Alena: A Novel (4 page)

In the piazza, rail-thin African men draped plastic sheets over their key chains and snow globes, squatting on the stones with their shoulders hunched to wait out the rain as they had waited out, no doubt, worse things in whatever countries they had left behind. The water slipped down my back in chilly streams, dripped from my hair. Oh, well! Nothing was stopping me from looking at the domes, was it? At the busy, bright façade? I walked toward the building, my eye sliding over the elegant clusters of columns, the glowing stone, the mosaics in the Romanesque archways. What was the word for those arched spaces tiled into image? Lunettes—the term drifted back to me from the twilit lecture room in Elvers Hall. My heart rose. Were those angels up there with their wet, golden wings? A solemn winged lion represented Saint Mark himself: noble, patient, gleaming dully in the rain against a backdrop of painted stars, a book clinging improbably to one paw.

And then, quite suddenly, the rain ceased. Or anyway, it ceased falling on me, though the sound of water rattling onto the piazza was as loud as ever. Someone had come up next to me holding an enormous umbrella. I jumped sideways and looked up. It was Bernard Augustin.

“You’re the girl from the Giardini,” he said. He stepped toward me so that I was again under the umbrella, politely declining to notice my suspicious fright. “How’s your friend?”

“Resting,” I said, though Louise wasn’t my friend, and I wasn’t a girl—I was twenty-five. I hoped it was true, at least, that Louise was resting. Possibly this very instant she was opening the connecting door and calling my name.

“Have you been inside?” He nodded toward the basilica.

I shook my head. “I didn’t realize the line would be so long,” I said, as though I had expected any line at all. I tried to picture a line at the Midwestern Museum of Art, snaking down the shallow steps and across the asphalt turn-around, under the mimosa trees. Never in a million years, not if we were giving the art away!

“It’s worse than Disney World,” Bernard Augustin said. “Which is strange. Because I don’t think most people enjoy it, once they get inside, as much as they enjoy Disney World.” He was dressed in a dark blue belted raincoat and black tasseled loafers, a handsome dark gray hat on his head. The big black umbrella he held over us had silver stars on the inside, faintly glowing like foam on the ocean at night.

I looked at the ragged line snaking across the piazza, the tourists wet and dogged, their expressions unreadable. German, Japanese, Chinese, Australian, Russian, Hungarian, American: all of them determined to see those tiles set in place the better part of a millennium ago. “It’s nice to see people lined up for art.”

“I would agree with you, if art was what they were lined up for. But it’s not.”

“What, then?”

“To check the box. Three days in Venice: The Rialto? Check. Gondola ride? Hmm, pricey. But—check. San Marco? Let’s see: long line, raining, but what the hell, might as well get it over with.”

I was offended, as though he were talking about me. “Maybe they’ll love it. Maybe they’ve been dreaming about coming to Venice for years!”

He laughed. “Maybe.”

“Or maybe they
are
just coming because Fodor’s told them to, but once they’re inside and see it—maybe it will open their eyes, open them up.” Wasn’t that what had happened to me? And not even in San Marco in Venice, but in a stuffy basement auditorium. Hadn’t my whole life been changed by that sustained encounter with Beauty? I thought Bernard Augustin would laugh, but I didn’t care. This was my credo—the power of art to transform what I could only call the soul, although even I wouldn’t have said that word aloud. Not to Bernard Augustin, anyway. But he didn’t laugh. Instead he looked out to where the rain was falling lightly, slantwise, in thin gray needles, and began to spin the umbrella so that the stars went around. “It’s slowing down,” he said.

We strolled across the wet, slippery stones. Bernard took my arm. It was a gesture I’d read about in books, seen shimmering in black and silver on movie screens and television screens. His big hand braced my forearm, and, although I didn’t lean into it, I felt its steady presence as an unlooked-for comfort, like a stuffed toy belonging to a child who has more or less outgrown it. Our steps aligned. I could smell the damp cloth of his coat, the sour smell of the rain and the canals, and a faint, bitter, aromatic smell, like orange peels and brine, that I would later know was his cologne. We stopped on the far right-hand side of San Marco and looked up at the first lunette, a half-moon niche of mosaic supported by frothy columns. On one side of the picture, some people wrestled with a bundle, while in the middle, men in robes and turbans seemed anxious about something.

“The transport of the body of Saint Mark from Alexandria,” Bernard said. “You know the story, of course?”

I shook my head. Louise, if she had been there, might have spoken the same words, using them to mean the opposite of what they said. Bernard’s tone of benign, bland politeness put me at ease. I didn’t know why he was being so nice to me, but I was grateful.

“Saint Mark was buried in Alexandria,” Bernard said. “His body lay at rest there until the ninth century, when two Venetian merchants stole it and smuggled it to Venice. They did this by hiding the corpse—I suppose it was only bones by then—in slabs of bacon.”

I laughed.

Bernard smiled. His eyes lightened a shade from near black to deep brown, and clusters of starfish lines appeared on his temples. “You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. Muslims can’t touch pork, so the customs officials in Alexandria had no way of discovering the body.”

“That’s terrible,” I said. “It sounds like something that would happen today.”

He made no comment. We walked along the façade to the second lunette, in which the men with white turbans had been replaced by different men in black hats. “That was in 828 AD. Or CE, if you prefer. After they smuggled the bones out of Alexandria, they brought them back to Venice.” The long body of the saint, covered in a blue cloth, dominated the foreground of the third lunette, a glowing halo circling his head. “The doge and the people receiving the body,” Bernard said.

You could see his head—the dead saint’s head—lifting toward the man in white and gold whom I guessed was the doge. “He doesn’t look dead. Maybe saints don’t decompose? Maybe that’s one of the benefits?”

“I’d think that was more likely to be true of devils.”

I felt faintly disappointed. Not that the mosaics weren’t lovely, gold and pinkish red and clear blue shining down from under the white-veined marble. But somehow I wasn’t transported. Maybe it was just because the pictures were so high up and difficult to see. I strained my eyes toward the image of Saint Mark under his blue cloth, willing myself to feel something.

“After that, they lost the body for a while. They hid it away for safekeeping, so no one could steal it while they built the basilica. But of course that took a couple of hundred years, and when they were done they couldn’t remember where they had put it. Calamity! Disaster! Just imagine—all those priests and cardinals rushing through the city, peering into vaults and storage sheds and hidey-holes all over Venice. That was in 1063. A couple of decades went by, and still no Saint Mark. So, what do you think they did?” He looked at me with a kind of patience behind which I sensed something else—a weight, a sadness. I remembered what Louise had said—
He never got over it
. Was he thinking of his friend, then, who had disappeared? Who had never made it to Venice? I wanted to distract him, to amuse him. To make that shadow of sadness disappear.

“I’d manufacture one,” I said. “Out of clay, maybe. Or just find some other old bones. Like when a kid’s guinea pig dies and the parents get a new one and secretly make a switch.”

“I never had a guinea pig,” Bernard Augustin said.

We were silent. The rain fell. The pigeons rose in waves and settled again farther away. The damp line of tourists snaked slowly forward. I thought how strange to me he was, this man: rich, cultured, educated. He was a man who had made a mark on the world, who had suffered a grave and mysterious loss, yet was kind to Louise, kind to me. I wasn’t falling in love with him, exactly. I knew he was gay, and he must have been twenty years older than I was. But perhaps I was falling in love with him inexactly. With him, or with the life he represented. It was hard, then, to tell them apart.

“Anyway,” I said shyly. “I hope the cardinals didn’t do that. Perpetrate a fraud. Maybe they prayed. Isn’t that what they’re supposed to be good at?”

“They did better than that,” Bernard said. “They organized the whole city to pray. All of Venice got down on its knees and prayed for the recovery of the bones! All over the city, from the palazzos and the hovels, the canals and the
calli
, prayers rose up in clouds past the chimneys into the sky! After three days, they reached the ear of God. Down in the city, a column burst open, and there it was—Saint Mark’s body, like a rabbit emerging from a hat. Just think how much it must have scared the guy who found him.” His voice changed, went low and thin. “Just because you’ve been praying for a corpse doesn’t mean you like it when you find it.”

We walked toward the fourth and final lunette, Bernard’s arm still forming a platform for mine, the rain lightening to a drizzle and the sky brightening. “So, at last, the Venetians transferred Saint Mark to his final resting place, the Basilica of San Marco, where he could stretch out in style after all those centuries walled up in the pillar.”

Why should it be final? I wondered. It seemed to me that a body exhumed, stolen, hidden, lost, and found again by way of a miracle might well have some life in it still. “Maybe it’s not finished,” I said. “Maybe the body is just resting, getting ready for more adventures.” I smiled up at Bernard, but his face went blank, like one of the old stones. My little joke had fallen flat. Embarrassed, I looked up at the last mosaic, and everything else fell away.

The fourth lunette was different from the others. Gold ringed a towering building with floating domes that I saw was San Marco itself: dark domes, white Istrian stone, and figures in gold and green and blue standing in the foreground in groups—standing, in fact, just where we were standing. Some of them carried staffs, and some had hoods, and their feet peeked serenely out from under the robes as if to signal that they were of the earth rather than of heaven. Something lifted in my chest, and a spark of energy spread through me as though along a golden fuse. I felt alive, awake, and my vision seemed to grow clearer, so that I could take in every part at once—detail and architecture, line and hue, composition and expression. “Oh!” I said. “I love this one!”

The rain had stopped. Bernard shut up his umbrella. Over our heads the domes of the basilica glowed in the wet, and inside the lunette the miniature basilica glowed too, and the ancient citizens of Venice rejoiced. In the piazza, the African peddlers uncovered their wares. I looked and looked, losing myself in the picture, until at last Bernard said, “This is the only lunette that survives from the thirteenth century. The others are seventeenth- and eighteenth-century restorations.”

“That’s why, then! This one is . . .” What was the word for what it was? There were no words. The feeling had to be expressed in tiles of gold and clay and glass.

After a while, Bernard said, “I’m going to have a drink. Would you like to join me?”

I blinked at him. I had no idea how much time had passed. The sky was bright blue with a few long strands of cloud, and suddenly I thought of Louise, her long strands of hair across the pillow. “I have to go!” It was like the time I was sixteen and fell asleep in the backseat of Tommy Starankovic’s car, parked beside a potato field in summer. It was the only infraction my parents ever spanked me for, though I was far too old for spanking by then. Never mind that we were only kissing, never mind that I only missed curfew by twenty minutes. Never mind that it was the first time—both for kissing and for being late.

And what if I
had
slept with Tommy Starankovic? What if I had gotten pregnant, dropped out of school, married him, or someone? I might have three children by now and live in a little house a stone’s throw from where that car had been parked—less than a mile from my parents. Wouldn’t that have been a better outcome, from their point of view, after all?

When I stepped, breathless, into my room, Louise was sitting on my bed wearing a violet silk kimono patterned with yellow lotuses. She looked groggy, her disheveled hair clipped back. There was a faint whiff of sulfur in the air—no doubt from the canals—making it seem that she was smoldering. No way of knowing if she had been planted there for a minute or an hour.

“I was calling you,” she accused.

“I’m so sorry, Louise. I just ran down for a . . . What can I do for you? How are you feeling?” I took a step closer, but she raised her hand like a policeman and shut her eyes.

“Please speak softly,” she enjoined me. I stood on the rug and waited. Her head bobbed, and the wrinkled stem of her neck sagged, and she put her hand to her eyes. Then she peered up at me. “I get these migraines. I have pills. There isn’t anything else to do.”