Altai: A Novel (3 page)

5.

I wandered aimlessly, in the places of the city I thought of as home, wherever my legs might take me. I thought of the people I would have to make pay, first with pain, then with their lives. I wondered about the meaning of the Consigliere’s words, winnowing names and faces. I was determined not to disappoint him: No one would ever want to disappoint Bartolomeo Nordio. However, I had no name that matched the characteristics of the perfect culprit as they had just been outlined to me.

I set off, heading down the Ruga Rialto and cutting through the
calli
, impelled by the gravity of my thoughts. On the Riva del Vin I stopped to look at the canal, the boats, the chaos of people, and to listen to the voices. I had to solve the riddle. I had to come up with a name. As I walked, I realized that my feet were taking me in a precise direction. Arianna, like her namesake, had unspooled her invisible thread, and I, half unaware, had followed it.

I found myself in Calle del Paradiso, outside a door that I knew very well. I knocked until the maid opened up. She saw me, nodded in greeting and climbed the stairs. She was going to announce my presence to her mistress.

Arianna welcomed me with an expression of faint surprise. The smile on her freckled face was cheerful. “I wasn’t expecting you. But your visit fills me with joy.” She surveyed me from head to toe. “You look glum. What’s up?”

“The whole of Venice knows what’s up. But I will tell you afterward.”

I wasn’t the best of lovers that day. Too hasty, too brutal. I drank from her lips like a man parched by the August sun. I pounced on her full, heavy breasts like a hungry man on loaves of bread. I agitated her hips like a drunk shaking a bottle to get at the last drop.

My courtesan, besides, wasn’t the best in the universe just then. Perhaps, I thought, she could sense my unease.

As God willed, the embrace came to an end.

“Now tell me what’s wrong.”

I looked at the woman. She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Blonde, curly hair; dark, shining eyes. She had been one of the best-known courtesans in Venice before she became mine alone. For some years I had been the only one who paid for her services. My condition prevented me from visiting brothels, where rumors spread like wildfire. Arianna kept me out of trouble.

“I have to find a culprit for the fire at the Arsenal. Someone up to the job. It’s irrelevant whether he really organized or committed the crime.”

“A scapegoat,” she said.

“Exactly.”

“We’re often called to do things we don’t want to do,” she said, or at least I thought she did. I was barely listening to her, thinking out loud.

“I need a perfect culprit to feed to the people of Venice. Consigliere Nordio is thinking of a man with a double life, because he says the man has to be beyond suspicion.”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I turned my boss’s words around in my head, trying to enter them from all sides, to grasp their every implication.

Beyond suspicion.

Someone with a sufficiently elevated position.

Someone with a secret, an impostor.

I felt the warmth of my lover close to me.

Beyond suspicion.

I looked at Arianna. She smiled, uncertainly. Furtively, swiftly, she checked the door. It just took a moment. I looked down.

A secret.

My flaccid penis dangling to one side.

An impostor.

A penis without a foreskin.

A Jew.

A wave of horror ran through me. I suddenly turned to Arianna: she had hidden her face with her arms. I leaped to my feet and ran to the window that faced the
calle
. I glanced through the crack between the shutters.

Five guards were waiting outside the front door. I recognized two of them. My most trusted men. Gualberto Rizzi and Marco Tavosanis.

They owed everything to me. So, they were the most likely to want to get me. Men hate their benefactors. Do somebody a favor and nine times out of ten you’ll make an implacable enemy.

My lover had withdrawn to the end of the bed and covered herself with the sheet. Fear assumed the garb of modesty. Her eyes were moist. “They forced me—they did, Emanuele. Against my very will.” My lover, the only person I trusted, had sold the secret of my origins. Strip down Emanuele and you will find
Manuel
, the Jewish boy from Ragusa across the Adriatic.

They needed a culprit for the storm
et tulerunt me
, the Jew, the impostor, the liar,
et stabit Venetia a fervore suo
.

Hurry downstairs, confront the bastards in plain view. Counting on surprise and on my dagger, I could overpower two or three men, but not all of them.

Flight isn’t running full tilt with other people after you. Flight is disappearance.

Arianna came a few feet toward me, letting the sheet fall. Her face was anxious, but resolute. “They won’t get you if you do as I say. There’s a passageway that leads to the house next door, which is uninhabited. From there you can escape through the back way.”

For a moment I stood firmly on the spot. Then I got moving.

6.

God had shown me at least a hint of compassion, in that I escaped the hands of Rizzi and Tavosanis. Hands that had acted at my command and now wanted to take my freedom and my life. Hands that were the fist and the claws of the inquisitor, as I had been the eyes, ears, and tongue on the cobbles and the water of Venice.

The sky was dark, the wind was coming in from the northeast and the summer was being carried away. I walked along the
calli
that I would no longer call home. As a piece of gravel forms a cyst under your skin after a nasty fall, and can only be removed with an incision, and the stone comes out along with blood—so Venice spewed me out.

People were noticing me. I had to stop walking so quickly, stop looking over my shoulder. I was a fugitive, and my body announced as much. Someone pointed at me, but I had already turned the corner, I was running, another corner, yet another, and at last I started walking again, because no one was coming after me. I had to keep a clear head and think.

I couldn’t go back to my house. Without a doubt, they would be keeping an eye on it. No, I had to disappear very quickly. There wasn’t much money in my pocket, just enough to leave the city, but I had a substantial sum at the Braun Bank, at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. It was money set aside for a rainy day, and the rainy day had arrived. I had entrusted it to a German banker to keep it far from prying eyes.

I quickened my pace again and headed for the Rialto. The need to move toward the interior of the city did battle with my instinct to reach the sea, a boat, safety. I forced myself to stay calm, as cold as I was when I questioned suspects. I took a course through the less busy
calli
, and when I emerged near the Fondaco I waited for a few minutes before edging toward the front door of the building with my back to the wall. A few cautious steps and I froze again. Something was holding me back—a sensation, a premonition based on my years of experience in the field. How many times had I trailed a spy or a troublemaker? I flattened myself into a doorway, covered by the bustle of carts and porters. Amid the ceaseless movement of goods, the eye could spot immobility.

The first of them was standing in the corner of a
calle
, leaning against the wall. He was looking around very slowly, observing everyone who passed in front of him.

The second was right beside the entrance. A dark cape fell from his shoulders and covered him entirely, hiding possible weapons.

There was also a third. There’s always a third. I hadn’t noticed him immediately because he was just a few feet away from me. He was checking the length of street separating me from the front door.

I waited for him to turn his head in the other direction, then slipped from my hiding place and turned back, into the dark innards of Venice, away, far from the death that lay in wait for me, away, feet flying on the cobbles, free to obey my instinct to flee.

A gold chain with a medal hung on my chest. A gift from my father: on one side the Holy Cross, on the other the Lion of Saint Mark, with its book closed and sword unsheathed. The war banner of the fleet.

War. The Republic had declared war on Emanuele De Zante, its faithful servant.

Betrayed servant. Treacherous servant. Fugitive.

I could convert the medal into small change, wherever fate happened to take me.

The most important thing was to flee. I would think of everything else afterward.

I reached a jetty and bargained briefly, letting the gondolier have more money than he expected. The gondola moved, while music from strolling players drifted across from the land. We slipped around the long loop of the Grand Canal into a leaden afternoon, harbinger of autumn. The ceaseless activity that animated the city hadn’t yet subsided. Boats plowed the water; men busied themselves on the shore.

Nostalgia, regret and rage pressed my heart, gripped my throat and tied my guts in a knot. The
palazzi
slipped past, half hidden in the darkness. Rather than making them out clearly, I was merely aware of their massive presence. Memory filled the gaps that the eye couldn’t pierce. Every image that appeared in my mind carved a furrow in my soul. The notes that had greeted my departure rang out still.

So it was that I abandoned Venice, sure that I would never see her again.

7.

“
Ti volir cunciar partida, Tuota?
”

Those were the words, after days of rough silence spent in a corner of the world where the Po, as if drunk, twists and snakes before hurling itself into the sea. I accompanied them with a twisted smile on my weary, muddy face, my right hand seeming to ask for alms but in reality showing the dice—the things least expected in the middle of a bog. I’d fashioned them from the wood of a dead poplar tree, carving in the numbers with the tip of my knife: I, II, III, IV, V and VI. No more than a joke, a trinket, my notion of a comical greeting to the man I might meet. The man who had been like a father to me.

“You want to play, Tuota?” You want to play these dice with me? Fate, who carried me in the palm of her hand yesterday, now thwarts me, grips and squeezes me like a rotten apple. All of a sudden, I, a Venetian gentleman, find myself once more a fugitive Jew, and accused of betraying the Republic. My feet are in the mud and the phrase whirls around in my head. “
Ti volir cunciar partida, Tuota?
You want to play?”

Just like that, in the bastard language that foreigners used in every port on the Mediterranean from Genoa to Tripoli, from Smyrna to Gibraltar. The lingua franca of corsairs, merchants, smugglers; the language of every illicit trade, even here, among the reeds, to the hoots of the owls, on an island in the Po. In that marshland the river goes mad, on that last mile it touches the apex of desire, yearning to be extinguished in the great gulf’s embrace. It loses its senses and loses itself in labyrinths, mad hybrids of land and water.

There, in a tumbledown shack, I had hidden after leaving Venice. I was as crazy as the river, and no less confused, but I knew that sooner or later a boat would come, and on that boat there would be outlaws.

I knew, because for a while I’d been with them. I’d been
one
of them.

And here I was, with those rough dice in my hand, in front of me the boat, a
batana
, and on that
batana
was Tuota. The moon lit it up to let me look at him, and he, too, looked at me.

“You’re a mighty brave man to show your face here, in this place, in this way,” the
vegliotto
said in his language. “I barely recognized you. You only just escaped dying like a dog.”

He certainly couldn’t have forgiven me, and the surprise, my appearance, my little joke, everything seemed likely to rake up old grudges.

“I’m a fugitive, Tuota. Venice wants me dead.”

Tuone Jurman shook his head, as he did when I erred on the side of naïveté as a little boy. Age didn’t seem to have left its mark on his face, apart from his beard, now gray. Tuone Jurman. Tuota.

I wanted to tell him about the years when we had been apart, and about what had happened to me a few days before. Tell him about my secret life, my shady responsibilities.

Perhaps, at first, he would have listened to me while pretending to do something else: peer through the reeds, look for lights along the shore, mutter orders to the two men who were assisting him. I didn’t know either of them; they were very young. Then, when I went into details about my second life—or was it my third?—who knows what the old smuggler might have done? Perhaps he would have thrown me into the water, after first cutting my throat with his fish knife. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he would have humiliated me with serious, silent contempt.

I told him nothing, and he asked no questions. He didn’t ask why I wanted to go back to Ragusa, of all places—a city of memories and spies, of streets where eyes and ears might recognize me and of inns where mouths might give me away. I, on the other hand, had asked myself, during my days of solitude, Why Ragusa, still so close to the jaws of the lion?

The answer was him: Tuone Jurman.

My mother had arranged for me to be brought up as a good Jewish boy, faithful to the Torah, but things hadn’t worked out that way. Even as a boy, I had preferred the port to the rabbi’s school, and the coarse conversation of the dockers to the boredom of the
midrashim
. It was there that I had met Tuota, the only one who could make me feel like a man before I felt like a Jew. I had soon set out to work with him, sailing for the islands off the Dalmatian coast. Little deals, smuggling, and every now and again we had gone as far as the opposite coast, invisible landing posts between Venice and Ferrara, taking on board and ferrying across the sea someone who planned to deny Christ, or who had already denied him, and was going to the empire of the Turks in search of adventure. And besides, was it not on the shores of the Po that Heracles had asked the nymphs where the trees with golden fruit grew? In our own century, Muslim nymphs replied by pointing beyond the estuary, toward the great Orient. They spoke of caliphs and sultans more wealthy and liberal than the Italian noblemen. Artillerymen, doctors, sailors, weavers: Those who allowed themselves to be persuaded turned to people like us, and from Dalmatia the journey continued, southward or eastward.

I had dedicated myself to that trade, with Tuota and his colleagues, until my father had come back to the city—my real father, first by semen and then by surname, and my life had changed for ever. And now I was back with Tuone Jurman. The man who felt I had betrayed him, when I had never done any such thing.

In the years of service that I had given to the Republic, I had never said or done anything to stop the trafficking I myself had done as a young man. And now I needed him; I was the one who was fleeing, with a burned bridge, a burned arsenal, in fact, behind me, and now I could make the journey in one direction only. Tuota would keep on going back and forth, back and forth, for who knows how long. I would just have to go, and that would be that, never to return.

We sat in silence, amid grim glances, tight jaws and the occasional snort, somewhere between impatience and resignation, that meant “Look what’s happened to me this time.”

Tuone Jurman. Who else could take me beyond the sea and allow me to start a new life elsewhere? We left the estuary, the Adriatic received us, and for a time the former ferryman became the ferried.

A short time afterward, we reached the
schierazzo
. The square sail, just as I remembered it.

As I climbed the rope ladder along the keel, I felt a twinge that made me falter. So many times, in that other life of mine, I had performed these motions. Now I didn’t know how to go on. Tuota was below me. He became aware of my confusion and touched my calf. You won’t fall, those fingers said.

So it was that I found myself at my point of departure. I was going back to Ragusa, Dobro Venedik, the Good Venice, as the Turks called it, mispronouncing the Slavic name, to distinguish it from the Bad Venice on the other side of the sea. A
porto franco
, neither Eastern nor Western, a midway city where everyone moored sooner or later, some in search of shelter from the storm, some chasing business deals, some pursued by their own destiny.

I sighted it in front of me several days later, at sunset, trapped within its fortresses that were like a clenched fist: Dubrovnik. From a distance, as we approached, I tried to understand what I was feeling. As I approached, I was moving away. Fleeing, I was coming home.

In my jacket pocket my fingers fiddled with the dice.