The Art of Waiting (24 page)

‘Oh, on Burano. It was my grandfather's house but it's a bit of a shell now. I share it with the neighbours' goats – they let me in now and again.'

‘I share with an old goat too, in the ghetto.'

‘That's a lot nearer than Burano.'

‘Yes, I suspect you might be right about that.'

‘And I think I've missed the last
vaporetto
home now.'

‘Well, that sounds like a good enough excuse. Just promise you won't think any less of me when you see the place. It's not like where I lived before. And ignore the smell.'

The house was silent when they arrived and the only shadows that moved in the hall were those of the cats. They followed Isabella and Aldo up the stairs and when the bedroom door closed they rubbed themselves against the frame and purred at the sound of the soft tender voices that drifted into the hall from Isabella's room. Inside, the two shadows of their former selves wrapped themselves in the cool shroud of the sheets and felt again the touch of warm flesh and they held onto each other long afterwards in the chill of the room. She kissed his hand and ran her lips up along the veins until her lips came to rest on the wild eyes of the pig, its face unfaded on his arm.

‘You've still got your pet pig, I see?'

‘Of course. How am I ever going to get rid of the little bastard unless I scour him off with a knife? He's sleeping now, though. Too much work for him these last few years – sometimes I think he's the only thing that got me through the war alive.'

‘And your darling angel in the snow? She must have helped.'

‘You're not jealous, are you?'

‘Fuck you, Tintoretto.'

‘I was only joking.'

‘Where is she now, anyway, your little winged creature?'

‘I have no idea.'

She stopped herself. ‘I'm sorry, Aldo, I shouldn't make fun of her. I know I'm no substitute.'

‘Don't say that.'

‘Well, am I? Remember the rules.'

‘You're more than you ever thought.'

‘You haven't answered my question.'

‘I know.'

‘That's all right,' she said, but her voice gave her away.

‘I thought you didn't believe in those things,' he said.

‘I didn't. But it's been a long road, these last few years. A long, long road. I surprised even myself. I never realised I could do it, you know. Remember how I made fun of you? I had no idea.'

‘Who was he?'

‘His name was Walter. A German. I met him during the war, of course. When else would I have met a German? They were in Venice a long time, you know. They sent him away once, but he came back. And then when the British came they all left, and he went too and I've heard nothing since. That was five years ago. And of course no one round here understood. I suppose that's not surprising, with my reputation, but it really was different with Walter. But they had it in for me all the same. You know what they did to us? I mean, there were others like me, of course. You know what they did? I so wish I could make them feel what I felt, when they took me out into the street and scratched and kicked me and hacked and pulled at my hair,
shaved my head like they were shearing a diseased sheep. Neighbours I'd had for years. The women were the worst, you know, I don't know why. Maybe they hated me already. I suppose I'd fucked half their men.'

She laughed.

‘And then my husband threw me out. After so long, begging him for a divorce, all that duplicity, he goes and kicks me out for falling for a man of the wrong nationality, a man who should have been my enemy. What a husband, the fucking hypocrite.'

‘He never deserved you.'

‘That's what he said in the end.'

He stroked her hair, blacker than the darkness, as smooth and as long as he remembered it, swallowing up his hand in its softness. They kissed, a gentle kiss of mutual understanding, and listened as an orchestra of cats purred their lullabies outside the door.

‘I'm tired, Aldo. I'm so tired.'

‘Sleep, then, Isabella, sleep. And sweet dreams, my dear . . .'

He stroked her hair in time to the slow contented purring of the cats until her breathing deepened and slowed and then he too loosened his chains and invited the night to anaesthetise him, and it drugged his eyes with its softness and its love. Several hours later Isabella was still beside him, watching him as he woke.

‘Thank you for everything,' she said.

‘For what?'

‘For making me feel like someone again.'

They caught the
vaporetto
in mid-afternoon, as soon as Isabella had finished her shift at the supermarket, the sky vast and empty as they cut across the lagoon, past San Michele and Murano and on between the buoys that marked the channel between the sunken banks of sand. They reached the powder-blue house on Burano as the sky began to pale in the east.

‘Well, this is it,' said Aldo. ‘Home, sweet home.'

‘Nice place. Where's your family now, anyway?'

He shook his head. ‘They moved to Rome a while back, it seems, when I was away.'

‘To Rome? Why on earth to Rome?'

‘Family duties. It seems my sister's husband is from there. Never met him, myself. A lot can happen in eight years.'

‘And you haven't been to look for them?'

‘Not yet. I will, of course, but I really haven't got the money for the trip. That sounds a pretty lame excuse, doesn't it? But, Isabella, I've barely been able to eat these last few months. I couldn't possibly pay to go to Rome and back, and the hotel and all the rest.'

‘But you have to try, Aldo. I'll help you out. How much do you need? What are friends for, after all? Please, you have to go and look for them. I don't have much, but I'll lend you what I can.'

They sat on the beach until it was dark and then they went back to the house and up the narrow stairs. Aldo lit a candle and placed it on the chair by the door. It flickered in the breaths of air that slipped in through the broken panes.

‘It's cold in here, Aldo. Haven't you got any blankets? And you've been living here since you got back?'

‘Since July. It was warm enough in the summer . . .'

‘Yes, but look at your windows. There's almost nothing left of them.'

‘Blame the goats.'

‘Goats?'

‘Glass-chewing bastards.'

‘Oh.'

‘Isabella, for a long time I had nothing. Less than nothing. I was a beggar, you know. You wouldn't have recognised me, hair down to here, a great big beard. I was a mess. No one would offer me work, so I used to come back here every night, then back to Venice every afternoon to look through the bins for something to eat. But then I found the violin, and things have been better since then, with the money I get from playing in the street.'

‘Aldo,' she said. ‘It's too cold here. Let's go back to the ghetto. You can stay with me again tonight. And I'll lend you some money so you can get this place sorted out. And so you can go to look for your family in Rome.'

Pantheon

Rome, December 1950

Aldo boarded the train to Rome and Isabella saw him off and the train jolted out of the station and over the causeway towards Mestre. He closed his eyes and listened to the rhythm of the wheels and when he opened them again the train was crossing the northern plain. He fell asleep and woke as they were passing through Florence, the terracotta tiles of the Duomo lit up by the winter sun. The train reached Rome in mid-afternoon and the capital's December air was no warmer than in the north and Aldo pulled his coat tight around him and lifted the collar as he left Stazione Termini and walked across the forecourt and past the rows of taxis and buses. He set off down the Via Nazionale, a broad, straight artery pulsing with life, cars and buses ferrying people to and fro and pedestrians swarming across the streets and pavements, in and out of shops and buildings, restless atoms in the city's beating heart. Aldo stopped to catch his breath.

‘Which way to the centre?' he asked a man at a newspaper kiosk.

‘Where do you want? Piazza Spagna? Piazza Venezia? Pantheon?'

‘Yes, yes, Pantheon, that's it.'

The man gestured down Via Nazionale and Aldo pushed his way along the crowded pavement, a steady stream of headlamps accentuating the dusk. He reached Piazza Venezia and Mussolini's enormous architectural monument to himself, the cars a rush of whirling light and noise round its base – ah yes, old Benito, Aldo thought.
Il Duce
and his fat fascist arse, as Luca used to say. He'd heard that they hung him by his ankles from a lamppost in the end, and he couldn't think of a better end for him, after all the man had done. A solitary
traffic policeman stood stranded on his little podium in the middle of the square, waving his white-gloved hands here and there in a futile attempt at influence. Aldo turned down Via del Corso, then into Piazza Colonna and past the government buildings, then the streets narrowed and through a gap he saw great pillars holding up an enormous portico and the top of a domed roof just visible behind. He dipped his hand in the fountain in the middle of the square and washed the sweat from his face, then drank from cupped hands. He looked at the streets that ran up the slope on either side of the ancient building, and he remembered what Gianni had said about the view from his apartment, of the Pantheon in the rain and the ice creams that fell in the street as people hurried away, and he wondered about Gianni's family, and which of the old apartment buildings they might be in, and he thought about how much he wanted to be able to visit them now and tell them that Gianni had died a noble death, that he had fought bravely in battle and gone down like a hero, but then he was suddenly glad that he would never be able to find them, because they would see straight away that he was lying. So he stood and looked at the Pantheon in the half-light as thin white birds flew swirling overhead, and then it dawned on him that he had nowhere to stay. He went to the hotel on the corner of the square, peeling layers of ochre on its walls, but the price of a room was way beyond his means and so he headed back up Via Nazionale to the cheap-dive hotels that were clustered around the station, and later on he sat in his room and listened to the cars outside and the footsteps of other guests returning to their rooms along the echoing hall, the rise and fall of their voices, and the sound of a radio playing street songs from Naples. He woke early the next morning and made his way back to the old city centre but he had little information to help the police in his search.

‘Come back in two days,' the desk sergeant told him. ‘I'll see what I can find.'

But he returned to no avail. No record of their names could be found. He left the building and walked to Piazza Venezia, then up the steep flight of marble steps to the Piazza del Campidoglio. A wedding
party had gathered there and the bride and groom were showered with rice as they emerged. Aldo turned and looked across the red-tiled rooftops that stretched across the old Tridente. He scratched at the spot on his leg where a bed-bug had bitten him in the night, a bite less potent than those of the fleas and bugs of Russia but an irritant and a bad memory all the same. His knees were stiff and aching, his feet were sore, he was hungry. His money would last only another couple of days. He placed his head in his hands and dragged his fingers back through his hair, then leant back and looked at the sky. A faint drizzle was thickening the air and he saw the wedding party scampering for the shelter of the overhanging balconies and the colonnades. He stood up and walked the short distance to the Piazza della Rotonda and looked again at the Pantheon in the pale afternoon light. A winter sun emerged from behind the clouds and he went inside and watched as a disc of sunlight traced its lonely path through the oculus and around the inner wall, and then the sun was covered up again and grey clouds scudded low and light rain fell through the aperture, the raindrops seemingly suspended in a perfect column in the air. Then he headed towards Campo de' Fiori and when he got there the market was winding down, the stallholders stacking their crates and calling out the final prices of the day, eager to be gone, the remaining fruit and vegetables gathered together in the corners from where the rubbish would be collected and the square hosed down that evening. Aldo sifted through a box of discarded bits and pieces, just a bad habit now, not exactly a necessity. A stallholder caught his eye, a probing look.

‘Just looking,' Aldo joked.

‘No problem, my friend. You can have a bag of the good ones if you want.'

Aldo took the bag, brimming with ripe tomatoes from the south, and thanked the man. As he turned he glimpsed a familiar figure disappearing behind the awning of a nearby stall. He rushed after her, looking around in excitement and panic for the rounded shoulders, the dark but slightly greying hair tied up in a bun. Then he caught sight of her again and he ran after her and laid an eager hand on her shoulder.

‘Mamma! Mamma! Oh, my God, what luck! I thought I'd never find you!'

The woman turned, brushed his hand away, gave him a filthy look. The tomatoes slipped from his hands and splattered on the cobbles as he stumbled over his apologies.

‘I'm so sorry,
signora
. I thought you were someone else.'

He walked quickly away, leaving red flesh and seeds on the street. His head was spinning now and he headed straight to the station. He sat on the platform for two hours, waiting for a train as the rain thickened into sleet and the temperature fell further and he rested his head in his dirty hands and looked at the worn-out shoes on his feet and noticed the remnants of the tomatoes that had stuck themselves to the leather. He closed his eyes and wondered what he would do when he got back to Venice. Where would he go? Who would he see? Unlike his longed-for return from the war, there was no sense of homecoming now, nor the all-consuming desire for revenge on Fausto Pozzi. The fierce will to survive that had sustained him throughout the hardship of his years in Russia – and his first months back in Venice – had been dissolving away with the recent upturn in his fortunes, and he sensed that its departure would leave a vacuum that could not be filled, the peaks and troughs of triumph and despair replaced by the numbing monotony of the plateau, a plateau on which everything for miles around was visible and yet there was actually nothing much to see, no anticipated future landmarks or way-points by which to navigate his life, nothing except the occasional presence of Isabella blowing past him like tumbleweed in the night, unwilling to be detained on her way through the ghost town of memories that Venice had become for them both. And somewhere beyond the plateau, way out of sight beyond the eastern horizon where the birch forests rose, dwelt the possibility of Katerina, but she was a possibility that lived on only in memories and dreams, in a world devoid of time, a world freed of the minutes, hours and days in which we live and love and are condemned to find and then lose each other again.

Aldo looked at the station clock again. Still forty minutes until
his train was due. Then he looked up past the station roof and he saw the dense flurries, the great downy flakes that were floating over the tracks, and he leapt to his feet and ran out of the station and into the open air and he looked up at the sky as the torrent of snow poured down, and he rushed off towards Via Nazionale. He reached the Pantheon and he hurried in under the portico and stopped in the doorway and watched as the snow fell through the oculus in a tumbling column from dome to floor, and Aldo felt his heart suddenly pierced with a cold white improbable joy. Gianni had been right all along. Sometimes it really does snow in the heart of Rome and the most beautiful thing one might remember, when sitting in the freezing mud of the Russian steppe in times of war, really could be the Pantheon, pure and white and ancient in a snowstorm. He spent the whole night walking through snow-filled streets and squares. He stared at his feet as he walked, kicking up the fresh snow, and he sensed the tramping of the others nearby, Gianni and Luigi and the sergeant, but when he looked up he saw that he was walking alone through the night and it was only their memory in whose footsteps he was walking, but they were with him nonetheless, and he lay down on a bench and slept in the blizzard and was happy. He woke as the first of the commuters were making their way to work. The sound of a hundred mopeds troubled the air and he got up and crossed the city and caught the next train back to Venice.