The Secret Book of Grazia dei Rossi Read online

  Once I knew the cause I did not wonder at my mother’s distress. The dishes had been ordered by her papa from the Castel Durante kiln of the elder Giovanni Maria, surely the finest maker of tin-glazed ware in the peninsula. The brilliance of the blue that came to life in Messer Giovanni’s kiln was enough to make the sky sigh with envy. Indeed, it was said that no one in Mantova save the Gonzagas themselves owned more elegant tableware than Rachel dei Rossi.

  What happened next needs little explanation. Mama was not herself, being within weeks of her lying-in. Cateruccia had to be gotten out of the kitchen before she caused more damage. Also someone had to watch over Jehiel and me. I spoke up for Zaira as our child minder, but a piteous look from Mama told her she could not be spared. So, in a moment of rash expedience, Mama sent us away in care of the slave girl with strict orders not to venture out into the street. How could she have known that Cateruccia had other plans for herself, plans which she neatly expanded to include us?

  When the time came to fetch the matzoh from the communal forno, the slattern ordered us to come along. She was a strapping Tartar with a bullying way that we found hard to resist. Besides, the bakehouse was only two houses away from ours. Such a brief passage hardly seemed to fall under Mama’s interdiction to stay off the street. And, indeed, our vicolo — more of a lane than a street — presented the perfect picture of serene seclusion when we walked out into the crisp March day.

  At the forno, an equal tranquillity prevailed, if anything an unaccustomed tranquillity. Generally the place buzzed like a hive with the gossip and greetings of servants, slaves, and housewives. But that afternoon we were the only customers.

  Zoppo, the lame baker, greeted us with his usual disagreeable wheeze, muttering as he removed the round, flat biscuits with his long-handled paddle. What vexed him today was that his customers were tardy in picking up their matzoh. No one ever considered the baker, he grumbled. He too had a family, he reminded us. He too must make preparations for the seder. It would serve them all damn right, he snarled — blasphemy on the eve of Passover! — if he shut up shop there and then and left them without.

  Thinking back, it strikes me that the reason Zoppo’s customers hadn’t picked up their unleavened bread for the evening service was that many of them had heard about Fra Bernardino’s permission to preach and were already on their way out of town.

  When we had filled our hamper with matzoh and climbed up the steps of the forno onto the vicolo, we were once again subjected to Cateruccia’s blandishments, this time sugar-coated. “They say there is a juggler in the piazza today who throws balls of fire in the air and catches them with his bare hands,” she coaxed. “And a dancing bear who performs the moresca in time to a drum.”

  I might have been able to resist the juggler. But I had never seen a dancing bear. And your Uncle Jehiel knew no better, at the age of six, than to follow his foolish sister in her pursuit of novelty.

  The first sight to greet us when we turned the corner into the Via Peschiara was a woman walking down the street on her hands, accompanied by a dog walking on his hind legs, the two of them dressed alike in white and red squares. Then, before we had time to absorb the wonder of their appearance, the woman flipped herself upright and began a series of amazing somersaults, the dog all the while jumping up and down and barking his encouragement. Jehiel clapped his dimpled hands in glee and wanted to turn and follow them, but Cateruccia pushed him firmly ahead, straight into the arms of a beggar staggering along the street presumably in the grip of “divine inspiration.” And this felso was only one of several specialists in the art of begging who lined the street. There was a testatore, pale and shaking and looking to be very ill, chanting his promise to leave all he possessed to anyone who would help him in his final hour. And several rogues in chains jabbering nonsense and showing off wounds supposedly received at the hands of the Saracens. And an extraordinary allacrimanto, who kept tears flowing from his eyes in a never-ending stream.

  There is truly no end to the ingenuity of our Italian beggars. How rich they would be if they put all that effort and cunning into an honest trade! Or do I malign them by excluding begging from the “honest trades”? Grant them their due. They give the gullible donor a good show for his money. Little Jehiel was ready to give up a treasured ducat to the allacrimanto, but Cateruccia kept prodding us on to the piazza with promises of sweetmeats and jesters.

  With great poise, she shepherded us along the arcades that line the piazza, set aside this day for the jongleurs, acrobats, troubadours, and mountebanks who always appear on the fringes of any public spectacle. At the end of the arcade, there was a gambler’s booth. Here, Cateruccia took the trouble to introduce the gambler to us as a friend of our father. This outlandish announcement was accompanied by an odd, lopsided grin that stirred up misgivings in me. For the first time since we started off, I set myself against the Tartar and advised her as smartly as I could that we were expected at home. But she insisted that we must stay just a little while, for a great saint was about to arrive.

  Completely in charge now, she hustled us through the gathering crowd and into the piazza itself, where a temporary pulpit had been erected at the north end. A low partition of white cloth ran the full length of the square. Its purpose was to separate the men from the ladies, Cateruccia explained to us. The farther we got from the Casa dei Rossi, the less muddle-headed she became. Either the proximity of her sainted friar performed a true miracle and cleared her head of its habitual confusion, or her stupidity was a veil she donned at home in order to hide her thoughts from us. Whatever the reason, she certainly did come to life, Lazarus-like, that morning. Her slit-eyes opened wide. Her slack body stiffened to alertness. And her craven manner gave way to assurance.

  Without our noticing it, the holiday spirit had undergone a change in the few moments since we entered the piazza. The gay babble had quieted down to a hush. Many of the people around us were standing with eyes closed and hands clasped in silent prayer. I looked up and saw Cateruccia’s lips moving in rhythm with the click of her rosary beads, suspended above my head like a hanging rope. Across the aisle in the men’s section, a young father was giving his son a breathless report of a miracle that the sainted frate had performed that very morning.

  “When he found there was no boat to carry him across the Mincio, do you know what he did? Can you guess?”

  “No, Papa,” we heard.

  “He laid down his cloak as if it were a raft, and sailed across the river on it,” the unseen father explained to his child. “And never got wet.”

  Jehiel looked up at me, his eyes wide. “It is not true,” I wanted to tell him. “Men do not float across rivers on cloaks, except in fairy stories.” But as I bent down toward his ear, my whisper was drowned out by a roar louder than a hundred lions. Fra Bernardino da Feltre had arrived.

  I should have guessed that da Feltre would be Cateruccia’s holy man, but somehow, in the excitement, it failed to register with me. Then, looking up at her, I caught the end of a small but triumphant smile and I knew she had lured us to this place in anticipation of this moment. But by then all possibility of escape was cut off by the hundreds of bodies that surrounded us on all sides.

  To my surprise the friar did not in any way resemble the devil I expected him to be. He was, in fact, a frail man with a soft voice and a gentle manner. And as he joked and jested, I felt the tension slowly leave my body and began to enjoy the afternoon exactly as I and all the others in that crowd were meant to do.

  “Behold Monna de la Torre” — he pointed out a woman with a very elaborate headdress — “with a tower on her head as tall as that one.” Here he turned and pointed at the Tower of the Cage behind the piazza. Then he whirled back to fix his chosen victim with his bright eyes.

  “Monna Vanitas, you have made a god of your head. Deny that false god. Pull down that proud tower. For I see upon its battlements the devil’s banner.” And, would you beli
eve it, the woman rose to her feet and began to tug at her hair and to pull it down in full view of the crowd.

  Now Fra Bernardino began to intone the litany of women’s vanities — from the ale, those wide sleeves which he called wings and warned would be clipped, to the pianelle, the foot coverings that have a pointed heel and many layers of leather beneath the sole to make women appear taller.

  “God has made a woman small, and you put stilts under her to make her tall,” he berated them. “He has made her dark and you smear her up with lead to make her pale. He has made her yellow and you paint her red. Do not try to improve on God,” he admonished sternly. “He is the best painter.”

  By the time Fra Bernardino left off talking of clothes and started in on delicatura, I had fallen into a drowse, lulled by the heat of the March sun and the buzz of the crowd. So I was caught quite off guard by his first mention of Jews. The frate did not speak loudly and I was not certain if I had heard him right, but a look from Cateruccia told me I had.

  “Listen! Listen to the saint!” She grasped me in her sturdy arms and, with a great grunt, yanked my hand from Jehiel’s and hoisted me onto her shoulders.

  “. . . If only you spent as much time beautifying your souls as you do beautifying your bodies.” There was no censure in the frate’s tone, only infinite regret. “But no. Instead you invite Jewish witches into your houses with their ass’s milk and sulfur paste and promises of beauty. . . . How many of you are guilty of consanguinity with Jews?”

  Here and there the odd reluctant hand was raised.

  “Confess it,” he urged sweetly. “Confess and you will be forgiven.”

  A few more hands.

  “I command you,” he roared in a completely different voice. “Tell the world that you have been a dupe of Jewish witches. Shout it out so God can hear you.”

  This brought the required screams and faints, which the friar allowed to run their course before he returned to his theme,

  “Some there are among you whose mouth stinks from their cosmetics. Some of you reek of sulfur and smell so foul in the presence of your husbands that you turn them into sodomites. In this you are urged on by these domestic enemies who weasel their way into your houses to work their evil . . .”

  Behind us a cry went up: “I repent my vanity, O blessed friar.”

  Now, many of the women around us began to strip themselves to the waist and scourge themselves with small whips passed around by the friar’s boys, his so-called Army of the Pure in Heart, along with flacons of wine and wine-soaked cloths to ease the wounds of those who were scourging themselves. The sun was high in the sky and its penetrating rays, together with the fragrance of the wine and the sight of blood, must have driven me into something of a delirium. I only came to my senses after repeated pokes and pinches from Cateruccia. There was something she wanted me to hear.

  Love. The friar was speaking of loving kindness. “See to it that there is nothing in your heart but caritas — charity. And remember,” he warned, “the greatest sins are sins against caritas: avarice, blasphemy, witchcraft, and usury.”

  “For these sins you will go to the hot house. To the devil’s house . . .” A great moan went up. “And you will have many a visit from Brother Rod.” Another great moan.

  Then suddenly, a different tone, thoughtful, almost pedagogical. “Money is the vital warmth of a town. Usurers are leeches who draw the blood and warmth from a sick limb with insatiable ardor. And when the blood and warmth leave the extremities of the body to flow back toward the heart, it is a sign of death. Do you understand?” I didn’t. Not a word made sense to me, but Cateruccia shook her head up and down in a positive frenzy of comprehension.

  “And it is not enough that you do not commit these crimes yourselves. You must cleanse your town of those who do. You must destroy the usurer in your midst, for he is the enemy of Christian charity.”

  From some dim, arcaded corner, an unseen voice boomed out, “Kill the Jews.” The phrase echoed eerily across the piazza.

  All at once the white curtain was down and all around us men, women, and children were crowding toward the pulpit, many of them with a wild light in their eyes, like mad people.

  Cateruccia put me down and began to chant, “Dio! Dio!” quietly at first, then louder and louder. All around us people took up the cry, “Dio! Dio!” It seemed that the entire crowd was shouting “Dio! Dio!” Carried away completely, Cateruccia let go of Jehiel and began to throw her arms up into the air as if she were reaching for heaven. “Dio! Dio!” she shouted, her eyes closed tight, her body jerking convulsively with each repetition of the sacred word.

  I saw my chance. Yanking my brother from between her legs, I made for the arcades at the side of the square, pulling the poor child, half dead with fear, past the friar’s boys now brandishing knives, along streets echoing with fearful shouts, and finally through our portal, where I fell headlong into Zaira’s arms, panting and weeping.

  3

  “Upstairs, quick, and clean up before your poor mother sees you looking like a pair of little Gypsies . . . and on the night of the first seder . . .” Zaira’s sole concern was to save Mama from any further perturbation. She didn’t even inquire what mischief we had been into to get ourselves so bedraggled. In fact, no one had even noticed we were gone.

  “Look there. Your cheek is all mottled. What have you been leaning on? Here, let me . . .” As she dabbed away, I told myself it would be best for Mama if I kept silent about what we had witnessed at the Piazza delle Erbe. Perhaps I lacked the courage to take the punishment for my disobedience. Whatever the reason, I dressed for the seder in silence and arrived at the table loaded down with my guilty knowledge of what was happening in the town.

  Seated at Mama’s sumptuous table, lit by the glow of pure white candles and swaddled against the winds of the world by the comfort of the ritual, everyone — even the servants — had managed to forget the unease stirred up by Monna Matilda and had entered fully into the spirit of the Passover. Everyone except me. And Cateruccia. Wherever I moved in the room, I felt her eyes on me, gloating. When Papa called us to take our places for the seder, she placed herself modestly at the foot of the great table, from which vantage point she could look directly into my face without being observed. To a casual eye, she was her usual sleepy, slow-witted self. But, even though I tried to keep my eyes on the prayer book, I could feel her eyes boring into mine, taunting me with the secret we shared.

  Finally we came to the climax of the ritual, that moment when the youngest of the house rises to ask his father the Four Questions. Jehiel stood tall at Papa’s side, his tiny waist encircled with a gold link belt and his sturdy little body encased in a padded velvet doublet. He had a taste for red, and Papa had ordered him a pair of borzacchini which the cobbler swore were the smallest pair of trimmed boots he had ever made, ever so fetching in soft black leather with a turnover cuff of red velvet and a rosette of green and peacock ribbons fastened to the right boot. Since the time of our first condotta with the Gonzagas, they had permitted the dei Rossi men to display their colors.

  To complete Jehiel’s ensemble, Mama had fastened to his hair just above the widow’s peak a pearl which nestled there amid the chestnut curls like a glowing charm. He was a prince that night. He made our house a palace. My father was a king and all of us were members of a royal family.

  And when that little boy took hold of our precious illuminated Haggadah with its velvet and filigree cover, and began to read the ancient questions in the ancient tongue, he was letter-perfect. Nothing about his manner suggested that he had been through the most terrifying experience of his short life a few hours before. Not the slightest hesitation or stammer marred his performance.

  “Wherefore is this night different from all other nights?” His reedy boy’s voice sang out like Pan’s pipes.

  As he and Papa went through the ancient dialogue, my memory of the afternoon ret
reated. Somehow our famiglia would be saved from the frate’s marauding boys just as the Jews had been saved from Pharaoh centuries before.

  By the time we got to counting the ten plagues which were inflicted on the Egyptians — frogs and gnats and mullein (whatever that was) — I was spilling out the droplets of wine that marked each plague with the same gleeful abandon as the other children.

  Now, it was my turn to glower at Cateruccia. “See, you slut, what happens to those who persecute the Jews! Flies and dust and boils and mullein.”

  But my happiness was short-lived. Halfway through the meal, a loud ringing of the outer bell announced a visitor. At first I thought it was Elijah, for whom a silver cup is always placed in the center of the table in the unlikely event that he decides to make a miraculous appearance. But the adults of the famiglia knew that trouble comes to the door in the dark night far more often than a miracle. And indeed, the messenger, a distant Gonzaga connection by the name of della Valle, had brought evil tidings.

  He held in his hand a grido issued by the Marchese that very hour warning the Jews of Mantova to remain in their houses for their own safety. A disturbance had broken out in the Gradaro district. Rulers never use the word “riot” unless they have to. “But the Marchese has instructed me to advise you that your family has no cause for worry,” the equerry assured Papa, with the excessive condescension that courtiers always use when addressing those they consider their inferiors. “The dei Rossis occupy a particular place in my lord’s heart,” he intoned, as if conferring a benediction. “As a mark of his affection Marchese Francesco has sent with me two carts to carry your famiglia to the Porto Catena and an armed escort of ten men to see you safely aboard a boat bound for Ferrara, where you will be safe in the bosom of your family until the unnatural fever of our people has burned itself out.” No mention was made of how many Jews might be consumed in this fire.