The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  I swear I hear his voice in my ear. “Treasure these books, Graziella, for they are the most generous of friends. Faithful always, never changing. Love them and they will return your love a hundredfold.”

  Papa’s books. I had asked Davide Finzi to put them where they belonged, each wrapped in a silk rag as Papa kept them.

  Now I approach the book rack and begin to turn over the manuscripts. Maimonides, of course. Josephus on the Jewish wars. Papa’s own Passover Haggadah, covered in red velvet with a border of opal jewels. And the grammars, less elegant but more marked by use. Virgil, Cicero, Terence, Horace, Catullus, and finally, the Decameron. No secular library — nor any cleric’s library either, for that matter — would be complete without that masterpiece. And alongside, its less celebrated sibling, De Claris Mulieribus, Boccaccio’s tribute to 104 great women.

  My fingers find their way to the story of Dido, defended here against what the master calls “the infamy undeservedly cast on her honor,” and rescued from her consignment by Dante to the second circle of Hell with other souls of the lustful.

  “She gave the people laws and regulations for living,” I read, “and, as the noble city grew, Dido became famous throughout Africa for her great beauty such as had never been seen before and for her virtue and chastity.”

  In Boccaccio’s version of Dido’s story, the union between her and Aeneas is never consummated. Aeneas is simply a visitor who happens by at the moment of her death. The real story is Dido’s betrayal by her own people, who think to save their city by delivering her into the hands of the marauding African king, Jarbas. But Dido will not accept the usurper in her husband’s place. “She cast aside womanly weakness and hardened her spirit to manly strength,” Boccaccio tells us.

  In full view of her people, the Queen climbs up to the high sacrificial altar to perform the slaughter of a lamb. “Citizens, I go to my husband as you desire,” she informs her subjects with heavy irony. Whereupon she points the knife not against the animal but against her own chaste breast and falls on it.

  “And for this she deserves being called Dido which in Phoenician means heroic,” states Boccaccio, putting the lie to both Virgil and Dante, who see her as the wanton lover of Aeneas.

  Do these poets sit and squabble over their inventions up in heaven, I wonder, as we do on earth? Will readers in some future time who come upon my Book of Heroines dispute my vision of Caterina Sforza or Lucrezia Borgia or my friend Diamante Bonaventura, whom I numbered among the heroic women of our time? Perhaps. My only defense is that I have tried, with all my strength, to conform my work to Judah’s precept: accuracy of statement. What I knew from my own experience I have verified against the recollection of others. What I did not know I sought to learn. Where the letter was missing I contrived it in what I took to be the spirit of the character I was limning with my pen.

  I did not begin with a grand scheme for what became Grazia’s Book of Heroines. Inspired by Boccaccio, what I wrote that first day in my father’s studiolo was a modest poem on the life of my friend Diamante Bonaventura, modeled after the lives in his De Claris Mulieribus. But when I was done with Diamante’s life — especially with her death, which still brings tears to my eyes when I contemplate it — my friend called out to me for comradeship. “Just a few more pages,” she urged me. “One or two other women of courage to keep me company between the velvet covers.”

  The first companion I chose for her was Isotta Nogarola, a scholar who withdrew from friendship, from the life of the city, and from public view to work in solitude. Self-exiled to a book-lined cell in a Florentine convent, she gave up her life as grandly and generously as Diamante had, for a great love: the love of scholarship. Then came Ginevra Almieri, who fought her way back to life from the grave. Then the virago Caterina Sforza and the others. Without intending to I created a gallery of women.

  Although I was guided by Boccaccio in my selection, I would not make myself his slave. Of the more than one hundred women he chose to extol, only six were women of his own time. All the rest he picked from the ancient world. His reason: that the merits of pagan women had never yet been set forth, even in their own time. When I came to select my heroines, circumstances had changed. Boccaccio himself had already chronicled the merits of pagan women. But the merits of the women of my own time had not yet been published. I determined to concentrate on the unpublished heroines of the present, both well known and obscure, following him in principle if not in the detail.

  Where I did copy him slavishly was in my definition of what constitutes a famous woman. My women are not “virtuous” in the narrow sense. I sing the virtu of those who rise above others through their intellect, daring, or strength. Just as Boccaccio included Flora the prostitute and Pauline the idiot among his famous women, so I have included the likes of Giulia Farnese, the Borgia pope’s whore, known to the Romans as “the bride of Christ.” Just as the master allows space to Faustina because of her incomparable beauty and in spite of her lascivious heart, so I have made room for Lucrezia Borgia. Whatever her vices, she was a woman of power to be reckoned with in the world. And God knows that in her youth, she was renowned for her great beauty.

  But those decisions came later. At the beginning I simply began to scratch out the life of my friend Diamante in as accurate and pungent a style as I could, not sparing her lapses nor overrating her courage, both of which I was tempted to do on every page. This task occupied my life pleasantly while I awaited the inception of my friend’s other memorial: the child Judah and I had vowed to produce. Each morning after prayers he set off for the Gonzaga Reggio, leaving me his studiolo for my work. Each noon he arrived promptly to dine and to consummate our marriage, an act which quickly became a ritual observance for us both. And when I say ritual, I do not use the word loosely. I can still see myself filling a basin with the rose-scented water that would purify us for our labors and measuring out the sweet oil that would ease the passage of the life-giving ooze from Judah’s body to mine, with the same dutiful care that I observed when I covered my head to repeat the Sabbath prayers. Looking back, it seems to me that I approached the task of lighting Judah’s fire with the same hand and in the same spirit that informed my performance each Friday evening when I lit the Sabbath candles.

  For many months Judah did not confide in me Marchese Francesco’s purpose in bringing him to Mantova. And, as usual in our dealings with each other, I had not the nerve to ask. But such things will out, and sure enough, one afternoon as we rested from our baby-making chores there came an importunate knocking at our door that led, quite accidentally, to the exposure of Judah’s secret. Not wishing to awaken him, I quickly dressed myself and ran down to put a stop to the noise at the portal. There I found one of the stablemasters from the Gonzaga stud threatening our porter with a beating if he did not fetch Judah at once. He even raised his whip to me, but when I informed him as grandly as I could that I was mistress here, he came off his arrogance far enough to instruct me that Messer Leone was wanted at once at the stud because Granturco had taken a tumble and injured his foreleg.

  Could this be the same Granturco that had recently won a purple scarf at Brescia? Was Judah’s patient a resident of the Gonzaga stud? Had the famous physician been hired by the Gonzagas as a horse doctor?

  The answer to all of the above was yes, and Judah readily admitted it once I had caught him out.

  “But you detest horses. You cannot bear to ride them,” I reminded him.

  “Curing them is another matter,” he rejoined, slightly offended. “And now, if you will excuse me, I have a sick patient waiting.” And with that he was off, but I barred the door to him and would not let him pass until he had revealed to me how this incongruous commission had come about. And here is his tale.

  “You know that the Aragonese are almost as unhinged on the subject of horses as the Gonzagas. So you will understand how it was that the King of Napoli paid a small fortune for a book on the diseas
es of horses in the actual hand of Hippocrates. It was not until the book was in his hands that he remembered he was unable to read Greek. Nor, it seemed, could any member of his court.

  “But by then, he was possessed by a notion that this treatise would enable him to produce the healthiest, thus the strongest, horses in Italy. All he needed was a translator to bring to light the veterinary wisdom in his ancient manuscript.

  “He dispatched an agent to Athens with orders to acquire a Greek scholar at not too steep a price. The foolish King got what he paid for. The mangled prescriptions misinterpreted by the bargain-rate scholar killed off several valuable animals before the King gave up on Hippocrates.

  “Now who should enter the scene but Marchese Francesco Gonzaga, come down to Napoli to wipe out whatever vestiges of the French army had been spared by the love disease. He heard about the Hippocrates manuscript and managed to buy it cheap.”

  “But this time the bargain was no sham,” I remarked.

  “Oh, it was a shrewd purchase,” Judah agreed. “And I told him so when I ran up against him at Napoli. Hippocrates’ veterinary text is known and much admired in Arabia. And you know the quality of their animals.”

  “Then the true fault must have been with the Greek translator,” I surmised.

  “Precisely what I told the Marchese in Napoli. Actually,” he added, “I told him I would stake my life on it.”

  “Without even seeing the manuscript?”

  “Hippocrates was the greatest physician who ever lived,” Judah informed me, in that lofty tone he sometimes assumes when his judgment is called into question. “And since I am one of the finest physicians of the day and certainly among the great scholars of Greek in this peninsula, you can be assured that when the correct remedies are accurately applied by me they will prove most efficacious. That is why the Marchese has offered me an enormous stipend to translate the volume for his exclusive use and to test its efficacy on his animals.”

  “So you are body physician to the Marchese’s horses.” I still could not quite believe it.

  “Disease is disease, Grazia, and anatomy is anatomy. I am not too proud to wish to cure any of God’s creatures, be it horse or man.” Oh, how Diamante would have loved that speech! “Besides,” he added, “when I think of some of the human patients I have treated, I cannot believe that these equine subjects can possibly prove more difficult, more obdurate, or less grateful.”

  To Judah, I believe, the exposure of his secret came as a relief, for after that he joked often and quite merrily about his equine patients. Once, when I asked him what he did every afternoon at the stud, he answered, altogether serious, that he talked to the horses. What his patron might have made of this form of veterinary practice, he had no way of knowing. The Marchese was little seen in Mantova that year. Exactly what he was up to nobody knew, although everyone had ideas on the subject. Conjecture on his long absences fell into two categories: one, that he was dallying with his mistress, a certain Teodora, who had appeared publicly at his side in Brescia; the other, that he was conspiring at out-of-the-way places with agents of the new King of France, Louis XII, the heir of little Charles VIII who had beaned himself into eternity at the tennis court.

  In her husband’s absence Madonna Isabella occupied herself with running the Mantovan territory, adding to her collections and, I gathered, waiting for her husband to settle down long enough to give her the son they both so ardently desired. Was it not a coincidence, Judah remarked, that each of us sat waiting the same blessing, she in her palace across the square, me in my modest house near the fish market, “. . . but both equally humble before the magnitude of God’s will,” as he put it.

  “She expressed a wish to see you,” he added. “She calls you her little sister and asks when you will come to call on her.”

  “And what did you tell her?” I asked.

  “That you were fatigued by the journey from Firenze and harassed by household duties.”

  “And how did she take it?” I asked, knowing that Madonna Isabella did not take kindly to being refused in the smallest matter for any reason.

  “She seemed slightly annoyed,” he replied coolly.

  To be perfectly truthful, I was tempted. I am not immune to the seductions of court life. But neither was I prepared to forgive and forget.

  “Give her what excuse you will,” I told him. “Say I’m pregnant.”

  “And are you?” he asked.

  “No. But I soon will be. Better that than the truth: that I cannot bear to look upon her face. Or the Marchese Francesco’s. Together those two have brought me nothing but misery.”

  “They too have their miseries,” Judah reminded me quietly.

  “You refer to this mistress of his that he flaunts like a jewel?”

  “That and her inability to produce an heir. The child she was carrying when you last saw her died within a few months of its birth.”

  “Was it a boy?” I asked.

  “A girl, I think,” he replied.

  “Then the death of that baby was no misery to her. She cares only for boys.”

  “That is a harsh judgment, wife,” he replied.

  “Harsh but accurate,” I retorted. “Like all princes, Madama is more of a dynast than a mother. Do you know she refused to use the golden cradle for her first child because the poor thing was a mere girl? I would not be surprised if the second daughter died of neglect with a mother like that.”

  “Sometimes women come late to a realization of mother love,” he reminded me. “Think of Diamante . . .”

  “You dare to compare Diamante Bonaventura to a coldhearted bitch like Isabella d’Este!” The reproach came out of me harsh and loud.

  “No need to shout, wife,” he remonstrated gently. But, as it so often did in those days, the subject of bearing children grated on my nerves. A fear had begun to grow in me that the child I so confidently planned might not be so easy to conceive. And, to exacerbate my unease, life seemed to be stirring everywhere around me but in my womb.

  At Roma a child was born to Lucrezia Borgia four months after her second marriage and named after her father, Rodrigo. The question bruited about the peninsula was: Who is the child’s true father, her brother Cesare or her father, the Pope? Each of them had been seen kissing her full on the lips before, after, and in between her various marriages. But this gossip did not deter Alfonso d’Este of Ferrara from asking for her hand in marriage once the child in question was safely tucked away.

  On the feast of Mathias we learned of the birth of a son to Philip the Handsome of Burgundy and his mad wife, Joanna of Spain, which brought to mind Isaachino Bonaventura’s prediction of the dynastic consequences of this marriage. Born during their endless journeying between Spain and Germany, this child had been dropped off at his birthplace like a cumbersome package in the same manner that the addled mother had deposited her other children wherever they fell out in the various towns of Europe. At the time, this Habsburg pup was simply one more reminder of my own disappointed hopes. It turned out that, as Isaachino foretold, his birth did produce far-reaching dynastic consequences. Still, I doubt that the Libyan Sibyl herself could have foreseen a troublemaker of the stature of Charles V, our revered Holy Roman Emperor, when his mismatched parents were joined in matrimony.

  From Ferrara came the news that the two dei Rossi marriages celebrated the previous year were about to bear fruit. My friend Penina, married at last to the German rabbi, was expecting a child in the spring, and my brother and his slut of a wife, having produced an heir six months after their hasty marriage, were now expecting another. I prayed every day for one small share of this rampant fecundity and copulated with rigorous regularity. Still, the year 1499 drew to its end without any sign of a child in my womb.

  In December, Leonardo of Vinci passed through Mantova with his friend Luca Pacioli. To earn a few ducats he obliged Madonna Isabella by drawin
g her in chalk. I have never seen this drawing. Her husband gave it away to the first person who asked for it. Imagine! To toss away a work from the hand of Leonardo. That Francesco ought to have stuck to judging horseflesh.

  Oddly enough, Madama regretted the loss of her portrait even less than her husband. It was not really a very good likeness, she confided to Judah. It made her look fat. Judah reported this to me with considerable mirth. Overweening vanity in high persons always did tickle him.

  “Of course she looked plump to him,” he remarked casually. “She’s at least five months pregnant.”

  How had the illustrissima earned God’s blessing? Which of my sins was greater than hers or my cousin Ricca’s or Lucrezia Borgia’s or the mad Joanna’s? Among them, those women had committed harlotry, mendacity, desertion, incest, and tens of minor offenses against the Holy Writ. Yet God had judged them fit to be mothers and not me.

  Rather than give way to despair, I cultivated a faith in numbers. I worked a sampler emblazoned with the number 1500 in purple and strung it up above my carrel like a banner to announce to myself that the new century would bring a change of fortune.

  41

  The first month of the year 1500 brought news of a terrible accident in Ferrara and a double death in the family. The letter, signed by my cousin Asher and penned by his own hand, was brief. On the previous day my grandfather and Penina’s young husband had drowned together in the waters of the Po en route to petition Duke Ercole at Marmirolo. The sled they were riding in had pitched through a weakened patch in the ice and sunk before help could be summoned.

  Much as I dreaded the voyage, it seemed to me right that I should go to the funeral for Penina’s sake, and, as it often does, what I anticipated as an onerous duty turned out a pleasure.

  We traveled by sled as my grandfather had done on the day of his death, yet I felt no fear. After my long confinement as a staid housewife the bracing air exhilarated my spirit, infusing me with a zest I thought I had lost forever. And when the merchants I was traveling with asked if I was game to ride on through the night, I agreed without a qualm. By stopping only to change horses, we reached Ferrara in less than two days’ ride, not far short of the speed of a dispatch rider.