The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (19 page)

Then, in the second year of our stay in Bologna, an event happened that transformed me overnight from a mousy, domestic creature into a positive monster of worldliness and vanity. All it took was a short letter. The news it contained snatched me up out of exile and disgrace. Within days after that letter arrived, I was bound for glory.

13

A
lthough the Dei Rossi couriers plied the canals between Ferrara and Bologna regularly on banking business, we had received only one personal message during the first year of our exile. On that occasion, Papa opened the envelope joyfully, hoping, no doubt, for some word of forgiveness. Instead, what he read to us was a brief, cold note to the effect that his brother, our Uncle Joseph, had been called to God, leaving my Aunt Dorotea widowed and my cousins fatherless. Having lost a parent myself, I knew I ought to feel compassion for their loss, but when I sat down to write my condolences (at Papa’s instruction) I found it difficult to pretend a warmth I did not feel. Jehiel wrote too, as did Papa himself. None of us received the courtesy of an acknowledgment.

The next personal document arrived at the beginning of the second year of our Bolognese exile — January of 1491. Who had been called to God now? I wondered as we stood by waiting for the solemn announcement. But this time Papa’s face brightened as he read. And by the time he reached the end of the letter, he was smiling.

“Well, my dear,” he addressed me. “It seems that you are about to be honored by the Jews of Ferrara.”

“Do not josh me, Papa,” I begged him. “Tell us what has happened. Who else is dead?”

“No one is dead,” he replied. “This letter concerns you, Grazia. It seems that you have been selected to portray Esther, Queen of the Jews, in the wedding procession of young Alfonso d’Este next month.”

“What about
me
, Papa? What part do I play?” Jehiel asked.

“No mention of you, my boy,” Papa answered. “Nor of me. Only your sister is to be honored.”

“If you and Jehiel are not included, then I won’t go either,” I announced.

“Now, now, let us not be precipitate,” Papa cautioned. “It will only be for two weeks — three at most.”

“I don’t want to go,” I answered. “Not even for three days. I hate that house and I hate —”

Papa’s warning look stopped me from finishing the sentence.

“Allow me to tell you how this invitation came about,” he coaxed with what was, for him, remarkable patience. “Then you may take a decision. But remember this, my daughter . . .” I heard an unmistakable trace of the old steel in his voice. “No matter what you decide, it will be up to me, finally, whether you go to Ferrara or no.”

I knew him too well to resist when he took this tone. Meekly, I answered, “As you wish, honored Signore Padre,” and took my place on the stool at his side.

“In two months’ time,” Papa resumed, “the Duke’s eldest son, Alfonso, is to be married to young Anna Sforza, the bastard daughter of the Duke of Milano.”

“I remember this Alfonso d’Este, Papa,” Jehiel interrupted. “He was playing tennis with his two sisters the day we went with you to Belriguardo.”

“You remember them, do you?” Papa seemed surprised.

“Of course we do, Papa,” I assured him importantly. “We saw them playing tennis the day you played Z —” I caught myself short and Papa continued with his explanation.

“Well, the boy you saw is getting married on the twelfth of February and this letter says that the Duke has asked the
Wad Kellilah
for a Jewish queen to grace his son’s procession as one did his own wedding procession some twenty years ago.”

“But why me, Papa?” I interrupted. “Why must I go? Can they not get some other girl to play the queen?”

“Reading between the lines, I gather that the elders of the community have proposed other maidens for the honor, but” — he turned to read directly from the letter — “‘. . . no other maiden will suit the Este duke but Grazia dei Rossi. And it is to enable said Grazia to reenter the Ferrarese community that we hereby offer amnesty from her excommunication.’”

“I do not want their clemency if it does not include you and Jehiel and little Gershom. Either forgive us all or none,” I declaimed in my most Didoesque fashion.

But Papa was having none of it. “Does it occur to you, my dear,” he inquired derisively, “that there are more consequential matters in this world than what you wish or do not wish . . . such as what the Duke wishes, who holds the lives of two hundred Jews in his hands?”

“I do not trust those elders, those
parnassim
,” I muttered. “That letter is probably a counterfeit.”

“No matter what you think of them, daughter,” Papa replied evenly, “I cannot imagine them to have concocted this scheme out of cunning; for surely their last wish is to pay respect to the daughter of a man so disgraced as myself. No. The Duke’s will is what prevails here. And, as I have reminded you many times, Jews do not say no to dukes.”

“I understand, Papa. But I still do not wish to go. I am afraid.”

“Afraid? You?”

“When we traveled here from Ferrara, you and Jehiel and Gelsomina were with me. But now I will be alone. . . .”

“You have a point there.” Papa thought for a moment. “Yes, we must find you a companion. A protector.”

Jehiel sprang up at once and stood on his toes as tall as he could make himself. But Papa squelched the idea with a shake of his head.

“I have it,” he announced after several moments of thought. “We’ll send Zio Zeta along with you. He is the logical one.”

“
Lo zio?
” I couldn’t believe my ears. “But he can hardly see and he can’t hear without his trumpet.”

“He is good and kind and loves you as he loves himself,” Papa replied firmly.

When the old man was told the plan, he jumped as if stung by a bee, clasped his hands to his breast, and cried, “
Ferrara mia!
” with such a mixture of joy and pathos that there was no way to tell whether he was happy or sad to be going to the place.

When Papa brought out from the warehouse a monk’s habit and an ebony cross for him to wear as a foil against highwaymen, the old man donned it readily, twirled about daintily as if quite delighted with his new identity, and then suddenly clapped his hands to his breast and cried, “May God forgive me for my sin!”

My protection against thieves and rapists was a boy’s outfit concocted out of odds and ends of Jehiel’s wardrobe. Although two years younger than I, he was a sturdy boy almost up to my height, so that his shirt and trunk hose fitted me without a pin. But I refused the generous offer of the red
borzacchini
which he had kept with him long after he outgrew them. Knowing his great affection for those elegant boots, I contented myself with a pair of rough clogs that some poor boy’s mother had left in pawn with us and never returned to claim.

Thus disguised, Zio Zeta and I were mounted on a pair of mules one wintry morning bound for the southern terminus of the Reno canal.
Lo zio
jogged along the rutted road without a word of complaint. But when we reached the mooring dock at Corticella, he slid down off his mule, crawled onto the deck of the closest barge, and collapsed like a bag of bones, hugging the coal burner on the deck and refusing to eat, drink, even to relieve himself or move his bowels.

In vain did the barge captain warn him that we still needed many souls to fill the craft and that we might be moored there all the balance of the day — or longer. “You had better take refuge at the inn with the other passengers, Signore Padre,” he advised Zio respectfully. “There is a warm fire at the inn.”

But the old man refused to move. “No inns, for God’s sake,” he moaned, and curled himself up even tighter in his cassock.

By a stroke of good fortune, this standoff was interrupted when a pair of those religious women called Poor Clares who follow the teachings of Saint Francis approached the barge seeking passage along the canal. Now, with them to augment the group of pilgrims waiting at the inn, we constituted a party sufficient to fill up the vessel to the captain’s satisfaction.

Taking
lo zio
for a monk on account of his dress, these two nuns instantly dedicated themselves to the care of the old man, insisting that he share the soup they kept hot on a brazier and later covering him with one of their own blankets when the northern winds reached down into our bones.

At the sluiceways, when we were all forced out of the barge so that it might be towed through the locks by a team of horses — there seemed to be several more of these than I remembered from the previous time — the two sisters carried old Zio up and down the banks, an act of compassion I remind myself of when I become outraged by the bigots and seducers who display the underside of Christian monasticism.

There was no difficulty filling empty seats on the next lap of the journey. The slim barques that ply the shallow marshes cannot accommodate more than six on their two boards, and those are made sittable only by squeezing the passengers together like peas in a pod. Heedless of the shouts of the bargemaster,
lo zio
’s guardian angels bundled him aboard the sturdiest of the crafts and laid him down for a nap across the full horizontal expanse of one of the boards, leaving the other for themselves and me. Then, having said their beads, they wrapped their shawls around themselves and went off into a snooze, leaving the pilot furious but helpless to dislodge the old man from three paying seats and leaving me to my fancies.

That Duke Ercole d’Este had remembered me kept intruding on my thoughts. If he remembered me, he must be kindly disposed toward me. If kindly disposed, he might be amenable to an entreaty . . .

A plan began to take shape in my mind. I would contrive somehow to petition the Duke on Papa’s behalf. I would move his capricious heart and get him to force Papa’s reinstatement as he had mine. Quite taken with the role of Papa’s rescuer, I began to compose an oration that would capture the Duke’s attention with classical allusions and, at the same time, win his fickle heart with flattery as I had seen Papa do.

I must compare him with gods and heroes. But which ones? Caesar? Pompey? Hercules? Of course. Ercole is our Italian transposition of Hercules. That god was his namesake. Now what I needed was an instance of the god’s clemency; better yet, a moment at which he set himself against the world to right a terrible wrong. But all I could dredge up was a printed image seen fleetingly in some marketplace or other of the nude god posed between two half-dressed women, making his choice between pleasure and duty. Hardly apt for my purpose.

I never did find a suitable analogy. But the search through memory served to hold my attention for the journey through the bog, and before I knew it, we were being borne along the icy ruts of the road into Ferrara on a litter with runners — a sled.

It had been a frigid journey, especially the least piece on the sled, but no chillier than the welcome that awaited us when we arrived at the Casa dei Rossi after almost three days of arduous travel. We were hungry and stiff with cold. But neither food nor a warmer were offered by La Nonna’s steward, Giorgio. Taking his cue from his mistress, old Giorgio would do his duty by us but nothing more. So I crawled under the silk coverlet racked by hunger pangs and flooded with pity for poor little Graziella, scorned by her family, cast off like a leper without even a crust of bread for her supper.

Curling myself up into a tight ball, I squeezed my eyes shut and willed myself to sleep. But before Morpheus responded to my summons I heard a rustle, then a soft pitter-patter, then a whispered shush, and there in bed beside me was a little girl I had never seen before.

“I am your cousin Penina,” she introduced herself. “I have brought you something to cheer you. Courage must be rewarded.” Whereupon she held out a handful of sweetmeats, all of which she fed me without reserving even one for herself. Younger than I by two years, she had recently been adopted by my grandparents, she told me. “So now I am your cousin,” she informed me. “But, if you agree, we can also be friends.” And friends we became.

She had heard horrific reports of the rigors of the journey through the Ferrarese marshes — told with relish, she informed me, by various members of the
famiglia
. “They do not wish you well, Grazia,” she reported sadly. “But you will have your day when you ride through Ferrara on that elephant and leave them on the ground gaping.”

Elephant? Nowhere in the letter of invitation had there been mention of an elephant. But Penina assured me that the Jewish queen would indeed ride on one.

“The Duke insisted upon it,” she explained. “Years ago the Jews of Ferrara contributed some biblical queen on an elephant to his wedding procession and he wants nothing less for his son. Your grandfather ordered the beast all the way from Constantinople, together with its keeper,” she added.
Dio!
What was I in for?

Penina did not stay long with me that first time, but after that came to me every night, often carrying with her some tidbit from the kitchen. How she contrived to smuggle the stuff out I cannot imagine — La Nonna’s larder was better policed than the
podesta
’s prison. But Penina was full of spirit, and having picked me as a friend, stuck by me at great risk to her position in the
famiglia
. La Nonna, who had taken her in on a whim when her parents died, was quite capable of throwing her out if she did not suit the role of the grateful orphan.