Her ankles were bare from April till October. She painted her toenails in the summer, the color of dried blood. I’m fond of a drop of blood, female blood.
I get it when I can, which is a lot, if you know me.
But how did it come to this? That one August night in the whipping rain I bit the object of my affection, and so caused the girl’s death? And witnessed the impaling of her murderer?
There’s little crime in Venice, as there’s nowhere for a criminal to run. Few can walk on water; even if some plumbers think they can.
And it was one of that breed, a man with a knife and an ego like God’s, who abducted the girl from her ground-floor apartment a few minutes before she died. I heard him arrive, quietly singing his favorite song, improvised from the names on the doorbells along our street. This is how it went (but you must imagine the words rolled through his shaggy tonsils, and perfumed with his asshole breath):
Fuck you, the Misters Gasperin
Fuck you, the Misters Olivetti
Fuck you, the Misters Lovisi
Fuck you, the Misters Zanetti …
When he rang the bell, I heard the girl stumble toward the door, which was right beside the flue where I’d been napping. My heart beat faster than two wristwatches, for I’m frightened of the same things as the next guy: loud noises, barbwire, poison, a bigger fellow than myself.
“Chi è?” she asked. (“Who is it?”)
“Io,” he said, unfurling that canvas umbrella. (“Me.”)
She was a girl to whom any number of men might have made this reply. From my hole in the wall I saw her open the door and peer out the threshold, balancing her bare feet, with the varnished toes, on the stripe of greasy Istrian stone, speckled by lamplight and flung raindrops. He was on her in an instant.
“Out,” he said, with the knife at her throat. “Come with me.”
I was not the only witness to the scene.
“Oho, what have we here?” croaked my whiskery companion.
You see, there was a woman, a gondolier’s widow, my hostess and landlady at that time. We shared a little hutch carved out of the damp ground floor of a grand palazzo near Santo Stefano. Discontented years had reptiled my landlady’s skin, thickened her neck, and drawn the corners of her coarse mouth downward. Her eyes had popped in the constant search of something to disapprove of, until she resembled a pinkish stippled toad in a wig. And while the old lady may have looked like a flesh-colored amphibian, she was strong as an ox, and stuffed stiff as a teddy bear, not with wool or sawdust, but with spite for all her fellow humans.
Perhaps she had loved her husband once, for she lived surrounded by the memorabilia of his profession. The dried corpses of flowers were arranged in a silver gondola vase, though the metal had long been blackened by the gases emitted by her drains. Her knitting bag hung from the old gondola’s wooden forcola. She even crammed her dimpled rear end into one of the gondola’s little tasseled stools when she watched the television programs she hated. More than anything she despised Festa in Piazza and its faux square filled with cheerful dancing couples. She never missed a show. And she cursed it volubly all through. She hated the wide-eyed presenters, the aging singers, the bored musicians, and the underage dancers. She hated the audience, the director, and the advertisers. Most of all, she hated the cameraman, who could not keep his lens from jiggling in the crevices between the breasts and thighs of the dancing girls.
But I have left the poor girl and the plumber on the doorstep in the rain!
So—the old woman woke promptly on the clanging sneer of the doorbell. In her iron cot, she slept little, so restless was her desire to find something new to be disgusted by. God had granted this woman a blessing: a next-door neighbor who was not a good girl. She was the delicate, dirty kind of girl who appealed to gangsters.
As she rushed to her spy-mirror, the old woman snagged her own nightdress on the ferro of her husband’s gondola, which hung on the wall. With a curse, she lifted the offending curved comb of steel from its hook, and tucked it under her arm.
“Non si sa mai,” she muttered. (“You never know.”)
A twitched curtain and the spy-mirror revealed the face of the man at the next door. It was her son-in-law, the gangster. He played the amiable plumber, the joker, the hand-waggler, the punster, the clown. But he was one of those outlaws who bring misery, poverty, and ill health to hundreds of lives by brutishly shoddy work charged at crippling rates. His customers were rightfully afraid of him. In Venice, we have water flowing through us the way other cities have faith. For Venetians, a plumber is a kind of priest. A rotten priest is a more fearful object than a rotten burglar. The betrayal is more comprehensive. So it is in Venice with plumbers. A bad plumber is like a priest who corrupts little boys and frightens them into silence with the potency of the church. A truly bad plumber is il male impersonificato, a friend to flood, mold, and stink, an eager but ineffectual fondler of tools, a house haunter who manifests in sleepless, dripping nights, in a nameless sense of dread in the boiler room. This plumber was of that degree of badness, as ripe a son of Beelzebub as ever fissured a mains pipe with a careless nail. You could see it in his walk, smell it in his clothes. And see it on his face—which was flattened with sin, as if someone had pulled a stocking over it.
The old lady had suffered her own plumbing to be ruined by this hydraulic son-in-law of hers. She knew that he betrayed her downtrodden daughter too. The wife of that plumber suffered more leaks than anyone, more sodden days. Her faulty water-gates strained the Venetian floodwater straight into her carpet. Her lavatory oozed slow slime like contempt.
Now, like myself, the old woman had seen her son-in-law at the next-door apartment before. She knew that he had also inflicted his plumbing on the dirty, delicate girl. The old lady had witnessed the plumber leaving the girl’s apartment on a number of smudged dawns. She had spied him arriving at several stagnant lunch hours, disappearing from the throbbing hot light of the calle into the dark doorway. She had also observed how, as he left on the previous day, he had passed another gangster swaggering in the direction of her door. He had waited in a crook of the calle until he had seen the other gangster receive a delicate, dirty admittance to the girl’s door.
Now the old lady used her spy-mirror to watch the man with the knife march the girl down our calle. She waited until she saw them turn right, not left, at the crossroads. Then she dived into one of the fetid, flowered bags of viscose that she wore by day, picked up the ferro, and waddled after them. As did I, keeping a careful distance from the old woman, for she had several times beaten me with a broom handle, and once thrown a pot of boiling water on my back. It’s still bald there.
A man with a knife force-marching a girl—from my hidden places, I have seen all this and worse. A man handing a girl a piece of chalk, and forcing her to draw a hopscotch outline in the rain—no, that was new. As was his blindfolding her, passing her a candle for one hand and an umbrella for the other, and lighting a cigarette for himself as he sat by the well under the dry of the canopy with the knife between his knees.
What did he mean to do to her? Humiliate her for preferring another gangster to himself? A special plumber’s revenge: make her catch her death of cold in the rain? Or was it that visions of the day’s slackened pipes and betrayed boilers swirled in his head, robbing him of sleep, reminding him of the girl’s preference? Was it the maddening clench of August heat? Or the light rapping of the rain, the musical notes of the liquid which was his life’s work, that had woken him and sent him out on the flowing streets to do more gangstering and worse than the other fellow?
In the early hours, Venice is lonely as a lake. The heat had stoppered up even the tiny trickle of humanity that you might encounter in Santo Stefano at two in the morning. From the corner of the Palazzo Loredan, the old woman and I had a private view of the blindfolding, the chalking of the hopscotch, the handing over of the candlestick, the pathetic sobbing and hopping of the delicate, dirty girl in the nightdress. We
saw the first shaft of lightning finger the ground. We saw the first raindrops weaving through the air. We had the best view of the man with the knife between his knees, seated comfortably just a few yards away. With his back to us. We saw the smoke from his cigarette rise above the silhouette of his thick pipe of a neck and his shaggy cistern-shaped head.
The last time the old woman and I had seen that thick pipe of a neck from this angle, it had been bent over her boiler. Over his shoulder, he had tossed the news that the boiler was comprehensively dead and that a new one would cost her three thousand euros. He had installed that boiler less than a year before, a Caliban of boilers, a monstrosity bred from the blackened, broken organs of other boilers he had wrenched, kicked, and beaten to death. For that, he’d put the bite on the old lady for four thousand euros, a whole cushionful and change.
“Cash,” he’d sneered. “Unless you want to pay the tax. And that’s with your sconto affettuoso, mind. What do you say?”
An affectionate discount. What did she say? Here was his answer, at last. The girl was still hopping when the old woman did her work with the silver-pronged ferro. I was excited by the grunt and thrust and the smell of blood. Perhaps that was why I ran across the square to perform my instinctive act upon the ankle of the girl. Blood begets blood. It always has. Or perhaps I wanted to alert the girl to the fact that her tormentor was no more. I could not have foreseen the umbrella enfolding her like a tulip with petals of fire. Or the savory steam that would rise from her crisped corpse. Or the blood of the plumber, diluted by rain, palely loitering in a pool around her body.
“Che cagnón,” muttered the old lady. (“What a terrible stink.”)
Together, like friends enjoying a horror movie in the dark barrel of a cinema, the old woman and I took in the blaze. I even nestled up to her, for the comfort of flesh against my trembling fur. Finally, we turned our backs on the burnt girl and the impaled man and walked back toward the apartment.
Suddenly, pink lightning sewed up the sky in great clumsy stitches, like a battlefield surgeon. A monstrous thunderclap sent us both squealing to the bridge. The rain was thickening into something more useful, scampering furiously over all the roofs of Venice. Steam rose from the baked stone of the streets. The both of us were sneezing and shaking the droplets out of our whiskers. By the time we arrived at our door, the storm had fully opened its heart: thick shafts of silver stabbed the street, bayonets of water, crushing the flowers and filling the leaf-clotted gutters.
The old woman opened the door for me. I scuttled in ahead of her, expecting her boot in my buttock or a broom on my snout at any moment.
I was wrong.
“Mangiamo qualcosa insieme, vecio,” she burbled in a cordial manner. (“Let’s have something to eat together, old chap.”)
I stared at her uncertainly. This was the first time she’d ever acknowledged me, although she’d long relied on me to clean up what she spilled on the linoleum.
She consulted the fridge and dropped a rind of gorgonzola wetly on the floor for me. I wasn’t too dainty to swallow it. Something red was thrown in my direction. Automatically, I closed my jaws around it, and felt the miniature abrasions of a strawberry on my tongue.
Eating put the heart back in me. I looked across at her ankle.
No, I mustn’t, I realized. She and I are married now. By what happened out there.
Next to our door, the rising black water sucked fervently at the steps, and an illegal soil pipe, installed by the plumber, fed it with filth.
DESDEMONA UNDICESIMA
BY ISABELLA SANTACROCE
Piazza San Marco
Translated from Italian by Judith Forshaw
I
I am not mad. I was watching them come out of the water, as stately as empresses, and I, at the window, was alone. I am afraid.
My name is Desdemona Undicesima; you are reading my words. You should know that these words belong to a dead woman, and I dedicate them to you, for always.
If you were here, in this room, you would see my eyes. And in them Venice.
It was November 5, 1911, there were motionless gondolas under the moon, then the fog descended.
It is so difficult not to lie. Do you love me? Don’t be sad; I did not suffer. It was nice thinking that I was far away. Because this is what happens when you determine the outcome of your actions, of the voice you have and that you will never hear again.
I killed myself on November 5, 1911 at midnight in room number 5 of the Grand Hotel Bellosguardo. I was wearing a purple dress and pale velvet slippers. I was hungry. I could hear a child crying in her sleep. The rest was silence.
I had arrived in Venice a month before with my husband. I remember precisely a fork placed on the table. It was gleaming. My husband was laughing, saying: “My dear, don’t you think Venice is mysterious? Look at this fork; it has the sun inside it.”
I do not remember my reply, perhaps I stared at his hands, the way he had of moving them, it was odious. The thing that used to frighten me most about my husband was his hands; they seemed to belong to another man, a man who had killed without shedding a tear.
Are you listening to me? Now imagine that my voice is in these words. Put your right ear to them and listen.
Three numbers. Now say, “Three numbers.”
The first is number 5, the second is number 13, the third is number 7.
You will feel my breath on your face. Do you feel it? I am close to you now.
Death is warm. Death is a noise that ends.
Listen to me.
I adored Venice. I would gaze at her in a book. There were photographs, and she was so beautiful that my face was stained with tears. I saw Ophelia painted by Millais when I looked at her. That is what I saw, and I wanted to reach her, to lie down beside her, with the sun in my eyes.
For so long I insisted. My darling, take me to Venice.
My husband would yawn, saying: “Venice is duller than you.” Or he would say: “Venice is foggier than you.” Or he would say: “Venice is gloomier than you.” Or he would say: “You are Venice; look at yourself in the mirror and you will see her.”
The long walks in my mind. I have only ever walked in my mind. I used to leave in the morning, and sometimes I would not return. I would stay closeted inside her for days. I would walk continuously; it was almost never-ending.
A labyrinth of bones.
My husband did not hate me; he did not understand me. Incomprehension is more unbearable than hate, because it does not exist.
We had no children; I would have liked to be a mother. I wanted a baby girl. I would have called her Cassandra. And I used to imagine that she had perfumed hair, and then sweet lips, full of kisses.
I had drawn her in my journal. Every day I perfected her. My daughter had become resplendent.
I took her too to Venice.
We left on October 2, 1911. It was raining. The tree trunks were shiny.
I had managed to convince him. I had said to him: “My darling, I have waited so long, give me this present, and I will never forget you.”
He had looked at me. There was something in his gaze, perhaps anger.
He had replied: “My dear, we leave on the second of October, but promise me you will stop loving me so, you unnerve me.”
Men. Cruel beasts.
On October 2 it was raining. The tree trunks were shiny. There was singing; only I could hear it. Nightingales and then a childish voice, frail.
My husband was driving. I stared at his gloves, then his profile. I asked myself: Who is this man?
We arrived in Venice on October 5 at four thirty p.m. I was having difficulty breathing.
How much water, I thought. How much water there is here. Venice is the stomach of a pregnant woman, I thought. Inside her is my daughter.
I wanted to call her, to shout: Cassandra, where are you?
To write is hellish. I am writing, and it is hellish. Hell is where a true writer lives. Writing is evil, darkness, black.
I am looking at you. Do you see me? I am wearing a purple dress, pale velvet slippers. I am sitting in room number 5 of the Grand Hotel Bellosguardo, a child is crying in her sleep, the rest is silence.
Listen to me.
A gondolier, his name was Ludovico, it was he who ferried us to the Grand Hotel Bellosguardo.
My husband was grumbling. He was saying: “Venice bores me. I need something to drink.”
We entered room number 5, my husband with a glass in his hand.
I said to him: “My darling, this room is very elegant. I like it.”
He dropped the glass to the floor, then he said: “Now I like it too.”
I wanted to kill him. I looked at a golden paper knife.
Love is a surgical operation without anaesthetic.
Love is a deep pain.
I unpacked the suitcases. My husband was sleeping. His shadow was moving on the curtains. There was a gentle wind.
I went into the bathroom, I masturbated slowly. I could see myself reflected in the washbasin tap, I was pathetic. I could see a woman caressing herself, it was me. I wondered: Who is that woman? She must be an unhappy woman; she has graveyards and festivals in her eyes. This is what I thought.
The night, when it arrived, I remember it being immense and mirrored in the water. I was watching it as I breathed in the funereal perfume of my fate.
Three fates exist; when the last one arrives, the perfume begins.
That evening we dined in a romantic restaurant.
I was staring at a fork placed on the table. It was gleaming. My husband was laughing, saying: “My dear, don’t you think Venice is mysterious? Look at this fork; it has the sun inside it.”
Listen to me.
At ten o’clock we walked, we crossed bridges. The gondolas—black, accursed swans—seemed to watch us.
It was then that I saw them for the first time. They were three violet shadows, they were rising from the water like stately empresses.
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