The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (12 page)

7

T
he renowned Leone del Medigo arrived at my sickroom followed by a much smaller retinue than had accompanied him on his visit to Uncle Joseph. Only my father and La Nonna, Aunts Dorotea and Sofronia, two servants, and Zaira accompanied him.

Taken by a fit of shyness, I buried my head in my pillows at the sight of them.

“I hear you have not been well of late, Madonna Grazia.” His voice came to me in a tone quite unlike the resonant one he had employed when addressing the
famiglia
, a low tone meant for my ears alone, which won me over at once.

Without being asked, I turned my face from the pillow and looked up into those heavy-lidded, all-seeing eyes.

“May I try to help you overcome your debilitation?” he asked with an air of grave courtesy owed to a duchess at the very least.

I bobbed my head up and down to signify my agreement.

“Very good. Now then . . .” He turned to the assembled company. “You may go about your business, all of you. But you . . .” He pointed to Zaira as if he had selected her quite at random. “You will please stay in the room for modesty’s sake.”

They stood rooted to the spot, not so much recalcitrant as stunned. To dismiss La Nonna in such a manner was unheard of. But he appeared to be quite unmindful of the irregularity of his behavior. He simply repeated, “Go now, all of you. Out!” — like a kindly schoolmaster shooing his charges out to play.

Of course, they went. Certainly his fame as a healer lent him authority. But it was his fame as a scholar that gave him
gravitas
. Why else do we train physicians at universities but to add wisdom to their skills and thus to distinguish them from surgeons, who are, after all, nothing more than butchers of human bodies?

Mind you, it did not detract from the great man’s presence that he knew how to dress to perfection the part of the celebrated physician-scholar. No shabby or threadbare dog fur for Messer Leone. Only the finest ermine trimming for his capacious robe, a full-length garment of rich black stuff trimmed with bands of scarlet. On his fingers, heavily begemmed rings. And on his feet, gilded spurs like a knight’s. This was the imposing personage who sat down beside me on the bed and asked after my state of health.

“Do you suffer pain?”

I answered shyly that I did not suffer pain.

“Lassitude? Cramp in any limb? An ache in the belly?”

“Only this wretched nausea,” I explained. “And then I vomit.”

“In the morning or evening? Or at dawn?” he asked, waiting patiently for my answer and listening attentively when I gave it. This scrupulous attention to the patient formed the core of Judah’s famous “bedside manner,” sought by princes and kings, an intensity of interest rivaled only by the rapt attention of a lover in contemplation of his love. And, as with all Judah’s patients, it brought out such trust in me that I found myself blurting out before I knew it the fear that had been gnawing away in me since my malady began, and which I had confided to no one.

“Do you think I have gravel and stones like Uncle Joseph?” I asked him. “Or a tumor in my belly? Is that why I am wasting away?”

“A tumor? Not likely. Growths and crystals rarely appear in people as young as yourself. How old are you, little madonna?”

“My name is Grazia, sir,” I replied, as I had been taught to do. “And I am nine years old . . . almost.”

“My name is Judah.” He did not volunteer his age. No matter. Anyone over fifteen years of age was old to me.

“Now that we have introduced ourselves,” he resumed, “we will get down to business. In a moment, I will ask for a sample of your urine. There is much to be learned from that . . .”

“And my blood, sir. Will you bleed me?” I asked, uninhibited now in the expression of my secret fears. “Will you cut into my veins . . .”

“I don’t believe so,” he answered quite matter-of-factly. “The urine sample will tell me what I need to know. And an examination, of course.” He gestured to Zaira to pull back the coverlet. “You have my word, I will not hurt you.”

The examination was indeed painless. Even more remarkable, it was not humiliating. Judah did not touch my body with love, as the sentimental would have it, but with respect. And even when he probed my most intimate orifices, he performed that examination with such care that I did not — as is almost always the case with medical examinations — feel I had been violated.

When he finished, he ordered Zaira to cover me again and asked for a basin so that he might wash his hands. Now we were ready for the next phase: giving up the urine sample. Another potential humiliation. For try as I may, I could not squeeze out more than a drop or two. The damned stuff settled tenaciously in my bladder, refusing to come out no matter how I exhorted it. With a delicacy uncommon in physicians — or in men in general, for that matter — Judah chose that moment to leave the room, ostensibly to see to a remedy for Uncle Joseph but, in truth, to spare me the embarrassment of voiding my bladder in the presence of a stranger. Once he left, the task was accomplished expeditiously and I was able to greet him on his return with a full yellow beaker.

He went about his analysis of my urine in the same careful, patient manner that he had adopted when examining my body. First he placed the beaker directly under his nose and inhaled its aroma deeply. Next he dipped his finger into the liquid and dabbed a taste of it on his tongue; then another; and then another, licking his lips after each taste as if searching for some hidden essence.

Next, he poured a dram of it into a crockery dish and, withdrawing from his bag a vial of deep purple stuff, carefully poured exactly two drops of the purple liquid into the yellow. And he smiled when the mixture went green, just as the magician does when his turn is brought to a successful conclusion.

“I can assure you there is no tumor,” he announced after all this was done. “Nor is there gravel or stone in your belly.”

“But why then do I vomit up my food?” I asked.

“Ah, my dear.” He sat down beside me once again. “If I knew the answers to all the questions beginning with ‘why,’ I would be Jehovah Himself and not a humble physician.”

“But if you do not know what ails me, sir . . .” My voice trailed off. It seemed tactless in the extreme to say what was in my mind, that is, if he did not know the cause of my ailment, how could he cure it?

“Not to know the cause does not mean that one cannot effect a cure,” he admonished me.

This was a form of thinking I understood well from my study of Aristotle’s logic.

“How then shall you cure me, sir?” I asked, bolder by the minute.

“For one thing, I will prohibit all nasty-tasting medicines. No purges are to be allowed in this room. Not so much as a drop of cassia or rhubarb.” Now a pen was secured, and ink and vellum, and I was ordered to copy my own diet. It was my first task as a scribe. And I still remember how he led off, almost gravely, as if to underline the importance of the undertaking. Item — a daily addition of
galinga
for its stimulating and heating properties and to warm and comfort the brain. Item — cinnamon in the wine, for it greatly comforts both a cold and humid stomach and a cold liver and expels the humors of the stomach.

Here he added in his most matter-of-fact tone that a liberal intake of cinnamon would encourage menstruation. “And the sooner the better for your health and spirit, little woman.” I had no idea what he was talking about, never having heard the word “menstruation” before — it certainly had not come up in Aristotle, Cicero, and Pliny — and I was too embarrassed to ask the meaning of it.

There was also to be ordered for me a comfit from the apothecary called
tregea
. One dose a day, he explained, would encourage the flow of urine.

“Do you like fruits?” he asked.

I confessed that I did, mightily.

“Well then, write this: Almonds fresh and dried, as many as you will. Fresh and dried figs before a meal. Also grapes. But not afterwards. Melons in season before a meal. But” — he held his hand up in a commanding gesture — “be so courteous to me as to cast aside the fruits which are harmful —
baccelli
, apples, chestnuts, and pears.”

I gave him my solemn word never again to so much as look upon a podded bean or an apple or a chestnut or a pear, a vow which I have since broken more times than I have honored it; for I believe that no fruit of this earth is harmful in moderation, a point of contention between me and the great physician.

But at that first meeting there was nothing in him or his prescriptions that did not command my fervid obeisance. My faith was rewarded almost at once by a dramatic improvement in my well-being. And in addition, the effects of his visit continued to brighten my life long after his departure.

As if by magic, four new horses appeared in the stable and our daily rides resumed. The oiled cloth that covered the schoolroom windows was removed, letting in the sounds of birds and the rays of the sun and the whispers of the breeze. I was witness to that dramatic moment, for La Nonna, in a sudden reversal, decreed that henceforth the girls of the household were to be instructed in the Hebrew language and Judaic history and practice. Not Talmud, mind you. Girls had no use for the sacred law. And there was to be no Latin. Certainly no Greek. Nothing so arcane as Aramaic nor as frivolous as French. Those romances which Dante calls “the most beauteous fables of King Arthur” were condemned out of hand by my grandmother as “incredible French lies.” But I was back in the schoolroom. And, to add to the bouquet of my delights, La Nonna engaged that most excellent dancing master, Messer Ambrogio of Pesaro, who had served at the courts of Milano and Pesaro and had even been lauded in a terza rima poem by Filelfo of Firenze. The maestro came to us directly from the Estense
castello
, where he taught dancing to the Este children, Isabella, Beatrice, and the ducal heir, Alfonso.

Mind you, this particular blossom had its thorny side; for the appointment of Maestro Ambrogio was, in an offhanded kind of way, an insult to Zaira. She too was an experienced dancing teacher. And she had earlier offered her services to the household and been turned down.

My grandmother was nothing if not deliberate in her actions. She must by then have sniffed out the growing affection between my father and Zaira and I have no doubt that the wound to Zaira’s pride in the matter of the dancing lessons was the opening feint in a farther-reaching plan to sever this threatening appendage from our family group.

But La Nonna was a shrewd old campaigner. Secure in the knowledge that nothing could come of the affair until Papa’s year of mourning was up, she bided her time, waiting for the right moment to strike.

8

E
veryone knows that Jewish parents adore their firstborn son, often to the detriment of their other children. Yet, in the dei Rossi family it seemed that my father, the eldest, was despised by his parents almost to the point of loathing. I sensed that this unnatural malice had been provoked by an event of which I was ignorant. And to be sure, not long after we arrived at the Casa dei Rossi, my Aunt Dorotea inadvertently revealed in a dinnertime conversation that my father was not, after all, the eldest dei Rossi son. There had been another boy — the true firstborn — who died young.

Later my cousin Ricca, loose-lipped like her mother, let slip that a weakness for gambling had clouded Papa’s early life in Ferrara, culminating in some dreadful catastrophe she could not bring herself to speak of. But all the pieces did not fall into place until a crisis in the lives of Mantova’s Jews erupted which tore aside the curtain of secrecy that had hidden my father’s early life from my view, and exposed the entire sordid mess.

Duke Ercole d’Este was at the center of it. Just before the celebration of Chanukah, he decided, after several decades of benign tolerance, to reinstate the wearing of the yellow badge by the Jews of Ferrara. This badge, a large circle of cloth sewn to the outer garments of Jews to signify their race, was meant to warn the Christian population against the temptations of consanguinity.

Why did the Duke choose that moment to reintroduce the hated thing? More than likely, sheer whimsicality. I can attest to the vagrant impulses that run riot in the blood of the Estes. Our patroness has inherited a sufficient measure of the family capriciousness to give me ample proof of it. Or perhaps there was an actual cause. The rains had hit our territory with unaccustomed force that autumn, flooding the forests and ruining the hunting season. That whim of nature could easily have moved a prince who loved the hunt to vent his spleen on whatever target came to hand, such as the Jews. Whatever the cause, a
grido
reinstating the wearing of the badge was promulgated and the
parnassim
of the Jewish community of Ferrara were soon at our portal begging my father to intercede for them.

To my surprise, my grandfather refused even to consider the proposal. “If the Duke will not be moved, he will not. And that is the end of it,” he announced to the five men and the rabbi who had come to beg help.