little tongue and wriggles around to suck the milk from the soaked bread, as she will have to do for the entire journey. Slim white hands caress the baby’s forehead once. The bottle is corked with a flat round porous stopper, tight enough to stifle sound, loose enough to allow the passage of vital air.
The bottle is carried gently to the boat by the woman who does all this. She herself puts the bottle with its fellows, twelve in all to make a tun. The others contain the finest Veneto wine, a Valpolicella that will be a most welcome gift to the sisters. The boat leaves its mooring with a jolt and the baby in the bottle is on her way, the infant sleeping as the waters of her native lagoon rock her. In the port of Mestre the bottle and its fellows are transferred to a cart and the long round south to Florence. The baby wakes, screams, suckles the sour milk, and sleeps again, and at long last the wine reaches its destination.
The Ospedale della Innocenta in the Santa Croce district of Florence is used to receiving foundlings. Most of them are left on the great cartwheel that is set into the wall, one side within the convent, one half outside. Hapless deformed or unwanted infants can be left, with no question or censure, on the half of the wheel that protrudes from the wall. The wheel is rotated and the babe is taken by kindly hands within. But the sisters were not used to their foundlings arriving in a gift of a tun of Venetian wine. Only the abbess knew to follow her exalted instructions and look in the twelfth bottle. There, against all expectation, but in answer to her prayers, she lifted out the babe alive. Passive, floppy, so thin her swaddles had fallen from her body and the bread she had suckled covered in evil-smelling, mustard-colored shit. The abbess cared not for this—a truly good woman, she warmed the filthy baby in her own habit and wiped the feces away with her own vestments. Until, from the warmth and smell of female flesh, and the touch of feminine lips on my forehead, I awoke.
So, now that you know, I was ready to come out of my bottle, like a djinn, to return to myself and the present. I stirred, and the woman in the prow turned to look at me. My mother wore her half-lion mask again. I could see her eyes only: serene, green glass. Unconcerned, as if she knew I would wake, that this day and this moment would come when we were together again. I knew what my first question would be, and I’m sure that she did too.
“Are you my Vero Madre?”
“I am.”
There was a small smile in her voice. She found the phrase, the childish name I had given her, the fantasy that had been my spine, held me upright through the years of whoring, been my bread to sustain me, nothing more than a joke. “And you sent me from Venice as a baby in a bottle?”
“I did. For your own safety.”
I narrowed my eyes. I was afraid of her but not afraid to ask the question. “Did you send me from you because I was a bastard?”
She did not flinch. “No. I sent you from me because you weren’t. You were and are the true-born daughter and heir of Giovanni Mocenigo, the present Doge of Venice.”
I was silent, taking in this amazing statement.
Madonna.
I was the dogaressa’s daughter!
She took my silence as a question and was coaxed into explanations. “When you were born there was a crucial maritime law to be passed in the council. The ruling party needed my husband’s connivance, but he would not support them. Your life was threatened as a bargaining tool so I sent you away, said you’d died and we had overlaid you.”
“Why did you not come for me?” It was little more than a whisper.
“This city was a caldron of poison. As well as the threat to you, there were alliances to be made with those whom we did not wish to adjoin. But we had already promised you to the Prince of Pisa for his son, forming a critical maritime alliance. You were safe with the nuns—they taught you Scripture and kept you chaste. We thought it best to leave you be for the time being.”
The time being. Twelve years I was at the Ospedale. My mother blithely removed me from