Текст книги "The Journeyer"

Автор книги: Gary Jennings

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So here we are, Luigi. I have once more recounted my life from childhood to the end of my journeying. I have told again many of the tales you heard that long time ago, and many of those in more detail, and I have retold some others which you and I decided not to put into the earlier book, and I think many other stories besides, which I never did confide to you before. Now I give you leave to take any or all of my adventures, and ascribe them to the fictional hero of your latest work in progress, and make of them what you will.

There is not much more to tell of myself, and probably none of it would you find of any application to your new work, so I will tell it briefly.

6

I got back to Venice to find that my father and Marègna Lisa were well along in the building of our luxurious new Casa Polo—or rather, the making new of an old palazzo they had bought. It was on the Corte Sabionera, in a much more fashionable confino than our previous residence. It was also nearer to the Rialto, where, now that I was the recognized head of the Compagnia Polo, I was expected by tradition to mingle and converse with my fellow merchants twice a day, each morning just before noon and each evening at the close of the working day. That was and still is a pleasant custom, and I have often picked up the odd bit of useful information that might not have come to me in the ordinary course of business. I did not at all mind being respectfully addressed there as Messere, and respectfully listened to when I gave my sage opinion on this or that question of statutes or tariffs or whatever. I also did not too muchmind being now head of the Compagnia Polo, though I had arrived at that eminence rather by default.

My father never did actually resign in my favor. He merely, from this time on, paid less and less attention to the company and more to other interests. For a while, he gave all his energies to supervision of the building and furnishing and decoration of the new Ca’ Polo. On several occasions during its construction, he pointed out to me that this new palazzo was ample enough for many more people than we were preparing to put into it.

“Remember what the Doge said, Marco,” he reminded me. “If there is to be a Compagnia Polo and a house of Polo after you, there must be sons.”

“Father, you of all people must know how I feel on that subject. I should not mind paternity, but maternity has cost me more than I can ever count.”

“Nonsense!” my stepmother put in sternly, but then she softened. “I do not mean to deprecate what you lost, Marco, but I must protest. When you told that tragic story, you were telling of a frail foreign woman. Venetian women are born and bred to breed. They enjoy being ‘pregnant to the ears,’ as the vulgar describe it, and they keenly feel the lack when they are not. Find yourself a good, wide-hipped Venetian wife, and leave the rest to her.”

“Or,” said my practical father, “find yourself a wife you can love sufficiently to want to have children with, but one you can love lightly enough that her loss would not be insupportable.”

When the Ca’ Polo was finished and we had moved in, my father turned his attention to a project even more novel and extraordinary. He founded what I might call a School for Merchant Adventurers. In actuality, it never had a name and it was not any academy of formal study. My father simply offered his experience and advice and access to our map collection, to any who might care to seek their fortune on the Silk Road. It was mostly young men who applied to him for schooling, but a few were as old as myself. For a stipulated percentage of the profit from a student’s putative first successful trading expedition—to Baghdad, Balkh, anywhere else in the East, even all the way to Khanbalik—Nicolò Polo would impart to the apprentice adventurer all the useful information at his command, let the apprentice copy the route from our own maps, teach the apprentice some necessary phrases of Trade Farsi, even give the apprentice the names he remembered of native merchants, camel-pullers, guides, drovers and such, all along the route. He guaranteed nothing—since, after all, much of his knowledge had to be out of date by now. But neither did the apprentice journeyers have to pay him anything for their schooling, until and unless they profited from it. As I recall, many novices did set out in the direction Maistro Polo had twice gone, and some came safely back from as far away as Persia, and one or two of them came back prosperous, and paid their dues. But I think my father would have continued in that whimsical occupation even if it had never paid him a bagatìn, for in a sense it kept him still journeying afar—and even into his last years.

However, the consequence was that I, who had been a vagabond as carefree and wandersome and willful as any wind, now found my once wide horizons narrowed down to daily attendance at the company counting house and warehouse, with twice-a-day intervals of conviviality and gossip on the Rialto. It was my obligation; somebody had to keep up the Compagnia Polo; my father had in effect retired from it, and Zio Mafìo was still and forever a housebound invalid. In Constantinople, my eldest uncle also gradually edged out of the business (and died, I think of boredom, not long after). So there my cousin Nicolò and here myself found ourselves inheriting the full responsibility of our separate branches of the company. Cuzìn Nico actually seemed to enjoy being a merchant prince. And I? Well, it was honest and useful and not onerous work I was doing, and I had not yet got bored with the humdrum sameness of it day after day, and I had more or less resigned myself to this being allof my life. But then two new things happened.

The first was your sending me, Luigi, my copy of your just-completed Description of the World.I immediately gave over every spare moment to reading our book and savoring it and, as I finished each sheet, giving it to a copyist to make additional manuscripts. I found it in all ways admirable, with only a few errors, which were no doubt to be blamed on my pace of narration while you set down the words, and my neglect to read over your original draft with a critical eye.

The errors consisted only in an occasional misdating of this or that event, an occasional adventure set down out of sequence, an occasional one of the difficult Eastern place-names misheard or misspelled—your writing Saianfu, for example, where it should have been Yun-nan-fu, and Yang-zho for Hang-zho (which would have put me and my Manzi tax-collector career in a quite different city and distant from the one where I actually served). However, I never earlier bothered to point out those minor errors to you, and I hope my doing so now does not distress you. They could mean nothing to anyone but me—who else in this Western world would know there is any difference between Yang-zho and Hang-zho? —and I did not even trouble to have my scribe correct them while making his copies.

I made formal presentation of one of the copies to the Doge Gradenigo, and he must immediately have circulated it among his Council of nobles, and they to all their families and even servants. I presented another copy to the priest of our new parish of San Zuàne Grisostomo, and he must have circulated it among all his clergy and congregation, because in no time I was famous again. With even more avidity than they had shown when I first came home from Kithai, people began seeking to scrape my acquaintance, accosting me at public functions, pointing at me in the street, on the Rialto, from passing gòndole. And your own copies, Luigi, must have proliferated and scattered like dandelion seeds, for merchants and travelers visiting Venice from abroad said they came as much for a look at me as to see the San Marco Basilica and other notable sights of the city. If I received them, many told me they had read the Description of the Worldin their home country, already translated into their native language.

As I have said, Luigi, it did us little good to omit from that narrative many things we thought too marvelous to be believed. Some of the enthusiasts seeking to meet me were seeking to meet what they properly considered a Far Journeyer, but a great many wished to meet a man they mistakenly considered Un Grand Romancier, author of an imaginative and entertaining fiction, and others clearly wished only to ogle a Prodigious Liar, as they might have flocked to watch the frusta of some eminent criminal at the piazzetta pillars. It seemed that the more I protested—“I told nothing but the truth!”—the less I was believed, and the more humorously (but fondly) I was regarded. I could hardly complain of being the cynosure of all eyes, and all those eyes warmly admiring, but I should have preferred that they admired me as something other than a fablemaker.

I earlier said that our family’s new Ca’ Polo was situated in the Corte Sabionera. It was, yes, and of course it still is, physically, and I suppose even the latest street map of Venice gives the official name of that little square as Ships-Ballast Court. But no resident of the city called it that any more. It was known to everybody as the Corte del Milione– in my honor—for I was now known as Marco Milione, man of the million lies and fictions and exaggerations. I had become both famous and notorious.

In time, I learned to live with my new and peculiar reputation, and even to disregard the troops of urchins who sometimes followed me on my walks from the Corte to the Compagnia or the Rialto. They would brandish stick swords and prance in a sort of gallop gait, and spank their own behinds while they did so, and shout things like “Come hither, great princes!” and “The orda will get you!” Such constant attention was a nuisance, and enabled even strangers to recognize me and greet me at times when I might have preferred anonymity. But it was partly on account of my being now conspicuous that another new thing occurred.

I forget where I was walking that day, but, on the street, I came face to face with the little girl Doris who had been my childhood playmate and had in those days so much adored me. I was astonished. By rights, Doris should have been nearly as old as I was—in her early forties—and probably, she being of the lower class, already a gray and wrinkled and worn-out drudge of a maràntega. But here she was, grown only to young womanhood—in her middle twenties, no more—and decently attired, not in the shapeless black of old street women, and just as golden blonde and fresh-faced and pretty as she had been when I last saw her. I was more than astonished, I was thunderstruck. I so far forgot my manners as to blurt her name, right there on the street, but at least I thought to address her respectfully:

“Damìna Doris Tagiabue!”

She might have bridled at my effrontery and swept her skirts aside and stalked on past me. But she saw my trailing retinue of urchins playing Mongols, and she had to suppress a smile, and she said amiably enough:

“You are Messer Marco of the—I mean—”

“Marco of the Millions. You can say it, Doris. Everyone does. And you used to call me worse things. Marcolfo and such.”

“Messere, I fear you have mistaken me. I assume you must once have known my mother, whose maiden name was Doris Tagiabue.”

“Your mother!” For a moment I forgot that Doris must by now be a matron, if not a crone. Perhaps because this girl was so like my memory of her, I remembered only the unformed and untamed little zuzzurrullona I had known. “But she was just a child!”

“Children grow up, Messere,” she said, and added mischievously, “Even yours will,” and she indicated my half-dozen miniature Mongols.

“Those are not mine. Beat the retreat, men!”I shouted at them, and with much rearing and wheeling of their imaginary steeds they retired to a distance.

“I was but jesting, Messere,” said the so-familiar stranger, smiling openly now, and even more resembling the merry sprite of my recollection. “Among the things well-known in Venice is that the Messer Marco Polo is still a bachelor. My mother, however, grew up and married. I am her daughter and my name is Donata.”

“A pretty name for a pretty young lady: the given one, the gift.” I bowed as if we had been formally introduced. “Dona Donata, I would be grateful if you would tell me where your mother lives now. I should like to see her again. We were once—close friends.”

“Almèi, Messere. Then I regret to tell you that she died of an influenza di febbre some years ago.”

“Gramo mi! I lament to hear it. She was a dear person. My condolences, Dona Donata.”

“Damìna, Messere,” she corrected me. “My mother was the Dona Doris Loredano. I am, like you, unmarried.”

I started to say something outrageously daring—and hesitated—and then said it:

“Somehow I cannot condole on your being unmarried.” She looked faintly surprised at my boldness, but not scandalized, so I went on, “Damìna Donata Loredano, if I sent acceptable sensàli to your father, do you think he might be persuaded to let me call at your family residence? We could talk of your late mother … of old times … .”

She cocked her head and regarded me for a moment. Then she said forthrightly, without archness, as her mother might have done:

“The famous and esteemed Messer Marco Polo surely is welcome everywhere. If your sensali will apply to the Maistro Lorenzo Loredano at his place of business in the Merceria …”

Sensàli can mean business brokers or marriage brokers, and it was the latter kind I sent, in the person of my staid and starched stepmother, together with a formidable maid or two of hers. Marègna Lisa returned from that mission to report that the Maistro Loredano had acceded most hospitably to my request for permission to pay a series of calls. She added, with a noticeable elevation of her eyebrows:

“He is an artisan of leather goods. Evidently an honest and respectable and hardworking currier. But, Marco, onlya currier. Morel di mezo. You could be paying calls on the daughters of the sangue blo. The Dandolo family, the Balbi, the Candiani …”

“Dona Lisa, I once had a Nena Zulià who likewise complained of my tastes. Even in my youth I was contrary, preferring a savory morel to one with a noble name.”

However, I did not swoop upon the Loredano household and abduct Donata. I paid court to her as properly and ritually and for as long a time as if she had been of the very bluest blood. Her father, who gave the impression of having been assembled from some of his own tanned hides, received me cordially and made no comment on the fact that I was nearly as old as he. After all, one of the accepted ways for a daughter of the “middle mushroom” class to sprout higher in the world was for her to make an advantageous May-December marriage, usually to a widower with numerous children. On that scale, I was really no older than November, and I came unencumbered with any step-brood. So the Maistro Lorenzo merely mumbled some of the phrases traditionally spoken by an unmoneyed father to a wealthy suitor, to dispel any suspicion that he was voluntarily surrendering his daughter to the diritto di signoria:

“I must make known my reluctance, Messere. A daughter should not aspire to higher station than life gave her. To the natural burden of her low birth she risks adding a heavier servitude.”

“It is I who aspire, Messere,” I assured him. “I can only hope that your daughter will favor my aspirations, and I promise that she would never have cause to regret having done so.”

I would bring flowers, or some small gift, and Donata and I would sit together, always with an accompagnatrice—one of Fiordelisa’s iron-corseted maids—sitting nearby to make sure we behaved with rigid respectability. But that did not prevent Donata’s speaking to me as freely and frankly as Doris had been wont to do.

“If you knew my mother in her youth, Messer Marco, then you know that she began life as a poor orphan. Literally of the low popolàzo. So I shall put on no false airs and graces in her behalf. When she married a prospering currier, owner of his own workshop, she did marry above her class. But no one would ever have known it, if she had not chosen to make no secret of it. There was never anything coarse or vulgar about her during all the rest of her life. She made a good wife to my father and a good mother to me.”

“I would have made wager on it,” I said.

“I think she was a credit to her higher station in life. I tell you this, Messer Marco, so that if you—if you should have any doubts about my own qualifications for moving higher yet …”

“Darling Donata, I have had no least doubt at all. Even when your mother and I were children together, I could see the promise in her. But I will not say ‘like mother, like daughter.’ Because, even if I had never known her, I should quickly have recognized your own promise. Shall I, like a mooning and courting trovatore, sing your qualities? Beauty, intelligence, good humor—”

“Please do not omit honesty,” she interrupted. “For I would have you know everything there is to know. My mother never whispered any hint of this to me, and I should certainly never breathe it in my good father’s hearing, but—but there are things a child gets to know, or at least suspect, without being told. Mind you, Messer Marco, I admire my mother for having made a good marriage. But I might be less admiring of the way she must have done it, and so might you. I have an unshakable suspicion that her marriage to my father was impelled by their having—how do I say?—their having anticipated the eventto some degree. I fear that a comparison of the date written on their consenso di matrimonio and that written on my own atta di nascita might prove embarrassing.”

I smiled at young Donata’s thinking she might shock someone as inured and impervious to shock as I was. And I smiled more broadly at her innocent simplicity. She must be quite unaware, I thought, that a great many marriages among the lower classes never were solemnized by anydocument or ceremony or sacrament. If Doris had indeed, by the oldest of feminine ruses, exalted herself from the popolàzo to the morel di mezo, it did not lessen my regard for her—or for this pretty product of her ruse. And if that was the only impediment Donata could fear as a possible interference to our marriage, it was a trifling one. I made two promises at that moment. One was only to myself, and unspoken: I took oath that never during our married lifetime would I reveal any of the secrets of my past or the skeletons in my own cupboard. The other promise I made aloud, after smoothing away my smile and assuming a very solemn face:

“I swear, dearest Donata, that I shall never hold it against you—that you were prematurely born. There is no disgrace in that.”

“Ah, you older men are so commendably tolerant of human frailty.” I may have winced at that, for she added, “You are a good man, Messer Marco.”

“And your mother was a good woman. Do not think ill of her for having been a determined woman, as well. She knew how to get her own way.” I remembered, somewhat guiltily, one instance of that. The recollection made me say, “I take it that she never mentioned having been acquainted with me.”

“Not that I recall. Should she have?”

“No, no. I was nobody worth mentioning in those days. But I should confess—” I stopped, for I had just sworn not to confess anything that had happened in my past life. And I could hardly confess that Doris Tagiabue had come to Lorenzo Loredano no virgin as a consequence of her having first practiced her wiles on me. So I merely repeated:

“Your mother knew how to get her own way. If I had not had to leave Venice, it could very well have happened that she would have married mewhen we were a little older.”

Donata pouted prettily. “What an ungallant thing to say, even if it is true. Now you make me seem like a second choice.”

“And now you make meseem like someone browsing in a market. I did not choose you by volition, dear girl. I had no part in it. When I first saw you, I said to myself, ‘She must have been put on this earth for me.’ And when you spoke your name, I knewit. I knew that I had been given a gift.”

And that pleased her, and made things right again.

On another occasion during our courtship, when we sat together, I put to her this question: “What of children when we are married, Donata?”

She blinked at me in perplexity, as if I had asked whether she intended to go on breathing after we were married. So I went on:

“A married couple are of course expected to have children. It is the natural thing. It is expected by their families, the Church, the Lord God, the community. But despite those expectations, there must be some people who do not wish to conform.”

“I am not among them,” she said, like a response to a catechism.

“And there are some who simply cannot.”

After a moment of silence, she said, “Are you intimating, Marco—?” She had by this time eased into addressing me informally. Now she said, choosing her words with delicacy, “Are you intimating, Marco, that perhaps you were, um, during your journeying, um, injured in some way?”

“No, no, no. I am whole and healthy, and competent to be a father. As far as I know, I mean. I was rather referring to those unfortunate women who are, for one reason or another, barren.”

She looked away from me, and blushed as she said, “I cannot protest ‘no, no, no,’ for I have no way of knowing. But I think, if you were to count the barren women you have heard of, you would find that they are mostly pale and fragile and vaporish noblewomen. I come of good, solid, redblooded peasant stock and, like any Christian woman, I hope to be the mother of multitudes. I pray to the good Lord that I will. But if He in His wisdom should somehow choose to make me barren, I would try with fortitude to bear the affliction. However, I have confidence in the Lord’s goodness.”

“It is not always of the good Lord’s doing,” I said. “In the East there are known various ways to prevent conception—”

Donata gasped and crossed herself. “Never say such a thing! Do not even speak of such a dreadful sin! Why, what would the good Pare Nardo say, if he even dreamed you had imagined such things? Oh, Marco, do assure me that you put no mention in your bookof anything so criminal and sordid and un-Christian. I have not read the book, but I have heard some people call it scandalous. Was that the scandal they spoke of?”

“I really do not remember,” I said placatively. “I think that was one of the things I left out. I merely wished to tell you that such things are possible, in case—”

“Not in Christendom! It is unspeakable! Unthinkable!”

“Yes, yes, my dear. Forgive me.”

“Only if you promise me,” she said firmly. “Promise me you will forget that and all othervile practices you may have witnessed in the East. That our good Christian marriage will never be tainted by anything un-Christian you learned or saw or even heard of in those pagan lands.”

“Well, not everything pagan is vile … .”

“Promise me!”

“But, Donata, suppose I should have another opportunity or occasion to go eastward, and wished to take you with me. You would be the first Western woman, to my knowledge, ever to—”

“No. I will never go, Marco,” she said flatly, and her blush had gone now. Her face was very white and her lips set. “I should not wish you to go. There. I have said it. You are a wealthy man, Marco, with no need to increase your wealth. You are famous for your journeying already, with no need to increase that fame or to journey ever again. You have responsibilities, and will shortly have me for another, and I hope we will both have others. You are no longer—you are no longer the boy you were when you set out before. I should not have wished to marry that boy, Marco, not then or now. I want a mature and sober and dependable man, and I want him at home. I took you to be that man. If you are not, if you still harbor a restless and reckless boy inside you, I think you had better confess it now. We will have to put on a good face for our families and friends and all the gossips of Venice, when we announce the dissolution of our betrothal.”

“You are indeed very like your mother.” I sighed. “But you are young. In time to come, you might even desireto journey—”

“Not outside Christendom,” she said, still in that flat voice. “Promise me.”

“Very well. I shall never take you outside Chris—”

“Nor will you go.”

“Now that, Donata, I could not swear in good faith. My very business may require at least a return visit to Constantinople on occasion, and all around that city are un-Christian lands. My foot might slip, and—”

“This much, then. Promise me you will not go away until our children, if God gives us children, are grown to a responsible age. You have told me how your own father left his son to run wild among the street folk.”

I laughed. “Donata, theywere not all vile, either. One of them was your mother.”

“My mother raised me to be better than my mother. My own children are not to be abandoned. Promise me.”

“I promise,” I said. I did not pause then to calculate that, if our marriage produced a son in the ordinary interval, I would be something like sixty-five years old before he had reached his majority. I was only thinking that Donata, still young herself, might have many changes of mind during our life together. “I promise, Donata. As long as there are children at home, and unless you decree otherwise, so will I be at home.”

And in the first year of the new century, in the year one thousand three hundred and one, we were married.

All was done with punctilious observance of the proprieties. When our period of courtship was deemed suitably long enough, Donata’s father and mine and a notary convened at the Church of San Zuàne Grisostomo for the ceremony of impalmatura, and they severally perused and signed and affirmed the marriage contract, just as if I had been some shy and awkward and adolescent bridegroom—when in fact it was I who had seen to the drawing up of the contract, with the counsel of my Compagnia attorneys-at-law. At the conclusion of the impalmatura, I put the betrothal ring on Donata’s finger. On subsequent Sundays, Pare Nardo proclaimed from the pulpit the bandi, and posted them on the church door, and no one came forward to dispute the proposed marriage. Then Dona Lisa engaged a friar-scribe with an excellent hand to write the partecipazioni di nozze, and sent them, each with the traditional gift parcel of confèti almonds, by liveried messenger to all the invited guests. They included everyone of any consequence in Venice, for, although there were sumptuary laws limiting the extravagance of most families’ public ceremonies, the Doge Gradenigo graciously granted us exemption. And, when the day came, it was a celebration on the scale of a citywide festa—after the nuptial mass, the banquet and feasting, the music and song and dancing, the drinking and brindisi and tipsy guests falling into the Corte canal, the confèti and coriàndoli thrown. When all that required the participation of Donata and myself was over, her bridal maids gave her the donora: setting in her arms for a moment a borrowed baby and tucking in her shoe a gold sequin coin, symbols of her being evermore blessed with fecundity and richness—and then we left the still uproarious festa and betook ourselves inside the Ca’ Polo, deserted of all but servants, the family to stay with friends during our luna di miele.

And in our bedchamber, in private, in Donata I discovered Doris all over again, for her body was the same milk-white, adorned with the same two small shell-pink points. Except that Donata was a grown woman and fully developed in womanhood, with a golden floss to prove it, she was the image of her mother, even to the identical appurtenance that I had once likened to the morsel called ladylips. Much else of the night was a repetition of a stolen afternoon long years ago. As I had taught then, so I taught now, beginning with the turning of Donata’s shell-pink points to a blushing and eager coral-pink. But here I will again draw the curtain of connubial privacy, though a little belatedly, for I have already told it all—the events of this night being very nearly the same as on that long-ago afternoon. And this time, too, it delighted us both. At risk of sounding disloyal to olden time, I might even say that this occasion was more delicious than the earlier, because this time we were not sinning.

7

WHEN Donata came to her confinement, I was there at home, in the house, close at hand, partly in compliance with my promise to her and our then-unarrived family, partly in memory of another time when I had so unforgivably been absent. They would not let me into Donata’s chamber for the event, of course, and I had no desire to be there. But I had done everything possible to prepare for the event, including the engagement of the sage physician Piero Abano, whom I paid lavishly to bequeath all his other patients to another mèdego and do nothing but attend Donata throughout her pregnancy. He early inculcated what he called his Six-Element Regimen: proper diet and drink, properly alternating periods of motion and rest, sleep and waking, evacuation and retention, fresh air during the day and close air at night, and “assuagement of the passions of the mind.” Whether that regimen was the more to be credited, or Donata’s “good peasant stock,” there was no childbed difficulty. Dotòr Abano and his two midwives and my stepmother came, in a bunch, to tell me that Donata’s labor had been easy and the birth like the squirting of an orange pip. They had to shake me awake to tell me, for I had again been reliving my own onetime experience of such travail and, to ameliorate it, had drunk three or four bottles of Barolo and succumbed into blessed oblivion.

“I am sorry she is not a boy,” murmured Donata, when they let me into the chamber to view our daughter for the first time. “I should have known. The carrying and the labor were too easy. Next time I shall pay heed to what the old women say: Labor a little longer, and give birth to a male child.”