Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Crivano passes by the moneychangers and bankers at their benches under the colonnades, then proceeds south through the Rialto, pausing to examine red chicory from Treviso, wheels of cheese from Asiago, sheaves of asparagus from Bassano del Grappa. He finds bright-skinned lemons and bitter oranges from the Terrafirma, including the fragrant teardrop fruit from Bergamo, but the handful of sweet citrus available is absurdly expensive, and he asks a vendor why this is so. Uskoks, the man says with a shrug.

The pungent hemp and pitch in the Ropemakers’ Square are pleasing to his nose, but Crivano has no interest in this merchandise. He turns down the narrow Street of the Insurers, passes through a sottoportego into the Campo San Giacometto, and emerges near the Proclamation Column, surprised to find himself in the spot where twenty years ago he and the Lark heard the news that Nicosia, city of their birth, had fallen. They’d been crossing the square to the Pisani bank to redeem more of his father’s letters of advice: two doe-eyed street wanderers, eager to be corrupted. Those boys seem entirely strange to him now: anxious, smooth-cheeked, full of foolish notions. They stood open-mouthed, their hearts striking the anvils of their ribs, as they struggled to parse the dialect of the comandador atop the porphyry column. In the general uproar they made their way south to the Molo and stood weeping and howling with rage under the arcades of the Doge’s Palace as the clerk copied their names— Gabriel Glissenti, Vettor Crivano —into the register of the Gold and Black Eagle of Corfu. Ravenous as only the young and privileged can be for their own annihilation. It was a clear day in September; they’d been planning a visit to a bookshop. That much, at least, has not changed.

The Rialto too seems much the same. Crivano crosses the pavement to read the notices posted around the hunchbacked statue at the column’s base. When trading with Dalmatia, captains of state-auctioned galleys must henceforth make port at Spalato. The Serene Republic encourages the Hapsburgs and the Sultan to resolve without warfare their ongoing dispute in Croatia. Uskok pirates have intercepted three merchant vessels of late, murdering the crews and eating the hearts of their captains, as is their custom .

Not till Crivano turns to check the clock on the façade of San Giacometto does he glimpse the new stone bridge. Its stepped incline rises from the Street of the Goldsmiths and arcs across the Grand Canal in a single broad span, fed from the Treasury and the Riva del Vin by a pair of steeper staircases. A moment ago Crivano had forgotten it; now he hurries toward it as if expecting it to dissolve into air.

When he and the Lark first came to the city they often heard discussion of the need for such a bridge — a permanent link between the Rialto and the Piazza befitting a great Christian power — but they gathered that such debates had been ongoing for fifty years or more, and it seemed that plagues, fires, war, and the opposition of foot-dragging reactionaries on the Great Council would delay its construction forever. Now, here it is. Ascending along the south balustrade, Crivano surveys burci and trabacoli unloading their cargo below: iron and coal on the left bank, wine-casks on the right. He stands in the apex of the pavilion and looks down at the Grand Canal, watching its dark surface play tricks with the rising sun. When the breeze shifts, he can make out the sharp tang of fresh-cut limestone through the water’s briny stench.

On his way down, he moves into the double row of shops in the broad central passage to browse the offerings of jewelers and goldsmiths. Toward the bottom he finds a glass vendor displaying beads made in imitation of fine pearls — better than perfect, in gorgeous and improbable colors — and as he looks up from them he’s startled to meet his own gaze in a flat mirror hung on the side wall. It’s a rectangular Del Gallo glass of very high quality, only a few inches long, set in a swirling calcedonio frame; Crivano would swear it to be a window were his own face not watching from the midst of it. He recoils, looks again. His lined skin, his jagged teeth, his jackal eyes. Reminded once more of who and what he is.

He locates Ciotti’s shop near the Campo San Salvator: the small wooden sign that announces it as MINERVA appears and disappears behind billowing red silks displayed by the mercer next door. Ciotti himself stands in the entrance, consulting in easy German with a man whom Crivano takes to be his printer. When Crivano approaches, Ciotti claps him on the shoulder and waves him inside with a broad smile.

A fine-boned boy of about thirteen stands in the front room; he greets Crivano warily. Behind him, over a low partition, two bespectacled proofreaders sit at a table by a widow, bent over a stack of unbound pages. One reads aloud almost inaudibly as the other checks the text. Both move their lips; Crivano can’t tell which one speaks.

He peruses the octavos displayed in the front room as he waits. Fifty or so titles stacked on two narrow tables: histories and biographies and volumes of verse. Most are printed in vulgar tongues, mostly local and Tuscan; a sizable minority are in Latin. The books in the tallest stack — an anthology of missionary correspondence from China and Japan — bear the shop’s own imprint. At the edge of the far table, Crivano finds two books by the Nolan. One is the octavo that Tristão showed him over supper at the White Eagle; the other is a philosophical dialogue written in Tuscan, in the style of Lucian. Its front matter states that it was published here in the city, and this amuses Crivano: it was obviously bound by an English printer, perhaps jealous of the Aldine pedigree. He wonders if this deception was made at the Nolan’s request.

As Ciotti steps through the door, Crivano leans down to feign a close examination of the stacked books. I was just admiring the craftsmanship of this table, he says. It supports both these Jesuit letters and the works of the Nolan without tipping discernibly in the direction of either.

Ciotti laughs. I appreciate your attentiveness, he says. It is not always easy to strike such a balance. Especially in this neighborhood, where the very ground beneath our feet fairly often seems to shift.

Crivano rises to exchange bows and clasp hands with the Sienese. Were it not for the thick-lensed spectacles hanging by a chain around his neck, Ciotti might be mistaken for a prosperous artisan: a baker, perhaps, or a carpenter.

I was surprised to see your own device on the frontispiece of the Jesuit anthology, Crivano says. Your friend Lord Mocenigo must be quite pleased with that undertaking.

The bookseller’s smile cools into a perspicacious smirk. Judge not, my friend, he says. I’m sure you’ll agree that as narrators of voyages, the footsoldiers of the Pope are unsurpassed. My favored customers are always eager to learn of the customs of distant lands. Of course, all of our Republic’s citizens are interested to read news of Spanish activity at the far corners of the earth. And, naturally, those among us who hold with the Curia in matters temporal and spiritual are delighted to find printed accounts of the Society of Jesus available at this emporium. Yet you will note, Dottore Crivano — as I myself note with displeasure each time I open or close my shop’s shutters — that this stack remains quite tall, even as those around it diminish. Would you care to join me in my workroom? Dottore de Nis’s friend should be with us shortly.

Ciotti leads Crivano to a small cluttered office near the back of the shop, then closes the heavy door behind them. Crivano takes a seat beside a table awash in loose charts and unbound proofs; Ciotti sits opposite. The brick walls are laddered with oak bookshelves, each stacked to the base of the next.