Gun Island

by Amitav Ghosh

  ‘Yes, I understand that,’ said Cinta. ‘But why is the world warming? Is that natural too?’

  ‘Yes, in a sense it is,’ I said. ‘It’s happening because there’s more and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and other greenhouse gases too.’

  ‘And where do these gases come from?’ said Cinta. ‘Do they not come from cars and planes and factories that make –’ she looked around the kitchen, pointing with her forefinger – ‘whistling kettles and electric toasters and espresso machines? Is all this natural too – that we should need these things that nobody needed a hundred years ago?’

  ‘Oh come on, Cinta,’ I retorted. ‘You know as well as I do that there’s a long history behind all of this.’

  She seized eagerly upon this. ‘Eccolo! There you are! So you cannot say that this spider’s presence here is “natural” or “scientific”. It is here because of our history; because of things human beings have done. It is linked to you already – you have a prior connection with that spider, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘So what are you saying then?’ I shot back sarcastically. ‘That the spider was brought here by some sort of magic or witchcraft? That it’s carrying a message? Or trying to take possession of me?’

  Cinta smoothed back her long white hair.

  ‘Didn’t you just say, Dino, that you feel yourself fading away, that you’re losing your will?’

  ‘So I did.’

  ‘Do you know what that is a symptom of?’

  ‘Maybe depression?’

  ‘You can call it that if you like. But there are other ways of looking at it as well. When I was writing my book about the Inquisition in Venice I read hundreds of case files that described those symptoms. The cases were adjudicated by Inquisitors, and many of them were about magical practices and spirit possession. That may lead you to think that these cases were about ghostly apparitions or things flying about in the sky – but that was not it at all. Almost always the cases were about the loss of “will” and “freedom” – volontà e libertà. A victim thinks that she is being prevailed on to do things she would not normally do, of her own will. Or someone feels that a spell has been put on them or that they have been given a potion that has made them fall in love with someone they would not otherwise have cared for. A wife might believe that someone has put a spell on her husband to steal him from her. A son may imagine that someone has bewitched his father so that he is wasting his wealth. A girl is convinced that she has been robbed of her will to the point that she cannot get out of bed or even move her limbs. They are all beset by a feeling that inexplicable forces are acting upon them in such a way that they are no longer in control of what happens to them. Most cases of possession are exactly like that.’

  She looked into my eyes and smiled. ‘And are these not your own symptoms?’

  I stared at her in disbelief. ‘Cinta, are you really trying to tell me that I’m possessed? That my soul has been stolen?’

  She smiled. ‘No, Dino, no. That is not at all what I am saying. You and I don’t live in a world where it is possible to be possessed in the old sense. These things happened to our ancestors because their will, and their sense of their presence in the world, were essential to their very survival. To get by they had to depend on the soil, the weather, animals, neighbours, family and so on, none of which would yield what they needed just for the asking, in the manner of, say, a cash machine, or a ticket agent at the stazione. Everything they depended on for their livelihood could fight back and resist, no matter whether it was a spouse or a horse, let alone the wind and the weather. Merely to survive they needed to assert their presence or they would have been overwhelmed, they would have become shadows of themselves. That is why possession – the loss of presence – was a matter of such anxiety for them. You and I face no such threat. We live in a world of impersonal systems; we don’t have to impose our presence on a cash machine in order to get our money; we don’t have to exert our will on our cellphones in order to make them work. In our circumstances no one needs to assert their presence in order to get by from day to day. And since it is not needed, that sense of presence slowly fades, or is lost or forgotten – it’s easier to let the systems take over.’

  It took me a couple of minutes to work out the implications of what she was saying. ‘But if that’s true, Cinta,’ I said, ‘then what you’re implying is that people today – people like us – are already possessed?’

  She smiled in her enigmatic way. ‘All I can say, Dino, is that when I look at this world – our world – with the diagnostic tools of an Inquisitor, it becomes impossible to avoid a simple conclusion.’

  ‘Which is…?’

  ‘That the world of today presents all the symptoms of demonic possession.’

  I gasped. ‘What? You can’t be serious, Cinta! In what sense does it present the symptoms of demonic possession?’

  ‘Just look around you, caro.’ There was a touch of weariness in her voice now. ‘Everybody knows what must be done if the world is to continue to be a liveable place, if our homes are not to be invaded by the sea, or by creatures like that spider. Everybody knows … and yet we are powerless, even the most powerful among us. We go about our daily business through habit, as though we were in the grip of forces that have overwhelmed our will; we see shocking and monstrous things happening all around us and we avert our eyes; we surrender ourselves willingly to whatever it is that has us in its power.’

  She smiled and reached out to pat my hand. ‘That is why whatever is happening to you is not “possession”. Rather I would say that it is a risveglio, a kind of awakening. It may be dangerous of course, but that is because you are waking up to things that you had never imagined or sensed before. You are lucky, Dino – some unknown force has given you a great gift.’

  She got up and went to look out of a window. ‘I envy you, caro, but I am grateful too – you have brought the Gun Merchant into my life as well. I think that imposes an obligation on us, don’t you?’

  ‘What kind of obligation?’

  ‘To retrace his footsteps; to try to see Venice as it was when he was here.’

  ‘And how do we do that?’

  ‘I think we should go for a long walk, to look at some of the things that the Gun Merchant would have seen when he was in Venice. How do you feel about that?’

  I jumped eagerly to my feet. ‘I think that’s a wonderful idea! When shall we go?’

  She smiled. ‘In a while, caro. Let me settle in first. Maybe after lunch?’

  * * *

  That afternoon, as so often before, Cinta stepped out in an outfit that was at once eccentric and mysteriously elegant: she had matched a flowing black dress and a fuchsia-coloured Indian dupatta with a pair of blue sneakers and a tan fedora that had a feather sticking out of the hatband.

  It was a clear day and the city was thronged with visitors. The noise of the crowd filled the streets with a sound that would once have been an indistinct hubbub to me but within which I was now aware of a constant murmuring of Bangla. It was as though I were in a forest and the whispering voices of a certain stream, or a kind of tree, were reaching out towards me, not to draw me into the spirit of the place, but rather into its living flesh.

  To Cinta, on the other hand, the forest whispered of absences: ‘My aunt lived there…’ she would say, lifting a finger to point, ‘and over there was the best hat maker in the city’; or, while passing yet another souvenir shop, ‘My friends and I would go to that shop, after school, for a sfogliatina.’

  From time to time she would spot an acquaintance and they would greet each other with the melancholy ardour of the last members of a vanishing tribe: ‘There are so few of us Venetians left now that we all know each other. I can hardly describe the joy it gives me to speak our dialect.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean, Cinta.’

  At one corner she stopped to show me an alley. ‘Over there is the house where Marco Polo is said to have been born. I’m sure someone would have point
ed it out to the Gun Merchant – the Polos were, after all, the most famous of merchant-travellers, even then.’

  After a short while we found ourselves on the Rialto Bridge. Cinta stabbed a forefinger in the direction of a magnificent palace with a crimson facade, pierced by rows of tall, pointed windows.

  ‘This is the Palazzo Bembo,’ she said. ‘It belonged to the family of the great poet Pietro Bembo.’

  ‘After whom Manutius named the Bembo font?’

  ‘Exactly! Long after Pietro Bembo’s lifetime, a great traveller was born into the same family, Ambrosio Bembo – he was younger than the Gun Merchant but a contemporary nonetheless. In 1671, at the age of nineteen, young Ambrosio set off on a long journey; he travelled all the way to India and back.’

  Cocking her head she began to scratch her cheek.

  ‘It is not too far-fetched, I think, to imagine that Ambrosio Bembo may have met the Gun Merchant. After all, he is sure to have made enquiries about the route, amongst people in the know. Someone or the other would have told him about Captain Ilyas, who in turn may have mentioned that a native of India was present right here, in Venice. È abbastanza plausibile, no?’

  In the meantime, a young Bengali had appeared in front of us, carrying a bucket that was filled with ice and bottled water. Succumbing to his entreaties Cinta bought a couple of bottles, one for me and one for her. Then she whispered to me, in an aside. ‘Ask this ragazzo where he’s from and how he came here. In Bangla.’

  ‘Desh koi?’ I said to the boy.

  The boy was astonished, as I knew he would be, at being addressed in Bangla by a random customer.

  The look on his face delighted Cinta. ‘What does he say? Dimmi! Dimmi!’

  The ragazzo listened as I translated his words. ‘He’s from Madaripur, in Bangladesh, my own ancestral district. He left when he was eighteen and went to work in Libya. After two years he crossed the sea in a rubber raft and ended up in Sicily.’

  ‘He came in a gommone?’ gasped Cinta. ‘But didn’t he fear for his life? Ask him – wasn’t he afraid to take such risks?’

  I put the question to him and then translated his answer. ‘He says he never thought about it like that. He was in a group and they crossed over together, giving hope and courage to each other.’

  Here the young man broke in, with a grin, challenging me. ‘And you?’ he said. ‘How did you come here?’

  ‘In a plane.’

  ‘And is there no risk in that?’ he said, grinning. ‘Did you study the risks before you got on the plane?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nor did I,’ he said. ‘Sometimes things seem normal just because others are doing it. And anyway, when you’re young you don’t think so much about risk.’

  Picking up his bucket he went racing after another customer.

  I explained what he had said to Cinta and she nodded as though I had confirmed something that had long been on her mind.

  ‘Sometimes I ask myself,’ she said, ‘what would happen if those great Venetian travellers – the Polos, Niccolò de’ Conti, Ambrosio Bembo – were to come back to the Venice of today? Who would they have more in common with? Us twenty-first-century Italians, who rely on immigrants to do all our dirty work? The tourists, who come in luxury liners and aeroplanes? Or these ragazzi migranti, who take their lives in their hands to cross the seas, just like all those great Venetian travellers of the past?’

  * * *

  We went over the Rialto Bridge and then Cinta turned right, into a piazza that adjoined an arcade. Under the shade of the arches lay a row of old shopfronts, most of them now boarded up.

  ‘This,’ said Cinta, ‘was the market where your Merchant would have come to dispose of his cowrie shells. Here he would have bargained with wholesalers who needed shells to provision ships bound for the Atlantic. In West Africa the currency of cowries was essential for the fastest-growing commerce of the time – chattel slavery, intended for the New World. It was at this time that the trade in African slaves was becoming a pillar of the colonial economies of Europe.’

  She walked on, leading me across a crowded street and into a narrow, quiet lane. ‘You must remember, Dino,’ said Cinta, ‘that at the time when your Merchant came here, in the 1660s, Venice was a shrunken, haunted city. Its best days as a commercial power were over – they had ended with the discovery of the new sea routes, to the Americas and to the Indian Ocean. And this was, after all, the calamitous time of the Little Ice Age, when everything was in disorder, in the heavens and on earth. For Venice the crisis peaked in 1630. On the far side of the Alps a terrible war was raging, the Thirty Years War – just as a new thirty years’ war is raging now, across the Mediterranean. And then amidst all of this, the weather too turned against humanity; the skies opened up, deluging the plains of northern Italy – no one had ever seen rain like this before, rain that swept away crops and destroyed harvests. The price of food shot up and hunger stalked the land – and where there is hunger, disease always follows.

  ‘In 1629 German soldiers brought the plague to Milan and within weeks tens of thousands were dead. The epidemic leapt from city to city – from Mantova to Padova and then Venice, where it is said to have been brought in by a diplomat.

  ‘The disease was not new to Venice; there had been other outbreaks of the plague before and much had been learnt from them: many tracts had been published on governing la peste and permanent boards of health had been set up as far back as the fifteenth century. You could even say that modern sanitary protocols, for dealing with epidemics, were invented in Venice. So when the great plague of 1630 broke out the city fathers were not slow to act.’

  She stabbed my arm with her forefinger, as if to prevent me from jumping to a mistaken conclusion.

  ‘Do not imagine, Dino, that these councillors were credulous men. Most of them had been educated at the University of Padova, which was a great centre of rationalism – that is where Galileo had once taught, and his doctrine, of the orderliness of nature, was like scripture to the men who presided over Venice. They were like the EU bureaucrats of today – competent, well-educated administrators, not given to flights of fancy: their faith in the power of human reason was limitless.

  ‘They got swiftly to work, enacting measure after measure. Quarantines and curfews were put into place; all who were suspected of infection were transported to a quarantined island, while the few who recovered were sent to yet another island. All public places were closed and people were forbidden to leave their houses; only soldiers could move about freely. The streets were so empty that plants began to sprout between the paving stones. Specially appointed marshals, whose faces were covered with beaked masks, would go from house to house, fumigating and checking for signs of the disease.

  ‘But the plague was relentless. People died in the thousands – workmen and fishwives, noblewomen and priests, not even the most exalted probiviri were spared. In a few months a quarter of the city’s population perished. The barques that carried away the dead could not cope with the numbers; the canals were choked with corpses; in the Arsenale – where today they hold exhibitions of art – bodies lay stacked in piles, men could not be found to pour lye on them.

  ‘But in the midst of this horror there was one tiny corner of the city, an alleyway called the Corte Nova, that was almost unaffected. A young girl who lived there had made a painting of the Blessed Virgin and hung it at the entrance of the corte, saying that the plague would not be able to get past the Madonna – and strangely, miraculously, it transpired that the people who lived in that alley were spared the horrors of the plague.

  ‘The Blessed Virgin has always been greatly venerated by Venetians; now the whole city threw itself on her mercy. Even the city fathers, those competent men of reason, recognized their utter helplessness and passed a resolution pledging to build a great church dedicated to the Madonna. And when it happened, soon after, that the plague began to recede, it was said that a miracle had been wrought by Santa Maria della Salute – the Mado
nna of Good Health.’

  She came to a halt and pointed ahead, to a great grey dome that had come suddenly into view ahead of us, towering over the Grand Canal. ‘And there it is: Santa Maria della Salute. Today the church is one of the great icons of the city.’

  ‘Yes, I remember the Turner paintings.’

  ‘There have been many others as well – La Salute has probably been painted and photographed as much as any place on earth. Yet it could also be said that it is a monument to a catastrophe, a memorial to the terrible afflictions of the Little Ice Age.’

  We paused to admire the soaring, octagonal church as the reflected ripples of the Grand Canal played upon its bright white surface.

  ‘Your Merchant would not have seen La Salute in this form,’ said Cinta. ‘It took almost fifty years to build. Just to lay the foundations, in the mud, took many years. In the 1660s, if that was indeed when your Merchant was here, he would have seen only the octagonal rotunda that supports the dome. But he would have observed the great church rising and he would have known why it was being built. How could he not? The Venice of his time was a place where the terrible plague of 1630 was still a vivid memory.’

  As she was speaking a vaporetto sped by, on the Grand Canal, and the ripples on the church’s surface changed into a turbulent, shimmering vortex of reflected light. I saw then that the church was not merely beautiful; it was imbued also with dread and foreboding; it was a cry of warning from a moment of desperation so extreme that it had turned itself into stone.

  I followed Cinta up the monumental steps, into the church, and we walked around the circular aisle to the high altar, at the centre of which was a glowing, gilded icon of a dark-skinned Madonna and Child.

  ‘She is the Black Madonna of La Salute,’ said Cinta. ‘The Panaghia Mesopanditissa, Madonna the Mediator: it is she who stands between us and the incarnate Earth, with all its blessings and furies.’