A Trial in Venice

by Roberta Rich

  She studied Palladio’s smooth skin, muscular thighs, barrel chest, shrewd blue eyes and mason-spatulate thumbs. No question, he was a handsome old dog. But one old man in her bed was sufficient. Foscari came to her at night with his fly already unbuttoned, so impatient was he to possess her. Sometimes, God help her, he did not trouble himself to remove his green kid boots but wore them the entire time, bracing them against the footboard of the bed as he had his way with her. His seed, although it had a sour and goatish smell, might not be too old to cause mischief. It would not do to fall pregnant, of course, but she had a remedy for such a nuisance. In Rome, whores tucked sea sponges soaked in musk, amber and civet up their passages—a strategy that, so far, had worked equally well for her.

  “I must see Foscari,” Palladio said. “I hope to work out some of the fine points of our arrangement.”

  Cesca stared at him, disconcerted.

  “I have the endurance for one more undertaking before God calls me. My wife wishes to live in a villa such as this.”

  Well, she can find her own.

  “Her doctors tell me she needs a change of surroundings. As for me, I need a new project, one that will engage my heart and mind. This villa looks as though it will do nicely.”

  Cesca sat very still. “What do you mean?”

  “Foscari hasn’t mentioned our agreement?”

  Cesca shook her head.

  “He has promised me the villa.”

  Cesca could not imagine what Palladio was talking about. The only villa she could think of was the Villa Francesca. It took her a moment to work the matter out. Then she understood, and it was as if Palladio had dumped a barrel of live eels over her head.

  CHAPTER 7

  Port of Venice

  VENICE. THE CITY Hannah had abandoned so reluctantly and now returned to so eagerly had never looked more beautiful. It rose up from the lagoon like a fairy tale kingdom, its shimmering collection of islands strung together by bridges like pearls on a necklace. It was like a much-loved, familiar face seen with renewed affection after a long absence. With the salty spray wetting her face and the sun glinting off the water; the cerulean blue of the lagoon; the wind toying with the water, teasing wavelets into performing glittering dances; gondolas skimming along, as graceful as dragonflies; and the Piazza San Marco coming into sight—she wondered: how had she convinced herself she had conquered her need for Venice?

  Hannah had never felt at home in Constantinople, a city of half-barbarous Mussulmen. She had never become fluent in Osmanlica, the inelegant, disjointed language of the Turks; or understood their customs; or felt comfortable among her neighbours in the Jewish quarter. Most were Sephardim, Jews from Spain, who hardly seemed like Jews at all but rather some pleasure-loving variant of Christian.

  How fitting, how right it would be, to give birth to her child in Venice. But suppose Isaac remained behind in Constantinople? Suppose he had been so furious when he discovered her missing he had gone to the Rabbi? Isaac would have no trouble convincing him that her disobedience, her flight from bed and household, was grounds for divorce.

  The Fortuna had not docked in Malta due to a fierce storm that had blown the ship off course and so Assunta had voyaged the entire way. She would have to find another vessel to transport her back to her convent. The ship dropped anchor as a tender flying the Venetian flag pulled alongside. Two customs inspectors came on board. Short, bustling men wearing caps with the Venetian lion stencilled on the brims. Hannah’s heart sank.

  “What is happening?” asked Assunta, nodding at the gesticulating and shouting going on between the inspectors and the captain.

  Why had Hannah not anticipated this? All she had thought of was disembarking and finding Matteo. Now she told Assunta, “During outbreaks of plague, the custom inspectors require ships to unload passengers and crew onto Lazzareto Nuovo for forty days of quarantine to ensure no one is infected. All ships entering the harbour must do the same. We might be sequestered with hundreds of other angry travellers on that tiny island, unless our captain can convince the inspectors otherwise.” She rubbed together her index finger and thumb. “Sometimes a few ducats can persuade them to relax the rules.” A delay of forty days might mean the end of her chance to find Matteo alive. She watched from a distance as the captain and inspectors continued to argue. Finally, one of the inspectors accepted a handkerchief, lumpy with coins, from the captain and shoved it in his pocket. They got back into the tender and rowed off. Hannah breathed a sigh of relief as the captain ordered the anchor raised and they glided into harbour.

  When Hannah alighted on the wharf, she and the other passengers dropped to their knees and kissed the broad planks. She inhaled the pine pitch, breathed in the scent of damp earth and flowers and trees from the shore. But the ground continued to shift under her feet. Hannah had proven to be no better a sailor on this voyage than she had been years ago on her journey from Venice to Constantinople. After several storm-tossed weeks, she was grey with fatigue and bone thin. There was no Isaac—a husband all the more precious for his absence—to help her. How she missed his grin, his nimble wit, his steady calmness in much the way an amputee must miss his limb. At times during her journey when she had been struck by a sight such as the sails luffing in the wind, or confounded by the miserable, constant diet of double-baked biscuits and dried fish, she would turn to make a comment to Isaac—and find herself addressing the empty air. Other times she would turn to admire his handsome features and instead find herself staring at Assunta’s broad face.

  But she had much to be grateful for. The baby within her seemed unperturbed by the voyage and moved vigorously. Thanks to the kindness of God, she no longer suffered the usual afflictions of pregnancy: headache and swollen ankles.

  The wharf was crowded with dock workers and porters, men with legs like wishbones from lugging their heavy burdens. Hawkers were selling the bounty of the lagoon from pushcarts: tiny shrimp, sprats, eels and snails, clams, squid, sardines, mussels, rumba, a delicacy found only in the lagoon, and branzino, a fish of incomparable flavour. The lagoon tossed all these and more into the fisherman’s nets. Flocks of white pelicans hoping for a sardine surrounded their boats, squawking and flapping their wings, like a pack of raucous hunting dogs begging at a rich man’s table.

  A peasant woman from the Terra Firma, judging by her sombre dress and embroidered head scarf, sat with a large tub anchored between her knees. She was harping sheep’s milk to make pecorino.

  “The soonest worn, the soonest you become accustomed to it,” Assunta had said earlier, watching Hannah stuff the nun’s habit into her valise.

  Hannah had shaken her head. “I cannot wear such a garment to enter the ghetto.”

  “As you wish,” Assunta had said.

  Now she adjusted on Hannah’s head the red scarf that all Jewesses were obliged to wear then tucked in a stray lock of curly dark hair. “Be well. I hope you make peace with Asher.”

  “I must. My brother is a moneylender. Few secrets are safe from him. If anyone can find out what Foscari and Cesca are plotting, Asher can. He has a spider’s web of spies—Jew and gentile, other moneylenders, and merchants and porters in the palazzi along the Grand Canal, perhaps even law clerks and bailiffs. He used to say, ‘An informant in the right place is worth any number of soldiers in the field.’ My letter from Cesca was written many months ago. I need fresh news.” Hannah gave Assunta a hug. “We shall meet again, my friend. Thank you for travelling with me. May you find a ship to Malta soon and have a smooth sail onward.”

  Assunta held fast in her strong arms. Hannah would miss this fierce Bride of Christ.

  “With God’s help, you will find your son.”

  Hannah blinked away tears. “Thank you for your lessons. If I succeed in passing myself off as a nun, it will be due to your good tutoring.”

  “You were an apt pupil.” Sister Assunta paused. “For a heretic.”

  “Nonsense, your Latin prayers refused to stay in my head, tumbling in one ear
and out the other like stones through a chute,” said Hannah. “I am grateful for the pleasure of your company. It would have been a lonely voyage without you.”

  Hannah had grown fond of this brusque woman, who had not only instructed her in the ways of Christian prayers but also bossed about the Fortuna’s crew. She had shouted at them between cupped hands to reef in the sails. She had given the cabin boys advice on how best to climb the rigging and demonstrated with her long, curved needle and leather palm the most efficient method of mending wind-torn sails.

  “I hope you will think about what I have said. Do not turn your face from the teachings of the Lord. Put aside your heathen beliefs. Bend your knee to Jesus.”

  “Thank you for your concern about my soul.”

  It was an exchange they had had many times. Sister Assunta gave Hannah’s shoulder a hearty thump and they parted.

  Hannah found a porter to carry her valise. As she walked through the streets, the porter behind her, her cioppà barely flapped in the stiff breezes coming off the lagoon. The hem was weighted down with the fourteen ducats left after paying her passage. A woman, whether in broad daylight or blackest night, was an easy prey for thieves. In her pocket she had a number of scudi to cover her daily expenses.

  A large puddle soaked her shoes. The piazza was awash in water. It was the time of alta aqua, high tide, which sloshed into the streets and piazzi, making them impossible to cross dry shod. How easy to imagine Matteo at her side, stomping in the pools of salty lagoon water, making the water arc and glisten in the sun. In the eddying puddles he would sail the little red boat Isaac had carved for him.

  A former neighbour, wearing the obligatory red hat for Jewish men, marched along the Fondamenta toward her. Hannah ducked her head and pulled her head scarf lower on her forehead. It was not modest for an unrelated man and woman to greet each other in public. Some people crossed a bridge or ducked behind a building to avoid such encounters.

  Her dark dress and red scarf grew hotter as the sun rose overhead. How uncomfortable a nun’s habit would have been and yet, perhaps a wiser choice. The city swarmed with two-legged rats who hung about eavesdropping, trying to pick up sellable information—the price of wheat in Sicily, the number of boots the navy ordered, the cost of printed silk in Bellagio—or the sudden reappearance of the Jewish midwife who had disappeared the night the nobleman Niccolò di Padovani had been murdered.

  CHAPTER 8

  Jewish Ghetto,

  Venice

  TO BEG A FAVOUR of a foe is to disarm him. Or so they say. Hannah had no bed, no food, no heat, and no pillow upon which to lay her head. Her other siblings had left the ghetto long ago—one brother to Macedonia, another to Palestine; her sister, Jessica, of blessed memory, was dead.

  Hannah could not sleep rough on the street and risk being beaten and robbed or worse by one of the numerous gangs that roamed the streets and canals at night. Her ducats were all she had. There was the baby to protect. Sleeping on damp ground could bring on her travail. She did not want to give God an excuse to take this unborn child.

  A public inn was out of the question. Such establishments were far too dangerous for a woman travelling alone. Share a bed with a stranger, perhaps a man and surely a Christian? Unthinkable. She must go to the ghetto, seek out Asher, beg for shelter.

  The words of her brother’s letter still resounded in her memory: “You have stolen from me and from our family. You should have your right hand cut off like a common thief. You are dead to me. In my heart, I have sat shiva for you.” But he was, after all, her brother. With his help, she would save Matteo from whatever scheme Foscari and Cesca had devised. Asher would know about the law courts, know how to approach the clerks to find out if, as Isaac suspected, Foscari had petitioned to be appointed guardian.

  Many families had members who did not bring credit upon them—a lazy son, a lecherous uncle, a shiftless cousin, a headstrong girl. Asher was not ill-intentioned, merely impulsive, prone to bouts of anger that came and went as quickly as drifts of snow on the lagoon in January. His temper tantrums as a child had been legendary. In the ghetto, where everyone knew everything about the neighbours—from what the wife cooked for dinner, to how many times a week couples made love in their creaky beds shoved against thin walls—it was rumoured he was too eager to take chances. The other moneylenders were uneasy about his willingness to advance large sums to disreputable borrowers in exchange for interest rates higher than those permitted by law. These loans did not appear in Asher’s ledger for inspection by officials from the Ministero delle Finanze.

  Hannah and the porter headed north toward the ghetto. An hour or so before sunset they drew near the tiny island that had once been her home. The air was redolent with the smell of sugar caramelizing in the bakeries and yeast working in dough for challah. As she crossed the Ponte delle Guglie, she glanced up at her former building, her apartment, four rickety floors above the campo. Around her people chatted in Veneziano, the dialect of her childhood, and Hebrew and Ladino, the language of the Sephardim, and Yiddish, spoken by Jews from the Germanic countries. Every syllable, every word, every phrase was as clear as Murano glass. Here there would be no need for clumsy hand gestures, no fumbling for the right verb or noun, no reluctance to speak for fear of making a fool of herself. Her old frustrations—crying herself to sleep nights from homesickness, struggling in vain to learn the customs and language of the Ottomans—were forgotten.

  To return to the city of one’s birth is to flirt with the notion of becoming a child again. When she had departed Venice, Hannah had left her young self behind. Now she reunited with it—the toddler clinging to the sides of her crib; the bride in Isaac’s arms; the young matron blessing the Shabbat candles; the woman sitting in the women’s gallery, the mechitza, in the synagogue, listening to the men below chanting and singing God’s praises. She had longed for Venice in the way she yearned for her youth—yearned for it without being aware she was yearning.

  In front of the heavy wooden gates leading to the ghetto, Hannah reflexively stood to one side so the gentiles who had come to shop could proceed first. There were a few nuns in the crowd, shopping for second-hand garments to clothe their orphans.

  No one paid her the slightest attention. Hannah was amused to see Vicente, the gatekeeper, having a snooze, a jug of wine nestled between his feet. It was his task to unlock the gates at dawn and lock them at sunset.

  Seeing Vicente made Hannah recall the cozy suffocation of ghetto life—the gossip around the wellhead in the morning with the women, the smell of bread baking in the communal ovens, the children running through the sotoportegi, playing hide-and-go-seek or find-the-slipper. She inhaled—cinnamon, rotting refuse, perfume, bread baking, chicken roasting.

  The frantic swishing of dozens of brooms interrupted her reverie. How could she have forgotten? Sunset would mark the beginning of Shabbat. The women were preparing.

  The porter unloaded Hannah’s valise from his handcart and dropped it by her side next to the wellhead in the centre of the campo. Hannah gave him a few scudi. He stooped, tipped his hat and clattered past Vicente, out the gates and over the bridge, dragging his handcart behind him.

  The square of the Ghetto Nuovo was hardly more spacious than the deck of the Fortuna. When Hannah was a child, it had seemed immense. She had imagined it to be a miniature of the entire world and pretended her family’s house was Nueva España and her friend Raisl’s house on the other side of the square was darkest Africa. The campo was a vast ocean that must be traversed to get from one country to the other. From within the ghetto she had had no view of the glittering Venice. Her dwelling, with its peculiar haphazard windows, like all the others in the ghetto, faced inward toward the campo. The Council of Ten had ordered that any windows looking out on the city be bricked up. It would be unseemly for Jews to observe a Christian from a position of height, nor must a Christian be offended by the sight of Jews at worship. There had been talk of having the interior windows, those overlooking the c
ampo, bricked up as well, but kinder souls had prevailed and they were left open to admit whatever breeze and light there was. The ghetto was an uneasy compromise between Rome and the Republic of Venice. The Church wished the Jews expelled; the government tolerated them for their moneylending and trade connections with the Levant.

  How different her old loghetto was from her spacious, sunny house in Constantinople, with the generous garden filled with flowers and fruit trees. Although the ghetto teemed with people and livestock and carts like ants on a piece of honeyed bread, it was so shadowy it was as though the sun itself had been banished. Even now, an hour before sunset, oil lamps were hanging from the doorways of the bakery and the goldsmith and from under the archways of staircases leading to loghetti.

  When she had lived here, Hannah had been able to look out her apartment window and spot the top of Asher’s head, hair as tangled as a skein of black yarn curling out from under his red hat. He sat at his table in the untidy row near the Banco Rosso with the other moneylenders, in stalls no wider than the breadth of their shoulders. Some had a jeweller’s loupe screwed into one eye; some sat stroking their beards, chatting with passersby, waiting for customers. Piles of odds and ends taken in pledge sat at their feet.

  Now Hannah ran her eye down the familiar line of pale, dark men and yes, there was Asher, the handsomest of her brothers, four years younger than she was, holding a gemstone up between pincers the size of a mouse’s whiskers and squinting through a jeweller’s loupe. His good looks had got him into trouble as a young man. Perhaps they continued to do so, though he was married now to a keen-eyed, sharp-tongued woman.