Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (18 page)

Perhaps I have died and gone to heaven, I think, and heaven for me is Venice, that city of the heart; but the actual growling of my stomach convinces me that I am not in heaven, for surely heaven, whatever configuration it takes, has no hunger. (But what about hell? Has hell hunger?)

My maid runs in. She has come to empty the slops and fill the water jug, open wide the shutters on the
campiello
, stoke the fire, and help me dress.

She babbles to me in a curious dialect—part Venetian, part Hebrew, it sounds to my sleepy ears. If Arlecchina has sent me back in time, why has she not given me the language? My head is clogged with the clutter of inventions that have not yet been invented, words not yet shaped to the tongue, the useless impedimenta of the twentieth century. Strip all these away, I command myself. Sink or swim. Here I am alone in another time, knowing neither the language, nor the rules, nor my own position, age, history. All I know is that my name remains Jessica. Well, this will have to do.

The girl helps me up. I stagger to my washstand and looking glass, eager to see my face—whether it, too, has changed. It has not.

The same hazel-golden eyes, the same russet curls (though tinged with henna at the front), the same bosom, the same hands, the same feet. Even the hangnail I had some days before—in the twentieth century—is there. What a curious relief!

I allow my maid to help me wash, dress, and do my hair, hoping that with each motion, each garment, I may acclimate to this world in which I find myself. Perhaps even the memories of this past life will flood back to me so that I do not seem like an amnesic but rather like a normal person going about her normal life. Yet it is hard to stay calm in these circumstances. I am transfixed with wonder and terror that Arlecchina's magick has worked.

Then, all at once, a tingle begins in my toes, rises to my knees, my thighs, my quim, my navel, my waist, my breasts, my shoulders, my neck. My face becomes flushed and prickles as if with heat rash. My temples pound. It is as if I am a vessel filling up with the hot liquid of memories, dreams, desires. Every person is not just a physical body but a shadowy, psychic body of accumulated knowledge, longings, reveries. Perhaps the psychic body of Jessica has just, belatedly, caught up with me, and all of a sudden—God knows how—I can speak!

“Signorina Jessica,” says the maid, a saucy little number, “your father has gone to his prayers and demands that you come to the synagogue at once. Signor Shalach does not like to wait. He says bad enough that you are a spinster and give him no grandchildren, you could show your face amongst the women in the synagogue so as not to disgrace him utterly.”

“Impudent baggage,” I mutter, staring imperiously at this maid who dares be so rude to her mistress. I choose a crimson dress over a shift of white lawn and proceed to make my elaborate toilette with the sullen girl's help. This is not so easy. A profusion of pots and paints, pins and brushes, are put before me and I struggle with them, trying not to look like an idiot as I go about this elementary female task of doing my face in another time. But more than the unfamiliarity of the dressing table is the unfamiliarity of the smells. My maid smells rank with sweat. Do I smell the same? The hardest thing to love about the past may be its smell!

Everywhere my nose is assaulted by unfamiliar odors: the smell of fish, the smell of slops, my maid's sweat, my own. I have gone back into a century without deodorants, without abundant baths and showers. Will I ever get used to this? One gets used to everything in time, I tell myself.

Also, it occurs to me that I am friendless here. All my friends are dead—or, rather, they have not yet been born, which perhaps is the same thing. Even Antonia still waits somewhere on a cloud, for me and all her ancestors to be born. That thought fills me with such sadness that a tear comes to the corner of my eye and swells with luminescence, then makes a track down the white paint on my face. I watch in the wavy looking glass while it slides down my cheek. Death is everywhere about me, I think. Even the paint I put on is poisonous with lead. But then the question is, if I have defied death and time by journeying back here, am I still in danger of death from white lead, or plague, or anything? If I die now, shall I have to wait four hundred years to be reborn?

I am alone in this time, I think. But then I remember that I am not quite friendless, for that auburn-haired apparition I met in the ghetto is my friend and I feel I know him. Looking into his sad eyes last night, I felt I knew the depths of his soul. And I have read his poems—even those he thinks he has not yet conceived—and anyone who truly reads another's poems knows his soul.

Staggering on my high
zoccoli
, I am led, leaning on my maid, down into the
campiello
, then up into what seems another, smaller synagogue.

This time I am taken to the latticed women's gallery, where I sit amongst the women while the rabbi preaches in Venetian laced with Hebrew, while the men mutter their prayers below, while I am absorbed into the past.

I look down into the men's section, hoping to spot my father. Some of the men are clean shaven, some bearded. Many look less Jewish than Venetian, wearing their fashionable doublets and breeches, their goffered ruffs and golden chains.

Suddenly I see the one who commandeered me last night: a bearded old Jew whose face has been twisted by anger, and then has settled into embittered disappointment. He pulls on a reddish beard frosted with gray, and he seems more and more disconsolate as the sermon goes on.

The rabbi, I begin to make out (as I settle into this world, as I begin to understand not only its language but also its gestures and expressions), is preaching against gambling, warning of the plague, predicting that it will surely return if the Jews persist in their godlessness and game like Christians. He denounces those who ride in gondolas on the Sabbath, who redeem pledges on the Sabbath, who even have Christians in their homes to deal in used things—clothes, jewels, plate—on the Sabbath.

The old red-bearded man coughs and looks discomfited. He mutters to himself and shifts in his seat as the rabbi thunders of plague, invoking biblical exempla. The gorgeously dressed women about me shake their heads and give each other ironical looks (as though they know that preaching against these excesses is totally in vain).

Then the rabbi goes on, condemning Jews who watch heathen festivals like regattas and fireworks, who do not keep the faith of their fathers strictly enough. The sermon becomes repetitious, and I observe how, in every age, the mouthpiece of official piety is equally tedious, equally predictable.

All at once, I see him again. He is there in the synagogue, half hidden behind a tall Jew. He is sitting, in fact, not far from my father, taking in the sermon and nodding his head. I can see his thinning auburn hair beneath the black biretta he wears in honor of this holy place. Can he possibly be agreeing with the rabbi? Has he come from a night of sin and depravity, or have I only imagined it? Who can tell?

Later, in my father's private chambers, we meet again. Sabbath or not, my father has a long line of gentiles waiting to redeem pledges, and he has commanded me to come to his aid. I write down each sum in a ledger book and make a careful line through the name of the article redeemed.

What an assemblage of objects has found its way into the ghetto! Small paintings by the great Venetian masters, tapestries, plate, jewels from Constantinople and Cathay, pearls from the Orient, incense from the Levant, holy relics.

My father grumbles as he redeems the pledges. He grumbles that the low rate of interest allowed by the state barely allows him to survive. He grumbles that Jews are nothing to the Serenissima now, walled in the ghetto, bound to a measly five percent of interest—unlike the ten percent of years gone by, when Jews lived freely about the town, had great shops on the Rialto, and were proper Venetians in nearly every respect.

“We are treated like caged-up curs by the city we love and serve,” says Shalach, my father. His Hebrew name is Judah, but some call him Leone in the Italian fashion, after the Lion of Judah. He is an embittered man but not, I think, without his reasons. He loves Venice like an unrequited lover, and Venice scorns him for a Jew.

The young Englishman advances with his pledge. He bears a small silver mirror on which the crest of some great English house is engraved. He hands it to my father, who turns it over and over, making shimmery suns on the ceiling of the room. I look up. My eyes meet the Englishman's and my heart begins to race. Every woman knows that a man is a sort of door into the future. Is this man a door into ruin or into freedom? Into life or into death? I cannot tell. Once, in another life, I read of a Jewess flogged in the ghetto for the mere suspicion of her relation to a Christian man. There is grave danger here. I only know that I feel a door is opening on creaky hinges and I am full of longing, and also full of fear.

“How long?” says Shalach.

“Only a little while,” says the Englishman. “Then I shall redeem it. How much for it?”

Shalach turns the mirror over and over, now bedazzling the ceiling, now reflecting his own grizzled face.

“My ducats or my daughter?” says Shalach, noting the play of eyes going on between us, the play of eyes connoting future sighs.

“Ah,” says the Englishman, “your ducats.” But it seems he means “daughter.”

“Not more than five,” says my father, “and then, of course, the interest, the paltry interest that the great Serenissima permits to those she taxes without mercy, and allows the luxury of these great palazzi…” He indicates with an ironical nod of his head the narrow walls of the ghetto “skyscraper” in which we find ourselves.

“And what's the interest?” asks the Englishman.

“A pound of flesh,” jokes the Jew, my father. “A pound of flesh nearest to the heart—
my
heart, of course. But 'tis only a Jew's heart, and so it doth not bleed as doth a Christian's.” It is a joke, of course, but a bitter joke under which much truth lurks. “In sum, five percent—not more, not less. I cannot even pay my rent here in the ghetto with five percent, nor clothe this daughter that you find so beauteous, nor gamble like a Christian, buy jewels or plate…” He glances about the room, which is gorgeously appointed with unredeemed pledges, all of them for sale. We live in luxury, amongst things that do not belong to us. Our house is rented. All our richly carved chests full of silk, our tapestries, our paintings in their gilded frames, are but passing through our home on the way to other homes. Yet this is the way of life, is it not? Objects belong to no one. Ducats had as lief be faery gold. They pass from hand to hand, greasing the world but not entering into its essence. And what is its essence? Love.

The Englishman looks at me again. I boldly return his gaze.

“Very well,” he says. “Five ducats, with interest.” From the way he says this word “interest,” it seems he also leaves his heart here in the ghetto.

Shalach dispenses the money.

I take the silver mirror, examine it, look at my own reflection in it, then dip my quill in ink and pause, quill poised to register the object in my ledger.

“What, Signore, shall I name this thing, this pledge of yours?”

“'Tis the reflection of a noble house of Albion brought low by lechery,” says the Englishman.

“Come, sweet Signore, gentle Signore,” Shalach says with heavy irony, “we can make do with less philosophy.”

“If a Jew can lend five ducats with philosophy, why shall a Christian not
borrow
five ducats with philosophy? Hath not a Christian brains? Hath not a Christian conscience, pain, bitterness, and philosophy as much as any Jew?”

Shalach laughs. “Well said, too. But we do not see many such Christians here. Perhaps in England such wonders abound, though methought 'twas a barbaric land where even the fork is unknown and men eat their meat like curs, with greasy paws.”

“'Tis true,” says the Englishman, also laughing. “We bait the bear, eat with our paws, and mate with women who are as scullery maids to the magnificence of your Venetian ladies. I give you good day, Signor Shalach and Signorina Jessica.”

“Jessica? You know my daughter's name?” says Shalach suspiciously.

“You might say she made the name breed in my mouth, when my eyes first conceived her,” says the Englishman. “What else could she be called but Jessica, which means ‘she who looks out'—as out a window opening on faery casements.”

My father looks at me with grave and threatening eyes. “In future, look inward, daughter, or your eyes may be blinded by what they see.” And to the Englishman he says, “I give you good day, Signore.”

In my ledger, I scrawl the words: “
uno specchio d'argento—Inghilterra.
”

And then he is gone. He uses up one golden ducat bribing a guard again to leave the ghetto, and then he wanders the city with his four ducats, passing through the Rialto full of bustling shops selling glass and gold, mirrors and tapestries, fresh fish and week-old carrion.

He is thinking of the woman he has met, of her beauty, of his throbbing desire for her, greater even than his desire for that other dark lady who inspired such bitter poems of throttled lust. He is thinking also about money, what people do for money: kill for it, rob consecrated graves, sue without merit, marry those they do not love—thwarting love, thwarting desire. He is thinking also about debt. Debt is not unknown to him. His father in Stratford is a debtor; he himself has known what it is to be a poor supplicant for ducats, pence, pounds; a patron's plaything, a poet, and a player that must eat to play, and play to eat—words being notoriously unnourishing. In his heart there is the rebel thought that somehow he will make his words
pay
, that he will earn enough by words to have a coat of arms, a house, heart's ease for his poor debtor father, and recognition from a mocking wife—Anne, sweet, scolding, bitter Anne—who was once so dark and dirty abed but now has naught but words of money, and the lack thereof.