Of the two things I had begun to understand during the “interrogation”, one was that David, in Raimondo’s opinion, might be mad. The other was that if David (again in Raimondo’s opinion) wasn’t mad, he must be a dangerous con man.
But since (in my opinion) it couldn’t be ruled out that it was Raimondo who had gone mad, his suspicions did not worry me too much. Indeed, in a way they reassured me, at least regarding the immediate future: I could hope, after all, that David was less dependent on his mysterious organization (or whatever it was) than he had told me. And that therefore he might yet decide… who knows…
All the same, I was aware Raimondo could not swallow the “revelations made to Cosima” during their conversation at the window. And so he insisted on comparing them both with versions from other sources, and with the same story as I might know it.
It was a kind of high-school leaving exam, in which Raimondo was the examiner and I the candidate. That is how I see myself now in this second part of the enquiry.
Examiner – Tell me about the trades, skills or professions exercised by Silvera before his real or presumed job as a group leader.
Candidate – Yes. Well, as far as I know… or as far as I can guess, because we must distinguish between —
e Don’t worry about distinguishing, just use your own words to give me a brief outline of the overall picture. I will ask you for clarification of any points that require it.
c All right. So, after being initially directed by his family towards Talmudic studies, Silvera, on account of his restive and sceptical temperament, soon abandoned them, partly under the influence of Spinoza, whom he encountered in Rijnsburg. But this encounter did not come about in person. It was just that passing through Rijnsburg, where Spinoza lived, he —
e Signorina, I have already told you I will ask when any point needs clarification. Please proceed.
c Directed towards Talmudic studies, as I was saying, he abandoned them for drama studies and found temporary employment in a theatre company in Brooklyn which travelled the East Coast, as it says in my textbook on page 81.
e All right, but continue in your own words, don’t just cite the textbook parrot-fashion!
c (piqued) – As you wish. So he… Er, that is, having then given up his job as an itinerant actor, as he was attracted by the more remunerative profession of a travelling salesman, he continued to wander through various countries, at one time as a costume jewellery representative, as the book says on page 17, at another as an encyclopaedia salesman, as I deduce from his vast knowledge in all fields of learning.
e Good. Your deduction does you credit.
c (encouraged) – From the fact that, after abandoning the Queen of the Ionian Sea, he kept Imperial Tours’ emergency funds to himself, I further deduce that this continual changing of jobs, this living by his wits, had gradually modified his moral sense. I won’t say it had led him off the straight and narrow, because his path had never been a “straight” one, but it had caused him to stray from those principles that should always in any case —
e Quite right. Could you describe the various stages of this straying?
c Well, it might have started with that dud coin which, since he’d never managed to palm it off on anyone else, he ended up giving to me.
e To you?
c To a certain lady, let’s say. Then, under the sinister influence of Fugger, we find him engaging in a much shadier and more dangerous activity, that of drug smuggling. But he has never been afraid of danger, as the countless scars on pages 116–17 indicate.
e War wounds, in your opinion?
c Partly at least. One of his many erratic jobs, leaving aside the fact that he might have belonged to the Israeli secret service, must have been that of a mercenary, a soldier of fortune.
e What do you deduce that from?
c From the fact that Silvera, on page 142, says he knows how to do a number of little domestic chores – such as darning socks, sewing on buttons, even cobbling shoes – all typical of the soldier and in particular of the mercenary.
e Let’s take the shoes. Don’t they suggest something else?… Is it not possible that Silvera, along with his studies of the Talmud, had been directed towards the cobbler’s trade, and for a while at least had practised it?
c I’d never thought about it.
e Think about it now.
c No, on consideration, I find it impossible to believe someone like Silvera could ever have been a cobbler. First of all because he’s not the kind who ever stays long in any one place, and then —
e But we are considering the hypothesis that that was his first and real job, after which —
c Yes, but I rule it out all the same, since it doesn’t fit with his character at all.
e In what sense?
c Well, in the sense that the figure of Silvera, however he may have strayed, remains that of a gentleman! And a cobbler, it’s no good, I just can’t —
e This is because your reasoning is based on the snobbery and, if I may say so, the provincialism of the narrow sphere you move in. In more open, less prejudiced circles, such crafts as those of the cobbler, the farrier, the smith, the carpenter, not only are not considered, and never have been considered, in any way lowly or unbecoming, but are often associated with other studies and a host of creative activities. Do you know that Spinoza, whatever his relations may have been with Silvera, made eyeglasses?
c Yes, but it’s one thing to make eyeglasses – and anyway, Spinoza, for all I know, might have mostly carved lenses for microscopes and telescopes – and quite another to be —
e Well, think of Hans Sachs, then, the famous poet-shoemaker, friend of Dürer and Luther, who contemporaneously studied Latin, the flute and cobbling, inspiring Wagner to write his Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Or the cobbler of Dresden who played host to Goethe in 1767, supplying him with the model for the Ewige Jude and later Faust himself. Or Shi the carpenter, honoured by all of Chinese antiquity!… And the son of the carpenter of Nazareth, who learned and practised his father’s trade himself? You’re not going to tell me this means he wasn’t a gentleman?
c My God, Christ is one thing —
e And Silvera another? Up to a point, Signorina. Up to a point. But now let’s come to the question of language, or rather of the countless languages Silvera would appear to have learned in his life.
NB Here the Candidate, despite the Examiner’s exhortations, often repeats from the textbook parrot-fashion. Some of her replies are therefore omitted or abbreviated.
e What can you tell me of his mother tongue?
c Nothing. That is, on page 81 he says… (omissus). On the other hand, his surname would seem to indicate Sephardi extraction, that is to say Spanish or Portuguese. But this tells us nothing of his language, of course, and nor does the fact that he was born in Holland and is called David.
e Just David?
c Yes… I mean no. I seem to remember that on his passport, on page 54… (omissus). Ashver in Italian would be Asvero, wouldn’t it?
e Yes, or Assuero, from the Babylonian Ahzhuer. It’s quite a common name among Jews, as a consequence of their captivity in Babylon. But doesn’t this remind you of anything else? In the West, the most usual spelling is Ahsverus, or Ahasverus.
c I’ve studied the language question in depth, but I haven’t gone much into onomastics.
e A pity, because the question of the name and that of the profession are closely related. Have you never heard of a cobbler called Ashver, Asvero or Assuero, whichever it is?
c I don’t think so. Anyway, it’s not in my book.
e (irritated) – Well, it is in mine!… And now tell me how Silvera, in your opinion, could possibly know all the languages he claims to know?
c (astonished) – What do you mean, “claims”? Throughout the book, from the beginning to the end, he… (omissus).
e I know, I know. All the Western languages, practically, and the Eastern ones from Hindi to Chinese, quite a few of the southern ones, I’m told, and as for the African ones, I heard him with my own ears… I mean, a certain Raimondo, at the famous Feast at the House of Cosima, heard him with his own ears… joking in Swahili with the Moor, Issah, while the latter served the salad. Do you think it is possible for one single person to have learned all this?
c Well, in forty-five years, for someone who’s always travelled the world —
e In forty-five years? An entire lifetime wouldn’t be enough! Nor would two! Nor ten! Which brings us to the fundamental question.
c And that’s… what?
e The question of time, Signorina!
At this point the exam – or interrogation, whichever it was – was suddenly interrupted, after which its course was inverted and the scene changed radically. But the reason for this turnabout was not Chiara’s phone call. Chiara phoned later. The reason was Raimondo’s brusque reminder of the fundamental question of time.
How had I failed to realize, to work it out by myself, that it was “fundamental” in the sense that everything led towards it and everything depended on it?
And yet time with its threatening pyramids, hateful time which was now urging, pressing and hurtling relentlessly towards the end, had been tripping me up in all its varied forms, under all its deceptive aspects, right from the beginning. My feet had got tangled in its countless threads at every step, from Campo San Bartolomeo to Campo San Stefano and Campo San Giovanni in Bragora, from the Ponte delle Guglie to the Sacca della Misericordia and the enchanted Campiello dell’Abbazia, to the desolate landing stage of San Marcuola… And until one minute earlier I had talked about it, pondered over it, regarding the most varied subjects: lagoon navigation and land transport, fresco painting and Egyptian architecture, drug or “drugs” smuggling, itinerant trades and others, a visit (not a tourist visit! not an organized one!) to a house near Leiden, the difficulty of learning Chinese and Swahili…
I had never linked things up, though. I had never said to myself: all the mysteries of your “mystery man” boil down, fundamentally, to just one.
But now, after the meticulous recapitulation I had been forced to undergo, and based on the obscure, sporadic clues Raimondo himself had thrown out along with his questions, that single reminder was enough. It was as if the word “time”, in my sluggish brain, had flipped the mains switch.
Ten, a hundred bulbs lit up simultaneously, illuminating paths I had taken again and again as if by night, without seeing where I was walking; borders I had crossed blindly, as if in a tunnel; rooms I had already visited as if in the dark, without realizing who or what was inside them. I seemed to see the library itself, where we had been sitting for God knows how long, for the first time, although I remembered looking suspiciously around it when I entered, with the idea that Raimondo’s mysterious informers might still be there. And only now did I realize they were.
On the subject of libraries, however, I should also say that I am not quite so scatterbrained or ignorant as at times I am rated, or as I rate myself, outside of my own job. There are many things I know, more or less vaguely. But often, as happens in an exam, it takes a specific question about them to wipe them from my memory. That was what happened with Raimondo’s “exam”. For example, I knew the Fugger family was “well known in Venice”, and all I would have had to do to remember this fact was link it with the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. But I didn’t. I also knew a certain Asvero had been a cobbler, and I would have remembered it at least vaguely if only I had associated it with a sobriquet that Raimondo had cited in German. But (partly because I know very little German) I had not made the association. Whereas now, after the flipping of Mains-Switch Time, these faulty links or relays flipped in turn and each question found its answer, each tessera of the mosaic slipped into the right place, and even the tiniest details – little incidents I had ignored or allusions I hadn’t taken into account (like David’s joke when, on page 91 of my imaginary textbook, I had admitted to being “a little over thirty”) – suddenly took on a dazzling significance.
I saw that Raimondo was gazing at me with a kind of compassionate sympathy, and I guessed – I knew as surely as if I had seen myself in a mirror – the expression that must be painted on my face: it was the same one I had seen last night on Cosima’s face, at a certain point during her long conversation at the window.
Getting up, I walked a few paces through the library, and I too remained for a long while, as if dazed, in front of one of the large windows, automatically registering a flight of pigeons, grey smoke issuing from a chimney, and the fact that the sky had brightened and it was no longer raining. Then I went to the lectern where Raimondo had left Shakespeare’s sonnets, and where some of his other occult witnesses, his mysterious informers, were still confusedly heaped.
I saw Goethe’s autobiography and volumes by other German authors, some well known and others obscure, next to St John’s Gospel, open at the last page…
I noted, between the Historia of an Irish Benedictine monk and a compendium of Spanish folklore, some Florentine and Sienese Cronache of the thirteenth century, Wordsworth’s collected poems, a drama by the Danish short-story writer Hans Christian Andersen…
Lastly I opened and leafed through a French novel, illustrated by Doré, the title of which ran across the cover in large, fanciful, curlicued and almost illegible romantic characters. But it was a title I knew, one I had expected, and it was not difficult for me to decipher Mr Silvera’s presumed nickname, although he had denied ever having nicknames.
I went back and sat down next to Raimondo, who had not moved. “And now you’ve told me who he is —” I said.
He interrupted me with a gesture, then looked at me more compassionately than ever. “Not ‘who he is’,” he said. “I’ve merely told you who he says he is.”
Mr Silvera would not wish to spend his last few hours in Venice (his ship is to leave this evening, this much he has learned from Lomonaco) at the gates of the Maritime Station while waiting for Signor Michele Turriti. But he knows he is powerless against the delays and inadequacies of bureaucracy, whether high- or low-level.
Besides, he also knows it is his own fault. It is he who has trampled over the regulations. If he had not given in to his craving to stop somewhere and had instead continued, as he should have done, to travel around with Imperial Tours, the Board on which he depends would not have found itself faced with the immediate necessity of procuring him another identity and another job.
And he himself, on the other hand, would not have re-encountered that woman who had already struck him on the plane as attractive. He wouldn’t now be in such a hurry to get back to her. It wouldn’t bother him to be kept waiting by the warehouseman Turriti, who is supposed to give him all his boarding instructions for tonight.
But Turriti – he is finally told by a fellow in a pullover, who comes up to him and asks if he’s been sent by the Studio – is off sick at present. He’ll have to get his boarding instructions and everything else from a certain Albanese, an electrician at the Lighthouse Zone Command. Who, however, isn’t free yet and will come and pick him up in half an hour, say, or an hour at the outside. But not here. Mr Silvera (now Mr Bashevi) will have to go and wait for him on the other side of the Maritime Zone, at the end of the Zattere, where there is a service entrance: you cross the little bridge over the Rio di San Sebastiano and —
“Yes,” says Mr Silvera. “I know where it is.”
But that wasn’t the way one used to go, he thinks as he walks along the bare fondamenta of the Scomenzera canal, where nothing, apart from the facade of a disused church, now recalls the age of the Fugger firm and its not always legal import–export activity. A similar job, he remembers, to the one he is about to embark on now, and which he was entrusted with at the time by the young Hans (or Andreas?) Fugger, when his own name was… what?
Eliach?… De Pinhas?… Ginzberg?…
Difficult to say, after such a long time.
Not that he – Raimondo explained – had ever known much more than I did about that story. After Cosima’s rapt, exclamatory and tormented account, his first informer of any seriousness had been an old family friend, a teacher at the Armenian College of the Mekhitarist Fathers, whom Cosima had not hesitated to rouse in the middle of the night.
This man, though, while furnishing plenty of information and specific bibliographical data, had firmly refused to pronounce himself personally on the case. As far as the Church was concerned, he had said, the rumours of the existence of a Jew, cursed by Our Lord on the way of the Cross, had no historical foundation. The legend had its origin perhaps in the application to the Jew in question, but as a curse, an execration of an ambiguous promise of earthly immortality made to the apostle John, a promise reported by John himself at the end of his Gospel. As for a presumed cobbler, Ahsver, who, on account of his refusal to allow Jesus to rest at the entrance to his shop, had been condemned “never to be able to die” and to continue wandering until the Day of Judgement, there was no scriptural evidence of any kind.
But the Church, Cosima had interrupted feverishly, nonetheless could not rule out —
The Church could rule out nothing, the Mekhitarist Father had said over the phone. But the rule today was one of extreme prudence. We were no longer in the High Middle Ages (when the legend had started to spread throughout Europe), nor even in the age of Paulus von Eilzen, Bishop of Schleswig, who on meeting a Jewish vagabond named Ahasverus in Hamburg, had placed blind trust in his story and had furnished new details about him, assigning him the nickname of Ewige Jude (“Eternal Jew”), which in Italy and other countries had become “Wandering Jew”.
This story had then been taken up by Goethe, von Chamisso, Lenau, Hamerling and numerous others, all the way up to Eugène Sue’s popular novel, but with continual additions and updated interpretations: as if, from time to time, the ex-cobbler had varied his tale in order to make it comprehensible, acceptable to his modern listeners.
The Frenchman Edgar Quinet (he of the homonymous boulevard and metro station behind Gare Montparnasse) had even made a kind of diary out of it, Autobiographical Notebooks, in which the Wandering Jew appeared as a symbol not only of his nomadic and restless race but of all mankind on its incessant, uncertain journey.
But how – Cosima had sought to know from the Mekhitarist over the phone – had things really gone with Christ? Was it possible that Mr Silvera, kindness and tolerance in person (even if at times unbelievably stubborn, as shown in the episode with the consommé), could have slammed his door in the face of the exhausted Nazarene, staggering under the weight of the Cross and asking no more than to rest for an instant on his threshold?
At this point during the conversation at the window – and what would I have given to have been in Cosima’s place then! – David had confined himself by way of reply to one of his vague, inimitable ahs.
But the father from the Armenian College explained that this crude, primitive aspect of the legend had quickly fallen into disrepute. For Goethe things had gone quite differently, as Raimondo himself was able to ascertain later in his library (though he remained convinced that Mr Silvera, whether he had the name Ashver on his passport or not, was no more than a fanatic, a dangerous madman, or an equally dangerous con man, capable of stealing every last penny from myself or Cosima, and possibly from both of us).
According to Goethe, there had been no slammed door. Ahasver’s only crime on seeing Christ in the hands of the soldiery, being dragged to his torment amid the jeers of the crowd, had been to murmur with anger, with pity, with impotent despair, “Ach! Er hat mich nie hören wollen…” (“I told him so, curse it! But he wouldn’t listen”).
And he had told him so a thousand times; he had told the carpenter’s son from Nazareth that turning the other cheek was pointless. That was not the right path, parables were of no use, meekness, resignation to God’s will, got one nowhere. He, the cobbler’s son from Jerusalem, was on the side of the same truth and the same justice, but he had chosen a different path. His countless scars testified to it. And even though he didn’t believe the victory could be achieved the next day, he would never give up, he would always continue to —
“To wander aimlessly,” Someone had then decreed (not poor Christ, who was going off to die, but Someone else who had just taken over or was about to take over Up There: a kind of new Chairman, Cosima had gathered).
Because victory was within reach now. The victory was Golgotha. Even if a cobbler’s son refused to admit it.
Everything up to this point came from the Mekhitarist Father and the silent informers heaped on the reading stand. As for Cosima’s account, it was (and remains) difficult to distinguish between reality and fantasy.
The fact is that not even Raimondo had managed to establish with any precision what David had said to her and what she had gathered, if not indeed imagined, on her own account. With someone like Cosima it is almost impossible to tell. And that is why – I’m sure of it – David had chosen her as his confidante: not because he thought I would never believe him, but in order that certain details, as reported by her, might be variously interpreted or at least greeted with reserve, considered as subject to confirmation.
Besides, for Raimondo it wasn’t a question of distinguishing between fantasy and reality, but between what he judged to be the demented – or calculated – fabrications of the self-styled Ewige Jude and the added fancies of his cousin, who had not confined herself to simply listening to him, this Ewige Jude. She had continually interrupted him, as she often does (and as I do too at times, admittedly, but not to that extent), with the most idiotic and irrelevant of questions, or by asking him for clarification of the most incongruous points.
When, for example, he had told her that he had been acquainted for some time with the Nazarene (who was a few years younger than he was) and his disciples, especially the ex-publican Matthew, she had asked him if he had also known Mary Magdalen when she was still a sinner, and what this Magdalen was like, if by any chance there had ever been anything between them, any “little romance”… To which, obviously, he had replied with another of his ahs.
There were, however, aspects of the legend that had always remained particularly obscure, and Cosima had asked more or less reasonable questions about these, sometimes even intelligent ones, for example: if Mr Silvera was already about forty in AD 33, how did he happen to look no older now?
“Because I never change,” David had answered without quoting (and I must give him credit for it, apart from the fact that it would have been a waste of breath with Cosima) Sonnet CXXIII and its pyramids.
But then it was a very odd thing that… Well, that is: he ought to have become extremely famous, oughtn’t he?
Well, he was already pretty famous, actually.
Yes, but no… That is, she meant: if people who had already met him bumped into him again ten or twenty years later and found him exactly as he used to be, it ought to have been something quite… That is: it ought to have been in all the papers, oughtn’t it? They would have come running from all over to —
True, but things were arranged so this could never happen. He was never allowed to stop, and those he had met could never meet him again. They might perhaps cross his path, pass close by, but without realizing it.
And so in ten years, let’s say, she might be passing through Campo San Fantin or going down Calle della Mandola while he too was passing that way, but she would suddenly have to blow her nose or stop in front of a shop window, so she wouldn’t see him?
Exactly. Things were arranged so she would not be able to see him.
“It seems that poor Cosima,” Raimondo said sarcastically, “at this point practically burst into tears.”
“Poor Cosima? Oh yes? So what about me, then?” I said, bursting into tears myself.
It was a real crisis, I couldn’t stop. Raimondo was unable to calm me and reached the point of bringing me a glass of water, suggesting half an aspirin, addressing me.
“But figlia mia,” he repeated, “just reason for a moment, won’t you?… You can’t really think that he… you can’t seriously believe —”
“I don’t know what I believe!” I continued to sob. “I just know that I… that he… and you keep quiet, please, keep away from me, keep quiet… Because you, I know what you think! You reckon he’s mad or a swindler, a criminal, don’t you! But I tell you you’re wrong. He can’t be. Because he —”
“But I never said —”
“But you think it! Instead of asking yourself where he is now and why he doesn’t come back, why doesn’t he phone, why doesn’t Nava at least get in touch!… What time is it? I don’t even know —”
“Almost one o’clock. Do you want me to phone Nava? Shall I find out?”
“Yes, you call him, please… Thanks… And sorry. It’s just that I —”
I listened to him phoning, and from Nava’s voice, though barely audible, I gathered at once that there was no news. Nava himself, however, should anything happen, would immediately… he would personally take the trouble… et cetera.
“He hasn’t come back, nor has he phoned,” Raimondo confirmed ruefully. “And nobody else has asked after you except Chiara, just now, and she wants you to call her.”
“To hell with Chiara,” I said, drying my eyes.
We sat there for a while without talking. I applied a touch of make-up and in the end I drank my water, took my aspirin.
“Maybe she’s heard something about the villa in Padua,” said Raimondo with forced airiness, making a pitiful attempt to distract me.
“Who?”
“Chiara. It could be that De Bei after all —”
I wasn’t having any of it. I raised my head. “No, look, Raimondo.” I attacked him, taking him curtly by his name. “You can go on thinking I’m the lagoon idiot, and that David —”
“But I wouldn’t even dream —”
“Listen, Raimondo, just reason and tell me this. Explain how David could have managed it, how he could have recognized that Fugger if he hadn’t met him. Because isn’t that what he told Cosima? Isn’t that why you asked me all those questions?”
“Yes, sure. Just that he told Cosima he’d met him in 1508.”
“Whereas I was thinking of somebody still around today and didn’t make the connection at all. The name meant nothing to me, hearing it like that. How do you expect me to think of Fugger the Rich, of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, and of the age in which the Fuggers of the Lily, in Venice —”
“But Chiara told me quite definitely that the coat of arms in the portrait has got ears of corn, not lilies! It was the first thing I asked her this morning.”
“OK, that’s something I don’t understand, and I don’t understand what that fake ‘infiltrator’ has to do with the Zuanich collection. But the fact remains that the fakery came out just because the character was real. Without taking into account the fact that in Venice, in the days of Jakob Fugger, known as the Rich —”
“But isn’t there a famous portrait of Jakob the Rich by Dürer?”
“Yes. There’s a tempera painting in Munich, and an even more famous drawing in Berlin.”
“So he might have recognized him from those.”
“There’s no similarity between them. The Zuanich portrait must be of some other member of the family, much younger for a start. But I was saying that at that time in Venice, at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Fuggers were not only bankers and merchants, but occasionally smugglers, above all of saffron, pepper and other spices. That’s what the ‘drugs’ were! But I only realized this a second ago, I remembered because of the frescoes on the —” The last bulb lit up. I sat there with my mouth open, staring, and I suppose I must really have looked like the lagoon idiot, from the way Raimondo was looking at me.
“What frescoes?” he asked, almost scared, continuing to look at me while I still endeavoured to put things together, to connect.
“Wait a moment… let me think —”
“The ones by Pordenone at Santo Stefano?” he insisted. “Because of the Revenue Office? But at that time there was no Revenue Office nor even any Corps of Engineers. There was a monastery of —”
I silenced him with a gesture and went to the phone. I dialled Chiara’s number. “Chiara?… Listen, it’s just struck me that the fake portrait —”
But she interrupted me to say that she had just called me at the hotel about that very thing: the portrait, at least the one presented at the Sovrintendenza for the exit visa, was not —
“Ah, I knew it!” I said. “I guessed it! But how did they realize?”
My tone of triumph made Raimondo prick up his ears, and with his innate indiscretion he rose and came over to try and listen in. But Chiara was talking so agitatedly and quickly that I myself had trouble following her.
“And the ears of corn?” I asked. “How come there were two ears of corn on the coat of arms instead of… Ah, that was it!”
Raimondo quivered; he was on the point of snatching the receiver from me in his maniacal curiosity. But now I took my revenge. I enjoyed making him suffer for a change, reducing my part in the conversation to the bare minimum.
“Of course… I see… In 1509?… Yes, but more Veneto in 1508, because according to Sanudo’s Diaries… Another member of the family, at any rate. And then… Exactly! The portrait mentioned by Vasari! Which therefore isn’t the Young Man in a Fur Coat at the Alte Pinakothek!… And where did Federhen find it? And Palmarin?.. But what had the grandsons got to do with it?… Ah, I told you she wasn’t as senile as all that!… In any case, we must hand it to Federhen… What?… How did I realize the young man in the portrait…? But didn’t Raimondo explain that to you?… Yes, I’ll explain, but not now. Anyway, it wasn’t I who realized… No, it was a friend of mine who worked for the Fuggers in 1508.”
I hung up. Raimondo was in a state that was painful to see, but I wasn’t moved.
“Couldn’t you get me something to drink?” I said. “A mimosa, a screwdriver, I don’t know.”
Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing irregular, the electrician from the Lighthouse Zone Command explains. The Marie-Jeanne, from Freetown, belongs to a Canadian shipping company. The captain is above suspicion. And the cargo loaded here in Venice (somewhat hurriedly perhaps, with the omission of one or two formalities) corresponds more or less to the description on the lists. So it might seem there isn’t any need for an accompanier.
It’s just that in some of the destination ports problems could arise, there could be trouble, so it’ll be a question of arranging things, smoothing things over, oiling the wheels… But the company couldn’t be asked to do this. Nor could the captain, who knows nothing about it. Mr Bashevi’s “contact” will be the second officer, a much more easy-going sort, whom they’ll be meeting shortly.
Mr Bashevi looks at the time. “How shortly?” he asks.
Just the time needed to get from here, the Lighthouse Zone Command, to the Scomenzera canal, where the Marie-Jeanne is moored. But this evening, at nine o’clock, he had better present himself at the Zattere entrance, where someone will be waiting for him. The Marie-Jeanne leaves at eleven.
At the beginning of 1509, or of 1508 according to the Venetian calendar, the frescoes of the reconstructed Fondaco dei Tedeschi were completed, said the ex-lagoon idiot at last (who was a Fowke’s agent after all, and knew certain secrets of Venice better than the pretentious, arrogant, insufferable Raimondo). But those frescoes, she continued, had nothing to do with Pordenone. They were by Giorgione, who had been commissioned to paint them by Fugger the Rich himself; this latter, for all his riches, made a fuss about paying, as is recounted in Sanudo’s famous diaries. That was why Giorgione painted a portrait of one of his nephews (Hans, perhaps, or Andreas; at any rate one of those working at the Fondaco) but not of their stingy Uncle Jakob… “Are you following?” I asked with a slight smile.
Raimondo had been unable to swallow a single drop of his screwdriver, he was quivering so much. “Yes, but get on with it, get to the point, please…” he pleaded.
So: the frescoes, as is well known, deteriorated with time, and today all that is left is an almost illegible fragment (The Nude) at the Accademia. Whereas the portrait, on canvas, ended up in the hands of Vasari, who recounts that he kept it in his “book of drawings”. After which all trace of it was lost until someone, in the mid nineteenth century, claimed to identify it with a vaguely Giorgionesque portrait of a young man in furs, at the Alte Pinakothek. “Except that the portrait in question measures twenty-eight by twenty-one inches. And does it strike you as likely that a picture of that size could be the same one Vasari says he kept in his ‘book’, which measured eighteen by twelve inches at the most?”
“No,” the poor chap said resignedly, “it doesn’t seem likely.”
There you are then. Therefore, as early as 1871, Cavalcaselle rejected the identification and attributed the Munich picture to Palma il Vecchio… In 1926, Berenson followed suit, while other scholars suggested Mancini or Cariani… The search for the missing portrait continued… Until an Italo-German antiquarian with few scruples but a sharp eye spotted in the home of a patrician family of Vimercate (near Milan) a small Portrait of a Young Man; it had been badly restored, but under its repaintings she thought she recognized the hand of the master from Castelfranco. Furthermore, on the young man’s coat of arms there were two lilies which Anita Federhen – this was the antiquarian’s name – did not take long to recognize as those of the Fuggers, while the crude, boorish owners had always taken them for those of the Medici. And once she had identified the lilies, how could she fail to decide on an immediate purchase? Federhen —
“But what about the ears of corn? What have they got to do with it? Where did they come from?”
A little patience, please. And also a brief retracing of footsteps. Let us remember that Jakob Fugger was not above supplementing his already colossal income by smuggling pepper, saffron et cetera, on which Venice imposed enormous duties not only in its own ports but in all those under its control along the Spice Route. Fugger the Rich did not, however, personally oversee this questionable branch of his activities. One of his nephews dealt with it, hiring clandestine and cosmopolitan operators to accompany the cargoes and sort out trouble, smooth over difficulties, make necessary settlements. It can come as no surprise therefore that a traveller, cosmopolitan by race, the Wandering Jew, passing through Venice in 1509, which is to say—
“In 1508 more Veneto.”
“In 1508, as he later reported to Cosima, met up with the young Fugger for business reasons, the very year the latter was having his portrait painted by Giorgione. And so it’s clear why he had no trouble recognizing it in the Zuanich collection five centuries later, although the Zuanich portrait was a fake. Do you understand?”
“No!”
“Because you don’t want to. Because you persist in thinking David’s story is a pack of lies.”
“I don’t persist in thinking this. I think he truly believes what he says. But then, obviously, I have to think he’s completely —”
“Well then, wait another moment. Think of Federhen, who finds herself in possession of a Giorgione for a few million lire, which she could sell abroad for billions. What does she do? It would be dead easy to take it out in her suitcase but pointless, because as soon as the news of the Giorgione discovery got out, as soon as the photos hit the papers, the ex-owners would recognize it and the Italian authorities would ask for it back. Instead, what she needs is to be able to take it out with an official visa. Then they could whistle for it! And this is where the Zuanich collection and her accomplice Palmarin come into the story. But look, if these digressions don’t interest you, if you think I’m taking too long over it, I —”
“Come on, don’t torment me!”
“Well then, do you know what you do – or at least what you used to do, because they’re much more careful nowadays – if you want to export a valuable drawing with a visa? You slip it in among a whole load of rubbishy drawings, you take the whole lot along to the Sovrintendenza, and after a quick glance, bang bang bang, they stamp the whole lot through. But you couldn’t do this with a newly discovered Giorgione. A Giorgione is a Giorgione, after all, and as Federhen recognized it, so might they.”
“Quite. I imagine so.”
“And what they had to do was distract that glance, however quick it might be. It was essential that they should never be able to suspect the infiltrator. Or they shouldn’t be able to suspect it any more. As if they had already seen it over and over again and —”
“Good God!” shouted Raimondo, who isn’t ignorant. “You mean the infiltrator in the Zuanich collection was a purpose-made copy? Put there deliberately, before the real picture was presented to the Sovrintendenza?”
“Of course. The subject, apart from the coat of arms, was the same. But the Giorgionesque stamp of the original, already half-cancelled by the restoration, had been so greatly altered in the copy that they suggested nothing but a crude, grotesque eighteenth-century forgery, perfectly in keeping with the rest of the collection. And so not only collectors, connoisseurs and professionals like my humble self but also the functionaries from the Sovrintendenza and the Sovrintendente in person looked over it countless times without any reaction beyond disappointment and boredom. After which, when the authentic portrait was presented for its visa along with the rest of the collection, they weren’t going to carry out another check. The only danger was that if they spotted the Fugger lilies, they too might be reminded of the lost Giorgione portrait.”
“And so?”
“So no problem, because the original lilies had been camouflaged by ears of corn. One more repainting, what did it matter… The fact is, they might have given it the visa this very morning, if it hadn’t been for —”
“For me? Because I phoned Chiara this morning?”
“Yes, when all’s said and done, yes… Because when you told her about the portrait, Chiara got curious, she went along to the Sovrintendenza to have a closer look at it, and then they got curious too. They X-rayed the picture, saw the lilies under the freshly painted ears of corn, and sent for Federhen and Palmarin urgently.”
“And they told the whole story?”
“They had to. Also that they’d slipped the copy into the Zuanich collection with the old lady’s connivance. But what I was asking you was this – how did this whole fraud come out? Who was it who recognized an unknown young man in a fake portrait which didn’t have any lilies at all, on the surface or below it? And how could he have recognized him today, if he hadn’t known him then? And that is, if he himself were not…”
Raimondo said nothing for a long while. Then we were interrupted by a phone call (from his curly-haired choreographer, as far as I could gather) which kept him at the receiver for a quarter of an hour.
But in the meantime my feeling of triumph had abandoned me. Because I imagine that till then not even I had truly believed in the “revelation made to Cosima”, while the hypothesis of the madman or the con man had left me with a kind of alternative, some kind of hope… And now, with my impeccable reasoning, I had finished by cutting the ground away from under my own feet. Mr Silvera was the Ewige Jude, and the only thing I could hope for now was to see him again for the last time.
Though brief, the phone call had prevented Oreste Nava from taking immediate steps, and none of his assistants – least of all that ignoramus, Luigi – is now able to take control of the situation.
The famous operatic artist had entered, bringing with him a retinue of interviewers and photographers, and the undefended doors were beginning to let in a steady trickle of admirers and autograph hunters: the fans, a race whose very name Nava detests and which it is in any case his strict duty to keep out of the hotel.
Having hung up, he bustles out from behind the desk, imperiously signals to the clerks and porters to see to the door and nothing else, and hastens towards the stout figure with the air of one wishing to defend him. He sees clearly that the man would like nothing more than to be left to handle things by himself, improvise a press conference there and then (he must be here for a recital at the expense of some rich foundation; the Fenice on its own could never afford a celebrity of this calibre), and as a finale (despite the fact that one or two clients in the lobby are openly showing their annoyance, while others, including the broad-beamed lady from 104 and the pseudo-English couple from 421, are approaching him with toothy smiles) throw in a performance of the cavatina from Ernani. But his feebly proffered refusals grant Nava the pretext he needs.
His braided sleeve solicitously encircles the fat man’s shoulders, while his other stately hand turns away the most pressing interviewers, and a minute later they are both safe and sound in the service elevator, on their way to the pre-booked suite, 212.
Trouble is, I’ll have to look after this shit myself now, thinks Oreste Nava. Whose immediate desire, after the phone call, was to inform the distressed princess from 346 of it in person.
There was a knock, but not a theatrical one, at the door, and Alvise took half a step into the library without releasing the door handle. With his bald head, his red and black striped jacket, his deafness and Venetian accent, nobody would have taken him for a messenger from a classical tragedy. He was not Juliet’s friar, Cleopatra’s soldier, or the kerux who urgently announces the arrival of Agamemnon. If anything, he was a bumpkin from some Goldoni comedy.
“Sior Basegio’s here,” he announced.
“Who?” asked Raimondo. “What does he want?”
Alvise shrugged. “Sior Basegio,” he repeated.
“But who is he, has someone sent him? Has he come about the mattresses?”
Alvise’s face remained empty and innocent, leaving it unclear whether he didn’t know or hadn’t heard.
Raimondo left the room testily and a minute later I heard Signor Basegio’s voice as he explained that he had called the hotel and heard I was here. But the phone here was always engaged and so —
It wasn’t the man about the mattresses, it was David.
“Of course, naturally,” Raimondo was saying. “You were quite right to come here.”
Formalities. Good manners. Thank you. Not at all. But won’t you give me your coat? It’s no trouble. Don’t mention it. Do come in. Won’t you come this way? The only thing missing was “your servant, Sir”.
All this in place of flights of birds and other premonitory signs or phenomena – thunder and lightning, eclipses of the sun, prophetic howls from Cassandra. During these periods of unbearable tension while I waited for the response from the oracle, there was nothing to help me guess my fate other than the polite commonplaces and affable tones of the two approaching voices. How to interpret them? What did they promise?
In my wish for favourable auspices, I clutched at their well-mannered ordinariness. Their exchange evinced no urgency or agitation and therefore there had been some deferment, his departure was not imminent, David could stay until tomorrow, or even till Monday.
But at the same time I told myself that our meeting on the plane had also taken place under the sign of ordinariness. I remembered too that we had met up again in Campo San Bartolomeo without any quakings of the earth or blazing of the heavens. And it came back to me that I had incongruously thought – right here in Raimondo’s house the evening I arrived, as we sat down to dinner chatting – that the Last Supper might well have begun that way: with the Apostles sitting down and exchanging commonplaces and the day’s news, is your Aunt Ruth any better, what did that Pharisee say then, but is old Ezra really going to marry young Abigail —
I found I had risen to my feet, and when David appeared sideways on in the doorway, I had assumed – God knows how – an ordinary attitude, an ordinary smile and an absurdly ordinary voice, which now emerged and asked: “And so?”
“This evening,” he said. “I have to leave this evening at nine o’clock.”
“By plane.”
“No, by sea. A cargo ship.”
“But from the Zattere,” said Raimondo, he too seized by the demon of precision. “Not from Marghera.”
“From the Zattere,” David confirmed. And he added, as if there were some connection: “I’ve got a new passport, my name’s Bashevi now.”
“I see,” said Raimondo, meaning perhaps he now saw why Alvise had heard “Basegio”.
All three of us talked like spring-loaded toys, and in the wound-down silence that followed I did not perceive even a distant echo of Circe’s cries, the desperate laments of Dido. But what else could we possibly do in the almost twenty-first century?
We were obliged to sit down, and with an iron hand the century imposed its tranquillizing formalities – cigarettes, offer of coffee, ah, the ashtray, and, on David’s part, a brief account of the bureaucratic complications that had held him up. A bland, sugar-coated conversation, almost a TV talk show with a Very Special Guest, greeted by the Showgirl with a certain trepidation and interviewed by the Host with all the necessary caution.
Sitting in his deep armchair, with his long legs crossed, his trouser turn-ups and shoes (battered but solid English walking shoes) still rain-soaked, the ex-Mr Silvera answered any question we put to him.
“And do you often find yourself changing identity?” Raimondo the Host asked with respectful interest.
Depending on circumstances, the Guest answered placidly. Some identities could be kept up for years, at other times things would turn out in such a way that they had to be modified. And then at a certain point, obviously, the date of birth didn’t square.
“Yes, of course…” The Host glided over this while the Showgirl smiled embarrassedly towards the audience. “And the problem of a job? Getting by financially, shall we say?”
It was the same thing there too, explained the great traveller. Sometimes you got into a fairly regular job, like the one for Imperial Tours; at other times you had to accept work of a more dubious or more eventful nature, or get by day to day, living off your wits. However, things were arranged so he could… he always had to… continue his journey without stopping.
“But here in Venice you stopped for three days,” the Showgirl intervened vivaciously.
Ah, but illicitly, said the Guest, illicitly! And now, although he had no regrets, he was paying dearly for it.
A little bit too dearly, repeats the Guest to himself. But this does not exempt him from remorse, nor does it prevent him from feeling guilty towards the woman who is sitting on the divan in front of him, and on whom – while he furnishes his airy admissions, clarifications and explanations – he avoids resting his eyes.
He would like to say more and explain things better to her, to justify himself yet further. He would like, in short, at the very least to say sorry. But in the meantime he is grateful for the level of bland, detached allusiveness on which her affectionate friend maintains the conversation. And he takes advantage of it to put off the moment when they will find themselves alone, facing their last afternoon, their last few hours together, on leaving this house.