The Bestiary (22 page)

Talmet also had a taste for opium, which Marczek shared to a lesser degree. At that time, opium was readily available in Venice by way of Turkey. One rainy night during the
acqua alta,
when Saint Mark’s shimmered like a lake and planks had been laid down on strategic byways, Marczek and I pulled on rubber boots and went off to meet Talmet at a private club.

Outside the Doge’s Palace we passed the statue of Saint Theodore, perched on a crocodile, spear in hand. Theodore was the original patron saint of Venice. The crocodile was his emblem. Venetians whose family histories go back a millennium celebrate the feast day of Saint Theodore, not Saint Mark. In a letter to Mr. Hood, updating him on my search, I asked if he knew that these Venetians claim it is Alexander the Great, not Saint Mark, who is entombed in the saint’s basilica. Supposedly the merchants who claimed to have smuggled Mark’s body (by all other accounts, it was cremated) from Alexandria to Venice had, in fact, carried off Alexander’s remains, which disappeared from their mausoleum at the same time.

The club was on the Rio dei Servi, near the Ghetto. The owner was a plump Libyan woman in a man’s suit. In the lounge some well-dressed men were drinking at a glass bar. There were private rooms, one of which we entered. It was lit by floor lamps with red bulbs. It took my eyes a moment to adjust. Then I saw Talmet on a couch with two African women. They were sharing a hookah. The women wore silk robes and hoop earrings. Their eyes were bloodshot. A familiar scent, the smoke was so cloying it closed up my throat.

Talmet greeted us with a raised hand.

We pulled up chairs and he passed the hookah. He introduced the women as Efazah and Sela, from the Ivory Coast. The opium went right to my head and I lost track of the conversation. Everything slowed down. The air was red and hazy. After a while, Talmet went over to a large bed with Efazah and Sela. Sela dropped her robe and lay down. She had small breasts and wide hips. Efazah unzipped Talmet’s fly and began working with her lips and fingers to make him hard. They all seemed far away, their features blurry. Time passed—a few minutes that seemed like an hour—and Talmet was naked himself, on top of Sela.

Marczek and I exchanged glances and stood up.

“Is that what he always does?” I asked, as we stepped back into the rain.

“The African girls?”

“The exhibitionism. As in screwing a woman with her daughter present.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Or maybe it’s just another Tantric belief.”

He shrugged. “This is the first time I have played witness—and I have smoked with him there before.”

I wasn’t sure I believed him, but what difference did it make? Going out on the town with Marczek was a welcome distraction from my work. Usually the entertainment he provided was not so sleazy. I doubt he was surprised on this occasion, but I was sure he wasn’t embarrassed. Short of murder, and doing harm to a child or an animal, he thought most everything ought to be permitted. “Because it will happen anyway,” he explained with irrefutable logic.

In the end, however, this part of his life interested me less than our evolving conversations at the monastery. My classics background intrigued Marczek; the more esoteric our conversations, the better. He picked my brain, just as he did anyone’s who was a specialist in some field. We might talk about the saltworks of ancient Venetia or Plutarch’s methodology as a biographer. But, increasingly, Marczek told me about Byron’s Venetian exploits. Byron lived in Venice from November 1816 to December 1819, when he turned thirty-one. His vices made Talmet’s pale in comparison: serial adultery, promiscuity with both sexes, incest. Byron had been driven into exile by scandal, specifically the fact he had fathered a child on his half sister. In Venice, unconstrained, he slept with countless women, from high society and low. A powerful swimmer, he often swam home from his late-night trysts by way of the Grand Canal, pushing before him a plank on which a candle burned while paddling with his free arm.

But Byron was no mere libertine. In the afternoon he bathed or rode his horse on the Lido. He took a season box at La Fenice, which in his letters he called “The Phenix.” From midnight to dawn, with iron discipline, he wrote the initial cantos of his masterpiece,
Don Juan.
Then, after a few hours’ sleep, he sailed to San Lazzaro to study Armenian, a notoriously difficult language. He wrote his publisher that he was doing this in order to sharpen his mind in the midst of his dissipations. A menagerist from his youth, he established a lively group on the ground floor of his villa: two monkeys, a silver fox, a bear, a mastiff, three cats, a Spanish-speaking parrot, and a pair of wolf cubs named Romulus and Remus. In his journal he noted that the bear liked to sing folk songs in Veneto dialect, the fox told him stories, and the monkeys danced on the terrace by moonlight. He transcribed one of the fox’s stories: a princess named Lucina each night took the form of a nightingale to evade her suitors until she lost all memory of her human life and flew deep into the forest, never to be seen again.
^*4

But it was Byron’s Armenian studies that grabbed my attention. With the monks, he had compiled the first English-Armenian grammar. In the oblong library, where we sat beneath an oil painting of the poet, Marczek stunned me one day when he unknowingly revealed that, in performing this obscure task, Byron had been a crucial link in the history of the
Caravan Bestiary
.

I
HAD NEVER DISCUSSED
the
Caravan Bestiary
with Marczek. Over the years, there were only a handful of people in my life with whom I had. From my first notebook entries as a schoolboy, it had been a very private quest. I certainly wasn’t the only person in the world who knew about the
Caravan Bestiary,
but I was proprietary about what knowledge I did possess. Whether or not the bestiary was something so grand as one missing element of a universal history, the key to a
gnosis
of massive proportions (in our times did that mean a vertiginous glimpse of millions of shards briefly unified?), I had also, for better or worse, treated it as a missing piece of my personal history. Maybe that was the point. The dream of finding it—the dream that it existed at all—may have been nothing more than that, yet it sustained me at times when my lack of a family, my choice of lovers, my duller pursuits could not. My search had always been a refuge: the notion of a parallel world, and the creatures that might inhabit it, helped me to tolerate the harsher disappointments—and worse—of this world.

Now I was about to confide in Marczek. As we sipped the monks’ black tea, he was telling me how Byron came to San Lazzaro, first as a tourist, then as a student of Armenian, and finally in the unlikely role of grammarian. The grammar was his idea, and his delighted host, the abbot Pasquale Aucher, an expert linguist, agreed to collaborate.

“For weeks,” Marczek explained, “Byron sat here compiling declension and conjugation tables and vocabulary lists. His principal contribution was to set down in plain English the intricate, shifting rules of Armenian syntax that make Hungarian look easy. He wrote a preface as well, which was found among his papers after his death. It reads like a polemic and was never published. He declared that the Scriptures place Paradise in Armenia and that it was ‘in Armenia that the Flood first abated, and the dove alighted.’ In slaughtering Armenians, he added, Persians and Turks ‘alike have desolated the region where God created man in his own image’ and where Noah went aground in his ark.” Marczek chuckled. “For a man caricatured as Lucifer in London newspapers, he sounds like a reactionary Christian. Though he agreed with Byron’s sentiments, Father Aucher thought them too incendiary for a grammar, and so he quietly scotched the preface. Byron was furious, but he still underwrote the book’s publication in England. In gratitude, the monks gave him access to the monastery’s collection of rare illuminated books, the largest in Venice. Father Aucher took him on a tour of the library, showing off its treasures. A first edition of the
Divina Commedia.
A copy of the
Lives of the Saints
that belonged to Machiavelli. Then he showed Byron an exceptionally beautiful book, large and thick, bound in purple, with gilt-edged pages. A golden sun divided into quadrants was embossed on the front cover; within the quadrants were a dragon, a phoenix, a manticore, and a tortoise. On the back cover, a nine-tailed fox, haloed by stars, was etched on a silver moon. This is how the abbot himself described it:

It is a book of fantastic beasts, those excluded from the Ark, and others, more obscure yet, still to be found across the World, hidden in shadows or basking in light.

“What’s the matter?” Marczek asked.

I shook my head. I couldn’t believe that, after all those years, I had just heard the
Caravan Bestiary
described—size, color, cover adornments—by someone who had actually handled it.

“You’ve heard of this book?” Marczek said.

I nodded and gazed around the room. “So this is where Pigafetta left it.”

“You know about him, too?”

“I know quite a bit about him.” I could barely contain my excitement. “Vartan, I’ve been trying to find the
Caravan Bestiary
for ten years.”

For once, Marczek was speechless.

“I’ll explain,” I said. “But, first, what else can you tell me?”

“I’ll start with this: the abbot provided clear directions to the book’s hiding place.”

“Here?”

“In this room.” He stood up. “I’ll show you.”

After all this time, I thought, is it going to be this easy? The answer was no.

“I’m afraid the book’s been gone for some time,” Marczek said, “but according to the abbot, it was concealed for several centuries in a hidden drawer in an oak desk.”

He led me to a desk I hadn’t even noticed before, in a dark corner of the library.

“Here, behind the nautical atlases,” he said, sliding the atlases aside, tripping a latch, and pushing open a panel. He pulled out a wide deep drawer, about five inches high. It was empty. I put my hand in and ran my fingertips over the wood. They came away coated with fine dust. Knowing the bestiary had been shut in there all that time gave me a chill; if I never got closer to it than that, I would still be grateful.

Marczek was watching me. “This book means so much to you,” he murmured.

“I need you to tell me everything you know about it. And everything you think Byron knew.”

He sat back, gathering his thoughts. “No other biographer has even mentioned it, so far as I know. The Armenian grammar is well known. But this bestiary is not even a footnote.”

“How did you learn of it?”

“Last month the abbot and I came on a box of papers Byron accumulated while laboring over the grammar. Between a fractured list of irregular verbs and a draft of his preface, he left a four-page, unfinished letter to his friend Douglas Kinnaird in London. That letter, dated November 1819, tells an amazing story, which I’ve been fleshing out ever since. According to Byron, Father Aucher told him the bestiary had been entrusted to the monastery three hundred years earlier by a Knight Hospitaller. The knight was journeying from Malta to Armenia when he fell ill and stopped in Venice, his native city. He was a famous mariner, who had in fact come home to die. Neither Father Aucher nor Byron had ever heard of Antonio Pigafetta. Aucher discovered the record of Pigafetta’s visit here in the official journal of one of his remote predecessors, an abbot named Father Léon. Léon wrote that on the night of January 9, 1535, in a biting wind, Pigafetta crossed the lagoon in a
caorlina
rowed by six oarsmen. He wore a black cape and hat. Fifty-one years old, he was sickly, and looked far older. The great event of his youth, the Magellan voyage, was far behind him. He prayed in the chapel with the monks. He declined supper and requested a pot of tea while he wrote through the night at a table in a visitor’s cell. At dawn he presented Father Léon with a long letter and a red velvet pouch adorned with his personal seal, a pair of lions back to back. Then he returned to the city. His letter began with the declaration that he was entrusting this pouch to the monastery, which he called the Venetian outpost of Armenia, the land of Eden and the Flood. He said the pouch contained a
most perfect work, which must be preserved and protected.
What Léon found inside was the
Caravan Bestiary.

“Three centuries later, aided by Léon’s distant successor, Byron sat at that oak desk working through the bestiary’s Greek. He was intrigued by the book’s premise and enamored of its vivid illustrations: the same gargoyles, griffins, and dragons that had always fascinated him on the parapets of British churches. He recalled the fabulous monsters in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
and Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso.
It is no coincidence, Xeno, that the chimera and the manticore appear in
Don Juan.
Still, Byron had scant knowledge of bestiaries. He told Kinnaird that the only bestiary he ever saw, at the Cavendish Library in Cambridge, was so imbued with moralizing that—predictably—it repelled him. Until he translated Pigafetta’s notes, Byron had no idea how rare the book before him was. Writing in Veneto dialect, Pigafetta provided a brief history of the
Caravan Bestiary
and recounted how it had come into his possession. He explained that because he deemed it a ‘living book,’ worked over by many hands, he had no compunctions about inserting an appendix of additional animals real and fantastical, but ‘unknown in Christendom,’ that he had encountered circumnavigating the globe.”