Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (26 page)

T
HE POINT OF HIS PONIARD
in my bodice convinces me to come along. Thus am I half prodded, half dragged; out of the balustraded ballroom with its groaning feast table, its masks and costumed courtiers, along the painted trompe l'oeil halls of the villa.

My
zoccoli
clatter on the chequered marble floors; the painted people on the walls seem to smile and sneer as I move along the halls prodded by Harry, followed by Will.

Above us the ceilings are alive with mythological battles, rapes, judgments, feasts, and fancies, even as I am dragged toward I know not what similar fate.

Harry takes us first to his bedchamber—grander than either Will's or mine, and graced (or perhaps I should say cursed) with a huge marble fireplace whose opening is the height of a tall man and whose form is that of a grotesque head with a gigantic open mouth. It breathes fire at us; its marble teeth are blackened by wood smoke, while its huge globular eyes look up toward who knows what horrific vision of things to come. Here, Harry seizes cloaks and blankets, rudely gives them to Will to carry (as if he were no more than the most beggarly of manservants), and prods us once again out of the chamber and into the hall. Again, our Brighella hustles us along.

“Whither are we going,” asks Will, “and why?”

“I do not wear my heart upon my sleeve—for daws to peck at,” says Lord S. as he hurries us along. “I tell not where I go nor what I plan. I am not what I am.” He laughs like a commedia dell'arte villain, then hurries us out of the bedchamber and along the chequered hall again.

Halls open into other halls; painted people wink and stare, feast and revel, as we three hurry past. Occasionally we meet a masked flesh-and-blood reveler who has gone out, perchance to piss in the snow—some wandering Harlequin or Pantaloon or Pulcinella feeling nature's need beneath his motley and mask. Sometimes we pass another Harlequin and another Innamorata kissing and culling in the hall, or even furtively fornicating beneath voluminous skirts and farthingales. Harry hustles us on.

Out we go, finally, into a covered passageway where plows and carts are kept, rakes and pitchforks, thence into a snowy, moonlit garden all crystalline white with bluish purple shadows painting the snow under a full moon. On such a night, I think, when the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees, did Troilus mount the Trojan walls, and Thisbe o'ertrip the dew, and Dido waft her willow wand, and Medea gather enchanted herbs—but no, 'tis not true, for though the moon is full, the winds are bitter cold, and though Jessica, with an unthrift love, hath stolen from the wealthy Jew and run as far as Belmont, here there is no haven either, but menace in the frigid air.

Harry pushes and prods me into a boxhedge labyrinth, where loose pebbles nearly trip me in my
zoccoli
. We three scramble through the maze, rats in a trap, three blind mice whose fates are linked, although we know not how. Is there a Minotaur at the center, or are we three together our own Minotaur? How can one tell?

Through the elaborate labyrinth we go and out the other side, whence it appears that we are heading for a
tempietto
that stands, surrounded by dreaming poplars, at the other end of the garden. The little temple has Corinthian columns with swags of fruit and flowers connecting them, and a pediment upon which Grecian goddesses go about their Grecian business. Thither we are prodded, through an iron gate and up a brick stair, until we stand before a studded door with heavy, walnut coffers. Harry has the iron key. He turns it in the lock and the door creaks as it swings open, releasing the damp, ecclesiastical smell of snuffed candles, old incense, mildew, mold.

Hurrying us within the temple, Harry locks the door behind us and rushes ahead to light a few votive candles, whereupon the chapel is illuminated: a round and womblike space flanked by empty, pedimented niches. Where, in a Christian holy place, would stand statues of Jesus and Mary, John the Baptist and St. Peter, there are empty damask-curtained arches, and in one central niche the carved doors of the
aron
, with a beautiful, brass oil lamp hanging before it. Unlike the Venetian synagogues, which are rectangular, this synagogue is circular—as though it had previously been a church, hastily converted to the Jewish faith.

I gasp. To be here in our masks and disguises is sacrilege enough without even knowing what mischief Harry plans.

“Jewish meat is best enjoyed in a Jewish temple,” says Harry, spreading the blanket before the bimah and dragging me down to the floor with him. He tears off his olive-hued Brighella mask, tears off my black velvet loup, then covers my face with ravenous kisses. Absorbed though he is in his raging lust, nonetheless he looks up to see what his motley friend intends.

“Watch me plunder your dark lady,” hisses Harry.

Will lets fall a tear, not knowing yet what he should do. Poet that he is, he hesitates before he acts, and hates himself for hesitating.

“‘Thou dost love her because thou know'st I love her,'” says a taunting Harry. “Ah, Will, if thou and I are truly one, then—sweet flattery, she loves but me alone!”

Here, he pins me down, throws up my skirts, tears away my undergarments, and presses his flaming lips to my nether ones, darting a frenzied tongue in that purple place, which so resembles a hungry mouth.

I confess I am stirred as much as I am disgusted. Perhaps that is why I scream, whereupon Will falls upon Harry's back, raining blows upon his flaxen head. Harry laughs and quotes poetry: “‘That thou hast her, it is not all my grief…'” And the two men scuffle for me, touching each other as much like lovers as enemies.

This, I think, is at the very crux of love: it is all between the men, and we women are merely the lures and the excuses.

The two men pummel and pound each other, roll round and round in their motley and military attire, screaming curses, quoting poetry. Mayhem and murder mixed with verses, the fate of the human species: half beast, half angel, wholly conflicted. But which half will win? The beast or the angel? The poet or the murderer?

Harry brandishes his poniard, holds it to Will's throat. Will, as Harlequin, has the lesser weapon, merely a bat or cudgel, and pinned beneath Harry's knee as he is, he cannot use it.

Holding the dagger to Will's jugular, Harry says, “I kissed thee 'ere I killed thee!” then plants a lingering kiss upon Will's lips, more passionate than any he has given me. The kiss goes on and on as if in slow motion. Time seems to stop. My head is alive with lines of poetry that Will will never write, iambs unscanned, images unmade, suns, moons, stars, extinguished even before they are born in fire. I feel like God seeing the potential for a human life, then cutting it off at the bloody root. Poetry is divine but it requires a living hand to write it, eyes of fleshly jelly to read it, a waggling tongue to voice it, unsplit vocal chords to thunder it through the universe. The divine bleeds through the mortal, and now, with Harry's poniard beginning to cut his throat (and three red drops of blood springing through the line of white flesh on his neck), Will, my lover, my Harlequin, will never climb the towering stairs of verse that fill my mind: a colossal city, built for a moment in the brain and then demolished, vaporized, as if it had never been.

A gust of cold wind; the creak of hinges. The door swings open and behind it stands Arlecchina, brandishing a rusty key and cackling. Two revelers run in behind her; they are Pagliacco and Pulcinella, and they have come to seal my beauty's doom.

“The pound of flesh the whoring beggar owes!” screams Pagliacco in Grisha Krylov's voice, whereupon these two fall upon Harry, tearing him away from Will and commandeering his knife.

“Flay the beggarly poet alive!” screams Pulcinella (in a voice that seems to belong to Gaetano Manuzio). These two brigands begin to strip Will of his motley clothes preparatory to stripping him of his skin—a trick the Venetians have learned well from their erstwhile enemies, the Turks.

“Poetry must bleed to be real!” shouts Pagliacco, with his Russian accent. And now, having Will almost naked, Pulcinella puts the purloined poniard to Will's thigh and begins to strip the skin.

I can feel the knife in my
own
thigh—so close is our bond, our troth—and in desperation, I turn to Arlecchina, who still stands like a hideous sibyl, watching this display of cruelty.

“Help me, Arlecchina,” I plead.

“Help me no helps,” says she, “ye have all my magick round your finger!”

The ring! I have forgotten the ring. Whereupon I draw my frozen hand into the light and gaze upon it. It twinkles mystically around its knot of hair; I grope for the perfect wish, with no words wasted. So much rides upon this wish: Will's life, Jessica's, Shylock's, Romeo's, Juliet's, Othello's, Desdemona's, even Hamlet's and Lear's, all those other lives within those lives. Even my own life as Jessica Pruitt, since Jessica Pruitt could not truly be born if there were no Jessica Shylock for her to play!

Silently, clenching my heart, my bowels, my teeth, I call down all the powers of light and darkness into this one crystalline ring: “
Let Will Shakespeare live to write!
” I shout into the ring. And suddenly, raving out of time, in runs Judah Shalach, my stage father, ranting of his purloined daughter!

Now the men are mad with blood and mayhem. All want to kill Will; all want to kill each other for the sacred right to kill Will—as if the death of a poet were a sacrificial act, more precious even than the many deaths that litter the planet daily. Pagliacco will kill Pulcinella ere he lets him kill Will; and Harry will kill them both. Even Shalach, the subtle and self-mocking Jew who knows the uselessness of Jewish violence in a world of Christian bloodshed, is crazed to have Will's heart out, now that he sees the other brigands bent on the same act. The men are flushed with battle, their faces filled with blood as if they were in heat, in lust, in love. Pagliacco draws an imaginary line on the floor and dares Pulcinella to cross it. He does, as he is meant to do, and the battle heats up, whereupon Harry leaps into the fray and Shalach creeps upon him with a glittering stiletto, probably a pawn. He stabs at him but misses.

“Arlecchina!” I cry out again, as if for my mother.

“Let the men kill each other,” cackles Arlecchina, “
that
is the final female magick. The lions die, the lionesses live forever.”

“But live alone,” say I.

“But live,” says Arlecchina, cackling. “And younger lions come.” She tosses me the rusty key. I catch it in my ringed hand. “Lure the poet, lock the others in,” says she. “I vanish.” And in a moment she is gone, as if she has indeed vanished into the air.

Now Shalach has put away the stiletto and is beating Pagliacco with a club; while Pulcinella is engaged
corpo a corpo
with Brighella, or Lord S. For one moment Shalach looks at me and leers, and I suddenly see beneath his grizzled beard, his scarlet hat, the face of Per Erlanger, my old lover! Yessica, Yessica, he seems to say.

Will lies before the bimah utterly stunned, as if he cannot believe the men have stopped shredding his flesh and are, instead, attacking each other.

“Come, Will!” I call, but he lies there like a dead man. I run to his side and seize his bleeding hand, wrap him in the blanket Lord S. has brought, and drag him along the chapel floor. At the last possible moment he comes to his senses, and, in a daze, follows me out of the
tempietto
. We slam the door and lock the brigands in, then flee into the snow.

What can we be thinking? We are thinking we will return to the villa and find the feast and revels still in progress, but some new mischief is now afoot, for as we make our way back to the central villa, we see courtiers running out into the snow—Harlequins, Brighelli, Finocchi, Flautini, Pulcinelli, Pagliacci, Pantaloni, Capitani, Zanni, Innamorate—all fleeing the ball like so many Cinderellas hearing the clock strike midnight.

We have left the men dueling in the temple, and now we encounter this throng of revelers screaming, pushing, jostling in the moonlight.

I see Del Banco, with his sunlike mask, at the head of all the revelers.

“The villagers have come!” he shouts. “It was foretold.”

And sure enough, behind the revelers—in angry ranks and bearing pitchforks, rakes, hoes, and other homely agricultural implements—come the
contadini
of the Veneto, screaming death to
gli Ebrei!

I stop Del Banco long enough to ask him what the matter is.

“They claim we sacrifice a Christian child,” he says, then struggles onward with his courtiers.

“And where is the babe now?” I ask after him.

“With the
signora
, safe for now.” Whereupon he turns and runs with his costumed guests.

For a moment Will and I join the roiling ranks of fleeing revelers, for want of another place to go. Swept into the crowd, I kick off my
zoccoli
and run in stocking feet beside my beloved Harlequin. We cannot return to the
tempietto
where the men still fight, nor can we sneak back into the villa now—but surely this flight will soon be terminated by the pebbles and rocks beneath my feet, the difficulty of running on such stony, snowy ground.

“The labyrinth!” says Will. “We may hide in the labyrinth.” I nod at once—and so, shrinking stealthily away from the crowd of revelers, we hide behind a hedge and creep backward to the cover of the maze. We do so not a moment too soon, for one angry
contadino
has just seized a reveler dressed as Pantalone, slit open first his satin doublet and then the skin beneath, as if it were no more than the thinnest silk. Blood stains white satin, then moon-blue snow; shrieks reverberate in the clear mountain air.

I see the mad, blood-crazed face of one who thinks he kills his fellow man for an idea, though it is no such thing; it is blood lust finding an excuse, murder without a cause, unless that cause be murder's very self, the human need to spill red blood upon white snows, the beast leaving its mark.