I Was Waiting for You

by Maxim Jakubowski

  She made her way to her hotel, paid the bill in cash, retrieved her meagre belongings and took the Métro to the Gare Du Nord where she took the first Eurostar train to London. She knew that neither the British or French border officials at the station or at London’s Kings Cross scanned passports in view of the sheer amount of passengers passing through. It was better to avoid her particulars being archived a few weeks in a row departing Paris. The muddier the waters the better.

  She spent a week in London, acting like a normal tourist, visiting museums and theatre shows on Shaftesbury Avenue, enjoying Indian meals, walking in the plentiful parks, openly using her credit cards for the first time.

  For her flight back to New York she had a choice of seats to either Newark or Kennedy. She chose Kennedy.

  TAKE ME TO CARNEVALE

  JACK AND ELEONORA HAD arranged to meet the man in a small café on the left-hand side of Campo Santa Maria Formosa, right opposite the church and the hospital. It was February. It was Venice. A thin morning mist still shrouded the city, floating in from the lagoon, like a shimmering curtain of silk, half obscuring the old stones, the canals and the normal sounds of the floating city.

  They’d been communicating by e-mails since parting months before in Sitges.

  They both knew there were still things left unsaid between them.

  Thought they would give it one more chance. To see if they could banish the ghost of Giulia and past relationships.

  Jack hadn’t even brought his laptop with him on this Venice trip, but the apartment they were staying in, which he had agreed to house-sit for friends travelling in India, had a computer in almost every room and a wi-fi connection and it had been, for both of them, almost too much of a temptation. Like allowing their fate to be decided by the vagaries of electronic availability.

  Eleonora had been sitting on one of the sofas, half reading and half daydreaming, while he listened to music on his iPod. Right then the soundtrack by Nick Cave for The Assassination of Jesse James, he would remember later.

  “I don’t know,” Eleonora had said, and he had recognised exactly the precise words she had uttered, just from reading her lips behind the threnody in his ears. It was something she often mumbled when things were not quite right.

  He’d switched off the music and turned towards her.

  “What is it?”

  The green of her eyes emerged from a sea of sadness.

  “You know…” she replied.

  He knew. Oh yes, he knew. They were just going nowhere, and no earnest conversation could put them back on track. Even in Venice.

  They had reached the city a week or so earlier, arriving at Marco Polo airport. To save money, they had not gone to the extravagance of taking a water taxi but, instead, the bus which took them across the Ponte Della Liberta to Piazzale Roma where they had caught a vaporettodown the Grand Canal to the Rialto Bridge stop and, following the map they had been e-mailed by his friends, had somehow made their way on foot to the apartment, dodging the customary labyrinth of small bridges and lesser canals.

  By now they had visited a multitude of churches, several handfuls of Titian and Canaletto paintings, eaten too much exquisite food to jade the best of palates and suffered an indigestion of baroque and classical architecture and the silences between them were growing longer.

  From their bedroom window, they could see St Mark’s Place and the Doge’s Palace and the Campanile across a bend in the Canal. But the weather was cold and humid and the old building’s heating was stuttering at its best and they’d had to wear sweatshirts most of the time both inside and outside.

  Maybe he should have chosen the Caribbean where they could have lazed naked on a beach and the warmth might have seeped into their mood. But Eleonora had never been to Venice and he had promised her he would take her anywhere she wanted, and she was aware that Roberto and Barbara had once offered him the apartment here should he ever wish to visit. Jack had been to Venice several times before, and to be frank had never been too much of a fan. In summer, the canals smelt and he disliked being just an anonymous part of the tourist crowds. In truth, he was not a great traveller.

  Eleonora, on the other hand, was twenty years younger and always sported an enthusiasm for new places and experiences that he no longer could pretend he had. And he secretly knew he’d never possessed the joy or curiosity even when he had been younger himself.

  Although neither wanted to broach the subject they both knew to a different degree that their relationship was doomed. The age difference, the opposing temperaments, the cultural differences, the weight of his own past, her own ambitions in life. But loneliness still bound them. His, full of despair that she would in all likelihood turn out to be the last significant love of his life; hers, full of wonder that Jack had somehow become the first genuine love in her life — yes, she had now realised, Henry had just been a youthful infatuation– but with her mind, her imagination nagging her daily about the roads not taken and all the future roads that were still to be reached.

  In an effort to negate the due date on their affair, they had agreed to come to Venice. In her mind, she had wanted to confront beauty. In his, it was just a melancholy vision of past literary memories of Thomas Mann, Byron, Dickens or Nic Roeg which resonated in the greyness of his soul, the delusion that a trip to a new place could repair the stitches that were coming apart in his life. The magic of Venice as suture.

  “Carnival begins tomorrow,” he had pointed out to her.

  “Really?” she had exclaimed, her eyes widening in anticipation.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you buy me a mask?” Eleonora had asked.

  “Of course.”

  “And I will get one for you,” she suggested. “Something darkly romantic, that would just suit you.”

  “Why not?”

  “And we acquire them separately, and they remain secret until the first evening we go out and wear them. A surprise!”

  “A lovely idea,” Jack had readily agreed, the fleeting thought of Eleonora quite naked except for a delicate white Carnival mask shielding her face, and her green eyes peering through the disguise already warming his heart and suggestible loins.

  His finger lingered on her knee, and he shuddered. The electricity between them still worked.

  “Can we go online and read all about the Carnival?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said. They made their way to the guest bedroom where the nearest connected computer stood on a rickety trestle table their host used to mix his paints on.

  Above it, by coincidence, hung slightly crooked on the wall by the window, was a gaudy painting of a woman in chains wearing only a black mask which obscured her eyes. Roberto’s latest BDSM variation.

  They surfed freely for the next couple of hours, learning all about Carnevale and its origins, the tales of Casanova, the types of masks and their significance. One link led to another and yet another until an aimless stroke of the keyboard took them to the website where out of sheer prurient curiosity they arranged for the meeting in the bar on Campo Santa Maria Formosa the next day.

  At first, Jack had been somewhat hesitant, but Eleonora’s enthusiasm had swayed him.

  “It will be an experience,” she said.

  “I suppose so,” he answered.

  “Don’t act so old and blasé,” she added.

  Jack smiled wryly. She always knew howbest to silence him.

  “Yes, it’s all because of Attila the Hun.”

  They were sipping espressos at the back of the small café. The man was in his fifties and had white hair and was explaining how the earliest inhabitants of Venice had been exiled all the way to the lagoon by the invasion of their native lands by foreign hordes.

  “Fascinating,” Eleonora commented.

  “And the bridge that connects us to the Italian mainland was only built by Mussolini under a century ago. Before that we were isolated and you could only reach the city by water.”

  Jack ordered another round f
rom the hovering waitress. Mostly San Pellegrino mineral water; neither he nor Eleonora could cope with too much coffee at this time of day.

  “It’s a party,” the man who called himself Jacopo said. “But we try and organise matters so that we adhere to all the old traditions of the Venice Carnevale, not the diluted versions that have sadly evolved over the years since Carnevale’s heyday.”

  “We understand,” Jack said. Eleonora looked him in the eyes, and nodded.

  “It is strictly by invitation, of course,” he continued. “Normally, we try and restrict attendance to pure Venetians, but as you know, there are fewer of us now. The younger generations are all leaving the city. So sad.”

  He looked at Eleonora. Her dark hair shone glossily; she had washed it just before they had left the apartment to walk here. When wet her hair then extended to the small of her back like a long curtain of silk. Jack observed her, too. She looked luminous. Already excited by the prospect of the party they were being informally interviewed for. As if a fire was rising inside her, bringing light to her features, heat to her hidden senses. Jack recognised that gleam in her eyes. It was invariably present when she had been fucked. He kept on watching, transfixed as Jacopo’s words swept soundlessly over him. The man with the white hair also kept on observing Eleonora, as if weighing her in his steady gaze.

  Jack returned to reality, reluctantly abandoning his vision of Eleonora’s fascinated attention to the man’s words.

  “Naturally, you remain masters of your destiny. A polite ‘no’ will always prove an acceptable response to any overture, although it is hoped that all guests will participate freely and openly in the proceedings.”

  Again, Eleonora nodded, her chin bobbing up and down.

  Jack sighed discreetly.

  It was true that they had often discussed the remote prospect of others joining in their games, their lovemaking. But they had never reached the stage where they had actively done anything about it.

  Something inside him — something rotten or diseased?– had always imagined what it would be like to see Eleonora mounted by another, harboured the curiosity to witness how another man would touch her, make her moan. Because he found her so beautiful, part of him felt she should be shared with the whole world, so that all and sundry could truly understand why his love for her was so strong and overpowering. But it was a long road from mere thoughts to the realities of the flesh.

  She had even asked “Would you be jealous if it actually happened?” and he had been obliged to dig deep into his thoughts and had finally answered quite truthfully “I’m not sure. Maybe if I could watch. I wouldn’t want you to fuck another man behind my back, that’s for sure.”

  “Wonderful,” Jacopo said as he rose from the café table. “You are a lovely couple. I think you will enjoy our parties a lot.”

  They had jointly agreed to attend the opening of Carnevale the next day. He had slipped over a piece of paper on which he had scribbled the address.

  “Every party takes place in a different locale,” the man with the white hair had said. “They can only be reached by the canals, so you will have to make arrangements accordingly.”

  They all shook hands and he departed.

  Left alone, Jack and Eleonora looked at each other. He tried to smile, but couldn’t raise the right rictus. He knew already that they would go. Eleonora had always been a woman of her word and once a decision had been taken, only hell and high water could ever change her mind.

  “Well,” she said.

  “Hmmm…”

  Eleonora was dressing.

  “Don’t wear panties,” Jack suggested.

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I think it would fit in with the spirit of the occasion.”

  Eleonora chuckled softly.

  “If you say so. Anyway, the dress is quite heavy, so I shouldn’t feel the cold…” She gave him a twirl. He applauded theatrically.

  “Flattery will get you everywhere…” she said.

  They had been shopping in Mestre. In Venice, the prices were much too unaffordable. She had found him a sleek black silk suit made in Thailand which Jack wore with a black shirt and a scarlet bow tie.

  “My prince of darkness!” Eleonora laughed. As if he now reminded her of a vampire.

  In contrast, the dress they had acquired for tonight’s event for her was white and made from thick linen, falling to her ankles with ornate elegance from her bare shoulders downwards, thin, almost invisible straps holding the dress up above her small, delicate breasts, unveiling just a discreet if appetising hint of gentle cleavage. Underneath she wore just dark hold-up stockings reaching to mid-thigh, their shapely black veil as sharp as her luxuriant pubic hair. A perfect conjugation of nights, when she cheekily raised the dress to her midriff, exposing herself to him.

  God, she was stunning! Her lipstick was fiery red and she had surrounded her eyes with a grey circle of kohl.

  They had found masks at Mondonovo, on Rio Terra Canal, near the Campo Santa Margherita, where masks could still be found that were replicas of the old historical, traditional models, and were different from the traditional fare on offer to gullible tourists in search of local colour.

  For Jack, in his black outfit, they had chosen a larva, also called a volto. It was white, made of fine wax and should have typically been worn with a tricorn and cloak, which he had of course absolutely no intention of doing. After all, this was the twenty-first century! The shape of the mask would allow him to breathe and drink easily, and so there was no need to take it off, thus preserving anonymity.

  Eleonora, on the other hand, had been coaxed by the old wrinkled lady at the store to select a morettainstead of the more traditional bauta. It was an oval mask of black velvet that was usually worn by women visiting convents. Invented in France it had rapidly become popular in ancient Venice as it drew out the beauty of feminine features. The mask was finished off with a veil, and was normally secured in place by a small bit in the wearer's mouth. As this was not appropriate to participate in a modern party, Eleonora’s model had been modified so it was held by a clip at its apex that was attached to her mountain of curls.

  “Bella,” the old woman had said when Eleonora had tried the mask on.

  “Bellissima,” Jack said in turn, with a painful stab of fear coursing through his stomach, as Eleonora stood, fully attired in dress and mask, and the jungle of her curls peering impudently above the formal mask.

  “Grazie mille,” she laughed.

  There was so much more he wanted to say to her. Like “Do you really want to go?” or “What will you do if another man proposes to you?” or “Do you still want me?” but the gondola they had booked had just arrived. They walked down to the waterside entrance of the building. The night air was cold and the sky full of scattered stars whose reflection glistened over the waters of the small canal like a million phosphorescent fish.

  Jack read the address out to the gondolier in his French-accented Italian.

  “It’s party time,” Eleonora said.

  The half-abandoned palazzo dominated the Grand Canal halfway between the Ponte del Rialto and the Ponte dell’accademia, with the Campo San Polo visible from the ornate balconies on the land side of the building.

  The tall man who wore the white mask with the elongated beak, similar to the head attire medics had worn in the years of the Plague, when pepper had been lodged into the furthest reaches of the bird of prey-like beak to shield its wearers from the illness, had been hovering near them most of the evening. They had briefly been introduced by Jacopo, earlier on in the festivities. Occasionally he would approach them with new glasses of champagne and would whisper in Eleonora’s ears, or casually allow his leather-gloved hands to brush against her bare shoulders. His English was nigh perfect, albeit with West Coast American inflections. Jack couldn’t remember his name. Real or otherwise. They had been introduced as Byron and Ariadne. No one here used their real name.

  As neither Eleonora or Jack were particular
ly sociable or voluble, they had been isolated in the margins of the party and its flowing conversations. They had both drunk too much by now. Which meant he was retreating, as he often did, into longer and longer silences, whereas her demeanour was becoming looser, more joyful by the minute. How many times now had she wondered at the sheer elegance of the evening and its incomparable setting, the candles illuminating the cavernous, marble-floored rooms, the gold dishes laden with fruit, the never-ending flow of booze. She was intoxicated by both the alcohol and the sense of occasion. Was this the adventure she always claimed she was seeking whenever he would raise any questions about the future?

  A hand took hold of his. Jack turned round. A woman in a red velvet dress and a white powdered wig pulled him a metre or two towards her. He looked up at her. She had endless legs enhanced by thin six inch heels. Behind her mask, he could see her eyes were the colour of coal.

  “You are English, no?”

  “Indeed,” he answered.

  Her scent was sweet, cloying almost.

  “So you like our Carnevale?”

  “Absolutely,” he responded, ever polite.

  Her purple-lipsticked lips moved into the shape of a kiss.

  “Is it your first time in Venice?” she asked.

  “Not quite,” he answered. “But the first time I’ve been here at Carnival time, though.”

  “Ah…”

  She moved nearer to him.

  He realised they were now alone in the large room; the woman with purple lips, Eleonora, the tall guy and him. Somehow all the nearby partygoers had drifted out silently into the other neighbouring rooms, leaving faint echoes of conversations and the tinkling of crystal glasses eerily suspended in the tobacco smoke-infested air.

  He took a step back.

  “Oh… shy?”