Read Territorial Rights Online
Authors: Muriel Spark
Territorial Rights
Muriel Spark
Chapter One
T
HE BUREAU CLERK WAS
telephoning to the Pensione Sofia while Robert Leaver watched the water-traffic at the ferry and the off-season visitors arriving in Venice. It was a sunny day in October. The clerk, having spoken to the Sofia, told him there was a room vacant there. Robert nodded. ‘On vacation?’ said the bureau man. ‘Research. Art History,’ said Robert, lifting his briefcase and his suitcase.
He was taken to the Pensione Sofia through the sunny waters of palaces, domes and ferries. It was his first visit to Venice and he was young; but he had only half a mind to feel enchanted, the other half being still occupied with a personal anxiety in Paris from where he had just come. So that, while he was subject to the imperative claims of Venice the beautiful on first sight, he heard still in his ears the impatient voice of the older man: Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, good
bye.
Robert had been floundering about his own goodbyes, had made them apologetically, had said too many goodbyes. His suitcase in his hand, Robert had turned on the doorstep. ‘I’ll get in touch … goodbye again … goodbye for now … well, good—’
‘Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, good
bye.’
It was as if the older man had said, ‘You bore me. You can’t even leave in good style. You haven’t any slightest savvy about partings. You’ve always bored me.
Goodbye very much. Goodbye.’
With this angry memory not far behind, Robert let himself take in Venice, noting everything he passed on the way to the Pensione with a merely photographic attention.
The bright-eyed, plump young porter was waiting for him at the gate ready to take his bags. Robert let go of his suitcase but clung nervously to his briefcase. The porter showed no involvement one way or the other, but proceeded up the short flagged path of the street-entrance to its high glass doorway. The outside walls of the pensione were flaky but obviously it had been a handsome villa. He followed the porter into a long reception hall. The villa had been converted into a little private hotel. A few people were sitting about, ready to go out, waiting for their friends to come down. There was a large dark television set at the far end of the room with a group of chairs round it emptily waiting for the evening to fall. Behind the television was a wide french window, its curtains open; beyond that a long garden receding from the back of the house.
Two middle-aged women simultaneously detached themselves from the armchairs. One had been knitting, the other reading a magazine. They might have been guests, but they approached the reception desk together, smiling, obliging, and in charge. Their heads, as they bent over the big book to check his room, were alike, yellow-grey, neatly and newly done by the hairdresser. The forefinger of one of the women moved down the page to find his place, the forefinger of the other found it.
One of the good ladies behind the desk was asking, in adequate hotel English, how long he wanted to stay.
He opened his mouth and paused before replying in a French-inclined Italian, ‘Two or three weeks. Maybe a month’; and he seemed to have made this decision on the spot; almost, he could have said ‘Two or three days. Maybe a week.’
Her fingers moved around in the big book. ‘There’s a large room with two windows and separate shower, or another room, smaller with full bath.’
‘Two windows?’ the young man said. ‘The room with the bath, has it two windows
?’
‘No, only one,’ Eufemia said. ‘I’ll show you both rooms.’ She reached for the keys.
He followed, inordinately fussed about the choice between the two assets. A room with two windows, and only with shower. A room with one window but a full bath. Goodbye, good
bye
. He took the large room with two windows and shower.
‘Thank you, signora,’ he said, whereupon she invited him to call her Eufemia, adding that her sister was Katerina. And even this made Robert anxious, lest he should have got himself into an over-intimate guesthouse, which might threaten his privacy.
‘You’re lucky to find this room,’ Eufemia said as she checked the soap and the towels, and opened the cupboards and drawers to see that all was well for the new visitor. The room was large and randomly furnished with slightly shaky, though shiny, furniture. He noticed a telephone by the bed, and a desk, which for some reason reassured him about his personal independence in the place. ‘Even out of season’ Eufemia was saying, ‘you’d be surprised how many tourists arrive every day in Venice. Are you on holiday?’
‘Research,’ he said. ‘Art History.’
One of the windows looked out on a garden with the canal beyond, the other had a view of a large square with a bulbous church at the end of it.
‘Art history? Good, good!’ said Eufemia, as if unique wonders would never cease. ‘Well, sir, can I have your passport for the register?’
From the outside, Santa Maria Formosa is a bulbous and comely church. Behind it laps one of the narrow lanes of Venetian water which link streets to churches, squares to alleys. The church is wide and peaceful in its volume as if the front doors opened to show off the square before it, the square and all that stands around, the pharmacy, the funeral shop with its shiny coffins stacked one on top of another and carved with enthusiasm, the uneven roof-line, the Bar Dell’Orologio wherein youth and age stand eyeing each other, and, on the far left, the Communist Party’s ornate and ancient headquarters with its painted façade. Standing within the church doors you could, of course, see a short way down the side-path leading from the far end of the square to the street-gate and old-fashioned front garden of the Pensione Sofia.
Robert had come here as soon as he had unpacked, crossing the little bridge of the side-canal to the path that led into the expansive square. It was the afternoon hour when the shops were opening after lunch. Robert had walked around to see what sights there were to save up for later visits, and now was in the bar having coffee and a bun. He was wearing blue jeans and a thick sweater. He was twenty-four, thin, tallish and had a good head of light brown curly hair and a droopy brown moustache. Some other students of both sexes stood in the bar, came and went. Robert showed a piece of paper to the barman. It had an address on it, but the barman, having puzzled over it, said he had never heard of it. He then asked where this address was, which question was not really stupid; the other Venetians who now joined in with Robert’s problem made it clear that they knew where every place in their city was, but they didn’t know the streets by names. Where was this address near to, what monument, what bridge, what shop, what church? Was it up or down the Grand Canal from the Rialto Bridge? Another student, a Canadian, presently recognised the name of the street; this led to further discussion and finally it was marked on Robert’s map; not really very far away from where he was.
It was the moment that he came out of the bar that Robert caught a glimpse away in the distance of Lina Pancev, the girl whose address he was looking for. It was by her outline that he recognised her unmistakably, for she dressed in a gypsy style, bulky with full gathered skirts and shawls, more common among the young of Paris than of Venice. With this, she walked with a certain sway, more proud than really sexy. Her small head, with black bobbed hair, was set to look straight ahead with a touch of rigidity, as usual. She was crossing the far end of a narrow street leading off the Campo di Santa Maria Formosa. Her head and her outline passed and were lost.
Robert hurried to catch up with her, negotiating the mothers, prams, children on wild skateboards, students, old men and tourists who were filling the square in the last hours of sunlight. She had gone from sight when he reached the end of the narrow street, but he took the route towards her address and eventually, by the side of the bridge, in a narrow aperture between two high palaces, he saw her again standing there. She looked around her briefly, but only in her immediate vicinity, as if to assure herself that no one could physically stop her from some projected action, rather like a market-thief about to steal a bunch of grapes. Then she bent to lift her voluminous skirt to the knees, and shook out from under it an empty mackerel-tin, a milk-carton, bits of egg-shell and some pieces of old lettuce. She kicked aside this garbage, then walked on to her destination. It was exactly what she had done the day Robert had first seen her in a mean little side-street in Paris. That first time she had looked up and seen the young man watching her, and laughed, although she was embarrassed too. Robert had said, in an easy young way, ‘What are you doing?’
She had said she was getting rid of her garbage. Apparently, she lodged in a cheap room where she wasn’t allowed to cook. Well, she couldn’t afford to eat out, so she cooked all the same on a spirit-stove that she carried about with her from place to place. She managed quite well, she explained, the only problem being how to get rid of the rubbish; and she solved the problem by stuffing it up her clothes and shedding it in a back-street. She said, ‘I have to wear the big old women’s pants that come to the knees.’ She spoke first in French, and then changed to English because, as she explained to Robert later, he was laughing in English.
This time Robert didn’t laugh. He stood where he was, staring at the mystery of this exact repetition of events in another city; it was a near-hallucination, and, after all, it was no mystery, for Lina obviously had taken the same sort of poor lodgings and settled in with her forbidden spirit-stove. He had known Lina now for six weeks. First Paris and now Venice; goodbye, good
bye
. Lina was now out of sight, but he walked on after her to her new address. It seemed that the trouble between the two was about the autumn leaves.
Robert, watching at the garden window of his room, looked down on the neat heads of the two women.
The garden, dotted with rose-beds and other bright flowers, was divided by a gravel pathway about three feet wide. All down the exact middle of this path was set a row of whitewashed stones; they looked like those put on mountain roads to warn of a deep cliff-edge. Now the two women stood one on each side of the dividing line, stoutly, with one toe apiece precisely touching the verge. By the side of one of the women lay a mound of bright leaves; it was a huge mound, turning damp at the base, evidently intended for compost. It could have looked glorious to Robert in the faint misty light of that afternoon had his mind been more his own.
The two proprietors of the establishment shrieked on, not in the Italian they used when speaking to clients, but in a Venetian dialect of which the witness at the window could have perceived here and there only a few familiar landmarks of rational discourse. The argument turned on the actual place where the fallen leaves had been piled up. The leaves themselves seemed to be the responsibility of the one called Katerina. A few of them had accidentally spilled over the white line into that part of the garden where Eufemia, the other, was standing. Presently the violence and tone of the flare-up in the garden subsided into low grumbles, and then into nothing.
This was two days after Robert’s arrival. The afternoon sky had turned grey. He heard the water-traffic of Venice behind the shrubbery, at the far end of the garden path. There was movement, too, on the side-canal and on the little bridge which led to the footpath and to the river-gate of the Pensione Sofia. After the women’s voices had dissolved, Robert, still watching at the window, saw only the one called Eufemia standing her ground, in silence. She wore a sensible skirt and one of her stockings was slightly askew. On the other side of the white boundary, the other, Katerina, having reluctantly conceded the battle, bent to pick up in little handfuls the stray leaves; she threw them on to the vivid pile on the side where she stood and achieved this without placing her foot over the boundary. At one point, when three spreadeagled sprays of foliage seemed too far away for Katerina to reach, Eufemia pushed them nearer to hand with her shoe.
