Milan, September 1516
I traveled with Leonardo as far as Milan before turning back. He is going to France at the invitation of the French King, to a chateau at Amboise where he will be given a title and a stipend and comfortable rooms and a studio, and he will live out the rest of his days as the most celebrated mind in Europe, painting very little because his left hand has failed, drawing still because the drawing was never primarily about the hand.
We parted in the courtyard of a house in the Brera this morning. He looked at my face for a long moment before we embraced, as he has done every time we have parted since the reunion in Rome last year. He said something that was not goodbye because he was confident, as I was confident, that we would see each other again. He was sixty-four years old. I was fifty-eight by the calendar, and looked rather older, as I have since the mountains.
I turned back from the city gates. I did not watch him go. I have found that watching departures is different from being the one who departs, and not in a way I can easily explain.
He will die in Amboise in 1519. I will be in Venice when the news arrives, and I will sit with it for three days before I can move normally again. I do not know this yet. I am only standing in a Milanese courtyard in September 1516, watching the wagon disappear into the traffic, telling myself that I believe we will meet again. I believed it. It was not enough.