The Birth of Venus

by Sarah Dunant

She grabbed me by the arm. “Get up. It will hurt more on the floor. Get over here, girl. Hold your mistress up. Hook your elbows under her armpits. Go on. That’s it. Support her back upright against you. Come on, brace yourself, take her weight. Lift her. Now.”

  Tancia might be stupid but she was strong. I hung from her arms, my whole body shaking, my skirts hooked over my shoulders, my legs spread wide, my belly huge beneath me while my mother crouched at my feet. When the need came now I pushed, and I held the push till there was no more breath, until I felt my face go purple and my eyes water with the strain, and it seemed like the whole of my anus and sex was tearing apart.

  “And again. Push! The head is there. I can see it. It’s ready to come.”

  But I couldn’t do it. Just as suddenly, the urge left me and I fell back limp and shaking against Tancia’s arms, a woman cut down from the rack, every limb quivering like water with pain and fear. I could feel the tears running down my face and the mucus dribbling from my nose, and I would have sobbed if I hadn’t been too frightened of the energy it would have taken. There was no time to recover before it came again, this terrible need to expunge, expel, to shit this baby out of me. Except I couldn’t do it. With each push I felt myself about to explode. Something was terribly wrong. The head was deformed, so large it would never come out. The sin of its conception was now visited upon its birth and we would hang here forever, baby and I, in perpetual torment as it tried to tear its way out of my body.

  “I can’t . . . I can’t.” I could hear the panic in my voice. “I am too small. This is God’s punishment for my sins.”

  My mother’s voice was firm, as it had been all through my life, guiding, cajoling. “What? You think God has time for your sins? Even now Savonarola is under torture for heresy and treachery. His screams can be heard in the square. What are your faults to compare to his? Keep your breath for the baby. Here it comes. Now push, push down for all your life. Come on!”

  Again I pushed.

  “Yes, yes, again! It’s there. It’s nearly out.” I felt myself stretch to breaking point, but still I would not give.

  “I can’t,” I whimpered, as I gasped for breath. “I’m scared. I’m so scared.”

  This time she didn’t shout at me but knelt up and took my face in her hands and stroked the wetness away. And while her hand was gentle her voice was urgent. “Listen to me, Alessandra. You have the greatest spirit I have ever seen in a girl, and you haven’t come this far to die on the floor of your bedroom. Just one more push. One more and it will be over. I will help you. Just listen to me and do everything I say. Is it coming again? Yes? Take a deep breath. The biggest breath of your life. Yes, that’s it. Good. Now hold it. Now push, push. Hold. Push! And again. Push!”

  “Aaaah!” And as my voice howled around the room I heard another sound, the rip of my own flesh as the inside of me tore open to let the head through.

  “Yes. Yes!” I didn’t need her voice to tell me. Out it came. I could feel it, a huge fast slithering power and a sense of release like nothing I had ever known before. “Oh, it is here. It is come. Oh! Oh, look at it, look at it!”

  And as Tancia and I fell to the floor I saw at my feet a shining little goblin, crunched and hunched and covered in shit and blood and slime. “It’s a girl,” my mother said, in a hushed voice. “A beautiful, beautiful little girl.”

  She picked up the gluey little body and turned it upside down by the feet, and it choked as if its nose and lungs were filled with water until she slapped it hard on the rump, and then out came this angry vibrating little yell, a first instant protest against the insanity and outrage of the world it had entered.

  And because there was no knife or scissors, she used her teeth to bite sharply into the cord, severing it that way. Then she laid her on my stomach, only I was shaking so much that I could barely hold her and Tancia had to catch her as she slid down toward the floor. But then I had her and as my mother massaged my stomach to push out the afterbirth, I lay on the floor, this warm, slimy, creased little animal clasped in my arms.

  So it was that my daughter was born. After they had washed and wrapped her tight in swaddling cloth, because there was no wet nurse to feed her they brought her to me again and we watched in a kind of awe as she rooted her way like a blind worm to my breast, her gums fixing onto my nipple with such unexpected force that it made me yelp, her tiny jaws sucking and sucking until I felt the sweet pain of the milk starting to flow. And only then, after her demands had been met and she had fallen off the breast like a full tick blown up with fresh blood, did she deign to sleep and let me sleep too.

  Forty-five

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS I FELL IN LOVE: DEEPLY, profoundly, irrevocably. And if my husband had seen her too I have no doubt she would have won him also, with the miracle of her fingernails, the gravity of her unblinking gaze, and the glow from the palpable spark of divinity within her.

  As my world shrank into the pupils of her eyes, history was being made outside. My mother had been right about our joint agony. While my insides had been squeezed and stretched by the force of new life, Savonarola was hearing the sound of his own screams as his sinews snapped under the weight of the strappado. His reign over the New Jerusalem had ended that morning with the storming of San Marco. Though his loyal monks had fought more like soldiers—there was much talk of the mad strength of one Father Brunetto Datto, a giant of a Dominican with skin like pumice stone who wielded a knife with particular wild pleasure—in the end they were overcome, and the mob had broken in and found Savonarola bowed in prayer on the steps of the altar. From there he was taken in chains to the fortress tower of the Palazzo della Signoria, where the great Cosimo de’ Medici had been held sixty years before on the same charge of treason against the state. But while Cosimo had had the means to charm and bribe his jailers, there was to be no such relief for Friar Girolamo.

  He was subjected first to the strappado and then the rack. With each broken bit of body he pleaded guilty to another charge: false prophesy, heresy, treason, anything they wanted to hear just so long as they would stop the pain. At which point they had cut him down and taken him to his cell. But with the pain gone he recanted, crying out that it was torture and not the truth that had broken him and calling on God to bring him again to the light. Yet with the first ratchet of the rack he confessed again, and this time they went on until he had not the voice, let alone the courage, to deny again.

  Thus was Florence freed from the tyranny of the man who had set out to bring her to God, only in the end to find that God had deserted him. But though I had good reason to hate him I could only feel pity. At my bedside, Erila laughed at my compassion and told me how birth was notorious for softening a woman’s brain. And so two days passed and there was still no word from my husband.

  On the morning of the third day I woke to a shining sun and the sight of Erila and my mother in urgent conversation at my door. “What is it?” I said from the bed. They turned, exchanging fast glances. My mother came forward till she was standing close.

  “My dear child . . . there is news. You must be brave.”

  “Cristoforo.” Because, of course, all this time I had been expecting something. “It is Cristoforo, isn’t it?”

  She came to me and took my hand in hers as she told me, her eyes reading the journey of my feelings. It was a story of our time: how the city had been in the grip of bloodlust in the hours following the storming of San Marco, with old scores to be settled, old enemies hunted down. But not all the violence had been just, and a number of other bodies had been found, including one in the alley of La Bocca near the old bridge, a notorious place where the flesh of both men and women was traded under cover of night. And how there, in the light of a new morning, under the mess of stab wounds someone had recognized the cut of fine cloth and the nobility of a good face.

  I sat rock-still like one of his statues, my flesh grown cold at her words.

  “You must be brave, Alessandra,” my mother said again, and her voi
ce reminded me of the times when I was a child and she was teaching me how to speak to God as if He were my father as well as my Lord. “Such things are His will and it is not for us to question them.” She held me tight for a moment, and when she was satisfied that I had not broken apart with the shock she said softly, “My dear, your husband has no other family. If you are strong enough, it is asked that you come and claim the body.”

  IF LABOR SOFTENS FEELINGS IT ALSO UNRAVELS MEMORY, MAKING some moments stand forever and others fade almost as they happen.

  Though a wet nurse had been found, we took the baby because I could not bear to be separated from her. The servants, I remember, were standing by the door as we left, eyes down, their future torn apart by the news. On our way we stopped at the Baptistery. With my husband gone there had been no one to register the birth and it was the law that it must be done within sixty hours. A white bean for a girl, black for a boy. Under the golden cupola where the life of Our Lord unfolded in dense gleaming mosaics, the birth box rattled with new life.

  Outside, the streets were filthy with the debris of rioting: sticks and boulders and bits of clothing clogging the gutters and all of it lit by a dazzling sun. But though the weather was joyful the mood was somber. We were a godly state no more, and no one quite understood how much rejoicing we should take from that.

  The plague had taken so many victims they had had to set up a temporary morgue across the river, commandeering a set of rooms in the hospital of Santo Spírito. As we were guided through the labyrinth at the back of the church, I thought of my painter and his nights spent recording the ways in which violence dissected the human body. I clutched the baby closer and walked as a child myself again, in the footsteps of my mother, with my maidservant close behind.

  The official at the door was a rough man, his breath rancid with stale beer. He had a makeshift ledger in which were written columns of numbers and in some cases names. The writing was crude. My mother did the talking, telling our story in the same way she moved through the world, with grace and clarity. People listened to my mother. When she was finished he shuffled himself out of his chair and walked with us into the room.

  It was as one might imagine a battlefield after the army has moved on. There were rows of bodies lying on the floor, wrapped in winds of grubby linen. There was so much blood on some of them it made one fear they might still have been alive, dumped here to leak away the remains of life into their makeshift shrouds.

  My husband’s corpse was on a pallet near the end of the room. At another moment in history one might have hoped for more ceremony for the more noble names, but Florence was hemorrhaging death now and any space would have to do.

  We stood at the feet. He looked up at me. “You ready?”

  I gave the baby to my mother. She smiled at me. “Don’t be shocked, my child,” she said. “There is a greater power at work here than both of us.”

  He leaned down and pulled back the shroud. I closed my eyes and then opened them again—onto the bloodied face of a middle-aged man I had never seen before in my life.

  By my side Erila let out a broken howl. “Oh, master, oh, master, who can have done this to you?” As I turned she flung herself into my arms, clutching at me and howling. “Oh, my poor lady, don’t look, don’t look, it is too awful. What will become of us now?”

  I tried to shake her off, but she clung like a leech. “Are you mad?” I whispered in horror. “This isn’t Cristoforo!” But her wailing continued. I stared helplessly at my mother, who came immediately to join us. The man was watching keenly now. No doubt he had seen the way grief takes enough women to be ready for anything.

  My mother glanced down at the body, then up at me. Her look was keen. “Oh, my dear, dear daughter,” she said loudly. “I know what you must feel. How hard it is to understand how God could allow such a thing, to take away the man you loved for no reason. Grieve for him, grieve for your Cristoforo, and let him rest. He is gone to a better place.”

  As I stood there, my mouth open with dumb shock, my new soft womanliness came forward to help me and I started to weep; fat fast tears which once started were a law unto themselves. And all this commotion now woke the baby and she started to yell too, and so we stood there, a vision of female grief unleashed, and the man took his pen and marked a large cross beside my husband’s name.

  BACK IN THE UNCOMFORTABLE, UNCOMFORTING RECEIVING ROOM, Erila—whose tears had dried immediately once we left the building—brought us spiced wine and insisted that I take a potion from her pouch, before hugging me and then leaving us, closing the door firmly behind her. The baby lay in my arms blinking up at me as I faced my mother.

  “So,” I said numbly. “Where is he?”

  “Gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Into the country. With Tomaso. The morning of your labor he came to get me and told me what had passed between you. Once it was decided, he arranged for a body to be found with a note written in his hand so it would lead the authorities to us for identification. I am sorry for the distress it caused you. I didn’t tell you because I feared in your softened state you might not be able to hold with the pretense.” She sounded as matter-of-fact as a statesman whose job it is to take on grave questions and make sense of them for the rest of the frightened population.

  But I did not have her serenity. “I . . . I don’t understand. Why? Was it so important if the baby wasn’t his? Because—”

  “Because it might have been? Don’t worry, Alessandra. I know it all. I am not here to judge you. There is another court for that, and in that court I suspect you and I might find ourselves standing together some day.” She sighed. “It was not to do with the baby. He felt . . . well, I should not speak for him. He asked once it was revealed that I give you this. Though I think it would be wise if you destroyed it after.”

  And from out of her bodice she drew a letter. I took it with shaking hands. The baby whimpered in my arms. I hushed her back into quiet and cracked the seal.

  His hand was so elegant. Such a contrast to the violent scrawl in the Santo Spírito record book. It gave me pleasure just to look at it. Pleasure and recognition.

  My dear Alessandra,

  By the time you read this we will be gone. And you, God willing, will be delivered of a healthy child. Tomaso is in need of me. The damage done to him is terrible, and with his beauty gone and his body broken his need is even greater. I cannot rid myself of the accusation that my lust in some way created him, and so it is my duty now to tend the pain I have caused. My duty. And yes, still my desire. If you and I stayed together I would feel that pain for the rest of my life and would be an embittered companion for you and the child.

  With me dead a different future is now possible for you. With no other family to call upon my assets, a will has been drawn up which allows enough money to Tomaso to secure a life of modest comfort for us and which bequeaths the rest of my estate to you. As such it is uncommon and there may be those who question it, but it is legal and binding and it will be honored. The future is for you to decide. You are young enough to marry again. You may choose to return to your family or even, if you have the stomach for it, to live alone. I do not doubt your courage for an instant. Though I believe your mother has thoughts on this which you should listen to.

  I ask you to forgive me my harsh words to you in the gallery. Despite our arrangement I found myself more drawn to you than I had realized and your betrayal cut me deep, just as mine cut you in similar ways. I want you to know that I felt as much for you as it was possible for me to do, and that I always will.

  The key enclosed with this letter opens the manuscript cupboard in my study. You will be surprised by its contents. I am aware that some might label it theft, but since we both know it could otherwise have become war booty or worse—fuel for the fire—I would prefer to see it in your hands than any others I can think of. You understood this great new art of ours as well as any man I ever knew. Your father would have been proud of you.

 
I remain your loving husband, Cristoforo Langella

  I closed my hand tight over the key and read the letter a second time. And then a third. After a while my mother had to take it from me because my tears were turning the ink into rivulets of black wash, and such was its content that it would not do to obscure its meaning now. Erila was right. A woman’s brain is reduced to milksop by birth. In such a state we will love anyone, even those who have deserted or betrayed us. Now it seemed I must bring up my daughter with no husband and not even her blood grandfather to care for her. Your father would have been proud of you. How easily the world can be turned upside down by a few well-chosen words.

  Finally, when I looked up into my mother’s eyes she met my gaze directly. He would never have written such a thing if he had not spoken to her first, surely?

  “You know what it says?” I asked, when I had the wit to talk.

  “Those things that directly concern your future and my past we spoke of before he wrote it. The rest will be private to you.”

  And still she did not look away. Throughout my life she had radiated a quiet calm intelligence, which she had used to still the storms of rebellion and questioning that she found in me. It had never occurred to me that she might have suffered from such storms herself, or that her acceptance of God’s will and belief in His infinite mercy had any history of conflict within it. But I know now that it is not easy for daughters to think of their mothers as separate beings with lives and desires that are not subservient to their own. And just as I have since forgiven my own daughter that failure so I am sure my mother had forgiven me. To give her her due, that day she did not evade my questions or lie to me in any way. I think after so long there may even have been a relief in the telling of it.

  “So,” I said at last. “The inscription by Lorenzo de’ Medici in the book of Discourses that he gave my husband was dated 1477, the year of my conception. But you were not at court then, surely? Your brother’s star was already high enough to have you married off to a good husband. Isn’t that the story we were always told?”