Now I saw that it did. Not only reality, but a depth and life that sometimes made me doubt the reality of the life I had left behind. I listened to these men as they sat about on the deck in the evenings talking of their homes as sailors all over the world do, and I found my view of life to be doubling in size.
My first attempts to join in this talk were met with hearty laughter. It was not, I soon learned, a mockery of my clumsy speech, but rather a true delight to have one more added to their numbers. Haifa dozen or so of my countrymen, realizing that the alternative was an early death at the Turkish oars, soon professed Islam and joined with us as well. I did not scorn them for their apostasy. How could I, seeing that only a statement of ten words or so stood between our two virtues? Soon we were a very merry company indeed.
One thing only I felt was missing. Saracens, you must know, never speak of their women. They are quite particular about this; it is a tenet of religion with them. Even Husayn the Syrian was different from Enrico the Venetian I had jested with earlier on the Santa Lucia in this respect. When one of the converts sought to entertain us with a tale of his adventures in an Algerian brothel, he received such a look from my friend that he let the subject fall as decidedly bad taste. From then on, we might have been a ship of monks.
Madonna Baffo and the single female companion left to her remained guarded and separate, even though this called for the construction of a sort of screen about one end of the small ship because there were no cabins. Makeshift as the bits of canvas and broken crating were, they were effective, and so, besides being unspoken of, the women were also unseen and it was possible to ignore them altogether.
For others it was possible, but not for me. One day as I happened to pass near their corner of the ship, the guard motioned to me. I remembered him as the fellow who thought Madonna Baffo was my sister. I approached and saw through a flap in the canvas that the Governor’s daughter had been trying to ask something of her captors, but without success.
Smiling more at the guard than I dared to at the girl, I asked, “What is the matter?”
“I only wanted to know,” Madonna Baffo said with extreme and sudden coldness, “where they are taking us.”
“Constantinople,” I said, full of glad tidings.
“Constantinople. I see. Thank you, Signor Veniero,” and the canvas dropped behind her.
I explained the exchange to the guard as best I could. He nodded, and we shared a good laugh over something that, without direct reference to them, might well be translated as “the simplicity of women.”
Later, however, I thought the matter over and was deeply moved to pity. There those two women had been for over a week now without any knowledge of what their future might be. What dreadful fancies must have stirred their imaginations! Now that they knew the truth, surely their fancies could be no less oppressive. Madonna Baffo had been in sight of her father’s ships and his safe harbor, but had been violently torn away. If Corfu seemed a nowhere place, then Constantinople was the end of the world, a land of barbarians and infidels.
I thought perhaps I might go and lighten her heart somewhat with assurances that it was really a grand and civilized place, actually larger than any city in Christendom, more decently policed, and wealthier, even, than Venice. But that would be telling her fairy tales she would never experience in true life. If it was the galleys and the mines for the men, it was slavery in the harems for the women. Ah, there was a thought, the pain of which I had gladly and purposely avoided until that brief interview brought it home. And when it hit, the pain was great indeed.
Still, I could not share my pain with anyone. It would not be seemly to speak of women so to the Turks—and besides, these were less than women; they were slaves; it was Allah’s will. Now I knew some of the stifle the young women suffered. It turned the pain inward, made it fester and turn to gangrene. At least they had one another to cling to. Their talk could serve as a surgeon’s lance to let infection out. I had no one. I could not even speak to Husayn, my dear and closest friend. No, I had made my choice and, like a Turk now, I must learn to be satisfied.
For days on end the doubts and fears ran like a drunken brawl through my mind. Sometimes it grew so fierce that I could no longer bear to sit among the quiet, pleasant company of sailors and I had to seek out a lonely spot to suffer it alone. The spot I found was behind some boxes and barrels of provisions.
Turks are mistrustful of the loner. For them, even the most stifling company is preferable to the terrors of solitude. That comes, Husayn once told me, from the old days in the desert when loneliness was a constant curse for which there was only rarely ease. But they were considerate of a Christian’s idiosyncrasies and the cook learned to come and make his rummage through the stores with respect, even if he couldn’t do it completely free of all suspicion as to what a mind alone might be hatching.
It just so happened that this little corner was bordered on one side by the space set aside for the women. I would have found this a thing to try to escape in my state of mind, but it was a portion of their compound the women avoided, being exposed to gales and spray. Even the legend on the broken crating between us, BAFFO-CORFU, was a liability until I learned to avoid its sight and look only at the ever-changing, yet ever-calming, mind-wiping monotony of the sea.
One day, however, I suffered an intrusion. We’d hit a calm; the oars clashed rhythmically, loose in their leather slings. It was shortly after we had caught a glimpse of Patmos off starboard. I remember this detail because that island is everywhere revered as the home of Saint John, and what happened to me there had the quality of revelation about it.
Between the slats of a rifled crate, Sofia Baffo appeared to me in a vision. She walked slowly, tenderly cradling a bundle in her arms. I remembered our first meetings to which this was a sharp contrast. Music again accompanied her steps, but the tune she hummed was a dirge and her steps the measured ones of a funeral march.
Yet, I thought as I watched her approach, she would be no easier to catch in this guise than she had been when she was lively in the convent garden. A log is no easier to pick up when it is flaming than when burned to a white ash. Such a cold, burned-out log did Madonna Baffo seem to be now.
She is like Phaethon of old, I thought. As the sparks of his fall were strewn across the sky to become the Milky Way, so the fire of her last journey must be making an eternal trail of golden bits across the blue Mediterranean. And by the time we reached Constantinople, there would be nothing left at all of the blaze that had once been.
I almost thought I could see through her. She wore the light gold angel’s dress she had worn since her capture and her figure had grown markedly thinner. Even her hair lacked luster and remained, for the most part, trapped beneath her plain square kerchief. Certain that the merest puff of air would disintegrate her, I did not dare breathe as she came near.
No more than three paces away, Baffo’s daughter caught sight of me and started. If possible, she grew paler and thinner still, then quickly turned on her heels and made to go back the way she had come.
“No—no, don’t go,” I said in hardly more than a whisper. She stopped. She turned. These were two definite movements separated by a long pause of thought and a deliberate tightening of the shoulders. She took a step or two toward me, but still I could tell that she trusted me no more than had I been a spirit myself.
“What do you want?” she asked. She said it quietly, not so much from a fear of being overheard as from listless-ness that could not find the exertion of full voice worth the trouble.
“How...how are you?” I asked, tentatively cheerful.
Her look told me at once how stupid and tasteless my question was. How should she be under such conditions? It did not deserve an answer.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered, then tried brightness on a different tack. “What have you got there in your arms?” She looked hard at me, then came deliberately up to the partition. She whipped the corner of the cloth away from her bundle. My heart
skipped a beat and my eyes looked down in confusion. In her arms she held the little corpse of her favorite lapdog. Of aunt and maid, canaries and dogs, this was the last, and now he, too, was gone. His little needlelike canine teeth showed in a mouth half-opened in a sort of bizarre grimace.
I did not know what to say and finally came out with a clumsy, “I’m sorry.”
I’ll bet you are, her stare told me. She then covered the little creature up once more, carried him to the rail, and silently let him drop into the sea.
A long time passed in silence before she turned to me again. Her eyes, I saw, were dry, as dry as chalk, so it must hurt the lids to close over them.
“His name was Cosi-cosi.” She fixed me with a look whose aridity seemed to drain the moisture from all it touched. “Cosi-cosi. Because he was half brown and half white. I had him for five years, ever since he was a pup.” Her final statement that was worth an hour’s storytelling: “He was a gift from my father before he sailed for Corfu.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“I wanted to say good-bye to him alone. I wanted to be alone. But you are here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said for the third time. “I’ll go.” And I scrambled to my feet.
“Just a minute,” she called. I saw she had come to the partition and was thoughtfully picking at the splintered wood where the Turks’ axes had broken into her possessions.
“Yes?” I asked.
“I have been alone much lately,” she said, “and I have done much thinking.”
“About what?” I asked. She was making my own thoughts verbal.
“Well, I have been wondering.”
“Yes?”
“I have been wondering if you meant what you said to your friend that night before the Knights boarded us.”
“Of course Husayn is a Turk. That must be plain by now.”
“No. I meant... I meant what you said about me. About you...and me...”
“Oh.” I blushed. “That.” She had heard it all.
“You didn’t mean it.” She nodded slowly and began to turn away.
“No! No!” I blurted. “I mean...”
From this stuttering and looking at the ground I was suddenly drawn up into the hollows of her eyes and found myself speaking poetry. Though I had the impression that the whirlpool I felt was caused by her eyes, she, too, seemed caught up in it. We spun thus in a wild, inescapable swirl where time and the world about us meant nothing. We communicated at such a pace that words were rendered obsolete and eyes, gestures, and soon the touch of hands through the partition were called on to second them. It was only common lovers’ talk, the calloused may say. Yet I am constrained from exposing it to paper and possibly their profane eyes much as the Revelator himself was:
And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about to write, and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, “Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not.”
At length—a time that seemed a thousand years in but a minute—we slowly extracted ourselves from the violence of that thundering whirlpool. Being mortal, we had to return to breathe our mortality or die. But I found earth’s air rare and I panted over her hand as I bade it farewell, planting heavy-breathed kisses on its white knuckles, palm, and wrist.
“Be true, my love,” she said.
“My love,” I vowed, “I shall find a way to free you and for us to come together in the end. By my life, I shall.”
XIV
We sailed around the rugged sentinels of Lesbos and Limnos, their tops helmeted in rock and plumed with fleecy clouds. The western sun poured on our track, gilded with glory the hither projections of the armor of these Greek watchers and filled the great gorges beyond with dark purple shadows.
Oblivious of natural beauty, my sole purpose was to seek out other times to meet with Sofia and whisper to her through the ax-holes in the crating. The all-consuming passion we had experienced the first time never repeated itself. It returned only like sparks in an all-but-dead fire to light our dialogues. And our dialogues were otherwise composed of little but sighs and long pauses of dark despair between statements which all began with “Oh, if only...!” or “How I wish...!”
Still, there was more than enough kindled between us to drive me to attempt to achieve satisfaction no matter how desperate the chances. I determined to approach Husayn. I did not mean to betray our love, but only to sound the waters of the Turks’ mercy as with a plumb line.
However, I got no further than to say “Husayn, my friend, I was wondering...” before he stopped as with a heavy hand upon my shoulder.
“My young friend,” he said, “do not even ask. Such choices were offered at the first, but now it is too late. Tripoli, where you might have gained your freedom, is now a harbor left long ago in our wake. Constantinople will be reached shortly and Uluj Ali is determined upon his course. Throw your lot in with Allah. Trust to Him, and we shall see what He may do for you in the days to come.”
I said no more, for the hand upon my shoulder was a silent warning. I thought I had been so cautious in my courting, but now it was clear that any more boldness could very well put not only our happiness but our very lives in jeopardy. Fortunately, my inactive wait was not very long. That evening, the Turks prostrated in a slightly different direction for their prayers, for we had entered the Dardanelles and changed our all-important orientation to the Holy City of Mecca. By morning light the other city, Constantinople on the Golden Horn, could be seen, rising from the mist in brilliance like a second sun.
In the confusion of throwing anchor and then unloading, I ventured one last interview with my love. The Santa Lucia’s banners of Saint Mark, her crucifixes, and her images of the Virgin were hung upside down along the gunwale. Any boat that was close enough and idlers on the shore saluted this announcement of the Turks’ victory. The Sultan’s customary fifth of the spoils disembarked first and was tendered directly to the daunting seaside walls of the Sarai by wharfage collectors.
I found Madonna Baffo standing at the rail, in the exact spot where she had buried her little dog, watching all of this. I hoped the blasphemy to our icons did not distress her too much. I would tell her heaven could hear and answer the prayers of the righteous even upside down.
I spoke her name and she acknowledged my presence but she did not turn. Indeed, she never let her eyes leave their bewondered study of the scene before them: the myriad boats, tiny fishers and great galleys, bustling on the water like crowds in Venice’s market. The activity on the ridge before the great seawalls and, finally, the city itself rose as a backdrop with minarets and domes, great palaces and the stuffing of teeming slums in between. She was oblivious of insult.
“This is Constantinople?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied, trying to draw her attention to me by a display of worldly knowledge. But to say, “Yes, this is Constantinople” could have been done by a fool. It was obvious; there was no greater city in the world.
So I began to point out the sights to her. “The Turks like to call it Islambul, which means ‘Islam-abundant.’ That great dome is the Saint Sophia. Named, as your own sweet self, for holy wisdom, it was once the greatest monument of Christian faith in the world. These last hundred years, however, stripped of all but the shell of former glory, she has served the Turks in their heathen worship. There, beneath her great domes, are the lesser domes of Saint Irene and the columns of the...”
But she was not interested in my services as a guide. In a tone that indicated she would become angry if I disturbed her meditations further, she exclaimed, “By God! It is magnificent!”
XV
Husayn had patience with me and was content to linger in the square just inside the seawall after we had disembarked. Here I hoped to try and catch a glimpse of Sofia and see where she might be taken. The landings of Constantinople are a hurly-burly compared to which those of Venice are as regimented as if marching in review beneath the Doge’s balcony. In Const
antinople, it is as if an anthill—nay, three or four anthills each with ants of a different size and species— were all kicked together. The collisions, fights, and aimless running to and fro I witnessed were remarkable. Only as a second thought, it seemed, were goods, like bundled ant eggs, being salvaged and transported to safety. Even then, only one move out of twenty seemed to be the right bundle to the right human or animal back headed in the right direction.
It was as if the many decks of cards of all the peoples of the world were shuffled into one by a child who had no knowledge of the rules of any game, but only liked to shuffle. This led to some very curious combinations: a great black African guarding a shipment of dainty Chinese boxes rich with ivory inlay and carving; a tiny Chinaman, stripped—ribs starting—to a thin waist, strained under a heavy, vicious-looking load of elephant and rhinoceros tusks. Cool Indians, slippery like snakeskin, bargained with fat, basted-duck Italians in God-knows-what language for incense from Arabia, while the Arabians, secret, silent, ghostly men, more white robes and headdresses than flesh and blood, eyed sacks of grain as if they were filled with precious myrrh.
And everywhere were the Turks, Turks of all shapes and sizes. There were rich Turks and beggar Turks, Turkish fishermen, merchants, porters, pashas, soldiers, admirals, pickpockets, and customs officials. A Turk in a foreign land is immediately picked out for what he is, but here in their own land, one would be hard pressed to name a single trait that all of them shared. It was the Venetians that seemed more a caricature of nationality here.
Sofia Page 9