MAY 22ND, 1498
This whole life has been an echo, where everything he says has the weight of all the times he said it before. He has changed very little. He even went to Bologna to give the Lenten sermons, which he has never done since he remembered what he was. Two weeks before Piero poisoned Pico and Angelo, he gave a sermon on the text from Exodus, “Thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live,” in which he not only condemned poisoning but talked about different poisons in detail and the symptoms of arsenical poisoning. He wasn’t sure it would work to stop Piero, but he only had to delay him. He didn’t think Piero was stupid enough to poison his friends while everyone was talking about poison, but it was still taking a risk. He was very glad to be right. He also tried to stop Capponi leading the army to Pisa, but with no success. Capponi went, and died, as always. He did manage to abolish torture, but they tortured him anyway.
The other difference, this time, is that he has prayed. He does not know whether God hears him, or the saints he names, but he no longer feels that God’s ear is infallibly blocked. He prays to Lorenzo daily. He thinks, he hopes, there may have been a miracle.
He is sitting in the cell they call the little inn, high in the tower of the Senatorial Palace, waiting. His last book has been written, the meditation on the psalms, and if he wrote it from memory it was none the worse for that. His shoulders ache fiercely from where the torture dislocated them, but he almost welcomes the natural, Earthly pain. He takes a deep breath, and lets it out again slowly. The next morning they will hang him over the fire, and he will fall back into Hell. He strokes the stone with his fingers. He knows no way to take it with him. He never has. He looks over to where Crookback is lurking in the corner of the cell.
The comforters come and pray with him. He has not forgotten how sententious they are. He thinks of the night he spent with Angelo in the dungeon of the People’s Palace, the night Pico read to him in Rome, the night in Venice with Isabella and his children and grandchildren clustered around the bed, the surprise of Cesare’s dagger blossoming in his chest. He seems to be always dying and falling hard into Hell.
The comforters explain about Domenico and Silvestro, and he asks to see them. “When you inquire,” he says, “tell them that if they want an orderly execution, it would be better for me to have the chance to restrain my brothers. Otherwise, either of them might take the opportunity to make a speech and stir up the people, doing their best to start a riot and rob the occasion of all its dignity.”
The eyes of the comforters meet beneath their hoods.
“I’ll tell them,” the taller one says, and goes out, leaving him alone with the shorter one.
At once, Crookback comes scuttling out of the shadows, sideways like a crab. The comforter has his back to the demon, but he wouldn’t have seen him anyway. Girolamo is kneeling, reciting a psalm, but he stops praying as Crookback comes out. He could stop him and banish him even now, but he holds back. He understands this time that he wants to possess somebody so they can talk. Crookback leaps for the comforter and dives down his throat.
“Give me the stone,” he says, through the comforter’s mouth.
“What are you going to do with it?” he asks.
“I’m going to take it into Hell and make a gateway out, of course, you ninny.”
“We were brothers,” he says, as he said once in Hell, as Crookback said once to him in Ficino’s room. He remembers Michael’s face, and Raphael’s, angels experiencing pain for the first time as pain came into being because of what he had done.
“Yes. And there isn’t much time.” The comforter’s arms move awkwardly and his eyes have rolled up, showing the whites.
“Do you remember Heaven?”
“Yes! And if you get a move on and give me the stone there’s a chance we can get back there someday, when we’re purified enough. You can’t do this alone, Asbiel, and I can’t either. You have to trust me. Hell is always divided against itself. If we can do this together—that’s what it’s impossible to say in Hell!”
“The house divided against itself cannot stand, that means Hell cannot stand,” Girolamo says.
“Let’s bring it down, brother.”
“You said you were going to storm Heaven,” Girolamo says, still hesitating, though he hears the feet of the other comforter on the stairs, returning.
“Do you belive you are the only one who can learn from lifetimes here and in Hell?” Crookback slithers out from between the comforter’s lips. The man slumps to his knees. The demon scurries forward to where Girolamo kneels. As he hears the key in the lock, he reaches into his clothes and pulls out the stone. Crookback takes it between two of his demonic finger-legs, and vanishes.
The short comforter staggers to his feet as his companion comes in. Girolamo doesn’t know what he saw or what he remembers. He says nothing, as Girolamo goes through the usual words, and they take him down the long twisting stairs in the dark, to the chapel where Silvestro and Domenico are waiting. This time when he celebrates the mass, when he performs the miracle of the eucharist, he does not feel it is a blasphemy. He has tears on his cheeks, but then he always did.
In the morning light, outside in the Senatorial Square, they strip him of his habit, piece by piece. Brother Benedetto, the bishop of Vasona in full bishop’s regalia with his mitre, cope, and crook, formally excommunicates him. “I cast you out of the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant!” he says.
“You can do the first,” he says, as he always says. The Church Militant is the congregation of the faithful on Earth. The Church Triumphant is the congregation of saints in Heaven. “You don’t have the power to do the second.”
“Oh, sorry,” murmurs Benedetto, flushing, as if he were still one of Girolamo’s monks in San Marco. Girolamo wishes he had taught him better when he was. He hates sloppy theology. Girolamo is proclaimed a heretic, and handed over to the civil authorities, the Eight, who are standing in line, in their red robes. He is sentenced to death by hanging. They will be hanged over the fire, and afterwards their bodies will be burned, to make sure there are no remains that the poor Wailers can use for relics.
They are marched out individually, each of them in white, with a comforter in black close on either side. Silvestro is first, then Domenico. Girolamo goes last. The stake, with its crosspieces cut short and the ladder leaning against it from the circle of the piled-up pyre, doesn’t really look like a giraffe, but Girolamo smiles to himself thinking of it.
Every time he walked out unknowing from the palace, over the built-up trestles, towards the fire, he had thought he was going to martyrdom, that he would die for one moment and then live forever at God’s side. Now he knows what he is, that he is a demon, and that Heaven is still very far away, but possible, perhaps, if he was right to trust Crookback. Silvestro goes up. He calls on Jesus as he falls, but does not make a speech. The square is full of people, both supporters and enemies. Girolamo was right to do his best to prevent a riot. Domenico also calls on Jesus, once, loudly. Then it is Girolamo’s turn. The comforters release his arms, and he climbs. From the top of the ladder that leans on the stake, with the noose around his neck, he sees his shadow falling on the upturned faces crowding below. He looks up. He can see Brunelleschi’s dome for the last time in this life, huge but elegant, lifting his heart every time he sees it, even now. He tries to keep his eyes fixed on it, but the rope twists as he falls, and he sees the tower of the People’s Palace, with the red-tiled roofs of homes of ordinary Florentines in between.