The Veils of Venice

by Edward Sklepowich

  ‘Don’t sell me short, Barbara dear.’ A smile replaced the concentration on Urbino’s face as he said, ‘Let me see if I have this right. Apollonia is the daughter of your great aunt Isabel. Your grandmother was her great aunt, which I think makes her your second cousin. And Achille would have been your great aunt Isabel’s grandson and Apollonia’s nephew, not to mention your third cousin – or would he be between a third cousin and a fourth? Your grandmother was his great aunt.’

  Urbino’s genealogical skills impressed the contessa, but even though she had thought she was rather clear about the relations in the family, she felt more than a little confused by his nimble negotiation of the branches of the family tree. ‘Bravo! And much simpler to say that the Pindars and I are distant cousins.’

  ‘And this same Achille; distant in his cousinship,’ Urbino went on, ‘died in a boating accident with his parents. That’s something I know. It was a few years before I settled here.’

  ‘Yes. He was engaged to be married. He went out in a sailboat with his father Platone and his mother – Regina was her name. They sailed away from the Lido. A storm blew up. Their bodies weren’t found for several days. Everyone was devastated. And not just Olimpia, Gaby, and Ercule, but Apollonia, too. She had lost her brother as well as her nephew. And Eufrosina had a hard time. She seemed to think of Achille more as a brother than a cousin. Much closer to him than she was to her own brother, but Alessandro was a hard person to warm to even back then.

  ‘After the drownings, things got even worse financially for Olimpia, Gaby, and Ercule – and of course Gaby slipped into her terrible condition. Their money has just kept dwindling over the years. Olimpia might make enough to keep her going, and Gaby has hardly any expenses. As for Ercule, I don’t know if he has ever had a steady job. He’s indulged himself, dreaming of faraway places. They could sell the building. The upkeep alone must be a strain on them. It would bring in a lot of money, but the three of them aren’t in agreement about it. I assume that Gaby doesn’t want to sell and have to leave. Either Ercule or Olimpia must disagree with her – or possibly both of them.’

  ‘I assume they’re bringing in something from the rent they get from Apollonia.’

  ‘Not much, I don’t think. And not as much by far as Apollonia is saving by living there, from what I have heard. She is getting a great deal of money from renting out her building. She’s a clever woman, Apollonia. The family should put her in charge of finances.’

  Apollonia, who was in her late seventies, had managed to put away a large fortune. Her reputation for miserliness, at least at this point in her life, was legendary in the family.

  ‘And I doubt if the museum takes in much,’ Urbino observed.

  The family had accumulated a small collection of objects and paintings over the years. There were some fine pieces, which could fetch a good price if the family could agree about selling them. So far they hadn’t been able to agree.

  ‘In all the times I’ve been there, the most visitors I’ve seen are two or three,’ the contessa said.

  ‘That’s been my experience. But Gaby doesn’t seem to mind. She’s as proud of it as if it’s the Accademia.’

  ‘Sometimes I think it’s what keeps her going. I don’t know what would become of her without it, although maybe if she were cured, she wouldn’t need it anymore. They each have something to occupy themselves, even if they don’t make much money from it. Gaby has her collection, Olimpia has her atelier, and Ercule has his dreams. Gaby, Olimpia, Ercule, Apollonia, Alessandro, and Eufrosina. A strange group.’ The rip in the Fortuny fabric drew the contessa’s eyes. ‘All under the same roof these days.’ She got up and went over to the sofa. ‘Come sit next to me. I’ll show you some photographs.’

  For the next fifteen minutes they looked through the album.

  ‘She was such a pretty young woman,’ she said, indicating a photograph of Gaby in the Piazza San Marco. ‘And filled with joy. Look at her expression! Who would have thought she would come to be imprisoned in the house the way she is?’

  ‘Did something trigger it?’

  ‘I don’t know. It began not long after her parents and Achille died. That could have been what did it. And there was the usual talk of a failed romance, a man who jilted her. Her condition wasn’t severe at first. She just started to become more and more withdrawn, preferred to be by herself. By the way, she wasn’t always called Gaby. When she was much younger, up until after Achille died, she was called Ella. Gabriella, Ella, you see. Then she became Gaby. Why she changed her name, I don’t know. I could have asked. But there’s something about the Pindars that makes you feel uncomfortable asking personal questions. They’re all very closed in on themselves.’ She turned to the next page of the album. ‘These are of Ercule.’

  Urbino smiled as he looked at them. He was fond of Ercule, and the contessa knew why. It was because of Ercule’s particular brand of eccentricity. He had said a few weeks ago that one of the things he was looking forward to when he would be going through Apollonia’s Fortuny letters was the opportunity it would provide to spend some time with Ercule.

  ‘Look at this one.’

  It was a black-and-white photograph of a pale, moon-faced young man dressed in the robes and turban of a Turkish pasha. Ercule still affected these outfits. In the photograph he sat on a cushioned divan in a café and smoked a nargileh. Men in flowing moustaches were seated at a nearby table playing cards. It had been taken in Istanbul many years before. Ercule had been in his early twenties.

  ‘Ercule and his Turkey!’ the contessa exclaimed. ‘He sent that photograph to everyone he knew. He spent several months there. He’s never returned. I think he looks a lot like Alessandro here, don’t you? The same round face. Well, most of the Pindars resemble each other, more or less. I took the photograph below it,’ the contessa went on. The same pale man, though now dressed in a suit and tie and looking a littler older, stood on Westminster Bridge with Big Ben in the background. ‘The classic tourist photograph. He insisted. The three of them – Ercule, Gaby, and Olimpia – all came to London one summer when I was there.’

  It all seemed far away now. It belonged to the time when she was recuperating from Alvise’s death. It seemed that there were so many reminders of Alvise these January days. But were these days very different from any others? She realized she had given a sigh when Urbino turned to look up at her.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Nothing wrong with a little melancholy, as you well know,’ she teased him.

  Urbino’s melancholy was one of his most appealing traits. And he would never have decided to live in Venice if he hadn’t been its chronic victim.

  ‘Here’s Olimpia and Gaby in Trafalgar Square.’

  The two sisters stood by the fountain with the National Gallery behind them. Olimpia was a few inches taller and a few years older, but the family resemblance was unmistakable. Both young women had narrow faces, the Pindar blue eyes, and an abundance of reddish blond hair that seemed on fire in the sunshine.

  ‘They look so English,’ Urbino said.

  ‘Ercule as well. And look at this one of Achille.’

  She turned the pages of the album until she found the one she was looking for. The photograph had been taken in front of the Palazzo Pindar. Achille was in his late twenties. Dressed in flannel trousers and a tweed jacket, he stared into the camera with a smile in his blue eyes. His sandy-colored hair was tousled by the wind.

  ‘He was very good-looking, as you can see,’ the contessa said. ‘And he was one of the few tall Pindar men. Most of the others have been on the short side, like Ercule.’

  Urbino examined the photograph closely. ‘You’re right, he does look English.’

  ‘It must be the combination of the Venetian and English blood. The two strains reinforced each other.’

  ‘And they’re so English in other ways. Your great aunt Isabel seems to have put a strong stamp on the family.’

  ‘And each generation has cultivated it.
But sometimes I wonder if there’s going to be a next generation for the people in that house. If Achille hadn’t died, he would have married, but that wasn’t meant to be. Eufrosina never had any children.’ The contessa quickly got this out of the way and hurried to say, ‘It doesn’t look like Olimpia is going to go down the marriage aisle. Ercule is a confirmed bachelor if I ever saw one. And Gaby? No, not unless a great deal changes in her life. Maybe Alessandro. He’s the youngest of them. But he’ll have to get out from under his mother’s influence. She would have to approve, and she’s hard to please. The girl would have to be the next best thing to a nun.’

  ‘Do you know who Achille was engaged to?’

  ‘Someone named Nedda Ferro – I should say Nedda Bari now. You know her.’

  ‘Nedda Bari?’ Urbino told her that he had seen her earlier near the Palazzo Pindar. ‘She seemed to want to talk to Olimpia, but Olimpia ignored her. Is there bad blood between them?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Isn’t Bari renting Apollonia’s building?’

  ‘Yes. Maybe it had something to do with that, though what Olimpia’s concern in it might be, I have no idea.’ The contessa turned a page of the album and pointed to three photographs of Apollonia.

  In one of them Apollonia stood in the Campo San Giacomo dell’Orio in front of the church, where she went to Mass every morning and evening. After many decades of throwing herself into the world, Apollonia had become religious twenty years ago – religious to a fault, in the contessa’s opinion. It was as if, almost overnight, her cousin’s milk of human kindness and waters of gladness had been pumped out of her. Urbino only knew this new Apollonia, who still struck the contessa as peculiar, even like an imposter. She sometimes thought that her cousin’s conversion was a compensation for something she had done in her younger years, something she was deeply ashamed of, but what this might be, the contessa had no idea.

  The photograph of Apollonia showed a tall, thin, aged figure, with snow-white hair, wearing a long black dress. She clutched a black Spanish shawl around her shoulders. She was not more than a decade older in the photograph than the contessa was now but she looked considerably older than that, or so the contessa liked to think.

  Another photograph of Apollonia was the kind of close-up that made the contessa cringe, but Apollonia looked bravely into the camera. A piece of old black lace wrapped her head, showing no hair. The last time the contessa had seen Apollonia with her hair exposed had been more than a decade ago. The photograph had been taken at a restaurant in Dorsoduro during the Feast of the Redeemer seven years ago. Urbino had been with them at the time. As he had remarked on several occasions, Apollonia was one of the few people he knew who treated the festival as the religious celebration it was.

  Urbino was examining the photograph now, and the contessa could tell that he was comparing it to the third photograph. This one showed Apollonia when she was about the age of Eufrosina. It had been taken at a ball at the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini. Apollonia was smiling almost mischievously into the camera, her head tilted back. She was elegant in a Fortuny gown in red with gold details, colors she would not be caught dead wearing these days. The Fortuny had belonged to her aunt, Efigenia, her father’s sister, who had died at an advanced age after a long illness a few months before her brother and his wife had drowned. Like the letters, the Fortuny had passed to Apollonia. Efigenia and her husband hadn’t had any children. It was Fortuny’s letters to Efigenia that Urbino would soon be reading. The dress was one of the items that Eufrosina would be photographing, a thought that made the contessa feel a surge of renewed anxiety about Eufrosina’s ability to do a good job.

  ‘She was truly exquisite,’ Urbino said. ‘A real beauty. You can see the traces of it in the photographs from the Feast of the Redeemer.’

  ‘Traces, yes.’ The contessa remembered something that Greta Garbo supposedly once said: ‘The hand moves over the face every ten years …’

  A discreet knock sounded at the door. It was Vitale, her major-domo. In his deep voice he announced, ‘Signorina Olimpia Pindar is downstairs, contessa. She expressed the wish to speak with you.’

  The contessa and Urbino exchanged a quick glance.

  ‘Please have her join us.’

  The contessa had last seen Olimpia the month before at her atelier in the Palazzo Pindar, when Olimpia had put one of her prized possessions – a Fortuny purse – directly into her hands. It had belonged to her grandmother, the contessa’s relative, Isabel. On that occasion, Olimpia had seemed buoyant and filled with quiet assurance. She had recently received a commission from a theater group in Venice to design costumes for a Goldoni production.

  This morning, however, the older Pindar sister’s face was tense and drawn although her face lit up, it seemed, when she saw Urbino. Her eyes, which were a deeper blue than those of her cousins Eufrosina and Alessandro, had dark smudges beneath them.

  She was an attractive, vivacious woman in her early fifties with a narrow face, a large mouth, and the impressive height of almost all the Pindar women. Her chin-length reddish blond hair, showing few traces of gray, was in disarray. She was wearing black trousers and a long, ocelot coat.

  Vitale must have asked her if she wanted to take off her coat and she had obviously declined.

  ‘What a pleasant surprise, Olimpia. You don’t stop by at all as much as I would like you to. Please sit down.’

  ‘No, thank you. I’ll only be staying a few minutes. I’m happy to see you both together. I won’t beat around the bush.’ Her English, like that of all the Pindars, showed no trace of an accent and every facility in the negotiation of idioms. ‘I know that Mina told you what Gaby said to her, Barbara. And I know’ – she turned to Urbino – ‘that Barbara told you.’

  Because Olimpia was so sure and so correct, the contessa did not attempt to protest.

  ‘Mina promised that she wouldn’t say anything to you, Barbara, but it came over me as I was making a sketch an hour ago that she had.’

  ‘Mina is –’

  Olimpia broke her off. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Mina is kind. Considerate. A gentle soul. She has a sensitive heart. That is how I realized that she had said something. She wouldn’t be Mina if she hadn’t.’

  ‘Exactly,’ the contessa agreed. She glanced at Urbino, who was still standing and was looking at the two of them with an unreadable expression on his face.

  As Olimpia continued, she paced the room, putting the contessa, understandably influenced by the ocelot coat, in mind of a large cat.

  ‘Gaby likes to get attention. I love her, but it isn’t a good idea to humor her. She has to face reality. I worry about her. Ercule does, too.’ There seemed to be true concern in Olimpia’s voice. ‘Poor Gaby is in no danger from anyone but herself. No, I don’t mean she’d do anything to harm herself, but the way she’s afraid of everything and doesn’t try to change no matter what I say to her – no matter what anyone says to her – it’s self-destructive, isn’t it?’

  ‘From what I understand,’ Urbino said, following Olimpia with his eyes as she moved around the room, ‘Gaby has an emotional condition that –’

  ‘I realize that, and I sympathize with her.’ Olimpia came to a stop in front of a collection of watercolors. ‘She’s my little sister, don’t forget! I wish we could have the old Gaby back. But we know her better than anyone else does. And I know her better than Ercule. It would do more harm to her to take seriously this – this nonsense she is spreading around. If we all just ignore it, it will go away and some other strange idea will take its place. No one means her any harm. She knows that. Gaby doesn’t have an enemy in the world. You won’t help her, either of you’ – she swept them both with her eyes – ‘if you give any credence to what she said.’

  The contessa wondered if Gaby had been saying things to anyone else in addition to Mina. Olimpia had just said that Gaby was ‘spreading around’ her fears of being in danger.

  ‘What you say could be true, Olimpia, but it’s all t
he more reason why you should try to get her some professional help.’

  ‘Ercule and I know that, and you’ve tried yourself. You see how resistant she is. Ercule and I have hopes that we will eventually be able to persuade her. But we are not about to cart her off against her will. We know our sister well. So when you come to our house, Urbino, please don’t think that you have to put on your stalker’s cap.’

  She gave a laugh that was more like a whinny, in which the contessa heard the release of a great deal of tension. But Olimpia’s face remained as tense as before, and the smile that spread across it now drew even more attention to her agitated state.

  ‘Whatever time I spend in your house,’ Urbino said, ‘is going to be spent reading the letters Fortuny wrote to your great aunt Efigenia.’

  Once again, Urbino’s command of the relationships in the Pindar family impressed the contessa.

  ‘And I assure you,’ the contessa said, ‘that I only have Gaby’s best interests at heart. We are all cousins, aren’t we? And you can consider Urbino family, too. We have all adopted him, haven’t we, just as he’s adopted Venice? Everyone means well, and that is what is important. Mina cares a great deal about you, and because she cares about you, she cares about Gaby. That is why she told me. You shouldn’t be upset with her.’

  ‘Did I say that I was upset with her? I think I said the opposite. I understand her very well. Better than anyone. I don’t fault the dear girl in any way.’

  ‘Most interesting,’ the contessa said after Olimpia left. ‘Needless to say, she’s quickened your interest.’

  ‘Definitely. And I’m not so sure that that wasn’t exactly her intention.’

  Three

  ‘You can take them downstairs to the museum,’ Apollonia Ballarin said to Urbino the next morning in her salotto in the Palazzo Pindar. She and her two children lived on the second floor, with Eufrosina and Alessandro, below Olimpia’s attic atelier and above the Pindar piano nobile. ‘There’s no place for you to read them here. You’d be in the way.’