Hill Towns, page 17
“Sleep well,” Ada Forrest said. “I’ve always loved sleeping on trains. And this is a nice, clean new one.”
“We will,” I said, and kissed her on both cheeks, as I was learning to do. “There’s no way to say thank you, but I intend to find one before this trip is over.”
“Letting Sam do the portrait is thanks enough,” she said.
Sam hugged me and Joe indiscriminately. He smelled as he had on the first night I met him, of sweat and gin.
“A, don’t drink the water,” he said. “Get some mineral water from the attendant. Brush your teeth in it, even. The other stuff is just for flushing. B, leave a call for an hour before we get in. It’s a madhouse when you come into Venice. The guy will make you some first-rate espresso in the morning if you tip him enormously tonight. It’s worth it. C, sleep well. Or whatever. Everything is better on a train.”
He winked at Joe and kissed me on the forehead, and he and Ada went off down the corridor toward their own compartment. The train was beginning to move, slowly. By the time we got the luggage wedged into our tiny cubicle and pulled down the overhead bunk, it was swaying and clicking along through the anonymous suburbs northeast of Rome.
We washed our faces, and brushed our teeth with mineral water the smiling, well-tipped porter brought, and struggled out of our clothes. I knew there was no hope of finding my nightgown in the piled-up luggage; we literally had to crawl over it, naked, to get into our bunks. Joe came into the lower one with me, and we lay close together, sandwiched in on both sides, rocking through darkness that was lit in brief, flying intervals as we ghosted through small stations and out into the darkness again. Joe reached over me and pulled down the shade.
“We’d never forgive ourselves if we didn’t,” he said.
“No,” I said, reaching up to pull him down over me. His naked back was smooth and very warm, almost hot. The compartment was cool, though. It was very dark for a long time, and in the dark we might have been anywhere at all, except that the deep rushing-rocking of the train took us with it, deeper and harder and faster than we ever went on the Mountain. If I had not been pressed down so hard by the weight of Joe’s body I might have arched completely up off the bunk at the finish. I felt my head snap back, and my mouth open, and I tasted the sweat and salt of the side of his neck, and bit it not so gently. He cried out with more than release when I did, and I think I tasted, along with the salt of his skin, the salt-sweet of his blood.
“A Roman fuck is not your ordinary fuck,” he whispered later, when his breathing slowed.
“No,” I said, still quivering all over.
Much later, after he had struggled into the top bunk and I knew by the sound of his breathing that he slept, I reached over and let the shade up again and lay washed in moonlight, watching trees and hills and occasional old buildings and the arches of old, old, vine-covered bridges and culverts flash past and over me. The clack and sway of the train got into my blood, and I felt my breathing slide into the rhythm of the train. Just before I slid after it into sleep, I felt a sudden surge of fierce joy, the kind you seldom feel after childhood. Ahead of us lay Venice, safe on its island, safe in its lagoon. After that, Florence, the first of the hill towns. And after Florence, the hill towns themselves, the tall old hill towns of Tuscany. Safe, safe….
And all around me, my people, my community. Joe.
And Sam Forrest.
8
WE CAME INTO VENICE AT DAWN, BUT AS SAM HAD SAID, it was all of a frenzied hour before we had gotten ourselves off the train—Colin in a fireman’s carry made by Joe and Sam’s crossed arms, furious and hurting—and found our luggage. The morning was still and thick and gray. Even before we reached the quay, trotting alongside the mechanized baggage cart that bore our belongings and a sulky, flinching Colin, even before we left the gunmetal shadows of the station, we knew we were in the immense presence of water. Light danced its water dance on the metal roof of the baggage shed; we heard, instead of the blat of automobiles, the chugging and splashing of water traffic; we felt on our skin the slightly sticky slipcover of salt air; we smelled—a stronger, darker note under the complex rank exhalation of Venice in the summer—the sea.
We had been talking worriedly, while we waited for our baggage, of what to do about Colin. Venice, with its hundreds of tiny high-arched bridges, its twisting, narrow calles, its solid throngs of summer tourists and absence of automobile transport, is no place for the handicapped. Colin insisted he could walk, leaning on Sam and Joe, but his forehead was sheened with cold sweat, and his face was pinched and shrunken under its gold-leaf tan. Pain had aged and enfeebled him, and I thought that this, the first real helplessness of his remembered life, had frightened him. He said almost nothing and shook off Maria’s worried fingers. I knew he was going to be difficult to help. Perhaps we could tip our boatman heavily to help carry him to our hotel in the Campo La Fenice. It was, Sam said, about a five-minute walk from the San Marco landing stage if we took the Number One vaporetto, the one we’d planned to take. Sam and Ada both said it was by far the best and cheapest way to see the Grand Canal for the first time. It was the worst sort of folly, they said, to hire a gondola for a trip from the train station to San Marco.
“You’d have to skip dinner for the rest of your trip,” Sam said. “They’re the modern Italian equivalent of highway robbery.”
I could not imagine that Sam and Ada Forrest worried unduly about money, but it was nice of them to think of Maria and Colin’s newlywed budget. Or, for that matter, our academic one. Trinity paid its department heads handsomely, but we were not, I knew, in the Forrests’ bracket. Far from it.
Ada whispered something to Sam and he nodded, and she went in search of a telephone and came back in a few minutes smiling.
“The Europa and Regina is making up the living room of our suite into a bedroom for Sam and me,” she said. “It’s directly on the Canal Grande, no walking at all. And they’re sending the launch for us. This way Colin and Maria can have our bedroom where we can look after them, and Yolie can take their room at the Fenice. I’m sure the one they found for her last night is a broom closet. This will be better all the way round. That is, if you lovebirds don’t mind sharing a bath. It won’t be bad; Sam takes very few.”
Sam grinned evilly at her.
“Oh, God, we can’t take your bedroom, Ada.” Colin groaned. “You didn’t come to Venice to share a bathroom and wait on me. Where would Sam paint Cat?”
“The rooms are absolutely huge,” she said. “Even the bedrooms have sitting areas, and everything overlooks the canal. The light is lovely. Sam can set up his easel by one of the windows and we’ll still have enough room for a ball. I’m not going to take no for an answer on this, darling. You simply cannot manage the Fenice right now. You can lie on the chaise by the window and see all the Venice that’s worth seeing, and order gorgeous things from room service, and by the time we leave you’ll be able to walk much better. You’ll be all ready for Florence. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“I hate the fuck out of this,” Colin said.
“What a perfectly gracious thing to say to Ada,” Maria said tightly. Her skirt and blouse were badly crumpled, and there were yellowish circles under her dark eyes. I thought of the minuscule bunks on the overnight train and suspected that the second night of Maria Gerard’s married life had not been what she might have wished it to be. She had doubtlessly slept in her clothes, if she had slept at all. I imagined that she sat up all night, wedged into the lower bunk with Colin’s injured foot propped in her lap, trying to buffer him against the sways and jostles of the train. At the very best, she might have dozed a little. No transcendent flying, racketing love for her, as there had been for Joe and me. I did not blame her for the irritation in her husky voice. Colin injured and helpless did not, for some reason, elicit compassion.
“It’s OK,” Ada said, smiling her little cat’s smile. She wore sea-green cotton today, in a pattern of polished swirls; it seemed to catch and throw back the sea stipple on the shed’s ceiling. Her hair was tied high off her slender neck, and the green fabric turned her eyes the color of ice in arctic seas. Everything about Ada Forrest was cool on this thick morning.
“Well,” Yolanda Whitney said cheerfully, “I accept the offer of your old room at the Fenice, because I know the kind of ‘emergency accommodation’ they keep vacant, so you’ve got no choice. Don’t be a butt, Colin. Give your bride a break. The Europa’s got the best view in Venice, and they’ll look after you like you’re Michael Jackson. You wouldn’t do half that well at the dear old Fenice.”
Maria smiled at her gratefully, and Sam gave her a small hug.
“Come on,” he said to Colin. “For you I’ll bathe once a day. Rest of the time you won’t know we’re there. Souls of discretion, we’ll be.”
“Better do it, sport,” Joe said. “You don’t want to get on the bad side of these ladies.”
“There’s no way we can afford that hotel,” Colin said obdurately. “It was one of the ones we looked at when we planned the trip. Christ, we couldn’t even manage one night—”
“The room is courtesy of us,” Ada said. “Consider it a wedding present. After all, it’s already arranged; it isn’t costing anyone anything.”
“No. You’ve done too much for us. From now on I pay my way,” Colin said, and I thought it might actually be possible to dislike him if this side of him presented itself very often. But of course it didn’t; I had never seen it in all the years I had known him on the Mountain. Pain and disappointment, that’s what it was. Not the Colin I knew at all.
“Colin,” Ada said patiently, but with a very slight edge in her voice, “we are paying nothing for either room. The suite is gratis because Sam is…because Sam is Sam Forrest. We have stayed there often before, and the manager is an old friend. He owns one of Sam’s earliest Italian works. I don’t like to make a thing of this, but if it will ease your Yankee conscience I will tell you it is a matter of some pride to our friend, having Sam Forrest stay at his hotel. We would feel churlish trying to pay him for our accommodations; we stopped trying long ago. So you are not putting anyone out and you owe no one anything, and here is the hotel launch. Let’s by all means get into it and get you settled and get a decent breakfast. I think we’ll all feel better then.”
I was liking her more and more.
“Then thank you, Sam and Ada,” Colin mumbled, not meeting their eyes. “Thank you again.”
He did not say anything else as the boatman and Sam and Joe propped him tenderly in the smart hotel launch, and he did not speak for the entire length of the Grand Canal. For once I could not fault him. One’s first view of it, coming out of the shadowy cave of the baggage shed on a mist-pearled early morning, literally stops the breath. We were well away and passing slowly between lacy Gothic loggias and striped mooring poles, past small, secret canals winding into shadows and who knew what else, past the fairy-tale palazzi in their stained dress of soft, crumbling red and blue and pink and gold and white, past blade-prowed gondolas and barges and blundering vaporetti and sleek, low-rumbling private motor craft, before anyone said anything at all.
“Oh, my,” I said softly, on an indrawn breath. “Oh, my goodness….”
Venice remains to me now what it was that first morning: a city shimmering in midair, somewhere between sky and water. Atlantis risen. It is all movement and mirrors, illusion, mist, radiance, dapple and dance and diffusion. I never knew where I was in Venice, and I never knew with certainty which was the real city, the city of stone and flesh, and which the watery twin. The people I met in the dark calles were, I fancied, more often than not ghosts, and I am quite sure that many of the ghosts of Venice I took for real people, and nodded as we passed, and was nodded to in turn. Its opalescent beauty remains for me phantasmagorical and sucking, death at the bottom of it all, life at the bottom of the death. Who knows which Venice is real, or if any of it is? It dances in the air of its lagoon; it decays in the dark green of its water, it dies and is reborn hourly as the fantastic light changes. It is rich with treasures that were born elsewhere, with the plunder of a hundred kings and centuries; it seems to own none of itself but clings to each new eye and heart that is drawn down the great artery to its own heart as if to fashion for itself more sustaining flesh. I loved it; almost to my last day there, I did.
I truly believe Joe hated it. I still am not quite sure why. I think I know: Venice robs you of yourself and hands you back changed. But I still am not sure. It could be that it was because I loved it. We began to change in earnest, Joe and I, on that first slow ride down the Canal Grande. Or perhaps it was simply that we began to become…us.
Just before we passed under the Rialto Bridge we met a procession of black gondolas, trimmed sparingly with gold and moving infinitely slowly. Dark-clad men and women with black scarves and shawls over their heads followed in their gondolas the lead one, where a coffin and an oblong of flowers reposed alone except for the gondolier. A funeral; of course it was. How strange, I thought, to go to your last rest on water, as you had come from that first one. It seemed fitting, somehow natural. Our boatman took off his livery cap, and Ada Forrest made a discreet sign of the cross. Sam shook his red head in something like disgust. Joe gazed at the procession raptly. I knew what he would say before he said it.
“Death in Venice,” he said. “Perfect. Thomas Mann couldn’t have done better; are you sure you didn’t set it up for us, Sam?”
“Glad you like it,” Sam said. “But it’s none of my doing. I’d just chunk the poor bastard into the canal, like they do the dogs and cats. Thomas Mann obviously never had to pay for a funeral flotilla; these gondolas will set the family back whatever inheritance Uncle Aldo or whoever left. They will do it, though. I never heard of anybody going to San Michele permanently in a vaporetto.”
“Where’s San Michele?” Yolanda asked. She had her thick chestnut hair loose today on her shoulders, even though the gray stillness was already oppressive, and wore a low-cut yellow cotton dress and sandals. I thought she was looking prettier and younger each day I spent with her. Her eyes were clear; she had obviously stuck to the mineral water she still carried with her.
“The funeral island,” Sam said. “The cemetery island. It’s where them as can afford it have crypts, and them as can’t go into a common grave after twelve years. Proper field of bones, it is; like they grow death there. Doesn’t matter who you are, either; if you don’t pay you don’t stay. Twelve years and zip.”
“God,” Joe said. “That’s barbaric. Why? What about the English and Americans who’re buried here? Aren’t there quite a few? Didn’t Ezra Pound die here, and…somebody else, I forget who? Do they dump the foreigners too?”
“Nope. There’s a separate Protestant section that doesn’t get the heave-ho unless there’s Acqua alta—high water. Then, of course, everybody floats right on out. The reason for the twelve years is that there simply isn’t enough land on San Michele, or anywhere else in Venice, to hold the dead of all those centuries. There’s a separate Isle of Bones out past Torcello if San Michele isn’t Gothic enough for you.”
“Who else is there that we’d know?” Maria said, fascinated.
“Well, Wagner and Browning and Diaghilev, for starters. There’s something nice about Diaghilev, in the Orthodox Church section. For as long as anybody remembers there’s been a ballet slipper left on his grave, with flowers in it. When the old one finally rots, a new one appears. Nobody seems to know who brings them.”
“What a lovely thing,” I said, the enchantment growing. “To go across the lagoon in a gondola to your grave, to have someone leave a ballet slipper on it. No wonder you hear so much about death and beauty in the same breath here.”
It seemed to me that every small canal we passed was arched over with high, curved bridges. Venice seemed to be strung with them, like spiderwebs of lacy stone. The sight of them made me uneasy. I felt gooseflesh on my bare arms and rubbed them with my hands, even as the sun broke free of the mist and hung in the sky like the white thumb print of a moon.
Joe saw my gesture.
“Bridges, bridges everywhere,” he said lightly. “Cat will go out of her skull.”
Anger bit me like a stinging insect. I did not answer, but Sam did.
“Well, there’s this little saint, Saint Zita, I think,” he said. “She’s the patron saint of those who must cross bridges. I’ll get Cat one of her medals as soon as we land. She and Saint Zita will waltz right over every bridge in Venice.”
He looked levelly at Joe. He wore dark sunglasses this morning, and I could not see the piercing blue eyes. He reminded me of a hawk in its hunting hood, thin blade of nose and slash of mouth, coppery face. The earring shone dully. The ponytail was shoved up under the straw hat; it gave him a different look altogether. Florence; I thought he looked far more a piece of Florence than this aqueous, ephemeral place. Savonarola’s Florence.
Joe looked straight back at him. “You do that,” he said. And then, “Christ, look at that! Jesus! Does every toilet in Venice flush right into the Grand Canal?”
I looked, then looked quickly away. At the mouth of a tiny canal the bloated body of a small black-and-white dog bobbed among a cluster of what could only be human excrement. The sleek, evil head of a water rat bobbed in the midst of it, nibbling. A powerful stench followed the sight by a breath.
“Well, you know, Joe, death and beauty,” Sam Forrest drawled. “You said it yourself. Oscar Wilde said riding in a gondola was like riding in a coffin through a sewer. I’d think you of all people would dig it. You know, Gothic decay? Faulkner?”
“Faulkner didn’t shit in his water,” Joe said tightly. I thought dismally that things were not going to go well for us in Venice.
“How do you know?” Sam said, smiling murderously, as only Southerners really seem to know how to do. I thought he was angry with Joe for his remark about me and the bridges; the thought pleased me obscurely but troubled me, too. I did not want these two men circling around me stiff-legged, like male dogs.
