In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  “Enough for what? A miracle?”

  “Fiammetta—”

  “Tell me—why is it you find it so hard to look at me, Bucino?”

  “I am looking at you,” I said, pulling my head up and staring directly at her. “You are the one who is looking away.”

  Now she turned to me, her eyes as green and cold as the two emeralds I had just pawned to keep us fed. “And? What do you see?”

  “I see a beautiful woman with the luck of the Devil in need of food and a good bath.”

  “Liar. Look again. Or maybe you need help.”

  Her hand slid under the grimy sheet, and she pulled out a small, ivory-backed mirror. Time was in Rome when she could barely go an hour without scrutinizing her beauty, but with the Devil at your heels, you move too fast for vanity, and looking glasses are few and far between in the hull of a cargo ship. She twirled the stem of the mirror in her fingers, the sun catching the surface and sending prisms of light around the room. “It seems Meragosa sold everything that she could rip out of the floor, but what she didn’t know about she couldn’t steal. It was in between the slats of the bed. When I was young, that was my mother’s safe place for the money she earned.”

  She handed it to me. It was heavy, but the glass was still fine enough to do its work. I caught a glimpse of a face under a great misshapen dome of a forehead, and just for an instant I was surprised by myself again, for, unlike the rest of the world, I do not register my ugliness daily. Compared with me, my lady is a newly risen Venus. But then my looks do not earn our living.

  “I have been looking at myself in that mirror ever since I was a child, Bucino. Studying my reflection was part of my training. The glass was a gift to my mother from a man who ran a shop in the Merceria. It used to be mounted on the wall next to the bed and covered by a little curtain to keep the sun off the silver. There was a shelf underneath, where she kept pots of oils and perfume, and she would pick me up every day to see myself—”

  “Hunger distorts the world as badly as tarnished glass,” I interrupted. “Eat something, and then we’ll talk.”

  She shook her head impatiently. “—and each and every time I looked she would say, ‘I don’t do this for you to become vain, Fiammetta, but because beauty is your gift from God and it should be used and not squandered. Study this face as if it were a map of the ocean, your own trade route to the Indies. For it will bring you its own fortune. But always believe what the glass tells you. Because while others will try to flatter you, it has no reason to lie.’ ”

  She stopped. I said nothing.

  “So, Bucino, is it lying now? If so, you had better tell me, because we are the only sailors left together in this enterprise.”

  I took a breath. If I had had wit enough, I suppose I might have embroidered the truth a little, since she had lived her whole life on the rich cream of compliment, and without it her spirit would become as enervated as her body. If I had had wit enough…

  “You are ill,” I said. “And thin as a street whore. Hardship has eaten your flesh away. But it is only flesh, and food will make you plump again.”

  “Well-picked words, Bucino.” She took the mirror from me and held it briefly up in front of her. “Now,” she said. “Tell me about my face.”

  “Your skin is dull. Your scalp is scabby, you have too little hair, and there is a cut that rises into your hairline. But your glow will come back, and if you fashion it right, your hair, once it grows again, will easily disguise the flaw that remains.”

  “Once it grows again! Look at me, Bucino. I am bald.” And her voice was like a child’s wail.

  “You are cropped.”

  “No. Bald.” She put her head down toward me, her fingers moving across her scalp. “Look, feel! Here. And here. And here. There is no hair, or none that will grow again. My scalp is like ridges of earth after a drought. Feel it. Look at it. I am bald. Oh, sweet Jesus…this is what comes from the spite of skinny German cows. I should just have lifted my skirts in the hall and let the men at me. The pricks of two dozen Protestants would have been easier to bear than this.”

  “You think so? And how would it have been once they turned their lust into your sin and butchered us all to assuage their guilt?”

  “Hah! At least we would have died more quickly. Now we shall starve slowly from my ugliness. Look at me. What price my talents in bed now? I am bald, God damn it, Bucino. And we are lost.”

  “No,” I said, my voice as fierce as hers. “I am not lost, though you may be. You are certainly half starved and infected with melancholy and melodrama.”

  “Oh. And when did I give you permission to insult me?”

  “When you started insulting yourself. We are partners now, remember? It was you who promised that if I could haul my carcass here, then together we could make this work. What is this bog of self-pity? Your mother didn’t teach you this. We could be breeding maggots now, like half the rest of Rome. With the right salves on your wounds and a fire in your stomach, we might be eating off silver plates before next summer comes around. But if they shaved your spirit when they shaved your head, then you’d better tell me now, because I didn’t come to this cesspit of a city, where sewers run like open veins and where I am indeed scarcely bigger than the rats, for you to give up on us now.”

  I pulled myself off the bed. There are those who say that it is funny to watch squat men posture indignation, that when dwarves stamp their feet, kings and nobles only laugh. But my mistress was not laughing now. “I’ll come back when there is more in your stomach than bile.”

  I moved toward the door and stood there for a long moment. When I looked back, she was sitting, staring at the plate, jaw set, and though she would not admit it later, there were tears sliding down her cheeks.

  I waited. She put out her hand and took a scoop of fish flesh. I watched the flakes go into her mouth, saw the threads of saliva forming at the edges of her lips as she chewed doggedly. She sniffed and took a sip from the glass. I stayed where I was. She took another mouthful, and then another slurp of wine.

  “When she left Rome, she had enough to live well here,” she said in a fierce whisper. “It was what she wanted. To come back to this house and live like a lady. Yet all that’s left is filth and sickness. I don’t know what happened here.”

  I have few enough memories of my own mother. She died when I was still young. Some people said it was the burden of having given birth to such a monstrosity, but I do not believe that, for in the hazy tumble of the past, there is a woman’s face smiling down at me, holding me, running her fingers over the top of my head as if it was a thing of wonder rather than a thing of shame. My lady’s mother I had known for the best part of two years, when my employment overlapped with her increasing homesickness in Rome and her decision to leave. No doubt she had been a beauty once, for she still held herself more like a lady than like a whore, but her face had grown sharp counting purses. For the first six months, she spied on me as a falcon spies on a mouse in the grass, waiting for it to break cover enough to pounce, and she would have had my liver for dog meat if she had spotted as much as a missing button from the household accounts. There are those who would say that she sold her only daughter into prostitution to provide for her own old age. But all the moralists I have met either live off the Church or have purses of their own to nourish their sanctimony, and where I come from, anyone with a profitable trade would be a fool not to pass the tricks of it on to their children. All I know is that Madame Bianchini was a woman with a stout head on her and a fist as tight as an asshole when it came to money. When she was in her right mind, it would have taken more than Meragosa to swindle anything out of her. Though my lady had missed her when she had left, she was well trained by then and not one to dwell on what she couldn’t have. That, too, was something she had been taught. There are times, however, even in the best learners, when despair cuts sharper than the will.

  I walked back to the bed and clambered up close to her. She rubbed her eyes fiercely with t
he back of her hand. “Remember what they say, Bucino?” she said at last. “How if you sleep in a bed where someone has died, you too are doomed unless it’s been blessed with holy water?”

  “Yes, and the same people also say that God doesn’t let anyone die on the same day they go to Mass. Yet the ground gobbles gangs of pious widows and nuns every day. What? You never heard that one?”

  “No,” she said, and her smile ignited the spark of her spirit just for that instant. She held out her glass, and I refilled it. She took a longer draft this time. “You don’t think it was the pox, do you? I saw no sign of it on her, and surely she would have told me if it had been. But everyone knows that this city has it even more than Rome. Boats and boils—they go together. That’s what she used to tell me.” She looked up at me. “Have you really decided against it so soon, Bucino? I warned you that it would smell worse in summer.”

  I shook my head and lied with my eyes. At another time she would have noticed.

  “There was a girl, when we lived here,” she said. “She was young, maybe only a few years older than I…. Her name was Elena something, but we used to call her La Draga. She had something wrong with her that made her walk strangely, and her eyes were bad, but she was clever and knew about plants and healing. My mother would get potions from her. There was a liquid. The Courtesans’ Cordial we used to call it. Holy water and pulped mare’s kidney. I swear that’s what my mother said it was. It would bring on bleeding if you were late. La Draga could make all kinds of stuff. She cured me once of a coughing fever when everyone else thought I was going to die.” She ran her fingers over the edge of the cut on her forehead into her stubbly hair. “If we could get in touch with her, I think she might know what to do with this.”

  “If she’s in Venice, I’ll find her.”

  “What price did you get for the emeralds?”

  I told her, and she nodded quietly. “I don’t think he swindled me.”

  She laughed. “If he did, he would be the first.”

  Outside, a fat gull swooped past, screeching at the sun. She glanced out the window. “You know the air is better on the big canals. Many of the bigger houses have gardens, with frangipani and lavender and bowers of wild jasmine. When my mother was at her most successful, she was invited sometimes to such places. She would come back in the mornings afterward and wake me; get into my bed and tell me of the rich guests, the food and the clothes. Sometimes she’d have a blossom or some petals she had hidden in her dress, though to me they smelled as much of the men as of the garden. She would try to find the right words to make me imagine it all. ‘As sweet as Arcadia’ was the nearest she could get.”

  She looked back at me, and I knew the danger was past.

  “As sweet as Arcadia. Now that would be something to aim for, wouldn’t you say, Bucino?”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Downstairs, the kitchen is still empty and the food untouched. In the closeness of the room, with my stomach sated, my own smell rises up to clog my nostrils. I wedge a broken chair against the door, mix a pail of stove water with a few cups from the well bucket, and pull off my sweat-caked clothes. In Rome we used to wash with imported Venetian soap, so scented and fat that it looked almost good enough to eat, but here there is only a sliver of hard cake, which, when I pump fast enough, makes a thin lather sufficient to drown a few lice, though I doubt it does much to sweeten my smell.

  The road has taken its toll on me also, eating into the roundness of my trunk and thinning my thighs so that the skin on them is flabby. I suds my balls as best I can and hold them in my hand for a moment, my prick shriveled like a salted slug. It has been some time since it has been as gainfully employed as my wits. While there is nothing to be earned from my squashed stature (if you discount the oohs and aahs of a bored crowd watching a dwarf juggling fire and then prancing around as if it had burned him), my body and I have lived together now for some thirty years, and I have grown fond of its strangeness—which, after all, is not that strange to me. Hunchbacks. Cripples. Dwarves. Children whose mouths are joined to their noses. Women with no slits for babies. Men with breasts as well as balls. The world is full of tales of the Devil in deformity, yet the truth is that ugliness is a good deal more common than beauty, and in better times I have usually been able to find pleasure enough when I needed it. Just as men are ruled by their pricks, so women, I have found, are more curious, even mischievous animals, and while they may mope and pine after perfect flesh, they also have a hankering for novelty, are susceptible to humor in flattery, and may come to enjoy acquired tastes even if they do not like to admit it in public. And so it has been for me.

  Still, even in the most adventurous of houses, filth and poverty do not rank as natural aphrodisiacs.

  I am rinsed and pulling on my new old clothes when the chair rattles against the wood and Meragosa pushes her way into the kitchen. On the table my purse is near the plate of food. My fist covers it fast, though not so fast that her narrow eyes don’t take it in.

  “Whoa…sweet Jesus!” She shivers theatrically in disgust.

  “The rat has got itself wet at last. You found the Jews then?”

  “Yes. That’s yours.” I motion to the plate. “If you want it.”

  She pokes a finger into the fish flesh. “How much’d it cost you?”

  I tell her.

  “You was cheated. You give me the money next time, and I’ll sort it for you.” But she is sitting and eating it quickly enough. I stand watching for a while, then pull the broken chair closer to her. She yanks away quickly. “You keep your distance. You may be washed, but you still smell like a sewer.”

  In the battle between her need to keep the purse strings open and the gut swell of her loathing, she is having trouble getting the balance right. I lean carefully back in the chair, keeping my eyes on her as she eats. Her skin is like an old leather purse, and there are barely any teeth in her mouth. She looks as if she has been ugly forever. From the pulpit, her hideousness would be proof of her sins, but there would have been a time when even she was peachy ripe, when her clients saw sweetness rather than decay. How many hours have I spent watching old men with chicken-gizzard necks trying not to salivate over my mistress’s flesh as they swap Platonic platitudes about how her beauty is an echo of God’s perfection? The word sin never slipped their lips. One of them even sent her love sonnets in which the rhymes careered between the carnal and the divine. We would read them aloud together and mock him. Seduction is amusing enough when one is not deceived by it.

  “Do you know a woman called La Draga?” I say after a bit.

  “Her real name is Elena something.”

  “Elena Crusichi?” She looks up briefly. “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t. What d’you want her for?”

  “My lady needs to see her.”

  “My lady, eh? Needs to see La Draga? Well, what a surprise. What’s she going to do for her? Weave her a wig?”

  “What she does for her is none of your business, Meragosa. And if you want to keep your belly full, you should be careful what you say now.”

  “Why? Because of the size of your purse? Or maybe because I’ve got a famous Roman courtesan upstairs? I’ve seen her, remember. I went up there and had a good look while you were out. She’s not going to be making anybody’s fortune anymore. Oh, she used to have it, all right. She was the most luscious little virgin in Venice for a while. Trained to have a man’s tongue hanging out of his mouth at a hundred paces. But it’s gone now. Her snatch is stretched and her head is burned stubble. She’s a freak with no future. Just like you, rat man.”

  The more she rants, the quieter I am beginning to feel. Sometimes that’s how it works with me. “What happened to my lady’s mother, Meragosa?”

  “I told you. She died. You want to know how? She rotted away with diseases given to her by a hundred different men, that’s how.” She stabs at the remains of the fish, snorting. “And I had to stand by and smell the stink.”

  Now, for the first time, I understand
why my lady’s mother had left Rome when she did, for she always seemed to me a woman driven more by business than by homesickness. But no man yearns for fresh young flesh when it is managed by a body with the pox. She must have known it was coming even then. Better to die in private and leave your daughter the spoils.

  I wait until she gets the mouthful in.

  “Actually, Meragosa, you’re wrong,” I say quietly. And I lift the purse in my hand so that the coins rattle a little against themselves and the rubies. “That’s not how it happened at all.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I mean my lady’s mother was quite well when she got here. In fact she spent her last years happily, well tended and well looked after. Then, six months ago, she caught a fever. You nursed her and made her last days as comfortable as you could, given how loyal you were to her, and she died quickly and without pain. A sad but not such an awful end. Can you remember all that?”

  Her mouth is open now, half-masticated bits of fish stuck to her teeth. I rattle the purse again. But she is getting the point. You can see her adding up the coins, offer and counteroffer.

  “Because when my lady asks you how it was, that is what you’re going to tell her.”

  She snorts out a gob of food, which hits the table close to my hand. I ignore it, slipping my hand into the purse and pulling out a single gold ducat, which I lay on the table between us.

  “If you say this, if you tell it to my mistress in a way that she believes, then I guarantee you that as well as this coin now there will be meat in the kitchen every day of the year and a new gown for you by All Saints’. And that until you die you will be looked after and cared for, rather than thrown on the scrap heap like the old hag you are.”

  She makes a clumsy move toward the money.

  “However—”

  And because a juggler, even an out-of-practice one, can move monkey-fast when he needs to, I am up and over the table with my face shoved into hers even before she has time to scream. “However, if you don’t”—and while she yelps, she also listens, because my mouth is too close to her ear for her not to hear every word—“then I promise you that you’ll die much sooner, wishing that I really was only a rat. Only by then you will have lost so many tops of your fingers and gobbets of your flesh that they will wonder what devil has been sucking on your teats as you slept.” And as I say it, I open my mouth wide, so that even as she squirms backward, she can’t fail to see the two filed and pointed side teeth, which hold pride of place in the roof of my mouth.