Looking for Marco Polo

by Alan Armstrong

  “Sugar,” Mark’s mother translated.

  The waitress turned quickly and yelled something to the orange-slicing man. He wasn’t alarmed; he yelled back, “Sì! Sì!,” wiped his hands on his juice-stained apron, grabbed what looked like a canoe paddle, and hustled over to the oven to slide out a square pan bubbling over with tomato and browning cheese. It smelled wonderful.

  Mark went to the counter to sugar his cup. The counterman looked up and smiled.

  “Please?” Mark asked, pointing and gesturing to let the man know he wanted some of the stuff in the square pan.

  “Lasagna? No, no, not yet,” the man said, shaking his head. “It must ripen. We cool it, then bake it once more for il pranzo. You come for il pranzo—lunch—then you eat the lasagna. I save for you a big piece,” he said, spreading his hands wide. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” said Mark. He looked in the case, then pointed to a yellow pancake. The counterman nodded happily, signaling that Mark had chosen the best thing for la colazione—breakfast—as he sprinkled on herbs from a big tin shaker and painted it lightly with olive oil before he slid it into the oven.

  The pancake was a frittata—whipped egg baked with cheese and garlic and bits of ham and broccoli, his mother explained. It came with a glass of the dark red orange juice and a plate of small crescent-shaped pastries dusted white with sugar.

  “Mmm,” said Mark as he took a bite of frittata.

  The juice was sweet. The pastries tasted like almond, their sugar dusting fine as flour.

  “So what did Marco eat for breakfast?” he asked.

  His mother looked up from her cup. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe a cup of hot milk, but no coffee in it, I guess, and no sugar. Maybe a small round of bread smeared with fat, and an apple. Maybe an egg or a piece of fried fish.”

  Mark made a face. “Fish for breakfast? Ugly!”

  The waitress answered the phone in the corner. Her whole conversation was “Eh? Eh! Eh. Eh. Eh. Eh! Eh.” She was a short, round woman in worn-down bedroom slippers, a bright print dress, and a smeared blue-striped apron. Her voice went up and down like a saxophone.

  When she finished the call, she shuffled over, her slippers flap-flapping with every step. Without asking, she poured more juice and put down another plate of sweet crescents. “Eh?” she said with a wink at Mark.

  The two women chatted, then the waitress turned to Mark. “Why you spend Christmas in Venice?” she asked.

  Mark licked the powdered sugar off his lips. “We’re looking for my father,” he said. “He’s lost.”

  “Your father?” she cried. “He is lost in Venice?”

  Mark’s mother put in gently, “Actually, he’s in the Gobi Desert, but the agency he works for is here in Venice. And he might not be lost. He’s doing research with the herders, following the path your famous Marco Polo followed across the desert.”

  “Ah! Marco Polo!” said the waitress, seeming to swell up as she opened her arms and smiled at Mark. “Marco Polo. ‘Millionaire Marco,’ we call him for his big stories. He is like a sport star with us. I am sorry I cannot tell you how to find your father, but Marco Polo, he is all over Venice. Except for his body. They lost it. Give me your map. I show you where you look for Marco … start here, this place, where is his home—Casa Polo.”

  Dad,

  How come you came here to go to the desert? Did you go by boat? Mom’s been showing me where you are on the map. There’s no TV in my room, not even a radio. Venice is wet and smelly. Some of the buildings lean like they might fall over—which Mom says is because everything is built on poles stuck in the mud. Why did anyone ever bother coming to this place? I can see why Marco Polo left. Breakfast was OK. What do you get for breakfast? Do they make coffee where you are? I hope we hear something about you today.

  Love, Mark

  3

  MARCO POLO’S PILLOW

  As they set out from Signora Eh’s café, a sharp breeze made them hunker into their coats and bury their hands.

  “Hats would be good,” Mark’s mother said.

  “I bet Dad wouldn’t wear one,” Mark said, setting his face and squinting. The cold wind made him tear.

  “Bet he would,” his mom said, rubbing her ears. “Something woven out of camel’s hair like the herders wear.”

  They heard the Christmas market before they saw it, a hum of happy people. Around the edges there were jugglers and clowns and men painted gold all over standing like statues before dishes for tips. Farther along a troupe of mimes in white pretended to sing opera without making a sound. From the way the actors gestured, Mark could follow the story. People around him were swaying to the imagined music.

  There was a stand for mittens, scarves, and hats. Mark’s mother stopped and quickly bought a beret for herself and a bright red wool watch cap like sailors wear. She held it out. Mark shrugged and pulled it on.

  A tanned old man in a black hat was selling flowers from a rickety handcart he must have made and painted himself. It had the picture of a smiling golden-faced Madonna on the front. She was surrounded by strings of red and yellow flowers, blue leaves, and grinning red snakes. Some of the man’s teeth were gold. He was no taller than Mark, but he was broad and strong. His hat was dusty; his gray shirt was mended and stained. Mark noticed he wore more shirts underneath.

  He had roses. Mark’s mother leaned over and sniffed.

  “Ah,” she said with a sigh.

  “From Sicily,” the man said proudly. “Where I from. At Christmas, roses in Sicily, so I bring here.”

  “Wonderful. Just what we need,” she said. “Six, please.”

  “For your room,” she said, handing them to Mark. “I read somewhere that in the old days Venetian innkeepers put flowers in the rooms to freshen things. Now yours will smell like Christmas in Sicily—or springtime in Baltimore. Sniff!” she urged.

  Mark did. “Thanks.”

  The old man beamed. “Buone, eh?—Good?”

  Mark nodded. “Grazie,” he said.

  “Prego,” replied the flower-seller with a polite nod.

  “He can’t make much doing that, can he?” Mark asked as they walked into the buzzing warren of stands and tables. “I mean, he must be poor.”

  “Looks to me like he knows how to be happy with what he’s got,” his mother replied. “It’s a gift few people have.”

  The square was filled with vendors’ tables under gaudy striped umbrellas. One table had rows of what his mother said were santons—carefully painted hand-sized clay figures of Joseph, Mary, the wise men, the shepherds, and all the animals for crèches. The next stand was for puppets. Over it there was a large, sly-looking Puss in Boots in a shiny blue satin suit with silver fur cuffs and a jaunty black plumed hat. He was holding a seaman’s map in one paw, a globe in the other.

  The table that stopped Mark had small things from China, tiny carvings of animals and people.

  “Looks like the kind of stuff Marco Polo might have brought back,” his mother said.

  There was a chipped green and white porcelain box. It was the size of a small shoe box decorated with fierce-headed purple and red dragons, their blue tongues curling out. The top was slightly scooped.

  “It’s a Chinese pillow,” his mother explained. “Marco Polo might have slept on one.”

  Mark put it up against the back of his head.

  “How do you sleep on it?” he asked. “It’s hard.”

  “Maybe you should try,” his mother said, motioning to the dealer.

  “For your Marco Polo dreams,” she said with a smile as she bought it.

  Mark was amazed. His mother rarely bought souvenirs, and she was really careful about money. It wasn’t cheap. It looked old enough to have really belonged to Marco. “I’ll try it,” he said.

  They bought bags of apricots and dates and ate them as they walked, spitting out the pits.

  They approached what looked like a low white pyramid with a flattened top.

  “The Rialto Bridge,” M
ark’s mother said. “It’s the main bridge over the Grand Canal, the great highway of Venice.”

  Tides of people floated up the layers of steps to the top, where they could look down on boats of all sizes and colors. A bright green garbage scow moved slowly under a cloud of screaming gulls.

  The sun flickered above slate gray clouds, faster moving and darker and colder-looking than the ones they’d noticed earlier. Bells clanged the quarter hour, some five minutes before, some five minutes after, so all along there was music like the choppy waves. Men sculled by in gondolas, calling as they stroked. The water churned with the wakes of tour boats, outboards, floating buses called vaporettos, and taxis.

  Near the bridge they stopped for coffee and hot chocoate: boiled milk in a heavy blue cup with a cube of chocolate on a stick laid alongside. Mark twirled the chocolate in the steaming white until it turned brown. It was thick and sweet.

  He couldn’t help himself: he slurped up a long hot sip. He looked over at his mother, expecting a scold about manners. She just shook her head and smiled.

  “Oh man!” he sighed, wriggling with pleasure. “Why can’t we get cocoa like this at home?”

  “I guess for the same reason we can’t get coffee like this,” his mother said, holding up her tiny cup. “It must be the water.”

  “Yeah. Seawater with green stuff floating in it,” Mark said. “That’s what we need back home.”

  In the open-sided market below, a large black fish had been gutted and lopped into steaks and then put back together. The table was gooey with scales, slime, and blood. The tiny, bent-over, blood-spattered fishwoman sold her fish section by section, down to the tail, and, as they watched, she sold that too, along with the head.

  Afterward they walked single file following arrows marked CA POLO along a narrow canal, then a narrow calle, crossing several small bridges humped just enough to allow a gondola to pass under. Laundry hung out over the smaller lanes. When the sun shone, the drying jeans, whites, and bright shirts flapped like flags.

  “The map says that’s it,” his mother said, pointing to a wall with a marble arch.

  Mark stood back and squinted to take in the wall, the arch, and the surroundings. “That?” he said as he rubbed his arms. “That’s Marco Polo’s house?”

  “What’s left of it,” his mother said. “Cold?” she asked.

  “I’m okay.” Mark was an only child and his parents worried about him too much, particularly his mother. But he did feel odd. He shook himself like a dog shaking off wet. He couldn’t explain it, but he felt as if he were in the presence of something alive that he couldn’t see.

  Is this what Dad meant about hints and traces? he wondered.

  “It says in the guidebook,” his mother said, “that Marco’s house was torn down after a fire to make way for the theater. It mentions the arch, so I guess that’s the one he walked under the night he got back from China. Did you read that part in the book?”

  “Yeah,” Mark said. It was the only part he had read: the beginning, telling about Marco’s coming home after his travels. Mark thought it was strange that a story about travels should begin with the coming-home part.

  The stone arch was carved with circles of flowers, shields, figures of lizard-looking beasts, and something with the head of an eagle and the body, hind legs, and tail of a lion.

  Mark went over and stood under it. He stretched out his arms and measured the opening. It was four stretched-out-Marks wide. “Marco says he and his father and his uncle arrived with a donkey and a big dog,” he explained. “I’m just checking to see if they could all have fit through. I guess they could.”

  He turned and looked around the small square. “Do you think it looks the same now as it did then?” he asked.

  His mother nodded. “Pretty much.”

  “That must be where he went to get water.” Mark pointed to the wellhead. It came up to his waist and looked like the top of a column, only it was hollow. It was the length of a man across.

  “If you run your hands over the stone,” his mother said, “you might be able to feel where the lion’s head was. It says in the guidebook that in Marco’s time all the wellheads in Venice had carved lions’ heads on them, but then foreign soldiers came and knocked them off.”

  Mark’s scalp tingled.

  Maybe I’m touching what Marco Polo touched.

  “Was the water salty?” he asked.

  “It wasn’t a well,” his mother explained. “The space under this paving was a cistern, maybe still is. The paving was laid on a slant, so rainwater drained into it, water from the roofs too.”

  “Did they drink it?” Mark asked.

  His mother nodded.

  Mark scrunched up his face. “Along with dead pigeons and all the other stuff that must have fallen in?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe they boiled it.”

  There was an iron grating over the top.

  “They don’t use it anymore, right?” Mark asked, leaning over and staring down.

  “I don’t think so,” his mother replied.

  Mark called down, “Hi!”

  He waited a long moment.

  “I heard back!” he said, straightening up.

  They headed back to their hotel, twisting along canals and stitching over bridges. On the way they passed the big museum. It was open.

  His mother pointed to the sign. “Mondo di Marco Polo—Marco Polo’s World. Want to go in?” she asked.

  Mark sagged. “Maybe later, Mom,” he said. “I’m tired.”

  “Come on,” she urged. “A quick walk through. Five minutes.”

  The rooms were large and dark, with tall ceilings. The first was filled with huge dark globes of the world mounted in gilded frames. Some of the globes were as tall as a man. There were cases of books laid open. Pictures and maps were hung all the way up to the ceiling. Staring up, Mark felt woozy. His legs were heavy.

  The next room had a scale model of a black Venetian war galley with manikins on the benches—two to a bench, twenty-five benches on each side, with an ax and spear beside every one, sharp and ready for battle. The figure of a boy in a blue jacket sat in the stern with a drum, beating time for the rowers. The prow ended in an iron beak shaped like a dragon’s head.

  “They were paid,” his mother translated from the sign. “These rowers weren’t slaves like the Roman galley slaves. For the Venetians, being a rower was a good job. It says the point at the front was for holing the enemy.”

  “What’s holing?” Mark wanted to know.

  “Ramming—poking a hole in the enemy boat to sink it,” she answered.

  Mark pointed to the figure of the boy at the stern. “That kid’s been beating his drum for a long time.”

  In the next room there was the standing figure of a Mongol warrior in quilt armor and a metal helmet with broad gold wings. He stood holding a spear beside a pony.

  Mark went and stood beside the warrior. They were the same size. “Those soldiers were grown-ups, right?” he called to his mother.

  “Yes,” she answered. “People are bigger now. Better diet.”

  On the walls there were racks of Mongol lances, each with a vicious hook just below the point. There were rows of shields made from woven reeds, the fronts covered with brass and beaten gold and decorated with black writing. In the cases there were dozens of battle helmets, each one with what looked like a vase on one side.

  On the way out his mother pointed to the displays of open books. “Marco’s book in French and Latin, the earliest printed ones,” she said. “The ones over there, the ones written out by hand, they came first.”

  “Mom,” Mark groaned, “I’ve got museum feet….”

  She looked at her watch. “Time for il pranzo,” she announced. “Can you make it back to the signora’s for some of that lasagna before we nap?”

  Remembering the bubbling pan of cheese and tomato, Mark brightened. “Sure!” he said.

  Just before the bridge to their campo his m
other stopped them in front of a shop. The sign said IL PAPIRO. “Paper,” she explained. “You need some for your letters to Dad.”

  “Aw, Mom …”

  “One minute!”

  The shopkeeper’s face was a round of pink under a big black fur hat. She wore a neck-to-ankles cocoon of dark red wool. She nodded and smiled as Mark’s mother stepped in, Mark lagging behind with a sour look.

  “So what you need?” the woman asked, holding up a sign in English:

  WE PROVIDE—

  PAPERS OF EVERY KIND

  CALLIGRAPHY SCRIPTS

  HANDWRITING ANALYSIS

  PALM READING

  TOURIST ADVICE

  TOILET—1 EURO

  “He needs paper for letters,” Mark’s mom said.

  “This is good, writing letters,” the woman exclaimed as she wormed past boxes and displays to a shelf, “but first you must gather ideas. You must write down what surprises—quick, before it is ordinary.

  “Here—this will fit your pocket,” she said, handing Mark a ballpoint and a small red leather booklet. “Try the pen on it. See? Good, the paper! Feel how it welcomes the pen! This is important: a writer’s paper should never fight the hand! So you write your first book! And—see?—you can tear out sheets for mail.”

  Dear Dad,

  Mom got the people at the agency to send out some people to look for you. I hope they find you soon. She showed me the Gobi on the map. It’s colored tan, which means it’s really dry. Mom’s worried because of no letters, but the agency chief says he’s sure you’re OK because the last team met some other herders who didn’t say anything was wrong except the water had moved. There’s water everywhere here. The roads are water. Our hotel is old and smelly. Everything here is really old with a lot of fancy stuff hung on it. Nothing is new. The lady at the restaurant told us where Marco Polo’s house was, so we went there, but it burned down a long time ago. On the way Mom bought me a pillow like he used. It’s hard as a rock. I stood under the arch he went under when he came home. They named the airport for him but they lost his body. Mom read in the guidebook that most Venetians didn’t wear underwear. The museum didn’t have any. The woman where we bought this paper said we must be Americans because of our shoes. “For practical,” she said. It’s the boots Mom makes us wear. Nobody here wears things like you’re going moose hunting. She read my palm for free. She says I’m going exploring. I’m keeping the notebook she sold us in my pocket to write you notes for when I see you. It’s red leather. It cost a lot. People here don’t go fast, or push, and lots of them smile when they look at you. There are no joggers and no black people. From the looks of the water, don’t eat the fish, but the other stuff is OK. What do you eat? Mom says goat and a lot of cheese made from sheep and goat milk. She says we’re going to get some to try. Ropes and life preservers are hanging all over this place so a lot of people must fall in. The fire truck is a boat. Mom says you’re wearing a camel-hair hat. Are you? We saw a camel. Mom bought me a red one to wear—a hat, not a camel, but I bet you could get one here. This place is all shops and water.