The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (79 page)

“It is I, Grazia, your brother Jehiel,” he announced. “Am I such a stranger that you will not open your door to me?”

What had transfigured my strutting peacock of a brother into a mendicant?

The answer is simple. He had given himself over body and soul to a new Messiah, an Israelite named David Reubeni who claimed descent from the princes of one of the lost tribes of Israel and authority from God Himself.

“This David draws thoughts as pure and sparkling as spring water from the depths of the cabalistic well,” my brother explained, serenely forgetful of Judah’s detestation of the very word cabala. “Wherever he goes people flock to listen to his wisdom. Of course some come to try him with questions. But they do not succeed. For nothing is hidden from him.”

“And how came you to this paragon?” I could sense Judah trying with all his strength to keep the scorn out of his voice.

“Quite simple,” my brother answered, with all the innocent assurance of the woefully woolly-headed. “I was sent to Venezia by my prince to collect a panel painting he had ordered from Tiziano. But when I got there that lazy rascal had not finished the work. He claimed he could not get his Aphrodite right, which I took for procrastination. That was before I understood that the delay was a part of God’s plan.”

“You understood that the painter’s procrastination was engineered by God?” Judah had the appearance of a man who could not believe what he had heard.

“I am afraid we do not quite understand the connection between this holy man and Maestro Tiziano’s hand, brother,” I told him.

“I saw that God had stayed the painter’s hand until the moment I was destined to meet the holy man,” Jehiel answered, in a patient, condescending tone that irritated even me, who loved him dearly. “Reubeni was on his way to Roma, but by way of Ferrara. Imagine it! Both of us on the same barque and all because God stayed Tiziano’s hand. It was the first day of the new moon of Adar.” He paused to allow the import of this statement to sink in. “In other words, we came together at the very moment when my planets found themselves in the most fortunate conjunction.”

“Ah yes, the first day of the moon of Adar . . .” At this point Judah gave up and retreated into a kind of trance, as he often does when the conversation bores or annoys him. Now it was left to me to make sense of my brother’s non sequiturs.

“And what brings this holy man to Roma, brother?” I asked.

“He comes to Italy not only as a holy man but as an emissary from his brother, King Joseph of the tribe of Reuben.”

“Is that not one of the lost tribes of Israel?” I had been taught that the tribe of Reuben was lost along with the other nine.

“We have all been misled, Grazia,” was the astounding reply. “The tribe of Reuben did not perish with the others. It flourishes in the wilderness of Chabor and is engaged even as we speak in constant warfare against the Turk. It is this war which conjoins Prince David with the Pope and all the Christian princes of Europe. They stand together against the infidel.”

This last was too much for Judah. He literally choked on the alliance between the Christian princes of Europe and this suddenly rediscovered lost tribe of Israel, and rose to leave the table. But Jehiel bade him sit and listen to an important proposal.

“I have consulted my master, Prince David Reubeni, and he agrees to accept you as our translator at the court of the Vatican. It is a great honor, brother. For the first time, a Jew will be received not as a suppliant or a servant but as an ambassador equal to any Christian.”

At this suggestion, there passed over Judah’s face the look of a drowning man. “Quite beyond my powers,” he sputtered.

Then, as if someone had thrown him a rope, he bobbed up quite cheerfully. “But I do know of someone eminently suited for the job,” he announced, gaining spirit with every word. “A scholar of great repute among both Jews and Christians, someone of your own blood who will bring honor to your house.”

“And who is that, brother?” Jehiel asked, all unsuspecting.

“Why, your own sister, Madonna Grazia, she of the silver tongue and the immaculate hand.”

Just wait until I get you alone, Signore del Medigo, I thought. But the die was cast. I had been nominated. I could not refuse my brother. Besides, I did harbor a curiosity as to the personage my brother had chosen to follow to the ends of the earth.

David Reubeni’s audience with the Pope was fixed for two mornings hence. Jehiel insisted I must wear my finest clothes and jewels. “Remember, Grazia, that we do not go as beggars but as the equals of princes,” he admonished me.

“What about you?” I retorted. “You look lower than the scurviest street sweeper.”

“But there is a purpose to it, sister,” he replied. “We who surround Prince David must not rob him of his allure.”

“And will Reubeni appear barefooted in a filthy cloak with matted hair?” I pressed him.

“He will appear as grand as any Christian prince astride a white horse, clad all in white wearing the jewels that the faithful have donated to his crusade.”

And indeed, when I did lay my eyes on him, the charlatan was dressed like a prince. But he sat his white horse like a dressed-up monkey, a shriveled little monkey at that, reduced to skin and bones by fasting.

If this is the savior of the Jews, God help us, I thought. But I was alone in my judgment. When Reubeni rode into Saint Peter’s Square he was followed by a great mob of at least a hundred Roman Christians as well as his personal escort of Jews, each one of them trudging behind him in worshipful silence.

At the gates of the Vatican, the Swiss guards parted ranks to give passage to the little dark man on the white horse. Into the Vatican we walked in solemn procession, past the gardens, past the fountains, past the Belvedere Palace, through Raffaello’s sunlit loggia, into the sanctum sanctorum: the Pope’s private apartments.

Here, waiting to greet us, stood a smallish man in a red hat. It was Cardinal Egidio de Viterbo, Jehiel whispered to me. How he was able to identify the cardinal I do not know, since he kept his eyes half lowered at all times as if to avoid being blinded by the rays of glory that emanated from the holy Reubeni. And when the little monkey-man beckoned in our direction for assistance in dismounting, my once-graceful brother fairly fell over his feet in haste to render this lowly service.

Whatever else this Messiah might or might not be, he
was
a master of ceremony. Everything proceeded at an even, majestic pace. I saw my brother kiss the roe of his idol’s holy boot before offering his clasped hands to receive the holy foot. Then, when he had performed his groom’s task and safely deposited the little fellow on the tiles, I saw him reach for the hem of his master’s sleeve and kiss it. His obeisance rendered, he raised himself slowly, leaned into the master’s ear, and began to whisper.

At that moment the smooth flow of the procession was interrupted by Reubeni himself. Uttering a vicious hiss, the little man raised his brown hand high in the air as if to smite my brother like an avenging angel.

Jehiel fell to his knees, an abject creature.

The holy man spar a great gob of spittle full upon my penitent brother and turned to look at me. Steel is not colder nor more unforgiving than that look.

All at once a hundred pairs of eyes were fastened on me. Hard eyes filled with accusation.

Jehiel came staggering toward me through the crowd, panting and sobbing, and pushed me out into the adjoining corridor.

“Oh, Grazia, I have offended my master mightily. He will never forgive me,” he cried.

“What have you done?” I asked.

“I have dishonored him and defiled this holy mission. I ought never to have listened to Judah and brought you here.” Whereupon he sank to his knees beside me and, hands clasped, fell into the cadences of the morning prayer. Only when he got to that passage in which every Jewish man thanks God every day of his life for not making him a woman and began to beat his breast wildly and to beg forgiveness for staining Jehovah’s escutcheon with the touch of a woman did I begin to understand the bizarre display I had just witnessed.

Jehiel’s offense was to have brought a lowly woman to serve as his master’s voice; and I was that woman. I had brought my brother down in disgrace. I was the stain on Reubeni’s escutcheon.

For some reason this understanding did not provoke me. Instead, I felt a rush of pity for the ruin of the man who was my brother, sobbing beside me as if his heart was forever broken.

“Go back and make your peace with him,” I urged.

“And you?”

“I will stay here and wait.”

“You are not offended?”

Offended? I prayed he might never know how happy I was to be rid of his wailing and of the sight of the pious fraud he had pledged his loyalty to.

Assured that I would nor hold it against him, he was off in a moment to demean himself even further before the little brown monkey, and I was left to my devices.

I looked around me. It was a small room empty of furniture, but every wall surface was covered with jumping, writhing, twisting figures so lifelike that even my untutored eye recognized the hand of a master. Directly facing me bright red flames were consuming a building from which naked men fled while a woman leaned over the roof at a treacherous angle to lower her baby to safety. This must be Raffaello’s “Fire in the Borgo,” the latest of the masterpieces he had so nobly begun with the “School of Athens.” Yes, for a certainty it was. In the deep background I made out the Pope, hand raised, damping the fire below the walls of the Vatican with a benediction. There on the left I found the bent figure of Aeneas carrying his old father to safety with his son Ascanio by his side.

“Grazia.” I felt a man’s grip on my arm. Not Jehiel’s hand, yet a touch familiar to me.

“Grazia . . . turn. Look at me. You need not speak. One look in those eyes is all I ask. Then if you wish I will leave you.”

I turned. He was in some kind of uniform with a black band wound around his arm. I touched it softly with my fingers.

“I am in mourning,” he explained.

“I am sorry,” I said.

With great tenderness he drew me over to a bench nearby. “I cannot believe even now that I am seeing you.” He shook his head as if in wonder at some miracle. Then without any words he reached over and traced with his two index fingers the outline of my face, my nose, my lips . . . “We must leave this place. Come with me, Grazia.” His voice was soft but urgent.

“No. I cannot. My brother . . .”

“Will you not grant me one hour?”

“I have a new life,” I stammered.

“I have no designs on your life, madonna,” he replied with infinite sweetness. “I simply ask for an hour of your time.”

I could not find voice to explain that with every passing minute in his presence I was giving up ground, that within an hour I could easily become altogether lost.

As we walked out into the Borgo he inquired what had brought me to Roma.

I replied that I lived here, that I was a Roman now. “We lost our taste for Venezia,” I explained.

“Ah, Venezia,” he repeated. And sighed. And I could not find in me the strength to pursue the subject as I might have done. Instead I asked what brought him to Roma.

“Only this month the new Medici pontiff, Pope Clement, seconded me from the French court,” he replied.

“Then I take it you too are a Roman now.”

“Not Roman nor Parisian nor Spanish nor any other species,” he answered. “I am that nomadic animal known as a roving ambassador, meaning that my master, the Pope, can and does move my person around Europe as if I were a chessman. No, much as I regret it at this moment, I cannot call Roma my home.”

“Is Roma that seductive?” I inquired.

What I longed to hear from his lips was that Roma had suddenly become a paradise because I was in it . . . that I made the old stones sing with my smile and turned the pale Roman sky into a heavenly vault with my gaze. But instead he talked of Madonna Isabella, whom he had seen recently, and how unkindly the years had dealt with her.

“Is she ill?” I asked, surprised to find as I mouthed the polite inquiry that I harbored a real concern for the woman.

“She is not ill in body,” he replied, “but in spirit. You know of course that Marchese Francesco has died. I fear that since his father’s death, my cousin Federico’s hat no longer fits his head. He does not pay his mother the respect owing her.”

My own opinion is that the only way that boy will ever grasp the reins of state firmly in his own hands is to run over his mother with a battlewagon. But I do not say that. Instead I suggest that the young Marchese might have felt it necessary to assert his authority strongly in order to become his own man.

He agrees. “Unfortunately,” he adds, “Federico is
not
his own man. He has simply transferred his obedience from one woman to another, a young woman and beautiful. Also named Isabella.”

“Does he mean to marry this other Isabella?”

“Alas, the other Isabella is already married. But that has not stopped Federico from conferring on her all the honors and privileges of a consort. He has made her his Marchesana in everything but name. And the court to its eternal shame has followed his lead. These days when young Isabella Boschetti rides out into the streets of Mantova the nobles follow her train as if she were a princess. Isabella d’Este,
La Prima Donna del Mondo
, can barely attract the allegiance of one or two old men.”

“Poor Madonna Isabella.” I find myself remembering how valiantly she fought, for her boy against her husband, the Doge, and the Pope. To have him turn away from her now when she was beginning to get old; worse, to see another woman — a mistress — installed in her place . . . No apothecary could have concocted a pill more bitter.

“With your permission, I will carry your regards to her when I next visit Mantova,” he said. “She always speaks to me of you.”

“What does she say?” I asked.

“She admires you. Your intellect. Your talent.”

And what of you? Do you admire me? Have you thought of me since that night in Venezia? How many times? Are you reminded of me when you pass through the Piazza San Andrea in spring? And when you gallop past the Sacred Wood on your way to Marmirolo, do you remember how we lay together on the damp ground beside the Bosco Fontana and pledged our vows through eternity?