Nasi remained silent. I thought he was weighing up my words, but I was wrong. When he spoke again, he seemed to be returning to himself. “My Aunt Gracia said a Jew always has to have his luggage beside the door. We are the wandering people. We must know when the time comes to set off on our travels again.”
“Travels? Where to, Yossef? You’ve already traveled all around Europe.”
He raised his head and stared at me. “I’m Yossef Nasi; I can always start doing it again.”
Inside me, something broke. I wanted to cry, but on no account must I do that. “There’s no time. There’s one more thing to do and I’m going to do it. I need that ship.”
He shook his head. He avoided looking at me, and I understood that I wouldn’t persuade him. I could only try to save him.
“May the Lord protect you, Yossef.”
I left the room, taking with me the image of a man trapped in a circle of candlelight.
In the loggia I found myself face to face with Gomez, standing by the wall, plunged in darkness. The love he felt for Yossef forced him to watch over him until the end.
“Good luck,” he said to me.
He had understood; perhaps he had eavesdropped. It didn’t matter.
We took leave of each other with a handshake.
Each minute was more precious than the last. I collected my few belongings together in a bag, gripped Ismail’s dagger and hid it under my cloak. Nonetheless, the object that would be most useful to me was quite different. I dashed down the stairs and stepped into the library. The volumes were sleeping on the shelves, barely visible. I had spent whole hours, days, shut away in there, with my nose in pages that smelt of flight, of survival, running through ancient knowledge, the knowledge of my people and the peoples they had encountered on their long peregrination. If the New Zion was a utopian dream, the story contained in those books was concrete, made of flesh and blood, of lives lived, of hopes, tireless study and faith. Perhaps I had never been as close to the Kingdom anywhere as I was in there. Suddenly I gave a start: There was no time to lose. I searched everywhere until I touched the cylindrical object. Takiyuddin’s optical tube. I slipped it into my bag and turned to look again at the library of the Palazzo Belvedere.
A beam of moonlight came in through the window and flowed over the table. Something on it attracted my attention. I stepped over and recognized the bundle that Ismail had had under his arm as he said good-bye. I cautiously opened it. It contained a manuscript. In the end the old man had decided not to consign those pages to the four winds. I couldn’t help being pleased by his choice: He had brought them to the right place.
I closed the bundle again and quickly left the library. My footsteps echoed around the empty drawing room. I passed by the portrait of Gracia Nasi, but I didn’t look up.
“You’re leaving him, aren’t you?”
Reyna’s voice made me jump. I turned round and saw her sitting by the fire in a big armchair, hidden by its high back. That was why I hadn’t noticed her. She got up and took a few steps toward me.
“I want to help him,” I replied.
She came closer, near enough for me to see the pin that fastened her dressing gown: a red coral brooch. “Have you still not understood? No one can. Not even Ismail could. Not even my mother. And I. .” She didn’t finish the sentence. “That man would make a pact with Satan, just to pursue his obsessions.” She took her eyes off me. “You never got to know him in the end, just to love him. I hope you will be wise enough not to come back here.”
She turned her back on me and went to sit down again, invisible behind the chair.
I picked up my shoulder bag. “Goodbye, Donna Reyna.”
I left without turning round again. I was in a hurry. By dawn I had to find a boat to take me to Bandirma.
17
I sneezed so violently that I thought I’d broken the veins in my nose. I expected to see blood, and instead the leaves of tobacco expelled from my nostrils opened like strange petals before they fell on the deck.
Tobacco stuffed in the nostrils: that’s the method they use on warships when the stench rising from the oarsmen’s banks becomes unbearable. The crew wash with water and sand, bucketfuls of seawater are thrown amongst the benches to get rid of the feces, but there is nothing else to be done. The nose must be busy smelling strong, dense odors, if you want to survive the stench of a battleship.
The mind must be firm, if it is not to waver in the face of the task at hand, and the heart, too, must be a firm, if slender, vessel.
Mimi Reis passed me another handful of tobacco leaves. I would have liked a remedy as effective for the oscillations in my mind, and a drug as powerful for my thumping heart.
1 Elul 5331, 11 Jumada al-Awwal 979, October 1, 1571. The wind was warm now, as if summer hadn’t ended after all. We had sailed the Sea of Marmara, plowed the northern Aegean, passed along the coast of Euboea, and now we were circumnavigating the Morea, in search of Muezzinzade Ali’s fleet.
“Don’t worry, Cardoso. We’ll find him. These are my seas.”
Mimi Reis opened a pilot’s book and laid it out on a barrel. The outline of the coasts was an intricate arabesque, the names were oriflammes, the sandbanks tiny dots, the outlying rocks little crosses. “The latest information located the fleet in the Adriatic, off Zara, but I’m willing to bet that Muezzinzade Ali is already coming back, to intercept the crusades when they set sail from Messina.” He ran his finger along a route that came down the Adriatic and entered the Ionian Sea until it reached Cephalonia and Corfu. Then he pointed to a route that came out of the Straits of Messina, passed along Calabria and arrived at the same destination as the other one.
I thought again of the mosaic in Palazzo Belvedere. There, it took only a few steps to cross the Mediterranean. I tried to focus my attention on the present again. Mimi Reis’s finger was now pointing to a spot in the Gulf of Corinth, near a cluster of islands.
“Lepanto. If the Sultan’s fleet wants to take on supplies, it will stop there. You understand? That’s where the crusaders are going to pounce.”
“We’ve got to persuade Muezzinzade Ali to avoid the galleasses at all costs.”
I could see the concern on his broad face. “Muezzinzade is no calascione,” he said in his Bari dialect. “He’s not the type to shirk a fight. L’acqua ca non ha fatte in ciele sta—the water that hasn’t fallen is still in the sky. God will grant victory to the deserving side.”
Mimi Reis had reinvested the money he had earned in the Naxos enterprise by fitting out a galliot, the kind that the Turks call kalita. The Sultan’s slender vessels are similar to the ships of the Christians, and they sail better even though they are built worse. They are arched, with bow and stern very high in the water, and more lightly armed. The crew — almost all Greeks and Albanians, a number of renegade Italians, a few Muscovites and Poles — were well fed, and were paid three aspers a day. Mimi Reis had chosen every oarsman personally. No slaves: He wanted to be sure that everyone would take up arms in the event of a clash. The wind was fair, the sea calm. The ship sped along the waves, and everything seemed propitious for the voyage, but premonition and concern hovered over our decks like a persistent and impalpable cloud. I slept little and badly, and not because of the usual worries of someone about to sail into the open sea.
No, what kept me tossing were the nightmares, their backdrop a city on the surface of the water, surrounded by breached and partly shattered walls. The scene incorporated all my life, all the faces and voices that belonged to my days. Arianna betrayed me every night, Dana waited for me in the shade of the carob tree and spoke Hebrew. Every night I reached a place that was Ragusa, and Salonika, Constantinople seen from the sea, and Famagusta surrounded by corpses.