The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  “Oh, Grandfather, do not even say that.” Ricca sprang up. “I cannot bear to think of life without you and La Nonna. Remember you promised to dance at my wedding. And at the birth of my first son. Promise me you will not die.”

  Plautus could not have written her speech better. And the vain old man sucked in every false word like a bee sucking in nectar.

  But Dorotea was not so easily distracted. She knew her father-in-law’s capricious nature and the value of his promises. And one look at me must have assured her that she would get my mother’s house away from me over my dead body.

  When at last the list was done the lawyer took a deep breath and asked for a glass of wine, which he downed in one gulp as if to fortify himself for the next explosion.

  “While my younger son, Gershom, remains short of his maturity,” the reading went on, “I commend the management of his affairs to my daughter, Grazia, and her husband, the renowned physician del Medigo. It is my wish that they supervise his education and guide him in the way of an honorable life. To assist him in reaching his goal after he is grown, I bequeath to him my life’s savings, a sum of some twenty thousand ducats on deposit at the dei Rossi banco in Ferrara. That sum ought to buy him a good wife and a house in which to put her when the time comes.”

  “But that is my money!” Once again Dorotea rose to her feet. This time her eyes were wild and her shout a shriek that could have been heard as far as the castello. “That money is mine. He has no right to it.” And before anyone knew what she was doing, she had rushed across the room and grabbed the terrified boy by his hair. “Give it back, you little swine. Daniele promised it to me. You have no right to it.”

  It took all our efforts to subdue her. She clung to that child’s hair like a drowning man to a raft, and left him in a state near to shock. I determined then and there to make self-defense a part of his education as soon as I took charge of him. No man should be defenseless against attack in this violent world. Nor woman either.

  After some moments of confusion Dorotea was led off, still wild around the eyes and threatening to sue my hapless little brother, who crouched shuddering in the crook of my arm. And La Nonna glowered at me as if I were responsible for the entire farce.

  “Is it true, Grazia? Did my son promise his wife the money?” she demanded.

  “I have no idea, Grandmother,” I replied tartly.

  “Very strange. Very odd,” she muttered. “But then my son always was a strange one.”

  “He was an honorable man, a fine husband, and a good father to his children,” I retorted.

  “Still quick to take offense, Grazia?” Her beady little eyes squinted over at me. “I had hoped that marriage would soften you.”

  “My honorable husband finds me the gentlest of wives,” I replied. “But he would not expect me to stand by and hear my father slandered.”

  “Nor I.” A little voice beside me piped up. Gershom.

  “Be quiet, child,” she grunted.

  “At any rate you will not have to put up with my odious presence any longer. Now that our mourning is over, there is nothing to keep me here.”

  “As you wish,” she answered coldly. “Can we finish up quickly, Ser Moshe?”

  “There is little more to be read, Madonna Sarabella,” he answered. “Only a few small bequests to some old servants and retainers. To a cook named Rosa, five gold ducats.” Poor old Rosa with the red nose whom Dorotea had dismissed. “And to Uncle Zvai of Bologna, twenty gold ducats.” Dear old Zio Zeta. I had a sudden longing to see him again. We would be passing through Bologna on our way back to Firenze. I made a note in my mind to inquire if we might stay in the little house on Jew Street. I would show Gershom the place where he had suckled at Gelsomina’s breast. And Jehiel . . . I turned to look at him. To my astonishment, his lips were red with biting and his breath was coming in short, angry bursts.

  Did he too feel cheated by Papa’s will? It seemed unlikely. And yet there he sat, his face working in a most agitated way. I must sort this out at once.

  “Are you angry with me about the house?” I asked him as soon as the lawyer had left the room.

  “How could I be angry? You deserve the house. You nursed Papa. You cared for him. Dorotea ran away. She deserves nothing.”

  “Then what is troubling you?”

  As I had so often seen him do in the past month, he stood silent, shifting his weight uneasily from one foot to the other.

  “Come, Jehiel,” I urged him. “Tell me. Whatever it is, we will always love each other. Maybe I can help.”

  “No! You will not understand. And you will try to dissuade me. But I will not be dissuaded, Grazia. I have made up my mind.”

  “To what?”

  “To stay here in Ferrara with La Nonna and Grandpa and to marry Ricca.”

  My face must have turned quite pale with shock.

  “I love her, Grazia. We love each other,” he went on, speaking very fast. “Everything is all arranged. Grandfather says he will persuade the Duke to give me a post in his foundry.”

  “A foundryman? Is that your ambition?”

  “Papa understood me. I knew you would not.”

  “I do not mean to be hard on you. But you are my little brother.” I leaned over to embrace him but he turned his face away.

  “I am not a baby, Grazia, to be rebuked and then fondled and forgiven. I am a man.”

  “A man! At fifteen!”

  “I will soon be sixteen. Old enough to do a man’s work. And to perform a man’s duties in the bedroom as well. Look. Look at this arm.” He rolled up the sleeve of his camicia. “Do you see those muscles? They are a man’s muscles. I am a man now, Grazia. I do not need a mother.”

  “Nor a sister? Nor a friend?” I asked.

  “You will always be my sister. And I hope my friend. But you cannot run my life. I am not made like you and Judah. I know you despise me for it but I am not.”

  “We do not despise you.”

  “He does.”

  “Perhaps he expects too much, but he loves you as I do.”

  “No, Grazia. If we are to be true friends we must have truth between us. Your husband despises me because I am not a scholar. He regards me as an ignorant lout. But I have my own ideas, Grazia. I have already learned the watchmaker’s art from a master in Mantova. And I have designed a small crossbow that catapults an arrow much more fiercely than a mere archery bow and is light enough for a man to carry in the hunt. It is almost done. And when I have finished it, I will present it to the Duke — you know he loves both hunting and new gadgets — and I am certain to get an appointment at his cannon foundry.”

  “You want to spend your life making cannons?”

  “Not only cannons. Other machinery. Battering machines. And hoists. And fording craft. And even bridges. I like to make things, Grazia. You could never see that.”

  “You never tried to make me see it, Jehiel. You have avoided me ever since I came here. In all our days of mourning, never a smile from you nor a touch on the arm.”

  “That was wrong of me, Grazia. I felt you despised me and I feared your displeasure. But now that we have come together again, how about a hug?” He held his arms out enticingly. “And a promise to dance at my wedding?”

  “That I will never do.”

  “Then you are no friend to me. Nor sister.” He drew back.

  “You must not marry her, Jehiel. She has her mother’s sluttish nature and will do you the same ill her mother did our father.”

  “How dare you speak that way about my intended? What gives you the right?”

  “I am your sister. I love you.”

  “And I you, Grazia. Although you do try my patience with your endless criticisms. Now listen to me, sister. I cannot make you love Ricca as I do. But I can insist that you respect her. Just as you insisted that my grandparents respect Papa.”


  “But Papa was worthy of their respect,” I wailed.

  “Enough, Grazia. There are sides to Ricca that you have never seen.”

  And that you will never see again once she has hooked you, poor fish, I thought. But he had decided. Even I could see there was no point in prolonging the argument. I could win nothing and stood a good chance to lose my brother’s love. So I kissed him on the cheek, wished him good fortune in all his ventures, and went to my room to begin packing.

  Now who came knocking on my door but Penina, another who had grown away from me in the past month.

  “Come and comfort me, dearest Penina,” I cried. “For I am sorely in need of a shoulder to cry on.”

  “You, Grazia? In need?”

  “Do I appear to you so callused that nothing can touch my heart?” I demanded.

  “You appear to me to have hardened your heart against the world,” she answered in her painfully truthful manner.

  “Even against you?” I asked.

  “Even against me,” she answered, looking me straight in the face, even though I knew how she shrank from any unpleasantness.

  “It is these people,” I explained. “La Nonna. She turns me into a viper. She —” I stopped myself. I who loathe excuses and justifications, blaming another for my own defects.

  “I know how hard it has been for you here, Grazia.” The gentle soul held out her hand to smooth my cheek. “I did not mean to castigate you.”

  “And I did not mean to snivel my way out of my wrongdoings,” I answered, gentled by her touch. “If I have seemed cold to you, I apologize. It was inadvertent, I assure you. For I hold you as dear as if you were my own sister.”

  “I have never doubted that you love me, Grazia,” she answered. “But I wish you had allowed me to help you more.”

  “Help me? How could you have helped me?” I asked.

  “Probably not at all,” she answered. “But I felt my uselessness keenly. It is not altogether comfortable always to be the one being helped and never the one to do the helping.”

  “Well, you can help me now,” I said. “For I have rarely felt so low in my spirits or so hopeless. Jehiel insists he will stay here in Ferrara and marry Ricca.”

  “I know.” She turned her face from me. “She fascinates him.”

  “She’s a bitch and a whore,” I ranted. “She doesn’t care a fig for him either. It’s only what he will inherit. Greedy pig!”

  “Grazia, please. Could we speak of something else?” As she turned back to face me, she wiped a tear from her eye and I suddenly realized how unutterably cruel I was being, rubbing salt into her wound simply to expunge my own frustration.

  “Forgive me,” I cried. “I am stupid and blind. You still love him, do you not?”

  She shook her head sadly. “I have tried to master my feelings but it is no use . . . living with him day after day . . . seeing his desire for her in his eyes . . .”

  “You must get away from them. That will make it easier for you, my poor sweet. Come with me to Firenze. Judah will love to see you. And I will be delirious with happiness to have my dear Penina beside me once again.”

  “No. My life is here.” When people who are normally tractable finally put their feet down and refuse to budge, the fervor of their conviction creates a kind of resonance around them, as if they had plucked a lute string with all their strength. “My life is here,” she repeated in just that resonant tone.

  “But you are not happy . . .” I began.

  “Please, Grazia. Do not try to run my life for me. I am past fourteen years. I am a woman. It is time for me to be married. To have children. To have my own life.”

  “So you too no longer need me,” I said.

  “As a friend I will always need you. And so will your brothers. But not as a mother.”

  “But you will leave me Gershom,” I said, half in jest but with a bite.

  “Not for long, Grazia. He too will grow to manhood. We are not your children. You must have your own children. That is what God intended.”

  I left Ferrara two days later with my little brother, Gershom. Once I had confided to Asher my miserable memories of travel along the Reno, he insisted on accompanying us as far as Bologna. And perhaps because of his reassuring presence, the banks did not seem nearly so high nor the inn at Malalbergo half so grim as before. And when we got to Corticella I found that this time we would not have to transfer ourselves to a donkey train for the last lap of the journey. Giovanni Bentivoglio, a tireless improver like so many Italian tyrants, had completed the Reno canal all the way to the gates of Bologna.

  At Bologna, the manager of the banco, doubtless on La Nonna’s instructions and in spite of Zio Zeta’s tears, refused us a bed in the little house I remembered so fondly. Our old uncle had gotten frail and was more easily moved to tears than ever. He wept to see us. He wept when the manager refused us a bed. He wept when we took lodgings at an inn. He wept when he heard of Papa’s bequest to him. And of course he wept a flood when we bade him goodbye. I do believe that old man shed all the tears he had been holding back for a lifetime during the two days we spent in Bologna.

  My parting from Asher was even more laced with pathos, albeit not dramatized by tears. He had been my best friend through the last weeks, at times my only friend. At parting he spoke of his feelings for me only indirectly.

  “If I were Gershom’s age I too could come to Firenze and sit at Judah’s feet and learn from him and bask in the light of your smile. But alas . . .”

  Alas, he was not a boy but a man. And I was no longer a girl but a matron with a wife’s responsibilities.

  My last sight of him was his heavyset figure, feet astride, his flat hat tilted by the wind and held by one hand to his head while the other waved us on, so solid that he looked to be planted there in the earth forever.

  39

  Judah returned from Napoli celebrated not only as the French king’s personal physician but as the discoverer of the mercury cure for the French boils, now officially named syphilis after its first victim, the ancient shepherd Syphilus. More in demand than ever, he found it all too easy to fill up his days with patients and leave me to find easy refuge in books, studying Greek along with my brother Gershom and basking in the sunny warmth bestowed on me by my friend Diamante. Thus life provided each of us with the illusion if not the substance of a complete existence. But each night as we prepared to retire, the becalmed marriage bed stood before us as silent evidence that nothing had changed between us.

  When I journeyed up to Mantova, I left behind a metropolis radiant with humanistic light. But the city of Firenze had undergone an amazing transformation during my absence. I returned to a theocracy ruled in the name of Christ (Whom the citizens had crowned king of their city), with Fra Girolamo Savonarola ensconced as His deputy. He staged his first Bonfire of the Vanities during my absence. But I had a gallery seat for the second. During my absence the Bonaventura family had moved to a house just off the Calimala, fronting on the Piazza della Signoria, and on the morning of the great event I sat at Diamante’s side on her rooftop and watched the Florentines pile up their treasure for burning in the square below.

  A seven-tier platform had been built especially for what the frate called the Scourge of Unclean Things. Everything was grist for Savonarola’s mill — lutes and zithers and card tables and chessboards and statues both sacred and profane and panels of oil painting — all manner of rare and beautiful objects. Dotted in among them like the shiny sugar sprinkled on confetti we were able to count hundreds of dandy boxes and small objects — carved chessmen and etched bowls, jeweled casks and fine glass perfume bottles. All this beautiful mess was swathed in coils of women’s hair and wrapped in bolts of silk and satin cloth like one enormous birthday gift.

  Can you imagine the frugal Florentines throwing away wealth? They did. With abandon. Somehow Fra Girolamo persuaded
them that they were trading mere baubles for everlasting salvation. With my own eyes I saw Fra Bartolommeo step forward and place four of his drawings on the pyre — red chalk sketches, they seemed to be, of nude women. Beside me, Diamante gasped. Even she, no patron of the arts, appreciated their beauty. After Fra Bartolommeo came Sandro Botticelli hauling a large panel of the Virgin with a saint at either hand. The frate, you understand, had condemned the artists for using their mistresses and wives as models for the Virgin and Her acolytes. Sacrilegious filth he called it.

  Once the stage was set, the performance began. First came a hundred white-clad schoolchildren singing the ave verum corpus. Next, the four captains of the four main quarters of the city, each holding a flaming torch high in the air. In slow and measured steps, each took his place at one of the four corners of the pyre. The choir ceased to sing. A moment of silence. Then a flourish of trumpets announced the man of the hour, the Scourge of Christ, Girolamo Savonarola.

  Like a king ascending a throne, he climbed the seven steps to the top of the pyre. Turning to face the crowd, he raised his right arm as if to pronounce a benediction. But no. Instead, his fist slashed through the air to give the signal to his captains: Let the conflagration begin!

  As one, the captains stepped forward to light the corners of the pyre. In perfect symmetry, the fire rose to a single point and thence straight up to heaven.

  In hindsight I recognize that moment as Fra Girolamo’s apogee, the point at which his meteoric rise reversed its course and became his fall. There was an edge of excess to the spectacular bonfires that went against the prudent, calculating Florentine temperament. Two fires was one too many.

  The friar’s reversal of fortune began in Roma, where Pope Rodrigo Borgia divined that the time had come to pluck out the thorn that had nestled in his side for half a dozen years. He issued a papal bull excommunicating Savonarola. Heresy was the charge. Either ship the heretic priest to Roma to be dealt with by my inquisitors, he told the signoria of Firenze, or lock him up in your own stinche. Otherwise the whole city will be placed under an interdict.