Sofia

by Ann Chamberlin

  “The first mate!” she exclaimed with scorn. “Now I know you are full of lies. You are much too young to be the first mate of a fishing boat, let alone a galley.”

  Although this time I had spoken the truth, her scorn cut as deeply as if I had been caught in an abominably proud boast.

  “My uncle is her captain,” I insisted. “I have been at sea with him since I was eight and he does indeed charge me with such responsibility. As a matter of fact,” and now I sought to get back at her, “I have been personally charged with the safe conduct of both yourself and your holy chaperon.” I nodded in the direction of the aunt’s convent. “Good day, Madonna Baffo. I will see you on the dock at the rising of the tide on Saint Sebastian’s Day.”

  The girl sucked her breath at this and then let it out in a little squeal of anger. She stooped down and grabbed a handful of pebbles from the path which she flung at me. I scrambled up the wall in a moment—it was easy for one used to the rigging of ships—and sat perched on the top, out of her range.

  I tipped my hat once more and bade Governor Baffo’s fair daughter a fond “Until Saint Sebastian’s Day.”

  Then I dropped over the wall, pursued by her curses to the end of the lane and the canal.

  II

  “A willful and headstrong girl,” my uncle Jacopo said with a disbelieving shake of his head as I finished telling him my afternoon’s adventure.

  His voice gave me a moment’s chill, coming as it did from behind the mask he was trying on before a small mirror in our room. The black mask’s beetling brows that made the eyes empty pits and the grotesque nose that gave a sepulchral hiss to his words had me convinced for a moment that my uncle spoke to me from beyond the grave.

  Uncle Jacopo swept the mask off his face. It was of a piece with the tall, conical white hat, so that he now stood revealed as the man I’d always known and loved, who’d taken me in when my own parents and his wife had died in the same epidemic. Life fairly burst from his dark eyes, the flash around them heavily crinkled from much gazing across a sunburned sea. The gray on his wavy hair was no more than the white -caps formed before a warm, gentle south wind that made for good sailing and a quick homeward journey.

  “Why don’t you wear this mask tonight?” he asked, handing me the now-limp disguise.

  “Me, Uncle?”

  “Oh, I masked my share in my day, I can tell you. Used it to cover youth and folly and more indiscretion than I can remember.”

  “You, Uncle?” I teased. “My pious, God-fearing uncle? I won’t believe it!”

  “You don’t believe it because I was always careful to wear a mask when I did it,” he replied with a conspiratorial wink. He rested a hand on my shoulder, which was now almost level with his. “The time comes to pass everything on to younger blood, those with the stamina to take it. Accept the mask as the first of everything I shall leave you.”

  “Uncle, I expect to be best man at your remarriage any day now, and then what follows—”

  “No, Giorgio. I won’t remarry. I couldn’t get a son if I did. Too many whores in too many ports. The pox they carry— I won’t put another decent woman through what I put my Isabella in her honest attempts to get an heir. It’s up to you. The continuation of our line, the charge from God in the Garden to multiply and replenish, it’s all on your shoulders now. See that you don’t fail that responsibility as I have done.”

  “I shall not,” I answered my uncle’s sudden and unaccustomed sobriety with what I hoped would match it. “But let’s not think of that now, not tonight, not at Carnival.”

  The mood would not leave my uncle yet, though he pushed at it with sarcasm and a flourish. “I bequeath to you the grand old mask of the Veniero revelers.”

  “Thank you, most gracious uncle. I accept.” When he phrased it like that, I could hardly refuse. “But you will wear my visor. For Carnival.”

  Uncle Jacopo took my simple black satin band and fingered it as he turned to look more out the window than at what he held in his hand. We were on the third story; the more prosperous branches of the family claimed the lower floors but allowed us these small rooms whenever the sea brought us home. Our long months abroad, after all, paid for their tapestries, their Persian rugs, their silverplate, their long winter evenings by the fireside. Our labor paid for their glass windows, a luxury we rarely saw elsewhere, but which were common here, even on third floors, like the one my uncle gazed through now.

  The window was made of twenty or more separate little panes, their round bull’s-eyes leaded together in a pattern of alternating red, green, and clear. All I could see from where I stood was the occasional dart of a sea gull through the clear circles. I supposed my uncle could see more.

  “Ah, Venice.” He sighed, laboring under his mood of dark premonition. “ ‘If the Earthly Paradise where Adam dwelt with Eye were like Venice, Eye would have had a difficult time tempting him away from it with a mere fig.’

  He was quoting Pietro Aretino, the famous satirist who was then but six years in his grave. I knew my uncle meant merely to comment on the fact that in none of her colonies, where we spent most of our time, was the tradition of masks at Carnival allowed. But I could not help recalling the image Baffo’s daughter evoked for me in another garden that afternoon. Signorina Baffo was a subject I felt we had left too soon, but I didn’t know how to bring my uncle around to it again, especially with this mood on him.

  I had gone so far as to admit aloud, “I shall never lose the taste for talk of her.”

  At this my uncle had laughed and joked about my “growing lad’s appetite.” Then he’d gone on to say, “I wonder about Governor Baffo’s willingness to entrust his daughter to the year’s first sail. What is she, that the marrying of her cannot wait for more settled weather?”

  “The governor must be acquainted with your skills, Uncle. He trusts you to find the harbors in the worst storm and bring her safe if any can.”

  “Let us pray to Saint Elmo it may be so.” My uncle let me know by his tone that my sense of immortality was a youthful rashness. With a sigh, he’d gone on, “I, for one, am ready to be off. Enough of this anchored life, this tedium! This constant sense our land-locked cousins give me that I cannot swim in this little drop of theirs. Pray, Giorgio, for good weather on the twentieth, lest the Council rescind its leniency, fear more losses of the Republic’s profits, and shove the day of first sail on into Lent once more.”

  To distract myself as much as anything, I fit the mask on my head and over my face. I breathed the sour, slightly salty smell of my uncle as if the black leather over my nose were his own flayed skin. But what a transformation I discovered in the mirror Uncle Jacopo had propped up in the niche along with the guardian statue of the Virgin!

  The anxious hunger for more about Sofia Baffo that twitched my cheeks was wiped clean like a slate of chalk marks. Such cleansing power is in the mystery of the mask, the total evaporation right before the eyes of all individuality, of joy and sorrow, of good and evil, of youth and old age. Even male and female, the very first attribute with which a midwife burdens a babe, even that could vanish behind a mask and one could be at once unborn, as yet only hoped for. I had heard stories of it happening.

  When the world sees us as individuals, it robs us. “So much may you do,” it says, “but no more. No more as an untried youth, the lesser son of a lesser son. Or as a woman.” But take all of that from a man’s face—what freedom is there! And power.

  I felt a thrill and turned to my uncle for his approval, the first time since I’d climbed the plane tree that other things besides “Saint Sebastian’s Day” set my heart to skipping.

  Even as he frowned the lips below his simple black band in a thoughtful nod at my sudden erasure, the bells of Venice began to ring all about us. The bird flight across the clear glass panes darted faster now, as if the gulls and pigeons were evensong made corporeal.

  “There. It is time we were going,” my uncle said. He took our two evening capes up off the bed and
tossed me mine.

  We stopped by briefly to beg, unsuccessfully, that Husayn in the next room should join us. He was such a good old friend of the family that we could never see him put up with the rest of his kind under the watchful eye of Messer Marc Antonio Barbaro. But it was wiser for us to ignore a Carnival recklessness, as Husayn always managed to do, and to remember that he was a Muslim passing as a Christian. He was good at his cover, but every time church bells rang, you could see he was hearing the muezzin’s call. His face betraved a certain longing that might be called homesickness, or merely an ache in the knee joints to sink onto a carpet facing Mecca once more. The less Venice saw of that, the more serene the Republic could remain.

  So we left Husayn with his ledgers and went on our way, stopping only once more to pick up our black Piero from the servants’ quarters. We would need him to bear the torch on our return.

  We began to wish Piero had taken a torch from the bracket at home. Dark came early these winter evenings. A storm was blowing in off the lagoon and it began to drizzle, extinguishing all but the most stalwart of the shrine votives. Venice’s alleyways were usually quite well illuminated by these public displavs of piety. Now we passed only a few ghostly Madonnas, shivering before the blast.

  The very stones of Venice seemed to be weeping, the wood loosed the smell of damp rot. The canals pockmarked in the twilight, the stairs on the bridges over them grew slick. The low arches we passed under were some cover, but ghostly light thrown up from the water danced on the corbels of their roofs. It was a night for the closed cab of a gondola, but as a mariner, my uncle took hard ground when he could get it, even when it meant, as it did that night, going the long way round.

  “Though I am hard pressed to call Venice terra firma under any circumstances,” he quipped. In several places, the dark water had begun to lap its way up into flagstone yards and piazzas.

  We came at last to the palace of my dead mother’s kin, the Foscari. I did not know this center of wealth and power well, these four stories of imposing red brick. The Foscari lords hoped that an occasional invitation to such events would be enough to discharge their familial obligations to us. And if we were at sea when the summons came, all the better for them, pity for me.

  The manservant in brilliant scarlet livery who opened the door failed at first to recognize my name. My uncle exchanged a glance with me. Even masked, that glance urged long suffering. I silently swore, as I had done so many times, that someday with heaven’s help I would put the Foscari in their place and make them recognize me.

  “No wonder Venice is so full of public demands of heaven, lining their alleys with votives.” This murmur into my uncle’s ear was as close as I could come to long suffering when at last the door closed at our backs and we were relieved of our wet wraps. “Perhaps I should buy a candle and make such a compact with heaven tomorrow. Do you think that would help them remember my name?”

  Uncle Jacopo smiled and gestured for restraint as we entered the Foscari lobby, rich with paintings by Bellini and Titian at which it would not be good manners to gawk as closely as I wanted to. I did fully intend to make such a vow. But that is one more youthful resolution I never got around to doing.

  My Foscari uncles had footed a play in their own private theater that night, something to give Carnival a shove off its moorings of Christmas and Epiphany. The prologue had already begun as Uncle Jacopo and I slipped into our seats on the left-hand side of a tiered arrangement that bracketed the stage on three sides. We might have received scowls for our tardiness, except for the fact that this was Venice and many others were even later. In our masks, we might have been the Doge and his nephew for all the others knew.

  And this thought set my mind stirring in its old direction again. “Do you think, Uncle—?” I sued into his ear. “Do you think there’s a chance Baffo’s daughter might—?”

  “We must think of her as any other package of goods we are hired to carry,” he replied firmly.

  No one scowled at our talk, for no one in the audience kept quiet if it didn’t suit them. In general, they carried on a lively chatter among themselves, slapped down tin playing cards, ventured at dice, and even brawled. And scarlet-liveried servants mingled, offering drinks, antipasti, and tasseled cushions to keep the feet off the cold marble floor. The production on stage was, in fact, hardly more than the background, like a group of instrumentalists set up on a balcony over the conviviality in a sitting room.

  It was a new play. I’ve forgotten the author if, indeed, it had one and was not a joint effort of the cast. I didn’t take long to get the gist of the plot. The characters were those familiar to us from commedia dell’arte. Their relationships were the same, as it must be with any set of caricatures. Only their surroundings were novel, and the smell of fresh scenery paint made me worry for the actor’s costumes any time they passed too close to the rear flats.

  My uncle read my thoughts through the mask at the first entrance of our young female lead, Columbine. “We must give our cargo the care of uncut jewels,” he counseled, “but ignore her like salted fish.”

  Our sweet maid Columbine did not undergo her perils in Italy as usual. She had been kidnapped from the bosom of her

  family and spirited away to the harem of the Turkish Sultan, a part Pantalone took on himself in a leering mask, familiar for all its darkness and token turban. And of course it was up to Harlequin, the blustering Captain, and their friends to save her with lots of slapstick, pies in the face, and tying the Pantalone-Sultan up in his own turban “for Saint Mark and for Venice!” No matter how distracted the audience was with themselves, the expression of these sentiments never failed to elicit applause and a cheer, so it was repeated, frequently and loudly from the stage.

  “I am glad Husayn stayed home,” I told Uncle Jacopo.

  I was struck at once by the strange fascination the transport of familiar characters to this exotic setting had on my fellow countrymen. The Sultan was an adversary at whose discomfort any Venetian could cheer. But the spectacle of scores of beautiful, nubile, totally dependent, submissive young women bored to voraciousness answered some deeper fantasy. This says more about what we wish for out womenfolk, I thought, than about the barbarousness of our enemy.

  And presented by the illusion of harem walls on stage, the afternoon’s scene in the convent garden wouldn’t leave me.

  “Corfu is not such a long journey,” Uncle Jacopo said in sympathy.

  Having established the plot so it no longer required my undivided attention, I remarked how odd it was that actors in masks should be playing for an audience equally, if not more heavily, masked. Who had the greater persona to create? The most to hide? I remembered the surge of power I’d felt when I’d first let the mask obliterate my features. The power an actor has to commit gross fooleries on stage and yet risk no censure when he returns to normal life.

  Even more than the actors’ power, however, was the power to see without being seen, the power of an omniscient audience who knew that Harlequin was concealed behind that screen, when the Sultan did not.

  The fact that our familiar Columbine added to her lacy pink mask the effigy of a Turkish lady’s veils made me take one more leap of association. What if the harem was not at all how we wished it could be for our lecherous old Pantalones?

  “What do Turkish women feel when they drape their faces beyond the profane gaze and escaped the trap of individuality?” I asked.

  My uncle laughed out loud, but only shrugged. “Your afternoon has turned your head. You can never know what any woman is thinking. Turkish women might not exist for all we may fathom them. And for your information, the same holds true for Baffo’s daughter.”

  I had been with my uncle to the lands of the infidel. I liked our friend Husayn, knew him to be no barbarian. But it occurred to me that my mind brought nothing—nothing at all beyond these same lecherous imaginings that were the product of my culture, not theirs—when I tried to conjure with the words “women of the Ottomans.” Th
e women I knew in Constantinople were all Europeans—wives of colleagues. And the whores my uncle frequented, who gave him his disease. Women who’d found their profession too congested here and sought advancement on foreign shores.

  They were never spoken of, Turkish women, certainly not paraded on stage like this. I’d never seen a Turkish woman that I could recall. Perhaps they all had two heads and that monstrosity was what the flitting grilles and passing sedans camouflaged. Perhaps it was some other secret. Great, unearthly beauty my countrymen liked to believe. What about influence? Power?

  The Turks did have shadow puppets. I remembered seeing a shadow play in a public square in Constantinople once. The characters seemed to be the same stock figures we knew in Venice. There had been women—shrewish old ones; fair, sweet young ones. That was all they were—figures in a shadow play. But suppose that is what I was to them? All men were to them, seen through their screens? And who was pulling the strings?

  The rows of candlelight in Venice’s alleys told me that— for all their bruit, their annual presumption to take the Adriatic as a bride, their masks and lavish spectacles—even the Foscari, the greatest of my countrymen, were never fully confident they ruled the world.

  I remembered the feeling of power hiding my face had given me—continued to give me as I looked brazenly about that evening’s assembly. I let my eyes rove where they would, on bosom or codpiece, on pompous righteousness or untrammeled debauchery, never bothering to censor my thoughts lest they register in my face. Suppose Turkish women had that same freedom not just on Carnival nights but all day, every day, from birth—

  God above! What was I thinking? The last thing on earth I wanted to be was a woman!

  “Still to understand them—” I tried to tempt my uncle.

  Action on the stage distracted my musings at this point. No piece of brilliantly rehearsed staging, but an unforeseen blunder produced the sudden general guffaw. It caught everyone off guard and prohibited further advancement of the plot while even the actors struggled with tears of mirth under their visors.