"Luciana da Parma", a story by Robert Wexelblatt.

 

 

5.

            The Duke and Duchess of Modena arrived with their son in a huge gilded coach that needed six horses to haul it.  Their retinue was large enough to consume the equivalent of a couple fair-sized dowries. The ceremony to seal the betrothal was the sort of formality that called for the utmost efforts of everyone, from scullions to ministers; the logistics were about the same as a small war’s.  There were banquets, masques, and a joust for the rich, pageants, public feasts, and horse races for everybody.  Every musician in the area played and all the guilds paraded.
            The young couple were shifted about like furniture.  Standing beside Sandro during one evening reception, Luciana whispered to him, “Look, fellow pawn, there goes knight to queen’s seven, and the bishop just put the king in mate.”
            Sandro stifled a chuckle, thereby passing at least one test.
            The two had ample time together, but none of it alone.  In public Sandro delivered what sounded like speeches memorized from Seneca, with a very slight stutter.  As for Luciana, she was demure.  Before the arrival of their guests, her father, who had always encouraged her wit, took both her hands in his and said, “There’ll be time for a thousand sallies later, my dear.”  Signor Polacchio offered her much the same advice:  “Diplomacy is a peculiar form of comedy, my Lady, one in which nobody is allowed to laugh.”
            Filippo was there with his useless Visconti wife, both of them looking sour.  Giovanni and his Farnese bride stuck close by his mother and father.  As he was the heir, protocol required it, though he’d have done so anyway.
            During Mass, Luciana noted that the future Duke of Modena closed his eyes in devotion and that when they were open he looked first to his mother.  However, when he did look at her it was always with a shy smile.
            Sitting next to each other at dinner the first night, she ventured a comment.  “My Lord, I understand you like mathematics and know Greek.”
            “A little Greek,” he said, embarrassed.  “Not much.”
            “Latin?”
            “My tutor, Father Poggio, was very strict.  So many declensions.”
            “Hoc opus, hic labor est,” she said.
            “Cicero?”
            “Virgil.”
            Physically, he was nothing like Guido d’Ostiglia.  He was slimmer than Guido; his neck was narrower, and he was obviously uncomfortable in his fashionable new clothes.  He never made jokes. 
            Guido’s father had tactfully arranged that the boy should visit Florence for an indefinite period.  Luciana received no less than fifteen sonnets from him on his departure.  They were his best efforts by far.
            As they took the seats of honor for the guilds’ parade, Luciana decided she might as well begin calling her future husband by his given name.  “Sandro, may I ask you something?”
            He nodded.
            “Is your father faithful to your mother?  Mine isn’t.”
            The boy’s mouth fell open in astonishment.
            “Sorry.  I didn’t mean to pry.  What I suppose I really want to know is how you feel about the vow of fidelity.”
            He looked shocked.  “How do I feel about a vow made before God?”
            “Exactly.”
            On another occasion, following a masque on the theme of Apollo and Daphne, they were given a few moments of rest on a banquette while the musicians left and the hall was cleared of scenery.  Luciana pointed to one of the Sforzas.
            “Do you believe they’ll try to take over Modena, Sandro?  They’ve done so before.”
            The boy gave a prompt answer this time.  “My father thinks it’s possible.  I believe that’s why we’re getting married.”
            “Do you know if he’s in contact with the French?  Your father, I mean.”
            “I don’t think so.  No, wait.  He did mention something about the French but I can’t recall what.”
            Luciana sighed.  “But to bring the French over the mountains would be a capital error.  Don’t you agree?”
            Sandro looked at her more closely than he had before.  “You know, Luciana, you’re really very pretty, even when you’re being serious.  Especially then.”
            Luciana smiled at this graceless, and therefore sincere, compliment.  “Thank you, Sandro.  By the way, I meant to ask if you know the work of Luca Pacioli?”
            “No.”
            “He’s a mathematician. Signor Polacchio received a manuscript from him last week.  He has some original and useful ideas about how to keep accounts, though he steals shamelessly from Della Francesca.  Would you like to see it?”
            “Yes, I would like that very much.  Grazie mille.”

 

6.

            Only after she accused him of abandoning her did Polacchio consent to spend a year in Modena watching over his former pupil while exploring the middling ducal library, enjoying his reputation, the heavenly vinegar, and the divine prosciutto crudo. His advice to Luciana was to be cautious not only with her new in-laws but also with the courtiers.They were, he told her in confidence, a second-rate collection.  “But they’re conscious of their limitations and all the less trustworthy as a result.  The mediocre are the most susceptible to envy,” he concluded sententiously.
            Luciana replied with an allusion to Plato.  “I’ve noticed it, too. The gossip  here is even nastier than in Parma.  They’re like those people Socrates said preferred tearing others down to improving themselves.”
            Polacchio smiled with the complacency of a successful teacher.
            “I have to say you’re doing well:  respected by everybody, liked by many, and loved by some.  You’ve been generous with the poor and you know how to speak to the common people.  That’s no negligible talent, seeing how they crave familiarity but insist on dignity.”
            “In Parma I had few opportunities to help the poor.  Now I have many.”
            “Yes.  Widows and orphans bless you twice a day.  But winning over your mother-in-law, there was a true labor of Herakles, there’s an achievement.”
            Polacchio greatly overestimated the difficulty of this task. The Duchess could never, like Luciana’s mother, be content under the thumb of a man.  She valued the female mind, insisted on a measure of independence, even indulged a certain rebelliousness, albeit of the inconsequential, point-scoring variety.  Taken as a group, her lady-attendants were superior to her husband’s advisors in both morality and intelligence; and her young daughter-in-law seemed to perfect the circle, making it more charming.  In fact, it was Luciana’s reputation for learning and wit, confirmed by her tutor, that had made the Duchess her advocate in the marriage sweepstakes.  As for Luciana, she found in the Duchess the friendship she had missed with her own mother.  The Duchess, who had wanted a daughter, took note of how well Luciana got on with Sandro, the way she brought him out of himself and made him happy.  It helped that they both adored Dante and couldn’t stand the bishop.

            Sandro was only twenty years old when his father died, Luciana seventeen.  The Duke’s death came after a brief respiratory illness his doctors were powerless to arrest.  To the surprise of those who mistook her independent manner for indifference, the Duchess was inconsolable.  Luciana was only able to talk her out of taking the veil by pointing out that such a step would place her under the authority of men like the Bishop of Modena—“or, worse yet, the Pope!”
            The same week her father-in-law died Luciana sent an urgent letter to Polacchio, who was then in Venice, summoning him to Modena and asking him to bring along a competent engineer.  “I am told that Signor Cramonti is in Venice at present.  He would do.  If things proceed as I intend, there will be work and good pay for you both.”
            Luciana knew from her father and other sources as well that there were men in Milan who hated what had been done at Lodi and who plotted to take back Modena, and Parma as well.  In her view, the death of the Duke made the whole region vulnerable.  Her inexperienced and indecisive husband lacked a martial reputation.  Her father was far better prepared but, on its own, Parma could not fend off a real attack from the Sforzas.  She worked on an idea of how the two cities could be defended.  After all, why else was she in Modena if not to defend Parma?
            In the second year of her marriage, shortly after the departure of Polacchio, she explored Modena’s two rivers, the Secchia and the Panaro.  It was while floating down the latter that a notion had come to her through an association of ideas.  Before he left she and Polachhio had been reading the Roman historians.  In an effort to bring to life the old chronicles, the tutor had asked her to compare Livy’s and Polybius’ accounts of a battle fought hardly more than two day’s distance from where they sat.  This was Hannibal’s defeat of the Romans on the River Trebia.  During her voyage down the Panaro, the kernel of the scheme came to her like a daydream.
            Within days of the Duke’s interment, however, she worked her idea out in more detail and she disclosed it to her husband.  The same day she dispatched a trusted messenger, one of the women she had brought with her from Parma, to speak with her father and the old condottiero.

            The dam was constructed roughly and rapidly.  It was devised by Polacchio and Cramonti to give the appearance of being only an unusually large mill, with wheel and weir, situated at the head of a narrow valley, almost a ravine, just to the west of Modena, through which the Panaro flowed before meandering over the plain. 
            When news came that a Milanese army was marching toward Parma and Modena, Luciana’s plan, much improved by d’Ostiglia, was put into motion.  Parma’s forces left the city heading west.  After engaging in a few skirmishes to give the Milanese a good look at them, they retreated eastward, drawing the enemy away from Parma and toward Modena.  Meanwhile, Modena’s troops fortified by peasant volunteers concealed themselves on the heights on either side of the valley.  The old condottiero led his troops on an orderly retreat straight up the valley but instructed the hindmost to hang back and give the appearance of fleeing in panic.  Seeing this, the Milanese impetuously rushed into the valley right behind them.  As soon as the last of Parma’s men began to scale the slope at the end of the valley, a signal was given and the dam was pulled down.  The pent up Panaro, suddenly freed, gushed into the valley.  It was hardly a biblical flood, but the torrent was sufficient to knock over the Milanese vanguard and get them all mired in the mud.  At that moment, the Modenese on the heights rose up and showered the enemy with arrows; they rolled rocks and whole tree trunks down on them, and threw all kinds of missile weapons.  The Milanese were compelled to withdraw in disorder.
            The Sforzas denied responsibility for the attack, blaming the old party of the Visconti for acting independently, which may even have been true. Francesco Sforza tossed a couple dozen men in his dungeons, formally apologized to Modena and Parma, and once again confirmed, with the most solemn oaths, his devotion to the Peace of Lodi.

 

7.

            The name attached to the library of Modena is Sandro’s but the credit for its outstanding collection of incunabula belongs properly to Luciana.  A good deal is owed also to Polacchio, who sent many of these books to her, first from Venice, then Florence, Basel, Wittenberg, and finally from Amsterdam.  “My teacher’s star,” Luciana liked to joke, “drifts ever northwards.”  His own Morum Lata, De Pantheiusmus Occidentalis et Orientalis had been condemned as heretical by several powerful churchmen which did not deter Luciana from including three copies in the ducal library.  Most of the other volumes she had from Polacchio were even more offensive to the Church.
            When the Bishop of Modena at last gained the red hat he had coveted for so long, he deemed it his duty to confront the Duke about his library.  Sandro simply referred him to his wife.  In consideration of her youth, position, and popularity in the city, prudence suggested discretion.  He invited the duchess to his palace on the pretext of presenting her with three tomes straight from Rome, all freshly printed and unobjectionable.
            “Knowing your cherished aim of building up the ducal library, I am delighted to make you a gift of these, my Lady.”
            “Many thanks, Your Eminence.  I assure you they shall be cared for as they deserve.”
            “You are most welcome. But while we’re on the subject of the library I must remind you that it contains many books, particularly those from the North, that have been condemned.  Such works are to be burned, not collected, and certainly not read.”
            Luciana’s reply was typical.  “Your Eminence, how can people know what books to reject if they can’t read them?  Surely, you can’t believe that the lucubrations of some dyspeptic German or Hollander could turn the heads of true children of Mother Church whom you have instructed in right thinking since they were baptized?”
            Even the local clergy were relieved when the Cardinal, while retaining the title and emoluments of Bishop of Modena, moved his residence to Rome.
            Luciana gave birth to a son.  The boy was christened Francesco—not, as some foolishly thought, to propitiate the Duke of Milan—but after the laureate Petrarca.
            The Peace of Lodi having been re-established, Luciana and Sandro devoted themselves to their son, the happiness of the city, and the patronage of the arts.  Many famous men spent time in Modena.  Not only paintings and statues accumulated but also smaller objets d’art, exotic curiosities, well-wrought salvers and saltcellars.  Just as Polacchio had predicted, Sandro needed to be governed and, with help from her mother-in-law, Luciana managed this without undermining her husband’s dignity but in a way that increased his self-confidence.  He was faithfully devoted to his wife and she to him.  Both doted on little Francesco.  They had a few good years.
            From its third month, Luciana’s second pregnancy did not proceed smoothly.  By the seventh she could not leave her bed.  The five doctors the terrified Duke summoned—two local men plus one each from Florence, Pisa, and Venice—frowned and whispered, whispered and frowned.  Luciana’s mother-in-law would not leave her bedside until implored to do so by Luciana herself.  Despite his age, when told that his daughter’s life was in danger, her father would not take a coach but galloped all the way from Parma.
            The child, a girl, was delivered early but alive; however, after ten days, Luciana died.  She was twenty-six years of age.  The girl was christened Agnella Lucia da Modena.  The whole city went into deep mourning for a month.  Sandro commissioned Baraschetti to design the charming little Church of Saint Margaret of Antioch in his wife’s memory.
            A year and a half later, Charles VIII entered Italy, the peace ended, and the wars resumed.  Sandro, who had never recovered from the loss of his wife, was soon overthrown and took refuge with his children in Parma, now under the rule of Luciana’s elder brother, whose hospitality was meager and grudging.
            Guido d’Ostiglia, after distinguishing himself in the wars, became in Siena what his father had been in Parma.  He married twice and people say his mistresses were beyond counting.