Sarah Dunant’s historical fiction doesn’t merely breathe. It weeps, it celebrates, and, along some of Venice’s more stagnant waterways, it occasionally reeks. Which is as it should be – to read “In the Company of the Courtesan” is to be transported to the sights and scents of a 16th-century Renaissance world through a book that is not about the sale of sex but rather the exchange of favors.
Fiametta Bianchini is at the apex of Roman society when, in 1527, German and Spanish armies arrive to sack the city. Her combination of moxie and charm doesn’t long protect her house, but it buys her a little time. She ends up as one of the luckier of the invasion’s victims. Shorn of her hair but not her spirit, she heads to Venice with no more than the clothes on her back and, for the future, a few swallowed gems.
She is accompanied by Bucino Teodoldi, a dwarf. Her constant companion and the narrator of the tale, Bucino is part procurer, part protector. And while he is willing to follow Fiametta to nearly the ends of the Earth, he is unhappy that Venice is her choice.
“My God, this city stinks,” says Bucino. “Not everywhere – along the southern wharves where the ships dock the air is heady with left-over spices and on the Grand Canal money buys fresh breezes along with luxury – but everywhere we are, where crumbling houses rise out of rank water and a dozen families live stacked on top of each other like rotting vegetables, the decay and filth burning the inside of your nostrils.”
The pair arrives in Venice where they make their way to a house on a dank canal, the home of Fiametta’s mother. But the mother is dead, and the dwelling is little more than a ruin.
Their relationship is not one of love, but the interdependence is so close that it might as well be. Fiametta’s life and livelihood are ordered by the dwarf; her trust in and affection for him are nearly unconditional. He returns this warmth, denied to him by the rest of the world because of his appearance, with a fierce, though occasionally sharp, loyalty.
Fate has given the pair their lives, however, and in that they have choices. Fiametta enlists the help of a healer, La Draga, to restore both her beauty and her spirit. Together, Bucino and Fiametta establish a life, and if it isn’t quite as star-studded as the one they left in Rome, it eventually becomes solid and reasonably secure.
What is perhaps most surprising, given the title, is the novel’s complete lack of titillating scenes. Bucino is all business when it comes to sex, and it would be very poor business indeed were the courtesan to become emotionally involved with a client. At its heart, though, this is not the courtesan’s story. It belongs to Bucino.
Bucino sees the beauty, and the darkness, that surrounds the pair. Fiametta is, in many ways, a mystery because she never speaks for herself. The reader sees her only through Bucino’s eyes, and his perceptions are colored by his often painful experiences.
Dunant’s characters are fully imagined, and she masterfully blends history and fiction. She writes in an afterword that neither Fiametta nor Bucino are based on real characters, but Fiametta inhabits the world of both real-life writer Pietro Aretino and artist Titian. In creating a picture of the larger society, Dunant includes the relationship between the city’s Jewish money lenders and the commerce of the day, and the fragile political relationship between Turkish traders and their Venetian counterparts.
The novel is loosely plotted, but this quality doesn’t detract from its appeal. The details of life and its trappings are rich. The struggle to reclaim a life whose initial purchase was dear is compelling. And though the times are different from ours, the people essentially are not, and the reader comes to care about them because they are quite familiar.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
“In the Company of the Courtesan”
By Sarah Dunant
Random House, 384 pages, $23.95
