Altai: A Novel (7 page)

14.

The multicolored strip of houses grew larger with each stroke of the oars, until it filled my eyes. The city I saw was as splendid as a bride, lying outstretched on green slopes mottled with gaudy colors, red, yellow, indigo, beneath a sky that the northwesterly wind had turned a clear, deep blue.

I turned back to look for the estuary of the river that had impelled us into the gulf. I turned to one of my guards, a hairy little man armed to the teeth who spoke a Greek dialect to his colleagues. “
Poia poli ine afti?”
I asked, hoping the question was comprehensible.

He didn’t reply. No one had spoken to me during the entire journey, even though I’d asked the men several times where they were taking me. Exasperation started battling with patience again. I wanted to gesticulate, to insult him in various languages, but I didn’t do any of that. Then, all of a sudden, I heard him utter a single word.

“
Thessaloniki
.”

I studied the line of houses again. I must have imagined it. Fate was taking me where Tuota had said it would. Salonika. The Jerusalem of the Balkans. That was what they called the old city of Saint Demetrius, the capital of the Sephardim in the Ottoman empire. One of the fortresses of Nasi, from which his long hand drew innumerable threads.

We were arriving here after weeks of traveling. The first had been infernal. Leaving Ragusa, we had entered the interior on a dilapidated road. The creaks of the cart sounded like the wails of a cat in heat, and the jolts hadn’t done much to heal my ribs. Across mountains and narrow windswept valleys we had reached Podgorica, where a doctor had visited me and bound up my chest. I had a fever, but there was no time to stop. The cart had set off again for Skopje, and Del Soto’s men had handed me over to a new set of guards. The journey had continued on the water, on board a long barge, to the great relief of my bones. Now, I realized that we must have sailed the river Axios across Macedonia to the estuary that feeds into the Aegean. The water around us was the Thermaic Gulf.

After we moored in an inlet in the port, I was pushed into a cart and driven toward the place they had decided I was going to stay. The streets were crowded, the smells were strong, the jerks and jolts were dizzying. Luckily for me, I hadn’t eaten for hours, or I would have thrown up.

“
Mi ozo en tu kulo
!” I heard someone shout. The memory of the same oath on the lips of old Abecassi struck me like a slap.

The journey had exhausted me, and nausea dealt me the final blow. I was in Salonika for the first time in my life, and I was arriving with my soul bowed.

In Salonika’s low city people lived cheek by jowl. Their world was foul-smelling: the stench of urine kept in tubs to tan hides, the stench of those tanned hides, the stench of rubbish and rot. Above that rottenness there floated perfumes of cooking and lust.

The words exchanged from one house to another invaded the room where I was being kept. The Ladino of the Spanish Jews, the language of my mother, fixed me in the past. A landlord whose manners were pleasant but firm fixed me to the present, a present that was always the same, day after day.

He said his name was Efrem Del Burgo. He was a short, round man with the face of a mastiff, the son of Jews who had taken refuge in Salonika fifty years before. His father had come from Puglia, his mother from Granada.

Efrem was the owner of a tanning works and of the house where I was imprisoned, or so he said. He spoke a melodic Ladino, as rounded as his body; his Italian was dry, made up of crisp, short phrases. Every morning he knocked at the door and entered my room, to ask me how I had spent the night and exchange civilities.

My questions about Nasi or about my confinement bounced off a wall of politeness and smiles. I knew how the world of spies worked: He wasn’t the one who was going to question me. The ingredients used to prepare for an interrogation were always the same: waiting and uncertainty. I wondered how long I would have to wait.

Efrem himself brought me my breakfast and dinner: beans with meat, chicken croquettes, desserts of dry fruit, but no wine or
rakia
. Perhaps they wanted to keep me thoughtful and alert. In that state of constant lucidity I could only look at the world through the grille of the window and listen to its voices.

As the first days passed I didn’t see anyone apart from my “jailer.” I addressed him mostly in Italian, sometimes in my rusty Ladino.

“
Kuanto tiempo tengo ke estar aki?
What are we waiting for?”

Efrem replied only with smiles and shrugs.

One day, he brought a servant into my room carrying a tub, jugs of hot water and a bowl full of some kind of perfume. Efrem touched his nose and pulled a face: “It might be the custom in
Venesia,
but here we wash.”

When I was washed and dressed he nodded, but he still didn’t seem satisfied. “
Pareses un papas
,” he said comparing me to a Greek priest. He meant that it was time to shave me and cut my hair. The barber he sent to me the same day was the third person I’d met between those walls, but he had been given instructions not to talk to me—a difficult task for someone of his profession.

Like almost all of the Jews in Salonika, the man wore a yellow turban. Like Efrem, the servant, and the passersby that I glimpsed from the window, he struck me has having a refined and cultivated elegance.

I was genuinely dumbfounded when I saw, down in the street, women walking around covered with ornaments and jewels, proud in their brightly colored garments. The care they devoted to their clothes seemed to contrast with the neighborhood’s intolerable stench and filth. I had never seen Jewish women dressed up like that, apart from my mother. For hours, as a child, I had watched her making herself pretty, painting her face, decorating her neck and ears with gold and precious stones inherited from her mother and grandmother.

In my captivity, which had lasted a week, I desired those women as I had never desired anyone. Even the oldest of them. In Ragusa I had stayed away from women, perhaps because my lover had betrayed me, or perhaps because the memory of my mother was everywhere around me. I had looked for liquor and wine, and even now I missed them, certainly, but not as much as I missed intimacy with a woman.

In Venice I had once seen a monkey in a cage brought from Africa. It jumped around, shrieking, its member stiff and erect as a pen. That was how I felt, alone, in that room. Five times a day, the muezzin’s chant drifted down from the upper city. The elongated, vibrant phrasing sounded like a hymn to my desire.

Early one morning, out in the corridor, I heard a female voice. It must have been a servant. She passed by, humming to herself, and making my heart leap. When Efrem came in I confronted him. I demanded wine and a woman.

“
Kero una muyer!
”
I shouted. “
Y kero vino!
”

I tried to put my hands around his neck, but was immobilized by two huge servants. They shoved me against the wall and pinned me there until I calmed down. Efrem came toward me. “It’s fine, Venetian,” he said. “I’ll see that you’re taken outside.”

The men locked the door behind them, leaving me sitting on the floor.

15.

In the field of yellow turbans there was the occasional white one, indicating a Muslim, and more rarely a blue one, signaling a Greek Christian.

I had trouble believing what I saw and felt. A Jew disguised as a Christian dressed up as a Jew, my soul turned inside out like a pair of trousers, I was walking around a little Oriental Spain that reminded me, even though it was different, of the world of my childhood. Perhaps it was a multiplied version, a thousand times more powerful and intense. The sound of Ladino filled the streets and my head, causing an unsettling euphoria, a feeling I had never had before. I had never heard that language spoken by so many men and women at the same time.

For a reason that struck me as obscure, the Sephardim who had been chased from Castille and Aragon, from Portugal and Granada, from Sicily and the Kingdom of Naples had chosen that city, of all cities, for their new life. A city of trading and business deals, of tanners and weavers, carders and dyers, multicolored crowds and strong smells. The Jews of Salonika made the uniforms of the Ottoman janissaries, and sewed other garments that were appreciated and sold around much of the empire. Silver gleamed in Salonika, more silver than I had ever seen: It arrived every day from mines nearby, to be worked on by Jewish craftsmen who turned it into jewelry, the same that I saw on the necks, wrists and earlobes of the women around me—women drenched in perfumes that made my head spin, whose movements shook my body from top to bottom. My desire to fornicate pawed the ground. Impatience tempted me, with every step I took, to set off in search of a whore. But I couldn’t do that. I was escorted by three men, one on each side and a third bringing up the rear. I wondered whether they had orders to kill me if I tried to escape. How much time and money had Nasi invested in me? Too much for him not to go all the way with me, or too little for me not to be expendable?

We turned into an alleyway, and things suddenly changed. In a moment we had passed from the noise and color of the main thoroughfare to the shadow and quiet of a short, narrow backstreet of houses crammed against one another. One of the guards knocked on a little door. It was opened by an even littler man, a dwarf, with a blue turban and a long beard, white jacket and trousers, red slippers.

The man who had been tailing me until then addressed the little man in Greek, in a tone that seemed curt and contemptuous. The man let us in.

Inside, another surprise: an elegant residence. Light from chandeliers fell on fine carpets; trays with glasses of tea rested on low tables beside cushions and divans; and on solid wooden surfaces were tastefully arranged objects, decorated bowls and statuettes. Beyond that first room, an open door led to a flight of stairs.

The little man gestured to me to go up. I looked at my guards, one after the other. They glanced at me with impatient agreement, as if to say, “What are you waiting for? We haven’t got all day.”

I practically ran up the stairs, reaching a corridor at the top. In a doorway, with the light behind it, a female outline. I narrowed my eyes and saw that she was already undressed, as naked as the day she was born. I walked over to her and pushed her down on a wide, low bed. The sheets smelled fresh, and so did she. A lamp to my right, a tumble of dark hair, skillful hands unbuttoning and gripping me. I spread her thighs, but too late.

I cursed in a low voice, looking down at my member, flaccid and empty, at semen smearing my belly and my cock. Semen that had spurted quickly and furiously, just giving me time to take my pants down. Semen that had freed itself without waiting for me. It had freed itself, leaving me in chains. While the woman got up I felt embarrassment and doubt speaking to one another, saying something to each other, or slipping away, suddenly, vanishing.

I was still wearing my turban. And beneath my turban, inside my head, the echo of a shriek. The cry of a monkey, or a guffaw.

Someone, somewhere in the depths of my mind, was laughing at me.

16.

My return to captivity was slow and pathetic. My guards jeered at me silently, taunting me in their thoughts, and so did the women who crowded the street. I felt hundreds of eyes on me, as if they knew where I came from and how little of a man I had proved to be.

As on the way there, my escort baffled me with twists and turns and dead ends, until I got home exhausted. Home, I said, because that was what I thought by then. Efrem’s house was my only refuge, prison though it was.

Once I was through the door, Efrem gestured to me to be quiet and follow him. He led me across the internal courtyard, opened a side door and stood in the doorway waiting for me to come in.

A dark, strong-looking man was waiting for me on a high-backed chair. Bearded, unturbaned, dressed as powerful men dress the world over. “
Salud i Beraha
,” he said. “Sit down, we have to talk.”

In front of him were a little table and another chair. In the room around us, everything was vague. I could have spent crucial hours there, without remembering a single detail, whether it was luxurious or plain and bare. Reluctantly, I sat down.

“I call myself Moisés Navarro. I hope you like this city.”

I remember that he kept his hands in his lap, resting on the elegant fabric of his gown. On his finger he wore a little ring, a ruby the color of blood. The light from the window bisected his face, so that his eyes stayed in the gloom and his mouth seemed to belong to someone else. I watched it moving and formulating words. “Efrem
will bring us coffee.”

“Spare me the formalities,” I replied in Italian. “Tell me exactly what you’re interested in, and let’s get it over with.”

Navarro clicked his tongue with disapproval. He lifted one hand a little, Efrem left the room, and the door closed. We were left on our own.

“Such ingratitude, Messer De Zante. If it wasn’t for us, you would be dangling from a rope in Venice now, or perhaps with your guts scattered in all directions. Don’t you think you owe us something?” He spoke without rancor, but his feigned politeness was at most a thin veneer.

“If I wasn’t who I am you would have let me die.”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “ We saved you because we don’t know who you are. Or rather, we don’t know who you’ll want to be from now on. Because the man you were in Venice no longer exists, or am I mistaken?”

I didn’t reply. I was expecting an argument with the Sphinx and I knew the game very well. I couldn’t afford to give him an excuse.

“Oh, plainly, some things we do know,” he went on, his lips barely curling into a smile. “Trifles, like the fact that you were an agent of the Venetian secret service and that you’re accused of setting fire to the Arsenal.”

“And nothing new so far,” I spat contemptuously. “Tell me something I don’t know. For example, what you want from me.”

He stroked his moustache affectedly, then folded his hands in his lap again. “I told you: gratitude. Like the gratitude of the shipwrecked man for the sailors who pick him up. You were floundering in the water, traps awaited you at every landfall, along with people ready to stab you in the back. Venice wants your head, and she’s telling the four winds.”

“Get to the point,” I snapped.

“Very well. Then let’s go back to the beginning. How did a Jew from Ragusa end up protecting the secrets of La Serenissima?”

I was taken aback by my own reaction. I wanted to be honest. I had often imagined a plight like this: kidnapped by the enemy, grilled, tortured. Every time, in my head, I imagined myself concealing or twisting the truth, throwing my questioner off the track, serving him up some intriguing blend of reality and lies. And in fact, now that the moment had come, I wanted to tell the truth. But why? I tried to contain my thought, give it some sensible motivation. I convinced myself that openness was appropriate. Spill the beans, and see what happens. Before I had finished reasoning thus, already my lips were moving.

“I’m not a Jew anymore.”

Navarro looked interested. The movement was tiny, almost imperceptible, but I saw him leaning forward. And then I went on.

“I left Ragusa when I was very young, because I didn’t want to be like you. I was fed up to the back teeth with this hypocritical clique, with meanness, with fear. Fed up with cultivating a rat-like soul.” I paused, waiting for a reply that didn’t come. Navarro looked at me in silence. He was definitely thinking about the intention behind my words. At last he said, “Go on.”

“My father was a gentile, a Venetian. One day he returned to Ragusa to redeem my wretched life. He took me with him to Venice; he made me study. He concealed my origins; he gave me his name and his faith. Once my studies were over, he introduced me to Consigliere Bartolomeo Nordio.”

There was no need to add anything else. Just as Jupiter is lightning personified, Nordio’s name embodied the secrets of the Republic.

“What tasks did you perform for him?”

Still I held my cards close to my chest: “At first, I followed people who came to Venice from the Levant. I collected rumors about possible spies, I tailed them, I checked up on what they were doing.”

There was a knock at the door. Efrem came in with a tray and two steaming little glasses. “I don’t want coffee,” I said. “Bring wine.”

“You’ll have that later,” Navarro reassured me. “For now, I need your mind to stay alert.” He waited for the door to close again, and then he gestured to me. “Go on.”

I sipped the black brew, scorching my palate. I cursed under my breath. “After a few years, I was promoted. The Consigliere gave me the task of unearthing anyone who might be undermining the order of the Republic. Spies, heretics, insurrectionaries . . . crypto-Jews.”

Navarro moved very slightly, spreading his legs and brushing a bit of invisible dust from his cloak. “What exactly did your responsibilities consist of?”

“I was in charge of a handful of trusted men. We collected evidence, we interrogated suspects, we made them confess.”

“Why were you, a man so devoted to the state, accused of setting fire to the Arsenal?”

I took a deep breath. “They discovered my secret. A missing half inch of skin where the sun doesn’t shine. I had lied to the Republic and to Nordio. They ordered me to find the perfect culprit. And the perfect culprit was me.” I laughed. “I, who fought for them for years, written off as a man in Nasi’s pay.”

He let me savor those words without batting an eyelid. “Do you have any idea who it was who caused the fire?”

“The workers at the Arsenal themselves.”

“What evidence do you have for that?”

I recapitulated the facts I had uncovered along with Rizzi and Tavosanis during the first two days after the act, and concluded, “All they would have had to do was set fire to the powder store the previous evening, and half of Venice would have sunk. I deduced that it wasn’t the work of an outside enemy, but of a Venetian expert who knew the place very well. The
arsenalotti
are a very solid corporation. Someone very high up in the Republic thinks he can bring them to heel, and they wanted to send a loud, clear message.”

He seemed to meditate on what I had just said, then got to his feet. “We’ll continue tomorrow,” he said, and pointed to a little desk against the wall. “In the meantime, here are paper, pen and ink. I want a map of the Arsenal and a description of the damage done in the fire. Do it calmly, there’s no hurry.
Asta amanyana
, De Zante.”

I didn’t return his farewell. Without saying another word, the Sphinx took his leave.