by Martin Seay
How did my brother die?
He was struck by a cannonball. A ball from the centerline pedrero of an Ottoman galley. Quite a large stone: at least fifty pounds, I should think. The ball must have cracked when it was fired, for I found a scattering of limestone chips where it had passed. Had the enemy been in a trough between waves and not riding a crest, the shot would have sundered the deck, and I and many others would have died as well. As it was, it went high. Your brother stood beside me, then he did not.
Were you able to see to his remains before you were overrun?
I tried, lady. But there were no remains to speak of. I am deeply sorry.
She nods. Her posture suggests grief, but there is no grief in her face, only excitement, and exhaustion. Everyone of noble birth was executed, she says. So Gabriel would have died anyway.
Yes. I sometimes comfort myself with that thought. The cannonball spared him agony and indignity alike.
She’s silent now, rubbing her hands in her lap as if to warm them, although it is not cold in this room. Or is it? It’s hard for him to say. He stares openly at her, sorting her into pieces to memorize every detail—her lips, her feet, her brow—but everything his stare gathers slides swiftly toward oblivion, warm rain striking bare rock. It’s rarely the eye, he knows, that best serves the recollecting mind. He fights the urge to press his nose to her scalp, to take hold of her soft palms, to see what he can untangle from the webwork of lined skin there. After tonight he does not plan to see this girl again.
What happened to you? she says. After the Turks captured you?
Crivano shrugs. I was fortunate, he says. I was not put to the oars, as many of my shipmates were. Owing to my youth, I was given to the janissaries, and with them I encountered hardship and adventure in strange lands I had never dreamed of. I learned their language, and the language of the Arabs, and in time I became an interpreter.
And then you escaped.
Yes. I betrayed the trust that I had earned, and I fled. I wish I could declare my choice to have been an easy one, but it was not. Almost half my life had been spent among the Turks. My boyhood home was lost, my family gone. The lands where I was to seek my freedom were alien to me. The world into which I had been born no longer had any means of recognizing me, nor I it.
With no family, Perina says, you are no one here. Worse than no one. You are a corpse. An effigy. A ghost.
Her expression remains placid, her voice reserved, but Crivano senses a whisper of rage in her, so pure as to be invisible, like a very hot flame. Yes, he says. I’m sure you understand.
Why did you come back?
Crivano looks at his lap, at the floor. His drunkenness is abandoning him, leaving him sluggish and stupid, in peril of forgetting that his lies are lies. As we grow older, he says, we sometimes find that our most momentous decisions are unseen by us as we make them. We perceive only a confusion of paltry choices, like the tesserae of a mosaic. Only with distance do prevailing images become clear. A man came to me in the night and said he had stolen the skin of Marcantonio Bragadin, the hero of Famagusta. He asked me to help him, and I said I would. All else has issued from that.
They sit in silence for a while. The sound of voices singing the Magnificat echoes from the corridor. Across the parlor, the nun pulls and winds her thread. Her impatience settles over them like a fog.
I must make a momentous decision soon, Perina says.
To take your vows?
She nods. I am twenty years old, she says. I have been an educant here since I was eight. Most of us are married or clothed as nuns prior to our sixteenth year. I fear I am becoming a source of anxiety to the abbess. She informs me that she has already selected my new name, and looks forward to bestowing it upon me soon. She has been informing me of this on a regular basis for more than a year now, and her considerable patience is on the wane. I have no words to tell you, dottore, how fervently I seek to quit this barren harem of Christ. There is nothing—
Her eyes are riveted now to his own, glinting like obsidian under her veil.
—nothing that I would not do to leave this place. Nothing.
Crivano casts a nervous glance at the nun, but her beleaguered expression remains unaltered.
Don’t be overly concerned about Sister Perpetua, dottore, Perina says. She’s very devout, but also somewhat deaf. We prisoners of Santa Caterina are fortunate to have her as our gatekeeper.
I gather, Crivano says, that you sense no vocation toward the veil.
If you search this edifice brick by brick, dottore, you will find herein perhaps a dozen genuine vocations. Mostly we are the surplus daughters of the Republic’s great families, married off to Christ without indignity or excessive expense, and we spend that portion of our day unallocated to prayer enacting doll-game renditions of the rivalries that engage our families in the outside world—only with no real consequence, of course. The few among us with any brains avoid those of our own rank and consort instead with the repentant harlots, who know something of life’s complexities, who know the best songs and the best stories, who offer explicit instruction on how we can best entertain our husbands and lovers as we seek our ultimate stations in the world.
Crivano realizes that his jaw is agape, and shuts it.
I, naturally, have little stake in such talk, she continues. I spend my days with whatever books come to me, and in shameful reveries. Would you like to hear the most shameful, dottore? The daydream which has most preoccupied me in recent days, which I would confess to no one but you, is this: I imagine that the ship that carried my mother and my sister from Cyprus never did find the lagoon safely, but instead was set upon by Ottoman corsairs. I imagine that I was born not in the comfortable lair of the Contarini, but in Constantinople, where I became an odalisque in the seraglio. And then of course I imagine a young sultan who values the small wit I do possess over the great beauty I do not, and takes me for his favorite. You blush to hear these things, dottore, and yet I do not blush to speak them. Would it be somehow less shameful for me to make one small addition to my fantasy, and wish that I had been born into the seraglio a boy? To wish, in short, for a life like the one you yourself have led? Odd as it may be, I cannot.
Crivano holds her gaze as best he can. His arms are wet-wool heavy; he’s not sure his legs will carry him when the time comes to rise. We can hardly choose our dreams, lady, he says.
Can you help me escape this place? Only escape. Nothing more.
He shakes his head slowly. A mistake: when he stops, the room spins on. You don’t understand what you ask, he says. Where would you go?
There are places, she says. And people. Please, dottore.
The revolving walls make him nauseous, so he closes his eyes. Breathing deeply. Laughing under his breath. It is very easy, at this moment, for him to imagine himself as dreamed into being by this girl. As a shadow cast by her childish hands before an as-yet-unseen light.
Dottore? she says. Are you again unwell?
Your new name, Crivano says. Do you know yet what it is to be?
No. I could guess, I suppose.
He opens his eyes. It thrills the blood, doesn’t it? he says. The thought of casting aside an old name. But it is not a thing to do casually. Lest you find yourself with no name at all.
Perina, the nun says. It’s time. Show your guest to the door.
Perina rises, tugs gently on his wrist; he’s grateful for her help. I want to tell you more about your brother, he says.
I have many questions. You’ll come again soon, won’t you?
He was greatly loved by everyone who knew him, Crivano says. He gave all of us courage until the moment he died. To this day he remains for me a paragon of grace and boldness.
A shadow passes across Perina’s face; her gaze drops to the floor. Then she folds her arm into his and eases him toward the exit. I have been told, she says, that in his boyhood my brother was greatly inclined to solitude and melancholy. And that you were much to thank for lightening his dispositio
n.
There’s a note of uncertainty in her voice: a concern she’s eager to dismiss. It sobers him like packed snow against his neck. I must confess, he says, that the years of struggle and sorrow have added weight to my own temperament. I can scarcely recall the playful youth you describe. But if I did anything to ease your brother’s brief bright path through the world, then I am honored to have done so.
She smiles under her veil. Moving him forward. Her eyes fixed on the stone floor. The nun, on her feet again, hovers behind them.
Perina gives his forearm a surreptitious squeeze. You’ll help me, she whispers.
I—will try.
The door swings open and the night comes in, airy and echoless. Belltowers and chimney-funnels and the edges of tiled rooftops cast black outlines against the western sky, while shadows rise in the streets below. The canal’s surface shuffles the left-behind light—blue heavens, orange lanterns—and Crivano slouches toward it, descending the convent steps. Halfway down he sags against the rail and turns back. Perina still stands in the door. Your cousin, he says. The senator. What did he say about me?
She’s surprised by his question, at a loss for an answer. Very little, she says. Nothing, really.
He only arranged our meeting.
Yes, she says. I asked him to do so.
The nun is behind her, one hand on her shoulder, the other on the doorframe. Perina’s veiled eyes are lost in the dusk.
Then how, Crivano says, did you first learn that I knew your brother? That I fought at Lepanto?
There’s a lengthy silence. A breeze rustles the crowns of the sea-pines in the churchyard. Dottore de Nis, she says at last. Dottore de Nis told me.
Good night, dottore, the gatekeeper nun shouts as she shuts the door. Do be vigilant in the dark.
53
The bolt slides home with an emphatic boom. In the ensuing silence, Crivano stares at the gray oak planks of the convent door until lamplight vanishes from the gaps between them. Then he takes a swift weary inventory—his parcel, his stick—and turns south, toward the church of the Apostles and the Rialto beyond. In the distance the belltower in the Piazza glows like a hot iron against the starry sky; Crivano can see pale flashes of night-birds around it, feasting on insects summoned by the fire.
When he comes to the Saint Sophia Canal he takes a few unsteady paces to the water’s edge, sets his burdens down, and parts his robes to piss, splashing the quay, tracing crazy patterns across the surface, nearly wetting himself. He wants to dwell on what he’s just heard but cannot: he needs to find Obizzo, to give him the news. He never should have come here. What perversity impelled him? Was it engendered in himself, or—somehow—by the crooked city streets, which seem willfully to frustrate his errands, to distract him with queer spectacles, strange musings, unfamiliar impulses? Even now each shuffling step toward the Rialto brings him no closer: he sees the Grand Canal flash between palace walls but finds no path that leads there.
In the campo of Saint John the Golden-Tongued he finally gives up, chooses a street he’s certain will connect him to the Mercerie, and emerges instead behind the German fondaco, at the Grand Canal at last, near the very spot where the new bridge spans it. Crivano hurries to the Riva del Carbon, searching the face of every idle gondolier in the hope of glimpsing Obizzo. When he’s nearly reached the Morosini house—where last night he half-listened to the Nolan’s lecture—he turns around again. The bridge is a needle-fanged maw over the water, its broad philtrum lit with torches; their phantom twins gambol in the waves below.
In the works of Thrice-Great Hermes, we read of the double essence of Divine Man, of how He looked down from the armature of the spheres and fell in love with Nature when He saw His reflection upon Her waters. Climbing the bridge’s sloped central pathway, Crivano spots a figure he recognizes leaning against the marble balustrade: the wart-footed streetwalker, alone, tired, probably hungry, but not in any visible distress. She’s looking down at the city: rows of inscrutable palaces, lanterns winking from black outlines of boats. The expression she wears is familiar from his janissary years; he saw it sometimes, albeit rarely, in the faces of peasants displaced by the sweep of armies. How wondrous, it seems to say, is this thing that destroys me.
Crivano slips from the waning procession to stand undetected behind her, close enough to study the sinews in her neck and shoulders, to smell the many days of peppery sweat her skin has accrued. The brown dye on her hands and forearms has faded somewhat. When she stirs, adjusting her weight, Crivano hastens away.
The Universe, in all its disorder and variety, is the mirror which captured Divine Man’s as-yet-unseen reflection. But its seeming chaos masks a unity: Amphitrite, the Ocean, who also corresponds to the waters wherein naked Diana bathes when she is glimpsed by Actaeon, the Intellect. Crivano wanders south to the limit of the Riva del Vin, north to the fishmarket, long vacant at this hour, though still reeking. Boatman after boatman after boatman, soliciting fares, awaiting their masters, laughing and cursing with their fellows. Obizzo is nowhere to be found. On his way through the Ropemakers’ Square Crivano realizes that the image he’s fixed in his brain—the lens through which his mind’s eye has been scanning the canal-sides—is not Obizzo’s broad countenance but the lean face of dead Verzelin. He’s confused the features of a man he murdered. He could have passed Obizzo a dozen times tonight and never known.
He slumps against a pillar in the colonnade of the Treasury and closes his eyes, breathing through his sudarium. Sober now, but aching, exhausted. The White Eagle seems very far to go. A baffled heaviness that’s stalked him all day has at last overtaken him; he still cannot fathom its source. The aim of all his intrigues is now practically within his grasp: in mere days his work will be done. So wherefore this misdirection, these impediments, that seem to bubble from the ferment of his own brain? Even now, as he tries to retrieve Obizzo’s visage, the only image that appears is Perina’s veiled face, her beseeching eyes. Only escape, she said. Nothing more.
There is another course that Crivano could take. The thought rattles his heart. How easily Obizzo could join Verzelin on the lagoon’s floor: a fugitive, he’s practically dead already. Then a private word to the senator—I have recognized one of the Turks at the fondaco as the chief tormentor of my days in bondage, and I must be revenged—to protect him from the sultan’s agents. A meeting with Narkis in a secluded spot; a stiletto between his ribs. Serena would say nothing; what could he say? In two decisive sweeps, the conspiracy would be erased. Here, then, is the ultimate perversion: Crivano could abandon the betrayal masked by his current respectability and become respectable. The gecko who drops his tail.
He has the senator’s blessing. He could wed the foolish lovely girl. What would prevent it? Who would object? He could forsake his current treachery for a treachery altogether more loathsome and more profound, a treachery unknown to every other living soul. The idea is not without its appeal: to become, at last, the perfect impostor.
Someone is watching. Crivano opens his eyes.
It’s the whore. She’s only steps away, standing with her back to the canal. Her expression empty, or emptied. Here I am, it says.
Until now he has taken her for a provincial girl, selling herself during the Sensa for extra coins; in doing so, he may have been too hasty. She’s chosen this moment with care. She seems certain of what he’ll do; more certain than he is himself. He wonders how that could be possible.
He tucks away his sudarium and steps toward her; she greets him politely. He inquires after her foot, and she says that it still troubles her. He asks if she has a bed for the night, and she says that she does not, not yet, but that she’s sure she’ll manage. Then he asks her price.
Back at the White Eagle, he interrupts Anzolo’s supper to give him Serena’s parcel. This must be delivered to Dottore Tristão de Nis before dawn, he says. You will find him at the house of Andrea and Nicolò Morosini. The men who carry it should be well-armed, entirely trustworthy, and lacking any for
mal affiliation with this locanda. Its contents are of incalculable worth, and uncertain legitimacy. I intend now to retire, and I should not like to be troubled prior to the fourteenth bell. Oh—have a chambermaid bring a large washbasin, a clean flesh-brush, and a spare pitcher of water to my room. An extra lamp, as well. Immediately, please.
The whore is stepping from her skirts when the knock comes. Crivano opens the door wide enough to gather in what the maid has brought, then shuts and bolts it with muttered thanks. He fills the basin, lights the lamp, and hangs up his own garments while she washes herself. Her eyes linger on the two emblems that mark his skin—the key on his chest, the Sword of the Prophet on his calf—but she asks no questions. Her long shadow stretches over the walls, dulling and sharpening in the erratic light.
When she’s done, he grips her by the neck and washes her again, scrubbing hard until her flesh turns rosy beneath its sun-darkened brown. She makes no protest. He wipes her dry, directs her to the bed, moves the lamps closer. Then he begins to inspect her, minutely, for condylomata and chancres. His eyes are dry and tired. She’s immobile, silent, watching the ceiling. Soft voices rise from the street outside. From somewhere more distant comes the low liquid whistle of a scops-owl.
He stands, washes his own arms past the elbow, and directs her to sit up. Then he tilts her head toward the light and puts his fingers in her mouth. Her tongue, her cheeks, her throat are free from signs of disease. He tips her back onto the wool-stuffed mattress, folds the hinges of her knees, and applies his spit-slick fingers to her anus and vulva. He intends this as a prudent preliminary to copulation, but it soon becomes an end in itself: it is what he wants, what he is doing, why he brought her here. He recalls the invasion of Georgia: lovely young corpses stacked in a barn in Tiflis, the stench of death arrested by the brutal cold. Extraordinary machines! More perfect with their souls gone. He could have spent hours exploring them, days cutting them to pieces.