The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  “Well”—he shot the fastest look at Cristoforo—“I don’t really . . .” He trailed off with a slight shrug, obeying the instruction he had clearly been given to humor me.

  The silence returned. I looked at my husband. He looked at me. I smiled, but he did not quite return it.

  “Tomaso reports that they are clearing the convents,” he said mildly, “removing any art that doesn’t conform to the monk’s vision of decency and any ornaments or vestments that are too rich.”

  “What will he do with all the confiscated wealth?” I asked.

  “No one knows. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t start smelling woodsmoke before too long.”

  “He wouldn’t dare, surely?”

  “I think it is not a question of dare. He can do as he pleases, as long as he takes the people with him.”

  “What of the remainder of the Medici collection?” I said. “He wouldn’t destroy that?”

  “No. More likely he will suggest that they auction it off.”

  “Then keep an inventory of everybody who buys it,” I said tartly. “You will have to temper your urge for acquiring more beauty, Cristoforo, or we shall find ourselves marked out for other reasons.”

  He nodded slightly, acknowledging the wisdom of my logic. I shot a glance at Tomaso. “And what is your opinion of our friar’s attitude to the Rinascimento?” I said, eager to show up his shallowness. “I am sure it must occupy your mind continually.”

  He gave a slight scowl. Don’t thumb your nose at me, I thought. You have done far more hurting in your life than you have ever been hurt.

  “So,” I continued, after it was clear that he would not. “I hear that Luca has gone for God’s warrior. Let us hope you haven’t made an enemy there.”

  “Luca? No. He just likes armies. You never saw him on the streets in the old days. He likes brawling. If it isn’t fighting the French, it’s fighting sinners. It’s where he gets his pleasure.”

  “Well, we all get it in different places.” I paused. “Mother says you are never home.” I paused again. Longer this time. “She knows about you, yes?”

  And he looked up alarmed. “No. What makes you say that?”

  “Because that’s the impression she gives. Maybe Luca has felt the need to confess on your behalf.”

  “I told you. He wouldn’t betray me,” he said moodily. “Anyway, he doesn’t know enough.”

  Whereas I do, I thought. The temperature between us was rising. I could feel it coming up like vomit in my throat. And I could feel my husband, our husband, tensing up on the other side of the room. Tomaso sent him another look, a more obvious one this time, one that had laziness to it and spoke of conspiracy, sweat, and desire. While I had been cooing over babies and swaddling clothes, they had been rolling each other in the glorious security of my absence. This might be my home now, but at this moment I was the interloper. It made me mad with pain.

  “Still, you must admit it has a certain symmetry: one son goes to God while the other goes to the Devil. Lucky for our parents, both daughters are married. How delighted they must have been when you suggested my suitor, Tomaso,” I said quietly, but not the less viciously for that.

  “Oh, and you of course were so blameless,” he said, fast as a magnet snapping onto metal. “Maybe if I’d had a sweeter little sister, things might have been different.”

  “Ah.” I turned my body away so I couldn’t read the warning signs I would be getting from my husband. “So that was how it happened. You were born a pure soul ready to fly to God, and then this vile young girl arrived and so humiliated you—because you could not be bothered to learn anything—that you turned against all women, and so she set you on the path to sodomy.”

  “Alessandra.” Cristoforo’s voice behind me was quiet. I might almost not have heard it.

  “I told you, there was no point,” Tomaso said bitterly. “She doesn’t forgive.”

  I shook my head. “Oh, I think you are more guilty of that sin than I, sir,” I said icily, and I could feel the control slipping away. “You know we talk of you, Cristoforo and I? Does he not tell you that? Quite often, actually. About how pretty you are. And how stupid.”

  I felt my husband rise from his chair. “Alessandra,” he said, more severely this time.

  But I could not stop now. It was as if a dam had burst inside me. I turned to him too. “Of course, we do not use those actual words, do we, Cristoforo? But each time that I make you think or laugh with some piece of learning or an observation of art, rather than some simpering gesture or fluttering of eyelashes . . . each time I see your eyes light up with the pleasure of our conversation, and your mind is distracted for a moment from his body . . . then I think I have scored a small victory. If not for God, then at least for humanity.”

  Oh, but I did not want it to be like this. I had imagined it all so different: how I would be courteous and witty, would smile and reassure and so, little by little, lure them both into a conversation where I could quietly, subtly, expose my brother’s shallow vanity for what it was, while I watched my husband’s eyes shine with involuntary pride at my intelligence and humor.

  But I couldn’t do it. Because of course hate, or maybe it was love, isn’t like that.

  I watched them staring at me, a mixture of pity and disdain in their eyes, and suddenly it all slid away: my recklessness, my courage, my monstrous, monstrous confidence leaking out from the wound that, I realized now, I had inflicted on myself. What should have been their shame had become my own. I think at that moment I would have even joined the Snivelers if someone could have taken away the pain.

  I got up from my seat and could feel that I was shaking. My husband’s eyes were cold. It struck me that he looked older suddenly, or maybe it was simply the contrast with Tomaso’s overripeness.

  “I am sorry, husband,” I said, looking directly at him. “I seem to have forgotten my side of our bargain. Forgive me. I shall go to my room. Welcome, brother. I do hope you enjoy your stay.”

  I turned and walked to the door. Cristoforo watched me go. He did not follow me. He could have said something, but he did not. As I closed the door I imagined them coming together like a long sweet sigh, entwining and fusing into each other like Dante’s thieves and serpents, so that I could no longer tell my brother from my husband. And I did myself further damage by the tenderness and violence of the image.

  Twenty-seven

  SHE OPENED THE DOOR AND STOOD AT THE END OF THE room, and even in my hysteria I could see she was frightened to come in. Which scared me even more, because she had never been frightened of me, even when as a child I had been at my meanest to her.

  “Go away, Erila!” I shouted, burying my head in the covers, but that only decided her. She crossed the room and climbed onto the bed and put her arms around me. I pushed her off. “Go away.”

  Still she stayed.

  “You knew. Everybody knew, yet you didn’t tell me.”

  “No!” And this time she held on to me till I had to look at her. “No. If I had known would I have let you marry him? Would I? Of course not. I knew he was profligate. That he plucked where he could. That much I knew. But men stick it in all manner of holes when nothing else is available. It’s common knowledge, and your mother and I did you wrong if we protected you so much you didn’t know that. But those same men usually turn from one to the other without blinking. So, yes, they will fuck a man if a woman is not available. That is how it is. It may not be how your God would have it, but it is how it is.” There was something in the very violence of her language that made me feel better. Or at least made me listen. “But for the most part, all that ends when they get married. The boys dry up and the women stay wet for them. Or at least for the children. So I thought—maybe because I wanted to think—that that was how it would be with him. In which case, why tell you? It would only have made that first night worse.”

  That first night. Clever women do not die of it. But we would not go into that now. “And Tomaso?” I said, g
ulping back my sobs. “Did you know about him?”

  She sighed. “There were rumors. But he is a tease, your brother. It could all just have been part of his games. Maybe I should have listened more. But not the two of them. I knew nothing about that. If it had been gossip I would certainly have heard it and I didn’t.”

  “What about my mother?”

  “Oh, God forgive us, your mother didn’t know.”

  “Oh, but she did! She knew Cristoforo at court when she was younger. He said he saw her there.”

  “And what of it? She was a young girl. She would have known even less of such things than you. How could you even think such a thing about her? It would break her heart.”

  Instead, though, it had broken mine. “Well, if she didn’t know, she does now. At least about Tomaso. I saw it in her face.”

  Erila shook her head. “Many secrets are no longer secrets now. It seems the Snivelers make good whisperers too. From the stuff I’m hearing, even the confessional box has no back to it anymore. Most likely Luca, the new angel of God, said something.”

  So much for Tomaso as a judge of character. “But . . . if no one knew . . . I mean, how did you find out?”

  “I live here, remember?” and she gestured to the walls.

  “Do they all know?”

  “Of course. Believe me, if he didn’t pay them so well they would probably not be the only ones by now. They like him. Even for his sins.” She paused. “And so do you. That’s the worst of it.”

  SHE STAYED WITH ME TILL I SLEPT, BUT THE PAIN HAD SEEPED into my dreams and that night the snake coils came in to torment me again. The mountebank’s leer was the Devil’s mouth; the serpent rose up from it, full of color and hissing lascivious rage, crushing and cursing me until I woke up screaming, though I think my voice was only in my sleep because the house was deathly calm around me.

  Erila’s pallet by the door was empty. The darkness howled in my ears and I swear I could hear the rustle of the snake inside it. My skin was wet with the sweat of fear. I was abandoned in a house of sin, and the Devil was come to get me. I forced myself to get up and light the lamp. The shadows retreated to the corners of the room, lapping there like a rising tide. I dug desperately into my chest, pulling out my drawings, chalks, and pens from the bottom. Prayer comes in many forms. If sleeping brought the Devil and my husband’s sins took away my words, then I would stay awake and try to pray to God through my pen, conjuring up an image of Our Lady to intercede for me.

  My hands were shaking as I took out the lump of black chalk. It had been weeks since I had used it and its edges were blunt. I found my blade, wrapped in a piece of my father’s cloth, and started to sharpen the end, the sound of the scraping gently familiar. But the semidarkness and the moisture of my fingers made me clumsy and the blade slipped suddenly, slicing a fast long furrow across my hand and down my inner arm.

  The blood welled up instantly, bright against my sallow skin, a vibrancy of color that no dye could capture. I stared in fascination as the line grew thicker, spreading out across my arm till it started to drip onto the floor. What story had Tomaso told me once? About a madman in prison who had opened his own veins to write the testimony of his innocence on the walls, and how, once started, he could not stop and they had found him next morning, bloodless, shriveled in the corner, the walls covered with crusted black words. What stories might I tell now if I could find the right color for them? The thought made me shiver. The blood was flowing quicker now. I should stanch it as Erila had taught me. But not yet. I grabbed the small ceramic dish used to hold herbs from the summer pomade and held it under the wound. The drops flowed into each other on my skin, then splashed fat and hard into the dish. It was not long before they formed a shallow pool. The liquid of life (God’s ink). Too precious for paper. The pain would come soon. I would need cloth to bind the skin tight. But the fabric from the blade was too small and my other garments too precious. I slipped my gown over my head. I would use that. Soon . . . First I must choose my brush, the one made from the fattest miniver tails, its end thick as a sunbeam. My body faced me in the burnished glass. I saw again the serpent dancing its way across the mountebank’s oiled arms, the sun playing off its coils. In the lamplight I was pearly with sweat. My husband and my brother were even now entwined together, greedy with lust. I would never feel what they were feeling. My body would remain a foreign land to me, uncharted and untouched. No one to caress my skin or marvel at its beauty. I dipped the tails into the blood and with a flourishing stroke traced a cool wet line from my left shoulder down over my breasts. The color was like a scarlet banner across my skin.

  “In God’s name!”

  She had hold of me immediately. The dish went cracking to the floor, the blood splattering.

  “Leave me be!”

  She snapped the brush out of my hand, seizing my arm above the elbow and holding it up high, her fingers like a vice gripping my flesh, applying pressure to stem the flow.

  “Leave me be, Erila,” I yelled again, my voice high and angry.

  “I will not. You are in the grip of the dream still. It had you so thrashing and moaning I went to fetch you a draft.” And she snatched the gown with her other hand and started to wrap it tight around the wound.

  “Ah! You hurt me. Let me alone, I tell you; I am fine.”

  “Oh, yes, as fine as a madwoman.”

  And I did not sound so fine either, because we could both hear my laughter now even though there was little enough to laugh at. I saw her eyes wide with shock as she pulled me to her, holding me so tight that I could barely breathe.

  “I am fine, I am fine,” I said, over and over again, as the laughter turned to tears and the pain of the cut came in like a branding iron, offering me something more powerful than self-pity to fight against.

  Twenty-eight

  AFTER THAT NIGHT I WAS ILL FOR A WHILE. ERILA WAS SO worried that she took away my blades and brushes until my wildness left me. I slept a lot and lost my appetite for food as well as life. The wound swelled and pussed and brought a fever in its wake. Erila nursed me with herbs and poultices until the skin joined back together and the healing started, though it left a scar which journeyed from angry red to the white raised line that I still have today. And all the time she watched over me with the ferocity of a hellhound at the gate, so that when my husband came to inquire after my health later that first day, I heard their raised voices outside the door but there was never any question as to which one of them would win.

  Later, when my calmness had earned her trust again and my sense of humor was restored enough to hear her quips, I asked her what had passed between them and she had acted out the scene for my amusement: he the hangdog, posturing, then harassing and threatening; she the half-witch black slave, spinning tales of heartbreak and sudden bloody miscarriage.

  It was such a shocking lie that I found it almost pleasing.

  “You didn’t say that!”

  “Why not? He wants a child. It’s about time he realized he’s not going to get one from poking your brother.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. From what you say he made a deal with you. You make him stick to it. If he likes the smell of arse that’s his affair. Tomaso is just his whore on the side. You are the mistress of the house, and he had better treat you as such.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Oh . . . that he had no idea, that he was sorry, and . . . blah blah. They never know what to say about women’s stuff. The first mention of that kind of blood and even the ones who like cunt go queasy.”

  “Erila!” I had laughed. “Your language is worse than Tomaso’s.”

  She shrugged. “At least my behavior is better. You ‘ladies’ don’t know the half of it. You should hear the things they say about you. Either you’re standing under your halos, eyes up to heaven, or you’re munching apples in their faces and flashing your bush. I’m not even sure they know which they prefer. The best you can do is choose when you change your costume.”
She had grinned at me. “My mother used to say that in our land there were enough gods for women to have at least one on their side, while your religion has three in one and they are all men. Even the bird.”

  It was such a shocking way to describe the Holy Spirit that I found myself wanting to giggle. “I hope she did not spout such blasphemy in public.”

  She shrugged. “If she did, who would care? You forget the laws of slavery mean she had no soul to save.”

  “So what? She died a heathen?”

  “She died in bondage. That was all that mattered to her.”

  “But you go to church, Erila,” I said. “You know your prayers as well as I. Are you telling me that all this time you don’t believe?”

  She looked down. “I grew up in another language, under another sun,” she said. “I believe what I need to believe to get by.”

  “And when you are free. Will that change things?”

  “Let’s talk about that when it happens.”

  Though we both knew that siding with me against him was not the way to see freedom come any faster.

  “Well,” I said, “I think whatever secrets are in your heart, God will see them and He will know that you are a good person and look kindly on you.”

  She stared at me. “And which God is that, yours or the monk’s?”

  She was right. When I was a child it had all seemed so simple. There had been one God, who, though He had a voice like thunder when angry, also had enough love to keep me warm at night when I spoke to Him directly. Or so it seemed to me. And the more I learned and the more complex and extraordinary the world became, the deeper His capacity to accept my knowledge and rejoice with me. Because whatever man’s achievement, it came first and foremost from Him. But this no longer seemed true. Now man’s greatest achievements seemed to be in direct opposition to God, or this God, the one who was now ruling Florence. This God was so obsessed with the Devil that He seemed to have no time for beauty or wonder, and all of our knowledge and art was condemned as just another place for evil to hide. So now I no longer knew which God was the true one, only which was louder.