Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (17 page)

“Ho! Who goes there? The ghetto has been closed since sundown!”

The face of the man is fierce beneath his scarlet hat, and his bare sword promises mischief.

“'Tis time all
signorine
should be homeward bound!” shouts his confrere, more gently.

I turn back and walk sadly along the Ghetto Vecchio, accepting my fate. I know a Jewess cannot venture into Venice by night. Even masked, disguised, and in a secret gondola, she risks nothing less than her life.

Then all at once I see him. He has soft wisps of auburn hair worn loose about his nape and flowing into a wispy auburn beard, which he continually twists into a point. One small gold hoop gleams in his left ear, catching what light there is. Over his pinked, white silk doublet he wears a tattered velvet mandilion that gives but little protection against the wicked night. His velvet breeches, which at one time seem to have been trimmed with braid to match the mandilion, are travel-worn and rubbed. His pale flesh-colored stockings are mud-stained, his pale shoe leather muddy and worn. He appears to be in his late twenties, but who can tell? This man has a sadness and pensiveness well past his years. I know at once who this brave stranger who ventures into the locked ghetto is.

We nearly collide in the narrow
calle
, whereupon he looks up, meets my gaze, and says, all in one gasp:

“Who ever loved, who loved not at first sight?”

My heart pounds. My breath grows short. In an instant I realize that I am drawn to this man and that he will change the course of my life. (One always knows this on first meeting, knows it immediately—however one may try to deny it later.)

“
Signore
,” I say, curtsying politely.

“Rosaline,” he mutters.

“No,” I say. “'Tis Jessica.”

“Rosaline, Jessica, Emilia—what's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

“And you are Will,” I say.

He looks amazed. “And you an angel, writing me in her heavenly book—I must be dead of plague, for how else should you know my name?”

“Because I summoned you,” I say with the boldness of kindled lust.

“Summoned me? Summoned a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, a motley to the view, a needy nothing trimmed in jollity that travels here, travels there, bound to a noble lord, a patron upon whose pleasure I attend?”

“All that will be healed and revealed by time. In future, he will be known solely because of you.”

Will laughs derisively. “Marry, come up, you jest of scars that never felt a wound.”

“Doubt me not,” I say, liking this oracular role.

“Where may I find you, come to you, wait upon you?”

“Nowhere, Sirrah, for I am bound as well, but to a father upon whose pleasure I attend. And you are in danger for your very life here in the ghetto after sundown—unless you are a Jew.”

“No Jew,” says Will, “but one who would fain be one if it would bring me closer to your love.”

And at that very moment who should appear—his face a mask of fury beneath his crimson hat, his mantle flying out behind him like a banner in the wind—but my father.

“Jessica,” he thunders, “look to your duties. Homeward, my girl. Look to your Sabbath duties. How dare you leave the synagogue 'ere the prayers were done?”

My father takes me firmly by the arm and drags me off.

And now, where does
he
go? For lover that I am already, half my mind goes with him. He bribes a Christian guard to leave the ghetto, whereupon he makes his way tortuously back to the palazzo where he lodges with his noble patron, and finds the young gentlemen gaming. Their faces bear the blank, intent looks of those who are bewitched by dice, knowing that their fortunes rise and fall upon a throw of bones. But Will's head is full of fancies, his heart full of longing. He wonders about this dark lady he has met in the dark
calle
, in the dark and rainy ghetto where he has just been to hear the great rabbi preach. She reminds him of Emilia, the queen's musician who played her way into his poet's heart on the virginals and then betrayed him with his friend—and half of London. Emilia is also a dark Italian beauty, her people coming from this part of the world, he thinks. But she is fiery and unpredictable, unchaste, perhaps even clapt. Or so the burning of his nether regions after their dalliances would indicate. She has more than once sent him to Bath, seeking cure.

He watches the young aristocrats playing at dice. In London, on shipboard, in Venice, they have played at dice as if the world rose and fell upon the game—and, for them, it does. It is a kind of drug, thinks Will, who cannot afford this opiate without growing still more indebted to his patron. But is poetry not also a sort of drug? The scratch of words on a piece of foolscap, the dreamy-eyed state wherein Queen Mab flits through one's brain with her fairy train, and the present world is quite obliterated…Aye—that's his drug! The sound of goose-quill scratching o'er the page, the pages multiplying, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven…one hundred, until they lift the weight upon his breast, and by their heaviness in the hand make his head feel light.

The prince of darkness is a gentleman, he thinks, watching these young lordings gaming. The English lord with his flaxen curls and the young Venetians with their sable or auburn ringlets, their gorgeous velvet doublets unbuttoned from neck to belly to let the air in and the mansweat out, all are equally bewitched by the dice. And then there are the whores who attend them, the famous courtesans of Venice with their powdered breasts and painted faces, their reddened curls (reddened, he is told, by sitting on little balconies—
altane—
in the sun and painting their locks with a special caustic mixture). These women look like heaven without, but Will knows they are hell within—for who wants a quim bought with a crown, or a drab bought with however many ducats? Will would rather save his dribbling dart of love for the page, the foolscap whereon it drips imperishable words.

But
are
they so imperishable? Yes, he must tell himself in order to write them—for one thing the world never needs is another poet (or worse, a player-poet!)—but his mind, if the truth be known, is full of doubts. His wife, Anne, mocks him, and his father doubts him. How should scribbling verses feed his three hostages to fortune? Or care for aged parents who have suffered fortune's reverses, fortune's misfortunes, if you will. Will won't think of this, for to think of this is madness. To be here in Italy, a world away, while his kin in Stratford perhaps perish from plague…

Plagues have always shadowed his life, from its very start. The year of his nativity, plague swept Stratford, and he—a mere babe in his cradle, the first of his mother's children to survive—was spared by his stars for a destiny yet unguessed. His mother told him of this often. Little Will saved for some greatness still unproved. “Y'are of Arden blood. And though we have come down in the world,” she would always say, glancing at Will's poor father, “we are Ardens still.” Just so, he had heard, did Venetian aristocrats pawn their last gold plate, protesting, “We are Vendramins (Veniers, Loredans, Barozzis, Zorzis, Mocenigos, Dandolos, Marcellos, or Pisanis) still!”

“Why so sad, my friend?” says Lord S., suddenly looking bored and restless (because he is losing).

“A lady, Milord. A lady I met in the ghetto.”

“Jewess?”

Will nods his head.

His friend laughs. “The exotic drabs amuse you…Come, Will, there are ladies enough here!”

He nods at the courtesans and makes a lewd gesture with his fingers to indicate copulation, country matters, lechery, the business of the bed.

“We'll all three abed,” he says, putting his arm around the shoulder of a plump courtesan called Diamante.

“Come, Will—thou belie thy name.”

Will knows that this is part of his contract with Harry, to be a player-playmate, to share a woman between the two of them so as to disguise Harry's preference for the double-pricked pleasure of man on man, the passion of a master who is also a mistress, a master-mistress, so to say.

And so they take leave of the damnable whoreson dicers and retire to the bedchamber where, under a ceiling painted by that legendary old man Jacopo Robusti, called Tintoretto (who paints still in Venice), they tangle their six limbs upon a golden bed above which golden cherubim flutter and choir.

Diamante knows her part well. Before the sport begins, she leaves her bodice and her farthingale, her petticoats, her embroidered aprons, her pearls, her silken hose, her high bejeweled
zoccoli
upon a golden chair and draws on instead a pair of Harry's velvet breeches, a padded doublet, even his boots.

And so it appears that we have here three boys playing abed. Diamante begins with Will, who shuts his eyes as she loosens his breech and plays tunes upon his rising flute, his fife, his pipe, his musical pillicock. He groans with pleasure, pretending not to notice when she moves on to Harry and Harry presses his own sweet, red, pouting boy-lips to Will's stiff staff.

What a welter of guilt and confusion is in Will's mind as he pretends not to know what is afoot, acock, abed. For truly, with his eyes shut, he can still pretend that a woman teases him upward to that heaven of choiring cherubim, that a woman squeezes the sweet musical sap out of his tingling flute, that a woman swallows the silver fountain that explodes like fireworks over the Thames on the queen's birthday. And what woman is it, in his fancy? Why, none other than the fleeing beauty he has met in the ghetto, her russet hair feathered with flame in front but for all that not failing to betray its dark and devilish roots.

Now the play turns rough. Lord S. seizes Will by the shoulders and wrestles him to the floor, biting his neck with supposed kisses, drawing little points of blood, but not enough to satisfy his thirst. Thus he draws his poniard from its case and begins to sliver his friend's arm, neck, thigh, with cuts that are less playful than they seem. With a pink and agile tongue, Diamante licks the blood away. Lord S. slashes playfully again, until Will wonders when the jest will grow serious and his lording will kill him wantonly for sport as boys kill flies.

Perhaps to distract Lord S., Diamante now kneels on all fours and urges our young lord to turn his dribbling dart of love toward that dark place that was not made for love. So swift and unmerciful is he that she screams and our poet stops him, strokes her, holds her in his arms. She is sweet and soft to Harry's acrid hairiness, her odor like roses against his musky mansmell, her skin supple and soft.

Now Lord S. is jealous. Now he grasps her in his arms, thrusts his ramrod in her rear again, commanding Will to pierce the other place so that they two can be as twins, of one blood in one woman's body. Obedient, despite his mutinous soul, Will does as his lord commands, turning Diamante to his will, doing the dirty deed from above as Lord S. pierces her from below until they make a three-backed beast that pants and screams and begs for mercy.

Though Will has Diamante in his arms, yet he suspects that the darkness he plumbs belongs to his friend, not to their mutual courtesan; and so it is with reluctance, even horror, that he dies a thunderous death, then slips remorsefully away.

Now it is Harry's turn to spit white into the poet's face, covering it with a stiff mask of seed that stings, like fiery rain.

When both men have spent their silver coin of passion for each other, they attend to the pleasure of their pagan paramour, paddling in her peculiar river, tipping her purple velvet flower until Diamante groans with an “Oh” that flies up to the painted angels on the ceiling who are not aghast, having seen more hells in their time than Satan.

What remorse Will feels when the treble act is done! To be a male varlet to a rich patron, a catamite, a Ganymede, a very Patroclus to Achilles, why, neither poetry nor plague justifies this! Sick with regret, he skulks away (leaving Harry and Diamante entangled on the bed beneath the bored and gilded cherubim, the painted angels who never avert their eyes) and goes back to the room where the Venetian gentlemen—Bassanio and Gratiano—are still gaming. Then he joins their game with a desperate passion, and in a trice has lost more ducats than he can borrow from his lordship without spending more such silver coin of lust for all eternity. He is well and truly captured now, and like Kit Marlowe's Dr. Faustus wants to scream: “Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer! / I'll burn my books—Ah Mephistophilis!”

This cycle of lust and sin, passion and poetry, has been going on unabated since first Will fell in with Lord S. and his lovely, lordly ways so much more glittering than Stratford ones. For how should he, a poet, be able to resist the wanton pictures, the music, incense, and sweet burning wood of a noble household, where books gleam in their bindings, players come to put on costly revels, and the queen herself is entertained? A poet must know these things, not linger in homely Stratford, where greasy Joan doth keel the pot. But oh, how he misses homely Stratford, and never more than here in dark Venice, where his Lording Love has grown still more a Lord of Misrule than he was in London.

In debt, in despair, Will now has ample cause to revisit the ghetto on the morrow to beg or borrow money from the Jew, Jessica's father, whose name he does not yet even know.

I
AWAKENED, EXPECTING A
world of toaster ovens and telephones, motorbikes and microwaves, Concordes and Explorer satellites, atom bombs and submarines—for present-consciousness doesn't slip away so fast. But when I was indeed awake, it was in a walnut bed with writhing columns, the sound of children running in a courtyard far, far below, water sounds under a queerly boarded and bricked-up window (open only a sliver on top, as if by chance), and over it the faint ripple of light on a ceiling—
la vecia
, I now remember the Venetians call it.
Fare la vecia:
to squint as the “old woman” squints—that ripply glistening on the ceiling of a room, which one sees in only one city on earth.