Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants

by Mathias Enard

  Half the guests remain.

  They are playing games and sipping sorbets.

  Arslan is still there, which reassures the artist a little. All hope is not lost. Maybe they’ll come later. Yes, that’s it, without a doubt. The musicians will arrive at night, with the torches.

  Michelangelo tastes the sweet cherry soup chilled with snow from Anatolia or the Balkans compressed into large blocks and preserved in the dark, at the bottom of cisterns, covered in straw.

  People offer to play a game of cones or tric-trac with him; he refuses. He dislikes games even more than drinking, if that’s possible. He sits down next to Arslan, who displays his eternal smile, and asks him how his business is going, a topic of conversation like any other.

  “I can’t complain. Peace with the Republic is favorable for trade. I should return to Venice soon. I have a warehouse there, not as large as this one, but flourishing all the same.”

  Michelangelo finds it difficult to believe that this muscular young man is actually a merchant. One could picture him as a swordsman, even a courtier, but surely not behind a counter, even a Venetian one. He wonders what sort of chance brought him close to Maringhi. No doubt both merchants know each other; perhaps they even buy things from each other.

  The Florentines present are cheerful, with a nostalgic cheerfulness; their host has had a pile of wood set up in the middle of the fountain in his courtyard, which he will set alight at night, at the risk of setting the whole neighborhood on fire, which doesn’t seem to worry him too much. Michelangelo remembers the St. John festivities in the palace of Lorenzo the Magnificent, when he was still an apprentice, and feels a lump rise in his throat. Life has only given him a few pleasant moments until now; years of relentless work, troubles, and humiliations. But the memories of the palace of the Medicis glow in him with a special light. Beyond the excellent training he received there, in Lorenzo’s entourage and in court life there was an almost familial security that he often misses, whether it had come from the insouciance of youth, or his thirst to learn, never quenched. There too he often confronted his comrades; he learned how to sweat, to fight, to suffer and work. It was in the harsh gazes of his masters that Michelangelo found his fathers. In their harshness and their rare tenderness.

  Day is beginning to fade away; the sky is streaked with pink, a light sea breeze refreshes the caravanserai; they’ve opened the gates wide to let the air in, which is now travelling through the arcades and tenderly stirring the leaves of the fig tree.

  Mesihi comes back, after having been called away urgently by the Vizier. He seems worried. Michelangelo doesn’t pay him much mind.

  He is relieved.

  He has heard the Florentines whispering that the musicians would soon be arriving; they’d light the fire, there would be drinking.

  All of a sudden, he can let himself give in to the lightheartedness of the summer evening.

  A sad omen: this morning the monkey died. Or maybe during the night; when Michelangelo woke up, he found him lying on the ground, paws folded in, chin tucked under, as if he had been stopped as he ran.

  Michelangelo took the tiny hand in his, lifted it, let it fall back.

  He picked the animal up; it seemed to have lost all its weight, to weigh nothing now, as if only the energy of life gave it mass.

  It was a little thing that death rendered even more fragile.

  Michelangelo felt a lump in his throat. He laid the small body out in the cage, which he unhooked and set on the floor.

  He didn’t want to see it anymore, so he called a servant to get rid of it immediately, hoping that would also erase the strange sadness that was stifling him. He mourned this death like that of a child he’d barely grown to know.

  Michelangelo dreams of a banquet from long ago, when you could discuss Eros without your speech being slurred by wine, without your elocution being impaired by it, when beauty was only contemplation of beauty, far from these ugly moments prefiguring death, when bodies fought no longer against their fluids, their moods, their desires. He dreams of an ideal banquet, where table companions wouldn’t reel from fatigue or alcohol, when all vulgarity would be banished for the sake of art.

  He watches the guests turn ugly in pleasure, all of them, except Arslan and Mesihi, who are sizing each other up strangely, with a look of mutual challenge, almost without bringing their cups to their perfect lips.

  There’s a mystery there that Michelangelo doesn’t try to decipher; he thinks vaguely — since he is vain — that it has to do with him, with his person.

  As always when he’s about to finish a project, he is both happy and sad; happy to have finished and sad that the work isn’t as perfect as if God Himself had created it.

  How many works of art will there have to be to put beauty into the world? he thinks as he watches the guests get drunk.

  The fire dancing in the basin forms faces; they’re all terrible monsters from another age, gargoyles of moving shadows. A single orange-tinged flame hypnotizes him: the body of the singer. Her slight movements, her melody rising up into the night, her hand skillfully tapping the drum to general indifference.

  Michelangelo feels anxious.

  He wants to have the beloved voice near him in the half light. He senses that Mesihi is watching him with a strange concern. Contradictory feelings agitate him.

  This time, he carefully kept himself from touching the heavy wine his compatriots are noisily swigging.

  Often one wishes for things to repeat; you want to relive a moment that escaped, return to a gesture that didn’t take place or a word that wasn’t uttered; you try to find again the sounds that were left in your throat, the caress you didn’t dare give, the tightening of the chest that is gone forever.

  Lying on his side in the dark, Michelangelo is disturbed by his own coldness, as if beauty always eluded him. There is nothing palpable, nothing attainable in the body, it slips between the hands and disappears like snow or sand; never does one find unity, never does one attain the flame; once separated, the two heaps of clay will never join, they will wander in the dark, guided by the illusion of a star.

  Although he loves this skin against his shoulder, the smooth shiver of foreign hair on his neck, its spicy perfume, the magic has stopped working. Pleasure leaves him unmoved.

  He would like to be opened up, so the passion inside could be set free.

  He would fly away and burn then, like the phoenix.

  You feel as if the end is approaching, as if this is the last night. You will have had the chance to stretch out your hand to me, I will have offered myself in vain. That’s how it is. It’s not me you desire. I am nothing but the reflection of your poet friend, the one who sacrifices himself for your happiness. I do not exist. Maybe you’re discovering that now. You will suffer from it later on, of course; you will forget; in vain you will have covered the walls with our faces, our features will vanish little by little. Bridges are beautiful things, so long as they last; everything will perish. You are capable of stretching out a stone footbridge, but you don’t know how to let yourself go in the arms that are waiting for you.

  Time will solve all that, who knows. Fate, patience, willpower. Nothing of your time here will remain. Traces, clues, an edifice. Like my vanished country, over there, at the other end of the sea. Now it lives only in stories and in the people who tell them. For a long time they will have to talk about lost battles, forgotten kings, vanished animals. About what was, what could have been, so that it can exist again. This border you trace as you turn your back on me, like a line drawn with a stick in the sand, will be erased someday; someday you too will yield to the present, even if only in death.

  Someday you will return.

  For a long time Michelangelo watched the young woman sleeping beside him. She is a golden shadow; the flickering candle illumines her ankle, her thigh, her hand closed as if clutching sleep itself or something inaccessible;
her skin is dark, Michelangelo gently runs his finger over her arm, then back up to the hollow of her shoulder.

  He knows nothing of her; he let himself be charmed by that weary voice, then he watched her doze off as the midsummer fire was dying down, revealing the countless stars of the June night.

  Three Spanish words are spinning in his head like a melody.

  Reyes, batallas, elefantes.

  Battaglie, re, elefanti.

  He will record them in his notebook, the way a child fiercely guards his treasure of precious pebbles.

  Mesihi accompanied Arslan to the gate of the caravanserai. Drunk, the Florentines went to bed; only Maringhi’s servants are still bustling around in the courtyard and making the last traces of the banquet disappear.

  Mesihi watches the fire die down little by little, as sadness covers him with its ashes.

  He senses he is about to lose Michelangelo forever.

  The obsequious Arslan is a strange spy, both an agent from Venice and the Sultan’s man; he navigates between each, offering his equivocal services on both sides of the sea.

  Here too there are conspiracies and palace intrigue; jealousies, plotters ready to do anything to discredit Ali Pasha in the Bayezid’s eyes, to block the construction of this impious bridge, the work of an infidel, to bring about the minister’s disgrace by means of a scandal.

  Michelangelo suspects nothing.

  Mesihi knows that Arslan is a cog in these machinations; he can do nothing against him, even less so because, in exchange for the price of a fief in Bosnia, Arslan has just revealed to him the terms of the conspiracy. Mesihi offered everything he owns for this information.

  Now he feels alone and overwhelmed; he knows what he has to do.

  He will have to estrange the one he loves in order to protect him.

  Tear him away from the deadly Andalusian.

  Organize his escape, hide his departure, and bid him farewell.

  I’m going to have to kill you. You don’t know that. You wouldn’t be able to believe it. I am not asleep; I’m waiting for you to doze off, then I’ll take the black dagger on your table and pass it through your body. There’s no point in being vexed. That’s how it is. I have no choice. One always has a choice. I could give up now; give up the money, face the threats; if I don’t kill you I’ll be found drowned on the other side of the Bosphorus, or strangled in my bedroom with a silken cord. One can get caught up in dreaming. I could have imagined an escape into the night, with you or someone else; I have delayed this moment as long as I could.

  I don’t know if I’ll succeed.

  I’ll have to muster all the hatred I can feel against your people, and I don’t have any. Or not much. I’ll have to summon the strength of the past, imagine I’m avenging my father, my lost country, my people, scattered, spread out on the shores of the sea.

  I know you have nothing to do with any of that.

  Forces pull us, manipulate us in the dark; we resist. I have resisted. Perhaps the last barrier will be fear, the memory of your hand caressing me gently as if it were discovering the trunk of an unknown tree.

  You do not desire me and yet you are tender.

  I won’t manage to do it. I don’t have the passionate pain of the Vizier betraying his lover; I don’t have the jealous anger of the Sultan who kills him.

  I have held a weapon one time only, one horrible time, and I trembled from it for a whole year after.

  Even soldiers need shouts and the noise of battle to find courage.

  I could explain to you why they gave me this task, by what chance; I could tell you about your many enemies, about me, my life, but that would change nothing. Those powerful people you fear have sealed your fate and mine. If you had breathed the madness of love into me, if I had been able to seduce you, perhaps then we could both have saved ourselves.

  I tried to love you so I wouldn’t have to kill you.

  You have fallen asleep.

  I’ll have to go through with it.

  Fortunately in the half light I can barely make out your face; it will be simpler; this blade is so perfect it will slice your throat effortlessly, preventing you from crying out; you’ll feel a warm stream flowing down your chest, you’ll suffocate without understanding and your strength will leave you.

  Judith did it long ago, to save her people. I have no people to save, no old woman to hold a bag in which to hide your head; I am alone and afraid.

  This blade is much heavier than a janissary’s scimitar; it has the weight of our two lives together.

  I’ll remain till the end of days with the dagger in my hand, standing in the night, not daring either to leave or to strike you.

  Michelangelo is awakened by a shout, a struggle in the dark; he is afraid, rolls to the foot of the bed, without understanding; a call for help, confused thuds on the floor; he sees someone bringing a light, he hears his name called.

  He gets up with difficulty.

  The bloody body of a woman is lying on the ground.

  Mesihi is standing, his eyes wild, looking crazed and pale.

  He is still brandishing Aldobrandini’s black dagger, which has just penetrated the singer’s flesh with such ease.

  Michelangelo remains speechless for a few seconds. He can’t look away from the naked body lying on the floor: a black pool is getting larger under her chest; her face, from the side, half covered by unkempt hair, is pale as the moon; it seems agitated by some final movement which is scarcely one, a shiver at most.

  On the threshold, the servants with their candles are stupefied, surprised both by the beauty of the young woman’s nudity and the violence of the scene.

  The sculptor leans over the woman whose contours he is discovering in the light. He doesn’t dare touch her.

  He turns to Mesihi.

  Suddenly he rushes at Mesihi, shouting; he punches him in the face, half stunning him; instinctively, Mesihi lifts the dagger to protect himself and wounds Michelangelo in the arm; insensitive to fear, the sculptor hits him again, catches hold of his wrist, and twists; he twists, he is strong; he is powerful and wounded and if Maringhi’s servants hadn’t intervened to overcome him, not only would Mesihi’s bones have been broken, but, once Michelangelo had the dagger in his possession, he would surely have finished the poet off with a thousand furious blows.

  Michelangelo is too surprised and weakened, too shocked to cry. He let his arm be bandaged by Manuel; the dagger opened up a good-sized, very straight wound on his biceps. One last time he secretly stroked the singer’s hair, her body cold as marble; he avoided looking at her face, her closed eyes.

  Then the corpse disappeared.

  For a long time Michelangelo remained sitting on his bed, his heart pounding, trying to understand, and then he understood.

  He understood Mesihi’s terrible vengeance, his atrocious jealousy; he pictures the poet acting in cold blood, at night, and the thought makes him tremble.

  He preferred to kill the young woman so she wouldn’t snatch Michelangelo away from him.

  The sculptor shivers with anger and pain.

  It will take him months to be able to sleep again.

  Mesihi decided to keep quiet.

  He fled into the night, also wounded, his wrist in pain; he smoked some opium, drank till he vomited, but nothing helped. He keeps seeing the image of that body standing in the half light, weapon in hand; he remembers having rushed toward her, he remembers struggling; she cried out, fought back; then she stopped fighting, when he had the knife; no matter how hard he tries to remember, he is incapable of understanding what happened after, how he felt the contact of a breast against his chest, the young woman sighing and giving way, then falling, wounded to death.

  It seemed to him as if she threw herself onto the blade.

  He will never know.

  Mesihi is drunk without being drunk.

>   He trembles; cries in solitude; he wraps himself up in a dark woolen cloak, frail rampart against the world, when day breaks.

  Buonarroto, I don’t have time to answer your letter, since it’s night; and even when I will have the time, I couldn’t give you a firm answer, since I don’t see the end of my business here. I’ll be near you soon and then I’ll do everything I can for you, as I have done up to now. I myself feel worse than ever, wounded and overcome with great fatigue; but I have the patience to try to reach my goal. So you can be patient for a little while, since you are 10,000 times more fortunate than I am right now.

  Your Michelagnolo

  Mesihi remained silent.

  He sacrificed his love one last time, hoping for nothing in return.

  He defended the Frank against his enemy, saved him, that’s what matters; too bad if by saving him he has lost him forever.

  He will forget him, who knows, in the taverns of Tahtakale, in the arms of ephebes and singers with houris’ eyes who will come massage his thighs; in the beauty of poetry and calligraphy.

  He cries often; only the coming of night and debauchery brings him a little comfort.

  Four woolen shirts, one of them torn and bloodstained; two flannel doublets; one surcoat of the same material; three quills and the same number of inkpots; one broken mirror; four sheets of paper covered with drawings; two more covered with writing; three pairs of hose; one compass; some red chalk in a lead box; one silver case containing smelling salts; one cup of the same metal: that is the exact inventory of what is to be found in Michelangelo’s room after his departure, methodically written down by Ottoman scribes.

  He leaves Constantinople in secret. Pursued by the presence of death, overwhelmed by the memory of a love he was unable to give before it was too late, betrayed, he thinks, by Mesihi’s jealousy, deceived by the powerful, urged by his brothers and the prospect of returning to the service of the Pope, he takes flight, just as he fled Rome three months earlier, wounded, torn apart, broken.