I, Lazzaro: Being the True, Complete, Authentic & Uncensored Account of My Youth, Education, Combats, Amores, Voyages & Traffiques Written Freely in My Own Hand Excerpt from a novel by Eric Darton
Jost Amman. Swiss, before 1539-1591. Procession of the Doge of Venice to the Bucintoro on Ascenscion Day, ca. 1565. Published by Johann Valentin Schallern, 1697. Woodcut. (Detail). Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Editor’s Note:
This is I, Lazzaro’s first appearance in print. The second volume in a trilogy, the novel is the prequel to Free City (WW Norton, 1996), which is being reissued by Dalkey Archive and may be pre-ordered here.
We are delighted, not least because a new generation will have access to this political, historical and fantastical tale of love and strife set in a northern European port town at the dawn of the Enlightenment.
9 November, 16-- My dearest Lambrecht, I have just eaten the most delicious canary. Of course not, I was just pulling your leg. But don’t think I wouldn’t, were it well prepared and seasoned. Still, never have I felt more the luxuriating cat. And why? I’ve just had word of a turn of events, which has at last brought all the levers of my Enterprise – in which you play no small part – firmly within my grasp. Cogs align, shafts are greased, the mainspring’s taut. Wherefore each heartbeat hastens the moment when I shall be able to set the great machine in motion – a triumph far grander than you could dream of, much less attain. But friend, before I say another word, I must ask how you are faring. I was, I confess, alarmed this morning to see you looking so gray with fatigue. Perhaps I am driving you too hard. But what is to be done? We have so many things to accomplish. Certainly, our Adela, too, must bear some responsibility for your exhaustion. Indeed her nocturnal demands often snatch what little slumber you might otherwise procure. So you are caught between Scylla and Charybdis, for once that brain of yours sets to work on one of our problems, you are unable to rest until you fall down. Hah, but then she bids you rise up again, and you – unfailingly – obey! Truly you must learn to put your foot down with both of us. But that is not your nature, is it? You simply cannot say no when some mental puzzle has taken hold, or when the skillful hands call you to attention. And I admit, your readiness to exceed all mortal limitations – excepting of course my own – is useful to me beyond measure. Ah, caro dottore, were you to avail yourself of certain of the serums with which I habitually dose myself, you might nearly equal my capacities. But when I offer, you dismiss them as quackeries. Well then, physician, I must leave you to rely on the worthless nostrums your beloved professors taught you! You see, I know you inside and out. You are as transparent as the new, untinted glass in the Marienkirche windows. That last bombardment did in all those ancient and brightly-colored parables of vice punished and virtue rewarded. And of course, the clothmakers’ guild, that cabal of penurious wretches, has failed to make good on its promise to replace them. They are likely holding out for me to put up nine-tenths of the funds. Then they’ll toss in a beggar’s share and claim the glory for themselves. What do you think, should I turn the other cheek and oblige them? Restore the windows from my own pocket, so as to give the faithful a glimpse of their heavenly Jerusalem? Of course I can already hear you saying that it would not hurt to burnish my reputation for piety, let alone civic munificence. You’ll catch more flies with honey than vinegar, isn’t that what you’d say? And if I do, you’ll find an opportunity to let the Diet know, with your customary discretion, whose generosity lay behind so worthy a gift to all. Ah, friend, how can I not value you beyond measure? Yet for all the efforts you undertake on my behalf, I must confess, your incuriosity irks me still. Apart from what I wear on my coatsleeve, what truly do you know of me, your benefactor – he who pays you both reliably and well, the man who glazes your windows and provides fuel for your fire to keep the winter’s chill at bay? From such anecdotes as I’ve told in passing you’ve gleaned that I have traveled much, that my journeys took me far from where I was born, to regions south and west of here – quadrants of the globe you’ve studied in geographical tomes, yet never aspired to set a foot in. Such a stay-at-home! It would drive me mad to be stuck in one place for a lifetime. But we are hardly spun, wove, nor cut from the same cloth, are we? You do not even know my true given name. Wherefore in the course of this missive I will enlighten you on all, leaving out neither the general nor the particular. Now, tell me, Lambrecht, do you recall your birth? Of course not, how could you? For you do not have my little eye, which first opened wide as I struggled to free myself from my mother’s womb. Up go your eyebrows. Indeed, since before I could walk, or talk, or breathe of my own accord, I have possessed a little eye that at certain moments observes the world remotely, and at times may venture a great distance from my body. You say nothing, but I see the thought flicker: He’s really gone round the bend now! While in the very next instant, your mind falls to speculation: Yet, supposing such an eye could exist.… How might it work? You see the caravan of thoughts I’ve set in motion? Where was I? Ah, yes, in the womb. Well, dottore, let me tell you, it was out to get me. I don’t know what she ate or drank, but by the time it got to me – pure poison! Wherefore I thought I’d better make a break of it before it killed me. Well, that’s easier said than done, for soon as I started trying to escape came the most dreadful hammering upon my skull; as I wriggled, hot, slick walls compressed my body on all sides, a rhythmic pounding, merciless – for an eternity. Yet moved I naught. That’s it, I’m done before I start. Much more of this and I’ll be crushed to nothing. Punto e basta.Silenzio. Then, a spark in the night: the little eye awakens, extends itself, feels the limits of its tether, stretches further… si rompe! The little eye begins to roam, casting about for the something it can recognize. Being new to the world, it sees but knows nothing, hence, finds no purchase for its gaze. So it flies in every direction: now shooting on high to mountain peaks, then diving into the ocean’s depths. It wings through the forest like a sparrow hawk, glides over desert wastes, and thus by a thousand angles and degrees, it begins to take the measure of the world. It is a wonderment, my little eye, for it may penetrate everywhere, unseen as the wind. Roving, it indexes the globe’s lineaments, catalogues its proportions and qualities: divine, profane and every jot in between. Traversing every land, it commits to memory their animals and flora, their multifarious terrains, and manner of folk, if populated. At length, having feasted upon so much knowledge, it rests, as the almighty is said to have done on the seventh day, hovering over the magnificent city of M. on the eastern Ligurian shore. Gliding, it observes the winter sunset, the number and disposition of the vessels in the harbor, the crosses atop the spires of a score of churches, the smoke of chimneys, and it also notes that there are certain chimneys from which no smoke arises. Are these houses too poor to have fire? No, ‘tis custom, not lack which quenches them – ‘tis the Sabbath day. Now, as though drawn by some power of attraction, the eye skims the rooftops to pause above one of these smokeless chimneys. Tentatively, it enters the opening, then boldly plunges down, to emerge through the cold hearth grate of the garret floor. Ah, something moves there: a woman tossing upon the pallet that passes for a bed. The eye draws closer, beholds her – she’s scarcely older than a child, yet convulsing in the throes of childbirth. The eye lingers above her face, seeks out her gaze. She looks beyond it, up through the very rafters. Her jaws gape wide in what must be a scream, then clench. It sees the white of her knuckles clutching at the straw, the shudder of her body as she heaves forth a living thing, beet red, mouth agape, ravenous for life. A pair of hands appear from the dimness bearing a muslin cloth. They wind it round the infant, from feet to chest to neck, then all about its head. Hands and bundle rise and move across the room. The girl upon the straw raises her head, her lips part. Hand unlatches the door. Her head falls back upon the pillow. The door swings fast. Eye follows bundle down six flights of shuddering step, thence onto a narrow lane, desert of all humanity. One by one, three dogs emerge from the shadows. They trail behind, noses incited by the smell of blood and caca. The procession wends through the night, now this way, now that, along a serpent’s nest of alleys until one narrow passage opens onto a tiny campo. In the center stands a well. No water’s been drawn these past ten years, whence it serves the quarter as a midden. Hands set the bundle down upon the well’s broad stone lip. Warily the curs draw closer. Hands grasp the heavy iron lid, drag it aside, then raise the bundle over the abyss. La! the rag unwinds, the infant tumbles, birth cord waving free – one-two-three-four-five meters down and turns, somehow, in flight, to land upon its back in solid, yielding muck. The eye records it all – hovering like a twin to that night’s full moon. It remarks on the tranquility with which the newborn reposes upon its tender bed, even as Hands draw the well lid back into place, then vanish beneath the folds of a cloak that melts into the shadows. I cagnaci circle the well, their noses still taunted by the smell, yet bereft of their prize. Lambrecht, do you see the clock set high in the bell tower of a church that faces onto the campo? It is by this that the eye tallies the hours. It notes that at half past four the well begins to vibrate, then gradually commences to shake. Inch by inch, the lid shifts to one side. The last of the dogs turns tail and flees, even the mortar crumbles and stones begin to fall to the ground. Now the iron disk begins to shudder. It increases its agitation, like the top of a pot violently aboil. Then, as if tossed by a giant hand, it flies up only to crash down and shatter upon the flagstones. Light spills from flung-open doors and the eye counts out the sum of feet that come rushing toward the well: two, now six, now twenty. A party of men lower a bearded fellow down a man on a rope – a vagrant they’ve enlisted on the promise of a quattrino. He reeks, his hands shake, yet he seizes the bundle and holds it fast. The bundle rises. The eye ceases to record. E la fanciulla lying still upon the straw pallet? What of her? Have the rigors of childbed claimed her, or will she presently struggle to her feet? And when the babe lived within her did she ever call him by name, whether silently or aloud: David. Efraim. Rafaele. Samuele. Eleazar? Hah! Yet it is that latter, transmuted to Lazzaro which the good brothers inscribed in the baptismal record, commending his soul to the saint whose day was dawning even as he was drawn forth from the tomb. Oh, friend, the look upon your face! Shock of course – you who’ve known me only as Roberto. What story had you told yourself of my lineage and beginnings? I’ll wager you thought me born to noble but modest country folk – let us call them Emilio and Costanza: he a retired cavalry officer, decorated in combat with the Turk, whereby his wound still troubles him on those rare damp days. She’s a modest creature somewhat his junior, oval of face, swan-necked, narrow of waist, formosa, and broad of hip. She’s skilled in all domestic arts, and enlivened by a love of music and dance. And indeed she sings like an angel, directing her mellifluous tones toward her infant’s ears as he ripens like a peach within her. Ecco Roberto: first and long-anticipated son for whom masses are intoned and carillons rung – a babe twice-baptized: first, in the joyous tears of his parents and again in the holy water of the church. And when an ancient and prophetic crone is called to the cradle, does she prise open his fist to find, writ large upon the tiny palm, lines that converge irrefutably upon a bounteous future of near-Biblical longevity? Wherefore the household rejoices even as the retainers prepare a great feast, and riders gallop forth to invite the neighbors for miles around. Had you imagined, when he achieved the age of three, a groom leading him, mounted on a gray pony, round a ring bordered by fertile fields, and beyond, high atop a ridge, a stately line of cypress trees? Yes, this is how your patron passed his tender years: drinking in the wholesome attar of hay and horseshit commingled with sun-dried linen spread upon a table bowing in the center from the weight of so much wine and cheese. Sitting on his mother’s lap Roberto’s little hand reaches out to sop up the juices of roasted fowl with slices of white and fine-grained bread. And his education – well, of course we must not neglect that. Wherefore a bevy of masters schools him well in every practical and courtly art. Firm, but kind, they always use him gently. Surely this is the manner by which your Roberto grows to love the world and all its creatures. Ah, friend, you shake your head. But confess, is this not the picture you had painted of my youth? Well truly I am sorry to disabuse you of the happy fable you’d conjured on my behalf. Come, come, don’t look so bereft. We who live must all be born somewhere and somehow. Our circumstances are neither of our choosing, nor can they be gainsaid. Fortune places us, where, when and how at Her whim. And, if we emerge from the tomb-womb alive, all that follows rests upon the force of our spirit and the firmness of our will. Now, caro dottore, I must interrupt myself, for here is a strange thing indeed. Have you ever known me to be sick a day? I never take cold shivers. Nor fevers. And you know how robust my digestion is – I’m as regular as the Marienkirche chimes. Yet tonight, the moment I commenced to write, I felt my bowels tighten, my belly began to boil and swell within, until now I’m fairly bursting at the seams. Ah, here come knife-like spasms. Yet I’ll not put down my pen, but rather continue undeterred. Indeed the the most remarkable imagining just entered my mind – a phantasy wherein I summoned Heinrich and sent him round to rouse you to my aid, and when you arrived, I besought you take this dagger and slit me open, yes, so as to read my entrails and thus apprehend in them my nature and my history – thus saving me an agony of writing. Of course you would not hear of such thing, but rather placed a compress on my brow, prescribed physic, and counseled me to eat nothing beside your tasteless northern porridge – absent even any beer – for the next three days! Indeed, I might send Heinrich to fetch you and, by dint of proximity, awaken our Adela too. Oh, she’s a handsome gnocca still to be certain, but there was a score of years past – though it seems but yesterday – that I had occasion to gaze upon her face as she slept. Ah, Lambrecht, you should have seen her then, a visage so exquisite I could not bear to look upon it, her pale lids trembling with movement of her eyes beneath them – swift as sparrows. Wherefore I gazed instead upon her breasts as they rose and fell – two sisters – Claudia and Gianna she called them – each of a distinct size and shape as though belonging to different women, one bold, the other circumspect… And I made a game of taking my own breath in and out with hers as I saw the coverlet rise and fall. Now there’s a wonder for you. In only the instant it took to write these words, the pressure begins to ease. You see, the malady requires nothing more than that I disembowel myself upon the page. Ah, what’s the hour? By the spire nearly three. For you, an interval of sweet repose; for Lazzaro, a call to be about traffique. Ah, here come the chimes – whose sound recalls the bells that often summoned him abroad in those days of which I’ll presently enlighten you. A singular clock near the great piazza – two giant Moors for bell-ringers – the pealing resounded in every quarter: San Marco, the Arsenale, the Geto, and out across the waves to the farthest reaches of the lagoon.