Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (24 page)

Ding, dong, bell.

“For whom have ye brought this babe?” says Arlecchina, trying to snatch it from my arms. I hold him fast.

“For the
signora
,” I say. “Pray, call her.”

Arlecchina makes a hideous face at her retainer and sends the plump, blond man scurrying off into the far chamber from which the music wafts.

Will and I stand there for a moment face to face with Arlecchina, while the baby shrieks as if he would drown out this faery music.

“Prithee, close the portal,” says the poet to the witch, “for 'tis cold, 'tis cold.”

What he does
not
say is that we three are pursued. Perhaps the old witch knows this already, for she seems to know everything. She stares at me and smiles evilly, her witchy right eye larger than her left. Suddenly I see something that I have not noticed before (in that other life, or is it the same life with different costumes?): Arlecchina has a goiter that bulges on the right side of her crepy neck.

“Let no one beg the ring, Jessica,” she says in a voice that crackles like dry wood in a fire. “No, not for three thousand ducats—for you may have need of the ring.”

I look at once at my fingers, searching for the magic object, which I have nearly forgotten. It is still there, on the third finger of my left hand, and its transparent crystal twinkles over the auburn strands of hair beneath, which are still twisted into a love-knot.

“Words fail,” cackles Arlecchina, “time must have a stop; babies cry, then cry no more; poets scribble, then fall silent; the clock ticks, then is smashed; but rings pass from hand to hand, from age to age; begged, borrowed, stolen, belonging to no one, rolling through time into eternity, taking our lives with them.” And, having uttered these portents, Arlecchina lets out a long, resonant cackle, slams the heavy, coffered door at our backs, pivots on her heel, and slithers off in the direction of the music.

As she lifts her heavy black skirts to slip away, I can see that she is wearing
crakows
on her feet, those long-toed phallic shoes whose
poulaines
, or points, curl upward then seem to turn back on themselves. Her petticoats are blue, with silver crescent moons upon them; and though her back is still bent as a sickle, she is walking without her usual staff. Is it truly Arlecchina, or do I dream her? How will I ever find out?

“Of what ring does she speak?” asks Will, whereupon I turn to look at him quizzically, for I have forgotten for the moment that he has not always been with me and thus does not know about the magic ring. Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I see an owl loosed from under Arlecchina's skirts! It darts up toward the painted ceiling of the villa, which is resplendent with angels poised upon rosy clouds.

“Did you see that?” I ask Will.

“See what?” he says.

“The owl from under the old witch's skirts.”

“No,” says he. “Ah, Jessica, you are tired. Oft when I am tired, I seem to see animals or birds in the corners of my eyes. 'Tis all illusion, tricks the senses play upon us.” And he reaches out to stroke my cheek. The moment his fingers touch my flesh, I am on fire with longing for him, despite the long journey, the crying baby, the appearance of the witch, the ring, the owl. Abruptly, the mortal music ceases.

We wait for what seem endless ticking moments for Arlecchina to return. The marble floor we stand on is a chessboard upon which we play out the knight's moves of our lives. Oh, to be a pawn! Oh, to take two steps forward, two steps back, to castle the useless king, uselessly, while the queen rules the board screaming “off with their heads”—and only the gallant snorting horses with their quivering nostrils and glossy manes express the complexities of our lives.

“We are destiny's pawns,” says Will, reading my thoughts, as poets will.

“Destiny's knights errant,” I say, whereupon the babe lets out a howl as Arlecchina returns—followed by Signora Del Banco.

How can I tell you this, it is so strange? Signora Del Banco, with her masses of silver hair heaped upon her head like the puffed sail of a great galley, looks astonishingly like Lilli Persson! True, she is wearing a pearl-studded, sixteenth-century Venetian bodice; true, she commands this villa and its servants as if she perfectly belongs here, yet still she seems so like Björn's wife that I want to call her “Lilli,” though I restrain myself.

Her great green eyes fill with tears when she beholds the baby wrapped in sable. “Welcome, little stranger,” she says, clasping the babe to her bosom. And I know beyond all doubt that this woman feels herself to be its mother. Will knows it too.

“Money cannot breed like this,” says she, rocking the babe in her arms.

Arlecchina smiles her twisted smile and looking at me knowingly, says, “Yet many have sold their souls for ducats, and their babes, too—as the young gentlemen surely know.” Her words stab me in the heart, for I think of Antonia, whom I did not sell but whose fate is presently as unknown to me as if I had.

“Begone!” Signora Del Banco says to the witch. “Make their chambers ready. These gentlemen are to be our guests tonight, along with the English lord. We shall have masques and revels for them to celebrate the babe, whom we shall presently circumcise according to our Jewish laws and call Leone—after Judah, that lion's whelp.”

“My father's name,” I gasp.

“Then are you, too, a Jew?” asks Signora Del Banco, still thinking me a Venetian boy. I swear I don't know what to answer. Jew, Christian, man, woman—what am I truly? Just one burning human soul, one flame, one puff of white smoke—who wears different disguises in different times—seeking to ascend toward heaven. And yet, if it is most difficult of all things on this earth to be (and most perilous), then I shall choose to be a Jew. For a Jew is one who goes willingly into the flames rather than renounce her burning faith, and such heroism would I choose.

“I am a Jew,” I say, pleased enough with the words to repeat them. “I am a Jew,” I reiterate, “and my friend is a poet.”

“Welcome to you both,” says Signora Del Banco. “Welcome to Montebello, where both Jews and Christians are safe.”

She cuddles the orphan babe in her sheltering arms as we follow her to our chambers and Arlecchina's cackle resounds through the marble halls.

The villa has vaulted, plastered ceilings, some richly decorated, some ornamented only by a mask upon the keystone. We follow Signora Del Banco along a hallway whose ceiling bustles with depictions of Cosmic Harmony and Eternal Wisdom, enthroned amid the gods and goddesses of Olympus. To my eye, the work seems reminiscent of Veronese's, yet the brightness of the colors and the perfection of the paint outdazzle even the restored and repainted murals I have seen in other Palladian villas. Of course, I realize with surprise, these paintings are quite new. I am used to seeing the art of the sixteenth century through the metamorphoses wrought by time's pentimentoes and retouchings. Now that time has abolished itself for me, the paint seems too bright—almost vulgarly so.

And what curious murals embellish this villa! At every turning, one sees false, half-opened doorways with painted servants lurking behind them, false balconies with painted courtiers poised upon them, false terraces with painted lutanists plucking their painted strings, false porticos with painted feasters and dancers. Everywhere the eye alights it is promptly fooled! The painted people seem almost more real than the
real
people, and the real people of this villa seem none too real themselves.

Presently we arrive in what appears to be the guest wing of the villa, where the poet and I are given adjoining rooms. Mine has a great canopied bed that stands upon a platform and is hung with tasseled emerald damask. The columns of the bed are fluted, with Ionic capitals, and the furniture in the room is quite plain: a large chest, several simple wooden chairs covered with worked leather, and a trestle table with a brass brazier under it for warming frozen toes. The walls in this bedchamber are also covered with murals. Painted Corinthian columns flank painted porticos that reveal, beneath their arches, pleasant painted gardens.

Near the bed there is a disturbing trompe l'oeil doorway in which a female figure stands, as if on guard. Despite her laced bodice and winged ruff, her hennaed hair, her high
zoccoli
, and the fluttering fan she holds in her right hand, she looks like my mother when last I saw her alive—or do I imagine this? I think suddenly of Browning's “My Last Duchess.” My Last Mother, I want to say, but bite my tongue, not wanting to betray how alien I am here, a refugee from other, future times.

Maids are sent to help us undress and wash, and also to bring us our costumes for the revels to come. I am given the attire of the Innamorata in the commedia dell'arte troupe (as if my boy's disguise had fooled no one), and the poet is given the costume of Harlequin, or Arlecchino—an irony I cannot fail to notice.

Fearful though he is for his very life, Will (who is a player to his fingertips) is thrilled by the Harlequin costume he finds spread out on his bed. The costume is perfect in every particular and executed with great skill and cunning: the black half-mask with its separate chin-piece; the patched suit suggesting a parti-colored fool, a tatterdemalion, a motley to the view; the black ballet slippers, the soft cap with its dangling hare's tail, even the traditional bat, hung around the waist with a thong of leather.

Will can hardly wait to try on his costume and play his role, but first we must rest after our long journey and wash away the dust of the road. As we fuss about in our adjoining chambers with the half-open doors between them, I think how happily Will and I travel together—as if we had been partners for many lifetimes. This naturalness, coexisting with passion, must be love—a love such as I have never known, for it is both utterly secure and perilously risky. “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath,” I remember, risk being the very essence of love as defined by the poet himself.

But what of this sense of rightness, this comfort, this feeling of being at home at last, united with the other half of one's self? This is more than I dared ever hope.

Suddenly Will runs in to me, wearing his motley. He turns for me, showing it off. He drops his mask, then puts it back on, doing a little dance around the room, miming the perfect Harlequin. Then all at once he banishes the maids in a stern, masterly voice. They flee from the room bowing and tittering. My heart pounds as if it should fly out of my bosom. Then it happens—all in a rush—he takes me in his arms (I still dressed in my boy's doublet), holds me fast, and kisses me with molten sweetness.

“Jessica, Jessica,” he says, enfolding me. The tight rosebud between my thighs, furled for so many celibate months, wants nothing more than to explode, but my mind races ahead as minds will. Perhaps when animals mate it is all a matter of blood and nerves, scents and synapses, vessels filling and vessels emptying (although sometimes I doubt even that); but humans love within the context of that great convention “Love,” that well-worn metaphor “Love,” that gaudy tapestry “Love” woven through the ages by the poets and artists, dyed in our nerves, imprinted on our brains, accompanied by sweet familiar music.

Oh, I had loved and lusted, loved and “Loved.” And sometimes I was not sure whether I had loved “Love” or the man in question, myself and my role as Innamorata, or just the adrenaline rush of love, that most powerful of all drugs, that highest of all highs—kickier than cocaine, more euphoric than opium, dizzier than dope. For sometimes we create a lover out of a parti-colored fool just to feel that rush again—and when the rush is over, we look at him and laugh, asking ourselves why.

But at its truest, love is altogether another matter: a matter of gods and goddesses, of spirits merging, of a holy communion in the flesh. And one never knows, before making that leap of faith, whether one will find pure spirit or mere motley, holy communion or sexual aerobics, gods and goddesses, or goats and monkeys. “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath”—the essence and the test of love.

“Jessica,” the poet says, “I must have you.”

“Dear my love, you took me with your eyes some days ago—it is inevitable your limbs must follow…”

And here I confess I am torn—whether to break off (as in the good/bad old days of grundyish censorship) or whether, indeed, to describe our carnal amour as he himself, that most carnal of poets, would have done. Shall we pause and let the readers vote? After all, who would dare describe love with the greatest poet the world has ever known, the poet who himself defined love? To detail organs, motions, sheets, wet spots, would be too gross, too literal, too finally deflating! It is quite one thing to imagine the poet of poets abed with his convent Juliet or his bisexual earl—but for a mere player like myself to go back in time, bed him, and then tell tales out of school? Fie on't! Was Will Shakespeare good in bed? Let the reader judge!

Exciting it certainly was, for sex was dangerous then—and therefore more piquant. Sex most dangerous is most rare. If nothing can come of it (neither plagues nor babies), then perhaps there is no existential risk and the mystery is less.

We knew when we made love that this act might be our last on earth. The earl, his patron, followed hot upon our love, and Bassanio and Gratiano had surely come to Montebello by this hour, raving of pounds of flesh. It was only a question of time before they caught up with us. Thus, we made love in the hopes of making time, our enemy, stand still.

When we came to it—to bed, that is—when we peeled off each other's clothes (my boy's doublet, his motley), when we ran trembling fingers along each other's arms, backs, legs, igniting each other's skin—we were caught up in a sort of natural disaster, an act of God, a shipwreck, a typhoon, a tempest over which we had absolutely no control. It was as if meteorites showered the earth, or the moon was sucked into the sea; as if a tidal wave swallowed a whole convoy of Venetian galleys, spreading crimson silks, gold coins and frankincense and myrrh upon the churning waters.