Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Hm? Oh. Yes. Hermes Trismegistus. Do you know who he is?

I know who he is in your book. He’s some kind of god, or a wizard, who lived a long time ago.

He was understood by Renaissance intellectuals to be the Egyptian equivalent of Moses. He was identified with Thoth — the giver of laws, the inventor of writing — and also with the Greek Hermes, the messenger of the gods, the god of healing, of magic, and of secrets. He was an intermediary between worlds, a crosser of barriers, and as such he was regarded as the patron of thieves, scholars, alchemists, and, of course, of gamblers like yourself. That is what I meant.

So you didn’t just make him up?

No! Welles says. Good lord, no. It took hundreds of people, misunderstanding one another for thousands of years, to invent the Thrice-Great Hermes. Starving poets huddled in their garrets. Drunken bards prancing around bonfires. Weary mothers luring their wee babes toward sleep. I just added my own small confusion to the end of the long and crooked column.

They’re still blocks south of the arcades. The broad lots are dotted with large beachfront houses, once grand, now wind-scoured, listing on their foundations. The few that show any evidence of care only seem more decrepit for it: fresh paint coats a collapsed veranda, plaster cherubim caper on a denuded lawn, neat rows of marigolds line a path of shattered cobblestone. There’s a ruined boat in the yard of the next house — long and black, a toothed iron prow, half-buried in sand — that’s been turned into a flowerbox: its split hull runs over with periwinkle, coreopsis, rose mallow, the petals turned pale sepia by the streetlamps’ glow.

Stanley is silent, absently counting the wide planks beneath his feet, conscious of the sandy gaps. He thinks about tightrope walkers, about how they’re not supposed to look down, not supposed to think about the precariousness of what supports them. He wonders if it was a smart idea to come out here after all. What about Crivano? he says.

Crivano?

You made Crivano up. Right?

Welles sighs, looks out at the ocean. With Crivano, he says, I took a number of liberties. In the historical record he is barely a shade. I filled in the gaps as imaginatively as possible. Of course, it is precisely those lacunae that made it possible for me to write the book at all.

Stanley stops walking. Welles and the dog carry on for a couple of paces, then turn and circle to face him.

You’re telling me Crivano was a real person, Stanley says.

He was a historical person, yes. I discovered a brief and rather cryptic mention of him in the letters of Suor Giustina Glissenti while I was researching an entirely unrelated matter, and I was enchanted by the metaphorical possibilities he suggested.

You’re pulling my goddamn leg.

I am not, no. From Suor Giustina’s account I was able to infer only that the Council of Ten issued an arrest order for a person named Vettor Crivano in the summer of 1592, accusing him of taking part in a conspiracy to steal from the craftsmen of Murano on behalf of unknown foreign entities information regarding the manufacture of flat glass mirrors. In those days, a person so accused could expect to be imprisoned or enslaved, or, if he managed somehow to escape the city, to be pursued by assassins and murdered. It was a very serious matter. As I’m sure you gathered from reading my two long poems on the commercial history of images, the Muranese greatly benefited from their virtual monopoly on flat glass mirrors well into the Eighteenth Century, so we can assume that Crivano was unsuccessful. From other sources I discovered that he was a physician and an alchemist who took his doctorate at Bologna, and I was able to trace his family origins to colonial Cyprus, prior to the Ottoman siege. The remainder of his biography I — to borrow your phraseology — made up.

So how much of what happens in the book is true?

I really prefer not to speak in such terms, Stanley. When you say true , I take you to mean factual . But there are other kinds of truth. I am an old-fashioned poet. I understand my role to be essentially that delineated by Crivano’s English contemporary Sir Philip Sidney, who tells us that the poet affirms nothing, and therefore never lies. In my daily life, as I said, I am an accountant. I was employed by the Air Force for many years, and later by the aerospace industry. I admit — in fact I insist — that genuine satisfactions are to be found in my profession’s regimented artificiality. But in the hours that I call my own, during that brief plunge from work toward sleep, I choose to dabble in more ambiguous enterprises. So I hope you will understand my reticence at being pinned down on these ostensibly metaphysical issues, which at best qualify as quibbles over points of fact, and which probably ought to be regarded as no more than mere semantics.

Welles is poker-faced, pleased with himself; his demurral hangs before him like a scrim. Stanley knows there are gaps in it, but he can’t see them yet. He can hear Welles’s breath, his own breath too, and he’s suddenly disgusted by the sound: two pairs of fleshy bellows suctioning the air while the half-dark world spins steadily beneath them.

The little dog is slobbering at his feet. Stanley closes his eyes, bunches his fists, shifts his weight to kick it. He pictures it arcing toward the sand, leash aflutter like the tail of a kite. Welles’s shocked expression as the loop snaps from his yellowed fingers.

He wonders if Welles really is heeled like he says he is, and if so, what sort of gat he might be carrying. Sometimes with fat guys it can be hard to tell.

Stanley straightens up, unclenches his fingers, forces a smile. Welles eyes him expectantly. In the moonlight they look like polished marble statues of themselves.

Mister Welles, Stanley says, I would really like to know just how much of your goddamn book is true.

The acolyte lights the candles as the priest opens the book. The long wicks flare, and the image of the Virgin appears in the vault above the apse, her gray form steady against the flickering screen of gold. The glass tesserae of her eyes catch the dim light, and her gaze seems to go everywhere.

The priest’s hand moves across the psalter; its thick pages curl and fall. Venite exultemus Domino iubilemus Deo salutari nostro , he intones. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving, and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms . At the priest’s back are the relics of Saint Donatus, along with the bones of the dragon he slew by spitting in its mouth. Overhead, the wooden roof slopes outward like a ship’s hull.

Even now, hours before dawn, the basilica is not empty. Solitary figures pass in the aisles: sleepless fishermen, glassblowers between shifts, veiled widows impatient for Christ’s return. Some kneel and mutter prayers. In the narthex, at the base of a marble column, a lone drunkard snores.

At the south end of the shallow transept a man drifts along the uneven stones. His steps are cautious, slow, measured by the soft tap of his walkingstick. His downcast eyes trace images on the mosaic floor: eagles and griffins, cockerels bearing a trussed fox, peacocks eating from a chalice. Beneath the clean flames of the beeswax candles the patterned checks of porphyry and serpentine blend into a fluid surface, undulating and unfathomable. The man lifts his black morocco boots like a heron hunting frogs.