The Mirror Thief (29 page)

One of Marco’s nephews, a chubby boy of around seven, takes Crivano’s hand and leads him up two flights to the great hall on the piano nobile. The furnishings he knows from previous visits—suits of armor, shields and bucklers, sunbursts of swords and spears, all framed by tattered banners bearing emblems and devices he recalls from his childhood—are now clustered at the hall’s far end, and the nearby walls are lined with folded wooden screens, rolled black curtains, and partly assembled scaffolding. Before he can make a closer inspection, the boy tugs him into the blazing atrium.

A long table shaded with parasols stretches between two neat rows of almond trees, their branches already sagging with green fruit. A dozen or so servants—twice the usual retinue, temporary help hired for the Sensa—set places across its oaken expanse with goblets and flatware. Crivano recognizes a few of the milling guests from state banquets and earlier introductions, but most faces are strange to him.

The senator himself stands at the edge of the grass, looking well-rested
and magnificent in a lynx-trimmed velvet robe. He claps his big hands warmly on Crivano’s shoulders. I am gratified to find you well, senator, Crivano says.

Contarini’s response is spoken in the language of court, not that of the Republic; foreign visitors must be present. I give credit to you and to your physic, dottore, he says. It has restored me so completely that I am scarcely able to recognize myself.

The senator turns to the man on his right, a gaunt and balding Neapolitan of sallow complexion. This is the heroic personage of whom I spoke, my friend, he says. Dottore Vettor Crivano, a child of Cyprus like myself, who suffered years in infidel bondage, who made a daring escape from Constantinople and helped restore the remains of the valiant Marcantonio Bragadin to the hands of the Republic. Devoted in equal measure to wisdom and to brave deeds, he graduated from Bologna with distinction, and has come our city to commence his career as a physician. Dottore Crivano, I don’t believe you’ve met Signore della Porta.

Crivano and the Neapolitan exchange polite bows.

Dottore Crivano’s father, Contarini continues, was chief secretary to my kinsman Lord Pietro Glissenti, the last chamberlain of Cyprus, and served him faithfully until they were both massacred at Famagusta. Were that sacrifice insufficient to place the Contarini family in his debt, Dottore Crivano has recently cured me of a sleeplessness that has troubled me since well before Lent. You really should seek his council about your own ailments, Giovan. He is the best man to help you.

You are unwell, signore? Crivano asks.

The Neapolitan’s voice is quiet and crisp, like a shuffle of documents. It’s nothing at all, he says. I’m fine.

Contarini leans toward Crivano, lowers his voice. He coughs, he says. At times I imagine his heart will leap from his jaws like a toad, he coughs so much. It’s worse after he eats, which is why he refuses to dine with us. One hesitates to believe, dottore, that such terrible noises can come from the lungs of such a small man.

I pray you will forgive my discourtesy, senator, the Neapolitan says,
but as you have no doubt noticed, the sun nears its zenith. With your permission, I will see to the children.

Della Porta takes his leave across the peristyle, entering the great hall. Contarini claps Crivano on the arm with a conspiratorial wink and turns to greet another guest. Momentarily at a loss, Crivano fades into the crowd, seeking faces he knows, pondering the Neapolitan. Della Porta, he thinks. From Naples. Why is this familiar?

The servants have begun to seat the guests. Crivano winds up between a sullen and heavily veiled maiden and an elderly gentleman called Barbaro—a procurator of San Marco, quite deaf—who loudly denigrates the glassmakers’ guild until the first course arrives. The glassworks of the Medici, old Barbaro shouts, makes lenses of quality, but it has no prayer of competing with the factories of Holland. And where do their finest craftsmen come from? They come from here! We treat our guildsmen like merchant princes, and they conduct themselves like roundheeled whores!

Crivano wants to raise a polite dissent—a pointless impulse, since the procurator is certain not to hear him—and he’s sifting his brain for what little he knows of optics when recollection comes. I beg your pardon, lady, he whispers to the veiled girl. The Neapolitan gentleman who was here a short time ago, the one called della Porta—is he not Giambattista della Porta, the author of
Magiae Naturalis
, and the famous book on physiognomy?

Beneath clouds of gray lace the girl’s eyes are riveted to his own, but she makes no reply.

Or perhaps, Crivano says, you know him as a playwright, and not as an eminent scholar? As the author of the popular comedies
Penelope
, and
The Maid
, and
Olympia
?

The girl’s voice is a contralto murmur, each word precisely formed. I grant that Signore della Porta is eminent, she says. And he is certainly a scholar. I suppose we may therefore speak of him with justification as an eminent scholar.

You question Signore della Porta’s scholarship, lady?

Oh, no, dottore. As one who read
Magiae Naturalis
with great zeal in both its editions, I dare not raise any such protest. Besides, the little
instruction I receive in the convent school hardly qualifies me to speak on this matter. I can only parrot what I have gleaned from overhearing the discussions of my erudite cousins.

And what is that, if I may ask?

She looks at the tabletop, and her voice sinks further toward silence. If the great community of scholars can be likened to the family of musical instruments, she says, then Giambattista della Porta can be likened to a churchbell. His work is distinguished by its enviable clarity, but not by its subtlety or its scope.

Crivano laughs, drawing an irritated glare from the old procurator. As he gropes for a clever rejoinder—a pun, perhaps, about how her observation has the ring of truth—servants arrive with enormous platters: cured ham simmered with capers in wine, pork tongue and fresh grapes, marzipan and spicecake. Crivano is rubbing his palms together, turning to the girl with some comment about the feast, when she lifts her veils.

It is as if he has been plunging like Icarus toward the sea—falling for such a long time and from such a terrible height that he has forgotten himself to be falling—and now has struck the water at last. His lungs refuse air; his jellied limbs seem to fly from him. He feels himself rise for the prayer and for Contarini’s toast, raise his goblet of Moselle wine, but his ears perceive nothing but the interior churn of his own humors.

He cannot imagine why this ictus has come upon him. He has never met this girl before; he has no notion of who she is. Cream-skinned and sharp-faced, with obstinate eyes, she is not beautiful except in the ways that youth and vivacity are always beautiful. There is, perhaps, a scent. He is less entranced than terrified. He cannot bear to look upon her face. His eyes fix instead upon the grain of the tabletop, their focus as hot and relentless as Archimedes’ terrible glass. Yet the only clear image in his head is that of the Lark’s demolished body, its pink meat cannonball-scattered across the quarterdeck of the
Gold and Black Eagle
. Why this memory now?

The old procurator has resumed his ranting; a line of brown sauce bisects his chin. Our glassmakers lack loyalty and direction! he thunders. They could crush Florence and Amsterdam with ease, but they won’t
learn, they won’t change, they lack science. Look here: why is the city of Saint Mark superior to the city of Saint Peter? Because it has no pagan past! This is why glassmaking is our great art: in no discipline but this do modern artisans surpass their pagan predecessors. The shops of Murano should be crowded with painters and engineers and architects, learned men seeking to emulate their example. But what do they sell instead? Mirrors! Nice flat mirrors for ladies and sodomites!

The guests empty the platters and more platters appear: roast quail with eggplant, fried sweetbreads with lemon, a soup of songbirds and almond-paste. As each majolica dish is cleared, bare-breasted images of Annona and Felicitas and Juno Moneta emerge from the crumbs and sauces, offering mute blessings to the Contarini line. Now comes a boiled calf and a pair of stuffed geese, here are chicken pies and pigs’ feet, here is a pigeon stew with mortadella and translucent whole onions, sightless eyes rolling in the dark broth. Crivano eats almost nothing. The girl, nearly motionless in the margin of his sight, seems to eat even less.

Contarini rises at the head of the table, his hand in the air, his strong fingers imperiously curled. It is the height of rudeness, he says, to hasten one’s guests through their meals. Thus I offer my apologies. But my esteemed colleague Signore della Porta informs me that our entertainments must commence immediately if we are to have them at all. It seems that our revels depend—as I suppose all things depend—on the advantage conveyed by the rays of the noonday sun. More than that I shall not say, for fear of evoking the voluminous wrath of the little Neapolitan. Enough! Let us recess through the peristyle, where seats await us!

Crivano mumbles a quick courtesy to the maiden, pushes to his feet, and hurries from the courtyard, seizing the chance to escape and collect himself. His pulse hammers in his temples and his gut, muffled and out of phase, like laborers sinking a pile through thick clay. He is simply ill, he thinks: stricken by some mundane lagoon miasma. It’s coincidence, nothing to do with the girl. But even as he thinks these things he imagines himself as an under-rehearsed player, declaiming them to an unseen audience in the dark theater of his own mind. Already some secret part of him must know.

With nothing in his belly to slow its progress the wine is rampant in his blood, making his footfalls heavy and loose as he steps indoors. The great hall has been cleared of its clutter; the stacked screens and folded curtains are assembled and hung, occluding the windows that open to the courtyard. The only visible daylight rises through the loggia at the opposite end: a liquid shimmer on the frescoed ceiling, the oscillating echo of the Grand Canal’s surface, just out of sight below. Somewhere nearby—he can’t say where—he hears a soft clang of metal brushing metal, and the muted laughter of a child.

Crivano blinks, unsteady in the abrupt darkness. A servant with a lamp appears at his side to convey him to an adjacent room. Here too the windows are blocked by curtains, and before the curtains stands an upright polyptych of blank canvases. By the wan yellow light of candelabra Crivano finds four rows of campaign chairs facing the canvas screen; a wide aisle runs down their center, and he follows it to a seat near the front. As he lowers himself into his chair, he notes a small lectern standing to one side of the easels, and a long wooden trunk on the floor beneath them, one end hidden by the curtains. He’s puzzling over this as the other guests file in, and suddenly the seat to his right is occupied. He knows without looking that it’s the girl.

Contarini reappears, sweeping majestically into a chair, and now della Porta stands at the lectern. Senator Contarini, he says, most eminent ladies and gentlemen, my esteemed friends, I thank you for your indulgence in permitting me the opportunity to demonstrate this afternoon some principles of
scientia
that have been of enduring interest to me. I should say before we begin that the images you are about to witness may be shocking to some of you, and that any women present, or persons of delicate constitution or infirm mentality, may wish to absent themselves. I can assure you, however, that everything you see here today is produced by only the most virtuous application of natural magic, and brought about by my own reverential understanding of the hidden processes of the Divine Soul of the World. At this time I will offer no further explanation beyond referring interested parties to the expanded edition
of my book
Magiae Naturalis
, widely available from your fair city’s superior booksellers. The text from which I read is a verse narrative of my own composition. Extinguish the lights, please.

Della Porta begins to orate a self-important prologue concerning the past glories of the Republic, and Crivano’s attention is snuffed out with the candles, wandering to the girl, to Contarini, to the other guests, to the gilt splendor of the room, to the odd trunk on the floor, back to the girl again, until a sudden thump issues from the cloaked windows and a weird panorama materializes across the canvas screen.

Gasps rise from the nearby seats, along with a few muttered curses; the girl seems to tense, to draw somewhat closer. It is as if the wall before them has dissolved to reveal a shadowy landscape: a glade ringed by misshapen trees under a sunless sky. The image is so clear and so dynamic in its color and detail as to make the best efforts of the most adroit trompe-l’oeil painters seem like the scribbles of feebleminded children. And now the leaves of the phantom trees are indeed moving, rustled by a slight breeze. The audience’s gasps are renewed.

After the initial shock, Crivano thinks of a chapter in della Porta’s book—and also a similar, greatly superior discussion of the same topic in the writings of Ibn al-Haitham—and he grins, pleased with himself. It’s a camera obscura, he whispers. That box on the floor. It is merely the courtyard beyond the wall that we see.

For a long time the girl does not reply.
Thereafter spake wise Dandolo
, della Porta drones,
his fervor undiminished by his years
.

But we’re facing the courtyard, the girl whispers. And the image is not upsidedown, as it should be.

Shhhh
, Contarini hisses over his shoulder.

The girl is correct: this is no camera obscura, or at least not simply that. Crivano reviews his knowledge of optics and finds it wanting. A second lens? he wonders. A convex mirror?

A crash of cymbals and the eerie bray of a shawm banish these thoughts. Two parties of armored men come into view, their broadswords and bright helmets strafing the room with fantastic flashes. They take positions on
either side of a rampart that emerges from the murk—Byzantines to the left, Crusaders to the right—and shake their weapons fiercely at each other.