Q by Luther Blissett (poetry books to read txt) 📕
The final blow: 'Omnia sunt communia, sons of whores!'
His head flies into the dust.
* * *
The houses are being ransacked. Doors smashed in with kicks and axe-blows. We'll be next. No time to lose. I lean over him.
'Magister, listen to me, we've got to go, they're coming... For the love of God, Magister...' I grasp his shoulders. He whispers a reply. He can't move. Trapped, we're trapped.
Like Elias.
My hand clutches my sword. Like Elias. I wish I had his courage.
'What do you think you're doing? We've had enough of martyrdom. Go on, get out while you can!'
The voice. As though from the bowels of the earth. I can't believe he's spoken. He's moving even less than be
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- Author: Luther Blissett
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There’s a time for war and a time for peace. There’s a time when you can do anything, and a time when you have no choice, because all of a sudden twenty years of fire and courage have vanished beneath the wrinkles of your face.
And you begin to dread the arrival of a messenger. What will your next task be? I dread the disgust that runs the narrow path from belly to brain. Something you should be able to conceal behind the authority of missions accomplished, behind experience. And yet that feeling of naisea won’t go away, in fact it grows stronger by the day, however much you try to send it back down to the depths. You can’t find a reason, you’re held by a thousand faces, the faces of men and women dispatched to hell.
Then one fine day you find yourself telling yourself it wasn’t you. That you didn’t take up that sword. And when that happens you know you’re finished.
Q’s diary
Viterbo, 10th August 1548
The record of an interrogation, of one Brother Lucifer, reaches me from Ferrara. It concerns the spread of heresy in the community of the so-called ‘Po pirates’, already the plague of the Ferrara merchants, who were recently eradicated by Duke Ercole II d’Este.
The friar showed clear signs of madness, declaring that he didn’t know in what year of grace we were living, and declaring his conviction that Leo X was still the Pope.
Indicted for bringing heretical and pagan-influenced rituals among the outlaws of the marshes, and particularly of practising adult baptism, he defended himself by maintaining that he had taken delivery of the consignment from a missionary, one Friar Titian, who had in return received it from the abbot of Pomposa. The friar, he said, had sent him the ‘librum de nova doctrina‘, The Benefit of Christ Crucified, and had then conferred a second baptism upon him.
I took out the letter. The Venetian inquisitors are merely ignorant servants of the Doge. They haven’t the faintest idea what Anabaptists are. They wouldn’t find our Anabaptist missionary if they spent a hundred years looking for him. He never shows up in the same place twice. Every sighting comes from a different location, and the epicentre of those locations is always Venice. It’s almost a pattern. All you have to do is put all the pieces together. One single man moving between the territories of Venice and Ferrara, rebaptising people, allowing his chosen name to leak out. By the time the Inquisition gets there, he’s already disappeared into the void,� he’s plunged back into the bowels of history, whence he came. It’s clear enough: he’s not on a pilgrimage, there’s no way of following him. Just a series of single points, so that he knows he’ll get away with it. He baptises people, he makes sure everyone knows his name, and then he disappears. Otherwise why would he choose such a strange and celebrated name for himself?
17th August 1548
From the confession of Friar Adalberto Rizzi, also known as Friar Poplar, captured on the Ferrarese bank of the Po on 30th June 1548, and held in the prisons of the Duke d’Este.
‘And he invited me to reflect on the fact that when he asked a little five-year-old boy who Jesus Christ was, he got the reply: a statue. And from that he deduced that it was not right to administer the doctrine to minds incapable of comprehension…’
‘He said that the worship of statues and simulacra opened up the way to an ignorant and incompetent faith…’
‘Yes, he affirmed that his name was Titian, and that he was on his way to Rome…’
The child and the statue.
Shivering. A shiver running through my head.
The child and the statue.
Something a long way away, hurtling towards me at very great speed, carried by a wind that sweeps memory away.
The child and the statue.
Venice, 30th August 1548
A black shadow outlined in the doorway. Duarte Gomez takes one step forward, stops and stamps the heel of his boot. Olive-coloured face, delicate features, slightly feminine, but with a crease running across his brow.
A nod to Demetra, who takes the girls away.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Please, you’ve got to come with me.’
The Miquez’s servant goes outside with me, first to the porch and then to the alleyway where there’s only space for one person to pass at a time.
The two brothers are there. Like two hired killers waiting on the threshold for their victim.
Jo�o is taller, wearing a big black hat decorated with a leather strap. Bernardo, looking� like a little boy, with the comical beginnings of a beard under his chin. Their Toledan swords point out from under their coats. The light fades from one moment to the next.
‘What’s happening, gentlemen? Why all this mystery?’
The smile he always wears looks somehow broken, as though it’s at odds with his state of mind. ‘They’ve got Perna.’
‘Where?’
‘In Milan.’
‘What the fuck’s he doing in Milan? Didn’t we decide to forget that particular market?’
The three Sephardic faces darken, and the light fades some more.�
‘He was supposed to stop in Bergamo, collect the money from the booksellers and come back. It seems he wanted to take the risk. He’s been accused of selling heretical books.’
I listen to my breathing as it echoes from one end of the alley to the other, and lean against the wall.
‘The Holy Office?’
‘You can bet on it.’
Gomez goes on nervously stamping his heels on the cobbles.
‘What are we going to do?’
Jo�o takes out a rolled up sheet of paper.
‘We’ll pay up and get him out before things get too serious. Duarte’s setting off tonight. Gonzaga owes me some money: I’ve suggested wiping out his debt if he puts in a good word.’
‘Do you think it’ll work?’
‘I hope so.’
‘Shit. I don’t like it, Jo�o, I don’t like it at all.’
‘It was just chance, I’m sure of it. Bad luck and carelessness.’
Bad premonitions, I can’t think straight.
The elder Miquez gives me his sincerest smile. ‘Don’t worry. I’m still the most important financier in the city. They won’t dare touch us.’
I press my hands against both walls, as though to push them apart. ‘For how long, Jo�o? For how long?’
*
Venice, 3rd September
Maybe someone has managed to put together the pieces of the puzzle. Bad news from Naples: Infante, our man down here, has been put in prison, and is going to be interrogated by the Inquisition.
They’re slowly unravelling the intrigue that we’ve woven over the past two years.
Cardinal Carafa still hasn’t used his biggest guns: while Pole, Morone, Soranzo and all the other Spirituali are still on top his hands are tied.
If Reginald Pole were to become Pope before Carafa managed to go on the attack, the Inquisition would be halted: the old games would start up again, even the excommunication of the Benefit of Christ Crucified would be suspended.
These networks are too extensive for one single man. It may even be fascinating for someone who’s reached the fifth decade of his life, someone who’s managing to appreciate its geometry, its design, but there’s still something else to be done. Something personal.�
Something that’s been waiting for twenty years. When your muscles start stiffening and your bones ache, unsettled scores become more important than battles and strategies.
Titian the Anabaptist is going to have to strike again, but far away from here: a strong wind is rising, and I’ve got to keep our vendettas far away from Venice.
You’ve got to come and find me. So that I can get you.
Q’s diary
Venice, 28th September 1548
Heresy is everywhere in Venice.
In the way the women dress, with their breasts outside their clothes, and heels a span high beneath their shoes. In the thousand narrow alleyways, where forbidden doctrines are whispered. In the impossible foundations that support the city.
In Venice the Germans are everywhere too. There isn’t a calle, a campo or a canal that doesn’t know the sound of Luther’s language.
Venice: the ideal terrain for pursuing a trail.
The Fondaco brewery. Coming out with the occasional reference to Anabaptism: startled faces, references to the M�nster massacre, no useful information. Titian: Who, the painter? Nothing at all.
A walk around the Rialto market, sniffing the air. Up and down the bridge, and then down to St Mark’s, along the Strada delle Mercerie. People busy doing deals, Germans selling furs, impossible to imagine any of them baptising a friar in a convent in Rovigo, let alone among the students of Padua.
The students: Titian is a cultured man, someone who can speak the language of the universities at least as well as that of the innkeepers and carpenters of Bassano.
A sense I have: the man I am looking for doesn’t frequent those places.
Venice, 30th September 1548
Archive of the Inquisition.
Three Germans implicated in heresy trials.
— Matthias Kleber, thirty-two, Bavarian, lutenist in Venice for twelve years, caught stealing consecrated hosts from the tabernacle in the Church of San Rocco, sentenced to exile, but rehabilitated with his repentance and conversion to the Catholic faith.
— Ernst Hreusch, forty-one, wood-merchant, originally from Mainz, tried for writing words in praise Luther on the walls of the churches of San Mos� and San Zaccaria. Sentenced to the punishment of rubbing them out, and of making payments of one hundred and fifty ducats to the two churches.
— Werner Kaltz, twenty-six, tramp, from the city of Zurich, found guilty of being a wizard for his work as a chiromancer, alchemist and astrologer. Escaped from the Piombi prison, still at large.
A semi-iconoclast, a Luther fanatic and a wizard. I try to imagine them in the various situations in which I have seen Titian as protagonist, but none of them really seems suited to the role of Anabaptist missionary.
Reverse the task: imagine Titian bringing his own ghost to life, moving through the streets and shops of the city like a puppet. No.
In Venice Titian isn’t Titian. He’s someone else. If he’d been rebaptising people here too, someone would remember. Titian is concealing his own identity: at the same time, though, it seems as though he wants to give his actions the greatest possible resonance.
Who is, who was, Titian in Venice?
Venice, 18th October 1548
A letter preceded them. That’s why we’re here at the jetty, our eyes fixed on the Giudecca canal. They should be about to appear over there.
Bernardo Miquez walks up and down. Jo�o is as solid as a statue, very elegant as always, leather gloves slipped into his belt, and wide sleeves on his jacket, flapping about in the wind.
Demetra has made me a woollen scarf for this frosty autumn. I’m grateful to her for that, because my throat’s been playing up for some time.
I observe the boats gliding slowly towards the piers and discharging their weird and colourful human cargoes.
‘For the Doge and St Mark!’
I give a start at the screeching voice of a massive black bird being carried in a cage.
Jo�o laughs out loud when he sees the expression on my face: ‘Talking birds, my friend! This city never ceases to amaze.’
Bernard leans forwards on to the edge of the bench, almost losing his balance: ‘There they are!’
‘Where?’ I keep quiet about the fact that my eyesight isn’t as keen as it once was.
‘Over there, they’ve just disembarked!’
I pretend to recognise the boat, which is still a tiny dark blur: ‘Is that really them?’
‘Of course it is! There’s Sebastiano!’
‘By
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