Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (31 page)

Then comes Will's voice, heavy with irony: “Being your slave,” says he, “what should I do but tend, upon the hours and times of your desire?”

“Then hate me when thou wilt,” says Harry, “but for God's sake, play not your motley japes about the dying wench…See where she faints with fever and expires.”

My eyes flutter open. Before me I see Will restored to his former state of fashion—the balding young Englishman abroad. And Harry has dropped his Brighella mask and goes about the world once more in his own flaxen hair. I see he looks on me with lust—and love.

For a moment, I am lucid and I understand it all: Will's love for Harry, and his love for me. Harry's love for Will, and his love for me—all intertwined, impossible to untangle. When two brothers love the same woman, is it each other that they love? Or the woman? Or is it both?
They
do not know the answer to this riddle. Do I?

“Farewell, gentle Jessica,” says Will. “Thou art too dear for my possessing…”

“He means we sail for England on the morrow, having redeemed my mother's glass.” I see where it glints in Harry's hand like a harbinger of doom, for it is cracked now, God knows how. “No matter,” says Harry, seeing me eye the crack, “a new glass will be found in England. 'Tis the silver back I crave, the beast with two backs as 'twere.”

My heart sinks; I know I will never see Will again, yet I also understand that he must go home with Harry to write his plays and poems.

“I release you from my death,” I say to Will, whose face now seems as cracked with sorrow as that glass.

“My love is as a fever longing still, for that which longer nurseth the disease,” he says, looking at me with liquid eyes that seem to understand my gift to him.

Harry proffers a golden goblet whereof he bids me drink: “
Un goccino
,
per piacere
.” I bring my lips to the cup and take a drop on my burning tongue. My head swims and I drift again into the sea of fever. And then—or do I imagine this?—he is suddenly beneath my coverlet, pressing his girlish lips to my feverish quim.

“Come, let me suck the fever out of you,” he says, raising his head above that tropic country, then diving down to graze its shores again. As he does so, Will plants his lips upon my blistered lips; two brothers joined by the electric current of one woman. For one mad moment, I exult in having them both applied to my body like poultices, and even in my illness I begin to come—riotously, as in dreams.

And suddenly I am out of my body. I have left it behind and I am rising now, hovering above it near the ceiling and looking down at Jessica who lies there on the carved walnut bed, caged by four writhing columns. What a beautiful young woman, I think, to die so soon. Her hair is chestnut brown with titian red-gold streaks; her eyes are brown, flickering to gold. She wears the garb of a wealthy young Jewess in the ghetto and two young Christian foreigners genuflect before the orifices of her body, then rise and flee the room like thieves, forgetting their pocket mirror, which still lies on the coverlet, catching the dregs of sun in its broken face.

A commotion in the room when they have gone. Maids rushing in. Then a doctor, then a rabbi, then a distraught old man with a grizzled beard. He looks upon the dead wench.

“Is this the promised end?” he howls. “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones. Had I your tongues and eyes, I'd use them so that heaven's vault should crack. She's gone forever! I know when one is dead and when one lives. She's dead as earth. Lend me a looking glass. If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, why then she lives!”

The rabbi takes the mirror from the bed, puts it beneath the dead woman's nose. No mist, no motion. She is dead as earth, and now they draw the coverlet above her head and offer muffled prayers.

I watch all this like a spectator at a play, as if I were not in that body and that body were not dead. I want to tell Shalach that he has slipped his role and accidently spoken King Lear's lines, not his own, but I cannot speak for I am not really there. I seem to drift over the room, alighting now upon Jessica, now upon the baby, bidding my farewells. It still does not seem possible that I am dead. But when, presently, a coffin is brought and they lift the woman into its depths and arrange her in its womblike, red satin interior, I know the terror of being buried alive.

Now I am in the coffin, my heart pounding as if it meant to burst; now I am being carried down a crooked stair, jostled horribly, nearly dropped, then hastily caught again. Now I hear the sounds of the
campo
, feel a gust of wind through the box's slats. Now I am carried to the edge of a canal (for I hear water lapping), now lowered into a boat, and now we rock gently as we are rowed along canals. This gentle motion calms me for a time and lets me catch my breath. Is it possible that Arlecchina lied? Was that her last cruel joke, a false deathbed promise to a dying waif? And what of the ring? I have the ring still—but cannot move my hand to look on it. Nor can I see out of these earthen eyes!

We row, we row. Now the water grows rough. We must be in the basin of San Marco, rowing in the direction of the Lido. I can feel the chop, hear the curses of the boatmen as I take my last long sea journey toward burial in the sacred ground of the Venetian Jews. Thinking of that I become really fearful again—fearful of suffocation, for I know I am not dead. Or am I? How can I tell any longer what is real and what is not, what is life and what is death, or even what century or what place I shall be buried alive in—if burial is to be my fate.

I wish again upon the ring. Of course I cannot see it, but I can feel it around my finger like a burning wire. I visualize it in my mind and appeal to it and to Arlecchina for help. The boat suddenly begins to rock quite furiously. Waves spill over the side. The boatmen scream and curse. A storm seems to ensue and hailstones pelt down on my coffin lid, ping, ping, pinging on my little roof with an almost cozy, comforting sound.

The waves are wild now, and the boat rocks harder and harder. With a sudden crash of thunder and lightning, the coffin is capsized into the boiling basin of St. Mark and floats away from the screaming boatmen.

A dream of floating, floating, floating on the sea. The coffin rocks as if it were a cradle, and that cradle in the waves. Once, at a health spa in the desert, I whiled half a day away in a flotation tank, held up by Epsom salts: thus it is to be in a coffin in the sea. Fear is suddenly gone. If I must die, I am blessed at least to die in the sea. I give myself into the Nereids' hands, hoping they mean me well.

How long I drift thus I cannot tell. I imagine myself floating past the islands of the lagoon, past Mazzorbo, the island of the nuns, past Murano, Burano, and then past the point of the Lido toward the open sea. Buoys clang. Seagulls swoop down on my rocking coffin-boat, their curious claws landing on the wood with a scraping chicken-scratching sound. And then, suddenly, one furious wave grabs me at its crest and dashes me, box and all, toward the shore. I duck the box the way a young Malibu surfer once taught me how to duck a surfboard. In the tumult of the waves, I lose my
zoccoli
, my stockings, my skirts, my petticoats, even my boned, bejeweled bodice, to the churning sea. And Arlecchina's magic ring marries the Adriatic as surely as the doges' rings once did. So sweetly does it slip away that I do not even notice when it plights its troth with the sea. I swallow mouthfuls of salt water, but still I swim with all my strength for shore.

Suddenly, rocks and pebbles scratch my bare soles. I rise out of the sea—head, shoulders, breasts, navel, quim, thighs, legs—naked as Botticelli's Venus. My long dark hair is knotted with seaweed; bits of sand and shell are under my fingernails, in my navel, between my molars. I inhale deeply and my nostrils thrill to the smell of Venice.

I look up. Even in the
nebbia
I can see the misty turrets of the Excelsior; and before it the naked beach, its summer tents all gone. And lying half buried in the sand, with no note inside it but only murky seawater, is that telltale sign of the twentieth century—a greenish bottle bearing the name of the patron saint of mineral water: San Pellegrino.

I
AM LYING IN
bed at Lorelei's house in Dorsoduro. I have the front bedroom on the second floor facing the canal, and I can hear the gondoliers joking and shouting in the old boathouse near the Campo San Trovaso. Bells ring. The ceiling shimmers with the old woman's squinny—
fa la vecia
, as the Venetians say.

Motorboats race by, making the greenish water of the canal suddenly almost white. Seagulls fly in from the lagoon, rest briefly on buoys in the Guidecca Canal, then dip and dive near San Trovaso before alighting upon the tiled chimneys of the French Embassy, looking seaward, their beaks tasting of salt.

Out at the Lido, in the Antico Cimitero Israelitico, the old Jews sleep—perhaps even Shalach sleeps—for the oldest graves there date back to the quattrocento and are wild with moss and ivy, their weathered Hebrew letters gold with lichen, green with moss. The tarnished gold coins of the lichen are now their only wealth. By some curious Venetian irony, the graves of the Jews are undisturbed while the Christians, who are buried in San Michele, receive only a twelve-year lease, then suffer the indignity of having their bones dug up and flung upon the bone island. Thus Venice is still comparatively kind to her Jews, who have learned to shrug and gesticulate like proper Italians—which perhaps they are. Or then again, perhaps the Italians have learned to shrug from
them
. Some say, in fact, that the Italians are one of the lost tribes of Israel, now so intermarried and genetically muddled that one cannot tell where Jewishness leaves off and Italianness begins. No wonder that Jews and Italians still greet each other like brothers and recognize each other all over the earth as members of the same tribe.

I wake up feeling peaceful, with a sense of utter safety and security—shall I call it bliss? I am in Venice. The time is now. Mother has been laid to rest. Antonia, I am sure, is well. I know I shall see her soon.

Suddenly, the doorbell jangles my reverie. I hear Lorelei running to the door in her velvet palazzo slippers; I imagine her blonde curls tossing as she runs.

“
Chi è?
” she calls, then opens the door without waiting for an answer. I hear garbled speech, hers and a man's. Then the door slams again and I hear Lorelei's feet on the stairs, running up to my room.

She knocks on the door. She peers in. From her expression of concern, I can see that I have been ill for a long time. But I am not ill now.

“Come in!” I call.

“A man came, with an envelope for you…He says it's a script. He says that Björn will call you later about the start date of the film. Here.” She hands me a gray envelope. “
Vuoi un caffè?
”

“I'd love one,” I say.

Still sitting in bed, I tear open the envelope. Inside, there's a script in a plastic binder. The title page reads:

Serenissima

a film

by

Björn Persson

property of:

Björn Persson Productions, Ltd.

3
rd draft: Jan. 1985

Heart pounding, breath coming short, I flip through the hundred or so pages of the script. All of it is there: Harry, Will, Shalach, Jessica, the gambling, the ghetto, the
cortigiane
, the costume ball, the pogrom, the hairbreadth 'scapes and most disastrous chances, the
nebbia
, the baby, the plague, the coffin, the sea, the rebirth.

I flip at once to the first scene where Will meets Jessica in the ghetto, she staggering on her
zoccoli
, he twisting his auburn beard, his one gold earring glinting.

“Who ever loved, who loved not at first sight?” he says, quoting his rival and looking up at the lady who is to be his muse on earth. I long to read on, to relive the adventure, to lose myself in a reverie of love so strong it can wrench time back upon itself as if it were the merest Möbius strip…

But I must close the book for now, because in one corner of the room, in a bassinet trimmed with blue and silver ribbons, the baby, my little lion, cries.

E
RICA
J
ONG
is an award-winning poet, novelist, and memoirist, and one of the nation's most distinctive voices on women and sexuality. She has won many literary awards: the Bess Hokin Prize from
Poetry
magazine (also awarded to Sylvia Plath and W. S. Merwin); a National Endowment for the Arts award; the first Fernanda Pivano Award in Italy (named for the critic who introduced Ernest Hemingway, Allen Ginsberg, and Erica Jong herself to the Italian public); the Sigmund Freud Award for Literature, also it Italy; the United Nations Award for Excellence in Literature; and the Deauville Award for Literary Excellence in France.

Raised by artists in the intellectual melting pot of New York's Upper West Side, Jong graduated from the High School of Music & Art and Barnard College, where she majored in writing and Italian literature. She then completed a Master's degree in eighteenth-century English literature at Columbia (1965) and began PhD studies. She first attracted serious attention as a poet, publishing her debut volume,
Fruits & Vegetables
, in 1971 and her second,
Half-Lives
, in 1973.

Also in 1973, she published the book for which she is best known. Partially drawing on Jong's early life, as well as her wild imagination,
Fear of Flying
, hailed by John Updike as the female answer to
Portnoy's Complaint
and
The Catcher in the Rye
, is about a woman trying to find herself and learn how to fly free of her repressions. Isadora Wing seeks to discover her soul and her sexuality, and in the process, she delves into erotic fantasy and experimentation, shocking many critics—but delighting readers.