In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  I clap my hands slowly from my place by the door. And she smiles slightly as she turns, for she is always good at sensing an audience, and gives a gracious bow with the nod of her head. “Thank you.”

  “I’ve only ever seen you play for men,” I say. “Is it different playing alone?”

  “Different?” She plucks at a string, and the note vibrates in the air. “I don’t know. I was always playing for an audience, even when it wasn’t there.” She shrugs, and I wonder, as I do from time to time, how strange it must be to be bred expressly to pleasure others. As much a vocation surely as that of any nun in thrall to God. She is, however, mercifully unsentimental about such things. That too, I daresay, is her training.

  “Though this instrument is rubbish, Bucino. The wood is warped, the strings are too tightly strung, and the pegs too stuck for me to alter.”

  “Well, you still make it sing well enough for my ears.”

  She laughs. “Which were always made of cloth when it comes to music.”

  “As you will. But until you have a bed full of lovers, you will have to make do with the compliments I give.”

  But she is not one for false modesty, my lady, and I know that she is still pleased.

  “So. How was it? Did you go to the piazza?”

  “I did.” I hear again the voices of the castrati in chorus with the howling of the dogs and see the dwarf ’s flag and the lion’s wing in silhouette together against the burnished night sky.

  “And—it was very fine.”

  “Good. She always dresses well for her pageants, Venice. It is one of her great talents. Maybe you will grow to like the city after all.”

  “Fiammetta,” I say softly, and she turns, for I do not use her name often. “There is something I must tell you.”

  And knowing, as she does, that it must be serious, she smiles. “Let me see. You found yourself in conversation with a noble merchant who has a house on the Grand Canal and has been looking all his life for a woman with green eyes and shorn fair hair.”

  “Not quite. Aretino is here.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  It is a shame that they ended up as enemies, for they had much in common. They were both strangers to Rome, both from humble beginnings but with enough of an education to be unafraid of those more powerful yet more stupid than themselves. They each had a sharp wit and an even sharper hunger for the wealth it could bring them, and they seemed not to recognize the meaning of failure. If she was younger and more beautiful, then that was only fair, since women make their fortunes from their looks, not their pens. And if he had a crueler mouth, well, that was because, for all her experience of the flesh, he was as much a whore as she was, though he made his living by selling his wit rather than his body.

  By the time they met, they were each established in their different ways. Aretino had wormed his way into the outer circle of Leo X, where his tart reporting on the scandals of the day brought him to the attention of one Cardinal Giuliano d’Medici, who became his patron as much to deflect the vitriol from himself as to target it toward other people. When Leo died and the papal crown was there for the taking, Aretino did such a good job of insulting all of Giuliano’s rivals that when one of them became pope instead, it was safer for him to disappear for a while. He came back two years later for the next papal election, where his horse finally won the race. Enter Clement VII.

  By then my lady was herself a force to be reckoned with. In those days Rome was the natural home of courtesans. Indeed, it had been their birthplace. A city full of sophisticated clerics, too secular to be saints, especially when it came to matters of the flesh, had soon enough created its own court, with women as refined out of bed as they were wayward in it. Such was the appetite for beauty that any girl with a wit and intelligence to match her looks and a mother willing to procure for her could make a small fortune while her looks lasted. Those twelve offers for my lady’s virginity had resulted first in a house paid for by the French ambassador, a man who, as she tells it now, had a liking for young girls but a passion for boys, and so she mastered early the attractions of male clothing and sodomy. While they are worthy talents for a successful courtesan, they are limiting for a young woman with her potential, and my lady’s mother was soon wheeling and dealing to find her other keepers. One of those was a cardinal in the new pope’s circle, and because he had a fondness for conversation as well as copulation, my lady’s house became a place for pleasures of the mind as well as the body. In this way she came to the attention of Pietro Aretino.

  In another life they might indeed have become lovers (he was pretty then, and you had only to spend an hour in the company of either of them to understand how that mutual wit and energy might spark a flame). But my lady’s mother was a dragon at the gates, and she was smart enough about the business to know that when rich men keep women in the style to which they themselves are accustomed, they don’t want to find some sewer satirist pushing his nose into their pots of nectar. As to what exactly took place, I have no idea, for I was new to the household then and still confined to the abacus and the kitchen, but I do remember the morning when we woke to find my lady’s name, in a series of Aretino’s satires on the Pasquino statue, being used as a byword for the licentiousness of Rome. While such publicity was as much advertisement as it was insult for a good courtesan, his behavior was ungentlemanly to say the least, and for a time both parties went out of their way to demean each other whenever they got the chance.

  Yet that is not the whole story either. For it has to be said that a few years later, when Aretino wrote a set of obscene sonnets to support the disgraced engraver Marcantonio Raimondi, he chose not to use my lady’s name as one of the Roman whores he exposed there. And later, when the papal censor, the sour-faced Bishop Giberti, hired an assassin to knife him down on the streets, my lady, when she received news of his injuries, did not choose to celebrate as so many did but instead kept her thoughts to herself.

  She has moved to the window, so I cannot see her face. Like most good courtesans, she is adept at living with two sets of feelings: the ones she has and the ones she pretends to have to humor her clients. In this way she is often interested when she is bored, sweet when she is peeved, funny when she is sad, and always ready to pull back the sheets to play when what she would most like to do is sleep alone in them.

  “My lady?”

  She turns on me, and to my surprise there is laughter in her eyes. “Oh, Bucino—don’t sound so worried. Of course he would end up in Venice. We should have guessed. Where else could he go? He’s offended most of the rest of Italy by now. And scum always collects on the top of the water. What? Why are you looking at me like that? You didn’t believe those stories people told about us, did you? It was all lies. Roman gossip, nothing more. I couldn’t care less about him.”

  “Unfortunately, it is not as simple as that,” I say, a little piqued that she finds it necessary to dissemble to me of all people, though I suspect it is as much to herself. “While he may be scum, from what I saw he is indeed floating close to the top here. And he knows that we are in trouble.”

  “Why? How does he know that? What did you say to him about me?” And now she is angry at the very thought. “Jesu, Bucino, you know better than to tell anybody our business, especially a poisonous windbag. While I have been rotting in this room, it was your job to find out the lay of the city. How did you miss a toad as big as Aretino?”

  “Possibly because he doesn’t wear a dress,” I say evenly.

  “Don’t let your anger steal your wits. I told him nothing. I didn’t need to. Even if his boasts of influence are only half true, the fact that you are not known here is its own testimony to our misfortune.”

  “Oh! To have survived the massacre of Rome only to be trashed by a gutter poet. We do not deserve this.”

  “It’s not as bad as you think. He spoke fondly of you. I think he was afraid you had died in the rubble of Rome. He says he can help us.”

  She lets out a long sigh and sh
akes her head. In the end she always looks a thing straight in the eye. Believe me, not all women arrive so quickly at where they need to be. “I don’t know. You have to be careful with Aretino. He is smart, and he flatters your wit so you think he is your friend. But cross him and he has a tongue like a viper. And his pen always goes where the money is. Our ‘disagreement’ was a long time ago, but I would not choose to be beholden to him for anything.”

  She pauses. “Still, you’re right, Bucino. His presence makes our decision for us. Now that he knows we’re here, we had better get on with it, or his gossip will run before us. The only reason Venice has not heard of me is because I am not yet announced. But I am ready. We both know that. And while this house may not be on the Grand Canal, with some nuns’ hair and the right tapestries and furnishings, we can give that snoop across the water something to confess to at her next confession.”

  Women are weak vessels, their humors too cold and their hearts too afflicted by irrational emotion to stand as tall as men. So says every philosopher from Saint Paul to the old man who measures the well. What I say is they have not met my lady. “You have the resilience of a great whore,” I say, grinning. “And you play the lute like an angel.”

  “And you flatter like a bucket of slops. I should have left you dropping the balls next to that banker’s table. If—”

  “I know, I know. If he had had a monkey instead of a dwarf, you would have bought the monkey. Though I doubt it would have taken to the water any better than I have.”

  It is so late now that it is early. The morning light is making stripes on the floor through the shutters, and it is so long since I have slept I can no longer tell if I am tired.

  “Oh, God.” She yawns, stretching back against the bed. “You know what I miss most of all, Bucino? The food. I am so hungry for taste every day that if I were still intact, I would sell my virginity for a good dish of sardines fried in orange and sugar. Or veal with morello cherry sauce and squash baked with nutmeg and cinnamon and—”

  “No. Not veal, wild boar. With honey and juniper. And a salad of endives, herbs, and caper flowers. And anchovies, fresh and salted…. And for dessert—”

  “—ricotta tart with quinces and apple.”

  “Peaches in grappa.”

  “Marzipan cakes.”

  “Ending with sugared fruits.”

  “Oh…oh.” And we are laughing now. “Help me. Oh, I am drooling here.”

  I pull a grimy paper from my pocket and uncover the remains of the sugared pears I bought in the piazza.

  “Here. Try this,” I say. And I lift it up to her. “Here’s to the best whore and the best cook under the same roof again.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Next morning La Draga and I meet in the kitchen to negotiate the price of my lady’s new head of hair. Mindful of Fiammetta’s comments, I make a greater effort to be pleasant. I offer her some refreshment, but by now we are equally suspicious of each other, and she refuses, keeping to her place in the doorway while she calculates the sums of materials and the labor. Her addition is as fast as mine, and when I have checked it, it comes to more than I expected, though what do I know of the price of nuns’ locks? Still, I am loath to question her outright.

  “Hmm. It makes a tidy profit for the convent then, this trade in hair?”

  I watch her head tilt again. Her eyes are closed today, and her mouth stays slightly open, so there is almost a quality of the simpleton about her. “The money does not go to the convent. It goes to the nuns.”

  “So what? The novices are not yet properly acquainted with the custom of charity?”

  “I think it’s you who are not acquainted with the customs of Venice,” she says quietly, and the notion of the simpleton dissolves fast enough. “The best hair comes from the richest girls. They need the money to dress up their habits and keep their cells in good fashion.”

  “In good fashion? And you can tell what is good and bad fashion, can you?” Damn it. For it comes out both faster and, I swear, crueler than I intended.

  The little breath she takes in is sharper than before, but the voice remains cool. “I can tell when I’m in a room with no furniture, bare flagstones, and the smell of sweat and cooking grease, yes. And how that’s different from lavender pomades and the sound of voices against soft woven carpets and tapestries. Perhaps you’re one of those people who’re used to seeing only with their eyes. When you next go to the Merceria, look for the rug merchant whose blind wife grades the quality of the weave. He runs a wealthy business.” She pauses. “I am asked for at the convent this afternoon. Do I buy the hair or not?”

  I think of my carved dog with the honeycomb of bees in his mouth. God damn it. It is like being in the room with a swarm of them. I have lived too long with women like my lady, who are trained to charm men, always sweetening their sting with flattery. Perhaps, if she had eyes and could see the impact of her tongue, she might be more sparing with its acidity. Still, her business with me is not courtship. And neither is mine with her.

  “Here.”

  I open my purse for her and hold out the requisite number of coins. She registers the clink with a tilt of her head, but as she moves toward me, her body catches the leg of the chair. As I knew it would. She stumbles but holds her balance. I see a shadow move over her face. On the street the rumor is that she can fold curses in with the mix of her herbs and ointments, and for that reason it is best not to cross her. But she will not curse us. We give her too much money. I go to her and press the cold metal of the ducats into her hand, and she pulls away as if my touch burns, though the coins are already safe in her fist. Is it my imagination, or do I see her smile ripen a fraction? Every middleman I have ever known takes a slice out of the profits, and here in Venice each and every one of them is an expert. What did Meragosa tell me about her only the other day? That for all her manners, she was born poor as a whore, and that she would kill her grandmother for the right amount of gold. Of course, it is Meragosa’s way to demean everyone, but the fact is, in a profession such as ours, there are always hungry ticks looking for a fat body to draw blood from, and we are too lean and weak as yet to risk such blood loss, and need to be careful.

  Well, if our strategy works, we will not need her ministrations for much longer.

  Meragosa, by contrast, is like some grotesque, skittish lamb, all eager and excited by the idea of our venture. Over the next few days she even starts filling buckets of water to begin scrubbing a decade of filth from the walls and paintwork, ready for our new life. Our house has ticks everywhere.

  With my purse open now, the Jewish secondhand traders are lining up to serve us. Such is the quality of their stock that even those who curse them behind their backs are eager to do business with them face-to-face. I have some sympathy for them, for while there may be places in the world where dwarves make up the government and Jews own their own land, in Venice, as in the rest of Christendom, they do only the dirtier jobs, like lending money or buying what is already used, though they have become so good at it that many people resent them for it. That and the fact that they killed our Lord, which in the eyes of many makes them more fearful than the Devil himself. Until we came to Venice, the only Jews I had met were men who seemed to scuttle in the shadows, and for that reason it was easy to fear them. But this city is so full of strangers with strange religions that the Jews feel more familiar than most, and while they might be confined to the Ghetto at night, they walk the streets in daylight like any other men. Indeed, my sallow-skinned young pawnbroker has such a solemnity behind his dark eyes that I sometimes yearn to set aside the business of money and talk to him of life for a while.

  It is his uncle who runs the clothes business that we pick, for everyone knows the other here. He arrives from the Ghetto with his two assistants carrying huge bundles on their backs, and when they undo them, my lady’s room is transformed into a market stall of cloth: rainbows of velvet, brocades, and silks; dresses with clouds of white lawn breaking out from their tight-cut
sleeves and low bodices fringed with temptations of lace; yards of petticoats; swirls of cloaks and shawls; filigree-veined gold and silver veils; and high-laced clogs, some as tall as a hod of bricks to raise a beautiful woman out of the threat of high tides and lift her head into the heavens. During the years when such luxury had been commonplace to us, I had become fluent in the language of women’s clothes, understanding how a certain color or cut might suit my lady better than another. While it is not a talent most men would boast of, since their purpose in life is more to remove such garments than to put them on, I have found honesty in this matter more effective than flattery when it comes to winning the trust of a beautiful woman. Or at least the one I have grown to know best.

  My lady, though, does not waste time indulging herself but becomes instantly as sharp a trader as the man in front of her, not least because inside this riot of secondhand cloth there is always a selection of cut-price new garments. (In this the Jews are like everyone else in Venice: while they obey the laws in the spirit, they are not averse to a little commercial enterprise if both sides gain and neither is found out.) She moves through the piles, plucking one thing up and throwing down another, pointing out flaws, asking prices, tutting and moaning over what isn’t there, balancing quality against price, and even smell—“This one you should give to the dogs, it has the smell of the pox about it”—though careful to praise and drool over enough pieces, usually ones she does not want to buy, to keep their spirits up.