The Eternal City by Ferdinand Addis

Author:Ferdinand Addis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2018-04-08T16:00:00+00:00

15

MY DEBT TO NATURE

The marriages of Lucrezia Borgia

_________

1493–1501

A PARTY AT the palace of the Vatican. The food has been eaten. The plates are cleared. Tables pushed aside. There has been dancing. Fifty of Rome’s finest courtesans are here, summoned by the duke of Valence, Il Valentino, the pope’s own son.

Courtesans are famous for their finery. They count their admirers in pearls and precious stones; their romantic successes are visible in the fineness of their silks.

But as the courtesans danced, they lost their clothes. Candelabras, placed around the floor, shine on discarded dresses – dresses that are fortunes, whole livelihoods – cast aside amid the party debris. Moving back and forth between the candle flames are the courtesans themselves. Naked now, they are bent down on hands and knees, playing a game. Someone has scattered chestnuts around the room, chestnuts for autumn, and the courtesans, pale and bare, are rooting around in the darkness, collecting them.

Everyone is laughing. What else can they do? The courtesans are laughing, on their hands and knees. Later, the men in the room will strip off too, and join them. It will be like a performance. There will be prizes.

The duke of Valence is delighted with the show. His father the pope sits nearby, an old man, but fleshy and full of appetite. And next to him, unreadable through the murk of history, is the Pope’s daughter, Lucrezia Borgia, twenty-one years old. She is about to be married for the third time.

* * *

‘Rome always has been, and ever will be… the city of whores.’ So wrote the scurrilous poet Pietro Aretino, but he was hardly exaggerating. The city of St Peter was also Italy’s most notorious centre of prostitution.

Prostitutes started young – coached in the game, often enough, by their mothers. Choreographed well, the appearance of a fresh new face on the scene could cause a profitable stir. It was important not to be too brazen. At first the girl would show herself only for a moment at her mother’s window, a shy child peeping down from a seedy room.

Word would go around. Soon the local bravos would be haunting the street outside, editions of Petrarch peeping from their pockets – not his Latin poetry, but the love sonnets in Italian which had, since his death, become wildly popular. Kisses would be thrown at the window. Gifts promised. Dainty words exchanged.

And then, at last, after the proper maternal negotiations, the girl’s virginity could be sold for a handsome sum, and, if you knew the trick, sold again and again – the sheets stained each time with gum arabic and betel nut.

So the life of a prostitute began – a life of standing in open windows, lighted windows whose night-time glow shone like a promise on to muddy streets. Rome’s thousands of lonely men longed to be in those well-decorated rooms, to be warm, to be loved. A prostitute’s life was a life of ‘friendships’, based on the exchange of gifts: the men gave valuables and coin, the women gave their bodies, carefully rationed.

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