The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (60 page)

They cheered again when the three twitching bodies were lowered into the flames. All of a sudden the rope that bound Era Girolamo’s arms to his upper body burst asunder and his arms swung forward and out as if to gather in every mortal being in the piazza. And the crowd dropped to its knees in terror amidst cries of “
Miracolo! Miracolo!
”

Diamante and I did not last out the spectacle. We survived the agonized jerks of the martyrs and the bloodthirsty howls of the crowd. But once the smell of burning flesh began to waft up toward us, Diamante ran off to the comfort of her scent bottle. And I followed her, happy to fill my nostrils with anything other than that rank, cloying odor. Three times she had recourse to the night pail to vomit up her disgust. Even then she remained bilious, which surprised me. Ordinarily, she had the constitution of a hog butcher.

“I am going to call Judah down,” I told her. “He can put a stop to this vomiting.”

“No.” She held her hand up weakly to stop me from going. “There is nothing he can do. I am like this every morning now.”

“Have you spoken to Judah about it?”

“There is no need. My malaise is only temporary.” She smiled. “I am pregnant, Grazia.”

“Pregnant?”

“Why so surprised, my friend? It is quite a familiar state for me.”

“Pregnant, yes,” I replied. “But sick, no.” Diamante’s effortless confinements had made her the envy of her circle.

“Ah, but this one is different. This one . . .” She placed her hand gently over her belly. “This child is a girl.”

“You went to the conjurer?”

“I need no magic man to tell me what I already know. She is a girl. And I love her as I never loved those boys. I even have a name for her. Fioretta. Little flower.”

“And if these auguries of yours prove wrong and she turns out to be a boy, you can call him Fioretto,” I joked. “That will certainly win him the envy of his playmates.”

But she was not to be deterred by my jest. “I know I must sound a fool to you, Grazia. But I tell you I
know
. Those boys grew in me like great turnips, as firmly anchored in the soil of my womb and as easy to pull out when they grew ripe. This one is shallowly planted. Every time I make a sudden move she jumps in my belly like a skittish fish. A sudden change of position, a blow however slight, any upset of my temper, causes her to quiver as if she has been jarred to her tiny roots. There will be no gallops for us this summer, my friend. I dare not even dance the
moresca
around the Passover table.” She clasped my hand tightly. “This one I love, Grazia. This one I love.”

The first things to be given up for little Fioretta were our daily gallops. “Remember what happened to the Queen of Portugal,” Diamante quoted her mother-in-law, but only half in jest now.

Next went our neighborliness. With cases of plague multiplying daily, Diamante felt she must leave her husband and take refuge in the country “for the sake of the little flower.” Ever generous, she invited me to join her there. But to desert Judah and my brother seemed to me a dereliction of duty, and neither of them would consider abandoning the city.

Watching Judah pursue his calling in those days was a revelation. Each day, he dressed neatly and close-shaven (for he maintained that contagion might nestle in body hair along with fleas) and went out on his rounds protected only by a fine cotton mask he had devised to cover his lower face. That and a talisman of sweet herbs hung around his neck were the extent of his precautions. When I suggested that he confine his visits to private residences and not expose himself to the contagion of the pesthouse, he replied that if I would agree to seek safety in the country he would do as I asked. But I could not bring myself to leave him and my brother. Yet every day the city became a more dangerous place.

In August, the
signoria
ordered a pit to be dug just outside the Porta Romano. The press of bodies had finally overwhelmed the gravediggers. From then on, all Florentines of whatever class or situation were buried in a single mass grave each day and a single funeral mass was sung daily for them all. Judah took it on himself to head up a group of volunteers to bury the Jewish victims separately and pray over them in the traditional way. To his surprise — although not to mine — Isaachino Bonaventura became his strongest supporter in this endeavor, sometimes neglecting to visit his pregnant wife in order to perform these odious duties.

When Gershom announced his intention of joining Isaachino’s cadre I objected with all my strength. He was exactly the same age you are now, hardly the time of life to be hauling around pestiferous corpses from morning till night. To my astonishment, Judah disagreed. “He will never become a man, no matter how many pages of the Mishna he commits to memory, if you do not allow him to exercise his virtue,” he insisted. And after that my two men left me each day to go out burying.

Each night, my fastidious brother arrived home smelling of rot and camphor. And each evening, we heated pot after pot of water and poured it over him and scrubbed at him with carbolic soap until I thought we would rub his fine pale skin right off his bones.

Next to him, Judah sat in another great tub, yawning and dozing through his cleansing like some Oriental pasha. Never before or since, I daresay, have those two been cleaner in the sight of God and man. But in spite of those who would tell us that those ablutions must have raised them to a safe place at God’s right hand — for cleanliness is next best to godliness — I knew that each day they went out to do God’s work, the risk of contagion grew. However, nothing I could say or do would move them from their self-imposed task and I, the least prayerful of women, was forced into the last refuge of the desperate: constant prayers to God to keep them both alive until an early frost put an end to the plague season. Perhaps He heard me. They survived.

I had intended to journey to the Bonaventura villa and be at my friend’s side for the birth of her child. But the little girl — yes, it
was
a girl — true to her whimsical nature, arrived long before the frost. Thus I did not see her until she was already a month old, a preternaturally quiet little thing with translucent skin who looked to belong more to the other world than to this one. But I was more concerned for my friend, suddenly transformed into a woman obsessed to whom nothing mattered except her motherhood.

By then the plague had subsided and Isaachino wanted his wife with him in town. But Diamante would not leave Fioretta. He could not understand her reluctance. After all, she had left her boys in the country for the early years of their lives and no harm had come to them. What was so different about this child?

The contention between them was exacerbated when Diamante’s mother-in-law discovered that she insisted on nursing the child herself, resorting to the wet nurse only when she came up empty.

“Her milk is not rich enough,” the old lady complained to me. “It is thin and blue, like the milk of a lady. What this child needs is a peasant girl whose milk gushes out like a geyser. My poor daughter-in-law has to squeeze hers out by the drop. Mark me, the child will grow up thin and sickly if this keeps up.”

“But Diamante is healthy, madonna,” I expostulated. “And perhaps if she drinks cow’s milk and eats butter . . .”

“She can drink herself drunk,” the old lady snapped back. “But she will never turn herself into a cow. Peasants are bred for that. We are not.”

At last a compromise was reached. The child and the wet nurse would both move into town. In addition to considerable gold, this maneuver entailed the uprooting of an entire family — for the wet nurse would not go without her own nursing babe and her young husband. But even with the wet nurse at hand to feed the babe, Diamante insisted that Fioretta sleep in a cradle next to her, and was up and down continually in the night fussing over the child.

“She hovers over that cradle like some dark angel, listening to the child’s breath,” Isaachino told me. “It is not natural.”

I assured him that the aberration was a passing one and urged him to hold his patience. But in my heart I wondered where it would all end. The small inner voice first heard by Diamante when her child was in the womb seemed to grow in its insistence with each day, until it was dictating her every move.

“It is love run amok like a cancer,” Judah said.

“But cancer kills,” I reminded him.

To which he gave no answer.

Within a week after Diamante’s removal into town, a messenger came to our door with an urgent call for Judah from the Bonaventura family. I awaited his return with mounting anxiety. When he came back hours later his face was ashen.

“I have terrible news, Grazia,” he began. “There is no way to soften this blow.”

“It is Diamante . . .”

“Yes, Diamante and the baby. And the wet nurse. And her own child. A cruel blow . . .”

“Tell me.”

Three times he took a deep breath and opened his mouth, only to close it again and shake his head. Then at last, with an enormous effort of will, he began his terrible story.

“I was called tonight to attend the wet nurse. A fever. Nothing much, it seemed. When I arrived she seemed fit enough. She was lying in bed suckling her own infant. But when I came close, I saw on her breast the sign of the . . .”

Don’t say it, I begged him silently. Make it not so.

“The tokens were there on the nurse’s breast. The woman is a tippler it seems. Every night after little Fioretta was put in her cradle beside Diamante, the nurse went out to some foul tavern nearby. She must have caught the disease there.”

“Does Diamante know her nurse has the plague?” I asked.

“She knows everything. And she has taken little Fioretta to her own breast once again and will not let the child go. It is certain death for her, Grazia. Fioretta had been sucking in the contagion every time she was put to the breast of the wet nurse. The child is doomed.”

“And Diamante?”

“Determined to die with her child.”

“I must go to her,” I mumbled.

“No, you must not. She is harboring the plague now. You go at risk of your life. She begs you not to come.”

“But I —”

“Your friend Diamante is very determined. She is removing back to the country so as not to infect others. Very likely she is gone from the city by now.”

“I cannot leave her to die alone,” I insisted.

“She forbids you to come, Grazia. You must respect her wishes. Besides, she will not be alone. I will be with her.” He took my hand and squeezed it. “I will be your representative. And I will make certain that she does not suffer unnecessarily. And that her wishes are respected, just as you would do.”

Still, I was haunted by the specter of my friend facing death without a loving companion to send her on her way. “Will Isaachino go, then?” I asked.

“No. Like you he insisted on it. But she prevailed over him. For the sake of the little boys. ‘Can I die peacefully knowing that I have left behind two orphans?’ she asked him. She is very clear in her head, Grazia. Very logical.” He shook his head, incredulous at such capacity in a woman. “And very brave . . .” he added quietly, blinking his eyes once or twice to rid them of moisture. “Also very wrongheaded and stubborn and foolish.”

Faithful to his promise, Judah went each day by horse to sit with Diamante and her babe, returning late each night stinking of the sulfur fumes he used to disinfect himself. Each night, he returned home with a bulletin. Little Fioretta was sinking. But peacefully. Still no signs of buboes on Diamante.

Then, one night, Judah did not return and I knew long before the messenger arrived the reason for his dereliction.

“I found the babe, Fioretta, in a coma when I arrived,” Judah told me when he came home in the early hours of the morning. “When I bent to examine the child, there were the tokens on Diamante’s breast. ‘The moment she draws her last breath I will die as well,’ she told me, quite calmly, not a quaver in her voice. And so she did. She and the infant departed this world at the same moment. I think that they will keep each other company in paradise. For I never saw such a beautiful death.”

“There is nothing beautiful about death,” I retorted with all the bitterness I felt. “Death is cruel. Arbitrary. Senseless. Unjust. Unbearable . . .”

“But we must bear it. For her sake. And for our own,” he answered calmly.

“How can we act for her sake? She is gone. Dead.”

“But her spirit remains in you,” he answered patiently. “And her last wishes must be respected. Would you not agree?”

To that proposition, I could not say no.

“She left a message for you. ‘Tell Grazia that she must take up life with renewed vigor after I am gone. For she must bear the child I lost, a girl child. And she must name this girl Fioretta. If she loves me, let her do that for me.’”

“She wishes me to bear a child?”

“She wishes us to bear a child. For her. A living memorial.”

“But it takes two to make a child,” I reminded him. “I fear my friend Diamante did not know what she asked.”

“I think she did,” he replied solemnly. “Yes, I do believe she did.”

“But I never said a word . . .”

He placed his fingers over my lips. “I know you did not betray me. But I think she knew nonetheless.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“The way she looked at me when she spoke of this child you would bear. And the fact that she asked me to swear to it.”

“And did you swear?” I asked.

“Most willingly. Such a charge from a dying woman has all the force of an instruction from God Himself. I could never disobey her wishes.”

Without a word being spoken, we knelt together and exchanged new vows of fidelity and fruitfulness.

There can be love without passion. That night when we lay down together, we caressed each other’s bodies for the first time. I felt . . . The word “vessel” comes to mind as we hear it in the Bible. Yes, I felt like a delicate vessel, precious, ordained to hold a life and consecrated to that purpose.

Next morning Judah suggested to me that we might do well to celebrate the true beginning of our marriage in a new place. I did not find it difficult to accede to his suggestion without argument. Even when it emerged that the place he had fixed on was Mantova, I did not dissent. “Whither thou goest, I will go . . .” I had finally taken to heart Ruth’s vow as a Jewish wife.