This Pisan, in his own way, is as persistent as the assassin. He never lets go, seems to have but one purpose in this life. One day I may be forced to throttle him. My only refuge is silence. I will speak when I am ready to speak. When the tale is complete, then it will begin.
The candle flame wavered as Rusticello eyed Marco, his difficult companion, thin of face and form, sitting cross-legged on his straw, gazing fixedly not out the window, as Rusticello sensed, but at it, the perfect black square, compass of night, jewel of nothingness.
Without altering his concentration, Marco spoke. “Am I mad, that I find immense pleasure in the perfection of the window's shape? The square, the square into which all other shapes fit; a form befitting emptiness, a nest of space, the bit of peace it provides me.”
Rusticello, on one elbow, said, “It faces east. Venice. Your home.”
“And beyond.” Marco looked about the cell. “And here we wait, inside this perfect cube.”
“Three nights now I have heard you cry out in your sleep.”
“Yes, what of it?”
“You cry ‘Maria, Anna. Maria, Anna.’ It rends my heart to hear you.”
“My wife and daughter.” Marco bowed his head and stared at the floor. “My father is old but has great wealth. He will soon buy my freedom. I am sure of it.”
“The roads between here and Venice are slow. Such negotiations are delicate and can take a long time.”
Marco again stared at the window. “Maria has lovely green eyes, and Anna, my baby, has thick curly hair. I dreamt of them again last night.”
Rusticello nodded, then signaled a change in subject by sitting fully up and leaning back against the mottled stone wall. “Do you see, it does not matter whether your tale is true or not. Your dreams are just as real.”
Marco turned from the window, his salt and pepper beard disheveled, his tired eyes gazing hard at Rusticello. “Why is it you always come back to the same subject? You are a dog gnawing a bone. How can you believe my tale when I myself question it, question whether it truly happened?”
Rusticello took his turn gazing out the window. “Either what you say is true, in the eyes of God, or it is the most magnificent Devil's lie ever concocted. Either way, it makes no difference.” Rusticello tried prompting him. “Tell me about your fellow travellers. What were they like?”
Marco thought a moment.
“Did they have beards?”
“Yes, they had beards. And Niccolo was the taller. No, I believe Maffeo was the taller.”
“Perhaps they were the same height?”
“It is possible.” Grackles could be heard grumbling in the distance. Marco stood and looked into the mirror. “Niccolo had a large wart on his left hand– or perhaps the right.” Marco shook his head. “No, no, I remember nothing. They are but shades now, ghosts of memory. Impossible to hold.” He hardened again into silence.
Perhaps the Venetian is playing a game to ridicule me, a bit of sport to pass the time. Perhaps the Venetian never went further east than Curzola or Modon. Rusticello looked into Marco's face but could read nothing there.
“How long have we been here?” Marco stretches out and stares at the ceiling.
Rusticello sits with his back against the wall, searching his hairy arm for a flea. “I have been marking the days.” He points to the wall, then peers at it. He slumps back against the cool damp stone. “And so here we rot knowing nothing of our fate. Bah! Does it matter?” Rusticello pauses and hangs his head. “God in Heaven, I am hungry. There is nothing I would not give for a joint of pork, or better yet, a roast capon.”
“I, a man of action, who has travelled to the ends of the earth, further than any man alive, am now stuck in this room.” Marco glances about as if seeing the four walls for the first time. “Stuck,” he points down, “in this room, doomed to travel here,” he points to his right temple. “Here!”
Rusticello stood with his back against the wall of their cell, arms hanging at his sides, his palms flat against the sweating stone. That morning they had awakened to find an acacia leaf on the floor of their cell. Thinking it had blown in through the window in the middle of the night, Rusticello called it an omen, telling them they would soon be free. This possibility of freedom he looked upon with mixed feelings– if it came too soon he would never have the tale from the Venetian.
Rusticello glanced about. “I sometimes believe you are the Antichrist whose arrival was prophesied last century by Joachim da Fiore in his calculated ravings.” Rusticello paused, thinking, head cocked. “Perhaps it would help unstop your tongue if I were to tell you a story. I know many. Know you the tales of Chretien de Troyes? Perhaps you have heard his romances from the court of Champagne?”
Rusticello's question was met with silence.
“He claimed to have found the written source for his tale in a book in the library of Saint Peter's Cathedral in Beauvais. A lie, of course. A vain attempt to lend ecclesiastical authority to his work.”
Marco remained still.
“His tale, Cliges, begins and ends in Constantinople, a place you tell me you have seen. Perhaps the story would interest you? No? Another, perhaps? Maybe the one titled Erec and Enide which begins, ‘The peasant has a proverb: What you scorn may be worth much more than you think’ No? Then perhaps the one titled The Knight With a Lion.”
Rusticello was sure he had noticed the slightest possible twitch in the Venetian's neck, a stiffening, a subtle turning of the ear. He went on, gazing at the ceiling.
“Yes, I remember now. He said, ‘Every lover is in prison….’ I remember it. It is all coming back to me now. Would you like to hear it?”
Rusticello was shocked to see Marco turn to gaze wide-eyed at him. “Yes, tell me.”
In the parchment-coloured light of an early spring evening, Marco and Rusticello both lay stretched out listening to the last birds singing in the dying sun. The warm damp rose from the earth and flowed in their window. The first star gleamed in the square of darkening blue.
“If we could remember everything we would be overwhelmed,” Rusticello said to the ceiling. “The flood of faces and images would destroy us.”
Marco grunted. “The past is useless. Memory is nothing more than dreaming backwards. Nothing happens in the past.” Marco raised himself up on one elbow and looked at the Pisan. “Are you an alchemist?”
“I have some knowledge of the alchemical arts. Let me tell you what I have learned about the possibilities of base matter.”
Flopping onto his back again Marco sighed audibly, “No. Don't.”
Later, from the anonymous dark, Marco's voice came, so quietly Rusticello thought at first that the Venetian was talking to himself. “I once knew an alchemist, an Arab, our guide. He was young although his brown face had the wrinkles of an old sage, like the crackle-glaze of a dried stream. He learned about alchemy from the academy at Alexandria, through the Nestorians. He learned also from the Chinese, on his few visits there. Don't excite yourself, my friend. I am not about to divulge the tale you have long awaited. But his face appeared to me just this moment. This Arab knew about the green lion that devours the sun. A lot of good it did him, in the end. At any rate, he knew the treatises of Jabir ibn Hayan and al-Razi and Avicenna and Zosimos of Panopolis; he knew the enigmatic text called Turbus with its anagrams, allegories and myths. He knew of the eagle-lion, the dragon with the magic carbuncle in its head. I saw his face a moment ago, but it's fading away.” Marco paused.
“Yes?”
Marco passed his hand over his eyes. “A curse on the Genoese. I long for my young wife, my child. I can no longer remember their faces either. Of necessity, I have put them out of my mind. Now I have your face instead. Your face to gaze at day in and day out, for weeks and months on end, its haggard beaten look, like an old sad dog. And you have mine.”
The cold penetrated every stone of their cell. Cold coming up from the floor, down from the ceiling. A damp ever-present chill. Rusticello paced back and forth, a moth-gouged brown blanket wrapped tightly round him.
“Blast the faceless whoresons who put us here! It must be colder inside than out.”
“Mmm,” agreed Marco from his pile of straw where he lay shivering with a blanket pulled up to his chin. “At least it dulls the fleas.”
The small sliding window at waist level in the thick door opened. A meaty hand with thick clouded nails pushed a steaming bowl, grey and chipped, through the opening. Rusticello bent down and took the bowl in both palms (like a ritual of the Mass, Marco thought), took three steps and handed it to Marco who was in the process of sitting up. He returned for his own bowl and the window slid shut.
They began slurping the soup, happy to have something to warm their innards, Marco using an “apostle” spoon, one of the few personal possessions he had been allowed to salvage from his ship. The spoon boasted a handle in the shape of the apostle Mark. It had been a gift from Marco's godfather.
Marco held the spoon in the air, halfway to his mouth, and looked into it. “What do you suppose it is? The meat, I mean.”
Rusticello nodded. “Cat.”
Marco did not hesitate but shoved the spoonful of soup into his mouth.
They ate in silence.
After a while Rusticello glanced up at the window. “It's snowing.”
Marco looked too. Placing the bowl carefully aside, he struggled to his feet, walked to the window and stood taking deep breaths of the outside air. “Snow has a distinct smell. I love the smell of snow.”
“Does it snow in Venice?”
“On occasion. It is strange. This moment, just this moment, I feel I have never been happier in my life. Is it not strange? To feel this? Here?”
Rusticello kept eating. “Cat,” was all he said.
Marco, standing at the window, was mumbling to himself. He stopped and turned around.
Rusticello pointed. “Your soup. It's getting cold.”