The Midwife of Venice (17 page)

She tiptoed toward the cradle draped with a
padiglione
woven in the di Padovani colours. This would be her final goodbye to a child she had brought into the world. Already the thought of never seeing him again pained her. Better she should quit this palazzo now, but she could not without one last look at him. The window was open, she noticed. Too much air would not benefit the baby. She pulled it closed. Then, carefully stepping over the protective circle of salt, she pushed the curtains aside and bent down, ready to plant a kiss on Matteo’s cheek.

The cradle was empty.

I
N THE PAST WEEK
Isaac’s fortunes had, if not soared—for how could anyone describe the eating of mouldy bread and half-rotten fish as soaring?—at least improved. He now had victuals, shelter, and an occupation of sorts. He slept in Joseph’s stable at night, next to wagons and carts and horses that munched their hay all night relentlessly. And if the rats nibbled his toes before he was finally able to sink into the arms of Morpheus, what of it? That could happen anywhere, even in Venice. At least he was not eating the leather from his own shoes.

As part of the bargain, Isaac had convinced Joseph that he, Isaac, could earn more money writing letters in the
square than he could rowing on a slave galley. So Isaac became a scribe. Two-thirds of his meagre fees, whether paid in coin or in kind, went straight into Joseph’s greasy pocket; the other third went to Isaac. But—and this was the important part of the deal—if he could win the heart of the widow Gertrudis for Joseph, Isaac would be granted his freedom. Everything depended on his persuasive tongue and his nimble mind.

On Friday, which was market day, and again on Monday and Thursday, Isaac sat on his fleshless behind in the main square. No matter how he shifted on the ground, it was painful. He wrote letters and drafted contracts for the honest citizens of Valletta, who were, for the most part, innocent of the written word. Most could not even recognize their own names written in dust on the side of a wagon. But the astonishing transactions they engaged in! The pig had a firm grip on the Christian imagination. Last week, one of his customers, a farmer from Gozo, directed Isaac to pen a letter to his wife instructing her to give his favourite sow a brisk going-over with a twig brush while he was away. In the course of the past week, Isaac had drafted several contracts for the purchase and sale of sows. He had copied out recipes for head cheese, roast suckling pig, and a stew called
trumpo
made of pig snout and rutabaga. The very thought of such a dish made him bilious.

Business arrangements that men had previously sealed with a handshake and a bottle of malmsey wine were now codified in Isaac’s meticulous script, writing so tiny that Isaac himself could not read it, even after the ink had dried.
But neither could anyone else. This did not prevent his customers from nodding solemnly over Isaac’s parchment and swearing they had never gazed upon a finer hand. The remainder of the week Isaac laboured for Joseph, sizing canvas and sewing sails.

So three days a week, in the square, installed under an olive tree, a plank across his knees for a desk, Isaac dealt with hearty men reeking of cow shit. Some were generous and thanked him with gifts of potatoes, carrots, and even figs. One man for whom Isaac had written a marriage contract presented him with a not-too-badly-worn pair of breeches.

Isaac recited to his customers what was to become a well-honed speech. “This parchment does not come easily to me,” he would say. “The Knights in Valletta—may carbuncles cover their asses—refused me paper, so by my own industry I have converted a sheepskin to parchment. I provide a full broadsheet for the verbose, a quarto for the moderately loquacious, and an octavo, an eighth of a sheet, for the succinct. For the inarticulate, I offer odds and ends made from scraps of the hind legs.” He would then wave the various sizes of parchment in front the customer’s nose. Sometimes Isaac would add, “Let my bleeding hands be your incentive to brevity.”

The church bells rang out at noon. It was the appointed hour. Soon Joseph would appear standing over him, blotting out the sun, to collect the letter that would shoot Cupid’s arrow squarely into Gertrudis’s heart. Better to be a purveyor of love potions, like the crones in the market,
Isaac thought. Why had he laboured over—no,
agonized
over—his composition when he could more easily have concocted a stew of bat guano, toad’s wart, and fennel, and enjoyed just as great a chance of success?

Isaac had glimpsed Gertrudis several times from a distance as she hurried through the street, sketch paper under her arm, the hungry eyes of every man upon her. His heart sank every time he watched her graceful form picking its way through the idlers in front of the tavern. On several occasions, on her way to the shop of the apothecary who compounded her paint pigments and provided her with linseed oil, she looked across the square at Isaac and smiled.

Oh, Joseph, Isaac thought, you are flying too close to the sun and you will crash to the earth, taking me with you. You are a man who does not desire what is within your grasp, and longs only for what you cannot attain. The island is full of stout peasant girls who would keep you warm in the winter and shade you in the summer.

Isaac remembered that yearning for love, that hunger that could be satisfied by only one woman. But here in Malta he had come to realize that his belly was a more insistent organ than his prick.

His dreams left him in no doubt of that. The same dream had come to him every night since he was taken prisoner months ago. Hannah stood before him dressed in a white camisole, her nipples pushing through the thin fabric, dark hair cascading around her shoulders. She implored him to make love to her. When he embraced her, her arms stretched longer and longer until they entwined him in a vinous
embrace, binding his limbs to his torso. When he sucked her nipples, they became clusters of grapes. When he ran his hands over her belly, it turned into a ripe melon. When he kissed her, her lips became persimmons. Entering her was like severing a moist fig in two. During his waking hours, it was the thought of Hannah’s baked kugel, which was like eating a cloud, that made him grow tumescent.

Last night when he dreamt of Hannah, she was wearing the blue robes of the Madonna in the painting of the Annunciation he had seen through the church doors of St. Zaccaria. She spoke to him, whispering words of love. When he awoke, Hannah’s dream words were fresh in his mind, and he feverishly transcribed them. When he reread what he’d written, he knew that this was the love letter that would melt ice, never mind the female heart.

Now, as he set up in the square, Isaac tried to wash away the memory of the dream. He bit into a lump of bread he had tucked in his shirt. Afraid of breaking off a tooth, he crumbled it with his fingers and sucked the crumbs until they were soft enough to swallow. The letter, securely tucked under the waistband of his new breeches, crinkled and stabbed at his belly. As he arranged his writing material—ink, quill, and parchment—he glanced around, hoping to catch sight of Hector, the local agent for the Society for the Release of Captives and the man who held his fate in his hands.

In the past week, in exchange for a few coins he could use to buy gruel, stale bread, and the occasional piece of fruit, Isaac had hauled canvas, delivered provisions to the
ships at dock, and watched Joseph sell slaves down at the wharf to the galley captains. But not once had he set eyes on Hector.

Now, Joseph appeared out of nowhere before him, rubbing his temples and looking worried. “Have you got my letter? I must have it now.”

Isaac extracted it from his waistband and made a ceremony of blowing away the dust and brushing off a few crawling ants. Then he handed it to Joseph with a flourish.

Like many illiterate men, Joseph was cowed by the sight of the written word. Gingerly he accepted the missive, opened it, and pretended to read it while Isaac waited. A seagull flew overhead and narrowly missed depositing a consignment of excrement on Joseph’s head. The letter said everything a lover could say to his intended. It said what Isaac would say to Hannah if he ever saw her again.

“Shall I read your masterpiece?” he asked, taking it back from Joseph.

Joseph nodded, looked at the ground, and hitched up breeches stained yellow with sheep’s piss, a gesture that unleashed an acrid smell. His mare moved nearer, her ears twitching like crows on a branch.

Isaac customarily read aloud in a singsong cadence more suited to the reading of a bill of lading than a love letter, but this time he drew on his experience as an occasional cantor in
shul
and sang out in a high, clear voice:
“Dearest Gertrudis.”

By the time Isaac finished, tears had formed in Joseph’s eyes. “A very fine letter. I could not have written better
myself.” He blew his nose on a rag, producing an alarming honk like the call of a gander. Then he opened the cloth to peer inside, as though searching for pearls or rubies.

There was one sentence—and one sentence only—in the whole missive that was not complete and perfect. Isaac said, “There is a small detail you must supply. What colour are Gertrudis’s eyes?” Isaac had almost written
black
, because that was the colour of Hannah’s eyes.

“Damn me if I ever noticed,” Joseph said. “What colour are most women’s eyes?” Shifting a coil of hemp rope from one shoulder to the other, he said, “Brown, I guess.” He swivelled his head to look at his mare. “Same colour as old Cosma’s here. And another thing I just remembered—she has eyelashes.”

Was there no limit to the idiocy of this man who held Isaac’s life in his hands? Isaac inserted the word
brown
in the final sentence, sprinkled sand on the writing, and when it was dry, held the letter out to Joseph.

Isaac gestured to the bottom of the page. Joseph pressed to the parchment a thumb so dirty it was not necessary to first coat it with ink. Isaac sprinkled Joseph’s print with more sand, set it in the sun to dry for a moment, and then folded the letter into a rectangle. He dripped candle wax to seal it. When the wax was almost dry, he sealed it with his own thumb.

“Take the letter to her and then prepare yourself. She will swoon in your arms.”

“We will see what she has to say.”

Isaac patted the letter and gave it to Joseph.

“You may live to see Venice again, my friend,” Joseph said. Then he grasped his horse by its bridle, and that familiar gesture seemed to make him revert to his previous self. “Get over to my shop now. I have work for you.” Then Joseph, his mare’s head bobbing over on his shoulder, headed in the direction of the harbour, presumably to deliver the letter to Gertrudis.

It pained Isaac to see Joseph disappearing down the road with a letter that was meant for Hannah.

Isaac sighed and wrapped his pot of ink, parchment, and quill into a square of linen and knotted the corners. So lost in thought was he that he was startled to see, through the sulphurous smoke from the ship-repair yards, a lanky, horse-faced man tying his mare to a post. The man advanced toward him, proceeding in a half trot that made Isaac wonder why the man had bothered with a horse in the first place. It must be Hector. Assunta had said that Hector had an equine look about him. This man wore breeches so short that, had he been a Venetian, they could have been explained only by the expectation of a high tide. It was as though he were wearing the clothes of a shorter, stouter brother. Over his chest, he wore a close-fitting jerkin of black wool.

The
Esecutori contro la Bestemmia
would find no silk, no rings, and no golden chains on this man—no violation of the Sumptuary Laws at all. And yet, there was a certain foppishness to his aspect—something in the way he folded his neck piece. And the smooth appearance of his shirt suggested the application of a hot iron, or at the very least the pressing between two boards.

He came to a halt in front of Isaac, casting a dark stripe of shadow on Isaac’s knees and torn breeches. “Hello, Signore, you must be Isaac Levi.”

“Hector, I presume?” Isaac scrambled to his feet and shook his hand. “Isaac Levi, at your service.”

Hector gave Isaac’s hand a shake. “So you are managing to survive?” He glanced at the quill protruding from the tied bundle of linen. “Writing letters for local people?”

Hector’s voice was high-pitched but kind. He smelled pleasantly of woodsmoke and lemons.

“Joseph, the man who owns me, has agreed I can write the odd letter here and there as long as I give him two-thirds of my fees.” To hide his nervousness, Isaac gabbled on. “I am a one-eyed man in the country of the blind.” He grinned. “But enough of my poor ramblings. What is the news from Venice?” Isaac clasped Hector’s arm and helped him to be seated on a fallen log, trying to conceal his excitement, willing himself to act as calmly as if he were at his desk in the ghetto. When they were both seated, Isaac asked, “Is there any news of my wife, Hannah?”

“The Society writes me that she is well.”

There was something about his eye-shifting manner that made Isaac apprehensive. “Is that all? She is well?”