I, Iago

by Nicole Galland

  “Really?” Cassio asked as his buttocks slid down the stone parapet and found their way to the stone floor of the wall walk.

  “Oh, absolutely,” I assured him, as if we were discussing fencing techniques. “The Danes, the Germans, the Dutch—they’re all heavy drinkers, of course, but not one of them could ever hold his own against an Englishman. Speaking of drink, your cup is empty, Lieutenant—hey, boy! Fill the lieutenant’s cup here!” I called out to the only other person on the walls beside myself who was not soused: Montano’s page boy. He was scurrying around with a large pitcher of wine, keeping all the cups full.

  Cassio watched the wine go into his glass with the fascination of a dim-witted child. He was almost endearing in this state. “Why . . . how . . . so tell me . . . you said the English drink a lot?”

  “Oh, yes,” I assured him. “A Brit can drink a Dane under the table, and the Germans who try to keep up with him end up puking all over themselves. And the Dutch—there’s a competition that gets very ugly . . .”

  Cassio’s attention had wandered already. He opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it again, having immediately lost his thought. Then with a suddenly renewed vigor, he sat up straight, held his cup high, and cried out, “Give me some wine and let me speak a little! To the health of our general!”

  “Here here!” Montano said from a stone’s toss away down the wall walk, where he had been singing an equally idiotic drinking song in Greek. “I’ll drink a cup to him with you, and raise you another cup!” The page boy, halfway between the two men, hesitated, deciding whose cup to refill first. He chose Montano’s.

  To keep Cassio’s attention distracted, I began another drinking song, this one filthy; it demanded a toast at the end of each verse, and with his first drink, Cassio announced this was the most exquisite song he had ever heard in the whole of his life.

  Was he drunk enough? I considered signaling to Roderigo to move in for the end-game, but Cassio startled me by suddenly leaping to his feet—without falling over. “There are souls who must be saved!” he announced, out of nothing, to everyone in hearing distance. By now the party included guardsmen who were supposed to be dispersed along the whole of the Citadel’s wall walk. “And there are souls who must not be saved,” he added, for clarity.

  Since I was the closest man to him, a number of men looked to me, as if my response would tell them how to mark their own responses.

  “True enough,” I said.

  “I,” said Michele Cassio grandly, “hope to be saved.”

  You won’t be, I thought; aloud, I said, in an agreeable tone, “And so do I, Lieutenant.”

  “Me too, me too!” shouted some dozen voices around us in the flickering torchlight. Cassio, ignoring them all, held up his hand to me. “Very sorry, Iago,” he slurred, “but you’ll not be saved before me, cuz I’m a lieutenant and you’re jus’ an ensign, and the lieutenant comes first.”

  I tried to keep a disinterested look on my face but I could not do it; I could feel my eyes blaze. So he wanted to talk about that, did he? I was more than ready. “Indeed?” I said softly. “And exactly how did you come to be lieutenant, my friend?”

  Cassio was drunk, but not quite drunk enough to miss my tone. He waved his hand unsteadily before him, as if dismissing a very large insect. “No more o’ that,” he said, and hiccupped, and then giggled at his hiccupping. He looked up and noticed that men were staring at him. “D’not think, gentlemen, that I’m drunk,” he slurred. About to lose his balance, he fell onto me, his long arm draping across my shoulders. I grimaced broadly; but, good soldier that I was, I held him up. Cassio giggled at me affectionately. “Thiss my ensign,” he said, gesturing to me. “Thiss my right hand.” And with a giggle, holding up his free arm: “And thiss my left hand! See, not drunk.”

  He pulled himself off me to show he did not need me for balance; immediately he slumped backward against the wall where he’d been sitting.

  The guards with us, not quite as drunk as he, but pretty close, applauded him and went back to their cups.

  “I tol’ you,” Cassio said, and gestured for the page boy to come to him. Cassio handed the boy his cup, then used the page’s shoulder for balance to raise himself. “Nobody here is ’lowed to think I’m drunk, yes?” And he staggered off, reeling, through the open door into the keep.

  Without looking at Roderigo, I signaled for him to follow after Cassio. Then I turned my attention away; I could not afford to be infected by Roderigo’s fear, which I was sure was eating him alive right now.

  Their lieutenant absent, the guards looked around at one another uncertainly. Montano, the Cypriot leader, had sobered up a bit over the past hour, perhaps from all the singing. He moved closer to the keep door. “All right everyone, come, let’s set the watch! Disperse,” he called out. He glanced at me and with one expressive eyebrow, summoned me to step closer. I did. With a second expressive eyebrow, he gestured at the door through which Cassio had just staggered away.

  I nodded with rueful understanding. “Cassio is a soldier worthy of Caesar,” I said quietly. The soldiers were all spreading out along the wall walk, but there were two stationed right here at the keep entrance, and I wanted to appear as if I didn’t want them to hear me. “He has just the one vice, but it rules him often. Honestly, in confidence, I beg you: it worries me how much Othello trusts him.”

  “Is he like this a lot?” Montano asked.

  I nodded and bit my lip regretfully. “Every night—he can’t sleep if he hasn’t soused himself up. I feel for him, but it is a serious problem.”

  Montano looked incredulous. “Othello knows this?”

  I made a face. “I probably have not been as direct with him about it as I should be, as Michele is a friend of mine.”

  Montano—older, wiser, and tipsier than I—shook his head in gentle chastisement. “I have heard about you, Iago, how you are always blunt and honest, and do the right thing, and stand by your words. It is precisely somebody like you who must tell the Moor that his lieutenant is a sot.”

  “I cannot do that to Cassio. My intention is to cure him of the evil, before Othello even knows about—”

  My pathetic attempt at sycophancy was cut short by a shrill cry within the keep:

  “Help! Heeelllp!” squealed a painfully familiar voice.

  A moment later, Roderigo came flying out the keep door onto the parapet, Michele Cassio close on his heels, sword drawn, tripping over his own heels. His drunken state was possibly the reason Roderigo was still alive.

  The two men guarding the keep door stared as their superior stumbled past them hurling names at Roderigo, too slurred to even understand; Roderigo, wide-eyed, bald and bewhiskered, looked like a confused bat that had been cornered by a snake. He gave me a beseeching look as he scampered around this open spot on the wall walk. I was afraid he’d try to hide behind me.

  “What’s the matter, Lieutenant?” Montano demanded, stepping up to Cassio.

  “This knave talked back to me!” I think is what Cassio said; it sounded more like: “Thisnaytawbatomeee.” The two guards exchanged amazed looks and snickered. Montano gestured sharply, and they stopped.

  “I didn’t!” Roderigo cried, now trying to curl up into a perfect circle right there in the middle of the walk.

  “Illbeatim!” Cassio declared.

  “Beat me?” Roderigo nearly shrieked, straight at me, a cry for help. I could not risk his calling me by name.

  “Shutupy’rogueyou!” Cassio demanded, and took one staggering step in Roderigo’s direction with his sword raised.

  I knew I should have stepped in to save Roderigo; I felt a shot of guilt for failing to. But it was hypnotic to watch my own machinations working out so exactly right, before my eyes, with so little effort on my part. It was seductive.

  Montano took the step I should have: he reached out and grabbed the sword from Cassio’s hand. Although certainly drunk himself, he was more sober than Cassio, and his wavering gaze wavered less t
han the lieutenant’s. “Stop that now, Lieutenant,” he ordered. He tossed the sword to the stone floor of the walk, and then reached again, this time constraining Cassio with a wrist-grip.

  “Lemme go, sir,” Cassio growled. “Lemme go or I’ll knock you ri’ off th’s wall.”

  “Cassio,” Montano said gently, paternally. “Cassio, you’re very drunk.”

  It added fuel to the fire of his self-righteousness. “Dr’nk? D’you dare call meee dr’nk?” he sneered at Montano. With a sharpness and a quickness that belied his state, Cassio reached for the dagger in his belt and pulled it out flashing it in the torchlight; he turned on Montano and would have stabbed him with it, but Montano too was sharper than he seemed: he released Cassio’s wrist, leapt out of the way, drew his sword, and pressed the point of it on Cassio’s collarbone.

  Cassio slapped it away on the flat side with his palm; Montano, not expecting this, let the sword fall from his grasp but then pulled out his own dagger. The two lunged stumbling toward each other. I took a cautious step forward, wanting to pull them apart without being myself struck. Roderigo, beyond them, was trying to get my attention. Urgently, I gestured him to leave; relieved, he tore down along the wall watch and disappeared into the darkness.

  I turned my attention back to the duelers. “Lieutenant Cassio, put up!” I ordered. My plan did not require anyone to get killed, or even wounded. This was getting out of hand. “Montano, sir, you are not so drunk as he, contain yourself!”

  They circled each other, looking for an opportunity to reach out with a blind and ill-considered stab. It was the kind of fight they’d have had as first-week recruits learning defense skills.

  “Help!” I shouted at the two guards at the keep door. “The watch! Somebody call the watch!” That was ironic: here were the two leaders of the watch. But Roderigo must have set the alarm as he retreated; the bells on the chapel tower began to peal, and all the guards along the Citadel walls called out to one another, asking what passed. Far down below, doors swung open onto the streets of the town, and I could hear the mustering voices of anxious Cypriot civilians.

  Montano, when the bells began, instinctively looked over at them. Cassio used that moment: he leapt forward and slashed at Montano’s abdomen.

  Montano shouted from the pain. He fell back onto the stone, curling around his bloody middle. The men along the wall walk began running toward us.

  Cassio, crazed now, was about to step in for a direct downward stab at Montano’s side; I jumped against him to send him sprawling against the parapet; he nearly rebounded off it, finally landing on his ass. “Hold, Lieutenant, for the love of heaven!” I shouted at him, grabbing his right arm when he tried to rise again.

  I prayed Montano would be all right even as something inside of me exulted at the injury: Cassio had just attacked the governor of Cyprus! He would never live down the shame of this evening. My plan was working better than I ever dreamed, in front of two dozen witnesses, and none of it was traceable to me. I’d never felt such power in my life. It was hard not to laugh aloud with the thrill of it.

  And then, the perfect coda to my fabulous concerto of revenge: at that moment, through the keep door, erupted Othello, wide-eyed and half undressed.

  “What is going on?” he demanded, still tying on his sword-belt. Four attendants scurried after him with torches. “Are we under attack—”

  “I’m bleeding,” Montano shouted out in the haze of inebriation and pain. “Help! I’m bleeding to death!”

  Oblivious to the outrage he was creating for himself, Cassio responded to this plea by struggling again to rise, as if he would have another go at the governor.

  “Hold, Lieutenant!” I shouted; I yanked him back down and caught his wrist at such an angle he could not keep the grip on his dagger. After a furious moment of resistance, he let it go, and it clanged to the stone beneath us. “For God’s sake man, what are you trying to do?” I demanded. When Cassio began to explain to me the hurt he intended for Montano, I overrode him: “The general is here, Lieutenant; for the love of heaven, shut up and listen to him!”

  It took Othello a moment to recover from his rush of alarm. In the light, I watched his dawning realization that this was a drunken brawl. There was a flicker of relief, then much disgust . . . then fury.

  “Are you mad?” he demanded in a low, dangerous voice. “So we do not need the Turks, we can all just kill ourselves off? Is that it? Put your blade away, Michele—and the rest of you. The next man who makes the slightest move toward violence will die by my hand.” He glanced up, and suddenly his voice expanded to fill the whole night sky: “Stop that dreadful bell, for heaven’s sake! You are scaring the population half to death! They’ll think the Turks have landed after all.” He turned his attention back to all of us on the wall walk. “Somebody tell me what’s the matter here.”

  None of us spoke. His eyes strayed over all of us, and—of course—rested on me. The bells stopped.

  “Iago, it is up to you. Speak. Tell me who began this.”

  I said nothing.

  “Speak, Iago. If you are my friend, tell me honestly what happened here.”

  Oh, that was so like him—not to simply order his ensign, as was his right, but to call upon a bond of friendship to invoke loyalty. A quality I loved in him, more than I wanted to right now.

  For a long moment I said nothing. I had created all of this, so easily—it had been no labor. In fact, except for Montano’s wound, it was all good entertainment. And best of all, I was about to reap the benefits of it. All it required of me was the smallest lie of omission. Although even that caused a twinge of conscience.

  “I do not know,” I said, with an apologetic shrug. “They were friendly, everyone was getting along well, and then suddenly . . .” I shook my head. “Suddenly there were drawn swords and screams and insults. I’m sorry I’ve got nothing more to say to it. I have no idea what happened.”

  Othello turned unhappily toward Cassio. “Michele, explain yourself.”

  Cassio, almost shivering with embarrassment, and fighting off the fog of drunkenness, did the only intelligent thing possible: “Forgive me, General, but I can’t speak,” he managed to say, his face resting hard against the cold stone of the parapet. I was afraid he might throw up on me.

  Othello frowned. Turning away from us, he tried Montano. “Governor,” he said patiently, “I do not know you as well as I know these others, but I know you have a name for gravity and wisdom. Tell me what makes you throw off that reputation to become a night-brawler?”

  Montano did not move from his curled-up position. “I’m badly hurt,” he moaned. “I need physic. Iago can tell you everything. I was defending myself.”

  Othello looked around at the men. “Can no one tell me anything?” he demanded. “Who started this nonsense? This is a town of war! People’s hearts have been brimful of fear for months now, and we, who are supposed to ensure their safety—we’re now the ones who make them fearful! What fools among you do not understand how monstrous that is?” His voice grew quick and stern. “Iago, tell me now, who began it?”

  Seeing me hesitate, Montano grunted in a pained voice, “Tell the truth, Iago, or you are no true soldier.”

  “Do not say that,” I retorted, grateful he was giving me so many opportunities to play the role of regretful truth-teller. “I’d rather have my tongue cut from my mouth before I let it say anything against Michele Cassi . . . oh.” I looked away from Othello with sheepish worry. I did it so well that I almost fooled myself.

  “Go on, Iago,” Othello said through clenched teeth.

  “I will,” I said, “but if you listen to the whole story you’ll see that Cassio is not to blame. We were all out here talking, and suddenly, Cassio and some stranger came running out from the tower, and Cassio had his sword drawn on the stranger. I’d never seen him look like that before. Signior Montano here stepped in to try to stop Cassio from attacking the stranger, who was unarmed—that’s all it was. Montano got in the way
. I don’t know why Cassio was so enraged at the stranger, but Cassio is a rational man, I’m sure the stranger had it coming and Cassio had every right to be after him.”

  There was a longish silence, during which Othello perused my expression as if I were a piece of art he was contemplating buying. Finally, with a sigh, he looked away and said, “Iago, your loyalty to a friend is forcing you to make light of the matter. Michele Cassio,” he said, with a small cough of distaste, and then turned full on to Cassio. I helped Cassio in his attempt to scramble to his feet. Othello held out his hand, palm up, as if expecting something. “Cassio, I love you like a brother, but you will never be an officer of mine. Give me the lieutenant’s sash.”

  Victory!

  Fighting back Florentine tears, Cassio tried to pull the sash off over his head. It got caught on the ostrich feather. I was near enough to help him remove it, but that seemed a graceless gesture. I wondered how long it would be before Othello finally did the right thing and awarded me the sash. Perhaps he would do it this very moment . . .

  . . . and he might have, but his wife showed up.

  Blond hair mussed, in a white linen nightdress, with a red silk shawl wrapped about her shoulders, Desdemona stared in sleepy confusion at all of us.

  “And on top of it all, you’ve woken my wife! You’ll pay for that!” Othello snapped. You are truly obsessed, I thought, if you make that as much a sin as terrifying an entire town.

  “What’s the matter?” Her sweet, small voice sounded jarringly delicate after the masculine shouting and carryings-on. Her face was shadowed by the torchlight behind her.

  “Nothing, sweetheart,” Othello said, solicitously putting an arm around her. “This is just the soldier’s life, being awoken in the middle of the night because fools are fighting with each other. Go back to bed. You there,” he ordered a couple of the guards. “Take Governor Montano to the hospital, I will go after to see he is well. Iago—”

  I nearly leapt toward him, so eager was I to be given the sash. “Iago, take some men and go about the town, make sure people know this was a false alarm, and all is well.”