by Rice, Anne
Thrown over his shoulder I was carried out, taken through a crowded courtyard, past wondrous stinking camels and donkeys and heaps of filth, out by the harbor where the ships waited, over the gangplank and into the ship’s hold.
It was filth again, the smell of hemp, the rustling of the rats on board. I was thrown on a pallet of rough cloth. Once again, I looked for the escape and saw only the ladder by which we’d descended and above heard the voices of too many men.
It was still dark when the ship began to move. Within an hour I was so sick, I wanted simply to die. I curled up on the floor and lay as still as possible, hiding myself entirely under the soft clinging fabric of the old tunic. I slept for the longest time.
When I awoke an old man was there. He wore a different style of dress, less frightening to me than that of the turbaned Turks, and his eyes were kindly. He bent near me. He spoke a new language which was uncommonly soft and sweet, but I couldn’t understand him.
A voice speaking Greek told him that I was a mute, had no wits and growled like a beast.
Time to laugh again, but I was too sick.
The same Greek told the old man I hadn’t been torn or wounded. I was marked at a high price.
The old man made some dismissing gestures as he shook his head and talked a song in the new speech. He laid his hands on me and gently coaxed me to my feet.
He took me through a doorway into a small chamber, draped all in red silk.
I spent the rest of the voyage in this chamber, except for one night.
On that one night—and I can’t place it in terms of the journey—I awoke, and finding him asleep beside me, this old man who never touched me except to pat or console me, I went out, up the ladder, and stood for a long time looking up at the stars.
We were at anchor in a port, and a city of dark blue-black buildings with domed roofs and bell towers tumbled down the cliffs to the harbor where the torches turned beneath the ornamented arches of an arcade.
All this, the civilized shore, looked probable to me, appealing, but I had no thought that I could jump ship and get free. Men wandered beneath the archways. Beneath the arch nearest to me, a strangely garbed man in a shiny helmet, with a big broad sword dangling on his hip, stood guard against the branching fretted column, carved so marvelously to look like a tree as it supported the cloister, like the remnant of a palace into which this channel for ships had been rudely dug.
I didn’t look at the shore much after this first long and memorable glimpse. I looked up at Heaven and her court of mythical creatures fixed forever in the all powerful and inscrutable stars. Ink black was the night beyond them, and they so like jewels that old poetry came back to me, the sound even of hymns sung only by men.
As I recall it, hours passed before I was caught, beaten fiercely with a leather thong and dragged back down in the hold. I knew the beating would stop when the old man saw me. He was furious and trembling. He gathered me to him, and we bedded down again. He was too old to ask anything of me.
I didn’t love him. It was clear to the witless mute that this man regarded him as something quite valuable, to be preserved for sale. But I needed him and he wiped my tears. I slept as much as I could. I was sick every time the waves were rough. Sometimes the heat alone sickened me. I didn’t know real heat. The man fed me so well that sometimes I thought I was a being kept by him like a fatted calf to be sold for food.
When we reached Venice, it was late in the day. I had no hint of the beauty of Italy. I’d been locked away from it, down in this grime pit with the old keeper, and being taken up into the city I soon saw that my suspicions about the old keeper were perfectly right.
In a dark room, he and another man fell into bitter argument. Nothing could make me speak. Nothing could make me indicate that I understood anything that was happening to me. I did, however, understand. Money changed hands. The old man left without looking back.
They tried to teach me things. The soft caressing new language was all around me. Boys came, sat beside me, tried to coax me with soft kisses and embraces. They pinched the nipples on my chest and tried to touch the private parts which I’d been taught not even to look at on account of the bitter occasion of sin.
Several times I resolved to pray. But I discovered I couldn’t remember the words. Even the images were indistinct. Lights had gone out forever which had guided me through all my years. Every time I drifted deep into thought, someone struck me or yanked at my hair.
They always came with ointments after they hit me. They were careful to treat the abraded skin. Once, when a man struck me on the side of the face, another shouted and grabbed his upraised hand before he could land the second blow.
I refused food and drink. They couldn’t make me take it. I couldn’t take it. I didn’t choose to starve. I simply couldn’t do anything to keep myself alive. I knew I was going home. I was going home. I would die and go home. It would be an awful painful passage. I would have cried if I’d been alone. But I was never alone. I’d have to die in front of people. I hadn’t seen real daylight in forever. Even the lamps hurt my eyes because I was so much in unbroken darkness. But people were always there.
The lamp would brighten. They sat in a ring around me with grimy little faces and quick pawlike hands that wiped my hair out of my face or shook me by the shoulder. I turned my face to the wall.
A sound kept me company. This was to be the end of my life. The sound was the sound of water outside. I could hear it against the wall. I could tell when a boat passed and I could hear the wood pylons creaking, and I lay my head against the stone and felt the house sway in the water as if we were not beside it but planted in it, which of course we were.
Once I dreamed of home, but I don’t remember what it was like. I woke, I cried, and there came a volley of little greetings from the shadows, wheedling, sentimental voices.
I thought I wanted to be alone. I didn’t. When they locked me up for days and nights in a black room without bread or water, I began to scream and pound on the walls. No one came.
After a while, I fell into a stupor. It was a violent jolt when the door was opened. I sat up, covering my eyes. The lamp was a menace. My head throbbed.
But there came a soft insinuating perfume, a mixture of the smell of sweet burning wood in snowing winter and that of crushed flowers and pungent oil.
I was touched by something hard, something made of wood or brass, only this thing moved as if it were organic. At last I opened my eyes and saw that a man held me, and these inhuman things, these things that felt so like stone or brass, were his white fingers, and he looked at me with eager, gentle blue eyes.
“Amadeo,” he said.
He was dressed all in red velvet and splendidly tall. His blond hair was parted in the middle in a saintly fashion and combed richly down to his shoulders where it broke over his cloak in lustrous curls. He had a smooth forehead without a line to it, and high straight golden eyebrows dark enough to give his face a clear, determined look. His lashes curled like dark golden threads from his eyelids. And when he smiled, his lips were flushed suddenly with a pale immediate color that made their full careful shape all the more visible.
I knew him. I spoke to him. I could have never seen such miracles in the face of anyone else.
He smiled so kindly at me. His upper lip and chin were all clean shaven. I couldn’t even see the scantest hair on him, and his nose was narrow and delicate though large enough to be in proportion to the other magnetic features of his face.
“Not the Christ, my child,” he said. “But one who comes with his own salvation. Come into my arms.”
“I’m dying, Master.” What was my language? I can’t say even now what it was. But he understood me.
“No, little one, you’re not dying. You’re coming now into my protection, and perhaps if the stars are with us, if they are kind to us, you’ll never die at all.”
“But you are the Christ. I know you!”
He shook his head, and in the most common human w
ay he lowered his eyes as he did, and he smiled. His generous lips parted, and I saw only a human’s white teeth. He put his hands beneath my arms, lifted me and kissed my throat, and the shivers paralyzed me. I closed my eyes and felt his fingers on top of them, and heard him say into my ear, “Sleep as I take you home.”
When I awoke, we were in a huge bath. No Venetian ever had such a bath as this, I can tell you that now from all the things I saw later, but what did I know of the conventions of this place? This was a palace truly; I had seen palaces.
I climbed up and out of the swaddling of velvet in which I lay—his red cloak if I’m not mistaken—and I saw a great curtained bed to my right and, beyond, the deep oval basin of the bath itself. Water poured from a shell held by angels into the basin, and steam rose from the broad surface, and in the steam my Master stood. His white chest was naked and the nipples faintly pink, and his hair, pushed back from his smooth straight forehead, looked even thicker and more beautifully blond than it had before.
He beckoned to me.
I was afraid of the water. I knelt at the edge and put my hand into it.
With amazing speed and grace, he reached for me and brought me down into the warm pool, pushing me until the water covered my shoulders and then tilting back my head.
Again I looked up at him. Beyond him the bright-blue ceiling was covered in startlingly vivid angels with giant white feathery wings. I had never seen such brilliant and curly angels, leaping as they did, out of all restraint and style, to flaunt their human beauty in muscled limbs and swirling garments, in flying locks. It seemed a bit of madness this, these robust and romping figures, this riot of celestial play above me to which the steam ascended, evaporating in a golden light.
I looked at my Master. His face was right before me. Kiss me again, yes, do it, that shiver, kiss—. But he was of the same ilk as those painted beings, one of them, and this some form of heathen Heaven, a pagan place of Soldiers’ gods where all is wine, and fruit, and flesh. I had come to the wrong place.
He threw back his head. He gave way to ringing laughter. He lifted a handful of water again and let it spill down my chest. He opened his mouth and for a moment I saw the flash of something very wrong and dangerous, teeth such as a wolf might have. But these were gone, and only his lips sucked at my throat, then at my shoulder. Only his lips sucked at the nipple as I sought too late to cover it.
I groaned for all this. I sank against him in the warm water, and his lips went down my chest to my belly. He sucked tenderly at the skin as if he were sucking up the salt and the heat from it, and even his forehead nudging my shoulder filled me with warm thrilling sensations. I put my arm around him, and when he found the sin itself, I felt it go off as if an arrow had been shot from it, and it were a crossbow; I felt it go, this arrow, this thrust, and I cried out.
He let me lie for a while against him. He bathed me slowly. He had a soft gathered cloth with which he wiped my face. He dipped me back to wash my hair.
And then when he thought I had rested enough, we began the kisses again.
Before dawn, I woke against his pillow. I sat up and saw him as he put on his big cloak and covered his head. The room was full of boys again, but these were not the sad, emaciated tutors of the brothel. These boys were handsome, well fed, smiling and sweet, as they gathered around the bed.
They wore brightly colored tunics of effervescent colors, with fabrics carefully pleated and tight belts that gave them a girlish grace. All wore long luxuriant hair.
My Master looked at me and in a tongue I knew, I knew perfectly, he said that I was his only child, and he would come again that night, and by such time as that I would have seen a new world.
“A new world!” I cried out. “No, don’t leave me, Master. I don’t want the whole world. I want you!”
“Amadeo,” he said in this private tongue of confidence, leaning over the bed, his hair dry now and beautifully brushed, his hands softened with powder. “You have me forever. Let the boys feed you, dress you.” You belong to me, to Marius De Romanus, now.
He turned to them and gave them their commands in the soft singing language.
And you would have thought from their happy faces that he had given them sweets and gold.
“Amadeo, Amadeo,” they sang as they gathered around me. They held me so that I couldn’t follow him. They spoke Greek to me, fast and easily, and Greek for me was not so easy. But I understood.
Come with us, you are one of us, we are to be good to you, we are to be especially good to you. They dressed me up hastily in castoffs, arguing with one another about my tunic, was it good enough, and these faded stockings, well, it was only for now! Put on the slippers; here, a jacket that was too small for Riccardo. These seemed the garments of kings.
“We love you,” said Albinus, the second in command to Riccardo, and a dramatic contrast to the black-haired Riccardo, for his blond hair and pale green eyes. The other boys, I couldn’t quite distinguish, but these two were easy to watch.
“Yes, we love you,” said Riccardo, pushing back his black hair and winking at me, his skin so smooth and dark compared to the others. His eyes were fiercely black. He clutched my hand and I saw his long thin fingers. Here everyone had thin fingers, fine fingers. They had fingers like mine, and mine had been unusual among my brethren. But I couldn’t think of this.
An eerie possibility suggested itself to me, that I, the pale one, the one who made all the trouble, the one with the fine fingers, had been spirited away to the good land where I belonged. But that was altogether too fabulous to believe. My head ached. I saw wordless flashes of the stubby horsemen who had captured me, of the stinking hold of the ship in which I’d been brought to Constantinople, flashes of gaunt, busy men, men fussing as they had handled me there.
Dear God, why did anyone love me? What for? Marius De Romanus, why do you love me?
The Master smiled as he waved from the door. The hood was up around his head, a crimson frame for his fine cheekbones and his curling lips.
My eyes filled with tears.
A white mist swirled around the Master as the door closed behind him. The night was going. But the candles still burned.
We came into a large room, and I saw that it was full of paints and pots of color and brushes standing in earthen jars ready to be used. Great white squares of cloth—canvas—waited for the paint.
These boys didn’t make their colors with the yolk of an egg in the time-honored manner. They mixed the bright fine ground pigments directly with the amber-colored oils. Great glossy gobs of color awaited me in little pots. I took the brush when they gave it to me. I looked at the stretched white cloth on which I was to paint.
“Not from human hands,” I said. But what did these words mean? I lifted the brush and I began to paint him, this blond-haired man who had rescued me from darkness and squalor. I threw out the hand with the brush, dipping the bristles into the jars of cream and pink and white and slapping these colors onto the curiously resilient canvas. But I couldn’t make a picture. No picture came!
“Not by human hands!” I whispered. I dropped the brush. I put my hands over my face.
I searched for the words in Greek. When I said them, several of the boys nodded, but they didn’t grasp the meaning. How could I explain to them the catastrophe? I looked at my fingers. What had become of—. There all recollection burnt up and I was left suddenly with Amadeo.
“I can’t do it.” I stared at the canvas, at the mess of colors. “Maybe if it was wood, not cloth, I could do it.”
What had it been that I could do? They didn’t understand.
He was not the Living Lord, my Master, the blond one, the blond one with the icy blue eyes.
But he was my Lord. And I could not do this thing that was meant to be done.
To comfort me, to distract me, the boys took up their brushes and quickly astonished me with pictures that ran like a stream out of their quick applications of the brush.
A boy’s face, cheeks, lips
, eyes, yes, and reddish-golden hair in profusion. Good Lord, it was I … it was not a canvas but a mirror. It was this Amadeo. Riccardo took over to refine the expression, to deepen the eyes and work a sorcery on the tongue so I seemed about to speak. What was this rampant magic that made a boy appear out of nothing, most natural, at a casual angle, with knitted brows and streaks of unkempt hair over his ear?
It seemed both blasphemous and beautiful, this fluid, abandoned fleshly figure.
Riccardo spelled the letters out in Greek as he wrote them. Then he threw the brush down. He cried:
“A very different picture is what our Master has in mind.” He snatched up the drawings.
They pulled me through the house, the “palazzo” as they called it, teaching me the word with relish.
The entire place was filled with such paintings—on its walls, its ceilings, on panels and canvases stacked against each other—towering pictures full of ruined buildings, broken columns, rampant greenery, distant mountains and an endless stream of busy people with flushed faces, their luxuriant hair and gorgeous clothing always rumpled and curling in a wind.
It was like the big platters of fruit and meats that they brought out and set before me. A mad disorder, an abundance for the sake of itself, a great drench of colors and shapes. It was like the wine, too sweet and light.
It was like the city below when they threw open the windows, and I saw the small black boats—gondolas, even then—in brilliant sunlight coursing through the greenish waters, when I saw the men in their sumptuous scarlet or gold cloaks hurrying along the quays.
Into our gondolas we piled, a troop of us, and suddenly we traveled in graceful darting silence among the facades, each huge house as magnificent as a Cathedral, with its narrow pointed arches, its lotus windows, its covering of gleaming white stone.
Even the older, sorrier dwellings, not too ornate but nevertheless monstrous in size, were plastered in colors, a rose so deep it seemed to come from crushed petals, a green so thick it seemed to have been mixed from the opaque water itself.
