The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  The guests empty the platters and more platters appear: roast quail with eggplant, fried sweetbreads with lemon, a soup of songbirds and almond-paste. As each majolica dish is cleared, bare-breasted images of Annona and Felicitas and Juno Moneta emerge from the crumbs and sauces, offering mute blessings to the Contarini line. Now comes a boiled calf and a pair of stuffed geese, here are chicken pies and pigs’ feet, here is a pigeon stew with mortadella and translucent whole onions, sightless eyes rolling in the dark broth. Crivano eats almost nothing. The girl, nearly motionless in the margin of his sight, seems to eat even less.

  Contarini rises at the head of the table, his hand in the air, his strong fingers imperiously curled. It is the height of rudeness, he says, to hasten one’s guests through their meals. Thus I offer my apologies. But my esteemed colleague Signore della Porta informs me that our entertainments must commence immediately if we are to have them at all. It seems that our revels depend—as I suppose all things depend—on the advantage conveyed by the rays of the noonday sun. More than that I shall not say, for fear of evoking the voluminous wrath of the little Neapolitan. Enough! Let us recess through the peristyle, where seats await us!

  Crivano mumbles a quick courtesy to the maiden, pushes to his feet, and hurries from the courtyard, seizing the chance to escape and collect himself. His pulse hammers in his temples and his gut, muffled and out of phase, like laborers sinking a pile through thick clay. He is simply ill, he thinks: stricken by some mundane lagoon miasma. It’s coincidence, nothing to do with the girl. But even as he thinks these things he imagines himself as an under-rehearsed player, declaiming them to an unseen audience in the dark theater of his own mind. Already some secret part of him must know.

  With nothing in his belly to slow its progress the wine is rampant in his blood, making his footfalls heavy and loose as he steps indoors. The great hall has been cleared of its clutter; the stacked screens and folded curtains are assembled and hung, occluding the windows that open to the courtyard. The only visible daylight rises through the loggia at the opposite end: a liquid shimmer on the frescoed ceiling, the oscillating echo of the Grand Canal’s surface, just out of sight below. Somewhere nearby—he can’t say where—he hears a soft clang of metal brushing metal, and the muted laughter of a child.

  Crivano blinks, unsteady in the abrupt darkness. A servant with a lamp appears at his side to convey him to an adjacent room. Here too the windows are blocked by curtains, and before the curtains stands an upright polyptych of blank canvases. By the wan yellow light of candelabra Crivano finds four rows of campaign chairs facing the canvas screen; a wide aisle runs down their center, and he follows it to a seat near the front. As he lowers himself into his chair, he notes a small lectern standing to one side of the easels, and a long wooden trunk on the floor beneath them, one end hidden by the curtains. He’s puzzling over this as the other guests file in, and suddenly the seat to his right is occupied. He knows without looking that it’s the girl.

  Contarini reappears, sweeping majestically into a chair, and now della Porta stands at the lectern. Senator Contarini, he says, most eminent ladies and gentlemen, my esteemed friends, I thank you for your indulgence in permitting me the opportunity to demonstrate this afternoon some principles of scientia that have been of enduring interest to me. I should say before we begin that the images you are about to witness may be shocking to some of you, and that any women present, or persons of delicate constitution or infirm mentality, may wish to absent themselves. I can assure you, however, that everything you see here today is produced by only the most virtuous application of natural magic, and brought about by my own reverential understanding of the hidden processes of the Divine Soul of the World. At this time I will offer no further explanation beyond referring interested parties to the expanded edition of my book Magiae Naturalis, widely available from your fair city’s superior booksellers. The text from which I read is a verse narrative of my own composition. Extinguish the lights, please.

  Della Porta begins to orate a self-important prologue concerning the past glories of the Republic, and Crivano’s attention is snuffed out with the candles, wandering to the girl, to Contarini, to the other guests, to the gilt splendor of the room, to the odd trunk on the floor, back to the girl again, until a sudden thump issues from the cloaked windows and a weird panorama materializes across the canvas screen.

  Gasps rise from the nearby seats, along with a few muttered curses; the girl seems to tense, to draw somewhat closer. It is as if the wall before them has dissolved to reveal a shadowy landscape: a glade ringed by misshapen trees under a sunless sky. The image is so clear and so dynamic in its color and detail as to make the best efforts of the most adroit trompe-l’oeil painters seem like the scribbles of feebleminded children. And now the leaves of the phantom trees are indeed moving, rustled by a slight breeze. The audience’s gasps are renewed.

  After the initial shock, Crivano thinks of a chapter in della Porta’s book—and also a similar, greatly superior discussion of the same topic in the writings of Ibn al-Haitham—and he grins, pleased with himself. It’s a camera obscura, he whispers. That box on the floor. It is merely the courtyard beyond the wall that we see.

  For a long time the girl does not reply. Thereafter spake wise Dandolo, della Porta drones, his fervor undiminished by his years.

  But we’re facing the courtyard, the girl whispers. And the image is not upsidedown, as it should be.

  Shhhh, Contarini hisses over his shoulder.

  The girl is correct: this is no camera obscura, or at least not simply that. Crivano reviews his knowledge of optics and finds it wanting. A second lens? he wonders. A convex mirror?

  A crash of cymbals and the eerie bray of a shawm banish these thoughts. Two parties of armored men come into view, their broadswords and bright helmets strafing the room with fantastic flashes. They take positions on either side of a rampart that emerges from the murk—Byzantines to the left, Crusaders to the right—and shake their weapons fiercely at each other.

  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 banqu
et 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.

  29

  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.