I looked around for Mimi Reis: I missed his words of instruction. I saw him standing on a barrel, his left hand, held aloft, gripping a hawser, his right still clutching his sword. I couldn’t make out what he was saying. Smoke engulfed the scene, but I could still hear him spurring on his men and railing at Venice. His voice came and went, according to the wind and the fluctuations in the battle clamor.
Close to me, a young sailor spoke. His face was stunned, his skin drenched with sweat, his eyes like lanterns. I thought I caught him saying that just as we’d left Lepanto, the Ottoman fleet had been marked by a bad omen. Crows. There had been a flight of crows.
A shot from a falconet shattered the wooden planks that sheltered us. The ball struck the young man in the throat and tore off his head. Blood gushed over me, and I instinctively rose to my feet. I felt a very sharp pain in my leg and fell to my knees.
That was my salvation. I heard another bullet whistling where I had held my head a moment before. I looked at my calf; it had been pierced by a shot. The blood formed a little stream. I rested my back against the ravaged planks.
Cries of rage and desperation and insults rose from our ranks when we saw how the Christians were treating their prisoners. We peered out from above the ruins of our shelter. Blood formed pools on the deck.
Mimi Reis led the final sortie, followed by those few who were still able to fight, who were launching any missile that came to hand: pieces of wood, shoes, broken pikes, oranges and lemons. He had taken off his shirt, and you could make out the marks that etched their story on his skin even though it was blackened with smoke. The Muslims were fighting furiously. There were more Venetians, and they had more arquebuses. We began to lose our impetus. Mimi Reis waved his sword, disappeared amongst the bodies of his attackers, re-emerged, railed, gripped the throat of a Venetian seaman and yelled in his face. There was another salvo, aimed directly at us, a prelude to the final assault. The pirate was hidden by smoke.
Then I saw his face, twisted into a grin, high above the bodies and the drifting smoke. His severed head, dancing on a pike.
I don’t know where my strength came from. I got up and dragged myself toward the side of the ship behind me. I heard cries and words of encouragement in Venetian, coming closer and closer. I rested my backside against the wall. With my hands, I lifted my injured leg over to the other side, along with my good leg. I dropped into the water.
When I resurfaced, I saw the gray mass of a galleass, in the distance, amid the fire from other ruined ships. It sailed slowly, like a massive turtle, indifferent to the slaughter.
Behind me I heard a cry of victory, and a chorus of voices giving thanks to Saint Mark.
Finale,Venice, December 11, 1571
Hawsers, scraps of sail, ropes, tree trunks, shards of shattered hulls, figureheads, oranges, pages from books, a rosary.
I floated for a long time, among the living and the dead, amid the scum of war, a piece of flotsam among many others.
I could have rested in the anonymous silence of the depths, with the fallen of a thousand storms and battles, like one of Ulysses’s companions. My death would have been worthy of the poems my father once read to me. Instead, the waves returned me to the world, so that my fate might come full circle. Et stetit mare a fervore suo, sated by the sacrifice of thousands.
They picked me up, the Venetians. Only to plunge me into this yet blacker abyss, the one reserved for the defeated and the traitorous, but not before cauterizing my wound with a red-hot iron. My cries must have been heard all the way here, announcing to everyone the arrival of an important prisoner. In fact it was not mercy that guided the surgeon’s hand, but my name. It was just by chance that I was spotted by a convict condemned to a life sentence at the oars. He had risen from his bench and stretched out a filthy hand, the index finger pointing at me. His naked thigh still bore the violet scar from the bullet. Baldan is his name. I should have aimed for his heart, the day I decided to shoot at him to stop him from escaping across the canal. He couldn’t have forgotten the man who had consigned him to a life of pain. For years, as he cursed my name with his every breath, he must have prayed that he might one day take his revenge, and inflict the same suffering on me. God heard his plea, putting him on the benches of the ship that picked me up.
That’s the Arsenal assassin.
A Jew corrupted by Jewish money.
A traitor.
A murderer.
That’s me. They didn’t need to torture me to obtain a confession; I could have spoken the sentence myself. Denial would have been pointless, not after I’d plotted to obtain a war that left piles of corpses rotting in the sun and fattening the fish. A war whose fruits no longer belong to us. We only bear its blows.
They say that the Ottoman fleet was destroyed, that Kapudan Pasha is dead, sunk to the bottom of the sea with his flagship. They say that only Ucciali, that shrewd pirate, got away, and that he will now be the Sultan’s Great Admiral.
They say that Bragadin’s stuffed hide reached Constantinople, and that it led Lala Mustafa’s belated parade.
On the other hand, nothing is said of Yossef Nasi, as if he were an enemy no longer feared. And yet at my trial they asked me about him: Was it true that he was Selim’s lover, that he had had children with his aunt, Gracia Nasi, that he worshipped the devil in the seclusion of his residence?
I laughed out loud at their stolid faces. A hearty laugh that echoed like a scandal around those dilapidated walls.
They brought me here, to this dark hole, where cold grips the limbs and tirelessly shakes them. Venice is cold as winter approaches, and this prison is even more so. My wound is a black lump of burned meat; I no longer even notice it. Not after being up to my calves in bilge for days and days, my feet tormented by water and chains, and then in this musty cell, reserved for the poor wretches I once locked up in here.
The Jews have been thrown out of Venice, expelled, all of them. I’m the last one, and a grand finale awaits me.
That’s how I know he’s coming. He won’t be able to resist the temptation of seeing me before everything is done. I stay alert, I pace my spot to banish shivers and rats. I squash the insects that scrabble around under my clothes. It’s strange how, even when the end is imminent, we go on repeating certain gestures, as if self-preservation were still a necessity.
In this blind intimacy, I can think about the ones I have left behind.
Tuota, whom I still imagine sitting bolt upright at the tiller.
Yossef, locked away in the solitude of Palazzo Belvedere.
Ismail, Ali, Hafiz and Mukhtar, together in the vastness of the desert.
Dana. I sacrificed our bond to the plan that should have returned me to myself, and instead it has only led me back to my starting point. I see again her face, her body, her hair; I hear her inviting voice. Welcome to my garden.
I stop on the threshold of the memory, startled at the rattle of the bolts. The door is thrown wide open and a torch banishes the darkness, showing the grim face of the jailer, bestial in the flickering light. I step aside to let him pass in.
He has aged. His hair and beard are grizzled. But his expression is the same: the face of someone accustomed to studying his neighbor.
“Good to see you, Consigliere.”
Bartolomeo Nordio studies me for a long time. Perhaps he, too, is seeing the marks, or rather the ravages, that time has left on me.
“I didn’t think you’d be so careless as to let yourself be captured. Not after getting away from me.”
I shrug as I once wouldn’t have dared to do in his presence. “Sorry to disappoint you.”