“An emergency,” Emo said, coming back into the front of the shop and hanging up the phone. “Someone had his keys stolen and needs me to put in a new lock. Where would I be without house visits?”
Emo started closing up his shop. Urbino lingered a few minutes longer and said, “By the way, I’ve noticed that Gildo seems sad these days. He tells me that a friend of his died.”
Emo looked at him sharply.
“Are you concerned about Gildo, or is this about the Ca’ Pozza?”
“What does the Ca’ Pozza have to do with Gildo?”
But as he asked the question, the answer came to him before Emo responded. He had a quick vision of Elvira shouting and shaking her fist at the poop of the gondola where Gildo was maneuvering his oar when it had gone by the Ca’ Pozza.
“As if you don’t know. His friend fell from the building next door to the Ca’ Pozza.”
30
At nine on Sunday morning, on the day of his next visit to the Ca’ Pozza, Urbino climbed up from the attic to the altana perched on the rose-colored roof of the Palazzo Uccello.
There he found Gildo as Natalia had said he would. The slim young man was gathering the blankets, jackets, and scarves she had put out to air on the wooden terrace in the expectation of a day of sun and gentle breeze. But half an hour ago the day had changed abruptly. Dark clouds, driven in from the sea by a steady wind, were thickening above the city.
“I’ll help you,” Urbino said.
Together they took down the items. They were already damp and in danger of blowing off the altana.
Many of the buildings in Venice had these wooden terraces attached to their roofs. They were as characteristic of the city’s architecture as its covered wellheads, inverted bell and obelisk chimneys, and sottoportici. Originally they were built on the palazzi for the noble women to sit and bleach their hair in the sun, with the help of a special concoction that included powdered Damascus soap and burned lead. These days, however, they had more mundane functions, unless you were someone like Urbino who would often spend hours on the bench among the geraniums, dreaming and gazing across the roofs of the city.
Gildo was silent as he placed a plaid scarf in the wicker hamper.
“There’s something I’d like to mention, Gildo,” Urbino began. “I had a talk with your uncle yesterday when I went to give him the check.”
Urbino mentioned the check because he didn’t want Gildo to think that he had gone to see Emo to get information about him.
Gildo continued to remove the items from the racks. He didn’t look at Urbino.
“I hope you know that I’m concerned about you. When I mentioned to your uncle that you were a little depressed lately about your friend, he told me that he died in a fall from the building next door to the Ca’ Pozza.”
Gildo’s head snapped up. There was a wounded look in his generous green eyes.
“Excuse me, Signor Urbino, but we should get everything off the altana.” His voice, usually slurred in the appealing Venetian manner, sounded stifled and unnatural. “I don’t have much time. Remember that today is one of the days when I go to the Bacino Orseolo.”
“Of course, Gildo. And Natalia and I are delaying you with this task. We can talk some other time. Here, let me help you with that blanket.”
31
In the afternoon, to pass the time before he was expected at the Ca’ Pozza, Urbino went to the Accademia Gallery. When he had been there three months ago with Habib he had been distracted, although pleasurably, by playing the role of an indulgent cicerone as he so often did with Habib. This afternoon he wanted to have a leisurely, solitary turn through the galleries to soothe his nerves. He expected to be temporarily carried away from the world beyond the walls of the Accademia.
But it didn’t work out that way.
Carpaccio’s Dream of St. Ursula, with the peacefully sleeping saint visited by an angel in her chastely ordered bedroom, a painting that Ruskin had lavished pages of praise on, reminded Urbino by cruel contrast of his very different, troubling dream. He had suffered from it again last night.
As for Giorgione’s toothless old woman pointing to the warning words Col tempo written on a scroll of paper, it evoked nothing less than the image of Possle’s aged face that had changed so much over time.
Another Carpaccio, The Miracle of the Relic of the Cross, seemed innocent enough until Urbino fixated on certain details. The old wooden Rialto Bridge carried his thoughts back to Elvira’s erratic behavior yesterday morning. The blithe gondolas became superimposed with Possle’s stationary one at the Ca’ Pozza and, just as he was turning away, also whispered of Gildo’s reticence about his friend’s death.
Neither was there any relief in Tintoretto’s spectral Theft of the Body of St. Mark from Alexandria. It wasn’t so much that the turbulent sky made Urbino anxious about the storm that was soon to assault the city, but that the repetition of all the arcades and steps with their fleeing, ghostly figures spoke a language of danger and obsession, and all in the service of a supposedly noble intention.
Here in the Accademia he was wandering through a cavern whose decorated walls were looking at him with familiar eyes and emitting confused, but disturbingly appropriate, words and signs. When he found himself trying to search out personal meanings in other paintings, he decided it was time to leave. He still had time for a much needed drink before seeing Possle.
As he was heading for the staircase, someone called out his name jovially. It was Lino Cipri, in a flowing tie and a worn, black velvet jacket. He was copying Lorenzo Lotto’s portrait of a brooding gentleman in his study, one of the paintings commissioned by Eugene.
Urbino was surprised to see Cipri since the painter had told him that he was usually home in the afternoon. But perhaps he was eager to finish the Lotto. Urbino looked back and forth between the original and the copy. He nodded in appreciation.
“You’ve managed to capture the salamander and the fallen rose petals exactly,” he said. “Eugene will be pleased with this one as well.”
“I hope so.” Cipri was visibly delighted with Urbino’s praise. “Too bad you didn’t stay for the conversazione. My wife and I were spellbound. The Contessa had us wanting more. It was like listening to music to hear what she had to say about those days, and there was a lot of participation from the audience.”
“It wasn’t my choice that I wasn’t there. She got my solemn promise to stay away. Stage fright, you know.”
“There was no need for her to be afraid. Maybe you’ll come next time.”
Urbino paid Cipri a few more compliments about the Lotto copy and then left him to his work.
32
Urbino approached the door of the Ca’ Pozza. Low, dark clouds raced above the roof of the building with a menacing air. The storm had held off so far, but soon it would unleash itself. He was about to ring the bell when footsteps rushed up behind him. He turned and confronted the face of Elvira.
She grabbed the front of his cloak with both her hands. “Don’t go in, signore! Don’t go in!” she shouted in rapid Italian. “If you enter, you won’t return, not alive. No, you won’t return!”
This version of the warning over the portals of Dante’s Hell gave Urbino more than a momentary pause. He tried gently to pull away, but the woman’s grip was firm.
“You’re Signora Elvira,” he said, keeping his voice low and soothing. “Don’t distress yourself. I’m in no danger.”
“You are, I tell you!”
She released him and peered into his face. She was almost the same height as he was. Her eyes glowed with a feverish fire. “You know me?” she asked in a soft voice. “I don’t know you.”
“Let me take you home, Signora Elvira.”
“Home? I have no home. This building destroyed it. It destroys everything. It will destroy you! Don’t go inside!”
With this repeated warning she dashed away down the calle beside the Ca’ Pozza. On the pavement lay the yellow scarf she had been waving at the m
erchant in the Rialto. It was torn and soiled. Urbino slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.
To Urbino’s surprise, the door of the Ca’ Pozza stood open. Armando, clad in what was his habitual black, stood aside to let Urbino in. His dark eyes searched the quay with a barely concealed fury touched with fear.
33
The bone-chilling damp of the Ca’ Pozza, more intense than it was outdoors and considerably colder than could be expected of even an old Venetian palazzo, settled down over Urbino again as soon as he stepped over the threshold. His awareness that he was in large part a victim of his own superstition didn’t lessen the feeling anymore than it had on his first visit but, instead, seemed to increase it. Reluctantly, he took off his cloak and placed it over one of the gargoyles on the clothes stand.
The grim Armando, giving off his unwashed odor, conducted him across the lower hall, past the closed door of what Possle had called one of the mute’s nooks and crannies in the silent house. The high staircase rose at its slightly tilted angle, or so it seemed once again to Urbino.
As they ascended through its heavy shadows, with Armando a few steps above him, the strains of music and a male voice suddenly shattered the silence.
“ ‘So, we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be ne’er as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.’”
When they reached the long, dark sala, Urbino stopped to listen to the rest of the song. It came from the gondola room, whose door was thrown open wide.
“‘For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.’”
Armando, who had continued across the sala, stopped at the door of the gondola room and waited for Urbino. His arms, with their scarred hands, were close against his sides. Under his scrutiny, Urbino crossed the sala and entered the hot, inert air of the strange chamber.
He took in the scene with a quick glance. The domed ceiling, the shuttered windows, the dark draperies, the rococo mirror, the candles, the pots of exotic flowers, the silver cage with its dead cricket, the orange walls with their portraits and still-life paintings, the improbable gondola under its canopy, and, in it, Possle’s reclining figure, dressed in red satins and purple silks.
“An interesting piece of music, don’t you think, Mr. Macintyre? Please sit down.”
Urbino seated himself in the high-backed armchair close to the gondola, where he had sat on the previous occasion.
“But I’m sure that you found it too loud,” Possle went on, after giving a little tug at the purple silk that swathed his head. “You must forgive me, but I refuse to wear a hearing aid.”
Considering the man’s old-fashioned, if not antiquated air, however, Urbino wouldn’t have been surprised if Possle had a hearing trumpet concealed among the orange cushions.
“Armando will bring us our Amontillado.”
Armando, who had been hovering in the doorway, nodded and withdrew.
“You know the song?” Possle asked.
His small, dark eyes behind his large, black glasses bore into Urbino.
“It’s one of Byron’s poems set to music. The refrain comes from an old Scottish song. My grandfather used to sing it to me.”
“Indeed? What a coincidence. ‘And the soul wears out the breast,’” Possle recited in his tremulous voice. He made no attempt to sing the words. “Byron was barely twenty-nine when he wrote those words. I’m almost three times that.”
“Melancholy was in his nature,” Urbino observed. “The poem expresses his repentant mood after carnevale, I believe,” Urbino went on, feeling a little pedantic. Possle was staring at him. “Even the young are susceptible to that,” he went on. “Last time you asked me if I liked Byron. It appears that you like him a great deal yourself. Perhaps more than I do.”
“Is that what you think? Or know?”
Possle’s emphasis puzzled Urbino, who remained silent. Possle looked narrowly at him from his recumbent position.
“But you might have a professional interest, Mr. Macintyre.” Possle’s eyes again searched Urbino’s face. “I’m referring to the biography on Byron that you might write one of these days.”
He made a longish pause and seemed irritated when Urbino didn’t respond.
“And here we both are, you and me,” Possle continued, “two lovers of Byron in the middle of Venice, ‘the pleasant place of all festivity, The revel of the earth, the masque of Italy.’”
“You’re fond of quoting Byron,” Urbino ventured.
“But that’s an easy one to recognize. Almost everyone knows it.”
He fussed around with the cushions for a few moments.
“Your Scottish grandfather, you say? The ancient Celtic clan of Macintyre. ‘Son of a Carpenter,’ it means, rather a plebeian association for someone like yourself. Through Difficulties is your clan’s motto. Your crest, a right hand holding aloft a dagger. I believe your ancestor chopped off his own thumb to plug up a hole in the sinking galley of a chieftain. This old head of mine is filled with the most amazing nonsense, Mr. Macintyre.”
Possle had obviously done research on him, or Armando had. The question was why.
“I suppose you’d like to be the greatest biographer since Boswell?” Possle now said.
“Hardly.”
“More in the line of Lytton Strachey, then? Attacking a life from an unusual angle? Is that what you would like to do with me?”
Possle withdrew the crystal vaporizer from among the cushions and squeezed the bulb once, twice. The aroma of his special potpourri quickly spread through the warm air. Urbino could only distinguish the scent of tuberose and orange blossom but none of the other essences Possle had named.
“You’d be an interesting subject,” Urbino said.
“Who knows, Mr. Macintyre? I might be of use to you but perhaps not in the way that you’re thinking.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m aware that I’m more of an oddity, an anomaly, call it, than anything else. Some people might think the same of you,” Possle added, with a little cough that could have been embarrassment or a cover for amusement.
Urbino had to agree with this, but he did so silently. Despite the theatricality and eccentricity of Possle’s gondola, Urbino’s negotiation of the canals in his own gondola was certainly not less so in its way. One might even argue that at least Possle was confined to the privacy of the Ca’ Pozza, whereas Urbino was very much in the public eye.
“I’m not Byron.” Possle said this with an air of amused regret. “I’m not Peggy Guggenheim. But what I am, Mr. Macintyre, is a source of information about the people who have passed through the Ca’ Pozza in its heyday. In their heyday. In mine,” he added, his thin voice dropping lower. “I could be your mirror. Oh, don’t look so surprised. I don’t mean that you would see yourself in me, but who knows?” he said, with a lifting of his sparse brows. “What I mean is that I could be your filter. The good and the bad, the rich and the famous, the talented and the failures”—his voice grew a little more forceful—“all seen through the eyes of someone who can barely see now, or hear.”
At this point Armando entered and deposited the tray next to the carafe of water and the goblets on the small, inlaid table. He poured the pale wine into two porcelain cups. He handed one cup to Possle. This time, the other cup was left for Urbino to reach for.
Armando gave an almost imperceptible bow and left the room.
Urbino had hardly registered the man’s coming and going. Possle had just come close to saying that he would be willing to work with Urbino. Could the mystery of why Possle had summoned him be as simple—as wonderfully and unexpectedly simple—as that? Yet even if
this were the case, it didn’t explain why he had chosen Urbino.
“Is that why you’ve asked me to come here?” Urbino began, after considering his words carefully. “May I assume that you’re making an overture?”
Possle took a sip of the wine.
“An overture, yes, but an overture of what kind?” his host replied. “Perhaps I’ve been too precipitate in getting your hopes up. I’m a man who likes to proceed slowly and logically, not unlike yourself, but one who will also make a quick leap sometimes to even my own surprise. That’s like you, too, I have a feeling.”
He scrutinized Urbino with his small, quick eyes, his tongue darting out to moisten his lips in his habitual gesture. If he had reminded Urbino of a preserved saint on the previous occasion, this afternoon there was something almost reptilian about him—frail, yes, but sinuous and with a distinct sense that he might leap and strike.
They sipped their wine in silence. A distant rumble of thunder penetrated the gondola room from beyond the drawn drapes and closed shutters.
Possle kept his cup propped on his stomach. Pressed against his silk shirtfront hung the large, strangely shaped metal talisman on its gold chain, one of whose details was a crescent. Urbino was reminded of the symbol affixed to the inside of the Ca’ Pozza’s front door. He stared at the talisman, and once he began it became difficult to take his eyes away from it.
When he did, transferring his attention to its owner, Possle’s head had dropped on his chest. His eyes were closed. The cup looked as if it might slip from his grasp.
Urbino was about to get up and take it when his eye became caught by something white on the carpet near his feet. It was a piece of paper, the size of a postcard. It appeared to have writing on it. Without thinking, he leaned over and picked it up. He didn’t examine it, but thrust it into his pocket, surprising himself with the force of his own impulse.
He had hardly withdrawn his hand from his pocket when Possle’s voice gave him a start.
The Last Gondola Page 11
