I had been with my uncle to the lands of the infidel. I liked our friend Husayn, knew him to be no barbarian. But it occurred to me that my mind brought nothing—nothing at all beyond these same lecherous imaginings that were the product of my culture, not theirs—when I tried to conjure with the words “women of the Ottomans.” The women I knew in Constantinople were all Europeans—wives of colleagues. And the whores my uncle frequented, who gave him his disease. Women who’d found their profession too congested here and sought advancement on foreign shores.
They were never spoken of, Turkish women, certainly not paraded on stage like this. I’d never seen a Turkish woman that I could recall. Perhaps they all had two heads and that monstrosity was what the flitting grilles and passing sedans camouflaged. Perhaps it was some other secret. Great, unearthly beauty my countrymen liked to believe. What about influence? Power?
The Turks did have shadow puppets. I remembered seeing a shadow play in a public square in Constantinople once. The characters seemed to be the same stock figures we knew in Venice. There had been women—shrewish old ones; fair, sweet young ones. That was all they were—figures in a shadow play. But suppose that is what I was to them? All men were to them, seen through their screens? And who was pulling the strings?
The rows of candlelight in Venice’s alleys told me that— for all their bruit, their annual presumption to take the Adriatic as a bride, their masks and lavish spectacles—even the Foscari, the greatest of my countrymen, were never fully confident they ruled the world.
I remembered the feeling of power hiding my face had given me—continued to give me as I looked brazenly about that evening’s assembly. I let my eyes rove where they would, on bosom or codpiece, on pompous righteousness or untrammeled debauchery, never bothering to censor my thoughts lest they register in my face. Suppose Turkish women had that same freedom not just on Carnival nights but all day, every day, from birth—
God above! What was I thinking? The last thing on earth I wanted to be was a woman!
“Still to understand them—” I tried to tempt my uncle.
Action on the stage distracted my musings at this point. No piece of brilliantly rehearsed staging, but an unforeseen blunder produced the sudden general guffaw. It caught everyone off guard and prohibited further advancement of the plot while even the actors struggled with tears of mirth under their visors.
Our Columbine was guarded by a great buffoon of a eunuch. I knew the man playing the part. No amount of makeup or yards of silk costuming could hide his bulk. He was my maternal uncles’ gondolier, called in to play this bit part for which physique and a gregarious personality if not his booming bass recommended him. Had I come upon him out of context, I might not have recognized the face, but the gondolier’s girdle of muscle added to the girth around his hips would have betrayed his occupation anywhere. And I had seen him often enough bellowing out his soulful lyrics as he poled the gold-trimmed launch with the Foscari crest about the Serene City. The Council had spent a lot of time ruing the extravagance of our nobility’s gondolas, but at this date they had not yet brought themselves to condemn us all by edict to a uniform and somber black.
I knew the poleman easily now as he took the brunt of a tightly rehearsed dialogue focusing on the words “capon” and “pruned” and “gelded,” as all the while he lamented his state in the face of our beauteous Columbine. I squirmed in my seat at the very thought of such a handicap.
I was not the only one who recognized the gondolier-eunuch. A two-year-old hovering beyond the lamp glow did as well, escaped his keepers and toddled up onto stage, chirping “Papa! Papa!” as tickled as could be.
Once the illusion was broken this far, everyone suddenly remembered that this man was the father not only of a two-year-old, but often others.
“His wife,” I overheard from neighbors, “prays daily for Santa Monica to spare her that gondolier’s virile embrace.”
When he could no longer ignore the tugging on his robe, the great man bent down and acknowledged his offspring, swept him up into his arms and accepted the “Papa!” adulation until the child’s mother, visibly expectant yet once again, struggled up to reclaim her child, a peck on the cheek from her husband and the bawdy cheers of the audience.
Eventually, the scene crumbled to a conclusion. So enthralling had the whole comedy been for some minutes that it took me quite by surprise to return to myself and discover a hand on my knee. It was slowly working its way higher.
III
Flesh showed above the black of my uncle’s mask as he raised his brows in a quizzical expression. He, too, was conscious of the liberties being taken upon my person by the unknown masked figure that had appeared suddenly in the seat on my other side. If my uncle did not complain, how could I?
She was a tall, slender vision in burgundy velvet with quantities of jewels, beyond price but unmatched, on her hands, neck, and waist. Her wide square decollete was filled with the finest lace worked in gold thread, her black hair draped in cutwork, but her face was a mystery, hidden behind a moiré burgundy mask trimmed in the same gold lace. In this she was perfectly Venetian: the laws of our city forbid any noblewoman to appear in more than one color, exempting gold or silver used as trim. To my mind, this law enforced good taste, which might otherwise have descended to a Harlequin patchwork of gaud.
Her first words to me were, “I’ll wager you wouldn’t have the difficulty of that poor cropped Turk. I’ll wager you could give a lady the pleasures of
