My mind wandered back to the procession, to the Florentines shouting “Francia! Francia!” to welcome their conquerors. What awaited us there on the morrow? Thus far the French had behaved well. But how long could such a motley collection hold together? The Scottish bowmen especially had frightened me. So tall and so savage. I needed to see Judah — to get his reassurance that all would be well with us. That we would not be seized, robbed, tied, raped . . . Throwing off the quilt, I quickly dove into my gamorra and crept out into the corridor.
It was a long, cold, unfriendly space lit only by a flickering candle positioned to illuminate a small panel of the Virgin in the Sienese style. A forbidding sentinel of the staircase, her wide, unseeing eyes stared out at me from her niche at the end of the corridor. Instinctively I crouched down as I passed beneath her, as if to avoid that reproachful gaze.
Down the staircase I crept, stealthily so as not to wake the dead, across the vast reception hall hung with ghostly tapestries that muffled all sound, and cold enough to chill your blood. At the portal of the room where Count Pico’s body lay, I hesitated for a long moment, reluctant to violate the eerie silence that enveloped the place. But I had come too far to turn back.
I thrust aside the heavy drapery. The scene drew me toward the bier, closer and closer, unable to resist the sight: Judah, unconscious of my presence, on his knees at Pico’s side, his tears falling unchecked on the dead face like a soft salty rain. He was mumbling, muttering, keening, clasping and unclasping the dead hands in his own, swaying back and forth over that dead body as Jews do when they recite the prayer for the dead. But what Judah was whispering was no prayer for the dead.
“My beloved . . .” I heard. “There is no sun without you and no moon. Only grayness. And tears.” And, sobbing: “Speak to me one last time. Tell me I am forgiven. That you love me. Oh, speak . . .” And I saw him raise one of those dead hands to his lips and cover it with kisses. Then, as if the hand was not enough to feed his great hunger, he laid it aside and fell upon the face, covering it with kisses, lifting the head to gaze into the closed eyes and kissing the dead mouth as passionately as if he held a woman in his arms.
He saw me then, turned and saw me. And with an agonized groan, he heaved himself to his feet and staggered from the room, clutching his head in his hands like a great wounded beast.
31
Silence hung over Judah and me like a heavy cloud as we plodded homeward from the Fiesole heights. Even the horses became sullen and skittish. Judah came close to being thrown when his mount unaccountably shied at a crossing. And twice he had to dismount and lead the neighing horse across the stream on foot. That animal has caught the contagion from us, I thought. He knows we are descending into some kind of hell.
But Judah, who must have been gathering his courage all through the tortuous descent, finally found the will to break the silence when we stopped outside the city walls to water the horses.
“Grazia, I understand how you feel. You feel lied to, betrayed. But I swear to you there has been nothing between him and me since our marriage.”
I felt the pressure of his hand on my arm and shook it off. “Don’t touch me!” The words leapt from my throat.
“Very well. But may I speak?” The question was put in a pitifully suppliant voice I had never heard before.
I nodded my assent.
“I swear by all that is holy to me that when I married you I believed it was over. But then the fever got its hold on him and I thought he might die . . .” He hesitated, hoping no doubt for an encouraging word from me. But I had no encouragement to give him.
“This passion was not a thing that either he or I pursued,” he went on. “Like the Furies, it pursued us.”
“When men succumb to weakness, they blame the gods,” I told him. “I thought you were above such self-deception.”
“Have it any way you wish,” he replied. “Call me a weakling —”
“Worse, a deceiver,” I cut in, showing my anger now. “The deception is what hurts the most. Calling me your little wife when you never meant to make me wife. Blaming my youth for our barren bed when it was your love for another that kept us apart.”
“But I did believe we would take up a life as man and wife someday . . .”
“Someday,” I echoed.
He buried his head in his hands, and only after a long wait did he lift his eyes to meet mine. “My nature is flawed, Grazia, deeply flawed. I am a sinner. A deceiver. But I never meant you harm.” Again he touched my arm, but this time he withdrew it before I could throw it off. “I am what lam, Grazia. Knowing that, will you still have me for your husband?”
“No!” My pride had been stomped on and I could not rise above my wounds. “No,” I repeated, “I will not be your wife.”
“Do you wish a divorce, then?”
“No.” As before, the words issued from my throat unwilled.
“What then?”
“At this moment I do not feel you are my friend. Friends do not lie to one another. And love does not betray,” I told him, speaking the words just as they came to me. “After what I saw last night the role of wife seems to me a travesty. I am no wife to you nor are you husband to me or ever have been. But I have known you as friend and perhaps I can again. Let us go back to the time before our marriage. You spoke to me then of being loving friends and nothing more. Maybe we can regain that friendship. I will try. But this time, no lies, Judah.”
In that understanding we took up our life together once more. But now it was Judah who moved toward me at night in bed, looking for warmth, while I turned my back and retreated into my own world of dreams. And he was the one who kept his vow to be a loving friend whereas I, in spite of my resolve, found myself dishonoring my pledge every day. Sometimes I betrayed myself with a bitter word, sometimes with a look, often with a gesture of dismissal if Judah dared even the slightest evidence of tenderness toward me. An ice crust had formed around my heart that would not melt.
Servants are the most accurate gauge of domestic discord, the first to know when it heats up and when it cools down. So it was not entirely surprising to me when one day in the midst of our perusal of Boccaccio, my pupil, Medina, broke off his translating and asked, “Is something wrong, madonna? You speak so coldly these days. Is it my fault?”
I had become so flooded with bile that even this boy could sense it. “I do not hate you, Medina,” I answered softly. “But I am very sad. I have suffered a deep disappointment.”
“I know, madonna.”
What did he know? I bent down, lifted his chin in my hands and set his face at a level with mine. The almond eyes were half closed as usual. His breath smelled of cloves, an expensive remedy against the garlic breath I had complained of.
“Where did you get the cloves, Medina?” I asked.
“From the master, madonna.”
“Four of those must have cost you a month’s wages.”
The long, curled black lashes swept over his face coquettishly. “They were a gift, madonna.” Then he added, “The master loves you more than his own life, madonna.”
There it was again, that insinuating intimacy, as if he had been present at Fiesole.
“Leave me now, Medina,” I ordered him. “There will be no lesson today.”
But he did not obey. He stayed there kneeling at my feet, smelling of cloves.
“Go now,” I repeated.
Still he did not move.
“What is it, Medina? Speak or get out.”
“I no longer wish to study Maestro Boccaccio, madonna. I wish to study the poet Terence.”
I was prepared for any insolence but not for this strange request. “You have never displayed the slightest interest in the ancients,” I answered. “Why now?”
“We can all learn from Terence, madonna. It was he who said, ‘I am a man and nothing human is alien to me.’ Which means th
at we must forgive and pity. My master says that justice is a brutal whip in the hands of someone untouched by caritas.”
“He is not the first to make that observation, Medina,” I commented. “The Christian apostle Mark made the same point more than a dozen hundred years ago.”
“Which only strengthens the case, madonna. All of life is a revelation of the one perfect truth, madonna. All earthly faiths are imperfect strivings after that perfect faith and thus resemble each other more and more, the closer we come to the perfection of perfect love — caritas.”
“What has all this to do with Terence, Medina?”
He shook his head, confused for the moment by the necessity to explain himself. Then, he simply resumed his oration. “I speak of harmony, madonna, and the divinity of man. As the great Pico has written in his oration on the dignity of man, (Did I see a sly grimace pass over his face when he spoke the name Pico?) all is the word of God, the stars in the heavens, the elements of the earth, the voices of nature, the senses of men . . .”
“Enough!” I had had a gutful of this prattle. “What are you getting at, Medina? Spit it out!”
Whereupon he took a deep breath, leaned forward, and pointing his finger at me like an avenging angel, intoned in a manner worthy of Savonarola himself, “I am a man and nothing human is alien to me. We can all learn from Terence, madonna.”
Then, as if his courage had left him in one great voiding, he scurried to the door and fled.
I never saw that boy again. When Judah returned home for dinner I asked him to dismiss Medina at once. An insolence too humiliating to repeat, I told him. I did not offer the details. He did not press me.
By evening, the boy’s few belongings were packed and sent off. He did not appear the next morning nor ever again at our portal. But every time I saw Judah leave our house and head in the direction of the river where the Spaniards lived, I wondered if he was gone to visit his boy Medina with a little packet of cloves tucked into his pocket or a small book of verse — perhaps Pindar’s odes to the athletes, their backs arched like bows.
I never asked Judah where he went when he turned left instead of right. And the name of Medina was added to the name of Count Pico della Mirandola on the unwritten list of names not to be mentioned in the arid conversations between us.
Poor Judah. Everything in his life went wrong at the same moment. He lost the man he loved. His comfortable charade of a marriage was shattered. Piero dei Medici’s exile wiped out the Platonic Academy, his haven of camaraderie and intellectual delight. The dispersal of the Laurentian Library robbed him of his sinecure as librarian of the now-scattered Medici collection. Deprived of friends, work, and love, he was left stranded on an island of domestic discord with a shrew for company.
But Fortuna, who has always kept a weather eye out for Judah, looked down, and seeing one of her favorites brought so low, determined to end his penance. This she did in her usual whimsical way, by granting him the least of all his heart’s desires. She enlisted him again into the service of the King of France, now firmly established as the conqueror of Napoli and an avid student of Neapolitan dolce far niente. With this shining example before them, his troops, loyal Frenchmen every one, set about to follow their sovereign’s dalliance along the primrose path. And soon there appeared among the soldiers a virulent new affliction known by the French as “the love disease” and by the Neapolitans as “the French boils.” By whatever name, it seriously threatened the health of the King’s army. Once again the French monarch had need of his specialist in diseases below the navel. Judah left at once for Napoli.
Less than a week later I received a letter from my stepmother, Dorotea, urging me to come to Mantova without delay. Some trouble with the Gonzagas, so horrendous in its consequences that she could not write of it.
Her letter left me as ignorant of the nature of the impending catastrophe in Mantova as Judah was of the nature of the mysterious love disease that had disabled the French army in Napoli. But we each of us answered the call and took off, Judah to the south, I to the north. Fortuna had willed it.
32
My father’s new house was situated on the western edge of Mantova hard by the Porta Mulina. Riding in through that gate, I was spared the sight of the places that might desolate my spirit with reminders of loss: our old home near the fish market, where I had left my childhood; the Piazza delle Erbe, where I lost my innocent belief in the world’s goodwill; the Reggio, where I had been severed from the man I loved.
Moments after we had passed through the gate, we headed into a street lettered “Via San Simone,” and our porter called out to me to halt my horse. This was it, he shouted, number five, the number Dorotea had written in her letter. I had noted the house as we turned the corner — a strikingly angled building on the corner with a most beautiful carved balustrade around the loggia — and had ridden on past it, never for a moment thinking that this palazzo could be my father’s house. It was much too grand. Almost twice the width of our old house, with a polychromed facade and in a very exposed location for the house of a Jew.
“Are you certain this is it?” I asked doubtfully. Then I heard, “Here she is! Here she is! It is Grazia come home!” and out into the street poured my family: Dorotea, her features composed into a false smile; at her side, Ricca, still lumpish like her mother; Asher, fat and bashful; standing modestly to one side, my darling Penina, thin and bent like a bamboo reed; dodging in and out among them, Jehiel, showing the beginnings of a barrel chest; and Gershom, a pensive seven-year-old with a perfect oval face and black coals for eyes. As I embraced him I vowed to take him back to Firenze with me and teach him how to smile.
But where was my father?
“Your father is resting,” Dorotea volunteered before I had a chance to ask. “I would not wake him even for you, Grazia, he sleeps so fitfully.”
My father a fitful sleeper? He always slept like a stone.
“What ails him, Dorotea?” I asked her directly. “Your letter was marvelously vague.”
“I did not have the heart to write it,” she answered. For once, I believed her. There were black smudges under her eyes that often come from sleepless nights.
“I want to know what is happening here, Dorotea,” I pressed her. “Why have I been called?”
What I got in reply was a prolonged sigh and a quiver of the lower lip. “Take me to him,” I instructed her. Better to make my own investigation than try to penetrate a veil of tears.
“I will take you, cousin.” Asher stepped forward. What a kind, open countenance he had. Why had I never noticed?
We found my father in his studiolo wrapped in a blanket, dozing in a chair, lost in it, small and shrunken in his shawl, and with a yellowish tinge to his skin. Liver, I thought. Then I stopped thinking and simply threw my arms around him and hugged him with all my strength.
At first, he struggled against my embrace. I had surprised him in his sleep. But then, I heard him mumble, “Graziella mia,” and felt his arms close around me. And we stayed there clasping each other for God knows how many minutes until I became aware of a discreet clearing of the throat behind me and realized that Asher must still be with us. I released my hold on Papa — he seemed so light in my arms — and calling up my utmost courtesy so as not to insult the good fellow, I asked my cousin if he would be good enough to leave us.
He bobbed one of his awkward little bows and made haste to oblige me. Obviously, the role of eavesdropper was uncongenial to him.
I must remember, I thought, not to lump him together with his mother and sister; for he is a completely different article.
As if to reinforce the thought, he mumbled shyly as he passed me, “I am glad you have come, Grazia.” And was gone.
“Asher has grown into a fine fellow,” I remarked to my father.
“He is my right hand, only steadier,” Papa answered, holding up his trembling right hand to prove the
truth of the metaphor. “I could not have got on without him these past weeks.”
“What about Jehiel? Is he too young for the banco?” I asked.
“Your brother will always be too young.” Papa smiled indulgently. “He is a tinkerer. A dreamer. Perhaps someday he will make an engineer. But a banker, never. Now, the little one is another story.”
“Gershom?”
“He took to the abacus like an infant to the tit. Thrives on it.”
“He looks so solemn, Papa. Does he ever smile?”
“He is a worrier like you, daughter.”
“But not such a trial as I was?”
“Few children are.” Again, the indulgent smile. Who was this stranger with the low voice and air of resignation? What had happened to my contumacious father?
“What is wrong with you, Papa?” I asked him.
“Some months back, there was an episode out in the street. Ruffians, ignoranti. In the melee a stone struck me on the back. Maestro Portaleone says it caused a tumor to grow on my kidney. He has prescribed a poultice to ease my discomfort.”
A poultice for a tumor? What nonsense was this? And what was the meaning of this “discomfort” he spoke of? Dio, I do hate it when physicians refer to pain as “discomfort.”
“Are you in pain, Papa?” I asked.
“A little. Sometimes when I change my position . . .” He shifted his body to show me and grimaced noticeably from the exertion.
“You are in pain.”
“My pain is eased by the sight of you,” he replied. Eased, perhaps, but not removed. The tight creases at the corners of his mouth told me that much. Clearly I must get Judah to come at once. At once.
Meantime I must not continue to aggravate the patient’s misery by interjecting my unease into his tranquillity.
“What can I do to aid in your convalescence, Papa?” I asked, putting on as cheerful a face as I could. “Is there some special thing I can cook that might whet your appetite? Or would you like me to read to you? Virgil, perhaps.”
The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi Page 34
