The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi

by Jacqueline Park

  Most of the scows and barges that made up the flotilla bore aloft huge piles of possessions, for most of the families brought with them everything in the world they owned, including dogs and cats and birds and even whole dovecotes of pigeons. We took a position directly behind a rag seller who had managed to pack his wife, five children, and all their possessions onto one small scow. There we were joined by the Meshullam family’s train of gondolas and barges.

  As the flotilla moved haltingly along the Grand Canal, I was reminded of the Venetian processions painted by Vittore Carpaccio. On both sides of the water you have housewives leaning out of their windows to view the spectacle. The bridges become the bleachers for the courtesans. Everywhere there are young boys larking about among the housemaids. And all the faces are lit up with joy to see the spectacle . . . the casting out of the hated Jews.

  The pace of the procession was funereal. But after some hours, we turned off the Grand Canal and entered the district of San Girolamo, a marshy and insalubrious part of the city as far removed as one can get from the Piazza San Marco. There, many years before, had been established the cannon factory, the ghetto. The spot was clearly marked by a stone ball perched on top of the iron gateway now manned by two tall Venetian guards wearing the Doge’s insignia. The fortresslike aspect of the place was emphasized by recent repairs on the buildings that faced the canal. During the previous week all the windows on the side facing out had been bricked up. Even our gaze was anathema to the Venetians.

  At the first sight of that prison — it is a prison for all they still call it ghetto — children and adults alike began to weep and then to sway and then to pray as we do when mourning the dead. How appropriate, since we were engaged in burying ourselves.

  As the long day wound down, our craft edged slowly toward that implacable wall where we awaited our turn to disembark. Then just before sunset the decorum of the occasion was disrupted by the arrival of a sleek gondola bearing a patrician crest, which swept around the bend of the canal and sped past all the other craft like an arrogant dowager who claims the place at the head of the line as her right.

  At first all we heard from under the canopy was a series of imperious commands.

  “Pass them by, pass them by,” the mistress of the craft commanded her boatman. And then: “Pull up there. No, not there, ham hock. Can you not see the mud? I wish to be put off on the dry part. There. In front of that dirty barge. Tell those people to move. If they will not, ram the barge. Move, curs.” Obediently the gondolier rammed a dirty barge out of his path and maneuvered his craft into its place.

  By now everyone within sight of the gondola was holding his breath, waiting for the sight of the person about to disembark.

  First came a large fan, shoved out from under the canopy by an arm covered with jeweled bracelets. Next came a rather large foot bound in the highest pianelle I have ever seen. More like stilts than pianelle, they were calculated to lift the wearer at least two hands above her normal height. We now had a foot and a hand. Next, in response to a terse command from behind the curtains of the baldacchino, one of the boatmen leapt off the gondola and with a great flourish opened a parasol, presumably to shield the passenger’s delicate skin from the rays of the setting sun.

  Now a book bound in gold and red velvet was thrust at the gondolier by the bejeweled hand. And finally the lady herself emerged, giving the crowd a fine view of her ample bosom. She was as good as naked from the waist up. Mind you, for modesty’s sake, she held a half-mask over her upper face to conceal her eyes. But I would have recognized that nose and that chin and that voluptuous mouth anywhere. It was my former sister-in-law, Ricca, followed by a wizened crone, her ruffiana, her female pimp . . . Dorotea, come to roost in the Venetian ghetto.

  In the craft beside us, pushing forward for a better view, young Jacob Meshullam licked his lips. “Amazing, is she not?”

  “Who is she?” asked his father.

  “Why that is Bellina Ebrea, the Jewish courtesan, Papa,” his son explained. “You have heard me speak of her. She is the one who goes about the streets reading Psalms from her little gold Bible. It never leaves her hand. Not even at the certain moment.”

  “It is Ricca,” I whispered to Judah.

  “I know,” he whispered back.

  With her two boatmen following, her Bible in hand, and her mother following along like a maidservant, she sailed past the officials and their clerks, tossing out orders in a deep contralto voice clear as a basset horn.

  “I am to have the top story in the building at the left corner. My things will be arriving later tonight. And mark you, make certain that no harm befalls my lute. It is a treasure from the hand of Lorenzo de Pavia and is the very favorite thing of a most important gentleman of my acquaintance.”

  With that she rounded the corner and was lost to our view.

  “Much as I loathe them both, I am saddened by what they have come to,” I confided in Judah.

  “Do not waste your pity, Grazia,” was his reply. “That woman has accomplished what few of us are privileged to do in this life. She has found her true vocation and is practicing it with notable success.”

  My first look at the quarters in which I was destined to spend my confinement brought instantly to mind my mother’s birth pangs in that hellhole of an inn at Governolo long ago. Dark, cramped, and filthy, the single room meant to serve us for living, sleeping, cooking, eating, and study seemed cut off from all the light in the world. Yet Judah assured me that this suite was the best to be had at any price. We were among the fortunate. Less spacious rooms were being made to accommodate whole families. In my mind I understood I should be grateful. But my heart was flooded with despair. “They mean to bury us here,” I told Judah. “We must escape from this place or I will die here.”

  But the possibility of escape retreated farther with each day’s passing. As always Judah’s faith in God’s ultimate wisdom sustained him. He was even able to discover a benevolent intent behind our incarceration in the ghetto at this particular moment.

  “Perhaps being born in the Venetian ghetto is God’s way of marking your child as one of His chosen people,” he suggested. What my heart heard was that if you could not be his child, you would at least belong to his God.

  You were the first boy child born in the Venetian ghetto. Was it an honor or a shame? If you are looking for God’s answer, I give you the evidence of it herewith. You were a child of the sun, born after a single night of laboring just as the first light suffused the sky. Our neighbors wanted us to call you Mithras because you had bested the sun god in entering the world. I clung to my first choice, Danilo — little Daniele — in memory of my father. But the gods had their own imprese to bestow: a pair of eyes bluer than the vault of heaven. All babies are born with blue eyes. But not eyes of that particular cornflower blue. And, as if they were not enough to mark your heritage, a thatch of golden hair graced your broad little brow.

  “You really ought to call him Apollo,” said my neighbor, the seamstress who saw me through my labor. “He is a golden boy.”

  Since we were denied the services of wet nurses in the ghetto, I nursed you myself. Why do women so easily relinquish this pleasure? I wonder. You had the habit of closing your eyes as you sucked and opening them wide when you had gotten your fill. Those were the moments I treasured, moments that made everything unbearable about the ghetto — the crowding, the racket, the stink — bearable.

  Also there was kindness within that maze of hovels. And even without. Judah’s patron sent box after box of oil and wine to celebrate your birth and more wine and candles and sweetmeats to celebrate your circumcision. And he worked assiduously to help us escape into the light once more. Perhaps as a Venetian he felt shame at what he had brought us to. Whatever the cause, he wrote to Pope Leo a glowing encomium on Judah’s behalf and I am certain that it, along with others by such luminaries as Pietro Bembo, helped Judah to gain the
post of body physician to the Holy Father.

  When the news of the appointment arrived I literally jumped for joy, spilling out milk all over my chemise. I had tried to hide the depth to which my spirit sank each evening at sundown when the huge gates of the ghetto swung shut on us and the clang of the three massive locks announced to the world that the Jews of Venezia were safely locked in for the night. But, once we had bade goodbye to that hateful place and were sailing out the rio to freedom, I gave voice to my emotions and Judah in his turn disclosed to me a despair as black as my own which he had hidden for my sake.

  “This ghetto has engendered in me visions that turn my blood to water,” he confided, as we drifted away from the forbidding facade with its patchwork of blind windows.

  “But surely the Senate will relent in time.” I could not bear to think that others less fortunate might be immured there for all of their lives.

  “I wish I could share your optimism,” he replied. “But I fear my vision of the future is much more bleak than yours. In my prospect, this ghetto in Venezia is only the first. Soon another will spring up in some other city — Parma perhaps or Trento — then another and yet another until finally there will be a ghetto in every city. At this moment Venezia is no longer a place where Jews can live freely. Soon Italy itself will not be a fit country. And not long after, other nations will follow suit and there will be no place for us in all of Christendom.”

  “Oh, that could never happen!”

  “Oh yes it could,” he corrected me. “And my bones tell me it will. Today the Venetians say the sight of Jews is an offense to God. But I say that the sight of many people is an offense to men and that once you begin to enclose the outcasts in some place set aside, there is no end. For, even as a Jew is an offense to God, a poor man is an offense to one with a full belly and a madman is an offense to one who has all his wits about him.

  “Here in this cursed year of 1516 the Venetians have put their Jews aside out of sight in an enclosure where they cannot offend the pious eyes of Christians. But Jews are not the only pariahs. Mark me, we will be followed by other despised groups. Would it not improve the landscape of the city if the citizens were not forced to smell the filth of the poor or to expose themselves to the anguish of the mad? Why not enclosures for them?”

  There was a terrifying logic behind his argument that drove me to follow him down a dark path where I had no wish to go. I placed my hand on his arm in a pathetic attempt to stem the flow of his imaginings. But he was not yet done.

  “I predict that as certainly as the night follows the day it will not be long before these pariahs — the sequestered ones — are seen to be the authors of their own misfortunes. That will be the means of perpetuating the enclosures. Mark me” — he was thundering now like an Old Testament prophet — “it will not be long before the victims of these sequesterments will be blamed for the crime of having brought misfortune upon themselves. They will be accused, jailed, whipped, like common criminals. After many decades — or centuries — they will be gathered up like a crop of rank weeds and burned.”

  From where, I wondered, did such thoughts come to him, thoughts so morbid, so fantastic? It was too bleak a vision of the future for me. But that night I fell asleep wondering, Supposing what he foretells comes to pass? Who will want to live in such a world?

  48

  Our first months in Roma were all delight. The Tiber did not overrun its banks in 1516, so we were spared the annual flood. And Judah’s new patron, Pope Leo, received him with all the pomp and ceremony due a chief body physician. Unfortunately, the physician did not possess an instant cure for the Pope’s painful anal fistula; but he did concoct an unguent to calm the suppurating wound. For this the grateful patient rewarded him with an additional emolument, an appointment to the Pontiff’s own university, the Studium Urbanum.

  Judah was only one among the many accomplished men attracted to the service of this magnanimous patron. As soon as the Pope was elected, he announced the appointment of two Latin secretaries, Pietro Bembo and Jacopo Sadoleto. Both were distinguished Ciceronian Latinists and between them they set the humanistic tone of the court. He enticed the singer Gabriele Merino into his service by making him an archbishop. From his predecessor he inherited the glorious duo Raffaello Santi and Michelangelo Buonarroti. Buonarroti’s tempestuous nature proved too much for the easygoing Medici pope. But Raffaello became the instrument he used to accomplish extensive improvements of the Vatican and of the city of Roma. Under Leo Roma shone like a beacon, beckoning every artist, poet, and humanist in the peninsula to join the ever-widening Leonine circle.

  Even those of us on the periphery were touched. Buried in their dusty cassone, my heroines began to stir. “Release us, Grazia,” they whispered to me. “We are cold and stiff from this long interment. Every half-baked Minerva is allowed to warm herself in Leo’s sun. Why not us?”

  I could not resist the call.

  “Courage, Grazia,” I muttered to myself as I lifted the lid of the cassone, unopened since the day I had consigned my creatures to death rather than dishonor at the hands of Madonna Isabella and her henchman Equicola.

  What did I fear? That the interred heroines would rise to revenge themselves for their long incarceration? Or that I would find them beyond resuscitation?

  When I touched the pile of vellum leaves, wisps of pale dust rose as if from a desiccated corpse. But these bodies were not dead. Reading the pages brought them instantly to life. Before long my heroines had regained their former vitality and were pressing to have their stories presented to the world at last.

  If ever there was a time and place for them, Leonine Roma was it. The city was teeming with enlightened printers and publishers. Surely there must be one among them willing to bring out my Book of Heroines despite its lack of patronage. Newly inspired, I set about to polish up my portraits, taking as my mentor in portraiture Maestro Mantegna. If my subject had a wart on her nose I would describe it. If she was fat I would limn in the folds. If she was a wanton I would list her lovers. With one toe rocking the cradle beside me as I worked, the work of revision became a joyful task. Never was a poet more inspired by his muse than I was by your wide, unblinking blue eyes peering up at me as I composed.

  I also regained my brother in Leo’s Roma. By the time we took up residence in our new home under the ancient Portico d’Ottavia, your Uncle Gershom had established himself as an agent for the great Sienese banker Agostino Chigi, and was living across the Tiber on a property adjacent to Chigi’s newly built Villa Suburbana. Once we had settled in we urged him to join our household, but he quickly and decisively rejected the offer.

  “Ser Chigi is always in fine spirits at the villa. The very sight of it sets him to smiling. In that benign mood he often stops to chat when he catches sight of me. Thus, living where I do in such close proximity to him when he is at his most expansive, I receive all the news of Roma firsthand.”

  “Do I take it that getting the news of Roma is more consequential to you than being in the bosom of your family?” Judah inquired stiffly.

  “For a banker, dear brother-in-law, the answer is a reluctant yes,” my brother replied cheerfully. “News is the lifeblood of banking. I would never have made my investments in the Campo Marzio had I not known in advance that the Pope was planning expansion in that area.”

  “You own a palace in the Campo Marzio?” I asked.

  “Not yet. But I do own land there which someday will be worth a fortune,” he replied with cool assurance.

  He had good cause to be confident. Before the age of thirty, he had achieved by his own efforts a success unmatched by any Jew in Roma. Dressed in the finest brocades and velvets, treated by the Pope’s banker as an intimate, flattered and fawned upon by men twice his age, he had every reason to believe that his star would continue to rise forever. But will it? I wonder, sitting here in the heart of a city that is every day increasingly threatened
with despoliation. My father always put his faith in movable property — bags of gems, easy to hide, easy to transport. I wonder if history will prove him a cleverer banker than his clever son.

  Do you remember how sweet life was in our little house among the ancient pillars of the Portico d’Ottavia? True, the Tiber came much too close for comfort and safety. And the fish in the market below did stink in our noses when the wind blew in the wrong direction. But I learned early in life to tolerate the odor of dead fish, for I grew up close by a fish market just as you did.

  Fishy as it was, I quickly came to love the life around us in the Jewish quarter. I loved my Jewish neighbors even if most of them were, as Judah pointed out by way of apology, poor ignorant ragpickers. I loved the garlands of tattered garments they festooned on the walls behind their stalls. I loved having our own neighborhood ruin, the ancient Portico d’Ottavia. From the moment we took possession of the little house the Pope had provided for us, I felt protected by those sheltering arches.

  It was months before a bizarre upheaval turned my view of Leonine Roma upside down and revealed to me its scabrous underbelly. The revelation came in the person of one of the many leeches who wax fat on the body of the papal Curia, a certain Marc Antonio Nino, secretary to Cardinal Petrucci.

  This flunkey made quite an impression striding across Ottavia’s square with a white plume flying from his berretta and a heavy gold chain hanging from his neck. I felt I ought to shout down and warn him against wearing such an ostentatious collar in this quarter. Already two Gypsies were edging close to him as he walked. They materialize by magic at the sight of gold. But then I noticed at his right hand a hulking servant type, sword unsheathed, and I ceased to worry for his safety from the Gypsies and began to worry for our own well-being. Visits from courtiers with armed guards rarely bode well.