William Vollmann - Last Stories and Other Stories

In Genoa, agents of the Vatican received delivery of another twelve hundred barrels of Cirtovic’s wine. Now the Austrians and the Swedes got a taste for it; and I have even read that odd lots of it ended up at the Russian Court. Catherine the Great bathed in the stuff, after which her various lovers drank it. In Tartaria it corrupted a certain Khan who finally sold Cirtovic what was supposed never to leave the family: an Arabic manuscript on the subjugation of monsters. A Coptic priest in Ethiopia accepted a cask of red in exchange for an illuminated treatise on the geography of heaven. For Cirtovic was, you see, a collector.

In his younger days he was frequently to be seen upon the docks and quays, opening wooden chests, drawing men into taverns, pressing coins into callused hands, while the Triestini wondered what was happening. He was built like a porter; his beard was salt-stained; he smiled easily, and all his doings seemed to be accomplished slowly, in the light. Around his neck hung some medallion or amulet concealed in a leathern bag, so that he resembled all the more some credulous peasant. Stolid even in the bora wind, gentle of speech, almost humble, unremarkable, such was Jovo Cirtovic. Yet again and again he sewed up the market, with greater celerity than a young bride preparing her rich old husband’s shroud. And it wasn’t merely wines he dealt in; it got said that even rotten onions he could unload at a profit! He leased a warehouse right on the Canal Grande, just in time for the Canal Grande to become the harbor’s liveliest tentacle. Against him it was also remembered that he had established himself in the city only one year before the Emperor elevated it to a free port. Laughing, Cirtovic offered wine at the communal celebration, but they noticed that he laughed only with his mouth. He could write Cyrillic and Glagolitic with equal facility — a nearly unmatched ability hereabouts. His fellow Serbs called him as wise as Saint Sava, not that they knew his mind. He was a man of his word, as everyone admitted, and generous on the rare occasions that he entertained. Moreover, he seemed adept with nearly any make of dromoscope. In taverns they computed his worth at half a million florins (an exaggeration); but most definitely he now dominated the Hungarian trade, which had enriched many daring men; and he vended the best Bohemian glass; in consideration of how much Count Giovanni Vojnovich had paid for a carafe and two dozen wineglasses, his rivals saw fit to multiply and magnify the treasure of Jovo Cirtovic, with as much gusto as if it belonged to them. For six years the Ragusan consulate knew him well. Then he also began dealing with Saracens. You must remember that ever since the Sultan had reconquered Morea from the Venetians, the latter operated more assertively in Ragusan waters, hoping to make up the loss; and when they appealed for amelioration of their taxes and duties, so that they could at least make a living as their fathers had — surely the Sultan could understand; even Turks had fathers! — he equivocated, all the while impelling his Sarajevans to invest new ports at Bar, Ulcinij, Novi and Budva. It can be perilous to trade with people who hate one another. But the prudent skipper who alters his flag from port to port reduces his risk, oh, yes, and increases his profit. What bribes or taxes Cirtovic had to pay is unrecorded; the main thing is that he never returned home without his head. That man had luck! Neither earthquakes nor French troops harmed his stock; English pirates lost him in a fog; his helmsmen never went off course; his glassware declined to break before he sold it; even pestilence, which visited Trieste nearly as often as sin, robbed away only his most inessential employees. While others had to wait on a fair breeze, somehow Jovo Cirtovic always knew when to raise sail. It might be dead calm in the harbor; no matter. Cirtovic embarked his men. When the ship was laden, he’d cry out: Hold onto the wind with your teeth! — Just about then, the wind would come. Did God truly love him so much? After his third voyage to Africa, every sailor on the Beograd, right down to the cabin boy, received as a bonus one of those jewels that glow red like a sea monster’s eye when it surfaces at dusk. The wise ones used them to get wives and sloops; some left Cirtovic’s employ, with good feelings all around; the rest squandered them on whores, and once they had flooded the jewelry-shops of Trieste, a certain haughty ruby-dealer hanged himself, following which the Cincars swooped in to buy cheap and sell far away. After that, most ambitious young mariners hoped to sail for Jovo Cirtovic.

Around that time certain rich men of the city began to build houses up on the hill, where they could guard their families from future epidemics; Cirtovic listened, saying nothing; soon two drunken notaries sang about a lot he had purchased in that district. Even the other Serbs were shocked, for they all lived quite satisfactorily in their warehouses. This Cirtovic, lacked he any regard for rules? They had already agreed that he was no son of his late father, who had made it his business to be a dread to Turks at night. — In order to raise up an appropriate edifice for himself, Jovo Cirtovic now commenced to trade still more widely. It was all he could do not to smile at the naïve customs men of Philadelphia, who worried that he might know his way around the Vatican when he had long been at home in uncannier realms — not least the Bosphorus itself, which in those days was unfailingly studded with sailing ships most of which flew the Sultan’s colors, and some of which flew no flag at all. Wending his trade betwixt the curving deltas and the peninsulas crowned with mosques walled like forts and bristling with crescent-topped steeples, he cast before him the lure of a courtesy which pretended not to be wary, and treasured within his vest a safe-conduct bearing the Sultan’s seal and illuminated in gold by seven calligraphers. Had the Philadelphians chanced upon that, they would have had no idea what it was.

He was married by then, but nobody could say who had been invited to his wedding, for it took place back in Serbia, during his seventh absence from Trieste; he had chosen his bride by correspondence with his brothers, making use of a certain Cincar wax trader who would later become his undeclared supercargo on an African voyage. According to dockside idlers, Count Vojnovich was offended by some aspect of these proceedings, perhaps because he wanted the lady for himself. She arrived well veiled, accompanied by a mound of crates and trunks; it was dusk when Cirtovic, having briefly confabulated with his factor, Captain Vasojevic, led her down the gangplank and into a closed carriage. She was slender and she walked with rapid little steps. Another veiled woman who must have been her maidservant came just behind. In good Serbian fashion, both wore daggers at their sides. I’d guess they were thinking on the pear trees, kinsfolk and rapid streams they would never see again. Perhaps they’d been seasick. Spitting, Petar whipped up the horses. The next morning Cirtovic gave six hundred florins to the church, which at that time had stood for barely a year; it still served both Greeks and Serbs. Then he went straight to the dock and put his topmen to cutching some sails for the Kosovo. The Triestini, who certainly kept secrets of their own, watched all this with narrowed eyes, jutting out their beards as they asked one another what seraglio those females hailed from, and which other ports the Lazar might have touched on in the course of her wedding voyage; for the Adriatic coast, particularly on the Dalmatian side, is so addicted to doublings that a stranger can hardly tell whether the blue-green land-wave he spies below the sky’s belly is an island or the continuation of the continent. In short, this part of the world is a smuggler’s paradise. Whether or not our good Cirtovic ever accepted the discreeter commissions of contraband trade remains, in token of his success, unrecorded, but year after year his fleet plied up and down the labyrinthine coast, counting off stone beacons, hill-castles and their ruins, making quiet landfalls behind walls of birch-beech leaves. Returning quietly into the great blue bay with the whiteness of Trieste before him, he stood beside the steersman, gazing ahead in that guarded way he had, as if there were clouds between all others and himself — he who could see through all clouds. Yes, he who derives from the shadow passes more freely in and out of sunlight than he who was born in brightness. So the Triestini, tanned by the shimmer of their near-African sea, asserted, in order to excuse themselves for not venturing to Serbia, whose roads are paved with bleeding gravestones. For that matter, they did not even peer into the Orthodox church. In the market, housewives bowed their heads together to gossip about the new couple, in between the more interesting task of considering eggplants, while their husbands disputed as to whether or not Jovo Cirtovic possessed the evil eye. The way some described him, he wore the masklike face of a vampire squid, when in fact even the wariest customs guards saw nothing in him but well-heeled blandness, and his sailors loved him as they would have anyone who brought them home alive and paid good money. To be sure, he seemed care-ridden now; certain Triestini (who of course loved their native city so much as to frown upon even the neighboring port of Muggia) proposed that if he merely renounced Serbia entirely, forgetting those half-real denizens of an unlucky place, he’d grow as happy as the rest of us — although it could have been (as a certain unsuccessful butcher proposed) that debt had snared him. After all, how much capital must it take to send out so many ships? The Triestini would have loved to know. Unfortunately, the interloper’s brothers, recently arrived, proved almost equally closemouthed, although Cristoforo Cirtovic did say: Jovo’s always been a mystery to us. He takes after our late father, may he sit in the presence of the saints. — Bribing the watchman, a certain Captain Morelli snooped through the logbook of the Sava and was astonished to discover some proof or demonstration relating to the section of a right-angled cone; what it meant was conjectural, since the writing was Glagolitic. Copying it out, he sprang it on Cristoforo Cirtovic, who said: What’s this gibberish? — This Morelli next waylaid Stefano Cirtovic on the docks when that latter was unloading a cargo from Korea; Stefano said: Don’t ask me my brother’s business.