The Journeyer

by Gary Jennings

  “The famous and esteemed Messer Marco Polo surely is welcome everywhere. If your sensali will apply to the Maistro Lorenzo Loredano at his place of business in the Merceria …”

  Sensàli can mean business brokers or marriage brokers, and it was the latter kind I sent, in the person of my staid and starched stepmother, together with a formidable maid or two of hers. Marègna Lisa returned from that mission to report that the Maistro Loredano had acceded most hospitably to my request for permission to pay a series of calls. She added, with a noticeable elevation of her eyebrows:

  “He is an artisan of leather goods. Evidently an honest and respectable and hardworking currier. But, Marco, only a currier. Morel di mezo. You could be paying calls on the daughters of the sangue blo. The Dandolo family, the Balbi, the Candiani …”

  “Dona Lisa, I once had a Nena Zulià who likewise complained of my tastes. Even in my youth I was contrary, preferring a savory morel to one with a noble name.”

  However, I did not swoop upon the Loredano household and abduct Donata. I paid court to her as properly and ritually and for as long a time as if she had been of the very bluest blood. Her father, who gave the impression of having been assembled from some of his own tanned hides, received me cordially and made no comment on the fact that I was nearly as old as he. After all, one of the accepted ways for a daughter of the “middle mushroom” class to sprout higher in the world was for her to make an advantageous May-December marriage, usually to a widower with numerous children. On that scale, I was really no older than November, and I came unencumbered with any step-brood. So the Maistro Lorenzo merely mumbled some of the phrases traditionally spoken by an unmoneyed father to a wealthy suitor, to dispel any suspicion that he was voluntarily surrendering his daughter to the diritto di signoria:

  “I must make known my reluctance, Messere. A daughter should not aspire to higher station than life gave her. To the natural burden of her low birth she risks adding a heavier servitude.”

  “It is I who aspire, Messere,” I assured him. “I can only hope that your daughter will favor my aspirations, and I promise that she would never have cause to regret having done so.”

  I would bring flowers, or some small gift, and Donata and I would sit together, always with an accompagnatrice—one of Fiordelisa’s iron-corseted maids—sitting nearby to make sure we behaved with rigid respectability. But that did not prevent Donata’s speaking to me as freely and frankly as Doris had been wont to do.

  “If you knew my mother in her youth, Messer Marco, then you know that she began life as a poor orphan. Literally of the low popolàzo. So I shall put on no false airs and graces in her behalf. When she married a prospering currier, owner of his own workshop, she did marry above her class. But no one would ever have known it, if she had not chosen to make no secret of it. There was never anything coarse or vulgar about her during all the rest of her life. She made a good wife to my father and a good mother to me.”

  “I would have made wager on it,” I said.

  “I think she was a credit to her higher station in life. I tell you this, Messer Marco, so that if you—if you should have any doubts about my own qualifications for moving higher yet …”

  “Darling Donata, I have had no least doubt at all. Even when your mother and I were children together, I could see the promise in her. But I will not say ‘like mother, like daughter.’ Because, even if I had never known her, I should quickly have recognized your own promise. Shall I, like a mooning and courting trovatore, sing your qualities? Beauty, intelligence, good humor—”

  “Please do not omit honesty,” she interrupted. “For I would have you know everything there is to know. My mother never whispered any hint of this to me, and I should certainly never breathe it in my good father’s hearing, but—but there are things a child gets to know, or at least suspect, without being told. Mind you, Messer Marco, I admire my mother for having made a good marriage. But I might be less admiring of the way she must have done it, and so might you. I have an unshakable suspicion that her marriage to my father was impelled by their having—how do I say?—their having anticipated the event to some degree. I fear that a comparison of the date written on their consenso di matrimonio and that written on my own atta di nascita might prove embarrassing.”

  I smiled at young Donata’s thinking she might shock someone as inured and impervious to shock as I was. And I smiled more broadly at her innocent simplicity. She must be quite unaware, I thought, that a great many marriages among the lower classes never were solemnized by any document or ceremony or sacrament. If Doris had indeed, by the oldest of feminine ruses, exalted herself from the popolàzo to the morel di mezo, it did not lessen my regard for her—or for this pretty product of her ruse. And if that was the only impediment Donata could fear as a possible interference to our marriage, it was a trifling one. I made two promises at that moment. One was only to myself, and unspoken: I took oath that never during our married lifetime would I reveal any of the secrets of my past or the skeletons in my own cupboard. The other promise I made aloud, after smoothing away my smile and assuming a very solemn face:

  “I swear, dearest Donata, that I shall never hold it against you—that you were prematurely born. There is no disgrace in that.”

  “Ah, you older men are so commendably tolerant of human frailty.” I may have winced at that, for she added, “You are a good man, Messer Marco.”

  “And your mother was a good woman. Do not think ill of her for having been a determined woman, as well. She knew how to get her own way.” I remembered, somewhat guiltily, one instance of that. The recollection made me say, “I take it that she never mentioned having been acquainted with me.”

  “Not that I recall. Should she have?”

  “No, no. I was nobody worth mentioning in those days. But I should confess—” I stopped, for I had just sworn not to confess anything that had happened in my past life. And I could hardly confess that Doris Tagiabue had come to Lorenzo Loredano no virgin as a consequence of her having first practiced her wiles on me. So I merely repeated:

  “Your mother knew how to get her own way. If I had not had to leave Venice, it could very well have happened that she would have married me when we were a little older.”

  Donata pouted prettily. “What an ungallant thing to say, even if it is true. Now you make me seem like a second choice.”

  “And now you make me seem like someone browsing in a market. I did not choose you by volition, dear girl. I had no part in it. When I first saw you, I said to myself, ‘She must have been put on this earth for me.’ And when you spoke your name, I knew it. I knew that I had been given a gift.”

  And that pleased her, and made things right again.

  On another occasion during our courtship, when we sat together, I put to her this question: “What of children when we are married, Donata?”

  She blinked at me in perplexity, as if I had asked whether she intended to go on breathing after we were married. So I went on:

  “A married couple are of course expected to have children. It is the natural thing. It is expected by their families, the Church, the Lord God, the community. But despite those expectations, there must be some people who do not wish to conform.”

  “I am not among them,” she said, like a response to a catechism.

  “And there are some who simply cannot.”

  After a moment of silence, she said, “Are you intimating, Marco—?” She had by this time eased into addressing me informally. Now she said, choosing her words with delicacy, “Are you intimating, Marco, that perhaps you were, um, during your journeying, um, injured in some way?”

  “No, no, no. I am whole and healthy, and competent to be a father. As far as I know, I mean. I was rather referring to those unfortunate women who are, for one reason or another, barren.”

  She looked away from me, and blushed as she said, “I cannot protest ‘no, no, no,’ for I have no way of knowing. But I think, if you were to count the barren women you have hear
d of, you would find that they are mostly pale and fragile and vaporish noblewomen. I come of good, solid, redblooded peasant stock and, like any Christian woman, I hope to be the mother of multitudes. I pray to the good Lord that I will. But if He in His wisdom should somehow choose to make me barren, I would try with fortitude to bear the affliction. However, I have confidence in the Lord’s goodness.”

  “It is not always of the good Lord’s doing,” I said. “In the East there are known various ways to prevent conception—”

  Donata gasped and crossed herself. “Never say such a thing! Do not even speak of such a dreadful sin! Why, what would the good Pare Nardo say, if he even dreamed you had imagined such things? Oh, Marco, do assure me that you put no mention in your book of anything so criminal and sordid and un-Christian. I have not read the book, but I have heard some people call it scandalous. Was that the scandal they spoke of?”

  “I really do not remember,” I said placatively. “I think that was one of the things I left out. I merely wished to tell you that such things are possible, in case—”

  “Not in Christendom! It is unspeakable! Unthinkable!”

  “Yes, yes, my dear. Forgive me.”

  “Only if you promise me,” she said firmly. “Promise me you will forget that and all other vile practices you may have witnessed in the East. That our good Christian marriage will never be tainted by anything un-Christian you learned or saw or even heard of in those pagan lands.”

  “Well, not everything pagan is vile … .”

  “Promise me!”

  “But, Donata, suppose I should have another opportunity or occasion to go eastward, and wished to take you with me. You would be the first Western woman, to my knowledge, ever to—”

  “No. I will never go, Marco,” she said flatly, and her blush had gone now. Her face was very white and her lips set. “I should not wish you to go. There. I have said it. You are a wealthy man, Marco, with no need to increase your wealth. You are famous for your journeying already, with no need to increase that fame or to journey ever again. You have responsibilities, and will shortly have me for another, and I hope we will both have others. You are no longer—you are no longer the boy you were when you set out before. I should not have wished to marry that boy, Marco, not then or now. I want a mature and sober and dependable man, and I want him at home. I took you to be that man. If you are not, if you still harbor a restless and reckless boy inside you, I think you had better confess it now. We will have to put on a good face for our families and friends and all the gossips of Venice, when we announce the dissolution of our betrothal.”

  “You are indeed very like your mother.” I sighed. “But you are young. In time to come, you might even desire to journey—”

  “Not outside Christendom,” she said, still in that flat voice. “Promise me.”

  “Very well. I shall never take you outside Chris—”

  “Nor will you go.”

  “Now that, Donata, I could not swear in good faith. My very business may require at least a return visit to Constantinople on occasion, and all around that city are un-Christian lands. My foot might slip, and—”

  “This much, then. Promise me you will not go away until our children, if God gives us children, are grown to a responsible age. You have told me how your own father left his son to run wild among the street folk.”

  I laughed. “Donata, they were not all vile, either. One of them was your mother.”

  “My mother raised me to be better than my mother. My own children are not to be abandoned. Promise me.”

  “I promise,” I said. I did not pause then to calculate that, if our marriage produced a son in the ordinary interval, I would be something like sixty-five years old before he had reached his majority. I was only thinking that Donata, still young herself, might have many changes of mind during our life together. “I promise, Donata. As long as there are children at home, and unless you decree otherwise, so will I be at home.”

  And in the first year of the new century, in the year one thousand three hundred and one, we were married.

  All was done with punctilious observance of the proprieties. When our period of courtship was deemed suitably long enough, Donata’s father and mine and a notary convened at the Church of San Zuàne Grisostomo for the ceremony of impalmatura, and they severally perused and signed and affirmed the marriage contract, just as if I had been some shy and awkward and adolescent bridegroom—when in fact it was I who had seen to the drawing up of the contract, with the counsel of my Compagnia attorneys-at-law. At the conclusion of the impalmatura, I put the betrothal ring on Donata’s finger. On subsequent Sundays, Pare Nardo proclaimed from the pulpit the bandi, and posted them on the church door, and no one came forward to dispute the proposed marriage. Then Dona Lisa engaged a friar-scribe with an excellent hand to write the partecipazioni di nozze, and sent them, each with the traditional gift parcel of confèti almonds, by liveried messenger to all the invited guests. They included everyone of any consequence in Venice, for, although there were sumptuary laws limiting the extravagance of most families’ public ceremonies, the Doge Gradenigo graciously granted us exemption. And, when the day came, it was a celebration on the scale of a citywide festa—after the nuptial mass, the banquet and feasting, the music and song and dancing, the drinking and brindisi and tipsy guests falling into the Corte canal, the confèti and coriàndoli thrown. When all that required the participation of Donata and myself was over, her bridal maids gave her the donora: setting in her arms for a moment a borrowed baby and tucking in her shoe a gold sequin coin, symbols of her being evermore blessed with fecundity and richness—and then we left the still uproarious festa and betook ourselves inside the Ca’ Polo, deserted of all but servants, the family to stay with friends during our luna di miele.

  And in our bedchamber, in private, in Donata I discovered Doris all over again, for her body was the same milk-white, adorned with the same two small shell-pink points. Except that Donata was a grown woman and fully developed in womanhood, with a golden floss to prove it, she was the image of her mother, even to the identical appurtenance that I had once likened to the morsel called ladylips. Much else of the night was a repetition of a stolen afternoon long years ago. As I had taught then, so I taught now, beginning with the turning of Donata’s shell-pink points to a blushing and eager coral-pink. But here I will again draw the curtain of connubial privacy, though a little belatedly, for I have already told it all—the events of this night being very nearly the same as on that long-ago afternoon. And this time, too, it delighted us both. At risk of sounding disloyal to olden time, I might even say that this occasion was more delicious than the earlier, because this time we were not sinning.

  7

  WHEN Donata came to her confinement, I was there at home, in the house, close at hand, partly in compliance with my promise to her and our then-unarrived family, partly in memory of another time when I had so unforgivably been absent. They would not let me into Donata’s chamber for the event, of course, and I had no desire to be there. But I had done everything possible to prepare for the event, including the engagement of the sage physician Piero Abano, whom I paid lavishly to bequeath all his other patients to another mèdego and do nothing but attend Donata throughout her pregnancy. He early inculcated what he called his Six-Element Regimen: proper diet and drink, properly alternating periods of motion and rest, sleep and waking, evacuation and retention, fresh air during the day and close air at night, and “assuagement of the passions of the mind.” Whether that regimen was the more to be credited, or Donata’s “good peasant stock,” there was no childbed difficulty. Dotòr Abano and his two midwives and my stepmother came, in a bunch, to tell me that Donata’s labor had been easy and the birth like the squirting of an orange pip. They had to shake me awake to tell me, for I had again been reliving my own onetime experience of such travail and, to ameliorate it, had drunk three or four bottles of Barolo and succumbed into blessed oblivion.

  “I am sorry she is n
ot a boy,” murmured Donata, when they let me into the chamber to view our daughter for the first time. “I should have known. The carrying and the labor were too easy. Next time I shall pay heed to what the old women say: Labor a little longer, and give birth to a male child.”

  “Hush, hush,” I said. “Now I am the happy recipient of two gifts.”

  We named her Fantina.

  Although Donata was from our earliest acquaintance wary of having me introduce any “un-Christian ideas” into our household, I was able to convince her of the worthiness of some alien customs. I do not mean any of the things I taught her in bed. Donata was a virgin when we wed, so she had no way of distinguishing the practices Venetian or exotic, universal or especial. But I also taught her, for instance, what I knew of the way the Han women kept themselves clean inside and out. I very delicately imparted that information to her, early in our marriage, and she saw the merit in that un-Christian bathing habit, and adopted it. After Fantina’s birth I insisted that she be likewise frequently bathed on the outside and, when she was older, on the inside as well. Donata briefly balked, saying:

  “Bathed, yes. But the inner irrigation? That is all very well for a woman already married, but it would efface Fantina’s maidenhead. She would never have proof of her virginity.”

  I said, “In my opinion, purity is best detected in the wine, not in the waxen seal on the flask. Teach Fantina to keep her body clean and sweet, and I believe her morals are likely to remain so, as well. Any future husband will recognize that quality in her, and require no mere physical token of it.”

  So Donata complied, and instructed Fantina’s nurse to bathe her frequently and thoroughly, and so instructed every subsequent nena we had in the house. Some were at first amazed and critical, but they gradually came to approve, and I think spread the word among their servant circles that an un-Christian cleanliness was not, as commonly believed, debilitating, for in time the Venetians of both sexes and all ages got noticeably cleaner than in the olden days. By introducing just that one custom of the Han, I may have done much to improve the entire city of Venice—from the skin out, so to speak.