The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  We had passed under the Porta San Spirito in our meander and were headed into that wasteland between the Vatican and Trastevere where my brother used to live on Ser Chigi’s estate. When I felt a slight tug at my shawl, I thought some field animal — perhaps a mouse — had jumped up on me. Then, in rapid succession, a slight pressure against my thigh where my borsetta hung from my waist; the quicksilver movement of a pair of hands; a flash of red velvet; a smart smack; a cry of pain.

  We had fallen into a nest of Gypsies.

  Of course the mere sight of Lord Pirro’s sword sent them flying off. But the spell was broken, the sacred spring forgotten. I was not a fourteen-year-old heroine risking all for love. I was Madonna Grazia dei Rossi — wife and scholar.

  “Have you been in good health?” I inquired, to cover my embarrassment at being surprised in paradise.

  “Of course I have,” was the brusque answer. “And so have you from all appearances. Grazia, we have so little time. Let us not waste any of it on politesse.”

  He reached for my hand. I drew it away.

  He stepped close. “Have you forgotten Venezia, lady?”

  It was my second opportunity that day to confess that no day passed without my remembering that rapturous encounter. I could have told him then that a son had been born of that wondrous night, a beautiful boy who bore a likeness to him. But no. Instead, I found myself answering coldly, “We cannot simply climb into a convenient bed every time we encounter each other.”

  The bitter tone of my rejoinder cut short his smile. With nothing more than a slight grimace to indicate how precisely my arrow had hit its mark, he held out his arm and bowed in a courtly manner. “May I accompany you back to the Vatican palace?”

  “Thank you,” I answered, just as formal as he.

  By the time we reached the San Spirito Gate I began to regret my outburst. “I thought we understood that there could never be anything further between us,” I began. “My husband . . . your wife . . .”

  “My wife is dead, madonna,” he replied coldly. “Dead of the plague this year at Bozzuolo. She was a virtuous woman and a good wife, even though there was no love between us. Nor could she produce a living child. Only five dead ones. But she bore the lot of a soldier’s wife with fortitude and I owe her my respect.”

  We were back in the Borgo by then. Do it, Grazia, I told myself. Beg his forgiveness before you lose him forever.

  “There was no call for me to speak to you as I did,” I admitted, but without looking him in the eye.

  “Quite the opposite,” he answered. “I was presumptuous to believe that I would hold the same place in your heart as you do in mine. Who am I to impute feelings to you, a woman I have twice over seduced and abandoned?”

  I opened my mouth to answer the question but he seemed determined not to hear me.

  “For a moment today I believed I had been given one last chance. But today is not my fortunate day.”

  “You sound like my brother the stargazer,” I berated him.

  “There are moments of decision in this life, Grazia,” he went on. “Any soldier will tell you that in every battle there comes an opportunity that must be seized or all is lost. Hence the motto ‘Carpe Diem.’”

  “Is this a war between you and me, then?” I asked. “Are we adversaries?”

  “So it would seem,” he answered, grim-faced.

  The Vatican gates loomed up ahead. We entered, silent, and parted without a further word, our moment lost.

  52

  Although I did my best to make light of my humiliation in the Pope’s apartment, Judah was furious at what he took to be an insult to his wife, his house, and himself. Since he laid all the blame for the debacle on Jehiel, my brother’s remaining time with us became a casus belli. (Your Uncle Gershom, with a banker’s instinct for being — or not being — in the right place at the right time, managed to have to spend the entire duration of Jehiel’s Roman sojourn away from Roma on “important business.”)

  One night at supper Jehiel let slip an admiring reference to Lazzarelli’s Epistola Enoch. It was as if he had slapped a stinking fish on the table. Judah’s nostrils quivered with distaste and disdain.

  “Accursed cabala!” he thundered. “I will not hear it spoken of in my house!”

  “And on what grounds do you base your objection, brother?” Jehiel inquired, with an unctuous mildness he must have copied from his holy man and which drove Judah even farther into rage.

  “As a Jew, I object because the cabalists create deities in these seraphim of theirs contrary to the law of Moses, which tells us plainly as the first and fundamental command that there is only one God. And as a scholar and a thinking man, I object because these transformations from men into gods that the cabalists claim to generate with their magic directly contradict all human reason.”

  That slur silenced Jehiel for the moment. But the war continued.

  Each Friday when Jehiel arrived to spend the Sabbath with us, Judah invited him to take part at evening prayers. And each time he did so, Jehiel declined politely without giving his reasons. But my brother was never able to hold his tongue, and finally, one Friday evening, he followed his refusal to join Judah in prayer with the explanation that he preferred a spiritual understanding of the Torah to blind ritual observance.

  “Blind observance!” If Judah had had any tendency toward apoplexy, he would certainly have had a fit at that. As it was, he exploded into a series of epithets, calling my poor brother in turn a Christ-lover, an ingrate, and an idiot and ending up by showing him the door.

  “These fools dare to question the laws of Moses,” he fulminated. “As if their addled brains had a better grasp of truth than the Prophets. Believe me, Grazia, that brother of yours is halfway to conversion without knowing it. Today he favors spiritualized understanding. Tomorrow he will dunk his head into the baptism font. Then he can wallow in his spiritualized understanding to his heart’s content and never be obliged to perform any observance ever again.”

  “He does not mean half of what he says,” I tried to explain. “His mind has been consumed by this Reubeni.”

  “What mind?” Judah grumbled.

  “Just because he does not think like you . . .”

  “He does not think at all. Can he not see where these heresies will lead him?”

  “You mistake him,” I insisted. “He has no intention of leaving our faith.”

  “It is not his apostasy that frightens me. I fear for his wretched carcass. Try to understand, Grazia. Jehiel babbles about ‘regeneration.’ He quotes Lazzarelli like a parrot: Man was created to know divine things and to dominate all creation. What does that sound like to you?”

  “Heresy,” I admitted.

  “The Hermetic fallacy is nor new to me,” he explained. “I heard it from the lips of Ficino and . . .” He paused. “Others.”

  “Others?”

  He paused again.

  I waited.

  “Oh, Grazia, I have lived too long and seen too much,” he burst out.

  “What is the danger to my brother that you foresee?” I asked. “Tell me.”

  “Very well,” he replied. “Jehiel is flirting with a dangerous philosophy. Simply put, it is the belief that man through his own capabilities — albeit under the guidance of a magician — has the power to become a terrestrial God.”

  This was indeed diabolism.

  “Pico della Mirandola.” A shadow passed over his face when he spoke the name. “Pico was called to Roma and came close to burning for less heretical sentiments. And he was clever, rich, respected, and a Christian. What do you think the church will do to a Jew who publishes it about that any man can reach the level of Christ once he has mastered the effluvia of influences pouring down from the stars?”

  “Jehiel believes that?”

  “Lazzarelli promulgates that doctrine and your
brother has taken up Lazzarelli.”

  “Dio!”

  “Believe me, Grazia, it is not your brother’s apostasy that concerns me. Jews have deserted the ship of Moses before and will again. No, my dear, your brother is flirting with a flame far more damaging than apostasy, a flame that may consume him literally. The Catholic church has its own system of sanctified miracles to preserve, exclusive to them and mediated through their priesthood. There is no room in the house of their God for secular magic. That, my dear, is why magicians and sorcerers burn.”

  Plainly I had misjudged the quality of his concern. “I see now that Jehiel is in real danger,” I admitted.

  “He puts us all in jeopardy,” Judah answered gravely. “It was one thing for him to tinker with fancy hunting weapons and to predict at what hour the Este whoremaster should inject his sperm into his Duchess in order to produce a boy baby. But now he is in Roma, where the flame of orthodoxy burns brightest. For all our sakes, I pray he leaves soon and goes back to Ferrara to turn dross into gold.”

  It was during these tempestuous times that Zaira chose to reconsider my offer of hospitality, or so I took to be her purpose when she turned up at my house. No doubt the rigors of existence had finally caught up with her. Otherwise she never would have come to beg a favor of me. That I knew. Nor was I surprised that the request presented itself in the form of an order from the gods.

  “The oracles instruct me that I must accept your offer of aid, madonna,” she announced without any formalities. “If I refuse you, the consequences will be grave for all of us.”

  Good, I thought. Let her move in at once. Judah will understand. “Shall I hire the muleteer or will you?” I asked.

  “I do not understand, madonna,” she replied, looking puzzled. “What use will I make of a muleteer?”

  “How then will you move your boxes?”

  This question appeared to throw her into even greater confusion than my previous one.

  “You do intend to move into our house, do you not?” I asked.

  “Never,” she replied. “I thought we had settled that.”

  “Then perhaps it is I who do not understand,” I suggested with a trace of irritation.

  “Indeed you do not, Grazia. What can you know of my life?”

  “I know that you have been buffeted by fate, that you are forced to find your bread in low places, that you are ill.”

  “Not so fast, madonna. Do not bury me yet.”

  My stricken look must have told her how deeply the accusation cut me. She took my hand in hers and, very much the Zaira of old, said gently, “This disease I suffer from is not the plague, you know, which kills in a day. I have a few good years left before the French devil claims me.”

  “But how will you live?”

  “Just as I do now,” she answered cheerfully.

  “I want to take care of you,” I cried.

  “But I am quite capable of taking care of myself,” she answered, with the same maddening aplomb. “I have a life of my own. Perhaps it is not the one you would wish for me. Perhaps not the one I would wish for myself. But it is the life I have made and it has its consolations.”

  “What consolations?” I was beyond patience now. “Poverty? Filth? Humiliation? Disease?”

  “The first is mother of all the rest, believe me, madonna.” She said it so softly that I barely heard, carried away as you know I can be by my own passion.

  “I do not want you to die alone,” I wailed.

  “But I am not alone, madonna.” Again, she spoke softly. But this time I heard her. Not alone?

  “You have a . . .”

  “Two,” she replied. “An Italian and a Spaniard. Buying them both presents is quite a strain on my budget. But worth it.”

  Not yet ready for the grave indeed. That was putting it mildly.

  “I think of them as my famiglia,” she added, with an unmistakably salacious leer.

  “Is it because of this . . . famiglia that you refuse to come and live with us?” I asked.

  She paused, pushed out her lower lip, and chewed on it for a moment. “No,” she answered at last. “Although I would miss them, especially the Italian. He is an Adonis.” She sighed softly, then shook herself out of her regret and continued. “It is for my own sake, madonna, that I do not come to live in your house as a pensioner, for the sake of my own life which I mean to live — what there is left of it — according to my own lights. To sleep where I wish, with whom I wish, to take my pleasure where I find it. And if misery comes along as a companion, to accept that in the same spirit.”

  I had heard men speak so. But never before a woman.

  “Now about the money,” she continued without missing a beat. “I will need money for the house and food until I am established . . .” (Dio, I thought, she wants me to invest in a bordello.) “And wood and ashes and soap and baskets and water and clotheslines. Is that asking too much?”

  “You mean to go back to the laundry?”

  “I am too old and sick to play the ruffiana,” she replied. “And too honest for a witch. What else is left?”

  “But you told me that the laundry was a hole in hell.”

  “That was the Spanish laundry,” she answered. “I would not shame you by cheating my customers and abusing my girls as that Spanish bitch did, feeding us wine all day so that by the end we never knew if we had gotten paid or not.”

  “She did that?”

  “Kept us tipsy all the time. Then beat us when we fell asleep at the tubs. If you like I can show you the marks.”

  I begged her not to trouble herself. I could tolerate her words. I could not tolerate her wounds.

  “Tell me how you propose to operate this honest establishment,” I asked.

  “For one thing, I will use both soap and lye in the true Spanish way, not delude the customers with the tall tale that leaving the lye in the clothes gets rid of stains.”

  “Does it not, then?”

  “Madonna, do you not look to see what happens in your washhouse?”

  I had to admit that I did not.

  “Your mother taught you better,” she admonished me. “But you needn’t worry about that now. For my laundry will give you perfect service. We will soak the clothes and soap them and put them in a basket and drain them and leave them all night in the basket so that the lye can drain out, which is what that Spanish bitch never took the time to do.”

  “It sounds like a good method,” I commented.

  “It is the only method for an honest laundress. Do you agree then? On the money?” I gave her my hand on it.

  From that time on she arrived each Monday to collect our laundry and to deliver the previous week’s hamper. But she refused to meet you or Judah, or even to see Jehiel. At first I insisted. Then I understood that in spite of her claims not to be ashamed of her state, her pride would not permit them to see her so degraded. And I no longer pressed her.

  Nor did I have any success in reconciling my husband and my brother. The savage discord that had erupted between them over Lazzarelli destroyed whatever little trust they had built up out of their mutual love for me, leaving only bitterness and stubbornness on both sides. And thus things remained until Jehiel left Roma for Portugal to accompany David Reubeni in soliciting funds for a crusade against the Turk.

  Loyalty to my brother took me to the embarkation point to salute the holy band as it set off. By then Reubeni’s brief celebrity with the fickle Roman mob had run out and his party consisted only of ten raggedy Jews without so much as a horse among them. But their leader appeared more resplendent than ever. He had given up white (had he lost his purity in Roma? I wondered) and was clad in a gabardine of red damask and a black velvet cap embroidered with gold and pearls — personal gifts to Prince David from Pope Clement, Jehiel whispered to me proudly. My brother, alas, still wore the same shabby cloak in which h
e had arrived at our portal. To see him so dilapidated, his face gaunt, his body shrunken — for he had taken to fasting in emulation of his idol — was a sight to tear your heart from your body.

  Yet he was happy on that day. His eyes shone with high hope and optimism as he described for me the glorious days ahead. With Judah’s forebodings buzzing in my brain, I begged him to be prudent, if not for his own sake, at least for the sake of his motherless boys.

  “Promise me,” I begged him, “that you will not tell fortunes. Or sell amulets. And, above all, that you not theologize disputatiously with Christians.”

  He took the request as an insult.

  “What do you take me for, a simpleton?” he demanded.

  No, not a simpleton, I thought. Worse. You are the son who has not even the capacity to inquire.

  He walked off to join his crusade without a backward glance or a final embrace. It was a bitter parting.

  FROM DANILO’S ARCHIVE

  TO GRAZIA DEI ROSSI DEL MEDIGO AT ROMA

  My dearest and most beloved Grazia:

  I am now at liberty to reveal to you a secret I have concealed over this past year. Prepare yourself for a shock. I am married. Sit down, Grazia. Take a deep breath. Now read on.

  Your brother Jehiel and I were married in a private ceremony on the eve of his departure with the holy David. In one stroke God granted me two of my most ardent prayers: to be married to the man I love and to have you as my sister. May I begin again and salute you correctly:

  My dearest and most beloved sister: (Ah, it is good to write that word.)

  I know you will forgive me for holding back my news. It was not my design but my Jehiel’s. He made me promise a solemn oath not to reveal this marriage to you until he had left Roma. Now he is halfway to Portugal and I am released from my oath. Rejoice with me in my happiness, Grazia, I beg you.

  Perhaps you guessed that we lived in this house as man and wife long before we went to the rabbi. That was a secret I had no difficulty in keeping from you. I lived in shame of it every day. My only excuse is that I could not help myself. You above all people know how long I have loved your brother When I finally found a way into his heart through his children, I took it. I knew that all I was to him was a nursemaid and a bedmate, but I was content with my portion. To me, he is everything.