Death in a Serene City

by Edward Sklepowich

  “No, I don’t!” She took a big bite of another cake. “I think it would be good sense. You’re too old for such things.”

  He laughed. “Ah, then you do admit my age. That’s some improvement.”

  “I admit nothing except that there are things one might be too old or too young for, and your—your obsession with this disreputable character is definitely one of them.”

  “To each our obsessions. I know of a respectable British woman—an inglese venezianizzata, to use her own expression—who makes it a point to collect every book she can find on Venice.”

  Perhaps he could get the conversation back to Margaret Quinton and her Venice novel.

  The Contessa stared at him blankly for a few moments and put down the tea cake. She didn’t defend herself by pointing out that her book collection had been started a long time ago by the da Capo-Zendrini family and was one of the best in the city. Instead the lines of worry came again.

  “Something seems to be bothering you today,” he said.

  She shrugged.

  From his seven years of friendship with her he knew that she liked to be coaxed. Almost a game between them, it seemed to have less of sexual coyness in it than a reluctance to commit herself to something that might give her too much pleasure or someone else too much discomfort.

  He reached for her hand.

  “What’s the matter, Barbara? You don’t seem yourself today. You’re a bit on edge. Are you upset with me about anything? If you are—”

  “Don’t be silly, caro. It has nothing to do with you. It’s my party tonight.”

  She was giving a party to celebrate the anniversary of her marriage, a date she kept religiously even though her husband had been dead for more than ten years. Not being a person who felt comfortable at large gatherings, Urbino had declined the invitation as he sometimes did.

  “Are you sure it’s not because of me?”

  “Don’t be so self-centered. It’s because of Clifford Voyd. He’s coming.”

  “But you’ve been singing his praises ever since you met him. I thought you liked him.”

  “I do—or at least I did. I still do, it’s just that …”

  “It’s Margaret Quinton, isn’t it?”

  “Yes! He’s responsible—and don’t try to tell me any different.”

  “But she committed suicide.”

  “Suicide, caro, can be prevented—and it can be caused.”

  Two things about the Contessa that Urbino had never doubted were her intelligence and her morality. If her morality sometimes seemed inflexible, it wasn’t reserved only for others. She conducted herself in accordance with the strictest principles. Urbino would have been shocked to learn otherwise. He never listened to any of the gossip that circulated within the insular, suspicious society of long-established Venetians who still considered her an interloper after thirty years.

  “But surely you aren’t implying that Clifford Voyd—the great Clifford Voyd—did anything that could have led that poor woman to throw herself from her window in the middle of the night? From what I understand they were great friends.”

  “My dear Urbino, how much longer will you have to live before you realize that it isn’t the things we do that cause the real sorrows of our life but the many, many things we don’t?” Then, as if he might have missed her point, “Sins of omission, you know.”

  Yes, he knew. Bless me, Father, for I have sinned, I accuse myself of not … The list was by now too long to contemplate.

  “What is it that the great Clifford Voyd didn’t do?”

  “He didn’t see what he should have, that she was in love with him, that she felt encouraged, that she hoped.”

  “They were friends.”

  She took a sip of tea before she said with emphasis, the cup still in her hand, “In that kind of friendship it’s always the woman who suffers. Such men should know themselves better. They should curb their charm.”

  It was as if she were talking about such men getting their hair cut or dressing down for certain social occasions.

  “Voyd does have a great charm—and a great talent.”

  “Is it so great, his talent?” she asked, echoing what she had asked earlier about Margaret Quinton.

  “You know it is, Barbara. You’ve read his books. He’s one of the best. He’s won all the prizes except the big one and his name is on the list every year.”

  “All that isn’t good enough for me. It wasn’t good enough for Margaret Quinton either.”

  Once again she stared out at the Piazza. It had started to rain and people were taking shelter under the arcades. Something seemed to catch her attention.

  “Don’t be upset, Urbino,” she said, turning back to him, “but it’s Stefano.”

  He had no idea why she thought he might be upset. He looked out the window to see Stefano Bellorini hurrying across the Piazza from the Mercerie, his head with its fringe of fading Venetian-red hair angled against the rain.

  The Contessa must have realized he was puzzled by her comment.

  “I mean about being interrupted,” she clarified.

  From the slight frown that worried her face, however, it seemed that she was the one upset by the entrance of the craftsman. She had just time to tell him that Bellorini wanted to show her the sketches for the frames he was making for some small family photographs of hers before the man hurried into the room and came up to their table.

  “I’m so sorry, Barbara, but I can’t find them,” he said before even saying hello.

  The fiftyish Bellorini looked crestfallen. He took out a handkerchief to dab at the top of his head. Droplets of water glistened in his full beard and moustache that had most likely been grown to compensate for the almost complete absence of hair above. Bellorini had the understandable vanity of a man whose youthful good looks had been cruelly treated by time. One of the few remnants was his deep blue eyes that hadn’t faded with age. They were troubled now.

  “I told you there wasn’t any need to bring them here. They can wait until this evening. You’ll find them.”

  “But to bring business to your celebration, Barbara!”

  He took off his glasses and wiped them.

  “I was just trying to convince Urbino to come this evening. Maybe this will give him an additional reason.”

  “You are not going? I would not believe it!” He had spoken this time in his precise and formal English, something he rarely did with his two native English-speaking friends, feeling self-conscious. “But you are not ill?”

  The Contessa couldn’t resist the opening.

  “He does look a bit tired, doesn’t he, Stefano? I was just telling him as much.”

  Urbino felt uncomfortable under their scrutiny.

  “My party would be good for him, would lift that weariness right off his face, don’t you think? But do sit down. Have some tea or a drink.”

  She looked around for their waiter.

  “Thank you, Barbara, but I can’t stay. The least I can do is be sure I have the sketches for tonight. I know I haven’t lost them. I just have to find them—wherever they are! I hope you’ll be there to see them yourself, Urbino. Until later.”

  As he was going into the foyer, he collided with an impeccably dressed young man whose annoyance was evident in his glaring look. He shot out sharp words at the departing Stefano whose pinkish face acquired more color than usual. With an exaggerated straightening of the collar of his camel-hair coat, the young man walked through the Chinese salon to the Oriental salon next to it and surveyed the occupants from the doorway next to Urbino and the Contessa. His blond, good-looking head held high, he turned and went back into the foyer.

  “Poor Stefano,” the Contessa said, “so talented but so absent-minded. Do they always have to go together like that?” But she didn’t seem to want or expect an answer. She looked at Urbino with her earlier worried expression.

  “You don’t think Voyd should be enjoying himself in public, do you?” he asked, picking up the thread of th
eir interrupted conversation.

  “You put it so bluntly to make it seem silly of me but, yes, I’m old-fashioned enough to hold with such things. There should be greater respect, especially when there’s been such responsibility.”

  “Cancel your party, then. Reschedule it.”

  “It’s too late for that as you well know. I suppose I should have done it when I heard about Margaret’s death. At any rate, to call off the party would be to let the man off the hook. If my party is any kind of temptation for him, it’s not for me to remove it because of his weakness.”

  Not wanting to provoke an extended lecture on the ethics of the Garden of Eden, which she was quite capable of delivering, he asked how she knew Voyd would even be at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini tonight. Hadn’t the invitations gone out a week before Quintan’s death? He might have called in his regrets while they were here at Florian’s.

  “Be assured, my dear Urbino, the man will most definitely be there.” She took another sip of tea, then set the cup and saucer down with a clatter. “That’s why I wish you would come.”

  “What good would that do?”

  “It would do me a great deal of good just to see you there. And who knows? You might be able to find out exactly how the great Clifford Voyd feels about her death.”

  “You mean that after all you’ve just said you think he might be racked with remorse?”

  “Anything is possible. Believe me, I gave up the luxury of being surprised at the age of forty.”

  6

  TWENTY minutes later, as Urbino made his way from Florian’s, he left the arcade and strode briskly through the Piazza. He didn’t mind that the rain was now coming down heavily or that the Contessa had insisted that he walk home instead of returning with her in the boat.

  “Go for one of your walks,” she had said. Think it over.”

  She knew that he loved his walks and that he especially loved Venice in the rain. Perhaps she thought that she stood the best chance of seeing him later if she let him mull things over as he got himself good and wet.

  It wasn’t that he had a particular preference for rainy days in themselves. There had been enough of them in New Orleans to last him a lifetime, and here in Venice they could penetrate to your very core even if you never ventured out. It was just that the rain usually cleared the narrow streets and squares of even the Venetians themselves and he could indulge in his harmless little fantasy that the city was a bit closer to being his alone.

  Now, as he turned his umbrella to the rain that was being driven in by the wind from the lagoon, no one else was in sight except for a man rushing toward the shelter of the portico of the Merceric, a copy of Il Gazzettino held over his head. A few seconds later another man emerged from the Mercerie, going toward the Molo San Marco at a leisurely pace, protected by boots, a mackintosh, and a shapeless hat. Despite his unhurried gait, he did not stop to look up at San Marco, as if to illustrate the truth of Ruskin’s exaggeration that Venetians pass its splendors by regardlessly.

  Urbino, however, despite what the Contessa might think about his having been “Venetianized,” never ceased to see it. He stopped now before he got any closer to see it the better. The Basilica didn’t loom above him as other great cathedrals did but seemed almost to prostrate itself in Oriental fashion before the high tower of the Campanile. And yet the ornate Basilica, with its onion domes, colored marble, mosaics, statues, arches, and porches, had all the splendors of a sultan reclining on his cushions, while the bell tower with its plain brick facade resembled a servant of the realm standing silently at attention. This was one of the many scenes to be found throughout Venice whose appeal was due to the improbable, the excessive, and the unexpected.

  Raised planks had been set up in front of the Basilica so that people would be able to avoid the water that might well up through the paving stones of the Piazza or wash in from the lagoon if these rains continued. Although he knew full well not only the inconvenience of finding his route through the labyrinthine city detoured almost endlessly by flooded streets but also the serious damage done by floods, even small ones, Urbino nonetheless came close to wishing for an acqua alta, came close to saying, like one of Banquo’s murderers, “Let it come down,” as he looked at the even darker clouds now rolling in from the north.

  Family and friends who came to visit often spent much of their time complaining about the odor of the canals in summer and the rains and flooded streets in winter. But Urbino himself was the kind of lover who transformed even the most brutish of faults into the most engaging of virtues—or willed himself blind. Love that did anything else didn’t deserve the name. If his brief marriage right after college had been an exercise in just such blindness, it hadn’t warned him off completely.

  If it had, he might never have been captivated by Venice ten years ago following the death of his parents in a car accident. He had arrived during the madness of the tourist season, intending to finish his business and return home, where his biography of the chess player Paul Morphy had just been sold to the films. Instead, amid all the heat, the odors, the crowds, and the noise, he had decided to stay forever.

  He had come to Venice to decide what to do with the Veneto-Byzantine palazzo in the Cannaregio near Santa Fosca that had been in his mother’s family for generations. His mother, an only child like himself, had seldom traveled far from her native New Orleans, although she had often talked about the city where her grandfather had been born.

  She had known little about the property except that it was called the Palazzo Uccello. She didn’t even have a photograph. When Urbino saw it, he laughed out loud for it was little bigger than the houses in his neighborhood near Tulane. It was ironic that the relatively small, run-down building was called the Palazzo Uccello while a much more impressive building next door was simply the Casa Maddalena.

  During his weeks in Venice the city worked its magic on him. Where others have loved Venice but felt alienated from it, as if they have wandered into a world that can never be theirs, Urbino had loved it almost immediately as the home he had been waiting for. He had seen it in innumerable photographs, paintings, and movies, read about it in stories and poems and travel accounts, yet when he had seen the real thing he hadn’t been disappointed. The city exceeded his expectations.

  It is questionable, however, whether Venice would have had such an impact on him if he hadn’t, at a more impressionable age, read the book the Contessa had been chiding him about, the book that—he had never dared tell her—was said to have corrupted Dorian Gray. He had found an old, illustrated edition of the French novel in a dusty bookshop in the French Quarter. This story of a neurotic aristocrat who retires to his mansion outside Paris to lead a self-contained, eccentric life of the mind and senses had grabbed hold of Urbino. At the age of seventeen, when most other boys are thinking about a life of commitment, Urbino dreamed instead of one that would bring him seclusion on his own terms.

  He had copied out several passages from the novel into a notebook and then illustrated them. One of his favorites was the description of Des Esseintes’s fantasy of a special domicile for himself:

  Already he had begun dreaming of a refined Thebaid, a desert hermitage equipped with all the modern conveniences, a snugly heated ark on dry land in which he might take refuge from the incessant deluge of human stupidity.

  Ten years later, when he had come to Venice to inherit the Palazzo Uccello, he realized that to live in a palazzo, however small, in this museum city would be to go Des Esseintes one better. In fact, like Urbino’s own watercolor illustration for the passage—a gleaming boatlike building—the palazzi lined up on either side of the Grand Canal resembled ornate ships brought to permanent berth.

  The decision to commit himself to the city had come suddenly. Walking through the damp and moldy pianterreno of the Palazzo Uccello the day before he was scheduled to leave, he had told the agente immobiliare with him that he didn’t want to put the building up for sale after all. He would keep it. He would make it h
is home.

  The only way he could finance the needed repairs was to sell the house in New Orleans. For almost a year he lived in one room at a pensione near the train station while the work was being done.

  When he eventually moved in, it was with considerable excitement and not a little nervousness. All the income from his books, supplemented by the inheritance from his parents, had to go into the upkeep. Although it was difficult, he had never regretted his decision.

  The Palazzo Uccello was, he liked to think, a delightful ark within the greater ark that was Venice. Behind its walls he was far away from the crowds yet close enough to the flow of life to make him feel snug in his solitude.

  On this late afternoon, however, despite the attractions of the Palazzo Uccello, he didn’t turn down the Mercerie but went through the Piazzetta past the column with the winged lion to the Molo San Marco. He stood at the balustrade in front of the Royal Gardens, deserted now of painters and souvenir sellers. Only one other person was there, a thin old man beneath a battered umbrella standing next to the telescope and staring off toward the low line of the Lido.

  With the broad expanse of the lagoon stretching from the Riva degli Schiavoni to the Giudecca, Urbino felt as if he were on the deck of a ship. The Church of San Giorgio Maggiore with its classical brick facade and tall bell tower floated in the near distance on its own island. To its right on the Giudecca rose the Redentore, chaste and dignified among the unimpressive scramble of buildings around it. At the mouth of the Grand Canal, beyond the Dogana di Mare and its golden ball on which Fortune perched, the baroque whiteness of the Salute gleamed with its oversized cupolas, little tower, and graceful flight of steps, its wide quay obscured by the landing stages along the Molo between Urbino and the church. Vaporetti, motorboats, yachts, and barges crossed the lagoon and slipped in and out of the Grand Canal and the Giudecca. Passing each other in the middle of the lagoon were a car ferry headed for the Lido and a dark tanker with the Greek flag plying toward Porto Marghera. The wakes from all this water traffic rocked the tarpaulin-covered gondolas and motorboats moored along the quay and slapped against the foundations of the balustrade and wooden walkway beneath him.