by David Hewson
The distant waters of the lagoon offered the occasional blast of a vaporetto horn. From the city came the hourly metallic boom of a church bell.
Infrequently, though audible and unmistakable, the night was punctuated too by the distant rhythmic yapping of a dog.
So disturbed was Aitchison’s sleep that he failed to wake until almost one in the afternoon and was only then roused by the hammering of the cleaning woman on the door. The middle-aged harridan who ran the boarding house declared that breakfast was absolutely no longer ‘disponibile’.
By various twists and turns, and many dead ends finishing in the black water of a canal, he found his way to the waterfront. The day remained dark and close to freezing. Puddles of icy water were congealing into treacherous black mirrors on the paving stones. He recalled the night before and avoided them carefully. Venice seemed full of dangers he had never, for one moment, anticipated.
The lagoon barely moved beneath a sky so heavy it made his headache worse. The shimmering horizon was vague and unreal, like a mirage, a Fata Morgana that was neither near nor distant. A vast ocean liner occupied much of the quayside, blocking the view to what he knew, from his book, to be San Giorgio Maggiore across the basin. There seemed to be even fewer real people around than the previous day, here at least, beyond the tourist magnet of San Marco.
The thought of that place drove him further east to the very tip of the city, the island of Sant’Elena, reached by a bridge from the desolate empty gardens of the Biennale exhibition with their sad little rough-hewn pavilions.
In spite of the chill he sat outside a solitary restaurant, huddled beneath a gas heater posing as a standard lamp. Aitchison was disturbed to see that it was impossible for any of the island dogs to pass him without taking notice. A look. A pause. A backward stare.
‘Bugger off,’ he growled in a low, harsh voice to one, as luck would have it, just as the waiter was returning with a second coffee and another glass of the biting white spirit he was finally, after some effort, beginning to appreciate.
‘They hurt no one,’ the man said. ‘Just dogs.’
‘In-bred stupid mutts,’ Aitchison muttered to himself as the waiter departed. They did seem to come from a limited, near-identical gene pool. Colouring varied wildly, as did the shape of the head. But the size – corgi-like, with a low, rounded belly – and the tail – bowed, very upright and bushy – were too common to be random. His statistician’s mind told him there would be a rational explanation for this. Darwin ruled even here. In a restricted gene pool physical characteristics would come to be dominated by a limited set of possibilities. The same might have applied to the men of Venice had they not been seafarers, possessing the morals and sexual curiosity that went with such a profession.
He downed the last of the drink and knew there was an exception. The dog in the alley, a tiny white pyramid of fur, was nothing like the common mongrels wandering the empty streets of Sant’Elena. That thing was different, entirely so.
Head hurting a little, full of cheap booze and plentiful bigoli pasta, he stumbled back towards the city, across the bridge, by the bare pavilions, into the broad thoroughfare of the Via Garibaldi and on to the walls of the Arsenale, past the judgemental gaze of its stiff mute lions by the clock tower and the gates to the old dockyard.
Sometimes thoughts refused to die. They needed to be buried, with a conscious, deliberate act.
Even using the simple map he’d picked up for free in the restaurant it took three efforts, long annoying sorties into the warren of alleys and lanes that ran higgledy-piggledy inwards from the point at which the great liner was berthed.
Finally, at the end of the afternoon, with the light starting to fade so quickly it seemed night was falling from the sky like rain, he found the place and entered the gloomy, dusty interior.
It smelled of old people and mouldering books.
The Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni was a modest white Palladian building next to an attractive brown tiered bridge. Not quite a church, more some kind of religious guild house, or so he gathered from reading the pamphlet the man at the door handed over when, once again, he paid the entrance fee.
The painting was where he remembered it on the right-hand wall. Jerome Aitchison made a point of ignoring the thing and instead wandered upstairs, finding himself in an old, timbered meeting room filled with heavy worn benches and tables blackened by time. Ahead of him lay an ornate altar and some shadowy paintings of obscure men in obscure situations. There was a tall, attractive woman, not young but not old, gazing at a canvas on a stand. She was about his own height with an intelligent and very pretty face and a physique that would once have been described as statuesque. She wore an old-fashioned black coat, half-open to reveal a plain red dress beneath, both somewhat shabby. An old, battered leather satchel hung over her right shoulder which, to Aitchison, made her resemble an impoverished post-grad student forever trapped in an endless cycle of study. Her calm grey eyes dominated a tanned, smiling face framed by ill-disciplined blonde curls that fell to her shoulders then tumbled down her back. Those eyes followed him carefully as he walked in, as if performing a calculation. She said hello in English with an accent that was hard to place, Italian yet American too. He grumbled a response then, deciding there was little to interest him in what seemed to be some kind of long-dead gentleman’s club, returned to the ground floor, still keeping well away from the canvas with the dog.
The previous day he’d ignored the sheet of paper the same warden had handed to every visitor as they entered. Now Aitchison studied it carefully. Everything on this level was by the same hand, that of the painter Vittore Carpaccio, and dated from the early sixteenth century. This was needless information. Aitchison was sufficiently familiar with Italian works of art to recognize the uniformity of style and approach in the paintings around him, and the rough period. The works were principally commissioned to record the lives of three Balkan saints, Schiavoni being a Venetian term for the Slavs who once formed an immigrant seafaring class within the city. The subjects held little interest for a mathematician. He preferred to see images that contained life and flesh, female preferably, Titian above all others, that Raphael of La Fornarina apart.
There was nothing so enticing here. For the most part he was surrounded by dour grey men in long medieval costumes, frozen in the performance of some everyday act, a conversation usually, in a pose meant to contain religious or philosophical significance. When he looked more closely, however, there were some oddities. A canvas labelled The Daughter of Emperor Gordian is Exorcised by St Tryphon depicted a young girl sporting a halo and accompanied by an extraordinarily nasty pint-sized monster, half horned donkey, half winged lizard. The city behind this bizarre scene looked much like the Venice beyond the door. Close by was a gruesome depiction of St George, another Slav hero it seemed, slaying a scaly dragon surrounded by maimed and half-eaten corpses, watched all the while by a virginal maiden who looked, it occurred to Aitchison, a little bored by the spectacle.
‘Do you like Carpaccio?’ asked the woman, who had quietly slunk behind him without warning, and spoke with such loud confidence it made Aitchison jump out of his skin.
‘Raw meat?’ he muttered without thinking.
She laughed and he found he was unable to take his eyes off her.
‘No. The painter. Vittore.’ She hesitated for a moment then added, ‘Though the two are related.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Raw meat. And him.’ She spoke easily, knowledgeably. ‘It’s not an old recipe, you know. A fake really, unlike the paintings. Giuseppe Cipriani invented it in 1950, on the spot in Harry’s Bar. The Contessa Amalia Nani Mocenigo, one of his regulars, told him her doctor had demanded she follow a diet that forbade cooked meat. Cipriani went into the kitchen and returned with a plate of raw thinly sliced fillet of beef and a light sauce. When the Contessa asked its name . . .’
The woman watched, to make sure he was listening.
‘There was a C
arpaccio exhibition in Venice at the time. It was the first thing that came into his head. They’re sly here, you see, particularly when it comes to commerce.’
Aitchison had seen the dish everywhere – with beef, fish, crustaceans. Sometimes carpaccio even found its way into the college dining room.
‘Is that true?’ he asked.
‘Absolutely. Venice is a city of invention. If something doesn’t exist, one simply makes it up. Be warned, though. Reality here is entirely subjective. Remove one of these fabrications from its natural home in the lagoon and it’ll crumble to dust in your fingers the moment you set foot on terraferma.’ She held out a pale, strong hand and it gripped his before he even realized. ‘Sofia Bianchi. Bad writer, mediocre artist, pathetically inaccurate fortune-teller, though competent and knowledgeable tour guide for those of an aesthetic persuasion. I don’t suppose you need any help, do you? If you like Carpaccio you must see the Ursula cycle in the Accademia. Cecil B. DeMille before they invented movies. I can talk you through every scene, only twenty euros an hour, negotiable for a half day or more.’
Aitchison shivered at the name and the memories it stirred.
Ursula.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘I also do Vivaldi and Casanova among others. Or we could go straight to every worthwhile grave in San Michele if you’re feeling morbidly curious, which most visitors are for some reason. Death in Venice. It had a ring to it long before Thomas Mann.’
‘No, no . . .’
He hated being approached by people wanting money. It was so impertinent, all the more from one so fetching that her presence left him a little tongue-tied.
‘I’m s-sorry,’ Aitchison stuttered.
She watched him, unabashed, coyly aware of his shy interest.
‘I like to be on my own,’ he added, unsure whether that was a lie too.
Sofia Bianchi took rejection well. Perhaps she was used to it, though he wondered why. She was a very attractive woman, blessed with striking, sophisticated features that grated with her apparent impoverishment. Her face was that of a model or a rich man’s wife, not some down-at-heel tour guide trying to drum up custom in a deserted Venetian scuola.
‘Oh well. I thought you looked at a loose end. I apologize for being forward. It’s just that . . .’ She held up her head and her fine nose flared, as if sniffing the air. ‘It’s so very deserted out there, apart from the poor sad sticks from the cruise ships and they’re spoken for. This is a curious time in Venice. Beautiful but strange. So few people. And the light. On a good day anyway . . . Makes me wish I could paint properly. What I see in my head. I don’t suppose you might be interested in a little local art for your wall back home?’ She waited for a second then shrugged at his silence and said, ‘It’s like being in a dream really. One in which there’s nothing for a hungry mouth like me to do but hunt, if you’ll pardon the expression.’
‘Quiet apart from the dogs . . .’ he mumbled.
‘Dogs? Oh! You like dogs? Join the club. So much sweeter than human beings, don’t you think? I intend to adopt one soon, when I have the time.’ She paused then smiled. ‘And the money.’
She took his arm, simultaneously turning and dragging him across the room to the painting that had drawn him here, though he had yet to find the courage to face it.
‘Now here’s a riddle,’ the woman said. ‘Prove yourself. Name the breed, please.’
He gazed at the white bundle of fur seated on the floor of the study of some bearded saint working away, distracted, at his desk. St Augustine, the pamphlet said. This ancient ascetic was perched on a dais by the window in a room made for an academic, one Aitchison envied the moment he examined it. Books were everywhere, on the floor, on shelves along the walls, with an early astronomical instrument – an astrolabe? – and, at the rear, an alcove bearing the diminutive statue of what appeared to be a religious figure. Candlesticks lined the walls to afford light when it was needed. Nothing denoted the slightest sense of motion, not even the dog. It was a solitary place for quiet work and meditation, exquisitely painted, an entire universe of obscure frozen detail.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the animal. Surrounded by a panoply of icons about learning, next to a famous figure even an atheist like Aitchison had heard of, the creature drew the viewer’s attention from everything as it stared intently at the man at the desk.
‘A Maltese?’ he guessed.
It was the only small breed of dog he could think of.
The man at the door came over and looked at him as if he were mad. Aitchison had assumed he was a pensioner eking out the day. But now he looked the fellow seemed younger, more Aitchison’s own age, with sharp, intelligent eyes behind thick horn-rimmed spectacles.
‘A Maltese? Do you know how often I have to listen to this nonsense?’ he asked. ‘Every huckster, every amateur tour guide comes in here and says that. A Maltese? Listen to Signora Bianchi. She’s an educated Italian lady. She knows.’
The woman beamed at hearing this praise. Aitchison was surprised to discover she was Italian. Her English, though tainted by an American accent, seemed so fluent.
‘The dog is a volpino,’ she declared. ‘Unknown outside Italy until a few brave breeders started taking them abroad. Even now most people have never heard of the dears. Volpino. It means “little fox”. One of the oldest established breeds of dog there is. Aristocratic Romans used to treat them as members of the family and dress them up with jewels and fine jackets. Here . . .’
She reached into her battered bag then thrust a sheet of paper from a computer printer into his hands. Aitchison shoved it into his coat pocket without a second glance.
‘These are some notes of my own on this painting. You can have them. A freebie for a fellow dog-lover.’
He couldn’t drag his attention away from the shape on the canvas. It seemed alive.
‘The volpino. Is it common?’ he asked.
The warden and Sofia Bianchi glanced at each other and sighed.
‘No, sir,’ the Venetian replied. ‘Most of us have never seen one, except . . .’ His hand extended towards the wall. ‘Here.’
‘Worldwide,’ the woman added, ‘there are perhaps a couple of thousand at the most. So few that many dog clubs refuse even to recognize them as a breed. Exclusive, you see.’
Aitchison pointed to the door.
‘I saw one. Outside.’
This very one, he thought.
The warden blinked and seemed to turn a little pale.
‘There are no volpini in Venice, sir. You must have seen something else. We have many dogs . . .’
‘But not like this.’
His comment appeared to make the man extremely uncomfortable.
‘It’s impossible, signore.’ His keen narrow eyes stayed fixed on Aitchison. ‘But if one were to meet a volpino, one would treat it with kindness and respect, I trust.’
‘Same with all dogs,’ the woman told him. ‘They’re just dumb little animals. We shouldn’t take out our misery on them. No good and evil in their world, not unless we introduce it.’
‘All dogs,’ the warden agreed. ‘Especially the volpino.’
Aitchison recalled the kick he’d aimed at the obstinate creature that had stood in his way in the narrow alley in the labyrinth of Castello the night before. It was poorly aimed but deliberate. He had wanted to hurt the thing and that was, he knew, because its mute, keen, expectant gaze seemed to mirror the expression he’d seen everywhere in Cambridge after his fall from a solitary form of grace. In kicking out at the volpino he had aimed his fury at the world, with all its uncaring, sneering cruelty, or so his drunken mind had told him. And he’d missed.
Their remarks went unanswered. Something else had caught his eye. Beneath the dog on the canvas, to one side, the artist had contrived to paint a small written note. It looked like a scrap of paper left idly on the floor.
He still had Latin in his head from public school. Both the rigours of the language, and the logic that it dr
ummed into him, had never quite disappeared.
The paper read ‘Victor Carpathius Fingebat’.
It was a short, if artificial, step from the Italian ‘Vittore Carpaccio’ to the Latinized ‘Victor Carpathius’. Jerome Aitchison had, however, always been proud of his ability to master the intricate detail of conjugating verbs, an exercise which was not so far from his beloved algebra and calculus. ‘Fingebat’ came from ‘fingere’, which might be translated as ‘to form, create, devise or conjure’. It was by no means uncommon to omit the object – namely the canvas – from such a simple sentence, even though this was a transitive verb. Nevertheless, one would have expected the artist to have adopted the perfect tense – ‘fingit’ – which would have rendered the signature as, ‘Vittore Carpaccio devised this’. Or – as he had surely seen in other works of this era – to have used the more appropriate and common verb ‘facere’, to make, as in ‘Victor Carpathius me fecit’, indicating that the canvas itself was announcing the identity of its creator.
The import of the inscription beneath the dog was maddeningly unclear.
‘The odd thing is,’ Sofia Bianchi declared, interrupting his train of thought, ‘it was never meant to be a dog in the first place. There’s a preliminary sketch Carpaccio made in the British Museum. In that the animal on the floor is an ermine, representing purity. Somewhere along the way he changed it to a dog, for fidelity one imagines.’
The Venetian warden looked out of sorts and made noises about closing soon. Then he went back to his seat by the entrance and sat there, staring at the worn stone floor.
The smell of damp seemed to be getting more marked. Through the open door Aitchison could see that it was beginning to rain. The light from the porch made the forceful shower resemble rods of glistening ice falling to earth.
‘The inscription—’ he began.
‘It’s known as a “cartellino”,’ she interrupted. ‘The placing of a note within the painting to allow the work itself to declare its provenance. It means Vittore Carpaccio created this.’
‘No!’
