I had gone so far as to admit aloud, “I shall never lose the taste for talk of her.”
At this my uncle had laughed and joked about my “growing lad’s appetite.” Then he’d gone on to say, “I wonder about Governor Baffo’s willingness to entrust his daughter to the year’s first sail. What is she, that the marrying of her cannot wait for more settled weather?”
“The governor must be acquainted with your skills, Uncle. He trusts you to find the harbors in the worst storm and bring her safe if any can.”
“Let us pray to Saint Elmo it may be so.” My uncle let me know by his tone that my sense of immortality was a youthful rashness. With a sigh, he’d gone on, “I, for one, am ready to be off. Enough of this anchored life, this tedium! This constant sense our land-locked cousins give me that I cannot swim in this little drop of theirs. Pray, Giorgio, for good weather on the twentieth, lest the Council rescind its leniency, fear more losses of the Republic’s profits, and shove the day of first sail on into Lent once more.”
To distract myself as much as anything, I fit the mask on my head and over my face. I breathed the sour, slightly salty smell of my uncle as if the black leather over my nose were his own flayed skin. But what a transformation I discovered in the mirror Uncle Jacopo had propped up in the niche along with the guardian statue of the Virgin!
The anxious hunger for more about Sofia Baffo that twitched my cheeks was wiped clean like a slate of chalk marks. Such cleansing power is in the mystery of the mask, the total evaporation right before the eyes of all individuality, of joy and sorrow, of good and evil, of youth and old age. Even male and female, the very first attribute with which a midwife burdens a babe, even that could vanish behind a mask and one could be at once unborn, as yet only hoped for. I had heard stories of it happening.
When the world sees us as individuals, it robs us. “So much may you do,” it says, “but no more. No more as an untried youth, the lesser son of a lesser son. Or as a woman.” But take all of that from a man’s face—what freedom is there! And power.
I felt a thrill and turned to my uncle for his approval, the first time since I’d climbed the plane tree that other things besides “Saint Sebastian’s Day” set my heart to skipping.
Even as he frowned the lips below his simple black band in a thoughtful nod at my sudden erasure, the bells of Venice began to ring all about us. The bird flight across the clear glass panes darted faster now, as if the gulls and pigeons were evensong made corporeal.
“There. It is time we were going,” my uncle said. He took our two evening capes up off the bed and tossed me mine.
We stopped by briefly to beg, unsuccessfully, that Husayn in the next room should join us. He was such a good old friend of the family that we could never see him put up with the rest of his kind under the watchful eye of Messer Marc Antonio Barbaro. But it was wiser for us to ignore a Carnival recklessness, as Husayn always managed to do, and to remember that he was a Muslim passing as a Christian. He was good at his cover, but every time church bells rang, you could see he was hearing the muezzin’s call. His face betraved a certain longing that might be called homesickness, or merely an ache in the knee joints to sink onto a carpet facing Mecca once more. The less Venice saw of that, the more serene the Republic could remain.
So we left Husayn with his ledgers and went on our way, stopping only once more to pick up our black Piero from the servants’ quarters. We would need him to bear the torch on our return.
We began to wish Piero had taken a torch from the bracket at home. Dark came early these winter evenings. A storm was blowing in off the lagoon and it began to drizzle, extinguishing all but the most stalwart of the shrine votives. Venice’s alleyways were usually quite well illuminated by these public displavs of piety. Now we passed only a few ghostly Madonnas, shivering before the blast.
The very stones of Venice seemed to be weeping, the wood loosed the smell of damp rot. The canals pockmarked in the twilight, the stairs on the bridges over them grew slick. The low arches we passed under were some cover, but ghostly light thrown up from the water danced on the corbels of their roofs. It was a night for the closed cab of a gondola, but as a mariner, my uncle took hard ground when he could get it, even when it meant, as it did that night, going the long way round.
“Though I am hard pressed to call Venice terra firma under any circumstances,” he quipped. In several places, the dark water had begun to lap its way up into flagstone yards and piazzas.
We came at last to the palace of my dead mother’s kin, the Foscari. I did not know this center of wealth and power well, these four stories of imposing red brick. The Foscari lords hoped that an occasional invitation to such events would be enough to discharge their familial obligations to us.
