Q, Luther Blissett [children's ebooks online .txt] 📗
- Author: Luther Blissett
- Performer: 0156031965
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I look at him askance. ‘Me? Faith?’ I laugh heartily and return the slap. ‘You can’t know me that well!’
Pietro Perna gets back up from the floor, dusting down his clothes. ‘Puttana miseria, you’re free with your hands, mate! I remember this guy in Florence…’
Oporinus intervenes with a paternal air, knowing very well that when he talks about Italy Perna becomes unstoppable. ‘Come on, Messer Pietro, let’s get down to business. These gentlemen are waiting for me and you’ve jumped the queue. What sort of thing can I interest you in?’
The Italian is still walking around between the tables and the shelves, grabbing a book with each step he takes. ‘Not this one, not this one, not… this one either. This one!’ He taps the cover with the back of his hand, ‘Give me twenty copies of this and a hundred of the Vesalius.’
Meanwhile the chimes of the bell remind me that it’s really getting late. I nod to Oporinus to indicate that I’ll drop in again, and make for the door.
‘No, wait!’ Perna’s shrill voice and his rapid footsteps behind me. As though he hadn’t spoken. ‘I’m talking to you, wait for me. Oporinus, one to keep your eye on: the third volume of Rabelais, translate it, and see what happens, don’t you think? Then there’s Michael Servet, you must have read his treatise against the Trinity, well, you don’t feel offended because of what I said about faith, do you?’
He catches up with me after following me for half a mile, drying the generous expanse of his forehead with a handkerchief.
‘You’re a touchy one, aren’t you, mate? You Nordics haven’t got the hang of irony!’
‘Could be,’ I reply, breaking away abruptly from his sweaty hand, ‘and you must forgive me for striking you back then, as you know, Nordic people don’t touch each other unless they’re going to fight.’
The Italian tries to catch his breath after his long run, while at the same time trying to keep up with my rapid pace. ‘I’ve been told you’re quite rich, that you’ve seen more than anyone could imagine, that you’re an Anabaptist and you’re interested in the book trade. I seem to have worked out where you stand on Anabaptism. What about the rest?’
‘Put it this way: if the rest was true, what would you ask me?’
‘I’d suggest going into business.’
I shake my head. ‘The last person who did that was executed a few months ago. Drop it, that would be my advice!’
He insists on gripping my arm with that hand of his. ‘You wouldn’t be superstitious about Italians, would you, pal?’
‘It isn’t a question of superstition. It’s what’s happened so far: everyone who’s been involved with me has met a terrible end.’
‘But you’re still alive!’ he shrieks in that irritatingly high-pitched voice of his. ‘And I’m very lucky.’
He’s in front of me, walking backwards with his arms spread.�
‘At least listen to what I have to say! It’s about that book I mentioned before, The Benefit of Christ Crucified. An ex-plo-sive piece of writing. Let’s agree on this: what he says, in itself, is fine for bores, you know? Some stodgy stuff about justification by faith alone, but the important thing is that it was the cardinals who wrote it. That’s a scandal, don’t you see? And scandals mean thousands of copies.’
I put up the fur collar of my jacket to shield my ears from the freezing wind.
�‘Talk to Oporinus about it, why don’t you? I’m sure he’ll be interested.’
‘Oporinus is out of the picture, mate. Only Italians are going to be interested in The Benefit of Christ Crucified. You can’t publish a book like that in Basle.’
‘And where’s it being published?’
‘In Venice. That’s actually where they published it. But they’re about to ban the printing of it, it’s a matter of a few months, the current publisher may have to stop making copies, capito? And it could be that the people who are distributing it at the moment will drop it like a hot stone. You know very well that in Venice…’
‘I don’t know a lot about Venice. Someone told me they’ve got canals there like they have in Amsterdam.’
My unwanted companion suddenly comes to a standstill as though he’s suddenly been taken ill. He clutches a ring protruding from the wall, the kind you tie horses to, and slowly turns his head towards me. ‘Are you telling me you’ve never been to Venice?’
‘I’ll tell you more than that: this city is the southernmost place I’ve ever set foot in.’
Sounding offended, and still clutching the ring, he says, ‘But in that case everything I’ve heard about you is mistaken. Not only are you not an Anabaptist, c_apito_? but you can’t have seen such incredible things as all that if Venice isn’t one of them, and certainly you can’t be all that interested in the book trade if you’ve never visited the capital of printing, and finally you can’t be as rich as all that, because nowadays no one with the money to spare would deny themselves a trip to Italy.’
I look at him for a moment, still unable to understand why it is, in the end, that� I can’t help liking this awkward, petulant little man. At any rate, it’s time to say goodbye to him, he’s already dragged me quite a long way from the place where I was supposed to be.
‘If you want to spend the whole morning hanging on to that ring, that’s fine by me. But as to myself, I’ve got to get an important letter to the post by midday.’
He looks half-dead. ‘Off you go, pal. I already know you’re going to accept my proposal. You don’t need any other reason. It’s your chance to see Venice.’
Basle, Ash Wednesday 1545
I’ve jotted down a few inadequate lines that will cross the hills, beyond Franche-Comt�, turning into the Seine, following its ever-broader, ever-flatter course, where the boats will make for Paris and the sea. And then the Channel and the English coast. A month, maybe more. That way they’ll be able to escape the war, the mercenary troops of the German princes, the armies massed at the Dutch border by the Emperor’s vassals.�
I hand over the letter.
Addressed to a ghost by the name of Gotz von Polnitz, in the city of London.
No one had said so openly, but we knew we were close to the end. We’d already got two hundred and fifty thousand florins stashed away. And a sense that Fugger was beginning to suspect something.
Gotz von Polnitz, the only one who always stayed in the shadows, beyond suspicion. Apart from anything else he died a few years ago under the name of Lazarus Tucher.
It was to him that I entrusted the fate of the people dearest to me. Kathleen, Magda: if things go wrong, he’s the one to turn to. Lot’s going to have to run faster than the police, without looking back.
I had just disembarked when a little boy came over and advised me to go home.
‘They’ve taken everyone away.’
My agreement with Gotz. If you take them with you, put a red cloth in the window of the house where we’ve hidden the money.
The cloth was there, perhaps it still is. The house belonged to an old merchant who had moved to Goa, in the Indies. And the money was still there: a hundred thousand florins.
I should have joined Kathleen and Magda, in safety, and lived the rest of my days in peace.
But I didn’t have the guts: history tells me if I touch anyone they die. Friends, brethren, fellow travellers. There’s a lake of blood behind me that begins far away, one day in May, and reaches all the way here.
Thomas M�ntzer: tortured and executed, twenty years ago.
Elias the miner: beheaded with the sword of a mercenary in a muddy street.
Hans Hut: suffocated in jail when he burnt his own bedding.
Johannes Denck: carried off by the plague in this very city.
Melchior Hofmann: probably rotted away in the prisons of Strasbourg.
Jan Vokertsz: first martyr on Dutch soil.
Jan Matthys of Haarlem: in pieces in a wicker basket.
Jan Bockelson of Leyden, Bernhard Knipperdolling, Hans Krechting: tortured with red-hot pincers, executed and publicly displayed in three cages hung from the steeple of St Lamberti.
Jan Van Batenburg: beheaded in Vilvoorde.
The names are the names of corpses.
The last survivor of an unfortunate race, a race of people that history has decided to exterminate. Sole survivor, along with the women who gave sustenance to the minds of the warriors. Ottilie, Ursula, Kathleen. Magda is safe, under another sky. Her twelve years of age are the leak through which life can slip away, escaping from half a century of defeats.
I am the last remnant of an era, and I drag myself along with all that era’s dead, a heavy burden that I wouldn’t wish anyone else to be condemned to bear. Let alone the family that I might have had. They’re safe, that’s what matters. Gotz will take care of them. He promised.
Maybe you’d have done the same for me, mathematical wizard, but I was a risk, I was plague-ridden, a face that they would always recognise. So you said nothing, and you hoisted anchor even though you didn’t want to. You said so from the start: if it goes badly, we will never have known each other, we won’t help each other, it’ll be every man for himself. You took your share and Eloi’s on behalf of Magda and Kathleen. You proved to be a kind-hearted son of a bitch.
Kathleen. These lines won’t explain things, a thousand letters wouldn’t. It was me they were after, not you, they would have taken the women and children too, of course they would, but not Gotz the ghost, so keep them safe, England, safe in the arms of your English friends and their drunkard king.
Kathleen. Maybe you read in my face that day that everything was coming to an end. That we would never see each other again, even if I’d managed it, even if I’d� got away. Because an ancient destiny had caught up with me, and a thousand lost friends died again with Eloi.
They took Balthasar, who will never see his wife again, they took Davion and Dorhout. They took Dominique, whose writing dies with him. And then van Hove, the money wasn’t much use to him this time; and Steenaerts, Stevens, van Heer. The big house was left empty. I got away and I’m on my own, yet again.
We feared the wrath of Fugger the Sly: we hadn’t reckoned with the Pope’s sleuths.
He didn’t give up so much as a name. His spirit flew free from his torn flesh. They say he laughed, that he laughed loudly, that rather than screaming he laughed. I prefer to think of him that way: while the smoke envelops him, he’s laughing his head off in defiance of the black crows. But he should still be here, offering me schnaps and those perfumed cigars from the Indies.
It is my destiny to survive, always, to go on living in defeat, taking it a little at a time.
I’m old now. Every time thunder shakes the heavens, I start at the memory of the cannon. Every time I close my eyes to sleep, I know that by the time I open them again I’ll have been visited by many ghosts.
Kathleen, now, in a place far away from war, I am
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