The Journeyer

On that equivocal note, he departed again. Mordecai and I sat talking with animated speculation far into the night, even after the coprifuoco had rung and a guard growled through the door hole for us to extinguish the dim light of our rag lamp.
Another four or five days had to pass, fretful ones for me, but then the door creaked open and a man came in, a man so burly he had to struggle through it. Inside the cell he stood up, and he seemed to keep on standing up, so tall was he. I had no least recollection of being related to a man so immense. He was as hairy as he was big, with tousled black locks and a bristling blue-black beard. He looked down at me from his intimidating great height, and his voice was disdainful when he boomed loudly:
“Well! If this is not pure merda with a piecrust on it!”
I said meekly, “Benvegnuo, caro pare.”
“I am not your dear father, young toad! I am your uncle Mafio.”
“Benvegnuo, caro zio. Is not my father coming?”
“No. We could get permission for only one visitor. And he should rightly be secluded in mourning for your mother.”
“Oh. Yes.”
“In truth, however, he is busy courting his next wife.”
That rocked me on my heels. “What? How could he do such a thing?”
“Who are you to sound disapproving, you disreputable scagaron? The poor man comes back from abroad to find his wife long buried, her maid-servant disappeared, a valuable slave lost, his friend the Doge dead—and his son, the hope of the family, in prison charged with the foulest murder in Venetian history!” So loudly that everybody in the Vulcano must have heard, he bellowed, “Tell me the truth! Did you do the deed?”
“No, my lord uncle,” I said, quailing. “But what has all that to do with a new wife?”
My uncle said more quietly, with a snort of deprecation, “Your father is an uxorious man. For some reason, he likes being married.”
“He chose an odd way to demonstrate it to my mother,” I said. “Going away and staying as he did.”
“And he will be going away again,” said Uncle Mafio. “That is why he must have someone with good sense to leave in charge of the family interests. He has not time to wait for another son. Another wife will have to do.”
“Why another anything?” I said hotly. “He has a son!”
My uncle did not reply to that with words. He merely looked me up and down, with scathing eyes, and then let his gaze roam around the constricted, dim, fetid cell.
Again abashed, I said, “I had hoped he could get me out of here.”
“No, you must get yourself out,” said my uncle, and my heart sank. But he continued to look about the room and said, as if thinking aloud, “Of all the kinds of disaster that can befall a city, Venice has always most feared the risk of a great fire. It would be especially fearsome if it threatened the Doge’s Palace and the civic treasures contained in it, or the Basilica of San Marco and its even more irreplaceable treasures. Since that palace is next door to this prison on one side, and that church adjoining on the other side, the guards here in the Vulcano used to take particular precautions—I imagine they do still—that any smallest lamp flame in these cells is carefully monitored.”
“Why, yes, they—”
“Shut up. They do that because if in the nighttime such a lamp were to set fire to, say, these wooden bed planks, there would be urgent outcry and much running about with pails of water. A prisoner would have to be let out of his burning cell so the fire could be extinguished. And then, if, in the smoke and turmoil, that prisoner could get as far as the corridor of the Giardini Foschi on the canal side of the prison, he might think to slide away the moveable stone panel in the wall there, which leads to the outside. And if he contrived to do that, say, tomorow night, he would probably find a batelo idling about on the water immediately below.”
Mafio finally brought his eyes around to me again. I was too busy contemplating the possibilities to say anything, but old Mordecai spoke up unbidden:
“That has been done before. And because of that, there is now a law that any prisoner attempting such an arson—no matter how trivial his original offense—will be himself condemned to burn. And from that sentence there is no appeal.”
Uncle Mafio said sardonically, “Thank you, Matusalem.” To me he said, “Well, you have just heard one more good reason to make not a try but a success of it.” He kicked at the door to summon the guard. “Until tomorrow night, nephew.”
I lay awake most of that night. It was not that the escape required much planning; I simply lay awake to enjoy the prospect of being free again. And old Cartafilo roused up suddenly out of an apparently sound sleep to say:
“I hope your family know what they are doing. Another law is that a prisoner’s closest relation is responsible for his behavior. A father for a son—khas vesholem—a husband for a female prisoner, a master for a slave. If a prisoner does escape by arson, that one responsible for him will be burned instead.”
“My uncle does not appear to be a man much concerned about laws,” I said, rather proudly, “or even much afraid of burning. But Mordecai, I cannot do it without your participation. We must make the break together. What say you?”
He was silent for a while, then he mumbled, “I daresay burning is preferable to a slow death from the pettechie, the prison disease. And I long ago outlived every last one of my relations.”
So the next night came, and when the coprifuoco tolled and the guards commanded us to put out our lamp, we only shaded its light with the pissota pail. When the guards had gone on by, I spilled most of the fish oil from the lamp onto my bed planks. Mordecai contributed his outer robe—it was quite green with mold and mildew and would make the blaze smokier—and we bundled that under my bed and lighted it from the lamp’s rag wick. In just moments the cell was clouded black and the wood had begun to flicker with flames. Mordecai and I fanned our arms to help the smoke out through the door hole, and clamored loudly, “Fuoco! Al fuoco!” and heard running feet in the corridor.
Then, as my uncle had predicted, there was commotion and confusion, and Mordecai and I were ordered out of the cell so the men with water buckets could crawl in. Smoke billowed out with us, and the guards shoved us out of their way. There was quite a number of them in the passage, but they paid us little heed. So, aided by the concealing smoke and darkness, we sneaked farther down the corridor and around a bend in it. “Now this way!” said Mordecai, and he set off at a speed remarkable for a man of his age. He had been in the prison long enough to have learned its passages, and he led me this way and that, until we glimpsed light at the end of one long hall. He stopped there at a corner, peered around it and waved me on. We turned into a shorter corridor furnished with two or three wall lamps, but otherwise empty.
Mordecai knelt, motioned for me to help, and I saw that one large square stone in the bottom of the wall had iron grips bolted to it. Mordecai seized one, I the other, and we heaved and the stone came away, revealing itself to be shallower than the others around it. Wonderfully fresh air, damp and smelling of salt, swept in through the opening. I stood up straight to take a gratefully deep inhalation, and in the next instant I was knocked down. A guard had sprung from somewhere and was shouting for help.
There was a moment of even more confusion than before. The guard threw himself upon me and we thrashed about on the stone floor, while Mordecai crouched by the hole and regarded us with open mouth and wide eyes. I found myself briefly on top of the guard, and took advantage of it. I knelt so that he had my full weight on his chest and my knees pinned his arms to the floor. I clamped both hands over his loudly flapping mouth, turned to Mordecai and gasped, “I cannot hold—for long.”