Marco Polo: A Private Life

1323, Venice

The damp in Venice enters not by force but by repetition. It comes up through the flagstones, through the cloth of my shirt, into the chest that has begun to answer even the shallowest cold with a rattle I no longer pretend to misunderstand. The bell at San Marco has just rung the hour. My ink is cold. My hands, which once steadied a Mongol relay-tablet in my palm, now hold the pen at a slight tremor even when I think they do not. I am writing because I must, and because my daughter Fantina, who brings me broth in the afternoons, has twice in the last week completed a sentence I had begun and could not finish.

Men here have always preferred the parts of my account that asked the least of them. The lacquered halls. The paper money. The breadth of the roads. The great beasts. The improbable distances. All those surfaces that can be admired or dismissed with equal laziness. They do not care to see the sequence beneath such things, the couriers at their relay posts, the tax registers, the governors fearful of audit, the punishments made visible so that others might never require the same correction. Yet it was the order of the thing, not the wonder of it, that explained the world I entered. If I can set the order down with care enough before my body thins further and my memory begins yielding ground faster than my hand can recover it, then perhaps what survives of Cathay in the mouths of Venice will not be only marvel deformed into fable.