Contarini breaks off with a laugh, claps Crivano on the arm. I was about to say that it’s known only to Somnus and his three silent sons, he finishes But you’re on fine terms with dewy-winged Somnus, aren’t you, dottore? You must be, given how swiftly you have reinstated me to his good graces.
This is an obvious ploy to abandon the subject—a clumsy one by the senator’s standards—but Crivano can’t thwart it gracefully. Instead, he forces a courteous chuckle. I’m pleased to hear this, senator, he says. I’m honored to have been of service in this small matter.
Hardly small when you’re the sleepless one, dottore, Contarini says. He gestures toward the door in the corner, the door from which he emerged. Will you join me in my library? he says. It’s in shameful disarray at the moment, but I’ll give you a brief tour. If anything you find there will be of use in your studies, then we shall make arrangements.
You’re far too kind, Senator, Crivano says. I dare not impose—
But the senator is already gone, leaving Crivano little choice but to follow him. As he steps to the library door, the old man’s voice carries from inside. Here’s an odd thing, it says. I know not—perhaps you will—whether this might be some lingering echo of the cowslip wine, or simply the consequence of prior deficiency, but for the past few nights, dottore, my dreams have been all but overwhelming in their intensity.
For an instant Crivano stands paralyzed at the library’s threshold, stunned at the plentitude before him, before he manages to venture inside. Rather larger than the anteroom he just quit, this chamber is so loaded with treasure as to seem smaller, little more than a closet. Its walls appear at first to be constructed entirely from paper and leather: new octavos, old quartos, ancient codices, some piled flat, some with their banded edges showing, others spine-out in the modern style, and none of them chained. Only after a hard blinking glance do slivers of oak begin to materialize: a right-angled grid of shelves and cubbyholes that undergirds everything, keeping it in place. What meager territory remains unclaimed by bookcases is given over to diagrams, schematics, the sketches of engineers and architects, displayed in simple wooden frames. Crivano’s vision flits between them—real and imagined structures exploded by eye and pencil onto featureless landscapes of white—until it locates a familiar image: the clean symmetrical fa?ade of the new Church of the Redeemer.
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?