“More years of waiting, Master Niketas, and meanwhile your Manuel also died. Even if I had not yet visited your country, I knew enough about it to think that, with a new basileus, all the old advisers would be done away with. I prayed to the Blessed Virgin and all the saints that Zosimos had not been killed: even blinded, he would still suit me, he had only to give me the map so I could read it. And at the same time I felt the years flowing from me like blood.”
Niketas urged Baudolino not to allow himself to be disheartened now by his former disappointment. He ordered his cook and servant to outdo themselves, and he wanted their last meal prepared under the sun of
Constantinople to remind him of all the sweetness of his sea and his land. And so he wanted lobsters and porgies on the table, boiled prawns, fried crabs, lentils with oysters and clams, sea dates, accompanied by a puree of beans and rice with honey, girt with a crown of fish roe, and all served with Cretan wine. But this was only the first course. Afterwards came a stew that wafted a delicious aroma, and in the pan were steaming four hearts of cabbage, hard and white as snow, a carp and about twenty little mackerel, fillets of salt fish, fourteen eggs, a bit of Wallachian sheep cheese, all bathed in a good quart of oil, sprinkled with pepper, and flavored with twelve heads of garlic. But with that second dish he asked for a wine of Ganos.
- Baudolino and Colandrina
From the courtyard of the Genoese came the laments of Niketas’s daughters, who were reluctant to have their faces smeared with dirt, accustomed as they were to the vermilion of their cosmetics. “Calm down,” Grillo said to them, “beauty alone doesn’t make a woman.”
And he explained that it wasn’t even certain that these marks of ringworm and pox they were applying to their faces would suffice to disgust a lusty pilgrim those men who were satisfying themselves on anyone they found, young or old, healthy or sick, Greeks or Saracens or Jews, because in these matters religion doesn’t count. To arouse disgust, he added, they should be covered with bumps, like a grater. Niketas’s wife lovingly collaborated in uglifying her daughters, adding a sore on the forehead or some chicken skin on the nose, to make it seem half eaten away.
Baudolino looked sadly at that sweet family group, and said abruptly: “And so, as I was casting about, not knowing what to do, I also took a wife.”
He told the story of his marriage in a less merry tone, as if it were a painful memory.
“At that time I was moving back and forth between the court and Alessandria. Frederick still couldn’t swallow the fact of that city’s existence, and I was trying to patch things up between my fellow-citizens and the emperor.
The situation was more favorable than in the past. Alexander III was dead, and Alessandria had lost its protector. The emperor was gradually coming to terms with the Italian cities, and Alessandria could no longer represent itself as the bulwark of the League. Genoa had by now come over to the side of the empire, and Alessandria had everything to gain by going with the Genoese, and nothing to gain by remaining the only city hostile to Frederick.
A solution had to be found that would be honorable for all. So, while I was spending my days talking with my fellow-citizens, then returning to court to sound out the emperor’s mood, I became aware of Colandrina. She was the daughter of Guasco, and she had grown up more or less before my eyes, though I hadn’t realized she had become a woman. She was very sweet, and she moved with a somewhat awkward grace.
After the story of the siege, my father and I were considered the saviors of the city, and she looked at me as if I were Saint George. When I spoke with Guasco, she would crouch near me, her eyes shining, as she drank in my words. I could have been her father, because she was barely fifteen and I was thirty-eight. I don’t know if I had fallen in love with her, but I liked seeing her around me, and I began telling incredible stories to the others so that she would hear me. Guasco, too, had become aware of this.
It’s true that he was a miles, and therefore something bigger than a ministerial like me (a peasant’s son into the bargain), but, as I told you, I was the city’s pet, I wore a sword on my hip, I lived at court…. It would not have been a bad match, and it was Guasco himself who said to me: Why don’t you marry Colandrina? She’s become a burden here, she drops the pans, and when you’re away she spends all her time at the window looking out to see if you’re coming.
It was a fine wedding, in the church of San Pietro, the cathedral we had given to the pope, rest his soul, though the new one didn’t even know it existed. It was a strange marriage, because after the first night I had to go off and join Frederick, and so it went for a good year, with a wife I saw once in a blue moon, and it touched my heart to see her joy every time I came back.” “So you loved her?”
“I think I did, but it was the first time I’d taken a wife, and I didn’t really know what to do with her, except those things that husbands do at night, but during the day I didn’t know if I should pat her like a child, treat her as a lady, scold her for her clumsiness—because she still needed a father—or forgive her everything, and perhaps spoil her instead. But, at the end of the first year, she told me she was expecting a child, and then I began looking at her as if she were the Virgin Mary.
When I came home, I would beg her forgiveness for having been away, I took her to Mass on Sunday to show everybody that Baudolino’s fine wife was about to give him a son, and on the few evenings we spent together we told each other what we would do with that Baudolinetto Colandrinino she was carrying in her belly. She sometimes imagined that Frederick would give him a dukedom, and I was almost ready to believe it myself.
I told her about the kingdom of Prester John, and she said she wouldn’t let me go there alone for all the gold in the world, because there was no telling how many beautiful ladies there were down there, and she wanted to see if any place could be finer and bigger than Alessandria and Solero put together.
Then I told her about the Grasal and her eyes widened: Just think, dear Baudolino, you go down there, you come back with the cup from which Our Lord drank, and you become the most famous knight of all Christendom, you build a shrine for this Grasal at Montecastello, and they come to see it all the way from Quargnento…. We daydreamed like children, and I said to myself: poor Abdul, you believe that love is a faraway princess, but mine is so close that I can tickle her behind the ear, and she laughs and tells me I give her goose bumps…. But it was short-lived.”
“Why?”
“Because while she was pregnant, the Alessandrians made a pact with Genoa against the people of Silvano d’Orba. They were just a handful, but still they roamed the area and robbed the peasants. Colandrina that day went out beyond the city walls to gather some flowers because she had heard I was about to arrive. She stopped near a flock of sheep, to joke with the shepherd, who was one of her father’s men, and a band of those bastards rushed over to seize the sheep. Perhaps they didn’t mean to harm her, but they roughly pushed her about, flung her to the ground, the sheep ran off, trampling her underfoot…. The shepherd had already taken to his heels, and when her family found her, late in the evening, after realizing she hadn’t come home, she had a fever.
Guasco sent someone to find me, I came home at full speed, but meanwhile two days had gone by. I found her in bed, dying, and, on seeing me, she tried to apologize because, she said, the baby had come out ahead of time, and he was already dead, and she tormented herself because she hadn’t even been able to give me a son. She looked like a little wax madonna, and you had to put your ear to her mouth to hear what she was saying. Don’t look at me, Baudolino, she said, my face is all splotchy from weeping, and so you find not only a bad mother but also an ugly wife…. She died begging my forgiveness, while I was asking hers, for not having been at her side in her moment of danger. Then I asked to see the little corpse, but they
