Over against the palace wall, the janissaries now on guard, I noted, were excused from prayer to maintain their vigilance. The sun had just turned on its minaret pivot and filled the space before the mosque with pale early March light, every gloss of warmth still encasing an inner core of cold.
Flocks of pigeons, however, seemed to find this rarified light the perfect mating medium. By some birdish alchemy, they had divvied up their usual anonymous masses into perfect pairs, though there was as yet no breeding going on. Each darker, generally more purple male pursued with incessant coos and low, scraping bows, oblivious to anything in the world but his chosen one. This groveling courtship also included dragging the tails along the flagstones until I wondered that the feathers weren’t worn away, whether the poor besotted fellows would ever manage to fly again. I came to recognize the scraping. I would turn at the sound—and never fail to find yet another poor sap cooing deep in his throat and bobbing up and down convulsively along the peaked rib of a tomb or up and over the cramped roots of a tree.
All the while the females couldn’t care less. They avoided the males all together, intent on their customary waddle from crumb to crumb. Whenever possible, they flew off, only to be pursued relentlessly from tomb to fountain and back again by the fruitless, tedious—even I could see it was tedious—bowing and scraping. I was unnerved to find myself divided from all other males except these featherheads by the rise and fall, the droning surf of recited Arabic ebbing between the mosque’s arches.
But before I had time to embrace the ramifications of this thought, prayers were over. The mosque disgorged. Husayn rejoined me and led me to the western side of the square, where the baths were.
“Also built by Sinan and Bayazid,” he told me.
“But on Christian backs.”
Accusingly I thrust a palm in the direction of the pillars that flanked the bath’s entrance. They were carved with repeating curves and ovals representing peacock-feather eyes, obviously reused, and obviously of Byzantine origin.
Husayn forgave my tone with a “Mashallah.”
It—even the fall of Constantinople into infidel hands— was God’s will. I might have been more agreeable to the sentiment had it not been said exactly the way Uncle Jacopo used to say Che sarà sarà when considering the limits God had placed on his life. I remembered the final limit, and grieved, refusing to accept.
“Remember, too,” Husayn said, “that the Christian Romans rifled many of Constantinople’s treasures off conquered pagan temples first.”
My friend then proceeded to give more of our precious aspers to the bath attendant.
XIX
The first obstacle to overcome in our visit to Sultan Bayazid’s gift to clean posterity was a continuous stream of slaves bent under the weight of the wood required to stoke the bath’s furnace. A single furnace served both sides of the establishment, both the men’s and the women’s around the far end of the building of which I had caught no glimpse. This efficiency did little to ease the straining of these men, some of whom were past their prime.
I grimaced. What similar heavy labors would Sofia Baffo’s young, lithe body be forced to undertake if Husayn’s vague plan did not work out? It hardly bore thinking of, but I couldn’t help myself.
Husayn read my thoughts and steered me deeper into the edifice with an arm meant for comfort about my shoulders. “Trust me, trust Allah,” he said. “And trust Abu Isa. Abu Isa will not do anything to damage his own goods.”
The first room into which he ushered me was divided into many small cubicles. Marble—water-stained, mildewed in the pores, dilapidated with age—covered the low dividing walls. Clearly it, too, had served in previous buildings.
We each laid claim to an empty cubicle as Husayn tried more diversion. “I must say, my friend, you have a very curious notion of slavery. You seem to think it some great moral wrong, while all the time you Venetians are among the greatest slavers on the seas.”
More male slaves, bare-chested, with only red-and-white-striped towels about their loins, paraded here and there between the cubicles with stacks of other towels on their heads. One remarkably tall African—who could see over the division of my cubicle with no difficulty—shoved one of his stack at me. It was of a very thick fabric, cotton made plush by leaving the loops of the pile uncut. Stringy fringe as long as my hand trimmed the raw edges to prevent unraveling.
Husayn continued chatting over the partition. “Your uncle, mercy on his soul, kept old black Piero.”
My exploration of the towel—indeed, everything about his station, not just me—seemed to entertain the towering African. His full purplish lips were set in something of a smirk. I understood that I was to strip down until my costume matched his. I didn’t know if I was prepared to do this among strangers, infidel strangers at that. All these men in the neighboring cubicles, I realized, would be circumcised, as the Turks’ barbarous custom was. Probably even the African had undergone the rite. This realization made me very uneasy: I shrank perceptibly under the weight of my codpiece.
I must say modesty prevailed throughout the bathing ordinance, even in the case of the African, who could have looked over the partition but, after one final smirk, did not. Modesty is, Husayn informed me, a tenant of religion with Muslims, even among the same sex and in the bath. But I could hardly keep from recoiling at the thought of identical mutilation under identical towels and irrationally feared that if I took the towel, I might likewise lose what was under it. This made me very slow to carry through what was expected.
All the while, Husayn kept encouraging, not in so many words, but with his continuous prattle. This was meant to assure me that he was not far away, but it only served to make me realize that he, too, was alien.
“I know your father had four or five purchased servants in his household while he yet lived.”
Husayn was right, but I wouldn’t admit it. “It is different when it is someone you know.”
“As I recall, your nursemaid—the very woman who suckled you—she was not a freeborn woman, was she? Yet you do not love her any less for that.”
I could avoid the inevitable no longer. I presented myself outside the cubicle; the safety of my clothes remained behind. The sight of Husayn exposed in near nakedness quite startled me. His flesh was fish-pale, hairless as a woman’s, with woman-like breasts and an ample belly. Most startling of all was his head. I’d never seen him without either a Venetian cap or Turkish turban. The entire dome of his cranium save a single knot at the top was shaved as naked as a boccie ball. This was a ball that had seen hard use in the alleys, however, for the bumps and seams of a human head are as graceless as most bodies are unrobed.
The intimidating African reappeared to provide each of us with a pair of pattens for our feet. These shoes were inlaid with mother-of-pearl on the in-step straps. The delicacy of the work belied the clomping weight that suddenly overcame the foot once it slipped into the clog. Each sole was elevated off the floor by chunks of wood as large as the blocks on the Santa Lucia’s banner pulley. I felt like a courtesan crossing the Piazza in her chopines.
“They keep your feet up off the cold marble, the spills of dirty water on the floor. They prevent slips and falls,” Husayn assured me.
Husayn gave a tightening tug, meaning to be helpful, on the clumsy knot of my towel. Besides almost unfooting me as I tried to get the knack of the shoes, he otherwise gave no sign that I looked as out of place as I felt other than to amend his assurances to “These pattens do take some getting used to.”
He must not have found my appearance as distasteful as I found his—or that of most of the other men in the room.
Of course his lack of criticism might be due to the fact that my host was occupied at the moment. A slave from Husayn’s house had just arrived, no doubt at the bidding of the urchin paid off earlier. The menial brought a small crate with him, and I was distracted from my awkwardness to recognize it as a straw-packed crate of Venetian glass the Santa Lucia had taken in
to her hold over a month ago.
“I suppose you mean to find a buyer for that here in the baths?” I asked.
Husayn smiled but didn’t exactly commit himself one way or another. He told the slave to set the crate down in his cubicle and then to join us. The baths would certainly be the strangest of bazaars if haggling was to go on dressed the way we were. A haggler needs to hide much of his intent in order to be successful; layers of clothing can only help in his efforts.
Still, I appreciated the fact that Husayn might be willing to put up his profits from such a sale toward my cause. The costliest goblet would, with luck, bring perhaps only half of the price we were looking at, but I couldn’t ignore the gesture. I determined to be more gracious to my generous host.
As we waited for his man to join us, Husayn chatted on.
“The life of a galley slave is not so enviable, granted.”
“Or one of those out in the forecourt hauling wood.”
“Those are free Turks we saw out in the forecourt hauling wood. Wood-haulers’ guild.”
“I see. But why were they so—so—”
“Desperate?”
“Yes, desperate.”
“A free man is not assured food for his family at night. The slave is—unless his master is bent on ruining his patrimony. The free man works against hunger, the hunger of his children, the illness of his parents, old age, the crippling effects of his work. The slave doesn’t have these at his back.”
I happened to catch another glimpse of the tall African. He was swinging his way through the room as if to some heavy African rhythm only he could hear. He still smirked superiorly and I realized the small heap of towels he wore like a janissary headdress was not calculated either to wear him out or make his master rich. I had a flash of the shrine to Saint Gummarus in Venice, always full, rich with offerings. Saint Gummarus was the patron of ruptures, much frequented by the porter’s guild, the zannis we called them, when a life of desperate freedom had come to the end of its usefulness—
“But yes, I will agree. To be but a nameless body in a nameless mass of power-production—like one stick in the baker’s fire—that is no life for a man, black or white, Muslim or Christian. Slave or free, I may add. Therefore I approve of using only criminals in the galleys—men who for some act against society have forfeited their right to be counted in that society. The same does not apply to domestic slaves, who are always taken into the master’s home and treated with dignity.” The household slave did appear now and I gave Husayn, at least, credit for practicing what he preached as we went on to the bath’s next phase, all three together.
The next room, like the first, smelled of dominant male. A dome pierced by numerous star-shaped windows sieved down drifting sunbeams. Four fountains of cold water tumbled out of lions’ mouths—these must have been of Byzantine origin as well—into marble basins before running off in little channels set into the floor. A slave attendant was fast asleep on a pile of more red and white in a corner, giving some credence to Husayn’s words. These words, along with every clomp of clog or touch of mussel shell to marble, echoed achingly off wall and crisp water.
“It is quite common, my friend, for poor families in the wild hills of Caucasia for example to sell their sons and especially their daughters to Constantinople-bound merchants. Not only do they need the money, poor souls, but most importantly, they know their children will eat more, dress better, and have a better chance of advancement here than in their poor land where a decent living cannot be eked out.”
In this room, Husayn had his slave plaster him with a caustic, whitish putty concocted of lime and water with a touch of arsenic. I did not need the warning to be careful how I touched it to my lips or my eyes. No amount of coaxing could get me to undergo the treatment which, after about a quarter of an hour, the slave skillfully scraped off with a mussel shell. This was how Husayn maintained his unnatural hairlessness, which fashion he was obliged to rescind every time business brought him to the west.
“You know, Suleiman the Lawgiver—our present ruler, may Allah find favor with him—he is a very strange case for a sultan. He married the mother of his sons. Usually the women of a sultan’s harem are purchased—every one of them—and what an advancement for a girl! To rise from poverty so desperate that she must run barefoot through deep snow, to become Valide Sultan—the highest post any woman can reach in our empire—a post only slightly less powerful than that held by the Sultan himself. What is to be pitied there? All our sultans, you see, are the products of slave women.”
Husayn recited this while he deftly shifted his red-and-white toweling this way and that so the slave could eyen attack his genitals. I certainly would never allow that, no matter how much time I was forced to spend among the Turks. Perhaps it was an accident with just such a purple mussel shell that had first set the absurd fashion of circumcision into play.
I did allow myself to be scrubbed by a bathhouse slave. After slathering me with suds from a bowl filled to the brim with musk-scented soap, he encased his hand in a sleeve of nubby toweling. This he adroitly alternated with horsehair cloth and the dried skeleton of a gourd named from the Arabic luffa. The only thing he didn’t use on me was wire gauze, but all of his implements felt like it, abrading and tingling the flesh. I had been afraid to loose more vital parts to a mussel shell. This treatment cost me a good deal of skin. I think, in fact, that my attendant commented with a gap-toothed grin something to the effect that he had never found so much filth to flay on a client.
It was quite touching to watch, at another basin, a young man about my age giving the same treatment to his enfeebled grandfather. Altogether, soap and skin was flushed from us down the marble channels with bowls full of tap water.
“Slavery is not so hopeless nor as powerless as you imagine,’ Husayn gurgled between dousings. “Especially not for a young woman with the looks and talents of your signorina.
“And you must admit she was quite content when we left her.” he reiterated. “Do you think, my friend, that, having tasted those dainties she breakfasted on today, she could ever be satisfied with what you could provide her? Forgive me, my friend, but she is a vain and frivolous young woman. She has expensive tastes and I despair for you if you should try and meet them, an orphan as you are now and a sailor.
“Come, come, be merry. Let me send the little black girl to you again tonight and this time do not shove her away. Enjoy her. Her life will be improved if you do. And so, Allah willing, will be yours. Lose yourself in her and see if the memory of Sofia Baffo is not gently coaxed away. Madonna Baffo is content with the fate Allah has willed for her. My friend, be you content as well.”
With a violent hand to my head, I signaled I could never be content as we went on to the bath’s third room.
XX
The ceiling of this third room was held up over its central pool by four columns whose elaborately foliate capitals were of obvious Byzantine provenance as well. More architectural details, however, escaped me as the room’s main feature—its heat—grabbed me by the throat.
Heat rose up off the pool’s surface as from a pot shortly before the cook tosses in the pasta. Heat throbbed up from the floor. Heat shot out in sulfuric jets within alcoves spaced around the perimeter of the pool. Heat glowed from the skins of two score Turks lounging about in attitudes of the most grotesque indolence. Shapes floated toward me through mists of steam. In slow motion, they revolved and vanished like wraiths. Form blurred at the pressure of heat in the corners of my eyes.
In short, nothing on earth has ever so closely re-created one of the lower cauldrons of Dante’s Inferno as a Turkish bath. The self-indulgent denizens of Sybaris and the cardinally slothful are condemned to a fantastic parody of their sins. The Foscari stage came nowhere near this apparition of strigils and luffas as whips and scourges, the masseurs as torturing demons.
“Take me out of here!” I begged of Husayn, struggling for breath in the dense atmosphere.
But all comprehensi
on of Venetian had steamed out of Husayn’s mind. My words were lost in the murmuring undercurrent of sound made by subdued laughter and whispered conversations—or the awe we all felt to find ourselves the objects of eternal damnation.
I had no choice but to follow my host down two steps into the cloudy, neck-high depths of the pool. We kept our red-and-white knee-length skirts about us as we did so and the cloth floated up to the surface about our waists until the water saturated it.
This pool is hot enough to boil an egg, I thought, but couldn’t say it aloud. My voice box seemed hardened already beyond any vibration. The heat cut the tendons in my joints and flattened me, like the water itself, against the marble at a level.
It was quite remarkable that in this place of everlasting torture I caught my first good glimpse of a Turkish woman. She was upon us before I knew it, skirting the poolside with rapid steps as she took the shortest route from door to door. I never actually saw her face, as she held both hands before it and glimpsed the world—at least so she wouldn’t tumble into the pool and join us—through the narrowest of spaces between her fingers. But that she was a woman left no doubt, and had there been any blood left that wasn’t already on the surface of my skin, I would have blushed.
A number of men were watching the woman’s progress with interest, and Husayn felt obliged to offer some apology. “She is accused of adultery,” he said, proving that he hadn’t lost all use of Venetian after all. “She runs this gauntlet to prove her innocence, her husband and brother observe. She wears no shalvar and, if she is guilty, her skirts will blow up over her head.”
“If they do—?” I gasped. I was more concerned for my own temperature, and relieved to find voice, than for the woman.
“If this happens, her husband has the right to kill her, same as a wronged husband would in Venice. This gauntlet is an old custom, existing, like the capitals of these pillars, from the time of the Greeks.”
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