The whitewash on the walls behind Ghazanfer was in need of reap-plication. His eyes, however, were all too familiar with the space and allowed him to ignore the fact. His bulk filled the narrow room, furnished though it was with no more than the chair he occupied, his narghile, and a narrow rope-strung cot. There did not seem to be room for anybody else. Anything more than a quiet smoke, certainly an important meeting, seemed out of the question.
But Andrea Barbarigo entered the room almost immediately and the eunuch made space for him. Though I’d met both men before, it was only now that I was struck by the total contrast between them. Barbarigo was short and wiry. Whereas the eunuch was so obdurate as to make one imagine a swarm of mosquitoes could not force him to scratch, the attaché seemed to suffer eternally the torments of lo. Constantly the Venetian smoothed his beard, his hair, his hose, the end of his nose, cracked his knuckles, turned his rings around on his fingers, sniffed, coughed, and when he remembered himself after each act, he grinned sheepishly.
The eunuch was clean-faced as if every woman were a razor, and constant contact with them kept him smooth. The attaché, to continue the same image, had not seen the edge of female metal since I’d seen him last, just after Safiye’s son was born and she’d sent me—Well, I thought she’d sent me for a priest. Not for the first time, I thought Venice should have seen their man married before they sent him here.
I’d first met Barbarigo long ago, in my Foscari uncle’s reception hall in Venice. That was so far away I smiled to think how I’d imagined us mirror images of one another: same age, same height, same class, same future, if the Fates were kind. Then, he, as I, had been Venetian to the teeth. What had become of me was a tale not worth rehearsing, but now I noticed that he, although not completely Turkified, combined the styles.
Barbarigo wore a Turkish turban with a feather at an angle only an Italian would affect, hose and shoes, but his robe was of Eastern stuff, cut a bit short and sashed around the waist. It was the most foppish of both styles, the dignity of neither. And around his neck the young attaché was wearing the locket I recognized from the Kira’s display box. He fingered it voraciously as he made his salaams to the eunuch.
“So tell me, tell me, how fares your lady?” Barbarigo asked, out of breath. “How fares Sofia Baffo?”
I had not known such words existed in Turkish. It was a question only an Italian would think or dare to ask of a eunuch and, as the conversation continued, I remarked to myself that, though he took on Turkish syllables, Barbarigo’s inflections and ideas remained pure Italian. He hadn’t a Turkish thought or value in his brain.
Ghazanfer forgave the man his lack of manners. It seemed he had done so before and Safiye must have assured him that if he would please her, he must continue to do so in the future. The eunuch’s reply, though prefaced with a half-smile, refused to be moved by Barbarigo’s passion. But then Ghazanfer rose and, with his monstrous hands, began to palm the young attaché.
“By Jesu and Maria!”
The Italian came out of Barbarigo in such a groan of anticipation at Ghazanfer’s first touch that I had to echo the sentiment in my own mind. By Jesu and Maria! What sordid thing am I going to witness here?
“You know I only do this to satisfy myself,” the eunuch said in his flutelike, feminine tones.
“I know you do, khadim.” My countryman groaned another reply.
Panting with the heartbeat of his desire, Barbarigo began to help the eunuch peel through layers of costume. The attaché’s turban tumbled off and collapsed to its natural, formless self on the floor. His bare head revealed a very un-Turkish tumble of curls—so like a eunuch’s in this Eastern world.
So like mine.
I couldn’t say that there hadn’t been rumors circulating about the strange tastes of Safiye’s head khadim, but I’d learned never to believe a tenth of the things a harem whispers. Now?
Off came the shoes, the sash—I was about to turn away in disgust when suddenly the eunuch reached his satisfaction. Ghazanfer stepped away from Barbarigo, as calm as ever, and nodded. I saw now that, while the great Hungarian didn’t balk at allowing strange men into his lady’s presence, he did consider searching such men for concealed weapons a part of his duties. This was the satisfaction he had sought—and gained. No more. No weapons were concealed on this man, or none that Ghazanfer could remove without a castrator’s skill. The eunuch bowed and exited.
But the attaché’s frenzy continued to climb. He was down to mere hose when the door to the Kira’s back room opened once again to admit the silent bundle of veils and wrappers that is a Turkish woman in public.
But then she wasn’t in public any longer.
If I hadn’t guessed before, I knew at the first whiff of jasmine through broken slats who this woman was. I never saw her face, for though veils flew like waves parting before a ship’s prow, Barbarigo devoured her features in his hunger. I saw clearly the frantic collapse onto the room’s narrow cot. The ropes creaked dangerously under their double burden.
Then I heard the all-too-familiar woman’s crescendo of her lover’s name, her “Caro mios,” her “Amorosos”. Her yellow kidskin slippers were just a rotted board’s distance from me as they kicked for purchase in her climax.
Desires I thought had been cut from me rose staggering from the dead. With no place to go, they festered within. I thought I was going to be sick.
III
An hour later, I was waiting for him
