The Mirror Thief(76)

This recognition comes with vertiginous dizziness. That unearthly white temple on the Giudecca, he thinks, was once no more than this: a few lines on paper, a notion blooming in a man’s skull. Just so this palace in which he now stands, all the volumes bowing the shelves around him, the black boat that brought him here—indeed, the entire city: all of it precipitated from thousands of skulls over the course of long centuries. Just so the mirror-thieving scheme that now carries him in its wake: hatched by the fertile intellect of the haseki sultan. Just so the death of poor Verzelin: the rank issue of his own conspiring brain. Just so every subtle or sensible thing beneath the sun: once only an idea in the mind of God.

A heavy walnut chair stands a few inches from Crivano, its back and arms worked with elaborate designs, and he puts a hand on it to buttress himself, then steps forward and sinks into it. Already seated at his massive desk, Contarini arranges and rearranges the chaos of documents on its surface as he speaks.

These dreams of mine, he says, are no mundane sifting of the day’s affairs. They are eruptions from the depths of my most secret heart. Faces that death shrouded long ago from my eyes, faces I recall only from inferior portraits I’ve passed for years without regard—my mother, my father, my brothers and sisters, my own lost children, even the wet-nurses and the favored stewards of my infant home—these faces haunt me in sleep, appearing as vividly to me as you do now. They have led me along corridors of reminiscence to times and localities I had utterly forgotten, where I have spent whole nights feasting on details I never remarked upon my initial visitations. What is most confounding of all, Vettor, is the haste by which these dream-shades are queered and dispersed by the first morning rays that penetrate my feeble old eyes. What in sleep was pure becomes base and ridiculous. Please understand that I have no wish to avoid these dreams. On the contrary, I find myself rising from them with calm suffusing my spirit, with fervor quickening my steps. I simply regard them with wonderment, as one might a new comet or a chimeric beast, and I seek to understand them. Have you any advice to share with an inquisitive old man on such a trifling matter?

Crivano has been only half-listening; he shifts slightly in his seat. There is a substantial corpus of literature on dreams, he says, but my own expertise in the area is far from complete. Perhaps you will permit me to study the issue further, to meditate on it for a few days, before I conceive a diagnosis. There may well be physic to help clarify these phantasms.

Of course, dottore. My curiosity is inflamed, but my urgency is not great. And I shall myself seek out the writings you’ve mentioned. I must confess that I have already been lured into the pages of the Oneirocritica of Ephesius, a book whose utility in these chambers until recently consisted of flattening curled paper on humid afternoons. It is a strange and wonderful thing, dottore, for a man of my age to awaken feeling younger, with the sense that the daylit world has grown sharper and more vivid before his eyes. It is surprising, too, to find the invigorating agent linked so closely to memories of the past, changed though those memories might be by the lens of the dreaming mind. It is not generally a tonic for old men, this act of remembering. Don’t you agree?

Crivano notes the trenchant cast of the senator’s white eyebrows, and he takes a moment to respond. I suppose, he says, that that depends on what is being remembered. Dottore de Nis has spoken to me of one you might consult on this matter. An expert on the art of memory, hailing from Nola, who is currently a guest in the home of Lord Zuanne Mocenigo.

Contarini spits out a rough laugh. Yes, he says. I’ve met the Nolan of whom you speak. An interesting fellow. Disagreeable. Quite deluded, I think. I understand from my colleagues at Padua that he has applied for their vacant chair in mathematics, which, from what I can follow of this man’s thinking, seems somewhat akin to the Turkish sultan’s chief astrologer seeking to become the next pope. I have begun writing letters in support of one of his competitors—the son of the famed lutenist Vincenzo Galilei, lately resident in Pisa—who seems rather promising despite his relative youth. You learned of the Nolan from Trist?o, you say?

That’s correct, senator.

I see, Contarini says. I hope you will forgive an old man his harangues, Vettor, if I remind you to exercise caution with Dottore de Nis.

Crivano gives the senator a broad, empty smile. As always, I receive your advice with gratitude, he says, but I have seen nothing at all in Dottore de Nis’s conduct worthy of censure.

You would not. Nor would I. In fact, I would trust—I have trusted—Trist?o de Nis with my life. The pressing issue is not what we see, but what the Inquisition sees.

Crivano smoothes his beard, runs a thumb across his pursed lips. I am told, he says, that the Inquisition is weak in the territories of the Republic. Is this not so?

It is indeed so. And it is aware of its weakness. And like a starving animal, it now hungers after anything more vulnerable than itself. Jews and Turks are now entirely safe within our city, provided they identify themselves and keep to their approved areas. Likewise, all established Christian families have little to fear. But for new Christians like Trist?o—for any person who navigates the boundaries between the discrete communities of our polis—dangers do remain. Because the conversions of the Jews of Portugal were coerced by King Manuel, the sincerity of Portuguese Christians is always suspect here. Dottore de Nis has many friends among the learned men of the Ghetto, including several widely reputed to be alchemists and magi. I also know him to be acquainted with Turkish scholars. The great affection he engenders among noble families—members of this household foremost among them—has thusfar kept him above reproach. But if the wrong person were to denounce him, it could be very bad.