Frail Barrier

by Edward Sklepowich

  The woman extended a cold, damp hand.

  ‘As I was saying, this is a marvelous city, but I’m feeling all the heat and humidity today. And up and down the steps of the bridges! There’s no end to them, is there?’

  ‘They do get fatiguing.’ Urbino looked down at her case and backpack. ‘You paint.’

  ‘Watercolors. Mainly for my own pleasure, though I sell one now and again, even here.’ She was breathing more normally now. ‘I thought that I might be able to give one to my hotel as payment but they looked at me as if I were dotty. I remember reading somewhere that they do that in Venice.’

  ‘I don’t think they do it much anymore. It was a nice custom.’

  ‘You know Venice?’

  ‘I live here,’ he explained.

  ‘How nice! I just met a group of Americans in the Piazza San Marco but they were on a tour. Since you know Venice so well, maybe you can help me. I’m looking for an inexpensive hotel. I’ve been going from one to another and they’re either full up or too expensive.’

  ‘Where are you staying?’

  She named a hotel in Dorsoduro not far from the Accademia Gallery. ‘I’m on my way there now,’ she said.

  ‘How much longer do you plan to stay in Venice?’

  ‘Another three weeks, if possible. I’ve already been here for two weeks. There’s so much to paint! There’s something about Venice that makes you want to stay here forever once you get here. I guess you know what I mean by that!’

  Urbino smiled. ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘But I’ll have to leave soon if I can’t find a cheaper place to stay.’

  Urbino asked her how much she was paying at her hotel. She didn’t name an exorbitant amount, but he knew there were far less expensive hotels in town.

  ‘Maybe I can do something,’ he said. ‘I can’t promise, but I know some places that might have more reasonable rates, though they’re not as well located as Dorsoduro. I can contact you at your hotel?’

  ‘Until the middle of next week. That will probably be my limit.’

  ‘I’m going out of town for a few days, but I’ll try to find something more suitable for you as soon as I get back.’

  ‘Are you always a good Samaritan?’

  Urbino laughed. ‘Far from it. But I’ve noticed you a few times in different places in the city. I feel as if I know you a little. Venice can have that effect. One time you were good-natured when a man knocked down your canvas.’

  ‘I remember that. No damage done.’

  ‘And another time you even walked past my building. I was looking out of the window. I live near the Ghetto.’

  ‘What a coincidence! Right past your house!’

  She shifted uncomfortably in the seat.

  ‘Here’s my card.’ Urbino handed it to her. He stood up and picked up his package. ‘My vaporetto is coming. Yours will be arriving from the opposite direction.’ He pointed toward the Rialto Bridge.

  ‘I’ll let you know if I change my hotel before you contact me, Mr. Macintyre. Thank you very much.’

  As the vaporetto was or its way to the San Marcuola stop, Urbino realized that he now had two favors to do: find an estate agent for Nick Hollander and an inexpensive room for Maisie Croy. He started to run various possibilities through his head.

  On the train to Bassano del Grappo, where the contessa’s car would meet him to take him up to Asolo, Urbino tried to concentrate on his Goethe, but thoughts about Konrad Zoll and Luca Benigni distracted him. The deaths in rapid succession of the two men, so different in age, health, and other circumstances, made him feel vulnerable with their reminders of what could happen to anyone at any time.

  He forced his mind to think about the contessa and the Villa La Muta. He always enjoyed being with her in Asolo. One of these years he would stay with her for an extended period of time instead of these brief visits.

  One of these years, he repeated silently to himself. One so easily assumed that there would be other occasions, other opportunities to do the things one had always wanted to do.

  Konrad Zoll, with his fortune and his liberty, had been able to do whatever large or small things he desired, but disease had come along to smash everything. Now he was dead, reduced to ashes in an urn in a lavish apartment on the Grand Canal. And the younger Luca Benigni, who must have pitied the fact that his wealthy friend was nearing the end of his life, was dead, too.

  These thoughts fed Urbino’s melancholy temperament. He usually told himself that he enjoyed his melancholy and wouldn’t want to be any different. But other times he suspected that he had only become accustomed to it and was afraid, for reasons he couldn’t understand, of being bereft of it.

  When he got off at Bassano del Grappa and went to the waiting Bentley, he was disappointed to learn that the contessa had decided not to come with the car. He was eager to see her and had hoped they might indulge themselves in a grappa at the Nardini distillery on the timber Alpine Bridge in Bassano. On the drive to Asolo, he decided he would spend a few weeks at La Muta with the contessa in September after the regatta. The days would be beautiful then.

  The sight of the Villa La Muta, in the gently rolling hills beneath the arcaded town, lifted his spirits. When he got out of the car, he breathed in the fresh air gratefully and looked beyond the villa across the wide Trevisan plain to the Alpine foothills. This was a place where you could easily forget your cares for a while.

  Giorgione had lingered with his lute in its rose gardens and the Queen of Cyprus had held fabled court in its lambent air. In fact, Urbino reminded himself, it had even bequeathed its name to an Italian verb of indolence. Pietro Bembo, a Renaissance satirist who had used Asolo as the setting for his dialogues on love, had coined the verb asolare to describe spending one’s time in pleasurable, mindless inactivity and irresponsibility. Yes, the relatives of the contessa’s husband had chosen their retreat well in the eighteenth century. Instead of following the custom of other Venetians who had made their summer villeggiature on the banks of the Brenta Canal, the Conte Paolo had gone to Asolo, twenty-five miles northwest of Venice, where he had taken over a villa designed by Palladio’s follower Scamozzi.

  The villa’s name – La Muta, or ‘The Mute Woman’ – originated from a seventeenth-century woman who had retired to the hill town after witnessing a bloody murder in Florence and who had never been known to speak again.

  Understandably enough, the contessa – of a far less melancholy turn than Urbino – had been disturbed by this rather Gothic association. After some troubled thinking, she had ingeniously found a solution by commissioning a copy of Raphael’s painting of a gentlewoman, known as La Muta.

  In fact, Urbino was soon embracing the contessa below the painting itself on the stone staircase in the front hall.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing her the two gifts.

  ‘Thank you, caro. And I have something for you as well. A few days of blessed rest away from the madness of Venice.’

  ‘Sad,’ the contessa said half an hour later as the two friends walked through the puzzle maze behind the villa. Urbino had just told her about the death of Luca Benigni.

  It was dusk. The lights had come on a few minutes earlier. But the contessa didn’t need light to find her way to the center of her maze. Urbino was convinced she could do it blindfolded.

  As for him, although he had negotiated it a dozen times, he needed the contessa to guide him through its devious twists and turns and cul-de-sacs. It was either her guidance, that is, or the indignity of uncovering one of the signs that said ‘LIFT IF LOST.’ He remembered one summer afternoon ten years ago when he had ventured into the maze on his own and become lost. He had been too proud to uncover any of the signs. Trying a trick he had read about, he had kept his left hand in constant contact with the hedge wall, but it had done no good. He had eventually found his way to the center by exhausting trial and error, and had waited sheepishly for the contessa to join him with a bottle of Prosecco.

  ‘It’s the fine line, caro,
’ the contessa said when they stopped at a spiral junction.

  ‘The fine line?’ Urbino repeated.

  He waited for the contessa to take one of the paths, which she did without any hesitation. All he could see above the hedges were the upper stories of La Muta, the darkening sky, and the top of the viewing tower in the center.

  ‘It’s a painful truth,’ the contessa responded. ‘The fine line between life and death. Remember what happened to Gildo’s friend last August? Out in the lagoon and hit by a bolt of lightning in the middle of his forehead. Dead, dead, dead. If it’s not a storm of one kind or another that gets us, it’s something that sneaks up on us until …’ She trailed off.

  Urbino, whose sentiments were similar to the contessa’s, said nothing.

  She sighed and patted his arm.

  ‘Ah, but here we are, caro!’ she cried.

  The contessa meant that they had reached, without the slightest confusion on her part, the center of the maze. The tower rose above them into the purple evening air.

  But her words held another meaning for Urbino. Here they were, he said to himself, this moment now, together.

  They seated themselves on the scrolled marble bench.

  ‘It’s a good time to read this,’ the contessa said.

  She withdrew a piece of folded newsprint from the pocket of her dress and handed it to him.

  ‘There’s still enough light. It’s the article about Konrad Zoll that Sebastian sent. Read it while I climb the tower. No, I’ll be fine. I like the exercise. I do it once a day.’

  Urbino unfolded the article. It was clipped from an edition of the International Herald Tribune of two years ago. Urbino, who read the newspaper a few times a week, had no memory of having read the article.

  It gave an account of an exhibition in Munich of ancient Egyptian objects from Konrad Zoll’s private collection. The exhibition had been arranged to coincide with a new production of Aida in which Zoll’s friend, the tenor Zacharias Kellner, sang the role of Radames. Zoll, who, according to the article, had inherited a fortune as the only child of the banker Richard Zoll of Frankfurt, was described as a philanthropist and art collector who traveled widely and had special interests in ancient Egyptian, Islamic, French, and Venetian art. He had organized a campaign to come to the relief of an earthquake-stricken village in Algeria and had endowed a chair in art history at the University of Munich. In addition to his native German, he had been fluent in Italian, French, and English. The rest of the article described some of the items in the exhibit and their provenance.

  The photograph accompanying the article showed a smiling, healthy-faced Zoll in black tie. He was holding up an agate bowl as the stout Kellner looked on. In the background were several men and women. One of them was the bald, tanned Nick Hollander. He stood close to a woman in her sixties who bore a striking resemblance to him. Urbino assumed that she must be his mother. Zoll and Hollander’s mother had divorced five years ago. It would seem that the divorce had been more or less amicable since she had showed up at the exhibition.

  Urbino started to reread the article. He held it at an angle to catch the illumination from one of the lanterns on the tower. He was interrupted by a loud voice that carried over the tops of the hedges. It was Gervasio, the contessa’s major-domo.

  ‘Signor Urbino, there is an urgent telephone call for you.’

  Urbino went inside the tower. He looked up the spiral of the stone staircase. The contessa had turned on the light switch.

  ‘Barbara?’

  ‘I heard him. I’m on my way down. I—’

  A scraping sound echoed against the stones.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m afraid I twisted my ankle. But I’ll be all right.’

  Urbino went up the narrow staircase to help the contessa down. He supported her as she guided him out of the maze. Gervasio was waiting for them at the entrance.

  ‘Go ahead and take the call. Gervasio will help me. Take it in the salotto verde.’

  It was Natalia.

  ‘Thank God, Signor Urbino! What took you so long?’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Her voice was choked.

  ‘It’s Albina Gonella! She’s dead!’

  Urbino was stunned. He couldn’t say anything for a few moments.

  ‘Dead?’ His heart was racing. ‘But I just saw her two nights ago!’

  ‘She’s dead just the same. Heart attack, they say. And not just that, but the way it happened.’

  Urbino heard her take a deep breath.

  ‘All alone she was. In a calle near her apartment. And in the middle of that storm we had. What are things coming to? Albina Gonella dying like an abandoned dog in the street! Who would have thought such a thing?’

  ‘This is terrible news. Poor Albina. She didn’t complain about feeling ill but she did look tired.’ He was silent for a moment, then added, ‘I helped her with her work that night.’

  His sadness and shock were joined now by a stab of guilt. Apparently, Albina must have died only a short time after he had seen her to her door. Tears filled his eyes.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you that slave driver at Da Valdo was working her to death? Why couldn’t you have found some other job for her? I have to hang up now. I wanted to call you as soon as I learned, seeing as you’re all the way up in Asolo with the contessa.’

  Natalia gave a slight emphasis to ‘Asolo.’

  Her meaning couldn’t have been any clearer if she had used the verb of indolence itself.

  The contessa, with Gervasio supporting her under the elbow, came into the salotto verde as Urbino was putting the telephone receiver down. Catullus, the contessa’s Doberman, had joined them and was looking up at his mistress with an almost human solicitude. The contessa seated herself in one of the carved chairs and Catullus settled at her feet on the Aubusson.

  ‘What is it, caro? You look knackered all of a sudden.’

  Urbino dropped into a chair.

  ‘Albina Gonella is dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ the contessa repeated hollowly in a low voice after a few moments.

  ‘The night of the storm. Apparently of a heart attack. That was Natalia.’

  ‘Holy Mother of God! Albina!’ Tears welled in her eyes and spilled on to her cheeks. ‘May she rest in peace.’

  As she took out a handkerchief to wipe her eyes, her gaze strayed to the easel portrait of the Conte Alvise painted at the time of their marriage. The portrait captured him at his prime, around forty, handsome, vigorous, with black hair, blue eyes, and fair Venetian skin.

  ‘A fresh death brings back all the others,’ she said in a low, choked voice.

  ‘I must have been with her right before she died.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  Urbino explained how he had met Albina at Da Valdo and walked her home.

  ‘She forgot her house keys at the restaurant. Giulietta let her in.’

  He picked up one of the hand-painted ceramic fischietti on the marble ormolu-mounted table beside his chair. The whistle was shaped like a dove. He looked at it from several angles as if he was obliged to study it, but for what reason, he had no idea. He returned it to the table with the other bird and animal whistles.

  ‘You feel guilty because you were with her before she died,’ the contessa said. ‘I understand. But what does that signify? You shouldn’t feel that way, no more than I should have when Alvise died half an hour after I left his room.’

  ‘But you did.’

  Instead of responding the contessa looked down at her gold bracelet with the intertwined letters A and B that Albina had so recently restored to her.

  They remained in silence. Urbino got up and went over to the small bar concealed in the top of a Hepplewhite bureau bookcase. He poured out a sherry for himself and the contessa.

  When he was seated again, the contessa said, ‘You couldn’t have prevented her death. She had a heart attack.’

  ‘So it appears. No,’ he added when the con
tessa gave him a surprised look, ‘I have no reason to doubt that she did, although I have every intention of finding out more. It’s because of the keys that I feel the way I do. If I hadn’t gone to Da Valdo, if I hadn’t helped her, if I hadn’t changed her routine, she wouldn’t have forgotten them.’

  ‘And you think that’s why she went out again? To get her keys?’

  ‘It seems logical. And when she went out she got caught in the storm, she might have lost her way, become frightened and … and then she died alone.’

  But even as he worked this scenario out it didn’t seem quite right.

  ‘Don’t torture yourself,’ the contessa said gently. ‘You’re not responsible. You could just as much blame Giulietta for having opened the door for her. If she hadn’t, you both would have gone back together for the keys, if that’s why she went out again. Or blame the storm or the fact that she had to have a job that took her out at that hour of the night. Or blame life itself!’

  They both became absorbed in their own thoughts. They sipped their sherry. The contessa patted Catullus’s head. Urbino stared blankly at the pastels and miniatures by Rosalba Camera on the opposite wall, seeing none of their delicate beauty.

  The contessa gave a sigh and got up. She took a few steps, limping slightly.

  ‘I don’t think I did much damage. It should be all right if I put some ice on it.’

  She blessed herself with the holy water from the acquasantiera by the door.

  ‘Poor, precious Albina,’ she said. ‘I can’t absorb it. I’ll call Giulietta. She would appreciate some help with the funeral. They only had each other.’

  Albina Gonella’s funeral was celebrated in the Church of the Carmini between the Campo Santa Margherita and the Zattere only a few steps away from the Scuola where she had enjoyed Così Fan Tutte last October with Claudio and her sister. The ornate and somber interior of the Gothic church, with its wooden sculptural decorations and dark frieze of paintings high on the walls, made a contrast to the woman’s simple coffin and drew even more of the mourners’ attention to it.

  Urbino sat in the same pew as the contessa, Giulietta, Oriana, Natalia, and Gildo. There were many others who had come to pay their final respects as well as some tourists who had wandered into the church with their guidebooks but were refraining from walking around. They stood quietly observing the ceremony from the small chapel with Cima da Conegliano’s Nativity over the altar, probably secretly thrilled that their visit coincided with an authentic Venetian funeral.