The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  Later, when my eye had been educated, the balance and harmony of Brunelleschi’s facade for the Ospedale brought me to a stop every time I passed through the Piazza Santissima Annunziata. But when Judah took me by it that first day, I found myself forced to express an admiration I did not feel. All I saw was a low flat building — no towers — fronted by some skinny unimpressive little columns. I did find the swaddled infants in the roundels adorable — and expressed my approval in precisely those condescending words.

  I was even less impressed by the Medici house in Via Larga. Small, I thought. Square. Plain. It certainly was austere compared to the Gothic piles that Biaggio Rossetti built for the Estes and the Gonzagas. It did not even have its own tower and could not have contained more than fifty rooms at most. Our Reggio at Mantova boasted more than six hundred rooms counting all of its additions. What did Judah find to admire in this small boxlike structure?

  My eyes followed his pointing finger to rest in turn on the jutting cornice and the three registers below it. I especially detested the bottom register clad in massive blocks of unadorned, rustic stone. But I managed to disguise my lack of enthusiasm.

  “Dismount, wife, and I will show you the Medici garden.” Judah offered me his arm.

  Only one garden? With my own eyes I had seen half a dozen gardens within the walls of the Reggio at Mantova. But I kept my counsel and followed his bidding, tethering my horse alongside his on one of the huge iron rings that together with a series of bulky torch holders constituted the only adornment on the facade of the Medici house. Where were the putti and the grotteschi and the carved fishes and lions, those embellishments that in my eyes gave a palace its air of splendor?

  My disappointment grew deeper when, having been waved through the courtyard (lined with those skinny columns again), we stood at the threshold of the little garden behind it. Could this be the celebrated Medici garden where Lorenzo dei Medici, il magnifico, had gathered together the great philosophers and scholars of the world to discuss the ideas of Plato and Socrates amid the most glorious sculptures of our time? At first glance there seemed to be no sculptures at all, unless you were to count a stone boy squeezing a fish that spouted water in the center of a small pool.

  “Does the sculpture please you, little bride?” Judah asked me.

  “It is rather small, honored husband,” I replied, trying to find a phrase that would hide my disappointment without causing me to lie.

  “Small. Yes.” Judah pulled on his lower lip and said no more.

  Donatello’s rendering of Judith and Holofernes stood plainly visible on a plinth in one corner of the garden. But that piece of statuary is far from monumental and I had eyes only for the monumental, so I missed it. An even more egregious want of taste was my failure to notice the same master’s wonderful David, that cocky boy in the ruffled hat who has changed the course of the art of sculpture forever. My eyes were blinded by the modesty of the scale.

  It took many years for me to catch the secret of Florentine grandeur. This rich and elegant city does not reveal herself readily to the casual glance. The true Firenze conceals herself (ought I to say himself? Firenze is the most masculine of cities) behind the closed doors of churches and private houses. As a Jewess, churches were forbidden to me. And although Judah was at home among the merchant princes of the town, almost a year passed before I got a glimpse of the gracious city/country life enjoyed by the magnates in their town houses and country villas. Given Judah’s preferred style of living, I might have lived and died in Firenze without penetrating the heart of the city.

  Now understand, Judah was no jailor. He was simply unsociable. More precisely, he got all he needed of conversation and companionship at the Platonic Academy. That I had no such opportunity to mingle in society as he did at the Academy or that I might not be quite ready, at the age of fifteen, to dedicate my life to housewifery and discussions of the Phaedo did not, I am sure, enter his mind.

  At the beginning of our marriage I lent myself with a will to the role of the exemplary wife who finds all the diversion she needs in tending her house. Each morning, I lined up my domestic troops in the kitchen and searched their heads for lice just as Dorotea had instructed me to do. Lice, you remember, can destroy your household. And dirt.

  Was that a curl of dust under the credenza? Gimlet-eyed, I found it out. Then I went in search of Orlando and gave him a good tongue-lashing for having missed it.

  Had I tasted an excess of pepper in the soup? Magliana was called to task. Pepper did not grow on a pepper tree in our garden, I reminded her. It had been carried across deserts and over seas at great cost to her master. Yes, I did say such things. Worse, I threatened to have her beaten or discharged. Dorotea would have been proud of me. I was a woman now, a member in good standing of the sisterhood of Jewish wives.

  But despite my posturings in the kitchen and the larder, I was not a Jewish wife in every respect. In the bedroom Judah and I remained, to use his phrase, “loving friends.” And I could not stop myself from wondering, as I lay in my marriage bed being cuddled like a child, what kind of marriage excluded the very act that sanctified it in the eyes of God. But I dared not question the arrangement; for I found myself much more in awe of Judah after our marriage than I had been before.

  The humanistic circle in which he moved in Firenze brought out aspects of his nature never shown to me during the brief weeks of our courtship. Not unkindness certainly. Judah has never been unkind. Nor irascible or impatient. Pressed to describe to you the nature of the change in him, the best I can offer is “inattentive.” Even when he sat opposite me at dinner and praised my table, his compliments were given with an abstracted air, as if he was forcing himself to pay attention. But after dinner, dressing to attend the Academy with his colleagues, he was another man — light of eye and springy in step. Some days I was convinced that he must be keeping a mistress somewhere, a luscious blonde with rosy cheeks and curves.

  From the first night of our marriage, I had fallen asleep cradled in Judah’s arms. After we settled into our own marriage bed in Firenze, he gradually retreated from that position until, within a few months, we were no longer sleeping spoon fashion — as loving friends — but back to back as if to signify that we no longer shared the same world of dreams. And indeed, as the months passed I did begin to dream dreams that I knew were shameful. But could not stop.

  In these dreams I am dancing naked with a masked man, whirling madly in a candlelit ballroom. Suddenly, the music stops and there stands Francesco Gonzaga all in white. But no. It is not Francesco. It is Judah wrapped in his white prayer shawl, his arm raised like an avenging angel.

  I bow my head, waiting for the blow to fall. He lunges forward and yanks off my partner’s mask, revealing . . . Lord Pirro. I wake up. It is possible to purge adulterous thoughts in life. But in dreams?

  These dreams which came and went became a guilty secret that intensified the increasing distance between me and Judah. Days would go by without a word between us except for the analysis of texts that now made up the conversational substance of our noonday meal together.

  I felt I had done something wrong but could not find the courage to ask what. Books, my ultimate refuge, lost their appeal. I began to distract myself by gazing out into the street. Without my being aware of it, I was becoming that most despised of creatures, the wife who hangs out the window snooping.

  Before long the prospect from the window no longer satisfied my curiosity. Seeking a less constricted view, I announced to my astonished servants that henceforth I myself would hang out the laundry on the upper loggia and bring it in at sundown. Not coincidentally, the loggia gave a wide view of the comings and goings in the street below all the way down to the Arno.

  Our house was situated in the Oltr’arno, a district that stands in relation to the heart of Firenze as Trastevere stands to the heart of Roma. Both are separated from the center by a river. But there the simila
rity ends. In Trastevere you find the Street of the Tanners, the Street of the Dyers, the Street of the Bankers, each street restricted to a single trade according to the fashion of the Dark Ages. By contrast, on the streets of the Oltr’arno the shoemaker cobbles beside the butcher and the rich man gorges himself next door to the half-starved porter. At the top of our street a tailor plied his craft on the ground floor of a typical Florentine craftsman’s house, no wider than four spans of a man’s arms by law. Close at his hand stood a farrier’s shop. Next to it, a wood-carver. Then came our house, wider by twice than any of the tradesmen’s houses and all the more commodious because we had no shop on the ground floor and were free to use all three stories for living in.

  Directly across the street from us, a baker and a pork butcher nestled side by side, offering an ever-present temptation to our servant Orlando, who loved the meat of the hog better than life itself and could never be made to understand why he might not bring it into our house.

  Just past us at the point where the road pitched down toward the riverbank, three quite grand gentlemen’s houses took up most of the frontage. But at the bottom where the street slid into the muck of low-lying lots beside the river, the houses became smaller once again.

  It took me a few weeks of diligent observation between the clotheslines to sort out the inhabitants of these diverse establishments. The cobbler was easily identifiable by his leather apron, the baker by his tall white hat, and the pork butcher by his blood-spattered coat. With a little effort I managed to distinguish those who lived in the grand houses from those who lived in the mean ones and to recognize which were the servants and which the masters. But even after several weeks of careful observation, I still could not account for a tight clique of dark-complexioned people dressed alike in black cloaks who never passed in ones or twos but always in a gaggle.

  They could not be members of a monastic order, since the men and women mixed freely and there were children in the group. Something told me they were Moors. I had never actually seen a Moor, but there was a tinge of Africa in those sallow faces and a flavor to their embroidered garments which I recognized as Byzantine from having seen books illuminated by Sienese artists in what was termed the maniera greca. But, to confuse the issue, the women were veiled below the eyes like Turks or Persians. What manner of people were they? This puzzle became the focus of my empty mind and would likely have continued to do so had not a peremptory demand for Judah’s services disturbed the pattern of our days.

  Young Count Pico of Mirandola, Judah’s former pupil and now his sponsor at the Platonic Academy, had been taken by a high spiking fever and was calling for his old master.

  I have never seen Judah move so fast as he did in response to that summons. More like a general than a physician, he instantly deputized Orlando to hire a pair of horses and me to fasten his camicia and lace his boots. Then, after only the briefest of farewells, he and the servant disappeared into the falling dark.

  He did not come home the next day. Or the next. On the third day of his absence — a Thursday — Orlando returned briefly to retrieve certain supplies from his master’s laboratory. But he brought no word for his master’s wife. When I asked for a report, all I got from that half-wit was a melange of the gold service at Count Pico’s table, the Persian shawls that covered him (“Softer than duck down, lady, and made of a million colors”), the gold braid on the servants’ liveries, and other nonsense. My questions about the Count’s condition met with dumb incomprehension. As for when I could expect my husband home — not a clue.

  Normally Friday was the day Judah devoted himself to supplying the household with its weekly needs. In his absence, the cook presented me with her list of necessaries — a capon, fresh fish, makings for a salad, goat’s-milk cheese, and so forth.

  To be honest, I could have made do without fresh stuff. Nobody ever died on a diet of bread and beans. But that prospect did not tempt me. Besides, a far more appealing alternative began to suggest itself to me. What if I were to go to the market myself? I knew that no respectable woman would be seen in the street unaccompanied. But I told myself . . . Does it matter what I told myself? Fortuna had opened the door of my cage and I simply donned my bonnet, picked up a basket, stepped out into the sunlight, and soared over the Ponte Vecchio to the market square.

  Give them credit, all the merchants dealt with me most courteously. I found everything I needed with no trouble, except for the fish, which smelled spoiled to me and which I refused to buy at stall after stall. After an eternity of poking, sniffing, and looking into the eyes of a legion of carp and tench, I was about to give up when who should come alongside me but an old gentleman I recognized as Messer Bonaventura, head of a large clan of Jewish banchieri. He was one of perhaps three or four souls I had been introduced to on a rare visit to the synagogue.

  “Good morning, sir,” I greeted him.

  “Eh?” He motioned to his servant to hand him a little golden horn, which he put to his ear. “What’s that again?”

  “I said good morning, sir,” I repeated.

  “And good morning to you, madonna,” he replied agreeably. “But may I know who is bidding me good day?”

  “It is Grazia dei Rossi, wife of Judah del Medigo,” I answered.

  “So it is. So it is. And where is your august husband, lady?” he asked.

  “Up in the hills of Fiesole with a sick patient,” I replied.

  “Then who brought you here to the market, lady?”

  “I have brought myself, sir,” I answered. “We were in need of supplies.”

  “Come to the market yourself you say?” He pushed the trumpet up against my lips as if somehow the proximity of the instrument would rephrase my words.

  “Yes sir, quite alone,” I assured him.

  When the full impact of my statement had sunk in he insisted that I could not possibly return home alone. Out of the question. I must come with him to his own house to recover from my ordeal in the streets, and later, after I had rested, he would have me accompanied across the river to my home. But now I must — must! — put myself under his protection.

  Seeing no courteous way to resist this deaf and determined old man, I agreed.

  The visit did not begin auspiciously. Madonna Regina, the old man’s wife, turned quite pale when he reported finding me alone in front of the fishmonger’s stall, and insisted on pouring into me cup after cup of borage tea to counteract whatever malady I might have contracted in such gamey surroundings. After that I was put to rest in her second-best bed to recover from my ordeal. (No amount of nay-saying from me could lessen her conviction that my adventure at the market had been an arduous trial.)

  The old woman was full of apologies that her daughter-in-law Diamante was not there to receive me. “She is on her horse again.” She shook her head disapprovingly. “Always bouncing her belly around on the back of that animal. Just like the Queen of Portugal. And you know what happened to her.”

  With that enigmatic hint she was gone, taking my boots with her to be cleansed of whatever disgusting stuff they may have picked up in the market.

  Next thing, the bouncing Diamante herself appeared at the door still dressed for hunting in a hat with a magnificent red plume. She was a true Diana. Tall. Long-necked. Golden-haired. Everything I longed to be and was not. Had you told me at that moment that we two were destined to become friends, I would have staked my entire fortune against it.

  “Here.” She held out my boots to me. “You’ll need these to make your escape.”

  When I failed to grasp her meaning she went on to explain. “If I were you I’d put the boots on before my mother-in-law finds another reason to take them away. Believe me, the old parties would like nothing better than to keep you locked up here on some pretext or other.”

  “Locked up?” Surely she was joking.

  “Not with a key and bars,” she explained. “With kindness. Because t
he streets are dangerous. And horses are dangerous. Very dangerous. And young women are reckless . . .”

  “Like the Queen of Portugal?” I asked.

  “Precisely. If you take my advice you will get going while my esteemed mother- and father-in-law are taking their rest. I will send your goods on with a lackey. Go now.”

  It sounded like good advice. I donned my boots at once and with Diamante’s help slipped down the broad staircase and into the courtyard.

  Then I belatedly remembered my manners. “I haven’t even said thank you —”

  “Write them a note,” she cut in. “I hear you’re a practiced scribe.”

  There was not much to do but thank her and be on my way. But although I knew myself to be well rescued from the strangling embrace of the senior Bonaventuras, I did suffer a pang of regret at leaving this bold Diana of the banchieri.

  25

  Until his abrupt flight to Fiesole I had known Judah only as a dignified, slow-moving, deliberate sort of man — the soul of gravitas. The haste with which he made his departure to attend Count Pico astonished me. But even more of a surprise was the limping, bleary-eyed, disheveled Judah who staggered into our bedroom five nights later, barely able to croak out a greeting before he collapsed beside me in a deep sleep.

  I concluded that he had not slept much these past five nights, and indeed, when he awoke, he confirmed my diagnosis. “Count Pico was in the grip of a raging fever and I could trust no one to care for him but myself,” he explained.

  “Is he so important a personage, then, to require a body attendant?” I inquired.

  “Important?” Judah pondered my question. “Who is to be the judge of a philosopher’s importance? He is much admired in the Medici circle. Yet he himself would be first to admit that he is no Plato.”

  “Why then . . .”

  “Why then what?”

  “Why could you not trust a servant or another friend to spell you at his bedside?”