The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (93 page)

Together the two women walk the perimeter of the huge tapestries, which, laid side by side, leave only a narrow margin of the tile flooring as a walkway. Occasionally one or the other will comment on the vitality of a gesture or the perfection of a line. Mostly, they remain silent in the presence of such beauty.

At last the sputtering candles announce the end of the show. Regretfully, Isabella orders the tapestries to be rolled up and locked away. Far from exhausting her, this orgy of visual pleasure has calmed her spirit and brought the light of life back into her eyes. She appears to be sated and utterly content, as if she had spent the long night in the arms of a lover.

The following evening, under Madonna Isabella’s personal supervision, a long caravan forms up outside the Colonna Palace, cordoned off from the crowd by two hundred of Ferrante Gonzaga’s most loyal
bravi
. Ever attentive to the smallest detail, Isabella sees to it that Grazia dei Rossi and her son, Danilo, are accorded a position of honor hard by her litter, “to help protect me from any harm that may befall,” she explains to a beguiled Danilo. As always, the lady assumes that any mark of her favor is its own reward. In fact, what the forward position offers is the first look at unspeakable horror.

Five days of Imperial occupation have transformed a city of palaces and pleasure gardens into a charnel house. The streets are strewn with bodies, many of them headless or limbless; palaces are reduced to piles of rubble, blocks of houses to smoldering ashes. More pitiful even than the dead are the survivors who wander through the streets dazed — fathers searching for daughters, husbands for wives, jostled and pushed about by street wenches parading in ermine, toothless hags bedecked with coronets, and soldiers reeling about drunk on wine or blood or both.

The route to the port takes Isabella’s party into the Via Giulia, the broadest avenue in Roma. Tonight Isabella’s cortege can barely squeeze its way between the piles of detritus that line the road on either side — beds and mattresses, broken pots, broken bodies, dead cats, all tossed carelessly into heaps during the height of the looting.

Straight ahead, blocking the road, a motley group of lowlifes cluster around a bonfire. Silhouetted against the wall of Farnese’s garden they make an eerie dumb show, dancing a jig around a figure hidden to Grazia’s eyes.

“Open your mouth to receive Christ’s nourishment, priest,” she hears. A space clears in the circle, permitting her to see one of the dancers stagger forward and proceed to urinate on a fat man with a crucifix around his neck who sits on the ground weeping.

Then comes the chant, “Drink, priest, drink. Drink the wine of the people.”

Grazia manages to keep her composure until the blasphemous ritual runs down and the crowd disperses. But farther along as Madonna Isabella’s party is crossing the Ponte Sisto, she makes the mistake of peering down at the Tiber, where a sight greets her eyes that shatters her composure. Directly under her gaze the nude body of a girl floats slowly by faceup, her long auburn hair fanning out behind her like a train, her young body skewered from her vagina to her mouth by a pike. She recognizes the girl at once as one of Domenico Massimi’s redheaded daughters, a young woman she had seen dancing at one of Madama’s fetes less than a month before.

“Don’t look, Mama.” Danilo turns her face away and places his arm around her shoulder to steady her. From then on, she walks with her eyes down.

At length the party arrives at the Ripagrande, where a group of barges stands ready to receive them. Now the pace picks up. The loading is accomplished expeditiously. Of all the party the only one who can bear to look back at the ruin of the once-great city is the youngest member, Danilo del Medigo. The despair that has taken root in the hearts of the others has not penetrated his. As the barge pushes off for Ostia, he turns to look at Roma for what may be the last time and salutes the city with a jaunty wave.

Sliding noiselessly across the glassy surface of the Tiber, Grazia is reminded of another escape by river. Will Ostia prove to be another Borgoforte? Will Messer Andrea Doria keep his bargain and have a vessel waiting for them at the dock to carry them out to the Tyrrhenian Sea? Or will their party be insulted, refused help, turned away?

Grazia reaches for her son and, wrapping him in the fold of her shawl, clasps him in a tight embrace.

When the refugees from Roma first began to arrive at the port of Ostia, the hands and hangers-on at the port rushed eagerly to the quayside to observe each contingent. That was before the people of Ostia realized that the Imperials had shaken these people loose of every ducat they possessed before allowing them to leave. Highly placed though some of them may have been — and might be again — they are at this moment just as much beggars as the lowliest derelict on the waterfront, with not a ducat among the lot to pay for a loaf of bread. Even worse, their presence constitutes a menace to the town.

Paolo, the porter, is one of the first to have perceived the danger of giving aid and comfort to the refugees. “What if word gets to the Imperials that we took their enemies into our homes or gave them food?” he put it to his fellows. “In war, a man can get strung up for aiding the enemy. Do we want to risk our lives for these Romans?”

In company with the others in the audience, Nobilia found her protector’s arguments persuasive. Why risk reprisals from the fierce landsknechts for offering
caritas
to their enemies? Besides, there is little point in soliciting clients if they cannot pay. So Nobilia has remained shut up behind a window at the inn, avoiding all contact with the tainted souls who stream forth daily off the barges that ply their way between Roma and Ostia. But now and then, for distraction, she does steal a peek at the collection of human misery that has washed up at the port.

Sitting sideways at her window, the better to see out through the crack she has opened between the shutters, Nobilia watches the day’s dismal parade. There is the usual complement of barefoot ladies and gentlemen with tattered
camicias
and slashed trunk hose. And she notes that today the armless and legless and noseless and earless are present in disproportionate numbers. Is it the Germans who cultivate this fancy for cutting off body parts or the Spaniards? she wonders. Most likely the Spaniards. Word has it that the Germans are more brutish, the Spaniards more cruel.

Her musings are interrupted by the glimpse of a golden head bobbing up and down on the deck of the barge tying up below. Fair hair is rare in these parts. And these golden curls, caught in the sunlight, are so beautiful. She draws her eyes into a squint, trying to make out the face beneath the curly thatch. Something about the nose looks familiar. She pushes aside the shutter and leans over the sill to get a good look.

Now she recognizes him. It is the page who came last autumn with the old Jew and the lady in the carriage. And there she is, the lady herself, not quite so grand now but not as bad off as some Nobilia has seen this past week. At least this lady has managed to hold on to her boots.

The boy and the lady descend from the barge and join a party of several others on the quay. As Nobilia watches, an even grander lady waddles down the plank and joins the party, a lady so grand that she keeps her entire face hidden under a long black veil. To give her passage across the quay, the group divides itself into two halves. It is as if Moses came back down to part the sea of people so that the lady could walk unimpeded to the door of the inn.

Before the grand dame reaches the portal the blond page pops up out of the crowd and with a deep bow and a flourish, throws open the door of the inn. Nobilia claps her hands with delight. She appreciates a gallant gesture.

The great lady is inside the inn now and Nobilia creeps out of her room and crouches at the top of the stairs to eavesdrop. The innkeeper claims to have no rooms. The lady calls him a liar. The innkeeper declares himself slandered and orders the lady off. The page marches up to face the publican toe-to-toe and demands an apology on the lady’s behalf. But before a fracas can develop, an old man wearing the chain of a steward shuffles his way forward swinging a velvet bag that jingles the tune of coin against coin.

To this accompaniment, the rooms materialize as if by magic — the attic for the men, the second floor for the ladies, and the innkeeper’s own room for the Marchesana and her attendants — all, including the host’s own, dank, dirty and dismal. But by now the party is so worn out by fatigue and fear that no one complains. They simply lay themselves down head to toe on their lumpy pallets and thank God for their deliverance, the Marchesana included.

After dark, when the refugees have settled into sleep and the inn is quiet, a perky figure darts into the hallway and skips up the stairs to the attic where men are lying all around on pallets, snoring. Silent as a cat, Nobilia slips under the blanket that covers all of Danilo except for his golden thatch.

“Shh . . .” she warns him when he stirs to the touch of her body. “I’ve come to carry you to paradise.”

“But I have no money for the fare,” he murmurs sleepily.

“Never mind,” she whispers. “We all must give a little bit of
caritas
now and then.”

63

M
ay 20, 1527

Huddled in a dank corner of the Marchesana’s room in the Atlantis Inn in Ostia, Grazia writes: “Five days in this filthy pesthole held captive by storms so fierce and winds so wild that even Andrea Doria’s Genovese seamen fear to set sail. Madama reminds me how much better off we are in port — even in Ostia — than we would be at sea. I wonder. This place has the smell of death about it. I find myself making plans. Tomorrow I will consign to you, my son, the two items of value I am carrying with me, my portrait by Maestro Mantegna, which I wish you to wear rolled up under your
camicia
like a bellyband, and my
libro segreto
made for you to read when you reach manhood. Together, they constitute your inheritance. Common sense tells me that nobody ever died of cold and lice. Still, I will turn over the portrait and the manuscript to you tomorrow.”

Grazia is not the only one to have lost heart in Ostia. After five days without fresh air or water on a diet of moldy bread and maggoty meat, locked up with a greedy-gut host who has begun to charge even for washing water, most of the members of the Marchesana’s party have fallen into despondency, personal filth, foul temper, or some combination thereof. The only one who remains in perfect spirits is young Danilo.

“You can be proud of your boy, Grazia,” Isabella tells her secretary. “He is a model of fortitude for us all.” And indeed, the boy goes about with a smile on his face, whistling all day long.

What can there be in this hellhole to keep him so happy? wonders Grazia. Isabella, a light sleeper, has more than a suspicion. But she keeps her counsel.

On the seventh day of their Ostian captivity, the sun breaks through and calms the Tyrrhenian waters. Christians though they are, the entire party sends up a cheer for Apollo.

“My prayers have been answered,” Isabella tells Grazia as they clamber up the gangway of Andrea Doria’s four-master the
Hesperion
. “Next stop, Civitavecchia. Then Genova. And finally, Mantova and home.” She crosses herself out of reverence for the god who has arranged this itinerary for her.

It does appear that God has answered someone’s prayers. But did He answer my call, Grazia asks herself, or was it Madama’s Christian prayers that moved Him to call off His storm and give us passage out of Ostia? This is no idle question from a woman preparing to desert her own God for a more expedient one.

Aboard the
Hesperion
on the twenty-third day of May, Grazia writes:

“Apparently apostasy does not come easy to me. Madama, who I think has never suffered a qualm of conscience in her life, attributes my perturbation to the rotten eggs we were fed at Ostia. Now that we are safely under way, she assures me, the sea air will cure my malady. But what if it is not a disorder of the gut that disturbs me? What if I am suffering from a crisis of the soul?”

She stops. Something about this sentence bothers her. Crisis of the soul? “The sea air seems to have infected me with a touch of grandiloquence,” she continues. “In plain language, living through the sack has shaken my faith in the rightness of my decision to cut myself loose from my past. And seven hellish days in Ostia have done little to restore my confidence in the venture. Can a woman who abandons her God expect anything but sorrow and disappointment in repayment?”

As if in response to her question, the wind shifts abruptly, overturning her ink bottle and making a large black stain on her cloak.

Summoned by the winds, the storm quickly reappears, even wilder than before. This time no one in the party has the stomach to face it, not even the indomitable Isabella. Crowded into the airless saloon of the vessel, the refugees must deal not only with the press of bodies that threatens to suffocate them and the crash of thunderbolts that deafen them but also with the relentless roll of the ship as it tosses from side to side, sickening the most robust stomachs and turning the ship’s mess into a sea of vomit.