I, Iago Read online

  The other men around the table hummed with laughter, and—again, synchronized—finally put the meat into their mouths and began to chew. Roderigo still could not speak. I feared he had wet himself, but I did not wish to add to his humiliation by checking.

  “You there, then!” Galinarion snarled, pointing at me with his knife. I must have jumped, or looked alarmed—something to afford the table mirth. What cretins, I thought, to find amusement in the terror of those smaller than yourselves.

  “Yes, sir,” I said smartly, and executed a courtly bow. This made the gentlemen of the table nearly choke on their meat, they were so amused.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Iago, sir.”

  “What were you doing in my garden without my permission?”

  The table quieted itself in anticipation of the answer. Roderigo squinted and appeared to be praying silently.

  “We were just coming down from your rooftop, sir, where we had stolen an egg from your hen,” I said.

  Galinarion sat up very straight, and his eyes opened very wide; the other men made amused ooooo-ing noises until he held his hand up, commanding silence.

  “Those eggs are priceless, boy.” He held his hand out. “Return it to me at once.”

  I held up the handkerchief with the shells in it. “I’m afraid this is all I can give you now, sir. We ate the raw egg between us, because we’d heard your eggs were special. I suppose we heard wrong.”

  Galinarion went red beneath the dusting of powder on his face, and his guests banged the table with the meat of their fists, howling. Roderigo made a small noise, and I felt him gaping at me, terrified. His breath began to shake, and I feared he would burst out sobbing.

  For what felt like eternity, Galinarion glared at me, furious accusation on his face. The fury was so venomous that the table spontaneously quieted itself, sensing something hideous about to happen, hideous beyond the scope of even their perverse and petty mirth.

  Suddenly, this was no entertaining escapade, but a catastrophe. It was within this patrician’s rights to beat me savagely or imprison me, and my parents did not know where I was. He raised his impressive bulk out of his chair and took a threatening step in my direction.

  Then abruptly, he sat back down . . . and burst out laughing.

  His laughter was forced, like water through a fountain. It was so intense that his guests responded to it as to an order; they all laughed as well, although with less intensity and much bemusement.

  “You little liar!” Galinarion harrumphed. “This is some prank one of my rivals has set up to discredit the worth of my hen!” He looked around the table, pointing at each of them in a grand, nervous gesture. “Which of you did this? Confess now! A very worthy prank, and neatly done, but you cannot unman me with it! Come now, which of you has set these boys on me?” They all continued guffawing, pointing at one another with good-natured accusation, shaking their heads in good-natured denial. Finally Galinarion turned back to me, still trembling with furious laughter. “Well, boy, tell me, don’t be afraid, which of these gentlemen bribed you to try to make a fool of me? What are these then, the shells of some other eggs, eh?” He reached out for the kerchief, and I gave it to him.

  “None of them bribed us to do anything,” I said, raising my voice to be heard above the raucous chuckling. “We did it ourselves. We’re boys. It’s the sort of thing boys just do.”

  This brought a new wave of louder and more genuine laughter from the group.

  “Precocious little whoreson, isn’t he?” one cheered as two others echoed me, using a childish lisp I did not have.

  “Well if it’s none of you, it must be that whoreson da Chioggia! He is always trying to start a feud with me, he is so hopelessly jealous of my hen and all my other treasures. Admit it, boy, was it da Chioggia?”

  “No,” I said, impatient now that I realized we were out of danger.

  “Of course it was. Well, never mind, this will yield a ducat for you each. Go back to him and tell him that you’ve failed. Give him my heartiest congratulations, though, for it was quite a good idea.” He turned back to the table. “Have boys eat such eggs as those! One wonders what he does with his own boys when the lamps are low!”

  This signaled the greatest laughing swell of all. Reassured that none of his guests now believed we had eaten his eggs without being transformed into young satyrs, he summoned his steward to hand us each a ducat from a velvet purse, and then shooed us away.

  “May I have my handkerchief back, sir?” I asked.

  He chucked it at me as if we were bosom chums.

  The gardener, annoyed that his arrest had come to nothing, grabbed us each by the collar and trundled us through the great house, down the stairs, deliberately trying to take us off our balance, which he managed to do with Roderigo several times. We went through the kitchens and out into the garden, where he’d apprehended us. He expelled us from the back gate as if we were rodents.

  Finally Roderigo and I looked directly at each other. “You are the most remarkable person I know,” he said in an awed whisper.

  “All I did was tell the truth,” I said.

  “And we got ducats for it!” Roderigo said, brandishing his.

  “So the maxim is true: it pays to be honest,” I said. I untied the kerchief and shook out the eggshells, then folded it up and tucked it into my belt. I’d have received a cuffing if I’d lost it.

  I glanced at Roderigo. He was still staring at me as if I had performed a miracle. His clothes were dirtied from our adventure, and I knew he had little else to wear at home. I had the rummage of two surviving elders, so my wardrobe, although faded, was ample. “Here,” I said and handed him my ducat. “I could never have got this without you.”

  He blushed. “But you’re the one who earned it!” he stammered. “If anything, I should give you mine.”

  “I don’t need it, Roderigo,” I said with the kindest bluntness I could manage. “And I know you do. Take it. Let it help your uncle buy new line and hooks, to make up for the ones we left back there. Or perhaps your father might purchase better clothes for you.”

  He started blubbering then and grabbed me in a tight embrace. “You are the best, most righteous fellow I have ever met or can imagine on this earth,” he declared. “I don’t know why Providence has blessed me with such a remarkable friend, but I shall always try to be worthy of you.”

  “Thank you,” I said awkwardly. He smelled of barley, for some reason. I took a step backward, and he relented his grip. I patted his arm and held out my right hand, palm up, to initiate our secret handshake. “Let’s be getting home now.”

  A fortnight later, the craze for hens in Venice was passé.

  Chapter 2

  BOYS GROW INTO YOUTHS, and youths to men. There are other tales of Roderigo and me, all conforming to pattern: Iago dreams up something clever to pass the time; Iago invites Roderigo to join him; they are nearly triumphant but in the end foiled; Iago gets them out of the scrape, and always by a blunt honesty that so embarrasses whoever apprehends them, that the apprehender would rather let them free than face the consequences of pursuing anything Iago is saying.

  BUT THEN I became a man, and I put away childish things—for example, Roderigo. Our friendship faded without rancor. There were no fallings-out, no betrayals or public humiliations. We reached an age at which our time went into our emerging vocations, and here we differed so profoundly we simply had no chance to fraternize.

  RODERIGO NOW SPENT his days by his father’s side, a spice merchant acolyte. And I? I craved a life of the mind. I wished to be a scholar—a professor or at least a teacher. I was an insatiable reader and from the age of ten used my small allowance to buy the octavo size of every book published by the Aldine Press. In their original languages, I devoured Aristotle, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes (although humor is too topical to age or translate well), Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Hippocrates, Plato, Dante, Pindar, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Plutarch, Pliny,
Cicero . . . and, of course, Machiavelli, even though he was from Florence. My room, lacking shelf space, was filled with piles of books, every one of which I’d read and some of which I had nearly memorized. The Aldine Press’s invention of italics delighted me: I loved that passion and intensity could be expressed with such a subtle alteration from the norm.

  But for all my love of learning, I had known from the age of ten, from the day of my brother’s funeral, that my future was to be a military one. I had no passion or interest in the military arts. In fact, given how little interest most Venetian families had in military reputations, I suspected my father, in declaring I must become a soldier, was merely being punitive. But he was still my father, and so his word was law.

  Having exhausted the best teaching minds of Venice, I was declared (by father) to have finished my education, abruptly, one day in high summer. I had learned everything he felt I needed to know, from fencing to dancing to grammar to mathematics, history, classical languages, and philosophy. Now I faced my life’s most defining decision: to which branch of the Venetian armed forces should I devote myself? There were four:

  Cavalry. Navy. Artillery. Infantry.

  I closed myself in my bedroom and languidly paced, then settled onto my uncurtained bed, then rose and paced again, then stared out the window at the rooftops of lower surrounding houses, then threw myself faceup onto the bed, then rose to pace again, all the time chewing my lower lip until it was swollen, playing out various scenarios regarding the remainder of my life.

  I might become a horseman on the mainland cavalry—the best in Italy. Or I might be an officer in the ranks of Venice’s fabled naval forces. I decided within the first hour of deliberation that I had no interest in the artillery, for they simply blew things up. I also had no interest in the infantry. Nobody had any interest in the infantry.

  After a few more hours of pacing and fidgeting, I determined that between cavalry and navy, I preferred the navy. It would allow me to get farther away from Venice, a place full of people whom I felt compelled to try to impress even while I knew I never would—most notably, my father. Further, it seemed to me that in the navy, skill mattered more than privilege. In the cavalry, a rich man could afford a better mount than could a poor man, and therefore accomplish more. I did not want to rise because of the horse my father’s money could buy; I wanted to earn what I became. I did not want people whispering what my own inner demons whispered to me: you are nothing at all, only your father’s unloving wealth gives you the right to exist. On your own, you’re nothing, because you are uncouth.

  And so in the swampy height of summer, ruminating languidly upon my summer bedding, I chose the way of the sea. I had a weakness for the romantic: I liked the notion of continuing the ancient tradition of ruling the waves. I was, of everyone I knew (possibly excepting Roderigo), the least capable of filling the boots of the ancient mariners who went before me—and yet I committed to it in my heart. That commitment, once made privately, filled me with a giddy expectation. I stood and looked about at my piles of books, then selected Herodotus and resettled beneath the bare canopy frame, to revisit the Battle of Salamis with a new appreciation now knowing that I might someday find myself in straits similar to Xerxes’.

  But my reading was interrupted by a tentative rap at my door. “Come,” I said. A pretty, plump servant girl, whom I suspected my father was sleeping with, pushed open the door just enough to glance inside.

  “If you please, master, your father has called for you,” she said, with lowered gaze.

  “Thank you,” I said and set Herodotus aside, glad of the summons. I would have made my way down to his office soon anyhow, to share with him my vocational intentions.

  Father was a silk merchant—or more precisely, an entrepreneur, a setaiòlo. He bought raw silk, oversaw the production without dirtying his own hands, and then traded the finished product at a profit. He was an officer in the Silk Guild and often took his dinner at the Silk Office in Campo San Giovanni Crisostomo, across the Grand Canal.

  His storeroom was the first floor of our home, but his office was one broad flight of steps up from there, the marble burnished bright from so many feet trampling on it over centuries. Our bedrooms were all one floor above that; I descended briskly, affecting an energy I did not really have in the oppressive heat. I felt a happy nervousness; as I descended the steps, I anticipated Father’s reaction to my decision. I knew he would agree with it, as it would save him the cost of a horse, but since he never outright approved of anything about me, I wondered how he would manage to express his approval in a disapproving manner.

  The heavy oak door to his office was standing ajar, and I stepped through.

  Father had a very comfortable chair in his office, of dyed leather rigged on a wooden frame. The seat was permanently concave from decades of taking the imprint of his buttocks. It was the only chair in this room; all other seating consisted of floor cushions around low tables, a custom borrowed from our one-time trading partners far to the east.

  I was in my favorite ormesini summer wear. (The youngest son always gets the cheapest weave.) Father, in his black silk cap, in his unadorned red broccatello doublet, his samite breeches, his eyes glancing over an invoice from one of his shops, gestured me to sit on a fat cushion on the rugs. I did so, bowing first.

  “And so,” Father began, his eyes still on his work. “The da Cremona Artillery School starts next week.”

  I blinked in confusion. “I do not know anything about that, Father. I have decided on a naval career,” I said.

  He glanced up briefly as he transferred the invoice to a pile on his left while taking a new invoice from a pile on his right. I tried to ignore the sudden sinking feeling in my gut.

  “A naval career for whom?” he asked.

  “Myself,” I said.

  An expression crossed his face as if a bug was worrying his ear. Then the expression softened and he said, with a small cough, “No, you’re going into the artillery. I have already enrolled you at the school.”

  “Father—”

  “I have given this more thought than you have, Iago. Every member of the navy must be in top fighting form at all times. You would fail at that. The artillery has excellent placement and also gives you an inside advantage for a civilian office in the infantry later.”

  I stared at him, flummoxed.

  “I do not need you making a fool of yourself or bringing embarrassment on our family name by being inadequate. I did not call you in here to discuss which branch of the military you prefer.”

  Swallowing a stomachful of bile in total silence, I managed to ask, “Then why did you call me in here, Father?”

  His voice almost muffled behind the new invoice he was purposelessly staring at, he replied, “To remind you to pay your respects to your mother before you depart. She gets sentimental about these things, and I do not have the energy, in this heat, to soothe her. Make sure to leave her contented. And take this,” he said, picking up a leaf of paper from his desk and holding it out to me without looking at it, or at me. “It details your training program. You’re dismissed.”

  TOO FURIOUS TO be stunned, too stunned to be furious, I slumped on my bed and read the leaf he had given me.

  The state-sponsored Artillery School, I learned, had once been based in the campo of Santa Barbara, Barbara being the patron saint of things that explode. The school’s official quarters had moved to Campo Santa Maria Formosa, but there was a particular intensive training program based within the Arsenal. “Our three-month-long sequestering is meant as much to induct participants into military life as to teach artillery skills” I read. “This includes living as members of a company, specifically mess and bed in a dormitory built 350 years ago, when the entire Republic gave herself over to the creation of a Crusader fleet.”

  That fleet, by the way, besieged and defeated Constantinople, the greatest city in the world. You never see Venice attempt such heroics nowadays.

  Chapter 3

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p; ON THE APPOINTED DAY, my father’s servants packed a leather satchel for me with the few requisite items that the Academy had advised. I was so disinterested in my imminent career that I did not even bother to examine the contents of the satchel. I added only a small blank parchment and a stub of lead, to capture interesting thoughts, if I should happen to have any.

  Possibly the only issue about which my father and I were in agreement (although for different reasons) was that I should carry my own satchel to the Arsenal, rather than be escorted by a servant. I liked the notion of appearing self-sufficient from my first moment there.

  Father liked the notion that he would not be inconvenienced by the lack of a servant for the afternoon.

  I LEFT THE house on the fifteenth of August. This was the eve of the feast of San Rocco, when the doge would make a pilgrimage to our neighborhood church. I was glad to miss the pomp of that. There were no emotional leave-takings, not even with my mother.

  To avoid the crowded Rialto, I took a gondola across the Grand Canal and then serpentined through the narrow alleys of San Marco until they opened up into the Piazza. Fabric stretched on large wooden frames had been erected to afford some shade to all the ministers and commissioners and aides and clerks who were trying to conduct business among the peddlers and fortune-tellers and flower sellers and notaries. The cloth frames had crowds beneath them; the rest of the Piazza was baking, heat rising in mercurial shimmers for two hundred paces.

  I skirted the edge of the Piazza, asking pardon of the young gentles who were grudgingly trying to impress the older gentles in a game of patrician politics that I, by birth, would never be allowed to join. I turned right into the Piazzetta and, by the two columns, considered a second gondola. I decided that was a choice for weaklings. I was a man, and strong, and self-sufficient. I would walk. Laden with satchel, I strode the length of the Riva degli Schiavoni, growing sticky and then slick with sweat in the sultry breeze meandering in from the lagoon.