The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (59 page)

“That was wrong of me, Grazia. I felt you despised me and I feared your displeasure. But now that we have come together again, how about a hug?” He held his arms out enticingly. “And a promise to dance at my wedding?”

“That I will never do.”

“Then you are no friend to me. Nor sister.” He drew back.

“You must not marry her, Jehiel. She has her mother’s sluttish nature and will do you the same ill her mother did our father.”

“How dare you speak that way about my intended? What gives you the right?”

“I am your sister. I love you.”

“And I you, Grazia. Although you do try my patience with your endless criticisms. Now listen to me, sister. I cannot make you love Ricca as I do. But I can insist that you respect her. Just as you insisted that my grandparents respect Papa.”

“But Papa was worthy of their respect,” I wailed.

“Enough, Grazia. There are sides to Ricca that you have never seen.”

And that you will never see again once she has hooked you, poor fish, I thought. But he had decided. Even I could see there was no point in prolonging the argument. I could win nothing and stood a good chance to lose my brother’s love. So I kissed him on the cheek, wished him good fortune in all his ventures, and went to my room to begin packing.

Now who came knocking on my door but Penina, another who had grown away from me in the past month.

“Come and comfort me, dearest Penina,” I cried. “For I am sorely in need of a shoulder to cry on.”

“You, Grazia? In need?”

“Do I appear to you so callused that nothing can touch my heart?” I demanded.

“You appear to me to have hardened your heart against the world,” she answered in her painfully truthful manner.

“Even against you?” I asked.

“Even against me,” she answered, looking me straight in the face, even though I knew how she shrank from any unpleasantness.

“It is these people,” I explained. “La Nonna. She turns me into a viper. She —” I stopped myself. I who loathe excuses and justifications, blaming another for my own defects.

“I know how hard it has been for you here, Grazia.” The gentle soul held out her hand to smooth my cheek. “I did not mean to castigate you.”

“And I did not mean to snivel my way out of my wrongdoings,” I answered, gentled by her touch. “If I have seemed cold to you, I apologize. It was inadvertent, I assure you. For I hold you as dear as if you were my own sister.”

“I have never doubted that you love me, Grazia,” she answered. “But I wish you had allowed me to help you more.”

“Help me? How could you have helped me?” I asked.

“Probably not at all,” she answered. “But I felt my uselessness keenly. It is not altogether comfortable always to be the one being helped and never the one to do the helping.”

“Well, you can help me now,” I said. “For I have rarely felt so low in my spirits or so hopeless. Jehiel insists he will stay here in Ferrara and marry Ricca.”

“I know.” She turned her face from me. “She fascinates him.”

“She’s a bitch and a whore,” I ranted. “She doesn’t care a fig for him either. It’s only what he will inherit. Greedy pig!”

“Grazia, please. Could we speak of something else?” As she turned back to face me, she wiped a tear from her eye and I suddenly realized how unutterably cruel I was being, rubbing salt into her wound simply to expunge my own frustration.

“Forgive me,” I cried. “I am stupid and blind. You still love him, do you not?”

She shook her head sadly. “I have tried to master my feelings but it is no use . . . living with him day after day . . . seeing his desire for her in his eyes . . .”

“You must get away from them. That will make it easier for you, my poor sweet. Come with me to Firenze. Judah will love to see you. And I will be delirious with happiness to have my dear Penina beside me once again.”

“No. My life is here.” When people who are normally tractable finally put their feet down and refuse to budge, the fervor of their conviction creates a kind of resonance around them, as if they had plucked a lute string with all their strength. “My life is here,” she repeated in just that resonant tone.

“But you are not happy . . .” I began.

“Please, Grazia. Do not try to run my life for me. I am past fourteen years. I am a woman. It is time for me to be married. To have children. To have my own life.”

“So you too no longer need me,” I said.

“As a friend I will always need you. And so will your brothers. But not as a mother.”

“But you
will
leave me Gershom,” I said, half in jest but with a bite.

“Not for long, Grazia. He too will grow to manhood. We are not your children. You must have your own children. That is what God intended.”

I left Ferrara two days later with my little brother, Gershom. Once I had confided to Asher my miserable memories of travel along the Reno, he insisted on accompanying us as far as Bologna. And perhaps because of his reassuring presence, the banks did not seem nearly so high nor the inn at Malalbergo half so grim as before. And when we got to Corticella I found that this time we would not have to transfer ourselves to a donkey train for the last lap of the journey. Giovanni Bentivoglio, a tireless improver like so many Italian tyrants, had completed the Reno canal all the way to the gates of Bologna.

At Bologna, the manager of the
banco
, doubtless on La Nonna’s instructions and in spite of Zio Zeta’s tears, refused us a bed in the little house I remembered so fondly. Our old uncle had gotten frail and was more easily moved to tears than ever. He wept to see us. He wept when the manager refused us a bed. He wept when we took lodgings at an inn. He wept when he heard of Papa’s bequest to him. And of course he wept a flood when we bade him goodbye. I do believe that old man shed all the tears he had been holding back for a lifetime during the two days we spent in Bologna.

My parting from Asher was even more laced with pathos, albeit not dramatized by tears. He had been my best friend through the last weeks, at times my only friend. At parting he spoke of his feelings for me only indirectly.

“If I were Gershom’s age I too could come to Firenze and sit at Judah’s feet and learn from him and bask in the light of your smile. But alas . . .”

Alas, he was not a boy but a man. And I was no longer a girl but a matron with a wife’s responsibilities.

My last sight of him was his heavyset figure, feet astride, his flat hat tilted by the wind and held by one hand to his head while the other waved us on, so solid that he looked to be planted there in the earth forever.

39

J
udah returned from Napoli celebrated not only as the French king’s personal physician but as the discoverer of the mercury cure for the French boils, now officially named syphilis after its first victim, the ancient shepherd Syphilus. More in demand than ever, he found it all too easy to fill up his days with patients and leave me to find easy refuge in books, studying Greek along with my brother Gershom and basking in the sunny warmth bestowed on me by my friend Diamante. Thus life provided each of us with the illusion if not the substance of a complete existence. But each night as we prepared to retire, the becalmed marriage bed stood before us as silent evidence that nothing had changed between us.

When I journeyed up to Mantova, I left behind a metropolis radiant with humanistic light. But the city of Firenze had undergone an amazing transformation during my absence. I returned to a theocracy ruled in the name of Christ (Whom the citizens had crowned king of their city), with Fra Girolamo Savonarola ensconced as His deputy. He staged his first Bonfire of the Vanities during my absence. But I had a gallery seat for the second. During my absence the Bonaventura family had moved to a house just off the Calimala, fronting on the Piazza della Signoria, and on the morning of the great event I sat at Diamante’s side on her rooftop and watched the Florentines pile up their treasure for burning in the square below.

A seven-tier platform had been built especially for what the
frate
called the Scourge of Unclean Things. Everything was grist for Savonarola’s mill — lutes and zithers and card tables and chessboards and statues both sacred and profane and panels of oil painting — all manner of rare and beautiful objects. Dotted in among them like the shiny sugar sprinkled on
confetti
we were able to count hundreds of dandy boxes and small objects — carved chessmen and etched bowls, jeweled casks and fine glass perfume bottles. All this beautiful mess was swathed in coils of women’s hair and wrapped in bolts of silk and satin cloth like one enormous birthday gift.

Can you imagine the frugal Florentines throwing away wealth? They did. With abandon. Somehow Fra Girolamo persuaded them that they were trading mere baubles for everlasting salvation. With my own eyes I saw Fra Bartolommeo step forward and place four of his drawings on the pyre — red chalk sketches, they seemed to be, of nude women. Beside me, Diamante gasped. Even she, no patron of the arts, appreciated their beauty. After Fra Bartolommeo came Sandro Botticelli hauling a large panel of the Virgin with a saint at either hand. The
frate
, you understand, had condemned the artists for using their mistresses and wives as models for the Virgin and Her acolytes. Sacrilegious filth he called it.

Once the stage was set, the performance began. First came a hundred white-clad schoolchildren singing the
ave verum corpus
. Next, the four captains of the four main quarters of the city, each holding a flaming torch high in the air. In slow and measured steps, each took his place at one of the four corners of the pyre. The choir ceased to sing. A moment of silence. Then a flourish of trumpets announced the man of the hour, the Scourge of Christ, Girolamo Savonarola.

Like a king ascending a throne, he climbed the seven steps to the top of the pyre. Turning to face the crowd, he raised his right arm as if to pronounce a benediction. But no. Instead, his fist slashed through the air to give the signal to his captains: Let the conflagration begin!

As one, the captains stepped forward to light the corners of the pyre. In perfect symmetry, the fire rose to a single point and thence straight up to heaven.

In hindsight I recognize that moment as Fra Girolamo’s apogee, the point at which his meteoric rise reversed its course and became his fall. There was an edge of excess to the spectacular bonfires that went against the prudent, calculating Florentine temperament. Two fires was one too many.

The friar’s reversal of fortune began in Roma, where Pope Rodrigo Borgia divined that the time had come to pluck out the thorn that had nestled in his side for half a dozen years. He issued a papal bull excommunicating Savonarola. Heresy was the charge. Either ship the heretic priest to Roma to be dealt with by my inquisitors, he told the
signoria
of Firenze, or lock him up in your own
stinche
. Otherwise the whole city will be placed under an interdict.

Interdiction meant that Florentines could not get married, could not receive extreme unction, could not be buried, could not take communion. And take note: The Pope had the power to prohibit all the Christian cities of the world from conducting business with any Christian city under interdiction. With one decisive gesture the Pope had contrived to threaten the Florentines both in their pocketbooks and in their souls. Who was the Sword of Christ now?

From that moment on, Savonarola’s star plummeted with startling suddenness. In April of 1498, Girolamo Savonarola was arrested by the Florentine Senate. Before they had stretched him twice on the rack, he confessed to everything — that he was no prophet; that God had not spoken in his ear; that his visions were lies. On the twenty-third of May, he was burned on a pyre in the Piazza della Signoria.

The very same day at Blois, Charles VIII hit his head on a low lintel as he came off the tennis court, and expired there and then. Rodrigo Borgia’s enemies were all falling down at once.

On the day of Savonarola’s burning, Diamante and I were up on the Bonaventura roof, the same place from which we had witnessed his Bonfire of the Vanities. All the Bonaventura
famiglia
were present, including the servants, many of whom had once been ardent supporters of the
frate
. Even Judah took time out from his busy life to witness the event. Who, he asked, could miss the burning of the greatest vanity of all — Era Girolamo himself?

The burning of the man himself was not staged with anything like the
bravura
of his Scourge of Unclean Things. Strange as it sounds, the event was much less solemn. There was much laughter and chattering in the crowd, even throughout the hanging of the two Dominicans who were condemned to keep the
frate
company in hell.

But at the sight of Era Girolamo being led up to the gibbet, the noise ceased abruptly and his stringing up took place as a dumb show in eerie silence. Then suddenly the air was fractured by shock after shock of earsplitting bombast. Some villain had conceived the idea of sprinkling gunpowder over the faggots so that when the fire reached them, they would explode with the noise of a hundred rockets, as at a fete. That trick reignited the holiday spirit. Coached by the signal, the people cheered.