Balthasar's Odyssey (49 page)

Neither Domenico nor Marta can help me now. Nor anyone else, present or absent; nor any memory. Everything that comes into my mind adds to my confusion. And so does everything around me, everything I can see and everything I can manage to remember. And of course this year itself, this accursed year. Only four weeks of it are left, but those four weeks seem simply insurmountable — an ocean without sun or moon or stars, just wave after wave after wave as far as the horizon.

No, I'm still in no fit state to write.

10 December

Our boat has left Chios behind, and my mind too is beginning to distance itself from all that happened to me there. It will take more time yet for the wound to heal, but after ten days I can at last think of something else sometimes. Perhaps I ought to try to go on with my journal…

Up till now I haven't been able to give a proper account of what happened. But it's time I did so, even if, when I come to the most painful moments, I have to confine myself to words devoid of feeling — “he said”, “he asked”, “she said”, “seeing that”, “it was agreed”.

When Marta came on board the
Charybdis,
Domenico would have liked to send for her during the night and find out what had become of the child she'd been carrying, deliver his verdict, and set out straight away back to Italy. But as she could scarcely stand, he resigned himself, as I've already said, to letting her sleep for a while. Everyone on the boat had a few hours' rest, apart from the look-outs — in case some Ottoman ship should decide to intercept us. But the sea was so rough that night we must have been the only vessel there.

In the morning we met again in the captain's quarters. Demetrios and Yannis were there too, making five of us in all. Domenico solemnly asked Marta if she preferred to be questioned in her husband's presence or without him. I translated the question for her, into the Arabic that's spoken in Gibelet, and she said at once, almost imploringly:

“Without him!”

Her expression, and the way she wrung her hands, made it unnecessary for me to translate her answer.

So Domenico went on:

“Signor Baldassare has told us you were pregnant when you came to Chios last January. But your husband maintains you've never had a child.”

Marta looked stricken. She turned to me for a moment, then hid her face in her hands and began to sob. I took a step towards her, but Domenico — taking his role as judge seriously — signed to me to stay where I was. He also signed to the others not to say or do anything; just to wait. When he thought he'd given the witness enough time to collect herself, he said:

“Go on.”

I translated, adding:

“Speak. There's nothing to be afraid of. No one's going to hurt you.”

But my words, instead of reassuring her, seemed to upset her even more. Her sobs grew louder. Domenico told me not to add anything to what he asked me to translate. I promised I wouldn't.

A few seconds went by. Marta's sobbing died down, and Domenico, with a tinge of impatience, repeated his question. Then Marta looked up and said:

“I've never had a child!”

“What do you mean?”

I'd cried it out aloud. Domenico called me to order. I apologised again, then translated just what Marta had said.

Then she said, in a steady voice:

“There never was a child. I never was pregnant.”

“But you told me you were!”

“Yes, because I thought I was. But I was mistaken.”

I looked at her for a long, long time, but couldn't once catch her eye. I wanted to see something that resembled the truth in her look; at least to understand whether she'd lied to me all along; if she'd lied to me only about the child, to make me take her back as fast as possible to her scoundrel of a husband; or if she was lying to me now. She only raised her eyes two or three times, furtively, probably to see if I was still looking at her, and if I believed her.

Then Domenico asked her, in a fatherly manner:

“Tell us, Marta — do you want to go ashore, back to your husband, or to come with us?”

I translated it as “come back with me”. But she answered clearly, pointing, that she wanted to go back to Katarraktis.

With the man she hates? I didn't understand. Then suddenly it struck me.

“Wait, Domenico,” I said. “I think I understand what's going on. Her son must be on the island, and she's afraid something would happen to him if she said anything against her husband. Tell her that if that's what she's afraid of, we'll make her husband send for the child, just as we made him send for her. Only
she
will go for the child, and we'll hold on to her husband until she comes back. Then he won't be able to do anything to her!”

“Calm down!” said the Calabrian. “I think all that may just be make-believe. But if you have the slightest doubt, I want you to say to her what you've just said to me. And you can promise her, in my name, that no harm will come either to her or to her son.”

I then launched into a long tirade, at once passionate, desperate and imploring, begging Marta to tell me the truth. She listened with her eyes downcast. When I'd finished, she looked at Domenico and said:

“There never was a child. I never was pregnant. I can't have children.”

She'd spoken in Arabic. She repeated what she'd said in faulty Greek, turning to Demetrios. Domenico glanced at him inquiringly.

The sailor, who so far had remained silent, looked embarrassed. His eyes turned first to me, then to Marta, then to me again, and finally to his captain.

“When I went to their house,” he said, “I didn't get the impression there was a child around.”

“It was the middle of the night — he'd have been asleep!”

“I banged at the door and woke everyone up. There was a great commotion, but I didn't hear a baby crying.”

I tried to speak, but Domenico stopped me.

“That'll do! In my opinion the woman's telling the truth! We must let her and her husband go.”

“Not yet! Wait!”

“No, Baldassare, I won't wait. The matter's settled. We're leaving. We've already made ourselves late to please you, and I hope one day you'll remember to thank all the men who risked great danger for your sake!”

These words hurt me more than Domenico could have imagined. I had been a hero to him, and now he saw me as a jilted lover, whining and making things up. In a few hours, a few minutes or a few words even, the noble and honourable Signor Baldassare had become a nuisance, a troublesome passenger barely tolerated, whom you could tell to be quiet.

If I went to weep in a corner away from everybody, it was as much because of that as because of Marta. She left as soon as the questioning was over. I suppose Domenico apologised to her husband, and I think he offered them the dinghy to take them back to the shore. I didn't want to be present at the farewells.

My wound has closed a little by now, though it's still very painful. I still don't understand Marta's behaviour. I ask myself questions so strange I don't like to write them down. I still need to think …

11 December

What if everyone lied to me?

What if this whole expedition was a trick, a deception, designed only to make me give Marta up?

Perhaps this idea is just a delusion arising out of humiliation, loneliness, and several sleepless nights. But it could be the truth.

Gregorio, wanting to make me give Marta up once and for all, could have told Domenico to take me with him and do whatever was necessary to make me never want to see her again.

Didn't someone tell me one day in Smyrna that Sayyaf was mixed up in smuggling — smuggling mastic? So it's likely that Domenico knew him, though he pretended he was seeing him for the first time. That may have been why they made me stay behind a partition. So that I couldn't see their nods and winks, and unmask their conspiracy!

And probably Marta knew Demetrios and Yannis too; she'd have seen them before, in her husband's house. So she'd have felt obliged to say what she did.

But when we were alone together in the hold, when she was lying down, why didn't she take the opportunity to speak to me in secret?

I must be deluding myself! Why should all those people have been merely acting a part? Just to deceive me and make me give up that woman? Hadn't they anything better to do with their lives than risk being hanged or impaled in order to dabble in my amorous intrigues?

My reason is as out of joint as my poor father's shoulder was once. It needs a good shock to re-set it.

13 December

For twelve days I wandered about on the boat as if I were invisible: everyone had orders to avoid me. If a sailor threw me a word from time to time, it was half-heartedly, and after making sure no one else was looking. I took my meals alone and surreptitiously, as if I had the plague.

But today people started talking to me again. Domenico came up to me and threw his arms round me as if he was just welcoming me on board. That was the signal for all the rest to mix with me again.

I could have sulked, refused the offered hand, let the braggart blood of the Embriaci speak. But no. The truth is, I'm relieved to be back in favour. I found it hard to bear, being an outcast.

I'm not one of those people who revel in adversity.

I like to be liked. Loved.

14 December

According to Domenico, I should thank the Almighty for arranging things His way rather than mine. These words, from a smuggler turned spiritual adviser, have made me think. Weigh things up, make comparisons. And in the end I don't think he's altogether wrong.

“Suppose she'd said what you hoped she'd say. That her husband ill-treated her, that she'd lost her child because of him, and she'd like to leave him. In that case I imagine you'd have kept her and taken her back to your own country.”

“Of course!”

“What about the husband?”

“To hell with him!”

“Yes, but would you have let him go home, so that one day he might come and knock at your door and ask for his wife back? And what would you have told her family? That he was dead?”

“Do you think I never thought of all that?”

“Oh no, I'm sure you did. But I'd like you to tell me how you proposed to solve those problems.”

We were both silent for a while.

“I don't want to torture you, Baldassare. I'm your friend, and I've done for you what your own father wouldn't have done. So I'm going to say to you what you yourself don't like to say to me. You should have killed that swine of a husband. No, don't make a face and look shocked-I know you thought of it, and so did I. Because if the woman had decided to leave him, neither you nor I would have wanted him to remain alive to come back and haunt us. I'd always have been thinking, every time I went to Chios, that there was someone there waiting to be revenged on me. And you too would have preferred to know he was dead.”

“Probably!”

“But could you have killed him?”

“I thought of it,” I admitted, but didn't go any further.

“Thinking of it isn't enough. Wishing for it still less. Wishing someone else was dead — that's something that can happen every day. A servant who steals, a difficult customer, a troublesome neighbour, even your own father. But in this case, wishing wouldn't have been enough. Would you have been capable of, say, picking up a knife and going up to your rival and sticking it in his heart? Or binding him hand and foot and throwing him overboard? You
thought
of it, and I
thought
of it for you. I wondered what would be the ideal solution for you. And I found it. Killing him, throwing him overboard wouldn't have been enough. You didn't only need to know he was dead; you also needed your neighbours to see he was dead. We'd have had to head in the direction of Gibelet, taking him with us, still alive. When we were a few cables' lengths from the nearby coast, we'd have tied his feet together, thrown him overboard, towed him along for an hour, say, then hauled him up again, drowned. Then we'd have untied his feet and laid him on a stretcher, and you and the woman would have put on long faces and let my men take you and the corpse ashore. You'd have told everyone he'd fallen overboard and drowned that day; and I'd have confirmed it. Then you'd have buried him, and a year later you'd have married his widow.

“That's how
I
would have managed it. I've already killed dozens of men, and none of them has come back to haunt me in my dreams. But you — tell me, could you have done it?”

I admitted that I'd certainly have thanked God if our expedition had ended in the way he'd just imagined. But that I couldn't have committed a crime like that myself.

“Then be glad she didn't say what you hoped she'd say!”

15 December

I keep thinking about what Domenico said. If he'd been me, I've no doubt he'd have acted exactly as he described. But I'm a born merchant, and I have the soul of a merchant, not of a pirate or a warrior. Nor that of a brigand, either — perhaps that's why Marta chose the other instead of me. He, like Domenico, wouldn't have hesitated to kill to get what he wanted. Neither of them has any scruples about it. But would either of them ever have gone out of their way for the love of a woman?