The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (85 page)

To Madama the Colonnas are the real villains of the piece. She will never forgive Vespasiano for breaking faith with the Pope. “When I think that I have promised my beautiful niece to that dishonorable cur . . .” she raged. It was too late to break off the marriage agreement but she vowed that she would refuse to attend the wedding. Then she added, quite proud of herself, “One must maintain some principle.” As though refusing a wedding invitation ranks as a major act of defiance. If this travesty of ethics is what we get from a woman who has enjoyed the finest moral education in Italy, what can we expect from the European rulers who were not exposed to the humanism of Vittorino’s school?

Judah is right, I thought. This palace — this world of pomp and
lusso
— is maintained by compromise and opportunism, the worst place to bring up a child. I made plans to spirit you out of this sink and back to the Portico d’Ottavia the moment the Colonnas were safely gone from Roma. But before I could commandeer a
bravo
to accompany us, Madama summoned me. She has read my mind, I thought. But no. She simply needed my services to whip up dispatches to her son and her brother telling them of Cardinal Colonna’s one-day campaign.

“And mind you, he did not even trouble himself to apologize for upsetting my household and disturbing my rest.” I remember the outrage in her voice as she dictated.

“There is something of the brute in these Colonnese, Grazia,” she remarked thoughtfully. “With all their pretensions to ancient lineage, they are at heart bandits from the hills who cannot resist a call to pillage and rapine.”

Note that nowhere in this outpouring of indignation did Madama talk of relinquishing the cardinal’s loan of his palace for the duration of her stay in Roma. That idea never came close to her mind. It is so pleasant and comfortable here in the Palazzo Colonna with its delightful gardens. And the alternative — her son-in-law Urbino’s palace, low-lying and damp without a garden to speak of — would not do, not at all.

Long after her letters were dictated the lady continued to fulminate against the Colonnese, but the tirade was finally brought to a close by a yawn. “I am tired, Grazia. So must you be.” She raised her hand to her brow. “Rest awhile. I will do the same.”

I moved quickly toward the door. But no sooner had I reached the portal than I was recalled.

“I am remiss. How could I have forgotten? Your son slept under our roof last night and I did not even inquire after him. Was he comfortable in his little trundle bed? I hope it was not too short to accommodate his frame. Since I have never seen the boy, I have no way of knowing his height. How old is he now?”

“Ten years,” I replied.

“Does he resemble you or his father?”

“In certain respects, both; in some, neither.”

“Hmm.” Madama knows when she is being put off. “I hope the young man will forgive me for not welcoming him myself on his first visit to our court, but the events of yesterday . . .” Her hands fluttered. “Perhaps next time . . .”

I drew a breath of relief.

“On the other hand he might take it as a sign of my disrespect for you and his father if I did not welcome him personally.”

“Not at all, madonna. He will understand,” I hastened to reassure her.

“No. It is not right. I must see him and greet him if only for a moment. Quickly, Grazia, fetch the boy.”

What you remember of that interview is the gracious princess on the raised gilt chair that she affects even in her dressing room . . . her welcome, her warmth, her gracious invitation to come to the palace any time, even to attend her fencing school.

What I remember is how she beckoned you closer, ever closer, and how, when you were no farther than three feet from her face, she pulled up her spectacles, attached them to the bridge of her nose, and murmured, “Let me see your eyes.” Those eyes. Bluer than cornflowers. A dead giveaway.

“And when did you say you were born?” she asks.

You, already half a courtier through some combination of observation and blood, do not remind the lady that you never did say when you were born. Instead, you answer courteously, “I was born in the year 1516.”

“Ah yes, the same year as the battle of Marignano.”

“Oh no, madonna,” you correct her, overproud of your fine memory just like your mother. “I was born in 1516. The battle was fought at Marignano in 1515. I know because my father was wounded there while in the service of the King of France.”

“In 1515, of course,” the lady concurs graciously. “I remember being told of Maestro Judah’s wounds and of how he was carried home more dead than alive just after the battle, carried all the way to Venezia.” She pauses. “And you were born in the year 1516, some nine months later . . .”

Her voice trails off into a knowing smile.

FROM DANILO’S ARCHIVE

TO THE ESTEEMED MARCHESANA ISABELLA D’ESTE DA GONZAGA AT ROMA

Illustrious, Brave, and Honored Mother:

You are quick to inform me of the Colonnas’ dastardly attack on the Holy Father — for which I thank you many times. But nowhere in your dispatch do you speak of plans to leave Roma. I agree with you that Pompeo Colonna is a pig and that his brother Vespasiano is a cur. But with all respect, Mother, the point of the exercise is that the Emperor has his eye on Roma.

Wishing not to alarm you, I may have spoken too softly of the German hordes camped in my territory these past months. Trust me, the rumors you hear are only too true. Georg Frundsberg does keep knotted at his saddle side a silken rope with which he intends to hang the Holy Father. To him, the Pope is the Antichrist. Yes, Mother, the commander that the Emperor has sent down into Italy to save us is a flaming, believing, bloody Lutheran! He worships two idols: his feudal lord, Emperor Charles, and his spiritual lord, Martin Luther; for them he is prepared to sacrifice fortune, honor, his very life.

This is a man out of the Dark Ages, a knight the like of whom we in Italy know nothing. He has mortgaged all of his lands in order to mount this campaign with no help from the Emperor. The whole of his personal fortune has gone into this expedition. Listening to him talk, it is as if we were living five hundred years ago and he was setting off on a Crusade to the Holy Land.

Let others disdain his barbarian ways. I do not. I urge you, Mother, remove yourself from his path, for he is a prodigious force entirely capable of overrunning this peninsula like a tidal wave. Let me remind you that his men are Protestants and bear no respect for a Catholic princess. To them, you are simply a rich marchesana loaded with clothes and jewels and
molti soldi.
Your fame, which has spread throughout the world, has made you a tempting target.

Go anywhere — to Urbino, Pesaro, Venezia, wherever pleases you if Mantova no longer does — but leave Roma now, for the sake of a son who loves you more than he loves his own life.

(signed) Fed. G. at Mantova.

January 3, 1527.

56

J
udah 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.”