Duchess of Milan (40 page)

Eleonora stirred her soup, then put her spoon down. “When we went to war with Venice, this house was confiscated by the Signory. After the peace was negotiated, the house was restored to us. I guess I could not believe that the war was really over until I had come here again. But Venice was never the same for me. Parts of this house have been standing here for five hundred years, yet even this house seemed changed after the war. I could never again bring myself to love even the one thing in Venice that was ours.”

Beatrice wasn’t accustomed to the weariness, almost frailty, in her mother’s voice. She considered Mama as durable as the house itself.

“What did Ser Privolo promise you tonight?”

Beatrice heard her own spoon clatter into her bowl.

“I saw the business with the
confetti.
He might as well have made an address to the entire Maggior Consiglio.”

In spite of herself, Beatrice was relieved that Mama knew. “Mama, I tricked the Signory.” Somewhere deep inside her a voice pleaded: Mama, please be proud of me. And deeper still: Please love me.

Eleonora crossed herself.
“Nostro Signore,
you are as mad as your father. What in the name of God do you mean?”

“Mama, by telling them that my husband intends to be invested by the German Emperor, I got them to agree that he could become Duke of Milan if Alfonso does something. I asked for more than I wanted and got exactly what I wanted. I have secured peace for us, Mama.”

Eleonora looked at her daughter with mixed horror and astonishment, her eyes piercing and her jaw slack. “What in the name of God would make you do something so utterly--”

“Mama, Eesh has asked Alfonso to attack us, and I have a letter that can prove it. I can show you Eesh’s letter, Mama.”

“Where is this letter?”

Beatrice dashed down the stairs to her bedroom. She removed the letter from her tooled silver document case and bounced back up the stairs, her heart pounding with joyous anticipation. Now Mama would see.

Eleonora examined the seal. She read quickly, shaking her head slightly. When she finished, she looked up at Beatrice. “I would expect this from your cousin. But what you have done is far more reckless and foolish. You have no idea what you are playing with. You may well have brought us to the threshold of war. I want your most solemn oath that you will never tell your husband what Ser Privolo told you tonight.”

The word “foolish” was a slap so hard that Beatrice’s lips trembled. And then she was just angry. “No, Mama, you are the fool. Because if Grandfather Ferrante dies, the only way we will avoid war is if my husband is allowed to become Duke of Milan.”

Eleonora looked off into the distance. A black gondola glided by on the darkened water like a floating bier. “Peace is every man’s wife,” she said. “And war is every man’s mistress. The
condottieri
like my brother love war so much because they do not have to live with its consequences. To them war is just a great hunt or tournament. They gallop across the countryside in their armor, gaily pursuing one another’s armies, avoiding at all costs actually meeting in battle. If a town or city is too weak to oppose them, they sack and loot it or simply extort their expenses from the terrified citizens. And they burn and pillage every village in their path. In all the wars that have been fought in Italy since I have been alive, a hundred women and children have been murdered by soldiers for each soldier who met with some accident while avoiding battle.”

“Mama, I really believe that my husband doesn’t want war.” And yet a doubt came up like a whisper from a deep well. Do I?

“Yes, I believe that is true. And your husband is even more dangerous than my brother. Your husband believes he can use the threat of war to wage his peace. He will threaten Naples with France and Venice with Germany and Florence with Rome and say it is all done in the name of peace. He thinks he can call the King of France across the mountains and then send him back as easily as if he were a
condottiere
with fifty footmen.”

“Mama, the King of France will never have to come to Italy as long as Alfonso doesn’t attack--”

“That is your husband’s fantasy, to conquer my brother with threats, just as it is my brother’s fantasy to conquer Milan with his army. The men who rule Italy live in castles of their fantasies, parading in their armor at jousts and ordering their architects to draw cities with the streets all in rows and romancing their mistresses with sonnets written by their poets.” Eleonora bemusedly shook her head. “But you, my dear daughter, like even the simplest plowman’s wife, are condemned to live in the real world. And you as well as any woman know the violence and suffering required to bring a single child into that world. Every moment of every day, somewhere a woman is waging a mortal struggle to create life. And every moment of every day we must struggle to nurture and protect that life we have created with
our
pain and
our
blood. At our breasts the lamb of peace must be suckled, for it will find nothing at a man’s dry teat.”

Eleonora crossed herself, her pudgy hand moving across her bosom with practiced grace. “Merciful God, Beatrice, what I have seen of war! I promise you I pray to the Virgin every day that my girls will never have to see such things.” She crossed herself again. “And I thank God every day that I have not lost any of my babies. I remember when the Venetians besieged us. No food could come in. The water was quickly fouled. Then the plague broke out in the city. So many died that the bodies they carted to the Duomo each day filled the entire piazza. Day after day. They were all black from the disease. So many babies, all in rows, their little faces all black, like fallen statues of little
negre
angels. Each one of them once cradled in some woman’s womb and fed at her breast. All dead, all that sweet milk and whispered love and gentle caresses turned to rot and decay. I would beg sweet Jesus to take me before I ever have to see anything like that again. I beg our sweet Lord to take me if my death can save one baby from that. That is all war is. Dead babies.”

Beatrice stared as if examining those rows of little black corpses. Then she shook her head violently. “You are a liar and a hypocrite, Mama. Yes, I know the pain and fear that it took to bring Ercole into the world, and I know that I would do it a thousand times again to hold him in my arms just once. And I would die for him, Mama. I almost did.” Suddenly she stood up. “You left me in Naples, Mama. For eight years I didn’t know what it was like to have a mother hold me in her arms. How can you love all these other women’s babies and not love me, Mama?”

Eleonora shot out of her chair. “I will not listen to you tell me that. ...” Then the conviction drained from her heavy, powerful face. She looked down at her soup, her thick jowls trembling with each little sideways motion of her head. She reached out and pressed her fingers against the tablecloth. Her arms were shaking. Finally she said, “I suppose I never wanted you to know how much your father despises my father. Of course after the other night I am sure you realize that. They have been rivals since your father was a boy.” There was a terrible resignation in her voice, as if her words were marching her to her death. “I brought you children to Naples with me because your father’s nephew Niccolo had just attempted to overthrow us. After we arrived, your father blamed my father for supporting Niccolo, and one thing led to another and it seemed we would have war yet again. Already I had seen too much war, and I had seen only the smallest fraction of what I have seen since then. So I agreed to return to Ferrara and negotiate a peace between my father and your father.”

Eleonora stopped, and her dark swooping eyebrows twitched. “My
own father
forced me to leave one of my
own children
with him as a hostage to that peace.” Eleonora’s tone was so venomous that Beatrice understood instantly something she couldn’t have imagined in her wildest conjecture: Mama hates her father.

Beatrice felt her mother’s hate draw up her own, like two spitting adders facing off. “So why did you choose me, Mama?”

“Of course your brother Alfonso had to come back. He is your father’s heir. You were the second girl. ...”

Beatrice was so stunned by the simple mathematics of her mother’s choice that it was a moment before she realized that this wasn’t the truth, either. Her scream exploded in the loggia and echoed down the canal. “Liar, Mama! Liar!”

Eleonora reached across the table, a pathetic, beseeching gesture, as if trying to escape her ponderous body. “You don’t know how it hurt me, baby. It hurt as much as if you had been torn from my womb. In the name of God, baby, if you believe nothing else, believe that I loved you and have always loved you.”

“I don’t love you, Mama.” Beatrice straightened triumphantly, seeming to tower next to her mother’s defeated posture. “And I don’t care if you ever loved me.” She rushed past her mother in a whisper of taffeta and disappeared into the house.

Eleonora turned and raised her arm again, even more feebly, then let it drop. She stared out across the canal. Directly opposite was one of the newer churches in Venice, an
all’antica
design of radical geometric purity, its virtually unadorned facade as simple as a gravestone.

The images she had kept locked away for so long appeared in the darkness, a shadow mime against the blank wall of the church. Her father coming to her bed, a heavy, dark incubus reeking of wine. The blackened skeleton of a village and rows of fresh little mounds in the raw red earth of the Campania. Mass executions, processions of headless necks spurting blood . . . And then she examined her own guilt, a mental ledger kept in meticulous detail. Beatrice. God knew how much she loved Beatrice. But her firstborn, Isabella, had always been the child every mother dreams of, so golden and gifted that it was as if an angel had been sent to earth. Even now she could feel the grief when Bel had gone away to Mantua to be married, the next day walking through her daughter’s empty rooms as if walking through her tomb, the day after that ordering Bel’s rooms sealed forever so that she would not have to see them empty again. God forgive her. In Naples she had never questioned which child she would leave behind. God forgive her, because in her heart she had thanked God that she had Beatrice to leave behind.

Eleonora struggled to her feet. She supported herself against the marble balustrade and challenged all the horrors she had conjured in the night. I cannot give you back your childhood, she silently confessed to Beatrice. I can only give you and Italy the peace for which your childhood was slaughtered. If I have to come back from the grave I will see that you and your baby have that peace. And perhaps then you will know that I loved you.

Beatrice came quickly awake in the darkened room and reminded herself that she was in Venice. A monkey jeered somewhere, followed by a dog barking, the sounds so distant that they seemed from another time. She could not hear anything moving on the canal outside her window.

Her dream was still vivid. She had been in the darkened nave of a cathedral, except this cathedral had been round like a wheel, its circumference as vast as a city wall. The cathedral had turned, and she had stayed at its center, watching the aisle chapels glide past, each illuminated for a moment by a brilliant pop of light, like fireworks going off. In that instant of light the contents of each chapel had materialized and disappeared. Strange things. Her grandfather on his bier, like something made of wax. Eesh dressed in black, sobbing, her face so sunken she might have been a corpse. One of Mama’s dead babies, a statue of black-glazed terra-cotta with terrible ruby eyes. A painting of her uncle Alfonso, surrounded by pomegranate wreaths and kneeling saints, his face blue. Her baby, but another boy’s name on the marble plaque beneath him. A nude madonna, her legs spread, her genitals painted red . . .

Around and around the cathedral had spun, faster and faster, the great wind of this motion rising in her ears, the images popping so fast that there was no longer an instant of darkness between them. Stop the wheel, the wind had soughed beneath its roar, stop the wheel. But she knew that if she did, the force that held her at the center would send her flying off into one of the aisle chapels, and there she would stay forever, frozen in some eternity, her place at the center taken by a new penitent watching her fate rush past.

She sat up. This night she had slept naked because of the heat. She pressed her hands to her breast and felt for her heart, her own touch arousing her, a delicious mingling of fear and desire. The fear was the terrible import of the secret she now held locked in her breast, known only to herself, Mama, and the Signory. But she did not have to unlock that secret. Not until she needed it to save her baby. Only then would she tell her husband. Perhaps Grandfather Ferrante would live forever; perhaps he would never allow Alfonso to do anything.

Her desire was more complicated. Power, that was part of it. Of course she had the power to avenge herself on Eesh. Whenever she wanted. But now she also had power over her husband. The power to give him the thing he held dearest. The power to raise him up or cast him down. The power to play the game of fate.

Beatrice lightly stroked her nipples, making them hard. She shuddered, and a tremor of excitement ran through her. “Touch me,” she whispered to her imaginary lover. “Hold me. Listen to my heart and imagine that you understand its music, that your caresses have authored its every song. Because you will never hear the music of my secret heart. You will touch me never knowing that just beneath your fingers is the key you can never reach, the key that unlocks every fate. The silent choice of my secret heart.”

CHAPTER 33

Extract of a letter of the scholar Ponzone da Cremona to Isabella d’Este da Gonzaga, Marquesa of Mantua. Ferrara, June 1493

...
I
hear that a man named Colombo has recently discovered an island for the King of Spain, on which are found men of our size but with skin the hue of copper and noses like apes . . . they all go about naked, men as well as women. Twelve men and four women have been brought back to the King of Spain, but two of them fell ill of some disease the physicians cannot ascertain, and have died. . . . The rest have been given clothes. . . . They seem intelligent and are quite tame and gentle. No one can comprehend their language. . . .