The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

  “Sodomy,” I repeated. “Such a grave sin that I have only recently understood its meaning. Though I feel my education in such matters was rather lacking.”

  “Well, it is not something that a good family need take notice of,” she said, and now she was every bit as brittle as I. In those words, the enormity of her betrayal was made clear to me and, while I could hardly believe it, I also felt such fury that it was difficult to be in the same room with her. I stood up, making some excuse that I had work to do. But she did not move.

  “Alessandra,” she said.

  I stared at her evenly.

  “My dear child, if you are unhappy—”

  “Unhappy? Why? What could there possibly be in my marriage that makes me unhappy?” And I continued to stare at her.

  She rose up, defeated by my aggression. “You know your father would like it if you came to visit. He is much weighed down by the matters of business these days. Ours is not the only state to be in turmoil, and too much politics is bad for trade. I think it would distract him a little to be visited by his favorite daughter,” she said gently. “As it would myself.”

  “Really. I would have thought the house would be full of my brothers, now we are becoming tougher on young men’s follies.”

  “Well, it is true that Luca has changed his ways,” she said. “Indeed, I fear Savonarola has made a new conquest in your brother. You should be aware of that in your dealings with him. And Tomaso—” She broke off and I saw again the tremor in her. “Well, we do not see a great deal of Tomaso these days. I think that is another thing that worries your father.” And she dropped her eyes.

  She had got as far as the door and still I had said nothing, when she turned. “Oh, but I have forgotten. I have brought you something. From the painter.”

  “The painter?” I felt the familiar sweet pain rise and curl in my stomach, though such had been the drama of our lives that I had not thought of him for some time.

  “Yes.” She pulled out something from her bag, a parcel wrapped in white muslin. “He gave it to me this morning. It is his wedding gift. I think he may have been put out that we did not use him for a marriage chest, though your father did explain to him there had been no time.”

  “How is he?”

  She gave a shrug. “He has begun the frescoes. But we are not to see them till they are finished. He works by day with his helpers, then on his own at night. He leaves the house only to attend service. He is a strange young man. I have said no more than fifty words to him in all the time he has been with us. I think he was probably better suited to his monastery than our worldly city. But your father still believes in him. We must hope his frescoes are as rich as his faith.”

  She stopped. Maybe she was hoping she might have softened my silence with the promise of further gossip. But still I would do nothing to help her, so she embraced me quickly and went.

  The room grew cold around my new aloneness. I would not let myself think about what I had learned, because if I did I would surely fall into a chasm of pain from which I would never emerge. Instead, I turned my attention to the painter’s present.

  I unwrapped the muslin carefully. Underneath, painted in tempera on a panel of wood about the size of a large church Bible, was a portrait of Our Lady. The scene was vibrant with the color palette of the Florentine sun, and the background detail showed off elements of the city: the great dome, the complex perspectives of its loggias and piazzas, and a wealth of churches. At the center sat the Virgin, her hands (such beautifully painted hands) folded gently in her lap and her gold-leaf halo shining out to the world, defining her as the Mother of God.

  That much was certain. What was less certain was the moment of her life in which he had chosen to capture her. Her youth was paramount, and from the way she was staring boldly out past the viewer’s gaze it was clear that she was looking at someone. Yet there was no sign of any eager angel bringing her glad tidings and no dancing or sleeping baby to bring her joy. Her face was long and full, too full to be beautiful, and her skin nowhere near pale enough to be fashionable, but despite her looks there was something about her: a gravity, an intensity almost, that made you look twice.

  That second look revealed something else. Mary was less of a supplicant than an inquirer; there was a questioning in her eyes, as if she were yet to satisfactorily understand or accept everything that was being asked of her—and that, without understanding, it was possible she might choose not to obey.

  In short, there was a kind of rebellion to her, the like of which I had never seen in a Madonna before. Yet despite her transgression I knew her well enough. Because her face was my own.

  Twenty-six

  I STAYED UP INTO THE NIGHT, MY MIND CAREERING between the guilt of my mother and the transgression of the painter. How could she have been capable of such betrayal? What was he thinking to create such a work? I sat at my bedroom window looking out onto a city that was more forbidden to me now than when I had been a virgin in my father’s house, and I wondered about the journey of my life, which had taken me from such hope to such despair. As I sat there I caught the first flakes of snow rushing up out of the darkness past the window. And because snow was something that happened rarely in the city, I was, despite myself, entranced and stayed up to watch. So it was that I witnessed the arrival of the great blizzard.

  It raged for two nights and two days, the snow so thick and wind-driven that in daylight it was hard to see even to the other side of the street. When it finally blew itself out, the city was transformed: the streets more like the contours of the countryside, with dips and dunes that buried many houses up to the second floor, while so much rain had turned to ice from the overhangs of the roofs that Florence looked as if it had been hung with curtains of cascading crystals. It was so beautiful it could almost have been the work of God, a vision to celebrate our new purity. Though others said it was a sign that Our Lord had joined with Savonarola and, having failed to burn our sin away with the heat, now sought to freeze it out of us with the cold.

  The weather became our lives for a while. The river froze deep enough for children to build bonfires on its surface, and the boatmen were the first to starve as Florentines learned to walk on water. Years before, when I was a child and there had been a snowstorm strong enough to cover the city, people had taken to the streets to build snow sculptures, and one of the apprentices at Lorenzo’s sculpture school had constructed a lion as a symbol of Florence in the garden of the Medici Palace. It was so lifelike that Lorenzo had opened the gates to let the citizenry see it. But there were no such fripperies now. Each evening as darkness fell the city grew so silent that you would think the people had been frozen into the landscape. My husband’s house was drafty enough that we might as well have been on the street, and indeed, some people did die in their homes. We at least had fires, which burned the front of our legs while leaving our backs freezing.

  By the second week the snow turned to black ice and became so perilous that no one went out unless they had to. The winter darkness began to seep into our souls. It seemed to last forever. The days had scarcely any daylight to them yet they were achingly long, and my husband’s growing impatience with his separation from my brother was so overt that after a while his longing began to overrule his politeness and he started to withdraw from me, keeping himself to his study long into the night. His absence upset me more than I could bear to admit. Then, one morning, the weather notwithstanding, he left the house and did not return with the dark.

  But if he could go, then so could I. Next day, leaving a note for Erila, I headed out alone to visit my sister.

  On the streets, the air was so cold you could only take small breaths, it so cauterized your nostrils. People walked slowly, their whole attention focused on where they put their feet. Some carried bags of dirt—earth and grit—that they scattered like seed corn in front of them. Salt would have done better, but it was far too valued a commodity to waste on one’s footsteps. I had neither, and as a result my way wa
s treacherous and, while the distance between our two houses was not far, my skirts were torn and crusted black before I had traveled a hundred yards.

  Plautilla welcomed me with astonished but open arms, setting me down by the fire and clucking over the daring and stupidity of her precipitate younger sister. Her house felt so different from mine. It was less grand and more recently built so there were fewer cracks to let the cold in. There were also more fires, and it had that relentless busyness of family that I remembered so fondly from my childhood. In contrast to my raw nose and pinched face she looked comfortable and warm, though it has to be said she was almost as fat without the baby as she had been with.

  Despite the wonder of its timing, my sister’s nativity had clearly been a good deal less humble than Our Lady’s. In her defense one could argue that since her confinement had coincided with the invasion, Plautilla had not been out in public for a while and no one had broken the news to her about how much things had changed. Nevertheless, if the Sumptuary Police had chosen to pay a visit to the nursery they would have had the baby out of most of her clothes and much of the furniture on the street. Fortunately, we had not come to that. Yet.

  She let me hold my bawling, scrunched-up little niece, who dutifully screamed in my arms until the wet nurse took her and fixed her onto the breast, where she gorged herself like a young lamb, so that you could hear the greedy suck and gulp of her jaws, while Plautilla sat in plump serene silence, replete with her triumph and soft nipples.

  “I understand now that this is what women were made for.” She sighed. “Though I wish Eve had saved us some of the agony of birthing. You would not believe the pain. I think it must be worse than the strappado. God showed Our Lady great mercy in relieving her of that particular burden.” She popped another sweet into her mouth. “But look at her, will you? Doesn’t Papa’s cream cloth make the most beautiful swaddling? See what you have to look forward to. She is a much greater creation than all your scribbling, don’t you think?”

  I agreed that she was, though—since Plautilla only held her three or four times during my visit and spent the rest of the days sorting out baggage that would accompany the baby and the wet nurse to the country within the week—I couldn’t quite see how significant a difference she was going to make to her life. As for Maurizio, from the brief few moments I saw him he seemed rather bored by the whole affair, but then the men of the state were about bigger business than babies. And she was only a girl.

  “Mother says you are well but grown humble. I must say you look a little plain.”

  “Very plain,” I said. “But then the world is grown plain. I am surprised they have not told you.”

  “Oh, why should I leave the house? I have everything I need here.”

  “And after the baby goes? What will you do then?”

  “I will tidy up, and when I’m rested we will set about making another,” she said, with a coy smile. “Maurizio will not rest until we have a fleet of boys to lead the new Republic.”

  “Good for him,” I said. “If you get them out quickly they could become the new warriors for God.”

  “Yes. Talking of warriors, have you seen Luca recently?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, let me tell you he is changed. He came to see Illuminata just two days ago. Don’t you love that name? Like a new light in the sky. He said it was a fitting name for our time and that blessed was the fruit of my womb.” She laughed. “Imagine our Luca using such language. Mind you, he looked awful. His nose was blue from the cold of the street patrol. He had all his hair cut off, like a monk. Though I’ve heard there are younger ones who really do look like angels.”

  Though I bet they poke like devils, I thought, remembering the group in the square. I cast a glance at the wet nurse, who had her eyes fixed on Illuminata, who in turn was staring unblinking back up at her. Was she too a follower of the new state? It was hard to know what one could say in front of whom these days.

  “Don’t worry,” Plautilla whispered, catching my look. “She’s from outside Florence. She barely understands us.”

  But I saw a small flash in the hooded eyes that made me think otherwise.

  “Guess what Luca bought me as her birthing present? A book of Savonarola’s sermons. Fancy that! Straight from the printing press. Imagine, they are printing them now. Three new printer’s shops opened in the Via dei Librai in the last few months, he said, all to deal with the new words. Do you remember when Mother used to say it was vulgar to buy books that came from mechanical means? That the beauty of the words was—” She stumbled.

  “—half in the strokes of the pens that copied them,” I said. “Because the copyists added their love and devotion to the original text.”

  “Ooh. You do remember everything. Well, no more. Even gentlemen buy printed books now. I hear it is all the rage. Just think. No sooner does he say things than they are in our hands. So those who cannot read can have them read aloud. No wonder he has such a devout following.”

  Though she could be easily distracted by flurries of fashion, she was not stupid, my sister, and I believe that had she been in church listening to the passion of his words during this time, she too might have felt a certain fear as well as wonder. But the pleasures of marriage and motherhood were softening her brain. “You are right,” I said quietly. “Still, I would give it some time before you read them to Illuminata.”

  I saw the wet nurse shift her gaze slightly, pulling the baby off the breast for a moment so that its indignant screams momentarily disrupted the conversation. For the rest of my stay I did not bring the subject up again.

  WHEN I ARRIVED HOME SOME DAYS LATER, THE ICE WAS MELTING.

  On the corner of our street the thaw had revealed a half-frozen body of a dog, its insides slit open and its black entrails coming to life as the first maggots began to survive the cold. I could not tell if the stink was of life or of death. My house also smelled different, as if some foreign animal had entered it. Or it could have been that I spotted Tomaso’s horse tethered next to Cristoforo’s in the courtyard. They were both glistening with sweat, standing companionably close, waiting for the groom to finish brushing them. The boy broke off from his task to greet me with a quick nod. I nodded back. Why did I feel so sure that he had ministered to both animals like this many times before?

  Erila met me before I could get as far as my room. I expected her to berate me for my absence, but instead there was almost an exaggerated jollity to her.

  “How was your sister?”

  “Plump,” I said. “In many ways.”

  “And the baby?”

  “Hard to tell. It was covered in milk vomit. But it has a voice on it. I think it’ll survive.”

  “Your brother is here. Tomaso.” Was it my imagination or was she looking at me rather keenly?

  “Really,” I said casually. “When did he arrive?”

  “The day after you left,” she said, and her studied casualness felt about as real as my own. So did she know too? Had she always known? Had everyone known but me?

  “Where are they now?”

  “They just got in from riding. I . . . I think they are in the receiving room.”

  “Perhaps you would tell them I am home. No. No, on second thought I will go to them myself.”

  I sidestepped her and climbed the stairs quickly before I lost my courage, feeling her eyes on my back as I went. The day after I had left. My husband’s naked desire made me ashamed for him. And for myself.

  I pushed open the door quietly. They had made themselves at home. The table was still laid from supper with a good wine opened, and the air was heavy with the smell of spices. It would seem the kitchen had done them proud. They were standing at the open grate, close to the fire and closer still to each other, though not touching. To the unobservant eye they might have been two friends sharing the warmth, but all I could feel was the charge between them, leaping like the crack of energy between two burning logs of wood.

  Tomaso was less oste
ntatiously dressed now, clearly mindful of the new codes, though it seemed to me that his good-looking face was going a little to fat. He would be twenty next birthday. Not exactly manhood, but old enough to warrant heavier punishments. Was it yesterday Plautilla had been recounting stories of how in Venice younger men convicted of sodomy regularly had their noses cut off, a prostitute’s punishment, befitting their emasculated status and designed to ruin their vanity? It had made me understand the meaning of that mutilation of the boy on the steps of the Baptistery the day of my marriage. In all my years of conflict with Tomaso I had never harbored such cruel thoughts toward him, and it scared me that I should do so now.

  He was the first to see me, catching my eye over my husband’s shoulder. We had spent our lives as each other’s tormentors: he the mule with the thick kick, me the mosquito, scoring half a dozen red blisters to his one occasional thump.

  “Hello, sister,” he said, and I swear his triumph was tinged with fear.

  “Hello, Tomaso.” I knew my voice must be strange because I could barely find enough breath to get his name out properly.

  My husband turned immediately, moving away from his lover and toward me in the same sleek move. “My dear. Welcome home. How was your sister?”

  “Plump. In many ways.” Thank God for the power of memory.

  There followed a confused few steps of dance as we arranged ourselves in the room, Cristoforo in one chair, me in another, and Tomaso on a small settee nearby: husband, wife, and brother-in-law, a charming family group of Florence’s more cultured elite.

  “And what of the baby?”

  “Fine.” There was a pause. What was Savonarola’s great wisdom when it came to women? After obedience, a wife’s greatest virtue is silence. But then to be a real wife you have to have a real husband.

  “Plautilla has missed you,” I said to Tomaso. “She says you are the only one not to visit.”

  He dropped his eyes. “I know. I have been busy.”

  Snipping the frills off your garments, no doubt, I thought, though as I did so I noticed he was wearing the silver wedding belt. The fact of it registered like a punch in my stomach. “I am surprised you have been out so much. I would have thought the city less inviting for you these days.”