“Remember what the Doge said, Marco,” he reminded me. “If there is to be a Compagnia Polo and a house of Polo after you, there must be sons.”
“Father, you of all people must know how I feel on that subject. I should not mind paternity, but maternity has cost me more than I can ever count.”
“Nonsense!” my stepmother put in sternly, but then she softened. “I do not mean to deprecate what you lost, Marco, but I must protest. When you told that tragic story, you were telling of a frail foreign woman. Venetian women are born and bred to breed. They enjoy being ‘pregnant to the ears,’ as the vulgar describe it, and they keenly feel the lack when they are not. Find yourself a good, wide-hipped Venetian wife, and leave the rest to her.”
“Or,” said my practical father, “find yourself a wife you can love sufficiently to want to have children with, but one you can love lightly enough that her loss would not be insupportable.”
When the Ca’ Polo was finished and we had moved in, my father turned his attention to a project even more novel and extraordinary. He founded what I might call a School for Merchant Adventurers. In actuality, it never had a name and it was not any academy of formal study. My father simply offered his experience and advice and access to our map collection, to any who might care to seek their fortune on the Silk Road. It was mostly young men who applied to him for schooling, but a few were as old as myself. For a stipulated percentage of the profit from a student’s putative first successful trading expedition—to Baghdad, Balkh, anywhere else in the East, even all the way to Khanbalik—Nicolò Polo would impart to the apprentice adventurer all the useful information at his command, let the apprentice copy the route from our own maps, teach the apprentice some necessary phrases of Trade Farsi, even give the apprentice the names he remembered of native merchants, camel-pullers, guides, drovers and such, all along the route. He guaranteed nothing—since, after all, much of his knowledge had to be out of date by now. But neither did the apprentice journeyers have to pay him anything for their schooling, until and unless they profited from it. As I recall, many novices did set out in the direction Maistro Polo had twice gone, and some came safely back from as far away as Persia, and one or two of them came back prosperous, and paid their dues. But I think my father would have continued in that whimsical occupation even if it had never paid him a bagatìn, for in a sense it kept him still journeying afar—and even into his last years.
However, the consequence was that I, who had been a vagabond as carefree and wandersome and willful as any wind, now found my once wide horizons narrowed down to daily attendance at the company counting house and warehouse, with twice-a-day intervals of conviviality and gossip on the Rialto. It was my obligation; somebody had to keep up the Compagnia Polo; my father had in effect retired from it, and Zio Mafìo was still and forever a housebound invalid. In Constantinople, my eldest uncle also gradually edged out of the business (and died, I think of boredom, not long after). So there my cousin Nicolò and here myself found ourselves inheriting the full responsibility of our separate branches of the company. Cuzìn Nico actually seemed to enjoy being a merchant prince. And I? Well, it was honest and useful and not onerous work I was doing, and I had not yet got bored with the humdrum sameness of it day after day, and I had more or less resigned myself to this being all of my life. But then two new things happened.
The first was your sending me, Luigi, my copy of your just-completed Description of the World. I immediately gave over every spare moment to reading our book and savoring it and, as I finished each sheet, giving it to a copyist to make additional manuscripts. I found it in all ways admirable, with only a few errors, which were no doubt to be blamed on my pace of narration while you set down the words, and my neglect to read over your original draft with a critical eye.
The errors consisted only in an occasional misdating of this or that event, an occasional adventure set down out of sequence, an occasional one of the difficult Eastern place-names misheard or misspelled—your writing Saianfu, for example, where it should have been Yun-nan-fu, and Yang-zho for Hang-zho (which would have put me and my Manzi tax-collector career in a quite different city and distant from the one where I actually served). However, I never earlier bothered to point out those minor errors to you, and I hope my doing so now does not distress you. They could mean nothing to anyone but me—who else in this Western world would know there is any difference between Yang-zho and Hang-zho? —and I did not even trouble to have my scribe correct them while making his copies.
I made formal presentation of one of the copies to the Doge Gradenigo, and he must immediately have circulated it among his Council of nobles, and they to all their families and even servants. I presented another copy to the priest of our new parish of San Zuàne Grisostomo, and he must have circulated it among all his clergy and congregation, because in no time I was famous again. With even more avidity than they had shown when I first came home from Kithai, people began seeking to scrape my acquaintance, accosting me at public functions, pointing at me in the street, on the Rialto, from passing gòndole. And your own copies, Luigi, must have proliferated and scattered like dandelion seeds, for merchants and travelers visiting Venice from abroad said they came as much for a look at me as to see the San Marco Basilica and other notable sights of the city. If I received them, many told me they had read the Description of the World in their home country, already translated into their native language.
As I have said, Luigi, it did us little good to omit from that narrative many things we thought too marvelous to be believed. Some of the enthusiasts seeking to meet me were seeking to meet what they properly considered a Far Journeyer, but a great many wished to meet a man they mistakenly considered Un Grand Romancier, author of an imaginative and entertaining fiction, and others clearly wished only to ogle a Prodigious Liar, as they might have flocked to watch the frusta of some eminent criminal at the piazzetta pillars. It seemed that the more I protested—“I told nothing but the truth!”—the less I was believed, and the more humorously (but fondly) I was regarded. I could hardly complain of being the cynosure of all eyes, and all those eyes warmly admiring, but I should have preferred that they admired me as something other than a fablemaker.
I earlier said that our family’s new Ca’ Polo was situated in the Corte Sabionera. It was, yes, and of course it still is, physically, and I suppose even the latest street map of Venice gives the official name of that little square as Ships-Ballast Court. But no resident of the city called it that any more. It was known to everybody as the Corte del Milione—in my honor—for I was now known as Marco Milione, man of the million lies and fictions and exaggerations. I had become both famous and notorious.
In time, I learned to live with my new and peculiar reputation, and even to disregard the troops of urchins who sometimes followed me on my walks from the Corte to the Compagnia or the Rialto. They would brandish stick swords and prance in a sort of gallop gait, and spank their own behinds while they did so, and shout things like “Come hither, great princes!” and “The orda will get you!” Such constant attention was a nuisance, and enabled even strangers to recognize me and greet me at times when I might have preferred anonymity. But it was partly on account of my being now conspicuous that another new thing occurred.