by Martin Seay
The moon’s reflection on the canal’s surface is split by a swimming rat; the smooth V of its wake expands toward the banks with geometrical precision. Welles packs his pipe as he waits for it to cross. When he’s finished, he lights up, then lets the burning match drop to the water. A circle of blue-green flame forms where it falls, flares for a moment, and dies out.
We think of cities as places, Welles says. They are not. Mountains are places. Deserts are places. We are, in fact, standing in a desert right now. Cities are ideas. Independent of geography. They can vanish, suddenly or gradually, and reappear thousands of miles away. Changed, perhaps. Reduced. Always imperfectly realized. But still somehow the same. Retaining the essence of the idea. As above, so below, as the alchemists would say. To perfect the wonders of the One. This, for me, is the heart—the real kernel—of Crivano’s story. It’s what I had in mind when I wrote it, anyway. And it’s why I wanted to show you this place. We should go back now.
They return to the boulevard the way they came, then make a left to pick up the boardwalk again. Stanley replays what Welles has been saying in his mind, looking for threads that might connect to the questions he wants answered. He’s glad the guy’s on a roll, but it’s making him nervous, too. It almost seems like Welles is talking about a different book than the one he read. What was it you said a minute ago? Stanley says. About my patron? What was it you meant by that?
Hm? Oh. Yes. Hermes Trismegistus. Do you know who he is?
I know who he is in your book. He’s some kind of god, or a wizard, who lived a long time ago.
He was understood by Renaissance intellectuals to be the Egyptian equivalent of Moses. He was identified with Thoth—the giver of laws, the inventor of writing—and also with the Greek Hermes, the messenger of the gods, the god of healing, of magic, and of secrets. He was an intermediary between worlds, a crosser of barriers, and as such he was regarded as the patron of thieves, scholars, alchemists, and, of course, of gamblers like yourself. That is what I meant.
So you didn’t just make him up?
No! Welles says. Good lord, no. It took hundreds of people, misunderstanding one another for thousands of years, to invent the Thrice-Great Hermes. Starving poets huddled in their garrets. Drunken bards prancing around bonfires. Weary mothers luring their wee babes toward sleep. I just added my own small confusion to the end of the long and crooked column.
They’re still blocks south of the arcades. The broad lots are dotted with large beachfront houses, once grand, now wind-scoured, listing on their foundations. The few that show any evidence of care only seem more decrepit for it: fresh paint coats a collapsed veranda, plaster cherubim caper on a denuded lawn, neat rows of marigolds line a path of shattered cobblestone. There’s a ruined boat in the yard of the next house—long and black, a toothed iron prow, half-buried in sand—that’s been turned into a flowerbox: its split hull runs over with periwinkle, coreopsis, rose mallow, the petals turned pale sepia by the streetlamps’ glow.
Stanley is silent, absently counting the wide planks beneath his feet, conscious of the sandy gaps. He thinks about tightrope walkers, about how they’re not supposed to look down, not supposed to think about the precariousness of what supports them. He wonders if it was a smart idea to come out here after all. What about Crivano? he says.
Crivano?
You made Crivano up. Right?
Welles sighs, looks out at the ocean. With Crivano, he says, I took a number of liberties. In the historical record he is barely a shade. I filled in the gaps as imaginatively as possible. Of course, it is precisely those lacunae that made it possible for me to write the book at all.
Stanley stops walking. Welles and the dog carry on for a couple of paces, then turn and circle to face him.
You’re telling me Crivano was a real person, Stanley says.
He was a historical person, yes. I discovered a brief and rather cryptic mention of him in the letters of Suor Giustina Glissenti while I was researching an entirely unrelated matter, and I was enchanted by the metaphorical possibilities he suggested.
You’re pulling my goddamn leg.
I am not, no. From Suor Giustina’s account I was able to infer only that the Council of Ten issued an arrest order for a person named Vettor Crivano in the summer of 1592, accusing him of taking part in a conspiracy to steal from the craftsmen of Murano on behalf of unknown foreign entities information regarding the manufacture of flat glass mirrors. In those days, a person so accused could expect to be imprisoned or enslaved, or, if he managed somehow to escape the city, to be pursued by assassins and murdered. It was a very serious matter. As I’m sure you gathered from reading my two long poems on the commercial history of images, the Muranese greatly benefited from their virtual monopoly on flat glass mirrors well into the Eighteenth Century, so we can assume that Crivano was unsuccessful. From other sources I discovered that he was a physician and an alchemist who took his doctorate at Bologna, and I was able to trace his family origins to colonial Cyprus, prior to the Ottoman siege. The remainder of his biography I—to borrow your phraseology—made up.
So how much of what happens in the book is true?
I really prefer not to speak in such terms, Stanley. When you say true, I take you to mean factual. But there are other kinds of truth. I am an old-fashioned poet. I understand my role to be essentially that delineated by Crivano’s English contemporary Sir Philip Sidney, who tells us that the poet affirms nothing, and therefore never lies. In my daily life, as I said, I am an accountant. I was employed by the Air Force for many years, and later by the aerospace industry. I admit—in fact I insist—that genuine satisfactions are to be found in my profession’s regimented artificiality. But in the hours that I call my own, during that brief plunge from work toward sleep, I choose to dabble in more ambiguous enterprises. So I hope you will understand my reticence at being pinned down on these ostensibly metaphysical issues, which at best qualify as quibbles over points of fact, and which probably ought to be regarded as no more than mere semantics.
Welles is poker-faced, pleased with himself; his demurral hangs before him like a scrim. Stanley knows there are gaps in it, but he can’t see them yet. He can hear Welles’s breath, his own breath too, and he’s suddenly disgusted by the sound: two pairs of fleshy bellows suctioning the air while the half-dark world spins steadily beneath them.
The little dog is slobbering at his feet. Stanley closes his eyes, bunches his fists, shifts his weight to kick it. He pictures it arcing toward the sand, leash aflutter like the tail of a kite. Welles’s shocked expression as the loop snaps from his yellowed fingers.
He wonders if Welles really is heeled like he says he is, and if so, what sort of gat he might be carrying. Sometimes with fat guys it can be hard to tell.
Stanley straightens up, unclenches his fingers, forces a smile. Welles eyes him expectantly. In the moonlight they look like polished marble statues of themselves.
Mister Welles, Stanley says, I would really like to know just how much of your goddamn book is true.
PREPARATIO
MAY 20, 1592
And seeing in the Water a shape, a shape like unto himself, in himself he loved it, and would cohabit with it; and immediately upon the resolution ensued the Operation, and brought forth the unreasonable Image or Shape.
Nature presently laying hold of what it so much loved, did wholly wrap herself about it, and they were mingled, for they loved one another.
—Pimander
23
The acolyte lights the candles as the priest opens the book. The long wicks flare, and the image of the Virgin appears in the vault above the apse, her gray form steady against the flickering screen of gold. The glass tesserae of her eyes catch the dim light, and her gaze seems to go everywhere.
The priest’s hand moves across the psalter; its thick pages curl and fall. Venite exultemus Domino iubilemus Deo salutari nostro, he intones. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving, and make a joyful noise unto him with
psalms. At the priest’s back are the relics of Saint Donatus, along with the bones of the dragon he slew by spitting in its mouth. Overhead, the wooden roof slopes outward like a ship’s hull.
Even now, hours before dawn, the basilica is not empty. Solitary figures pass in the aisles: sleepless fishermen, glassblowers between shifts, veiled widows impatient for Christ’s return. Some kneel and mutter prayers. In the narthex, at the base of a marble column, a lone drunkard snores.
At the south end of the shallow transept a man drifts along the uneven stones. His steps are cautious, slow, measured by the soft tap of his walkingstick. His downcast eyes trace images on the mosaic floor: eagles and griffins, cockerels bearing a trussed fox, peacocks eating from a chalice. Beneath the clean flames of the beeswax candles the patterned checks of porphyry and serpentine blend into a fluid surface, undulating and unfathomable. The man lifts his black morocco boots like a heron hunting frogs.
Picture him there, between the piers of the old brick church: gaunt and sinewy, around thirty-five years old, wearing the long black robe of a Bolognese doctor. His small forked beard is trimmed close, his red-blond hair cropped a bit shorter than is the current fashion. He is somewhat less filthy, less flea- and louse-ridden, than those he moves among. His velvet cap and brocade jerkin are rich but not ostentatious. His worn lopsided face suggests a difficult birth and many misfortunes suffered since. There is a strangeness to his aspect, a detachment, that those who meet him tend to ascribe to his erudition, or to his many years spent abroad, although in doing so they are mistaken.
The sea is his, and he made it, chants the priest. His hands formed the dry land. Mist rises from the canal outside, wedding the ocean to the darkness, bearing a chill through the heavy wooden doors. The black-robed man shivers, turns to go.
Let this be him, then. Crivano, the Mirror Thief. Let him bear the name. Who else can claim it?
24
As he crosses the threshold, Crivano can hear the Te Deum echoing from the convent of Saint Mark and Saint Andrew, two hundred yards north. A bright halfmoon lingers in the western sky; beneath it, the Campo San Donato is all but deserted. In the distance, across the wide canal, torches light the path of a procession as it leaves the new Trevisan house. By the entrance of the baptistery just ahead, yawning linkboys trade taunts with a pair of rude commoners, watchmen of the Ministry of Night. Crivano raises his stick as he descends the church steps, and one of the boys puts a taper to his wrought-iron lantern. Here’s your light, dottore, the boy says.
I’m looking for a ridotto called the Salamander.
Sure, dottore. It’s across the long bridge, near San Pietro Martire. Do you want to get a boat?
I’ll walk, Crivano says.
They cross the square and follow the canal south, then turn west when it merges into a broader channel. A gap in the buildings widens toward the lagoon, and for a moment Crivano can see the lights of the city, over a mile away: weak glimmers from the Arsenal, and farther on the orange blaze atop the belltower in the Piazza. The sea is calm. A few boats are already on the water, bearing lanterns in their prows, and he wonders whether Obizzo’s craft is among them.
The wide fondamenta grows busier as they approach the long bridge. Merchants hurry to boats moored at quayside, bearing bundles or pushing carts laden with bronzeware and majolica and spindled glass beads, eager to cross the lagoon to their booths in the Piazza San Marco before the festival crowds gather. A week ago, when Crivano last came here to Murano to meet with his co-conspirators, he found many shops along this canal closed for the Sensa, having moved their business into the city. Meanwhile, in the Rialto, the guilds had to cajole and bully their members to abandon their storefronts and show their wares in the Piazza. The guilds’ case seemed difficult to make. When your whole city is a market, why bother with the fair?
From the bridge’s lofty midpoint Crivano can see a tremble in the air over the buildings ahead: heat rising from glass factories. Once lit, their furnaces burn at a constant temperature for weeks on end, even months. The boats below the bridge are stacked with hewn alderwood, soon to be unloaded.
The linkboy leads him past a church, then into a bustling campiello. The workers they pass are flush-faced and soot-blackened; their eyes are red-rimmed and hard, like they’ve come lately from battle. Near the campiello’s wellhead a workman is beating and cursing another, pounding heavy fists on his skull and shoulders. The attacker wears a thick bandage on his forearm; the man he strikes is little more than a boy. When the young man falls, his assailant kicks him until his nose and mouth are well-bloodied. Then a pair of stout fellows steps in and halfheartedly pulls them apart.
Here, dottore, the linkboy says. The Salamander.
Crivano gives him a few copper gazettes and sends him on his way. No sign marks the building: an ordinary two-story shop, its shutters replaced by rectangles of clear aqua glass, firelight falling through the drapes behind them. There’s another window set in the door, this one stained a startling orange, with a translucent red lizard wriggling at its center. The door swings open with a touch.
He’s not sure what to expect inside—knife-wielding gamblers, bare-bosomed whores—but it’s a quiet place: a large room lit by oil lamps with a hearth at the far end; an old woman and what must be her grown son at work behind a long wooden counter; a ceiling hung thickly with game, sausages, cured hams. In the corner a young man strums a cittern, singing wordlessly. A halfdozen or so laborers are scattered across eight tables, dining or sipping cups of wine. Crivano spots the two he’s looking for right away, but stands empty-faced in the entrance until the old woman comes for his stick and robe.
Would you care for soup, dottore? We have good sausage, too. And a pheasant.
Just wine.
Crivano seats himself at an empty table. After a moment, the glassmaker Serena appears at his elbow, his hat in his hand. Dottore, he says.
Maestro. Will you join me?
Thank you, dottore. Please allow me to present my eldest son, Alexandro.
The boy is twelve or thirteen, with a serious face. He already bears small scars on his hands and forearms from the furnaces. His bow is dignified and respectful. His eyes are a man’s eyes. Crivano thinks briefly of his own youth: when he and the Lark left Cyprus for Padua, they were this boy’s age. He doubts greatly that either was so poised.
You help your father in the workshop? Crivano says.
Yes, dottore.
He also studies with the Augustinians, Serena says. He’s a good student.
Serena musses the boy’s chestnut hair with his broad right hand. His first three fingers lack their tips; each ends abruptly with a variegated whorl of scar tissue. Crivano hadn’t noticed this before. Do you enjoy your studies, Alexandro? he asks the boy.
No, dottore.
Serena laughs. He’d rather be working the glass, he says. He thinks the lessons are worthless. Sometimes I agree. The friars make him learn Latin, and the language of court. Why? Better for a tradesman to learn English, don’t you think? Or Dutch.
As he says this, Serena gives Crivano a pointed look that makes him uneasy. Well, maestro, Crivano says, those are the languages of the nobility. And tradesmen want to sell to the nobility. Is this not so?
Tradesmen want to sell to those with access to money and markets, Serena says. Like the English. And the Dutch.
As Serena settles into the chair his son pulls out for him, Crivano steals a glance across the room. The silverer Verzelin hasn’t moved from his spot by the fire. He’s slumped forward, his head on the table. Crivano knows him by the tremors in his legs.
Serena has placed a parcel on the oak planks. Those sketches you gave me were very good, dottore, he says. Very clear and detailed.
Yes. I didn’t make them.
Serena smiles. My compliments, then, to your friend’s draughtsmanship, he says. He leans forward. I understand why your friend wants to remain in the shadows, he says. This kind of work—not everyone will do it. Not these day
s.
You don’t want the job?
I’ll do the job, dottore. But I’ll have to choose my help with care. As you’ve seen, there has been—how to put it?—an increase in piety throughout the patriarchate. Piety of a particular sort. And all of us praise God for this, of course. But often we’re surprised to find practices once thought merely eccentric now being decried as heresy. I see this happen in my own workshop. So I must be cautious. For this piece, of course, we also need a metalworker who can be trusted. Fortunately I know of one.
Crivano nods. He has opened his mouth to reply when a yelp comes from near the hearth; Verzelin is upright in his chair. He jerks his head left and right, barking gibberish, then slouches to the table again. The cittern player shoots a quick look at him, but never breaks time.
He’s drunk? Crivano says.
He’s mad.
Crivano looks at Serena, doing his best to feign surprise.
Serena shrugs. It happens to them sometimes, he says.
To whom?
To the silverers. They go mad. No one knows why. Runs in their families, I suppose.