Painting Mona Lisa aka I, Mona Lisa

“You are pregnant,” she said implacably.

We stared at each other for a very long, very silent moment.

I let go a sudden laugh, and she caught my hand and smiled.

Just as abruptly, I turned my face and stared, melancholy, into the fire.

“I want to see my mother,” I said.

LI

Two days later, Zalumma swaddled me against the chill. With my father’s leave, she and I rode to the churchyard at Santo Spirito. Had I not been feeling unsteady, we could have walked.

The driver waited inside the narthex while we women went outside to the churchyard. The cold air stung my nose and eyes and made them water; the tip of Zalumma’s nose, the edges of her nostrils, were bright pink. We both raised the hoods of our capes-new ones, courtesy of Ser Francesco.

The dead grass and leaves were frosted and crackled beneath our feet as we walked to where my mother was buried.

My mother lay in a crypt of pink and white marble that gleamed like pearl where the feeble sunlight struck it. Per my father’s wishes, her marker was plainer than most: Two curly-haired marble cherubs adorned it. One sat upon the marker, an arm and his face directed upward, as if contemplating her destination; the other gazed solemnly at the viewer, the index finger of his dimpled fist pointing at her name:

ANNA LUCREZIA DI PAOLO STROZZI

Had the weather not been bitter, I think I would simply have sat down next to her, on the ground, and rested in her presence. As it was, I stood none too steadily and thought, Mother, I am going to have a child. I put a gloved hand on her tomb; it burned like ice, and I thought how very cold her bones must be, lying there.

“Three years ago,” I said aloud to Zalumma. “Three years ago this very day, she took me to the Duomo.” It had been cold that day, too, though it did not make me ache so.

“On your birthday,” Zalumma said. Her voice was taut; I thought she would cry. “She wanted to do something special for you that day.”

Grief, I thought, had made her forgetful. I clucked my tongue gently, made my tone light. Zalumma cried very rarely, and I could not have borne it that day. “Silly. Where is your head? You know my birthday is in June. The fifteenth, like today.”

Zalumma bowed her head beside me. “Your mother always tried to do something special for you on this day. Something no one else would notice, but I always knew.”

I turned my face toward her. She knew exactly what she was saying. She stared straight ahead at my mother’s grave, unable to meet my gaze.

“That’s impossible,” I said slowly. “Everyone knows my birthday falls in June.”

“You were born at your grandmother’s country estate. Your father sent Madonna Lucrezia there when she began to show. And she stayed there for almost a year after you were born.” Her face was flushed. She, who had always been supremely confident, now spoke timidly, stumbling over her words. “She and your father were agreed on this. And she swore me to secrecy. If it had been only for him…” Her handsome features contorted briefly with hate.

I had entirely forgotten the cold. “What you’re saying makes no sense, Zalumma. No sense. Why would so many people-”

“Your father had a wife, before your mother,” she said swiftly. “A young thing. He was married to her four years before she died of fever. And she never conceived. They blamed it on her, of course. They never question the man.

“But then he married your mother. Three years passed, and again, no child. No child, until…” She turned to me, suddenly herself again and filled with exasperation. “Oh, child! Go look in a mirror! You look nothing like Antonio! But everyone else could see it-”

“See what?” I had made myself intentionally stupid, I think, because I did not want to understand what she was saying-but in retrospect, I must have understood it all along. I was near crying. “I know I don’t look like my father, but… what does everyone see?”

She put her hands upon my shoulders at last, in a gesture of comfort, as if she had finally realized that what she was saying would hurt me. “Madonna, forgive me. Forgive me. Your mother loved Giuliano de’ Medici.”

“Giuliano-” I began, then stopped. I had been going to say that Zalumma was mad, that Giuliano-my Giuliano-had never met my mother, so to say that she loved him was insane.

But then my mind returned to that point in time when I had stood in Lorenzo’s courtyard with Leonardo, and the artist had asked me to pose in front of Giuliano’s statue, with its oddly familiar features.

I thought of Leonardo’s skillful, trained eye, how he had so faithfully reproduced my image in a sketch after meeting me only once. I thought, too, of Lorenzo, staring through the window, waiting. I knew then he had been watching the artist for a sign.

My mother had to have known I was Giuliano’s child from the start. My father, in his jealousy, had shunned her for months before I was conceived, and continued to do so long after I was born. That same jealousy caused him to strike her when she confessed she was pregnant.

There were rumors of the affair, of course. Once Giuliano died, my mother and Antonio agreed upon a deception, to spare my father shame: She would deliver me in secret, in her mother’s house in the country, and return with me when my age made the lie feasible. I was baptized late; my false birthdate was recorded in the city ledger.

That way, no one would suspect me of being Giuliano de’ Medici’s daughter. No one except perhaps for the astrologer, paid by Zalumma in secret so that she and my desperately curious mother could learn the truth about my destiny.

No one, except Leonardo and Lorenzo, who had recognized their loved one’s features from afar.

Zalumma and I rode home in silence.

Why, I had demanded of her in the churchyard, did you not tell me this earlier? Why did you wait until now?

Because your mother made me promise to keep this secret from you, she had replied, almost shouting from the grip of strong emotion. And then-you were so miserable living with your father, there seemed no point in making you more miserable, until you were free of him. I had planned to tell you the day you married Giuliano.

I speak now because you deserve to know the truth about the child you carry.

I wanted to weep, for many reasons, but the tears remained trapped in my tightening throat. I remembered Lorenzo, whispering, I love you, child; I remembered my mother, giving me the medallion as a keepsake. And now it was gone, and I had nothing to remember my real father or my husband-my cousin- by.

Perhaps I should have felt angry with my father-with Antonio-for striking my mother because she carried me. But I could only remember his crushed hands, his bleeding fingers where the nails had been torn away. I could only remember my father’s words, as I left to attend the dying Lorenzo:

No matter what he says to you, you are my daughter.

He must have been terrified that I would learn the truth that night; yet he had let me go.

When we returned home, I went up to my chambers and did not go down for supper; I couldn’t have eaten anyway. Zalumma brought me bread and salt to settle my uneasy stomach.

We still did not speak. My mind was racing, reinterpreting the past, and Zalumma seemed to understand that. I