The Bestiary (21 page)

Gritti had shown as little interest in the bestiary as in the Bible beside which it was shelved in his wife’s library. Then, one stormy night in November 1523, a nobleman and Knight Hospitaller named Antonio Pigafetta paid his respects at the palace. Pigafetta was the most uniquely traveled Venetian of his time, outstripping even Marco Polo. A member of Ferdinand Magellan’s original crew of 270 who set out to circumnavigate the globe, Pigafetta had become a celebrity as one of the eighteen survivors who actually completed the voyage three years later, putting into port at Seville in a storm-battered ship, starving and half-naked. Magellan himself, hacked to death by tribes-men on the island of Mactan in the Philippines, was not among them. With a sharp eye and prodigious memory, Pigafetta had become the unofficial chronicler of Magellan’s voyage. Much celebrated, he made the rounds of the European courts—Portugal, Spain, France—before touching down in his native city. He presented Doge Gritti with a handwritten copy of his journal, filled with the marvels of unknown places: Brunei, a city built over salt water, like Venice; the island of Mindanao, where the warriors ate their enemies’ hearts raw, sprinkled with lemon juice; Tierra del Fuego, where eight-foot giants walked barefoot on ice and worshiped a volcano; Java, whose trees, harder than iron, produced leaves that came alive (they had feet and tails) when they fell to the ground. Pigafetta claimed to have kept one such leaf in a cage for nine days before it escaped. On the Malay peninsula he encountered a fish with a pig’s head, in Borneo parrots with mirrors for eyes, and in Loçan an “armored mule,” thickly plated, with hooves that shot sparks and iron teeth that dripped rust. On Sumatra he heard tales of the Garuda, that once a year flew to the sun and back.

In his
Memoirs,
Pigafetta recounts how, as a token of his appreciation, Gritti gave him the
Caravan Bestiary
to pass along to his Grand Master, Philippe de Villier. Having just been driven from Rhodes by the Turks, the Knights Hospitallers were temporarily headquartered in Italy. De Villier served Pope Clement VII, with whom Gritti wanted good relations. Making De Villier a gift like the bestiary could only help. But he never received it. Recognizing its worth, and knowing De Villier would see in it only something to peddle, Pigafetta kept the original of the bestiary and had a copy made for De Villier. Sure enough, De Villier took the copy to Prince Mehlenberg of Bavaria, who promptly purchased it for two thousand florins. Mehlenberg liked to bring distinguished scholars to his alpine estate. Among his other houseguests at that time was the Swiss naturalist Konrad Gesner. Gesner was famous for having translated the Lord’s Prayer into the world’s 130 known languages and compiled the first dictionary of the Gypsies’ language. Now he was embarked on his masterwork, a comprehensive
Historia Animalium,
in which he combined fact and fantasy as freely as Pliny the Elder. He promised to supply his readers with all the facts recorded, speculated on, or imagined about every animal known to man. Not surprisingly, Gesner was fascinated by the
Caravan Bestiary,
which he read under the watchful eye of Mehlenberg. Gesner mentions it but once in the
Historia,
but he pilfered from it extensively, as I discovered in the library at the Villa Ziane, reading Edward Topsell’s 1658 English translation. I came on descriptions of the catoblepas, that massive black bull with dragon scales and Gorgon eyes that turn men to stone; the Indian leucrotta, the swiftest animal on earth, with a lion’s torso, stag’s hindquarters, and horse’s head; and the Assyrian pazuzu, a harbinger of disease, with its human head, bird’s wings, and lion’s paws.

Pigafetta meanwhile took the original
Caravan Bestiary
to Malta. Then he returned to Venice for good. I was sure he must have brought along the bestiary, but upon his death it disappeared again. If not the book itself, I thought the key to its whereabouts must be in Venice. When I met a Hungarian count named Vartan Marczek at the Armenian monastery on the island of San Lazzaro one October morning, I wouldn’t have guessed that he was the one who held that key.

It was the first time I had visited San Lazzaro. My guide, a young monk, introduced me to Marczek, and we exchanged pleasantries before I continued my tour. Marczek was standing on a bench with outstretched palms, feeding bread crumbs to the peacocks that roamed the garden. With his skullcap and flowing hair, he gave a good imitation of Saint Francis of Assisi. But Marczek was no saint.

O
VER THE NEXT MONTH
I redoubled my research efforts, making day trips to Padua and Treviso, staying for several nights in Vicenza, riding the
rapido
to Genoa, pursuing leads that didn’t pan out. It was no longer Dandolo, but Pigafetta about whom I sought information. I discovered his exact place of birth (Vicenza), his parents’ names (Vitali and Zara), the Venetian sestiere in which he’d grown up (Santa Croce), and the fact his father had been a nautical engineer at the Arsenal; but what I needed, and couldn’t find, was information about his later years.

One afternoon, exhausted and bleary-eyed, I left the Villa Ziane and, on a whim, rode out to the Armenian monastery. San Lazzaro was one of the most peaceful places in the lagoon, and I thought a few hours there would help clear my head. The garden was empty. Bees were humming in the flowers, bitterns dipping through the reeds. I entered a small courtyard and came upon two monks dozing in the shade. Then I saw Count Marczek, book in hand, a pencil in his teeth, pacing around a bubbling fountain. I had been spending so much time alone, and had met so few people in the city, that I was immediately glad to see him. To my surprise, he remembered me, and invited me to join him for a cup of tea.

He spent most days at the monastery, reading in the library, feeding the peacocks, fishing off the pier with the monks. He wore the blue robe and slippers offered to guests of the abbot. Fifty years old, he had long gray hair and a thick moustache. From the waist up, he was built like a wrestler—barrel-chested, bulging neck muscles—but his legs were thin and his feet small for a man six three.

We fell into conversation, and over the next few weeks became friends and continued that conversation, talking away the afternoons before boarding the last vaporetto back to the city at dusk. Vartan Marczek was a raconteur of the old school, an excellent companion. He seemed to have been everywhere and done everything. I felt in him a kindred spirit, and a model, like Mr. Hood: someone with a deep and eclectic curiosity who had maintained, and refined, his enthusiasms into middle age. Like Mr. Hood, he was also generous with his time and knowledge. I felt lucky to have encountered both these men so early in my life. Though their temperaments and personal codes were different, other dissimilarities could be deceptive; that is, while on the surface Marczek might appear to have led a racier life, I knew Mr. Hood had been places Marczek could only imagine.

In the city Marczek tied his hair back in a ponytail and donned a wide-brimmed black hat, checkered scarf, and yellow cashmere coat. He wore a ring set with an oval of Pliocene amber in which an ant had been entombed. We went out for long dinners. Marczek was familiar with restaurants unusual for Venice: Afghan, Brazilian, the cuisine of Macao. He knew the names of maître d’s, waiters, coat-check girls. Gondoliers lounging at various
stazia
greeted him. He bantered with the hawkers at the Rialto Bridge, who called him Barone. He seemed to have countless acquaintances. Yet he made his home in Paris, and before this extended stay, he had seldom visited Venice for more than a week or two at a stretch.

For the past five years, Marczek had been writing a biography of Lord Byron for a French publisher. Previously he had published a biography of Georg Buchner and a bestseller entitled
Three Fascists: Céline, D’Annunzio Junger.
It was the latter’s success that enabled him to keep his publisher at bay while he dawdled, digressed, and complained that he would never finish the Byron book. In fact, he was nearly finished. A part of him didn’t want to be.

“I don’t want to leave him. For all his imperfections, I am smitten, like so many before me. As with any biography, there is the illusion that the whole, the real, story lies clearly before you, from birth to death, if only you approach it from the correct angle. Now, at the end, I can only wonder what I missed and how much I skewed that angle.”

He took notes in Hungarian—his native tongue—and wrote his text in French. He was an autodidact who could also speak English, German, Italian, Albanian, and Armenian. I had a facility with languages, but I was a piker compared to Marczek. He claimed that the blood of nearly every European nationality ran in his veins. His mother was half Czech, half Albanian, and his eyes lit up when I mentioned the Albanian lore I had learned from Evgénia: for example, the country’s “true name,” Shqipri, and the eagle myths created around the twin peaks of Mount Korab. He had inherited his title from his father.

“An earldom represented the lowest rung of royalty in the old Hungary. Still, my father had plenty of money to go around. But what the communists didn’t confiscate, he pissed away on women and gambling. He fled to Austria and secured a license to export beer to Hungary. When he died a few years later, he bequeathed me that license, which was worth a good deal more than his title, at least until the Hungarian government banned all imported beer.”

Marczek lived in a sprawling, drafty apartment off the Campo San Silvestro. Through tall windows, past the cupola on the Palazzo Barzizza, he had an eastward view of the Grand Canal. The furniture was sparse. Pyramids of books were strategically placed on the Persian rugs. When weather permitted, he worked at a table on the
altana,
the wooden platform on the roof where Venetian ladies once bleached their hair in the sun with a mixture of alum, Damascus soap, and burnt lead. Puffing Havana torpedoes, Marczek pecked away with two fingers on his pale green Olivetti. Researching Byron’s life, he had spent two years in England, six months in Greece and Albania, and now a year in Italy. These labors, and his library and archive excursions, were one side of his life—one I could relate to—but I sensed there was another, very different side, and I soon came to know it.

He threw elaborate parties, famous for their revolving sets of guests. Foreign academics, local literati, art restorers, models, musicians, con men, a Kabuki troupe. Strangers brought other strangers, and there were evenings when Marczek wasn’t acquainted with a single one of the dozens of people milling around the apartment. I believe he liked those times best. For all his outward sociability, he was an introvert, immersing himself for years in the lives of other men, and these parties were his way of letting go and stepping out of himself. He had a girlfriend named Oso. She was Japanese, twenty years his junior. She designed glassware. She had close-cropped hair and puffy cheeks and a full figure which she showed off with tight silk dresses and four-inch heels. She and Marczek conversed in Italian, and he liked to cook for her.

The first time Marczek had me over to dinner, Oso mixed us martinis. While he was cooking, she and I went up to the altana and watched the sun set across the lagoon. Back in the living room, she put on a record. Deep flute music filled the apartment.

“It’s a shakuhachi flute,” she said, joining me on the sofa. “In medieval Japan it was carved from tough root bamboo because the komuso, the priest-warriors who played it, were not permitted to carry swords. The flute is three feet long, and they used it both as a sacred instrument and a cudgel.”

“So they could attain satori and also bludgeon their enemies.”

“Exactly,” she smiled, spearing the olive in her glass.

Marczek’s inclinations as a biographer seemed to draw him to people whose lives were less a continuum than a jumble of conflicting incarnations. There was a former stunt pilot who had become an herbalist; a Bulgarian poet who—“like Rimbaud,” he boasted—sold armaments in the Third World; and, most outrageous, a defrocked Coptic priest named Talmet. Nearing sixty, he had lost his collar because of sexual indiscretions with married women in his parish. His bishop in Alexandria turned a blind eye until Talmet seduced a woman in her daughter’s bedroom—while the girl lay beside them. Talmet was short and compact, with restless blue eyes and a pallid smile. Soft-spoken, attentive, he seemed utterly sincere—and maybe he was. The kind of person you wouldn’t mind confessing to if confessions were something you did. He had become an astrologer to the rich. His work-place was impressive: a glass dome built atop the Palazzo Bernini by an amateur astronomer in 1870. While the stars blazed overhead, Talmet cast your horoscope. He also made housecalls. Once a month he held a séance. There were only twelve seats at the round black table, including his own. The waiting lists were long. Talmet had become rich himself. He was a collector now, a patron of the arts. But his true passion lay in patronizing the city’s call girls.

“He would have been happiest,” Marczek observed, “if he lived around 1600, when the courtesans here were members of the ruling class, as accomplished in music and poetry as they were in bed. He shares the Tantric belief that sex clears the channels of the body so the spirit can roam.”