Bitter Greens (23 page)

Selena Leonelli
. It rolled around my mouth like the sweetest of jujubes. I smiled at her, and the unfamiliar movement of the muscles around my mouth seemed to tug up my heart from the black pit into which it had fallen. A new name seemed to signal the possibility of a new life.

‘And how do you come to have such a fine ruby, Selena?’

‘It was my mother’s.’

‘Your mother is dead now.’ Sibillia said it as a statement of truth, not as a question. I nodded. ‘And you wish revenge on the man who caused her death.’

I nodded again.

‘Very well, I’ll help you, but if you are caught and charged with witchcraft you must not mention my name.’

‘I won’t,’ I promised.

But she gave me that quizzical lift of her eyebrow again and said, ‘No, Selena, you will not, for I shall bind your tongue so that you cannot speak my name, no matter how much you wish you could.’

So that was the first spell I ever learnt: the binding of a tongue, the binding of another’s will.

The second spell I learnt was how to drive a man mad by disturbing his sleep with nightmares. This is how you do it.

Take a long black candle and a sharp pin. Write your enemy’s name along the candle with the pin, driving the letters in good and deep. Bind the candle in the spiny brambles of a blackberry vine. Wrap it in a square of black cloth, along with a handful of grave dirt (I used dirt from the communal pauper’s grave my mother’s body was tossed into). Sew it closed with black thread. On the first night of the full moon, smash the candle as hard as you can with a hammer, while chanting:

Do this for the next three days. Then take the bag, now filled with smashed candle powder, and bury it in your victim’s garden, preferably under his bedroom window.

Zusto da Grittoni did not have a garden but I buried it in a topiary pot on his balcony. I took to lurking outside his villa, watching him pacing back and forth across his window when all the rest of Venice slept. By the end of winter, when the streets of Venice were flooded with icy water, Zusto da Grittoni had hanged himself from his bedposts. He would have gone straight to the deepest level of hell, I know, and there he would suffer for all eternity.

And I went to live with Wise Sibillia to learn her craft.

Love and hatred were the witch’s currency.

Her garden was an aphrodisiac garden and a poison garden. Roses and myrtle and passionflowers grew entwined with hemlock and foxgloves, mandrake and nightshade, the heavy-headed, bell-shaped flowers of dark purplish-red from which was distilled the belladonna eye-drops that had killed my mother.

When I was first shown the small room in which I was to sleep, I felt something under my ribs spring open. It was like I had stepped back into my mother’s childhood, or into a daydream. The room was roughly whitewashed, but the sun filtered through jasmine so that shadows of tendrils and blossom coiled and uncoiled across the walls. I was able to step through the narrow doorway and, barefoot, stand on the warm soil, breathing in the heady scent of the garden, filling my lungs and veins with the exhilarating power of life and death.

In return for such beauty, offering Wise Sibillia my wrist to prick and my blood to suck seemed a small price to pay.

During the day, I assisted Sibillia as she harvested flowers and leaves, dug up roots, crushed berries and mixed concoctions. While she saw clients, I worked for her in her library, laboriously hand-copying the manuscripts of spells and incantations that she kept locked away in a stone chest. Venice
was then the centre of the publishing world, printing presses churning out all kinds of books and pamphlets every day, yet the books I slowly copied onto parchment, trying desperately not to blot, would have sent any printer to the pyre.

As I finished writing out each difficult arcane page, I made another secret copy for myself, which I concealed under my mattress and dug out again at night to read over and learn by heart.

Sibillia sold my handwritten manuscripts for great sums of money, to sorcerers and philosophers all over Europe, the books smuggled out in false-bottomed chests filled with flasks of perfume and rose water, jars of white lead and vinegar face paint, depilatory creams made of caustic lime to burn away eyebrows and the pubic hair, pomanders of amber and musk, lip salves of vermilion and cochineal – women’s frivolities, which no customs officer would bother to search through.

In the afternoons, I filled my basket with love potions and cures, poisons and curses, and delivered them all over Venice. Nearly all of Sibillia’s clients were women – whores who wanted revenge on their pimps, nuns wanting to abort a secret child, young women languishing with unrequited love, stout matrons wanting to poison their husbands’ young and lovely mistresses.

I came to know the labyrinthine alleys and plazas of Venice as I knew my own body, its snaking canals and crooked bridges, its hidden squares, its round domes and jutting spires, its palaces and hovels, convents and brothels. I was accompanied everywhere by a thickset surly-faced manservant named Sergio, for women did not walk the streets of Venice alone, not even whores.

As I walked the stony streets, basket over my arm, I examined the feet of the men who passed me, looking always for shoes that I knew. I listened to gossip, asked questions and set street kids to spy for me, till – one by one – I tracked down the men who had raped my mother. Our old servants were the first I found. I made wax figures of them all, dressing them in little outfits I made from old clothes I paid to have stolen from their chests. I also paid to have the hair plucked from their brushes or nail clippings
gathered from under their beds. I stuck the hair on the little poppets’ heads and sewed the nail clippings inside, then amused myself in the evenings by sticking pins in them, into their heads and their feet, and especially at the soft juncture of their legs. Eventually, I’d hold the poppets over my candle flame till they had melted into grotesque shapes, and then I’d bury them in the garden.

After our servants, I tracked down Zusto da Grittoni’s. Then, when they too had died or gone mad, I began to search for those other men, the ones in soldier’s boots and a priest’s long cassock, those filthy tramps with their yellow curling toenails. I used every maleficent spell I learnt from Sibillia’s books – pulling a parsley root from the earth while crying out my enemy’s name, burying the decomposing heart of a dead rat in their garden, sprinkling food they were to eat with dirt gathered from my mother’s grave – experimenting to see which spell worked fastest or had the most dire effects. I watched my enemies, enjoying their slow torment, relishing their eventual breakdown and death.

As they dwindled, I grew plump and sleek, my hair growing in ripples of fiery red-gold, down past my waist. I became aware of the glances of men in the street, and occasionally a young blood in striped hose and slashed sleeves would call out to me, begging me for a smile, a kiss, a fuck. I always shook my head and hurried away, glad of the bulk of Sergio behind me.

One day, in the spring before my fifteenth birthday, I was coming down the stairs of a grand house on the Campo San Samuele when one of these young bloods came bouncing up. He was dressed in salmon-pink and indigo velvet, one leg striped pink and purple, the other pink and grey. His codpiece bulged out, pushing aside the folds of his doublet.

‘Here’s a pretty sweetmeat,’ he said, pausing at the sight of me. ‘I’m feeling a trifle peckish. Let me have a taste of you.’ He pushed me into the wall, one hand squeezing my breast, his wet tongue swirling inside my mouth like a child trying to lick out a bowl. Revulsion filled me. I whipped out my dagger and pricked him in the side.

He jerked away with a curse and touched his side. His fingers came away bloody. ‘You cut me, you little cow.’

‘Touch me again and I’ll curse you so your cock falls off.’

‘You’ve torn my doublet. Do you know how much it cost?’

‘Do you think I care?’ With my dagger held out threateningly, I went backward down the steps.

As I reached the floor below, he suddenly called out, ‘Witch.’

Smiling, I made the sign of the horns with my left hand, pointing my extended forefinger and little finger straight at him. Horrified, he grabbed his left testicle with his right hand. I laughed and went out to where Sergio was waiting for me. He frowned at the sight of me, and I wondered if my face showed the sting of the young man’s beard. I glanced down at my dress and saw that my bodice was disordered. Surreptitiously, I straightened it.

A few days later, Carnevale began with an explosion of fireworks and continued in a wild hurly-burly of feasts and masquerades and parties. With a hood over my distinctive hair and a mask hiding my face, I accompanied Sibillia as she wandered the crowded noisy streets or glided in her gondola down the crowded canals, the surface fizzing with the reflection of flaming torches and shooting stars of pink and orange and purple and silver, the air thick with acrid smoke, which stung my nostrils. Everyone was filled with frenetic gaiety, as if Venice sought to forget the humiliation of the last few years, when we had lost our Dry Land Dominion in the west and our trade routes in the east. Our diplomats had been forced to kneel before the Pope and confess their sins and accept the ritual scourging rods. At least the Pope had not forced them to wear halters about their necks as he had threatened.

Sibillia had told me that the Venetian coffers were rattling like a beggar’s after the disastrous war, but there was no sign of poverty on the canals and
campi
of La Serenissima. Everywhere I looked were billowing gowns of satin trimmed with fur, embroidered
chopines
as thick as a Bible, velvet cloaks and flashing jewels. Music and the deep thrum of conversation floated from every window, lit by the light of a thousand tall white candles, and from dark alleyways I heard soft laughter and the occasional grunt and moan of pleasure.

I had stopped to watch a troupe of acrobats in the square as they walked
on their hands and turned neat backflips and cartwheels. One was spinning wheels of fire in his bare hands, throwing flaming torches up in the air then catching them again. As I tilted back my head to watch the whirl of bright flame, my hood fell back. A man behind me exclaimed, ‘How beautiful.’

I half-turned and saw a young man reaching out his hand to me. He was dark and swarthy, in his early twenties, with a shabby cloak and broad peasant hands speckled with paint. He picked up a tendril of my hair and twined it about his fingers. ‘Look, Francesco, is this not the most gorgeous colour? How could I capture this on canvas?’

Another young man, a little taller and a little older, stared dispassionately at me and said, ‘Vermilion?’

‘It darkens too much. She’d be a brunette by the end of the year. I’d want her to flame from my canvas for centuries.’

Francesco snorted. ‘You always were an ambitious brute, Tiziano.’

‘Is it ambitious to know you have talent and want to use it? Surely you don’t want your little brother to waste his God-given gift instead of making our fortune with it?’

The young painter still had a firm grip on a lock of my hair. I said coldly, ‘Excuse me,’ and tried to jerk my head free. He grinned at me and used the long tendril of hair as a leash to draw me closer. He smelt of earth and crushed herbs, as if he had been rolling in a garden. ‘Red and yellow ochre for your hair and the yolk of a town hen for your pearly skin,’ he said. ‘And I’d pay a fortune for some cochineal to capture the red of your mouth.’ As he spoke, he suddenly bent his head and kissed me. His mouth was soft and gentle. I could not move, as if he had cast a binding spell upon me. I gave no thought at all to my dagger, but only to the feel of his mouth on mine, his hands in my hair, drawing me ever closer so I felt as if I could swoon in his arms and he would catch me.

He drew his mouth away and smiled at me. ‘Come to my studio and I’ll paint you,’ he whispered in my ear. ‘My name is Tiziano Vecellio. What’s yours?’

At the same moment, we became aware of the hulking presence of Sibillia’s bodyguard, Sergio, looming over us. Tiziano said ‘Uh-oh’ under
his breath, gave my hair one last affectionate tug and melted away into the crowd, followed quickly by his frowning brother. I followed him with my gaze, then realised Sibillia was watching me from the shadows, her dark stare inscrutable as ever. I shrugged and gave a quick smile and hurried to join her, saying, ‘Carnevale time, it goes to everyone’s heads. It must be the masks.’

I was quiet and preoccupied for the rest of the evening, though, very aware of the heaviness of my breasts and the tingling of my blood.
Tiziano
, I said to myself, and wished I dared ask Sibillia what she knew of him.

The next morning, Sibillia called me to her sitting room. I came in smoothly, sank into a graceful curtsey and offered her my arm, wrist upwards, even though I knew the moon was not full and she would not take blood from me in the full glare of the day. It was a gesture of submission and placation, false as my smile.

She shook her head, her gaze calculating. ‘Not today, Selena. Come, sit down. I want to talk to you.’

Thoughts of my hoard of secretly copied manuscripts flashed into my head. I pushed them away at once, afraid Sibillia would read my mind. I bowed my head and sat down on a stool before her, smoothing my skirt over my knees. Truth be told, I was afraid of Sibillia. I wanted her power, her wealth, her strength, but I dared not let her know it. She was ruthless, and I was not yet fifteen. Despite all my watching and listening and stealthy copying, I was just beginning to dimly grasp the knowledge she had spent centuries acquiring.

‘Selena, you are a woman now. Your blood has begun to flow.’

I bit my lip. I had washed my rags in secret, revolted and disturbed by my own traitorous body. I did not want to be a woman, at the mercy of men and time – I wanted to stay immaculate and inviolate forever.

Sibillia’s eyes were gentle with understanding. ‘You cannot stop the passing of time, Selena. Believe me, I have tried with all my strength. The world turns, seasons pass, everything changes. You were a child, and now you are a woman and so no use to me any more.’

I had not been expecting this. I stared at her, eyes wide with shock. ‘But … I …’

‘I need the blood of a virgin,’ she said.

‘I’m still a virgin.’

‘But for how much longer?’ Her left eyebrow rose in that characteristic quizzical expression of hers.

‘Forever,’ I cried.

She smiled wryly. ‘You plan to take the veil and be a nun?’

I was taken aback. ‘No …’

‘Then you shall soon lose your maidenhood, whether willingly or not.’

‘I’d rather die.’

‘You’d rather die than surrender to the pleasures of the flesh? I did not think you were a fool, Selena. Or so devout you believe all the blather of bishops and popes, who mouth sanctimonious words from the pulpit while their mistresses and bastards jostle in the pews below. Do you not realise that sex is a sacred force of nature, filled with power and passion and life and laughter? You cannot be a witch unless you master that force.’

I was silent, my stomach cramping. All I could think of was my mother’s soft animalistic grunts of pain.

‘You are very beautiful, Selena, as I’m sure you know. You must understand that your beauty is as much a curse as a blessing. It will give you power, if you use it wisely. But it does mean that you must choose your sphere of influence. There are only three choices for women in this world that we live in. You can be a nun, or a wife, or a whore. Which will you choose?’