Bitter Greens

by Kate Forsyth

  The next day, I went out. I told myself I needed to find food, but the truth is I could not bear to stay in that room. First, I took a turquoise brooch to the Jews and exchanged it for a small bag of coins, which I hid in my bodice. Then, I went to market, bargaining with shopkeepers for their leftovers and off-cuts. My coins dwindled alarmingly fast. On my way back to the house with the pomegranate tree, I stole an orange off a table. My heart banged hard against the bones of my chest. It felt good. I felt alive. I stole a shawl off a washing line and a cushion off a chair, and ran all the way home, my lungs compressed with terror and triumph.

  My mother lay motionless, her knees to her chin. She did not respond to my chatter, just turned her face away. Looking out the window at the jumble of roofs, I sat on my new cushion, the shawl about my shoulders, and ate my orange slowly, licking the juice from my fingers. Then I went out again.

  My days fell into a pattern. I would roam the alleyways, stealing whatever I could, regardless of whether I needed it or not. I wanted to keep my thoughts focused firmly forward. But, every day, something – the creak of an old gate, a smell oozing from a doorway, a flash of something white in the corner of my eye – would stab me like a stiletto through the heart. Then I would scrub our room again, smashing fleas with the back of my scrubbing brush, or I’d beat the rug with a broom out the window till the people below shouted and shook their fists at me.

  I don’t think my mother ever managed to forget, not even for a moment. She lay on her bed, clutching the lock of red-gold hair to her heart, her eyes wide open and staring at nothing. I tried to coax her to get up, to come and sit in the window and look down at the busy life of the street below, but she always shook her head. I could not coax her to eat much, so she got thinner and paler. She did not even have the energy or the will to weep, though she spoke a few words. ‘Thank you’ or ‘I’m sorry’. Once, she called me tesorina. I began to feel a little less afraid.

  Summer came. It was so hot in our tiny room that I scarcely slept. Perspiration trickled down my back and prickled my groin and my armpits. Every time I glanced at my mother, she was awake, staring at the wall, her knees tucked up under her chin. ‘Go back to sleep,’ I’d say. ‘Everything’s all right.’ She’d nod and shut her eyes. It seemed as if I was the mother, and she my little bambina.

  Sores developed at the corner of her mouth. She felt them with her tongue and turned a piteous face towards me. ‘I’ve the pox,’ she said.

  I tried to comfort her, but she lifted her skirt and tried to see the red inflamed lips of her vagina. Sores clustered all around it. She felt them with her fingers. ‘I wish I was dead,’ she whispered. She lay down on her makeshift bed, weeping hopelessly, the lock of my father’s hair pressed against her cheek.

  I went downstairs and stood for a while in the doorway, leaning my head against the doorframe. It was a hot golden evening and the streets were full of people seeking some movement of air. I looked not at their faces, laughing, glistening with sweat, nor at their swinging skirts or striding legs, bright in multicoloured hose; I looked at their feet. Feet in soft shoes, in boots, in chopines. Bare feet, filthy and black. I felt my rage boiling inside me.

  Our landlady came down the hall and stood near me. ‘Hot,’ she said, waving her hand about her red-painted mouth. She looked at me out of the corner of one black-kohled eye. ‘Your month is almost up. Got any more pearls in that bag of yours?’

  ‘No. But don’t worry, I’ll pay you for the room.’

  ‘How old are you, little bimba?’

  I crossed my arms. ‘Old enough.’

  ‘Old enough for a gentleman friend? I know someone who’d like a pretty little thing like you.’

  ‘If you bring a man anywhere near me, I’ll slice off his cock and then I’ll shove it up your arse.’ I showed her the poniard I had stolen and now carried in my bodice.

  She drew back a wary step, then laughed. ‘What if I bring more than one?’

  ‘Then I’ll kill you.’

  She must have realised I meant it, for she called me a little cow, drew her shawl about her raddled bosom and went away down the hall.

  I went out into the streets that night, stealing anything that took my fancy, yelling insults up at the whores, dodging the deluge of piss from upturned chamber pots, making rude gestures at anyone who I thought looked at me sideways, throwing stones at cats, kicking over baskets of fruit, anything to make me feel alive and powerful. Though I scored plenty of insults and rude gestures in return, no one chased me or hurt me. I would like to think it was because I radiated waves of red-hot rage, but, truthfully, I think I still looked like a skinny little girl, even though inside I felt I was as world-weary as our landlady.

  I came home only when doors began to shut up for the night and the alleys were shrouded in darkness. I carried my poniard in my hand, not at all sure that the old whore, our landlady, wouldn’t have men lying in wait for me. All was quiet, though, and I slipped up the stairs to the room I shared with my mother, feeling guilty now for having left her so long.

  The first thing I noticed was the smell of vomit.

  ‘Mama?’ I peered into the darkness. There was no answer. ‘Mama?’ I scrabbled to strike a spark with my flint and stone. My hands were shaking with a sudden intense anxiety. A spark lit and died, but in its brief flare I saw my mother lying sprawled on the cushions, her eyes staring at me. My heart beat a staccato. I struck again and again, till I managed to light a taper. I lit a candle and turned slowly to look at her.

  She was dead. Her mouth hung open, a streak of dried vomit on her chin. Her eyes bulged horribly. My father’s lock of hair lay across one limp palm. The vial of belladonna eye-drops lay fallen from the other. Belladonna was poisonous, I knew. My mother had always warned me not to drink it.

  I stood stock still, staring at her. Her eyes seemed to accuse me. Slowly, not taking my eyes off her, I backed across the room and fumbled behind the stove, looking for the drawstring bag full of jewellery I had hidden there. I tied it about my waist, backed out of the room and shut the door. I slid down to the ground, bowed my head into my arms and sat, unable to think or feel, wanting only to disappear into darkness.

  I sat there all night. Only the stealthy advance of light into the stairwell roused me from my stupor. I rose stiffly, went downstairs and banged on our landlady’s door until she got up and opened the door a crack.

  ‘What do you want?’ she croaked.

  ‘I need a witch.’

  Curiosity sparked in her dull brown eyes. She tilted her matted head. ‘It’ll cost you.’

  I dug in my pocket for the few scudi I carried on me. She examined them carefully, rubbing her thumb over the edges to make sure they had not been clipped, then told me, ‘Best witch I know is Wise Sibillia. They say she’s a thousand years old and once led a coven of witches in the Appenines, before the Inquisition drove her away. You’d best be careful – if you betray her, she’ll tear out your heart and eat it.’

  Wise Sibillia sounded perfect.

  The witch’s eyes were black and inscrutable. Her long flowing hair was as white as an old woman’s, though her figure was straight and strong, and her dark olive skin smooth and unlined, except for one deep crease between her brows, angling down from the left. It was her mouth that betrayed her. The lips were sunken and puckered, and, when she opened them to speak, she revealed only a few broken stumps of teeth.

  ‘So, child, what can I do for you?’ the witch said.

  ‘I want revenge on someone,’ I answered.

  ‘Are you sure you want to dabble in such dark matters? Can you not spit in his soup or put a thistle in his shoe?’

  I looked at her scornfully. ‘I want him to suffer forever.’

  Her lip curled in amusement. ‘Powerful black magic, then. You will need to hate him with great intensity.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Do you have money?’

  I did not trouble with the few battered scudis I carried in my pocket. I lifted
my skirt and unknotted a ruby ring I had tied in the hem of my petticoat. It was the most valuable piece of jewellery my mother had owned. I lifted it against the light to show Sibillia. She raised her left eyebrow, deepening the line at its corner so I knew how it had been carved into her flesh.

  ‘You must hate him very much.’

  ‘I do,’ I repeated.

  ‘What is your name, child?’ Sibillia asked.

  I bit my lip and looked away. We were sitting in her garden at dusk. The air was heavy with perfume from a white hanging flower like an angel’s trumpet. Giant moths beat against the lanterns strung along the archways of her patio. A thin crescent moon was pinned to the sky above the crooked tilted roofs of San Polo.

  I remembered an old story my nursemaid had once told me about the moon and witches. ‘Selena,’ I answered.

  ‘A most intriguing name. Much more interesting than Maria.’

  I tried hard not to react. How had she known my name was Maria? Most girls in Venice were called that, I told myself, and raised my chin.

  ‘Do you have a last name, Selena?’ the witch asked.

  The whore’s brat. The bastard. And now a new one: the orphan. I shook my head.

  ‘So when is your birthday?’

  I told her, and she said, ‘Born under the sign of the lion – most suitable, given your hair and eyes. You should call yourself Selena Leonelli. That’s a name with power.’

  Selena Leonelli. It rolled around my mouth like the sweetest of jujubes. I smiled at her, and the unfamiliar movement of the muscles around my mouth seemed to tug up my heart from the black pit into which it had fallen. A new name seemed to signal the possibility of a new life.

  ‘And how do you come to have such a fine ruby, Selena?’

  ‘It was my mother’s.’

  ‘Your mother is dead now.’ Sibillia said it as a statement of truth, not as a question. I nodded. ‘And you wish revenge on the man who caused her death.’

  I nodded again.

  ‘Very well, I’ll help you, but if you are caught and charged with witchcraft you must not mention my name.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I promised.

  But she gave me that quizzical lift of her eyebrow again and said, ‘No, Selena, you will not, for I shall bind your tongue so that you cannot speak my name, no matter how much you wish you could.’

  So that was the first spell I ever learnt: the binding of a tongue, the binding of another’s will.

  The second spell I learnt was how to drive a man mad by disturbing his sleep with nightmares. This is how you do it.

  Take a long black candle and a sharp pin. Write your enemy’s name along the candle with the pin, driving the letters in good and deep. Bind the candle in the spiny brambles of a blackberry vine. Wrap it in a square of black cloth, along with a handful of grave dirt (I used dirt from the communal pauper’s grave my mother’s body was tossed into). Sew it closed with black thread. On the first night of the full moon, smash the candle as hard as you can with a hammer, while chanting:

  Wake with a scream, haunted by dreams,

  never rest, never sleep,

  clawed from the deep.

  Do this for the next three days. Then take the bag, now filled with smashed candle powder, and bury it in your victim’s garden, preferably under his bedroom window.

  Zusto da Grittoni did not have a garden but I buried it in a topiary pot on his balcony. I took to lurking outside his villa, watching him pacing back and forth across his window when all the rest of Venice slept. By the end of winter, when the streets of Venice were flooded with icy water, Zusto da Grittoni had hanged himself from his bedposts. He would have gone straight to the deepest level of hell, I know, and there he would suffer for all eternity.

  And I went to live with Wise Sibillia to learn her craft.

  LOVE AND HATRED

  Venice, Italy – 1508 to 1510

  Love and hatred were the witch’s currency.

  Her garden was an aphrodisiac garden and a poison garden. Roses and myrtle and passionflowers grew entwined with hemlock and foxgloves, mandrake and nightshade, the heavy-headed, bell-shaped flowers of dark purplish-red from which was distilled the belladonna eye-drops that had killed my mother.

  When I was first shown the small room in which I was to sleep, I felt something under my ribs spring open. It was like I had stepped back into my mother’s childhood, or into a daydream. The room was roughly whitewashed, but the sun filtered through jasmine so that shadows of tendrils and blossom coiled and uncoiled across the walls. I was able to step through the narrow doorway and, barefoot, stand on the warm soil, breathing in the heady scent of the garden, filling my lungs and veins with the exhilarating power of life and death.

  In return for such beauty, offering Wise Sibillia my wrist to prick and my blood to suck seemed a small price to pay.

  During the day, I assisted Sibillia as she harvested flowers and leaves, dug up roots, crushed berries and mixed concoctions. While she saw clients, I worked for her in her library, laboriously hand-copying the manuscripts of spells and incantations that she kept locked away in a stone chest. Venice was then the centre of the publishing world, printing presses churning out all kinds of books and pamphlets every day, yet the books I slowly copied onto parchment, trying desperately not to blot, would have sent any printer to the pyre.

  As I finished writing out each difficult arcane page, I made another secret copy for myself, which I concealed under my mattress and dug out again at night to read over and learn by heart.

  Sibillia sold my handwritten manuscripts for great sums of money, to sorcerers and philosophers all over Europe, the books smuggled out in false-bottomed chests filled with flasks of perfume and rose water, jars of white lead and vinegar face paint, depilatory creams made of caustic lime to burn away eyebrows and the pubic hair, pomanders of amber and musk, lip salves of vermilion and cochineal – women’s frivolities, which no customs officer would bother to search through.

  In the afternoons, I filled my basket with love potions and cures, poisons and curses, and delivered them all over Venice. Nearly all of Sibillia’s clients were women – whores who wanted revenge on their pimps, nuns wanting to abort a secret child, young women languishing with unrequited love, stout matrons wanting to poison their husbands’ young and lovely mistresses.

  I came to know the labyrinthine alleys and plazas of Venice as I knew my own body, its snaking canals and crooked bridges, its hidden squares, its round domes and jutting spires, its palaces and hovels, convents and brothels. I was accompanied everywhere by a thickset surly-faced manservant named Sergio, for women did not walk the streets of Venice alone, not even whores.

  As I walked the stony streets, basket over my arm, I examined the feet of the men who passed me, looking always for shoes that I knew. I listened to gossip, asked questions and set street kids to spy for me, till – one by one – I tracked down the men who had raped my mother. Our old servants were the first I found. I made wax figures of them all, dressing them in little outfits I made from old clothes I paid to have stolen from their chests. I also paid to have the hair plucked from their brushes or nail clippings gathered from under their beds. I stuck the hair on the little poppets’ heads and sewed the nail clippings inside, then amused myself in the evenings by sticking pins in them, into their heads and their feet, and especially at the soft juncture of their legs. Eventually, I’d hold the poppets over my candle flame till they had melted into grotesque shapes, and then I’d bury them in the garden.

  After our servants, I tracked down Zusto da Grittoni’s. Then, when they too had died or gone mad, I began to search for those other men, the ones in soldier’s boots and a priest’s long cassock, those filthy tramps with their yellow curling toenails. I used every maleficent spell I learnt from Sibillia’s books – pulling a parsley root from the earth while crying out my enemy’s name, burying the decomposing heart of a dead rat in their garden, sprinkling food they were to eat with dirt gathered from my mother’s grave
– experimenting to see which spell worked fastest or had the most dire effects. I watched my enemies, enjoying their slow torment, relishing their eventual breakdown and death.

  As they dwindled, I grew plump and sleek, my hair growing in ripples of fiery red-gold, down past my waist. I became aware of the glances of men in the street, and occasionally a young blood in striped hose and slashed sleeves would call out to me, begging me for a smile, a kiss, a fuck. I always shook my head and hurried away, glad of the bulk of Sergio behind me.

  One day, in the spring before my fifteenth birthday, I was coming down the stairs of a grand house on the Campo San Samuele when one of these young bloods came bouncing up. He was dressed in salmon-pink and indigo velvet, one leg striped pink and purple, the other pink and grey. His codpiece bulged out, pushing aside the folds of his doublet.

  ‘Here’s a pretty sweetmeat,’ he said, pausing at the sight of me. ‘I’m feeling a trifle peckish. Let me have a taste of you.’ He pushed me into the wall, one hand squeezing my breast, his wet tongue swirling inside my mouth like a child trying to lick out a bowl. Revulsion filled me. I whipped out my dagger and pricked him in the side.

  He jerked away with a curse and touched his side. His fingers came away bloody. ‘You cut me, you little cow.’

  ‘Touch me again and I’ll curse you so your cock falls off.’

  ‘You’ve torn my doublet. Do you know how much it cost?’

  ‘Do you think I care?’ With my dagger held out threateningly, I went backward down the steps.

  As I reached the floor below, he suddenly called out, ‘Witch.’