“Where is Adriana?”
Marco looks up sharply. That voice. I know that voice. He stops looking at the man and turns to Graziela who has brought her hand to her mouth.
“You…you don't know?”
“What is it?”
Marco knows now, suddenly realizes with a shiver who this man is.
“A little over a year ago,” Graziela stares at the ground, “a sickness, we don't know what it was. The priest said he had never seen anyone die so quickly.”
Niccolo drops to his knees. Marco can hear the cry rising in his father's throat long before it shatters the silent square.
My father won't tell me about the magic of those lands to the East. But I can feel it oozing out the pores of his skin, can hear it echo in his head. He would rather stick to bolts of cloth and weighing pearls. But I can hear into his dreams. I can listen with the patience of stones.
Marco watches his father test a bolt of wool from a load recently arrived from Bruges. Niccolo rubs his long hands across it as if he has a secret intelligence lodged in the tips of his fingers. He is judging the wool for its lanolin content, deciding on its quality, determining its value. Niccolo is tall and thin with an aquiline face and a pronounced widow's peak. His long straight nose and slightly sad drooping eyes are lowered, looking down now at the wool in his hands.
Despite the years they have spent apart, Marco feels there is no one he knows better. He has absolute trust in this stranger, a man returned from those distant places whose names alone thrill Marco to the depths of his heart.
“Marco,” his father asks without looking up. “Why do you spend so much time staring out to sea?”
“I am listening, father.”
“Listening?”
“Yes– to the chimes of Cathay.”
Niccolo shakes his head. “Never mind. Feel this.” He holds out the bolt of wool and Marco rubs it between his fingers. “Now smell it.” Marco takes in a deep draught from the wool as he has seen his father do in this warehouse many times before. “Now this one.” His father holds out another bolt of cloth. “You see the difference? You understand? This one has more lanolin in it,” he says pointing to the first bolt. “Don't forget. You won't forget, will you?”
I stand, staring at the sea, listening. I hear so clearly now, I am hearing beyond the present, and into the past as well. I face east and hear a voice calling to me– and from behind I hear whispering from my shadow, as if my shadow itself has been given voice.
The voice from behind strikes terror in my heart, but the voice from the East shatters softly into a tinkling of glass, and draws further away, tempting me to follow, calling to me like the sea waves washing down the strand and hissing with foam. And beyond it all I am deaf with a vast silence that never leaves me– as if I can only hear with such clarity because beneath the sounds rests a profound silence.
I hear us preparing to head East again, hear the sound of the wind, the whip of the sail, the waters flowing. If I am to travel well I must learn patience. I must learn how to listen. I must learn about death.
I knew little about death until that night at the shipyards. Since then it has never left me, not for a moment. It is my unshakable shadow, my ticking angel. Its journey an exact replica and echo of my own.
Uncle Maffeo was on his way to check out a small coastal ship he owned with Marco's father. The ship, which usually plied the Adriatic between Venice and Brindisi carrying casks of olive oil one way and loads of timber and glass the other, was undergoing winter repairs. At the last moment, Marco had asked if he could come along.
Broad-shouldered, reserved, Maffeo always appeared to be brooding. Those who didn't know him read the look in his wide face as anger, but Marco knew that as soon as someone spoke to Maffeo his face would light up in a friendly smile.
A weightless snow was falling in late afternoon on the line of empty caravelles shifting at anchor in the yards of the Arsenal. As they stepped from his uncle's gondola, poled by Tadeo, a bearded rangy servant renowned for his silence, Marco could see winter's darkness climbing out of the lagoon and settling down on them from the thick grey sky. Walking past the deserted docks, Marco and his uncle heard the sound of workmen busy inside the sheds: echoes of hammering, shouts, metal clanging on metal. They reached the fourth shed on the left and entered.
Inside the warehouse, the Polo ship stood on logs used to roll it up the ramp from the water, rippling cold and black. An acrid smoke filled the cavernous building, coming from a cauldron of pitch about twelve feet across. Inside the cauldron, the pitch bubbled, writhing and pulsing as if alive. A spidery catwalk rimmed the interior of the building, high above in the drifting dark.
Labourers dipped long-handled pots into the viscous pitch and disappeared down into the ship's hold. Others fed the fire with splits of wood. Still others leaned forward, hammering planks.
“Come with me,” Uncle Maffeo says above the din.
Marco follows him up the ladder leading to the catwalk. As they move along, stopping now and then to survey the scene below, they suddenly hear angry shouts and curses from two men further along the parapet. Marco and his uncle come to a rigid halt. The men have not noticed them. Through the gloom, Marco notices a flash of metal. A moment later, one of the men is falling, the handle of a knife sticking from the side of his neck. He lands heavily in the cauldron of pitch.
Marco stares at the scene below. A labourer runs for a rope, another for a plank, but…too late. The worker sinks backwards into the seething cauldron, sending out gentle black waves as he goes down.
Uncle Maffeo hurries along the catwalk in an attempt to catch the murderer but he has vanished into the night like smoke disappearing into fog. Maffeo finds Marco and talks to the workers about the identity of the men.
A rough old greybeard steps forward. “I recognized the murderer.”
“Yes?” Maffeo nods.
“One of the Doge's assassins. Roberto, our friend, must have been punished for some crime against the Republic. We don't know what it was. He never spoke of it.” The other labourers nod their heads in agreement.
“The Doge's assassin? Then we can do nothing. Before the pitch cools, fish him out and take him to his family. Clean him up first.”
Maffeo takes his young nephew home. Tadeo the gondolier merely shakes his head. On their return trip, Marco fears being alone with his thoughts, but dares not break his uncle's grim silence.
Several days later, Marco woke in the middle of the night scorched with fever, his throat enflamed with catarrh. All that day he struggled in a world half-dream, half-waking nightmare, his sweat caustic to the touch.
Marco's aunt treated him with odouriferous poultices and soothing words. His father watched from the doorway to the boy's room, his forehead etched with concern. A servant was sent to fetch the doctor.
The arrival of Doctor Alberi demanded attentions similar to those surrounding the entrance of a highly placed priest or bishop. After the doctor had discussed the situation with Marco's father and aunt, he took a chair by the boy's bedside. The doctor, who had studied at the famous school of medicine at Salerno (and who let this salient point slip into his conversation with Signor Polo), was a prodigious man who exhibited extreme confidence and skill. Dressed in his fine velvet robes, he would expound upon his suggested diagnosis and its proper cure. Doubt and ambiguity neither entered his mind, nor his speech.
“It is apparent the fever has been caused because he has committed a serious sin. The influence of Mars,