The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  Madama’s generosity had given me a shred of hope to cling to. But that last shred was severed when just two days later we had word from Dorotea that her beloved son, Asher, had died after an application of the strappado. As the Greek physician had predicted, my cousin’s heart gave out from the shock of the tremendous blow. His death united all the surviving members of our family under my roof (except Jehiel who, as Ricca reminded us daily, might as well be dead).

  Dorotea brought her son’s body by river from Ferrara to Mantova, and together she and Ricca and Penina and Gershom and Judah and I buried him. Then we settled down for the mandated thirty days to mourn.

  I never knew how much I had depended on my cousin or how much I loved him until he was gone. The one person who would always come when I called, who would always love me no matter what, was gone, never to come back. I feel his loss to this day.

  Prayers were said for him for thirty days. But on many of those days we were compelled to forgo the memorial prayer service because we could not gather up the ten men needed to form a minyan. Mind you, our Jewish neighbors had much to lose by public demonstration of friendliness toward us: cancellation of their Ferrarese condotta; seizure of their persons. Still these considerations did not stop Davide Finzi from joining in our prayers. He was always present both morning and evening, along with his sons and his two grandsons. Nor did the Norsa family desert us for fear of Alfonso d’Este’s wrath. But in the middle of the month, they were off on their annual journey to the Champagne Fair, and after that, my beloved Asher was mourned or not depending on whatever stray Jewish travelers the barges washed up on the shores of the Lago Superiore who could chant “Yisgadal v’yiskadash” with my brother, my husband, and our few loyal friends.

  One of the Mantovans who did make haste to convey condolences was Madonna Isabella. Granted, unlike our Jewish neighbors, she stood in no danger from her brother Alfonso for expressing sympathy with us. On the other hand, she certainly had nothing to gain by her kindness. For the second time in as many weeks I was touched by her compassion and resolved to call upon her at the Reggio as soon as our mourning period ended. I felt certain she had honored her promise to petition her brother on Asher’s behalf. And, in the event, I was proven right. For Dorotea later informed us that Marchesana Isabella’s petition arrived in Ferrara on the very day that Asher expired in the arms of the torturer.

  If ever you wish to put a truly vicious curse on anyone, wish him to be locked up in a small house for a year with your Aunt Ricca. That I did not mangle her to death during her daily lamentations for herself is a credit to my forbearance. But eventually I began seriously to question my own ability to continue living in such proximity to her. Yet I had promised Jehiel to care for her.

  I might simply have left the house to her and fled. Judah had been offered a fine appointment — as body physician to Count Giovanni Sassatello, General of the Republic of Venezia — which included as is customary a house, a mule, an allowance of oil, fish, and grain, and an astronomic stipend of twenty-five ducats a month.

  After a year with Ricca and her brats, the offer to move to Venezia appeared to me as a dispensation from the Almighty Himself. But there were Gershom and Penina to consider. Could I in conscience inflict the burden of Ricca’s custody on them?

  I never thought to consult Gershom on the matter. To me he was still a boy even though he already had served an arduous apprenticeship as a fledgling banker and had emerged with glowing testimonials. Here I digress briefly to warn you against myself, my son. No matter how old or how wise you grow, I fear I will always consider you in some sense a boy. And I strongly advise you to stake your claims as a man whenever the opportunity arises and to pursue them vigorously in spite of my opposition. It is a task that children born of strong-willed parents inherit.

  Your Uncle Gershom needed no such instruction. Not only did he have the nerve to oppose me, he was born with a banker’s sense of timing. During the preliminary skirmishes between me and Ricca he stood by, allowing the boil to grow and fester until the day it burst. When that happened, he stepped in as healer.

  Ricca and I had long detested each other. She felt I had cheated her of her birthright. I resented her disloyalty to my brother. But when we joined battle in the sewing room it was not over such substantial issues but over a small piece of lace I had been saving to trim a bonnet for Penina’s little Sarabella.

  One day, without a by-your-leave, she picked it up and began to trim her cap with it. As I sat watching her stitch, it was as if her needle plunged into me each time she ran it through my lace. The first day she wore it, the sight of that finely worked filigree entwined in her coarse black plait set me on fire. I went for her like a wild thing. She lunged for my face with her nails. I grabbed her hand and bent the fingers back until they cracked.

  Alerted by our shrieks, Gershom rushed downstairs from the courtyard, convinced, he later told me, that someone was dying in the sewing room. What he saw was two grown women rolling around on the tiles locked in furious combat, with hair and blood flying. He had to enlist the help of our manservant to pry us apart but he finally did put a stop to the joust. Ricca stalked off muttering curses and I was left to the pitiless judgment of my little brother.

  “Oh, Grazia.” He could barely contain his amusement. “I am astonished at you. Where is my lady sister, the devotee of the ancients? What has become of the golden mean and ‘Above all, no zeal’?”

  “Even I can be driven beyond endurance,” I replied crossly.

  “So I see.” He came closer to inspect the river of blood that Ricca had dug into my cheek. “This wound must be attended to. Shall I call Judah?”

  If there was anyone I did not wish to see me in this sorry state, it was Judah. So I persuaded Gershom to fetch a certain unguent from my beauty box to cleanse the wound of infection. “She is as likely to be rabid as any other mad bitch,” I explained, my vengeful spirit still at the boil.

  Until then I had tended to his blackened eyes, bruised limbs, and other childish hurts and had never missed the opportunity to preach to him the virtues of restraint and self-control. Now the roles were reversed. He not only spread the healing unguent on my burning cheek, he also added to the treatment a dollop of wise counsel.

  “I have heard the expression that no kitchen is big enough to accommodate two women, but for you and Ricca a refectory would not suffice. You two cannot live under the same roof, Grazia. You will end up killing each other.”

  “What’s to be done, then?” I asked.

  “Obviously one of you must yield place to the other,” he answered.

  “If it were that simple I would happily leave this house to her and Penina. And you, of course, brother,” I replied. “But who then will take care of you?”

  “Take care of me?”

  “You and the women and children,” I replied, still quite unconscious of the implied insult to his manhood.

  “Might I suggest to you, sister, that I no longer need taking care of, in your sense? And that I might even be capable of taking care of the others?”

  I admitted that the thought had never entered my mind.

  “Are you ready to hand over the reins, Grazia? Think before you answer. For if you are, I am willing to take them up and lead this ragtag little dei Rossi force from now on.”

  “Can it really be that simple?” I asked.

  “For me it is,” he answered gravely. “I have only one condition to make, Grazia.”

  “And that is?”

  “I refuse absolutely and categorically to marry either of those women.”

  Marry? It was becoming clear that he had a completely different picture of himself than I did. “Do you have your own bride picked out, then?” I asked, half teasing but half serious.

  He blushed and denied it. But something in the denial, some trace of braggadocio, hinted that this fledgling had already made his initial voyage
into Venus’s orbit. Maybe more than once.

  That day he and I struck our bargain. From now on he would be head of the family. I would leave the house and its inhabitants under his protection and follow my husband to Venezia.

  Once decided, our move to the Veneto was accomplished with astounding ease and quickness. To Ricca it must have seemed as if God had reached down from heaven to pluck out a thorn in her side — namely, me. To Gershom my departure spelled a change in his status from boy to man. Even to Penina, who I thought would regret my departure most, the new arrangement promised certain advantages.

  “This time things will be different between me and Ricca, Grazia,” she told me. “I am finished playing the mat under her feet. My daughter demands more of me. If not for myself, I must contest Ricca for little Sarabella’s rights. And I will.”

  The only one who seemed to regret my going was, of all people, Dorotea. She actually wept when she heard the news of our imminent departure.

  Mindful of her service to me, I paid my final visit to thank Madonna Isabella. I had in addition a second purpose: to offer her a place in my humble pantheon of heroines, should she be gracious enough to accept.

  “And when will I see what you have made of me with your wicked pen, Madonna Ecritus?” she asked playfully. But I detected an urgent undercurrent beneath the casual question. We all wish to know in advance what will be said of us by our historians — and to make editorial revisions if we are allowed. But I was not about to fall into that trap.

  “One of the great disadvantages in undertaking biographies of living people,” I explained to her (as if she did not already understand this), “is that they may claim the right to censor what one writes. Dead people are too moribund to do much else but turn over in their graves.”

  She laughed thinly at the jest.

  “In fact,” I went on, “if I were not able to enjoy as much freedom in writing of the quick as I can when writing of the dead, I would give up on the living entirely.”

  “I see.” She rubbed her little finger up and down against the side of her nose several times, a habit she has when she is making calculations. “Well . . .” The rubbing stopped and a new decisive tone took over. “In that case I wish you luck in your ventures and look forward to seeing the completed manuscript before we are both too old and weak-eyed to read it.”

  43

  Permit me to introduce to you Messer Aldus Manutius: scholar, printer, self-appointed guardian of textual integrity, founder of the celebrated Aldine Press of Venezia. Like many men of prodigious accomplishment, Ser Aldo was consumed by a single overwhelming passion: to publish on his new printing machine all the great works of the Golden Age, not only Homer, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero but also lesser-known writers whose manuscripts had lain moldering in the libraries of ancient abbeys during the Dark Ages. His passion to find and publish these lost texts was exceeded only by his will to publish them in faultlessly authentic translations.

  This obsession led him to establish his press in Venezia where he hoped to find a bottomless pool of translators, grammarians, and copy readers. But he quickly learned that although there was such a pool, it was hardly bottomless. Thus he was forced to spend whatever time he could spare from the press trolling the canals for Greek scholars to aid him in his noble endeavor.

  From the moment we arrived in Venezia, Judah became Ser Aldo’s quarry. Through his humanist friends the printer approached Judah for a new translation of Plutarch’s Moralia. Judah declined the commission, explaining that his duties to his new patron, the General, prohibited such a vast expenditure of time.

  Undaunted, Ser Aldo lowered his sights. He had heard of Judah’s translation of Hippocrates’ veterinary treatise. Might not that translation be acquired by the Aldine Press? Judah doubted Francesco Gonzaga would be willing to share the secrets of that arcane work with other breeders. The truth was that Judah wanted no commerce with printed books, which he viewed as a means of duplicating the most stupid ideas in a moment and spreading trash throughout the world, to use his own words.

  What Ser Aldo finally had to settle for was Judah’s membership in the Neakdemia, that group of earnest patricians who met regularly at the Aldine Press to converse in the ancient tongues. One among them was Pietro Bembo, then a rising star in the humanist firmament. It was to Bembo that Judah mentioned his learned wife, Grazia, and her immaculate hand.

  Now this Bembo was neither better nor worse than others of his stripe — that is to say, haughty, snobbish, and prejudiced against Jews. Yet at the sound of the word “Greek,” his bigotry evaporated and he became as eager for information of me as a besotted suitor.

  “Does this wife of yours write Greek as well as Latin?” he asked Judah.

  “Impeccably,” Judah replied proudly. “I taught her myself.”

  “Then she is the one we need for Ser Aldo’s edition of the poems of Sappho. A woman’s delicate touch would not go amiss in that maze of ambiguities. Besides, you will be there to assist the work, for you need only walk across your bedchamber to correct your scribe.”

  This suggestion put Judah into a quandary. To mix the roles of provost and husband, he felt, was to court disaster in both endeavors. “If my honorable wife wishes to take on the task, I have no objection,” he told Bembo. “But you must find her another editor. When it comes to scholarship, Madonna Grazia is, so to say, her own man.

  Looking back, I realize what a generous gesture Judah made that day. A different husband would have kept his wife bent over her script as if over a spinning wheel and then taken all the credit for the product of her labors . . . and the payment as well. By forcing me to meet Ser Aldo on my own, Judah laid the basis for any reputation which I now enjoy as a scholar. I see that now. And I praise him for his generosity of spirit and purse. But at the time, my insight was clouded by my timidity. I had no wish to be my own man.” I was flattered by Judah’s confidence in me of course. But I was also intimidated by the stern air of pedantry that hung over the Aldine circle. I would be honored to do the work, I told Judah, but I was truly terrified by the prospect of coming face-to-face with the formidable Aldus.

  “Aldo is not the bear people take him for,” he assured me. “He is a man with a mission. A man on fire. And, occasionally, those who approach him closely may get a bit singed. But never burned, Grazia.”

  “Scorched is more like it, from what I have heard,” I replied. “They say that this Aldus exhibits a terribilita of temper equal to that of Michelangelo Buonarroti.”

  “There is only one way for you to find out,” he answered. “Meet with the man. See for yourself. Then make an independent judgment. I have arranged for you to call on him this coming Monday. He expects you at the stroke of noon.”

  “But what shall I say?” I wailed. “What shall I do?”

  “Do and say whatever comes naturally to you,” he answered, quite untouched by my perturbation. “Haggling over wages is no different from haggling over a tapestry or a goblet. Believe me, Grazia, in the matter of bargaining, Aldo is a child in comparison to you. And besides . . .” He leaned forward and tapped me playfully under the chin. “You and he have something in common. You both believe that the printed book will be the salvation of the human race.”

  His arguments were persuasive. But even more enticing to me was the promise that a gondola would be hired to take me to the appointment. We were living on the island of Murano then and the prospect of being whisked across the lagoon and wafted past the great palaces on the Grand Canal lured me into agreement.

  The Grand Canal did not disappoint. Bordered like a Byzantine illumination by shimmering golden palaces called Ca’ d’Oro or Ca’ Rezzonico (ca’ being short for casa in the Venetian dialect), that waterway is surely the most magical in the world, especially when the sunlight dances on the surface, as it did that day.

  At the time, Venezia was a city of women. Courtesans of both high and low es
tate constituted some ten percent of the population of the city. As soon as my gondolier turned off the canal I began to see women hanging out of windows, their bare arms perched on velvet pillows, their strong perfume wafting down to the water below, their ever-present songbirds perched beside them in golden cages, echoing the seductive serenades of their mistresses.

  In due course we made a sharp turn into the small rio spanned by the renowned Ponte delle Tette, the Bridge of Tits, which I had heard much of but had never seen.

  The Ponte delle Tette lives up to its reputation. Try to imagine layers of women stacked in rows from one end of the bridge to the other, each one naked from the waist up, their jeweled white hands cupping their milky breasts, thrusting them out at all comers as if to say, “Come and suck, you sons of women.”

  Observing my distaste, the gondolier was quick to inform me that this spectacle was sanctioned by the Venetian Senate. “It brings trade to the city,” he explained, as if the benefits of trade excused any transgression of morality or taste. There speaks a Venetian.

  Hardly had I begun to recover from my astonishment at the bridge than we drew up before Maestro Aldo’s establishment. Here a shock of a quite different sort awaited me. Nailed to the post that served to anchor the gondolas that came to his establishment, the proprietor had posted a notice printed in the elegant cursive script for which the Aldine Press is celebrated, and addressed to Whoever You Are. It read: “Aldus begs you once and for all to state briefly what you want and then leave quickly, unless you have come, like Hercules, to support the weary Atlas on your shoulders. For that is what you will do when you enter this door.”

  Not encouraging. But I gathered my courage and jangled the bellpull. No response. I tugged at the thing again. Again no one answered. Altogether I had to signal four times before the door curtain was pulled aside.

  There stood a man, slim and sprightly, with bright eyes, round spectacles, and a very bushy head of wiry hair which stood out in all directions. I introduced myself and was invited to enter by this person, who did not seem to recognize me even when I identified myself as the wife of Leone del Medigo. But when I mentioned Greek, the bright eyes lit up.