The Lying Tongue

by Andrew Wilson

  As I came out, feeling slightly soiled, I made a plan in my head detailing everything that needed to be done and in what order. People at university, Eliza even, had always thought it odd that I was interested in keeping things neat and tidy. Obsessive, they had said. But they should have thanked me. I could never understand how people could exist surrounded by mess. If you lived somewhere, it was your duty to keep it clean.

  I was sure Crace would be grateful for the help I could give him. After all, it couldn’t have been much fun for him living like this. The bathroom—cleaning the toilet, bath and basin—would have to be tackled first of all, followed by the kitchen. Then I would dust everywhere, get rid of all the cobwebs that had accumulated around Crace’s paintings and drawings, sweep the floors, polish the furniture and cut back the vines in the courtyard. How long would it take me to get the palazzo into some kind of shape? And then what about the upper floor that Crace had said was no longer used? Did he expect me to clean that as well? I dreaded to think what kind of condition that was in.

  I knocked on Crace’s bedroom door and heard his voice telling me to come in. I entered the large room, which had windows overlooking the canal. Clothes—jackets, trousers, socks, under-pants and vests—were strewn all across the floor. Crace was nowhere to be seen. I walked across the terrazzo in the central part of the room, and then onto wine-dark parquet that had been laid in each of a series of alcoves that ranged around the edge. In one of the alcoves, situated between elaborately decorated buttermilk-colored columns, was a bed complete with a carved ivory head-board boasting a tempera painting of the Virgin and Child flanked by a couple of saints. Above this, Crace had hung another beautiful Madonna; I couldn’t discern the artist but it was of exquisite quality. The walls of the alcove were lined with a rich fabric covered by a pattern of broken columns and capitals. The bed itself was surrounded by thick burgundy curtains. As I brushed past it, a cloud of dust spores mushroomed by my knees.

  “There you are,” he said from behind me.

  I turned to see Crace walking out of a room I presumed must be his study.

  “I thought I might get started—on the cleaning front,” I said.

  “Yes, yes, good idea. I hope you don’t find me too feral. I have let things slip rather, I’m afraid.”

  “Where do you want me to start? I thought maybe the bathroom and the kitchen first, followed by the rest.”

  “Are you sure? I was rather looking forward to a drink.”

  “Well, it won’t take me long,” I said.

  “If you’re certain. It’s not really the nicest way to welcome a guest into my home, though, is it?”

  “The sooner it’s done, the nicer it will be for all of us,” I said quite firmly.

  “If you insist.”

  We walked out of the bedroom, down the corridor and out into the portego.

  “I’ll give those windows a wash as well, to let some light in,” I said, gesturing toward the end of the grand hall that overlooked the canal. “And then at some point, after I’ve done down here, you can tell me what to do about upstairs.”

  “Oh, no, there’s no need to bother with that,” he said. “I haven’t been up there in years. I think it’s probably so dirty up there that it’s started to clean itself.”

  Smiling, he accompanied me through the double doors that led directly into the kitchen and showed me the cupboard under the sink where he thought I could find cleaning materials. I bent down and took out an old green bucket full of dried cloths and dirt-smeared bottles of bleach, scouring fluids and detergent, all of which were empty.

  “That’s decided the matter for us, hasn’t it?” said Crace, his eyes twinkling.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you’ve got nothing to clean with, and I can’t possibly let you go out and leave me. After all, you’ve only just arrived. It would be terribly bad manners.”

  “But it will only take—”

  “No arguments. We’ll have a drink and then we can talk about it. Now, what will you have?”

  After a couple of drinks—dark, sickly sweet sherry, this time in glasses I had quickly washed out—I finally managed to extract myself from Crace and go in search of a shop. He insisted that I should be gone for no longer than fifteen minutes. I knew he didn’t like to be left by himself, but I didn’t think he was that serious. When I arrived back at the palazzo with two plastic bags full of bleach bottles, detergent, lime scale remover, wax polish, rubber gloves, a new toilet brush and a couple of packets of scourers and cloths, he was standing at the top of the stairs in the courtyard with a pained expression on his face, looking at his watch.

  “Another minute and I’m afraid it would have been all over,” he said quietly.

  “Sorry?” I said, breezing up the stairs toward him.

  “Oh, never mind,” he sighed. “Never mind.”

  After making sure Crace was settled in the drawing room, reading and with a glass full of sherry within easy reach, I set to work. In the bathroom, I raised the blinds, sending clouds of dust into the room, and then let some fresh air into the space. I put on my rubber gloves and attacked the toilet first, blasting it with half a bottle of bleach, which I let stand while I cleaned the sink. I took down the shower curtain, which was so badly mildewed that I would need to buy another, and scrubbed the bath, but while I managed to clean away a good deal of dirt, it was impossible to erase the oval of grime that ringed around its upper edge, a visual echo of its top lip. Using the shower attachment, I rinsed away the dirty water, extracted a handful of gray and yellow hairs from the plug hole and wiped the surface once more. I swept the floor, cleaning up the hair balls and strips of toilet paper, and emptied a waste bin full of even more loo paper, old plasters and worms of dental floss. I cleaned the mirror on the front of the small medicine cabinet above the sink, sorted out the shelves inside (which seemed to contain a great many plasters as well as some sleeping pills) and wiped all around it. Before opening the toilet, I flushed it a couple of times and then started to scrub, using even more bleach to try and shift the buildup.

  Disposing of the rubber gloves I had used to clean the bathroom, I put on another pair and started on the kitchen. I slowly dismantled the tower of dirty dishes in the sink, careful not to break anything. After running out of space on the work surface, I placed the rest of the plates, pots and bowls on sheets of old newspaper on the floor. Bits of food—old pieces of half-chewed meat, disintegrating vegetables, a few splintered bones and a mass of flaccid green fibers—coagulated at the bottom of the sink, giving off a rank, rotten smell. I fingered my way around the rim of the plug and gathered it all up, shaping it into a ball in my hand and disposing of it in a black bin liner, and then started to wash the dishes.

  How long had Crace been living like this, I wondered. From the evidence all around me—the dirt, the neglect, the mess—it seemed like he had lost the ability to cope some months ago. But most probably he was the type to resist employing someone, out of pride more than anything, for as long as reasonably possible. He had obviously reached a point where he realized he could no longer carry on living like he was. But what of his former employee, the boy who had lived in my room before me? From the state of things—he couldn’t have spent much time here at all. That, or he had only bothered to clean his room and nowhere else in the palazzo.

  By late afternoon I had managed to clean the bathroom and the kitchen and had started to dust the cobwebs from the drawings in the grand hall. One of the etchings depicted an angel blowing a trumpet, holding a wreath and standing on a sphere, flanked by two figures beneath, one a male satyr, the other a woman surrounded by scientific and military instruments. As I leaned closer to the etching, I felt someone watching me. I looked up. Crace was standing outside the double doors of the drawing room, looking down the portego at me, smiling.

  “Io son colei che ognuno al mondo brama, perché per me dopo la morte vive,” he said in perfect Italian. “‘I am she whom everyone in the world longs
for, because through me they live after death.’ The inscription underneath.”

  I squinted as I tried to make out the Italian verse at the bottom of the etching.

  “An Allegory of Fame,” said Crace, walking toward me, repeating the first two lines and then continuing, “and if vice or virtue operates so as to obtain plunder or honorable empire, I am infamy for the former and for the latter fame. Vice has only blame from me while virtue has glory, palms and crown.”

  “I didn’t realize you had such good Italian,” I said.

  “Oh, just a little. It’s rather beautiful, though, this etching, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. Who is it by?” I asked, trying to see if it was signed.

  “Battista del Moro, thought to be done around 1560. But I think it’s interesting that despite the rather moralizing verse underneath it, the figure of fame is looking not toward the personification of all that is good, but toward the satyr, the symbol of evil. And, if I’m not mistaken, I think she’s rather enamored of him, wouldn’t you say?”

  I had to admit that yes, in the etching, she did seem more attracted to vice than to virtue.

  At the end of that first day I fell into my bed, exhausted. As I lay there listening to the gentle ebbing of the water, with the moonlight shining through the slats in the shutters, I felt that I was in some kind of dream, a character in a surreal vision. I’d never met anyone like Crace before, and I could tell it would take me a while to get used to his strangeness. Over a simple supper of spaghetti with tomatoes, basil and Parmigiano, which we had at the table in the kitchen, I asked him why he had decided to come to Venice and how he had chosen this palazzo. Although he told me not to be offended, and from his manner he was far from rude, he refused to answer, saying that those kind of details were extraneous to my needs. The fact that he existed in the here and now, he said, should be enough for me.

  I learned that it was better to wait for him to introduce a subject into the conversation. He adored talking about his art, and I enjoyed listening to him—and that night he told me about how he had amassed a great deal of his collection, buying pieces twenty or thirty years ago for next to nothing. The names he recited were certainly impressive. In addition to the works he had already described to me, he owned drawings and etchings by Palma Giovane, Domenico Brusasorci, Benedetto Caliari, and Domenico Tintoretto; and paintings by Paolo Veronese, Paris Bordon, Moretto da Brescia and Lorenzo Lotto, as well as a good deal of quite exquisite glassware by some of Venice’s finest craftsmen.

  Over coffee he asked me about my art history degree, and I sketched out the arc of the course and its structure, chronology and theoretical stance. I tried to impress him by showing off my knowledge of Vasari, but he dismissed the writer of Lives of the Artists with a wave of his hand and a comment about how he had introduced biographical vulgarity into art history. He agreed, he said, with Cellini, who thought Vasari nothing better than a coward and a liar. By the way, had I read Cellini’s autobiography? I replied that I had not. It was great fun, he said, his eyes gleaming. He summarized it for me before outlining Cellini’s seemingly insatiable appetite for violence and how he had committed a series of murders in cold blood, events that he related in the book with unadulterated glee. He described an incident in which Cellini had tried to knife a man in the face, but after his victim suddenly turned around, he stabbed him under the ear instead. Crace thought this story hilarious, and as he laughed, his little reptilian eyes disappeared into the folds of flesh in his face.

  “Cellini said that artists, unique in their profession, should stand above the law,” Crace said, finally catching his breath and studying me closely. “Free of responsibility and able to disregard the rules. Do you think the same thing, Mr. Woods? Please say that you do.”

  Although I wasn’t quite sure what to say, I thought it best to agree with him. As I nodded my assent, he looked at me with what can only be described as an expression of affection.

  “I can see that we’re going to get on splendidly,” he said.

  It took me a week to clean the palazzo, and during that time I frequently felt as though, no matter how much effort I put into it, the apartments refused to relinquish their patina of dirt. It was like some kind of protective shell, a barrier that resisted any attempt to penetrate or invade it.

  The ingrained dirt on the mullioned windows at the two ends of the portego seemed particularly stubborn, almost acting as a shield to distance Crace from the outside world. Using a rickety set of stepladders I had found in a cupboard in the kitchen I climbed to the top of the windows, took hold of my cloth and cleaning spray and started to attack the grime. Although my cloth got darker and darker, nothing seemed to be coming off the surface of the glass. But finally a small coin-shaped pocket of light shone through the window, growing and growing until the glass had cleared and I could see outside.

  One side of the palazzo looked onto a street, separated only by a narrow stretch of water and a bridge, the other onto a much wider canal. A boat laden with oranges, grapefruits, limes and lemons glided by. A gondola, steered by a proud, haughty-looking man and seating a kissing couple, lolling about in the back with honeymoon happiness, slowly made its way past me before it disappeared around a corner. Across the other side of the water, an elegant dark-haired woman stood on her balcony smoking a cigarette. Everywhere I looked people were getting on with their lives, having an existence, while Crace immured himself in his palazzo, a self-imposed prisoner. But at least after I had cleaned the windows, Crace could see out of his gaol.

  The vines in the courtyard, which were planted in a small patch of ground near the gate, had a life of their own, their tendrils weaving up and around the staircase in a determined attempt to invade the interior. It was almost as if they wanted to asphyxiate the palazzo, squeezing the life out of everything inside. As I cut through the woody stems that grew up and around the columns and the metal latticework, the whole organism seemed to shift and move in a stubborn effort to survive. The only way to defeat it, I found, was to cut it into as many small pieces as possible and then deposit them into black refuse bags, but even then the tendrils tried to snake and slip away.

  Similarly the moss growing on the Corinthian column and the naked cherub in the center of the courtyard was stubborn and hard to shift. After I had tried, and failed, to remove it using a cloth, I had to resort to using an old chisel, which I had found under the sink, but the job was still laborious and time consuming.

  I spent those first few days in a permanent sweat, stripping down to my vest and shorts as I tried to make the place look decent again. As I cleaned the interior, I disturbed ancient dust, flakes of skin and strands of hair, which I imagined belonged to those who were long dead. The dirt had a smooth, almost powdery texture to it, pulverized and softened by the process of time. I moved piles of books, cleaned Crace’s soiled clothes, carried pieces of furniture, swept, dusted, scrubbed and exterminated. Spiders had made their homes behind exquisite artwork, the frames being used as miniature proscenium arches on which to drape their webs, their own spectacular sets. In the kitchen, by the rubbish bin, I discovered a colony of ants that regularly feasted on the packet of sugar that Crace often left on the work surface. And in his bedroom, living between the dark, damp folds of his bed curtain, a few small toadstools had started to grow. Cockroaches lived in the bathroom, and wood lice often crawled out from under the Persian rug in the drawing room.

  As I neared the end of the heavy-duty cleaning, I realized that not only had I not touched Crace’s study but I had not even seen it. By this point I had learned enough about him to realize he had a highly developed, if not obsessional, sense of privacy, and I thought it only best to seek his permission to enter the room. I put down my cleaning materials and, still wearing my vest that was now stained and mottled, walked down the portego and through the double doors into the drawing room, where Crace sat reading.

  “Mr. Crace, I wondered whether I might be able to ask you something.”

&n
bsp; “Yes?”

  “I’ve nearly finished the cleaning now, but I realized I haven’t done your study. Do you want me to?”

  He looked thoughtful for a moment and then resigned, defeated. “I suppose you’d better. It is rather a state. There is a good deal of correspondence on the desk, which does need sorting out at some point.”

  He sighed, put his book down on the table, slowly stood up and shuffled toward me. As he passed, his bony hand brushed against my skin.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  I followed him out of the drawing room, down the portego into his bedroom and through the door at the end of that room, which led into his dark, windowless study.

  “Is there a light in here?” I asked.

  “Yes, just over there,” said Crace, pointing toward the outline of a desk by the far wall.

  As I switched on the light, I saw that the desk was piled high with letters, some of which had fallen down onto the Persian rug below. Underneath the mass of correspondence was a mug covered in mold, a rotten apple core, a few screwed-up yellowed tissues and an ink pen. On a low wooden stand near the desk was an earthenware ink pot in the shape of a terrapin; underneath the layer of dust I could see that it boasted a fine yellow, green and beige sgraffito decoration. In addition to the bookshelves that lined the room, there was an open display case, a sort of cabinet of curiosities, full of objets, including a slipware flask in the form of a scallop shell; a blue and yellow bowl that showed a young shepherd boy on a mountainside being abducted by an eagle; a number of exquisite vases; a few miniatures, some surrounded by frames of silver or black velvet; a white marble relief featuring a young boy placing his left hand into a bowl of fire, which I think was a representation of Mucius Scaevola; an ornate pair of brass candlesticks and a triangular box with winged figures at each of its ends, which I took to be a perfume burner. Everything in the cabinet was covered in a thick layer of dust.