In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  As he puts his foot on the first step, he must hear me, for his breath sucks in quickly. “Who is it? Is someone there? Fiammetta?”

  Sweet voice. Sweet boy. I open my mouth and let out a long growl, and it must sound like the dog at the gates of Hell, for he yelps in fear.

  “Ah—who is there?”

  “Who are you? The house is closed.”

  “Oh! Signor Teodoldi? It is me, Vittorio Foscari. You scared me.”

  I would scare him more if he saw me, for my face is going crooked with the pain. As for him, I can almost smell the lust and the longing, like soft sweat on his skin. Well, not tonight, pup. Tonight you pay or pleasure yourself.

  “You are trespassing, sir. The house is closed.”

  “No, no. It is all right. Your lady knows. I am invited.”

  “Ah. You are invited?” I say. “Then I’ll just take your purse for what you owe us and you can go on up.”

  “I, er…”

  “What—no money?”

  “No. I mean—Fiammetta said—”

  “It doesn’t matter what she said. I am the gatekeeper. And I say, No money, no entrance.”

  “Look. I don’t think—” He takes a step up.

  “Haaaaah!” And the sound that breaks from me now is one that is soaked in pain, though it seems only to add to his terror. He is twice my size, and he could take me down easily enough if he wanted, for I am broken already, but it seems my wildness and the darkness have him by the balls. A boy with his head in his books and his tongue now in secret places. He may be a lion in bed, but he is still a lamb at the slaughterhouse. The only fights he has been in are in his imagination, and it is easy to be brave there.

  “Vittorio?” Above us, I catch the erratic swoop of candlelight. God damn it, she has heard us. “Where are you?”

  He lets out a squeaking noise, and the light appears at the top of the stairs, its glow falling onto me and bouncing off the steel of the knife.

  “My God, Bucino! What is happening? What are you doing?”

  “What indeed,” I say. “I caught this young puppy trying to swill at your trough without paying.” And I may be shouting now, for it is hard to judge my voice over the pounding in my ears.

  “How dare you be so vulgar?” she says imperiously, as much for his benefit as for mine, for she is not the only one behaving unprofessionally now. But I hold my ground. She takes a step nearer, and her voice falls. “Bucino, don’t do this. You know I asked him to come.”

  “Ah, well then, so he can….” Below me he makes a move upward, and I yank the knife up sharply. “It’s just he’ll have to leave his balls with me on the stairs for safekeeping.”

  “Ah!”

  “Oh, God.”

  And I am not sure who shouts now, he or she, but it is loud enough to wake the household.

  “Put down the knife, Bucino. Put it down. Don’t worry, Vittorio. He won’t hurt you.”

  “Won’t I? He’s very pretty, I’ll give you that. But it would keep his chin smoother if I took them off him.”

  She is halfway down to me now. “Why are you doing this?” she whispers fiercely. I shake my head. She must smell me now, for my sweat is like stale fish.

  She straightens up. “Vittorio? You had better go. I will see to this.”

  “Go? But I—I can’t leave you with him. He’s—he’s a madman!”

  Ah! That I am. “Ma-a-a-a-ad.” For the word is like a howl anyway. My God, but my deformity is on my side now: a midget reeking of sulfur coming out of the darkness to pull sinners down into Hell. You men, beware.

  Not her, though. She is not scared. And she does not like his fear either. I can tell. Who wants a lover who doesn’t have the courage to risk himself for love?

  There are voices downstairs, and more light. There will be scandal abroad soon enough. Gabriella appears in the hall, wild-eyed and tousled; behind her Marcello; and then Mauro, fists up, ready to pummel some meat, for he enjoys a ruckus more than anyone I know.

  “Go, Vittorio,” she says again. “I will handle him. Go!…”

  And go he does.

  “Be careful, Vittorio,” I call after him. “That churning in your stomach isn’t fear, you know. She’s poisoning you. Feeding you witchy stuff to make your prick so hard that one day it’ll fall off and smash into stone pieces.”

  But he is gone already. Good riddance. Triumph in the shape of another wave of pain sweeps over me. I feel my balance tilting.

  “The rest of you, go back to bed.”

  “Do you need any help, my lady?” Mauro’s voice. Good old ham fist. Loyal to the end.

  “No, Mauro. We will be fine. Go to bed. Just leave us alone.”

  He gives a last growl and then turns and fades away.

  She lifts the candle above her. Heaven only knows what she sees in its light.

  “In God’s name, what is wrong with you, Bucino? Are you ill or just drunk?”

  If only she would come nearer now, she would know. She would understand. I open my mouth, but I cannot speak. It takes all my energy to keep the knife in my hand. If there were more light, she could see the damage. Or feel the fever, for where I was an ice block before, now I am a human torch.

  Her voice is shaky. “Drunk. And what? Jealous? Is that it? Of what? Him? Me? Our pleasure? Is that what this is about, Bucino? You are jealous because I am happy while you are not?”

  And I think for that moment that I am going to pass out, for the world is spinning.

  “Oh, my God…I am right, yes. This is about you, not me. You are the one who is mad with it. Look at you. When did you last have pleasure, eh, Bucino? When did you last play, or laugh until your sides hurt? When did you last have a woman, for that matter? Success has turned you sour. You live in that room bent over your abacus and your account books like some spider over her filthy eggs. Where is the life in that? My God, La Draga is right. It’s you who are the one in need of love potions, not me.”

  She shakes her head and takes a step upward.

  “You think I am the one who is threatening our livelihood, but I tell you, Bucino, you are as changed as I am. You have become an old man. And believe me, that is worse for business than any courtesan becoming a whore.”

  “It’s not me—” I start to speak, but the sound is almost too loud to bear inside my head.

  “I don’t want to hear it. I have had enough of your fury and your sanctimony. Maybe our time together is ended.”

  “Ha! Well, if it is, then I’ll go gladly.” And though every word hurts now, there is something almost satisfying in the pain. “For I am as much wanted as you, you know. I could walk out of here tomorrow with the Turk and have a greater fortune than you will ever see.”

  “Then why don’t you go—and leave me alone.”

  I make a move toward her, but my legs falter as soon as I start.

  “No. Don’t come near me!” Her voice is shaking so now that I cannot tell fury from fear. “I don’t want anything to do with you. Not now. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  She turns and runs back up the stairs. I would follow her if I could, only I cannot walk now. The knife falls by my side, clattering onto the stairs. Somehow I pull myself up and get to my room. But there is no strength now, even to lock the door.

  I am at my desk, counting, the abacus in front of me a set of shining ruby stones. There is a noise at the window, a great commotion. Fear eats at my gut. I take the beads off their string and stick them into my mouth, swallowing them down one by one until I am choking.

  Now suddenly I am outside, running along a canal edge, with angry birds wheeling high above me, their cries like screams. I keep close to the wall so they cannot spot me, but everywhere I look I see myself, for the walls, even the ground beneath me, are made of mirrors now. Above me, the bird wind gets stronger. A great flock of seagulls is swooping and squawking in to land, pecking furiously at the carcasses of fish heads and mermaids’ tails, which I see now are littered all around. But there is one bird much la
rger than the rest: a seagull still, but with talons like an eagle’s, each claw as big as a pitchfork. He circles above me. I am so scared I cannot breathe, and as he dips toward me, I see his eyes, large and white like communion hosts, wells of scum-covered milk. He swoops, hooking his claws into my ears, the talons reaching deep inside to get purchase, and while I scream in agony, he picks me up by my head and lifts me off the ground.

  As we soar into the sky, I look down, and now there is a woman on the street staring up at me, only the bird’s eyes have become hers: wide, white circles, scummy and sightless. She is laughing, and the bird is laughing with her. But I am crying, and as the tears drop, each of them turns into a flashing red ruby, and as they hit the water a fish leaps up and snaps at them as we spin out over the ocean, the talons like steel spikes driving into my brain. We are far out to sea when I hear her, my lady, calling to me….

  “Bucino. Oh, sweet Jesus, what has happened? Bucino. What it is? Speak to me. Please.”

  But I cannot see her. Maybe I am dropped already into the ocean, for I cannot breathe properly either. No, I cannot breathe because I am still crying.

  “For God’s sake, someone get La Draga. Oh, dear Lord. Oh, I’m sorry. How long have you been like this? What happened to you? Oh, I should have known. It’s all right. It’s all right. I’ll help you.”

  Someone—she—puts arms around me, and I want to tell her that I am sick, that my smell is bad, and that I need another sleeping draft from the kitchen…but I cannot stop crying enough to get the words out.

  And then the bird sticks its claws farther into my ears.

  I do not remember my mother. She died when I was four years old, and I have no image or memory of what she looked like, though my father told me often that she was beautiful, with hair as black and sleek as a velvet cloak and skin so pale that at full moon her face was luminous in the semidarkness. Or at least that was what he said. But then it was his job to find the right words to describe things. That is what secretaries are paid to do. And while there are those who are wedded to the facts and only the facts, my father always had a hankering for poetry. Which is how he wooed my mother. Which is why, when I was born, his world ripped apart at the seams, for there are no sonnets to deformity in any book that I have read, and the only words to describe me, his own son, child of his beloved and beautiful wife, were ones connected with Hell rather than Heaven.

  As to my mother’s luminosity, well, since I never saw her in the moonlight, I do not know. But memory is not just the pictures that you can keep in your mind’s eye. It is also things you know without ever seeing them. So while I cannot tell you what she looked like, I do know how she felt. I know the touch of her skin, the warmth of her hands, and the feeling of her arms around me. For when I was little, I am sure that she lay with me, curled herself around my strange smallness, and held me to her as if I was the most precious and most beautiful thing in the world, so special that she and I could never be separated. And that her warmth helped me with the pain. I know this because, while I do not “remember” it as it happened, the first time I ever slept with a woman, a prostitute in Rome, clean and less ugly than I, I had enough money to pay for the whole night, and while my prick enjoyed being inside her enough to show its excitement and therefore make a man of me, it was the sleeping with her that made me weep like a child. It was winter, and the room where she worked was freezing, or maybe I reminded her of a child she had lost, for she was old enough to be my mother and I was small enough. I remember sometime in the night I woke to the warmth of her breath on my neck. Her arms were around my chest, and her legs were curled under me, like a large spoon lying next to a smaller one. I lay for hours, wrapped inside the deepest comfort, reliving a memory that perhaps I never had of a time when I was loved for, rather than despite, what I am. Then, at first light, I slid out from her arms and left, so that I would not have to suffer the humiliation of her waking distaste.

  The pain flows in and out in waves. Sometimes the bird is there with its talons, and I have to beat it off with my hands; sometimes I am alone, beached and helpless. I am awake and asleep. I am freezing in the light. I am burning in the dark. I am dead yet somehow still alive. When I try to open my eyes, I see flashes searing the darkness, and I hear someone crying, a dreadful wailing, which is both in me and an eternity away. “Help me. Oh, God, help me, please.”

  The answering voice, when it comes, is gentle and cool, as cool as the fingers that rest on my domed head, moist like the chunks they chip off the ice barges in the furnace of summer. “I know how much it hurts, Bucino. I know. But it will not last forever. You will live through it and not always be in such pain. Don’t be frightened…you are not alone.”

  After that, there is nothing for a while. Or nothing that I remember. Only, when the fire comes again, this time there is the touch of wet cloth all over my skin. And later, when the cold sets in and chatters my teeth, I am wrapped in blankets, and someone—the same person—now rubs at my hands and feet until they thaw from ice into flesh again. The next thing I know it is night, and I am lying on my side, and one of the gouged holes of my ear is filled with an oily warmth that seeps inside, silky, soothing. I am breathing in a cave inside my head, for that is the only place I can hear anything now. The oil’s presumption angers the pain, and the skewering comes again, as bad as ever before, so that I think my eggplant skull must crack down the middle and my brains spew out of my head like those of the men I saw on the streets of Rome that day. But fingers press gently down onto my skin where my neck meets my ears, rubbing around the bone, sending the warmth deeper into my head until slowly, slowly, the pain starts to roll back and fade away. And when it is over, arms come around me and hold me, and I curl up inside them and am safe again, for the bird does not come when I am held.

  At some time, I don’t know when, the voice comes again, gentle, like a litany, so deep inside that again I think it must be in my own mind. I am in terror at first, for now it speaks of Heaven, as if I am arrived there, describing how our bodies will become like pieces of glass, pure, shining in the sun, moving faster than arrows, but soft enough to merge into and through one another. How, when we open our mouths, the sound will be that of a thousand lutes and we will sing with the intense beauty of it all. Then the voice itself starts to sing, boyish high and sweet, yet clear enough for me to hear it through the howling pain. Only I know it is a woman’s voice, for it comes with the warmth of a woman’s arms again around me.

  I wake. It is night, and for a moment it seems there is no pain. The room is dark, and I see by candlelight my mistress sitting on a chair at the end of the bed. I close my eyes. When I open them again, she has changed and it is La Draga sitting in the same place. She is there the next time too, and I look at her for longer. But the ache begins to flare, and I think I moan a little, because she is staring at me, and I swear that she is seeing me—seeing me—for she seems to smile, and in the gloom I feel a beam of light move from her whitened eye to deep inside my head, her blindness moving through my deafness, and as it reaches me so the ache is dulled before it can take hold.

  Yet when I try to thank her, the room has changed and there is darkness again and she is gone. But when I sleep now, I am no longer woken by the pain.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “…from his deformity?”

  “That’s what she said. It is the way his ear is made, it seems, so that when water gets in, it cannot get out again, and everything starts to rot inside.”

  I know I am back, not so much because the pain is gone but because the background roar in my head is absent so that I can hear again, even though their voices are low so as not to wake me.

  “My God, the poor bastard, he must have been going mad with it.”

  “Ah…you cannot imagine. You could hear his sobbing all over the house. Those first days were so awful. I was sure he was going to die.”

  If I had the stamina, I would open my eyes and join in, but as it is, all I can do is lie with my face to th
e wall and listen. It will do well enough. The sound of my lady’s voice has never been sweeter. Even Aretino’s growl has music in it.

  “So how did she cure him?”

  “Sleeping drafts, unctions of special oils in his ears, warm poultices, massaging the bones. She wouldn’t leave his side. I never imagined she was so fond, for the two of them bicker more than they talk. But you should have seen her, Pietro: night after night, watching over him, caring for him until the fever broke and the spasms became less severe.”

  “My God, egghead or not, he’s a lucky man. You’d think a deformity like his would put the fear of God into women. Yet you all rally to him. Remember Rome? There were a couple of women there who couldn’t get enough of him. It used to amaze me. What is his secret?”

  And my lady laughs a little. “Who is asking? Aretino the man or Aretino the scurrilous writer?”

  “What? Don’t tell me! It is the size of his prick!”

  “Oh, shush…you will wake him.”

  “Why not? Now that he is going to live, I’d say hearing this would be a better tonic than anything your kitchen can prepare.”

  “Shhh.”

  I hear the swish of her skirts as she moves toward the bed, and even the precision of the sound is a pleasure to me. I do not intend to deceive her, but my eyes are lead shutters, and the ebb and flow of my breathing is natural enough now that the agony is passed. I know she is close by the smell of mint and rosemary mixed on her breath. It must be Thursday. If I did have the energy to open my eyes, her skin would be milk white and her eyes clear and bright. I try to keep my eyelids from flickering and take another breath and let it out. Her scent grows fainter in the air. When their voices come now, they are quieter, farther away, though not so far that I cannot make out the words.

  “He is asleep. He looks so peaceful. I have not seen his face so smooth for years.”

  “You should see yourself, Fiammetta. You look at him almost as a mother looks at a child. It is strange, the two of you. Everybody wonders, you know.”