The Family - Mario Puzo [148]
When Cesare had gone, she felt a surprising sadness. For in that moment she was certain they would not meet again, and so he might never know that those papers could not make any difference. For she held within her womb the part of him she had already claimed. And as the mother of his heir, those territories would in the end once again belong to her.
Filofila was the finest verse scandalmonger of Rome. Secretly in the pay of the Orsini family, he was under the personal protection of Cardinal Antonio Orsini himself. Filofila invented the grossest crimes for the most saintly men. He had an even better time with people of villainous deeds, as long as they were ranked in high place. He could vilify cities as a whole: Florence was the big-breasted, wide-hipped harlot, a city full of riches and great artists but lacking in fighting men. The citizens of Florence were moneylenders, cronies to the Turks, versed in sodomy. And like a whore she went to all kinds of foreign powers for protection, instead of coupling herself with her fellow Italian cities.
Venice was, of course, the secretive unforgiving city of the doges, who would sell its citizens’ blood for trade, who executed its own people if they as much as told a foreigner how many ducats it cost to buy silk in the Far East. Venice was a huge snake, waiting in its great canal to snap up any morsel of the civilized world that could help it profit. A city without art or artisans, without great books or a great library, a city forever closed to the humanities. But a city expert in treachery, executing both small and great alike for their crimes.
Naples was the city of the syphilitic pox, the French disease—just as Milan was the French sycophant, fellow to the sodomitic traitor Florence.
But it was the Borgia clan that Filofila made the target for his most scabrous verses.
He sang out in rhyme about their orgies in the Vatican, their murders in Rome and in all the city-states of Italy. His verse was eloquent, his prose exquisite, when he took up his pen to claim that Pope Alexander had used simony to purchase the papacy, or that he had twenty natural children. He had betrayed the Crusades, stealing money from Peter’s Pence to pay Cesare Borgia’s soldiers, making his son master of Romagna and forcing the Papal States to heel. And for what? To support his family, his bastard children, his mistresses, his orgies. And even more: as if committing incest with his natural daughter were not enough, he had taught her to poison his rich enemies in the college of cardinals and then traded her off in marriage more than once to cement his alliances with other powerful families of Italy. One marriage was annulled; the other ended in widowhood—that condition brought about by her own natural brother, Cesare Borgia.
Yet it was when Filofila wrote his poems about Cesare Borgia that he surpassed himself. With loving detail he described how Cesare always wore a mask to hide a face disfigured by the suppurating sores of the French pox; how he had deceived both the Spanish and French kings, and betrayed Italy with both of them at the same time; how Cesare too committed incest, with both his sister and his sister-in-law. He had made one brother a cuckold and the other a corpse. Rape was his special pleasure, murder his most subtle diplomacy.
But now, with the fabulous d’Este marriage soon to take place, Filofila turned his venomous pen to Lucrezia. She had lain with her father and her brother—separately at first, then all together in the same bed. She had sex with dogs, monkeys, and mules; and when her footman caught her at these vile perversions, she poisoned him. Now unable to bear the shame of her lustful conduct, her father was trading her off to Ferrara to cement a relationship with an illustrious Italian family. Yes, Filofila thought, he had outdone himself with his work on Lucrezia.
All this made Filofila famous. The verses had been copied and posted on the walls of Rome, circulated through Florence, and especially requested by rich Venetians. Not that Filofila dared to sign