The old woman took my hand without ceremony and led me up a narrow stair that groaned at every step.
The garret air was dry; the ceiling sloped low enough to enforce humility.
She pointed to a small bed among four in a row.
"You will sleep here. The others are at school. The fifth bed is for the servant girl—she keeps you all in order."
She turned and went down again, and I followed, because at nine one does not yet know that obedience is optional.
The garden she showed me was little more than a square of weeds bordered by a wall and three fences.
It had the advantage of existing.
"There. You may walk until dinner," she said, and left me to contemplate existence.
I felt neither joy nor grief—merely the neutrality of a parcel correctly delivered. Only the woman herself troubled me.
I knew nothing then of beauty or ugliness, but her voice rasped like a file, and her face, with its heavy brows and the hint of a beard, filled me with an instinctive distaste.
It was not fear; simply the sense that I should rather look elsewhere.
At noon three boys burst into the garden, loud and cheerful. One asked if I missed home already. I did not dignify him with a reply.
Children are merciful, however, and silence counts as consent. Before long I was running and tumbling with them, laughing as though I had always belonged.
When the servant called us to table—a broad girl with hands built for farming rather than service—we obeyed.
Before each place lay a wooden spoon.
I pushed mine back.
"I have a silver one," I said. "My grandmother's gift."
The girl smiled as if humoring royalty. "The mistress says we're all equal here. No silver spoons."
Equality! A word that promises much and delivers broth.
I said nothing and took up the wood.
Having thus learned that equality in everything was the rule of the house, I went to work like the others and began to eat the soup out of the common dish.
If I did not complain of the rapidity with which my companions made it disappear, I could not help wondering at such inequality being allowed.
The soup was followed by a sliver of dried cod and an apple. The drink was a pale, bitter liquid called graspia—the ghost of wine revived by boiling grape stems in water.
After the first sip I decided philosophy would sit better with plain water. From the following day I drank nothing else.
This way of living surprised me; I was uncertain whether I even had the right to complain of it.
Thus began my education—simple, frugal, and, as I later learned, highly instructive.
After dinner, the servant led me to school. It was run by a young priest—Doctor Gozzi—who had agreed to instruct me at the modest rate of forty sous a month, or, as the Abbé Grimani would later remark, the eleventh part of a sequin well spent.
It was a writing class. I was placed among children half my size, five and six years old, whose delight at my expense was pure and unanimous.
I had nothing to write, and even less to say. They laughed, of course—they were right to. I was the joke.
When the lesson ended, the servant fetched me home. Supper proved worse than dinner, which at least had been edible.
Afterward, we were sent to bed, and that was when my education in misery began.
Three familiar species of vermin soon made my acquaintance, followed by rats that leapt like gymnasts across the rafters.
One landed square on my bed.
My blood froze.
I screamed, once, twice—then louder.
The servant did not move. She possessed either the sleep of saints or the indifference of stones.
Before long, my body learned a small philosophy: the vermin's bites distracted me from fear of the rats, and the rats' scurrying dulled the pain of the vermin.
Between these two evils my mind discovered balance.
If misery could not be avoided, it could at least be studied.
At dawn I fled the garret, covered in bites and dirty. I demanded a clean shirt.
"Sunday," said the servant, yawning. "Linen day."
Her laughter when I threatened to complain was perfectly unanswerable.
For the first time in my life, I wept—tears of sorrow and of anger together—while my companions laughed.
They shared my condition, but they were used to it.
And that makes all the difference.
That morning at school, I slept through the lesson.
My right eye was swollen, my shirt stained, my pride in tatters.
A boy whispered to the master, no doubt hoping to prolong the comedy.
Doctor Gozzi, who would one day matter to me more than he knew, said nothing at first. He simply watched.
Then he sent for me.
Doctor Gozzi called me into his chamber. He listened without interrupting, hands folded, his expression calm.
When I finished, I lifted my shirt and showed him the blisters that marked my skin—proof more eloquent than complaint.
He said nothing.
He reached for his cloak, took my hand, and led me back through the streets of Padua. His stride was long and purposeful; I half-ran to keep up.
The mistress was in the hallway when we entered.
Without ceremony, the doctor lifted my shirt once more. The sight of my wounds startled even her.
"Would you care to explain this?" he asked. His tone was courteous, which made it worse.
She gasped, clutched her apron. "I—knew nothing! The servant girl must have neglected the cleaning. Lazy creature! I'll send her packing this instant!"
"Let us first see his bed," said Gozzi.
We climbed to the garret.
He drew back the sheets; vermin scattered before us.
The mistress reddened, stammered, and renewed her performance of outrage. "The servant, how dare she!"
But the girl had heard.
She stepped forward, eyes blazing. "Your servant, yes—but not your liar." She flung open the other beds. "Look! They sleep no better than he does!"
The mistress slapped her.
The girl struck back and fled, leaving silence behind.
Doctor Gozzi stood a moment, inspecting the ruin of my bed.
Then he placed his hand gently on my head. "This boy," he said, "will not set foot in my school again until he is sent to me as clean as the others."
He turned and left.
Justice does not linger. Her rage did.
The door had scarcely closed before she wheeled on me, her voice shrill with humiliation. "You've ruined me, you little wretch! If ever you cause such a scandal again, I'll throw you into the street!"
I could not understand.
Until that day I had known only clean rooms, kind words, and the easy confidence of innocence. To be punished for another's fault bewildered me.
I felt my throat tighten but I maintained silence and my previous commitment of never looking at her hideous face.
At last, she hurled a clean shirt at me, as one tosses charity to a beggar. An hour later, a new servant changed the sheets.
After Doctor Gozzi's visit to my miserable boarding house, my fortunes improved — slightly.
The sheets were changed, the room was swept, and though the rats still held their nightly assemblies beneath my bed, I learned the wisdom of ignoring what cannot be remedied.
At school, the good doctor treated me with a care I neither expected nor deserved.
He praised my penmanship, encouraged my Latin, and, out of vanity more than gratitude, I applied myself with zeal.
One afternoon, our lessons ended early. Doctor Gozzi gathered our papers into a neat stack, laid them on the desk, and smiled at us over his spectacles.
"We still have half an hour," he said. "What shall we discuss?"
The question loosed pandemonium.
"The Holy Church!" cried one boy.
"No, the cultivation stages!" shouted another.
Voices overlapped; desks shook. I sat back, watching Gozzi with curiosity.
He listened to our babble with an expression midway between amusement and despair, then lifted a single finger.
"Very well," he said. "Since you cannot agree on the Church or cultivation, let us speak instead of the world in which both exist."
The class fell still. Even I leaned forward.
He began, pacing slowly before the window.
"We live upon the continent of Auropia, united—or so men claim—by the Solarian Faith. At its summit sits His Holiness, the Pontiff in Radiance, guardian of our souls and judge of our sins."
The pious crossed themselves. I considered the matter and decided God would not miss one sign of the cross more or less.
"Here on the Scarletan Peninsula," Gozzi went on, "stood once a mighty empire. Today, it lies divided among kingdoms and republics—each small enough to envy, none strong enough to rule. We belong to the Venecian Republic: mistress of the seas, eleven centuries old, rich in trade, poorer in virtue."
Several boys puffed their chests at this.
I merely smiled; patriotism requires leisure, and hunger leaves little of it.
"To the north," he said, drawing invisible maps with his hands, "the Habsburg realms; to the south, the Bourbon kingdoms; between them, the Church States, where holiness and politics share the same bed. Beyond Scarletan lie the great powers: the proud Francians, the gold-drenched Espannans, the stern Anglians, and the snowbound Russans, who, they say, live in a land of eternal snow."
A murmur of awe rippled through the class. Snow, to us, was not unfamiliar but the 'eternal' adjective astounded us.
"And farther east," Gozzi said, lowering his voice, "rises the Sublime Crescent—our eternal adversary. The Turks, blinded by a false creed, have sought for centuries to drown the light of Solaria beneath their crescent moon. Yet they will never prevail, for the Almighty protects the faithful."
He crossed himself with deliberate gravity; the boys followed at once.
Then a bold student piped up:
"But teacher! You haven't told us about the cultivation stages!"
The room buzzed again with approval. I too perked up; the word stages suggested both mystery and progress, which appealed equally to my vanity and my curiosity.
Doctor Gozzi glanced at the window, where the afternoon sun was slipping toward the roofs. He checked his watch, sighed, and smiled in defeat.
"Another day," he said. "The hour's gone. Class dismissed."
The boys groaned. I hid my own disappointment shaking my head.
As we left, I found myself walking more slowly than usual, my mind alive with maps and miracles.
I did not know that before long I would leave that classroom forever — yet what I heard that day, and what I did not, stayed with me longer than any lesson.
Padua restored my health only to betray my stomach.
Strength returned, appetite doubled, and the boarding-house's laws of equality decreed that every child starve in identical measure.
Sleep brought no mercy.
Each night I dreamed of banquet tables bending under roasted fowl and golden loaves, and each morning I woke to an empty bowl and a hungrier imagination.
At that rate, virtue itself might have perished from malnutrition.
It was clear that moderation would kill me faster than excess, so I made a compact with necessity.
I would eat—quietly, cleverly, and unseen.
Necessity, as philosophers know, begets ingenuity.
One evening I discovered fifty red herrings laid in rows upon a kitchen table. I memorized their number and position.
That night I crept from my bed, barefoot and resolute.
When dawn came, the herrings had vanished.
Soon my foraging extended to sausages in the chimney and eggs still warm from the hen. Each theft was a small adventure, each mouthful a triumph.
The old Sclavonian, despairing of ever finding the culprit, dismissed servant after servant, yet the larder emptied with clocklike regularity.
In spite of such enterprise, I remained as thin as paper.
School, at least, rewarded a different appetite.
After some months of diligence, Doctor Gozzi promoted me to dux—chief examiner of thirty boys.
My task was to review their lessons and report their merit.
At first, I approached the office with the gravity of a magistrate.
Then one morning a trembling scholar handed me his exercise—an ocean of errors—and, with it, a parcel wrapped in paper.
I unfolded it: roast chicken, still warm. The scent rose to my head like incense.
I weighed justice against supper.
My stomach decided. "Excellent work," I said, signing the paper with authority.
The precedent was contagious.
Soon came cutlets, sweetmeats, even small coins slipped into my pocket for favorable verdicts.
My fame spread; my figure prospered.
I was the best-fed tyrant in Padua.
But gluttony governs poorly.
When deserving boys brought no tribute, I failed them without mercy.
Their protests united into rebellion; the whole class rose against me.
A tribunal was held, evidence produced, judgment swift. Doctor Gozzi removed my badge of office.
He ended with this my first reign—brief, inglorious, and highly instructive.
Yet I would likely have fared worse still, had not Fate soon decided to end my cruel apprenticeship.