Farewell to the Flesh (2 page)

Even if you had no other evidence than the smooth, efficient way the sisters went about their business in Sister Clara's cell, as if they were performing the ordinary tasks of housekeeping, you would nonetheless know that death was far from a stranger to this building that housed the convent and its attendant pensione.

Yet death, though familiar, wasn't any more welcome here than elsewhere. It didn't always come so benevolently or wear such a fresh face as it had for Sister Clara, who seemed happy to be delivered into the hands of her Heavenly Bridegroom.

Far from it. Dying sisters at Santa Crispina have been known to scream and even curse when they finally saw the face that death was wearing for them.

Such reluctance on the part of some sisters to leave their building for the bosom of Abraham might lead you to think it was a snug ark whose considerable comforts mocked the order's vow of poverty. You would be wrong, however, as you would immediately have known when you saw the building's leprous stones and chipped statuary, its damp-warped shutters and listing staircases, its buckling floors and crumbling plaster. The furniture was heavy, dark, and minimal, and the paintings scattered throughout the four stories were mainly grim memento mori and martyrdoms. Never did divine motherhood look as consumptive as it did in some of the Madonnas holding their beloved sons in their arms. As for the Last Supper and the Crucifixion that hung in the guests' dining room, you would have been hard pressed to say which of the two was less appetizing.

And yet, despite the dismal quarters, there were several reasons why you might consider staying at the pensione run by the Sisters of the Charity of Santa Crispina.

For one thing, you might be zealously inclined to purify your spirit in the Casa Crispina's austere surroundings, reminiscent of some dark medieval inn where you were frozen in winter and baked in summer. The good sisters saw no need to make you any more comfortable than they were themselves, the charity of their ancient order obliging them not to deny you any of the pleasures to be gained from the mortification of the flesh.

The Casa Crispina provided a clean, sparsely furnished room, three plain meals a day, and the sound of bells from matins all the way through vespers to compline. You were free to ignore these summonses as you wished but the sisters believed that even the mere sound, falling on your ear in sleep or in sloth, had some beneficial effect. To make things as easy as possible, they had placed a prie-dieu and inspirational lithograph in each of the ten rooms so that you could not invoke the excuse of the inconvenience of a long walk to the chapel.

Another, much more obvious reason why you might be attracted to the Casa Crispina was purely a matter of lire since it was one of the cheapest places to stay in all of Venice—unless, that is, you reckoned in the cost of throat and chest medications in winter and all those
aranciate
and ices you were likely to consume in summer.

If these considerations of austerity and cost did not sway you, however, perhaps the retiring nature of the Casa Crispina could, for it was in a remote part of the Cannaregio into which tourists only occasionally strayed from the Ghetto or the Church of the Madonna dell'Orto, the parish church of Tintoretto. Thus you might indulge here the fantasy that almost every tourist has—that he is anything but what he is.

The shopkeeper, the children playing by the covered wellhead, the mask maker arranging his display, the two old women in black shaking their heads over the death notice on the bakery-shop window—you could convince yourself that all these residents of the quarter that you saw in only the first few moments of leaving the Casa Crispina couldn't possibly know you for what you really were.

It was much harder to maintain the fiction of your true identity, however, within the somber walls of the Casa Crispina itself where the sisters' domain was clearly separate from that of their guests. You might conceal other things but never that you were anything more than a mere guest, someone initiated into less arcane mysteries than those the good sisters shared.

The pensione, except for its dining area, was confined to the story above the ground level, while the nuns were semicloistered on the next two floors. The two groups mingled only in the chapel and the reception area—both on the ground floor—and on the front staircase that connected all four floors. The sisters, however, usually used their own private entrance and staircase.

The refectory at the rear of the ground floor was divided by a flimsy partition with a door. Large stained-glass windows, which looked out on a narrow canal, were usually shuttered. The guests were served in their own area not by the sisters themselves but by two middle-aged women from nearby Mestre who wore perpetually disgruntled expressions.

As Dora Spaak sat down at the empty table in her usual place, she glanced as she always did at the partly opened door into the sisters' refectory. Although the sisters ate earlier, Dora occasionally thought she could see the flutter of dark-gray cloth through the opening. One time when she had come to the dining room earlier than usual, she had heard a voice droning something indistinguishable. A prayer? a homily? the life of a martyred saint? There had been no way for her to tell but it had given her an uneasy feeling.

No, Dora didn't feel at all comfortable staying at the Casa Crispina. She hated it when some of the sisters referred to it by its old-fashioned name, the Hospice, because even though she knew this was supposed to evoke memories of the religious lodgings for the weary in the Holy Land of long ago, all a nurse like her could think of was pain and the end of life.

So much seemed peculiar here. For example, even though it would have been easier for the women from Mestre to bring the food directly from the kitchen to the guests' dining room through the nuns' refectory, they instead made circuitous trips down a corridor even though the nuns had long finished dinner.

As Dora was trying to figure out once again why the door between the two areas was always partly open if no one went through it during meals—was it to tease them all with fleeting glimpses of a better life or to allow the sisters to keep an eye on their guests?—she heard someone approaching. It could be her brother, Nicholas. He had been seeing to their mother in her room, making sure that she really didn't want to come out to dinner, that she didn't want to be coaxed into joining them. Nicholas had more patience with their mother than she did. Dora was already dreading returning to Pittsburgh alone with her.

When she looked away from the door, it wasn't Nicholas standing there but the handsome photographer who had been so nice to her since she arrived.

“Thinking of joining the sisters? They could use some young blood.”

He had a soothing, well-modulated voice, one she could have listened to for hours. It was the kind of voice she associated with the best bred of Englishmen.

Dora felt herself blushing. She looked down at her napkin, stained from the meals of previous days.

“You should be careful. The sisters might hear you, Mr. Gibbon.”

“Just Val, remember?”

“Val—that's short for…?”

He gave her a dazzling smile. His eyes were as dark as any Italian's but his skin was whiter than hers.

“Guess.”

“I couldn't—unless—”

“Yes?”

“Could it be Valentine?”

His quick laugh made her feel foolish. She dared not look up right away but busied herself with her napkin. When she felt strong enough to encounter his dark eyes again, however, she saw that they were no longer alone. Xenia Campi, the Italian woman who lived at the pensione and claimed to be able to see into the future, was standing next to Val, a frown on her heavily made-up face.

“Excuse me, sir.” Stout, black-haired, and in her mid-forties, the Italian woman spoke deliberately in heavily accented English. She put her hand on the top of the chair behind which Val Gibbon was standing. “This is
my
seat.”

“Excuse
me
, signora! Everything in order here in the convent. What would happen if it wasn't, even during Carnival—or should I say
especially
during Carnival!”

Val Gibbon moved aside so that the woman, wearing a plum-colored, robelike dress with voluminous sleeves, could take her accustomed place next to Dora. Before he went to the other side of the table, the photographer bent down close to Dora's ear and whispered, “Nothing as romantic as that, I'm afraid, but thank you for thinking so. It shows you have a tender imagination.”

He went to sit down near the end of the table, his back to the partly open door. As he unfolded his napkin, he looked over at Dora.

“A
very
tender imagination,” he added with a smile.

Dora looked away. She had been surprised to see Val Gibbon in the dining room tonight, not because he had come upon her unawares and seemed to enjoy doing it, but because he hadn't eaten at the Casa Crispina for several nights in a row now. She had missed him. No matter what the others might say, she could tell he was in every sense a gentleman. He was like one of those Englishmen who always ended up being especially nice to poor young girls in the books she used to read. They might have seemed strange and even gruff at first, hiding some disturbing secret, but they always made up for it before the end of the story.

On the second evening of Val Gibbon's absence, Xenia Campi had said, “I don't foresee good things for a man who has money to throw away like that.”

Whether this was an opinion or the fruit of the woman's supposedly clairvoyant vision, Dora didn't know and didn't want to know. Dora was in almost constant fear that the woman would say something about
her
future. It wasn't that she believed that Xenia Campi—or anyone—could see into the future, but she was superstitious. She was sure that the ill the woman might claim to see would come true, just because she had dared utter it. As for the good she might predict, that was sure to fly away as quickly as the pigeons in St. Mark's Square whenever there was any sudden sound.

Tonight Xenia Campi looked particularly humorless and depressed, and had an unnatural restraint that made Dora feel as if she might strike out at any moment at her or the photographer with some dire prediction or scathing indictment. Dora was relieved when Nicholas, without their mother, took his seat on her other side.

He was soon followed, noisily, by the three teenage boys from Naples. Xenia Campi darted a quick glance at one of the boys, who avoided looking at her and started to talk nervously to his companions. The three boys usually kept very much to themselves, not saying more than a few words of greeting during their meals and never staying longer than was necessary. They were here for Carnival and obviously didn't want to spend any time away from more exciting things in the big square.

“And how are you feeling this evening, Signora Campi?” Nicholas asked.

“Much better, thank you. My cold is almost gone.”

“Mr. Lubonski isn't as fortunate, I'm afraid.”

The Pole who was restoring the fresco in the nearby church was confined to his room with the flu.

“Signor Lubonski's condition is much more serious than mine, I assure you.”

Xenia Campi said this as if, from the privileged position of someone born with a caul, she saw things about the man's lungs that even an X ray couldn't.

Nicholas turned somewhat hesitantly to Val Gibbon. Dora had noticed that her brother was frequently self-conscious with Gibbon and would hardly look him in the face when he spoke to him. She attributed this to his characteristic shyness around very outgoing people. It didn't mean he didn't like them. In fact, she had always thought it was very much the opposite.

As her brother addressed Val Gibbon now, Dora was pleased to note the almost boyish enthusiasm behind his words.

“You must be finding plenty of things to photograph in Venice during Carnival, Mr. Gibbon. It must be difficult to know what not to take a picture of when there's so much to choose from.”

Gibbon smiled at him.

“Not at all, Mr. Spaak. That's the difference between an amateur and a professional. Photography is one of the arts, you know. Like all artists, the true photographer is an initiate in mysteries unknown to others.”

Xenia Campi, with no attempt to hold her voice down, said to Dora, “There's no more art in taking a picture than there is in making a ragout!”

Dora hoped Val Gibbon didn't think ill of her for being the recipient of the remark. She would have frowned at the woman except for her fear that it might draw even more notice—or that the woman would turn her ill will on her. Her heart went out to the photographer. He might be good at pretending to be strong, but she sensed that he was almost as vulnerable as she was to an unkind word.

“Ah, but Signora Campi,” Gibbon said as he turned to the woman, “surely you know that there are cooks and there are chefs, there are holiday picture takers and there are photographers—just as surely as there are Luna Park frauds and whatever might be the opposite in your own profession. You see that I am kind enough to call it a profession.”

Xenia Campi's eyes widened but she said nothing. One of the boys at the far end of the table started to laugh loudly and was soon joined by the other two. They began to sing a song in Italian. Dora couldn't understand the song but Xenia Campi frowned in their direction, and the boy she had glanced at earlier stopped singing.

Poor Val Gibbon held his head high but Dora could see his bruised heart. It was just as exposed for her as was the Flaming Heart of Jesus that graced the wall of her room upstairs.

The serving woman came in from the corridor with a tureen of steaming soup. Dora sighed. Another meal at the Casa Crispina was about to begin.

2

Urbino looked down from the window of the Palazzo Uccello straight into the eyes of Death.

Only a few moments earlier, Urbino had put aside the volume of
Remembrance of Things Past
and gone to the window. Someone is in the
calle
, he had said to himself, even though he had heard nothing.