The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  I began the conversation by inquiring about the Count’s state of health — not a subject that had ever interested me before, nor did it then except as a means of arriving diplomatically at my point.

  “Count Pico is not well. Not at all well,” Judah responded. “He still suffers from a recurrent tertian fever against which all my remedies do not avail. But whatever brought Count Pico to your mind? I have not spoken of him to you in some time.”

  “He was the table subject at the Bonaventuras’ villa,” I replied. “Ser Isaachino believes that Count Pico is after the deep secrets of cabala in the cause of the Christian church.”

  “Isaachino Bonaventura is an overgrown baby with an abacus where his brain should be,” Judah replied crossly.

  “Perhaps. But is what he says the truth? Does your patron the Count seek out the secrets of the cabala from you?”

  “He does have a great interest in cabala,” Judah admitted ruefully, “for which I must take part of the blame. Years ago at Padova — he was only a boy when he came there to study, not more than fourteen years old, with a mind like a diamond — he sought me out. He wished me to translate for him from Averroës and to teach him the Arab tongue. I introduced him to cabala merely as an oddity. A distraction. I never thought for a moment it would beguile his mind. Plato and Socrates were my mentors. But Pico fell under the spell of the mystics and has remained there, I fear, ever since.”

  “But you tell me he is a Platonist. How can he give his allegiance to both a pagan philosopher and Jesus Christ?”

  “He believes that every way is the way to the One Truth,” Judah answered simply. “It is not easy to estimate how much soothsaying and magic operate in his brain. But I do know that fruitful aspirations animate his mind. His great dream is of religious harmony. Peace among men. He seeks to find the method for reducing all faiths, all doctrines, all languages of the Lord to one unity.” Precisely Isaachino Bonaventura’s phrase, I noted. “As I say, he believes that every way is the way to the One Truth, if we could but find it.”

  “Including the way of Savonarola?”

  “What do you know of Savonarola?” Judah whirled on me.

  “Isaachino Bonaventura was saying —”

  “Do I have to tell you again that Isaachino Bonaventura is an ignorante, that he knows nothing but the numbers in his ledger?”

  “He knows what is happening in the city,” I answered boldly, in defense of my new friends.

  “Does he now?”

  “He told us that this priest Savonarola is in correspondence with the French king against the Pope. And that he intends to bring the French army into Italy to cleanse us of heresy and corruption.”

  “Hmm.” Judah pondered this thought. When he spoke again, the petulance was gone from his tone. “I cannot but agree with Isaachino Bonaventura that Fra Savonarola is playing a perilous game. It is foolish of me to plead his cause. This flirtation of his with the French is mad. He is a dangerous man. A fanatic.”

  “Does not that make him a strange companion for a Platonist?” I asked, trying to keep the pride out of my tone, for surely Judah had made my point for me with this admission.

  “You are quite the little logician, my Grazia, are you not?”

  “I do not aim to be clever, sir. I only try to understand the mysteries of the human heart,” I replied, with what I hoped was suitable modesty. “And I find it incomprehensible that a Platonist like Count Pico cultivates a fanatic such as you say this priest Savonarola is.”

  “So do I, little wife, so do I.” The man who gave this soft answer was a different Judah, a seeker who, as he confessed his incomprehension, nodded his head from side to side like a bewildered child. “These divided souls among whom I have spent so much of my life are still a mystery to me after all these years.”

  “The Christian Platonists, sir, and their search for One Truth?”

  “Exactly.” I had never seen him like this. Humble, puzzled, and somehow innocent. “Is it possible to fuse Christianity and paganism without making one the handmaid of the other, even for the most brilliant mind?” He stopped suddenly as if shocked by the sound of his own doubts. Then, turning his full gaze on me, he uttered an amazing confidence. “Sometimes my own Pico astonishes me with his interpretations. Last week, he plunged into Virgil’s Eclogues and emerged with the poet’s forecast that a Golden Boy would come to earth and inaugurate a Golden Age. And who do you suppose he interprets that Golden Boy to be?”

  I knew at once who that Golden Boy had to be. “He interprets the pagan boy to be Jesus Christ.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I knew it because of what Isaachino said about Pico della Mirandola. The Platonists might be searching for One Truth but it is still One Christian Truth. Because these Christians are all proselytizers at heart. I know it from my dealings with Madonna Isabella. Tell me true, sir, has this Pico never tried to convert you?”

  With this bold query, I went too far. At the hint of an attack on his pet, the doubting, confiding, companionable Judah vanished, giving place to the man of gravitas, sure of himself, proud, defended by his superior knowledge and wit.

  “Of course Lord Pico tries to convert me,” he answered loftily, making nothing of my accusation. “It is a game between us. He swears he will make me a Christian before he dies, and I swear he never will.”

  But I would not be deterred. “Tell me this, then,” I challenged. “How long a step is it between your amiable game with the Count and the forcible conversion of Jews, as has happened in Spain?”

  What made me adopt this accusatory stance? God only knows. Whatever the reason, my contentiousness completely destroyed the congress that had been building between me and my husband. When he answered my question about forcible conversion, it was as my enemy.

  “I see you are determined to mark my patron as a Jew-hater. Isaachino Bonaventura has poisoned your mind.”

  “Isaachino has brought certain facts to my attention.”

  “Did he bring to your attention that Count Pico was convicted of heresy by the Roman Inquisition for the crime of encouraging the obstinacy of Jews and of being a Jew-lover and of Judaizing?”

  “Did he burn for it?” I inquired, dripping acid.

  “Fortunately he escaped Roma before the sentence could be pronounced, and was taken under the protection of Lorenzo il magnifico.”

  “When we Jews are accused of heresy, we burn,” I responded, making no attempt now to hide my anger. “When Medina’s brother was accused of heresy, he was put to the torture, his arms torn from his body, and hung like an animal from the bargello’s tower, for he had no powerful friends to shield him from the Christians’ wrath.”

  “Are you blaming Lord Pico for having friends, Grazia?”

  “I am simply saying, sir,” I replied, “that it is easy to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time and to keep a foot in each camp when you have powerful friends on either side to make certain you do not fall into the chasm between and break your bones.”

  “Some are blessed by fortune with good friends,” Judah answered smoothly. “I for one. So if it is your intention to condemn Count Pico for having friends in high places, then you must surely condemn me along with him. How else do you suppose I hold my position here in Firenze except by the intercession of Count Pico and the acquiescence of Piero dei Medici? And what enables your lady friend Madonna Diamante to caper around the countryside on a blood stallion with a groom in attendance like a princess? Powerful friends, Grazia. Any Jew in this country lives happy and free only through his powerful friends in the Christian community.” And without another word, he got up, turned on his heel, and left the room.

  I had driven him away with my anger. Why? Was I jealous of the Count, of Judah’s obvious preferment of his company to mine, of the way Judah’s eyes lit up when he spoke of his old pupil’s quicksilver intelligenc
e. If so, the sentiment was unworthy of me. If Judah found more stimulation in the company of Count Pico of Mirandola than with me, who could blame him? I was impulsive and willful, fit only to gallop and giggle.

  Thus began my self-castigation. Judah was my savior. He was endlessly forgiving, always eager to please me. On my account he had brought Medina de Cases into our house to provide me with a pupil and thus to occupy my time in something better than gazing out the window. He had forsaken his distinguished colleagues at the Platonic Academy for a group of provincial Jewish bankers in order to introduce me into a social milieu where I might feel at home. For my amusement, he had acted the fool at a Shikurim Purim. All this for my happiness. And I had repaid him by repeating slanders against his beloved pupil and patron, Count Pico.

  If I had failed to find a community of interest with Medina de Cases, whose fault was that but mine? If I had found Judah’s performance as the Purim rabbi disappointing, my own priggishness was the cause. If I did not fill him with desire, my skinny, flat, boy’s body was at least partly to blame. If he did not choose to confide in me, no doubt my own shrewishness had marked me as unsympathetic.

  The facts led to only one possible conclusion. I must work and study to make myself a fit companion for a wise man. I must keep my temper in check and bite my hasty tongue. And I must somehow make myself lovable.

  28

  Girolamo Savonarola. If the sound of that name echoes into future centuries, how will he be remembered? As a villain? As a saint? As a hero? As a heretic? He was all these things and more to the Florentines in the brief span — less than eight years — of his rise and fall in the city.

  After first hearing the name from Isaachino Bonaventura, I now seemed to hear it wherever I turned. Like a cancer that grows from a single lesion, his following (dubbed piagnoni — “weepers” — for their ostentatious piety) quickly spread from the monastery at San Marco into all the districts of the city. A good number of these piagnoni were children, young boys — shades of Fra Bernardino da Feltre’s Army of the Pure in Heart — who clothed themselves in white cassocks in imitation of monastic novices. At first they merely importuned passersby, crying of the scourge to be unleashed upon the Florentines if they did not repent their godless ways. But very quickly their harangues assumed a physical aspect as well — grabbing women’s necklaces off their throats and snatching furs from their shoulders, knocking down merchants who dealt in lusso goods, and increasingly provoking sword and dagger fights with Savonarola’s opponents.

  In this climate of escalating passions the magnificent Lorenzo’s heritage of liberality quickly gave way to Savonarola’s harsh orthodoxy. Public punishments of the cruelest sort supplanted the pageants and feasts of Medici times; and the pursuit of pleasure yielded to the search for sin.

  As always, the first victims of the heresy hunters were the insulted and injured of this world — Gypsies, the mad, whores, and Jews. And the first among the first were Jewish whores, who bore a double stain.

  I came to know this persecution because by chance a cousin of Diamante’s chose that season for her wedding. It was May in the year 1494, a fine day for the procession that wound its way through the Duomo Square on the way to the synagogue. Suddenly the peace of the occasion was shattered when a boil of citizens spilled over into the square from one of the adjoining streets, shrieking curses and tossing small stones at an unseen victim. Then all at once the crowd parted to reveal the cause of the uproar: a woman, chained to a cart and wearing the yellow badge of the prostitute, being whipped along the street by the bargello.

  “Dio,” Diamante muttered beside me. “It is the Jewish whore caught out at last, damn fool. She has been warned against cohabiting with Christians. See, there is her client behind the cart with his privates exposed. He’s lucky they didn’t cut them off.”

  Now the whole ugly procession moved into full view before us: the woman, her chemise torn from neck to thigh so as to expose her beaten body, her back a river of blood; the bargello standing high on his little cart like a Roman charioteer whipping her on; the Christian shorn of his hose, his cock and balls tolling a warning to the spectators. Still he was not the one being whipped. It was the woman who took the punishment, not only from the bargello but from the crowd as well. The sting of the whip as it fell on her seemed to excite some animal memory in them. Every time the lash drew blood, there were shouts of vicious obscenities, all directed at the woman.

  “Don’t look, Grazia. Cover your eyes.” Diamante turned to veil my face with her cloak. And I took advantage of this merciful blindness and did not look. But as the cart came abreast of us I began to hear the woman’s cries, hardly stronger than the yelp of a puppy, and suddenly aware of my cowardice, I pushed aside Diamante’s cloak and looked straight at the poor creature.

  At that moment she threw back her head to toss aside the dark curls that fell across her face, and our eyes met. I knew those flashing eyes. I knew this woman. And she knew me. It was Zaira.

  I jumped forward but Diamante grabbed me with her strong arms and barred my way.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” she whispered urgently. “You must not take notice. We are all in danger here. She is a Jewess, remember. If you make any more gestures toward her the bargello will take you too. Perhaps all of us.”

  The bargello’s whip whirred through the air. Zaira’s eyes widened with terror. I screamed as if the lash had fallen on my own back.

  Diamante’s hand closed over my mouth. “Let them pass, Grazia. She deserves what she’s getting. She was warned.”

  I made another effort to free myself. But years at the reins had given Diamante the muscles of a muleteer, and to be perfectly truthful, I did not struggle against her with all my might. I let them take my beloved Zaira to the torture. I jettisoned her for the same reason that sailors jettison heavy cargo in a storm — to save their own skins. Diamante had provided me with the perfect excuse. I must not endanger the safety of “all of us.”

  But my conscience could not abide the evasion. Before the sun was up I plucked an unwilling Medina out of his hiding-hole in Judah’s studiolo and ordered him to accompany me on an errand across the river. He grumbled, but in the end, he did accompany me across the Ponte Vecchio. However, when we turned away from the market and toward the Piazza della Signoria he began to hang back.

  “Where are we going, madonna?” He tugged anxiously at the sleeve of my gamorra.

  “I have an important task to do,” I replied.

  “Where? Where are you taking me?” His voice began to rise.

  I strode ahead decisively, hoping to encourage him by example. But after some steps I sensed he had not followed me, and indeed, when I turned around I discovered that he had removed himself to the wall that held back the Arno at that point and was clinging to it like an ivy plant. I knew Medina for a fainthearted whiner. But never until that moment had he actually refused to obey me.

  Back I went, prepared to slap him if necessary. But when I stood close to him I saw a look on his face of such misery that my heart was touched and I opted for a more compassionate style of persuasion.

  “Why so obdurate, naughty boy?” I wheedled. “What is troubling you? Tell me now.”

  “There are places I cannot go in this city,” he mumbled.

  “Where? What places?” I asked.

  “In the Via Calzaiuoli . . .” He spoke so quietly I could barely make out his words. “There is a church they have made out of an old granary.”

  I knew the church. I had seen it on the day we first entered Firenze. “That is the church named after Saint Michael, is it not?” I asked.

  “That is it. Orsanmichele.” As he intoned the name of the church his eyes widened. “In the wall of that church, in a niche, stands the Virgin that was smeared with shit.”

  “By your brother Bartolomeo?”

  “I beg you, madonna, do not make me go near that
place. The Virgin is waiting for me. She has put the curse of death on me. Let me go home.”

  To force him on would be cruel indeed. Still, no amount of pity would bring back his brother. Bartolomeo de Cases was dead. But Zaira was alive. I made my choice. I smacked him, hard.

  Then I held out my hand. “Take it,” I ordered him. “Now pull yourself up, cleanse your mind of ghosts, and gather your courage together. For I am going to the bargello this day. And you are going with me.”

  And to be sure, he put forth one foot. Then another. And he walked at my side across the Piazza della Signoria without too much trembling. When we passed the Chiesa Orsanmichele he did turn his face away. But he did not falter and we passed that obstacle safely. However, when the forbidding tower of the Bargello’s Palace loomed up in our path he began to shake. Who can blame him? The Bargello’s Palace was designed to put fear into the hearts of the boldest men. How could it not paralyze the will of a terrified boy — and a boy with such memories of it as Medina’s? Lucky for me I had to put on a brave front for him. Otherwise I might not have had the courage to approach the guard myself. But, forced to act the part of a virago, I carried it off, as one almost always does when life offers no other choice.

  “I seek to see the Jewish whore who was brought here yesterday,” I informed the guard with as much authority as I could command.

  “Do you now, little lady?” He had a twinkle in his eye and an obvious weakness for pert girls, a good omen for my mission.

  “Yes, I do, sir,” I replied. The man was so tall that I doubted my reedy voice would reach his ears if I did not shout.

  “And may I know your purpose?” he inquired, still twinkling.

  “I believe I recognized her as one who served my family long ago and I wished to bring her what comfort I could as she often comforted me when I was a child,” I answered, forgoing guile for truth and sincerity.