Farewell to the Flesh

by Edward Sklepowich

  “Guess.”

  “I couldn’t—unless—”

  “Yes?”

  “Could it be Valentine?”

  His quick laugh made her feel foolish. She dared not look up right away but busied herself with her napkin. When she felt strong enough to encounter his dark eyes again, however, she saw that they were no longer alone. Xenia Campi, the Italian woman who lived at the pensione and claimed to be able to see into the future, was standing next to Val, a frown on her heavily made-up face.

  “Excuse me, sir.” Stout, black-haired, and in her mid-forties, the Italian woman spoke deliberately in heavily accented English. She put her hand on the top of the chair behind which Val Gibbon was standing. “This is my seat.”

  “Excuse me, signora! Everything in order here in the convent. What would happen if it wasn’t, even during Carnival—or should I say especially during Carnival!”

  Val Gibbon moved aside so that the woman, wearing a plum-colored, robelike dress with voluminous sleeves, could take her accustomed place next to Dora. Before he went to the other side of the table, the photographer bent down close to Dora’s ear and whispered, “Nothing as romantic as that, I’m afraid, but thank you for thinking so. It shows you have a tender imagination.”

  He went to sit down near the end of the table, his back to the partly open door. As he unfolded his napkin, he looked over at Dora.

  “A very tender imagination,” he added with a smile.

  Dora looked away. She had been surprised to see Val Gibbon in the dining room tonight, not because he had come upon her unawares and seemed to enjoy doing it, but because he hadn’t eaten at the Casa Crispina for several nights in a row now. She had missed him. No matter what the others might say, she could tell he was in every sense a gentleman. He was like one of those Englishmen who always ended up being especially nice to poor young girls in the books she used to read. They might have seemed strange and even gruff at first, hiding some disturbing secret, but they always made up for it before the end of the story.

  On the second evening of Val Gibbon’s absence, Xenia Campi had said, “I don’t foresee good things for a man who has money to throw away like that.”

  Whether this was an opinion or the fruit of the woman’s supposedly clairvoyant vision, Dora didn’t know and didn’t want to know. Dora was in almost constant fear that the woman would say something about her future. It wasn’t that she believed that Xenia Campi—or anyone—could see into the future, but she was superstitious. She was sure that the ill the woman might claim to see would come true, just because she had dared utter it. As for the good she might predict, that was sure to fly away as quickly as the pigeons in St. Mark’s Square whenever there was any sudden sound.

  Tonight Xenia Campi looked particularly humorless and depressed, and had an unnatural restraint that made Dora feel as if she might strike out at any moment at her or the photographer with some dire prediction or scathing indictment. Dora was relieved when Nicholas, without their mother, took his seat on her other side.

  He was soon followed, noisily, by the three teenage boys from Naples. Xenia Campi darted a quick glance at one of the boys, who avoided looking at her and started to talk nervously to his companions. The three boys usually kept very much to themselves, not saying more than a few words of greeting during their meals and never staying longer than was necessary. They were here for Carnival and obviously didn’t want to spend any time away from more exciting things in the big square.

  “And how are you feeling this evening, Signora Campi?” Nicholas asked.

  “Much better, thank you. My cold is almost gone.”

  “Mr. Lubonski isn’t as fortunate, I’m afraid.”

  The Pole who was restoring the fresco in the nearby church was confined to his room with the flu.

  “Signor Lubonski’s condition is much more serious than mine, I assure you.”

  Xenia Campi said this as if, from the privileged position of someone born with a caul, she saw things about the man’s lungs that even an X ray couldn’t.

  Nicholas turned somewhat hesitantly to Val Gibbon. Dora had noticed that her brother was frequently self-conscious with Gibbon and would hardly look him in the face when he spoke to him. She attributed this to his characteristic shyness around very outgoing people. It didn’t mean he didn’t like them. In fact, she had always thought it was very much the opposite.

  As her brother addressed Val Gibbon now, Dora was pleased to note the almost boyish enthusiasm behind his words.

  “You must be finding plenty of things to photograph in Venice during Carnival, Mr. Gibbon. It must be difficult to know what not to take a picture of when there’s so much to choose from.”

  Gibbon smiled at him.

  “Not at all, Mr. Spaak. That’s the difference between an amateur and a professional. Photography is one of the arts, you know. Like all artists, the true photographer is an initiate in mysteries unknown to others.”

  Xenia Campi, with no attempt to hold her voice down, said to Dora, “There’s no more art in taking a picture than there is in making a ragout!”

  Dora hoped Val Gibbon didn’t think ill of her for being the recipient of the remark. She would have frowned at the woman except for her fear that it might draw even more notice—or that the woman would turn her ill will on her. Her heart went out to the photographer. He might be good at pretending to be strong, but she sensed that he was almost as vulnerable as she was to an unkind word.

  “Ah, but Signora Campi,” Gibbon said as he turned to the woman, “surely you know that there are cooks and there are chefs, there are holiday picture takers and there are photographers—just as surely as there are Luna Park frauds and whatever might be the opposite in your own profession. You see that I am kind enough to call it a profession.”

  Xenia Campi’s eyes widened but she said nothing. One of the boys at the far end of the table started to laugh loudly and was soon joined by the other two. They began to sing a song in Italian. Dora couldn’t understand the song but Xenia Campi frowned in their direction, and the boy she had glanced at earlier stopped singing.

  Poor Val Gibbon held his head high but Dora could see his bruised heart. It was just as exposed for her as was the Flaming Heart of Jesus that graced the wall of her room upstairs.

  The serving woman came in from the corridor with a tureen of steaming soup. Dora sighed. Another meal at the Casa Crispina was about to begin.

  2

  Urbino looked down from the window of the Palazzo Uccello straight into the eyes of Death.

  Only a few moments earlier, Urbino had put aside the volume of Remembrance of Things Past and gone to the window. Someone is in the calle, he had said to himself, even though he had heard nothing.

  He had been right. The Palazzo Uccello had been visited on this February evening by Death and the Lady of Veils.

  Death was tall, dressed almost all in black. Black boots, black leggings and gloves, a black steeple of a hat pulled down over a mad jumble of black crepe Medusa locks. The eyelets of the white oval mask were trimmed in black. Hundreds of featherlike ebony scraps had been sewn together to form a cape that its wearer hugged close.

  The Lady of Veils was a vision in white. In fact, with her cascade of short veils framing a delicate mask, her gauze robe, gloves, feathered fan, and slippers—all ghostly white—she seemed to be an emanation of the fog that was curling over the bridge from the canal and drifting into the alley.

  Death, conscious of his audience, extended his arms, and suddenly became a burst of color, exposing long tatters of crimson, indigo, yellow, jade, and pink cloth sewn to the torso of the garment beneath. It was like seeing someone eviscerated. The beauty was perversely enhanced for Urbino by the horror of the association.

  The Lady of Veils moved closer to Death and let herself be enclosed in the blossom of his embrace.

  Was the Lady a woman and Death a man? There was no way of knowing. They carried their secret away with them as they broke their embrace and seeme
d to glide over the humpbacked bridge. The calle was empty once again of everything except the drifting, curling fog.

  Serena, the cat he had rescued from the Public Gardens, jumped up on the sill to get Urbino’s attention. He turned back into the room and took Schumann’s Carnaval from the shelf. The Contessa had given him the recording to help him through his recuperation from a bout of the flu that had kept him housebound for almost a week.

  “It should more than make up for whatever of Carnevale you think you’re missing, caro.” She had sighed and shaken her well-coiffed head. “Why can’t our celebration be sane and romantic like Schumann’s?”

  “But it wouldn’t be the Venetian Carnival then, would it?” He did not remind her of the sad suicidal end that Schumann had come to. “I wish it were two months long the way it used to be,” he said playfully. “Just imagine if it began the day after Christmas!”

  “Even after ten years, you’re as much of a perplexity as when I first met you! I thought you cherished your solitude, that you had come here to Venice to be away from it all. Isn’t it enough that you’re forcing me to give this costume ball?” she said with little regard for how she had actually arrived at this decision a month ago. “Oh, yes, caro, you’re a perplexity to me—a dear, sweet one but a perplexity nonetheless.”

  “Am I so different from you? You enjoy your solitude, too, and yet you negotiate drawing rooms like a goldfish in a crystal bowl. You’re in your element then.”

  “Of course I am!” she had said, visibly pleased with his image. “But with you the two are horrible extremes. You could use some order and balance. Listen to Carnaval.”

  That’s just what he would do now. He put the record in the player and sat on the sofa. The soothing notes of the “Préambule” filled the room, followed by the movements of Pierrot and Harlequin, those two commedia dell’arte figures of the spirit and the flesh. Naïve Pierrot and coarse Harlequin. Now there were two extremes, Urbino thought as he pictured the figures against his closed eyelids. Could the spirit of the one inhabit the flesh of the other? He would have to pose this riddle to the Contessa.

  Two screams from the calle interrupted the “Valse noble” and Urbino went to the window again. The alley and the bridge seemed deserted. He was about to turn away when a form detached itself from the shadows near the bridge and crept along the calle past the Palazzo Uccello. Whether a man or a woman he couldn’t tell any more than with Death and the Lady of Veils a little while ago.

  The form was swathed in long dark robes, its face covered with an equally dark hood. When it neared the opening of a courtyard, a second form bounded from the shadows and, with another of the screams that had caught his attention, ran down the calle and beyond Urbino’s sight. The first figure quickened its pace in pursuit as a cry floated back and up to the closed window.

  What had he seen? A playful game of hide and seek? One person pursuing another with evil intent? An argument between friends that might end with them kissing each other?

  The appearances could cover any of these realities.

  Urbino went back to the sofa. The fifth movement had begun. Reaching out to stroke the cat, Urbino smiled to himself.

  If Barbara could only see me now, he thought. This was almost as good as a cork-lined room, and he was more than content—at least for the time being.

  3

  Schumann’s Carnaval ended. Urbino poured himself another glass of Corvo and picked up the Proust, opening it to where a postcard reproduction of Man Ray’s photograph of Proust’s death profile marked his place.

  He had read Remembrance of Things Past several times before but he was reading it now because of the book on Proust he was adding to his Venetian Lives series. Proust and Venice would focus on the role the city had played in the writer’s life and art. It would have reproductions of paintings by Carpaccio, Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto and photographs of Venetian scenes and buildings by the city’s premier photographer, Porfirio.

  Urbino had reached the point where Proust’s narrator finally gets to Venice after years of expectation and postponement and after the sudden death of his beloved Albertine. Inevitably, despite Marcel’s appreciation of the beauty and secrecy of the city, he finds himself somewhat disillusioned, and by the time he is about to leave, Venice is no longer an enchanted labyrinth out of the Arabian Nights but something sinister and deceptive that seems to have little to do with Doges and Turner. It doesn’t even seem to be Venice any longer, but a mendacious fiction where the palaces are nothing but lifeless marble and the water that makes the city unique only a combination of hydrogen and oxygen.

  Urbino read for a while and then put the book down again, finding it difficult to concentrate tonight on the subjunctive and the imperfect, on the essential melancholia at the lime-blossom heart of Proust’s style and story.

  Followed by Serena, who had been sleeping on one of the maroon velvet seats of the mahogany confessional on the other side of the room, he went to the study and put Children of Paradise in the video machine.

  Urbino didn’t know how much of the long movie he would be able to watch before dropping off to sleep, but he knew the tragic story of a mime’s love for a beautiful actress so well that he could start it at any point without any problem. With its retelling of the story of Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine and its great final scene in which the mime Baptiste is separated forever from his beloved Garance by the mad Carnival crowd, it was particularly suited to the season.

  He settled himself in his favorite armchair, Serena nestled against him, as the story started to unfold. Garance, the voluptuous yet tenderly maternal woman for whom love was “terriblement simple,” was watching a performance in front of the Funambules. In just a few moments Baptiste would fall in love with her forever.

  Urbino found himself almost holding his breath. Serena purred. The childlike Baptiste, dressed as a clown all in white, turned in Garance’s direction and looked at her with his soulful eyes.

  Ah, there, it had happened! The rest—passion, yearning, jealousy, death, and separation—they all were fated now.

  4

  A small rose-colored object flew through the air at Urbino. He didn’t have time to avoid it and it smashed against his black Austrian cape. A colorless liquid splashed out, soaking into the cape and sprinkling his face.

  Fortunately the painted egg had been filled with rose water. Urbino brushed the eggshell from his cape and smiled at the boy who had made him his target. Dressed in a multicolored clown costume with a long tail and rabbitlike ears, the boy carried a basket filled with eggs. Another boy, also dressed as a mattaccino, stood next to him. They both laughed. Urbino waved. The mattaccini continued on their way, throwing an occasional egg but saving most of them for the Piazza.

  The Strada Nova was busy with shoppers, tourists on their way to the Piazza, and merchants behind their outdoor stalls. Spirits were high on this clear, brisk afternoon. Urbino had taken a detour on his way to the Church of San Gabriele to get his first, up-close sight of Carnival.

  Young children in frilly skirts, tutus, baggy pants, feathers, face paint, and the masks of cartoon characters shouted and raced through the crowd. A mother pushed her daughter along slowly in a stroller. Both had red balloons lifting their ponytails. A group of chess figures—knights, queens, and bishops—strolled along sedately, followed by a pack of devils darting mischievously through the crowd and pretending to steal things from the booths.

  Even many of those in street clothes wore masks or had them hanging around their necks or tucked into their pockets. Urbino’s own red half mask was hanging around his neck.

  In the Campo Santa Fosca, mandolins and guitars played and a high, sweet voice sang Lorenzo Il Magnifico’s opening lines from The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne:

  “How beautiful is youth

  which is fleeing by!

  Whoever wishes to be happy,

  let him be so

  for tomorrow holds no promises.”

  The singer
was a Gypsy boy about twelve with dark circles under his eyes. The three swarthy musicians continued to play as the boy took off his cap and went around the crowd for money. He brought the money over to one of the men and started another song, his voice just as sweet as before but his face even more weary-looking.

  5

  Half an hour later Urbino climbed the paint-splattered ladder in the right nave of the Church of San Gabriele. He stood on the wooden platform, not even six feet square, and looked down at the uneven stone floor more than twenty feet below. The longer he looked at it the farther away it seemed. It had an almost hypnotic effect and only with some effort was he able to turn his attention to the fresco.

  It was a sixteenth-century work by one of Titian’s followers and depicted Saint Gabriel in three of his heavenly missions: to Daniel, Zachary, and—most prominent of all in the center—to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Giulio Licino had had only a faint glimmer of the robustness and magical color of his master, but the fresco, dimmed now by the years and the pollution that managed to invade even the church itself, deserved to shine with its original beauty, inferior though it might be to Titian’s.

  Urbino had looked up at the fresco dozens of times since he had moved to Venice. Never had it occurred to him that someday he would be helping to restore it.

  He smiled at his exaggeration. He was more in the position of only observing the restoration of the fresco. Lubonski, however, let him do some of the less difficult things that a skilled workman might be trusted with, such as applying the first coat of lime plaster, the trullisatio, to the severely damaged areas. Sometimes Urbino felt the way he had one long ago summer fetching and handing tools to his father as he had built a gazebo in their backyard.

  Last summer he had studied art restoration on the lagoon island of San Servolo and at the Palazzo Spinelli in Florence to prepare himself for a brief biography of the Minolfis, a renowned Venetian family of restorers. He had taken the commission at the request of the Contessa, who was close to the family.