by Susan Swan
She stood by a news kiosk, a striking figure with her height and bright clothes. A few of the young men in the crowd stared her way, with sly looks of appreciation. The exertion of walking had made her cheeks ruddy and her cropped brown hair was windblown and standing slightly on end. Out on the canal, gondolas with straw-hatted rowers scudded past the palazzos that rose up in the water-dappled sunlight like country houses fringed by narrow green lawns. Except that the green borders under the houses were not lawns but algae exposed by the tide.
She realized she had stumbled into the midst of the regatta whose start she and Lee had witnessed earlier in the morning. A skiff with an all-female crew in long pleated skirts rowed by. As they passed, the cox stopped talking on her megaphone and lifted her hand to Luce in a woman-to-woman salute. The men on the embankment cheered noisily.
Farther up the canal, gondolas were pulling in at a refreshment booth to accept their cans of Gatorade and oranges. As the rowers and regatta officials milled together and chatted, she thought of Casanova and his leisurely approach to travel. What was his advice about going only where your whims take you? She relaxed and began walking at a thinking pace. A few minutes later, without trying, she arrived at the Piazza San Marco, where she was supposed to meet Dino in an hour. At the San Marco station, a vaporetto was discharging sightseers who had been packed in the low, squat ferry like refugees. They swarmed onto the crowded wharf, while out on the lagoon, she saw the flotilla of regatta boats jostling and bobbing towards the finish line at the mouth of the Grand Canal. It was Sunday, and the door to the Sansovinian Library stood open; tourists were pouring through its doors.
Inside the library, a guard said Signor Goldoni was waiting for her. A guide led Luce upstairs and into a crowded room where families stood by a tall window watching the regatta. She felt touched by the sight of the mothers and small children waving at the milling boats on the green shimmer of the Basin.
“You like our regatta?” A man emerged from the group and introduced himself as Signor Goldoni. Luce noticed that his loafers were made of beautiful copper-coloured leather. Nodding politely, she followed him to his office.
“The boat race always takes place on a Sunday, and the library opens this office for all of us who work here so we can come and watch it with our families.” He seated himself at a desk.
“How kind,” Luce murmured.
“Yes, yes, very quiet,” he replied, mishearing her. “Do you realize it’s the only day in Venice when you can’t hear a motor-boat? They are forbidden today. Will you show me your documents? I am eager to see the letters, of course.”
Signor Goldoni removed the documents from their plastic case. He examined Casanova’s letters, reverently drawing on white gloves to avoid leaving a fingerprint, and holding them by the edge of the page.
“It looks authentic,” he said, excitement rising up in his voice. “What an extraordinary contribution for our exhibit!”
To Luce’s disappointment, he barely glanced at Asked For’s journal. He only scanned the flyleaf, smiling and nodding. Then he placed it back in its archival box.
“Is this all?”
“Yes,” she whispered, aware that a fiery heat was spreading from her neck to her face. She realized she had left the Arabic manuscript in her hotel room. How could she have overlooked it? She saw it in her mind’s eye—on the bedside table.
“Well, if anything else about Casanova turns up in your family’s attic, please be sure to let us know.” He gave Luce a release form and handed her box to a young assistant to lock safely away.
“Yes, we will,” she said, signing the document granting the library the loan of their family documents.
“Do you like Casanova? Most women do.” He glanced inquiringly at Luce. “He belonged to all of us, you understand? Some historians say the chapters in his memoir describing his love for men have been lost or suppressed.”
“I didn’t know that.” Luce handed him back the release form. “Everyone has their interpretation of Casanova, it seems.”
Signor Goldoni gave Luce the smile of a comrade-in-arms. “We archivists don’t know everything, do we? Yes, Charles Smith told me we are in the same business,” he added. “That is why I was not worried for the safety of the documents. I knew you would take good care of Casanova’s letters.”
Overcome with embarrassment, she said goodbye and hurried out into the square. She was upset with herself for botching the delivery, but tomorrow she would make her apologies and bring the Arabic manuscript to the Sansovinian. She looked around for Dino Fabbiani. Had he waited for her? He’d said 1 p.m. It was already one-thirty, and the young photographer was nowhere to be seen. She considered returning to the hotel to get the manuscript and find Lee, but on impulse bought a ticket to see the prison that had housed Casanova in the Ducal Palace.
As she walked through the courtyard and up the Staircase of the Giants, she thought of Asked For Adams visiting the waiting room of the ambassadors with her father. Dust and nostalgia. The universal smell of ancient buildings. When she was in her late teens, she and her mother had toured Somerset, England, and seen the bronze plaque in the medieval church of St. Mary the Virgin, honouring the ploughman and maltster Henry Adams. In 1638 he had set sail to the New World at the age of fifty-eight. He had taken with him his wife and their eight sons.
“You see, Luce, we have inherited optimistic genes,” her mother had laughed. That was their last trip together before Kitty met Lee.
On the first floor of the Ducal Palace, Luce joined a group on the “Secret Tour” through the Leads under the palace’s lead roof. Outside the first cell in which Casanova had been imprisoned, their guide told them that because Casanova stood two metres tall, he’d been allowed to leave the room with its low ceiling and exercise in the attic. The cell lay directly over the room where the three State Inquisitors had voted to arrest Casanova. She peeked into the box-shaped room with its tiny, barred windows and a ceiling barely higher than her head. She asked the guide if she could go in. With a little bow, the guide opened the door. The third plank to the left of the door of the seventh cell, she told herself, thinking of Casanova’s instructions to Asked For Adams. She bent down, feeling the guide’s eyes on her back, and ran her hand over the floorboards by the door. They appeared to be nailed firmly in place. She rose to her feet and caught the guide smiling indulgently, as if she was one of thousands of Casanova fans who made the pilgrimage to this dusty room.
She sheepishly followed the other tourists into the attic of a large tower where this man who had known her ancestor had been given permission to stretch his legs. The attic resembled the hull of an old galley, the guide said, because it was built by the workers at the Arsenal, who worked so quickly and skilfully they could finish a ship in an afternoon. Its walls of birch, larch and oak had been treated with salt water to turn the wood as hard as stone. As she stood on the walkway strewn over the floor beams, thought she heard Casanova whisper, Watch out—I am still here, a cat among pigeons!
Staring up at the beams in the attic, she was amazed by his persistence. How could anyone cut through that roof with a hunk of granite? But he had not given up, no matter how many setbacks he suffered. No wonder Asked For Adams fell under his influence, she thought. He was a man who could talk you out of yourself.
She felt disappointed when the tour was over. As the others hurried out of the palace, she stopped to gaze down through a high, grilled window onto the Sansovinian Library. There, marching across its roof, she saw the forgotten stone people with the steadfast expressions that had moved Asked For Adams. She brought out Lee’s guidebook to find the names of the lonely figures, and something fell out onto the stone floor. It was a photograph of a petite, fair-haired woman with a youthful face. The photo was dated the year her mother met Lee, when Luce was twenty. In the photo, her mother’s lips were curled in a spirited smile, as if she was saying to the photographer, “I don’t like the way you are bossing me around, but I still wish you well.” Luce
remembered the same look of sunny determination on her mother’s face.
Slowly, she bent her head until her cheek was resting against the cool stone of the palace wall. She heard herself weeping and she was amazed at the sound of her anguish.
In Luce’s childhood there had been one great sorrow: the loss of her father when she was six. He was a young medical intern who had left her mother and gone off to Australia. He had written to them once and then they heard nothing after that. Kitty had been too proud to search for him. As a child, Luce used to look for her father under the bedsheets and her bewildered face would make her mother cry. In a rage, her mother had given away his clothes to the Salvation Army, but Luce had smuggled a pair of his oxblood brogues to the back of her closet along with his huge rubber stethoscope, which she used for testing the heartbeat of her dolls. She would bring out her father’s shoes when she felt sad, and stroke their perforated toes. Then, when her mother inherited the hundred-year-old house that had belonged to Luce’s grandfather, her father’s things were lost in the move.
As she grew older, she thought of him less. She adopted her mother’s name and discovered that she liked living in the old house, whose foundations had been put in place by the grandson of Aaron Adams. A portrait of its pretty, pale blue board-and-batten façade had been painted by a member of the Group of Seven and curators sometimes included the painting in their retrospectives. Luce did her schoolwork and ran the household while her mother worked long hours at the university. In the early years, her mother had researched pottery-making by Iroquoian-speaking tribes, a term that included the Hurons and the Iroquois who lived in Eastern Canada. In monographs with truly boring academic titles like Southern Ontario Pottery: Art among the Iroquoian-Speakers, K.A. Adams argued that pottery-making in these Neolithic tribes was practised by women who taught the craft to their daughters. Luce sometimes helped her mother with the research and for that she would be included in the credits.
It was her mother’s interest in the goddess movement—so derided in archaeological circles—that undermined the bond between them. Luce felt skeptical about her mother’s theory that the peoples of prehistory worshipped a deity called the Great Earth Mother. She didn’t understand how her mother had gone from pointing out the possibility that women in some Woodland tribes might have been potters to the grandiose claim that most prehistoric relics were sacred objects used in the worship of a goddess. When her mother became a follower of the late archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, Kitty began to attract older female academics and women interested in the goddess movement. And being the daughter of the well-known Dr. K.A. Adams started to feel like waiting her turn in a crowded hall of strange women, each one claiming her mother’s attention. As if her mother’s fans didn’t have mothers of their own.
After public appearances, Kitty would seize her hand and exclaim: “Luce! My stalwart! I am so tired of all this!” She liked the strange little glassy look of exhaustion in her mother’s eyes. It made her feel needed. And she would be overcome with a rush of protective love and pride because she was the one her mother leaned on. Then her mother would go back to her work, and Luce would start plotting how to get her attention again.
Luce hadn’t realized how far her mother’s views had pulled them apart until she encountered one of Kitty’s fans in the reading room at the Miller. That afternoon, she came back from lunch to find that a schoolgirl with a nose ring was reading an old essay Luce had helped her mother write about Aataentsic, the woman in the origin myth of the Hurons.
In that instant it seemed as if she saw her life go by; how she had helped her mother with her work and run the household; and then, how her mother had left her behind and gone away with Lee Pronski. No matter what her mother said, she knew she wasn’t stalwart or patient. She felt only hurt and jealous.
Downstairs, she walked listlessly past the room where, more than two hundred years before, the Inquisitors had voted on Casanova’s case. She entered the Great Hall and saw before her the same famous painting, The Coronation of the Virgin by Tintoretto, that Asked For had shown her father. It covered the eastern wall—a vast, sombre canvas in which hundreds of little human bodies, likely saints and popes, floated in a mud-coloured sky, their lifted arms and straining bodies turned towards the numinous circles of light around Christ and the Virgin Mary.
In the crowd of tourists around the painting, she noticed a woman wearing a long red scarf. The woman was talking to a man carrying a camera.
“Dino!” Luce cried happily.
Startled, he stopped talking to the woman and ambled over.
“Were you waiting for me?” she asked. “I’m sorry I was late.”
“Of course, bella.” He bowed, snapping together the heels of his brogues.
After her lapse into sadness upstairs, she felt relieved to have his company, and they walked out across the arcade around the Ducal Palace and into the square. He pointed at the Campanile, explaining that Galileo had demonstrated his telescope to the Doge in the tower in 1609. The tower had fallen down in 1902, but no one had been hurt, Dino said, except for a cat named after Casanova’s dog, Melampyge.
“He had another dog called Finette,” Luce said, and Dino shrugged absent-mindedly. She told him then about the passage in the old journal in which Asked For Adams described meeting Casanova in the tower, and he began to listen thoughtfully. Overhead in the Campanile, a bell was tolling again.
At the other end of the piazza, a small crowd had gathered at the base of a second tower. The people were staring up at the richly ornamented clock face. Following their gaze, Luce saw three little kings and an angel trundling out of the doors on either side of the tower—the angel raising its trumpet to its lips and the kings bowing as they bobbed past the Virgin and the Christ Child in the niche above the clock.
“The three Magi always draw an audience,” Dino said, bringing out his Mayima and aiming it at the clock. “Would you like to go inside and see its mechanism? My friend Alberto lives there.”
He lowered his camera and without waiting for her answer, he took her by the hand and drew her towards the archway under the clock tower. He knocked on a door partly hidden by the scaffolding.
“Dino!” A young man with a receding hairline stood before them.
“Alberto!” Dino kissed the young man on both cheeks and they proceeded up a set of stairs and into a kitchen.
The room pulsed with a sound like the beat of a giant heart. The muffled bang was broken every few minutes by a frenzy of whirling and crashing flywheels and ratchets. Loops of chains and ropes ran through the wooden ceiling and floor. Sleeping on a table in the midst of this immense mechanical toy lay a three-legged cat.
“She’s missing a foreleg so I named her Venus,” Alberto said. “I think she is what you English call Siamese.”
“Ciao, Venus!” Dino made a mock bow towards the cat, who sat up and yawned at the sound of their voices.
Looking closer, she saw that the cat’s right eye was the opalescent blue of a Siamese, but its left was shut tight. A yellow ooze ran from the corner of the eye. “You poor thing!” she said.
“Alas, I can’t take her to Milano.”
“You are going on holiday, Alberto?” Dino smiled.
“I’m staying with my sister while they repair my big baby.” Alberto waved grandly at the clock. “My sister is allergic to cats. If you know anyone who would like Venus, be my guest, as you say in English.”
The cat leapt off the table and hopped in a funny little lopsided motion over towards Luce. She could hear the rattle of its purr as it rubbed itself against her pant leg.
“It likes your voice, bella.” Dino smiled as he took a photograph of Luce crouching down to stroke the cat’s battered-looking head.
“I wish I could take her,” Luce said. “But we leave tomorrow.” “Ah, well, think it over.” Alberto nodded at Dino. “If you change your mind, Dino will bring it to your hotel. I hope you will remember seeing the greatest wonder of Venice. If it is true
as they say, that time is money—then I am the richest man in the world.”
“Oh, time is much more complex than that,” Dino said, winking at Luce, and she smiled shyly. It was true: she could feel the arrow of time bending mysteriously. It seemed to her that time was thundering backwards, like a river returning to its source.
A few minutes later, she was walking with Dino through the great Piazza San Marco, where tourists moved among the pigeons like currents of sea air from the Adriatic, their cameras bobbing on their chests, the side veils of their Tilley hats fluttering. One of the larger groups, judging from their boisterous, drawling voices, came from the American South. They called out to one another as they pushed their way into a crowded pizzeria on the edge of the square.
“Are the pigeons a metaphor for the tourists?” Dino asked sarcastically. “Or are the tourists a metaphor for the birds?”
Luce smiled obligingly. Near the middle of the square, she noticed the guide who had been talking to Dino in the Ducal Palace. As she watched, the woman lifted up a huge scarlet umbrella and the tourists scurried in her direction.
“The tourists can’t be a metaphor for the birds,” Dino said. “They are too badly dressed.”
Luce laughed, her usually solemn round face as unguarded as a schoolgirl’s, and Dino bowed like a performer accepting applause. Then he pivoted on the heel of his brogue and waved at a figure in a frock coat who was calling out to him in Italian. The man’s head sprouted a mountainous plumage of yellow curls, and his high-heeled pumps shone bright pink against the cobblestones.