Sofia
what offense it was impossible to say. The girl, a mousy little thing, didn’t reply, even if she was able. The eunuch then grabbed her thin arm with one meat-like hand. She gasped and then shrieked, pain mixed with terror, as the eunuch shoved her out of the room in front of him. Sofia saw the girl pause and scratch something into the wood of the door frame against which his first bad aim flung her.Later, when the girl’s shrieks had been swallowed in the marble bowels of the place like heartburn chased by the parsley of gathering night, Sofia got up and went to look at the door frame. Ostensibly she went to help herself to the saucer of oil and a floating wick which was the cheap source of the room’s only illumination. She needed it to ensure that her bed was free of the worst sorts of vermin.
But she did not fail to take the opportunity to investigate the doorpost. She saw a scratch of shallow, raw wood. It seemed unlikely that the girl could have made such a mark in such hard wood without drawing her own blood or at least breaking a nail. But all Sofia could make out was the shape of a cross, a desperate but silent sign to say: “I was here. The world does not heed my short and miserable passing. But, witness God, I was here.”
Sofia turned back to the others in the room to tell them— To tell them what? Those who had not already buried their faces in a pretense of sleep did so now. No words had place in this oblivion.
More than once Sofia felt inclined to join those girls who dissolved to tears when the light went out and safe anonymity came. Tears, at least, were universal communication. But somehow she refrained, telling herself all the while, “Be strong. Be patient. Come morning, things will be better. Prove to that great woman that you are worthy of her.” Somehow she had gotten the notion that that woman, like God, would have those piercing eyes on her even in the dark. Lulled by such thoughts, she managed to sleep.
Come morning, however, Sofia woke to find herself lying in a pool of blood.
“Oh, God’s wounds!” she blurted out. “Not the curse!”
Her words drew the attention of the others in the room, just waking, and attention was the last thing she wanted. Sofia pulled the quilt over her head and wished she could vanish off the face of the earth.
Why does this have to happen to me? she moaned to the dark quilt. “Be strong. Be patient,” seemed absurd advice when utter weakness had her in its grip. Her hopes were dashed. The wonderful woman who had so admired her the day before would want nothing to do with her now, messy as she was. For surely the woman herself never succumbed to such weakness. Never. She was too controlled, too beautiful and gracious, too powerful, one might almost say too male to ever, ever be so burdened.
And there was that between us which let her know I was not such a silly female, either. But the continuing warmth between her legs told Sofia all control had vanished.
Sofia had never quite believed Saint Mark truly reposed in the golden reliquary her aunt made her go up and kiss on high holy days. What did it matter that the heist of the body, hidden in a barrel of pickled pork, from the indolent and heretical Alexandrians was well documented: in glimmering frescoes to either side of the chapel, in the preserved and sanctified slats of barrel displayed nearby?
Sofia had seen—and smelled—enough week-old corpses displayed by beggars in the Piazza to have her doubts. If that lumber pile encased in gold really was the reverend limbs of the Apostle, she couldn’t help suspecting that, beyond pickle brine, somebody was helping heaven along with a little coating of “incorruptible” arsenic and wax. And if heaven really was working a miracle of preservation here, she would never believe beyond that. This deity’s conjuring trick could never have any efficacy for anyone else. Not for the distasteful bulk of the blind and lame and palsied who had contaminated the reliquary with their lips before her. And certainly not for Sofia Baffo who actually, most days of the month, scorned the idea that heaven could do anything she couldn’t do very well by herself, thank you.
Similarly, against all evidence, Governor Baffo’s daughter continued to refuse to believe in her menses. If some mistake—like getting overheated and catching a cold when all the nuns did, too—had made it happen once, her greater sense would prohibit it happening again. And when it came a second time, she would surely not let it happen a third.
How long had it been now? This was not something with which she liked to clutter her head. Only when it rudely imposed itself on her being did she think about it. Now was one of those inescapable times. A year. Maybe more. To the best of her calculation. Every month, as regular as a full moon. As regular as fish on Friday—which she hated.
Sometimes she had thought it, like so many other unpleasant, stifling things, was a consequence of convent life. If she once escaped her aunt’s scrutiny...the long arm of her father’s law... But now it was clear it had pursued her even beyond Christendom. It was with her to stay, no failure of circumstance or of those fools she was forced to suffer around her, but an integral part of her own being. A curse indeed.
Part of her ability to deny this unpleasant state of affairs was due to the fact that always when she had bled before, her aunt had taken responsibility. The first time it came, unannounced, unprepared, the very scriptural thief in the night, Sofia had taken to her bed, convinced she was going to die from this terrible and unnatural thing her body was doing to