Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (21 page)

Now, with a mighty gust from the open sea, they are blown across the lagoon, faster than Will can steer. Will surrenders to his fate. “I am thine,” says he in a soft voice. “Thy will be done.” And with that resignation, such peace takes him that truly he does not care whether his gods assign him to life or death. He hopes for a miracle, but does not expect one. In such a frame of mind, all blessings flow.

The boat scrapes bottom. Can these be rocks below? Then all is lost. But, mirabile dictu, it scrapes not rocks but only soft mud, grasses, and reeds that entangle the rudder, halt the tiller's play, and gently stop the boat on a mucky bank.

Will lowers the sail, picks up the girl, and carries her through the freezing water, which quickly soaks his shoes, and onto a grassy bank.

Ahead he can see a little house with a crooked red tile roof and black shutters. He carries the girl thither. She moans low and shivers along her whole body. He knocks at the door.

Presently it is opened by as curious a man as Will has ever seen. He bears a belly almost as big as the girl's, which he carries before him, his arms folded upon it. His gray hair flies this way and that as if he, too, had crossed the lagoon in the little
topo—
and his right eye looks toward Jerusalem whilst his left eye looks toward the Americas.

Mutely he motions the two into his abode, which seems, truly, the reflection of a disordered mind. Broken sticks of stately furniture, ruined altarpieces stolen from great churches (a Bellini madonna with a hole where her right eye should be), piles of peach and apricot pits in the corners, wine fermenting in an oaken cask, cheese in a stinking tub. Straw lies on the floor, piled into the semblances of beds. In the center of the room is a table with empty glasses, dirty plates, dried and rotted fruit, cheese parings, nail parings, mouse droppings, and even little mushrooms growing out of a tablecloth halfway gone back to the earth from which it, and all things, spring.

Without a word, but with several bestial grunts, the hermit helps Will place the moaning girl onto a pallet of straw, where she lies moaning, as if in a delirium.

Minutes pass. The two men keep their vigil, feeling useless and stupid, not knowing what to do to aid the girl. Will remembers Anne's two lyings-in, how the midwife was brought and the men banished; though screams issued from her birthing chamber (where she lay on the second-best bed), the men were called upon to do nothing but wait. Yet here they are, in the very room of birth, helplessly observing.

The girl moans, sweats, tosses her head from side to side in pain. The hermit rises to get some water from a pail, pours it into a cup for the girl, and holds it to her lips, whereupon she drinks thirstily. Will knows somehow that this is not right, but he can do nothing.

All at once the girl lets out a deep and bestial sound, seizes her belly, and gives a great heave with her whole body. Will helps to part her legs and remove her undergarments, and as he does, he is amazed to see a dark little circle emerging between her legs, then growing bigger and bigger as it strains the walls of her privy place, which flows blackish red with blood. It seems that the child's head splits that place consecrated to Venus, sending a stream of bright red blood into the darker clots that issue from her womb. Another heave from the girl and a little face appears, eyes shut tight, cheeks glistening with crimson blood like a little planet bathed in ruddy morning sun, then two little shoulders, arms, a little torso, a curled baby cockling, two little feet that have never touched the ground.

Will catches the baby as it squeezes out of eternity and into time. He cannot believe what his eyes behold, what his hands grasp, so beside himself is he with the miracle of it, the commonplace miracle that occurs each day, in each part of the globe, without ceasing to be miraculous.

Still attached to the mother by a blue and purple cord, like the girdle of a great Venetian's robe, the little man-child has not yet breathed nor screamed—and yet it seems alive.

Will slaps it on its tiny back; it gives a lusty cry, and as it cries, its mother rises up, sets eyes on the boy, smiles, grasps her throat and begins suddenly to vomit. 'Tis the fatal water the hermit hath offered, thinks the poet. And then it all happens in a rush: the child draws breath, the mother chokes on her own vomit, turns blue, and breathes her last while the two men watch, astounded that life and death can be as twins, born within moments of each other.

To save the child or save the mother? Will deliberates. Whereupon he raises the mother's form and seeks to slap her leaden back to give her life! 'Tis of no use. She's dead as earth. Will cuts the infant's cord with a cheese paring knife, clamps it with a string, praying to almighty God that it may live more providently than its mother died. The hermit runs out of the house in a frenzy, Will knows not where.

Meanwhile the girl, as blue of face as a sepulchral statue lying under death's pale flag, has breathed her last.

Will wraps the babe in his doublet, holds it close, then wipes away the deadly vomit from Giulietta's mouth.

“Now cracks a noble heart,” says the poet. “Goodnight, sweet princess, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

The hermit returns, leading a she-goat, whom presently he milks into a pail. With great pains, he dribbles the milk into a sort of bladder made for wine.

They give the babe to drink.

W
HEN HE BROUGHT
the babe to me in the ghetto, I thought him at first quite mad, for by now I had lived there long enough—only a few days, but in those few days also a lifetime—to know my role and those of my supporting characters.

“Aren't you afraid I'll sacrifice the child?” I say to this disheveled figure of a poet, with wild hair and wild eyes, who comes to me clutching a tiny baby.

“I have no fear of you,” he says, “for I see in your eyes that you are good, but there are others to whom this child would be naught but a pawn or an innocent to slaughter.”

It was a weekday morning in the ghetto, a market day, and the whole
campo
was teeming with people—fruit and vegetable vendors from the country (the pickings were scarce this time of year, but there were apples, squash, nuts, stored from the fall), Jewish butchers selling fresh-slaughtered meat, old-clothes dealers (or
strazzaria
), pots and pans vendors, Levantine spice merchants wearing their turbans and robes, dealers in used things, old things, broken things, stolen things.

Lined up at one end of the
campo
were the poor, who could not read, bearing their loan tickets (red, yellow, blue) telling them which bank to go to (Banco Rosso, Banco Giallo, Banco Azzurro). They carried little things, whatever they had to pledge: a torn shirt, an embroidered sheet, a brass cup, a silver spoon, a torn piece of tapestry, a blunt knife, a bent and battered dagger taken in who knows what mortal battle.

The din in the ghetto was fierce on such a day and the
campo
was alive with Jews, foreigners, children, animals. The poet had almost to scream to make himself heard above the roar of the crowd and no one saw or cared that in his mandilion he bore a babe, whose fate hung in the balance between Christian and Jew, between life and death.

I dragged him to a shadowed archway where we could speak in greater peace.

“Where did you get the babe?” I ask.

“I cannot say now,” says the poet, “but if you'll but trust me for the nonce, I'll reveal all in time.”

“Is it circumcised?” I ask.

“No,” says the poet.

I am seized with fear.

“If the babe were to be found dead in or near the ghetto,” say I, “'twould cause a massacre of Jews—especially as Christmas approaches, and killing Jews this time of year is considered merry sport. You have truly put me in grave danger coming here like this.”

“Then help me, Jessica.”

“Why should I help—such a stranger as you are?”

I say this, but looking in his eyes I do not feel he is a stranger—this man who has summoned me back through the mists of time. Besides, I know that I must spare this child—if not for the child's own sake, then for my people's. So far, the Jews of Venice have been spared such frivolous massacres by Christians, but who knows what this child might do?

“There is a woman in the country, near Bassano,” I slowly say, “where the hills are gentle and goats still graze—who would take this babe, circumcise it, and bring it up a Jew. She is the barren wife of a great Italian-Jewish banker who lives like a prince in a villa by Palladio but grieves that he has no son. Del Banco is his name.”

“And would the child be safe?”

“If we can get there safely, the child would be safe indeed—as safe as a Jew can be in a Christian world. The brother of this rich Jew is doctor to the doge, thus the family has many privileges other Jews do not…But many dangers must be met to go to them.”

“Jessica, I have risked all to save this babe—my life, my limbs. Two Venetian lordings may come after me for gambling debts I cannot pay, and my noble friend will surely be enraged when he finds me gone.”

“Why should I care?” I say, knowing I do.

Will looks into my eyes. “If you care not for me,” he says, “then care for this babe, this innocent, saved for who knows what fate. Have mercy on his soul.”

“And why do I owe him or you my mercy?”

“You do not. Mercy is never owed. It is a gift, the quality of which is never strained. It droppeth as a gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath: it is twice blessed; it blesseth him that gives and him that takes.”

These words move me. I remember my future life as in a dream; these words reverberate through time, strangely linking two disparate, yet similar, selves.

“My father has some business with this Jew of Bassano,” I now say. “Perhaps I can prevail upon him to send me as his courier…Go now. Hide yourself somewhere outside the ghetto's walls. Then meet me in the
campo
near the Frari church, when the clock strikes three…
Now go!
” And I send him off, more wild-eyed than ever, clutching the babe, whom he clumsily feeds with a wine bladder of milk. I pray that it may live as I go to reason with my father, whose character by now I know.

How to describe living two lives at once? It is, after all, my sullen craft, my soaring art, to live one life in the quotidian (buying food, cleaning house, caring for kin) while I lead a more heroic life on the stage—speaking the lines of queens and courtesans, lovers and heroines. To hold two characters in mind at once, one's self and one's not-self, this is my art. And so to be Jessica-Christian and also Jessica-Jew seems less strange than it might be to one who followed a different calling. I am a player, after all, strolling through time.
That
is my religion. I remember the life of Jessica Pruitt as in a dream. Jessica Shalach is my present. But human beings are so made as to wake and dream all in one day and think nothing of it. We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

I understand my father better now, and in my better understanding understand his bitterness. Many Jews of Venice bless the doges, bless even the institution of the ghetto less than a hundred years ago, as something that protects both Jew and Christian. But my father's people were the privileged Jews of the Levant; my great-great-grandfather came to Venice as a pretended galley slave—who paid the captain fifty ducats for his freedom, thus he knew Venice in the days before Jews lived behind the wall. 'Tis said they traded on the Spina Lunga (called Giudecca after them) and had synagogues, where the friendly breeze of the lagoon could cool their summers, and windows that faced out toward the sea. Now they have these bricked-up towers and hidden synagogues. Since the ghetto was declared on the first of April, in the year 1516, Jews have been forbidden to live outside its walls, and only when they die do they exult in the breezes of the Lido, where the doge has given them sacred burial ground. To see the sea only from the cemetery—this is the fate of Venice's Jews in our age! Yet it is so much better than the fate of Jews in Rome or Florence that many count themselves quite blessed and do not even know the glory of the past.

Not so my father. His father was a patriarch amongst Venetian Jews; his late wife, Leah, an heiress from Castelfranco, and pure Italian for as many centuries back as any Christian. Thus he feels he is as much a true Venetian as the doge, and he resents the tribute he must pay. With this he justifies all—dealing on the Sabbath, keeping a gondola and liveried gondolier (though, of course, the gondolas are not so gaudy as in times past, since the Serenissima decreed they must all be painted black)—all excess. He is not like those marranos lately arrived from Spain, who count themselves lucky to be alive and out of the clutches of the Inquisition!

I know I can persuade my father of almost anything if I play upon these sympathies…

When I go to him this morning, he is not in the ghetto but at the foot of the Rialto bridge—the new stone bridge opened just this year to replace the creaky wooden drawbridge that burned down last year. There, amid the Turks and Germans, the crush of foreigners from every corner of the globe, some few privileged Jews pay dearly in golden ducats to the Serenissima for the right to trade old clothes on the Rialto. My father, in turn, pays one of these Jews, whose name is Tubal, to share his place. There he sells to the foreign visitors to Venice such pledges as have never been redeemed by their poor owners.

Not all the goods are mean. Often a gorgeous doublet or a pair of fine-tooled boots comes to hand, or even a hand-painted fan, a ruff studded with Orient pearls, a pair of fur-lined gloves from France, a fur pelisse from Muscovy, a small painting by a great Venetian master. I love the Rialto with its shops of every description, its glorious fish market (with all the creatures of the deep staring up at me with questioning eyes), its passing gondolas rowed by liveried Moors, its great ladies with their little dogs, its bankers, traders, and merchants speaking in a babble of tongues, and its silent thieves, stealing from those bemused or besotted foreigners who have lost their way in the labyrinth of Venice.