The Family - Mario Puzo [174]
At dawn the next morning, still bound hand and foot, Cesare was gagged, wrapped in a shroud, and placed in a wooden coffin. The coffin was closed and driven by wagon to the port, where it was loaded aboard a Spanish galleon bound for Valencia.
Cesare could not breathe; there was too little room in the small box even to struggle. He tried with all his might to resist his own panic, for he was certain that if he gave in, it could make a madman of him.
De Córdoba had chosen this method of transport, for he had no intention of allowing any Neapolitans still loyal to Cesare to learn that he had been arrested. He felt he had more than sufficient men to repel any rescue attempt. But, as he put it to his lieutenant, “Why take a chance? This way any waterfront spy will see only the coffin of a poor dead Spaniard being carried home for burial.”
When the galleon was an hour out at sea, the captain finally gave the order to free Cesare from the coffin and remove his shroud and gag.
Pale and shaking, still bound, he was thrown into a storage locker near the stern of the ship.
The locker was cramped, but filthy as it was, at least it had a vent in its door, better than the stifling coffin in which Cesare had spent his last hours.
Once each day during his journey across the sea, Cesare was fed wormy biscuits and water by one of the crew. Kind and obviously experienced in sea voyaging, the man pounded each biscuit on the deck to knock the worms loose before breaking off pieces to push into Cesare’s mouth.
“Sorry about the bonds,” he told Cesare. “But the captain ordered it. You stay trussed up until we arrive in Valencia.”
After a miserable voyage marked by rough seas, disgusting food, and cramped, foul-smelling quarters, the galleon finally docked at Villanueva del Grao. Ironically this was the same Valencian port from which Cesare’s great-uncle Alonso Borgia—later Pope Calixtus—had left Spain for Italy more than sixty years before.
The bustling port was filled with the soldiers of Ferdinand and Isabella, and so there was no further need to disguise or conceal the prisoner.
Once again, Cesare was thrown over the back of a mule and carried down a cobblestone street alongside the harbor to a tall castle which was now a prison. This time he did not fight.
Cesare was pushed into a tiny cell near the top of the castle and there, with four armed guards present, his bonds were finally removed.
Cesare stood, rubbing his sore wrists. He looked around the cell, taking in the stained mattress on the floor, the rusted food bowl, and the foul-smelling slop bucket. Would this be his home for the rest of his life? If so, that would in great likelihood not be long, for his devout friends Ferdinand and Isabella, anxious to please both the new Pope and Juan’s widow, would almost certainly decide to torture and kill him.
Days passed, then weeks. And Cesare sat on the floor of his cell trying to keep his mind alert by counting things—roaches on the wall, flyspecks on the ceiling, the number of times each day the tiny slot in his door would open. Once a week, he was allowed an hour of fresh air in the small prison courtyard. On Sundays, he was brought a basin of rancid water with which to cleanse himself.
Was this better than death? he wondered. He could not be certain, but he knew he would find out before too long.
Still, the weeks turned into months and his situation remained the same. There were times he was certain he had gone mad, when he forgot where he was, when he imagined himself walking along the shores of Silverlake, or arguing good-naturedly with his father. He tried not to think of Lucrezia, and yet there were times she seemed to be standing in the same cell, stroking his hair, kissing his lips, talking to him in sweet comforting words.
He had the time now to think about and understand his father, to see what he had tried to do, not fault him for his errors. Was his father as great as he appeared to Cesare? Though he knew it had been