The manservant in brilliant scarlet livery who opened the door failed at first to recognize my name. My uncle exchanged a glance with me. Even masked, that glance urged long suffering. I silently swore, as I had done so many times, that someday with heaven’s help I would put the Foscari in their place and make them recognize me.
“No wonder Venice is so full of public demands of heaven, lining their alleys with votives.” This murmur into my uncle’s ear was as close as I could come to long suffering when at last the door closed at our backs and we were relieved of our wet wraps. “Perhaps I should buy a candle and make such a compact with heaven tomorrow. Do you think that would help them remember my name?”
Uncle Jacopo smiled and gestured for restraint as we entered the Foscari lobby, rich with paintings by Bellini and Titian at which it would not be good manners to gawk as closely as I wanted to. I did fully intend to make such a vow. But that is one more youthful resolution I never got around to doing.
My Foscari uncles had footed a play in their own private theater that night, something to give Carnival a shove off its moorings of Christmas and Epiphany. The prologue had already begun as Uncle Jacopo and I slipped into our seats on the left-hand side of a tiered arrangement that bracketed the stage on three sides. We might have received scowls for our tardiness, except for the fact that this was Venice and many others were even later. In our masks, we might have been the Doge and his nephew for all the others knew.
And this thought set my mind stirring in its old direction again. “Do you think, Uncle—?” I sued into his ear. “Do you think there’s a chance Baffo’s daughter might—?”
“We must think of her as any other package of goods we are hired to carry,” he replied firmly.
No one scowled at our talk, for no one in the audience kept quiet if it didn’t suit them. In general, they carried on a lively chatter among themselves, slapped down tin playing cards, ventured at dice, and even brawled. And scarlet-liveried servants mingled, offering drinks, antipasti, and tasseled cushions to keep the feet off the cold marble floor. The production on stage was, in fact, hardly more than the background, like a group of instrumentalists set up on a balcony over the conviviality in a sitting room.
It was a new play. I’ve forgotten the author if, indeed, it had one and was not a joint effort of the cast. I didn’t take long to get the gist of the plot. The characters were those familiar to us from commedia dell’arte. Their relationships were the same, as it must be with any set of caricatures. Only their surroundings were novel, and the smell of fresh scenery paint made me worry for the actor’s costumes any time they passed too close to the rear flats.
My uncle read my thoughts through the mask at the first entrance of our young female lead, Columbine. “We must give our cargo the care of uncut jewels,” he counseled, “but ignore her like salted fish.”
Our sweet maid Columbine did not undergo her perils in Italy as usual. She had been kidnapped from the bosom of her
family and spirited away to the harem of the Turkish Sultan, a part Pantalone took on himself in a leering mask, familiar for all its darkness and token turban. And of course it was up to Harlequin, the blustering Captain, and their friends to save her with lots of slapstick, pies in the face, and tying the Pantalone-Sultan up in his own turban “for Saint Mark and for Venice!” No matter how distracted the audience was with themselves, the expression of these sentiments never failed to elicit applause and a cheer, so it was repeated, frequently and loudly from the stage.
“I am glad Husayn stayed home,” I told Uncle Jacopo.
I was struck at once by the strange fascination the transport of familiar characters to this exotic setting had on my fellow countrymen. The Sultan was an adversary at whose discomfort any Venetian could cheer. But the spectacle of scores of beautiful, nubile, totally dependent, submissive young women bored to voraciousness answered some deeper fantasy. This says more about what we wish for out womenfolk, I thought, than about the barbarousness of our enemy.
And presented by the illusion of harem walls on stage, the afternoon’s scene in the convent garden wouldn’t leave me.
“Corfu is not such a long journey,” Uncle Jacopo said in sympathy.
Having established the plot so it no longer required my undivided attention, I remarked how odd it was that actors in masks should be playing for an audience equally, if not more heavily, masked. Who had the greater persona to create? The most to hide? I remembered the surge of power I’d felt when I’d first let the mask obliterate my features. The power an actor has to commit gross fooleries on stage and yet risk no censure when he returns to normal life.
Even more than the actors’ power, however, was the power to see without being seen, the power of an omniscient audience who knew that Harlequin was concealed behind that screen, when the Sultan did not.
The fact that our familiar Columbine added to her lacy pink mask the effigy of a Turkish lady’s veils made me take one more leap of association. What if the harem was not at all how we wished it could be for our lecherous old Pantalones?
“What do Turkish women feel when they drape their faces beyond the profane gaze and escaped the trap of individuality?” I asked.
My uncle laughed out loud, but only shrugged. “Your afternoon has turned your head. You can never know what any woman is thinking. Turkish women might not exist for all we
