Frail Barrier (2 page)

Claudio was also a champion rower. He had been training, with Urbino's gondolier Gildo as his partner, for the
gondolini
qualification races next month. The
gondolino
competition, involving the small gondola designed specifically for racing, was the highlight of the regatta.

‘You know what I want even before I do, Claudio,' she said.

‘What is that, Contessa?'

Claudio spoke English well but with a heavy accent.

‘Another pot of tea, please.'

‘Of course, Contessa. But your opinion is too high.' He flashed his bright, healthy smile. ‘I came over to give you this.'

He opened his palm.

In it was a bracelet in an elegantly simple design of three gold strands and the intertwined letters
B
and
A
in gold. One of the contessa's most treasured possessions, it was a gift from her late husband Alvise on their last wedding anniversary.

‘But I don't understand.' She looked at her bare right wrist and back at the bracelet, as if she expected to find that Claudio held only a replica and that she was still wearing the original.

‘Albina found it, Contessa.'

This was Albina Gonella, the restroom attendant. The contessa was fond of her, and occasionally visited her and her sister Giulietta, a seamstress, who lived in the Dorsoduro quarter near Campo Santa Margherita.

‘But I didn't even notice that I had lost it. However did such a thing happen? How careless of me! Poor Alvise!'

‘Albina found it on the carpet in the foyer outside the rest-rooms.' Claudio placed the bracelet in her hand. ‘She's seen you wearing it. You should have the clasp strengthened. You might not be as lucky if it happens again. I'll get your tea.'

‘Thank you, Claudio. And thank Albina – but no,' she interrupted herself. She got up from the banquette. ‘I need to see her myself. Is she still upstairs?'

‘Yes, Contessa.'

While Urbino waited for the contessa to return, he looked out into the piazza.

He took in the animated scene with appreciation but without focusing on anything or anyone in particular until he noticed two young men standing at the edge of the crowd under the arcade near Florian's. They were eating sandwiches and passing a bottle of mineral water back and forth. They listened to Florian's orchestra and appreciated the glowing mass of the Basilica until the two bronze figures atop the ornate clock tower caught their attention. The figures struck the fifth hour.

They were so obviously delighted with it all that Urbino felt a peculiar and unexpected pang of envy. It was followed by the urge to invite them into the Chinese Salon for drinks and some of Florian's small sandwiches.

But of course he didn't. How presumptuous of him, not to mention condescending. As if it could add to their enjoyment of the Venetian scene if they were perched as he was in the Chinese Salon with a whole menu to command.

And yet if the two young men need not envy him, he need not really envy them either.

Contentment surged through him. How fortunate he was! No, not because he could indulge himself at the Caffè Florian whenever he might want to, alone or in the contessa's company. No, his contentment came from the realization that his love for the city hadn't dimmed over the years. He was still very much a man in love.

When Claudio brought the contessa's tea, Urbino ordered another sherry for himself and a celebratory plate of scones.

Some of his euphoria left him, however, when the contessa returned. Tired sadness stamped her face.

‘Dear marvelous Albina!' she said. ‘If she weren't so marvelous, where would I be? Where would my Alvise's bracelet be?'

They glanced at the gold ornament, restored now to its proper place on her wrist.

Looking around a bit furtively at the other patrons, the contessa said, with intensity in her lowered voice, ‘Anyone in here might have had it stashed away in his pocket or purse with no idea of how precious and irreplaceable it is to me!'

‘Why not have a scone, Barbara? Let me put some marmalade and cream on it for you.'

He took her silence for assent and attended to the soft tiny cake. When he offered it to her, she was staring absently at her bracelet, lost in thought. He waited a few moments, and then ate the scone himself.

‘How disturbing,
caro.'
The contessa spoke musingly, looking up. ‘How easy to lose something precious and not know it! Not until it's much, much too late.' She reached out and patted his hand. ‘Let's try not to forget that. There are so many precious things to lose.'

But then a puzzled look came into her eyes.

‘Where's my scone? Didn't you say you were preparing one for me?'

‘I—'

He moved his hand in the direction of the plate.

‘No. Let me give
you
one. You're one of my precious things. I enjoy taking care of you.'

The contessa spread the marmalade over the scone and added a dollop of clotted cream. She was much smoother in her movements than Urbino had been, and considerably more generous in the dollop.

‘If I ever start to lose
you
in the slightest way,' she said as she held out the freighted morsel, ‘I would know it immediately.'

‘I have no doubt of that, but we'll have to take it on the deepest faith. There will never be any risk of losing me.'

‘And neither will you ever lose me.'

A shadow crossed the contessa's attractive face. Her eye drifted to the spot under the busy arcade where the gaunt man with the bloody handkerchief had passed earlier with his young companion.

Urbino, knowing the melancholy train of her thoughts, introduced the topic of Asolo, which never failed to cheer her, and from this they passed on to other pleasant subjects.

For the next hour, there in the Chinese Salon, the two friends dwelled on things not lost and on those happily anticipated: the regatta, the contessa's party, the city in all its beauty and madness, and the love and friendship that was theirs to share for what they hoped would be many more long and full years to come.

Part One

Storms

One

Despite its splendid palaces and lively squares, its sun-washed Zattere and corridors of art, its oleander gardens and jewel-like courtyards, Dorsoduro is a quarter of death on this afternoon in early August.

Beneath the high dome of the Church of the Salute an old woman stares at the Black Madonna over the main altar. She petitions her for deliverance from the plague of age eating away her body.
Maria, salute degli infirmi, prega per noi
. Light spills on the woman's head from the windows piercing the dome, but she shivers.

In a vegetable barge in the canal by the Campo San Barnabà a man in the prime of health slices a melon in half to display its rich orange color. He cuts into one of his fingers. He laughs, sucks the blood, and jokes with a pretty young housewife. In two weeks he'll be dying in a hospital bed on the other side of Venice.

On a bench in the Campo Santa Margherita, a thin, pale woman watches her son licking a cone of mulberry
gelato
and wonders whether she'll be alive next year to see the dark fruit ripen in her courtyard and stain her windowsills.

An old man is being pushed in his wheelchair along the Zattere beneath rose brick walls and cascades of honeysuckle. A sleek white liner, sparkling in the sunshine, makes its way down the Giudecca Canal toward the Adriatic. The man twists his head for a tear-blurred view of the island of the Giudecca where he fell in love for the first time. By the next low tide, when the city's rats emerge, he'll be dead.

In a darkened room near Ca' Foscari a woman who visited the Accademia Gallery once every week for thirty-five years is about to stop breathing. Her life is now reduced to memories, becoming dimmer and dimmer. The last vision before her eyes isn't the face of her granddaughter by her side. It's Giorgione's
La Vecchia
.

How far away she had thought this day would be when she had first seen the painting of the old woman. How little she had understood the warning on the scrap of paper in the woman's hands:
Col Tempo
. With time.

In a small, stuffy apartment not far from the splendors of the Ca' Rezzonico where Robert Browning died, a father kisses the still warm – the too warm – cheeks of his infant son.

In a bedroom of a palazzo on the Grand Canal across from the Gritti Palace Hotel, a white-faced man lies in an eighteenth-century bed with St. Ursula painted on the tester. Another man, wearing a peacock blue sweater, sits beside the bed. A third man, bald and dressed in a cream-colored suit, paces the Turkish carpet.

‘He's dead,' says the man at the bedside.

The other man stops his pacing, stares at the body.

It's what they've been waiting for, but not in the same way.

And before too long, they too will be dead this summer, and Urbino and the contessa's serene world will be shaken up once again.

A week later the city was attacked by its most violent storm of the summer.

Until three in the afternoon the sky over the city and the lagoon was bright blue. Then, within moments and as the Moors were striking the hour in the Piazza San Marco, the blue turned deep purple with swirls of bright red. It was a canvas worthy of the Peggy Guggenheim Museum. Tourists marveled at the beauty of the sky. But the Venetians knew that chaos was on the way.

Jagged shards of lightning split the sky over the narrow strand of the Lido. A gale-force wind turned the glassy waters of the lagoon into high peaks. Sheets of rain slashed against everything and everyone exposed to the sudden onslaught. Boats were forced to take different routes, avoiding vulnerable stops where the landings rocked violently or were flooded.

The sirens warning of
acqua alta
sounded, barely audible above the clamor of the storm. The Piazza San Marco, with its orchestra platforms and chairs, looked like the abandoned deck of a sinking ship.

The storm lashing Venice was the kind that threatened its frail existence more than barbarian hordes, rival empires, or Napoleon's troops ever had. The strongest defenses that the city could construct would be too fragile if storms like these became more frequent than they already were.

And on this day in early August the storm was devilishly twinned.

Shortly after ten o'clock, lightning illuminated the
campi
and bridges like stage sets under the fiercest day-for-night lamps. The thunder was so deafening that when windows broke from the force of the wind, it was as if the thunder had done it.

It all ended around midnight, abruptly. The malicious hand that had been testing the limits and the bulwarks of the lagoon city, built on marshes and mudflats, released its prey. And in its quick release it showed its power more than it had during all the previous hours of rage.

Three days afterward, in the late morning, the black coffin-like craft that was Urbino's gondola glided down a small canal in the Dorsoduro district.

It was a bright, sunny day, but traces of the recent storm marked the scene.

An occasional piece of rubbish, swept into the canal by the wind and rain and still not carried off by the tides, brushed the sides of the gondola and sometimes clung to Gildo's oar. The offensive odor of backed-up drains lingered in the air. The
ferro
of a gondola had been snapped off, and a fragment of the decorative prow floated in several inches of water in the boat.

Perspiration beaded Urbino's forehead. The air inside the
felze
was damp and heavy. The occasional breeze that entered the small, closed cabin with its shutters was not quite fetid, but certainly far from the fresh and invigorating air the contessa was enjoying in Asolo. Despite these discomforts, however, Urbino preferred the covering of the
felze
to being in plain view, and it did provide shelter from the sun. In fact, he seldom had Gildo remove the structure, even though sitting inside it only increased curiosity since gondolas had long since dispensed with the
felze
.

But Urbino couldn't bear all those eyes on him – nor, if the truth were told, being mistaken for a tourist who insisted on being floated by his gondolier beneath the Bridge of Sighs during his allotted minutes on the water.

It might seem strange that although shy about being seen, he indulged in such an ostentatious form of transport. But Urbino had long since stopped worrying about his inconsistencies or even being aware of many of them. As for good friends like the contessa, who had given him the gondola to mark the twentieth anniversary of their relationship, they regarded them as perpetual sources of amusement.

Although he was an energetic walker and loved roaming the city on foot, the craft's suggestion of invalidism and indolence suited another part of his temperament, as the contessa well knew. Rowed by the young, vigorous Gildo, Urbino could reduce all effort to lifting his finger to turn the page of a book, moving his head to gaze through the shutters, and rearranging his cushions.

Nor was Urbino unaffected by the gondola's old-fashioned associations. When he was drifting along, concealed in the
felze
, it was as if the clock had been moved back to some late Victorian year and he was on his way to have his portrait painted by Sargent.

Perhaps an even stronger appeal in the craft than these, however, was the marvelous way that it provided a floating post from which he could observe the world outside while not being observed himself.

There could be no better example of this latter advantage than what he was experiencing now. For something in the scene outside drew his attention. He put his volume of Goethe down in his lap, marking his place with a postcard reproduction of Tischbein's portrait of the writer.

The gondola was approaching one of those bridges typical of Venice; small, stone, single-span, and with a low parapet. Water steps, slick with green, descended to the water on either side. Prominent on the bridge against the brilliant blue sky was the figure of a woman in late middle age. She wore a green dress. Around her pale, thin face was a fiery crown of red hair, obviously the result of art and not nature. She stood beside an easel with a paintbrush in her hand.