by David Hewson
Piero whistled softly to the dog and it came to the stern. He held out a small leather loop attached to the tiller and waited as Xerxes turned to face the prow, then took the strap in his mouth.
“Avanti!” Piero whispered, and the dog’s eyes fixed immediately ahead of the boat, on the far horizon. “Go straight, my little beauty. Papa needs a break.”
He came and sat with Laura and Daniel in the middle, balancing his weight on one side against their combined on the opposite.
“You see this, Daniel?” he asked, looking at the two sleeping men. “This pair love each other like a couple of little doves. Don’t mind the American, now. He’s Scacchi’s choice, for better or worse, and jealousy’s such a mean little thing. Men loving men...I don’t get it. But what’s it to me? Nothing.”
Daniel was silent.
“And nothing to you, my new friend, I know,” Piero added. “That’s not why Scacchi invited you here. He told me. Not that a fool like me pretends to understand. He says these things you wrote...”
“My paper,” Daniel offered.
“Yeah. He says they’re the best. OK? But...just be patient. See that dog?”
Xerxes stood stiffly in the stern, eyes on the horizon, leather strap lodged firmly in his jaws.
“He’s a marvel,” Daniel observed, and truly believed as much.
“More than that. He is proof of the existence of God.”
“Piero!” Laura scolded him. “That is sacrilegious.”
The big man’s eyes were a little glassy. Daniel did not want to consider how much Campari had been consumed on the long, slow voyage across the lagoon to the airport.
“Not at all. He is a proof of the existence of God, and I shall tell you why. You are aware, Daniel, that he is a G-dog. I may not say the G-word out loud, of course, since he’ll be off that tiller in a moment, sending us around in circles, barking like a she-wolf in season, and waking those two slumbering lovers over there. You understand my meaning?”
Turning his body to ensure the dog did not see him, Daniel mimed the action of pulling a shotgun to the shoulder and releasing the trigger.
“Exactly. Yet he is the most ancient of breeds. Why, I shall take you to Torcello in the good ship Sophia one day and show you the great, great-to-greatest grandfather of this very dog sitting in a mosaic on the wall there. All that, long before the G-things even existed! Explain that, my girl.”
Laura slapped him on the knee. “It is called evolution, you fool.”
“It is called the work of God. For God, you see, does not know time as we do. When He invents the spaniel, He does so understanding that one day some other of His creatures shall invent the G-thing. So He places within the animal’s blood the knowledge of it there already, saving Himself the trouble of inventing some new animal when the need arises. For God, Time is just another of His creations. Like trees. And men. And water. And...”
He extended the plastic beaker. “Spritz! Furthermore...”
Laura filled it to halfway, tut-tutting. “Furthermore, Piero, you are dead drunk.”
He looked miserable all of a sudden. “I guess.” Then he sniffed the air as if it had changed, and peered at the dog, with its dark, damp nose held high in the stern. The boat had shifted direction to the east, though no one had noticed. Piero walked to the back of the boat and straightened up the tiller to put them back on course.
“Avanti, Xerxes,” he said gently. “We go home to Sant’ Erasmo later. After we drop these good people off in the city. Home.”
Laura threw him a couple of pillows from her side of the boat.
“Home,” the big man repeated, then stared at Daniel. “Scacchi said you didn’t have one. That right?”
“My mother died a year ago,” Daniel answered. “My father left before I was born. But I have somewhere to live.”
“No relations?”
“None close.”
“And you a clever guy too?” Piero seemed surprised. “So much for what the books say.”
Laura tut-tutted again, stumbled to the other side of the boat, made the pillows into a makeshift bed, then came back to sit beside Daniel.
“A man who has no home has nothing,” Piero declared. “Like that Paul there. It’s Scacchi’s choice. OK. And God knows the old man pays for it, what with that disease the American gave him. But this isn’t his home. He doesn’t have one. Where are they going to put him when he dies? Probably in a casket on some plane back to America, where he came from.”
“Piero,” Laura said with only the hint of scolding in her voice. “You sleep, now. Please.”
“Yes,” the large man said, and lay down on the pillows, fitting his enormous frame onto the narrow wooden ledge with a precision that could only have come from much practice. In the stern the dog gave a low whine but never once let go of the leather strap. Daniel Forster looked at Laura. She raised her glass to him and said, “ Salute.” San Michele, with its endless round of recycled graves, was beginning to make itself apparent to their left. Daniel touched his plastic beaker to hers and tried to think of the famous names buried there: Diaghilev and Stravinsky and Ezra Pound... The city had lived inside his thoughts for so long, its districts memorised, its history picked over for months on end. He had wondered if the reality might turn out to be a disappointment, a living theme park preserved only for the tourists. Something told him already this would not be the case, but also that the real city, the real lagoon, would be different from the picture he had built in his imagination out of the constant stream of books he had borrowed from the college library.
His thoughts clouded over, became confused. Then he realised that Laura had extended a long, slim, tanned hand and that she was very pretty indeed.
“I am the servant here,” she said. “I am cook, housekeeper, nurse-maid, and anything else you can think of. You must know that Scacchi, while he has his foibles, is the kindest man on earth. You will remember this, please, in your dealings with him.”
“Yes,” he replied, shaking the hand awkwardly, wondering whether this was a warning about his own behaviour or that of the master of the house. Wondering, too, whether she really expected him to kiss that small patch of tanned flesh she held out to him.
“And as for Piero,” she continued, “he is a holy fool. Paul and Scacchi are—you have a phrase in English—‘like two peas from the same pod.’ It is just that one bears his fate more bravely than the other, though perhaps a sense of guilt has something to say about the matter there also. I love them both, and will be grateful if, for the period of your stay here, you either learn to love them, too, or affect to do so.”
“I shall, of course.”
She tapped him lightly on the knee. “Silly boy. How can you say that? You don’t even know us yet.”
He smiled, feeling she had caught him out. “Then what would you have me say?”
“Nothing. Just listen. And wait. I know men find these things difficult. Oh, damn!”
The boat had shifted direction again. Xerxes was trembling in the stern.
“To think he can let a dog steer us home.”
Laura made her way carefully to the back of the Sophia and took the tiller from Xerxes. The dog let out a grateful growl before perching on the rear platform of the vessel, where he lifted a leg and let loose a lively stream of liquid over the side. Then Xerxes stared balefully at Laura until he realised she had no intention of letting him regain the tiller. The animal shuffled amidships, placed its muzzle tenderly in Piero’s groin, and closed its eyes.
Three sleeping drunks and a dog called Xerxes. And a strange, intriguing woman staring at him from the back of the boat, carefully directing them towards the city. In his head Daniel Forster had played the scene of his entry to the city on many occasions. None of these imagined arrivals came close to matching the reality.
Nor could he have predicted what occurred next. As the ancient boat made a slow but steady passage along the Cannaregio waterfront, they were joined by a long, sleek police speedboat
which came alongside, then slowed to match their speed. Laura sat in the helm, unmoved by the vessel’s presence. In the rear of the speedboat stood a thin woman with short blonde hair. She wore a two-piece blue suit with a tightly cut jacket and a skirt that stopped just above the knee. In her hand was a megaphone. Daniel looked at the three sleeping men, as did the policewoman. Then the police officer stared at Laura, who merely smiled back at her and shrugged her shoulders.
It was too noisy and too distant to be certain, but Daniel felt sure that the policewoman had sworn at this point, then barked an order to the officer at the wheel of the launch. The boat lurched under a surge of power, then raced off, buoyed on its own seething platform of foam.
“See,” Laura noted. “Even the police come out to greet you, Daniel.”
But he scarcely heard her words. The Sophia had veered sharply and was now headed for the mouth of what he surmised was the Cannaregio canal. It was busy with small boats. A ’52 vaporetto chugged towards them. They passed beneath the odd, geometrical outline of the Tre Archi bridge, Laura dodging the traffic expertly, and then the Sophia set off along the straight haul to the Grand Canal. To his left, Daniel knew, lay the older part of Cannaregio, with the original Jewish ghetto hidden somewhere in its midst. To the right was the busy commercial and tourist quarter around the station.
“You know why you are here?” Laura asked, unflustered by the multitude of vessels of all shapes, sizes, and colours around her.
“To catalogue Signor Scacchi’s library,” he said, speaking loudly over the sound of the canal.
“Library!” She laughed out loud, and it made her seem much younger, he thought. “He called it that!”
The junction with the Grand Canal was ahead of them. The Sophia bobbed on the swell from the throng of boats milling in the busy waterway.
“Then why am I here?” he yelled, not knowing where to look.
She beamed at him and said something that was lost in the angry horn of a vaporetto shooing a gondola of Japanese tourists out of its way. Daniel was unsure, and did not want to ask, but wondered if she had answered: To save us. There was no time for introspection. They had turned, abruptly and with a sudden burst of speed, and were now midstream of the Grand Canal. Nothing—no photograph, no painting, no words on the page—had prepared him for this sight. The city’s beating jugular lay before him. Great buildings rose on both sides, Gothic and Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical, a startling juxtaposition of styles in which the centuries tripped over each other’s feet. Vaporetti and water taxis, haulage boats and gondolas bustled across the water like insects skating over a pond. It was a world which appeared to live in multiple dimensions: on every side, above in the towering palaces and churches, and below in the shifting black waters of the lagoon.
“And one thing we all forgot to say,” Laura added.
“What was that?” he asked.
She removed the sunglasses, and a pair of warm green eyes appraised him. “Why,” she said with a thoughtful smile that briefly made him forget the view, “welcome to Venice, Mr. Daniel Forster.”
5
A boy’s new home
Our uncle gives me a sideways look when I call this place the “Palazzo Scacchi.” Strictly speaking, it is a house, in Venetian parlance Ca’ Scacchi, but anywhere else in the world this would surely be regarded as a palace, albeit one in need of a little care and attention.
We live in the parish of San Cassian, on the border of the sestieri San Polo and Santa Croce. Our house is by the side of the little rio San Cassian (which any but a Venetian would call a canal) and small campo of the same name. We have the usual door which leads onto the street, and two entrances from the water. One runs under a grand, rounded arch into the ground floor of the house, which, as is customary in this city, is used as a cellar for storage. The second belongs to the warehouse and printing studio, which represents the Scacchis’ contribution to the world of commerce. This is situated in an adjoining building, some three storeys high (our home is four!), attached to the north side, towards the Grand Canal.
Finally, there is yet another mode of exit: a wooden bridge with handrails runs from the first floor of the house between the two river entrances straight over the canal and into the square itself. Consequently I can wander over it in the morning and find fresh water from the well in the centre of the campo while still rubbing the sleep from my eyes. Or I may hail a gondola from my bedroom window, find it waiting for me by the time I get downstairs, and, but a single minute later, be in the midst of the greatest waterway on earth, almost slap opposite the magnificence of the Ca’ d’Oro! And this does not deserve the name “palace”?
The house is almost two hundred years old, I am told, with weathered brickwork the colour of chestnuts that have lain on the ground all winter and handsome arched windows, most with their own miniature Doric columns which frame green-painted shutters designed to keep out the cruel summer heat. I live on the third floor in the third room to the right (things always come in threes, they say). When I lie in bed at night, I can hear the lapping of the water, the chatter and songs of the passing gondoliers, and, in the square, the occasional bawdy chatter of the local whores. The neighbourhood has something of a reputation for the latter, I’m afraid (but this is a city, remember—I am sure you have the same in Seville). Nevertheless, I understand why Uncle pursues his trade here. The prices are not so steep. The location is central and easy for our clients to find. Furthermore, the printing trade has many roots in this area. Scotto and Gardano, Rampazetto and Novimagio all made their homes hereabouts at some time. The quarter has the spirit of a community of bookmen about it, even if some of the old names are now nothing more than fading title pieces on the shelves of the Rialto antiquaries.
Oh, sister! I pray for the day when I can show you these things instead of struggling to describe them in a letter which may take Heaven knows how long to reach you in Spain! Venice is like a vast simulacrum of our old library at home, one that stretches forever, unfathomed, full of dark corners and random wonders, some on my very doorstep. Last night, while rooting around in the jumbled corners of the warehouse cellar, I found behind a pile of unsold (and, frankly, inferior) cantatas a single copy of Aristotle’s Poetics, published in the city in 1502 by Aldus Manutius himself. The imprint of the Aldine academy is on the title page—that famous colophon of the anchor and dolphin which our father told us about! I raced to Uncle Leo with my discovery and—now, here’s a victory— something very close to a smile broke the thin, flat line of the Scacchi lips. “A find, boy! You’ll pay your way yet. This’ll fetch good money when I hawk it down the Rialto.”
“May I read a little first, sir?” I asked, and felt a degree of trepidation when I made the request. Uncle Leo has a forbidding manner at times.
“Books are for selling, not reading,” he replied firmly. But at least I had it for the night, since the dealers were by that hour closed. I have since searched diligently in other chaotic corners for similar jewels but found little of importance. Our uncle is a businessman first and a publisher second, though he has an ear for music too. Sometimes he asks me to play pieces that are sent for setting, and, by accident, I discovered he once had ambitions in this field (the Scacchis are born polymaths, girl, even if fate sometimes thwarts us).
There is an ancient harpsichord in what passes for the parlour, on the first floor, above the main bridge. The tone . . . well, imagine holding a couple of our old Leghorn hens, the ones past laying age, and trying to extract a sound in unison by tickling their feathered breasts. “Cck-cluck, Cck-cluck, Cck-cluck . . . CCK-CLUCK!”
Still, as Leo says, an instrument is only one half of the bargain. Even such an amateur as I may extract something akin to a melody from the keyboard. Music or literature, most of the compositions we print are turned into ink and paper out of vanity, of course. The “author” pays, or, if he has found a patron, then some poor sap with a surfeit of unwanted cash foots the bill. Some show merit, though. Three nights ag
o Leo placed a single sheet in front of me and barked, “Play that!” then afterwards asked my opinion (not a common occurrence).
Something told me this was a time to be politic. “An interesting piece, Uncle, but I find it hard to judge on a single page. Is there no more?”
“None!” he said with a sardonic grin on his face. He held up his right hand in front of me and I saw what previously I had only glimpsed. The little finger and the index were horribly bent, as if the sinews of each had decided to withdraw on themselves and pull the flesh tightly into the palm. I had wondered why Leo was so slow at setting type. Now I knew. His musical days were surely past, at least as a player. “Nor will there be any more with a hand like this.”
“This was your work?” I tried not to look too surprised. Just between you and me, Lucia, it was rather good.
“Something to impress the Red Priest and his little girls at La Pietà. Had I finished it before this claw appeared.”
“I’m sorry, sir. If you like, you could dictate to me and see if I might turn your ideas into something on a page.”
“And if I go blind, perhaps you will paint on my instructions so that I may rival Canaletto?”
It seemed best to say nothing. Uncle Leo has few friends, and none female as far as I can judge, a shame since a wife might mellow him. His trade is his life, and a hard trade it is, too, with hours too long for much in the way of romance. The two of us must do everything in this publishing process, from setting the type to working the press, though Leo assures me he will seek hired help should the contract warrant it. If Aldus Manutius (or Aldo Manuzio, as the locals knew him better) could not make a living as a publisher in Venice, I wonder sometimes how a mere Scacchi might manage.