Marco Polo - Laurence Bergreen [173]
Marco concludes his tale with a bawdy turn: “And then her husband, who was very drunk, being sorry for his wife, stooped down there and began to blow, wishing to melt that ice with warm breath. And while he blew, the moisture of the breath was frozen and so the hairs of the beard were caught together with the hair of the woman’s thigh. Therefore in the same way he could not move because of the exceeding pain; and there he was bending down like this.” At this point, Marco, if he was telling the tale in company, may have demonstrated just what he meant for the amusement of his audience.
“Thus, if they wished to leave that spot, it was necessary for some[one] to come by who should break up that ice.” Given enough drunken laughter, it is possible that no one would have been able to hear Marco utter the last words of his crude joke.
MARCO CONVEYS the impression that he could go on forever with his histories, tales, miracles, myths, jokes, and unique experiences. “Now you have heard all the facts that were possible to tell of Tartars and Saracens and of their life and customs,” he advises, “and of as many other countries in the world as was possible to search and know”—with one significant exception.
By way of an encore, Marco wished to narrate a journey by water; he had been landlocked for too many years, and he craved a fresh wind and a billowing sail. “We have said or spoken nothing of the Greater Sea nor of the provinces that are around it, though we have well explored it all.” He briefly flirted with the temptation to embark on the sequel, but he ultimately rejected the idea, since, he explains, “it seems to me to be wearisome to speak that which may be unnecessary and useless, since they are so many who explore it and sail it every day. As is well known, such as are Venetians and Genoese and Pisans and many other people who make that journey so often that everyone knows what is there.” In fact, not everyone in the last decade of the thirteenth century, when most people never wandered more than a few miles from their place of birth, knew what was there, but perhaps those whom Marco knew and respected did.
“Therefore, I am silent and say nothing to you of that.” Another time, perhaps.
In the end, Marco acknowledges there was little he could have done to alter the trajectory of his life. “I believe our return was the pleasure of God,” he concludes, “that the things that are in the world might be known. For, according as we have told at the beginning of the book,…there was never any man, neither Christian nor Saracen nor Tartar nor pagan, who has ever explored as much of the world as did Master Marco, the son of Master Niccolò Polo, noble and great citizen of Venice.”
The result was an epic that overflows its limits, one that is inexhaustible and self-replenishing. In it, Marco traveled through time as well as space. Along the remote westernmost stretches of the Silk Road in the Pamir highlands, he visited a more primitive world, and encountered people and societies unchanged since prehistoric times. In China, he moved forward hundreds of years into a technological and cultural utopia. Yet his vision of the future, as embodied in the highly civilized city of Quinsai, was troubled by new manifestations of ancient struggles. Undone by their success in commerce, and subverted by superstition and sensuality, the Chinese of Quinsai, as depicted by Marco, were not masters of their national destiny; they were vulnerable to aggressive warriors like the Mongols, preferring to deter threats at home, such as fire, to those coming from afar, such as warriors on horseback, bent on conquest. In China, Marco saw the future, but it was hardly less chaotic than the present.
Sealed off from one another by brigands, warring kingdoms, and the rise of Islam until the coming of the Pax Mongolica, East and West had their Silk Road for conveying goods—as well as religious