Tomorrow

by Damian Dibben

  No one noticed me. Why should they? I was just a dog like any other. Only I knew the obscure secret of my age. I often passed by the little palazzo where we’d taken lodgings. ‘My companion and I have come especially to see the new cathedral.’ One day I found the doors open and voices coming from the upstairs windows where our room was. It was ludicrous in the extreme to think my master might have been there, just a short journey from the place we’d been separated, but I was too muddled by loss to be logical. I ran up the stairs and nudged through the door. I found an office, a pawnbroker’s den, with shelves of random chattels where the great mahogany bed had been. How it saddened me to find the pair of bears gone. A brash young broker, his feet on the desk, was shaking his head as an old man offered desperate pleas.

  ‘See it from my point of view,’ the pawnbroker bragged, ‘if I help you, I have to help everyone.’ He noticed me and cursed, half getting to his feet. ‘Out of here! Get out.’

  By then, bitter cold had taken hold again and turned the sky to iron. In the streets, the people lucky enough to have cloaks or furs had buttoned them tight against the north wind. As a crowd of children herded past me, I saw him, my master, his back to me, waiting on the steps of an alleyway church, curled sandy hair, a grey cloak thrown over his shoulder. He has gone mad, I thought, he’s waiting at the wrong doors. That is not our cathedral. I hollered at him and when he moved off, I chased him down the street, surprised by his cologne—bergamot and bitter orange—wondering if it was a new habit of his to wear it.

  Finally I overtook him. He was not my master. This man had a small nose, thin lips and an ineffectual air, the opposite of my master. He’d done me no harm, but I glowered at him nonetheless.

  Over the years I have made many human friends, all gone now, bones cold under the ground or dissolved beneath the sea, but my first true companion in Venice was Angelique. I came upon her outside Florian’s in San Marco, secreted beneath the arcade, sun slanting against her face, a book open in front of her. I was intrigued that she sat alone, before I realized I knew her already. She lived in an apricot palazzo close to my cathedral and passed me sometimes, head down, trailing a scent of alkanet and belladonna. She was about thirty I guessed, and had a shy beauty, somehow enhanced by the porcelain-thin cleft that ran from her nose to her mouth, slightly buckling her upper lip.

  She noticed me. ‘Je pense que nous nous connaissons?’ she said, her voice as warm as the sunlight on the pages of her book. I was drawn to her side, where I found her odour was more mysterious than I’d realized: like a souk at night, or an untamed tropical garden. She took off her glove, lay her hand on my neck and the heat of it sent a tremor down my spine. ‘You’re a gentleman, no? A softly spoken knight?’ After coffee, she stood up. ‘I have to go. Enchanté, mon seigneur,’ she said, curtsying. I followed at a distance. ‘You’re coming?’ she said.

  I had never intended to take another master or a mistress, it was unthinkable, and I certainly would not have accepted her offer to stay in her house had she not lived in plain sight of the cathedral—but when she opened her door and beckoned me with a smile, I caught once more her scent of alkanet and belladonna—I could not resist.

  Her situation at home was unhappy. Her brooding husband, a fur merchant, lived separately on the palazzo’s piano nobile—the first floor, as the Italians call it—and only ever spoke to her to scold or criticize. He had many personal callers, courtesans who would trail mockingly up and down past Angelique’s rooms at the back of the building, but even then he would often come in the dead of night, pull down his breeches and rut her from behind.

  Despite this, and the fact, I sensed, she’d lost a child, as she often talked to a picture of a dreamy-eyed girl that hung over the fireplace, she was contagious with unexpected joy. She, like my master, took interest in things and people that others of her rank would ignore. We were forever going on mischievous trips, to spice bazaars or silk markets or gem emporiums. I recall her closing her eyes as she touched the faces of statues, or stifling giggles at a recital of harpsichords, or insisting we slip, uninvited, into a gondoliers’ dance.

  In time she grew sick, turning first hot, then so cold that her skin coarsened like rock. All her enticing aromas deserted her, the whites of her eyes browned, her kidneys and liver stank of abscesses and diarrhoea slipped down her legs, browning her petticoats. I watched, ears folded back, as she vomited thick nubs of blood, and I longed for my master, that he might help her with one of his medicines. She shivered for days beneath a blanket and her husband never came. One night, she pushed open her windows to find the sky awash with stars. She sat, out of breath, peering up at them, then turned to me, and her smile became a question mark.

  After they’d put her body into a crate, rolled it down the stairs and taken it away, her husband chained me up in the cellar like a rat-catcher, until I found a chance to escape and return to the cathedral steps. It was some months later when it struck me, quite plainly, that the picture of the girl that she spoke to had a cleft above her lip too and was not her daughter, but her younger self.

  Some years later, I met Jerome, a fast-talking, always-laughing bachelor, who rented rooms behind the cathedral. In his younger days, I was certain, he’d had a daring life at sea, and though his work was no longer intrepid, filling ledgers with information about ships, he kept his sense of adventure. His rooms were alive with fascinating comings and goings, all-night card games, musicians and artists. The various ladies in his life were so charmed by him, and so likeable and fascinating themselves, there was never any rancour. He had a manservant, Benjamin, who bore the scars of slave ships, and was a lion of a human: unprejudiced, intelligent and almost heartbreakingly faithful. Jerome returned one night drenched in blood, a gash in his abdomen, his fingers bare where he’d been robbed of his jewels and died in Benjamin’s arms. The poor man cried for days on end, and when Jerome’s plain sister arrived with her ungracious children, she gave Benjamin short shrift, refusing even his request for a keepsake of his master’s hair. After the funeral, I went with him, saw him off on a ship for the mainland—to what I have no idea—and he was crying still.

  I returned to Jerome’s freshly filled grave and lurked into the night, growing furious with the world: the trickery of it, the pointlessness, humans and animals born simply to suffer, for the pain to invariably worsen with age, for anguish to thicken and veins clog, until they were skidding down to death, to one of the cold-hearted graves that lay about me. Why? Even the fortunate people, those whose special lives began in cosy wood-panelled nurseries, a trill of softly spoken humans leaning over the cot, even they were doomed, before long, to disease or madness, and certainly death. And for dogs, meaner still, more than a decade of existence was miraculous before limbs stiffened, backs ached, tumours grew from ravages of matter, memory broke up and dissolved, breath rattled, and then...

  I had never felt as lonely as I did in that churchyard. In the morning I went to cathedral and looked at the painting of the slayed giant. I’d always focused on the dead giant, but it was the boy who gave me hope that day. That and my master’s words:

  ‘Tomorrow we begin again.’

  * * *

  Times changed, over the passage of drizzled autumns, long winters and stenching summers, and fashions too: the age of powder and panniers, of elaborate headdresses and white wigs. Sometimes I’d wake up, in the strange half-light of early morning, or puzzled and headachy from a daytime nap, and forget which era I was in. In my mind, I’d slipped back to a past time, half a century ago or more, when smells were different, softer, harsher, coarser, gentler, an age when men wore wide ruffs or short boots or lace collars, and drank mead, eau-de-vie, juniper gin, corn brandy, Armagnac. Sometimes I’d even return to the time when we were still together, my master and I. I’d wake, puffed up and proud, my fur like velvet. For minutes, hours sometimes, I felt so content, so warmed through, so excited by possibilities, that I didn’t care that it
had only been a fantasy.

  Awake, I thought of him ceaselessly. I checked every shoe and boot that passed. Even when I was occupied with other thoughts or people, he reappeared in an endless loop, with every tenth beat of my heart. And lurking beyond him, always, in the dark architecture of my mind, was Vilder, the man who had tried to kill me. The monster—I was sure—who had taken my beloved.

  Such was my vigil. Over the decades I would make new companions: soldiers, dukes, gondoliers, marble-cutters. But they would die, all of them, from disease, or old age. And I’d become friends with dogs—street dogs, house dogs, palazzo dogs—and they’d perish too. A person who keeps dogs will lose many in their lifetime. I was a dog who lost people. Time took from me everyone and everything I’d fallen in love with.

  But I was sure, in the very core of me, that one day my true master would return. For if I was still alive, surely so was he.

  4

  THE DELUGE

  Venice, May 1815

  In my dream, the weathervane, the golden goddess astride the customs house, comes to life at dawn. The boatmen and customs counters, still sleepy as they arrive for work, don’t notice the miniature spirit spring from her perch and take to the amethyst sky, little wings carrying her across the city, over the canals and bell towers to the opera house. She finds the front doors barred, but slips through the glass, then the walls, and into the auditorium. She circles once, her shadow flying fast across the painted dome of heavens, before coming to land on the balustrade of the royal box. Two dogs are fast asleep there, I one of them. She whispers in my ear, telling of good news...

  In the opera house, I wake and stand straight up, listening. There is an unusual clarity in my head and all around me. It’s morning and several theatre chandeliers, now lit, are being raised. The jingle of glass is both ethereal and lucid. Light inches up the wall of the stall, making the crimson silk throb. My fur tingles, inexplicably so. I steal from my chair and peer over the parapet. A lady is pacing the stage, half in costume. A pair of set decorators are at work, whilst a handful of other men lounge about the stalls. Everything is sharp and clear, but has a peculiar otherworldliness too. A pianist strikes up and the costumed lady begins to sing musical scales, notes rising to a falsetto, descending, then rising again.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Sporco says.

  ‘Sssh!’ I tell him, not because I’m frightened of being discovered—what can they do but throw us out?—but so I can understand the sensations that are assailing me.

  Doors below swing open and a man strides in, velvet jacket, grey ponytail, self-important, the director, with a trail of assistants in his wake. He claps. ‘Buongiorno, tutti. Tancredi by Gioachino Rossini,’ he declares. ‘Act One, Argino’s palace in Syracuse.’

  ‘Let’s go,’ I say.

  Leaving the compartment and retracing our steps down to the front hall, I feel dizzy, the stairs seem alive and unanchored to the press of my paws. At the bottom, the front doors are still locked, but a barred window, close to the ground, is open. Drawn to it, I put my snout through and take a draught of the air outside—and at once a heady charge shakes through me as I realize.

  He is here. My master has returned to the city.

  For an insane moment, I believe it, but almost immediately I discount the notion as fantasy. It’s impossible I could smell him even if he was. But it’s not a smell; it’s a sense. That special awareness I always had for my master, which I believe all dogs possess for the ones they love. In the decades we were together, there were a handful of times he had to hurry off and leave me with a friend. He might be gone for days, but I knew precisely when he would return, when I’d hear his carriage approach. I put my face to the window again, but this time I listen rather than smell, closing my eyes to the infinite sounds of the city, and suddenly I can see him, in my mind’s eye. I can see my master ascend the steps of the cathedral and halt before the front door, looking for me.

  He is here.

  My heart races. I try, idiotically, to push through the bars of the window, but they’re too close together.

  ‘What’s happened?’ says Sporco.

  I turn from the window and rush past him—no time for his clowning now—and dive through the doors into the auditorium. ‘I’m coming! I’m coming!’ I bark to my master. It’s lunacy: he can’t hear me inside the building. I pound down the aisle through the theatre. Its thousand honeycomb stalls are the colour of galaxies. A new stage flat is coming to land: pretend castle, flying buttresses and dark orange sky. ‘I’m here!’

  ‘Che cos’è?’ says the director, appalled. ‘Dogs? Who brought dogs in here?’

  I bound on to the stage and the opera singer gasps and gallops to the wings, half her costume coming off in a cloud behind her. Sporco scampers after us, thinking it’s a game. ‘Whose dogs are these?’ bawls the director, as everyone in the stalls gets to their feet.

  I race behind the stage, to the scene dock where we entered, but the way to it is locked. I double back, avoiding the gang of theatre people pursuing us, into a corridor where the dressing rooms are, flying in and out of each, searching for an escape, Sporco scampering at my heels, laughing. ‘Fun, eh? Chases. Adventures. Hurrah!’ Going into the last of the rooms, the door slams shut behind us.

  ‘They can stay there until someone comes for then,’ says the director behind it, and a lock turns.

  I try to push the door open, bashing at the handle. ‘Let me out! Let me out!’ But all the footsteps retreat and there comes the sound of another door slamming shut at the end of the passage, blocking all sound completely. ‘Let me out!’ The room doesn’t even have a window. ‘Let me out!’ I circle the walls, bashing through the congregation of mannequins that are pinned with costumes. I go round and round, every time returning to the door, hammering my shoulder against it, dragging my claws up and down against the lock. ‘Let me go!’ I’ve become one of those halfwit dogs that whines for things it’ll never receive. Sporco watches me, no longer having fun, his ears stuck out in bewilderment.

  Calm, I eventually tell myself. He is here, that is all that matters. I have waited and he has come. I am sure of it. To escape I must be methodical and calm. My chest heaves. Methodical. No sooner does my panic melt, it comes again, for I can’t sense him any more. I snout the air for that special odour—midnight in the tall forest, stiff parchment paper, a whisper of pine sap—but there’s nothing. I close my eyes, try to imagine him on the steps of the cathedral, but in my panic I can’t remember what he looks like. I bark and bark until I have no voice left.

  Finally, in the afternoon, footsteps return, the door is unlocked and opened. ‘I must go,’ I pant to Sporco, tearing out before anyone can stop me through a jumble of legs, dressers with armfuls of clothes, singers readying for the show. This time, the scene dock is open, I charge across it and exit back on to the canal-way. Perhaps it’s just the excitement of escape, but I’m sure I sense him again, a scintilla of him.

  On I gallop, to Dorsoduro, back to my alcove, on fire inside—passages, canal-ways, bridges, until at last the cathedral rises from the sea, the sun behind it, like a giant with its back turned. I have looked on that building a thousand times, but never has my heart raced so fast.

  I go to the steps, trance-like, on air it seems, burning all over, the colours and smells of the city so intense I could throw my head back and howl. A mob of choristers—boys in white surplices, boisterous and noisy—are on the threshold of the church, waiting to be issued in for evensong. ‘Buonasera, cane,’ they say as I barge through.

  I press my nose to the stones. At once a shock: he was here! Yes. But no sooner have I caught the scent it eludes me. ‘Buonasera, Signor Cane.’ Two children stroke me and I snap them away and they laugh. I zigzag down, probing each step. Dizzying shreds of him. Midnight in a tall forest, stiff parchment paper, a whisper of pine sap. The choir master gives an order, choristers file in, and I go with th
em.

  The church is like a dusky jewel-box inside. Statues watch me and sweet smoke hangs in the air: camphor, sandalwood, myrrh, gum Arabic. No blend on earth is more thrilling or appalling. For a century congregations have poured in and out, but the incense survives. I inch forward, peering up at the cupola.

  ‘Like a great crown upon our heads, is it not?’

  He turned on the spot and a shaft of light from a high window slanted on his face. The organ starts up, a morose end-of-the-world dirge that plunges right through me. I pad round, behind the altar, to the side chapel.

  ‘And look, the fresco there. Is it Titian?’

  The slayed giant, colours muted now. The warrior upside down, head twisted, spilt blood. The spot where his scarf fell still empty. I paste my nostrils to the tiles, inhaling over and over.

  I return to the front steps and survey the port, back straight, ears alert. The city is not as it was yesterday, not as it has been for a hundred and twenty-seven years. It rings with a new possibility. A troop ship is docking, soldiers coming ashore. He’s not amongst them. I snout along the quay, this way and that, like one of those lunatic spaniels maddened by a scent it can’t trace. There’s no proof of my master, no certainty, but still I’m teased by the sense of him.

  I wait, sitting precisely halfway up the steps, in the perfect place, darting my head to every passing human. Minutes pass, then hours, and I begin to wonder if my mind is playing tricks, after the upset of La Perla yesterday. I look up at the golden weathervane, but she is still and rooted to her perch. Gradually, my conviction begins to fall away. I fret about whether I should go and search other places, the northern harbour perhaps, or even to the Arsenale in the east, but I’m too frightened to move: ‘If we lose one another, my champion, wait for me on the steps. Just here, by the door.’