Sofia
days in the desert when loneliness was a constant curse for which there was only rarely ease. But they were considerate of a Christian’s idiosyncrasies and the cook learned to come and make his rummage through the stores with respect, even if he couldn’t do it completely free of all suspicion as to what a mind alone might be hatching.It just so happened that this little corner was bordered on one side by the space set aside for the women. I would have found this a thing to try to escape in my state of mind, but it was a portion of their compound the women avoided, being exposed to gales and spray. Even the legend on the broken crating between us, BAFFO-CORFU, was a liability until I learned to avoid its sight and look only at the ever-changing, yet ever-calming, mind-wiping monotony of the sea.
One day, however, I suffered an intrusion. We’d hit a calm; the oars clashed rhythmically, loose in their leather slings. It was shortly after we had caught a glimpse of Patmos off starboard. I remember this detail because that island is everywhere revered as the home of Saint John, and what happened to me there had the quality of revelation about it.
Between the slats of a rifled crate, Sofia Baffo appeared to me in a vision. She walked slowly, tenderly cradling a bundle in her arms. I remembered our first meetings to which this was a sharp contrast. Music again accompanied her steps, but the tune she hummed was a dirge and her steps the measured ones of a funeral march.
Yet, I thought as I watched her approach, she would be no easier to catch in this guise than she had been when she was lively in the convent garden. A log is no easier to pick up when it is flaming than when burned to a white ash. Such a cold, burned-out log did Madonna Baffo seem to be now.
She is like Phaethon of old, I thought. As the sparks of his fall were strewn across the sky to become the Milky Way, so the fire of her last journey must be making an eternal trail of golden bits across the blue Mediterranean. And by the time we reached Constantinople, there would be nothing left at all of the blaze that had once been.
I almost thought I could see through her. She wore the light gold angel’s dress she had worn since her capture and her figure had grown markedly thinner. Even her hair lacked luster and remained, for the most part, trapped beneath her plain square kerchief. Certain that the merest puff of air would disintegrate her, I did not dare breathe as she came near.
No more than three paces away, Baffo’s daughter caught sight of me and started. If possible, she grew paler and thinner still, then quickly turned on her heels and made to go back the way she had come.
“No—no, don’t go,” I said in hardly more than a whisper. She stopped. She turned. These were two definite movements separated by a long pause of thought and a deliberate tightening of the shoulders. She took a step or two toward me, but still I could tell that she trusted me no more than had I been a spirit myself.
“What do you want?” she asked. She said it quietly, not so much from a fear of being overheard as from listless-ness that could not find the exertion of full voice worth the trouble.
“How...how are you?” I asked, tentatively cheerful.
Her look told me at once how stupid and tasteless my question was. How should she be under such conditions? It did not deserve an answer.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered, then tried brightness on a different tack. “What have you got there in your arms?” She looked hard at me, then came deliberately up to the partition. She whipped the corner of the cloth away from her bundle. My heart skipped a beat and my eyes looked down in confusion. In her arms she held the little corpse of her favorite lapdog. Of aunt and maid, canaries and dogs, this was the last, and now he, too, was gone. His little needlelike canine teeth showed in a mouth half-opened in a sort of bizarre grimace.
I did not know what to say and finally came out with a clumsy, “I’m sorry.”
I’ll bet you are, her stare told me. She then covered the little creature up once more, carried him to the rail, and silently let him drop into the sea.
A long time passed in silence before she turned to me again. Her eyes, I saw, were dry, as dry as chalk, so it must hurt the lids to close over them.
“His name was Cosi-cosi.” She fixed me with a look whose aridity seemed to drain the moisture from all it touched. “Cosi-cosi. Because he was half brown and half white. I had him for five years, ever since he was a pup.” Her final statement that was worth an hour’s storytelling: “He was a gift from my father before he sailed for Corfu.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“I wanted to say good-bye to him alone. I wanted to be alone. But you are here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said for the third time. “I’ll go.” And I scrambled to my feet.
“Just a minute,” she called. I saw she had come to the partition and was thoughtfully picking at the splintered wood where the Turks’ axes had broken into her possessions.
“Yes?” I asked.
“I have been alone much lately,” she said, “and I have done much thinking.”
“About what?” I asked. She was making my own thoughts verbal.
“Well, I have been wondering.”
“Yes?”
“I have been wondering if you meant what you said to your friend that night before the Knights boarded us.”
“Of course Husayn is a Turk. That must be plain by now.”
“No. I meant... I meant what you said about me. About you...and me...”
“Oh.” I blushed. “That.” She had heard it all.
“You didn’t mean it.” She nodded slowly and began to