Farewell to the Flesh

by Edward Sklepowich

  This morning it might help him see something other than an impossible chaos in the details of Val Gibbon’s life and death and in the lives of the other people Urbino had become familiar with.

  At first Urbino sought out the quieter areas of the Cannaregio and in fifteen minutes, after crossing over a wooden bridge and going under an archway, he was in the isolated Campo Ghetto Nuovo.

  The square, surrounded by tall narrow tenement buildings, had its usual weekday activity far removed from the frenzies of Carnival. The only people in masks were three young children chasing each other back and forth from a bare tree to one of the covered stone wellheads. They wore yellow plastic masks beneath their woolen hats, the kind of mask Nicholas Spaak had seen on the face of the person standing suspiciously across from the entrance of the Calle Santa Scolastica. Two women, their shopping baskets on the ground, looked with amusement at the children and chatted, occasionally casting apprehensive glances at the lowering sky.

  Urbino didn’t stop but continued to walk briskly out of the square and over the bridge past the synagogues and the shops of metalworkers and carpenters.

  Urbino’s mind was filled with thoughts and speculations about Val Gibbon and his murder. Something was glimmering there in the darkness of his meditations, of this he was sure—something thin, silver, hopefully more strong than it looked. Last night he had called it his Ariadne’s thread and this late morning he still felt the aptness of the image.

  He reviewed most of what he believed was important. His review didn’t begin with Sister Teresa’s summoning him from the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini the evening after Gibbon’s murder but with the days immediately before.

  The reach of his review also extended back into the pasts of the people he had spoken with or been told about, pasts either reluctantly or eagerly confided in him. It wasn’t just Gibbon’s life he tried to understand but the lives of all the others it had touched—the Casa Crispina guests, Rigoletti and Firpo, Tonio Vico and his stepmother, and, of course, Hazel Reeve. His mind was a kaleidoscope of masks and faces, and he wasn’t at all sure that he was yet able to distinguish between them.

  He bought a pastry, eating it as he entered the dark alley that led to the sottoportego running beneath several buildings. Beyond, framed at the end of the passageway, he saw the water traffic of the Cannaregio Canal and people hurrying along the quay.

  He was soon walking against a steady flow of people hurrying to the Piazza from the train station. Most of these were day tourists who would return on one of the last trains after getting their taste of Carnevale. They tended to be among the most boisterous of the revelers but seldom wore elaborate costumes, only paper or plastic masks. Many of them used noisemakers and threw handfuls of confetti. A shower of the brightly colored pieces of paper fell soddenly over Urbino as he entered the Campo San Geremia.

  Looking across the square to the church where the preserved body of Santa Lucia, patron saint of the eyes and sight, reposed in her crystal coffin, Urbino said a quick prayer for the kind of vision that would allow him to see the one true but camouflaged thing in all the confusing falseness. If it were given him, he promised Santa Lucia that he would add his own testimonial to all the discarded eyeglasses, ex-votos depicting eyes, photographs of the cured, and doctors’ certificates of restored vision that the faithful left in homage to the little saint.

  After threading his way through the jammed Lista di Spagna with its trinket shops, restaurants, and hotels, he was happy to reach the Ponte Scalzi that lifted its stone arch far above the busy waters of the Grand Canal. He stopped in the center, surveying the people streaming down the steps of the train station and piling into the waiting water-buses or hurrying on foot toward the Piazza. The sound of shouts and laughter competed with that of all the water traffic.

  The noise and the crowds abated as he went through narrow alleys to a campo he treasured for its unpretentious yet secret air. Though relatively unknown to tourists, this unadorned square, set in a nest of confusing alleys not far from the Rialto and the train station, was typical of a city that flaunted its openness to the eye and the elements while also turning almost incestuously in on itself.

  He stopped for an ombra of red wine and called the hospital. Stella Maris Spaak had been moved from intensive care and could have visitors for short periods of time.

  After leaving the bar he paused to lean against the parapet of a narrow bridge. It was the infamous Ponte delle Tette—the Bridge of Teats—where in the sixteenth century courtesans were permitted by law to expose their breasts to entice reluctant youths into heterosexuality. Some of the prostitutes, however, had more success by simply dressing as boys in doublet and hose.

  Urbino pulled his scarf up further against the cold wind gusting along the canal. Soapsuds were slowly drifting along on the surface of the water and a small plastic bag of refuse nudged the water steps where a group of cats were huddled. From a window above the canal a woman in a knit cap shook out a dusty mop.

  Into this less than romantic scene a black gondola with two reclining figures drifted into sight from beneath the bridge. On such a cold day it was unusual for anyone to venture on a gondola ride. These two people must be both hardy and incurably romantic to do it, and their preference for these secret waters could be said to bespeak a fine discrimination. Gondola traffic was usually concentrated on the Grand Canal between San Marco and the Rialto Bridge and in the network of canals in the San Marco quarter.

  The two figures were so bundled in their scarves and in the blankets provided by the gondolier that they wouldn’t have been out of place in a sleigh in nineteenth-century St. Petersburg. This association amused him and he imagined them as some latter-day Kitty and Levin out for a ride and was about to leave them to their relative privacy when one of the two figures turned around to look up at the bridge. Despite the swaddling of the scarves around the face he could tell that it was a woman, and that the woman was indisputably Hazel Reeve, but she didn’t seem to recognize him, perhaps because of his own scarf pulled up above his chin. Whether she recognized him or not, he didn’t know; she definitely didn’t acknowledge him but turned back to her companion. Urbino’s first thought was that her companion must certainly be Tonio Vico but his second was the admission that he couldn’t even be sure whether it was a man or a woman.

  He watched the gondola make its slow way down the canal and then, preceded by the warning cry of the gondolier, turn down into another waterway that would eventually bring it out into the Grand Canal.

  11

  “Don’t be upset with me, caro,” the Contessa said when Urbino came into her salotto at a quarter to five. “I’ve already seen Josef. Berenice, Oriana, and I were over on Murano and when we were coming back across the lagoon I asked Milo to take us to the hospital. We were practically there as it was. I thought it would be better to do it then because the Lord only knew what I would be faced with when I came back here. And I was right!” she said triumphantly. “Mauro said that Alvise’s sister Siviglia called from Vicenza and will be here at seven, instead of eight-thirty as she had said she would be. She’ll be all ready to go and I’ll look like a frump!”

  “You should be all the more thankful then that it’s a masquerade, Barbara. You can hide behind one of the masks you haven’t decided on yet. I bought you a new moretta yesterday.”

  He gave her the packet that she had been glancing at since he had arrived.

  “Thank you for your generosity, but I have no intention of hiding behind anything!”

  “And if you do end up looking like a frump, Barbara—which I doubt could ever happen—I’m sure everyone will assume it’s the costume of a frump.”

  She stared at him, trying to figure out if he had paid her a compliment or not.

  “But about Josef, Barbara,” he went on, “how did it go?”

  “Not too well at first, I’m afraid, but that was my fault. Oriana left us to see her friend who lives by the Querini-Stampalia. Berenice came with me. All I told her w
as that Josef was restoring the fresco at San Gabriele. I didn’t tell her anything else, don’t worry. Josef seemed pleased enough to see me when I stepped through the door, although he was obviously uneasy, but when he saw Berenice come in, trying to beam good cheer despite her troubles, poor dear, he realized we weren’t going to be alone. I had thought he might prefer it that way since we wouldn’t be able to get into anything that might upset him. But he was upset already so I asked Berenice to wait for me outside.”

  “Did you talk about Sir Rupert?”

  “Not directly. Josef didn’t seem up to it, and I wasn’t either. I told him that you had mentioned your conversation with him and left it at that. I said that all I wanted to hear was that he was all better and that when he got out of hospital he was to come here with me for as long as he wanted or needed. He seemed happy to hear that.”

  “I’m not sure how free Josef is going to be once he does get well.”

  “I didn’t notice any policeman standing at attention outside his door, thank God. They can’t be too concerned about him if he’s left alone from time to time like that—though what a bedridden man who still looks half dead is supposed to do, I’d like to know!”

  “Maybe it’s better that you went without me, Barbara. This way Josef gets two visits instead of one.”

  “He’s had plenty of visitors already today. When Berenice and I were leaving, Sister Teresa was going in to see him with the young woman I saw at Florian’s with Gibbon.”

  “Dora Spaak.”

  “Right. I invited her to come tonight. I told her she could come with Sister Teresa and not to worry if she didn’t have any costume or formal clothes. I was afraid she might be offended at the invitation since her mother was in hospital but her face lit up.”

  “I should be on my way, Barbara,” Urbino said, getting up. “Do you think Milo could take me to the hospital?”

  “Of course, caro.” She smiled, picking up one of the Tunisian cushions and cradling it against her chest. “He won’t be going the most direct way, though. I hope you don’t mind. He’ll be going the whole length of the Canalazzo. I promised Hazel that Milo would take her to Harry’s, You don’t mind being with her as far as there, do you?”

  Something akin to the enigmatic smile she had worn several days ago was on her lips, and once again it had to do with Hazel Reeve. Exactly what she was thinking or feeling behind that smile was impossible to fathom. He hoped his own face was as much a mask as hers.

  12

  For the first five minutes of his trip down the Grand Canal in the Contessa’s motorboat with Hazel Reeve, Urbino couldn’t help thinking how much less romantic it was than riding in a gondola on a back canal. Did Hazel, looking out at the palazzi and water traffic, think the same thing? If she did, she gave no indication.

  “This is absolutely marvelous, isn’t it! Barbara is so lucky. Oh, don’t tell her I said ‘lucky,’ will you?” She reached out to touch his arm gently. “She has the taste and the imagination to do wonderful things with the money she has. I don’t suppose that’s luck, is it? Enough people have the money—maybe that’s where the luck comes in—but they don’t have the taste and the imagination.”

  She shook her head slowly as if she were contemplating her own sad position. Surely she didn’t place herself in the latter category.

  “What about the ones with the taste and the imagination but without the money?” Urbino said. “Would you say they’re un-lucky?”

  “Oh, Urbino, I’m enjoying myself too much to get involved in a serious discussion. All this is such a fantasy!” She indicated the golden lights, the glimpses of ceiling frescoes, chandeliers and warm interiors, the water taxis with their costumed groups pulling up in front of the water entrances of the palazzi, the decorated facades of the buildings, the festive groups crowded on the boat landings, the dark lustrous waters and the other craft gliding soundlessly by. “Why break the spell?”

  Her rhetorical question described just what Urbino hoped to be able to do before they reached Harry’s—break the spell of this trip down the Grand Canal and get Hazel Reeve to tell him a few things.

  Hazel kept asking him to name the various palazzi, churches, and buildings doubled in the dark waters of the Grand Canal. She wasn’t content with mere names but also wanted histories, lineages, operatic tales of love, passion, and death. He was happy that his own knowledge and the rich human history of the Grand Canal made it possible to give her what she wanted.

  Her hunger, however, made him a little uneasy. Was there something else behind it? Could she be keeping him occupied so that they wouldn’t have to talk seriously, as Berenice Pillow had seemed to be doing for part of their walk back from the wine bar yesterday? Did she hope that her enthusiasms and his encouraged accounts would keep them away from other topics until she was safely deposited at Harry’s?

  He intended to try to find out.

  His first opportunity, and perhaps his best, came when they were passing the Ca’Rezzonico where Browning had died more than a hundred years ago.

  “You might know that Browning died here.” He indicated the magnificent facade of the palazzo. “I’ve often thought that Venice was an appropriate place for him to die. After all, he was a poet of masks wasn’t he? He’s always wearing one in his poems. He’s Porphyria’s lover, he’s the brother in the Spanish cloister, he’s the Duke of Ferrara and Fra Lippo Lippi and Abt Vogler and Andrea del Sarto and all the Italians in The Ring and the Book—even the Pope himself! I don’t feel as if I know Browning but I love him.”

  Hazel looked at him with her widely spaced eyes that glimmered from the lights outside the Contessa’s boat. Urbino started to recite a stanza from one of Browning’s poems about Venice:

  “Past we glide, and past, and past!

  Why’s the Pucci Palace flaring

  Like a beacon in the blast?

  Guests by hundreds not one caring

  If the dear host’s neck were wried:

  Past we glide!”

  “That’s from ‘In a Gondola,’” Hazel said, and started to recite some lines from the poem herself.

  “Dip your arm o’er the boat side, elbow deep,

  As I do, thus: were death so unlike sleep,

  Caught this way?”

  Neither of them said anything as they passed under the Accademia Bridge. As its shadows flickered over her face, Hazel pulled her coat more tightly around her. The scarf she had muffled her face with earlier in the gondola was loose now around her neck.

  “But we can’t dip our arms in the water in this boat, can we, Urbino?” she said. “Things have changed since the days of Browning and Elizabeth Barrett.”

  “And don’t forget that the gondolas had a felze then, a little black cabin with louvered windows where the passengers could shelter from bad weather and be private.”

  She didn’t say anything. Was she thinking that he had finally broken the spell? She was staring at the Gothic Palazzo Barbara. Perhaps he could still provoke her into a revelation.

  “Browning stayed there. So did Sargent and James. In fact, James had one of his characters, an American heiress, die there after she found out that the man she loved had betrayed her.”

  The Contessa’s boat passed the Palazzo Barbaro and several other palazzi before Hazel said, “Women seldom die for such things except in books, Urbino, and when they do they don’t just ‘turn their face to the wall’ and expire the way she did. And neither do they will all their money to the man who deceived them.”

  It was obvious she knew James’s story well.

  “The days of fine renunciatory gestures like that have gone forever,” Urbino said, thinking of how she had refused to put aside her promise to her father about the prenuptial agreement.

  “If they ever existed. And if they did, I’m not sure they should have,” she surprised him by saying, given what she had told him about her own scruples.

  “That palazzo there,” he said, indicating the low white building to their right, �
��is the Peggy Guggenheim museum. The ‘Unfinished Palazzo’ as it’s called. If it had been finished it would be the largest palazzo on the Grand Canal.”

  She stared at the building with its horse and rider by Marino Marini facing the Grand Canal through the water gate.

  “To think of all the modern art behind those walls,” Hazel said. “It strikes me as being out of place in the city of Carpaccio and Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto. Venice doesn’t belong to the modern world, even if we are going down the Grand Canal in a motorboat.”

  “Peggy Guggenheim was the last to have her own private gondola.”

  “Did it have a felze that she could hide inside?” She smiled. “Are we playing games with each other with all this talk about gondolas, Urbino? That was you on the bridge today, wasn’t it? You probably wondered why I didn’t say hello but at first I wasn’t quite sure if it was you. I am a bit nearsighted.” She avoided his eyes for a few moments and stared at the landing stage of Santa Maria del Giglio where a crowd of people waited for the boat. She turned back to him. “When I realized that it was you, I didn’t say hello because I was a little embarrassed. To tell you the truth I wasn’t absolutely sure you knew it was me either. You didn’t indicate that you had.”

  “You were rather muffled up.”

  “Could you see who I was with?”

  “As I said, I could barely recognize you.”

  She looked at him assessingly. He could sense her suspicion and nervousness.

  “It was Xenia Campi, you know.” She laughed. It sounded genuine. “Yes, Xenia Campi. I’m embarrassed to admit it.” There was an awkward smile on her face. “That’s another reason why I didn’t say hello.”