The Secret Supper Read Free Page A

had changed the behavior and the aims of her powerful husband. Her personality began to fascinate me. Superstitious, addicted to profane literature and seduced by whatever exotic notion circulated in her fiefdom, her obsession was to bring to Milan the former splendor of Florence under the Medici.
    I believe it was this that put me on my guard. Though the Church had managed gradually to undermine the pillars of that powerful Florentine family, weakening the support they lent to thinkers and artists fond of unorthodox notions, the Vatican was not prepared to face a resurgence of such ideas in the great northern city of Milan. The Medici villas, the memory of the Academy that Cosimo the Elder had founded to rescue the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, the exaggerated protection he had given to architects, painters and sculptors, filled not only the fertile imagination of the duchess but mine as well. Except that she allowed these things to guide her own beliefs and infect the duke himself with their poisonous allure.
    Since the day when Alexander VI ascended to Peter’s throne, in 1492, I kept sending messages to my superiors to warn them of what might happen. No one paid any attention to my advice. Milan, so close to the French frontier and with a political tradition of rebellion against Rome, was the perfect candidate to nurse what might become an important schism within the Church. Nor did Bethany believe me. And the Pope, lukewarm toward heretics (barely a year after having donned the tiara, he had already begged forgiveness for having hounded such kabbalists as Pico della Mirandola), lent deaf ears to my warnings.
    “That friar, Agostino Leyre,” my brothers in the Secretariat of Keys used to say about me, “pays too much heed to the messages from the Soothsayer. He’s bound to end up just as mad.”

3
    The Soothsayer.
    He is the only piece missing to finish the puzzle.
    His presence merits an explanation. The fact is that, besides my own warnings to the Holy Father and to the highest powers in the Dominican Order concerning the Duchy of Milan’s errant path, there were others that issued from a quite different source, thereby confirming my worst fears. He was an anonymous witness, well informed, who every week would send to our House of Truth minutely detailed letters denouncing the beginnings of a vast sorcerer’s operation in the lands of Ludovico il Moro.
    His letters started arriving in autumn of 1496, four months before the death of Donna Beatrice. They were addressed to our order’s seat in Rome, at the monastery of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where they were read and put away as the work of a poor devil obsessed with the presumed doctrinal strayings of the Sforza family. I do not blame them. We were living then in times of madness, and the letters of yet another fanatic did not overly worry any of our father superiors.
    Except for one.
    It was the archivist who, at Bethany’s latest general chapter meeting, spoke to me of the writings of this new prophet.
    “You should read them,” he said. “As soon as I saw them I thought of you.”
    “Indeed?”
    I remember the archivist’s owlish eyes, blinking feverishly.
    “They are a very curious thing. They have been written by someone who shares your same fears, Father Agostino. A prophet of the Apocalypse, cultivated, well versed in grammar, such a man as the Christian world has not seen since the times of Friar Tanchelmo de Amberes.”
    “Friar Tanchelmo?”
    “Yes. A crazy old man from the twelfth century who denounced the Church for having turned itself into a brothel, and who accused the priests of living in constant sin. Our Soothsayer does not go so far as that, even if, by the tone of his letters, I suspect he won’t be long in getting there.”
    Leaning forward, the archivist added in a wheezing voice:
    “Do you know what makes him different from other madmen?”
    I shook my head.
    “That he seems better informed than any of us. This Soothsayer is a