The Bestiary

by Nicholas Christopher

  I boarded the No. 51 vaporetto to San Giorgio Maggiore and crossed the Giudecca Canal as ceremonial gondolas, carrying gold statues of dragons and winged lions, rounded the tip of the Dorsoduro from the Grand Canal. It was the day of the August regatta. Teams of rowers in black-and-white-striped shirts were preparing their sleek boats for the first race. Spectators lined the Zattere, jamming the parapets around the old Customs House. Vendors were selling candies and cakes, pennants and balloons.

  I circled the gardens beside the Teatro Verde and walked up the gravel path flanked by walnut trees to the Biblioteca Fondazine in the Villa Ziane. For weeks, I had been following the same daily routine: for nine hours, breaking only for lunch, I planted myself at a reading table piled with leather-bound books and scroll maps. There were few other visitors. The cavernous room was so quiet I could hear only the scratching of my pen in my notebook. Occasionally a footfall echoed on the marble floor. Or I’d hear someone climbing the tightly spiraling steel stairways to the mezzanine and upper tiers. A giant oil painting depicted the victorious fleet returning from the Battle of Lepanto. And on the domed ceiling there was a mural of the third doge, Orso Ipato, clutching a trident in the prow of a longboat. He wore a flowing red robe and a gold cap. His profile—the hooked nose and strong chin—was one I had often seen while wandering the city: on trades-men, waiters, a fishmonger near the Rio San Giustina.

  In three months I had filled three notebooks. When the library was closed on Sundays, I typed up my notes, first in my hotel room, then in the tiny apartment I sublet near the Campo San Polo when I realized I would be in Venice, not for weeks, but months. After lunch on Sundays, I often took the motonave to Torcello. The population of fifty seemed woefully outnumbered by the island’s ghosts, the multitudes wiped out by malaria five hundred years before. I strolled through the marshes, then sat in the cool light of the ancient cathedral. I loved the animal traceries on the marble panels before the altar and the mosaics depicting the Last Judgment on the counter-façade: on the left, destined for Paradise, sipping nectar from a crystal fountain, children and animals (lions, foxes, deer, and peacocks); on the right, the damned—corrupt officials, murderers, and infidels—disgorged in hell by sea monsters and prodded into the fires by avenging angels.

  Deciphering the florid handwriting of medieval scribes, I had now read through nearly all the surviving private correspondence and public records of Doge Andrea Dandolo. I followed up every reference to Dandolo I could find. I spent weeks exploring the remaining records of his immediate descendants. I knew as much about him, perhaps, as anyone alive. He was my only lead, and I had to follow it. But I still hadn’t found what I was looking for: specific clues as to the whereabouts of the Caravan Bestiary after his death in 1355.

  The fourteenth century, which commences with Dante’s descent to the underworld, held few surprises for someone of my own century: endless wars, religious fanaticism, famines and epidemics, cutthroat imperialism. The Venetians were at the center of that world, pouring huge sums into their foreign adventures. The swift galleys the navy shipwrights constructed at the Arsenal were feared throughout the Mediterranean. The Venetian government employed a vast network of spies, at home and abroad, and was so layered in secrecy that no part of it ever had complete knowledge of any other. And all of this was under Dandolo, the most enlightened doge of his time. But, in the end, his reign was defined, not by war or intrigue, but the Black Death. At its peak, the disease claimed sixty Venetians a day. The bodies piled up. Every physican but one fled the city. Dandolo would reward this man for his bravery with an annuity of five hundred gold ducats.

  A handful of physicians, the so-called plague doctors, were lured from Ravenna and Florence. They specialized in treating the Black Death until they succumbed to it themselves. They wore an elaborate costume: a huge bird mask, with protective spectacles and a beak ingeniously honeycombed with vials of medicinal herbs and tonics; thick gloves; a scarf dusted with powdered oyster shells; and a canvas coat soaked in wax. They carried a stick with which to raise the bedclothes of the sick. And a tuning fork whose vibrations dispelled toxic vapors. All of this paraphernalia was intended to prevent their contracting the plague, and of course it failed.

  It was one of these doctors, across the centuries, who enabled me to pick up the trail of the Caravan Bestiary again. He, and Dandolo’s eldest daughter, Beatrice. I was sifting through a packet of her letters that had been well preserved in a leather box. The letters were unremarkable, though well written, and I was nearly done skimming them when I came on one that brought me up in my seat.

  On March 14, 1367, a week after her mother’s death, Beatrice Lungasti, née Dandolo, informed her husband Fabrizio, a sea captain stationed on the island of Chios, of a curious request her mother had made on her deathbed. The former Dogaressa instructed her daughter to seek out a Dr. Armando Bendetto of Ravenna, saying she had entrusted a packet to him for safekeeping when the Doge sent the family to Castelfranco to escape the plague.

  Mother informed me that Bendetto was one of the finest physicians to lend his services to the Republic at that dread time. He snatched from death my father’s cousins, Pietro Dandolo and Timoro Carpaneri, who had been stricken with hellish fevers. In gratitude, Uncle Pietro gave him 3,000 ducats. After two months, exhausted, Bendetto returned to Ravenna, where the plague was just taking root. He took my mother’s packet, but once the plague abated, and for years afterward, she had no word from him. He was such an honorable man that Mother could not fathom his silence. After my father’s death, she tried to locate Bendetto, but her efforts, feeble on account of her ill health, came to nothing. She regretted that she had not previously confided in my sisters and me and enlisted our help. With your experience of the world, Fabrizio, perhaps you will have better luck. On your return to Venice, kindly put in at Ravenna and inquire after Bendetto, but do not tarry, for I miss you terribly…

  Lungasti did as his wife asked, and learned that Bendetto had died several years earlier after a long illness. Bendetto’s widow, a woman half her husband’s age, was a great beauty. Upon Bendetto’s death, she had opened the Dogaressa’s packet and was disappointed to find that it contained, not jewels or gold, but an illuminated book of strange beasts. The Latin text was penned in sea-blue ink. Books did not interest the widow. She stored it away with her husband’s medical texts and forgot about it—until Lungasti’s arrival. He was smitten with the widow and she with him. They became lovers. He extended his stay in Ravenna. One night he asked about the packet, and without hesitation she dug out the bestiary and made him a gift of it. To placate his wife, Lungasti sent it to her by courier. If he knew how rare it was, he didn’t let on. Nor did he ever return to Venice. He and the widow moved to Sardinia, where thirty years later he died, a trader in silks. For the rest of her life, embittered and solitary, Beatrice Lungasti rued the day she had dispatched her husband to Ravenna, complaining that she had exchanged him for a book of beasts. And that this was her father’s ill-starred legacy, born of the Black Death.

  Upon Beatrice’s death, the bestiary was passed on to her son, then his daughter, and then her daughter, Serena—Andrea Dandolo’s great-great-granddaughter—who married another doge, Andrea Gritti, in 1508. No one knows which of these people, if any, actually read the Caravan Bestiary. It had acquired the status of a family heirloom, and as such was passed down along with other books, keepsakes, and domestic fineries which it far exceeded in value.

  From the records of Andrea Gritti’s dogeship, his letters, and a biography written by two of his contemporaries, I was able to piece together in a couple of weeks the next stage of the Caravan Bestiary’s odyssey.

  Andrea Gritti was nothing like his scholarly predecessor, Dandolo. Nor did he fit the austere profile of most doges. He was a womanizer, a carouser. A spy in his youth, he fathered at least three bastards on Turkish women and one on a nun who was his favorite mistress. He died at eighty-six, in December 1538, after feasting for two days on grilled eels an
d drinking a dozen flagons of cold wine. It was fifteen years earlier that he played a small but decisive role in the history of the Caravan Bestiary.

  Gritti had shown as little interest in the bestiary as in the Bible beside which it was shelved in his wife’s library. Then, one stormy night in November 1523, a nobleman and Knight Hospitaller named Antonio Pigafetta paid his respects at the palace. Pigafetta was the most uniquely traveled Venetian of his time, outstripping even Marco Polo. A member of Ferdinand Magellan’s original crew of 270 who set out to circumnavigate the globe, Pigafetta had become a celebrity as one of the eighteen survivors who actually completed the voyage three years later, putting into port at Seville in a storm-battered ship, starving and half-naked. Magellan himself, hacked to death by tribes-men on the island of Mactan in the Philippines, was not among them. With a sharp eye and prodigious memory, Pigafetta had become the unofficial chronicler of Magellan’s voyage. Much celebrated, he made the rounds of the European courts—Portugal, Spain, France—before touching down in his native city. He presented Doge Gritti with a handwritten copy of his journal, filled with the marvels of unknown places: Brunei, a city built over salt water, like Venice; the island of Mindanao, where the warriors ate their enemies’ hearts raw, sprinkled with lemon juice; Tierra del Fuego, where eight-foot giants walked barefoot on ice and worshiped a volcano; Java, whose trees, harder than iron, produced leaves that came alive (they had feet and tails) when they fell to the ground. Pigafetta claimed to have kept one such leaf in a cage for nine days before it escaped. On the Malay peninsula he encountered a fish with a pig’s head, in Borneo parrots with mirrors for eyes, and in Loçan an “armored mule,” thickly plated, with hooves that shot sparks and iron teeth that dripped rust. On Sumatra he heard tales of the Garuda, that once a year flew to the sun and back.

  In his Memoirs, Pigafetta recounts how, as a token of his appreciation, Gritti gave him the Caravan Bestiary to pass along to his Grand Master, Philippe de Villier. Having just been driven from Rhodes by the Turks, the Knights Hospitallers were temporarily headquartered in Italy. De Villier served Pope Clement VII, with whom Gritti wanted good relations. Making De Villier a gift like the bestiary could only help. But he never received it. Recognizing its worth, and knowing De Villier would see in it only something to peddle, Pigafetta kept the original of the bestiary and had a copy made for De Villier. Sure enough, De Villier took the copy to Prince Mehlenberg of Bavaria, who promptly purchased it for two thousand florins. Mehlenberg liked to bring distinguished scholars to his alpine estate. Among his other houseguests at that time was the Swiss naturalist Konrad Gesner. Gesner was famous for having translated the Lord’s Prayer into the world’s 130 known languages and compiled the first dictionary of the Gypsies’ language. Now he was embarked on his masterwork, a comprehensive Historia Animalium, in which he combined fact and fantasy as freely as Pliny the Elder. He promised to supply his readers with all the facts recorded, speculated on, or imagined about every animal known to man. Not surprisingly, Gesner was fascinated by the Caravan Bestiary, which he read under the watchful eye of Mehlenberg. Gesner mentions it but once in the Historia, but he pilfered from it extensively, as I discovered in the library at the Villa Ziane, reading Edward Topsell’s 1658 English translation. I came on descriptions of the catoblepas, that massive black bull with dragon scales and Gorgon eyes that turn men to stone; the Indian leucrotta, the swiftest animal on earth, with a lion’s torso, stag’s hindquarters, and horse’s head; and the Assyrian pazuzu, a harbinger of disease, with its human head, bird’s wings, and lion’s paws.

  Pigafetta meanwhile took the original Caravan Bestiary to Malta. Then he returned to Venice for good. I was sure he must have brought along the bestiary, but upon his death it disappeared again. If not the book itself, I thought the key to its whereabouts must be in Venice. When I met a Hungarian count named Vartan Marczek at the Armenian monastery on the island of San Lazzaro one October morning, I wouldn’t have guessed that he was the one who held that key.

  It was the first time I had visited San Lazzaro. My guide, a young monk, introduced me to Marczek, and we exchanged pleasantries before I continued my tour. Marczek was standing on a bench with outstretched palms, feeding bread crumbs to the peacocks that roamed the garden. With his skullcap and flowing hair, he gave a good imitation of Saint Francis of Assisi. But Marczek was no saint.

  OVER THE NEXT MONTH I redoubled my research efforts, making day trips to Padua and Treviso, staying for several nights in Vicenza, riding the rapido to Genoa, pursuing leads that didn’t pan out. It was no longer Dandolo, but Pigafetta about whom I sought information. I discovered his exact place of birth (Vicenza), his parents’ names (Vitali and Zara), the Venetian sestiere in which he’d grown up (Santa Croce), and the fact his father had been a nautical engineer at the Arsenal; but what I needed, and couldn’t find, was information about his later years.

  One afternoon, exhausted and bleary-eyed, I left the Villa Ziane and, on a whim, rode out to the Armenian monastery. San Lazzaro was one of the most peaceful places in the lagoon, and I thought a few hours there would help clear my head. The garden was empty. Bees were humming in the flowers, bitterns dipping through the reeds. I entered a small courtyard and came upon two monks dozing in the shade. Then I saw Count Marczek, book in hand, a pencil in his teeth, pacing around a bubbling fountain. I had been spending so much time alone, and had met so few people in the city, that I was immediately glad to see him. To my surprise, he remembered me, and invited me to join him for a cup of tea.

  He spent most days at the monastery, reading in the library, feeding the peacocks, fishing off the pier with the monks. He wore the blue robe and slippers offered to guests of the abbot. Fifty years old, he had long gray hair and a thick moustache. From the waist up, he was built like a wrestler—barrel-chested, bulging neck muscles—but his legs were thin and his feet small for a man six three.

  We fell into conversation, and over the next few weeks became friends and continued that conversation, talking away the afternoons before boarding the last vaporetto back to the city at dusk. Vartan Marczek was a raconteur of the old school, an excellent companion. He seemed to have been everywhere and done everything. I felt in him a kindred spirit, and a model, like Mr. Hood: someone with a deep and eclectic curiosity who had maintained, and refined, his enthusiasms into middle age. Like Mr. Hood, he was also generous with his time and knowledge. I felt lucky to have encountered both these men so early in my life. Though their temperaments and personal codes were different, other dissimilarities could be deceptive; that is, while on the surface Marczek might appear to have led a racier life, I knew Mr. Hood had been places Marczek could only imagine.

  In the city Marczek tied his hair back in a ponytail and donned a wide-brimmed black hat, checkered scarf, and yellow cashmere coat. He wore a ring set with an oval of Pliocene amber in which an ant had been entombed. We went out for long dinners. Marczek was familiar with restaurants unusual for Venice: Afghan, Brazilian, the cuisine of Macao. He knew the names of maître d’s, waiters, coat-check girls. Gondoliers lounging at various stazia greeted him. He bantered with the hawkers at the Rialto Bridge, who called him Barone. He seemed to have countless acquaintances. Yet he made his home in Paris, and before this extended stay, he had seldom visited Venice for more than a week or two at a stretch.

  For the past five years, Marczek had been writing a biography of Lord Byron for a French publisher. Previously he had published a biography of Georg Buchner and a bestseller entitled Three Fascists: Céline, D’Annunzio Junger. It was the latter’s success that enabled him to keep his publisher at bay while he dawdled, digressed, and complained that he would never finish the Byron book. In fact, he was nearly finished. A part of him didn’t want to be.

  “I don’t want to leave him. For all his imperfections, I am smitten, like so many before me. As with any biography, there is the illusion that the whole, the real, story lies clearly before you, from birth to death, if only you approach it from
the correct angle. Now, at the end, I can only wonder what I missed and how much I skewed that angle.”

  He took notes in Hungarian—his native tongue—and wrote his text in French. He was an autodidact who could also speak English, German, Italian, Albanian, and Armenian. I had a facility with languages, but I was a piker compared to Marczek. He claimed that the blood of nearly every European nationality ran in his veins. His mother was half Czech, half Albanian, and his eyes lit up when I mentioned the Albanian lore I had learned from Evgénia: for example, the country’s “true name,” Shqipri, and the eagle myths created around the twin peaks of Mount Korab. He had inherited his title from his father.

  “An earldom represented the lowest rung of royalty in the old Hungary. Still, my father had plenty of money to go around. But what the communists didn’t confiscate, he pissed away on women and gambling. He fled to Austria and secured a license to export beer to Hungary. When he died a few years later, he bequeathed me that license, which was worth a good deal more than his title, at least until the Hungarian government banned all imported beer.”

  Marczek lived in a sprawling, drafty apartment off the Campo San Silvestro. Through tall windows, past the cupola on the Palazzo Barzizza, he had an eastward view of the Grand Canal. The furniture was sparse. Pyramids of books were strategically placed on the Persian rugs. When weather permitted, he worked at a table on the altana, the wooden platform on the roof where Venetian ladies once bleached their hair in the sun with a mixture of alum, Damascus soap, and burnt lead. Puffing Havana torpedoes, Marczek pecked away with two fingers on his pale green Olivetti. Researching Byron’s life, he had spent two years in England, six months in Greece and Albania, and now a year in Italy. These labors, and his library and archive excursions, were one side of his life—one I could relate to—but I sensed there was another, very different side, and I soon came to know it.