The Remedy: A Novel of London & Venice Page 2
So it was scarcely a problem to me if my savior turned out to be an Englishman who spoke Italian like a native and even Venetian like a Venetian, with only his little glint of northern coldness to mark him out from us.
He was visiting Venice on some business matter or other that was never made clear to me, quite possibly because I was not listening.
Who can listen when there is so much to touch and taste as this man offered me, even from his first glance, when he came to the parlatorio to see the girls, prattling like cloister parrots behind the wall of metal fretwork that contained us, barely, from the world. I saw him and something cold and vivid immediately congealed in my stomach. I rose from my seat and pressed my nose against the grille. He laughed at my frank interest and stepped forward, caressed my nose with a slow finger, as if picking me out from a litter of puppies.
This one.
How was I to know that was all it was to him?
Nor, in all likelihood, was it the first time.
Retrospectively, I have no doubts that my Anglican lover made a habit of cuckolding the Popish God by inducing brides of Christ to commit adultery. For him it was just another form of illicit commerce, of the style he liked so much. He was a man who revelled in delinquency and malfeasance. Far more than plain dealing, he enjoyed dubious business pacts sealed in dark taverns and dangerous negotiations on deserted bridges in the early hours of the morning. So smuggling me out of a convent spiced the regular joys of lovemaking with a little risky free-trading.
I guessed none of that at the time. I simply rejoiced that this picking out met entirely with my own plans.
I knew almost nothing about him, and I liked it that way.
Some love is like gangrene, I told myself, it does not require the oxygen of information in order to thrive.
This love would be of that variety.
• 3 •
Emmenagogue Pills
Take Venetian Borace, Myrrh, each 45 grains; Birthwort Root, Saffron, each 15 grains; Oil of Pennyroyal, Savine, Cloves, each 2 drops; with Syrup of the 5 opening Roots make 18 Pills for 6 Doses.
The Title tells their Design. Let them be given about the Menstrous Time, when Nature is slothful and wants Stimulation, twice a Day.
I never knew whom he paid to have me let out in the middle of that sultry night: at San Zaccaria, at all levels of authority certain things were to be had for cash. I only knew this: an older, humbler nun came and shook me awake, dragged me, stumbling, yawning and protesting to a room where a ewer of steaming water and a bowl of perfumed soap were waiting, with an ostentatious dress of thin silk worn almost to transparency but of a vivid orange color.
“Wash,” she said, curtly, “especially there, and in your mouth.” I could not look at her sallow, tragic face. She was clearly moved by the occasion, but I could not distinguish whether it was jealousy or mere ill temper at the extra chore that kept her lips working in breathless oaths. Blushing, I commenced to wash, trying to keep my chemise lowered. Impatiently she ripped it over my head and I stood before her naked. I whimpered and covered myself with my hands, not able to meet her eyes for shame. She was sorry for me then and spoke more kindly.
“Learn to do this. It won’t be the only time tonight.”
When I was clean and decked in the dress, which covered me as barely as a sigh, she took my hand, as a nurse might take a little child’s, and hurried me through long, airless corridors to a barred door that opened straight into the orchard. We passed through the trees to the second door where the ruota was inserted. This wheel—half in the real world, half in ours, enabled food, money and—at times—unwanted babies to be passed through a hatch, while concealing the identities of the people at either side. I wondered if some kind of illicit transaction was about to take place and how it could concern me. But instead the nun drew back a black cloth that screened the gate’s iron grille and looked out. She seemed to be expecting someone.
Outside I glimpsed the gold of his hair illuminated by a lantern. His face, not at all anxious, just amused and pleased, was not even staring at the door, but looking up at the stars as if reading their portents and finding them much to his satisfaction—just as was to be expected, for in his case, all plans were blessed and all promised things delivered. It was the man I had seen at the parlatorio grille, who had touched my nose through the bar. His smiling complacency made my own discomposure and ignorance feel ridiculous.
The nun whispered to him and he came closer to the door, which she opened, and then bundled me into his arms. I was oddly gratified to find them trembling a little. He reached over me and handed her some money. I knew then what was to happen.
I had been a prudish child. I never liked to see my parents show any affection to each other. Once I had beheld two servants kissing, and I screamed all kinds of murder, drawing people from all over the palazzo to witness this disgusting orgy. Afterwards, when my mother explained certain matters to me, I vomited. The naked facts were too bare for my taste. Despite my feelings on the subject, current circumstances made me see my forthcoming telescoped seduction in an optimistic light. I think God made me a cold young woman, for I was easily able to conquer my scruples about the act itself by thinking about the reward of freedom that I would thereby procure. I almost looked forward to it, though I felt fear as well.
I looked at the nun, wondering if I might appeal to her— should I wish to—and opened my mouth, but then I felt his hands on my breasts.
Believe me, it is not necessary to love the man who takes your virginity, even if he does so with scintillation. My former prejudices against the act itself were dispelled that first night in his rooms in a palazzo near Rialto. And I liked to hear the words that accompanied all stages of the business. It seemed too good to be true, that my savior could also provide such subsidiary pleasures as compliments that raised me to a peak of warm satisfaction about myself. But I felt nothing for the man himself.
It seemed to me that he had awakened my senses without touching any deeper notions of romance that might be lying dormant in me. Perhaps I lacked them entirely?
Then, at the end of our first night together he knelt and kissed my feet and fed me some sweet cakes he dipped first in a goblet of wine. By this time my lips, eyes, fingers, and sex were all replete, and with that almond crescent and the kiss that followed it, I think we both knew he had found the casement of my glassy heart, though he had not yet entered it.
When I came back from him the first time, the other women asked me, So what kind of man is he?
Is he rich?
Does he… appeal, cut it were?
What did you smell of his character?
And then, when they saw I was too far gone for that, they loosed their more difficult questions:
Had he given you hid real name?
And—
Has he softness to him or will he be hard as ice when the time corner?
But who can listen to questions like this, in the first fever of contagion, and who wants to hear the answers, either?
Not I.
There followed three months of hard lovemaking and days drained of thoughts, except hazy recollections of our most recent assignation. It seemed the very essence of a superfine thing to be bundled in his arms each night, or rigged out in some lustrous gown he’d supplied for the pleasure of unlacing it. I was ecstatic as a prophet at this change to my life.
I could not too much admire this miracle of passion that made the walls of San Zaccaria both transparent and permeable.
When I knew that I was carrying his child, I came to him full of hope. What man does not a son, even one fathered outside of marriage with a woman who is not of his tongue or kind?
And indeed, upon hearing the news, my lover mimicked delight and mimed all kinds of shows of tenderness, protection and ever-after happiness, without actually uttering the words. I settled into his arms, observed the golden tinge of those English hairs on his wrists, and allowed myself to think of nothing.
I refused th
e Emmenagogue pills offered by the nuns and adopted the important personage of a cherished mother-to-be.
So this is love, I declared to myself. But I knew that I was lying. My lover and I performed all the duties laid down in the statutes of pure romance, but the thing did not come to its natural conclusion. My rapture was threadbare, venal—and short-lived.
• 4 •
Balsamic Lozenges
Take fine Dragons Blood (in drops) 2 scruples [sic]; Flowers of Benjamin 16 grains; Balm of Gilead 24 grains; fine Sugar searced 4 ounces; Mucilage of Gum Tragacanth as much as requisite, make Lozenges according to Art.
They are good for such as are in danger of a Consumption, to be carried always about, and taken frequently.
God did not design me for a mother.
The early pregnancy was terrible. I retched my innards into a basin every morning for weeks, confirming that the fetus, conceived in the hot, dry tramontana wind, was male. I sent my regrets to my lover, and he responded tenderly, that he would wait. I believe he returned briefly to London in this period.
After a few weeks the ignominy ceased, and I resumed my nightly visits with him.
By day, at the convent, I gazed complacently on Palma il Vecchio’s Madonna col Bambino, happily reflecting how much prettier I was than she—all spaniel-faced and drooping. And her baby—a gingerish and fat-lipped little gargoyle. But the shapely relief of Mary and Jesus on the archway to Campo San Zaccaria—that was elegance indeed! And Bellini’s Madonna, I always thought, was pleasantly endowed with good looks not unlike my own, and she also suited blue. Our son would be much more like Bellini’s infant Christ, a refined and exquisite creature, whom I would always clothe with elegance and raise to be a heartbreaking little gentleman. I did not plan to succeed him with any more babies, however. My sisters in carnality at San Zaccaria had by now explained a few robust facts neglected by my mother, and I would not be so careless again.
None of the paintings showed women with the ungainly outlines of late pregnancy, and I did not anticipate that state with any pleasure. Worse, I imagined that it would render my lover more paternal, less passionate, less desirous of giving pleasure. And my burgeoning shape would make it more difficult for him to spirit me away from Venice.
I never found out, though. For, needless to say, by the time I reached a visible amplitude, he was gone.
Some time into the fourth month he tired of me.
I speculated endlessly on the change in him, unwilling to pin the blame on what had really caused it.
Fear of losing his youth by becoming a father? Fear of my Golden Book blood and the indelible connection he would make in marrying me? When I first saw him examine the altered profile of my belly, his eyes became unreadable.
There was another reason. There’s no point in concealing it now.
You see, we fought. Not just the fervid arguments of lovers, but something darker. It was as if the devil in him—for it was there—and the devil in me were passionately in love with one another too. I had skirmished with other girls in the convent and with my parents who had placed me there, but the quarrels I knew with him were of a different order altogether.
It mattered not at all what subject inspired the war. It was the style of the combat that was so terrifying.
I discovered this when we argued for the first time. I remember that he ridiculed me, and how that stung, for no one had ever done so before. He called me stupid. He laughed at me, called me a brainless eel, a silly cod.
Then we were divided by a dense viscous silence spangled with fulminous glances, during which each of us, I’m assured, wished himself and herself dead if only so that the other might be impaled on a shaft of sharpest guilt. When he brushed past me I felt bristles of anger scraping my skin with intent to damage. He wished me ill, I could see that: not just misery but physical harm. Confronted by his anger, his adoration of me disappeared without a trace.
As a man who was enchanted by me, he was undeniably attractive. As a man who didn’t love me, he was simply—repulsive.
It was a cruel blow to see him in this antipathetical light. My plans for liberty were pinned upon him. It was painful to force myself to acknowledge in this instance not that I must renounce him but that I must mount my hopes upon a lesser object, yet still housed in that same disappointing carcass.
And so, while he waited for my apology, I was engaged in an entirely different fatica. I was cauterizing my green hopes, sealing in the still useful sap.
So, I reflected, this man I thought so beautifully formed for my purpose had improvidently hardened into a disagreeable shape that revolts me. I am trapped here with my attraction for that other incarnation. Am I to attach myself to this brutal new circumstance?
I told myself that it was merely a convenience that he had once—moderately—pleased me. In my difficulties I would have acted as I did with him, were he a very goblin.
So now, I must steel myself to make pretty to him, to make him forget I ever showed him the least morsel of rebellion, make him think I slavered for his love, that this precious balm was all I sought. By then I had learned some things from the other “sportive” nuns that could make a monkey of the cleverest man. Why, all the truncheoned beasts turn their eyes up and roll over at those things they taught me, so even a mere Englishman must respond. Dogs of all races wag their tail when you finger them aptly.
So, with sand in my heart, I set about winning the bastardly worm back. I bent my head to kiss his hand, subtly tonguing it so that it seemed that the cool sting of a tear was left behind. That stirred him, and even while I felt a tremor in his fingers, I was sinking to my knees before him, my eyes cast down, kissing his knees, his calves, the tops of his boots, all the while not insensible to the mandolin effect of my proffered rear-quarters and waist.
“Forgive me,” I whispered, “though I so little deserve it. I am so ashamed.”
Inwardly I spat words of an untranslatable Venetian character, which, if he had heard them, would have assassinated him and haunted his corpse with their vile resonances. But I continued aloud, soft as a dove, “I prostrate myself to you—take me back to your bosom, my beloved one.”
And I ran my finger from his boot to his breast, now fixing upon his small blue eyes my own large green ones, piteously laden with unspent tears that I had conjured up not from remorse but from fury.
“Just a gesture,” I begged. “Anything to show me that you allow me back into your heart.”
“You may do as you wish,” he said, stiffly. “It’s nothing to me, “yet I knew he was already half-beguiled.
“You are extraordinarily… good,” I murmured humbly.
Then he raised me upon his knees, whereupon he commenced his usual flashy fiddling with my ribbons. And kissed me with the usual hard lips, and turned me upon the bed and took me with the usual speed and skill.
On the divano while he mounted me I, all unseen, made the most vile grimaces and gestures and silently insulted his every move. Although I had known no other lover, I was ready to attribute great deficiencies to him in their comparison. Knowing how he would abhor it, I imagined other men in his place—all of the pitifully few adult male faces I could conjure from my limited experience, from our priest-confessor to the butcher’s delivery boy who came bashfully into the kitchens at San Zaccaria. In the dark, I scraped the inside of my cheek to my lover. I dilated my nostrils and my sphincter at him. Against the pillow, I bent the nail of my thumb back at him till it broke. I turned myself invisibly inside out to show my hatred. I pushed my curls into my ears to filter the hateful sounds of my lover’s pleasure.
But I was gratified to see that as he spent himself a grateful tear hovered on his nose before it dropped on my own lid.
I lay panting and whimpering my false admiration and satisfaction and then lifted my head to kiss his eyes and lips, those parts of him that I had much rather score a dozen times or so with my nails, were this body of his not the only vehicle for conveying me out of my prison.
A Refrigerating Expression
Take Male Pimpernel 3 handfuls; Borage 6 handfuls; Roots of Borage cut into thin Rundles 2 ounces; Pippins 3; Salt Prunel 2 drams; white Sugar 1 ounce and a half, stamp, and pour on them Meadowsweet Water 3 pints; when they have stood cold a night’s space, strain out the clear Liquor.
It’s dedicated to the service of such melancholy Persons, as are of an Adult, hot and dry Temperament, for it corrects atrabilarious Blood, qualifies its Ebullitions, tempers flatulent Estuosities of the Hypochondria, refrigerates the over-heated Brain, condenses rarified and restrains boisterous Spirits, precipitates Salts, and carries them off by Urine.
Too late came to me the realization that this dark ribbon of nastiness that flowed through him was as habitual and crucial to his doings as the cloaca maxima, to Rome. His temper purified him: He excreted all unwholesome emotions in this way.
If he felt any inner pain, he simply bludgeoned someone else, and that took the pain away for a while. No wonder he enjoyed such a smooth face, and dispensed such an uncreased smile. His lines and scars were surely worn by the people who had loved him. So that even when I was oh-so-discreet and flattering, unrolled myself like a carpet beneath his feet, he still felt the need to stomp on me, cursing and spitting in his jakes-breath, at the times when the venom overspilled.