by Sarah Bower
During this speech the brothers had risen and now stood facing the balcony with their hands linked, their chains entwined. I saw Ferrante begin to shake like a man with an ague and slump against Giulio, who staggered slightly but managed to keep them both upright. The executioner laid his axe on the block and a ragged cheer went up from some parts of the crowd, though others looked disappointed. Many had travelled a long way for the spectacle, and others had probably expected to make their year’s earnings out of the day. Quickly attuning himself to the uncertain mood, the duke went on, “Let us celebrate instead, an end to discord and bloodshed between brothers and the beginning of a new age of peace and prosperity. We will have bonfires lit and there will be music and dancing and we will have oxen and suckling pigs roasted in the piazza.” The duke sat down looking well pleased with himself. “Good,” he said, with the brutal compassion of a surgeon drawing the skin over an amputation, “now to dinner.” The cheering coalesced into a gleeful roar loud enough to scare up the buzzards from above the city gates. Smiles and murmurs of approval spread among the ducal party, though I noticed Donna Lucrezia neither smiled nor looked at her husband. Perhaps she had known all along what he intended.
***
Ferrante and Giulio were taken back into the castle, to separate rooms in the Torre Leone. The doors to these rooms were sealed and the windows bricked up until a space not much larger than one of the old duke’s cat doors was left in each of them. There they were condemned to spend the rest of their natural lives and it was forbidden ever to speak their names in the Duchy of Ferrara or the County of Modena though sometimes, in her sleep, my friend Angela disobeyed that command.
In that year of the Christians 1506, Ferrante d’Este was twenty-nine years old and his brother Don Giulio was twenty-six. I never saw either of them again, so they have remained that age for me, caught like those who die young in an aspic of remembrance.
THE BOOK OF LOVE
A brother is in me
Whose letters
Were like water
When my heart was thirsty
Now, when others’ come,
Not his,
The thought of him writing
Within me is fire.
Shmu’el Hanagid, On the Death of Isaac, His Brother
The Head of Jupiter, Mantua, Sixth Day of Teveth in the Year Five Thousand Two Hundred and Sixty-Seven
To Esther Sarfati from Gideon da Quieto d’Arzenta, greetings.
I had promised myself I would not do this. I made myself a solemn vow never to try to contact you, but now they tell me Valentino is free and will return to Italy so there seems to be little to lose and everything to gain in writing you this letter.
I suppose you are very happy and I rejoice for you, truly, if you are. Yet I remember some of the things Don Giulio said to me during his exile, about you, and Valentino, and I wonder if you are happy, and then I feel the chink in my armour, the temptation to reach out to you and see if what I thought I saw in you was real or just the product of an imagination inflamed by loss and hunger and fear and hopelessness.
I will have to begin at the beginning, at the very point when I saw you hurrying away from me in Don Giulio’s garden. I watched your back until you came level with the glass houses, then suddenly the sun emerged from behind a cloud and its light on the glass dazzled me. When I could see again, you were gone.
Don Giulio had the grace to apologise for his indiscretion. He was angry; he was in pain and desperately worried for his future. He was so bound up in his own concerns he had failed to give sufficient consideration to the effect his words might have on others. And he did not blame me for having a weak spot for you because you were a very pretty girl, accomplished and amusing and a loyal friend to his beloved Donna Angela. He never stopped talking about Donna Angela; even after her marriage to Alessandro Pio part of him believed she would come round, and they would live happily ever after with their daughter. While another part of him grew twisted and plotted against the duke and the cardinal and seemed honestly to believe Don Ferrante could make an effective ruler. I did not know Don Ferrante at all, of course, but what I saw of him was a charming, lazy fop, quite incapable of running a hen house, never mind a state. At that time, Don Giulio’s powers of self-delusion seemed immeasurable.
I wonder now if that is why I continued to work for him, even after I became aware his interest lay not in my artistic abilities but in my knowledge of chemistry. I was attracted to the idea of self-delusion. I was living in a dream in which I was destined for the same kind of fame as Michelangelo or Leonardo or young Raffaele. I even thought I looked like Raffaele. I saw him once, when my master took me on a trip to Urbino, and he was thin, like me, with curly hair, though not so tall. Actually, his face was beautifully proportioned, which mine is not but, as I say, this part of my story is about self-delusion. You might also be interested to know our trip was fruitless because your Valentino had just taken the city and was not interested in commissioning artists. We could not gain access to the palace, so we stayed a night with Ser Santi, Raffaele’s father, and went back to Mantua the next day. The roads, I remember, were crawling with soldiers.
Self-delusion can also give rise to extraordinary, some would say, reckless, courage. Looking back now, I can scarcely credit the fact that Don Giulio stayed in Ferrara as long as he did, and experimented as openly as he did with the poison that was going to—without, of course, being in any way detectable—kill the duke and the cardinal and avenge his eyes. Perhaps he should have asked the advice of your Valentino about that. Is he not a great man with poisons?
Eventually, however, Donna Isabella prevailed with her brother and he set out for Mantua. He graciously invited me to accompany him, pointing out that at least one person at court—you, of course—had come across us together in compromising circumstances and that I would be safer back in Mantua. Among my own kind, he said, as though one Jew is much the same as another and I might blend effortlessly in, a goldsmith indistinguishable from a butcher, a candle dipper or a knife grinder. I was content to go. I had no further work in Ferrara and nothing else to keep me there, and as Donna Isabella had patronised me before, I had no reason to suppose she might not do so again.
Are the Borgias so good at poisoning because they are themselves made not of flesh but of some poisonous substance? It quickly transpired that Don Giulio was not an honoured guest in his sister’s house but a prisoner, albeit a comfortable one. As for myself, hearing that I had been “taken on” as she put it by her sister-in-law, Donna Isabella wondered if I would not find her own humble requirements insufficiently challenging for my great talents. And so on and so forth. Reason dictates that she was distancing herself from me because she saw me as part of Don Giulio’s conspiracy, but why not say so? Why couch it all in terms that made it sound as though I had been contaminated by association with Duchesa Lucrezia? Well, that has been the fashion, hasn’t it, since Valentino’s fall, and Donna Isabella was ever a slave of fashion.
So perhaps Valentino’s release—or did he escape? This has not been made clear to us here in Mantua—will signal an improvement in my fortunes. Perhaps the great man himself may look generously on me, for by all accounts he was very pleased with his masks. Have you seen them? Donna Isabella reported to me that he was so delighted with my gold skull he had hung it beside his bed, so I dare say you have seen that one at least.
The All-Knowing knows I need a break in my luck. Until the soldiers came to fetch Don Giulio, I managed to find work on a small scale, among less scrupulous patrons than Donna Isabella. I made a salt cellar of fabulous vulgarity for a man who has done well out of the current craze here for perfumed gloves. Do they have it in Ferrara also, or does the rivalry between the duchess and the marquesa preclude any common ground on fashions? I worked some small pieces of enamel jewellery for a sea captain who has four wives among the Indians of New Spain. I will come back to him. Don Francesco himself commissioned me, through a discreet third party, to make a s
ilver cap badge with a large citrine for a boy chorister who had taken his fancy, though he has yet to make the final payment on it. I wonder if your lady Lucrezia knows how incontinent he is with his affections, or if she is used to that kind of thing in her family.
Since the trial, however, I am persona non grata everywhere. I have moved away from my father’s house because I am afraid my presence there might put my family in danger. I thought I might lodge in my old master’s studio, which has stood empty since his death while his widow and sons quarrel over what is to be done with it, but everything was locked and barred and I was loathe to break in in case I drew attention to myself and got myself arrested. You ask why I too did not leave Mantua? Well, of course you don’t, but you might. It would be a reasonable question. I will say this. If I had had to leave Mantua then, the only place I would have wanted to go would have been Ferrara. I would have been drawn there as Plato says the soul is drawn to beauty, but I would have been less sure of my welcome.
Well, winter was coming and I was beginning to wonder if I would have to cast myself on the mercy of the Franciscans who run a hostel here. At least Duke Alfonso’s men, if they came, would be unlikely to look for a Jew in a Franciscan hostel. Then I remembered the Jupiter. At the time of his death, old Sperandio was working on a bronze Jupiter so large it could not be cast all of a piece but was to be done in sections then dovetailed. A revolutionary technique, very difficult to achieve, but that will not interest you. What may interest you, given the address I have put at the head of this letter—oh, a fine pun, worthy of a courtier—is that at his death, Sperandio had completed only the head of the Jupiter and this was lying in his studio yard as it was too large to fit indoors. It had been cast using the lost wax method and was therefore hollow—and big enough to accommodate some kind of bed.
A new wife setting up her first home could not have been more delighted than I as I scrambled up Jupiter’s beard and through his open mouth into the empty dome of his head. A casting of this sort is like a moral tale converted into an image—though it is beautiful outside, within it may be rough, with craters made by bubbles of gas from the heating of the metal and sharp jags where the bronze has cooled around the plaster core. So my first task was to hammer and chisel and file until I had a space where I could lay my bedding without tearing it, or my own flesh, to ribbons. I was very pleased, though, with one outcropping I found, in the space between Jupiter’s nose and his left eye, which has made a very serviceable hook for my clothes.
I have been here two months now and I am quite cosy. I managed to scrounge some hides from the tanner to use as curtains to keep out the wind. They are heavy, which is excellent, though smell rather strongly of sheep’s piss. I have rigged up a shelf in Jupiter’s brow where I can light my Sabbath candles and a board across one side of his jaw where I eat, and where I am writing this letter. I remain undisturbed because when people see lights or movement inside the god’s mouth or eye-sockets, they think the head is haunted and keep away. I could, I suppose, stay here for as long as Don Giulio stays in his prison—until I starve or go mad. But Valentino is free, and that changes everything.
I have decided to leave Mantua as soon as the weather improves. I shall go first to Rome and from there to Ostia where I am going to meet the sea captain I have mentioned, the man with four Indian wives. Esther, I have decided to go to New Spain. There is no future for me here, no future for any of us I fear. You know, of course, of the massacre of the Jews in Lisbon.
I am a resourceful man, and though I still have ambitions to be a great artist, I now know they cannot be achieved quickly or straightforwardly. The skills I have learned in my craft are adaptable and can be put to good use anywhere—if it is His will I should be a blacksmith or a sword-maker, so be it. As I said to you once before, what my beliefs teach me is that I must hold myself ready, open to whatever plans He has for me.
The proposal I made you was no flirtation, though it surprised me at least as much as it surprised you. I love you, and there is nothing to be done about it. I have tried. Don Giulio and I both tried all those things men try when they want to forget women. We worked and drank and made love to strangers—and still found we talked about you and Donna Angela endlessly, and found the strangers we made love to just ended up looking like you.
Don Giulio told me something else about you during one of those long, maudlin, drunken conversations. I suppose he thought if I could not be put off by the thought of being the rival of the dangerous Valentino, then more drastic measures were called for. He told me you have a son, and that he is the boy’s godfather.
I will not describe to you how sick that made me feel, the thought of that living, breathing confirmation of your love for another, the way a child binds you indissolubly together. It conjured images in my brain and sentiments in my heart that shame me. Valentino has red hair, they say. Does your son have red hair? No, I don’t want to know. I shall find out soon enough.
Esther, will you come with me to New Spain? If not for your own sake, for your son’s. Even if Valentino can take back all he has lost, what chance does the boy have in Ferrara, with Don Giulio for a godfather? With the help of the Father of us all, I am prepared to try to be a father to him, and in the new world he can grow up free of the past and all its dangers. And a child might bring us together, who knows?
Well, if I am wrong, I will perhaps hear news of you from time to time in the great house your lover will set you up in, and I will rue the day I did not stay in Italy so I might have you as a patron. But do me the honour of thinking carefully about my request, in case what you think you want is not what you really want, or if you are no longer in love with Valentino and do not rejoice in his liberty. Though if I am honest, as I must be now, I realise this is more self-delusion for I always felt there was someone special in your life and chose to disregard my instincts.
I wish you had trusted me with the story of your life before, then I remind myself that everything you do is still you, even the lies you tell. Were you afraid to confide in me? Can you love a man who makes you afraid? No, that is not a fair question. It is late and my head aches with the cold. Did you celebrate Hanukkah this year, as we did last? Another unfair question. Write back. Ask me some unfair questions. I shall not leave Mantua for another month at least for my captain does not sail until the month of Adar. Tell me if you are a good sailor.
Your heart’s bondsman,
Gideon d’Arzenta
CHAPTER 1
FERRARA, 22 APRIL 1507
These are the letters I will never send, the blood of my heart. The deed is planned for tomorrow. I am entrusting these to Juanito, with orders to bring them to you should I die in the attempt. From my words you will be able to reconstruct me, as Isis did Osiris.
The rumours had been eddying around us for weeks. I am certain all of us had rehearsed what we would say and do, how we would think and feel, if they were confirmed. Yet when Juan Grasica arrived, and dismounted slowly in the castle courtyard, as if, by delaying the end of his journey he could also deny its purpose, we were not ready. We were like the city militia who drill every year for the spring floods, then stand amazed as the river races through the streets, carrying off their sandbags and leaving a trail of yellow mud, drowned pigs, and broken furniture in its wake.
Juanito had been well briefed for his task. He went first to Ippolito to deliver his news, but I suppose they were behind the times in Pamplona, in the wild country of Navarre. Relations between Ippolito and Donna Lucrezia had never quite recovered after the Coniurga; the unspoken names of Giulio and Ferrante hovered between them like the fairies who sour the milk. This was no time for Ippolito to pretend otherwise, so he charged Fra Raffaello with carrying Juanito’s message to madonna.
Easter had come early that year, and madonna had been preoccupied during Carnival by a visit from Don Francesco, so some of the marriages she had negotiated for her young ladies were taking place in the weeks between Easter and Corpus Christi as Carnival had fa
llen in the dead of winter. Madonna had also suffered another miscarriage, which some attributed to too much dancing and going about on horseback and others, behind their hands, to too much activity of another sort in the company of Don Francesco Gonzaga who had come to Ferrara without Donna Isabella, who was about to give birth again herself.
We were in the Camera Dal Pozzolo, sewing a trousseau for a distant Gonzaga cousin who was to marry the Venetian ambassador’s nephew the following Saturday. I remember these inconsequential details, even the fact that I had just re-charged my needle with the cream silk thread I was using to embroider bouquets of love-in-idleness around the neck of a nightgown. I remember Fra Raffaello’s flushed cheeks and working mouth and the way self-satisfaction and terror warred in his eyes, and the calm way madonna laid her work in her lap as the slave scratched on the door and she said, “Enter.”
What I do not remember, what I have since had to reconstruct in my imagination, is how I felt as Fra Raffaello bowed his head and said, “Madonna, you must brace yourself. I have news of great seriousness.”
“Yes,” she said. I am sure she knew, as I did, what he was going to say next.
“News from the King of Navarre,” he went on, working himself up to his task. Madonna did nothing to help him; the gaze she levelled on him was as cool and grey as the oblong of unseasonal sky showing in the window behind her. Though she valued his spiritual counsel he was not, ultimately, in her confidence, merely in that of the Duchess of Ferrara. Watching her, it became clear to me that she was, in her way, as good at wearing masks as Cesare had been. Had been. I had thought of him in the past tense.
“His messenger brings word of the death in battle of the Duke of Valentinois, madonna.”
