Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Laughter and a filthy song carry down the canal. Crivano turns to see a group of young nobles — drunk, garbed as Chinamen, joined by a pair of masked whores — cross the bridge to the old Zon house and pound on its heavy wooden door. The men must have been set upon lately by a mattacino: he can smell musk even over his spearmint oil. One of the false Chinamen gapes at him with kohl-slanted eyes. Crivano turns, crossing the bridge back the way he came.

In the Campo Santa Giustina he stops to seek out a monument to the Battle of Lepanto, certain he’ll find one, but there’s nothing. The church itself is cracked and sagging: he peeks through the entrance to see a pair of rock-doves waddling across the narthex, pale light dappling the flagstone floor from holes in the roof. He forces a sour smile, turns south again. How quickly times change. How sweet to forget.

Tomorrow is the last night of the fair. Two weeks ago, on Ascension Day, Crivano was the guest of honor on the Contarini family galley: he stood on the garlanded quarterdeck next to Giacomo Contarini himself and lent the old man a steady shoulder as they approached the mouth of the lagoon. He watched Doge Cicogna teeter aboard his Bucintoro, heard his clear voice carry across the waves —we espouse thee, O sea, as a sign of true and perpetual dominion —even as his councilors scrambled to keep him upright long enough to toss the ring over the side. Later that afternoon, on the Lido, Crivano took communion not far from the firing range where he and the Lark proved themselves as bowmen twenty-two years before. Then he sat through an interminable banquet in order to receive a fleeting audience with Cicogna himself. The Republic thanks you, my son, for your heroic efforts in her service . The shrunken old doge clearly had no notion of who Crivano was, or of what his heroism consisted; he dozed off even as the words left his tongue, and Crivano was whisked away as fireworks bloomed over the distant roofs of the city. Probably just as well.

He was content then to miss the revels in the Piazza — that odd mélange of depravity and tradecraft — but now he finds himself eager to see them before they end, to lose himself in their crush and spectacle. After three wrong turns down three dead-end streets he picks up the canal again just past the apse of San Lorenzo — he can hear workers stacking tile and singing on its roof, though they’re too high to be seen — and shoulders his way across a bridge through a crowd of violet-capped Greeks to the fondamenta on the opposite side. He crosses again a bit farther on, passes the plain façade of San Antonin, the gothic palaces of the Campo della Bràgora, and just as he’s certain he’s lost his way he emerges onto the Riva degli Schiavoni to find the Bacino of San Marco arrayed before him, shimmering like a curtain of cut-glass beads.

He steps from the flow of traffic to look across the water. The monumental church of San Giorgio Maggiore that dominates the view was barely begun when he and the Lark first came here. Farther west on the Giudecca, the cool and stately Redeemer is entirely new to him. Both façades are pure white Istrian stone, blinding in the sun. Impossible structures in an impossible city. They remind him of Greek ruins he saw in Efes, but that doesn’t diminish their strangeness. Their massive doors seem poised to open on a world never seen by human eyes.

A peote flashes past, on its way to meet an incoming carrack; its keel and oars barely disturb the water’s surface. Crivano suddenly wishes he could forget his first glimpse of the city — wrestling with the Lark over the best spot on the rail as the Molo came into view — so that he might now see it fresh, weigh it fairly against other miracles he’s witnessed in the intervening years: the labyrinthine medina of Tunis, the pyramids of the Giza Plateau, the living rock temples of Wadi Araba. He leans against a palina at the quay’s edge, closes his eyes, and tries to retrieve the feeling of the days spent waiting out the quarantine in Malamocco, the memory of standing on a rock wall at the lagoon’s edge as a storm came in. The Lark was somewhere behind him, singing and clowning for some peasant girls— My noble friend and I are going to Padua to become physicians. Come, let me examine you! — while he leaned into the wind, trying to sort the shapes of belltowers from the distant scud.

Sleep is stalking him: he jolts awake to find himself tipping forward, seizes hold of the palina to keep from toppling into the waves, and his walkingstick clatters to the ground. Crivano stops it with his foot, stoops to pick it up.

A group of merchants has gathered nearby on the quay. They’re watching the approaching carrack; he follows their eyes. The ship’s mainmast is gone — partly splintered, partly hacked through at shoulder-height, as if someone took an axe to it while the ship ran before the wind — and as it draws closer he sees that its hull is bristling with arrows, pocked with lead shot, stained rust-brown under the scuppers.

Christ have mercy, one of the merchants mutters. The pirates are at it again.

The uskoks, you think? his fellow asks.

Who else, fool? Look at the blood! That craft played host to a cannibal feast, of that you can be certain. The merchant spits into the waves. Someone should tell limp-pricked old Cicogna that his new bride cuckolds him with the Devil himself, he says. And their bastard whelps now have the run of our waters.

Crivano turns to go. Ahead, just off the Riva, a troupe of gypsy acrobats performs somersaults on the foundations of what’s to be the new prison. Crivano pushes through the crowd across the bridge to the Molo, passing the arcades of the Doge’s Palace as he makes his way to the twin columns. Five long tables stretch between them, manned by masked attendants shaking bone dice in clay cups. Behind each table a long queue of merchants and farmers snakes toward the artisans’ booths. The new wing of the Library boxes in the Piazzetta like a canyon; two rows of wooden stalls run its full length, into the Piazza itself. A disordered throng moves from exhibit to exhibit — sturdy peasant women from the Terrafirma, German pilgrims provisioning for the Holy Land, silver-veiled brides in damask gowns — and Crivano takes a deep breath and steps forward to join it.

Grotesque profusion! Engraved boxes and majolica vessels. Sachets and vials and pomanders of scents. Octavo breviaries and pornographic woodcuts. Trellises draped with chaplets and fake pearls. Shelves bowed by the weight of shoes, combs, caps, hose, needles. Pigment-vendors grinding their products into careful mounds. Goldsmiths, coppersmiths, and tinsmiths twisting chimeras from wire and foil. Empty-eyed bravi fingering knifetips. Greeks peddling leather, Lombards peddling linens, Slavs peddling wool.

As he moves among the displays, Crivano realizes that he has managed to forget his entanglements, to loose his mind’s grip on the intrigues that lend purpose to his days, to become for a moment exactly what he seems: an idle man engaged in the survey of merchandise. Some weeks ago, when he arrived in the city, moments such as these came upon him only rarely; he’d emerge from them with a start, like one who remembers he’s left a coin-purse unattended. Now Crivano has come to suspect that he is safest at these times: browsing for goods, entertaining his Contarini patrons, debating learned citizens about trivia of mutual interest. Dissembly can hardly fail him when he does not dissemble. He wonders whether he might one day succeed so completely in forgetting himself — his whole occult catalogue of betrayal and deceit — that he’s able to meet the evidence of his corruption with sincere bafflement.

A pair of mattacini rushes from the steps of the Basilica, launching from their plaited slings blown-out eggs stuffed with musky rags, and the shouting and shrieking crowd parts before them. Crivano steps through the gap, around the loggetta of the belltower into the Piazza itself. The shapes and textures of this place have been so vivid to him during the twenty-odd years he’s been away that he tends to forget how few days he and the Lark actually spent here. His recollections have served as a kind of beacon in times of confusion and difficulty, a means of tracking his passage through the world. But now that he’s come back, he’s been surprised to discover how much his mind altered during his absence: how much it augmented or elided or rearranged to suit the dictates of his imagination. He feels himself moving not through the city that has haunted him for so long, but through a city that is itself haunted by that city.