“Why?”
“So everyone can identify us as Jews. That way, they’ll have no trouble shunning us or abusing us or harassing us. Or trying to convert us to Christianity. That’s the favorite thing, isn’t it? Trying to convert the Jew?” An edge of bitterness had crept into her voice.
Niccolo sensed the swing in her mood. And he knew what to do about it. Distract her. Make her think of something else. “What’s wrong with conversion? Jews convert to Christianity all the time. Let me tell you about it. There was a merchant in Florence named Gianotto who had a cloth business. And among his business associates was a rich Jew named Ibrahim, who was also a merchant. Gianotto recognized his friend’s honesty and his upright character, and began to regret that this good man was destined to be condemned for all eternity and damned to hell because of his lack of faith. So he decided to convert him.
“Gianotto began to lecture his Jewish friend on the error of his ways, and to explain all that was holy and good in the Christian faith. At first, Ibrahim resisted and said, ‘I was born a Jew and I’ll die one, and nothing will cause me to change.’ But Gianotto was insistent. He kept at him and slowly wore down his resistance. In the end, Ibrahim agreed to become a Christian, but on one condition. He said, ‘All right, Gianotto, I’m willing to try your religion, but first I want to go to Rome to see the Holy Father and his brothers, the cardinals, and all the Curia. I want to see these great and holy men, so that I can truly understand why your faith is better than mine. Then, I shall allow myself to be baptized.’
“Gianotto was in despair, and tried everything in his power to keep Ibrahim from going to Rome—‘It’s too far, it’s dangerous for a man of your age, it’s expensive, the weather is bad.’ But Ibrahim was determined, and so he went.
“When he got there, he began to observe the behavior of the pope and the cardinals and the other priests. Ibrahim was astounded. Never had he seen such a filthy, bawdy company in his entire life. He saw every conceivable type of vice, natural and unnatural. He saw that the only way to gain a favor at the papal court was through the intercession of whores and little boys! So Ibrahim, his head hung low in somber thought, returned to Florence.”
Niccolo was warming to his tale, and what was best, the girl seemed intrigued. “When Ibrahim got back, Gianotto was ashamed and was even afraid to talk to his Jewish friend, knowing, as any Christian in Italy would know, what he must have seen in the Eternal City. But Ibrahim sent for him, and Gianotto was forced to face him, ‘Well, what did you think of the Holy Father?’ he asked, cringing.
“‘Oh, he was an abomination. And his cardinals and all his priests. I saw no good works there, no holiness, no devotion, no exemplary lives. Instead I saw a frightening display of all the seven deadly sins—I saw lust and anger, gluttony, sloth, fraud, envy and pride. And in such abundance that it’s a marvel to me that your God doesn’t strike out in His wrath and destroy this pestiferous church.’
“Gianotto was silent, deeply humiliated.
“‘But he doesn’t!’ continued Ibrahim. Despite every effort of the pope and vile court to destroy everything that is good and holy in the world. And this got me to thinking, Gianotto. Any church that is able to withstand that kind of wickedness and corruption must have something powerful going for it. So come now, I’ve made my choice. What else can I do? Take me to be baptized.’”
At first, Niccolo told his story in a deadly serious tone, but gradually, he began to exaggerate more and more. At the end of Niccolo’s tale, the girl was so pleased by the odd twist of events that she clapped her hands in delight. “Beautiful hands,” Niccolo thought. “Tiny hands.”
He beamed. He seemed to have won her approval. He was happy. She derived some small comfort from his efforts and even had the audacity to plant a small kiss on Niccolo’s forehead as a reward.
“If you promise you won’t try to convert me, then I think we can be friends,” she said.
“I promise,” Niccolo vowed.
“Because it gets so tedious,” she said, “and they never give up. Did you know that every week they send a preacher down to the borghetto, to preach to the Jews? We all have to go and we all have to sit quietly and listen. It’s required by law. And who knows, maybe one of us will convert?”
“We have to go too,” said Niccolo, “every Sunday. Miss one Sunday and you go straight to hell. I guess it’s the same for everyone.”
“It’s not the same for everyone.” Again, her mood swung, again toward unhappiness. “For us, it’s different. We have to wear these badges so you can see us coming. We’re not allowed to own land or carry weapons. We’re not even allowed out after dark! When something goes wrong, they blame the Jews. When the great plague started, what did they say? That the Jews had poisoned the wells! And on and on.” There were tears in her dark eyes.
Neither said anything for a long time. They stared at the bearded goats, impertinent creatures. Niccolo had never thought about Jews at all once he had determined they did not steal away bad little boys. He had always assumed they were content within the closed circle of their bizarre practices and beliefs.
When the girl spoke again, it was not in the agile, lively voice of this afternoon but in the distant, preoccupied monotone of yesterday evening at the roadside. “Do you know how they represent us in their paintings and statues, the Christian masters? How they represent the Jew who refuses to recognize Jesus Christ?”
Niccolo said he didn’t.
“As a beautiful woman—with a blindfold.”
The girl stated flatly that she intended to return to the city that afternoon, and Niccolo nearly made a fool of himself in protesting his readiness, his eagerness, his willingness, his insistence, and his boundless enthusiasm for accompanying her. The offer was accepted graciously, if with a certain sly smile, and they made ready to leave in order to get back to Florence before nightfall.
Prior to their departure, there was more eating. Pagolo, with true nobility of spirit, presented almost his entire cache of truffles to Cesca, their hostess, in a gesture of gratitude.
Michele, the archbishop of outlaws, had led the little party through the maze of precarious paths that wound down and out of the hills. Niccolo was careful to memorize the route as they went and promised to return to visit his new friends when he could. Michele left the three wayfarers on a narrow but serviceable road that he said would eventually carry them into Florence at the Porta San Friano.
Niccolo was surprised to discover that they were only about two hours away from the city on foot, less on horseback. In his state of nervous exhaustion, the previous night’s journey had taken on fantastic dimensions and seemed much longer than it actually was.
Pagolo was enjoying a postprandial hour of quiet, and Niccolo could have sworn he was asleep as he walked, if such a thing were possible. Niccolo was so absorbed in attending to the young lady in his charge that his chubby companion could have strolled over the edge of a cliff without his absence being remarked.
“Where will you go?” he asked her. Is your mother—”
“Dead,” she cut him off. “All dead now. I’ll go to Melchisadech, a business partner of my father. He lives in the house next door to us. He’ll know what I should do.”
“He’ll take care of you?” There was a note of disappointment in Niccolo’s voice, for he had been evolving an elaborate plan in which the family Machiavelli might be persuaded to shelter this unfortunate orphan, temporarily at least, but perhaps for a long time, perhaps forever.
“Tell me where you live,” he said, changing the subject.
Giuditta began to explain, but her task was complicated by a number of factors, foremost among them that Niccolo knew absolutely nothing of the streets of the borghetto, the Jewish quarter, and she knew little else. Furthermore, it was becoming apparent from their attempts to find some common geographical ground that the Jews did not always use the same street names as the Florentines did. A good deal of confusion could have been avoided if, for example, it had
been clear from the outset that what Giuditta insisted was the Via dei Macellai, the street of the butcher shops, was in fact what Niccolo referred to as the Via dei Giudei, the street of the Jews. Eventually, however, Giuditta succeeded in bringing Niccolo into the general vicinity of her house.
She was saying, “There is a vacant lot at the corner, full of rubble and stinking garbage. The garbage, they dump there deliberately, all the time, to harass us.”
“Who dumps it?” Niccolo interrupted.
“Men with oxcarts. Who do you think dumps it?” she replied. “Now listen. . . . If you continue along the edge of the vacant lot, you’ll see a house with a huge mural painted on the side. That house stands at the entrance to the borghetto.
“It’s an ugly thing, the mural. A man with wings is standing over a woman who is for some reason down on her hands and knees. I suppose it’s a religious subject. The painter they hired was an incompetent, and the thing came out a mess. Did you know the city actually hired a painter to put the clumsy picture there? Someone thought it would be a good idea to put up a religious painting in the borghetto to edify the Jews and bring us one step closer to conversion. So we got a holy Christian painting.
“My father was offended by the subject, and he and my uncle went to complain to the authorities. They said they felt the painting was inappropriate and meant to be an affront to their religion and sensibilities. They asked if they could have it removed. And you know what the reply was? They were beaten and fined!
“But that wasn’t the end of it. That night, someone came and did a little extra work on the painting. The next morning, there was a big crowd gathered in front of it crying, ‘Sacrilege, sacrilege!’
“The new painting still had the winged man standing upright with the woman on her knees in front of him, but now, now,” Giuditta interrupted her narrative and giggled. She blushed and continued, “Now he had the head of a goat. And instead of a sword, he was waving, well, waving something obscene in her face.
“They had to bring the original painter back in immediately to dismember the poor fellow. But the desecration, as they called it, was blamed on my father and uncle. They were arrested and beaten and fined again.”
The walls of the city were already in view by the time Giuditta’s lesson in the civic use of art had come to an end. Seeing them, she stopped abruptly, and Niccolo stopped too. “I have a favor to ask you,” she said.
“Anything,” he replied, and he meant it with all his heart—literally anything.
“Yesterday at the roadside, I saw you take something. I want it. I want the dagger that killed my brother.” Her gaze was steady, unyielding, emotionless. “So I never forget.”
Niccolo turned into the Via Romana and the welcome sight of his father’s house. It was still exactly the same as he had left it, solid and reassuring. But everything else had changed. His world had tilted a little, and everything in it was rearranged. The most important things in his life were things that hadn’t even existed for him two days ago, when he left this house.
He had little difficulty explaining his absence to his father. Knowing his son Niccolo to be a resourceful and responsible boy, Bernardo Machiavelli was not overly concerned with his comings and goings, and Niccolo was frequently absent for a few days at a time, especially during the hunting season. On the other hand, the absence of his other son, Totto, his firstborn and heir apparent, would have alarmed Bernardo to a considerable extent. Totto was oafish and slow-witted. People could take advantage of him.
However, it might have alarmed even the unflappable Bernardo if he knew that his second son had witnessed three murders, was getting mixed up with bandits, and, worse, was fraternizing with Jews.
“So you were out in the hills and you stayed the night with a contadino. Hmpph!” snorted Bernardo over dinner that evening at the prescribed hour. “What did you eat, turnips?”
“Duck, game birds,” said Niccolo.
“Heavy meat, greasy. I hope you at least had a salad to put your digestion back into good working order.” With these words, Bernardo plowed back into his liver sausages, signaling an end to the conversation. One can only hope that he had the good sense, after such heavy fare, to come to the assistance of his flailing digestion with copious amounts of well-dressed salad.
Niccolo was too excited to eat, and later that night, he was too excited to sleep. He was laying plans for tomorrow, for he had decided that tomorrow he absolutely must visit this strange, strange, beautiful girl.
Their separating had been too hasty, not at all the elaborate leave-taking he had been anticipating, involving, at a minimum, ceremonial hand kissing: Dusk was already upon the city when they passed through the gates. Suddenly, Giuditta, who was walking a few steps in front of him, turned, whispered, “Thank you and good-bye.” And then she was running. Fleeing.
“Wait!”
“I can’t,” she called out over her shoulder. “I have to go.” And as she and her voice trailed off, “Don’t you know, Jews aren’t allowed out after dark!”
Niccolo lay awake mulling over the implications of this abrupt separation and planning tomorrow’s joyful reunion. Should he take flowers? Should he go on horseback? Should he wear the black-velvet doublet?
These and other considerations occupied him as he tossed in his bed. He made frequent trips to the window to examine the heartless night sky for the slightest hint of dawn’s first light. He was feeling a curious combination of extreme agitation and, at the same time, sublime contentment. It was a sensation he was as yet unable to identify, a sensation that Florence’s best poet had once described as an “icy fire.” In a word, what he was experiencing were the first stirrings and twitchings of love.
Finally, rosy fingers of light began to tickle the eastern sky. Niccolo put on his best white shirt and new white hose and did indeed opt for the new black-velvet doublet. He looked dashing and, he thought, altogether heroic. He made his way downstairs while the rest of the household slept, for his attire would elicit unwanted curiosity, and if the true nature of his errand were somehow divined, insufferable teasing. He saddled one of his father’s horses—there were three. He took the black one to match his heroic outfit.
After an hour of aimless equestrian wandering and unbearable anxiety, Niccolo decided that a decent interval had elapsed since sunrise, and it was now an appropriate hour to go calling. In fact, it was a little more than half past seven. He crossed the river and headed north through progressively less familiar territory.
He was thinking now that the girl reminded him of the Madonna. What could be more logical? Giuditta was Jewish and so was Mary. Why shouldn’t they look alike? And she was beautiful, but sad. And deep. Like the Pietà, with her dead son in her arms, she contained all the sadness in the world. He had seen glimmers of many emotions cross her face—sorrow, rage, grief, even despair—but all were harnessed and brought quickly under control. Not like the Florentine women whose sorrow was a noisy affair, accompanied by extravagant displays of public wailing, breast beating, and, in the more extreme cases, the rending of garments, the pulling of hair, and theatrical swooning. She was passionate, proud, and private. And beautiful. And smart.
He had no trouble locating the pestilential garbage dump and the controversial mural she had described. Even Niccolo, who had little interest in the figurative arts, could see that is was executed by an inexpert and probably shaky hand. The angel Gabriel had a large, square head, with a stupid, blank expression on his face. Mary was hunched over on her knees and looked more like she was scrubbing the floor than receiving the joyous news. Beyond that ham-fisted mural lay the mysterious streets of the ghetto.
Despite the heat of the moment and his desire to present himself in as striking a posture as possible, Niccolo had second thoughts about galloping and clattering full tilt into that unknown Jewish underworld. Discretion prevailed, and he rode on, one street, two streets, until he saw a tavern where it would be safe to leave his horse. Several heavy iron rings had been fixed
into the wall of the establishment precisely for that purpose, and other horses idled about, awaiting the return of their riders.
Niccolo jumped down and tethered his mount. He fumbled a little with the reins. He was nervous, and it showed. He was, after all, on the most important quest of his short life. He noticed that the tavern and the houses around it were not of the most genteel aspect, but rather rundown and in need of repair. Trying to appear inconspicuous, he started off down the cluttered, dirty street. He walked stiffly past a group of rough young men several years older than himself who were entertaining what looked like rough and immodest young women. Men in clogs. Women in clogs. He worried about his riding boots, his black-velvet doublet and smart woolen hose. He worried that his finery would give him away in this distinctly unpolished part of town. But he needn’t have concerned himself. No one paid him the least bit of attention.
When he returned to the mural where the angel Gabriel had recently confronted the Blessed Virgin Mary with unspeakable rudeness, there was a hubbub at the corner. A crowd had gathered, people of all descriptions, most of them poor. Niccolo mingled, trying to find out what was going on, but the scraps of excited conversation he managed to overhear added up to very little. Only the often-repeated phrase “Jewish witch” emerged with any clarity from the babble around him.
A blustery old man seated on a cistern was pontificating with great conviction in a loud voice. Niccolo recognized him as the kind of man who knows everything before anyone else, who has inside sources, who can put two and two together. “I had it from Simone, the charcoal burner, and Simone’s the one who found her,” he was saying. “He went to deliver a load, and she was bent over the old man with the knife still in her hand. Cut his throat, she did. And all over the walls, she had drawn ancient Babylonian witch’s symbols with his blood.”
Machiavelli: The Novel Page 10