“It’s contract law,” he said, even more quietly.
“Pardon, do you want to ask my husband if I’m a witch? Shall I go get him? He’s just chatting with the Count of L’Aquila, probably committing troops for the protection of the Holy See. Let me tell him the teenaged cardinal wants a word.”
“You’ll forgive us, my lady, for our caution.”
She put a hand on his sloping red shoulder. Below that robe was real skin: skin that was born on a baby with a penis, and that stretched to cover him as he grew into a man, and stayed pale and freckled under every shirt and frock, moles sprinkled like the islands of the Indies, each with a dark hair, smoke rising from the volcano. Would that shoulder ever be caressed with anything but pity? [You haven’t seen my body yet, my sweet. If horror is your thing, if your insides are tickled by the grotesque, come circle my shoulder with your tongue, find the warts and festering wounds and lavish them with licks—if pity is your aphrodisiac.]
He twitched beneath her touch. When she let him go, she dragged her fingers lightly down his arm.
“Bring the contracts tomorrow,” she said, “and I’ll look them over. I have no intention of breaking any laws. I respect the church’s opinion of women.”
“I would be happy—” he said, and coughed. “I would be happy to stay. I mean, to sit with you. If you’re looking for— I would be at your service. I know how a foreigner can find herself in a city like Rome.”
“How?”
“Oh,” he said. He waved a hand around as if attempting to whip up the quartet into a high-spirited march. “Lonely.”
She noticed his eyelashes for the first time, how uncannily long they were around his weak eyes. In one blink, she imagined the entire gathered company freed of their clothes. Silks and diamonds vanished. Nothing left but sagging bellies and wobbly thighs and the triangular breasts of men. Hair in places no painter painted. Hair on backs, beneath arms, between legs. The tufts on the tops of big toes. Her own stomach, suspiciously swollen. What of this could people possibly want to see? [I’d eat you with my eyes until your flesh was a pile of crumbs. God didn’t make the body; if He had, He wouldn’t have thrown leaves over it. Your own conception took place in a pious tent of stale clothing, the pope looking penitently to the ceiling and the servant’s palm over her eyes. Don’t be bashful—or should I say don’t be raped. Take my hand, and let me show you the pieces I shaped.] She shut down the fancy, because it required her to wonder if there were parts of her so dark any pretense of whiteness would be lost.
“No,” she said. “I don’t get lonely.” The body wasn’t a temple; it was a tool.
At dinner Giulia found herself between a deaf man and his anxious wife, who was convinced their grown children were holding a séance in their palace while the parents were dining out, and shouted across Giulia through all three courses until the husband finally put a piece of roll in his ear. By the time the boys in matching tights came in with the puddings—cream and berries petrified in little pots—she’d lost her taste for battle; she wished herself alone with a book. The husband finally shouted to his wife, “What ghosts could they possibly summon?”
Giulia stood and clinked her knife against the edge of her plate. The assembly turned to her. “I saw six men in white sneak into the palace this afternoon; will there be entertainment or should I retire to bed?”
She spotted her husband—he was on the opposite side, far down by the windows. He raised a glass. “My new bride is the patron saint of joy,” he said. “And she bears no surprises.”
The young prince ushered his guests into the solarium, where performers were dragging props and pieces of scenery onto a makeshift stage. The actress’s cheeks were painted violent pink.
It was a plot to make the church a fool: a noble is hoodwinked by a schemer out to bed his wife, and the country priest aids and abets, all in the name of florins. The guests laughed at the wife’s willing naïveté, the prancing of the villain and how loudly he could snort. When the friar gave his blessing for an aborting potion to be sent to a promiscuous nun, the audience gave sideways glances, couldn’t help their smirks. The men read lines that pierced at Giulia: I do not praise her for making such a fuss before she agreed to go to bed (“I don’t want to! What’ll I do? What are you making me do? Oh, Mother of God!”); can’t you see a woman without children has no home?; women don’t have much of a brain; that cat-brained woman has driven us to our wits’ end. The one woman onstage: This seems to me the strangest: to have to submit my body to this shame.
The guests applauded the deception, the troupe made their bows, and the men stayed to partake in the host’s wine while the actress, fictionally impregnated, slid away. Did she return to her own husband, shedding her costume before she slipped between their marriage sheets? [What do you know of marriage sheets? She’s alone, same as you. Lives with her parents in a cramped apartment on the other side of the Tiber. She’ll have sardines for dinner, and no dessert.]
She kissed the cardinal on both cheeks when he left, feeling her heathen earrings bob against his face. It wouldn’t have been outrageous to take the seduction further, but a fisherman knows the best hook is the smallest one the trout will bite. The house emptied.
Bernardetto was at his dressing table, removing the rings from his hands. His Roman bedroom was smaller, the walls covered in red damask. It didn’t seem possible to her that he knew her condition; he must’ve thought the play not a mirror but a caution.
“Fine party,” she said, leaning against the door.
“You enjoyed the commedia?”
“A little broad.”
He made a noise of agreement.
“Would you like a kiss tonight?” she asked. Her arms were crossed behind her back like a girl’s.
He glanced up, then back at his waistcoat, with its tricky buttons. “No,” he said. “Thank you.”
It was a game, she decided in bed by herself. He saw her wager and raised it. But as her mind attempted to map out the next day’s plan—visit Santa Prassede, buy a new stock of paper from the Fabriano dealers, finalize the contract to acquire the monastery—she kept circling back to the woman actor and how the men, for all their rude bluster, would rather have touched anything in that room but her.
So it was a surprise when she was awakened in the darkest part of the night by a hand covering her mouth and another hand pulling back the bedsheets, fumbling at her chemise. She screamed through the clamped fingers and pushed herself out of bed and onto the floor, and when he came after her, she scrambled to the door, which he slammed shut. He shoved her onto the bed again, started hoisting up her skirt while she windmilled her legs into him, pummeling at his own skinny shape. He slapped her once across the face—the sting brought all the logic back to her. The intruder was her husband; what he was stealing was his own property.
His eyes were ferocious and terrified. He pinned her arms on either side as she lay on her back on the bed and leaned in close to her one red cheek and said, “If you call for someone, what would they say?” He used his knee to push her legs apart and she felt like a starfish, open to the sea, to the storm, to the shark, and he moved one hand to her chest to keep her down and the other fumbling to his breeches, and she thought do starfish survive because they have no memory? [Don’t close your eyes. Don’t let your arms go limp.]
Before God and a retinue of two hundred Medici and with a dowry of twenty-five thousand scudi, she had signed away her claim to virtue. There was nothing to save.
Not in all the lepers huddled in the dank corners of Florence had she ever thought a body so vile. Before he could find her, she reached a hand up to her husband’s neck and pulled him down to her face and—thinking she’d been stirred to passion, had succumbed to her weak and womanish nature—he lapped at her mouth, one hand still hunting, and with his dry lips dipped into hers, she bit down hard.
He howled, fell back, clutching at his bloody mouth with blank shock, as if a chair had collapsed beneath him. She scrabbled to
cover herself, lunged for the door. She was halfway down the long hall before she looked back. He was standing, limp, one hand to his wound, staring at the bed as if the betrayal still lay there.
The Grave
[ 896–897 ]
Behind the stairs to the crypt, Felix had placed a three-legged stool on which he could sit when the abbot was chastising monks above, and he was settled here now, listening to the muted maledictions while he looked fondly on Brother Bernardo, so recently his friend. Bernardo sat politely in his nook, hands folded in his lap, head drifting slightly to one side. If it drooped any more tomorrow, Felix would prop it up. When he’d peeled back Bernardo’s eyelid a few days ago and stared deeply within—his sister once told him heaven’s reflection could be glimpsed there—he’d accidentally squeezed it to get a better view, and the pupil had changed shape, become some sort of devilish triangle. He quickly closed the lid and crossed himself. God wouldn’t let Brother Bernardo wander around paradise with one goat eye.
Faith was a cure for curiosity. So Felix didn’t wonder how Bernardo would find the other monks up there, or if distance even existed, or whether friendship meant anything where there was no such thing as nonfriendship, likewise happiness. He was caught in a little limbo of his own, between the mild promise of heaven and the bustle of men: the ones upstairs, doddering around in their brown wool robes, and the ones busying through streets, the city, the misty fields of home—not misty; there’d been a terrible drought the summer he left, was asked to leave, forty years ago, and the grasses had crackled like fish bones. Now his hours were spent with these remnants. Lonely was too grand a word.
Felix’s stomach made a petulant noise. His friend was beginning to smell like Monday stew. Soon his face would be as dried and hollowed as Brother Giuseppe to his left, and his chest would collapse like Brother Timothy to his right, but for now Bernardo was the most robust of all the corpses perched on their thrones in this poor stone church on the hill where Remus once set up his challenge to Romulus, and lost.
“You coming to dinner?” The voice traveled down the stone steps.
Felix switched his head from one propped hand to the other.
“He’ll still be there in an hour,” the voice said.
Felix slapped his old knees and hoisted himself toward the stairs. “You’re right. Too much self-denial and one slips into pride. Beef today?”
Brother Sixtus laughed and reached out a damp hand to pull him the rest of the way. “Roasted cow,” he said. “Is that what they call it?” They hadn’t had red meat since they’d joined the monastery, but this was a pleasant joke to make. “Only four hoofs, so some of us will have to go without.”
“You haven’t heard of the six-hoofed steer out of Briton?”
“That many, and I’d wager it’s a swimming cow.”
Oh, and when a joke got rolling! “Back and forth across the straits to France all day; leanest meat you’ll ever eat.”
“Gave birth to a calf with two more, I heard, and then no one could tell it from an octopus.”
“In that case, give it to Brother Henry to fry up after all, because you’re talking about a fish.”
Past the nave—dark and cold, candles by the altar shivering like orphans—the cloisters rang with spoons on bowls, half-sung songs, and Henry with the pot of stew and his iron ladle, the rust flakes from which he called seasoning.
The newest brother sat next to Felix, his thin hands peeping out of his sleeves; he couldn’t have been past fifteen. The rest of the brotherhood must have looked like wizards to him.
“How does Brother Bernardo?” The boy’s hair was so blond it was almost white, thinly brushed over the tops of his ears.
“Oh, doing well.”
“He has a stink?”
“He was a good man, but he was no saint. Bless him, and all of us.”
“Bless us all.” The boy still wouldn’t look at Felix, but had now taken his spoon and was stirring wanly.
“You’d care to see him?”
“My mam died in winter. Couldn’t put her in the ground some time, so I seen her well enough.”
Felix lifted the bowl to his lips to catch the last of the broth, thinking of the passage of soup from his throat down to his twisty innards, soaking through his stomach to his muscles and his bones, each of them slurping in turn, building their mass with salt and herb and maybe a hint of mackerel, so that the outside world became his inside self. When he was younger, he’d felt such a wall around his person: a wall delightful to be breached, but the more treasured for its fixity. Now everything was just floating recombinant particles. Who could say what was Felix and what was not? [I, for one, would recognize you. With your cloudy hair like a poor-sheared sheep, and the shake of your thumb as you wipe the ooze off your peers. Don’t let the next world lure you; the threshold may seem to be wavering, but your goodness will vault you to a place where you’ll lose what you love: rich, wrong humanity.]
“Do you have dreams then?” the boy asked.
He meant did Bernardo’s corpse come sneaking into Felix’s nighttime memories—of the farm, of his fair sister, of her friends lined up on a bench plaiting one another’s hair. He once dreamed some boys outside had kicked a ball into the cloisters and before returning it, Bernardo had prodded Felix into a game, the arch into the transept serving as goal, and Felix had scored triumphantly, flapping his arms above his head. And the boys were somehow inside the cloisters then and set up a great cheer.
“Have you confessed this week?” he asked the boy.
“Oh, nothing troubles me either,” said the boy, rather quickly. “But things tend to pop up, don’t they, the worrying things, or the things we seen when we was small. I just think all that awful flesh and maybe—you know.”
“I remember seeing a goat slaughtered when I was young. Did you see something like that?”
“A goat, no,” the boy said. “Not a goat.” And with his eyes on his shoes, he took his bowl back for a second helping and went to sit by the abbot, Father Peter, who never laughed.
After dinner the brotherhood divided into cleaners and singers, and Felix, as he often did, chose the former task, finding relief in busy hands. Stack the bowls, wipe the tables, sweep the floor, scrub the pots, toss the dirty water on the cabbages, chuck the oily sand in the outhouse, gather the carrot tops and wilted chard and gristle in a basket and visit them upon the happy chickens, who bump their hips in a scramble to the door, their heads leading their legs by a seemingly dangerous margin. And all this to the singing brothers’ tune, a quiet chant if the weather was wet and cold, or a full-throated foot-stomper, their more restful chore never begrudged, for Felix found the greater pleasure in listening. And anyway, his own warble wasn’t pleasing, as his mother was careful to tell him on his first attempt to join the chorus of voices in the country church. He must have been six. “Ohh, my love,” she’d said, and put a hand over his mouth. “Let’s allow the angels to have their turn.”
It was too dark to see the broom now, so Felix affixed a new candle in his holder, a small brass cup with a ring for his thumb, and took it to the outhouse to sit for half an hour with his begrudging bowels. When he crossed back to the church, Brother Benedictus was kneeling closer to the altar than was customary, and when Felix raised a hand in greeting, he shuffled back. No harm in wanting to touch God. And yet neither Benedictus, nor the newest novitiate, nor most of the brothers had any interest in traveling to the subterranean reaches of this holy space to watch God at his most visible. The last keeper of the putridarium had died two years before, and Father Peter scrambled to find someone willing to tend the corpse of the tender. Felix’s singing was poor, his manuscript illumination haphazard, his understanding of the chemistry involved in baking perilously inexact. But he was not squeamish, and he believed as his mother had told him, that the body was a manifestation of God’s love for us. (This had been included in her list of reasons why young boys should refrain from abusing their most special parts. The penis also be
longed to God, and should never be handled with more than sober devotion, as one would hold a ewer of holy water. This image proved very peaceful to young Felix when he masturbated.) So the Father had blessed Felix—some said punished him—with the crypt key.
On his first visit below, he’d vomited. They looked like a seated council of ghouls, mouths hanging, flesh distended, waiting for someone to speak. His tasks were to defend the bodies from desecration in case of heathen raid and to mark carefully the progress of the bodies’ purgatorial decay so he might converse with monks who had fears about mortality. In practice, the Father discouraged him from loose corpse talk; he said it made the brothers ill.
Now his predecessor was third in line, a tumbly haystack of bones in a stained old habit, and Bernardo was his new treasure. As he let his supper digest, Felix peered again with wonder at the dead man’s eyes. Where did they sink, and on what time line? Did the fluid leach out first, and the filmy sack collapse like a popped balloon? Or was there some solid core, an olive pit, that the eye would eventually shrink to? Would blue irises turn red as veins dissolved and blood ran wild? [I can see why the others avoid you. Go back two millennia and eavesdrop on Sushruta of Varanasi, who submerged his cadavers in water to watch them rot without the stench (bright idea), and who could peel a cataract with proto-Buddhist clarity—or somersault ahead and meet Albrecht Hennig, who wandered into the Himalayas with a 30-gauge fishhook and in one year snared the cloudy nuclei of 44,000 groping Nepalese. Imagine what Milton could’ve done with a fishhook. Or you, whose eyes too are beginning to milk.] There was no running wild. Just a steady seeping—an occasional audible drip—as Bernardo’s fluids left the openings gently made in his bottom and passed through the hole in his stone seat, his toilet throne, and fell to the packed dirt below, sunless and cold.
His former friend had been what a kind man would call plumpish, and his arms had funneled that weight like pastry cream into the bags of his hands, leaving a crease at the wrist. He’d been tenderly packed, Bernardo, his limbs as clearly jointed as a doll’s. But the fat was draining. Perhaps Felix shouldn’t keep lifting aside the habit to observe the changes in the decomposing form, but he had to know when the ankles needed a well-aimed lancing. Exploding feet were frowned upon. Bernardo, lucky man to be blind to his mortification. Felix would be the keeper of his honor, and would never cringe, only chuckle. For there is also great humor in our embarrassments, humor in thinking we are anything more than a collection of fluids, of gases that find ways to noisily escape, of bile and pus and goo.
The Everlasting Page 8