Sofia (11 page)

The women sat occupied with their patient, Husayn and I sat staring nowhere but at our own hands, until I brought myself to whisper, “Come, my friend. Let’s go.”

“You will not have her?” Husayn asked once the door and the stern guard had come between the women and ourselves.

“You should know me better than that by now, Husayn,” I said. “I cannot take a woman like that, like a slave, like booty, as you Turks can. Especially not this woman. If I am to have her, I must win her, heart and hands, fair and square.”

“It may not be Allah’s will ever to offer her to you again.”

“Let that be between me and God,” I said, as a man goes to what may be his death.

Husayn nodded. “Very well. But I do not understand why you men of Venice enjoy making things ten times more difficult for yourselves than they ever have to be. And, I must say, you make it hard for my commander.”

“Oh, yes,” I said with bitter sarcasm. “Now your commander must force himself to enjoy her favors all alone.”

“My friend,” Husayn sounded hurt. “He wanted to give her to you. He wanted rid of the responsibility. This girl, he knows, will be difficult to keep virtuous.”

“I can see your commander’s lust even now tottering on the edge.”

“You sully the commander, Veniero, and I cannot allow it. Uluj Ali is on commission from the Sublime Porte itself and sails under the Kapudan Pasha. Uluj Ali is known throughout the Middle Sea as one I would trust my own harem to. He respects his women captives as if they were his own sisters.”

I knew I had to believe the earnestness in my friend’s voice. I also had to let some bitterness out. “He will keep them locked up like his own harem, though.”

“For their own protection, yes.”

“Madonna Baffo was tending the sick, not playing with broadswords.”

“Many of our men have been assigned to the boat where the sick are, and they were uneasy to carry out their duties with her there. Men should tend the male sick. Women have their own to comfort.”

“But what harm could she find among wounded men?”

“We cannot say, my friend. It is best not to tempt Allah.”

“But most of those men were Christians. She needn’t fear among Christians.”

“Needn’t she?” Husayn asked. “Our experience with the Knights of Malta and other of your Crusaders has been different. Our women in Algiers, for example, have learned that it is better to fall upon their husbands’ swords than to fall into the ‘mercy’ of those demon Christians’ hands. No, my friend. If you will not take my commander’s mercy when it is offered, you must not balk to submit to his law afterward.”

“Tell your commander to sail for Corfu,” I said. “Let it be so.”

For two days we sat with the island of Corfu visible on the horizon. Flying the white flag, the Turkish commander tried to bargain with Governor Baffo for the release of the hostages he held. The tender he sent in never returned. The message was as clear as if we had been there in Corfu’s public square to watch the execution of the messengers ourselves: “Damn you, Turk. We will send you to hell before we pay your godlessness a single ducat.” The Governor’s daughter, I saw, came by her pride and stubbornness legitimately.

On the third day, every ship in Corfu harbor (there were four) came out toward us in a bristling fleet.

“The Governor’s a fool,” Husayn muttered to me. “And a barbarian besides. What sort of man would attack a ship that carries his own daughter and his sister?”

Uluj Ali, in Husayn’s eyes, showed such more mercy. He turned our ships and fled rather than throw lives away in battle. The great galley slowed us down. The hole in her hull, in spite of some attempts at patching, was taking in a lot of water. But the Turks were prepared for this. They had herded us all onto their little craft and filled them with as much of the galley’s cargo as they could. I was given another choice—would I stay with the galley and return to my compatriots or would I sail with the Turks?

Since my uncle’s death, I had no kin and hence no sure future in Italy. Husayn was the dearest friend I had, and yet it was no easy choice to decide purposely never to see Venice again. Madonna Baffo must have overheard the offer, for her eyes shouted me a dare as I considered: “You are a coward, Veniero. I hope my father cuts you to ribbons for being a traitor.”

My fate was sealed with a glance of those eyes. I climbed down the ladder into the Turkish ship and, with that move, bade farewell forever to the Great Basin of Venice.

When the Corfiot ships began to gain on us, the Turks cut the galley free. While Governor Baffo paused to board and secure her, we caught a fine southerly wind, and by sunset we were safe in the open sea without a sail of pursuit in sight.

“Now where do we go, my friend?” I asked.

“Constantinople,” Husayn replied with a golden smile. On his tongue, the word was like pure honey—too sweet to be eaten straight, but tempting nonetheless.

Two days after this, the nun was released from this life into the hands of her merciful God. A week later, after a longer but, in the end, no less futile struggle, one of the two maidservants died as well. It was a fever, and it also carried off more than a few of the wound-weakened men and old black Piero besides. But I had seen death at sea before and I managed to keep my spirits high. The more time I spent with Husayn, the more I enjoyed his company. The songs and tales with which he regaled me were new ones suited to my age, and I wondered how I had ever thought the childish ones fascinating when these were yet to come.

I also began to learn a little more of his language. Actually, it was not “his language.” The language he had grown up with was Arabic, but the politics of the Islamic world now required one to speak Turkish, so Husayn had sympathy with my struggles. I had known words for “hello” and how to bargain somewhat from traveling with my uncle, but now my knowledge became more than just phrases with which to humor the native. It was a whole different language, neither more nor less than Venetian, and, most important, it expressed a whole new world I had never imagined to exist. Though I had been to both Antioch and Constantinople several times before, life there had always seemed like puppetry to me, a show put on for our visit that couldn’t possibly have reality once the audience had gone.

Now I saw that it did. Not only reality, but a depth and life that sometimes made me doubt the reality of the life I had left behind. I listened to these men as they sat about on the deck in the evenings talking of their homes as sailors all over the world do, and I found my view of life to be doubling in size.

My first attempts to join in this talk were met with hearty laughter. It was not, I soon learned, a mockery of my clumsy speech, but rather a true delight to have one more added to their numbers. Haifa dozen or so of my countrymen, realizing that the alternative was an early death at the Turkish oars, soon professed Islam and joined with us as well. I did not scorn them for their apostasy. How could I, seeing that only a statement of ten words or so stood between our two virtues? Soon we were a very merry company indeed.

One thing only I felt was missing. Saracens, you must know, never speak of their women. They are quite particular about this; it is a tenet of religion with them. Even Husayn the Syrian was different from Enrico the Venetian I had jested with earlier on the
Santa Lucia
in this respect. When one of the converts sought to entertain us with a tale of his adventures in an Algerian brothel, he received such a look from my friend that he let the subject fall as decidedly bad taste. From then on, we might have been a ship of monks.

Madonna Baffo and the single female companion left to her remained guarded and separate, even though this called for the construction of a sort of screen about one end of the small ship because there were no cabins. Makeshift as the bits of canvas and broken crating were, they were effective, and so, besides being unspoken of, the women were also unseen and it was possible to ignore them altogether.

For others it was possible, but not for me. One day as I happened to pass near their corner of the ship, the guard motioned to me. I remembered him as the fellow who thought Madonna Baffo was my sister. I approached and saw through a flap in the canvas that the Governor’s daughter had been trying to ask something of her captors, but without success.

Smiling more at the guard than I dared to at the girl, I asked, “What is the matter?”

“I only wanted to know,” Madonna Baffo said with extreme and sudden coldness, “where they are taking us.”

“Constantinople,” I said, full of glad tidings.

“Constantinople. I see. Thank you, Signor Veniero,” and the canvas dropped behind her.

I explained the exchange to the guard as best I could. He nodded, and we shared a good laugh over something that, without direct reference to them, might well be translated as “the simplicity of women.”

Later, however, I thought the matter over and was deeply moved to pity. There those two women had been for over a week now without any knowledge of what their future might be. What dreadful fancies must have stirred their imaginations! Now that they knew the truth, surely their fancies could be no less oppressive. Madonna Baffo had been in sight of her father’s ships and his safe harbor, but had been violently torn away. If Corfu seemed a nowhere place, then Constantinople was the end of the world, a land of barbarians and infidels.

I thought perhaps I might go and lighten her heart somewhat with assurances that it was really a grand and civilized place, actually larger than any city in Christendom, more decently policed, and wealthier, even, than Venice. But that would be telling her fairy tales she would never experience in true life. If it was the galleys and the mines for the men, it was slavery in the harems for the women. Ah, there was a thought, the pain of which I had gladly and purposely avoided until that brief interview brought it home. And when it hit, the pain was great indeed.

Still, I could not share my pain with anyone. It would not be seemly to speak of women so to the Turks—and besides, these were less than women; they were slaves; it was Allah’s will. Now I knew some of the stifle the young women suffered. It turned the pain inward, made it fester and turn to gangrene. At least they had one another to cling to. Their talk could serve as a surgeon’s lance to let infection out. I had no one. I could not even speak to Husayn, my dear and closest friend. No, I had made my choice and, like a Turk now, I must learn to be satisfied.

For days on end the doubts and fears ran like a drunken brawl through my mind. Sometimes it grew so fierce that I could no longer bear to sit among the quiet, pleasant company of sailors and I had to seek out a lonely spot to suffer it alone. The spot I found was behind some boxes and barrels of provisions.

Turks are mistrustful of the loner. For them, even the most stifling company is preferable to the terrors of solitude. That comes, Husayn once told me, from the old days in the desert when loneliness was a constant curse for which there was only rarely ease. But they were considerate of a Christian’s idiosyncrasies and the cook learned to come and make his rummage through the stores with respect, even if he couldn’t do it completely free of all suspicion as to what a mind alone might be hatching.

It just so happened that this little corner was bordered on one side by the space set aside for the women. I would have found this a thing to try to escape in my state of mind, but it was a portion of their compound the women avoided, being exposed to gales and spray. Even the legend on the broken crating between us, BAFFO-CORFU, was a liability until I learned to avoid its sight and look only at the ever-changing, yet ever-calming, mind-wiping monotony of the sea.

One day, however, I suffered an intrusion. We’d hit a calm; the oars clashed rhythmically, loose in their leather slings. It was shortly after we had caught a glimpse of Patmos off starboard. I remember this detail because that island is everywhere revered as the home of Saint John, and what happened to me there had the quality of revelation about it.

Between the slats of a rifled crate, Sofia Baffo appeared to me in a vision. She walked slowly, tenderly cradling a bundle in her arms. I remembered our first meetings to which this was a sharp contrast. Music again accompanied her steps, but the tune she hummed was a dirge and her steps the measured ones of a funeral march.

Yet, I thought as I watched her approach, she would be no easier to catch in this guise than she had been when she was lively in the convent garden. A log is no easier to pick up when it is flaming than when burned to a white ash. Such a cold, burned-out log did Madonna Baffo seem to be now.

She is like Phaethon of old, I thought. As the sparks of his fall were strewn across the sky to become the Milky Way, so the fire of her last journey must be making an eternal trail of golden bits across the blue Mediterranean. And by the time we reached Constantinople, there would be nothing left at all of the blaze that had once been.

I almost thought I could see through her. She wore the light gold angel’s dress she had worn since her capture and her figure had grown markedly thinner. Even her hair lacked luster and remained, for the most part, trapped beneath her plain square kerchief. Certain that the merest puff of air would disintegrate her, I did not dare breathe as she came near.

No more than three paces away, Baffo’s daughter caught sight of me and started. If possible, she grew paler and thinner still, then quickly turned on her heels and made to go back the way she had come.

“No—no, don’t go,” I said in hardly more than a whisper. She stopped. She turned. These were two definite movements separated by a long pause of thought and a deliberate tightening of the shoulders. She took a step or two toward me, but still I could tell that she trusted me no more than had I been a spirit myself.

“What do you want?” she asked. She said it quietly, not so much from a fear of being overheard as from listless-ness that could not find the exertion of full voice worth the trouble.

“How...how are you?” I asked, tentatively cheerful.

Her look told me at once how stupid and tasteless my question was. How should she be under such conditions? It did not deserve an answer.