The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  I was awakened by a tap on my shoulder. Even half asleep, I knew the touch.

  “Do my eyes deceive me? No. It is my sweet Grazia.” Taking my hands in his, he raised me gently to my feet. “Oh, lady, you are a feast for my eyes. How come you here?”

  I quickly related to him all the events that had transpired, up to and including my puzzling audience with Madonna Isabella, but coming back again and again to my fateful encounter with Cateruccia at the casa dei catecumeni. “It is an evil augury.”

  “You believe that?”

  “There cannot be any doubt,” I assured him. “If I go into that place, I will lose my soul. The One True God has put her there to warn me away.”

  “Which God is that? The God that you have this very day renounced by coming to me?”

  In the confusion of the day I had forgotten what brought me to this place, what I had embraced, what I had rejected.

  “You look stricken, lady. Is it regret that clouds your eyes? So soon?”

  “Perhaps, sir,” I admitted. “I never expected to find the like of our old slave Cateruccia at the casa dei catecumeni. She is my devil.”

  “She is a wretch of no importance, a gnat to be swatted if it presumes to light on you,” he contradicted me firmly. “Think of your consequence in the world. You, my love, have this day become a protégée of the most powerful lady in Mantova as well as the beloved of her kinsman. This slave is beneath your notice.”

  From the moment I heard Cateruccia’s voice that morning, she had taken the shape in my mind of a great and powerful being hovering above me like a huge black bat. As I heard her described so disparagingly, she began to lose both volume and power.

  “Listen to me, Grazia.” I was hearing a new Lord Pirro, a wise and worldly man. “It is not with some unimportant slave that we must concern ourselves but with this proposed disputa that you tell me about. For although the One True God, as you call Him, may be heating up some dreadful punishment for you in the great by-and-by, Madonna Isabella is here and now in this palace and is capable of considerable spite when she is crossed. It is the Este in her. We on the Gonzaga side tend to display more consistency. Now . . .” He was sounding more businesslike by the minute. “Are you prepared to debate with her the question of Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Messiah?”

  The very idea filled me with trepidation. Only the wisest and most erudite Jews ever entered into such a disputa; for it takes a hand as practiced as Judah’s to guide the discussion safely past the rocky shoals of heresy and blasphemy, offenses for which Jews have been known to burn.

  “Oh, my lord, I could never . . . I could not possibly . . . I did not understand . . .” I floundered about in my fright.

  “But now you do understand,” he interrupted in a firm voice. “And now we must make haste to extricate ourselves from this treacherous trap of a disputa. For if we do not, it will snap shut on both of us tomorrow.”

  How clever he was. How knowing.

  “Have you ever watched the hummingbird as she goes about sucking nectar from the blossoms?” he inquired.

  Indeed I had. “My grandmother was cursed, as she put it, with a rampant trumpet vine that attracted hummingbirds in droves,” I answered. “Although I could never see the plague in it. They are so agile, so delicate, so quick — quicker than Mercury.”

  “What you have limned there is a likeness of my kinswoman, the Marchesana,” he said. “To her admirers, she appears to be a quicksilver creature, full of lightness. To her detractors, she is a species of freebooter, bent on extracting the last drop from every transaction. But there can be no disagreement about her quickness. She is one who tastes, sucks, and moves on with lightning speed. Like the hummingbird, my cousin flits quickly from blossom to blossom. For the moment, she fancies the prospect of this disputa with you. Given some number of days, she will find another great enthusiasm, I assure you. Eventually, she will discard the scheme altogether and it will be safe for you to appear at the Reggio. Meanwhile you will feign some female complaint and sequester yourself in the casa dei catecumeni.”

  “No,” I cried out. “I cannot go back there.”

  “Yes you can,” he insisted. “Believe me, the sight of you and Fingebat being carried by four of the Marchesana’s liveried porters will put this Cateruccia on her knees before you.”

  He was right of course. The moment that slut saw me on the litter, protected from the elements by a curtain emblazoned with the Gonzaga arms, her mouth dropped open and she actually did fall to her knees.

  Word of my arrival had been sent ahead, so all was in readiness for me, she announced, as obsequious now as she had been bold in other times. Fra Pietro extended his heartfelt welcome and would be in to see me before evening. This afternoon, he was at the Reggio conferring with Madonna Isabella. (Fra Pietro, the castellan of the casa dei catecumeni, was also the illustrissima’s confessor.) Having delivered her messages, the girl waited awkwardly to see me to my chamber.

  If anyone had told me that morning that I would end the day taking leave of my lover under the watchful eye of Cateruccia, I would have pronounced him mad. Yet that is the way it happened. After a brief moment in the entrance hall Lord Pirro informed me with a trace of embarrassment that he must return the litter forthwith — that, in truth, he himself was overdue at the Reggio. “For my time is not my own, my love. I am entirely at the disposal of my cousin, the Marchese, being in his service. And he has excused me only until vespers,” he explained.

  “He seems as jealous of his prerogatives as his wife is,” I remarked. “And as quick to take offense at any lapse in fealty.”

  “More so,” the young lord answered tersely. “Madonna Isabella can be jollied but my cousin Francesco has no playful side to him. I dare not defy him on pain of my life.” He told me this, not making a drama out of it but with a matter-of-fact acceptance that made it quite believable.

  Heedless of Cateruccia’s stolid presence, I begged a kiss of reassurance. And a kiss is what I got, that and no more. For my lover was visibly nervous now and eager to be gone to his master.

  “When will I see you?” I called into the gathering dusk.

  “I will send a note . . .” His voice trailed off.

  I stood in the portal watching until he was long gone. Then, as the twilight gathered, I slowly and finally closed the door on my family, my religion, and my God whose most stern command I was about to defy.

  18

  The room assigned to me more closely resembled a cell than a chamber. No embroidered satin pillows here to caress my back. No feather quilt to buffer me from the winter’s damp. No bed, in fact. Only a straw pallet on the floor. Plus a crude pine chest without a lock, a cracked pitcher, and a chamber pot. To complete this desolate picture, the room boasted but one window and that a tiny one, shuttered and beyond my reach. Would I ever hear a bird sing outside those shutters? I doubted it.

  Not surprisingly, my thoughts turned to home — to my brothers. I called out for Cateruccia (no silken bellpulls in this monk’s cell) and asked for a pen and some vellum. Quickly I penned a note to tell my family where I was. Given my address, they could easily deduce my intent.

  When the note was done I called again for Cateruccia and ordered her to have it delivered. Hand on hip, she informed me in a most defiant manner that no letter could leave the casa dei catecumeni before it was read by Fra Pietro. In vain I protested that my parents would be worried about me. She would not be moved.

  “Fra Pietro will attend to your affairs directly after matins. This is the hour he sets aside for conversos,” she informed me. Now that I was locked up securely within the gates, her manner was not as deferential as it had been earlier. She did not completely discard the mantle of respect she had assumed in Lord Pirro’s presence. She simply allowed me to glimpse flashes of the old insolence underneath, much in the way that wanton girls manage “accidentally” to d
isplay the red petticoats hidden beneath their sober gray gamorras.

  Having defied me in the name of Fra Pietro, she went on to presume further in the priest’s name. “We have our customs here, Donna Grazia,” she simpered, “which I have come to know since I first entered this house as a conversa.”

  “You were not a Christian before?” I asked.

  “Only in my heart,” she replied with another arch little smile. “But when my master, your father, abandoned me, Fra Pietro took pity on me, God bless his pure white soul, and agreed to train me as a Christian.”

  Abandoned! The gall of the girl. Perhaps I ought to have challenged the slander of my father there and then. But my spirit was eroded after the long day and I must admit the wretch still exerted a vestige of power over me.

  I felt her presence heavy and menacing in my tiny cell long after she had left me. It seemed that I had incarcerated myself in a prison as harsh and punitive as the one I had fled, without the comfort of my brothers to sustain me. I could not even turn for solace to my old friend Virgil, for the wretch had neglected to leave me a candle. Had it not been for Fingebat I believe I would have fallen prey to a true melancholic malady that night.

  Contrary to my fears that my confessor would be a graybeard with a sepulchral voice and quivering jowls, when he appeared next morning Fra Pietro turned out to be a comparatively young man, light of step and slim of figure, with a winning smile and a solicitous manner. First off, he ordered Cateruccia to fetch a warm stone from the fire to place next to my belly in my distress (he must have had a report of my arrival on the litter). In addition he offered me a sip of wine — an unheard-of indulgence in that abstemious household, I was to learn.

  Once the priest had made me comfortable, he hastened to reassure me that the letter to my parents had been delivered. They were entitled to supply me with food for the duration of my stay as I was still technically a Jewess, he reminded me. It would be some time before I could complete the training which must precede my baptism. Besides — he took my hand in his — we must all be certain that my desire to convert was sincere.

  “Oh, I am sincere, Padre,” I told him. “And I am most eager to get on with it.”

  “Good.” He nodded approvingly but did not seem overwhelmingly impressed by my enthusiasm. “It is well that you begin at once. For there are trials of both spirit and flesh ahead for you.”

  “Trials of flesh?” The phrase brought to my mind the old medieval rites of trial, the thought of which made me tremble.

  “Only the mildest mortifications, my child,” he reassured me. “We Christians need not suffer severe trials of the body. Christ suffered those for our sake.” He stated this with such firm conviction that it was impossible not to believe him, and for the first time since I had left home I began to feel some confidence in this venture. So that when the priest asked if I would be well enough to take dinner with him that day, I pronounced myself willing to try.

  The meal was execrable. I cannot remember ever having been served such poor fare or so little of it. A thin soup with a few potatoes to thicken it and some stale crusts floating on the top; a wine which burned the throat even though it was thoroughly watered; and a single fig. That constituted the whole of my first dinner at the casa dei catecumeni. As a side dish I was offered tidbits of Cateruccia’s witless chatter, and for seasoning, the ripe odor of her unwashed body.

  To these discomforts of flesh and spirit the priest remained admirably impervious. He drank Cateruccia’s watery soup and inhaled the fumes of her sweat and listened to her banal chatter with amiable cordiality. I was unable to muster an equal Christian caritas. In the dei Rossi house, as in most households, the servants ate after their masters were done. Even lowly Jews did not force themselves to endure the stink of their servants’ bodies while they ate. But although they ate second, I promise you that our servants dined forty times more delectably on leftovers than I did at Fra Pietro’s egalitarian table. Our servants would have staged a revolt had they been given these meager crusts and this watery slop for their daily allotment.

  I had come into this place prepared for conflicts of conscience and crises of the soul. I had never considered the possibility of having to starve for Christ.

  Toward the close of the day, Fra Pietro came to my chamber to conduct me on a turn around the cloister — if I felt able. He was solicitous in speech and manner but not so concerned as to spare me the chastisement he had brought me there to administer.

  I was about to face my first trial on the road to salvation, he explained. Starting now, I would be required to make ten rounds of the square each evening and to stop and repeat five times at each corner, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” To expedite my comprehension of this basic Christian precept, I was to seek out Cateruccia and invite her to pace out the penance at my side. “For she is one of God’s children just as you are, Signorina Grazia, and deserving of your pity,” he explained.

  “Take up her burden,” he urged me. “Remember Jesus Christ, our Lord.” He paused to cross himself and salute the Savior. “Think of Him pinioned to the cross suffering for our sins and think of the smallness of the sacrifice I ask of you now in His name.” Again he paused to genuflect. “Drink in Cateruccia’s ignorance, inhale her sweat as if it were ambergris and myrrh,” he exhorted. “Is that too much to ask of one who professes to have heard His call?”

  Up until that moment I could not truthfully have said that I had heard any such call. My presence in the House of Converts was certainly more an expediency than a vocation. But at that moment, standing in that little courtyard at dusk, facing that saintly man, overcome by the quiet force of his rhetoric, I did truly feel myself overwhelmed by grace. I threw myself at his feet, weeping.

  He was a wise confessor. He allowed me time to cry out all the pent-up misery of the past days — the fear, the hurt, the loneliness — all. Only when my tears finally gave way to dry racking heaves did he speak.

  “You feel yourself superior to the slave girl. You refuse to accept her as your sister in Christ, do you not?”

  Miserably, I nodded.

  “That is your pride speaking, the pride that will keep you from Christ.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” He was steel now, his touch cold as he dabbed at a tear on my cheek.

  “The true tears of the penitent are cooled by remorse,” he explained. “Those tears of yours are hot tears, tears of rage.”

  “But I am not angry, Father, I swear it.”

  “Then why do you weep so passionately? Why?”

  “I am hungry, Father. My belly is empty. I am starving.”

  The moment the words were out, I wanted to bite my tongue off. What must he think of me, bawling after food like an infant? I needn’t have worried. My outburst evoked no more distaste in him than did Cateruccia’s stench. Nor did it evoke the slightest inclination to feed me. From Fra Pietro, I got neither bread nor a stone. I got a sermon.

  “We Christians are congenitally abstemious and ascetic, after the way of our Lord Jesus Christ,” he began. “Whereas your people . . .” A slight shiver agitated his body. “I do not wish to defame your people. I shall merely point out to you that whereas a Jewish priest would merely have satisfied your physical desire for food this evening, Christ will reward your fast with everlasting grace. Is not the sacrifice of a piece of bread a small price to pay for eternal salvation?”

  Something of the sweetness of Christ’s love was revealed to me at that moment and I was able to answer, with a full heart, “Yes, Father. It is a small price, to be sure.”

  For this, I was rewarded by a smile of delight such as one sees on the faces of Fra Angelico’s angels.

  “Now listen carefully to what I have to tell you, Grazia,” he went on. “Nowhere more than in the food you eat, the pallet you sleep on, and the company you keep with lesser souls will you learn more quickly to grasp the heart of
the Christian faith, the transformation of flesh into spirit. I will lead you. You must trust my way. I will teach you. You must learn. But learning is not enough. You must come to know Christ in your own blood and your own flesh. Only then can you truly embrace Him.”

  He took me in his arms like a lover and fixed my eyes with his own. “Embrace the bleeding, beating heart of Christ, my child, I implore you.” Moved by some passionate religiosity, he fairly threw himself into a spasm of submission. “Il cuore del Cristo!”

  With this final cry, he subsided into deep silence, and after a while, without another word, he released me from his embrace and left the cloister.

  In due course, Cateruccia appeared. Inspired by Fra Pietro, I took her arm in the friendliest manner. Then we started off on our rounds, Cateruccia emitting hoarse sighs as she lumbered along beside me and I muttering, “The meek shall inherit the earth,” five times at each corner. By the end of it my hunger pangs had subsided and I walked up to my cell with a firm tread and an inner assurance that I had chosen the right path.

  19

  Life in the casa del catecumeni. Dreary. Harsh. Up before dawn in my cell. Most mornings a layer of ice has formed in the jug. I crack it with my fist, splash the frigid water on my face. (Jewish habits of sanitation die hard.) I ask myself if the addiction to washing is another indulgence of the flesh. Make a note to ask Fra Pietro. But I see him rarely. He is in constant attendance on Madonna Isabella. The court has moved to Marmirolo and he with it.

  I have not seen Lord Pirro since the first day of my incarceration in this place. Nor have I heard a word from him. Or from the illustrissima. The plan for the disputa must be forgotten. Have I too been forgotten?