The Undrowned Child

by Michelle Lovric

  Now everyone knew that Venice was sinking into the sea, a little more each year. But what Teo had just learnt was this: what held the city up was in fact … water. When the first Venetians built their town, they had rammed millions of poles into the mud to form the foundations for their houses. Beneath that mud was an aquifer, a cushion of water that pushed up against the mud, the poles and the buildings, and kept Venice afloat. Teo pictured a sky-blue cushion, softly bulging with water, with Venice resting on top of it like a comfortable cat in a basket.

  But Venice’s aquifer, she had just read, was now mysteriously disappearing. As its cushion of water deflated, the city was capsizing into the lagoon. No one could work out where the water was going or why the lagoon had suddenly grown so very salty that many marine animals were dying.

  Meanwhile the water temperature was also rising. It was as if there was something underneath the city, heating it up like a warming-pan in a bed. Diving parties had been sent below, but soon came racing back—the warm, soupy water had attracted a school of large sharks, some four yards long. Lately, their gray fins had been seen slicing down the Grand Canal. No one knew what those monsters were eating. But several tourists had disappeared without a trace, and the rumors were running wild.

  So now famous scientists were on their way to Venice from all over the world, to see what could be done. The train from Naples bristled with bearded men wearing monocles, each squinting over the same thick folder of notes that was now weighing so heavily on Teo’s spirits.

  As the train rolled into the plains of the Veneto, Teo had opened the file again. However disagreeable the truth, it was better to know, surely? Maria rolled her eyes. She rearranged her pink silk skirt disdainfully on the train’s worn seat and retied the ribbon on her green travel cape into an even more ostentatious pussycat bow.

  A moment later she whimpered, “Ouch! A horrid Venetian mosquito bit me!”

  “Shame, how is the mosquito?” asked Teo, without looking up.

  The first mystery the scientists would tackle was what had happened to Venice’s ancient marble wells. In the last few weeks the wells had started to burst their iron covers, and to send out great fountains of hot water. It all began in Campo San Maurizio, quite a surprise for some American students who were enjoying a late-night picnic of ham rolls on the steps around the well. For them a warm shower was rather welcome. But the well water was growing hotter by the day. When the well in front of the church of San Zaccaria sent up a steaming geyser, a whole wedding party was painfully scalded. And the water jet that shot out of the well in San Giacomo dell’Orio knocked the spire off the bell tower. Then the scientists had tested the water and discovered that it was not only at boiling temperature, but poisonous to drink.

  “Dear me!” thought Teo.

  But as she scanned more documents, she had been horrified to see that the Venetian authorities were stubbornly intent on pretending that nothing was wrong. The mayor of Venice had contributed a letter to the notes, in which he gaily insisted that it was a great deal of fuss over nothing.

  “A temporary fault,” he called it. He smiled patronizingly from the handsome photograph he had somewhat unnecessarily included with his letter. “Our friends at the water company have the situation under control. All the tourists can still take a nice warm bath in the evenings in their hotels. No one should cancel their visit to Venice.”

  Teo had impatiently turned the page on the luxuriant mustache of the mayor. She stared at sepia photographs of acqua alta. Now, this “high water,” as everyone knew, was perfectly normal in Venice. Many times each year the lowest points of the city, like the great square at San Marco, filled up with water that came gushing from under the stone paving. But in the last few weeks, the pictures showed San Marco dry as the Kalahari Desert. Instead, the highest parts of the town, the ones that never flooded, were suddenly filling with water for hours on end. People were left standing on chairs in their kitchens, or clinging to the branches of trees.

  The firemen and the officers of the water magistrate rushed around, taking the wooden flood pontoons to places where they had never been needed before. But when the tide surged up, it arrived with such remarkable force that the pontoons just sprang up and floated off, sometimes with terrified people on board.

  And the water that carried them away was always warm and dark as blood.

  Maria was supposed to be Teo’s best friend; for this trip, anyway. But the truth was that Teo was as fond of Maria as she was of cod-liver oil.

  Naturally Maria, with her perfect glossy hair and her chronically bored expression, had always been one of the “fashionable crowd” at school, the ones who cunningly adapted their hats and school pinafores to the latest style. The kind of girls who, even at eleven, could cause a carriage accident just by gazing at the coachman with their heads on one side.

  The fashionable crowd took pride in being far too modern to show much interest in schoolwork. They affected drawls and babylike lisps.

  Like Teo’s teacher, but for different reasons, Maria’s form-mistress had been quite content to let her pupil out of school to go to Venice.

  “Perhaps it will put an idea in her head,” Maria’s teacher had sighed. “Perhaps a museum … a spot of art, some culture, you never know.”

  Someone at the back of the room had called out, “Perhaps a spot of shopping!”

  And everyone in the fashionable crowd had giggled or clapped then, betraying Maria for a cheap laugh. That, of course, is what the fashionable crowd is like in any classroom anywhere in the world.

  Teo was most definitely not in the fashionable crowd. Well, a girl generally isn’t when she spends all her time in the library. (Teo even had a special library trick of being able to read books upside-down, which rather disconcerted the librarians.) To Teo’s lot had always fallen the schoolgirls’ full repertoire of nasty little tricks: the tea-party invitations ostentatiously handed out to everyone else but her, the mocking compliments on her clothes and the sudden silences or sniggering when she entered a room.

  The parents, of course, did not have much idea of the undercurrents of schoolgirl life. The adults innocently assumed that their daughters would amuse themselves together in Venice while the scientific gathering was in progress. No suitable replacement had yet been found for Teo’s poor Nanny Giulia. Maria’s always gave in their notice soon after arrival: Maria’s tantrums were legendary among the nannies of Naples.

  In a whispered conference in the corridor, as their train approached Venice, Teo had convinced Maria that it would be far better if they were to secretly spend the days ahead separately: “You can do what you want. I can do what I want. We only need to meet up in the evenings when our parents come home from their meetings.”

  “You’d really, really like that, then, Dora?” drawled Maria.

  Teo nodded fervently.

  “Then it’s goin’ to cost you something, ain’t it?”

  “But you want it too.…”

  “Or I could stick to you like glue, Te-Odore.”

  And so Teo was forced to bribe Maria with a great deal of her allowance. Maria seemed to spend all their joint pocket-money on scarves, belts, beads and Venetian slippers. It was the height of fashion that summer to wear crests: on scarves, printed all over skirts and even leather shoes. By the end of the second day in Venice, Maria was already covered head to toe in crests.

  “How exceedingly subtle,” Teo had observed sarcastically.

  Maria, with characteristic brilliance, riposted: “Go and boil your head, Dora.”

  Astonishingly, Maria’s parents didn’t notice the profusion of crests at all. It crossed Teo’s mind that Maria might be trying to attract their attention. That, as usual, failed miserably. Maria’s parents prided themselves on being far more interested in the next professorship than in what their foolish daughter wore. Maria’s father was highly competitive, and talked out of the corner of his mouth like a robber, and wore shiny suits like one too. Aurelia Naccaro barely spoke t
o her daughter. If Maria wanted their attention she would need to come home with an essay marked A.

  And that—given that Maria’s head seemed to Teo like an empty church where dust streamed in the sunlight—was not likely to happen in the conceivable future.

  at the hospital, the evening of June 1, 1899

  “Warm as blood,” Teo murmured. She was awake, she thought, but she could not open her eyes. She smelt carbolic soap, heard the brisk tap of shoes on a polished stone floor. Distant voices echoed down long corridors. Teo felt oddly separate from her own body, as if she hovered a few inches above herself.

  The last thing she remembered was tucking the old book into her pinafore before the doctor picked her up from the hotel bed and carried her down to his boat. Later, much later, she would recall shreds of the journey, the long black boat rocking under the stars, the moonlit windows above as they passed through the looming canyons of floating palaces, her mother’s frightened eyes gazing down on her, the rain falling quietly and persistently, a tall gray fin following them all the way down one canal, the back of a shop hung with sinister white masks like skulls, each with a single black spot by the nose.

  Then a gondola stacked with ivory tusks and black wood had sidled past them, followed by another, draped in black crêpe, bearing a tiny coffin covered in white flowers. Her mother had clutched her father’s arm and pointed at the coffin.

  “The mayor promised this city was safe for children, Alberto,” she had whispered. “Is it really? Is it?”

  Teo came slowly back to consciousness in a brightly lit room with a high ceiling, a porcelain stove and a grated window, down which the rain continued to cascade. She was lying fully dressed on a simple iron bed. When she finally opened her eyes, an ugly nurse in a blue cap was looking down on her with ferocious disapproval.

  The doctor was trying to persuade Teo’s parents that they should go back to their hotel. “She’s in the best possible hands,” he added firmly.

  “And that’s a fact,” added the nurse, thin-lipped, as if to say, “There shall be no mollycoddling of little girls here.”

  To hurry everyone out, Teo obediently swallowed the hot tisana that the nurse held up to her lips. It left a bitter, chalky rime on her tongue.

  “Now I’m so sleepy.” She yawned hugely at her mother, who finally seemed to be on the point of leaving, though with many anxious looks back.

  “Do turn off the gas-lamp as you leave, Mamma.” Teo forced out another yawn.

  The moment her parents’ footsteps had faded, Teo leant over and relit the lamp beside her bed.

  She climbed down and walked unsteadily to the door. Peering around it, Teo had a glimpse of endless corridors, nurses passing with lamps from room to room, from which came the faint sounds of children moaning. A little girl cried out, “Leave my hair alone, you brute!”

  All the nurses had their backs to Teo. She closed the door and wedged the handle with fire-tongs from the porcelain stove.

  Returning to the iron bed, Teo stumbled. She was still a little dizzy. And how long before the tisana started working? Quickly, she pulled the book from her pinafore.

  The beautiful sad girl on the cover had changed her position. She was now gazing down intently with her head a little on one side, as if encouraging Teo to open the book and read its contents.

  The thick paper inside was a dark cream color, like milky breakfast coffee, but with a pearly sheen. The inscription to Teodora-of-Sad-Memory was still there. She told herself, “But of course, it could be another Teodora. There must be thousands of Teodoras. And I’m from Naples. No one in Venice remembers me, do they?”

  How could they?

  She turned the page. There was an illustration, of another young girl operating a small hand-cranked printing machine. She was drawn only from the waist up. Above the engraving were some words about the book. The thing was, the book didn’t seem to think that it exactly was a book. Instead, it introduced itself as:

  The Key to the Secret City for the Children of Venice

  Below that was printed what must be the publishers’ name: the Seldom Seen Press.

  Teo cast a knowing eye over the engraving of the printing press. She liked everything to do with books. The best lessons at school this past term had been about Johannes Gutenberg, who had invented the printing press four hundred years before. The teacher had brought in a working model of Gutenberg’s machine. Then she had shown the children how to slot individual letters into wooden forms to “compose” a page, to brush ink over a metal plate, then run them through a heavy mangle … all this to produce a single shaky but real printed page.

  “Like magic!” Teo had marveled at the time.

  And there had been the added joy to it that when Maria had taken her turn at the press, her new mousseline de soie dress had been splattered by a slick of ink that had coursed off the roller while Teo turned it. Teo hadn’t meant to do it. It had just happened.

  Grinning at the memory, Teo turned to the next page of The Key to the Secret City. This was set in large type with many curly decorations. It was hard to understand, and Teo realized that the words were written not in Italian but in old Venetian dialect, which was more like Latin or French. This was a word game. Teo loved word games. And indeed, when she put half of her brain into Latin mode, and a quarter into French, leaving the rest for Italian, and squinted with one eye, reading aloud and hearing the sounds of the words—then she discovered that she could understand the Venetian dialect quite easily. Well, almost easily.

  The page said, We will show you our city, we will show you our heart.

  “Oh yes, please!” whispered Teo, feeling warm with pleasure.

  A strong smell of wet varnish filled the room. Teo glanced up as the window rattled violently. The storm was gathering force. Then she looked again, and a scream tore out of her throat. The Key to the Secret City slid to the floor as Teo leapt up and clutched her pillow in front of her.

  A dark figure stood hunched by the window. He had twice the bulk of an ordinary man. His bare arms were grooved with muscle and sinew. He was like some kind of monstrous joke, a crude sketch of a Blackamoor from a Penny Dreadful magazine: his skin was blacker than coal and his eyes bulged white in his broad, furious face. Broken chains dangled from his neck and legs.

  A groaning creak came from his joints and a thin stream of blood fell from his lips as he began to move towards her.

  around midnight, June 1, 1899

  “It’s a statue, you foolish child!” The nurse was shaking Teo harder than was really necessary. What harsh breath the woman had!

  The nurse had hurt her wrist wrenching the handle of the door that Teo had wedged with the tongs. And now the other children on the wards, woken by Teo’s screams, were wailing in a dismal chorus down every corridor.

  “But it moved! There was blood in its mouth! And I know it wasn’t here before.”

  “You know precisely nothing, young lady. You are indulging in an hysterical conniption.”

  Having supplied her own excuse, the nurse slapped Teo’s face for good measure. The doctor hurried in and gasped at the sight of the vast statue, “Dear God, not here too!”

  Teo, one hand on her smarting cheek, bellowed, “What not here too?”

  The nurse threw her a threatening look as the doctor sank into a chair. “Child, I hardly know. Someone is playing a very silly and sinister joke on Venice, just at a time when laughter is quite uncalled for. These statues have started appearing in people’s homes, in bakeries, and now in the hospital. The strange thing is, they’re very like Brustolons.”

  “Brusto …?”

  “Andrea Brustolon. Venetian sculptor. Two hundred years ago he carved these Blackamoors with ebony skin and ivory eyes.… Once upon a time these people were … well, no, never mind what they were, child.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, it’s a … long story, and not a very nice one.” The doctor wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Anyway, you used to see the Brustolons only in
museums or the grandest palaces. Suddenly they’re appearing all over the place.”

  “If they are antiques, why do they smell of fresh varnish?” queried Teo.

  The doctor did not seem to hear her. He lowered his voice and grumbled to himself, “The mayor has insisted on keeping it out of the papers, but that only means that it’s more of a shock when it happens to someone.”

  He rose and placed his hand on Teo’s forehead. “And indeed this shock has not done your fever any favors.”

  Quickly, he felt her neck and under her arms, whispering, “Nothing, thank God!”

  Teo persisted, “But there was blood in its mouth!”

  “I know, I know. Our practical joker has a truly twisted sense of humor. Look.” The doctor pulled a scalpel from his pocket and poked about inside the mouth of the statue. Out came a fat sliver of wriggling red slime. The doctor opened the window and flung it out into the rain.

  “Our prankster puts medical leeches full of blood inside the statues’ lips. They drip.… Anyone would think someone was trying to frighten Venice to death, or at least out of her wits.”

  Teo had a hundred more questions to ask. Where did the blood for the leeches come from? Who would want to frighten a city … to death? And the doctor had a hundred reasons why Teo should lie back in her bed and rest quietly.

  He picked up The Key to the Secret City, which had fallen on the floor.

  “I believe you like to read, child? Read yourself back to sleep, then.”

  The doctor seemed not to notice the girl on the cover giving him a smile and then nodding to Teo. But Teo did, and her hands tingled as she took the book.

  The nurse harrumphed and stalked out of the room. Permission to read in bed was apparently her definition of spoiling a child rotten.

  “But the … Brustolon?” pleaded Teo, pointing a shaking finger at the statue. “I can’t sleep with him looking at me like that, as if he wants to kill me.”