Passion (14 page)

She had stopped our boat outside an imposing residence that rose up six floors and commanded a choice place on this clean and fashionable canal.

'In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.'

Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest.

'Feel for yourself.'

I felt and without the slightest subterfuge moved my hand up and down. I could feel nothing. I put my ear to her body and crouched quite still in the bottom of the boat and a passing gondolier gave us a knowing smile.

I could hear nothing.

'Villanelle, you'd be dead if you had no heart.'

'Those soldiers you lived with, do you think they had hearts? Do you think my fat husband has a heart somewhere in his lard?' Now it was me shrugging my shoulders. 'It's a way of putting it, you know that.'

'I know that but I've told you already. This is an unusual city, we do things differendy here.'

'You want me to go inside that house and search for your heart?'

'Yes.'

It was fantastic.

'Henri, when you left Moscow, Domino gave you an icicle with a thread of gold running through it. Where is it?'

I told her I didn't know what had happened to it, I guessed it had melted in my pack and I had lost the thread of gold. I was ashamed of having lost it, but when Patrick died I forgot to take care of the things I loved for a while.

'I have it.'

'You have the gold?' I was incredulous, relieved. She must have found it and so I hadn't lost Domino after all.

'I have the icicle.' She fished into her bag and drew it out as cold and hard as the day he had plucked it from the canvas and sent me away. I turned it over in my hands. The boat bobbed up and down and the seagulls went their ordinary way. I looked at her, my eyes full of questions, but she only drew up her shoulders and turned her face back towards the house. 'Tonight, Henri. Tonight they'll be at the Fenice. I'll bring you here and wait for you, but I'm afraid to go in in case I can't bring myself to leave again.'

She took the icicle from me. 'When you bring me my heart, I'll give you your miracle.'

T love you,' I said.

'You're my brother,' she said and we rowed away.

We ate supper together, she, me and her parents, and they pressed me for details of my family.

'I come from a village surrounded by hills that stretch away bright green and spattered with dandelions. There is a river runs by that floods its banks eveiy winter and chokes in mud every summer. We depend on the river. We depend on the sun. There are no streets and squares where I come from, only small houses, one storey usually and paths in between made by so many feet not so many designing hands. We have no church, we use the barn, and in winter we have to squeeze in with the hay. We didn't notice the Revolution. Like you, it took us by surprise. Our thoughts are on the wood in our hands and the grain we grow and now and again on God. My mother was a devout woman and when she died my father said she was holding out her arms to the Holy Mother and her face was lit up from within. She died by chance. A horse fell on her and broke her hip and we have no medicine for such things, only for colic and madness. That was two years ago. My father still draws the plough and catches the moles that gash the fields. If I can, I'll get home for harvest and help him. It's where I belong.'

'What about your brains, Henri?' asked Villanelle, half sarcastic. 'A man like you, taught by a priest and travelled and fought. What will you think about back with the catde?'

I shrugged. 'What use are brains?'

'You could make your fortune here,' said her father, 'there's chances here for a young man.'

'You can stay with us,' said her mother.

But she said nothing and I could not stay and be her brother when my heart cried out to love her.

'You know,' said her mother, catching my arm, 'this is not a city like any other. Paris? I spit on it.' She spat. 'What's Paris? Just a few boulevards and some expensive shops. Here, there are mysteries that only the dead know. I tell you, the boatmen here have webbed feet. No, don't smile, it's true. I was married to one that's how I know and I brought up sons by my previous marriage.' She poked her foot in the air and tried to reach her toes. 'In between each toe, you'll find a web and with those webs they walk on water.'

Her husband didn't roar and bang the water jug as he usually did when he found something funny. He met my eyes and gave his litde half smile.

'A man has to keep an open mind. Ask Villanelle.'

But she was tight-lipped and soon left the room.

'She needs a new husband,' said her mother, her voice almost pleading, 'once that man's out of the
way ...
accidents happen very often in Venice, it's so dark and the waters are so deep. Who would be surprised if there was another death?'

Her husband laid his hand on her arm. 'Don't tempt the spirits.'

After the meal was over and her father was snoozing while her mother embroidered a cloth, Villanelle led me down to the boat and we slipped black along the black water. She had exchanged her cabbage and urine boat for a gondola and she rowed standing up in their off-centre graceful way. She said it was a better disguise; gondoliers often hung round the grand houses hoping for business. I was about to ask her where she had got the boat, but the words died in my mouth when I saw the markings on the prow.

It was a funeral boat.

The night was chilly but not dark with a bright moon that cast our shadows grotesquely on the water. We were soon at the water-gate and, as she had promised, the house seemed empty.

'How will I get in?' I whispered as she tied her boat to an iron ring.

'With this.' She gave me a key. Smooth and flat like a gaoler's key. 'I kept it for luck. It never brought me any.'

'How will I find your heart? This house is six storeys.'

'Listen for it beating and look in unlikely places. If there's danger, you'll hear me cry like a seagull over the water and you must hurry back.'

I left her and stepped into the wide hall, coming face to face with a full-sized scaly beast with a horn protruding from its head. I gave a litde cry, but it was stuffed. In front of me was a wooden staircase that bent round half-way up and disappeared into the middle of the house. I determined to start at the top and make my way down. I expected to find nothing, but unless I was able to describe each room to Villanelle, she would force me here again. I was certain of that.

The first door I opened had nothing in it but a harpsichord.

The second had fifteen stained-glass windows.

The third had no windows and on the floor, side by side, were two coffins, their lids open, white silk inside.

The fourth room was shelved from floor to ceiling and those shelves were filled with books two deep. There was a ladder.

In the fifth room a light burned and covering the whole of one wall was a map of the world. A map with whales in the seas and terrible monsters chewing the land. There were roads marked that seemed to disappear into the earth and at other times to stop abrupdy at the sea's edge. In each corner sat a cormorant, a fish struggling in its beak.

The sixth room was a sewing room, a tapestry some three- quarters done lay in its frame. The picture was of a young woman cross-legged in front of a pack of cards. It was Villanelle.

The seventh room was a study; the desk was covered in journals covered in a tiny spidery hand. Writing I could not read.

The eighth room had only a billiard table and a litde door leading off at one side. I was drawn to this door and, opening it, found it to be a vast walk-in closet racked with dresses of every kind, smelling of musk and incense. A woman's room. Here, I felt no fear. I wanted to bury my face in the clothes and Ue on the floor with the smell about me. I thought of Villanelle and her hair across my face and wondered if that was how she had felt with this sweet-smelling, seductive woman. Around the sides of the room were ebony boxes, monogrammed. I opened one and found it packed with litde glass phials. Inside were the aromas of pleasure and danger. Each phial contained at most five drops and so I judged them to be essences of great value and potency. Hardly thinking, I put one in my pocket and turned to leave. As I did so, a noise stopped me. A noise not like the sound of mice or beedes. A regular steady noise, like a heartbeat. My own heart missed a beat and I began to fling back gown after gown, scattering shoes and underclothes in my haste. I sat on my heels and listened again. It was low down, concealed.

On my hands and knees I crawled under one of the clothes rails and found a silk shift wrapped round an indigo jar. The jar was throbbing. I did not dare to unstopper it. I did not dare to check this valuable, fabulous thing and I carried it, still in the shift, down the last two floors and out into the empty night.

Villanelle was hunched in the boat staring at the water. When she heard me she reached out her hand to steady me and without asking a question rowed us swiftly away and far out into the lagoon. When she stopped at last, her sweat shining pale under the moon, I handed her my bundle.

She gave a sigh and her hands trembled, then she bade me turn away.

I heard her uncork the jar and a sound like gas escaping. Then she began to make terrible swallowing and choking noises

and only my fear kept me sitting at the other end of the boat, perhaps hearing her die.

There was quiet. She touched my back and when I turned round took my hand again and placed it on her breast.

Her heart was beating.

Not possible.

I tell you her heart was beating.

She asked me for the key and, placing both the key and the shift in the indigo jar, she tossed it into the water and smiled such a smile of radiance that had this all been folly, it would have been worth it. She asked me what I saw and I told her of each room and at each room she asked of another room and then I told her about the tapestry. Her face whitened.

'But you say it was not finished?'

'It was three-quarters finished.'

'And it was me? You're sure?'

Why was she so upset? Because if the tapestry had been finished and the woman had woven in her heart, she would have been a prisoner for ever.

'I don't understand any of this, Villanelle.'

'Don't think about it any more, I have my heart, you have your miracle. Now we can enjoy ourselves,' and she unravelled her hair and rowed me home in her red forest.

I slept badly, dreaming of the old woman's words, 'Beware of old enemies in new disguises,' but in the morning when Villanelle's mother woke me with eggs and coffee, the night gone and its nightmares seemed part of the same fantasy.

This is the city of madmen.

Her mother sat by my bed and chatted and urged me to ask Villanelle to marry me when she was free.

'I had a dream last night,' she said. 'A dream of death. Ask her, Henri.'

When we were out together that afternoon I did ask her, but she shook her head.

'I can't give you my heart.'

'I don't have to have it.'

'Perhaps not, but I need to give it. You're my brother.'

When I told her mother what had happened, she stopped in her baking. 'You're too steady for her, she goes for madmen. I tell her to calm down but she never will. She wants it to be Pentecost every day.'

Then she muttered something about the terrible island and blamed herself, but I never question these Venetians when they mutter; it's their own affair.

I began to think of leaving for France and though the thought of not seeing her each day froze my heart more cleanly than any zero winter, I remembered words of hers, words she had used when Patrick and she and I lay in a Russian hut drinking evil
spirit...

There's no sense in loving someone you can only wake up to by chance.

They say this city can absorb anyone. It does seem that eveiy nationality is here in some part. There are dreamers and poets and landscape painters with dirty noses and wanderers like me who came here by chance and never left. They are all looking for something, travelling the world and the seven seas but looking for a reason to stay. I'm not looking, I've found what it is I want and I can't have it. If I stayed, I would be staying not out of hope but out of fear. Fear of being alone, of being parted from a woman who simply by her presence makes the rest of my life seem shadows.

I say I'm in love with her. What does that mean?