The Journeyer

“But I did not kill her husband!”
“So who did? Probably the lover. Do you expect her to denounce him, when she can offer you up instead and thereby keep him safe?” I had no answer to that. After a moment he asked, “Did you ever hear of the lamia?”
“Lamia? It means a witch.”
“Not exactly. The lamia can take the form of a very young witch, and very beautiful. She does that to entice young men to fall in love with her. When she has snared one, she makes love to him so voluptuously and industriously that he gets quite exhausted. And when he is limp and helpless, she eats him alive. It is only a myth, of course, but a curiously pervasive and persistent myth. I have encountered it in every country I have visited around the Mediterranean Sea. And I have traveled much. It is strange, how so many different peoples believe in the bloodthirstiness of beauty.”
I considered that, and said, “She did smile while she watched you flogged, old man.”
“I am not surprised. She will probably reach the very height of venereal excitement when she watches you go to the Meatmaker.”
“To the what?”
“That is what we old prison veterans call the executioner—the Meatmaker.”
I cried, distraught, “But I cannot be executed! I am innocent! I am of the Ene Aca! I should not even be shut up with a Jew!”
“Oh, excuse me, your lordship. It is that the bad light in here has dimmed my eyesight. I took you for a common prisoner in the pozzi of the Vulcano.”
“I am not common!”
“Excuse me again,” he said, and reached a hand across the space between our bed shelves. He plucked something off my tunic and regarded it closely. “Only a flea. A common flea.” He popped it between his fingernails. “It appeared as common as my own.”
I grumbled, “There is nothing wrong with your eyesight.”
“If you really are a noble, young Marco, you must do what all the noble prisoners do. Agitate for a better cell, a private one, with a window over the street or the water. Then you can let down a string, and send messages, or haul up delicacies of food. That is not supposed to be allowed, but in the case of nobility the rules are winked at.”
“You make it sound as if I will be here a long time.”
“No.” He sighed. “Probably not long.”
The import of that remark made my hair prickle. “I keep telling you, old fool. I am innocent!”
And that made him reply, just as loudly and indignantly, “Why tell me, unhappy mamzar? Tell it to the Signori della Notte! I am innocent, too, but here I sit and here I will rot!”
“Wait! I have an idea,” I said. “We are both here because of the Lady Ilaria’s wiles and lies. If together we tell that to the Signori, they ought to wonder about her veracity.”
Mordecai shook his head doubtfully. “Whom would they believe? She is the widow of an almost Doge. You are an accused murderer and I am a convicted usurer.”
“You may be right,” I said, dispirited. “It is unfortunate that you are a Jew.”
He fixed me with a not at all dim eye and said, “People are forever telling me that. Why do you?”
“Oh … only that the testimony of a Jew is naturally suspect.”
“So I have frequently noticed. I wonder why.”
“Well … you did kill our Lord Jesus … .”
He snorted and said, “I, indeed!” As if disgusted with me, he turned his back and stretched out on his shelf and drew his voluminous robe about him. He muttered to the wall, “I only spoke to the man … only two words …” and then apparently went to sleep.
When a long and dismal time had passed, and the door hole had darkened, the door was noisily unlocked and two guards crawled in dragging a large vat. Old Cartafilo stopped snoring and sat up eagerly. The guards gave him and me each a wooden shingle, onto which they spooned from the vat a lukewarm, glutinous glob. Then they left for us a feeble lamp, a bowl of fish oil in which a scrap of rag burned with much smoke and little light, and they went away and slammed the door. I looked dubiously at the food.
“Polenta gruel,” Mordecai told me, avidly scooping his up with two fingers. “A holosh, but you had better eat it. Only meal of the day. You will get nothing else.”
“I am not hungry,” I said. “You may have mine.”
He almost snatched it, and ate both portions with much lip smacking. When he had done, he sat and sucked his teeth as if unwilling to miss a particle, and peered at me from under his fungus eyebrows, and finally said:
“What would you ordinarily be eating for supper?”
“Oh … perhaps a platter of tagiadele with persuto … and a zabagion to drink …”
“Bongusto,” he said sardonically. “I cannot pretend to tempt such a refined taste, but perhaps you would like some of these.” He rummaged inside his robe. “The tolerant Venetian laws allow me some religious observance, even in prison.” I could not see how that accounted for the square white crackers he brought out and handed to me. But I ate them gratefully, though they were almost tasteless, and I thanked him.
By the next day’s suppertime, I was hungry enough not to be fastidious. I would probably have eaten the prison gruel just because it meant a break in the monotony of doing nothing but sitting, and sleeping on the coverless hard bench, and walking the two or three steps the cell permitted, and occasionally making conversation with Cartafilo. But that is how the days went on, each of them marked off only by the lightening and darkening of the door hole, and the old zudio’s praying three times a day, and the evening arrival of the horrid food.
Perhaps it was not such a dreadful experience for Mordecai, since, to the best of my knowledge, he had spent all of his prior days huddled in his cell-like money shop on the Merceria, and this could not be a much different confinement. But I had been free and untrammeled and convivial; being immured in the Vulcano was like being buried alive. I realized that I ought to be grateful for having some company in my untimely grave, even if it was only a Jew, and even if his conversation was not always buoyant. One day I mentioned to him that I had seen several sorts of punishment administered at the pillars of Marco and Todaro, but never an execution.
He said, “That is because most of them are done here inside the walls, so that not even the other prisoners are aware of them until they are over. The condemned man is put into one of the cells of the Giardini Foschi, so called, and those cells have barred windows. The Meatmaker waits outside the cell, and waits patiently, until the man inside, moving about, moves before that window and with his back to it. Then the Meatmaker whips a garrotta through the bars and around the man’s throat, so that either his neck snaps or he strangles to death. The Dark Gardens are on the canal side of this building, and there is a removable stone slab in the corridor there. In the night, the victim’s body is slid through that secret hole and into a waiting boat, and it is conveyed to the Sepoltura Publica. Not until it is all finished is the execution announced. Far less fuss that way. Venice does not care to have it widely known that the old Roman lege de tagion is still so often exercised here. So the public executions are few. They are inflicted only on those convicted of really heinous crimes.”
“Crimes like what?” I asked.
“In my time, one man has died so for having raped a nun, and another for having told a foreigner some of the secrets of the Murano art of glassworking. I daresay the murder of a Doge-elect will rank with those, if that is what you are wondering.”
I swallowed. “What is—how is it done—in public?”
“The culprit kneels between the pillars and is beheaded by the Meatmaker. But before that, the Meatmaker has cut off whatever part of him was guilty of the crime. The nun raper, of course, had his gid amputated. The glassworker had his tongue cut out. And the condemned man marches to the pillars with the guilty piece of him suspended from a string around his neck. In your case, I suppose it will be only your hand.”