Frail Barrier (7 page)

Once again the city, built as it was on thousands of sand and clay islets of the lagoon, was being destabilized.

It would survive this storm, and the next, and the next, but it couldn't go on forever exposing its frailties to the forces of nature.

Two French tourists suffered through it. Blessedly, the most vicious salvos were now over. The man and the woman, trapped in Dorsoduro, were soaked to the skin and desperate to reach the train station. They thought that the last train of the night, the one that would take them across the causeway to Mestre where they were lodging, left at one fifteen, but it had pulled out of Santa Lucia almost an hour ago.

‘If you didn't want to save a measly twenty euros a night, we'd be in our beds by now,' the wife said. She pulled up against a building.

‘And if you didn't want another drink, we'd have got to the station before this storm,' her husband shot back.

‘Do you know where we are?'

‘You have the map.'

‘This pathetic thing?'

She held up the map. It was falling apart at the folds. She thrust it into her husband's hands.

‘It's useless,' she said. ‘No, don't throw it on the ground!'

‘As if another piece of rubbish is going to make a difference!'

Some of the plastic bags that had stood beside the buildings only a short time ago had been tossed around by the wind and split open. Refuse littered the
calle
.

‘Let's try this way.' The husband indicated the entrance of a
sottoportico
. He threw the map on top of a plastic rubbish bag. ‘Maybe we'll find a sign.'

‘And maybe it'll be pointing in two different directions like the ones we saw on the other side of the Grand Canal!'

They entered the covered passageway. No light showed.

‘Watch yourself,' the husband said. ‘Give me your arm.'

‘It's so dark in here.'

They groped their way slowly. Fifteen feet ahead a sheet of rain marked the end of the
sottoportico
. The husband took out a small flashlight attached to his keychain and directed its small but strong beam on the pavement.

‘This puddle is almost a foot deep,' the husband cried. ‘Don't they have sewers that work in this city? Watch out. You—'

He stopped short.

‘What's that?' he said more quietly.

He redirected the flashlight beam to illuminate a dark form in front of them.

It was an unmoving figure. It was sprawled on the flooded stones, face down in the puddle. One arm reached toward the head. The other was twisted beneath the body.

Two sodden, half-smoked cigarettes floated on the water near the body. Each of the cigarettes was smeared with bright red lipstick, which had the appearance of blood.

The French couple had no doubt that the person was dead. Why should they have? This was Venice, wasn't it?

Part Two

Into the Maze

Three

Urbino spent part of the next day at the final qualifying competition for the regatta in Malamocco. Since the Lido town wasn't easy to get to, he had arranged for Pasquale to bring him in the contessa's motorboat. The contessa was still up in Asolo.

Back in Venice the evidence of the ravages of the monstrous storm was all too evident. Even the Palazzo Uccello, which was protected because it stood almost midway between the Grand Canal and the lagoon, had suffered broken windows and damage to the supports of the
altana
. A flowerpot on the
altana
railing had become dislodged by the wind and crashed down near the water landing, narrowly missing the gondola. Fortunately, Gildo had secured the gondola well to the mooring and tightly covered it.

As soon as Urbino had awakened, he had called Vitale, the contessa's major-domo. He was relieved to learn that the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini had received only minor damage, mainly to the plantings in its garden and to a mooring pole that had been splintered when a water taxi had hit it.

Malamocco had escaped the major brunt of the storm, however, even though it was at one of the three points on the Lido where there was an opening into the Adriatic. The opening was the site of one of the ingenious – and controversial – dikes that were under construction to protect Venice from the devastating floods that threatened the city, and of which they had just got a disturbing preview.

Malamocco had put on a festive air for the competition. Perhaps because of the storm the usually sleepy town wanted to celebrate even more, and the residents seemed particularly spirited. Malamocco, which had once been the capital of the lagoon government before it was moved to the area of the Rialto, might not have seen much devastation from last night's storm, but it had a history of destruction from the sea, though not recent. A tidal wave had obliterated the original settlement a thousand years ago.

Urbino was part of the large crowd gathered along the waterfront in the sunshine. He cheered on Gildo and Claudio as they rowed their
gondolino
past in the shallow waters. The two men were in fine form, and although they were evidently not the best among the competitors, they weren't among the weakest.

The chronometer that made the eliminations was in their favor. Gildo and Claudio were selected as one of the final nine teams. Barring some unforeseen disqualification or illness, they would run in the
gondolino
regatta.

Urbino made his apologies to the two men when they invited him to celebrate with them and their supporters in Venice. He wanted to wander around the Lido.

Before having Pasquale take him to the Piazzale Santa Maria Elisabetta, Urbino had a panino and a glass of chilled white wine in a garden trattoria. From his table under a grape arbor he had a good view of the expanse of water in which the competition had taken place. The lagoon off Malamocco was still lively with boats. Many of them were private craft – motorboats, sandolos, rowboats, and gondolas – most of them staying close to shore and filled with merrymakers. People strolled along the wooden pier or sat on the grass and benches.

The waters immediately off of Malamocco were notoriously dangerous because of mudflats and currents. Wooden poles in the water marked the safe boat routes. Supposedly when Pepin asked an old local woman the way to Rivo Alto, the high bank of the Venetian islands that became known as the Rialto, she pointed across the exact point of the lagoon where she knew there were treacherous waters.
‘Sempre dritto,'
she said, ‘Straight ahead,' directing him and his men to their destruction by the Venetian forces when his fleet became mired. Today you could hear Venetians offering the same directions without any malevolence as they pointed out the way to some building or square or bridge. The irony, of course, was that in the confusing maze of Venice nothing could ever be ‘straight ahead.'

When Pasquale brought him to the busy Piazzale Santa Maria Elisabetta where the boats came in from Venice, Urbino walked down the Gran Viale toward the Adriatic. Although he loved Venice, he sometimes enjoyed escaping from it for a few hours on the Lido and taking in what seemed to him to be, after months in Venice, the distinct anomalies of bicycles, Vespas, cars, and buses. But August was not the time to do it, for it was crammed with tourists, bicycles, and cars. He was jostled by the crowd, most of them in shorts and bathing suits although some of them – these he suspected being early arrivals for the film festival – were dressed in the height of fashion and sometimes quite outlandishly. A child ran into him with a cone of chocolate
gelato
that made a stain on his trouser leg. He was almost run down by two teenagers pedaling furiously on a tandem.

After stopping for a mineral water in a café, for the day had become increasingly hot, he eventually reached the Old Jewish Cemetery, where he knew he would be able to find some peace and quiet. Other than himself, there was only an elderly couple, who returned his greeting politely and continued their slow circuit of the cemetery.

The cemetery was a small area that had recently been restored, although not to the best effect. Many of the old tombstones had been moved and regrouped together, and the place had lost some of that melancholy charm that appealed to Urbino, especially in cemeteries.

After walking around and examining the inscription on the obelisk that proclaimed the cemetery to be the ‘House of the Living,' he sat on the ground near a cypress tree. It seemed an appropriate place to take out his Goethe, which he had slipped in his pocket before leaving the Palazzo Uccello.

For the next half-hour, surrounded by the tombstones with their images of upraised hands, urns pouring water, lions, and coats of arms, Urbino lost himself in Goethe's impressions.

The next afternoon Urbino, on his way to meet Nick Hollander at the Gritti Palace, sat in the stern of a vaporetto as it passed down the Grand Canal. This was his preferred place in the boats, with his back to the prow. He enjoyed looking out at the scene after the vaporetto had already passed it.

What has been called the finest street in the world was also one of the busiest. To an eye less practiced than Urbino's it would also have seemed to be one of the most chaotic, but not because of any ravages of the recent storm.

Wasn't his vaporetto about to capsize the rocking gondola only a short distance away? From the look of alarm on the faces of the tourists in the black craft, they certainly seemed to think so. And how could the fireboat, speeding from the station near Ca' Foscari, possibly make its way among all the water traffic without a collision? Surely stretches of the Grand Canal would soon be filled with sinking crates of wine and mineral water, plastic bags of refuse, and splinters of sleek, polished wood?

But despite all the activity and all the craft going about then-business, there was order. Everyone kept to his proper place on – or rather
in
– the liquid pavement, even the three bright yellow kayaks that hugged the Cannaregio shore.

Urbino saw only this harmony in the scene. It was a harmony of green water and bright blue sky; of old stone buildings and their mirror images; of white seabirds and creamy boat wakes; of motion and stillness; of sound and silence.

The harmony was all the more remarkable, considering the chaos of the other night. But Venice was licking its wounds, pushing the water out of the front doors, repairing the windows, drying out the carpets, clothes, and furniture. It had done it before. And it would have to do it again.

Urbino was filled with admiration for the city. The traffic on the Grand Canal was like a procession of thanksgiving for having escaped the latest assaults. It was a procession that took the form of normal coming and going, of everyday business and entertainment.

Urbino's vaporetto, loaded with passengers it had picked up at the Piazzale Roma and the train station, rode low in the water. From his position beside the doors that led into the cabin Urbino felt as if he were level with the waters of the Canalazzo. Middle-aged American women occupied the other six seats in the stern. They were in a convivial mood, and kept snapping photographs as the boat proceeded in the direction of the Piazza San Marco.

Urbino gave himself up to the play of light and color and the marble walls of buildings that were austerely classical one moment and fancifully Gothic the next. He wondered how much more he might have enjoyed the palaces if they had been cleaned of the patina of age and weather and if their original frescoes and bright golds, blues, and reds had been restored. One thing would have been gained, something else lost.

Urbino would have remained in a ruminative frame of mind if some chance words in the conversation of his fellow passengers hadn't drawn his attention.

‘That palace there,' a woman's voice said, ‘that's where the Queen of Cyprus was born.' She held a guidebook in her hand. ‘You remember Cyprus, Laura. All those orange trees?'

‘The Queen of Cyprus! Where, Darlene? Oh, it's beautiful.'

Laura stood up and took a photograph of the building that Darlene, her friend with the guidebook, pointed out. But the building receiving her attentions was the Ca' d' Oro and not the palace on the opposite side of the Grand Canal where Caterina Cornaro, whose memory would be honored in the upcoming regatta, had seen the light of day in the late fifteenth century.

‘Excuse me,' Urbino said, ‘but that's the Ca' d' Oro. The one we just passed, the one over there' – he indicated the considerably more plain building on the San Polo side – ‘is the one where the Queen of Cyprus died. It's the Palazzo Corner della Regina and it's—'

‘Oh, I understand!' Darlene interrupted. ‘Regina means Queen in Italian, doesn't it? I had a girlfriend named Regina in Schenectady. This book here has got me all confused. I'm looking at things backwards and upside down!' She gave him a broad smile. ‘You're an American!'

Urbino admitted to it.

‘I could have sworn you were an Italian,' Darlene said with a laugh. She took in his Italian linen suit and Italian shoes. ‘What about you, girls?'

They all vigorously assented.

Urbino soon realized what he had got himself into. They started to assail him with questions. He explained that he had been living in the city for twenty years and was a writer. He wasn't even tempted to reveal that he was also an amateur sleuth.

‘I can't believe I'm really here!' Darlene said.

‘But only for one night,' Laura lamented. ‘I'm glad it's not raining. Someone told us in Rome that it always rains in Venice.'

‘Not every day, obviously,' Urbino said, ‘but we get more than our share. You're lucky you weren't here the other night.'

‘It was bad enough in Florence,' Laura said.

‘It's so romantic,' Darlene enthused. ‘We should be here with someone special. Not with a bunch of other girls, right ladies?'

Her companions turned their eager smiles on Urbino and away from the glories of the Grand Canal.