The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  That smile — so rare with Papa those days — captured far more of my attention than Judah’s clever talk of affairs. And I was only half listening when he went on to predict that from this league would arise a wave of violence that was sure to wash over all of Italy. What was Italy to me compared with Papa’s illness?

  “Now, wife . . .” Judah turned to me when we had taken our leave of my father. “Will you do me the honor to walk out with me into the town? I have need of your company for I am bound on a delicate diplomatic errand at the Reggio.”

  What of Papa? I wanted to know.

  “We will speak of that in good time, I promise you,” he answered. “But for now, do me a good turn and get out that beautiful silk gamorra that you wheedled out of me for your birth gift. And all your jewels. I do not wish the doctor’s wife to take second place to Lady Chiara.”

  “Lady Chiara? Who is she?”

  “Sister-in-law to Madonna Isabella. Sister to the Marchese Francesco. Married to the French king’s nephew on the Bourbon side. His name is Gilbert de Montpensier.”

  “But what business do you have with —” Before I could finish, he placed his fingers gently over my mouth to cut off my question. “If you accept my proposal to walk out with me I will tell you all on the way to the Reggio.”

  He did not need my company on his errand. In all likelihood he could have managed the interview better alone. But he knew the news in store for me, had known it, he told me much later, after one look into Papa’s eyes. And he had concocted his need for my company to prop up my spirits before he laid the burden on me.

  As we stepped out of the Casa dei Rossi into the sunlit day he took a deep lungful of air, held it, expelled it, and then demanded that I do the same. “Let us enjoy to the full this glorious day that God has given us. He would fault us if we were to tarnish His golden light with dark thoughts of what tomorrow might bring,” he instructed me.

  If Rabbi Abramo had heard such pagan sentiments attributed to his God, he would have damned the speaker as a heretic there and then. But Judah’s God was a humanist’s God for whom all things move from goodness to goodness and Who commands us to rejoice in the present. Taking my cue from Judah, I set about to exercise my lungs in the fine air and to satisfy my curiosity as to his business with Chiara Gonzaga, wife to Gilbert, Duke of Montpensier, nephew of the King of France. It was not like Judah to take up intimacy with either foreigners or Christians. With a certain notable exception, I reminded myself. Could it be that this Montpensier had become the successor to Pico della Mirandola?

  His next remark disabused me of my suspicions. “We have found common cause, the Frenchman and I,” he explained as we walked. “Both of us are far from home, both lonely, both exiled by the whim of the King. And both our wives have taken refuge in Mantova. Besides, he is quite civilized for a Frenchman. Eats with a fork just as we do. And worries about his little son and what will become of the boy should he be left fatherless with only an Italian mother and his negligent uncle, the King, to protect him. Part of my charge is to bring the little fellow a gift from his papa’s own hands.”

  Part of his charge? “And the rest?” I asked.

  But by then we had reached the Reggio and I had to rest content with a muttered “Later” for my answer.

  The Duchess of Montpensier did not look Italian. Her years in France had transformed her in a way difficult to pin down, yet quite unmistakable. What had she gained there? A languidness of gesture, a rarefied elegance, a contemptuously arrogant expression that Italian women — including princesses — do not cultivate. What had she lost? Vitality. Her eyes had a faraway look. Even as she listened she appeared not to hear what was said to her. Either she was stupid or the lassitude of the French courtly style had weakened her strong Gonzaga blood.

  “Maestro Leone, how kind of you to come,” she trilled in her French-accented Italian.

  “My pleasure, ma’am.” Judah bowed low. I have always been surprised at how well he can play the courtier when he must. “I bring regards from your illustrious husband and gifts from his own hand.” Reaching under his cloak, he drew out a small cloth bag and a rather larger wooden cask. “The jewel is for you, madonna. The cassone is for your honorable son Charles.”

  She clapped her hands together, as delighted as a girl.

  “Do let me see the jewel.”

  Silence as she opened the bag and spilled out of it a coral bead framed in diamonds. “How beautiful!” she exclaimed, and held it up to her bosom at the place where it might properly hang from a chain. “Is it not beautiful, is it not a masterwork?”

  “The Neapolitans are renowned for their cameo carvings,” Judah agreed. “Come and look, Grazia.” He beckoned me.

  “Oh yes, do,” the Duchess added agreeably, although until that moment she had made no sign to acknowledge my presence.

  “May I present my wife, ma’am.”

  I made the obligatory low curtsy.

  “Have you ever seen anything more exquisite?” she asked me. Then, without waiting for a reply, she bubbled on: “My sister-in-law, Madonna Isabella, will envy me this treasure. She does love jewels. Now then . . .” The lady looked up briefly from her perusal of her treasure. “Will there be anything else?”

  “About the gift for your son Charles, ma’am . . .” Judah handed her the cassone. “They are toy soldiers and the Duke most particularly asked me to have his son receive them in my presence. There are two sets in this box — one molded in metal and one carved in wood by a most skilled Neapolitan master. His father wishes him to choose.”

  “I believe he is in his room with his tutor, ma’am.” The maid spoke up. “If you recall, he was suffering from toothache . . .”

  “Oh yes. Toothache. Well, see if he is well enough to join us, Mathilde.” Then, turning to Judah: “I beg you, Maestro Leone, do not report this toothache to the Duke. My honorable husband takes every sniffle of that child as seriously as a death rattle. Believe me, the boy is perfectly sound.”

  “I do believe you, ma’am. And of course I will refrain from referring to this toothache if you wish it.”

  “Oh, you are everything they say of you, Maestro Leone — kind, discreet, and skillful. We must all be grateful for the service you rendered to our cousin the King. We are told that you cured him of the pox when all other efforts availed nothing.”

  Judah lowered his head modestly. “I was honored to be of service, madonna.”

  Now the little boy Charles was brought in, a handsome enough child with a thin intelligent face and a brooding air.

  “This is Maestro Leone Ebreo and his lady, Charles.” His mother presented us. “He has brought you something from your father.”

  “Papa? You have seen my papa?” The child’s eyes lit up.

  “I see your honored parent every day, sire,” Judah replied. “And he has commissioned me to present you with the contents of this box. May I?”

  Judah reached for the little cask which the boy’s mother had not even troubled herself to look into. “Voilà!” He pushed a concealed button on the underside of the box and the top sprang open, a trick which brought a most delicious sparkle into the boy’s eyes and a bored yawn to his mother. No doubt about it, the woman had spent too long in France.

  “May I take them out?” the boy asked eagerly, looking from Judah to his mother and back as if uncertain where the authority lay.

  “Your honorable father has some choice in mind for you. The gentleman will explain it.” The Duchess waved her hand vaguely. “Now I fear you must excuse me. Stay with him, Mathilde, and take him back to his tutor when this matter is settled.” And out she floated, back to whatever far-off country she inhabited in her mind.

  Before long, Judah and little Charles Bourbon had all the soldiers out of the box and were engaged in a life-and-death struggle — metal against wood — on the floor. Poor little boy, I thought to mysel
f. Locked up here with this vapid mother and cut off from the father he obviously adores.

  The afternoon at the Reggio ended oddly and in retrospect very interestingly. Little Charles begged Judah to stay on and on — how that boy longed for his father. But we did have to go. And at the end of the visit Judah told the boy he must make his choice between the wooden and the lead soldiers. Until then, he had behaved quite normally for a five-year-old boy. But faced with the necessity to make a choice, he became a different child.

  “But I love them both, maestro. I cannot choose. I cannot,” he cried out with real anguish.

  “Perhaps if you consider what you like about each set . . .” Judah suggested sympathetically.

  “No, I cannot. I must have both.” The boy was working himself into a most unhealthy state.

  “But the Duke most particularly wished you to have a choice.”

  “No.” The child was crying now and holding his head. “If I cannot have both I shall have none.”

  “Is it that you love them both so much?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  The child leaned forward toward me and in a voice that was almost a whisper confided, “I like the wooden ones, madonna. But I am afraid that my honorable father would have me choose the metal ones. Because they are so strong, you see. And I do not want to make the wrong choice and displease him.”

  I was left wondering, What happens to a child so fearful of losing his parent’s approval that he cannot summon the will to choose one toy over another? The answer is he grows up to be Constable Bourbon, who as a grown man with a choice to make could not decide whether to obey his King, to defy him, or to betray him.

  I was astonished when, as we made our way out of the Reggio, Judah, who abhors tittle-tattle, turned to me and asked, “Did you notice anything peculiar about that interview, Grazia?”

  “Aside from the fact that the woman seems to suffer from some kind of sleepwalking disease, you mean?”

  He smiled. “Perhaps that accounts for it.”

  “Accounts for what?”

  “She never asked a word about her husband,” he replied.

  “Exactly!”

  “You noticed it too.”

  I nodded. “Even if she hated him, she would want to know . . .”

  “And I was not certain as to how I would answer the woman.”

  “He is ill, this Montpensier?”

  “Yes, he is,” Judah answered. “I am treating him. With mercury. Very dangerous. It may not work.”

  “He has the love disease,” I guessed.

  “He and two thousand other Frenchmen.”

  “And how does one get this disease, Judah?”

  He hesitated a moment. “I will be delicate, Grazia. It takes more than kissing.”

  So that was the love disease. I ought to have guessed from the name. No wonder the Neapolitans called it the French boils. Fuck a whore, get infected, blame it on the French. That was the Italian bravo’s style.

  Now I understood Judah’s predicament. How do you tell a wife that her husband is ailing without disclosing that the disease was caught from another woman? Fortunately the wife hadn’t cared enough to ask. A strange woman, Chiara Gonzaga, Duchess of Montpensier.

  Her husband did die in Napoli as Judah feared he might, and his little son was immediately shipped off to France with his tutor. From what I can piece together of his story, he never saw his mother again. She lived out her days in Mantova an embittered, poor, neglected widow.

  A sad little story, is it not? But before you heave too deep a sigh for the widow and her son, let me remind you that this fatherless French boy has grown up to be the same Constable Bourbon who betrayed his King and country to put himself at the service of France’s great enemy, Emperor Charles V; that he is also the same Constable Bourbon who leads the barbaric Imperials toward Roma as I write, the same Constable Bourbon who menaces this city — and those of us in it — as no force has done since the Huns poured over the Alps to sack Roma in the year 410. In great measure, my son, we sit shivering here in this palazzo, fearing for our very lives, because of that little boy grown up.

  Our visit to the Reggio was a respite for my fretful soul, but only that. The same evening, Judah undertook a full examination of my father, purely to confirm what the first look had already told him. “It is a bad tumor, Grazia,” he explained to me when we were alone in our chamber. “One of those that duplicates itself within months. That old fool Portaleone was right for once. A surgeon is of no use here. Cut this growth out and two more will appear to take its place.”

  “Are you telling me there is no hope?” I asked.

  “You know that is not my judgment to make. Only God decides who lives and who dies.”

  “I hate God,” I muttered.

  “Grazia!”

  “He is so unjust. So arbitrary! At least Christ has some compassion.”

  “So they say,” he answered mildly. “But I have yet to see the proof of it. Christians die as suddenly and as cruelly as we do. Like us, they are stricken by plague. Their babies are born dead, their children maimed. I do not see any particular compassion being lavished on Christians. Except perhaps for rich Christians. There I see a difference. Observation has taught me that the poor of all religions suffer more grievously in this life than the rich. If you wish to eat injustice, chew on that for a time.”

  I had irritated him with my blasphemy. Worse, I had blamed him for God’s will after he had traveled over sea and land to come to my father’s aid.

  “Please forgive me, honorable husband,” I asked humbly. “Perhaps what we need is a surgeon to cut out my sharp tongue.”

  “No surgeons,” he answered, his anger gone. “This will be a hard time for you, Grazia. To see someone you love wasting away is one of life’s great trials. But you have the strength for it. And the love your father needs. Now, may I give you some advice?”

  “Please . . .”

  “Come close to me.” He beckoned me to move toward him in the bed and placed his arm around my shoulders. “If Daniele’s case follows the usual course, he will weaken and lose weight. These tumors seem to gobble up all the nourishment we feed the patient and leave none for the rest of the body. I have spoken frankly to your father. He does not fear death. He has given himself over to the disease. He is prepared to die. And you must help him do it easily. Are you up to the task?” I nodded, mute.

  “Good. Prepare yourself then. Soon he will begin to refuse food. Do not force him to eat. As the end approaches he will spend most of the hours in a doze.”

  “And when will that be, Judah?” Whose voice was this, calmly requesting a deathbed schedule?

  “No man can predict the moment of death,” he answered. “I would judge a few months. Mind you, I have been wrong before.”

  A few months. I could bear that, I thought.

  “I will leave you a vial of powerful medicine. Should he be in pain a drop or two on the tongue will ease it. Three may kill him. It is that powerful. Do you understand?”

  I nodded my understanding.

  “I would stay and see you through this if I could,” he went on. “Believe me, I do not willingly burden you with this responsibility. But my patron the King of France demands that I return to Napoli. I believe he is planning to battle his way back to France. And I hear the Venetians have hired Francesco Gonzaga to cut him down en route.”

  “We hear the same. These wars never end?” I asked, half to myself.

  “Not until the money runs out,” he replied cheerfully. “Bravery and honor have their place. But it takes cash to field an army. And even more cash to incite them to fight bravely.” Charles VIII had turned Judah into a cynic.

  Next morning the mules were at our door at matins, and before I knew it, Judah had paid one last visit to Papa, donned his traveling cloak
, and was at the portal ready to mount.

  There we stood alone in the misty morning, just the two of us — and the unspoken matter that lay between us.

  “When this is over . . .” Judah began.

  “Yes?” I encouraged him.

  “There will be time enough to talk. In Firenze. When we are alone.”

  “We are alone now,” I reminded him.

  “But time is short. And the shadow of death hangs over us.”

  Exactly the time, I thought, to speak of the future and of happiness. However, the habit of compliance was etched deep in me, so I did not insist. And so the moment passed.

  FROM DANILO’S ARCHIVE

  TO MARCHESA ISABELLA D’ESTE DA GONZAGA AT MANTOVA

  WRITTEN ON THE 10TH OF MAY, 1495.

  Honored Wife and Consort:

  We have news that the French king is about to retire from Napoli and to make for the Alps and thence back to France. Our plan is to head him off at the Taro River. For this we will need the reinforcement of the Swiss stradiots. As always, they are insisting on payment in advance. Here is the problem I face: Once again, the Venetian signoria procrastinates with its payments and I am left to equip my cohort out of my own treasury. I need seven thousand ducats at once. Do anything you must to raise the money. If necessary place your jewels in pawn with the Jews. You will have them back in due time. The Venetians always pay their debts eventually. But I need ducats now. These stradiots do not unsheathe a weapon until they see the color of money. Be quick.