I did it. I began to lie, and in that moment I became a mother.
Listen to me.
Do you know what smell the Stevensons had? They stank of rotting strawberries.
Odette was kissing me, clinging like a monkey to my body while my husband was entering her. Her husband Robert was saying: “How beautiful you all are, you look like you are dead.”
Sometimes we would have trips at night in a gondola. Ludovico rowed, smoking his evil-smelling cigarettes, then he lay down beside us, under a blanket, in the cold.
Around us the violet shadows were dancing, stirring up the fog, and the stars were becoming endless rivers.
On November 3 the shadows said: “You cannot continue lying. Not anymore. Not now that Cassandra has been killed.”
I was walking through one of the Grand Hotel Bellosguardo’s long corridors. I was looking at its wooden green damask walls, decorated with small pictures depicting running stags. In the air the smell of jasmine was so strong that it brought on attacks of dizziness that with immense effort I tried to tame, pretending they were friendly dogs.
All of a sudden an overwhelming giddiness forced me to stop, and at that moment the shadows surrounded me, saying: “You cannot continue lying. Not anymore. Not now that Cassandra has been killed.” And then they added: “You know who the Stevensons are. You have never forgotten them.” It was November 5, 1887. They opened the door, they said: “Come with us.” Then the fog descended.
I sat down on the floor, I saw a glass rolling. I recognized it. It was the glass that my husband had dropped. It was coming toward me, changing into a shell.
I took it in my hand; putting my ear to it I heard the sea.
“I am only a child,” I whispered. “Let me play with the shell.”
A door opened. “Come with us,” they said.
While they were hurting me, that woman was singing, she had a childish voice, frail.
There was a window above me, it was raining, I could see the tree trunks, they were shiny.
Listen to me. I am talking to you. If you are afraid you can go. Forget the numbers you have spoken and go. I don’t want you to watch me now, leave me alone. I will enter into my blood, as light as a feather.
Why are you crying? There is no sense in crying, because everything has already happened, I am merely telling the story. It has already happened, do you understand? And do you know what is left? Wind, just wind.
Do you hear it? It is so strong. Do you remember?
I was looking at the darkness of the night from the window, I was thinking about the dahlias, about when they bloom under the light. It seems like their petals are reaching out for caresses, and then the wind blows.
I am that dahlia now, and the wind is blowing.
Will you stay with me? Please don’t go, stay here. I want you to watch me enter into my blood, as light as a feather.
Do you remember?
I was thinking about the beauty of leaves, about when they fall from the branches and fly away like plucked feathers. And I was thinking about myself, about when I was small and I knew nothing of sin.
Listen to me.
It was November 5, 1911. The Stevensons came into our room like cobras. I could hear Emily crying in her sleep, the rest was silence.
The room was shaking.
I saw the chair moving, brushing against the curtains, then the shadows came in to watch us.
Only I was aware of their presence. Dark forces were everywhere.
While everyone was grunting like pigs, voices fell from the ceiling, filling my mouth. They said to me: “Enter your mind and travel across it. Do not stop, do not turn around. Go forward until you reach the gate. You will see Cassandra’s hands opening like dahlias under the light.”
I entered, I saw her hands. They caressed me, and then the fog descended.
I left. I started to count. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. When I got to 20 I got up from the bed.
20: they were grunting like pigs.
25: I picked up the golden paper knife.
35: I put on a purple dress and pale velvet slippers. I was hungry.
I moved toward the window, I looked at Venice. 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?”
I whispered: “Cassandra, where are you?”
My voice, a lament of wolves wounded by an iron heart.
It was then that she appeared. She had short hair, large eyes, vast dreams, and she was so beautiful that my face was stained with tears.
She was suspended in the air, while the stars became endless rivers.
“Come to me,” she said.
I was watching her playing, she had a shell in her hand.
“Come to me; if you come here, the door will not open,” she said.
“Come here,” she said, “put your ear to the shell, you will hear the sea.”
I know, I should have killed the Stevensons. I did not do it. I did not want it to happen, I did not want them to become wind, just wind.
I called to them, I said: “I remember you. You will not come in again.”
They laughed at me.
I cut my throat.
My husband was screaming.
How much blood, I thought. How much blood there is inside me.
Then the fog descended.
Listen to me. I know you are still here. I can hear you, I can hear your breathing. Stay here for a while.
I want to tell you that you should not be sad, I did not suffer. Death is warm.
Death is a noise that ends.
You see a sunset on your arms, and nothing more deserts you, no one deserts you, because at last you are alone, forever. You don’t have to wait for anyone, because no one will arrive, and no one will go away, because at last you are alone, forever.
And there are no more lies, because in death there is truth.
PART III
TOURISTS & OTHER TROUBLED FOLK
VENICE APHRODISIAC
BY PETER JAMES
Canal Grande
The first time they came to Venice, Johnny had told his wife he was on an important case; Joy had told her husband she was visiting her Italian relatives.
In the large, dingy hotel room with its window overlooking the Canal Grande, they tore off each other’s clothes before they had even unpacked, and made love to the sound of lapping water and vaporetti blattering past outside. She was insatiable; they both were. They made love morning, noon, and night, only venturing out for food to stoke up their energy. On that trip they barely even took time out to glimpse the sights of the city. They had eyes only for each other. Horny eyes, greedy for each other’s naked body. And aware of how precious little time they had.
Johnny whispered to her that Woody Allen, whose movies they both loved, was once asked if he thought that sex was dirty, and Woody had replied, “Only if you are doing it right.”
So they did it right. Over and over again. And in between they laughed a lot. Johnny told Joy she was the sexiest creature in the world. She told him no, he was.
One time, when he was deep inside her, she whispered into Johnny’s ear, “Let’s promise each other to come back and make love here in his room every year, forever.”
“Even after we’re dead?” he said.
“Why not? You’re stiff when you’re dead, aren’t you? Stiff as a gondolier’s oar!”
“You’re a wicked woman, Joy Jackson!”
“You wouldn’t like me if I wasn’t, you horny devil!”
“We could come back as ghosts, couldn’t we, and haunt this room?”
“We will!”
Two years later, acrimoniously divorced and free, they married. And they honeymooned in Venice in the same hotel—a former palazzo—in the same room. While they were there, they vowed as before to return to the same room every year for their anniversary, and they did so, without f
ail. In the beginning they always got naked long before they got around to unpacking. Often, after dining out, they got so horny they couldn’t wait until they got back to the hotel.
One time they did it late at night in a moored gondola. They did it beneath the Rialto Bridge. And under several other bridges. Venice cast its spell—coming here was an aphrodisiac to them. They drank Bellinis in their favorite café in Piazza San Marco, swigged glorious white wines from the Friuli district, and gorged on grilled seafood in their favorite restaurant, the Corte Sconta, which they always got lost trying to find, every year.
Some mornings, spent with passion, they’d take an early water taxi and drink espressos and grappa on the Lido at sunrise. Later, back in their dimly lit hotel room, they took photographs of each other naked and filmed themselves making love. One time, for fun, they made plaster of paris impressions of what Joy liked to call their rude bits. They were so in lust, nothing it seemed could stop them, or could ever change.
Once on an early anniversary, they visited Isola San Michele, Venice’s cemetery island. Staring at the graves, Johnny asked her, “Are you sure you’re still going to fancy me when I’m dead?”
“Probably even more than when you’re alive!” she had replied. “If that’s possible!”
“We might rattle a bit, if we’re—you know—both skeletons.” “We’ll have to do it quietly, so we don’t wake up the graveyard.”
“You’re a bad girl,” he had said, then kissed her on the lips. “You’d never have loved me if I was good, would you?”
“Nah,” he said. “Probably not.”
“Let me feel your oar!”
That was then. Now was thirty-five years later. They’d tried—and failed—to start a family. For a while it had been fun trying, and eventually they’d accepted their failure. A lot of water under the bridge. Or rather, all 409 of Venice’s bridges. They’d seen each one, and walked over most of them. Johnny ticked them off a coffee-stained list he brought with him each year, and which became increasingly creased each time he unfolded it. Johnny was a box ticker, she’d come to realize. “I like to see things in tidy boxes,” he used to say.
He said it rather too often.
“Only joking,” he said when she told him she was fed up hearing this.
They say there’s many a true word spoken in jest, but privately, he was not jesting. Plans were taking shape in his mind. Plans for a future without her.
In happier times they’d shared a love of Venetian glass, and used to go across to the island of Murano on every trip, to see their favorite glass factory, Novità Murano. They filled their home in Brighton, England with glass ornaments—vases, candlesticks, paperweights, figurines, goblets. Glass of every kind. They say that people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and they didn’t. Not physical ones. Just metaphorical ones. More and more.
The stones had started the day she peeked into his computer.
Johnny had been a police officer—a homicide detective. She had worked in the divisional intelligence unit of the same force. After he had retired, at forty-nine, he’d become bored. He managed to get a job in the fulfilment department of a mail order company that supplied framed cartoons of bad puns involving animals. Their best-selling cartoon strip was one with pictures of bulls. Bullshit. Bullderdash. Bullish. And so on.
Johnny sat at the computer all day, ticking boxes in a job he loathed, dispatching tasteless framed cartoons to people he detested for buying them, and then going home to a woman who looked more like the bulls in the cartoons every day. He sought out diversions on his computer and began visiting porn sites. Soon he started advertising himself, under various false names, on Internet dating sites.
That was what Joy found when she peeked into the contents of his laptop one day when he had gone to play golf—at least, that had been his story. He had not been to any golf club. It was strokes and holes of a very different kind he had been playing, and confronted with the evidence he’d been forced to fess-up. He was full-frontal, naked, and erect on eShagmates.
Naked and erect for everyone in the world, but her.
And so it was, on their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, they returned to the increasingly dilapidated palazzo on the Canal Grande, each with a very different agenda in their hearts and minds than those heady days of their honeymoon and the years that followed.
He planned to murder her here in Venice. He’d planned last year to murder her during a spring weekend break in Berlin, and the year before that in Barcelona. Each time he had bottled out. As a former homicide detective, if anyone knew how to get away with murder he did, but equally he was aware, few murderers ever succeeded. Murderers made mistakes in the white heat of the moment. All you needed was one tiny mistake. A clothing fiber, a hair, a discarded cigarette butt, a scratch, a footprint, a CCTV camera you hadn’t spotted. Anything.
Certain key words were fixed in his mind from years of grim experience. Motive. Body. Murder weapon. They were the three things that would catch a murderer. Without any one of those elements it became harder. Without all three, near impossible.
So all he had to do was find a way to dispose of her body. Lose the murder weapon (as yet not chosen). And as for motive, well, who was to know he had one? Other than the silly friends Joy gossiped with constantly.
The possibilities for murder in Venice were wide. Joy could not swim and its vast lagoon presented opportunities for drowning—except it was very shallow. There were plenty of buildings with rickety steps where a person could lose her footing. Windows high enough to ensure a fatal fall.
It had been years since they tore each other’s clothes off in the hotel room when they arrived. Instead, today as usual, Johnny logged on and hunched over his computer. He had a slight headache, which he ignored. Joy ate a packet of chocolate from the minibar, followed by a tin of nuts, then the complimentary biscuits that came with the coffee. Then she had a rest, tired from the journey. When she woke, to the sound of Johnny farting, she peered suspiciously over his shoulder to check if he was on one of his porn chat sites.
What she had missed while she slept was the e-mails back and forth between Johnny and his new love, Mandy, a petite divorcée he’d met at the gym where he’d gone to keep his six-pack in shape. He planned to return from Venice a free man.
The Bellinis in their favorite café had changed, and were no longer made with fresh peach juice or real champagne. Venice now smelled of drains. The restaurant was still fine, but Johnny barely tasted his food, he was so deep in thought. And his headache seemed to be growing worse. Joy had drunk most of the bottle of white wine, and on top of the Bellini earlier, into which he had slipped a double vodka, she seemed quite smashed. They had six more nights here. Once, the days had flown by. Now he struggled to see how they could even fill tomorrow. With luck he would not have to.
He called the waiter over for the bill, pointing to his wife who was half asleep and apologizing that she was drunk. It could be important that the waiter would remember this. Yes, poor lady, so drunk her husband struggled to help her out …
They staggered along a narrow street, and crossed a bridge that arced over a narrow canal. Somewhere in the dark distance a gondolier was singing a serenade.
“You haven’t taken me on a gondola in years,” she chided, slurring her words. “I haven’t felt your oar much in years either,” she teased. “Maybe I could feel it tonight?”
I’d rather have my gall bladder removed without an anaesthetic, he thought, but did not say.
“But I suppose you can’t get it up these days,” she taunted. “You don’t really have an oar anymore, do you? All you have is a little dead mouse that leaks.”
The splash of an oar became louder. So did the singing.
The gondola was sliding by beneath them. Entwined in each other’s arms was a young man and a young woman, clearly in love, like they had once been. Like he was now with Mandy Brent. He stared down at the inky water.
Two ghosts stared back.
Then only one.
It took Joy some moments to realize something was wrong. Then she turned in drunken panic, screaming for help, for a doctor, for an ambulance. A kindly neurosurgeon told her some hours later, in broken English, that there was nothing anyone could have done. Her husband had been felled by a massive cerebral aneurysm. He would have been dead within seconds.
Back in England, after Johnny’s body had been repatriated, was when Joy’s troubles really started. The solicitor informed her that he had left half of his entire estate, which was basically the house they lived in, to a woman she had never heard of. The next thing she knew, the woman was on the phone wanting to discuss the funeral arrangements.
“I’m having him cremated,” Joy said.
“He told me he wanted to be buried,” Mandy Brent insisted. “I’d like that, I’d like to have somewhere I can go and sit with him.”
All the more reason, thought Joy, to have him cremated. But there was another, bigger reason she had been thinking of. Much bigger!
The following year, on what would have been their thirtysixth wedding anniversary, Joy returned to Venice, to the same room in the dilapidated former palazzo. She unpacked from her suitcase the small gray plastic urn and put it on the windowsill, and stared at it, then at the view of the Canal Grande beyond.
“Remember what we said to each other, Johnny? Do you? That promise we made to each other? About coming back here? Well, I’m helping us to keep that promise!”
The next morning she took a vaporetto across to Murano. She spoke to the same courteous assistant, Valerio Barbero, in the glass factory, Novità Murano, who had helped them every year since they had started coming. Signore Barbero was an old man now, stooped and close to retirement. He told Joy how very deeply sympathetic he was, how sad, what a fine gentleman Signore Jones had been. And, as if this was quite a normal thing for him, he accepted the contents of the package and her design without even the tiniest flicker of his rheumy eyes. It would be ready in three days, he assured her.
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