In the Company of the Courtesan (28 page)

“I don't want to hear it. I have had enough of your fury and your sanctimony. Maybe our time together is ended.”

“Ha! Well, if it is, then I'll go gladly.” And though every word hurts now, there is something almost satisfying in the pain. “For I am as much wanted as you, you know. I could walk out of here tomorrow with the Turk and have a greater fortune than you will ever see.”

“Then why don't you go—and leave me alone.”

I make a move toward her, but my legs falter as soon as I start.

“No. Don't come near me!” Her voice is shaking so now that I cannot tell fury from fear. “I don't want anything to do with you. Not now. We'll talk in the morning.”

She turns and runs back up the stairs. I would follow her if I could, only I cannot walk now. The knife falls by my side, clattering onto the stairs. Somehow I pull myself up and get to my room. But there is no strength now, even to lock the door.

 

I am at my desk, counting, the abacus in front of me a set of shining ruby stones. There is a noise at the window, a great commotion. Fear eats at my gut. I take the beads off their string and stick them into my mouth, swallowing them down one by one until I am choking.

Now suddenly I am outside, running along a canal edge, with angry birds wheeling high above me, their cries like screams. I keep close to the wall so they cannot spot me, but everywhere I look I see myself, for the walls, even the ground beneath me, are made of mirrors now. Above me, the bird wind gets stronger. A great flock of seagulls is swooping and squawking in to land, pecking furiously at the carcasses of fish heads and mermaids' tails, which I see now are littered all around. But there is one bird much larger than the rest: a seagull still, but with talons like an eagle's, each claw as big as a pitchfork. He circles above me. I am so scared I cannot breathe, and as he dips toward me, I see his eyes, large and white like communion hosts, wells of scum-covered milk. He swoops, hooking his claws into my ears, the talons reaching deep inside to get purchase, and while I scream in agony, he picks me up by my head and lifts me off the ground.

As we soar into the sky, I look down, and now there is a woman on the street staring up at me, only the bird's eyes have become hers: wide, white circles, scummy and sightless. She is laughing, and the bird is laughing with her. But I am crying, and as the tears drop, each of them turns into a flashing red ruby, and as they hit the water a fish leaps up and snaps at them as we spin out over the ocean, the talons like steel spikes driving into my brain. We are far out to sea when I hear her, my lady, calling to me….

“Bucino. Oh, sweet Jesus, what has happened? Bucino. What it is? Speak to me. Please.”

But I cannot see her. Maybe I am dropped already into the ocean, for I cannot breathe properly either. No, I cannot breathe because I am still crying.

“For God's sake, someone get La Draga. Oh, dear Lord. Oh, I'm sorry. How long have you been like this? What happened to you? Oh, I should have known. It's all right. It's all right. I'll help you.”

Someone—she—puts arms around me, and I want to tell her that I am sick, that my smell is bad, and that I need another sleeping draft from the kitchen…but I cannot stop crying enough to get the words out.

And then the bird sticks its claws farther into my ears.

 

I do not remember my mother. She died when I was four years old, and I have no image or memory of what she looked like, though my father told me often that she was beautiful, with hair as black and sleek as a velvet cloak and skin so pale that at full moon her face was luminous in the semidarkness. Or at least that was what he said. But then it was his job to find the right words to describe things. That is what secretaries are paid to do. And while there are those who are wedded to the facts and only the facts, my father always had a hankering for poetry. Which is how he wooed my mother. Which is why, when I was born, his world ripped apart at the seams, for there are no sonnets to deformity in any book that I have read, and the only words to describe me, his own son, child of his beloved and beautiful wife, were ones connected with Hell rather than Heaven.

As to my mother's luminosity, well, since I never saw her in the moonlight, I do not know. But memory is not just the pictures that you can keep in your mind's eye. It is also things you know without ever seeing them. So while I cannot tell you what she looked like, I do know how she felt. I know the touch of her skin, the warmth of her hands, and the feeling of her arms around me. For when I was little, I am sure that she lay with me, curled herself around my strange smallness, and held me to her as if I was the most precious and most beautiful thing in the world, so special that she and I could never be separated. And that her warmth helped me with the pain. I know this because, while I do not “remember” it as it happened, the first time I ever slept with a woman, a prostitute in Rome, clean and less ugly than I, I had enough money to pay for the whole night, and while my prick enjoyed being inside her enough to show its excitement and therefore make a man of me, it was the sleeping with her that made me weep like a child. It was winter, and the room where she worked was freezing, or maybe I reminded her of a child she had lost, for she was old enough to be my mother and I was small enough. I remember sometime in the night I woke to the warmth of her breath on my neck. Her arms were around my chest, and her legs were curled under me, like a large spoon lying next to a smaller one. I lay for hours, wrapped inside the deepest comfort, reliving a memory that perhaps I never had of a time when I was loved for, rather than despite, what I am. Then, at first light, I slid out from her arms and left, so that I would not have to suffer the humiliation of her waking distaste.

 

The pain flows in and out in waves. Sometimes the bird is there with its talons, and I have to beat it off with my hands; sometimes I am alone, beached and helpless. I am awake and asleep. I am freezing in the light. I am burning in the dark. I am dead yet somehow still alive. When I try to open my eyes, I see flashes searing the darkness, and I hear someone crying, a dreadful wailing, which is both in me and an eternity away. “Help me. Oh, God, help me, please.”

The answering voice, when it comes, is gentle and cool, as cool as the fingers that rest on my domed head, moist like the chunks they chip off the ice barges in the furnace of summer. “I know how much it hurts, Bucino. I know. But it will not last forever. You will live through it and not always be in such pain. Don't be frightened…you are not alone.”

After that, there is nothing for a while. Or nothing that I remember. Only, when the fire comes again, this time there is the touch of wet cloth all over my skin. And later, when the cold sets in and chatters my teeth, I am wrapped in blankets, and someone—the same person—now rubs at my hands and feet until they thaw from ice into flesh again. The next thing I know it is night, and I am lying on my side, and one of the gouged holes of my ear is filled with an oily warmth that seeps inside, silky, soothing. I am breathing in a cave inside my head, for that is the only place I can hear anything now. The oil's presumption angers the pain, and the skewering comes again, as bad as ever before, so that I think my eggplant skull must crack down the middle and my brains spew out of my head like those of the men I saw on the streets of Rome that day. But fingers press gently down onto my skin where my neck meets my ears, rubbing around the bone, sending the warmth deeper into my head until slowly, slowly, the pain starts to roll back and fade away. And when it is over, arms come around me and hold me, and I curl up inside them and am safe again, for the bird does not come when I am held.

At some time, I don't know when, the voice comes again, gentle, like a litany, so deep inside that again I think it must be in my own mind. I am in terror at first, for now it speaks of Heaven, as if I am arrived there, describing how our bodies will become like pieces of glass, pure, shining in the sun, moving faster than arrows, but soft enough to merge into and through one another. How, when we open our mouths, the sound will be that of a thousand lutes and we will sing with the intense beauty of it all. Then the voice itself starts to sing, boyish high and sweet, yet clear enough for me to hear it through the howling pain. Only I know it is a woman's voice, for it comes with the warmth of a woman's arms again around me.

 

I wake. It is night, and for a moment it seems there is no pain. The room is dark, and I see by candlelight my mistress sitting on a chair at the end of the bed. I close my eyes. When I open them again, she has changed and it is La Draga sitting in the same place. She is there the next time too, and I look at her for longer. But the ache begins to flare, and I think I moan a little, because she is staring at me, and I swear that she is seeing me—seeing me—for she seems to smile, and in the gloom I feel a beam of light move from her whitened eye to deep inside my head, her blindness moving through my deafness, and as it reaches me so the ache is dulled before it can take hold.

Yet when I try to thank her, the room has changed and there is darkness again and she is gone. But when I sleep now, I am no longer woken by the pain.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“…from his deformity?”

“That's what she said. It is the way his ear is made, it seems, so that when water gets in, it cannot get out again, and everything starts to rot inside.”

I know I am back, not so much because the pain is gone but because the background roar in my head is absent so that I can hear again, even though their voices are low so as not to wake me.

“My God, the poor bastard, he must have been going mad with it.”

“Ah…you cannot imagine. You could hear his sobbing all over the house. Those first days were so awful. I was sure he was going to die.”

If I had the stamina, I would open my eyes and join in, but as it is, all I can do is lie with my face to the wall and listen. It will do well enough. The sound of my lady's voice has never been sweeter. Even Aretino's growl has music in it.

“So how did she cure him?”

“Sleeping drafts, unctions of special oils in his ears, warm poultices, massaging the bones. She wouldn't leave his side. I never imagined she was so fond, for the two of them bicker more than they talk. But you should have seen her, Pietro: night after night, watching over him, caring for him until the fever broke and the spasms became less severe.”

“My God, egghead or not, he's a lucky man. You'd think a deformity like his would put the fear of God into women. Yet you all rally to him. Remember Rome? There were a couple of women there who couldn't get enough of him. It used to amaze me. What is his secret?”

And my lady laughs a little. “Who is asking? Aretino the man or Aretino the scurrilous writer?”

“What? Don't tell me! It is the size of his prick!”

“Oh, shush…you will wake him.”

“Why not? Now that he is going to live, I'd say hearing this would be a better tonic than anything your kitchen can prepare.”

“Shhh.”

I hear the swish of her skirts as she moves toward the bed, and even the precision of the sound is a pleasure to me. I do not intend to deceive her, but my eyes are lead shutters, and the ebb and flow of my breathing is natural enough now that the agony is passed. I know she is close by the smell of mint and rosemary mixed on her breath. It must be Thursday. If I did have the energy to open my eyes, her skin would be milk white and her eyes clear and bright. I try to keep my eyelids from flickering and take another breath and let it out. Her scent grows fainter in the air. When their voices come now, they are quieter, farther away, though not so far that I cannot make out the words.

“He is asleep. He looks so peaceful. I have not seen his face so smooth for years.”

“You should see yourself, Fiammetta. You look at him almost as a mother looks at a child. It is strange, the two of you. Everybody wonders, you know.”

“Wonders what? Oh, Pietro, you of all people don't believe the gossip, do you?”

“Hmm! I told you. He has got a way about him.”

“And you have a mind that thrives on such base things.”

“Ah, to this sin I plead guilty. So tell me.”

“No! You, unlike him, have no loyalty. It's true, isn't it? The rumor that you are penning filth again?”

“Oh, no…not filth,
carina.
I would call it more an investigation into the various professions of love.”

“Let me guess. In the nunnery and the whorehouse.”

“I…More or less. But I promise I will never write a word about your beloved dwarf.”

“And me? Will you write about me?”

“If I do, no one will recognize you.”

“They had better not. If you betray—”

“Sweet lady, I am a slave. To both of you. You know that. We Roman adventurers must stick together.”

“Oh, so you are a Roman again. I thought you were become a full-fledged Venetian. You lie as well as they do.”

“Oh, that's a little harsh. It's true that when I write about Venice I embroider a little. But this city likes to look good in the mirror. Have you read Contarini's history? Compared with his Venice, Athens would be a failed state.”

It's true. It would. And it is to my great wonder that I can think straight about it now without being chewed up by pain. Still, everybody knows that Contarini is as much flattery as truth. Ah! God help me, I am back in the world with things to say, even if there is no energy yet to do the saying.

“Of course the city thrives on praise. Rome was the same. All that marble so the world would be dazzled by the shine. The difference is, the Aretino I knew then was more interested in exposing the dirt underneath. Why don't you spice the flattery with the tartness of truth, Pietro? Or have you really grown so soft on good living?”

Ah, my lady. How I have missed you!

“Hmm. I was young in Rome and didn't mind getting my ass kicked so much and I like Venice better. It works for its living, and its sins are more forgivable. Still, we must be careful. We could be seen as its corruption too,
carina,
and I would be a fool to bring the temple down upon our own heads. No, I will let it be known that my new work is a comment on the old Rome, and thus will I go down in history as a consummate chronicler of life. For when I write about such things—about the dance between men and women—then I do indeed tell it as it is, unvarnished, the whole truth.”

“Oh, please! ‘Ooh, ooh, put your prick in my ass again, ooh, for I am aflame, and all the pizzles of mules, asses, and oxen would not diminish my lust, even a little.' ” And her voice is silly and fluttery with fake desire. “Really, if you think that is the truth about women, Pietro, then you are more addled than your years. You simply write what you think men want to hear. And I warrant a good many of them aren't even thinking of women's bodies as they read it. What was the name of that boy you liked so well at the court in Mantua?”

“Ah, Fiammetta Bianchini! What a mouth you have on you. I should be grateful you have no urge to become a scribe yourself. But who could resist you? I tell you, if I were a marrying man—”

“—you would not marry
me.
God help us both. We would be strung up in San Marco for murder soon enough.”

“You are right. It is better this way.”

They are both laughing now. There is silence for a moment, yet it feels comfortable enough to me, the silence of old friends. Of which I am one. I am tired now and much in need of water, but I fear to break the spell; while there have been times in the past where my size has allowed me to hear conversations going on above my head, those conversations have never been about myself. What price the fame and riches of a Turkish court compared with this?

“Well, since you evidently know so much about these things, tell me about his ‘special powers.' ”

“First you swear to me that you won't put me in your book.”

“I promise that I will never use your name. On my heart.”

“You would do better to swear on your prick.”

“I must say, Fiammetta, for a woman who has had no sleep for the best part of a week, you are very lively.”

“Why not? ‘My deformity,' as you call him, is getting better.”

“So?”

“Actually, it is simple enough. You are right. He is not like other men. But it is not so much his ‘size'—and do not snigger, for I have never seen his prick nor ever will—as you well know, that is not how it is between us. Bucino has a way with women, as you call it, because he enjoys their company. Not just for the pleasure they give but for and of themselves. He is not frightened of us, and he does not need to impress or possess us—and you would be amazed, Pietro, how few men that is true of. All I know is that ever since I first met him at that stupid banker's house where he was pretending to be a jester and failing, I have felt more comfortable with him than with any other man I have ever met. Yes, you included.”

Her voice has grown a little louder. She should be careful, or she might wake me.

“So. Does that answer your question?”

“Absolutely. His secret is that he is a woman!”

Their laughter is so infectious now that I struggle to keep my breathing even, not to join in, and my throat is so dry I cannot swallow and I want to cough.

“Shhh…our voices will wake him. You may laugh at the idea, but I tell you, for all your skill with words, you will never know what that feels like. Remember that, if you can, next time you put your pen to paper.”

And this time when I swallow, as I must or I will choke, I make a noise, though I think it is covered by their laughter.

There is a pause. “You don't think he could have been awake all this time, do you?”

“Ha!” She stops, and they listen some more. But I swear I am silent as the grave now.

I think I hear her move again, though until she speaks I do not know to where.

“Well, if he is,” she says, and her voice comes from directly above me now, so close that I feel again her breath on my face,

“then I could tell him how much I have missed him. Not just these last few days either, but for the longest while. How without his voice in my ear I have at times fallen prey to melancholy and looked for reassurance in places where the gaining of it could only hurt me more. Ah, you would be surprised, Pietro, the ways in which success can be as painful as failure.” I hear the sigh she gives and the breath she takes in after it. “And after I had said all that, I would add that he should hurry back to health, for the latest news is that his troublesome fledgling is due to take wing for Crete next month to be initiated into the family trade, away from the temptations of the city. A migration that will makes us—some of us—sad.” She pauses. “Though I think we will survive.”

“Ah! Such poetry, Fiammetta, and from the woman who despises whores who compose. Perhaps you could translate it into plain language for me?”

She laughs. “Oh. It is nothing. Just women's chatter. And, since he is an honorary woman, I am sure that even if he
is
listening, he will be modest enough not to let me know he has heard. Isn't that so, Bucino?” And she raises her voice a little.

I take a long breath in, hold it for a second, and slowly, slowly, slowly, let it out again.