Bitter Greens

by Kate Forsyth

  ‘No. There’s no plague here. Go away!’

  ‘Two of your servants have been found with plague marks. All bedding and clothing must be burnt and the house shut up. You and anyone else living here will be taken to the Lazzaretto for forty days and forty nights. If you survive, you’ll be allowed back to Venice.’

  ‘But not many ever come back,’ one of the corpse-bearers sniggered.

  I tried to stop him, but the doctor shoved me aside and went into the house. The corpse-bearers followed him, dragging down priceless tapestries and curtains, gathering up cushions and bedclothes and throwing them out into the street. I wept as my new velvet dresses and fine lawn chemises were tossed out the window. Then the doctor found Sibillia, sweating and moaning in her bed. He called sharply to the corpse-bearers and they came to carry her downstairs.

  ‘It’s not the plague,’ I argued. ‘She just has an ague. She’ll be better tomorrow.’

  The doctor did not bother to reply. He watched, inscrutable behind his beaked mask, as all our bedding and clothes were set on fire. Gasping, I ran back inside and caught up Sibillia’s purse and shawl and a loaf of bread from the kitchen. It was all I had time for, the corpse-bearers coming to manhandle me away. Sibillia was tossed on top of the dead bodies, her cook, Bassi, groaning beside her, and planks were nailed across our door. I had to walk, stumbling and weeping, behind the cart as it made its way through the narrow alleyways and over arched bridges towards the lagoon. Every house and inn was shut up, every shopfront shuttered. Fires smouldered in every square, and the air was orange with smoke. The corpse-bearers rang a handbell, shouting, ‘Corpi morti, corpi morti!’

  Each narrow calle ran with the same cry and the tuneless clanging of countless handbells.

  In Piazza San Marco, a great bonfire was burning. Amidst the cloth and trade goods, I saw the small shapes of skinned cats and dogs impaled on sticks. Black smoke billowed everywhere, smelling nauseatingly of cooking flesh. Corpses lay in piles. People wailed, on their knees, hands lifted imploringly to heaven. A priest in a black cassock chanted incomprehensible prayers.

  The clock on the Torre dell’Orologio began to toll out.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  Five.

  Six.

  Seven.

  Eight.

  Nine.

  Ten.

  Eleven.

  Twelve.

  Each toll a second of my life unravelling, each toll a moment gone forever. I felt as if I was falling down into a great pit of blackness and madness and despair. The smoke choked me. I could not breathe. My heart clamoured in my ears.

  A young man lurched at me out of the haze. His fine velvet clothes were torn and disordered, his handsome face streaked with tear-tracks through the char of smoke. He saw me. Eyes widened in recognition.

  ‘You! You did this! You cursed me. Witch! Whore!’ The young man launched himself at me, knocked me to the ground. He punched me in the face, so blood poured from my nose. I could taste its strange metallic richness on my tongue. He punched me again, and I felt a tooth crack.

  No one came to my rescue. He could have sat astride me and pummelled me into a pulp, if Sibillia had not somehow found the strength to slip from the cart, falling to her knees beside it. She struggled up and stumbled towards me, her hands held out. With her white hair straggling about her pain-contorted face, her eyes wild with fever, she looked exactly like the evil witch of fairy tale.

  The young man moaned in terror and rolled away from me. Sibillia pointed one hand at him, two fingers extended in the sign of the devil’s horns, and chanted some words in a strange language. Terrified, the young man fled across the square, almost falling over a pile of dead bodies. I scrambled to my feet and ran to Sibillia, both hands catching her when she would have fallen. All around us, people were staring and pointing. ‘It’s Wise Sibillia,’ someone cried. ‘And her witch apprentice.’

  ‘He said she’d cursed us.’

  ‘Plague-carrier.’

  ‘Devil.’

  I put my arm around her back and supported her, obeying the plague doctor’s emphatic gesture towards the docks. As we stumbled past him, he drew away and made a quick sign of the cross. Sibillia’s legs almost gave way beneath her, and only my arm kept her from falling. An angry mutter rose from the crowd.

  We were put together in a small boat, tied by a long cable to another boat, where a cloaked and hooded man waited. The plague doctor bent and whispered something in his ear, and he turned his terrifying white-beaked mask towards us, eye-holes staring blankly. I saw his hand clench on the handle of the long oar he was holding. His fingernails were black and cracked and rotten. He made the quick sign of the cross and spat at us.

  Bassi and the dead bodies on the cart were tipped into a barge. I watched, shaking, as more bodies were flung on top. Soon, Bassi’s chubby form was hidden from sight. A few more people were ushered onto our boat – a distraught woman with a weeping child, a haggard young man, an old man in a nightgown and bare feet. They had evidently seen Sibillia cursing the young man, for they huddled at the other end of the boat, too frightened to look at us.

  Then the hooded oarsmen rowed away across the lagoon, dragging our smaller boat behind theirs. Sibillia coughed hoarsely. I wrapped her shawl about her and wished I had thought to bring something to drink. Smoke drifted through the air, stinging my eyes. The water did not glitter as it usually did but heaved up and down, grey and lustreless as the scales of a dead fish, occasionally gleaming with lurid reddish light. I peered ahead.

  We passed a low-lying swampy island. Ancient black galleons were moored about it, their bare masts creaking as they rocked on the swell. People crowded the decks, holding out imploring hands to us, calling in thin cracked voices. On the muddy shores were piles of dead bodies, some naked, some wrapped in shrouds. Men were digging graves nearby.

  Our boat was dragged past, heading towards another swampy island, the Isola del Lazzaretto Nuovo. Set right at the mouth of the lagoon, it was the place where ships had to go and unload their cargoes of spices and silks to be decontaminated with smoking herbs before being allowed into Venice. I had heard of it before – I did not know when. It seemed now it had been turned into a place where those suspected of having the plague were to be quarantined.

  We were left on the beach, Sibillia leaning heavily against my arm. A man in a leather coat and breeches came to meet us, a kerchief tied around his mouth. We picked our way past open graves, where corpses in their hundreds lay tumbled. I saw one with maggots seething in the eye socket, another who sat upright, arms held out stiffly, leering at me. The stench made me retch. I was glad when we finally reached the long building in the centre of the island. Graceful arches all along one side led into a cavernous and shadowy space within.

  It was worse inside, though. Straw pallets had been set up on the floor, with up to four people crowded on top. Others lay on the bare stone or sat against the walls, their heads hanging low. The sounds of retching and coughing and moaning filled the air. The smell was unbearable.

  Men in plague-doctor masks walked about with incense censers filled with smoking herbs. Mostly, they did not touch the sick, just prodded them with their long sticks. One doctor nearby lanced the angry boils covering a young woman. Putrid black liquid oozed out. ‘She should be at the Old Lazzaretto,’ he said to a colleague. ‘Those who come here without the plague will soon catch it.’

  ‘There’s no more room at the Old Lazzaretto. As fast as people die, more get sick,’ the other replied. ‘At this rate, half of Venice shall die.’

  I remembered the hot filthy little room where my mother had died and how I had ordered water for washing and smashed the cockroaches and fleas with the back of my scrubbing brush. There was no hot water here, and no scrubbing brush. I had sworn I would never live like that again, but the Lazzaretto was far, far worse.

  ‘I’m in hell,’ I whispered.

  ‘This is not
hell,’ the doctor replied wryly. ‘This is purgatory.’

  ‘Is there not a bed where I can lay her down? Is there no medicine, no food?’ I held out my hands to him.

  ‘Have you money?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘Find a Jew. They’ll sell you a mattress and something to eat.’

  So I looked for the distinctive yellow scarf the Jews all had to wear and paid an outrageous amount for a filthy vermin-ridden pallet and a cup of thin soup.

  Sibillia suffered all through the night, coughing till I feared she would retch up her insides. As the sky began to lighten, a jet of black blood gushed from her mouth. I ran, looking for help. Everyone was just as sick. I found a wooden hut with smoke trickling from a makeshift chimney. A man stood outside, a shovel in one hand. As I hurried towards him, he lifted his arm to press his wrist against his mouth and nose.

  ‘Help me, please … she’s dying.’

  ‘I know you, you’re the witch. Filthy witches and Jews, you’re what’s brought the wrath of God down upon us.’ He made the sign of the cross, with a hand whose nails were black and rotten, then went inside the hut and shut the door in my face.

  I went back to Sibillia and sat with her head cradled in my lap, stroking back her white hair, until she coughed and wheezed no more. Soon, the corpse-bearers came, calling through their white-beaked masks, ‘Corpi morti! Corpi morti!’

  One of them was the man who had spat at my feet. I recognised him by his blackened nails. He and his partner picked Sibillia’s body up by the arms and the feet and flung her into the cart. Then the man picked up a broken brick from the cart, wrenched open Sibillia’s jaws and jammed the brick inside her mouth. I cried out in protest.

  ‘She’s a witch,’ he said. ‘She’ll be chewing her way out of her shroud if we don’t jam her jaws.’

  ‘She’s dead,’ I wept.

  ‘Shroud-eaters feast on the flesh of the dead, then rise from the ground to infect us all. If we don’t jam her jaws, we’ll have to dig her up later and burn her heart and liver. We’ve got enough to do digging graves here without having to open them up again later.’

  His partner leant in so close that I gagged on the foul gust of his breath. ‘You can hear the shroud-eaters down in the ground, chewing away. First, they eat their way free of the shroud, then they gnaw off their own fingers, then they start on the bodies of the other dead. You can hear them grunting and snuffling and chomping away down there.’

  ‘They’ll eat their way out eventually, and then come looking for living flesh to gnaw,’ the man with the black fingernails said.

  His partner leant in even closer, fondling my waist. ‘Don’t worry, bella, if you’re afraid you can cuddle up with me tonight. I’ll keep you safe.’

  ‘Don’t touch me.’ I shoved him away.

  He laughed, and together they trundled the cart away down to the warehouse, stopping to collect other dead bodies, and I stood, my fists clenched, wanting to scream and rage at them. If I’d had a sword to hand, I would have run them through with pleasure, enjoying the spurt of their crimson life-blood. It was only then that I realised I had come to love Sibillia. She had indeed been a second mother to me.

  I went down to the beach and waded into the lagoon, and I scrubbed the smell of that foul place off me, using handfuls of sand to scour my skin. As I scrubbed, I wept, and as I wept, I planned what I would do to that rotten-fingered man. I’d curse him till his fingers and toes all dropped off. I’d fill his sleep with nightmares. I’d raise Sibillia from the plague-pit and send her to haunt him till he gouged out his own eyes and tore off his own ears.

  And then I would go and read every word of every book of Sibillia’s, till I found the spell to make sure I never grew old and died.

  TOUCH ME NOT

  Venice, Italy – March 1512

  I knew curses and charms and cantrips aplenty, spells to bind and to banish, spells to enthral and to enfeeble.

  Yet the one thing I could not banish was boredom. Not one of the men who crowded around my velvet chaise longue every night aroused even the faintest flicker of interest in me.

  Until I met again the young artist who had kissed me during Carnevale so long ago. He appeared at the brothel one spring night, almost two years after Sibillia’s death. He came in, shabbier than ever, paint on his hands, his dark curls in wild disarray.

  ‘Look, it’s Tiziano Vecellio,’ a fat merchant said. ‘He must have returned from Padua.’

  ‘He’s probably looking for a new model,’ another man said. ‘No respectable woman would ever let him paint her.’

  I stood up and moved towards him, smiling. He saw me through the crowd and came eagerly towards me. ‘It’s you, my beautiful redhead from Carnevale.’ A shadow flicked across his face. ‘I didn’t realise you were …’

  ‘I was not when I first saw you.’ For some reason, this seemed important for him to know.

  ‘You were certainly well guarded then,’ he answered with a quick wry grin. ‘What happened?’

  ‘The plague.’

  At once, his eyes flashed to mine. ‘I’m sorry. I lost friends in the plague too.’

  ‘There are few in Venice who did not.’ I gestured to a servant for some more wine, then raised high my goblet. ‘To life.’

  ‘And beauty.’ His face was sombre. I was glutted with compliments, yet these words of his pleased me. I smiled. He picked up a lock of my hair, coiling it around his finger. ‘It is the colour of fire, of passion, of life itself. It’s a colour to warm the soul.’

  My heart quickened, heat in my cheeks and in my loins. I wanted him to kiss me again – me, Selena Leonelli, who hated to be kissed. I let my clients slobber all over my body, but never, ever, on the mouth. My desire astonished me.

  ‘Can you stand very still?’ he asked me.

  Once again, his words surprised me. I thought of how often I stood, cold as a statue, as I was looked over by prospective clients. The other girls flirted and giggled and wriggled their hips. Yet there was always someone who wanted me.

  I nodded.

  ‘Would you let me paint you? I cannot pay much.’

  I thought of some of the great paintings I had seen in churches and salons in Venice, the women in them immortalised, their beauty untouched by worms and maggots.

  ‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘When?’

  ‘I need you to kneel here,’ Tiziano said, pushing me down onto a cushion on the floor. His hand was hot through the thin fabric of my chemise. ‘Lean forward, like so.’

  I obeyed, bracing one hand on the floor, looking up at him.

  ‘Here, put your hand on this pot.’ He passed me a small round jar with a lid. When I leant my weight on it, it cut into my hand.

  ‘I was painting my neighbour’s daughter but she could not stand having to hold the pose so long and began to cry,’ he told me. ‘The tears were just what I wanted. My Mary needs to be weeping and in despair, but then transfigured at seeing the resurrected body of the man she loves. It was wonderful when she began to weep. I got the first glimmer of how the painting should be. But then, when I finally let her go home, her mother said she could not come any more, that I was cruel to her. Cruel. Did she not realise I am trying to make a masterpiece?’

  ‘Do you wish me to weep?’ I was not pleased by the idea. I had not wept since Sibillia died, and I was determined to never do so again. Tears undermined your strength the way the sea washes away a sandcastle.

  ‘I want you to look up at me and realise that your beloved is not dead after all but alive,’ he said.

  I remembered how my mother had looked when my father had come to the palazzo, how she had run barefoot across the hall and leapt into his arms. I reached up one hand to Tiziano.

  ‘Yes,’ Tiziano cried and bent over me, catching my hand. ‘That’s it! Don’t move.’

  He hurried to his easel and swirled the paintbrush in paint. He looked at the painting, then at me, then bent his attention to the canvas again. Soon, my back was aching, my knees
crying out in torment, but I did not move. I fixed my eyes on the ceiling and thought of my mother’s face, illuminated with joy. In all the horror of what had come after, I had forgotten how she looked then, how much she had loved my father.

  ‘I have been thinking of death a great deal since the plague,’ Tiziano said in a low voice, dabbing at the canvas with a brush loaded with red paint. ‘My friend Zorzi died, you see. Giorgione Barbarelli was his real name. He was a great artist. Almost as great as me.’ He cast me an impish grin. ‘I decided I wanted to paint the scene just before the Ascension, the moment when Mary Magdalene sees the Saviour risen from the cross and realises the gift of his sacrifice, that one day we too shall follow him and experience our own resurrection.’

  My shoulders sagged. I had thought I sensed a wildness in him, a sensuality, a longing for freedom that matched my own. Yet here he was, mouthing the same empty platitudes I heard from the church pulpit. Then, once again, Tiziano surprised me.

  ‘I want to show how Mary loved Jesus as a woman loves a man, with all the force of her ardent nature, and how he too yearns towards her. He wants to touch her, he wants to feel the press of her flesh against his, yet he must not. It is time for him to leave such longings behind. Yet she is so beautiful and loves him so much, and he cannot bear to hurt her. And so he says to her, “Don’t touch me,” but it is a plea as much as a command.’

  His words had been so soft I could hardly hear him. Unconsciously, I had turned my face towards him, to watch his face. He felt my gaze and looked up again. ‘Don’t move.’

  I smiled at him.

  He smiled back involuntarily. ‘Why are you smiling?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m supposed to be weeping, aren’t I?’

  ‘I think I like smiling better than weeping.’

  ‘May I get up? I’m not used to spending so much time on my knees.’ I spoke with soft innuendo, but Tiziano only sighed and looked at his painting.

  He answered courteously enough, ‘Of course. Get up, move around. I think I have you anyway.’