Venice Noir

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “Sad, no?”

  “Yes,” Jonathan agrees.

  “I’ve always wondered why Thomas Mann called his book Death in Venice. It should have been Death on the Lido, properly speaking.”

  “I know,” Jonathan says. “Maybe it doesn’t have the same ring. People always think of Venice first. The Lido just hasn’t the same romantic connotation.”

  This was where Aschenbach had coveted the adolescent boy Tadzio and allowed death to welcome him into its arms in the novella. Jonathan hadn’t actually read it but he had seen the Visconti film. Though he would never admit to this publicly. There are a lot of classics he hasn’t read.

  “I only saw the movie,” the young woman says.

  “Me too.”

  “Philistines, eh?”

  “Absolutely,” Jonathan says. They both laugh.

  “Anyway,” she continues, “Aschenbach died of cholera, not a broken heart. A fanciful notion, but quite unrealistic.”

  There is a spark of mischief in her eyes.

  They continue down the road, walking parallel to the sea. The gray sky chills his bones to the core. It looks as if it will soon begin raining. He tightens his black cashmere scarf around his neck.

  They reach the Excelsior Hotel, which is also shuttered for the winter season. The main film screenings take place at festival time in the bowels of this luxury hotel.

  “Did you know that Venice no longer even has a single cinema?” Jonathan says.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. A city that hosts one of the world’s major film festivals doesn’t even have a functioning cinema throughout the year. No demand. Not enough people. The population is steadily falling. Young people don’t want to stay in Venice any longer. Tourists don’t come here to see movies. They have other desires.”

  “Interesting,” the young woman replies. “So what do you think brings people here in such numbers?”

  “The beauty of decay, the weight of history, I don’t know … Maybe it’s just habit, like lemmings. They reckon it’s a place everyone has to see at least once in their lifetime. Before they die.”

  “I thought that was Naples.”

  “Both,” Jonathan says. He’s never been to Naples. Nor even wanted too.

  A gust of wind surges past him, moving between the sea and the lagoon. He shivers yet again.

  “Can we turn back?” he asks her. “This is getting too cold for me. And at this time of year, all this is just too desolate.” He points to the abandoned beaches and shuttered buildings.

  “It’s just winter,” she responds. And swivels around.

  He remembers how warm the hotel had felt earlier, even though it was empty.

  “Did you come for the churches?” she asks you.

  “No.”

  “Did you come to Venice for the canals and the art?”

  “No.”

  “For the glass baubles from Murano, the food, the way the evanescent light plays on the slow-moving waters of the canals and the lagoon, the history, the gondolas, the teeming Rialto Bridge markets, the way the water slops against the stone walls of the canals when the tide rises … ?” A litany of questions.

  “No, no, no …”

  And you don’t have the courage or the audacity to tell her you have only returned to Venice to confront your own history, your memories, to wallow in the past, to understand once and for all that some things will never be the same again whatever you say or do. To finally come to terms with the fact that Giulietta was your last great adventure. And there can be no other. As if life has given you x number of chances, and you have taken them all, run out of numbers.

  But then you guess she knows all this already.

  You now sit in the hotel room, half a buttock uncomfortably perched on a corner of the same bed in which you and Giulietta had once made love in every conceivable position, while the young woman from the vaporetto stands by the door, observing you in silence, a detached interrogator in the house of love.

  “Do you even have a name?” you ask her.

  “Do you want me to have one?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  She pauses for a moment. Ponders. Decides. “Make it Emma.”

  “Your real name?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Not really, but it feels less awkward you having a name, I suppose.”

  “Makes sense, I agree,” she nods.

  “Emma?”

  “Yes?”

  “Who are you and what the fuck do you want?”

  “Admirably to the point.”

  “And about time too. So?”

  “Jonathan, you know who I am.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Yes, you do,” Emma asserts. “Just think. Hard. Come on …” Then smiles at you. A smile chock-full of compassion, sadness, and finality.

  You blink. Your jaw loosens.

  Deep down inside, you know who Emma really is. Could it happen any other way?

  Did you think she’d just arrive on the scene knocking on the door like the long-expected killers in a Hemingway short story, or dressed in a red vinyl coat like a Venice-haunting dwarf in the movies?

  And again, ask yourself, isn’t it right that she should be a sumptuous long-legged blonde, with tousled hair, emeraldgreen eyes, pale skin, and cheekbones to kill for? The saving grace of fate, or mere coincidence?

  “What now?” Jonathan asks.

  Through the open curtains of the hotel room, he can see the evening darkness take hold of the sky and, beyond the Villa Stella’s shrubbery, descend on the Lido. If he closes his eyes, he can imagine the pinpoint myriad lights across the lagoon illuminating the floating city. The thought occurs to him that he’s never been to Venice at acqua alta when the water surges across Piazza San Marco.

  There are so many things he’s never seen or done.

  “Do you want to keep the light on or should we switch it off,” Emma asks, a note of tender concern in her voice.

  Jonathan deliberates with himself just one brief moment.

  “I think I’d like to keep the light on,” he replies. “It would be nice to see everything. Clearly.”

  “Good choice,” she says.

  Once again he finds himself sitting on the corner of the bed while Emma stands just a few feet away, watching him, a halo of dying light circling her hair as the day retreats in the distance.

  Jonathan sighs. Takes a deep breath. The room is relatively small. There are few hotel rooms he can remember passing through in his travels that were truly large, for reason of budget. He’d feel lost in a large room. It also made him feel closer to them. The women. Cathleen in the Radisson at Heathrow; Claudia in the Hotel de l’Odéon in Paris; Ingeborg at the Prince Conti in New Orleans; Marilena in the Holiday Inn Towers in Chicago, or Nicole in that Seattle skyscraper of a joint whose name has now faded back into the abyss of memory; and New York, New York, Lisa in the Algonquin—the smallest room of all—and Giulietta at the Washington Square Hotel. And Giulietta again at the Condal in Barcelona, and the Pensione Dezi in Rome, and the rented one-story villa by the lake, and here and there and everywhere, he can’t even recall the full catalog of places they visited together after the initial encounter here at the Villa Stella. All the rooms of his life.

  Emma stands motionless. He can smell her perfume. An ever so fleeting touch of Anais Anais tempered with a darker note that softens the floral peaks of the fragrance, no doubt the intrinsic odor of her skin, a smell unique to her. An obscene thought flashes across his mind, speculation on the way her cunt might smell, a subtlety of juices and heat and ardor. Or taste.

  Emma moves.

  Toward him.

  Slowly, on a carpet of air.

  Her fingers graze his cheek and he can feel the coldness. She extends her other arm and her palm cups his chin and the dull toothache he’s been living with for the past fortnight fades away under her touch.

  She unbuttons his shirt.

  Jonathan rises from the bed and now faces h
er as she calmly, and deliberately, continues to help him out of his shirt one button at a time.

  Close to her, he can feel the tiny tremor of her breath. He looks deep into Emma’s eyes. They are mirrors and bottomless abysses. Her lips part. He moves nearer. Their mouths meet. Her tongue unfolds and shyly pierces his willing barrier. A slight taste of sugar, but far from unpleasant, unlike women who munch gum or smoke, which he’s always found disagreeable.

  Jonathan’s tongue in turn ventures forward, inching barely inside her, and meets her teeth. Instinctively, his hands leave his sides and he hesitantly touches her, one hand in the small of her back, the other cradling her neck. Emma doesn’t protest.

  His exploratory movements become bolder. The practiced habits of a lifetime.

  He reverently lifts her top. Her skin has an unbearable softness with the ability to turn all his senses into mush. His hand descends and tiptoes across her rump. Pliant but firm, tight oval cheeks shuddering slightly under his tactile examination.

  Porcelain horizons of pale white skin are unveiled, layer by layer, dimension by dimension.

  In this very room where Giulietta’s flesh had also been revealed to him, similarly pale but with a different, less milky variation in shade, just the hint of an olive tone, the texture of her sexual geography one more variation in the infinite palette of women’s nudity. He knows he shouldn’t be comparing, but it is difficult not to do so. Like a photographer or a filmmaker dissecting every image, every single sensation as it unfolds, a topographer of desire on a quest for the absolute.

  His eyes are drawn to the back of Emma’s calf. Unblemished, where Giulietta displayed a pale brown birthmark in the shape of an island, an inch or so across. His gaze lingers along the utterly smooth desert of her mons, where Giulietta sported a terribly exquisite jungle of jet-black curls.

  They are now both naked.

  He is rock hard.

  Where, comparing again—damnit—in the final months of the affair with Giulietta he’d all too often required pharmaceutical blue assistance to maintain his hard-on, not for lack of desire but because of the passage of time and its effects on his body. A fact he’d always carefully hidden from her, with furtive trips to the bathroom to get the pill from his shaving kit, or the pretext of a sudden headache and the need for the relief of an aspirin.

  Emma’s body is perfection incarnate.

  As if every woman he has ever known has come together, a female version of Frankenstein’s monster dedicated to beauty, a magical cocktail of features, highlights, and idiosyncrasies. A perfection full of imperfections, but tailored to his unwritten preferences.

  The way her eyebrows curve, the distance between her eyes, the height of her delicate, small breasts and the size and indefinable color of her nipples, the puckered depth of her belly button, the circumference of her long thighs and the alignment of her toes, the alluring angle of the empty space between her legs, beneath her love delta, and when she turns briefly, as if displaying herself fully to his voyeuristic gaze, the barely there, almost invisible shimmering blond down in the small of her back illuminated by end-of-day shards of light streaming through the window pane.

  “Come closer,” Emma says.

  They collide in slow motion.

  Jonathan holds his breath as once more their lips touch and a growing tremor begins to course through every synapse in his body. One of the young woman’s hands slithers with utter delicacy down his back as he feels the nubs of hardness of her nipples digging gently into his own chest. The mast of his penis cradling against the velvet skin of her cunt. Like a perfect fit.

  She pulls him down with one quiet and simple gesture and they fall, tangled, on the bed.

  They make love.

  Her grip below is domineering but expert, her mouth sucks the breath out of his lungs as they kiss with desperation, and then, just as he is gasping, she exhales again and the come-and-go of the tide that binds them continues. They fuck, they tumble, they squirm with pleasure, they fight for mutual domination.

  He feels himself thrusting deeper and deeper inside her until there is no way forward as he expands within her walls, occupies her fully, her damp innards roughly caressing every square inch of his stem.

  Jonathan closes his eyes. Abandons himself to the power of desire. Throughout she is silent, almost as if she is observing his thrashing, his animal reactions to her body, encouraging him, steadying him, mounting him. The faces of others he has known flash like lightning in a storm in front of his eyes. The tornado rises. Higher and higher.

  Soon, the pleasure becomes so intense it is almost like pain. His breath is short, his heart is pumping out of control like a runaway train, his skin feels on fire.

  “Yes, yes, yes …”

  He explodes.

  Inside her.

  Inside.

  He feels all the tiredness, the final ounces of energy fade away, like a bird taking elegant flight. His body relaxes.

  His chest hurts now, but his slowing heart both roars and is at peace.

  The young woman disengages from him at last, now a harbor for his seed.

  He opens his eyes and looks at her.

  Nude.

  Pale.

  Hypnotic.

  He wants to say something but the words don’t come. His left arm feels numb.

  His eyes flutter. Trying to communicate.

  “There, there,” she says.

  And the sound of her voice is as soothing as silk.

  “Peace,” she says.

  Beyond her head, he catches a final glimpse of the window that overlooks the Villa Stella gardens.

  It’s dark.

  It’s night on the Lido.

  His vision blurs.

  All is peace. All is dark.

  She rises from the bed, looks down at him, observes the sheen of sweat that covers his sprawled-out body, his fastshrinking cock. She bends down, her small hard breasts grazing his damp chest hair, and, with absurd generosity, closes his eyes.

  In the rising gloom of the room, she looks at Jonathan one last time. “Venice was a good choice, my love,” she whispers softly.

  She dresses.

  Leaves the room. The hotel. The island.

  It’s early morning before the first vaporetto of the day on line one arrives at the departure pier. The sky is gray and desolate still as she boards, the sole passenger.

  She sits at the back, now dressed in black.

  Soon, she will be moving up the Grand Canal, past the Doge’s Palace and San Marco and the stately procession of bridges, oblivious to all the beauty of the ethereal morning light falling on the waters.

  Venice, she knows, has two islands for the dead embraced within the compass of its lagoon: San Michele, where locals and celebrities are buried; but also Poveglia, where the forgotten lie, a shore of ashes that began with the bubonic plague centuries ago, white bones and dust washed over by the waters, a place of charred remains which the fishermen studiously avoid.

  For a brief moment she wonders whether Jonathan would feel at home there.

  But another collection beckons. A man called Conrad who lives in London, and is on a visit to Aosta.

  Time doesn’t even wait for angels of death.

  The vaporetto turns the bend.

  PANTEGANA

  BY MICHELLE LOVRIC

  Santo Stefano

  I’ll admit this much.

  The girl’s death was my fault as much as anyone’s.

  In the middle of the blindfold hopscotch, as lightning rasped through the raindrops, I nipped her ankle where the hem of her nightdress clung. She squealed and flung her lighted candlestick up in the air. Unfortunately, her umbrella was made of wood and canvas. Protected from the rain, the flame from the flying candle gushed up the umbrella’s shaft and snatched the fabric between the spindles.

  Still, she might have lived—if only the watching man had rolled her to the sodden flagstones and beaten the flames from her hair.

  And yes, perhaps he m
ight have done it, if he hadn’t just had the six silver blades of a gondola ferro impaled between his shoulders.

  Let us imagine a row of stars at this point, and turn from this scene so redly saturated in treachery. We’ve all got memories. And Il Gazzettino immortalized it in diagrams for days afterward. I made a nest of them, down where I sleep; the same place where I keep the crabs I’ve snatched until they’ve melted to a quiet pungent death.

  It didn’t take long for the crabs to melt, not that particular August. It was the worst I could remember, and I’m not young. There was a heat to make hell seem like a spring holiday. For days, it had been hot enough to sear the thin skin of your ears: a mummifying, thrumming, compassionless heat. My eyes hurt from the burned-out sun that sequinned the tired water with cheap gold. Nor was there any relief after sunset. Those sultry evenings, the mosquitoes stage-whispered incessantly about the ambushes and massacres they were planning for the early hours. The flowers browned in their window pots; tides lingered so low that the seaweed rotted; refuse seethed in the bins. All around us, the air hung thicker with death than the inside of a crematorium chimney. We craved a thunderstorm. We were addicted to the thought of it. Instead, the sky taunted us with nothing but occasional and thin emissions of rain. Even the raindrops arrived parboiled.

  Remembering that heat has addled my memory, and I’ve forgotten what I was telling.

  Ah yes. But why did I bite the girl?

  I’m fond of an ankle; a female ankle.

  It is harder to change your nature than to change the object of your affection. Ankle by ankle, I’d been involved with dozens of girls in Venice, not a one of whom saw me crouching in a flowerpot or still as stone behind a drainpipe as she passed. I blend with marble like grouting. People will walk into a room where I am and say, “Oh, no one here.”

  Usually, I let them continue to think that’s the case. If I don’t, the consequences can be unpleasant, or violent, for me.

  I used to watch that girl walking down our calle. There was a jagged little lilt to her gait. Evidently an old injury to my affectioned part—a fall years ago, perhaps, an undignified crumple in a gutter on a night of wine.