The Journeyer

“Be glad, Genovese, you are not on duty in India. When the servants brought me dinner there, they had to enter the dining room crawling on their bellies and pushing the trays of food before them.”

At first, my unsolicited contributions to the barrack conversations were sometimes received with strange and wondering looks, as when, for instance, two foppish gentlemen might be discussing, in high-flown language, the comparative virtues and charms of their lady loves back home, and I might venture:

“Have you yet determined, Messeri, whether your maidens are winter or summer women?” I would be regarded blankly, so I would explain: “The men of the Han say that a woman whose intimate aperture is situated unusually near the front of her artichoke is most suitable for cold winter nights, because you and she must closely intertwine to effect penetration. But a woman whose orifice is situated farther back between her legs is better for summertime. She can sit on your lap in a cool and breezy outdoor pavilion, while you enter her from the rear.”

The two elegant gentlemen might then reel away in horror, but less dandified sorts would come congregating to hear more such revelations. And it was not long before, every time I opened my mouth, I would have more listeners than any expounder of ballroom manners or sea-war logistics, and they would listen raptly. Not only did my fellow Venetians cluster about me when I spun my tales, but also the Genoan warders and guards, and the visiting Brothers of Justice, and also Pisan and Corsican and Paduan prisoners taken by the Genoans in other wars and battles. And one day I was approached by one who said:

“Messer Marco, I am Luigi Rustichello, late of Pisa …”

And you introduced yourself as a scrivener, a fableor, a romancier, and you asked my permission to write down my stories in a book. So we sat down together and I told my tales to you, and, through the agency of the Brotherhood of Justice, I was enabled to send a request to Venice, and my father dispatched to Genoa my collection of notes and scraps and journals, which added to my recollection many things that I myself had forgotten. Thus our year of confinement passed not wearisomely but busily and productively. And when the war was finally over, and a new peace signed between Venice and Genoa, and we prisoners were released to go home, I could say that the year had not been a wasted time, as I had feared. Indeed, it may have been the most fruitful year of my entire life, in that I accomplished one thing that has lasted, and gives promise of lasting longer than I shall. I mean our book, Luigi, the Description of the World. Certainly, in the score or so of years that now have passed since we said goodbye outside that Genoa palazzo, I have accomplished nothing that gave me comparable satisfaction.

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

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

6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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