Sofia (3 page)

When the world sees us as individuals, it robs us. “So much may you do,” it says, “but no more. No more as an untried youth, the lesser son of a lesser son. Or as a woman.” But take all of that from a man’s face—what freedom is there! And power.

I felt a thrill and turned to my uncle for his approval, the first time since I’d climbed the plane tree that other things besides “Saint Sebastian’s Day” set my heart to skipping.

Even as he frowned the lips below his simple black band in a thoughtful nod at my sudden erasure, the bells of Venice began to ring all about us. The bird flight across the clear glass panes darted faster now, as if the gulls and pigeons were evensong made corporeal.

“There. It is time we were going,” my uncle said. He took our two evening capes up off the bed and tossed me mine.

We stopped by briefly to beg, unsuccessfully, that Husayn in the next room should join us. He was such a good old friend of the family that we could never see him put up with the rest of his kind under the watchful eye of Messer Marc Antonio Barbaro. But it was wiser for us to ignore a Carnival recklessness, as Husayn always managed to do, and to remember that he was a Muslim passing as a Christian. He was good at his cover, but every time church bells rang, you could see he was hearing the muezzin’s call. His face betraved a certain longing that might be called homesickness, or merely an ache in the knee joints to sink onto a carpet facing Mecca once more. The less Venice saw of that, the more serene the Republic could remain.

So we left Husayn with his ledgers and went on our way, stopping only once more to pick up our black Piero from the servants’ quarters. We would need him to bear the torch on our return.

We began to wish Piero had taken a torch from the bracket at home. Dark came early these winter evenings. A storm was blowing in off the lagoon and it began to drizzle, extinguishing all but the most stalwart of the shrine votives. Venice’s alleyways were usually quite well illuminated by these public displavs of piety. Now we passed only a few ghostly Madonnas, shivering before the blast.

The very stones of Venice seemed to be weeping, the wood loosed the smell of damp rot. The canals pockmarked in the twilight, the stairs on the bridges over them grew slick. The low arches we passed under were some cover, but ghostly light thrown up from the water danced on the corbels of their roofs. It was a night for the closed cab of a gondola, but as a mariner, my uncle took hard ground when he could get it, even when it meant, as it did that night, going the long way round.

“Though I am hard pressed to call Venice
terra firma
under any circumstances,” he quipped. In several places, the dark water had begun to lap its way up into flagstone yards and piazzas.

We came at last to the palace of my dead mother’s kin, the Foscari. I did not know this center of wealth and power well, these four stories of imposing red brick. The Foscari lords hoped that an occasional invitation to such events would be enough to discharge their familial obligations to us. And if we were at sea when the summons came, all the better for them, pity for me.

The manservant in brilliant scarlet livery who opened the door failed at first to recognize my name. My uncle exchanged a glance with me. Even masked, that glance urged long suffering. I silently swore, as I had done so many times, that someday with heaven’s help I would put the Foscari in their place and make them recognize me.

“No wonder Venice is so full of public demands of heaven, lining their alleys with votives.” This murmur into my uncle’s ear was as close as I could come to long suffering when at last the door closed at our backs and we were relieved of our wet wraps. “Perhaps I should buy a candle and make such a compact with heaven tomorrow. Do you think that would help them remember my name?”

Uncle Jacopo smiled and gestured for restraint as we entered the Foscari lobby, rich with paintings by Bellini and Titian at which it would not be good manners to gawk as closely as I wanted to. I did fully intend to make such a vow. But that is one more youthful resolution I never got around to doing.

My Foscari uncles had footed a play in their own private theater that night, something to give Carnival a shove off its moorings of Christmas and Epiphany. The prologue had already begun as Uncle Jacopo and I slipped into our seats on the left-hand side of a tiered arrangement that bracketed the stage on three sides. We might have received scowls for our tardiness, except for the fact that this was Venice and many others were even later. In our masks, we might have been the Doge and his nephew for all the others knew.

And this thought set my mind stirring in its old direction again. “Do you think, Uncle—?” I sued into his ear. “Do you think there’s a chance Baffo’s daughter might—?”

“We must think of her as any other package of goods we are hired to carry,” he replied firmly.

No one scowled at our talk, for no one in the audience kept quiet if it didn’t suit them. In general, they carried on a lively chatter among themselves, slapped down tin playing cards, ventured at dice, and even brawled. And scarlet-liveried servants mingled, offering drinks, antipasti, and tasseled cushions to keep the feet off the cold marble floor. The production on stage was, in fact, hardly more than the background, like a group of instrumentalists set up on a balcony over the conviviality in a sitting room.

It was a new play. I’ve forgotten the author if, indeed, it had one and was not a joint effort of the cast. I didn’t take long to get the gist of the plot. The characters were those familiar to us from
commedia dell’arte
. Their relationships were the same, as it must be with any set of caricatures. Only their surroundings were novel, and the smell of fresh scenery paint made me worry for the actor’s costumes any time they passed too close to the rear flats.

My uncle read my thoughts through the mask at the first entrance of our young female lead, Columbine. “We must give our cargo the care of uncut jewels,” he counseled, “but ignore her like salted fish.”

Our sweet maid Columbine did not undergo her perils in Italy as usual. She had been kidnapped from the bosom of her

family and spirited away to the harem of the Turkish Sultan, a part Pantalone took on himself in a leering mask, familiar for all its darkness and token turban. And of course it was up to Harlequin, the blustering Captain, and their friends to save her with lots of slapstick, pies in the face, and tying the Pantalone-Sultan up in his own turban “for Saint Mark and for Venice!” No matter how distracted the audience was with themselves, the expression of these sentiments never failed to elicit applause and a cheer, so it was repeated, frequently and loudly from the stage.

“I am glad Husayn stayed home,” I told Uncle Jacopo.

I was struck at once by the strange fascination the transport of familiar characters to this exotic setting had on my fellow countrymen. The Sultan was an adversary at whose discomfort any Venetian could cheer. But the spectacle of scores of beautiful, nubile, totally dependent, submissive young women bored to voraciousness answered some deeper fantasy.
This says more about what we wish for out womenfolk
, I thought,
than about the barbarousness of our enemy
.

And presented by the illusion of harem walls on stage, the afternoon’s scene in the convent garden wouldn’t leave me.

“Corfu is not such a long journey,” Uncle Jacopo said in sympathy.

Having established the plot so it no longer required my undivided attention, I remarked how odd it was that actors in masks should be playing for an audience equally, if not more heavily, masked. Who had the greater persona to create? The most to hide? I remembered the surge of power I’d felt when I’d first let the mask obliterate my features. The power an actor has to commit gross fooleries on stage and yet risk no censure when he returns to normal life.

Even more than the actors’ power, however, was the power to see without being seen, the power of an omniscient audience who knew that Harlequin was concealed behind that screen, when the Sultan did not.

The fact that our familiar Columbine added to her lacy pink mask the effigy of a Turkish lady’s veils made me take one more leap of association. What if the harem was not at all how we wished it could be for our lecherous old Pantalones?

“What do Turkish women feel when they drape their faces beyond the profane gaze and escaped the trap of individuality?” I asked.

My uncle laughed out loud, but only shrugged. “Your afternoon has turned your head. You can never know what any woman is thinking. Turkish women might not exist for all we may fathom them. And for your information, the same holds true for Baffo’s daughter.”

I had been with my uncle to the lands of the infidel. I liked our friend Husayn, knew him to be no barbarian. But it occurred to me that my mind brought nothing—nothing at all beyond these same lecherous imaginings that were the product of my culture, not theirs—when I tried to conjure with the words “women of the Ottomans.” The women I knew in Constantinople were all Europeans—wives of colleagues. And the whores my uncle frequented, who gave him his disease. Women who’d found their profession too congested here and sought advancement on foreign shores.

They were never spoken of, Turkish women, certainly not paraded on stage like this. I’d never seen a Turkish woman that I could recall. Perhaps they all had two heads and that monstrosity was what the flitting grilles and passing sedans camouflaged. Perhaps it was some other secret. Great, unearthly beauty my countrymen liked to believe. What about influence? Power?

The Turks did have shadow puppets. I remembered seeing a shadow play in a public square in Constantinople once. The characters seemed to be the same stock figures we knew in Venice. There had been women—shrewish old ones; fair, sweet young ones. That was all they were—figures in a shadow play. But suppose that is what I was to them? All men were to them, seen through their screens? And who was pulling the strings?

The rows of candlelight in Venice’s alleys told me that— for all their bruit, their annual presumption to take the Adriatic as a bride, their masks and lavish spectacles—even the Foscari, the greatest of my countrymen, were never fully confident they ruled the world.

I remembered the feeling of power hiding my face had given me—continued to give me as I looked brazenly about that evening’s assembly. I let my eyes rove where they would, on bosom or codpiece, on pompous righteousness or untrammeled debauchery, never bothering to censor my thoughts lest they register in my face. Suppose Turkish women had that same freedom not just on Carnival nights but all day, every day, from birth—

God above! What was I thinking? The last thing on earth I wanted to be was a woman!

“Still to understand them—” I tried to tempt my uncle.

Action on the stage distracted my musings at this point. No piece of brilliantly rehearsed staging, but an unforeseen blunder produced the sudden general guffaw. It caught everyone off guard and prohibited further advancement of the plot while even the actors struggled with tears of mirth under their visors.

Our Columbine was guarded by a great buffoon of a eunuch. I knew the man playing the part. No amount of makeup or yards of silk costuming could hide his bulk. He was my maternal uncles’ gondolier, called in to play this bit part for which physique and a gregarious personality if not his booming bass recommended him. Had I come upon him out of context, I might not have recognized the face, but the gondolier’s girdle of muscle added to the girth around his hips would have betrayed his occupation anywhere. And I had seen him often enough bellowing out his soulful lyrics as he poled the gold-trimmed launch with the Foscari crest about the Serene City. The Council had spent a lot of time ruing the extravagance of our nobility’s gondolas, but at this date they had not yet brought themselves to condemn us all by edict to a uniform and somber black.

I knew the poleman easily now as he took the brunt of a tightly rehearsed dialogue focusing on the words “capon” and “pruned” and “gelded,” as all the while he lamented his state in the face of our beauteous Columbine. I squirmed in my seat at the very thought of such a handicap.

I was not the only one who recognized the gondolier-eunuch. A two-year-old hovering beyond the lamp glow did as well, escaped his keepers and toddled up onto stage, chirping “Papa! Papa!” as tickled as could be.

Once the illusion was broken this far, everyone suddenly remembered that this man was the father not only of a two-year-old, but often others.

“His wife,” I overheard from neighbors, “prays daily for Santa Monica to spare her that gondolier’s virile embrace.”

When he could no longer ignore the tugging on his robe, the great man bent down and acknowledged his offspring, swept him up into his arms and accepted the “Papa!” adulation until the child’s mother, visibly expectant yet once again, struggled up to reclaim her child, a peck on the cheek from her husband and the bawdy cheers of the audience.

Eventually, the scene crumbled to a conclusion. So enthralling had the whole comedy been for some minutes that it took me quite by surprise to return to myself and discover a hand on my knee. It was slowly working its way higher.

Flesh showed above the black of my uncle’s mask as he raised his brows in a quizzical expression. He, too, was conscious of the liberties being taken upon my person by the unknown masked figure that had appeared suddenly in the seat on my other side. If my uncle did not complain, how could I?

She was a tall, slender vision in burgundy velvet with quantities of jewels, beyond price but unmatched, on her hands, neck, and waist. Her wide square decollete was filled with the finest lace worked in gold thread, her black hair draped in cutwork, but her face was a mystery, hidden behind a moiré burgundy mask trimmed in the same gold lace. In this she was perfectly Venetian: the laws of our city forbid any noblewoman to appear in more than one color, exempting gold or silver used as trim. To my mind, this law enforced good taste, which might otherwise have descended to a Harlequin patchwork of gaud.