‘What happened?’
‘The same as usual. It’s the skeleton I’m most frightened of. It makes such sudden rushes at me.’
‘How many of them are there?’
Ada shrugs, as if considering the matter.
‘It’s hard to tell. They come and go. Often I’ve thought they’ve gone, then suddenly another one pops out from somewhere.’
‘Have they attacked you?’
She shakes her head.
‘They just try and scare me, keep me awake all night, never knowing what’s going to happen next.’
The man considers her for a long time.
‘How do they get in?’ he asks.
‘Don’t ask me! They just appear. In my bedroom it was last time. A light came on, I woke, and there they were.’
Despite herself, her voice shakes slightly as she remembers her terror.
‘Was the front door locked?’
‘Locked and bolted, as always. But nothing stops them.’
She pulls up the sleeve over her dress and displays a livid patch on her arm.
‘There! That’s what I got from bumping into one of them. There are others, too, not decent to be viewed. I showed the doctor, though.’
The man nods.
‘I’ve read the file on your case,’ he says. ‘The medical evidence is apparently inconclusive. The contusions could have resulted from a collision with some household object. A chair or table, for example.’
‘Do they think I go staggering about bumping into the furniture like some drunk?’ Ada protests. ‘Anyway, what about the mud?’
‘The report mentioned some marks on the floor. There was no sign of shoe tread or other distinguishing features.’
He sighs deeply.
‘You see the problem is, contessa, that after what happened before, people are disinclined to believe what you tell them.’
‘I can’t help that,’ returns Ada flatly.
‘On that occasion, you were convicted of causing a public nuisance by calling your deceased daughter Rosetta home every evening. You subsequently spent two years in a mental institution where you were diagnosed as suffering from persistent delusions. It is therefore only natural that without some concrete evidence that the phenomena you now describe have any reality outside your own imagination, it is going to be difficult if not impossible for me to take the matter further.’
‘I didn’t ask you to come,’ Ada retorts.
Her visitor takes a notebook from his pocket and writes something on a page which he tears out and hands to her.
‘That’s my number,’ he says. ‘I’m only just round the corner, in the old house. If this happens again, give me a call, whatever the time, day or night.’
Ada looks at the number, then at his eyes. She nods.
*
Leaving the palazzo, Aurelio Zen turned left into an alley so narrow he had to walk sideways, like a crab. It seemed to come to a dead end at a small canal, but at the last moment a portico was revealed, leading to a bridge. The tide was out and the water had shrivelled to a gutter a few centimetres deep between fat expanses of black slime where tethered boats lolled like capsized beetles. A little further along the canal, the elegant façade of Palazzo Zulian stood out from its neighbours.
The air, walled off from the prevailing breezes, was heavy with the stench of mud. An assortment of débris was visible at the bottom of the water: the wheel of a pram, a punctured bucket, a boot. A large rat slithered across the mud and hopped into an open drain. In older buildings, people still kept a heavy stone on the toilet cover to stop the creatures from getting loose in the house.
The alley scuttled off between the houses on the other side, eventually joining a broader street with shops and a church. Zen made his way past doors whose numbers read like the dates of an impossible life: 1684–1679, 1635–1628. He crossed a bridge where a man was manoeuvring a handcart laden with cans of cooking oil up the ridged pavement on the wheels fitted to the leading edge. The house opposite was clad in scaffolding and sacking, with a large plastic chute to carry waste rubble to a barge moored alongside, now aground in the mud. A workman was shovelling sand out of another boat into a wheelbarrow which his mate was holding on the plank bridge they had rigged up.
Zen squinted at the frontage. Surely that was where the Pagan family lived? The two boys had been at school with him, although they were never part of the same set. Presumably they must have inherited by now and were having the place done up. He was surprised to feel a stab of envy. If only he could afford to have the Zen house turned into a proper home for all of them, with a separate flat for his mother and plenty of space for him and Tania …
He immediately dismissed the idea. It was absurd to think that he could make a life for himself here at this late stage. There was nothing here for him now. He had used the place up, converted it to experiences and memories that made up the person he was. To return would be to condemn himself to a form of spiritual incest. Nothing new could happen to him here, nothing real. Besides, Tania wouldn’t want to move to a city which, despite its glamour, was essentially a provincial backwater. He walked on, frowning at the realization that this was the first time he had thought of Tania since his arrival.
Under the flat bland noonday light, the wedge-shaped campo looked like a small-scale replica of itself, a set of mocked-up frontages. How different it seemed in the eye of memory! Grand in stature, full of significance, peopled with a vast and various cast of every age and character, inexhaustible and yet coherent … Now it looked diminished, paltry and deserted. The city was dying. The paper Zen had bought earlier that morning had spelled out the grim rate of attrition. The preceding twenty-four hours had seen six births and twenty-one deaths. Twenty-one unique and irreplaceable repositories of local life and lore had been destroyed, while most of the six new citizens would be forced to emigrate in search of work and accommodation. In another fifty years, there would be no Venetians left at all.
Of all the houses in the neighbourhood, the Morosinis’ had been the liveliest and most welcoming. It was identical in size and layout to the Zens’, yet the two homes could hardly have been more different in every other way. The Cannaregio area was midway between the station and the slaughterhouse, and most local men worked for one or the other. Like Aurelio’s father, Silvio Morosini was a railwayman, and he had taken full advantage of this once the war came. No heroics for Silvio, who had decidedly left-wing sympathies but also an uncanny sense of which way the wind was blowing and when to keep his head down.
Angelo Zen could also have claimed exemption – the railways were then the sinews of both the economy and the war effort – but he had preferred to volunteer and was sent off to serve in the ill-trained and worse-equipped token force which Mussolini dispatched to the Russian front in order to bolster his status with his German ally. There Angelo had disappeared, along with the tens of thousands of other Italians unaccounted-for and presumed dead. The growing certainty of that death, coupled with the lack of any proof which would permit its recognition, had infiltrated the Zen household like an icy draught from the frozen battlefields and prison camps where the Armata Russa had met its miserable and ignominious fate.
But where Zen’s father was a dominating absence, celebrated at every turn by stilted sepia photographs of a figure whose third dimension increasingly seemed as hypothetical as the existence of an afterlife, Silvio Morosini was one of a crowd of unequivocally real presences jostling and clamouring for attention in the household of which he was the nominal head. In fact this position was filled by his wife Rosalba, who had been Giustiniana Zen’s closest friend long before her marriage and was not about to desert her and the fatherless only child now that Rosalba’s prediction that the union in question would come to no good had, God forbid, come true.
The result had been that Aurelio had grown up treating the Morosini house more or less as his own, and had often taken advantage of this freedom to escape from the intolerable spectacle of his mother w
eeping silently as she went about her work. The quarrels in Silvio’s and Rosalba’s home were frequent, open and vociferous, shows in which anyone present was expected to join, whether or not they were actually involved or indeed had any idea what the whole thing was supposed to be about. Everyone got their chance to yell and posture and strut about, and in the midst of these amateur dramatics the original cause of contention gradually frittered away, forgotten if not forgiven. The young Aurelio did not necessarily want to live permanently in such an atmosphere, but it certainly made a refreshing contrast to the stifling tensions of his own home, whose existence could not be admitted never mind assuaged.
Like the whole neighbourhood, and the city itself, the Morosini house was of course a quieter place these days. Rosalba had continued to keep in touch by letter and phone when Giustiniana moved to Rome to be with her son, and Zen had thus been kept informed of the children’s marriages and of Silvio’s death the previous year. It was nevertheless a shock to be confronted by the old woman who came to greet him at the head of the stairs. On the phone, Rosalba still sounded much the same as ever, and Zen had irrationally been expecting her to look the same. But the vigorous, bustling woman he remembered now bore an astonishing resemblance to his fading memories of Rosalba’s grandmother, a legendary figure who had been born before Venice belatedly joined the newly unified Kingdom of Italy. All her features had drawn inwards towards each other, like a contracting universe, producing a compact, miniaturized version of the face he remembered.
‘Welcome home, Aurelio!’ she cried, embracing him repeatedly. ‘I hope you found everything as you expected it. I did the best I could in the time, but it’s no easy task to bring a house back from the dead when it’s stood empty for so many years.’
Zen smiled warmly at her.
‘You did wonders, Rosalba. A real miracle.’
Seeing her as she really was, he felt ashamed of having agreed to let her do the heavy work of preparing the house for his arrival, even though it had been her idea. He had merely phoned to let her know he was coming and to ask her to see if the house, to which she had a key, could be made habitable. He might have known that she would not trust anyone else to do the job properly.
‘Let me take your coat,’ Rosalba continued animatedly. ‘I expect you find it cold here now you’ve got used to living down south.’
Zen sniffed the air appreciatively.
‘Something smells good.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing much. A little risoto de sepe col nero followed by sole. Come in, come in!’
Installed in the large armchair in the living room, Zen sipped a glass of sparkling wine while Rosalba gave him a crash course in local news and gossip. The armchair had formerly been the throne from which Silvio Morosini had dispensed judgements and decrees and generally lorded it over his unruly clan. At that time, Zen would no more have dreamt of sitting in it than of touching the firm plump legs of Silvio’s elder daughter Antonia, who was then causing him so much distress and bewilderment as the first member of the opposite sex he found himself unable to dismiss as ‘just a girl’. Antonia, for her part, had regarded Zen as suitable football and playground fodder for her brothers, but of no conceivable personal interest to her whatsoever. And now she was a mother of four and an estate agent in Vicenza.
‘… always flying off somewhere on the other side of the world. My grandchildren know Rio de Janeiro and Hong Kong better than they do our poor Venice. And when they do come, it’s just to gawk like everyone else. Families are what we need, not tourists! But what can you do? There’s no work, and the kind of rents they charge are just crazy, even though half the houses just stand empty …’
She broke off, perhaps remembering that the Zens’ house had been unoccupied since Giustiniana’s move to Rome.
‘Some more wine?’ she suggested, appearing in the doorway with the bottle. ‘And then we can eat.’
They were joined for lunch by a young woman who was introduced to Zen as Cristiana Morosini. A late and unexpected addition to the family, Cristiana had been a mere toddler when Zen had joined the police and left the city for a series of postings on the mainland. She was now a good-looking woman in her early thirties, with a slow, sensual manner and a striking resemblance to Zen’s memories of her elder sister. As she served the risotto, dark grey from the cuttlefish ink, Rosalba explained that Cristiana had left her husband, a local politician, after discovering that he was screwing one of his supporters.
‘Mamma!’
‘There’s no need to be coy with an old family friend. He’s seen you running around the house bare-arsed often enough, haven’t you Aurelio?’
‘Delicious,’ murmured Zen, savouring the combination of nutty rice, chewy cuttlefish and unctuous sauce.
‘I’m not being coy,’ Cristiana protested. ‘But one is a grotesque understatement.’
She held up three velvety white fingers.
‘There was that rich bitch from the Zattere, for a start. Then there’s Maria Luisa Squarcina, and don’t forget the Populin woman. She denies it, but she would, wouldn’t she? That’s three, not counting various secretaries, journalists and assorted hangers-on And those are only the ones everybody knows about. If you could fuck your way into office, Nando would be running the country by now.’
‘And what brings you back home, Aurelio?’ asked Rosalba. ‘You said on the phone that it was work, but what kind of work exactly?’
Zen washed down a delicious salty mouthful with some more wine.
‘Well of course it’s strictly confidential …’
‘You can count on us,’ Rosalba assured him.
‘We won’t breathe a word,’ seconded Cristiana.
Zen’s mother used to say that there were two ways of making sure everyone in Venice knew something: you could either get every parish priest in the city to read it out after Mass, or you could tell Rosalba Morosini.
‘The fact is,’ said Zen, ‘it’s a bit of a fiddle. I’ve been feeling rather homesick, and I wanted to sort out one or two things to do with the house. The problem was that I didn’t have any leave due, so I had to make it look like work.’
‘You put in for a transfer.’
‘Right. At the Ministry, where I work, we get reports from all over the country listing every crime reported and the action taken. Normally it all goes straight into the computer and gets pulped up into statistics, but I pulled out the reports for Venice and looked through them to find something suitable. Lo and behold, what do I see but the name of Ada Zulian …’
‘La contessa!’ cried Rosalba.
Zen nodded.
‘Apparently she’d phoned in with a complaint about intruders in her house. So I pulled a few strings and had myself drafted up here on a temporary basis to investigate.’
The lie was as effortless and unpremeditated as the evasive clouds of ink emitted by the cuttlefish they were eating.
‘Ada and her ghosts!’ cried Rosalba, having served her guest another helping of risotto. ‘It all started when her daughter disappeared. She never got over it. Lisa Rosteghin’s sister was a nurse in the mental hospital on San Clemente, and the stories she tells about Ada …! Apparently at one point a deputation of the other lunatics came to see the director to complain about her behaviour. “Excuse us, dottore,” they said, “but you’ve go to do something – this woman’s driving us crazy!”’
‘I remember her sidling up to me in the street,’ said Cristiana, wiping her lips with her napkin, ‘and calling me by the dead girl’s name in that creepy way she has. It put the fear of God into me, I can tell you.’
‘“This woman’s driving us crazy!”’ Rosalba repeated in a tone of hilarity. ‘Mind you, she was always half-mad if you ask me. The Saoners used to rent a house from her at one time, and you know what? When she sent in her account, they found she had charged them for the paper and ink the bill was written with! Can you believe it?’
‘What happened to her daughter?’ asked Zen idly.
Rosalba
’s animation instantly evaporated. She shrugged.
‘No one really knows. It was during the last years of the war. So many terrible things happened.’
She cleared the dishes and walked off to the kitchen. Zen looked up to find Cristiana’s big liquid eyes fixed on him like a pair of sea anemones. He barely had time to register their soft, tenacious presence before her mother returned.
‘Speaking of the Saoners, do you know what’s become of Tommaso?’ Zen asked as Rosalba served him a glistening leaf-shaped slab of sole.
‘The younger brother? Well, that’s the way I still think of him. He used to be your best friend, didn’t he?’
A host of remembered images of his best friend rose briefly in Zen’s mind like a flock of disturbed pigeons.
‘We lost touch years ago. Is he married yet?’
It was Cristiana who replied.
‘No, and he’s given up his job to concentrate on politics. He’s one of Nando’s right-hand men.’
‘I must look him up,’ mused Zen. ‘Does he still live in Calle del Magazen?’
‘You’re more likely to find him at party headquarters,’ said Cristiana tartly. ‘They’re there most of the time these days, with the municipal elections coming up. Nando has inspired them to give their all to the movement – especially to the female supporters.’
‘And how’s Giustiniana?’ asked Rosalba gaily. ‘Have some more sole, for goodness sake. You’re not eating!’
Aurelio Zen made his way slowly through the hushed and vacant spaces of the town in a daze brought on by the wine he had drunk at lunch, the grappa he had allowed Rosalba to talk him into having afterwards, and not least by his encounter with Cristiana Morosini, whose white flesh had somehow become inextricably confused in his memories with that of the fresh tender sole which had melted in his mouth. His mind was a jumble of contradictory thoughts and feelings, an inner landscape equivalent to the one all around him: blocks of every size and shape thrown together as though at random, like bricks tipped in a heap. Like so much else, this intimate disorder now seemed foreign to him, accustomed as he was to the planned vistas and grand boulevards of the capital. Everything was turning out very differently from what he had imagined.
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