'How's the food?'
I shouted to Palo, who had previously been sent to Bologna by Cossa's father to get everything set up for us, `Hey, Palo! How is the food in Bologna?'
'You are not going to believe it until you taste it,' Palo yelled. 'It is like ninety times better than Neapolitan food.'
'Well, they have snow so they should have better food, 'Cossa said.
Aeneas had not crossed into Italy, Ascanius had not built Alba nor Romulus Rome, when Bologna was already the noblest town in Tuscany, the chief city of the Etruscans. It extended as far as the foot of the Apennines, flourishing and fruitful, abounding in vineyards and olive groves. Unpolluted by marshy vapours, its soil was fertile, producing more than enough for the people of the plain: eater was brought into the city by the Canale di Reno. The city was famous for its square towers even more than for its arcaded streets. There were more than 950 towers; for the most part built of wood, often within five feet of their neighbours. The upper stories of the houses projected over crooked, narrow streets, the more pretentious made of brick decorated with terra cotta. There was no marble.
Ancient Bologna, on the Aemilian Way; was at the intersection of four provinces: Lombardy, the March of Verona, the Romandiola and Tuscany. It was the point at which the great lines of communication between the northern entrances of Italy and its centre converged. Students of the law from Norway to Greece who were to take their places in power throughout Christendom became our friends there.
The University of Bologna was the most famous centre of learning in southern Europe. Its rivals were Oxford and Paris. It taught the codification and administration of the laws on which the Church had survived for a millennium. It ignored theological speculation. Religious thought, which would have been only an illusion in the lives of these fledgling canon lawyers, had no substance. Theology was theoretical. The law took its nature from the material opportunities it represented. The student lawyers would graduate as doctors of canon law, then go on to become prelates bishops, archbishops and cardinals of the Church, stoically unaware of the spiritual side of the extraordinary complex they served, yet preserving and extending it by the attributes of their legal practice.
By banishing theological speculation from its curriculum, the university also banished all heresy to which such speculation gives rise and extinguished all interest in the purpose and meaning of the religion which the young lawyers were being trained to serve. The scholastic year lasted from October to the end of the following August. We needed to write no lies about Cossa's scholastic accomplishments in the letters which I dictated to Father Fanfarone for forgery into Cossa's hand. Cossa was renowned as a scholar.
Bernaba had brought her own money and a small collection of jewels. Spina had been generous. She thanked Cossa for his offer of hospitality in the same spacious, well-furnished house as we occupied, which Palo had found, four streets from the university. She told us she had to leave to get her business organized. `It's always hard to get started,' she said, `'but. I did it before and this looks like a pretty lively town.'
`You need a manager,' Cossa told her.
'A pimp?' she asked, without resentment.
'Watch your language, Bernaba,' I told her.
'Then what does he want to manage?' she asked. Am I a singer?'
'I have introductions to a lot of important people in Bologna,' Cossa said… `After I establish myself with them, I could introduce them to you.’
'What do you get out of this?'
`Information.'
'No money?'
'Information is money.'
`Then you won't take my money?'
`You're goddam right he won't take your money,' I told her.
`I didn't say that,' Cossa told her smoothly. 'Franco Ellera said it. That is business. You are a talented woman at your kind of work. I'll put up the money to set you up in style – see what I mean? It's like my father fitting out a ship for raiding. We'll agree on how much you earned in Rome and I'll allow you that much free and clear. But I'll take fifty per cent of whatever, you make over that, because of my investment and my key introductions, which will, after all establish you in business in a strange town.'
'What about trouble – you know, complaints, noisy drunks and women beaters?'
`We have Palo for that.'
`It sounds all right to me,' Bernaba said. `I will need all the protection I can get. But I'm not clear on, what kind of information you want.'
'That will develop naturally,' Cossa said. 'Let's concentrate on the business side for now. Like maybe you could add two or three more hot-looking cortegiani to your stable. We would finance that and protect their operation under you and take twenty-five per cent of what they make. You provide them with our money and our muscle and a nice place to work – and keep the other twenty-five per cent for yourself.'
`Cossa, hold on a minute, here,' I said.
`What's the matter?' he had the arrogance to ask me.
`I want to get something straight with you. This has nothing to do with fitting out a ship for your father's business. Even if it did I would still say that to make money from the business which drowned my mother is better than living off the shame of a woman who rents her body to men for the uses of their filthy lusts.'
`Filthy?' he said indignantly.
`Shame?' Bernaba said with shocked astonishment. `I am eating now! I have a, place to live and I had that before I met the two of you.'
`This is not personal, Bernaba; I said. `I want to be sure that Cossa understands. something important.'
`I do understand,' Cossa said. `We were cast into these roles. I am the son of a line of pirates. You are the son of a woman who was aboard a ship which my father took. Her fate was to drown, because, of all the women aboard those ships – about a hundred women only three of them drowned, so that was their fate. Bernaba was poor. You heard her. Until she went into her business as a courtesan, she didn't have enough to eat or maybe even a roof. We saved her from mutilation in the course of her work, yes, but we cost her a valuable client. So we owe her something. If we do nothing, if we turn her out upon the streets of a strange city, would that be right when you know we can help her? But, and this is the important point, Franco Ellera; the moment we help her on a large scale then she is obliged to give us a share in that business.'
`I'll count it when I see it,' Bernaba said.
`It will work,' he told her. `You will be a rich woman as long as you remember that I have nothing to do with any of this. Franco Ellera will be your contact. Franco Ellera will run Palo. We never had this conversation. If I am ever connected with this, a trentuno reale will be nothing to what will happen to you.'
Bernaba yawned theatrically.
`You understand me?'
`Yes. It makes a lot of sense.'
Bernaba moved into a very comfortable house which I found for her in Castelleto Street, where there was a market for the caviar-eyed Cyprian women who were forbidden to live near churches or monasteries – from what I have seen, at closest quarters, of church-men and monks, it would have. represented too much wear and tear on the, girls. The street was named after a celebrated brothel in Venice at the end of the Rialto bridge which I saw later on and ours was better.
Cossa, who was exactly like his father, could never see anything wrong in anything which produced money. If, for example, 2000 people lived in a forest which grew many hundreds of kinds of medicinal plants of benefit to mankind, and if the forest contained dozens, of animals and maybe insects which were the only food for those people, and Cossa or his father had a good money offer for the wood, they would cut down the entire forest immediately and feel it had been a good transaction. They knew instinctively that one of the things about a lot of money is that it eliminates moral nagging instantly. They were just as direct about the pursuit of power. Cossa was committed to spending ten years studying law because, if he excelled at it, he would' be invited to enter the doorway to power through the Church.