The Gondola Maker

by Morelli, Laura

  “Luca, I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” He turns his oar to slow the craft, then gently bumps the side of the boat on the quay. “I rowed first to the remero’s studio, but they said you had already left. Then I thought you might be in this part of town instead,” the lanky boy continues, looking past my shoulder toward the street where Annalisa’s house lies. I register panic on my brother’s face. “Brother, please, come quickly!” I step into the boat.

  “It’s Mamma.”

  Chapter 5

  My brother uses the puparin’s single oar to maneuver the boat down the narrow channel with swift and able strokes. This particular puparin is similar in design to, but smaller than, our family’s gondolas, and is better suited to Daniele’s youthful frame. We prefer taking the puparin over one of the gondolas because the lighter craft is easier to maneuver. Still, the boat is four times as long as the boy; yet Daniele makes rowing it look nearly as effortless as walking. His forearms, too fully developed for a boy of fifteen, propel the boat ever faster toward the family boatyard as the sun sinks below the horizon and the sky over the Grand Canal grows dim.

  “The midwife looked worried,” his voice wavers. I notice now that Daniele’s eyes are reddened and a drop of sweat slides down his temple. The craft slices the still water, sending ripples to lap against the stone walls of buildings lining the canal. Daniele’s legs rock gently back and forth, hefting the oar.

  “What—why?! This morning Mamma seemed well enough.” My hands grip the sides of the boat, my knuckles straining, as I lean toward my brother.

  “I don’t know,” continues Daniele tearfully. “I heard the midwife say the baby is stuck. Oh, Luca, Mamma looks terrible! Her skin is ashen and she’s not speaking.” He sniffles and sputters as he rows even faster.

  “For God’s sake! I told Father that she was too old to have babies! Look what he has done to her!” I thunder without thinking, slapping my knees. “The woman is forty-four years old! Doesn’t he have enough children?” I’ve said too much, even to my own brother.

  I fall silent, remembering the evening when our parents had announced the news of Mamma’s latest pregnancy over a bowl of vegetable stew. Mamma blushed, while our father beamed and teased her a bit before taking a bottle of Uncle Tino’s best homemade wine into the boatyard to celebrate.

  But I had felt nothing but disgust. I pled with Mamma to make it the last time. And now is she really going to die? I ask angrily. I do not speak out loud against my father this time, but I curse him inside my head.

  “They called for Father Davide,” Daniele continues, lowering his voice to a whisper as we approach the squero. Uncle Tino is waiting for us at the narrow dock that runs along the canal-side entrance to our house. When he spies the puparin, he begins to wave his hat.

  “Tutto bene! Tutto bene!” he cries, wiping tears from his eyes. “E arrivato il piccolino!” The little one has arrived.

  “Mamma?” pants Daniele, now breathless from making his fastest-ever crossing of the Grand Canal.

  My uncle extends his arms to grab the stern of the boat as it slows. “She’s sick, but she will live,” he replies, offering his arm to hoist us from the boat.

  “Madonna mia,” I sigh.

  We sprint down the short alley. As we cross the threshold into the dark coolness, we hear a baby crying. Father Davide, an elderly priest who baptized all of us, is putting on a hat to match his somber black cloak. As he exits the kitchen, he says nothing but smiles wearily and squeezes my arm.

  In the candlelight, I see my mother propped up in bed, pulling a newborn baby with a full head of black hair to her bare breast. The smell of sweat and blood fills the house. I try to quiet my thundering heart as I step into the room. Daniele, still panting, follows. Mariangela looks up from where she kneels on the floor, wringing blood from a rag over a bowl of black water. My sister’s face is completely drained of color; she looked exhausted, as if she has aged twenty years in one day. The midwife, a plump, pragmatic woman who has attended my mother many times, perches on the edge of the bed. She lays a gentle hand on Mamma’s leg and talks quietly to her.

  Mamma musters a smile as we enter the room. She looks awful, her eyes sunken and ringed with dark circles. Her lips are dry and cracked, her hair a tangled bird’s nest. I have never noticed so many streaks of gray through the frizz of her tousled locks.

  “It’s a boy. Isn’t he beautiful?” She pulls the baby from her breast and turns him so we can see our brother’s face. The baby’s cheeks are flushed with color, his eyes like black marbles. The skin of the baby’s chest and back are nearly transparent. Web-like blue veins trail beneath the surface, and I feel as though I could almost see the baby’s tiny heart beating. “Antonio,” Mamma whispers.

  The midwife shushes her, then addresses us. “Your mother has had a very difficult delivery. She needs her rest now.”

  “He’s perfect, Mamma,” I say, and I lean down to kiss her forehead, which feels clammy and smells sour.

  My father, brother, and I set up makeshift cots in the workshop so that Mamma and the baby can rest. Mariangela and the midwife stay awake, taking turns keeping a watchful eye on Mamma and the baby. There is little we can do, and we abandon the house to the women. As I listen to my father snore gruffly, images of my mother’s sunken face filled my head, and sleep will not come. After what seems hours of fitful tossing, I rise and step outside.

  The only sounds in the boatyard are the shrill cheeping of a frog and the steady lapping of water against the wall. I descend the slick ramp to the canal and heave myself onto the stones. I exhale as a mixture of pent-up joy, relief, and malaise well up in my breast. I reach my hands into the cool, mossy-smelling water and bring them to my face.

  Out of view of my sleeping family, I finally allow the tears to collect in my palms.

  THE GUILD MEETING is already underway when my father, brother, and I slip quietly into the back pew of our guild chapel. I hear the familiar voice of Armando, the chief officer or gastaldo of the boat makers’ guild, who, as always, insists on reading the statutes aloud from an impressively large book with a gilded cover that normally stands locked away behind an iron grate inside a niche in the chapel wall. Of course, we have all heard it before: how old you must be to be promoted from apprentice to journeyman; how much money each boatman is expected to contribute to the communal retirement and chapel maintenance funds; how we are obliged to cede the making of ferri to the blacksmiths’ guild; how much we would be fined if we hired a non-Venetian in our workshops.

  I glance around me and wonder how many of the men assembled in the chapel could honestly say that they follow every rule to the letter. I search my mind for a time when I witnessed my father go against the guild statutes, but I can’t think of one. For years he has held the position of Overseer of Apprentices, a coveted role to which his peers elected him. In this position, my father’s influence extends to other boatyards, setting the same high standards that he demands in his own workshop.

  “The price of a gondola shall be set by the guild,” the gastaldo intones, and I wonder how many of the men in the chapel are even listening. Several familiar faces turn to greet us with a nod, a smile, or a silent salute. Uncharacteristically, we are late.

  At dawn, Mariangela came to the boatyard to share the news that Mamma and the baby were resting peacefully. I agreed not to disturb them, even as anxious as I felt to see them for myself. My father had risen from his cot in the boatyard hours before, eager to make progress on Signor Pesaro’s new gondola before we had to depart for our annual guild meeting. As pink light dawned over the canal outside the squero, I watched my father inspect the gradual warp of the keel by running his hand down its side. We had torched the side of the boat the day before, tweaking the warp with fire and water, but now Father grumbled to himself as he fingered the seams between the planks. I knew that my brother and I would be required to start over again.
<
br />   The guild meeting adjourns, and the real business of the boat makers begins in the tavern across the square from the church portal. The men, creatures of habit, file across the cobblestones to imbibe a tankard of beer while they nurture the ties that have bound their families across generations. The tavern proprietor, Signora Bruni, serves the men their drinks, greeting each by name. My father’s colleagues crowd around him, congratulating him on the birth of a new son, piccolo Antonio, a new heir to the squero.

  From the sidelines, I watch my father. His thick black hair, flecked with gray, flows neatly away from his high brow, and his dark brown eyes light up as his colleagues praise and congratulate him. He is a handsome man, I admit. Instead of wearing him down, a lifetime of manual labor has kept Domenico Vianello strong and vital. He has aged well.

  In the distance, I hear a church bell, then another, then a third, announcing the mealtime hour. It starts slowly, then the clanging of several dozen church bells build to a crescendo, wildly out of sync. For a quarter hour or more, the entire city sings with the cacophony of peeling bells, urging us home in dissonant voices that echo across the canals. We men begin our return to our boatyards. My father and Uncle Tino stroll down the alleys, joking and teasing one another with familiar banter. My brother, my cousins, and I hang behind the older men. We move through the haphazardly laid-out neighborhoods, which teem with small storefronts that spill over with everything from fruit to birdcages and leather belts, while boats docked along the quaysides function as shops, selling spices, dishes, rugs, and medicinal plants.

  We arrive at our own boatyard, and I cut down the alley to our house, unable to wait any longer to see my mother and the baby.

  As soon as I feel the cool darkness of our kitchen, I know that something is wrong. It is still. Too still. A foul smell fills the air. There is no pot boiling on the fire. There is no fire in the hearth at all.

  I rush to the bedroom.

  Mariangela crouches on the floor at the end of our parents’ bed, her knees drawn to her chest, clutching the infant close to her body. Her face is completely blank, and she stares into space as if she does not realize I have entered the room.

  I look in the bed now. My mother is there. And yet she isn’t. Her frail body has sunken unnaturally into the bed, as if the mattress were trying to consume her. A shocking volume of blood soaks the sheets and spreads outward from beneath her, forming scarlet rings across the linen cover.

  Daniele enters the room now and gasps in horror. “Where is the midwife?” he shouts.

  “She left... She went looking for you,” replies Mariangela weakly. She continues to stare forward blankly.

  I rush to my mother’s side and kneel to look into her face. Her fiery amber eyes are now sunken and dark, her skin ashen and completely lifeless. Her cracked lips hang open slightly. No. It can’t be.

  But there is no doubt about it.

  My mother is gone.

  Chapter 6

  I row the puparin as fast as my arms will take me.

  The sun casts spangled patterns across the vast surface of the lagoon; it is as if floating gemstones gleam and wink at me. The world is oblivious to the horror of my dead mother, her sunken face, the bloody linens. Through my tears, the gems sparkle and shine, blinding me. I row mindlessly, paying little attention to my direction.

  I don’t know how much time has passed when I find myself near one of the public moorings of the Lido, the elongated barrier island that protects the Venetian lagoon from the Adriatic Sea. I lash the boat to one of the posts and climb onto the docks. I wander, not needing to find my way, for Daniele and I have spent many hours on the beach at the Lido on Sunday afternoons when our father finally takes a rest from the squero. On those excursions, we search for shells, watch girls walk along the sandy paths, and eat the crusty bread and cured ham our mother packs for us in a cloth.

  Today is different.

  I wander the beach, which stands eerily deserted. I hug my arms around my ribs to ward off the wind and in an unsuccessful attempt to comfort myself. A barrage of images floats to the surface of my mind, unconnected in time and context. I am in the kitchen, no more than three years old, singing a song while my mother claps her hands and laughs. Next, tears stream down Mamma’s face as she buries her own mother in a tree-lined cemetery plot on Murano. She brushes a lock of hair from her brow while stirring a large pot containing her homemade minestra over the fire. Splintered images emerge into focus, then fade as I shuffle through the sand.

  For long stretches in between, my memory seems to go blank. Is it, I wonder, my mind’s own means to protect itself from unbearable pain? I cannot begin to understand what my mother’s death means for me, for my father, for my brother and sister, for the baby. It is too much. I pick up a shard of a shell and cast it with great force into the foamy surf that laps the hard-packed sand.

  I imagine my mother as a girl on Murano, where my father says he first spied her walking to the vegetable market—a sheer stroke of luck—and trailed her in his rowboat. He followed the dark-haired beauty back to the studio where her father made window glass for the finest private residences in Venice. That night, our father told us, he went straight home to convince his parents to ask the glassmaker for his daughter’s hand. At first, my grandfather resisted, preferring that his son marry someone in their own confraternity, or at least within the boatbuilding trades. I wonder if, given enough time, my mother might even have caught the eye of one of the patrician clients of my grandfather’s glass studio, as beautiful and intelligent as she was. True to form, Domenico Vianello’s persistence paid off, and the marriage was ultimately arranged between the glassmaker’s daughter and the son of the gondola maker. Six months later, fifteen-year-old Donatella was carried off to the Vianello family boatyard in the family’s finest gondola with a new husband some twenty years her senior, while a regatta of aunts, uncles, cousins, and family friends cheered as they processed down the Grand Canal. When my grandfather died, Domenico Vianello inherited the boatyard.

  On any other day, I might stop to appreciate the beauty of the great swaths of pink and blue that streak the dusk sky on the Lido beach. Instead, I turn my back and return to the mooring where I have left the puparin. In a fog of despair amidst the beauty of the color-streaked sky, I row slowly back across the wide lagoon and into the familiar narrow waterways that lead to the squero.

  By the time I reach home, the sky is black and the moon appears as a slender sliver of glowing white. I moor the boat alongside the ramp that leads into the téza. Sighing heavily, I climb out of the boat and walk past the workshop, biting my lip, bracing myself for what awaits me inside the house—surely a collection of grieving siblings, family, and friends—and my mother’s body, again.

  It is time to face it.

  From the corner of my eye, I perceive light and movement, and I hesitate. It can’t be; my eyes must be playing tricks on me. I approach the door of the workshop and peer inside. I can hardly believe my eyes. My father. He is hunched over Signor Pesaro’s gondola. He has stripped off the great oak planks that form the curved sides of the boat, the planks that I expected our father would have us do over again to meet his standards. Now our father is re-forming them himself with a torch, little more than a bundle of marsh reeds set ablaze. The flames make wavering, dancing patterns of light and shadows against the back wall of the workshop.

  “You...” I begin, incredulously. My father looks up from his task. “What are you doing? You’re working? At a time like this?”

  Father sighs, then stands with his shoulders back, facing me squarely. He holds the torch out to one side and makes a silent shrug with the other palm open, as if to say, “What of it?”

  My jaw falls. “Dio Mio! All you think about is work! Your wife is dead. Everyone is in mourning. You have a new baby. And here you are in your workshop, doing what... making a boat?”

  My father gestures again,
this time with a bit less bravado. Dark circles ring his eyes. He sighs, then, and his shoulders heave. He turns his back to me and places the heel of one hand against the frame of the boat, as if for support. Quietly, he replies, “You’ll do the same one day, Luca. There is no other way to live, you must know that.”

  I hesitate, then react. “To hell with your work! To hell with destiny! Mamma is dead! Things can never go back to the way they were, don’t you understand? This is not the way things are supposed to be!”

  I pause and attempt to quell my words, but the anger has welled up inside my breast and has nowhere else to go. “It’s your fault that she is dead! Don’t you understand? The burden of her death is yours alone to bear. You knew she wasn’t healthy enough for another baby. The woman is... was... too old! You already have your sons, but that wasn’t enough for you. You had to produce another heir for your boatyard! When I think of it I feel I will vomit!”

  I pause, surprising myself with this outburst. I have never spoken out against my father in my life. Years of emotion begin to spill over—the weight of my destiny, my future laid out before me, my marriage to Annalisa Bonfante, my work. Tears well up, but I swallow hard to fight them back. I glare at my father.

  “How can I live here anymore? How can I work here with you? Knowing that it was your fault? That you killed her! I feel like walking out this door right now—forever!”

  Throughout this tirade, Father stands frozen, his back to me, perhaps the only way that I dare to spit out such hateful words to him. He turns to face me now, fixing his piercing eyes on his eldest son. I watch them turn black with anger as he chooses his words carefully, quietly, and matter-of-factly through pursed lips.

  “Everything I have done in my life I have done for my family, not only my wife and my children but for my future grandchildren, for the continuation of my father and my grandfather’s legacy, for the future of this squero. If—after all I have done—you feel compelled to leave, then maybe you should.”