The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (11 page)

Now it was his turn. He took as his text the line from Genesis: God formed the rib he had taken from the man into a wife. Staring fixedly into my eyes, he asked, “Why was Eve not formed out of man’s head?”

Then, before I had a chance to open my mouth, he answered his own question. “In order that she might not be clever and learn more than was good for her,” came his reply.

Beside him, La Nonna nodded her approval.

“And why not out of his eye or ear?” he continued. Then again without waiting for my answer: “So that she should not be curious, wishing to see and hear everything.”

As before, La Nonna shook her wattles in furious approval.

“And why was she not formed out of his mouth?” Again he answered his own question. “She was not formed out of his mouth so that she might not be too talkative. Or out of his heart so that she not be passionate. Nor was she formed out of his hand or foot. And why? In order that she might not touch everything nor go everywhere. It was to avoid all of these pitfalls that Eve was formed out of Adam’s rib, a part that is hidden from sight and must serve as an emblem of modesty and virtue. Forget the mind,” he concluded, waving his ignorance like a banner. “Women do best to keep their bodies in continual travail. Work, work, and more work. Make use of the needle and go to the loom for your recreation. Too much learning has already led you to pride and disrespect. Now you must learn to subdue the flesh.”

With this he leaned back in his chair, exhausted from the expenditure of such profound mentation.

But my grandmother had barely begun to exhaust her intellectual resources. “It is books and study that have corrupted your virtue, child,” she explained in a quiet, even sympathetic tone. “Books destroy a woman’s brains, who has little enough to begin with. And it is the solemn duty of all who are entrusted with the care of little girls to minister to them with the rod . . .” Here she nodded in the direction of a clutch of birch rods hanging on a hook behind her. “Yes, the rod,” she gestured to Giorgio — “applied in the greenness of their years so as to refashion their evil nature into a mold more pleasing to Him.”

On cue, the steward, a strapping fellow with a forearm as big as a ham hock, stepped forward and took me from the rear, pinning my arms behind me. I did manage to get in one good kick, which made him curse but gained me only further binding, this a rope he kept dangling from his belt that he employed to tie both my ankles and my wrists.

So now I was bound hand and foot, immobilized, with no recourse left me but to shout. And that I would not do. For I feared that once I opened my mouth, I would release a flood of tears. So I simply glared silently at the old woman, whose eyes glittered now with all the zeal of one of the Pope’s inquisitors. “Bring her to me, Maestro Giorgio,” she ordered.

Now, Giorgio dragged me across the floor and laid me against Grandmother’s bony knees. Then, as majestically as if he were a king, that monster turned to the wall and, making certain that he was in my full sight, selected one from among the birch rods hanging there and held it up.

My grandmother refused his choice with a decisive shake of her head. Thus he was encouraged to select a heavier stick. This one must have measured at least the girth of a man’s ring finger.

Having selected the whip, Giorgio then dipped it into a basin filled with salted water, the better to make the welts sting. Again La Nonna nodded her silent approval.

He stood waiting his final orders.

When they came, the import shocked all other thoughts out of my mind.

“Strip her,” the old woman ordered.

“Papa. Mama. Save me,” I shouted, but to no avail. The steward, well practiced in this procedure, neatly took up the hem of my
gamorra
and raised it high over my head, exposing my bare back to the rod.

Now I did indeed feel the symptoms of terror: a falling of the stomach as if to the center of the earth and a terrible shortness of breath.

After an eternity of time, I heard my grandmother order, “Stroke the first.”

The first stroke hit my back. A scream escaped me inadvertently.

The second stroke drew blood. As I crouched there against my grandmother’s knees, I felt a rivulet of the warm stuff trickle down between my legs.

More than anything I wanted to fall in a swoon and lose my senses. But God showed me no mercy. I remember it all: the terrible third stroke, more painful than the other two in that it intermingled its own pain with that of the two before it; the untying of the rope and the modest drawing of my chemise over my bloody ass; no word from either of those two monsters but for a curt “Off with you now” from La Nonna; and finally the painful limp down the corridor to my room, where I burrowed deep into the pillows of my grand canopied bed like a wounded cur.

After some time Papa found me out. Even though some part of me longed for comfort, I could not bear to be looked at, and when he made a move to pull back the coverlet I screamed out a “No!” so piercing that he stopped the effort at once and crept out.

Later that evening he returned, with questions. But I had no heart for a dialogue. I merely placed my hand on his mouth to silence him as I had seen my mother do. I had nothing to say to him. He who should have protected me against his bullying parent had left me instead to her mercy. I never forgave him for it. I do not say that I never loved my father after that. Or even that my love for him lessened. But never again was he a god to me or any kind of a hero.

Each evening he would come directly from prayers and sit silent, squeezing my hand from time to time in a mute plea for forgiveness. But I, stony-hearted, withheld it.

One evening, he brought with him a pearl pendant that had belonged to Mama and fastened it around my neck on a gold chain. Whereupon I unlatched the clasp and placed the offering back in his hand without a word.

Zaira was the one who rescued us from this sad impasse. It was she who suggested to Papa that he ought to read to me. Of course, he took up the suggestion with alacrity — anything to avoid my reproachful eyes. And I responded in spite of myself for he had cleverly selected my favorite — the
Aeneid
.

“This is a tale of arms and of a man,

The first to sail from the land of Troy,

And reach Italy, displaced by destiny . . .”

At first I remained aloof. But by the time Papa reached Juno’s declaration of war against Aeneas, a passage dear to me, I found myself reciting along with him.

“I, vanquished? I, abandon the fight?

The fates forbid me. They never stopped Minerva

from gutting the Argives’ fleet by fire

and drowning all of them . . .”

Who could resist Virgil’s oratory? By that conduit the terrible silence between me and my father was bridged and we took to passing the book back and forth and reading alternate passages to each other every evening.

It was during one of these readings that I first noticed Papa stealing glances at Zaira and she at him. Through my sleepy eyes and ears, I discerned the current that flowed between them, sluggish at first but rising to great turbulence as the weeks went by.

Alert behind my closed eyes, I could feel on my own skin the flush that suffused Zaira’s flesh. And my sharp ears caught the crackling hush in the air between their murmurs.

I never saw them touch. I do not believe they ever did embrace. For two worldly people — and both had seen and done much in their lives — they were remarkably innocent in pursuit of their love . . . much good it did them. All kinds of lewd behavior was later hinted at by La Nonna and her cohorts. But that was yet to come.

For the time, the affair was secret to all but me. In my dreams I saw Zaira lying beside Papa in Mama’s old bed in Mantova, the two of them as beautiful as ancient statues in their nakedness. Those were sweet dreams to me.

But by day my spirit languished. Since the day of the beating I had been possessed by intermittent nausea and an inability to keep solid food on my stomach. Never a plump child, I had begun to resemble a wraith clad in my black mourning garment. Still, I could not abide the thought of being seen by one of La Nonna’s doctors. Each time Papa brought up the subject, I wept so wildly that he did not have the heart to pursue it.

My salvation came from a most unexpected quarter: Papa’s ailing brother, Joseph, whom I hardly knew as he had been confined to his room by chronic ill health since we arrived. Then one day he took a sudden turn for the worse and on his account the finest doctor in all of Italy was invited to attend him. “The finest.” That is how my grandmother characterized the prodigy when she requested the entire
famiglia
to be present for his examination of my uncle.

As long as he was not about to lay hands on me, I was eager to get a good look at this paragon reputed to combine the genius of physician, philosopher, and scholar within his one sagacious person. I had heard him lauded for the philosophical
dispute
he engaged in all over the peninsula as frequently as for his miraculous cures. And all this was doubly amazing since he had not yet attained the age of thirty years.

The prodigy did not disappoint. A giant of a man, his
berretta
barely cleared the lintel when he entered the sickroom. Even La Nonna’s hefty Giorgio, who ushered him in, was dwarfed by the august presence presented to us as Leone del Medigo.

His first move, after making a courtly bow to the crowd assembled to see him do his magic, was to stride to the window and throw open the shutters. The effect was as if a thunderbolt had hit the room. Everybody knew that Uncle Joseph’s windows must never, never be opened for fear that in his weakened state a chill might carry him off.

Aunt Dorotea rushed across the room and fairly threw herself at the window in an effort to shut it tight once more. But the great physician prevented her by simply placing his massive girth between her and the opening and thus barring her way to the shutters.

“But he will die, he will die of the chilly air,” she cried.

“Nonsense, woman,” he corrected her, leaning out to fasten the shutters so that they would stay open. “The fetid air in this room will kill him faster than any draft. Let the poor man breathe.”

“But maestro, my husband’s weak chest . . .” she protested.

“No buts, madonna,” he cut her off. “God has given us the early-morning air so that we may breathe in its freshness. We must allow the patient to do God’s will. From now on, Joseph is to sit in a chair outside in the morning sun each day for an hour.”

“But he cannot walk,” Aunt Dorotea protested.

“My son’s limbs are weak,” La Nonna added.

“He can walk if you help him to walk,” the physician retorted firmly. “What you are helping him to do now is to become an invalid by keeping him a prisoner in this bed. Like all other members of the human body, the limbs are meant to be used. When Nature sees that any member no longer serves the body, she causes that useless thing to atrophy. If you wish to keep your faculties, you must exercise them. Use it or lose it,” he quoted from the Latin, then immediately focused his penetrating stare upon La Nonna once more and asked in his most stern manner, “Why do you suppose that men no longer have tails or horns?”

“That is God’s doing, maestro,” she replied. “And not for us to question. But I hear little of God from you. Where is He in all this talk of Nature?”

“Remember that He created Nature in all of her wonder in six days,” the physician replied patiently, as if instructing a backward child. “And that He looked around on the seventh day and was pleased with what He saw. What He saw, madonna, was Nature. And, since Nature pleased Him so well, do you not agree that Nature should please you and me equally well?”

After that a small, almost cursory nod was all it took to clear the room. Aunt Dorotea was allowed to stay, and one serving maid. The rest of us filed out obediently, my grandmother as meek as the rest.

The moment we were alone together, Zaira embarked on a paean of praise to the great physician — his sagacity, his kindness, his authority. “If ever I have need of a doctor, I pray to God to send me Messer Leone. Did you see his eyes, Grazia? So wise. So kind.”

Of course I had noticed those extraordinary eyes. But what impressed me most was the way he stood up to La Nonna, and I said so. “He wasn’t disrespectful, either. Nor disputatious. Yet he made her look a perfect fool,” I noted.

“Such a giant of a man he is, yet so gentle.” Zaira continued her rapture. “I wager you he has the touch of a woman.”

“How can you tell that?” I inquired.

“Did you see the way he held his hands? Drooping slightly. That always indicates a gentle touch in a man,” she informed me. “A doctor like that would never hurt his patient. And they say that when it comes to diagnosis he is the finest physician in all of Italy. It was Maestro Leone, you know, who treated Lorenzo dei Medici in his last attack of gout and stopped the pain. Such an honor for the Jews.” She paused and stared at me fixedly. “Yes, Leone del Medigo is a physician I would trust with my life.”

Her words echoed a chord already plucked within me. This amazing giant would cure me of my dyspepsia and melancholy. I knew it.

“I would indeed be a fool to refuse if he agrees to see me,” I told her with full confidence. “Please take him the message that I humbly request his attendance.”

Then I sat back to await the prodigious physician in whom I had recognized my guardian angel.