I COULD NOT STOP thinking about Emilia all the next day. Our encounter had ended abruptly when Roderigo, to my fathomless annoyance, came over to introduce himself. In his presence, she almost physically retreated. Shortly after his intrusion, Emilia had excused herself indoors. After that, I could not find her.
Given the mix of people at that fete, my guess was that Emilia was from a comfortable family but not a wealthy one, that she was likely destined to be the wife of a middling merchant; who owned a house but not one that fronted on a canal; who owned a business but was not known for being especially clever at it; who had a social presence but not one that made him any kind of wit. She, of course, wanted more than that for her future, and so she was fiercely scaring off all potential suitors of that ilk. This was the biography that I invented for her over the course of the following day. I conveniently forgot how entirely mistaken I’d been with the previous biography I’d invented for her, in which she was a whore.
LATE IN THE DAY I was informed by my brother that we were going to another masked ball that evening. This one was really prime, he explained; there would be senators and patricians, and only a few of the richest merchants in the city were invited. It was hugely significant, an enormous honor, that our family was welcome. (My mother had arranged the invitation, possibly by seduction.) I did not want to go, because I doubted Emilia would be there. But with gritted teeth, I agreed to attend, and again put on my military jerkin.
With the usual finery and elegance and personalized gondola and obsequious servants waiting for us, the usual broad marble staircases and ornately painted murals and alabaster handrails, with the usual smell of candles and the sounds of sackbuts and cornets and lutes, the usual delighted greeting from Roderigo, I found myself in yet another ballroom, this one at least as large and fine as the one to which Father had taken me the day he informed me I was to join the infantry.
In fact, for all I know, it was the same ballroom and the same senator. After five years of living in army barracks I could not make myself care about any of this frippery. Shortly before our arrival there had been fireworks in the adjoining campo, followed by a human pyramid; the guests had only just been ushered back into the hall, and now everyone was eagerly awaiting a Ruzante comedy about peasants performing improper acts with livestock. Actual livestock—although nothing larger than a goat—was being herded into one corner of the marble-floored room, and to cover the moment, the sackbut player was doing a solo rendition of a Willaert piece, the effect being that of an amorous weasel.
I looked around, hoping to see her, but Roderigo was the only figure I could recognize. He and my brother were among the few nonpatrician merchants who “deserved” to be at this masque, which meant excellent business opportunities for them.
THE NEXT HOUR was excruciating. Emilia wasn’t there; I could feel her absence in my lungs. Despite my mask, my identity was no secret; I was identified by scores of people I had never met. I was treated as if I were an exotic feathered bird, and Roderigo was being subtly congratulated for having tethered me. On top of which, I had to watch some very bad actors pretend to do questionable things to goats while speaking trippingly in verse. The goats smelled almost as bad as the actors did but were more authentic in their performance. This was followed (to cover the cleaning up of goat scat) by a Luzzaschi tune, which did nothing to improve my mood.
At about the time I felt I needed a vat of wine to regain my humor, Roderigo eagerly steered me toward a dining table that had just been set up near one wall. More notably, he was steering me toward a large gentleman in an extravagant half-mask and expensive velvet costume. The fellow was already tucking into the gilded oysters making up the first course of the feast. “You will never believe who this is,” Roderigo whispered delightedly in my ear, “or how he treats me now.” And then raising his voice, he held out an arm and declared, “Tasso! Such a joy to find you here tonight!”
It was the nasty fellow from the neighborhood militia who had mocked him, five years earlier, and then falsely claimed that he could get him gunpowder. Tasso looked up from the oyster he’d been contemplating, recognized the speaker’s voice, and smiled. With a small salute, he returned, “My darling Roderigo, the evening would not be complete without you.”
“Look whom I have brought.” Roderigo preened and presented me before himself as if I were a shy child. This gesture caught the notice of those just taking their seats around the table and—again—I found myself the center of attention among strangers.
“Tasso,” I said quietly, with a bow of my head. Grudgingly, sensing it was what Roderigo wanted, I sat beside the fellow, and Roderigo sat to my other side. That Tasso now seemed friendly toward Roderigo did not impress me. In fact, given my mood, and my conditioned impulse to protect hapless Roderigo, I found Tasso’s behavior highly suspect.
The expression revealed in the lower half of Tasso’s face suggested I was exactly the man he’d been waiting five years to greet. “Iago!” he cried and held out his thick arms wide in greeting. “Welcome back to society!”
“Good evening, Tasso,” I said coldly, without leaning toward his intended embrace. “Are you still lying to my friend Roderigo here? I am a master swordsman now, you know. I’ll run you through if you ever try again to cheat this man.”
The crowd of masked, cloaked figures had taken their seats. They tittered, and several even politely applauded. That was odd.
Tasso immediately laughed the hollow Venetian laugh I dislike. “What a loyal friend you are, Iago, to bear a grudge over a little jest five years dead! Keep this fellow close to your heart, Roderigo, do you hear?”
“It has nothing to do with Roderigo’s heart; I am making a comment on your character,” I retorted in a somber voice.
Tasso paused unsurely, aware that a score of masked faces were staring at the unmasked half of his face. How, I wondered, were they going to eat their oysters while wearing masks and gloves?
Finally, Tasso shrugged and declared, “My business is in ships, dear Iago. There is no way I could possibly cheat my good friend Roderigo even if I wished to, which I do not.” He brought the gilded oyster to his mouth and triumphantly devoured it.
“Are you in shipping?” I asked. “Could you not easily overcharge him?”
“I build the ships, sir,” Tasso said, with an affected gallant air, as if he had just bested me in a battle of wits but was too polite to rub my nose in it.
“Really?” I said, thinking of the sweating, burly men who had awed me, building ships, my first day within the Arsenal walls. “What tools do you use to build a ship?”
He chuckled indulgently. “By that I mean, of course, I hire men to build ships for my company. I do not build the ships myself.”
“Then why did you say you did?” I demanded. “Why do you Venetian gentlemen never say a damned thing that you mean? Has it been bred out of you? Your workers—who are men, as much as you are—they build ships. You do not build ships. You enable ships to be built, which is not the same thing.”
The audience of Bauta masks tittered, and gloved hands applauded me—which again I found odd, and somewhat unnerving.
I pulled my mask off. Sun-baked as I was, I must have looked very ugly, but I did not care. The audience of diners applauded again, this time heartily, their gilded oysters still sitting on their plates like golden jelly. I stared at them with frustrated bewilderment. A hoarse male voice called out, from the head of the table, “That’s quite a compliment, Tasso, to be treated to the attentions of a known truth-teller.”
I turned in the direction of the voice. “I’m not complimenting him,” I said.
“It is a compliment to him to receive your noncompliment,” the speaker explained indulgently. He stood up and I saw him now, a monstrously fat old man, wearing colors too bright for his size. “He is worthy to receive your attention, and your attention, Iago, is exotic here,” he said.
“What does that mean, worthy to receive my attention?” I was almost spitting now. “I do not want to talk to him, isn’t that clear from how I’m talking to him?”
“You are talking to him more than to the rest of us,” the elder pointed out, sounding pleased that now he was the one in the bear pit.
“I do not especially want to talk to the rest of you either,” I said, with an emphatic gesture that tumbled my mask out of my hand to the floor. Roderigo immediately stooped in his chair to pick it up. “There. Does that make you feel special, sir?”
“I am already special, Iago,” the older man said with unnerving complacency. “I am the man who made you famous.”
I suddenly recognized the voice. This was Pietro Galinarion, the owner of the famous hen. Seeing my startled expression, he continued, gravely and smug: “I have bragging rights to being the earliest victim of your precociousness. The more popular you and your precociousness are, the better that serves me.”
The table denizens tittered yet again and applauded. Tasso was beaming beneath his mask. It seemed that Bait the Curmudgeon was the new pastime for bored patricians. I did not want to play.
THE NEXT QUARTER HOUR I spent in a fog of irritation. I insulted Galinarion; I was applauded. I threw my mask into the punch bowl; I was applauded. I reprimanded the entire table for how mindlessly they were applauding everything; I was applauded. I stormed out of the hall, to applause, and left the grand house through the back steps and the servants’ entrance, imagining Emilia was there to see my righteous indignation, and desperate to find her in the carousing city.
Roderigo had wanted to follow me, but I gave him a warning glance, and he—alone of all the people there—understood how upset I was. He relented. I appreciated that so much, I almost told him to come after all.
I STORMED AROUND the streets of Venice aimlessly, trying to walk off my ill humor in the crowded, noisy walkways. People crossed excitedly from one ball to another, singing or shouting out things they would never dared say in sunlight while unmasked. Some stumbled happily down avenues and alleys, staggeringly drunk. There were scores of parties tonight in the city; somewhere, in one of them, Emilia must be dismissing all her suitors. How might I guess at which one to find her?
Having nothing to go on, deduction was my only hope. We had at least some acquaintances in common, or we would not have been invited to the same party the night before. I presumed that hers was not the wealthiest of families, so I made a calculation: which of our family friends was well off enough to host a Carnival masque, but only one of modest means? Once this would have been Roderigo’s family, but his intrigues now put them in much finer circumstances. So I guessed another family, the Molins. I oriented myself: I was north of Campo San Polo. So I crossed cobbled streets and over bridges with purpose now, heading generally south, to see if there was a party at the Molins’, just west of the campo.
To my joy, there was. I had no invitation, but it was late enough in the evening that the servants at the entrance were drunk, and they were startled by my military garb. They stood there, staring, as I brushed past them and up the stone staircase, where a pantomime had just concluded in the broad, tapestry-lined, underlit and overheated hall.
I saw her instantly, through a mass of young partygoers, although she was in the opposite corner of the room. It was the same gown, the same Moretta mask, the same coiffure. All of these things pointed to a modesty of means, which was promising; a wealthy family would never allow a soldier, even a petty officer, near their daughter.
My entrance was so abrupt, my jerkin so stern-looking, and my appearance taken as disheveled, that the population of the party—less powdered and poofy than the earlier ball—gave me their full attention, assuming I was there to raise an alarm. “Good evening,” I boomed. “Joyous Carnival to all of you!”
Jollity returned. Cries of “Welcome, Iago!” were interrupted by the drunken demand: “What’s happened to your mask?” from the middle of the hall.
“I outgrew it,” I retorted. The partygoers tittered slightly, and turned away to resume their own conversations. How refreshing: here, I would not stand out freakishly. These folk were the model of another Venetian tendency I normally disliked but now was grateful for: perfect self-absorption. A few eyes stayed on me out of curiosity, but otherwise I was just another reveler.
A reveler making straight for a particular woman.
Emilia seemed startled by the intensity of my approach and glanced to either side, aware that she was literally cornered. I felt my palms sweat and could feel my pulse quicken inside my ears.
“Good evening, disdainful lady,” I said, with an ironic bow. Behind me I heard servants pulling out trestle tables; supper would be served soon.
I saw her eyelids blink a few times rapidly through the eyeholes of her mask. “You assume I am disdainful before we’ve even spoken? You must have been chatting with a fellow I met last night.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Really? A fellow about your height and build, hanging about with libertines and slanderers and dullwits?”
“If I ever meet the fellow, I’ll tell him what you think of him.”
“Oh, do not, it would break his heart. Although I suppose that way at least he’d lose his appetite, and that would save our hosts a partridge wing or two. I can’t say they’ve overstocked the dining table.”
“You owe me a dance,” I said abruptly, and felt myself redden.
She smiled behind her mask; I could see it in the shape of her face. “Are you not at all surprised I knew who you were? You were masked last night.”
“I am, like yourself, dressed the same as I was last night. You saw the same man walking toward you. Masks never really hide much.”
“That has always been my opinion too,” she said.
“Then you may as well take yours off,” I suggested.
“On the contrary,” she answered, “if it’s not hiding much, there’s not much to reveal, so why bother? The ribbon is all caught up in my hair.”
I glanced involuntarily at her hair, just behind her ear, at the nape of her neck, and imagined helping her untangle the ribbon from the hair. It was a romantic—in fact, erotic—moment of imagining. Her laughter interrupted it.
“Have you any idea how transparent you are?” she teased. “I know exactly what you’re thinking at this moment.”
“And do you approve of what I’m thinking?” I asked, knowing she could see me blush.
“More than my parents would, if they saw me talking to an unmasked wild man who does not fit their merchants’ notion of whom I should be talking to.”
I felt victorious: my imagined biography of her was accurate. “They want to marry you off to someone boring.”
“Not a particular someone,” she clarified. “There is an array of someones to choose from.”
“Then what is the deciding criterion?”
She shrugged, and looked away into the room. Without my noticing, the pantomime had finished, and now some acrobatic clowns were working their way across the hall. “My parents lack imagination and humor, so they do not value those qualities in me. They would like to find somebody to whom I may be useful, but they can’t quite figure out what I’d be useful for.”
I was brazen: I eyed her slender, curving body up and down with undisguised desire. “I can think of something you’d be very useful for.”
To my great relief, she merely chuckled and crossed her arms over her chest, as she had the night before. “So it’s true what they say about you: you really do just blurt out whatever comes into your mind to say.”
“How . . . do you know who I am?”
She gestured around the room. “A dozen people called your name when you walked in here, and you wear a soldier’s garb. Of course I know who you are.” She sobered. “I’m sorry for your father’s recent passing.”
“Thank you,” I said awkwardly, suddenly feeling—ironically—exposed.
“My father is a wheat merchant,” she said. “His cousin is a very successful designer of Carnival costumes, it is the only reason my family is included in any of these festivities. I don’t belong in this world any more than you do.” She gave me a look that, even through the mask’s expressionless eyeholes, pierced right into my soul.
“Do you wish you did belong here?” I asked, holding the gaze.
“Absolutely not,” she said immediately.
“Then marry me,” I said.