The Serpent of Venice

“I know he will be in his quarters tonight, lady. Perhaps if you could visit him there, allow him the joy of giving you this token of his love, and perhaps use your own charms to help break the lock of his despair. To speak truly, lady, he needs you.”

Her breath stopped and her fingertips went to her chest as if to test that her heart had not stopped.

“He needs me?” She had been wanted, often, constantly since she was a girl, as had many a beauty, but needed?

“Aye, lady. But you must not tell him I was here. Go there, as if drawn only by your affection.”

“I will. Oh, I will.”

“Eight o’clock,” said Iago.

“Alas, once more I feel as if I am on the edge of a very precipice, at the edge, almost, almost, almost, and yes, I sneeze,” said the Moor. “Choo.”

Desdemona had been brushing her hair at the mirror when Othello came in. She turned, regarded him. “My lord, I’ve never known a man more brave, nor more manly in body and demeanor, yet your sneeze concerns me, for when I heard such a sneeze last, it was in the gardens of Belmont, and belonged to a weak and soon to be deceased squirrel.”

“ ’Twas a strong sneeze,” said the Moor.

“Aye, a mighty, heroic sneeze, my lord. The ship-sinking tempest blushes with shame at the blustering destruction of thine most magnificent and not at all sickly squirrel sneeze!”

“You mock me?”

She tossed her long hair over her shoulder. “I do, my lord.”

The Moor held his hand over his nose. “I would not offend thee with my squirrelish rheum, then. Bring me a handkerchief.”

Desdemona quickly retrieved a handkerchief from the chest by the bed and handed it to the Moor, who held it as if it were a foul, dead thing. “Not this one,” said he.

“But it is clean.”

“Have you the handkerchief I gave you? The one with the strawberries embroidered upon it?”

“I know not where it is, my lord.”

“I would have that one, with the strawberries. The one I did give you as my first favor. Given to me by my mother, who received it from an Egyptian charmer who could almost read the thoughts of people. She told my mother that as long as she kept it, it would subdue my father completely to her love, but if she lost it, or made gift of it, he should hold her loathed, and his spirits should hunt after her new fancies. She gave it to me as she was dying, and made me promise I would give it to my wife and she should make it the darling of her eye.”

“Really? You’ve a handful of snot, and a perfectly good handkerchief, but you would prefer to hold out for the one with the strawberries on it?”

“Tis true, there is magic in the warp and woof of it. A prophetic sibyl did weave it, and the worms that spun the silk were blessed, and the thread for the embroidery was colored with dye made from the hearts of mummified virgins. I would have that handkerchief. If you be true to me, lady, and not a wanton strumpet, I would have that handkerchief now.”

“Well, if it was so sodding sacred, my lord, you shouldn’t have soiled it as you did.”

“What?”

“I sent it to the laundry because you used it after you had me in the nun suit.”

“I am a soldier, Desdemona, and not refined in my ways. It was you bade me use it.”

“I told you not to wipe your knob on the curtains, I didn’t tell you to use the mystical bloody handkerchief and then storm in here and throw a wobbly over my being an adulteress because it got lost in the laundry.”

“It is true,” said Emilia, emerging from behind a dressing screen. “I am witness to it.”

“Ah!” said Othello, somewhat surprised that there was someone else in the room. “You saw me wipe my knob on the handkerchief?”

“Oh look, Emilia,” said Desdemona. “You’ve embarrassed him. He was the one in the nun suit at that point. Such a charming, impassioned lad is my Moor. Such a love.”

“No, General,” said Emilia. “I took the handkerchief to the laundry, where your lieutenant, Iago, absconded with it after being frightened off by the fool’s giant apprentice.”

“Iago?” said the Moor, dropping his arms as if the puppeteer had cut his strings.

“Aye, good sir,” said Emilia. “Iago.”

Desdemona went to her husband and squeezed his strong shoulder to steady him in his confusion. “You’d better tend to that sneeze, love. We can’t have the high general of Venice marching about the castle with crusty dragons perching in the caves of his noble nose.”

“Even the most powerful move to my will,” said Iago, to no one in particular. “Not by force or by threat, but by wit and guile. Othello is not so much caught in my net as he throws it over himself and comes along, thinking he is the fisher. As my own evils came alive as a dark killing creature, so will I with cleverness conjure the Moor from night-faced devil to cuckolded beast eating its own tail.

“I have instructed Othello to tell his wife that he will be out late, inspecting the vessels in the harbor until well into the night. Over a flagon of wine at the alehouse, I will fill his mind with vision of misdeeds and betrayal until he is enraged like the caged tiger taunted with sharpened rod. Then will I bring him to Cassio’s house, listen at the window while the Florentine does his dread deed with Bianca, who is well known for her lustful howling. And what husband, when so enraged, can distinguish the moans of one woman when he expects it is his own? And when I see the Moor’s temper has well come to a boil, then shall I call Cassio to the door and stand aside as the infuriated Moor murders him. Cassio, although a Florentine, is a darling of Venice, and the council, led by Antonio’s young senator, will depose Othello and appoint me to head the Venetian forces. First will come power, then, with our Crusade, will come wealth.”

CHORUS: And so, mad Iago, his vision as shallow as his intellect, his strategies as weak as his character, did draw plans for his own undoing.

“But alas,” said Iago, “perhaps there is a flaw in my plan that, because of the strength of my will and the breadth of my ambition, I am yet to discover . . .”

CHORUS: So beguiled by hate is the soldier, that he does not realize that the Venetians would never prosecute Othello, the son-in-law of a Senator, the heir to a Council seat himself, for what would look to be a well-justified killing of the man who wrongly used his wife. No working man at the docks would be undone for such a deed, so a general, a national hero, will not even stand trial.

“Oh bugger,” said Iago. “There is the ring of truth to it, isn’t there?”

CHORUS: Dazzlingly obvious to all but the most profoundly thick.

“Of course, Cassio is already failed as an officer, his murder serves not my purpose but for the pure pleasure of it. It is Othello who must fall before the Florentine’s sword. Yet, as Cassio is a skilled swordsman, though not from battle but from dogged disciplined practice, so is the Moor dangerous with his scimitar. I will have to slow his hand, as I did Rodrigo’s, with the Oriental potion. And if the darkling beast forms from the shadows and kills Othello, too . . . ? Well, he would have done well not to have trifled with my loyalties. You, Chorus, say nothing of this. I will see the Barbary horse dead this night, and I will not by your meddling be undone.”

CHORUS: A humble narrator is but a flourish in the scenery, no instrument of Fate is he. The watch bell tolls seven, and villains and heroes are called to put in motion their plots.

“Tis justice that on his last night the general waits in a common alehouse. It shows his kind were not meant for command. I am away.”

Marco Polo stood beside me at the rail on one side of the ship, while Jessica looked out over the sea on the other. “She is still not speaking to you, then?”

“Holding fast to her anger,” said I. “Not like telling her about Lorenzo sooner would have made anything better. She’s seen the world, met new friends, and learned to swear like a pirate—if she’d gone off with Lorenzo her gold would still be gone and her carcass would probably be feeding the fishes off some p

oxy Greek island.”

“What of your other lady, Pocket? The darker one?” The explorer bounced his eyebrows as if he were party to some bawdy secret, nudge, nudge.

“I haven’t seen her since we left Corsica, which is just as well. You keep that potion of yours capped, Polo. She might have been cute as a kitten when you last saw her, but now she seldom shows up without there’s a trail of gruesome gore and grieving survivors.”

“Except for you. She doesn’t harm you?”

“I am a tenderhearted fool, so I suffered bruised feelings when she used me roughly and left me hanging there in the dark, but not mortally, no.”

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“My roguish charm and clever wit, no doubt.”

“No, that’s not it. Maybe you just taste bad. English food . . .”

“Marco!” I cried, fixing the explorer with a critical gaze.

“Polo!” Drool answered from another part of the ship.

“Marco!” I repeated.

“Polo!” called Drool in the voice of a child.

And that continued for quite a while until the adventurer admitted that it is an accepted fact among monsters and giants of all stripes that Englishmen are delicious.

It was of no little concern to Iago that Brabantio’s potion had not made the Moor quick to anger, yet slow to move in a fight, as planned, but instead, agreeable, sentimental, and not a little sloppy. Iago crouched there, under Michael Cassio’s window, with the high general of Venice, listening to the sounds of lovers wafting through the shutters.

“The fiend!” said Iago. “He uses her like a base strumpet, listen to them.”

“I knew a caulker’s mate in Barcelona who played the base strumpet as we supped each evening,” said Othello dreamily. “Ballads as sad as a lost calf lowing for its mother.”