OUR wanderings had taken us eastwards, and by the height of the summer, Petruchio and I came to a little village on the Adriatic coast. It was seldom that a vessel larger than a fishing boat anchored there, and when the Santa Maria was sighted coming round the headland, the whole village turned out to watch. She was foreign built, with blunt, clumsy lines; and, as I heard later, she had been captured from the Spanish by corsairs and later retaken from them and sold as a trading ship.
I was standing on the wooden jetty when the crew came ashore. The first man to land was very tall. He wore gold earrings, and his striped singlet was tucked into ragged breeches of grey worsted. His blue eyes looked strangely brilliant in his sun-dark face, and in spite of his clothes, there was no doubting who was the captain of that motley crew. He asked me where he could replenish his water casks, and I showed him the way to the stream.
If the breeze had held, he would have left the same evening; but by midday there was a flat calm, and he said that his men had worked hard enough warping the Santa Maria to this anchorage and they could rest until there came a favorable wind.
The captain had led an adventurous life, and he had a great fund of tales to tell; of skirmishes against pirates, and of the countries he had been to on his voyages. In two or three days he and Petruchio were like brothers. They used to sit outside the inn door on a bench in the sun; drinking the rough wine and talking so hard that they never noticed the time passing. Even when the days were very hot the air was fresher by the sea, and being with the Captain, as we always called him, seemed to give Petruchio new strength, as if he were being refreshed from the other’s strong vitality.
For more than a year I had seen that Petruchio was growing steadily weaker. Though he refused to talk about it, I knew he was often in pain from the way he would press his hand to his side and catch his breath as if he had been stabbed by an invisible dagger. I had tried to make him go to a physician, but he had only smiled, and said, “They could not cure me; for I think my body so hates its own ugliness that it is trying to destroy itself.”
The night I woke to hear the wind blowing strongly from the south I could have wept—for I knew it meant that the Santa Maria would continue on her voyage. The Captain went on board at dawn—but there was no need of farewells: he had arranged with Petruchio for us to sail with him, and they had kept it a secret to surprise me.
I had never been on the sea before, and I was very excited at my unfamiliar surroundings. I thought the Santa Maria was a mighty ship, for she was the largest I had ever seen, but the Captain laughed at me, and said, “She would look like a rowing boat alongside any of the Spanish fleet, and if you saw one of those towering galleons on the horizon you might think her great spread of sails was the cliffs of an island.”
I shared the stern cabin with both of them. The beams seemed to press down on me and the Captain warned me not to bump my head. His height was very troublesome to him in the confined space below decks, and he used to say, “God forgot He was going to make me a sailor, or else that ships are made for little men.” Though the cabin was shabby it must once have been handsomely appointed; there were traces of gilt and vermilion on the carved mouldings, and the tattered brocade that covered the bench under the stern windows was of fine quality. It was here that the Captain kept the many strange relics he had collected in foreign lands: a piece of amber with a fly in it; carved coral; a heavy war club; a monkey’s skull, said to have magical properties, from the African coast. There was also a box of curious shells; and as he showed them to me, he told me of the beaches from which they had come.
The Captain, and any guests or passengers that he carried, always drank wine. I was sorry for the sailors who had to drink from the water-cask, for after about ten days there was green scum on it. One of the men told me that on a long voyage the water became so foul that they had to hold their noses against the stink before they could swallow it without retching.
We carried a mixed cargo: silk, some hogsheads of Spanish wine, salted fish, bark used in the tanning trade, and many other things I cannot remember. Few of the small towns along the coast had a good harbor; we anchored off-shore and the traders came out to us in a fishing boat, or the Captain went ashore to look for a new cargo. Sometimes he bought merchandise to trade, and sometimes he carried goods under charter.
I was very happy during the two months we were on the ship. At times I wished that the Captain had not a wife and five children living with his parents on a farm near Naples—he had not seen them for three years so I doubt if he can have loved them very much—because then he might have asked me to remain with him. I think I should have done so if I had had the chance; but first I should have made him promise not to leave me on land to have a lot of children I didn’t want. Unfortunately he seemed to look on me more as a child than a woman of eighteen; and he always treated me as if he were a kindly uncle. It was lucky that I never fell in love with him, otherwise I might have been very unhappy, instead of merely regretful that I could not follow the sea with a man of whom I was very fond.
When we came into Venetian waters we stood away from the coast. I had been hoping that at last I should see the town I had so often traveled towards and never reached. The Captain never told me the reason why he thought it unwise to attempt trading there. Perhaps they were in a state of war, or it may only have been that the dues were too heavy.
Soon afterwards we came to the great port of Trieste. The harbor was crowded with ships from many countries, men-of-war, coastal traders, merchantmen, ships from Spain so high out of the water that they seemed top-heavy. The merchants who came aboard us used to sit for hours in the stern cabin, drinking wine with the Captain while they haggled over the value of his cargo. When at last they were in agreement, bales or barrels would be taken up out of the hold and lowered into the little boat waiting alongside, while the two who had been arguing so fiercely parted from each other with many elaborate phrases of goodwill.
It was a charter that sent us to Fiume. Until then we had been fortunate in the weather, the sun shone nearly every day and the sea remained blue and mild. We left Trieste with a favorable breeze, and were out of sight of land before we saw storm clouds blowing up from the east.
Waves seemed to follow us like angry serpents, towering to strike down onto our stern; but somehow we always seemed to out-distance them. I wanted to stay on deck, but I was ordered below. There was no light or air in the cabin, for wooden covers had been put over all the port-lights and the hatches were battened down. So violent was the storm that the ship drove forward under bare yards; and the shrouds twanged like the devil’s lute strings as the wind tore at them.
After a time the wind lessened, but a high sea was still running and the ship wallowed in the trough of the waves like a dying porpoise. It was so dark in the cabin that until the cook came in with some food for us and lit the lantern, I did not realize that Petruchio had been injured. A heavy chair had worked free from its lashings and fallen on his knee. The bone was not broken, but it had begun to swell and it looked very painful. Though I put poultices of hot meal on it every hour, by the following night the flesh was still red and angry and he could walk only with difficulty.
Next morning the storm had abated. The sky was blue again, with high scudding clouds, and we made fine speed under a full press of canvas. The Captain said we should reach Fiume by the following evening, but it was twelve hours later than that when we tied up alongside the stone jetty. He went ashore at once; and when he came back from the town I could see he was disturbed about something. He told us he had been offered a very favorable charter to sail direct to the African coast. It would be a dangerous voyage, not only because he must reach his destination with all speed, and so would have to chance being many days out of sight of land, but also because it was rumored that three other ships which had attempted to follow the same route had been taken by corsairs on the Barbary coast. He kept on stressing the dangers of the voyage. It seemed out of character for this man who laughed at danger to talk so much of it, until I realized that he was trying to tell us he could not take us with him.
Petruchio was always quicker witted than I was. He said that his leg would heal better on land than on sea, and that as he had always wanted to go to Fiume it would suit us very well to be landed there. The Captain at first protested against our leaving him, but we knew he was relieved—a woman and a cripple make poor additions to a fighting crew. At last it was arranged we should wait there till the Santa Maria returned. The Captain was confident he would complete his voyage in three months, or if the wind were favorable, he might be back even sooner.
So the Santa Maria sailed. We watched her until she was hull down on the horizon—and then Petruchio and I were alone in Fiume.
Before he left, the Captain had found two little rooms over a ship-chandler’s for us. It was on the water front, and at night I used to lie listening to the water sucking at the wooden piers of the wharf. When a ship was loading, carts used to grind over the cobblestones and I could hear the rumble of the casks as they thudded down into the holds. It was easy to tell when a ship had made port after a long voyage by the vomit on the streets outside the taverns.
We knew that in Fiume it would be difficult for Petruchio to earn money as a jester, for the frequenters of the harbor taverns were mostly foreigners who could not understand Italian. But we had saved enough money to keep us through the time the Captain expected to be away, and he had promised that on his return he would give us passage to his home port of Naples.
I hid our bag of money under a loose floor-board in my room, because Petruchio thought it unsafe to carry it about with us. His leg refused to heal, and at last even he could not bear the pain of walking and he had to keep to his room. The chandler’s wife let me cook at her fire, and I used to go down to the market to buy our food. Fish was plentiful and it was easy to get meat; but at this season of the year the price of fruit or butter was too high for me to afford any. I missed being able to gather my own wild pot-herbs. I had never lived out of the sight of growing things before; in all the little villages and towns where I had been it had taken only a few minutes to get out of the shadows of buildings.
Petruchio often asked me if I still had the ring which that other Bastard of the Griffin had given me, and he made me repeat my promise that if he died I should go the House of the White Sisters for sanctuary. I had a picture of it in my mind: high, white walls, which shut away the turmoil of the world; quiet cloisters with white doves strutting among the ordered plots; and muted bells to mark the gentle hours. But I put the thought of it away from me, for I knew that there I should have no Petruchio—I was so afraid of having to live without him.
I never found out who stole our money. I think it was the squinting son of the chandler, but I knew it would be useless to accuse him; he would only have denied it and his parents would have turned us out. I did not tell Petruchio it was gone, for it would have made him unhappy to know that our livelihood depended on what I could earn.
The shop next door was owned by a meat-pickler. I earned a little money there, helping to fill the casks and nail down the lids. Much of what went into the brine tubs to feed the sailors was the refuse of the meat market. In some of the casks the meat was packed in dry salt; in others gobbets lay half-obscured in the pickling, like the brew in a sorcerer’s cauldron. I saw a pig’s eye floating on the surface of one of them, like a monstrous frog’s spawn.
I had to find other work as well as this, for what the briner gave me was not enough to pay our lodging and buy even a little food. There was a tavern along the quay which was owned by an elderly woman. She was always dressed in black, very soberly though in cloth of a rich quality. She walked with a stick but her carriage was erect and imperious. She seemed to have a flavor of Donna Isabella, so perhaps that was why I did not go to her sooner to ask for work. But at last I had to, for I could find it nowhere else.
I went to the tavern in the morning. The shutters had not yet been taken down, but when I rattled the latch it was opened to me by a loutish boy. Just inside the door was a dais; it was surrounded by a railing, and behind this the proprietress sat at an oak table tallying up the score of the week’s takings. Her voice was sharp when she asked me why I had come. Then she said, “There is no work for you here. You are too thin. Chickens and girls should both be plump.”
“But why should my being thin affect my playing? Long fingers are more nimble than fat ones on the strings. Won’t you hear me before deciding against me?”
“A lutanist?” She looked surprised. “Can you sing—not sickly romances but the kind of songs that make a sailor laugh?”
I said I would try, and sitting down on the edge of a table I began one of the songs that Lucia had sung when I first knew her, and I tried to play it as she would have done. Though I knew the woman liked it, I dared not haggle over the price. I accepted the little that she offered, and it was arranged that I should play there from six in the evening until they put the shutters up. Before I went out the woman looked at me piercingly and said, “You understand you are here as a lutanist. It is the only thing I require you for. If you try to interfere with other people’s work you will be dismissed at once. Everything here is very orderly. You are here to play the lute, and play the lute you shall and nothing else—except singing, of course.”
I started work that evening. The proprietress seemed to know most of her customers by name, and I was amused to see that she made them stick their daggers into a board behind her table. One man, he must have been a newcomer, protested, and she said to him, “Did you think you would need to draw a knife in my tavern? If so you had better walk along the quay till you find a cut-throats’ meeting-place. Plenty of them there are, as you will soon find! I am an honest, God-fearing woman and I will permit no brawling here.”
In every way she was very strict. If a drunken man tried to grab at me as I walked between the tables, she shouted at him, and he would look sheepish as a child caught stealing sugar. If a man got truculent he found himself thrown out by the huge negro servant she employed, or, if he was sober enough to pull himself out, he might be dropped into the harbor. When they were very drunk she left them to sober up on the wharfside, because, as she said, “If customers get drowned people begin to talk about it and that is bad for my business.”
Opposite the door to the quay there was another, which at first I thought must be a back entrance. Then I noticed that some men walked straight across the room and through the other door and knew it could not lead into the street. But it was only when the proprietress called out to a man who was trying to pull me down beside him, “Go into the back room if you want to drop anchor between a pair of thighs!” that I realized it was not a tavern she owned but a brothel.
The drabs all lived together in the back room. There were low partitions, not reaching to the roof, between each pallet, of which there were four on either side of the room; and a dirty curtain on a string gave them each an illusion of privacy. From seven in the evening until midnight their earnings belonged to the house, and during these hours they had to wait in their cubicles for customers; but what they made at other times they kept for themselves. They had a code of rules amongst themselves which they never broke; each girl was responsible for the man she brought into the room: if he was fighting drunk and created too much of a disturbance, she had to put half his fee into the common fund from which they paid the little gutter boy who cleaned the floor. This boy sat outside the doorway with a ship’s mop and a wooden bucket, and ran in to clean up the vomit at the sound of a protesting stomach; but though he was very nimble, a sour smell always clung to the floor of beaten earth.
In the day-time the girls used to gather round a large table under the high window at one end of the room, to sew, or gossip, or gamble away their earnings to each other at dice. They were much lower in the scale of harlotry than Lucia had ever been, and yet some of them had achieved a magnificent detachment. Vaccia talked about her work as if her body were a mule she hired out for a day’s work to a carter. She took more trouble than did the others with her appearance, and would cut, thread by thread, the frayed edge of her velvet dress, or mend with fine careful stitches a rent in her chemise or a torn ruffle. Another of them—I think if she had had one less thought she would have been an idiot—seldom talked to anyone. She was very lousy, and used to sit scratching herself, slowly and despairingly, like a dying monkey. Maria was pregnant, but her striped skirt was very full and the old woman had not yet noticed. Maria was terrified that she would be turned out. She dreaded being alone and having to wander round the alleys looking for men; for, she told me, girls who had no protection seldom got paid anything and ran the risk of having their throats cut.
I think the proprietress had a certain fondness for me, and she was not unkind to her girls. She treated them like a muleteer who keeps his animals in good condition so that they will make him a better profit. She went to a church in another part of the town, where prosperous merchants took their wives and families. Although she believed in hell-fire, I am sure she never thought she was in any danger of it, for she had a great opinion of her own virtues. I have heard her say that if the sailors’ mothers knew how well she looked after their sons they would remember her in their prayers.
The long, cold weeks went slowly by. It was a season of bitter gales: the winds screamed down from the mountains, and the skies were low and somber, leaden as coffin seals. My cloak was threadbare, and the cold gnawed at my fingers until there was blood on my lute strings.
Petruchio used to sit at the window, watching the grey horizon for the Santa Maria. Sometimes we thought we recognized her rig, but as the ship grew nearer it was always a stranger. I prayed so hard for her to come back, and I should have gone on board her, even when the gales were at their height, if only she would have taken us back to the Italy we knew. Whenever a new ship came into the harbor—and there were few of them at this season—I tried to get news of her from the crew. It was in January, four months after she had sailed, that I heard of her. She had foundered off Sicily with all hands.
Petruchio was desperate to get me away from Fiume, I think he already knew that he was dying, but he clung to life so fiercely that he made his body obey him. It was one evening while I was lute-playing that I found a way to get back to our own country. No ships had come into the harbor for the last two weeks, and captains were delaying their sailings until more favorable weather. Several days had gone by without my seeing a new face in the tavern, when a stranger walked in. I could see by his dress that he was not a sailor, and his fur-lined cloak showed that he was a man of substance. Even the proprietress greeted him with respect, and herself led him to a seat by the fire.
My songs seemed to please him; he made me play the ones that caught his ear till long past the time I was usually allowed to go home. He was made very welcome by the company, for he threw gold on the table and said that they were all to be his guests.
He looked so prosperous, yet wine brought him self-pity; he made me sit beside him, and while he stroked my hand he told me his troubles. “Three days I have stayed in this town listening to this accursed wind. I am a merchant; until I came to Fiume I thought a wise one, for I found these foreigners profitable to trade with. Now my business is concluded and I am trapped here by the sea. I have promised the Madonna that if she gets me safely back to Italy there shall be a new statue of her in the cathedral. But the wind is so loud I doubt whether she can hear my prayers.”
“You pray to the Madonna for a quiet passage. I pray to her for any passage, however rough, however dangerous, for it would get me back to a friendly shore.”
Then he made me tell him my story from the time the Santa Maria had sailed. He looked at me, the solemn, stupid look of a drunken man who thinks he still possesses a keen judgment. He spaced his words carefully, as if they were a line of stepping-stones from which he was afraid of slipping; he must judge each one separately and adjust his balance before moving on to the next. “I am a musician as well as a merchant. You may think merchants care only for trading, not for songs. But you are wrong! You may think merchants think only of money and have no generosity. That’s wrong too! I will prove it to you: I’ll pay your passage, and you can also take the dwarf you say you travel with. That proves I’m generous! I’ll make a bargain with you—I’m no fool to have money wheedled out of me even by such a pretty face as yours. You must play the lute to me and sing, the louder and bawdier the better, to keep the noise of the winds out of my ears....Maybe it will make me forget these accursed seas. I shall shut my eyes and listen to you, and perhaps I’ll believe the ship’s only swaying because I’ve drunk too much.”
I knew that he hoped for more than lute-playing, but I was too happy at his offer to worry about the difficulties of the journey.
It was hard to believe in our good fortune, and both Petruchio and I were afraid it was only a drunkard’s promise. But the merchant did not forget, and by the next evening we had sailed from Fiume.
There is little to tell of our journey. There were no great storms, though the waves were high enough for our benefactor to have no stomach for lutanists—it was too busy protesting against the sea! He was a kind man, although queasy and something of a coward. He was so overjoyed to feel firm land under his feet, that when we parted from him he further increased our gratitude by a gift of money.
Petruchio pretended that he had always wanted to see the castle where I was born. I knew that this was an excuse to travel towards Perugia, so that when he died it would be easy for me to reach the convent. He could no longer ride on a mule so we traveled slowly, having to wait until there was an ox-cart with a friendly driver going in our direction.
When we were still twenty leagues from Perugia, his illness was increased by a fever. I wanted to find lodging at a farm, but he would not rest. We went on, in a cart half-full of barrels, some of wine, some of oil. They were roped together but they rolled with the jolting of the cart, so we could not lean against them. Petruchio had once told me, that of all things, a hunchback most desires to be able to lie flat on the ground and look up at the sky. He could never lie flat, and now that he had grown so thin there were sores on his shoulders and elbows because it was so difficult for him to vary his position.
We tried to hide our sorrowful thoughts from each other with an imagery of earthly contentment. Of how we should write songs, he stringing the words and I the melody; songs that would echo throughout Italy until they were heard by some great lord who would find us and be our patron. He would be a man of kindliness and riches and would give us a corner of his palace to live in. I should have a lute inlaid with olive wood and painted with flowers, in colors soft as harpstrings plucked at dusk. Petruchio would no longer be a jester, and would keep the fair sheets of paper on which he would write his philosophies, in a coffer of leather curiously devised in scarlet and gilt, such as we had once seen in the hall of a great house. Hunger would never walk through our thoughts, and the cruel, shabby terrors of the very poor would no longer follow us.
I pillowed his head on my lap, and stroked his forehead to try to bring him sleep. His head looked too big for his body, as if it were a head carried on a pike. Pain had scored deep lines into his face; but life had written courage on his forehead, and gentleness spoke from his mouth even while he slept.
As I watched him it seemed that I saw him, in heavy armor, on a white horse, a man stronger than Bernard even in his prime. Behind him I saw banners; one emblazoned with three gold leopards, another with a white hart on an emerald field. Then I realized what I had always known though never shaped into words: Petruchio was not a dwarf like other dwarfs, but was a knight who had been grievously wounded. A knight whose now crippled hands had known the singing downsweep of a battle-axe; whose withered legs had gripped the deep sides of a mighty war-horse as it thundered on to meet the enemy.
That night the carter stopped at a farm belonging to his cousin. They gave me some milk for Petruchio, and let us sleep on a pile of sweet hay in the corner of a barn. Moonlight pierced between the broken roof tiles in silver rods; darkness and light, clearly divided the one from the other in a sharp line.
Petruchio had slept during the day, and all through the night he was wakeful. His voice was clear and strong, and it did not seem to tire him to talk. It was as though we had reached an unspoken agreement to abandon the pretence that he was going to get well again: he knew that he was going to die, and I accepted it. He talked about it calmly, almost eagerly, as though he were setting out on a voyage, and giving me careful instructions what I must do until I was able to join him.
He was so confident, so serene, that I almost forgot how soon his voice that had so often comforted me would be beyond my hearing. “It is strange, Carola, that even if our physicians were great men, even if they were near to the Christ in their power of healing, they would despair to cure a hunchback of his deformity. There is only one physician that will cure me. Soon I shall feel his hand on mine, and he will say to me, ‘Rise up, my friend, for you are whole again.’ And I shall be young and strong; my back will be straight as a poplar wand and my neck will carry my head proudly; there will be no clumsiness in my feet, and my thighs will be long and swift. I shall be clean and beautiful, for though Jesus cleansed lepers, Death is a greater physician.
“Even now I can feel my body loosening its hold on me, and just as at other times when I have had a fever, I can see a little further beyond the curtain. I want you to go to the House of the White Sisters not only for sanctuary—though that part of me which is still blinded by my mortality fears for the things that you might suffer if you were alone without your little dwarf to serve you.”
I felt my tears sliding down my face. I dared not brush them away, for I loved Petruchio too much to dim his freedom by my selfishness. He went on.
“We both share memory of an older time when men and women trained themselves as priests, in temples, where they shut themselves away only until they were ready to speak of what they knew. When you rode up into the hills you became wise in your own spirit; and monks and nuns must live as solitaries. You may find women there who have taken vows only from expedience; but there must be some who know of the things we know, and they will befriend you. Remember that the starving must eat slowly; that in our time it is easier to teach people the truth through their own formulas. You must go gently with them, or they will not accept the living truth but call it heresy.
“When you have listened to your own voice in the silence and are strong in certainty, you must leave the convent and share your knowledge among the people outside, even though it will expose you to the great danger of being recognized for a renegade nun. It may take you five years, or ten, shut away alone, but I shall always wait for you on the other side of sleep....
“I wonder if you will recognize Petruchio as I shall be then? I know you will. But if I thought you would deny me in a radiant guise and think me a stranger, I would still be a crippled dwarf in heaven.”
By the next evening he was too weak to climb out of the cart, but the driver was kind and carried him into the inn. I asked for a room to ourselves. The inn-keeper said he had none, until I showed him that I had money to pay.
I put Petruchio to bed, and the inn-keeper’s wife brought me a bowl of hot water and towels to bathe him. His lips were dry, and I kept moistening them with wine. It seemed that the flame of his fever would split the taut skin from his bones. I bathed his body until at last the sweat dewed his forehead and gathered in the hollow of his upper lip.
Then it seemed as if winter took him into her keeping. His teeth chattered with cold. I got heated stones, wrapped in a cloth, to put at his feet; but I could not warm him. I took off my clothes and lay with him in my arms, but his cheek between my breasts was cold.
His heart was still beating under my hand, very fast and sharp, as though he had been running. Twice I thought that it had stopped. I felt him stir, and my arms tightened round him. He opened his eyes.
“My Carola, are we in a dream?”
“No, my Petruchio, we are both awake. I am here. Can you not feel my arms holding you to me?”
He smiled, “So you have died too, my beloved. I have left the cold earth, and even my lonely dreams, and we are at last together—in Paradise.”
And my tears fell upon his forehead; but Petruchio did not feel them, for his body held him prisoner no longer.