The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (39 page)

A strange question. I stepped closer, the better to probe the eyes, those mirrors of the soul. Deep-set and rimmed with dark circles, they seemed to me to reflect some inner anguish. As for intelligence, I could not make a guess. Whatever lay behind that impassive gaze was hidden from me.

“As you see, Medina, my wife is a serious young woman not quick to make decisions.” Judah put his arm around the boy in a fatherly manner. “Run along now, but make sure to be on hand tomorrow morning before the bell tolls matins.” And with a gentle pat from his new master the boy was gone, leaving me full of questions.

I did not have to wait for an answer. Judah was only too eager to tell me the story of the de Cases family, and took it up the moment the boy had left us.

These unfortunate people were a remnant of that horde of Jews exiled from Spain the previous year by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, he told me.

“A group of these refugees has settled at the bottom of our street in one of those tiny houses on the riverbank,” he explained. “Many of them had risen high in the Spanish realm not only as physicians but as tax-farmers and advisers and familiars of the court itself. They were caught completely unprepared when the order came to expel the Jews.”

I found it difficult to believe that these refugees had no notion of their impending disaster — particularly if they had been so close to the court — and said so.

“No doubt they fell into the trap of believing that such a thing could not happen to them. To other Jews, perhaps. But not to them,” he responded. “The tide of Jew-hating rises and falls like the sea itself. When it floods we Jews ask ourselves, Why me? Why here? Why now? Whereas the real question is how can any Jew who makes his home upon a Christian promontory ever believe himself beyond reach of the tides?”

“I have never seen a Spanish Jew before,” I remarked. “Are they all so sallow? And do they all wear black and smell of garlic?”

“They are Spaniards, my dear,” Judah answered with a smile. “Garlic is like mother’s milk to them. But out of deference to you I will give Medina some powerful mint to chew when he is in your presence. Will that suffice to raise him to your standard?”

“My remark was not intended as a criticism, honored husband,” I lied. In truth there was a smell about the young Spaniard much more subtle than garlic that went against me.

“I am delighted that you find him pleasing . . .” (I had never said I found him pleasing.) “For you and he have much to offer one another.”

“Is he to teach me to eat garlic and look solemn?” I asked.

“It is you who are to teach him,” Judah answered, as pleased as if he had presented me with a bauble. “He is to be your pupil. The boy is all but unemployable here from his lack of training in vernacular Italian and I cannot imagine a better tutor for him than your learned self, my little wife. You are to teach him Italian.”

Until that moment, I had gobbled up whatever texts came my way like a starving man who fears he may never get another meal. But the true scholar consumes a text the way a deer ruminates her food, chewing it slowly, regurgitating it, reflecting upon it, and only then consuming it. That done, he takes the process one step farther, and after he has analyzed his food for thought, finds ways to manifest its essence to others. This I would try to do for Medina de Cases.

Now as you know, there are but two masters of the vernacular language: Dante Alighieri and Boccaccio. I leaned toward Dante, the loftier poet. But Judah persuaded me that Boccaccio’s more earthy tales might have a greater appeal to Medina than Dante’s terza rima. And his judgment proved doubly apt. Not only did Medina take to Boccaccio at once but the first text we chose, Boccaccio’s tale of the merchant Landolfo who is taken by pirates en route to Amalfi, described almost precisely the ordeal that the de Cases family endured during their flight from Spain.

As the boy explained to me, his family too had set sail on a fragile craft — a mother, father, and three brothers forced aboard at sword point by Spanish soldiers with neither food nor water enough to feed them. En route to the Amalfi coast, they, like Landolfo, ran into a great storm which made the waves run mountains high. Forced into a tiny cove, they too were taken over by the Genoese, “a race by nature rapacious and greedy of gain,” according to Boccaccio. By then the de Cases family was reduced to a father and two sons, one brother having died of drowning and the mother of a fever at sea. Now these three survivors were robbed of the last of their ducats and every other small thing that they possessed by the Genoese pirates. They themselves were locked into the hold of the pirate carrack to be sold as slaves when the ship reached the slave market at Constantinople.

In Boccaccio’s tale, there comes a violent spasm of the sea which, he tells us, smites the carrack with great force against a shoal, cracking her apart at midships. And after a long night clinging to a plank in the raging sea, the merchant Landolfo is rescued by the old women of Corfu.

“But that is what happened to us,” Medina gasped. “We too were captured by the Genoese, then a great storm cracked their ship in two, just as the poet tells it. And the Corfu women rescued us from the sea. That poet is a great seer.” Either that or, what seemed likely to me, the rough waters off the coast of Amalfi attracted pirates in Boccaccio’s time as they do now. And the old women of Corfu are not unaccustomed to finding human flotsam on the beach when they go out to gather firewood in the morning. Still, the eerie similarity between the tale I had selected and the true tale of the de Cases’ escape from Spain did promise a comradeship I had not anticipated when I first met Medina. In that spirit I presumed to ask after his brother, Bartolomeo. “Where is he now?” I inquired.

“Dead,” he answered. “Killed here in Firenze last year at Passover for desecrating a statue of the Virgin. The doctor told us that he was out of his head when he smeared the Virgin with shit. The seawater had infected his mind. But the
bargello
said that Christ could forgive anything except an insult to His Mother. They brought my brother to the
bargello
’s jail and hung him out the window by his feet. My father took me to see him hanging. He had no ears, no hands, only holes with blood dripping out of them onto the stones.”

This horrific tale he related to me as if giving street directions or enumerating an inventory, without a tear or a break in his voice. Thus died my hopes of camaraderie with Medina de Cases.

Happily, Judah’s next effort to provide me with companionship proved much more successful. From the first day we settled in Firenze, invitations had arrived constantly for us to dine with this one or to attend the bar mitzvah of that one’s son or the wedding of the other’s daughter. All these Judah refused without consulting me. Now, in an abrupt shift, he announced that we would be going to the country villa of the Bonaventura family to celebrate the feast of Purim, a feast often referred to as the Jewish
carnevale
. What I discovered at the Bonaventura celebration was that in Firenze, Jews who follow the humanist way have added their own pagan coloration to the feast of Purim, making it as much a celebration of Bacchus as of Queen Esther.

Much as he loathes strange beds, Judah agreed to depart for the Bonaventura villa in the afternoon before the feast and remain through the following night, a huge concession for him. In addition, he had himself fitted for a mask. When Medina saw his master put the thing up against his face I thought the boy would faint from astonishment. Apparently Spanish Jews do not indulge themselves in the
carnevale
revels that Italian Jews enjoy. Judah says it is because we are so much closer to the pagan culture that spawned these rites. I say it is because the Spaniards are a low, doleful people who dress in black, never smile (even when smiled at), and glory in pain rather than in delight, and that like us the Spanish Jews emulate their Christian hosts. So it is, I say, that our Purim resembles
carnevale
and theirs an auto-da-fé.

The Bonaventura family kept their farm — the Florentines all call their country villas “farms” — in the Mugello district about half an hour’s brisk ride from the city. As we rode, Judah kept up a running commentary on the sights as we passed them.

“The villa on the crest of the next hill is the Strozzis’ place.” He indicated a rambling group of low buildings ahead. “Look to the right. See the little shrine. It marks the beginning of Pala Strozzi’s farm.”

“But it is no farm. It is a vast holding. It is a grand estate,” I protested.

“The Florentines prefer to call their estates farms. They find it less ostentatious. Besides, these villas are genuine agricultural enterprises. This place of Strozzi’s is no idle hunting fief like those
delizie
you see in Lombardia. A place like this yields more than enough wine and oil to supply all the family’s needs, with plenty left over to sell for profit.”

Indeed, the land on both sides of the road stretched out as far as I could see in straight, rows of espaliered grapevines and even the groves proved to be of olive wood. Very neat. Doubtless very profitable. But I preferred the dense hemlock growths of the Mantovana, whose only profit was to give shade and shelter, and the bosky perfume of the deep forests of Lombardia. Where were the birds and snakes and rabbits and all the other creatures who find refuge in the wild? And where were the secret springs, once sacred to the gods?

“But where is nature in all this?” I asked, half to myself.

“What you see is nature tamed,” Judah answered, his eyes bright with enthusiasm. “This is nature as the ancients treated it. Horace’s Sabine farm, Cicero at Tusculum taught us to civilize nature in just this way.”

Like many other things Florentine that excited Judah’s admiration, the charm of the idea eluded me. I could find no relation between these well-run agricultural enterprises and Horace’s farm or Cicero’s. What was so noble about transforming wild nature into a grubby commercial enterprise for the profit of people who already had too much money?

Mind you, not all the farms in the Mugello were equally sumptuous. As we rode along the quiet country road, Judah pointed out to me a small property called La Costa that belonged to Cristoforo di Giorgio, the doctor, and another more modest one belonging to Nando, the stonemason.

“Only in Firenze does every citizen have his chance at the good life,” he intoned as he swayed from side to side on the donkey the Bonaventuras had thoughtfully provided for him. On this point I did not find it difficult to meet him. I have never lived in a place where Jews were treated more equitably than in Firenze under the Medici. Judah and I were provided for as well as any scholar and wife in the peninsula. And the Bonaventura family was permitted to live the life of the aristocracy in every respect. As evidence I give you the grandeur of their “farm” as it presented itself to my eyes that day.

The Bonaventura villa was an imposing brick structure with a colonnaded central portico which qualified as a farmhouse, I suppose, by virtue of its lack of turrets, gun emplacements, and the other military accoutrements of a castle. It was bordered by a meadow on one side, a vineyard on the other, a fenced kitchen garden behind, and, Judah pointed out, several hectares of hunting land beyond that. Apparently the Florentines did admit wild nature to their world, but only on condition that it occupy its proper place in the balance of things and suffer itself to be rigidly contained.

The entire Bonaventura clan was on hand to meet us: Diamante; her husband, Isaac (whom she called Isaachino in a most familiar way straight to his face); his parents; and several aunts and cousins and brothers and sisters I never did succeed in getting to know. Diamante took me in tow the moment we arrived, linking her arm with mine in a most sisterly fashion, and barely gave me time to visit the water closet before she spirited me off on a tour of the place. The plumbing astonished me. To have a private water closet piped out into the yard is extraordinary enough, but to have one in the country!

The estate was palatial, but palatial in that sly Florentine way that makes them refer to their
delizie
as farms and to their princes as ordinary citizens. In just that spirit, Diamante’s proudest exhibit turned out to be not the stables or the horses or even her pet falcon but her market garden.

“My husband gave this garden to me as my own territory,” she announced proudly as she led me into the walled enclosure. “And I also claim the profits from my little holding. For, as I said to Isaachino, if I am to have the responsibility then I must also reap the benefit. Here, taste this.” She pulled up a bunch of spinach. “Have you ever tasted spinach crisper or more mild?”

I confessed that I had not.

“That is because I use sheep manure on it. Horse manure turns vegetables strong. Did you know that?”

I confessed that I did not.

“You northerners do not love the land as we Tuscans do,” she declared, as if stating an incontrovertible fact.

“But that is not true.”

“Oh yes it is. My husband, Isaachino, has been all over Europe and he tells me that only here in Toscana do patricians toil on their land the way we do.” Then to demonstrate she yanked up her brocade
gamorra
, fell down to the earth on her knees, and began to dig around two long lines of slight green blades that had just begun to poke up through the soil. “When these ripen I shall send you some.”

“Thank you,” I replied courteously. No doubt about it, the girl was sincere. But I could not reconcile this peasant grubbing in the earth with the elegant huntress who had recently abetted my escape from her gilded prison.

“You do know what this is, do you not?” she teased, holding up a bit of green she had plucked.

“To be candid I do not.”

“Come down here with me then. Smell and you shall know. Come now. Do not be concerned about your skirt. Hike it up, like I do. That way the only thing to suffer will be your knees and you can get the soil off in your bath. You do bathe, do you not?”