Sofia (5 page)

“Gentlemen” were not at all what I was about, but I didn’t know how to contradict him. And since the man himself—or his twin—had given me the message with the eloquent S in the first place, I decided to take this advice as well.

I found myself in a lavishly wood-paneled hall illuminated by low-burning beeswax candles, even more alone than in the foyer. The most art-dreading of gentlemen was not going to miss the spectacle of a castrato. The paradox of high notes pushed by a man’s lungs forced its way into this room as well. How clever of Madonna Baffo to plan our meeting for this time! But, then, where was she?

A curtain concealed a balcony where a man could add his water to the Grand Canal. To ease my nervousness, I used it, thinking how fresh the air smelled in the dark for the night’s rain. This action restored my equilibrium somewhat. Odd that the organ we are always at such pains to conceal from the world should be so much a part of connecting with it. As my water joined that of the Grand Canal, so I felt myself joined once again to the human race, male as well as female. The disturbing world of castrati and harem attendants vanished behind flats and scrims like a conjuror’s illusion. I felt ready for reality again.

And that reality would tonight contain Sofia Baffo! Sofia Baffo, who only waited for me to find her.

Back from the balcony, I followed the stretch of a sideboard, heavy with food and drink. Oddly, the usual scents of such a board failed to reach my nostrils. The entire spread all seemed untouched, as if more than just the goblets were encrusted with gold. Whole birds glistened in their juices like brass. The burnished pears, the coppery figs, the oranges, the pyramids of nuts, even the intervening bunches of bay and sage had a high, della Robbia gloss to them. In the guttering light, they feasted the eye more than the belly—decorative, opulent, but unnourishing, hard, and unnatural.

I noticed briefly how the room’s floor was made of four colors of marble, inlaid in such a way that the darkest gray seemed to retreat and the lightest gold to leap forward. It fooled my eye into believing I was walking on cubes.

And as I walked, I heard the click of rapid footsteps echoing off that floor. I turned, looked up and then adjusted my hat and mask carefully as I found myself in the presence of an unknown youth. The youth wore a parti-colored Harlequin mask and a large, droopy sack of a hat. Of course, this was the salon for gentlemen, but the sound of those footsteps had at first made me think—

And then I saw the boy move and I knew it was no boy. The galliard and “Come to the Budding Grove” were no less incongruous in a hose and doublet than in the convent garden.

“Madonna?” I stammered.

“You didn’t recognize me? Then I shall easily fool them all.”

I wasn’t hearing very clearly. When I saw what the hose revealed, I understood why women’s legs are customarily draped in fabric, the more yards the better.

“In any case, you’ve come. And about time!” The words burst from her. “A brilliant decoy, that trollop who was all over you in the theater when I came in.

“The clothes—see!” She spun on the illusionary floor. “They’re a perfect fit.”

They were an awkward fit, actually, cut for a larger, male figure that went in where hers went out. The foppish hat disguised the most glorious of her features—her hair—and the padded codpiece was truly ridiculous, slipping from side to side as it did. But I couldn’t criticize anything into which she chose to put that body.

“Madonna—” was all I could think of to say. Perhaps I was calling on heaven.

“Just a minute. I must have a look at how the other half lives now, as this brief masquerade allows.”

She swept past me and I followed, enraptured by her dance.

“Hmm, the food’s much the same,” she declared, giving it only a passing glance. “Although you do have better drink. And we have daintily painted little pots behind our curtain. I suppose I should have a difficult time hitting the Grand Canal from here—” She mused, peering over the stonework railing into the night with an unnerving display of hips and thighs below the doublet.

“Well, come, my love,” she concluded.

She dropped the curtain before the balcony again and danced back to me, sweeping a fig from the sideboard as she passed. She presented the fruit to me with a bat of eyelashes in the holes of her mask and then she slipped her arm through mine.

I had known the scrub of gold lace. The touch of Sofia’s bare skin was molten.

“Come, Andrea. Don’t keep me guessing any longer. How are we to make our escape?”

And just in the moment when I realized she was mistaking me for someone else, that someone else joined us in the room.

“Sofia!”

The arm resting on mine grew rigid and cold.

Andrea Barbarigo threw off the mask and conical hat that so closely resembled mine. “You found the clothes in the lobby all right, I see,” he said stiffly.

“I—I did,” Baffo’s daughter replied.

“And they suit you?”

“They—they’ll do just fine for the purpose. But—but you didn’t get my note?”

“Note? What note?”

Her hand vacated mine altogether and through Harlequin’s parti-panes her eyes flashed with anger like sequins.

“Come, Sofia. The gondola waits at the rear entrance. We haven’t a moment to lose to make good our escape. As I live, you shall not marry that Corfiot. Or anyone else”— there was a sharp glance in my direction—”but me.”

“Yes, Andrea. I belong only to you.”

Her hand touched his arm with her uncommon desire for possession and in that moment Andrea Barbarigo burned to life. I knew the feeling.
Duel him, duel him!
came to my mind, but the necessary words of challenge got lost in my confusion, my hurt, and the accompanying feelings of worthlessness.

The fire remained with my opponent and he shot these words at me with a look that cut through the black of his mask. “You breathe a word about this to anyone, and I will personally see that your name finds its way into a lion’s mouth.”

A lion’s mouth! Now unabashed terror was added to my confusion and hurt. Lions’ mouths were dark shadows to the votives in Venice’s alleyways. I had not looked at them on our walk that evening because they were hidden by shadows, but also because I knew they were likely to induce nightmares. Hollow-eyed carvings with open mouths discretely placed throughout the city, the lions’ mouths invited anonymous naming of enemies to the Republic. The furtively slipped accusations went to the secret Councils of the Ten, who investigated each with the full gravity of bell, book, and candle: the serenity of the Republic was not to be trifled with. A man might never even know of what he was accused before he vanished—like a slip of parchment into the mouth of a lion in a dark, damp alley. Why, the elder Barbarigo was one of the Ten. His son might only drop a quiet word over dinner—

Two pairs of rapid clicks fell into step with one another across the floor of marble illusion. Thunderous applause to an Apollo encore covered the sound to all but my ears.

The instant Sofia Baffo was out of my sight, my head cleared as if I’d been doused with cold water. Andrea Barbarigo wasn’t going to drop my name to his father over dinner. He was eloping with Governor Baffo’s daughter. He’d be fortunate if his father ever allowed him in his sight again. As for the lion’s mouth—I was in a mask. Barbarigo wouldn’t recognize me on the torturer’s rack. He didn’t even know my name. And what is more, Baffo’s daughter didn’t either. There was no indication that she equated me with the messenger in the convent garden that afternoon.

“Ways around society’s constraints.” The words came so strongly to my lips I thought I must be recalling some old sailor’s saw. It took me a moment to remember my companion of earlier that evening in gold lace and moiré.

What else could I do? What any opium eater would do who saw the source of his drug drying up. I ran to the lobby, to the first man in livery I found, tugged on his scarlet sleeve and pointed to the escaping pair, muttering a few choice words about “elopement” and “dishonor on the Foscari household.”

Suddenly, there was scarlet livery everywhere, like the plague of blood in ancient Egypt. The theater emptied like Goshen, only with less unified direction. Perhaps they were the plague of hopping frogs instead.

The nun shrieked in a poor mimicry of the castrato and had to be given smelling salts. Old Barbarigo fluffed up behind his beard like a thunderstorm. I caught a glimpse of burgundy and wanted to learn something more from the moiré mask about “society’s constraints.” But gold lace slinked away under the confusion into the dark night as if I’d betrayed her as well.

The young lovers were bundled off quickly in separate gondolas. Baffo’s daughter dissolved into tears and her streaked, alabaster face seemed so young and naked in the glare of torchlight with her mask removed.

Andrea Barbarigo tried to send a glare of revenge in my direction, the challenge of a duel, but Sofia Baffo was out of his view now and the words failed him as they had me earlier. And old Barbarigo jerked his son around by the collar to march him to the door and gave him no chance.

This was fortunate because tears stung my own eyes as I watched Baffo’s daughter exit. Even a mask did not seem disguise enough for me at this point.

So the seraglio was wiped from everybody’s mind like sewage from the canals in a high tide. Columbine, for once, did not make good her escape. For all that, my Foscari kin came up to thank me afterward and declared that, the honor of their house intact, we could all live happily ever after.

I had made the great lords of Venice take notice of me. Why was I then so miserable?

“Business,” I shrugged at Uncle Jacopo’s congratulations as we followed old Piero’s bouncing torchlight home.

Would that those congratulations were as easy to shrug off as the continuing rain. My uncle sensed my mood and was careful to say no more.

Halfway home, I discovered I still held the fig. It had lost its brass-plated appearance and grown close to mush with the heat and pressure of my hand during the evening’s conclusion. On the off chance that the sickness in my stomach might be hunger, and to empty my hand, I ate it. I remembered only after the fact how the crunch of that fruit’s seeds always set my teeth on edge. The fig turned my stomach sticky and spread the ache to my hands and face besides.

“Saint Sebastian’s Day,” my uncle murmured. “It won’t be our easiest sailing.”

The ache spread across my shoulders with the comradely fling of his arm.

“Well, she is a willful and headstrong girl,” he murmured. As if that were any consolation.

“A willful and headstrong girl.”

I murmured the words aloud as I stood on the deck of the anchored
Santa Lucia
. I gazed pensively over the Venetian Basin with the spur of Santa Elena to starboard. The gray-green hills around Mestre draped the forward horizon and the city’s bustle. The colors everywhere were bleached, pastel, like scraps of life, lost at sea and drifted to shore. The day was so clear that even the foothills of the Dolomite Alps were visible. My eyes teared at the sight, for they were the source of the stiff, cold wind that numbed the nose to Venice’s usual slightly foul smell of swamp and sea. The wind set Saint Mark’s ubiquitous banners popping. Just like fireworks, I thought, were the explosions of the banners’ red and gold against the mountains’ blue haze.

The wind brought no ice; there would be good sailing this Saint Sebastian’s Day.

Off port was the island of my namesake, San Giorgio. There was talk of building a grand, new church for the holy monks sequestered there. I remembered the chill, the thrill of processions toward the old church: every tiny boat in the Republic lit with lamps that bounced off the black of Christmas Eve waters. As a child, I had thought the holy season somehow special for me alone because San Giorgio was
my
saint. I still got the feeling, looking toward the island, of heaven’s special favor.

I blushed at the rapid beating of my own heart. “A willful and headstrong girl.”

A high, piercing laugh jarred the thoughts I’d imagined I was keeping to myself. “Oh, I see.”

“I’m sorry, Husayn.” I did not see what the man who’d just joined me did.

“The sea,” he replied. “
She
is a willful and headstrong girl. I misunderstood for a moment because in my language ‘sea’ is a he. We Arabs see him sometimes as a little boy, playing, sometimes as a sleeping giant, sometimes as a youth, pining for love. Sometimes, Allah have mercy, the sea is a madman in his fury. I was just thinking how like the coils of a serpent the waters of the Basin look today, shimmering beneath us as the tide slithers landward to its height. So you see, I would not understand at once when you likened ‘him’ to a willful, headstrong girl.”

He continued: “But now I comprehend your comparison, and it is a beautiful one, my friend. I can see your girl, too, shimmering in silks and jewels and—rather brazen, no? Were I her father, I would pack her into the harem at once. Who knows? Perhaps this serpent I see slithering over the Basin is a she-serpent, painted and shameless, a temptress.”

I joined Husayn’s smile and, because I enjoyed the poetry of his voice so much, I did not bother to correct him in the object of it. Husayn had been a friend of our family since before my father died. I remember bouncing on his knee and rejoicing in the lumps of Turkish sugar wrapped up in multicolored squares of silk he used to bring me when I was but a child. If my uncle had become a father to me since I’d been orphaned, Husayn had moved into the position of godparent, an interesting role for an infidel.

But of course it was not the sea that had caught my interest at all, and the distraction irritated me. The sea had always been like a mother’s arms to me, surely Husayn realized that. I trusted it implicitly, even when it was rough.

It was Baffo’s daughter I did not trust.

My uncle had made Madonna Baffo my particular charge. I had been watching for her since dawn—and all the previous afternoon while I saw to the boarding of an infinite number of trunks and crates labeled BAFFO-CORFU. Crate after crate pulleyed up over the low center of the
Santa Lucia
that balanced between the sharp, high sweep of prow and the broad elevation of the stern. Here, when fully laden, the deck was almost sea level.