Looking for Marco Polo (21 page)

At the Christmas market Mark had gotten the signora a santon of a beaming woman in a white blouse and bright red peasant dress carrying a heaping bowl of dark yellow pasta. For his mother he’d found a maroon silk scarf decorated with Chinese letters in bold brushstrokes; for Hornaday, a wood carving of a black herding dog.

The doctor smiled in a strange way when Mark gave him the carving.

“For you,” said the signora, holding out a CD. “The music you nod your head to here, Vivaldi. And this,” she said, handing Mark a small carving of the Madonna. “So you will remember us at the café. Eh?”

Mark swallowed hard as a storm of feeling swept over him. He was close to crying.

“Th-thanks. Thank you all,” he stammered.

The signora got up and hugged him.

They sat quietly together for several minutes. Then Mark looked closely at the figure the signora had just given him. “Yours has all that paint on her,” he said, pointing. “Why?”

“She was a rescued,” the signora replied. “I found her lying beside a wall. Someone did that bad thing to her, I don’t know why, but she is safe here.”

Suddenly Mark stood up. “Mom, Doc,” he said,
“can we go back to Ca Polo the way we went the first time?”

“Sure, why not?” his mother said.

Mark went back to his room for the Marco Polo mask.

Just after they crossed the Rialto Bridge, he stopped. “Doc, do me a favor and go sit over there,” he said, pointing to an empty box beside a mooring post.

“You want a picture?” the doctor asked.

“No. Just go sit on that box. Take off your hat.”

Mark stepped back and squinted. Then he stepped back some more. The slanting winter light caught the bent-over head of the dark man.

“That’s how he saw him the first time,” Mark said. “He must have looked like that.”

“Who?” his mother asked.

“Mustafa,” Mark explained. “That’s how Mustafa must have looked when Marco saw him the first time. He was Marco’s teacher in the school of the street. He told Marco what to expect on the Road of Silk and how to act when he got to Kublai.”

It was dusk by the time they reached Ca Polo.

Mark looked around the campo.

“Leave me here with Boss for a little while,” he said. “We’ll meet you over in that café.”

Holding the Polo mask before his face, Mark waited with Boss in a corner of the square. The sky was like slate. It was damp and cold and absolutely still.

A shape appeared. A boy Mark’s age came to the cistern with a bucket to get water.

Boss jerked up. Mark caught his breath.

“Yes,” he whispered.

He couldn’t make out the other boy’s face, but he recognized the shape: it was like his own. The clothes were like those on the Polo figure in the museum.

“Ciao, Marco!”
he called.

The other turned and stared, trying to make out the caller. Then he smiled and waved.

“Ciao, Marco!”
he called back.
“Ciao, cane!” Hello, Marco! Hello, dog!

Boss woofed.

Just then a window opened and a woman leaned out—
“Marco! Vieni qua!”
she hollered in a sharp voice.
Come here!

The boy answered,
“Sì, Zia Anna. Sì! Vengo! Vengo!
Yes, Aunt Anna. I’m coming! I’m coming!” and he hurried off.

Slowly Mark and Boss walked to the café where the others were waiting. It was like a dream, but it wasn’t a dream; they’d seen him! Mark was sure of it.

He fumbled in his pocket for the cowrie charm.
Suddenly he pictured himself sitting with his father at the kitchen table with the scale as they planned their Gobi trip. He was ready. He and Boss were ready to go exploring like Marco.

And he’d write about it.

From ear to ear the story has passed till it reached mine …

This is a fiction. The spine of travel is somewhat as Marco described it, as are the ribs of the larger adventures. The rest is imagined but possible, including my guess that Marco and his father and uncle were on a mission for the doge and that members of the Jewish merchant community in Venice helped them.

I’ve imagined the first time Marco told of his travels—his reports to Kublai—and their back-and-forth as the emperor came to appreciate His Impertinence. I have no proof, but I’m pretty sure Marco used notes for those reports and used them again when he told his story to Rustichello.

A compact and convenient edition of
The Travels
is
one edited by Manuel Komroff and published by the Modern Library, New York, 1926. I’ve worked from two longer versions, one edited by Henry Yule in 1871 and revised by Henri Cordier in 1903, republished by Dover in 1993, which from now on I’ll refer to as “Y-C.” It has excellent notes. The other,
Marco Polo: The Description of the World,
was edited by A. C. Moule and Paul Pelliot (London: G. Routledge, 1938), “M-P.” Of the two, M-P is more readable, but it has few notes.

Another retelling I’ve used that has a lot of good background and some wonderful illustrations is Laurence Bergreen’s
Marco Polo: From Venice to Xanadu
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), “Bergreen.”

For general background I read Colin Thubron’s
Shadow of the Silk Road
(New York: HarperCollins, 2007), “Thubron”; Jean Bowie Shor’s
After You, Marco Polo
(New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1955), “Shor”; the 11th edition
Encyclopedia Britannica
essay “Marco Polo”; and Leonardo Olschki’s
Marco Polo’s Asia: An Introduction to His Description of the World,
translated by John A. Scott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960).

To add to what Marco Polo told about desert life and travel, I read T. E. Lawrence’s
Revolt in the Desert
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1927), “Lawrence,” and
Charles M. Doughty’s
Travels in Arabia Deserta,
edited by Edward Garnett (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), “Doughty.”

Specifics about life in late-thirteenth-century Venice, what it looked like, and the design of galleys and junks are historically accurate. As for Marco’s personal experiences and what he felt about them, I wrote what I imagined based on the experiences of others in similar circumstances.

The quote on page 259 is from Marco Barbaro’s account of the Polo family. It appears in Y-C, Introduction, vol. 1, p. 25.

N
OTES

Marco Polo lived from 1254 to 1324. He lived seventy years—a remarkably long life for his time, proof that he was both tough and lucky. So far as we know, he was only sick once—in the mountains approaching the Pamir Plateau.

He left Venice in November 1271, age seventeen, and arrived at Xanadu, Kublai’s summer palace in Mongolia, three and a half years later, in May 1275. He served in Kublai’s court for seventeen years, until 1292, and arrived back in Venice in 1295. Captured in a sea fight with the Genoese in September 1298, he was held prisoner until August 1299. In captivity he told his adventures to
a writer of popular romances named Rustichello, who wrote what we know variously as
Marco Polo’s Marvels, The Book of Travels,
or
Description of the World.

Chapter 1, Packing Light
: “Amongst the explorers to whom we owe such knowledge as we possess about the Gobi, the most important have been Marco Polo …”—
Encyclopedia Britannica,
11th ed. (1910–11), “Gobi,” vol. 12, p. 165.

Chapter 2, Marco Polo’s Hilton
: I first encountered the carved red camel in Salley Vickers’s
Miss Garnet’s Angel
(New York: HarperCollins, 2000).

Mark heard Antonio Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” in the café.

Many buildings in Venice slant because the oak, ash, and elm pilings they’re built upon have settled into the island mud over the years. A good description of Venetian building techniques with excellent illustrations is in the
Eyewitness Travel Guide: Venice and the Veneto
(London: DK Publishing, 2004), pp. 20–21.

Chapter 3, Marco Polo’s Pillow
: For more about Venetian galleys, see Y-C, Introduction, vol. 1, section 5, “Digression concerning the war-galleys of the Mediterranean States in the Middle Ages,” pp. 31–41,
and Frederic Chapin Lane’s
Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934), chap. 1, “The Galleys,” particularly pp. 7–13.

Chapter 4, The Wheezing Sickness
: A gripping description of asthma and the history of its treatment is in David McCullough’s biography of Teddy Roosevelt,
Mornings on Horseback
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981).

I’ve imagined Boss based on Marco’s description of Kublai’s mastiffs: Y-C, vol. 1, chap. 19, “Concerning [those] who have charge of the Khan’s hounds,” pp. 400–401. Elsewhere he remarks that the Tibetan shamans were accompanied by “the very largest mastiff dogs in the world, which are as large as asses and are very good at catching all sorts of wild beasts” (Bergreen, p. 175).

Chapter 5, The School of the Street
: Marco Polo mentions “apples of Paradise” in book 1, chap. 18 (p. 97 in the Y-C edition, and see note 1 to that chapter, p. 99). For more on this subject, see Beryl Brintnall Simpson and Molly Connor Ogorzaly’s “Citrus Fruits” in
Economic Botany: Plants in Our World
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1995), p. 121.

“The Silk Road” is the modern name given to a veining of trade routes that went from what we know today as the Chinese city of Xi’an, some by northern routes, some by southern, to entrepôts on the Black and Mediterranean Seas. For a contemporary description, see Thubron, p. 3.

Did Marco Polo go to China? Some scholars, like Frances Wood in
The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), say he didn’t. They think he made up his story from other travelers’ accounts. If he did, he wove silk from straw.

I think Marco did go to Xanadu, and on to China.
The Travels
doesn’t feel like something worked up from other writers’ scraps. All those extraordinary details are like whorls in a fingerprint, unique and compelling right from the start with Marco’s coming-home story. Where had he been for such a long time? We also know from official records that when the Polos arrived at the Black Sea port of Trebizond on their way home, the Genoese took some of their cargo. Where had they been?

No pictures of Marco Polo are known to have been made during his lifetime. See Y-C, Introduction, p. 75.

To get some idea of what Marco’s schooling might have been like, see John Larner’s
Marco Polo and the
Discovery of the World
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 37.

I’ve imagined Mustafa, although I’m pretty sure Marco learned about China from someone—or several—like him in the school of the street. Doughty suggested to me his advice to Marco and some of his expressions.

For the desert pirates’ attack and their magical devilish darkness of dry fog, see Y-C, vol. 1, book 1, chap. 18, and note 4 to that chapter. These are also described in M-P, p. 122.

Concerning Ladino, the traders’ language, see Max Weinreich,
History of the Yiddish Language
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

Chapter 7, Marco’s Homecoming
: The story of the Polos’ return to Venice is given in Y-C, vol. 1, “Personal History of the Travellers,” p. 25.

The gold stick that served the Polos as money and passport—“paiza of the Mongols”—is pictured on the inside cover of Y-C, vol. 1.

Chapter 8, Marco Goes Crazy
: The gambit is described in Y-C, vol. 1, “Personal History of the Travellers,”
p. 25.

Chapter 9, Stealing the Bones
: In my imagining, both Mark’s father and Dr. Hornaday were in Kirkuk together during the Gulf War. For an account of Hussein’s 1988 gas attack, see “Dedicated Group Hopes to Prove Chemicals Killed Kurds,”
The New York Times,
International Section, June 25, 2006, p. 4.

I’ve taken liberties with what is known about the Venetian merchants who collected Saint Mark’s relics. For a bare-bones account, see Patrick Geary’s
Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

The guidebooks I’ve used are
Venice and the Veneto
(London: DK Publishing, Inc., 2004) and Alta Macadam’s
Blue Guide Venice
(London: Somerset Books, 2007).

Chapter 10, Blindman’s Bluff
: The medieval Europeans’ conception of “dog-headed men” probably came from travelers’ descriptions of Chinese temple guardians—hideous terra-cotta grotesques glazed green and brown with fists raised in fury, the screaming heads twisted upward.

As for the idea of silk growing on trees, perhaps an early traveler saw a cocoon on a mulberry tree and figured it was some sort of fruit or seed. For centuries
the cultivation of silk was a closely guarded secret to protect China’s most valuable export. In terms of value and volume, silk was the principal commodity carried on the road.

The working of silk goes back more than six thousand years. Colin Thubron reports that a Neolithic carver scratched the image of a silkworm on an ivory cup and that other early sites have yielded red silk ribbon. His tellings of the legend of Lei-tzu discovering silk and the silk moth’s tragic life are vivid (Thubron, pp. 4, 124–126). On pages 124–126 he tells how silk is prepared.

Chapter 11, A Secret Mission
: I think the doge sent the Polos to Kublai. Some authorities say they sent themselves as merchants; others think it was the pope—for example, William Dalrymple in “The Venetian Treasure Hunt,” a review of
Venice and the Islamic World, 828–1797,
an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,
New York Review of Books,
July 19, 2007, pp. 29–31.

About my hunch that Jewish merchants helped the Polos, see Benjamin Arbel’s
Trading Nations: Jews and Venetians in the Early Modern Eastern Mediterranean
(New York: E. J. Brill, 1995). Amitav Ghosh’s
In an Antique
Land
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993) tells the story of Abraham Ben Yiju, a twelfth-century Jewish trader in a network that ran from Egypt to India. For other accounts see S. D. Goitein’s
Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).