Death in a Serene City
Page 29
Xenia Campi’s eyes widened but she said nothing. One of the boys at the far end of the table started to laugh loudly and was soon joined by the other two. They began to sing a song in Italian. Dora couldn’t understand the song but Xenia Campi frowned in their direction, and the boy she had glanced at earlier stopped singing.
Poor Val Gibbon held his head high but Dora could see his bruised heart. It was just as exposed for her as was the Flaming Heart of Jesus that graced the wall of her room upstairs.
The serving woman came in from the corridor with a tureen of steaming soup. Dora sighed. Another meal at the Casa Crispina was about to begin.
2
Urbino looked down from the window of the Palazzo Uccello straight into the eyes of Death.
Only a few moments earlier, Urbino had put aside the volume of Remembrance of Things Past and gone to the window. Someone is in the calle, he had said to himself, even though he had heard nothing.
He had been right. The Palazzo Uccello had been visited on this February evening by Death and the Lady of Veils.
Death was tall, dressed almost all in black. Black boots, black leggings and gloves, a black steeple of a hat pulled down over a mad jumble of black crepe Medusa locks. The eyelets of the white oval mask were trimmed in black. Hundreds of featherlike ebony scraps had been sewn together to form a cape that its wearer hugged close.
The Lady of Veils was a vision in white. In fact, with her cascade of short veils framing a delicate mask, her gauze robe, gloves, feathered fan, and slippers—all ghostly white—she seemed to be an emanation of the fog that was curling over the bridge from the canal and drifting into the alley.
Death, conscious of his audience, extended his arms, and suddenly became a burst of color, exposing long tatters of crimson, indigo, yellow, jade, and pink cloth sewn to the torso of the garment beneath. It was like seeing someone eviscerated. The beauty was perversely enhanced for Urbino by the horror of the association.
The Lady of Veils moved closer to Death and let herself be enclosed in the blossom of his embrace.
Was the Lady a woman and Death a man? There was no way of knowing. They carried their secret away with them as they broke their embrace and seemed to glide over the humpbacked bridge. The calle was empty once again of everything except the drifting, curling fog.
Serena, the cat he had rescued from the Public Gardens, jumped up on the sill to get Urbino’s attention. He turned back into the room and took Schumann’s Carnaval from the shelf. The Contessa had given him the recording to help him through his recuperation from a bout of the flu that had kept him housebound for almost a week.
“It should more than make up for whatever of Carnevale you think you’re missing, caro.” She had sighed and shaken her well-coiffed head. “Why can’t our celebration be sane and romantic like Schumann’s?”
“But it wouldn’t be the Venetian Carnival then, would it?” He did not remind her of the sad suicidal end that Schumann had come to. “I wish it were two months long the way it used to be,” he said playfully. “Just imagine if it began the day after Christmas!”
“Even after ten years, you’re as much of a perplexity as when I first met you! I thought you cherished your solitude, that you had come here to Venice to be away from it all. Isn’t it enough that you’re forcing me to give this costume ball?” she said with little regard for how she had actually arrived at this decision a month ago. “Oh, yes, caro, you’re a perplexity to me—a dear, sweet one but a perplexity nonetheless.”
“Am I so different from you? You enjoy your solitude, too, and yet you negotiate drawing rooms like a goldfish in a crystal bowl. You’re in your element then.”
“Of course I am!” she had said, visibly pleased with his image. “But with you the two are horrible extremes. You could use some order and balance. Listen to Carnaval.”
That’s just what he would do now. He put the record in the player and sat on the sofa. The soothing notes of the “Préambule” filled the room, followed by the movements of Pierrot and Harlequin, those two commedia dell’arte figures of the spirit and the flesh. Naïve Pierrot and coarse Harlequin. Now there were two extremes, Urbino thought as he pictured the figures against his closed eyelids. Could the spirit of the one inhabit the flesh of the other? He would have to pose this riddle to the Contessa.
Two screams from the calle interrupted the “Valse noble” and Urbino went to the window again. The alley and the bridge seemed deserted. He was about to turn away when a form detached itself from the shadows near the bridge and crept along the calle past the Palazzo Uccello. Whether a man or a woman he couldn’t tell any more than with Death and the Lady of Veils a little while ago.
The form was swathed in long dark robes, its face covered with an equally dark hood. When it neared the opening of a courtyard, a second form bounded from the shadows and, with another of the screams that had caught his attention, ran down the calle and beyond Urbino’s sight. The first figure quickened its pace in pursuit as a cry floated back and up to the closed window.
What had he seen? A playful game of hide and seek? One person pursuing another with evil intent? An argument between friends that might end with them kissing each other?
The appearances could cover any of these realities.
Urbino went back to the sofa. The fifth movement had begun. Reaching out to stroke the cat, Urbino smiled to himself.
If Barbara could only see me now, he thought. This was almost as good as a cork-lined room, and he was more than content—at least for the time being.
3
Schumann’s Carnaval ended. Urbino poured himself another glass of Corvo and picked up the Proust, opening it to where a postcard reproduction of Man Ray’s photograph of Proust’s death profile marked his place.
He had read Remembrance of Things Past several times before but he was reading it now because of the book on Proust he was adding to his Venetian Lives series. Proust and Venice would focus on the role the city had played in the writer’s life and art. It would have reproductions of paintings by Carpaccio, Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto and photographs of Venetian scenes and buildings by the city’s premier photographer, Porfirio.
Urbino had reached the point where Proust’s narrator finally gets to Venice after years of expectation and postponement and after the sudden death of his beloved Albertine. Inevitably, despite Marcel’s appreciation of the beauty and secrecy of the city, he finds himself somewhat disillusioned, and by the time he is about to leave, Venice is no longer an enchanted labyrinth out of the Arabian Nights but something sinister and deceptive that seems to have little to do with Doges and Turner. It doesn’t even seem to be Venice any longer, but a mendacious fiction where the palaces are nothing but lifeless marble and the water that makes the city unique only a combination of hydrogen and oxygen.
Urbino read for a while and then put the book down again, finding it difficult to concentrate tonight on the subjunctive and the imperfect, on the essential melancholia at the lime-blossom heart of Proust’s style and story.
Followed by Serena, who had been sleeping on one of the maroon velvet seats of the mahogany confessional on the other side of the room, he went to the study and put Children of Paradise in the video machine.
Urbino didn’t know how much of the long movie he would be able to watch before dropping off to sleep, but he knew the tragic story of a mime’s love for a beautiful actress so well that he could start it at any point without any problem. With its retelling of the story of Pierrot, Harlequin, and Columbine and its great final scene in which the mime Baptiste is separated forever from his beloved Garance by the mad Carnival crowd, it was particularly suited to the season.
He settled himself in his favorite armchair, Serena nestled against him, as the story started to unfold. Garance, the voluptuous yet tenderly maternal woman for whom love was “terriblement simple,” was watching a performance in front of the Funambules. In just a few moments Baptiste would fall in love with her forever.
; Urbino found himself almost holding his breath. Serena purred. The childlike Baptiste, dressed as a clown all in white, turned in Garance’s direction and looked at her with his soulful eyes.
Ah, there, it had happened! The rest—passion, yearning, jealousy, death, and separation—they all were fated now.
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