Farewell to the Flesh (35 page)

“If they ever existed. And if they did, I'm not sure they should have,” she surprised him by saying, given what she had told him about her own scruples.

“That palazzo there,” he said, indicating the low white building to their right, “is the Peggy Guggenheim museum. The ‘Unfinished Palazzo' as it's called. If it had been finished it would be the largest palazzo on the Grand Canal.”

She stared at the building with its horse and rider by Marino Marini facing the Grand Canal through the water gate.

“To think of all the modern art behind those walls,” Hazel said. “It strikes me as being out of place in the city of Carpaccio and Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto. Venice doesn't belong to the modern world, even if we are going down the Grand Canal in a motorboat.”

“Peggy Guggenheim was the last to have her own private gondola.”

“Did it have a
felze
that she could hide inside?” She smiled. “Are we playing games with each other with all this talk about gondolas, Urbino? That
was
you on the bridge today, wasn't it? You probably wondered why I didn't say hello but at first I wasn't quite sure if it was you. I
am
a bit nearsighted.” She avoided his eyes for a few moments and stared at the landing stage of Santa Maria del Giglio where a crowd of people waited for the boat. She turned back to him. “When I realized that it was you, I didn't say hello because I was a little embarrassed. To tell you the truth I wasn't absolutely sure you knew it was me either.
You
didn't indicate that you had.”

“You were rather muffled up.”

“Could you see who I was with?”

“As I said, I could barely recognize you.”

She looked at him assessingly. He could sense her suspicion and nervousness.

“It was Xenia Campi, you know.” She laughed. It sounded genuine. “Yes, Xenia Campi. I'm embarrassed to admit it.” There was an awkward smile on her face. “That's another reason why I didn't say hello.”

“I didn't know that you knew her.”

“I met her when I went to the Casa Crispina a second time. I wanted to see Val's room but the police still had it sealed. I spent a few minutes outside and Xenia Campi came down the hall. We started to talk and—and I'm afraid I encouraged her. I suppose I'm in a rather vulnerable state. I thought I was handling things so well but now I'm not so sure. It hasn't even been a week since Val was murdered. Xenia Campi spoke to me in such a gentle way. She said that she knew what it was like to lose someone you loved and that she could help me—help us all—find out what happened to Val. She said something about auras and fire. I wasn't listening too closely but when she said that everyone was concerned about where Val was killed but no one seemed to be paying any attention to how he had got there, it made a lot of sense, at least at the time.”

Urbino silently agreed with her. All that he knew about Gibbon's last day was that he had spent much of it in the Piazza, came back to the Casa Crispina for dinner, seen Dora in the dining room, and then left.

“She said she could find out but I would have to help her. We went outside and she stood there in a trance for a few minutes and then went to the water steps on the other side of the Casa Crispina. ‘A water trail,' she said. ‘We have to follow his water trail.' I know it's silly, but I believed she knew what she was talking about, so I told her that we'd go in a motorboat. She didn't want a motorboat. She said it would disperse the influence and that motorboats were also bad for the city. So that's why you saw us in the gondola. We followed what she said was the water trail. It seemed we were going up and down every back canal. Right after I saw you on the bridge, she said she had lost the trail. She blamed it on the suds she saw floating on the water. She insisted on getting out immediately and I went back to the Molo feeling very foolish.”

“Xenia Campi can be convincing in her own way,” Urbino said, thinking about her visit last night to the Palazzo Uccello. “I don't believe any of her business about auras and flames and whatever else she sees, but there's a definite passion—confused and misdirected though it might be—in what she says.”

Hazel smiled wryly.

“Isn't that often the case with passions?”

They were approaching San Marco. There was still something Urbino needed to know. Their time alone together was so short now that he knew he had to risk being abrupt but abruptness might end up serving his purposes. He might get a more direct answer or be better able to gauge her response if it was evasive.

“Forgive me for asking this, Hazel, but do you have any reason to believe that Val Gibbon betrayed you?”

Her response wasn't one of the ones he had expected. She laughed.

“‘Betrayed'! What a perfectly Victorian word, Urbino. It almost has furbelows on it. You have to admit it sounds strange when you use it for someone not in a novel. The word's on your mind because of that Henry James novel, isn't it?”

He reminded her that during dinner at the Montin she had mentioned something about a woman Gibbon had been involved with.

“Could he have continued the relationship?”

“Is there a difference between continuing a relationship and trying to end one gracefully?”

“Is that what he was trying to do?”

“I don't have the slightest idea. Of course there were other women. Val was charming and handsome. I'm not saying that he had relationships with them while we were together, but don't forget that neither of us expected to fall in love. I was involved with Tonio and I believe Val was involved with someone, too. We never talked about it, but once when we were at his flat the phone rang and I could tell there was a woman on the other end. I didn't hear what he was saying but I could tell that he was talking to a woman.”

“It couldn't have been another man?”

Milo was carefully maneuvering the boat between the pilings of the quay. The Molo and the Piazzetta blazed and clamored in front of them.

Hazel didn't answer but got up. Not wanting to leave her this way Urbino told Milo that he would get off here and walk the rest of the way to the hospital. Milo could bring the boat to the Rio dei Mendicanti and wait for him there.

Hazel and Urbino joined the crowd on the Molo and began to walk to Harry's in silence. The kiosks flanking the gardens were crowded with customers buying trinkets and postcards. An old man with a bored expression was demonstrating neon yo-yos by one of the stone benches that gave a view of the lagoon and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore floating in the distance. A few feet away a younger man, who looked like his son, was fashioning pink, yellow, and green neon bracelets and necklaces. The pavement between the kiosks and the marble wall by the water was dense with people, moving in both directions and jockeying for a good position from which to see the water processions that would be starting in about an hour. Out in the lagoon by San Giorgio was a barge from which multicolored lasers crisscrossed the sky.

Groups leaving the vaporetti pushed Urbino and Hazel against the buildings after they went down a bridge. He put his hand under her elbow to steady her. They stopped in front of Harry's in the Calle Vallaressa, drawing as close to the door as they could as the people flowed around them on their way to the Piazza.

“Thank you, Urbino, thank you for everything,” she said as they had to make way for a Doge who was emerging from Harry's.

There was something valedictory about her thank-you. She was thanking him in a way that seemed also to be saying good-bye, not just for the evening but for a longer time. Yet he must have been mistaken, for the next moment she said, “Come in and have a drink with Tonio and me.”

Before he could protest, she opened the door. He had no choice but to follow her in and immediately wished he hadn't.

One reason was the sheer noise of the place; another was the thickness of the smoke that set his eyes watering. But it was the look Tonio Vico, standing with a drink at the far edge of the crowded bar, gave him from his dark eyes that had Urbino wishing he weren't there.

13

The three of them were outside now, having decided against staying in Harry's, and were moving slowly toward the Piazza San Marco. It had started to snow, a wet snow that stung the face.

As they made their way down the narrow Calle Vallaressa with its fashionable shops, four-star hotels, and expensive restaurants, it was impossible for the three of them to keep together and soon Urbino found himself ahead of Hazel and Vico. How far ahead he was he couldn't tell because whenever he looked behind all he saw were shouting, unfamiliar faces and impassive masks. He didn't know if he should stop and wait. When he reached the glass shop at the intersection, he stepped into the entrance. They would be lost to him forever if he joined the crush coming from three directions and inching toward the Piazza.

In a few minutes the couple appeared, arm in arm, apparently unconcerned about the crowd or the stinging snow that was coming down faster and harder now. When they saw him, they ducked into the shelter of the shop opening.

“I'm going to avoid the Piazza and go to the hospital.”

“But you can't, Urbino! It's the last night of
Carnevale!
I know you'll be celebrating later with us at Barbara's but can't you come into the Piazza for at least a few minutes?”

She tugged at his sleeve as she plunged into the crowd with Vico, looking back at him. He followed.

The Piazza was seething. What Napoleon had called the finest drawing room in Europe was Like a masked ball in Bedlam.

People crowded under the long, golden corridors of the arcades, sat and sprawled on the steps, and danced and swarmed in the Piazza. Bright lamps tossed on their wires, and the huge chandelier in the middle blazed and swayed perilously in the gusts of snow-laden wind. The windows above the arcades had lights, and rows of illuminated white masks marched on poles above the crowd. Blue and green lights played over the domes of the Basilica, and the gold of the facade mosaics glowed so brightly, even through the driving snow, that it looked as if the building was on fire. Cameras flashed everywhere and even the music pouring out of the loudspeakers and being played by the orchestras at Quadri's and Florian's couldn't drown out the roar of the crowd. A line of masqueraders crossed the stage, posing and bowing. Urbino recognized many of the more elaborate costumes he had seen during the last week. Now, at Carnival's end, after wandering through the stage set of the city, the maskers were on an actual stage.

There was too much to see and hear to be able to do either without becoming confused and disoriented. One moment everything was an indistinguishable swirl of colors and material. The next moment you became entranced by one grotesque or comical detail—a man with two heads, a spray of feathers instead of a face, a grimacing figure apparently walking backward, a replica of the Campanile teetering between two gravestones with flashing lights, a tall, thin man with a dripping piece of meat impaled on a huge pitchfork.

Walking in stately procession near the stage was a mock cortege, complete with a shining black coffin and six pallbearers draped completely in dominoes, their faces covered in black masks. The coffin was followed by a group of laughing mourners dressed as Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot, and other commedia dell'arte figures who were dancing and pelting the coffin and onlookers with flowers. Every few steps Harlequin stopped to make an obscene gesture with his
batocchio
, a stick used for stirring the character's favored dish of polenta.

In the midst of all this chaos were silent, costumed figures, either alone or in clusters. They had an eerie stillness as they stood immobile against a column or in a doorway waiting to be photographed. One of them was Giovanni Firpo in his blue and green robe, high headdress with silver baubles, Oriental turquoise and silver mask, and large black feathered fan inset with tiny mirrors.

Most of the time Urbino was tossed by endless and unpredictable waves that seemed sometimes mainly colors, at other times shouts and laughs, at still others a dominant scent.

The three of them, buffeted by the crowd, walked under the arcade toward Florian's. Urbino was several feet behind the couple. Maybe Florian's could be their safe haven, and he could part from them there. Hazel turned, however, and beckoned Urbino to follow as she and Vico went down the steps into the Piazza and almost disappeared in the swirl of bodies lanced by snow.

He entered the thick of it himself. It was a deluge that put him in mind of the storming of the Bastille except that the object here was a different, more frightening kind of liberation. Pleasure was the object, in the pursuit of which there seemed to be no rules or thought of bridling the self but only a frenzy of letting it go. These were all thoroughly modern men and women, most of whom during the rest of the year kept to the straight and narrow. During
Carnevale
, however, they were allowed to be something else, and they were allowed to do it all together. It was intoxicating and seductive.

Pushing through the crowd Urbino thought he had lost Hazel and Tonio until he saw the young man's profile standing out against a cream-colored feathered headdress loaded down with wet snow. He caught up with them. Still arm in arm, they had stopped and were looking at the people dancing and posing and pushing at each other in the middle of the Piazza and on the ramp, the inclement weather only seeming to add to their spirits. A long sinuous line of maskers linked arm in arm rushed up one incline, scattering people as they ran and slid across the platform and down the other incline. The whip of revelers got longer and longer as others joined. Urbino thought he caught a glimpse of the small, birdlike face of Pierina in the crowd on the platform, a light-colored mask pushed to the top of her head.

“Isn't this thrilling!” Hazel said. “I wish we had our masks with us.” She waved a program she had picked up near the tourist office. “There's going to be a laser and Bengal lights show in half an hour and then some fireworks!”