“You haven’t written a biography of Byron,” Possle said, as he continued to stare at Urbino through his large, black glasses.
“Perhaps one of these days. I’ve been looking around for another project. I need something new to turn my hand to.”
“You’re still young enough to assume you have time for many projects. A marvelous luxury—or a comforting illusion. I’ve read all your books. I find them diverting. My favorite is Proust.”
“It’s gratifying to hear that a man of your experience finds my books of interest. If I had known, I would have had my publishers send you a copy of each.”
“I’m surprised that you didn’t think of that.” Possle paused for a beat, then said, “Let me see. I have the Proust book with me somewhere. Ah, here it is.”
He retrieved the slim mauve-colored volume from the cushions.
“I’ve marked a passage. Listen. ‘Inevitably, despite Marcel’s appreciation of the beauty and secrecy of the city,’” he read in his wavering voice, “‘he finds himself somewhat disillusioned, and by the time he is about to leave, Venice is no longer an enchanted labyrinth out of The Arabian Nights but something sinister and deceptive that seems to have little to do with Doges and Turners. It doesn’t even seem to be Venice any longer, but a mendacious fiction where the palaces are nothing but lifeless marble and the water that makes the city unique only a combination of hydrogen and oxygen.’”
This had been delivered in Possle’s thin, sharp voice with its strange intonation and tremulousness. Urbino’s own words had sounded somehow different from what he had written, although they were exactly the same.
Possle closed the book. “Is that how you feel now about Venice?”
“I was paraphrasing something Proust said.”
“I’m well aware of that. But tell me, do you feel disillusioned now? In this year of your life in Venice?”
“In some ways Venice has become more special than ever,” Urbino replied, expressing only a small portion of what was a very personal feeling these days about his adopted city.
“Since your return from Morocco, you mean, with your Moroccan friend.” Possle gave a nod of his purple-swathed head. “The enthusiasm of the young can help a jaded appetite, don’t you find? I believe he has gone home for a visit. I hope it won’t be for too long. You must miss him terribly. Your house must seem emptier than it used to be before he came to stay with you. But I’m becoming distracted, I fear. We were speaking about Venice and Proust. So tell me, my friend, do you also agree with Proust about Venice being sinister and deceptive and—what do you call it?—a mendacious fiction?”
Urbino, who was both uncomfortable and irritated by Possle’s references to Habib, responded coolly, “There’s something of that.”
“Of course there is,” Possle replied with a sly smile. “What else would one expect from a person of imagination like yourself, not to mention a person who has your other line of work? As for me, Venice has never disappointed. But our sherry has arrived.”
Armando entered with a tray and deposited it on the small inlaid table in front of the gondola. He poured the pale wine into two cups of translucent Chinese porcelain. He handed one cup to Possle, then the other, with considerably less ceremony, to Urbino.
“Thank you, Armando,” Possle said in Italian. “If we need anything else, I’ll ring for you.”
Armando gave an almost imperceptible bow and left the room.
Possle raised his cup. “To deep ventures and a good death,” he said.
As Urbino sipped the dry wine, he was reminded of Poe’s story of the man walled up by his enemy in a cellar filled with casks of Amontillado.
“Such a gentle wine for such a troubling story,” Possle said, yet again startling Urbino by the echo of what he had himself been thinking. “Ah, stories! One of my sorrows is that my eyes have worsened during the past few years along with my hearing. If only Armando might read to me, but as you’ve noticed, he’s mute, though his hearing is very acute.”
“I see. I…” Urbino trailed off.
“You thought he was reticent, the ideal servant? He is that. And also once the best gondolier I could have wanted, even better than your Gildo.”
First Habib, and now Gildo, Urbino thought. Possle wanted to make a point of showing him how much he knew about him.
“He became mute recently?” Urbino asked, choosing to show as little reaction as possible to Possle’s reference to Gildo. “Since you retired your gondola?”
“No, long before I even had the gondola.”
“Surely muteness must have been a handicap for a gondolier.”
“Armando has no handicaps that I’ve ever discovered. Don’t underestimate him. He could make all the warning cries.”
The air in the room began to feel more close and oppressive. Urbino set his cup down.
“Does Armando live here?”
“He’s more at home here than I am. He has his little nooks and crannies everywhere. You might have noticed one of them in the entrance hallway. He thinks of himself as my silent Cerberus when he’s there. We are well matched, the two of us. He has nowhere to go, and I can go nowhere. Alone together. We are most inseparable.”
He ran a hand slowly along the gleaming wood of the gondola. “Armando is part of my daily life,” he continued, “my double, my shadow, as someone once said of gondoliers. People either like their gondoliers or they hate them, Mr. Macintyre, and if they like them, they like them very much. Or, I might add, too much.” Possle looked in the direction of the sala with a faraway expression. “I prefer solitude, and so does Armando. We learn how to live from society. But solitude teaches us how to die; it has no flatterers.”
In what was by now becoming a puzzling and annoying pattern, Possle’s observation about solitude and his earlier one about gondoliers carried a distinctly familiar ring.
“You’re looking tired, Mr. Macintyre. Excuse me for drawing attention to it, old man that I am. I never had much patience when the old said I wasn’t looking well. There seemed something ghoulish in it. Here. Take this.”
He held out his empty cup.
Urbino got up. A pleasant scent struck his nostrils. It was the scent that he had first noticed upon entering the room, but much stronger.
As Urbino reseated himself, Possle reached among the cushions. He held up a large crystal vaporizer. Perhaps the cushions contained an endless supply of items to amuse the old man, which he periodically withdrew like a magician dipping into a deep and voluminous hat.
“It’s a combination of ambrosia, Mitcham lavender, sweet pea, extract of meadow flowers, tuberose, orange blossom, and almond blossom,” Possle recited. “That’s what you’re smelling. It allows me to wander in a constantly changing landscape and all while I’m in my stationary gondola. You can have more Amontillado, if you like. I only allow myself the one. I find I look forward to it much more that way.”
“No, thank you.”
“I wish I could offer you something more suited to your tastes. I’m inflexible in my routines. And being solitary, or relatively so,” he added with a smile, “I’m not accustomed to taking other people into consideration. That’s why I hope you’ll excuse me if I now put an end to our pleasant little visit.”
Urbino was taken completely by surprise and was not a little disappointed. Possle had been giving no signs that the visit was almost over.
Possle pulled a dark purple cord that extended from the wall and whose tasseled end was barely visible among the ubiquitous and encumbered cushions of the gondola.
“You’re wondering why I asked you to come, only to dismiss you so abruptly,” Possle said. “But all in good time. For the moment you can assume it’s only the whim of an old man. I think we’ve had a successful first visit, though, don’t you? When shall I have you here again? Ah, I see from the expression on your face that it pleases you to hear that. But perhaps it would be better not to specify the date. I’ve always found that when I set up a rendezvous too far in advan
ce, I feel that I should cancel it as the day and the hour draw close. Peculiar, but what else do you expect of a man who makes his voyages in a marooned gondola? Armando will show you out.”
Urbino barely had time to express his appreciation to Possle, when Armando appeared in the doorway like an apparition. Urbino threw a last glance back at Possle, lost in the cushions of his unusual divan.
He followed the silent Armando across the sala and down the shadow-filled high staircase. The door to the room where Possle had said Armando kept guard was now closed.
Armando left Urbino to collect his cloak himself and went to the heavy door. A symbol decorated the area above the inner lock, which Armando now turned. There was no bolt or other lock on the door except the one that corresponded to the large keyhole on the outer side.
The symbol consisted of a blue circle. In its center was a red-and-yellow eight-pointed star surrounded by yellow crescents. It had an air of the occult about it and resembled one of the heraldic emblems painted on the stern of the brightly decorated flat-bottomed boats of Chioggia. It struck Urbino as unusual in its combination of elements and even more so, perhaps, in that it adorned the inside of the door rather than the outside. It was as if it were warning the occupants not to venture into the world beyond the door instead of chasing away whatever evil spirits might want to enter.
Armando noted Urbino’s interest in the symbol and seemed to give him every opportunity to examine it as he slowly opened the door to release him into the late afternoon shadows.
22
When Urbino got back to the Palazzo Uccello after his encounter with Possle, he was fatigued. Although he had promised to let the Contessa know about everything that had happened during his first visit to the Ca’ Pozza, he telephoned her and said that he preferred to wait until tomorrow when he would see her in person. He wanted to think about it all first. Since this was the eve of her first conversazione, she didn’t press the matter.
Urbino picked at the sandwiches that Natalia had left for him and then went to the library. There he sat thinking for a long time, going over what had happened that afternoon behind the walls of the Ca’ Pozza. He spent almost as much time berating himself for what he had failed to communicate to Possle out of caution and reticence as he spent going over what Possle had said—or had seemed to say. He found himself becoming more and more weary and lay down on the sofa to close his eyes for a few minutes. He soon, however, fell asleep, with Serena next to him.
He awakened past midnight.
When he got into bed, he had some trouble falling sleep, but fortunately, when he did, he had no dreams. Yet all the while as he slept he seemed to be lying in wait for the one which had become his dark companion.
23
“If you didn’t ask him that,” the Contessa said to Urbino the next morning as he guided her along the slick pavement behind the Piazza San Marco, “then what did you ask him?”
The two friends were making their way from Florian’s to the music conservatory, where the Contessa was scheduled to give her first conversazione.
The unasked question she was referring to was the one that had been troubling Urbino ever since Armando had delivered Possle’s note.
If the Contessa hadn’t been the one to secure him the invitation, then who had it been?
“Maybe no one was responsible,” Urbino said, “no one but Possle himself. He knows about me, and he knows that I’ve been trying to contact him, apparently from Armando. As it turns out,” Urbino added in a rueful voice, “I didn’t end up asking him very much at all.”
“Quite unusual for you!”
“There are times when it’s better to keep quiet and listen—and observe.”
“But why do I get the impression that you’re not satisfied with having kept quiet?”
“It shows, does it? I asked a question here and there, and I’d like to think that I didn’t press more on him because it would have been premature, or presumptuous, or both. Considering it was my first visit,” he added more forcefully.
“And you didn’t want to make it your last as well.”
He nodded.
“But that’s not the whole story,” she said.
“No,” Urbino admitted with reluctance. “He seemed to be the one asking the questions, when he wasn’t revealing what he already knew about me, that is.”
“You’re a well-known local figure, caro, even notorious in your way, not unlike your strange host: The americano who lives in an historic palazzo, glides around in his own gondola, and tracks down murderers when he isn’t feeding off the dead like a vampire!”
“Thank you for the flattering picture! But that leaves us almost as confused as we were before. Did Possle contact me in my capacity as sleuth or as vampire, as you call me?”
“Perhaps both.”
“Or neither.” Urbino shook his head. “He gave no clear sign of anything along those lines. I felt as if I were there for his private entertainment.”
“That may not be far from the mark. After all, a man in his situation has to import most of his diversions. And years ago he became accustomed to a constant supply of them. It must be rather dull for him these days.”
“All alone, it seems, with Armando. What do you know about him?”
“Not anything. I was never in the Ca’ Pozza, remember, or in Possle’s gondola. And I never knew that Armando was a mute. He was very much in the background, and I certainly don’t remember that he looked as—as weird as you say he does now. But he made me feel uncomfortable, as if he was wishing me ill.”
“He couldn’t have made it more clear that he resented my being there.” Then Urbino added, “Or so it seemed.”
They came to a stop by a broad pool of water where a flotilla of gondolas was moored.
“At least you can cross him off your list of reasons why Possle might have invited you,” the Contessa said, as she searched the gondoliers who waited in their boats for their assignments to various stations around the city.
“Who knows? Possle seemed to be toying with me. Some of the things he said sounded familiar, irritatingly familiar, and I got the impression that he wanted to keep me off balance. Which he succeeded all too well in doing.”
“But I’m sure you’re going to be your usual patient self and put up with as much of it as possible. For the sake of a greater good.”
“If he asks me back.”
“Being exposed to you once is not enough,” the Contessa said, “if one can judge from my own response. Oh, there’s Gildo!”
She waved at the young man. He waved back to them from a gondola at the far edge of the clustered boats. His chiseled countenance showed little of its usual animation. It was one of the days when, according to their agreement, he wasn’t in Urbino’s service.
“He still looks sad, poor boy,” the Contessa said. “Have you found out anything more about his friend?”
“No,” Urbino replied, with a twinge of guilt. His interest in Possle was making him neglect other things. He cast a regretful glance back at Gildo. There was an air of isolation about his lithe figure.
Urbino held the Contessa more tightly as compensation for whatever ways he might have been neglecting her as they continued their slow, even stride toward the conservatory. They walked in a companionable silence, broken only by brief greetings given to acquaintances they met along the way. Above them the dark gray sky threatened more rain. The alleys were filled with shoppers and a scattering of tourists. Beneath a narrow, covered passageway, they had to draw to one side as a caravan of young people barged along.
Signs above their heads on the worn stones of the buildings provided direction, but Urbino and the Contessa had no more need of them than they had of any conversation. Each kept to his own thoughts. Urbino’s were about his meeting with Samuel Possle the previous day, and the Contessa’s, he assumed, were about her conversazione.
Thunder sounded as they crossed a square. The Contessa surveyed the leaden sky with a frown.
�
��Let’s go past La Fenice,” she suggested.
A few minutes later, under an increasingly darkening sky, they were contemplating the grand old opera house, where they had spent many unforgettable hours together. It was being restored after a disastrous fire had destroyed its jewel-box interior a few years ago.
The Contessa gave a deep sigh. “I’m going to give the biggest celebration ever when it’s finished,” she said. “But it will never be the same, will it?”
“Of course it will. It’s burned down before, and it’s risen from its ashes, remember,” Urbino consoled her, as they resumed their way, alluding to the name of the theater. La Fenice was Italian for the mythical phoenix bird, which after being consumed by flames, was reborn again from the ashes in its nest.
The thunder became louder and the sky darker. They ducked into the doorway of a shop for a few moments to open their umbrellas.
“I’ll take the rain as a good omen,” the Contessa said, now stepping across the stones more carefully.
“Your conversazione will be a great success. I have no doubt of that.”
A worried frown descended on the Contessa’s face. The silence they now fell into wasn’t an easy one as they continued in the direction of the music conservatory.
An idea started to form in Urbino’s mind about the Contessa’s conversazione, which she had got his pledge not to attend. He entertained the idea privately at first, hardly noticing that the rain had abated and the Contessa had closed her umbrella.
He stopped when they reached the Campo Morosini. At the other side of the square was the Renaissance palazzo of the music conservatory. The Contessa went on a few paces before she stopped as well. She turned around.
“I’m coming to your conversazione,” he said, shutting his umbrella and giving her the benefit of his recent thoughts. “It’s what I should do, and it’s what’s really best for you.”
The Contessa’s gray eyes grew large. “Haven’t I told you that I absolutely forbid it! Having you there, no matter how well intentioned and supportive you are and how much I love you, will make me a bundle of nerves, a bigger bundle of nerves.”
The Last Gondola Page 8
