The Last Gondola (24 page)

Here in the Palazzo Mocenigo-Nero, Byron had made his decision to study the Armenian language on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in the lagoon and had written the first two cantos of
Don Juan
. Perhaps he had also written the poems that Possle had mentioned.

A young man and a woman, speaking French, came down the
calle
and stood beside Urbino to read the plaque honoring Byron. The man carried a recently published biography about the homosexual component of the poet's libertinage. When the woman consulted her map, Urbino realized that they needed to get to the Accademia Bridge. He walked a short distance with them to show them the way and then sought out the thickening flow of people. Eventually he entered the fashionable street of shops that ended near the Piazza. He turned down an alley and stopped when he reached a secluded courtyard.

A middle-aged nun in a blue dress and white scarf was sweeping the pavement of her order's retirement home. Urbino wondered what the good sisters lying in their beds after a lifetime of faithful service would think if they knew that Byron had met and fallen in love with a beautiful married woman in a house in this same courtyard. But perhaps one of the sisters, after decades of devotion to her heavenly bridegroom, was at that very moment reading, through thick glasses, about how Byron had become the married woman's
cavaliere servente
, an ambiguous but socially accepted role in the morally lax city, and how they had settled down into a domestic relationship. The enthralled sister might even wet her dry cheek when she came to Byron's death from fever in Greece at the age of thirty-six and close the book with the consolation that she had read nothing more than a moral tale.

Urbino abandoned these thoughts and turned out of the courtyard. There was one more stop on his itinerary. A few minutes later he was standing in a busy street behind the Piazza San Marco and gazing up at yet another building. Here Byron had first lodged in Venice, shadowed by rumors of incest after he had left England. Soon after moving into his rooms, he was thick in an affair with the landlord's wife.

Perhaps Byron had written the poems that Possle claimed to have to this woman, whose dark eyes had mesmerized him. Perhaps they had somehow found their way from the heart of San Marco across the Grand Canal to Possle's isolated palazzo in San Polo. The point of all this walking and all this intense contemplation of some of the stones of Venice was to make him even more hungry for whatever poems Possle might have.

Urbino, buffeted by passersby, pulled himself out of his speculations and headed for Harry's Bar a short distance away. The small, unpretentious front room, however, was smoke filled and crowded with tourists, most of them drinking their obligatory Bellinis. He left after having a quick glass of wine and making a dinner reservation for next Tuesday for Emo and himself.

The number one
vaporetto
was about to leave from the landing in front of the bar. The boat attendant held the gate open until Urbino squeezed through, and then the boat set off up the Grand Canal through the fog. Urbino sat outside in the stern away from the wind and contemplated the view as the palaces and churches unrolled themselves. He mulled over the various notions that had been a counterpoint to his walk this afternoon.

On his way to the Palazzo Uccello from the boat landing, he stopped at a locksmith's, but not Demetrio Emo's. To go to
THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS
might have been a mistake.

The locksmith made a copy of the key Urbino had taken from Possle's bedroom. He had to search through a box of old key patterns before he was able to find a suitable one to use.

Back at the Palazzo Uccello, Urbino first telephoned the Contessa to ask her how her
conversazione
had gone. Although she was modest in what she said, he could tell that it had been another success. She promised him that she would give him more details when she saw him in person in a few more days. She had to go to Asolo again early tomorrow morning to attend to some problems at the villa in preparation for the visit of her sister and her family.

After speaking with the Contessa, he opened a bottle of Corvo and took it to the library. For the rest of the afternoon and evening, sustained by the wine and a plate of
tramezzini
sandwiches Natalia had left for him, he immersed himself in Byron's poetry and correspondence and in biographical accounts of his life.

Nothing he read gave him a clue about any unpublished Byron poems. Yet almost everything he read increased his hunger to lay his hands on them if they indeed existed, stashed away somewhere in the dark Ca' Pozza—to lay his hands on them by fair means, of course, he quickly amended as he turned off the lights of the library.

51

The next afternoon at two o'clock Urbino boarded the
motonave
for the Lido near the Doge's Palace. Sun and a pale blue sky had succeeded yesterday's fog and damp.

The boat was crowded with people taking advantage of the fair weather for an outing to the Lido. Gentle waves rocked the buoys and rippled the blue-green waters of the lagoon, scattered with
vaporetti
, delivery boats, and pleasure craft.

The curve of the Riva degli Schiavoni with its broad pavement, balconied buildings, little bridges, and moored boats and ships slid past. They were soon passing the Naval Museum, with its memories of the day the Contessa had provided the epithet that Urbino kept returning to: the thief of San Polo.

Farther along spread the area that was being prepared for the art exposition. Urbino would soon be swept up with Habib in the parties, photographic shoots, and stream of friends and family coming through Venice. Was it too much to expect that by the time of the opening in June he would be in possession of the poems, if they existed, and that his mysterious business with Possle would be at an end?

As the boat swung away from the tail of Venice, the small monastery island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, with its cypresses and onion shaped cupola, became visible.

A warm sea breeze was blowing down the main street of the narrow strip of land when Urbino disembarked on the Lido. Some of the passengers who had come over on the boat were renting bicycles from the shop near the landing. One couple was already pedaling away in a tandem in the direction of the open sea.

Urbino went into a bar and, under the influence of the large sign that dominated the boat landing, ordered a Campari. As he drank the bitter red liquid, he asked the bartender for directions to Lino Cipri's apartment on the assumption that the dapper painter was known in the neighborhood. He was. The bartender named a street a short distance away.

Urbino strolled in the sunshine down the broad avenue toward the sea past the shops, restaurants, hotels, and villas.

Despite his love for Venice, Urbino was sometimes glad to escape it for a few hours on the Lido, although never in the height of summer. At this time of the year, even on a Sunday like today, with more visitors than usual, it was a pleasant change from the claustrophobia of Venice. This was close to what Byron must have felt when he left Venice's society and intrigue to come horseback riding on what were, in his day, the barren strands of the Lido.

Urbino angled back toward the boat landing and soon reached the street where the Cipris lived. It was closed to traffic and bordered by one of the Lido's few canals. Small boats were moored alongside the brick walls of the quay.

He went up the cracked front steps of one of the least well-kept buildings and pushed the bell.

52

Cipri was in good spirits and seemed pleased to see Urbino. All pink and shining as if recently shaved and showered, he was dressed in a beige suit with a flowing blue cravat. He guided Urbino to a chair in the parlor across from the one in which his wife sat with a stern expression on her face. Cipri lowered the volume of Liszt's
Todtentanz
that was playing on a record player and slipped into the kitchen.

Signora Cipri wore a faded housedress. Her head was bare today. Urbino was dismayed to see that she had only a few wisps of gray hair.

The small room was crowded with worn furniture. Books were crammed into a bookcase and scattered in piles across the carpet and on tables and chairs. Unframed paintings were stacked against the wall behind the sofa.

Signora Cipri's armchair, with its floral fabric, provided a view of the entrance hall and the kitchen. A small table overflowed at her elbow with bottles of medication. She kept glancing in the direction of the kitchen as if she was impatient for her husband's return. When her sharp blue eyes rested on Urbino, they didn't move away at once but stared with an almost insolent air. He tried to engage her in conversation, but she remained silent. Taking it as a sign that she preferred Liszt's
danse macabre
to anything he might have to say, he leaned back and listened to the paraphrase of the
Dies Irae
with her.

Fortunately, Cipri soon emerged with it. On the tray were a pot of espresso, cups, an anisette bottle, and a small plate of biscuits. He fixed an espresso for his wife first, pouring in a generous portion of the anisette and a sliver of lemon, and gave her a biscuit.

Urbino mentioned that he had sent off the paintings and said, once again, that Eugene was sure to be pleased with them.

“I hope so,” Cipri said, as he seated himself in an armchair across from Urbino.

“Although I shouldn't speak for him, Eugene might want more Longhis. He had a hard time choosing which ones he wanted you to copy.”

“I'm at his service,” he said, “and yours, too, although I know that you're not interested in copies.”

“But perhaps you could do a portrait of someone,” Urbino said casually. “My friend Rebecca Mondador, the architect. I'd like to give it to her as a gift. That is, if she has time to sit for you, and if you have the time to do it.”

“Oh, I have the time!”

“Let me speak with her first. The portrait should be nothing like the style of the one you did for my fellow countryman, Samuel Possle. The one of his wife, his ex-wife now. I've been a recent visitor to the Ca' Pozza.”

Cipri threw a glance at his wife. Her keen blue eyes beneath their black brows, the eyes that had so disconcerted the Contessa at the music conservatory, flashed with some emotion Urbino couldn't identify.

“I've seen the portrait on two occasions. Along with two other of your paintings. Copies of Moreau. But the portrait—”

“Ah, yes, the Moreau copies,” Cipri interrupted nervously. “Can you believe that Signor Possle sent me all the way to Paris to do one of them,
The Apparition?
I even had an expense account. He was very generous. The other copy, the one of Salome, I had to do from reproductions. It's not as good. Do you like Moreau, Signor Urbino?”

“Yes. But about the portrait, unfortunately it's hung in a rather dark room. But what I could see of it impressed me. It's very good. And Mrs. Possle is extremely beautiful, or she was.”

Cipri was growing increasingly uncomfortable. His wife uttered a few words that Urbino couldn't make out.

“Of course I don't know how long ago you painted the portrait.”

“Thirty-eight years ago.”

“That
is
a long time, but even so, true beauty always leaves its traces, haven't you found?”

Cipri made no response.

Urbino drank down the remainder of his espresso. Without asking, Cipri poured anisette into the cup as well as into his own.

“Tell me, Signor Cipri, how well did you know Mrs. Possle?”

“How well did I know her? But—”

He looked at his wife again. Urbino now knew, too late, what Possle meant when he had said that Cipri had got the original of the portrait. Mrs. Cipri's eyes were closed. She was swaying slightly.

“Excuse me,” Cipri said.

He helped Signora Cipri out of her chair and guided her across the parlor and through a door. He returned a few minutes later, closing the door behind him. He shut off the
Todtentanz
.

“I'm sorry. I had no idea.”

“She'll be all right. She's changed so much since then.”

“I only realized a few moments ago that she was Samuel Possle's wife.”

Cipri nodded.

“Hilda. I married her eight years after I painted the portrait.”

“I've only become acquainted with Possle recently, you see,” Urbino explained. “I know he was married to a German woman, a poet, but other than that…” He trailed off.

“Hardly anyone knows that Hilda was married to Possle. We keep it to ourselves. It wasn't because of me that they divorced. And, yes, she's a poet. She still writes in German under her maiden name, Hilda Krippe. Some of her poems have been published recently. People come from Germany and Austria to see her.”

He reseated himself, poured more anisette, and took a sip.

“Don't be embarrassed,” he went on, “but she's sensitive. She's a very intelligent woman. Her mind hasn't dimmed at all. But the body…”

He shook his head and looked in the direction of the closed door.

“She's been feeling more poorly than usual. She was fine the day you saw us at the music conservatory, but she's had a relapse since then.”

Urbino considered what would now be appropriate. He could thank Cipri for his hospitality, apologize again, and take his leave, promising to let him know about the portrait commission.

But instead, after sipping his anisette, he said, “If things work out, I might write something about Possle. One reason for coming here was to ask you for your impressions of him. I had no idea of your wife's former relationship to him.”

“But now you'd like to ask her some questions, too.”

Cipri stated it so simply that Urbino was relieved that he could be more direct than he otherwise would have been. But he still needed to let Cipri believe that the main thrust of his questions was a biography of Possle.