Every Picture Tells a Story

by Gregory Dowling

  “No, sir.” Footsteps moved away.

  I breathed out, thanking whatever instinct it had been that had prevented me from making a wild leap into the next boat: incapacitating fear, probably. I started my splashy clambering progress again. I reached the bridge and had a moment of panic strangely mingled with dull resignation when it seemed it was too high for me to climb up to. Then I saw the holes in the brickwork in the nearest building. (Never sneer when people talk about the magic of Venice: how else do buildings with foundations like moldy Gruyère stay up?) I pushed my shoulder bag around to my back and climbed up, my fingers finding holds in gritty damp cracks and my feet in slimy caverns. I made it onto the bridge and glanced down the alley. There was no one around. I gave one look back at Palazzo Sambon, which was still in shuttered darkness. Beyond I saw the light from a window at the top of the hotel and the dark shape of a head leaning out. I gave a quick wave and a hand fluttered back. Then I set off down the bridge, my heart suddenly feeling like Gruyère cheese itself: heavy but with gaping holes.

  And that tom-tom in my temples was back, surprise surprise.

  I went in the direction of the station, refusing to think about what had happened between Lucy and me, and just concentrating on the immediate future. I’d decided that I would get a couchette train down to Rome: it was the only way I could think of getting a night’s sleep without having to hand my passport over. Unless the timetables had changed, there should be one around midnight.

  I made my way through the Ghetto, and along the side of the Cannaregio Canal, not glancing at that alley where we had kissed, but passing straight over the bridge. When I reached the open space below the station, I saw policemen at the top of the steps with machine guns. I stopped where I was, though not too noticeably. I thought of trying the side entrance, which takes one straight to platform one, but then guessed there would be just as many inside the station as well.

  For all its great beauty, Venice does have the disadvantage of being the easiest city in the world to bottle off. Stop the cars at Piazzale Roma and the trains at the station and then scatter a few fast boats around the lagoon, and you’ve got your terrorists trapped. And your innocent but unfortunately-rather-guilty-looking terrorist suspects too.

  I turned back and crossed the bridge over the Grand Canal, thinking hard. I could go back to my original hotel on Rio Marin. The terrorists weren’t likely to make another try at me there. Not with the police out in full force like this.

  So maybe the police would come for me there.

  This required even harder thinking—and my brain was already staggering. I couldn’t take much more of this—by which I meant just about everything: the latest confusing murder, the police everywhere, the terrorists everywhere, and Lucy mad at me: or was it me mad at Lucy? I was already unable to remember exactly how our latest little altercation had gone. The tom-tom prevented any really concrete thinking.

  So maybe I’d just have to bed down in some boat for the night. Unless … I suddenly thought of Alvise. This wasn’t exactly the usual time to drop in, but I felt he owed me an explanation. (He didn’t of course, but at that moment I felt he did: I felt the whole world owed me one right then.) He’d said he lived on a fondamenta by San Nicolò dei Mendicoli; well, that was conveniently near, and there weren’t that many fondamente around there. I should be able to find the place. Maybe I could even drop in on the hotel on the way and pick up my stuff. I’d tell them I was taking a train to Rome. I’d have to pay for the night all the same, but then I’d have had to do that anyway.

  And what if Alvise was with the terrorists? Well, this would be one way of finding out for sure. It might be one way of getting killed for sure too, but at least I’d die with one question the fewer on my mind. Yes, I had to find out what was behind his twitching and stammering.

  So I entered the hotel and explained my change of plans. They looked a little surprised but not actually suspicious. Why should they? I set off down the fondamenta ten minutes later with my kit bag on my back but my troubles all in a knot somewhere at the top of my head.

  17

  THE area around San Nicolò was very quiet. I’d once read that this part of the city had its own doge, and it has something of the feel of a separate little fishing village. Maybe I’d retire there.

  I tried the fondamenta leading toward the church. The doors to the houses were not on the fondamenta I discovered, but in the alley behind. I found Alvise’s name on a bell push together with the name Chiara Bortolo. For some reason I hadn’t thought of his not living on his own. Well, I hadn’t thought, full stop.

  Their names were on the middle of three bell pushes. I looked up at the house and saw that there were lights on behind the shutters of the middle flat. So I wouldn’t actually be waking them up.

  No, but all the same …

  The rucksack got heavier by the second. Well, I could always go away again if I was obviously unwelcome. And I did want to know just where Alvise stood in all this business. I rang the bell and stood back and cringed.

  “Chi xè ’o?” Alvise’s voice said from the grille.

  “Son mi,” I said. “Martin.”

  “What?” From the fact that he spoke in English I gathered that he’d understood.

  “Can I come in?”

  “But, but…” Then the door clicked open.

  I stepped in and started toward the steps. Then, with a second’s thought, I took the rucksack off my back and put it down in the narrow hallway next to a pram. This, I thought, was what was known as breaking things gently.

  I could also make a quicker getaway if he confronted me with a machine gun.

  As I walked up the steps I heard a baby crying. And the closer I got to the open door on the middle floor the more obvious it got that the crying was coming from there. This made the machine gun seem rather less likely—and the chances of a hearty welcome.

  Alvise was standing in the doorway. I was glad to note that he was fully dressed. He had both hands deeply embedded in his beard and looked rather as he’d looked when I’d first put my hand on his shoulder in the alley.

  “What—what—what’s the matter?”

  “Hello,” I said. “I hope I didn’t wake the baby.”

  “No, no, but what’s—what’s—”

  A woman’s voice called out in Venetian from the flat. “Let him come in, and then you can ask the questions.”

  Alvise stepped aside and removed a hand from his beard to usher me in. It returned straight to his beard.

  The flat was obviously very small. The room I walked straight into functioned as dining room and living room, but most noticeably as library. The walls were mainly books, as were most of the horizontal surfaces, with the clearly begrudged exception of two of the four chairs, half of the dining table, and some of the floor. In one of the book-free chairs a plump but pretty woman of about thirty was rocking a six-or seven-month-old baby to and fro. The baby seemed mostly an enormous mouth, from which an appropriately enormous noise was coming.

  “Ah, er, piacere,” I said.

  The plump woman smiled in a surprisingly unharassed way in my direction, almost as if she assumed I’d come to baby-sit. “Ciao,” she called out above the noise, and then in English, “I’m Chiara, Alvise’s wife.”

  “Ah, I’m Martin.”

  “Yes. Alvise told me about you. And this is Federica, our daughter. Say ciao, Federica.”

  Federica said it: the vowel part of the word anyway. Chiara said, “Alvise’s just warming the bottle for her.”

  “Yes, yes,” Alvise said, and disappeared into the kitchen. I followed him with my eyes. The kitchen looked fairly ordered but I could see a Pisan tower of dirty plates by the sink. I turned to Chiara and tried to convey by my general pose and attitude that if the baby noise had permitted I’d be making profuse apologies and explanations for my arrival at that hour. She smiled back and concentrated on the baby. Then Alvise emerged holding the feeding bottle, which was thrust into that huge opening, wh
ich immediately closed tight on it: there was sudden snuffling peace.

  Chiara said, “Sit down. Have a glass of wine.” Her English was rather more heavily accented than his.

  Alvise was still hovering in an agitated fashion. I said, “Look, I’m sorry, what I’ve done is unforgivable. I shouldn’t even have thought of coming round. I’m going. Just forget I came.” I turned to the door; I think I really meant it. It was the sheer domesticity of the scene that had decided me.

  Chiara said, “No. First tell us why you came, why not?”

  Alvise said, “Yes, yes…” but without much conviction I felt.

  “Thanks,” I said, “you’re very kind.”

  “Have a glass of wine,” Chiara said again.

  “Okay. But I promise I’ll go at once.” I sat down at the table but tried to make my pose look provisional. I accepted the glass of red wine that Alvise poured for me. I said to him, “You’ve told Chiara about me, have you?”

  “Roughly.”

  Chiara looked toward me. “I don’t think I’ve understood everything.”

  “Why did you come here?” Alvise said.

  “If you want to know the real truth, because two men tried to kidnap me outside my hotel this evening.” I drank some wine, hoping to take the melodrama out of this statement by the cool gesture.

  “What?” Chiara said. Her tone was of polite wonder, and she didn’t move the bottle in her hand one millimeter.

  Alvise lifted both hands to his beard again and twisted it. “Go on.”

  “That’s it. They tried to chuck me into a boat, but I managed to run for it. I thought of jumping on a train out of the city, but the station turned out to be full of policemen.”

  “So you came here,” he said.

  “Sorry, it was a stupid thing to do. I was just—well, I just felt so tired.” I took another sip.

  “Get the spare mattress out,” Chiara said in Italian.

  Alvise looked at her. “You’re sure?”

  “Don’t be silly. Of course. You’ll have to sleep in the room with Federica,” she said to me. “Don’t worry, she doesn’t usually wake up.”

  “Thanks, that’s marvelous. So long as Federica doesn’t mind. I’ll leave straightaway tomorrow morning, I swear.”

  “Yes, you will,” Alvise said. “I’m sorry, but you must.”

  “Alvise, don’t exaggerate,” Chiara said. “I know it’s for my sake you say this, but things aren’t so tragic.”

  I was obviously looking a bit puzzled. Alvise said suddenly. “I suppose you must have asked yourself why I left you so suddenly this evening.”

  “Well, er, I did wonder a little.…”

  “I told you that I’ve become a complete menefreghista in all things to do with politics, no?”

  “Yes. Is it true?”

  He gave his nervous shrug. “It’s true enough. I’ve learned the importance of keeping my head down. And when the carabinieri came round, I felt my head was up a little too high.”

  “When he says he’s learned this,” Chiara said in Italian, “what he means is that I have taught him this.”

  “Ah.”

  She spoke placidly and easily, with a rather more marked Venetian accent than he had. “You see, I learned this on my own. I went to jail.”

  “Oh.” And I didn’t add, “That brings us close.”

  Alvise said, “It was all so stupid, she had nothing to do with anything, they merely got names wrong, and because she had been involved with some political groups—” He was walking quickly up and down the tiny bit of free floor space tying his beard into the most complicated knots.

  “Caro, I’m telling the story, aren’t I?”

  “Yes, of course, of course, I was just explaining.…”

  “You see,” she went on, “when I was studying, I belonged to a political group on the left, and we were fairly active in the university—organizing protests and strikes. All the usual things: but unfortunately there was a woman called Clara Bortoli who was a member of a Red Brigade column in Milan, and her name was mentioned by a pentito. I was the nearest thing to be found, so they took me in.”

  “It was crazy, completely crazy,” Alvise said, “because first they wouldn’t say why she’d been arrested, what the evidence was, and then they just said her name had been given, without telling us by whom, and when we did find out, we could show that Chiara had never lived anywhere near Milan, but then they just said the pentito must have got some details wrong, but that didn’t change anything, and then—”

  Chiara’s voice came in calmly over her husband’s. “I was in jail for a year and a half, waiting for my trial. In that time they even arrested Clara Bortoli, but it took them a few months after her arrest to make the connection.”

  “A year and a half,” I said. I couldn’t say snap to that.

  “Yes.” She took the bottle out of the baby’s mouth and swung her onto her shoulder and patted her back. A Falstaffian belch was produced. “Brava, brava.” She put the baby back on her lap and dabbed at her mouth.

  “So,” Alvise said, “you see why I thought it best not to get involved in your story. It’s the old old story. Chiara was declared completely innocent, but she’s still the girl who was arrested as a BR suspect. That is still how she must figure in the police files. And with many of the neighbors too.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I see your point.” And how. “I’m sorry I came round at all. I mean the last thing I want is for you to get into any trouble.…”

  “It’s the last thing we want too,” Alvise said. “But you’re here now, it hardly matters.”

  “Yes, of course you must stay,” Chiara said.

  “So who were these people?” Alvise asked.

  “I didn’t stop to ask them, but they didn’t look like the police.” I recounted briefly how they’d waited for me. I told the story without any mention of Lucy, saying that I’d simply spotted them before they came at me and so managed to run for it.

  “And you’re still not going to the police,” Alvise said.

  “Well, not tonight at any rate.”

  “Okay. I suppose I’m hardly one to lecture you on civic duties.”

  “Well,” I said, “you did come looking for me when it would have been much easier just to forget you’d seen me.”

  “Yes,” Alvise said, “yes, much easier. But…” He gave another jerky shrug. “Once in the past I did the same thing and, well, the result wasn’t—wasn’t so good.” He suddenly turned and took the baby from Chiara and swung her in the air above himself.

  “Remember she’s just finished eating,” Chiara said.

  “Ah yes,” he said, bringing her to a more conventional cradled position.

  He didn’t seem ready to go on with what he’d been saying, so I thought maybe I should get in the usual baby questions: her age, her sleeping habits, whom she resembled most. Chiara answered all these questions as she washed out the bottle while Alvise did the fond-father bit, allowing her to tug his beard, which she did with even more savagery than he did himself. Then he said, over his daughter’s gurgles, “Maybe I should tell you about what happened in the past. It’s connected with Toni, so you might be interested.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “One of Toni’s closest friends was another ricercatore at the university, a guy called Padoan, Giulio Padoan.”

  “I’ve heard that name.”

  “Oh, yes? I may have mentioned him to you myself. Anyway, he taught history. I believe he specialized in Byzantine studies. I never knew him well, but one day not long after Chiara’s arrest Toni took me round to Padoan’s flat on the Giudecca for dinner. There were just the three of us. Padoan had a small flat, very neat, clean, and he prepared quite a good meal. Naturally they asked about Chiara. I’d only just started going with her. Well, all I could say was that there must have been a mistake. I didn’t know any more than they did, except that she must be innocent. Anyway this got us onto the subject of the Red Brigades and I remember Pad
oan saying that he never knew why they refused the name of terrorists: they would always call themselves combattenti per il comunismo, or armed revolutionaries, or whatever. Padoan said that as far as he was concerned ‘terrorist’ was a name to be proud of.”

  Chiara said, “I’ll put Federica to bed.”

  When she had left us, Alvise resumed. “Terror, Padoan said, was a weapon that the state had always used against the proletariat—the workers were kept in terror of the law, of the bosses, of unemployment. Well, finally the proletariat had learned that terror was one of the few weapons they had at their disposal too. They should be proud of having taken it up against their oppressors.”

  “Not nice,” I said as Alvise paused, and then wished I’d said something less fatuous.

  “Not, not nice at all. And you have to remember the context. It was in a period when you heard every other day that a newspaper editor or a union leader or some povero Cristo had been shot in the legs. Gambizzato—they even had to invent a new verb for it. I can describe only the climate at the university, as that was the world I knew; it was worst at Padova perhaps: there was shooting, but that was only—the top of the iceberg.”

  “Tip.”

  “Tip. Tip top, whatever. The iceberg was made up of the whole atmosphere that you could sense everywhere. People whose ideas weren’t on the ‘right lines’ found threats against them sprayed on the walls, received threats by phone, their cars were blown up, their front doors set on fire.… It was one hell of a time.” He made a gesture of disgust, which, since he’d just taken up a glass of wine, spattered the tablecloth.

  “So what did you say to Padoan?”

  “Well, we talked it over, and I tried not to take it too seriously: but I remember his—his thin voice explaining this point of view so reasonably, so care- fully over the sweet course. And he then praised a recent Red Brigade action in which a factory owner had been gambizzato despite his bodyguard. Efficiency, he said—the proletariat had to show himself to be organized and efficient, if he wanted to achieve maximum terror.”

  “Why all this to you?” I asked.