In this room, Husayn had his slave plaster him with a caustic, whitish putty concocted of lime and water with a touch of arsenic. I did not need the warning to be careful how I touched it to my lips or my eyes. No amount of coaxing could get me to undergo the treatment which, after about a quarter of an hour, the slave skillfully scraped off with a mussel shell. This was how Husayn maintained his unnatural hairlessness, which fashion he was obliged to rescind every time business brought him to the west.
“You know, Suleiman the Lawgiver—our present ruler, may Allah find favor with him—he is a very strange case for a sultan. He married the mother of his sons. Usually the women of a sultan’s harem are purchased—every one of them—and what an advancement for a girl! To rise from poverty so desperate that she must run barefoot through deep snow, to become Valide Sultan—the highest post any woman can reach in our empire—a post only slightly less powerful than that held by the Sultan himself. What is to be pitied there? All our sultans, you see, are the products of slave women.”
Husayn recited this while he deftly shifted his red-and-white toweling this way and that so the slave could eyen attack his genitals. I certainly would never allow that, no matter how much time I was forced to spend among the Turks. Perhaps it was an accident with just such a purple mussel shell that had first set the absurd fashion of circumcision into play.
I did allow myself to be scrubbed by a bathhouse slave. After slathering me with suds from a bowl filled to the brim with musk-scented soap, he encased his hand in a sleeve of nubby toweling. This he adroitly alternated with horsehair cloth and the dried skeleton of a gourd named from the Arabic luffa. The only thing he didn’t use on me was wire gauze, but all of his implements felt like it, abrading and tingling the flesh. I had been afraid to loose more vital parts to a mussel shell. This treatment cost me a good deal of skin. I think, in fact, that my attendant commented with a gap-toothed grin something to the effect that he had never found so much filth to flay on a client.
It was quite touching to watch, at another basin, a young man about my age giving the same treatment to his enfeebled grandfather. Altogether, soap and skin was flushed from us down the marble channels with bowls full of tap water.
“Slavery is not so hopeless nor as powerless as you imagine,’ Husayn gurgled between dousings. “Especially not for a young woman with the looks and talents of your signorina.
“And you must admit she was quite content when we left her.” he reiterated. “Do you think, my friend, that, having tasted those dainties she breakfasted on today, she could ever be satisfied with what you could provide her? Forgive me, my friend, but she is a vain and frivolous young woman. She has expensive tastes and I despair for you if you should try and meet them, an orphan as you are now and a sailor.
“Come, come, be merry. Let me send the little black girl to you again tonight and this time do not shove her away. Enjoy her. Her life will be improved if you do. And so, Allah willing, will be yours. Lose yourself in her and see if the memory of Sofia Baffo is not gently coaxed away. Madonna Baffo is content with the fate Allah has willed for her. My friend, be you content as well.”
With a violent hand to my head, I signaled I could never be content as we went on to the bath’s third room.
XX
The ceiling of this third room was held up over its central pool by four columns whose elaborately foliate capitals were of obvious Byzantine provenance as well. More architectural details, however, escaped me as the room’s main feature—its heat—grabbed me by the throat.
Heat rose up off the pool’s surface as from a pot shortly before the cook tosses in the pasta. Heat throbbed up from the floor. Heat shot out in sulfuric jets within alcoves spaced around the perimeter of the pool. Heat glowed from the skins of two score Turks lounging about in attitudes of the most grotesque indolence. Shapes floated toward me through mists of steam. In slow motion, they revolved and vanished like wraiths. Form blurred at the pressure of heat in the corners of my eyes.
In short, nothing on earth has ever so closely re-created one of the lower cauldrons of Dante’s Inferno as a Turkish bath. The self-indulgent denizens of Sybaris and the cardinally slothful are condemned to a fantastic parody of their sins. The Foscari stage came nowhere near this apparition of strigils and luffas as whips and scourges, the masseurs as torturing demons.
“Take me out of here!” I begged of Husayn, struggling for breath in the dense atmosphere.
But all comprehension of Venetian had steamed out of Husayn’s mind. My words were lost in the murmuring undercurrent of sound made by subdued laughter and whispered conversations—or the awe we all felt to find ourselves the objects of eternal damnation.
I had no choice but to follow my host down two steps into the cloudy, neck-high depths of the pool. We kept our red-and-white knee-length skirts about us as we did so and the cloth floated up to the surface about our waists until the water saturated it.
This pool is hot enough to boil an egg, I thought, but couldn’t say it aloud. My voice box seemed hardened already beyond any vibration. The heat cut the tendons in my joints and flattened me, like the water itself, against the marble
