“Getting used to it, thanks.”
Hunter had somehow fetched up here, demobilized from a war that nobody knew about, obscurely damaged, seeking refuge from time, safety behind the cloaks and masks and thousand-named mists of Venezia.
“There was a war? Where?”
“Europe. Everywhere. But no one seems to know of it . . . here . . .” he hesitated, with a wary look—“yet.”
“Why not? It’s so far away the news hasn’t reached here ‘yet’?” She let a breath go by, then—“Or it hasn’t happened ‘yet’?”
He gazed back, not in distress so much as a queer forgiveness, as if reluctant to blame her for not knowing. How could any of them know?
“Then I guess you’re a time-traveler from the future?” Not mocking, really, nor much surprised either.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how that could happen.”
“Easy. Somebody in the future invents a time machine, O.K.? Every crazy promoter both sides of the Atlantic’s been working on that, one of em’s bound to succeed, and when they do, those contraptions’ll just be common as cabs for hire. So . . . wherever you were, you must’ve hailed one. Hopped in, told the driver when you wanted to arrive at, and ehi presto! Here you are.”
“I wish I could remember. Anything. Whatever the time-reversal of ‘remembering’ is. . . .”
“Well, looks like you escaped your war anyhow. You’re here . . . you’re safe.” Meaning only to reassure him, but his dispirited look deepened now.
“‘Safe’ . . . safe.” Whoever he was talking to now, it wasn’t her. “Political space has its neutral ground. But does Time? is there such a thing as the neutral hour? one that goes neither forward nor back? is that too much to hope?”
Just then, not quite as if in answer, from one of the royal warships anchored off Castello, the Evening Gun sounded, a deep, songless chime of admonition pealing up and down the Riva.
It was about then that Dally started carrying his canvases, easel, and other gear for him, shooing away the local kids who were too importunate, in general taking care of what chores she could.
“ . . . OVERNIGHT, during a match, Dr. Grace appeared to me in a dream, ordered me to Charing Cross and onto the boat-train . . .”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“ . . . it was so real, he was wearing whites and one of those antiquated caps, and knew my name, and began to instruct me in my duty, there was a . . . a war, he said, in ‘Outer Europe,’ was how he put it, queer sort of geography isn’t it, even for a dream—and our country, our civilization, was somehow in peril. I felt no desire to join in, no passion, quite the opposite. I have been out on ‘adventures,’ I know that exhilaration, but it was simply not part of this . . . not available. You can see what I am, one more earnest village athlete, some amateur daubing, no depths to speak of. But there I was, surrendering to a most extraordinary call from the grave, the mass-grave-to-be of Europe, as if somewhere ahead lay an iron gateway, slightly ajar, leading to a low and sombre country, with an incalculable crowd on all sides eager to pass into it, and bearing me along. Whatever my own wishes . . .”
He was staying in a hotel room in Dorsoduro, with a restaurant downstairs. Morning glories wreathed among the ironwork. “Figured you’d be in a pensione, there’s a couple of em just up that li’l Rio San Vio there.”
“This turns out to be cheaper, actually—the pensioni include lunch, and if I stopped for that, I’d lose the best of the light, and if I didn’t, I’d be paying for a meal I wasn’t eating. But here at La Calcina, the kitchen’s open to all hours, and I can pretty much eat when I want to. Besides, one has the company of eminent ghosts, Turner and Whistler, Ruskin, Browning sorts of chap.”
“They died there? How good can the food be?”
“Oh, then call them ‘traces of consciousness.’ Psychical Research is beginning to open these matters up a bit. Ghosts can be . . . well, actually, look at them all.” He waved an arm up and down the Zattere. “Every tourist you see here streaming by, everyone who plans to sleep tonight in a strange bed, is potentially that kind of ghost. Transient beds for some reason are able to catch and hold these subtle vibrational impulses of the soul. Haven’t you noticed, in hotels, the way your dreams are often, alarmingly, not your own?”
“Not out where I’m sleeping.”
“Well, it’s true—especially in these smaller places, where the bedstead tends to be of iron or steel, enameled to keep away the cimici. Somehow the metal frame also acts as a receiving antenna, allowing dreamers to pick up traces of the dreams of whoever slept there just before them, as if, during sleep, we radiated in frequencies as yet undiscovered.”
“Thanks, have to try that sometime.” Beds and bedrooms, huh. She risked a quick lateral flick of the eyeballs. So far he had suggested nothing you’d’ve called improper, either to Dally or anyone else who’d come by in the course of the day. Not that she was interested in him romantically, of course, he wasn’t her type, though there were days, she had to admit, when anything was her type, gnarled fishermen, dimpled gigolos, Austrians in short trousers, waiters, gondolieri, a hungering she must discreetly take care of all by herself, and preferably on late nights when moonlight was slim.
She wondered if this “War” of his was responsible in some way for removing bodily passion from his life. How long was he fixing to stay in Venice? When the bora blew down from the mountains, announcing the winter, would he ride it on out of town? Would she? In September, when the vino forte arrived from Brindisi, Squinzano, and Barletta, would he be gone in a couple of weeks as well?
One day, strolling in the Piazzetta, Hunter motioned her under the arcade and into the Library, and pointed up at Tintoretto’s Abduction of the Body of St. Mark. She gazed for some time. “Well, if that ain’t the spookiest damned thing,” she whispered at last. “What’s going on?” she gestured nervously into those old Alexandrian shadows, where ghostly witnesses, up far too late, forever fled indoors before an unholy offense.
“It’s as if these Venetian painters saw things we can’t see anymore,” Hunter said. “A world of presences. Phantoms. History kept sweeping through, Napoleon, the Austrians, a hundred forms of bourgeois literalism, leading to its ultimate embodiment, the tourist—how beleaguered they must have felt. But stay in this town awhile, keep your senses open, reject nothing, and now and then you’ll see them.”
A few days later, at the Accademia, as if continuing the thought, he said, “The body, it’s another way to get past the body.”
“To the spirit behind it—”
“But not to deny the body—to reimagine it. Even”—nodding over at the Titian on the far wall—“if it’s ‘really’ just different kinds of greased mud smeared on cloth—to reimagine it as light.”
“More perfect.”
“Not necessarily. Sometimes more terrible—mortal, in pain, misshapen, even taken apart, broken down into geometrical surfaces, but each time somehow, when the process is working, gone beyond. . . .”
Beyond her, she guessed. She was trying to keep up, but Hunter didn’t make it easy. One day he told her a story she had actually already heard, as a sort of bedtime story, from Merle, who regarded this as a parable, maybe the first on record, about alchemy. It was from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, one of many pieces of Scripture that early church politics had kept from being included in the New Testament.
“Jesus was sort of a hell-raiser as a kid,” as Merle had told it, “the kind of wayward youth I’m always finding you keepin company with, in fact, not that I’m objecting,” as she had sat up in bed and looked for something to assault him with, “used to go around town pulling these adolescent pranks, making little critters out of clay, bringing them to life, birds that could fly, rabbits that talked, and like that, driving his parents crazy, not to mention most of the local adults, who were always coming by to complain—‘You better tell ’at Jesus to watch it.’ One day he’s out with some friends looking for trouble to get into, and they happen to go by th
e dyer’s shop, where there’s all these pots with different colors of dye and piles of clothes next to them, all sorted and each pile ready to be dyed a different color, Jesus says, ‘Watch this,’ and grabs up all the clothes in one big bundle, the dyer’s yelling, ‘Hey Jesus, what’d I tell you last time?’ drops what he’s doing and goes chasing after the kid, but Jesus is too fast for him, and before anybody can stop him he runs over to the biggest pot, the one with red dye in it, and dumps all the clothes in, and runs away laughing. The dyer is screaming bloody murder, tearing his beard, thrashing around on the ground, he sees his whole livelihood destroyed, even Jesus’s low-life friends think this time he’s gone a little too far, but here comes Jesus with his hand up in the air just like in the paintings, calm as anything—‘Settle down, everybody,’ and he starts pulling the clothes out of that pot again, and what do you know, each one comes out just the color it’s supposed to be, not only that but the exact shade of that color, too, no more housewives hollerin ‘hey I wanted lime green not Kelly green, you color-blind or something,’ no this time each item is the perfect color it was meant to be.”
“Not a heck of a lot different,” it had always seemed to Dally, “in fact, from that Pentecost story in Acts of the Apostles, which did get in the Bible, not colors this time but languages, Apostles are meeting in a house in Jerusalem, you’ll recall, Holy Ghost comes down like a mighty wind, tongues of fire and all, the fellas come out and start talking to the crowd outside, who’ve all been jabbering away in different tongues, there’s Romans and Jews, Egyptians and Arabians, Mesopotamians and Cappadocians and folks from east Texas, all expecting to hear just the same old Galilean dialect—but instead this time each one is amazed to hear those Apostles speaking to him in his own language.”
Hunter saw her point. “Yes, well it’s redemption, isn’t it, you expect chaos, you get order instead. Unmet expectations. Miracles.”
ONE DAY HUNTER announced he was switching to nocturnes. Each twilight after that, he left his rooms and set out with his gear, to put in a full night’s work. Dally switched her own day around to accommodate. “And this Venetian light you’re always talkin about—”
“You’ll see. It’s nocturnal light, the kind you need to run a green-blue glaze for. The night moisture in the air, the blurs and beams and sky-scatter, the lamplight reflected in the rii, above all of course the moon. . . .”
She wondered sometimes what he would have made of American light. She had sat adrift in insomnia for hours watching fields of windows lit and lampless, vulnerable flames and filaments by the thousands borne billowing as by waves of the sea, the broken rolling surfaces of the great cities, allowing herself to imagine, almost surrendering to the impossibility of ever belonging, since childhood when she’d ridden with Merle past all those small, perfect towns, longed after the lights at creeksides and the lights defining the shapes of bridges over great rivers, through church windows or trees in summer, casting shining parabolas down pale brick walls or haloed in bugs, lanterns on farm rigs, candles at windowpanes, each attached to a life running before and continuing on, long after she and Merle and the wagon would have passed, and the mute land risen up once again to cancel the brief revelation, the offer never clearly stated, the hand never fully dealt. . . .
Here in this ancient town progressively settling into a mask of itself, she began to look for episodes of counter-light, canalside gates into dank gloom, sotopòrteghi whose exits could not be seen, absent faces, missing lamps at the ends of calli. So there was revealed to her, night by night in ever more depressing clarity, a secret and tenebrous city, down into whose rat-infested labyrinths she witnessed children her age and younger being drawn, infected, corrupted, and too often made to vanish, like a coin or a card—just that interchangeably held in contempt by those who profited from the limitless appetite for young bodies that seemed to concentrate here from all over Europe and beyond.
She was much more comfortable working nights and trying to find someplace to sleep during the day. Nights had been getting just too hazardous. She had of course been approached, and by some mighty unwholesome customers, too, carrying on their faces scars as certificates of their professional histories, and visible beneath black suit-jackets, Bodeo 10.4 mm pistols as evidence of their dedication to business. The night predators came around, they whispered, they flirted, brought flowers and cigarettes, respectfully keeping their distance, playing by a strict code, until the prey, trembling against the pavement, engaged. Then the weapon which had not been clearly seen, which had appeared only in tantalizing glimpses, came out into the legendary moonlight, and all doubts, and most hopes, vanished.
Dally made a point of being on her feet till they’d moved on, which so far they had, the weather being on their side, they only had to wait. One, Tonio, with a particular interest in Dally, an English suit, almost accentless English. “I know so many of you, American girls, out having fun every night, beautiful clothes, the Casino, the big hotels, the fancy-dress balls at the palazzi. What can you see in this? sleeping with the rats. Such a waste of a lovely girl.”
All she had to do was start asking about the clothes, or what sort of room she’d be able to afford—she’d overheard these exchanges—and without quite knowing the moment the stakes of the game would’ve shifted to life and death, the hopeful young creature would be enfolded in the irreversible darkness of midnight beneath the foschetta.
It put her in a peculiar bind, her feelings for the city undiminished yet now with the element of fear that could not be wished aside, each night bringing new intelligence of evil waiting up the end of any little alleyway. Hunter argued that this was why so many people had come to love Venice, because of its “chiaroscuro.”
“Thanks for the news, easy enough for you, I guess, but nights out here on the masègni are not quite as romantic as they are for tourists.”
“You’re calling me a tourist?”
“You’ll leave someday. What would you call that?”
“Then, when I do, come with me.”
The noon cannon went off. A boatful of cigarette smugglers hastily tied up at the canalside and began to unload their cargo. Bells began to peal across the city. “Oh, patrone,” she said at last, “Beppo, you know, she’s-a not-a too sure. . . .” It did put a few new lines into his biography all right, but then time began to pass again as usual, and one day the bora came, and the first wine trains up from Puglia, and what do you know, he did not leave.
WINTER WAS COMING ON, and Dally needed someplace reliable to sleep during the day, the fondamente by now having been long out of the question. She was making do in courtyards, student hovels, back rooms of osterie, keeping on the go, but finally reluctantly, went to Hunter for advice. “Why didn’t you ask?” he said.
“Why didn’t I?”
His eyes shifted away. “Nothing simpler.” And next thing she knew, he had fixed her up with a room in the palazzo of the seminotorious Principessa Spongiatosta, one of many acquaintances Dally hadn’t known about till now.
She was expecting an older woman with ruinous features, a sort of human palazzo. Instead here was this bright-eyed dewdrop whom Time seemed not, or maybe, in Time’s case, never, to have touched. There was a Prince, too, but he was seldom around. Off traveling, according to Hunter, but there was more he wasn’t saying.
What intrigued Dally about the interior spaces at Ca’ Spongiatosta as she took odd moments to drift around the corridors and anterooms were the rapid changes in scale, something like the almost theatrical expansion from comfortable, dark, human-size alleyways to the vast tracklessness and light of Piazza San Marco. Dark red tiles, a portico in Roman Composite Order, giant decorative urns, brown light, japonica, myrtle, geraniums, fountains, high walls, narrow waterways, and miniature bridges incorporated into the palazzo structure, too many servants for Dally to keep straight. There might in fact be more than one of the Princess—she seemed to be everywhere, and now and then Dally could swear her appearances were multiple and not cons
ecutive, though what went on at the corners of Dally’s eyes had always enjoyed with her about the same status as dreams. Mirror tricks? Luca would know. Wherever he was, and Erlys.
She had news soon enough. One day a servant brought her a note. Who had come blowing in to town with the bora but Bria Zombini. She was staying at a small hotel across the Iron Bridge in Dorsoduro. Dally showed up in a frock the Princess was kind enough to let her borrow. Bria was wearing high-heeled shoes, just balancing the inch or so Dally had grown over the past year, so they greeted each other eye to eye. Dally saw this very self-possessed young lady, her hair up underneath a wide-brim Parisian hat, flicking sweat off her upper lip and going “Porca miseria!” same as always.
They linked arms and strolled down the Zattere. “Been everyplace,” Bria said. “Held over by popular demand, couple crowned heads, you know, the usual. They’re all about to sail back now, I’m supposed to meet them in Le Havre, happened to be this side of the Alps and thought I’d look in.”
“Oh, Bri, I miss you all somethin terrible, you know. . . .”
Bria narrowed her eyes a little, nodded. “But Venice has got you, and you think you want to stay over here now.”
“Thought-reading, these days.”
“Every letter you sent us—ain’t that hard to see.”
“How’s our Mamma doing?”
Bria shrugged. “Guess she’s a lot easier to miss when there’s some distance in between.”
“You two . . . you’ve been arguing?”
“Hah! She’s not gonna be happy till I’m dead or out the door.”
“What about Luca?”
“What about him? He’s Italian, he’s my pop. Thinks I’m some junior nun’s got to be kept behind a gate with a lock. So it’s two on one, swell situation, huh?”
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