The Gondola Maker

by Morelli, Laura

  The artist lifts his eyebrows. “Very well, then. I wanted to make sure you understand that I will pay for whatever materials you need to do the job.”

  My jaw drops. I can hardly believe the words coming out of the artist’s mouth.

  “You know, as a boy I spent many hours in that gondola. My father had me delivered to my arithmetic and Latin tutor six days out of seven in that old boat. Signor Palermo... he was tough, a former cleric.” The artist seems lost in the past. “I remember well being ferried to my lessons. In those days, my father kept the gondola in perfect condition, bedecked with a blue silk felso and brocade curtains. He was very proud of that boat.”

  “What happened to it?” I ask.

  The artist shifts in his chair. “We had a boatman; I don’t recall his name. Even though I was just a boy, I knew there was something rotten about that man. There was something evil behind his smile. One day my father—who was a renowned painter of altar panels in this very studio, you may know—accused his boatman of stealing money that was stored in a drawer in the painting studio. The boatman denied it, naturally, but my father released him from his service. That night, under cover of dark, the man stripped the gondola of its felso and oarlocks. But he didn’t stop there. He crashed the boat into a stone quayside, leaving a large hole in the bottom of the hull.” Trevisan heaves up from his chair and replaces a candle that has burned down to a stub inside an ornate candleholder. He uses another lit candle to ignite the wick.

  “The boatman then filled the bottom of the hull with rocks. Surely he meant for the boat to sink. I’ll never forget my father’s reaction,” the artist shakes his head. “I never saw him as angry as he was that day. We managed to save the boat from sinking, but unfortunately it has never been restored. It has lain upside down on trestles—just as you found it—ever since then, going on fifty years now. In some ways I think justice is finally being served. You—my own boatman, repairing the damage caused by my father’s rotten one. I only wish my father could see the old boat restored to its original beauty.” The artist shakes his head and clucks to himself.

  “Master Trevisan, I don’t know how to thank you for your generosity,” I muster.

  “Actually, it gives me pleasure to think about getting that old gondola out into the canal again.”

  The artist continues. “Not only that but I want to encourage your efforts, as I have a deep respect for good craftsmanship. And you, my dear Luca, are a fine craftsman.”

  A BOATMAN I HAVE never seen before slows his gondola before Trevisan’s mooring. I think nothing of it, since a steady stream of messengers arrives at the artist’s land-side and canal-side doors each day. Instead of heading toward the studio door, however, the boatman approaches the door to the boathouse.

  “Are you the artist’s gondoliere?” A young man with a neatly cropped beard and an intelligent face addresses me.

  “Yes,” I reply, surprised. I wipe my brow with my forearm and rise from where I squat, experimenting with folds in the fabric for the new felze.

  “I have a message for you,” the man says, and he hands me a diminutive parchment envelope.

  I take the envelope from the man’s hand, thinking there must be some mistake. But there it is: “Gondolier de xasada, Casa di Trevisan,” scrawled in brown ink across the front of the envelope in an elegant, feminine script. My heart skips a beat.

  “Thank you,” I say distractedly.

  “Bon lavoro,” the boatman says in a businesslike manner, then plies his strength into his oar and drifts down the canal.

  I tear open the envelope and unfold the familiar-looking piece of parchment:

  Signor Fabris, if it please you, meet me at the usual place and time this Saturday. Please destroy this note. —GZ

  Ignoring her instructions to destroy the note, I instead place it carefully back in the envelope and slip it into my breast pocket.

  I APPLY ALL MY force to the sandpaper. The boat is nearly bare, revealing the beautiful grains of various woods my grandfather used to craft it: amber-colored cherry, veined oak, and dark brown walnut planks. I slide my hands slowly down the length of the boat and re-sand a few spots that still feel rough under my fingertips. Black sawdust drifts and collects across my shoes and in the crevices between the cobblestones. The sandpaper swishes beneath my fingers, and I watch the tarnished paint turn to dust.

  I return to the prow, where there is one circle of black left on the boat. All that remains of the old boat’s original varnish is the mark of the Squero Vianello. The maple-leaf emblem is covered with the shiny, fissured black varnish that once coated the entire gondola. I run my fingertips over the maple leaf. The finish has darkened it into a pleasingly crackled patina that reveals the veins of the rounded leaves.

  I cannot find it within myself to sand it away.

  Chapter 34

  Anyone who happened to pass by the southern chapel inside the dark Church of San Giovanni Battista in Brágora might have perceived a still figure kneeling at one of the benches, deep in prayer, but I know better.

  She is waiting for me.

  Completely cloaked, her hood covers her face as she kneels, her hands clasped at her chin. I slip into the wooden pew. Her dog shudders and thumps his stumpy tail on the seat, flattening his ears. The dog’s trembling catches her attention, and she turns toward me.

  “Bonasera, signorina,” I whisper, kneeling beside her.

  “Salve,” she replies.

  “I’m sorry to interrupt your prayers,” I remark with a straight face.

  She snickers. Briefly, I catch sight of her straight teeth beneath the hood. Making her laugh causes my heart to swell. I smile, too. Overhead, the flutter of pigeon’s wings startles us, and we watch a downy feather drift to the large stones on the floor of the church.

  “I wasn’t praying,” she says. “I was wondering about those people at the bottom of that painting.” She gestures to a large painting, one of several hanging in the chapel. It shows the Madonna with the Christ Child on her lap surrounded by an assembly of saints. In the bottom corner are three people painted in miniature, kneeling in prayer. “I suppose they must be long-forgotten ancestors of mine. They must have paid a painter to include them praying in perpetuity at the feet of the Virgin.”

  I nod.

  “I wonder what they would think of the great Zanchi family now,” she says. We sit together in the stillness of the church, and Giuliana seems lost in her thoughts.

  “I sold the bracelet as you asked me, signorina,” I say finally, breaking the silence.

  “Very good,” she says, pushing back her hood. She counts the coins I transfer to her, shifting them from one hand to the other. “Thank you.” Then, without a word, she reaches into a small velvet bag in her lap. She pulls out another bracelet, this time with amber-colored gems, and places it in my palm. I turn the bracelet over between my fingers, watching the orange stones shimmer in the candlelight. She remains silent.

  I summon my nerve. “Signorina, if you don’t mind my asking, why are you doing this?”

  She meets my gaze for a moment, then looks at the floor. “It’s a complicated story,” she says, then falls silent. I nod. My mind searches for a way to keep the conversation going.

  “I mean, under the circumstances that you shared with me, I can understand that you wish to raise some money. But why would you not use your family’s own gondola, and your own boatman—Giacomo... Beppe?” I pause. “Why me?”

  She looks at me cautiously, as if trying to decide how much to reveal. “I am trying to organize a few things for myself.” She hesitates. “It has to do with my future. Our junior boatman has already been placed with another family. Beppe and our other servants are loyal to my parents—my mother, I mean—and I cannot risk that one of them will say something to her. Heaven knows Beppe is incapable of keeping a secret. My mother cannot know about this. She is trying t
o make... other arrangements for me.”

  “Would she have you betrothed?” I push, then hold my breath as I wait for her response.

  “Oh yes,” she replies quickly. “It’s either I marry or take my vows—as soon as possible. The way my mother sees it, we must pull together enough money to dower me properly or to make a donation suitable to place me in a convent where I will ply my labors for the glory of God.” She lifts her palms up subconsciously as if in supplication to the heavens.

  “Really? You–in a convent?”

  She sighs, then nods. “Why do you look so surprised? What other choice do I have? I was born to a patrician family. My father was a banker, but he was in debt when he died. Now, not even my brother has a chance to save our family. If instead I had been born to a candle maker, a glassblower, a wood carver, a draper, I might have had a path, a chance to work in my father’s trade. After all, my father always told me that I was the one with the head for numbers, not my brother Pietro, bless him. But have you ever heard of a daughter taking over her father’s position as a banker?” She reads my face. “I thought not.”

  “And has your mother found you a husband?”

  “Actually, I was already betrothed before my father died. As soon as my intended learned that my dowry had been depleted... Well, we haven’t seen him since.”

  “I’m sorry,” I manage to say.

  She shrugs. “Under the circumstances, I believe my mother will wish for me to join her at Santa Maria della Celestia.”

  We sit in heavy silence for a few moments.

  “What do you want?”

  She looks at me squarely in the face now as if surprised that it would occur to anyone to ask that question. Her pale green eyes register concern.

  “What do I want?” She hesitates, then takes a deep breath. “I want, well, something other than what my family seems to have planned for me.” She laughs nervously then hesitates again, as if framing this thought for the first time. “I do not wish to waste my days with a needle and thread, the wife of an old man with more important things to do.” She seems to grow bolder. “I want my own house, my own family. My own boat. It doesn’t have to be extravagant. No, not at all. I want...”

  “...to be free from what your family expects of you? To make your own way in the world? Not to follow someone else’s destiny but to find your own—for yourself?”

  Startled, she searches my eyes. “Exactly.”

  I nod. There is a long pause. “I know what you mean.”

  Now I understand what selling the jewelry is about, but I still don’t understand one thing. “Signorina, what does this have to do with your portrait, the one that Master Trevisan is painting?”

  Her smile disappears and she falls silent again. I feel a tingle run up my spine until the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. She produces a cloth bag, heavy with the coins she has counted as my commission, and places it in my hands.

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  THERE IS THE MATTER of getting the refurbished gondola into the water.

  I ponder the problem while I pick up the long-handled scogolo, a mop-like brush that I’ve fashioned from discarded materials in the boathouse and a bundle of sheep’s wool I bought in the market. I have reworked the brush a few times, and now I feel it will be perfect for applying varnish along the curve of the gondola’s hull. Now that I have stripped the boat of its original varnish, replaced the rotten and split pieces, and added a few personal touches like foot rests on the aft deck and reinforcements under the oak planks along the sides, I feel I have turned a corner. The boat—a new boat, my boat—is beginning to take shape.

  My father’s workshop, the way it used to be before the fire, was set up so that a gradual ramp led from the studio directly into the canal. Launching boats was as simple as sliding them until the water began to buoy their hulls and they rocked gently under your palms. Trevisan’s boathouse, on the other hand, consists of only a boat slip, a sheer drop from the stone floor into the canal. While I apply the first coat of varnish, I consider how I might design a makeshift wooden track that would allow me to launch the gondola gently into the water without damaging its hull. I will need to ask Trevisan’s shop assistants to help me slide the boat down the track with the help of several ropes, but I imagine that the solution will work.

  The fumes of the varnish are beginning to make me feel lightheaded, and I walk out to the dock in front of Trevisan’s studio door for a breath of fresh air. The boat slip is not ideally ventilated for such a project, so I have set up a small table on Trevisan’s dock, where I have begun to rough out the new oarlock. Now I can alternate between coating the gondola with thin layers of varnish inside the boathouse and stepping outside to work on the oarlock in the fresh air.

  I run my hands along the walnut slab I discovered weeks ago in a pile of discarded lumber at the back of Trevisan’s boathouse. Its weathered appearance and grainy texture drew my eye immediately. Despite my best carving efforts, however, the piece remains stubbornly block-like, impenetrable. Most oarlocks are in fact relatively straight, with curved notches only in specific places where the oars form a snug fit. The idea strikes me that if I try to elaborate these notches in larger, more curvilinear forms, it might allow the rower to achieve greater precision in handling the gondola. I don’t know if my idea will work.

  I turn the piece of wood over and try to visualize how such an oarlock might appear in three dimensions. I feel greater respect than ever for my dear remero and the skill that goes into forming the intricate nooks and crannies of the oarlocks that have evolved, over centuries, along with the rowing techniques of Venetian boatmen. Taking a deep breath, I pick up my knife and begin to pry away curls of walnut, which drift to the ground. Subconsciously, I begin to follow the curve of the long, blond veins of wood that trail along the block, as if the wood grain itself is showing me a path.

  “VALENTIN, LUCA, come please!” Trevisan throws his hands up in a gesture of despair.

  “Right away, Master Trevisan.” Valentin crosses the studio, wiping a paintbrush with an oily rag. I follow.

  Signora Amalia has summoned me from the boathouse to the artist’s studio to help the artist move some paintings. “Seems that Trevisan has more work than he has had in a long time. He requires more than the two more apprentices he employs in addition to Valentin. It’s a shame we lost Biondino; the timing is terrible,” she had clicked her tongue.

  Trevisan gives us instructions. “Give Valentin a hand with this painting, would you please, Luca? We must make choices. First, let’s move this one out of the way.” Valentin and I lift a canvas larger than the two of us together and transport it to a wall on the other side of the room. The painting shows a saint kneeling in a rocky wilderness, wearing only the loincloth of a beast. With a wild expression on his face, he seems to be experiencing a vision in the sky, the details of which are so far only roughly sketched.

  His assistants are all listening, but Trevisan seems to mutter mostly to himself. “The priority is to meet our contractual commitments. The others can wait. I am already behind on two deadlines, and a third is looming. And now the Council has charged us with painting three large banners for the Feast of the Ascension.” Trevisan sighs. “Banner painting! This type of ephemera is hardly worth our time,” he booms. “But how can I say no?” Valentin nods in silent agreement. “I suppose it is the cost of success.”

  In a corner of the studio, another assistant is painting a landscape in the background of a picture of an assembly of saints clustered around the Madonna with a chubby Christ Child on her lap. The boy furrows his brow, his tongue braced between his teeth in concentration. Impatiently, the artist grabs the easel and thrusts it aside. “This one can wait, too. Father Stefano hasn’t even paid me the first deposit.” The artist shakes his head in disgust. The boy jumps from his chair with a start, then slithers away and makes himself useful by rearranging pictu
res stacked against the wall.

  Another assistant is stretching canvas in the corner of the studio over a wooden frame, nailing down the cloth to the narrow strips of wood. Valentin has told me that Trevisan borrowed this young apprentice from a painter friend, but the artist now regrets his decision as it takes so much of his time to train this boy that it is hardly worth it. Trevisan snatches the hammer from the boy’s hand. “No,” he instructs. “The nails must be placed more closely together; otherwise as the canvas shrinks it will come apart and the picture will be ruined. You see? This is very important.”

  “Yes, Master Trevisan,” the boy says with an embarrassed expression.

  The artist hands the hammer back to the boy and strides to the other side of the studio where I am helping Valentin wrap a large portrait of a patrician woman in blue paper. The artist delivers his finished paintings wrapped in a particular type of paper that he dispatches Valentin to purchase by the ream at the paint pigments market or the Giudecca. Trevisan has taught Valentin and the other shop apprentices a way to fold and tuck the paper around the four edges of the picture so that it makes a tight, neat package. It is important to give his clients the impression that what is wrapped inside will be more than worth the price they paid, Valentin has explained to me. I watch him carefully so that I can attempt to copy his folding technique.

  “Let’s get this one out of here today,” the artist instructs Valentin, pointing to the picture we are wrapping. “Have Luca ferry you to the silk trader’s house. You know that I always personally deliver my paintings, but I do not have the time today. Please convey my apologies to Signor Malatesta.” The artist holds up his hands. “What else can I do? I’m just one person.”

  “Now,” he says, taking a deep breath. “First things first. I must finish the portrait of Signorina Zanchi before the Councillor changes his mind about it.”