The city is very lively because they are trying to revive the Carnival. There are people in masks and lots of things to see in the streets. And, contrary to what we were told, Venice does not stink. On the downside, there are armies of Japanese tourists, but that’s no different from Paris.
Philippe doesn’t seem too worried. You know him—he always has that unshakable optimism that sometimes verges on irresponsibility but, all in all, is a strength.
I know you don’t understand why your daughter let him take her place, but you must admit that in a situation like this—in other words, with a jury composed exclusively of men—a man will always have a better chance of winning than a woman of equal skill.
When I was very young, you taught me that a woman was not only a man’s equal, but was even superior to him, and I believed you. I still believe you, but we cannot ignore this sociological reality (I have been afraid of it for some time now) known as male domination.
It is said that in the whole history of the Logos Club, only four women have ever attained the rank of sophist: Catherine de Medici, Emilie du Châtelet, Marilyn Monroe, and Indira Gandhi (and we can still hope that she will become one again). That is not very many. And none, of course, has ever been the Great Protagoras.
But if Philippe wins the title, things will change for everyone: for him, as he’ll become one of the most influential men on the planet. For you, benefiting from his secret power, who will no longer have to fear Andropov or the Russians, and will be in a position to change the face of your country. (I would like to be able to say “our” country, but you wanted me to be French, and in that respect at least, my dear Papa, I exceeded your expectations.) And for your only daughter, who will gain another form of power and will reign supreme over French intellectual life.
Don’t judge Philippe too severely: recklessness is a form of courage and you know what he has agreed to risk. You always taught me to respect the journey from thought to act, even if the person making it treats it as a game. Without a tendency to melancholy, there is no psyche, and I know that Philippe lacks that, which perhaps makes him a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, as Shakespeare says, but that is probably what I like about him.
All my love, dear Papa,
Your loving daughter,
Julenka
PS: Did you receive the Jean Ferrat album I sent you?
90
“Ma si, it is a little approximate, vero.”
Simon and Bayard have just bumped into Umberto Eco on Piazza San Marco. It really does seem as if everyone has come to Venice. Simon’s paranoia now interprets any apparent coincidence as a sign that his entire life may be nothing but a fictional narrative; this muddles his analytical faculties and prevents him from thinking about the possible and likely reasons for Eco’s presence, here and now.
On the lagoon, a motley variety of boats maneuver in joyous disorder, to a soundtrack of colliding hulls, cannonades, and the roaring of extras.
“It’s a reconstruction of the Battle of Lepanto.” Eco has to shout to be heard over the noise of the cannonade and the cheers of the crowd.
For this second edition since its rebirth the year before, the Carnival is offering, among other colorful spectacles, a historical reconstruction: the Holy League, led by the Venetian fleet, alongside the Invincible Armada and the papal armies, affronting the Turks of Selim II, known as “Selim the Sot,” the son of Suleiman the Magnificent.
“Ma, you see that large vessel? It’s a replica of the Bucintoro, the ship on board which the doge, every year, on the Feast of the Ascension, would celebrate the sposalizio del mare, the marriage with the sea, by throwing a gold ring into the Adriatic. It was a ceremonial ship not at all intended to go to war. They took it out for official engagements, but it never left the lagoon and it has no business being here, because we are supposed to be in the Gulf of Lepanto on October 7, 1571.”
Simon is not really listening. He walks toward the dock, fascinated by this ballet of counterfeit galleys and painted skiffs. But when he is about to pass between the two columns that look like the uprights of an invisible door, Eco stops him: “Aspetta!”
Venetians never pass between the colonne di San Marco; they say it brings bad luck because it was here that the Republic would execute its prisoners before hanging their corpses by the feet.
At the top of the columns, Simon sees the winged lion of Venice and Saint Theodore flooring a crocodile. He mutters, “I’m not Venetian,” crosses the invisible threshold, and advances to the water’s edge.
And he sees. Not the slightly kitsch “son et lumière” show and the boats disguised as warships with their actors in their Sunday best. But the collision of armies: the six galleasses rising from the sea like floating fortresses, destroying everything around them; the two hundred galleys divided between the left wing, yellow banner, commanded by the Venetian provveditore-generale Agostino Barbarigo, who is shot in the eye with an arrow and dies at the start of the battle; the right wing, green banner, led by the timorous Genovese Gian Andrea Doria, transfixed by the agile maneuvers of the elusive Euldj Ali (Ali the convert, Ali the one-eyed, Ali the renegade, a Calabrian by birth who became the Bey of Algiers); in the center, blue banner, the high commander, Don John of Austria, for Spain, with Colonna, commander of the pope’s galleys, and seventy-five-year-old Sebastiano Venier, severe of face and white of beard, future doge of Venice, to whom John no longer says a word, at whom he never even glances since the incident with the Spanish captain. In the rearguard, in case things go badly, is the Marquis of Santa Cruz, white banner. Facing them, the Turkish fleet, commanded by Sufi Ali Pasha, kapudan pasha, with his janissaries and his corsairs.
And on board the galley La Marchesa, sick with fever, midshipman Miguel de Cervantes, who has been ordered to remain lying down in the hold but who wants to fight and begs his captain, because what will people say of him if he doesn’t take part in the greatest naval battle of all time?
So the captain agrees, and when the galleys ram into each other and collide, when the men fire their arquebuses at point-blank range and start to board the enemy ship, he fights like a dog, and in the fury of the sea and in the storm of war he chops up Turks like tuna but is shot in the chest and in the left hand. He continues to fight. Soon there will be no doubt that the Christians have won their victory—the head of the kapudan pasha is mounted on top of the mast on the admiral’s ship—but Miguel de Cervantes, the brave midshipman under the orders of his captain, Diego of Urbino, has lost the use of his left hand in the battle, or maybe the surgeons did a bad job.
Either way, from now on he will be known as the “one-armed man of Lepanto,” and some will mock his handicap. Incensed and wounded in body and soul, he will make this clarification in his preface to the second volume of Don Quixote: “As if the loss of my hand had been brought about in some tavern, and not on the grandest occasion the past or present has seen, or the future can hope to see.”
Amid the crowd of tourists and masks, Simon, too, feels feverish, and when he feels a tap on his shoulder, he half expects to see the doge, Alvise Mocenigo, burst into view along with the Council of Ten, who are out in force, and the three state inquisitors, to celebrate this dazzling victory of the Venetian lion and Christianity, but it is simply Umberto Eco, who smiles pleasantly and says to him: “There are some who went off in search of unicorns, but found only rhinoceroses.”