Wendelin had supposed all Italian girls dark, in the same way that German women tended almost universally to fairness. He was astonished at the prevalence of blondes in Venice. Johann, informed by his new wife, explained that Venetian women dyed their hair with noxious substances. Furtively sniffing her hair and gazing at her downy parting, Wendelin immediately dismissed any suspicions about the naturalness of his bride’s supple curls. With that matter settled, he relinquished all other trepidations at the notion of marrying a Venetian.
‘We shall indeed commit matrimony?’ he had asked her, when it was already obvious to all that no other course was possible to them. When he handed her the ring, he descended laboriously to one bended knee. Awkward as a puppy, he held out his short arms and inclined his large head to one side. The girl, already madly in love with his slightly crossed pale blue eyes, and firmly decided upon the number of their sons, had fallen into his arms, laughing.
‘I shall be married to an angel?’ Wendelin asked, amazed. ‘You even like me?’
‘Very much. This much,’ she smiled, kissing both his eyes. The next day he appeared at work, his hair rumpled at the back, a sure sign of erotic dreaming. His Venetian employees smiled to themselves, and thumped each other on the shoulder.
Chapter Two
Who’s seen beings so beatified?
Or so sweet-omened in their love?
My ma was got with me when she’d no more years than I have now – five short of an old crone of twenty, five more than a child of ten. She told me it was on a horse. I think that was to throw me off the sniff of her tale, for how often does one meet with a horse in this town?
It served her well, the horse. All I could do, for I was then but small, was ask her about the horse – I loved those beasts with all my heart.
‘Tell me of the horse!’ I would cry. I wanted to know every small thing about it. Had it in fact four legs each as tall as a man and did it run fast as a boat flies on waves at high tide? Was it white like foam, or grey like an old barrel? Did it make a noise like a long wet sneeze in March?
For years, in fact, I asked of nothing but the horse. Only when I first lay with my own man did I think to ask my ma for the rest of that tale of how she was got with me. It turned out that she was in the country, in a trap pulled by a horse, when my pa had got to love her just there and then. The rear end of the horse, which was in fact a white one, moved so sweet and smooth that his thoughts, which were then wet with wine, turned to acts of love and he could do nought but grind grain with my ma in the trap with the horse all loose in her reins and half in the road and half on the grass all the way from one town to the next.
So then there was me. I was born on the land, where they kept a farm, though both of them were from this town. But by the time I had five years my pa had moved us all back to this town. He’d made our land water-sick by too many irrigations, That madman tries to make Venice on terraferma,’ I heard one farm-wife hiss to another.
And so it seemed – for soon he could not live one day more with no sea smells in his nose and no sea light at play on the walls. He gave up his great water-stained farm, and all the horses (there was a small one for me), cows and wheat and vines and peacocks, even, that screeched in the yard, and came back to the old wet house in Venice where he’d been born.
He had then to put up with the whisperings of those who said he’d failed on the land. Though all knew in their hearts that to be gone from this town, if you were born here, is like to a living death, and that one day you must own it is so, and make your choice: to live like a worm on the dirt of dry land – for a rich, fat worm is still a worm – or to come home to the clean, good sea and live like a fish, but a fish with a soul.
So then I would wake in a room with sea light at play on the walls, and I grew, first two feet above the rim of the sea, then three, then four.
My father bought a shop, a small concern, which he planned to grow bigger. He worked and drank and worked and drank. He came home with the stench of wine on his mouth and I did not want him to kiss me. He did. I made a sourpuss purse with my lips and would wait till he’d gone before I would breathe again. Then I went out to the canal, spread my arms, and turned around and around and around, until the stink of his kiss was unravelled and blown away.
My father’s shop was a cartolaio, which sold books and the ingredients for books. His clients could contract the making and binding of handwritten books or bring an old book in for decoration with new boards on the outside or letters painted in gold and tempera at the tops of pages inside. In his small dark shop at Rialto the smell of ink nudged the smell of fish out of my nose when I went in there. (Of course, I was not allowed to touch the books he sold, just to smell them when he held them out to me.) I always begged him: ‘Hold the page to the light,’ so I could see the watermark – a bird, a gauntlet, a unicorn, perhaps! I loved these more than the words on the page, though I’d learned to read those too, with ease, more fluent even than my pa himself.
My pa tried to make a big noise in the town with smooth paper made of rags and oils, finer than the skins of goats but at half the cost and with a sweet dusty scent to it. He bought from mills on terraferma and set up to sell it in the town at profit.
The great objects of his ambition were those outsiders who’d come here not long back who said they could use it to make books. These were not those books that scribes make, one each year, each word carved as if from wood. No! These were quick books! Eight score books born at the same time like a brood of flies and each one whole and good, and each word in it whole and good too. My father was on fire with a dream that these quick books would make us rich.
They came from the North, these men who made the quick books. They brought with them small sharp tools that were special for books. Each one of those tools made a piece of a word. Each word made a piece of a page, and so it went.
One day my pa took me to see the men from the North at work on the quick books. They made them in the fondaco of the Germans by the Rialto Bridge. I was to wait below while pa went up to see if I might be allowed to come in to watch them at work.
So I sat on the steps of the bridge and looked up at the house and in the glass of the third floor, just then, I saw a face which I knew though I did not.
Straight away I felt that kind of shiver that starts in your neck and forks out through your body searching for a way out of you. There was a melting in my privities and a taste in my mouth like a citrus liquor and the light went strange, as if the sun had been taken with a fever and smeared its white eye.
I did not wait for my pa. I ran up the stairs in the heart of the fondaco. I knew just which way to go, though I did not. My pa looked shocked to see me there. He stood next to the man with the face, who smiled and smiled, but he was curd-pale with shock just as I was. He was fair as a chicken and wore his clothes stiffly, like a new pine coffin. I lifted my right hand up to ask leave to wait while I caught breath. They let me pant till I could speak.
My pa said: ‘I would like you to meet my …’ but I stopped him with my hand on his. I said, fast as if the words could be set free from my mouth, ‘No, no! You see, we are to be together,’ While I said this I held my palm up in front of the man’s face, like a flag that says ‘Love Me’.
‘Yes,’ said the man from the North, and I heard snow and spires and pine trees in his voice. I saw he had perhaps few years more than me and this seemed just right. Then he too held up the palm of his right hand, like a fish tendering its fin, like a flag that says ‘Yes’.
My pa looked from him to me and me to him and grew quite old in two jumps of a flea. It was as if the horse and acts of love were gone from him now for good, as it was my turn.
Then my pa’s face split in a white-tooth grin like the foam wake of a boat. I knew at once why he looked so pleased. For in this town of trade we sell all the things we love, and my pa saw that he might now sell his own child, me. My price was this: the man from the North might have me if he would buy all the rag stuf
f – which is called paper – to print his books from my pa now, and never mind the price, if he was to have acts of love with me, as I could see he wished to with all his heart.
And so did I, with him.
In the time it took my pa to bring one boatload of paper to the house of the men from the North I was betrothed to the man whose face I knew and did not.
* * *
Wendelin von Speyer wrote to Padre Pio:
I’ve not forgotten that you asked us to tell you all about Venice. So here are my impressions. As yet, I write in German, but indeed my Italian has improved beyond measure, and for a reason you might easily guess if you could see my face … but back to Venice!
How to compare it with Speyer? Speyer is a good little nun. Venice is a beautiful pirate. Before we came here we were told they were a lewd race, but to my mind the Venetians are not so full of the fleshly vices as a love of things. I believe they would sell their souls for spices, dyes, aromatics and salt from Egypt, furs and slaves from Tartary, soft wools and worked metals from our own northern lands. I never saw a town with such a lust for stuffs of all kinds! And even if Venice does not want those things, she still likes to handle them a little as they pass through. It’s a law that every sack of cinnamon, every twist of pepper, every bar of gold, which comes through Venice, even if merely on the way from Corfu to Flanders, must be traded at Rialto, to the profit of the town.
She (so you must call her, for Venice is more feminine than any place, if not always exactly a lady) has become a repository of precious and edible goods. And things of forms so exotic that one can only guess at their origin and purpose. Every day I see vegetables I cannot name and fabrics I could not dream. Even humble pumpkins are spiral-cut in airy slices, just for the joy of it. When I take the air with my bride-to-be – (Yes! I cannot resist inserting this information in the middle of my account of Venice: I am to be married!) – we often go to market, so she can teach me more about the town.
Rialto is our university, she declares. In this case, she says, I am the student and she the teacher. She giggles then, whispering shyly, ‘But in other things, you will be the teacher.’ She barely utters the words before she blushes and covers up her huge eyes with her tiny hands. I too find myself scarlet, but wave upon wave of pleasure crashes inside my whole body.
With so much of the exotic laid out for them on stalls every day, the Venetians seem to think themselves characters from some oriental tale, wily as Sinbad, mystical as giaours … yet in them all this orientalism takes the form of a mysterious languidness. They need more sleep than a cat, and it’s beyond them to come less than one hour late to any appointment, yawning and plaintive. It is no shame to them to send a boy to say they are simply too tired to come at all.
It fits when Lussièta explained to me this day that the Venetians are worn out – sodden – with a communal dreaming of the Orient, which has flowed (with no effort on their part, of course) into their imaginations, both from travellers’ tales and even more so, I think, from the flavours and perfumes of the spices in the market, which travel up their noses and embed foreign pleasures in their very brains.
We stood on the docks this morning, watching the trade galleys take flight to the horizon. My bride explained in great detail (she’s so wise in the workings of this town) how the Venetians, never stirring from their opulent gondolas, instead send their money on voyages. A round trip to Alexandria repays the investors one thousand per cent dividends. Even better, they are trading practical things, like iron and timber, for picturesque luxuries. I have a vision of the hopes and fortunes of half Venice floating on the sea, or trotting on the back of a camel twenty days east of Byzantium. (So the boat-builders are not always sleeping, then! This is good to know.)
When you asked me to describe the town I think you meant how it looks. Venetian houses are not like other houses. They are like boats, always ready to make a journey to Aleppo or Damascus! You do not enter a Venetian house, you embark upon it. And once you are inside – the sunlight reflects the waves on to the walls until you feel as if you’ve gone underwater to some strange new city below the waves.
This is of course all most outlandish. But Johann and I find that we are well suited here. You were absolutely correct in your advice, Padre: the Venetians have built a fine fondaco at Rialto for her respected German businessmen. Indeed all ‘Tedeschi’ merchants must stay and live there – I suppose, to ensure they do no smuggling or private enterprise untaxed by the town. It’s here we have set up our business.
Like German trade with Venice, the fondaco building has grown like a wild plant that flourishes so the plan is not particularly symmetrical. However, it is pleasing. The courtyard to the south, where we have our rooms, boasts seven splendid arches in each of its arcades.
The fondaco has its own kitchens and cooks. There’s a spacious dining room on the first floor. There are good wells with fresh water. The wine-store is open all night for our use. An excellent house master, appointed last year for his whole life (if he likes the work – there’s no keeping a Venetian in servitude), keeps the whole running smoothly, dispensing fresh sheets for the visiting merchants, keeping an eye on the porters, the boatmen, the weighers, the stampers and packers. He reports to a committee of three Venetian nobles, the visdomini. It’s all run rather like a college or a friary, well ordered and peaceful. Each merchant has his own sensale, a kind of Venetian broker, to advise what tax he must pay on each transaction. And of course Signor Sensale must have his little packet too.
It’s locked up every night against the robbers and madmen, of which, I regret to say, there appear to be many in this beautiful town, though probably not as many as they told us recently, when they increased the charges for guarding us.
We ourselves no longer live under the fondaco’s roof. We’ve finally persuaded the Venetians that we are not traders; that we are here to stay. We shall be citizens now, by grace of our marriages, of which I shall tell you more. We have rented two small houses behind a square known as San Pantalon.
We are both so happy with the women we have found. Imagine this: we might dandle Venetian babies on our laps next year! On the bad side, my father-in-law-to-be makes his demands upon us – he supplies us with good paper but drinks his own business dry and looks to me to help him. Johann is more lucky in this respect: his prospective father-in-law is a portrait painter of great renown. But Johann’s Paola is of a colder disposition than my Lussièta, and I am glad with the choice I have made, if you can call it a choice.
I am learning not to be hurt by the Venetians. Ach, so strange! Sometimes I think I have made a friend here; the next time I see him his eyes are opaque and he barely acknowledges me in the street, as if I’ve caused him some deep offence.
I believe now that the Venetians are like the water they live upon: they’re extremely sensual in their manners, always dragging their hands with slow pleasure over all their smooth stones and banister-rails. They change mood according to tides of success and happiness, according to light and darkness. The town affects them so much: how can it not? To live in such a strangely poetic place, full of windows and water and reflections!
I confess that I myself am not immune to the sensuality of the place. I feel the love of Venice in me in parts where I should not feel love for a city. But I fear that I grow boring in my enthusiasm for my new home. I shall now desist. Please convey my news to my parents when you see them in church on Sunday. Next week, when there is more time, I shall write to them. Lussièta is calling me. My little sweetmeat! She embodies this quality that I can only describe as ‘towardness’, which makes all living things, I included, incline towards her in the expectation of pleasure, which she unfailingly delivers. As for me, she warms my heart like hot beer! Sometimes, when I catch sight of her, I just raise my hands like the old saints at prayer and I say to myself, in my new tongue, ‘Ecco qua! Un miracolo!’
You will say that I live as yet in the idolatrous season of the newly-betrothed, but I feel certain th
at this balmy time will last for ever.
All this I have now, because you helped us to come to Venice. I never stop in my heart thanking you for sending us here, Padre Pio, never.
* * *
On 18 September 1469 the Collegio of Venice conferred upon Johann von Speyer the exclusive right to print the letters of Cicero and the Natural History of Pliny ‘in the most beautiful form of lettering’. Fines and confiscations protected this right if any other entrepreneur should commence a rival printing works.
Johann could not fully understand it, but the German merchants crowding round him at the fondaco to look at the elaborate document, thumped his shoulders and shook his hand. They read aloud the signatures of the Consiliari: Angelus Gradenigo, Bertuccius Contareno, Franciscus Dandolo, Jacobus Maureceno, Angelus Venerio: there were no more noble names to be seen in Venice.
A tiny man, bandy-legged as a turnspit-dog, tried to push through the crowd to the front. The Germans calmly joined ranks with their arms and elbows, keeping him to the back. There was a sound of whimpering and scurrying and suddenly his pocked face and one scarlet ear appeared between two German waists for a moment. The other half of his head was hidden in the hood of his cloak.
‘Who’s he?’ asked Wendelin with distaste/I mean what’s he?’
‘A spy from the priests at Murano,’ hissed a merchant. ‘They hate the thought of this monopoly. Unless it’s the Bible, and in Latin, they hate the whole idea of printing.’
* * *
To dream about your future love, they say you should remove the yolk from a hard-boiled egg and put salt in its place. Eat this for supper, just before going to bed. To know the trade of your future husband, crack the white of an egg into a glass of water. The shapes formed in the liquid will tell all.
I’d no need for such things. I knew my man and what he did, before I knew I was ready for a husband.
I saw him every day after that first one. He came to sign for me, to meet my ma, to sign some more, to try the ring. (He kneeled to give it to me!) He could even then speak the tongue of this country quite well, but not fast. When he speaks a small part wrong it charms my soul to see how it grieves him. His worst mistake was – and it is still – to tuck the word of action deep in the far end of the sentence so I must hold my breath for a long time to see where his thoughts are going.
The Floating Book Page 9