In the Company of the Courtesan (8 page)

CHAPTER FOUR

As my lady's health and hair grow, so does my knowledge of the city.

I begin with what I know: the alleyways that lead from our house; the first to the second, the second over a bridge, the third into the
campo.
Its huddled buildings, its small stone well, its church, the baker's oven, from where the smell of fresh bread draws a small crowd every morning; all this feels more like a village than a great city. But every city has to start somewhere, and my old man tells me that when Venice was born out of the lagoon, at first there were only dozens and dozens of tiny islands formed from clumps of houses sunk randomly into marsh water and that everyone moved everywhere by boat. But as each community grew bigger, with its own church and
campo
and freshwater well, gradually they joined together as best they could by way of more buildings and bridges, until there was a city where the main thoroughfares were liquid and the meaning of life was the sea.

Whether this is his fancy or fact I do not know, but it suits me well, for now I see Venice as a series of bigger and smaller circles, coalescing and overlapping, each one a filigree of land and water, like the lace pieces that the nuns produce as presents for their relatives. Each day I trace a new one until I have most of the great north island mapped in my head. Like a modern-day Theseus, I spin out threads of memory to help me: the façade of a certain house with a gold mosaic, the shrine with a decapitated Madonna on a corner, the broken ramp of an old wooden bridge, the arch of a new stone one, the particular smells that come from an alleyway that leads only to dank water. In this way I can move from the Jewish Ghetto in the west, around the market streets of the Merceria, across the piazza of San Marco, above the convent of San Zaccaria, and over a dozen small canals as far as the great walls of the Arsenale shipyard, without getting my feet wet—though it's a fragile enough confidence, for there are still parts of the city in which even a compass would become confused, where the alleys are as bent as used nails and the canals as gnarled as the veins in an old woman's hand.

My senses are acclimatizing too. I understand my old man's Venetian tongue better, for my vocabulary is as foreign as his now and I can make my own mouth go crooked so that my accent makes sense to others. As for the smell? Well, either it has cauterized my nostrils or the arrival of colder weather with storms and rains has washed the city cleaner. In the summer I ran to stay ahead of the stink, now I run to keep myself from the cold.

Meanwhile, La Draga's seeing fingers are healing my lady's scalp, and her company is massaging her spirit. The inside of our house, while it is as poor as ever, is colored now by laughter, the kind that only women's voices can bring, so that even Meragosa has lost her sour edge. My lady's hair is the length of a rebel nun's, the new growth thick and with sufficient sun and honey in its color to form a wild gold halo around her sweetening face, while what was once the forked lightning of a wound is now the palest ghost of a scar. A diet of good food has filled her body, so her breasts push against the lacing of her bodice, and though the dresses she wears still carry the scent of other women, she is fiercely critical of their bad stitching and failings of style. Indeed, her wit has returned sharp enough to have her fretting at her inactivity, so that last week, after our black-eyed Jew changed another ruby, I bought her a lute, an inferior thing of pine and sandalwood, but strung with five courses and enough tone to get her fingers and voice working again.

Maybe she can smell opportunity in the air. For in recent weeks the city has gone mad with business as the first ships have arrived from the Levant, brought in early by good winds.

While I have tried not to show it in her presence, these last months I have suffered heartache for Rome, its solidity as well as its familiar corruption. But even I am excited now. From above the great bridge down to the wharves on the southern island, everywhere is a chaos of trade. The Rialto drawbridge opens for so many tall-masted ships that it is almost impossible for people to cross, while other boats are so crammed together in the canal that they form their own bridges, an army of seamen and laborers forming human chains to move the bales and crates onto land. There are no beggars now; even the most professional cripples can find enough agility to earn a day's wage. You could furnish a life from the contents of these ships: silk, wool, fur, wood, ivory, spices, sugars, dyes, raw metals, precious stones. You feel rich looking at it. Whereas Rome made her money selling forgiveness for sins, Venice grows fat on feeding them. Gluttony, vanity, envy, avarice—the raw material for all of them is here, and for each and every box or bale that moves into or out of the city, there is a duty to be paid to the government.

You would think the rulers of this state must be the richest men in Christendom. Of course, there is no king or the tyranny of a single family to squander the profits. The doge, who looks regal enough when they wheel him out in his white-and-gold plumage, is a figure more of ceremony than of power, picked by means of a series of secret ballots so convoluted that even my old man cannot properly explain the process. When he dies—as this one will soon enough, I think, for he looks as wizened as an old bat already—his family will be excluded from the next ballot. In this way Venice prides herself on being a true republic. A fact that everyone knows because she never stops talking about it. In Rome, when Venetian visitors would begin extolling the virtues and wonders of their city, most people would fall asleep under the weight of the hyperbole. While other cities are wealthy, Venice is priceless…while other states are secure, Venice is impenetrable. Venice: the greatest, the loveliest, the oldest, the most just, the most peaceful. Venice—La Serenissima.

Given such monstrous pride, I had expected more ostentation. Yet the truth is that the men who run this state look more like priests than like rulers. You see them everywhere, in the great Piazza of San Marco and all over the Rialto, in their uniform of long, dark coats, cloths like togas thrown over one shoulder, and the simplest of black caps on their heads. Gathered together every Saturday morning, when the Great Council meets, they resemble nothing so much as a great flock of well-kept crows. My lady can decode subtle gradations of power in the trim of ermine over sable or fox fur and the varying shades of darker velvets, but to understand the rules fully, you have to have been born into them, your name at birth, marriage, and death entered into a golden book held in the Doge's Palace and checked by officials to ensure the bloodline is not corrupted by commoners.

The modesty of the men, however, is nothing compared with the invisibility of the women. And here my wanderings have taken on a keener edge, for if we are to make our living, it is my job to smell out the competition. By the end of the first month, I was in despair. While there isn't a city in Christendom without laws to keep the modest and wealthy whores, as well as the richest ones, off the streets, in Venice they actually seem to work. On market days, you might catch sight of the occasional matron in full regalia tottering on high shoes from one side of a
campo
to the other, her hands paddling jewels and attended by twittering servants and yapping dogs. But for the most part, rich women travel by water in covered boats or stay sequestered in their houses. The young do what they can to get attention, the girls preening themselves noisily at the windows, but you'd have to be twice my size to gain anything more than a crick in your neck, and when youngbloods in tunics and multicolored tights throw longing sighs upward (if the adults are crows, the young are gaudy parrots, all strut and plumage), the girls become instantly silly, flapping their arms and giggling, pulled hurriedly out of sight by some lurking protector.

However, every man needs to scratch the itch sometimes, and wherever there is public virtue, there is always private vice. The main brothel is near the market and the great residential hotel where the German merchants live. With the ships in, business is roaring, but the whores work strict hours, their day dictated like that of every other Venetian by the tolling of the Marangona bell, and to keep the peace on the streets, they are locked in for the night. If a man needs relief after closing time, he has to risk the labyrinth.

My old well man pretended to be shocked when I first asked him where to go, but he gave the answer fast enough. Once inside the alleys, vice grows like fungus, and if he wasn't so concerned with the state of his soul, I might show him the latest variety: the street of the tits, where the women perch on the sills of the upper-story windows, like some gross parody of the rich, stripped to the waist and dangling their feet for all to see under their skirts. Even here, though, there is strategy in vulgarity; for, as Meragosa tells it through her gappy grin, it's the government's own idea, because the state is in rising panic over the numbers of young men to be found in dark alleyways pleasing one another rather than sinning in the way God intended.

But Venice has more than sodomites to challenge her purity. During those dark, long nights when we were holed up outside Rome, my lady would lift my spirits by painting pictures of the wealth to be made from her native city, and I learned then that the city offers the right kind of women rich pickings when it comes to nobility. It is a simple case of mathematics over morality. If the rulers in the golden book are to keep their wealth intact, they have to limit marriages. Too many daughters with fat dowries and too many sons with slices of the family fortune spell disaster. So, to keep the lineages intact, the nunneries of Venice are bursting with wellborn women, and the family palazzi are home to a host of bachelors, men born into fine living in search of women with equally fine taste, but suitably compromised morals, to keep them serviced and entertained.

Enter the courtesan.

And in this, Venice being the most successful commercial city in Christendom, supply and demand are powerfully tuned. Just as the Doge's Palace holds the Golden Book of Lineage, there is another book—a rather more scurrilous one—that gives details of another set of citizens. A book so infamous that even I, who was ignorant of Venice—save for the fact that it is a great republic sunk into water that had fought the Turks to rule the eastern sea—had heard of it before we came. This is the Register of Courtesans: a list of the names of the city's most beautiful, most cultured, and most desirable women, with a space next to every entry where clients can write or read descriptions, prices, even assessments of value for money.

The only question is how to gain an entry. How does a courtesan eager to make her mark announce herself in a city where public ostentation is seen as a sign of vulgarity rather than success? The answer is simple. Since no trader worth his salt buys sight unseen, there are public places where sellers can go to advertise their wares. And in this, for all her protestations of purity, Venice turns out to be no more virtuous or more imaginative than the Holy City itself.

For courtesans, like everyone else, go to church.

CHAPTER FIVE

We have taken our places—separately—in the middle, where it is crowded and where, while we can see those in front, they cannot see us. For we are not here to be seen. On the contrary, until we have better cloth and a house furnished for hospitality, we must keep to the shadows. I would not have her here at all if I had my way. I am noticeable enough on my own, and if spotted together in public, we will be remembered. At least her head and face are well covered, though thanks to the ministrations of La Draga, my lady is nearly enough restored to her former self to hold the gaze of any man she might choose to look upon, and because she knows it now, she will find it harder to resist the challenge. I am done arguing with her, though. There is a limit to how long she can sit in a room with the rancid smell of magic in her hair, and as her confidence has returned, she has become more impatient with my secondhand reports.

“You are the nearest thing to a woman I have found in a man, Bucino, but you cannot judge the competition as well as I can. Anyway, you are too small to see properly over the pews and will therefore certainly miss some of the theater. It is time for me to be there now. When you go next, we go together.”

The church we have picked is Santi Giovanni e Paolo, which the Venetians call San Zanipolo—they have more names for their buildings than old women have endearments for their lapdogs. It has less gold and fewer relics than San Marco, and its interior cannot make your heart soar in the same way as the great vaulted nave of Santa Maria dei Frari, but it is big—one of the biggest in the city—and powerful, with the tombs of more than a dozen doges, and it brings the great and the wealthy flocking to Mass, not least because it has a fine and spacious
campo
outside, where after worship the faithful can mingle, showing off the cut of their new cloth along with their piety.

It is a feast day, and the mood on the streets is high. We arrive early so we can watch the congregation gather. The stone floor is alive with the rustle of silk skirts and tapping wooden heels. Of course, not all the women are professionals: in a city where rich women are sequestered, a great church is also a marketplace for pursuing possible marriage contacts, and to this end even respectable girls are allowed to try a little harder with their wardrobes to get themselves noticed. Still, any man with eyes in his head would be able to tell the difference soon enough.

According to my lady, the first trick is the entrance: “You can tell a successful courtesan from the moment she walks in. A good church will have four, maybe five hundred men gathered for Sunday Mass, and I warrant at least sixty or seventy of them will be as interested in the women as in the prayers, though some may not even know it yet. That's why the best courtesans dress for the space as much as for the watchers. You have to give the men time to study you as you come in, so they will know where to find you again during the rest of the Mass.”

There are at least four women in San Zanipolo today who know how to make an entrance, two dark, two fair. All of them I have seen before, and they come with their heads high, their dresses so full that in effect they carry their own stages around them, which means they can walk as slowly as they like, their skirts held delicately high over raised shoes and ankles as they pick their way across the flagstones.

They settle in the seats of their choice and spread their skirts, arranging their shawls carelessly, carefully, to show a glimpse of skin, though no breast—too much flesh too fast in church and a man can be reminded of Hell as easily as Heaven. One of the fair ones, with her hair in a golden net, soars above the crowd, for her stilt clogs are even higher than the rest. I would need a ladder to get even as far as her waist, but fashion makes perfect silliness of sense, and there are already a few tongues hanging out at the sight of her.

The Mass begins, and I glance across to where my lady sits, eagle-eyed, reading their posture as carefully as she has studied their wardrobe. I hear her voice in my head.

The trick now is to keep the men's attention on you even while you do nothing. So you follow the prayers, head erect, voice sweet but not too loud, eyes on the altar, but always aware of what others are seeing. The side or back of your head is as important as your face. While you dare not wear your hair loose, as the virgins do, you can tease a few curled strands down here and there, and weave or braid the rest into gilded or jeweled veils in ways that make it as interesting to study as any altarpiece. And if you've washed and dried it that morning with the right oils—the best courtesans take longer to get ready for Mass than any priest—then its scent can rival the incense. Though you should also have your own perfume, mixed especially, and when no one is looking you should waft it around a bit with your hands. In this way the front pews as well as the back will know you're there. But all this is just preening and preparation for the real test—which is the sermon.

The way my lady tells it, for this moment to work you first need to know your church, because, though it might be filled with the wealthiest men in the city, if the priest is a hellfire preacher who delivers his threats blunt and fast, then any whore worth her salt might as well give up and go home. But get a scholar who's never heard of an hourglass, and every courtesan in the church is already in Heaven.

As we are now; for though the preacher in San Zanipolo is a Dominican who avows purity, he is particularly fond of his own voice, which is a grave mistake, since it is a thin and reedy instrument that stupefies more souls than it saves. By ten minutes in, the older heads are going down onto their chests. As the snoring starts, the rich virgins come to life, slipping their veils aside and sending out glances like coy cupid darts while their mothers wrestle with the weight of a dozen biblical quotations.

All this fluttering makes for a perfect screen for more serious business. While my lady is hawkeyed for the women, I am also interested in the men and what is going on in their heads. I try to imagine myself in their place.

I pick out one figure—I noticed him when he came in. He is tall (as I would be in another life), substantial in girth, maybe forty years of age, and by his dress one of the ruling Crow families, the sleeves on his black coat lined with sable and his wife as rich and square as a four-poster bed. I sit myself in his seat. One of the dark-haired courtesans is in front to the left of me. Zanipolo is my regular church. If things go well, I am hoping to endow a small altar and intend to be buried here. I go to confession every month and am forgiven my sins. I thank God regularly for my good fortune and give him back his share of it, for which, in turn, he helps bring home my investments safely. This morning I have meditated on my Savior's wounds on the cross before praying that the price of silver will stay high enough for me to fund a share in another vessel to leave for Tunis in the spring. In this way I will raise a good dowry for my second daughter, who is ripening fast and must be protected from contamination, because young men do so lust for the crevices in young women's bodies. As, indeed, do older men at times, for there is great and comforting sweetness to be found there…

(Ah—see! So it happens: inch by inch, thought by thought, the slip-slide from the spirit to the flesh.) The air is grown stuffy now, and the priest's voice drones on. I shift a little to give myself more space, and as I do so I spot her, five or six rows away, upright amid a sea of slumped shoulders, her fine head high in the air. Of course, I knew she was there—I mean, I had noticed her before, when she first came in, how could I not?—only I had promised myself that today I would not…Well, never mind. We have sorted things out, God and I, and a man deserves a little pleasure now and then. I give myself time to really look at her, and she is indeed lovely: ruby dark hair—how lush it would be cascading down her back—golden skin, full lips, and the glimmer of flesh as she adjusts her shawl where it has slipped a little over her breast. Oh, she is so lovely that you might think God himself has put her here so I could appreciate the sublime perfection of his creation.

And now—oh my, and now—she moves her head in my direction, though she is not looking at me directly. I see the hint of a smile and then, then, the slow flick of her tongue moving to moisten her lips. She must be thinking of something, something pleasant no doubt. Something very pleasant. And before I know it, I am hard as a rock under my coat, and the line between redemption and temptation is already behind me, though I cannot for the life of me remember when I crossed it. Just as I don't really think about the fact that those moistened lips and that secretive smile are not for me only but also for the banker on my left, who has already enjoyed more than her looks and is eager to see her roll her tongue for him, not to mention the young admiral's son five rows behind, who is recently parted from a lady and is on the lookout again.

And so, as my lady would put it, “Without a word being said, the fish swim into the net.”

 

Mass ends, and the church is filled with busyness as the crowd starts to push out. We move fast and, once outside, place ourselves on the small stone bridge overlooking the
campo,
from where we can watch the final act of the performance. It is cold and the sky threatens rain, but that does not deter the crowd.

The space is so perfect for courtship that you might think the women had designed the
campo
themselves. To the right of the church as you leave, the shining new façade of the Scuola of San Marco is an excuse for all kinds of dalliance, since to appreciate the cleverness of its marble reliefs, you have to loiter in certain places, moving your body a little to the left or the right, tilting your head until you get the exact effect. You'd be amazed how many young, sweet things are suddenly aflame for the wonder of art. Farther into the center, other knots form around the great horse statue. The rider was some old Venetian general who left his fortune to the state on condition they immortalize him and his horse. He asked for San Marco, but they gave him Zanipolo instead. He sits up here now, all bellicose and bronze, boastful, oblivious of the action underneath him as young men and women exchange looks while pretending to study the straining muscles in the horse's metal thighs. I like the animal better than the man, but then Venice is a town that favors mules as much as horses, and while I'm safer on the streets these days, I still miss the stomping, snorting power of the great Roman breeds.

My lady's metaphor of the fish is an apt one, for now the whole congregation is out, with small shoals gathering around the more exotic species. Some of the men swim straight in; others hover at the edge, as if they have not yet decided in which direction they are headed. At the center the women turn and float, keeping track of all around them. They carry handkerchiefs or fans or rosary beads, which sometimes slip from their fingers to fall at the feet of a particular man. They smile and pout, tilting their heads as conversations start, covering coral lips with white, manicured hands when a certain compliment or comment causes a spurt of laughter in them and those around them. But while their mouths may be closed, their eyes are talking loudly.

At my lady's instruction, I move off the bridge into the square to observe them better. It's a mark of the excitement that the only people who notice me are a few elder statesmen and their warty wives, who cannot decide whether to stare at me or to shiver with distaste. Though I am not the only dwarf in the city (I've seen one in a troupe of acrobats who perform in the piazza sometimes), I am unusual enough to be a spectacle, which is another reason why it is better we are not seen together, or at least not until we are in business again, when my ugly exoticism can become part of her attraction.

I concentrate on the women in the crowd I know from other visits: the dark-haired beauty with the flashy yellow skirts and snapping fan, and the pale, willowy one with the skin of a marble Madonna and what looks like a net of stars in her frizzy hair. For these I have already discovered names and gossip. The rest I am still studying. If I were not so squat and ugly, I might try to play the acolyte to a few of them now, along with the rest of the suitors. But their game is too tall and quick for me, with glances and smiles darting to and fro as the women divide their time between the converted and the still tempted.

And so the attracted meet the attractive, and in this way is the trade begun.

I am about to turn back to my lady when something catches my eye. Maybe it is the way he holds his arm, for the story was that the attack left him maimed in the right hand. He is behind two other men now, and my view is blocked by their girth. He appears for an instant close to the woman in yellow, then disappears again. He is bearded, and I catch his face only in half profile, so I still cannot be sure. The last I heard of him he had fled Rome for the safety of Mantua and a patron whose wit was as crude as his own. Venice would be too stern for him, surely. But there is a certainty that comes more from the gut than from the brain. And I feel it now. He has his back to me, and I watch him and another man making their way toward the woman with the stars in her hair. Of course. He would like her. She would remind him of someone, and in the book there would no doubt be some entry about her wit and cleverness.

I turn back to the bridge, but while my lady has the eyes of a falcon, her view would be obstructed by the plinth of the statue.

I take a last look, but he is nowhere to be seen now.

It cannot be him. Fate would not do this to us.