Last Stories and Other Stories

THE TREASURE OF JOVO CIRTOVICH

When Jovo Cirtovic sailed to Trieste in 1718, the place must have whispered to him, for he stayed on to become a merchant of Friulian wines, which his ships carried with magical success. Before the native-born citizenry could open both eyes, he owned a veritable fleet, supplying ports as far away as Philadelphia. Why the grapes of Friuli bleed so delicious a juice remains nearly as mysterious to my mind as Cirtovic’s triumphal accession to the trade, although just yesterday, in that breezy hour when bronzes begin to surpass the darkness of pigeons, three of my fellow drinkers persuaded me that what accomplishes vinocultural excellence is soil, while two others led me to comprehend that the most ineffable qualities of the Bacchic Tetragrammaton derive from atmosphere, as has been proved down at Cinque Terra, where one famous salt-fogged vineyard, unremittingly guarded against the sea, produces a crop of great price. The waiter proposed to bring us a bottle of that stuff, but we disregarded him, for he was no Triestino; had we indulged his advice, he might even have poured something foreign down our throats. Meanwhile my helpful friends had educated me concerning the absolute excellence of Friulian vintages, which indeed occupy so commanding a position that should the Devil in his malice uproot every other grapevine on earth, nobody would be worse off, excepting only a few charlatans in Bordeaux or Tuscany. Here they paused to ascertain that my intellect had in truth kept pace with their instruction, for they were warmheartedly solicitous academicians, whose very breaths were purple. Yes, I said. Accordingly, all that remained was my indoctrination in the seventh syllogism of the thirty-first demonstration. This required their coming to blows, so I thanked them one and all, uplifting my glass, forsaking them for a breeze, the sea, a stone wall, potted palms. Then I poured a libation over Cirtovic’s cenotaph. He was a good father.

Now, what about soil versus atmosphere? I know I am getting out of my depth here, since wine disagrees with me (I’m drinking smoky Dubrovnik loža as I write this), but I do seek your tolerance of my efforts, being myself a merchant of sorts, retailing paragraphs by the sailmaker’s yard. How shall I say why Cirtovic could sell every last barrel that creaked and sloshed on his shipbelly voyages? In the Caffè San Marco my friends are still arguing about it; their tongues have gotten winestained and their eyelids resemble those reflections of blinds which droop in the arched windows of lingerie shops. Not even they can explain wine. In the Piedmont, waiters dispraise Friulian reds; in Spaleto and Zara (which our hero preferred to call Split and Zadar), fat old nobles swear upon Mary Magdalene’s reliquary that Friulian whites are absolutely no good. Cirtovic never committed himself to any theory about grapes; nor could I imagine how such abstrusities would have impressed the hardheaded merchants of Philadelphia. Was his secret simply price, which must have been low enough to satisfy frugality and high enough to massage pretension? Or did the Tories of that epoch feel a yearning for far-off salty places, which they indulged only by the glass? Up until then, many an innkeeper in those Colonies had been wont to regale his guests on fly-infused vinegar, reminding them that such had done well enough for Christ on the cross. Then came sea-barrels of wine from Friuli. For a quarter-hour the thirsty Yankees knew how to be happy. In vain the skinflints who sold foul stuff invoked cabals and vigilance committees against Cirtovic — wasn’t he a tool of the Papists? Examining the barque Kosovo as a precaution against contraband, a certain customs officer, invited for a glass of wine in the captain’s cabin, spied above the bed an icon of the Madre della Passione, or Strastnja: mostly silver, it was, but the metal drew sharp-edgedly away from around those two golden faces; Marija fitted the young mother’s part, while Jesus could have been a watchful little Roman Emperor. Ah, that draught, how magically purple it was! Cirtovic began smiling; he seemed an excellent fellow. Rising, the customs man demanded to know whether his mariners obeyed the Pope. — Not us! laughed the captain. If you like, I’ll attest an oath to that effect. — Then what are you? — Orthodox, sir. And I am quite sure our Patriarch has no designs on these Colonies. — The cautious customs man held fast to the proverb Take counsel in wine, but resolve afterwards in water; after another glass of the Friulian vintage he forgot the second half. And so the cargo got landed; heaven came to earth. Safely alone, Cirtovic raised a glass to his true hero, Prince Lazar.

In Genoa, agents of the Vatican received delivery of another twelve hundred barrels of Cirtovic’s wine. Now the Austrians and the Swedes got a taste for it; and I have even read that odd lots of it ended up at the Russian Court. Catherine the Great bathed in the stuff, after which her various lovers drank it. In Tartaria it corrupted a certain Khan who finally sold Cirtovic what was supposed never to leave the family: an Arabic manuscript on the subjugation of monsters. A Coptic priest in Ethiopia accepted a cask of red in exchange for an illuminated treatise on the geography of heaven. For Cirtovic was, you see, a collector.

In his younger days he was frequently to be seen upon the docks and quays, opening wooden chests, drawing men into taverns, pressing coins into callused hands, while the Triestini wondered what was happening. He was built like a porter; his beard was salt-stained; he smiled easily, and all his doings seemed to be accomplished slowly, in the light. Around his neck hung some medallion or amulet concealed in a leathern bag, so that he resembled all the more some credulous peasant. Stolid even in the bora wind, gentle of speech, almost humble, unremarkable, such was Jovo Cirtovic. Yet again and again he sewed up the market, with greater celerity than a young bride preparing her rich old husband’s shroud. And it wasn’t merely wines he dealt in; it got said that even rotten onions he could unload at a profit! He leased a warehouse right on the Canal Grande, just in time for the Canal Grande to become the harbor’s liveliest tentacle. Against him it was also remembered that he had established himself in the city only one year before the Emperor elevated it to a free port. Laughing, Cirtovic offered wine at the communal celebration, but they noticed that he laughed only with his mouth. He could write Cyrillic and Glagolitic with equal facility — a nearly unmatched ability hereabouts. His fellow Serbs called him as wise as Saint Sava, not that they knew his mind. He was a man of his word, as everyone admitted, and generous on the rare occasions that he entertained. Moreover, he seemed adept with nearly any make of dromoscope. In taverns they computed his worth at half a million florins (an exaggeration); but most definitely he now dominated the Hungarian trade, which had enriched many daring men; and he vended the best Bohemian glass; in consideration of how much Count Giovanni Vojnovich had paid for a carafe and two dozen wineglasses, his rivals saw fit to multiply and magnify the treasure of Jovo Cirtovic, with as much gusto as if it belonged to them. For six years the Ragusan consulate knew him well. Then he also began dealing with Saracens. You must remember that ever since the Sultan had reconquered Morea from the Venetians, the latter operated more assertively in Ragusan waters, hoping to make up the loss; and when they appealed for amelioration of their taxes and duties, so that they could at least make a living as their fathers had — surely the Sultan could understand; even Turks had fathers! — he equivocated, all the while impelling his Sarajevans to invest new ports at Bar, Ulcinij, Novi and Budva. It can be perilous to trade with people who hate one another. But the prudent skipper who alters his flag from port to port reduces his risk, oh, yes, and increases his profit. What bribes or taxes Cirtovic had to pay is unrecorded; the main thing is that he never returned home without his head. That man had luck! Neither earthquakes nor French troops harmed his stock; English pirates lost him in a fog; his helmsmen never went off course; his glassware declined to break before he sold it; even pestilence, which visited Trieste nearly as often as sin, robbed away only his most inessential employees. While others had to wait on a fair breeze, somehow Jovo Cirtovic always knew when to raise sail. It might be dead calm in the harbor; no matter. Cirtovic embarked his men. When the ship was laden, he’d cry out: Hold onto the wind with your teeth! — Just about then, the wind would come. Did God truly love him so much? After his third voyage to Africa, every sailor on the Beograd, right down to the cabin boy, received as a bonus one of those jewels that glow red like a sea monster’s eye when it surfaces at dusk. The wise ones used them to get wives and sloops; some left Cirtovic’s employ, with good feelings all around; the rest squandered them on whores, and once they had flooded the jewelry-shops of Trieste, a certain haughty ruby-dealer hanged himself, following which the Cincars swooped in to buy cheap and sell far away. After that, most ambitious young mariners hoped to sail for Jovo Cirtovic.

Around that time certain rich men of the city began to build houses up on the hill, where they could guard their families from future epidemics; Cirtovic listened, saying nothing; soon two drunken notaries sang about a lot he had purchased in that district. Even the other Serbs were shocked, for they all lived quite satisfactorily in their warehouses. This Cirtovic, lacked he any regard for rules? They had already agreed that he was no son of his late father, who had made it his business to be a dread to Turks at night. — In order to raise up an appropriate edifice for himself, Jovo Cirtovic now commenced to trade still more widely. It was all he could do not to smile at the naïve customs men of Philadelphia, who worried that he might know his way around the Vatican when he had long been at home in uncannier realms — not least the Bosphorus itself, which in those days was unfailingly studded with sailing ships most of which flew the Sultan’s colors, and some of which flew no flag at all. Wending his trade betwixt the curving deltas and the peninsulas crowned with mosques walled like forts and bristling with crescent-topped steeples, he cast before him the lure of a courtesy which pretended not to be wary, and treasured within his vest a safe-conduct bearing the Sultan’s seal and illuminated in gold by seven calligraphers. Had the Philadelphians chanced upon that, they would have had no idea what it was.

He was married by then, but nobody could say who had been invited to his wedding, for it took place back in Serbia, during his seventh absence from Trieste; he had chosen his bride by correspondence with his brothers, making use of a certain Cincar wax trader who would later become his undeclared supercargo on an African voyage. According to dockside idlers, Count Vojnovich was offended by some aspect of these proceedings, perhaps because he wanted the lady for himself. She arrived well veiled, accompanied by a mound of crates and trunks; it was dusk when Cirtovic, having briefly confabulated with his factor, Captain Vasojevic, led her down the gangplank and into a closed carriage. She was slender and she walked with rapid little steps. Another veiled woman who must have been her maidservant came just behind. In good Serbian fashion, both wore daggers at their sides. I’d guess they were thinking on the pear trees, kinsfolk and rapid streams they would never see again. Perhaps they’d been seasick. Spitting, Petar whipped up the horses. The next morning Cirtovic gave six hundred florins to the church, which at that time had stood for barely a year; it still served both Greeks and Serbs. Then he went straight to the dock and put his topmen to cutching some sails for the Kosovo. The Triestini, who certainly kept secrets of their own, watched all this with narrowed eyes, jutting out their beards as they asked one another what seraglio those females hailed from, and which other ports the Lazar might have touched on in the course of her wedding voyage; for the Adriatic coast, particularly on the Dalmatian side, is so addicted to doublings that a stranger can hardly tell whether the blue-green land-wave he spies below the sky’s belly is an island or the continuation of the continent. In short, this part of the world is a smuggler’s paradise. Whether or not our good Cirtovic ever accepted the discreeter commissions of contraband trade remains, in token of his success, unrecorded, but year after year his fleet plied up and down the labyrinthine coast, counting off stone beacons, hill-castles and their ruins, making quiet landfalls behind walls of birch-beech leaves. Returning quietly into the great blue bay with the whiteness of Trieste before him, he stood beside the steersman, gazing ahead in that guarded way he had, as if there were clouds between all others and himself — he who could see through all clouds. Yes, he who derives from the shadow passes more freely in and out of sunlight than he who was born in brightness. So the Triestini, tanned by the shimmer of their near-African sea, asserted, in order to excuse themselves for not venturing to Serbia, whose roads are paved with bleeding gravestones. For that matter, they did not even peer into the Orthodox church. In the market, housewives bowed their heads together to gossip about the new couple, in between the more interesting task of considering eggplants, while their husbands disputed as to whether or not Jovo Cirtovic possessed the evil eye. The way some described him, he wore the masklike face of a vampire squid, when in fact even the wariest customs guards saw nothing in him but well-heeled blandness, and his sailors loved him as they would have anyone who brought them home alive and paid good money. To be sure, he seemed care-ridden now; certain Triestini (who of course loved their native city so much as to frown upon even the neighboring port of Muggia) proposed that if he merely renounced Serbia entirely, forgetting those half-real denizens of an unlucky place, he’d grow as happy as the rest of us — although it could have been (as a certain unsuccessful butcher proposed) that debt had snared him. After all, how much capital must it take to send out so many ships? The Triestini would have loved to know. Unfortunately, the interloper’s brothers, recently arrived, proved almost equally closemouthed, although Cristoforo Cirtovic did say: Jovo’s always been a mystery to us. He takes after our late father, may he sit in the presence of the saints. — Bribing the watchman, a certain Captain Morelli snooped through the logbook of the Sava and was astonished to discover some proof or demonstration relating to the section of a right-angled cone; what it meant was conjectural, since the writing was Glagolitic. Copying it out, he sprang it on Cristoforo Cirtovic, who said: What’s this gibberish? — This Morelli next waylaid Stefano Cirtovic on the docks when that latter was unloading a cargo from Korea; Stefano said: Don’t ask me my brother’s business.

Sometimes the Cirtovic men (there were six of them in addition to Jovo) would take over the “Heaven’s Key” tavern behind the Ponterosso, get drunk and sing loud songs about the various methods in which they would like to kill Turks. Jovo never joined them there, although he met them frequently enough at his countinghouse, not to mention at church, together with their Serbian wives and children, beneath that gilded ceiling as round as the hyponome of a chambered nautilus. His own signora continued to wear a veil. No one even knew what to call her until a carpenter as longnosed and comical as Pulcinella announced that her name was Marija; Pulcinella’s sister’s cousin was a dressmaker who had measured this Marija, so it must be true. The Triestini were thrilled by his stupendous news. Just before Assumption Day another vendor of ancient Greek vases visited the Cirtovic residence, departing well satisfied. Captain Morelli treated him at the “Heaven’s Key.” You wouldn’t believe how much wine he could deduct from a bottle! Nor was the experiment profitable; for although he was looser-lipped than any fisherman’s whore, for that very reason he had never gotten beyond the foyer, where Nicola, the master’s eldest son (an unsatisfied youth, he opined), had received him beneath a grand portrait of Prince Lazar, offered him Turkish coffee (served by a veiled woman, evidently Marija Cirtovic’s maid), summoned the strapping coachman to carry away the crates, then sat with him in almost unfriendly silence until Petar had returned with all the best pieces extracted, the compensation consisting of twelfth-century gold coins from Hungary, tiny as buttons, already counted out, the prices discounted not unfairly (as the vendor himself admitted), but certainly without appeal. He thought he heard the signora upbraiding someone in the kitchen. (You know how all those Serbkinas are, he told his delighted listener.) Presently Cirtovic himself had appeared, to inquire after shards with writing on them. He sought a certain diagram by Pythagoras, and would pay more if the circles touched externally. The vendor nodded conscientiously, hoping to deceive him with future trash. Perhaps Captain Morelli knew some Greek who might collaborate in painting ochered circles? By the way, the vendor had ascertained that Cirtovic’s granary held wheat right up to the roof! — more proof of their enemy’s grandiosity, as all agreed over Friulian wine; by then there were a dozen Triestini present, all hoping to make a fool of Jovo Cirtovic. Sad to say, Captain Morelli was knifed in the guts a few nights later, and the vendor fled the city, either because he had done it or because he feared to be next. When asked what he thought about the murder, Cirtovic said it was a shame that so jovial a man had been lost. The Triestini lowered their eyes. For their next device, they hired a pretty harlot to approach their victim at his countinghouse; but he turned her over to his brother Florio, while his factor Captain Vasojevic (another closemouthed man) watched half-smiling from the second storey. She blabbed about Florio’s habits, to be sure, but what the hell did they care about that adulterer?

Jovo Cirtovic never failed to give hospitality to a certain itinerant snowy-bearded bard with a well-tuned guzla. At the “Heaven’s Key” the Triestini queried the old man as to the situations of rooms in the house, and where the coins were kept, and other such matters as good neighbors like to know about each other. Whenever the Cirtovices invited him to sing about the Battle of Kosovo, he got to observe the wife and daughters sewing around the hearth, beneath the smoking hams; and Cirtovic would be singing right along with him, haltingly accompanied by his sons. The imported servingmaid’s name, he said, was Srdjana — a tonguetwister, laughed the Triestini. They kept some hope of waylaying her, but she rarely came out of the house. Fortunately, some sailors do talk, especially over Friulian wine. Cirtovic’s mariners admitted freely that the Turkish bangles now shining on the wrists of their sweethearts came from Bar (their hosts, who promptly sought to trade there, fell mysteriously afoul of the Ragusan authorities), that their master’s brothers occasionally carried weapons and armaments into Serbia, and that Cirtovic owned better luck than any man they had heard of. As they already knew, he was a pious sort, who never failed to thank his saints. (By the way, Captain Vasojevic still refused to open his mouth.) One night the helmsman of the Lazar came by the “Heaven’s Key”; after his seventh glass of Friulian red he refuted Archimedes’s suppositions that a poppyseed-sized quantity of sand contains no more than ten thousand grains, and that the maximum possible diameter of the universe equals ten thousand times that of the earth, in which case the Sphere of Fixed Stars would be two hundred and fifty thousand stadia from Trieste, straight up — a decade’s journey, perhaps, depending on solar storms. After the twelfth glass, the helmsman grew confiding, and informed them with a childlike smile that granted fair lunar winds and adherence to certain timetables, the voyage could be made within half a year. Laughing, the purser (now into his seventeenth glass) put in that even if the excess of death can be added to itself, which he doubted, and indeed Cirtovic upheld him in his skepticism, then, with the aid of the Mother of God, something could presently be accomplished to the betterment of the Christian world. Then he fell asleep, but in the helmsman’s eyes shone an ideal like dawn light beyond the trees. The Triestini drunks agreed that these sailors knew more geography than anyone else; even the cook of the Lazar, who was formerly one of their own even though his uncle had apprenticed him out at Muggia, began after his sixth glass to discourse on matters beyond his station; he asked whether they had ever heard celestial music; and then, when they gaped at him, traced out with his fat forefinger the planetary orbits as drawn in the manuscript of Gjin Gazulli. Of course cooks, having food always within reach, find more time to think than other people; hence his remarks proved nothing, especially given the magical powers of the Friulian vintage — which meanwhile transformed itself ever more into gold and silver, until Jovo Cirtovic had risen out of envy’s sight. Sitting at his high wooden desk, which resembled the altar to which a judge ascends in order to sacrifice still another poor man to justice, he concealed himself behind a wall of ledgers. Occasionally the clerks overheard the thump of one of his roundhandled stamps. He sealed his documents himself, and kept the seal in his pocket.

Above Trieste’s harbor, fig-jungles sometimes shade the walls which guide informed persons to arched tunnel-streets where this or that mansion broods; and from that one such reclusive edifice in which Cirtovic ensconced his wife, a good Orthodox woman who never went out, there sprang pairs and trios of lovely girls who could very occasionally be glimpsed strolling rapidly (never unchaperoned) through September’s falling leaves. They wore more transparent veils than their mother, but traditional daggers rode at their hips. And there were the sons, Nicola, Vuk and Veljko; they could readily be met with in the harbor, and gave off no such uncanny an impression as their father, who had been overheard saying: Only knowledge will save you, boys! — They too had learned Glagolitic, it appeared, although what good that did them could not be fathomed, since no one managed to get them drunk. Between them and their uncles lay a shallow cordiality, with countercurrents. It might be that the sons anticipated some struggle as to who would control the business after their father. Stefano and Cristoforo Cirtovic sometimes carried them to Odessa or Marseilles, teaching them how to run with quartering winds, when to luff a ship and how to flog men for duty ill done, but perhaps their father had spoiled them, for around the port went the word that they were dependent although manly enough, unenterprising if admittedly unretiring. As for their sisters, Gordana, the plainest, for reasons which might have had to do with wine-barrels, wedded a cooper and presently removed with him up into the karst country; but the next few were sent back to Serbia to marry, departing in closed ships. Given the downtrodden state of his home country, which he himself had abandoned, Cirtovic, onlookers supposed, should have imposed upon his children kinder destinies. Once again, a sailor or two did talk; certain uncles were the brides’ conductors and wedding-guests, and they returned with stories; that was how the Triestini learned what in any case they expected: that each bride, decently (and opulently) veiled, of course, was met by a lot of powerfully proportioned, bearded, piratical-looking Serbs. At least the young ladies would be well defended! The Triestino dandies who stood outside San Giusto Cathedral, flourishing their spyglasses to inspect the girls who promenaded below, would scarcely have scraped up the luck to see the Cirtovic females in any event — for one thing, the Orthodox church held masses at other times — but why should that prevent young men from uplifting their foreheads in resentment at the loss of so much nubility? At the Communions of each other’s children, Cirtovic’s oldest captains (most of whom were Roman Catholic) sat at table in their best white shirts, with their spectacles slipping down their noses and their faces red with Friulian wine while between forkfuls of fried squid — the one dish, by the way, which the aforesaid Cirtovic disdained — they argued about their master’s deeds and habits, but until the Serbia-bound damsels had all been spoken for, no one outside the family, save only Captain Vasojevic, even knew how many girl-children Jovo Cirtovic possessed. (The reason was that his daughters were his jewels.) Creeping over the wall on Saint Lazzaro’s Eve* (having tranquilized the watchdogs with balls of fish-guts soaked in Friulian wine), our late Captain Morelli’s brother Luca, together with three other zealous defenders of Italian privilege, saw Cirtovic taking out his scales, the daughters embroidering their wedding-stuffs by the lattice window, and the signora standing in her long gold-embroidered dress of white linen and the tight-cinched tarnished belt and square-topped headdress. Then they heard the carriage; an uncle and all three brothers were arriving with Petar. So they fled, resuming the safer if less fruitful practice of importuning Captain Vasojevic over Friulian wine. — In heaven’s name, leave his business to him! said that loyal individual. All they wanted was a story, any story, they pleaded. Weren’t they all friends? Well, then, said Vasojevic, and he prayed to the Mother of God that this would gratify their lust for entertainment, he remembered waiting upon his master one evening in Ragusa, some years ago, when Cirtovic still voyaged in person, Ragusa profitable, and Vasojevic himself no more than a promising subaltern. Behind the black-gratinged windows of a marble house, orange light suddenly shone out, as if a cat had opened his eyes. Then Cirtovic emerged smiling. Vasojevic was to return immediately to the Lazar, there to take delivery of seven fancy inlaid trunks, which arrived within the hour. Obeying his instructions, he inspected these items for damages. They were dowry chests. He paid the carter, and added a tip from his own pocket. Another toast to Prince Lazar! In due course they were all unloaded in Trieste, and by nightfall Petar had conveyed them up the hill. That was all Vasojevic would say, and of course there might now be more or fewer daughters — in 1726, that voyage must have been, although it could have been 1727; either way, it was before the Sultan got dragged down from the sky. Now there was a new Sultan, and Vasojevic and Cirtovic both kept getting richer. How did they do it? A certain Captain Robert (whom the master promptly discharged for speaking out of turn) got drunk, and so, leaning in around him over those tiny blue-covered tables at the “Heaven’s Key,” the Triestini got to hear about the time that the Ragusans sought to punish Cirtovic for unlicensed trade, and he looked, not into each face but away from each, as if something warned him, until by infallible default he lighted on the most corruptible man. This gave rise to much discussion first of satanic powers, and secondly of hellfire, which these drinkers certainly carried within their own hearts. About their enemy, as usual, nothing was concluded, and meanwhile one of his agents rented a stable, filled it with Arabian horses offloaded from the Sava, and sold them all, very dear, to dukes, mercenaries and ruiners of servingmaids.

The Triestini were aware that in certain walled cities of the Istrian archipelago there dwelled persons so wealthy that their stonemasons might inscribe the following in their names: Receive, Our Father, this little church as a present. Captain Vasojevic was now believed to secrete a hoard of silver somewhere in his house, although the night-burglars who investigated this supposition found nothing but death. Captain Robert and Luca Morelli (who never made captain) had to pay off three new widows. In fine, the other merchants’ attempts to find out, emulate or ruin these Serbs remained as crude as the shield and letters on a fifteenth-century gold coin of King Sigismund. Cirtovic knew how to hide whatever mattered.

He certainly kept his daughters sequestered, all right — not that other men didn’t do the same in every petty kingdom of Italy. A few of the dandies still hoped vainly. One remained single all his life on a girl’s account. His name was Alberto. A night came when he wavered, for his best friends Fabio and Marco invited him to hear the singer Emanuela, by whom many ladies were annoyed because she demanded silence, silence, which is not necessarily a condition appropriate to people who are sipping wine together. She wore a long tight crimson robe whose gold buttons marched all the way down. The way she could enclose her fingers around certain words of her songs was something no one had ever witnessed before. She was said to be forty-seven but looked older. When she sang, three little beggar-girls who lived in the street began dancing and fanning themselves with branches; and the sky over Trieste became a domed ceiling with a golden snowflake-sun in the center, connected to many crowned Graces who balanced all longings and judgments upon their pretty heads. Most of the men watched this Emanuela submissively, and when each song ended there were those who wiped their eyes. Alberto was nearly enchanted. The women (who they were you can work out for yourself) shrugged at the floor, wiggling their fingers or whispering to the men who sat beside them. If the whispers got loud, Emanuela would stare at them with her sunken, glittering eyes. Alberto, I repeat, remained almost enchanted, but failed to expel his desire for Cirtovic’s daughters, and particularly for the youngest, whose name he had once overheard, and indeed, possibly misheard, as Tanya. In his hot sad life her image was as shade-rich as a grape arbor. Even as an old man, walking slowly with his hands behind his back, he annoyed others with his praises of a certain Tanyotchka, whom nobody else remembered, although in fact she still lived, and promenaded every day between church and hill, dressed in black. When he closed his eyes, Alberto, who did not recognize her, seemed to see the hollows of her white back, and rain was running down her shoulders. Opening his eyes, he sought out whitenesses in the sky to match her, but these proved all too grey or too blue. Just as a woman’s heel rises away from her sandal when she takes a step, showing for an instant a bit of sole whose pallor proves its kinship to white tubers and other such things which ordinarily live concealed, so this old man’s otherwise sun-tanned fantasies and illusions rebelliously bedecked themselves with the onion-jewels of the unknown. Thus he fell out of time, like a certain skull which anyone who can obey the obscure visiting hours is welcome to see in the Antiquarium; this skull is crumpled like a deflated gas mask from the First World War, the latter’s metal-rimmed goggles gaping, the former’s eye-sockets decorated with mineral stains. Who are you, skull? Whom did you love? Tanyotchka, Tanyotchka. Perhaps it was to placate people of his sort that Tanyotchka’s father Italianized his surname to Cirtovich. Although Captain Vasojevic declined to adopt that fashion, most Triestine Serbs accommodated themselves sooner or later. For example, I remember once unearthing a barely yellowed albumen print of Darinka Kvekich, dated circa 1860; she was bell-shaped in her immense skirt with ribs of pale embroidery; her exotic femininity was walled like a sailing ship. A Genovese notary who occasionally came to call was astonished at how rarely she appeared, although her tactful servingwoman explained: Every day she takes care of her very ill sister and of her other sister who is a little less ill. — But then where are these sisters? — The servingwoman smiled sadly. — Sweet Darinka, said the notary, I need to know how much you love me. — Indefinitely, she replied.

Who any of them were remained a wavy, blurry secret, rippling through those seeming crudenesses which deceive us like the blocky reflections of the lighthouse in the winter seas; Darinka Kvekich, for instance, appears so stiffly monumental in that photograph that our acquaintanceship extends only to her exoskeleton. As a matter of fact, Serbkinas are said to be the most passionate of women, and I have accepted this ever since I first saw cigarette smoke blossoming from a lady’s long white fingers one autumn afternoon in Beograd. (If only I could have offered her Friulian wine!) But this quality they keep hidden from most foreigners, treasuring it within the wall of bluish-white river which waits within the beech trees of Serbia; and their inconspicuousness succeeds all the better because there is so much flamboyant Italian beauty in Trieste. I myself sometimes still pine for a certain exemplar of Franz Lehar’s danza delle libellule, who made her appearance in an ice-blue gown with blue clouds around the hem, a blue scarf draped over her arm, and a strand of blue pearls dangling from her disdainful wrist. Meanwhile, in a dark niche in Trieste dwells the faint wooden statue of a Slavic woman, whom hardly anybody visits; while in a neighboring recess hangs an icon of the Madre della Passione, also called Strastnaja; as Cirtovich demonstrated to the Philadelphians, she is gold and silver on velvet. The heads of Serbkinas stare at me through oval window-mats, as if through the visors of iron helmets. They are no more distinct to me than any gulls and pigeons in Trieste’s cypress-shaking wind.

Meanwhile, our Signor Cirtovich grew a trifle rotund, and his hair whitened and withered. His brothers sailed to Izmir and the Orient, prosperously, but not overly so — another reason the Triestini preferred them to Jovo. They greeted a man like Christians, and weren’t too proud to eat squid! By now we bought salt from the Venetians, whose prices the Ragusans no longer hoped to approach. Where Cirtovich obtained it he would not tell, but to the Triestini he sold it cheaper than anyone, and it savored better. (The only way to take advantage of him was to offer him old maps and manuscripts; he remained greedy for such trash.) To the Jews of Trieste he brought, secured in an inconspicuous wooden chest, an Ark of the Torah, whose golden-green flowers and radially symmetrical vines upon a pinkish white background comprised a paradise as lovely and secret as his home. The Jews praised him and paid him well. Thanks to him, they could house their treasure in a silver cover inlaid with gold.

Although he had never yet been tricked by any of the sea’s shining and tarnished moods, bit by bit he seemed to grow shyer of the aqueous element — or perhaps merely more home-loving. Something disagreed with him, something as small yet black as a single housefly in a whitewashed whitestone room in Ragusa at high summer noon. At about the time that his son Nicola came of age, Cirtovich began to closet himself with a very old man (most likely Slovenian) who carried a snakeheaded walking-stick. Luca Morelli told Captain Robert that he had overheard the two principals discussing an iron hoard in the ground near Bled. Evidently a certain species of iron stood infallible against monsters of all types, and the old man agreed to bring a piece of it to be tried. Cirtovich replied something to the effect that any octopus can ooze through a tiny hole, at which the old man swore by the Mother of God that no sea-monster could get around his metal, in token of whose holiness he requested Signor Cirtovich to be informed, as could be verified by any number of esteemed persons, that from this very same ore had been smelted the sword of Prince Lazar, may Christ smile upon him, who could have vanquished the Turks at Kosovo had he not preferred a heavenly kingdom. Cirtovich responded in a very low voice, so that Morelli failed to comprehend his syllables. Six weeks later the old man reappeared shouldering a heavy sack, but soon left the warehouse in a rage. Cursing Cirtovich and all Serbs everywhere, he threw the sack into the Canal Grande, stamped his foot, then rapped his stick against the railing of the Ponterosso three times. That was the last they saw of him. After that, Cirtovich received fewer visitors. His smile failed to match his gaze. He kept his thumbs hooked in his vest pockets, except when he played with the chain of his pocketwatch. Even his friend Pavle Petrovic, another old settler whom he had previously greeted at church, began to feel unwelcome in this man’s shadow. Complaining to Florio and Alessandro, he was told: Well, that’s our brother.

In about 1746 Jovo Cirtovich received delivery of a fine book-chest with three mirrors glued inside the lid, and over the main compartment, as Vasojevic was called upon to ascertain, a lockable wooden panel figured with grapes and crowns. Captain Robert said: His brain must be worm-eaten! Why should he waste good gold like that? — Luca Morelli proposed that the man had a mistress. They asked Petar, who kept heroically quiet even over two bottles of wine. — In fact the item was for Cirtovich’s youngest daughter, Tanyotchka.

Triestina that she was, she grew up in the lovely softness of dirty grey stone, promenaded through brickwork like a sunset made of russet graveyard earth, secluded herself in shining veils and dresses each one of which could have been the silver cover of a sacred book. Her very first memory was of a yellow-green pine branch swaying in the rough sea; she could not remember that on that occasion her father had been carrying her in his arms. Sometimes when she opened her eyes he was gazing down at her with his sad smile. Then she remembered the painful brightness of her mother’s sunny curtains in the Triestine sea-wind, and the Ponterosso swiveling up and down for her father’s ships; Srdjana was letting her water the garden flowers, so she felt important; in the garden she used to chase slate-hued lizards with her brother Veljko, and when caught the creatures would cast off their wriggling tails. It was already time for church. The priest with the long white beard bowed to everyone and disappeared within the golden door of that great house where Jesus lived. And of course she would not forget Uncle Massimo and Aunt Eva, who gave her presents; even more significant were the sad dark eyes of Prince Lazar from the icon over her parents’ bed; he looked like the king of a deck of cards come alive. Then there was a certain painting in the drawing room, and in her imagination Tanya was or somehow would become the tender longhaired girl on the white horse, laying down her many-bangled arm upon the man’s head. Who he was she never thought to ask. She remembered how her sisters laughed at her whenever they caught her dreaming over this picture (Aleksandra and Liljana were the cruelest; Gordana cared the least). Her father in his grey homespun trousers, her mother with the little dagger at her belt, them she most frequently remembered not in and of themselves, but rather as elements of scenes, as when, for instance, she was riding in the coach with her mother to see her father off; arriving at the Canal Grande, they watched through the narrowest conceivable parting of the curtains as he descended the stone stairs to the skiff where two of his sailors waited to ferry him out to the Sava or the Lazar (by then he had turned over the Kosovo to Uncle Massimo, the Beograd to Uncle Florio). Sometimes Liljana might ride along; her brothers still accompanied them when they were young; they would leap out onto the quay and their father’s servitors would set them easy tasks, praising and humoring them as befitted the sons of a rich man. Uncle Florio or Uncle Stefano might be about the docks; they would always approach the carriage to greet the family in Christ’s name, kissing Tanya on the forehead. Once, while some gaunt carpenter bent far forward over his bench to watch, a sailor questioned Vuk about that neck-pouch which their father guarded like some diadem, but the boy took fright and sprinted back to the coach. By then their father had commended them to Saint Sava, vanishing promptly, while Petar conveyed the remnant home, her mother too proud to weep, the child knowing that the worst had happened: her father had left the world again, perhaps forever; and she imagined that the evening breeze was sobbing by means of the shaking reflection of leaves in a windowpane. While she was still very young, this image of the absent father quickly became as pallid as San Giusto’s above-the-doorway marble saint in his concentrically dimpled robe, holding a castle in one hand and a rake in the other, with his head cocked wryly; then her father came home to renew himself in her mind. Her mother slaughtered two chickens and a lamb; there were onions, potatoes, greens of all sorts, and Friulian wine, of course — never squid or octopus, which her father would not touch. Tanya and her sisters were kissing him in delight, because he had brought them a little box of coral-figured golden buttons. What her brothers got that time she disremembered. For a bedtime story he told them about blind creatures he had recently met in a certain limestone cave. Only Tanyotchka dared to ask: Papa, what were you doing in that cave? — to which he smilingly replied that perhaps he had needed to hide a certain something. In the morning she watched him reading old documents in an unknown alphabet. Then almost at once, or at least so she remembered it, they were escorting him back to the Canal Grande. He embraced them and stepped out of the carriage. Petar’s eyes grew as milky blue as the lagoon of Grado. Captain Vasojevic was waiting on the quay; he kissed his hand to Tanya. Her mother’s lips moved in a prayer, and as they turned up the road past the Teatro Romano, Tanya forgot her father because a plump black-and-white cat lay on the rim of the old Jesuit well, unmoving, her green eyes wide, and so the girl pleaded with her mother for a cat. Her mother kissed her wearily. Her brothers were hounding Petar to tell them how their father once escaped from a boatload of ravenous uskoks. — Well, young masters, why not ask Captain Vasojevic? If it happened, he must have been there. I don’t know about anything but horses.

Each time she was parted from her father, she continued to feel a fearful bewilderment as to how she ought to live without him, but ever less apprehension on his behalf, since he owned such heavenly luck. Soon she could remember him better and better, in part by means of a certain old book which he sometimes unlocked from his strongbox to show her. Its silver covers were mounted with mosaics of tiny gold, somber malachites, carnelian and hematite tiles; mostly it was all gold. Christ hovered, His pale robe glittering like mother-of-pearl and the four spokes of His golden wheel-halo making a cross as He shone there within an oval womb surrounded on all sides by haloed saints each of whose halo was a golden pavement of beads: Saint Lazar, Saint Sava and their kin reached out to touch the spears of golden light which radiated from His envelope. Opening the silver covers of this book, Tanya found the secret of those rays. But what it consisted in could not be expressed. The child believed that her father knew it as well as she; they had no need to speak of it. As for her sisters, they invariably exclaimed over that precious object, then, summoned by their mother, returned to their weaving and sewing, which they much preferred because, safely away from their father, they could laugh and sing as they desired.

These were some of the pictures in the book of Tanyotchka; they made her who she was. Throughout her life they accompanied her, sometimes closer or farther from her head, like the seagulls crying just before a rain. And I must not fail to mention the picture she simply lived in. Caressed on every fair day by that light of Trieste, which is born of sun, sea, paint and stone, and might be yellow or beige, but masks itself in all the colors, she never realized how Italian she was.

As he travelled less, her father built up his library, and long before that renowned Triestino Baron Revoltella even began to assemble his glass-fronted shelves of match-bound, spine-labeled volumes, Cirtovich possessed considerable bibliographic treasures. These became a portion of her heritage, and only hers, because to everybody else in the family that chamber felt as eerie as the site of a solitary burial. Once she asked her Uncle Alessandro what his favorite book might be, and he laughed, staring at her. Then she knew why her father kept aloof from his brothers.

She and her sisters used to play with seventeenth-century brass coins worn down into spurious translucency; their father once brought home a coffer of them, salvaged from some shipwreck and quite worthless except to children. The girls strung them into bracelets and necklaces. As for their brothers, they hid, hoarded and traded their shares.

Their father loved them all in the best way, doting on them, yet, as they somehow were aware, seeing their faults, guarding them from perils and follies, indulging them when that would do no harm, and correcting them only by necessity. The boys often disagreed, and fell to pummelling each other with shipwrights’ nippers, clamps and chisels; they would have swung wide-bladed axes if they could. Remembering his own childhood, Cirtovich did not beat them even for these follies. (He never struck his daughters at all; it was left to Marija to do that, without his knowledge.) Once, it is true, he laid hands on Vuk, whom he caught teasing his sisters with a dead octopus he had found, but that was to teach him that a man must never disrespect any woman.* The Triestini had come to imagine him as overbearing and even ferocious; and indeed, as might as well be confessed, in darker ports he had assaulted certain stubborn customs men, when the latter were unreasonable, and outnumbered, and if it happened to be a moonless night; but up here at home, when the sea breeze passed in between the shutters, which on spring and summer afternoons grew pearlescent with that special Friulian light, he played games with the children on his hands and knees. Marija laughed a little, then turned away.

Tanya’s brothers already dreamed of foreign coasts, and among themselves (saying nothing to their father, who simply awed them — he had no use for their plans) they fashioned ever shrewder fantasies of secret lucre. Nicola was the eldest, then Vuk and Veljko. Once they had mastered arithmetic, Captain Vasojevic quizzed them on Grisogono’s Venetian circles for calculating the heights of tides. Then he took them down to the harbor. Their hands grew rough and they spoke less and less. Their mother and sisters soon virtually lost sight of them, so frequently were they away in their father’s ships, learning the lie of the Dalmatian coast.

One evening Tanya overheard Captain Vasojevic trying to console her father, who seemed worried or upset. He was saying: Even octopi can be tricked into grabbing hold of olive branches. — What her father said to that she could not hear.

Now the younger sisters, as was indeed their own desire, began in turn to be married off closer to home than the elder, their destinies as simplified as the concentric blue leaf-waves on their parents’ plates. They wove their trousseau-clothes as industriously as a nest of elegant spiders. As each one was wed, she gently kissed her parents, brothers and sisters on the cheek.

As for Tanyotchka, by this time she had the peach-colored skin of a young woman, the creamy face of an Italian beauty. Of course she remained a Serbkina, the kind whose form is more powerful than tears.

If I may be more explicit, perhaps the reason that in later life her father did not entirely understand her was that while he kept his aspirations as uncorrupted as a soldier’s well-oiled arquebus, she grew up, as I said, a Triestina, sweetened by her summers in the arbor of grapes and roses, which, among other more secret things her family’s high walls enclosed; and when she heard her father’s booted footfalls on the stone walkway, although she invariably leapt up in joy and rushed into his arms, as soon as he had stroked her hair and given her two or three bristly kisses, he turned back to his business, with that sad and watchful expression freezing again on his face, and she, having established that by embracing him again she could delay the resumption of his cares but could never keep them away from him for more than another few instants, learned to let him go, turning away on her own account, in order to avoid the sight of his suffering — not that she even realized that she perceived it, quotidian as it was, and child as she was, inhaling life without distinguishing good from bad, which after all would have accomplished nothing anyhow; and likewise drinking in the cool, still, rose-scented afternoons as she sat in the pavilion sewing beside her mother. As crisp as the ivy-shadows on the awning, as sudden as the crow-caws were her experiences of her father, but just as one forgets shadow-patterns, however beautiful, so even now she still misplaced him in his absence, not that she thereby loved or needed him less. Her needle sometimes forgot to flash, hovering instead, like the black bumblebees considering which rose to investigate next; but this dreaminess, which her mother occasionally indulged and her father saw as something else, did not get her behindhand in her tasks. Where her thoughts glided at such times was as much a mystery to others as what might be in her father’s neck-pouch, but for a fact the singing of the blackbirds helped her remember, as any true Serb should, the day at Kosovo Polje, Field of Blackbirds, when Prince Lazar got his doom.

The first time that her eldest two brothers, well outfitted with warm goatskin vests, went off to sea, Tanya wept, and her mother slapped her face to scare away the bad luck. The child bowed her head to indicate the submissive repentance she scarcely felt. Then her mother kissed the icon many times, praying for a safe voyage. Tanya willingly did the same. Her mother explained about the evil eye, Satan’s watchful greed, the jealousy of men (from which Christ preserve us) and the snares of Death the Huntsman. The flower-engraved copper vessels were hissing on the great block of the stove, while Srdjana, who had pretended not to see anything, knelt on the floor, and crammed in more wood. Veljko and Petar had ridden down to the ropemaker’s to order rigging for Uncle Massimo. Tanya’s father was already at the warehouse.

Perhaps her mother said something to him, because a day or two later he took the girl, decently veiled, alone with him to the empty church, whose lower ceiling-domes were elaborate Easter eggs with figures on them, while the upper ones made up a vault of blue being circumnavigated by marching figures; at the highest point of that inner sky stood Christ in a sun of crackling golden flowers; and in the quiet sizzling of the votive candles her father asked her to pray to our heavenly Prince Lazar, whose shoulders are higher than the deck-cannons of any Spanish galleon. This she did, while he crossed himself and murmured beside her; and when they came out, the Canal Grande was black with ships. Her father inquired whether she loved her brothers, and she said yes. — Don’t worry, Tanyotchka. My luck will shelter them, even though they’ve gone with Uncle Stefano. — The girl kissed his hand. Petar drove them home, and there was her mother in the doorway, forming up a warp of fabric from her loom into the air and all the way across the courtyard to the stack of Roman gravestones which everybody now used for any and all purposes.

In those days she often liked to scare herself by making shadows on the wall with her gabled lantern; sometimes a twisted bit of driftwood that one of her brothers brought her would produce some fine weird shape. Whenever her mother caught her, the girl got extra work to do. But when her father noticed, he insisted that she not be punished merely for dreaming. Already she knew that there was something which she would be expected to do one day, something secret and good, which indeed she would come to demand of herself once its meaning announced itself from darkness.

By then she was braiding ropes for her father whenever he allowed her, first the trecia simplice, then the wide mesh of the plagietto con fragio. She loved more than anything to please him.

He inquired what she desired of him, and she said: To learn as much as you. — Smiling, he rose and went away. No one had ever said that to him before; nor had he asked the question of anyone, even her eldest brother. As she watched him go, she saw that obscene secret care, whatever it was, swoop back down onto his shoulders. A few days later she cried out in joy when he brought her a brass microscope.

Unlocking his Organum Mathematicum (a fine one made in Würzburg in 1668), he opened to her all the slanted shelves with their many-colored tabs of knowledge.

Here in one pocket were depictions of all seven planets, which truly did, in spite of what her mother and the priest insisted, revolve around the sun, elliptically. She pulled out a card depicting the moon’s hideous face, and this in one stroke destroyed her pleasure in lunar nights. Once a lady had come in to pray at church; from a distance she was radiant; then she drew near the altar, and the mother dug her fingernails into Tanyotchka’s wrist in disgust, for here was a syphilitic prostitute, whose leprous face was pitted with stinking sores. Her kindly father being absent, the men rushed to turn her out, thrusting at her with sticks until she ran away. Then her mother made all the children wash their faces and hands in rosewater. The lunar disk expressed this diseased character. But her father informed her that what appeared to be imperfections were nothing more or less than mountains and seas, irregular like our own. The girl wished to know whether there were people on the moon. Before he could answer, her mother laughed at her. — Father says that knowledge will save us! explained Tanya; her mother slapped her mouth.

And in another pocket were ships in profile passing a two-dimensional undulating Turkish coast of domes, minarets and clusters of rectangular edifices. She knew all too well that her father had been thereabouts. She raised the magnifying loupe, and with a thrill of horror discovered a Turkish woman in a green overmantle and a long white dress with red flowers. She asked whether all Turks were evil, as Uncle Massimo said. Stroking her hair for an instant, her father departed. She heard the carriage bearing him away; he was gone near about two months, and no news came. That night her mother prayed to Saint Thomas, who guards the rain-clouds.

She learned to operate the two disk-tiers of her father’s solar clock, to name each monster and animal painted on his celestial globe. She could already slide the bronze knob of the dromoscope as accurately as Nicola and Vuk; she was better at it than Veljko. Smiling, her father softly clapped his hands to watch her. Of course he’d never take her to sea.

Veljko had been jealous about the Organum Mathematicum, but their father brought the proper gift for him: a crocodile mummy from Umm-el-Baragât, which when Petar carried it from the warehouse was still wrapped in papyrus: crumbly, dingy stuff, inexplicably valued by their father, who removed it with extreme care and took it off to his study. The crocodile stank, but Veljko loved it. Tanya helped him improve its eyes with vermilion beads. Unfortunately, he carried it out into the garden one day, in hopes of scaring Srdjana, and before she could oblige him the watchdogs had devoured it.

As for Vuk and Nicola, the only presents their father now gave them were coins of various realms, all fungible; that satisfied them best.

Years after he was gone, Tanya wondered whether he had wished to tell her more about his youth in Serbia. Why she knew so little was mysterious in and of itself. Uncle Stefano’s daughters, for instance, loved to prattle about their high stone house, as if they could remember it. Uncle Alessandro first made friends with her brothers by telling over the Turks he had killed; of the three boys, Nicola especially adored him, and rushed to mend ropes for him or even tar the deck, if only he could be near him. Jovo Cirtovich was, perhaps, shy. On rare occasions Tanya overheard him relating to her proud and breathless brothers some family tale of raid or ambush, in which he never signified. — Remember well, he’d say. There were Cirtovices at Kosovo. — To the daughters he declined to mention such things, and so she did not inquire, a respectfully meant omission which in old age she regretted. Once for no reason he described that same stone house, which had smelled of sausages, tobacco and ancient wheat, and Tanya, a little afraid of being unseemly, inquired about her grandmother. — Much like your mother, he replied. She cared for all of us, without many words. — And Grandfather? Uncle Florio says he died a hero. — Marking the ledger with his forefinger, he looked up to say: He was a great man, praise be to God. Now, Tanyotchka, have you found the mistake in Uncle Massimo’s invoice?

There came the evening when, called urgently to save the church from fire, her father rode there with Petar and all her brothers and uncles, and Tanya found the key left in the lock of his ebony coffer. That time she was a good girl. A week after that, her father was at the warehouse, her mother in the garden caring for the lilies, her most prized flowers; her sisters were weaving and spinning for their dowry chests. Tanya had finished verifying the consignment sheets of a cargo of olive oil. One barrel was unaccounted for. Nicola rushed in, peeped into the looking-glass as earnestly as the helmsman watches the dog vane, then departed, very worked up, yet somehow pleased with himself. Where was Petar? The girl put her ear to the stable door and heard his snoring. Yes, she was safe, and would now accomplish her object. Opening the chest, she saw a hoard of secret books. They were all about death. Her Uncle Florio had once sworn to her that every Turk is as a werewolf who devours children’s flesh — and here was a tract which taught how any man could become just such a monster, by going to a certain island and lifting a certain white stone. What had her father to do with that? Terrified, the girl reclosed the lid and locked it, saying nothing to anyone. The next time they ate together, she watched her father’s teeth. Half reassured, she rendered herself wholly so by promising herself that those books were not what she had believed. She was learning how to keep secrets.

Just for her he once brought a wooden chest all the way from Egypt; within stood tiny blue mummiform servants with their arms folded across their breasts and their kohled eyes staring ahead. She used to march them all around. He said that they must have belonged to some Pharaoh’s sister-wife, who had been entombed with them so that they could do her work for her in the afterlife. Even a queen, so it seemed, was not exempt from agricultural labor.

Well, father, since we have taken away her slaves, will she have to work now?

He laughed and chucked her under the chin. Just then he was unriddling the mystery of the three triangles contained in the Pentangle of Solomon, and her still innocent as he supposed (for he never learned about the episode of the ebony coffer); to him it seemed that this first knowledge she was gathering must merely be as sweetly ancient to her as ears of wheat engraved on a buried Roman pillar; she was not yet armed with the Sword of the Word; the Divine Purpose had not murmured in her ear; but soon, perhaps even this winter, when the ships were in, he would show her the Cabbalistic Secrets of the Master Aptolcater.

Father, where is Captain Vasojevic?

Him? Oh, I’ve sent him back to Egypt.

(The task, he did not tell his daughter, was to expose from beneath the sands of Egypt a certain pyramid whose vertex touched the center of the earth, and copy whatever writing might be engraved therein.)

On another day she asked why Prince Lazar had fallen, and her father, rising, with tears in his eyes, explained that Christ had offered two choices: victory at Kosovo, and then eternal insignificance, or the tragic glory of a defeat which his descendants would unceasingly mourn and seek to avenge.

Trusting her above all others in the household, even his dear wife Marija, he ordered whichever books she wished, even when her mother thought them unsuitable, and while her younger brothers were telling off Dalmatia’s coastal islands to their father’s strictest sea-pilots (for mistakes they now got beaten — she never did), she began to study the ancient Greeks, because next spring he hoped for her help in collating seven fragmentary parchments concerning astral navigation. She chose certain dramas as her primers; he sent away to Rome, paying gold ducats. — He said to her: I’ve prayed to Saint Sava that you’ll find something I’ve overlooked. — At this the girl felt proud, guilty and uncertain. — He used to sit by the hour at his high easel-desk, calculating wages and profits, while she rested with her legs in his lap, reading Euripides. Not until she had children of her own did she realize how much trouble he must have put himself to, conveying the ledgers back and forth in order to be home with her longer. When she got to “Alcestis,” that play about the selfish man who falls out with his old father for declining to die for him, then finally persuades his wearily, tolerantly loving wife, Tanyotchka forgot to reach out and gently stroke her father’s wrist; and he, coming up out of absorption in his ledgers, presently noticed the lack, and saw her lovely face illuminated with tears. Saying nothing, he continued his sums, waiting for her to speak. He had almost come to the time when he must be off to his ships when she said: Now I understand.

Oh, is that so? And what do you understand?

It’s better to die for others than to—

Yes.

But why couldn’t he have won the battle also, and saved our land?

So then you don’t entirely understand. Well, darling, give me a kiss! The Beograd is coming in…

From Montenegro?

Good girl! And your uncle needs me.

Father, why must you do business with the Sultan?

For our advantage, and his disadvantage, silly girl! Now I’m going—

The girl smiled at him.

Father, about Prince Lazar—

Yes, darling, what is it? Be quick.

Would it be better to have hope of heaven, and live in the world trying to improve oneself, or just be born in heaven and never feel the need of anything?

That’s one crucial question, for a fact, said he, caressing her hair, and then as he turned away from her she saw the mysterious affliction settle back upon him, so that all the sudden he was as gnawed down to narrowness as the jackal-haunted Sabbioncello peninsula. Rising dutifully, she went to weave linen before her mother scolded her. Once her father had called for Petar, her mother stood for a long time in the garden, stretching out her hands to the doves.

Mother, mother, please tell me more about Saint Lazar.

What else do you need to know? He’s our holy saint, who gave his life for our glory.

But why couldn’t he—

Her mother sharply said: Whoever weeps for the world loses his eyes.

If they live and thrive, children must grow, just as surely as fig-roots will split the old stone walls of Trieste; thus Tanya bloomed up out of what she had imagined that she understood. Of course one only grows up so far; Tanya would never comprehend, as we can for her, that her entire life remained confined within those sad days before Serbia finally cast off the Turks — which were also the good days when the Ponterosso could still swivel open for the ships; yes, they were the young days of Trieste before Our Lady of the Flowers had blood on her forehead; those were the days of Tanya, who could still remember her mother carrying her inside the cathedral and along that awful glistening space where God could see her, then entering beneath the canopy, crossing herself, kissing the center icon, crossing herself and kissing the rightmost one, then repeating with the leftmost; now that she was grown, she understood that God could see her wherever she hid. Her perception of other matters grew meanwhile. She realized that her parents were not happy together. At least they were not poor. She took joy and comfort in the good sound of ducats pouring out onto the table whenever her father came home.

When an old Florentine lady with snow-white braids and a sea-tanned face knocked on their gate in hope of alms, her father, peering through the tiny window, told Srdjana not to admit her. — But, master, we have some slops… — Foolish woman, can’t you smell the plague on her? — A week later some neighbors were dead from the pest. — This too gave her comfort of a sort; her father could protect her.

Like her brothers, she learned to communicate in the runic bone-scratching of the old Lingua Venetica, but she had no one to trade messages with; her sisters being ignorant, and her mother, even admitting the inconsiderable possibility of her literacy in that language, lacking the time for nonsense. So Tanya began to memorize swatches of the Gospels, in order to recite them in church. Just before her First Communion she proved her knowledge, and the priest said, not entirely approvingly (not that her father cared what he thought), that he had never heard of so learned a girl.

Smiling sadly, her mother presented her with a necklace of silver coins on a golden chain; every coin bore the same profiled portrait of an unknown king. Tanyotchka’s hopes became as rich as the ivy on the walls.

Whenever her father and Captain Vasojevic went out, murmuring together, Tanyotchka, peeping out between the curtains of the highest window, saw other men grow as open-eyed as the painted saints of the Trecento period. This made her all the more inclined to remain indoors like her mother and sisters, especially since she had learned how to help her father balance his accounts. Occasionally now that she was older she was permitted to accompany Srdjana to the market by the Ponterosso; her mother rarely went. There Tanya discovered how poor most people are. She dreaded becoming a beggar. This she never dared to confess to her father, for what if this would insult him who was undefeatable? So, like all of us, she continued to bind and conceal her thoughts, sharpening her deductions the more. The way that her mother turned her back now when she found Tanya studying astronomy, the way her sisters so often wove and spun her share without complaint, and that steady sad alertness with which her father gazed at her, all proved again that some task would be laid on her. Whatever it was, she prayed it would relieve her father. Since he stood so superior to all fears, she now commenced to wonder whether that look of misery might derive from the body; for of course even he was mortal. But this thought she uprooted wherever it sprouted. Was it reassuring or the reverse that her father’s friend now seemed likewise weighed down? She could remember when Captain Vasojevic had been cheerfuller, which is to say not merely younger but more like unto other men. When she was much smaller, he scarcely came around. But once he had achieved her father’s confidence, with which their common nationality had much to do, he began to stay for supper, or at times overnight; and as the household warmed to him, he might occasionally chuck the nearest daughter under the chin, and with gruff shyness present her with some small and peculiar thing of appropriately moderate commercial value: a copper coin engraved with a pretty mermaid, a medallion of Prince Lazar, or a set of tiny animal-headed trade-weights picked out of some shipwreck or marketplace. By the time that Tanyotchka was twelve or thirteen, of course, such physical familiarities were out of the question, and he contented himself with bowing to her, or at most kissing her hand, before he gave her any pretty trifle.

Her mother used to wonder why he never married. Here she exposed an almost comical blindness, for it was into his hands that that Cincar wax trader had conveyed her so many years ago. Leading her into a private cabin, in company with her maidservant, Vasojevic promised the two women that they would be secure, and offered them whichever refreshments or conveniences they might wish. Reassured by the portrait of Prince Lazar, the maidservant removed her veil first. Her beauty was such that it superseded one of Vasojevic’s most beloved memories, which derived from a window-glimpse he had once obtained in Sarajevo of a woman, evidently Turkish, of immense elegance, who, it being winter, was wrapped in a sable coat whose soft hues were a rainbow of coffee, honey and milk, with sweet black shadows which matched her own black hair. Although he had as yet taken in no more of her than her outline, Vasojevic was already stricken. A ring lived on every one of her pale fingers, which ceaselessly stroked one another for warmth. The rest of her, however, remained perfectly still. She leaned forward, resting her fur-sleeved arms on her fur-sheltered knees, staring far away in boredom or sadness. After half an hour she lit a long pipe, which she then allowed to suffocate between her fingers. Then after another long pause she turned her head in his direction. Perhaps she had not realized that he was watching her. He saw a pale face, with dark, generous yet cruel lips. The longer he looked, the more she fascinated him. Her eyelashes upcurled, almost supplicatingly. She held a tiny black leather pouch which gleamed scratchlessly. Her hair was parted across her face, transforming her white forehead into a pagoda roof. She had a triangular chin. He thought her the most irresistible lady he had ever seen. Her long hair accompanied her throat down into the hot darkness of her fur collar. Her expression never changed. A slave rushed to shutter the window.

As she was to all other women he had seen before, so was the maidservant of his master’s bride to her, and thus the mistress to the maidservant. Bowing, Vasojevic asked them to send to him for anything they needed. Then he left them there, with a sailor outside the door to protect them, and that was how it went, all the way to Trieste.

Had her father seen fit to wed him to one of the many Cirtovich belles, no one in the family would have minded, in spite of the disparity in age; perhaps her mother had even once suspected some interest on his part, Tanyotchka being most definitely his favorite, for although she had not entirely achieved her mother’s former beauty, her heart was kinder, her intellect was as great as her father’s, and her eyes expressed such beautiful awareness, almost like the Virgin Marija herself; all the same, Vasojevic never came anywhere near marriage. Whenever he entered the Sultan’s dominions he made do with leering slave-girls playing peekaboo behind their fans, flashing their bangles, whistling, snapping their fingers and singing obscene songs in charming voices. Now that he was in on his master’s secret, he got a cash allowance for such sports. He paid with a silver coin issued by the ancient city of Panemuteichus, or with last year’s ducats; to the Turks it was all the same, for they knew how to weigh money as well as Jovo Cirtovich. Sometimes Vasojevic used to ask after a particular Aida, whom he never found; of late he had given that up. A certain Gypsy-looking girl, nicely laced into her pastel-colored corset, wriggled her gold hoop-earrings at him and leaped on him with the alacrity of a hungry corpse. The other women sprawled sniggering over the bowl of grapes they fed into each other’s mouths. Vasojevic did not care. Knowing what he did, he wished for neither wife nor children.

What blighted those two men (although it also of course advantaged them) had to do with a strange faculty which Jovo Cirtovic had inherited from his own father, a hajduk* both brave and cheerless who after an almost abnormally long life was shot by Turkish Janissaries whom he had sought to ambush in a high meadow on the eve of Saint George’s Day.* Two of the hajduks, who happened to be the dead man’s brothers, carried him home. The mother commenced to scream and gash herself, while Maksim, the second son, cursed in obscenities of despair. The other sons sat stroking their beards; and presently Alexander said: Please describe those Turks. — To Jovo, the first living son, then fell that neck-pouch of greasy black lambskin, which his father had worn so invariably beneath his shirt that no one in the family even stopped to wonder what it might contain; after all, curiosity has killed tigers as dead as cats. Or had they wondered nonetheless? Gazing on their grim father, whose lips rarely moved, the sons might have wondered indeed, or even speculated, but it proved best to turn away from such courses. That the pouch was supposed to descend from eldest to eldest was all that anyone knew. Maksim had been the last empirical explorer of this subject; although he was hardly seven years old then, their father felled him with his fists, execrating and kicking him without pity; the boy had been lucky to lose nothing but a tooth. After that, whenever their father stepped away and reached into his shirt, they averted their faces. The uncles remarked that on the night of his slaying, Lazar Cirtovic’s hand kept creeping toward his throat, as if he desired the touchstone but denied himself; this was peculiar, and so was the fact that the Janissaries had killed him in near-darkness, at more than a hundred paces, with a single bullet. At any rate, the family held the funeral, then made that renowned toast to the better hour, meaning the rendezvous in the afterworld with our loved dead. By then the better hour of Jovo Cirtovic had already commenced; for, withdrawing himself into a shepherd’s cave, he untied the legacy from around his throat. The leather smelled like his father’s sweat. He unpeeled the half-rotten, salty clasp. Within lay an ovoid object not unlike a drop of sea-glass, or perhaps a mirror. At first it seemed greenish-black, like old bronze. Reader, if you have ever robbed a Roman grave, you might have won yourself twin fibulae like mushroom-gilled breasts of greenish-silver, ready to be yoked onto the chest of some miniature deity. But although metal-comparisons momentarily occluded Jovo’s mind, the object must be comprised of glass, for a fact, although its substance — talk about through a glass darkly! — was blacker than anything he had ever seen. The impossibility of any such night-clot being transparent was more patent than an axiom out of Euclid. But as he peered into it, not without a certain longing connected with his father, he began, so it seemed, to glimpse something moving fitfully within, although how that could be was equally mysterious; in any event, the matter waxed unpleasant to his consideration, for indeed the longer he looked, the greater grew his dread; and now the thing inside, whatever it was, briskened like a treetop in a freshening breeze, and he began to get the sense of a ball (although it could have been pear-shaped or even gourd-like) festooned with myriad kelpish appendages whose incessant flickerings were what so horribly drew his eye. It could have been an upturned many-branching tuber, or a strange tree with a round eye just below the crown, or a new-pulled tooth still attached its bloody root. As his sense of menace increased, the conviction stole upon him that these arms would presently draw away from the thing’s face, exposing it to him, and that this would be the most fearful thing in the world. His response was of course defiance — for he had been raised to be a true Serb.

He concluded that this entity must be either death itself, or something contingent to it. It unfailingly appeared to him in this molluscid form, it bore a texture like tortoise-shell, and on occasion its body was colored like quicksilver. Its prickle-studded head resembled a Turk’s cap; and yet there were nights when he could have sworn it was a triangular mask. To prove his courage to himself, he once tapped on the glass; at which the thing coiled up and shrank, as if fearful, then grew an angry purple, and began lashing out against the sides of the crystal. To him the worst part, which rarely occurred, was when it showed him the ultramarine radiance of its eyes.

As his father’s fate proved (or did not), to see death’s arrival is hardly to forestall it; for death’s minions are myriad; and just because we spy an army of Turks approaching over the plains does not guarantee a victory, as again is shown by the doom of Prince Lazar. Besides, death may come when we are sleeping.

Jovo of course had foreseen nothing, lacking the pouch while his father lived. There had been no dream of bloody banners.

Since he did of course believe in heaven, Christ and angels, one might wonder whether his mistake (if he made any) consisted in refraining from turning to those beneficent helpers. His eventual point of view, a matter of convenience as well as comfort to him, was that the dark-glass thing might be an angel, howbeit of an ominous cast; in any event, it was this gift which God had set before him to make the occupation of his life, and he must face it first, just as a fisherman must get his nets in trim before he rows out anywhere. Perhaps he should have laid the matter in the Church’s lap. But he declined to offer himself up any longer to other men’s misunderstanding; moreover, he cherished what his father had bequeathed to him, not only because it brought him riches and power, but also quite simply because it came from his father.

Toward him the father had been strangely lenient, permitting him to read and study every now and then with the priest, so long as neither goats nor sheep got lost. Whenever he took his mother’s honey into town, he returned with coins. In those days he sensed that something would be expected of him, but how can a child know himself? Had he expressed a more martial character, his father might have been prouder; certainly his brothers and uncles would have made more of him; to please them he killed his first Turk, an old woodcutter, before he was ten, and showed both quickness and courage on mountain raids, but his heart lay in his numbers and letters, so that in time his father gazed across the fire at him with a sad bewildered pride. As for the son, to his father he had been lovingly loyal always, even through his dread.

Now that he was the family head, they feasted him from silver cups and drank his health, all the time watching him, to see what he would do. His mother, who had patiently hated the race ever since the Turks whipped her brother to death on the market square in Mostar, laid out the corpse in silence, folding its arms across its shattered breast. They toasted Saint Lazar, recourse of the persecuted and defeated.

The priest arrived. They prayed to Saint Sava. Fumigating the coffin with sulphur, tow-wisps and good black powder, they lowered the dead father into it. Afterward they threw in coins. Jovo and Maksim nailed down the lid. The sisters were screaming. The brothers passed the coffin out the window and laid it in the horse-cart. Jovo led the family to the open grave. And finally, as I have said, they toasted the better hour. Drinking grimly, the uncles waited for something else to be uttered, and presently Maksim said it: Brandy is good in its way, but I’d rather drink Turkish blood!

That anxiety which would weary him like a ceaseless ringing in one’s ears, that was not yet perceptible. What was he to do? His sisters lowered their eyes. As for his mother, uncles, brothers, all of them kept watching him as would the double ranks of saints on the golden polyptych in the Franciscan church at Pula. Perceiving his pallor, they prepared to misconstrue him, as they had done before. He was haunted, but no longer afraid. He saw that squid-face howsoever he turned, except to the west. Especially hateful were its tonguelike radula and its beak like beetle’s pincers, but when it showed him its huge round eye, that was nearly insufferable. Already he was growing accustomed to it; he would employ the thing to carry out his will. — But what did he will? First if not last, to do something great. — What that deed ought to be he would discover. Being practical, as a Serb had to be in that tyrannized land, he comprehended that he must first build up wealth, then perpetuate his family and his secret. This day he would set out.

On the riverbank he took a handful of Serbian earth and tied it up in a cloth. His youngest brother Lazar said: So, he’s getting out with whatever it is that Father carried. What a treacherous bastard! — Jovo forbore to strike him; the squid thing did not show him any need. They all perceived his determination to achieve some triumph, the more splendid since it remained undefined. Of course they could not see that staying on here would be a living death.

Turning the family over to Maksim, to whom he gave all of their father’s goods and most of his ready money, he signed on to the first ship he saw, and the sea foamed into grey bubbles like the delicately woven chain-links in Hungarian armor. The dark-glass offered him a comforting opacity. He was entering a more fruitful world and therefore, as ought to have been the case, an easier one. When he first rode the rainbow sea at the base of Ragusa’s walls at sunset, he smiled and thought: This was inevitable. — And he prospered, since he could see and avoid so many ills. Hardhanded in trade, and quick, as it proved, in the forecastle of any ship, confident against villains and perilous swells, familiar since childhood with both discomfort and cruelty, and (best of all) cognizant of prices and qualities, he spied out treasures of all sorts. The geometry of halyard, crosstree and shroud came so easy to his mind that the officers never beat him. Some of his shipmates were murderers, many treacherous and most drunk, but the squid-face peered in through his heart’s scuttle to warn him of their designs; even in his sleep the cold wet rasp of a tentacle across his neck woke him in good time, so that already his canniness (by which I mean uncanniness) began to be talked of. To be sure, neither he nor they disobeyed the creed of most human beings who act their role instead of merely mouthing it — that since life and death are both unjust, it cannot be evil to fight against them however one can. Against, for instance, the atrocities of the Turkish occupation one is justified in murdering any lone and harmless Turk, if it can be done in secret; and justification increases in direct proportion to profitability: rob the dead, by all means! — But others were enchained by speculations, while Cirtovic was bound to knowledge. Now that death had grown visible to him, he thought to strip life to equivalent nakedness. While the others sewed, gambled, drank and carved, he read an old grimoire which promised everything, ending: And this last point hath been proved, and is very true. One night an Englishman stepped over the sleeping cabin boy and tried to assassinate Cirtovic with a sailmaker’s needle, but the latter, galvanized by his angel’s electric-blue eye, shot him from underneath the blanket. The others held inquest, but there was the dead Englishman where he ought not to have been, with the needle still in his hand, and so they shrugged and threw him to the fishes. Withdrawing himself then, as though he meant to ease his bowels, Cirtovic peeped inside his lucky pouch, and found the thing hanging in darkness there, as if at ease, its arms dangling down and the suckers on them shining like strings of onions, which proved that nobody meant to avenge the Englishman, at least just now; so he returned to his hammock and slept the night through. Presently there came that evening when they were moored at Hvar, and Cirtovic scented an ambush by uskoks, in time sufficient to kill four of them. Just as certain squids are so transparent that one sees their brains and nerves beneath the skin, so the evil motives of others, if they impinged on him, were ever visible to Jovo Cirtovic. Mischances, even potential ones, announced their coming with equal clarity, as in that time off Pula when his demon rode the leech of the foresail, thanks to which he saw that the cringle had come loose, which could have hindered their getaway in a side-wind. The careless sailor got flogged; the second mate thanked Cirtovic. And just as Catholics enjoy touch-relics, so do sailors love the lucky man, for we all crave magic against danger. Ragusans, Spaniards, Triestini and renegade Turks, they all respected him, and even confided their money to him on certain doubtful ventures; whenever he agreed to take it, it came back to them with interest — unless, of course, they were fated to feed devil-fishes. To their horrors and fears he listened as would a rich man to the poor. Regarding his own life he appeared to feel nothing but pleasure, wonder and pride; for what can be as beautiful as the glory of God and the bread which people have earned? His aspirations continued to enlarge. To himself he seemed to be voyaging into an ever safer place. Perhaps if an enemy were to lock him within a prison tower he might not be able to get out again, but why couldn’t he could avoid getting dragged inside it in the first place? He even dreamed that the estrangement between himself and his brothers could be remedied. Hence long before Cirtovic became Cirtovich, he had begun to wonder why his father died at all. And his very longing to solve this question might have made him so abnormally acquisitive of knowledge — although he had ever been so, since his childhood; so perhaps his learning-greed was simply the desire to understand his father, whom he had never known as well as he would have wished. Why had the father withheld himself from the understanding of his sons? — Not from lack of love — if anything, he cared most essentially for his own blood kin — but, as might have been, from shyness of a sort, or the desire not to burden them with something, or (as Jovo believed) fidelity to a magic secret.

He remained certain that the charge which his father had laid upon him came out of love and faith, predicated in a seeing of his son. He had been expected to accomplish something great with the means now delivered to him. The fact that his father had done, for all he could tell, nothing great, and, moreover, had left him no explanation, much less instruction in the use of the dark-glass, unnerved him at times — for what if he should misuse it? But no, his father must have trusted him. It was left to him, without restriction, to employ the legacy as he willed. He knew that his father had been a great man — all the more so, it now seemed, that his doings must remain unknown.

He never supposed that a single deathless man could in and of himself overcome the Sultan’s empire, but the more he learned of magic, the better he believed in that art, and presently his heart’s wish became no less than to sail to the Sphere of Fixed Stars, in order to beseech Prince Lazar to return to earth, and free his suffering people. How could this be done? He held a conviction that his unique mental makeup, combined with the means which his father had bequeathed him, could alter most any story, given life and coin enough.

He settled in Trieste as he had left Beograd — which is to say, at the will of his cephalopodean guide. He took inspiration from the suddenness with which the Golfo’s breezy weather can give way to sweltering eternities, until a purple jellyfish of cloud comes swimming over Trieste; and even though the sky over Muggia remains as blue as the lapis lazuli in the church fresco, winds are already hissing through rigging and the masts are clattering, bells ringing by themselves, and the storm comes. An hour later all is hot and breathless, and again the merchants and their shipwrights promenade up the Ponterosso, discussing the manufacture of new moneycraft. From change to change, Jovo Cirtovich proved ready. As he liked to say, without wind, cobwebs would fill the sky. He lived within the off-green loveliness of olive leaves. Once he had been led to sell Friulian wines, trade-lines radiated out from his hands, and his career bore comparison to those golden stars in the blue heaven of an illuminated manuscript. And he married as you know. Some might say that his categorical mistake was to refrain from friendships with the Triestini; but Serbs have studied at a stern school; they trust in little but death; to him, the inhabitants of this port resembled an assembly of yellow-eyed octopi inside their little mounds. What would they have done to him, had they learned of his project? Remembering a certain morning when a Turkish cannonball nearly killed him, and the black-clad old women in the burning ruins had stared him over as if by missing death he had become strange or even monstrous, he declined to be gawked at, much less judged. Another fishwife offered him an old papyrus which some ignoramus had made into cartonnage for mummy-wrappings, and he bought it with a smile. Let her despise him! He read it easily, comprehending it down to the last grapheme. It was nothing but some dead merchant’s inventory of olive oil, salt and sheep. From a ragpicker he obtained a letter to a praetorian Prefect, concerning the situation of the now extinct Roman city of Cyrrhus, and incidentally detailing interesting particulars of the transit of Saturn. Back to Philadelphia he sailed to vend wine, Marija raising up both hands to send her blessing after him, gauntly feminine, shadow-eyed like the Virgin whose name she carried. As usual, he cried out: Hold onto the wind with your teeth! — The sailors cheered. And before she expected him he was already shortening sail, approaching the many-windowed rectangular edifices of the Borgo Teresiano, the Teatro Romano gaping in the sunlight like a dead giant’s eyesocket, Massimo and Florio embracing him tightly there before the warehouse, while Petar rode up with the carriage. Building his fleet, he sent out his ships parallel to the Longitude of Death, with facile flags dancing at their halyards. But how his father had felt upon first looking into the dark-glass, Jovo Cirtovich would have liked to know. For just that reason, perhaps he should have prayed more often to the Christ Procurator; but the many-armed angel around his neck merely gazed at him as would any animal, even a predatory or tame creature who sought something from him. The awareness in an animal’s eyes is alien beyond knowledge, whereas the gaze from within the dark-glass haunted him because he nearly comprehended it. All the same, he never feared it. Now that he was established, he could begin to achieve his wishes; and just as his multiplying capital gave birth to the many darkening rectangles of new sails against the evening sky, so his aspirations fanned out, his projects ravelling themselves practically of their own accord.

From the outset Captain Vasojevic served him faithfully; the fellow was as honest as Marija, as bravely dogged as a hajduk, as ready to liberate Serbia as Cirtovich himself, even if they must sail straight up into empty air! Impressed into serfdom on one of the immense Turkish farms, he had escaped only to see his youngest sister Aida hauled off to Abdul Bey’s harem. Unable to kill this Turk, he waylaid a wandering scholar from Travnik and cut his throat. Then he fled to Bar, and presently to Trieste. Perhaps what he and his master shared above all was the desire to tempt fate.

Mindful of Porphyry’s claim that Plotinus had achieved oneness with the Godhead four times, Vasojevic used to propose, in those days when the two of them still discussed a voyage to the Sphere of Fixed Stars, that they plumb the Enneads for the secret of celestial travel. Cirtovich knew Plotinus well enough, and believed him to be wanting in quantities and procedures: in short, no secret lay there. Besides, his destination had already begun to alter. What if Prince Lazar were not yet in heaven, but remained captive in some other realm? This would explain why he had not come back for these four centuries. The Sphere of Fixed Stars was known; one saw it every clear night. But since religion and even the best science of the Novum Organum failed to describe the treasure which his father had left him, thus his duty. So he studied death. Marija was in the storehouse counting bales of fiber. Massimo had brought him a case of plum brandy from the old country; once the Cincar traders were all paid off, he called Vasojevic up from the dock, locked the door, opened the first bottle, and they sat drinking toasts to Serbia, their dear home so blighted and lawless, while Cirtovich elucidated the qualities he read into Death the Huntsman, who must be as terrifying as had been his own father in anger; but Vasojevic, who in those first years remained naïve enough to eat fried squid without getting nauseated, could not yet comprehend him. Well, neither could anyone else. (A certain Captain Bijelic from Montenegro sometimes sailed to Trieste, where a merchant who purchased bales of tea from him inquired into the doings of Captain Cirtovich. — Bijelic said: He keeps to himself.)

Cirtovich began his tertiary researches with the fact that death cannot be said to be either cold or hot, liquid or solid; therefore it, like the soul, must not be embodied; and by means of certain more detailed proofs in this vein (the lemma conceded only by force, as it were), it grew apparent to Cirtovich that death is itself a spirit or active principle. Although the corollaries to this were unpleasant, he reminded himself that if the most precious thing is truth, then realities are treasures, never mind that they often seem to be excrements and bloody cinders. Sometimes he wanted no more than did Marija — a better life. Wasn’t that what she prayed for when her oval face shone gold in the cathedral torchlight? In truth, she brought gold light with her! She had wide dark eyes; the right was larger than the left. Her lips were rich red like the borders of icons. He never forgot how the whites of her eyes glowed in the dark church. When he lay down beside her, her eyes grew even larger, as if she were searching for something in him. But it was his fate to see a certain idea, his father’s, silhouetted every night. The enlargement of understanding, for which he possessed so high an aptitude, requires tranquillity, if it is to be more than a fighter’s ruthlessly expedient knowledge of good and evil — and Cirtovich’s peace was getting eaten away. Closing his eyes, he remembered the pine trees looking down on old walled towns.

Having buried his handful of Serbian earth in the garden, he now begot his children. Their Italian was better than his, of course. They were never morose as they might have been in Serbia. Indeed, they were active and optimistic. As for his daughters, each one veiled herself, as did her mother, like any good Serbkina in a city ruled by Turks. Without his knowing it he became ever more a man of Istria or at least Dalmatia, hoarding up islands in his mind. Thank God he had declined to be renowned for creeping through the mountains and stealing cows like some middling hajduk! He was going to be a savior. Before Tanya was born he had charted a plausible course. Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler had not, as the ignorant supposed, destroyed Ptolemaic cosmology. If anything, they had brought the Spheres within reach. The almost entirely uncentered earth (for only the Lunar Sphere revolved around it) conveniently intersected the Sphere of Jupiter at certain periods. This would facilitate the voyage. Praying to Saint Paul, who protects wine and wheat, he filled, then doubled his family granary. Wasn’t that the touch of proof? From this period he often recollected a certain autumn afternoon after his first wine-peddling voyage to Muscovy, Marija’s doves murmuring in the garden, Srdjana off to market, his wife sitting very still in that high-backed chair holding Nicola, who must have been less than two years old; he was clinging to his mother’s neck, peeking sidelong at his father. Suddenly the little boy stretched out his hand. He desired the mysterious thing which his father always wore around his neck. Marija watched huge-eyed and unsmiling. The child began to cry. Turning away, Jovo Cirtovich funded uskoks and befriended priests whose cassocks had secret pockets, his understanding harshening year by year, although not into what he would have termed dissatisfaction; he had not grown bitter like his brothers, whose dearest dream was to rip the Turks’ beards out and skin them like lambs. Hence his secret noble thoughts prepared him for knowledge rather than for hatred. Late at night he went to the garden, mapped stars and listened. He knew what he wanted, his ambition swinging brightly like a forecastle lantern in bad seas, and and although his good angel fixed its blue eye on him and opened its dark brown beak, he succeeded. — Oh, he’s as brave as a dragon! they said. — Moreover, it was known of him that unlike the Turks he never blinded or tortured anybody, even when on the trail of money. He was mostly kind to beggars. Even his competitors he treated with wary good humor, as if he were among the feathertopped masqueraders in a Venetian aquatic parade. — As for his face… well, such faces belong, for instance, to hardened adulterers who find themselves in difficulties — if they can only pull themselves out of this pit, in order to dive ravenously into the next, all will be well! — and so they gaze far away, clenching their lips in order not to get any more grave-dirt between their teeth; pressing their fists against their chests, they await the next pang of dread, grief or guilt.

When they wrote him that their mother had died, he pitied his brothers and invited them all to Trieste. They proudly refused, wavered, then bowed down to the power of his riches; for it turned out that they too had always wished to travel. So they came, Italianizing their names with mercenary haste: Massimo, Alessandro, Stefano, Cristoforo, Florio and Lazzaro. They spoke about their father, who since his death had become ever more handsome and terrible, and then Jovo gave them all ships. They were jealous of him, but more so of Vasojevic, who although not of their blood had been set so high above them. All the same, he was a man they could understand, unlike their brother. When Massimo demanded to become taken on as a full partner in the warehouse, Jovo Cirtovich gave him a sinecure and told him to study Glagolitic. They tried to learn about his doings through other Serbs: Jovan Moro and even Lazar Ljubibratic. Nobody knew anything. In silence he observed them peering at his neck-pouch. They would not have dared to treat their father thus.

His father’s soul swam ever farther away from him, like a lost tarnished fish of silver. Moreover, he felt desperation to see Marija getting greyer and unhappier, no matter how many turtledoves he brought her; while Tanya kept growing up without being part of the secret. What did he desire, then? He was anything but unhappy; great meditations sustained him, his aims, necessities and perils ingathered like the many-roped high masts peeping over the Ponterosso. Unlocking one of his coffers, he set to counting the black wormholes in the White Book. Then it came time to underwrite another cargo of Virginian tobacco for his sheep-dealing brothers, whose mediocrity remained as familiar and therefore pleasant to him as the stink of the Canal Grande. Scarcely cconcerned how he appeared to others, he kept dreaming that famous dream which we all dream under other guises, the one of the dead child who returns home too late, finding his parents long dead — yes, and likewise all his brothers and sisters, together with their children and grandchildren. When he laid his hand on Marija’s breast, her heartbeats came as dull as the churchbells of tiny Serbian villages.

In the forenoon watch of one of those ambiguous days when the bora becomes gentle, and the sky an ever richer, sweeter turquoise, this man whom no one knew summoned Vasojevic, who in those days still wore a gold-braided tunic like a Montenegrin, closed the door and laid out his father’s treasure. As the Americans say, misery loves company. Just as an octopus blushes while considering the capture of a certain crab, so did Vasojevic color, clenching his hand as if he might hurl the object out the window and into the Canal Grande. Cirtovich, likewise peering into the crystal, perceived a smaller, plumper incarnation than usual hanging there within the blackly glowing glass, with its pale wide eyes watching and its beak agape, and its ten arms the greenish-brown hue of kelp. So far as he was concerned, it went perfectly, and Vasojevic, sweating and rigid like a man getting impaled by Turks, turned away, staring out the window. — You understand now, said his master. — All Tanyotchka knew (looking up from a manifest for beeswax: the Cincars were pretending that her father had not paid them) was that on his next visit, slipping into her hand a fat bag of black old amber beads disarticulated from some necklace, their family friend smiled at her, but it was not the old smile. (Her mother was weaving a woolen rug; perhaps she did not notice the change.) And now Vasojevic began to grow rich and lucky on his own account.

Tanya watched her father get ever more hollowed out. He was gazing at her with eyes which she mistook for wrathful. How had she disappointed him? Then she decided that it must have been her mother who angered him. But then again that nasty speculation about his infirmity or senescence sprang up. His hair was whiter at the temples, no doubt. Not long ago she had heard him groaning loudly in his sleep. Oh, but she knew better than to ask her mother! — Liljana was calling her. When she had finished carding the wool, her father was seeking a certain place among the golden compass-roses and blue sea-monsters of his atlases, the place-names written in blood-red script. From the way his forefinger hovered over the deep, Tanya thought it must be an island. A year or two before, she might have dared to ask him. He touched her smooth hands.

Vasojevic had benefited almost immediately from his new power when, ascending Trieste’s most famous hill, in order to visit a certain Bohemian chemist on behalf of his master, he spied a dark-cloaked mendicant dozing or lurking in one of the grooves within the Arco di Riccardo, and instantly comprehended, although the beggar remained the merest clot of darkness within the soapy white stone, and although his face was buried in his chest — to any passerby he offered only a black-clad shoulder, long grey stinking hair, a limp swirl of cloth and flabby fingers twitching as if in sleep — that this man had a stiletto up his sleeve — for the decopodian incarnation of death now appeared, superimposed upon his face. Boldly approaching, Vasojevic cocked the well-charged pistol in his pocket. The murderer leapt up; the blade blossomed from his wrist. Perhaps Vasojevic would have won out in any event, for his beard had not grown grizzled by trusting the creatures of this world. Nonetheless he was grateful to Jovo Cirtovich; not all at once did life take on for him the hateful specificity of a round unwinking eye, and the suckers on ten arms which coiled and uncoiled, and water spurting from the funnel in that nasty head which, although it could change to red, orange, yellow, black, purple, most often appeared in his nightmares fleshed in that crapulous yellow-brown which he inexplicably loathed more than anything. No ship of his could ever now spring a leak, even during the darkest moment of the middle watch, without his knowing; no Venetian or Turkish barque could surprise him in a fog; wherever a pirate’s barbed grapnel hook might intend to fix itself, there his better angel would be lolling, gripping this line and that rope, waiting to alarm his second client. But why did he no longer crave to appease himself with revenge? In the rippled clarity of Grado Lagoon on a late spring evening, with their halyard puckishly flying the Wallachian flag, he asked to see the treasure again, and when his master obliged him, he stared into the crystal without expression. Cirtovich said: I often wonder what it thinks. Do you see how it opens its eye just now? I’m sure it can understand us. — By all the saints! cried Vasojevic. — And he turned away, only to perceive the simulacrum of that tubular entity floating at its ease off the bow, as it stared upward with its huge blue eyes, with a single kelplike tentacle poised as if mockingly, helpfully or warningly over the helm.

That summer Stefano Cirtovich lost a cargo of Japanese silks, and Jovo made up the loss. For this benevolence they disliked him all the more. Gratitude, of course, expressed itself in a dinner, and Stefano’s wife Elisabeth, an Austrian woman, served them a nice fat fish in a fish-shaped dish, with fresh bread, olives, cheese and Friulian wine — an adequate meal, which Marija complimented, while Tanya and Liljana ate shyly, with their faces bowed; Veljko got bored and pinched Tanya under the table; Vuk and Nicola were both at sea, and the other unmarried sisters were at home, because Marija wished to save Elisabeth from too great an effort. It was sunset, the sky scarlet as a Serbian cloak at a festival, when Florio appeared, only for an instant, he said, and only to greet his brothers. While Stefano sent the wine around again, Florio laughingly repeated what his youngest daughter Vesna had said: Oh, father, how I would love you to bring me a Turk’s head to play with! — Jovo Cirtovich kept quiet. Tanya grew wide-eyed. The next time they came out of church together, Florio took his arm and invited him to join his brothers and uncles in a raid upon a Turkish convoy at Trebinje. Didn’t he care to strike again for Mother Serbia? — Spare me your principles, said Jovo Cirtovich. I’ve seen you sell cows to Janissaries to turn an extra few ducats. — After this, his brothers accused him of putting on Turkish pantalons. He had heard it all before. That night he said to Tanya, who had asked no questions: Someone forgot that it’s better to fight for the Heavenly Kingdom. — Yes, father, but when will you tell me how to do that? — Marija glided sadly into the room, so he said: That’s all now, Tanyotchka. Have you calculated how many hogsheads can fit in the Beograd? — Yes, father, and I have an idea about the ballast… — He stroked her hair.

Florio and Massimo cornered him in the warehouse. They said: You’ve got luck, brother; there’s no denying that.

Jovo Cirtovich replied nothing.

Brother, they said, we’ve been talking. It seems you’ve kept Father’s legacy for yourself—

Watch what you say. Haven’t I given you bastards money and ships?

We praise you for that. But treasure comes easily to you. The other day Lazzaro brought up a certain point. You see, we’ve come to believe that what Father left you—

Measure a wolf’s tail once he’s dead, said Jovo Cirtovich. Now get out.

Again and again, Jovo Cirtovich asked his only friend whether he ought to show the treasure to Tanya. What was he to do with her anyhow? None of his sons possessed her aptitude, but how could a woman command ships? A little shyly, Vasojevic said: It might be given unto her to petition him. She’s a good girl, so sweet and so religious; if she said to him, sainted Lazar, please return to us, how could he deny her? — You’re too kind, said his master, smiling a little, because he believed every bit of it. And then the grimaces of care remasked both their faces, so that any stranger might have said: Two more refugees from the Turks! — But schools of gold ducats swam in; they were more successful every year. Better still, Cirtovich now decoded that papyrus from Heracleopolis, acquired on Vasojevic’s second voyage to Egypt, for a trifling price. Recognizing from the idiosyncratic excellence of the handwriting the geometer called High-Seeing, whose observations had been verified by Ptolemy, and being further reassured by the perfect errorlessness in the Greek, not to mention the later addition of a very specific critical sign before the lemma, which implied that some other careful intelligence had found the treatise worth considering in detail, Cirtovich saw fit to trust it as corroboration of what he had formerly merely hoped for: Nearly every voyage became possible. The night skies were dangerous, to be sure, but certain vibrating chords could speed a ship from orbit to orbit; then there were starry tangent courses, and a spiral way, inhabited by a kind of current, which passed through all the Spheres. The mind that believed itself condemned to a stationary or isolated existence committed a crime against itself. No reason remained not to dare ever higher. That night in the warehouse the two friends quaffed a bottle of Friulian wine, dreaming aloud about stars. Feeling quizzical, the master laid down the dark-glass on one of their astrological maps. The topic had turned to Jupiter, whose inhabitants, wrote High-Seeing, had invented a red fire of superlunary potency. The Great Red Spot was their work. The man who obtained some of this stuff would be invincible in war. So those two rode their hobbyhorse, and envisioned liberating Serbia forever. All the while their companion lay watching them with its electric-blue eye. Sometimes it glowed all through its body, and ever so often it uttered pinpricks of radiance. Rising suddenly, Vasojevic said, upraising his hand like Saint Mikhail: If I ever saw any such monster on the high seas, I’d take an axe to its arms! — Careful, my friend, murmured Jovo Cirtovich.

It was Vasojevic who first proposed (having dreamed strangely, about some distressed ship seeking to forge over a sandbar) that they might be imperiled or polluted, not by their end, of course, but by their means. — No, said his master. We’re getting old, so the world draws in; that’s all. Everything seems uglier as we age.

But why?

They watched each other carefully, to discover how well they slept.

On one occasion, as the two men completed the conveyance of a certain trunk from a fallen favorite of the Sultan to a hireling of the Holy Roman Empire, having rented a stevedore’s skiff, they were rowing toward the Ponterosso when Vasojevic’s gratitude came out; one of Cirtovich’s rivals (I think it was Luca Morelli) stood up at the extreme edge of the working half-bridge of little boats attached to the stone slab on the west side of the Canal Grande, shading his eyes with his hands as he gazed after them: to starboard there was Vasojevic in the red cloak, his silhouetted oar wounding the skiff’s reflection in the blue-black water, while to port sat Cirtovich, himself entirely a shadow, as was his side of the boat; and they passed beneath the Ponterosso without looking back, while on the east side of the canal, obscure within the dark crowd of beggars, idlers, prostitutes, and those who waited for their men to come home (not to mention Cirtovich’s brothers outstretching their longfingered hands), the consignee, which is to say the hireling, drifted slowly toward the sail-furled, forest-masted ships, where on the third gangway he was supposed to receive delivery, all parties well aware that their meeting, once accomplished, would be no more a secret, although since he had prepared, in Cirtovichian fashion, a closed carriage, any reaction of the Triestini would comprise a negligible quantity; and just before they emerged from the Ponterosso’s shadow, the two Serbs, sensing the observation of the man on the bridge of boats behind them, turned not toward him, but, being discreet men, toward each other; and in that instant the work of the thing in the neck-pouch advanced itself: Each found horror in the other’s sight, and knew it. After that, were they friends? They would have said so.

Nicola was home from sea; he had gone cruising with Stefano, and even seen a hundred-cannon English ship with her long bowsprit-proboscis rigged out in glory; Stefano called him a good boy, brave, intelligent and quick to work, but perhaps too softhearted. Nor did he have his father’s luck with winds. Then Vasojevic was absent for a year, during which time his master’s eldest daughter Nada died in childbirth — a clear case of strangulation of the womb. Marija Cirtovich mourned extremely over this, and travelled to Serbia in a closed ship, together with Massimo’s elder maidservant Ivica, Srdjana being needed to keep house in Trieste. Marija’s husband, although he uttered both tears and prayers, had no leisure to visit Nada’s grave. On that gloomy voyage Florio was the captain, since he had failed to clear a profit on a cargo of Caribbean sugar, which even Captain Robert (may he count his teeth on the palm of his hand!) could have sold for a profit, and so Jovo thought it best to set him something easy to do. So he commended Marija to Florio’s care, along with several well-chosen bereavement gifts for the widower’s family, who, truth to tell, had already put that grief behind them, since they were preparing to assassinate a certain Turkish bey of exceptional cruelty. As for Jovo Cirtovich, while he cherished a mild partiality toward their lurid doings, these could accomplish but the merest local effect; he preferred to command and underwrite Vasojevic’s voyage, which had been intended to establish the coordinates of that singing chord which runs down the earth, parallel to the Longitude of Death, and on which there lies a certain island where a white boulder stands out on white scree. Beneath this boulder hides a chest (or possibly a human-headed cremation urn), and within this, they say, lies an object especially esteemed by Jesus Christ the Victor. — While Marija was absent, he grew still closer to Tanya, dreaming less about his ten-armed angel, which could emit either black or white ink from the funnel in its head. Again and again, he despairingly appraised his children. Now that Veljko had grown older, he could no longer deny that this third son of his resembled steel badly forged. Aside from Tanya, the daughters were no more or less than he had expected them to be.

One day he was down at the harbor, that gently panting beast whose fur was the masts of ships, where one of Stefano’s sons informed him that Marija was nearly home; Florio had sent tidings from Ragusa. He thanked the young man. Now was surely the moment to instruct Tanya, as indeed he might have done, were it not for the dark-glass demon’s warnings, which reminded him of a crow cawing just before the rain comes.

Srdjana came running to kiss his wife’s hand, with many thanks to the saints for her return. Marija had gone entirely grey. It seemed unlikely that she had ever been a slender young woman breasted like an hourglass. Jovo Cirtovich greeted her affectionately enough. Within the hour he overheard her confiding to Florio that someone must have cast the evil eye upon her husband.

The triumphs which he had once expected for himself might yet be accomplished, if and only if the center of the Sphere of Spirits corresponded to the center of this earth. (How foolish and useless to seek the Sphere of Fixed Stars before exploring the Sphere of Skulls!) Tanyotchka had caught up with all that month’s accounts, so to gratify her, he watched her calculate the distance from the center of the earth to Saturn, which she accomplished very nicely by means of arcs and chords, according to the new method which he and Vasojevic had discovered. Marija and the other daughters were carding wool. His wife looked ancient; his pity became guilt, so that she made him feel all the more lonely. But Tanya… Again he asked himself whether he should have listened to Marija, and confined the girl to female work. But it was to Tanya if anyone that he’d hand over his father’s bequest. Massimo had now come right out and asked him for it — but Jovo Cirtovich disagreed with his brothers about many things, not least the magnitude although not the injustice of the Turkish terror. Massimo would use the treasure for revenge, in the service of Death the Huntsman; worse yet, he’d call that liberation. Sometimes Jovo Cirtovich grew melancholy without cause, and sought out one or another of his brothers, although he would never meet them at the “Heaven’s Key” tavern. Whenever they exhausted their words, which occurred quickly among these hardheaded men, they spoke admiringly of their late father. None admitted that they had feared him, in part because none could have said why, for hadn’t they themselves made a bloodily brutal crew, as the uncles still did in Serbia? Jovo Cirtovich, the head of that family, kept silent. He felt sure that had their father now come striding out of darkness, with dark clots of blood falling from his pale breast, he alone would not have fled. So he stared down his brothers, smiling bitterly, longing to get back to his accounts. Friulian wine was becoming still more profitable in Russia; wax prices were falling; from Tartaria he could buy four magic scrolls for the price of three. And his brothers read his disregard, and hated him. On Saint Lazar’s Day he strung silver coins around their daughters’ necks. — As for his sons, too clearly he perceived that they were obedient but feeble, even Vuk, the most aggressive, who lacked the faith and daring to cast his ducats upon the waters — nothing to hope for there. Nicola, the rightful heir, was too greedy; Alexander remained yet young for judgment. Only Tanya possessed the mind and spirit to use his dark-glass properly. (She said: Father, I need to finish weaving this cloth or Mother will be angry.) So far as he could see, the whole business remained on his shoulders. Commending Marija and the children to the saints, he accordingly made one of his own rare voyages, this time merely to Bar, where he closeted himself with a Father Anzulovic, who was said to know more than anyone about the posthumous doings of our sainted Lazar. Cirtovich poured out Friulian wine, and the priest proposed a toast to the destruction of the Turks, may the earth pursue them and the sea vomit them up! — The guest raised his glass in silence. Frowning, Father Anzulovic urged him to ride to Kosovo. Lazar’s sword, which would facilitate the deed proposed, was certainly beneath the threshold of the Red Mosque, as a holy document now proved. A brave man could do anything, the priest said. Smiling sadly, Cirtovich replied that he would consider the question. Instead he sailed home to Trieste, because he lacked Vasojevic to help him, and because Massimo was incompetent in the countinghouse, while Florio was too rash; besides, he could not forget how Marija had prayed to the souls of drowned men, in order that they would watch over him, and how when he said goodbye to Tanya she had looked up at him, her face already glowing with tears. Although he made his customary good way even against head seas, the squid-thing kept peeping in at him from under the foresail, whether or not in warning never clarified itself. No sooner had he arrived at the Ponterosso than he proceeded to church, praying for a long time to Saint Lazar, in longing to know where the heavenly kingdom lay. He decided not to burgle the Red Mosque. Massimo begged for another loan, which he granted. Stefano caught Captain Robert sneaking aboard the Lazar, and pitched him into the harbor. Petar needed money to repair the carriage. There was a dutiful letter from Gordana, who was pregnant again, praise God; Marija had the colic; he physicked her himself, for the squid-thing had long since taught him which herbs were best. Next he dispatched Vasojevic, who had indeed verified the coordinates of that singing chord of earth, not to Kosovo but all the way to Dejima Island, in order to barter with Dutchmen for the Japanese porcelains which only they could get. On Saint Sava’s Day the two men ascended into the countinghouse and toasted their purpose. I’ll hold onto the wind with my teeth! said his old friend, making the old joke; now he too possessed wind-luck. They shook hands. Cirtovich watched through the window as that two-sailed bragozzo passed out of the Canal Grande, bearing her officers into the harbor-night where the Lazar awaited them, and through the spyglass Cirtovich saw the frown of grief and worry on Vasojevic’s face. That voyage proved fair and lucrative, to be sure; each of Tanya’s sisters presently received a chrysanthemum-patterned robe, while her brothers were delighted to possess curved and double-grooved Japanese tanto daggers. Marija took custody of many ducats, not to mention a kakiemon-style vase decorated with birds. It was a successful adventure, for a fact, and after that the Triestini stood in even greater awe of him; all the same, Tanya could not help but note the day that the Lazar returned, when her father came in leading Vasojevic by the hand; he bade them bring out the wine-jug, and make the triple sign of the cross; they drank to God, the Holy Cross and the Holy Trinity, and then of course to Prince Lazar, after which Vasojevic and her father confabulated in the garden, and when she ran silently up to what she childishly called “the tower room,” to peep at them, they reminded her of tired fishermen with empty nets draped over the mast. But they reentered the house smiling; oh, yes, the business prospered, the grain-shed grew full again, and that week her father dedicated a gift not only to the Serbian Orthodox church but even to the cathedral at San Giusto. People now compared him to Count Giovanni Vojnovich, the hero of the Madonna dell’Assunta. Her mother looked as if she were expecting him to confess something. In the garden the lilies were brilliant. A mountain of crates with Japanese characters on them rose up in the coach shed, but only for a fortnight; and two days after they had disappeared, the Sava embarked for Venice, Genoa and Bar. This brought in more money than ever, and yet her father did not seem satisfied. Rereading his face, unable to stop hunting for weakness, she spied out, for the first time, uncertainty in his pouchy eyes. This unwelcome fact, which might have ushered her into pity and horror, she managed to set aside. Of course he resembled other people, in that he could not know everything; he had never found out (or had he?) about her peeping into his chest of death-books. Perceiving that she was anxious about something, he stroked her cheek, and she closed her eyes, won back to certainty. Why not escape ill consequences forever?

Once when Tanya sat studying the origin of angels in his Novum Organum, he was beside her, shaking his head over a Chinese Qing Dynasty amulet in the form of a giant bronze coin with a square hole in it. The girl kept quiet. Presently her father fetched a loupe. He copied down the inscription. Then, smiling hopelessly, he handed the thing to her, saying: Here’s another present for you.

Father, promise you won’t be angry.

Well?

Father, what do you wear around your neck?

Often he grasped for relief by justifying, mostly to himself but sometimes to the patient, silent Vasojevic, his careful concealments, which his elders’ dark doings against the Turkish overlordship had established in his character from boyhood; the usual practices of any mercantile man deepened that groove of secrecy; the nervous, angry, weary despair which death’s manifold proximities inflicted cut him off most of all. He had anticipated that sharing his strange knowledge with Vasojevic would lighten his loneliness. Oh, they remained friends without a doubt; each possessed the other’s pities and dreads. As for the treasure, that too they held in common, if it did not hold them. No wonder that he scrupled to bequeath it to Tanya!

He remembered his wife in her dark dress and cap, sitting in a high-backed chair, nursing Tanyotchka; he must have just returned from Muscovy. In the garden, the doves were speaking to one another in their semiliquid voices. And he seemed to remember Marija’s face glowing against a red curtain, but he no longer knew where that had been. Nicola and Vuk, why did he retain so few images of them? Well, if he hadn’t sent them voyaging with their uncles, the family would die out. They had better learn the business, being unfitted for the other thing. Besides, let his brothers raise them up to be Turk-haters; no doubt that was right, even if he lacked the stomach for it.

The creature in the dark-glass was not in and of itself, so far as he knew, evil. If he declined to tell the priests about it, that was merely on account of their petty understandings. What he hid — that thing itself, and the unhealthy emotions which its guardianship stimulated — was of smaller account than its hiddenness. And since to hide was to deny, how pleasant to close his eyes!

He believed with all his soul that he had lived a life no more sinful than any other. If he had killed men at sea to save what was his, if he had on occasion made sharp bargains, such acts were necessary if one were to get on in the world. In any event he would be hated for his success. The longing to be rid of that loathsome treasure never left him — but then he would be shamed before his dead ancestors. By what right could he forever alienate this legacy from his family? Tanya would make wise use of it, to help her mother and the other children, after he was gone. Why shouldn’t she employ it for greater good? She, who in the course of her education had unswervingly dissected the brainlike, fungoid tissues of the chambered nautilus, possessed what he once had; even though she could never command a ship, she might yet do something of which he could dream.

Of course Marija wished to marry her off; fifteen was old enough, she said. — I need her at home, he replied.

Cirtovich, discerning that the lot of the most loving fathers is sadness, had already begun compromising with doom by establishing his daughters in the best marriages he could, endowing them with gold, land and blessings, while tying the sons-in-law to him through benignity, intimidation and mutual interest. But when it came to Tanyotchka, he did more, although not too much, maintaining over her, ever more invisibly, his paternal shield, regretfully aware that unpicked fruit withers on the vine, and therefore that protecting our children from the quotidian nastiness of life is a self-poisoning strategy. For Tanya, therefore, he sought only one good beyond the aspirations of other parents: He intended to save her from death. — But perhaps that wasn’t right, or worth whatever it would cost.

He had trained up his sailors to great knowledge in the hope that one day they might carry him to the sphere that the dark-glass being came from. If the soul is the center of the circle called consciousness, then cannot other circles be drawn, to calculate the center of malignancy, doom or absence? Therein lies the place to which all mankind must carry war. What if Jovo Cirtovich could hunt down foul and sniffling death itself, and impale it forever in its cave? Four years ago, thanks to a Turkish annotation of the Kitab Tahdid al-Amakin, he and Vasojevic had finally completed their plotting of our globe’s Tropic Nodes, from either of which, when Jupiter is right, one may sail into superlunary spheres, and perhaps even into that great blue dome of ultramarine, the Sphere of Fixed Stars, with its stars of silver and gold arrayed in as many constellations as there are kinds of beasts, fishes, monsters, demons, angels, swords, hairpins and crowns. One night in that tower in Niš, calculating in units of the fourth order from al-Biruni’s coordinates and Osman’s timetables, Vasojevic had raised his sextant, then his spyglass; he cried out. When Cirtovich tried to look, the instant had passed. Vasojevic swore that on the golden sun at the center of that blue hemisphere he could see Christ Himself peering out, holding a Bible against His chest and wearing a halo which was brighter than sunfire. Inspired, yet sickened by disappointment, Cirtovich quizzed him again and again. They could go there! And if they bowed down before Christ in His own house, what good would not be theirs? Until dawn they spoke, but with the sun’s advent came the dark-glass monster, hovering like Beelzebub, lashing its tentacles against one after another of the horses of a dozen cantering Turkish Janissaries who would torture them for sport. And so the two Serbs crept away, to study death and attend to their fortunes. The next time Cirtovich raised the subject, his friend replied: Yes, master, we could go there, for a fact! But given what would go with us, I misdoubt our reception… — That was when Cirtovich wondered how he could bear it if they met that squid thing riding on Christ’s shoulder, stretching out its arms to warn them that here too, here even in heaven, was their death? In short, the gruesome activity, ubiquitous and almost merry, of their old friend had worn him down. Cirtovich had escaped from the Turkish lands, founded his family anew, and heaped up wealth and knowledge. Enough. His father had done less. So he told himself, staring gloomily at Marija and Tanya, wishing, as ageing men will, to enjoy his harvest untroubled. (He was getting old precisely because he had achieved everything.) How fine to sit in his walled garden, never to see even Vasojevic again, God forgive them both! To close his eyes and listen to the honeybees, enjoying the clink of gold ducats as Tanya counted receipts in the doorway, and then to fall asleep in the sunlight! But whenever Tanya arose to help her mother or sisters, her long smooth arms flashing, he remembered again that she was a woman now, full fifteen years old, and ought to be married off soon for her happiness. — She was watching him strangely; what if she were unwell? Seeing her thus downcast, he slipped her a little pouch of Caribbean sugar. 13

Burning a lamp to Saint George, Marija Cirtovich knelt and moved her lips, longing to know why God had brought her all the way here in order to give her to a husband who was distracted. What was it that nibbled at his conscience with such sharp little teeth? For she thought him guilty, because she never knew him; and the reason she did not know him was that between his business and his dreads he lacked the wherewithal to be known, at least to her. (He had long since proved that if death itself be suspended there must remain some kind of permanent equilibrium; perhaps he should have wondered if this were his present state.) Over the years his hearing seemed to sharpen, until sometimes he even fancied that when he passed by cemeteries he could hear the worms moving underground, which naturally tortured him; sometimes at night he sat up beside her, listening; for it had come to him that perhaps the sound was made by the arms of that thing in his dark-glass. On the rare evenings for which he found the leisure, his daughter, hidden behind her long hair, turned the pages of books, her sweet thumbs shining in the candlelight; she begged him, could they please stay together just one more moment, and just one more? Smiling silently, he kissed her forehead, rose and buttoned himself into his old sheepskin coat, for the bora was blowing. Vuk and Nicola, lately returned from a voyage, were sitting sleepily by the fire. They rose to their feet. He gave them a moldy purse of ready silver (Imperial coins of Claudius Anazarbus), instructing them to pay their mother’s outstanding invoices and advance Srdjana her wages. Massimo would carry out the rest. They nodded, not daring to ask questions. Well, well, he thought, let’s see what they can do while I’m off in the world. He did not call Marija, and she did not trouble herself to come to him. For her he felt nothing but pity. As for his sons, he now caught their eyes flickering from one to the other, as if they shared some secret. Such was the business of young men. The carriage rattled him away. It was a fell hour, to be sure; the coachman was crossing himself for fear of highwaymen. Cirtovich slapped his shoulder and said: Trust me, Petar! — Then the man was shamed; he knew that nothing on earth could harm him while he stayed in the care of his master. For his part, Cirtovich had reason to feel hemmed in. The longer and thus more improbably he lived on, the more anxious, so it seemed, grew death to get him, so that the thing in the dark-glass appeared before him ever oftener. Last spring Petar had been conveying him up the hill to San Giusto, in order to receive two treasure-chests whose doors were studded with iron flowers, when it rose up ahead, grabbling at a boulder in its many blackish-green arms as if it meant to hurl a landslide on him. — Stop, said Cirtovich. Turn into the monastery courtyard, quickly! — Petar obeyed. And not two moments later, the boulder came rolling down the road, smashing a peasant’s cart and then skipping down into the harbor. — By God, master! said Petar. — Get going, said Cirtovich.

They rode across the Ponterosso and into the piazza. Cirtovich could see the flicker of Vasojevic’s lamp in the upstairs window of the warehouse. Cirtovich blew his whistle. Two sleepy sailors ascended the steps of the quay, bearing torches. — You’ll be safe with them, Petar. No boozing, now.

I promise, master.

Cirtovich approached the warehouse. Even through the gusts and the creakings of ships he could hear the stealthy plashing of the squid-thing’s tentacles in the canal; so that must be where Death the Huntsman awaited him tonight. His rivals, the ones who on Sundays sang those canzonette spirituali with the black squareheaded notes suspended from the scarlet staves, huddled inside the “Heaven’s Key,” but Captain Robert, whom he merely scorned, lay darkly behind a wall of sacks and hogsheads, while the blood of this world pulsed round and round, the evening sky going purple and clouds coming in — no evil there, and none lurking in the doorway. Deploying one of his black iron keys, and then locking the door behind him, he ascended to his countinghouse. Vasojevic had already risen and was extending his hand.

Well? said Cirtovich.

The map bears all the signs.

God hear you! We might be away this Christmas.

And gladly, master, if only—

But what about our third member? chuckled Cirtovich, and out came his father’s treasure. Just then the demon’s almost tuberous or vegetable quality was especially pronounced as it hung there within the magnifying crystal, its two tentacles immensely longer than its arms, which in turn were as frail and swirly as ribbons. The eye was closed. — Well, well, said the master, winking the thing away, we seem to have permission. Now tell me.

I sent another spy to that Turk Orlanovic—

Oh, him! said the other, remembering that afternoon with Vasojevic in Constantinople, as they leaned forward over cups of Turkish coffee on a round table, buying military secrets from that suave bey in the fez and pajama-skirts, yes, Orlanovic, who cared only for money (and this was another of Cirtovich’s secrets, that for him money itself was not an end), Orlanovic, whose delicately curled moustaches and gentle eyes they disdained; thanks to his treachery, a certain Venetian raid had succeeded. After they completed the business, the two Serbs should have departed, but the dark-glass thing being quiescent just then, Cirtovich thought to reward his loyal companion, and likewise take his own pleasure; so there had been black-eyed Emina and Fata with the perfect-braided hair.

He smiled, but Vasojevic bowed his head as mournfully as a new bride kissing the hearthstone. There remained that matter between them. Cirtovich threw down a pouch of yellow tobacco from Scutari for old times’ sake.

He asked only ten ducats for it, Vasojevic was saying. I gave him twelve, to keep him sweet. A warlock made it. Some Illyrian—

Shaking out the map from its leathern cylinder-case, they unrolled it, weighted the corners with lead bullets, and swooped down like seagulls upon that pictured island — for it was as secret as the face of another man’s wife, or the night-errands of neighbors on the sea.

So they sailed south, far south, to what we call the gloomy latitudes, where the lichens curl as thickly as quarto pages on the windy dripping trees, and ferns lurk in the crevices of boulder-cliffs. Arriving at a certain nameless island, the Lazar shortened sail, then dropped her mudhook, following which the two friends rowed carefully between the remnant ice-floes (it was summer), beached their dinghy in the rocks, shouldered spades and vanished into a meadow of red peat at the forest’s edge. Once more Jovo Cirtovich imagined that he was entering a new world. Meanwhile the crew, not being paid for idleness, killed a whole herd of elephant seals, skinned them and salted the meat. Whatever their master was up to, they retained confidence in his luck, and thus in theirs. They dreaded neither this dull grey sea flowing rapidly nowhere, with its ugly oily whitecaps breaking out like pustules, nor that other tall black island not far ahead — which place the Illyrian mapmaker had likewise declined to name.

Praying to Saint Sava, who rules over snow and ice, and offering their most heartfelt invocation to Prince Lazar, our two principals now followed the river to the gentle slope of dark scree on whose crest the white boulder waited. (Perhaps they should have also prayed to Saint Thomas.) The wind blew stronger, so they sat their fur kalpaks on their heads. It was the hour between the two dog watches. Their aspirations resembled the glow of golden icons in a dark room.

Do you see it now? said Cirtovich.

God help us, yes! Master, don’t you? It’s wriggling all its arms down in there, and it’s watching us through the ground—

That’s enough, Vasojevic.

They drew a magic circle in the sand, then kindled a fire and burned mastic, aloes and frankincense. Through the fragrant smoke they passed a pentacle drawn in scarlet ink upon a virgin lambskin. Then they commenced to dig; and before we describe the object of it all, before the corpse arrives, carried through the window by two stoic men, the mother need do no more than stare into the night, waiting and worrying, while the boy called Jovo gets for an instant longer to keep the precious certainty of his father’s invulnerability. Then comes the sight and above all the touch of death. Their father has fallen. Death has ruined him — he who should never die. But now everything will be put right; any instant now our spade-edges will bite success.

And so their shovels struck wet sand, then ice, then gravel, and suddenly something hard and hollow — wood or metal? — The latter, of course — a bronze casket, as ancient as the three broken basilicas at Salona.

Remember, master, what the Patriarchs have said: There is no resurrection without death.

I’m not afraid. Are you?

Didn’t Lazar choose death?

Spoken like a Serb! And now, dear friend, let us be armed with the sword of God’s Word!

Adonai, they sang, then offered up a last prayer to Saint Sava, hoping that if they could accomplish this one magic thing their lives would be perfected, or at least mended. Although he should have kept his mind on the ritual, Cirtovich could not help but think on Tanyotchka biting her lip in half-mastered grief as he departed their home. Vasojevic was lucky never to have begun a household. His master knew that if they ever did return, the house would be smaller and sadder, the people older.

Now listen, Vasojevic. What’s next may require fast work—

With all respect, I’m still young enough!

I’ve never doubted that. But do we agree on what to wish for?

By all the saints! We came here to—

Yes, on our own behalf. But what about Prince Lazar? We could seize this chance to bring him back. Wasn’t that our old dream? Think about it. We could save our tortured country.

Or defeat death itself, as you used to say—

Knowing from the despairing hope in each other’s eyes what they both longed for above all else, they fell silent. Then Vasojevic said: Lazar, God praise him, made his choice and can take care of himself. I don’t say this for my own sake.

So you relinquish that dream?

Just as you say.

And death?

Endless life, and endlessly seeing that face before me — well, I’d rather not.

Raising up the chest, they tried to open it, but although green light began to bleed out as soon as they undid the clasps, the task required violence. They prayed once more, longing for their church’s smell of candle wax. With shovels they attacked the lid until it was a ruin like the multicracked shell of a boiled egg squeezed in the hand. Then they twisted with their Saracen blades, and it sprang aside.

Up rose their old companion like an emanation of the Great Godhead, closer and more corporeal than ever before, freed from the glass, neither larger nor smaller than it needed to be to fill the newly available space, its flesh breaking out in purple-brown ventral chromatophores, and all ten arms beating a tattoo against the sides of the casket before reaching out into the chilly air. The two men stepped back once it began discharging liquid from the funnel in its head, Vasojevic longing to sink a boat-hook into it and Cirtovich imagining those arms curling and tearing at his face. But fixing on them its jewel, that beautiful lidless eye, it grew calm, as if it recognized and trusted its friends. Before it had invariably appeared omniconscious, not to mention gruesomely hateful on account of the hatefulness which on their behalf it busily foresaw. And now it opened its beak like a baby bird. Which of us would not on occasion prefer to be dependent?

Almost as suave here as in Philadelphia, Cirtovich propitiated the thing with Friulian wine until its tentacles wriggled as sweetly as a baby’s toes. What did he care? After all, not even it could match his childhood dread of his father.

He drew out the dark-glass, proving to himself and his companion that it was not only transparent, but void. It seemed that the monster could not exist in two places simultaneously. Then, uttering another prayer, he poured another bottle of Friulian crimson into the creature’s beak. Drunkenly, wine drooling out of its beak, it draped one tentacle around his neck — the first time in all these years that it had ever touched him. Well, it felt no stranger than touching a corpse! Trusting in it not to hurt him — after all, what had it done him but good? — he knelt down, and raised it to his heart. At once it flushed red-violet, as does the giant octopus when disturbed. And Jovo Cirtovich felt moved to tenderness. But seeing Vasojevic standing quietly stubborn in his views, whatever they might have been, he set the creature gently down in the rocks.

In the box beneath where it had lain was another casket, which he withdrew. From it issued the scent of an unknown flower, but when he opened the lid, there was the head of his father, smiling at him. So grief came to him in truth.

Are you my father?

No.

Who are you?

I am the one you sought, it said, and its voice resembled the vivid strangeness of the gold on certain Byzantine icon panels, which as one alters one’s angle of view appears to shift its underhue from cool reptilian green to sanguinary red. Around it shone a soft light whose rays brought sweetness and tears.

We have come for a wish, said Cirtovich.

What would you?

Hesitating, thinking perchance to dicker with this being as with some Cincar trader, he demanded: Will you advise us? Shall we rid ourselves of that nightmare?

If you choose. What would you?

Or should I ask to hear death’s voice? Or preserve my favorite daughter forever, or find out where my father has flown?

Master, said Vasojevic, I pray you to improve this opportunity for the best. Never mind you or me, or even Tanya (and you know how I love her). What do I care for us, if we can make our land a graveyard for Turks?

Can you do that? Cirtovich asked his father’s head.

I can. Decide now, or gain nothing.

Cirtovich, inspired by his noble friend, was about to call for the restoration to earth of Prince Lazar when the dark-glass entity returned to its senses and reached out, the suckers on the undersides of its arms scintillating with the pearlescence of certain amphorae. When it touched Vasojevic, that man, who never in any emergency, even a battle, had expressed anything but coolness, cried out like a convict being branded on the forehead; and Cirtovich, compassionating him in that moment, shouted: Free us from that!

The head smiled sadly, then disappeared. So did the creature, the two caskets and the hole which had been dug. The dark-glass cracked.

Vasojevic, did it injure you?

No, master, barely a sting—

Cirtovich closed his eyes. Upraising her chin, Marija stared at him gloomily. Nicola, Vuk and Veljko stretched out their arms to him like drowning men. As for Tanya, that young woman, pulling her long hair diagonally across her forehead, prepared to go out as if she did not perceive him. Well, this was but his fancy. But what if she now began to suffer? And in truth, he felt ashamed before the shade of his father. Well, Massimo would have done far worse; he would have wished for the ointment which transforms a naked man into a wolf.

Jovo Cirtovich seemed to hear royal processions departing in faraway crownlands.

He opened his eyes. He took his father’s vacant treasure and hurled it down. There alone those two men stood, on that low hummocky peat-island which was studded with striped rocks and cut by those narrow silvery streams whose multiple forks fell into the sea.

Just as after a rain the Triestine sky is of an impeccably African brightness, thus it should now have been in the soul of Jovo Cirtovich, for he had attained his heart’s desire. Vasojevic stood leaning on a spade. — Well, said Cirtovich, did we act rightly?

We shall soon know, doubtless.

I could have demanded knowledge—

Foreknowledge we had.

This I’ve never asked you: When you saw the Sphere of Stars, was Lazar there?

Of course, master, and seated on Christ’s right hand. He smiled and beckoned to me, and not with one finger, either. You did ask that, and I told you. We would have been welcomed—

Well, there’s nothing to prevent us now. What do you say? Shall we refresh our crew, and then sail to heaven?

Vasojevic hung his head. Within the hour he seemed not merely to age, but to grow haggard and unclean.

Oh, yes, once they had rid themselves of the dark-glass thing, they should have felt at peace, and even righteous; but so long had they lived (Cirtovich especially) in anticipation of its ominous appearances that not seeing it refined their anxieties almost unbearably; for ambuscadoes had been laid — all the more diligently for Cirtovich since he evaded them with such defiant success — and now he could not find them out. Students of probability theory will assert that his peril of death at any given instant remained no greater now than half a century ago; but he knew death to be a kind of person, or at least an entity with multiple writhing arms. Therefore, death hunted him actively and intelligently. This might have been an error. Then again, nothing is as hateful to nature as incorruptibility. High time for the grave to take him! Thus he believed; and his face grew ghastlier than before; he might have been a prisoner condemned to row until death in a Turkish galley — but no; that sort of wretch remains chained to others, for better and worse; while the most hideous quality of Cirtovich’s existence, as ever, was solitariness, even though he kept longing to stroke Tanya’s hair.

In his father’s house in Serbia there had been a strange icon, depicting one of those cubical Biblical cities where lean brown men bore long scarlet coffins on their shoulders, ascending and descending clay stairs so that the mummies they carried could exchange one tomb for another — and everything mendaciously embellished with gold. Now he knew the meaning of it.

So he holed himself up, avoiding even Vasojevic, who likewise withdrew from inessential intercourse; and they sailed north, laboring in cross-seas, wandering through all twenty-eight Mansions of the Moon. Even Friulian wine could not cheer them. But what had they to fear? Their future resembled the weary wounded man whom one meets at the end of a trail of werewolf-blood. Vasojevic was looking still older; as for Cirtovich, he was now as fishy-bearded and bleary-eyed as that famous silver likeness of Saint Blasius. For years he had found no use for the superannuated worthies of Ragusa. Now he felt like one of them. Had he gazed in a mirror, he would have confessed that his face was no longer a bland mask; but what it expressed he could not make out. He supposed himself ready to acknowledge his losses, which so often until now had seemed to swivel into sudden gains. Behind his breastbone there seemed to dwell something hard, round and smooth. His consciousness kept fingering it as if it were a marble, turning it round and round in order to know it or, better yet, to massage it down into nothingness; but it would not go away; it was fear, when he had expected to win peace. And some other feeling still less creditable settled into his guts like an anchor digging in with both flukes. What was it? Although they remained as lovely to him as the bloody Serbian earth, even thoughts of Marija and his loyal sons and his daughters running silently to and fro on the carpets in their stockinged feet, gathering hams, potatoes, onions and wines for the welcoming feast, could scarcely warm him. Besides, this time he brought no silver coins to string around the necks of his women, and so he felt ashamed. At last his hours had become sad and definite. He fancied he could hear jointless fingers stealthily caressing the hull. But his ears had been for so many years disturbed by fanciful things that he doubted them even more than he did his own heart. Believing him to be weakening in luck or goodness, the sailors began to doubt him likewise, although they could not yet show it. Meanwhile he said to himself: If I die now I never need touch Tanya’s corpse — oh, God, that the beautiful delicacy of my daughter’s skin should be burned by death’s sucker-arms! — And so he went on hoping for life, at least for her.

You’re holding up like a true Serb, Vasojevic.

Thanks, master. You know, an octopus shows no sign of pain when we cast him into the fire—

One morning when they had almost regained the coast of Africa a pallid wave arose, spread itself into fingers and sought to pluck him from the forecastle. Cirtovich ducked away, but it got Vasojevic, seizing him in both tentacles, then speeding him down into the clutch of those long, tapering arms which were cratered with teeth-ringed suckers, and as the monster submerged they had one murky glimpse of the brown beak opening; and so after that Cirtovich lacked anyone who could understand him, excepting Tanya, of course — but not even she could have helped him reason out the causality of this latest death. Was that submarine predator the same as the devil he’d cast away, or was it a visitation of God, meant to rebuke him for dismissing his better angel? Either way, he commenced to fear that his own doom would come from the sea. The mate, who loved Vasojevic, had proposed to lower the creeper, in order to hook and grapple that kraken into reach of their guns, but Cirtovich refused, saying merely: It would kill us all. — A certain sailor with a bearded old head resembling Saint Stephen’s, whose limestone flesh keeps smoothening and blurring with time, whispered that their captain was now an evil-eyed Jonah, which most of them immediately believed, and had another man been lost on that voyage, they might have risen up and marooned him there in the African Sea. Withdrawing from them, he knelt before Saint Lazar’s icon, and prayed for his friend, but almost without feeling. He had squared off his dreams into a single thing as flat-sided and sharp-cornered as the heel of a mast, and now sat in his cabin thinking about Tanya. This year he’d present her with a real woman’s dagger to wear at her hip. It pleased him to think of her at home doing the accounts. As for Marija, the love he had bestowed upon her was as the coins he had thrown into his father’s coffin. Her lilies must be blooming up now. He wished he were sitting in the garden, listening to the murmurings of the dovecote; but then Marija would be out there with her back turned. And so he grew bitter against other living beings, and the more bitter he became, the less his sailors liked him. Although they were all adept at trapping the chambered nautilus in a baited basket, they caught nothing precious, as had never yet befallen men employed by Jovo Cirtovich.

Avoiding Italy because they had nothing to sell, and because there were more customs vessels on that side, they kept in sight of the limestone windings of the Adriatic coast, which were already bright with vineyards, grey with olive trees and green with palms; it was almost as if Cirtovich intended to trade there as usual, but they passed Spaleto, Ragusa, Zadar and Rijeka, sailing close-hauled to the wind. The sky was yellow. There was a tiny islet in the channel between Maun and Pag off which a certain chest had been sunk; their captain had once promised that its contents belonged to all of them, and now they demanded it. — Straight on, he told the helmsman, and now they were already level with Škrda. Embittered, they whispered for the first time of murdering him, but even now feared his luck, being uncertain whether it could not flare back after this waning. And the weather was so strange; the bora failed to blow. Two swabbies muttered when he set them to oiling the strakes, and he nearly punished them, but no blood for violence remained in him, and he could not have said why because he no longer understood himself, if indeed he ever had. They could have had their chest, for all he cared; merely for his own safety had he denied it to them, since they had asked so insolently, with their eyes like candles. They all disgusted him; when had they ever dreamed anything worthwhile? Once he had studied such men, and quickly mastered the study; perhaps if he had repeated the course he might have learned something new to distract himself, such as, how can men live rightly and perhaps even happily without seeking but the merest perpetuation of life? Or would this study merely have ruined him further? Curiously ashamed, as if blood marked the leech of their foresail, they sailed west by northwest, then northwest until they gained Pula to the starboard. And so they drew into the Golfo di Trieste, or, as he called it when he was young, the Tržaški zaliv. To him it all seemed dark and dirty, as if sky, sea and land alike had been smeared with lead. In his mouth dwelled a poisonous taste.

The Lazar came in on one of those calm days when the harbor was blue almost like Egyptian faience, and for a moment he imagined how lonely it used to be outside the walls of Trieste — a century ago, that was; now the walls were all muddled. It was near about Easter when they shortened sail. Seaweed fouled their ground tackle, and the canvas needed cutching. The mariners’ families stood silhouetted on the Ponterosso, waiting for their men. Jovo Cirtovich longed for the old marble font he had installed in his garden, and for that quiet daughter of his, so meek and obedient toward her mother, so understanding of him. But when she’d peeped into his weary eyes, how would she feel? Better, perhaps, if he never came home! Doubtless Marija would be disappointed, since he’d failed to make them any richer—

Anchoring among the ranks of high-masted ships outside the Canal Grande, he set the crew to transferring the seal-hides and certain other items, I suspect of a contraband nature, to a Venetian vessel whose captain he knew, then posted a light guard, led his sailors ashore and paid them off; as you might imagine, they were more perplexed than satisfied. In every tavern spread the news that he had grown unlucky. It was good that Vasojevic had not married; no one dependent would be impoverished by his death. But where was Petar? Why were his sons and brothers all absent? Cirtovich feared that some evil had befallen his house. Or had they somehow learned of his doings, and so forsaken him? But Tanyotchka would never do that, nor even Marija, no matter that she regarded him with the sad eyes of a silver deer; it wasn’t as if he’d abjured God! By now he shrank from everybody, believing that they recoiled from him. And so, as if fearing that misfortune might sniff him out, he passed the night alone in his countinghouse, locked in, sleepless, lighting no lamp; but a sharp-eyed busybody who spied into the upstairs windows late that night (for instance, Luca Morelli) might have seen the palest flicker behind the shutter: Cirtovich was burning a candle to Saint George, and another to Prince Lazar, with his eyes lowered over the ducats which his hands were counting: yes, still enough for Marija, Tanya and the rest if they grew more careful. All the same, he’d now return to importing Ragusan salt into Serbia and gold and silver threads from Constantinople. This had brought good money when he was young. He pulled off his sheepskin stockings; he opened his shirt. He groped at his throat, then remembered that he had no dark-glass anymore. Once upon a time he had gone adventuring into the private courtyards of Mostar and Sarajevo where the rich Turks raised roses and lovely young women. Now it was eerie enough merely to come home. Why had he avoided the Orthodox church, which was almost directly across the canal? He’d always been a wise avoider of law-courts, but never before had he declined an opportunity to whisper to his saints. Some years ago Vasojevic had ceased attending services except for high masses, because the main candelabrum hung as straight in the darkness as one of those squids who dangle their arms in a tight vertical cluster as they troll. Cirtovich had never been thus affected. But at every loud sea-swish he flinched nowadays. He sat over his ledgers and invoices, discovering that Massimo had as usual left receipts lying all in a muddle like a rotten heap of cast-off sails, that the Beograd was in late from Bergen and that the Cincar traders had overcharged him for wool. Nothing had altered; he could have been silently awaiting delivery of some new folio. Unlocking his secret coffers, he found untouched his separate bags of money, each ready for expected and unexpected deposits. He remembered a spring afternoon thirteen years ago now when he had stood inside the cathedral with Marija and the children, the many votive candles burning on their iron tree, and he raised baby Tanyotchka in his arms; she stretched out her hand at the rose-window, which glowed with rain-light like a chambered nautilus. Just last spring, for Saint Lazar’s Day, he had endowed the church with thirty-one thousand five hundred florins; even the Vojnoviches had been impressed.

And once again his thoughts turned and turned round the bygone enigma of his father, which had sunk so far down into the darkness of years that he could scarce glimpse something twirling, like a weighted corpse going feetfirst under the sea; he felt desolate at its going, and yet horrified at the thought that he might see it again.

At dawn he came out, half expecting to see arrayed against him the crosses of black tar which certain Serbs paint upon their doors, to keep away vampires. But the piazza was free of these. On the horizon a twin-masted Austrian warship, evidently of Venetian make, was shortening sail. He saw in the doorway of the “Heaven’s Key” an unknown Triestina, fifteen or sixteen years of age, with the small firm breasts of a Maenad on a Greek vase; she stood sweeping, and behind her, drunk, his old enemy Captain Robert. Not long prior to this latest voyage, Vasojevic had proposed to open up the fellow with a bronze-winged harpoon. But Jovo Cirtovich had always hoped to interpose smoothness between himself and brutality. And so he trod the blood-red iron of the Ponterosso, with ships groaning and ropes hissing on either side, again avoiding the church; he could have hired a coach; he scarcely knew why he continued on foot; it was as if something wicked might see him and follow him home if he rode too high. Of course everyone did know this bowed old man, no matter how he hid his head or hastened away.

He had to rest; he dozed a trifle. Flies descended on his reeking sheepskin coat. They buzzed in his ears. He got back to his feet.

Now he had reached the Teatro Romano. What did he fear then? Until now he had always expected to die intrepidly like his father. He said to himself: I hope to be ever more gentle with Tanya — yes, and with Marija, too, whom I now can remember when she was young, and sailed to me. On me be all guilt and blame. — Just within the old wall, a certain marble doorway is overhung with a cartouche which once presented a lion’s gape and now is merely dark empty jaws like a letter C, while the gnats thicken around the lamp; here old Cirtovich crept up the marble stairs, bending his knees and stooping, his hands in the pockets of his jacket.

The day was as hot as vampire’s blood. On the rim of the old Jesuit well a cat was sunning herself. She opened her yellow-green eyes. He stopped there a moment, smiling wearily, and just as he reached out to stroke the creature, the cobblestones parted beneath him, dirt and roots split apart, and so he found his grave. Just as ivy grows up over a castle wall, occluding every last brick, so the rats covered him, blossoming, shading his flesh from the misery of sunlight.

And no one ever knew his fate, although his sons scoured Trieste for weeks, and dragged the canal, and even searched many ships. Even Marija came out, walking in weary little steps, with that dagger at her belt. The closest they ever came to learning about him was when a certain brutal-looking sailor, stripped to the waist, with his trousers rolled up, blocked their way, laughed in their teeth and said: Cirtovich used to beat me. — To the end of her life, Tanya halfway disbelieved that her father could die. For two years, old Srdjana accompanied her each morning to the cathedral in order to pray for the vanished man, but they had to reduce her wages, and then she left their service, buckling round her hips a chain of fine brass because she was getting married at last. As for Petar, he grew demented, and drove the carriage round about by night, until old women made the sign of the cross whenever they saw him.

The Serbs praise the good fortune of the man who dies at Easter, since the angels are so merry just then that a canny soul can flit into heaven when they turn away from some gate or window in order to toast one another. Perhaps it was so for Jovo Cirtovich, who had slipped by so many customs men in his time — and, moreover, was not a bad man. Or maybe he remains imprisoned in his bones, deep under the Teatro Romano. (I myself cannot but wonder whether as he sped down into the earth he saw that dark-glass creature awaiting him, stretching out its swaying arms to him, opening its loathsome beak, with its eyes shining like cold fire. Probably it was not there.) In any case, his family held a funeral for him on the first anniversary of his disappearance, thus closing the book of his life, whose silver cover is engraved with figures. The Triestini came to gloat, and to see the inside of an Orthodox church. Suspicious of the great tapers and the canopy over the three icons of that vast chamber, they stared at the deep-worn crosses and double squares in the floor. But it was a good funeral just the same: Jovo Cirtovich had been laid low! Facing the iconostasis, the priest chanted beautifully as all the people crossed themselves. — With the exception of Cristoforo, who was tracking down a bad debt in the Orient, all the uncles appeared with their families; Marija Cirtovich sat between Massimo and his wife. Tanya was with her nieces. Luca Morelli stood smiling outside. He had already organized a celebration at the “Heaven’s Key.” Pavle Petrovic sat through the service and then paid his respects to Marija, shaking his head as he repeated: It was a visitation, dear lady, oh, yes! — Meanwhile Count Giovanni Vojnovich favored the mourners with his presence; they all got a good look at his gold medal. His epitaph for our Jovo (which fortunately Marija and Tanya did not hear): An overcunning man overleaps his luck. — Even Captain Robert was there. And in the highest house, Jesus gave Himself endlessly to the cross, surmounted by a circling swarm of dark triangles, his head hanging miserably, two robed figures beneath him in the immense space. It was a fine service, complete from Bishop to Archimandrite, for Jovo Cirtovich left a pretty legacy for his soul, as I can tell you. Some people said he should have been more generous to his family.

The dead man’s brother Massimo carried on the business through that year of hopeless waiting, then liquidated it. It turned out that the finances were as profoundly indented as Dalmatia’s coastline. Against Massimo’s advice, Jovo Cirtovich’s sons pooled their shares to revive the firm. They lacked their father’s luck, but got on far better with the Triestini, no doubt because they were native-born. I read that they all married well. But their wives and daughters no longer wore red-topped caps embroidered with golden roses; that was out of style. Everyone was thrilled to stop studying geometry. Wrapping their daggers in the leaves of forgotten books so they wouldn’t rattle, the young men sought to cut discreetly successful paths through life, as they supposed they had seen their father do.

Nicola never looked well put together. All the same, there was something beautiful in him, no matter how hopeless or even foolish. His father had struck at Turkish power in any way he could, feebly and treacherously. To Nicola now descended the longing to free the land of his birth. Unfortunately, he was not well versed in graphetics. When the rival captains, accompanied by local thieves and hangers-on, burgled the residence of the late Captain Vasojevic, to obtain whatever benefits the dead owe the living, Nicola heard about it at the last moment, and they could hardly keep him out, so he obtained a certain basket of papyri from Oxyrhynchus, thinking to gain some magic formula for wealth or martial power. Several critical signs misled him, and he gave over seeking to comprehend these old writings. By the time he was forty he was as pathetic as old Cirtovich, striving to escape the harbor’s curving pier-claws. Wondering whether it would be an act of cowardice or worse to relinquish his birthright, he clung to it for the sake of his father’s name, although his sea-aptitude was leaving him. He sailed to Philadelphia with a cargo of Bohemian textiles, and thought to have done well, but the bales of Virginian tobacco he carried home turned inexplicably moldy. Tanya finally coaxed him into letting her help with the accounts, but by then it was too late; the clerks had swindled away half the capital.

Vuk wondered aloud why he turned such a poor profit at the family business. Tanya reminded him that their father hailed from a land where life was more difficult, and death colored the sky; this surely virilized any man who survived. Instead of hazarding his capital and losing it, Vuk exemplified the way that an octopus will gather coins and whatnot into its amphora of residence. Thinking to craft an alliance, he married Luca Morelli’s younger sister Nella, who most definitely ruled the house. He was not unhappy counting his cash (much of which he hid from Nella) and eating potatoes and smoked meat. The Triestini liked him best of the dead man’s sons. He never acted haughty or uncanny. I admit that for a time he still could name all twelve Roman cities of Bithynia, as if he held himself ready to please his father. Nella had no use for that, so he gave his children a more practical education. At her persuasion he made over the Sava to Captain Robert, whose helmsman soon wrecked it off the coast of Sicily. The Beograd needed repairs, to which Nicola stubbornly or spitefully refused to agree. — Never mind, darling, said Nella. Just find something else to sell. — To Tanya, who still listened to him, Vuk tipsily insisted that their father had known him, or at least seen something in him. Courtly rather than handsome, he turned out to be one of those men who look best in late middle age. Bit by bit he sold off all their father’s Turkish scimitars, and his ivory-banded rifles studded with semiprecious stones. Then he started in on the books. Tanya tried to hide them, but he threatened to put her out of the house, and so in the end most of the library was sold away, although a few volumes did end up safe in the Archbishop’s possession.

Veljko, the brother whom Tanya loved best, used to write her whimsical messages in Lingua Venetica, which the rest of the family had long since turned their backs on. One night after drinking Friulian wine he asked whether she supposed that sky travel was an apocryphal fantasy, and was astonished when she burst into tears. Constitutionally less impelled toward what lay overhead than toward things beneath the earth, he trolled the multitudinous limestone caverns of the Dalmatian highlands in search of their father’s secret hoard, which probably never existed. At first Nicola flattered and probably sincerely admired Veljko, hoping that his discoveries might finance an army of liberation-minded hajduks. Both brothers fell out after the latter sold their father’s manuscript of Gjin Gazulli and got (so Veljko told Tanya) only enough for a drunk at the “Heaven’s Key.” Veljko continued his prospecting for seven years; until in Zara, which the Cirtoviches of course continued to call Zadar, he fell for a certain grey-eyed blonde. Keeping her in fine style, and meanwhile caring for his wife and children, he overtaxed his heart and died long before his brothers.

As for the sisters, they got along well enough, raising Orthodox children and praying for everyone’s souls. Discreetly they sold their bracelets of silver coins, as their father would have wished them to do. Now that he was gone, their husbands found courage to beat them whenever they deserved it; but in prayer the women consoled themselves, the priest swishing the tinkling censer, perfuming away all ills, and presently it seemed fantastic that their father had ever been able to shelter them from kicks and blows, which are, after all, the lot of most wives.

Of the dead man’s brothers, Massimo and Alessandro survived best; they stuck to the wholesale trade. Stefano, whose old face had grown as flat and wise-eyed as a flounder’s, found himself ever more often called upon to help Jovo’s children, which he did; may he receive his reward in better days. Cristoforo became an olive oil merchant. Strange to say, these four, who once had longed to impale Turkish heads in every castle tower, gave over that design, perhaps because it did not pay. As for Florio and Lazzaro, they sailed away to Izmir, and were never again heard of.

In the final years of the Ragusan republic, the Lazar was sunk by Venetian pirates, and the Cirtoviches nearly fell into debt. After this they began to buy insurance like everybody else. They went on drinking the three toasts, and never neglected that fourth cup in honor of Prince Lazar. If only they could have gotten hold of that leatherbound talisman, whatever it was! It must be admitted that they kept mostly cheerful, in obedience to that Serbian proverb when his house burns down, at least a man can warm himself. Sometimes they sat at the “Heaven’s Key,” theorizing as to the qualities and whereabouts of that enigmatical treasure. So went the years. Blaming Tanya’s bookkeeping practices, Nicola, who had bravely sold out his share of the business, was reduced to coming home in a bragozzo, with his conical wire-mesh traps full of lobsters. The others found ever less to do in their father’s countinghouse; first they voyaged; then they sat at home scraping their capital together. The other fishermen disdained them for slovenly souls, whose ropes lay as loose as the hair of women at a funeral. Luca Morelli bought the fittings of the Beograd, just to humiliate them. Nicola and Vuk were already dead when Serbia cut away the Turkish noose (which happened, as I recall, around Easter). So far as I can tell, the next generation remained in Trieste, although several did fall out of the records; perhaps they too met with accidents at sea, or even adventured back into their family homeland. By then the Cirtoviches possessed only two waterlogged merchant ships. As Milovan Djilas once wrote: Society has no way out of disappointment but the death of whole generations and whole classes… Austrian customs officials further hedged them in, and so I drink their memory-toast in Friulian wine.

Although Marija failed to survive him by many years (she aged with an eerie rapidity), Tanya lived into the era of diamond clasps, weaving her nephews’ undershirts, still hoping for her father to return. By then her family’s garden had been eaten up by caterpillars, and the Spanish consulate had taken over her father’s warehouse. Just as a preying nautilus extrudes its tentacles, so this or that rich Triestino overhung her property, trolling at its deeds and taxes, making her shameful offers. A certain Alberto importuned her the most, but he was too old. Meanwhile her brothers and uncles hounded her, hypothesizing that since she had been her father’s favorite she must know something about his treasure. When nothing came of their investigations, they ostracized her, I fear, but in time they forgave her. She became quite the old maid. All protections having been not only superseded but countermanded, death slavered to get at her now, so that even the brick-scaled, flag-clutching pier-claws of the harbor occasionally sought to close upon her whenever she promenaded in search of her father (sometimes followed at a distance by Alberto), with her woman’s dagger at her side, inquiring among the cloaked, barelegged Ragusan merchants, quizzing the beggar-children huddled together like figures on a dirty old marble frieze; but again and again death spat her out, not relishing the taste of her indifference.

How much did she comprehend? Although her father never told her in so many words that he had hoped to sail high enough to approach not only the stars and saints swarming through the sky like the ships in Venice on Ascension Day, scarlet bunting everywhere, oars swiveling like crustacean legs, lapis-cloaked ladies in the shaded galleries, peals of cathedral bells, but also the starry canals to grander spheres, until he came into the gold-haloed presence of his most adored saint, didn’t Tanya guess it all? Turning away from this, she rigged out yellow ledger-pages like the cutched sails of the Cirtoviches’ fleet, valiantly angling for the slightest breeze of profit. Even in this skill, in which she had no interest, she proved better than her father’s other children. But, as the Triestini remarked, the planets were against her.

She married late; her husband was a merchant whose family came from Muggia. He was as handsome, sad and smoothfaced as the bearded golden reliquary bust of Saint Nicholas, whose moustaches, beard and hair flow together like so many parallel waves of yarn; but Tanya scarcely noticed him. Their children died early. From across the room the husband frequently stood for a moment to watch this woman (who never permitted him to call her Tanyotchka), with her long grey hair hanging down and her chin in her hand as she did his accounts. He felt proud of her; she knew nearly as much as he did. Sometimes he got her to sit beside him by pretending interest in her father’s doings. When he died, he left her a decent portion.

Although she gave up on astronomy, she never ceased praying for her father’s safe return. She called upon Christ, and Saint Sava, and Saint Lazar, of course, not to mention the Holy Virgin, whom in Trieste we name Stella Maris. Every day she went to church. It would have pleased Jovo Cirtovich to see her go out for so many years into the Triestine twilight of many colors. But when people saw her on the street, she was just another old woman dressed in black.

THE MADONNA’S FOREHEAD

Once upon a time, somebody threw a brick at Our Lady of the Flowers, and she began to bleed from her stone forehead. From this occurrence we all accepted the occasional sentience of statues, but thence our themes departed in cardinal directions. Upholding the Madonna’s compassionate forbearance, some argued that she had in effect murmurously moaned to us: Your disrespect gashes me, but how could I, your loving mother, bring myself to punish you in any way? That is why I smile upon you just as before even while the blood runs down my cheek. — Schismatics asserted that her smile was in fact a punishment, and indeed a terrible one, for they remembered from their childhoods the faithful, distant sadnesses of their mothers when they sinned — longhaired mothers who licked the sugared spoon and pouted, swinging their knitted turquoise purses, strings of pearly tears commencing from their big sad brown eyes — and as for the children, their evil remained inexpiable; that was why nobody beat them; their lives had become hopeless. They were the ones who upon seeing the glare of the solar disk behind late summer clouds were capable of simultaneously rejecting both their present sweltering infinities, thickened by cigarette smoke, and the clammy bora wind of embryonic autumn. — Still others said: No, what’s proved is that she could not stop the brick from striking her! — The boy who threw the brick was their adherent. Of course he had never supposed that anything supernatural would happen, for be assured that he had thrown stones, rusty iron and other such before, impelled by blasphemies as insignificant to us as the rotations of the little carousel beside the Canal Grande. In those days the boy, whose name was Nino, appeared as hard and slender as a breadstick. Sometimes his parents punished him; hence his cunning had increased with the cowardice of experience, and he generally threw stones and bricks in the hottest hours of the afternoons, when arugula wilted under the striped umbrellas of the produce stalls and even the Italian flag sweated on its pole. He especially liked to climb over the railing where the Via del Teatro Romano overlooks those eponymous semicircles of grass-grown brick benches and globs of masonry which the centuries treat as does the morning sun the fish vendor’s blocks of ice; they may last out the afternoon, but count on them to be absent tomorrow! We may therefore consider this boy an agent of the morning sun. Arriving at the Roman theater with his pockets full of gravel, he would pick a weary old column and assail it with dents and dimples; once indeed a certain missile of his smashed off the corner of an ancient brick, and he felt as happy as if he had dislodged an enemy’s tooth. The afternoon weighed shadily on a rusty grating in an arched doorway set in a steep grassy hillside; this spot had always been sinister to Nino, and now, glancing at it as if by mistake, he discovered his triumph decaying into guilt and fear, because what if a ghost came out? But nothing did come, because the amphitheater, where gladiators once clubbed and stabbed each other for our amusement right there on the ocean’s edge, had already lost almost everything, even the sea itself, which had receded like an old man’s gums and now hid behind the white municipal building of flags and garbage cans. Then the boy’s courage returned, and he decided to throw something at the Madonna della Borella, whom we also know as the Madonna dei Fiori, Our Lady of the Flowers. Right then the sky was as smooth as the naked black buttocks of faraway statues, and the Madonna’s face was smoother even than that. Maybe he could break her nose off.

Just as the late afternoon sun extends itself down Trieste’s drainpipes, elongating their goldenness while devouring their shaded dullnesses, so that lines of gold expand like a summer thermometer’s mercury, penetrating each roof’s shaded zone even as the solar angle alters so that the lines of gold commence to narrow — already now they resemble the slenderest rays of light which a master’s one-haired brush could paint onto a Book of Hours, for the shade has risen all around it; now they are all gone — thus the past (if indeed there can be any such thing as a “past,” a present which has become nonexistent) of this iconoclast thins out the more radiantly it pretends to go backwards, so that if you were to ask me, why did he become that way? I might start to answer confidently, then lose my thread, distracted and annoyed precisely as you would be when a black lapdog goes barking past the merry-go-round, dragged by its weary master, slavering from both sides of its drooping little tongue, which is even more crimson than the velvet seats in the opera house. Meanwhile the horses gently rise and fall, while the pumpkin-coaches, sanctuaries for timid little ones, remain as solidly anchored to the revolving disk of reality they inhabit as would a fat woman’s bottom; and as the lapdog’s angry yelps succumb to the law of decrescendo, a little boy’s whine fills the impending acoustic vacuum; but the young mother of the bobbed hair and mohair scarf and spectacles waves to her four-year-old blonde in the sunglasses who clings (somehow regally) to her white plastic pony’s neck as it ascends and descends without consideration for the whining of the boy, who sits behind her all alone; other children accustom themselves to their pole-skewered horses with cautious amazement; then here comes the boy, Nino, all by himself; his father is reading the newspaper because it is Sunday and he is tired, his absence being in the small boy’s mind merely a grief, although when the boy has grown perhaps it will number among the father’s many sins which whirl in the shadows of the trembling olive-green hedges. A man walks by smiling, with his arms folded. He stops. He turns back. He cannot get enough music, it seems. The boy’s whines never reach him. And down the street they are knocking an old horse over the head, because Nino’s father and I both like to eat horsemeat steaks with green peppercorns. The man stands for a long time, smiling and faintly nodding his head. When the Sunday light strikes the yellow-painted zinc of the ticket kiosk, the pigeons suddenly look very dull indeed, and Nino’s whining becomes still more of an insult to the music, the waving parents, the happiness of this world.

As for the boy’s father, poor man, he’d gotten trapped by a pair of mammaries — or, to be more precise, by the peach-colored throat of the woman who now no longer loved him, or at least that was his belief although they had never talked about it because, as H. P. Lovecraft proved, it may well be better not to know the answers to questions of fatality and decay; for instance, what answer, what honest answer at least, could the whining boy have learned which would not have made him feel worse? For when we whine, dear brothers and sisters, we become unlovable; that is why the jackbooted heel which has just crushed the bones of the prisoner’s hand against the flagstones cannot be blamed for entering a partnership with the jackbooted toes in order to penetrate the prisoner’s screaming mouth at high speed, simply in order to shut him up, because most of us who claim to love a crying child are lying; the remainder must be themselves unlovable, because they tolerate, encourage, actually foment annoying demands upon our so-called obligations — not that I would ever suppose that the father wished to hurt his dear bambino whose face was always sticky with snot and the slobber of green and red candies. From one of the conical-roofed white vending tents on the edge of the Canal Grande there now came, temporarily expelling the smells of burned rubber and of cigarettes, a fragrance of frying calamari, and since Nino’s crying couldn’t get worse and he surely wouldn’t toddle off the moving carousel and if he did then naturally the attendant at the kiosk would take care of him, the father went to buy them both this treat — yes, both of them, for even now he still dreamed of being surrounded by children just as the plinth of Verdi’s statue has been lovingly besieged by red begonias — but I regret to say that as he approached the line of backs and buttocks between him and the calamari, he suddenly experienced, as perhaps he might have planned for and even welcomed had he slept or philandered less in order to read more frequently an Evangeliario, or better yet an Evangeliario covered in red leather and saints in silverworked relief, a thrombosis, and that was the end of him, right there on the Piazza del Ponterosso, surrounded on all sides by the candy-cake Habsburg buildings of Trieste. And he had been correct, because that dirty naughty boy kept whining so hard that he had made everything as horrible for himself as he could, which meant that he was safe; and when the carousel stopped, he clung to the shining pole of his horse, whining with his eyes closed; the attendant frowned, but since the father was out pissing or something he allowed the child, who frankly repulsed him, to stay where he was until all the parents had bent over their darlings to carry them off their horses, or smiled with outstretched arms while their children returned radiantly or regretfully to their care; so the next cloud of children swarmed onto the carousel, the whistle blew, and the smell of fresh-fried calamari blew from the white tents, in front of which a crowd was thickening like leukocytes around an enemy bacillus; so that the attendant supposed that the sidewalk painter had begun the day there, inconsiderately close to the businesses of others; or perhaps one of the North Africans had finally gotten hold of a good book to sell, preferably one pertaining to carnal adventures; but the crowd seemed too attentive even for that, and now here came a policeman in a very clean uniform; the crowd contracted to make him a passageway, and the attendant leaped onto the dais of his carousel in hopes of some excitement, so that just as the accordionist started to squeeze out the national anthem, the attendant gaped, proving to all of us that his teeth were as brown as the wooden keys of an old spinet; for he had just perceived the dead man.

A little girl, her hand held by her father’s, kept turning sideways to watch the pigeons and the sea, but her father supposed that it was the dead man who attracted her, hence his well-meaning yanking of her wrist; while the whining boy was sure that she kept looking at him in fascinated contempt; and it was this memory above all, whose basis you have just seen to be false, which hurt him most in later life — but did any of this justify his actions?

So the naughty boy grew up with his ever-merciful mother whom he hated, teased, tormented and drained. Those two were of so little interest to anyone else that they lived on the eighth floor of a seven-storey façade (chiseled dirty stone, which might have been pink or tan beneath its greyness). It could have been worse; they could have lived on the ninth floor, among the old widows who have gone to heaven; although it could have been better, in which case they might have been privileged to exist on the seventh floor, among the old widows who no longer watch but listen through the dark shades of their narrowly vertical windowpanes. Those years half throttled him with the stickiness of clothes at knees, elbows, shoulders, chest and back. He kept running to see where life was. Whenever life got away from him, he grew enraged and smeared his excrement on monuments. He was a disgusting boy, to be sure, and always had been. When he was small he used to fly from banister to shoulder or armchair to neck like a vampire bat, sinking his sharp little teeth into the flesh of anyone he chose. When people prayed he would roll his eyes and utter rude whistlings. Those behaviors grew more discreet upon the death of his father. Anyhow, what was he to do? Everything was grey with white glare behind it, like the noon sky in Trieste late in a summer which will not die. So he remained miserably exempt from the fear that so many feel in the face of death, from the vain desire to keep death from achieving total victory by commissioning monuments to ourselves. But finally his testicles descended, and at once autumn began, with a wind which whirled away the potato chips from their glass dishes on the tables of the outdoor cafés. The shadows were more distinct and we could all see farther. What we spied between the slats of our shutters used to be undifferentiated whiteness; but now it organized itself into distinctions of white light and blue light.

His mother bought him a little briefcase. He began to be excited by the dull sheen of brass plaques.

I cannot tell you whether he wanted to be good or merely to be approved of. He was a boy who told lies. Once his mother told him to eat a certain apple before it got overripe, and he said that he had done it but she found it in the dustbin. These careless lies of his became more extravagant, hence almost endearingly unearthly. A beggar came to the door. His mother was upstairs scrubbing the floor. She heard the beggar arguing with her son; she was just about to rise up off her aching knees and go to the young man’s aid when the door slammed behind the beggar; then her son came rushing upstairs with his face alight with virtue; he announced that he had given the beggar five hundred lire of his own money. What could the mother say? Perhaps he had at least felt a momentary charitable inclination, which should not be discouraged. Smiling pityingly, she patted his elbow and went on scrubbing the floor.

When he threw the brick at the Madonna’s white, white forehead, at first he disbelieved the result. Then, determined not to change his life, he approached the divine image in a scientific spirit, seeking to see some reservoir of rusty water beneath the paint. But no; she was bleeding. And she gazed at Nino, lovingly smiling — the smile of a lover, or a mother, or simply of a woman who loved — so giving, that smile, and so fearless, but not like the smile of the woman he would someday marry, who sometimes, at least at first, expressed such happiness that he seemed to smell the fragrance of oranges and lemons; and not like the heavy-lidded smiles of the prostitutes with whom he would in time lie on July afternoons, with the window open in hopes of a harbor breeze; no, she gazed at him with sad awareness — after all, not like his mother, who narrowed her awareness in order to avoid loving him less on account of his sins. Sad smile, brown eyes (one of them larger than the other), bleeding forehead — what did all this mean?

The boy knew well the tri-tiered stands of gum, candies and cough drops in little boxes, and then around the corner he knew a specific double-shelved pastry case, with cookies like full moons eclipsed at the center by smaller planets of jam. These cookies did not seem stealable, so he bought one with his mother’s money, then ran off with it to lurk amidst the sunken weedgrown columns of the Teatro Romano, seeking to deny what he had seen.

The psychotherapist Wilhelm Stekel asserts that our fundamental emotion is hatred. Hence we may conceive of the masochism merely as a painting over the sadistic portrait beneath. Such an assertion would be monstrous, could it not be proved. Are we created in Mary’s image — or, if you like, is she one of us? If so, what sadism does her portrait conceal? If not, is she inhuman? Or is Stekel incorrect? 7

Next question: Considering the way that some families have of devouring their weakest or most foreign member in some dramma eroico, I wonder whether Nino’s father had been sacrificed? His sense that his wife no longer needed him had been, as such feelings almost invariably are, entirely correct; without Nino and his demands the couple would have been worse off; hence if anyone had to go the father was the one. And why not? He was already as worn as the Arco di Riccardo. Such parapathies, once initiated, may well continue. Families are hungry. Could this explain why Nino chose to vandalize the Madonna, and why his mother said nothing? Pretending to him that she must visit her sister, she hurried out with a rag and a bucket of soapy water, struggling to clean the marble, but it did no good. 8

By this time we had all divided into factions, each of us attracted by the flavor of a sympathetic idea, just as in the Canal Grande a school of long green fingerlings will gather round an ice cream cone whose melting whiteness makes especially foul light in that dark water right above another gift to Neptune, namely a pallid rubber glove whose protrusions swiggle and sway in the listless current — and if you want to sit at a café with your friends and speculate as to whether that ice cream cone was dropped in the water by a careless child, or thrown in by the parent of a child who was naughty (who, for instance, whined), or whether it fell from the hands of a sticky child who had eaten too much and suddenly began to vomit, why, then, I wonder why you don’t have better things to do; and it may be much the same with the variously attractive theories about why the Madonna bled when the brick struck her forehead. Nobody except for that despicable boy knew the whole story. He’d lied to his mother, who suspected him but found it more relaxing, God bless her, to believe him; she took a long hot bath, and afterwards he rubbed her feet, all the while sarcastically abusing her for her lack of faith in him. But which way did he judge the question? When his brick hurt that perfect woman, her eyes had moved; she had seen him; this was absolutely for certain; and the blood which spattered his wrist was an earnest of her suffering, which horrified and humiliated him but mostly (in that instant at least) caused him to be terrified of discovery and punishment; as soon as he had gotten away, the horror of what he had done began to prey on him, until he decided not to think about it ever again; and when this strategy failed, he commenced to nourish resentment against Our Lady, who had caused him such suffering. If only she had stayed dead! Who was she to magick the merest nasty thoughtlessness into an atrocity, by being present in her body so unexpectedly? If I drive round the corner at high speed and some old lady is stupid enough to be crossing the street just then and no one has ever been in my way before at that corner, which I have taken at high speed all my life, how can the outcome be my fault? And so he became a Madonna-hater. (The young man’s mother took him to the Gran Teatro di Trieste. He licked his lips at the flowers and lace on Carmen’s costume.)

His mother was now an elderly marble-skinned woman, her head tilted back, her hair almost like a gilded mushroom cap. She wore a thin smile, with her nostrils flaring and her eyes not quite closed. The muscles and bones were taut on her face.

One of his father’s cousins was a pharmacist, and it was to him that Nino presently applied for employment. In the back room of the man’s shop, where he compounded his preparations, there hung an anatomical model of a woman, gloriously naked, and her belly opened so that one could see her internal organs. Opening her belly that night, with the half-formed intention of doing mischief, Nino found a little girl inside. He took her out, and instantly fell in love with her, for her anus was as pretty as the tawny ring in the white cup from which the espresso has been drunk; and so he finally grew up into a man and joined the army.

After several of those July amours to which I have alluded, he fell for a certain Triestina named Francesca whose waist-length chestnut hair, carefully combed, shone red, yellow and all the other colors as she sat with a rose in her folded hands. Some of her suitors could play the viola d’amore of nice red wood, but Nino, having enlisted in the engineers’ battalion, knew how to detonate things; and thanks to his unswerving application to dishonesty he could glamorize his occupations into something resembling the candylike floral depictions on a certain psalterium in Dubrovnik. So Francesca married him.

Nino’s mother congratulated them, with a tenderly submissive smile, as if she were relieved to fade out of this story. And Nino said to himself: Now I must become good. — He not only forgave the Madonna, but prepared even to love her.

But she went on bleeding; the neighbors remarked it; no one could explain who had injured her, and why she did not heal.

His wife was now a gentle, melancholy, elegant woman in brownish-black, wearing a brooch below her withered throat, a lace collar of moderate width, and round earrings of some precious stone which coincidentally resembled his dead mother’s eyes. As for him, he had resigned from the army in order to become a greengrocer, an occupation so respectable that he fancied himself nearly as worthwhile as a gold-relief saint with an upraised spear. Outside their window, the high-masted ships rocked quietly in the mirror-harbor. Of course they had children, a daughter who reminds me of a cherry tree growing out of the ruin of the old Basilica, and two busy little boys like the blooming bush on one of the high ledges of the Arco di Riccardo. I remember passing by their window and seeing the sons in their formal jackets, sitting at the piano for their lesson, while the potted orchid behind them grew sluttishly wild. Just as some rich orders like to get their old wooden icons sheathed in hammered silver, so Nino sometimes embellished his life with extramarital adventures, in order to display his loyalty to what he called happiness; while Francesca perfumed her underwear with dried orange blossoms.

One day Nino got a rash on his belly which declined to improve. He grew ill. At such times he had always been childishly peevish and dependent, so that the family could never do enough to please him. Finally Francesca gently said: Darling, I’ve heard that Our Lady’s blood works miracles.

Terrified, he sat up and said: What must I do?

I’ll go with you. We’ll pray. Then you must kiss her on the forehead, and swallow the blood.

Needless to say he preferred not to go. On the other hand, he feared suspicion and exposure as a result of any refusal — although only a little, for he had thrown that brick so long ago that his crime seemed unreal to him — and his rash itched so badly that he could scarcely sleep.

So his wife led him there. He crept up toward Our Lady of the Flowers, groaning with pain.

It was that time in mid or late afternoon when the Triestine summer, not having entirely established its sticky grip, allows a cloud or two to dim the sun, and an innocuous remembrance of the bora to rise deliciously in the shaded parks where children go fishing for tiny prey with hands, hopes and sticks; and even the old couples who sit together doing nothing are refreshed into holding hands there in the mottled shade of the chestnut trees of the Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” the bare-breasted stone nymph pissing happily from the circular array of jets, the many-windowed apartment façades glowing slate-green or whitish-pink outside the shady zone; tonight will be humid again, so people will open their windows, and the mosquitoes will feast all night. They descended the semicircular seat-steps of the Teatro Romano, and Nino could not help but look at the column which in boyhood he had damaged, first dreading that the brick might have healed itself, which would render this world’s laws still less predictable, then sad and guilty when he saw that it had not, and finally angry that he had been made to be sad. — He wished to pulverize Our Lady into gravel.

We’re almost there, darling.

Nino did not reply, because the Madonna’s smile came into view before the rest of her, and it unnerved him as much as ever. For years he had tactfully avoided reminding her of his existence, but now she herself had dragged him back! What was wrong with this world? He tried to say to himself: She’s nothing but a vampire! — never mind that he was the one who had come to drink blood.

He had forgotten her sadly smiling slightly bewildered face, and that infuriating way that her eyes had of looking lost. The Christ child in her arms was a sexless little adult.

Francesca was now praying steadily. He knelt beside her, moved his lips, and closed his eyes, so as not to be haunted by Our Lady’s face. Dove, lily and olive branch, those Marian attributes he promised henceforth to adore. When he could no longer put it off, he stood up and kissed that stone forehead, tasting dust, salt, soot, then blood.

Instantly her bleeding ceased, leaving for a souvenir a reddish-ocher stain on her smooth cold forehead. Simultaneously Nino found himself healed, so that his life became as lovely as the long dead singer Bianca Kaschman, as useless as an artificial sand dollar, as meaninglessly triumphant as wreaths of silver and gold. Again, one must wonder about Our Lady’s motives.

Within the year he turned away from his wife, since he now lacked any further need of others. Self-entitled to the seductive stare of a certain Triestina in a pallid formal gown with half a dozen hems, her right knee crossed over the left to make a platform for her left elbow as she played with the pearls on her triple-stranded necklace, her hair pulled back, everything dim and silver-blue but for the whites of her eyes, he pursued and eventually won her on a blue-grey day of bora rain, streetlamp reflections shining on the empty street like cat-eyes, until he finally unlatched the coffers of his heart for her and she saw inside. Francesca, for whom he had so long pretended to be tamed, kept looking desperately between her tanned and slender knees, in case she she had lost some part of herself. — Fortunately, she was comforted, for the long-necked, golden-haloed, blue-grey bird called the Holy Ghost flew to her from out of an old Croatian-Glagolitic missal. Then she took the children, and ran off with a haberdasher.

As for him, ambition bemused him, like a lady’s legs reflected in a curving wall of brass — but without Francesca his belly-rash returned. The next time Nino kissed the Madonna’s stained forehead, his affliction, as indeed he had expected, refused to divorce him. This was positively insulting, since Our Lady could easily have made another cure; everyone knows she vanquished a cholera epidemic in 1849. Lonely and perhaps not far away from death (so it certainly appeared when he looked into the mirror), Nino would have wooed her had he known how, but found it easier to become a politician — for his life, unlike yours or mine, was comically accidental and meaningless. Incited by slogans about smashing the idols, chipping away at restraint, tearing down the old order, he believed that life should have promised him something, and he was not the only one.

In his schooldays the bad boy had loved Emperor Massimiliano, touched his statue and even refrained from daubing, scratching or chipping it. So it might be “no accident” that he betook himself to the deep and ancient chairs of the Caffè San Marco, worn by generations of nationalists’ buttocks.

An eagle on a shroud for Lohengrin, said the Duke, and we’ll need turquoise-beaded bands on its wings and sad ruby eyes, because…

Silence! The leader arrives—

The leader liked Nino, because he was so good at telling lies, so before the Madonna had wept or bled again he got to take the train all the way to Venice, bearing in his briefcase the money and confidence of the party. Already he was hoping that someday he could for all purposes become a white statue whose arms would be pompously folded across his toga’d breast, overwatching the red flag which bore the historical weight of Trieste’s white fleur-de-lys well enough to slowly, slowly stir, unfurling like a pill dissolving in liquid, then wrapping itself up again, just as Caesar covered his face when he saw Brutus among his assassins… and below the flag’s balcony, all of us, his followers, even Our Lady (whose statue was naturally much smaller) would be carried into the shadow where arched windows shone silver and cigarette smoke diffused like sea-fog. Thus his hopes, and the train had barely passed Miramar. — Here came the trolley of coffees, candies and cigarettes. The woman who wheeled it wore a frothy white chemise, and there were dark circles under her armpits. As she drew close to his seat, he inhaled the smell of her sweat and was enchanted. Those intimate circles, they reminded him of the light seen through grape leaves. Because he knew what to say, she soon agreed to meet him in a hotel room where the shadow of the lace curtain on the Naples yellow wall resembled a harp, but when he undressed, it turned out that his sickness had spread. Revolted, the woman departed.

What will become of me? he anguished, which is not the same as what will I become? — If only Our Lady had left me as I was that first time — if Francesca hadn’t dragged me there…! — for what he detested above all was confusion. He wished to be what he was, coldly and secretly. But what was that?

Resigning from politics without even returning the money, and therefore knowing that unless her new husband, who had friends in three of Trieste’s marine insurance companies, saved him, his best hope was death, he returned on his knees to Francesca, who unfortunately had grown happy where she was. Out of pity (and with her new husband’s permission) she gave him a lily and an olive branch, instructing him to sleep with them under his pillow until he dreamed of the Madonna. But he never did. One cool whitish-pale morning when a single pale pigeon flew high across the Via Dante Alighieri, showing itself for the merest instant between the two embellished streetwalls, Nino returned to kiss Our Lady’s forehead once more in secret, desperate to believe that it would bleed again, although he knew quite well not only that all hope of that had fled, but also that whatever solution the mystery of the bleeding stone image might contain, he was better off never learning. Our Lady bowed her marble face, silently suffering the touch of his lips; and the bloodstain on her forehead matched in hue the crimson-brown garment of one of those faded figures on certain Istrian graveyard frescoes. He licked and licked at her forehead like a dog, but this time he could not obtain the slightest blood-taste. By the time death came, from complications of his rash, exacerbated by three bullets in the back, Nino had become bitter — although, come to think of it, he might always have been that way.

CAT GODDESS

Dark bronze Rossetti, haughty on his plinth, held a book and clutched his heart, while among the many abject figures below, a seminude crowned lady who held a tablet of the laws essayed eternally to offer him a palm branch. As soon as the evening darkened sufficiently to be safe, he stepped down, snubbing the poor crowned lady, who grew as disappointed as if she were made of flesh, an emotion she could not sweat out or weep out, because the foundry had cast her to love only him above her, whom he unfortunately considered a mere decoration; Rossetti-adoration was in her every bronze atom. Rossetti, differently comprised, wanted women. The clashing of bronze against bronze could not seduce him. Some of our miseries may be called tragedies of place, as was the syndrome of that poor crowned lady (whose name was Giovanna); had fate simply established her farther down the coast, she might have attracted the attentions of some marble Herakles. Cloaking his face, Rossetti set off to drink a grappa in the brown and creamy-yellow silence of the Caffè San Marco, where they kept a table for him by the far wall, in a niche whose sweet dimness offered however treacherously to preserve the semiliving from recognition. He paid in bronze, of course: heavy, dark, ovoid coins from a hoard within the plinth, which was much hollower than it appeared. Our Lady of the Flowers, who performs miracles every day, replenished his treasury, out of loving pity, which indeed shored up his equanimity. Why he could not be satisfied with standing forever overlooking the Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” graciously accepting the deposits of pigeons, cannot be explained; but several other plinths in Trieste had been vacated by now, their heroes and heroines having chosen ecstatic oblivion over unbending fame. There was, for instance, a certain shy little marble girl whose sculptor, Barcalgalia, had condemned her always to be half-trying to cover her pubis; meanwhile she had conveniently pulled up her marble shift, so over time she gave and took much joy. A century and more it had been since she first leaped off her marble block. Our Lady, whose hobbies include the arranging of marriages, once proposed her to Rossetti’s consideration, but he said: You know, cara, the thing is, I have a bitter disposition. That’s why I need someone soft and yielding. I’m not saying a stone woman can’t be forgiving; for instance, look at you, still smiling, with that bloodstained forehead! But you’re not, how should I say, available… — nor would he have wished her to be; although he had several times been tempted by the exaggerated frozen gazes of the thespians at the Circulo Artistico, he longed, if such a verb is not preposterous when applied to him, for a dear woman of flesh who could warm him up as even Triestine sunlight never could, not quite; indeed, it was considerably worse for poor bronze Giovanna, who had to stand always in his shadow — not that she ever complained. And so the shy marble girl found herself another taker; one day James Joyce stepped off his plinth by the Canal Grande, and the newspapers wrote that he had been stolen by a nymphomaniacal American heiress who engaged in untrammelled sexual congress with statues. After Joyce deserted his post, even Umberto Sava, it was said, began to be tempted by a certain someone cast in pure silver. As for Rossetti, all he needed were his nightly amours. For her part, Giovanna (whose longings resembled brass railings shining in the morning sun) never imagined lowering herself to engage in such practices. Where her idol went when he departed her she suspected all too well, but since he never failed to return, she had at least someone to look up to. So on the evening under consideration, she watched his departure no less calmly than mournfully. Rossetti turned his steps to the San Marco, which, while it was not as quiet as early on a Sunday afternoon just before closing, remained a good venue for a bronze fellow who prefers to be left in peace. Whenever he had the place to himself, Rossetti liked to inspect each of the round brass-bordered portraits, whose crudeness surpassed that of worn Etruscan frescoes. To the vertically grooved column-reliefs upon the Naples yellow walls clung plaques whose import might be stylized honeybees or petals of quartered flowers; these decorative concretions soothed Rossetti by reminding him of his plinth. So he sat down in his private corner, prepared to re-explore the way that some grappas burn and others glow. And on this night the slender, elderly waiter, whose spectacles never ceased shining even when he straightened his necktie, revealed, without even any expectation of a tip, that a sweet girl all alone in a tasselled scarf and a long pale dress dress of many embroideries had just decided to paint her lips, cock her plumed hat, and set off for the radiant sea. Can you believe it? She meant to abandon this world! Moreover, she derived not from some Serbo-Croatian-speaking karstic village high in the interior, which origin might have excused her, but from Trieste herself, empress of cities. The waiter, who took pride in knowing Rossetti’s tastes, remarked that this young lady, whose name was Silvia, was worth looking over, at which Rossetti pondered and ordered another grappa. Next morning, when Silvia arrived at the port, whose ships’ smokestacks resembled banded cigars, Rossetti, having without making her a single promise instructed Giovanna to take his place on the plinth, either with or without her palm branch, whatever she considered most discreetly effective, stood waiting to rescue the girl from the sea.

In case you are wondering whether anybody noticed the alteration of Rossetti’s monument, I may as well tell you now that the painter Leonor Fini, while making her morning promenade through that same Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” in hopes of reinterring a ghoulish hangover in the smallest possible hermetic coffin at the center of her skull, paused there, and caught the substitution right away, because when her father, wishing to raise her in the Catholic Church, had sought to kidnap her away from her mama, she became a watchful little girl in her knee-length skirt and sailor hat, posing with flowers and precociously pregnant with spite, clutching her cats, jeering and staring, growing up salacious and defiant, distrusting the male category and hence preferring to play with her transvestite friends. In the grimy alleys of Trieste she not infrequently spied ghosts — for instance, an old Serb named Jovo Cirtovich, whose face had perhaps fallen in a trifle, and his ancient, black-clad daughter Tanya or Tanyotchka, who was always seeking and never finding him. To more complacent observers they might have been shadows or scraps of cheese-paper. Once Leonor saw that pair wandering under a deep Roman arch which resembled a well laid on its side; he kept sighing and clutching at his throat, as if he had lost something which used to hang there, while she strode determinedly right through him, murmuring father, father, father. It chilled Leonor that they could not perceive one another; the lesson she derived was that a girl might as well seek pleasure in this life! On another occasion she saw the Emperor Massimiliano, dressed in the Mexican uniform in which he once delighted. When Leonor was a girl, her mama took her to visit Miramar, where, being apprised of the legend that who sleeps here in Massimiliano’s castle dies a violent death, she giggled and shuddered. Up on the wall, the pale melancholy faces of the Emperor and Empress, painted by Heirrich in 1863, almost seemed to foresee the execution. — Poor man! sighed Leonor’s mama. The Mexicans were so ungrateful… — The guide informed Leonor and her mama that to console him before he was shot, they performed his favorite tune, “La Paloma.” So when she encountered him that night on Via Dante Alighieri, Leonor hummed “La Paloma,” at which the ghost lifted his head and smiled sadly. How many other phantoms did the watchful woman see? — Cat-ghosts by the score, no doubt, and perhaps even the odd vampire. — And which of the living did she not see through? In that famous 1936 photograph by Dora Maar, Leonor sits with her stockinged knees apart and a black cat peering out glowing-eyed between them; she holds her head high, presenting her cleavage, her eyebrows painted on catlike, as if she pretends to be Cleopatra. One can tell that she sees everything. Ten years later, Cartier-Bresson catches her leaning forward in darkness, ornately decorated by embroidered sleeves, wide-eyed, pursing her lips as if in concentration, ruthlessly intent on seeing and being seen. Even in the photographs of Veno Pilon her wariness is her charm; sometimes she stares over her shoulder like a streetwalker. So you may be sure that she noticed Rossetti’s absence. With her loud, screeching laugh, Leonor now strolled up to the plinth and fondled Giovanna’s nipples. Her estimation of Rossetti took off like an unguided missile; she had never suspected that he might be one of her very own man-women! Not knowing what else to do in the face of such treatment, Giovanna kept very still. Leonor’s hangover perished with a plop, and she hurried home to paint the bronze lady and her palm branch into a crowd of bejeweled hermaphroditic clowns in the background of her latest surrealistic canvas, and before the oils had even dried down as far as tackiness, Leonor was wrapping herself in a robe of her own design and crowning her head with colored feathers, because a photographer from Marseilles had been entreating to do her portrait.

Meanwhile, as Giovanna stood anxious, shy and proud in her master’s place, with an electric-grey pigeon warming her head, Rossetti, who would have been insulted had he known Leonor’s new misapprehension of him, persuaded the erratic Silvia to take him back to her rented room. The roses had not yet wilted in their vase and her tabby cat Lilith was barely getting hungry. Silvia removed her clothes with darling clicks and rustles; Rossetti undressed himself with clinks and clanks. Three bronze coins fell out of his pocket. How the procedure was carried out I who was not there cannot tell you, but it remains certain that with great success they made love in her bed, and afterwards, while he lay naked beneath the white sheet watching her and humming “La Paloma,” although he did not know why it had entered his mind, a fly crawled upon his bronze forehead as Silvia stood naked by the shuttered window, sipping wine, holding Lilith against her breast and stroking her, hungering ever more to vanish from Trieste, which was why her eyes kept shining and glittering on that late afternoon by the sea. She had booked a berth on a certain twin-masted brigantino, the Tancredi, a former warship which now sailed into the past, ferrying seekers of lost dreams. To get rid of her lover, she acquiesced in becoming the next Signora Rossetti; by then the Tancredi had already departed. The instant her intended had dressed, constructed their rendezvous for that very evening behind the botanical gardens, kissed her lips, breasts, hands and then departed, Silvia, tyrannized by the fact that in summertime Trieste the smell of sweat can drown both smell and sound of sea, smashed her wineglass in a rage, at which Lilith, frightened by the uproar, hissed and showed her claws, which impelled Silvia to throw the animal out the window; and the calmness with which she observed the cat’s whirlings and screechings all the way down rendered her worthy of either damnation or pity — all because the odor of sweat from that unmade bed exasperated her. Now she desired to embark for Hvar or Opatija, where the sea’s fishy vapors make frequent headway against the air. Accordingly she poured the roses and water from her vase onto the bed, hurled the vase out the window to shatter on top of her dead cat, laughed, pulled her dress on, painted her lips reddish-black, cocked that pale hat on her head, locked the door behind her, just in case (which proves her not utterly irrational) and set off once more to buy her ticket to sea-freedom, but this time Leonor Fini, unapprised of Silvia’s unforgivable cruelty to cats, caught sight of her, and although she mostly preferred men she could dominate, or men-women to play with, Leonor found herself in a mood to give and receive Communion between this girl’s legs for the instruction, humiliation and delectation of all Leonor’s membrane-shrouded ladies bathing in pitch, Leonor’s gentle corpses and Leonor’s lesbians in jester dress — for by now our talented heroine had advanced beyond seeing other people’s ghosts; she invented her own. The world of Leonor Fini, the painted world, could be reached by lifting aside a certain oil painting on a certain easel. Being one of those women who say yes when they would rather say no, Silvia permitted Leonor to lead her to her studio, which was just downstairs from her mama’s apartment, and presently, after cigarettes and absinthe, her hostess opened the door in the easel, took her hand, and pulled her down to the dark garden of lichens, logs and glossy greens; so that before she knew it, Silvia was standing naked in dark water, huger-breasted than ever before, with the sky red behind her, and half-submerged skull-crocodiles watching; Leonor was dancing white and naked on a black driftwood log, and the grey-wigged red-cloaked skeleton of the Angel of Anatomy performed a string solo for them both, drawing a rib across the music-hole in a woman’s pelvis. — Silvia was thinking: I’d rather be in Opatija. — And then catbird ladies commenced to fly softly down, hovering just above the tarry water, swishing it around with their fat white breasts, so that before Leonor and Silvia had even made love once, Silvia was in distress, recalling all too well what she had done to Lilith and therefore (I am happy to say) repenting, which Our Lady of the Flowers found pleasing, since to her way of thinking contrition became people about as well as anything. Beneath a long veil, a jewel-like skeleton, pale and smooth like a fly’s eye, now squatted to embrace a bald unconscious man-woman to whom Leonor paid more attention than to Silvia — who stole the opportunity to dress. Leonor, who had anticipated painting a portrait of her standing waist deep in that pool, threw a glass dildo at her head and commanded her never to come back, which suited both parties. By then it was Sunday afternoon, so Silvia decided to climb the stairs of the bell tower. She would sail to the radiant sea on Monday. The tower was dark. Passing the Roman griffin or Pegasus or whatever it was, and the wing-headed thing carved into the marble, the excited girl ascended and ascended. Here the light was bluish-greyish-white, yet also warm; and gazing across the world she saw the myriad masts like stalks of dark grass in the harbor, beyond which the last roofs and the lighthouse demarcated the end of gravity. Tomorrow she would happily forsake the humid glare of the coast, gathering up armloads of those sea-diamonds which glitter all the way to Dalmatia — but spiderlike within the immense metal skirt of the cathedral bell clung Rossetti; for Our Lady, entreated with his orange-fragrant prayers, and wishing to encourage and even facilitate his promise-keeping (although his sincerity in proposing marriage I myself cannot help but fault, and the only reason she haunted his desires was that she had broken their rendezvous), had informed him where to find her. Giovanna being irrelevant, he invited Silvia to bronzify herself and share his plinth forever. She for her part, determined to be free, leaped out into the sunlight. Just before she met the pavement, the Madonna dei Fiori looked upward, not at her but at Rossetti, who, fascinated by the bloodstain on her stone forehead, was thereby saved from witnessing Silvia’s death — but all the same, he wept verdigrised tears on his plinth for a full three weeks, after which he got consoled by a slim, lovely young wasp-waisted beauty in a black jacket-skirt and black tights who held a whip and sometimes permitted him to feed tidbits to her pet bulldog. Her name was Lina. The whole time, Giovanna had heroically concealed her own troubles behind her palm branch.

Leonor, who loved a good quarrel, had been in a fine mood ever since she threw Silvia out. After drinking absinthe with two transvestite friends of hers she saw again the ghost of ancient Tanya Cirtovich in a light black veil, and painted that sad woman into the background of her latest oil autoportrait. The next time she visited the Madonna she found her weeping, and that was how she learned about Silvia’s suicide. Here I wish to insert that of all the Madonnas in the world, Our Lady of the Flowers takes greatest local interest in the doings of sinners. I have it on authority that when Buddha abandoned his family to go drink enlightenment beneath a tree, his little daughter cried so much as to fall into danger of death, so in the end they sent her to Trieste to be cared for by Our Lady, who sang her madrigals by night and gave her suck from her fine stone breasts until she became a stone seagull, a happy enough outcome were it not for the fact that after the fall of Mussolini they forgot who that seagull was and moved her into the Lapidarium. Our Lady wept twenty-four stone tears over that — the most she could have done for anybody so unchristian — and then, on a sultry autumn day when the bora blew the window open, transformed her into a real bird so that she could fly over the sea more or less as Silvia had wished to do. As for Silvia herself, how could Our Lady help such a bad girl? But was it Silvia’s fault that she had been created incapable of Triestine happiness? Moreover, she had repented about killing her cat. So the Madonna wept a river of tears into the sewer and through the forgotten Roman catacombs under the street and then down all the way to hell, in order to extinguish the flames which wracked that poor dead girl, who thus grew sufficiently sane to pray for Lilith, which entitled both Silvia and Lilith to come back to life, a favor which Our Lady gladly accomplished; she even gave Silvia a painted basket in which to carry her pet, who presently forgot to distrust her.

Leonor was one of those women who never allow anything to keep them from their pleasures — and, if I might say so, we would all better enjoy one another’s company if we lived and died like her. Being in a hurry, she stayed but a moment to hear the Madonna’s news, then kissed that stone female, of whom she was truly fond, upon the lips — didn’t they have cats in common? In their time they had both rescued myriads of felines, for, as Our Lady once remarked, a cat and a prayer are equally beloved in heaven, no matter how many songbirds the cat has done for. — You should really offer up a candle for Silvia, cara, even though she’s alive. Do it for me, my girl! — Of course, of course! cried Leonor, to whom grudges were an inconvenience. She went straight to the Serbian Orthodox church to keep her promise; and that very afternoon, as Silvia stood by the starboard railing of the ferry to Opatija, cradling Lilith in her arms and craving the snow-white specks of houses and villages ahead along the beach-edge of the blue-green coast, both woman and cat began to smell a delicious scent compounded of incense and catnip, all thanks to Leonor Fini and the Madonna, and so they lived happily ever after, until, dissatisfied with Opatija, they removed to Rijeka, and looking straight down past the white cliff-rocks and through the water’s wavering green near-translucency, down to where the white ovoid rocks, many of whose centers were green, waxed and waned like moons on the bottom of the harbor, Silvia imagined that she could see the back door to hell, which made her remember how she had sinned against Lilith, followed by her own dying, burning and all the rest of it; so, half suffocated, she picked up Lilith in her basket and carried her to the market, where a man was wooing his daughter with shining cherries which were almost the scarlet-purple of a harlot’s velvet dress; and first Silvia thought that cherries might save her; then she thought to trust in those neat bunches of chives, as yellow-green as summer, or in the pure white bulbs of leeks, never mind the lovely purple-black polka dots on glossy green fava beans; but the tiny old woman who sold them, turning her head like a bird — she had a brown-shawled, nut-colored face and eyes like small black round berries — gazed at Silvia and Lilith with such sweet half-comprehension (in other words, in so animal-like a fashion) that Silvia remembered Lilith’s trusting gaze the moment before she hurled her out the window (she had been purring wide-eyed, with her belly-fur whiter than sea-clouds); so they fled to Vienna; indeed, they had voyaged all the way to Prague, where staring out at her from the dark narrow doorway of a photographer’s shop Silvia saw a man whose face and hands were so white that she knew he must be dead; she might have recognized him from hell; his black eye-piercings aimed themselves at her, and his black gash of a mouth elongated; his black nostril-slits enlarged but of course did not pulse in the white flatness of his face. Just as Silvia began to wonder how her life would have been had she made love with Leonor Fini, the dead man said the words Heloy Tau Varaf Panthon Homnorcum Elemiath… at which Lilith, hissing, clawed at her basket, and then they both fell down dead, to the grief but not surprise of Our Lady of the Flowers.

Now I ought to tell you of another Triestine cat-career, whose creeping abjection rendered Our Lady of the Flowers yet sadder and wearier. Rossetti’s new sweetheart Lina, the one with the whip and the bulldog, loved cats nearly as much as did Leonor Fini, and currently kept a tiny mixed-breed specimen, named Giulia, who had in kittenhood been abandoned and so could never trust anybody. Lina tried sincerely to love Giulia, who repaid her with fear. At first she suspected her bulldog, but even when Giulia was entirely alone with Lina she could not successfully love her. Often, it is true, Giulia approached her when she was reading or sewing in bed, and not only meowed until she was petted but purred thereafter. But there were times when Giulia, suddenly fearing a lock of the woman’s hair or the loudness of her heartbeat, never mind the snoring of the bulldog down the hall, would scratch or even bite Lina, drawing blood. At the best of times it was not uncommon for Giulia to go on meowing even while she was being petted; she could never really be happy. If Lina sat up suddenly in bed, the cat rushed away in terror, sometimes continuing all the way down the hall until she crashed against the wall. At night she slept under the covers with her mistress, but not infrequently she would claw her way out from the bedspread and begin galloping up and down the corridor. Any stranger terrified her, as did anybody who stood erect, presumably because she had been tormented by boys when she lived on the street. Her instinct was therefore to hide. On certain mornings when her mistress stood before the wardrobe mirror, choosing a dress, Giulia would creep around her into the back of the closet, so quietly as to be unperceived, as a consequence of which she often got shut in. Upon being trapped in that dark place she never dared to meow, so that it sometimes took a day or more for Lina to find her. She likewise had a way of wriggling into chests of drawers, and her mistress feared that someday she would get crushed.

Lina disbelieved in God, on the grounds that there was so much evil in this world that should He exist He must be evil. When they discussed the matter, Rossetti said: I believe in the kingdom of heaven, but when I consider your cat, who seems mostly so, well, self-constricted and unhappy, I sometimes wonder whether God might be some horrible wooden thing Whose purpose is to constrict us. On the other hand…

He was allergic to cats, even though he was made of bronze. Whenever he visited, poor Giulia had to stay outside the bedroom (as for the bulldog, he slept downstairs). She then scuttered up and down the hallway for much of the night, so that finally, with Lina’s permission, he closed the door against her in hopes of getting some sleep — for he never slept when he was standing on his plinth; only when pressing himself against a woman’s body (preferably her backside) could he refresh himself with that fleshly treat called oblivion. So Giulia had to go. Later he heard the poor creature thudding against the door, and felt guilty and sorry. Each morning he found her curled up on the carpet outside the bedroom, in a wretched little ball of greyness. She could have been dead.

When she did die, she became a timid ghost. Because most cats never become Christians, the best place to seek them after their lives end is Limbo, where they and the pagan philosophers entertain one another. Round the corner from Our Lady’s statue was another way to hell, a well covered over with flowers, whose diverse beauties increased each time she brushed against them en route to helping another soul. Through those depths Our Lady now flew, her alabaster face downcast, her lips parted as if she might even breathe, and amidst shiny ebony snails and pale green night-leaves she found both Lilith, who had been stalking a child’s nine-hundred-year-old beetle-sized ghost, and Giulia, who was cowering in a temporarily vacant vampire hole. Gathering them both up into her arms, so that they nearly warmed the still Christ child she also carried, the Madonna ascended three hundred and thirty-two flights of stairs, each step paler and less nitrous than the last, and thus reached the realm of mummies, where triangles, ankhs, scales and herbs are carved into the lintels of false doors; after one more flight she came into the marble-boned place beneath Leonor Fini’s easel where the milk-nude women and pastel-tendoned grotesqueries dwell forever. Here there were also cats, and as many saucers of fish and of cream as they could well desire; but when Our Lady set down the two new arrivals, they hid. Knowing that they would come around in their own good time, she ascended through the easel to pay a visit on Leonor, who although she could never face the death of her own cats agreed to give Giulia and Lilith the most dazzling double funeral. By then Our Lady had even rescued Silvia, who was standing in the queue of terrified new souls to be burned forever, all of them as silent as the pigeons in the shady sandy piazza between the Museo Civico and the Instituto Nautico; plucking that lucky woman out of hell for the second time, Our Lady established her in a gilded cloud-boat on heaven’s endless seas. Then she flew home, loving Trieste’s long white descent from the karst to the pine trees behind it — so it seems when one approaches the city from the west, and it appears to underline a narrowing blue cape. She flew lower, and within an orange slit of light, a woman extended her stockinged leg as she smoked a cigarette; she was the clerk of a lingerie store. Our Lady overflew her, overseeing everything like the white sun pouring warmth through the cloud-lace above the massive shuttered edifice-islands whose top stories were so often painted yellow or pink; and for a space she hovered over the milky blue of cigarette smoke below the egg-yolk-hued streetlights; Leonor Fini was down there with her man-woman friend Arturo Nathan; the Madonna blew them both a kiss, so that for a moment the breeze smelled like oranges.

Rossetti was at Lina’s the next time that Leonor came promenading by. As it happened, she loved to take note of his absences, having caught him on several nightwalking errands, the last time being seven winters ago, when she, with her wolfskin cape over her shoulders and her fingernails painted dark, approached her rendezvous with a certain dilettantish Count, while as for Rossetti, a thespian female had lately attracted him by means of a dark cloak ribbed with decorations and a feathered beaver hat; she was smooth, lovely, opulent and plump; she was positively swanskinned; so he was just descending from his plinth when Leonor shrieked out, just to torment him: Police, police! Rossetti’s deserted his post!

Please, cara, be discreet!

Leonor coldly informed him: I hate discretion. I hate hidden tricks.

Having heard about the time she screamed down Mussolini’s mistress in Milan, he tried to brush past her in silence, so she spat in his face. After that he despised her, of course, whereas from Leonor’s point of view it could have been over; not only did she forgive him but he interested her (if he but knew it) as a physical form — because Leonor, who during her self-apprenticeship used to visit the morgue ever so often, had long since lost interest in cadavers, admiring mummies for their sculptural qualities, and preferring above all the perfection of that relic which deteriorates the least: the skeleton. Who could be more bone-durable than a bronze man? Of course she never mentioned this to him, not wishing to turn his head.

This morning Giovanna occupied the master’s place; having amassed confidence in the course of this last summer, she had slowly become the sort of apple-breasted woman who likes to stand nude on a plinth, with a bronze apple in her hand. And perhaps the kindly Madonna made her appear especially enticing to Leonor on that morning. Right away she craved to paint her nude, maybe holding out a tray of sweets, and definitely doing something with that adorable palm leaf; on second thought, maybe the sweet creature ought to forgo the tray and raise the palm leaf over her head as if she were an Amazon with a sword.

Rossetti, she said, I like you much better as a woman.

I am a woman, said Giovanna shyly.

But you look so mannish! Don’t lie to me or I’ll spit on you again.

You see, I’ve studied under him. Usually I stand down there. I try to act as he does, because—

Listen, baby, why don’t you run away from here and come to my cat funeral?

Oh, no, signora! I—

Is that man telling you what to do? Listen, precious. Come with me. If he says an unkind word to you, my friends and I will come here with blowtorches. Do you or don’t you like cats?

I—

Then come. Right now, sweetheart. I dislike the deference with which your Rossetti’s been treated. Oh, what nice breasts you have. I’ll make it worth your while.

Since Giovanna, like Silvia, could not say no, she let Leonor take her hand, and stepped shyly off the plinth, with her bronze heart clanging rapidly within her hollow bosom. Although in her time she had certainly seen things even more exciting than two white-wimpled farmwomen flirting with a young shepherd (for many things do happen in a park), she wondered what she might have missed. For instance, no one had ever held her hand before. Leonor, who knew how to pick up a cat such that even though its hind legs dangled it took no fright, led Giovanna with kindred gentleness into the stinging white sun, which had been doubled and half-melted amidst the oily brown rainbows of the Canal Grande. It seemed as if the curtain of water had already begun to part, and the white clouds crawling beside this splendid gash could have been the cigarette smoke of spectators at an orgy. Giovanna began to feel warm and limber. Now they turned down apartment-shaded stairs and through an arch where Leonor had once met a sweet Bohemian vampire named Milena; and presently Leonor unlocked a door in the wall, led her upstairs and unlocked another door. They were greeted by a wide-eyed, high-eared cat, who kept bristling out his whiskers. Then came three more cats, all coffee-colored like the reflections on the dark reddish-brown floor of the Caffè San Marco. Leonor was already kissing a kitten as sleek as the longhaired thespian who played Salome a century ago.

So this is my place, said her hostess unnecessarily. Later I’ll take you beneath the easel, because I’m going to paint you as a nude cat goddess. You see, we’re going to have a funeral for Giulia and Lilith. Now, these are more of my cats. I’ll introduce you later. Time to get ready. Here. What’s your name?

Giovanna.

Giovanna, take this atomizer and spray perfume on all those heaps of catshit, so our killjoys won’t dare complain. Oh, mama, there you are! I have a cat mask for you! Did you hear there’s going to be a double funeral? Giovanna, this is my mama, Malvina. She’s my best friend. Mama, this girl’s in love with Rossetti, the one in the Giardino Pubblico.

Well, well, said Leonor’s mama, smiling and fanning herself. Rossetti, of all people!

What do you see in him, anyway?

You see, Leonor, he’s like my father.

Does that mean you want to fuck him? Yes or no? Anyway, don’t let that man dominate the situation. Mama, darling, entertain this little girl while I change.

Malvina Fini stood in her sweeping black dress, smiling appraisingly at Giovanna as if at a suitor. She said: Are you interested in my daughter?

God forbid, signora!

The guests were already beginning to come. The sentimental ones wore black, the sluts wore leopardskins, and there were any number of pseudo- and quasi-feline poseurs. Knowing what was expected, Leonor’s mama led Giovanna down through the easel into the place where the niches were inset with frozen faded figures as in old churches, the atmosphere thick with silence. Self-absorbed pale women were wading naked in dark water with their hair like veils. Giovanna loved it. She had never felt so free.

For this latest saturnalia, Leonor now dressed herself in the coarse gauzelike covering of a Roman mummy, painted with ocher figures of cats and high-breasted girls in profile. — Splendid! cried Giovanna.

Thanks, cara.

But where are all the men?

The men around me are dead, her hostess explained. They’re too limited in understanding, too brutal to survive. Well, except for Arturo, of course. Arturo, caro! You look fabulous in that pink dress! I mean to paint you with a tropical bird perched on your finger. Oh, and you brought cake! Is the Prince going to be late again? Do cut Giovanna a piece, and spoon-feed it to her, for the poor girl’s made of bronze. Now here come some men. I’ll make them entertain you; they’ll love it.

And Giovanna, who had never eaten or drunk anything before, sat behind a pastel cake as elaborate as a cathedral, hoping this would never end — for it was much superior to the eternity she knew at the Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini”—until Leonor laughed and said: Go ahead, cara! Don’t be a prude. Eat.

Do you like me?

That’s impertinent. No, don’t look at me like that! I prefer cats. They’re much wiser than we are. You wanted men, you said? All right, silly! They’re waiting for us in that room! — And opening a door, she showed the wide-eyed bronze girl a convocation of shining-eyed gymnasts whose chests gleamed with constellations of medals. — Fuck them all if you like; just don’t take orders. All right now. Come sit by me. The services are beginning.

Lilith and Giulia, the two most important cats of the hour, behaved very differently. Lilith stalked slowly about with her tail upraised, while Giulia was scarcely to be seen.

Here came the chief mourner, Leonor’s cat Sappho, who had a way of craning her head over her shoulder when she meowed for food, showing off her white breast; and when she raised her ears she was like an owl with round yellow-green eyes. Leonor opened her arms. Sappho came in, digging her claws into Leonor’s robe as she ascended. Giovanna did not know what to think. She had seen cats in the park before, but until now they had been nearly colorless to her; she never imagined that they could be so intriguing. Why they preoccupied her at Leonor’s can be explained from the simple fact that she had never been indoors before, nor had anyone treated her as a friend, although she remembered certain looks of Rossetti’s which she had, perhaps, overinterpreted; I suspect that almost anybody could have won her over. Wide-eyed, she watched all those nude women around her; they were as white together as all the skirts of a flock of nurses, titillating themselves for lustral purposes; and thirteen nude ballerinas danced in honor of the two dead cats while thirteen naked nuns sang feline cantatas. Beside Giovanna, applauding, sat a visitor from downstairs: a high-breasted mummy lady whose necklaces were faded in many colors and whose white belly was cracked right down to her mons veneris. With a sad fragrance of cypresses Our Lady now appeared to bless the funeral with tears which hardened into good luck pearls. She stretched out her hands, and Giulia crept into them unwilling-seeming, as if she could not help herself. Then the Madonna drew her in, cradling her against the Christ child’s cold stone head. Giulia began to purr. Then it was Lilith’s turn. So both were rewarded and consoled for being dead.

After the words of praise were sung, Leonor found Giovanna a gymnast with whom to waltz, but although she tried to dance, she was too stiff; Leonor laughed at her, saying she might as well have been a wooden skeleton made for processionals! Leonor was dancing with her mama and Arturo, giggling like a schoolgirl. Then she threw herself down by the shore of a bubbling black pool, her cat Salome lying across her lap with her white paws dangling, the claws flexing in harmony with her purrings.

Giovanna, she remarked, I feel quite sensual toward you — but you love Rossetti, so there’s good reason to keep my distance. Mama, should I teach her how women do it?

Lolo, you’re embarrassing her!

Am I? Arturo, let’s start drinking! Where’s that old man I like? You know, the one with the pet owl? Oh, and Gianluca arrives at last. How adorable he is!

Giovanna began to be homesick.

There was a certain lovely nineteenth-century Triestina in a high-collared white dress with a jungle of perfect leaves and flowers on her hat; she licked her lips at Giovanna, quite lustfully, but Giovanna was not interested. Leonor inquired reproachfully: Baby, wouldn’t you like to see femininity triumphing over a city? Play with us; don’t be a prude!

But before she could begin to bully the bronze woman, the Madonna said: Giovanna, everyone everywhere deserves happiness, even people in hell. Think of me as your mama who loves you. What would you like? Shall I ask Rossetti if he’s willing to be your husband?

I want love, mama, any kind of love! I don’t care anymore. And if he doesn’t love me…

Now Giulia came creeping toward Our Lady, craving to be petted by that loving stone woman with the bloodstained forehead, and Our Lady lifted her up, embraced her until the Christ child began to open his eyes, then gently handed her to Giovanna. The instant she began to hold the cat, Giovanna experienced a hot feeling both in her bronze heart and between her legs.

So that’s how it is, said the Madonna, smiling. Come downstairs with me. I’m going to introduce you to a lady who’s a seventh cousin of mine. Would you like to be a cat goddess?

Will you decide for me, mama?

Well, then I think it’s for the best. Leonor, darling…

But Leonor had already gone off to be pleasured by an ivory bird with a serpent’s head.

Our Lady held her hand as they began to descend the stairs, and Giovanna found herself loving the dead cats more and more, not to mention the live ones; at the first landing she felt joyful tenderness for a certain woman’s mummy which rested there upon her painted semblance within the white coffin; and the breath began to hiss within Giovanna’s bronze windpipe because she lusted to know all the Egyptian cat-women who folded their arms across their animal-painted wooden breasts; smiling, upraising her lapis-bangled arms, a snake in a headdress lifted her golden head to bless Giovanna, and Our Lady said: Do you see?

One morning Lina (who never had any more cats, because they made her bulldog jealous) said to Rossetti: Marry me or make an end of it. — So he went back to his plinth, only to discover that Giovanna had abandoned it. That was when he comprehended that she was the one he should have loved. — Lina’s heart was broken, naturally, so Our Lady wept for her; the grey-green tear-streams flowed through the gutters and temporarily quenched the flames of hell. Meanwhile Octavian had already deserted his plinth; Maria Theresa had run away with an Austrian mountaineer; Massimiliano had strayed several times to give himself to pretty Croatian tourists; even marbleskinned Winckelmann had eloped with the bellboy of the Hotel Brulefer, so that Trieste’s pantheon of park-heroes had begun evermore to resemble a fading fresco of apostles on the ceiling of a village church, the sky tarnishing toward a wintry blue-grey.

Entering the Caffè San Marco, whose twin brass coatracks might have been the skeletons of immense wine bottles, Rossetti rejoined the shadows of shutters and window-lines projected on the floor like eagles whose ribs were lyres. He wished to ascend the wide white steps of the Politeama with Giovanna at his side, although he might have wanted Giovanna solely because he did not know what else to want. At least his choices were as distinct to him as the opposing armies of spools and knobheaded cones in the ancient Egyptian senet game. Far away, across the length of the café, beneath the ceiling’s breasty light globes, stood a mirror in which he could see himself and the old waiter below the reflections of the bridal-lace curtains. Rossetti sat down in the corner, and the waiter brought him three grappas. Just then, in one of the narrow silver-frosted panes — a rectangle of real life — he saw Giovanna, or someone much like her, but taller and stiffer, promenading hand in hand with Leonor Fini.

After investigating the way that after an extra grappa the coat stands at the Caffè San Marco begin to resemble horns and trombones, Rossetti, not knowing how else to act, reestablished himself at his post. When Leonor next encountered him, he was as well turned out, careful and lost in his own downward gaze, as a violinist.

All right, she said, I’ll bring you to her, but only if you come in high heels, with a crown of feathers.

Be merciful, Leonor!

Rossetti, you’re not nearly as masculine as you think. Lick up a little degradation; you might enjoy it. And you know what? If you do, both Giovanna and I will see you with different eyes. Both of us. Is that an enticement or what?

He murmured: I’m in your hands.

That’s better, signor! Now come with me. I’m going to show you something. Maybe you’ve never been this way. Your elegant girls don’t live up on the hill, do they?

Because he was so submissive now (and quite amusing in his high heels), Leonor did not mind helping him, although he slightly disgusted her — for in truth she used to enjoy his arrogance. Oh, well; there was nothing for it but to be as kind to him as to any maimed animal. Sensing this, he began to find her nearly as lovely as a nude amber woman. But then with a sadistic smile she giggled: Poor Octavian! and he saw that she had led him to the last surviving gate of Octavian Caesar’s wall, which had long since became the Arco di Riccardo. High upon this relic, whose ankles and square toes were so deeply gnawed away that some people hesitated to walk through it, a cloaked and hooded little figure stretched out its sleeves, worn down to gruesomeness, its eyeless face like a peach pit, supporting or supported by spiral leafwork. The tracks and bubbles on the coarse whiteness were atmospheric pollution, no doubt.

Pinching his cheek, Leonor told him: Stay on your plinth long enough and you’ll look just like that. What’s the use?

Since he was now broken, she took him home to the atelier where she lived with her cats, her lover-man and her friend-man, explaining: Giovanna’s underneath the easel. — But when her mama led him there, down, down, turn again, skulls clenched their fangs at him and goggled their eyesockets up out of the dark ooze, beside a dead butterfly and a dead lizard lying belly up. Far away, a blonde Sphinx was gazing at him. The Sphinx’s breasts were so huge and round that they glued her to the mud.

Malvina Fini left him alone there. So did Leonor, because she was in love with her own breasts.

He saw a woman not unlike Giovanna, but with still longer, richer hair, ornamented with leaves clasped in place by a dog skull, who stood beside a dark-furred cat-man or cat-woman; they were both leaning over a tombstone, admiring a lovely corpse. Closing his eyes in loneliness, he saw parallelograms of red light. And still Giovanna made no appearance, so at length he thought to descend another flight of stairs, which led him down, down, to the mummy realm; down to where two mummies were playing a game of senet, the gameboard having been pleasingly inscribed in the top of the drawered box where the wooden pieces were kept.

Some people, including Our Lady, who eternally preserved a bright attitude, might have found these caverns almost festive, for their walls were sometimes decorated with red, black, ocher and green scenes of Apis, the sacred bull, who carries the mummies away; but Rossetti could not help but wonder: Why hasn’t he carried these mummies away? Or is this where he brings them? — He now encountered a male mummy whose shoulders were hunched and whose knees were drawn up; he was grinning at Rossetti as if in agony, and his toes resembled white marbles. Disgusted, the bronze individual turned away, to browse among the nestled half-bodies of anthropoid coffins. Where was Giovanna? Cat mummies bared their teeth at him, lurking among the little faience things found in tombs; and although Rossetti did not know it, his expression, by which I mean the expression of his soul, for his bronze face could scarcely grimace very well, became a younger version of his hosts’. He had seen dead bodies before; sometimes murders were committed in Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” even right before his plinth; and during the Occupation, the Fascists used to execute people there at night; unable to do anything else, Rossetti, who himself hoped never to be destroyed by the earth, had taken note of the dead faces like cruder mummy-masks of the Old Kingdom; now he remembered them, and the suicided Silvia disturbed him like some tiny vampiretta keening by his ear. Moreover, at first the floor-mosaics had been nearly as ornate as the brilliant red chestnuts upon the green algae and within the yellow light in the bottom of the pond in the Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” but the designs grew ever more sinister, even to him, and the unpleasant atmosphere was deepened by the unsmiling joy of the goddess Hathor, whose diorite statue he encountered far too often; for even now Rossetti preferred a woman’s shape like some drop of bitumen pulled upward until it draws in at the waist. Hunting for Giovanna, ever so lonely even among these lovely slender statuettes of nude wooden women with their arms at their sides, he faced another stiffnecked, grinning mummy, with its bony hands splayed out in the air over its crotch — a wonder they didn’t break at the wrists! — and sometimes they approached him in a hostile manner, not that they could exactly trifle with his substance: a single blow from his bronze hand and they went flying into shards and flakes! But whatever he did, he now found himself surveilled by the rigid brown muscles of a certain mummy’s face, whose strained white grin and outthrust jaw felt still more unwelcome than the long white bones breaking through the torn brown fingers, pretending to be fingernails. He uttered Giovanna’s name. The mummy pointed deeper into the darkness. When he went that way, Giulia and Lilith, those two dead cats grown gruesomely swollen, launched themselves at him from some high dark niche, clacking their teeth against his face until he brushed them aside, and they flew into the darkness wailing.

At last he prayed: Madonna, cara, help me, and I’ll offer a double handful of bronze coins to the Cathedral San Giusto!

Pitying him, Our Lady pointed, and a stream of light sped from where she stood holding her stone child up there by the Teatro Romano; it penetrated the ground and made a road for him between the replicated sceptered profiles on the sides of Egyptian sarcophagi; so he went that way, until he came into a blind passageway, and his soul’s gaze grew as huge and dark as the kohled eyes upon a certain noble mummy-woman’s sarcophagus; because Giovanna seemed to have grown taller and more rigid, if that were possible; and, still crowned but otherwise utterly nude, she pressed herself up tight against Our Lady’s seventh cousin, the cat-headed avenger goddess Sekhmet, whose faces may differ but who always holds her scepter straight between her legs and whose tubular braids of stone hair fall down to her breasts — yes, Sekhmet, the one with the solar disk on her head; and Giovanna’s bronze tongue was in this cat goddess’s mouth and her bronze hands were clasping the goddess’s temples so tightly, grinding her stone face against hers, that the stone had already begun to crack, but Sekhmet did not care because to her Giovanna appeared as gravely beautiful as the goddess Maat, weigher of truth. Once upon a time, Sekhmet had been betrayed by the fugitive flesh of a certain wooden lady-statuette with worm-eaten eyes. Now she would only settle for imperishable loves.

As Rossetti approached them, he perceived himself to be shrinking. It is no coincidence that Sekhmet’s knees are so high that the supplicant cannot reach them. That inhuman, ruthless, whiskered head of hers slowly pulled away from Giovanna’s mouth, and there she stood, tall, stiff, hardbreasted and lion-faced. Much more imperishable than he (for she was made of diorite), she sat down on her plinth, as if to put him in his place.

Giovanna now turned, pointing her bronze palm branch at him like a spear.

At Sekhmet’s feet lay a half-rotten wooden coffer. Giovanna pointed to it sternly. Realizing what she expected, he withdrew three bronze coins and deposited them there. While the stone goddess sat watchful, with her lion-snout shadowed, he said: Giovanna, I’ll buy you a plump canopic jar with a falcon head…

But she replied, more inflexibly than he ever could have imagined: You’re not even a dream.

Rossetti returned, of course, to his plinth, where it came to him, again too late, that had he only been grave and stone-bearded like the god Ptah, he might have kept Giovanna; but since his desire for her had never been less superficial than some anthropoid pattern gilded over the glossy black bitumen of a mummy-case, and the stone cat goddess horrified him, he presently dismissed the matter from his mind. He no longer found it wearisome to adorn his standing-throne, especially on a May evening when he could overlook the brilliant gold-orange treetops of Trieste, whose church towers went golden-pink in the turquoise sky. His affections resembled bubbles in a carafe of mineral water, which may perhaps be bluer or more silver than the liquid they hang in. The matter of who might substitute for him whenever he went night-wandering concerned him, but since so many heroic effigies had already gone missing, and he had never cared that much for his so-called public, who paid him small regard and quickly rotted in any event, he essayed to overcome his self-constraint, and indeed so well succeeded that the plinth often stood empty, without any repercussions whatsoever. Admiring himself in the foxed mirror at the Caffè Stella Polaris, he presently grew sufficiently confident to drink espresso in broad daylight at the Caffè James Joyce, where vertical strips of brass ran around the counter, the legs of women accordingly getting sliced vertically, the toes of their dark leather shoes shining like stars, the black and white tiles widening away, the chocolate voices of women all fever-warm tracks of a railroad which might have carried him to his old flame Silvia (another lady about whom he endeavored never to think), and although none of these coffeehouse women showed interest in him (indeed, they sometimes mistook him for an ornate coatrack), he liked sitting there hour after hour, paying in bronze coins, dreaming about sweet women whose bodies presented the pinks, blacks and beiges of a Tiepolo drawing, while coffee-steam condensed on his forehead and he pretended that he was sweating. In a way, he was lost, and when Our Lady of the Flowers thought about him she sometimes wept, to the benefit of souls in hell, but he was not discontented, especially when he visited Leonor Fini.

A certain Duke of hers took a liking to Rossetti’s powers of observation, which were of the category miscalled “phenomenal,” so he sometimes invited him over to inspect his art collection. Narrowing her eyes with pleasure, like a cat whose mistress is gently scratching her between the ears, Leonor said: Darling, sometimes I’m almost proud of you. The Duke says you’re the only one who’s ever understood his Serbian icons. — For a long time Rossetti pored over a certain old Italian panel of singing girl-children, whose marble was now greenish like the translucencies of frog-spawn. Better than anyone he could hear the hymns soughing from their eternally half-opened mouths. He yearned to make them aware of him. Since he could not, and for that reason among several others grew ever more unmoored, he and Leonor become friends of a sort and occasionally even lovers; he once brought her a pair of thick earrings from which strings of beads depended like fingers of a hand.

Sometimes when she was marble-nude, gazing at herself in the mirror, alone but for her cat, Leonor found herself wondering how Rossetti would look in pink panties; by then he was up for anything; what a dear man he was! And women were mostly such bitches; she barely knew whom to trust! When she discussed this matter with the Duke (Lilith plumping herself out in Leonor’s lap, blinking gently as she got stroked), he insisted that Rossetti could be counted on, after which she valued him the more. And cypresses tilted up the flagstones across the courtyard; their friends faded into bluish-grey cartes de visite, like the portrait of the late-nineteenth-century signora in the long floral gown who stood with her sleeve-hidden hands on her hips, gazing dreamily along a diagonal to the other world, her hair parted high in the fashion of the period; once upon a time she had taught Leonor a certain trick of horizontal dancing. Our Lady replenished the coins in Rossetti’s plinth, and almost every year was as still as the grey-blue sea along the Istrian coast.

Leonor fell out with her Duke, and Rossetti continued his own amours. Of course he never again descended the flight of stairs to that cold dry place to visit Giovanna, so he never learned that Sekhmet’s flesh is sometimes rough, sparkling and dull, sometimes smooth, glossy and dark; that sometimes her lion-head is narrower and more doggish than others; that her breasts rise and sink upon her chilly chest-cliff as she pleases. He never learned that Giovanna, now unalterably herself, remained so fixed, stern, unbending and upright that even Osiris came to approve of her, and for all I know they have made her a goddess by now. As it was, every time he paid a call on Leonor he met all the cats he liked; including those naked Sphinxes whose marble breasts were bigger than planetoids; while other sorts of cat-women were invariably to be found admiring themselves in mirrors. They were more his type.

For a time Leonor moved to Paris; then her mama died, along with ever so many cats; she herself got old, and several other sad things happened. As she aged, she estimated Rossetti still more highly, because although he had barely known her then, he remembered the way she used to paint in gouache on crumpled paper in her carefree days.

THE TRENCH GHOST

Of course the Trench Ghost loved to play at soldiers. On those summer evenings when the light tempted even him, with the smooth grey-green translucence of old robed and headless figures of alabaster, he sometimes rose out of the ground, but never for more than an hour or two; his favorite time, as one might expect, was night, and since he could see quite well in the dark, and, like a salamander, preferred the clamminess of dirt, the best way to meet him, had anyone ever wished to, would have been to wander through the old installations at Redipuglia, preferably hooting like an owl, or groaning a little, which would have been music to him. Deep in the dirt, as trench-diggers and even certain well-connected archaeologists knew, lay tiny votive bronze figurines with genitalia and elongated limbs. The Trench Ghost, as one might imagine, was proficient at discovering these. How it was that he could pass through earth, and even concrete, more easily, and certainly more inconspicuously, than a mortar shell, while yet being able to shuffle material things about, might require an ectoplasmic physicist to explain; I can’t, but then I also never understood why soldiers slaughter each other. For whatever reason, their blood darkened the dirt of Redipuglia, thereby bringing the Trench Ghost into being. How or what he was before the war I have not learned; nor could I tell you my own whereabouts before I was born. At first he scarcely wondered why he existed. Lacking solid dislikes or memories, he nonetheless had to be, without remedy. Prior to his ghosthood he might well never have lived, although at times he seemed to see his own form, whatever that might have been, and beside him the bare toes of a woman, and then a waving white curtain gone blue with Triestine sea-light; this recollection, if you care to call it that, was as worm-eaten as an old wooden statue of Saint Anna; and I for my part suppose him never to have been human; let’s say that he was the genius loci of Redipuglia, some “emanation” or sad freak of the mass grave beside those trenches. Couldn’t a pair of beetle-ridden relics have acted as anode and cathode in the celestial battery which powered him? As for his origins, there could hardly have been any Trench Ghost in that vicinity before Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke at Sarajevo; there weren’t even any trenches… — but no, earlier battles had most certainly soaked his earth. — Whether he was subject to diminution and eventual extinction in proportion as that buried mountain of dead human matter decayed was not for his consideration. Death meant nothing to him, being merely fundamental.

Three dozen meters beneath the deepest trench lay a Roman marble fragment depicting an almost faceless hero on his rearing horse, the enemy’s horse crouching and trampled. The Trench Ghost used to sink down to it and gloat. He knew what murder was, and wished to drink the pride which comes of killing others in public, at risk to oneself, at times when killing or perishing is exactly what one’s leaders call for. In the beginning the Trench Ghost did not wish that the hero possessed a face. Why wouldn’t his own serve? So one twilight he flitted out of the emplacements and down through the trees to the little stream, in hopes of seeing his own reflection. He could not. After that, he began to consider faces. Beneath a concrete slab laid down in 1915 and forgotten long before the end of the war there lay a certain neighbor of his, a grey skull all alone, which the Trench Ghost used to take between his hands as if it were a crystal ball, staring into its mud-choked eyes. Wondering whether his face resembled this, he scrolled his hands across his forehead and down his cheeks, but never could decide whether to let his fingers pass through himself; hence his investigations dwindled into inconsistency. He seemed to be hairy, gristly and bony, but then again, there might be nothing to him. Sometimes he envied the skull, for being neither more nor less than what it was, and often he hated it.

He decided that if he could not know what he was, he might as well become a general. Deploying other creatures for some purpose external to them seemed grand; he might even fulfill himself thus. The cool, slippery trench with its many windings and its arched ceiling like a concrete debasement of Roman ruins was world enough in which to enact the noblest dramas. Gaunt as a mummy, with his legs worn down to bones, he began arraying his soldiers against each other. What the rare living visitors (mourners, students, lovers, sensation-seekers en route to Aquileia or Cividale) recoiled from as a deep belly-crawl of arched tunnel descending beyond those few half-lit galleries in which their shoes stayed clean, the Trench Ghost slid into as easily as an otter, right up to his chest in solid dirt; that way he could lay out his toys without bending over. The foremost of his gamepieces was a Venus-crowned hairpin made of bone; she, who must have been a thousand years old, began as his lieutenant-general, inspiring the others, who dared not retreat once he had pierced her into the mud, for her slender, yellow-green form was severe, her breasts hard, her tiny face resolute no matter whether the Trench Ghost had established her straight or crookedly. Immediately subordinate in rank came those Bronze Age figurines already described; as they drifted in and out of favor, he made them right or wrong, slaves or enemies. Who ought to lead the foes was a matter which gradually improved his mind; it would have been facile enough, as indeed he had done for some decades, simply to move them about, like a miser laying down gold coins; but in time even the Trench Ghost began to wonder what war was for; hence he decided to establish beyond his mere purpose an outright cause, relating to the conquest of evil; every martial monument on the battlefield cherished that as its engraved excuse! So which of his creatures should he define as wicked, and why? He meant to defeat them over and over, forever; hence they had to be sturdy and patient, perhaps even beautiful in their way; his cause required him to hate them, but not so vehemently as to destroy them, because then what would he do with himself? — Good Trench Ghost, he was already facing down eternity! — For the first half-century or so he satisfied himself with leaving them general-less. It sufficed that he swept them down. But presently he grew as unsatisfied with such easy victories as Hitler felt after his unopposed annexation of Czechoslovakia; and that was when he discovered another of his own qualities: He could make things.

Once upon a time, when men writhed and died in the trenches of Redipuglia, there had been fine weather, at least for a Trench Ghost: a birdsong of alarm whistles melodified the forest (which of course got wrecked and flattened — the reason that the current trees had achieved no great girth as yet); and steel butterflies of shell fragments flew up to complete this delightful picture. With almost none of a vampire’s helpless obsessiveness when put to counting grains of rice until sunrise, the Trench Ghost began to gather souvenir scraps of metal. As his ambitions grew, so did his powers. He could bite a piece of copper, iron or even case-hardened steel neatly in two. He could fold down rough edges, and pinch them as smooth as piecrust-dough. By breathing on his subsections, he could adhere them to each other better than if they’d been soldered. Before long he had made himself tiny saws, files, sanders and scrapers. Whenever he had assembled another toy, he carried it into the mass grave over by the monument. This dark place, horrid to you or me, always revitalized the Trench Ghost. Furthermore, some exudation of the sad mud at its center possessed the quality of fixing any metal with a black and durable finish.

I confess the possibility that the Trench Ghost lacked any power at all over material things, in which case he was simply an insane hallucinator. But the loneliness of God makes for no story in and of itself. That is why our scribes added people to the Bible. In this story of the Trench Ghost I have likewise thought fit to let him do this or that, because otherwise the actual desperation of the eternally aware yet powerless dead might distress you who live; anyhow, I cannot prove that what he perceived himself as doing was not actually being done. So let’s agree that he made a spider-legged little iron knight, who became one of his most determined captains. For the knight’s antagonist he now constructed a puppet of flat black plates whose arm-edges were sharper than razors and whose legs were as those of a machine-gun tripod. In enemy pairs he made them, tiny metal figures whose heads were frequently ejected shells and whose hands were vises or triggers (some also had tongs for hands). Unlike the works of modern factories, his differed individually, even if their functions and destinies bore one flavor. Deep underground he brushed past a grubby feminine figure who was half emerging from her marble stele in the third century before Christ and had still gotten no farther. He did not wonder who she was, but he considered how he could use her. His intelligence failed him there, for he was merely a Trench Ghost; hence he floated away and constructed his own counterpart, the enemy general: tall and black in form, a narrow triangle of metal with many grooves and knurlings on its surface; its springloaded razor-wrists folded prayerfully in, its many-jointed legs drawn up ready to leap; on its head a black helmet, in its eyes cruel determination without understanding; its mouth a sawtoothed groove.

For years he contented himself with posing his toy soldiers as would a child, lining them up; they were stiff, still and ready, and came to appear quite smart together; even those new black steel troopers had begun to go green-verdigrised, following after their elder brothers and sisters, the bronze figurines. Sometimes he employed the ammunition-holes in the wall to sort them in; as the two armies grew, he began to classify the pieces more whimsically; one night it might be all bronze figurines on one side and steel ones on the other; or perhaps the bronze entities called out to be officers on both sides, after which he was sure to humiliate them by putting the steel creatures in charge for the next round. And as he played these sad games, he imagined that the trenches around him were his home. He thought: All here is mine. He decided: No general is greater than I.

Before the youngest oaks had thickened, he discovered that if he held each toy soldier to his heart, it would come to life, or at least enter a state which appeared alive to its maker. I wish you could have seen those black many-legged things fighting, falling back before this or that steel officer as if some horseheaded demon were sweeping them away! To the Trench Ghost it was a particular treat to watch that enemy general, the puppet of flat black plates, swinging up its jointed, sharp-edged iron arm, like the legs of a machine-gun tripod. To oppose that entity and assist the cause of good, he now constructed another grinning verdigrised monster with splayed frog-legs; it could leap and bite most desperately, and its cheeks were sharper than scalpels. For an expression the Trench Ghost awarded it whatever he had seen in the eyes of that grey skull beneath the slab from 1915. After that he fashioned springtailed dragon soldiers, gendarmes whose helmets he roweled like cowboy spurs, beetle-browed metal infantry, shock troops who could roll forward on wheeled leaden plinths, brass corporals whose jaws happened to dwell in their chests, tapering-headed sappers no wider than Maxim cartridges, executioner queens whose skirts rushed open like skeletal umbrellas just before they worried enemies in half with their sawtoothed thighs, caterpillar-legged Alpine troops. The enemy general, of course, was the most impressively malevolent of all these toys. With each match he became more ferocious, and in this the other soldiers followed him. At first they used to knock each other down with clattering little scissors-kicks, or hurl each other waist-high against the concrete walls; by and by they learned the arts of charging, smashing and dismembering. Whenever a battle was concluded, there rose up in that dark and mucky tunnel a faint hissing or whistling or crackling. The victorious troops were cheering! Then, when the Trench Ghost flew over his miniature battlefield, breathing gusts of fog down upon their broken parts, they clanged back together again, ready for the next war.

Only the Venus-crowned hairpin refused to live. He attempted different exhalations and even foggy whispers, but could not reach her. Hence he fashioned a new steel lieutenant-general in her place. Not knowing why he did so, he pierced the Venus deep inside himself, until her face barely protruded from between his ribs. He swiveled her around in his heart so that she was always looking up at him. After that he felt a sensation of tenderness, as if he were a mother suckling her baby.

By now he felt, as most of us do, that he ruled his own doom; hence the future would be ever grander. And in this optimistic spirit the Trench Ghost taught the enemy general the art of the phalanx. All the troops already knew trench warfare. And they dug in, scrabbling grooves into the concrete with their bladed hands. Soon they began to make their own weapons.

Carrying the enemy general down under the concrete, the Trench Ghost showed him an unexploded cylinder of mustard gas. The little creature understood, and grinned with all his teeth.

His troops could not yet travel to mine their raw materials, so he brought them whatever they wished; in Redipuglia there is plenty of everything. He was beneficent; he built them a tiny smelter and a machine shop the size of a cigarette carton; they played fairly, and took turns, while the Trench Ghost reinspected that old memory he had of almost seeing a waving white curtain going blue in late summer Adriatic light. This picture did not lead to anything. By now the two lines were launching tiny projectiles at each other. Their bombs were no larger than matchheads, but that sufficed to blow up those brave little fellows. They screamed or buzzed when they were struck, and cheered when they did the striking. Their machine guns stridulated as sweetly as crickets; and when they rushed out of their hand-grooved trenchlets in hopes of seizing each other’s positions, their fierce-shining gazes were as pleasant to the Trench Ghost as I myself find the yellow-pupilled compound eyes of the pink hydrangeas in Trieste.

Now it began to happen that the enemy general would conquer the Trench Ghost’s troops, and pose upon that mound of dead metal skulls, with the splayed legs and upraised arms of a gladiator triumphing over his victim. Whenever the Trench Ghost won, he allowed his new lieutenant-general to take the credit, and then that metallic personage would preen himself like a flame-winged red-ocher demon painted on plaster. He too got stronger and crueler. By the time the oak trees got taller, the armies fought finely without any guidance from their maker. They still needed him to breathe them back into coherence after they were broken.

Another dawn whose cloud-grey was bluer than the machine guns had ever been, even when they were new, surprised the Trench Ghost into a sort of flush, as if he had been caught at something, or, far less likely, as if some spirit-fever had caressed the back of his neck; and once yellow lagoons of light began to afflict him from between those clouds, he felt still warmer, and sank down into the black mud below the concrete, where not even winter frogs could go. There he lay like a small child pretending to be asleep. Successive moments suffused and departed him no more quickly than they would have for you and me. Therefore, on account of his immortal consciousness, they tortured him. But he had long since learned how to be mad. All day, and each day, he suffered without understanding, which was how he endured it. At night, fancying himself refreshed, he rose up into his own sort of church where high barrels of thought once aimed outward, greyly shining.

The Trench Ghost’s victories brought him no increase in the introspective joys he already experienced (drifting above his battles, he wore the dreamy smile of a Nereid in the arms of a feminine deity). As for his defeats, they neither soured him against the enemy general, whom he never thought to name, nor did they give him any pride in the intelligence of his creation. Perhaps it would be best to say that they made him wonder what else he might do. There were evenings when his two armies ranked upon their separate window-ledges awaited his pleasure, while he existed elsewhere, experiencing that cool dank dampness deep within the hollow of his heart. Lolling in his high window seat, looking through the white-arched embrasures into the sunny forest, he learned, then forgot, how twig-shadows twitched upon the pale tan earth at breast height. It was mid-morning, the rectangular window now sighting on gravel, grass and leaves. He seemed to remember the cool moldy smell of a certain old church whose Madonna elongated herself into near-phantasmic proportions. He was gazing up above the altar’s fresh flowers to the Crucified One eternally perishing; and behind Him the daylight, white as linen, glowed through the three tall slit-windows. The Trench Ghost experienced something more refined than pleasure. He nearly flitted into the forest. He felt an impulse to pick flowers and lay them here.

Wandering this way and that through his round-ceilinged trenches set deep into the grass, he played at soldiers, one of the new-made recruits now slumping forward while standing with his hands over his steel belly, bowing grimly forward, his snout dripping sand-grains like tears; beside him, a soldier whose hands were visegrips stared at his god with a doglike look, as if he could possibly hope for something. But the Trench Ghost barely paid attention, because the sunset clouds now put him in mind of the way that some bronze helmets express verdigris in beautiful patches of turquoise and white, still leaving the bronze color here and there. Emerging from an embrasure, he hovered over his trenches’ round spines. There was lichen on them, and moss. Ivy climbed the lovely trees below them. He wandered down there in order to look back up at the skyline where his trenches lay invisibly. He listened to a blackbird. He was alone in the young forest. He liked to look up and count leaf-shadows. Soon he had gone all the way to the boundary, which was a certain helmet-topped grave.

He declined to believe that this was all there could be. Another slow-growing oak spread its arms above and away from the trench.

The smell of wild thyme, the ugly rounded galleries black-lichened and crackling, the pools of rainwater rapidly sinking into the karst meadow, these entered his essence, and so he carried the enemy general and his own lieutenant-general out into the sunlight, to warm them and see how they were affected, but they never did anything. He exhaled upon them very slowly. They faced off, and began to fight to the death, while he floated into the new forest, just above the railroad tracks, keeping exactly between the two tracks in the deep rock-groove there at Redipuglia. He picked a leaf and watched it fall. He stared into the sun. Looking about him, he decided: I am not this.

The Venus-crowned hairpin grew warm. Presently she tumbled out of his heart. Leaving her in the grass, he said to himself: She does not pertain to me.

Returning to his toy combatants, he found the enemy general standing atop the lieutenant-general’s decapitated remains. Although the latter continued to struggle, as insects often will even after central ganglia have been removed, its motions were to little purpose. The Trench Ghost lifted the enemy general away. Angrily, it stabbed him in the leg. The Trench Ghost felt vaguely proud. Surely whatever he was had to do with this place in which he had found himself and these things he had made.

Since he could see through dirt and rock, he found a round-cheeked child’s head made of marble — her nose broken off, her cheeks pitted — and a one-armed naked marble soldier who held his chin high. He left them underground, reasoning: They too have nothing to do with me.

Wandering through the reinforced connecting tunnels, he gazed up past the concrete and counted the roots of the young oaks and wild thyme bushes. From his visits to the mass grave he remembered brass epaulettes with gilded tentacles, a corroded canteen in a woven sack whose fibers now were atoms, a scrap of ribcage, a cross attached to a ribbon of gelato-colored stripes, and a blue case of visiting cards which to anyone else would have looked like mud. More roots groped deep through all that. He posited that things which grow downward might somehow relate to him.

Looking up between the inclined rusty rails of an artillery carriage (cannone da 149G, projectile weight thirty-five kilograms, maximum distance nine point three kilometers), he seemed to remember a sergeant inserting a child’s head into the barrel’s loading-hole, or perhaps only a loaded shell had gone in; and then two soldiers had manipulated the great wheel against the recoil-springs, in the name of great Madre Italia. Another memory appeared to be wedged behind the angled slabs of metal. In Trieste a woman was rising away from him, lifting her lips from the earth. Perhaps she was the one who had once lain beside him under the blue curtain. Then an Austrian shell was caressing a church whose wall-shards danced marble-white and bare-breasted like Nereids. He knew how the great barrel moved in its track; he had seen its birth from a vertical ovoid slit, and when the gun began to fire, destroying over months the pines that the Austrians had planted in better days, he had been there, too, all over the strategic zone demarcated by Peteans, Isonzo and Sdraussina.

He could not realize anything beyond all that, until one night when he was playing at soldiers, all the gamepieces on both sides attacked him. Smiling, still supposing that he was proud of them, he swiggled himself down, and permitted them to stab, cut and shoot his flesh, until he sent them to sleep with a long puff of breath. Then he said to himself: That they who come from me did this to me implies something about me. Yes, I’m sure that’s so.

Then he removed himself, standing alone like a machine gun lost in the grass.

People who think they know about ghosts often suppose that a ghost is tied to its place of death, burial or unwholesome love attachment; and while this may well be the rule, as evidenced by the famous Moaning Lady whom I hear in the next room whenever I visit my favorite whorehouse, the Trench Ghost remained as free, in his own estimation, as you or I; so presently, in the interests of discovering who else he might be, he flew north, where the blue-grey sea showed itself through the slit windows in the concrete pillboxes at Tungesnes, which naturally means Tongue Ness; and here the rounded blackened foredomes of old Nazi bunkers awaited the Allies who had tricked them by landing at Normandie instead. The rusty iron rebar pleased the Trench Ghost; it resembled sunset at Redipuglia. Belowground the ceilings were sometimes brilliantly corroded ribbons of steel, sometimes simply concrete, which stank far worse than his trenches; certainly all these chambers were fouler than the nearby Viking graves. Of course not every corpse had been disinterred, much less every beetle-ridden scrap of yellow-grey bone. But that wasn’t the reason it stank.

One autumn my friend Arild took me here, so that I could write this for you; thus I seem to see our Trench Ghost settling in the planked underchamber on whose ceiling huge brown spiders, slumbering, were awakened by Arild’s flashlight, and writhed furiously, as if about to plop down on our heads. We found cylinders of what might have been poison gas; and if that is what it was, the Trench Ghost must have been happy, because Germans were even better at the manufacture of that than Italians.

A guru once advised me: Find what is it that never sleeps and never wakes, and whose pale reflection is our sense of “I.” So I looked and looked; I hoped to discover the Trench Ghost, or at least to learn what his name might be — for it has always struck me that one defines oneself in part by naming others. What did he call himself, or what should I call him? — Arild said: From what I’ve read, ghosts cannot name anything. That’s one of the things that keep them dead.

In the rubber waders that my friend provided, following his flashlight, slopping in stinking mud or clambering over some farmer’s rotting pallets, I descended various flights of concrete stairs to where the grasses and flowers ended, then came into the entrance tunnel which soon angled sharply right, then straight, then left, then straight again, to make it easier for the defenders to knock an intruder on the head. I groaned, then hooted like an owl; but the Trench Ghost did not reply. Each bunker was different, probably so that intruders could make no plan. And in each bunker, my painful feeling worsened. It was a nastiness in the chest, foul and cold, wet and evil; I could not get enough air. Failing to find the Trench Ghost (although Arild promised that he had seen him), I returned out into the sweet smell of manure and moss.

In the evenings he pretended to wet his feet in the oily puddle within the square parapet of the command bunker’s viewing-tower. Of course he had found the pit for the murdered slave laborers; sometimes he sank down there, “to get ideas” as he put it. He wondered whether any of his toy soldiers at Redipuglia had outfought the others, in which case the form or attitude of that survivor might teach him something about himself. He considered waging wars of one against many, and many against one, of riot, confusion and slaughter, because, as the ancients have said, the pinnacle of military deployment approaches the formless. He hoped for a perfect realization as sharp as the knife-ridge along the top of an old helmet, or, failing that, for the expansion of his understanding, like ivy growing up between the snake-toes of a great fig which is busily cracking a Triestine courtyard’s flagstones. That three-angled slit of meadow and sea, sunk in the grass, seemed like a place to sink or even dig in, but no matter how deep he descended, he never found anything but dirt and stone. Concentric ring-tracks of concrete around the base of the vanished cannon led him to himself. Under a hill, a certain square concrete tunnel, closed up with stones by a farmer, tempted him to play at soldiers. Instead, he rose up under the grey sky, imitating a blackened pillbox. He asked himself: Am I this?

Floating down the wet, rock-heaped steps into mud and rubbish, he said to himself: Where the grass, moss and dandelions stop, the darkness begins.

He asked: Am I that?

In an old map room from which the benches had not yet rotted, he read the German instructions and warnings painted on the walls. He tried to take them to heart.

Sometimes he felt almost homesick for Redipuglia’s masonry of tiny karstic stones rather than these German slabs, but he told himself: I am not that place, at least not anymore.

One foggy night as he hovered over the sea he wondered how it would be to return to Redipuglia and bury the enemy general deep beneath a concrete slab. By then he had read a waterlogged German field manual, so he comprehended that by some standards that action would render him as wicked as the father who buries his son alive. He had tried to be good, without certain result; so maybe he should be wicked. In the end he stayed at Tungesnes half a hundred years, building ever larger gamepieces whose faces he pretended were his.

Since the Second American Civil War is one of my favorite periods, I am happy to end this story then. The victory of the Afro-Creole Matriarchy, which resulted in the castration of all white American males below the age of twelve, and the liquidation of the rest, was cruel enough, no doubt, but my interest is limited to historical regalia, and you must admit that the ankh-medallions and bright pink uniforms of the Matriarchs, not to mention their sky-blue marching-banners of rampant Erzulie, deserve to be collected. At any rate, by the time the Second American Civil War began, the Trench Ghost had taught himself how to make giant steel soldiers which filled whoever commanded them with dreams of victory. Of course he helped both sides, and got rewarded as he deserved. The last I heard, he was overhovering a munitions factory in China. But since eternal stories do have a way of becoming tedious, it seems best to fire up some final episode which pretends to define the Trench Ghost in his “soul,” for his existence, like yours or mine, assumes a sort of self-discovery.

During the Siege of Pocatello, which had now become a redoubt of white male power, the Trench Ghost was floating in the darkness, laughing, weeping and rubbing his hands. The chaplain, one-armed and marble-white, raised his bleeding head, staring out across the electrified wire, and the Trench Ghost imagined that he had seen him before. Indeed, perhaps he had, for, if people only knew, there are ghosts everywhere. A shell came screeching into the field hospital, while on all sides the Matriarchs chanted: Erzulie, Erzulie! — Another shell now killed the general. The chaplain lifted the microphone and shouted to the survivors: It is the body that is in danger, not you.

Astonished, the Trench Ghost asked himself whether that could be true. He decided that it was. — In that case, he decided, I’ll never be in danger. I have no body.

The next shell atomized the chaplain. The Trench Ghost said to himself: That man was in danger. Something happened to him. But nothing will ever happen to me.

Then he asked himself: If that man was more than a body, then where is he? Why can’t I see him? Can he see me? Is he where I am now?

And he began to search for the chaplain, as if he could hope for something. That was what led him all the way to China. How much more blood has darkened that dirt? In another century or two he might return to the Canal Grande in Trieste, because they say that every dead thing ends up in there…