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Feb. 24th, 2019 01:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dantealighieriskyeventide on tumblr said:
It was a sudden thing, the death, and that was what made it so hard to comprehend. Everything in those days felt demanded by a sense of narrative, from the smallest passing conversations to the movements of the city’s most important political actors, all dictated as a part of some larger story. It had been like that since Piccarda died, in some ways, but now there was something of an acceleration about it. I felt it, and so did my husband, and so— I presume, I don’t see how he couldn’t have— did Corso.
Did we know how the story would end, then? Did we know the direction in which we were being inexorably pulled, all of us, the whole city— though somehow it felt so intimate, as though we three alone were at its center? Did we sense it? I believe we did. I believe I did, at least. My husband certainly never lacked for a sense of narrative, and Corso—
Well. If he didn’t know where things were going, exactly, he certainly did not lack for a vision.
Anyway. Forese died in November, five years to the day before the coup ground into motion. The eighth of the month. He had fallen ill about a week before, and— no one had thought that it was serious, that was the thing. Forese had never been quite as invincible-seeming as Corso, but he hadn’t looked terribly sick. Everyone just assumed he’d caught cold, and for a while that was what it seemed like. He’d even been getting better, we all thought, on the day that he took seriously ill.
Corso had sat up with him, all week, and he was there that night— he was the one to call for a doctor, when Forese turned white as a sheet and started shuddering, sweat pouring off him as he insisted that he was freezing. Corso had ridden all the way across the city, bareback and barefoot and half-dressed in the late autumn chill, to get help; everyone had been so caught up in his heroics that they neglected to consider that Corso was the only person present when his dissident brother had suddenly become so desperately sick.
Forese was dead by sunrise.
I had not been there, when my cousin breathed his last. One of Forese’s wife’s nephews had come and gotten me (and my husband, as an afterthought) when Corso took off on horseback, used the key we kept under the stoop and shaken us bleary-eyed from our bed. I remember the sharp bite of the night air, the absence of moonlight, and the close warmth of the parlor where we kept candle-lit vigil with somber and silent faces— and the death grip of my husband’s hand on mine, holding onto me as if I were the only real thing in a world of surreal and shifting nightmare. When the doctor came down to the gathering of us, his words were soft and carefully measured, and it was still hours before dawn.
I did not cry, then, and neither did Dante— though later he would, in the privacy of our home, wrenched and weeping into my shoulder as I stroked his hair. For a moment I was afraid he would faint, but all the reaction I discerned was a tremor of emotion in his bottom lip, and the tightening of his hand around mine.
When the sun came up it felt…wrong, somehow, too warm after the night’s clean cold, the beauty of the day unfair when all that awaited us was a strange, difficult peripheral grief— was grappling, impossible sense-making, somehow. The little party dispersed in its time, all of us exchanging embraces and quiet words of comfort before trickling off back to our various corners of the parish. Dante and I went home, facing the Herculean task of explaining the cycle of human life to Jacopo, who at the time was barely six.
The funeral was three days later. Surprisingly not a lavish affair, as I think Florence had come to expect from the death of a Donati— certainly Piccarda’s had been as grand as if she were a saint we were welcoming into heaven. (Though I think part of that was just image control.) But it was dignified and fitting, and really quite lovely, in its way— the service was held in the parish church early in the morning and then the party processed out beyond the city walls, to one of the sprawling hilltop Donati estates, for the burial. Apparently Forese had requested, in his will, to be buried here. I think that Corso’s publicization of that fact had less to do with his dear departed brother’s wishes, and more to do with keeping a wayward son out of the family plot. But there wasn’t much I could do about that.
Before they lowered the coffin into the ground, Corso managed to swallow what I presumed was his guilt and give a stirring speech about the value of family in these troubled times. I— part of me wanted to laugh at that, and part of me wanted to rage. It was so like him, so like my cousin, to use his brother’s funeral as an opportunity to play politics. Resplendent in black silk, looking like the second coming of Caesar Augustus, he manipulated the grieving, vulnerable crowd with the same ease he always had. (I could feel Dante fuming next to me, probably already mentally composing a righteous polemic against hypocrisy. He had been— very close with Forese, years ago, and though they had somewhat fallen out of favor with each other, there are bonds which do not break.)
It was mid-morning, and the sort of clear November day that seems to only bless us once or twice a year. The sun shone on the green Arno, on the fall-golden grass; the last few leaves on the trees rustled in the gentle wind. Behind us the city looked practically peaceful, the serene cast of its sturdy walls belying the trouble I knew to be roiling storm-like within. Part of me wondered what Corso was risking, leaving the city at such a time, even for only a day— whether when we came back we would find our houses ransacked, our wealth gone, the careful wool pulled over the Signoria’s eyes ripped back by a single hair-trigger circumstance. It was all so fragile, this edifice Corso was building; one wrong move and the city that from here looked so solid would catch fire as easily as tinder.
He’d probably thought of all this before, of course, factored it into his calculations like the world’s most precise accountant. And he probably had contingency plans in place, for if the worst did come to pass. I’d expect nothing less, because I knew that he knew that such a worst was— was an eventual certainty, when the game was as delicate as this. You had to be two steps ahead, so that when the trip-wire caught you’d be ready for the fall.
My cousin came to join us, after his speech, as they were lowering the coffin into the ground— how small it looked, framed by all that darkness, so out of place on this golden morning. (Again that sense of disconnect, of narrative wrongness, that had seemed to frame every part of this. It all seemed like some terrible mistake.) I felt Dante stiffen next to me at the rustle of black silk on the gentle wind, the only noise that announced its owner’s arrival beside us. I put a hand on his— whether to warn or to comfort, or something else, I don’t know.
Corso certainly looked the picture of the grieving brother. He stood, head bowed and hands clasped before him, as the coffin reached the bottom of the pit with a muffled thump. The grave-diggers stepped back, to let the mourners throw the first few handfuls of earth.
The ground was arid, crumbling, sifting through my fingers like sand. Years ago this land had been overplanted, sucked dry of anything sustaining; nothing would grow here again for a generation or more. I tossed my handful in and tried not to think about it. My husband was next, and I could see the tightness of his jaw, the tiny quiver of his bottom lip that only a few people knew him well enough to spot. I squeezed his hand.
The dirt made a dry, rustling sound as we threw it in, like a fox through dead weeds.
I have not forgotten the sight of Corso standing over the grave of his brother, tossing his handful over the corpse, burying him with the rest of us. Rage rose in my throat like bile at the solemn composure of his expression, at the regality of his stance and dress, at the trace of wry satisfaction I thought I could see in the set of his shoulders, the curve of his mouth— how dare he? How dare he? My nails dug like knives into my husband’s hand, hard enough to draw blood; I tried with everything in me to swallow the awful sense of pride I felt kindling in my chest, swelling inexorably up from below the fury.
To this day I do not know if Corso did, in fact, kill Forese. There was no autopsy, no evidence, not even a suspicion. As far as I know I am the only one who has even considered the possibility— in those days the whole city was in love with Corso, he was their king, and those enemies which he did have were not so stupid as to anger the mob. I do know that the death was politically convenient, and that the two of them had fought near-constantly in the year leading up to it— about my husband, and Guido, and Forese’s non-involvement in the family, and Corso’s methods of promoting the family, sometimes in whispers and sometimes in screams. And, last and foremost: I know that my cousin would not have hesitated for a moment to kill Forese, if he determined by his cold and precise mathematics that Forese was a threat to his plan, because that was all. That was everything. It sounds cruel, but you must understand that in those days the pursuit of power was familial by definition, and if one of us were to choose anything, anything, over it, we would have renounced our name as surely as if we had outright declared allegiance to the Cerchi.
So: I don’t know, if they’d looked, whether or not they’d have found stray drops of cantarella, arsenic, or something quieter in Forese’s bedroom, on his clothes, in his food that fateful day. (Probably not; Corso would never have been that careless.) I don’t know, and I never will, but it doesn’t quite matter, does it? If he didn’t do it, he would have. When it’s your own family on the line, intent is as damning as the crime itself.
And I didn’t ask him, that bright November morning as we buried our brother. I didn’t particularly feel I needed to know. It would have changed nothing.
Actually— I need to revise my previous statement. I was not the only one who suspected Forese’s death of being something more than an accident. I could feel my husband shaking with emotion at my side, feet away from the burgeoning autocrat who had so probably killed the man he’d cared so deeply for. Forese was my cousin and I mourned him like a brother, but he and Dante had had some connection that eludes me even now. I know they were lovers, when we were younger, but that doesn’t explain all of it. Maybe it was an artistic thing, I’m not sure. I never got the chance to ask.
“Gemma,” my cousin started, as the grave-diggers threw in the last shovelfuls of earth, “I just want you to know—”
“Know what?” Dante cut in, his voice admirably controlled but for a tiny betrayal of a tremble. Corso stared at him, his face impassive, the mask of mourning (and maybe there was some genuine grief somewhere in there, my cousin is— was— a complicated man) perfectly undisturbed. “That you ki—” and I cut him off with a sharp, warning squeeze of his hand, hard enough to make the bones press together. My husband shut his mouth abruptly. I didn’t let go.
“What do you want me to know?” I tried to project composure, to veil the fury and the pride and the grief roiling in me like an ocean in the grip of a typhoon, but I think I just came across as flat. Numb. Fine.
“He told me to tell you that he loved you.” Corso turned to my husband and, almost graciously: “And you as well.” Dante bit his lip, a nervous tic he had that usually indicated some kind of internal conflict; if Corso noticed or knew, he didn’t comment. “Before he died. He wanted you both to know that he cared for you. That was one of the last things he said.”
This shouldn’t have affected me as much as it did— I knew Forese loved me, we’d been family, like siblings since before we could walk. And I knew he loved my husband. This was not a surprise. But something about it, about hearing his last words to me in the mouth of the man who’d killed him in the spiritual if not literal sense, hit me like a punch to the gut.
I like to think I did a good job of concealing it, though. Corso isn’t the only member of the family who can wear a mask.
The rest of the day passed in— somewhat of a blur, strangely. The wake was quiet, somber; the procession back to the city, informal though it was, even more so. I remember the stars out in full force, the jewel-box of heaven shining coldly down on my husband and I walked home. We said nothing, because there was nothing to say— or there was, but neither of us could quite find the words for it. That sense of wrongness remained, persisted, set both of us off balance. Set the whole city off balance, in the next few weeks— the space where Forese had been felt so disorienting, so utterly unlike a death aligned with the narrative we were all living in.
Did we know, then? I keep asking myself that question. Did the disruption of Forese’s passing alert us to the shape of the story, wake us up to the ending? I still think we knew before, else the death wouldn’t have felt so fundamentally out of place. He was supposed to be part of the endgame— then, what did it mean that one of the players was dead, taken out before the script called for it? Were our ends not so set as they appeared?
Still: we were pulled forward, inexorably, inescapably, into the final act. I don’t think, had the Rapture drawn the whole city up into the sky the very next day, that was a thing we could have changed.
Consider, Forese Donati dies and Dante goes to the funeral, meeting Corso there. Just, that whole situation.
Did we know how the story would end, then? Did we know the direction in which we were being inexorably pulled, all of us, the whole city— though somehow it felt so intimate, as though we three alone were at its center? Did we sense it? I believe we did. I believe I did, at least. My husband certainly never lacked for a sense of narrative, and Corso—
Well. If he didn’t know where things were going, exactly, he certainly did not lack for a vision.
Anyway. Forese died in November, five years to the day before the coup ground into motion. The eighth of the month. He had fallen ill about a week before, and— no one had thought that it was serious, that was the thing. Forese had never been quite as invincible-seeming as Corso, but he hadn’t looked terribly sick. Everyone just assumed he’d caught cold, and for a while that was what it seemed like. He’d even been getting better, we all thought, on the day that he took seriously ill.
Corso had sat up with him, all week, and he was there that night— he was the one to call for a doctor, when Forese turned white as a sheet and started shuddering, sweat pouring off him as he insisted that he was freezing. Corso had ridden all the way across the city, bareback and barefoot and half-dressed in the late autumn chill, to get help; everyone had been so caught up in his heroics that they neglected to consider that Corso was the only person present when his dissident brother had suddenly become so desperately sick.
Forese was dead by sunrise.
I had not been there, when my cousin breathed his last. One of Forese’s wife’s nephews had come and gotten me (and my husband, as an afterthought) when Corso took off on horseback, used the key we kept under the stoop and shaken us bleary-eyed from our bed. I remember the sharp bite of the night air, the absence of moonlight, and the close warmth of the parlor where we kept candle-lit vigil with somber and silent faces— and the death grip of my husband’s hand on mine, holding onto me as if I were the only real thing in a world of surreal and shifting nightmare. When the doctor came down to the gathering of us, his words were soft and carefully measured, and it was still hours before dawn.
I did not cry, then, and neither did Dante— though later he would, in the privacy of our home, wrenched and weeping into my shoulder as I stroked his hair. For a moment I was afraid he would faint, but all the reaction I discerned was a tremor of emotion in his bottom lip, and the tightening of his hand around mine.
When the sun came up it felt…wrong, somehow, too warm after the night’s clean cold, the beauty of the day unfair when all that awaited us was a strange, difficult peripheral grief— was grappling, impossible sense-making, somehow. The little party dispersed in its time, all of us exchanging embraces and quiet words of comfort before trickling off back to our various corners of the parish. Dante and I went home, facing the Herculean task of explaining the cycle of human life to Jacopo, who at the time was barely six.
The funeral was three days later. Surprisingly not a lavish affair, as I think Florence had come to expect from the death of a Donati— certainly Piccarda’s had been as grand as if she were a saint we were welcoming into heaven. (Though I think part of that was just image control.) But it was dignified and fitting, and really quite lovely, in its way— the service was held in the parish church early in the morning and then the party processed out beyond the city walls, to one of the sprawling hilltop Donati estates, for the burial. Apparently Forese had requested, in his will, to be buried here. I think that Corso’s publicization of that fact had less to do with his dear departed brother’s wishes, and more to do with keeping a wayward son out of the family plot. But there wasn’t much I could do about that.
Before they lowered the coffin into the ground, Corso managed to swallow what I presumed was his guilt and give a stirring speech about the value of family in these troubled times. I— part of me wanted to laugh at that, and part of me wanted to rage. It was so like him, so like my cousin, to use his brother’s funeral as an opportunity to play politics. Resplendent in black silk, looking like the second coming of Caesar Augustus, he manipulated the grieving, vulnerable crowd with the same ease he always had. (I could feel Dante fuming next to me, probably already mentally composing a righteous polemic against hypocrisy. He had been— very close with Forese, years ago, and though they had somewhat fallen out of favor with each other, there are bonds which do not break.)
It was mid-morning, and the sort of clear November day that seems to only bless us once or twice a year. The sun shone on the green Arno, on the fall-golden grass; the last few leaves on the trees rustled in the gentle wind. Behind us the city looked practically peaceful, the serene cast of its sturdy walls belying the trouble I knew to be roiling storm-like within. Part of me wondered what Corso was risking, leaving the city at such a time, even for only a day— whether when we came back we would find our houses ransacked, our wealth gone, the careful wool pulled over the Signoria’s eyes ripped back by a single hair-trigger circumstance. It was all so fragile, this edifice Corso was building; one wrong move and the city that from here looked so solid would catch fire as easily as tinder.
He’d probably thought of all this before, of course, factored it into his calculations like the world’s most precise accountant. And he probably had contingency plans in place, for if the worst did come to pass. I’d expect nothing less, because I knew that he knew that such a worst was— was an eventual certainty, when the game was as delicate as this. You had to be two steps ahead, so that when the trip-wire caught you’d be ready for the fall.
My cousin came to join us, after his speech, as they were lowering the coffin into the ground— how small it looked, framed by all that darkness, so out of place on this golden morning. (Again that sense of disconnect, of narrative wrongness, that had seemed to frame every part of this. It all seemed like some terrible mistake.) I felt Dante stiffen next to me at the rustle of black silk on the gentle wind, the only noise that announced its owner’s arrival beside us. I put a hand on his— whether to warn or to comfort, or something else, I don’t know.
Corso certainly looked the picture of the grieving brother. He stood, head bowed and hands clasped before him, as the coffin reached the bottom of the pit with a muffled thump. The grave-diggers stepped back, to let the mourners throw the first few handfuls of earth.
The ground was arid, crumbling, sifting through my fingers like sand. Years ago this land had been overplanted, sucked dry of anything sustaining; nothing would grow here again for a generation or more. I tossed my handful in and tried not to think about it. My husband was next, and I could see the tightness of his jaw, the tiny quiver of his bottom lip that only a few people knew him well enough to spot. I squeezed his hand.
The dirt made a dry, rustling sound as we threw it in, like a fox through dead weeds.
I have not forgotten the sight of Corso standing over the grave of his brother, tossing his handful over the corpse, burying him with the rest of us. Rage rose in my throat like bile at the solemn composure of his expression, at the regality of his stance and dress, at the trace of wry satisfaction I thought I could see in the set of his shoulders, the curve of his mouth— how dare he? How dare he? My nails dug like knives into my husband’s hand, hard enough to draw blood; I tried with everything in me to swallow the awful sense of pride I felt kindling in my chest, swelling inexorably up from below the fury.
To this day I do not know if Corso did, in fact, kill Forese. There was no autopsy, no evidence, not even a suspicion. As far as I know I am the only one who has even considered the possibility— in those days the whole city was in love with Corso, he was their king, and those enemies which he did have were not so stupid as to anger the mob. I do know that the death was politically convenient, and that the two of them had fought near-constantly in the year leading up to it— about my husband, and Guido, and Forese’s non-involvement in the family, and Corso’s methods of promoting the family, sometimes in whispers and sometimes in screams. And, last and foremost: I know that my cousin would not have hesitated for a moment to kill Forese, if he determined by his cold and precise mathematics that Forese was a threat to his plan, because that was all. That was everything. It sounds cruel, but you must understand that in those days the pursuit of power was familial by definition, and if one of us were to choose anything, anything, over it, we would have renounced our name as surely as if we had outright declared allegiance to the Cerchi.
So: I don’t know, if they’d looked, whether or not they’d have found stray drops of cantarella, arsenic, or something quieter in Forese’s bedroom, on his clothes, in his food that fateful day. (Probably not; Corso would never have been that careless.) I don’t know, and I never will, but it doesn’t quite matter, does it? If he didn’t do it, he would have. When it’s your own family on the line, intent is as damning as the crime itself.
And I didn’t ask him, that bright November morning as we buried our brother. I didn’t particularly feel I needed to know. It would have changed nothing.
Actually— I need to revise my previous statement. I was not the only one who suspected Forese’s death of being something more than an accident. I could feel my husband shaking with emotion at my side, feet away from the burgeoning autocrat who had so probably killed the man he’d cared so deeply for. Forese was my cousin and I mourned him like a brother, but he and Dante had had some connection that eludes me even now. I know they were lovers, when we were younger, but that doesn’t explain all of it. Maybe it was an artistic thing, I’m not sure. I never got the chance to ask.
“Gemma,” my cousin started, as the grave-diggers threw in the last shovelfuls of earth, “I just want you to know—”
“Know what?” Dante cut in, his voice admirably controlled but for a tiny betrayal of a tremble. Corso stared at him, his face impassive, the mask of mourning (and maybe there was some genuine grief somewhere in there, my cousin is— was— a complicated man) perfectly undisturbed. “That you ki—” and I cut him off with a sharp, warning squeeze of his hand, hard enough to make the bones press together. My husband shut his mouth abruptly. I didn’t let go.
“What do you want me to know?” I tried to project composure, to veil the fury and the pride and the grief roiling in me like an ocean in the grip of a typhoon, but I think I just came across as flat. Numb. Fine.
“He told me to tell you that he loved you.” Corso turned to my husband and, almost graciously: “And you as well.” Dante bit his lip, a nervous tic he had that usually indicated some kind of internal conflict; if Corso noticed or knew, he didn’t comment. “Before he died. He wanted you both to know that he cared for you. That was one of the last things he said.”
This shouldn’t have affected me as much as it did— I knew Forese loved me, we’d been family, like siblings since before we could walk. And I knew he loved my husband. This was not a surprise. But something about it, about hearing his last words to me in the mouth of the man who’d killed him in the spiritual if not literal sense, hit me like a punch to the gut.
I like to think I did a good job of concealing it, though. Corso isn’t the only member of the family who can wear a mask.
The rest of the day passed in— somewhat of a blur, strangely. The wake was quiet, somber; the procession back to the city, informal though it was, even more so. I remember the stars out in full force, the jewel-box of heaven shining coldly down on my husband and I walked home. We said nothing, because there was nothing to say— or there was, but neither of us could quite find the words for it. That sense of wrongness remained, persisted, set both of us off balance. Set the whole city off balance, in the next few weeks— the space where Forese had been felt so disorienting, so utterly unlike a death aligned with the narrative we were all living in.
Did we know, then? I keep asking myself that question. Did the disruption of Forese’s passing alert us to the shape of the story, wake us up to the ending? I still think we knew before, else the death wouldn’t have felt so fundamentally out of place. He was supposed to be part of the endgame— then, what did it mean that one of the players was dead, taken out before the script called for it? Were our ends not so set as they appeared?
Still: we were pulled forward, inexorably, inescapably, into the final act. I don’t think, had the Rapture drawn the whole city up into the sky the very next day, that was a thing we could have changed.
