Nostalgia, regret and rage pressed my heart, gripped my throat and tied my guts in a knot. The palazzi slipped past, half hidden in the darkness. Rather than making them out clearly, I was merely aware of their massive presence. Memory filled the gaps that the eye couldn’t pierce. Every image that appeared in my mind carved a furrow in my soul. The notes that had greeted my departure rang out still.
So it was that I abandoned Venice, sure that I would never see her again.
7
“Ti volir cunciar partida, Tuota?”
Those were the words, after days of rough silence spent in a corner of the world where the Po, as if drunk, twists and snakes before hurling itself into the sea. I accompanied them with a twisted smile on my weary, muddy face, my right hand seeming to ask for alms but in reality showing the dice — the things least expected in the middle of a bog. I’d fashioned them from the wood of a dead poplar tree, carving in the numbers with the tip of my knife: I, II, III, IV, V and VI. No more than a joke, a trinket, my notion of a comical greeting to the man I might meet. The man who had been like a father to me.
“You want to play, Tuota?” You want to play these dice with me? Fate, who carried me in the palm of her hand yesterday, now thwarts me, grips and squeezes me like a rotten apple. All of a sudden, I, a Venetian gentleman, find myself once more a fugitive Jew, and accused of betraying the Republic. My feet are in the mud and the phrase whirls around in my head. “Ti volir cunciar partida, Tuota? You want to play?”
Just like that, in the bastard language that foreigners used in every port on the Mediterranean from Genoa to Tripoli, from Smyrna to Gibraltar. The lingua franca of corsairs, merchants, smugglers; the language of every illicit trade, even here, among the reeds, to the hoots of the owls, on an island in the Po. In that marshland the river goes mad, on that last mile it touches the apex of desire, yearning to be extinguished in the great gulf’s embrace. It loses its senses and loses itself in labyrinths, mad hybrids of land and water.
There, in a tumbledown shack, I had hidden after leaving Venice. I was as crazy as the river, and no less confused, but I knew that sooner or later a boat would come, and on that boat there would be outlaws.
I knew, because for a while I’d been with them. I’d been one of them.
And here I was, with those rough dice in my hand, in front of me the boat, a batana, and on that batana was Tuota. The moon lit it up to let me look at him, and he, too, looked at me.
“You’re a mighty brave man to show your face here, in this place, in this way,” the vegliotto said in his language. “I barely recognized you. You only just escaped dying like a dog.”
He certainly couldn’t have forgiven me, and the surprise, my appearance, my little joke, everything seemed likely to rake up old grudges.
“I’m a fugitive, Tuota. Venice wants me dead.”
Tuone Jurman shook his head, as he did when I erred on the side of naïveté as a little boy. Age didn’t seem to have left its mark on his face, apart from his beard, now gray. Tuone Jurman. Tuota.
I wanted to tell him about the years when we had been apart, and about what had happened to me a few days before. Tell him about my secret life, my shady responsibilities.
Perhaps, at first, he would have listened to me while pretending to do something else: peer through the reeds, look for lights along the shore, mutter orders to the two men who were assisting him. I didn’t know either of them; they were very young. Then, when I went into details about my second life — or was it my third? — who knows what the old smuggler might have done? Perhaps he would have thrown me into the water, after first cutting my throat with his fish knife. Or perhaps not. Perhaps he would have humiliated me with serious, silent contempt.
I told him nothing, and he asked no questions. He didn’t ask why I wanted to go back to Ragusa, of all places — a city of memories and spies, of streets where eyes and ears might recognize me and of inns where mouths might give me away. I, on the other hand, had asked myself, during my days of solitude, Why Ragusa, still so close to the jaws of the lion?
The answer was him: Tuone Jurman.
My mother had arranged for me to be brought up as a good Jewish boy, faithful to the Torah, but things hadn’t worked out that way. Even as a boy, I had preferred the port to the rabbi’s school, and the coarse conversation of the dockers to the boredom of the midrashim. It was there that I had met Tuota, the only one who could make me feel like a man before I felt like a Jew. I had soon set out to work with him, sailing for the islands off the Dalmatian coast. Little deals, smuggling, and every now and again we had gone as far as the opposite coast, invisible landing posts between Venice and Ferrara, taking on board and ferrying across the sea someone who planned to deny Christ, or who had already denied him, and was going to the empire of the Turks in search of adventure. And besides, was it not on the shores of the Po that Heracles had asked the nymphs where the trees with golden fruit grew? In our own century, Muslim nymphs replied by pointing beyond the estuary, toward the great Orient. They spoke of caliphs and sultans more wealthy and liberal than the Italian noblemen. Artillerymen, doctors, sailors, weavers: Those who allowed themselves to be persuaded turned to people like us, and from Dalmatia the journey continued, southward or eastward.
I had dedicated myself to that trade, with Tuota and his colleagues, until my father had come back to the city — my real father, first by semen and then by surname, and my life had changed for ever. And now I was back with Tuone Jurman. The man who felt I had betrayed him, when I had never done any such thing.
In the years of service that I had given to the Republic, I had never said or done anything to stop the trafficking I myself had done as a young man. And now I needed him; I was the one who was fleeing, with a burned bridge, a burned arsenal, in fact, behind me, and now I could make the journey in one direction only. Tuota would keep on going back and forth, back and forth, for who knows how long. I would just have to go, and that would be that, never to return.
We sat in silence, amid grim glances, tight jaws and the occasional snort, somewhere between impatience and resignation, that meant “Look what’s happened to me this time.”
Tuone Jurman. Who else could take me beyond the sea and allow me to start a new life elsewhere? We left the estuary, the Adriatic received us, and for a time the former ferryman became the ferried.
A short time afterward, we reached the schierazzo. The square sail, just as I remembered it.
As I climbed the rope ladder along the keel, I felt a twinge that made me falter. So many times, in that other life of mine, I had performed these motions. Now I didn’t know how to go on. Tuota was below me. He became aware of my confusion and touched my calf. You won’t fall, those fingers said.
So it was that I found myself at my point of departure. I was going back to Ragusa, Dobro Venedik, the Good Venice, as the Turks called it, mispronouncing the Slavic name, to distinguish it from the Bad Venice on the other side of the sea. A porto franco, neither Eastern nor Western, a midway city where everyone moored sooner or later, some in search of shelter from the storm, some chasing business deals, some pursued by their own destiny.
I sighted it in front of me several days later, at sunset, trapped within its fortresses that were like a clenched fist: Dubrovnik. From a distance, as we approached, I tried to understand what I was feeling. As I approached, I was moving away. Fleeing, I was coming home.