The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  Eighteen

  MY HUSBAND’S PALAZZO WAS OLD AND DRAFTY, A SMELL OF damp about the very stones. My instinct about the guest list proved correct. It was not simply timing that had thinned the ranks, but a nervousness about past allegiances. With the government changing hands, it would not do to be seen at a wedding of the old guard, and my father, though he might not have been as prominent as he would have liked, was most certainly aligned. I can’t say it worried me. What need did we have of spectators? The ceremony was simple and brief. The notary was more agitated than we were, looking over his shoulder every time there was a shout or a noise from the street. But he did the job, supervising the signing of the contracts and the exchange of rings between the two of us. In the rush there had been no time for my husband to have brought the counter dowry, but he had done what he could and I think my mother was touched by the small amber brooch he gave her, an heirloom from his mother. For Luca there was a drinking flask and for Tomaso a silver belt, rather handsome, I thought, with promises of more things to follow.

  While the city shook with crisis, the inside of Cristoforo’s old house was quiet and refined. He had a calm way with him and throughout the ceremony treated me with polite attention, more like an acquaintance than a wife, but then of course so I was. I found it rather reassuring, proof of his honesty as well as his goodwill. We stood side by side, and he was tall enough that I did not have to hunch my shoulders to complement him as I would with many other men. He looked good: better than I, it must be said. When he was younger I daresay he would have been a spectacularly attractive man, and amid the lines and slightly florid complexion there was still enough haggard beauty in place to catch the eye.

  After the ceremony there was a simple meal of cold meats, pork jelly, and fresh roasted pike stuffed with raisins. Not much of a wedding feast, though I could tell from my father’s face that the wines, from the cellar, were superior. After we ate there was dancing and music in the winter receiving room. Plautilla puffed and sweated her way through a few rounds, but her gazelle grace was gone in the swell of her belly. After a while she sat on the side and watched as others played. When my new husband led me into the “Balli Rostiboli,” I didn’t fall over or miss the steps of any of the dances. My mother watched quietly. My father, beside her, feigned a certain interest, but his mind was on other things. I tried to imagine the world through his eyes. He had built his entire life on the advancement of his family and the glory of the state. Now his daughters were dispersed, his sons wild on the streets, the Republic in crisis, and the French army a day’s march away. While here we were, intent on dancing as if there were nothing better to do.

  The festivities broke up early in accordance with the curfew. My family took their leave, embracing first me and then my new husband. My mother kissed me solemnly on the forehead and, I think, would have spoken to me further but I would not look her in the eye. I was nervous now and willing to blame everybody but myself for my predicament. “You must be brave,” she had told me hurriedly that morning as she checked my dress, no time for the full briefing. “He will know you are young and he will take care. The marriage night might hurt a little, but it will be over soon. This is a great adventure, Alessandra. It will change your life and I believe, if you can embrace it, it will give you a stillness and a satisfaction that the future might otherwise deny you.”

  I’m not sure she believed it either. As for myself, I was so distracted by then that I was not even listening properly.

  “SO, ALESSANDRA LANGELLA, WHAT SHALL WE DO NOW, YOU AND I?” He stood surveying the quiet debris. The silence after the music was alarming.

  “I don’t know.”

  I knew he must be feeling my nerves. He poured himself another drink. Oh, please don’t get drunk, I thought. Ignorant as I was, even I knew that while a husband should not come to his bride in uncontrolled lust (and there had been no sign of anything like that; indeed, the only time he had touched me since the ceremony had been during the dancing), neither should he come to her in drink. As to the other forbiddens—well, I would no doubt learn them as we went along.

  “Perhaps we should explore some mutual interest for a while. Would you like to look at some art?”

  “Oh, yes!” I said, and I think my face must have lit up because he laughed at my gaucheness as one might laugh at the overeagerness of a child. I remember thinking as he did so that he seemed like a good man and that, once we had become man and wife, we could go back to talking as we had done at Plautilla’s house and spend our spare time sitting next to each other reading and studying affairs of the mind, like the brothers I had never really had. And in that way, though the state might crumble around us, we would keep something of the old Florence within ourselves, and so out of all of this horror would come something good.

  As we climbed the stairs I noticed it got colder.

  His sculpture collection was on the second floor. He had given over an entire room to it. There were five statues: two satyrs, a Hercules with muscles like knotted rope under marble skin, and a memorable Bacchus whose body, though stone, looked fleshier than my own. But the most beautiful was the young athlete: a naked youth, his weight taken on the back foot, his torso twisted in readiness for the thrust of the discus he held cupped in his right hand. Everything in his body spoke of fluidity and grace, as if Medusa had caught him at the very second before thought and action connected. Surely even Savonarola would have been moved by him. Sculpted long before Christ, there was palpable divinity in his perfection.

  “You like him?”

  “Oh, yes,” I breathed. “I like him very much. How old is he?”

  “He is modern.”

  “No. He is—”

  “—classical? I know, it’s an easy mistake. He is evidence of my philistinism.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I bought him in Rome from a man who swore he had been unearthed on the island of Crete two years before. The torso still bore the marks of earth and fungus. See the chipped fingers on the left hand? I paid a fortune for him. Then, when I got him back to Florence, a friend with connections to the Medici sculpture garden told me he was the work of a young artist. A copy from a piece that Cosimo had owned. Apparently it was not the first time that such a deceit had taken place.”

  I stared up at the young man. One could almost imagine him turning his head toward us, smiling at the discovery of his own fraud. It would be a charming smile, though.

  “What did you do?”

  “I congratulated the artist and kept the statue. I think he is worth whatever money I paid for him. Come. I have things that I think will interest you even more.”

  He took me into a smaller room. From a locked cupboard he took out a rich malachite cup and two agate vases, reset by Florentine goldsmiths in special gilded stands with his name engraved on the bottom. Then he pulled out small inlaid wooden drawers, revealing a set of Roman coins and jewelry. But his real prize he kept till last: a large portfolio that he placed carefully on a table in front of me. “They are illustrations of a text waiting to be bound into a book. Can you imagine what glory they will bring when it is finished?”

  I slid them out, one by one, until maybe a dozen of them lay in sequence across the table. The parchment was thin enough for me to see the writing on the back, but I didn’t need to read the words to know what book it was. The ink sketches showed glimpses of heaven: a sublimely delicate Beatrice holding Dante by the hand and guiding him up through a swarm of tiny spirits toward the Godhead above.

  “Paradiso.”

  “Indeed.”

  “And is there also Purgatorio and the Inferno?”

  “Of course.”

  I went farther back, canto by canto. As the drawings descended toward hell they became more complex and wild, some of them teeming with naked figures tormented by demons, others capturing men frozen into tree structures or violated by snakes. Though I knew Dante, my imagination could never have dreamed such a rolling river of images to go with the words
.

  “Oh! Who did these?”

  “You don’t recognize his style?”

  “I have not seen as much art as you,” I said quietly.

  “Try this.” He flicked through the pile and pulled out a particular canto from Paradiso in which the tendrils of Beatrice’s hair waved around her face with the same exuberance as the folds of her gown swept over her body. In her face, half coy, half serene, I thought I saw the hint of a more calculated mistress, one who pulled all manner of men’s desires away from their wives.

  “Alessandro Botticelli?”

  “Very good. She is indeed his Beatrice, don’t you think?”

  “But . . . but when did he draw these? I didn’t know that he had illustrated The Divine Comedy.”

  “Oh, our Sandro has almost as great a love for Dante as he does for God. Though I hear that is changing under the lash of Savonarola’s words. These were done some years ago, after he came back from Rome. At the start they were a labor of love rather than a commission, though he always has a patron. They took him a long time. And as you see, they remain unfinished.”

  “How did they come to you?”

  “Ah, sadly I am only their guardian. I hold them for a friend who has been busy with politics and fears his collection might become vulnerable to the violence abroad.”

  Of course I was curious as to who this friend might be, but he said nothing more. I thought of my mother and father. While she was cleverer than he was in so many ways, there were all manner of things he didn’t share with her and about which she did not ask. No doubt I would learn soon enough where the frontiers lay.

  I went back to the sketches. The journey through Paradiso was graceful, even profound, but my attention was continually drawn back to the Inferno. These pages crawled with suffering and sorrow: bodies drowning in rivers of blood, armies of lost souls rushing through eternity pursued by winds of fire, while Dante and Virgil, in some of the illustrations clothed in fiercely bright colors, walked along a precipice of cool stone licked by flames.

  “So tell me, Alessandra,” my husband said, looking over my shoulder, “why is it, do you think, that hell always holds more fascination than heaven?”

  I thought back to all the other paintings and frescoes I had seen, didactic in their horror: squatting imps with bat wings and claws, gouging flesh and crunching bone. Or the Devil himself, his great animal body thick with hair, stuffing screaming sinners into his mouth as if they were carrots. Compared with that, what images did I remember of heaven? Hosts of beatified saints and angels in serried ranks, united in wordless serenity.

  “Maybe it is because we have all felt pain,” I said. “Whereas it is harder for us to understand the sublime.”

  “Ah? You would see sublime as the opposite of pain? What about pleasure?”

  “I think . . . I think pleasure is too weak a word for union with God. Surely pleasure is an earthly concept: it is what comes from giving in to temptation.”

  “Precisely.” He laughed. “So the pain of hell reminds us of earthly pleasure. A potent connection, wouldn’t you say? Because it reminds us of life.”

  “Though it should also remind us of sin,” I said sternly.

  “Alas, yes.” He sighed. “Sin.” Though he did not sound too saddened by the thought. “The two do grow together like ivy round the bark.”

  “So which place will you go to, sir?” I asked, but the sternness had gone and I wondered how it would feel if next time I used the word husband.

  “Me? Oh, I shall go where I can find the best company.”

  “And will you be looking for gossip or philosophy?”

  He smiled. “For philosophy, of course. Give me classical scholars for eternity.”

  “Ah, then you are disqualified already. For those great minds remain in limbo, since they were born before the birth of the true Savior. And while they feel no pain, they suffer the despair that comes from having no hope of transcendence. Even purgatory is denied them.”

  He laughed. “Well done. Though I must tell you I smelled your trap. It was my compliment to spring it for you.” And of course as he said it I found myself wondering at the very pleasure of our conversation and how, if he was right, that in itself made it a candidate for sin. “Though I would add,” he continued, “that if Dante is to be our Virgil through the afterlife, I am sure we could both agree that there are places in hell where one might find good debating companions. In between torments, his sinners manage some penetrating discourse.”

  He and I were standing closer now, a hundred naked bodies at our fingertips. Dante’s hell had an elegant metaphysical symmetry about it: for each sin, the apposite torture. So gluttons suffered eternal hunger, thieves who could not tell their property from another’s found their bodies metamorphosing into snakes and serpents, and sinners consumed by the heat of lust were blown in endless flight by flaming winds, no satisfaction from the burning itch however much they scratched.

  Yet here we were studying them: husband and wife, our desire sanctified by the act of marriage. If there was to be bodily contact between us it could, rather than sin, be a stepping-stone to divinity. We had both read our Marsilio Ficino. Vinculum Mundi: love binding all of God’s creation together, Plato and Christianity in joyous union. So the physical act of love of man and woman was the first rung on a ladder that might lead to a final ecstatic union with the Godhead. I, who had so often dreamed of transcendence, now felt a slip-sliding sensation in my womb, a mixture in itself of pain and pleasure.

  Perhaps God had had a hand in this after all. If my husband up till now had chosen lust over love, then surely my purity might bring us both to salvation. Through our minds we might find our bodies, and through our bodies we would aspire to God.

  “Where did you meet my brother?” I said, because if ours was to be a meeting of souls I would need to know.

  He paused. “I think you know where.”

  “In a tavern?”

  “How much does it shock you?”

  “Not much,” I said. “You forget I have lived with him a long time. I know he spends much of his life in such places.”

  “He is young, though.” He paused. “I have no such excuse.”

  “It is not my business what you did before me,” I said, and I was pleased by my own meekness.

  “How sweetly you put it.” And he smiled.

  Yes, I thought. Women would find him attractive. Though he has presence, he does not pursue. Given the incessant way lust drives some men, I could see how this would be its own subtle seduction.

  We fell silent. I think we both knew the time had come. Despite his courtliness I wished he would touch me. Some simple contact: a brush of clothes or hands meeting across the parchment. Though I might want him purer, I had need of his knowledge now. I yawned.

  “You are tired?” he said immediately.

  “A little. It has been a long day.”

  “Then we shall retire. I shall call for your slave. What is her name?”

  “Erila.”

  “Erila. She can help you get ready.”

  I nodded, finding it hard to speak now, such was the pressure in my windpipe. I moved to the side, concentrating on the paintings, while he rang the bell. Hell’s bodies were all around me, writhing and rolling in savage memories of pleasure. This was a man at home with naked flesh. As his wife, I would have the advantage of his years of experience. Yes. I could have done worse.

  FIRST SHE TOOK OFF MY SHOES, EXTRACTING FROM INSIDE THE sole the gold florin my mother had placed there to bring my union wealth and fertility. As I held it in my palm I feared for a moment it might make me cry, so much was it the symbol of my lost home. Then she undid my laces and I stepped out of my dress and my chemise until I stood in front of her naked. My wedding night shift was ready on the bed. The room was cold, and as I shivered the surface of my skin rose up like the corpse of a plucked chicken. She stood with the gown in her hands, studying me. She had dressed me since I was a child and had watched the changes i
n me year by year. Now we both wondered where the thickened hips and the sprouting thatch of pubic hair had come from.

  “Oh, my lady,” she said, trying to be light and using the term in jest. “Look at you—such a ripe peach.”

  Despite myself I laughed. “I think fat, more like. I am puffed up like a diseased bladder.”

  “It’s flesh that comes and goes with the moon. But it suits you. You are ready.”

  “Oh, not you too, Erila. I have had enough of it from Tomaso. The only thing that has changed in me is that I bleed like a stuck pig now. Otherwise I am the same as before.”

  She smiled. “Not quite the same. Mark my words.”

  I wished again that she had been my mother. Then I could have asked her all the things I didn’t know and that might save my life or at least my dignity over the next few hours. But it was already too late. I grabbed the gown and pulled it over my head. The sheet of silk fell to the floor, my father’s profits caressing my naked hips and legs. Inside it I looked almost graceful.

  I sat while she took down my hair. It was so thick and unruly that when the last few pins came it fell heavily down my back.

  “It is like a river of black lava,” she said, as she began brushing and tugging its tangles free.

  “A field of squabbling crows, more like.”

  She shrugged. “Where I come from the color is beautiful.”

  “Oh! Then can I go and live in that country too? Or I have an even better idea.” I caught her eye in the mirror. “Why don’t you go to him tonight in my place? Really. It is perfect. It will be dark so he’ll never know the difference. We’ve barely exchanged twenty words together. No, stop laughing, I mean it. You are nearly as plump as I am. As long as he doesn’t talk Greek to you it’ll be simple.”

  Her laughter has always been a benign contagion, and for a while now we were both unable to stop. If he heard us, what would he think? I took a deep breath, held it in, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again she was smiling at me.

  “Do you think I am too young for this, Erila?” I said anxiously.