“So Mukhtar’s movements run through the word of God?” I asked him.
Ali thought for a moment before replying, “Yes, I think you could say that. But you could say it about any one of our movements, because everything that happens is the fruit of His creative will.”
The figure danced on, with the sea all around and the sunset in the background.
That night, beneath a sky with stars clustered thick as cherry blossoms, I struggled to fall asleep. The placid rhythm of the boat would have encouraged rest had I not been enchanted by that dangling moment. We were far from land, in perfect equilibrium between the vast mass of water and the dark blue vault of the sky, sometimes barely distinguishable from one another. The two young Indians had recited their prayers along with Ali and were now sitting back to back, they, too, enchanted by the spectacle of the night, while the other lay down on his mat.
Ismail crouched downwind, in the prow. I studied his dark silhouette and thought of Tuota. Who knew what had become of him. It was fate that put the men in my way who led me out on the sea. I went and sat next to Ismail, and we said nothing for a while, as if we were afraid to disturb the silence of the night. It was he who spoke first.
“There’s something you want to ask me and something that’s keeping you from it.”
His insight made me smile. “You know what I used to do for a living. I don’t know how you would interpret my curiosity.” He in turn gave me an amused glance.
“You were a policeman. Who’s to say that I haven’t done even worse things than that?” He was right. I knew little or nothing about him, and that was precisely the reason for my curiosity.
“You told the Great Falconer that the causes of the war are an impenetrable tangle. Have you fought?”
He stared at the dark expanse ahead of us. “In Germany, many years ago.”
“Were you a soldier?”
I thought he wasn’t going to reply, and sat counting my breaths. As I drew the fifth, he spoke: “Have you ever heard of the city of Münster, in Westphalia? I was there, in the year of our Lord 1534. And before that I was with the insurgent German peasants, at the battle of Frankenhausen.”
Münster. All kinds of stories were associated with that name. It was a kind of curse: “Münster” summed up the madness of the world. It was said that the Anabaptist heretics had abolished all the sacraments there, all traces of religion, of human and divine order. It was said that they were guided by the devil himself, in the false guise of a new David. It seemed impossible that I found myself in the presence of a witness of such far-off events. This man came from another world, the horrors of which I had heard talked about in Venice.
I stirred myself and tried to resume the thread of my questions. “You wanted to found the kingdom of God on earth, didn’t you?”
He looked into the distance again, drawn by the darkness, as his fingers slipped along his chest and rummaged under his shirt. “We wanted justice. And a reason to live and die. I had the good fortune to come out of it alive and meet people who explained something about the world to me. Something you don’t find written in the Bible or the Koran, but in account books and registers.” He fell silent. The weight of his memories couldn’t have been easy to bear.
“I suppose that one of those people, the ones who opened your eyes, was Yossef Nasi.”
He nodded, running his fingers through his beard. “I met him in Venice, after lengthy peregrinations, and when the Inquisition forced us to leave Europe, we chose Constantinople, where Yossef and Beatriz, or Donna Gracia, obtained an audience with Suleyman the Magnificent and offered him their services. I was there too that day, at the Seraglio. A heretic in the presence of the Sultan.” He turned to look at me. “Satisfied?” Then he wrapped himself up in his cloak, stretched his legs, leaned his back against the wall and closed his eyes.
“That was only the prelude,” I pressed him. “And after that? You left the capital, your allies. .” I paused for a second, before finishing the sentence. “The woman you loved.”
“You’re not one for letting things go, are you? You must have been very good at your job. If we’d met somewhere else, at some other time, I wouldn’t have hesitated to cut your throat.” The unexpected words chilled my blood. “I have spent my life fighting alongside the humble folk,” he continued. “That is my vocation. The vocation of people like Nasi, on the other hand, is to do business with princes and emperors. My place is not at Palazzo Belvedere. I sensed as much that day, after meeting Suleyman, but I chose to wait, to put myself to the test. At my age it’s difficult to give up the love of a woman, to give up having her beside you on the last stretch of your life. And when you decide to do it, you have to put a great distance between you.”
“You’ve talked to me about what you’ve lost. What do you have left?”
My words, spoken on impulse, must have penetrated the shell that protected him, touching him at a sensitive spot. The old man turned to look at the others. Two of them were already sound asleep, but Mukhtar was standing as straight as a figurehead, defying the sea to unbalance her. Or perhaps it was Hafiz.
“Just them.”
“Why do they always go with you?”
The night breeze hissed among the sails, made the joints creak, and together with the breaking of the waves against the keel it seemed to be composing a tune.
“I bought Hafiz and Mukhtar from a Portuguese slave trader who wanted to be rid of them. He thought he’d found a stable boy and a concubine, but when he worked out what kind of warriors they were, he took fright. I gave them their freedom, and since then they’ve called me ‘Baba,’ as if they were the children I never had.” He paused, as if to keep a hint of emotion at bay, and again I thought of the man I had for years called father, even though he wasn’t. “Ali came back to Mokha five years ago, after being away for a long time. His sheik died in Mecca while on the pilgrimage, and he headed south. He is a dervish, a Sufi. He was a great help to us during the rebellion last year. Perhaps you have heard that the rebels were heretics. They say that about all rebels. The truth is that they were peasants who were weary of being robbed by Turkish officials, and those religious men gave them a voice. Thanks to Ali, I was able to go on buying coffee from the insurgent tribes. Between us, we convinced the Zaydis to leave the city just before the Sultan’s fleet arrived. We avoided a bloodbath in Mokha.”
Far from appeasing my curiosity, his stories aroused it still more, if possible, but now the old man began preparing for sleep, adjusting the mat he was sitting on and arranging his traveling bag as a pillow. I had just enough time for one last question, and decided to come out with it.
“The other day, at your house, I understood that you disapproved of Don Yossef’s project. So why did you decide to help him?”
“I don’t really disapprove of it,” he said, resting his head on his bag. “But, you see, if you want to catch a hare, whether you hunt it with hounds or with a falcon, on foot or on horseback, it will always be a hare. Freedom, on the other hand, never remains the same; it changes according to the way you hunt. And if you train dogs to catch it for you, you may just bring back a doggy kind of freedom.”
I thought I understood what he was getting at, and tried to cloak my understanding under the authority of a famous piece of writing, one that the Consigliere had wanted all his subordinates to know by heart: “Machiavelli wrote that you must keep your eye on the end, not the means.”
“Yes, Yossef often used to say the same thing.” He closed his eyes and arranged himself on his side. “Over the years, I’ve learned that the means change the end.”