The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (78 page)

As my gaze widened, I saw that the entire loggia was peopled by naked bodies all turning, turning, with their arms pointed to heaven. Old men with unkempt beards, old women with breasts sagging to their knees, a small child chewing on a tit rag, boys and girls, men and women, some calm, some frenzied, all gyrating like mad herons, all begging to be delivered from that house of death.

Now I remembered the heartless (but necessary) decree that if a single member of any household, servant or master, was stricken, the entire
famiglia
must be quarantined whether they be sick or well — a virtual death sentence on the healthy ones. These twirlers on the loggia above me must be the healthy members of a
famiglia
immured within the house, parading their lack of buboes in the vain hope of being rescued from starvation, infection, and death.

I closed the curtains quickly and plugged up my ears with my fingers to silence the cries of the doomed ones. But their miserere continued to ring in my ears long after we had left that street. “See my body . . . healthy as yours . . . see my body . . .”

After a while the sound of the voices receded and the curtains began to undulate, then to flutter in the breeze. Gradually, coolness suffused the litter. We were ascending the Quirinal hill.

“Welcome, welcome . . .” Swathed in some version of a toga, Pantesilea flung open the curtains of the litter.

“Come look. Come see. How do you like my
vigna
? Is it not a paradise? Come bathe your face in my fountain. Never fear. The water is pure
acqua vergine
.”

I barely had a chance to investigate that claim before I was hauled off to the crest of the hill to admire the prospect.

“See my view of Mount Auria. I chose this spot for the panorama.” With a sweep of her draped arm she described a wide arc across the horizon. “There below us is the garden of the Palazzo Colonna. How I envy them their ruined tower! It is the very place where Nero stood to watch the barbarians come to burn this corrupt city, you know.”

I need not recall for you the attraction of this ruined tower, you who have often looked down upon it with me from the windows of my
studiolo
. But that was the first time I ever saw it and I was quickly lost in the contemplation of its past. On that spot Nero had stood watching the conflagration. Had he truly plucked at the strings of his viol while he watched? If so, what was he thinking of while he played upon his instrument?

It took the bray of a donkey to awaken me from my reverie. Then came a series of bawdy oaths. Finally a bright painted cart rounded the bend, piloted Roman chariot style by a blackamoor all naked except for a band of linen caught up at his hips and an orange turban. Behind him, sitting on a pile of straw and swathed in veils, rode a Gypsy woman in fifteen shades of crimson with gold flashing from her fingers, ears, and teeth. She alighted from the cart, assisted by the blackamoor.

It is difficult to describe the impression she made, at once tawdry and majestic, full of wind and yet carrying an air of authority, and most surprising, tinged with an edge of familiarity.

“Hail, mistress.” She bowed low before Pantesilea. “I have come to bring you the wisdom of the ancients, to ease your heart’s ache, to beautify your face and form, and to forecast for you all that is about to befall. Dido, at your service.”

Pantesilea led her forward to meet me. “Allow me to present the illustrious scholar and poet Madonna Grazia dei Rossi del Medigo, wife of the miraculous healer Leone del Medigo.”

“Grazia? Dei Rossi?” With a single sweeping gesture the
mezzana
pulled off her veils and stepped close to me, breathing garlic as a dragon breathes flame.

“Do not retreat from me, little Grazia. It is Zaira, your own Zaira.”

With the iteration of that name, I forgot about the garlic, the plague, Pantesilea, and the blackamoor (both struck dumb with amazement) and threw myself into Zaira’s arms.

We covered each other with kisses. We hugged until both of us were breathless. And then, as you can imagine, we began to pelt each other with questions.

“Have you been in Roma all this time?”

“Have
you
been in Roma all this time? Tell me everything.”

I spoke first, telling her much of what you have read here in this
ricordanza
. Then it was her turn.

“I left Firenze with a man who got me out of jail and promised to set me up in Roma as a respectable woman,” she began. “But instead he took me to the fair at Foligno and tried to sell me.”

“As a slave?” I asked.

“No, although a slave is what I would have become. No, he tried to sell me in the street.”

“Swine!”

She seemed to harbor less malice toward her betrayer than I did. “It was his profession,” she explained. “He was a pimp.”

“I still say he was a swine,” I insisted.

“As you like, Graziella. But he paid dear. They caught him stealing chickens at the fair and cut his hands off. Whereas I walked out of that town unbound and unmutilated and made my way to Roma. Mind you I was full of mange and dressed in an old sack, but I was free.”

“What then?”

“Knowing no better, I went to work for a Spanish laundress. Do you remember my hair, my beautiful hair, how thick it was and burnished, like a fine copper kettle?”

I did remember the beauty of her hair and said so.

“I lost it all in that filthy place. The humid air loosens the roots and it falls out in clumps.”

“What brought you to this Spanish laundress in the first place?” I asked.

“It was either the laundry or the Ponte Sisto for me,” she answered. “And no whore spreads her straw on that accursed bridge if she can help it. There is no lower place on earth, except the Hospital of San Giacomo.”

She shuddered. And I shuddered with her. I had heard stories of that foul hospice where infected prostitutes were sent to die. And I vowed that as long as I was alive to prevent it, such a thing would never happen to Zaira.

Then, full of my own
caritas
, I proposed there and then that she should come and live with us in the Portico d’Ottavia. “The house is not big, but it is comfortable and there is a little room beside Danilo’s.”

She held up her hand. “Not so fast, Graziella. Think what you are suggesting.”

“I do not have to think. My heart tells me . . .”

“Your heart is soft as mush. Always has been. But you have a brain. Use it. You have eyes, use them.” She reached out her hands and twisted my head on my neck until my eyes were locked with hers. “Look into my eyes and tell me what you see.”

“I see a woman, honest and honorable, and loaded with virtues.”

“You see an old whore with a face like a cauliflower and a body riddled with French boils,” she corrected me grimly. “I told you that I lost my hair in the Spanish laundry. That is a lie. I lost it from syphilis. I steal the lamps out of churches for the oil that is in them. I sell lies to credulous dupes. I am everything you detest, Graziella. How I got to be this way no longer matters. What does matter is that I am who I am. And I would rather be taken to San Giacomo in a cart and end my days befouled by pus and vomit than soil your life and loved ones with my corrupt presence.”

No words of mine could dissuade her of her own unworthiness, not even my threat to include her in my
Book of Heroines
.

“Don’t you dare, Grazia.” She waggled her finger in my nose like an old nurse in response to the suggestion. “It would make a mockery of us both.”

“But you would be —”

“I would be made a fool and so would you. If you want to shock the public, I have a candidate for you, a genuine heroine, my old mistress, Imperia. Let them know that even a fallen woman can be undone by feeling.”

“Did she really die for love?” I asked.

“Killed herself for the love of a man she trusted, who promised to marry her, then ran away like a craven coward to marry a woman with a name, position, and money.”

“Chigi,” I whispered.

“What has Chigi got to do with it?” She looked puzzled.

“The man who broke her heart . . .”

“Did he tell you that?” she asked.

I admitted that he had.

“He would have had you believe that he was the villain who betrayed her?” She smacked her thigh with her open palm. “That old cock!”

“Who was it, then, that broke her heart if not Chigi?” I asked.

“That is her secret . . . and mine, to the grave. But be certain it was not Agostino Chigi. Chigi was her slave until the end. For three days and three nights he paced the floor of her
sala
praying and hoping while, upstairs, she lay dying for the love of another man — a faithless knave who never even came to her funeral.”

When I wrote the story of Imperia for the second edition of my
Book of Heroines
, I did not name the man for whose love the great courtesan gave her life. That it was not Agostino Chigi was hardly essential to the tale. Let the world believe that he was the one who broke the great courtesan’s heart. Chigi had valued my discretion. If he chose to go down in history as a blackguard rather than a cuckold, I would not be the one to rob him of that dubious distinction.

51

T
he Romans hated Adrian VI from the beginning. They took his cautiousness for feebleness of will; his thrift for avarice; his asceticism for barbarism.

When he was shown the “Laocoön,” he turned away saying, “What else are these figures but heathen effigies?” They said he compared the Sistine ceiling to a filthy
stuffa
, planned to whitewash Michelangelo’s magnificent nudes, and meant to have all of Leo’s precious statues reduced to lime for building Saint Peter’s. And the Romans believed every mean thing they heard about him.

Perhaps if the unfortunate Pope had not spoken Latin with that barbaric guttural accent or if he had spent a few more pennies, even on himself . . . But no. Adrian set himself up in the Belvedere Palace of the Vatican like a pauper with no staff but a valet and an old woman he had brought with him from the Netherlands who attended to his washing and cooking. To her, they said, he gave from his own pocket the wretched sum of two ducats a day to be spent on his table saying, “This is for tomorrow.”

“The Romans will kill him,” my brother Gershom predicted. “He is no match for them.” He hit the mark.

When Adrian died after only eighteen months in the Pontiffs chair, there was dancing in the streets. With my own eyes I saw a garland that had been affixed by grateful Romans to the doorway of the Pope’s body physician, bearing the legend “To the liberator of the country, the Senate, and the people of Roma.” Never before or since have I seen a doctor publicly lauded for killing a patient.

The conclave which met to elect Adrian’s successor sat for fifty days. Moving with stealth and craftiness, Cardinal Giulio dei Medici lured supporters to his side one by one with promises of benefices and gold, much of it supplied by the new Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Charles had recently bought the office of Holy Roman Emperor using gold lent to him by the Fugger banking house. Why not buy himself a pope by the same means? Certainly the Medici was eminently buyable.

Did Giulio dei Medici comprehend the risk of putting himself so deeply in the Emperor’s debt? Perhaps. But he had inherited his cousin Leo’s empty treasury, and the Emperor’s ducats relieved him of that embarrassment.

To further weaken his position, the new Pope also fell heir to the enemies that his cousin had not succeeded in either buying off or fending off. It was an impressive list: Martin Luther, pledged to destroy the Catholic church, which he called “the whore of Babylon”; Suleiman of Turkey, equally determined to decimate what he called “the scourge named Christendom”; Francis I of France, who regarded the Pope as his personal chaplain by divine right and thus subservient to his royal self. And the new Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, who having bought himself a pope, intended to get full value for his money.

“It will take a pope stronger than Julius and wiser than Pius to protect Roma from these overgrown bullyboys, but Giulio Medici is up to the task,” my brother Gershom asserted, with all the buoyant confidence that the election of a second Medici pope instilled in his followers.

I believed Gershom implicitly. Judah kept his counsel.

Giulio Medici was crowned Clement VII in the waning months of the year 1523. Within weeks of the coronation Judah was called to the Vatican to resume his former role as body physician to the Pope. He returned home with the news that Clement had granted more favors in the first month of his reign than Adrian had during his entire term of office. He also observed wryly that Jews were back in style.

Now there came to us a letter from Ferrara that made my joy complete. My brother Jehiel was coming to Roma. He had taken a leave from Duke Alfonso and was setting off on a pilgrimage in the company of a most remarkable and holy man named David, a descendant of the ten lost tribes of Israel and very learned in cabala. The word ought to have warned me.

Jehiel himself arrived about a week after his letter, heavily bearded, with filthy feet and matted hair. You were always a brave child, but he sent you cowering into the kitchen crying that a mad preacher was at our door. Even I did not recognize him until he spoke.