Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (11 page)

Sometimes the Cirtovic men (there were six of them in addition to Jovo) would take over the “Heaven's Key” tavern behind the Ponterosso, get drunk and sing loud songs about the various methods in which they would like to kill Turks. Jovo never joined them there, although he met them frequently enough at his countinghouse, not to mention at church, together with their Serbian wives and children, beneath that gilded ceiling as round as the hyponome of a chambered nautilus. His own signora continued to wear a veil. No one even knew what to call her until a carpenter as longnosed and comical as Pulcinella announced that her name was Marija; Pulcinella's sister's cousin was a dressmaker who had measured this Marija, so it must be true. The Triestini were thrilled by his stupendous news. Just before Assumption Day another vendor of ancient Greek vases visited the Cirtovic residence, departing well satisfied. Captain Morelli treated him at the “Heaven's Key.” You wouldn't believe how much wine he could deduct from a bottle! Nor was the experiment profitable; for although he was looser-lipped than any fisherman's whore, for that very reason he had never gotten beyond the foyer, where Nicola, the master's eldest son (an unsatisfied youth, he opined), had received him beneath a grand portrait of Prince Lazar, offered him Turkish coffee (served by a veiled woman, evidently Marija Cirtovic's maid), summoned the strapping coachman to carry away the crates, then sat with him in almost unfriendly silence until Petar had returned with all the best pieces extracted, the compensation consisting of twelfth-century gold coins from Hungary, tiny as buttons, already counted out, the prices discounted not
unfairly (as the vendor himself admitted), but certainly without appeal. He thought he heard the signora upbraiding someone in the kitchen. (You know how all those Serbkinas are, he told his delighted listener.) Presently Cirtovic himself had appeared, to inquire after shards with writing on them. He sought a certain diagram by Pythagoras, and would pay more if the circles touched externally. The vendor nodded conscientiously, hoping to deceive him with future trash. Perhaps Captain Morelli knew some Greek who might collaborate in painting ochered circles? By the way, the vendor had ascertained that Cirtovic's granary held wheat right up to the roof!—more proof of their enemy's grandiosity, as all agreed over Friulian wine; by then there were a dozen Triestini present, all hoping to make a fool of Jovo Cirtovic. Sad to say, Captain Morelli was knifed in the guts a few nights later, and the vendor fled the city, either because he had done it or because he feared to be next. When asked what he thought about the murder, Cirtovic said it was a shame that so jovial a man had been lost. The Triestini lowered their eyes. For their next device, they hired a pretty harlot to approach their victim at his countinghouse; but he turned her over to his brother Florio, while his factor Captain Vasojevic (another closemouthed man) watched half-smiling from the second storey. She blabbed about Florio's habits, to be sure, but what the hell did they care about that adulterer?

Jovo Cirtovic never failed to give hospitality to a certain itinerant snowy-bearded bard with a well-tuned guzla. At the “Heaven's Key” the Triestini queried the old man as to the situations of rooms in the house, and where the coins were kept, and other such matters as good neighbors like to know about each other. Whenever the Cirtovices invited him to sing about the Battle of Kosovo, he got to observe the wife and daughters sewing around the hearth, beneath the smoking hams; and Cirtovic would be singing right along with him, haltingly accompanied by his sons. The imported servingmaid's name, he said, was Srdjana—a tonguetwister, laughed the Triestini. They kept some hope of waylaying her, but she rarely came out of the house. Fortunately, some sailors do talk, especially over Friulian wine. Cirtovic's mariners admitted freely that the Turkish bangles now shining on the wrists of their sweethearts came from Bar (their hosts, who promptly sought to trade there, fell mysteriously afoul of the Ragusan authorities), that their master's brothers
occasionally carried weapons and armaments into Serbia, and that Cirtovic owned better luck than any man they had heard of. As they already knew, he was a pious sort, who never failed to thank his saints. (By the way, Captain Vasojevic still refused to open his mouth.) One night the helmsman of the
Lazar
came by the “Heaven's Key”; after his seventh glass of Friulian red he refuted Archimedes's suppositions that a poppyseed-sized quantity of sand contains no more than ten thousand grains, and that the maximum possible diameter of the universe equals ten thousand times that of the earth, in which case the Sphere of Fixed Stars would be two hundred and fifty thousand stadia from Trieste, straight up—a decade's journey, perhaps, depending on solar storms. After the twelfth glass, the helmsman grew confiding, and informed them with a childlike smile that granted fair lunar winds and adherence to certain timetables, the voyage could be made within half a year. Laughing, the purser (now into his seventeenth glass) put in that even if the excess of death can be added to itself, which he doubted, and indeed Cirtovic upheld him in his skepticism, then, with the aid of the Mother of God, something could presently be accomplished to the betterment of the Christian world. Then he fell asleep, but in the helmsman's eyes shone an ideal like dawn light beyond the trees. The Triestini drunks agreed that these sailors knew more geography than anyone else; even the cook of the
Lazar,
who was formerly one of their own even though his uncle had apprenticed him out at Muggia, began after his sixth glass to discourse on matters beyond his station; he asked whether they had ever heard celestial music; and then, when they gaped at him, traced out with his fat forefinger the planetary orbits as drawn in the manuscript of Gjin Gazulli. Of course cooks, having food always within reach, find more time to think than other people; hence his remarks proved nothing, especially given the magical powers of the Friulian vintage—which meanwhile transformed itself ever more into gold and silver, until Jovo Cirtovic had risen out of envy's sight. Sitting at his high wooden desk, which resembled the altar to which a judge ascends in order to sacrifice still another poor man to justice, he concealed himself behind a wall of ledgers. Occasionally the clerks overheard the thump of one of his roundhandled stamps. He sealed his documents himself, and kept the seal in his pocket.

Above Trieste's harbor, fig-jungles sometimes shade the walls which
guide informed persons to arched tunnel-streets where this or that mansion broods; and from that one such reclusive edifice in which Cirtovic ensconced his wife, a good Orthodox woman who never went out, there sprang pairs and trios of lovely girls who could very occasionally be glimpsed strolling rapidly (never unchaperoned) through September's falling leaves. They wore more transparent veils than their mother, but traditional daggers rode at their hips. And there were the sons, Nicola, Vuk and Veljko; they could readily be met with in the harbor, and gave off no such uncanny an impression as their father, who had been overheard saying: Only knowledge will save you, boys!—They too had learned Glagolitic, it appeared, although what good that did them could not be fathomed, since no one managed to get them drunk. Between them and their uncles lay a shallow cordiality, with countercurrents. It might be that the sons anticipated some struggle as to who would control the business after their father. Stefano and Cristoforo Cirtovic sometimes carried them to Odessa or Marseilles, teaching them how to run with quartering winds, when to luff a ship and how to flog men for duty ill done, but perhaps their father had spoiled them, for around the port went the word that they were dependent although manly enough, unenterprising if admittedly unretiring. As for their sisters, Gordana, the plainest, for reasons which might have had to do with wine-barrels, wedded a cooper and presently removed with him up into the karst country; but the next few were sent back to Serbia to marry, departing in closed ships. Given the downtrodden state of his home country, which he himself had abandoned, Cirtovic, onlookers supposed, should have imposed upon his children kinder destinies. Once again, a sailor or two did talk; certain uncles were the brides' conductors and wedding-guests, and they returned with stories; that was how the Triestini learned what in any case they expected: that each bride, decently (and opulently) veiled, of course, was met by a lot of powerfully proportioned, bearded, piratical-looking Serbs. At least the young ladies would be well defended! The Triestino dandies who stood outside San Giusto Cathedral, flourishing their spyglasses to inspect the girls who promenaded below, would scarcely have scraped up the luck to see the Cirtovic females in any event—for one thing, the Orthodox church held masses at other times—but why should that prevent young men from uplifting their foreheads in resentment
at the loss of so much nubility? At the Communions of each other's children, Cirtovic's oldest captains (most of whom were Roman Catholic) sat at table in their best white shirts, with their spectacles slipping down their noses and their faces red with Friulian wine while between forkfuls of fried squid—the one dish, by the way, which the aforesaid Cirtovic disdained—they argued about their master's deeds and habits, but until the Serbia-bound damsels had all been spoken for, no one outside the family, save only Captain Vasojevic, even knew how many girl-children Jovo Cirtovic possessed. (The reason was that his daughters were his jewels.) Creeping over the wall on Saint Lazzaro's Eve
*
(having tranquilized the watchdogs with balls of fish-guts soaked in Friulian wine), our late Captain Morelli's brother Luca, together with three other zealous defenders of Italian privilege, saw Cirtovic taking out his scales, the daughters embroidering their wedding-stuffs by the lattice window, and the signora standing in her long gold-embroidered dress of white linen and the tight-cinched tarnished belt and square-topped headdress. Then they heard the carriage; an uncle and all three brothers were arriving with Petar. So they fled, resuming the safer if less fruitful practice of importuning Captain Vasojevic over Friulian wine.— In heaven's name, leave his business to him! said that loyal individual. All they wanted was a story, any story, they pleaded. Weren't they all friends? Well, then, said Vasojevic, and he prayed to the Mother of God that this would gratify their lust for entertainment, he remembered waiting upon his master one evening in Ragusa, some years ago, when Cirtovic still voyaged in person, Ragusa profitable, and Vasojevic himself no more than a promising subaltern. Behind the black-gratinged windows of a marble house, orange light suddenly shone out, as if a cat had opened his eyes. Then Cirtovic emerged smiling. Vasojevic was to return immediately to the
Lazar,
there to take delivery of seven fancy inlaid trunks, which arrived within the hour. Obeying his instructions, he inspected these items for damages. They were dowry chests. He paid the carter, and added a tip from his own pocket. Another toast to Prince Lazar! In due course they were all unloaded in Trieste, and by nightfall Petar had conveyed them up the hill. That was all Vasojevic would say, and of course there might
now be more or fewer daughters—in 1726, that voyage must have been, although it could have been 1727; either way, it was before the Sultan got dragged down from the sky. Now there was a new Sultan, and Vasojevic and Cirtovic both kept getting richer. How did they do it? A certain Captain Robert (whom the master promptly discharged for speaking out of turn) got drunk, and so, leaning in around him over those tiny blue-covered tables at the “Heaven's Key,” the Triestini got to hear about the time that the Ragusans sought to punish Cirtovic for unlicensed trade, and he looked, not into each face but away from each, as if something warned him, until by infallible default he lighted on the most corruptible man. This gave rise to much discussion first of satanic powers, and secondly of hellfire, which these drinkers certainly carried within their own hearts. About their enemy, as usual, nothing was concluded, and meanwhile one of his agents rented a stable, filled it with Arabian horses offloaded from the
Sava
, and sold them all, very dear, to dukes, mercenaries and ruiners of servingmaids.

The Triestini were aware that in certain walled cities of the Istrian archipelago there dwelled persons so wealthy that their stonemasons might inscribe the following in their names:
Receive, Our Father, this little church as a present.
Captain Vasojevic was now believed to secrete a hoard of silver somewhere in his house, although the night-burglars who investigated this supposition found nothing but death. Captain Robert and Luca Morelli (who never made captain) had to pay off three new widows. In fine, the other merchants' attempts to find out, emulate or ruin these Serbs remained as crude as the shield and letters on a fifteenth-century gold coin of King Sigismund. Cirtovic knew how to hide whatever mattered.

He certainly kept his daughters sequestered, all right—not that other men didn't do the same in every petty kingdom of Italy. A few of the dandies still hoped vainly. One remained single all his life on a girl's account. His name was Alberto. A night came when he wavered, for his best friends Fabio and Marco invited him to hear the singer Emanuela, by whom many ladies were annoyed because she demanded silence, silence, which is not necessarily a condition appropriate to people who are sipping wine together. She wore a long tight crimson robe whose gold buttons marched all the way down. The way she could enclose her fingers
around certain words of her songs was something no one had ever witnessed before. She was said to be forty-seven but looked older. When she sang, three little beggar-girls who lived in the street began dancing and fanning themselves with branches; and the sky over Trieste became a domed ceiling with a golden snowflake-sun in the center, connected to many crowned Graces who balanced all longings and judgments upon their pretty heads. Most of the men watched this Emanuela submissively, and when each song ended there were those who wiped their eyes. Alberto was nearly enchanted. The women (who they were you can work out for yourself) shrugged at the floor, wiggling their fingers or whispering to the men who sat beside them. If the whispers got loud, Emanuela would stare at them with her sunken, glittering eyes. Alberto, I repeat, remained almost enchanted, but failed to expel his desire for Cirtovic's daughters, and particularly for the youngest, whose name he had once overheard, and indeed, possibly misheard, as Tanya. In his hot sad life her image was as shade-rich as a grape arbor. Even as an old man, walking slowly with his hands behind his back, he annoyed others with his praises of a certain Tanyotchka, whom nobody else remembered, although in fact she still lived, and promenaded every day between church and hill, dressed in black. When he closed his eyes, Alberto, who did not recognize her, seemed to see the hollows of her white back, and rain was running down her shoulders. Opening his eyes, he sought out whitenesses in the sky to match her, but these proved all too grey or too blue. Just as a woman's heel rises away from her sandal when she takes a step, showing for an instant a bit of sole whose pallor proves its kinship to white tubers and other such things which ordinarily live concealed, so this old man's otherwise sun-tanned fantasies and illusions rebelliously bedecked themselves with the onion-jewels of the unknown. Thus he fell out of time, like a certain skull which anyone who can obey the obscure visiting hours is welcome to see in the Antiquarium; this skull is crumpled like a deflated gas mask from the First World War, the latter's metal-rimmed goggles gaping, the former's eye-sockets decorated with mineral stains. Who are you, skull? Whom did you love? Tanyotchka, Tanyotchka. Perhaps it was to placate people of his sort that Tanyotchka's father Italianized his surname to Cirtovich. Although Captain Vasojevic declined to adopt that fashion, most Triestine Serbs accommodated themselves
sooner or later. For example, I remember once unearthing a barely yellowed albumen print of Darinka Kvekich, dated circa 1860; she was bell-shaped in her immense skirt with ribs of pale embroidery; her exotic femininity was walled like a sailing ship. A Genovese notary who occasionally came to call was astonished at how rarely she appeared, although her tactful servingwoman explained: Every day she takes care of her very ill sister and of her other sister who is a little less ill.— But then where
are
these sisters?— The servingwoman smiled sadly.— Sweet Darinka, said the notary, I need to know how much you love me.— Indefinitely, she replied.