Chapter Three

CHAPTER THREE

In Which I Successfully Deliver My Letter

“There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”

-       Some lonely slob

I was received at the Palazzo by a lumbering servant with marsh green eyes. I say lumbering not because he had any physical defect, but because he moved as though he were a sulking teenager: shoulders slumped and face pitched towards the ground. Despite his poor posture, I judged him to be nearly six and a half feet tall and muscularly built; Michelangelo could have used him as the model for his famous David, if Michelangelo weren’t two years old at the time of my arrival. Minor details.

I wished that Rodolfo was there to see him. Here was a man far more fantastically endowed than I, and ten times more servile to boot. I followed this David to a smallish room with vaulted ceilings, complete with cherubim and seraphim and every other kind of heavenly imagery. The walls were exceptionally carved into various golden reliefs with classical Grecian busts sharing space with biblical figures. I immediately began searching for secret hinges on the panels. Many of these palaces had secret passageways built into them, mostly so that guests could be spied on. I was instructed to wait in this smallish room while Lorenzo was fetched. I followed my instructions.

The cost of paranoia used to be excessive. Think of the spies, the architects, the guards. Think of the time spent discerning: who said what, who can be trusted, how to make a dozen pieces of hearsay into a coherent narrative. Now we slap a dozen cold, unfeeling eyes around the perimeter and call it a day. The suburbs have been fortified and surveilled into drywall detention centers. Nice lawns, though.

~~

As I imagined trebuchets sieging a strip mall, a portion of the wall swung open to reveal a strikingly large nose attached to a stunningly average face. I gave a curt bow as Lorenzo De Medici stepped forward and closed the wall, although I could not help but smile at the silliness of such paranoia. It wouldn’t keep him from being stabbed in broad daylight in one year’s time.

“I am told you have a letter for me,” he squawked. I didn’t expect such an unpleasant sound. It was as though he were gargling small rocks. (Pheasants and other game birds do this, incidentally. They keep a healthy store of sharp rocks in the gizzard in order to grind up food, because they lack the ability to chew. I'm pretty sure Lorenzo isn't a pheasant, however.)

“Aye, sir, from the Sultan,” I said smoothly, although I couldn’t stop myself from sympathetically clearing my throat. He took the letter and slowly broke the blood-red seal. A minute passed. I shifted my weight from one hip to the other and looked for a sign of interest on his face, but I received nothing except the occasional nod and short hum. Finally, he lifted his head and glared directly at me.

“What happened to your eye?”

“Boating accident,” I lied.

~~

For those of you who don’t know much about Lorenzo De Medici, he is one man in a long line of rich men who controlled Florence in the distant past. Lorenzo the Magnificent, they called him. Almost all of his family was influential in some way; some even went on to become Popes. That’s pretty exciting, I suppose. I've never been the Pope. I’ve never even known any Popes.

Lorenzo’s fame is almost entirely derived from his patronage, which extended to the likes of Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci, among others. He patronized philosophers and poets as well, but these names are not as well-known as their more visually inclined counterparts. Spectacle sells, you know.

There is a legacy in making heroes of patrons, as though they are personally responsible for every artistic and scientific advance in human history. The truth, of course, is quite the opposite.

~~

“I am told in this letter that I am to treat you with some level of suspicion,” he lifted the letter and gave it a little wave, as though he could possibly mean some other, hitherto unmentioned letter. I heard footsteps behind me, clunky and haphazard in gait, almost certainly belonging to my David. The hairs on the nape of my neck bristled to life as the rest of my body calcified. Perhaps Rodolfo was right about my foolishness. “Why have you failed to disclose your name and rank? It can’t be that you appeared from nowhere just to offer to deliver a letter.”

Ignoring the fact that he somehow hit on the exact truth of my scenario, I answered: “My name is Aaron Pappalardo and I have no rank. I want to be a great man one day and so I've decided to work in the service of great men, so that I might learn their ways.”

~~

Maybe this seems disingenuous. It certainly seems pretentious. “So that I might learn their ways.” What was I, some sort of sycophantic supplicant in a kung fu movie? And greatness, what has that ever done for anybody? Who am I to think such a word is even available to me? (I have to admit at this point I’m looking a bit like a prick. And the text itself…)

~~

If you really wish to know what Mehmed’s letter said, cease your curiosity. It was merely a report on the state of the Venetian Wars coupled with a few trade propositions (and a brief post-script about the strange courier with an eyepatch). Perhaps such a document would prove interesting to a Venetian or a merchant (or a historian, later), but I was neither. I urge you to forget about the letter, dear reader. It will not serve a further role in this story.

Or will it?

(No. No, it won’t.)

~~

(Sometimes I check the mail before my parents can, in the hopes that maybe someone has sent me a letter. I don’t know who would take the time or what could reduce this hypothetical person to such analog desperation when all the people I know own/have access to phones and computers. I try not to think too hard about these questions, because otherwise checking the mail would be twice as depressing as it already is. No one is sending me letters.

But that shouldn’t be depressing, because—as I’ve already pointed out—there’s literally no reason for anyone to use this form of communication. And it isn’t as if I’m a total hermit. I talk with my parents, my friends, my girlfriend (less and less) …

Still, something about not getting letters in the mail makes me feel forgotten, like a four-year-old cupcake perched on a dumbwaiter, slouching and gathering dust in the attic. It doesn’t feel good being so dusty and stale, but things could always be worse. I could have been torn apart by a colony of ants, for example.)

~~

“Hmm… You believe that you may become a great man?” he asked and pointed at me with his letter-hand. I looked him in the eyes and said that anything is possible. After a moment of silent consideration, he seemed to find this response favorable. He rather suddenly pivoted and began to exit the room, but not without gesturing for me to follow him. The lumbering David trailed close behind, his eyes fixed on the floor. Lorenzo spoke as we walked:

“If you wish to be a great man, I have only one word for you. Study. The greatest men throughout history have been those with the power of knowledge. It is only now coming to our attention how much we have neglected the past and how much may be learned from it. The past few centuries have been barbarous and dreadful, there was no order, no progress, no humanity. The only thing one could count on was war, famine, and pestilence. But with the help of God and an insistence on education, we may begin to elevate ourselves from the squalor of provincial life. Look around this magnificent city! Look at the sheer beauty of it all!” His voice grated and grew into an affected passion. I could tell he was very proud of his self-perceived eloquence.

“But not everyone can afford to study. What about the thousands of servants and poor who fill the streets? What about the slaves?”

“What about them?”

“If education is so important, then surely it makes sense to extend it to as many as possible, right?”

“Are you implying that I should fund every soul who fancies himself an artist or a scholar? Or worse, everyone regardless of mental acuity or skill? Even if such a request wasn’t completely offensive to me and to God who made us so that we should be different from other men... Even if: I simply don’t have the resources to provide that kind of service to everyone,” he squawked, striding atop shimmering marble floors and past a perfectly ornate fresco detailing the exact moment when Lot’s wife was transmuted into a woman-sized pillar of salt. “If I did, I would have opened up a dozen schools by now.”

I wanted to tell him that people would still make the same excuses six hundred years later, despite possessing a superabundance of resources and the ability to distribute them. I had already begun to regret having made my trip.

~~

“Well, where are your beneficiaries now? I would love to speak with some of them, if I could.

“I have so many,” he replied quickly, wanting to return to a narrative in which his generosity knew no bounds. “Do you mean—”

“I mean the big ones. The— you know, Da Vinci, the… other ones.” I finished, realizing that I didn’t know the exact timeline for all the Italian Renaissance artists. Better to keep it vague than to say a name that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone.

“You are in luck. As it happens, Leonardo and Sandro arrived shortly before you did. Normally I would ask a strange, fairly impudent messenger such as yourself to leave, but something compels me to invite you to stay.”

(That something was me, of course. Poor Lorenzo, he didn’t even know what powers moved him.

It was I, the defecating God.)