Before Urbino reached the door, he stopped. “Your last Duchess, as you called her,” he said. He indicated the portrait. “She’s by Lino Cipri.”
“You know him?”
“A friend of mine commissioned some work from him. Copies. Do you know him well?”
“Not these days, if I ever did.” Possle gave a hollow laugh. “There’s no one I seem to know these days. You’re in very select company.”
“Did Cipri make the copies of the Moreau paintings?”
“Such interest in Lino Cipri! Yes, he did. I’m sure he’s got as much money from your friend as he could. He doesn’t believe in art for art’s sake. And in the case of the portrait here, he got the original.”
Urbino looked at the beautiful woman and then back at Possle.
“Just my little joke, Mr. Macintyre. By the way, I would suggest that you get more rest. You’re looking a bit haggard. Until the next time.”
Armando conducted Urbino across the sala and down the staircase. He stood in the hall without any expression on his hard-featured face, watching Urbino put on his cloak. But as he was closing the heavy door on Urbino, he did it with a smile full of malignancy and satisfaction.
On his walk back to the Palazzo Uccello, Urbino couldn’t quite shake the chill that he always had when he was in the Ca’ Pozza. The chill on this occasion had been intensified by the touch of Possle’s hand and Armando’s smile of farewell. Once again he felt the fatigue settling in that he now came to expect after these encounters at the Ca’ Pozza.
As soon as he got back home, he compared the key he had taken from Possle’s bedroom with the key to the front door of the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini.
He didn’t know if he was disappointed or relieved to find that the two didn’t match. He realized now how much he had expected them to.
He spent a long time thinking about what he had seen in Possle’s rooms and even more of his experience on the back staircase. It was inevitable that he associate the belt with the Contessa’s lost items, although she hadn’t said anything about missing a belt. It might only be a coincidence. He wasn’t even sure if the belt was a man’s or a woman’s.
A key, a belt, and Possle’s revelations about Byron.
In one way or another, Urbino had come away from the Ca’ Pozza today with each of these things. He couldn’t assume that they were connected or that they weren’t. Each of them might be nothing more than what the detective novels called a red herring. But on the other hand, one or all of them might lead him to some of the answers he was seeking inside Possle’s dark house and the world outside it.
50
Urbino spent most of Saturday morning, while the Contessa was giving her second conversazione, arranging for Cipri’s copies of the Longhis to be shipped to Eugene in New Orleans. It was a time-consuming affair, and he occupied himself during all the waiting by pondering over the copyist’s former relationship with Possle.
When his task was finished, he had lunch at a favorite restaurant on the San Marco side of the Rialto Bridge that was bustling at this time of the day. He ate at the bar, hoping that all the conversation and activity around him would help draw him out of his thoughts about Possle and the Ca’ Pozza, about the key he had taken, the belt he had seen on the staircase, and the recluse’s provocative remarks about Byron. But he only ended up feeling more solitary.
As soon as he stepped into the calle after lunch, he decided to seek out some of the locales associated with Byron as a way of concretizing some of his thoughts. The poet had spent several years in the city where, according to his own estimate, he had been the lover of two hundred women as well as a few men.
The possible existence of unpublished Byron poems, perhaps written during his notorious residency in the city, was even affecting Urbino’s dream now. Last night a new element had entered. As the Contessa approached the thronelike chairs, the young Possle slipped a hand beneath the veil of the woman wearing the Contessa’s silver cascade, withdrew a sheaf of papers, and waved them in the air. They were covered with florid handwriting in purple ink. When the Contessa reached Possle, the fire broke out as he knew it would, but instead of the drapes catching fire, the papers did.
As always, Urbino had awakened when the flames started to engulf the room.
The dream was still very much on his mind as he walked in the general direction of the Piazza San Marco on this gray, overcast day. The sun kept trying to break through but succeeded for only a few scattered moments. Traces of fog curled above the waters of the Grand Canal and crept across the squares and alleys like something alive.
Packs of boisterous students interrupted Urbino’s progress and reflections. Their easy camaraderie and enthusiasm could not have been more of a contrast to his meditative mood.
Urbino needed to be skeptical about Possle’s possible possession of unpublished poems by Byron. It wasn’t that such things didn’t happen or that people like Urbino didn’t unearth them. He was aware of several instances. In fact, he knew a woman who had stumbled on previously unknown letters by Henry James, which had shed light on his sexual identity.
But for every genuine discovery, a thousand hoaxes confounded the public; and if ever there was a person who would perpetrate such a hoax, that person was certainly Samuel Possle, the thief of San Polo, as Urbino was more and more coming to think of him. Everything about him, from his clothes and his Amontillado to his allusions and his choice of decor and music, was calculated, and nothing more so than his bizarre divan.
And yet Urbino couldn’t discount the possibility that unpublished poems by Byron were hidden somewhere in the Ca’ Pozza, waiting to be exposed to the light. If they were, how long had they been there, and how had they come into Possle’s hands? Possle had said that there was no doubt of Byron’s authorship. Did this mean that someone had authenticated them? All of them? And what were they about? Were they a sequence? Isolated poems? First draughts of poems that had already been published?
Urbino had a sinking feeling as he formulated this latter question. It made him realize how much he was already hoping, so soon after Possle had made his revelation, that he indeed did have authentic poems and ones that had never seen the light of day. They might not provide the answer to the riddle of the universe, but they would certainly shake the lesser world of Byron studies and help make the reputation of whoever found them. They were just what Urbino needed at this time. Much better than a biography of Possle would be.
The idea of the poems remained temptingly before his eyes as he plunged through the tortuous alleys. If Possle had them, Urbino would do whatever he could to get possession of them, do anything, that is, within reason. This amendment he almost voiced aloud as if to assure himself of an inviolable personal principle. It was also one that Possle had ironically drawn attention to yesterday.
Urbino threaded his way through the alleys until he reached a calle that led toward the Grand Canal. Fog from the waterway was brushing against the brick and stucco.
He came to a halt at a building on his right. It was the Palazzo Benzon, the first stop on what he had decided would be his contemplative little itinerary in honor of Byron. This wasn’t the best way to view the building, for like most of the palazzi on the Grand Canal, it turned its back to the pedestrian world and showed its full splendor only by water.
But his imagination had little trouble investing it with some of its past glory when the Contessa Marina Querini-Benzon had conducted a literary salon in one of its sumptuous apartments. She was none other than the blonde woman named in the Venetian love song “La biondina in gondoleta” that gondoliers still serenaded their customers with. Byron, who had begun as a luminary of the sixty-year-old contessa’s salon, had ended up her lover, as Urbino had been speculating about yesterday in the presence of Peggy Guggenheim’s bed.
He retraced his steps down the calle and bent them toward the four Palazzi Mocenigo, which stood at the volta of the Canalazzo where it made its sharpest turn. The fog was thicker here. It obscured
first one part of the scene, then another, as it stole along.
The Palazzo Mocenigo-Vecchio was the one that Demetrio Emo had described as being haunted by the ghost of the alchemist Giordano Bruno.
But Urbino was drawn to the Palazzo Mocenigo-Nero, for it had been here that Byron, from 1818 to 1819, with a dog, monkey, fox, and wolf to keep him company, had created the romantic aura of his Venetian years. He had pursued his mistresses, swum the length of the Grand Canal, ridden horses on the Lido, and argued incessantly with his friend Shelley, who disapproved of Byron’s sexual obsession that had gondoliers soliciting lovers for him on the streets and canals. And in its rooms he had carried on his notorious affair with a woman known as La Fornarina, the baker’s wife, who had attacked him with a knife during a quarrel and then jumped into the Grand Canal from the balcony of his rooms.
Here in the Palazzo Mocenigo-Nero, Byron had made his decision to study the Armenian language on the island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in the lagoon and had written the first two cantos of Don Juan. Perhaps he had also written the poems that Possle had mentioned.
A young man and a woman, speaking French, came down the calle and stood beside Urbino to read the plaque honoring Byron. The man carried a recently published biography about the homosexual component of the poet’s libertinage. When the woman consulted her map, Urbino realized that they needed to get to the Accademia Bridge. He walked a short distance with them to show them the way and then sought out the thickening flow of people. Eventually he entered the fashionable street of shops that ended near the Piazza. He turned down an alley and stopped when he reached a secluded courtyard.
A middle-aged nun in a blue dress and white scarf was sweeping the pavement of her order’s retirement home. Urbino wondered what the good sisters lying in their beds after a lifetime of faithful service would think if they knew that Byron had met and fallen in love with a beautiful married woman in a house in this same courtyard. But perhaps one of the sisters, after decades of devotion to her heavenly bridegroom, was at that very moment reading, through thick glasses, about how Byron had become the married woman’s cavaliere servente, an ambiguous but socially accepted role in the morally lax city, and how they had settled down into a domestic relationship. The enthralled sister might even wet her dry cheek when she came to Byron’s death from fever in Greece at the age of thirty-six and close the book with the consolation that she had read nothing more than a moral tale.
Urbino abandoned these thoughts and turned out of the courtyard. There was one more stop on his itinerary. A few minutes later he was standing in a busy street behind the Piazza San Marco and gazing up at yet another building. Here Byron had first lodged in Venice, shadowed by rumors of incest after he had left England. Soon after moving into his rooms, he was thick in an affair with the landlord’s wife.
Perhaps Byron had written the poems that Possle claimed to have to this woman, whose dark eyes had mesmerized him. Perhaps they had somehow found their way from the heart of San Marco across the Grand Canal to Possle’s isolated palazzo in San Polo. The point of all this walking and all this intense contemplation of some of the stones of Venice was to make him even more hungry for whatever poems Possle might have.
Urbino, buffeted by passersby, pulled himself out of his speculations and headed for Harry’s Bar a short distance away. The small, unpretentious front room, however, was smoke filled and crowded with tourists, most of them drinking their obligatory Bellinis. He left after having a quick glass of wine and making a dinner reservation for next Tuesday for Emo and himself.
The number one vaporetto was about to leave from the landing in front of the bar. The boat attendant held the gate open until Urbino squeezed through, and then the boat set off up the Grand Canal through the fog. Urbino sat outside in the stern away from the wind and contemplated the view as the palaces and churches unrolled themselves. He mulled over the various notions that had been a counterpoint to his walk this afternoon.
On his way to the Palazzo Uccello from the boat landing, he stopped at a locksmith’s, but not Demetrio Emo’s. To go to THE KEEPER OF THE KEYS might have been a mistake.
The locksmith made a copy of the key Urbino had taken from Possle’s bedroom. He had to search through a box of old key patterns before he was able to find a suitable one to use.
Back at the Palazzo Uccello, Urbino first telephoned the Contessa to ask her how her conversazione had gone. Although she was modest in what she said, he could tell that it had been another success. She promised him that she would give him more details when she saw him in person in a few more days. She had to go to Asolo again early tomorrow morning to attend to some problems at the villa in preparation for the visit of her sister and her family.
After speaking with the Contessa, he opened a bottle of Corvo and took it to the library. For the rest of the afternoon and evening, sustained by the wine and a plate of tramezzini sandwiches Natalia had left for him, he immersed himself in Byron’s poetry and correspondence and in biographical accounts of his life.
Nothing he read gave him a clue about any unpublished Byron poems. Yet almost everything he read increased his hunger to lay his hands on them if they indeed existed, stashed away somewhere in the dark Ca’ Pozza—to lay his hands on them by fair means, of course, he quickly amended as he turned off the lights of the library.
51
The next afternoon at two o’clock Urbino boarded the motonave for the Lido near the Doge’s Palace. Sun and a pale blue sky had succeeded yesterday’s fog and damp.
The boat was crowded with people taking advantage of the fair weather for an outing to the Lido. Gentle waves rocked the buoys and rippled the blue-green waters of the lagoon, scattered with vaporetti, delivery boats, and pleasure craft.
The curve of the Riva degli Schiavoni with its broad pavement, balconied buildings, little bridges, and moored boats and ships slid past. They were soon passing the Naval Museum, with its memories of the day the Contessa had provided the epithet that Urbino kept returning to: the thief of San Polo.
Farther along spread the area that was being prepared for the art exposition. Urbino would soon be swept up with Habib in the parties, photographic shoots, and stream of friends and family coming through Venice. Was it too much to expect that by the time of the opening in June he would be in possession of the poems, if they existed, and that his mysterious business with Possle would be at an end?
As the boat swung away from the tail of Venice, the small monastery island of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, with its cypresses and onion shaped cupola, became visible.
A warm sea breeze was blowing down the main street of the narrow strip of land when Urbino disembarked on the Lido. Some of the passengers who had come over on the boat were renting bicycles from the shop near the landing. One couple was already pedaling away in a tandem in the direction of the open sea.
Urbino went into a bar and, under the influence of the large sign that dominated the boat landing, ordered a Campari. As he drank the bitter red liquid, he asked the bartender for directions to Lino Cipri’s apartment on the assumption that the dapper painter was known in the neighborhood. He was. The bartender named a street a short distance away.
Urbino strolled in the sunshine down the broad avenue toward the sea past the shops, restaurants, hotels, and villas.
Despite his love for Venice, Urbino was sometimes glad to escape it for a few hours on the Lido, although never in the height of summer. At this time of the year, even on a Sunday like today, with more visitors than usual, it was a pleasant change from the claustrophobia of Venice. This was close to what Byron must have felt when he left Venice’s society and intrigue to come horseback riding on what were, in his day, the barren strands of the Lido.
Urbino angled back toward the boat landing and soon reached the street where the Cipris lived. It was closed to traffic and bordered by one of the Lido’s few canals. Small boats were moored alongside the brick walls of the quay.
He went up the cracked front steps
of one of the least well-kept buildings and pushed the bell.
52
Cipri was in good spirits and seemed pleased to see Urbino. All pink and shining as if recently shaved and showered, he was dressed in a beige suit with a flowing blue cravat. He guided Urbino to a chair in the parlor across from the one in which his wife sat with a stern expression on her face. Cipri lowered the volume of Liszt’s Todtentanz that was playing on a record player and slipped into the kitchen.
Signora Cipri wore a faded housedress. Her head was bare today. Urbino was dismayed to see that she had only a few wisps of gray hair.
The small room was crowded with worn furniture. Books were crammed into a bookcase and scattered in piles across the carpet and on tables and chairs. Unframed paintings were stacked against the wall behind the sofa.
Signora Cipri’s armchair, with its floral fabric, provided a view of the entrance hall and the kitchen. A small table overflowed at her elbow with bottles of medication. She kept glancing in the direction of the kitchen as if she was impatient for her husband’s return. When her sharp blue eyes rested on Urbino, they didn’t move away at once but stared with an almost insolent air. He tried to engage her in conversation, but she remained silent. Taking it as a sign that she preferred Liszt’s danse macabre to anything he might have to say, he leaned back and listened to the paraphrase of the Dies Irae with her.
Fortunately, Cipri soon emerged with it. On the tray were a pot of espresso, cups, an anisette bottle, and a small plate of biscuits. He fixed an espresso for his wife first, pouring in a generous portion of the anisette and a sliver of lemon, and gave her a biscuit.
Urbino mentioned that he had sent off the paintings and said, once again, that Eugene was sure to be pleased with them.
The Last Gondola Page 18
