The Lion of Venice

1997

Prologue

In the year 1298, soon after my return from the East, the Genoese threw me in prison. I shared a filthy cell with a Pisan who called himself Rusticello. He had a bad smell and a wheedling, bothersome voice.

Marco awakens on his bed of straw, the stained wall before his eyes assembling itself out of the shards of his dreams.

He sees cracks on the wall splay out like sprigs of lightning on a map, twining across a thousand leagues, ten thousand parasang, a hundred thousand li. With his finger he absently traces his journey, winding and unpredictable as birdsong.

He supposes he is lucky to be alive.

When Marco had first returned from the East, the Doge of Venice appointed him Gentleman-Commander of a galley with a hundred oar, part of a Venetian fleet that engaged the Genoese in the Greek sea. To the boom of kettle drums and cry of horns, the Venetians sailed straight into battle and prompt defeat. Marco and seven thousand others were captured, their ships towed backwards to the port of Genoa, the banners bearing their proud lions, dragging in the waves.

He had watched with the other Venetian sailors, stunned, as they landed at Genoa under a low grey sky and the despairing commander of the Venetian fleet leapt onto the quay and beat his brains out against a stone bench.

Then Marco was thrown into a prison cell. That was three days ago.

Marco rolls over. Rusticello, sitting across the room, stares at him.

Dream?

Rusticello, a scribe and poet from Pisa, arrested for an unknown crime, shares the cell. A specialist in chivalry and its lore, the Pisan had garnered a smattering of fame for his Provencal romances.

Marco gazes at Rusticello without speaking. Who is this Pisan? Fifty unenviable years on his shoulders, his lank dirty hair an unseemly length, fat as a friar with thick soft hands to match, nails yellow, half his teeth broken or missing, long ears with fleshy lobes, tufts of hair growing from his nostrils. An obsessive mind, too, with penetrating eyes, round and small as peas. And a sour smell, as of grain fermenting. I suppose I will smell as bad soon enough.

Already it seems to Marco he has spent a lifetime staring at the four walls, trapped with the disputatious Pisan whose insistent, grating voice has worked at him as a knife scrapes at a mussel clinging to seaside rocks.

A salt mist drifts through the square window. Marco sniffs the air– the open sea. He fills his lungs with it.

Rusticello speaks, as if the night were but a momentary pause in their conversation of the previous evening. So you see, Marco, I myself have penned several romance tales and I can tell you this–a work already exists. It exists in eternity; we can only hope to reveal it as it coils down out of the light and into time, where all men can see it.

From his pile of straw, Marco scoffs. All men? Even the great Khan from his gold-lined tomb? Pah! If I have learned anything, I have learned this: the uselessness of letters.

I take note of your cynicism, but one must be willing to make the attempt. Lord God of Angels, let me write the book, Marco. A description of the world. Tell me. Look here– I have paper, quill, ink. I am ready. I listen.

Marco gazes into the brightness, stares into the empty glyph of the window. I never went anywhere. My journey was simply a tale that appeared before my eyes as I rode into it. And as I pushed on I passed deeper and deeper into other tales and the tales within those and tales within those. I tell you, I never went anywhere. He rubs his hand across his eyes. So many…words. Descriptions of the world. Tell me, Rusticello, about Pisa. How is it there?

Much like anywhere else. Genoa. Venezia. The time passes there as it passes elsewhere. Why do you ask?

What does the air smell like?

The air? The air of Pisa? Like a swamp on a hot afternoon. But, you avoid me. He taps the quill on the blank sheet. Let me write the book. Now. I and all the angels in heaven are listening.

Marco, silent, gazes into the window's brilliant white light.

Conception

Venice, 1254.

Niccolo, my father, was a practical man, a merchant. He used to say there is no such thing as magic. He used to say, Do not talk about such things, people won't believe you. But I have seen it, I have experienced magic. I know it exists.

The Lion of Venice, in a pose of extravagant stillness, sniffs the air from atop his column of violet Troas granite. A bizarre, freakish animal, he is half-lion, half-mythical beast. His mouth is frozen open under a cat's nose, and his ears are almost human, though it is nothing like a lion's head. The face, white eyes of faceted chalcedony, emits a kind of demonic intelligence. And wings: unreal, towering wings. He is a rude demiurge, congeries of metals fused around a hollow core, a bound fury, a monster, a beast! His moist nostrils tremble and flare open. The winged statue readies himself to pounce.

Uncanny, impossible scents seem to quicken him into life–crushed almonds, flashes of honeysuckle, lemon, gardenia, clove, as well as the fresh, clean odor of damp earth and starched cotton, stitched by an intriguing ribbon of seaweed.

The doors of the Church of San Marco ease open on a flood of morning light. Adriana stands on the threshold looking out into the blinding square. In that moment, she notices a lustrous current of air curling in from the sea. The square is silent, no one moves. Everything everywhere is still. For a fraction of an instant, all over the city, statues awake to their reflections in the canals. They gaze at themselves, for a moment, in the motionless waters.

And then it passes. The square is stitched, cross-hatched with lines of families leaving Mass, and the statues fall back again into their strong, silent dreams.

Adriana follows her parents out the towering doors of San Marco, floating from the cool shadows into the hard sunshine illuminating the piazza. The wind flips and curls blue and gold pennants at the square's edge. The sea breeze flows over the water, holding off, for a while, the rising heat of a Venetian morning.

The impossible magic of the Mass, of transubstantiation, still worries Adriana. How is it bread and wine can be transformed into His body and blood? How is it that certain things in the world can change into other things? Shading her soft dark eyes, she steps further into the light and looks up.

Adriana is strangely excited, for she thinks she has seen the wings of the statue quiver. She turns and hurries to catch up to her parents, who are working their way to the middle of the square where they greet the Polos, parents of her betrothed.

The fresh morning weather of Ascension Thursday passed and Venice was becalmed in the hottest month of May anyone could remember. Heat drained from every pore of every stone in the city. The sun was barely visible through the haze draped over the lagoons. And yet the sun seemed everywhere at once: bouncing off the viscous water of the canals, flowing out of every crack and crevice in dank alleys, igniting the sweaty gold florins falling on a barrel in Adriana's father's waterfront warehouse. Grackles on roof peaks stood silenced, their beaks spread wide, mouths open. Caught fish hit the air and went slack with the heat, their eyes clouding into white. The night held no relief. The stored heat of day radiated from the stone walls of palaces and churches. Half-dead, unable to sleep, men crowded the squares through the night, dragging themselves along claustrophobic alleys and cortes like sluggish ghosts. The canals offered no respite. The water was the temperature of a tepid bath and smelled like the pus of swamps.

After two desperate nights of twisting and turning in bed, Adriana, on the third, falls into a deep and dreamless sleep.

The Lion, from his perch in the piazza, sees into her balcony, left wide open to admit any chance breeze, and gazes upon her white nightdress, the ringlets of black hair on her forehead soaked by her sweat. He waits and watches.

Rooted to his column on the Molo, the small square near San Marco overlooking the lagoon, his thoughts are echoed by pulses of heat-lightning on the horizon to the east, shudderings of distant thunder from the dead-still sea. In the enormous darkness, a tongue of lightning illuminates the nearby Doge's palace roof and the cobbles of the piazza. It lights up the route through alleys, along canals, across squares, illuminates a house not far from Piazza San Marco, its second-story balcony, a woman entwined in sheets of seaweed- and anise-laden fog.

The Lion stands and stares, stunned by the depth of Adriana's fierce beauty, the dusky glow of her skin, the black shine of her hair, the curves of her limbs. He watches her breathe, gazes into the depths of her. Again, for an instant, all is still: the canals, the sea, even the stars stilled in their traces.

Of course, they blamed Niccolo, the Polo boy, once Adriana had begun to show. They didn't know when or how it had happened, but guessed that the boy must have climbed in an open window when Adriana's father was out, dragging himself through the sweltering alleys during the hot spell after Ascension Thursday. Adriana denied every accusation as, of course, she would. The Polo boy, too, insisted on his innocence.

The families consulted a priest. As he waved his right hand in the air while slipping the proffered coins into the pocket of his cassock with the other, he explained, "It happens. No one knows why; the influence of the planets likely, or some evil done long ago. The Lord Himself knows, in such a world as this. Call me again when the child is born and I will determine its state at that time. Buon giorno and God be praised."

The heads of both families, being merchants with practical natures, decided that a hastened marriage was the most efficacious cure for the affliction at hand and so Niccolo and Adriana, not unwillingly, for they harboured a deep affection for each other, were hurried to the altar several years earlier than planned. In due time, the child was born and was inspected by the priest. A slight feline cast to the eyes perhaps, and something odd about the ears–a touch shriveled–but otherwise normal.

The boy was given the name of Marco, an appellation befitting a long enduring Venetian family, for Mark the Apostle was the city's patron saint and his remains had long before been translated into the Church of San Marco. And indeed, the piazza in front of the church was adorned with St. Mark's symbol, a lion.

The years passed like a single morning, afternoon and evening, the tides breathing in and out of Venice, waves breaking and dissolving on the Lido where sometimes I walked along the beach holding my mother's hand. I was still young and ran off with my friend, Giorgio, to catch up to the parade cutting through the sunlit heart of Venice.

Marco pointed his stick, looked at Giorgio, and shrugged as the two boys watched a man running down the street shouting into the morning air, Lorenzo Tiepolo is chosen! Lorenzo Tiepolo the new Doge! As people came to their windows and doors, an excited murmur filled the street.

Lorenzo Tiepolo! It is impossible!

I knew it would be him. Did I not tell you?

Are you sure?

Did you not hear? Lorenzo Tiepolo.

Lorenzo Tiepolo?

"Si. Lorenzo Tiepolo."

By late morning, the entire population was surging down the crowded alleys to Piazza San Marco where the new Doge, the supreme ruler of the Republic of Venice, would be celebrated. All were in a festive mood, talking and shouting and gesturing: a crowd of tailors arm in arm singing; men drinking wine; children chasing each other. Marco and Giorgio walked with their mothers, Adriana and Antonia, and Marco's Aunt Graziela who lived with the Polos. The boys would burst into short runs through the crowd only to return and then scurry off again. The women talked excitedly about preparations for the festival that always followed the election of a new Doge.

A fine, early summer breeze whipped pennants at the square's edge as Marco and Giorgio looked over the shoulders of a group of young hooligans throwing dice under the arcades. One of the gamers turned and growled, chasing the boys away. The square was brimming with peasants from the countryside as well as wealthy families with their entourage of servants and slaves. Patrician women fanned themselves as they watched from loggias high above the piazza.

The procession began, and Marco and Giorgio, slim as water weeds and slippery as eels, wormed their way to the front of the crowd.

A flourish of long silver horns sounded as the doors of the Church of San Marco swung wide and out marched, in a fog of incense, sixteen standard-bearers carrying double-pointed banners bearing the image of the winged lion. The wind coming off the lagoon whipped the flags on the square and a spontaneous cheer went through the crowd in the piazza to be joined by those from hundreds of boats crowding the lagoon. Marco and Giorgio held their ears. The lions seemed alive, leaping and flying in unison high above the voices, claiming for Venice not only the land and sea, but the sky itself.

Heralds, musicians and young pages were followed by a phalanx of squires in puffed sleeves and round hats. Canons in long robes, a boy with a crucifix and finally the Patriarch of Venice, the city's highest clergyman, ushered ceremoniously from the doors of the Church. These were pursued by three young boys, ballotini, bearing the Doge's pillow, his chair and his hat. And, finally the Doge himself appeared, the majestic Serenissima, wearing a white Phrygian cap, and an official mantle draped over his shoulders. He was an ordinary man, an old man, and his nose was too long. But Marco soon forgot his surprise when the men in the crowd doffed their round hats and bowed as the Doge passed before them. The long line of the parade snaked about the piazza as the people cheered and whooped, Viva San Marco! Viva San Marco!

With a shout, the parade of guilds started across the piazza to present themselves to the Doge, now taking his seat in front of the palace: dyers, sailmakers, tanners, clothing makers (dressed in gold), barber-surgeons (in circlets of pearls), the pattenori who worked in horn or ivory, apothecaries and spicers, charcoal makers, furriers (in robes of ermine and squirrel), pepperers, perfumers, glovers and glassmakers.

As the guild of masons passed Giorgio saw his father and shouted, Papa! Papa! so that his father came over to the boy, lifted him up on his shoulders and continued along with the parade.

For the next week, Marco could hear the racket of