“I know you were carrying a message. I saw Donna Reyna hand it to you, and believe me, it’s very important for me to know what it was.” I looked her straight in the eyes; she grew increasingly bewildered.
“It was a letter for Nurbanu Sultan. But you. .”
I gritted my teeth, fists clenched. I had been right. Dana was yielding, and I mustn’t ease my grip on her. “No buts: Listen to me carefully. The next time Donna Reyna gives you a message of that kind, you bring it to me right away, you understand? Even if it’s sealed I know how to open and close it without anyone noticing, without suspicion falling on you.”
“I can’t do that, Manuel. Do you realize what you’re asking of me?”
I did realize, yes, and it wasn’t anything very terrible or dangerous. I insisted, and she refused again. Once, twice. “Come on, don’t tell me you’re the only serving girl in the world who doesn’t read her masters’ correspondence.”
“I’m not a serving girl,” were the only words she managed to say, but I realized that by now she was neither startled nor frightened. She was defying me, and that gave me a pang in my heart, right in the spot where my self-love lay.
“You know why Donna Gracia denied you the honor of going with her when she went to die?”
“She wanted me to stay with her daughter,” she said in the irritable tone of someone who is being forced to repeat herself.
I gave her a joyless smile. Once I would have accepted that explanation, but now it was not enough. Not if I wanted to discover the truth. “Wasn’t it more that she didn’t want you beside her?”
She drew herself up in silence. The moon lit her face. “It’s too late to ask.”
I had struck home, I had hurt her and I was pleased. She turned again, ready to flee. I jumped from the bed and joined her. I gripped her shoulder and forced her to look me in the face. “Perhaps she didn’t trust you. Perhaps she thought you were unworthy.”
She pulled herself free. “Stop it, Manuel. I haven’t done anything to deserve these insults.”
I pretended not to hear. “Or did Donna Reyna tell you stay?”
Again she tried to leave, and again I held on to her, with both hands. “I’ve already told you,” I shouted into her face, “in this palace everyone has to answer my questions. Anyone who doesn’t deserves my suspicion, even if they stuff me with drugged cakes and slip into my bed every night.”
I studied the effect of my words. Dana looked at the floor, and didn’t resist when I raised her chin. Her black hair smelt of almonds, as it had the first time I had smelled it.
“I don’t believe in your devotion to Donna Gracia. You told me that Yossef Nasi saved you from a marriage you didn’t want, to a fat provincial bey. Since when has a harem slave chosen to be a chambermaid rather than the wife of an important imperial functionary?”
Now her eyes were filling with tears of rage, and I realized that I had crossed a line.
“Marrying a Muslim would have meant converting,” she said in a harsh voice. “Christian servants happily barter God for an easier life. I don’t change my faith as one changes one’s clothes.” She was talking about me, she wanted to return the barb, but she couldn’t hurt me. These allusions to my past life now sounded strange and distant to my ears.
“Yes, you’re not one to betray, you are true. The point is. . to whom have you been true for all this time? Donna Reyna? Nurbanu Sultan?”
She turned her back on my sarcasm, but I held her back once more and pushed her against the wall. She slipped down and crouched with her knees against her chest, like a deer surrounded by dogs. Quivering, I bent over her, drenched in sweat and struggling to overcome my desire to strike her.
She wept in silence, not sobbing, just tears slipping down her face, bent double as if she had been dealt a fatal blow. I nodded to myself.
“Both, of course. Nurbanu sent you here to plot with Yossef Nasi’s wife. Those letters aren’t full of ladies’ gossip, are they?”
“You’re mad,” I heard her murmur.
I walked over to the window and sought comfort in the air of the Bosphorus, but it was as thick and dense as a mildewed wall. “Perhaps. And perhaps this city isn’t all that different from Venice. Back there I was betrayed by a woman. That isn’t going to happen again here.”
I heard her getting up and I didn’t turn around. She left without a sound, leaving me prey to my obsessions, my eyes lost in the night.
35
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your strength. The kabbalist Meir interpreted that line of the Qoheleth as an invitation to completeness.
The will is not enough, he said, to bond with an important task. You need a soul that is all of a piece. My own had been much mended, but I hoped the Lord would grant me a new one. The soul of a raptor, which would plunge down on its prey, its instinct incorruptible by doubts or hesitations. A creature capable of seizing the body and the mind for an enterprise that waited only to be accomplished: defending Yossef Nasi from the perils that surrounded him.
When I joined him in the big drawing room that morning, he gave me a worried look. I must have looked as if I’d slept on an anthill. I set out my deductions in the clearest and most linear way that my fatigue allowed. I said that there was a chain of distaff-side relationships linking the Imperial Palace, the palace of the Grand Vizier, Ashkenazi’s house and Palazzo Belvedere. Through Dana and Esther Handali, Nurbanu had allied herself with the Jewish gentlewomen who favored Venice. We had been harboring the Lion of Saint Mark within our own walls.
Nasi listened with great attention and few questions. Then he pointed to the painting that hung above the door. The woman in the portrait looked down at us like a wise queen.
He said that he, the nephew of Gracia Nasi, would certainly not have been one to underestimate the power of women. Over the past six months, through Selim, he had given Nurbanu dozens of presents, jewels, precious books, Italian fabrics, mirrors. Anything to soften her resistance to the war. As to Reyna, he added that her rancor was fundamentally comprehensible, and she had no choice but to support him. Perhaps I was right. Perhaps she and Nurbanu were plotting behind our backs, but the war had started now, and female diplomacy was no longer a crucial weapon.
As he said this, he lowered his eyes to the mosaic of the Mediterranean that filled the whole floor. Right beneath our feet was the outline of the island of Cyprus. I asked him what he planned to do with Dana, and his reply left me flabbergasted.
“Nothing. The cannon are speaking now.”
I was speechless, and a queasy sense of unease took hold me. I took my leave and strode away.
Above the garden, a sky full of clouds. At any moment I expected to hear thunder exploding over the hills, but the storm seemed reluctant to break, and flies buzzed crazily around over the grass. My mind echoed with Arianna’s voice. “They forced me, Emanuele. Against my will.”
No, no one had forced Dana. I knew that her kisses weren’t false, or her embraces or the fluids that we had exchanged. And yet suspicion had dug an unbridgeable gulf between us. Doubt and suspicion were my vocation, but that part of me wasn’t the one I felt getting the upper hand; it was the part of me that was frightened by what I had surmised.
And there was another passage of the Scriptures, buried in memories of my life as a Christian, where Jesus says that he doesn’t pour new wine into old bottles, because the new wine bursts them and you lose both bottle and wine. I clenched my teeth in rage and turned on my heel. The rain had started falling, but I didn’t care about that. I stopped under a plane tree, holding my breath, drenched through by the summer storm, staring at the houses of Scutari and the forests of Asia.