The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (77 page)

50

T
he person least surprised by Pope Leo’s early death was Judah. “He will not live to see his forty-fifth birthday,” he had predicted gloomily after his first examination of the patient. “And nothing I can do will delay his end.”

“Because you cannot cure his fistula?” I asked.

“Men do not die of fistulas, they only suffer,” he replied. “No, this Medici is at risk from birth — all the Medici die young; it is bred in the bone — and he compounds the inheritance by his manner of living. Everything I observe in his constitution spells death: his corpulence, his bloat, his chronic catarrh, all demand that he follow a regimen of moderation. Instead, he alternates fasts with gorging and bouts of violent exercise with torpor. And every excess brings him nearer to the diseases that carried off his father and brother.”

Leo died on the second of December in the year 1521, in the forty-sixth year of his life, cheating Judah’s prediction by six months. His death blasted apart the fabric of Roman life like a broadside from one of Alfonso d’Este’s
bombarde
, leaving the tattered shreds of the golden years fluttering in the winter wind. At his death every cup, every chalice, every crucifix, every altarpiece, every valuable object in his treasury lay in pawn. He was in debt over 850,000 ducats.

Like lice we Romans live off the body of the Curia. When the Pope rides high on the hog’s back we gorge ourselves. When his fortunes wane we all go hungry. With Leo’s death Roma entered on a prolonged fast. Everyone felt the pinch at once — bootmakers, butchers, courtesans, muleteers, innkeepers, embroiderers, actors, musicians, even the Jewish rag peddlers — all lost custom.

Our family was doubly hit in that twelvemonth. With the death of the Pope, Judah lost his patron. With the death of the Pope’s banker, my brother lost his sinecure, his home, and his mistress. When he announced he was retiring from the world of banking to live frugally on his investments, Pantesilea took off for greener fields with no hard feelings on either side. In fact, Gershom continued to advise her on her investments and she continued to call me sister and visit us on those occasions when her conscience led her to her favorite sanctuary, the Church of Sant’Agostino.

She and my brother were two of a kind, I tell you. It took more than hard times to knock them off their pins. Gershom accepted his reversal of fortune with a shrug and a smile.

“Remember what Koheleth tells us, that everything has its season,” he reminded me. “In time, this harsh climate will give way to fair weather and the barren bushes of this city will blossom once again with lush fruit. When they do I, Geronimo dei Rossi, will be there to gather in the harvest. Meantime I will take a lesson from Signore Bear, go into hibernation, and live off my fat.”

Others simply fled. Bembo, the exquisite, felt a sudden need to commune with nature and withdrew from Roma to a secluded spot near Padova, taking with him as a memento of his Leonine days a beautiful concubine named Morosina and all the wealth he had accumulated as Leo’s principal secretary.

Many prelates joined the exodus. Cardinals who had not laid eyes on the source of their benefices for twenty years heard the call of duty and sped off to give succor to their distant flocks. The Academicians wandered into exile. Sadoleto, our finest Latinist, retired to Carpentras, Castiglione to Mantova. The Florentines who had been nibbling away at Leo’s treasury like clever mice for a decade skittered back to Toscana with wagonloads of loot. Of the inner circle only Paolo Giovio remained — a diligent scholar of history marking off the daily defections.

It seemed that God was determined to exact retribution for every golden moment of Leonine indulgence. While the cardinals were locked up debating who they would elect as Leo’s successor, a new menace appeared in our midst: the plague.

Overwhelmed by their misfortunes, the Romans looked to the Vatican for a savior. What they got for their Holy Father was Adrian of Tortola, tutor to Emperor Charles V, a man so mindful of his obligations to his Emperor that he would not leave Spain even to attend the consistory that elected him pope.

When the cardinals emerged to announce the election of a German to the throne of Saint Peter, the streets filled with people hissing and booing to express their indignation. With a world of candidates to choose from, these men had elected a barbarian, a poor dependent of the Emperor, a man from whom no one could expect a favor.

Only Cardinal Gonzaga had the courage to face the howling crowd. Putting on a brave smile, he thanked his clamorous attendants for contenting themselves with words of abuse. “We deserve the most rigorous punishment,” he told them. “I am grateful that you choose to avenge your wrongs with words and not with stones.”

By the day of the new Pope’s coronation as Adrian VI, the plague was claiming victims at the rate of thirty or more a day. Judah said he had never seen it more virulent, not even in Firenze in the nineties. “I fear lest God should completely annihilate the inhabitants of this city,” he confided in me. Was it God who had it in for us, I wondered, or the devil? Demons and furies infected the Roman imagination that plague season and I was not immune to the contagion.

There was a Greek called Demetrius who paraded the city with a bull he claimed to have tamed by spells. He came to our piazza one morning, and despite Judah’s warning, I found myself down in the street with the gawkers come to touch the miraculous animal and thus to achieve immunity from the pestilence.

A few days later Judah told me that this Greek had sacrificed his holy animal at midnight in the Colosseum. “The scoundrel professes to appease the hostile demons that have taken over the city and persuades half of Roma to join him in the sacrilege. We have reverted to the worst excesses of the Dark Ages.” Then he added with the thin smile he habitually assumed when mentioning Jehiel, “Too bad your brother Maestro Vitale the Occultist cannot be spared from Duke Alfonso’s service. He could earn the mint selling his spells and amulets to these lapsed pagans.”

In truth, your fortune-telling uncle
would
have done well in the Roma of Adrian VI. Romans never have been more than a step away from their pagan roots at any time. Seeing the physicians powerless against the contagion, they understandably — one might almost say, reasonably — turned to the magicians for help. It was a rare citizen who dared walk out into the street without an amulet hung around his neck to protect him from the evil spirits. I might have worn one myself had I not feared Judah’s contempt. Your Uncle Gershom, always one to hedge his bets, did send off to “Maestro Vitale” at Ferrara for a precious bit of ancient writing to keep on his person. And the lady Pantesilea came around with charms and talismans dripping off her ears and wrists and waist and neck, the way jewels had in safer times.

“We must no longer kiss, madonna,” she warned me one day when I leaned forward to embrace her. “For there is contagion in kisses.”

I reported this advice to Judah, who pronounced the lady amazingly intelligent for an ignorant tart. I did not enlighten him as to the pharmacopoeia of potions and charms — all procured from various sorcerers — with which this “intelligent” lady doctored herself. Nor did I bother his mind with the information that she was everlastingly after me to embrace her thaumaturgy and join her in patronizing its questionable practitioners.

There was in particular a procuress of her acquaintance who she swore knew all the secrets of Venus
and
Averroës both.

“This woman is in touch with the infinite,” she assured me with utmost conviction. “Even if you do not need the benefit of her love potions — which
work
, believe me, for I have tried them — you should benefit as I do from her profound understanding of female skin. She understands how the skin breathes and through those breaths she can expunge wrinkles and turn those ugly brown spots to which we women are prone back to their rosy hue. She can make your hair curl like one of Maestro Melozzo’s
putti
, and she tells the future better than any astrologer. Allow me to bring her to you, madonna, I beg you.”

I would have allowed it gladly but I dared not welcome this creature into our house. In Judah’s pantheon, witches and sorcerers stand lower than snakes.

Pantesilea persevered. She brought a tooth whitener made by the prodigious procuress out of ground-up pearls; then came a breast cream extracted from the umbilical cords of infant boys. And, knowing my softest spot, she brought for you a painted mask of monk’s cloth, special protection for “the little warrior” to wear when you ventured outside. This you instantly added to your wardrobe, along with the tin helmet — a gift from your Uncle Jehiel — that you donned when you galloped around the square on your hobbyhorse brandishing your wooden sword and shouting “Charge!” at the top of your lungs. But much as you loved the gift, I still could not bring myself to meet with the donor, out of respect for Judah’s feelings.

“I see that there is no moving you, madonna, and I will cease to try,” she finally announced. “From now on, the name of Dido will not pass my lips.”

“Dido? This
ruffiana
calls herself Dido?”

“What would you have her call herself? Puttana? Zoppina?” she replied crossly. “Have I not told you that this woman is not some ordinary procuress? Do you suppose that the divine Imperia would have employed some vulgarian as her
mezzana
?”

“Imperia?” The name had never been mentioned in all our conversations.

“Yes, Imperia, mistress to two popes and God knows how many cardinals, toast of three cities . . .”

The same Imperia I had so cavalierly banished from my company of worthy women. “You never told me that this Dido was
ruffiana
to Imperia,” I reminded her.

“Not
ruffiana
,” she corrected me. “In those golden times, Dido was a
mezzana
, the only female
mezzano
in Roma, perhaps in the world.”

At this point I must interrupt briefly to clarify the cloudy distinction between these two degrees of pimpery as I came to understand it that day. The
ruffiana
is essentially a procuress, but also a hairdresser and beauty expert with a specialty of hiding defects and concealing the ravages of age. Many of these paragons also tell fortunes by cards and by the stars, concoct love potions, make charms, and cast spells.

The
mezzano
, who occupies a step up on this greasy ladder, is also a procurer. But he is often a musician as well. He knows all the latest love songs and, in emulation of a gentleman of the town, never fails to carry a copy of Petrarch’s sonnets in his pocket. But above all, he is a negotiator. It is through the mediation of her
mezzano
that a courtesan of the first rank conducts the long and complicated negotiations — often beginning with a song or a sonnet supplied by the
mezzano
— which, if successful, result in the suitor being received in the courtesan’s salon. Need I add that this road is paved with expensive presents frequently chosen — or at least specified — by the
mezzano
. After all, he knows the lady’s taste.

On the face of it there does not seem to be much to choose between the status of the
ruffiana
and the
mezzano
. A pimp is a pimp. But to those who patronize courtesans (which includes cardinals, ambassadors, and all the wit and learning of Roma), the distinction counts.

To me it mattered not a whit what status this Dido had achieved in the ladder of pimpery. What decided me that I must meet her was her name and her association with Imperia. In the tumult of post-Leonine Roma, the name Imperia had slipped beneath my notice along with my resolve to pay my debt of honor to Agostino Chigi someday. Now Fortuna had brought this self-named Dido into my orbit. I felt I must reach out to her. It was foreordained.

“I will see her,” I told an astonished Pantesilea. “But not here.” That much I owed to Judah.

It took her only a moment to find a solution. “You must come to my
vigna
.” She tossed off this newly acquired property as if it were a new cloak. “There we three can meet unobserved in the cool of the arbor and explore the mysteries of the great unknown. It is the perfectly discreet place.”

I agreed.

On the day of the outing I received from her a pomander consisting of a ball of resin stuffed with lavender, wrapped in a note cautioning me not to open the curtains of the
baldacchino
under any provocation, “. . . for the air of Roma is thick and vitiated by plague demons,” in the words of my counselor.

“The city is like a giant tomb,” Judah had told me. So I was prepared to ride through the streets in silence. But what I heard through the heavy curtains of my
baldacchino
sounded more like
carnevale
revelry. The incessant ringing of bells, loud music, pistol shots, and the crackle of grenades filled the air. Puzzled at first, I then remembered that explosions were ignited in order to stir up the air and thus dispel the demonic pall. That odd bit of reasoning accounted for the tambourines and the volleys of gunfire. And there was no mystery in the moans and shrieks of the dying. But as we moved along the Via Lata, a new sound began to intrude itself upon the cacophony. It occurred irregularly and seemed to issue from the windows of certain specific houses. Sometimes uttered by a single voice, more often by several, the repeated cry was, “See my body, see my body . . .”

My curiosity thoroughly aroused, I bade the litter-bearers stop and, against all wisdom, parted the curtains of the
baldacchino
a slit. Directly in my line of sight a barricaded door displayed the huge red
X
that marked a plague house. My eyes traveled up the facade of the house, past the
piano nobile
, past the shuttered windows of the attic floor to the top loggia. What I saw there I shall never forget: a young girl, completely naked, turning slowly around and around, her arms raised high to show that she had no buboes in her armpits where those telltale signs first appear, and chanting as she turned, “See my body as healthy as yours, Madonna . . . see my body . . . save me, for God’s sake.”