Wu Ming - Altai

Once his career in the navy of La Serenissima was at an end, De Zante had dedicated himself to politics. He had introduced me to the Consigliere and asked him to take me on. Within two years, I was launched on my new career in the secret service.

When my father died, I found myself the master of a well-kept house in Cannaregio, with a servant and a cook. For eight years I hadn’t wanted for a change of clothes.

I had also discovered my talent. The Consigliere had spotted my anger and translated it into his language, a tongue of deceptions, mysteries, and murders, all for the security of the Republic. De Zante had given me a name and a new faith, but the Consigliere gave me a cause to fight, kill and die for. That man was a superior mind, a genius of his time. I had never wavered. Until he had asked me to frame myself.

I didn’t touch the revolting soup that they passed me through the hole in the door, and I watched the darkness filling the cell until no light entered from the little window at the top. It must have been a moonless night, for I could hardly see my own hand.

After hours of stillness, I heard a rattling sound from the lock. I shrank back against the wall and slipped behind the opening door. No light, no word came in from outside.

For a while I waited for something to happen, and then I tiptoed toward the threshold. I thought I could hear someone breathing, and I froze. I went on listening, and finally I decided to take a step forward. I was in total darkness and had no idea where the exit was. I walked down a narrow corridor, always staying close to the wall, with one arm outstretched. I advanced slowly, for fear of suddenly finding myself at the top of a flight of stairs and tumbling down.

My sense of smell came to my aid. A light breeze reached me, carrying a breath of the sea. I followed it as a dog follows a scent and found myself by a half-open door. I opened it. In front of me the glimpse of a path, a piece of night sky, a faint lapping sound. Not a soul.

I leaned out through the doorway, in search of the fresh night air. A blade stung my throat. Someone pronounced my name.

“ Ti star Emanuele De Zante? ”

“ Mi star .” I replied in the same lingua franca of the ports.

The sword lowered, but it didn’t disappear. I became aware of a dark outline at my side, and another one on my other side.

“You have to come with us,” said the voice. “If you try to escape, noi ti massar. Understand?”

We must have been below the southern walls, near the docks. I was sure they were going to take me somewhere else, far from Ragusa; they must have a boat ready and waiting.

Instead, we headed toward the heart of the city. My ribs were hurting, and soon I found myself panting for breath. Things got worse when we turned into a street that rose between the houses towards the eastern bastions. I had to stop a few times, but the two shadows gripped me beneath the arms and forced me to go on.

By the time we reached the top I was breathless. I slipped to the ground, and they picked me up again, pushed me into an alleyway, then into a courtyard. I smelled horses and found myself resting against the seat of a cart.

A familiar outline came toward me from a doorway. The dawn’s light was starting to appear above the hills, just enough for me to recognize Del Soto.

“You’re out of jail, but you’re not safe yet.”

I’d got enough of my breath back to speak.

“Where are you taking me?”

He sighed. “I can’t tell you.”

“Go to hell,” I hissed.

“It’s just a precaution,” he reassured me. “You’ll be going to a safe place, where the Venetians won’t be able to get you.”

A stitch in my ribs made me bend double with a groan, and he helped me back up. I felt an instinctive impulse to shrink from that contact, but discovered that I didn’t have the strength. He nodded to the servants, who took me and hoisted me onto the cart.

“Why not a boat?” I murmured.

“Venice will be looking for you in all the ports of the Adriatic. You’re going to be leaving by land. Good-bye, De Zante.”

He gave his men the order to set off, a whip cracked, the wheels creaked. I slumped beneath the heavy tarpaulin they’d used to cover me, and stayed like that, with my throat tight and a hole where my heart should have been, an abyss that sucked everything in: the pain in my ribs, the bruises, the thoughts, my past, the help that Tuota had given me, the crossing to Durrës, everything. Even my name.

The multicolored strip of houses grew larger with each stroke of the oars, until it filled my eyes. The city I saw was as splendid as a bride, lying outstretched on green slopes mottled with gaudy colors, red, yellow, indigo, beneath a sky that the northwesterly wind had turned a clear, deep blue.

I turned back to look for the estuary of the river that had impelled us into the gulf. I turned to one of my guards, a hairy little man armed to the teeth who spoke a Greek dialect to his colleagues. “ Poia poli ine afti?” I asked, hoping the question was comprehensible.

He didn’t reply. No one had spoken to me during the entire journey, even though I’d asked the men several times where they were taking me. Exasperation started battling with patience again. I wanted to gesticulate, to insult him in various languages, but I didn’t do any of that. Then, all of a sudden, I heard him utter a single word.

“ Thessaloniki .”

I studied the line of houses again. I must have imagined it. Fate was taking me where Tuota had said it would. Salonika. The Jerusalem of the Balkans. That was what they called the old city of Saint Demetrius, the capital of the Sephardim in the Ottoman empire. One of the fortresses of Nasi, from which his long hand drew innumerable threads.

We were arriving here after weeks of traveling. The first had been infernal. Leaving Ragusa, we had entered the interior on a dilapidated road. The creaks of the cart sounded like the wails of a cat in heat, and the jolts hadn’t done much to heal my ribs. Across mountains and narrow windswept valleys we had reached Podgorica, where a doctor had visited me and bound up my chest. I had a fever, but there was no time to stop. The cart had set off again for Skopje, and Del Soto’s men had handed me over to a new set of guards. The journey had continued on the water, on board a long barge, to the great relief of my bones. Now, I realized that we must have sailed the river Axios across Macedonia to the estuary that feeds into the Aegean. The water around us was the Thermaic Gulf.

After we moored in an inlet in the port, I was pushed into a cart and driven toward the place they had decided I was going to stay. The streets were crowded, the smells were strong, the jerks and jolts were dizzying. Luckily for me, I hadn’t eaten for hours, or I would have thrown up.

“ Mi ozo en tu kulo !” I heard someone shout. The memory of the same oath on the lips of old Abecassi struck me like a slap.

The journey had exhausted me, and nausea dealt me the final blow. I was in Salonika for the first time in my life, and I was arriving with my soul bowed.

In Salonika’s low city people lived cheek by jowl. Their world was foul-smelling: the stench of urine kept in tubs to tan hides, the stench of those tanned hides, the stench of rubbish and rot. Above that rottenness there floated perfumes of cooking and lust.

The words exchanged from one house to another invaded the room where I was being kept. The Ladino of the Spanish Jews, the language of my mother, fixed me in the past. A landlord whose manners were pleasant but firm fixed me to the present, a present that was always the same, day after day.

He said his name was Efrem Del Burgo. He was a short, round man with the face of a mastiff, the son of Jews who had taken refuge in Salonika fifty years before. His father had come from Puglia, his mother from Granada.