Deadly to the Sight (3 page)

He was well aware that he was considered an eccentric by many of the Venetians, and in fact by many of his own friends both here and back home. And there was no doubt that he struck an eccentric pose, but not intentionally so, during these late-night walks in his cape, negotiating the familiar city with an air of aimless purpose.

As he kept to his elastic stride in the direction of the Grand Canal through twisting alleys and across secluded squares, moving more slowly up and down the slick, slippery steps of bridges, he didn't meet another living soul. All he heard, other than his own echoing footsteps, was the slap of water against stone steps and wood hulls, and disembodied voices that sometimes rose up from the black waters and other times floated over the rooftops. It was like wandering through someone else's meticulously detailed dream of an impossible city where gravity was in abeyance, and reflections—even during the night hours—might be mistaken for the real thing if you stared too long.

But tonight Urbino didn't linger on bridges as he usually did, peering down into the dark mirrors of the canals over which wisps of mist were curling. He was soon on the small, graceful bridge that provided the only land access to the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini, whose large iron door was still, at this hour, illuminated by its ornately embossed lamps.

Like all the palazzi on the Grand Canal, the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini turned its aristocratic back on the plebeian activity of the alleys, squares, and bridges, and risked courting envy by presenting all its restrained beauty only on the side of the broad waterway. With its classical facade in Istrian stone and an elaborate attic frieze of lions set off by gentle pilasters, projecting balconies, small oval windows, blue-and-white mooring poles, and trim landing stage, the imposing building was a marriage of austerity with grace, of a simple formality with playfulness.

When the Contessa had married the Conte Alvise, the building had been denuded of its many decorations and severely damaged by the war and industrial pollution from the mainland. She had dedicated herself—in an obsessive way, said some jealous Venetians—to return it to its former glory. Before Urbino had met her, he had heard unkind stories about her hard line with architects and restorers, her search throughout Italy and Europe to find pieces to fill in the gaps in its furnishings, her physical and emotional exhaustion afterward, and her extended stay in a Swiss sanatorium.

Rather than forming a negative impression of her, as many of the gossips intended, he had become fascinated, recognizing in her passion for her adopted city an image of his own, although her passion had considerably more money to keep it afloat. When they had met seventeen years ago at a Biennale reception, they had formed an instant rapport. Ever since, they had been close friends and confidants, and, somehow, more than this.

Light glowed behind shuttered windows on the second story. The windows belonged to the Contessa's bedroom. If it had been the windows of her
salotto blu
, it would have been almost definite proof that she was waiting for someone. Instead the Contessa, who usually retired before eleven, had turned on her lights because she couldn't sleep, as was her custom.

Should he ring the bell and speak with her? As soon as he formulated this question, however, he moved backward slightly, to conceal himself in a mass of shadows cast by the building behind him. He didn't want her to see him if she happened to look out of the window. This was the indirect, but clear answer to his question. He wouldn't disturb her, for he knew his friend well. Whatever distress she might be feeling would only be increased by this sudden descent on her privacy. When she was ready to confide in him, he would be there to help. Until then, he would keep his distance.

As he turned away from the Contessa's palazzo, he felt the presentiment again that something was not quite right behind its walls. Exactly what, he didn't know, but he was certain that it must have something to do with the old woman who had been staring so solemnly at her outside of Florian's.

3

Since that first day in Venice when Urbino and Habib had floated in style to the Palazzo Uccello, Urbino had played the indulgent
cicerone
, answering the younger man's constant flow of questions and showing him around the city that he himself was discovering again. It wasn't just that absence, like some fine gold dust, had restored value to all the familiar scenes, but that in the deep pool of Habib's enthusiasm he saw a distant reflection of his own original feelings.

It would be wrong to assume, however, that everything was a delight to Habib. He was critical, usually of smells, and impatient of all the walking.

On more than one occasion, he would come to an abrupt halt on the parapet of a bridge or at the foot of a palace's staircase or in a long museum corridor, and loudly lament, “
Sidi
, my uncles!” Urbino would good-humoredly correct him—“
ankles
, not uncles”—and, with just as much good humor, wait for him to regain his strength so that they could cross off another sight from Urbino's impossibly long list.

The Contessa had been making things a bit easier for the both of them lately by putting her motorboat at their disposal when she didn't need it herself.

One of the things Urbino could count on during these outings—other than Habib's malapropisms and theatrical displays of fatigue—was his painter's eye for details. Whether it was a question of a bossage of gargoyles and
putti
on the facade of a palazzo, or a lion's head door knocker, or a shrine in an out-of-the-way corner, Habib saw it and pointed it out to Urbino. He then drew it in his sketchbook, which he always had with him.

At one-thirty in the afternoon, two weeks after Urbino's conversation with the Contessa at Florian's, Urbino went to join Habib in the Corte Seconda del Milion. Habib was completing some sketches of the boyhood home of Marco Polo and one of the nearby covered passageways. He showed them to Urbino.

“Very good, Habib.”

“I want to come back and capture this same spot with my paints. The light in Venice is very tricky.”

“And it's not the only thing that is! You've done enough for today. You've more than earned a good lunch.”

“I could eat a horse!” Habib enthused, for whom idioms and cliches were mint-new.

“Good, but I have something different in mind. But not here. On Burano.”

4

The Contessa's
motoscafo
cut across the shallow waters to Burano. As the sun broke momentarily through the layer of clouds, the lagoon, with its marshes and mud banks, shimmered ahead of them.

Giorgio commanded the craft lightly and with a touch of elegance, as if in compensation for the limp that hampered him on land. He answered Habib's questions about the sunken islands with their ruined buildings along their route. Although his information wasn't always accurate, it was given in good spirit. It wasn't difficult to see how the handsome man had captured Oriana's perpetually straying eye.

Burano, with its campanile leaning at a precarious and picturesque angle, soon came into view. Urbino gave a little shiver as they approached the quay. He attributed it to the characteristically damp chill of the island, which he always felt more keenly here than in Venice. It seemed to penetrate the closed, heated cabin, and made him feel vaguely unwell.

The last time he had been to Burano had been in summer several years before, when its notoriously filthy canals were being drained. The odor had been terrible, but then—as now—with a chill spreading over his skin, the sight of the improbably bright colors of the small houses had almost made up for the unpleasant assault on the other senses.

Gallons and gallons of red, purple, blue, green, and yellow had been mercilessly spilled to adorn the huddled buildings with an abandon that was both crazed and childlike. The stunning effect was itself responsible for the squeezing and mixing of further gallons of oils and watercolors by artists, and the scrolling of innumerable miles of film by photographers.

Yet, charming though it could be, Burano wasn't a place where Urbino would have been happy to live. It was too relentlessly cheerful in its brightness and with its jaunty strings of washing hung between the houses and across the squares. Its bridges, canals, and houses were too small to suit him. And worst of all, life here was almost a blueprint of conventionality, with the women at their lace and the men at their nets. Or so it had always seemed to Urbino, who during his visits had frequently screamed silently for something more subversive.

Surely Burano must have its dark secrets, now as it had in the past. And perhaps the primary colors of its houses were a trap of delight for the eye, distracting it from contemplating the inevitable cost of the island's perpetual performance of normality. Yet even the colors couldn't deceive the eye for long, at least not an eye like Urbino's, which inevitably—and almost gratefully—noted the way these colors spilled and bled into the invasive waters of the lagoon.

He didn't give Habib the benefit of these impressions, however, for he knew too well the melancholy burden of never seeing things as they actually appeared, a burden all the more melancholy when the appearances were as lovely as those of Burano.

“It's beautiful,” cried Habib.

“Yes, it is,” Urbino responded.

Stretching ahead of them when they got out of the motorboat was a gauntlet of stalls and shops, presided over by what seemed to be interchangeable, middle-aged women. Urbino would soon have negotiated the danger with barely a slackened pace. He hadn't counted on Habib, however.

“I must buy something for my mother on this beautiful island!” he cried out when he saw the first stall dripping with lace. “We can send it to her. Yes?”

“A marvelous idea. I should have thought of it myself.”

Habib had already collected enough gloves, perfume, shoes, belts, towels, and other items to furnish not just his mother but their whole extended family. He had bought hardly anything for himself, however, which to Urbino indicated an innate generosity that made him, in his own turn, generous and all the more happy to be footing the bill.

Habib began to diligently examine doilies, antimacassars, handkerchiefs, napkins, curtains, bedcovers, blouses, vests, shawls, scarves, umbrellas, and designs of cats, gondolas, and flowers in thin wooden frames. He passed from stall to stall and shop to shop, holding items up to the light, turning them over, feeling and even sniffing them, as if he were looking for an immediate position as a quality inspector. The more things he looked at and the more time he spent, the more difficulty he had in deciding.

Every suggestion Urbino made was rejected, albeit pleasantly, because of some personal or maternal or cultural or religious inappropriateness that Urbino didn't understand. After a while, Urbino left him to his own devices, stepping in only when the women's English or Habib's Italian was inadequate.

Finally, to Urbino's relief, Habib settled on a particular tablecloth because the shop owner with her head scarf, he whispered to Urbino, reminded him “too much” of his mother. But when Urbino translated the amount into dollars, Habib reached out to hold back his hand.

“It is a fortune! I will choose something else.”

He began to search through some smaller items.

The price was indeed high. Urbino, not a good judge of the quality of lacework, found the tablecloth attractive and without any obvious flaws. He wished the Contessa was with them, but knowing her, she would have scorned all these shops and insisted on going to Jesurum behind the Basilica, which was much more expensive. And then Habib would have missed the pleasure of buying something on “the island made of lace,” as he kept calling Burano, and from this particular woman with whom, despite the language barrier, he had developed a rapport.

“We'll buy it,” Urbino insisted, and handed the woman the money. He also asked her to wrap up six butterfly adornments that Habib had been admiring. He could give one to each of his sisters.

They wandered over the island for half an hour, down narrow quaysides beneath wrought-iron balconies, over a wooden bridge, and past row after row of the painted houses, some with geometrical designs. Even the boats were brightly painted.

Urbino conducted Habib to one of the more whimsical houses. It was decorated in a kaleidoscope of different-colored squares, rectangles, circles, diamonds, and stripes. Every year or two the owner arranged the shapes in entirely different combinations as if in harmony with some ever shifting, mysterious celestial pattern.

“Maybe it is to push away the evil spirits,” Habib suggested.

“Possibly.”

“You should have warned me!”

“Of what?”

“Of all these colors. I should have brought my paints!”

“Some other time. Look at the doors along here. Each is a different color from the house, and from each other.”

“And all of them are framed in white! The windows too! You like doors, I know,” Habib said with a smile. “You always looked at them in the medina.”

Urbino then brought Habib to the quarter where the Contessa owned two adjoining buildings. One was bright green, the other a deep purple. The German writer who had been staying at the Palazzo Uccello now occupied the green house. But it wasn't to pay her a visit that they had come. At any rate, they'd be going to a reception at Frieda Hensel's in a few days. But because the reception would be in the evening, Habib wouldn't be able to appreciate the color of her house.

As usual, Habib was full of questions. He wanted to know whether neighbors agreed on what colors they would paint their houses, and why some of the houses had different colors for different stories, and what the geometrical designs meant. And did the women who made lace also make the fishnets, which were drying in the sun? Why were all the lace curtains in the windows white? And why weren't there any big palaces anywhere, and instead so many small buildings, even smaller than the one in the Fez medina where his family lived?