The Bestiary (20 page)

I leaned closer to her. “You were right about Rhodes, Madame. The bestiary did end up there around 1255. But it was not destroyed. Let me read you something I discovered last year, from a tract written in 1382 by a former Crusader named Guy Pelletier.”

I took out my Hawaii notebook and read her the passage in French.

When I finished, her eyes were wide, but she merely nodded and said, “Read it to me again.”

I did so, slowly, and she shook her head in amazement. “So he claims to have known in October 1351 that this Martin Lafourie had the book ‘several years earlier.’”

“1347, to be exact.”

“You were able to trace Lafourie, then.”

“Yes. Did you ever hear of him?”

“Never. Nor Pelletier. Where did you find this tract of his?”

I told her, and she smiled broadly. “Two Frenchmen. I looked all over France and Italy for something like this, and you found it in Hawaii, of all places. I congratulate you, Mr. Atlas, on a tremendous discovery. And I apologize. Because so many others failed—because I failed—was no reason to assume that you could not have succeeded.”

“You didn’t fail. And I got very lucky.”

“I am not going to argue with you. Just tell me the rest, please.”

“I’ll let you read it for yourself.”

Sylvie had smuggled Volume 16 of the
Chronicles
up to the second floor of the library and photostated D’Épernay’s letter. I took the pages from my briefcase and passed them to Madame Faville, telling her their source.

She listened carefully, then put on her reading glasses. “In a basement at the Sorbonne,” she murmured, shaking her head.

It was a thrill for me, watching this old woman’s face light up as she read through D’Épernay’s letter. Occasionally she paused, and read a sentence over again, mouthing the words. She nodded, grimaced, wrinkled her brow. I didn’t know how much active thought she had given the
Caravan Bestiary
over the previous decades, but at that moment I could see her reconnecting with her youthful self, the memories of her own search, the small triumphs, false leads, possibilities pursued or abandoned, until finally it ended for her. On Rhodes, in 1255.

She looked up when she was finished, not with tears in her eyes, but laughter. “It’s incredible, Mr. Atlas.”

“Please call me Xeno.”

“Xeno, I think we ought to have a glass of cognac. I have a fine bottle in that cabinet, if you would do the honors.”

I got out the bottle and two glasses. She watched me pour, then raised her glass. “Congratulations.”

The cognac was very smooth.

“With what you know, I wonder why you didn’t go directly to Venice,” she said.

“I had to see you first. I wanted you to know.”

“Thank you,” she said softly, reaching for my hand. “Now go to Venice, for both of us.”

F
ROM THE
P
UBLIC
G
ARDENS
I walked down the promenade, past the bronze statue of Garibaldi, to the vaporetto station. The wind was strong and salt coated my lips. It could have been the same wind that had tousled Garibaldi’s hair and made him turn up his collar as he gazed across the choppy waters of the canal.

I had so immersed myself in the private correspondence and public records of Doge Andrea Dandolo that I had begun to feel I was living in the Venice of 1347 rather than 1975. In fact, the city’s essential maze hadn’t changed: a Venetian of Dandolo’s time, transported to the twentieth century, would have had no trouble finding his way around. The names of nearly every
calle, campiello, ramo, rio, fondamenta, salizada,
and
piscina
(that wonderful menu of Venetian byways) remained the same. I walked them endlessly, and some evenings, as the mist off the canals darkened, felt as if I might turn a corner and meet up with Dandolo himself. As Lafourie had noted, he was not cut from the usual mold: he was not just the youngest and best educated, but one of the most popular doges, nicknamed
il conti,
“the little count.” A trim, handsome man with intense eyes, his likeness is well preserved in the statue atop his sarcophagus in the Basilica and the mosaic portrait above the baptistery altar at Saint Mark’s, both of which I had visited that morning. After ruling for eleven tumultuous years, Dandolo died at forty-seven, his health shattered. Among the crises he faced were a belligerent Ottoman Empire, ballooning debt, widespread piracy, and a naval war with the rival republic of Genoa—all of which paled beside a catastrophe soon after he was elected that no Venetian, or European, could have imagined.

I boarded the No. 51 vaporetto to San Giorgio Maggiore and crossed the Giudecca Canal as ceremonial gondolas, carrying gold statues of dragons and winged lions, rounded the tip of the Dorsoduro from the Grand Canal. It was the day of the August regatta. Teams of rowers in black-and-white-striped shirts were preparing their sleek boats for the first race. Spectators lined the Zattere, jamming the parapets around the old Customs House. Vendors were selling candies and cakes, pennants and balloons.

I circled the gardens beside the Teatro Verde and walked up the gravel path flanked by walnut trees to the Biblioteca Fondazine in the Villa Ziane. For weeks, I had been following the same daily routine: for nine hours, breaking only for lunch, I planted myself at a reading table piled with leather-bound books and scroll maps. There were few other visitors. The cavernous room was so quiet I could hear only the scratching of my pen in my notebook. Occasionally a footfall echoed on the marble floor. Or I’d hear someone climbing the tightly spiraling steel stairways to the mezzanine and upper tiers. A giant oil painting depicted the victorious fleet returning from the Battle of Lepanto. And on the domed ceiling there was a mural of the third doge, Orso Ipato, clutching a trident in the prow of a longboat. He wore a flowing red robe and a gold cap. His profile—the hooked nose and strong chin—was one I had often seen while wandering the city: on trades-men, waiters, a fishmonger near the Rio San Giustina.

In three months I had filled three notebooks. When the library was closed on Sundays, I typed up my notes, first in my hotel room, then in the tiny apartment I sublet near the Campo San Polo when I realized I would be in Venice, not for weeks, but months. After lunch on Sundays, I often took the motonave to Torcello. The population of fifty seemed woefully outnumbered by the island’s ghosts, the multitudes wiped out by malaria five hundred years before. I strolled through the marshes, then sat in the cool light of the ancient cathedral. I loved the animal traceries on the marble panels before the altar and the mosaics depicting the Last Judgment on the counter-façade: on the left, destined for Paradise, sipping nectar from a crystal fountain, children and animals (lions, foxes, deer, and peacocks); on the right, the damned—corrupt officials, murderers, and infidels—disgorged in hell by sea monsters and prodded into the fires by avenging angels.

Deciphering the florid handwriting of medieval scribes, I had now read through nearly all the surviving private correspondence and public records of Doge Andrea Dandolo. I followed up every reference to Dandolo I could find. I spent weeks exploring the remaining records of his immediate descendants. I knew as much about him, perhaps, as anyone alive. He was my only lead, and I had to follow it. But I still hadn’t found what I was looking for: specific clues as to the whereabouts of the
Caravan Bestiary
after his death in 1355.

The fourteenth century, which commences with Dante’s descent to the underworld, held few surprises for someone of my own century: endless wars, religious fanaticism, famines and epidemics, cutthroat imperialism. The Venetians were at the center of that world, pouring huge sums into their foreign adventures. The swift galleys the navy shipwrights constructed at the Arsenal were feared throughout the Mediterranean. The Venetian government employed a vast network of spies, at home and abroad, and was so layered in secrecy that no part of it ever had complete knowledge of any other. And all of this was under Dandolo, the most enlightened doge of his time. But, in the end, his reign was defined, not by war or intrigue, but the Black Death. At its peak, the disease claimed sixty Venetians a day. The bodies piled up. Every physican but one fled the city. Dandolo would reward this man for his bravery with an annuity of five hundred gold ducats.

A handful of physicians, the so-called plague doctors, were lured from Ravenna and Florence. They specialized in treating the Black Death until they succumbed to it themselves. They wore an elaborate costume: a huge bird mask, with protective spectacles and a beak ingeniously honeycombed with vials of medicinal herbs and tonics; thick gloves; a scarf dusted with powdered oyster shells; and a canvas coat soaked in wax. They carried a stick with which to raise the bedclothes of the sick. And a tuning fork whose vibrations dispelled toxic vapors. All of this paraphernalia was intended to prevent their contracting the plague, and of course it failed.

It was one of these doctors, across the centuries, who enabled me to pick up the trail of the
Caravan Bestiary
again. He, and Dandolo’s eldest daughter, Beatrice. I was sifting through a packet of her letters that had been well preserved in a leather box. The letters were unremarkable, though well written, and I was nearly done skimming them when I came on one that brought me up in my seat.

On March 14, 1367, a week after her mother’s death, Beatrice Lungasti, née Dandolo, informed her husband Fabrizio, a sea captain stationed on the island of Chios, of a curious request her mother had made on her deathbed. The former Dogaressa instructed her daughter to seek out a Dr. Armando Bendetto of Ravenna, saying she had entrusted a packet to him for safekeeping when the Doge sent the family to Castelfranco to escape the plague.

Mother informed me that Bendetto was one of the finest physicians to lend his services to the Republic at that dread time. He snatched from death my father’s cousins, Pietro Dandolo and Timoro Carpaneri, who had been stricken with hellish fevers. In gratitude, Uncle Pietro gave him 3,000 ducats. After two months, exhausted, Bendetto returned to Ravenna, where the plague was just taking root. He took my mother’s packet, but once the plague abated, and for years afterward, she had no word from him. He was such an honorable man that Mother could not fathom his silence. After my father’s death, she tried to locate Bendetto, but her efforts, feeble on account of her ill health, came to nothing. She regretted that she had not previously confided in my sisters and me and enlisted our help. With your experience of the world, Fabrizio, perhaps you will have better luck. On your return to Venice, kindly put in at Ravenna and inquire after Bendetto, but do not tarry, for I miss you terribly…

Lungasti did as his wife asked, and learned that Bendetto had died several years earlier after a long illness. Bendetto’s widow, a woman half her husband’s age, was a great beauty. Upon Bendetto’s death, she had opened the Dogaressa’s packet and was disappointed to find that it contained, not jewels or gold, but an illuminated book of strange beasts. The Latin text was penned in sea-blue ink. Books did not interest the widow. She stored it away with her husband’s medical texts and forgot about it—until Lungasti’s arrival. He was smitten with the widow and she with him. They became lovers. He extended his stay in Ravenna. One night he asked about the packet, and without hesitation she dug out the bestiary and made him a gift of it. To placate his wife, Lungasti sent it to her by courier. If he knew how rare it was, he didn’t let on. Nor did he ever return to Venice. He and the widow moved to Sardinia, where thirty years later he died, a trader in silks. For the rest of her life, embittered and solitary, Beatrice Lungasti rued the day she had dispatched her husband to Ravenna, complaining that she had exchanged him for a book of beasts. And that this was her father’s ill-starred legacy, born of the Black Death.

Upon Beatrice’s death, the bestiary was passed on to her son, then his daughter, and then her daughter, Serena—Andrea Dandolo’s great-great-granddaughter—who married another doge, Andrea Gritti, in 1508. No one knows which of these people, if any, actually read the
Caravan Bestiary.
It had acquired the status of a family heirloom, and as such was passed down along with other books, keepsakes, and domestic fineries which it far exceeded in value.

From the records of Andrea Gritti’s dogeship, his letters, and a biography written by two of his contemporaries, I was able to piece together in a couple of weeks the next stage of the
Caravan Bestiary’
s odyssey.

Andrea Gritti was nothing like his scholarly predecessor, Dandolo. Nor did he fit the austere profile of most doges. He was a womanizer, a carouser. A spy in his youth, he fathered at least three bastards on Turkish women and one on a nun who was his favorite mistress. He died at eighty-six, in December 1538, after feasting for two days on grilled eels and drinking a dozen flagons of cold wine. It was fifteen years earlier that he played a small but decisive role in the history of the
Caravan Bestiary.