I practically ran up the stairs, reaching a corridor at the top. In a doorway, with the light behind it, a female outline. I narrowed my eyes and saw that she was already undressed, as naked as the day she was born. I walked over to her and pushed her down on a wide, low bed. The sheets smelled fresh, and so did she. A lamp to my right, a tumble of dark hair, skillful hands unbuttoning and gripping me. I spread her thighs, but too late.
I cursed in a low voice, looking down at my member, flaccid and empty, at semen smearing my belly and my cock. Semen that had spurted quickly and furiously, just giving me time to take my pants down. Semen that had freed itself without waiting for me. It had freed itself, leaving me in chains. While the woman got up I felt embarrassment and doubt speaking to one another, saying something to each other, or slipping away, suddenly, vanishing.
I was still wearing my turban. And beneath my turban, inside my head, the echo of a shriek. The cry of a monkey, or a guffaw.
Someone, somewhere in the depths of my mind, was laughing at me.
16
My return to captivity was slow and pathetic. My guards jeered at me silently, taunting me in their thoughts, and so did the women who crowded the street. I felt hundreds of eyes on me, as if they knew where I came from and how little of a man I had proved to be.
As on the way there, my escort baffled me with twists and turns and dead ends, until I got home exhausted. Home, I said, because that was what I thought by then. Efrem’s house was my only refuge, prison though it was.
Once I was through the door, Efrem gestured to me to be quiet and follow him. He led me across the internal courtyard, opened a side door and stood in the doorway waiting for me to come in.
A dark, strong-looking man was waiting for me on a high-backed chair. Bearded, unturbaned, dressed as powerful men dress the world over. “Salud i Beraha,” he said. “Sit down, we have to talk.”
In front of him were a little table and another chair. In the room around us, everything was vague. I could have spent crucial hours there, without remembering a single detail, whether it was luxurious or plain and bare. Reluctantly, I sat down.
“I call myself Moisés Navarro. I hope you like this city.”
I remember that he kept his hands in his lap, resting on the elegant fabric of his gown. On his finger he wore a little ring, a ruby the color of blood. The light from the window bisected his face, so that his eyes stayed in the gloom and his mouth seemed to belong to someone else. I watched it moving and formulating words. “Efrem will bring us coffee.”
“Spare me the formalities,” I replied in Italian. “Tell me exactly what you’re interested in, and let’s get it over with.”
Navarro clicked his tongue with disapproval. He lifted one hand a little, Efrem left the room, and the door closed. We were left on our own.
“Such ingratitude, Messer De Zante. If it wasn’t for us, you would be dangling from a rope in Venice now, or perhaps with your guts scattered in all directions. Don’t you think you owe us something?” He spoke without rancor, but his feigned politeness was at most a thin veneer.
“If I wasn’t who I am you would have let me die.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “ We saved you because we don’t know who you are. Or rather, we don’t know who you’ll want to be from now on. Because the man you were in Venice no longer exists, or am I mistaken?”
I didn’t reply. I was expecting an argument with the Sphinx and I knew the game very well. I couldn’t afford to give him an excuse.
“Oh, plainly, some things we do know,” he went on, his lips barely curling into a smile. “Trifles, like the fact that you were an agent of the Venetian secret service and that you’re accused of setting fire to the Arsenal.”
“And nothing new so far,” I spat contemptuously. “Tell me something I don’t know. For example, what you want from me.”
He stroked his moustache affectedly, then folded his hands in his lap again. “I told you: gratitude. Like the gratitude of the shipwrecked man for the sailors who pick him up. You were floundering in the water, traps awaited you at every landfall, along with people ready to stab you in the back. Venice wants your head, and she’s telling the four winds.”
“Get to the point,” I snapped.
“Very well. Then let’s go back to the beginning. How did a Jew from Ragusa end up protecting the secrets of La Serenissima?”
I was taken aback by my own reaction. I wanted to be honest. I had often imagined a plight like this: kidnapped by the enemy, grilled, tortured. Every time, in my head, I imagined myself concealing or twisting the truth, throwing my questioner off the track, serving him up some intriguing blend of reality and lies. And in fact, now that the moment had come, I wanted to tell the truth. But why? I tried to contain my thought, give it some sensible motivation. I convinced myself that openness was appropriate. Spill the beans, and see what happens. Before I had finished reasoning thus, already my lips were moving.
“I’m not a Jew anymore.”
Navarro looked interested. The movement was tiny, almost imperceptible, but I saw him leaning forward. And then I went on.
“I left Ragusa when I was very young, because I didn’t want to be like you. I was fed up to the back teeth with this hypocritical clique, with meanness, with fear. Fed up with cultivating a rat-like soul.” I paused, waiting for a reply that didn’t come. Navarro looked at me in silence. He was definitely thinking about the intention behind my words. At last he said, “Go on.”
“My father was a gentile, a Venetian. One day he returned to Ragusa to redeem my wretched life. He took me with him to Venice; he made me study. He concealed my origins; he gave me his name and his faith. Once my studies were over, he introduced me to Consigliere Bartolomeo Nordio.”
There was no need to add anything else. Just as Jupiter is lightning personified, Nordio’s name embodied the secrets of the Republic.
“What tasks did you perform for him?”
Still I held my cards close to my chest: “At first, I followed people who came to Venice from the Levant. I collected rumors about possible spies, I tailed them, I checked up on what they were doing.”
There was a knock at the door. Efrem came in with a tray and two steaming little glasses. “I don’t want coffee,” I said. “Bring wine.”
“You’ll have that later,” Navarro reassured me. “For now, I need your mind to stay alert.” He waited for the door to close again, and then he gestured to me. “Go on.”
I sipped the black brew, scorching my palate. I cursed under my breath. “After a few years, I was promoted. The Consigliere gave me the task of unearthing anyone who might be undermining the order of the Republic. Spies, heretics, insurrectionaries. . crypto-Jews.”
Navarro moved very slightly, spreading his legs and brushing a bit of invisible dust from his cloak. “What exactly did your responsibilities consist of?”
“I was in charge of a handful of trusted men. We collected evidence, we interrogated suspects, we made them confess.”
“Why were you, a man so devoted to the state, accused of setting fire to the Arsenal?”
I took a deep breath. “They discovered my secret. A missing half inch of skin where the sun doesn’t shine. I had lied to the Republic and to Nordio. They ordered me to find the perfect culprit. And the perfect culprit was me.” I laughed. “I, who fought for them for years, written off as a man in Nasi’s pay.”
He let me savor those words without batting an eyelid. “Do you have any idea who it was who caused the fire?”