Q by Luther Blissett (poetry books to read txt) 📕

Venice, 3rd November 1551

Chill light of dawn.

I study the short, rippling waves of the lagoon, which will bring Defeat to me. Will bring me face to face with it.

The island of San Michele. A church, a cloister, a cemetery.

A whole life’s actions concentrated into a few short days. Endgame is approaching, and no one could predict its outcome.

Now there can be no delays. The old Baptist, the heretical hare, Titian, finally hunted down. His hunter in Venice. The Jews caught in a trap leading straight to the scaffold.

Decades of intrigues and attacks, betrayals and retreats, rashness and remorse, are all rushing together all of a sudden. The prophets and the king of a single, tragic day; cardinals and popes, and new popes; bankers, prices, merchants and preachers; men of letters, painters and spies and counsellors and pimps. Everywhere, involving everyone, the same war. Those people, myself among them, were the most fortunate ones. They enjoyed the privilege of fighting the war. Wretches or noblemen, bastards or heroes, wretched spies or knights of the humble, sordid mercenaries or prophets of a coming age, they chose the battlefield, they embraced a faith, they stirred up the flames of hope and vanity. And in that battlefield they found the one who ripped their flesh to pieces; that faith is the one that betrayed them on the final day; the flames are the pyre on which they are burning now. They were responsible for their shifting fortunes and their own unstinting ruin. Day after day they filled the poisoned chalice that would finally kill them.

We ourselves must ask forgiveness for having had too propitious a fate. Enjoy our privilege to the dregs. Work out a final plan. Test out that crazed conclusion.

Not much longer to wait. The faint light of dawn is starting to give shape to the tombstones and the white crosses, a scattered army leading down to the water.

The campanile of San Michele looms over the whole flat island, standing out against the stars that are going out one by one. A sea breeze swells up beneath my woollen cloak. I can feel exhaustion spreading through my limbs, and in the throbbing pain behind my right eye. My attention is captured by each little thing, each detail, it needs a break after all the long sleepless nights, with Jo�o at my side, planning the operation down to its tiniest particulars. In the distance, returning fishing boats, keeping to the open sea to avoid the treacherous shallows at low tide. The first gulls are either starting to fly or settling on the calm water.

I should be tense, agitated. Instead I am aware only of the exhaustion in my bones, my rheumatic pains, and also a certain hesitancy. Perhaps deep down I don’t want to know. I’d rather preserve intact the suspicions that have travelled with me throughout all those years. Turn the page and start a calmer story, a tale of soft beds and welcoming loved ones. Tear myself away from the battlefield and rest, for ever.

But the dead would return to interrogate me. All those faces insist on memories. They say that it’s down to the last man left alive to settle the scores. To discover the truth. Perhaps I owe more to them than I do to myself, perhaps I owe more to the ones who were left in the field, the prophets betrayed by their own prophecies, the peasants who used their hoes as swords, the weavers who turned themselves into soldiers to topple the bishops and the princes, all the people who have travelled with me throughout my life. I also owe it to the Jews, that strange breed of pilgrims with no destination who have gone with me the last part of the way.

Or maybe not. Sometimes I think this is the illusion that has kept me going, trying out new paths, never stopping to admit that more than anything else it was the years that betrayed me.

Or perhaps it’s both at once. I can no longer give things the same importance as I once did. And yet I should do. Now that I’m about to have the confirmation that I’ve been seeking for such a long time; now that the story is about to reach its conclusion. Now I’m almost sorry. Because I know that I’m just going to be disappointed. Disappointed at having reached the end, disappointed at recognising the man who has been selling us to the enemy for thirty years. It’s stupid, it’s absurd, that more than anything else I feel the desire to ask him to remember the past, to bring out all those faces once again. The only one who really knows my story, who can still talk to me about that passion, that hope. It’s the desire, stupid and banal, of an old man. That’s all it is. Or maybe it’s only fatigue that’s taking me back, the heedless sleep that blots out the mind.

A boat appears on the horizon, making straight for the island.

Fine, it’s time to finish things off.

The Hunchback moors the boat to the little jetty. The hooded man is helped out. The Sephardi unties his hands and removes his hood. Then he turns back and gets on board.

The old man rubs his wrists, blinks his reddened eyes; his face marked by exhaustion, grey dishevelled hair. He brings a hand to his eyebrow and rubs a deep scar, then fixes his eye on me.

I try to scrub away years from that face.

Qo�let.

He speaks first: ‘An action worthy of Captain Gert from the Well.’

‘When did you work it out?’

His palm presses on his old wound. ‘I went back to M�nster.’ He coughs, wrapping his dark cloak around him. ‘I’ve been looking for you for years, and in the end you were the one who found me.’

‘But you’d worked it out already.’

‘It wasn’t that difficult: Titian the Baptist, a pimp with the name of a heretic. Antwerp, and the survivors of M�nster. Three days ago I had my final confirmation. A well constructed trap. Only you could have prepared it.’

‘I’d been told you died in M�nster, trying to force the bishops’ blockade.’

He leans on one of the tombstones, hands on his knees, eyes on the ground. Like myself, he is no longer of an age for chilly dawns like this one. And more importantly, he no longer has a reason not to remember.

‘You left in the spring of ‘34, in search of money and ammunition in Holland. You did me a favour: I’d have been sorry to see you engulfed by the hastening destruction along with the rest. I had arrived in M�nster with a task: to join the Anabaptists in their struggle against the bishop, to become one of them, with all that entailed, help them to turn the city into the New Jerusalem, and when the time came to send that hope up in flames. I introduced myself to Bernhard Rothmann with a large donation for the cause, telling him I was a former mercenary who had been away from M�nster for many years. Money achieved what my story could not.’

I look at this bent old man, having difficulty recognising him as the man I entrusted with the defence of the Market Square in the days when we took M�nster. Now he’s only the relic of my lieutenant, Heinrich Gresbeck.

He goes on: ‘I attached myself to you because they said you had fought with Thomas M�ntzer: you were the only one I could depend on. The arrival of Matthys, his swift end and the sudden acclamation of Bockelson as his successor made the work much easier. All I needed was for you to go. I became the confidant of Bernhard Rothmann, now a mere shadow of the fiery preacher who had led the Anabaptists against the bishop. I dusted down the Wittenberg lectures, spent days and nights with him discussing the regulations of the New Zion, the practices of the