“Are you already preparing to take it to Cyprus?” I interrupted her, pointing to the little tree. Dana raised her head and set the hoe aside. She came lightly toward me, barefoot, and stroked my cheek. Over the past few weeks I had stopped trimming my beard, which had grown luxuriant. I wanted to walk around the European city without danger of being recognized. “Your eyes look happy,” Dana said. “Won’t you tell me why?”
I gave her a clue. “One of Don Yossef’s enemies has an Achilles’ heel, and I’ve exposed it.”
“And who is he? One of the Jews you were talking to me about?”
I didn’t reply, even thought I would have liked to tell her about Ashkenazi and Traverso, to give her a better understanding of my job and my contribution to Nasi’s enterprise.
“I understand,” she said in a singsong voice. “The usual secrets between you and your boss.” She slowly shook her head, as if to rid herself of some strange thought, but I asked her to welcome it, and not to keep it hidden from me.
“I was thinking I’d know more about what you did if the Senyora were still alive. She and Don Yossef consulted one another about everything — they took all their decisions together. And she often told me; she trusted me. But now I only know that my master could become king of Cyprus. Donna Reyna told me that, but she, too, complains that she knows too little.”
I marveled at her way of talking about things. I said, “I don’t think she was really very interested in Don Yossef’s plans.”
In the cage hanging from the carob, the goldfinch hopped about and chirruped pointedly. “Who knows?” Dana translated. “I don’t think he ever asked her opinion.”
“And you?” I asked quickly. “What do you think about Don Yossef’s plans?”
Dana shrugged. “I told you, I’m just a lady-in-waiting, to a queen who doesn’t know her own kingdom. I can only hope that the new palace has a corner where I can plant my garden.”
“Of course you’ll have a garden,” I said. “Don Yossef promised me the residence of my choice.”
It took her a few moments to work out what I was referring to. A house for both of us, where we could live together. And it took me a few to realize what I had just done. I was wracked with doubt, and my thoughts were a blur. My days at Palazzo Belvedere had been a succession of metamorphoses, discoveries, frenetic activity. Three months previously I had been a different person, lost, drifting. How could I be sure that I had finally berthed? How could I give someone else any kind of certainty?
And yet, I drew joy from indulging Dana. Thinking of us both, of our life together, granted me a youth that I had never had. Emanuele De Zante was dead, and I, Manuel Cardoso, had gone back to my bar mitzvah, as if I were fifteen years old again.
Except that I was thirty-one, and covered in scars.
I banished the bad thoughts as if they were irritating insects. I slipped the second glass from under my clothes, poured out a little of the wine still left in mine, then handed it to Dana. She raised it slightly and recited a phrase in our ancient tongue: Barukh ata Adonai Eloheinu melekh haolam, bo’re p’ri hagafen.
It was the prayer of thanks for the fruit of the vine, and it was also the first of the marriage blessings that come before the libation by the bride and groom.
We kissed for a long time, swapping sips of wine. I found it very hard to resist the desire to take her and lie down there, on the grass, beneath that carob tree that made her a child again, but I didn’t want to risk anyone discovering our secret.
We drained our glasses in a final sip, and then I told her I had to get back. I had to talk to Nasi about Bernardo Traverso’s sea crossings. We exchanged one last kiss, only brushing each other’s lips, and then she got up and let me out of her garden.
22
“Bartolomeo Nordio must have been proud of you.” Nasi received my account with these words, then asked me to help him assess what needed to be done. We had to get our hands on the bailiff’s letters and at the same time unmask Ashkenazi, while making sure that Sokollu didn’t get his clutches on our net and free the prey. That was why I hadn’t seized the letters at the hammam; if I had, the Jewish doctor would have coped, and his dealings with Traverso wouldn’t have come to light. Besides, Don Yossef added, we couldn’t carry out a large-scale action in the city, where we had neither men nor weapons. We had to make careful preparations, wait for Traverso’s first voyage and strike him on the sea.
“On the sea?” I asked. “How?”
“We’ll force Ashkenazi’s ship to make an unscheduled stopover. The ship will be inspected, and the rest you can imagine.”
“How will we force it to make a stopover?”
“Pirates. The waters between here and Candia are full of them.”
At first I thought he was joking. Just as when you’re a child and you make up a story, adding one character after another, Nasi had introduced sea-robbers into the tale, the same ones who were to act as a pretext for the war on Venice, the same ones that my father, Gioanbattista De Zante, had fought on countless expeditions. That Don Yossef could resort to pirates if necessary was a piece of information out of nowhere as far as I was concerned.
I showed my surprise, and the future King of Cyprus nodded with an inspired expression on his face. “Fortune willed that an old friend would decide to come back to town. Someone who has spent his whole life in the worst possible company. Ismail al-Mokhawi might be able to help us.”
Pirates and Anabaptists. That remark left me more baffled than ever. I remembered my mentor’s saturnine mood the day after his nighttime visit to his old friend.
Nasi guessed the nature of my reflections. “I know David talked to you about Ismail. You see, the man is a gentile, but to me he’s a brother. Have you ever had a brother?”
No, just a stillborn sister. “Not that I know of,” I replied.
“There are a lot of proverbs about being brothers, but they say everything and its opposite. It’s a bond that no one can explain. ‘Amor di fratelli, amor di coltelli,’ they say in Italy. ‘Brotherly love is a matter of knives.’ ‘An offended brother is more unyielding than a fortified city,’ it says in the Mishlê Shlomoh.”
I found the image appropriate: thick walls of stone. I was ignorant about too many things, and the bond between Nasi and the man from Mokha was impenetrable to me.
“Ismail’s return filled me with joy, and yet knowing that he is here torments me. He’s a rock hanging above my head.”
“Why did he come back?”
“Gracia wrote to him.”
I didn’t tell him I knew about that already, for I wanted to keep Dana out of our conversation. Nasi went on, “She asked him to help me with one last mission. She said no more than that, and she’s no longer here to put our doubts to rest.”
The explanation struck me as obvious, so much so that I couldn’t help myself.
“Perhaps she wanted to see the two of you together at the conquest of Cyprus, building up the kingdom.”
Nasi shook his head doubtfully. “Ismail hates kingdoms, sovereigns and princes. Gracia knew that better than anyone. I set out our plan for him, but his heart remained cold.”
“If that’s the case, why do you want him to help you now?”
“Chiefly because he’s the right person. And because the rock’s hanging there. We know it’s going to fall, but we don’t know where or when. I don’t want to leave these decisions to a gust of wind. I want to be the one who does the pushing.”