Carnival for the Dead

by David Hewson

  The vaporetto had pulled in at every last fermata on the Grand Canal. It was now almost ten and she’d not eaten a thing since the baccalà at lunchtime with Tosi, in the little bar that looked like a junk shop. Teresa bought herself a couple of small panini and, without thinking, a spritz, served in a plastic cup. Then she stood on her own in the square next to the hunchback’s statue, trying to stifle the nagging thought that this was pointless. She didn’t know what to do any more, what to ask, who to talk to.

  She was, it seemed to her, very like Sofia must have been when she found herself back in Venice after a gap of sixteen years. Friendless? That was how it appeared. But clearly it couldn’t be so.

  Teresa quickly devoured the two panini and bought herself another drink. Out in the dark and the cold, jostled from time to time by anonymous, disguised strangers, it was easier to think somehow. Easier than it had been with Tosi and Strozzi and Camilla all asking the same question: how can we help?

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ she said to herself.

  She thought of what Tosi had said about Peroni, somewhere in Sicily, and the odd single life she’d led before she met him. Men came and went, mostly the latter if she were honest, and she didn’t mind because attachment carried with it such difficult and demanding conditions. Until Peroni turned up, with his gruff voice, quick smile and a sense of humour that never failed to lift her spirits, she’d never really understood what it meant to be swept off one’s feet. But he’d managed it somehow, and never once made her feel less than free, independent, her own woman.

  There was no sense to the relationship whatsoever. That’s what love’s like, she thought. A condition that couldn’t be explained, measured, or defined. It was a word the two of them rarely, if ever, exchanged because it was so unnecessary. A platitude, a truism. Like pointing out the presence of the sun during the day and the moon at night.

  ‘Where’s the logic there?’ she muttered.

  ‘Logic? You want logic?’

  A man was next to her. She recognized him from the night before. Heavily built, with a beard that was a little too tidy to be anything but arrogant. He’d stood close to the helpful one at the bar, not saying a word then, just listening. And watching.

  ‘Talking to myself,’ she said. ‘A bad habit.’

  ‘Dead right. Talk to me. Much more interesting.’

  He was wearing the costume of what she took to be some kind of medieval count. A heavy cloak, fancy trousers with stockings and buckled shoes. A broad-brimmed velvet hat. But no mask.

  ‘I’m looking for someone,’ she said, and immediately realized the words had come out badly.

  ‘Aren’t we all?’ he grinned.

  ‘No. You were here last night. With your helpful friend.’ She pointed to the bar in the hole in the wall. ‘Over there. I explained to him . . . My aunt . . .’

  ‘Ah. Want a drink?’

  She smiled briefly, said nothing and walked off into the next piazza, the one with the disco and the lights, where the barman had recognized Sofia immediately. He wasn’t there this time, just a woman in a ridiculous flimsy cartoon-character costume and mask, holding out plastic glasses of spritz at people the moment they came near. Teresa bought one and tried to talk to her. The noise was too loud now. It was late. People were getting a little drunk. This was all a waste of time.

  She shuffled over and stood outside the fancy cheese shop, staring through the glass at the lumps of parmesan and provolone that lay beneath the dim interior lights like cuts of meat.

  Sofia came here and did much the same thing.

  Why?

  Because she was lonely. Because this was what she did everywhere she lived. Hung around with a fast-changing bohemian crowd, never putting down roots, never once forging a stable relationship. And then moving on.

  Except here, before, something had gone wrong. The mask of the solitary, footloose wanderer had slipped. She’d become pregnant. She’d terminated the child for some reason. Then, briefly, her world collapsed until, nursed by Teresa’s own mother, she recovered enough to return to her old way of life elsewhere.

  More than a decade and a half later she’d returned, in spite of the memories. They were still bad, still real. The drunken conversation she’d had with Camilla at Christmas – one that still stung, for Teresa – proved that.

  A man in a straw hat and a familiar hooped shirt walked past. The gondolier. She followed him, caught his arm, stopped him.

  ‘Last night . . .’ she began.

  He was staring at her, puzzled, maybe interested too.

  ‘What about it?’

  It wasn’t the same man. Or maybe it was. She couldn’t be sure.

  ‘I talked to you about my aunt. You said you took her somewhere.’

  ‘Didn’t take her anywhere.’ He winked. ‘What are you really looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said and walked off into the darkness, starting to like the way it folded round her like a vast, enveloping cloak.

  There was another bar on the far side of the square, the biggest she’d seen so far. She bought a drink from the stand outside, stood in the midst of the crowd, letting her head spin a little as she tried to think. The music was so loud here it was impossible for anyone to speak. All around her people, some young, some much older, danced to the rhythm and the lights, bodies moving, in costume, in heavy winter coats, laughing, locked in the stupidity of a strange masquerade in which they could lose their identities completely.

  Was that what Sofia sought too? Anonymity? Some mundane comfort, the warmth of another? Anything to blank out her own lost personality and all those restless years travelling the world, looking to escape something, never quite accepting it might be herself?

  The longer Teresa stayed in Venice, walking in Sofia’s footsteps, the more she felt at one with her, able to see this place through the eyes of the woman she’d come to regard as a sister, someone to be admired, emulated even. In the black night of the Rialto, behind masks, engrossed with strangers in the shadows, there was no guilt, no sense of failure, no elder sister or mother to look down on you from on high and pass a cruel and exacting judgement.

  Time slipped by unnoticed, in a semi-drunken haze. Just as it was doing now.

  ‘It’s me again,’ said someone by her elbow.

  The badly dressed count with the too-tidy beard nudged her shoulder, looking cocky and expectant.

  ‘If you and I were the last two human beings on the planet,’ she said very slowly, very carefully, ‘I’d be happy to leave the place to the ants.’

  Feeling a touch cheerier she walked off, depositing the remains of her drink in the nearest bin.

  Sofia’s secret lay here, hidden in the shadows of these bleak, chill campielli and arcades. But at that moment Teresa lacked the wit to find it, or to locate in her own underused imagination some clue to where it might lie. Even if her head was clear, not muddied by the three or four strong glasses of drink she’d found herself downing as she wandered among these faceless, pointless crowds.

  For some reason the next episode in the story, the essential, cryptic clue, had failed to materialize and she didn’t want to wonder why.

  The stories could come from only one of three sources. Someone who held Sofia and was, for whatever reason, determined to taunt Teresa to find her. Some ally, a friend who understood her plight and was powerless to unravel its origins themselves. Or Sofia herself, trapped, scared, intent on communicating through cryptic riddles, piece by piece, for reasons Teresa couldn’t begin to guess.

  An old, welcome sound rang out over the racket from the disco. Church bells from somewhere, San Giacomo perhaps, or one of the many other towers close by. She counted the tolls, realizing she had no idea of the time. Everything became lost and malleable in these dim alleys and corners and archways. A part of her, the same facet she shared with Sofia if she were honest, half-enjoyed that.

  Midnight. Two hours had slipped by since she stepped off the vaporetto on the far side of the canal. Now
the boats would be on the night service again, and she wasn’t willing to wait for that.

  The bearded count had followed her. Ignoring his continuing half-hearted attentions she set off eastwards, back towards Dorsoduro, down the long winding alleys that led to the Campo Santa Margherita and then Zattere, a route that was now sufficiently familiar for her to walk it without thinking.

  Twenty minutes later she crossed the broad empty space of the Campo Santa Margherita. There was no one around this late, not even a few drunk students or carnival revellers. Her sharp, quick footsteps made a rhythmic loud tapping sound, like the ticking of a metronome, as she crossed the wide paving stones. From behind came something similar.

  An echo. Had to be.

  All the same she didn’t turn, telling herself it was the cruel chill breeze blowing from the direction of the Rialto that she didn’t want to face. Instead she quickened her pace down the narrow street towards the Ponte dei Pugni, the Bridge of Fists, a low, curved crossing over a narrow rio.

  In the darkness she could just make out the boats that, during the day, sold fruit and vegetables, shiny peppers, bright green chicory and zucchini, on the far side of the water. Now they were covered in tarpaulins, slumbering, like the city itself. The only light came from the sky: a hazy moon dimmed by high cloud. What little moisture that remained on the cobblestones had turned to glittering ice. The freezing night air left her face and fingers numb.

  She’d had too much to drink, talked to people who didn’t care about her questions, discovered nothing from any of them, only a mounting sense of ignorance and frustration in herself. The harder she tried to understand, the less she saw.

  This investigation needed to be personal, not forensic. The kind of intimate, prying peek behind the scenes of individual lives that real cops like Peroni, Costa and Falcone pursued. Not the logical, dogged deduction that was second nature to her as a scientist, trying to force the truth out of a smear of blood, a knife wound, a trace of humanity on a wall or a footprint in the mud.

  As she strode across the bridge she was met by the first living thing she had seen in minutes. It was a dog, small and white, trotting purposefully across the stones from the other side.

  The little animal stopped in front of her and lifted its pert, curious head. She was aware of being judged by two black and beady eyes.

  A familiar dog. It sat down on the hard cold stone, staring at her, as if determined to make this point.

  Except it couldn’t be. These things were impossible. Just as the fictional – or half-real – Jerome Aitchison had said in the story she had lost.

  The dog was quite motionless, waiting. Teresa had never been much of a one for pets, but she remembered something Peroni, who loved all animals, had taught her. Remembered what the warden of the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni had said too, twice over, once in the story, the second time only earlier that day.

  Treat it with kindness and respect.

  This was ridiculous. Irrational. Or as Tosi had put it, super-rational.

  The fictional Jerome Aitchison had mistreated this animal – no, she thought quickly. An animal like this. She would never dream of doing something similar. Yet the warden in the scuola seemed to indicate that more was required. Not simply inaction but a positive act of gentleness and courtesy. Doing nothing was insufficient, just as it was with Sofia in the lost, hazy years before she vanished.

  Teresa Lupo looked at the dog and said, with only the slightest of slurs, ‘You will never know how happy I am that not another living soul will see this.’

  Slowly, in an open and friendly fashion, she removed her right glove, bent down and offered the animal the back of her hand, stopping just short of its black shiny nose. Exactly as Peroni had taught her.

  The dog blinked, moved its head forward, sniffed and then – this could not be real – appeared to nod. She raised her hand and, just once, stroked its head gently, slowly with her fingers.

  The fur felt hard and stiff as if very old. The animal waited a second or two then got up off its haunches and trotted off into the darkness, back towards the Rialto.

  Alone, on the Bridge of Fists, she felt a strange sense of freedom. As if she’d rejected a familiar part of herself, an important aspect of her own character but one that had overwhelmed some other subterranean side.

  Her breath remained short and it was not from the night or the rapid route march home any more. Another corner had been turned, some rusty mental lock freed.

  She looked at the bridge and the canal beneath it and a memory returned, of visiting Venice as a tourist, on her own, when she was young. Wandering around, head alternately deep in a guide book or staring about her, amazed by the city’s distinctive beauty.

  There was a story about this very area. Of Katharine Hepburn here, making some long-forgotten movie in the 1950s, falling into the San Barnaba canal during a scene, swallowing the grey, foul water of the lagoon. And getting sick, ill with some strange, persistent malady that followed her for years. An infection no doctor could quite diagnose. An unwanted memory of Venice, circulating in the blood, unwilling to leave.

  Something similar had brought Sofia back. A recurrent, obsessive need to return.

  Another thought occurred to her. Whatever that curious, illogical virus was she felt at one with its persistent nature. Sofia’s failings – her inner sense of loneliness and impatience, the endless, pointless curiosity that had taken her around the world – were traits that Teresa knew she shared, tendencies she’d managed to stifle over the years. Only just. Had she known about Sofia’s agonies here sixteen years before she could easily have become as lost in these dark, narrow lanes as her much-loved aunt, the sister she’d never had.

  Perhaps now she was. And that was the point, of Sofia’s mysterious disappearance, of the cryptic, unresolved pointers to its unravelling. Of the dog.

  The masks of the carnival served several purposes. To disguise the identity of the wearers from those around them. But there were other masks too, more subtle and disquieting ones. Masks that fooled the wearer, provided a veneer a man or woman might use in order to hide their own identity from themselves.

  Was that what stood between her and Sofia’s mystery? Some lack of self-knowledge, or personal insight?

  Sometimes a mask is there to fool others. Sometimes to fool oneself.

  ‘This is too damned hard,’ she muttered, wishing for the umpteenth time that day she had Peroni and Costa and Falcone to help her, knowing the assignment in Sicily made that impossible. She felt out of her depth here, in a city where the rules of everyday life seemed not to matter.

  Teresa looked down and another recollection came back. Centuries before, close to where she stood, two marble footprints had been carved into the paving stones of this bridge. They marked the point where Venetians of old gathered to fight. These were vicious pitched battles, to the death sometimes, between the Castellani of the east, workers for the most part in the Arsenale boatyards, and the Nicolotti of the west, tough, unforgiving fishermen.

  These marks were the starting point of their war for mastery of this small piece of masonry over an insignificant stretch of water.

  Men fought for the most trifling, fleeting of prizes. Yet it was part of human nature to labour, to struggle, to contest for whatever others coveted. Wasn’t that what she was doing now? So badly? With an excess of zeal and energy and precious little insight?

  So many arguments, with the police, with fleeting figures in the night in the Rialto, almost with Tosi and Camilla too, people who were on her side and wanted to help. There was something here she failed to understand. No, more than that. Failed even to see.

  And she’d patted the head of a small dog, one that, logically, could not in any sense be ‘real’.

  A sound caught her attention, a noise from behind. Footsteps. She hadn’t moved.

  Teresa Lupo turned, the anger rising within her again, ready to confront the buffoon with the beard, to use her fists if necessary, as surely
and as viciously as any Venetian fisherman or boatyard worker would have done in this very place a few centuries before.

  ‘Don’t even think . . .’ she began in a loud, firm voice.

  Words left her.

  It wasn’t the ugly man in the costume of a medieval count. This figure stood at the foot of the steps and the very sight of him made her feel cold and dead inside.

  He was tall and broad and imposing, a big man, though the full black cloak was so flowing and capacious it was difficult to decide how much of this was bulk, how much muscle or fabric. Standing at the foot of the steps of the Ponte dei Pugni he looked up at her with his white, ghostly face, tilting the long shiny nose to one side like a quizzical bird waiting for a question.

  She knew the Plague Doctor so well by now. His broad-brimmed hat with the buckle, the ebony ruff at his neck. The ivory beak the colour of the moon and above it the crystal eyes, impenetrable, inhuman.

  A fit and active man, she guessed. There was no point in trying to run, even if that was in her head.

  He didn’t speak. Simply stood there, head cocked to the left like a deathly dark cockatoo.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked.

  The head turned from one side to the other, as if thinking. The creature in black said nothing, simply held out his gloved hands and made a gesture of incomprehension or despair, turning them inwards then out.

  ‘Where’s Sofia?’ she yelled.

  Teresa took two swift steps down the bridge and snatched at the long white bill in front of her, determined to remove it. The man retreated backwards, then, so quickly she lost sight of him for a moment, fell into a dark sotoportego beneath the building behind.

  She followed, walking quickly, chasing the flowing black cloak that whirled ahead of her. Almost immediately she found herself in a small, grimy courtyard strewn with litter, the walls covered in graffiti. There was a pale white wellhead, ornately carved, at the centre.