In the Company of the Courtesan (9 page)

CHAPTER SIX

“No flattery now, right, Bucino? This is not the time.”

We are sitting together near a thick seawall. The water of the lagoon in front of us is as flat as the surface of a table. With the crowd dispersed, we have made our way across the arched bridge by the Scuola of San Marco, then north along the waterway that cuts upward from the Grand Canal to the shore until we are at the very top of the north island. The sky has cleared, and while it is too cold to loiter, the air is clear and bright, so that we can see past the island of San Michele as far as Murano, where a hundred glass foundries belch thin columns of smoke into the pale air.

“So. Let's start with the one in yellow, the one who couldn't keep her head still, even in church. She is either famous or desperate to become so.”

“Her name's Teresa Salvanagola. And you're right, it's fame that's making her brazen. She has a house near the Scuola of San Rocco—”

“—and a list of clients as big as her tits, I have no doubt. Who are her keepers?”

“There's a silk merchant and one of the Council of Forty, although she also entertains outside. Most recently she has taken up with a young bachelor from the Corner family—”

“—at whom she was making eyes during the raising of the host. She needn't have bothered, he is well enough hooked. She is lovely, though the plasterwork on her face probably means she's starting to show her age. All right, who's next? The young, sweet one, in the deep purple silk bodice and crimson lace. Delicate, with a face like one of Raphael's Madonnas.”

“The rumor is she is from out of town. There's not much I could find out about her. She is new.”

“Yes, and very fresh. And still finding it all great sport, I suspect, as if she can't believe her luck. Was it her mother next to her? Oh, it doesn't matter. For now let's assume it was. She can't be doing it alone so young, and as they came out, I thought there was a certain similarity around the mouth. But did you see her then? Oh, there was spice in that innocence. Like honey to the bees, buzz buzz…Who else? There was one I couldn't see properly in the square because the statue was in the way. Fair, frizzy hair and shoulders like bed pillows.”

“Julia Lombardino,” I say, and I see again his limp and the glimpse of a beard as he moved through the crowd.

She waits. “And? Even I could find out her name, Bucino. You are not to be congratulated yet. What else?”

Not now. There would be no point unless I was sure. “She is native Venetian. Clever, known for her education.”

“Outside the bedroom as well as in, I presume.”

“She writes verses.”

“Oh, God, save us from whore poetesses! They are more boring than their clients. Still, from the flock she had gathered around her, it appears she must flatter as well as she rhymes. Was there anyone else there I should know about?”

And because I cannot be sure it was him, I say nothing. “No one serious, not today. There are others, but they all operate in different parishes.”

“So let me hear about them.”

I talk for a few moments. She listens carefully, asking only the occasional question. When I am finished, she shakes her head. “If they are all successful, then there are more than I expected. Rome was not so full.”

I shrug. “It's a sign of the times. There were more beggars too when we came. War breeds chaos.”

She slips a finger up to her forehead. The scar is almost invisible to the eye now, but I daresay she can still feel it. “Is there any news, Bucino? Do you know what's happening there?”

We do not talk about the past, she and I. It has seemed better for us to be looking forward rather than back. So I have to think before I speak, because it is hard to know what to tell and what to leave out.

“The pope is fled to Orvieto, where he struggles to raise his ransom and where his cardinals are forced to ride on mules as if they were the first Christians again. Rome is still run by soldiers, and bad water and rotting flesh have brought pestilence and cholera.”

“What of our people? Adriana, Baldesar?”

I shake my head.

“If you knew, you would tell me, yes?” she says, and does not let me look away.

I take a breath. “I would tell you.” Though I do not tell the stories I have heard of the pits dug near the city walls where a hundred corpses a day were pushed into quicklime; no names, no tombstones.

“What about the others? Did Gianbattista Rosa get out?”

“I don't know. Parmigianino, it seems, is safe, as is August Valdo, though his library is lost. The Germans used it to light their stoves with.”

“Oh, my Lord. What of Ascanio?”

I watch him again, darting into the mayhem, his fancy little book left behind him. “No news.”

“And his master, Marcantonio?”

I shake my head.

“Then he must be dead. If he had survived, he would have made it to Venice by now. The best printing presses in the world are here.” She pauses. “And our cardinal? He is dead too, yes,” she says, and there is no question in her voice. I say nothing.

“You know, Bucino, sometimes I think about that night when you came back from the walls. If we had known how it was going to be, I wonder if we wouldn't have given up then and there.”

“No,” I say quietly. “If we had known, we would have done exactly what we did.”

“Ah, Bucino, sometimes you sound like my mother. ‘Regret is a rich woman's luxury, Fiammetta. Time is short, and you must run with it rather than against it. Always remember that the man yet to come could be richer than the one before.' ” She shakes her head. “Just think, Bucino. Some mothers teach their children prayers to go with the rosary beads; by my first confession, I already knew things I couldn't tell any priest. Ha! Well, it's as well she can't see us now.”

Behind us the hulls of the boats crack against the stone quays. Though the sun is out, the wind is sharp. I can feel it ringing in my ears, and I lift my shoulders to protect them. When I was young, I would sometimes suffer from pains that would worm deep inside my head, and I fear the winter might bring them on again. In Rome you hear horror stories of the North: how sometimes people's fingers freeze at night so that they have to crack them back into life in the morning. But my lady is almost recovered now and will soon be making heat in all kinds of places.

“So.” And her voice is different, as if it too has changed with the weather. “This is how it seems to me. If we substitute the bachelors for the clergy and add all the businessmen and foreign merchants and ambassadors, then there is as good a market here as in Rome. And if the others are all as they were today, then in the right clothes I could take on any one of them.”

As she says the words, she stares straight at me to read any shadow of doubt she might see there. Her hood is pushed back and her hair secured into a wide band woven with fake flowers, so that it is impossible to tell its real length. While the decoration is secondhand, the face is her own. In Rome, toward the end of her reign, she had been known to let young painters measure the distances between her chin, her nose, and her forehead in their search to verify the dimensions of perfect symmetry. But what made their hands tremble was the way those fierce green eyes looked directly into theirs and the stories of how, when she was naked, she could cloak herself in her hair alone. Her hair. That is my only question.

“I know, I think about it constantly. But La Draga has a source. There are certain convents where she heals sick nuns and where there is a market for novitiates' locks. And she knows a woman who can weave new hair into old using golden threads so that the join leaves barely a mark. I think we must try it. If we wait for mine to grow back long enough, I'll be using as much chalk on my cheeks as the Salvanagola woman. We have enough money for it, yes? How many rubies do we have left?”

I take a breath. “After this last one I changed, two, including the great one. And a few good pearls.”

“We have spent four rubies in six months? How is that possible?”

I shrug. “We feed a household now. Your hair grows again and your face is lovely.”

“Still, La Draga's prices are not so expensive, surely?”

“No, but neither is she cheap. We gambled you would recover quickly, and so you have. No one doubts her skill, but she charges witches' rates and it's a sellers' market.”

“Oh, Bucino…La Draga is no witch.”

“That's not what the gossip says. She does a good enough imitation. Her eyes are turned inside out, and she walks like a spider with half its legs cut off.”

“Ha! You are a dwarf who waddles with a grin like an imp from Hell, yet you'd be the first to skewer anyone who read the Devil into your deformity. And since when do you listen to gossip as if it were fact?” She stares at me. “You know, Bucino, I do believe you're cross with her because she spends more time with me than you do. You should join us. Her wit can be as ripe as yours, and she sees well enough into people without using her eyes.”

I shrug. “I'm too busy for women's talk.”

It's true that while my lady's recovery is as much in my interest as in hers, the endless business of women's beauty can crush a man with boredom. But it is more than that. My crossness, as Fiammetta calls it, is real enough. For all her magic fingers, La Draga still sends shudders through me. I came upon them together once at the end of the day, in a fit of laughter over some tale my lady was telling about the wonder and richness of life in Rome. They did not notice me right away, and though no one can read greed into a blind woman's eyes, I swear in that moment I could feel longing like a fast fever in her, and I wondered how wise my lady was to trust her so.

For her part, La Draga is as wary of me as I am of her. I get none of her laughter or wit; instead we meet only briefly at the end of each week, when she comes for her money. She stays standing at the kitchen door, twisted inside her cloak, her eyes milk-thick so that she seems to be looking backward into her own skull. Which suits me well enough, for I don't want her looking any further into mine. She asked me a few weeks ago if my ears hurt with the cold and said that if they did, she could give me something to help with the pain. I hate the fact that she knows so much about my body, as if she feels herself superior to me, she with her twisted spine and mad blindness. Her eyes and the stink of her remedies make me think of drowning in scummy water. At first, when I was more homesick than I would let myself admit, she summed up all that I loathed most about the city. Now, even if I am wrong about her, it is hard to break the habit of crossing swords.

“Well, all I know is she can cure more than wounds, and despite her bent body, she feels sorry for no one, least of all herself. Which is a quality you share with her. I think you would like her if you gave her a chance. Still…we have more important things to do than argue about La Draga. If we put the pearls and the great ruby together, do we have enough to set ourselves up?”

“It depends on what we're buying,” I say, relieved to be back to business. “For clothes, it's better than Rome. The Jews running the secondhand market are sharp, and they sell tomorrow's fashions before today's are old. Yes”—I put up my hand to stem her objection—“I know how much you hate it, but new clothes are a rich whore's luxury, and for now it will have to do.”

“Then I do the choosing. That goes for the jewelry too. Your eye is good, but Venetians can spot a fake long before the foreigner can. I'll need my own perfume too. And shoes—and they cannot be secondhand.” I bow my head to hide my smile: the pleasure is as much in the edge of her hunger as in the rush of her knowledge. “What about furniture? How much must we buy?”

“Less than in Rome. Hangings and tapestries can be hired. So can seats, chests, plates, linen, ornaments, glasses…”

“Oh, Bucino.” She claps her hands in delight. “You and Venice were made for each other. I had forgotten how much it is the city of the secondhand.”

“That's only because so many fortunes are broken as well as made here. And,” I say, because she needs to remember that I am as good at my job as she is at hers, “to that end, if we have to hire a house, we will start in debt, and we have no security to buy us credit.”

She stops and thinks for a moment. “Is there any other way to begin?”

“Like what?”

“We take a house but hold it only until we have snared the right prey.”

I shrug. “God knows, you have grown lovely again, but even with new hair, it will take time to build up a trade.”

“Not if we were offering something special. Something—immediate.” And she rolls the word in her mouth. “So imagine this. A lovely young woman comes to town and takes a house in a place where the world walks by. She is new, fresh. She sits at the open window with a copy of Petrarch in her hands—my God, we even have the right book already—and smiles at those who pass. Word gets around, and some young—and not so young—men come and look at her. She doesn't move away as modesty demands she should but instead lets them gaze more, and when she does notice them, she is coy and flirtatious at the same time. After a while a few of them knock on the door to find out who she is and where she comes from.” And there is mischief in her eyes as she tells it now. “You didn't know me then, Bucino, but I played this once to perfection. Mother took a house near the Sisto bridge for a week when we first came to Rome. She had had me practice every smile and gesture for weeks before. We had twelve bids within the first two days—twelve!—most of them from men of substance. We were set up in a small house on the Via Magdalena two weeks later. I know, I know, it is a risk. But I was never seen here—my mother made sure of that—and I am not so old that I couldn't pass for younger. As far as they are concerned, I could be fresh merchandise.”