The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  A few days later Judah told me that this Greek had sacrificed his holy animal at midnight in the Colosseum. “The scoundrel professes to appease the hostile demons that have taken over the city and persuades half of Roma to join him in the sacrilege. We have reverted to the worst excesses of the Dark Ages.” Then he added with the thin smile he habitually assumed when mentioning Jehiel, “Too bad your brother Maestro Vitale the Occultist cannot be spared from Duke Alfonso’s service. He could earn the mint selling his spells and amulets to these lapsed pagans.”

  In truth, your fortune-telling uncle would have done well in the Roma of Adrian VI. Romans never have been more than a step away from their pagan roots at any time. Seeing the physicians powerless against the contagion, they understandably — one might almost say, reasonably — turned to the magicians for help. It was a rare citizen who dared walk out into the street without an amulet hung around his neck to protect him from the evil spirits. I might have worn one myself had I not feared Judah’s contempt. Your Uncle Gershom, always one to hedge his bets, did send off to “Maestro Vitale” at Ferrara for a precious bit of ancient writing to keep on his person. And the lady Pantesilea came around with charms and talismans dripping off her ears and wrists and waist and neck, the way jewels had in safer times.

  “We must no longer kiss, madonna,” she warned me one day when I leaned forward to embrace her. “For there is contagion in kisses.”

  I reported this advice to Judah, who pronounced the lady amazingly intelligent for an ignorant tart. I did not enlighten him as to the pharmacopoeia of potions and charms — all procured from various sorcerers — with which this “intelligent” lady doctored herself. Nor did I bother his mind with the information that she was everlastingly after me to embrace her thaumaturgy and join her in patronizing its questionable practitioners.

  There was in particular a procuress of her acquaintance who she swore knew all the secrets of Venus and Averroës both.

  “This woman is in touch with the infinite,” she assured me with utmost conviction. “Even if you do not need the benefit of her love potions — which work, believe me, for I have tried them — you should benefit as I do from her profound understanding of female skin. She understands how the skin breathes and through those breaths she can expunge wrinkles and turn those ugly brown spots to which we women are prone back to their rosy hue. She can make your hair curl like one of Maestro Melozzo’s putti, and she tells the future better than any astrologer. Allow me to bring her to you, madonna, I beg you.”

  I would have allowed it gladly but I dared not welcome this creature into our house. In Judah’s pantheon, witches and sorcerers stand lower than snakes.

  Pantesilea persevered. She brought a tooth whitener made by the prodigious procuress out of ground-up pearls; then came a breast cream extracted from the umbilical cords of infant boys. And, knowing my softest spot, she brought for you a painted mask of monk’s cloth, special protection for “the little warrior” to wear when you ventured outside. This you instantly added to your wardrobe, along with the tin helmet — a gift from your Uncle Jehiel — that you donned when you galloped around the square on your hobbyhorse brandishing your wooden sword and shouting “Charge!” at the top of your lungs. But much as you loved the gift, I still could not bring myself to meet with the donor, out of respect for Judah’s feelings.

  “I see that there is no moving you, madonna, and I will cease to try,” she finally announced. “From now on, the name of Dido will not pass my lips.”

  “Dido? This ruffiana calls herself Dido?”

  “What would you have her call herself? Puttana? Zoppina?” she replied crossly. “Have I not told you that this woman is not some ordinary procuress? Do you suppose that the divine Imperia would have employed some vulgarian as her mezzana?”

  “Imperia?” The name had never been mentioned in all our conversations.

  “Yes, Imperia, mistress to two popes and God knows how many cardinals, toast of three cities . . .”

  The same Imperia I had so cavalierly banished from my company of worthy women. “You never told me that this Dido was ruffiana to Imperia,” I reminded her.

  “Not ruffiana,” she corrected me. “In those golden times, Dido was a mezzana, the only female mezzano in Roma, perhaps in the world.”

  At this point I must interrupt briefly to clarify the cloudy distinction between these two degrees of pimpery as I came to understand it that day. The ruffiana is essentially a procuress, but also a hairdresser and beauty expert with a specialty of hiding defects and concealing the ravages of age. Many of these paragons also tell fortunes by cards and by the stars, concoct love potions, make charms, and cast spells.

  The mezzano, who occupies a step up on this greasy ladder, is also a procurer. But he is often a musician as well. He knows all the latest love songs and, in emulation of a gentleman of the town, never fails to carry a copy of Petrarch’s sonnets in his pocket. But above all, he is a negotiator. It is through the mediation of her mezzano that a courtesan of the first rank conducts the long and complicated negotiations — often beginning with a song or a sonnet supplied by the mezzano — which, if successful, result in the suitor being received in the courtesan’s salon. Need I add that this road is paved with expensive presents frequently chosen — or at least specified — by the mezzano. After all, he knows the lady’s taste.

  On the face of it there does not seem to be much to choose between the status of the ruffiana and the mezzano. A pimp is a pimp. But to those who patronize courtesans (which includes cardinals, ambassadors, and all the wit and learning of Roma), the distinction counts.

  To me it mattered not a whit what status this Dido had achieved in the ladder of pimpery. What decided me that I must meet her was her name and her association with Imperia. In the tumult of post-Leonine Roma, the name Imperia had slipped beneath my notice along with my resolve to pay my debt of honor to Agostino Chigi someday. Now Fortuna had brought this self-named Dido into my orbit. I felt I must reach out to her. It was foreordained.

  “I will see her,” I told an astonished Pantesilea. “But not here.” That much I owed to Judah.

  It took her only a moment to find a solution. “You must come to my vigna.” She tossed off this newly acquired property as if it were a new cloak. “There we three can meet unobserved in the cool of the arbor and explore the mysteries of the great unknown. It is the perfectly discreet place.”

  I agreed.

  On the day of the outing I received from her a pomander consisting of a ball of resin stuffed with lavender, wrapped in a note cautioning me not to open the curtains of the baldacchino under any provocation, “. . . for the air of Roma is thick and vitiated by plague demons,” in the words of my counselor.

  “The city is like a giant tomb,” Judah had told me. So I was prepared to ride through the streets in silence. But what I heard through the heavy curtains of my baldacchino sounded more like carnevale revelry. The incessant ringing of bells, loud music, pistol shots, and the crackle of grenades filled the air. Puzzled at first, I then remembered that explosions were ignited in order to stir up the air and thus dispel the demonic pall. That odd bit of reasoning accounted for the tambourines and the volleys of gunfire. And there was no mystery in the moans and shrieks of the dying. But as we moved along the Via Lata, a new sound began to intrude itself upon the cacophony. It occurred irregularly and seemed to issue from the windows of certain specific houses. Sometimes uttered by a single voice, more often by several, the repeated cry was, “See my body, see my body . . .”

  My curiosity thoroughly aroused, I bade the litter-bearers stop and, against all wisdom, parted the curtains of the baldacchino a slit. Directly in my line of sight a barricaded door displayed the huge red X that marked a plague house. My eyes traveled up the facade of the house, past the piano nobile, past the shuttered windows of the attic floor to the top loggia. What I saw there I shall never forget: a young
girl, completely naked, turning slowly around and around, her arms raised high to show that she had no buboes in her armpits where those telltale signs first appear, and chanting as she turned, “See my body as healthy as yours, Madonna . . . see my body . . . save me, for God’s sake.”

  As my gaze widened, I saw that the entire loggia was peopled by naked bodies all turning, turning, with their arms pointed to heaven. Old men with unkempt beards, old women with breasts sagging to their knees, a small child chewing on a tit rag, boys and girls, men and women, some calm, some frenzied, all gyrating like mad herons, all begging to be delivered from that house of death.

  Now I remembered the heartless (but necessary) decree that if a single member of any household, servant or master, was stricken, the entire famiglia must be quarantined whether they be sick or well — a virtual death sentence on the healthy ones. These twirlers on the loggia above me must be the healthy members of a famiglia immured within the house, parading their lack of buboes in the vain hope of being rescued from starvation, infection, and death.

  I closed the curtains quickly and plugged up my ears with my fingers to silence the cries of the doomed ones. But their miserere continued to ring in my ears long after we had left that street. “See my body . . . healthy as yours . . . see my body . . .”

  After a while the sound of the voices receded and the curtains began to undulate, then to flutter in the breeze. Gradually, coolness suffused the litter. We were ascending the Quirinal hill.

  “Welcome, welcome . . .” Swathed in some version of a toga, Pantesilea flung open the curtains of the litter.

  “Come look. Come see. How do you like my vigna? Is it not a paradise? Come bathe your face in my fountain. Never fear. The water is pure acqua vergine.”

  I barely had a chance to investigate that claim before I was hauled off to the crest of the hill to admire the prospect.

  “See my view of Mount Auria. I chose this spot for the panorama.” With a sweep of her draped arm she described a wide arc across the horizon. “There below us is the garden of the Palazzo Colonna. How I envy them their ruined tower! It is the very place where Nero stood to watch the barbarians come to burn this corrupt city, you know.”

  I need not recall for you the attraction of this ruined tower, you who have often looked down upon it with me from the windows of my studiolo. But that was the first time I ever saw it and I was quickly lost in the contemplation of its past. On that spot Nero had stood watching the conflagration. Had he truly plucked at the strings of his viol while he watched? If so, what was he thinking of while he played upon his instrument?

  It took the bray of a donkey to awaken me from my reverie. Then came a series of bawdy oaths. Finally a bright painted cart rounded the bend, piloted Roman chariot style by a blackamoor all naked except for a band of linen caught up at his hips and an orange turban. Behind him, sitting on a pile of straw and swathed in veils, rode a Gypsy woman in fifteen shades of crimson with gold flashing from her fingers, ears, and teeth. She alighted from the cart, assisted by the blackamoor.

  It is difficult to describe the impression she made, at once tawdry and majestic, full of wind and yet carrying an air of authority, and most surprising, tinged with an edge of familiarity.

  “Hail, mistress.” She bowed low before Pantesilea. “I have come to bring you the wisdom of the ancients, to ease your heart’s ache, to beautify your face and form, and to forecast for you all that is about to befall. Dido, at your service.”

  Pantesilea led her forward to meet me. “Allow me to present the illustrious scholar and poet Madonna Grazia dei Rossi del Medigo, wife of the miraculous healer Leone del Medigo.”

  “Grazia? Dei Rossi?” With a single sweeping gesture the mezzana pulled off her veils and stepped close to me, breathing garlic as a dragon breathes flame.

  “Do not retreat from me, little Grazia. It is Zaira, your own Zaira.”

  With the iteration of that name, I forgot about the garlic, the plague, Pantesilea, and the blackamoor (both struck dumb with amazement) and threw myself into Zaira’s arms.

  We covered each other with kisses. We hugged until both of us were breathless. And then, as you can imagine, we began to pelt each other with questions.

  “Have you been in Roma all this time?”

  “Have you been in Roma all this time? Tell me everything.”

  I spoke first, telling her much of what you have read here in this ricordanza. Then it was her turn.

  “I left Firenze with a man who got me out of jail and promised to set me up in Roma as a respectable woman,” she began. “But instead he took me to the fair at Foligno and tried to sell me.”

  “As a slave?” I asked.

  “No, although a slave is what I would have become. No, he tried to sell me in the street.”

  “Swine!”

  She seemed to harbor less malice toward her betrayer than I did. “It was his profession,” she explained. “He was a pimp.”

  “I still say he was a swine,” I insisted.

  “As you like, Graziella. But he paid dear. They caught him stealing chickens at the fair and cut his hands off. Whereas I walked out of that town unbound and unmutilated and made my way to Roma. Mind you I was full of mange and dressed in an old sack, but I was free.”

  “What then?”

  “Knowing no better, I went to work for a Spanish laundress. Do you remember my hair, my beautiful hair, how thick it was and burnished, like a fine copper kettle?”

  I did remember the beauty of her hair and said so.

  “I lost it all in that filthy place. The humid air loosens the roots and it falls out in clumps.”

  “What brought you to this Spanish laundress in the first place?” I asked.

  “It was either the laundry or the Ponte Sisto for me,” she answered. “And no whore spreads her straw on that accursed bridge if she can help it. There is no lower place on earth, except the Hospital of San Giacomo.”

  She shuddered. And I shuddered with her. I had heard stories of that foul hospice where infected prostitutes were sent to die. And I vowed that as long as I was alive to prevent it, such a thing would never happen to Zaira.

  Then, full of my own caritas, I proposed there and then that she should come and live with us in the Portico d’Ottavia. “The house is not big, but it is comfortable and there is a little room beside Danilo’s.”

  She held up her hand. “Not so fast, Graziella. Think what you are suggesting.”

  “I do not have to think. My heart tells me . . .”

  “Your heart is soft as mush. Always has been. But you have a brain. Use it. You have eyes, use them.” She reached out her hands and twisted my head on my neck until my eyes were locked with hers. “Look into my eyes and tell me what you see.”

  “I see a woman, honest and honorable, and loaded with virtues.”

  “You see an old whore with a face like a cauliflower and a body riddled with French boils,” she corrected me grimly. “I told you that I lost my hair in the Spanish laundry. That is a lie. I lost it from syphilis. I steal the lamps out of churches for the oil that is in them. I sell lies to credulous dupes. I am everything you detest, Graziella. How I got to be this way no longer matters. What does matter is that I am who I am. And I would rather be taken to San Giacomo in a cart and end my days befouled by pus and vomit than soil your life and loved ones with my corrupt presence.”

  No words of mine could dissuade her of her own unworthiness, not even my threat to include her in my Book of Heroines.

  “Don’t you dare, Grazia.” She waggled her finger in my nose like an old nurse in response to the suggestion. “It would make a mockery of us both.”

  “But you would be —”

  “I would be made a fool and so would you. If you want to shock the public, I have a candidate for you, a genuine heroine, my old mistress, Imperia. Let them know that even a fall
en woman can be undone by feeling.”

  “Did she really die for love?” I asked.

  “Killed herself for the love of a man she trusted, who promised to marry her, then ran away like a craven coward to marry a woman with a name, position, and money.”

  “Chigi,” I whispered.

  “What has Chigi got to do with it?” She looked puzzled.

  “The man who broke her heart . . .”

  “Did he tell you that?” she asked.

  I admitted that he had.

  “He would have had you believe that he was the villain who betrayed her?” She smacked her thigh with her open palm. “That old cock!”

  “Who was it, then, that broke her heart if not Chigi?” I asked.

  “That is her secret . . . and mine, to the grave. But be certain it was not Agostino Chigi. Chigi was her slave until the end. For three days and three nights he paced the floor of her sala praying and hoping while, upstairs, she lay dying for the love of another man — a faithless knave who never even came to her funeral.”

  When I wrote the story of Imperia for the second edition of my Book of Heroines, I did not name the man for whose love the great courtesan gave her life. That it was not Agostino Chigi was hardly essential to the tale. Let the world believe that he was the one who broke the great courtesan’s heart. Chigi had valued my discretion. If he chose to go down in history as a blackguard rather than a cuckold, I would not be the one to rob him of that dubious distinction.

  51

  The Romans hated Adrian VI from the beginning. They took his cautiousness for feebleness of will; his thrift for avarice; his asceticism for barbarism.

  When he was shown the “Laocoön,” he turned away saying, “What else are these figures but heathen effigies?” They said he compared the Sistine ceiling to a filthy stuffa, planned to whitewash Michelangelo’s magnificent nudes, and meant to have all of Leo’s precious statues reduced to lime for building Saint Peter’s. And the Romans believed every mean thing they heard about him.