The Legacy of Grazia dei Rossi (5 page)

3

THE PRINCESS
AND THE PALADIN

The princess had made it abundantly clear that what appealed to her about Ariosto’s epic was purely and simply the love story of Isabella and Zerbino. Any reference to the larger tale of which it was a part, or to its origins in the world of French chivalry, she met with a barely disguised yawn. He knew that if he was to capture her attention and hold it, he must jettison Ariosto’s opening cantos and leap into the middle of Canto 13, where the knight-errant, Orlando, out for a gallop in the French countryside, discovers a maiden being held prisoner in a cave. She is not much older than fifteen, and even though her eyes are tear-swollen, such is her beauty that she makes her filthy prison look like a paradise.

“Full well do I know that I may suffer for having spoken to you,” she tells her rescuer, “but I will tell you my story even if I pay for it with my life.”

Danilo could not resist sneaking a peek at his princess to see if she had taken the bait and was rewarded with an expression of rapt attention. So far, so good.

“I am Isabella, daughter of the King of Galicia,” the captive maiden goes on. “Once I had a happy life. I was young, beautiful, rich, and esteemed. Now I am poor, wretched, and debased.”

“Young, beautiful, rich, and esteemed,” Saida repeated. “How does that sound in your language?”

He checked his text. “
Felice, gentile, giovane, ricca, onesta e bella,
” he read.

She repeated the strange words slowly, turning them over in her mouth as if to taste them. “And now she is?”

“
Povere, infelice e vile,
” he read. “Poor, wretched, and debased . . .”

“Poor princess . . .” She dabbed at her eyes.

This was going even better than he expected. “She tells Orlando that although she used to be the daughter of a king, she no longer is,” he continued.

“How can that be?” Saida loved a puzzle.

“Because she is now the daughter of grief, misery, and sadness. And it is all the fault of love.” He hesitated before continuing. “That is not quite right. The Italian words are
colpa d’amore.
There is a suggestion of her being heart struck.”

Saida clutched her breast.

“Shall I go on?” he inquired. Need he have asked?

He continued: “The damsel sets off to seek refuge in a convent to dedicate the rest of her life to the service of God. Not that she will ever forego either her love for Zerbino or the possession of his mortal remains. Wherever she is, wherever she tarries, his corpse accompanies her and is with her night and day.”

The delicacy of this final detail brought new tears of admiration to Saida’s eyes.

It had been months since the tutor and the pupil returned to
The Thousand and One Nights
. And now Saida was the one begging for more, and Danilo was the one parceling out his daily readings in miserly increments.

“Of course, Princess Isabella is destined never to reach her refuge. Not far from the convent she encounters a savage Saracen, an African king named Rodomonte, who does not immediately kill or dishonor her. But Isabella knows that every hour she spends with this man increases the peril she is in. She conceives a plan . . .” Danilo stopped his tale, unable to voice the words he was about to read. “I cannot go further. The end of Isabella is too cruel for your young ears. Even Madonna Isabella D’Este could not bear to have it read to her. And she is a grown woman.”

Saida said nothing. She simply pursed her lips in that stubborn way she did when her mind was made up.

Reluctantly, he began to trace Isabella’s downward spiral into the arms of death.

“In the brightness of the early morning, before Rodomonte’s head is clouded by wine (a habit against his religion that the villain has picked up in France), Isabella makes him a provocative proposal,” he said. “‘If you leave my honor safe,’ she says, ‘I will give you something of far greater value. Search and you can find a thousand comely women to possess, but no one in the world can give you what I have to offer.’ Artfully, she leaves the precise nature of this priceless gift shrouded in mystery.

“Intrigued, Rodomonte accepts her offer, knowing that once he has the gift, he can easily break his word and take the woman along with it. Isabella takes Rodomonte out into the woods to search for a certain herb that when boiled with ivy and roasted over a fire of Cyprus wood, and then pressed between innocent hands, produces a magic juice. ‘Whoever bathes himself with this juice three times,’ she tells him, ‘so hardens his body that he will become proof against fire and steel.’

“‘I shall bathe myself with it from the crown of my head down to my breast,’ she tells him. ‘Then you must turn your sword upon me as if you intend to cut off my head, and you will see the wonderful result.’

“Whereupon she bathes herself in the juice three times, then steps forth to offer her bare neck to be severed. Completely convinced by her charade, Rodomonte unsheathes his sword and in one slice lops her fair head clean from her shoulders.”

“No!” The cry escaped Princess Saida’s lips like a moan.

“Yes, three times. The poet is specific,” Danilo insisted. “And from that head a voice can clearly be heard calling the name Zerbino.” He paused. “Shall I read what the poet has to say about this?”

She nodded, dumb with grief.

“Here is Ariosto’s benediction: ‘Depart in peace, beautiful spirit, and take thy seat in the skies,’” Danilo intoned in a sepulchral voice. “‘If my verses had the power, I would work to the limit of my poet’s skill to give them such endurance that, for a thousand years, the world would have knowledge of the illustrious name Isabella
.
’”

“I will pray for her.” Saida folded her hands under her chin and lowered her head. Then, after a suitably solemn pause, she raised her head and announced briskly, “Now we must begin again.”

“Again?”

“Yes. We go back to the beginning of Isabella’s story. Let us begin this very day, leaving out no detail. But this time” — he noted that her mouth was set in the now familiar, determined pout — “this time, I will speak for Isabella. You may read all the rest. But I will be Isabella. And you must teach me her words.”

So they began again to recite Ariosto’s poem, the two of them now. Then one day Saida, quite overcome by the perils of Isabella, tossed away her notes and began to act out her part, embellishing it as her fancy dictated.

From then on, the Princess and the Paladin became a kind of mode that they slipped in and out of whenever the inclination and the opportunity permitted. Gradually, the game insinuated itself into the riding ring, the archery court, and the ball field in the form of brief intervals of wordplay, teasing, and tag. They acted out Isabella’s rescue by Orlando, Zerbino’s death, Isabella’s sacrifice, sometimes complete, sometimes in part, depending on the time available.

Although secrecy was never mentioned, none of their fellow students was ever included in this play. And when the fine weather came and the class was rewarded with weekly picnics on the little island of Kinali, the Princess and the Paladin found their perfect setting surrounded by a dense forest that eerily resembled those so prominently featured in
Orlando Furioso
. Saida was very good at melting away from the others undetected, and Danilo became an expert at picking up her signals and following her surreptitiously.

Alone in the woods they found glades that might have been cleared explicitly for the purpose of jousting and caves ideal for the imprisonment of princesses. They even uncovered a fountain, dried up and battered but a fountain nevertheless, of the sort likely to be encountered by any paladin galloping over the countryside or any princess escaping the clutches of a villainous Saracen. It was as if nature herself had created the ideal setting for Isabella’s tragedy.

How could such things have happened under the watchful eyes of the nurses and teachers and
lalas
of the Harem School? Perhaps because it came about innocently. Princess Saida and the foreign boy were so young. Both were thought to be children, much too young to present any threat to each other. And the boy was mastering the Turkish language at a formidable rate. Soon he would move on to a European school of his father’s choosing. And the princess would, of course, marry.

Was it the certainty that, in the very near future, these children would be leaving their childhood behind them that blinded the adults to what was happening between them in the here and now? Whatever the case, their ferocious chases on horseback, their muttered little exchanges as they shot off their arrows during archery practice, and their occasional absences from their fellow students went unremarked, and they remained free to play the game they had invented.

Then, as unexpectedly as it had begun, the little idyll came to an end. With the threat of puberty looming, the time arrived for the children of the Harem School to put away childish things and move into adulthood: the boys to enter one of the all-male pages’ schools, the girls to be immersed deep in the harem to prepare for marriage.

Oddly enough, the event that ushered in this sudden change was marked by a seemingly unrelated ceremonial occasion: the circumcision of three of Suleiman’s sons. And Danilo’s first intimation of what lay ahead arrived in the unlikely form of an invitation from Prince Mehmet, the Sultan’s first son by his Second
Kadin,
to take a walk in his mother’s garden.

Since the prince was younger — just the age at which Danilo himself had come into the Princes School — contact between the two boys had been limited to nods and smiles. So Danilo was puzzled by the sudden offer of a princely arm. What could this boy want of him? He quickly found out. As soon as they were out of earshot of the other students, Mehmet dropped his formal manner and got straight to the point.

“I know that you were circumcised because all Jews are cut,” he began. “Tell me, please, did it hurt?”

What was Prince Mehmet after? Whatever it was, Danilo had nothing to lose by telling the truth. “I can’t remember,” he replied with perfect candor. Then, his curiosity piqued, he asked, “Why do you want to know?”

“Because we’ve been told that two of my brothers and I are going to be circumcised on the twenty-third day of June, and I have to know how much it hurts in order to prepare myself. They say it hurts like burning hell. Does it?” And, when Danilo did not immediately answer, the young prince added, “They say you never forget the pain.”

“I can’t remember.” Danilo was beginning to feel himself inadequate to conduct this bizarre conversation. “You see, I was only seven days old when I was circumcised. That’s when we Jews do it.”

“Damn!” The boy slapped his hand against his thigh. “No one told me that. And now you think me a fool.”

“Of course I don’t, Mehmet. You can’t be expected to know everybody else’s customs.”

“I’ll bet you do,” the boy answered. “Everyone knows how clever the Jews are. I learned that from my great-grandfather, Bayezid. Do you know what he said when he heard that the Catholic king of Spain had expelled the Jews from his country?”

Danilo shook his head.

“My great-grandfather said, ‘People tell me that Ferdinand of Spain is a wise king. I ask, how wise can he be? A king who impoverishes his country by expelling the Jews and enriches the Ottoman Empire by sending them to us must be stupid.’”

“Your great-grandfather said that?”

“In 1492,” the boy assured him confidently. “Even then, we Ottomans knew that the Jews are the most clever of all races. My father told me that story. He also told me that the Jews are skilled craftsmen, astute merchants, and brilliant doctors. That is why we have always welcomed them into the Ottoman Empire. Did not your father, the physician, cure my father of his gout when all the Arab doctors failed?” Then, without waiting for a confirmation, he added, “And now I see for myself an example. How clever of you to do it to babies.”

“Clever? Babies?” Danilo was having difficulty making the leap.

“Because babies don’t feel anything. We Muslims leave it until so late that we always remember the pain. But that is not why I am afraid.” He stopped abruptly.

“Why then?”

The boy looked down at his boots, silent, then peered up through the fringe of shiny black hair on his forehead, bit his lip, and looked Danilo straight in the eye, having decided, it seemed, to give up a secret.

“I am afraid that I will disgrace myself by crying out,” he whispered. “The pain will pass, but the shame will never go away. People always remember that you cried out at your circumcision.” He paused, then almost as if speaking to himself, asked, “But what if you can’t stop yourself?”

The question was accompanied by a look so woebegone that Danilo found himself wrapping his arm affectionately around the younger boy’s shoulder. “You have nothing to worry about, Mehmet. You are a brave boy just like your namesake, Mehmet the Conqueror. Everybody says you resemble him.”

“They do?” The boy remained solemn but looked slightly less woeful. “We must learn to be brave, my brothers and I, because there is nothing ahead for us but certain death.”

Danilo was well aware of the Ottoman practice of eliminating all fraternal rivals to the throne each time a new sultan was crowned. But he had stored it in his memory as an ancient custom, not something that really happened to the real princes he knew. Now, suddenly, he found himself looking into its human face.

“But there were no executions when your father, Suleiman, came to the throne,” he temporized.

“Only because he had no living brothers. But my mother tells us that, on the day that my half-brother, Mustafa, comes to the throne, he will exile her and have us all killed.”

“Oh, surely Mustafa wouldn’t do a thing like that,” said Danilo, knowing as he spoke how foolish he sounded.

“It was my ancestor, Bayezid, who authored this law,” the boy explained. “He did it to preserve the succession. Do you wish to hear his exact words?”

At Danilo’s nod of assent the boy began to recite his forefather’s dictum. “
It is proper for whichever of my sons is favored by God with the sultanate to move immediately to execute his brothers in order to prevent the outbreak of a civil war.
” Then, striking a pose, the little prince continued, “
What is the death of a prince compared to the loss of a province?
”