by Martin Seay
How is it possible? It’s a stupid question. The girl’s existence seems improbable only because he’s never considered that it could be the case. He went so long without news of home or family, without giving them a thought. He had to. His eventual freedom depended on it, on his seeming indifference. When he needed signposts and antecedents, he never sought them in the world, but only in myths and fancies half-remembered from his childhood, refashioned according to his momentary need. He always found them. Was his indifference only seeming? If so, what did it conceal? These are better questions, but they slide from his attention like quicksilver on an ointment slab, and he’s disinclined to pursue them.
Shouts from the campo ahead: a group of portly nobles costumed as New World savages—wooden clubs, fur loincloths, twigs and dry leaves in their hair—chasing after a gang of common boys, hollering propositions. Show us that downy-wreathed cock of yours, you young devil! The boys laugh and run toward Crivano; the handsome one in the lead kicks a leather ball before him with unworried ease. Firelight through a casino window brushes the boy’s face, and for an instant he’s the Lark—pausing to catch his breath in a football game, plucking ripe medlars from a fruit stall in the Rialto, dancing a galliard across the deck of the Gold and Black Eagle.
Then the boy skids to a halt, stops the ball with his toe, takes a few limping sidelong steps while beckoning to his comrades, and he’s no longer the Lark, no longer a boy at all, but the crop-headed whore from last night, the one with the warty foot and the dye-stained hands. As they rush by, he sees that each of her companions is also a young woman, a whore attired as a boy, no doubt to tempt rarefied fancies.
As the last of them passes, Crivano’s gaze returns to the first, to her smirking face. A fine evening to you, dottore, she says, and doffs her cap with a stifled giggle. Then she gives the ball a mighty kick, and is gone.
In the next moment the sham savages are upon him, slowed hopelessly by their rope-and-wood sandals, hooting like jungle apes as they shoulder past. One of their number—bald and squat, with the face of a cruel idiot child—takes a halfhearted swing at Crivano’s head with his cudgel; Crivano ducks, and cracks the man across the ribs with his own stick. The blow echoes with a hollow meaty sound, but the man lumbers on, unperturbed, after the fleeing whores. Too drunk to notice pain. Tomorrow he’ll have a pretty bruise he won’t recall receiving, at the very least. Crivano half-hopes the cur will black out unnoticed in a sottoportego somewhere, drown in the night on his own blood.
Here’s your light, dottore!
A torch bobs toward him, sweating fiery beads of pitch that vanish as they strike the pavement, clutched in the hand of a linkboy of about seven years. On the opposite side of the campo, under the star-sifted indigo sky, Crivano can make out the orange lights of more mooncursers, probably the elder brothers of this one.
I’m looking for the Morosini house, Crivano says.
It’s nearby, the linkboy says, then narrows his soot-rimmed little eyes. But it’s not easy to find, he says. I could show you.
Crivano sighs. He’s late, tired, suddenly famished, and he dips into his coin-purse to sprinkle dull green copper into the urchin’s upraised palm.
31
The Morosini house is on the Riva del Carbon, just north of the church of San Luca; it’s small, or seems so in the shadow of the looming Grimani palace two doors down. Candlelight pours from every window of every floor. Watching the bright and dark shapes that pass before those portals, listening the many-tongued chatter within, Crivano recalls a wicker cage of colored birds he once saw offered for sale by a wild-eyed Somali boatman, somewhere near Heliopolis on the delta of the Nile.
Two torches blaze in sconces at the open landward door, and Crivano brushes past the linkboy to walk inside. He wonders how he’ll manage even rudimentary exchanges with his learned peers given the disturbance he’s just suffered. Were it not for Tristão he would not have come tonight—yet even as he thinks this, he can feel his body disentangling from its shock, comforted by rote performances of salutation and gratitude.
A footman hastens from the water-gate to greet him, then disappears and returns with the steward, a muscular Provençal with a neat black beard and a stoical expression. Good evening, dottore, he says with a deep bow. The Brothers Morosini welcome you.
I apologize for my tardiness, Crivano says as he surrenders his stick and his robe. Has the banquet concluded?
With the sweep of an arm, the steward invites him upstairs. The staff is clearing the table now, he says. Tonight’s address is soon to begin.
A muffled catlike yowl issues from Crivano’s empty stomach. I see, he says. If there is any way I might be granted access to whatever esculents remain, I’d be grateful. I’m afraid unforeseen circumstances prevented me from taking a meal prior to—
Of course, the steward says as they emerge onto the piano nobile. I’m sure we can make some arrangement. Forgive me, dottore, but may I ask your name?
Crivano, Crivano says. Vettor Crivano.
The man snaps to a halt, clears his throat, inhales deeply, and his stentorian voice echoes from the beamed ceiling. Gentlemen! he says. Dottore Vettor Crivano!
There are nearly two dozen men in the great hall, divided into shifting groups of twos and threes and fours. A few look his way and nod. Crivano sees nobles and citizens, lawyers and physicians, scholars and friars; he overhears discussions in German, French, English, Latin, and the language of court, along with the Republic’s own tongue. Under the hum of voices he can hear a soft chime of plucked strings, but his sight finds no players. Neither does it locate Dottore de Nis.
Nearby, a pair of young patricians argues spiritedly with a third: slightly older, with an absurd plume of hair, attired in a busked and bom-basted Spanish doublet that even Crivano can recognize as outmoded. But Lord Mocenigo, one of the pair says, the ships of the Turk suffer worse than do our own the assaults of the uskok pirates. Surely blame must lie with the Hapsburg princes who ply them with weapons and gold?
So, Crivano thinks, this buffoon is Zuanne Mocenigo: the Nolan’s patron and host. He casts his eyes about the hall, trying to guess who the Nolan himself might be, until the elder of Mocenigo’s interlocutors disengages and walks toward him. Greetings, dottore! the man says, seizing Crivano’s arm. I must say, Tristão described you perfectly. I knew you at once.
If he erred at all, signore, Crivano says, it was no doubt from generosity. You, I gather, are one of my noble hosts, although I confess I know not which.
I’m Andrea Morosini. That’s my brother Nicolò there, in debate with Lord Mocenigo. Come, I’ll introduce you.
Milord, the steward says, forgive my intrusion, but the dottore has not yet taken his supper. If you’ll permit me, I’ll take him to the pantry now, and return him to you in a moment.
Yes. Of course. Go with Hugo, dottore. He’ll see you fed. Our Nolan friend is about to begin his lecture, but with any luck I can delay him. Oh, dottore?
Andrea takes Crivano’s elbow as he’s moving away. He’s somewhat shorter than Crivano. Athletic, poised like an acrobat, but soft. He leans in close and speaks.
You did a brave thing at Constantinople, he says. No one can dispute that. My brother and I are proud to have you in our house.
Before Crivano can consider what might have prompted this commendation, the steward is leading him through the huge room, past the long banquet table, now almost bare. The dark terrazzo floor is flecked by stone chips of mossy gray and blackbird-beak orange; its polished surface—like that of an underground pool—returns Crivano’s blurred image. As he walks, slow fireflies swarm before his drowned phantom self: the reflection of the candles on the brass chandeliers overhead.
To his right, through the door of a dayroom, he glimpses the musicians: a sturdy black-beaded man with a lute and a Servite friar wrestling with a massive theorbo. They’ve paused in their playing for a good-humored squabble. No, the one with the lute says, plucking a repeated note. Down, he says. Tune
down.
Crivano has passed the dayroom by the time he hears the Servite’s response. Down? the friar says, twanging a bass string. You’re deaf. Listen to that buzz!
The voice is familiar. Why? Crivano pauses, turns back, and meets the eye of a second friar just outside the dayroom door. This one is dressed in a tunic and scapular of matching bole: the habit of no order Crivano can name. Sharp-featured. Splenetic. A patchy chestnut beard, and the frail physique of a sickly boy. He’s been conversing in Latin with a Hungarian baron while a bookish German youth looks on. Noting Crivano’s gaze, the friar’s eyes flash, his weak jaw snaps shut, and he counters with an insolent glower of his own.
Hunger has turned Crivano’s temper foul; he’s about to square his shoulders and call the man out when the steward takes hold of his elbow. Here, dottore, he says. This way. Before our hired girls depart with all the food.
Crivano permits himself to be led, and as they resume their course, realization dawns. The lean and quarrelsome friar, he thinks: that pompous little ass must be the Nolan.
The hirelings have removed the banquet to a storeroom off a nearby corridor; the steward dismisses them with handclaps and a few brusque words in Friulian. Let me set a place for you, dottore.
That’s hardly necessary, Crivano says, unsheathing the knife on his belt. You may leave me. I’ll only be a moment.
He sets in immediately on the hindquarters of a jointed hare, then moves on to a flaky piece of mullet in a black-pepper glaze. Consumed, these somehow leave him more famished, and he steps up and broadens his assault: a wedge of pigeon pie, a salad of rocket and purslane, a bowl of noodles with cinnamon and shaved cheese, the ruined donjon of a sugar castle, the thigh of a roast peacock. Across the room, a rawboned Moorish girl who’s stayed behind to dump bones into a stockpot eyes his progress nervously. After a moment she wipes her greasy hands on her apron and tiptoes away, leaving Crivano alone.
He presses on. The skin of his belly grows tight, so he limits himself to single bites as he moves from dish to dish, searching the cluttered table for whatever taste will collapse the void gnawing in his gut. Walnuts. Boiled squid. A soft yellow cheese. Poached quince. A purple candied rose. Fish jelly. A white-stalked herb he can’t even identify. He recalls the siege of Tunis: the door-to-door hunt through the medina for escaped Spaniards. Numbing, desperate, faintly ridiculous. What within himself wants so badly to be fed?
He’s attacking a cured Milanese sausage when Tristão bursts in, a wary and determined cast on his comely face, as if he half-expects the room to be filled with cloaked assassins. Not atypically, his mien is that of a man in the midst of a great and nebulous adventure. Vettor! he says. Here you are! You are here.
Crivano’s knife saws through the mold-dusted sausage casing; he speaks through a mouth only partly empty. I am indeed, he says. Where in God’s name have you been? I don’t know any of these Uranici. How do you expect—
Come with me, Tristão says. We must be swift. The Nolan is soon to speak.
A moment, please. I’m eating.
Come! Tristão says, grabbing Crivano’s sleeve with one hand, beckoning with the other. Come come come come come!
Crivano folds the thin sausage slices into a scrap of bread and follows Tristão into the corridor. They turn not toward the great hall, but deeper into the house. As he walks, Tristão fishes a folded sheet of paper from his doublet, flattens it, and hands it to Crivano. Here, he says. Look.
Penciled off-center on the yellow sheet is an oblong shape, pinched at one end like a deformed pear, or a long-stemmed fig. Crivano stares the drawing, rotates it, but can make nothing of it.
This, Tristão says, will work. Don’t you think so?
Crivano looks at Tristão, flummoxed. Tristão looks back. He seems intent on resuming a discussion Crivano doesn’t recall having had in the first place. Don’t I think what will work? Crivano says.
Tristão flicks the paper with a long middle finger. This, he says.
What is it supposed to be? A uterus?
Tristão stops, gives Crivano an icy glare, and plucks the drawing from his hand. He slaps it flat against the wall, produces a pencil from his robe, licks the tip, and scrapes it across the paper, darkening the lines on either side of the shape’s broad end, as if to thicken the womb’s endometrium. Your man on Murano, he says. Your mirrormaker. He will do this for me. With—I don’t remember how to say it.
Silvering, Crivano says. You want to make an alembic.
Yes! An alembic. What else would it be?
A mirrored alembic. An alembic lined with silvering.
No, Tristão says. Not lined. Coated. On the outside. A clear glass alembic. To trap the light within. Do you see? Do you not believe that this method will work?
Tristão has never discussed alchemical practice openly with Crivano before. If the wrong person—Mocenigo, or a pious servant—were to overhear, they likely would find themselves facing the Inquisition. Tristão could be tortured and expelled. Crivano gapes in disbelief, but Tristão’s face shows no concern: impatient, but otherwise calm.
I—I don’t know, Crivano says. I have not had access to a laboratory in some months. And I have never considered—
He looks past Tristão to the drawing, still held against the wall, and squints at it. Is light produced during the Great Work? he says. I’ve never heard such a thing.
I don’t know if light is produced, Tristão says, exasperated. I think perhaps that no one knows this. I could find nothing conclusive in the literature. For that reason, if no other, this approach must be attempted. If the sun never set, Vettor, would we know that there are stars? No. We would not.
Crivano is at a loss. He looks at Tristão, then back at the drawing, then down at the bread and sausage wadded in his hand. He lifts them, takes a small sheepish bite.
Tristão’s nostrils flare; he stuffs the pencil and the drawing back into his doublet. When he speaks again he takes the tone of a beleaguered schoolmaster, his voice soft and sharp. How do we judge the progress of the Great Work? he says.
Crivano shrugs, chews, swallows. By the colors it takes, of course.
Yes. We speak of blackening, of whitening, of the tail of the peacock, of the final redness that yields the elixir that we seek. They agree on little else, but all sources agree on this. The colors are important. Perhaps they are more important than we know.
I don’t see what you’re getting at, my friend.
Perhaps, Tristão says, the colors are not merely qualities, but products. Perhaps the key to a successful operation is to feed not the alchemist’s vision with their display, but the chemical engine itself. To hold the color, undevoured by the human eye. And what holds color, as liquid is held by clay, or hard wood, or metal, or glass?
A mirror.
Only that. Nothing else. Scholars of optics and of perspective describe the mirror as a device to assist our vision, but it is not. Or it is so only accidentally. The mirror is an invisible object. It is a machine for unseeing. And I believe it is the hidden heart of the processes to which we devote our efforts.
Crivano knits his brow, puts a thumb across his lips. Interesting, he says. A fresh approach to the problem, without question. And yet I must confess, Tristão, that I can think of nothing in the alchemical literature to ratify your claim.
Tristão elevates his eyebrows mildly. No? he says. Permit me to refer you to the foundational text of our art, the Tabula Smaragdina of Hermes the Thrice-Great.
Crivano stifles a laugh. The Emerald Tablet? he says, louder than he means to. He looks both ways down the corridor, steps closer, whispers. You can’t be serious, he says. To what passage do you refer?
Its very name, Vettor. The word emerald. The Greeks of antiquity used the same word to name any polished green stone, as did the Romans after them. Emeralds, jaspers, certain granites. In Pliny we read of the Emperor Nero, weak of sight, who viewed the deeds of his gladiators with the aid of an emerald. Our historians always identify this obje
ct as a lens, but I believe it to have been a curved jasper mirror. Furthermore, I believe it likely that the original text of the Emerald Tablet was etched upon a mirror of similar design, no doubt mislaid in the chaos of passing centuries. Mirroring is, after all, what it prescribes—as above, so below—and mirroring is its intended function.
Tristão has advanced this case with waning fervor: not as though beset by doubt, but rather as though unable to maintain his interest in prosecuting a line of reasoning he regards as self-evident. Crivano gapes in disbelief. Every educated man—from Suez to Stockholm, from Lisbon to Lahore—has at least a passing knowledge of the Emerald Tablet, even if only as an ungodly thing to be eschewed and condemned. Any scholar concerned with the pursuit of secret knowledge knows its thirteen enigmatic sentences by memory. Yet in a lifetime of study—in two lifetimes, Ottoman and Frankish—Crivano has never encountered the notion that Tristão so blithely puts forth, nor any notion that might be its parent, or its sibling. For the first time he finds himself considering the possibility that his handsome friend may not be merely eccentric, or imprudent, but genuinely mad. He wonders whether Narkis knows this, wonders again why Narkis directed him to make Tristão’s acquaintance in the first place.
Tristão seems lost in thought; Crivano clears his throat softly to reclaim his attention. So, Crivano says, that’s what you wanted to show me?
No, Tristão says. This.
He steps forward, opening a door to another storeroom, this one filled with dusty crates and casks. A lamp burns on a table in the room’s center, illuminating a small beechwood strongbox. Tristão pulls a key from around his neck, unlocks it, and opens the lid.
It’s full of coins: silver ducats and gold sequins. Well over a thousand, to judge by its dimensions. Tristão closes it, locks it, hands the key to Crivano. For the glassmaker, he says. Give it to him, please, and bring my mirror to me.
