He supposed that God must be punishing him at last for his years of selfish and self-indulgent infidelity.
Francesca now crossed the room and held both Filippo’s hands in hers. Up close, he saw that her eyes were wide with entreaty and—unexpectedly—with fear. Her voice quivered as she said, “I have to ask you, Filippo—no, not ask…beg. Please, please, please…I’m begging you—keep my secrets.” She paused, then said, “It wasn’t ever going to be possible to hide this from you. Oh, God! I am going to have to ask you to lie for me—for who knows how long. You’re Luca’s friend, Filippo—if things turn out well for Luca and me, we’ll no doubt meet in times to come, you and your wife, and Luca and me. With one unguarded sentence in the wrong company, you could destroy any future Luca and I might ever have together. Any time I ever see you, Filippo, I’ll be waiting and watching, trying my best to smother my fear of what I know you could do. I know that. But I know too that you’re a good man. A kind man, and—”
There were bright tears in her eyes.
And he realized what it was about her that was different. Her assuredness—her brazen, libidinous, energetic assuredness—was quite gone.
The courtesan was dead.
A vivid sense of a loss of opportunity clanged in the newly emptied space in Filippo’s head, and a slightly nauseous lurch of anger rose and fell in his throat. But then, much to his surprise, shoving their way past his aching groin, past his wretched, frustrated disappointment and the stabbing of his fears for the future, came striding a pair of unexpected emotions: sympathy and compassion. He put his arms around Francesca in a way he had never done before: in tenderness. Holding her against his chest for a moment, he said softly onto the top of her head, “What sort of man do you imagine I am, Francesca? What can you think of me? Do you really think that—out of pique, or spite, or a desire for revenge, or whatever it is—I would ever deliberately spoil your chances of real happiness?”
Francesca pulled back from him, stared up into his face for a moment and then began to cry.
***
Filippo was glad that Maria was asleep when he arrived home. He had stayed only a matter of another few minutes at Francesca’s—it had still been light when he had left her house—but, not feeling robust enough to face his wife, he had wandered through the city and down to the sea, where he had sat on a low wall, staring out over the water until well after dark.
He intended to spend that night—as he often did—in the smallest of the three bedchambers. The bed in here was narrow and the mattress was thin. He usually pretended to curse the lack of comfort, although he knew in his heart that in fact he rather relished the aggrieved sense of martyrdom it offered him; it had always been a way of sweetening the sourness of his guilt. A sense of shame at his infidelity was something which had hung around him like a bad smell ever since he had first been introduced to Francesca, but as he lay on the lumpy bed and thought about it now, he realized that, over the years, the increasing familiarity with the routine of his Wednesday visits had somehow given his licentious disloyalty an air of artificial respectability.
Now it was over, though, he wondered in hindsight if it had actually just been rather grubby.
Filippo had always tried to convince himself that his arrangements with Francesca provided the least disloyal solution to the intransigent problems of his and Maria’s marriage: it might be that Francesca asked for payment for her favors, but he had never quite been able to see her as a whore. She was more like a friend, he had always told himself, a friend who understood his needs and his difficulties; a friend who was happy to offer him a solution to his frustrations without hurting Maria. It was not, after all, as though they had been lovers. Francesca had never even made a pretense of loving him—he was sure of it, and glad of it. He had never loved her—not the way he knew he loved Maria. He and Francesca had never coupled other than as a commercial transaction, and now he was grateful for that, too. He had been astounded by her beauty; frantically aroused and joyously liberated by her flamboyant lack of inhibition; he had been comforted by her consistent refusal to judge him. But though his body might have been all but possessed by her, he knew now that this beautiful woman had never truly reached his heart. This was, he supposed, why he had never felt that he had betrayed his wife.
Now the thought of Maria sent a knife through his guts as he sat down on the edge of the bed and removed his shoes.
He pictured her lying asleep in the next room, entirely unaware as usual of where he had been and what he had been doing. He imagined her sleeping face and wished—with a racking feeling of longing—that he could just open the door to her chamber, climb into bed with her, and tell her…everything. He realized, as he imagined the scenario, what a relief it would be to unburden himself.
***
Maria, however, was not asleep and she was certainly not unaware of where Filippo had been. She was sitting up in her bed, a wrap around her shoulders, writing in her vellum-bound notebook, and the words she was writing were sending a thin, wire-like thrill of arousal down through her insides.
***
If you can’t say it or do it, just think it and write it, the woman in the crimson dress had said that day, amongst other, more intimate, advice. Whatever it is, and however guilty you might feel committing it to paper—just write it. Nobody need ever see it, unless you choose to show them…and you’ll find that writing can be the most extraordinary release.
She had bought a notebook that very day and had determined to write as soon as she had retired to bed. Book, quill, and ink at the ready, propped up against her pillows, she had wrapped a shawl around her shoulders, and, with a breath-held sense of fear, heart thudding as if she were about to excise a festering wound on her own leg, she had nipped the end of her tongue between her teeth and stared at the first blank page in her new book. The words she wanted to write had hung in her head, shouting out their robust refusal to leave her pen, and she had pressed herself back against her pillows in suffocating desperation, her loaded quill trembling in her fingers, tilting her chin high to hold back scalding tears.
She had stared at the paper, transfixed by its blankness, and the tip of the quill had hovered above it, pulsing minutely with her heartbeat. She had placed the nib on the page. One tear had spilled over, slid down her cheek, and dripped onto the paper. Slowly and painfully, she had scratched a short sentence.
I think my husband is fucking another woman.
That one forbidden word had shrieked inside her head, shocking her with its bald vulgarity, and for a moment she had not been able to breathe.
And then the dam had burst. She had started to write, had written for over an hour, staining her hands with ink, freckling with black her night shift and the bedcovers around her, cramping her fingers as she penned a minute description of the activities in which she presumed Filippo had been indulging during his hours of absence, week after week. Her long-fettered imagination had crept out through its newly opened door and, blinking in the unaccustomed light, had begun to explore the many acutely painful possibilities that it found right outside. She had resolutely begun peering into forbidden rooms full of sounds and sights that sent shards of shame, like fragments of broken glass, deep into her guts, and, much to her surprise, but just as the crimson-clad woman had predicted, the sense of release was profound.
Perhaps, she had written, as the thought had occurred to her, shame is only powerful when it is locked away—like a frustrated guard dog, which, tethered night and day, finds that its snarling ferocity builds in intensity, simply because it has no means of release. Maria imagined this dog, set free to run through the hills, galloping on and on until physical exhaustion finally brought it down, all aggression vanished; she pictured its heaving sides, its lolling tongue, imagined its exhilaration and its sense of freedom. He will sleep where he falls, she wrote, there on the sun-baked earth, savoring the novelty of an exhausti
on borne of physical release rather than that of pent-up frustration.
“I have to let it out,” she had said aloud. “Everything I have locked away. I have to let it out. I have to let it race up into the hills and run itself to exhaustion.”
And so she had ranked in her mind a gallery of images—collecting them from all the forbidden rooms she had just discovered, and displaying them as though along the length of a long wall. They were images that she knew from experience would evoke the usual churning, smothering feelings of shame as soon as she saw them, but rather than avert her eyes, as she always did, she would, she had decided, make herself walk along the display; she would force herself to examine each one, until she had confronted them all.
And she would write down what she felt each time, in meticulous detail.
***
Fully aware of Filippo’s presence in the smallest bedroom on the other side of the wall, Maria wrote and wrote until her fingers ached. Finally, rereading her last paragraph for the third time, she put down her pen and the book and stared at the bedchamber wall for several long seconds. “Now it seems that I can think it and write it,” she said to herself. “And that is a considerable achievement. But it will be of no use at all, unless I can find a way to say it and do it.”
Putting her book, pen and ink into a box, she got out of bed and put the box into the long wooden chest that stood at the end of her bed. A folded blanket lay on the end of the bed. This Maria picked up and placed in the chest on top of the box. She closed the lid of the chest, got back into bed, and pulled the covers over herself.
Thirty-one
The door to the inn burst open, and a buffet of sea-smelling air pushed its way into the smoky interior. All the candles guttered; a few went out. Along with some half-dozen others, Carlo della Rovere looked around to see who had arrived.
“Cicciano!” he called across the room, raising one hand.
Michele di Cicciano strode toward where Carlo was sitting. Pushing past seated drinkers and kicking aside an empty chair that stood in his way, he slumped heavily onto a bench on the opposite side of the table, breathing loudly through his nose.
After a moment, he said, “Get that effeminate little bardassa of yours to bring me a fucking grappa, will you?”
Carlo called over his shoulder, “Marco?”
Over on the far side of the room, the thin boy with the greasy pigtail jerked his chin in acknowledgment.
“Two more, can you? In fact, bring us the bottle, why don’t you?”
A nod.
“So,” Carlo said. “What’s the matter?”
Michele chewed the inside of his cheek and said nothing.
A pause.
“Has something happened?”
“Seems my money’s not good enough for her anymore.”
“Who?”
“That fucking, fucking Felizzi bitch.”
Frowning, Carlo said, “Is that such a problem to you? She’s only a whore. Fair enough, a bloody good one—a bloody expensive one!—but a whore nonetheless. Can’t you just find another? Surely there must be at least one other woman in this city prepared to lie back and endure, for the amount of gold you might possibly throw at her?”
Michele hunched his shoulders and clamped his folded arms across his chest; one knee began twitching furiously. With his jaw jutting and his breath still audible in his nose, he suddenly reminded Carlo forcibly of an irascible bull. He half-imagined steam coming from Michele’s nostrils, and smothered a smirk.
Michele said, his voice obviously deliberately quiet, “I don’t care to be told what to do by a fucking doxy!”
Marco, arriving at their table, leaned past Carlo—rubbing his arm along Carlo’s shoulder as he did so—and placed a full bottle of grappa and a second glass down on the tabletop. Michele snatched up the bottle even as Marco’s fingers released it, splashed a measure into his glass, and swallowed it down in one mouthful. Grimacing against the strength of the spirit, he refilled the glass. Emptied it again.
Carlo and Marco both watched Michele for a moment as he refilled and emptied the glass yet again, then Marco laid a hand briefly upon Carlo’s sleeve and left.
Attempting to fill the ballooning hollow of silence, Carlo said, “She has children, Cicciano, did you know?”
No reply.
“Extraordinary things. Twins. Completely bloody identical. I’d be surprised if she can tell them apart, let alone anyone else.”
Another silence.
Michele glared at him and said, “Just why the fuck do you think I’d be interested in her children?”
“No reason.”
A pause.
Carlo went on, “I saw them the other day. With that eunuch of hers.”
Michele seemed not to be listening. Apparently talking to himself rather than to Carlo, he hissed, “Bloody, bloody bitch! Sends the fucking servant down to tell me that she no longer wishes to see me. Won’t even talk to me herself.”
“What was the reason?”
Michele’s voice quivered with anger. He spoke in what was clearly an imitation of the black-eyed servant’s voice and accent. “She no longer wishes to…entertain…for a living.” A pause. In his own voice, thick with sarcasm, he then added, “Apparently.”
“So it’s not just you?”
Michele flashed him a look. “Apparently not.”
Carlo let out a soft breath of surprise. “She seemed enthusiastic enough the other week, according to my brother,” he said. “I wonder what’s changed her mind so suddenly.”
“The bitch. I could just—”
Carlo watched Michele’s fingers curl and tighten. He thought of Gianni, face crumpled with anger, punching out at him with his unpracticed fist, and fingered his nose, which was still tender. That had all been about the Felizzi woman too; she certainly provoked strong feelings in those people she allowed under her skirts, he thought. Or didn’t allow, either, it now seemed.
He thought then, with biting irritation, of the large amount of gold he had lost to this Signora Felizzi, on the occasion of Gianni’s defloration. Remembering the conversation he had had a week or so before, with the little privateer, an idea blossomed in his mind. Carlo felt a slow smile stretch the corners of his mouth, as a possible means of teaching Michele’s whore a lesson she would never forget, and of recouping his losses at the same time, began to take shape.
“And what the fuck are you laughing at?” Michele snarled.
Carlo told him. His gaze flicking around the inn to ensure they could not be overheard, he outlined his idea.
Michele stared at Carlo, mouth slightly open. He looked deeply shocked for a moment, but then, his expression hardening, he nodded.
Thirty-two
Luca will be here in a matter of minutes. He told me yesterday that he wanted to take me out on the water this morning—his friend Piero Parisetto has a boat, apparently, which Luca says he sometimes borrows when he feels the need to get away from the bustle of the city. It’s only small: not large enough for us to take the girls with us, he says, so they’ll stay here with Ilaria today.
I hope they don’t mind. Poor Ilaria has been looking thunderous all morning. I have told her and Sebastiano that they are to be dismissed and, although I have offered them both a more than generous sum of money to cushion the blow, Ilaria quite obviously feels very poorly treated. (Sebastiano has said nothing, but then I would have been astonished if he had; he rarely gives his opinion on anything.) Neither of them has actually complained openly, but there has been an unpleasant atmosphere of aggrieved resentment seeping through the house since my announcement, like some noxious marsh gas.
They are leaving on Saturday, and Modesto will be moving in to their room next week. The girls are delighted; they are very fond of Modesto.
Eyeing myself in the mirror,
I fiddle a stray wisp of hair back into the complicated web of braids I cobbled together this morning, and fiddle my lower lip between my teeth to redden it. My dress is an old, plain, brown one that I haven’t worn for years; it’s the most suitable thing I have, I think, for an outing in a small boat. It’s been difficult to decide what to wear ever since all this happened; so much of my wardrobe is of course so entirely unsuitable for the supposedly sober Signora Marrone. I have been reduced to three or four dresses, and with two of these, I have had to replace their opulent gold lacings and fastenings with much simpler and plainer ones in an attempt to make them seem a little less frivolous.
All this deceit is making me feel desperately uncomfortable. I’m lying to Luca—God! I hate doing it! Luca is so transparently honest that my duplicity seems doubly shameful, and I feel ever less worthy of his affections. But even the thought of confessing the truth fills me with dread: it would be catastrophic.
My heart starts to race as I imagine how the conversation might go. How would I set about it? I suppose I would begin by admitting: I have something to tell you… I’m sure Luca would smile at my trite words, an affectionate air of unsuspicious curiosity on his face. Eyebrows raised, head tilted slightly to one side, he would wait to hear what I had to confess, certain that whatever I was dreading revealing could not be anything very terrible. I don’t know how to tell you this, I would say, but…I am not what I have told you I am. I imagine myself hesitating, and stammering, and struggling to speak. Luca’s brow would furrow at the sight of my genuine disquiet, with the first intimations of real anxiety. And then the horrible truth would all burst out, like being sick. I am not a widow. I have never been married. My children are not—as I have implied—the legitimate orphan daughters of a respectable merchantman, but are, rather, the bastard offspring of the fifth duke of Ferrara, whose paid mistress I was for eight years, before I ran away from him and set up here in Napoli…as a courtesan. I have made a great deal of money. Neither this house and its contents nor my other house in the Via San Tommaso were in fact left to me by my late husband, as I have led you to believe; rather, one was given to me by a grateful patron, and the other was bought with my own earnings, and you should know that every scudo was earned…the hard way.
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