Farewell to the Flesh (3 page)

He had been right. The Palazzo Uccello had been visited on this February evening by Death and the Lady of Veils.

Death was tall, dressed almost all in black. Black boots, black leggings and gloves, a black steeple of a hat pulled down over a mad jumble of black crepe Medusa locks. The eyelets of the white oval mask were trimmed in black. Hundreds of featherlike ebony scraps had been sewn together to form a cape that its wearer hugged close.

The Lady of Veils was a vision in white. In fact, with her cascade of short veils framing a delicate mask, her gauze robe, gloves, feathered fan, and slippers—all ghostly white—she seemed to be an emanation of the fog that was curling over the bridge from the canal and drifting into the alley.

Death, conscious of his audience, extended his arms, and suddenly became a burst of color, exposing long tatters of crimson, indigo, yellow, jade, and pink cloth sewn to the torso of the garment beneath. It was like seeing someone eviscerated. The beauty was perversely enhanced for Urbino by the horror of the association.

The Lady of Veils moved closer to Death and let herself be enclosed in the blossom of his embrace.

Was the Lady a woman and Death a man? There was no way of knowing. They carried their secret away with them as they broke their embrace and seemed to glide over the humpbacked bridge. The
calle
was empty once again of everything except the drifting, curling fog.

Serena, the cat he had rescued from the Public Gardens, jumped up on the sill to get Urbino's attention. He turned back into the room and took Schumann's
Carnaval
from the shelf. The Contessa had given him the recording to help him through his recuperation from a bout of the flu that had kept him housebound for almost a week.

“It should more than make up for whatever of
Carnevale
you think you're missing,
caro.”
She had sighed and shaken her well-coiffed head. “Why can't our celebration be sane and romantic like Schumann's?”

“But it wouldn't be the Venetian Carnival then, would it?” He did not remind her of the sad suicidal end that Schumann had come to. “I wish it were two months long the way it used to be,” he said playfully. “Just imagine if it began the day after Christmas!”

“Even after ten years, you're as much of a perplexity as when I first met you! I thought you cherished your solitude, that you had come here to Venice to be away from it all. Isn't it enough that you're forcing me to give this costume ball?” she said with little regard for how she had actually arrived at this decision a month ago. “Oh, yes,
caro
, you're a perplexity to me—a dear, sweet one but a perplexity nonetheless.”

“Am I so different from you? You enjoy your solitude, too, and yet you negotiate drawing rooms like a goldfish in a crystal bowl. You're in your element then.”

“Of course I am!” she had said, visibly pleased with his image. “But with you the two are horrible extremes. You could use some order and balance. Listen to
Carnaval.”

That's just what he would do now. He put the record in the player and sat on the sofa. The soothing notes of the “Préambule” filled the room, followed by the movements of Pierrot and Harlequin, those two commedia dell'arte figures of the spirit and the flesh. Naïve Pierrot and coarse Harlequin. Now
there
were two extremes, Urbino thought as he pictured the figures against his closed eyelids. Could the spirit of the one inhabit the flesh of the other? He would have to pose this riddle to the Contessa.

Two screams from the
calle
interrupted the “Valse noble” and Urbino went to the window again. The alley and the bridge seemed deserted. He was about to turn away when a form detached itself from the shadows near the bridge and crept along the
calle
past the Palazzo Uccello. Whether a man or a woman he couldn't tell any more than with Death and the Lady of Veils a little while ago.

The form was swathed in long dark robes, its face covered with an equally dark hood. When it neared the opening of a courtyard, a second form bounded from the shadows and, with another of the screams that had caught his attention, ran down the
calle
and beyond Urbino's sight. The first figure quickened its pace in pursuit as a cry floated back and up to the closed window.

What had he seen? A playful game of hide and seek? One person pursuing another with evil intent? An argument between friends that might end with them kissing each other?

The appearances could cover any of these realities.

Urbino went back to the sofa. The fifth movement had begun. Reaching out to stroke the cat, Urbino smiled to himself.

If Barbara could only see me now, he thought. This was almost as good as a cork-lined room, and he was more than content—at least for the time being.

3

Schumann's
Carnaval
ended. Urbino poured himself another glass of Corvo and picked up the Proust, opening it to where a postcard reproduction of Man Ray's photograph of Proust's death profile marked his place.

He had read
Remembrance of Things Past
several times before but he was reading it now because of the book on Proust he was adding to his
Venetian Lives
series.
Proust and Venice
would focus on the role the city had played in the writer's life and art. It would have reproductions of paintings by Carpaccio, Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto and photographs of Venetian scenes and buildings by the city's premier photographer, Porfirio.

Urbino had reached the point where Proust's narrator finally gets to Venice after years of expectation and postponement and after the sudden death of his beloved Albertine. Inevitably, despite Marcel's appreciation of the beauty and secrecy of the city, he finds himself somewhat disillusioned, and by the time he is about to leave, Venice is no longer an enchanted labyrinth out of the
Arabian Nights
but something sinister and deceptive that seems to have little to do with Doges and Turner. It doesn't even seem to be Venice any longer, but a mendacious fiction where the palaces are nothing but lifeless marble and the water that makes the city unique only a combination of hydrogen and oxygen.

Urbino read for a while and then put the book down again, finding it difficult to concentrate tonight on the subjunctive and the imperfect, on the essential melancholia at the lime-blossom heart of Proust's style and story.

Followed by Serena, who had been sleeping on one of the maroon velvet seats of the mahogany confessional on the other side of the room, he went to the study and put
Children of Paradise
in the video machine.

Urbino didn't know how much of the long movie he would be able to watch before dropping off to sleep, but he knew the tragic story of a mime's love for a beautiful actress so well that he could start it at any point without any problem. With its retelling of the story of Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine and its great final scene in which the mime Baptiste is separated forever from his beloved Garance by the mad Carnival crowd, it was particularly suited to the season.

He settled himself in his favorite armchair, Serena nestled against him, as the story started to unfold. Garance, the voluptuous yet tenderly maternal woman for whom love was
“terriblement simple,”
was watching a performance in front of the Funambules. In just a few moments Baptiste would fall in love with her forever.

Urbino found himself almost holding his breath. Serena purred. The childlike Baptiste, dressed as a clown all in white, turned in Garance's direction and looked at her with his soulful eyes.

Ah, there, it had happened! The rest—passion, yearning, jealousy, death, and separation—they all were fated now.

4

A small rose-colored object flew through the air at Urbino. He didn't have time to avoid it and it smashed against his black Austrian cape. A colorless liquid splashed out, soaking into the cape and sprinkling his face.

Fortunately the painted egg had been filled with rose water. Urbino brushed the eggshell from his cape and smiled at the boy who had made him his target. Dressed in a multicolored clown costume with a long tail and rabbitlike ears, the boy carried a basket filled with eggs. Another boy, also dressed as a
mattaccino
, stood next to him. They both laughed. Urbino waved. The
mattaccini
continued on their way, throwing an occasional egg but saving most of them for the Piazza.

The Strada Nova was busy with shoppers, tourists on their way to the Piazza, and merchants behind their outdoor stalls. Spirits were high on this clear, brisk afternoon. Urbino had taken a detour on his way to the Church of San Gabriele to get his first, up-close sight of Carnival.

Young children in frilly skirts, tutus, baggy pants, feathers, face paint, and the masks of cartoon characters shouted and raced through the crowd. A mother pushed her daughter along slowly in a stroller. Both had red balloons lifting their ponytails. A group of chess figures—knights, queens, and bishops—strolled along sedately, followed by a pack of devils darting mischievously through the crowd and pretending to steal things from the booths.

Even many of those in street clothes wore masks or had them hanging around their necks or tucked into their pockets. Urbino's own red half mask was hanging around his neck.

In the Campo Santa Fosca, mandolins and guitars played and a high, sweet voice sang Lorenzo Il Magnifico's opening lines from
The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne:

“How beautiful is youth

which is fleeing by!

Whoever wishes to be happy
,

let him be so

for tomorrow holds no promises.”

The singer was a Gypsy boy about twelve with dark circles under his eyes. The three swarthy musicians continued to play as the boy took off his cap and went around the crowd for money. He brought the money over to one of the men and started another song, his voice just as sweet as before but his face even more weary-looking.

5

Half an hour later Urbino climbed the paint-splattered ladder in the right nave of the Church of San Gabriele. He stood on the wooden platform, not even six feet square, and looked down at the uneven stone floor more than twenty feet below. The longer he looked at it the farther away it seemed. It had an almost hypnotic effect and only with some effort was he able to turn his attention to the fresco.

It was a sixteenth-century work by one of Titian's followers and depicted Saint Gabriel in three of his heavenly missions: to Daniel, Zachary, and—most prominent of all in the center—to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Giulio Licino had had only a faint glimmer of the robustness and magical color of his master, but the fresco, dimmed now by the years and the pollution that managed to invade even the church itself, deserved to shine with its original beauty, inferior though it might be to Titian's.

Urbino had looked up at the fresco dozens of times since he had moved to Venice. Never had it occurred to him that someday he would be helping to restore it.

He smiled at his exaggeration. He was more in the position of only observing the restoration of the fresco. Lubonski, however, let him do some of the less difficult things that a skilled workman might be trusted with, such as applying the first coat of lime plaster, the
trullisatio
, to the severely damaged areas. Sometimes Urbino felt the way he had one long ago summer fetching and handing tools to his father as he had built a gazebo in their backyard.

Last summer he had studied art restoration on the lagoon island of San Servolo and at the Palazzo Spinelli in Florence to prepare himself for a brief biography of the Minolfis, a renowned Venetian family of restorers. He had taken the commission at the request of the Contessa, who was close to the family.

The courses on San Servolo and at the Palazzo Spinelli would have been more than enough for his purposes, but he had become interested in restoration for its own sake and enjoyed helping, in his small way, to bring things back to the way they once had been.

“I want to do something more,” he had said to the Contessa last September as they waited for the Regatta to begin. He had just finished telling her how thrilled he had been the other day on San Servolo when, his face covered with a plastic mask, he had removed some corrosion from the hem of a stone Madonna with the quartz cutter. “I want to do something more than what I've already done here in Venice.”

“You've done enough already,
caro
, and you'll continue to,” she said. “You've fixed up the Palazzo Uccello and you're writing your biographies. And just think of all the pleasure you give me! My life would be empty without you. What more could you possibly want than all that?”

“Maybe I'd like to be able to see some change—however small—that I've made here. A change for the better that I could reach out and touch. Something that other people could see, too. You're right about restoring the Palazzo Uccello but I live there. It wasn't completely selfless.”

The Contessa shook her head and looked down at the Grand Canal.

“Are you speaking from some strange kind of American guilt? You've already turned over the top floor to Natalia and her husband.”

“I just want to do something more,” he repeated.

“You Americans and your
doing!”
she said with the air of a person whose greater years and British heredity had allowed her to see so much ill-conceived American activity. “Work harder on your biographies! You've got the one on Proust to finish. Find another case to sleuth! Did you know that someone has been stealing the votive candles from the street shrine of the Madonna by the Ca' da Capo? Try your hand at that. Until something better comes along you're going to have to just sit tight and go through the motions of being content. Just don't do anything drastic. Whenever I hear someone talking the way you are and see that same look on their face I think: Beware! You're on the brink of a big mistake. If I didn't know you had a few more years to go, I'd say that you were having a mid-life crisis.”