Sins of the House of Borgia (59 page)

When all the candles had been lit and the
menorah
taken to stand in the open street doorway, the lamps were lighted in the main room and the women began to bring food to the long table which sparkled with silver and bronze and coloured glass. I knew these people, I thought, as an elderly woman in black handed me a wide majolica dish of buttered cabbage and told me to set it on the table. They were the same people I had shared the festivals with as a child in Rome, living unnoticed in small, plain houses with everything they owned of value or beauty packed in boxes, ready to leave. But if you went into their houses at Purim or Hanukkah or Yom Kippur, you would see how they could blossom, as suddenly as flowers in the desert when it rains. The older girls and their mothers would exchange their modest, even drab, clothes for striped silks and slashed velvets, and headscarves tinkling with tiny gold coins. Tableware of wood and horn would be replaced with silver and glass, and there would be dishes coloured with saffron and turmeric, fragrant with cinnamon and nutmeg and the distillation of orange flowers. My father, with his expansive self-confidence and his broad network of roots in the city, kept a very different house. It looked like the country villas of the
goyim
to whom he lent money to build them, and it was right on the edge of the Jewish quarter so if my brothers and I climbed the tallest of the plum trees in our orchard, we could see right into the upstairs windows of the Christians.

After the meal, the children were made to clear the table and then Gideon stood up and began to delve theatrically in his pockets. As the children crowded around him, he began to pull out, one by one, beautifully carved and decorated
sevivot
, one for each child and all unique.

“He has been making them for weeks,” a young woman told me, in a proud, proprietory tone which made me take particular notice of her. I thought her beautiful, in the same frail, ethereal way as Dorotea Caracciolo. I saw she wore no wedding ring, and watched Gideon to see how often he looked in her direction. But he was wholly absorbed in handing out the little spinning tops and explaining the rules of the game to his over-excited audience, one of whom had now clambered on to the table and was trying to dislodge Gideon’s skull cap
.
I had a fleeting, uncanny sense that I was looking down some kind of magical telescope into the future, seeing him as he would be in ten or twenty years, a benevolent patriarch presiding over his family. The prospect warmed me for a moment, and then I wished I had never come, because what was his future was my past, and the past is a place you can never go back to.

I rose abruptly.

“Are you unwell?” asked the young woman, with perhaps a little more hope than concern.

“I should leave,” I said, addressing myself to Gideon. “If I stay too late I will not be able to get past the guards at the gate.”

“Oh, don’t worry about them. They’re used to me going in and out at strange times.” He grinned. “I tell them the duchess has summoned me to talk about her commission.” A hum of nervous laughter ran around the table, eyes flicked in my direction then dropped away again. The children, sensing tension among the adults, fell silent.

“Well,” I said, forcing a smile, “it is true we often keep late hours. I suppose you might be believed.”

“So you will stay a little longer?”

“No, really, I…you have all been very kind and the meal was delicious but…”

“I will fetch your cloak,” said the young woman, rising from the table.

“Then I will escort you home,” said Gideon.

“You will miss the Cordoban,” warned an older man who wore a full beard and ear curls.

“I shan’t be long. Go to my room as usual when he arrives. Everything is ready.”

The night had cleared and grown colder, and a hazy moon silvered the wet roofs. Most of the Hanukkah lights had gone out now, and the old streets harboured nothing but slinking cats and the faint residual odours of roast goose and burnt sugar. And us. Gideon and I, listening awkwardly to the loud crunch of our footsteps.

“Who is the Cordoban?” I asked, to make conversation. “I am sorry you will miss him on my account.”

“Best you don’t ask,” he replied, his matter-of-fact tone at odds with his words. The gulf between our worlds yawned and secrets seethed in it.

“It was kind of you, Gideon,” I said, “but do not ask me here again.”

“You used my name.” He sounded triumphant. “You used my given name. Of course I shall ask you again. Didn’t you enjoy yourself? Wasn’t the food wonderful? Weren’t you made welcome?”

“Your hosts behaved exactly as they should when a guest enters their house on a festival, but they didn’t warm to me. They were curious about me, that’s all. A
conversa
at court. They would probably have stuck pins in me if they dared, to see if my blood runs the same colour as theirs.”

“No, there is a prohibition against it in the
Torah
.” He spoke so earnestly I did not immediately understand he was joking, so he pinched my arm to make me laugh. But my laughter was false and I longed to be back in my own room.

“I don’t belong here, that’s all. I am no longer a Jew.” I had no place but that room, where Angela’s old gowns gathered dust and Leonardo’s drawing had begun to fade, and Cesare’s letter had cracked along its folds in the bottom of my travelling chest. No family but Girolamo, and Girolamo was a Borgia. “I am Violante; I break promises.”

“You are always a Jew. Even my sister is still a Jew. We didn’t ask to be Jews, we were chosen. We promised Him nothing; the promising is all on His side.”

We had passed through the gate and were almost across the cathedral square. The sight of the great old fortress looming out of its moat made me feel homesick, as though I had been away for a long time. I wanted to be back inside its walls, cocooned in its intrigues like a fly wrapped in spider silk. “You may leave me here,” I told Gideon.

“If you’re sure. Well…” He offered me his torch. “I’m sure I shall see you when I come to court to show the duchess my designs.”

I closed my hand around the stem of the torch, but he did not immediately let it go, and we stood there, hands touching, locked in a wordless, decorous battle for the light. “Do not seek me out,” I warned him. “You know nothing about me. Nothing.”

“All the more reason to look for your company. I am a curious man, Monna Violante.” He bowed and left me, loping back across the square with his hands in his pockets. The brim of his felt hat was frilled like a lettuce by the damp in the air.

When I reached my room and made myself ready for bed, I could not sleep. The fire had gone out, and the bed-clothes felt damp, and the Hanukkah meal lay heavy on my stomach. Perhaps that was why my mother’s recipe book came to mind. It lay now in the bottom of my travelling case, along with the rest of my meagre history. I had put it there on my return to Ferrara and had not looked at it since. I lit the candle on my nightstand, removed the book from the case, then climbed back into bed and, with my bent knees for a lectern, opened it at the first page.

Leah Sarfati
, she had written, with more confidence in her hand when she wrote her given name than when adding my father’s. The date beneath I took to be the date of their wedding, since it fell about a year before Eli was born.
In this book I will keep a record of everything I have learned and will learn about keeping a good Jewish home and raising children in the sight of Our Father. By His Grace I may one day have a daughter to hand it to on her wedding day, but I pray first for sons.
Below this, in my father’s hand, were written some words in Hebrew which I took to be prayers and blessings for the home and family.

The pages that followed contained recipes for festival dishes and daily meals, remedies for cuts and bruises and common agues, charms against plague and small pox, compounds for cleaning silver and bronze and mending broken pots. She had recorded her timetable for Shabbat preparations, in what order the cooking and cleaning should be done, how the boys’ clothes should be laid out and my hair braided last thing before sundown on Friday to give me the best chance of looking tidy until the Shabbat ended. Her cooking utensils were meticulously listed so there could be no mistaking which were for meat and which for milk.

Her entries began in the same neat, self-conscious hand that had written her newly-married name but as the years passed and her family grew, and Spain became an ever more frightening place for Jews to live, they became more hurried and untidy, the ink smudged and blotted, the writing leaning further and further forward as though straining towards its end. How happy she must have been, I thought, with a fierce pang of loss, when she did eventually have a daughter to whom she could hand on all this accumulated wisdom. There was a clutch of childbirth charms and remedies for pain in labour, sore nipples and stretch marks on the belly around the time of Eli’s birth. These were followed by potions to make babies sleep, unguents to ease their gums during teething, tips for keeping children’s limbs straight and making their hair curl. Each of our histories was there to be read between the lines of recipes for weaning foods, remedies for colic, unguents for the chicken pox, and poultices for grazed knees; yet none of us was mentioned by name, as if her love for us was a dangerous force which had to be bound by the careful listing of ingredients and proportions, methods and doses, the way spirits can be bound by charms.

My mother’s domestic life seemed to end abruptly with a recipe for beeswax furniture polish given her, she noted, by Yasmin Abravanel during the month of Elul in the year 5251. A whole year before we left Toledo.

Slowly, I flicked through the empty pages, until I chanced on another one, near the back of the book, on which she had begun to write again.
Charms to Rekindle Passion,
she had inscribed at the head of the page.
You must take a good wax candle and anoint it with oil of cinnamon. Burn in its flame a bay leaf on which you have written the name of your beloved. Put a pillow stuffed with cloves and vanilla flowers upon his side of the bed. Keep one seed from a lemon you have consumed and plant it, and give the plant to your beloved to keep your love fresh and true. You must make a poppet with hair or nail clippings of your rival within and surround it with angelica leaves and that way you will ban her from your house.

I got these from Señora da Souza, the Portuguese laundress on Cal’ Ebraico,
she had added beneath the charms.
I expect they are nonsense but what can I do against a woman so strong in magic she can draw him all the way to Rome? He has left again this morning, saying it is unavoidable business, but he has clerks in Rome. Why must he go there himself barely six months from his last visit? Last night he said her name in his sleep, so today I went to Señora da Souza, who has a reputation for discretion, or so I have been told. The woman’s name is Mariam.

I closed the book abruptly, as though by not seeing what my mother had written I could erase it. So that was why he had left us behind. It had nothing to do with my fair hair and blue eyes, though, of course, he had made good use of them since. Like any successful man of business, he exploited what he had and did not regret what he lost. I was smitten with a dizzying sense of dislocation, a sudden notion that the person I had believed myself to be, and the place I had believed I occupied in the world, had never existed and I was someone else entirely. It was not until I realised I was not to blame for my mother’s ill-conceived, panic-stricken departure from Toledo, and her wretched death, that I understood how weighed down I had been by my guilt. I could simply off-load it now, as I had so many things, from housework to loving my family, on to Mariam.

You follow love,
she had said. But where had love led her, or my father? They had not married, even when he knew he was free to do so. I searched my memory but could not bring to mind a single instance when I had seen them demonstrate affection toward one another. Had my mother been following love when she took me from Toledo, even though we might safely have stayed and passed as Christian, or was she driven by something else entirely? And where had love led Angela, or poor, scarred Giulio? Or me. By the time I finished pondering these questions it was dawn and I was no nearer finding any answers. I had just closed my eyes, thinking I would attempt to sleep for an hour, when the cathedral bell began to toll and I remembered it was Christmas Eve and I would be obliged to accompany Donna Lucrezia to morning Mass.

My head pounded with a dull ache all through the service, which seemed interminable, and my knees protested at the cold striking through the marble floor of madonna’s chapel. I hoped I had taken a chill, but thought it more likely it was my other ailment flaring up again, and made a mental note to have words with the incompetent apothecary. Fra Raffaello did not preach, the Lord be praised, his style being better suited to the less joyful dates in the Church calendar. Madonna’s own head chaplain, a man as sleek and plump as a seal, did not detain us long with his reflections on the impending birth of Christ. At the end of the service I asked madonna if I might be excused to lie down for a while, but she forbade it.

She made me go with her to her room, to put aside her prayer book and rosary, she said, but I was afraid she wanted to talk to me about Cesare. Her majordomo, Sancho, had returned from Spain some days earlier. He had seen Cesare at Medina del Campo and had brought letters from him. Could there be one for me? I wondered, then dismissed the thought; even if he had written to me I did not want to know what he had to say, to set eyes on that familiar hand with its loops and sweeps, to read his beautiful lies.