I, Mona Lisa by Natasha Solomons

Author:Natasha Solomons [Solomons, Natasha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529151350
Publisher: Cornerstone

Spring

Plans for the pageant lie on every surface. There are elaborate stage sets of mountains that open with a complex series of pulleys to reveal His Holiness on his throne, with celestial skies above and the heavenly hosts; designs of costumes in red and gold for the processions; while Salaì and Tommaso and Cecco paint scenery and instruct the carpenters on how to construct the mechanisms in the staging. Leonardo leaves most of the work to his assistants. The gardeners at the Belvedere Palace all know him now. One of them finds an odd-looking lizard and saves it for him. Leonardo brings it back to the bottega beneath the apartment, with tremendous excitement, and attaches wings to its spine with a mixture of quicksilver. They are made from scales stripped from other lizards and fish and quiver as it walks. He gives the creature a tail and horns and a crimson beard and feeds it scraps of meat to tame it and keeps it in a box next to those of his beloved cats. Whenever visitors call, he tosses meat out and the beast hurtles forth, terrifying the unsuspecting.

‘You’re bored,’ I reprimand, when he has frightened the third papal courier.

Leonardo and Leda are in fits of laughter.

The maestro has also purged the fat from the guts of a bullock and made them so fine that they rest in the palm of Salaì’s hand like the silk of a spider’s web. He attaches the bellows to one end and fills them with air so that they expand to fill the entire space, crushing all the occupants into a corner. He skins lizards, frogs and snakes and inflates them with air and then suddenly releases them so that they puff and fly around the room.

‘They are scientia experiments.’

‘You’re playing pranks like a schoolboy.’

Only Leda is amused, thrilled by the absurdity of his games, but soon his attention turns to other, darker pursuits. Beneath the apartment is a cavern of alchemy. There are plants and a distillery filled with hissing steam and bubbling pans. I watch while he works, attempting different distillations for varnishes and glazes based on old Roman recipes. Some days he retreats to the hospital at Santo Spirito and performs dissections on flayed corpses and returns, invigorated, his fingers blotched with ink and bodily fluid. I long to go with him. The mortals slumber but I cannot, and I remain in the bottega, listening to the hiss of the pots and waiting for him. La Cremona’s words have lingered with me. All his drawings are of men. I see the flayed and separated cords of men’s thighs, shaded and hatched in chalk and yellow wash to show the vessels and organs. I lack a body of my own and I want to see a real woman’s again. I have only glimpsed La Cremona’s, and I long to see another, to see how the parts are layered. The next time I see him draw his black cloak about his stained and foul britches, I call out to him, pleading.

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