Juliet's Nurse

by Lois Leveen

  It’s true Lord Cappelletto wants all Verona to know he is a rich man. But there are other things he’d not have his wife know, and that is why he buys what he believes will distract her. During the next months, the Cappelletti wardrobes swell. But Lady Cappelletta’s womb does not. Whether the same can be said of the pursemaker’s daughters, I cannot tell, their bodies hidden beneath new cloaks as they scurry along the Via Cappello.

  The year’s first snow does not come until the middle of February, falling just past dawn in great fat flakes that make Juliet press her nose against the cold glass of the window. Tybalt would carry her out into the courtyard still in her nightclothes if I did not stop them long enough to bundle her, and him, and myself as well. Outside, the chill air tingles against our skin, as Tybalt insists we turn our faces up to the sky, open-mouthed like three baby birds waiting for worms to drop from their mama’s beak. Juliet giggles at the silver taste of falling snow, but whimpers with disappointment when she watches the flakes melt into moist nothing in her cupped hand. Tybalt lifts her up, spinning with her in his arms until she laughs once more.

  A man’s boots crunch along the entryway. It is Pietro, come to check how the hive is faring in the blustery cold. Juliet wriggles free of Tybalt and totters toward my husband, half-singing and half-panting, “Po, Po, Po,” in perfect imitation of the tone with which I call Pietro’s name when he and I lay together. Why does this surprise me? She’s heard it enough times, when I’ve given her a top or doll or just a pot-spoon to bang against the floor, anything to distract her while my husband and I take our tumble. “Po,” she says again, insistent, reaching up her arms.

  Pietro scoops her up, planting a warming kiss on her reddened ear. But as she shrieks another joyful “Po,” Lord Cappelletto appears behind my husband.

  “What’s this?” he asks.

  I’m not sure which distresses him more, to find Juliet outside at this hour and in such weather, or to see her beaming at the beekeeper with a grander version of the same adoring look Lord Cappelletto believes she saves only for him.

  “Where have you been so early, Uncle?” Tybalt asks, juggling snowballs. The four perfect rounds arc up, only to smash apart when he tries to catch them.

  Lord Cappelletto blinks once, twice, as though he is trying to conjure the right answer, then says, “A business matter. For the prince.”

  But his clothes are dry, his cheeks pale, not the wet and pink they’d be if he’d come all the way from the prince’s castle, or even one of the lordly palaces that line the Piazza dei Signori. He must have passed the smallest hours of the night at the pursemaker’s house, hoping to slip back here before anyone noticed he was gone.

  My teeth ache in the wintry air as I reach for Juliet. I mean to hurry her inside, but when I take her from Pietro, she shrieks, “Po, Po, Po,” so fiercely that Lady Cappelletta rushes down into the courtyard, asking whether the house is under attack.

  “Such a bright child.” I speak as though Juliet’s recognizing Pietro should please the Cappelletti. “She knows it is the beekeeper, and she asks for a little honey.”

  I pray the mention of sweets will distract Lady Cappelletta as well as Tybalt, just as surely as needing to deceive Lady Cappelletta will distract Lord Cappelletto.

  Pietro, who never comes to Ca’ Cappelletti with an empty pocket, pulls out a bundle of candies and passes them to Lord Cappelletto, who doles them to his wife and nephew, and to Juliet, like a guilt-faced priest giving out the sacrament. Lady Cappelletta shivers, blue-lipped in the cold, and lets her husband drape an arm around her, guiding her inside. I follow, carrying Juliet back to our room without any farewell to my husband, who is already answering a new round of Tybalt’s never-ending questions.

  A child will parrot whatever it might hear, and who knows what the consequences will be, for the child or for the one whose words she innocently repeats. When I was a girl—older surely than Juliet though I could not say how much older—I repeated what I’d heard my father say a hundred times: pox-faced son of the Devil. His hateful name for our hated landlord. Yes, a child too easily recites what it does not understand, and that is how I spoke those words when Luca Covoni appeared one summer day to take his share of my father’s harvest.

  He repeated them, looking not at me but at my father. And before my father could respond, Covoni said the rent on the land we worked would be doubled the next year, and every year thereafter.

  Covoni had barely left before my father grabbed a metal cooking spoon and began to beat my face with it. When I asked what I’d done wrong, he bared my buttocks and swung the spoon against that tender flesh, whacking out each syllable of pox-faced son of the Devil, demanding I never mock him again.

  Though I’d always been quick with words, I’d not known what it meant to mock. And this I must have protested to him. For next he screamed he’d take a knife to my very tongue and cut it loose for all the trouble it caused. My mother went out, leaving me to his rage—or so I thought. She reappeared clutching a clay jug she’d hidden in the root cellar. Even I could smell the heavily fermented contents as she uncorked it. Wine made my father cruel enough. Surely with such evil spirits in him, he’d kill me.

  But once he started to drink, he could not stop. By the fifth swig, or the sixth, he’d lost interest in me. My mother just had time to whisper a single command to me before he shoved her down onto the bed. She smiled at him, but she kept one eye on me to make sure I did as she bade, running to my aunt’s house on the far side of the village. It was three days before she let me back. My father’s rage had faded, though the angriest of the red welts he’d laid on me were still raw. That was my first lesson in the value of keeping things unspoken, or carefully half-told.

  I’d not lay a hand on Juliet, would not even threaten it. But by the look upon Lord Cappelletto’s face when she called for Pietro, I know I must quell what’s dangerous in her mouth, just as surely as my father did what was in mine.

  The day is bright from sun and snow, too bright for spinning schemes. I wait until night settles like a great shadow over Ca’ Cappelletti. Then I teach Juliet to do what I hope will keep us in Lord Cappelletto’s highest graces.

  I let her grow hungry and hungrier, before I untruss my left breast. I dance it above her, watching her watch the nipple slick with milk. As her mouth opens, I take her chin in my other hand, gently working her jaw up and down as I say, “Papà.”

  “Po,” she says. “Po,” reaching for me with greedy hands.

  I pull away. “Papà.”

  “Pa-po.” Closer, but still not close enough.

  “Papà, Papà, Papà, Papà, Papà, Papà, Papà.” I repeat it so many times it begins to sound like none-such speech to me, until at last she says, “pa pa.”

  “Yes, my darling girl, yes.” I let her take me in her mouth, indulging her only long enough to dull the ache I feel from being too full of milk. Then I pry her from my breast and make her say “pa pa” again, before I let her drink her fill.

  I go to sleep thinking myself quite clever. But when I wake, Juliet is kicking at my ribs, calling “pa pa, pa pa,” as she pounds her hands against my breast. That is what she thinks “pa pa” means.

  This will please neither Lord Cappelletto nor Lady Cappelletta.

  Lord Cappelletto’s grown so full in the gut, there’s a pouch within the household sewing basket filled with buttons he’s burst loose. I slip one of the silver buttons stamped with the Cappelletti crest into my blouse, and, sure the saints will smile at such ingenuity, let it settle into place between my breasts. When I gather Juliet to me to nurse, she discovers the button, clutching it with one hand while the other cups the great globe of me that fills her mouth. I kiss her hair, then kiss the hand that holds the button, whispering, “Papà.” Every time she nurses, she finds the button, wrapping greedy fingers around its shiny surface and singing out, “pa pa,” before she latches onto me.

  I bide our time until the prince next comes to dine. While he brags of the fine bride
he’s at last contracted for—who will come from Naples with a good dowry, a grand title, and best of all, a dead father, no surviving uncles, and a sister who rules the city of Durazzo childless—I let Juliet crawl into Lord Cappelletto’s lap. She reaches for the topmost of his buttons, calling, “pa pa, pa pa.”

  “Papà,” Lord Cappelletto repeats, laughing and grabbing her insistent hands before they tear the button loose.

  Juliet smiles up at him and says, “Nusskiz,” which is how she demands a kiss from me. Lord Cappelletto, who always thinks he understands what he does not, bows his head and pushes his big nose toward her delicate lips, waiting for her to kiss it. I notice what no one else does: how she hesitates. But my good girl does what is asked of her. I nod, letting her know that later, once we are alone, I’ll give her what she seeks.

  It’s harder to herd a well-pastured lamb than one that’s never left its pen. Freed first of swaddling and then of the girello, Juliet tumbles and stumbles and grabs at anything she can. We go to confession just before Pentecost, and when Friar Lorenzo bends to bless her, she pulls so hard at his Pater Noster cross that the cord snaps. Beads fly loose, bouncing across the hard floor of his cell. I kneel and crawl, searching out the myrtle-scented beads. He keeps careful count until I find them all.

  But Friar Lorenzo’ll not scold Juliet. He lays a loving hand on her bejeweled cap and says, “Juliet Cappelletta di Cappelletto, truly you are Heaven’s child.”

  She rewards him by snugging herself into the thick folds of his cassock and trilling out, “Fri-lore-so, Fri-lore-so.” The holy celibate, beaming like a proud grandsire at how she forms his name, offers a Latin benediction to show all is forgiven.

  When we leave his cell, I take her into the lower church, where she toddles up and down the aisles to touch the brightly colored saints painted upon the square pillars while I say my Ave Marias. Her delighted squeals echo against the ceiling arches, until I’d swear the icons themselves smile back at her. She insists she can make it up all the steps by herself, and though she uses hands as well as feet in her crawling climb, when she reaches the top, I stand on the landing below and clap to show her she’s done well. This sets her squealing again, and she bolts into the upper church—and comes to a smacking stop against a kneeling, sobbing woman.

  I hie to them, murmuring an apology to the mourner. As I scoop up Juliet, she grabs at the woman’s veil, expecting a game of peekie-boo as she pulls the dark fabric up. But my sweet girl’s grin cracks into a gasp when she sees the woman’s face, leaden with grief.

  The woman reaches to tug the veil free. But no, her fierce hands seize Juliet, snatching the child to her.

  Juliet screams. A sound of pure fear, entirely unlike her familiar squeals of joy, or impatient wailing, or frustrated sobs, or any other noise she’s ever made.

  “So alive,” the woman says, clinging tighter as Juliet shrieks louder.

  I reach for Juliet. “Let me take her, while you make a prayer for the departing soul of the one the you’ve lost.”

  “I’ve not lost one,” the woman says. “I’ve lost them all.”

  Her grip is as tight as mine, and we stand together like a single, strange beast wrapped around my screaming Juliet, until one of the Franciscans hurries out from the sacristy as if he’s expecting to combat Satan himself. Seeing him, the woman looses her hold. I cradle Juliet to me, bearing her away, out of San Fermo and into the bright sun.

  Shushing her terrified cries, I carry her toward the Adige, hoping the swooping gulls will distract her. But even when her screams subside, she’ll not forget the woman.

  “Who-da?” she asks, “Why-do?”—her worried way of wondering who the woman is, and what made her act so strangely.

  How am I to answer? Although I’d never before seen her, I know everything about the woman’s agony as surely as, in that horrible year when plague crept across this very bridge into Verona, I knew my own miserable self.

  For weeks, for months, as the mysterious pestilence ravaged the city, I woke fearing I felt the gentle swell in the pit beneath my arm or between my legs. I was sure I would be the one taken, and then Pietro after me, our children left orphans. When each dawn found us well, I prayed my thanks, then prayed my beseechment that I might live to pray such thanks the next day, too.

  Pietro and I lumbered like blinded mules through the deathly miasma that lay upon the city, struggling to keep ourselves and our boys clear of it. I rose at odd hours so that I could draw water from the public fountain when no one else was there. And I wrapped myself like the wife of a Mohammedan whenever I went to the market, although in truth we stayed half-starved because I feared what sickly airs might coat any eggs or grain or meat I bought.

  That spring, Pietro was hired by a confectioner whose apprentices had fled the city. It was against the guild rules for a grown man to be taken into the trade, but in those dismal seasons no one bothered to enforce such statutes, for what man wants to waste what might be his last healthy day just to swear out a complaint against a rival artisan? If you’ve never lived through plague, you’d not believe how popular clove-soaked candied walnuts or cinnamon-sugared bozolati can be. When disease ravages innocent and guilty alike, there are those who don hairshirts and shout for repentance, and those who drop breeches and call for delights. Appetites for confections swelled along with appetites for every other bodily indulgence, and Pietro was gone long hours from us. When my chores gave me need to go out as well, I bade Nunzio lead his brothers to the roof, to play whatever games they could invent. I never would have believed this safe and right before the plague, but now I thought only of the one great harm that I believed could not find them there.

  Any mother of sons knows how boys will entertain themselves watching ants carry off the carcass of a wasp. From our roof, my sons saw Verona’s bier-bearers crawling ant-like through the streets, first to the cemeteries and then, once there was not a single square of consecrated ground left unfilled, to any field beyond the city gates where a mass grave-pit could be dug. It was not right for children to gape at those bespotted, boil-ridden corpses being carried off. But what else could I do with them, six sons I dared not let into the street? I always barred the door from the outside, so they could not let themselves out. Returning an hour later, I’d hear their shouts and taunts, the thrumming of a ball against the wall, all the boisterous cacophony of boys kept locked inside echoing along the street. In happier times, a mother might scold her sons for such disturbance to the neighbors. But during those months when pestilence silenced so many, whenever I came back to my boys’ noisy mischief, I kissed and hugged them hard, until even little Angelo squirmed away from me.

  Half a year we lived like that. Till the autumn day I went to buy the last of the season’s onions, hoping they would somehow be enough to get us through the winter. When I haggled over the brown-skinned bulbs, did I forget to beg the saints’ forgiveness for my great presumption that there would be eight of us to feed all the way to spring?

  As I neared our house, I heard Angelo crying as though his older brothers were tormenting him. No mother is surprised by such things, but Angelo’s wail was unusually frightened, and frightening. The door was still shut fast, just as I’d left it. But what tingled in the pit of my arms and between my legs swelled to a throb as I unbarred the door and hurried up the stairs. There was Angelo, red-faced and bawling, bound to the bed with a dishcloth. I stopped only long enough to see he was unharmed, before I searched out his brothers. They were not inside, and when I called them name by name to come back from the roof, there was no answer.

  I hauled myself up the ladder, but none of my boys stood upon the roof’s sloping tiles. My yells sounded back unanswered from the walls of the neighboring buildings, which rose above our little house.

  Somewhere Berto let out a giggle. One of his brothers smacked him back to silence before I could be sure where the sound was coming from. Curving foot to tile, foot to tile, I crept to the edge of the roof. Bracing myself against the co
rner of our neighbor Luigi’s house, I peered out. Though the day was cold, Luigi’s shutter was flung back, a patch of faded bigello caught on its hinge. I knew the fabric well. Nunzio, Nesto, and Donato each had worn and outgrown the tunic it was torn from, which now was Enzo’s.

  Angelo, still bound to the bed, let out a doleful cry. My foot slipped, sending a tile sliding off the roof. It smashed into the street, and Enzo poked his curious head out from Luigi’s window like a ground-mole popping up from his hole. Before I could grab for him, his brothers pulled him back inside.

  I could not creep hand-over-hand along the awning pole that hung across the windows, as my sons must have. Instead I crawled back up the roof and down the ladder, hurrying down our stairs into the street. Banging on Luigi’s door, I called his name, and then the name of each of my naughty sons. None answered. I grabbed the latch, which lifted too easily in my hand.

  Luigi was a tanner, and at first I thought the stink inside must have come from a remnant of curing hide. But climbing his stair, I knew the stench was too terrible for that.

  I found him lying on the floor. His half-rotten corpse gaped with holes where rats had fed off him for who could say how long. But those devil-toothed rodents would never be so cruel again thanks to my sons, who’d taken Luigi’s kitchen pestle and smashed the rats to death. Five in all, one for each boy.

  How could they be so impious? As if dying unshriven and unblessed, then being chewed through like some Alpine cheese, was not enough for Luigi to suffer. Though the sight and stench of him turned my stomach, I kept my sons in that room yet longer, ordering them all to kneel and pray for the poor man’s wandering soul.

  But I could tell already it was too late. I did not yell, or strike, or chasten them. Neither did Pietro, when I told him that night what they’d done. We both knew that what punishment they’d suffer for their savage sport was one we could neither give nor relieve.