The Remedy (29 page)
It is all he needs to say: Tom was right—she is known to the gondoliers and therefore to everyone. The gondolier raises his eyebrow not at the request but at the late hour. Valentine chooses to find such punctiliousness trivial. A great artist, like a great businessman, surely keeps all hours, lest something unexpected be inadvertently lost.
And indeed, as they cross the water, the gondolier points out in the distance the milky splash of a chandelier aglow inside an upstairs window. Her studio turns out to be a magnificent palazzo on the Grand Canal, approached through three marble arches by the jetty.
The weather is mild. The air rustles against his cheek like a silk handkerchief. The moon dips in and out of clouds, foreshortening and lengthening the view. The studio of Cecilia Cornaro sometimes seems a breath away, sometimes a mile. All around them the night has flattened the façades of the
palazzi
, and the blackened arches of their water gates seem like the flicked tongues of enormous sea monsters lurking just below the water’s surface. A paunchy moon slaps clumsy brushstrokes of light across the canal.
The gondolier curses suddenly. The boat chops over a hidden obstacle, and is jostled from all sides with light nudges as if from large, hard-bodied fish. Blinded by the light from the artist’s windows, Valentine cannot at first make out what has happened. His eyes adjust to the lesser glow of reflections in the water, and he beholds a most extraordinary sight.
Someone, perhaps as a joke, perhaps as a living kind of poem, has released upon the water a full tide of masks. All around him bob the half-faces and feathered headdresses of papier-mâché people, all borne so swiftly on the current that it appears as if a strange aquatic tribe swims in formation down the Grand Canal, each on his or her back, empty eyes staring up at the moon.
Valentine chooses not to take this phenomenon as a warning, but an omen to the good. A hundred faces have forthrightly offered
themselves to him, he thinks, a picturesque and romantic gesture: surely he shall—now this minute—find the one face he wants.
Leaping to shore, Valentine gazes up at the candlelight dancing in the black window panes. Yes, it is all as he imagined! He is so close to finding his mistress that it is almost laughable. He hoots with mirth, and the departing gondolier turns back to look at him strangely. The man cannot possibly understand: She must be in there, even now, her head held delicately in classic three-quarter posture, her unringed hands demurely in her lap.
He finds the water steps and hurtles up them, panting not just from exertion but with the emotion of this reunion. Should he gather her in his arms immediately? Should he simply stop at the door and give her a look that shoots through the heart? He is even thinking:
I shall have myself inserted into this magnificent portrait. Cecilia Comoro shall paint us together, touching along every line of our bodies.
At this vision, of a
matrimonial
sort of portrait, he suddenly pauses on the penultimate step of the jetty. It is an absence of such trappings that has driven his mistress away from him. He will not be given a second chance. If he offers such a thing now then he must mean what it indicates.
Such a surge of joy constricts his heart, that he can feel the tracery of blood vessels rubefying. He takes another step upwards. The loneliness of the last forty days, of his whole life on earth, when Valentine thinks about it, is about to be terminated. So what does it matter if their lives are practically alien, one to the other? They have the rest of their allotted time to make up the discoveries.
Again he stops dead, stubbing a blistered toe against the last step.
Why not?
It is exactly what he wants. In the last few seconds a sizzling marriage-fever has come upon him, and he knows it can be cured only by a nightly application of her skin against his, and the lullabying of her sleep-sighs, and the surety of her company in the morning, every morning, until the end of his days.
If he cannot live unmarried to Mimosina Dolcezza, then he must be married to her. In the silent archway, in front of the swift silent water, he can hear just two things: his own hurried heartbeat
and a banknote in his pocket that is crackling with the involuntary jitter of his legs.
Crit! Snick!
With each move, it sizzles with crude venality against his thigh. How can he get to his knees with this infernal noise as his accompaniment? He whips out the banknote and throws it into the canal, only too late remembering that it is a large one.
In the
androne
, the lanterns are swinging as crazily as his heart, their facets spreading roving contagions of black and white spots over two grandiose statues of men larger than life and caught in mid-swagger. The first and second doors are firmly closed against him but the third opens smoothly at a touch of his finger.
In a moment he is halfway up the palazzo stairs, biting his tongue with the effort of remembering to breathe. His hands prickle and he would swear he can smell gunpowder. When he bursts into the room, he immediately goes down on his knees, closes his eyes the better to concentrate, and clasps his hands together, preparatory to asking the all-important question, to which the answer is surely a foregone and happy conclusion.
Will you have me, then?
When he looks up he finds he is in a room lined floor to ceiling with love-flushed painted faces. Dilating among them are two living visages, those of a large striped cat and a small brown-eyed girl of about seventeen years, with voluminous auburn hair. The cat regards him with polite interest, and the girl wipes her beautiful but color-stained hands on a cloth, while looking at him with an avid and undisguised curiosity.
She is not Mimosina Dolcezza.
Take Waters of black Cherries 2 ounces; of Mint, Damask Roses, Orange flowers Coelestis, each 1 dram; strong Cinnamon, and compound Peony Waters, each 2 drams; Confection of Alkermes, Gascoin powder, each 1 scruple; Oil of Cloves 1 drop; Syrup of Gilly flowers 3 drams, mix.
It notably succours the Spirits when sunk, and failing; and does eminent Service in Weakness, Faintings and Palpitation of the Heart.
Valentine Greatrakes,
sipping fragolino
from an earthen bowl, has not quite perished from embarrassment, though he thinks it a near thing.
He has by degrees risen from his knees, introduced, and even explained himself to the girl, who turns out to be the artist herself and to be quite expert and but lightly accented in his own tongue, no doubt as a result of long hours in the company of the many celebrated Englishmen she has painted.
Her soft voice is no less grateful on the ear, he must admit, than that of Mimosina Dolcezza and he is surprised that the accent is so similar, for Cecilia Cornaro is a Golden Book daughter, albeit a wayward one. He supposes that an actress of humble origins must learn to imitate the timber of an aristocratic voice as a matter of course. It is a trick he regrets that he has never managed himself, of course, no matter how he distends his sentences with flourishing words. Only a foreigner like Mimosina Dolcezza would be deceived about his true social station, and he believes that Cecilia Cornaro has already seen through him and detected the truth.
She is much too kind to say so, of course, treating him with a graceful courtesy, somewhat underscored by what appears to be an irrepressible and playful spirit of irony.
Cecilia Cornaro, twinkling and smiling, is very sorry, but she cannot help him as he needs to be helped. She is not currently painting the portrait of any beautiful young woman just returned from London. She would like to help him more, she says, and he believes her. There is unmitigated sincerity in her humorous brown gaze. Moreover, she is alight with a happy curiosity.
“No one has come to me with such a story before!” she says enthusiastically, as if he has brought her a marvelous gift—and he has told her but the bare bones of it, leaving out the theatrical and free-trading connections, out of sheer shyness and confusion. She scents better gleaning. She cannot wait to strip off the pith of it and discover the fruit. Her very hair is electric with the excitement, and her curls appear, to his tired eyes, to have grown alarmingly in profusion while he has recounted his tale. She walks to and fro across the room, too excited to sit still. Her movements keep the medicinal aromas of her paints in constant circulation through the air. In a moment, in this most alien situation, Valentine feels completely at home. Cecilia Cornaro’s studio, with its bottles and pestles of vivid powdered tint, reminds him of Dizzom’s lair at the depository on Bankside.
Now that, surely, is a good omen, is it not?
But no, she believes that she has never painted anyone named Mimosina Dolcezza—she smiles widely at the name. She asks him if he possesses a miniature or some other sketch of the woman, which would recall her instantly to mind. He thinks of the undrawn portrait on the ice, and the warning that accompanied it, and shakes his head sadly.
She hands him another bowl of
fragolino.
While he drinks it, she walks around him. His skin prickles, feeling her eyes traveling all over it. She offers him chocolate cake from a platter she pulls unexpectedly out of a large bathtub. When he refuses it a third time, she reluctantly puts it away, and observes in a slightly disparaging tone, “Ah, so you don’t like sweets, then.”
He shakes his head, watching her from over the rim of his
fragolino
cup.
“And your mistress, what’s her real name?” asks Cecilia Cornaro, finally, now leaning forward to scan his face, and at the same time brushing a lock of hair that has fallen in his eye, so that she may behold him fully. She continues to stare at him with a consuming interest, and he finds himself blushing. But in a moment she has turned, and is lighting small candles on a hat made of stuffed leather, which she now places on her head. She ushers him to a stool, presses him down upon it, and sits so close to him that his face is warmed by the heat of the tapers that cluster around her spiraling hair. She pulls a stick of charcoal from her pocket and taps it on her palm, then draws a small easel closer to her, all the while never taking her eyes from his face.
Valentine whispers: “That is her real name. Mimosina Dolcezza.” He loves to say it, and repeats more loudly, “Yes, Mimosina Dolcezza.”
She looks at him with transparent pity. “Ah,
Signore
, I see you need some things explained to you. That name—is not a real one. It is the assumed name of a courtesan or a dancer, perhaps…”
“She is an actress.” His voice is breaking.
“Ah yes, indeed. And you say she is Venetian?”
“Yes.”
“But I have never seen or heard of a woman of that name.” She adds, not bothering to conceal her pride, “I know everyone. I paint everyone.”
“She is frequently away on tour in foreign countries.”
“Well, yes, that could explain it perhaps. Some Venetian actresses live their lives almost entirely in exile. Venice treats them shabbily They are cared for better outside of their own town. Still, it is strange that I have not come across her, if she is young and beautiful. The ones like that, they usually come to me. Or their lovers send them.”
The mention of “lovers” is heartily unwelcome on the ears, I must say.
It would seem an act of extraordinary disloyalty for Valentine to utter the truth: While she is beautiful, actual youth is no longer among the fascinations of Mimosina Dolcezza. So he does not.
Cecilia Cornaro chivvies him, “And what is she like? To look upon, I mean.”
“Why must you know?”
“So that we may play a game. I would like to have you paint her for me.”
Valentine Greatrakes recoils.
She is toying with me. I need not games but hope and hard facts now, preferably intertwined.
Valentine stammers, half-rising from his chair in his distress. “You mock me. I cannot paint…”
“No, I want you to paint her with words.” She lifts her charcoal and turns the easel away from him, simply confounding his disarray with a businesslike demeanor. “First, the shape of her face—is it an oval, a strawberry or perhaps an apple? And her neck… is it long, or short?”
The happy tongue of Valentine Greatrakes, so long kept silent on this most delectable of subjects, needs no third inquiry. It bursts forth into a most refulgent description of Mimosina Dolcezza, not neglecting any detail that has given him pleasure, and there are so many that he talks for a great length of time. He closes his eyes the better to see her.
All the while Cecilia Cornaro is making rapid movements at the easel, and asking yet more questions.
So many and such intricate questions that Valentine falls into a trance and lets his mouth frame answers without reference to his brain. For how is a man consciously to know if the eyebrows of his mistress are natural or tweezed? Or remember the distance between eye and brow? He sees her as one single vision, as everything he desires fused in one, not as her separate parts.
Women probably think differently
, he muses, and for the first time he wonders how Mimosina Dolcezza sees
him.
This does not quite bear thinking about, not in view of the last time she laid eyes on him, guttered with drink at the door of her departing coach.
Still, he trusts this young woman with the blackened fingers. Perhaps it is the
fragolino
, perhaps it is exhaustion. But he has every confidence that a most perfect and living portrait of Mimosina Dolcezza will shortly be presented to him. To help her, he talks without drawing breath until his lips are numb and he can think of not one more image, simile or exclamation. Cecilia Cornaro nods, smiles sometimes, and at other times looks quite grave.
“You’re sure?” she asks after some answers. “You’re really certain? That she is fine and plump? You know the heart can put a blindfold on the eyes, and you never know until it’s far too late. The eye is a lens that magnifies the objects it likes, and magnification, of course, distorts.”
