Ascension

by Gregory Dowling

  “We’re investigating a question of inheritance,” I said. “It seems that on the island of Corfu some local families have contested the passing of some parcels of land to the Garzoni family, since certain local bye-laws were ignored; the contestation dates back to the early years of the century and we are hoping that family members who retain any records from those years might be able to throw some light on the matter.”

  “My mother didn’t have any papers,” said Mantovan. “She was cut off with nothing beyond the clothes she was wearing.”

  His wife snorted. “She didn’t have to accept that treatment. But you know she liked to play the martyr.”

  “My dear, some respect, please. My dear mother –”

  “Yes, yes, she’s dead, God rest her soul, but you know what I think.”

  He clearly did and made only a token attempt to defend his parent. “She married for love, and she knew what to expect. It was a courageous decision –”

  “Which she spent the rest of her life complaining about.”

  “She didn’t complain, my dear.”

  “No, she just sat there and sighed. And we were all expected to commiserate.”

  I imagine that the older Siora Mantovan must have been disappointed in her expectations, at least with regard to her daughter-in-law.

  “So there are no family papers,” I said tentatively.

  “Nothing,” said Mantovan.

  “I wonder if you can tell me anything about your uncle.”

  “What’s this got to do with the inheritance?” said Siora Mantovan.

  “Nothing directly,” I said, “but it all helps us to build up a picture. We need to know about his involvement with his overseas estates. And perhaps your mother will have reminisced about her early days.”

  “Never stopped,” said Siora Mantovan.

  “Now that’s not quite true, my dear.”

  “Never let an opportunity to let us know what a great sacrifice she had made go by. No wonder your father lost the will to live. ‘Oh, in the palace we always used silver forks for fish…’” She said these last words in a crude caricature of an aristocratic accent, and fluttered the tortured cloth as if it were a brocaded fan.

  “Did she talk about her brother?” I asked.

  “All the time,” said Siora Mantovan, just as her husband said, “Occasionally.”

  “And what did she say about him?”

  “Well, she was understandably rather resentful,” began Siora Mantovan.

  His wife cut in: “Of course she complained about his cruelty but the fact was she obviously admired him.”

  “Admired him?” I said in surprise.

  “My dear, you know that’s not true.”

  She went on regardless: “She was always telling stories about how cruel and unpitying he was, how obsessed with the family honour. But so was she.”

  “My dear, that’s an absurd thing to say. How can you imply she was cruel?”

  “No, obsessed with the family honour. And you know that’s true.”

  “Well, naturally she took some pride in –”

  “She never stopped talking about the Garzonis, and what they’d done for Venice, and their role in the battle of Lepanto. She made one big mistake in her life and spent the rest of it looking back at what could have been and comparing her feeble husband with her strong brother –”

  “My dear, you’re talking about my father here.”

  “Oh, you know I never had anything against your father. Felt sorry for him. But it was clear your mother wished he had some of the Garzoni rigidity.” She looked at her own husband, and the expression on her face clearly suggested that she understood the feeling. I would not have been too surprised at this point if she had made explicit an underlying sexual reference. I guessed that these arguments were nothing new between them; the wife probably welcomed any chance to return to the subject, even if offered by an inquisitive sbirro who was probably not going to buy more than a few grams of pecorino. I wondered whether she had married Mantovan thinking that the connection might provide her way out of this fishy quarter of the city; if so, she was making her disappointment plain.

  “What sort of stories did she tell about her brother?” I said, trying to lead the conversation back to the territory of usefulness rather than mere gossip.

  “Oh, there’s one story she was always telling,” said Siora Mantovan. “About when she was fifteen years old and wanted to go to church one Sunday wearing a new dress she had been given by a family friend. Her parents insisted that it was not suitable – too many frills, or something – and they had a great row. Her brother didn’t say a word but he put an end to the row by simply tearing the dress off her and throwing it on to the fire.”

  “Ah,” I said. It was a feeble reaction but I was trying to take in the picture this created. Tearing a dress from a girl’s body suggested something far more disturbing than merely a wish to protect the family’s honour.

  Mantovan spoke up now, possibly eager to ingratiate himself with his wife by agreeing with her. “Yes, she often told that story. She said she could never forgive him for it. He did it in front of the servants, as well. And her parents didn’t say a thing; they were probably shocked but they never said a word of reproach to her brother.”

  “But there was always something strange about the way she kept telling it,” said his wife. “I had to ask her to stop doing it in front of the children.” Then she looked sharply at me. “Does this help your investigations? Properties on Corfu, wasn’t it?”

  “Well, not directly, of course,” I said, “but it helps us to understand nobleman Garzoni.”

  “And his sister,” she said. “Well, are you going to buy that cheese?”

  “Oh yes, of course,” I said, and I turned to Sior Mantovan and indicated the portion required, making it larger than I really needed.

  Another customer entered the shop at that point and I guessed there was little point in trying to obtain any further information. I paid for the cheese and thanked them. Siora Mantovan gave a final wrench to the cloth by way of farewell and disappeared into the inner room. Sior Mantovan offered me a weak smile and turned to the other customer. “The usual?” he said. I sensed relief in a return to routine.

  19

  In the early evening of the next day I approached Palazzo Garzoni.

  Put like that it sounds simple; in fact it was quite otherwise. My approach to the palace had taken most of the day to prepare. I knew that gaining entrance was going to be difficult: not necessarily the most difficult thing I was to do over the next few days (this premonition proved most grimly true), but certainly something that would require forethought and planning.

  And so I thought and planned thoroughly. From all I had heard, nobleman Garzoni did not throw open his doors to all and sundry. I would have to make it clear that I was definitely not sundry.

  First, I decided there was little point in trying to outshine Count Gelashvili sartorially. In fact, I was going to do the exact opposite: I was going to out-dark him. I spent a significant portion of my earnings on a completely new set of clothes, in which everything, from shoe-buckles to tricorn hat, was black: as richly and deeply Plutonic a black as money could buy. I even managed, in an obscure shop in Cannaregio, to discover a wig of jet-black yak-hair curls; the shop-owner assured me (quite mendaciously and also unnecessarily) that they were going to be all the rage. I carried an ebony cane and over my shoulder I slung a dark leather satchel containing a couple of books, my sketching materials and a few other assorted items. I had even toyed with the idea of painting my teeth black but decided that might be overdoing things.

  Then I needed something to set off this Stygian guise. What better than light? And so at the landing stage of San Tomà, immediately opposite Palazzo Garzoni, I hired a gondola with two gondoliers and four torch-men. The gondoliers were men I had never seen before, as far as I knew, and I hoped they did not know Bepi – and that Bepi would never get to hear of this exploit. (Well, this
hope applied to all my acquaintances in the city – almost certainly a forlorn one, given the infinite reticulations of the city’s network of gossip.) The torch-men were taken from a nearby tavern at the extortionate price of one scudo each for their services. All in all this was proving a highly expensive production. It had better work.

  I asked for a gondola without a cabin; this was easily obtained, as the station at San Tomà also serves as a landing-stage for the cross-canal ferry; the gondolas used as ferries have no seats or trimmings and a wider girth.

  I had been wondering whether I should try to invent a story that would convince these six sceptical Venetians of the innocence and rationality of my proceedings but decided that it was not worth the bother; I would never manage to come up with a fiction that would withstand serious scrutiny, or even hold out against a sardonic quip. So I just fell back on using a marked English accent so that they could attribute the whole performance to the eccentricity of foreigners.

  As luck would have it our final departure from the landing stage took place in a gathering storm. Clouds almost as dark as my own clothes were massing over the grand Gothic façade of Ca’ Foscari to our right; far off to the left the Rialto Bridge gleamed as if it had absorbed the last fitful rays of the setting sun before black clouds had swallowed it. The water had taken on an ominous dark sheen, setting off the numerous bobbing lanterns of the boats, which were all making hastily towards their mooring stations.

  I looked across at Palazzo Garzoni. There were flickering lights in the windows of the piano nobile and I thought I could detect faces in the side rooms. This was a good moment to set off.

  I stepped into the gondola and stood in the very centre of it. Two of the torch-men took up position in front of me, and two behind. I told them to move as close to the side of the boat as possible so that I would be plainly, if darkly, visible in the centre. And, as already agreed, they now kindled their torches till they were blazing furiously and then raised them high in the air. The gondoliers pushed off and swung the gondola round so that we were pointing straight at Palazzo Garzoni. We moved forward.

  I do not think I have ever felt quite so conspicuous. This was, of course, the point of the whole exercise, but it did not make it any the less excruciating. Up until that moment I had been firmly pushing away all thoughts of public opinion; I realised that I had to take on the mentality and personality of a born showman – someone like Count Gelashvili, for instance. Otherwise I could not hope to succeed. This meant systematically crushing any inner doubts and endeavouring to achieve a state of pure external appreciation of my own performance; I had to reach the point where I was viewing the whole spectacle from some imaginary gallery in the clouds.

  I almost succeeded. A distant roll of thunder I took to be divine applause and I even found myself thrilling to it. But then somewhere inside me a little voice said: “Please God don’t let Lucia see this.” Why Lucia should have come to mind at that precise moment I would have been hard put to it to explain.

  The thunder continued to roll. Other gondolas were bobbing and swivelling around us and somewhere a gondolier raised an ironic cheer. The flames from the two torches in front of me flared back so that I felt their warmth against my cheeks. I stared up at the Gothic façade of Palazzo Garzoni and saw movement at the windows above. We came nudging against the poles beside the palace’s water entrance and the gondola swung round and came to a halt by the seaweedy steps. The large wooden door remained closed and the windows on either side showed no sign of light or life.

  Then a voice called from the balcony above. “What do you want?”

  The accent was eastern Castello; I guessed this was not the nobleman himself.

  I shouted back: “I have a document to deliver to nobleman Garzoni. He will be interested in it.” And I lifted my satchel above my head invitingly.

  There was silence. The torch-men lowered their torches and one of them spat into the canal, while the gondolier behind me muttered: “It’s going to piss down.” I told him peremptorily to keep quiet, thinking how glad I was that he was not Bepi.

  Then there was a flicker of light in the windows beside the water entrance. I heard a scrabbling of chains and keys. The door was scraped open and we found ourselves staring at a man in dark clothes holding a small lantern. He had a round face that glistened in the lantern-light. The eyes, however, were small and sharp. They flickered quickly over the gondola to fix on me. “Give it to me,” he said and stretched his hand out.

  I reached into my satchel and pulled out a neatly rolled scroll tied with a black ribbon (the ribbon in itself had cost me another hour of searching, but I had decided consistency mattered).

  He took it from me and without saying another word closed the door again. A few seconds later the ground floor was dark again.

  “Now what, sior?” said the gondolier behind me.

  “We wait,” I said, trying to sound perfectly calm.

  We stayed there another five minutes. Lightning flickered in the sky and the first raindrops began to fall. I could sense dissatisfaction growing all around me; I quelled the first muttered imprecation with another peremptory “Silence” but I knew that my hold over them was slackening. And if the rain got any heavier …

  And it did. It was as if the gods suddenly overturned a celestial bathtub. The torches went out with hisses and our clothes were instantly pasted to our skins. Suddenly all six men were protesting.

  “One minute,” I said, trying to make it sound like an order rather than a plea – and at that moment the water-gate scraped open again.

  “He says come in,” said the same round-faced man.

  “Thank you,” I said. I distributed what remained of the men’s pay and then stepped onto the slimy steps by the entrance. I had a sudden image of myself slipping and tumbling head first into the canal, which would have spoiled the effect somewhat. Fortunately this did not happen and I reached the top of the stairs, where I turned and said to the six men: “You need not wait.”

  They made no more than a concerted muttering, fortunately covered by another crash of thunder; I imagine each of them said something along the lines of “To tell the truth, esteemed sior, that had not been our intention.” I gave them a last wave and strode through the doorway. I heard the gondola push out into the rain-churned canal, carrying six men I hoped never to meet again.

  I turned to the man by my side. “And so please lead me,” I said awkwardly keeping up my exaggerated English accent.

  He placed his lantern in a bracket, closed the door, turned a large key and fastened a rusty chain. Each movement was careful and precise. Then he took hold of the lantern again and walked ahead of me. He did not say a word and neither did I. His round face suggested plumpness but in fact his body was trim and sleek; he walked with a kind of fussy precision, as if counting and measuring each step.

  The entrance hall was the usual large cold space with posturing statues. We made our way to the monumental staircase on the left-hand side. This led to the great salone on the piano nobile, which was only slightly less cold and bleak than the entrance hall below; large canvases on the side walls provided the only visual attraction, apart from the view on to the Grand Canal at the far end. There was no furniture, apart from a table by the window with two simple chairs drawn up to it. On the table stood a single candle; this, apart from the torch in my companion’s hand, was the only lighting. I glanced up. There were two large multi-branch chandeliers but their dingy appearance suggested they had not been used in years.

  At the table sat a man wrapped in a nobleman’s cloak. With symbolic appropriateness lightning flickered outside as he raised his head to stare at me. His head was against the window and the candle was to one side so I had only a vague impression of a cadaverous shape, with shadowy pits where his features should have been; a few fluttering strands of white hair glistened in the candlelight. He wore no wig. I saw that the document I had delivered was laid out on the table in front of him.

  There were
two other people present; it was odd that I had not noticed them first because they were far larger – or at least broader – than anything else in the room. They were both sitting at the window staring out at the rain. One had a mane of red hair and the other greasy black locks that hung straight down either side of his face like a wet towel placed there by a barber. They wore dark clothes and, apart from the hair, shared certain bovine features and a fixed dullness of expression; I guessed them to be brothers. Neither of them had done more than glance at me before going back to the more interesting sight of the rain.

  “Did you create this?” said the man in the nobleman’s cloak. His voice was quiet and indistinct, as if it reached me from the other side of the Grand Canal.

  “I did, Excellency.”

  The man with the lantern went to the other side of the table, so that he was standing beside Garzoni, as if protecting him. He glanced briefly down at the document and then went back to staring at me. He was a man in his early fifties, with an expression of what I guessed was permanent peevishness on his round, glistening face; the decision to invite me upstairs had certainly not been his. There was something clerical about him; I could imagine him working alongside Signor Massaro, in fact. But I would not attempt to crack a joke with him.

  I looked back at Garzoni. Now that the lantern-light was closer to him I could see the features more clearly; however, although the shadows had lessened, the pits remained. His eyes were like pinheads at the bottom of twin mine shafts, and deep declivities ran down the sides of his face in jagged but parallel lines. His mouth was drawn inwards, suggesting a sparseness of teeth, an impression confirmed by the indistinctness of his pronunciation. He was looking down at the sketch on the document and the cryptic words written around it.

  I had drawn the Great Pyramid and hovering over it Thoth, pictured with the body of a man and the head of an ibis; he held a writing tablet and a pair of compasses. Both the pyramid and Thoth were ingeniously (though I say it myself) incorporated into the upper branches of the conventional Cabalistic image of the tree of life, the three uppermost circles forming the angles of the pyramid, and the two sloping sides running parallel to the two arms of Thoth’s compasses.