The Malice of Fortune (22 page)

In the same fashion, neither will I offer an apology. You see, any child born of the seed of the left testicle is offered these opportunities, and these alone: wife, nun, or whore. Where the father can afford a dowry, the first choice is made; she surrenders her virginity, property, and liberty to her husband, and prays to the Holy Virgin that her father has bought her a good man. The father who does not have a dowry, or has squandered it on his firstborn or wishes to save it for the prettiest of the brood, can always choose Christ as his son-in-law, a convenience that has made our convents so populous—and has made those parasites who call themselves monks so relentlessly eager to cuckold their own Father in Heaven.

And then there is the whore. In the beginning, she has no more choice of who picks her fig, and when, than does the dowered wife or the Bride of Christ, and it is as true as the Gospel that it was no different for me. Here is my story:

My mama—your grandmother—and I moved from town to town when I was growing up, simple places such as Carpi and Lucca; she did not bring me to Rome until I was twelve years old. The city struck
me dumb with fear, these countless people from all over Christendom and the Levant rushing about on the streets, jabbering away in a Babel of tongues; to make it worse, Mama had to go into an
ospedale
because she was suffering from a dreadful catarrh, which had plagued her for months. So one day she left me in the care of a certain Madonna Taddea, who had rooms on the third floor of an ancient palazzo near the Campo dei Fiori, where she lived among ponderous old furniture and fragments of antique statues. She was the first woman I had ever seen in a wig and her aging face was painted like a saint’s effigy.

After several weeks Mama still had not returned, and one afternoon Madonna Taddea was visited by a much younger lady who resembled no living creature I had ever seen. It was as if she had been conjured from the canzone of Petrarch or the fables of Pulci. She required only a little rouge to color a face like cream, with eyes like agates and lips so red that they seemed to bleed.

“I am Madonna Gambiera, the natural daughter of the Prince of Squillace,” this vision told me, her words flowing like water from a spring. By this she meant she was the prince’s bastard; I was too innocent to know that even this parentage was her
invenzione
. Having recommended herself, Gambiera proceeded to poke at me like a physician and examine my teeth as if I were a horse in the market down the street. When she had finished she announced, “You are my sister. Who is called Sancia.” She nodded as if a divine messenger had whispered this name to her. “Now you will come and live in my house.”

“But my mama is coming back,” I said. “How will she find your house?”

Gambiera’s agate eyes appeared almost golden as she looked up at Madonna Taddea. Then she gave me the most charming expression I had ever seen in my life, as if she were an angel sent to assure me that this trifle shouldn’t trouble either my mama or me in the least. “I live on the Via Giulia, so close that you can throw a stone from here to there. Nothing at all to concern your mama.”

So began my life as Gambiera’s little sister, and I would require all the words in two Bibles just to tell you the half of it. Her house on the Via Giulia was not so splendid as the one I would own, within ten years, on the Via dei Banchi; nonetheless I thought I had gone to
Paradise when she took me up the stairs to her salon, where the scent of flowers and perfumes made me swoon. I did not leave that house for months, while Gambiera prepared me for my trade, dressing and painting me like a doll on countless occasions, before at last she took me out with her.

My first “business” supper was at the palazzo of “His Excellency,” whom I now know to have been some cardinal’s secretary and abacus-rattler, but to little me he might have been the pope. He was not a young man, and though he dyed his hair, his drooping eyes betrayed him. Several other men were there and Gambiera engaged them all with her brook-like chatter, mostly in Italian, though from time to time she issued little phrases in French or Latin.

The supper itself was perhaps the most astonishing wonder of that house—I had never seen desserts that resembled sculptures and statues, and as much pork and capon was taken from that table as scrap as I had likely eaten in all my life. But after I had finished nibbling my spun-sugar unicorn, Gambiera took me into the latrine and said, “His Excellency is going to have you tonight. Now look at me. He has not paid for anything more than this.” Here she pretended she was a man holding his works in his hand, thrusting between my thighs. “You just pull up your skirts and hold your legs together no matter how he tries to push them apart, and let him rub his thing between your thighs. He has not paid to touch you here.” She gave my hairless little monkey a hard squeeze. “If he does, you scream and I will come. That cock will spit its seed between your legs, so come back here and wash when he is done. He can kiss you, but don’t take his tongue or anything else in your mouth. I am saving you for something better.”

I will only tell you that I did as instructed and afterward went into the latrine, where I began to wash myself with a towel I had wetted in the basin beside His Excellency’s bed. I stood in the dark scrubbing that vile secretion from my legs—I had never imagined that a man’s “seed” would be any different than the dry seed a farmer tosses upon a field. And at that moment I knew my mama was never coming back for me.

I did not sob as you might think I would have. Instead I recalled the
Inferno
, the first book I had ever read, when the poet enters the
gates of Dis and looks out over a vast graveyard of fiery tombs, spread in all directions as far as he can see. Still just a girl, I saw before me a life no less terrible and inescapable than the city of Dis, to which I believed my own mother had abandoned me. In this fashion I blamed my poor mama for the choice others made.

Just then Gambiera burst into the latrine, her eyes dark and darting. “We’ll go now,” she said in a harsh whisper. She grabbed my hand before I could even drop my skirts, yet instead of taking me downstairs to the street she dragged me deeper into the house, where shortly we entered the most remarkable room. It was lit by only a single lamp, but I could see antiquities and books everywhere.

Gambiera’s head swiveled like an owl’s as she appraised all these treasures. “Take something,” she whispered malevolently.

A moment later, she lunged at one of the tables, her fingers like talons, and snatched her “gratuity,” as she always referred to these thefts. I could only see that she had pinched what looked like an immense coin, though no doubt it was an antique medallion of some sort. “If you don’t take something every time,” she said, drilling me with those raven eyes, “you will end your life in a whorehouse, with every malformed, half-witted gallows bait in Christendom shoving his donkey dick into your little perfume bottle.”

Terrified even to imagine a fate worse than that to which I was already condemned, I grabbed a book, smaller than most of the others, the leather binding almost black from grease—and clutched it like my last hope as Gambiera dragged me out into the street.

When I returned to my bedroom at Gambiera’s house, I read the title on the front page:
Regulaes grammaticales
. I did not know that this was a Latin grammar, or that it was the first book any child encounters when he ventures beyond the vernacular. But as I turned the pages, I gazed in wonder at those strange and beguiling Latin words. To me they seemed like the answers to all the mysteries of the universe.

From this humble beginning, I accompanied my thieving “sister” to suppers, garden parties, concerts, theatricals, and balls for almost four more years, halfway through giving up the chastity Gambiera had so carefully husbanded to the highest bidder, a fat old German cardinal who grunted and groaned like a quarry worker throughout—after
having paid four hundred ducats for a pleasure that did not seem worth a
carlino
to either of us.

But I also advanced from my
Regulaes grammaticales
to Ovid and Horace, and then to Cicero and Tacitus. And soon I became wise enough to understand that I could pluck knowledge from a learned man’s brain as easily as I could steal a manuscript from his
studiolo
. In this fashion I earned a distinction that eventually brought me to the tables of the most distinguished men of letters, as well as the princes of the Church. When Rodrigo Borgia became pope, an office he could not have purchased without the singular aid of my great friend and patron, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, I was among those who dined with the new pontiff the next day, at twenty-four years old occupying a chair any man in Rome would have given his right hand—and his right testicle—to claim.

I did not stop my climb up this Jacob’s ladder of learning and wealth until I met your father. After several years in Spain, Juan had returned to Rome to become captain general of the papal armies, a position coveted by everyone, it seemed, save him; your father was the only man I had ever met who valued love, however reckless and mad, over his own greed and ambition. They all laughed at Juan’s vanity, his silly
alla turca
costumes, but they could never see that he was mocking their vanity and self-importance, that he wished only to live every day as if the sun that set on it would never rise again. I adored his virtues and did not understand that he could not survive his faults. And I only pray that you will be heir to the former and possess few of the latter.

So my darling, in such fashion I made the best of the choice that was made for me. Year after year I added to my treasury of knowledge and earned a liberty that few nuns or wives could ever imagine: I owned my own property and was free to converse with whom I chose about topics of interest to me. I found myself at the center of great events and knew well, often to my profit, not only the persons of great men but also their peculiarities.

Yet even the
cortigiana onesta
fortunate enough to have mastered her trade must fear the inevitable loss of her assets—beauty and youth. When Geras clasps us to his wizened breast, there are those few
cortigiane
who have husbanded their income well enough to retire in modest
comfort. But there are a great many more who must continue to labor, even as they become husks, the sad remains of their youth rattling around inside them like seeds in a dry gourd. If a courtesan must take up residence in a brothel, she is not likely to go out again, except in her coffin. And every day she will pray that it is her last. It is the living truth upon the Body of Christ, that a
cortigiana onesta
would rather walk into a graveyard and throw herself into her own tomb, than walk through the door of a whorehouse.

XVI

Far more than the whorehouse, however, I feared leaving you in your grandfather’s house. So I waited until my heart had let go of my throat, forced myself to take a breath, and climbed the steps.

The
bravo
met me at the front door, his drowsy eyes wandering all over me as he let me into a room of considerable size, lit by greasy tallow candles and a blazing fireplace with a terra-cotta hood as broad as the roof of a small farmhouse. The tables were bare planks littered with jugs, glasses, platters, and bones, with men of all sorts seated on the rude benches: secretaries, farmers, merchants in fur-trimmed caps, cavalry officers in gold-stitched jackets. The girls who paraded about for them were attired in wool dresses a servant wouldn’t wear on Sunday. Some showed the grinding years—as well as the pox scars and pustules—that even a jar of ceruse could not conceal. But a few still had the unadorned beauty that country girls so often possess. I prayed for a blessing on all these ladies, knowing full well that what little grace God had already shown them would be withdrawn bit by bit every day they were here.

Despite the crowd, the pimp wasn’t difficult to find—no man with any other sort of livelihood would wear Spanish shoes so long and pointed that you could spit a capon on the toes. I raised a hand to obtain his notice.

He came to me with hips forward, his four-color hose so tight that it was pink at the knees, his codpiece no doubt obtained from the other half of the
bravo’s
melon. The French pox had left his face as rough as
a peach pit. Faster than a cardinal’s chamberlain can reach for a tip, he had his hand on my
culo
.

“I’m not here to work for a poxy shit-rag like you,” I said, which made him so mad that he raised his hand as if to give me a knock on the ear, lowering it only because I had already drawn a few ducats from the lining of my cape. “I want some girls. I’ve got a Florentine wool peddler back at my palazzo who’s swallowed every piece of meat we’ve thrown at him and still won’t get up from the table. If you’ll move your runny ass, I’ll go up and give them a look.”

The pimp followed me upstairs, where curtains had made many rooms of several. An unseen trombonist played with sufficient wind that only occasionally did I hear the grunts and cries of fleeting passion; I had to shout a bit to issue further instruction. “I must have a pretty girl and a Tuscan-speaker—he likes to tell them to do this and that and he’ll pay ten ducats if he doesn’t have to point. And I would like her to be familiar with the tastes of better men, if you understand my meaning.” Of course I meant gentlemen such as the
condottieri
.

Grunting, the pimp moved past me, going nearly to the end of the hall before he drew aside a curtain made from a bedsheet that had been much used and never laundered. The lady inside, still in her shift, knelt upon a straw pallet scarcely better than they sell to pilgrims during Jubilee, her head obscuring the works of her guest, who had raised his rough country tunic.

I was about to protest that this girl did not seem much familiar with the better class of men. But at that moment her farmer smiled at me, as if I had been summoned to pull his rope as well.

I recognized his black lamprey teeth, which quickly vanished when he similarly identified me; evidently he had seen me well enough out at that dreadful farmhouse. He pushed away the girl’s head and sprang toward me with such alacrity that I had time only to turn my back and cringe. I was waiting for the blow when he flew through the door, still pulling up his hose.