Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482)

by Vollmann, William T.

  I could have been unvanquished, if death had not been victorious.

  Epitaph for Lord Šimon Keglevic of Bužin, died 17 December 1579

  1

  When Jovo Cirtovic sailed to Trieste in 1718, the place must have whispered to him, for he stayed on to become a merchant of Friulian wines, which his ships carried with magical success. Before the native-born citizenry could open both eyes, he owned a veritable fleet, supplying ports as far away as Philadelphia. Why the grapes of Friuli bleed so delicious a juice remains nearly as mysterious to my mind as Cirtovic’s triumphal accession to the trade, although just yesterday, in that breezy hour when bronzes begin to surpass the darkness of pigeons, three of my fellow drinkers persuaded me that what accomplishes vinocultural excellence is soil, while two others led me to comprehend that the most ineffable qualities of the Bacchic Tetragrammaton derive from atmosphere, as has been proved down at Cinque Terra, where one famous salt-fogged vineyard, unremittingly guarded against the sea, produces a crop of great price. The waiter proposed to bring us a bottle of that stuff, but we disregarded him, for he was no Triestino; had we indulged his advice, he might even have poured something foreign down our throats. Meanwhile my helpful friends had educated me concerning the absolute excellence of Friulian vintages, which indeed occupy so commanding a position that should the Devil in his malice uproot every other grapevine on earth, nobody would be worse off, excepting only a few charlatans in Bordeaux or Tuscany. Here they paused to ascertain that my intellect had in truth kept pace with their instruction, for they were warmheartedly solicitous academicians, whose very breaths were purple. Yes, I said. Accordingly, all that remained was my indoctrination in the seventh syllogism of the thirty-first demonstration. This required their coming to blows, so I thanked them one and all, uplifting my glass, forsaking them for a breeze, the sea, a stone wall, potted palms. Then I poured a libation over Cirtovic’s cenotaph. He was a good father.

  Now, what about soil versus atmosphere? I know I am getting out of my depth here, since wine disagrees with me (I’m drinking smoky Dubrovnik loža as I write this), but I do seek your tolerance of my efforts, being myself a merchant of sorts, retailing paragraphs by the sailmaker’s yard. How shall I say why Cirtovic could sell every last barrel that creaked and sloshed on his shipbelly voyages? In the Caffè San Marco my friends are still arguing about it; their tongues have gotten winestained and their eyelids resemble those reflections of blinds which droop in the arched windows of lingerie shops. Not even they can explain wine. In the Piedmont, waiters dispraise Friulian reds; in Spaleto and Zara (which our hero preferred to call Split and Zadar), fat old nobles swear upon Mary Magdalene’s reliquary that Friulian whites are absolutely no good. Cirtovic never committed himself to any theory about grapes; nor could I imagine how such abstrusities would have impressed the hardheaded merchants of Philadelphia. Was his secret simply price, which must have been low enough to satisfy frugality and high enough to massage pretension? Or did the Tories of that epoch feel a yearning for far-off salty places, which they indulged only by the glass? Up until then, many an innkeeper in those Colonies had been wont to regale his guests on fly-infused vinegar, reminding them that such had done well enough for Christ on the cross. Then came sea-barrels of wine from Friuli. For a quarter-hour the thirsty Yankees knew how to be happy. In vain the skinflints who sold foul stuff invoked cabals and vigilance committees against Cirtovic—wasn’t he a tool of the Papists? Examining the barque Kosovo as a precaution against contraband, a certain customs officer, invited for a glass of wine in the captain’s cabin, spied above the bed an icon of the Madre della Passione, or Strastnja: mostly silver, it was, but the metal drew sharp-edgedly away from around those two golden faces; Marija fitted the young mother’s part, while Jesus could have been a watchful little Roman Emperor. Ah, that draught, how magically purple it was! Cirtovic began smiling; he seemed an excellent fellow. Rising, the customs man demanded to know whether his mariners obeyed the Pope.— Not us! laughed the captain. If you like, I’ll attest an oath to that effect.— Then what are you?— Orthodox, sir. And I am quite sure our Patriarch has no designs on these Colonies.— The cautious customs man held fast to the proverb Take counsel in wine, but resolve afterwards in water; after another glass of the Friulian vintage he forgot the second half. And so the cargo got landed; heaven came to earth. Safely alone, Cirtovic raised a glass to his true hero, Prince Lazar.

  In Genoa, agents of the Vatican received delivery of another twelve hundred barrels of Cirtovic’s wine. Now the Austrians and the Swedes got a taste for it; and I have even read that odd lots of it ended up at the Russian Court. Catherine the Great bathed in the stuff, after which her various lovers drank it. In Tartaria it corrupted a certain Khan who finally sold Cirtovic what was supposed never to leave the family: an Arabic manuscript on the subjugation of monsters. A Coptic priest in Ethiopia accepted a cask of red in exchange for an illuminated treatise on the geography of heaven. For Cirtovic was, you see, a collector.

  In his younger days he was frequently to be seen upon the docks and quays, opening wooden chests, drawing men into taverns, pressing coins into callused hands, while the Triestini wondered what was happening. He was built like a porter; his beard was salt-stained; he smiled easily, and all his doings seemed to be accomplished slowly, in the light. Around his neck hung some medallion or amulet concealed in a leathern bag, so that he resembled all the more some credulous peasant. Stolid even in the bora wind, gentle of speech, almost humble, unremarkable, such was Jovo Cirtovic. Yet again and again he sewed up the market, with greater celerity than a young bride preparing her rich old husband’s shroud. And it wasn’t merely wines he dealt in; it got said that even rotten onions he could unload at a profit! He leased a warehouse right on the Canal Grande, just in time for the Canal Grande to become the harbor’s liveliest tentacle. Against him it was also remembered that he had established himself in the city only one year before the Emperor elevated it to a free port. Laughing, Cirtovic offered wine at the communal celebration, but they noticed that he laughed only with his mouth. He could write Cyrillic and Glagolitic with equal facility—a nearly unmatched ability hereabouts. His fellow Serbs called him as wise as Saint Sava, not that they knew his mind. He was a man of his word, as everyone admitted, and generous on the rare occasions that he entertained. Moreover, he seemed adept with nearly any make of dromoscope. In taverns they computed his worth at half a million florins (an exaggeration); but most definitely he now dominated the Hungarian trade, which had enriched many daring men; and he vended the best Bohemian glass; in consideration of how much Count Giovanni Vojnovich had paid for a carafe and two dozen wineglasses, his rivals saw fit to multiply and magnify the treasure of Jovo Cirtovic, with as much gusto as if it belonged to them. For six years the Ragusan consulate knew him well. Then he also began dealing with Saracens. You must remember that ever since the Sultan had reconquered Morea from the Venetians, the latter operated more assertively in Ragusan waters, hoping to make up the loss; and when they appealed for amelioration of their taxes and duties, so that they could at least make a living as their fathers had—surely the Sultan could understand; even Turks had fathers!—he equivocated, all the while impelling his Sarajevans to invest new ports at Bar, Ulcinij, Novi and Budva. It can be perilous to trade with people who hate one another. But the prudent skipper who alters his flag from port to port reduces his risk, oh, yes, and increases his profit. What bribes or taxes Cirtovic had to pay is unrecorded; the main thing is that he never returned home without his head. That man had luck! Neither earthquakes nor French troops harmed his stock; English pirates lost him in a fog; his helmsmen never went off course; his glassware declined to break before he sold it; even pestilence, which visited Trieste nearly as often as sin, robbed away only his most inessential employees. While others had to wait on a fair breeze, somehow Jovo Cirtovic always knew when to raise sail. It might be dead calm in the harbor; no matter. Cirtovic embarked his men. When the ship
was laden, he’d cry out: Hold onto the wind with your teeth!— Just about then, the wind would come. Did God truly love him so much? After his third voyage to Africa, every sailor on the Beograd, right down to the cabin boy, received as a bonus one of those jewels that glow red like a sea monster’s eye when it surfaces at dusk. The wise ones used them to get wives and sloops; some left Cirtovic’s employ, with good feelings all around; the rest squandered them on whores, and once they had flooded the jewelry-shops of Trieste, a certain haughty ruby-dealer hanged himself, following which the Cincars swooped in to buy cheap and sell far away. After that, most ambitious young mariners hoped to sail for Jovo Cirtovic.

  Around that time certain rich men of the city began to build houses up on the hill, where they could guard their families from future epidemics; Cirtovic listened, saying nothing; soon two drunken notaries sang about a lot he had purchased in that district. Even the other Serbs were shocked, for they all lived quite satisfactorily in their warehouses. This Cirtovic, lacked he any regard for rules? They had already agreed that he was no son of his late father, who had made it his business to be a dread to Turks at night.— In order to raise up an appropriate edifice for himself, Jovo Cirtovic now commenced to trade still more widely. It was all he could do not to smile at the naïve customs men of Philadelphia, who worried that he might know his way around the Vatican when he had long been at home in uncannier realms—not least the Bosphorus itself, which in those days was unfailingly studded with sailing ships most of which flew the Sultan’s colors, and some of which flew no flag at all. Wending his trade betwixt the curving deltas and the peninsulas crowned with mosques walled like forts and bristling with crescent-topped steeples, he cast before him the lure of a courtesy which pretended not to be wary, and treasured within his vest a safe-conduct bearing the Sultan’s seal and illuminated in gold by seven calligraphers. Had the Philadelphians chanced upon that, they would have had no idea what it was.

  He was married by then, but nobody could say who had been invited to his wedding, for it took place back in Serbia, during his seventh absence from Trieste; he had chosen his bride by correspondence with his brothers, making use of a certain Cincar wax trader who would later become his undeclared supercargo on an African voyage. According to dockside idlers, Count Vojnovich was offended by some aspect of these proceedings, perhaps because he wanted the lady for himself. She arrived well veiled, accompanied by a mound of crates and trunks; it was dusk when Cirtovic, having briefly confabulated with his factor, Captain Vasojevic, led her down the gangplank and into a closed carriage. She was slender and she walked with rapid little steps. Another veiled woman who must have been her maidservant came just behind. In good Serbian fashion, both wore daggers at their sides. I’d guess they were thinking on the pear trees, kinsfolk and rapid streams they would never see again. Perhaps they’d been seasick. Spitting, Petar whipped up the horses. The next morning Cirtovic gave six hundred florins to the church, which at that time had stood for barely a year; it still served both Greeks and Serbs. Then he went straight to the dock and put his topmen to cutching some sails for the Kosovo. The Triestini, who certainly kept secrets of their own, watched all this with narrowed eyes, jutting out their beards as they asked one another what seraglio those females hailed from, and which other ports the Lazar might have touched on in the course of her wedding voyage; for the Adriatic coast, particularly on the Dalmatian side, is so addicted to doublings that a stranger can hardly tell whether the blue-green land-wave he spies below the sky’s belly is an island or the continuation of the continent. In short, this part of the world is a smuggler’s paradise. Whether or not our good Cirtovic ever accepted the discreeter commissions of contraband trade remains, in token of his success, unrecorded, but year after year his fleet plied up and down the labyrinthine coast, counting off stone beacons, hill-castles and their ruins, making quiet landfalls behind walls of birch-beech leaves. Returning quietly into the great blue bay with the whiteness of Trieste before him, he stood beside the steersman, gazing ahead in that guarded way he had, as if there were clouds between all others and himself—he who could see through all clouds. Yes, he who derives from the shadow passes more freely in and out of sunlight than he who was born in brightness. So the Triestini, tanned by the shimmer of their near-African sea, asserted, in order to excuse themselves for not venturing to Serbia, whose roads are paved with bleeding gravestones. For that matter, they did not even peer into the Orthodox church. In the market, housewives bowed their heads together to gossip about the new couple, in between the more interesting task of considering eggplants, while their husbands disputed as to whether or not Jovo Cirtovic possessed the evil eye. The way some described him, he wore the masklike face of a vampire squid, when in fact even the wariest customs guards saw nothing in him but well-heeled blandness, and his sailors loved him as they would have anyone who brought them home alive and paid good money. To be sure, he seemed care-ridden now; certain Triestini (who of course loved their native city so much as to frown upon even the neighboring port of Muggia) proposed that if he merely renounced Serbia entirely, forgetting those half-real denizens of an unlucky place, he’d grow as happy as the rest of us—although it could have been (as a certain unsuccessful butcher proposed) that debt had snared him. After all, how much capital must it take to send out so many ships? The Triestini would have loved to know. Unfortunately, the interloper’s brothers, recently arrived, proved almost equally closemouthed, although Cristoforo Cirtovic did say: Jovo’s always been a mystery to us. He takes after our late father, may he sit in the presence of the saints.— Bribing the watchman, a certain Captain Morelli snooped through the logbook of the Sava and was astonished to discover some proof or demonstration relating to the section of a right-angled cone; what it meant was conjectural, since the writing was Glagolitic. Copying it out, he sprang it on Cristoforo Cirtovic, who said: What’s this gibberish?— This Morelli next waylaid Stefano Cirtovic on the docks when that latter was unloading a cargo from Korea; Stefano said: Don’t ask me my brother’s business.

  Sometimes the Cirtovic men (there were six of them in addition to Jovo) would take over the “Heaven’s Key” tavern behind the Ponterosso, get drunk and sing loud songs about the various methods in which they would like to kill Turks. Jovo never joined them there, although he met them frequently enough at his countinghouse, not to mention at church, together with their Serbian wives and children, beneath that gilded ceiling as round as the hyponome of a chambered nautilus. His own signora continued to wear a veil. No one even knew what to call her until a carpenter as longnosed and comical as Pulcinella announced that her name was Marija; Pulcinella’s sister’s cousin was a dressmaker who had measured this Marija, so it must be true. The Triestini were thrilled by his stupendous news. Just before Assumption Day another vendor of ancient Greek vases visited the Cirtovic residence, departing well satisfied. Captain Morelli treated him at the “Heaven’s Key.” You wouldn’t believe how much wine he could deduct from a bottle! Nor was the experiment profitable; for although he was looser-lipped than any fisherman’s whore, for that very reason he had never gotten beyond the foyer, where Nicola, the master’s eldest son (an unsatisfied youth, he opined), had received him beneath a grand portrait of Prince Lazar, offered him Turkish coffee (served by a veiled woman, evidently Marija Cirtovic’s maid), summoned the strapping coachman to carry away the crates, then sat with him in almost unfriendly silence until Petar had returned with all the best pieces extracted, the compensation consisting of twelfth-century gold coins from Hungary, tiny as buttons, already counted out, the prices discounted not unfairly (as the vendor himself admitted), but certainly without appeal. He thought he heard the signora upbraiding someone in the kitchen. (You know how all those Serbkinas are, he told his delighted listener.) Presently Cirtovic himself had appeared, to inquire after shards with writing on them. He sought a certain diagram by Pythagoras, and would pay more if the circles touched externally. The vendor nodded conscientiously, ho
ping to deceive him with future trash. Perhaps Captain Morelli knew some Greek who might collaborate in painting ochered circles? By the way, the vendor had ascertained that Cirtovic’s granary held wheat right up to the roof!—more proof of their enemy’s grandiosity, as all agreed over Friulian wine; by then there were a dozen Triestini present, all hoping to make a fool of Jovo Cirtovic. Sad to say, Captain Morelli was knifed in the guts a few nights later, and the vendor fled the city, either because he had done it or because he feared to be next. When asked what he thought about the murder, Cirtovic said it was a shame that so jovial a man had been lost. The Triestini lowered their eyes. For their next device, they hired a pretty harlot to approach their victim at his countinghouse; but he turned her over to his brother Florio, while his factor Captain Vasojevic (another closemouthed man) watched half-smiling from the second storey. She blabbed about Florio’s habits, to be sure, but what the hell did they care about that adulterer?

  Jovo Cirtovic never failed to give hospitality to a certain itinerant snowy-bearded bard with a well-tuned guzla. At the “Heaven’s Key” the Triestini queried the old man as to the situations of rooms in the house, and where the coins were kept, and other such matters as good neighbors like to know about each other. Whenever the Cirtovices invited him to sing about the Battle of Kosovo, he got to observe the wife and daughters sewing around the hearth, beneath the smoking hams; and Cirtovic would be singing right along with him, haltingly accompanied by his sons. The imported servingmaid’s name, he said, was Srdjana—a tonguetwister, laughed the Triestini. They kept some hope of waylaying her, but she rarely came out of the house. Fortunately, some sailors do talk, especially over Friulian wine. Cirtovic’s mariners admitted freely that the Turkish bangles now shining on the wrists of their sweethearts came from Bar (their hosts, who promptly sought to trade there, fell mysteriously afoul of the Ragusan authorities), that their master’s brothers occasionally carried weapons and armaments into Serbia, and that Cirtovic owned better luck than any man they had heard of. As they already knew, he was a pious sort, who never failed to thank his saints. (By the way, Captain Vasojevic still refused to open his mouth.) One night the helmsman of the Lazar came by the “Heaven’s Key”; after his seventh glass of Friulian red he refuted Archimedes’s suppositions that a poppyseed-sized quantity of sand contains no more than ten thousand grains, and that the maximum possible diameter of the universe equals ten thousand times that of the earth, in which case the Sphere of Fixed Stars would be two hundred and fifty thousand stadia from Trieste, straight up—a decade’s journey, perhaps, depending on solar storms. After the twelfth glass, the helmsman grew confiding, and informed them with a childlike smile that granted fair lunar winds and adherence to certain timetables, the voyage could be made within half a year. Laughing, the purser (now into his seventeenth glass) put in that even if the excess of death can be added to itself, which he doubted, and indeed Cirtovic upheld him in his skepticism, then, with the aid of the Mother of God, something could presently be accomplished to the betterment of the Christian world. Then he fell asleep, but in the helmsman’s eyes shone an ideal like dawn light beyond the trees. The Triestini drunks agreed that these sailors knew more geography than anyone else; even the cook of the Lazar, who was formerly one of their own even though his uncle had apprenticed him out at Muggia, began after his sixth glass to discourse on matters beyond his station; he asked whether they had ever heard celestial music; and then, when they gaped at him, traced out with his fat forefinger the planetary orbits as drawn in the manuscript of Gjin Gazulli. Of course cooks, having food always within reach, find more time to think than other people; hence his remarks proved nothing, especially given the magical powers of the Friulian vintage—which meanwhile transformed itself ever more into gold and silver, until Jovo Cirtovic had risen out of envy’s sight. Sitting at his high wooden desk, which resembled the altar to which a judge ascends in order to sacrifice still another poor man to justice, he concealed himself behind a wall of ledgers. Occasionally the clerks overheard the thump of one of his roundhandled stamps. He sealed his documents himself, and kept the seal in his pocket.