Gasps rise from the nearby seats, along with a few muttered curses; the girl seems to tense, to draw somewhat closer. It is as if the wall before them has dissolved to reveal a shadowy landscape: a glade ringed by misshapen trees under a sunless sky. The image is so clear and so dynamic in its color and detail as to make the best efforts of the most adroit trompe-l’oeil painters seem like the scribbles of feebleminded children. And now the leaves of the phantom trees are indeed moving, rustled by a slight breeze. The audience’s gasps are renewed.
After the initial shock, Crivano thinks of a chapter in della Porta’s book — and also a similar, greatly superior discussion of the same topic in the writings of Ibn al-Haitham — and he grins, pleased with himself. It’s a camera obscura, he whispers. That box on the floor. It is merely the courtyard beyond the wall that we see.
For a long time the girl does not reply. Thereafter spake wise Dandolo, della Porta drones, his fervor undiminished by his years.
But we’re facing the courtyard, the girl whispers. And the image is not upsidedown, as it should be.
Shhhh, Contarini hisses over his shoulder.
The girl is correct: this is no camera obscura, or at least not simply that. Crivano reviews his knowledge of optics and finds it wanting. A second lens? he wonders. A convex mirror?
A crash of cymbals and the eerie bray of a shawm banish these thoughts. Two parties of armored men come into view, their broadswords and bright helmets strafing the room with fantastic flashes. They take positions on either side of a rampart that emerges from the murk — Byzantines to the left, Crusaders to the right — and shake their weapons fiercely at each other.
The Neapolitan continues his labored narration of the familiar tale: the blind doge’s fanatic assault on the walls of Constantinople. And lo, the other princes looked, and saw the courage of this ancient man, and greatly were they shamed, for he whose deeds they witnessed had no sight. Despite the inept verse and the fanciful images, Crivano finds himself less amused than disturbed. Something in the dreamlike aspect of della Porta’s projection spawns in him clouds of violent memories, unmoored to anything but one another, which reach his mind’s eye from nowhere and fade as quickly as they come. The Gulf of Patras red with blood, its surface aflame, choked with arrows and shields and hacked-off limbs and white turbans. A barn in Tiflis filled with corpses, steaming in the cold. The Lark reloading on the quarterdeck, singing a rude song, and then the thunderclap, and the smoke, and gone forever. Captain Bua lashed to a post in the Lepanto town square, screaming, flensed to his shoulder. The tanned hide of Bragadin upon the bailo’s desk. Verzelin’s white hand poking from under the sackcloth. The Lark again, unfolding his battered matriculation certificate in the firelight. My mother will never believe I’m dead. If you give her this, then maybe she’ll know.
The rampart splits, the Crusaders overwhelm the Greeks, and the audience cheers and applauds. Della Porta steps forward with a smug bow, bends over the wooden trunk — his spindly hand aglow for an instant amid a swarm of motes, its shadow huge across the canvas backdrop — and shuts its angled lid. The panorama goes dark.
The girl is murmuring something about apertures, biconvex lenses, mirrored bowls, but Crivano excuses himself and stumbles from the room. In the great hall, the servants are removing the curtains and panels from the windows, letting the light through. The children pour in from the courtyard, laughing and shouting, wearing bits of their fathers’ armor, waving their dull swords. Crivano sweeps between them to the peristyle, stepping over their sham plaster rampart, filling his lungs with warm air.
More servants are clearing away the banquet table; he passes them on his way to the courtyard’s far end, where low box-hedges form concentric rings. An oval sundial stands at their center, polished broccatello on a gray limestone base; its iron gnomon, set near the analemma’s top, puts the hour near the twenty-first bell. The breeze has picked up and the haze has dissipated; a few scraps of high cloud fleck the sky, moving toward the horizon with surprising swiftness. Crivano is suddenly weary. He seats himself on a curved bench and watches the gnomon’s shadow creep across the glittering marble until the girl finds him again.
She’s watching from outside the hedges, her face veiled, her nervous fingers bunched before her. Crivano comes to his feet, removes his cap, and stares evenly at her until she joins him. They sit for a while in uneasy silence. She’s older than he thought; probably past twenty. Something about her reminds him of Cyprus, although he can’t say what. Who are you? he asks.
I’m called Perina, she says. I am Senator Contarini’s cousin.
Who is your father?
My parents are not living. I never knew my father. I grew up in this house.
Bells ring the hour all over the city: a bright throbbing drone, like the sound of heavy rain on a roof. Crivano’s hands have begun to tremble; he clamps them on his knees to still them. So, he says, you’re a nun.
She makes a sour face. I’m an educant, she says. At the convent school of Santa Caterina. I have taken no vows.
They must expect that you will do so. Or you would not have liberty to come and go as you please.
Through the years, Perina says, the sisters of Santa Caterina have benefited greatly from the bequests of the Contarini family. This conveys advantages.
I see.
Near the banquet table, a child charging blind beneath his enormous bronze helmet has collided with the trunk of an almond tree. He lands on his back in the grass; his helmet clatters away. After a moment he sits up and begins to wail. Crivano smiles.
I am told, Perina says, that you fought the Turks at Lepanto. Is this true?
Other boys are laughing at the sobbing child. An older girl shushes them, stoops to tend his bloodied nose. You fought the Turks at Lepanto, Crivano thinks. Not simply: You fought at Lepanto. An interesting specificity. Yes, Crivano says. It is true.
I should like very much to hear about your role in the battle, Dottore Crivano, if you are willing to speak of it.
A flurry of black-and-yellow tits flaps into view over the roof, hunting treetops for cankerworms. They weave and dive acrobatically over the children’s heads, paying them no mind, and are paid no mind in return.
That was very long ago, Crivano says, and I fear the passage of years has put my memories at some variance. No doubt you have read them already, but I must say you’ll be better served by the famous accounts previously set down by veterans of the battle, if only because those men took up their quills so soon after laying down their swords.
Of course, Perina says. Still, I am greatly interested in the particularities of your experience. If you can bring yourself to share them with me, I would be grateful.
You would even, Crivano continues, find more clarity and better understanding in the writings of recent historians of the Republic who were not there, who have never been to war at all, who have no direct knowledge of any territory save that of their studious libraries. The ultimate import of such an event, lady, can least be discerned in the unformed chaos of its midst. My memories of Lepanto are spun mostly from smoke, and noise, and the dead and dying bodies of men. I am sure that many brave acts occurred on that grave day, but I took part in none, nor did I witness any. For myself and my fellows it amounted to a long inglorious clamber to keep our lives, one our majority prosecuted without success. Do not lament the loss of such chronicles, lady. And do not believe that the stories of these fallen men are interred with them. They are in fact the very soil that vanishes their bones.