THE SMELL OF DEATH made Cesca giddy. It had a sweetish odour rather like the water in a vase of lilies that had not been changed for several days. The windows in the bedchamber were too narrow to admit a breeze. The oil lamps sucked all the air from the room. For what Francesca—or as most people called her, Cesca—had in mind, none of these details made the slightest difference.
Inside were all the women, including Cesca and the widow, Grazia. Outside in the garden were the male mourners—Jews clad in shades of black and grey, curls hanging down on either side of their faces, beards showing the remnants of last night’s soup, their skin colourless from too much time in the prayer house.
All except for one man.
Like a white heron among a flock of crows stood Foscari, the nobleman from Venice—tall, fair, blue-eyed, and beardless. There was a deliberate grace to him, an economy of movement as he stooped to listen to something the rabbi was saying, cupping his hand behind his ear as though he were hard of hearing, although Cesca knew he was not. And then there was the matter of his nose—silver, attached by silk threads wrapped around his ears, flashing in the intermittent rays of the sun.
Why, she wondered, would a gentile trouble himself to attend the funeral of a Jew? And not just any gentile but a marquis. And not just any marquis but the Venetian ambassador to Constantinople. Surely such a man must have better things to do than attend the funeral of an obscure moneylender.
In a semicircle around the bed, Cesca stood with the other women who were darting glances at Grazia, waiting for her to approach the corpse and begin the ablutions—wash the body, stuff the ears, nose and mouth with cotton wool, tie the ankles, cross the hands on his breast, and wrap him in a shroud. The widow Grazia should step forward and begin the task, but she did not.
“I cannot, Cesca,” Grazia finally said, turning to her. “You must do what has to be done.”
“As you wish,” Cesca replied, approaching the bed. To her relief, none of the other women moved toward the body to help her. This would make it easier to carry out her plan. “Go outside, all of you. I will look after him.” She had almost said “it.” I will look after it. That was all he was now—no longer Leon, no longer human, no longer anything but an unpleasant household task to be performed.
The women hesitated. They stood for a moment, their arms at their sides.
Cesca put an arm around Grazia’s shoulders and gave her a nudge toward the door. “Go. I can manage.”
The other women took Grazia by the arm and trooped out to the garden, where they stood apart from the male mourners. Cesca locked the door behind them.
With Grazia and the other women gone, she would have the solitude she needed to wash and wrap the body. It amused her to remember that this morning when she threw cloths over the mirrors, a custom required when sitting shiva, the period of mourning, she had noticed that even after everything she had done, her eyes remained as guileless as lapis lazuli.
Leon had died young. His black beard, without a hint of white, reached the middle of his well-fleshed chest. Death had scrubbed the colour from his face and left it a dull grey. He wore a prayer shawl, black frock coat, and breeches.
Cesca had donned a stained wool skirt this morning, knowing what lay ahead. She would not sacrifice her good dress. The rabbi would perform keriah, using a knife and slitting her mourner’s clothes, not on a seam that could be mended but in the middle of the cloth, making it unwearable.
This was the way of Jews. Cesca had studied their habits well. For two years she had worked for Leon and Grazia as the “Shabbat goy,” performing chores forbidden to be done by Jews—extinguishing candles and lamps on Friday night, lighting the fire on Sabbath morning. The services she had performed for Leon’s sole benefit she preferred not to dwell upon.
Jews were profligate in some ways: two sets of pots and dishes to keep milk from mingling with meat, and costly beeswax candles wasted squinting over books. But they seemed to Cesca miserly in other ways—refusing to buy fresh cherries in July, walking thousands of paces out of their way to save a scudo on a pail of goat’s milk.
Grazia was not like this. She had been a Christian, the blue-eyed daughter of a baker, who had fallen in love with Leon when she was fifteen and, to her family’s horror, converted to Judaism.
Was Foscari acquainted with the custom of keriah? Through the open window, she glanced into the garden, searching in the crowd of men for his well-barbered head of sleek chestnut hair. Evidently not. He was wearing his handsome white jacket, buttoned in spite of the heat, not a bead of sweat on his brow. She looked away when she saw him gazing at her, but not before she observed one blue eye close in a wink. Something stirred in her. It had been a long time since she had had a well-made man in her bed. Had she known what lay in store for her at Foscari’s hands, she would not have given a long, sensual wink in reply.
Cesca closed the window and turned to the task at hand. She would make quick work of Leon, then the men would lift him onto a palanquin and carry him down the hill to the Jewish graveyard outside of town. While Leon was being released into the waiting arms of his pagan god, Cesca would help herself to what she was after in his study.
She took a step toward the bed, leaned over the corpse, and lifted its arm. Taking a deep breath, she began to undress him—yanking off his white tallis, his prayer shawl, tugging off the black gabardine breeches, and jerking him out of his jacket. Even in death, his body repulsed her—the long feet splayed outward, the fingers curled up at his sides. She tossed a sheet over the corpse and dipped a cloth in a bowl of warm soapy water, then wrung it out so that it was nearly dry. She wrapped it around her hand like a glove. Nudging aside a corner of the sheet, she picked up an arm and began to wash it with purposeful strokes.
Her gaze fell on his face. There was swelling over his right eye. Grazia believed it had been caused by a blow to his head on the corner of the table as he toppled to the floor after his heart gave out. When Grazia found him, he had one leg folded underneath him, the other rotated at an awkward angle.
Cesca passed a hand over his eyes but they would not close. They resisted her, staring sightlessly—as dark and cold as they had been in life. This was why mourners placed coins on the eyes of the dead, but she had none, and even if she had, she would not have wasted them on Leon. Studying his cooling body, she wondered at herself having been frightened of him—his pale, lashless eyes that had tracked her as she dusted, swept, polished, and set the table with silver and crystal, all the while feigning interest in the account books he kept for his business as a moneylender, brow furrowed in a scholarly frown.
In fairness, Cesca had also watched Leon. One afternoon she was quietly trimming candlewicks when Leon thought she was at the market. When she heard the hinges of his strongbox squeak nearby, she fastened her eye to a knothole in the baseboard, which gave her a view of the study.
The only light shone from high above his head—a lumpy and ill-made candle. The wick was braided from the worst class of rags, cast-off cotton perhaps or a charred scrap of linen. It was hard to imagine the exemplary Grazia—her feather-light pastry, her flawlessly straight seams and crisp table linen—fashioning such a thing. No matter, Leon did not care as long as no tallow fell on his gold.
He had lifted the lid of the chest wrapped in iron bands, which was set high on a simple wooden platform to protect it from water damage—the Tiber River flooded the Jewish Quarter during the rainy season each year, rendering the main floors dank and wet. He removed a canvas pouch from the chest. As the rough boards of the floor dug into her knees and hands, Cesca heard the clink of coins and watched as Leon opened the pouch. Next, she saw the flash of gold as Leon counted his money, letting the coins trickle between his fingers. Once counted, he replaced them in the pouch and locked them in the chest.
With the thought of that gold so close at hand, her movements quickened. She washed Leon’s armpits, the inside of the elbows, the veins etching a trace of blue on the pallid grey skin. She finished, then let the arm drop and moved to the other side of the bed.
When she lifted the other arm his jagged fingernails caught on her dress and pulled at her bodice, as though he were clutching for her breasts one last time. His nails were so long that they curled under. Cesca found a small pair of scissors in a drawer and began to trim them. She would toss the parings in the fire so that his spirit did not return to seek revenge.
Out of the corner of her eye, through the window, she saw Foscari. He was talking to Grazia, his face the very picture of sympathy. Then, he reached high into the apple tree and plucked a fruit from its branches. As he ate, he leaned forward so the juice did not drip on his jacket. Foscari had arrived the first time one rainy night last week to borrow money from Leon. Cesca had overheard Leon tell Grazia that Foscari needed ten ducats to cover some gaming debts.
Cesca grasped the corpse’s right hand. The gold wedding ring set with a diamond caught the light, gleaming. The nail beds were as deep and rectilinear as a coffin. Ink stained the callus on his middle finger where he had grasped his quill. The broad webbing between Leon’s fingers made his ring easy to slip off, and the diamond flashed as she dropped it into her pocket. Once the body was wrapped in the winding-sheet, no one would know the ring was missing.
Seeing Foscari wipe a drop of juice off his chin made Cesca hungry. When she was a child, there had been three years of abundant harvest, then one year of terrible famine—“the starving time,” her mother called it—a time when they ate bark, roots, grass, acorns, white clay, even boiled up leather shoes and boots. A memory floated to the surface of her mind. She was a child, perhaps four or five years, holding her mother’s hand in the middle of a square in Rome. Cesca wore a tattered green dress with an uneven hem.
Surrounding them was a huge, jostling crowd. The man next to her, a tanner judging by the stink of him, nearly trampled her in his haste to get to a scaffold. It was so high in the sky that she could barely see the hanged man swinging from the noose. The ravenous mob surged forward. Her mother swung Cesca to her hip and, making swift jabs of her elbows, shoved her way to the front of the crowd.
The tanner got there first and began hacking at the body. With his skinning knife, he severed a piece of leg and crammed it into his mouth. When Cesca’s mother begged him for a taste, he tossed her a bloody hunk of thigh. Her mother held it to Cesca’s lips. “To live, you must eat, my darling.” When Cesca averted her face, her mother coaxed her, cupping her hand under her mouth, speaking to her in a murmur until she eased in a small piece, encouraging her to chew and swallow. At first she wanted to spit it out, but the blood was warm and salty, the flesh springy and dense. Cesca’s throat relaxed. She swallowed and then, like a fledgling in a nest, opened her mouth for another morsel. Never had she felt her mother’s love so strongly.
Cesca returned to the corpse, swabbing Leon’s white, hairless thighs. His flaccid penis lay between his legs. She had not seen it in the light of day. Under the quilt, there had been only an unseen shaft of flesh, pushing and insistent. Leon imagined she enjoyed these encounters. And so she did, but not in the way he thought. Their grapplings were a welcome respite from scrubbing pots and dipping candles. In Leon’s bed her mind could wander. She could dream of the country, of hills and wheat ripening in the sun, of orchards heavy with cherries, peaches, and apples. Of her future.
From the pile of rags in the corner she took a long strip of muslin and tied his jaws together, heedless of whether his tongue was tucked into the back of his throat. She poured herself a glass of wine from a jug on the floor and drank it down. Then, crossing herself, she fumbled about under the shroud and, head turned aside, stuffed balled-up bits of rag into his orifice.
Cesca searched his room for the knife she knew he kept there. She picked it up. With the tip of the blade, she nudged his phallus into the valley between his legs, below the soft hillock of his belly. Then she gave it a jab. Leon had no more use for it than he had for his ducats. A pretty little farm in Bassano del Grappa, just a few rolling hectares. What an obedient little donkey I appear to be, Cesca thought—one of those biddable beasts who labours without complaint for years for the pleasure of kicking my master once.