The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi (68 page)

In the brief space of an afternoon my gondolier had whisked me up to the heights of Venetian life and down to its dregs. As we floated back under the Bridge of Tits, I looked up at the courtesans packed in like so many carcasses in a meat market, and reflected that but for an accident of fate, I might well have spent my afternoon up on the bridge instead of palavering at the Aldine Press over the niceties of authorship. And there welled up in me an immense gratitude for the fortunate endowment that enabled me to sell the works of my own hands rather than the use of my body and to gain satisfaction from a respected craft.

Editing Ser Aldo’s introductions had merely been a test of my skill. As soon as he had satisfied himself that I was competent, he set me to real work rendering the poems of Sappho into the Tuscan tongue. “For it is most appropriate,” he informed me on granting me the commission, “that the lady poet be interpreted by one of her own sex.”

Now I have never been an enthusiastic admirer of Sappho. Among the ancient lyricists Catullus is more to my taste. But Ser Aldo cared more about Greek than Latin in those days. Besides, he and his circle believed that such robust fare as Ovid and Catullus fell naturally into the province of male translators. They would have been amazed to know bow many of my sisters have committed to memory Catullus’s passionate plea to his Clodia. I can scarcely count up the number of dreary evenings Madonna Isabella and I have enlivened by declaiming in unison Catullus’s wild words:

Come, Lesbia, let us live and love

Nor give a damn what sour old men say . . .

Give me a thousand kisses, then a hundred,

Another thousand, another hundred,

And, in one breath, still kiss another thousand,

Another hundred . . .

After Catullus, Sappho’s love lyrics are tame stuff. But conscience overcame my indifference and
I
set about to serve the poet of Lesbos with all my heart and mind, both of which were needed since I was assigned three different texts, one in Greek and two in Latin translation, from which to derive her authentic compositions.

The Greek text had been written with a stylus on some kind of papyrus and lent to us by a rich collector from Crete who absolutely believed that it had been written by the hand of the poet herself. Both Messer Aldo and Pietro Bembo were convinced it was a forgery, but we never let on to the collector. When I asked why, Ser Aldo replied in a manner perfectly characteristic of him, “Why break his heart?” Without stopping for my answer he added, “He would not believe us anyway.”

So we treated the borrowed manuscript with all the respect due its supposed provenance but relied mostly for purity of text upon two others, each copied by the hand of a monk in the Dark Ages. One came from the monastery at Corvei and the other from Augsburg, of all places. The one from Corvei, which I judged to be the less corrupt of the two, was the plainer, with only the initial letter of each page illuminated. But it was written in a fine even script that only a fellow scribe could fully appreciate and was remarkably lacking in grammatical flaws. Of course, given the vulgar taste of our times, it had been valued at one quarter the price of the illuminated text from Augsburg. Very fancy, that one, with little pictures of the
F
’s and the
H
’s in the margins and several fully drawn pages plastered with ultramarine and gold, showing that a lot of money had been spent to decorate it.

As the work went on and I became more and more immersed in it, I came to love both the poetry of Sappho and the modest little Corvei manuscript equally. And at the end of the task, I arranged through Messer Aldo to buy it. After much soul-searching, I decided to sell one of La Nonna’s smaller jewels for the purpose. That little volume was the first acquisition of my own library.

I also reaped another reward from Sappho. Ser Aldo was so pleased with my work that he offered me a selection of the comedies of Aristophanes — lighter stuff than the great Greek tragedies which, of course, constituted the natural province of male interpreters. But I accepted what came to me under his patronage and settled into the detached life of a scholar on the isle of Murano, seeing very few people other than Judah and going almost nowhere except for the occasional visit to Ser Aldo’s press.

Never before or since have I lived more satisfied with my lot. The pangs of childlessness were somehow driven off by the regular scratching of my quill. And when I began to feel myself slipping too far beyond the family circle, a few days in Mantova gave me back what I missed. There, in my father’s old house near the fish market, my brother ruled over what he laughingly called his harem. Actually his jest contained much truth, for he took as much pride in the family of which he was unquestionably the head as any sultan. Certainly none of his four fatherless nieces and nephews suffered from the lack of a father. And, in return, the children adored their Uncle Geronimo (for some reason they preferred to call him by his Italian name).

Even Ricca found a place in this newly constituted family. She was much subdued now and, from everything I observed, had come completely under my brother’s domination. At the slightest nod from him she would break off in the middle of a sentence and inquire, “Is that not so, brother Gershom?” in a most maidenly and modest way. Her deportment toward Penina had become equally respectful although not nearly so subservient, quite proper from woman to woman, I thought. To me she returned cordiality for cordiality. Jehiel’s name was never mentioned between us. In short, we managed to throw a bridge of
cortesia
over the muddy waters that swirled below the surface of our relationship. And I left that place each time regretting that my visit had come to an end and promising to come back soon.

But always my quill beckoned. And the pile of rag vellum sheets waiting to be filled with the wisdom of the ancients. The sentimental might opine that since I was childless, the books I produced for Ser Aldo became my children. But that is twaddle. Books are books and children are children. The wonder of the printed book is that it can disseminate knowledge at such a small cost compared to a written manuscript that even the poor can afford acquaintance with Plato or Cicero. And the charm is that this is a new thing in the world, a weapon of incalculable potency in the battle of the poor and ignorant to raise themselves up. This possibility is what gave me pleasure and satisfaction in my work for Ser Aldo. Believe me, a woman, whether she has children or not, still needs to feel herself capable of worthwhile work just as a man does.

In the year 1506, I translated
The Flies
and received much credit for it. My translation of
The Birds
the next year brought me even more acclaim. At the onset of each negotiation with Ser Aldo, I bargained for better financial terms and the opportunity to tackle the
Lysistrata
, a work which amused me with its ingenious solution for balancing out the unequal powers of men and women. My monetary requests were always granted — albeit with some grumbling — but my request to bring the breath of life back to the
Lysistrata
invariably elicited a negative response. “For it is scurrilous stuff,” Ser Aldo cautioned me. “And might even be considered seditious.”

It took Madonna Isabella to ruffle the calm surface of my scholarly life in Venezia. I had given the Gonzagas almost no thought since the time of my father’s death. That part of my life was over, I thought. So when I heard that Francesco Gonzaga had traded his Venetian generalship for a high-paying commission from the French, I merely took note that in addition to his other virtues, he was a turncoat. But when I heard that he had been taken prisoner by his erstwhile patrons while sleeping in his campaign tent and was being brought into Venezia in chains, I made the effort to hie myself across to the Grand Canal to witness the spectacle along with half the city.

The day he was brought into town bonfires were lit in the
campos
; masses were sung in the churches, and cries of “Kill the traitor!” rang out everywhere. Looking down on the flotilla from General Sassatello’s loggia, I felt that history was passing in front of me as it does in Mantegna’s “Triumphs.”

The Marchese was accorded a barge of his own, as befits a prisoner of consequence. He was not caged in a crude sense but set up on a box high enough for all to see, surrounded by the unsheathed swords of the splendidly equipped guards massed at the base of his platform. His scowl when he passed below me was so ferocious I would not have been surprised to hear him growl like an animal at bay.

Following the prisoner came the booty that was captured with him. One barge displayed his silver plate and his splendid suits of armor; another the sumptuous hangings that had lined his tents; yet another his furnishings, including the spacious bed in which he was sleeping when the Venetians captured him. After this came five huge barges loaded with some of the finest horses in the world.

For weeks after her husband’s capture stories came to us at the Aldine Press — like any hive of intellectual activity, it was a major center for gossip — of Madonna Isabella’s efforts to cheer her raging bull of a husband and to effect his release. Like the others, I was amused. Nothing more. It was almost a decade since our lives had intersected. In the interim I had managed to create a gap between the time in my life when the Gonzagas mattered to me a great deal and the present, when they mattered not at all.

Then came a letter from Madama herself which put the lie to that comforting fiction. The purpose of the letter was to demand a reduction in the price of a packet of books she had ordered from the Aldine Press. But it not only contained column after column of what she characterized as pricing errors (each one of which she claimed entitled her to a discount), it also made reference to an obscure work of scholarship — authored by a Jewess residing in Venezia — for which she had long cherished high hopes. To my complete stupefaction, the work she cited was my
Book of Heroines
, which at that moment lay unedited and almost forgotten in a dusty
cassone
in our boxroom. To me, the letter came as a shock. To Ser Aldo, it added an item to his long list of grievances.

“I am vexed that I should be the last to know of this egg you have been hatching here under my roof,” he reproved me, waving the letter under my nose. “May I ask why you have been keeping this treasure from me? Is it that you do not consider the Aldine Press a sufficiently distinguished repository for your precious words?”

Could he have forgotten his stern interrogation of me on the day we met and his adamant detestation of authors’ solicitations?

“To hear of it from a third party . . .” he sniffed. “It is an affront.”

“Oh, Ser Aldo, I am sorry,” and indeed I was, for it was plain the old man had quite forgotten his diatribe against authors and was genuinely hurt that I had not confided in him.

“And what am I to make of this, lady?” He thrust in front of my nose the postscript of Madama’s letter and I read with astonishment, “Since I believe the work to be a distinguished extension of Boccaccio’s
De Claris Mulieribus
, I am prepared to sponsor Grazia dei Rossi’s
Book of Heroines
should the Aldine Press decide to publish it.” How typical of her highhanded ways to address herself directly to Ser Aldo and to overleap entirely the insignificant person of the author.

The lady’s arrogance was somewhat mitigated by a second letter, addressed to me this time, inviting me to attend on her at the Reggio in Mantova to plan the progress of my
Book of Heroines
. Notable by its absence was any mention of the long silence between us, nor did she express the slightest doubt that I would jump at her offer. Even Judah assumed I would go. He was as importunate as the habitués of the Aldine Press who descended on me en masse after the invitation arrived to offer advice, most of it having to do with ways to collect my travel expenses and my authorship fees in advance.

But in the end it was the prospect of seeing my family that drew me back to Mantova. I missed my friend Penina, and my brother Gershom, the only brother I had left. So, leaving Fingebat behind as hostage for a quick return, I set off, full of misgivings, for Mantova.

I walked into one of the most severe crises in the life of Madama Isabella. Her husband’s incarceration in Venezia had been an ordeal for her from the beginning. Now the Venetians conceived a plan whereby before her husband could be ransomed, she must give over their ten-year-old son, Federico, to stand as hostage for his father’s promise not to engage against Venezia once he was released. And her husband, the gallant Marchese, was threatening to cut her vocal cords if she did not comply.

So far, she had managed to hold on to the boy. But just as I reached Mantova, the Pope insinuated himself into the negotiations with an offer to house the little hostage in the Vatican palace under his own personal supervision.

“I will continue to resist the demands of my husband,” Madama told me. “And I will find reasons to keep Federico out of the hands of the Doge. But my will is powerless against the Pope and his saints. That monster means to take from me my last and finest treasure — my son — and I hope that God will soon ruin him and he will die.”

Then, almost without taking a breath, she quickly abandoned the detested Pope to the judgment of heaven and set herself to the practical problem of how to hold on to her son.

“The best line of approach we can take is to plead a mother’s love. Besides, it is the truest thing we can say and truth is always the best argument, is it not?” Then, without waiting for an answer from me, she went on. “You know how to phrase such letters, Grazia. Messer Equicola is hopeless, like all men.”

That is the closest I came to being hired officially as her secretary. But for once I did not feel badly used, for I found myself in total sympathy with her, especially after I had read the despicable correspondence between her and the three men who, between them, had turned a beloved little boy into a pawn in their power struggles. I was also flattered that she had asked me, a humble scribe, to speak up in her name against a marchese, a doge, and a pope.