the one to write verses with me back and forth across the tavern table. He had been the one to play the lute as you do, Toby, and I had seen his hands chopped off, thrown to dogs as if they were garbage, and his body torn all but to pieces before his eyes were finally put out.”
“Better that he died, the poor soul,” said Fr. Piero. “May God forgive those who did these things to him.”
“Yes, may God forgive them. I do not know if Giovanni could forgive them, or whether I could forgive them.
“But Giovanni lived in this house like a ghost. And not a ghost who hurls bottles against walls or rattles doors, or heaves ink pots into the air or throws things against a cellar floor. He lived as if he had no heart left. As if he had nothing in him, while I, day and night, talked of better times, of better things, of his marrying again, as he had lost his wife so many years ago, of his perhaps having another son.”
He stopped and shook his head. “Perhaps this was the wrong thing to suggest to him. Perhaps it wounded him more deeply than I supposed. All I know is that he kept his few precious articles to himself, his books to himself, and would never settle into the library or make himself at home with me at any repast. At last I gave up the idea of making him live in and enjoy this house as its proper occupant, and I went on back to my own, and came to see him as often as I could only to find him, often as not, in the cellar of all places, and reluctant to come up to me unless he was certain I was alone. The servants told me he had hidden his treasure in the cellar, and some of his most precious books.
“He was in essence a destroyed man. The scholar no longer existed in him. Memory was too painful for him. The present didn’t exist.
“Then came Holy Week as it does each year and those who were Jews in these streets shut up their doors as always and stayed within as the law requires. And the roughs of the neighborhood, the lowborn, the foolish, went about as always after the heated Lenten sermons heaving rocks at the houses of the Jews and cursing them for the killing of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
“I thought nothing of it as regards Giovanni because he was in one of my houses and I never expected the slightest harm would come to him, but on Good Friday night, I was called by my servants to go at once. The mob had attacked the house, and Giovanni had gone out to face them, weeping, howling in rage, hurling rocks at them as they hurled rocks at him.
“My guards struggled to put an end to the melee. I dragged Giovanni back inside.
“But Giovanni’s desperate actions had touched off a riot. Hundreds were pounding on the doors and the walls, threatening to tear the place apart.
“Now there are many hiding places in this house, behind paneled walls, off staircases which one might not discover for years. But the most secure place is in the cellar, beneath the stones in the middle of the floor.
“With all my strength, I dragged Giovanni down there. ‘You must hide,’ I told him, ‘until I can make this mob go away.’
“He was bloodied and bleeding, cut badly about the head and face. I don’t think he understood me. I lifted the false flags that conceal an underground storage space, and I forced him down into it, roughly and desperately, insisting he remain there until the danger was past. I don’t think he understood what was happening. He fought me madly. Finally I struck him a blow that made him go quiet. Like a child, he turned on his side and, pulling up his knees, put a hand over his face.
“It was then that I glimpsed his treasure and his books in this hiding place, and I thought, it is good these things are hidden, for the ruffians outside are about to breach the house.
“He was shaking and moaning as I put the stones back into place.
“The windows of the house were being broken, the door was being rammed again and again.
“Finally, surrounded by the servants, and armed as best I could be, I opened the door and told the mob that the Jew they sought was not here. I let the ringleaders in to see for themselves.
“I threatened them all with fierce retaliation if they dared harm one item of my property. And my guards and servants watched them as they roamed about the main rooms, down into the cellar and up through some of the bedchambers before finally leaving a good deal more quietly than they had come in. None of them had bothered with the top floor. They did not see the synagogue or the sacred books. What they wanted was blood. They wanted the Jew who had fought them and struck them, and that one they could not find.
“Once the house was secured again, I went to the cellar. I lifted the stones, eager to free my poor friend, and attend to him, and what do you think I found?”
“He was dead,” said Fr. Piero in a low voice.
Signore Antonio nodded. Then he looked off again as if he wished, for all the world, to be absolutely alone now rather than telling this tale.
“Did I kill him?” he asked. “Or did he die from the blows he’d received from the others? How could I know? I knew only he was dead. His suffering was ended. And for the moment, I merely moved the stones back into place.
“That night another mob came, and the house was once again the target for their abuse. But I had left it locked and secured, and when the toughs saw that no lights burned within, they finally went away.
“Soldiers came on Monday after Easter. Was it true, a Jew known to me had attacked Christians in Holy Week when it was forbidden that a Jew be seen in the streets?
“I gave the usual noncommittal responses. How was I to know such a thing? ‘There is no Jew here anymore. Search the house if you like.’ And search the house they did. ‘He’s gone, fled,’ I insisted. They left soon enough. But more than once they came back with the same questions.
“I was miserable with grief and guilt. The more I brooded on it, the more I cursed myself for my roughness with Giovanni, that I had dragged him to the cellar, that I had beaten him to make him lie quiet. I could not bear what I had done, and I could not bear the pain I felt in remembering all that had gone before. And somehow in my misery, I dared to blame him. I dared to blame him that I had not been able to protect him, and heal him. I dared to curse him for the sheer misery that I had felt.”
Again, he stopped and looked away. A long moment passed.
“You left him there, buried in the cellar,” said Fr. Piero.
Signore Ant
onio nodded, slowly turning to face the priest again.
“Of course I told myself that I would soon attend to his burial. I would wait until no one even remembered the riot of Holy Week and I would go to the elders of his community and tell them that he must be laid to rest.”
“But you never did it,” said Fr. Piero softly.
“No,” said Signore Antonio. “I never did it. I shut up the house and abandoned it. Now and then I stored things there, old furniture, books, wine, whatever had to be moved from this house. But I never entered the house myself. This is the first time, the very first time since, that I have entered the house.”
When it was clear that he had paused again, I said softly, “The ghost has gone quiet. The ghost went quiet when you began to speak.”
Signore Antonio bowed his head and put his hand to his eyes. I thought he would break into sobs, but he only took a ragged breath, and then went on,
“I always thought,” he said, “that I would tend to this, someday, I would have the proper prayers said for him by his own. But I never did.
“Before the end of the year I was married, I began to travel. My wife and I buried more than one child over the years, but my beloved son, Niccolò, whom you see here, has cheated death more than once. Aye, more than once. And there was always some reason not to approach the abandoned house, not to disturb the dust of the cellar floor, not to face the questions of the Jews as to their old friend and scholar Giovanni, not to explain why I had done what I did.”
“But you didn’t murder him,” Fr. Piero said. “It was not your doing.”
“No,” said Signore Antonio, “but he was murdered nevertheless.”
The priest sighed and nodded.
Signore Antonio looked pointedly at Vitale.
“When I met you, I loved you immediately,” he said. “You can’t imagine what a pleasure it was to bring you into the old house, to show you the synagogue and the library, and to put before you so many of Giovanni’s books.”
Vitale nodded gravely. There were tears in his eyes.