She trailed off.
“What is it, Barbara? It’s Nina Crivelli, isn’t it?”
She poured out her own cup and added sugar before responding.
“I suppose it was a little obvious, the way she was stalking me outside Florian’s.”
“Is that how you describe it? Maybe it’s more serious than I thought. What’s this all about?” It would be best to wait to hear what she had to say before telling her about his own encounter with Crivelli.
She took a sip of tea to fortify her.
“It’s all rather embarrassing,” she began. “Or that’s all it was at first. I suppose that was why I didn’t say anything all this time. But things have changed since then. I guess the best place to begin is the day I showed Frieda the Casa Verde. I wanted to help get her established before I left for London since you’d be returning shortly after I got back. I didn’t think that Burano would suit her, especially after she had stayed at the Palazzo Uccello, but—” She broke off abruptly. “Just listen to me! I’m getting off the point already. I used to be such a good storyteller.”
“Calm down. You’re all wound up, like Oriana. Maybe you should have something other than tea?”
“Maybe you mean you should have. But it will just sap your strength. You haven’t been looking all that well since you got back, you know.”
“My body hasn’t readjusted to the weather.”
“Is that it? Go right ahead, then. Suit yourself.”
He was tempted, but he showed his solidarity by raising his cup and taking another sip.
“Go on,” he urged.
She took a deep breath and continued at a slower pace. Urbino settled himself in his chair, determined to keep to tea drinking for the moment, and not to interrupt her as she relived what he soon realized had been a distressing series of events.
10
On the morning the Contessa took Frieda Hensel to Burano it was clear and bright, but it started to darken for her as soon as Giorgio was maneuvering the motoscafo to the landing.
An old woman was standing alone on the quay staring at the boat. The Contessa recognized her as a lace maker from Burano. She had become acquainted with her when she had tried to set up a lace making scholarship there several years before. The woman had been given a large amount of money in anticipation of giving lace making lessons, but, according to the Contessa’s agent, she had given only two afternoons of instruction and then refused to give any of the money back. The Contessa had not pressed the matter.
She now gave a little shiver. The Contessa had seldom felt so assaulted by a gaze as she was by the woman’s. Her eyes, magnified behind thick glasses, seemed to invade the very privacy of her thoughts and leave behind a chill.
Frieda gave a full-hearted laugh. She was a tall, attractive woman in her late forties with slightly protruding eyes. She wore, as was her custom, a large colorful scarf tied around her head and draped over one shoulder.
“You are cold, Barbara?” she said. She had a strong accent, but spoke excellent English. “But today, for November, it is so warm. It is not like the winter at all. You have become Italian after all these years!”
On their walk to the bright green house on a small canal, and all the time the Contessa was showing it to Frieda as if she were an estate agent, she couldn’t shake her chill despite the sunshine and the German woman’s enthusiasm. She realized that it was the chill of a premonition. She had felt them before. Although they usually turned out to be nothing, whenever one touched her, she expected the worst.
All during their meal at Il Piccolo Nettuno, a small restaurant on the Via Galuppi where she often ate when she was on the island, she was abstracted and apprehensive. Frieda joked with her, perhaps perceiving that the Contessa was disturbed about something. She assured the Contessa that the little Casa Verde was delightful, and that she’d take good care of it, and that she was completely prepared—in fact, she insisted—that the Contessa accept at least a token amount from her in the way of rent.
The Contessa responded to her exuberance with a wan smile that she saw reflected from odd, unaccustomed angles in one or another of the restaurant’s unavoidable mirrors. She attributed these ill-considered new additions to the vanity of the woman who owned the restaurant and who kept throwing glances into them as she moved from table to table.
The Contessa noticed that the waiter, who had worked at the restaurant for as long as she had been coming, was reeling more than usual as he carried plates. She had always suspected him of frequent nips from a bottle in the kitchen. Obviously the mirrors only added to his disorientation and lack of surefootedness these days.
The Contessa was beginning to feel more at ease by the time they were lingering over coffee, Frieda’s having been “corrected” by a generous dose of anisette. Regina Bella, the padrona, joined them to chat, speaking in English and only now and again breaking into Italian.
“Everyone here on Burano is grateful for your attempts to help its delicate art, Contessa,” she said in a voice made hoarse from all the cigarettes she smoked. “We Buranelli are one big family. We hope you will try again to establish a scholarship. The time wasn’t right before.”
The Contessa’s immediate response was to give a perceptible start and an equally perceptible gasp. She stared into one of the mirrors.
In it, the face of the old woman from the boat landing peered at her with her grotesquely magnified eyes. She pressed a lace handkerchief against her mouth and then drank from a glass of water, all the while staring at the Contessa.
This sudden appearance of the old woman in the restaurant would have been enough in itself to startle the Contessa. Her distress was heightened, however, by the way that Bella’s comment had seemed to invoke the face of the very person who had been largely responsible for the failure of her benevolence. It suggested to the Contessa the old adage, Speak of the devil and he will appear.
Bella followed the Contessa’s gaze. She gave a nervous laugh.
“That’s Nina Crivelli,” she said.
“Yes,” the Contessa said, “I recognized her.”
“People always remember Nina! Those eyes! They stab right into you! She used to be one of the best of the lace makers in her day, before her sight started to go. It was all the lace making that did it. She can hardly see beyond her nose, even with the glasses. I think that’s why her eyes seem like knives, from the strain. But she manages to see quite a bit, don’t you worry about that. She’s become very attached to the restaurant recently,” she added in a lighter tone.
“Almost blind?” Frieda said with exaggerated sympathy. “How sad, and from making beautiful lace. There is a story to be found, yes, don’t you think?”
“A story?” Bella repeated.
“I am a writer, my dear. Be careful. Some of us have been known to steal a person’s life before they know it!”
Bella, who seemed to follow the spirit of this if not quite all the sense, retreated behind a confused smile.
“Steal? I never said that Nina would steal even a button!” She lit a cigarette and glanced uneasily in the direction of the kitchen. “The waiter, Salvatore, is her son. She comes to check up on him every day. She’s a very attentive mother, even after so many years. She does some of his cleaning up to get him home earlier. Sometimes she cooks meals when Nella isn’t here. You must excuse me.”
Bella threw her lamb’s wool coat over her shoulders and dashed into the street, turning toward the main square.
The Contessa paid Salvatore, and indicated he could keep the rather generous amount left over. She wanted to get out of the restaurant, and back to the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini as soon as possible. She had a vague sense of insecurity as long as she stayed on Burano.
Frieda stopped at one of the lace shops on the way to the boat landing.
“If it’s good Burano lace you’re looking for,” the Contessa told her, “you won’t find it in one of these places.”
“Unfortunately, Barbara, I don’t have your large
purse. Nor your good taste, I am sure. Please indulge me. I need a special piece of lace for my costume for your ball. I will be Scheherazade, and wear a lovely lace veil instead of a mask, yes!”
While the Contessa waited impatiently as Frieda started to look through the lace items, she felt a tug at her coat sleeve. Turning around, she was face to face with Nina Crivelli. It would have been almost comical to the Contessa, the way the old lace maker seemed to be popping up out of thin air—comical, that is, if she didn’t find it more than a little alarming. And in a few minutes she had even more reason to be dismayed.
“You are kind and generous, Contessa,” Crivelli said in Italian without any preliminary.
A foul odor emanated from the old woman, a smell of decay and death. She lifted a gnarled hand in the air, with one finger pointing toward the Contessa. The Contessa drew back. The woman gave her a mocking smile as her finger moved slowly through the air between them. Crivelli nodded and put her hand down.
“Is poor woman, Nina Crivelli,” the lace maker said in English. “Money.”
She rubbed the fingers of one hand together, still with her mocking smile.
The Contessa made no response except to open her purse and take out three ten-thousand-lira notes, feeling a sense of desperation as she did it. If this was all she needed to get rid of the woman for good, she thought, she would give her double or triple that amount. She was, in fact, about to extract another ten thousand lire, when she noticed Crivelli’s reaction.
She was staring at the money in the Contessa’s hand with her alarming eyes. Whether this was because she was offended at being offered such a relatively small amount or any money at all, despite her plea, it was impossible to determine.
“Later!” Crivelli said in Italian. She slipped behind the neighboring lace kiosk. The Contessa waited for her to come back, but she appeared to have vanished.
Frieda didn’t seem to have observed the encounter, but all the way back to Venice she kept asking the Contessa if she was feeling all right. The Contessa’s halfhearted assurances that she was fine didn’t seem to satisfy the German woman, who was reluctant to part with her new friend.
Five days later, after making the necessary arrangements for the changes at the little house on Burano and Frieda’s smooth move there from the Palazzo Uccello, the Contessa took the train to London. She was caught up in visits, shopping, theaters, and museums. Only at odd moments did she think about her encounters with Nina Crivelli. When she did, however, she felt the same sense of premonition as she had that day on Burano, a premonition that neither distance nor time had weakened.
As a consequence, it wasn’t a total surprise when one of the first things Vitale told her on her return was about the “strange old woman” who had been loitering outside the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini and who, on one occasion, had rung the bell and asked for her. Vitale had been cautious enough to inform the woman only that the Contessa was not at home and to ask for a message.
There had been none.
11
If the Contessa had no doubts that her path would cross with Nina Crivelli’s again, it wasn’t because of the nature of Venice, whose waterways and alleys and profusion of squares made privacy impossible as soon as you stepped out of your door. Nor was it because she was obliged to visit Frieda and thus was treading the even more public spaces of Burano where the old woman lived.
Her certainty came from the echo in her mind of the lace maker’s urgent “later!,” which, now that she was back in Venice, sounded with a particularly disturbing loudness. Anxious to get the next inevitable encounter with Crivelli over with, she was restless at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini, and found excuses to be out and about, and especially to go to Burano. But yet she was shy of seeking Crivelli out more directly by going to Il Piccolo Nettuno, which she avoided. She realized that she was a bundle of inconsistencies.
When a week passed with no sight of the lace maker, the Contessa’s nerves were at the breaking point. It was with the hope of soothing them that, one morning, after visiting a friend who lived above a shop on the Calle del Paradiso, she walked the short distance to the Church of Santa Maria Formosa.
The Contessa had special places scattered throughout Venice where she sought out repose. She thought of them as way stations on a long journey. Like the Chinese salon at Florian’s, they were public spaces, but because of association and familiarity, she had made them her own.
The Church of Santa Maria Formosa fell into this small but special category because of one of its paintings. It was by Palma Il Vecchio, and it portrayed the Contessa’s namesake, Santa Barbara. The Oratorio on Burano, because it had its own portrait of the same saint, was another of the Contessa’s refuges, but on this particular day and with her particular problems, Burano was out of the question for any kind of restorative reflection.
Leaving behind the lively square with its palaces, market, and cafes, she slipped into the Renaissance church, drawing her silk scarf around her head. When she touched her forehead with the water from the stoup, it felt so unusually cold that she realized she might be slightly feverish.
She was pleased to see that her accustomed chair, with its view of the great painting, was not only unoccupied, but that there was no one else in the church except two art students making studies of the Vivarini triptych. She seated herself and looked at the Palma Il Vecchio.
This sixteenth-century portrait of the patron saint of bombardiers, who was blond, buxom, and graced with a small cannon at her feet, somehow had the ability to comfort her despite its martial associations. She liked to think that if she shared anything with the portrait—other than her blondness—it was the painted woman’s air of calmness and faith in the presence of the inevitable. In Santa Barbara’s case, this inevitability was her own immediate death.
Sitting there in the late-morning quiet, the Contessa contemplated the saint’s serene face beneath its crown and the delicacy of colors blending together so smoothly. For a few moments she closed her eyes, and started to recite a brief prayer to St. Barbara that she had learned from the nuns at St. Brigid’s-by-the-Sea.
“Sudden death, Contessa,” said a voice in Italian. “Lightning. Bombs.”
The Contessa’s eyes flew open. Standing in the aisle beside her was Nina Crivelli. In her hand, sheathed in a black fingerless glove, was a large plastic bag. It bore the name of one of the fashionable shops on the Calle Large XXII Marzo.
Somehow the Contessa found her voice.
“Are you following me, Signora Crivelli?”
She looked up at the woman, forcing herself to stare directly into her magnified brown eyes. Surely it was a pose worthy of Santa Barbara, thought the Contessa, who could indulge, despite her distress, in this bit of self-importance—unless, of course, it was something more like bravado.
“Perhaps, Contessa, it is you who are following Nina Crivelli!”
There was no answer to this. Crivelli might have been in the church when she came in, concealed by the shadows or even sitting inside one of the confessionals. This thought, however, was even more disturbing. It seemed to compromise her sense of freedom even more if the place she had chosen to escape from the lace maker was the one where the woman already was, waiting for her.
“You are a busy woman,” the lace maker continued. “Even your prayers must be scheduled, yes?”
This only confused the Contessa more. She showed her state of mind by saying, more loudly than she intended, “What is it that you want with me, signora!”
The two art students paused in their work to look at her. What did they see, she wondered? Probably a haughty woman disdaining the pleas of one of the city’s poor. The thought that she could be so misunderstood would, in other circumstances, have made her more concerned about appearances, but today was different.
As a response to her question, Crivelli seated herself in the chair behind the Contessa, obliging the Contessa to twist her body slightly to look at her. The lace maker then leaned toward her, fixing her with
her eyes. Once again, as there had been in front of the lace shop, there was the odor of something foul in the air.
“I need money,” she said as quietly as the Contessa had almost shouted. “Much more than thirty thousand lire. If you cannot find it in your heart to give it to me, Contessa, I am prepared to sell you something. I would give it to you free, but I have to consider my needs. I am a desperate woman.”
Indeed, at that moment, because of the shadows that conspired to darken all her face except for the thick glasses and the magnified, invasive eyes behind them, the lace maker did look desperate enough for anything.
The Contessa’s gaze involuntarily flickered in the direction of Crivelli’s plastic bag, now lying on the stone pavement. An absurd hope that the woman wanted an exorbitant price for a handmade lace tablecloth stuffed inside the bag flashed through her mind. It was quickly quashed, however, as her eyes returned to Crivelli’s.
“What is it that you have to sell, signora?” she asked in as firm a tone as she could muster.
The answer came quickly and in the same low, urgent voice.
“Information, Contessa.”
Hesitant footsteps sounded at the entrance. The lace maker, who had a more direct view of the door, peered in its direction nervously. The Contessa shifted herself to get a view.
A man stood motionless by the entrance. The dimness of the church made it impossible to see his face. With her poor eyesight, the lace maker could surely see even far less than Barbara could. The Contessa returned her full attention to the woman. She perceived a wariness in her that hadn’t been there before.
“Information, signora? Information about what?”
The Contessa sensed the gradual approach of the person who had just entered the church. He appeared to be moving slowly from place to place as if examining the architecture and art. The lace maker kept peering in his direction, with a frown of concentration.
Crivelli, who had been so eager to speak before, now fell into silence. She appeared to be thinking. Then, she brought out with effort and much more loudly than before, “I—I speak of someone dead. Yes! Someone who is dead, Contessa.” She looked over the Contessa’s shoulder, presumably in the direction of the approaching man or perhaps someone else. “He is long dead. He was—he is,” she corrected herself, “close to your heart.”
Deadly to the Sight Page 5
