In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  “I know. And I know what ails her too. As do you, I think.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I mean she is making a spectacle of herself, cavorting with that mewling pup, and you are helping her.”

  “Ah!”

  “Yes—ah! So what have you got in your bag today for her then?” She moves her head sharply, that fast, instinctive gesture I associate with attack as much as defense. My God, it takes so little to pull us back into the past again. “Some mix of holy wine and menstrual blood to get his heart pounding faster, perhaps?”

  “Oh!” And to my surprise, her laugh rings out around the room. “Oh, you compliment me too much, Bucino. If I could change how people felt that easily, I would have slid something into your wine a long time ago.”

  And despite myself, her answer takes me aback. The fact is, when I rant these days people take notice of me, for I run this house now, and while I may be small, I can be vicious when I need to be. But not her. She has never trembled before me, or if she has, it was always only to give as good as she got.

  “So what are you doing for her? Because she is sick with it, no doubt of that.”

  “I know that as well as you. I also know it is a more stubborn illness than many, for it makes the sufferer feel better rather than worse. You do not help, being harsh on her. Perhaps you could let her enjoy a little of the happiness.”

  “Happiness! My God, it seems everyone is deranged now. This is a courtesan’s house. We are here to sell sex to men, not happiness to ourselves. Once she starts to put her pleasure above theirs, it is the beginning of the end. I know this business.”

  “What makes you think I don’t?”

  I stare at her. “Well, if you do, then tell her. Stop it now. Before it ruins her. You once said to me that we both had her welfare at heart. Remember? So care for her now. Get her to come to her senses.”

  “It’s not as simple as that….”

  “Oh, really? Then God damn you, that’s what I say. For you are as much the problem as she.”

  I turn on my heel and move out of the room, and I can feel her sightless eyes boring into my back and buttocks as I go. No doubt the next time my balls ache I’ll be in terror that she has a wax effigy of them in a nutcracker. Money for old rope. I swear that is half the secret with women like her: the more you believe in their power the more it works.

  Out on the street I head for the Grand Canal and cross at the Rialto. The day is balmy, glorious; the sky is a bright, fierce blue, as if Tiziano has taken a great paintbrush and dragged it across the horizon. I have no idea where I am going, but I go anyway, walking fast, as if the work of my bandy little legs might outstrip the churning in my head.

  Stupid. Fiammetta Bianchini is stupid: like the tavern keeper who gets drunk on his own wine or the gambler throwing the night’s winnings away on a hand of cards from a deck he knows is stacked against him.

  The city is alive with spring and festival fever. There are people everywhere. I skirt the top of the piazza, noisy with preparations for the great Ascension trade fair—half of Europe will be buying here within the week—and plunge through the tangled branches of streets and canals that run parallel to the great southern docks. I am moving on animal sense now—this is the first route through the city that I ever learned, and I can do it in my sleep. Do it with my eyes closed. Blind. Damn La Draga too.

  Stupid. I, Bucino Teodoldi, am stupid: because while I can spot the loss of a gram of sugar in a week’s household accounts or work out the discount on a hundred yards of silk before the merchant has done the addition, I have not seen what has been right in front of my eyes. God damn me too.

  I pass north of the great convent of San Zaccaria, where the noblest of Venetian families stow barge loads of virgin daughters, unaware of the gossip that its walls have as many holes as a sieve and that it is the nuns themselves who have been easing the bricks out. Men and women. Like bees to honey. Flies to shit. One bite of the apple and the worm is everywhere. Aretino was right. We are damned to lasciviousness. The rest is simply business. Too late now.

  Stupid. She is stupid: to have come so far and done so much to risk it all, to throw it away on so little.

  With every turn the streets are more crowded. The traffic is going one way and I am going with it, pushed ahead as the pace quickens. I move down another fondamenta, this time even narrower than the last, so I have to keep next to the wall to avoid being pushed toward the water. I want to stop and rest, but the crush is such that I have to stay moving, like part of a shoal of fish all darting together upstream.

  Stupid. I am stupid: to have been so busy preening myself on our success that I have sat by and let her do it. Well, at least I know what is happening now.

  At least I know what is happening now. Even the canal is busy, a mass of gondolas and barges all moving together, so many that their oar strokes are almost synchronized in the tide. Everyone is heading east, toward the Arsenale, where the ship workers and the rope makers and sailmakers live. And the business is mayhem. At one bridge or another, a hundred men will soon be beating one another to a pulp to conquer a square foot of space in the middle. Having lost the battle for the Ponte dei Pugni two days ago, the Nicolotti men are intent on revenge, taking the fight into enemy territory with a flood of loyal Venetians following in their wake, for news of a bridge battle in Venice travels faster than water. Faster than disease. And I am now part of the contagion.

  Why not? Madness suits my mood. After all, even La Draga admits that my lady is ill. She has contracted courtesans’ disease. God damn it, the symptoms are clear enough now. The laughter I hear from her room on the nights he visits. The impatience through the afternoon of an evening when he is due. An excess of gaiety, a sudden bout of lassitude or bad temper, all with too little time in between. Love: the only other ailment fatal to a courtesan, for while the pox eats the body, it is love that destroys the mind. And for what? Vittorio Foscari! A sap, a colt, a pup barely weaned, still young enough to be in the thrall of a kind of green sickness. I remember when he first arrived, brought by his older brother, like a boy on his first day at school. The fledgling needed help: he had reached the age of seventeen with his nose in books and a gross nervousness of women. My mistress had a reputation for being lovely, honest, and clean. Would she do the decent thing and deflower him? That evening when he arrived, he felt as if he had been taken too soon out of the oven. Pretty enough but soft, unbaked, still warm in the making. Some mothers, I know, keep the youngest ones tied to their skirts, using them as last memories of their own youth. The fear, of course, is that such adoration turns them into womanly men. Well, they were lucky with Foscari. It was clear early on that he was not that way inclined. And that he was a student eager enough to learn from a good teacher.

  The crowd is a multitude now. We must be nearing the bridge, for there are so many of us we are hardly moving, with more people feeding in from the smaller alleyways. There is shouting and singing: slogans, war chants composed around the names of famous fighters. If this were not a festival, such a mob would already have been headed off by the city’s security forces, for a revenge match so soon after a defeat is bound to end in worse violence. The order of government and the occasional disorder of street life. As with the bilge of prostitution siphoning off excess, the great ship of state thrives on it.

  Now the bridge comes into sight ahead, but all I can see is a mass of flailing bodies. The crowd grinds to a halt, for there is nowhere else for the people to go. If I stay where I am, I will see nothing but the man in front of me, and the heat and the crush will overwhelm me. I put my head down and brace my elbows straight out like sharpened sticks. While my arms may be small, they connect at gut level with the softest areas of men’s flesh, and I am well practiced in their use. I drive myself through the throng almost to the edge of the water. It is my intention to get onto one of the pontoons that already cover the canal, made from boats and gondolas lashed together and floored with wooden planks as viewing pla
tforms for the richer citizens; merchants, Crows, even some white-frocked clergy and friars. Today’s admission will be high because the fight is a wild one and there are small fortunes to be made from betting on the outcome. But the purse in my jacket is mine as well as hers—for Fiammetta Bianchini is not the only one who works for our living. If she is giving it away, then so can I.

  That first night he came to us the family paid us a good sum to put on a show: the best wines, conversation, music, supper, bed—all the trimmings. He had never seen anything as lovely as she, and her beauty and power shone in his eyes. I daresay he was lovely enough too when he stepped out of clothes, especially compared to the grizzled old farts who had passed through her bedroom recently. There was laughter, I remember; first from her, sweet, like running water and as cunningly fake as a glass stone, and then from both of them, looser, heartier, more from the stomach than from the throat. I must say, she wooed him very prettily. And in doing so she must have wooed herself. You would be surprised how many courtesans at some point fall in love with the idea of falling in love, to experience the thrill and freshness that they must pretend so many times with other men. It seems to me that the more successful they are, the greater the danger: for, once life is comfortable, there is nothing to fear, nothing to fight for. Which means in turn that there is nothing to look forward to. Which, in a strange way, can make one think more keenly of death and yearn for some way of standing out against it, some hunger for an extravagance of feeling bigger even than death itself.

  An extravagance of feeling. It comes in many garbs. Fear, for instance. For anyone afraid of water, the pontoons across the canals hold their own terror, for once you are aboard there is little enough to hold you on, and the canal slaps greedily at the sides. The better purses—of which I am one today—can buy a seat secured by ropes to the floor. Still, my panic is nothing against that of the men on the bridge, for there are no railings at all there, just a sheer drop on either side into dank water. There must be a hundred madmen up there already, with at least as many more crammed onto the ramps, screaming and pushing from behind. Those in the middle have no way forward but by knocking their opponents down and trampling them or throwing them into the canal. The battle is simple: one side has to drive the other backward far enough to take the bridge. Some of them are brandishing weapons, long sticks with sharpened ends, but there is no room to wield them effectively, and most of the men are using their fists. Many are half naked, and a number are bloodied. Every time a man comes off the edge and thrashes into the water a great roar breaks from the crowd and the fighting gets even heavier. The Castellani Arsenale workers are still flushed from their last victory and are on home territory now, so their supporters shout the loudest. But the men attacking, the Nicolotti gang from Dorsoduro, are fishermen off the boats of the Adriatic, experts at keeping their balance on stormy seas while hauling tons of fish flesh from the deep, and today they are fueled by the promise of revenge.

  Of course, there are things about him that attracted her. There is an intensity to his innocence. He has a hunger for life, and he is not ashamed of his own passion. Nature has endowed him with a sweetness of disposition that would have made his compliments feel fresher to her, his puppy-dog desire less soiled. As for what takes place between them in bed—well, I have heard too many choruses of moaning from my lady’s room to make any judgment based on that alone. But anyone who has been young knows that the great grief of love is that your body feels the most when it knows the least. I see them again, exhausted and entwined in the night silence. My God, what man wouldn’t happily give a year of his life to have his stamina and her knowledge welded together? But all fever has exhilaration inside its delirium, and fire consumes more than it warms. In the end there will be only ashes, and her reputation will suffer more than his, for such matches are the stuff of instant gossip and everyone is waiting for the satisfaction of watching a great courtesan impale herself on the sword of her own desire. As for him? Well, he may be sweet now, but he is rich and his head is full of nothing: romantic verses and the bright colors of his own spring. I give him six months until the blossom starts to wilt and he sees life through the same eyes as everyone else: a place where cunning plays better than truth and where my lady is just another commodity that his birth and purse give him access to above others. It is how the world works, and I have seen it all before. So has she. Which is why her fall is so painful now.

  In the middle of the bridge, a small space has opened up around two particular combatants, big men stripped and sweating, both fat with muscle and clasped in a wild embrace, their legs knotted together, their torsos swaying toward the water. The spectators are going wild, for these are two perfect specimens and there will be money on the outcome of their coupling. They break apart, panting, then fling themselves together again, searching for a better hold as they stagger step by step closer to the water. A new howl goes up with every lost inch. Their bodies are so close now I can see the welts rising on their flesh from the pummeling they have inflicted on each other. Then, just as it seems as if they are bound to plunge together like a pair of misshapenly joined twins, one of them somehow manages to free a hand and throws a monstrous punch into the other’s abdomen, pulling himself away as the man crumples, moaning and toppling, stone heavy, into the water below. His opponent throws up his arms in triumph, and pandemonium breaks out amid the crowd.

  The force of the fighter hitting the water sends waves against the pontoon, fierce enough to have us all yelping with the excitement. The crowd is screaming for both the victor and the victim, but when the fallen man comes to the surface, his body is listless in the water. From the Arsenale side of the canal, people start prodding at him with oars. Men have been known to fake unconsciousness at this time, so that when the enemy starts to pull them up they take half a dozen back into the drink with them. I risk my own fear to stand up and watch as they push and poke him toward our boats. A couple of men near me haul him up on the planks and lay him out, but he still isn’t moving and his neck falls at a strange angle, exposing a black gouge in one side of his forehead. It makes me think of the man I once saw pulled from a public joust with a lance stuck right through his eye. Or the bodies in bits lying in the streets after the devastation of Rome. On both sides of me, fat purses are changing hands now. Whoever he was, he must have been a champion, because a great moaning chant is rising up from the fishermen, while on the other side of the bridge, the Arsenale fighters are roaring and stomping and waving their arms. The brawl is spreading to the spectators, and people are screaming and starting to push one another, some falling and getting mashed underfoot by the crowd.

  On the bridge the scrum has started anew, and with their warrior down, it seems the fishermen are being routed again. There are so many bodies in the water that the pontoon is swaying wildly now. Sweet Jesus, if they ever drained this canal, they would surely find a graveyard amid the pots and pans and leftovers of living. I feel panic rising like vomit in my throat. I have to get off. But I am not the only one. There is an instant crush of Crows and clergy, all pushing to get to dry land. At the same time, the land itself is seething. In the distance I hear the gunfire. On the next bridge, men in civic uniform are pushing their way into the edge of the crowd. It may be a festival, but a riot is a riot, and while the security forces might choose not to risk their lives facing the mob directly, they aren’t above maiming or killing where they can as an example to others. But I would take my chances with darting bayonets and shot rather than sink under black water. I hurl myself toward the edge of the boat where a run of planks connects it to the fondamenta, but a Crow twice my size is there before me. His bulk throws me, and I feel myself losing my balance.

  “Bucino!” I hear a voice calling above the mayhem. “Bucino Teodoldi! Here! Put out your hand!”

  And I obey blindly, having no idea where or to whom.

  “Buci-i-ino-o-o!”

  The cry seems as long as my fall. As I hit the water, I hear the wind of a grea
t bird’s wings flapping above me, and I feel the Devil’s fingers grabbing at me, pulling me down and around through dark water toward the thick slime, so that I dare not even open my mouth to scream for fear that I will drown in my own terror…until I have to breathe.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  “Bucino?”

  The voice comes from a long way away, quiet, filtering through the water, because I must be fathoms deep now, so far down that even the devils have stopped pulling and my body is lying flat and heavy, suspended in some strange, thick current.

  “Bucino?”

  I take a breath and start to choke. There is water inside me, and I am drowning all over again. I am pulled roughly by my hands till I am sitting upright, and someone is thumping me on the back, and now I cannot stop coughing, for it seems my nose and throat are still underwater, so I have to fight to find the air amid the liquid.

  “That’s right. Cough the rest of it up. Spit it out, little friend.”

  I throw up some foul-smelling bile, and the effort of extracting it makes me cry and wheeze at the same time. But at least now I know I am not drowned. I open my eyes, and when I look down I can see that I am lying on a bed, my clothes pulled off me and my barrel chest exposed to the world, pasty and gray like old fish flesh. I am not wet anymore, just cold and heavy. I fall back onto the pillow, and this time when I look up I can make out the face of my Turk, his dark skin made blacker by the cream silk of his turban.

  The Turk? My God, then I am dead indeed and gone to Hell. To the place where the pagans go. The eternal wasteland of the godless.

  “Don’t worry. You are safe enough now.”

  “Where am I?”

  “You are in my house.”

  “But you…you are gone.”

  “Gone and come again. Six weeks ago. In time for the Sensa fair. Lucky for you that I am, eh? For I never miss a fight. You, however, are not built to go alone.”