The Road to Damietta

  I waited, my face a mask, my heart beating.

  "There's a miracle also," he said. "It was reported from Gubbio, just before I left. It seems that the town had been bedeviled by a wolf, a large and ferocious beast that roamed the surrounding country, killing everything it saw, even humans. People were afraid of taking a step beyond the town walls lest they be slain by the monster.

  "Francis, hearing of their plight, went to Gubbio and talked to them about taking the wolf to task. The townspeople were horrified. They told him that of a certainty he would be killed. But Francis and a companion, while the people climbed on the town wall and watched in horror, strode into the countryside and called to the wolf. Even before he called, the beast was already running toward him, jaws agape, flecked with foam."

  Raul was enjoying himself with the story, but we were blocking the narrow street, so I suggested that we move on to a wider place.

  "To the consternation of the townspeople," he continued, now dramatizing his words, making wild movements with his hands, "Francis Bernardone gave the sign of the cross and the wolf came to a halt.

  "Come here, Brother Wolf,' Francis said, speaking sternly. 'Come here and lie down beside me.'

  "When the beast obeyed his command, Francis read it a lecture. 'You have done a lot of damage around here, Brother Wolf. You have murdered God's creatures and human beings who are made in God's image. You deserve to be punished as a robber and a murderer. But I want to bring peace between you and the people of Gubbio. Therefore you will be forgiven your evil deeds, and from now on neither people nor dogs are to persecute you.'

  "He made everyone promise to feed the beast every day, since it was only from hunger, he told them, that it did evil things. From then on, it is said, peace reigned between the townspeople and Brother Wolf."

  Raul gave me a sidelong glance, gauging the effect of the story he had told in his mocking voice.

  "What do you find so strange about Francis and the wolf?" I asked him.

  "Everything!"

  "Have you forgotten that Buddha, one of your favorites, has said, 'While dwelling on the mountain top, I drew lions and tigers to me through the power of friendship. Surrounded by lions and tigers, by panthers, bears and wolves, by antelope and deer, and wild boar, I live in the forest. No creature is frightened of me, and I have no fear of any living thing'?"

  "That was a thousand years ago, my dear Ricca, and it was Buddha speaking. Bernardone is not the Buddha Siddhartha."

  "The men are related," I said, seeing clearly and for the first time the thoughts that bound the two together. "They both are drawing water from the same well. They're trying to reconcile animals and men. And also man and man."

  "You must think that Bernardone is another Christ."

  "Nothing of the kind."

  "But the veil of adoration still covers your lovely eyes."

  "How poetic!"

  "And truthful."

  We walked on to the monastery, but Raul, who felt uncomfortable in Aunt Sofia's presence, who in turn felt uncomfortable in his, refused to go farther. Opening his portmanteau, he laid out on the steps a bulging armload of scrolls.

  "The Confessions of Saint Augustine" he announced.

  "You brought all this for me to copy?" I asked, appalled by the towering pile. "It will take months. Years. How long is this supposed to go on, the rest of my life? Until I am blind and old?"

  "Until you are over your infatuation," Raul said, sounding like my father, and with his mouth drawn in, looking like him.

  "Who is to be the judge of all this? Mother Sofia? Davino di Montanaro? Raul de los Santos? Who? Who is to say when the infatuation, as you call it, has come to an end?"

  "You alone will be the judge," he said, "since you're the only one who will know whether it's ended or not. When and if it ends. Now. This year. Or next year, or never."

  "Never!" I said.

  I asked about the new crusade. "Has it been abandoned? We hear little of it here in the monastery, only that kings and nobles are busy fighting among themselves and give no thought to the infidels."

  "Delayed but not abandoned," Raul said. "Your friend Bishop Pelagius has been summoned to Rome by the pope. It appears that as a young man he showed unusual talents as a warrior. It is said that he fought for Perugia against Assisi. Invented the strategy that won the war. There's talk of his being put in command of the new Christian army, which is supposed to land in Damietta and attack the sultan of Egypt."

  I didn't ask him again if he thought Francis might join the crusade, though it weighed heavily upon me, for thousands upon thousands had been killed in the other four crusades and thousands would be killed in a new one.

  That night I wrote a letter to my family, putting down everything that I did on a usual day in the monastery—a long list without complaint, hoping that if I seemed to be industrious and happy, then contrarily my father would ask me to return. Raul took the letter with him when he left.

  24

  Long months passed yet the Confessions went much more quickly than I had foreseen, once I had solved the copyists quirks in the matter of Latin verbs and had accustomed myself to Augustine's odd notions about women and at last to Saint Augustine himself. I was repelled by his belief that women were thorns in man's flesh, ungodly distractions on his tortuous path to salvation.

  It isn't necessary for a copyist to believe in what is being copied, or to resist the temptation—powerful, with me—to change an ill-advised word here and there. For instance, early in the Confessions, where the saint wrote that he "should not believe many things concerning himself on the authority of feeble women," I removed the word "feeble."

  I also straightened out several other things that I found belittling. And I overcame my anger about the author's taking a beautiful serf girl as his mistress and then, after she bore him a child, whom he ecstatically called "The Gift of God," brazenly abandoning her, much in the arrogant way Abelard abandoned Heloise.

  Still, the work irritated me. I got tired of the endless talk about salvation. I longed for the saint to report another meeting with a sloe-eyed serf, another theft of fruit from a pear tree. But I was to be disappointed. The saint remained a saint and the Confessions became a drudgery. Had I not had the services of two of the sisters and Nicola, I would have given up.

  Toward the end of the book, Augustine says, after much of the same, "And I called it formless, not that it lacked form, but because it had such as, did it appear, my mind would turn from, as unwonted and incongruous, and at which human weakness would be disturbed. But even that which I did conceive was formless, not by the privation of all form, but in comparison of more beautiful forms; and true reason persuaded me that I ought altogether to remove from it all remnants of any form whatever, if I wished to conceive matter wholly without form; and I not. For sooner could I imagine that that which should be deprived of all form was not at all, than conceive anything between form and nothing—neither formed, nor nothing, formless, nearly nothing..." Writing this down laboriously, understanding little, I stopped in the middle of the paragraph.

  Music—the sound of a thousand lutes and trumpets—was pouring through the window. San Marco Square blazed with torches. Their light streamed across the copy I was making. I got up and closed the window.

  I had missed one of the festas, the masquerades when everyone in Venice, the doge himself, everyone except the nuns, and even some of the church dignitaries, dressed in costumes and masks. Fishermen forsook their skiffs and became armored knights. Lowly clerks washed the ink from their fingers and became the merchants they slaved for. Scrubwomen rose from their calloused knees and in a breath took on the fair mark of princesses. Knights became paupers. And there were quiet souls who chose to be demonic, leaping imps of hell. Everyone, it seemed, wished to be somebody else, for a brief night at least.

  I opened the shutters and looked down upon the arcaded square, at the Grand Canal in the distance where lanterns showed on drifting gondolas.

  "Nico
la," I said, "we have never gone to a festa. Here is one on our doorstep. Let's dress up and go."

  "We have nothing to dress up in," she complained.

  "There's a shop this side of the Rialto bridge where they sell all kinds of masks, whatever you want."

  She went on with what she was doing and never looked up.

  "Hurry," I said. "It's getting late and the shop is a long walk. The masks will be picked over if we don't go now."

  "What will Mother Sofia say?"

  "That we can't go. We'll have to recite a hundred Hail Marys just because we asked."

  "Then we shouldn't ask."

  Nicola took all the monastery rules as law. She had grown as strict about them as the nuns were.

  "Tell me," I said, "are you going or not?"

  She looked up from the bowl of color she was mixing. "I'm afraid."

  "Then don't go. You won't have much fun at the festa if you're frightened every minute."

  "You're right. I won't."

  I went softly down the stairs. I saw no one, for the nuns were all in bed, it being well after complin. I was up only because I had Aunt Sofia's permission to work on the Confessions. The big door was bolted. Quietly I slid the bolt, let myself out, and ran.

  There was a dwindling crowd at the shop, and I found in a pile of pawed-over masks only one that was not broken, the face of a bright young man with a commanding mouth, a long, straight nose, rather dark in complexion, possibly a Spaniard; though painted on cardboard, it was quite arresting and lifelike. Could I pass as a man? Did I wish to? And why not!

  Not until I came within sight of the torches burning in San Marco did I realize that my slippers showed below the hem of my cloak. There was nothing to do about this. I put it out of my mind and joined the maskers, who were moving through the square like a rainbow river—disappearing, forming rivulets, appearing again to form a river of many colors.

  Caught up in the flood, unable to move in any direction except the way it was flowing, waving my arms, making silly noises, singing off-key, thinking only of Francis Bernardone, only of him and all the delights we would share if he were here, I flung myself, exhausted, into an opening between two shops.

  A mask showed out of the half-darkness, lit by a candle shielded in a paper cone. A hairy hand held the light that revealed the mask of a pretty girl with blond curls and a spot of red paint on either cheek.

  "Do you mind if I share this haven with you?" said a manly voice. "My feet have given out. For the moment at least."

  Pressed so close that I could feel the candle's heat, I couldn't very well refuse him.

  "It would be better if they held the festa outside Venice in the campagna," I said, "where there's grass instead of stones."

  "Yes, it's the stones but chiefly the holes between the stones that do you in. However, if this festa had been held in the meadows, as you suggest, then we would never have met."

  "Have we met?"

  "Like two pieces of driftwood on the shore." My companion, attempting a bow, was restrained by the walls on three sides of us. "My name, despite the mask, is Filippo."

  The voice was aristocratic.

  "Filippo di Viterbo. And yours? I note that your hands are the slender hands of a woman. Is it Celesta or Margherita—that's my sister's name—or Asparia or Angelita? Kindly tell me."

  "Ricca."

  "Ricca what?"

  "Just Ricca."

  "A pretty name," he said, "sufficient for the moment."

  The candle was hot on my cardboard mask.

  "Sufficient," he said in his drawling, aristocratic voice, "for the night is long."

  His arm began to press against my breast.

  "How fortunate that we have found each other," he drawled. "Now, when I go away crusading I'll have someone to grace my dreams."

  "When do you go?" I asked, to buy time while I waited for a chance to leap into the stream passing down the narrow byway.

  "Soon. Tomorrow. Next month. Who can say? But I, Filippo di Viterbo, will go whenever it is that the fleet sails."

  He asked me to hold the candle, which I did, and turning sideways he drew forth from his cloak a flask of wine that sparkled ruby-red in the candlelight. He wiped the mouth of the flask with a handkerchief.

  "Wine from our vineyards on the river Po," he said, holding the flask before me.

  "I've already had too much to drink. My stomach is about to rebel."

  "This will settle your stomach. It's an excellent wine, not sweet, a trifle dry. You'll like it. Most girls do."

  I put the flask to my lips but didn't drink. I thanked him and passed the wine back, and he drank what was left. He edged himself between me and the opening that led to the street. His breath came hot through the slits in his mask.

  If I screamed, no one would hear my voice. He dropped the empty flask on the stones at my feet. It made no sound that I could hear in the maelstrom of sounds that swept the street.

  I moved enough to get one hand free, and raising it, I ripped the mask from his face. The movement touched the paper cone that was shielding the candle and set it on fire. In the spurt of light, I saw before me an old man with a stained white beard and a painted mouth.

  The wretched, leering face gave me the strength to push his body against the wall, far enough to free myself and run. After twice round San Marco Square, I managed to find a way out of the singing mob and reached the monastery near the hour of midnight. The big door was closed. I sat huddled on the steps until the bells rang at dawn and Aunt Sofia let me in.

  She didn't smile, but she said in the gentlest words I had heard from her, "I don't blame you. Once, when I was your age, long ago, I confess that I did the same. I never regretted it, and don't you. Did you enjoy the festa?"

  "No," I said. "Not at all!"

  25

  Augustine's Confessions, as difficult as they were, I would have copied before winter came had not Nicola been swept away by a children's crusade. I was left to work alone.

  The crusade had begun in some country to the north of us by a boy preacher who roused the children of his village into a frenzied desire to march on Jerusalem and win back the Holy Sepulcher. The frenzy spread over all of Europe and children by the thousands took to the road, hundreds of them marching south through Venice. They came singing, with banners and small wooden crosses decked out with flowers.

  Encountering one of these young pilgrims, Nicola asked her where she was going. "To God," the girl replied. These brief words, the banners and the songs and the trumpets, were all that was needed to excite Nicola. The next day she marched away with the girl, carrying a banner of her own, which I reluctantly painted for her.

  By the thousands the marchers reached the southern coast and wandered about from one harbor to the next, seeking ships to take them to the Holy Land. They lacked money but this was no hindrance. Shipmasters gladly took them aboard, sailed to infidel ports, and sold them, both girls and boys, in the slave markets at Alexandria. Not one of the thousands of young crusaders ever reached the city of Jerusalem.

  Those who didn't sail—those who were still alive—were left on the shores and wandered back to the north along the roads they had traveled. Without their crosses and banners and holy songs, they were coldly treated. Those among our citizens who once had pelted them with flowers now pelted them with stones. They mocked the youths as cowards and the ravished girls as rejected bawds.

  Nicola returned on a wintry day—the first time in the memory of Aunt Sofia that seawater in some of the canals froze over. She looked much as she had when Bishop Pelagius found her on his doorstep.

  I had long since finished Saint Augustine's Confessions, two books by Herodotus, essays by Plato and Thucydides, and a detailed history of Venice from the day of its founding to the present. I was halfway through a voluminous work by Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, a book written in Arabic and brought by Raul on one of his occasional journeys from Assisi, when Nicola returned to Venice. Dressed in a worn-out cloak a
nd broken shoes, her eyes haunted and red from weeping, for days she was too exhausted to speak a word.

  Aunt Sofia relaxed the rules and allowed us to talk during meals. She had a grand dinner with lentils and roasted ducks and served cups of a wine she had been saving for a happy occasion. Nicola's return was especially welcome to me, burdened as I was.

  But in a few short months, Venice suffered a sudden and horrendous rout. The Fifth Crusade against the infidels, which had been talked about for a long time and which had already begun with a small foray against the Egyptian city of Damietta, burst upon us.

  Crusaders came from hamlets, towns, cities, and provinces in Europe—princes and princesses, knights and priests, the strong and the feeble, villains and cutthroats. They pitched tents in San Marco Square, along the esplanade on the Grand Canal, and on the islands of the bay. They slept in alleys, in the holds of derelict ships. Gregorio made room in our warehouse for an English earl and his ten pikemen. Mother Sofia took in a French princess and her five ladies-in-waiting, shoving Nicola and me off to a dank hole in the far reaches of the monastery.

  "Only for a week, my dear," she said when I told her that I couldn't work among bats, mice, and salamanders. "I can't refuse the handsome gift Princess Marianne has tendered us. The fleet has gathered. It will sail, I am told, within the month. Then you can return to your work."

  But the fleet didn't sail in a month. Word came that Jean de Brienne of Champagne, son of Count Erard, who had assembled a fleet in Genoa and was supposed to be a leader in the crusade, had been replaced at the last moment by a cardinal from Rome. This caused confusion among the leaders in Venice, which was increased by the doge, who had made a bargain with the crusaders to put them safely ashore in the Holy Land.