Giulia laughed. “Did she think I was one?”
A young boy with freckles passed, he too yellow-capped.
“They’re made to wear them, I believe,” Paola said.
They came to the river, and Giulia thought of the poems she’d write, the acclaim that’d sweep her past the maudlin Laura Battiferri. Comparing the Tiber to a woman’s hair was too simple. Better to liken it to a menstrual flow; it had nearly the same scent.
“And what if I’d brought the mustard headpiece with the pearls? Should I have been mistaken for a Jew?”
From the banks they could spy the old basilica, which was slowly becoming the new basilica. She’d ask Bernardetto if they could see Pope Sixtus’s chapel, where Botticelli had painted the grandmother of Cosimo, carrying a cord of firewood. Giulia wanted to ask her maid to cross with her—on the far side of the river was another neighborhood, louder, with brighter flowers—but night meant women must retreat, like swallows. She turned back to her side of the city, where a few shopkeepers had put out lanterns and a prostitute was whistling from a window.
A display of colored jars caught Paola’s attention. “Do you mind?”
The window had dried skins and pots of herbs and snake’s teeth strung on bracelets. As Paola opened the door, the pharmacist—a man the size of a goat—came running at them, hands up and fluttering.
“Signore! Enter, enter! I have all your medical needs, your potions for the throat, your powders for the head, rare grasses from the Quirinal Hill to lure your lovers, catgut to bind a wound, cat flesh to soothe the jaundice. You have facial spots? Nothing that can’t be fixed by tobacco. Here, let me show you the new shipment from the newest world. A rare treat!” He clopped to the back of the store.
“Are you so sick of me you need a cure?” Giulia asked her maid.
“They might have something for dropsy of the womb.”
Giulia picked up a vial of foul-smelling paste. “I’m not ill.”
“It may need a smoking, is all. I haven’t been able to lace you proper.”
“I’m only getting pudgy, like any good wife.”
Paola dropped her voice low. “Except you haven’t been a wife.”
The pharmacist returned with a smile and a garland of dried tobacco in his arms. One leaf floated out in his rush and fell at Paola’s feet.
“My lady, no! Do not bend for it! That your fingers should brush the ground—I would not sleep. I tell you, sleep would not come to me. Massimo!”
A boy idled out from the dark space behind the counter where a small pig floated in a yellow tonic, labeled Sus sanctus. The boy was larger than his master, though no more than twelve or thirteen, sleepy-eyed and uninterested.
“Massimo, I’m making a mess. Observe.” And he pointed at the leaf kissing Paola’s toes.
The boy pushed his legs forward like they didn’t belong to him, were a heavy separate instrument.
“Forgive him, signore, he’s my brother’s son, my brother who never won a race in his life.”
“Stronzo,” the boy muttered, grabbing the tobacco.
“Beautiful! The floor is now perfection. Now let’s visit the table so I may lay these out, but only if you’d be so gracious.”
At the long wooden counter the women lifted their veils to examine the herb.
“It comes in salts and syrups, oils and powders. You wonder why the Indians live a hundred years? They chew this for breakfast, they bathe in its seepage.”
“Who told you Indians live a hundred years?” Giulia asked.
The shopkeeper had no response, and the maid looked up at him.
“And if we suffered from a woman’s ailment?” Paola said.
“Dysmenorrhea? Or retained menses? Or,” and he brought a hand to his heart, “an unrequited adoration?”
“Retained,” Giulia interrupted. “The blood held on to by an erratic God—or, perhaps,” and she copied his gesture, “little hands. Do you have something for that? For unclenching a fetus’s grip?”
Paola’s eyes got froggy. The pharmacist was still looking at her, the maid, for meaning.
“My lady,” he said to her. “Your girl has quite an imagination.”
The boy had his elbows on the counter, and both men now were looking at Giulia’s face. The owner smiled weakly at Paola. The boy dug around for a piece of food caught in his molars. Paola looked at the ground.
“We’ll take the pig,” Giulia said, setting her purse down loudly on the counter.
“My—my lady,” the shopkeeper said, hands fumbling for paper to wrap the jar.
The boy sucked the food off his finger. “She ain’t a lady, she’s a Moor.”
And so the peace of the evening broke into a hundred parts, each with the same sharp edge.
“They don’t know,” Giulia said on the walk home. “It’s Rome. A hundred years ago, they were throwing Christians to the lions.”
She’d left the bottled pig. Paola said she could get a live one at Monte Testaccio, where for sport they pushed hogs in rickety carts down the hill. Her maid had veiled her face again, but the dropping sun had been cut off by the buildings—which seemed closer now than they did before, as if someone were squeezing the city together—and Giulia strode on bare-faced. She used to think it was in one’s bearing, that if she carried herself like Leonor of Toledo, with leopard steps and unblinking eyes, no one would have the room to question her. But even the whitest woman was blacker than a man.
“I only worry you shouldn’t have hit him, ma’am.”
“That child was born begging to be struck. You set that boy down among the Jolofs, they’d eat him for breakfast.”
“Naturally,” Paola said. She struggled to keep up with her mistress’s pace.
“They’d flay his grub-pale skin and show him what’s on the inside of a man. I mean, they’d pluck out an eye just far enough so it could rotate around and look at his own red muscle. Isn’t the eye attached with some kind of strings? And then once he’d really seen the sight, and how measly his own skin looked compared to that raging red inside, they’d dispense with the eyeballs and cut him up and roast him for snacks. Because he’s not even substantial enough for dinner, the son of a whore.”
“He was rather a meaty boy, though,” said Paola, who never learned.
“He was two-thirds fat. He’d just melt away in the skillet.”
Dusk had settled on them fast, and in her rage Giulia had lost where they were. It was hard to tell a street from an alley, they were all so cramped, each with a sheep bleating through. Paola had earlier recommended bringing one of the local footmen as a guide, but if she mentioned that now, Giulia would cut off her hair.
“I’d be happy to ask the way,” she said.
But Giulia had no desire to stop moving. Motion was the cure. She turned down a street that had a breeze caught in it like a cat. In the last light, all the faces had a shade on them; the shops were pulling in their tables of displays, and people kept their heads down, wanting to get home, have someone soothe them, rub the city off their shoulders, their feet. Veils and burgher’s caps and snoods, but no yellow hats, not this far into the dark. It’s the people who hurt people who should be quarantined. Where was the God of the Israelites? [Where is He ever, sweet cheeks? Hiding behind His cloud—watching, as He bites His nails, to see which direction the humans will turn. Oh, the ignominy of omni-impotence. He laid out these streets like snakes, for me. He scourged the campagna with drought, to swell the Romans’ bellies with emptiness. He opened the gates of the city to mutineers, so they could steal the Veronica, play ball with the heads of Peter and Paul, strap the Sacred Lance of Longinus to a German pike, graffiti Martin Luther’s name on Raphael’s fresco. And noble Raphael? He who was named city commissioner of antiquities, charged with their defense? He stole a many-breasted Diana of Ephesus from the Rossi villa—just snuck it out the back door at midnight with two brawny friends and a hand cart. The God of the Israelites, the God of the pope, the God fermenting in your womb, He
is the puppeteer without strings, only a man with two crossed sticks. See, I’m over Him.]
Just as fear was beginning to dry out her heart, she looked down an alley and saw in the distance between its narrows a tower she recognized. She’d record the evening as a victory, only because on her first day in a new city she’d had the wits to note landmarks and, without asking a single stupid soul for help, to find her way home.
“Would you pass those infant mushrooms.”
“I’m shocked you think my arms are so long.”
“I wouldn’t have wed you,” he said, “if I thought your limbs were anything but proportional.”
What would she do if she succeeded in annoying him to death? [Marry for love, for sweet sexual pleasure?] She’d wrap her breasts, don his clothes, draw a beard on her chin, and carry out his business so he’d stop losing half a florin on every one-florin contract.
“Paola says you got lost today.”
“Am I sitting here or not?”
“And felt for the Jews.”
She got up and grabbed the porcelain bowl of shrunken mushrooms, each like a crooked finger floating in gravy, and took them to her husband’s side. “What harm is feeling?”
Bernardetto put his napkin over his lap to protect his leggings.
Giulia set the bowl down heavily. She fished one out and put it in her mouth. “It tastes like brine.” She brushed a finger across her nose and sat on his lap. She used to love mushrooms.
“You’re tired,” he said.
“I’m tired.”
He put a hand as hesitant as a seedling on her knee. She looked down at it and considered. Beneath the pink of his skin ran icy vein rivers, white and blue, his knuckles white mountains, his fingernails cold plates. If he hadn’t been a man, and her husband, she would’ve rubbed a thumb across his skin, because she was curious and, contrary to what anyone who knew her would’ve guessed, loved touch.
Instead she stood and returned to her seat, where she ate the rest of her boiled ham in silence.
One of the candles snuffed itself out, the wick winding down like a strangled snake, and when the servant came in with bowls of cooked cream for dessert, Bernardetto asked for the light to be replaced. The servant inclined his head as if the need for light was a matter of opinion, and never returned.
“Tomorrow is Santa Sabina,” he said, stirring his spoon around until the panna couldn’t have been more than soup.
“With the cardinals?” she asked.
“I don’t know what business you’re getting up to, with whatever pennies the Medici let you play with, but do keep in mind you’re a representative of this house now.”
“You doubt I could make an investment? Are my brains too misty, my loins too rank? You understand I’m Cosimo’s deputy.”
He crossed his arms against his chest, stretched his legs out. “Any seawater in the cream, or are you satisfied?”
She looked down into her bowl, scooped clean. “I’d like to go to bed.”
“Kiss me first,” he said, and she pushed back her chair and walked to him and placed her fingertips on her lips and then flicked them across the side of his head.
She could drink savin tea.
She could ask her husband to kick her in the stomach, without explaining why.
Before a fetus was a homo, it was a creatura.
To rid the womb of an early child was contraception.
To rid the womb of a late child required a soft penance; it wasn’t homicide till after the third month—or after the eighth month—or not at all.
This would sin against the fifth commandment, and the sixth.
She could jump backward or carry weights around.
She could let blood from the inside of her foot.
She could work hard in a garden, bending over and digging.
They called it an inanimatus, a conceptus, a figliolo, a brutta fetu.
Hippocrates said he’d never help a woman abort; Hippocrates’s daughter was turned into a dragon that no knight would kiss—one wonders why.
She could wear a heavy train, a dress too tight.
“Allooori,” she had teased when she met the painter, presenting her hand.
“Allori,” he said. “Laurels. They’re a kind of tree.”
“You’re the trees, and I’m the doctors. Which of us is really doing something?”
“Today? You sit. I move.”
He was efficient, she’d give him that. Leonor had suggested he paint her in the north study, which got hardly any light but was draped in heavy fabrics that suggested the scene of powerful decisions. She’d dressed in her personal colors: deep blue, with thin gold silk beneath the bodice to cover her shoulders, a gold veil framing her dusky face, her black eyes, her mouth that always looked better when it was speaking.
He pointed at the old oak chair by the desk.
“No, thank you,” she said, and stood behind it, leaning her elbows on the chair back and propping her chin in her hands.
He ignored her, sketching her surroundings first: the slope of the chair arm, the table to her right. What an odd face he had, narrow as his chest, clay-colored hair sweeping around his temples. Lips like two little shells she might find on the beach at Ostia. Everything about his features called out to be touched. The silk of the curls, the porcelain sheen across his mouth. She wasn’t usually fascinated by men—not the way she could stare at Leonor through every gesture, from breakfast to dinner—but then Allori had no assumption about him. He was as strange in front of her as a dolphin would have been, and as sleek.
“Stand up straight,” he said.
“Have you ever painted a prettier girl than my cousin Maria?” She pulled a corner of the veil around her shoulder, brushing its edge along her chin.
“She’s the redhead?”
He was so good at not looking at her. He might be a eunuch.
“Is this really the art you grew up dreaming of? Painting the faces of rich children?”
“You’re not a child.” He licked his pencil in a manner she believed to be provocative.
She pulled her bodice taut and gave her skirts a poof. “It’s all about the fashion,” she said, and dropped her chin so she could look out beneath her lashes.
“No speaking, please, for a moment.” And in a few quick seconds his hand had swept across the rough paper and captured the lines of her face, static lines that would necessarily betray her. You could see the African in her when she was still. “You may continue in your outrage,” he said, and moved on to her torso and skirts.
“Surely an artist must have an appreciation of beauty.” She didn’t much care for his degree of concentration. “You wouldn’t pick an old hag to model for the Madonna.”
“You think Mary never aged?”
She had no idea. She swam back to her depths. “Did the duchess tell you where I came from?”
“Found under a cabbage leaf,” he said.
She tried to imagine him back at his studio, the penciled forms of all the Medici girls before him, trying to breathe life into each with his palette of oils. It didn’t seem like he should be allowed to ponder their curves without supervision, letting his brush slide down their waists and across the smooth lines of their chests. Sitting for hours with their eyes, dabbing his brush again and again, tenderly, into the dark whorl of their gaze. There was the cliché, of course, of the artistic temperament. Raphael and the lust that undid him.
“Is it too warm?” he asked.
Her cheeks. “I have an appointment to meet my betrothed,” she said. “I didn’t imagine it would take so long for a sketch.”
“They haven’t given you much time for yourself.”
“It’s not my job to be unwed.”
“What does the new one bring? An army?”
“A fair amount of Naples. But I’m the prize.”
“Because you’re the brains.”
She stopped herself from smiling after her mouth had already puckered; it looked as if she were keeping a lem
on candy inside and refused to spit it out.
He tilted his head, erased something at the bottom of the page. Was he not pleased with her feet? [The only thing prettier than your silk slipper is your five baby toes, each its own skin shoe over a tiny pouch of meat and bone.]
“Are you satisfied with what you create? The fact of creation, I mean. Does it satisfy you?”
He paused. “I can come back tomorrow. I’ve got the foundations here.”
“I’d imagine you spend a lot of your time not being as good as you want to be. Bankers don’t feel that way. Bankers go home and sleep without dreams.”
“You’re not a banker.” He rolled the paper and tied it with a scrap of twine and packed his pencils in a bag. His easel had folding legs and collapsed into a pile of sticks that could be stowed in a carrying case.
“It’s like living right up against the sun all the time, and hardly ever touching it. It must be poison, over time.”
“And what about you, cave creature?” He slung the case over his shoulder and put the paper under his arm.
She pulled both corners of her veil over her mouth and stared at him in a state of mingled affront and rapture. She felt the urge to swallow him whole, to simply take his head in her jaws and consume everything about him she didn’t understand. She said nothing. He nodded and left, and her hand clenched the back of the chair like a weapon. If he walked back in that dark room, she’d snap the arm off the chair and hurl it at him, javelin-style, and when the servants came in to see what the screaming was about, they’d find her crouched over him, her skirts tied up, her chest covered in mail, her hair unleashed. Blood in her mouth. Bradamante.
Santa Sabina loomed next to the old Savelli ruins. The orange trees were laden with the hard green beginnings of fruit. Bernardetto stood at the retaining wall next to the decrepit tower and looked out over the city, a sea captain observing the waves. Across the Tiber, the dome of St. Peter’s was rising. Scaffolds clung to the broken shape like spiders.
Giulia had found a Mirabilia Urbis Romae in the library, a hundred years old and stinking of must, but she copied down the salient tips for tourists before accompanying the cardinals up to the Aventine.
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