by Martin Seay
The prime spot on the longest wall is occupied by something quite different, a jewel-toned scene from Ovid: bare-bosomed blond Europa, reclining on her garlanded white bull. More bovines appear in nearby frames, and one of these in particular captures Crivano’s attention: a bucolic tableau of the autumn harvest. When Crivano weighs the busy composition against his own memories of a year on an Anatolian farm—his fourteenth year, the year after Lepanto, the year before the janissaries claimed him—it seems absurd, sketched after the fancy of a painter lacking aptitude for or interest in any accurate depiction of the practicalities of agriculture. The undifferentiated farmers, their wobbly stack of crated apples, the array of irrelevant tools: despite their silliness, they transfix him. Every detail seems designed to repudiate his own experience, to displace his faded memories with an abstract truth to which the painter alone controls access. The craftsman’s bold hand has even hung a centaur in the distant clouds—clouds of tenebrous green that can’t help but echo the spectral landscape conjured by della Porta’s device.
The senator’s gentle basso reaches him from across the room, like a hand laid upon his shoulder. Whatever its faults, he says, that canvas is my favorite. It pains me to no end, what has become of that man.
Crivano turns with a measured bow. The painter? he says. I don’t know of him.
Senator Contarini has changed from his velvet robe into a black tunic of fine damask; he crosses the room to Crivano’s side and leans against the edge of a table. The painter, he says, comes from Bassano del Grappa. He rose to prominence in the studio of his father Jacopo, who made great success with rustic scenes such as this. Many of our most ancient families delight in evocations of their distant holdings on the mainland, the source of so much of their wealth. If you have visited a noble house in this city, then I’ll wager you have seen old Jacopo’s work.
The senator reaches into a muddle of instruments and withdraws a magnifying lens, which he lifts to the painting’s surface to examine the cloud-borne centaur. After the great fire in the doge’s palace, he continues, Francesco—for Francesco is the given name of the one who painted this—moved his household to our city, in order to open a workshop of his own. The Great Council had entrusted to me the restoration of the palace, and I awarded Francesco a number of commissions. I believed that I saw in his work the promise of greatness. Greatness of a sort not witnessed in this city since the plague took Titian from us. That potential no longer has any hope of being realized. But who can say with certainty that I was wrong? Or am I no more than a mooncalf for concerning myself with idle matters such as these, instead of with galleys, armaments, fortifications, the various blunt cudgels of republic?
Crivano shifts his weight, watches the crystal lens roam the painted surface. If one is to wield power, he says, then one must control the image of power. Or so a certain clerk of Florence would have us believe.
Contarini chuckles. I tell myself as much, he says. Often I do. Of course, that same clever Florentine also warns us of men who dream about ideal republics that have never existed. These fools—how does he put it?—are so tormented by the notion that how we live is very distant from how we ought to live, that they disregard what is done in favor of what should be done. Thus do they invite ruin upon themselves, their realms, their families. I sometimes suspect that I should count myself among these dreaming fools. But this suspicion always fails to shame me.
The glass glides across the canvas: green clouds, red apples, tranquil brown cows. What became of him? Crivano says.
Of whom?
Of the painter, senator.
Contarini straightens, and his hand falls away, polishing the lens on his sleeve. Against his father’s counsel, he says, Francesco began to associate with a group of learned young nobles. Politically aggressive, impatient with the Pope’s dictates, involved with the search for secret knowledge. These were hardly the same nobles who had made his family wealthy. This conflicted allegiance made Francesco anxious, and his was not a temperament well-suited to anxiety. It seems clear in retrospect that he suffered from a certain infirmity of the mind. According to his poor wife, he became convinced that the sbirri of the Council of Ten were hounding him, and intended to do him harm. He believed that they attacked him with demoniacal magic while he slept, expunging and altering his memories. Or so has his wife testified. To me it seems equally likely that he simply sought release from the world, as some men do, and always have done. In any case, some six months ago he leapt from the highest window of his rented home. The fall did not kill him, but it broke him quite badly, and despite the exertions of our friend Dottore de Nis he remains bedridden today, unable to perform for himself even the most mundane of tasks. In his infinite mercy, God did not permit the natural progression to be upended in this instance: he granted heartbroken old Jacopo eternal rest in February. And any day now, I imagine, Francesco will follow his father to the grave.
Crivano furrows his brow and studies the canvas, as if it might disclose some hint of its maker’s madness, but it remains as it was. I don’t suppose, he says, the painter’s fears could have had any substance?
His fears about the sbirri, you mean? Contarini says with a macabre smile. Or those concerning demonic assaults upon his sleeping mind?
About the sbirri.
The senator arches his eyebrows, shakes his head, looks away. I made inquiries, he says. I suppose as the man’s chief patron I felt responsible to some degree. The wife’s allegations seemed unlikely, but—owing to the peculiar activities of some of Francesco’s young friends—not quite out of the question. The Inquisition claimed to know nothing of him. The Ministry of Night pled ignorance as well.
And what of the Council of Ten?
Contarini claps his hands softly, cupping his palms as if to trap a fly, then flattens them, rubbing them slowly together. From the Ten, he says, I received only the routine obfuscation. They never deny anything, you know. Their potency rests on the common perception that their eyes and ears are everywhere. A denial might suggest that they don’t know what you’re talking about. Thus the truth of the matter must remain sealed in their leonine jaws, just as the secret of Francesco’s spoilt memory can be known only—
Contarini breaks off with a laugh, claps Crivano on the arm. I was about to say that it’s known only to Somnus and his three silent sons, he finishes But you’re on fine terms with dewy-winged Somnus, aren’t you, dottore? You must be, given how swiftly you have reinstated me to his good graces.
This is an obvious ploy to abandon the subject—a clumsy one by the senator’s standards—but Crivano can’t thwart it gracefully. Instead, he forces a courteous chuckle. I’m pleased to hear this, senator, he says. I’m honored to have been of service in this small matter.
Hardly small when you’re the sleepless one, dottore, Contarini says. He gestures toward the door in the corner, the door from which he emerged. Will you join me in my library? he says. It’s in shameful disarray at the moment, but I’ll give you a brief tour. If anything you find there will be of use in your studies, then we shall make arrangements.
You’re far too kind, Senator, Crivano says. I dare not impose—
But the senator is already gone, leaving Crivano little choice but to follow him. As he steps to the library door, the old man’s voice carries from inside. Here’s an odd thing, it says. I know not—perhaps you will—whether this might be some lingering echo of the cowslip wine, or simply the consequence of prior deficiency, but for the past few nights, dottore, my dreams have been all but overwhelming in their intensity.
For an instant Crivano stands paralyzed at the library’s threshold, stunned at the plentitude before him, before he manages to venture inside. Rather larger than the anteroom he just quit, this chamber is so loaded with treasure as to seem smaller, little more than a closet. Its walls appear at first to be constructed entirely from paper and leather: new octavos, old quartos, ancient codices, some piled flat, some with their banded edges showing, others spine-out in the
modern style, and none of them chained. Only after a hard blinking glance do slivers of oak begin to materialize: a right-angled grid of shelves and cubbyholes that undergirds everything, keeping it in place. What meager territory remains unclaimed by bookcases is given over to diagrams, schematics, the sketches of engineers and architects, displayed in simple wooden frames. Crivano’s vision flits between them—real and imagined structures exploded by eye and pencil onto featureless landscapes of white—until it locates a familiar image: the clean symmetrical façade of the new Church of the Redeemer.
This recognition comes with vertiginous dizziness. That unearthly white temple on the Giudecca, he thinks, was once no more than this: a few lines on paper, a notion blooming in a man’s skull. Just so this palace in which he now stands, all the volumes bowing the shelves around him, the black boat that brought him here—indeed, the entire city: all of it precipitated from thousands of skulls over the course of long centuries. Just so the mirror-thieving scheme that now carries him in its wake: hatched by the fertile intellect of the haseki sultan. Just so the death of poor Verzelin: the rank issue of his own conspiring brain. Just so every subtle or sensible thing beneath the sun: once only an idea in the mind of God.
A heavy walnut chair stands a few inches from Crivano, its back and arms worked with elaborate designs, and he puts a hand on it to buttress himself, then steps forward and sinks into it. Already seated at his massive desk, Contarini arranges and rearranges the chaos of documents on its surface as he speaks.
These dreams of mine, he says, are no mundane sifting of the day’s affairs. They are eruptions from the depths of my most secret heart. Faces that death shrouded long ago from my eyes, faces I recall only from inferior portraits I’ve passed for years without regard—my mother, my father, my brothers and sisters, my own lost children, even the wet-nurses and the favored stewards of my infant home—these faces haunt me in sleep, appearing as vividly to me as you do now. They have led me along corridors of reminiscence to times and localities I had utterly forgotten, where I have spent whole nights feasting on details I never remarked upon my initial visitations. What is most confounding of all, Vettor, is the haste by which these dream-shades are queered and dispersed by the first morning rays that penetrate my feeble old eyes. What in sleep was pure becomes base and ridiculous. Please understand that I have no wish to avoid these dreams. On the contrary, I find myself rising from them with calm suffusing my spirit, with fervor quickening my steps. I simply regard them with wonderment, as one might a new comet or a chimeric beast, and I seek to understand them. Have you any advice to share with an inquisitive old man on such a trifling matter?
Crivano has been only half-listening; he shifts slightly in his seat. There is a substantial corpus of literature on dreams, he says, but my own expertise in the area is far from complete. Perhaps you will permit me to study the issue further, to meditate on it for a few days, before I conceive a diagnosis. There may well be physic to help clarify these phantasms.
Of course, dottore. My curiosity is inflamed, but my urgency is not great. And I shall myself seek out the writings you’ve mentioned. I must confess that I have already been lured into the pages of the Oneirocritica of Ephesius, a book whose utility in these chambers until recently consisted of flattening curled paper on humid afternoons. It is a strange and wonderful thing, dottore, for a man of my age to awaken feeling younger, with the sense that the daylit world has grown sharper and more vivid before his eyes. It is surprising, too, to find the invigorating agent linked so closely to memories of the past, changed though those memories might be by the lens of the dreaming mind. It is not generally a tonic for old men, this act of remembering. Don’t you agree?
Crivano notes the trenchant cast of the senator’s white eyebrows, and he takes a moment to respond. I suppose, he says, that that depends on what is being remembered. Dottore de Nis has spoken to me of one you might consult on this matter. An expert on the art of memory, hailing from Nola, who is currently a guest in the home of Lord Zuanne Mocenigo.
Contarini spits out a rough laugh. Yes, he says. I’ve met the Nolan of whom you speak. An interesting fellow. Disagreeable. Quite deluded, I think. I understand from my colleagues at Padua that he has applied for their vacant chair in mathematics, which, from what I can follow of this man’s thinking, seems somewhat akin to the Turkish sultan’s chief astrologer seeking to become the next pope. I have begun writing letters in support of one of his competitors—the son of the famed lutenist Vincenzo Galilei, lately resident in Pisa—who seems rather promising despite his relative youth. You learned of the Nolan from Tristão, you say?
That’s correct, senator.
I see, Contarini says. I hope you will forgive an old man his harangues, Vettor, if I remind you to exercise caution with Dottore de Nis.
Crivano gives the senator a broad, empty smile. As always, I receive your advice with gratitude, he says, but I have seen nothing at all in Dottore de Nis’s conduct worthy of censure.
You would not. Nor would I. In fact, I would trust—I have trusted—Tristão de Nis with my life. The pressing issue is not what we see, but what the Inquisition sees.
Crivano smoothes his beard, runs a thumb across his pursed lips. I am told, he says, that the Inquisition is weak in the territories of the Republic. Is this not so?
It is indeed so. And it is aware of its weakness. And like a starving animal, it now hungers after anything more vulnerable than itself. Jews and Turks are now entirely safe within our city, provided they identify themselves and keep to their approved areas. Likewise, all established Christian families have little to fear. But for new Christians like Tristão—for any person who navigates the boundaries between the discrete communities of our polis—dangers do remain. Because the conversions of the Jews of Portugal were coerced by King Manuel, the sincerity of Portuguese Christians is always suspect here. Dottore de Nis has many friends among the learned men of the Ghetto, including several widely reputed to be alchemists and magi. I also know him to be acquainted with Turkish scholars. The great affection he engenders among noble families—members of this household foremost among them—has thusfar kept him above reproach. But if the wrong person were to denounce him, it could be very bad.
Do you believe Tristão to be sincere in his profession of faith, Senator?
In the end, what you or I or anyone else believes will not matter.
Of course, Crivano says. I understand completely. But I humbly put the question to you again. Do you believe that Dottore de Nis is sincere?
A flash of irritation clouds Contarini’s face, then dissipates. He reaches across the desk to lift a large hexagonal crystal—perfectly clear but for a few fine capillaries of gold—that weights a stack of his correspondence. He shifts the crystal absently from palm to palm. Do you read Boccaccio, Vettor? he asks.
Not in a great number of years.
Perhaps you will recall a story that Boccaccio puts in the mouth of Melchizedek the Jew. Melchizedek tells the sultan the tale of an exceedingly wealthy old man, whose family passes to its most favored son of each generation a ring of great antiquity. When the time comes for this old man to write his will, he is unable to choose between his three equally virtuous sons, and instead hires a skilled jeweler to fashion two copies of the ring. So exact are these replicas that after the old man’s death, no one, not even the jeweler, can tell which is the original. So it is, Melchizedek declares, with the Christians, the Muhammadans, the Jews. How is one to resolve this puzzle? If the three rings are truly identical, is it blasphemous to wonder whether this should be a concern for mortal men? Whether it matters at all?
Tongue-tied like a schoolboy, Crivano stares at the insignia carved into the senator’s desk, unable to think of any response but one: the old man is dead. He opts to keep his silence.
The senator places the rock-crystal in a sunbeam, rotating it on its point. Colored rays sweep the desk like spokes of an invisible wheel. On its smooth sides Crivano can make out the iri
descent whorls of Contarini’s fingerprints.
This afternoon, Contarini says, you met my young cousin.
Perina. Yes.
She had questions for you.
Yes. She did.
Contarini draws a deep breath and lets it out. For the first time today, he looks old. I had asked Perina, he says, to be delicate and respectful, in a manner befitting a young lady of her station. But I fear that her youth in this house suffered a lack of womanly paragons for such behavior, and thus her tread is often heavier than it should be. For this you have my apologies.
No apology is needed, Senator. I enjoyed speaking with—
Contarini quiets him with a raised palm. Please, he says. Grant an old diplomat a few frank words to ease his guilty conscience. Perina sought to interrogate you about the Battle of Lepanto, for reasons you have perhaps by now ascertained. I indulged her, not only by arranging today’s encounter, but also by withholding from you my knowledge of her intentions. I allowed you to be ambushed. I had imagined this to be a thing of small consequence—an amusing stratagem to disrupt your usual reserve, to encourage you to speak freely of your past deeds—but I see now that I was presumptuous.
He lays his heavy crystal down, angling a thin rainbow smear across the desktop, over the white surface of an unfinished epistle. On it, Crivano can make out a careful sketch of the Piazza, an inverted salutation written in French. The sun is dropping over the canal, lengthening Contarini’s shadow. The cast spectrum has already begun to fade.
I never went to war, Contarini says. Like many of my fellow senators, I came of age during a peaceful era in our Republic’s history. I and my colleagues should be grateful for this. Instead, we are envious. We see these younger men, our sons and our cousins, who tasted firsthand the victory at Lepanto, who can always respond to our pretense of aged wisdom by saying: But I was there! And we sigh, and we dream of the fame we might have won if only Fortune had smiled upon us as she did upon them. In short, we imagine war to be a crucible for forging glory. It is not. It is a waste and a horror—the product of the worst failures of velvety statesmen like myself—and to envy any man a brush with it is an impious folly.
