The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  56

  Judah returned from Ferrara a man obsessed with one idea: The Italy we knew was doomed. The Colonna raid had confirmed his worst fears. The barbarians were upon us. We must leave Italy at once to escape the holocaust.

  Without even consulting me he wrote a letter to Suleiman the Magnificent agreeing to enter the Sultan’s service if he was still wanted. When I questioned the move he replied, “If this country were my patient, I would tell his relatives that the time had come to say goodbye to him. That is exactly the course I propose to follow with Italy.” He then added, in a much stronger tone, “The matter is decided. You must obey me in this, Grazia.”

  His high-handedness neither reassured me of his wisdom nor allayed my fears. I had heard tales of the life women led in the Sultan’s seraglio. Would I be expected to live there? To take the veil like a nun? Where would you be brought up? Would we be permitted to have our own house?

  To all my questions, he answered brusquely, “It will all be arranged. There is no time to waste on details.” Details!

  “I cannot agree to go and certainly not to carry my son back into the Dark Ages because of some phantom in my husband’s imagination,” I confided to Madonna Isabella, who stepped into the role of my counselor in that troubled time. “He asks too much.”

  “Far too much,” she agreed.

  “And he will not be moved,” I went on, “even to the extent of writing another letter to the Sultan to request answers to my questions. I cannot go. He leaves me no choice but to refuse.”

  This time I heard no sly digs from her on the subject of Jewish nerves. She listened attentively, considered thoughtfully, and when she volunteered advice, it was prudent and conciliatory.

  “Why not let Maestro Judah go on ahead to Constantinople as a sort of advance party?” she asked. “He can write and tell you what life would be like there for you. And in the interim, you can move in with me and become my confidential secretary.”

  Her suggestion seemed to me a solution worthy of Solomon. But when I carried the proposal home to Judah, he rejected it out of hand. “You don’t know the Germans as I do,” he explained. “They are fanatics and always will be. Without them in the picture, the Emperor and the French king might have gone on bickering over Italy until the next century. But Luther has transformed the Emperors cause into a jihad. Now that the Colonnas have exposed the soft underbelly of this city, it is only a matter of time before the Imperials swoop down on us. And when they come, they will make the Goths and the Vandals look like benign visitors by comparison.”

  Could we not simply leave Roma for a time, until the worst was over? I pressed him.

  “You think the worst will be over once these new barbarians have seized the Vatican? Ha!” he barked. “An attack on Roma is only the beginning, my dear. The worst comes when the church rouses itself to fight back. Do you need a picture? Think of Spain since 1492. The Inquisition is master of all, even of kings. Heresy-hunting is the favored sport. The auto-da-fé has replaced feasting and dancing. And God help the Jews.

  “You tell me you fear to lose your freedom in the seraglio,” he continued. “How much freedom will you have in the new Imperial Roma? You told me once you would suffocate and die in the air of the Venetian ghetto. I remind you of that and beg you to allow me to save you from such a fate here in Roma.”

  How well he knew me. The city of his vision — stern, repressive, pitiless — could never serve me as home. Even were I to convert and save myself, I could never stand in a crowd cheering while a man burned to a cinder the way the Florentines did when they burned Savonarola. Or as I have no doubt the Portuguese did when they burned my brother Jehiel in the public square in Tavira.

  When I advised Madonna Isabella of my final and irrevocable decision to leave Roma with my husband, her first response was to berate me as an ingrate for rejecting her munificent offer. But her pique quickly gave way to serious questions as to why I was willing to give up the opportunity of a lifetime.

  “To be the confidential secretary to a princess is an honor never yet vouchsafed a woman and not likely to be offered to a Jewess again,” she pointed out. “Think before you refuse me. Think of your son’s future and of the honor you will bring to your people.”

  I had thought. I had thought so much that I had no thoughts left that I could call my own. So, like a dumb puppet, I simply repeated Judah’s prophecy: that bad times were upon us and that the Jews would be the first to suffer.

  “Underneath that Platonism of his your Judah is just another old Jewish soothsayer crying doom and gloom,” was her response to his prophecy. “But let us give him the benefit of the doubt. Let us agree to his case. If the Jews are doomed to suffer, why be a Jew at all? Why cling to this cursed faith?”

  “He is too old to change now, madonna, too embedded in Judaism,” I replied.

  “And you? Just because the world is finished for him, must that mean that it is over for you as well? And for your son?”

  I had asked myself that question too many times in the preceding weeks to find a ready affirmative answer.

  Encouraged by my silence, she continued. “Think of the boy, Grazia. Why subject him to such a hard life? With his looks, his bearing, he would be instantly accepted as a member of my household, a student in the Pope’s sapienza, an apprentice in the fencing corps of noble young men. With those blue eyes anything he wished could be his.” Then as if it were an afterthought, she added, “I never could understand where he got those angel’s eyes. If I did not know you better, Grazia, I would suspect some . . .” She raised her eyebrows knowingly. “Why, Grazia, you have turned all rosy. Have I touched a chord? Have I uncovered a secret? Come, Grazia, tell me, is the father someone I know?”

  I turned my head away to ward off the attack I knew was coming, but she simply leaned over, took my face firmly in her hands and turned it toward her own. “Let us have a game,” she cooed. “I will ask you questions and you will answer them. But you must tell the truth.”

  “That is a child’s game, madonna,” I retorted. “And what you speak of is not a childish matter.”

  “But of course it is,” she disagreed sweetly. “For it is something that happened long ago, as in a fairy tale . . . and with someone known to me . . . Have I not hit the mark?”

  “Yes, madonna,” I confessed wearily.

  “But not a Jew,” she went on. “The blush has already told me that. A Christian most certainly. Handsome. He must be to have fathered such a son. Known to me . . . known well to me . . . a member of my family, perhaps . . . a kinsman . . . That narrows the list.”

  Why does she not pounce and be done with this cat-and-mouse game? I thought.

  “A kinsman of mine who was in Venezia directly after the battle of Pavia,” she went on. “A kinsman of mine who was in your house nine months before your son was born . . . The boy’s father must be . . . How stupid of me not to have guessed.”

  Of course she had already guessed. But years of playing scartino had taught her to save her trump card for the final trick. She played it. “Now that we all know the truth, it is out of the question for you to take this boy away from his father, is it not?”

  “Do you refer to my husband, madonna?” I asked, knowing well she did not.

  “I refer to my kinsman, Lord Pirro Gonzaga of Bozzuolo,” she replied directly. “Who it appears is the boy’s father by blood, a man who proposed marriage to you even before he knew your boy was his. It would be wrong by the canon of any religion or law to keep this father and his son apart, Grazia. You know it in your heart.”

  These plain words penetrated the layers of false reasoning that Judah had laid on me. The insoluble problems — whether to go to Turkey, whether to seek a divorce, where my loyalties lay, how best to serve you, Judah, Lord Pirro, myself — all crystallized in an instant and I knew what I must do.

  Ten years before, Judah and I had mad
e an unspoken pact to keep the truth of your fatherhood hidden — from the world, from you, from ourselves. As I dragged my feet homeward past the ancient Portico d’Ottavia I prepared the words that would blaze a path through that deep silence, words as simple and direct as Madama’s to me. “Danilo is not your son, Judah. You cannot take him to Turkey. He is not yours to take.”

  These were the words I delivered. They tore through the air like arrows and hit their target in the heart. I heard Judah groan with pain. But for me there was no turning back.

  “I will not go with you to Turkey,” I continued, pounding away at the stricken figure slumped in a chair across the room. “Nor will Danilo. He will stay here with me. He will be told the truth. It is his right to know his father.”

  “I am his father,” he croaked in a broken voice.

  “No, you are not,” I insisted, relentless. “His father is —”

  He raised his head and held up his hand. “Spare me that knowledge, Grazia. The name is not the issue here, nor the man.”

  “But Danilo is our joint concern, Judah,” I told him. “We have deceived him with our silence. We have kept him from his true father. We must give him back.”

  He shook his head violently. “I will not give him up. I cannot. He is the only son I will ever have.”

  “You have no choice,” I replied, made strong by my belated conversion to the cause of truth. “I mean to tell him tonight with or without your assent.” Even as I spoke the words, I regretted my intransigence. “Judah . . .” I moved close to him, the better to engage his eyes. “You and I have suffered grievously from the lie that came between us once. We must not allow a second lie to come between us and our son. All I ask is that we tell him the truth.”

  “The truth is . . .” He straightened his shoulders and lifted his chin as an adversary might do. “The truth is that according to the law of Israel, being the son of a Jewish mother, he is a Jew.”

  “Then tell him that,” I replied softly, my harshness somehow mitigated by his will to fight this hopeless battle to the end. “And tell him how much you love him. For that is surely as important as any law. But tell him the truth.”

  “Very well.” Thank God, I thought. “But not yet.”

  This time his intransigence only served to try my patience. “You are bargaining over Danilo like a pawnbroker, Judah. I will not have it.”

  “Oh yes you will.” His reply came back harsh and bullying. “Let me remind you that I too have a stake in this boy, Grazia. I have nurtured him. I have taught him. I have trained him in the rituals of our people. I have dreamed of standing at his side on the bimah and seeing him welcomed into the community of Jewish men. I have earned the right to fight for my son, have I not?”

  I nodded my assent.

  “Danilo stands little more than a year from the time he must prepare to become a man by the laws of Israel. Let us make that waiting period a time of probation for him in the Christian world. I propose that we adopt Madonna Isabella’s plan. I will go to Turkey. You will introduce Danilo to all the delights of the life you have chosen for him and for yourself . . . Oh yes, you have. If we are after truth, let us have the whole truth. I know that I am fighting for both you and my son.”

  In honesty I could not deny it.

  “At the end of a year, you will divorce me or not as you choose. Danilo, with all the facts laid out before him, will choose either his blood father and the Christian life or me and the life in which he has been raised. But until the year is up, there will be no talk of divorce, no conversions. All I ask is one year to make my case.”

  “And what of his blood father? Now that Madonna Isabella knows who he is, he is bound to find out. There are no secrets in courts. Is the man to wait for a year to claim his son?”

  “Perhaps if you remind him of the tender care his son has received at my hands, he will take pity on me. Can you, Grazia, will you plead my case with him?” It would have taken a harder heart than mine to deny this proud man reduced to begging a favor.

  So it was agreed. And two days later you and I journeyed to Ostia in Madama’s golden coach to say our goodbyes to the man you had known all your life as your father.

  FROM DANILO’S ARCHIVE

  TO GRAZIA DEI ROSSI DEL MEDIGO AT ROMA

  Grazia:

  I left France a happy man, headed for home and the woman he loved and trusted with his whole heart. But a letter awaited me here at Piacenza that tore my happiness to tatters. I know you will find this intemperate expression foreign to my usual manner, but I assure you that when I take stock of my years on earth, I will mark this fourteenth day of February in the year 1527 as the low point of my life.

  The letter that greeted me on arrival here, written by a member of Madonna Isabella’s court who need not be named, was so loaded with innuendo and malice that my honor as a gentleman bade me destroy and forget it. Still, the possibility of a betrayal of my heart and my honor torments me.

  Can it be possible that the boy I offered to adopt is indeed my own son? That you have hidden this boy away from me for the eleven years of his life? That you are capable of such a monstrous deception?

  If this sounds to you like the raving of a madman, if you have no knowledge of it, forgive me my doubts. But if by some godforsaken chance you do, please do not wound me any further with evasions. Only the truth can cauterize this festering sore.

  Everything in me longs to rush on to Roma, to look into your eyes and to hear from your lips that these slanders are the inventions of a vicious mind. But, to rub salt into my wound, my mission has been extended. I am ordered to make a detour to Urbino’s camp, there to insinuate myself into his confidence and to ferret out precisely what the man is doing at Milano. As you know, he has led the world to believe that, in his words, he has the Imperials blocked up there tighter than a virgin’s hymen. But my master, the Holy Father, suspects that all is not what it seems with the blockade. So I, the failed diplomat, am now seconded into the spying game, for which I have even less heart than for diplomacy. You know that I am not an admirer of Urbino. In fact, I find him personally unpleasant and professionally incompetent. Nonetheless he is a fellow officer. He is also son-in-law to my kinswoman Madonna Isabella, and the idea of using his hospitality in order to spy on him stinks in my nostrils.

  I will, of course, do my duty. But I am crippled in my resolve by a wretchedness of spirit unlike anything I have ever known. I trusted you, Grazia. Have I been deceived by someone so close to my heart?

  Signed with a heavy heart, P.G.

  Piacenza, February 14, 1527.

  TO GRAZIA DEI ROSSI DEL MEDIGO AT ROMA

  Greetings from Ferrara, dear sister:

  As Koheleth says, “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity and a striving after wind.” Truly, a man struggling to make his own fate engages himself in a futile enterprise just as a sailor does who strives after a fair wind. It will come when it will come, or not, as God wills.

  On Tuesday, the fifth day of March, I will marry Penina. I could have held out indefinitely against all human persuasion, but against God’s will I am powerless. My duty is clearly prescribed in the Holy Book. I must take my brother’s place in his widow’s bed without delay. Wish us good fortune, Grazia. Congratulations, I do not deserve. I am simply doing my duty as a Jewish man.

  During the days of settling the accounts of our beloved brother, God bless his memory, my mind seized the opportunity to dwell on matters far removed from the loan bank and the counting table. Perhaps it was Jehiel’s martyrdom that set me free from my worldly life. All I know is that some force entered my brain and, as if drawing aside a curtain, exposed to me in a flash the true meaning of a point of argumentation between your honorable husband and my late lamented brother which I never wholly understood.

  “A Jew must be an observing Jew; there is no other kind; for ours is a religion of practice, not transcendence.” How man
y times I have heard Judah expound this view. Yet only in these past weeks have I come to a true understanding of it. A man cannot deny the practice and pretend to embrace the faith any more than he can live the life of a Christian by day and the life of a Jew by night. For me, the issue has come to this: Am I a Jew or am I not? If I am, then I must observe the law.

  In this instance my obedience takes the form of marriage to my brother’s widow. Since I have made that decision others crowd in on me at a rapid pace. No longer will I submit to being called Geronimo. My name as it is written in God’s book is Gershom. Men must either call me that or cease to address me. No longer will I stumble through life half blind, showing one side of my double face to the synagogue, the other to the city. I am a whole man at last. A Jew. A banker. Soon to be the husband of a Jewish wife and, God willing, to produce Jewish sons.

  I believe in God and His commandments. I find graven images abhorrent, even those I once adored as the essence of beauty. I am finished with Geronimo, with the divine Raffaello, and with the flesh of the pig. And my spirit is the lighter for it.

  Had God not seen fit to take our brother from us and to force me to this decision, I might never have known relief from the agony of the double life. I can only believe that it was my destiny finally to live the life of an observing Jew, just as it was Jehiel’s to die a martyr’s death. I mourn him. But in between the teardrops I glory in my release from the curse of Janus. There is a logic and clarity in this life that far better suits my nature. Geronimo is now a dead man. Gershom alone lives.

  God’s blessing on you, Grazia, from your brother who at last knows his rightful name.

  (signed) Gershom dei Rossi, in his own hand.

  Ferrara, February 20, 1527.

  57

  Today is the day of Lord Pirro’s return from Urbino’s camp. The moment of truth is upon me. If you are ever tempted to practice deceit, my son, remember this: Only shame ensues and a pain in the heart.