‘Off on your travels, are you? Shall I come?’
‘No.’
He asks me every day and the answer is always the same.
‘Let’s play,’ he barks, blocking my path, ducking down and rolling his tufty brows. ‘Play! Come on!’ He thumps me on the snout, wheedling me with tricksy growls, before taking off around the quay in a figure of eight, and back to me. ‘Play! Huh?’
Part of me would like to. It seems decades have passed since I scrapped for no reason, for the thrill of bashing against another. But I’m too old for games and, besides, it’s better not to set a precedent. ‘Look, she returns, tuo amata. Now’s your chance.’ Sporco, flummoxed, glances from me to the Dalmatian and back again, his outsize ears pivoting in tandem. ‘Go on, before she gets away.’ He flies from the bridge in one leap and I escape across it and into the heart of the city.
I’ve lived so long in Venice, and seen it from the tops of so many bell towers—most particularly the Campanile in San Marco’s Square, the highest—I have a precise sense of its shape. In a lagoon of many far-reaching islands, Venice is the largest, a dreamy sliver of a city, a mirage, where land becomes sea and sea becomes land, as mysterious as the glass that’s furnaced in nearby Murano.
Venice itself is a fish-shaped island, marbled with canals and with a serpentine grand waterway bisecting it. The two halves are joined in only one place, almost in the centre of the mass, at the Rialto Bridge, a confection of white marble arches ascending and descending, on which there are shops, and almost always a heaving mass of activity.
Due south of it, at the edge of the water, are the principal institutions and buildings of the city, the doge’s palace—the giant cube of pink sugar—the old, Byzantine cathedral, the Campanile and the prison, all around San Marco’s Square. Whilst the new cathedral, my cathedral, lies opposite, on the southernmost slip of land.
Far east of the Rialto is the Arsenale, where the navy is stationed—whatever navy that may be, as there have been, in just fifteen years, variously a Venetian, French and Austrian one. North and west of the Rialto are the commercial areas, and the docks where most the ships come in from the mainland. It is to those that I head.
Though I live and spend most of my time in my den—the stone hollow in the side of the customs house, where rope used to be stored long ago—from it I have a view of the steps of the cathedral. If he comes, he will come searching for me there. It is where he told me to wait. But the northern port is the place where he and I first docked in Venice, and I’ve always thought that it would be miraculous if I could surprise him as he alighted from a ship. So I go to it every morning. I thread a time-honoured course around the maze of alleys and canal-ways to the fish market, turning north through the streets of Santa Croce and on to the port. The routine is sacrosanct. I’ve followed it day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade.
Occasionally I’m gripped by a need to visit other places, perhaps the Arsenale, or maybe one of the outer islands. But in general I’m too anxious to stray more than a few hours from my home.
I arrive at the harbour and head, as always, to a little terrace by a tumbledown church at the edge of the water. I’m about to sit when I remember the weathervane and, as I do, the euphoric throb comes again, like a door coming ajar, letting in a murmur of heat and light, before quickly pressing shut again. I stare fixedly across the lagoon towards the distant smudge of the mainland, alert, the fur on my back lifted, antenna-like. Along with these shivers of elation, the change in the weather, the guarantee of summer, I have a sense of optimism, of good things about to happen.
Unlike the quays close to my den, the western fondamenta, with its big skies and giant cranes, has more in keeping with the brash ports of northern Europe. Cologne perhaps, or Amsterdam. I stay much longer than I usually would, and even when I have the notion to leave, I find myself wandering along the quay instead, the image of the turning weathervane coming back to me time and time again. I watch a barge dock, its crew jumping ashore to hurriedly unload its cargo of boxes, whilst a supervisor in a top hat takes stock. The insatiable merry-go-round of trade and money. The boxes contain glass—I can hear it shiver as they’re set down.
Five times I pad back and forth, for what reason I have no real sense. The city chatters and sings behind me. Its perpetual out-of-kilter peal of bells swells and wanes. Occasionally funeral gondolas, with their mournful awnings and flying-eagle figureheads, set off from the pier heading for the ‘island of the dead.’ Sailors and harbourmen, finished for the morning, gather in clusters: bottles of ale are uncorked, china pipes are lit, trails of tobacco smoke curl up to the sky. Grey clouds roll in and it starts to get cooler, no longer spring-like. I feel idiotic for staying so long, thinking that something miraculous might come across the sea. Why, after all this time, would he come today? I’m hungry and I decide to return home to my torta di fagioli.
As I reach the little bridge that crosses to the city’s final promontory of land where I live, Sporco comes bounding towards me.
‘Quickly, quickly, something terrible has happened.’
Having just watched funeral gondolas processing across the lagoon, I get a shock to see one docked in front of a tenement that overlooks the side of the cathedral. An insistent barking comes from a top-floor apartment. It’s a voice I recognize: La Perla.
‘Beatricia, Beatricia, Beatricia,’ she’s crying.
On the pavement a body has been covered with a blanket. An undertaker is in conversation with two people I recognize: the hard-drinking son of La Perla’s owner and his efficiently unsociable wife. I don’t know the son’s name, but he’s one of those humans, cheeks permanently livid with irritation, who seem like they’ll hit you as good as look at you. Their presence there, the son already driving a hard bargain with the undertaker, along with La Perla’s desperate bays, can surely mean only one thing, that Beatricia is dead. Approaching and peering under the cover, my fear is confirmed: a polite sack of bones in a lace-fringed dress, a cobwebbed profusion of grey hair, all colour eviscerated from her face, even from her lips.
‘Is she?’ Sporco enquires, staying well back.
‘Yes. Gone.’
Sporco makes a pantomime expression of disbelief. ‘And what’ll happen to La Perla?’
I glance round at the son and his wife. ‘Si vuoi una buona sepoltura. If you want a good burial,’ the undertaker is explaining to them, ‘a plot on San Daniele—’
The son cuts him off. ‘Give me none of your sales talk. A hole in the ground is a hole in the ground.’ He bends down and reaches under the cover to unclasp a string of pearls from Beatricia’s neck, but his fingers are too thick for the job, and he has to tug it over the corpse’s head, leaving its hair sticking up.
I cock my ear to La Perla’s howling and take a deep breath, before passing on into the courtyard of her building. ‘What are you going to tell her?’ says Sporco, shadowing behind. I don’t know, but keep going. We go up three flights of stairs. At the top, hearing paws clip back and forth along the tiles inside the apartment, La Perla’s voice hoarse from constant wailing, my stomach gives a little lurch. She and her Beatricia have never left each other’s side. I know those first hours are the most unnatural, the overturning of everything, the absurd reality—unthinkable even a day ago—that you’ll never see your beloved again. I stand on my hind legs, push my paw against the handle.
‘Mamma!’ La Perla thrills as the door opens, skittering towards us. She halts when she sees it’s me. She peers over my head—but her mistress isn’t there either, just Sporco. Her eyes founder. I’m so used to La Perla being young, looking like a cotton ball, I often forget she’s past ten now, her tight white curls gone sepia with age.
‘How are you, Perlita?’ I ask softly, slipping in. A thousand knick-knacks crowd the little place, amidst the smell of urine and lavender.
‘How am I?’ she trills. ‘A fine
question, I should say. Sick to my stomach I am. Have you seen my mamma, my Beatricia? They carried her away. Why?’ She could be one of those melodramatic actresses that so amused my master, only her tragedy is all too real. ‘Have you seen her?’ She returns her gaze to Sporco in the porch. ‘Who is that? He smells.’ She’s not so distracted that she can’t serve up an insult.
‘You know Sporco. My—’ for lack of a better word ‘—my neighbour.’
‘No,’ she replies grandly. ‘I don’t believe we’ve been acquainted.’
This isn’t true. She’s clapped eyes on him every day since he washed up in our corner of town three years ago.
‘Hello, La Perla,’ Sporco chances, entering gingerly. ‘What a beautiful place!’ Sporco has never lived in a house and rarely gets invited into them. ‘You have a fireplace!’ He dashes towards it, before remembering why we’re here and stops. ‘Are you bearing up all right?’
She pinches her nostrils, pads round him on the balls of her paws and sniffs, just very lightly, at his behind. When Sporco tries to sniff back, she scuttles away. ‘I’m fine, just fine. But you shouldn’t be here. My Beatricia will be back soon and she doesn’t like wild animals in the house.’ She jumps up on to a little pink armchair and nestles into it, old and frail.
For a while it has concerned me about what would happen if Beatricia dies. Her ageing had seemed to accelerate in the last year: she’d grown paler, unsteadier on her feet, almost unrecognizable from the vigorous talkative being that used to dart about the city. But I thought, I hoped, she had plenty of years left. Even so, I’d formulated a plan, as I often find myself doing, for the inevitable day. I’d decided, even if the son and his wife deigned to keep La Perla, which was unlikely in the extreme, that it would be too cruel to allow it. Sharing my den was out of the question: not for the inconvenience to me—though that would be considerable—but because it’s just a plain hollowed-out cavity, an utterly inauspicious place that smells of damp and rope—a residence that La Perla would deem far beneath her. Other options were limited. Despite her high regard for herself, La Perla’s never been particularly pretty to humans, is no longer young, and is as obstinate as she’s bad-tempered. In the end, I settled on the plan of taking her to the palazzo in San Polo, where an elderly foreign couple had accumulated a menagerie of abandoned animals.
‘La Perla, your mamma’s not coming back.’ The phrase drops out of me before I can stop it. Sproco freezes, mouth gaping. He stares at La Perla, waiting for her reaction. ‘There is no easy way to tell you, so I will just say it plainly,’ I continue, ‘your Beatricia is dead.’ Her eyes muddle and darken. Sporco looks from me to her and droops his ears out of respect. ‘We need to—to come up with a plan for what we’re going to do now.’
She blinks but says nothing.
‘La Perla, do you understand what I am saying? Your mamma—’
She sits up, stiffens her tail, bares her teeth—little nuggets of off-white—before leaping from the chair and nipping me hard. ‘Kindly leave. Nobody invited you in.’
Footsteps come up the stairs, the door swings wide and La Perla lets out a squeak as she’s thrust aside. The son and his wife stalk in. ‘The state of it,’ the husband puffs and his wife shakes her head in accord. ‘And that silly creature of hers too.’ The son scowls at La Perla, but gasps when he realizes there are two other dogs. ‘Fuori di qui!’ He swats Sporco towards the door and kicks him in the backside. ‘Pulcioso! Parassiti.’
La Perla runs one way and then the other, before scuttling under the pink armchair. When the son tries to pull her out, La Perla bites his hand. Furious, he turns the chair over, grabs her and throws her out of the door. She cartwheels down the stairs, bumping against the landing banister. I rear up and bare my teeth at the brute—but stop myself. A hundred years or more have passed since I’ve drawn blood. The son actually looks contrite, but hides it with a laugh. I leave and he slams the door behind me.
Sporco is helping La Perla to her feet. ‘I’m quite all right, thank you,’ she asserts. ‘No need to trouble yourself.’ She gazes at the door, the entrance to her home, just a plain timber slab, but one that has been essential to her entire life—and she’s still expecting a miracle, the poor soul.
‘Come on,’ I say and eventually she turns her back on it and we descend.
Going back to the quay, there’s no way of avoiding Beatricia. But better La Perla sees her, and understands her mistress is not returning. She stops in front of the body and pauses, before pawing the blanket from Beatricia’s face and revealing it to the midday glare. I brace myself for a scene. So does Sporco, his outsize ears doing a fretful caper. But La Perla just lifts her foot and prods the old woman’s cheek. Solid. I wonder how long she’s already sat with the body, and how much she comprehends the situation.
The undertaker and his assistant push through, load the body on to a stretcher and carry it off to their boat. Now La Perla will shriek, I assume, but she remains mute, watching Beatricia being loaded up as if she were some piece of furniture. I say very softly, ‘Perlita, do you understand what has happened?’ I press against her, so she can feel the warmth of my body, and her chest makes tiny kicks up and down. ‘You’re being very brave, but you don’t have to be, if you don’t want.’ After we’ve watched the black-sailed ship set off and turn out of sight, and still she’s made no response, I say, ‘Well, as it happens, I have a plan.’
Before leaving, I say to Sporco, ‘You go back home.’ His tail halts mid-air and begins to droop, until I add. ‘You can look after my torta until I return. Make sure it’s safe.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Sporco agrees enthusiastically, the hair about his shoulders puffing up with the pride. He goes, but comes back. ‘Goodbye, La Perla. See you again soon.’ He hazards one last attempt at smelling her behind.
‘Goodbye, sir,’ she says emphatically, avoiding him.
* * *
Crossing the city, La Perla trails a few steps behind me, head low, but otherwise continuing to show no emotion. I try to cheer her up, nodding at passing sights. ‘Look at that cat watching the singing gondolier.’ ‘You see that funny lady with a ship-shape hat?’ ‘What a family, marching to lunch in identical outfits.’ She doesn’t involve herself in my conversation. And for my part, I grow more anxious than usual at being away so long away from my den, and wonder again if the creaking weathervane and my curious pangs had any meaning.
The Mulhernes, the people I’m taking her to, are a wealthy couple that settled in the city in their middle age ‘for its art, its weather and its distance from the gossipers of County Cork,’ I heard the wife comment once. She’s tiny, always beautifully dressed in layers of silk and batiste, and as energetic as a clock spring, whilst her husband, a rangy, jovial mischief-maker, is blind. She acts as his eyes to the city. It’s been at least a decade since they discovered me, at the entrance to my alcove. ‘Poor creature, all on his own. What’s he waiting for?’ she said. ‘Someone coming on a ship? It breaks my heart.’ Her husband got down on to the filthy flagstones to cuddle me. ‘He’s ever so noble,’ he said. ‘Let’s take him home, my darling. Would you like to come home with us? You’re quite enchanting.’
It was tempting—they were clearly kind-hearted and the golden barge they arrived to church in, with its crew of smartly dressed attendants, suggested a luxurious home—but I didn’t go. Not then, nor on any of the subsequent occasions they tried to cajole me. They lived in the north of the city, too far from the cathedral to be practical for me. I did, however, occasionally take ‘lost causes’ to their door. Not dogs like Sporco, who are more or less happy on the streets, but ones like La Perla, who wouldn’t stand a chance anywhere else.
‘Isn’t it a paradise, Perlita?’ I say, once we arrive at the gates of the palazzo. ‘You don’t often find gardens like this in the city, do you?’ No reply. ‘And the Mulhernes, you couldn’t have kinder people. They’ll spoil you rotten. Dogs are their
family. They adore them. Did I tell you about the food here? They have, I don’t know, three chefs? Tortine, ah, like you’ve never had. Rich pies with ricotta and mushrooms and all sorts. That’s right, you’ll have to watch it, Perlita, or you’ll get dumpy. You don’t want to lose that figure of yours.’
She pivots one eye towards me and holds it there. ‘If they’re so kind, why don’t you live with them? You don’t have a master or a mistress either. You don’t have a real home.’
Her barb catches me by surprise. I open my mouth to reply, but nothing comes out, so I push open the gate and motion for her to enter.
The gardens have got overgrown and I realize it must have been a few years since I was here. Then, it was an organized riot of colour, now lanky weeds and nettles have sprung up between the terraces, and long fingers of ivy have entrapped the company of statues. For a moment I fear the couple may have moved on—or worse—when, amidst an excitement of barks, a pack of dogs emerge from the house and straight away engulf us. La Perla makes a display of distress as two terriers and old Spinone take the measure of her.
‘That will do! Quiet, you rabble.’ An old man chuckles, shuffling forth, feeling his way down the steps. ‘Enough of your histrionics.’ I don’t recognize him for a moment. His hair has thinned to nothing, his ruddy cheeks hollowed and I’m reminded, as I so often am, how quickly time does its work, on humans and dogs and all. That is their curse, the opposite of my own: the never-ending ache of long life.
‘What is it?’ says his wife, bustling out, a vision of tulle in peacock colours. She takes her husband by the arm to guide him down.
‘Something has caught the attention of these monsters.’
‘Good grief,’ she says, spotting me. ‘He’s returned.’
The husband stops dead. ‘Who? Not our friend from the cathedral?’
‘The very same. How old must he be now?’
Being blind, her husband looks to where he thinks I am and holds out his arms. ‘Welcome, friend. Our valiant Robin Hood. Have you brought us something, as you used to, years ago?’
Tomorrow Page 4