Sofia (7 page)

Truth to tell, I had quite forgotten about our willful passenger until then. She had been very quiet.

But, “when the children are quiet,” my old nurse used to say, “I know they’re up to mischief.”

My uncle brought the old nun to me. “This is my nephew Giorgio, the ship’s first mate,” he said. “He will see to your difficulty.” A roll of his eyes as he left told me privately that he did not have time for the foolishness of the problem.

The nun’s face was tear-stained and already a little green from the movement of the ship. She faced me with courage, however, clutching her beads for support, and defied me to resist the divinity contained in them.

“Holy Sister?”

“Young Signor Veniero.” She heaved an ample bosom in my direction with anything but eroticism. “Signor Veniero, I demand that you discipline your man.”

“My man?”

“That monster of a blackamoor, Signore.”

“Piero? Why? What’s he done?”

Once or twice she opened her mouth like a fish gasping in air, but she could not bring herself to speak the name of the atrocity. She had to take me across the deck, through all the benches of heaving rowers, and show me. Our progress halted on a stretch of forecastle where we could see the spray mowed before us in golden sheaves and the twilight sky above caught in a web of rigging.

There was my uncle’s man, in the place I expected him. Legs crossed in his long, exotic white cotton trousers, he was dutifully mending ropes in the day’s last light. But beside him, perched on a great coil, was Governor Baffo’s daughter.

She had changed her costume. It was plum velvet now, flashy with gold chains and rings. But the pink silk was still with her. She had spent the afternoon, it seemed, ripping and cutting up the skirt and now, armed with needle and thread, she was in the process of making it up into a shirt for old Piero. After a morning spent playing mad on the quayside and swinging on the gibbet, there was little use in her trying to salvage it for another display of fashion. Nevertheless, how well the color suited my uncle’s man had not been lost on Baffo’s daughter, either.

She hadn’t progressed far with the project—firstly, because she was not a very good seamstress. Her second difficulty was that she was maintaining an extremely active interest in Piero’s work to the neglect of her own. She watched his fingers, commented on their agility, asked any question that came to her head as if she would be required to mend ropes herself the very next day.

While I stood and watched with the aunt, I saw Baffo’s daughter bend over the slave twice, once dropping her thimble in among the coils, which he gallantly retrieved. As this produced no more result than that, she bent a second time with feigned interest in the ropemaking that served to reveal more of her cleavage than of his hemp. It seemed very clear that Madonna Baffo had decided to begin her flirtations with, of all the men on the ship, her rescuer of that morning, our black slave.

I had to laugh out loud.

“Signore!” the aunt said, appalled. “This is not a joking matter.”

“No, Sister, certainly not,” I said. “But I don’t know what you expect poor Piero to—” I clamped my mouth hard upon the thought and tried to suck the bitterness of the nun’s face into mine to keep the corners of my mouth turned down. “Send your niece to me in our cabin. I will speak to her.”

“My niece!” the nun said. “I most certainly will not. It’s your man that needs curbing, not Sofia. And I certainly will not allow her to enter a strange man’s cabin. Alone? Unchaperoned? God have mercy on me.”

“As you wish, Holy Sister. But our man is not very bright. He will stand right in front of you and nod at every word you say, but turn around and do exactly what you asked him not to do the next minute.”

“Signor Veniero, I am not talking about a simple scolding. I want your brazen man punished—whipped, scourged— whatever is customary here at sea.”

“Even that, Holy Sister, rarely has any effect. He is as big as an ox, twice as tough, and three times as dull-witted.” I had to direct the nun’s attention elsewhere to keep her from seeing the broad winks with which Piero was greeting my attempts to get him out of his fix. “Just look at the scars across his back and shoulders there: beatings that would have killed an ordinary man. But they made no impression on him. He is quite incorrigible, I’m afraid.”

“Then I wonder that your uncle keeps him,” the aunt replied with a tight breath of air.

“What we could get for him would not be worth the trouble.”

I lied, of course. Piero was more than our slave. He was part of the family and clever enough to cover for me if ever I were kept from my mate’s duties. But the nun, being the simple, sheltered soul she was, believed me at once.

“Very well,” she said. “I will do as you ask. But I will stand outside your door and hear your every word. If my niece should but draw her breath... Besides,” she muttered as she tripped over the ropes to where the unlikely pair sat, “I don’t know what you can say to correct her that I haven’t already tried. Sweet Jesus, it we can only get to my brother safe and alive...”

And with the girl’s virtue intact, I silently read the end of the sentence in the old nun’s lace.

***

“Come in, Madonna Baffo,” I said to the knock on my door. “Come in,” I said again as she entered and closed the door behind her. Sitting in my uncle’s great armchair, I thought, gave my voice strength and authority.

“Have a seat,” I invited her.

She sat.

“Have some wine?” I offered, pouring. “It’s very good. Last year’s vintage from Cyprus.”

She looked at me warily, but she took the dare and the goblet. I raised my own drink to her, but she did not return the toast. She quickly put the wine to her lips and drank. She was not used to drinking on board, however, and a sudden swell sent the strong liquid up the back ol her throat and into her nose. She choked and sputtered. The aunt burst into the room at the sound.

“Auntie, it’s nothing,” the girl insisted, trying to conceal the breathlessness that still lingered in her throat. I knew she was humiliated, and I smiled quietly at this first triumph as the aunt grudgingly left the room again.

To make up for her original defeat, Baffo’s daughter turned to me now with a haughty fire in her eyes and a rigid perfection in her limbs. I had to fight the disability the sight of her gave me. She was perfection. The plum color, I thought, suited her best of all. And the velvet was as soft a^ night. Her face was like a clear, pale, cold moon in that night. It could easily turn a man mad. I was in grave danger of losing my advantage.

“Madonna Baffo,” I said. “It seems you have—er, fallen in love, shall we say?”

“What business is that of yours? You have got me on the ship, and that is all your duty.”

“It is no business of mine,” I agreed, “except that it is our man you have dropped your kerchief for.” I took a sip of wine and looked at her askance. “Truly, Madonna Baffo. A lovely young lady such as yourself. A ship full of healthy young sailors. And a black slave is the best you can do? By San Marco! You’re much too intelligent a young woman to feel you must reward a man simply because he saves your life. And of course, you must know I paid Piero to watch out for you and promised him a coral earring for his trouble. He has been recompensed. If anyone is your creditor, then I would say it is myself.”

I could see by her eyes that she did not like being in my debt. I counted it as another point in my favor.

“Well, lest I bring your auntie in here for my presumption, let me immediately say that I quit you of all repayment. I need no reward. It was my duty to see you safe on board. It was business. No—more than that. It was a pleasure.”

Baffo’s daughter sniffed her skepticism.

“However, on one point I am still unsatisfied.”

Baffo’s daughter stirred in her seat.

“I cannot understand why—why Piero, of all the sailors...?”

The girl leaned toward me, showing off the white softness of her cleavage again, which the cabin’s lamp highlighted and shadowed far better than the light on deck.

“Guess,” she said, and took a sip of wine.

“Very well.” I thought for a moment. “You want to make your aunt jealous.”

She giggled. “No.”

“You want to hurt me. Get at me for some offense committed”—I blushed as I thought of the offense she could hold against me, of the burn of her arm on mine in Foscari’s hall, then struggled to recover myself—”committed unwittingly, I vow—and so you pursue my man.”

“You flatter yourself, Signor Veniero.”

A point for her. “Very well. Someone else on board?”

She shook her head.

“It’s not anyone on board. But it is someone. You do want to hurt someone. Who is it?”

“My father.”

“Your father?”

“Of course. And that stupid peasant I’m supposed to marry. Signor Veniero, you are a simpleton.”

“But I don’t understand. How can your dalliance on board ship affect someone who is not even here to see it?”

“Easily.” She sat back in the chair with a self-assured look that told me she expected to win the game with what she would say next. “I expect your dear Piero to give me a child. What fun I shall have when I present my husband with his heir—a little blackamoor.”

She began to laugh heartily at the joke and its doubtless effect on the listener outside the door. But she stopped short when I joined her mirth. I roared helplessly until the tears rolled down my cheeks. She sat glaring at me with her fist clenched angrily about the stem of her goblet. What finally stopped my laughter in a series of heavy gasps was that very look. By God, she was lovely with that mixture of scorn yet puzzlement in her eyes! Though I was certain now I would win our little contest, I somehow felt myself in serious jeopardy. I was sobered, but fortunately still in a sporting humor.

“Come here, Madonna. I want to show you something.”

From the lap desk on my bunk I took out a fresh piece of paper, dipped my pen in ink and wrote:

Madonna, can you read this?

With a wicked glance toward the door that would keep our writing in confidence, she snatched the pen from me and scribbled, Yes.

There was silence in the cabin save for the creaking of the hull beneath us and the scratching of the pen in my hand as I wrote,
Madonna. My uncle’s man cannot make you pregnant. He is a eunuch.

“What’s that?” she snapped aloud.

I resisted another laugh and replaced it by a smile of fatherly indulgence at her innocence.
A eunuch
, I wrote, is
like the castrato who sang at the Foscaris’ last Saturday night. Or were you too busy running off with Andrea Barbarigo to notice? A eunuch is a man who has had his male parts cut off so as to make him impotent. Among the Turks, where my uncle bought his man, it is a common practice. To get slaves they can trust with their women, the slavers in Turkey...

I stopped writing, for no more was necessary. It was a lie. I was sorry to have to defame Piero twice in as many minutes, first to say he was a simpleton and now this. A big, healthy eunuch such as our Piero would make—if the operation didn’t kill him—was worth too much money on the international market for poor mariners such as ourselves to own. He was, alas, as virile as anybody else.

Nevertheless, my bluff, inspired by the memory of those piercing, unearthly notes that had underscored our last meeting, worked. If I, the foolish first mate of a small galley bound for Corfu, knew about her failed attempt at freedom, how much further up the heap of Venetian society had it gone? The young woman hung limp with humiliation in her chair.

I smiled gently again, but her eyes refused to meet mine. “Come now,” I teased, almost sorry to see her humbled so. “Drink up your wine before you go. It will help you not to die of a broken heart.”

In a fury that spilled every drop, she slammed down her goblet and fled from the room. She made no reply to her aunt’s eager inquiries outside, but vanished down the deck in the direction of their cabin.

I gently closed the door behind her and sat and finished my wine, bemused into dreams by my brief treatise on the sexless ones, headed by her little scribble,
Yes
. The Venetian
Sí
: its capital
S
was the same as had undersigned the note that began
My love
, which I still kept close in the bosom of my doublet. I folded this correspondence, too, and stored it in the same safe place.

***

I saw no sign of either aunt or niece all the next morning. Only in the heat of the afternoon did the aunt have to come on deck to relieve herself of the sickness. I went over to offer her my condolences and what help one born to the sea can give without seeming to mock. She looked up at me with more gratitude than I would have thought possible from one in such distress.

“Bless you, Signore,” she said, then struggled to say more. U I don’t know what it was you showed my niece in your cabin last night, but whatever it was, it worked wonders. She hasn’t stirred from her bed since then.”

“I pray heaven she is not sick, too.”

“Oh, no, not she. She has a stomach of iron and veins of ice. Only—what shall I say? Soundly subdued. Yes, that’s the only word for it. Subdued. Subdued at last. Pray God it may last to Corfu.”

The year of our Lord, 1562. The end of January. Under the winter sky, the Dalmatian coast seemed more stark than usual, the fir trees like last defenders holding out upon the fortress of white granite cliffs. We had put in at Ragusa for supplies and to avoid a storm, but the storm was past now and another two days, three at the most, would see us in Corfu.

It was hard to believe that any voyage could be so uneventful. But for one that carried that she-demon Baffo, it nothing short of unnerved me. Certainly I saw her again. She spent no more than a day locked up in her cabin before the moans and smells of her aunt’s sickness drove her to seek fresh air and diversion outside. But somehow she always contrived to be at the other end of the ship from me. If I were helping the men drag in fish on the starboard side, she would be interested in the coasts off the port. If I went port thinking to point out the landmarks we passed, she would find the sunset more attractive. If I had conversation with the pilot in the stern, she would be at the very point of the prow, leaning forward like a figurehead, as if she couldn’t wait to be in Corfu. And if I went forward, she hung over the stern longing for the places we had already been.