The plague doctor approaches silently, bottle in hand, and Simon, once again, as in Ithaca when the dog attacked Derrida, is fascinated by this bizarre, unreal pantomime. He hears bursts of laughter from customers at an osteria, very close by: he knows it is only a few yards away, but the uneven echoes of the street musicians and the ambient agitation of the Venetian night immediately persuade him that if he calls for help (he tries to remember how to say “Help” in Italian), no one will pay any attention.
While he retreats, Simon thinks: in the hypothesis where he is truly a character from a novel (a hypothesis strengthened by the situation, the masks, the picturesque blunt objects: a novel by an author unafraid of tackling clichés, he thinks), what would he really risk? A novel is not a dream: you can die in a novel. Then again, the central character is not normally killed. Except, perhaps, at the end of the story.
But if it was the end of the story, how would he know? How can he know what page of his life he is on? How can any of us know when we have reached our last page?
And what if he wasn’t the central character? Doesn’t everyone believe himself the hero of his own existence?
From a conceptual point of view, Simon is not sure he is sufficiently equipped to correctly grasp the problem of life and death from the perspective of novelistic ontology, so he decides to return, while there is still time—i.e., before the masked man moving toward him smashes him in the face with the empty bottle—to a more pragmatic approach.
Theoretically, his only way out is the rio behind him, but this is February, the water must be ice-cold, and he fears it would be too easy afterward for one of the thugs to grab a gondola oar (there are gondolas parked every ten yards) and—while he was floundering in the canal—to pummel him like a tuna, like in Aeschylus’s The Persians, like the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis.
Thought is faster than action, and he has time to think all this before the white beak finally lifts his bottle. But just as he is about to bring it down on Simon, the bottle falls from his hand. Or rather someone tears it from his hand. The white beak turns around and, where his two accomplices were, he sees two Japanese men in black suits. The bauta and the capitano are lying on the ground. The white beak stares dumbly, arms hanging, at a scene he cannot understand. He is duly hit over the head with his own bottle in a succession of precise, muted movements. His assailant’s expertise is such that the bottle does not break, and his suit barely picks up a wrinkle.
The three men on the ground groan softly. The three men standing do not make any sound at all.
If a novelist is presiding over his fate, Simon wonders why this author has chosen these two mysterious guardian angels to watch over him. The second Japanese man approaches, greets him with a discreet bow, and replies to the unasked question: “Any friend of Roland Barthes is a friend of ours.” Then they both vanish into the night like ninjas.
Simon considers this explanation to be rather minimal, but he realizes he will have to be content with it, so he heads back to the hotel, where he will finally be able to get some sleep.
86
In Rome, in Madrid, in Constantinople, and perhaps even in Venice, people are wondering. What is the aim of this formidable armada? What territories do the Christians want to retake or conquer? Do they want to retake Cyprus? Do they want to start a thirteenth crusade? But as yet no one knows that Famagusta has fallen, and the screams of the tortured Bragadin have not yet been heard. Only Don John of Austria and Sebastiano Venier have the intuition that the battle may represent an end in itself, and that what is at stake is the total destruction of the enemy army.
87
While they wait for the duel, Bayard continues to go for walks with Simon to clear his head. Their wanderings bring them to the foot of the equestrian statue of Colleone, and while Bayard admires the statue, fascinated by the strength of the bronze, by the dexterity of Verrocchio’s chisel, and by what he imagines of the life of the condottiere, a severe warrior, powerful and authoritarian, Simon enters the San Zanipolo basilica, where he sees Sollers praying before a mural fresco.
Simon is suspicious, and startled by the coincidence. But then again, Venice is a small city and there is really nothing so exceptional about bumping into the same person twice at a tourist site when you are a tourist yourself.
All the same, as he does not particularly want to talk to him, Simon pushes on discreetly into the nave, contemplates the tombs of the doges (and among them, that of Sebastiano Venier, the hero of the Battle of Lepanto), admires Bellini’s paintings, and, in the Chapel of the Rosary, those of Veronese.
When he is sure that Sollers has left, he approaches the fresco.
There is a sort of urn surrounded by two little winged lions and, above them, an engraving representing the torture of an elderly bald man with a long beard and prominent, sinewy muscles, who is being carved up.
Below, a plaque with Latin inscriptions that Simon deciphers with difficulty: Marcantonio Bragadin, governor of Cyprus, was horribly martyred by the Turks for having heroically defended a siege that lasted from September 1570 to July 1571 in the fortress of Famagusta. (And also for having shown his conqueror a lack of respect upon surrender, but the marble plaque does not say this. Apparently he arrogantly refused to free the customary hostage in exchange for the liberation of Christian commanders, and he showed no interest in the fate of Turkish prisoners that the pasha accused him of having let his men massacre.)
So anyway, they cut off his ears and his nose, and left him to become infected and start rotting for a week. Then, when he refused to convert (he still had enough strength to spit insults at his torturers), they weighed him down with sacks full of earth and rocks and dragged him from battery to battery, mocked and beaten by the Turkish soldiers.
And his torment did not end there: they hoisted him onto the yardarm of a galley so all the Christian slaves could behold the vision of their defeat and of the Turkish anger. And for an hour, the Turks yelled at him: “Behold! Can you see your squadron? Behold the great Christ! Can you see your rescuers on their way?”
Finally, he was tied naked to a column and flayed alive.
Then his corpse was stuffed and taken through the streets of the town on the back of an ox, before being sent to Constantinople.
But it is his skin inside the urn, a pathetic relic. How did it get here? The Latin inscription does not say.
Why was Sollers praying before this wall? Simon has no idea.
88
“I am not under orders to receive Venetian scum.”
Obviously, the Tuscan captain who says this to the chief admiral, Sebastiano Venier, gets into deep trouble; aware that he has gone too far and knowing the old Venetian’s reputation for severity, he resisted arrest and it all ended in mutiny, with the captain gravely injured then hanged as an example.
But he was under Spanish command, which implies that Venier did not have the right to decide his punishment and, above all, to summarily execute him. When Don John learns this, he seriously considers whether Venier should himself be hanged to teach him due respect for hierarchy, but the provveditore Barbarigo, second-in-command of the Venetian fleet, convinces him not to do anything that might compromise the entire operation.
The fleet continues on its way to the Gulf of Lepanto.
89
Tatko,
We have safely arrived in Venice and Philippe is going to compete.
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.