In the Company of the Courtesan: A Novel

by Sarah Dunant

  There are no sides to this great canal of open water, nowhere to be pulled to safety here, while out there in the gloom are birds with wings like the wind and an appetite for small prey. I will not go there again. Not so soon.

  The boat is docked now, and there is a stream of people getting off. The shore is sudden chaos, with boxes and bags and shouting. I hear the indignant cluck of chickens, and someone has what looks like a small pig squashed under his arm, for it is squealing louder than any baby; no doubt it senses that, having left the fields, it is destined for the spit. I am lost in the crowd. To the left I hear the thick splashing of the water against the stone, and I know how the pig feels. It is a simple enough choice. If I want to speak to her again, I will have to follow her onto the boat.

  I have spent my whole life refusing to be as small as others want me to be. Yet my fear has still let me down. The barge is loading now, the first people jostling and laughing as they push ahead. I am at the end of the line, my feet firmly on dry land. La Draga’s bent figure stands six or seven ahead of me.

  Let Fate decide. If there is room, I will go and walk on water with her; if not, I will turn around and go home.

  There is room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  I wedge myself in on a side bench, between a spreading old woman and a hefty man. While their smell is bad, their solidity reassures a little. The boat pushes off, and we move into the mist. La Draga is sitting farther to the front, turned away from me, her head held high despite the curve of her spine. The fact that we cannot see where we are going will be of no concern to her, though I know sound travels differently in fog, and she is too alert not to know what is going on around her. The shawl has slipped slightly from her head now, so that I can see a tangle of hair in a long, untidy braid, almost as white as her skin. We have already lost sight of the dock, and my fists are held so tight in my lap that the knuckles are white ridges against my skin. I make myself loosen my fingers and try to breathe. It is not so bad. There are no bird’s talons in my ears, and the chickens scrambling in the boxes at my feet are more perturbed than I am. I wonder about my lady, at sea in a very different boat, with the wealth and majesty of Venice all around her, and I hope the more open water of the Lido has chased the mists away so that, when the doge comes to cast the wedding ring into the gray depths, there is enough sun to catch the glint of it before it hits the water.

  Even as I think it, the weather seems to clear a little ahead, and to the left a bell tower begins to take shape out of the gloom. I have seen it enough times from the shore to know it as the bell tower of the church on the island of San Michele, a building about which Aretino and his architect friend, Sansovino, are scathing, for they see it as a dull example of the old classical style, though I am more impressed by the miracle of its construction: all that carting of great barge loads of brick and stone and stuff out into the middle of the sea. It takes us maybe fifteen, twenty minutes to reach it, but we do not stop. The only people living here are Franciscan monks, and they have their own boats, to keep them uncontaminated from life outside.

  Of course. For a woman who cannot see, it is poetic that the island of her birth should be the one that produces the world’s finest mirrors. We are heading now to Murano.

  Already the long, thin lump of land is rising up in front of us. I knew the name Murano long before I ever came to Venice. No one who has lived in a house of any substance does not. The word has moved halfway across the world. It is one of the reasons my Turk arrives with such a full purse—the greatest mosques of Constantinople, it seems, are lit by its hanging lamps, and when we packed up my lady’s wealth in Rome, it was not mere glass but Murano crystal that we wrapped so carefully in cloth and stored in the bottoms of the trunks so the barbarians would not get their hands on it. Our merchant, Alberini, says there is no other place on earth where they have the ingredients, the knowledge, and the experience to make such quality in such quantity, though I think this is as much politics as craft, for it’s common knowledge that if any master glassmaker leaves the island, he is forbidden by law to set up a business anywhere else.

  Alberini brought my lady here once, along with a Spanish nobleman whom he wanted to impress with Venetian beauty, both flesh and glass. She came back aglow with stories of furnaces hot as Hell, from where men scooped white-hot globules of glass onto the ends of pipes and blew them into great bubbles of transparent crystal. But the even greater wonder, she said, was the way they played with the glass in its molten state, thick as runny cheese, twirling and cutting and fashioning it into the shapes of a dozen animals or exotic flowers and curling leaves for the fall of a chandelier. Such miracles a young girl with failing sight would barely have noticed. Though she, like every woman, would have learned early enough that fire burns and that out of heat—most especially man’s heat—comes creation.

  As we move closer, the island grows in size and depth. I make out stretches of scrubland with buildings and chimneys all around, though hardly any trees, as the furnaces long ago devoured most of them, so that along with the pebbles and potash, Murano now imports barge loads of wood to stoke the ever open mouths of flame. The boat follows the coastline and then cuts into a canal, as in the mother city, its sides a mass of warehouses with barges lined up at every available mooring place. Though there is little activity here today, for even the best of Venice rests on the day when the doge marries the sea.

  The first waterway curves into another, and some fine new palaces rise up on either side. There are Venetian nobles who have homes here with great ornamental gardens, but it is hardly the Grand Canal, and however rich my business, I think I would feel myself a kind of exile if I lived here. The boat is slowing now, and the people are getting restless. The sky is clear, and the day has heated up. My cushion of an old woman is fidgeting, and I grab hold of the side to counteract the tilting. La Draga is still as a statue, staring straight ahead. We come into dock, and now at last she moves, her feet if anything steadier than mine on the shifting surface. The grizzled boatman takes her hand as she crosses onto the landing bay and smiles at her as he does so. Maybe he recognizes her from her youth or regular visits. Maybe she can tell a man by the touch of his hand. I still remember her turning to me that day I ran after her onto the street, knowing from the way my feet hit the stones who I was and that I was somehow agitated. It was the first time she touched me, reading the shape of my great head with her fingers. They were cool then too, I remember, thin stemmed and delicate despite all the grinding of powders and mixing of pastes. It gives me a shudder to think about it now, as if I have already exposed myself too much to her. In the back of the boat, I pull my cloak over my head and my shoulders so that, if needed, I might pass for a bent old man rather than a misshapen younger one.

  I am curious about where she will go. Maybe some house, once a workshop, now home to an aging grandparent. I imagine an old man, his shelves filled with small glass bottles, for of course a woman of her profession would need a constant source of vials for all her potions. I think he would be a fellow of some intelligence, this grandfather, for she is clever enough under her silence; a glassmaker with an interest in alchemy, perhaps, as the manufacture of glass is its own kind of magic.

  But I am mistaken, because she is not heading for home. Instead, to my surprise, she is going to church. The building rises out of a bend in the canal, its back looking out onto the water, an elegant curved apse with light stone arches and brickwork like clever stitching; old Venice rather than new, but I like it more for that. As I come up to it, she is already halfway to the entrance.

  Inside, the place is still full of worshipers eager for God’s ear. She sits halfway down at the end of a pew, head bent. I place myself a dozen rows behind her. What is she doing here? Prayers for her dead relatives or prayers for herself? What words do witches use when they address God? I think of my lady at confession: “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. This last month I have made my living pleasuring twenty men, not one of whom is my h
usband.” A usual enough sin, even if it comes in unusual amounts. But with La Draga it would be different. How to explain the dipping of a consecrated host in menstrual blood to hook a man’s lust, or all those semiliquid little bodies washed out from desperate women’s wombs? In the mind of any priest, this is God’s work done by the Devil. With such stains on the debit sheet of a soul, would the health of a few prostitutes or the saved life of a dwarf mean anything at all?

  I drop my eyes and find myself staring at the floor: a lake of stone and marble mosaic triangles, diamonds, and squares constructed into circles that move outward and flow one into the other, like Venice’s little islands flowing into a whole. When you look further, you can spot single images: the shape of a peacock with its tail splayed and, nearby, what might be plants or other birds. How many pieces did it take to make such a floor? How many people die every year? How would it be if this was a mosaic of souls: a million beings gone through the flame to make matter molten, in the same way that the furnace breaks down stones into liquid and, if the ingredients are right, purifies them into something clean and clear? Is that what Heaven is? A process of spiritual alchemy in which the body loses its earthly weight and is transformed into the flawless matter of soul?

  What were her words that night? That our bodies will be like glass, clear, pure, able to move faster than arrows, but soft and pliable enough to merge into and through one another. And that when we open our mouths, the sound will be that of a thousand lutes and we will sing constantly at the beauty of it all. I hear her voice again, sweet, gentle in my ear. She must have learned her visions here, in a world of transparent strength.

  I imagine her under Tiziano’s brush, her bent figure uncurling, her eyes opening toward God. Mystic or witch. Healing or hammering. I feel a tension in my chest, as if my lungs will not let me take in enough air. What do I know of such things? I am a courtesan’s dwarf, and my business is accommodating men’s desires. If I’m truthful, I am no better than she. Yet she helped me. Forgave my anger, warmed me in my ice age, held me through the flame. And I do feel different. More different than I have for years. Without her I would have died, but instead I am aflame with life. So that I want to touch and hear and taste it all again.

  Oh, listen to you, Bucino! You’re like a lovesick donkey braying in a backyard, tethered to its own fear. From contempt and suspicion you are moved now to cloying adoration. The only alchemy you have gone through is one that thickens the blood and encourages bad poetry.

  The voice inside is fierce and snide at the same time. It is one of many that I have grown up with. When you are as ugly as I am, if you cannot find companions on the outside, then you must find some within or you will die of loneliness. But they must be as hard as they are sometimes soft, for everyone needs both to survive. That is why my lady and I have been such fine companions. We were, in our own ways, bred to be alone, to resist feeling rather than to fall into it. That was why when she fell to loving the puppy I gave her no quarter. Yet here I am mooning over a cripple.

  I stare at the back of her head. Then in my mind I turn her around so I can look at her again: the way her limbs do not connect properly as she walks, her smooth face with its milk eyes, the skin so pale it feels as if she has been drained of blood, serene and alarming in equal measures. What is her real name? Elena Crus…something? Crusichi? Yes, that is it. Elena Crusichi. Even the sound of it is interesting.

  I don’t need any voices to tell me what is happening. I know. Of course I know. I am growing to like her. A lot. Or maybe it is truer to say that I am removing the block in my mind that has for so long prevented it. How strange it is when you have known something always, yet at the same time have not known it at all. Like seeing someone every day of her life and yet choosing not to notice who she is.

  It is a stupid enough story when I think about it. Careless cruelty, to which you would think I would have become inured, even then. But I was young. Well, young in mind. My body was grown, as least as far as it ever would, and it was raging with its own new heat. My father was dead, and I was in the care of his brother in Florence, a notary, well enough known in his trade, though not good enough to be great or great enough to be humble. He took me in because Christian charity said he had to and because I had a better hand and quicker wit than any of his children and he could put me to work doing his copying. But he hated my deformity as a stain on the family, and I hated him back.

  I was fifteen when he brought her to the house. She was from Dalmatia, and he had got her from a friend’s house to work in the kitchen. She was very small, almost as small as I was, though so thin that I suspect her size was from lack of food rather than birth. But she was also ugly beyond belief. Something had happened to her mouth when she had been pulled out of the womb, and she had a harelip so fierce that it made her look as if she was always sneering, and when she breathed she sounded like a pig. She was instructed to bring me my food at lunchtimes to the study. So that we might become “acquainted.” She was angry. I could see that from the start, down deep behind her eyes, though the immediate rebellion, I suspect, had been beaten out of her. I think now she might have been quite smart. But I was not interested in finding out. Two weeks later he offered her to me as a betrothed, with the words “It will not be easy for you to find a wife with your body, Bucino, and you are growing now, and it seems unfair that you should not enjoy the fruits of love like anyone else.”

  The next week, I left his home and Florence for good. It was the making of me. For though it was hard at first, I found ways to live on the road. Over the next few years, I lost my sensitivity and my virginity. I honed my wits, learned how to pick purses and to juggle, and by the time I reached Rome, where the cruelty is more sophisticated and veiled, I was ready to use my body as my fortune rather than my fate. But the experience left me with a horror of deformity in others. Because I learned something that night when she and I sat at my uncle’s table like performing animals, celebrating our informal “betrothal”: that it is easier for people to laugh at two than to laugh at one. For when there are two, no one needs to confront you directly, look into your eyes, and read there either the humiliation he has caused you or the challenge that you offer back.

  I made a pact with myself that night that I would dissociate myself from others like me. Instead I would live with—and even off—the specialness of my deformity. For in that way I could not be ignored. So of course my lady, when she found me, was the answer to all my prayers. Not because her beauty made me more ugly, though of course it did, but because, in a strange way, it made me stand out as much as she. The world is full of people whom other people forget. But no one forgets my lady. And with the two of us together, they do not forget me either. If I cannot be perfect, then I will be the most perfectly imperfect. For that title I do not choose to compete.

  Yet over the years it has left me lonely. Which is why I sit in this church looking at a woman in whose company I might have found wit and intelligence and sustenance, but whom I have chosen to damn simply because she is too like me.

  We sit for a long time, heads down, each of us in our separate thoughts. I am so caught in mine that I miss the moment when she silently rises and leaves the pew, and for an instant I panic, thinking I have lost her. I reach the great doors after she has gone through them and move out into sunlight, fierce as a blow, so that it takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust and to see her making her way down a small side street.

  She is moving with a sense of purpose now. Even her walk is more fluid, as if she knows each step. As I am sure she does, for it turns out her destination is close enough. About a hundred yards from the church, there is the beginning of a workshop. A set of buildings with chimneys and warehouses, and to the back some small houses. As I turn the corner she has turned before me, I see her going inside one.

  I am lost now. What should I do? Go up and knock on the door and announce myself? “Hello. Is Elena Crusichi here? Yes? Good. You see, I have followed you all this way to tell you that a
ll these years I have misjudged you. And because I think we might have things in common and I want to get to know you better.”

  She will think the fever made me crazy. At this moment I might agree. It is hot out in the open, and both my head and my legs are dizzy with exhaustion. Barely a week ago I was dying. It is beginning to feel as if I am again. My stomach starts to cramp, and I find myself thinking of the pig on its spit in the campo and my saliva starts running. Of course. All I have had since early morning is two glasses of gut rot. What if my weakness is not infatuation but hunger? I shall decide nothing until I have eaten.

  I move back onto the streets. The main street—as much as such a thing exists—seems to run parallel to the wharf, and not far away I can see activity, a set of stalls and shops with people gathered. Somewhere someone is cooking something, and the smell draws me on. As I walk into a small half square, the effect is palpable. Dwarves, it would seem, do not visit Murano. A boy with a squashed face and eyes like raisins comes and stands in front of me gaping until I grin at him, and then he bursts into tears. No doubt about it: I should not speak to anyone until I have eaten. I pick an open shop where there are roasted meats and fresh bread, and the owner is too old and gum-eyed to see what a freak he is serving. As the first few mouthfuls hit my stomach, I wonder if I shouldn’t abandon the pursuit of women in favor of good food. I must be stuffing my face, because people are still looking. Once the worst of my hunger is sated, I start to exploit the attention. I have taken a handful of bread rolls for the meat, and now I flick two of them high into the air, catching them deftly. Then I take a few more and start them all spinning. Even the boy has stopped crying now and is openmouthed. I make faces as I juggle, and after a while I pretend to drop one, then catch it again. Three or four people gasp. I think back to Alberini and his party trick with the goblet. Now that I have a full stomach, I am in the mood for some fun. I will make a better impression on La Draga if I arrive feeling appreciated rather than ignored.