“Oh,” he says. “Do you not live here?” He sounds surprised.
“No.” I do not expand. He does not need to know.
He helps me refasten my laces without being asked, which amuses me, and within moments we are both dressed and Gianni is almost ready to leave my chamber. Standing awkwardly once more by the door, one hand on the iron handle, he turns back to where I am sitting on a low chair, one foot crooked up on the other knee, while I refasten my garter. “Thank you again, Signora,” he says. “My brother and his friend did not intend to, but in the end, they have done me a very great favor. As have you.”
“I am delighted to have launched so intuitive a lover upon the unsuspecting ladies of Napoli, Gianni. None of them know it yet, but one day somebody out there will be very, very lucky to have you.”
He crosses the room once more, bends and kisses my mouth again with a confidence neither he nor I could have imagined two hours ago, and then he leaves, standing straighter and looking rather older than he did when he arrived.
***
A little while later, Modesto and I wind our way through the empty streets back to my other house in the sea-smelling street near Santa Lucia. Modesto is carrying my chopines for me, and I am walking barefoot, my now trailing skirts hitched up and over one arm. Modesto sees me in, and bids me good night.
The soft snoring from the downstairs chamber shared by Sebastiano and Ilaria tells me that my two house servants are already asleep, when I pause in my hallway before climbing the stairs to check on my sleeping children.
The rest of the house is silent.
Upstairs, the two identical, beautiful faces lie side by side on the pillow, dark hair tangled about their cheeks. Beata has her thumb in her mouth as usual. As I watch them, Bella grunts and heaves over to one side of the bed, pulling most of the covers with her, leaving Beata with nothing. Her thin arms and legs seem fragile, her pointed little buttocks pale and vulnerable, exposed so suddenly. I reach across, pull the blankets back, and tuck them snugly around both little girls without waking either.
I go back downstairs, pour myself a large goblet of red wine, and take it up to the roof garden.
I feel strangely detached. Almost bewildered.
It is a vital part of being successful in this line of work—being able to distance yourself from the customer. As a puttana, on the streets, you have to shut your true self away—lock it somewhere inaccessible—if you are to have a chance of enduring the demands of those men who choose to pay for pleasure. What they want is usually distasteful—it may be downright dangerous—but, as little more than street scum, you have no choice but to allow yourself to become the object they all perceive you to be.
I remember it well.
Now, after nearly two years as a cortigiana, I have devised a very different way of playing the game. My game. All my patrons still believe that they can take from me what they want: they are now paying me a small fortune for the privilege, and I make sure that I let them believe this to be the case. If they wish to beat me, I am content to be beaten. If they want mothering, I can hold them in my arms and sing them a lullaby as I give suck. And if they need to be in subjugated thrall to a wild she-demon, I will kneel over them, hold a knife to their throats, and make them beg for their pleasures.
I am to each of them what they most desire.
That, after all, is the lot of the courtesan, is it not?
But what none of them realize—not one of them—is that I make damned sure right from the first moment that I decide exactly what it is that they want. I create the desire in each one of them, and then fulfil it.
It’s my choice.
Not theirs.
Just as Modesto was saying the other day, I’ve made for Michele a wildcat with whom he can fight to his heart’s content; Vasquez now thinks himself some sort of demi-god, rutting with Aphrodite, and Filippo? Filippo just needs an arse to spank, to nullify the emasculating effect of his wife’s frigidity.
The distance must be kept though, with all of them. Just as it was when I used to walk the streets. Intimacy will inevitably destroy the fortifications I have spent years constructing.
I created a desire in Gianni just now and fulfilled it for him: I made him wish to be thought of as a gentle, caring lover; I allowed him to become one and then watched his pride and satisfaction at having achieved his goal.
It was well done.
But I will not admit the thought that is whispering to me now. I cannot. The prospect is terrifying. This strange feeling of detachment that is so acutely unnerving me as I sit here is something quite new, quite different: something more akin to a bleak, melancholic sense of homesickness than to my habitual whore’s professional distance. In creating this desire within Gianni tonight, I have a needling suspicion that I have unwittingly begun something of the same process within myself. I don’t think it’s Gianni himself that I want—he’s little more than a child—but as I think now of his mouth, warm on the ridged skin of my scar, a nagging voice begins to whine around my head like an August mosquito, telling me over and over again that I have started something dangerous.
Eight
The great vaulted aisle of San Giacomo degli Spagnoli was cool, but as soon as Father Ippolito pulled the door of the little confessional chamber closed, the sweat began to bead on his forehead. When he sat down, his cassock wilted across his knees. The woollen fabric itched: Father Ippolito often thought he might just as well be performing a permanent penance, given the constant discomfort of his clothing in the warmer weather. He ran a thin, nail-bitten hand through damp hair and pinched the bridge of a beaky nose to try to stave off the beginnings of what seemed set to become a memorable headache.
He thought with longing of his first brief appointment as priest in Torino. A beautiful place, Torino: cool, mountainous, and dignified.
Torino had been easy compared with his present situation.
Apart from anything else, he had never had to deal with anything quite as unnerving as a courtesan in Torino.
It cost this earnest young man very dearly to hear the repeated confessions of a woman whose multitudinous sins seemed to him at once monstrous and shamefully fascinating, and he often wondered why it was that she always seemed to appear in the church on the days he was detailed to man the confessional. He peered around the door before he closed it and saw her in the shadows of the second row of seats, seated near another thin woman in a white cap. She caught his eye and smiled; Father Ippolito’s face burned, and he drew in his head once more and closed the door.
The courtesan was beautiful, he thought, his heart racing: high-cheekboned, dark-haired, and liquid-eyed, like an exquisite painting of the Madonna. But even to think this—in any way to link the mother of God with this shameless woman was a desecration, and Father Ippolito mentally berated himself.
He played out in his mind, as he waited, a familiar scene from the gospel: the story of the woman caught in adultery. He thought of Christ’s benevolent and understanding forgiveness as he imagined the scene: Christ sitting on a doorstep in the town square, drawing with His finger in the sandy earth as the howling rabble kicked and pushed the unfortunate woman to her knees before Him.
Perhaps she had been beautiful.
Perhaps that was what had so enraged the townsmen.
Father Ippolito imagined the kindness in the eyes of the Son of God and the trembling terror of the woman who faced an unimaginable death by stoning were He to condemn her as her neighbors condemned her. But what was one simple act of adultery, mortal sin though it might be, compared to the catalogue of lewdness described so vividly to him each week? How calmly would Christ have reacted to that, he wondered?
Was this woman trying to tempt him? She regularly subjected him, a celibate priest, to depictions of activities he could hardly imagine, professing remorse at her shamelessness, though this re
morse could hardly be heartfelt, thought Father Ippolito, since she returned weekly to reiterate the same transgressions.
Someone slipped into the tiny room on the other side of the wooden divide and pulled the door shut.
His insides gave a jolt.
Through the gauze-hung window, he could not quite make out the features in the gloom, but a soft voice whispered, “Perdonatemi, mio Padre…”
It was not her.
He murmured the Latin words, heard the woman’s muttered responses, and then waited to hear what she had to say.
When it came, it was slow and halting. “I…I am frequently unable to abide by my marriage vows.”
Father Ippolito’s heart sank. He mentally fiddled the sand of the town square with his finger and steeled himself for yet another litany of indecency.
“I…I…” The voice faltered again.
“Please, child,” said Father Ippolito, feeling little more than a child himself, “unburden yourself of whatever is distressing you.”
“I do not care to lie with my husband, even though I know he wishes me to,” she said in a voice that was hardly more than a breath.
“And…are you in need of confessing to the sin of adultery?”
“Oh no, Father!” A little stronger. “No. Quite the opposite. I cannot…cannot…” She stopped without finishing her sentence, paused, and then muttered. “I frequently commit the sin of disobedience, and when I do manage to obey, it is with a terrible, resentful reluctance.”
Father Ippolito was not entirely sure he understood, but his relief outweighed his confusion, and with great enthusiasm he offered the woman the absolution she so patently craved. She muttered her Act of Contrition and disappeared.
The door opened again, and this time he was hit by a buffeting stench of garlic so strong it pushed its way through the gauze partition in seconds. Father Ippolito’s eyes watered, and he slid as far back from the partition as the bench seat allowed. A rough male voice muttered the opening prayers, and a litany of trivial, predictable transgressions followed. Father Ippolito advised, absolved, and quickly bade farewell to this unwelcome penitent, and a few moments later, the courtesan came in, closed the door, and knelt down. He knew who it was before she spoke.
***
Father Ippolito wiped his damp forehead with a linen kerchief and ran his tongue over dry lips, tasting salt upon them. He had taken in almost nothing of the troubles of his other parishioners that morning and had absolved some dozen people of sins he had hardly registered, so entirely had his mind been filled by the teeming images conjured so vividly by the courtesan.
He wondered if he should speak to the bishop.
Perhaps it would be advisable for some arrangement to be made so he could be relieved of having to endure this weekly exposition to temptation. But then again, he argued with himself, Christ had endured forty consecutive days in the desert, beleaguered by repeated temptations: temptations besides which these brief confessional moments paled into nothingness. Maybe it was the Will of God that he, Father Ippolito, should continue to suffer these tantalizing glimpses of the forbidden to test his spiritual resolve.
He pushed from his mind the thought that he would miss the courtesan’s tales of immodesty far too much to do anything that might precipitate their removal from his life.
Father Ippolito rested sharp elbows upon his knees, put his head in his hands, and stared at the dusty floor of the confessional box through his splayed fingers.
***
Maria di Laviano finished her penances and her prayers. She looked up and saw a tall woman with extravagantly braided black hair stepping from the confessional box. Tucking a stray wisp back under the edge of her cap, she watched as the woman knelt down a few seats away from her, on the same row, and bent her expensive-looking head over clasped hands. Maria noticed several large rings on each of those hands. Her own fingers were bare save for her wedding ring. A string of small red stones around the woman’s neck glittered in a shaft of sunshine that sliced diagonally down through the gloom of the nave from an opening in a stained-glass window high above her: tiny pools of color played across her throat and under her chin, like bloodstains.
A moment later, the woman raised her gaze to the roof, and Maria saw she had tears in her eyes.
She continued to watch covertly for a moment and then started as the woman turned her head and caught Maria’s eye. She ran the tip of one finger under each line of lower lashes, neatly to remove the hovering tears, and Maria felt herself reddening, embarrassed to be caught in the act of eavesdropping upon a moment’s vulnerability. The woman then rose from her knees and sidled along the row to the aisle. She bobbed a brief genuflection, turned, and walked toward the great entrance doors; her slow steps ringing clear in the vaulted silence.
Nine
“When are you going to tell me what it was like, Gianni?”
“Shut up, Carlo! I’ve told you I don’t want to discuss it.”
“Why? Why not? I think I have a right to some of the…details, don’t you? I’d like to be sure you’re telling the truth, apart from anything else—I want to be quite certain you actually did it.” Carlo della Rovere’s eyes widened, and he licked his lips. “I mean, Michele and I deposited you on her doorstep…I know you got there…but I only have your word for it, don’t I, that you kept your side of the bargain.”
“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You bastard, Gianni—”
“You hoped I’d fail, didn’t you? I can’t imagine that you ever thought I’d go through with it. Well I did, Carlo, I ‘kept my side of the bargain,’ but I am not going to tell you anything about it.”
Carlo’s voice took on a sharp edge. “You’re right—I didn’t think you’d do it. If I’m being honest, I only set it up because I thought I’d be getting my money back.” He paused, and then said, “But listen, Gian: She came highly recommended, so…I’d be interested to know—was she worth it? I’d be bloody disappointed to have paid such an exorbitant amount, if she wasn’t.”
Gianni glared at his brother and said nothing.
Carlo laughed. Mouth closed, the laugh came out through his nose as a snort. “Well? Was she? Michele thinks so. Michele has told me quite a bit about the Signora, Gian, but I want to hear it from you. He says…” Carlo’s eyes flicked to the door as if to make sure his father was not about to appear. He dropped his voice and ran his tongue over his lips again before he spoke. “Michele says she’s beautiful. He says her breasts are quite exquisite (if one appreciates such things, of course), like warm peaches, he says, and her cunt is—Ow!”
Gianni’s fist cut Carlo short. His knuckles landed on the side of Carlo’s nose with a crack; the blow knocked Carlo off balance; he stumbled against the fireplace and sat down hard on the hearthstone, blood running from his nose. He clamped one palm over his face, and red trickled through the gaps in his fingers and down the back of his hand.
“You foul-minded little bastard, Carlo,” Gianni said softly. “Don’t you dare discuss her like that.”
Carlo sat where he had fallen. His smirk had quite gone. “The woman’s a whore…and deserves…no better,” he mumbled.
“Shut your mouth!”
“Oh, dear.” Carlo took his hand away from his nose, looked with distaste at the scarlet mess in his palm, and wiped it on his breeches, where it left a long, dark smear. When he raised it again, he replaced it, palm-down this time, underneath where the blood was still dripping. “Has the little boy…fallen in love?” He swallowed awkwardly.
Gianni stared at his brother with disbelief. His knuckles hurt and his fingers felt stiff; he stretched them out like a starfish and re-fisted them, cradled them in the other hand. He paused, trying to decide whether he trusted himself to speak, and when the words finally came, they were little more than a whisper.
“Mamma would have been ashamed to hear you say such things.”
“Mamma would have been ashamed to know Papa’s best boy had bedded a whore,” Carlo said with a sneer.
Gianni flushed. “And you think she would have been proud to know it was my brother who procured her for me?” he said. He glanced down at his fist, still cupped inside the fingers of his left hand, and with a last, tight-lipped glance at Carlo, Gianni left the long dining room and walked toward the head of the stairs.
“Going out?”
Gianni turned to see his father. A tall, dark-haired man of some forty years, he was holding the edge of his study door with one hand, and from the fingers of the other dangled a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. His expression was mildly curious.
Gianni nodded.
“What was the noise about? Carlo sounded—”
“Nothing, Papa. We had a disagreement.”
His father frowned briefly—more, Gianni thought, from concern than anger—and said, “Are you going down into the town?”
“No. Not so far. I just need some air.”
“A suffocating sort of disagreement then?”
Gianni closed his eyes for a second and then said, “You could describe it that way.”
“Come and find me when you get back, Gianni, will you? I need your help in sorting out a couple of things for next week…”
Gianni nodded again, turned from his father and took the stairs at a run.
***
The light outside was low and yellow. Gianni walked with long strides away from the house, down the street toward the small piazza. Carlo’s sneering words tumbled over themselves inside his head. Oh, dear. Has the little boy fallen in love? Had he? He sat down on a low wall and put both palms over his face; his fingertips pressed against his skull through his hair. After a moment or two, sliding his hands around and locking his fingers behind his neck, Gianni stared across the piazza and allowed himself to re-create in his mind that evening’s experiences. The apprehension, the crippling, smothering embarrassment, his fear of failure; and then the revelation as he had laid hands on that extraordinary body and had finally understood why—why it was that artists and poets had for so many centuries trumpeted their evocations of physical love so joyously in paint, in marble, and in sinuous words. Gianni felt a slither of hunger for Francesca move downward from his throat and he held his breath; closing his eyes, he allowed it to wash through him. His mouth opened slightly, his breath caught in his throat, and the jumbled sounds of the busy piazza wove a net of warm noise around him as he sat on the wall and remembered.
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