In the Company of the Courtesan (36 page)

We sit together on the pallet now, though there is barely enough straw in it to tell it from the floor, and she leans back against the wall.

“I still don't understand. You stayed with us and helped us. And you never took anything else,” I say after a while.

“No…” She stops. “Though you have a rude fortune inside your silver lock.”

“What?”

“One-five-two-six.”

“My God. When did you find it?”

“When do you think? When was I ever allowed into your special chamber?”

“You broke the code?”

“I've always been good at things like that.” She pauses. “Does she use them for her men?”

“No. It is an investment. We will sell it to pay for our old age.”

“Then I hope you get a fat sum. When you get old, you'll have to be careful with your joints, Bucino. They'll grow stiff faster than most men's.”

And her concern curdles my insides again. “Did you always know so much about dwarves?”

“A little. I learned more after I met you.”

“I wish…I wish I had taken more time to learn about you.”

She shakes her head. “We haven't time for that now.” She puts out a hand, and it connects with the top of my head. “It's not really an eggplant, you know,” she says. “I only said it to get you angry that first time when you asked me how blind I was. Remember? Oh, you were always so eager to fight with me….” And now, suddenly, I feel a shakiness in her. “I don't…”

“Shush.” I bring my hand up and put it over hers again, then pick it up, holding it carefully between both of my own. I stroke her skin, running my finger gently along the wrist where they have applied the rope. “You're right. We don't need to talk about the past.” Her fingers helped me so much. Made the ocean tides of pain drain away. I would give anything to do the same for her now.

“I think…I think I'm tired. Maybe I will lie down for a while.”

I help her as she stretches out, and as I do the smell of her, sweet and sour, is like heady perfume all around me. I watch a long shiver pass across her form. “Are you cold?”

“A little. Will you lie with me? You must be tired too.”

“I—I…Yes, yes I will.”

I try so hard to be careful, arranging myself so I do not disturb her, but as soon as my body comes into contact with hers, I feel myself start to grow hard. My God, they say men get erections when they drop the trap on the scaffold. Did Adam have more control over his own body before the apple? I think if God wanted us to behave better, he should have helped us more. I draw away quickly so she will not feel me.

We lie that way for a moment, then, gently, I move my arm across and over her body. She takes my hand and holds it in hers.

Her voice, when it comes next, is sleepy, blurred with the power of the draft. “I'm afraid I was never good at such things, Bucino. I only ever did it a few times, and I never grew to like it.” She lets out a long breath. “Still, I would not take it back. For her sake.”

So at last I understand it all. Now, when it is too late. “Oh, I think you have little enough to regret,” I say, and I squeeze her hand gently. “Believe me, I have seen enough of it by now to know it is more a thing of the body than a thing of the soul. You have done more for people in your life by taking away their pain than by giving them pleasure.”

“You think so?” And I daresay, if she were not so tired, she might tell me more, for it is a conversation long overdue. But I can feel her slipping away. I pull her closer to me and hold her, feeling the rhythm of our breathing, rising, falling, until her body goes slack against mine. She sleeps. As does the sad Faustina in the cell next door. And, while it is not my intention, for I want to remember every second of this night, it seems that I sleep too.

 

Dawn does not penetrate underground stone, and the candle has long ago sputtered out. So it is noise that wakes me: his thumping footsteps and the angry clank of the keys. I sit up because I do not want to be found like this, but I cannot extract myself properly, for she has hold of my hand still and even in her sleep does not let it go.

He is at the door, his candle poking into our intimacy. “Time's up. I'm out of here, and if you don't go now you'll be underground for the rest of your life.”

“Elena. Elena?”

I feel her moving beside me.

“Had a good time, eh?” He lifts the lamp above him so that it throws light on us both. “Well, everyone deserves a last fuck. Especially if they pay for it.”

She is sitting up now, though her eyes are so caked and closed that I'm not sure she can see me at all.

“Elena,” I whisper. “I have to go. I'm sorry. Listen to me. Remember the cakes. One for the pain and two…two or three for before they take you…. It will help. You can remember that, yes?”

“Hey! Get yourself out, quick now.” Now that the money has run out, I am a cockroach again.

Only now it is I who cannot let go of her hand.

“It is all right, Bucino. It's all right.” And she withdraws it gently herself. “We are not fighting anymore. You can go now.”

I get up and walk stiff-legged through the half-open gate. I see the jailer's smirk. And at that moment I want to kill him, throw myself at him, sink my fangs into his neck, and watch the blood spurt.

“Bucino?”

Her voice calls me back.

“I…There is something I have to tell you. Her name…her name is Fiammetta.” She stops for a second, as if it is all too much of an effort. “And I came back because I missed you. Both of you. And because I wanted to be part of it.”

The door slams behind me, and she turns her face to the wall again.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

I spend the night of her execution propped in my chair in the loggia, high enough to see the water, the rooftops low enough to catch the first gray before sunrise. Time moves slowly. I do not sleep, and I do not think. Or if I do, I cannot remember what or about whom. I am up in anticipation long before the moment. The hour before the dawn always has an edge to it. The hour of the last wager, the hour of the final intimacies of the night, the hour of prayer before the matins bell.

The house is silent as I move down the stairs to the bottom and out onto the wooden dock. The current slaps carelessly against the sides of our gondola, and I edge myself to the very end of the wood, until the canal is beneath me. Dawn is in the air now, if not yet in the sky. I can feel it, like a great winch, pulling the sun slowly up to its breaking point above the horizon. I look down into the water. I am still frightened of it. Even though I know it is perhaps no deeper than the height of a room, it still feels fathomless to me. I am right to be scared. I have been inside it now. I know that drowning will be the most awful death in the world.

But Elena Crusichi will not drown. She will hear the hollow slap of the water against the wood as they row her out into the middle of the wide Orfano Canal. And though Mauro's fruit will have made her drowsy, she will feel the panic rising. But she will never feel herself sucked down into the black depths. Because as she sits there, next to the priest, with her hands tied in front of her, waiting, without warning the man behind her will slip a rope over her head and around her neck, and, with two or three hard, fast twists, choke first the breath and then the life out of her. Of course garroting is not nothing. As with every form of death, there are degrees of proficiency: it can be long or short, a bloody semidecapitation or a sudden, intense throttling. It all depends on the skill and experience of the executioner. And we have been promised the very best. She will gasp and retch for breath, and the struggle will be sharp and over soon enough.

Only her body will go down into the deep. Elena Crusichi will already be gone.

That is what Mauro's rich sauces, my lady's pleading and her open legs, have done for us. There was no last-minute pardon. Loredan did not lie to us. He did what he could, but he said it himself: at another time, perhaps; but an inflammatory crime in an inflammatory moment calls for a stern response. There will be no gloating, no spectacle. The point is not cruelty but stability. Venice the peaceful demands Venice the just.

As for what comes next, well, as I stand here, I am comforted by a memory—my God, it is so sharp, down through so many years—of a poem that Aretino read to me once in Rome, when he and I were both new to my lady's house and he would come into the kitchen to practice his vernacular wit among the servants. Oh, he was outrageous then; pretty, almost like a girl, clever, strutting, willing to fly into the face of the sun, and I was young and angry enough with my deformity to want to fly with him, to find the idea of rebellion against the Church and even God intoxicating. I remember his voice, so caustic and strong.

From summer to winter the rich

Are in Paradise, and the poor are in Hell.

And the blind fools who await the dove

With fasting and absolutions and Our Fathers

Serve only to fatten the orchard

For friars for their cloisters.

“So, Bucino! If that is true, which of us should be afraid of death now? Those who have it all already or the ones who go without? Imagine it. How would it be if the end was not Heaven or Hell but just an absence of life? My God, I swear that would be Heaven enough for most of us.”

I am sure he confessed such heretical notions long ago, for he writes with a certain beauty about God now, and it is not, I think, just to keep him in the good books of the state. Revolution is a young man's fantasy; there is so much of life ahead in which to change your mind. Yet I am no longer young, and I still think of that poem, still wonder about the man who wrote it, if his absence of life proved also an absence of suffering.

The air is warm and gauzy. In front of me the sky is stained with pinks and mauves, mad colors, too wild for the moment—just like the morning when I set out from my lady's house in Rome to try to find the cardinal. So many died then. Thousands of them…like broken fragments in the mosaic floor.

The struggle will have stopped. The deed will be done. She will be one of those now.

And what of us? What are we now?

“Bucino?”

I don't hear the door opening, so her voice, though quiet enough, runs like a knife through me.

She is in her robe, her hair long and untidy down her back. Of course she has not slept either, simply kept her own vigil. She is carrying a pottery drinking cup. “Mauro made this for you: warmed malmsey.”

“He is up?”

“They are all up. I don't think anyone has slept.”

I take a sip. It is sweet and warm. Not like the water at all. After a while she puts her hand on my shoulder. I hear someone crying from inside. Gabriella. There is a lot to cry for. She will have no one to soothe the stabbing pains she gets during her cycle of the moon anymore.

“It's done,” I say.

“Yes, it's done. Come in now and we will sleep a little.”

 

But it seems it is not done. Not quite over yet.

I sleep, though for how long I have no idea, because, when the frantic knocking wakes me, it feels as if it is still dawn. Somehow I get myself to the door and open it to see Gabriella's amazed, excited face. Oh, God, oh, God, what if they have pardoned her? What if we are saved?

“You have to come, Bucino. She's downstairs on the dock. Mauro saw her when he went out to throw away the rubbish. We don't know what to do. My lady is there, but you have to come.”

My legs are bowed with tiredness, and they almost trip me as I rush, I am so bandy. I move to the
portego
loggia first, for at least I can see from there. My lady is standing almost directly beneath me on the dock, still, almost frozen. In front ofher is a small child. She has a cloud of white hair, with the rising sun ablaze behind her. And at her feet sits a small, bulging bag.

I fall down the stairs and out through the water doors. My lady throws her hand behind her to stop me from going any farther. I halt. The child glances up, then down again.

My lady's voice is richest silk. “—tired to have come so far so early. Who brought you? Did you see the sun come up over the sea?”

But the child says nothing. Just stands and blinks in the light.

“You must be hungry. We have fresh bread and sweet jams inside.”

Still nothing. Her mother pretended to be blind; now her daughter is as adept at faking deafness. It is a shrewd test, to be so good at keeping one's own counsel. And a skill one cannot learn early enough. I move around my lady's skirts carefully until I am in front of her.

She is smaller than I, and in the last weeks her legs have grown sturdier. I daresay she is using their new firmness now to back up her will. My God, she has enough of her mother in her to hound me to my grave. Oh, the pain of it, to see her again. But also the utter, utter joy. Her eyes flick to me, hold there for a whole, unblinking, solemn second, then move away again. At least she has acknowledged I am here.

My lady rests her hand on my shoulder. “I'll go and fetch us some food.”

I nod. “And bring the engraved goblet out too,” I say quietly. “The one that Alberini brought you as a first gift.”

Her footsteps move inside.

I study this imp in front of me. There is griminess around the edges of her mouth, as if she has recently eaten something sticky, and there is a smudge on her forehead. Maybe she slept against the dirty wood on the boat and woke up with it. Under the halo of wild, white curls, her cheeks are fat, as if they have great bubbles caught inside them, and her mouth is pouting full. My God, she is lovely. I can see her on the ceiling of a room in a palace, wings too small for her chubby body, her truculence transformed into mischief, as she holds aloft our Lady's train while they propel themselves toward Heaven. Tiziano could use her to charm a flood of ducats out of his tightfisted mother superiors. But is it innocence he would capture here? I am not so sure. Certainly there is strength. And suspicion. I warrant something of her mother's intelligence too.

Of course she would have known better than anyone that there would be no children in this house unless someone gave us one, and how much it would be loved and cared for if someone did. An old great-grandparent and a mother at the bottom of the sea. The last will and testament of Elena Crusichi. And I understand that this is how it will be for me: how every time I look at her I will taste one in the other. Now and for as long as I live. That is the nature of my punishment.

My punishment, but also our saving.

My lady is so nervous with excitement that she almost drops the glass. The bread is warm in a basket, half a dozen small balls of it. I hold one out to her, for its smell would tempt Saint John the Baptist out of the wilderness. She wants it, I can tell. She won't give in, though. But this time there is slight movement of the head.

I put down the basket and pick up four or five more rolls. They are almost too soft for it, but I try anyway: juggling a few of them in the air until the aroma of fresh baking is all around us. She is watching now, and there is excitement in her face.

I let one drop. It falls close to her foot. I catch the rest, then pick it up and solemnly hold it out to her. Her hand comes out, and she takes it. For a second it looks as if she will just hold it, but then in one swift move it goes into her mouth, all in one bite.

“Look,” I say as she chews. “I have something else for you.” I lift my hand to take the goblet from my lady. “See? This here on the side, the writing? Isn't it clever? Does your grandfather do things like this?”

She nods slightly.

“It's for you. He left it here with us. Do you see? Look. Look at the letters. Here is your name. F-i-a-m-m-e-t-t-a.”

Behind me, I hear my lady's sharp intake of breath.

The child looks eagerly to see where I'm pointing. Though she is too young to decipher letters, she knows her name well enough.

“It's for you. To drink out of while you are here. You can hold it if you want. Though you must be careful, for it will break easily. But then I think you know that already about glass.”

She nods and holds out her hands for it, cupping it between her palms carefully as if it were a living thing that she is holding, and staring at the letters. And already I think I see a flash in her eyes that makes me know she will be reading them soon enough. She looks at the goblet for a long time, then hands it back to me.

“So, shall we go in?”

I pick up her bag, and she follows us into the house.