The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  “‘Lord, Lord,’ I say to Him, ‘I will preach if I must. But why need I meddle with the government of Florence? I am but a simple monk.’ Then the Lord says in a terrible voice. ‘Take heed, Girolamo. If you would make Florence a holy city, its godliness must be built on deep foundations. A government of true virtue. This is your task. And though you may fear it, I am with you. As you speak, so my words flow over your tongue. And thus the darkness will be penetrated, until there is no place for the sinners to hide.

  “‘But never mistake the severity of the journey. The very fabric is rotten, eaten away with the wormwood of lust and greed. Even those who think themselves godly must be brought to justice; those men and women of the church who drink my blood from gold and silver chalices and care more for the cups than for me, they must be taught again the meaning of humility. Those who worship false gods through pagan tongues must have their mouths sealed. Those who stoke the fires of the flesh must have the lust burned out of them. . . . And those who look at their faces before my own must have their mirrors smashed and their eyes turned inward to see the stain on their souls. . . .

  “‘And in this great work men will lead the way. For as the corruption of man began with the corruption of woman, so their vanity and frailty must be guided by stronger hands. A truly godly state is one where the women stay behind closed doors and their salvation rests in obedience and silence.

  “‘As the pride of Christendom goes to war to win back my Holy Land, so the glorious youth of Florence will take to the streets to wage battle on sin. They will be an army of the godly. The very ground will sing with their footsteps. And the weak, the gamblers, the fornicators, and the sodomites, all those who flout my laws shall feel my wrath.’ Thus saith the Lord to me. And thus I obey. Praise be His name, in heaven and on earth. Praise be to this our great work in building the New Jerusalem.”

  And I swear, if it were not God then I do not know who was inside him, because he did indeed seem like a man possessed. I felt a shudder go through me, and for that moment it made me want to tear up my drawings and ask for forgiveness and God’s light, though the yearning came more from fear than any joy of salvation. Yet even as I felt it and the congregation rose up with one voice to praise him, I could not help but also be reminded of the sound that rose from Piazza Santa Croce on the day the city held her annual football contest, and the way the men in the crowd roared out their approval at every instance of sudden skill or aggression.

  I turned to Erila to see how she was affected, and as I did I lifted my head a fraction, just as the man in front of me chose that moment to shift his weight to get a better view. And so his sideways glance caught mine and I knew instantly we were discovered. A whisper went up toward us, and Erila, more attuned than I to the speed of male violence, grabbed and pulled me through the crowd until we reached the crack in the door and spit ourselves out, safe but shaking, into the cool sunshine of a bright December morning in the New Jerusalem.

  Twenty-four

  WHILE SAVONAROLA PREACHED HIS GODLY CITY FROM THE pulpit, Erila and I took to the streets. The idea of living behind closed doors with only seclusion and piety for company made me cold with fear. Even without the stain of my husband’s sins I would fail every test that Savonarola’s God would set me, and I had risked too much to go meekly into that darkness now.

  Most days we went to the market. Though women may be temptation on the streets, the business of shopping and cooking must still be done, and if the veil was thick enough it was sometimes hard to tell the curious from the obedient. I do not know what Florence’s Mercato Vecchio is like now, but then it was a wonder: a circus of sensation. Like everything else in our city it was stained with the mess of living, but that also gave it its vibrancy and style. Inside the square were elegant airy loggias, each constructed by and decorated for the trades they housed. So under the medallion portraits of animals were the butchers and under the fish the fishmongers, vying for the attention of your nostrils with bakers, tanners, fruit sellers, and a hundred steaming food stalls, where you could buy anything from stewed eel or roasted pike fresh from the river to chunks of pork stuffed with rosemary and sliced off the carcass as it dropped its juices off the spit. It was as if all the smells of life—the yeast, the cooking, the death, and the decay—had been thrown together in a great stewpot. I have found nothing to compare to it, and during those first dark winter days of God’s kingdom in Florence it felt like all that I had craved and was most afraid to lose.

  Everyone had something to sell, and those who had nothing sold their nothingness. There was no loggia for the beggars, but they had their pitch nevertheless—on the steps of the four churches that stood like sentinels around the square. Erila said there were already more beggars since Savonarola had taken control. But whether that was because there was more hardship or more piety—and therefore greater expectations of charity—it was hard to know. The one who really captivated me was the wrestler. He was standing on a plinth near the western entrance to the square and a crowd had already gathered around him. Erila said she knew him of old. Before he was a mountebank he had been a professional fighter who took on all comers in the mud reaches by the river. In those days he had had a manager who took bets for him, and there was always a crowd to be found shouting on the contestants, as they stumbled and groaned in the black quicksand until both parties emerged looking like devils. She told me later that she had once seen him bury another man’s head so deep in the mud that he could only signal his surrender by the waving of his arms.

  But such spectacles had been built on gambling, and in the wake of the new laws he had no option but to find another use for his magnificent body. He was naked to the waist, the cold sending his breath out as smoke. His upper torso was more like an animal’s than a man’s, his muscles so prominent and thick that his neck reminded me directly of a bull. He made me think of the Minotaur and its howling attack on great Theseus in the center of the labyrinth. But his was a different aberration of nature.

  His skin had been oiled until it shone, and along his arms and across and around his chest was a painting (though what paint could adhere to such oily human skin?) of a great serpent. And as he flexed his muscles, making his skin ripple, so its thick green and black curves gleamed and slithered along his upper arms and across his torso. It was a most monstrous and magical sight. I was entranced, so much so that I pushed my way rudely to the front till I was standing right below him.

  The richness of my cloth drew attention to my purse and he leaned over toward me. “Watch carefully, little mistress,” he said, “though you may have to lift your veil to see the wonder properly.” I moved aside my muslin and he grinned at me, a gap as wide as the Arno between his front teeth, then lifted out his arms toward me so this time, when the snake crawled, it was so close I could almost touch it. “The Devil is a serpent. Beware of the hidden sins in the pleasure of a man’s arms.”

  By now Erila was tugging at my sleeve, but I threw her off. “How did you do that to your body?” I said eagerly. “What paints did you use?”

  “Put some silver in the box and I’ll tell you.” The snake leaped upward onto his other shoulder.

  I dug into my purse and threw half a florin in the box. It sat glimmering there amid the dull copper. Erila gave a theatrical sigh at my gullibility and grabbed my purse out of my hand, stuffing it inside her own bodice for safekeeping.

  “So tell me!” I said. “It cannot be paint. In which case it must be dye?”

  “Dye and blood,” he said darkly, squatting down now so he was indeed close enough to touch, close enough to see the film of sweat and oil on his skin and smell the sourness of his body. “First you cut into the skin, little cuts, snip snip snip, then one by one you prick in the colors.”

  “Oh. Does it hurt?”

  “Hah. I screamed like a baby,” he said. “But once it was started I wouldn’t let them stop. And so every day my snake grows prettier and more lithe. The Devil serpent has a woman’s face, you know. To
tempt men. Next time I go under the knife I’ll ask them to give it your features.”

  “Ach!” Erila’s voice, sniping with contempt. “Listen to this flattery. He just wants another coin.”

  But I shooed her away. “I know who did this,” I said quickly. “It was the dyers of Santa Croce. You’re one of them, yes?”

  “I was,” he said, and he stared at me more closely. “How did you know that?”

  “I have seen their skin patterns. I went there once, as a child.”

  “With your father, the cloth merchant,” he said.

  “Yes! Yes!”

  “I remember you. You were small and bossy and had your nose into everything.”

  I laughed out loud. “Really! You really remember me!”

  Erila tutted loudly. “I’ve got her purse already, bonehead. There’s no more silver to be had.”

  “I don’t need your money, mistress,” he growled. “I make more waving my arms than you do on the streets after dark when they can’t tell your color from the black of the night.” And he turned his attention back to me. “Yes, I remember you. You had fine clothes and this ugly scrunched-up face. Still, you weren’t afraid of anything.”

  I registered his words like a small knife jab. I might have taken a step back but his face came closer. “But I tell you something. I didn’t think you were ugly. Not at all. I thought you were luscious.” And as he said the word he sent the snake rippling languidly across his body toward me, at the same time flicking his tongue around his lips till the tip came out and waggled at me. It was a gesture of such naked lust that I felt my stomach turn with queasy excitement. I moved away quickly and pushed toward Erila, who was already free from the crowd, and as I went I heard his crude laughter ringing out over my head.

  She was so angry at my disobedience that for a few moments she wouldn’t talk to me. But as the crowd thinned, she stopped and turned to me. “You all right?”

  “Yes,” I said, though I suspect it was clear I wasn’t. “Yes.”

  “So now maybe you see why ladies on the streets take chaperones. Don’t worry about him. His days are numbered. Once the new army finds him they’ll have him strung up so fast that both of his precious snakes will go limp with terror.”

  But I could not shrug off either the beauty of his body or the truth of his observations about my own.

  “Erila?” I stopped her again.

  “What is it?”

  “Am I really so ugly that he would recognize me after all these years?”

  She snorted and grabbed me to her in a fast hug. “Aah, it wasn’t your ugliness he remembered, it was your courage. God help us, it’ll get you into more mischief than your looks ever will.”

  So she pulled me down the narrow streets toward home.

  BUT THAT NIGHT I COULD NOT GET HIS SKIN OUT OF MY MIND. I slept badly, the muscles of the snake squeezing my dreams into nightmares until I woke in a sweat, fighting its coils off my body. My gown was soaked cold on my skin. I peeled it off and stumbled to my wardrobe chest to find another. In the dim light from the outside torches, I caught the reflection of my upper torso in the small burnished mirror on the paneled wall. The sight of my nakedness held me there for a moment. My face was full of heavy shadow and my curves trapped darkness under my breasts. I thought of my sister on her wedding day, shining with the confidence of her beauty, and suddenly I could not bear the contrast. The mountebank was right. There was nothing in me to delight the eye. I was so ugly that men remembered me only for my hideousness. I was so ugly even my husband found me distasteful. I remembered the painter’s description of Eve as she fled Paradise, howling into the darkness, newly ashamed of her own nakedness. She had been wooed by a serpent also, its forked tongue piercing her innocence as its coils squeezed life from its prey. I climbed back into my bed and curled in on myself. After a while my finger strayed toward my cleft, seeking a comfort from my body that no one else would ever give. But the night was full of sin now and my fingers were afraid of the sweetness they might find, and instead I cried myself to sleep with my loneliness for company.

  Twenty-five

  OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS, GOD AND THE DEVIL FOUGHT it out in the streets of the city. Savonarola preached daily while gangs of young boys appeared as his warriors of the new church, chastising Florentines for their lack of piety and sending women home to keep their own counsel.

  My sister Plautilla, on the other hand, who had always had a talent with appearances, chose this moment to surpass herself. Erila woke me at dawn on Christmas morning with the news. “There is a messenger from your mother’s house. Your sister gave birth this night to a baby girl. Your mother is with her now and will call on us on her way home.”

  My mother. I had not seen her since my marriage six weeks before. While there had been times in my life when her love had felt strict and implacable, there was no one else who both understood my perversity and cared for me despite or even because of it. Yet this same woman now had a past that connected her with my husband and a son who had orchestrated his own sister’s downfall. By the time she arrived that afternoon, I had become almost frightened to see her. My fragility was not helped by the fact that my husband had left the night before and was not yet returned.

  I welcomed her in the receiving room, like a good wife should, though the room felt cold and loveless compared with the one she had furnished with such grace. I stood up as she came in and we embraced. After we were seated she studied me with her usual eagle eye.

  “Your sister sends her love. She is proud as a peacock and in excellent spirits. The baby is in good voice too.”

  “Praise be to God,” I said.

  “Indeed. And you, Alessandra? You look well.”

  “I am.”

  “And your husband?”

  “He is well too.”

  “I am sorry to miss him.”

  “Yes . . . I am sure he will be back soon.”

  She paused. “So. Things between you are . . .”

  “—magnificent,” I said firmly.

  I watched her register the rebuff and try again. “The house is very quiet. How do you spend your time?”

  “I pray,” I said. “Just as you suggested. And to answer your next question, I am not pregnant yet.”

  She smiled at my naïveté. “Well, I would not worry. Your sister was faster than many in that regard.”

  “Did the baby come easily?”

  “Easier than you,” she said gently, and the reference to my birth was, I know, an attempt to make me softer toward her. But I was having none of it.

  “Maurizio will be a rich man today.”

  “Indeed. Though no doubt he would have preferred a boy.”

  “Still, he wagered four hundred florins on a girl. No heir, but a good start for a dowry. I must talk to Cristoforo about doing the same thing. When my time comes.”

  I was pleased with myself for this sentence, for it sounded very like the way I thought a wife should talk.

  My mother stared at me. “Alessandra?”

  “Yes?” I said brightly.

  “Is everything all right, my child?”

  “Of course. You have no need to worry about me anymore. I am married, remember.”

  She paused. She wanted to say more, but I could see that she was disconcerted by this brittle, self-possessed young woman who now sat in front of her. I let the silence grow.

  “How long were you at court, Mother?”

  “What?”

  “My husband has been sharing his memories of the days of Lorenzo the Magnificent. He tells of how the whole court sang the praises of your beauty and your wit.”

  I think if I had physically attacked her she would not have been more taken aback. I had certainly never seen her struggle so for words before. “I didn’t . . . I was never at court. I simply visited . . . a few times . . . when I was young. My brother took me. But—”

  “So you did know my husband?”

  “No. No . . . I mean, if he had been there I mi
ght have seen him, but I didn’t know him. I . . . it was all a long time ago.”

  “Still, I am surprised you never speak of it. You who are so keen for us to acknowledge history. Didn’t you think we would be interested?”

  “It was a long time ago,” she repeated. “I was very young . . . not much older than you are now.”

  Except right at that moment I felt very old indeed. “Was my father at court too? Is that how you met?” Because it seemed clear to me that if my father had rubbed shoulders with such greatness, we, his children, would never have heard the end of it.

  “No,” she said, and with the word I could feel the change in her voice as she regained her composure. “Our marriage came later. You know, Alessandra, while your passion for the past is admirable, I think we would do better to talk of the present.” She stopped. “You should know that your father is not well.”

  “Not well? How?”

  “He is . . . he is under some strain. The invasion and the changes in Florence’s fortunes have gone hard with him.”

  “I would have thought he would have made good business out of it. From what I heard, the only thing the French were willing to pay for was our cloth.”

  “Yes. Only your father would not sell it to them.” And when I heard that, I loved him all the more for it. “I fear his refusal will have marked him out as a man of the opposition. I trust it will not cause us grief in the future.”

  “Still, he must have known he could no longer expect to be called to the Signoria. Our great hall of government will be filled with Snivelers from now on,” I said, using the slang word for Savonarola’s followers. She looked alarmed. “Don’t worry. I don’t use such words in public. My husband keeps me well abreast of the changes in the city. Like you I have heard of the new laws—against gambling and fornication.” I paused. “Against sodomy.”

  Once again my words stopped her breath. I could feel it. The air between us grew very still. Surely it was not possible. That my own mother would have let such a thing happen.