The Last Gondola (12 page)

As Urbino drank his coffee, he wasn't thinking of the good times the three of them had had at last year's festival, however, but of Possle. One of the photographs in the slick magazine had captured Possle crossing the bridge of boats in all his vitality. It was hard to reconcile that image with the one that was more firmly engraved in his mind now of the feeble old man in the gondola.

And yet however physically incapacitated Possle might be, he had displayed a sharpness of mind and a sardonic humor that had obviously been honed over the years. If they had impressed Urbino, they had also served to disconcert him, since so much of their force had seemed to be directed at him personally for motives that, at this early point, were obscure. And then there was the unmistakably hungry look in the man's eyes.

Urbino was still upset with himself for not having taken more of an initiative with Possle, but he told himself that there would be time for that, or so he hoped.

He left the café and struck out along the Zattere toward the mouth of the Grand Canal. He stopped to watch a woman with her stool and easel, who was doing an acquatint of the Island of the Giudecca. She was German. Urbino praised her work, and they spent a few moments commenting on the view. Then he set out again.

His steps took him past the salt warehouses, where Biennale exhibitions were mounted, and past the villas of Milanese industrialists and foreigners. This had been a favorite walk of Ezra Pound, who had lived close by with his companion Olga Rudge. Perhaps on occasion Possle had accompanied the controversial poet on one of his promenades.

This thought, with all of its possibilities, was like oil on the fire of Urbino's need to know more about Possle and to be the person who would open light into the unknown recesses of his life.

With his mind a swirl of scenarios and strategies now that he had his foot in the door of the Ca' Pozza, Urbino reached the isolated point where the Giudecca Canal, the Grand Canal, and the lagoon all met. For the moment, he had the spot all to himself. He sat on a bench. A cold wind blew across the waters from the Adriatic, turning the weathervane statue of Fortune on its large golden ball atop the Customs House building.

Urbino gazed out at the swathe of greenish gray water beneath a sky of clouds and patches of blue. He sent some positive thoughts across the distance to the Contessa, who should be fully launched into her
conversazione
by now.

Although the scene before him was one of the most dramatic in Venice, tourists seldom sought it out. On one side the twin columns of the Piazzetta and the Doge's Palace with its Gothic arcades caught the shifting light, while on the other, the Church of San Giorgio regarded the scene with all its cool and beautiful aloofness. Here, with the wind whipping in his face, it was easy to imagine that he was at the prow of a ship, sailing into Venice.

When this pleasant image was immediately replaced by one of Possle on the deck of the ship that had brought him back to the States for his last visit more than four decades ago, as the man had reminded him yesterday, Urbino got up from the bench with both amusement and impatience.

There was very little escape from his monomania, it would seem.

25

Urbino's brisk pace soon had him crossing the small bridge that brought him to the
squero
of San Trovaso, one of the few remaining gondola workshops in Venice and reputedly the best. The Contessa had commissioned his own gondola here.

A man in a beret had his easel set up and was evoking the dark wood buildings that were more Alpine than Venetian. Beneath a long balcony filled with bright geraniums, three of the keel-less boats stood on the canal bank. One was upright, the other two turned over, showing their green-painted flat bottoms. All three were positioned on trestles like the ones holding Possle's gondola. To complete the scene—to the painter's delight, Urbino was sure—was laundry fluttering on a line, a leaning ladder, and two industrious craftsmen or
squerarioli
.

Urbino greeted one of the men. He had struck up an acquaintance with him over the years. Long before the Contessa had given him the gondola, he had been fascinated with their construction and would sometimes come here to this
squero
to watch the men at their work. Making a gondola was an elaborate and time-consuming process that involved cutting and shaping two hundred and eighty pieces of mahogany, cherry, elm, and five other kinds of wood, then bending the long pieces for the sides after they have been heated on open fires.

The walnut
forcole
weren't made in the boatyards but in special workshops elsewhere in the city.

“Is everything all right with the gondola, Signor Urbino?” the
squerariolo
asked him.

“Perfect.”

“It had to be. The Contessa was here two or three times a week to check up on us,” the man said with a laugh. “I don't know how she kept it a secret from you. We were going to ask her if she wanted a room in the house so she could keep better watch.”

The man carried a paint-splattered sawhorse into the enclosed workshop. Urbino let him go about his work for a few minutes, then mentioned that he had just seen a
forcola
that an apprentice had made.

“Even I could spot some flaws, but it was fine nonetheless.”

“The young man should keep at it.”

This was almost the same thing Urbino had said to Gildo, and now he told the craftsman what Gildo had told him—that his friend, the apprentice, was dead.

The man made commiserating sounds as he brought a pile of lagoon cane, used for the fires, to a corner of the building.

“Do you know an oar and
forcola
maker from the Castello district?” Urbino asked him.

“He's almost ready to retire. We don't get our
forcole
from him, but he's one of the best.”

Urbino got the name of the
remero
and his Castello address and let the man go about his work.

26

Shortly after eight the next morning, beneath the clear March sky, Urbino's gondola, maneuvered by the silent and brooding Gildo, swept into the Grand Canal near the palazzo where Wagner died. Crisp air, blown down from the Dolomites, carried the scent of snow. Urbino's reveries, encouraged by the small waterways, dispersed as the gondola, now surrounded by much larger and much more utilitarian vessels, glided between the marble palaces with what seemed to Urbino to be an insolent air.

He gazed at the buildings with some of the precious greenness of the tourist, which, once lost, is so hard to recover.

But his virgin impressions didn't last long. As his eye took in the Church of San Stae, it was difficult to say whether his enjoyment of its baroque facade was increased or diminished by his knowledge that the church's name was a Venetian corruption of Sant'Eustachio. And the same applied to the sumptuous Ca' Pesaro, with its history of the posthumous deception of a duchess, as well as to the mask-fronted Ca' Corner, which had been a plebian pawnshop centuries ago.

But one of the things about knowledge, Urbino reminded himself as the gondola passed the Ca' d'Oro with all of its Gothic flamboyance, was that once you had it, you couldn't get rid of it, even if you wanted and needed to.

In an indirect but somehow inevitable way, this train of thoughts led him to the Contessa's lost items. At Florian's she had expressed her fear of losing her memory. This was one way that knowledge could be lost, wasn't it, by some perverse shifting of what had once been clear and sharp? But he didn't believe that this was happening to his Contessa.

What exactly this disappearance of her items amounted to, however, he had little idea at the moment, except for his belief that this was no ordinary theft, if it was indeed a theft. The fact that the Contessa's used clothing was missing was more disturbing to him than that the necklace was, even though it had been his gift to her. And he knew that this aspect of it was preying on her mind as well.

He had communicated both his certainty and his ignorance to the Contessa last night after he had called her about her
conversazione
. She had been relieved, for she knew how uncomfortable he was when he was in doubt. He would solve her troubling little mystery, she had reassured them both. She was willing to be patient.

As for her
conversazione
, it appeared that she had charmed everyone. At least this was Urbino's interpretation of her more modest and characteristic “It went swimmingly, swimmingly!” To which she had added, “You were with me,
caro
. Every second. And so was Alvise.”

She gave him a brief summary of what she had accomplished and how she and her audience had played off of each other in a way that she said was pure music.

Urbino didn't need to worry about any problems coming at her from this direction, it seemed. And he was determined to do his best to settle the matter of her missing items. He would do it all the more eagerly because it didn't relate to Samuel Possle. It would be not only a welcome service but a welcome distraction as well.

When Urbino looked out the shuttered window as the gondola approached the stone, humpbacked arch of the Rialto Bridge, his eyes sought out a little courtyard washed by the morning sunshine. Because of Gildo, the Campiello del Remer, named as it was after local oarmakers, quickened Urbino's interest more now than it ever had before. He was frequently finding examples like this of how the city could renew itself for him. It was as if it were filled with signs and clues, hints and associations based not on its own past but on the dovetailing of this past with his own present and even future.

For example, how many times had he walked past the Ca' Pozza in the years he had been in Venice without feeling what he now felt about the place? And all that while Possle had been behind its walls, waiting, without knowing that he was waiting, for Urbino to catch up with him.

When was Possle going to invite him back?
This question had been Urbino's almost constant companion, and it floated back to him now as Gildo slowed down the gondola. He didn't know whether he had spent more time entertaining this question or trying to chase away its dark twin:
Was Possle going to invite him back to the Ca' Pozza at all?

Gildo deftly brought the gondola to the Pescheria landing beside the Rialto Bridge, and Urbino disembarked. He arranged for Gildo to meet him at the same place in an hour and headed for the nearby markets set up in the area.

Once or twice a month, more for his own sake than for hers, Urbino relieved Natalia of the errand of going to the Rialto markets. Here people went around buying necessary items. Fruit, vegetables, meat, and fish. It made him feel connected to the natural and essential rhythms of life, although the irony of arriving and departing in the extravagance of his own gondola wasn't lost on him.

He first wandered through the covered fish market in the clear morning sunshine. Behind their stalls the fishermen called and shouted in the Venetian dialect full of what seemed an impossible number of Xs and Zs. Their displays of that morning's catch from the Adriatic in all its variety, colors, and shapes pleased the eye almost as much as they would eventually please the palate. Urbino spent many minutes walking up and down the aisles and standing in front of one table after another, wishing he were a photographer or a painter.

A weather-beaten fisherman joked that if Urbino didn't buy anything they were going to charge him for looking. Urbino decided on
coda di rospo
, and smiled as he remembered Habib's horror at discovering that the name of the delicious fish he had been eating translated unappetizingly as the tail of a toad.

Urbino then strolled into the vegetable market, which was set up in one of the few open places on the whole length of the Canalazzo. He walked past temptingly arranged fruits and vegetables with prices handwritten on cards until he reached the stand presided over by a stout woman named Marta, whom he and Natalia always bought from.

She weighed out and deposited a cornucopia of the local produce into Urbino's two sacks, chatting about the weather and asking after the Contessa and Habib, whom she called his African friend.

Suddenly a voice emitted a stream of execrations. A tall woman in a dark brown coat gesticulated with her yellow scarf at a neighboring vendor. She was in her late forties. Blotches of bright pink marred her pale skin. Her short, brown hair was laced through with gray. Her eyes had a distracted look as they shot around at the staring shoppers and merchants.

Urbino recognized her as the angry woman from the embankment in front of the Ca' Pozza.

“Who is she?” he asked Marta.

“Elvira is her name.”

The woman named Elvira stopped shouting as suddenly as she had started off. In apparent bewilderment she gazed around her with a softer expression now in her eyes. She then dashed off into the crowd of shoppers. As they moved aside to let her get through, a dark figure became visible. It looked remarkably like Armando, but the next moment the crowd pulled together again, and the figure was lost to view.

“What else do you know about her?” Urbino asked Marta as he stared into the crowd, searching it to see if his original impression had been correct.

Marta made the universally understood circular motion with one finger beside her temple.

“She's touched, poor thing. Sometimes she's as normal as you or me. She wasn't always like that.” Marta's voice dropped into more sympathetic tones as she added, “She's become worse since the death of her son.”

“When was that?

“Back in December, before Christmas, poor woman.”

“Does she live near here?”

“Not too far. In San Polo. Her son died right in front of her eyes, they say. He fell from a building.”

For a few more moments Urbino watched the crowd for any sign of the distracted woman or Possle's valet. Both had vanished.

He still had twenty-five minutes before he had to return to the gondola.