The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (23 page)

The week that followed passed peaceably and amicably. Asher drifted into the
banco
each day to assist as he could. Seeing him ill at ease, I offered him my seat on the
cassone
. He accepted it gratefully. Now I was the odd man out. But it was only for the duration of the visit. So I thought. However, on the following Sabbath eve Papa summarily informed us that he was about to journey to Ferrara and that our cousin Asher would stay on to supervise the
banco
in his absence. Early the next morning, a mule arrived at the door to carry Papa off and we were left behind with our new master.

It was not in Papa’s character to move so swiftly nor so secretively. He was the most forthright of men. But he was also as malleable as wax in the hands of his family. Mind you, none of this occurred to me at the time. For one thing, life went on very pleasantly in the little house after Papa left. I resumed my place on the
cassone
. Only now, I sat there beside Asher.

Another thing. My cousin was quite taken with me. I would often catch him looking at me with something close to longing. And once or twice, he even made a clumsy move to touch my hand.

Here is a fact of life for you, my son. No woman can resist being adored. Consistent, abject worship is a more powerful ploy in the game of love even than brute force. A man of strength can force a woman to submit to his advances. But he cannot compel her to give herself over to him. Whereas the constant pressure of unalloyed adoration never fails to call forth surrender.

First comes irritation. “Will he never leave off this milksop gazing?”

Then comes pity. “The poor thing is dying of love for me.”

Next, impatience, a very important part of the process. “Why doesn’t he
do
something about it, for God’s sake, before we both die of boredom?”

After that, guilt. “How can I be so cruel? He asks so little. One smile would give him happiness for a whole day . . .”

At last, the lady relents. She smiles invitingly. Still he is too shy to do more than blush and look at his feet. Now, she is determined to put some starch into him. Bold, she looks into his eyes. He trembles. She is touched. Was ever a woman held so dear? At last, she takes his hand in hers. She fondles it. She presses it to her bosom. The courtship has been accomplished. She is his. Believe it.

People wonder how so-and-so can capture the hearts of so many women? He is pale, skinny, pockmarked, bandy-legged, and cross-eyed. What do women see in him? I asked one such unlikely cocksman in Madama’s circle (discretion forbids me to mention his name, but he is high in the church and notorious for his great success with ladies) what accounted for his prowess. His answer was a statement you can ponder. “I simply put my limp member in her hand and start to cry,” he told me.

Of course, my cousin Asher did no such thing. He was not a practiced seducer. His shyness was honest and natural. And when I finally did take his hand in mine (thinking to alleviate the misery of his unrequited passion for me), he literally ran out the door and into Jew Street. But that evening when we lit the candles he suggested boldly that we might essay something a little more secular than the Holy Book. “My education has been sadly neglected by that German ignoramus Rabbi Abramo,” he told me, “and I feel the need to improve my understanding of the world.” It was the longest sentence I had ever heard him speak.

I wasted no time in rushing up to my room to retrieve my copy of the
Aeneid
from under my pillows. And that night, we stayed up until the candles sputtered down to their ends, reading to each other out of my favorite chapter, in which Dido laments her lost lover. It was a most romantic moment, our two heads leaning in toward each other in order to share the light and the text. And we might as well have been alone, since although Zio and Jehiel stayed until the bitter end, they both slid into slumber shortly after the reading began, leaving us with no reminder that we were chaperoned other than an occasional snore.

At the end of the evening, Asher accompanied me to the door of my room and even got up the courage to lean forward as if to embrace me. But then his prudence took over and he slunk away down the hall without even saying goodnight.

The next day Papa returned full of schemes. His trip to Ferrara had succeeded beyond his dreams. The
cherem
had been lifted. He was once again a Jew among Jews.

“And that is not half of it, children,” he informed us with shining eyes. “We are to leave this insignificant outpost and return to Mantova where our old friends, the Gonzaga princes, are pleased to welcome us.”

“Will we have our old home back? And our ponies?” Jehiel wanted to know.

“For a certainty,” Papa answered with confidence.

“And our beautiful garden?” I asked.

“Only if you agree to tend it, little Graziella,” he replied. “For your Aunt Dorotea, I fear, is no gardener.”

“Aunt Dorotea?”

“Yes, my dears.” Papa scooped us up and sat us down upon his lap with unaccustomed familiarity. “I have saved the best news until the last. Now that I am reinstated, I am able to take my brother’s place as I am ordered to do by the laws of Israel.”

“Take Uncle Joseph’s place?” I did not follow his meaning.

“Yes, my dear. It is written that after a suitable period of mourning, the observing Jew, if he be unmarried, must take the place of his dead brother, marry the widow and adopt her children.” Then, turning to Asher: “You are my son now, as dear to me as Jehiel and Gershom. And Ricca is my daughter, as dear to me as Grazia. And Dorotea is my wife. I married her this week in your grandmother’s house in Ferrara.”

15

M
y father’s marriage and our move back to Lombardia brought our odyssey full circle, from Mantova to Ferrara to Bologna and, now, back to the town of my childhood. But we were in a different house this time. And with a different mother. Never were two women less alike than my mother and Dorotea.

At dinner, my new stepmother imposed an iron discipline completely at odds with the free exchange that had always prevailed among Papa, the boys, and myself. There was little laughing and no leaning at Dorotea’s table. Jehiel and I were not permitted to speak until spoken to. And God help poor little Gershom if he reached out for a bit of bread before the “honored Signore Padre,” as Dorotea insisted we call our father, had raised his cup.

She was also, like her mother-in-law, a great believer in purges, which she dispensed to us every Sabbath eve before bedtime so that our bodies would be, as she put it, clean inside and out. We had been raised in a more modern school of medicine, where fresh air, exercise, and plenty of fruit did the work of cleansing the gut. But we swallowed the vile stuff she dished out and endured the cramps that inevitably followed without protest.

I think we were waiting for Papa to step in and set things right. But as the weeks lengthened into months, not a word of objection was heard from him. Instead I found my prerogatives disappearing one by one. The first to go was my place in the
banco
. Dorotea claimed, with some justice, that my presence was much more urgently needed in the
casa
than behind the counting table. With a large household to run and two young boys to raise, she needed every spare female hand. And there went my chiefest freedom.

Next came the matter of books and learning. We had no tutor in residence — Dorotea had as yet been unable to find one to suit her — so that in order to pursue my studies, I would have had to attend the synagogue school with my brother Jehiel. But girls were not welcome in the school. I begged Papa to solicit special permission for me. Dorotea pointed out that it would be unseemly for me to be seen walking back and forth in the public streets every day, like a common tart, as she put it. Once again, Papa withdrew from the contest. Even more than my seat at the
banco
, my pursuit of knowledge had given me a window on the great world. Now a shade was drawn over that window.

But I did find a chink of light in the gloom. Denied a tutor, I set out to school myself. Each day after dinner, I sequestered myself in my bedroom, pleading a headache. And there, in the autumnal afternoon light, I pored over my old Cicero, parsing and analyzing just as I would have done under the direction of a teacher.

Made bold by Cicero, I soon ventured farther into forbidden territory. I had always wanted to sample the worldly pleasures of La Nonna’s “French lies,” and one afternoon, I sashayed through the kitchen, across the backyard, and into the warehouse in search of enlightenment and sin.

Any loan-banker always held in pawn dozens of copies of the
Reale di Francia
. It was far and away the most popular book in Italy — still is, I believe — read by the educated class in the original French and by the less cultivated in vernacular Italian. According to the plan I had formulated, I would steal one copy of each version and, by going from the one language to the other, would teach myself the French tongue while I reveled in the forbidden pleasures of romance.

As I had anticipated, the warehouse held in pawn more than half a dozen versions of the
Reale
in the French language, two of them beautifully illuminated. But I chose a cheap printed copy with only two woodcuts for illustration, reasoning that the more valuable items might occasion a more serious search if their owners should return to claim them. Likewise with the vernacular translation. I picked the most dog-eared, shabby one of the lot, reasoning that the owner of such a poor thing was unlikely to recoup his fortunes sufficiently to reclaim it.

As Madonna Isabella is fond of saying, no one who reads books and collects them is ever totally bereft of comfort in this life. Books made my early days in Dorotea’s household bearable. They also kept me out of sight and out of mischief. But books were never all of life for me. I was also attracted to the glitter of the great world. And when a communication came inviting the dei Rossi
famiglia
to attend upon Marchese Francesco Gonzaga and his Marchesana at the Reggio, I put away my books and entered into the plans for the audience as eagerly as everybody else in our household.

It had been the old Marchese’s custom to reaffirm his
condotta
with his Jewish
banchieri
each autumn — a not so subtle reminder that October was traditionally the month for giving gifts. During the first years of his rule Marchese Francesco had allowed this custom to drop from use, largely because the harvest time coincided with the major
palios
of the year and he far preferred galloping around racecourses winning ribbons to staying home and entertaining packs of Jews. But after he married Madonna Isabella in 1490, life at the Reggio became more courtly. And one of the customs Marchese Francesco revived in honor of his Este bride was the annual reception of his Jews.

On the day of the harvest reception we joined the five other Jewish banking families of Mantova and marched together into the Gonzaga stronghold: women, children, rabbis,
shohets
, clerks, and serving maids — all polished up for the occasion and dressed so grandly you would have thought we were en route to meet our Maker rather than a minor Christian prince — and only a marchese at that, not even a duke.

Mind you, the Gonzagas disported themselves like kings. The Marchese and his bride had set themselves up on identical gilded armchairs in the center of a large, formal garden under a white silk
baldacchino
that fluttered in the breeze. What a sight they presented to us on their twin daises, surrounded by courtiers and dogs — lean, rangy hunting dogs for him, small squeaky lapdogs for her — and two or three of their favorite dwarfs tumbling around at their feet. Glowing mistily in the autumn sun, they seemed posed, as if waiting for Maestro Mantegna to immortalize them with his brush as he had Marchese Francesco’s grandparents on the walls of the Camera degli Sposi.

All that was missing was an appreciative audience. And that we Jews supplied when we were pushed forward into the presence, en masse, by a pair of turbaned body servants, garbed to resemble Janissaries with balloon trousers and scimitars hanging from their waists — a marvelous exotic touch.