Wu Ming - Altai

Efrem was the owner of a tanning works and of the house where I was imprisoned, or so he said. He spoke a melodic Ladino, as rounded as his body; his Italian was dry, made up of crisp, short phrases. Every morning he knocked at the door and entered my room, to ask me how I had spent the night and exchange civilities.

My questions about Nasi or about my confinement bounced off a wall of politeness and smiles. I knew how the world of spies worked: He wasn’t the one who was going to question me. The ingredients used to prepare for an interrogation were always the same: waiting and uncertainty. I wondered how long I would have to wait.

Efrem himself brought me my breakfast and dinner: beans with meat, chicken croquettes, desserts of dry fruit, but no wine or rakia . Perhaps they wanted to keep me thoughtful and alert. In that state of constant lucidity I could only look at the world through the grille of the window and listen to its voices.

As the first days passed I didn’t see anyone apart from my “jailer.” I addressed him mostly in Italian, sometimes in my rusty Ladino.

“ Kuanto tiempo tengo ke estar aki? What are we waiting for?”

Efrem replied only with smiles and shrugs.

One day, he brought a servant into my room carrying a tub, jugs of hot water and a bowl full of some kind of perfume. Efrem touched his nose and pulled a face: “It might be the custom in Venesia, but here we wash.”

When I was washed and dressed he nodded, but he still didn’t seem satisfied. “ Pareses un papas ,” he said comparing me to a Greek priest. He meant that it was time to shave me and cut my hair. The barber he sent to me the same day was the third person I’d met between those walls, but he had been given instructions not to talk to me — a difficult task for someone of his profession.

Like almost all of the Jews in Salonika, the man wore a yellow turban. Like Efrem, the servant, and the passersby that I glimpsed from the window, he struck me has having a refined and cultivated elegance.

I was genuinely dumbfounded when I saw, down in the street, women walking around covered with ornaments and jewels, proud in their brightly colored garments. The care they devoted to their clothes seemed to contrast with the neighborhood’s intolerable stench and filth. I had never seen Jewish women dressed up like that, apart from my mother. For hours, as a child, I had watched her making herself pretty, painting her face, decorating her neck and ears with gold and precious stones inherited from her mother and grandmother.

In my captivity, which had lasted a week, I desired those women as I had never desired anyone. Even the oldest of them. In Ragusa I had stayed away from women, perhaps because my lover had betrayed me, or perhaps because the memory of my mother was everywhere around me. I had looked for liquor and wine, and even now I missed them, certainly, but not as much as I missed intimacy with a woman.

In Venice I had once seen a monkey in a cage brought from Africa. It jumped around, shrieking, its member stiff and erect as a pen. That was how I felt, alone, in that room. Five times a day, the muezzin’s chant drifted down from the upper city. The elongated, vibrant phrasing sounded like a hymn to my desire.

Early one morning, out in the corridor, I heard a female voice. It must have been a servant. She passed by, humming to herself, and making my heart leap. When Efrem came in I confronted him. I demanded wine and a woman.

“ Kero una muyer!” I shouted. “ Y kero vino!”

I tried to put my hands around his neck, but was immobilized by two huge servants. They shoved me against the wall and pinned me there until I calmed down. Efrem came toward me. “It’s fine, Venetian,” he said. “I’ll see that you’re taken outside.”

The men locked the door behind them, leaving me sitting on the floor.

In the field of yellow turbans there was the occasional white one, indicating a Muslim, and more rarely a blue one, signaling a Greek Christian.

I had trouble believing what I saw and felt. A Jew disguised as a Christian dressed up as a Jew, my soul turned inside out like a pair of trousers, I was walking around a little Oriental Spain that reminded me, even though it was different, of the world of my childhood. Perhaps it was a multiplied version, a thousand times more powerful and intense. The sound of Ladino filled the streets and my head, causing an unsettling euphoria, a feeling I had never had before. I had never heard that language spoken by so many men and women at the same time.

For a reason that struck me as obscure, the Sephardim who had been chased from Castille and Aragon, from Portugal and Granada, from Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples had chosen that city, of all cities, for their new life. A city of trading and business deals, of tanners and weavers, carders and dyers, multicolored crowds and strong smells. The Jews of Salonika made the uniforms of the Ottoman janissaries, and sewed other garments that were appreciated and sold around much of the empire. Silver gleamed in Salonika, more silver than I had ever seen: It arrived every day from mines nearby, to be worked on by Jewish craftsmen who turned it into jewelry, the same that I saw on the necks, wrists and earlobes of the women around me — women drenched in perfumes that made my head spin, whose movements shook my body from top to bottom. My desire to fornicate pawed the ground. Impatience tempted me, with every step I took, to set off in search of a whore. But I couldn’t do that. I was escorted by three men, one on each side and a third bringing up the rear. I wondered whether they had orders to kill me if I tried to escape. How much time and money had Nasi invested in me? Too much for him not to go all the way with me, or too little for me not to be expendable?

We turned into an alleyway, and things suddenly changed. In a moment we had passed from the noise and color of the main thoroughfare to the shadow and quiet of a short, narrow backstreet of houses crammed against one another. One of the guards knocked on a little door. It was opened by an even littler man, a dwarf, with a blue turban and a long beard, white jacket and trousers, red slippers.

The man who had been tailing me until then addressed the little man in Greek, in a tone that seemed curt and contemptuous. The man let us in.

Inside, another surprise: an elegant residence. Light from chandeliers fell on fine carpets; trays with glasses of tea rested on low tables beside cushions and divans; and on solid wooden surfaces were tastefully arranged objects, decorated bowls and statuettes. Beyond that first room, an open door led to a flight of stairs.

The little man gestured to me to go up. I looked at my guards, one after the other. They glanced at me with impatient agreement, as if to say, “What are you waiting for? We haven’t got all day.”

I practically ran up the stairs, reaching a corridor at the top. In a doorway, with the light behind it, a female outline. I narrowed my eyes and saw that she was already undressed, as naked as the day she was born. I walked over to her and pushed her down on a wide, low bed. The sheets smelled fresh, and so did she. A lamp to my right, a tumble of dark hair, skillful hands unbuttoning and gripping me. I spread her thighs, but too late.

I cursed in a low voice, looking down at my member, flaccid and empty, at semen smearing my belly and my cock. Semen that had spurted quickly and furiously, just giving me time to take my pants down. Semen that had freed itself without waiting for me. It had freed itself, leaving me in chains. While the woman got up I felt embarrassment and doubt speaking to one another, saying something to each other, or slipping away, suddenly, vanishing.