Tomorrow

by Damian Dibben

  ‘He has,’ his wife says, her face muddling at the sight of my companion. I fear she may reject La Perla, who’s hunched up like an old cat, with an expression that is more spiteful than frightened. I have in mind to tell her to stand straight and look more desirable, when the old man drops to his knees and, by luck, catches her in his arms.

  ‘She’s gorgeous, just gorgeous,’ he says as she tries to free herself. ‘We’ve room for one more, haven’t we, my darling?’

  His wife gives a long-suffering laugh and rests her hand on the top of my head. ‘I’d prefer it was this one. Come inside all and let’s eat.’

  I’m desperate to get back, but I go with La Perla into the palazzo to make sure she settles. Within, I find the same sumptuous pigsty I remember, a palace for animals, the entire piano nobile given over to their welfare, every priceless chaise and settee flattened, discoloured and furred by dogs and an assortment of other animals—cats, two rabbits in a birdcage and a parrot sitting on a perch by the window. (When I first came to the place, I was put in mind of Queen Henrietta Maria’s eccentric, unruly menagerie at Somerset House in old London.) The animals’ food is served up in grand, eccentric style in a string of mismatching china bowls in front of the fireplace.

  ‘I don’t like these people,’ La Perla asides to me, making a point of refusing her meal.

  ‘That’s not fair, Perlita, they’re very kind.’

  ‘So you keep saying. But I shan’t stay here. It doesn’t suit me.’

  ‘It will have to.’ The sharpness of my tone surprises her. I soften. ‘La Perla, this is a good place.’ I want to tell her that she won’t do better, that she’s old and difficult, too cowardly to scavenge for fish bones in the wharves and too fussy to eat them. I want to tell her how lucky she has been to have had Beatricia in the first place, when dogs like Sporco were tied to a pontoon post as a puppy and left for dead. ‘You’ll have a chance here,’ I say. ‘You’ll make new friends.’

  She shows her teeth and before I know it, she’s bitten me on the ear, sharply, drawing blood. She runs to a corner to sulk. My heart could break for her, the smallness of her indignation, the tininess of her existence. Poor soul. I go to her and sit with her a while longer. The lady of the house is watching us, brows bunched together as she tries to fathom who or what I am.

  ‘Now, where’s the new arrival?’ her husband is saying, holding up a treat as he feels along the litter. I kiss La Perla on the nose. ‘You’re a good sort, La Perla,’ I say and leave the room.

  Hurrying home for the second time in a day, I’m so preoccupied by visions of her in her new home, keeping her distance from everyone, being brittle if they try to be friendly, even as she is breaking to pieces inside, that I make a wrong turn and find myself in the street where half a dozen butcher’s shops are bunched together. I always avoid this loathsome thoroughfare, revolted by the stench of meat, by the blood-sloshed, offal-coated cobbles, but now I must pass along it or retrace my steps entirely. It’s more frenetic than anywhere. Humans, with almost savage end-of-day urgency, thumb coins into butchers’ palms and take hold of packets of flesh, as packs of wide-eyed dogs linger about, spellbound by the trophies that hang in every window. ‘Some of that would go down nicely,’ or, ‘What I’d give for a piece of it,’ they murmur to one another, eyeing up headless rabbits and bolts of fatty entrails stockinged in red string. I double my speed.

  By the time I get back to Dorsoduro and crown the bridge before the cathedral, I’m morose to my bones. So often, even after all these years, the phenomenon of the view thrills me—two great churches separated by the mouth of the grand canal, the forest of masts and rigging in between, the ever-changing miasma of odours that sweeten the air, the galleons gliding away, the sheer possibility of it all—but not tonight. I’m beset with indefinable anger. I study the front of my cathedral, scowling at the pale flight of steps, the bronze doors shut for the evening, and it could be yesterday that my master and I stood in front of them, when the building was brand new, he chatting along to me. ‘And the stone is Istrian, no? You see how the marble dust catches the light?’

  Sporco is waiting at the entrance to my den, lying with his head angled towards the place I stowed my torta. I know he won’t have touched it, in that way he can be trusted, but all the same I’m in no mood to be sociable. When he notices me approaching, he gets to his feet, tail spinning. ‘I kept an eye, just as you asked—all is safe.’ He licks his lips.

  I push past him into my den and sink at the sight of it. It’s a prison: barely large enough to contain me, three decrepit walls that still smell, even after all this time of wet rope. This is how I live? This is what I have to show for myself? ‘Why don’t you live with them?’ La Perla had said before. ‘You don’t have a master or a mistress either. You don’t have a real home.’ She’s right. No matter the wonders I have seen, or the palaces I once lived in, I’m unrooted, a wanderer, a vagrant. ‘One day we’ll settle down. One day we’ll find a home,’ my master always promised. We never did. I have no home. He was my home. I paw the torta from the corner. This morning it had filled me with delight, but now it smells ordinary and stale. I slip down a mouthful, but all I seem to taste is the bile inching up from my stomach. Sporco’s shadow hangs over me and his tail slaps, infuriatingly, against the wall. I catch up another piece and swallow. What does my master look like now? Is he changed? Is his aroma the same? Midnight in a tall forest, stiff parchment paper and a whisper of pine sap.

  ‘It is meat, isn’t it? You can’t fool me.’

  ‘Get out! Out!’

  Sporco skitters away.

  ‘A hole in the ground is a hole in the ground,’ Beatricia’s son had said earlier, pocketing his mother’s pearls. If he had love for her once, it was gone. I bite into a piece of pastry, chomping joylessly, before I remember, as I always try to, the phrase my master always used when things didn’t go our way.

  ‘Tomorrow we begin again,’ he’d say, sometimes over a trivial thing, a burnt dinner, or our coach getting stuck in mud, but other times, uttered in defiance, a call to hope, when something had shaken us to our cores.

  I calm down, gradually, and a while later I look round for Sporco. He sits at a remove, hunched, ears wilted, eyes scooped together—no longer smiling. I should be kinder to him, for he is a lost soul too. ‘I am sorry, friend.’ I nudge the pieces of torta out into the open. ‘Here.’ At first he hangs back, but eventually his tail reanimates to a half-speed loop and he returns. ‘Eat,’ I say, stepping back. ‘Finish it.’ No sooner have I spoken, than a chunk has vanished down his throat, and another and another until it’s all gone and he’s lashing the cobbles clean.

  Tomorrow we begin again.

  A thought strikes me: that tonight, for once, I should treat myself. I should give myself a dose of splendour, of magnificence, to remember the old days. That’s what my master would do.

  ‘I shall sleep somewhere else this evening,’ I say to Sporco, hesitating before adding, ‘come with me, if you like?’ Sporco’s ears stick up.

  * * *

  We go to the opera house on the other side of the Rialto. I know it’s closed today, a Sunday, and also how to break in. Like La Perla, Sporco has barely ventured beyond the spit of land he inhabits, its little grid of streets and canals, and I have the sense, though he tries to hide it, he’s spooked to venture so far from home, halting whenever he hears footsteps approach and backing into the shadows, until they’ve passed.

  We steal along a ledge beside a back canal and under a gate into a vaulted space at the rear of theatre where the scenery is kept. I come to the opera from time to time, mostly lingering in the piazza at the front, craning my ear to the thrum of music inside, but sometimes I enter when everyone has gone for the night.

  The scene dock is perky with aromas of flax, cedar oil and varnish. A silvery gleam filters through skylight. Painted flats, as high as the room, lean against the wall, cycl
oramas of faraway places, mysterious in the half-light. There’s one of a turreted castle, nestled amongst white-tipped mountains; another of a terracotta palace rising up from an emerald jungle; a third of silver halls with onion-shaped roofs against an icy shoreline.

  ‘What are those?’ Sporco asks, tilting his head at them.

  ‘Those? Those are the realms,’ I say with pride. ‘All the places you can voyage to. Though some of them have been lost in time.’

  ‘The realms?’ he says, enjoying the sound of it in his mouth, and repeating it. ‘I like them, I do.’

  ‘The world beyond our sea is a more surprising place than you could ever imagine.’

  Sporco’s gaze lingers on a backdrop of a pine forest in winter, a winding path disappearing into the snow. ‘This is where we’re sleeping?’

  I lead the way along a passage into the auditorium. Half a dozen theatre chandeliers hang at head height, extinguished for the night, groaning under their weight, brass branches and festoons of crystal drops, fantastical jellyfish in a dark sea. We jump down into the stalls and pass up the aisle, Sporco ogling the stage set, an audacious vignette of ancient times, columns receding in a false perspective.

  I will never forget my first time in an opera house, in Mantua, how my fur tingled at the sight of a thousand golden stalls honeycombed to the ceiling, every box a secret in itself: a conjuration, two, three or four humans in their own little plays; candlelight catching the glint of enrapt eyes and tremors of gilt thread, the thrill of scandal whispered behind hands. When the curtains opened and the music began—when I first felt the soar of bow on strings in that room—my insides ached with joy. The piece we saw that night was as strange and beguiling as a dream. A young shepherd, a lyrist, takes a ferry to a treacherous underworld in search of his bride. He meets a god king there who has a face of shadow and a crown of fire and plays a melody for him—to win back his beloved. When I was very young, I hadn’t understood music, it was just an incoherent babble, but that night in Mantua I grasped the advantage that humans had over our species, to create such marvels from contraptions of wood and metal, from mere thin air.

  We go upstairs and nudge through a door into the royal box with its scent of beeswax polish, velvet, shellac. ‘Here we shall sleep,’ I say, nodding at the four silked armchairs. ‘Kings and emperors have put their backsides on those seats.’

  Sporco giggles and in a flash he’s jumped up on one. He circles three times and drops down in a ball. He’ll be dirtying the fabric—artisans would have spent weeks working on the silk of that chair—but let him enjoy it. I mount the adjacent throne and survey the empty stage. The silence is surprising, the absence of water lapping against pier stones, a ringing, cushioned hush in its place. ‘We should stay every night,’ Sporco says and within moments his eyes are closed.

  Yes, he is a lost soul like I.

  I witnessed his abandonment. I woke at dawn, three years ago, at the entrance to my hideaway and noticed a young man waiting on a pontoon on the other side of the water. He was twitchy, kept looking at his pocket watch, a holdall slung from one shoulder and a bundle of books tied with rope from the other. A girl hurried on to the pontoon, excited and apologetic. She too had a travelling case, which he tossed into a boat, along with his own luggage. She was no more than fifteen, neat and timid, whilst he was older by a number of years, and had a kind of dishevelled self-importance.

  I hadn’t seen the puppy—it had been enfolded under her cloak—but it yapped when she set it down, a bundle of gold wool skittering against its leash, a pup of five weeks. But the man refused to let him come. There was an argument, angry whispers echoing across the water. The scoundrel fastened the dog to a post and hastened the girl into the boat. It devastated her to have to leave her pet, but she was too in awe of the rake. My breath quickened as he jumped aboard and cast off towards the sea, pushing hard down on the oars.

  ‘No! Come back!’ I barked and the girl, eyes stung with tears, looked round to see where the noise came from. The poor puppy pulled against its leash, whining as his mistress vanished round the curve of the water.

  I set off immediately for the abandoned puppy through the city, over the Rialto, double backing, all to arrive at a short distance from where I started. I untied his leash and asked if he’d like to come with me, but he just sat, confused, his eyes on the horizon. Eventually, I returned to my own lookout. He stayed for days, on the opposite side of the canal. After a while I found it too heartbreaking to watch and found myself looking in the opposite direction. The next time I dared peek, he was gone.

  Two months passed before I chanced on him again. He had filled out into a dog, caked in dirt and reeking of the street. And, though he was surly and streetwise to begin with, I made a point of watching out for him. I never once mentioned the pontoon to him and, though I always hoped he had somehow blotted the memory from his mind, I knew it certainly must lurk there. Worse: it probably shaped everything in his life.

  Indeed, we are all lost souls. He, I, La Perla. And it gives me no solace that I have been lost longer than any, a hundred and twenty-seven years since my master vanished on our trip to the cathedral.

  At once I recall the golden weathervane and the abrupt twitches of joy I had this morning, and fear wildfires through me: What if he comes tonight? Of all nights, when I’m sleeping in another place. I sit bolt upright, resolved to return, then dismiss the idea, calling to mind the damp walls of my alcove. I’m being superstitious, that’s all. I sit back down and curl up to sleep.

  ‘Why, after a hundred and twenty-seven years, would he come tonight?’

  2

  THE SLAYED GIANT

  Venice, August 1688

  It was nearly eighty years after the frost fair in Whitehall, that we went to visit Venice, my first time there. I’d never seen a city floating in the sea. As we’d approached the Embankment, my master grew more and more excited. ‘This is the place,’ he said. ‘Great, great city, audacious republic, tiny but colossal. La Serenissima. Vain perhaps, self-regarding, but splendid, splendid. And enlightened too. Such artistry is here. You think I’m mad, don’t you?’ He laughed, stroking the top of my head. ‘But prepare for rare treasures, my champion.’ I straightened my spine and lifted my ears to the wind. It seemed like decades since I’d heard him talk in that way, or seen his eyes spark, a charge of energy about him, bright and vital as he used to be.

  His life, and thus mine, could be divided into two parts. The first thirty years, from when I was a puppy, travelling between the various courts of Europe—first at Elsinore, then London, Prague, Paris, Madrid and so on—he in employ of the palace, chiefly as a doctor, but often more than that, as he had numerous talents and interests, from astronomy to engineering and the science of plants. We lived those years in comfort at the very least, and often in luxury.

  The second phase of our lives had started in Amsterdam, on a dreadful August night that I try to think about as little as possible. After it, my master had embarked on his ‘new beginning,’ his mission to be a doctor on the battlefield. To atone. For decades we trailed armies, sought out war—of which there seemed an endless supply in those years—and attended the injured, in body and mind. It was gruelling work and it took its toll. My master’s character, and no doubt mine, gradually transfigured, as we became entirely practical creatures and a good deal of joy was washed from our lives.

  Of course, it was not total hardship. Apart from the fact that years could pass between one battle and the next, there were periods when my master would enforce a break and we’d leave the trail of armies for a while. Usually we’d return to one of the courts we’d lived in before and my master would seek a spell of employment, partly for money, partly to replenish our supplies, but also to bask a little in the splendour of the old days. But sometimes he would take time off from even that and we would make an excursion that involved no work at all. ‘Just you and I,’ as he said. Our trip
to Venice was such an interlude. So we were tired, dirty, our heads still full with the racket of armies, but in those two days we found our spirits again. Who knew they would be our last together.

  We took private lodgings in a tumbledown palazzo near the Rialto, an inscrutable landlady showing us to a suite on the first floor. ‘È perfetto,’ my master said with a smile, as he pushed open a pair of shutters, so light streamed in from the Grand Canal. I did not find the room as inviting as he, with its mismatch of furniture, bare walls and peeling plasterwork. In particular, the bed, raised from the floor like a sepulchre, with a pair of mahogany bears cresting the headboard, had a maudlin feel, but I was so accustomed to the filth of army camps by then, to sodden ground and leaking bivouacs, it was a relief to be there.

  ‘My companion and I have come especially to see the new cathedral,’ my master told the landlady. ‘La nuova cattedrale. Abbiamo sentito è magnifico.’ He hoped for a reaction, but received none. ‘What goes on in the piazzale there?’ he asked instead.

  She whisked her hand and shrugged. ‘Festa di San Rocco.’

  My master became even more excited. ‘The feast of St Roch, do you hear, my champion? The patron saint of dogs himself. Ha. Of course! Where are we? August. How auspicious to arrive today. There will be dancing for sure, at the Festa di San Rocco. La danza?’ He nodded at the lady before setting off in a jig across the room.

  He washed, changed, unpacked his things, stowing them in tidy piles. (I had always loved his neatness, it calmed me.) ‘We shall view the cathedral first at a distance, from the Piazzetta at San Marco. Then we shall visit in person tomorrow. Much better to tease ourselves a little; we’ve waited so long. What say you, my champion? In any case, we need to go in the early morning: it will seem as if created for us.’

  We set off into the boisterous throng of streets. I don’t know how many times he’d visited in the past—before I came into the world—but he knew his way around like a local. We came from an alley, through an arch into a shock of space and sunlight and he laughed. ‘The greatest rectangle in all civilization. That’s what I used to call it. I still do. Does it not make your hairs stand on end? Even you, my virtuoso, who has so many.’