Alena: A Novel

by Pastan, Rachel

  “There’s practically no point even being here,” said April. “They’ll want to know what I saw, and I’ll have to say I saw Ellsworth Dietz slip his hand down Margy Donovan’s waistband as they were waiting for the vaporetto!” “They” were her clients, agribusiness magnates mostly.

  “I heard she paid just over a million for that Hockney,” Louise said, meaning Margy Donovan. “The smudgy one.”

  “No, not a Hockney, it was a Chetwith.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Oh, Chetwith!” April said. “I heard his show at Gagosian bombed, they hardly sold anything.”

  “No, no,” said Sarabeth. “Bernard Augustin bought up the whole show. Betsy Green told me, and she should know.”

  “Not the whole show—not of Chetwith!” April was appalled.

  “Those chain-link pieces that sort of sag on the wall. He thinks Chetwith is the new Damien Hirst.”

  “But why is he buying at all?” April asked. “I heard he shut up the whole museum. The Nauk. After . . . you know.”

  “Can’t he still buy?” Louise demanded. “For his own pleasure?”

  “Drowning his sorrows in art,” Sarabeth said. “Art therapy.”

  “I don’t understand,” April said. “I thought he was gay.”

  Louise fanned her hand in front of her face. “Yes, he’s gay, of course. Just look at his ties. But they were close. They were like brother and sister!”

  “He couldn’t run the place without her,” Sarabeth said. “It was all her, the Nauk. Her taste. He just wrote the checks.”

  “I heard he warned her against swimming alone,” Louise said. “But she was a free spirit!”

  “Look,” Sarabeth said suddenly. She was taller than the rest of us and could see, a bit, over the crowd. “There he is.”

  We swiveled our heads in the direction hers, periscope-like, pointed. For a moment I saw the big head with the cropped salt-and-pepper hair floating like a grim moon over that surging sea of well-dressed humanity. He looked like a man who had lost his way and found himself in a rank jungle full of monkeys and mosquitoes.

  “I don’t feel . . .” Louise said. She leaned heavily against me, so that I teetered and almost fell against April.

  “Let’s get her some air,” Sarabeth commanded.

  I took one arm and Sarabeth took the other, and somehow we half guided, half dragged Louise, who was sweating and greenish, out into the dusty heat. She threw a hand across her face to shield her eyes, already behind dark glasses, from the glare. “If I could just lie down for a moment,” she said, alarming us with her apparent intention of depositing herself on the dusty Giardini path.

  April spied a bench behind us in the blazing sun. “Let’s just get you over there,” she said.

  Louise nodded. She took a step and stumbled over nothing. Her solid, black-clad body slumped sideways like a blunt needle on an instrument dial slipping suddenly to zero. Then she was on the ground. We knelt around her.

  “Louise!” April cupped her shoulder.

  “She’s fainted,” Sarabeth said. “Go get help!” She was looking at me.

  “How?” I cried. Oh, what were we doing in a city without cars! What did they do in emergencies? Did amphibious vehicles roll up out of the murky water? Did uniformed men appear bearing litters? I looked around for a policeman, a guard, someone in uniform, but there were only well-dressed citizens of the world buzzing from pavilion to pavilion like flies.

  “There must be an office! A guard booth. Go and see!”

  I stood up and looked wildly around. Which way to go? Should I run back down to the busy vaporetto landing? Into the pavilion? I was just turning toward the steps when Bernard Augustin stepped out the door into the white hot day.

  “Mr. Augustin!” I said, but he didn’t hear me. He was walking fast in our direction, his eyes fixed vacantly on nothing that I could see.

  Sarabeth and April rose. Louise lay slumped, a black humped shape like a seal. Bernard noticed her in stages—you could see him register first an obstacle, and then an anomaly, and finally the fact of a body on the ground. He stopped, staring fiercely into our faces. “What happened?” he demanded.

  “She fainted,” Sarabeth murmured, suddenly demure.

  Bernard knelt beside Louise, then rose again and began calling out loudly in Italian, the knees of his expensive suit soiled. Louise made a sound and opened her eyes. Suddenly everyone was looking at us, moving toward us. We had been invisible, and Bernard had materialized us. Two officials in black brass-buttoned jackets and stiff hats were suddenly present, making a fuss, producing bottles of water, talking into cell phones. Apparently Bernard had materialized them too.

  Louise sat up. She looked dazed but not displeased to find herself at the center of this little fuss. “Grazie, grazie, mille grazie,” she sighed. “Non è niente.”

  “Which hotel is she staying at?” Bernard asked Sarabeth.

  Sarabeth looked at me.

  “We’re staying at the da Silva,” I said.

  “You’re with her?” Bernard turned his face to me like a searchlight. It was my first close look at him: gray-white skin, handsome nose, dark, darting, impatient eyes with those mussel-shell shadows. He seemed angry, formal, almost electric, as though if you came too close you would get a shock. He seemed to take up a great deal of space. He looked me up and down: my blue knit dress, my frightened face, my bare smudged knees. “Come on, then!” he commanded.

  Five minutes later the three of us were in a water taxi, skimming back up the canal. “What happened?” Louise asked me groggily, but I wasn’t sure. Time seemed to be passing very oddly. Suddenly we were stepping off the boat, which disappeared without anyone seeming to have paid for it, and then we were walking slowly up the hot street, Bernard Augustin on one side of Louise and me on the other, and then abruptly we were inside the hotel, and he was speaking to the man behind the counter who dispensed the keys. Fragments of phrases kept escaping Louise’s lips: “You shouldn’t have,” “I’m very,” “No reason,” “Now and then,” none of which our escort responded to with anything more than a hum. And then we were getting out of the dark, groaning elevator, just the two of us—Louise and I—and as the doors closed she leaned against me and asked, “Did you tip the elevator boy?”

  Had she mistaken Bernard Augustin for an elevator boy?

  In her room, Louise asked me to call room service for tea, lemons, ice. “Please shut the blinds,” she moaned, sitting heavily on the bed.

  “They’re shut.”

  “Tighter.” She laid her head on the pillow, the thick strands of hair making me think of leeches in the pond on my grandparents’ farm. She let her shoes slip off, and her scrunched skirt rode up her pale thighs. I felt bad for her, but I also thought now I would have some time to myself. Maybe I could wander over to San Marco while she lay in bed with the blinds tightly shut. When room service came, I poured the tea.

  “Just leave it on the table,” she said.

  “All right.” I moved toward the connecting door.

  “I’ll call if I need anything.”

  Hmm. What were the chances of that? “If I’m not there, I’m just down having an espresso in the bar.”

  “You should have ordered one when you called room service,” she said.

  “I didn’t think of it.”

  She was feeling well enough to give me a look.

  “Sugar?” I asked.

  “Yes. No. Do they have Splenda?”

  “I don’t see any.”

  “God, the Italians! How do they stay so thin?”

  I went into my adjoining room and sat on the bed. It was a single bed with a white spread and small blue decorative pillows. A child’s bed, a virgin’s. In hotels in America you never saw a single bed, did you? I didn’t know, I hadn’t stayed in many hotels.

  What
should I do? Would she call? Could I—should I—sneak away? I might not be in Venice again for years, or ever. Didn’t I owe a debt to Art larger than the one I owed to Louise? And anyway, she had taken another pill, she could sleep for hours. Why should I stay like a nanny to watch over her? It was ridiculous. It was wrong. She just wanted to stop me from enjoying myself.

  I stood up and walked softly to the connecting door, turned the knob as carefully as a thief in a movie, peered into the darkened room. If she was awake, I could say I just wanted to check on her—which was true. But she wasn’t awake. She lay as I had left her, a loose, lumpy package on top of the spread, snoring in light, congested bursts like a little dog.

  Outside, the sky had changed, gone smoky flat and white. As I crossed the street, a few drops of rain spotted the pavement and chilled my arms, giving me goose bumps. Armed with my Fodor’s and unnecessary sunglasses, I wormed past a family of American tourists, some noisy Germans, and a school group with matching T-shirts, my heart thumping as I breathed in the smells of rain, ancient grime, dank stone, coffee. I was in Venice! I turned to look back at the shuttered handsome face of the Hotel da Silva to see if it reproached me. I counted up to the fourth floor, remembering to start at zero. If Louise had awakened and come to the window, she would see me escaping—or rather, she would see me hesitating, standing like a fool in the rain, which was falling a little harder now, making umbrellas flower all over the narrow street. Somewhere someone was singing in Italian. The clear, aching sound drifted over the wet flagstones as it might have a hundred years before—two hundred years—a thousand years. What was my life or Louise’s life in those terms? A wink, a cough, a single note in a long symphony. I turned my head up into the rain, caught a sour drop on my tongue, and fled toward San Marco.

  By the time I reached the piazza, the rain was coming down harder. The water puddled in hollows, spreading out across the stones. Rivulets formed, connecting puddle to puddle, and soon a network of little streams gurgled and hissed across the slippery, gritty pavement, where dark huddled pigeons shifted like living shadows. A long line of people hugged the columned arcade, crowding under umbrellas or shielding their heads with sweatshirts and newspapers. Above them rose the froth of marble, the glistening arches and cupolas running with rain, the gray, glowering sky. A line! Of course there would be a line—of course the ordinary tourist hordes were here in Venice with their knapsacks and their cameras, their sneakers and guidebooks and baseball caps. What if I went to the front and explained that I was a curator (curatorial assistant) on her first trip to Italy, that I had only a couple of hours? Would they let me in?

  In the piazza, rail-thin African men draped plastic sheets over their key chains and snow globes, squatting on the stones with their shoulders hunched to wait out the rain as they had waited out, no doubt, worse things in whatever countries they had left behind. The water slipped down my back in chilly streams, dripped from my hair. Oh, well! Nothing was stopping me from looking at the domes, was it? At the busy, bright façade? I walked toward the building, my eye sliding over the elegant clusters of columns, the glowing stone, the mosaics in the Romanesque archways. What was the word for those arched spaces tiled into image? Lunettes—the term drifted back to me from the twilit lecture room in Elvers Hall. My heart rose. Were those angels up there with their wet, golden wings? A solemn winged lion represented Saint Mark himself: noble, patient, gleaming dully in the rain against a backdrop of painted stars, a book clinging improbably to one paw.

  And then, quite suddenly, the rain ceased. Or anyway, it ceased falling on me, though the sound of water rattling onto the piazza was as loud as ever. Someone had come up next to me holding an enormous umbrella. I jumped sideways and looked up. It was Bernard Augustin.

  “You’re the girl from the Giardini,” he said. He stepped toward me so that I was again under the umbrella, politely declining to notice my suspicious fright. “How’s your friend?”

  “Resting,” I said, though Louise wasn’t my friend, and I wasn’t a girl—I was twenty-five. I hoped it was true, at least, that Louise was resting. Possibly this very instant she was opening the connecting door and calling my name.

  “Have you been inside?” He nodded toward the basilica.

  I shook my head. “I didn’t realize the line would be so long,” I said, as though I had expected any line at all. I tried to picture a line at the Midwestern Museum of Art, snaking down the shallow steps and across the asphalt turn-around, under the mimosa trees. Never in a million years, not if we were giving the art away!

  “It’s worse than Disney World,” Bernard Augustin said. “Which is strange. Because I don’t think most people enjoy it, once they get inside, as much as they enjoy Disney World.” He was dressed in a dark blue belted raincoat and black tasseled loafers, a handsome dark gray hat on his head. The big black umbrella he held over us had silver stars on the inside, faintly glowing like foam on the ocean at night.

  I looked at the ragged line snaking across the piazza, the tourists wet and dogged, their expressions unreadable. German, Japanese, Chinese, Australian, Russian, Hungarian, American: all of them determined to see those tiles set in place the better part of a millennium ago. “It’s nice to see people lined up for art.”

  “I would agree with you, if art was what they were lined up for. But it’s not.”

  “What, then?”

  “To check the box. Three days in Venice: The Rialto? Check. Gondola ride? Hmm, pricey. But—check. San Marco? Let’s see: long line, raining, but what the hell, might as well get it over with.”

  I was offended, as though he were talking about me. “Maybe they’ll love it. Maybe they’ve been dreaming about coming to Venice for years!”

  He laughed. “Maybe.”

  “Or maybe they are just coming because Fodor’s told them to, but once they’re inside and see it—maybe it will open their eyes, open them up.” Wasn’t that what had happened to me? And not even in San Marco in Venice, but in a stuffy basement auditorium. Hadn’t my whole life been changed by that sustained encounter with Beauty? I thought Bernard Augustin would laugh, but I didn’t care. This was my credo—the power of art to transform what I could only call the soul, although even I wouldn’t have said that word aloud. Not to Bernard Augustin, anyway. But he didn’t laugh. Instead he looked out to where the rain was falling lightly, slantwise, in thin gray needles, and began to spin the umbrella so that the stars went around. “It’s slowing down,” he said.

  We strolled across the wet, slippery stones. Bernard took my arm. It was a gesture I’d read about in books, seen shimmering in black and silver on movie screens and television screens. His big hand braced my forearm, and, although I didn’t lean into it, I felt its steady presence as an unlooked-for comfort, like a stuffed toy belonging to a child who has more or less outgrown it. Our steps aligned. I could smell the damp cloth of his coat, the sour smell of the rain and the canals, and a faint, bitter, aromatic smell, like orange peels and brine, that I would later know was his cologne. We stopped on the far right-hand side of San Marco and looked up at the first lunette, a half-moon niche of mosaic supported by frothy columns. On one side of the picture, some people wrestled with a bundle, while in the middle, men in robes and turbans seemed anxious about something.

  “The transport of the body of Saint Mark from Alexandria,” Bernard said. “You know the story, of course?”

  I shook my head. Louise, if she had been there, might have spoken the same words, using them to mean the opposite of what they said. Bernard’s tone of benign, bland politeness put me at ease. I didn’t know why he was being so nice to me, but I was grateful.

  “Saint Mark was buried in Alexandria,” Bernard said. “His body lay at rest there until the ninth century, when two Venetian merchants stole it and smuggled it to Venice. They did this by hiding the corpse—I suppose it was only bones by then—in slabs of bacon.”

  I laughed.

&
nbsp; Bernard smiled. His eyes lightened a shade from near black to deep brown, and clusters of starfish lines appeared on his temples. “You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. Muslims can’t touch pork, so the customs officials in Alexandria had no way of discovering the body.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said. “It sounds like something that would happen today.”

  He made no comment. We walked along the façade to the second lunette, in which the men with white turbans had been replaced by different men in black hats. “That was in 828 AD. Or CE, if you prefer. After they smuggled the bones out of Alexandria, they brought them back to Venice.” The long body of the saint, covered in a blue cloth, dominated the foreground of the third lunette, a glowing halo circling his head. “The doge and the people receiving the body,” Bernard said.

  You could see his head—the dead saint’s head—lifting toward the man in white and gold whom I guessed was the doge. “He doesn’t look dead. Maybe saints don’t decompose? Maybe that’s one of the benefits?”

  “I’d think that was more likely to be true of devils.”

  I felt faintly disappointed. Not that the mosaics weren’t lovely, gold and pinkish red and clear blue shining down from under the white-veined marble. But somehow I wasn’t transported. Maybe it was just because the pictures were so high up and difficult to see. I strained my eyes toward the image of Saint Mark under his blue cloth, willing myself to feel something.

  “After that, they lost the body for a while. They hid it away for safekeeping, so no one could steal it while they built the basilica. But of course that took a couple of hundred years, and when they were done they couldn’t remember where they had put it. Calamity! Disaster! Just imagine—all those priests and cardinals rushing through the city, peering into vaults and storage sheds and hidey-holes all over Venice. That was in 1063. A couple of decades went by, and still no Saint Mark. So, what do you think they did?” He looked at me with a kind of patience behind which I sensed something else—a weight, a sadness. I remembered what Louise had said—He never got over it. Was he thinking of his friend, then, who had disappeared? Who had never made it to Venice? I wanted to distract him, to amuse him. To make that shadow of sadness disappear.