In a fit of misguided generosity I gave him a note for another bottle and went to watch the reflected lights out on the lagoon. If I hadn't been stewed, I'd have tried to think. As it was, I did nothing but watch the lights until I nodded off and woke shivering.
The next morning Cosima and I caught the boat from the Fondamenta Nuove. I was a bit embarrassed seeing Keith and Gerry already on the boat among the crowd in the bows, but was pleased they saw me with a beautiful bird. I was proud of her. Some things are so beautiful you have to look at them piecemeal or they blind you. Cosima was like that. They both waved back, Keith especially smiling wide. Cosima, I observed, pinked up and gave them only the briefest nod.
"Glad they came," I said conversationally. 'The only two who aren't moviemakers." She didn't rise, just gave a noncommittal mmm.
The boat goes to Murano and Burano before reaching Torcello. Naturally I'd forgotten my map, so Cosima had to point out the places we passed. A true Venetian, to her Murano was a sort of industrial slum island and she barely glanced at it as the vaporetto chugged nearer, past the posh bright brickwork which rims San Michele cemetery island.
"We had to put all the glassmakers in one place safely away from the rest of us," she explained casually. "Their furnaces kept setting Venice afire."
"Recently?" I was only joking, but her pretty, serious face showed concentration reflected in the boat windows.
'Thirteenth century. Of course, it was as well they were moved out to Murano, Lovejoy. It became a little . . . depraved."
I'd heard that too, but never in such tones of reproof. Moral indignation from a Venetian is a scream, seeing they invented Carnival and the cicisbeo, that sissy upper-class version of a gigolo. Still, depravity makes you even more interested, so I looked with fascination as we stopped to let droves of folk on and off, then puttered past the line of glassmakers' slipways and wharves. Lovely to see higgledy-piggledy industry flourishing exactly as it did six centuries gone. The pleasure gardens are now all vanished beneath hundreds of tiny crammed glass factories, but I thought it looked lovely. My sort of scene. Especially the idea of all those lovely special glasses made by those old-generation glassmakers on every mantelpiece. She'd made the glass-makers' banishment sound somewhere near Mongolia. It's hardly a mile.
"Pity Cesare couldn't come," I said as our prow turned towards Burano. "We could have gone to see the San Donato if we'd had his boat."
She did glance at the gliding islands then. Her hair was moving in the wind that breezed down the length of the boat's interior, silkier than on any telly advert. "I am content,” she said quietly.
"Yes, er, great. Me too." For the first time I realized she looked even more like a million quid than usual. Were relatives lurking on Torcello? Were we going to drop in on a mob of uncles and crones for colazione? An ordeal loomed. God. I felt in a state, sloppy as always. "San Donato," I said lamely. "Not every day you see a saint whose spit kills dragons. The Muranese say they've the dragon's bones behind the high altar."
She shrugged dismissively. "The Muranese!"
The boat moved slowly into the northern waters of the lagoon. Still a warming sun, still that lovely brittle daylight. But as the occasional island stops came and went and Venice's doomed city receded in the morning mists, the beat and rush of the boat seemed lonelier than it had. The water seemed muddy, less blue. We could hardly see the long lines of the islands and banks to seaward, and the islands now seemed threadbare and even desolate.
Cosima touched my knee. "Are you well, dear?"
I grinned with every erg, determined to show I was on top of the world. "The best day I ever had so far, love."
She drew breath the way women do when checking they won't be overheard. About us the passengers had thinned, so out it came. "Please do not jump to conclusions, Lovejoy," she said. "I am merely anxious to accompany you to Torcello, since you appear to have read of the Teocota Madonna."
I hastily agreed to whatever it was she was blathering about, and dismissed her mood as one of these weirdities they often have, because Burano was in sight, its splash of blues, reds, and yellow houses a brilliant set of nursery bricks crammed any old how among the drab lagoon marshes. You can't help loving it. It is a toytown. Its campanile leans like a Saturday drunk. Everything, from canals to doorways, is dinky. No wonder they're born lacemakers. Delighted as I was, though, Cosima stayed aloof.
"They made a lace collar of blond hair for Louis XIV," I babbled, delighted at the colorful island. "They have a museum for Venetian point lace—"
"Torcello soon, dear," Cosima said, her face lighting into a smile that dried me up.
“Er, good."
Only love illuminates a woman's eyes with that kind of radiance. Love and all its works. My instant conclusion: Lover-boy lives somewhere on Torcello, and we'd presumably bump, accidentally of course, into this rustic cretin, which would give her the excuse to leave me stranded. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't narked. I mean, all's fair in love and all that. But even gigolos get paid. I'd somehow got myself into the position of unpaid stooge. For a few minutes, as the boat moved on serenely through the bright delicate mists of the morning, I maintained a pained silence so pointedly that Cosima shyly reached across and took my hand, her eyes avoiding mine. My frost didn't last long. It couldn't. Nobody's frost can last long when that ancient warmth beats out of the waters and the stones shriek at you of past human existence and love preserved in the works of Man.
'Torcello, dear," Cosima was saying. "I hope you'll . . ."
But I was already eager to be on the landing stage, and only later, when it was altogether too hopelessly late for both of us, did I piece together the conversation on the vaporetto with my lovely Cosima.
Like I said. Pathetic.
Torcello.
We'd gone a few hundred yards when I stopped.
"Where is it, love?"
She paused with me, holding my arm. "This is Torcello, dear."
"But the city. The great palaces."
Her eyes moistened, gazing at me. "You didn't read quite enough. Torcello is . . . ending."
"There's twenty great churches," I bleated, standing on the overgrown path beside the canal.
'Two."
"And thirty thousand inhabitants."
"Less than a hundred souls." Her eyes were brimming now, hers or mine. "I'm so sorry, darling."
The canal runs straight from the landing stage into the heart of what is left of Torcello's great square. Now it's not even a village green. The great stone arches of the fifteenth-century bridges, the dazzling fondamenta, the might of empire literally fallen and overgrown. A wooden bridge crossed near a canal junction. A couple of cottages, a scruffy field or two, a few lanes of artichokes here and there in the dampish fields. A line of peach trees. Weeds and reeds. A tiny file of ducks. I sat on the canal edge.
"It ... it sent a fleet of galleys to the Chioggia wars." My voice hardly reached a whisper. "It was a whole empire." It had even sent two Torcello agents to steal St. Mark's body from mighty Egypt.
"Gone, dear." She was hugging me, kneeling beside me and rocking gently. "Don't be sad. You live too much inside your head. You must come out, darling."
Lucky there was nobody else about. We were the only ones to have disembarked at Torcello except for Keith and Gerry, who had set up Gerry's easel by the landing stage, so we were unseen. Cosima took my hand and led me then into the orchard, me trailing like a heartbroken school kid, and we lay beneath the spreading branches.
She hand-shushed me from calling out at the pinnacle, and then I was murmuring and rocking my head on her breast while her fingers made sure we were decently clothed again so as not to give offense to any ghosts which happened by.
She talked to me, even though I was almost oblivious in that small death which follows loving. We must have looked so incongruous, a delicious colorful bird with dazzling, lustrous hair, sitting-kneeling in a lost orchard with her elegant new dress crumpled, nursing a slumbering dishevele
d oaf who wasn't paying the slightest heed to a word she was saying. Odd, but women I actually love are the only ones who can switch off my nightmares. That hour in Torcello I dozed deeper and more restfully than I had for many a month. She did everything for me that magical time, with the reeds soughing and the stalks clashing softly all about the edges of the waterways. Once I half woke to hear a couple of children shouting, but Cosima calmed me out of being startled. "They're the little ones playing al pangalo, darling. Only a game of batting sticks. Shush."
At the finish she had to wake me to get me moving. Our aim had always been to nosh at Cipriani's. Until Cosima explained how the famous restaurant had come to the rescue of poor old Torcello practically single-handed I hadn't realized that the famous locanda was the one remaining epicenter of life in Torcello. She had booked us in, and so we dined in sunshiny elegance looking out over the small vegetable gardens next the tiny central square of Torcello. Beneath us, around us, entirely covered and unseen, the ruins of one of the powerful medieval empires of Europe. Around, an innocent spectacle of market gardening with a bloke hoeing vegetables, and a couple of buildings in view, with a farmhouse a little distance off.
I got up courage to ask her. "What about your, erm, intended?"
"Intended?"
"Your bloke."
"Cesare thinks too much of his own wishes." Cosima reproved me at the impertinence by wagging her head so her hair swung.
"Cesare? The boatman?" I needed a minute to take that in. No big bruiser meeting us? No bloke back in Venice?
"Cesare. But only a little. Anyway, Lovejoy. He never has been so . . . close. Certainly not my intended."
Hence the glowerings. Hence his growing surliness. Hence I'm as thick as usual, because Cesare saw me threatening his own ambitions for Cosima. That's what I needed all right, an enemy I'd picked unerringly to reveal my interest in the Palazzo Malcontento. He was also my one means of independent transport, apart from stolen gondolas.
Which raised the question of what Cesare was doing back in Venice while Cosima and yours truly were whooping it up in Torcello.
"Listen, Cosima." I'm always awkward saying thanks. "Giving me, erm, love . . . My soul gets sort of damp when it feels antiques go wrong."
“I know, darling. Learning about Torcello. I told you too suddenly."
"My fault." I got my money out to pay for our meal. "But you have the right to know everything." I meant almost everything. "It's time for you to ask me about myself, love. I'll answer every question with complete honesty. Promise." I meant almost complete.
"No." Firmly she poured the last of the wine for us. "It is time for me to tell you about myself. We shall exchange information while we examine the remaining pieces of Torcello. There are several hours of daylight left, darling."
"If s a deal."
"And I have arranged a surprise for you."
I couldn't help wondering as we raised glasses. A deal of planning had gone into this day at Torcello. I only wished I'd been in on it, so I could work things out. I was beginning to think I'd been surprised enough.
The dusty little center of Torcello pulled me up short.
The Piazza—its proper name—was once the great meeting place for the all powerful Tribune. I expected at least something, a sign, some spectacular ruins. Anything to abate this terrible feeling of melancholy.
Instead, there's theadbare grass, dusty paths, and two or three little cottages. A building converted to a tiny museum. To one side is a low octagonal church, all fawn colors, and this taller cathedral with stone swing shutters to protect its windows. A canal runs by. A lady in traditional dress had a stall selling unbelievably mediocre modem lace. A big stone chair stands improbably in the center of the space, God knows why, just asking for a stray tourist to clown for a comical holiday snap.
And that's it. Get the point? That's it all Exactly as if we'd gone to find a bustling Times Square or Piccadilly and found instead a derelict yard.
I felt ill.
"Come, darling." Cosima hauled me to come into the cathedral. "We'll sit for a while. I'm sorry about the tower, but lightning's taken its top off." This temporary setback happened over three centuries gone. I watched her fold a headscarf to enter the cathedral. Most underrated of all woman's decorations is the old headscarf. I touched her cool cheek to show I approved.
She said gravely, "Dearest, I want to pray. Only to . . . explain. Not apologize. You can look at the Teocota while I do."
I almost started a grin, thinking. What is all this? But she wasn't joking, and moved towards a transept, her heels clicking echoes down the nave. Grumbling inwardly that there wasn't any need to put on airs or assume fetching little tableaux—she'd already hooked me in the most permanent way—I turned to move parallel, along the northern length of the nave, and saw it.
Maybe it was the sheer spectacle or its unusual form, though I'd been expecting something profound because everybody on earth's heard of the Teocota Madonna. Or maybe it was just having loved Cosima. Whatever the cause, I was blammed by it. The background's gold and faint, and the Madonna herself is somehow elongated like an El Greco, but those are just technical points. Ignore them. Technique is only the irreverent dogma by forgers and curators. Concentrate on technique too much and you miss love and feeling. The mosaic face weeps. The Madonna gazes above your head, not at you, but beyond as if at the things you've left undone and the cruelty you've enacted on your way to Torcello. Of course, I found myself reasoning, the Madonna didn't really mean me. She was reproaching the rest of the buggers, because I'm always reasonable and fair-minded and have a pretty good reputation for doing the right thing and never hurting people. Beautiful, stunning. I shivered, but only because it was colder in the cathedral than I thought.
Or it could be the lurking horror of realizing that the image of old Mr. Pinder had suddenly shifted in my mind. He might not be a batty old lunatic. He could possibly be what he actually presented himself to be: an elderly man battling against neglect and ignorance with the only forces at his disposal to protect ancient brilliance like this Madonna.
Christ, I thought. The notion made me glance suspiciously at Cosima, but she was oblivious, contentedly crossing herself after having lit two candles. No artifice, no pretense, as she came across and whispered eagerly, "Did you like the Madonna, Lovejoy?"
"Yes, thanks."
"They say some Greeks made it."
"They did a good job."
"Darling! Your hand is freezing.''
"I’m cold."
"Then it's time for sunshine, and my surprise. Come, darling."
We left, the Madonna's tearful gaze burning down above the crown of my head.
16
"We've come absolutely miles," Cosima said.
We lay on a reedy island no higher than a mud flat among myriad small water channels. The day was still hot, but a steady breeze had sprung up, causing the dense reeds to make a dry clattering sound. Here and there a duck splashed, businesslike, but that was it. Great for secret loving picnics, but nothing else.
"How far, love?" I hated countryside, and this remoteness was at least partly that.
She raised her head, finally kneeling up to see across the palude flats. We'd seen Torcello's campanile when putting the sandolo boat ashore. "About two kilometers, I suppose. Almost."
"Good idea, your lady's engine.”
Cosima laughed and fell sprawling, embracing me. "Is the signore tired, then?" This witticism made her roll in the aisles when she came to the punch line. "May one ask why?"
I had to laugh with her. The surprise had been a sandolo, a small curved-looking boat. You row it standing up like a gondolier does, but mostly with two oars. The oldish lady from whom Cosima had hired the sandolo had mischievously explained that the object humped in the stem beneath a black plastic dustbin bag was an outboard motor. "Wise to take precautions against the lagoon," she said. "And for exhaustion, on your return." Cosima had given her a mock scolding at such aggressiveness but th
e old Torcellana had cackled all the more and pushed us off. She'd used the ancient greeting "salve” showing she was local.
Cosima wanted to row, but so did I. I felt I'd rowed a race but had a high old time losing my way before Cosima said we should stop. We had a picnic and love on the blanket she happened to have brought along. I called her a scheming hussy and she said she didn't care.
"What's that noise?" The dozy afternoon kept being punctured. "It's nearer."
"Shooting, beyond Santa Cristina. The Doge of Venice used to give five ducks to the noble families every Christmas. Folk still shoot."
"I hope we scared some off to safety."
We'd made rather a racket the second time around, which was okay, because apart from the occasional shrill outboard and lazy squawkings from the dense reeds there was almost total silence. I reached for her again but she pushed my hand away.
"There's a boat coming. Listen."
"Stopping."
At the canal back in Torcello we'd glimpsed Gerry and Keith puttering past the locanda intersection in a motor dinghy. Keith had waved. Gerry was too preoccupied consulting a paper, apparently giving directions as they'd headed out into the lagoon. Hardly anything to paint around here, that was for sure. Except me and Cosima. And ducks, but they were being decimated.
Another shot sounded, not quite so distant. No echoes like the others. Cosima drooped over me, our faces inches apart in the hair-filtered sunlight.
"Maybe somebody looking for the San Lorenzo. It was a great church. Now it's just a mound in the water. People dig at low water for rubble."
"Saint Francis loved the ducks when he came here," I accused.
"Dear Lovejoy. Always looking for somebody else to blame."
"Bloody cheek."
"It's true. You should look at yourself, darling, instead of the rest."
She was smiling and rubbing noses but it's the sort of chitchat that gets you narked, especially when you know for a start that you're twice as reasonable as everybody else.
The Gondola Scam Page 11