When they wrote him that their mother had died, he pitied his brothers and invited them all to Trieste. They proudly refused, wavered, then bowed down to the power of his riches; for it turned out that they too had always wished to travel. So they came, Italianizing their names with mercenary haste: Massimo, Alessandro, Stefano, Cristoforo, Florio and Lazzaro. They spoke about their father, who since his death had become ever more handsome and terrible, and then Jovo gave them all ships. They were jealous of him, but more so of Vasojevic, who although not of their blood had been set so high above them. All the same, he was a man they could understand, unlike their brother. When Massimo demanded to become taken on as a full partner in the warehouse, Jovo Cirtovich gave him a sinecure and told him to study Glagolitic. They tried to learn about his doings through other Serbs: Jovan Moro and even Lazar Ljubibratic. Nobody knew anything. In silence he observed them peering at his neck-pouch. They would not have dared to treat their father thus.
His father’s soul swam ever farther away from him, like a lost tarnished fish of silver. Moreover, he felt desperation to see Marija getting greyer and unhappier, no matter how many turtledoves he brought her; while Tanya kept growing up without being part of the secret. What did he desire, then? He was anything but unhappy; great meditations sustained him, his aims, necessities and perils ingathered like the many-roped high masts peeping over the Ponterosso. Unlocking one of his coffers, he set to counting the black wormholes in the White Book. Then it came time to underwrite another cargo of Virginian tobacco for his sheep-dealing brothers, whose mediocrity remained as familiar and therefore pleasant to him as the stink of the Canal Grande. Scarcely cconcerned how he appeared to others, he kept dreaming that famous dream which we all dream under other guises, the one of the dead child who returns home too late, finding his parents long dead — yes, and likewise all his brothers and sisters, together with their children and grandchildren. When he laid his hand on Marija’s breast, her heartbeats came as dull as the churchbells of tiny Serbian villages.
In the forenoon watch of one of those ambiguous days when the bora becomes gentle, and the sky an ever richer, sweeter turquoise, this man whom no one knew summoned Vasojevic, who in those days still wore a gold-braided tunic like a Montenegrin, closed the door and laid out his father’s treasure. As the Americans say, misery loves company. Just as an octopus blushes while considering the capture of a certain crab, so did Vasojevic color, clenching his hand as if he might hurl the object out the window and into the Canal Grande. Cirtovich, likewise peering into the crystal, perceived a smaller, plumper incarnation than usual hanging there within the blackly glowing glass, with its pale wide eyes watching and its beak agape, and its ten arms the greenish-brown hue of kelp. So far as he was concerned, it went perfectly, and Vasojevic, sweating and rigid like a man getting impaled by Turks, turned away, staring out the window. — You understand now, said his master. — All Tanyotchka knew (looking up from a manifest for beeswax: the Cincars were pretending that her father had not paid them) was that on his next visit, slipping into her hand a fat bag of black old amber beads disarticulated from some necklace, their family friend smiled at her, but it was not the old smile. (Her mother was weaving a woolen rug; perhaps she did not notice the change.) And now Vasojevic began to grow rich and lucky on his own account.
Tanya watched her father get ever more hollowed out. He was gazing at her with eyes which she mistook for wrathful. How had she disappointed him? Then she decided that it must have been her mother who angered him. But then again that nasty speculation about his infirmity or senescence sprang up. His hair was whiter at the temples, no doubt. Not long ago she had heard him groaning loudly in his sleep. Oh, but she knew better than to ask her mother! — Liljana was calling her. When she had finished carding the wool, her father was seeking a certain place among the golden compass-roses and blue sea-monsters of his atlases, the place-names written in blood-red script. From the way his forefinger hovered over the deep, Tanya thought it must be an island. A year or two before, she might have dared to ask him. He touched her smooth hands.
Vasojevic had benefited almost immediately from his new power when, ascending Trieste’s most famous hill, in order to visit a certain Bohemian chemist on behalf of his master, he spied a dark-cloaked mendicant dozing or lurking in one of the grooves within the Arco di Riccardo, and instantly comprehended, although the beggar remained the merest clot of darkness within the soapy white stone, and although his face was buried in his chest — to any passerby he offered only a black-clad shoulder, long grey stinking hair, a limp swirl of cloth and flabby fingers twitching as if in sleep — that this man had a stiletto up his sleeve — for the decopodian incarnation of death now appeared, superimposed upon his face. Boldly approaching, Vasojevic cocked the well-charged pistol in his pocket. The murderer leapt up; the blade blossomed from his wrist. Perhaps Vasojevic would have won out in any event, for his beard had not grown grizzled by trusting the creatures of this world. Nonetheless he was grateful to Jovo Cirtovich; not all at once did life take on for him the hateful specificity of a round unwinking eye, and the suckers on ten arms which coiled and uncoiled, and water spurting from the funnel in that nasty head which, although it could change to red, orange, yellow, black, purple, most often appeared in his nightmares fleshed in that crapulous yellow-brown which he inexplicably loathed more than anything. No ship of his could ever now spring a leak, even during the darkest moment of the middle watch, without his knowing; no Venetian or Turkish barque could surprise him in a fog; wherever a pirate’s barbed grapnel hook might intend to fix itself, there his better angel would be lolling, gripping this line and that rope, waiting to alarm his second client. But why did he no longer crave to appease himself with revenge? In the rippled clarity of Grado Lagoon on a late spring evening, with their halyard puckishly flying the Wallachian flag, he asked to see the treasure again, and when his master obliged him, he stared into the crystal without expression. Cirtovich said: I often wonder what it thinks. Do you see how it opens its eye just now? I’m sure it can understand us. — By all the saints! cried Vasojevic. — And he turned away, only to perceive the simulacrum of that tubular entity floating at its ease off the bow, as it stared upward with its huge blue eyes, with a single kelplike tentacle poised as if mockingly, helpfully or warningly over the helm.