by Martin Seay
Crivano sets his half-eaten bread and sausage on the table, takes the key, and drapes it around his own neck. Then he takes hold of the box’s handles and tries to lift it. It won’t budge.
Tonight, Tristão says, when you depart, you will have the assistance of Hugo and the footman. About my project they know nothing of import, and they can be trusted to be silent. I am very grateful to you for this errand, Vettor.
He bends, blows out the lamp.
Crivano gulps the last of his food as they hurry down the corridor. The lute and the theorbo are playing again; the candles in the great hall are being snuffed, and the Uranici are congregating in the dayroom. Come quickly, Tristão says. There is a fellow here tonight to whom I have pledged to introduce you.
Most of the guests have gathered around the two musicians; they clap and shout encouragement as the players embark upon a fantasia that grows increasingly complex and harmonically improbable. The lutenist plays as if he has surplus fingers. Crivano can see the long neck of the theorbo nod with the rhythm, but the musicians themselves are hidden by the crowd.
Tristão walks to the chamber’s opposite end, toward the row of breeze-sieving windows that opens onto the Grand Canal. Two men converse there; Crivano notes with displeasure that one is Lord Mocenigo. As they draw near, the noble’s vaguely cretinous face clarifies in the dim light, its expression aggrieved and conspiratorial. You now tell me, Crivano overhears him say, that you met no one in all of Frankfurt who successfully learned the Nolan’s so-called art of memory?
The other man, a tall and burly Sienese, seems unfazed by Mocenigo’s question, but he smiles with relief and gratitude when Tristão and Crivano approach. Dottore de Nis! he says. As always, your arrival makes the rest of us seem even uglier than we are.
Mocenigo emits an irritated puff, stalks away. Messer Ciotti, Tristão says, allow me to present Dottore Vettor Crivano, who has come recently from Bologna. Dottore Crivano, this is Messer Giovanni Battista Ciotti, who may be known to you already as the proprietor of Minerva, our city’s finest bookshop.
They exchange bows. Crivano has been in Ciotti’s shop; he heard of it even before he left Bologna, and made a point of visiting soon after he arrived. It’s very good, stocking many titles concerning secret knowledge that he’d hesitate to carry openly in the street. I’m pleased and honored to make your acquaintance, Crivano says.
Ciotti’s smiling response is lost in cheers. The lutenist has doubled time against the bass thrum of the theorbo, executing runs along his fretboard that Crivano’s ears can barely sort out. The end arrives with a daring flourish, and applause fills the room. As it fades, a distant bravo! sounds from a boat passing on the canal, and everyone laughs.
Guests stoop to congratulate the players, the crowd begins to part, and Crivano catches a glimpse of the lutenist, sheepishly eyeing his calloused fingers. Extraordinary, Crivano says. Who is he?
I have not seen him before, Tristão says. He is quite adroit.
He’s a scholar from Pisa, Ciotti says. I imagine he learned to play from his famous father, who recently died, I’m sorry to say. He, good sirs, was a fine lutenist.
The Nolan is standing near the hearth now, conversing with the Paduan scholar who’s to introduce him; the German boy hovers nearby. Messer Ciotti, Tristão breaks in, at our last encounter, I believe you mentioned to me your need for the services of a person able to read and understand the writing of the Arabs. Someone also capable of discretion. Do you still suffer from such a lack?
Ciotti seems surprised for a moment. I do, he says. An Arabic document has come into my possession, an esoteric manuscript, and I’ve recently had it translated. I would like to have this Latin rendering authenticated before I pay my translator the balance of what he is owed.
This man, Tristão says, placing a hand on Crivano’s shoulder, speaks and writes the Arabic tongue with great proficiency. Also the languages of the Greeks and the Persians and the Ottoman Turks, the last of whom kept him prisoner for many years and came to rely upon his skills and experience as an interpreter. I think that perhaps, if he is willing, Dottore Crivano could be of great help to you in this matter.
Crivano and Ciotti look at each other. Then both speak at once, fall silent again, and smile awkwardly. I would consider it a privilege to assist, Crivano says. May I ask how lengthy is the manuscript in question?
Not long. Scarcely ten thousand Latin words.
Crivano nods, suddenly wary, as if he’s stepped among slip-nooses. It might require several hours, he says. I don’t suppose you’d permit me to remove the translation and the original manuscript from your shop?
Ciotti smiles. I might, he says, if I were the manuscript’s owner. But I am not.
He turns to Tristão. Dottore de Nis, he says, when last we spoke, you suggested to me that this task might be compassed most quickly by a pair of translators working in concert. Do either of you know another scholar with a facility in Arabic?
Crivano looks at Ciotti, then at Tristão, who’s watching them both intently, like a child who’s trapped a pair of scorpions in a jar. In fact, Tristão says, I may know of such a man.
Gentlemen! A voice rises from beside the hearth, speaking a clear and reedy Latin. Members of the Uranian Academy! it says. Distinguished guests! On behalf of our hosts, the generous Andreas and Nicolaus Morosini, I thank you for your attention. As always, I am Fabius Paolini, and tonight I am pleased to welcome Philotheus Iordanus Brunus Nolanus to the convocation of this assembly. This is not the first time that Doctor Brunus has addressed us. This chamber was full on the occasion of his previous visit, and all those who were here surely recall as vividly as do I the spirited debate that arose. I shall therefore assume that our speaker is known to most of you—from your familiarity with his famous publications on philosophy, cosmology, memory, and magic, if not from my earlier long-winded introduction—and I shall therefore forego a second one. Tonight Doctor Brunus will, I believe, lecture us on the art of memory, a subject of considerable interest to many in this room. Doctor, I gratefully surrender the floor to you.
The Nolan moves into the space that Paolini has vacated; he makes a slow circle, as if testing the soundness of the floor. His gait is feline, or viverrine, not quite human. He walks with bent knees, on the balls of his feet; his small deep-set eyes scour the room with raw contempt. Crivano recalls a torch-bearing dervish in Tiflis who made a run at their powder store; the janissary archers shot him so full of arrows that when he finally died their shafts kept his limp corpse off the dirt. The dervish’s face as he charged bore an expression identical to the one the Nolan wears now. The world, Crivano thinks, is a poor container for such men.
When at last he speaks, the friar’s voice is rough and shrill, as though coarsened by frequent shouting. My thanks, Doctor Paolini, he says. In fact, I will not be speaking on memory tonight. I have done so before in this room, and to raise the subject here again would cheapen it. Those still unconvinced will remain so, regardless of how I argue. Tonight, rather than lecturing on the art of memory, I will demonstrate it. Perhaps this exercise will quiet those who say that the art is a sham, a waste, a fancy. Gentlemen, I invite you to name my topic for me. We are all learned men, are we not? Choose whatever subject pleases you, and I, extempore, shall engage it.
A startled silence ensues. The Nolan faces his audience with a cool sneer. The quiet collapses into soft grumbles, a few snickers, the shuffle of nervous feet. Paolini clears his throat.
Oh, come now, audience! the Nolan says. Wherefore this reluctance? Choose! Be bold! You are scholars, are you not? Each of you has a favored subject, held always close to heart. Name it! I may not match the erudition you command while ensconced in your bookish chambers, but note that I will speak with recourse to no library save that resident within my own mind. Doctor Paolini, you have written knowledgably on occult themes in Virgil, have you not? Shall I speak on that? Or mathematics, perhaps? Have we a geometer among us who will demonstrate his acumen?
But no, the Nolan continues. All too easily I could have prepared myself in advance to confront those subjects. My desire is only to be challenged, for it is by such challenges that truth becomes clear. Stipulate, someone, beyond these suggestions of mine! If the Nolan is to be taken, it must be by surprise!
The mirror, Tristão says. Address the issue of the mirror.
His smooth limpid voice bears a sudden edge that silences the room. The Nolan seems confused: he squints, his eyes spring from face to face. Who speaks? he says. Who has spoken?
Tristão doesn’t respond. His face is blank, dispassionate; his attitude that of a gambler who has placed his wager and now awaits the revelation of the dice. Every eye present has unmoored itself from the Nolan and drifted to him.
After a long moment, Ciotti answers on his behalf. My friend Dottore de Nis, he says, has asked that you discourse upon the mirror.
The Nolan scowls. The mirror, he says. I must confess that this request leaves me somewhat at a loss. At a loss, that is, to judge why your friend would ask a scholar like myself to address that topic, and not seek the expertise of an unlettered tradesman. I had understood this forum to be concerned with higher things.
A familiar voice rises from the room’s opposite end: that of the second musician, the Servite friar. Crivano suddenly remembers where he’s heard it before: it’s the voice of the mountebank alchemist he saw yesterday in Campo San Luca, shortly before the plaguedoctor appeared. But this can hardly be. Friars donning masks to play satire in the streets?
Hold, please, the Servite says. I beg your pardon, Doctor Brunus, but if you will dismiss the mirror—its construction and its function—as a subject devoid of science, suitable only for debate by the guilds, then I grant you will find many who agree with you, but I cannot place myself among them. Philosophers may long for a world in which the artifex’s technique proceeds always from the application of reason, but more often we find that methods simply arise, and it falls to us thinkers to scurry after them, to wring significance from industry and accident. The flat mirrors lately turned out by the Murano craftsmen may indeed present such a case. Who among us has gazed into one of these without the symptoms of wonderment and disturbance?
Now Paolini speaks, his voice quickened with zeal. In the Phaedrus of Plato, he says, as I’m sure Doctor Brunus recalls, we read King Thamus’s remark to the god Thoth: the parent of an art is not always the best judge of its utility. As Brother Sarpi has just suggested, with the mirror this may well be so. Thamus refers, of course, to Thoth’s invention of writing—so this strikes close to your own scholarship, Doctor Brunus, for Thamus’s complaint is that the invention of letters aids not the memory of the Egyptians, but instead causes it to atrophy. Writing promotes not recollection, but reminiscence; it delivers not truth, but only a semblance of truth. In your previous lecture to us, you described the picture-writing of the Egyptians as superior to the alphabets of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Hebrews, for it evokes pure sense, not mere sound. You delineated for us your system of memory based on figures and patterns, which you say will enable the disciplined magus to assemble in his imagination a picture of the universe entire, thereby to gain power over its most hidden correspondences. And now Dottore de Nis has raised the issue of a simple invention which precisely, if fleetingly, captures the images of particular objects placed before it. Should we fear the ubiquity of this device in our dwelling-chambers? Will the image-making capacity of our imaginations sicken in its presence? Surely these are not inconsequential concerns for a philosopher.
A general murmur of assent follows, then builds in volume. Until this academy refuses to suffer such frauds, Crivano hears someone say, we hardly deserve to be taken seriously. How has this self-important clown been twice invited? It’s the fault of that idiot Mocenigo, I think.
The Nolan flushes a deep red, casts his eyes down, squeezes them shut. After a moment he turns out his palms, looks heavenward, and begins to rise on tiptoe. As if rehearsing his eventual deliverance from the base ignorance of his earthly tormentors. His face grows calm, he sinks back to the floor, and he fixes the room with the sad and sickly smile of a martyr.
For a moment, his lean features are half-lit by pink flares launched from a passing galley, but no one seems to pay these small fraudulent comets any mind. They trace fiery arcs across the night sky, then perish with a hiss on the surface of the canal.
Very well, my friends, the Nolan shouts. As promised, I shall grant your request. Let us now consider the mirror.
SVBLIMATIO
MARCH 16, 2003
I speak of the American deserts and of the cities which are not cities. No oases, no monuments; infinite panning shots over mineral landscapes and freeways. Everywhere: Los Angeles or Twenty-Nine Palms, Las Vegas or Borrego Springs …
—JEAN BAUDRILLARD, America
32
In Curtis’s dream his head is bandaged, his eyes taped over with balls of white gauze, and somehow he can see right through them.
He’s walking away from his overturned Humvee, cracked and hissing on the cobblestone street—although the crash really happened on a dirt road south of Gnjilane, not anyplace that looked like this. Italian marines from the San Marco Battalion squat in the shade of a row of palmtrees, watching him with grim sympathy. Curtis raises a hand to them, and now he knows this place: Split, in Croatia, where he came ashore during Dynamic Response back in ’98, three years before the accident.
The blue harbor is stretched behind him. The blue sky is punctuated by a line of Sea Stallions, their rotors muttering in the breeze. Green mountains to the north. A couple of belltowers poking over tiled rooftops. Ahead, the Iron Gate of Diocletian’s palace, framed by low arches. The pavingstones are slick beneath his slippered feet, worn down by centuries of passage.
Someone is on his left, leading him, someone he can’t see. At first it’s Danielle; then he remembers that he can’t have met Danielle yet, that he’s still months and miles away from Bethesda, and the realization thrills him: he’s moving under his own power, safe and unafraid, gliding through the wide and shifting world. The person leading him speaks low, at the threshold of his hearing. He can’t make anything out. The voice guides him like a silver thread in a labyrinth.
They’re moving quickly through twisting streets, past the Byzantine arches of a Gothic loggia, beneath a boxy white belltower, through an ancient peristyle. Twinned stone lions. A granite sphinx. The passageways narrowing. The walls filmed with shimmering esophageal ooze. Everywhere now the tang of the sea.
The crown of a second tower—brick, square, topped by a steep pyramid—appears and disappears in the spaces between rooftops. As they draw close, it seems to grow taller, thicker, greener at its tip. They cross jade canals, slosh through puddled corridors, and emerge into a colonnaded square swarming with white doves. Startled into flight, the birds ripple like foam across the gray sky. The great belltower catches their shadows. Curtis knows this place, too.
He’s alone now, moving forward between the tower and the domes of a gilded basilica, rounding the corner of a grand hall and looking out at the churning sea beyond. There’s a small group of ragged gamblers on the quay up ahead, gathered between two marble columns, throwing dice below the stinking corpses of hanged men. As he approaches, Curtis sees Stanley crouched over the tumbling cubes. Stanley looks up and smiles, and Curtis can see that he’s dead: his flesh sagging, his eyesockets black voids. He offers Curtis the dice with a withered hand, and Curtis declines. The dead Stanley turns and hurls them with tremendous force, aiming at an island on the lagoon’s distant edge. If they hit the water, Curtis doesn’t see the splash.
The gamblers are gone. Curtis pushe
s through crowds of camera-slung tourists, self-conscious in his hospital gown; he crosses a bridge to the entrance of the Doge’s Palace, and he’s in the casino again, just left of the high-limit slots. He works his way toward the elevators, eager to get back to his bed. As he passes the Oculus Lounge he scans the tables for Veronica, then for Stanley, and finally for the kid he chased last night. Thinking back, replaying it in his head, Curtis is embarrassed for both of them. The Whistler with his little mirror, Curtis with his fumbling pursuit. Grown men playing at being detectives, spies, criminals. Damon too, with his scheming and his faxes. And Stanley. Stanley with his whole life. But Curtis—who has seen misery and death in seven countries, who has been broken and imperfectly rebuilt, who should at this point know better—Curtis worst of all.
33
He’s awake now.
It takes him a minute to find the book in the sheets. He spent most of last night reading it: in Veronica’s room, after she fell asleep on the couch, then here, until he dozed off himself. He wipes his eyelids, reaches to turn off the lamp on the nightstand.
The Mirror Thief. Curtis can’t make heads of tails of it. So far as he can tell, it’s mostly about a guy named Crivano who’s some kind of wizard. Other people are in it, too: somebody called Hermes, somebody called the Nolan. The moon has a speaking part. Sometimes it seems like a plot is coming together, but then a six- or seven-page poem comes along—about the business of alchemy, or the technology of glassmaking, or the relationship of metals to planets—and the story gets put on hold. It’s all supposed to be very smart and serious, but at the same time there’s something goofy and Dungeons-&-Dragons about it, too.
Lust and war! The Gorgon’s stony gaze
masks the inner limit of the body—
adulterers ensnared by such silk thread
as spiders hoist upon the rafter-beam.
Web-spinners, mirror-makers, Athena