Venice Noir

by Maxim Jakubowski

  The Chinese restaurant is still open. With her left hand she caresses the knife in her bag, and she feels her cell phone and purse to make sure she’s got them with her, a habitual check she almost always does. She could wait. Perhaps she should. She could go on working and go on sharpening pencils whenever she feels uneasy. Stay in her personal ghetto. Instead she does it. She touches her nose with her right hand. Then she lets it fall with an abrupt movement. She doesn’t say hello to Lulu’s owner who is still putting up posters: If anyone has seen this cat, please phone xxx. Reward offered.

  You were only twenty, you were restless, fickle, and beautiful, you were my family and they want me to stop feeling you near me but I can’t let them do that, you will always be with me; you do know that, my darling? I’m nothing if you’re not near me, my life is nothing, I miss you and I missed feeling you close as I do now, there’s the smell, your very last perfume, yes, it’s really there, I can smell it, it’s only right that this is how it is, none of the doctors I met understood anything, they wanted to control me, control my sense of smell, my mind, my emotions, but they didn’t succeed, you’d be proud of me, little sister.

  She goes into the Chinese restaurant and waves at Anna’s mother. Anna walks toward her.

  “I’m hungry. Do you want to come to the osteria near the bridge?”

  “Don’t you want something here?”

  “No, you know I don’t really like Chinese food.”

  “Okay, wait a minute while I get my bag.”

  Anna had walked close by her, very close, and she had definitely been aware of something: she hadn’t taken a shower.

  Don’t worry about me, little sister, everything’s all right, you’re still near me.

  PART II

  SHADOWS OF THE PAST

  LIDO WINTER

  BY MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI

  Lido

  The vaporetto turns the bend.

  You’ve seen it in countless paintings by Canaletto, Turner, and others, a thousand and one photographs and movies and TV documentaries, but still the eternal view unfolds like a slow-motion epiphany.

  The Grand Canal in all its majesty. Canal Grande.

  Moving past the Ponte degli Scalzi, the choppy waters flowing all the way downstream toward the Rialto Bridge that looms in the gray distance, the crumbling stone outposts on either shore like parallel rows of zombie guests at a wedding waiting for the bride and groom to troop past and be assaulted by clouds of confetti, the domes of churches in the hinterlands, the procession of palazzi straight from the pages of history and guidebooks: Gritti, Dona Balbi, Zen, Marcello Toderini, Calbo Crotta, Flangini, Giovanelli, and on and on, like a litany of open-mouthed operatic celebrations of decay and grandeur, the sound of water lapping in the wake of the vaporetto’s passage, the unique smells of La Serenissima, gulls above observing your steady journey toward the open spaces of the lagoon, past the markets, and finally the Ponte dell’Accademia and onward beyond Piazza San Marco and the Doge’s Palace and into the murky emptiness that separates the principal part of the city from the nearby islands.

  It’s not the first time you’ve made this journey, but it always takes your breath away as the façades unrolling on both sides of your field of vision steadily unveil centuries and more of history, of stories imagined and read about. Of classic movies. Of books. Stories that stick in your throat and in your mind like rough diamonds full of fury.

  The hiccuping engine of the vaporetto guides you into open waters past the final promontory of the Giudecca, beyond the tip of San Giorgio Maggiore, and cuts through a cluster of lingering mist, heading for the fast-approaching line of land of the Lido.

  He wraps the black cashmere scarf tighter around his open collar as the marine breeze makes its coldness felt. Looks around. Since the San Marco stop, there is just a handful of passengers left on the vaporetto. Mostly locals with bulging shopping bags, a couple of teenagers busy texting on pink cell phones, hopefully not to each other, a well-dressed businessman of some sort whose hairpiece is an uncomfortable match for his russet moustache.

  And sitting right at the back, lost in distant dreams of an unfathomable nature, the young woman. He’d distractedly noticed her boarding the vaporetto at the Santa Lucia train station, running down the stone steps toward the embarcation point, holding her bag in one hand, her golden hair flowing behind her. It was just about to leave and she’d only caught it with a few seconds to spare.

  Her green mac is now unbuttoned, displaying the violent fire of a red sweatshirt over skinny black jeans. Even though, like him, she is obviously a tourist, she appears different. As if she belongs here somehow amongst the cold breeze of the lagoon.

  And come to think of it, how does Jonathan appear to on lookers? Just a tourist with no luggage. A man with wild gray hair curling out of control, his stocky frame bulked up within a heavy brown leather coat. Middle-aged, unremarkable.

  The vaporetto shudders to a slow halt in front of the pier, and the passengers disembark. Jonathan is in no hurry and allows the locals to stream past him before he even rises from his wooden seat. As he steps off onto the island, he gives a final look back at the vaporetto. The young woman is no longer sitting in the rear, although he had somehow not noticed her overtaking him. Strange. He looks ahead at the small treelined piazza, which hosts the vaporetto station. The other passengers are dispersing in two or three separate directions but there is no sign of her. He sighs and mentally speculates how tall she had actually been. Her posture had reminded him of Kathleen. Who’d been five feet eleven. And lithe and clumsy and surprisingly submissive between the sheets. Jonathan sighs again as memories come streaming back in a torrent before he deliberately cuts them off. Now is not the time.

  He looks ahead. The piazza is empty, like a set for a ghost town in a movie. Shuttered cafés on both corners of the main road which, he remembers, leads a few miles farther down to the beaches. And the big hotels and casinos.

  But somehow it now appears so different, as if his memory is playing tricks on him and he hadn’t actually been here all those years back.

  A car crosses the piazza in front of him at a low speed and it’s something of a shock, a disconnect. You just don’t expect cars in Venice. But he reminds himself this is the Lido and not Venice itself. A random thought occurs to him: Do they ship the cars in from somewhere? How?

  Jonathan then recalls the forgotten fact that Giulietta had come here by car once. At film festival time. There is some ferry that comes in from somewhere on the mainland, but he can’t precisely remember where from.

  That was when they’d met.

  She’d conducted a brief interview with him in London. She hadn’t made too much of an impression on him at the time. But during the course of the following months, they had begun corresponding. About one thing or another. Gradually the tone of the exchange had become personal and soon they had tacitly agreed that they would meet again in Venice at the film festival and both knew they would become lovers.

  His initial surprise was that she was so much taller than she had been in his memory. And uncannily beautiful too.

  She’d driven there in her father’s camper with a girlfriend who had managed to get them a press pass through an uncle who worked for RAI. Had found an isolated area near Malamocco to park at night toward the southern tip of the island. Not that Giulietta ever slept there at night, being in his bed until the early hours of each morning when the screenings began, some of which they would attend together, sometimes holding hands in the darkness.

  Behind him the vaporetto leaves, cutting through the waters, returning to Venice. Jonathan glances around. A long road disappears ahead, in all likelihood leading toward the Lungomare, he remembers. All roads south on the Lido invariably reach the Lungomare, the Adriatic.

  He sets off. Was it the second or third turn to the left? He tries both and is soon lost. Every small turn off the main road looks alike. Unable to find the small hotel where they had first fucked. Is it because in winter e
verything here seems different? He stumbles his way back to the main road. There is no one around he can ask for directions and he can’t get a connection on his iPhone and search Google Maps.

  The cold breeze is insidiously finding its way through his heavy leather coat. He shivers as every bone in his body protests.

  “You took a wrong turn.”

  Jonathan swivels around.

  It’s the young woman from the vaporetto. Out of nowhere.

  He looks her straight in the eye. She holds his stare, her painted Mona Lisa lips fixed in a semblance of irony.

  “How would you know?” he queries.

  “I know,” she says.

  “You’ve been here before? Do you live here?”

  “I just know,” she says.

  From the moment he first heard her voice, he has been glued to the spot. He feels an ache in his right hip. Her eyes are ice green, deep wells of certainty.

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Follow me.” The young woman’s voice is transatlantic, impossible to pinpoint. She could as easily be British or American, or even from elsewhere, the words carefully modulated, the product of expensive elocution lessons maybe.

  She takes a long, almost manly stride toward the curb and Jonathan follows her. Her hair shimmers in the winter breeze, curls sprouting in every direction like a crowd of thorns. He calls out to her, “I’m Jonathan, by the way …”

  She nods, as if she already knows this.

  “What is your name?” he persists.

  She turns her head around toward him and smiles gently, as if hesitant to reveal her true identity.

  “My name doesn’t matter,” she finally says, and increases her pace. They are now walking down a narrow tree-bordered street of high brick walls and concealed gardens. It’s all beginning to look familiar to Jonathan. He digs his gloved hands deep down into the pockets of his coat. How can it be so damn cold in Venice of all places? He’d somehow never associated Venice with this sort of weather.

  Her slim ankles dance ahead of him as she makes her way through the narrow Lido backstreets.

  You had come to Venice in search of memories. Traces, images, thoughts of Giulietta somehow persistently lingering in your mind from the time you had spent together here. Over the past couple of months you had already roamed the winter pavements of Paris, Barcelona, Amsterdam, New Orleans, Seattle, and New York on a similar pilgrimage to recapture a past that was fast fading into the untouchable distance of time and could no longer be held between your useless fingers. Not just frozen shards of Giulietta, but of all the other women you had known; some loved, some desired, lusted after, all lost or, at any rate, left behind in the ebb and swirl of the ever-flowing tides of feelings and dissolving days. The headlines and paragraphs of what had been your life.

  You could feel it in your bones: the night was coming.

  Slowly but surely.

  All-conquering.

  And this was your pathetic way of raging against the falling darkness. Your only way.

  Some would have called it ridiculous, but in a curious way it all made sense. It was the sort of minor theatrical gesture that the characters in the books and movies that touched you most would do. There was even a French novel later made into a film where the central character had done just that before committing suicide. But his wandering peregrinations had merely carried him through Paris, visiting acquaintances on both sides of the Seine; men, women, past friends. You had watched the movie over a dozen times when still in your twenties. Not that you had any intention of topping yourself, of course, but wasn’t there something so damn romantic about the idea of such a hopeless quest in search of the past and its parade of unforgettable women? And you were weak and so prone to giving in to temptations of every nature.

  In your bones: the dull pain of a recurring toothache, the dizziness that swamped your senses on unwelcome occasions, the creaking in your joints, the hairs growing out of your nose and ears that you waged a losing battle against with your faithful set of tweezers, the shortness of breath, the blurriness in your vision when you woke in the mornings (this despite two cataract operations), the white pubic hairs sprouting on the left-hand side of your shriveled cock, the tired posture you witnessed all too often in the bathroom mirror, the tangled strands of gray hair that increasingly got caught in your brush, the incessant tiptoeing down the dimly lit corridor to relieve the pressure on your bladder at night, the tiredness that came so easily, the increasing unattractiveness of your aging body. But most of all, the terrible acceptance that, these days, there was nothing to look forward too any longer.

  Yes, night was calling and its dark melody was becoming all too magically seductive to you.

  Your travel agent had found you this exquisite small boutique hotel on the Lido, lost in a jungle of luxuriant shrubbery, a few minutes off the Via Marco Polo. Every room was full of antique furniture, heavy brocade, and curtains, like traveling back into an earlier century of indolence. It was a quarter of an hour’s walk from there to the festival screenings held in a palatial congress center by the sea.

  You had arranged to meet up with Giulietta after the opening movie. Prior to the screening you both had invitations to a formal dinner but were seated at different tables, far apart. She had been wearing a dress with an open back and your heart had experienced a pang of jealous pain on every occasion her neighbor at the table, a Rome editor she occasionally penned freelance pieces for, distractedly allowed his damn fingers to stray across her skin in a gesture of both affection and, it appeared to you, ownership.

  You had, finally, made your way back in silence to your hotel. It had been a warm, humid September night. God only knew what she could be thinking, having rashly agreed some weeks before by e-mail to join a man she barely knew in his bed, a man double her age.

  Maybe something buried deep inside your uncertainties was already telling you Giulietta would be your last adventure and you had to seize the day and not look such a gift horse in the mouth. What you didn’t know is how she would make your heart melt, and how you would fall in love with her and turn all over again into a stumbling teenager in the thrall of it all.

  Venice nights: Giuli’s lanky body, the dark colors of the hotel room’s heavy curtains, the tight dark curls of her pubes, the smell of her skin, her silences (and yours …), the sweat and intoxicating odors of lovemaking, halting breaths, sighs, cries. Early-morning yawns, open windows, and the smell of magnolia seeping in from the overgrown gardens outside, dark coffee in bed and vaporetto trips for mornings in the city, walks across a hundred bridges to discover a wildness of churches, the Arsenale, the grounds of the Biennale, further coffees in a small bar on Campo Santa Maria Formosa that Donna Leon had recommended, Bellinis at a bar that Hemingway had allegedly written about, an expensive meal at Florian’s which all the guidebooks insisted should not be missed.

  Late-morning screenings back on the Lido and then aimless afternoons hand in hand getting lost in the maze of La Serenissima, away from the familiar tourist tracks, the Ghetto, San Polo.

  One evening, Giulietta wanted to go to the casino and was refused entry as the burly doorman would not believe she was over eighteen—yes, she did look that young—and she had left her passport and identity papers in your room. Giulietta laughed aloud but you blushed more than she did. Dirty old man caught with under-age prey! The bouncer’s steely eyes pierced you through and through.

  Neither of you filed much copy about the films in the competition and the Venice Nights section that year …

  The exiguous lobby of Villa Stella is empty. When they enter the grounds of the hotel, Jonathan immediately recognizes the place. The overgrown gardens, the clean-cut façade.

  Little has changed.

  “Come,” the young blond woman beckons him, as she lifts the oak panel that separates the granite-topped registration counter from the common area. She slides elegantly between the counter and a high-backed chair and turns to the wall where the room keys all hang and
takes one. Maybe she is staying here, which would explain her relaxed familiarity? But how could she have known it was this specific hotel he was seeking?

  “It’s out of season,” she says, as if answering Jonathan’s question.

  “And you have the run of the place?”

  “You could say that.” An enigmatic smile spreads across her lips.

  She opens the door to the hotel room and Jonathan flinches.

  “Oh …”

  “What is it?” the young woman asks.

  “Have you done this on purpose?”

  “What?”

  “This particular room?”

  “I took the first key at random,” she answers, the expression on her face unchanged. “There are only twelve rooms. One chance in twelve,” she adds.

  Jonathan shrugs his shoulders, content to go along with the fable.

  The room is frozen in time, conjuring up too many memories and images sharp enough to puncture his heart and soul. All of a sudden, he loses his resolve.

  “Would you mind if we came back later? Had a walk first?” he inquires.

  “No problem.”

  They take the main road toward the sea, where the thin strip of land of the island borders on the Adriatic. Turn right at the Lungomare, walking down Gabriele d’Annunzio where it turns into Guglielmo.

  The Hotel des Bains is shuttered and shielded by a barbwire fence. He has read somewhere it was soon to be remodeled into an apartment block. Its beach is also inaccessible, its golden sands lying wet and forlorn with scattered frayed deckchairs upturned here and there, like memories of a past, more opulent era.