The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (82 page)

“Time has been good to you, Grazia,” she crooned, looking into my eyes in that way she has of making you feel that she cares for no one else in the world. “Your waist is as small as it was the first day I laid my eyes on you. Do you remember?”

Did I remember? Who could forget such a terrifying moment?

“And now you are famous, celebrated throughout Europe. Why, I have heard you referred to as Boccaccio’s daughter. Come closer. Let me look at you. It has been too long.”

As she spoke she reached down for a pair of spectacles that hung between her breasts on a gold chain, and put them up to her eyes to see me better. “Hardly a wrinkle.” She pinched my cheek softly. “The flesh still firm as a young girl’s.” She sighed. “Would that I could say the same for myself.”

I assured her that she had not changed any more than I had. But we both knew this to be a lie. What I saw before me was an old woman, very fat, with gray hairs sprouting out of her
balzo
, a protruding belly which no dressmaker’s art could disguise, and a set of fingers puffed up like pastry balls.

Seeing Madonna Isabella, whom I had known as a slim girl with a step as light as a nymph’s, sunk so far into decay, I felt a welling up behind my eyeballs and the next moment I was dissolved in a saltwater bath.

“Grazia, what is it, my dear?” She put her hand on my shoulder, a sure sign that she was truly moved.

Between sobs I told her of Jehiel’s misfortunes at the court of the King of Portugal and of my fears for his life.

“Maestro Vitale always was a wild one,” she observed. “There seems to be one such in every family. And they are the ones we cherish the most . . .”

The slight quiver of her lips told me she was speaking from her own painful experience. But, being Madonna Isabella, she would not allow herself to dwell overlong in the unfamiliar haunts of sisterhood. However, she did commiserate — in her way.

“Your brother’s fate is in God’s hands now, Grazia,” she advised me. “There is nothing we can do to help him. But there is an elixir vitae for your melancholy. To act, to do, to read, to write, to busy oneself with work, these are Nepenthe’s remedy for your disease. Perhaps you should enter our service. As you know, we have always felt a certain closeness to you, especially now with your honorable husband so far away. Besides . . .” She leaned over, dropping the royal rhetoric in the descent. “It doesn’t do for a woman to stay locked up with only a child for company. It rots the brain. How old is your son now?”

“Ten years,” I replied.

“You must bring him to us one day. We will be pleased to audience him,” she announced, back to being the
alta donna
again. Have I mentioned the whimsicality of this woman?

“So it is settled then. You will attend us on Mondays and Wednesdays. We can surely find something for you to do.”

She may have lost her figure and her smooth complexion, I thought to myself, but she has kept her arrogance intact. Nonetheless, I did agree to the proposal. To turn her down twice in one lifetime was courting catastrophe.

After that I waited on the lady in her borrowed palace twice each week. The subject of my brother’s incarceration was never raised between us again, but from time to time as I bent over my writing table I felt the light touch of her hand on my shoulder and I did find those occasional touches comforting in the weeks of waiting for news from Judah, especially so since Madama is not a great one for touching, particularly those of the lower orders.

The previous year had been a tumultuous one for Italy. The French army was decimated at Pavia and King Francis himself taken to a Spanish prison where he languished for almost a year before his mother, Louise, was able to negotiate the terms of his release with the Emperor.

While these momentous events played out on the world stage my attention was riveted on Portugal. Living with the realization that as each week passed, my brother’s folly and carelessness were drawing him closer to disaster, the misfortunes of kings and emperors hardly touched my mind. But every day in Madama’s service I was pulled back into the great world of affairs, like it or not.

Normally a robust woman, she developed a permanent headache on the day she first heard rumors that Georg Frundsberg, an obscure Swabian feudatory of the Emperor’s, had gathered up a force of German soldiers, called landsknechts, and was preparing to cross the Alps into Italy to teach the Pope respect for his feudal lord, Emperor Charles V.

Remember that traditionally the Marchese owed his feudal loyalty to the Emperor. At the same time, he held a contract as a mercenary captain in the opposing army, the Pope’s army. Each day, I witnessed the tremendous exertion of will with which Madonna Isabella banished her worry over this intractable problem from her mind and, instead, bent that marvelous instrument to what she believed to be its proper function: devising ways to keep Mantova balanced on the high wire of neutrality, above the fray.

Out of sorts with her principal secretary, she now insisted that all her voluminous communications must be composed in my immaculate hand. Not surprisingly, my two days of service per week extended to four, then five. Before long I found myself spending more time at the Palazzo Colonna than in my own house under the Portico d’Ottavia.

Thus enmeshed in Madama’s feverish maneuvers to shore up her state and her house, I barely had time to supervise my own little household, and as a result hardly noticed that Zaira had ceased to appear with her laundry cart. Even when the maid brought it to my attention, I took the dereliction as one of Zaira’s vagaries and told myself that her life, as she had reminded me more than once, was her own business.

Then one day when Zaira’s affairs were the farthest thing from my mind, I was interrupted at my desk in the Palazzo Colonna by a caller. I could tell by the distaste with which the flunkey pronounced the word “caller” that this surprise visitor did not live up to his standard. “Just the type a Jewess would drag in,” I could almost hear him say to himself as he announced my guest. It is always the underlings who cling fastest to snobbery.

Now this mysterious guest appears. He is someone I have never seen. Medium height. Swarthy. Corsican, perhaps, with Herculean shoulders and very big feet. Scruffy to be sure but with a most engaging smile.

“Forgive the intrusion, madonna.” He removes his cap respectfully.

I forgive him at once and inquire his business.

“A delicate matter, concerning my friend Dido.” He seems actually embarrassed. “She has taken herself to the Hospital of San Giacomo.”

“San Giacomo?” I cannot believe what I am hearing.

“Last week she went blind. I reached my hand out to help her and she hounded me out of the house. Then, while I was out, she hired a litter and took herself to that pesthole of a hospice at Santa Maria Nuova. It took me until today to find her. She is lying in a long room with fifty other prostitutes on a straw pallet drenched with piss. Oh, madonna, if you ever loved her, get her out of that sewer.”

“What must I do?”

“All that is needed is a doctor’s permission and a place where she will be cared for, a haven . . .”

The haven I could and would supply. The doctor’s permit was not so easy to come by. Judah could have written such a document handily. But Judah was somewhere between Italy and Portugal. And my brother Gershom was hibernating in the Ferrarese countryside.

Considering who else I could enlist in Zaira’s cause, I thought at once of Madonna Isabella. She was the most powerful person I knew and she sat in a suite of rooms less than a hundred steps from me.

Without even asking the page at the door to announce my presence, I pushed my way into the little sitting room that served as her dressing room and, begging her pardon most humbly, requested her help in a matter of life and death.

What I presented was a colored version of Zaira and her affairs. Zaira’s story, after all, was not a matter of my authorship and I felt no shame in tailoring the tale to the lady’s taste. Throughout my recital I referred to Zaira as my nurse, painting her as a woman of uncommon virtue with whom life had dealt harshly (all true), and managed to abridge certain details such as the fact that Zaira had been blinded by the French disease and was now dying of that affliction. Eyes ruined by years of embroidering in bad light seemed a much more appealing detail. Mind you, knowing Madonna’s fascination with celebrated personages, I did cobble up as tasty a dish as I could out of Zaira’s servitude to Imperia and Messer Agostino Chigi. Chigi was dead. How could gossip hurt him now?

I must have done a fine job of sweetening my tale, for when I came to Zaira’s present pathetic condition Madama, her eyes quite misty, volunteered her interest. “We are touched by the story of this unfortunate widow, Grazia, and would help her if we could. But how? Shall we send our steward?” She rejected that idea with a nod of her head. “No. What is needed is a man of authority and presence. I have it. My kinsman Lord Pirro of Bozzuolo is in Roma at this moment conferring with the Holy Father. Soldiers know how to accomplish these things, do you not agree?”

In my many weeks in her service this was the first mention I had heard of Lord Pirro. Now she simply let the name fall at my feet like a rose.

“Yes, Lord Pirro is definitely the one to take care of this matter,” she went on. “I will send for him at once. And you must go home and make a room ready to receive the invalid. Lord Pirro will bring her to you before this day is out. You can depend upon it.” Then she added, “One can always depend upon Lord Pirro, Grazia.”

The litter that brought Zaira out of the hospice arrived at the Portico d’Ottavia long after you were asleep. Just as well. The bundle of bones under the dirty blanket was not a sight I would wish you to see. When I bent over to lift the black veil that covered her face, Lord Pirro reached out to hold me back.

“Believe me, Grazia, it is better if you do not look,” he warned. But I thrust aside the restraining arm, drew back the veil, and saw what words can barely describe . . . wide, staring eyes sunken into what once had been a face but was now a mass of running sores oozing pus and blood. Almost imperceptibly, the mouth moved. Simply a back-and-forth sawing of the jaws. No sound. But enough to tell me she wished to speak.

I felt for her hand under the blanket, not even bothering to brush off the army of fleas that attacked my arm when it reached into their stronghold. Mindless of the vermin, I began to stroke her arm and to murmur words of which I have no recollection. And after a while she began to respond with sounds even more incoherent than mine, mutterings and mumblings interlaced with bits of prayer played against a constant iteration of my name . . . “Grazia. Grazia. Grazia.” And finally, a sentence: “Thank God you came to me, my little Graziella.” Mark me. No one wants to die alone.

Sometime during that long night a basin was brought and her poor wasted body washed and the flea-filled blanket exchanged for clean linen. After that I remember a pair of powerful arms lifting up the fragile body and carrying it into a small anteroom, where I laid myself down alongside, the better to hold her in my arms.

As dawn was breaking she sat up as if resuscitated and asked in a perfectly clear voice, “Am I forgiven?”

“Of course you are,” I reassured her. “God has mercy. He forgives.” At a loss for words of comfort, I riffled through my mind. “The Lord is my shepherd . . .” The Psalm came to me unbidden. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . .” Before I came to the end, a tap on the shoulder alerted me that this life — so entwined with mine for so many years and in so many ways — had ended.

All through the long night I had felt the life oozing out of Zaira’s worn body, draining my own vitality with it in some kind of sympathetic union. Now a strong, callused hand took hold of mine and I began to feel a steady current of strength flowing back into me. Eyes closed, I clung to the vital force as I allowed myself to be lifted up and carried to my bedchamber.

Need I tell you more? Lord Pirro was back under Judah’s roof, back in my heart, in my arms, in my bed. Time enough for shame tomorrow.

I awoke in a sea of pleasure, with a muscled arm holding me safe as in a cradle. Then I remembered where I was and whose arm it was, and like Eve at the instant she bit into the apple, I knew at once the corruption of my body and pulled up the quilt to cover my nakedness.

“Do not start off this day by shaming your body or our love, Grazia, I beg you.”

I dared not look at the speaker.

“Allow me to feast my eyes for just one moment more.” He always seemed to be asking for just one something — one look, one hour, one moment. Still I made no move to stop him when he slid back the coverlet and once again exposed my nakedness. I may be an adulteress but I am not such a hypocrite as to deny by day that which I condone by night.

Once or twice I made an effort to disengage, but the power of our passion held us both in thrall to the point of total exhaustion. Finally toward nones we fell back for the last time on linens by then soaked through with the sweat of our labors.

We did not awake until the bells chimed for vespers. When we did, Lord Pirro announced without any preamble, “You must marry me, Grazia. There is no other way for us.”

I made a vain effort to protest. I spoke of Judah, whose absence in my cause had given us this opportunity. I spoke of ingratitude. I protested that I could not steal away from Judah in the night like a thief.

“Write him a letter,” was the implacable answer.

Dismiss Judah from our lives with a stroke of my pen? At the very moment that he was on an errand of mercy to save my brother’s life? It was unthinkable. The dissolution of this marriage, if it was to be, must be discussed, planned, prepared for. I owed Judah that. “I need time,” I explained.

“You are not prepared to entrust your life to me, is that not the sum of these excuses?” he demanded in his usual forthright way. And I could not deny it.

“For your lack of faith in me, Grazia, I have no remedy. After what I did to you in our youth, I can expect no better. But if you believe that it is all tumbling about in the grass with me, you are wrong. Perhaps it was true once, but the years have taught me lessons. To prove it, I wish to declare my intentions toward your son. When we marry, I expect to adopt the boy and bring him up as my own. For I love every part of you, Grazia, including everything that you love.”