The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (4 page)

“The people of Trento put the houses of the Jews to the torch one by one. Then they lay back and waited, the way hunters wait for their dogs to flush out the prey. And after not too many moments, the Jews began to emerge, choking, from the fiery furnaces that moments ago had been their homes. As they came out, the Christians cut them down one by one. It is said that no one there got out alive. Women, children, the old, infirm, all perished.”

He leaned back, exhausted.

And I kept silent, thinking that the same preacher who had exhorted the people of Trento to a crime too vicious to imagine would, this day, be preaching in my town, in my square. And I knew why a roomful of people had lowered their heads in desperate prayer and why Papa shivered at the mention of the name Trento.

2

A
s I write of the old days in Mantova, the people appear to me like characters in a masque. My brother Jehiel becomes a little boy again. My father is young and handsome and hopeful, unpricked by Fortuna’s poisonous arrows. My mother glides gracefully through the scene, always dainty no matter the extra girth her pregnancy has brought her. And Zaira . . . ah, Zaira . . . my nurse, my comfort, my friend. She had arrived at our gate only a few weeks before, forced to flee from her town of Modena by the same threat that now menaced Mantova: Fra Bernardino.

Papa, always ready to help a coreligionist in trouble, introduced her into our
famiglia
, explaining to us that her profession — she was a dancing teacher — made her a prime target for those
ignoranti
who use the death of their Savior as an excuse for riot and violence. Later, I asked Zaira why the
ignoranti
picked on dancing teachers in particular. I suppose I expected a show of emotion when I mentioned the subject . . . anger, distress, even tears. Instead, she favored me with a perfectly composed countenance and, without a trace of bitterness or malice, explained the behavior of her persecutors.

“It has to do with what they call consanguinity — closeness. When we teach our pupils to dance, we lay our hands on them, like so,” she explained, clasping my waist to illustrate the point. “And from there it is but a short step to casting spells, laying down curses, and other witches’ tricks, you see.”

I knew enough about the punishment inflicted on witches to find the thought terrifying. But Zaira was not easily frightened. In her, nature had combined two qualities not often found together: an ability to see the world without illusions and, along with it, a readiness to accept the misery and injustice of that world without complaint or cynicism.

The ladies in my mother’s sewing circle saw none of Zaira’s virtues. A bird of exotic plumage, she was completely out of place in Mama’s nest of brown wrens. No matter how diligently she plied her needle or how high she buttoned up her chemise, she could not hide the curve of her breast or the length of her legs or the girlish dew of her complexion. She made them all seem doughy and pale and for that they could not forgive her.

But my mother befriended and defended Zaira and thus gained her undying loyalty. Beset by the fevers and ague of a difficult pregnancy, my mother sorely needed a nurse. And in quick time Zaira fell into that role, warding off the least hint of ill humor, bad tidings, or any other threats to Mama’s peace of mind.

But even constant vigilance cannot prevent domestic calamities on feast days. Shortly after dinner a loud crash from the top of the house followed by a terrible cry alerted the household that disaster had struck the kitchen.

Now my mother was not a woman given to sudden fits and tempers. Yet it was exactly in such a state that we found her when we dashed up to the kitchen. All activity had ceased. The roasts had stopped turning on the spit. The broth boiled over onto the fire, unstirred. The servants stood transfixed by what lay on the floor at Mama’s feet — a small pile of shards which I recognized at once as the shattered remains of a dish from the gorgeous blue and yellow service that was the pride of her dowry. Zaira had her arms around my mother and was waving a small vial of smelling salts under her nose, while off to one side stood the culprit — our Tartar slave girl, Cateruccia — her arms folded, chin thrust out, more defiant than penitent.

Behind her on the plate rack was lined up the set of portrait plates of heroes and heroines of the Pentateuch. David was there. And Noah. And Miriam. Moses, of course, and Joshua with his trumpet, each of them identified by his name in Latin script. We were a very advanced Jewish family to name our heroes in the language of the humanists rather than the language of our ancestors. And, indeed, to go beyond the first five books to search out suitable subjects for the maker’s superb portraiture.

I always tried to position the plate of Judith holding up the head of Holofernes next to my place when the Passover table was laid. It was my favorite. And now it lay in a hundred pieces, the general’s severed head watered by Mama’s tears.

Once I knew the cause I did not wonder at my mother’s distress. The dishes had been ordered by her papa from the Castel Durante kiln of the elder Giovanni Maria, surely the finest maker of tin-glazed ware in the peninsula. The brilliance of the blue that came to life in Messer Giovanni’s kiln was enough to make the sky sigh with envy. Indeed, it was said that no one in Mantova save the Gonzagas themselves owned more elegant tableware than Rachel dei Rossi.

What happened next needs little explanation. Mama was not herself, being within weeks of her lying-in. Cateruccia had to be gotten out of the kitchen before she caused more damage. Also someone had to watch over Jehiel and me. I spoke up for Zaira as our child minder, but a piteous look from Mama told her she could not be spared. So, in a moment of rash expedience, Mama sent us away in care of the slave girl with strict orders not to venture out into the street. How could she have known that Cateruccia had other plans for herself, plans which she neatly expanded to include us?

When the time came to fetch the matzoh from the communal
forno
, the slattern ordered us to come along. She was a strapping Tartar with a bullying way that we found hard to resist. Besides, the bakehouse was only two houses away from ours. Such a brief passage hardly seemed to fall under Mama’s interdiction to stay off the street. And, indeed, our
vicolo
— more of a lane than a street — presented the perfect picture of serene seclusion when we walked out into the crisp March day.

At the
forno
, an equal tranquillity prevailed, if anything an unaccustomed tranquillity. Generally the place buzzed like a hive with the gossip and greetings of servants, slaves, and housewives. But that afternoon we were the only customers.

Zoppo, the lame baker, greeted us with his usual disagreeable wheeze, muttering as he removed the round, flat biscuits with his long-handled paddle. What vexed him today was that his customers were tardy in picking up their matzoh. No one ever considered the baker, he grumbled. He too had a family, he reminded us. He too must make preparations for the seder. It would serve them all damn right, he snarled — blasphemy on the eve of Passover! — if he shut up shop there and then and left them without.

Thinking back, it strikes me that the reason Zoppo’s customers hadn’t picked up their unleavened bread for the evening service was that many of them had heard about Fra Bernardino’s permission to preach and were already on their way out of town.

When we had filled our hamper with matzoh and climbed up the steps of the
forno
onto the
vicolo
, we were once again subjected to Cateruccia’s blandishments, this time sugar-coated. “They say there is a juggler in the piazza today who throws balls of fire in the air and catches them with his bare hands,” she coaxed. “And a dancing bear who performs the
moresca
in time to a drum.”

I might have been able to resist the juggler. But I had never seen a dancing bear. And your Uncle Jehiel knew no better, at the age of six, than to follow his foolish sister in her pursuit of novelty.

The first sight to greet us when we turned the corner into the Via Peschiara was a woman walking down the street on her hands, accompanied by a dog walking on his hind legs, the two of them dressed alike in white and red squares. Then, before we had time to absorb the wonder of their appearance, the woman flipped herself upright and began a series of amazing somersaults, the dog all the while jumping up and down and barking his encouragement. Jehiel clapped his dimpled hands in glee and wanted to turn and follow them, but Cateruccia pushed him firmly ahead, straight into the arms of a beggar staggering along the street presumably in the grip of “divine inspiration.” And this
felso
was only one of several specialists in the art of begging who lined the street. There was a
testatore
, pale and shaking and looking to be very ill, chanting his promise to leave all he possessed to anyone who would help him in his final hour. And several rogues in chains jabbering nonsense and showing off wounds supposedly received at the hands of the Saracens. And an extraordinary
allacrimanto
, who kept tears flowing from his eyes in a never-ending stream.

There is truly no end to the ingenuity of our Italian beggars. How rich they would be if they put all that effort and cunning into an honest trade! Or do I malign them by excluding begging from the “honest trades”? Grant them their due. They give the gullible donor a good show for his money. Little Jehiel was ready to give up a treasured ducat to the
allacrimanto
, but Cateruccia kept prodding us on to the piazza with promises of sweetmeats and jesters.

With great poise, she shepherded us along the arcades that line the piazza, set aside this day for the jongleurs, acrobats, troubadours, and mountebanks who always appear on the fringes of any public spectacle. At the end of the arcade, there was a gambler’s booth. Here, Cateruccia took the trouble to introduce the gambler to us as a friend of our father. This outlandish announcement was accompanied by an odd, lopsided grin that stirred up misgivings in me. For the first time since we started off, I set myself against the Tartar and advised her as smartly as I could that we were expected at home. But she insisted that we must stay just a little while, for a great saint was about to arrive.

Completely in charge now, she hustled us through the gathering crowd and into the piazza itself, where a temporary pulpit had been erected at the north end. A low partition of white cloth ran the full length of the square. Its purpose was to separate the men from the ladies, Cateruccia explained to us. The farther we got from the Casa dei Rossi, the less muddle-headed she became. Either the proximity of her sainted friar performed a true miracle and cleared her head of its habitual confusion, or her stupidity was a veil she donned at home in order to hide her thoughts from us. Whatever the reason, she certainly did come to life, Lazarus-like, that morning. Her slit-eyes opened wide. Her slack body stiffened to alertness. And her craven manner gave way to assurance.

Without our noticing it, the holiday spirit had undergone a change in the few moments since we entered the piazza. The gay babble had quieted down to a hush. Many of the people around us were standing with eyes closed and hands clasped in silent prayer. I looked up and saw Cateruccia’s lips moving in rhythm with the click of her rosary beads, suspended above my head like a hanging rope. Across the aisle in the men’s section, a young father was giving his son a breathless report of a miracle that the sainted
frate
had performed that very morning.

“When he found there was no boat to carry him across the Mincio, do you know what he did? Can you guess?”

“No, Papa,” we heard.

“He laid down his cloak as if it were a raft, and sailed across the river on it,” the unseen father explained to his child. “And never got wet.”

Jehiel looked up at me, his eyes wide. “It is not true,” I wanted to tell him. “Men do not float across rivers on cloaks, except in fairy stories.” But as I bent down toward his ear, my whisper was drowned out by a roar louder than a hundred lions. Fra Bernardino da Feltre had arrived.

I should have guessed that da Feltre would be Cateruccia’s holy man, but somehow, in the excitement, it failed to register with me. Then, looking up at her, I caught the end of a small but triumphant smile and I knew she had lured us to this place in anticipation of this moment. But by then all possibility of escape was cut off by the hundreds of bodies that surrounded us on all sides.

To my surprise the friar did not in any way resemble the devil I expected him to be. He was, in fact, a frail man with a soft voice and a gentle manner. And as he joked and jested, I felt the tension slowly leave my body and began to enjoy the afternoon exactly as I and all the others in that crowd were meant to do.

“Behold Monna de la Torre” — he pointed out a woman with a very elaborate headdress — “with a tower on her head as tall as that one.” Here he turned and pointed at the Tower of the Cage behind the piazza. Then he whirled back to fix his chosen victim with his bright eyes.