Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (19 page)

Love and money. Why do the two go together so insatiably? First comes love, the clinging, the longing, the laggardly mornings abed when nothing matters but the beloved's face, arms, breasts, quim, the wet velvet flower of desire—pure purple. But then comes money—hard, cold, clanking money, like a wall between the lovers. Necessity comes in, and all our necessities are, perforce, different. His necessity is to write. Hers to bear babes, suckle them, and scold him for the folly of being a player and poet. But the throbbing within to strut the boards, to wield the pen, cannot be denied. O reason not the need! Who can judge another's need? Only the muse, or God.

The poet walks the cold, slated streets thinking of love, of money. How will he repay? Gaming? Acting in a show? Or will he borrow from Lord S. again (with what filthy interest he already knows. A Jew's usury is purer). And if he does not repay, what will the Jew do? The joking, bitter Jew that jests of pounds of flesh and is as loath to be a Jew as he to be a player and a poet. Loath, yet also proud—the fate of Jews and poets.

The object wherewith he got the loan, the silver mirror that he stole—nay, not stole, but borrowed—from Harry was a gift from Harry's beauteous mother, the Countess of Southampton, whom Harry so resembles. Curious that a mirror should be surety for the loan. A simple object, yet also an object of great subtlety, an object that gives back the self as money does not, as love does. Love, money, mirrors, loans—all life is loaned to us by God, whose crooked reflections we are. Love alone makes that reflection straight. Love alone gives us back ourselves.

But mirrors are surely subtle and possibly magical things. Will has read of witches who can trap reflections in mirrors and destroy the lives of men. He also has heard of witches who can catch—as in a glass trap—the beloved's image and make her love a chosen one forever. Ah, for one of those, thinks Will, to catch forever the Jew's daughter and win her love!

Mirrors and love, mirrors and players. In London, some years ago, when he first arrived in that astounding metropolis, was published a pamphlet, “A Mirror of Monsters,” inveighing against players. The author called them “fiends that are crept into the world by stealth…sent from their great captain Satan…to deceive the world, to lead the people with enticing shows, to the Devil.” And yet this same author, Will Rankins (Will remembers this, for the rogue had his own Christian name), had latterly become a scribe himself, penning plays for Henslowe at the Rose Theatre to be played by Nottingham's men. And not good plays neither! Ah, the ones who inveigh most against the theater are ever thus: poets with broken pens, poor, castrated scribes who scourge the playhouse since they cannot write. Will spits when he thinks of them. And his heart aches when he thinks of London, when he thinks of Stratford. But it aches the more when he thinks of the Jew's daughter, whose eyes beckon like home, golden and glistening: coins whose value is beyond price.

Suddenly he stops in the street, his heart clenched in his chest. There, rooted 'neath one loosened paving stone, sticking up like a pair of grisly scissors made of flesh, are two bare legs—the feet blue with cold, the toenails still growing after death. 'Tis a man buried alive face down! Or what remains of a man. Will halts in his tracks, looks up—for what reason he knows not—at the street sign. The street is curiously called Rio Terrá dei Assassini, but no one seems to care what it is called save he. Dusk is falling early and people rush home, seemingly blind to these legs lately kicking the air above the street, these legs frozen in death's dance, in a posture of surly impenitence.

“Prithee, Sirrah,” says the poet to a tradesman hurrying to a wine shop, an
osteria
, “whose legs are these?”

The man shrugs, not understanding his words, not caring for the carrion in the street, not wanting to meddle with the destiny of another unfortunate whose fate might perchance taint his own, or interrupt his drink—or supper.

“
Che cosa è?
” Will asks another tradesman in his rudimentary Italian.

“
La morte
,” says the man, who carries a black broom and a satchel, and has the dirty face of a chimney sweep. “
La morte è la morte
.” And the sweep shrugs in that infinitely philosophical way the Italians have perfected since the days of the Etruscans.

“Yes,” says Will, muttering to himself like a madman, a bedlamite abroad. “Death
is
death.” That much Italian he understands. Somehow he is sure that this headless man (or what remains of him) died for debt. And Will is colder now than he has been before, and more homesick than ever. He hurries home, the ducats clanking in his pocket like harbingers of doom.

W
HEN HE RETURNS
, his friend is in a fury.

“Who
is
this drab,” he storms, “that she makes you venture again and again into the ghetto? And seeking what? And without your lord?”

“Dear my love, I go only to hear the great rabbi who preaches in the ghetto, who calls Christians and Jews from around the globe with his extraordinary eloquence.”

Lord S. shrugs. He does not believe his friend.

“Come, Will, I shall take you to a Christian place that shall make you forget all such Jewish drabs. There is a convent on an island hard by Venice, where the daughters of the rich Venetians are put away so that their dowers may be better stolen by their relations. These women, I am told, make such merriment, riot, misrule, and lechery that the very stews of London seem convents by contrast. Come, we'll away by bark, by sea, and spend a night or two amongst these queens and courtesans of love.”

“Nay, Harry,” says Will. “We've courtesans aplenty here in Venice.”

Lord S. laughs derisively. “My simple friend. You are a poet, therefore your true meaning is written in your brow, your eye: you wish to stay in Venice for the Jewess. But you belong with me…” (Will thought he almost said
to
me.) “…Therefore we venture forth, we two. I shall not stir alone.”

“Go, then, with Bassanio and Gratiano, your gaming lords.”

“Nay, my friend. They have gone away to Padova—and good for you they have done so, for they made dire threats of what they might do if you do not repay your gambling debt. Their absence buys you time. And I assure you, Will, I shall not pay your debt an you not come with me.”

“Pay it not!” Will thunders, with a new determination and rebellion. “I'll pay myself!”

“Hah!” laughs Lord S., his girlish lips opening in a little pink O, slivering at once into a thin pink sickle moon. “And how shall you repay without your lord?”

“I shall,” says Will, fingering the ducats in his pocket.

“They say you owe one thousand ducats or even more, and they have buried men for less, drowned men for less, flayed men for less. Fortunately they are not Jews—they charge no interest—except your life…”

Except my life, thinks Will, swallowing his anger for the moment and succumbing to his lord's desire. Except my life, which is but lightly lent, with interest, and may be taken back at any moment. He thinks of the scissored legs of death in the street of the assassins and a shudder takes him, like the approach of death itself.

And so, on the morrow, they sail away into the islands of the lagoon. The weather is cold. The fog,
la nebbia
, the Venetians call it, rises above the basin of St. Mark like a great mythical monster with dissolving wings, a tail that curls into the Grand Canal, and scales of sunlight mixed with mist. Their little boat bobs on black waters like a child's toy in a fountain of some stately home. Will is sad and pensive; his lord is full of gusto for the great adventure.

And he is also brimming with wondrous stories of the other marvels they shall visit after this foray to the convent of the lecherous nuns: Verona, and Giulietta's tomb (the sepulchre of a young maid who died for love); lordly country villas (designed by some fellow called Palladio), which make their greatest English castles seem like hovels; and, finally, a great house in Venice itself where they shall meet with a mysterious Moor who slew a multitude of Turks to become the very toast of the Serenissima. Moors, maidens, villains, villas, nuns, lechery—Will cares for none of these. He dreams only of the Jewess as they sail away from her into the fog.

On an island called Mazzorbo (near Burano, near Murano, where Venetians blow their molten faery glass) stands a solemn convent with an ivy-covered tower, which rises above the sea, amongst weeping cypresses that whip and whimper in the wind.

The boatman moors their bark to a landing that creaks with every surge of the tide as if it would come loose. Should a tempest come up, as the darkening sky seems now to threaten, their bark would be dashed against the rocks and they would never leave the island of the lecherous nuns—or not alive.

Capes swirling about them in the wicked wind, they make their way along a rocky path that leads upward to the convent. Their boatman takes them first along a cloistered walkway lined with the same somber cypresses, then to a slippery marble stair, then to a huge iron gate behind which there is a hewn oaken door, cut, it seems, from one giant tree.

The boatman knocks. A wimpled face looks out from the small grating within the mythic door. 'Tis the pretty face of a very young nun, a novice, not more than twelve or thirteen years. She smiles, then slams the little door within the door, and summons someone inside to open the larger door.

Slowly it swings back on creaky hinges, and the gentlemen enter.

At first it seems a proper enough nunnery: solemn and sober, with little nuns whispering about and tiptoeing from their duties to their prayers. The gentlemen's cloaks, heavy with the splash of the lagoon, are taken by several sisters, who whisper and titter amongst themselves, and soon the gentlemen are led into a narrow passageway, through one door, then another, down a flight of stairs, through another door, up a flight of stairs that twists and turns and turns and twists as it ascends a tower.

The stone is cold and damp, slippery with moss. The first young nun goes before them with a lantern. Presently, as Will's eyes grow accustomed to the dark, he sees imbedded in the brickwork walls of the tower (or
torre
, as they call it here), small, stony plaques with names carved upon them. B
ERNARDO
, G
IROLAMO
, E
LISABETTA
, E
NRICO
, M
ARINO
, G
IORGIO
, B
ENEDETTA
, G
IULIANO
, A
NDREA
, A
LVISE
, M
ARIA
, U
RSULA
, the stones read.

“What mean these names?” asks Will, who is always rapt and raptured when he sees the written (or the carven) word.

“These are the baptized babies,” says Lord S. “Their souls have gone to heaven from this tower.”

“What?” says Will.

“The babies of the nuns,” says Harry, “born, baptized, strangled, with their mother's milk still on their tongues.” Harry climbs behind him in the gloom—so Will cannot pause to look and weep.

“Born to die?” asks Will.

“So are we all,” says Harry. “The babies are the bastards of these nuns. On earth, they would surely cause dissension and disaster in their families. In heaven, they choir as sweetly as cherubim.”

Will shudders again with horror. Venice, he thinks, is a city of horrors, more even than lusty London with its bearbaitings and beheadings, drawings and quarterings, and its dark and muddy streets where a man can be slain at ten of the clock for no more than a watch chain, or a ring with a hair knot. He thinks of his son, Hamnet, his daughters, Judith and Susannah: sturdy enough children now, but when they were small, their little bones spoke to him of imminent disasters—plague, fevers, broken skulls—all the ills the flesh is heir to. Plague rages now in London. Has it reached Stratford yet—Stratford with its plaguy climate, its unhealthful bogs and swamps? What if his only son should die, as innocent in his way (a boy of almost seven now) as these babes? It does not bear thinking of. Many a man is given burthens more than he can bear. And his noble friend, who will not take a wife and remake his own image despite a spate of urging sonnets (penned by Will at the Countess of Southampton's gilded request)—why, what does he know of life, of death? He knows only of lechery and literature, nor wishes to know more.

“Death is cheap, Will,” says Lord S.

“Only to those it does not touch,” says Will.

They climb higher. More children's names accost their eyes. Each child a soul, each soul a cry to heaven, each cry to heaven a poem, each poem mute.

“Can they keep none of these children?” asks Will.

“None,” says Lord S. “What would a nun do with children? But they are safely baptized Christians. They go to heaven straightaway, and are saved. At least, praise God, they are not Jews.”

Will continues climbing before his friend, who, from time to time, pokes him in the rear with his gloved hand.

“Onward! Upward!” cries Lord S. “Do not quail in this adventure. 'Tis a poet's business to become a hero!”

Yes, thinks Will, who can justify these travels and adventures only thus: a poet must perforce be an explorer, setting his foot on virgin isles with strange inhabitants only to bring back such exotic fruit as his muse alone transmutes to plays and poems.

At the head of the stair, there is a darkened chamber whose windows are slits the width of rapiers, letting in sabers of light that make a pattern on the stony mossy floor.

Here the gentlemen pause and look about, seeing what seems an empty chamber at the top of this tall, tottering tower, which sways slightly in the wind from the lagoon.

Then suddenly there is laughter and the sound of muffled footsteps above their heads. A wooden trap door opens in the ceiling of the tower and down comes a cunningly carved, small wooden ladder such as is used in the library of a great and stately house to reach the books. On the ladder is a nun, dressed all in white—wimple, habit, even little boots—and where her face should be there is a silvered golden mask, half moon, half sun.