In the Company of the Courtesan

  A few shops down, a man is selling glass pots and glasses. They are clumsy compared with the stuff I have seen in Venice, full of impurities and bubbles. The best is no doubt exported and the workers must make do with the leftovers. But they are cheap enough for a man with my pocket and free time on his hands after so many years of work, and I buy five of them.

  I set myself up by the side of the road, eat the remaining two sausages, and wipe my hands on the grass to get the grease off. Then I take off my hat, pick up the pots, and start to juggle. It is not as easy as the bread, for while they are firmer, their shapes and weights are more variable and therefore unstable, and I have to concentrate hard not to drop them.

  By now a small crowd has gathered, and people are starting to applaud. I am enjoying myself. It’s a long time since I have had this feeling, mind and body working together. When did I last juggle for an audience? A few performances in the early days of our success in Venice? And before then, that night in Rome. My God, I had felt alive enough then, the excitement that comes with fear sluicing like raw alcohol through my body. And though I am in no danger now, there is a similar edge in me; the heat, the strangeness of the place, the idea of La Draga, and my newfound sense of life.

  All I have to do is keep my eyes on the flying glass.

  In my defense, I think that if she had come as she usually does, I would have seen her earlier, for somehow I was waiting for her.

  It happens like this. I am getting cocky. And, I daresay, a little tired. The crowd is now five or six deep. Someone throws a small coin into my hat, and I give a wink to acknowledge it. It used to be a party trick I had with pretty girls. The move misfires, and I miss the falling pot by a fraction that is also a mile. In my panic to regain control, I make a wild lunge to catch it and only just succeed. A cheer goes up, and I make a face, which makes people laugh as if they think it was all deliberate. So this time I almost miss again, throwing the pots a little to one side so I have to stagger to reach them. And they love that. My staggering takes me closer to the crowd. They make way for me, and soon I am walking as I juggle, the air above me full of turning glass glinting in the sunlight and laughter and applause all around me.

  Then suddenly there is a small child in my way, rooted to the spot, eyes out on stalks. The arcing ball moves too far out of my reach and too close to her, and this time I don’t get to it in time and it smashes to the ground, right by her feet. I catch the others quickly as they drop and squat down in front of her to survey the damage. She is not hurt. Indeed, she does not seem upset at all. She is very small, at that age when standing is still its own achievement, and her legs are almost as bandy as mine. But it is not her age that sets her apart as much as her looks. She has the palest of pale skins and a crown of wild curls, so fair that they are almost white, while her eyes are like fat, brown almonds, and they are staring at me with an intense concentration but not one iota of fear. I smile with my eyes rather than my mouth and slowly offer one of the remaining glass pots to her, and after she has stared at it a little longer, she puts out a hand to touch it. As she does so, a woman pushes through the crowd frantically, shouting her name. A child on her own and the sound of broken glass. It would have any mother distraught. As she breaks into the little circle where we are now bent together, the child turns and looks up to her.

  As do I.

  It is strange what one registers in a single instant. In fact, it is possible that, had it gone differently, I might not even have recognized her. The hair is out from its braid and pinned up high on her head, with a few straying curls around her cheeks, and the way she holds herself shows it off to much effect, for her body is somehow released from its painful hunch so that it moves upright, willowy and fluid. She is lovely. That much I remember, and will until the day I die. But there is no time for me to tell her now because she darts straightway down and scoops the child up in her arms, cradling her deep into her chest, head to head, both faces hidden; then, equally frantic, she starts to push back into the crowd. Only the little girl will have none of it. She has been interrupted at a game, and she wriggles and yells and pulls herself away from her mother’s body, so that the woman has no option but to lift her face as well, though so briefly that I am not sure what it is I have seen. The skin is as smooth and white as ever. But the eyes, the eyes are different. Where once there were pools of gray, filmy milk, now they seem livid and active. Immediately she is bent and busy over the child again. But it is too late.

  “Elena!”

  I say her name loud and clear, and though I have never used it before in her presence, it moves through her like a long shiver, and involuntarily her eyes pull halfway up to meet mine for a split second. I swear she feels the same lurch of panic as I do, though when I think about it, I know that it must be worse for her, because it is her life rather than mine that collapses in that instant. For while her eyes are not good, the outer pale circles red and angry as if there is some irritation or infection present, there are definite and recognizable pupils, sharp and dark at the centers.

  La Draga, it seems, is not only an able-bodied young woman with no hunch or spine defect. She can also see.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  There is a moment of paralysis, as if the world is stopped still and we are all held rigid inside it. Even the child is quiet. Then, suddenly, all is movement, and she is breaking through and out of the crowd, the babe clasped to her breast, before I have gotten my breath back. My breath or my mind.

  Not blind. La Draga is not blind.

  The audience is restless now; the interlude is over, and they want more skill or bravura. When nothing happens, they start to drift away. The space opens up around me, and soon I find myself alone, just a few curious souls staring from the sidelines.

  La Draga is not blind and she walks tall. She is a fraud, a charlatan, a fake. The words hit like hammer blows all down my spine and ignite a knot of pain. What did she once tell me? That my back pain was because my trunk was heavier than my legs. My God. I had thought her so clever at the time. To know what she couldn’t see. Around me the earth is littered with shards of glass from the smashed pot. The sun catches the edges of a few, and they glint and shine like scrubby diamonds in the dust. I pick one up and crush my fist over it. I feel the edge pierce my palm. I like the way it bites into my flesh. La Draga is a fake, God damn her. She can see as well as anyone. She is a fraud. We have been deceived. I open my fist on a fragment of glass smeared with blood. I hold it up and watch the sun play with it. Not so much a diamond now as a ruby. Colored glass. The thoughts fall heavily, like flat stones into water, each one causing a larger ripple.

  Colored glass. Of course. There is a shop off the Rialto that sells only the cream of Murano glass. It has a sailing ship in the window, a miniature Venetian round galley, so perfect in every detail that there are even lines of rigging between the masts, teased and stretched out from small globules of glass. Everything in the shop is glass pretending to be something else. Many are more expensive than the real thing, like the bunch of red grapes so real-looking they seem to have the sheen of the sun on them. Trinkets for rich people. But they do offer one thing cheaper to bring in the crowds: a basket of fake jewels, bright and busy, crude when you know the real thing, of course, for it is impossible to fake the inner dazzle of diamond, though the colored stones are more convincing, the rubies and the emeralds. Indeed, there is a rumor that if you know where to go and are willing to pay more…

  Suffice it to say I had not seen these stones when I took our bulging purse to the pawnbroker all those years ago.

  La Draga is a child of Murano. She more than anyone would understand the power of glass. This young woman, who is not blind and does not limp. Like the pale, sweet-faced young woman who offered the ruby to our Jew, walked straight off the street and looked him directly in the eye as she told him a sob story about her mistress’s plight with our stolen gem.

  My back still skewers me, but my mind is working again. I am in our old house by the cana
l that morning, the squint-eyed bat across the water, and La Draga sitting on my lady’s bed. It was a familiar enough pose in those days when our furniture was so scarce and she was mixing ointments and creams from the pots all around her, her hands everywhere. Including, no doubt, when no one is looking, between the slats of the mattress to find a purse containing a dark, rich ruby whose quality you would recognize instantly if you knew your jewels and which, if you knew the right pair of hands in the right workshop to take it to, could be faked at least well enough to fool its owners.

  Now I am moving too. As fast as my throbbing little legs will take me, across the street and along the wharf toward the dock, where I can see a boat taking on passengers ready to return to the mainland. La Draga will not be one of them. Whatever she decides now, she must leave the child before she can come back, so I will get there before her. What I will do there I do not know yet, but get there I will.

  They are pulling away from the mooring by the time I reach the dock, and my heart is pounding so fiercely and my legs hurt so much that I cannot even summon up the energy to be afraid of the water. As we plow through open sea toward the city, I sit transfixed, writing a short treatise on the life and times of a fraud in my head.

  La Draga. I watch her walking down the street, her head crooked to one side, one leg dragging behind the other because her back has a twist in it. How easy! I would not waddle if I didn’t have to, but I have watched enough men try to ape me, and if they took the time to study harder, they might convince, for it is just a question of practice. And God knows, the city has enough cripples to learn from.

  But what point is there to a crooked spine on its own? It cannot help to cure disease or seem to give you second sight. But being blind when you can see all along…now that is indeed a clever way to go. The first time she saw my lady, her hands flew like soft bird wings over her stubble head, and, without being told, she could trace the cut exactly from her scalp to her forehead. Just as she knew what kind of dwarf I was, without asking. Or that Aretino had a mangled right hand and a scar on his neck. I watch his eyes go wide with wonder at her wisdom. Knowing things that no blind person could ever know.

  If an apothecary sees a wound and cures it, he is a good doctor. If a blind girl senses the same thing and then it heals, she is a miracle worker. And once you are a miracle worker, the rest is easy. What you cannot cure by your medicines you can cure by faith. He loves me, he loves me not. Well, no one can be sure of that. But if he was nicer to you after a potion, then who is there to thank but the potion maker? Thank God for La Draga. She gets the men by the balls and ties them to women’s heartstrings. Where would Venice be without her? Maybe that is what she did to me. Slipped me a potion along with my cure…

  As for the rest, the bigger fish…well, she just has to wait and watch and take her chance. Like at our house. If there are valuables to be had, then the last person you suspect is the one who cannot see them. Does she always have an inside accomplice? Probably. It was easy enough with Meragosa. The old whore hated us anyway. Who knows? They had probably already cheated Fiammetta’s mother out of the last of her wealth as she lay rotting in bed. La Draga had told my lady that she never met her mother, but what is one lie amid so many? By the time La Draga came to us, Meragosa couldn’t wait to get out. This way they both got what they wanted. The proceeds of a fat ruby, while one took the sting and the other remained to go on milking the cow. Repeat that through a city where most people have a servant they neither like nor trust and where the feelings are heartily reciprocated and you have a tidy little business. My only question now is practical. How? How does someone who can see make her eyes so blind?

  The boat docks on the northern shore, and I clamber off immediately. The golden galley will not return until late afternoon, and then there will be an evening of processions and banquets. It is, of course, forbidden that someone like my lady should find herself as a guest at one of these, but she will be there nevertheless. With her absent, who can I go to, who can I tell? I retrace my footsteps from the dock. Now that the mist is gone, it doesn’t take long to find her street. I stand in front of La Draga’s house. Whatever she keeps in there is important enough to warrant a fat lock fixed to the door. Though I have led a disreputable life, housebreaking is not one of my talents. I do, however, have others.

  The houses back onto the canal, where there will almost certainly be windows too small for a man but large enough for an able dwarf. If I could find a way to negotiate the water…I reach the sotto portego and move down it. My nose curls as the smell rises, and as I get to the end I understand why. The canal is there, all right, but there is nothing in it. Like the one near the Arsenale where I once drank myself stupid after we had been robbed of our future, it has been drained: dammed two bridges down with thick wooden pylons and the water pumped away to reveal a mass of evil sludge reaching three-quarters of the way up to the level of the walkway. It must connect straight to the Rio di Santa Giustina and the sea, for the northern tides slide powerfully in here and often silt up the smaller arteries, making it impossible for heavy cargo to travel, so that after a while they must be dredged. This is a route for the barges from Murano, and while it is a poor district that might otherwise be left to rot, Venice lets nothing stop trade.

  For today, though, the city’s obsession is my savior, because along the edge where the silt meets the walls, they have sunk temporary walkways so the men can haul themselves in and move in the wheelbarrows. All I have to do is clamber along it to reach the level of her first-floor windows. The other houses are deserted; even the oldest of bats will be out celebrating, which means there is no one to spy on me, no one to see how inch by inch I feel my way along, my hands against the wall, my back to the drop. How far down would the mud go? Deeper than a dwarf? To drown in the sewage of Venice. The trick is to not think about it. My God, how scared does she get? I wonder. A woman who spends her whole life faking and stealing. Or does it become easier the more people you fool?

  The window, when I reach it, is glass, but crude fat eyes of it in a rickety frame and with a rusted catch, and it gives with little enough work. I push it open, hoist myself up, and push myself through. The drop on the other side is farther than the pull up, and I misjudge it and go sprawling. But though I was always too clumsy to make it past the second layer of the human pyramid, I still learned how to fall well enough, and I recover quickly.

  I get my bearings. There is little enough to see. The space is small and frugal: a bed and chest, locked. I move into another, equally small room. But this one is different: this is almost an apothecary shop. Everywhere I look there are makeshift shelves stacked with glass vials and pots like the ones on Murano, a line of herbs and powders—I recognize sage, fennel, tartar, ground peppers, and what looks like flour. She could beat Mauro at his own game, though the ingredients grow more sinister with the liquids and solids. There is no mistaking the dirtied-gold tint of urine and the splashy black-red of blood. There is a box with eggs, all shapes and sizes, a jar containing the pulp of some animal organ preserved in brine, and a pot of what looks like congealed fat. Underneath the shelves I find magnets, with a few preserved dogs’ paws and pieces of rolled parchment decorated with words: OMEGA ALPHA. La Draga, it seems, is not just a witch of the womb. She is dabbling in astrology too. Last year Venice’s Holy Office flogged and exiled an ex-priest who sold luck along with forgiveness and claimed to be able to predict the outcome of votes in the government. Though he lived in a slum, they found a bulging sack of ducats under his floorboards, for even pretending to manipulate the future is a profitable business.

  I take a poker from the fireplace and move back into the bedroom. The chest is old and easy enough to pry open. Why not? I want her to know that she has been found out, to feel the sense of violation, just as she has violated others. The lid lifts to reveal layers of clothing—old dresses, slips, shawls, petticoats—and as soon as my fingers touch them, the scent of her wraps itself around me, the individual smell of her f
lesh and something sweeter, the leftovers of some homemade perfume perhaps, and it skewers me in my stomach. I swallow back the feeling and keep on digging. What am I looking for? A cache of fake jewels, a sack of coins, stolen treasures from other people’s houses?

  If there is booty, she doesn’t keep it here. Or not the kind I am looking for. Toward the bottom, wrapped in a shawl, I come across a small notebook, its seams broken and pages adrift. When I open it, I can barely believe what I see. Each and every page is full: line after line of small writing, punctuated by diagrams and figures, crude, annotated drawings of parts of the body. That she is this literate is unexpected enough. What is more remarkable is that she is writing in some kind of code, the letters jumbled and interspersed with numbers and signs. These are secrets, all right, but none that I can fathom. All I know for sure is that it is some register: dates and people, ailments and remedies.

  My God, she may be a fraud in some ways, but not in all.

  As I push it back, my fingers connect with something else, deep in the corner. I pull out a small wooden box, and as soon as I open it I know I have found it, though what exactly I cannot tell. The inside lid is a mirror, best quality, fine, clear, and below, cradled in black cloth, sit two curved, misty-white glass circles, small enough to catch a single drop of rain or dew.