Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

I pray you will forgive my discourtesy, senator, the Neapolitan says, but as you have no doubt noticed, the sun nears its zenith. With your permission, I will see to the children.

Della Porta takes his leave across the peristyle, entering the great hall. Contarini claps Crivano on the arm with a conspiratorial wink and turns to greet another guest. Momentarily at a loss, Crivano fades into the crowd, seeking faces he knows, pondering the Neapolitan. Della Porta, he thinks. From Naples. Why is this familiar?

The servants have begun to seat the guests. Crivano winds up between a sullen and heavily veiled maiden and an elderly gentleman called Barbaro — a procurator of San Marco, quite deaf — who loudly denigrates the glassmakers’ guild until the first course arrives. The glassworks of the Medici, old Barbaro shouts, makes lenses of quality, but it has no prayer of competing with the factories of Holland. And where do their finest craftsmen come from? They come from here! We treat our guildsmen like merchant princes, and they conduct themselves like roundheeled whores!

Crivano wants to raise a polite dissent — a pointless impulse, since the procurator is certain not to hear him — and he’s sifting his brain for what little he knows of optics when recollection comes. I beg your pardon, lady, he whispers to the veiled girl. The Neapolitan gentleman who was here a short time ago, the one called della Porta — is he not Giambattista della Porta, the author of Magiae Naturalis , and the famous book on physiognomy?

Beneath clouds of gray lace the girl’s eyes are riveted to his own, but she makes no reply.

Or perhaps, Crivano says, you know him as a playwright, and not as an eminent scholar? As the author of the popular comedies Penelope , and The Maid , and Olympia ?

The girl’s voice is a contralto murmur, each word precisely formed. I grant that Signore della Porta is eminent, she says. And he is certainly a scholar. I suppose we may therefore speak of him with justification as an eminent scholar.

You question Signore della Porta’s scholarship, lady?

Oh, no, dottore. As one who read Magiae Naturalis with great zeal in both its editions, I dare not raise any such protest. Besides, the little instruction I receive in the convent school hardly qualifies me to speak on this matter. I can only parrot what I have gleaned from overhearing the discussions of my erudite cousins.

And what is that, if I may ask?

She looks at the tabletop, and her voice sinks further toward silence. If the great community of scholars can be likened to the family of musical instruments, she says, then Giambattista della Porta can be likened to a churchbell. His work is distinguished by its enviable clarity, but not by its subtlety or its scope.

Crivano laughs, drawing an irritated glare from the old procurator. As he gropes for a clever rejoinder — a pun, perhaps, about how her observation has the ring of truth — servants arrive with enormous platters: cured ham simmered with capers in wine, pork tongue and fresh grapes, marzipan and spicecake. Crivano is rubbing his palms together, turning to the girl with some comment about the feast, when she lifts her veils.

It is as if he has been plunging like Icarus toward the sea — falling for such a long time and from such a terrible height that he has forgotten himself to be falling — and now has struck the water at last. His lungs refuse air; his jellied limbs seem to fly from him. He feels himself rise for the prayer and for Contarini’s toast, raise his goblet of Moselle wine, but his ears perceive nothing but the interior churn of his own humors.

He cannot imagine why this ictus has come upon him. He has never met this girl before; he has no notion of who she is. Cream-skinned and sharp-faced, with obstinate eyes, she is not beautiful except in the ways that youth and vivacity are always beautiful. There is, perhaps, a scent. He is less entranced than terrified. He cannot bear to look upon her face. His eyes fix instead upon the grain of the tabletop, their focus as hot and relentless as Archimedes’ terrible glass. Yet the only clear image in his head is that of the Lark’s demolished body, its pink meat cannonball-scattered across the quarterdeck of the Gold and Black Eagle . Why this memory now?

The old procurator has resumed his ranting; a line of brown sauce bisects his chin. Our glassmakers lack loyalty and direction! he thunders. They could crush Florence and Amsterdam with ease, but they won’t learn, they won’t change, they lack science. Look here: why is the city of Saint Mark superior to the city of Saint Peter? Because it has no pagan past! This is why glassmaking is our great art: in no discipline but this do modern artisans surpass their pagan predecessors. The shops of Murano should be crowded with painters and engineers and architects, learned men seeking to emulate their example. But what do they sell instead? Mirrors! Nice flat mirrors for ladies and sodomites!

The guests empty the platters and more platters appear: roast quail with eggplant, fried sweetbreads with lemon, a soup of songbirds and almond-paste. As each majolica dish is cleared, bare-breasted images of Annona and Felicitas and Juno Moneta emerge from the crumbs and sauces, offering mute blessings to the Contarini line. Now comes a boiled calf and a pair of stuffed geese, here are chicken pies and pigs’ feet, here is a pigeon stew with mortadella and translucent whole onions, sightless eyes rolling in the dark broth. Crivano eats almost nothing. The girl, nearly motionless in the margin of his sight, seems to eat even less.

Contarini rises at the head of the table, his hand in the air, his strong fingers imperiously curled. It is the height of rudeness, he says, to hasten one’s guests through their meals. Thus I offer my apologies. But my esteemed colleague Signore della Porta informs me that our entertainments must commence immediately if we are to have them at all. It seems that our revels depend — as I suppose all things depend — on the advantage conveyed by the rays of the noonday sun. More than that I shall not say, for fear of evoking the voluminous wrath of the little Neapolitan. Enough! Let us recess through the peristyle, where seats await us!

Crivano mumbles a quick courtesy to the maiden, pushes to his feet, and hurries from the courtyard, seizing the chance to escape and collect himself. His pulse hammers in his temples and his gut, muffled and out of phase, like laborers sinking a pile through thick clay. He is simply ill, he thinks: stricken by some mundane lagoon miasma. It’s coincidence, nothing to do with the girl. But even as he thinks these things he imagines himself as an under-rehearsed player, declaiming them to an unseen audience in the dark theater of his own mind. Already some secret part of him must know.

With nothing in his belly to slow its progress the wine is rampant in his blood, making his footfalls heavy and loose as he steps indoors. The great hall has been cleared of its clutter; the stacked screens and folded curtains are assembled and hung, occluding the windows that open to the courtyard. The only visible daylight rises through the loggia at the opposite end: a liquid shimmer on the frescoed ceiling, the oscillating echo of the Grand Canal’s surface, just out of sight below. Somewhere nearby — he can’t say where — he hears a soft clang of metal brushing metal, and the muted laughter of a child.

Crivano blinks, unsteady in the abrupt darkness. A servant with a lamp appears at his side to convey him to an adjacent room. Here too the windows are blocked by curtains, and before the curtains stands an upright polyptych of blank canvases. By the wan yellow light of candelabra Crivano finds four rows of campaign chairs facing the canvas screen; a wide aisle runs down their center, and he follows it to a seat near the front. As he lowers himself into his chair, he notes a small lectern standing to one side of the easels, and a long wooden trunk on the floor beneath them, one end hidden by the curtains. He’s puzzling over this as the other guests file in, and suddenly the seat to his right is occupied. He knows without looking that it’s the girl.