I did not fail her, at least in the matter of promptness. The next afternoon, I presented myself as commanded, and the servants’ door was opened by an ancient hag. The hag’s little eyes were as mistrustful as if she knew every shameful thing about Venice, and she admitted me to the house as distastefully as if I had been one of the worst. She led me upstairs, along a hall, pointed a withered finger at a door, and left me. I knocked at the panel and the Dona Ilaria opened it. I stepped inside and she secured the latch behind me.
She bade me be seated, and then she walked up and down before my chair, regarding me speculatively. She wore a dress covered with gold-colored flakes that shimmered like a serpent’s scales. It was a close-fitting dress and her walk was sinuous. The lady would have looked rather reptilian and dangerous, except that she kept wringing her hands the while, and thus betrayed her own uncertainty at our being alone together.
“I have been thinking about you ever since last night,” she said. I started to echo that, wholeheartedly, but I could not make my voice work, and she went on. “You say you ch-choose to serve me, and there is indeed a service you could do. You say you would do it for love, and I confess that arouses my … my curiosity. But I think you are aware that I have a husband.”
I swallowed loudly and said yes, I was aware.
“He is much older than I, and he is embittered by age. He is j-jealous of my youth and envious of all things youthful. He also has a violent temper. Clearly I cannot enlist the service of a—of a young man—not to mention enjoy the love of one. You understand? I might wish to, even yearn to, but I cannot, being a married woman.”
I gave that some thought, then cleared my throat and said what seemed to me obvious, “An old husband will die and you will still be young.”
“You do understand!” She stopped wringing her hands and clapped them, applauding. “You are quick of intellect for such a—such a young man.” She cocked her head, the better to look admiringly at me. “So he must die. Yes?”
Dejectedly I stood up to go, supposing that we had agreed that any yearned-for connection between us must simply wait until her bad-natured old husband was dead. I was not happy at that postponement, but, as Ilaria said, we both were young. We could restrain ourselves for a while.
Before I could turn to the door, though, she came and stood very close to me. She pressed herself against me, in fact, and looked down into my eyes and very softly inquired, “How will you do it?”
I gulped and said hoarsely, “How will I do what, my lady?”
She laughed a conspiratorial laugh. “You are discreet besides! But I think I will have to know, because it will require some prior planning to ensure that I am not … . However, that can wait. For now, pretend that I asked how you will—love me.”
“With all my heart!” I said in a croak.
“Oh, with that, too, let us hope. But surely—do I shock you, Marco? —with some other part of you as well?” She laughed merrily at what must have been the expression on my face.
I made a strangled noise and coughed and said, “I have been taught by an experienced teacher. When you are free and we can make love, I will know how to do that. I assure you, my lady, I will not make a fool of myself.”
She lifted her eyebrows and said, “Well! I have been wooed with promises of many different delights, but never quite that one.” She studied me again, through eyelashes that were like talons reaching for my heart. “Show me, then, how you do not make a fool of yourself. I owe you at least an earnest payment for your service.”
Ilaria raised her hands to her shoulders and somehow unfastened the top of her gold-serpent gown. It slipped down to her waist, and she undid the bustenca underneath, and let that drop to the floor, and I was gazing upon her breasts of milk and roses. I think I must have tried simultaneously to grab for her and to peel off my own clothes, for she gave a small shriek.
“Who was it taught you, boy? A goat? Come to the bed.”
I tried to temper my boyish eagerness with manly decorum, but that was even more difficult when we were on the bed and both of us were totally unclad. Ilaria’s body was mine to savor in every inviting detail, and even a stronger man than myself might have wished to abandon all restraint. Tinted of milk and roses, fragrant of milk and roses, soft as milk and roses, her flesh was so beautifully different from the gross meat of Malgarita and Zulià that she might have been a woman of a new and superior race. It was all I could do to keep from nibbling her to see if she tasted as delectable as she looked and smelled and felt to the touch.
I told her that, and she smiled and stretched languorously and closed her eyes and suggested, “Nibble, then, but g-gently. Do to me
all
the interesting things you have learned.”
I ran one tremulous finger along the length of her—from the fringe of closed eyelashes down her shapely Verona nose, across the pouted lips, down her chin and her satin throat, over the mound of one firm breast and its pert nipple, down her smoothly rounded belly to the feathering of fine hair below—and she squirmed and mewed with pleasure. I remembered something that made me halt my tracing finger there. To demonstrate that I knew very well how to do things, I told her with suave assurance, “I will not play with your pota, in case you have to pee.”
Her whole body jerked and her eyes flew open and she exploded,
“Amoredèi!”
and she flailed angrily out from under my hand and well away from me.
She knelt at the far edge of the bed and stared as if I were something that had just emerged from a crack in the floor. After vibrating at me for a moment, she demanded, “Who
was
it taught you, asenazzo?”
I, the ass, mumbled, “A girl of the boat people.”
“Dio v’agiuta,” she sighed. “Better a goat.”
She lay down again, but on her side, with her head propped on a hand so she could go on staring at me. “Now I really am curious,” she said. “Since I do not have to—excuse myself—what do you do next?”
“Well,” I said, disconcerted. “I put my. You know, my candle. Into your uh. And move it. Back and forth. And, well, that is it.” A wondering and terrible silence ensued, until I said uncomfortably, “Is it not?”
“Do you truly believe that is all there is to it? A melody on one string?” She shook her head in slow marveling. I began miserably to collect myself. “No, do not go away. Do not move. Stay where you are and let me teach you properly. Now, to begin with …”
I was surprised, but pleasantly so, to learn that making love should be rather like making music, and that “to begin with,” both players should commence the playing so far away from their main instruments—instead, using lips and eyelashes and earlobes—and that the music could be so enjoyable even in its pianìsimo beginning. The music swelled to vivace when Ilaria introduced for instruments her full breasts and softly rigid nipples, and teased and coaxed me into using my tongue instead of fingers to pluck the notes from them. At that pizzicato, she literally gave voice and sang in accompaniment to the music.
In a brief interval between those choruses, she informed me, in a voice gone whispery, “You have now heard the hymn of the convent.”
I also learned that a woman really does possess such a thing as the lumaghèta of which I had heard, and that the word is correct in both its meanings. The lumaghèta is indeed a thing somewhat resembling a small snail, but in function it is more like the tuning key that a lutist employs. When Ilaria showed me, by doing it first herself, how to manipulate the lumaghèta delicately and adroitly, I could make her, like a veritable lute herself, hum and twang and ring delightfully. She taught me how to do other things, too, which she could not do to herself, and which would never have occurred to my imagination. So at one moment I would be twiddling with my fingers as on the frets of a viella, and the next I would be using my lips in the manner of playing a dulzaina, and the next I would be flutter-tonguing in the way a flutist blows his flute.
It was not until well along in that afternoon’s divertimento that Ilaria gave the cue for us to join our main instruments, and we played all’unisono, and the music rose in crescendo to an unbelievable climax of tuti fortìsimi. Then we kept on bringing it back up to that peak, again and again, during most of the rest of the afternoon. Then we played several codas, each a little more diminuendo, until we were both fairly drained of music. Then we lay quietly side by side, enjoying the waning tremolo after-echoes … dolce, dolce … dolce …
When some time had passed, I thought to make gallant inquiry: “Do you not want to jump around and sneeze?”
She gave a slight start, looked sideways at me, and muttered something I could not hear. Then she said, “No, grazie, I do not, Marco. I wish now to talk of my husband.”
“Why darken the day?” I objected. “Let us rest a little longer and then see if we cannot play another tune.”
“Oh, no! As long as I remain a married woman, I shall remain a ch-chaste one. We do not do this again until my husband is dead.”
I had acquiesced when she earlier set that condition. But now I had sampled the ecstasy that awaited, and the thought of waiting was insupportable. I said, “Even though he is old, that might take years.”
She gave me a look and said sharply, “Why should it? What means do you propose using?”
Bewildered, I said, “I?”
“Did you intend j-just to go on following him, as you did last night? Until perhaps you
annoy
him to death?”
The truth finally began to filter through my density. I said in awe, “Do you seriously mean he is to be killed?”
“I mean he is to be killed seriously,” she said, with flat sarcasm. “What did you think we have been talking about, asenazzo, when we talked of your doing me a service?”
“I thought you meant … this.” And I shyly touched her there.
“No more of that.” She wriggled a little away from me. “And by the way, if you must use vulgar language, try at least to call that my mona. It sounds a
little
less awful than that other word.”
“But am I never to touch your mona again?” I said wretchedly. “Not until I do that other service for you?”
“To the victor the spoils. I have enjoyed polishing your stilèto, Marco, but another bravo might offer me a sword.”
“A bravo,” I reflected. “Yes, such a deed would make me a real bravo, would it not?”
She said persuasively, “And I would much rather love a dashing bravo than a furtive despoiler of other men’s wives.”
“There is a sword in a closet at home,” I muttered to myself. “It must have belonged to my father or one of his brothers. It is old, but it is kept honed and bright.”
.“You will never be blamed or even suspected. My husband must have many enemies, for what important man has not? And they will be of his own age and standing. No one would think to suspect a mere—I mean a younger man who has no discernible motive for taking his life. You have only to accost him in the dark, when he is alone, and make sure of your strike so he does not linger long enough to give any description—”
“No,” I interrupted her. “Better if I could find him among a gathering of his peers, those who include his actual enemies. If in those circumstances I could do it unobserved … But no.” I suddenly realized that I was contemplating murder. I concluded lamely, “That would probably be impossible.”
“Not for a g-genuine bravo,” Ilaria said, in the voice of a dove. “Not for one who will be rewarded so bounteously.”
She moved against me again, and continued to move, tantalizing with the promise of that reward. This aroused in me several conflicting emotions, but my body recognized only one of them and raised a baton to play a fanfare of salute.
“No,” said Ilaria, fending me off and becoming very businesslike. “A music maistra may give the first lesson free, to indicate what can be learned. But if you wish further lessons in more advanced execution, you must earn them.”
She was clever, to send me away not completely satiated. As it was, I left the house—again by the servants’ door—throbbing almost painfully and lusting as if I had not been satisfied at all. I was being led and directed, so to speak, by that baton of mine, and its inclination was to lead me back to Ilaria’s bower, whatever that might require of me. Other events seemed also to be conspiring toward that end. When I came around from the back of the block of houses, I found the Samarco piazza full of people in a buzzing commotion, and a uniformed banditore was crying the news:
The Doge Ranieri Zeno had been stricken by a sudden seizure that afternoon in his palace chambers. The Doge was dead. The Council was being summoned to start voting for a successor to the ducal crown. The whole of Venice was bidden to observe a three-day period of mourning before the funeral of the Doge Zeno.
Well, I thought as I went on my way, if a great Doge can die, why cannot a lesser noble? And, it occurred to me, the funeral ceremonies would entail more than one assemblage of those lesser nobles all together. Among them would be my lady’s husband and undoubtedly, as she had suggested, some of his enviers and enemies.