The DaVinci Cure

After my own time spent as a vagabond when I was a child, I can easily spot another when traveling through these streets. His entire body had a forward lean about it as if he were already leaving where he stood. Eyes darting from person to person, calculating the distances of potential getaways from everyone else instead of looking at their faces. I recognize such intense and aimless fear from this boy on the roadside.

When Leonardo took me in all those years ago, he told me I had a gift to recognize the unfinished things of this world. He told me I could see past the apparent realities to the deeper mechanisms that underlay them.

Now, I see this runaway boy who can’t be more than 12 years old with his shoes wrong for the winter here in Florence. His hands were red with cold when they left his pockets to wipe his nose. When we stopped, and I asked him his name, an obvious, practiced lie left his lips. I know Leonardo could tell as well, but he still stepped past me to introduce himself and not push or correct the boy. He had a way of humoring about him when Da Vinci felt someone could be useful.

We needed this boy because there was much work to be done, Leonardo’s head was excruciating this week, and his falling sickness also seemed to get worse since we moved to Florence. After finishing The Last Supper in Milan, Leonardo needed a fresh start somewhere else to work on his current masterpiece.

The boy was in a stupor of disbelief and excitement that the Leonardo Da Vinci was speaking to him.

“Tell me, boy. Would you like to learn how to cook?”

The kitchen at the monastery of Santissima Annunziata was enormous. White stone made up the walls and dozens of archways holding up the ceiling like the cavernous remains of some ancient monster’s skull. Leonardo and I were staying here while he worked on his newest commission from the city government for some kind of portrait of a woman whose name I can’t recall. The monks who resided in this monastery didn’t worry themselves much with the inanities of the modern world, but they absolutely took their cooking seriously. Leonardo stood near a lit open-hearth fireplace in the center of the room. The fire heated an oven above it, and the boy sat wide-eyed on a stool near the fire, his face glowing from what seemed to be the heat and the majesty of his situation.

The boy looked comfortable. The boy looked happy. These two emotions have no doubt eluded him for months, potentially years. Any comparisons I saw in myself to him were gone in this moment. I would have known these feelings were mistakes. He obviously did not know this.

Leonardo spoke sweetly to the boy, stopping periodically to ineffectively rub his eyes to alleviate his coming and going migraines. In the kitchen, Leonardo Da Vinci moved as he painted. With wraithlike fluidity, he tied his hair back and washed his hands. With a surgeon’s care, he meticulously spread out each ingredient and explained them to the boy. An array of sweeteners, wines, spices, chocolates, molasses, and others was spread on the table near the heating oven. The smell of the bread in the oven intoxicated the vast kitchen. This could have easily been Da Vinci’s profession had he not gone the way of painting and engineering.

“Ok, boy. Watch closely and listen well.” He didn’t look at the boy when he spoke, but was working on some kind of poultice in a bowl in his hands, combining the ingredients with a frenetic concentration. His words came out in a torrent. This normally happened when his hands were being occupied. Like the dexterous act of fine movement was a softener of his mind.

“The way I am bruising the herbs here will awaken the oils inside them. This maximizes the flavor and the medicinal properties. Chopping and cutting don’t have the same effect. Here, smell them.” Leonardo held the bowl out to the boy, and I could tell the aroma was pleasing by his visceral reaction. The boy watched and listened like these new and foreign skills were much different, more amicable escapes than he was used to.

Leonardo spoke, and the boy smiled. He dumped a heaping bowl full of awakened spices and herbs into a boiling stock pot, and the boy smiled. Leonardo showed the boy the pantry, the hanging salted meats, and the fine cheeses the boy had never heard of, and the boy smiled. As the preparation continued, I could see hints of Da Vinci’s headaches intensifying and his falling sickness showing signs of an episode. He rubbed his eyes more frequently and had to stop often to comfort his shaking hand.

“Boy, this monastery holds a special place in my heart. These monks were able to offer remedies that many hospitals and doctors do not have the courage to prescribe.” Leonardo gestured vaguely at the room. “Some of these recipe tomes contain elixirs dating back to the times of Sun gods and pantheons of other deities.”

The stock boiled. The bread rose. The boy looked puzzled.

“Monasteries like this contain the most talented apothecaries in the world, boy. Grinding the great relics found under the pyramids to a powder finer than flour and creating the strongest medicine in the world.”

The boy’s confusion was obvious now, and he unconsciously briefly returned to making sure he knew where all the exits were and measuring distance from me and Da Vinci.

“They took it a step further here, boy.” A great shiver wracked Leonardo’s body, causing him to drop a knife and cough out that final word like some wet cackling demon. “The mummy powder was too hard to find, so fresh blood, dried and powdered, helped control some of my fits. When you bury a human skull in a shallow wet cave, a green moss called Usnea, or Muscus ex Craneo Humano, forms. This lichen is easily harvested and sold in small paper twists for the treatment of migraines. Did you know about any of this, boy? About the great medicine…” he convulsed again, doubling him over for a moment “… the great medicine we are all capable of?”

Da Vinci’s eyes reflected the fire under the oven as he stared unblinking and mad at the boy.

“Is it barbarism, boy? To cure a man of debilitating ailments? To steal that cure from a lesser, unproductive observer and redistribute it to the people creating the beauty and progress of this world? DAMN!” His hands flew to his eyes, and Leonardo’s chin tucked in agony for several seconds. “NO!” He was now screaming at the boy. “NO! These are the most profound experiments. The ones that push the limits of humanity and end up offering benefits to the good of us all. Boy! You look uneasy! WHY?”

Da Vinci’s words now had great weight. A mass pulling all the other air and sound out of the room, filtering everything through the oven fire and making the world a silent, burning, breathless tomb.

“I…” The boy stuttered and composed himself. “I thought you were a painter.”

Leonardo looked at me for the first time since we had all been in the kitchen, and he laughed. His head reared back, and he laughed as a wolf howls at the moon with a mouth full of blood and meat between his teeth. His laughter rang out in a hysterical echo in the large, open space. Another violent shudder shook his body, triggering a coughing fit as he turned back to me.

“Did you tell the boy your name?” Sweat spit from Da Vinci’s lips at the culmination of every word, even though the dead of winter outside kept the massive space cool.

The boy then turned to me as well. There he is. The real, unsmiling him. He is again a runaway. I see the constant potential for evasion in his eyes. The panic of uncertainty for getting into and out of this room.

“My name is Salai, boy.” I smiled at him just like Leonardo taught me to. I had never smiled before he took me in, and I believe that quality saved me. He taught me how to do it. When to do it. Now seemed appropriate.

The boy had a physical reaction to me grinning at him. He saw right through it. He turned back to Leonardo, who was now sitting in a chair near the fire, palms cradling his entire face with his elbows on his thighs.

“I gave him that name, boy.” He spoke through his fingers without looking up. “It means little devil. Unclean one.”

“I earned it.” My voice startled the boy to his feet.

Looking up from his hands, but still significantly slouched over, Da Vinci half drooled, half gasped out, “Impurities like Salai are simply out of place in this world. Once repositioned and repurposed, they are essential for the successful endeavors of men like me.”

The boy took a half-shuffle, half-step towards the space between Leonardo and I that led to the door we entered the kitchen through. Leonardo, now completely mad with shakes, fever, and migraines, rambled on about the persistence of life at all costs, how some men are born to push humanity forward and live on no matter what, how death didn’t cause people to vanish, but rather supported the world through different means. He mumbled that the stomach was actually a vessel of the greatest alchemy, and that the freshest ingredients yielded the most profound healing concoctions. The entire room seemed to get warmer with his fevered madness.

Leonardo devolved into incoherence, intermittent laughter, and bone-rattling shakes. The boy, now frantic with fear, was dripping sweat himself and looking back and forth between Da Vinci and me. I tensed, ready to move to incapacitate the boy. The boy shot his glance at me like he could read my thoughts. Like he knew my intentions. Years of street living intuition recognizing a monster. At that very moment, our tensions peaked. He and I were both ready to make our moves. Leonardo shot out a hand and grabbed the boy’s jacket faster than could be believed. In perfect clarity and depthless indifference, Leonardo spoke.

“We preserve our life with the death of others. In a dead thing, insensate life remains which, when it is reunited with the stomachs of the living, regains sensitive and intellectual life.”

Da Vinci collapsed on the floor in a puddle of his own effluence, sprawled and unmoving in the throes of his conditions. The boy stood, mouth agape, looking down at him as I struck him once, and he fell without drama.

Leonardo awoke to me spooning small portions of soup into his mouth. His face returned to color. His shakes subsided. His fever broken. His strength and mental composition returned quickly, and he sighed deeply. The sigh of relief that I have heard dozens of times now as I have brought him back from the void of his afflictions. He smiled.

“Seek out the lady Gherardini tomorrow. I am ready to begin the commissioned portrait that her husband paid for now that my strength is back up.” His voice was clean and unwavering.

“Absolutely, signore.” I took a sip of my own soup, and the feeling of invigoration was overwhelming. “She has a cogname different than her husband. How would you like me to address her?”

Da Vinci seemed lost in some space between the reality of the observable world and the place where his thoughts fit in the hearts and minds of all men. Where his glories would be interpreted. He seemed propelled hundreds of years into the future and hundreds of miles away from here.

“Mona.” He returned to me. “Address her as Mona Lisa.”After my own time spent as