By the time we got back to my room, tiredness was attacking me from all angles. My eyes were having trouble staying open. I could feel sleep washing over me like waves on a pebbly shore, leaving me small windows of alertness before drowning me again in weariness.
Wordlessly, I let Marco take off my clothes and put me to bed. I felt the warmth of his hand on my stomach before drifting away into deep, deep sleep. In my dreams, the blackness swirled like a sinister oil painting with streaks of other colours spurting and spraying in front of my closed eyelids. It was unsettling, angry, confused. Very Jackson Pollock on a bad day. And it went on for far too long, leaving me feeling anxious and out of sorts when I woke up.
‘Marco?’ I whispered sleepily, turning to face him, seeking solace in his arms. But his side of the bed, of course, was empty. There would be no solace. Marco was gone.
I suppose you would have seen this coming. And had I not been blind to all but Marco’s animal magnetism, I suppose I would have seen it too.
As it was, I looked around my gorgeous room, which showed no sign at all of ever having had a handsome gondolier in it, no trace of the man who could make me forget my husband. There was no point in checking the wardrobe or under the bed. I knew in my heart of hearts that he was gone. No doubt about it. Gone. Devastation seeped into every pore, knocking the wind clear out of me.
I mean I knew it was preposterous from the start, someone like me and someone like him, but it had just unfolded so naturally, so perfectly, and felt so right that something inside me must have screamed ‘I deserve this!’ because I hadn’t fought it at all. I hadn’t argued with myself that he’d mistaken me for someone else, I hadn’t joked my way out of his embrace, I hadn’t let the guilt with which I was so heavily endowed overwhelm my instinctive desire. I had seized the day, I had carpe diemed up the wazoo. I had opened myself up to him, despite it all, despite the real me, and I’d had the best goddamn experience of my whole goddamn life.
I sucked back a sob. Whatever Marco had awoken in me I could not bear to put back to sleep. I felt alive for the first time in I couldn’t remember how long. I tingled with the memory of him. How could I live without feeling those lips on my skin, those hands on my breasts, those thighs pressed against mine, his breath hot on my neck?
It was morning, the sounds of the city awakening were sifting in through the window, the light casting shadows on my pistachio surroundings. I calmed the panic in my chest. I had found an antidote to my doubts over a future with Tom and I was not going to let it go.
I pulled on my jeans and the cashmere cardigan Fleur had given me for my last birthday and ran out of the hotel. I would find him, I decided. I would bring him back. I would make love to him again and then maybe I would know what to do next. Right then that was all I could come up with; it was as far as I could see — a growl low in my stomach calling out for more of my gorgeous gondolier.
Of course, at Traghetto Santa Maria del Giglio his gondola was gone and the other gondolier there, the same slob who’d been there the night before, claimed to know nothing of Marco but offered to take me for a ride for 100 euros, a snip, he claimed, at that price. He was blowing the smoke of a strong cigarette in my face and eyeing me in a way that made me feel dirty. His gondolier hat was ratty and his white shirt frayed at the collar with a dribble of something red spilled down the front. His teeth were stained brown, his fingers yellow and he smelled of nothing pleasant.
‘Marco,’ I stressed, realising as I did how little I knew of the man, how few clues I had to help me find him. Not even his surname. ‘You must know Marco. He’s tall, quite tall, and wears a black T-shirt and trousers. He has 12 gondolas. He was here last night, with me, you must remember.’
A sleazy smile crept over the gondolier’s face. ‘Oh, so you’ve been with Marco,’ he said. I felt relief for a moment. Perhaps help was at hand. ‘Well, let me tell you little Miss Americano — there’s nothing Marco can give you that I can’t.’ He made a lewd gesture with one hand and his crotch, only narrowly missing setting himself on fire as his cigarette end brushed against his acrylic pants.
‘Excuse me,’ I said prudishly. ‘But there is no need to be disgusting.’
The gondolier laughed. ‘It is not me who has been disgusting, Signorina,’ he said, spitting into the canal as he did so. ‘You all think you are so special.’
I tried to tough it out but it was too hard. ‘You all? What is that supposed to mean?’
‘You think you are the first pretty girl to fall in love with a gondolier like Marco?’ This man’s face was twisted and mean. I just knew that he was not a gondolier with whom pretty girls fell in love. ‘These canal waters overflow with the blood of foolish women’s broken hearts. Go home, Signorina. Forget him. Go home.’
I turned and ran, not even bothering to wipe the tears from my cheeks. But running is not my thing, due to not being thin and pert, and no matter how quickly I wanted to get away from the ugly gondolier’s lies — or even worse, truths — I just couldn’t keep myself jiggling up and down like that. So I slowed to an upset sort of a scurry, then to a walk. I would go to the Rialto where I had seen Marco yesterday, I decided. Of course! Marco had to work! He would be there, or not far away, and I would wait for him. And everything would be all right.
This thought lifted my spirits and I skipped across the Rio di San Moise, the smell of coffee in the air reminding me that I couldn’t be too far away from Pasticceria Marchini, which was alleged to have Venice’s best pastries. But my heart needed feeding before my stomach and in fact my jeans were feeling a little firm after the feasting that had gone on the day before, despite the high calorific burn factor, so I kept moving towards the Rialto.
Halfway there I caught a glimpse of a tall, dark gondolier disappearing around the corner in his boat, the familiar throaty laugh of a female passenger echoing around the canal. It sounded just like Fleur.
And wouldn’t that be just like her, I found myself thinking, to steal my beautiful boyfriend — she who could summon up anyone she wanted and at least five spares. I started to run again then, ignoring the jolt in my knees and the jiggle in my bra, following the direction in which I thought the gondola had gone. But the water is by far the simplest way to get around Venice and trying to follow the gondola on foot I was thwarted at every turn. Within two minutes I had come to a dead end in a dingy little alley and knew I had lost Marco and Fleur forever. But there was no way it could have been Fleur and if it had been Marco, he was probably on his way back to the Rialto.
My heart sank when I got there and saw the clutch of other gondoliers mooching about on the pier, my one not among them.
‘Have you seen Marco?’ I asked, but the first lot turned their backs on me.
‘Marco?’ I asked another trio, but they talked amongst themselves and laughed at me, one even jabbing at me with his cell phone, his eyes deep set and dead-looking.
I knew how it looked. I knew what they were thinking. But I just couldn’t believe that Marco would do that to me. So I waited. And waited. And waited. But by 11 o’clock I felt that every one of Venice’s thousand gondoliers but him had passed me by.
‘If he comes,’ I told the gondoliers standing beside me, ‘if Marco comes tell him I’ve gone to Do’ Mori.’
‘Quello lì, non lo vedrai mai più,’ the tallest one said, shaking his head. While I couldn’t be sure exactly what he meant, I could tell that it wasn’t good.
It took a while to find Do’ Mori. It was not that far from the bridge but the alleys were all narrow and dark and one looked much the same as the other. But eventually I recognised the wooden sign hanging over the hidden doorway.
‘Signora Marinello!’ I cried with relief when I finally stumbled into the bar. Marco was nowhere to be seen but the sight of her ruby cheeks was most welcome. ‘Have you seen him? Seen Marco?’
Signora Marinello poured a glass of wine and slid it over the worn wooden counter-top. ‘I’ve seen Marco, yes,’ she said. ‘But you don’t nee
d Marco no more, Constanzia.’
I pushed the glass back to her. I had thought she was a friend. I felt anger surge through me with near-volcanic heat then shrink away again to a hard little rock, leaving me empty and scared.
‘But I do,’ I whispered, my eyes sliding desperately over the tuna croquettes, my mouth not even bothering to water. ‘I need him more than ever. Why would you say otherwise?’
‘Is just the way it is,’ Signora Marinello wiped her hands on the dishcloth that was tucked into the apron tied around her substantial middle. ‘Is just the way it is, Constanzia. Time for you to move on.’
The concern was still there in her eyes. It killed me. She must have known from the start that Marco was going to drop me like a hot potato. She straightened a tray of polpette, which failed to tickle my taste buds in the slightest. I was really not myself. The tinny taste was growing stronger and stronger in my mouth. The headache that had waxed and waned over the past day or so throbbed violently now in at least three different places.
‘You going to be fine,’ she said vehemently. ‘You going to be better than you was before. You don’t need Marco no more. Trust me, my love.’
I started to say something, to argue, to plead, to beg her for any suggestion that might lead me to my gondolier, but at that moment a familiar but most out-of-place face walked into Do’ Mori. It belonged to Ty Wheatley, a snooty magazine publisher I knew vaguely from Manhattan — yet he seemed hardly surprised at all to see me.
‘There you are,’ he said and he leaned in to kiss me, on the mouth.
Now Ty Wheatley was not a man I expected to kiss me on the mouth, nor anywhere else for that matter. He was just about good-looking but not up my alley at all, no way. You may know the type. He’d started if not on the wrong side of the tracks then near them, but came into money thanks to some distant uncle when he was in his 20s. He’d then hot-footed it from Idaho or Iowa or Oklahoma to seek fame and fortune in New York, cleverly buying a property magazine that with the boom turned out to be a brilliant investment. He was squashy around the middle, prone to speaking in a phoney English accent and always dressed in cream linen, something I totally deplored.
He ate at all the nice restaurants, went to all the right parties and was the sort of person so aware of what you should do to fit in that he never quite managed it himself. I’d picked that desperation up in him the first time we met and it rang a nasty little bell inside me too, making me feel like the gawky schoolgirl I had once been and had no interest in being again.
Actually, when I came to think about it, standing there at the bar at Do’ Mori, my cheeks flushed, palms sweating and heart thumping so loudly in my chest my temples hummed, I couldn’t quite remember how I knew all this. About Ty. I had only met him a couple of times, no more than in passing really. And the last time I had seen him he had wanted to talk to me about something but I had cleverly fobbed him off by going to the bathroom halfway through the conversation.
‘Darling,’ Ty said, to my horror putting his arms around me. ‘You look so pale.’
I looked over at Signora Marinello who had a funny expression on her face, not disappointment — I can recognise that from a hundred paces, I’ve had a lifetime of that — but not something a million miles away either.
‘Try the Giudecca,’ she said to me, and with that I wrenched myself out of Ty Wheatley’s grasp and fled.
Five
The Giudecca was the long thin island at the south of the lagoon known best, according to the sweating tourist squashed up against me on the vaporetto, for its fading palaces and gardens and the glitzy Hotel Cipriani.
The boat dropped me at Il Redentore, the island’s principal monument, and once the crowd dispersed into the church and down the wide quayside facing back to the city I found myself standing on the concrete forecourt not having a clue what to do next.
My headache had gotten worse: it pulsed behind my eyes like an overworked air-conditioning unit. A mild breeze was chilling my body — I was cold despite the warm temperature — yet my face felt flushed and feverish. I didn’t know what was wrong with me but I felt completely unglued. It was an ugly sensation made all the more terrifying by the fact that I was sure Marco was the only cure and I didn’t know if I would ever see him again. It was clear the Giudecca was not a gondoliers’ hangout. The water was rough and choppy between the island and the city, there would be no gondolas out there, and the buildings had a run-down industrial feel about them.
My smelly tourist friend had been vomited off the vaporetto and poured into the church with the rest of the tourist commuters and the only other people still standing outside Il Redentore were two old men, grandfathers I guessed, each with a sleeping toddler in a stroller. They were smoking and enjoying a lively debate, which continued as I approached.
‘Excuse me,’ I interrupted them. ‘Excuse me, do you have a moment?’
They stopped talking.
‘I was wondering if you could tell me where I might find any gondoliers?’
Could I have asked a more stupid question if I tried? I doubted it.
‘No, no, I don’t mean any gondolier,’ I continued in a panic as the grandfathers exchanged a look that I was pretty sure meant a finger circling an ear was soon to follow.
‘Just one, really,’ I carried on idiotically. ‘No, definitely! One, definitely! One gondolier.’ The grandfathers pushed their strollers around in unison and started to move at a sprightly gait away from me. ‘Marco,’ I cried. ‘Do you know him? It’s just that —’ but they were gone.
The splodge of wet galoshes on the ground drew my attention to a dark and crinkly skinned fisherman who was walking along the wharf from the opposite direction. He had frazzled grey hair and carried a pail full of twitching fish tails, driving his mutt of a big black dog to distraction.
I approached him more carefully than I had the grandfathers. Calling out before I got too close. ‘Excuse me,’ I called. ‘Do you know where I could find Marco, the gondolier?’
‘Gondolière?’ He at least acknowledged my question. I couldn’t even see his eyes; his skin was wrinkled into so many folds it covered them completely. But he threw back his head so he could get a good look at me, slowly checked me out, then pointed towards the other side of the island. ‘Squero,’ he said, as I heard a fish tail slap against the side of his pail making his dog whine with longing. ‘Boatyard. Boats.’
I walked briskly along until I found an alleyway that went through to the other side, emerging onto a narrower, shabbier quay that faced out to the wider lagoon.
‘Squero?’ I asked an ancient, shrivelled woman sitting outside her crumbling apartment, the window box next to her full to overflowing with the crisp brown heads of long-dead flowers. She pointed to my right and off I went, not really knowing what I was looking for until I came upon the wide opening of what looked like an old factory. When I looked in I saw the skeleton of a gondola, pale and naked like the bones of a slender whale, being worked on by a silver-haired man in a red polo shirt.
‘Hello?’ I called.
He looked up, carefully placed his tools on the workbench next to him and walked over to me. Up close, I saw he was not as old as his hair would have had me believe. Fifty, maybe, I thought, or even late 40s. And his eyes were a shade of pale green so clear they made me shiver. I couldn’t stop looking at them. He smiled and his crow’s feet winked at me. His skin was sun-darkened and pleasantly wrinkled.
‘I’m looking for Marco,’ I said. ‘Do you know where I can find him?’
‘Luca,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ I was flustered; that headache was killing me. ‘Connie. Connie Farrell. Pleased to meet you too.’ I grasped the outstretched hand and it felt warm and strong. I could feel the calluses on his palm and my head was suddenly filled with the faint scent of lemons. He was having a very odd effect on me. I felt floaty and strange. I’d never taken Ecstasy — Emmet had abused enough drugs for both
of us — but I wondered if this was what it felt like. My innards felt kind of warm, despite the fact my skin still felt the ache of a chill, and my head was full of puffy clouds.
‘Come in, Connie,’ he said, and although his voice was sort of muffled, I thought he too spoke perfect English. I could not detect one trace of an Italian accent. Dazed, I followed him into the workshop and over to the skeleton of the half-built gondola.
He picked up his tools — they looked like gynaecological instruments to me — and said: ‘Do you mind?’
I nodded dopily, hoping like hell I wasn’t agreeing to an internal examination. I had a terrible thirst that raged from the pit of my stomach up through my chest to my throat and my mouth, leaving my tongue stuck to the roof. I wanted desperately to ask for a glass of water but couldn’t find the words.
Luca had picked up a chisel and turned back to his boat, gently chipping at it, smoothing the lip of the gondola — although it already looked pretty level to me.
‘It’s a dying art, you know,’ he said, his back to me, as I watched the outline of his ribs under his red shirt, just the faintest patches of sweat under his armpits, the scent of citrus still hanging in the air. ‘Gondola-making. There are only three of us left.’ He ran his hands over the stretch of wood he’d just been working on, back and forth, back and forth, as though his skin itself might soothe the splinters. ‘Nobody cares about the boats any more. It’s all about the money.’
The way he leaned over the gondola, his tools in his hands, his arms outstretched reminded me of a pool player, of Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke with that silver hair, nutty skin and those piercing eyes.
‘Hard to believe only 50 years ago most people got around this city rowing,’ he said, his voice lapping at me like the waters of the Grand Canal against the sunken walls of the Gritti Palace. ‘Sure, the tourists go for a spin these days but if you wanted to go from here to Burano in a gondola, the way you might have done back then?’ He crouched down so his eye was level with his handiwork. ‘Not a chance,’ he answered himself, standing up again. ‘And you want to know why? Because to be able to do that, the gondolier would have to know how to row properly and how to master and manage his boat. And he would have had to come to me and work with me to create a gondola in the first place that could actually make it to Burano. In good time. Without killing him in the process. He would have had to be interested from the very beginning. In the gondola.’
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