Reading sample of "Leonardo e l'enigma di un sorriso"

Here a reading sample of "Leonardo and the Enigma of the Smile" By Janna Carioli, for all our non-italian reades!

Chapter one: His First Notebook

“Mmmfff!”
Leonardo chased away the fly tickling his nose with a snort and, without opening his eyes, stuck his face under the down quilt. He was dreaming about flying and wanted to finish his dream. He was coming down a hill in great leaps without ever touching the ground. His body was light and to rise up into the air he simply had to slowly flap his arms like a hawk. It was a wonderful sensation and he didn’t want to abandon the dream just because of a stupid insect. But the fly went and tickled his ear. Grumbling, he pulled out his hand and gave himself a loud slap on the cheek.
“Drop dead!” but by then he had already woken up.
A chuckle emphasized his failure to catch the fly.
Leonardo opened his eyes to the face of his uncle Francesco, who burst out laughing next to his bed, showing him the feather he had been tickling him with.
“But, what time is it?” he muttered, scratching his rumpled mass of blond curls.
“It’s the dawn of your birthday, sleepy head.”
Shoot, he was right! Leonardo jumped out of bed shivering in his rough cotton nightshirt and went barefoot to use the chamber pot while peeking at the grey sky outside the window.
“Ugh, it’s rainy again today!”
That year it seemed the spring had no intention of ever arriving. After the flood that, in January, had caused the Arno to overflow its banks, the winter had continued on long and cold. In Vinci, the only room in the house where you could enjoy a bit of warmth was the kitchen with the fireplace where Grandma Lucia was preparing breakfast.
He ran back underneath the covers.
“And my present?”
“Who told you I got you a present?” his uncle teased.
But Leonardo wasn’t fooled. He knew well that there was a present for him. Why would he have woken him at dawn if there wasn’t? For as long as he could remember, Francesco had celebrated his birthdays by building him a small toy. One year it was a small animal cut from wood, another was a whistle, another still was a catapult or a top. The little boy was impatient. He did have a present for him. The man took a sort of small brick out of the sash that held up his breeches.
“What is it?”
He looked suspiciously at the strange object.
“It’s a notebook.”
“A…notebook? For me? I’ve never had a notebook!”
“In fact. You’re twelve years old and it’s time you had one. This way at least you’ll stop stealing paper from your grandmother’s desk to draw caricatures. The last time she got extremely angry. You scribbled all over the back of an important document just to make fun of the priest and drew him with a nose so long it touched his chin!”
Leonardo laughed.
“It looked like him, though!”
Francesco showed him the notebook that he had made with his own hands: the pages were well-bound with a thin cord made of animal entrails and the cover was of soft leather and closed with a pierced cherry stone.
He tried to grab the little notebook, but his uncle kept it from him.
“But…you must make an effort to write properly, and not with your left hand! Promise?”
He replied neither yes nor no.
As if he hadn’t tried to write “properly”. Quite the opposite. Actually, it had been Father Piero di Bartolomeo, who taught grammar and abacus at the rectory, who had made him try. He had tried… and had got a beating. He had even tried tying his left hand behind his back in order to teach him to write with his right hand and not with the “devil’s hand” as he always said. And Leonardo, painfully, had learned. But as soon as he was out of view of the priest, he started writing again as he wanted, with his left hand and backwards.
It was the only way that came naturally to him.
Moreover, he derived a subtle pleasure from writing this way. In order to read his pages, the others had to hold his writing in front of a mirror. This way, he seemed to be able to keep his thoughts secret.
Grandpa Antonio looked at him with a sigh and muttered, “What are we going to do with our strange son!” while his grandmother replied annoyed in her strong Tuscan accent, “You’re the strange one! He’s just a kid like all the rest!”
Francesco ceremoniously presented him with the notebook.
“I’ve written your name and the date inside so that you’ll always remember your old uncle…and I forbid you to draw caricatures of me!” he said in an ironically serious voice.
On the first page the following was written with a flourish, “Lionardo – Vinci, April 15, 1464.”
His “old” uncle was 28 years old. There had not been a moment of the boy’s life that had not been spent playing with this kind of big brother who carried him around piggyback, had taught him to climb trees, prepare traps for wild hares and scuffle with the village boys.
Leonardo hastily slipped on his short breeches, grabbed the notebook and ran down the stairs.
A fire had already been lit in the kitchen and his grandmother was stirring the soup in a pot over the coals of the fireplace.
On the table there was a row of large rye loaves set out to rise.
“Oh, it’s you Lionardo. Go get a bundle of wood for…”
But he darted past her and slipped out the door shouting “ok, ok, I’ll be right there” and he took off running through the fields.
It had stopped raining and the puddles reflected a sky that little by little was getting clearer. The birds had started singing again as they always do after a storm and Leonardo, jumping barefoot into the centre of every puddle, was happy.
He ran over to the house of Caterina, his mother.
Who knows whether she remembered that today was his birthday?
Who knows…
In past years, she had always remembered. Even though she had had three little girls after him, fathered by Accattabriga, a gigantic, sinister kilnman who aroused a certain fear in him.
He ran quickly along the canal connecting his grandparents’ house and Campo Zeppi. The red, straight branches of the willow trees, still bare of foliage, reached up toward the sky like hair on their heads.
When he got within sight of the low, stone house, he slowed down. A gaunt, grey dog started barking at him, pulling at its chain, and wagged its tail in hope as he watched the hand in which Leonardo held the notebook tightly.
“Good boy, Branco, good boy!”
The stall door was open and the air was dense with the heat of the cows. A woman’s voice sang softly in a corner.
“The olive falls, but the leaf does not, your beauty never diminishes…”
Leonardo hesitated in the doorway.
Caterina was sitting on a low milk stool nursing Elisabeth, the youngest baby girl. A loose, blond curl fell like a thin, strand of gold across the bald head of the newborn girl.
The boy felt his heart lurch. He saw his mother’s face again, just like that, as if he were looking up at her from below like his little sister was looking at her now.
The woman looked at her with a mysterious smile as if she, a peasant, held inside her all the knowledge in the world. A beam of dusty light illuminated her, creating around her a kind of magic circle.
He felt a pang of envy.
Once he had also been inside that circle.
Leonardo thought his mother resembled the Madonna above the altar of the church in Vinci. She turned and smiled at him.
“Lionardo!”
“Moth…Caterina…”
That “mother” was about to escape his lips, as happened every time he saw her. But, he held it back. His grandfather had explained it to him a hundred times. He was to call Albiera, the young woman his father had married shortly after his birth, “mother”. Caterina was just the peasant woman who had brought him into the world.
Maybe to the others. But to him, she was his mother. And he rolled the two syllables of that word around in his mouth savouring them every time he saw her.
She put her fingers to her lips signalling him to be quiet. The baby girl was falling asleep.
Leonardo let himself slip to the ground and leaned against the door. While he waited, he took out a little piece of carbon, opened the notebook and began tracing the face of the woman, once more singing the little one a lullaby to put her to sleep.
“The olive falls, but the leaf does not, your beauty never diminishes…”
Caterina began tidying herself up. She laced up her blouse and rested the infant on the hay. Then she rummaged through a bag under her apron and took out a little cake.
“Happy Birthday, Lionardo.”
She hadn’t forgotten.
He spent the morning playing with Branco and carting Maria and Piera, his step-sisters, around piggyback, who competed with each other for his attention, happily wiping their runny noses on his shirt.
By the time he had returned home to his grandfather’s house, it was almost one o’clock.
He ran into the farmyard and then stopped amazed. His father’s carriage was in the courtyard. Was it possible he was there for him?
Ser Piero had never remembered his birthday. In Vinci, they only saw each other at Christmas and for the patron saint’s feast day. The fact that his wife, Albiera, was finally pregnant with their first child made his visit even stranger.
Leonardo slipped quietly into the house. The voices of his father and grandfather argued animatedly.
He hid behind the door and listened.
They were arguing over a piece of the farm that his father wanted to sell. But his grandfather refused. And he refused precisely in Leonardo’s name.
“He’s illegitimate. He can’t become a notary like you, Piero. The only possibility he has is to stay in Vinci and help Francesco take care of the land. I’m over eighty years old, I certainly won’t be around forever!”
“But I need it now! Now, understand? My child will be born in June. A real son, who’ll take my name, who’ll make something of himself. I need the money,” his father said in a firm voice. “I need to give him a proper baptism! I certainly can’t ask a Medici to be godfather of the son of a beggar! Fortunately, I take care of some of their affairs and they promised me. I need the money!”
“And Lionardo? Aren’t you thinking about him? He’s your son as well.”
He held his breath and waited for his father’s answer. Ser Piero had always had a vaguely condescending attitude toward him. When he came to Vinci, the only thing he asked him was if he behaved well with his grandparents. Every now and then he gave him a sort of suppressed caress, but nothing more. He couldn’t ever remember receiving a real hug from him. Though he had tried in a thousand different ways to win his affection. He had even learned to play the lyre just because his grandfather had mentioned that his father sang well and that he liked music. But one Christmas, when he had prepared a ballad to sing to him, Ser Piero had listened to a verse or two and then had begun talking with Albiera, losing interest in him. Leonardo, who had waited for months for that moment, still felt his cheeks burning in humiliation.
“He’s your son as well,” his grandfather had said. He stood still and listened.
“Leonardo…I’ll find him something to do in Florence. He’s got to start practicing a trade. He can go work in a workshop somewhere and earn his bread honourably.”
And so, the only thing that counted for his father was that he wasn’t a burden.
But his grandfather objected.
“Why don’t you leave him in Vinci a little while longer? In Florence, you wouldn’t have time to look after him. Your baby is about to be born. You have other things to think about. He’s fine here with us.”
Ser Piero sighed.
“Oh, ok. Maybe you’re right. One more year, then we’ll see. But I insist on your thinking about the land.”
Leonardo let out a sigh of relief. He had no desire to leave Vinci.
A shadow appeared at his back.
Albiera was behind him and had caught him spying. Her belly was full with child and her face pale and weary from the trip. His father’s wife had always been kind to him, but they really had nothing to say to each other.
The boy blushed, greeted “Mrs. Mother” hastily and escaped again into the fields.