Rupert would have helped me with my suitcase if he hadn’t been weighted down with two himself—it had probably been Rupert, I’d realized, who’d taught me to pack in the first place, though he’d seemed a good deal more cheerful with his load. After the first half-mile or so I had, rather hopefully, suggested a taxi, only to be told there were no cars in Venice. Not a one. Visitors and residents were forced to leave their vehicles in car parks at the city’s edge, and enter the Venetian maze on foot. There were water taxis, of course, Rupert had said, and a sort of bus system involving larger boats called vaporetti which patrolled the Grand Canal. But our hotel, as luck would have it, wasn’t on the Grand Canal. So we had walked.
But I hadn’t complained.
Rupert had been like a child at a holiday camp since I’d said I was taking the part in Il Prezzo—I’d never seen him so openly happy, and it was clear from the way he had gone about planning things that he wanted this trip to be special, something that we’d both remember fondly in the years to come. As Bryan had pointed out, this would be my first ‘big’ play, and Rupert’s last, so it was natural, I suppose, that Rupert would want to make everything perfect.
And starting in Venice had been a big part of his plan. Rupert loved Venice. He’d managed to take me to nearly all his other favourite travel spots, but what with school schedules and his work, one thing or another, we never had made it to Venice.
Not only had Rupert made special arrangements to give us a night’s stopover here, on our way to D’Ascanio’s villa, but he’d spent the past fortnight showering me with coloured brochures and maps, showing me the sights we’d see and telling me the history of this strangest of all European cities. Founded by people who’d literally gone to the edge of the land to find safety in those dark days that had followed the fall of the Roman Empire, when barbaric marauders had terrorized Italy, Venice was an engineering triumph, built on water—or, more correctly, on piles sunk into a marshy lagoon—its hundred islands held fast by a labyrinth of bridges and canals.
The very name Venice had seemed to me ancient and rich, filled with romance.
So far, though, reality hadn’t lived up to the image.
The hotel was nice enough, but it was modern and might have been anywhere. I did appreciate the shower, though. I stepped clean from it now, wrapping myself in the thick hotel towel as I padded across to my suitcase in search of fresh clothes.
I had just finished dressing when Rupert knocked at my door.
“Well,” he said, as I let him in, “we’ve had a fax from Il Piacere. Seems our SM is flying into Venice today, as well, and young D’Ascanio’s given him the name of our hotel here, so we’ll meet up for dinner and go on together tomorrow by train.”
I knew he’d already told me the name of our stage manager—there weren’t too many people in the business that Rupert didn’t know—but I’d forgotten. “Who’s our SM, again?”
“Bill Melansky. Nice chap, American, I’ve worked with him before. You’ll like him.” Looking down, he fiddled with his camera, checked the settings. “I do hope I’ve brought enough film.”
“I thought you’d been here a dozen times.”
“I have, but not with you.”
Which prodded me to put my own ambivalence aside and try to let on I was having a good time, that I was loving Venice just as much as he was.
And I wanted to love it, I did. As we left the hotel and came into the main tourist thoroughfare I focussed my weary eyes harder, and tried, but the Venice I saw was a city of commerce, of shops selling Carnivale masks and hand-blown glass and leather goods and marbled paper, jewellers’ windows dotted in between to make things glitter, and Italian ice-cream stands on every corner.
Not that this was anything new, I thought. Venice must always have been one great market, a Babel of languages. Even now, in late March with the Carnivale over, the hotels were full and the streets thick with tourists, and I heard English spoken more often, it seemed, than Italian.
Aware of Rupert’s scrutiny, I summoned all my acting skills and smiled. “Where to first? The Rialto?” I remembered he’d said that he liked the Rialto especially, not only the lovely white high-arched bridge itself, but the district that surrounded it—a shopper’s mecca, he had called it.
He watched my face a moment longer; looked away. “You know, the best way to see the Rialto would be from the water. Come on.” Stepping clear of the current of tourists he towed me behind him, one hand on my arm, as though I were still a small child he might easily lose. “We’ll take a gondola.”
Visions of seasickness rose to my mind but I kept my face deliberately cheerful as he detoured me off to the nearest stone bridge on a narrow canal where two young men in identical outfits—black trousers and jackets, and shirts horizontally striped red-and-white, and flat-brimmed straw hats and white trainers—lounged together against the stone railing and called by turns “Gondola-Gondola!” over the heads of the swift passing crowd.
The taller one straightened, arms folded, as Rupert approached him, preparing to bargain a price. Rupert appeared to be losing the battle until, turning, he pointed at me and said something—my name, I think. Both the gondoliers looked, and the taller one smiled. Then he nodded, replying to Rupert, who motioned me forwards.
“He says he can take us.”
I glanced down at the moored gondola bobbing by the stone steps that led down to the canal, below the bridge. “Take us where?”
But Rupert only smiled. “You’ll see.”
Near the sottoportego a gondolier leaned on his oar, trading gossip with a woman who was hanging out her washing from the window-ledge, above. The pair of them stopped talking as he bore down on them, his mind alive with purpose like a hound that had just caught the scent of its quarry.
“An Englishwoman,” he demanded of the gondolier, “a blonde young Englishwoman, beautiful. She travels with a man. Have they been passengers of yours this morning?”
“No, signore, no. I have had no one.” The gondolier shrugged off his luck. “But I have seen a couple like this, maybe half an hour ago?” He glanced upwards at the woman in her window to confirm the time, and at her nod repeated, “Yes, half an hour ago they came by, in the gondola of my friend Paolo.”
“Do you know where he was taking them?”
“I think to the Rialto.”
“Then quickly,” he commanded, stepping down into the gondola as though it were his private launch. “Quickly, we must go to the Rialto.”
If he could have urged the craft to travel faster, he’d have done it. As it was, he could barely restrain himself from reaching over in his seat to paddle with his hands, to speed their progress. But the gondola cut through the green canals as swiftly as it could, as if the gondolier had caught his fever.
A thrill raced through him as they turned into the turmoil of the Grand Canal and made towards the graceful white-arched bridge of the Rialto. He was close now, he thought. Very close . . .
At the mooring poles beside the bridge they found Paolo plumping up the purple cushions of his gondola. “The English couple? Yes, they were just here.”
Just here, he thought gleefully. Yes, very close. He paid the gondolier and climbed ashore, becoming once again the hunter as the crowd closed in around him, swept him on, while with keen eyes he searched the moving sea of faces.
vi
IT was an odd sensation, stepping from firm and predictable land onto something unstable, a surface that quivered like something alive. I sat hastily, seeking balance in the long and narrow boat that suddenly seemed far too narrow, too wobbly.
Casting round for reassurance I took heart in the gondola’s obvious age. Its lacquered black sides had been lovingly polished for years, I decided, as had the arching brass dolphins who held the red cords on which soft padded bumpers were strung, to each side of the seat. The seat itself was leather, smooth and yielding underneath me, and in case of extra passengers a rather ornate chair had been positioned to my right, in front.
The only less-than-reassuring feature was the gleaming silver ornament that topped the long, up-curling prow—a curious thing like the blade of an executioner’s axe, pointed perpetually outwards as if to keep all other boats at a distance.
Rupert got in and the gondola rolled and I clutched at its sides; grasped them harder when the gondolier stepped on behind us, taking up his oar and pushing off with a cheerful farewell to his partner, left back at the bridge calling ‘Gondola-Gondola!’ all by himself.
Rupert settled himself on the cushion beside me, adjusting his camera. “Relax,” he said, testing his lens with an experimental snap of me in profile. “It’s perfectly safe. Just like punting on the Cam.”
“Yes, well, we didn’t all go to Cambridge,” I reminded him, but I tried to relax all the same. I didn’t want to spoil Rupert’s pleasure at showing me the sights. To distract my rolling stomach I glanced over my shoulder and watched as our gondolier shifted his feet on the small Persian rug that protected the polished black boards in the stern, using his own weight as much as his oar as he steered us through the shadows underneath the little bridge.
Rupert, mistaking my fierce concentration for a lack of confidence, said, “It’s a mostly inherited trade, gondolier. There can only ever be five hundred of them at any given time, that’s the law, so it tends to get passed on from father to son. Our chap here is probably not the first man in his family to do this.” The gondolier, when asked, confirmed in passable English that he was indeed fourth-generation. “You see?” Rupert told me. “So no need to worry, he knows what he’s doing. Ah, look there,” he said, distracting me by pointing to the left as we passed an intersecting canal. “See way up there, that bit of land in the lagoon, that’s where they blow the glass. The island of Murano.”
I caught only a glimpse as we glided by, and a bracing clean whiff of the sea—the first time I’d smelled anything at all on these canals, in spite of all the things I’d read and heard. Perhaps the recent rains, I thought, had cleansed the ancient waterways, or maybe it was simply that we’d come in spring and not a few months later, when the summer’s heat and still more tourists took their toll on the city’s hygiene. Whatever the reason, apart from a faint breath of sea air from time to time all I could smell was the rich scent of greenery, lacy pale branches of trees hanging high overhead and the ivy that clung to the crumbled brick walls of a small side canal.
My stomach settled. The noise of the crowds at our backs grew progressively fainter, disappearing entirely as we rounded the next corner, leaving only the lulling splash and pull of the gondolier’s oar and the creak of the boards as he balanced himself. The hushed and huddled buildings pressed us closely, painted pink and green and ivory, windows shuttered, with a laundry line hung here and there between the rusting railings of their balconies. I heard the small repeating click of Rupert’s camera shutter, and the slap of pigeons’ wings as they rose flapping from their hidden perches, seeking higher places; heard the water gently lapping at the old walls with their softly greening stones. And as I exhaled on a sigh I knew that Rupert, who’d been watching me again, could now rest satisfied.
Here, at last, was the Venice I’d dreamed of, the Venice of Shakespeare, of Byron, of Browning; faded a little, perhaps, like a magnificent Renaissance painting that had lain too long in the sunlight, but still standing, silent and agelessly beautiful; still worthy of the name La Serenissima—the Most Serene.
We floated on peacefully, our gondolier calling out ‘Oi!’ as a warning each time he manouevred us round another corner of the labyrinth. From time to time he pointed out an interesting sight that we were passing—the Church of St. Madelena, the house of the explorers Antonio and Nicola Zeno, the palazzos of a half a dozen dukes whose names I didn’t know—buildings whose facades were set with marble carved in deep relief above columns and colonnades shaped with those strange pointed arches that looked as though they’d come straight out of the Arabian Nights . . . a legacy, I supposed, from the days when the trade winds had carried to Venice tall galleons laden with spices and silks from the East.
And then, as we entered a narrow canal where a peeling pink building with iron-barred windows rose out of its dappled reflection in water the colour of olives, our gondolier tapped Rupert once on the shoulder.
“Ecco,” he told him. “La Casetta Fiorita.”
And I knew then why Rupert had wanted to bring me this way, in the gondola.
Leaning forward in my seat, I took a closer look up at the crumbling ‘Little House of Flowers’ where Galeazzo D’Ascanio had spent his years in Venice. He had written of this house in The Season of Storms, the book of poems Rupert had given me for my birthday, and I wished I had the book in my hands now so I could read the lines again and get their full effect, but the book was still packed in my suitcase back at the hotel, and all I could remember was one fragment of a verse in which he’d called the Casetta Fiorita ‘that birthplace of our passion.’
I had pictured it quite differently, a grander house than this one. . . but I wasn’t disappointed. This was better, really. More romantic.
I couldn’t see flowers, but twisting vines trailed down one side of the building and clung to the curving stone balcony two storeys up, from whose window, I thought, Galeazzo had first glimpsed his Celia as she passed by in a gondola, as I was passing now. I sighed, and looking up I fancied I saw something for an instant break the shadows at the window, like a ghostly face forgotten, gazing out.
“No one lives here anymore,” said Rupert sadly. “A shame, but there it is. It isn’t safe.”
“Why not? Is it sinking?”
“I should think that would be a large part of it, yes. All of Venice is sinking. But part of it, too, is the age of the house. This one’s ancient, you know. Thirteenth-century.”
I shaded my eyes with one hand as I studied the structure, imagining what it must have looked like all those years ago; what sights it must have seen. “It’s a pity he doesn’t restore this house, too.”
“Sorry?”
“Galeazzo’s grandson.”
“I’m sure that he would, if he owned it.”
“Wasn’t this part of his inheritance, then?”
Rupert, with a shake of his head, informed me that Galeazzo D’Ascanio had only rented the Casetta Fiorita. “It belonged, I believe, to an Austrian financier, and when the First World War got going it was sequestrated—”
“Sequestrated?”
“Confiscated,” he said, simplifying, “by the government, who rented it to Galeazzo, furnished.”
“Hardly fair on the Austrian,” I remarked.
Rupert, with a patient shrug, reminded me that war was rarely fair. “Though he had his revenge. He trained as an aviator and got himself selected for the squadron that bombed Venice. Apparently he took delight in dropping bombs on his old neighbours. Even hit his own house a few times. See?” He pointed out the scars along the roofline as we glided underneath the jutting balcony, where a carved stone lion’s head appeared in the tangle of vines, blindly snarling.
My initial sympathy for the displaced Austrian vanished. “What a bloody stupid thing to do.”
“I’m sure it didn’t help the house much,” Rupert said, squinting as he focussed his lens on the lion’s head. “And it would be lovely, as you say, if someone would restore it. But Venetian laws are strict about what can and can’t be done to these old buildings, and many owners simply can’t afford to do the work. Cheaper to clear out and leave the house empty.”
Not entirely empty, I thought. There were ghosts here. From behind the black window I felt the eyes watching me, silently following, as our gondolier called out an echoing “Oi!” and we slipped round another corner in the canal, leaving the decaying pink Casetta Fiorita alone and softly dreaming of the grandeur it had known.
It was noon when he reached the Piazza San Marco.
The midday sun had bleached the square and cast a haze across the piazzetta, so that even the statues of San Teodoro and Sa
n Marco’s winged lion, they who had for these eight centuries stood vigilant, their eyes fixed ever eastward over the serene lagoon, appeared today to slumber on their columns while below them at the edge of the canal the water barely swelled beneath the waiting row of gondolas.
He turned his back upon the gleaming pinnacles and domes of the basilica and searched among the faces in the strolling crowd for hers. No easy task, that. All of Venice seemed to be here, standing idly sharing gossip in the shadow of the bell-tower, or lunching at café tables by the Moorish colonnades. Music rose and met from either side of the piazza where the orchestras competed for attention from beneath their café awnings, a cultivated duel of rival melodies and rhythm that yet managed to produce a pleasing harmony.
“Maître!” a delighted voice behind him cried and, turning, he recognized the oldest of the waiters from the café on his right, a sun-creased man from Corsica whose thick French accent clung to every word. “Maître, what a joy to see you here again. You must sit here, where all who pass can see you and pay tribute to your talent.”
He hesitated . . . he had not meant to stop here, but rather, like one of his own hounds, to keep to the chase, to find the scent and pursue it, relentless . . . but the waiter’s words, the blatant adoration, moved him suddenly. He sat. What did it matter, he thought, if he paused for a meal? Did not his own hounds hunt the better when they were refreshed?