The Secret Dead

Начало книги

I was eighteen years old and had justtaken holy orders the summer Fra Gennaro found the girl. It was not the firsttime I had seen a naked woman. I had entered the Dominican order as a novice atfifteen, old enough by then to have tasted first love, the sweet warmth of agirl’s pliant body in the shade of the olive trees above the village of Nola. Adistant cousin, as it turned out; her family was livid. Perhaps that was why myfather had been so ready to pay out for my education, though God knows he couldill afford it. Sending me away to the Dominicans in the city was cheaper than ascandal. We were given new names on taking our final vows, to symbolize theshedding of our old selves. I took the name Giordano, though most people justcalled me Bruno.

Naples in the summer of 1566 was an inferno of heat andnoise, dust and crowds; a city of heart-stopping beauty and casual violence. Twohundred and fifty thousand souls seething inside ancient walls built to house one-tenththat number, the tenements growing higher and higher, until their shadowsalmost shut out the sun because land was scarce, so much of it taken up by thevast gardens and courtyards of the palazzos and the religious houses. Tensionsin the city streets brewed and boiled like the forces of the great volcano thatovershadowed them. Even walking from one side of a piazza to the other felt likefighting through the front line of an advancing army: elbows and fists,baskets, barrows, and hot, angry bodies jostling and shoving, trampling orcrushing one another. Horses and carts plowed through the heaving marketplaces whilethe sun hammered down without pity and blazed back from walls of yellow tufastone or from the flashing blades of knives drawn in exchanges of rich,inventive cursing.

Читать дальше →