Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (22 page)

When I go to my father, at first I pretend nothing is the matter. I rummage through his goods as a daughter will in her father's store, hoping to choose the best for myself.

This makes him laugh. “Once a daughter, always a daughter,” he says.

In an indulgent mood, he lets me take three pledges that I fancy: a pair of gloves, earrings of Orient pearl, and a small painting by Carpaccio that was pledged some time past by an aristocrat, ruined by gambling debts. My father can refuse me nothing in this mood. Bitter as he is toward all the world, under his grumbling exterior he is sweet to his daughter. Though he may bark at me, still he is my pawn.

“What are ducats compared to a daughter?” he likes to say. “A Jew must oft have money to save his life, but what use is that life to him if he hath no family? Our ancient nation weaves a curious path twixt servility and pride, twixt saving and spending. We would hoard our gold to save our necks, knowing that at any moment the Christian curs may come to us, demanding tribute in exchange for our lives—and woe to the Jew who cannot pay. But money in its own self, for its own sake, is not the sap of life. It is grease for the wheels of commerce, but neither heart nor soul is warmed by its shine.”

“Father,” I say, “do you remember the promise you made to Del Banco in the
campagna?
”

“What promise, Daughter?”

“You promised that if a cloak of sable should come to hand—a precious cloak from Muscovy—you'd send it for his wife before the winter…and here I see before me just such a cloak.” I hold up a sable I have found amongst his pledges. It is a fair-enough fur, though one moth has had his way with it.

My father looks. “'Tis not good enough for Del Banco's wife,” he says.

“But, Father, I can stitch it quite invisibly—this I know. And if I carry it to Del Banco in the country before the roads are wholly blocked with snow, he will be in your debt eternally.”

My father looks at me gravely. “Del Banco's debt and Del Banco's ducats are nothing to my only daughter…How should you disguise yourself on such a journey—you a Jewess and a lovely one at that?”

“By dressing as a Christian boy,” I say. And from amongst my father's pledges, I pick out the very costume: breeches, doublet, hose—from boots to bonnet, all of it is there.

“Daughter,” says my father, “with Leah gone, you are the dearest thing on earth to me.”

“I shall be quite safe in my disguise. Besides, you gave your word. 'Tis December now, and already cold in Venice. 'Tis rumored the lagoon may freeze, as have some of the small canals. Imagine how much colder in the mountains. Soon, the snow will settle in the country roads, and try as you may, you cannot keep your promise.”

My father knows that what I say is true.

“You have often said,” I press on with my advantage, “that a Jew's only protection in a Christian world lies in keeping his bond to his brother. Del Banco oft has saved your skin. His brother is physician to the doge, studied at Padova, goes about outside all ghettos and doth not wear the crimson bonnet, nor even a piece of crimson cloth upon his hat. You cannot afford bad blood with such a family!”

“Your mother's family was as old as theirs—nay, older than the Caesars, or the doges.”

“Father, you gave your word. Your word must be as sound and good as your ducats…You may deal on the Sabbath, game like a Christian, go about in a gondola on holy days, but if you break your word, I shall not want to call you ‘Father' more.”

At this, old Shalach's eyes fill with tears, and I know that I have won my suit.

“Stay, Daughter,” says he, but his eyes almost say “go.”

“Go carefully then,” he says at last. “Go carefully and may your mother's ghost go with you.”

My mother's ghost did indeed go with me—my mother, Leah (whom, in truth, I never knew but felt I had), but also my other mother, who had married descendants of doges and kings (for all the good it did her).

We set out by gondola for terra firma, the mad poet and I and the little babe whose destiny had already been so strange and star-crossed. Who knows the destiny of any baby? Try as we may to make them safe from the world—safe behind locked gates, trust funds, and sheltering arms of expert doctors, expert nurses, and confused (for all parents are confused) parents—we never can guarantee their safety (or our own, for that matter). Our fates have plans for us to which we are not always privy. Nor are we privy to the meaning behind those plans—if there is one. We go on blind faith. We whistle in the dark. Even when it seems that all is safe and secure, howling chaos lives just behind the wall, behind the brick wall of the nursery, which truly is as thin and permeable as any Venetian fog.

Venice today still
feels
like an island. It has the claustrophobic social life of a cruise ship—the same people constantly remixed in different drawing rooms (or even the same drawing rooms)—the hothouse air of a very enclosed world, an island that gossip crosses in less than half a day. If you buy octopus on the Rialto at nine
A.M.
, by noon all Venice knows what you are having for dinner (and the cannier members of the social set, or those who employ spies, know how your guest list reads). Gossip is as endemic and necessary on islands as on movie sets, a matter of survival. Stranded with the same few souls for what seems like eternity, it is essential to know where one stands: what parties one has been invited to, what parties excluded from, who one's friends are, who one's pseudofriends are, and who one's true foes. So the island fever of Venice remains—despite the causeways to the mainland and the railroad installed by the Austrians. But at the time into which I was sucked (as into the eye of a hurricane) Venice really
was
an island, and terra firma really was terra firma—reached only by gondola, and in December, it was a choppy and perilous ride.

Little whitecaps crowned the jagged waves. The babe squealed. The poet looked seasick (perhaps he was), and I, in my boy's attire, could pass for neither wet-nurse nor mother. But at least I did not pass for Jewess.

A gondola took us to terra firma—in this case, Chioggia. The gondoliers, for there were two, were traditionally foul-mouthed, and cursed at the weather, the choppy sea, the storm clouds, and the generous tips we gave them (which they found paltry—no, some things never change in Venice). They even cursed at the baby, though you could tell they didn't mean it—for Italians love babies, no matter how they pretend to grumble and no matter how puny and skinny those babies are.

This baby in particular had long thin fingers, little pink nails with silvery crescents at their bases, and toes that seemed not to curl at all; they flew out like tiny pink flags. Still, it lived. It sucked heartily at the bladder of goat's milk that kept it alive, and I was astounded anew (it had been hundreds of years, after all, since Antonia was an infant—literally!) at the strength of the will to live as it manifests itself in a newborn child. This baby, whom we had wrapped in the Muscovy pelisse for warmth, wanted so to live! All my broodiest feelings were rekindled by witnessing this.

Hundreds of years backward in time or hundreds of years forward seems, by the way, to make no difference. So long as people are people, some things remain remarkably constant: fear of death, a baby's will to live, love, seasickness, the difficulty of getting from here to there, from there to here.

Travel in these times was hardly easy. River routes were always preferable to land routes—for though there were still some few horses in Venice at that time, travel by
cavalli
was slow in the extreme. Locks separated the River Brenta (around which Bassano del Grappa nestles) from the salt water of the lagoon, and hoists were used to raise the gondolas out of the water, whence they were carried overland (if one had so contracted with one's gondoliers) to another lock at the mouth of the River Brenta. One could go either by way of Fusina or Chioggia to the Brenta, and then, as now, there were heated and differing opinions about the best route, the best prices, the best boatmen to choose.

All time is continuous and flowing, and it flows, I'm convinced; in a circular pattern. But it is easier to get from 1984 to 1592 than from Venice to Bassano by boat carrying a baby.

We had entered a time, after all, when navigable rivers were the most convenient way to travel and the Adige, the Po, the Sile, the Piave, the Brenta, fulfilled the functions that the
autostrade
do now.

There were ferries on these routes, but the poet had hired a private gondola because of his fear that we were being followed and because he was a stranger in a strange land, saddled with a baby, frightened for his life, and somehow he felt safer in the little gondola with two oarsmen than he would have felt in a public ferry.

His fear made me brave. If it is true, as has sometimes been said, that the human species is distinguished by its ability to be best when things are worst, then I am a charter member of the human species. For the worse things get, the better I am. All alone I can conjure up demons that terrify and transfix me, but in the face of real danger I become calm, magnificent, brave. Give me a boy's doublet, two assassins and a lover in pursuit, noble lines to speak, a baby to protect—in short, a heroine's role—and all is well with my world. But leave me alone in a cozy room with a clock ticking away the minutes and I may just go mad!

The Brenta begins in the Alps, empties into the Adriatic. Going up it in reverse from the ancient city of Chioggia, it meanders past Codevigo, Piove di Sacco, Stra, Vigonza, Piazzola, Cittadella, Sandrigo, Marostica, until it reaches the sweet city of Bassano with its covered bridge, its cobbled streets, its
osterie
selling
grappa
and Pinot Grigio, its gorgeous view of snow-covered Monte Grappa and the higher Alps beyond. I cover this territory as if covering it were as easy as drawing one's finger along a map. It is, of course, not. Even the best of dramatists (Shakespeare, for instance) takes you from here to there in a flash of inspiration—just by noting a scene change. Film editors do the same. One splice and we go backward or forward in time, from Venice to Bassano, from Bassano to Timbuktu, Kingdom Come to Ultima Thule—but not so the novelist, diarist, or biographer, who is anchored to the quotidian rules of geography and must explain the hows, the whys, the wherefores, of travel in every age.

By river, then, from Chioggia to Bassano. Imagine the chill wind, the little snow-covered hillocks, the half-ruined castles poised upon them, the riverboats we passed, the crying baby wrapped in sable, the cold, the cold. But more important—imagine what transpired between me and Will as we fussed over this baby that destiny had thrown into our laps. Protecting it, we fell hopelessly in love—this baby, neither his nor mine, yet given to us to care for and to shield from the harsh winds that whipped about us.

“Where did you get the child?” I ask again and again, but for the moment I ask in vain, for he will not tell me, being an honorable man and not confusing spilt confession with moral righteousness.

“I am his godfather,” says Will. “That is, the father God appointed, and you, therefore, are his godmother. 'Tis an honorable enough post, more honorable methinks than being a natural father or mother, which is sometimes thrust upon one by a darkling shaft of lust whereupon our children become tickets in God's lottery.”

I look at the baby. Tears fill my eyes, for I remember Antonia, taken from me in a cruel custody suit four hundred years from now. (My ex-husband will argue that my life as a vagabond, a strolling player, makes me an unfit mother, though he himself will become fit for fatherhood just by virtue of replacing me with another woman to care, resentfully, for my child.) Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, bone of my bone, the apple of my eye—taken from me with writs and motions, depositions, the expert testimonies of “expert” witnesses…There will come a point at which I will decide no longer to resist, for as in that story about Solomon, I will not want to tear the babe in half to salve my own ego. And what remorse, regret, and madness I will live with then—you alone, dear reader, will know.

But what of this baby, whom we carry upriver to Bassano? This little boy who was born Christian but is being taken into the mountains to become a Jew? Babies have, after all, no religion but eating, no creed but sleeping. God to them is mother—or her breast. Was this baby godless, then—having only a goat's bladder of milk, a mad poet in a mandilion, and a mad actress wearing a boy's doublet?

In the busy market town of Bassano dusk is falling when, after five days of rugged river travel, we arrive at her wharves, beneath her covered bridge, in the shadow of snow-covered Monte Grappa. Bassano, like Castelfranco, like Asolo, like Cittadella, was once a town with many Jewish bankers, Jewish dealers in old clothes, who lived in uneasy peace with their Christian brothers. Not so when we arrived, for the Jews of Bassano were officially expelled in the early part of the century, and Del Banco's family had only kept their country seat by virtue of his brother's relation to the doge and the special dispensations granted to his family. He lived in the mountains part of the year, in Venice the rest of it. But he had retained the privilege of this villa (which, in title, belonged to the doge's family) because of the illness of his wife, to whom we hoped to bring this babe.

Italians were never ferocious Jew-killers or Jew-baiters—though sometimes a despairing, drunken Christian sinner would snatch a Jewish babe, baptize it with water from the gutters, and pronounce it Christian in order to save his own sinful soul (for so the Church promised). Jewish parents lived in terror of this. And there had been ugly incidents of attack on Jewish homes at beautiful Asolo some decades ago. It was a strange century for Jews in Italy—a country they had inhabited since Roman times, traveling from the Holy Land over old Roman roads. They would be tolerated at times to minister to the needs of the poor when no Christian pawn bank, no
monte di pietà
, was established in a town; but as soon as one existed, the Jews were no longer safe and they might indeed have to flee on a few days' notice—or else endure the establishment of a ghetto on pain of their lives and fortunes.