by Diana Cachey
“What the hell? Why me? Go swim,” thought Louisa. She looked up and waited for the seagull to come back and change her mind.
“In a canal? A canal with boat traffic?” she said aloud to whomever might care to answer. “Anything?” she prodded, but nothing happened.
So she did the next best thing. She went into the kitchen and poured herself another glass of red wine. Upon finishing it, she began to remember the words to the song.
I’m a fish with the will of a wandering wave, sliding, gliding, taking my fill.”
She wrote down. Was there a code in it? What did it mean?
“Oh what the hell. I will try to find that spot,” she said, “but I’m not going in,” she yelled in the direction of the canal.
She waved up at the sky, the strange Venetian sky that today had brought talking birds with pieces of paper that featured song lyrics. She put on hat, coat, gloves, scarf and boots and grabbed the paper where she’d written the few lyrics she remembered.
Finally, she poured another glass of wine to take on the search and left.
She tried to picture where Barbara might’ve stayed when she saw the blonde woman swim in a canal. She needed to find a hotel room with its window above a small canal that led in the larger Guidecca Canal.
Ordinarily, Louisa would pass the cafe near Ca’ Foscari but she knew too many assorted characters who would stop her to chat. She halted on the corner before the bridge.
She stood at the bridge and made a mental request -- to the mermaid, the seagull, her intuitive self or whomever seemed to be leading her somewhere to swim. In her mind, she said, “If someone in the cafe tries to delay me, please tell me if I am supposed to stop and talk to them. Let me know if it’s part of your plan, part of the clue, or if you want me to keep moving on instead.”
The short prayer calmed her. Soon a boat came down the canal, driven by her friend Tom.
Tom, an American married to a Belgium woman who grew up in Venice, befriended Louisa during her first trip. She’d been sitting on Nico’s terrace at Zattere, trying to decide what gelato to order, when Tom leaned over and suggested vanilla ice cream topped with Amarene, a sauce of sour black cherries. It became her favorite ice cream and he became a friend.
Besides his sleek motor boat, Tom also owned a splendid three story apartment overlooking the Grand Canal.
When he saw Louisa standing on the shore near Ca’ Foscari, he immediately pulled his boat over to her side of the canal.
“You headed out. Or home?”
“Out,” said Louisa.
“Hop in.”
“Great, but I’m not exactly sure where I’m going.”
“Even better. No plans.”
“I’ve got a plan, just not sure where it starts.”
“That’s the best way to see Venice. Explore,” he said as he thrust the boat into reverse. With a series of back and forth maneuvers, he parked by some stairs that led into the canal. At the concrete edge of the canal, the fondamenta, he hung on while Louisa stepped into his boat.
“You had dinner?” he said.
“No.”
“Looking for company?”
“Haven’t even had lunch. Slept all day.”
“Good idea. It’s been a strange day. Freaky shit.”
“Like what freaky shit?” Louisa said, having had her own freaky shit occur during the windy day, in her apartment no less.
“Sit down and I’ll tell you.”
Tom handed her his cell phone. It displayed an article that read:
BREAKING NEWS: Today, a rare tornado hit Venice, Italy.
Tree limbs broken, market stalls overturned and some buildings were damaged. No injuries have been reported. One of the worst hit areas was the Sant’ Elena Island where an open air market was in progress (area also known for the Venice Biennale). The tornado caused terrified shoppers to dash for cover.
A water bus ticket office had its roof ripped off by the tornado and a number of boats were capsized.
Tom’s boat coasted through the same canal where earlier a parade of gondoliers serenaded passengers in their craft under Louisa’s bedroom window, above which a seagull had flown with three torn papers gliding behind it, and in which waters Louisa saw a mermaid’s ghost face. Louisa held her breath until they turned the corner towards the Grand Canal then she exhaled relief that she’d witnessed no more paranormal activity in the haunted river.
“Freaky shit, huh?” Tom said and nodded at his cell phone in Louisa’s hand.
“Um, yeah.”
“Seagulls and pigeons acting out everywhere.” Tom glanced at the sky.
“Seagulls? Acting out?”
“Squawking. Like fearful of the wind.”
“I can’t believe I slept through it. Weird dreams.” Unsure of her dreams, reality and those seeming apparitions, Louisa said nothing about the mermaid songs.
“Shit yea. Tornadoes make people dream weird. They make ya see strange stuff, like the Wizard of Oz, right?”
“I had strange dreams and when I woke up, papers flew, seagulls howled at me.”
“Wind howling. Papers flying everywhere, uh huh, sounds about right.”
“I thought it was a fluke, the crazy apparitions.”
“It wasn’t a fluke. Freaky dreams come in storms.”
“I don’t know,” she said, and her thoughts drifted back to those three pieces of torn paper crumbling themselves up, then assembling back into one page, without tape, which produced the words to a song in her dreams. Maybe it was like Oz, she dreamt it all.
“Where we goin, sugah?”
“Somewhere near the Guidecca canal.” He motioned for Louisa to sit down in the captain’s seat with him. He always wanted Louisa to be up front, where water taxi drivers, police boat captains and gondoliers could see a hot blonde riding next to him.
“Venice side or over where I pick you up for drinks after your spa time?” Tom and Louisa enjoyed many boat rides together, along the rivers and waters of this exquisite town, on their way for coffee, drinks, pastries or meals.
“Venice. A small canal that leads out past Zattere.”
“Only a few rios that take you from a side canal to the Guidecca. What’s nearby?”
“A hotel. My sister stayed there once and her window overlooked it.”
“I know just the one,” he said, “see how God works these things out for you?” He fired up the engines and pulled away from the water taxi he’d been trailing.
Tom was a spiritual guy of sorts who believed you needed to “let go and let God” and all that jazz. Yet he stole apples and umbrellas from the lobbies of hotel rooms. Interesting paradoxes like that abounded in Tom. Louisa loved that about him.
“How do you know the hotel it is?”
“I picked Barbie up there one night. Years ago.”
“Of course, why hadn’t I thought of that?”
“Didn’t need to, he said, “God thought of it.”
Indeed God had. If there was such a thing as this thing called god.
Maybe there is something to all of this god stuff after all, thought Louisa.
“I told you there was something to all of this God stuff,” Tom said as if on command.
Louisa nodded. The breeze blew wisps of hair into her mouth. She grabbed a strand and twirled it about with her fingers. God or ghosts?
“You in a hurry?”
“Not sure,” said Louisa, “uh, back in my apartment. . .”
“Tell me, sugah, You looked kinda squeamish back there on the fondamenta when I found you today.”
“Um, a ghost told me to go for a swim.”
“Really? How interesting.”
“In that canal by Barbie’s hotel room window. I think.”
“Let’s see, it’s almost dark. If we head right over, we might make the sunset.”
“Sounds wonderful.”
Tom moved to Venice a decade ago and many things, great and small, magically fell into place for he and his wife, who spoke
several languages fluently, which proved handy when it came to finding them a boat, a slip to keep it in and their gorgeous voluminous palace facing Rialto bridge. Beautiful, fashionable, intelligent -- all words to describe his wife -- but some would also call her long-suffering because, although Tom owned lucrative businesses and amassed a fortune, he also was a ladies’ man.
Tom and Louisa became not only close friends but each other’s confidantes, matchmakers, dinner dates -- everything but lovers. Still, his wife wasn’t sure about that part, or even how she felt about them being close friends, so Tom always left his wife behind whenever he journeyed with Louisa anywhere in his boat. Louisa nodded at the fortitude of his wife, who indeed was correct about some things -- Tom’s relationship with Louisa’s best friend, Rebecca, was more than suspect. It had been consummated.
Louisa departed Tom’s boat and waved him off. Soon she saw a blonde weaving over a bridge with a fair-haired Venetian man in tow, both dressed in white. It was too familiar. Almost a vision but it was real. The Venetian yelled at her, pulled her back to him while the woman struggled to leave.
Now she knew she was in the right place, the place where the ghosts wanted her. To swim?
Louisa cringed, not only about swimming in the cold waters of the dirty canal but also of her debacles with Matteo. She shook her head but couldn’t look away. She scrutinized their arguing, pleading, stomping away. They’d be coming back, returning for more, this much she knew from experience.
What next? More drama? Will they perform for all to see?
She soon had her answer.
The blonde woman stepped into the canal, the frigid water, which seemed to sober her up a bit. Another blonde in the same canal? Louisa understood how a pissed off, tipsy beauty could jump in just to prove her independence to a domineering man.
Boats lurched toward the blonde in the water and her Venetian lover had no choice but to attempt a rescue. What a spectacle, oh the insanity. He kissed her, she pushed, boats swerved to miss them. Louisa closed her eyes, could watch no more. She turned to leave but froze.
What she saw shook next her worse than a swim in a freezing canal. The side of the bridge boasted a bas-relief, one of a ship with dolphin masthead. The street sign read Fondamenta Delfino. The ship appeared to be old and the dolphin looked like those from Greek frescos. Where was that ship? Within the sound of tolling bells? She needed to find it. Where would she find it? Even if she found it, what would she do? What clue might it conceal?
Wait. Wasn’t Louisa supposed to go for a swim?
So far, she’d only observed her lookalike doing so. Was she supposed to scuba dive on the ship, sunken somewhere in the lagoon? Was she to swim to find it?
An avid diver, Louisa longed for years to scuba dive the lagoon. Despite the chilling cold and murky visibility, she knew it had tales to tell and held treasures lost from medieval wars and floods in San Marco. She remembered that a dive center was located along the Zattere, very near to where Tom had just dropped her.
“You fool,” she laughed as she realized she could swim to the dive shop along the fondamenta, so close was it to her current position, or she could simply walk.
Unlike the Buranese, the divemasters at the nautical shop did not shun the blonde. They embraced the American and welcomed her questions about a ship named Delfino, which may’ve been the one immortalized not only on the bridge but on adjacent palazzo walls. Indeed, the gate to the courtyard wherein the shop was set back held a similar image of a ship.
They obliged Louisa with legends of sunken ships and called in other Venetians to confer about how to find the Delfino. They studied maps and detailed descriptions culled from dusty leather bound volumes. Venetians, called on the phone and pulled from off the street, weighed in on the nautical documents. Others added their own versions of tales about the Delfino.
Or rather, Delfini, plural, as in more than one sunken ship. “Dolphin” seems to have been a popular name for ships that sailed across the Adriatic sea, both to and from Venice. Stories were told of several wrecks of different sizes, ages and histories and all with the same name. Venetians even told stories of dolphins spotted from their own motor or sailboats. Dolphins, they explained, were spiritual animals who protected sailors, swimmers and divers alike. People of the Venetian lagoon loved dolphins and, not surprisingly, festooned many a boat with its motif.
Several maps showed the most likely ships, named Delfino, to fit the description in the ghost clue -- that is, within the sound of the tolling bells of San Marco. The divers then helped Louisa narrow the search to just two. Both were on record at the Ca’Foscari library for Louisa to research further and find the locations where they lie in the deep.
Then, before Louisa departed the dive shop, they celebrated in typical Italian style -- with wine and dancing. They pulled out the Prosecco, popped the cork, poured glasses of the bubbly and toasted their success in helping another dive aficionado on her quest to dive a wreck. They even offered to take her to it, but only after they all danced with her, of course.
Louisa recalled the advice of the ghost expert. She needed to rely on Matteo. She also needed to dive the Delfino and the only person she knew who could captain the boat, other than the divemasters at the shop who already knew way too much for her comfort, was Matteo.
Matteo. Why Matteo? She hesitated.
She could trust Matteo with the dive but she didn’t trust herself with him. She needed back-up. She needed the Calvary. Soon.
Unbeknownst to Tom, Louisa’s best friend, Rebecca, was coming to Venice. The Calvary -- as Rebecca had jokingly called herself -- would be there to save the day.
“If not the day then at least the Carnival,” she’d told Louisa, who intended to persuade her to get there sooner rather than later.
Unbeknownst to Louisa, the Calvary had already booked her flight.
The sun set behind the clouds. There was no horizon shot, no last look at the fiery globe before it dipped into dusk. Tonight the sun clung to clouds and spiked out its rays above them.
To most who gathered to enjoy the sunset, it disappointed. Clouds obstructed their view of the sun vanishing behind the sea. Louisa, to the contrary, was delighted. For her, the best part of the show occurred after the sun fell below her line of sight when the rays painted a new sky every second. Clouds didn’t obstruct, they blended the colors, they enhanced the sky.
Master artists paint those billowing clouds in their sunsets like nature today has painted its own masterpiece sky, thought Louisa.
The clouds upon the horizon meant something else to Louisa, something not so great. These clouds she now enjoyed at sunset meant quite another matter in the morning, when on open sea, they headed out to the wreck site. Tomorrow they were to dive dangerously deep, then enter and explore an unknown ship, find clues to its identity, to hopefully lead to more clues. Was it a wild goose chase? Right now she worried more about the impending wild ride out to the wreck or a possible cancellation of the dive. Waiting was the worse that could happen, a missed attempt would prolong their search, leaving unanswered questions for calmer seas.
She shuddered and cringed at another possibility -- if the weather was borderline, they’d be tempted to dive anyway, where surface problems would be her great but not worse or only enemy. The choppy surf could become rougher while she and Matteo explored the depths. This was a situation that intimidated her to this day, even after diving thousands of dives and with training well past expert level. They might also be hauling up relics they might find, complicating both the search and their entry into the bobbing boat after the dive upon surfacing. She hated that. When it came to less than ideal seas, her mind could mess with her expertise and make her act like a greenhorn, the word used by experienced divers to describe beginners because they often donned bright green fins.
You are not a greenhorn. You can deal with choppy seas, she reminded herself. As long as you are breathing, you’re okay, she repeated to herself, a phrase taught to her years ago b
y experienced wreck divers. She realized she had been holding her breath just thinking about rough seas.
“Ahhhh,” she exhaled then forced herself to breath in deep and exhale again for good measure.
The sun has set. It’s over. It’s dark, like it will be inside that wreck, with the deep sea all around me, she thought and off she went to the nearest bar. Man, I could use a drink.
It had been years since she took a drink before a dive, although divers loved to party, a culture Louisa fit in with all too well. Some of the people in that culture died -- by diving too deep on air, during breath-hold dives that ended in a shallow water blackouts or from heart attacks and other maladies. A few of those were alcohol-related, such as dive sensibilities compromised by years of hard living and with bodies deteriorated or not up to the fitness level that an advance dive demanded. True, many of those deaths were simply bad luck or accidents, but some fatal dives could’ve been prevented by better choices. One thing she knew was that drinkers seemed to have more bad luck and made worse choices. One way or another, alcohol probably contributed to, if not directly caused, many of those dive fatalities.
Having thought it through, a drink no longer loomed as a way to calm her nerves the night before a dive. What now presented a better idea than a drink was a quick trip to the library to check her sources about the wreck and wreck site.
Sources conflicted as to the bottom topography. One source said the wreck sat at eight-five feet while the other said it lay deeper, around one-hundred and twenty-five feet. A major difference, forty feet, changed the dive considerably. The shallower depth was within the limits of recreational diving whereas the deeper depth made it a mandatory decompression dive. Louisa calculated their dive time limits for both depths and prepared a plan for either alternative, but confirming the correct depth was desirable so she would have one less thing worry about underwater. A deeper dive not only limited their bottom time and mandated a decompression stop during the ascent but it also demanded more air and increased the risk of nitrogen narcosis.