Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

I made it when I was twelve, Serena says. My first carafe. That’s a glassmaker’s daily bread, carafes. This one wasn’t good enough to qualify me as a journeyman. But I was still young then.

Crivano nods, drains the last of his brandy. He examines his cup again in the light from the window. Tipping it. Holding it close to his face.

Can you see it? Serena asks.

He looks again. There, in the base: a tiny line of bubbles, smaller than an eyelash. The bubbles themselves visible only as a group. This blemish, you mean? Crivano says. This is why it’s not for sale?

Of course. You think I’d sell a piece with such an obvious flaw? Still, the shape of these was pleasing to me. And I needed a pair of cups.

Crivano sets the glass down. Serena fills it again. Crivano’s cheeks are warm, like he’s been near a very hot fire. Which, in fact, he has. You make very beautiful things, maestro, he says.

Serena gives him a strange look as he stoppers the carafe, sets it aside. No, dottore, he says. I do not. I make this.

His hand plucks something from the desktop and tosses it to Crivano; Crivano’s caught it almost before he realizes it’s been thrown. It’s the lump of raw glass Serena took from the cooling pan in the workshop: smooth, oblong, flatter on one side, a pointed lobe opposite, pitted here and there by delicate bubbles. It’s greenish and frosted, but it lets light through. Its shape recalls something; Crivano can’t say what.

Other men in this shop make beautiful things, Serena says. One day, when they are older, perhaps my boys will do so as well. But me? I make this.

He leans forward and takes the raw glass from Crivano’s hand, then sits back in his chair. The blob sits in his right palm like a wet frog, sheltered under the branches of his three scarred tipless fingers.

I make it so it melts evenly, he says. So it can be worked. I make it strong and pliable. I make it clear, when clarity is called for. When mystery is desired, I make it play games with the light. I hope very much that others are able to make it beautiful, dottore. But that is their responsibility. It is not mine.

As the traghetto draws near San Cristofero della Pace, disturbing a group of avocets and black-winged stilts in the shallows, Crivano vomits most of Serena’s liquor over the gunwale and begins to feel better. He rinses his mouth from the gondolier’s flask, settles in the shade of the canopy, and rests his head on one of the posts, watching the birds along the bank, the fishermen’s nets drying in the afternoon sun. So heavy, his teeming skull. He imagines it filling like the bottom bulb of an hourglass, every grain a thought, a memory, a secret.

The gondolier moors his craft. Crivano pays him and disembarks onto the fondamenta, clutching his parcel tight against his chest, so intent on keeping it safe that he leaves his walkingstick behind. The gondolier runs after him, catches him when he’s nearly to the Campo Santa Giustina; Crivano thanks him, pays him again.

He has no intention of stopping in the church but somehow winds up there anyway, weaving from sunbeam to mote-dusted sunbeam across the broken floor of the nave, thinking of Lepanto. Captain Bua in his breastplate and helmet: Santa Giustina, we pray that on this, your feast day, you will intercede on our behalf, and secure for us the blessings of God as we fight to defend the chastity of our great Republic from savages . Clutching the Lark’s spray-slick hand as the fleets closed: the last good moment, before the drums and cymbals crashed over the waves to be answered by horns from the Christian galleys, before the line dispersed and the real horror began. The first man he killed: turbaned head blown off and scattered on the water as he jumped from the oven platform. Slipping on the blood-brown deck, ankles tangled in viscera. The Lark clubbing a dead janissary with someone’s severed forearm while keening cannonballs tore the air overhead. The thunderclap when the Christ over the World lit its powder magazine, shattering the Ottoman galleys around it, bits of wood and iron and flesh raining through the smoke. The gulf aflame with burning wrecks, drifting into clusters like petals on a pond, lodestones on quicksilver. Fumbling in the tear-blurred darkness for the Lark’s matriculation certificate as the Turks stormed the decks overhead.

He needs to eat something. Outside, behind the cracked apse, he finds a small casino serving spit-roasted kid along with chewy bread and an unimpressive red wine. The only other customers are four hard-faced Arsenal workers with scavenged wood shavings bundled at their feet; they cease their dice-game when he walks in, unhurriedly hiding their cup and coins, glaring in silence. With so many ridotti springing up around the city, Crivano’s surprised to see them gaming in public; their flagrancy speaks to the decline of the campo. The stares don’t abate, so Crivano makes short work of his meal, rises, and — feeling restored by the food, emboldened by the wine — approaches them. Will you good fellows take a physician’s wager? he says.

After permitting them to cheat him out of a small sum, Crivano orders wine for the table, and inquires about the state of the church. It’s shameful, they agree; no fit memorial for Lepanto’s honored dead. One of the four was in the battle himself, or says he was: at the oars of Vincenzo Quirini’s flagship, jabbing his pike through Turkish ribcages. He came home with his freedom, a few ducats’ worth of loot, a few stories no one wants to hear. Only fools boast of fighting for nothing, he says, so I never boast. The diplomats, they never intended to retake Cyprus. That’s clear enough now, isn’t it? They were making their deal with the sultan even as we sailed into battle. But I defended the lives of my bench-mates, I sent a lot of Turks to hell, I didn’t shame myself through cowardice. I’m satisfied. If anything else matters, I don’t see how.

The sun is low by the time Crivano is on the street again. Beside the church’s steps he meets a young priest with a taper, drunker than he is, skulking inside to light the few remaining candles. The sallow skin of the man’s neck is inflamed by traces of the Spanish disease. For a moment Crivano wants to pursue this wretch, to thrash him with his stick, but he thinks better of it. His anger surprises him. Why should he be troubled that Lepanto is forgotten? Hasn’t he tried to forget it himself?

He thinks of Perina: her urgent questions, her wide searching eyes. What convent is she in? Santa Caterina, isn’t it? Nearby, past Zanipolo, not far from the Crucifers’ church. What was it she said? It is precisely this chaos I seek knowledge of, for in such disarray resides the truth! Ah, youth’s sincere conviction when it speaks such words! Amusing, disquieting, embarrassing. Like watching children at play with their fathers’ swords. He wants to see her, to speak to her. And the fact that he’s about to commit an act of treason shouldn’t preclude him from keeping his promise to the senator, should it?

A busy salizzada takes him to Campo San Zanipolo, where he steps between the peddlers’ carts by the mounted bronze of Colleoni to pause in front of the Scuola of Saint Mark and regain his bearings. The odd trompe-l’oeil façade with its pelicans and phoenixes and winged lions only serves to confuse him further, so he rejoins the crowd, moving west. At first he’s able to plot his route by the ancient squat belltower of the Crucifers and the slender onion-domed campanile of the Apostles’ church, but he’s soon among the high walls of hospitals and new palaces and has only the sun to locate him. He’s all but given up hope of finding his way when he crosses a broad canal to see the long latticed façade of the Zen palace, and Santa Caterina just beyond.