The Mirror Thief (30 page)

The Neapolitan continues his labored narration of the familiar tale: the blind doge’s fanatic assault on the walls of Constantinople.
And lo, the other princes looked, and saw the courage of this ancient man, and greatly were they shamed, for he whose deeds they witnessed had no sight
. Despite the inept verse and the fanciful images, Crivano finds himself less amused than disturbed. Something in the dreamlike aspect of della Porta’s projection spawns in him clouds of violent memories, unmoored to anything but one another, which reach his mind’s eye from nowhere and fade as quickly as they come. The Gulf of Patras red with blood, its surface aflame, choked with arrows and shields and hacked-off limbs and white turbans. A barn in Tiflis filled with corpses, steaming in the cold. The Lark reloading on the quarterdeck, singing a rude song, and then the thunderclap, and the smoke, and gone forever. Captain Bua lashed to a post in the Lepanto town square, screaming, flensed to his shoulder. The tanned hide of Bragadin upon the bailo’s desk. Verzelin’s white hand poking from under the sackcloth. The Lark again, unfolding his battered matriculation certificate in the firelight.
My mother will never believe I’m dead. If you give her this, then maybe she’ll know
.

The rampart splits, the Crusaders overwhelm the Greeks, and the audience cheers and applauds. Della Porta steps forward with a smug bow, bends over the wooden trunk—his spindly hand aglow for an instant amid a swarm of motes, its shadow huge across the canvas backdrop—and shuts its angled lid. The panorama goes dark.

The girl is murmuring something about apertures, biconvex lenses, mirrored bowls, but Crivano excuses himself and stumbles from the room. In the great hall, the servants are removing the curtains and panels from the windows, letting the light through. The children pour in from the courtyard, laughing and shouting, wearing bits of their fathers’ armor, waving their dull swords. Crivano sweeps between them to the peristyle, stepping over their sham plaster rampart, filling his lungs with warm air.

More servants are clearing away the banquet table; he passes them on
his way to the courtyard’s far end, where low box-hedges form concentric rings. An oval sundial stands at their center, polished broccatello on a gray limestone base; its iron gnomon, set near the analemma’s top, puts the hour near the twenty-first bell. The breeze has picked up and the haze has dissipated; a few scraps of high cloud fleck the sky, moving toward the horizon with surprising swiftness. Crivano is suddenly weary. He seats himself on a curved bench and watches the gnomon’s shadow creep across the glittering marble until the girl finds him again.

She’s watching from outside the hedges, her face veiled, her nervous fingers bunched before her. Crivano comes to his feet, removes his cap, and stares evenly at her until she joins him. They sit for a while in uneasy silence. She’s older than he thought; probably past twenty. Something about her reminds him of Cyprus, although he can’t say what. Who are you? he asks.

I’m called Perina, she says. I am Senator Contarini’s cousin.

Who is your father?

My parents are not living. I never knew my father. I grew up in this house.

Bells ring the hour all over the city: a bright throbbing drone, like the sound of heavy rain on a roof. Crivano’s hands have begun to tremble; he clamps them on his knees to still them. So, he says, you’re a nun.

She makes a sour face. I’m an educant, she says. At the convent school of Santa Caterina. I have taken no vows.

They must expect that you will do so. Or you would not have liberty to come and go as you please.

Through the years, Perina says, the sisters of Santa Caterina have benefited greatly from the bequests of the Contarini family. This conveys advantages.

I see.

Near the banquet table, a child charging blind beneath his enormous bronze helmet has collided with the trunk of an almond tree. He lands on his back in the grass; his helmet clatters away. After a moment he sits up and begins to wail. Crivano smiles.

I am told, Perina says, that you fought the Turks at Lepanto. Is this true?

Other boys are laughing at the sobbing child. An older girl shushes them, stoops to tend his bloodied nose.
You fought the Turks at Lepanto
, Crivano thinks. Not simply:
You fought at Lepanto
. An interesting specificity. Yes, Crivano says. It is true.

I should like very much to hear about your role in the battle, Dottore Crivano, if you are willing to speak of it.

A flurry of black-and-yellow tits flaps into view over the roof, hunting treetops for cankerworms. They weave and dive acrobatically over the children’s heads, paying them no mind, and are paid no mind in return.

That was very long ago, Crivano says, and I fear the passage of years has put my memories at some variance. No doubt you have read them already, but I must say you’ll be better served by the famous accounts previously set down by veterans of the battle, if only because those men took up their quills so soon after laying down their swords.

Of course, Perina says. Still, I am greatly interested in the particularities of your experience. If you can bring yourself to share them with me, I would be grateful.

You would even, Crivano continues, find more clarity and better understanding in the writings of recent historians of the Republic who were
not
there, who have never been to war at all, who have no direct knowledge of any territory save that of their studious libraries. The ultimate import of such an event, lady, can least be discerned in the unformed chaos of its midst. My memories of Lepanto are spun mostly from smoke, and noise, and the dead and dying bodies of men. I am sure that many brave acts occurred on that grave day, but I took part in none, nor did I witness any. For myself and my fellows it amounted to a long inglorious clamber to keep our lives, one our majority prosecuted without success. Do not lament the loss of such chronicles, lady. And do not believe that the stories of these fallen men are interred with them. They are in fact the very soil that vanishes their bones.

By the time Crivano has finished speaking, his own voice sounds distant, as if reaching him from a nearby room. His vision has tunneled
to exclude all but fragments of the girl: her folded hands, her powdered breasts, her veiled face.

But don’t you see, dottore? the girl says, and grips his forearm with a steady hand. It is precisely this chaos, precisely this derangement, that I seek knowledge of!

He can’t be certain through the veil, but it looks as if her eyes are bright with tears. Aware of her cool fingers on his wrist and of a sudden lurching grind in his belly, he shuts his own eyes and clenches his jaw. Why? he asks.

Her fingers uncurl; he feels her shift on the bench. Because, she says, I have come to believe that in such disarray resides the truth.

The tits flutter overhead.
Eee-cha
, they say.
Eee-cha, eee-cha
.

My sincerest apologies, Crivano says. I wish to continue this discussion, lady, and I have no desire to be rude, but is there by chance a nearby privy to which you can direct me? I fear that I have become ill.

The girl is on her feet, agitated, tugging his arm; he permits her to lead him into the back half of the palace, down a long corridor. From among her apologies and offers of aid and expressions of concern he gleans directions to the privy, and hurriedly takes his leave.

He’s able to avoid soiling himself, but only narrowly. With his citizen’s robe hung on a peg, his hose around his boot-tops, he sits over the aperture in the worn wood and rests his head on the brick wall and voids himself, sweating and shivering by turns. He feels restored almost instantly, and then foolish, and then, as he’s tidying up, he’s struck by the sudden desire to simply remain forever in this small reeking room, hiding from the eyes of others, estranged even from his own machinations. He draws long breaths and closes his eyes and imagines himself as a pupa, secreted in the fecund soil while the busy insect world swarms on around him.

When at last he emerges the girl has gone, but young Marco Contarini is standing in the hallway. Are you well enough to see my father, dottore? he asks. He had hoped for a few minutes of your time.

The senator’s private apartments are on a mezzanine below the piano nobile, on the side of the house that looks out on the Grand Canal. Waiting in the anteroom while Marco consults with his father, flipping through an octavo edition of Cardano’s
De Varietate Rerum
that he finds open on a table, Crivano is aware of the insistent clap of waves against the palace walls, the faint song of a boatman rowing by. A song he knows, or once knew in his youth.

Then a bolt clicks, the heavy inner door swings open, and it’s Verzelin, stumbling forward on dead legs, his sackcloth shroud overgrown by eelgrass, his eyesockets picked clean by crabs. His accusing mouth spills a torrent of black mud down his chest, the mud alive with ghost-white wriggling things.

Crivano recoils—his scapulae gouge the wall, the octavo slides to the floor—but it’s not Verzelin, of course it’s not, only young Marco, emerging from his father’s library. By the blessed virgin, dottore, he says. What on earth is the matter?

Nothing! Crivano sputters. Not a thing. The lingering effect of a minor sickness, that is all. I ate a poisonous fragment of quail at my locanda last night, and it has been slow to vacate. My apologies. There is no cause for concern.

That’s unfortunate, dottore. You have my sympathy. You’re at the White Eagle, aren’t you? They’re quite reputable, but no inn is altogether safe, particularly during the Sensa. You should reconsider my father’s offer to stay here with us.

You’re very kind, Crivano says, bending to fetch the dropped book. But the White Eagle is ideal for my purposes, and I wouldn’t think of imposing on your busy household. After all, bad quail can turn up any locanda.

Marco narrows his eyes, cocks his head. I hope, he says, that my foolish cousin said nothing to upset or offend you.

A host of twitches convenes beneath Crivano’s skin. Who? he says.

My cousin. Perina. The girl with whom—

Oh yes, of course! But no, not at all! She’s a delight. Very poised. Clever.

Indeed, Marco says. Well, then. My father has asked me to apologize for the delay. He’ll receive you shortly, if you have no objections to awaiting him here.

Crivano has no objections. Marco departs, and after a moment spent refocusing his faculties, Crivano continues his exploration of the room. In scholarly circles these chambers are among the most renowned in Christendom, whispered of in covetous tones from Warsaw to Lisbon. Many men would hazard propriety or commit grave offense for a passing glimpse of what he now dawdles among. Even the richness of the room’s furnishings—the fireplace of serpentine and marble, the gilt frieze of allegories rendered in oils—pales beside what litters the tabletops and hangs from the walls. Glazed shards of Greek vases. Fragments of Roman sculpture. Wooden cases filled with rare minerals, curious crystals, hides of strange beasts. A bewildering array of mechanisms for measurement and calculation. Scale models of siege engines and galleasses. Painted panels and canvases of great virtuosity and inventiveness.

Hesitant to touch anything, Crivano gravitates toward the last of these. A portrait of a bearded patrician, shunted into a dim corner by its larger neighbors, is the first to catch his eye. Cracked with age, its surface bears an image so precise in its detail as to be mistakable for a window, or a mirror. Impressive though it is, a chill lifelessness inheres in it—the antiseptic vacuity of a specimen—which might account for the prominence it cedes to other works.

The prime spot on the longest wall is occupied by something quite different, a jewel-toned scene from Ovid: bare-bosomed blond Europa, reclining on her garlanded white bull. More bovines appear in nearby frames, and one of these in particular captures Crivano’s attention: a bucolic tableau of the autumn harvest. When Crivano weighs the busy composition against his own memories of a year on an Anatolian farm—his
fourteenth year, the year after Lepanto, the year before the janissaries claimed him—it seems absurd, sketched after the fancy of a painter lacking aptitude for or interest in any accurate depiction of the practicalities of agriculture. The undifferentiated farmers, their wobbly stack of crated apples, the array of irrelevant tools: despite their silliness, they transfix him. Every detail seems designed to repudiate his own experience, to displace his faded memories with an abstract truth to which the painter alone controls access. The craftsman’s bold hand has even hung a centaur in the distant clouds—clouds of tenebrous green that can’t help but echo the spectral landscape conjured by della Porta’s device.

The senator’s gentle basso reaches him from across the room, like a hand laid upon his shoulder. Whatever its faults, he says, that canvas is my favorite. It pains me to no end, what has become of that man.

Crivano turns with a measured bow. The painter? he says. I don’t know of him.

Senator Contarini has changed from his velvet robe into a black tunic of fine damask; he crosses the room to Crivano’s side and leans against the edge of a table. The painter, he says, comes from Bassano del Grappa. He rose to prominence in the studio of his father Jacopo, who made great success with rustic scenes such as this. Many of our most ancient families delight in evocations of their distant holdings on the mainland, the source of so much of their wealth. If you have visited a noble house in this city, then I’ll wager you have seen old Jacopo’s work.

The senator reaches into a muddle of instruments and withdraws a magnifying lens, which he lifts to the painting’s surface to examine the cloud-borne centaur. After the great fire in the doge’s palace, he continues, Francesco—for Francesco is the given name of the one who painted this—moved his household to our city, in order to open a workshop of his own. The Great Council had entrusted to me the restoration of the palace, and I awarded Francesco a number of commissions. I believed that I saw in his work the promise of greatness. Greatness of a sort not witnessed in this city since the plague took Titian from us. That potential no longer has any hope of being realized. But who can say with certainty that I was
wrong? Or am I no more than a mooncalf for concerning myself with idle matters such as these, instead of with galleys, armaments, fortifications, the various blunt cudgels of republic?