In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  The door slams in my face.

  I stand there, my face hot from the exchange. I slam my hand hard against the wood. Damned Jew. What makes him think he has the right to tell me what not to do? But the truth is, his anger has shaken me. I fumble at the wrapping on the book. As the cloth unwinds, a piece of paper flutters out and down into the gutter. I grab at it frantically, peering at it in the gloom. On it are written four numbers. 1-5-2-6? Yes, 1526. 1526. I have them in my head now. I crumple up the paper and stuff it in my doublet. But there is no way I can open the book here, now.

  In this wild weather, it will take me time to get home. I move out of the Ghetto before the gates close and retrace my steps to the edge of the nearest campo. To the left is a small bridge, newly restored in stone. I still can’t see it, but I know it is there. There is a lamp on a corner, a new one put up to go with the new bridge, which is the pride of the commune, and it is lit every evening regularly at dusk. During normal weather it illuminates the fondamenta to either side. I am halfway across before I make out its weak glow, but if I stand underneath it I can at least see enough to arrange the numbers correctly. My fingers are stiff with the cold, and their stubbiness makes it hard to hold the barrel with enough precision to maneuver the cogs. 1.5.2.6.

  I hear something click, and as the lock snaps open I am thinking that if you read the numbers together they not only show a pattern but they also make a date, and I wonder what happened in that year that would have made Ascanio pick it as the key.

  In the same instant as I pull off the lock and open the book, I know what it was.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Of course I have seen them before. There weren’t many in our profession who hadn’t at least glimpsed them, though we never owned a copy, for they changed hands immediately at rich men’s prices, and when the law came down, they disappeared fast as cockroaches under a rock. The pope’s censor, Cardinal Giberti, and his men did a good job. There were rumors that he had built a fire in the courtyard of the Vatican and burned them, as Savonarola had burned the vanities of Florence a generation before. As little as a year after, it was impossible to find a single edition in the city. Or at least I heard of none.

  Later, some crude woodcut copies were made, which so blurred the lines of Giulio’s original pen and muddied his shading that it was hard to see what exactly was taking place. But the original engravings were as clear as the morning light, for Marcantonio Raimondi was known to have the steadiest hand in Rome when it came to incising steel lines into copper. If he was the city’s best engraver, then Giulio Romano was certainly her best draftsman, for though he lacked the easy charm of his master, Raphael, he understood the human body as if he had investigated each and every muscle under its skin, and the positions into which he put his figures were a testament both to our appetite for pictorial drama and to his joyful ability to contort and explore the human form.

  It is worth remembering that, before these engravings, Romans were by no means innocents in matters of artistic lust. In the richer houses, you could see any number of fleshy nymphs chased by satyrs or swooning Ledas transfixed by the great beating wings of Zeus’s swan, and rumor had it that in the Chigi Palace there was even a Roman statue of a satyr in a state of advanced priapic agitation for a young boy. As for women, well, anyone with an appetite for such things could find naked Venuses by the handful, coyly studying their perfect reflections in hand mirrors or lying staring out into the distance, unaware they are being so watched by so many sets of eyes. Yet though the desire they pricked may have been modern, the subject matter was mostly classical, their nakedness clothed in at least a semblance of mythology, to be appreciated only by those with an educated taste. And, however carnal the suggestion, there was always something left to the imagination. Conclusion, climax, coitus, was missing.

  Until Giulio Romano.

  My poor, sad-eyed Jew. How long did it take him to realize? Had the book fallen open halfway through, or had he been careful and started with the frontispiece? No trace of Petrarch here, though he might not have known it from the first page. A short title, just two words: The Positions. I suppose he might still have imagined philosophy, or even theological discussion. And the curiosity grown from our conversation would surely have made him turn the page. But what about the next one? And the one after that?

  The Positions: sixteen images of sixteen couples, showing sixteen positions of fornication. In the fog of the bridge, it is hard to make out all the details, but as I flip the pages, my memory adds what my eyes can’t. That had been the power of those prints. Once seen, you couldn’t forget them. Each image was explicit, exuberant, and even acrobatic. Set amid a smattering of classical allusions—the odd pillar and some flowing drapery—these very modern bodies were busy at the work of love. In some the couples lay twisted together on beds; in one a woman was propped up on cushions on the floor, her buttocks high in the air, in another lowering herself onto a man as if she were arranging herself on a seat, in another balancing on one leg as she guided him inside her; in yet another a man whirling the woman around the room skewered on his prick. Figures with the physiques of gods and goddesses and the imaginations of whores, the men strutting and rippling, the women with an abundance of soft, open flesh. And all of them enamored, enslaved by lust.

  I feel again the Jew’s agitated fury toward me. What had I read in his eyes? Disgust poisoned by excitement? The outrage of arousal. He wouldn’t be alone. Most men, once they had started looking, couldn’t stop, though I have come across a few more fragile souls who, when they had finished, were hard-pressed to tell their lust from their self-loathing.

  Those who knew Giulio Romano’s work could hardly have claimed complete surprise. His appetite for both the act and the re-creation of it was common knowledge. Not least to Pope Clement VII, who was one of his biggest patrons. As a Medici, Clement came from a noble lineage of the erotic: his uncle, Lorenzo the Magnificent, had written an infamous sonnet extolling the virtues of sodomy within marriage, and the pope himself enjoyed the stimulation of art as much as the next prelate. He also paid well for it. Though the rumor, which spread like fire through Rome after the engravings first appeared, was that Giulio had first drawn the couples straight onto the Vatican walls in protest for not being paid for already finished work.

  Still, while Clement may have been more or less displeased to discover such blatant eroticism decorating his salon, he certainly did not expect to wake up one morning to find Marcantonio’s engravings of it circulating—at a pretty price—through Roman society. Which, of course, included the most prestigious members of the Curia. For months, no one could talk of anything else. They did wonders for our profession. My lady was beside herself with excitement, trying to recognize her fellow courtesans from a telltale bracelet left on a wrist or the Medusa curls of a certain hairstyle. Clients arrived with copies under their cloaks: louche men who liked the idea of imagining it just before they did it, timid men who had long desired things they hadn’t been able to name. The same images that inflamed young man’s fancies were used to improve the performances of old men’s tools. For a while it seemed as if most of Roman society, secular and sacred, was busy in bed.

  But even when the scandal was at its hottest, there were some, like myself, who followed politics as much as pleasure and who knew we were flying close to the sun. To be fair to the pope’s sour-faced censor, Giberti, these were dangerous times. Half of Germany was alight with rebellion and heresy, and their printing presses were working day and night, spewing out their own images of Rome, showing our Holy Father as the Antichrist and the Devil’s whore presiding over the city of Sodom. This was not the moment for His Holiness to be seen as producing propaganda to rival theirs.

  And so, through Giberti, the papal fist closed. And squeezed. Giulio beat a quick retreat to Mantua, where he had a patron with more money and less guilt, while Marcantonio and his assistant found themselves incarcerated in the Vatican jail, with all existing copies of the engravings confis
cated and the original copper plates destroyed.

  Or so we all believed.

  But now as I stand here on the edge of the bridge in the fog, with the book open in my hands, I am no longer sure. Of course, there might always have been a single last copy concealed somewhere in the studio, cleverly disguised under the innocence of Petrarch. While it felt too devious for the down-to-earth commercial spirit of Marcantonio, it was the kind of cunning one might expect of an assistant, especially one who might already have been planning a future without his master.

  But even that does not totally explain the wonder of the book that is now in my hands.

  Because this edition of The Positions is more than just a set of images.

  This edition has words as well.

  The verses—“The Licentious Sonnets,” as they were known—are not new either. Our very own scourge Pietro Aretino had written them after the scandal, in support of his old friend Marcantonio and to thumb his nose at his even older enemy Giberti. Putting his playwriting muscles together with his talent for the vernacular, Aretino had composed each sonnet as a conversation between each couple, a dialogue of lust for every position, written in a jubilant language of pricks and snatches, cocks and asses; mouthfuls of rich, fat words to complement the rich, fat flesh on its journey away from God into an ecstasy of sin. Celebration, damnation, and defiance. Aretino at his worst and best. It was all here.

  It didn’t take long for some inferior printer to produce a set of inferior woodblock illustrations to go with them, and for these to be chased around town onto the nearest fire. As for Aretino, well, Giberti slipped his avenging sword to someone else to use. After another public battle of words, the poet found himself knifed in a dark alley, ostensibly by the jilted lover of one of his conquests, but a man who everyone knew was in need of the money he got for the job. With his neck decorated with blood and his writing hand maimed, Aretino left Rome for good. A few copies of the offending book remained hidden away or smuggled out of the city, but they were so crudely produced that they did a disservice to both the images and the words.

  But the real triumvirate of Rome’s erotic imagination—Giulio’s exuberance etched by Marcantonio’s pen and brought to life by Aretino’s scurrilous tongue—this had never been captured for posterity.

  Except that is exactly what I am now holding in my hands; a delicious transgression put together by the clever hands of Ascanio with the engravings on one page and their accompanying sonnets, printed in a flowery, flowing script, on the other. A volume to set the world aflame, locked away inside the gentle leather binding of Petrarch’s sonnets.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Oh, Bucino! Our ship is come home from the Indies. You are a Marco Polo among dwarves! Venice should raise a statue to you. Look at this, will you? Every line is so clean, so perfect. See—you can make out a single braid in Lorenzina’s hair. Though at that angle, her thighs look as big as a bull’s. But then Giulio always made our flesh fatter than the men’s. Even when I was eating all the time, I was never large enough for his taste. It is as well there are so few positions where the woman is on top. For there might have been injury otherwise.”

  Her eyes are as bright as newly polished emeralds, and you can feel the joy and the laughter bubbling up underneath. I don’t think my lady could be more pleased if the doge himself had offered to become her patron then and there.

  “Oh, oh—my Lord, remember this one? ‘I am not Mars, I am Ercole Rangone, and I am screwing you, Angela Grega, and if I had my lute here, I would play you, while fucking you, a song.’ Dear God, that’s more poetry than ever came out of his mouth when he was upright. And this is supposed to be Lorenzina speaking…. Listen: ‘Give me your tongue and prop your feet on the wall, squeeze my thighs and hold me tight…. One day I’ll take your prick up my ass, and I assure you it will come out still in one piece.’ Imagine Lorenzina delivering that! Remember that coy little look she used to specialize in when you met her in the streets? Maybe she had teeth down there after all. Though I doubt it. He is such a liar, Aretino. Really. He boasts of how he gives the women voices, but then he lets us say only the words that men want to hear. He is always going on about how real it is when he writes, but I tell you, there’s as much fantasy in here as there is in any courtly love poem.”

  “What—you mean courtesans actually talk like wives when they’re in bed?” I say. “What a disappointment. I must stop saving my wages.”

  “Ah, Bucino! Don’t be so modest. I bet you could get a wife talking at least a little dirty. I remember how those Roman matrons used to look at you in the market. So-o-o curious they were. What? You think I didn’t see? It’s my job to notice such things…. Difference. Novelty. The pleasure of the new. Getting abroad what you can’t have at home. That’s what we are all about. You know that as well as I do. Look at these. No wonder most people couldn’t get enough of them. I doubt anyone outside the Church had ever seen this much sodomy. Ha! Poor Giberti. We did put the fear of the Devil in him for a while there, didn’t we?”

  And, my God, she is right. For that brief moment when the images seemed to rule Rome, what others called sin we sinners called an honest trade. Giving people what they want at a fair price. We certainly made a fair enough profit out of it.

  “So tell me, Bucino, how do we go about selling this treasure? Should we be trying to find a Venetian cardinal? I know my own dear Roman one would have given most of his antiquities to have this in his collection.”

  “A cardinal? I don’t think so,” I say. “Most of them are Crows before they are cardinals and nowhere near as rancid here as they were in Rome.”

  In which case, who are we going to sell it to?

  I have been asking myself the same question since the moment I opened that first page on the bridge in the fog. Because while there is no doubt that its sale is rich with promise, it is also fraught with danger. As soon as a book like this arrives on the market, its seller will become as infamous as its owner—not to mention those responsible for the original work.

  “Are you sure that we really want to let it go?” I ask quietly.

  “Of course!…I mean, if we were established now, I would keep it under my pillow, for with this in my bedroom, I would soon be the most sought after whore in Christendom.” She laughs. “But we are not established, Bucino, and with the right bidder this will bring us a small fortune.”

  “And once it is gone from our hands, what then? News of it will spread like a fire through rafters. Even without the original plates, there are so many printers in this city that there’ll be bad copies burning off the presses within days, just as in Rome. It will get back to us eventually. Such things always do, and while there is money in fame, there is danger in notoriety.”

  “Indeed. But at this moment, I would take it over obscurity.”

  “Maybe, but what about the others? Giulio is safe in Mantua, and Marcantonio is already half dead in Bologna, but Aretino is a faux Venetian now and eager to win his way into the government’s good books. To have his name brazenly displayed next to the world’s most obscene sonnets at this tender moment will not endear him to those who make the laws and hand out the patronage.”

  She shrugs. “But everyone knows he wrote them. He is a libertine already. He is famed for it.”

  “Maybe. But even he doesn’t shit in the drawing rooms of his patrons. Think about it, Fiammetta. Venice boasts a good deal more piety than Rome. There are more codes here, the convents are stricter, and the doge is so upright that he sends his own daughter home when she wears a dress too rich for the law. Once this gets out, Aretino might argue that it was aimed only at the corruption of Rome, but the truth is it will harden men’s pricks whichever city they live in. In no time at all most of the government will be sporting their own erections, and they will be forced to suppress the book in the name of public good. And Aretino’s hopes of patronage could go down along with it.”

  She is silent for a moment. “We don’t owe him anything. You know a
s well as I do it was he who sent that boatload of thugs to us.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Though I don’t think his aim was to destroy you. More to try and bring you to him.”

  “That’s because he likes to win. He always did.”

  “And what? Now you want to see him lose?”

  “I…Yes…No…” She sighs theatrically. “Oh…I don’t know.” I have watched her act the smart whore for so long, I forget sometimes that in years she is a young woman still. She frowns and sighs again. “He treated me badly, Bucino. Haven’t you ever felt angry toward someone who hurt you?”

  “Incandescent,” I say, seeing a certain man’s smug face as he introduces me to a sad young girl. My God, I have not thought of him for a long time. And I will not now. “But if that same person came to me with a fat enough purse, I wouldn’t let that get in the way. All I am saying is that at this moment, with his sphere of influence, we have more reasons to keep him as a friend than to make him our enemy.”

  She smiles wryly at my use of what was once her own advice. “Oh, I know…a courtesan should always put business above her heart! Ah, how many times did my mother hammer those words into me? I tell you, Bucino, I could write my own book about this profession. The cost as well as the profit. For sometimes it is as hard as anything you would ask a man to do.”

  “I know,” I say. “I have watched you for long enough to understand that.”

  “However…” And now her voice is strong, as if she is suddenly declaiming to the world. “It is still better than anything else you or I would have been offered in this life. So! Where does that leave us? We cannot afford to make an enemy of Aretino. Which means we cannot afford to sell the book. Which means we are now in possession of a priceless object that we cannot afford to keep because we are still as poor as Dominican nuns—well, the few of them who obey the rules, anyway. It seems I must become a gondola whore after all.”