I was feeling so guilty, for so many different reasons, that I did something unprecedented for me. Of my own accord, not impelled by any authority, I betook myself to church to make my confession. I did not go to our confino’s San Felice, for its old Pare Nunziata knew me as well as the local sbiri did, and I desired a more disinterested auditor. So I went all the way to the Basilica of San Marco. None of the priests there knew me, but the bones of my namesake saint lay there, and I hoped they would be sympathetic.
In that great vaulted nave, I felt like a bug, diminished by all the glowing gold and marble and the holy notables aloft and aloof in the ceiling mosaics. Everything in that most beautiful building is bigger than real life, including the sonorous music, which brays and bleats from a rigabèlo that seems too small to contain so much noise. San Marco’s is always thronged, so I had to stand in line before one of the confessionals. Finally, I got in and got launched on my purgation: “Father, I have too freely followed where my curiosity has led me, and it has led me astray from the paths of virtue … .” I went on in that vein for some time, until the priest impatiently requested that I not regale him with
all
the circumstances preliminary to my misdemeanors. So, albeit reluctantly, I fell back on formula—“have sinned in thought and word and deed”—and the pare decreed some number of Paternosters and Avemarìas, and I left the box to begin on them, and I got hit by lightning.
I mean that almost literally, so vivid was the shock I felt when I first laid eyes on the Dona Ilaria. I did not then know her name, of course; I knew only that I was looking at the most beautiful woman I had yet seen in my life, and that my heart was hers. She was just then coming out of a confessional herself, so her veil was up. I could not believe that a lady of such radiant loveliness could have had anything more than trivial to confess, but, before she lowered her veil, I saw a sparkle as of tears in her glorious eyes. I heard a creak as the priest shut the slide in the box she had just quitted, and he too came out. He said something to the other supplicants waiting in line there, and they all mumbled grouchily and dispersed to other lines. He joined the Dona Ilaria and both of them knelt in an empty pew.
In a sort of trance, I moved closer and slid into the pew across the aisle from them, and fixed my gaze sideways on them. Though they both kept their heads bent, I could see that the priest was a young man and handsome in an austere kind of way. You may not credit this, but I felt a twinge of jealousy that my lady—
my lady
—had not chosen a drier old stick to tell her troubles to. Both he and she, as I could tell even through her veil, were moving their lips prayerfully, but they were doing so alternately. I supposed he must be leading her in some litany. I might have been consumed with curiosity to know what she could have said in the confessional to require such intimate attention from her confessor, but I was too much occupied with devouring her beauty.
How do I describe her? When we view a monument or an edifice, any such work of art or architecture, we remark on this and that element of it. Either the combination of details makes it handsome, or some particular detail is so noteworthy as to redeem the whole from mediocrity. But the human face is never viewed as an accretion of details. It either strikes us immediately as beautiful in its entirety, or it does not. If we can say of a woman only that “she has nicely arched eyebrows,” then clearly we had to look hard to see that, and the rest of her features are little worth remarking.
I can say that Ilaria had a fine and fair complexion and hair of a glowing auburn color, but many other Venetian women do, too. I can say that she had eyes so alive that they seemed to be lighted from within instead of reflecting the light without. That she had a chin one would want to cup in the palm of a hand. That she had what I have always thought of as “the Verona nose,” because it is seen most often there—thin and pronounced, but shapely, like a sleek boat’s fine prow, with the eyes deepset on either side.
I could praise her mouth especially. It was exquisitely shaped and gave promise of being soft if ever other lips should press upon it. But more than that. When Ilaria and the priest rose together after their orisons and genuflected, she curtsied again to him and said some few words in a soft voice. I do not recall what they were, but let me suppose that they were these: “I will join you behind the chantry, Father, after the compline.” I do recall that she concluded by saying “Ciao,” because that is the languid Venetian way of saying
schiavo,
“your slave,” and I thought it an oddly familiar way of saying goodbye to a priest. But all that mattered then was the manner in which she spoke: “I will j-join you behind the ch-chantry, Father, after the compline. Ci-ciao.” Each time she pouted her lips to form the
ch
or
j
sound, she stammered ever so slightly and thus prolonged the pout. It made her lips look ready and waiting for a kiss. It was delicious.
I instantly forgot that I was supposed to be petitioning for absolution of other misdeeds, and tried to follow her when she left the church. She could not possibly have been aware of my existence, but she departed from San Marco’s in a way that almost seemed intended to discourage pursuit. Moving more swiftly and adroitly than I could have done even if chased by a sbiro, she flickered through the crowd in the atrium and vanished from my sight. Marveling, I went all the long way around the basilica’s outside, then up and down all the arcades surrounding the vast piazza. Mystified, I several times crisscrossed the piazza itself, through clouds of pigeons—then the smaller piazzetta, from the bell tower down to the two pillars at the waterfront. Despairing, I returned to the great church and looked in every last chapel and the sanctuary and the baptistery. Desolated, I even went up the stairs to the loggia where the golden horses stand. At last, heartbroken, I went home.
After a tormented night, I went again the next day to comb the church and its environs. I must have looked like a wandering soul seeking solace. And the woman might have been a wandering angel who had alighted only the once; she was not to be found. So I made my mournful way to the neighborhood of the boat people. The boys gave me a cheery salute, and Doris gave me a glance of disdain. When I responded with a forlorn sigh, Ubaldo was solicitous and asked what ailed me. I told him—I had lost my heart to a lady and then lost my lady—and all the children laughed, except Doris, who looked suddenly stricken.
“You have largazze on your mind these days,” Ubaldo said. “Do you intend to be the cock of every hen in the world?”
“This is a full-grown woman, not a girl,” I said. “And she is too sublime even to be thought of as …”
“As a pota!” several of the boys chorused.
“Anyway,” I said, in a bored drawl, “as regards the pota, all women are alike.” Man of the world, I had now seen a grand total of two females in the nude.
“I do not know about that,” one boy said ruminatively. “I once heard a much-traveled mariner tell how to recognize a woman of the most utterly desirable bedworthiness.”
“Tell us! Tell!” came the chorus.
“When she stands upright, with her legs pressed together, there should be a little, a tiny little triangle of daylight between her thighs and her artichoke.”
“Does your lady show daylight?” someone asked me.
“I have seen her the once, and that was in church! Do you suppose she was undressed in church?”
“Well, then, does Malgarita show daylight?”
I said, and so did several other boys, “I did not think to look.”
Malgarita giggled, and giggled again when her brother said, “You could not have seen, anyway. Her bottom hangs down too far behind, and her belly in front.”
“Let us look at Doris!” someone shouted. “Olà, Doris! Stand with your legs together and raise your skirt.”
“Ask a real woman!” Malgarita sneered. “That one would not know whether to lay eggs or give milk.”
Instead of lashing back with some retort, as I would have expected of her, Doris sobbed and ran away.
All the chaffering was amusing enough, and maybe even educational, but my concern was elsewhere. I said, “If I can find my lady again, and point her out to you fellows, perhaps you could manage to follow her better than I did, and tell me where she lives.”
“No, grazie!” Ubaldo said firmly. “To molest a highborn lady is to gamble between the pillars.”
Daniele snapped his fingers. “That reminds me. I heard that there is to be a frusta at the pillars this very afternoon. Some poor bastard who gambled and lost. Let us go and see it.”
And so we did. A frusta is a public scourging and the pillars are those two I have mentioned, near the waterfront in Samarco’s piazzetta. One of the columns is dedicated to my namesake saint and the other to Venice’s earlier patron saint Teodoro, called Todaro here. All public punishments and executions of malefactors are carried out there—“between Marco and Todaro,” as we say.
The centerpiece that day was a man we boys all knew, though we did not know his name. He was universally called only II Zudìo, which means either the Jew or the usurer, or more commonly both. He resided in the burghèto set aside for his race, but the narrow shop in which he changed money and lent money was on the Mercerìa, where we boys lately did most of our thieving, and we had often seen him huddled at his counting table. He had hair and beard like a sort of curly red fungus going gray; he wore on his long coat the round yellow patch proclaiming him a Jew and the red hat that proclaimed him a Western Jew.
There were numerous others of his race in the crowd that afternoon, most in red hats, but some in the yellow head-wrappings signifying their Levantine origin. They would probably not have come of their own will to see a fellow Jew whipped and humiliated, for which reason Venetian law makes it mandatory for all adult male Jews to attend on such occasions. Of course, the crowd consisted mostly of non-Jews, gathered just for the sport, and an unusually high proportion were female.
The zudìo had been convicted of a fairly common offense—the gouging of excessive interest on some loan—but gossip had him guilty of more spicy intrigues. There was a widespread rumor that he, unlike any sensible Christian pawnbroker who dealt only in jewels and plate and other valuables, would take in pawn and lend good money for letters of mere paper, though they had to be letters of an indiscreet or compromising nature. Since so many Venetian women employed scribes to write for them letters of just that nature, or to read to them the letters of that nature which they received, perhaps the women wanted to look at the zudìo and speculate on whether he held incriminating copies of their correspondence. Or maybe, as so many women so often do, they simply wished to see a man flogged.
The usurer was accompanied to the flogging post by several uniformed gastaldi guards and his assigned comforter, a member of the lay Brotherhood of Justice. The brother, to remain anonymous in that degrading capacity of comforter to a Jew, wore a full gown and a hood over his head with eyeholes cut in it. A preco of the Quarantia stood where I had stood on the day before—high above the crowd on San Marco’s loggia of the four horses—and read in a ringing voice:
“Inasmuch as the convict Mordecai Cartafilo has behaved very cruelly, against the peace of the State and the honor of the Republic and the virtue of its citizens … he is sentenced to endure thirteen vigorous strokes of the frusta, and thereafter to be confined in a pozzo of the Palace Prison while the Signori della Notte make inquiry of him into further particulars of his crimes … .”
The zudìo, when by custom he was asked if he had any complaint to make of the judgment, merely growled uncaringly, “Nè tibi nè catabi.” The wretch may have shrugged coolly enough before he felt the scourge, but he did other things during the next several minutes. First he grunted, then he cried out, and then he howled. I glanced around at the crowd—the Christians were all nodding approvingly and the Jews were trying to look elsewhere—and my glance stopped at a certain face, and locked there, and I began sidling through the pack of people to get nearer to my lost lady found.
There came a shriek from behind me, and Ubaldo’s voice calling, “Olà, Marco, you are not listening to the music of the sinagòga!”
But I did not turn around. I was taking no chance of letting the woman slip from my sight this time. She was again unveiled, the better to watch the frusta, and again I feasted my eyes on her beauty. As I got closer I saw that she stood next to a tall man who wore a cloak with a hood closely drawn about his face; he was nearly as anonymous as the Brother of Justice at the flogging post. And when I stood very close I heard that man murmur to my lady, “Then it was you who spoke to the snout.”
“The J-Jew deserved it,” she said, the delicious pout lingering briefly on her lips.
He murmured, “A chicken before a tribunal of foxes.”
She laughed lightly but without humor. “Would you have preferred that I let the ch-chicken go to the confessional, Father?”
I wondered if the lady was younger than she looked, that she addressed every man as father. But then I sneaked a look up into the man’s hood, I being shorter than he was, and saw that it was the San Marco priest of the day before. Wondering why he should be going about with his vestments hidden, I listened some more, but their disjointed conversation gave me no hint.