Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Beside the front door is a coat-rack crowned by upcurved horns; hats hang from the horns. Among them is the tweed driver’s cap that Welles wore the night Stanley first met him. Stanley takes it, puts it on his own head. It fits better than he expected.

He pulls on his wet jacket and takes up his father’s fieldpack and leaves the house through the side door in the kitchen. He stands in the yard with mist slicking his bare neck and imagines the car pulling up: Welles and Synnøve on the walk, their dear boy Claudio between them, hand in a plaster cast, a grin splitting his battered handsome face. The three of them sweep to the porch, eager to get indoors, to free imprisoned Cynthia, to chant their spells and bare their bodies and commence their beautiful life together: the perfect family in a perfect world. Stanley pictures himself, too: creeping after them, toward the creaking bedsprings and the moans and the laughter, the black pistol heavy in his hand, and every whispering shoreline ghost gathered at his back.

He’s fleetingly aware of who he is at this moment: distinct from people he used to be, people he’ll one day become. In times past he would have torched this house with no second thought. Most of his future selves would do it, too; even now he understands that about himself. Years from tonight — in idle moments, half-asleep — he’ll imagine the blaze he could have made, the ending he might have written. Picturing it as seen from the sea, or from a passing plane: the house a bright unsteady flare on the dark shoreline, throwing shadows in every direction. The girl the raw fuel hidden at its heart. Hell, he’ll think, looking back on this moment. I could have showed you hell.

But not him. Not tonight. No such luck.

When after a few minutes the car hasn’t appeared, Stanley adjusts the pack on his shoulder, unlatches the gate, and walks into the wet narrow street.

With a short laugh Crivano wakes himself, then sits open-eyed in the breath-warm darkness, trying to recall what in his dream so amused him.

It was quite late last night when he left the Morosini house. Still, he now he feels entirely restored, scornful of more slumber. He kicks his blankets aside, rises to stretch, withdraws the chamberpot from beneath the bed.

As he’s pissing, he notes a dim indigo sliver of sky between the closed shutters and wonders at the hour. In his memory the Nolan’s voice persists — odd, since Crivano granted the lecture but a modicum of attention. In Cecco’s commentary on Sacrobosco, we read of the demon Floron, who can be apprehended in a steel mirror by means of certain invocations . So spoke the Nolan. Or did he? Could this still be the dream-voice of Crivano’s imagination, limpeting fast to whatever daylit surface will hold it? He can’t be sure.

Ten bells ring from San Aponal as he lights the lamp, fills the basin, splashes his face and neck. In half an hour the sun will be up. He’s to present himself at Ciotti’s shop by the stroke of twelve: plenty of time for a stroll through the Rialto, an inspection of the new bridge. Last night his passage into sleep was hampered by anxieties over the day’s strange events — Tristão’s insistent introduction to Ciotti, and the unexpected emergence of the girl Perina before that — but this morning these concerns seem distant, as if stifled by some antic reassurance received in his dreams. Crivano feels vigorous and reckless, like a vessel running before the wind.

Among the wise Egyptians, the mirror evokes Hathor the Cow, she who rings the sky as the Milky Way, the Earth as the Nile. The comparable Greek figure, of course, is Amphitrite . The Nolan spoke last night for perhaps two-thirds of an hour. It seemed longer. Crivano might have followed more closely had he not been so unnerved by Tristão’s conduct: his indiscreet mention of the silvered alembic, his suggestion of the mirror as the Nolan’s topic. This, surely, is why Narkis directed him to associate with Tristão in the first place — the man’s imprudent dabbling in secret knowledge is the thrashing shark that will feed the swift remora of their own conspiracy — but Crivano can’t help but feel exposed, compromised, by such rash gestures. Last night Tristão retired from the chamber only minutes after giving the Nolan his subject: a whisper to Ciotti, and he was gone. While no doubt eccentric, it’s unlike Tristão to be rude, even to a popinjay like the Nolan.

Hathor is the wife of Ra, who is the Sun. So too, as Isis, is she the wife of Osiris. So too, as Seshat, is she the wife of Thoth . Crivano hears a buzz of snores as he makes his way through the corridor. No other lodgers seem to be astir. In the parlor downstairs, a yawning Friulian girl in a nightshirt feeds the fireplace with split wood. Good day, young woman, Crivano says. Has Anzolo yet risen?

The girl turns, startled, then averts her eyes. Not yet, dottore, she says. Shall I fetch him?

He takes a moment to look her over: limp hair, wide hips, fourteen or fifteen years old. They always seem a bit frightened of him, these girls. Never charmed or smitten, as they are with Tristão. Stupid to be envious, of course. No need, Crivano says. Give him a message. Last night he helped me carry a small strongbox, which we locked away in a closet. I am going out now; I plan to return to the White Eagle by the fourteenth bell. At that time I will need a dependable and able-bodied gondolier to take me to Murano with that box. I trust that Anzolo will be able to make such arrangements.

I’m sure he will, dottore. I’ll see that he gets your instructions.

Outside, the sky has ripened to a yellow-tinged blue. Shutters open, carpets drape sills, and the smell of leavened dough trails from the baskets of women on their way to the fornaio. Crivano idles under the White Eagle’s sign to formulate his route to the Mercerie — closing his eyes to assemble the city’s image in his head, imagining himself afloat above it — and as he sets off, the sun’s first rays flare across the belltower of San Cassian.

Halfway along the Street of the Coopers a blue-flowered bunch of pennyroyal in an apothecary’s window distracts him, and he misses the turn onto Swordsmen’s Street. Not till he smells the fishmarket ahead does he realize his error, by which time he’s disinclined to turn back. He can see bright air over the canal, a wall of light where the buildings fall away, and he continues toward it. Suspending his purpose for a moment. Luxuriating in the ravel of possibilities, the sensation of being neither lost nor certain.

The Babylonians speak of Hathor as Ishtar. The Hebrews call her Astarte. The Greeks also know her as Io, beloved of Zeus, guarded by a giant with one hundred eyes who is, of course, slain by Hermes . Crivano steps over puddled seawater and piles of offal, moving among the fishmongers’ stalls to see what the ocean has divulged. Much is familiar from his visits to the Balık Pazarı during his years at court, but much is also new, or forgotten. Gangly spidercrabs. Coral-hued langoustines. Frogmouthed monkfish. Razor clams in neat rows, like the spines of books. A tangle of octopodes, their purple arms pocked with white suckers. Mullet and seabream stiffening in the warm air, their eyes gone foggy, like inferior glass. Behind the booths the water is a weave of pulsing lozenges, borrowing blue from the sky, orange from the palaces along the Grand Canal. A bragozzo moored at the white limestone quay is emptying its hold, spilling out sardines in a slick mirrored torrent.