by David Hewson
I remember there was something happening across the way. One of the bigger palazzi on the Grand Canal was holding a party. There was music, so loud it drowned out the passing boats. Or perhaps that’s just my head getting things wrong. I was pretty shaken by then, and shaken people do stupid things. Like looking into drawers when they’re in no fit state to handle what they might contain.
Nonno Paolo’s typewriter was still on the desk. The place had his smell about it, dust, old age, a fragrant kind of antiquated cologne. And the faint fustiness of damp that always hung around the Colombina, the price of living in a building that stood on ancient timber driven into yet more ancient mud.
I read his note again, then placed it next to the typewriter. The little key was fiddly. Perhaps that bottom drawer hadn’t been opened in ages. Maybe it wouldn’t work at all and then I’d have an excuse. I could walk away, try to forget about everything, find some way to flush his story from my head and return to normal, whatever normal was. Right then I wasn’t sure.
Third try it turned.
There was another envelope in there, much like the ones he’d been giving me in the hospital only older. Nothing written on the front. Right above it, crushing the paper into the corner, was a grey metal pistol that looked military, as if it might have come from the war. Crammed alongside was a gilt box, faded, dusty, on the top in silver stencil the words: Uccello, Fine Weavers, Venice.
It took a while for my fumbling fingers to prise open the lid. There was a reason that was so hard. A stain, dark, dry and old, ran from whatever it contained right up to the plain cardboard inside the top, like an accidental seal.
I picked up the thing inside before I’d even realized what it was: a piece of old soprarizzo velvet, the colours mute and dull. Still I could see the pattern and it was much like the ones his words had formed in my head. Angry winged lions, rampant with gaping furious mouths. This was one of the banners Paolo Uccello, Vanni Artom and Chiara Vecchi had woven that bleak winter week fifty-six years before, now cut in two down the middle, the tear marked by dangling threads.
I dropped it straight away. It wasn’t hard to make out that much of it had once been soaked in blood.
Not caring if Dad heard or not I went back to my room, got all the other envelopes he’d given me, returned to his study, threw them in the drawer with the others, the gilt and silver box with its vile contents, the gun, wishing all along I wasn’t cursing him in my head.
Enough, I thought, and turned the key. Then I went to the window, opened it, stared at the gleaming water, the lights across the canal, listened to the party music filling the tiny enclosed universe of Venice, a place I knew I had to flee.
The note, the last thing he’d ever written, I balled up and threw out of the open window. The little key to his secrets followed, vanishing over the moonlit water.
I don’t remember much after that, not until we buried him.
It was a sultry summer morning. We stood in the middle of a gleaming black launch as it navigated the choppy waters across to San Michele, me, Mum and Dad, arms linked, together for the first time in years. Chiara was there too, weeping enough for the rest of us. The coffin was covered with flowers, as was the roof of the boat. A small crowd, employees, city officials, old family friends, stood on the waterfront at Fondamente Nove to watch us leave. Nonno Paolo had paid for a burial plot in advance, not that any of us knew the details until after. Since the cemetery island was overcrowded we’d been granted a lease on a grave for ten years or so. After that Grandad’s remains would be moved into a metal box and reburied in a small wall compartment he’d reserved a few plots away.
After the funeral I didn’t talk much. Mum told Dad she was worried about me. Chiara probably said the same. He knew something was wrong but he’d no idea how to deal with it. Any more than me. Finally two weeks after the funeral, when I turned down one more invitation to go out to the beach in a family outing to Alberoni, the two of us sat down together at the breakfast table. He wanted a talk.
Everything Dad said made sense. How it was natural to mourn when you lost a relative you loved. How that same relative would want you to end that grief after a while, pick up the pieces and get on with your life. I couldn’t argue with a thing. After all Nonno Paolo had used pretty much the same words in that letter he left for me in hospital. Still, I could hardly tell Dad why I’d retreated into the miserable, puzzled state I was in. To do that I’d have to go back into the mansard study, show him a wartime gun, a bloodied piece of fabric, and read the last chapter of Nonno Paolo’s grim and violent story.
I couldn’t face it so I lied. Venice was too small, too stifling, I said. I was coming up to sixteen. I needed to grow, to escape, to see more of the world than I could manage from my bedroom in the Colombina with its view of nothing but a stretch of sluggish water and a line of very old buildings.
Being Dad, of course, he listened.
A week later I was packing my bags. I never could have guessed it would be two decades before I’d look through that window again.
Where did all those years go? Into running mainly.
First I went to an international school in Oxford where I learned English and French and pretty soon the name of every pub along the Iffley Road. Oxford suited me, the bustle, the loudness of the city that seemed to drown out everything else. When my time at school was done I managed to get a place at a business college there, with the help of Dad’s money, naturally. It’s amazing how you can stretch out a university education when someone else is paying. Oxford would occupy almost eight years of my life before finally I left.
We corresponded through email and phone calls and met from time to time at the villa he’d bought himself in Sicily, usually with his latest girlfriend in tow. At regular intervals Dad would ask me if I’d like to spend some time in our office in Santa Croce, now a branch office of the conglomerate that owned the House of Uccello. After I kept coming up with any number of excuses why I didn’t want to return home he finally asked why I seemed to hate the place. Whether it was him or something else. I said it wasn’t complicated. Venice was for old people and tourists. I needed to live somewhere different, somewhere I could breathe.
Why did I never tell him the truth? For one thing I felt it would have been a betrayal. Nonno Paolo gave me his story. He could have told Dad, but he held back everything. There had to be a reason, not that I understood what it could possibly be. Then there was Chiara and the fear in her face whenever I’d raised the subject of the war. I’d no idea what she wanted to keep buried. Perhaps I’d no right to be told and Nonno Paolo no right to tell it either. Given her obvious disquiet I couldn’t possibly risk hurting someone who’d been so selflessly kind to three generations of Uccello men over fifty or more years.
She died, something of a legend on the island of Burano, at the age of ninety-two, seven years after Nonno Paolo, just as I was finishing one more module in Oxford. I did come back for her crowded lagoon funeral, but only because it was on her island home. I went there directly by water taxi from Marco Polo airport, stayed in a local hotel, and left without ever seeing an inch of the Grand Canal. Dad and I ate a sad funeral supper in a restaurant he loved, the Gatto Nero, afterwards: risotto di gò, goby fish fresh from mud cooked with rice, the dish the place was famous for. It was the taste of home: simple, rich, full of the fragrance of the lagoon. I still couldn’t wait to get straight back to the airport the next morning.
There was another reason I kept quiet. If I talked I’d have to confess just how much Nonno Paolo’s story had haunted me over the years, and still did. Pieces of his narrative would pop into my head, unwanted, and refuse to leave. The Turner painting so admired by Paolo Uccello’s art-loving mother, the boats in front of the Dogana and Salute, came to be something of an obsession for a good six months after I discovered the original was in the Tate in London. As soon as I read that I caught the first bus I could to see it. Six or seven times over the coming months I went back to stare at the thing again.
As the young Paolo had pointed out, it was a fabrication. This was the Venice I knew but not quite as it was in real life. The artist had shifted the perspective, moved entire buildings, rebuilt the city to suit his own imagination.
Did the artist twist real life deliberately to achieve some effect? Or was it just accident, a scene misremembered? The first, surely. Turner, I found out, kept detailed preliminary sketches for much of his work, some of which were in the same gallery. It was obvious he must have hired a boat, sat in the lagoon, looked at the scene in front of him and decided to change it. Just the kind of trick Nonno Paolo might have played with his story too. Was he really saying that he wasn’t the son of the original Uccello family at all? That the original Paolo had sacrificed his life to save a wounded Jewish partisan from Turin, a man he loved called Giovanni Artom? How could that be true? How would he – and Chiara – keep such a secret for five and a half decades? What, in pursuit of the picture he wanted to paint, had he changed? And how much of it was the truth rearranged, how much pure invention?
There were, of course, no answers. Only further questions the more I tried to unpick the tangle of threads I had at my disposal. Of course the locked drawer in the mansard might offer me the final part of the story, but I wasn’t ready to face that.
To Dad’s exasperation I decided my future now lay with the visual arts, not commerce. With his support I went to Paris, bought a lot of expensive camera equipment and determined to be a photographer. Almost four years of trying everything, fashion, landscape, news, left me dependent as ever on his support. For one brief, insane moment I even considered flying out to Lebanon to see if I could work my way into Syria to try to document the civil war there. When I mentioned that on the phone it was one of the few times he lost his temper. He caught the next plane and gave me a brisk lecture. Entering a perilous war zone was, he said very forcefully over a suitably lavish dinner near Les Halles, one crazy idea of mine he would never bankroll.
Not that it mattered. A Parisian cameraman I half-knew had gone ahead of me. Five weeks later, as I hung around Dad’s Sicilian villa trying to bring him round to the idea, it was all on the news. Pierre had been kidnapped and very publicly murdered by his captors. I couldn’t look at the hideous videos. Besides, in my heart I knew why the idea of seeing war close up intrigued me, and it was nothing to do with Syria at all. I wanted to witness how closely real life matched the images I had of the Artoms’ final bloody days in Venice, pictures I couldn’t get out of my head. It was the challenge of the Turner painting again. I was trying to match what was in my head against what I knew to be real.
Not long after Paris I ran out of excuses. I couldn’t face another bout of education or endless rounds of trying to sell my quite average photographic skills. I gave in to his appeals. Dad found me a position in London working for the European corporate headquarters of the conglomerate that now owned the House of Uccello. Nothing too onerous. Anyone could have done it, and for half the salary they were paying me. To begin with I was checking on consignments, talking to customers and suppliers, trying to see where things were going wrong and put them right. Long hours, no great social life, a flat in a new block in Docklands not far from the office.
I liked London, though after that strange referendum set the English apart from the rest of us in Europe I found life as a foreigner changed somewhat. Not so much in the capital – half of us there were from other countries. But when I had to visit depots in the regions I began to feel uneasy. One time, on a train to East Anglia, I took a call from our Bologna office, in Italian naturally. I didn’t notice the angry looks I was getting from the surly individual opposite until I’d finished and he spat out, ‘You lot can all fuck off home now. Brexit. That’s what we voted for. Best you get gone.’
If it hadn’t been for one of my fellow passengers stepping in it could easily have come to blows.
I tried to stay in the city as much as I could after that. Even there you only had to follow the news to understand something was changing, and it wasn’t good.
Bored with chasing couriers, I talked my way into the publication section in marketing and started to work on the production of brochures and catalogues for the many different brands we owned. It was work I took to for once, and I like to think I was good at it. One time Dad came over he admired a book about industrial design we’d produced for a Swedish subsidiary. Why not pillage the archives of the House of Uccello and produce a lavish volume about all our historic velvet patterns too?
It was a good idea. But still nothing was going to drag me back to meet Nonno Paolo’s ghosts. Until, one June morning in 2019, almost twenty years to the day he died, I got a call I’d dreaded for so long.
‘Nico.’ Dad sounded strange, almost frail, which was unusual. He always seemed the healthiest of men. ‘I’m calling you from the bloody hospital. I can’t believe it. I know you’re not going to like this but I need you here.’
‘Where’s here?’
‘Where do you think? Please. Come home. If only for a little while. I know you hate this place but it’s important. Your old father’s never asked much of you over the years.’
This was a downright lie. I was now thirty-five years old and in all that time he’d never asked for a thing, while I just kept on taking and taking.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Can’t talk on the phone. I took the liberty of having a word with your boss. You’re free to go. Come quick, please. Right now.’
One day later I was back. He was in Giovanni e Paolo. The hospital didn’t seem much different as I stepped through that familiar entrance for the first time in twenty years. It still looked more a façade for an art gallery than a medical facility. The same woman could have been behind the front desk for all I knew.
Dad was in a private room one floor up from where Nonno Paolo died. Across the lagoon San Michele shimmered in the distance just as it had before. I couldn’t stop looking at those distant white castellated walls as I walked in.
Half-moon spectacles on, reading a copy of the Financial Times, he beamed at me as I came through the door. I’d seen him in Sicily the Christmas before with his then squeeze, a Croatian woman who was twenty years his junior and extraordinarily beautiful.
‘Sit,’ he said, patting the chair at the side of the bed.
‘How are you?’ I asked, my heart in my mouth. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Who said anything’s wrong?’
‘I thought you were sick.’
‘What made you think that?’
A little voice inside me wanted to shriek.
‘You’re in hospital, Dad. You said it was urgent.’
‘Oh that’s just a little thing. A hernia. A few days and I’m out of here. Nothing to worry about.’
‘You scared the living hell out of me!’
He did the Dad thing he always tried when he’d got something wrong. Said oops and looked theatrically guilty.
Finally, it seemed to occur to him that perhaps I might have got a different message from his call.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you. It’s just that events are moving very quickly and there are things you can’t leave to a phone call.’ He reached out, touched my hand, smiled and said, ‘It’s good to see you. It always is.’
‘I’m glad you’re not sick. I was worried.’
‘Especially good to see you here.’ He gestured at the window, still largely oblivious to the fact he’d put the wind up me. ‘Home.’
‘London’s my home now.’
‘Too noisy that place. Besides, after this Brexit nonsense you’ll have to beg for a work permit or something, won’t you?’
I shrugged and said nothing.
‘I never did understand why you took against Venice. I thought …’
When he didn’t finish I said, ‘You thought what?’
‘I thought it was me. Your mother leaving like that. Me and women.’
I laughed. This was so ridiculous.
‘No. It was ne
ver you. Where’s Marina?’
‘Gone back to Dubrovnik.’ He frowned. ‘They never stay. You must have noticed. They like my money. Me … I’m not so interesting. How about … how about you? That lovely Irish girl, Mary? I liked her.’
‘Her name was Morag. She was Scottish.’
‘Yes. That one. Lovely girl.’
‘So you said. I’m in between relationships at the moment.’
‘Well! We’ve something in common there.’
‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out, Dad.’
‘Don’t be. I’m used to it. Look …’ He gestured at the window. ‘I know this wasn’t the most exciting of places when you were growing up. No cars. No bikes. No fun. A city for old people, not the young.’
‘It wasn’t just that,’ I murmured, not that he was listening.
‘It’s all very different now. We’re really international. Part of the world. Just listen to the accents on the streets.’
‘They’re tourists.’
‘Not all of them. Plenty live here. Work here. You can fly anywhere from the airport. New York. Tokyo. Broadband and Wi-Fi and phones and all that nonsense. We’ve got the lot.’
‘What is it you want?’
There was a slyness about him. That, at least, he’d inherited from Nonno Paolo. He hesitated for a moment, then broke the news that had summoned me to his bedside, heart in mouth, thinking he might be on his last legs, which clearly couldn’t be further from the truth.
The House of Uccello, it seemed, was about to be coughed up by its US parent. The conglomerate was slimming down and had come to the conclusion an upmarket Italian fabric and clothing business no longer fitted its corporate profile. My father had negotiated the buyback of the company. We were to be our own masters once more, owners of our two Venetian weaving mills and a larger, more commercial, unit in Vicenza.
He wanted me to come and help him revive it, with the idea of inheriting the business in a few years’ time when he finally retired to Sicily with his yacht and a companion yet to be discovered.
‘Only if you want to, Nico,’ he said with that wide-eyed gaze of innocence that won him so many conquests.
