The Floating Book, Page 2

  She decided when she’d had her fill of me, and pushed me off the divan in a peremptory fashion. I giggled weakly: it was less humiliating to read that gesture as a playful one. Once she’d smoothed down her robe, she talked to me in a normal voice of everyday things: the scandals of the town and the Baths. I fancied that her laugh was a little throatier, a little more intimate than hitherto. Very little was said of what had just passed between us, and most of it by me. I was too intimidated by her poise to say what I wanted to, which was, of course, that I had fallen irredeemably in love.

  I only know I pleased her because further appointments have been made. Many other appointments. She’s never more friendly than on the first occasion; she does not acknowledge our relations in public. A woman who loves cannot help but betray her affections: Clodia has no difficulties with discretion.

  I could not flatter myself that I’d taken her heart by storm. Still, well, you know – I’d had her. I was so impressed with myself. I was the lover of the most sought-after woman in Rome!

  Now I had something to write about.

  I immediately christened her ‘Lesbia’, in my poetry. The way a child gives a name to something it wants, as if that makes possession of it official. Like the sun, or the reflection of the moon in the water. My possession of ‘Lesbia’ was as substantial as that. This name was the greatest compliment I could bestow. The women of the isle of Lesbia are thought the most exquisite in the world; also, as personified in their ancient poetess, Sappho, the most refined, poetic and delicately passionate. That other meaning, the fellatory one, is not what I mean at all … Forgive me if I seem to patronise you by explaining the allusion. I know not if they talk of such things in the provinces and the camps.

  Lesbia’s sparrow, Lesbia’s sandal, Lesbia’s kisses … Our kisses, I promised, would be more than the grains of sand on the spicy shores of Cyrene. The white heat of the sun, the power of Rome, would all melt before our passion. I boasted that the docility of that sparrow of hers and its gentle assaults on her finger would be nothing to the animal pleasures I offered.

  So I’m a soldier too, Lucius. Writing poems about Clodia has turned me into a commander of words!

  I’m a veteran now. First I marshal my words and dispose them in formation. Then I say, ‘Now, words, do your duty and serve!’ Off they go, sometimes hitting the mark straight away, sometimes splitting off into innuendo or meaningless, merely rhythmic, sequences.

  At the beginning I thought I was inventing new senses, like ‘constriction-sense around the heart’, or ‘whirring wings around my naked back’, but all these images are merely foot-soldiers of the old senses. And so I always come back to those five great generals.

  Each new poem, I summon them up and say, ‘Mouth! Nose! Eyes! Skin! Ears! Tell me what Clodia has done to you! Consider and report back for duty forthwith!’

  They shuffle off to their deliberations and come back with their accounts. I ready my wax tablet and raise my stylus.

  ‘Mouth first!’ I say, ‘What’s she done to you?’

  ‘Ravished me, sir.’

  ‘Nose?’

  ‘Ravished … the perfume …’

  ‘OK,’ I interrupt, ‘Skin?’

  ‘Ravished, utterly.’

  ‘Ears, you too?’

  ‘That voice …’

  ‘Boring!’ I tell them. ‘Tell me something original about ravishment.’

  Eventually, they do. My mouth fetches me the memory of a kiss; my nose a recollection of an unguent, and eventually something melds together. I keep writing and erasing words on wax until I have a sense of recognition, until I can see my feelings in that pearly mirror making their own steam.

  I don’t cast a poem off till I can come to it anew, creep up on it by surprise. If I can still say, on re-reading, ‘Aha! Got it!’ then the poem is ready. It’s already fighting on its own account. It rebuffs me and goes out into the world on its own.

  To make me famous, to get me talked about.

  To let everybody know that this overpraised slut of a city has one more poet’s mouth to feed now.

  Chapter One

  … For I will give you such an unguent

  distilled upon my lover via Venus and Cupid

  that when you smell it

  you’ll be on your knees,

  begging the Gods to make you

  All nose.

  In certain light-suffused mists, Venice deconstructs herself. One sees faint smears of silhouettes, and in these the architect’s early sketches: the skeletons of the palazzi as he saw them on paper when they were only dreams. When the haze lifts, those buildings swell again with substance, as if freshly built. But until that happens the Venetians nose their way around their city.

  In the thickened air every stink and every fragrance is unbearably intensified. The canals smell of billy goat and grass-clippings, the ever-present steam of sea-louse soup smells of dark sea caves, the babies smell of mouse holes, and the women smell of what they desire.

  When the sea vapour blanked the town in those days, the streets were dark; only the cesendoli, little shrines to the Madonna, remained perpetually lit, and a few lamps under the arcades until the fourth hour of the night. The unpaved streets lurched rutted and holed; the wooden bridges were prone to collapse unexpectedly, rendering the mist, already churning with possibilities of dangerous and wonderful encounters, more threatening and more exciting.

  The fog swallowed noises, belching soft echoes of them. Rocking like a sleeping crib on the water, the city cocked a blind ear, sniffed like a mole. On days like that, men and women shuffled through their town like sleepwalkers, their nostrils flared, their toes splayed and all their animal senses acutely alert.

  The fog created intimate pockets, making impromptu couples of people who merely passed in the street, uniting for brief moments lantern sellers, fried food hawkers, wool beaters, mask makers, fabric stretchers, caulkers. It parted to reveal instantaneous tableaux which soon disappeared again in the vapour – a fat flute player who looked like a constipated but hopeful baby puckering up his lips for the spoon; scuole of battuti – flagellants who, veiled and bare-backed, perambulated the city scourging themselves with iron chains and birch branches; a cat and her husband in the business of procreation.

  Or, out of the mist might loom the face of a large, grinning pig. It was not long since the Senate had outlawed the vagrant Tantony boars that still caused havoc in the streets. The pigs, supposed to be fed by the charity of the faithful, were but loosely tended by the monks of San Antonio. The beasts had grown fat and fierce by merely helping themselves to whatever food they wanted. When the mist soused their bristles they grew skittish, knocking unsuspecting passers-by into the freezing canals.

  On days like that, the men who loved Sosia Simeon wondered what she was about, because they knew her. They knew that on a whim, she would betray them all without a thought. And so she was doing, in the first thick autumn mist of 1467, with a middle-aged nobleman she had just passed in the fogbound ghost of a back street in the Misericordia.

  She had seen a needy cast in his green eyes and the tell-tale hollow of his breast as he wove out of the fog: he himself might not know it, but Nicolò Malipiero, it was plain to Sosia, was in need of a woman. Instantly, she had opened her cloak just a little so that her warm and somewhat feral smell could visit his nose. Her scent travelled through the soft white vapour, tangible as a prodding finger.

  Sosia’s nobleman was bulky as a boar himself and awkward with his weight. As Sosia approached him, he gasped. She slowed her pace, lingering on her left foot, looking into his eyes. The nobleman made a whimpering noise, then an unaccustomed swift move, turning around to pull at her wrist. His red senatorial robe spun round them like a wave of blood.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘I am Sosia.’

  ‘Are you … ? Do you …?’

  ‘Are you Venetian?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sosia smiled.

  ‘H-h-how … much?
’

  She said nothing, but drew him into an alleyway, and parted her cloak. The mist isolated them in an instant. He shuddered between her legs, staring into her eyes, which she then closed briefly, twisting on his stalk as if trying to pinch a wildflower from its grasses. He cried out, biting his tongue, but it was the most pleasure he had ever experienced. Tears transpired on his cheeks.

  * * *

  He felt no relief, having had her. Nicolò Malipiero was still asking, again, When? How much? as the liquid cooled on her thighs and they stood breath-close together in the doorway, cocooned in the mist.

  Sosia said: ‘Decide what I’m worth, you do that.’

  ‘I cannot do this. I must know you. This is … important.’ The tone of his voice rose in an uncertain shameful whine.

  Silently, she moved to go, restless as a squirrel in his arms. She was as foreign a woman as he had seen or heard. The Venetian courtesans were many and various in their styles but he had not been with such a one before. Her accent disturbed him; she disturbed him. She had no grace or tenderness to her; none of the motherly kindness of some whores, not even an eye on the commercial possibilities of another encounter.

  ‘When will I see you again?’

  ‘How can I know that?’

  ‘Come to my studiolo tomorrow. It will be empty.’

  He fastened his hand on her wrist and whispered the directions in her ear.

  ‘Here’s the key.’ She reached out for it, revealing the yellow badge fastened to her elbow. He gasped but she had slipped the key under a wing of her cloak without looking at it, and was gone.

  Of course she did not arrive the next day, when Nicolò Malipiero lay shivering under the blankets of ermine and bear that he had bought to examine and love her upon. He lay alone, sick with fear that he would never see her again, his fists balled up like dead roses.

  Nor did she come the day after, by which time a midnight storm had at last erased the mist, and Venice sparkled like malice in iridescent sunlight. He waited for her. He poured wine in splashes and waited till the tiny bubbles at the edge of the glass evaporated, promising himself that she would be there when the red liquid lay perfectly quiescent. By the end of the second day he had not yet left the studio, in terror that she would appear at that moment and be lost to him. The room had started to smell, metallically, of fear and the stale trapped breath of hopeless need. He sent a messenger to his wife: I am ill; I don’t want to infect the children, stay away.

  At the dawn of the third day Sosia pushed the unclosed door open with her foot, and stood profiled in the doorway, the cut of her waist and the slant panniers of her haunches in black silhouette, the key dangling in her hand.

  She said: ‘So do you have some red wine, Mister Nobleman? That’s what I like.’

  He was naked, still waiting under the ermine. Now he leapt from the bed, clumsy with joy, the tiny blades of the fur embossed on his plump flesh as if he were a flagellant. Reaching for the pitcher, instead he knocked it to the floor. He turned to face her, humiliated to the darkest core of his soul. He was painfully aware of the splashes of wine sidling down his knees, the ignominious teardrop on the end of his nose, and the aching erection unfurling slowly in front of her.

  Sosia thought momentarily of elegant Domenico Zorzi, whose thin lips were infinitely flexible and whose facial skin was pitted like a cucumber. He was no doubt waiting for her, as arranged, in the sumptuous gloom of his palazzo. He would have a new book for her, today, he had promised. Well, he would wait. He might even become lost in the book, scholar that he was, and forget about her for an hour or two. Felice Feliciano, she banished forcibly from her mind. Her husband Rabino did not enter it at all.

  The cold weather had broken, she was twenty-seven years old, and Sosia Simeon was in the mood and good appetite for a new Venetian nobleman. That morning she had opened a fresh page of her ledger and added the name: ‘Nicolò Malipiero’ to the Golden Book column.

  It looked good, she thought, under all the rest.

  Chapter Two

  … He’s married a green girl

  who’s not even come into bud,

  tender-playful as a kid.

  She needs kid-glove treatment.

  You must touch her as delicately

  as you’d pull the skin off a grape.

  But he lets her do what she likes,

  and you can guess what she likes to do!

  Rabino Simeon, discreetly watching her hide the book in its habitual cleft in the scullery wall, saw that his wife had lost substance in the days since he last beheld her. He noted how a strand of dark hair, caught up in her mouth, seemed to draw the corner of her lip towards her unusually complicated ear. Against the eggshell pallor of her face, the black hair looked like a crack in her skin.

  He suspected the worst as to the nature of her illness. Mortification cast his eyes down to the floor as she passed him on the stairs on her way up to their bedroom.

  Sadly, he noted her thin wrists and the rasp of her breath, but his pity was veined with darker feelings.

  As if to dislodge the unsavoury visions conjured by the ledger, Rabino shook his head violently, dislodging flakes of skin that sifted on his robe, uneasy as maggots. He drew his cloak around him, obscuring the yellow circle on his sleeve, and slipped out into the gelid depths of the night. If Sosia planned to spend a rare evening in their home, then he was happier to be out of it.

  * * *

  On the day Sosia Simeon met Nicolò Malipiero, it was exactly twelve years since Rabino had taken Sosia from a wretched family of Dalmatian Jews, initially as a maid and clerk. It had been another moist and frigid day, he recalled, another December, when he himself had not yet reached his fortieth year. She was then twelve, or so he was told, still a puella, an innocent and immature girl in the eyes of the law. He soon realised that she was at least two years older. Days after she arrived in his home she had asked him, unblushingly, for rags for her personal use.

  He made a nest for her in the attic, and explained her duties as kindly as he could. She edged past him into the room, brushing him with her breast and then looked pointedly down the stairs by which they had ascended. Rabino realised that her privacy was important to her. She’s had none till now, poor little creature, he thought.

  Her grasp of Italian was astonishing, given her background and the limits of her experience in the world. Her schoolteacher father had taught her the language, she informed him. But there was more sophistication in her vocabulary than Rabino had heard in her father’s and her grammar was better. More disturbingly, she never stumbled over words.

  She rarely spoke more than a sentence, but he found that her eyes were always upon him, no matter when he looked up. Her gaze, that never actually met his own eyes, was neither grateful nor subservient. Sosia appeared to be intensely interested in his every movement. She seemed to study the lines of his limbs, to see through his robes, more like a libidinous widow than a little girl. Rabino was trapped in her gaze like a fly drowning slowly in a bowl of sugar water. Its effect upon him was distorting: he quickly came to think of Sosia as an older woman than she was, mature in her desires and forthright in the expression of them.

  Rabino could not decide if the girl was beautiful or ugly. Different moments saw her features gilded with a sensuous light or hard and sullen as if coarsely carved in granite. This conundrum drew his own eyes to her again and again, until watching Sosia intently became an involuntary and chronic act of shame.

  She did not seem oppressed by his gaze; on the contrary she absorbed it as if it were her right. He could have sworn that there were times she deliberately placed herself in the way of his eyes. She made a compelling ritual of extracting the seeds of an apple with her tongue. When they ate, she would let the spoon linger in her mouth so that he grew breathless waiting for her to withdraw it. It was hard to believe she was innocent of the effect on him when she splashed her clothes while washing linen so that her chemise grew transparent, revealing her arms and the delic
ate furrow of her collarbone.

  She spoke so rarely that Rabino could not enter her mind. Soon it became convenient to think of her as merely physical, the embodiment of forbidden appetites.

  * * *

  She had lived in his home three months, her shameless gaze devouring his composure, when lust overtook him in the pantry one winters night. He found himself holding her hips while he entered her. She did not flinch as he put his hands upon her; did not resist as he raised her skirt. She was completely compliant, cool and passive in his arms. As he toiled and blushed, she turned her neck slowly to glance back at him for just a moment. Afterwards she had not looked at him again, but continued scraping the plates with her thin fingers. She touched neither herself nor him.

  Watching her from the corner of the room, feeling himself not just violator but voyeur, Rabino found it impossible to believe he had just committed this brutish act in his own home, and that there were no apparent consequences. In the candlelight a splash of foamy liquid glittered suddenly on the flagstone. He turned away, stricken. He, of all people, a doctor … he could not bear to think what he had done. The rasp of her nails on the earthenware drove him from the room.

  He married her. He knew he did not love her, that she was not the companion of his soul he had always longed to find, but he thought this sacrifice the most honourable way to expiate his sin. He could not admit, even to himself, that he was also afraid that the girl would become pregnant. There had been just that one brief lapse, and he had managed to spill his seed on the floor – however he knew, because the first instance had been involuntary, that it could happen again. He had become, in his own eyes, a monstrous slave to a reprehensible incontinence.