Grotesque profusion! Engraved boxes and majolica vessels. Sachets and vials and pomanders of scents. Octavo breviaries and pornographic woodcuts. Trellises draped with chaplets and fake pearls. Shelves bowed by the weight of shoes, combs, caps, hose, needles. Pigment-vendors grinding their products into careful mounds. Goldsmiths, coppersmiths, and tinsmiths twisting chimeras from wire and foil. Empty-eyed bravi fingering knifetips. Greeks peddling leather, Lombards peddling linens, Slavs peddling wool.
As he moves among the displays, Crivano realizes that he has managed to forget his entanglements, to loose his mind’s grip on the intrigues that lend purpose to his days, to become for a moment exactly what he seems: an idle man engaged in the survey of merchandise. Some weeks ago, when he arrived in the city, moments such as these came upon him only rarely; he’d emerge from them with a start, like one who remembers he’s left a coin-purse unattended. Now Crivano has come to suspect that he is safest at these times: browsing for goods, entertaining his Contarini patrons, debating learned citizens about trivia of mutual interest. Dissembly can hardly fail him when he does not dissemble. He wonders whether he might one day succeed so completely in forgetting himself—his whole occult catalogue of betrayal and deceit—that he’s able to meet the evidence of his corruption with sincere bafflement.
A pair of mattacini rushes from the steps of the Basilica, launching from their plaited slings blown-out eggs stuffed with musky rags, and the shouting and shrieking crowd parts before them. Crivano steps through the gap, around the loggetta of the belltower into the Piazza itself. The shapes and textures of this place have been so vivid to him during the twenty-odd years he’s been away that he tends to forget how few days he and the Lark actually spent here. His recollections have served as a kind of beacon in times of confusion and difficulty, a means of tracking his passage through the world. But now that he’s come back, he’s been surprised to discover how much his mind altered during his absence: how much it augmented or elided or rearranged to suit the dictates of his imagination. He feels himself moving not through the city that has haunted him for so long, but through a city that is itself haunted by that city.
He’s made nearly a full circuit of the Piazza before he notices that it’s grown larger. The old pilgrims’ hostel has been demolished—replaced by a new Procuracy, maybe half-finished, in a fussy classical style—and the square’s trapezium broadened. This space holds the fair’s most elaborate installations: here the glassmakers’ tables display leaping dolphins, reared dragons, winding serpents, a glass armada under full sail. Crivano draws closer to admire a miniature castle with scarlet banners, edged by a bosk of frothy trees and a moat bubbling with citrine wine.
But this all pales beside the mirrormakers’ showcase. They’ve linked their booths with a wooden passageway of columns and rafters, like a pergola bereft of vines, and hung the inner surfaces with an assortment of flat glasses. Beneath a canvas banner at the entrance—VIRTUTUM SYDERA MICANT—five strapping guildsmen beckon to passersby, doffing their caps and singing in rough harmony. Their tune is borrowed from an old frottola, one the Lark used to perform, though Crivano can’t recall its true words.
A simple art, ladies! If everyone knew it,
then every globe-blowing jackass would do it.
Demonstrate here? Do you take us for fools?
Come visit Murano! We’ll show you our tools!
As Crivano elbows his way across their threshold, his halfsize image slides into view around him—to his right, to his left, overhead—while others, smaller still, appear alongside those, ricocheted from the mirrors opposite. Every glass surface he passes shows a procession of windowed chambers, endlessly iterated, with Crivano the living void at its center. He reaches for his sudarium, hurries to the other side.