This is an unanticipated pleasure, she says, and I am glad that you have come. But what urgent matter brings you here at such an odd hour?
Pious lady, I must confess: I have dissembled. For this I beg your pardon. The exigency that impels me to your parlor can claim as its ambit naught save the animal confines of my own person. It is perhaps a priest’s sanctuary I should seek, but my feet led me here, in hope of opening my mouth to evacuate my brain. Fair Perina, I have come lately upon a man who fought at Lepanto, and the reminiscence thusly prompted made me long for your ready ear and kind attention. Will you sit with me?
They sit. With great effort Crivano retrieves his stick from the floor. Be brief, the nun says. Perina, I trust you know the rules that govern proper conduct in the parlor, and I trust you will keep the dottore cognizant of them.
The nun crosses the room, lights a second lamp, sits, and takes up a drop-spindle and a basket of wool. Her unblinking eyes prick him through the shadows as she spins.
After our last meeting, Perina says, I felt certain that thereafter you would seek to avoid me. I feared that my many questions had given offense. So I am very happy to see you now, dottore. Though I do wish I had known to expect you.
He smiles, looks at her. Disgusted with himself for having been even a bit surprised when the senator told him who she is. So much Cyprus in her — though she’s never set foot there and never will. So many echoes that she herself cannot hear. Being near her carries an illicit thrill of invisibility, a thrill compounded by her appearance: dark wool frock and swiftly donned veil, accidental and ingenuous, unornamented for the eyes of men. This pleases him. He could tell her anything.
The senator explained to me who you are, he says.
She swallows. Shadows appear and disappear along her throat.
I will speak to you of Lepanto, he says, though there will be little you do not already know. Your brother and I were on our way to Padua when news came to us of the fall of Nicosia. We elected to sign onto a galley as bowmen. We were young, younger than you are now, and no warriors, to be sure. The only galley that would take us was a Corfiot ship called the Gold and Black Eagle. The Eagle met the Holy League in Messina, and on the day of the battle we were in the right wing. The fighting was all in our favor at first, but when the Turkish flank came fully into view our maneuvers became confused. Our admirals doubted one another, our line broke, and we lost sight of the other Christian galleys. We prevailed in a few close exchanges — alas, your brother perished in one of these — but we soon found ourselves entirely surrounded. Our captain, a man called Pietro Bua, chose to surrender, and the retreating Turks towed us to the harbor of Lepanto and assembled us in the town square. They were very angry at their defeat, and greatly sorrowed by the loss of so many men. All Christians of noble birth were divided from the rest. To be ransomed, we thought. But the Turks beheaded these gentlemen, and they flayed Captain Bua alive. The survivors passed into slavery.
How did my brother die?
He was struck by a cannonball. A ball from the centerline pedrero of an Ottoman galley. Quite a large stone: at least fifty pounds, I should think. The ball must have cracked when it was fired, for I found a scattering of limestone chips where it had passed. Had the enemy been in a trough between waves and not riding a crest, the shot would have sundered the deck, and I and many others would have died as well. As it was, it went high. Your brother stood beside me, then he did not.
Were you able to see to his remains before you were overrun?
I tried, lady. But there were no remains to speak of. I am deeply sorry.
She nods. Her posture suggests grief, but there is no grief in her face, only excitement, and exhaustion. Everyone of noble birth was executed, she says. So Gabriel would have died anyway.
Yes. I sometimes comfort myself with that thought. The cannonball spared him agony and indignity alike.
She’s silent now, rubbing her hands in her lap as if to warm them, although it is not cold in this room. Or is it? It’s hard for him to say. He stares openly at her, sorting her into pieces to memorize every detail — her lips, her feet, her brow — but everything his stare gathers slides swiftly toward oblivion, warm rain striking bare rock. It’s rarely the eye, he knows, that best serves the recollecting mind. He fights the urge to press his nose to her scalp, to take hold of her soft palms, to see what he can untangle from the webwork of lined skin there. After tonight he does not plan to see this girl again.
What happened to you? she says. After the Turks captured you?
Crivano shrugs. I was fortunate, he says. I was not put to the oars, as many of my shipmates were. Owing to my youth, I was given to the janissaries, and with them I encountered hardship and adventure in strange lands I had never dreamed of. I learned their language, and the language of the Arabs, and in time I became an interpreter.
And then you escaped.
Yes. I betrayed the trust that I had earned, and I fled. I wish I could declare my choice to have been an easy one, but it was not. Almost half my life had been spent among the Turks. My boyhood home was lost, my family gone. The lands where I was to seek my freedom were alien to me. The world into which I had been born no longer had any means of recognizing me, nor I it.
With no family, Perina says, you are no one here. Worse than no one. You are a corpse. An effigy. A ghost.
Her expression remains placid, her voice reserved, but Crivano senses a whisper of rage in her, so pure as to be invisible, like a very hot flame. Yes, he says. I’m sure you understand.
Why did you come back?
Crivano looks at his lap, at the floor. His drunkenness is abandoning him, leaving him sluggish and stupid, in peril of forgetting that his lies are lies. As we grow older, he says, we sometimes find that our most momentous decisions are unseen by us as we make them. We perceive only a confusion of paltry choices, like the tesserae of a mosaic. Only with distance do prevailing images become clear. A man came to me in the night and said he had stolen the skin of Marcantonio Bragadin, the hero of Famagusta. He asked me to help him, and I said I would. All else has issued from that.
They sit in silence for a while. The sound of voices singing the Magnificat echoes from the corridor. Across the parlor, the nun pulls and winds her thread. Her impatience settles over them like a fog.
I must make a momentous decision soon, Perina says.
To take your vows?
She nods. I am twenty years old, she says. I have been an educant here since I was eight. Most of us are married or clothed as nuns prior to our sixteenth year. I fear I am becoming a source of anxiety to the abbess. She informs me that she has already selected my new name, and looks forward to bestowing it upon me soon. She has been informing me of this on a regular basis for more than a year now, and her considerable patience is on the wane. I have no words to tell you, dottore, how fervently I seek to quit this barren harem of Christ. There is nothing—
Her eyes are riveted now to his own, glinting like obsidian under her veil.
— nothing that I would not do to leave this place. Nothing.
Crivano casts a nervous glance at the nun, but her beleaguered expression remains unaltered.
Don’t be overly concerned about Sister Perpetua, dottore, Perina says. She’s very devout, but also somewhat deaf. We prisoners of Santa Caterina are fortunate to have her as our gatekeeper.
I gather, Crivano says, that you sense no vocation toward the veil.
If you search this edifice brick by brick, dottore, you will find herein perhaps a dozen genuine vocations. Mostly we are the surplus daughters of the Republic’s great families, married off to Christ without indignity or excessive expense, and we spend that portion of our day unallocated to prayer enacting doll-game renditions of the rivalries that engage our families in the outside world — only with no real consequence, of course. The few among us with any brains avoid those of our own rank and consort instead with the repentant harlots, who know something of life’s complexities, who know the best songs and the best stories, who offer explicit instruction on how we can best entertain our husbands and lovers as we seek our ultimate stations in the world.