The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (74 page)

“Oh, that could never happen!”

“Oh yes it could,” he corrected me. “And my bones tell me it will. Today the Venetians say the sight of Jews is an offense to God. But I say that the sight of many people is an offense to men and that once you begin to enclose the outcasts in some place set aside, there is no end. For, even as a Jew is an offense to God, a poor man is an offense to one with a full belly and a madman is an offense to one who has all his wits about him.

“Here in this cursed year of 1516 the Venetians have put their Jews aside out of sight in an enclosure where they cannot offend the pious eyes of Christians. But Jews are not the only pariahs. Mark me, we will be followed by other despised groups. Would it not improve the landscape of the city if the citizens were not forced to smell the filth of the poor or to expose themselves to the anguish of the mad? Why not enclosures for them?”

There was a terrifying logic behind his argument that drove me to follow him down a dark path where I had no wish to go. I placed my hand on his arm in a pathetic attempt to stem the flow of his imaginings. But he was not yet done.

“I predict that as certainly as the night follows the day it will not be long before these pariahs — the sequestered ones — are seen to be the authors of their own misfortunes. That will be the means of perpetuating the enclosures. Mark me” — he was thundering now like an Old Testament prophet — “it will not be long before the victims of these sequesterments will be blamed for the crime of having brought misfortune upon themselves. They will be accused, jailed, whipped, like common criminals. After many decades — or centuries — they will be gathered up like a crop of rank weeds and burned.”

From where, I wondered, did such thoughts come to him, thoughts so morbid, so fantastic? It was too bleak a vision of the future for me. But that night I fell asleep wondering, Supposing what he foretells comes to pass? Who will want to live in such a world?

48

O
ur first months in Roma were all delight. The Tiber did not overrun its banks in 1516, so we were spared the annual flood. And Judah’s new patron, Pope Leo, received him with all the pomp and ceremony due a chief body physician. Unfortunately, the physician did not possess an instant cure for the Pope’s painful anal fistula; but he did concoct an unguent to calm the suppurating wound. For this the grateful patient rewarded him with an additional emolument, an appointment to the Pontiff’s own university, the Studium Urbanum.

Judah was only one among the many accomplished men attracted to the service of this magnanimous patron. As soon as the Pope was elected, he announced the appointment of two Latin secretaries, Pietro Bembo and Jacopo Sadoleto. Both were distinguished Ciceronian Latinists and between them they set the humanistic tone of the court. He enticed the singer Gabriele Merino into his service by making him an archbishop. From his predecessor he inherited the glorious duo Raffaello Santi and Michelangelo Buonarroti. Buonarroti’s tempestuous nature proved too much for the easygoing Medici pope. But Raffaello became the instrument he used to accomplish extensive improvements of the Vatican and of the city of Roma. Under Leo Roma shone like a beacon, beckoning every artist, poet, and humanist in the peninsula to join the ever-widening Leonine circle.

Even those of us on the periphery were touched. Buried in their dusty
cassone
, my heroines began to stir. “Release us, Grazia,” they whispered to me. “We are cold and stiff from this long interment. Every half-baked Minerva is allowed to warm herself in Leo’s sun. Why not us?”

I could not resist the call.

“Courage, Grazia,” I muttered to myself as I lifted the lid of the
cassone
, unopened since the day I had consigned my creatures to death rather than dishonor at the hands of Madonna Isabella and her henchman Equicola.

What did I fear? That the interred heroines would rise to revenge themselves for their long incarceration? Or that I would find them beyond resuscitation?

When I touched the pile of vellum leaves, wisps of pale dust rose as if from a desiccated corpse. But these bodies were not dead. Reading the pages brought them instantly to life. Before long my heroines had regained their former vitality and were pressing to have their stories presented to the world at last.

If ever there was a time and place for them, Leonine Roma was it. The city was teeming with enlightened printers and publishers. Surely there must be one among them willing to bring out my
Book of Heroines
despite its lack of patronage. Newly inspired, I set about to polish up my portraits, taking as my mentor in portraiture Maestro Mantegna. If my subject had a wart on her nose I would describe it. If she was fat I would limn in the folds. If she was a wanton I would list her lovers. With one toe rocking the cradle beside me as I worked, the work of revision became a joyful task. Never was a poet more inspired by his muse than I was by your wide, unblinking blue eyes peering up at me as I composed.

I also regained my brother in Leo’s Roma. By the time we took up residence in our new home under the ancient Portico d’Ottavia, your Uncle Gershom had established himself as an agent for the great Sienese banker Agostino Chigi, and was living across the Tiber on a property adjacent to Chigi’s newly built Villa Suburbana. Once we had settled in we urged him to join our household, but he quickly and decisively rejected the offer.

“Ser Chigi is always in fine spirits at the villa. The very sight of it sets him to smiling. In that benign mood he often stops to chat when he catches sight of me. Thus, living where I do in such close proximity to him when he is at his most expansive, I receive all the news of Roma firsthand.”

“Do I take it that getting the news of Roma is more consequential to you than being in the bosom of your family?” Judah inquired stiffly.

“For a banker, dear brother-in-law, the answer is a reluctant yes,” my brother replied cheerfully. “News is the lifeblood of banking. I would never have made my investments in the Campo Marzio had I not known in advance that the Pope was planning expansion in that area.”

“You own a palace in the Campo Marzio?” I asked.

“Not yet. But I do own land there which someday will be worth a fortune,” he replied with cool assurance.

He had good cause to be confident. Before the age of thirty, he had achieved by his own efforts a success unmatched by any Jew in Roma. Dressed in the finest brocades and velvets, treated by the Pope’s banker as an intimate, flattered and fawned upon by men twice his age, he had every reason to believe that his star would continue to rise forever. But will it? I wonder, sitting here in the heart of a city that is every day increasingly threatened with despoliation. My father always put his faith in movable property — bags of gems, easy to hide, easy to transport. I wonder if history will prove him a cleverer banker than his clever son.

Do you remember how sweet life was in our little house among the ancient pillars of the Portico d’Ottavia? True, the Tiber came much too close for comfort and safety. And the fish in the market below did stink in our noses when the wind blew in the wrong direction. But I learned early in life to tolerate the odor of dead fish, for I grew up close by a fish market just as you did.

Fishy as it was, I quickly came to love the life around us in the Jewish quarter. I loved my Jewish neighbors even if most of them were, as Judah pointed out by way of apology, poor ignorant ragpickers. I loved the garlands of tattered garments they festooned on the walls behind their stalls. I loved having our own neighborhood ruin, the ancient Portico d’Ottavia. From the moment we took possession of the little house the Pope had provided for us, I felt protected by those sheltering arches.

It was months before a bizarre upheaval turned my view of Leonine Roma upside down and revealed to me its scabrous underbelly. The revelation came in the person of one of the many leeches who wax fat on the body of the papal Curia, a certain Marc Antonio Nino, secretary to Cardinal Petrucci.

This flunkey made quite an impression striding across Ottavia’s square with a white plume flying from his
berretta
and a heavy gold chain hanging from his neck. I felt I ought to shout down and warn him against wearing such an ostentatious collar in this quarter. Already two Gypsies were edging close to him as he walked. They materialize by magic at the sight of gold. But then I noticed at his right hand a hulking servant type, sword unsheathed, and I ceased to worry for his safety from the Gypsies and began to worry for our own well-being. Visits from courtiers with armed guards rarely bode well.

I got little indication from this Nino if he meant us good or ill. His business was far too confidential to be divulged to a mere wife; he made that quite clear when I met him at the door. And after he left, Judah remained locked up in his
studiolo
with a chair barring the portal, always a sign that he was perturbed.

When he emerged late in the afternoon, he did not mention the visitor. And when I asked him who the man was, he changed the subject abruptly. But the visit had disturbed him.

That night he tossed about the bed like a rudderless ship, bumping against me, then shoving off a distance, then throwing off the coverlet, then pulling it back up. Not a word did he utter about the afternoon’s visitor. But in the morning, after he had put on his phylacteries and said his prayers and washed himself, he turned to me and without warning announced, “We must leave Roma immediately.”

When I asked him why, he as much as told me to mind my own affairs. Still, I was not about to be torn from my home and scattered to the winds without knowing the cause of it.

“I will not budge until I know the reason for this upheaval,” I announced firmly.

“Better for you if you don’t,” he muttered.

“It has to do with that courtier who came to see you yesterday, does it not?” I pressed.

“Yes,” he replied, and nothing more.

“What did he want of you?” I asked.

No reply.

“Judah, look at me.” He turned toward me reluctantly. “I am your wife, Grazia, not some cretinous slave. I deserve your confidence.”

“I had hoped to keep it from you.” He sighed. “But if you must know, one of the cardinals has concocted a scheme to murder the Pope. This Nino is his secretary. They want me to apply a series of poisoned bandages to the Pope’s fistula when I treat it.”

“Would that kill him?”

“Oh yes. His wound suppurates constantly. It is as good an entry for poison as any mouth. I told this Nino no, of course. But he would not accept my no, and in the end, I had to force him out the door with his sackful of ducats. But none of that matters. I am implicated now in a plot to kill the Pope. If this plot is discovered, Cardinal Petrucci and his friends will certainly look for a place to lay the blame and I am the logical candidate. Men will say anything under torture. The rack makes cowards of us all.”

The fear in his eyes, his pallor, the beads of sweat that dotted his forehead, all worked on me like a contagion, infecting me with the same terror. If the Petrucci plot succeeded, Judah’s position of trust would certainly place him first in the line of suspects. Yet some inner voice of reason reminded me that to run away is often considered an admission of guilt, and warned me against a hasty flight. We needed time and thought. And a cool head.

“I believe we should consult with Gershom before we take any irrevocable action,” I told Judah.

“Your little brother?”

“He has his own identity now, Judah,” I reminded him. “He is a part of the great world and understands its workings. Besides, he has an orderly mind, and — not the least — we can trust him. We risk nothing in seeking his opinion.”

“Very well,” Judah conceded. “But Grazia, we must be on the road by dawn tomorrow. That is my final word.” Clearly it would take a more powerful lever than I possessed to move this boulder.

I dressed quickly and, enlisting my maid as companion, set out to find my brother. We had yet to be invited to Gershom’s house. All I knew of it was that it abutted Chigi’s property across the Tiber somewhere between Trastevere and the Borgo, a long stretch of uninhabited wasteland at the edge of the river. Why on earth, I wondered as my girl and I tramped around bogs and over pastures, had a clever man like Ser Chigi chosen such a wayward spot for his villa? Like Judah, I am an urbanist and would pitch my tent in Saint Peter’s Square if the space were to let.