The Four Horsemen

by Gregory Dowling

  Isabella Venier addressed them: “Signori, this is Alvise Marangon, who is going to address us in Homeric fashion all evening.”

  “Marangon,” said Sanudo, repeating my surname with a kind of lazy relish.

  “Marangon!” repeated a youth with a round face, capped by an over-elaborate wig. He let out a single high-pitched laugh.

  I bowed. “At your service,” I said.

  “Very useful if we need our chairs repaired,” said Sanudo with a slight yawn.

  “Chairs repaired!” repeated the round-faced one. It seemed he favoured Madricardo’s form of conversation.

  “Now, now,” said Isabella Venier. “We are not here to judge people on their names.” She introduced the four young men to me, all of whom turned out to be scions of noble families: Andrea Sanudo, Giulio Tron (the round-faced youth), and two brothers, Marco Bon (a long-faced fellow with apparently little to say), and Federico Bon (a plumper and just slightly more loquacious version of his brother). Then she turned to me. “Perhaps you could tell us a little more about yourself, in Homeric fashion or not, as you wish.” This time her smile was one of encouragement, particularly welcome after Sanudo’s air of languid boredom. She took a seat on the divan next to Sanudo and waved her fan in mock command. “Please, Signor Marangon, tell us how you came to be interested in Homer.”

  “Perhaps I should first say that I cannot read Homer in the original Greek,” I said.

  Sanudo let out an audible sigh. Isabella Venier immediately spoke up. “That is a pity for you, Signor Alvise. However, you are certainly not alone in that in this company.”

  Federico Bon said, “I can just about make out the letters. Not a great achievement after years spent supposedly reading the stuff at the university. Hoping to improve on that by coming here.”

  “Myself, I can’t even read the letters!” said Giulio Tron with a squeaking laugh.

  Isabella Venier continued, “We are all drawn together by our love of things Greek, but we have different relations to the Greek world. There are those like myself who grew up on a Greek island and speak the language as well as I do Tuscan Italian and Venetian. And there are those, like my husband Marco Querini” – she made the vaguest of gestures skywards, which I presumed did not mean that he had left this world for a higher realm but that he was otherwise engaged this evening – “and many others here, whose ties to the lands of the Eastern Roman Empire go back centuries, even though they themselves have never lived in those lands; such people preserve historical and familial memories even if they do not have mastery of the language.”

  “The language is not the point,” said Sanudo. “It is the ties that count.” And he stared at me, as if challenging me to deny this.

  “Certainly I have no family ties with Greece, Excellency,” I said, taking care to give him the respect due to his rank. There was little point in arousing resentment here.

  “I have no doubt of that,” he said.

  “It is a cultural bond I feel,” I said.

  “Cultural bond,” he said, slowly and deliberately. And immediately Giulio Tron took up the two words with his high-pitched giggle: “Cultural bond!”

  “And what is this ‘cultural bond’ between you and Greece?” Sanudo said.

  “A literary one,” I said, “due to my own rather eccentric education.”

  “Tell us more,” said Isabella Venier. “I’m always intrigued by eccentricity.”

  “So long as eccentric is not a mere euphemism for meagre,” said Sanudo.

  Giulio Tron squeaked a repetition of the last word of this sentence, possibly the only polysyllabic one he had understood, and the two Bon brothers indulged in sardonic smiles as well.

  “Signor Andrea,” said Isabella Venier, “that is entirely uncalled for. This is my salotto, and all my guests are to be treated with courtesy.”

  “It was a generalisation,” said Sanudo. “I did not say it applied to Signor Marangon.” He spoke my surname with careful deliberation.

  She rapped her fan against his elbow, but in an archly playful fashion. She seemed determined to keep the tone light. She then turned to me. “Signor Alvise, forgive my friend. His devotion to the lands lost to the Ottomans sometimes makes him forget his manners.”

  I bowed, but took care to direct my bow to her and not to Sanudo. “I have not had the benefit of a university education,” I said.

  “Really?” said Sanudo, in evident mock surprise.

  “And I grew up in England, with a number of different tutors.”

  “In England?” said Isabella Venier. “This is intriguing. But your accent is pure Venetian.”

  “My mother was pure Venetian,” I said. “An actress who found fortune in England.”

  “An actress,” repeated Sanudo. His habit of repetition was entirely different from that of Madricardo, or from that of his round-faced friend. He managed to make the words he repeated carry completely different meanings. Giulio Tron clearly caught the new meaning at once and squeaked the word with salacious delight.

  “An actress,” I repeated, firmly and icily.

  “How very intriguing,” said Isabella Venier. “And have you inherited her theatrical skills?”

  “I may have done,” I said. “But perhaps you will be better equipped to judge later on this evening.”

  “So what are you proposing to do?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Sanudo, “are you going to give us a full performance of a Greek tragedy?”

  “I didn’t come with the intention of performing but of participating in a cultural discussion. But if performance is required, I won’t hold back.”

  “And what will you perform?” said Isabella Venier.

  “Well, I came with the idea that I might talk, if required, on how Homer has been translated into English. If necessary I can give you some lines from the best translation.” I pulled my volume of Pope from my pocket by way of demonstration.

  “Lines that no one but you will understand,” said Sanudo, as I replaced the book.

  Suddenly his friend Federico Bon spoke up. “I say,” he said. “I’ve seen you.”

  “Indeed?” I said.

  “Yes, you were with an English visitor in the Piazza. You’re a – you’re a—”

  “I’m a cicerone,” I said with a bow.

  “Good God,” said Sanudo. He gazed at me with sudden added disgust.

  Isabella Venier spoke up: “How very resourceful of you. And do you always act as cicerone to English visitors?”

  “That is certainly my speciality,” I said.

  “Well, I suppose they’re the ones with the money,” said Federico Bon. He seemed a little more thoughtful than his companions.

  “There are certainly some wealthy English visitors,” I said.

  “And I expect you take them to all the best casini,” went on Federico Bon. “You can probably get a good cut like that.”

  “I confine myself to the places of cultural and historic interest,” I said. “My clients don’t seem to need any guidance with regard to gambling and other entertainments.” I sounded insufferable even to myself.

  Sanudo let out a sardonic laugh. “Cultural and historic interest, I’m sure. I’ve never seen a milord who wasn’t drunk – unless he was whoring.” I detected an added bitterness to his tone and wondered if he had any particular reason for this animosity against the English aristocracy.

  “Signor Andrea,” said Isabella Venier, “perhaps it depends on where you have been observing them.”

  I wished I had come out with that. Of course, if I had done so he would not have reacted quite so mildly. He merely gave her a forced half-smile with the faintest indication of irritation in his eyes. Tron let out a high-pitched laugh, and Sanudo’s eyes flashed on him with full fury, causing Tron to break off with a nervous squeak.

  “I think perhaps I should introduce you to some more of our guests,” said Isabella Venier, getting to her feet, “before we begin our general meeting. You will be interested to encounter
our Greek thinker, I’m sure.”

  “Most interested,” I said, giving a bow to the four young men, who acknowledged it with degrees of courtesy ranging from the formally correct (the two Bon brothers) to the blatantly contemptuous (Sanudo) by way of the stridulously flustered (Tron).

  Isabella Venier led me across the room. On the way she paused to give instructions to one of the servants, and while she was talking to him Madricardo came up to me and spoke in a low voice. “I thought I had better just say a word of warning, of warning.”

  “What about?”

  “Do be careful not to antagonise Sanudo, Sanudo, you know, don’t antagonise him.”

  I thought of saying that it was too late but instead asked, “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s Noblewoman Venier’s cicisbeo, her cicisbeo.”

  “Ah,” I said. It was certainly useful to know that Sanudo filled the role of semi-official gallant and possibly her lover.

  At that moment Isabella Venier returned to my side and led me towards the group of people I had noted earlier because of their plainer attire. This group too had its clear leader – or, at least, its clear focal point. This was a man in his late thirties, who seemed to have chosen his clothes and hairstyle in deliberate opposition to those of his hostess; apart from a loose off-white shirt, everything about him was dark, from his gleaming black shoes to his glossy black hair, left loose and flowing around his dark-complexioned face. His dark eyes gazed with a faint glimmer of curiosity at me as Isabella and I approached. The other people around stepped aside, clearly aware that they were not the point of attraction here. They included, I now noticed, a bearded priest in the garb of the Orthodox Church and two other young men whom I also guessed to be of Greek extraction.

  “Signor Komnenos, this is Signor Alvise Marangon,” said Isabella Venier with her dazzling smile, apparently impervious to the gloom emanating from the man.

  And then came the transformation. Suddenly he too smiled, a flash of white teeth, as if determined to match his hostess’s display of brilliance. We both bowed.

  “Signor Alvise is a cicerone for English visitors,” she went on.

  “The newest barbarian invaders,” he said with just a trace of a foreign accent. It was an attractive voice, and I could imagine how this man had charmed the company.

  “They come here in order to be civilised,” I said. “It would be cruel to deny them the possibility.”

  “I’m not sure that everyone is capable of being civilised. Nor that this is the best place to do it.” He said this casually, with only the faintest hint of a smile, and everyone was clearly delighted by the insult to their city. A grizzled man in a shabby grey jacket nodded his head and beamed; a couple of scholarly-looking men, with old-fashioned long wigs, looked at each other with expressions of satisfied complacency, as if glad that they had not wasted their evening. The priest nodded with fierce conviction.

  I said, “You don’t see Venice as the heir to Constantinople, then?”

  “Venice is the spoiler and predator of my city.” The same light tone, as if he had made a remark about the foggy weather.

  Again the heads all around nodded in agreement, the priest’s head moving with twice the vigour of everyone else’s.

  I persisted. “But can’t we consider it fortunate that something of your city’s greatness has been preserved here? Not all has been lost to the Ottomans?”

  The mention of the Ottomans seemed to bring everyone together in a general murmur of opprobrium, but it was not clear that my overall sentiment had been approved. They all seemed to be waiting for Komnenos to supply their lead.

  “The Ottomans are not are our only oppressors,” he said after quite a long pause. It was something of an anticlimax, I thought, but those around us did not seem disappointed. Bewigged heads bobbed up and down in sage but lively agreement; I wondered how many of them knew exactly what they were agreeing about.

  “Ah,” I said, “I suppose not.” I didn’t point out that he had not answered my question. Here too I imagined there was probably no advantage in assuming an antagonistic stance. I would have liked to ask him about Padoan, but not in front of all these people.

  “I speak for my fellow Greeks,” he said, waving a hand at the two young men I had guessed to be compatriots and the Greek priest. All three nodded, although I was not sure they fully understood what he was saying. He introduced them to me; the priest was Father Giorgos, currently staying at the Greek church, and the two young men were Dimitris and Alexis (I never caught their surnames), who were working as mosaic-restorers at Saint Mark’s. This last piece of information allowed me to make some vague remark about the fruitful interchange of artistic skills between the former Eastern Roman Empire and Venice, at which the young men nodded (uncomprehendingly, I think), while Komnenos said, “Very fruitful: you steal our works and when they’re broken we come and repair them for you.”

  Noblewoman Venier, the practised hostess, broke in. “I think it might be time for us all to move into the next room where wine and biscuits will be served.”

  I was glad I had not come with an empty stomach. As I was close to the door she was indicating I passed through it to the next room in time to see a man with grey hair look up in alarm from a desk in the far corner; he had been gazing at a small bronze statue in an absorbed fashion. He instantly realised that his privacy was about to be disturbed. He picked the statue up protectively and scuttled towards the door at the opposite end of the room, like a startled animal. The spaniel that loped along beside him seemed less agitated.

  I heard my hostess heave a sigh. When I glanced at her, she gave me a wry smile and said softly, “My husband, poor man. I had warned him there would be company.”

  I was rather surprised that she should speak to me so familiarly of her husband, whose noble rank was as certain as her own, and she flashed another smile at me. “You seem as startled as my poor husband. Please understand that there are no distinctions between any here on these occasions.”

  I was about to ask her if she had informed Sanudo of this, but fortunately held back for at that moment he came up to us and ostentatiously moved between me and her. I stepped back compliantly; the role of cicisbeo was his, after all. However, she gave him a reproachful tap on the shoulder with her fan and said, “I will accompany Signor Alvise this evening. It is his first time here.”

  “I think he can find his own way to a chair,” he said.

  “That is not the point, Signor Andrea,” she said. “I wish to make him feel at home.”

  He stared hard at her and then at me. For one moment he seemed tempted to make a scene and he actually jostled against me; then, as if realising how undignified such behaviour made him look, he moved away to re-join his friends.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “It is my pleasure,” she replied.

  The whole company had now entered this smaller room, on three sides of which, framed in gilt wood against red velvet, hung life-size portraits of prominent members of the Querini family, in black and scarlet robes, with here a bright cardinal’s hat, there a gleaming flash of symbolic armour, and everywhere thick creamy wigs. Chairs were placed against the walls underneath the portraits, and one hesitated to move them, since the painted decorations around their curved backs subtly matched the ones that ran along the base of each picture-frame.

  People seemed to know where they were going to sit, and I noticed that the already formed clusters tended to remain consistently close. Isabella Venier took her seat in the middle of the left-hand wall, beneath a canvas of a lip-curling, scarlet-clad procurator, and with an imperious wave of her fan bade me sit next to her. Andrea Sanudo and his three friends deliberately sat opposite us, from where Sanudo stared at me, apparently trying to mimic the facial expression of the painted face above my right shoulder.

  For a while we simply sat there, while three servants brought round glasses of Cypriot wine and buranelli biscuits. The conversations begun in the other room continued in a
low buzz until the servants had retired, and then they gradually petered out, and faces turned expectantly towards Isabella Venier.

  “Friends of Greece,” she began, “friends of the Eastern Roman Empire, thank you all for joining me here once again.” Her voice, although audible to all, seemed to be as low and intimate as ever, so that I had the impression (and I suspect I was not the only one) that she was speaking directly and personally to me alone. “As on previous occasions we will divide our encounter into two separate parts; in the first part we will discuss what practical moves can be made towards a recovery of those territories lost to the Turks.”

  This took me by surprise. Was this motley group of languid aristocrats, bored scholars and aggrieved Greeks planning to reopen hostilities with the Ottoman Empire, thirty years after the Peace of Passarowitz?

  I looked around and saw no one raising any objection or even a single eyebrow. Komnenos had a faint smile on his lips, as if the idea of Venice’s undertaking any bellicose activity was self-evidently absurd (and I could not disagree with him), while the others all nodded thoughtfully.

  Isabella Venier went on, “And then we will continue with our usual cultural activities: some poetry from our friend Kostantinos Komnenos . . .” – he gave a leisurely nod, as if to say that he might be so gracious as to bestow upon us a few lines – “and perhaps a word or two from our newest arrival, Signor Alvise Marangon, a lover of Homer.”

  “And a cicerone,” said Andrea Sanudo, arousing a murmur of puzzled curiosity; this seemed to disappoint Sanudo, who had perhaps been hoping for a roar of derision.

  I lifted one hand, to identify myself, but did not speak.

  Isabella Venier talked on. She certainly knew how to hold the attention of the audience; she talked of her own love for the island on which she had grown up, the role Kythira (or Cerigo, as the Venetians called it) had played in the expanding Venetian empire. She acknowledged how fortunate she had been to divide her time between the mother city and an island that had never come under Turkish dominion. She spoke of the sorrow she knew so many of the others must have experienced, either directly in having been expelled from their families’ lands (and here she obtained the assent of some older people, who I later learned had been expelled from the island of Tinos and from the Morea in 1715), or from having grown up knowing the tears of nostalgic grandparents or the sad tales passed down from more distant ancestors, driven from the isles of the Cyclades or from Crete or from Cyprus (and this aroused widespread nodding and a general murmur of recognition). Sanudo himself was one of the most vigorous assenters. I learned later that the Sanudo family had established themselves, with the acquiescence of the Venetian Republic, as dukes of Naxos in the thirteenth century and had held semi-piratical sway over the Cyclades for centuries, until being driven out by the Ottomans in the sixteenth century.