The Art of Waiting (22 page)

As each day passed, Aldo's beard grew longer and his eyes more distant and he became more attuned to this new way of life. Each day, before he set off towards Venice, he would pluck a flower from the garden and place it in a small chipped vase he had found near San Marco, and he would wipe the glass of the picture frame with his sleeve and replace it on the nail above his bed, as a religious man might clean and replace a picture of the Madonna. He often saw a street musician with a violin in Campo Santo Stefano, and he would sit and listen and rub his hands together to try to keep them warm against the cold and the damp of an accelerating autumn, and each day when he returned to the house it was slighter colder and less hospitable and the wind that blew in through the broken windows was less tolerable, and each morning the number of flowers in the garden was diminished until finally, one day in October, there were
none. And so the flower from the previous day remained in the vase for more than a week, until it was no more than a clock of brown petals clinging to the stalk, counting down the dying days of the year with each falling petal.

By late autumn the bins around the markets were full of rich pickings that remained in edible form for longer than had been possible in the oppressive heat and humidity of summer. The discarded fruit and vegetables now lingered for days before mould ate them away from inside. The apples were the best, plentiful at this time of year and perfectly acceptable even when half-gone and smelling of cider, unlike the citrus fruits which fermented swiftly beneath the rubbish, turning foul and bitter. Aldo usually searched the bins under the cover of darkness now, hiding his face behind his lengthening beard and unkempt hair as he scavenged around the fringes of society. He had been doing this long enough now to have become something of an expert in the anticipated pickings of the various neighbourhoods. He would always start in Cannaregio, arriving on the
vaporetto
at Fondamente Nuove and passing the old family home first of all. Then he would cross the Canale Grande via the bridge near the railway station and cut through Santa Croce and Dorsoduro, passing the boatyard where the gondolas lay with upturned hulls, then on to the hated door of Antica Locanda Fausto before crossing the bridge at Accademia and on to San Marco. From there he crossed Piazza San Marco and continued along behind the Basilica into Castello, finally turning left again to head back to Fondamente Nuove with his bags full of rubbish. The whole circuit could take several hours, the exact time depending on how often and for how long he stopped to contemplate the landmarks from a previous life that littered his route. He considered it a working day, no different from any other job, requiring the same dedication and commitment if you were to make a success of it. It was certainly not a lazy man's choice of occupation, walking several miles a day in order to cover all the best spots. Of course, calling it a
choice
of occupation would not be strictly accurate, but he had come to accept the daily routine in the same way that a shopworker or a desk-bound civil servant
might accept their daily commute and their day-long imprisonment behind a counter or a desk. And at least he was able to spend the whole day outside in the fresh air to which his time on the steppe had accustomed him, and the long hours of walking eased his mind. His working day had shifted with the seasons, summer's early evening run now giving way to a more manageable late-afternoon trawl as the winter nights drew in, and on dull days dusk came in mid-afternoon and Aldo was able to leave the empty shell of his grandfather's house on Burano a little after two, catch the
vaporetto
to Fondamente Nuove, and start work as four o'clock shadows filled the alleys. On one occasion, close to his old home on Fondamenta della Sensa, he saw a vision of Katerina walking towards him along the quay, and he paused and watched as the vision passed him by, its head turned towards the canal, and as the vision's footsteps faded away he nearly turned in pursuit, but he knew that it was futile and that even if a vision was capable of recognising a man, it would evaporate in his arms if he tried to detain it.

He was usually home before midnight, and on the rare occasions that he missed the last
vaporetto
to Burano he would find a place on a bench in the public gardens towards the eastern end of Castello. Beside one of the churches along this route there was a convent where the nuns would offer him a bowl of soup or a small brown bag of their homemade biscuits or a slice of warm
pizza bianca
, its top dusted with salt. And there was a café in the ghetto where the owner would sometimes offer him a coffee and slip him a sandwich or half a loaf of bread, although there was a tacit understanding that he would not linger for long on the premises. He always saved the bread until he reached Campo Santo Stefano, the spot where the old street musician often played the violin, and Aldo would sit and listen to the music and pick at the bread until all that remained were the crumbs at his feet over which the sparrows would quarrel in the dust. As he watched the man play, the music brought back memories of late nights at Casa Luca, of recitals in the church near the Rialto, of Isabella, and of course of the house suspended somewhere in time beside a lake in the shimmering heart of Russia, but all these
memories merely accentuated everything that he had lost. Aldo would sit and listen until, tired of playing, the old man would put the coins he had gathered into his pocket, place the violin back in its case, and disappear beyond the far end of the square and over the bridge at Accademia. After the man had left, Aldo would head back to Fondamente Nuove and wait for the
vaporetto
, his heart sinking each day a little further into the mire.

As October lengthened into November, the daily round became a grind. Perhaps it was the worsening weather, the heavy mists that formed during the night and shrouded the lagoon for days on end, or the heavy squalls that blew in and drenched the rooftops and filled the gutters to overflowing, or the floodtides that rose through the streets and sent the inhabitants up onto duckboards and the rubbish floating across the squares, but whatever the cause, the decline in Aldo's spirits was outwardly visible and relentless. He began to miss days, convincing himself he was too ill or tired to do his round, and he would lie in the top room of the house on Burano as the roof let in the rain, and he picked at the bits and pieces he had saved from the previous day and then went out for a walk among the houses, and the kids playing football against the back wall of the church would call him names and kick the ball at the back of his head as he walked away. He would shout at them and then return to the house and sit by the water's edge in the rain and listen to the voices of the water birds as they swirled overhead in the mist, and then he would go inside and wait for darkness so that he could sleep fitfully until dawn. His wild beard and hair mapped his descent down the slippery slope of desperation and he reached the point where he gave up hope of ever fitting back into the life he had once had here, reconciling himself to a permanent role as scavenger and outcast, almost a beast, less than a goat, floating like rubbish on a rising tide of resentment. He knew his descent into squalor during the war was unavoidable, but when arriving back home his aspirations had grown. Of course he had expected to encounter some initial difficulties in readjusting, but he had assumed these would be temporary. After all, he must be some sort of hero, just for
surviving, for making it back from the Russian front where tens of thousands of his comrades had been lost – almost ninety per cent of them, he had heard. So surely there would be people now to support him, to love him, for him to love, and some sympathy for the returning soldier trying to pick up the threads of his life and stitch himself back together again. But instead he found a changed society that had suffered too much to be interested in his plight, and nothing that was left of the life he had known, no one to help him, just the bare walls of an empty house on Burano commandeered by goats that had to be forcibly removed so he could shelter between its crumbling walls and watch his life fall apart all around him.

The Violin

Venice, November 1950

Aldo sat on the bench in Campo Santo Stefano and watched the old man with the violin. He must be well into his seventies, Aldo thought, dressed in simple clothes of brown, black and grey, his face pleasant and serene as he nodded at passers-by and then took up the violin and teased out a tune. Aldo watched him, his own empty hands fidgeting with the meagre bag of rubbish he had dragged around all afternoon. He twisted and turned it in his lap, looked inside at the contents, the rotting fruit of several hours' work. His head pounded, his feet ached, and all he had to show for his efforts were two florets of cauliflower, a handful of green leaves of uncertain origin, a squashed tomato and a husk of brown bread containing a variety of seeds that had largely been pecked away by the pigeons. He looked again at the violinist and noted the courteous nods of recognition he received from passers-by. A young couple stopped to listen and the music brought a smile to their lips and they walked off laughing, leaving a few coins in the old man's case. Aldo looked at the people on the benches around the square, chatting and laughing in twos or threes. Then he looked at the bench on which he sat, on which no one else would sit except for an old lady who perched like a nervous bird at the far end for a few seconds before looking at him, standing up, and hurrying away. The old man transferred the coins from his case to his pocket and replaced them with the violin and walked off in the direction of the bridge at Accademia. Aldo stood up and followed him across the bridge, then into Santa Croce and the labyrinth of alleyways and canals towards San Polo. He kept a discreet distance and the only footsteps were those of Aldo and the violinist, but as
Aldo tired, and the idea that had begun to form in his mind took flight, he turned away, disgusted at the thought that had made him stray so far from his normal route. He went back to the house on Burano and yelled at the goats and lay down on the bed and curled up and shivered in the November chill.

He stayed there until dawn and all through the next day and the following night. He woke at last in the late afternoon to the sound of heavy rain falling on terracotta tiles from leaden skies. He rose from his bed and walked under a steady rain towards the quayside and caught the
vaporetto
to Venice. This time he did not pass by the house on Fondamenta della Sensa and he skipped his usual stop-off at the café and the possibility of a gift of bread, and instead he headed straight for Campo Santo Stefano, already resolved to carry out the deed that was creeping up on him unseen. But damn it, when he reached the square the violinist was not there so he sat on the bench opposite the statue and waited as the rain turned to drizzle and then to a vapour that thickened into mist. Then he heard footsteps, familiar footsteps now, the sound of the violinist arriving, and Aldo observed him carefully as he got himself ready to play. He sized up the man's frail and stooping frame, the narrow shoulders and the crooked limbs. He looked down at the shoes which must once have been elegant, a polished shiny black with fresh new laces and sharp-edged heels, but now cracked and curling around the edges. Aldo listened to the music and recognised several of the pieces that he used to play in recitals before the war, the adagios of Albinioni and Mahler and Camille Saint-Saëns'
The Swan
. He watched until the man packed away his instrument and walked off towards Accademia, the usual route. Aldo stood up and followed a little way behind him, through Santa Croce and towards San Polo, and the streets were populated only by an occasional passing figure in the fog, and the violinist turned each corner a little way ahead of Aldo, but with each corner the distance between them diminished until they were separated by just a few short steps, and when the man turned around he raised his hand for protection but Aldo's fist smashed into the side of his head and the man fell to his knees and looked up at him.

‘What do you want from me?' the man pleaded. ‘What do you want? I have nothing.'

‘I have less.'

The second blow knocked the man clean into the canal. The violin clattered across the quay, falling out of its case. Aldo picked it up and put it back inside. Then he hurried off up the alleyway and was lost in the fog.

He woke the next morning to the full of horror of what he had done. He looked at the ceiling and tried to persuade himself that the previous day could not have happened, but it was no use, reality could not be denied and the damning proof stood propped on a chair in the corner by the window where Aldo had left it the night before. Aldo lay on the bed for the rest of the day, shifting with the cold, alternately turning his back on the violin and then fixing it with a cold hard unblinking stare until his eyes grew tired and the light darkened, but then he would blink and the room and everything in it re-emerged, and the violin still sat propped on the chair near the door and seemed to be considering him silently. Aldo stood up but the violin sent him cowering back onto the bed and he lay there again until he needed to relieve himself, but the violin still would not let him past and so he was forced to urinate through the broken window into the garden below, where the goats regarded him with indifference and the neighbours, fussing about on their porch, had their suspicions further confirmed. Time waxed and waned until Aldo was no longer sure how long he had been in the room under the withering gaze of the violin, but he was certain that the sun had come and gone several times when the wind outside began to rise, rushing in from the east, across the sea and the spit of land bordering the lagoon, then across the marshes where the ducks sought refuge among the reeds, and then it came hurtling in through the broken windows. It swirled around the room, lifted Aldo's hair, howled down the stairs, banging the door back and forth as it departed. The violin twitched in the wind, the ghosts of notes lifting up and blowing around the room as the storm set off an orchestra of noise and the branches of the trees clashed together hard and brittle outside and
the slamming door banged out its percussive rhythm. Aldo rushed past the chair where the violin sat, and he propelled himself down the stairs and then out through the door, assisted by the wind that was shoving at his back, and he rushed down to the beach, throwing off his clothes as he ran, and he plunged into the cold water and swam out into the darkness until his feet no longer touched the silt beneath him. Then he stopped and looked around and realised that the night was calm, the trees were still, the moon shining down and illuminating the house and the thin mist that was lifting off the waves.

He swam back to the shore and returned to his room, slowly ascending the stairs, his breath still hard and rasping, but now from exhaustion, no longer from fear. The violin still sat on the chair and he felt it observe him as he came into the room, but its gaze was no longer one of reproach and accusation but of triumph, and when Aldo picked it up and took the bow and ran it tenderly across the strings, its voice was clear and sharp and beautiful and it wrapped him in something like hope or even forgiveness, or what he imagined or hoped that forgiveness might be. He played all the pieces he knew and his fingertips, no longer accustomed to the bite of the strings, became grooved and tender and he placed the violin back on the chair and took a mirror and an old razor and a pair of scissors down to the beach. He hacked away at the long growths of beard, shaved off what remained, and saw a face that he had long forgotten looking back at him. Then he cut his hair short and gathered it all up from where it had fallen and cast it onto the black lagoon. He washed his face in the water and scratched away at the pig on his arm, pushing and pulling at its features, but it would not be removed and it looked at him, hurt and confused, perhaps even betrayed after all it had done for him, so he kissed it goodnight and returned to the house and slept until mid-morning. Then he took the
vaporetto
to Venice as usual, but this time he did not carry with him empty bags for the collection of discarded vegetables and fruit, but instead the violin. In Piazza San Marco he stood near Caffé Florian and a dam broke and the music that had lain dormant within him for years flooded out, and the tin that he left on the ground rattled its own
accompaniment as a coin or two was tipped in by passers-by and Aldo nodded and smiled and occasionally gave a small considered bow as they went on their way. He played until his fingertips were red raw and blistering, and when he went to collect his tin he was surprised by its weight and he tipped the coins into his hand, and there were so many that some of them spilled onto the ground and rolled away across the square.