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Boccaccio and Dante were Florentines, said one of the other boys, but all in all the two weren't so bad.
Our Master loved all kinds of books, I was told, you couldn't go wrong spending your money on them, he was always pleased with that. I'd come to see that the teachers who came to the house would drive me crazy with their lessons. It was the studia humanitatis that we must all learn, and it included history, grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and ancient authors . . . all of this so much dazzling words that only revealed its meaning to me as it was often repeated and demonstrated in the days to come.
We could not look too good for our Master either, that was another lesson I must learn. Gold and silver chains, necklaces with medallions and other such trinkets were bought for me and laid over my neck. I needed rings, jeweled rings. We had to bargain fiercely with the jewelers for these, and I came out of it wearing a real emerald from the new world, and two ruby rings carved with silver inscriptions which I couldn't read.
I couldn't get over the sight of my hand with a ring. To this very night of my life, some five hundred years after, you see, I have a weakness for jeweled rings. Only during those centuries in Paris when I was a penitent, one of Satan's discalced Children of the Night, during that long slumber only, did I give up my rings. But we'll come to that nightmare soon enough.
For now, this was Venice, I was Marius's child and romped with his other children in a manner that would be repeated for years ahead.
On to the tailor.
As I was measured and pinned and dressed, the boys told me stories of all those rich Venetians who came to our Master seeking to have even the smallest piece of his work. As for our Master, he, claiming that he was too wretched, sold almost nothing but occasionally did a portrait of a woman or man who struck his eye. These portraits almost always worked the person into a mythological subject-gods, goddesses, angels, saints. Names I knew and names I'd never heard of tripped off the boys' tongues. It seemed here all echoes of sacred things were swept up in a new tide.
Memory would jolt me only to release me. Saints and gods, they were one and the same? Wasn't there a code to which I should remain faithful that somehow dictated these were but artful lies? I couldn't get it clear in my head, and all around me was such happiness, yes, happiness. It seemed impossible that these simple shining faces could mask wickedness. I didn't believe it. Yet all pleasure to me was
suspect. I was dazzled when I could not give in, and overcome when I did surrender, and as the days followed I surrendered with ever greater ease all the time.
This day of initiation was only one of hundreds, nay, thousands that were to follow, and I don't know when I started to understand with any preciseness what my boy companions said. That time came, however, and rather quickly. I do not remember being the naive one very long.
On this first excursion, it was magic. And high above the sky was the perfect blue of cobalt, and the breeze from the sea was fresh and moist and cool. There above were massed the scudding clouds I had seen so wondrously rendered in the paintings of the palazzo, and there came my first hint that the paintings of my Master were no lie.
Indeed when we entered, by special permission, the Doges' chapel, San Marco, I was caught by the throat by its splendor-its walls of gleaming tessellated gold. But another shock followed hard upon my finding myself virtually entombed in light and in riches. Here were stark, somber figures, figures of saints I knew.
These were no mystery to me, the almond-eyed tenants of these hammered walls, severe in their straight careful drapery, their hands infallibly folded in prayer. I knew their halos, I knew the tiny holes made in the gold to make it glitter ever more magically. I knew the judgment of these bearded patriarchs who gazed impassively on me as I stopped, dead in my tracks, unable to go on.
I slumped to the stone floor. I was sick.
I had to be taken from the church. The noise of the piazza rose over me as if I were descending to some awful denouement. I wanted to tell my friends it was inevitable, not their fault.
The boys were in a fluster. I couldn't explain it. Stunned, sweating all over and lying limp at the base of a column, I listened dully as they explained to me in Greek that this church was only part of all I had seen. Why should it frighten me so? Yes, it was old, yes, it was Byzantine, as so much in Venice was. "Our ships have traded with Byzantium for centuries. We are a maritime empire. " I tried to grasp it.
What came clear in my pain was only that this place had not been a special judgment upon me. I had been taken from it as easily as I had been brought into it. The sweet-voiced boys with the gentle hands who surrounded me, who offered me cool wine to drink and fruit to eat that I might recover, they did not hold this place in any terrible dread.
Turning to the left of me, I glimpsed the quays, the harbor. I ran towards it, thunderstruck by the sight of the wooden ships. They stood at anchor four and five deep, but beyond them was enacted the greatest miracle: great galleons of deep ballooning wood, their sails collecting the breeze, their graceful oars chopping the water as they moved out to sea.
Back and forth the traffic moved, the huge wooden barks dangerously close to one another, slipping in and out of the mouth of Venice, while others no less graceful and impossible at anchor disgorged abundant goods.
Leading me stumbling to the Arsenale, my companions comforted me with the sight of the ships being built by ordinary men. In days to come I would hang about at the Arsenale for hours, watching the ingenious process by which human beings made such immense barks that to my mind should rightly sink.
Now and then in snatches I saw images of icy rivers, of barges and flatboats, of coarse men reeking of animal fat and rancid leather. But these last ragged tidbits of the winter world from which I'd come faded.
Perhaps had this not been Venice, it would have been a different tale.
In all my years in Venice, I never tired of the Arsenale, of watching the ships being built. I had no problem gaining access by means of a few kind words and coins, and it was ever my delight to watch these fantastical structures being constructed of bowed ribs, bent wood and piercing masts. Of this first day, we were rushed through this yard of miracles. It was enough.
Yes, well, it was Venice, this place that must erase from my mind, at least for a while, the clotted torment of some earlier existence, some congestion of all truths I would not face.
My Master would never have been there, had it not been Venice.
Not a month later he would tell me matter-of-factly what each of the cities of Italy had to offer him, how he loved to watch Michelangelo, the great sculptor, hard at work in Florence, how he went to listen to the fine teachers in Rome.
"But Venice has an art of a thousand years," he said as he himself lifted his brush to paint the huge panel before him. "Venice is in itself a work of art, a metropolis of impossible domestic temples built side by side like waxen honeycombs and maintained in ever flowing nectar by a population as busy as bees. Behold our palaces, they alone are worthy of the eye. "
As time passed he would school me in the history of Venice, as did the others, dwelling on the nature of the Republic, which, though despotic in its decisions and fiercely hostile to the outsider, was nevertheless a city of "equal" men. Florence, Milan, Rome-these cities were falling under the power of small elites or powerful families and individuals, while Venice, for all her faults, remained governed by her Senators, her powerful merchants and her Council of Ten.
On that first day, an everlasting love for Venice was born in me. It seemed singularly devoid of horrors, a warm home even for its well-dressed and clever beggars, a hive of prosperity and vehement passion as well as staggering wealth.
And in the tailor shop, was I not being made up into a prince like my new friends?
