Q - Luther Blissett (interesting novels to read TXT) 📗
- Author: Luther Blissett
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The Sephardi’s loyal friend slips a hood over his head and ties his wrists behind his back. No one speaks.
He sits him down on an unsteady bench.
The faceless man can neither see anything nor feel the passage of time. The Sephardi’s brother says he’ll have to wait, the explanations will come at the proper time and not before. Then silence falls again.
The hooded man’s limbs are filled with torpor, it’s very cold, he arches his back, stretches his legs, starts succumbing to fatigue.
After an endless period of time, three dull knocks come from the far end of the cellar. The Sephardi’s brother and his friend take him beneath the arms and lift him, carrying him to a narrow passageway. The hooded man puts up no resistance, his legs are unsteady, he feels the rocking of a boat on water. They bring him on board.
The hunchback plunges the pole into the water and guides the boat towards the maze of canals, shielded by the darkness.
The hooded man doesn’t know what to expect.
The Sephardi is waiting in a safe house overlooking the Sacca della Misericordia. They lead the hooded man off the boat and walk him into the house. A lot of coming and going up and down stairs, then he is made comfortable in an armchair.
The Sephardi is seated opposite him. The hooded man smells the aroma of a cigar and becomes aware of a faint light.
The Sephardi has pleasant manners and expresses his thoughts clearly. He says that the unpleasant condition of being a prisoner makes anyone, even the strongest of men, incapable of predicting his immediate fate. If that state is imposed on someone accustomed to deciding the fates of others, it is not hard to imagine his utter confusion. Anyway, a little information, some clarification of what was happening, would certainly alleviate that burden.
The Sephardi says that you have to be particularly careful in Venice when choosing your informers. That here in Venice informing is probably the most widespread profession after prostitution, and one might even say that it differed in no respects from the latter. In Venice, informers are quick to switch allegiances. And furthermore a spy asks only a decent wage and his own personal safety; anyone capable of offering him those will enjoy his services. So it could be that inconveniences of this kind are due either to the sparse remuneration offered by the inquisitors, or to the excessive generosity of their enemies. And the funny thing is that in this case the generous payment has come from someone who is constantly being accused of greed and usury
The hooded man hears the other man’s footsteps moving in a circle.
After a few seconds the voice begins again. It says that trusting faithless informers was certainly an act of carelessness, but it was not the only one. Indeed, not leaving your enemies with an escape route is equally imprudent. Tightening the noose around an entire community, leading them to predict a future of suffering and death, will inevitably unleash surprising reactions. The man with his back to the wall is the man who will defend himself best. War, not only spiritual war, is an art as refined as diplomacy, which derives from it. And in this art, against their will, the Jews have been obliged to excel. When you are encircled, you come up with plans; faced with death, you fight.
The Sephardi announces that there will be much more to talk about, such as, for example, that Turk who brags about having been in their service on behalf of the Sultan. But all in due course. Because first, after a few hours’ rest, another journey awaits him.
The hooded man is laid out on a hard bed and falls into a troubled sleep.
Venice, 3rd November 1551
Chill light of dawn.
I study the short, rippling waves of the lagoon, which will bring Defeat to me. Will bring me face to face with it.
The island of San Michele. A church, a cloister, a cemetery.
A whole life’s actions concentrated into a few short days. Endgame is approaching, and no one could predict its outcome.
Now there can be no delays. The old Baptist, the heretical hare, Titian, finally hunted down. His hunter in Venice. The Jews caught in a trap leading straight to the scaffold.
Decades of intrigues and attacks, betrayals and retreats, rashness and remorse, are all rushing together all of a sudden. The prophets and the king of a single, tragic day; cardinals and popes, and new popes; bankers, prices, merchants and preachers; men of letters, painters and spies and counsellors and pimps. Everywhere, involving everyone, the same war. Those people, myself among them, were the most fortunate ones. They enjoyed the privilege of fighting the war. Wretches or noblemen, bastards or heroes, wretched spies or knights of the humble, sordid mercenaries or prophets of a coming age, they chose the battlefield, they embraced a faith, they stirred up the flames of hope and vanity. And in that battlefield they found the one who ripped their flesh to pieces; that faith is the one that betrayed them on the final day; the flames are the pyre on which they are burning now. They were responsible for their shifting fortunes and their own unstinting ruin. Day after day they filled the poisoned chalice that would finally kill them.
We ourselves must ask forgiveness for having had too propitious a fate. Enjoy our privilege to the dregs. Work out a final plan. Test out that crazed conclusion.
Not much longer to wait. The faint light of dawn is starting to give shape to the tombstones and the white crosses, a scattered army leading down to the water.
The campanile of San Michele looms over the whole flat island, standing out against the stars that are going out one by one. A sea breeze swells up beneath my woollen cloak. I can feel exhaustion spreading through my limbs, and in the throbbing pain behind my right eye. My attention is captured by each little thing, each detail, it needs a break after all the long sleepless nights, with Jo�o at my side, planning the operation down to its tiniest particulars. In the distance, returning fishing boats, keeping to the open sea to avoid the treacherous shallows at low tide. The first gulls are either starting to fly or settling on the calm water.
I should be tense, agitated. Instead I am aware only of the exhaustion in my bones, my rheumatic pains, and also a certain hesitancy. Perhaps deep down I don’t want to know. I’d rather preserve intact the suspicions that have travelled with me throughout all those years. Turn the page and start a calmer story, a tale of soft beds and welcoming loved ones. Tear myself away from the battlefield and rest, for ever.
But the dead would return to interrogate me. All those faces insist on memories. They say that it’s down to the last man left alive to settle the scores. To discover the truth. Perhaps I owe more to them than I do to myself, perhaps I owe more to the ones who were left in the field, the prophets betrayed by their own prophecies, the peasants who used their hoes as swords, the weavers who turned themselves into soldiers to topple the bishops and the princes, all the people who have travelled with me throughout my life. I also owe it to the Jews, that strange breed of pilgrims with no destination who have gone with me the last part of the way.
Or maybe not. Sometimes I think this is the illusion that has kept me going, trying out new paths, never stopping to admit that more than anything else it was the years that betrayed me.
Or perhaps it’s both at once. I can no longer give things the same importance as I once did. And yet I should do. Now that I’m about to have the confirmation that I’ve been seeking for such a long time; now that the story is about to reach its conclusion. Now I’m almost sorry. Because I know that I’m just going to be disappointed. Disappointed at having reached the end, disappointed at recognising the man who has been selling us to the enemy for thirty years. It’s stupid, it’s absurd, that more than anything else I feel the desire to ask him to remember the past, to bring out all those faces once again. The only one who really knows my story, who can still talk to me about that passion, that hope. It’s the desire, stupid and banal, of an old man. That’s all it is. Or maybe it’s only fatigue that’s taking me back, the heedless sleep that blots out the mind.
A boat appears on the horizon, making straight for the island.
Fine, it’s time to finish things off.
The Hunchback moors the boat to the little jetty. The hooded man is helped out. The Sephardi unties his hands and removes his hood. Then he turns back and gets on board.
The old man rubs his wrists, blinks his reddened eyes; his face marked by exhaustion, grey dishevelled hair. He brings a hand to his eyebrow and rubs a deep scar, then fixes his eye on me.
I try to scrub away years from that face.
Qo�let.
He speaks first: ‘An action worthy of Captain Gert from the Well.’
‘When did you work it out?’
His palm presses on his old wound. ‘I went back to M�nster.’ He coughs, wrapping his dark cloak around him. ‘I’ve been looking for you for years, and in the end you were the one who found me.’
‘But you’d worked it out already.’
‘It wasn’t that difficult: Titian the Baptist, a pimp with the name of a heretic. Antwerp, and the survivors of M�nster. Three days ago I had my final confirmation. A well constructed trap. Only you could have prepared it.’
‘I’d been told you died in M�nster, trying to force the bishops’ blockade.’
He leans on one of the tombstones, hands on his knees, eyes on the ground. Like myself, he is no longer of an age for chilly dawns like this one. And more importantly, he no longer has a reason not to remember.
‘You left in the spring of ‘34, in search of money and ammunition in Holland. You did me a favour: I’d have been sorry to see you engulfed by the hastening destruction along with the rest. I had arrived in M�nster with a task: to join the Anabaptists in their struggle against the bishop, to become one of them, with all that entailed, help them to turn the city into the New Jerusalem, and when the time came to send that hope up in flames. I introduced myself to Bernhard Rothmann with a large donation for the cause, telling him I was a former mercenary who had been away from M�nster for many years. Money achieved what my story could not.’
I look at this bent old man, having difficulty recognising him as the man I entrusted with the defence of the Market Square in the days when we took M�nster. Now he’s only the relic of my lieutenant, Heinrich Gresbeck.
He goes on: ‘I attached myself to you because they said you had fought with Thomas M�ntzer: you were the only one I could depend on. The arrival of Matthys, his swift end and the sudden acclamation of Bockelson as his successor made the work much easier. All I needed was for you to go. I became the confidant of Bernhard Rothmann, now a mere shadow of the fiery preacher who had led the Anabaptists against the bishop. I dusted down the Wittenberg lectures, spent days and nights with him discussing the regulations of the New Zion, the practices of the
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