Dubin's Lives

by Bernard Malamud

  Pigeons rose, wheeling, fluttering over them in the Piazza San Marco. There were a dozen tourists on the Square. Dubin, showing the girl around, pointed out artifacts, objects of interest in and around the Cathedral, reading to her from his guidebook what had been plundered when and where. She listened, looked where he pointed, walked on.

  Kitty, on first seeing the Cathedral, had cried out in delight. Coming to a new city, she walked on air through its streets. Fanny gazed around almost without curiosity, looking back as though she did not trust either what she saw or her response. He was not dissatisfied. She would learn; he enjoyed her company. Fanny liked to lock fingers as they walked—what pleasure the simple gesture gave, what a compliment, flesh on flesh.

  She had a Kodak in her bag and pulled it out to snap his picture. Dubin threw a hand up before his face.

  “Oh, come on—what’s a picture?”

  “Let’s take yours.” He snatched the camera and snapped one of Fanny, her knees bent, extending a palm to a curious pigeon. Another alighted on her head. “Get off me, you shitty bird.” She swatted at it, laughed in embarrassment as the pigeon fluttered away.

  A priest in skirts and biretta, carrying a briefcase and rolled umbrella, perhaps noticing Fanny’s crucifix if not her vital good looks, inclined his head in courteous greeting.

  He offered to take a picture of them with his Polaroid.

  “Let’s, William—”

  Dubin thanked the priest, said it wasn’t necessary. “Are you from the States, Father?”

  “Newark, New Jersey.”

  “Small world, I was born there.”

  “I was born in Trenton,” said Fanny.

  “Were you?” Dubin asked in surprise. “We’re all from the Garden State —maybe the same garden.”

  The three laughed.

  “Where was your wife born?” she asked.

  “Montreal,” he answered, clearing his throat.

  The priest tipped his biretta. “Blessings on you, my child,” he said to Fanny.

  Later she squeezed Dubin’s hand.

  “What made you ask about my wife just then?”

  “Just then I wanted to know where she was born.”

  They wandered on the Piazza, along the galleries toward the Campanile. He asked her impression. “Does this city get to you? Some who see it for the first time wonder if they’re the victims of their imagination.”

  “I like it all right though it isn’t Fat City. I can smell smog. It’s like a whiff of L.A., only oilier.”

  “That’s from the mainland. Still, not everybody loves the Square or Venice itself. Montaigne did but thought it stank. So did Lawrence. In a letter he called it écoeuré—without heart; in a poem he speaks of it as ‘the abhorrent green slippery city of Venice.’”

  “Then why have we come here?”

  “To be together.”

  “But why here?”

  “I thought it might rouse up a bit of magic and blow it around.”

  “Did your wife like Venice?”

  “Encore my wife?”

  “It’s an honest question.”

  “She loves it, although we’ve never been here but a short time before something nasty happens.”

  “What did?”

  “Once I had a manuscript stolen out of my suitcase. I got it back a year later. It was mailed to me in the States and when I reread it I was glad I had lost it.”

  “Why?”

  “It wasn’t a good piece of work—a blow to my pride.”

  “Did anything else happen?”

  “Kitty got awfully sick here.”

  “Like me—the trots?”

  “She ran a high fever—she almost never does—and wanted to leave. She was afraid the plague was back for a visit, but as soon as we were on the plane she recovered and that was that.”

  “What bugs her? Why does she go around sniffing the gas?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Man, it’s weird.”

  “Forget it. Anyway, here we are together.”

  She said she wished they had stayed in Rome.

  “We’ll be back in a day or two. I wanted to scoot up to see if Venice affected you as it does me. Obviously it doesn’t.”

  She momentarily rested her head on his shoulder.

  They had stopped in front of a small jewelry shop. Dubin, noticing something in the window, asked her to excuse him.

  “Can’t I go in with you?”

  “It won’t take more than a minute. I’ll be right out.”

  When he came out of the jeweler’s a moment later, Fanny was earnestly engaged in conversation with a taut-bottomed erect red-haired young man in front of a lavish glass shop a few doors down.

  “This is Amadeo Rossini. He wants us to ride in his gondola,” she said to Dubin.

  “I thought they were mostly stacked away till spring,” he said genially.

  “Not his,” Fanny said.

  “I am steel een my beezinez, signore,” the young gondolier said. He resembled a matador in black T-shirt and jeans. His pants were tight, buttocks elegant.

  “Care for a ride, Fanny?”

  “I wouldn’t mind.”

  The gondolier led them, Dubin carrying Fanny’s cardigan, up a narrow street to a mooring pole where a single battered gondola, its prow spotted with bird droppings—the boat looked as though it had barely escaped a drastic fate—lay in the green water at the dock, lapped by ripples a parting vaporetto made.

  After assisting his two passengers into the bulky boat—he seemed charmed by the vision of Fanny’s black bra through her jersey—Amadeo, wearing his professional red-ribboned yellow straw hat, pushed off with a long oar and the ride began pleasantly in the warmish early-November sun. Fanny, her color restored, lifted her face to the light. If there were Indians in Italy this was an Indian summer’s day.

  Amid the decay what beauty! Many of the palazzi were façade-eroded yet stately, graceful, despite asymmetry of windows and columns. Some houses were boarded up—pigeons nesting in the grillwork—in need of restoration; but their shimmering reflections in the greenish water—salmon, orange, aquamarine—excited Dubin. He lit a cigarillo and smoked contentedly, at times beset by thoughts of Venice subsiding in brackish water at the sea’s bottom to be nibbled at into eternity by bony pale fish. The gondola was gliding toward Ponte Accademia and as he watched the reflections in the water it was no great effort to think himself afloat in an insubstantial world. With open eyes Dubin dreamed of passionate love in a fantastic city.

  The gondolier broke into song. In a pleasant high tenor he celebrated love in a gondola. His eyes, when Dubin turned to look, were anchored on Fanny. Hers, dear girl, were shut as she listened. Perhaps he was singing to her black brassiere? Or was it her gold crucifix that had inspired his song? No doubt simply Fanny herself, sexy Pippa passes. Dubin experienced no jealousy. What he felt in her presence no doubt the young gondolier also felt, but me first by prior contract. I met her once on a country road, wooed her by wanting, flew away with her over the sea. She’s with me—my girl. No point feeling sorry for the gondolier. He has youth; I am momentarily graced by her presence. Next week it’s into my long work again.

  “Two bits for your thoughts,” he remarked to Fanny musing as she watched the water.

  She smiled affectionately, pinched his nose. He bent to her. They kissed in the gondola as the youth sang. She lightly ran her fingers up the inside of Dubin’s thigh.

  “We’re highly visible, should we go elsewhere?”

  “I dig this ride,” she softly sighed.

  The battered gondola with blue seats and faded green carpet glided on, the youth singing still, confessing passion and pain to an unknown ear, Trident maybe? Though he did not understand the Venetian dialect, Dubin made out “jealous husband” in “Le bele toseta ga el mario gelosa,” and was tempted to advise the young man to rest his voice but refrained.

  The boat was in mid-canal after rounding the bend toward the Rialto b
efore he noticed people staring at them from palazzi windows; others from small craft on the canal. It then occurred to Dubin that theirs was the only tourist gondola out that morning. The Venetians were, from old, commercial types, but he beheld no other sightseers around and felt momentary apprehension which he ridiculed but it was there. Had the gondolier on his fat nerve taken them out at a forbidden time? He had waked that morning short of cash and decided it was still summer? So he hauls his banged-up boat from a back canal and goes hunting for belated tourists? Summer anyone? Fanny with Dubin had walked into his practical needs? What a nuisance if they were stopped by the police motoscafo. He looked around and saw the municipal garbage scow, trailed by floating lettuce leaves and a few boiled onions bobbing in the wavy water.

  There was also a sand barge and a variety of rowboats, blunt- and sharp-nosed, plus assorted topi delivering produce, meat, cases of beer, even a small coffin for a child or midget.

  A hairy-chested man called to them from a barge filled with gray sand.

  “What’s he saying?” Fanny asked.

  “Get off the canal, they need the water.”

  “Va fan’gulo,” chanted the gondolier.

  The hairy bargeman cupped his palm over his upper arm, thrusting the free fist into the air.

  Unaffected, Amadeo went on singing his love songs. Now he celebrated a petite blonde in a gondola, who out of exquisite pleasure went to sleep as the gondolier rowed. Dubin had asked him what the song was about. To what end he did not sing. A few people crossing the outer stairs of the Rialto stopped to look at the boat. A woman with flowers waved at them. Dubin, facing an audience, felt self-conscious: glad-ragged goat of fifty-six courting a chick of twenty-two who’d be better served, at least in appearance, by the youth who rowed them. I should be rowing them.

  Why, he asked himself, didn’t this happen to me when I was twenty-five and had less to be self-conscious about? Why was I studying law when I should by some miracle have been in Venice? He felt false and hungered for privacy.

  “Pull over,” he said to the gondolier. “We want to get off.”

  “Oh, not yet, please,” Fanny said.

  “Pull over to the dock,” Dubin said. “If the police come we may be ordered off the canal.”

  “You mak’ meestake, signore,” the gondolier replied, angered. “No one ’as the right to tell me when I weel work or what to do, if ees summer or weenter.”

  But Dubin, still uncomfortable, insisted and paid him off; to placate Fanny he included a healthy tip over an exorbitant fee. The handsome gondolier lifted his straw hat, bowing stiffly. His copper head of hair remained an enduring vision.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that, William,” Fanny said on the embankment, her face tense. “So what if the guy was singing at me? It did no harm.”

  Dubin denied the singing had bothered him. He said he was restless. “There’s so much to see in the city. We’ll do better on foot. Distances are deceptive here.”

  He insisted on showing her where some extraordinary people had lived and worked. Close by, near the Goldoni Campo where Venetians gather in talky droves each evening, he pointed out the cortile where Marco Polo’s house was supposed to have stood.

  “He left Venice when he was a kid of seventeen for a fabulous journey throughout the East that ended a generation, plus a Venetian war, later, in a dank prison in Genoa. There he dictated a book of his travels, which is, among other things, a masterpiece of observation of an anthropological sort. In folklore he’s become Marco Millioni, the comic liar, but in truth he said what he saw in a precise Venetian way, without poetry or passion, yet he saw well and kept the Asian world in his head until he was able to record it on paper, via the help of a literary hack he discovered in his cell. Two centuries later Christopher Columbus read the book and had one more reason to take off for what was to be the new world. Isn’t it marvelous, Fanny, the way things tie up and turn out?”

  “I read about it when I was a kid.”

  They then hurried, by ways Dubin knew, over stone bridges arching quiet canals, to the Moorish neighborhood where Tintoretto had lived and painted. Fanny and Dubin entered the church of Madonna dell’Orto to see his frescoes. Tintoretto was buried by the side of his favorite daughter Marieta. The biographer told Fanny about the painter—a self-educated imaginative man of genius.

  “Some say he painted too much and wasn’t as good as the Venetian best, but many of his pictures knock me cold. His miracles have the mysterious force of the miraculous. Marieta was herself a fine portrait painter who used to help in his studio dressed in the then equivalent of dungarees. She died young, at thirty, and he mourned her the short rest of his life. There’s a legend that he painted her portrait as she lay dead.”

  “Didn’t he paint her when she was alive?”

  “Probably. This was something else—a last act of love.” Dubin, as he talked, perspired.

  “Maybe he flipped,” Fanny said.

  Reversing direction when they were once more outside, Dubin led her back to St. Mark’s and then along the embankment to the Chiesa S. Maria della Pietà. Fanny was showing fatigue. He asked her if she wanted to rest but she said she would stay with it if this was the last of the sightseeing that morning. Dubin assured her it was.

  In the church he said: “Here once stood a church orphanage with a music chapel for girl foundlings. Rousseau said there wasn’t one of them without some considerable blemish but when they played their beautiful music he saw less and heard more. Vivaldi was known as ‘il prete rosso’—he had auburn hair; he taught them to fiddle and sing, and confessed himself in waterfalls of stringed music. He worked there, off and on, for forty years, composed in a hurry, and earned thousands of ducats. Kings came to hear his concerts but in the end he ran afoul of the Pope’s nuncio and fell out of favor, presumably for neglecting to say Mass; not to speak of his friendship with a singer and her sister who had traveled with him for fourteen years. He spent money like water and died a pauper. Like Mozart’s, his grave has vanished, but given his music who needs it?”

  Her face was weary. “Jesus, all you think about is biography.”

  “Not all,” he said with a light laugh.

  Dubin explained that since they were so near where men of this kind had lived it was only right to stop by and pay their respects. “I get this mind-blowing sense—as you say—of their lives and quality. I’m taken by those who celebrate life by making much of their own. It’s a subtle altruism.”

  “If genius is your bag.”

  Dubin thought their genius made their humanity more clearly apparent. “One learns easily from their ordinary lives.”

  “I’ve got my own to live.”

  “To live it well—”

  Though her mouth drooped, Fanny assented.

  She said she was dead tired and could they now go home? “At least in the gondola it was a ride.”

  Dubin led her by short cuts back to the Hotel Contessa, but not before he had stopped off at the jeweler’s he had visited earlier, to pick up a bracelet for Fanny, a twenty-two-carat gold band overlaid with a spiraling coil, which surprised and delighted her. She kissed him warmly as she admired the handsome bracelet on her extended arm. “I am really genuinely happy.”

  After a light lunch at the hotel, spaghetti al burro with a small bottle of non-gaseous mineral water for her; fettucine with red wine for Dubin, they went out again. Fanny, after the meal, had complained of cramps but they quickly disappeared. The day’s beauty persisted: the flawless sky flared blue; canals encrusted with green sparkling light; and aura of Venice: expansive, enlivened—sense of island, sense of sea, of voyage.

  To Dubin’s surprise, though not Fanny’s, a small fleet of pleasure gondolas appeared on the Grand Canal as though a carnival had been declared. Dubin offered to make restitution for the aborted ride of that morning by taking her out again but she, after seriously surveying the scene, shook her head. He suggested, if her cramps were gone entirely and she felt refreshed, the
Accademia Gallery so she could see some paintings of Tintoretto’s after the frescoes of that morning. But Fanny wanted to do some shopping first and Dubin went with her. She bought discreetly—a few modest presents for friends, which he offered to pay for because she had only fifty dollars with her. She would not accept.

  Wherever they went she cast occasional glances behind. Dubin, looking where she had looked, saw bright sunlight between palazzi. If you saw through dark glasses would that people the world? Fanny removed her shades only to examine the colors of objects in the shops.

  “You feel all right, Fanny?”

  “I guess so. I guess what’s on my mind is that I better have a bath and get some rest instead of tracking along with you to the museum. That is, if you expect me to have energy for this afternoon.” She smiled affectionately.

  “In that case do rest, my dear.”

  She asked him not to stay too long, and Dubin promised to be back at five.

  He took the gallery picture by picture at first, viewing slowly; yet not always seeing: thinking of Fanny as Venus bathing, Venus revived. He stayed until half-past four and considered remaining longer to give her more time to herself—he had thoughtlessly worn her out with walking that morning; but Dubin hadn’t the serenity to wait longer. He left the gallery and as he was recrossing the Accademia bridge, observed below, in a long black gondola on the sunlit canal, an auburn-haired girl with a gray-haired man, his arm draped around her shoulders. They were sitting with their backs to him, the girl resting her bronze head against the old man’s breast. Dubin, watching in a confusion of emotion, called down from the bridge, “Maud—it’s your father! Maud, it’s me!” She did not turn. He hurried down fifty steps and ran, as Venetians watched, across the Campi Morosini and S. Angelo, then into Calle de la Mandola toward the water. After ten minutes he emerged at the Grand Canal close by the Rialto. Dubin arrived before the gondola and waited, winded—not sure what he could say or do or not do—for the boat to catch up with him. But when it floated toward the bridge, the gondola had in it only the gondolier poling it. Could this be the one he had seen? Another that followed contained two young women and a boy. Dubin looked into the distance and beheld no others.