The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

I write every day to my love, but I know that these letters are not delivered since Fra Pietro is not here to put his stamp of approval on them. Kneeling on the cold stones of the Church of San Andrea, which we do, Cateruccia and I, four times each day, I do not feel Christ entering into me. I feel cold entering into me. And hunger. And disappointment. And disgust. (I do try to overcome my revulsion against Cateruccia but it retains its hold on me.)

  Food is delivered here for me every day — white bread and buttery cheese and figs. My family brings kosher food to the casa dei catecumeni to keep my Jewish soul free of the taint of the pig, should I change my mind about converting.

  Every day at dinner this banquet of Jewish delicacies is put at my place beside the watery soup. So far, I have resisted eating it. But with every day that passes, my resolution weakens. I know it is only a matter of time before I give in to the cravings of my belly.

  They have taken my Virgil away. Also my grammar books. In their stead, I find beside my bed a tattered printed version of The Imitation of Christ. I try to read it. The words of the saint make no sense to me. I make a note to ask Fra Pietro why he gave me this particular book. If I ever do see him.

  What holds me in this place? Why do I not run off? Quite simply, I have nowhere to go. I have bound myself over. I am a slave to Christ.

  Yet I am also, and always was, a creature of hope. And when, on an afternoon some two weeks after my incarceration began, Cateruccia informed me brusquely that I was wanted below, I took heart at once. My love had not forsaken me, after all.

  No reproaches, I promised myself. I would exhibit only my most engaging face to him. I would hide my disappointment and express only my joy to see him again. Full of resolve, I passed through the portal that led to the cloister and searched in the dusky light for the familiar broad shoulders and the raffish berretta.

  In the farthest corner my eyes discerned a shapeless form huddled against a pillar. Moving closer, I could see that it was not a single body but two. They were shrouded in dark cloaks and bent over as if they carried the world’s troubles on their shoulders. I could not make out the faces. But as I approached, they revealed themselves to be my father and his wife, Dorotea.

  “Papa!”

  He turned, arms outstretched. He wrapped himself around me like a swaddling blanket and I snuggled into his body, a child again. Then I caught sight of Dorotea, her eyes reproachful, her stance rigid, unbending; and the bile began to course through my body, black and bitter. I withdrew from my father’s embrace.

  “We tried to come before, Grazia.” Papa’s tone was conciliatory, even suppliant. “But the visit took some arranging. Do you receive your food regularly?”

  “I do, honored padre,” I replied, every bit as respectful — and every bit as distant — as Dorotea’s code of conduct demanded.

  Her attention went to Fingebat. “They allow you to keep that flea-bitten mongrel in the house?” she inquired, pointing contemptuously at the little creature at her feet.

  “Why yes, honored stepmother.” I bent to pick him up. “Jesus loved all living creatures great and small. He placed them under the special protection of Saint Francis.”

  “What about those pigs they go around slaughtering by the hundreds? And the deer and the fowl they kill for the sport of it? Whose protection are they under?” she snapped back.

  “Please, Dorotea . . . this is no way . . .” Papa placed his hand on her arm as if to restrain her nasty tongue, but he never was a match for her.

  “You must take care not to place yourself beyond redemption by eating the forbidden flesh of the pig and other such unclean stuff.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust. “If you set yourself against God’s commandments, it will go all the harder for you when you return to us.”

  “I will never return to you. Never.”

  “You say that now . . .” She sniffed. “They will tempt you with dainty morsels.” I smiled to myself at what Dorotea would make of the watery soup that constituted my tempting Christian diet.

  “It is also very important that you do not eat fish without scales such as the eels these Christians dote on.”

  The more she hectored me, the more I became convinced that Fra Pietro was correct in his condemnation of the Jewish obsession with things of the flesh. Could the woman talk of nothing but food?

  When she finally finished her peroration I got my chance to speak.

  “What news of my brothers?” I asked. “Are they well?”

  “As well as can be, considering the shame they feel —”

  “They are well, daughter,” Papa cut in. “But they miss you mightily. They ask every day when you will be home again.”

  “I miss them too,” I answered. “Possibly even more than they miss me. For they have each other . . .”

  “Why do you not come home with us now, daughter?” Papa reached out and took my hand in his. “Give your sad eyes the treat of the sight of those who love you so much.”

  Sadly I nodded my refusal.

  “Why not, child? What have we done to make you so bitter and so obdurate? How can we make amends?”

  Before I could even consider whether I might risk an honest reply, Dorotea made up my mind for me. “Do not lower yourself to beg her, honored husband. She is not worth it.”

  Those words concluded the interview. I quickly excused myself and left the cloister without even saying goodbye.

  If Dorotea’s intent had been to drive me farther into the arms of Christ, she could not have done a better job of it. The next morning, I fairly bounded out of bed in my effort to be first at the church, determined as never before to taste Christ’s blood when I was offered the wine and to feel His flesh between my teeth when I chewed the consecrated wafer. If belief was a requisite for baptism, I would believe. If it killed me, I would believe.

  Did this fit of faith come from the heart? Christ must have thought so. For not too long after my parents’ visit, another visitor came to me in the cloister. Not shrouded or bent over, this one. Oh no, this caller shone with the aura of Saint George himself, decked out as he was in gold spurs and chains. My knight had come to fetch me.

  But oh, I looked a fright. My newfound religiosity had led me to neglect my personal habits. I was dirty. My hair hung down greasy and lank. As for my garments, a coarse, black hooded cloak had become my second skin.

  To my astonishment, my drab and disheveled appearance seemed to inflame my lover’s ardor rather than to cool it.

  “Look at you. So thin. So pale. Oh, my love, what you have endured for my sake. You have deprived yourself of all comfort, all adornment . . . Oh, my angel . . .”

  Locked in my lord’s arms, clutched, cosseted, kissed, and caressed, I fell back into the fleshly world without a backward glance. My only reverent thought — if you can call it that — was that all my sacrifices had been well worth this moment.

  The visit was short. He had ridden more than twenty leagues at full gallop from the Gonzaga country place at Marmirolo and must return before sunset on pain of his kinswoman’s extreme displeasure, “. . . for I am her favorite partner at scartino excepting only her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Urbino, who is not with us this season,” he explained.

  Still keeping a firm hold on my waist, he began quickly to tell me all that had transpired in his world since we parted.

  “Since the court moved to Marmirolo I am expected to ride out with Marchese Francesco every morning . . . a pleasant duty, I must admit. Do you hunt, my love?”

  I confessed that I had never had the opportunity.

  “But you do ride, do you not? Something other than elephants?”

  “It is my greatest pleasure, after Virgil,” I answered, happy not to disappoint him.

  “After Virgil, of course,” he repeated with one of those sly smiles of his. “I keep forgetting that in addition to your unbridled spirit and your hot passions you
are also quite the lady scholar.”

  “Would you prefer me light-minded and bird-witted?” I inquired, with just a touch of the tartness I always felt when he teased me for my bookish preoccupations.

  “Soothe those ruffled feathers, lady. I bring good tidings. Madonna Isabella has invited you to Marmirolo.”

  “For a disputa?” I asked anxiously.

  “No. That is forgotten, as I assured you it would be. Now we are all agog for country pursuits — music, games, dancing, and the hunt.”

  “Oh dear. The hunt.”

  “Never fear, my love, you are not invited to that. To be offered a place close to the Marchese’s dogs is the highest honor of all at the Gonzaga court. No, this is merely a fete. But Madonna Isabella herself issued the invitation and that counts for something. I will come for you at dawn on Saturday. Be ready.”

  But I could not be ready. Readiness was not possible. Tearfully, I told him that my attendance was out of the question.

  “You refuse the Marchesana’s invitation?”

  “Oh sir, I know that Jews do not say no to princes. My father taught me that. But I cannot go to this party. You see, I have nothing to wear. They have taken away my clothes.”

  “Then they must bring them back.”

  “But my hair . . . there is no one to wash my head.”

  “The slave girl will do it.”

  “Oh no. I dare not ask Fra Pietro.”

  “Perhaps you do not dare, my love, but I do. Pta Pietro sits next to me every day at dinner in the country. It is his good report that has put you back in Madonna Isabella’s favor. He tells us you are his most compliant conversa.”

  “He does?”

  “Yes, my little scholar. You are not unobserved here. Or uncared for. Did you think you were?”

  I hung my head. In truth I had thought just that.

  “Now then, do we have any other problems to solve? For I must be off.”

  “So soon?”

  “You know that my cousin the Marchese is a demanding taskmaster,” he answered.

  “Do you not sometimes wish to be free of this servitude?” I asked. “To be your own man rather than his?”

  “Few of us are vouchsafed such liberty, my love,” he answered. “Even my cousin is not his ‘own man,’ as you put it. He is the hired captain of the Venetians and that makes him their creature much as I am his. They pay his living just as he pays mine. Remember your Plato. No man is free. Is that not what the old Greek pederast taught?”

  “If the revered sage ever said such a thing, I am not aware of it,” I snapped back.

  “‘Destiny waiteth alike for them that men call free and them by others mastered,’” he quoted with perfect accuracy, putting my nose completely out of joint. Then he swooped me up in his arms and pressed me to him tight enough to squeeze all the starch out of me. Not content with mastering me in that way, he then whirled me around the little courtyard until my head swam with vertigo and, for a last tease, took a nip out of my ear that made me squeal with pain. In revenge, I had at his chin with the hard right fist I had cultivated wrestling with my brother. I wager that old cloister had never witnessed such merriment or such tumult. Oh, we were hellions, both of us, ready to jettison prudence at a moment’s notice and abandon ourselves to our fancies and passions.

  The next day a small cassone appeared beside my bed. When I looked inside, there lay my chemise freshly laundered and smelling deliciously of comfrey. Cateruccia had not forgotten the housewifely lessons she learned in my mother’s house.

  On Friday morning, Cateruccia lumbered up the stairs hauling a bucket of water on her head and carrying a flacon of liquid in the pocket of her apron.

  “From the illustrissima Marchesana Isabella,” she mumbled when she handed the bottle to me. “A hairwash.”

  The stuff inside the bottle, I discovered when I pulled out the cork and sniffed it, smelled unmistakably of chamomile; but there were other scents lingering around the edges of the herb that I could not so readily identify. Vinegar? Lettuce? The chemist who mixed the potion had disguised his formula well. But however confusing the chemistry, the message in the bottle was quite clear. For one woman to share her beauty potions with another could only be interpreted as a gesture of friendship.

  The night before the fete, I made my first voluntary prayer to the Lord Jesus Christ.

  “Sweet Jesus,” I prayed, “let me be a success tomorrow at Marmirolo and find favor in Madonna Isabella’s sight as I have in Yours. Please let my hair fall into soft curls and not stick up in spikes. And please make me graceful in the dance and witty in the talk. Amen.”

  20

  All my life I had heard talk of the pleasures of country living and of hunting lodges and various delizie where princes could shed the formality of court life and “be themselves,” as the saying goes. What I quickly learned at Marmirolo was that grand people are always grand, no matter what the surroundings.

  Even at Marmirolo the Marchese and his Marchesana seated themselves on a dais above everyone else. The ladies were just as corseted and as bejeweled as ever. There were as many courses at table, servants in attendance, and perfumed courtiers as in town. Everyone vied to sit closest to the Marchese, who, in the country as in town, clearly preferred the company of the pack of dogs with whom he carried on a continuous, barking sort of conversation and was permitted to be as rude and boorish as he chose, whereas for the rest of us, a rigid protocol reigned over all activities, even the games.

  No sooner had we dismounted than we were ushered into the sala grande, where Messer Equicola, Madonna Isabella’s Master of Revels, was in the process of expounding every detail of the rules of games to the players. We came in as he was winding down, to everyone’s evident relief.

  “Let me once again remind the gathering that a game suitable for noble company is neither cards nor dice nor athletics. It is discourse based upon some ingenious proposition that calls upon the quick exercise of wit and erudition.” I repeated these words to myself in an effort to fix them in my mind.

  “Remember,” he went on, “no one can refuse to take part in the game if he is present and invited to do so. Nor should anyone play in a careless manner. Show interest in the game. Above all, everything that is said or done should tend toward joy and laughter and pleasure — but no buffoonery, mind.”

  “Hear that,” the Marchese shouted over to Matello the dwarf, who stood in a corner sulking as he always did when he was not the center of attention. “We’ll have none of your crude farting today.”

  Whereupon Matello let out a most odoriferous explosion of gas in a series of high toots. Not to be outdone, his companion, Crazy Catherine, rushed into the center of the floor and spewed out a river of pee to everyone’s amusement save that of Messer Equicola, upstaged as he always was by the little people.

  But he managed to get back the attention of the gathering by tapping several of them lightly on their heads with his mestola. That ladle signifies the office of Master of Revels, and Equicola wielded it majestically.

  “Remember now, if a player has to do a thing that consists of acts, gestures, or signs, he should strive to do it gracefully — no jerking or twitching even in the Game of the Deformed.” What on earth was that game? I wondered. “And be careful not to repeat the same proverb or device, even if it is apropos. For repetition makes tedium.”

  To this statement the Marchese interposed a loud grunt of assent which Equicola acknowledged with a graceful bow.

  “Most important” — he cleared his throat to emphasize the importance of what he was about to tell us — “if you are questioned on the subject of love, your replies should show a certain loftiness. In your answers, be jealous of the honor of woman and admiring of her virtue and greatness. Couch your replies rather in the style of Petrarch than in the styles of Ovid or Catullus. Now, let us begin.”

  “Sooner
begun, sooner ended,” the Marchese mumbled.

  The game that Equicola had selected was, he declared, brand-new and never before played in the whole of Italy. He called it the Game of Ships and swore he had made it up himself. In this game a lady is caught in a storm with two suitors chosen from among the company by the Master of Revels. She is forced to throw one of them overboard in order to save the vessel. When questioned by the Master, the player must give her reasons for the choice.

  That was as far as we got. With a growl that came from somewhere deep in his bowels, Marchese Francesco heaved himself forward in his chair and ordered a change in the program. “This Game of Ships is too long to play before we eat,” he announced. “I am hungry now. The game be damned. It’s time to sup.” And every toady there cheered him.

  During the fish course, Lord Pirro brought over to meet me two ladies of the court, who seemed vastly unimpressed by the honor. Then, between the fish and the pie Madonna Isabella called out my name and bade me sit at her side for a while, a signal honor. My mastery of the classics had captured her interest, she said. Did I know Greek as well as Latin? And what about Hebrew?

  At that moment I thanked God for those long afternoons at Papa’s side in the Bologna banco, for I could reply in all candor that I did indeed know a little Greek and more than a little Hebrew. No knowledge is ever wasted.

  Without doubt I had caught the light of the princess’s eye. For a few moments, I even became the repository of her confidence. She confessed to me with disarming candor how bitterly she regretted being forced to abandon her own studies in the crush of court business. She had plans to commission certain works of scholarship, she told me, in emulation of her adored papa (yes, she used that familiar term in my presence that day!). Perhaps I might be the one to help her begin this enterprise, she suggested. She did not say yes or no, only maybe.

  Returning to my chair, I passed the two chilly ladies-in-waiting, who now seemed eager to engage me in conversation. Amazing what a touch of preferment can do to enhance one’s charms.