Ladies of the Lagoon
In the sumptuous Villa Belmont did Portia Brabantio abide, a fair-haired, newly orphaned lady with the ripening of twenty-two summers upon her bosom, a wit as sharp as a dagger, and a beauty that had been praised on all the islands of Venice, particularly by those signors hoping to gain access to her knickers. Waiting upon the lady was her maid Nerissa, a raven-haired beauty half again as clever as her mistress, and as good a friend as money could buy. The two had been together since they were little girls, and so loved and hated each other like sisters.
“By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is weary of this great world.” Over her hair Portia wore a net of gold punctuated with pearls, which she picked at as if they were opulent lice.
“Well, buying shoes can be taxing, especially when you have only one maid to carry your parcels.”
“Not from buying shoes,” said Portia, lifting her gown to check that she was wearing new shoes and that all the travel and
her father dying while she was gone had not been in vain. “I haven’t been sleeping well since we returned from Florence. I wake thinking I hear screaming deep in the bowels of the villa—the sound of someone suffering, but when I sit up in bed, I hear nothing.”
“Perhaps if you did something during the day, milady—lifted a finger, maybe two, in care of yourself—exhaustion would pleasantly overtake you and your slumber would be filled with sweetest dreams.”
“Dancing?” ventured Portia. “I do so prefer dancing to suffering, don’t you, Nerissa?”
“You speak as if one must choose one over another, but as any gentleman who has turned you around a ballroom can attest, dancing and suffering can be partners in step.”
“Oh, sweet Nerissa, I shall miss your loving snark when I am married and you are safely installed in a nunnery giving good service to priests and pirates, or in a brothel bearing the gentle jumps of rascals.”
“Would it were so, but I fear I shall ever be here at Belmont, blowing dust and clearing the cobwebs from milady’s nethers, your father’s puzzle having verily assured your spinsterhood.”
They tittered through gritted teeth, then Portia flung her needlepoint off the veranda as if it were a pie made from leprosy, then plopped down on a marble stool by the table, her legs askew, elbow to thigh, hand cradling a troubled chin.
“Oh balls.”
“Milady?”
“You’re right, of course,” said Portia. She scowled at three jewel chests that were laid out on the table. “I know you’re right. No man is going to pay the bride price and pass Father’s sodding test. Three thousand ducats? It’s absurd.”
“Your father set the price and the test to see you married better than Desdemona.”
“And yet she shall have Belmont, her Moor shall have Father’s seat on the senate council, and I shall have one of our shoddy estates on the mainland—and for my bed, some rich old prat who’s good at puzzles.”
Nerissa walked around the table, running her hand over each of three jewel chests: gold, silver, and lead. “Perhaps once your suitors have proved they have the bride price, you can pick the one you fancy and we will steer him to open the right chest.”
“That’s just the point, I don’t know which chest holds my picture, and therefore the right to my hand. Father’s wax seal is on each of the locks, we cannot test them. I might have to marry the first man with three thousand ducats who chooses a key, or I may hand the key to the man I favor, only to have him pick a chest that holds some false treasure. Father vexes me from the grave. How did he think that such a test would lead me to a better man than wed my sister when the game is so bloody random?”
“He thought to guide your choice himself, while seeming to show no favor. I heard him say that he thought Desdemona married the Moor as much to defy his will as for any love of the general. With the bride price, he could assure that your suitors would be gentlemen of means, then with the chests he could steer the one he favored to the right chest, without spurring a rebellious spirit in you.”
“A fine plan, I suppose, had he lived. I might have at least guided his choice.”
“It was all properly drawn up by lawyers.”
“Father and his lawyers. Who was it that said, ‘First, kill all the lawyers’?”
“I believe it was the little English fool so favored by the doge.”
“Oh, well, it’s true anyway.”
“Then he said, ‘And after the lawyers, a proper thinning of you poxy nobles.’ ”
“So annoying.”
“Yet comely, in his jittering way.”
“You know, Nerissa, that enormous codpiece he wears is stuffed with scrap silk.”
“That is not how he carries himself.”
“Bowlegged, you mean?” Portia giggled.
“No, like he fears nothing. The fool stands steady among merchants turned jelly-spined for fear a wrong word might affect their fortunes. Steady anyway, before he was struck down by grief. Oh, to be loved so much that a man might ruin himself for my loss. That, milady, is a lover.”
“He’s an insolent fool, Nerissa, and tiny, too; I forbid you to fancy him.”
“I don’t fancy him, but I admire his boldness. Well, I admired it. They say he left in the middle of the night, took his monkey and his giant simpleton, and sailed back to France on a merchantman. Is that the bell at the dock?”
Portia stood, composed herself, and looked over the railing at where her needlepoint might have sailed. She turned and looked surprised as the doorman entered.
“Madame, Signor Antonio Donnola, a merchant of Venice, with two associates, Signors Gratiano and Bassanio, to pay their respects to the lady.”
“Oh, I remember Signor Bassanio,” said Portia, a crinkle of a smile sparkling in her gray-blue eyes. “Fetch refreshment, and bring some flowers for this dreary table. And, Nerissa, fetch those three daggers in their leather harness we found among father’s things. Antonio will know which of Father’s friends left them.”
“Yes, madame.”
CHORUS: And so, chained in the dark, naked and bedeviled by a hellish creature unknown, after five changings of the tides, the fool went mad.
I am not mad!
CHORUS: Fear did twist the jester’s tiny mind—stretch it past the limits of sanity until it snapped—and shivering and pale, he went mad.
I am not mad!
CHORUS: Stark, raving mad. Bonkers. Drooling, frothing, barking mad.
I am not bloody mad, you berk!
CHORUS: You’re shouting at a disembodied voice in the dark.
Oh, fuckstockings. Good point. Well, a bit knackered, perhaps, but not bloody mad. Although who could blame me, really, if I had taken a stroll down Barking at the Moon Lane, what with the poisoning, the thirst and starvation, the wounds, the pervasive darkness, and the fearsome creature lurking in the water, waiting to rend me to bloody shreds, and so forth. Enough, really, to put even the most sturdy bloke off his regimen, and I, a wan and wispy crafter of japes, what chance did I have to cling to sanity’s silken tether?
I kept my mind busy during low tides, like now, by plotting intricate tortures and revenges upon my captor, between sobbing and moaning piteously over my lost Cordelia, my freedom, and my exile from light and warmth. Between bouts of soul-crushing despair, I busy myself slurping sips of water from my arm. A small triumph, the steady dripping from above that clapped on the ledge by my hand, like the tick of my life’s clock running down, has turned out to be my life blood. It is freshwater, you see, no doubt leaking from some cistern above, and if I am determined, and I position my chains just so, I can drink enough as it runs down the chains and my arm to quell the thirst. Sometimes I busy myself by singing a song, or shrieking until my voice breaks. But when the tide is high and the chamber fills with warm seawater, then she comes, and this dark hell is a different place.
I do not know how long I have been here. I counted the changing of the tides for a while, but with no way to mark them, I lost count. It seems a lifetime, but it could be only days. I try to imagine Brabantio and his family moving in the manse above me, and I think I can hear voices, or the ringing of a bell, but I can’t be sure. The sounds I hear in my head, the voices of the dead, are as real to me as anything I might hear from outside.
I talk to them, the dead, who come to me in the dark, and if I squint, I can see them, those phantoms of my past, blue-gray against the blackness. Lovers, friends, enemies, tossers, walleys, lick-spittles, catch-farts, slags, hags, and bum-snipers. People who I don’t remember ever having seen before pass by, pause, look at me, their eyes as black and empty as everything else. I don’t know if I dream them, or if I even sleep. The tide takes the weight off my chains and I drift. Just drift.
I always scream when she comes, sliding in by my knees, around the chamber, back behind my legs. Even if I have been waiting, anticipating, even if I am aware of her in the chamber, in that moment when she touches me, I am startled, terrified, and I can hear my pulse pound
like a battle drum in my neck. My chains rattle and I fall, crucified in my shackles before her.
She will not harm me, until she does, but I am given to that. That first time, when the Montressor’s poison and fear were still high in my blood, I felt it was a shark or a great eel in the room, saw in my mind’s eye the saw teeth tearing pieces from me. And when claws or spines fastened into my loins and something soft—ever so soft—like honey in water, wrapped upon my manhood, my mind could find no picture to put on the creature. What thing of the vasty deep was soft, gentle, yet strong, spiny? I had seen octopi alive in buckets of seawater in the fish market in Venice, and a fishmonger had dared me to touch one, and yes, it was soft, and disgusting, little more than a tripe with a purpose. “You fucking Venetians will eat anything the sea pukes up, won’t you? This looks like something shat out by something too disgusting to be allowed near a kitchen, and I am from a race of avowed offal eaters.” The fishmonger laughed.
This thing in the water, in the dark, was not an octopus, though. What did I know? But it worked away at me and after some time settled, curled around my feet, and stayed there. If it was to kill me, so be it. My legs were constrained, wrapped in coils of unrelenting strength up to my hips. I could not fight it, nor kick at it, and I had used all of my breath in shrieking at it. I fainted or surrendered, or was constricted until I choked, I don’t know, but when I was conscious again, the tide was out and I was alone in my chamber.
When thirst moved me to try to arrange my chains to channel water down my arm, my hand landed on something alive and I shrieked. (Yes, I do a lot of shrieking here in the dark. There is little else to do between the terror and the suffering—perhaps the disembodied tosser voice is right. Perhaps I have gone mad? Oh, well, how can you tell in the dark?) But it wasn’t alive, what was on the ledge—recently alive, perhaps. I ran my hand over it gently, feeling the spines, the fins, the eyes—a fish. Dead, but recently so—as long as my forearm and as big around. And the flesh had been scored, I could feel the cuts through the scales. I assumed the posture of prayer, where both of my hands could meet, and I ate the fish’s flesh, willing myself to slow down, not to swallow the scales or bones. It was the finest food I had ever eaten, and I felt my very being envelop it, making it part of me as if I were absorbing nourishment from the very dark itself.