The Road from Midnight

by Wendyl Nissen

  “Daisy, we are just friends. I told you. There’s no way I could even look at another man in a romantic way, let alone sleep with him. I’m a wreck. I just like him being around, that’s all.”

  “Okay then. And you’re not a wreck. You are coping really well and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but you’re really skinny. You’ve lost heaps of weight. You look terrific.”

  “No, I hadn’t noticed but thanks for trying to make me feel good. I love you.”

  We caught the boat together to the airport the next day and as I waved goodbye to my dear friend festooned in crystals, still with her trademark mad red hair and harem pants, tears streamed down my cheeks. She had been the only person in the world whom I could rely on and suddenly I felt very lonely.

  I settled into Marco’s apartment, which was like an antique shop filled with rare pieces of furniture and religious art he had come across through his work and had restored.

  “I’ve given you the old priest’s bed,” he announced as he hauled my heavy suitcase up the three flights of stairs. “I found it in the basement of a church I was working on and I reckon its 500 years old,” he laughed, looking at my horrified face as I followed him up the old staircase.

  “Don’t worry, it’s been fully restored and has a lovely new mattress. It’s just the sort of bed a lost princess like you needs,” he said reassuringly.

  I leapt into it that first night and did indeed feel like royalty slowly sinking into its depths.

  Over dinner Marco told me of all the tombs and antiquities that have sometimes been under the churches he works on for hundreds of years.

  “Most of the furniture we find has been hidden during wars for safe keeping and then forgotten about,” he explained, “They always needed a lot of work so the priests were usually happy to get them off their hands for a small fee.”

  Marco explained to me how restoring Italy’s many old churches was a political minefield, as so many of them had been built on top of other structures, blending together work which ranged over many centuries. The problem for the architect was restoring it when the specialists in the baroque period insisted that you couldn’t pull down that building to reveal the one underneath from the Romanesque period five centuries earlier. Often Marco was forced to broker an agreement where elements of one were allowed to remain while the other was revealed.

  “That is part of my charm,” he said as I sat in awe of this kid from Christchurch who had grown into such an amazing and thoroughly knowledgeable expert.

  In the main room of his apartment was a tiny window which he said was so old he didn’t have the heart to get rid of it.

  “I could imagine it being the one source of light into someone’s room and I found iron work where little shutters had been fitted.”

  So he kept it and had a little sheet of glass put in. I adored it and often sat and looked out imagining I was that little girl peering out into the world in some long forgotten century. I bought a tiny marguerite daisy plant on one of my walks and put it there along with a picture of Charlotte and a candle which I lit every morning. It was my unspoken shrine and one day I noticed Marco had bought a new candle when the other one was about to run out and lit it.

  Marco didn’t seem to have anyone significant in his life. I brought it up a few times and he muttered about an archaeologist in Sicily he saw sometimes but I got the distinct impression he wasn’t into long-term relationships. The only long-term bond he had was with his churches.

  So we settled into an easy life together, meeting up at the end of the day, and eating out some nights at Marco’s favourite osteria in the neighbourhood, helping me make new friends with the local people and introducing me to a whole new world of food. Slowly he taught me a few words of Italian in the Venetian dialect, which was very important if I was to get along with the locals. I learned that eating was about tasting and enjoying the best and freshest food. He took me to the local markets to buy fresh fish and to the local fruit and vegetable man who sold his goods direct from his boat on the canal. I learned to buy our food fresh every day, and while Marco did most of the cooking I was learning how to prepare food without a recipe, just going on simple tastes and combinations like fresh tomatoes, basil and buffalo mozzarella, or anchovies and balsamic vinegar. For the first time in my life food mattered as something intrinsic to my daily life rather than something you shoved down as quickly as possible between meetings.

  We never ran out of things to talk about, from parties we went to in the old days, our long-running dispute over Ian Drury and how much he loved him and I hated him, to the role of religion in the lives of the Italians. Marco also took me to the obvious tourist sights such as San Marco and the Rialto but I could tell he hated being there and I didn’t much like the crowds. We would sit in a café drinking coffee and listen to the maddening Americans who seemed to need to voice every thing they were experiencing:

  “Oh I don’t like that, can you believe they painted it that colour?” Or: “I’m drinking my wine now and I’m thinking it’s got an interesting taste, very red colour isn’t it, I’ve swallowed it now and I really don’t think it’s up to much.”

  Marco and I would sit at our table laughing at the sheer arrogance of these people who appeared to have no sensitivity towards other cultures at all.

  “Wait until you stand next to one of them looking at a beautiful piece of art and listen to them complain that there is too much nudity, it’s unbelievable.”

  Eventually Marco worked out that I was enjoying discovering the art of Venice and he took me to the Accademia where I found all the Madonna con bambino paintings too moving but fell in love with a Tinteretto called “St Mark Freeing a Slave”. I could relate to the slave cast down on the ground about to have his eyes put out and his legs broken surrounded by turmoil. Some days I knew exactly how powerless he felt. Marco then took me to see more Tinterettos at the Scuola Grande San Rocco where the passion and movement of his paintings left me astonished.

  Soon I was taking to the calles of Venice on my own with the energy of a new convert. Marco gave me a map, where he had ringed churches of interest and gave me instructions:

  “First you will get lost, even the locals sometimes get lost, but don’t worry. Just keep walking and you’ll be surprised how many times you end up at our campo and getting lost is really the only way to see Venice. You might even find a deserted campo free of tourists. And if you don’t find your way back then make your way to the grande canal and hop on a vaparetto. Here are some tickets, just make sure you are going the right way and get off at Ca’Rezzonico.

  “Okay that’s easy. I can find my way back from there,” I assured him.

  “And do try to use some Italian. It is just rude to be in someone else’s country and not at least try. So say “ciao” for hello and “adìo” for goodbye and “per piasser” for please and “grassie” for thank you, just like I taught you. Have you got that?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye.

  I made him repeat them a few times, practised and set off. But not before I had stocked up on coins. I got through a surprising amount as I visited the churches.

  Every night he would be amused to find me sitting with postcards and icons I had picked up at various churches, quizzing him about what different saints meant and boring him with yet another discovery of a Tintoretto.

  “Oh my God, I found the biggest most best one today at Madonna dell’Orto, “The Worship of the Golden Calf”, it is massive and full of his usual flying figures and passion and turmoil and I love the way he just lets a little bit of blue or crimson come through,” I’d gush, full of the joys of Italian renaissance painting.

  “And then I turned around and there he was, buried in a tomb, right there in front of me. Amazing.”

  Marco would laugh indulgently as he made his way through the various packages of food I had also enthusiastically picked up on my way through Venice. Hand made tortellini of proscuito crudo, amaretti biscuits, always fresh tomatoes and artichokes.
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  “Do you know how to cook them? I’ve only eaten them once a long, long time ago.”

  It was official. I may have just emerged from a shock no person should have to endure, but somehow I was channelling my energy into falling in love with Venice. I wasn’t exactly refusing to process the grief, I still had days when I couldn’t even get out of bed, but Venice provided a distraction, a reason to get out of bed because there was another church I needed to visit. I couldn’t get enough, and finding them was a welcome adventure and diversion.

  “You’re not the first person to fall in love with Venice,” laughed Marco. “Artists love the light but writers in particular seem to find it entrancing. Byron lived here, so did Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Henry James. Actually Henry James wrote the best story while he was living here: ‘The Aspern Papers.’ I’ll get it for you, you’ll enjoy reading it as you discover Venice,” he said as he eagerly searched for it on his over stocked bookshelves.

  “Ah here it is,” he said blowing the dust off. “Plenty more where that comes from. Daphne du Maurier wrote Don’t Look Now here. They made a movie out of it at St Nicolai just around the corner past Billa. I’ll see if I can rent it out one night, the sex scene with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie is out of this world,” he continued, excited at having someone to share his knowledge of Venice with at last.

  The one thing I couldn’t understand was the grumpiness of the Venetians. Marco had explained their frustration with tourists taking over their neighbourhood but they really were plain rude. After I had been told off for the 100th time by some old woman in the supermarket for doing something wrong like taking too long at the check-out, or taking too long ordering my 100 grams of proscuitto crudo, I let rip telling the old bag to “shut the fuck up.” The look of horror on her face was impressive, the silence and the scowls I received from the rest of the customers, made me deeply ashamed. I was prone to these outbursts of anger, and I had no idea where they were coming from.

  “Why don’t they just bloody move if they don’t like living here?” I moaned to Marco that night when he got home from work.

  “Jane, do you have any idea what you are saying? The Venetians have lived here since the year 453, they belong here. They’ve been taken over by the French and the Austrians and fought back. They have a history here, a long history. Would you expect Te Arawa back home to shift out of their tribal lands in Rotorua because there were too many tourists? Do you think Venetians should be denied the very lifestyle you are presently falling in love with?” he was getting a bit worked up now.

  “Okay, I see what you mean. I just, well they just seem so damn rude,” I grumped.

  “Jane, recently, on a Sunday 120,000 tourists came into Venice, in one day. Is it any wonder the residents shudder every time they hear the rumbling of a trolley suitcase on the cobblestones outside their windows?”

  “No, no you’re right. I’m sorry. I guess I’m being a bit unrealistic.”

  “How would you like it?” Marco continued warming to his topic now. “If you had to move out of the house you were born in, not to mention your parents and your grandparents, and … well … people related to you who lived there a thousand years ago? It’s not something we Kiwis can accept, the fact that the house you lived in could hold the stains and the scratches created by your family years ago. That’s special, that’s not something you give up because of some loud Americans at your front door every day.”

  “Okay, okay calm down. But do they ever accept foreigners? The ones who live here and do good work like you do. You’ve been here for five years, they seem to like you.”

  Marco threw his head back and laughed. “Are you kidding? They hate me even more because I am fussing around with their churches and many of the Venetians think we are only working to preserve them for the tourists. They would rather have everything crumbling in damp the way it has always been.”

  “Oh, well no wonder you were glad to have me arrive, even if I was an absolute wreck,’ I said.

  “Jane, I have lots of friends and they are mainly Italians from terra firma, the mainland. They have no problem with Kiwis, many of our troops were stationed here fighting with the Italians in the Second World War, and many stayed and worked with the resistance. They have not forgotten us,” he said with pride.

  “And when it gets too much I catch a train to the mainland. Belluno is only two hours away and suddenly you are at the foot of the Dolomite mountains, so close to Austria and it is heavenly. I’ll take you there one day,” he said.

  He also took the “moment of truth”, as he later called it to fill me in on the fact that Venice has terrible food and restaurants apart from the ones only the locals know and he couldn’t wait to get me onto the mainland and into the heart of Italy where the real food is.

  “When we need to do a big shop, we’ll go into Treviso by train. Much cheaper and it will save us a lot of money in the long run,” he assured me.

  “Well thanks for removing some of that Venice magic for me,” I said.

  “You have had long enough mooching around with your newfound love affair. Time to realise that even Venice has pimples on its arse,” he laughed.

  As the weeks went by and Marco and I enjoyed wonderful meals and wine together I found myself sharing every sordid detail of my life from the battle to keep Jim Craig away from me, his insistence that Charlotte was his child and the deep shame I felt letting Lawrence turn my Charlotte into a celebrity handbag. Through it all he listened, hugged, wiped away the tears and told me that it was all over. I was starting a new life here in Venice, and I should look forward, not back.

  12

  The police gave Lawrence back his passport and let him go. The New Zealand consulate in Milan went along with Lawrence’s insistence that his public needed him back home, that he was losing work by not being there to host Two Twonight and if we were all honest we realised that the story of missing Charlotte Cunningham had been dropped by the world’s media. There had not been one sighting, not one piece of evidence or a clue which the police could work with. She had simply ceased to exist that awful night on the train, and we were being gently encouraged to accept the fact that she was most probably dead. The sad reality was that children go missing around the world every day and the fact that Charlotte was European, blonde and blue-eyed and came with a parent who was equally photogenic and more than happy to play the role of grieving father for the cameras, meant that initially our missing daughter made great fodder for the emotion starved news media.

  Now, with no new leads, they had dropped us and moved on to other victims, other grieving people with tales of loss to tell. And quite simply, Lawrence missed the attention and needed to get home where he had a ready and willing supply of it.

  We met at Osteria san Barnaba for dinner the night before he flew out. We had only seen each other at the police station for our regular briefings with Inspector Leggièri and even then I felt ill having to sit in the same room as Lawrence. I didn’t know where he was staying and had little interest in him. I could no longer see a man I had loved, or had a child with. All I saw was a vain, egotistical self promoter. Our marriage was over. In the aftermath of losing my child I was also blaming him. And perhaps he was blaming me too. When you lose a child and have no idea where they are or what has happened to them, you have to turn on someone. And in our case it suited us to turn on each other.

  I arrived first and was greeted warmly by Sandro who ran the restaurant even though he kept threatening to retire to Friuli, in northeastern Italy. I ate here a lot as it was near Marco’s apartment, and the whole family were so accepting and welcoming to me that I found it hard to stay away.

  “A campari please, Sandro,” I asked as I sat down. I had taken to drinking campari and soda before dinner as the locals do, and I was planning to get a couple under my belt before Lawrence turned up with his needy ego.

  “We have a magnificent trippe un umido Jane, you’ll love it.”

  And indeed I would. I ha
d eaten all manner of things in this restaurant from musèto (a fatty sausage made mostly from pig’s snout), sépa (cuttlefish) in black ink risotto to baccala the salted cod loved by all Venetians. I began visiting his restaurant as a woman with no appetite, who only ate because she needed to keep her strength up and Sandro was a man on a mission. So far I had eaten everything he put in front of me and enjoyed every mouthful.

  “You have been eating a lot better lately, Jane. We think you might have found some happiness after all this misery, no?” asked Sandro with a raised eyebrow.

  “Maybe, Sandro, maybe.”

  As Lawrence waltzed into the osteria you would never guess he was a man who just a month ago had lost his only daughter. He had made good use of his time buying up some designer clothes, grown a European goatee and you could tell he felt he was looking pretty hot.

  “Hi, Jane, how are you doing?” he asked full of confidence and a slight swagger, before sitting his tight arse down and ordering a beer.

  “Oh like you give a shit,” I snapped back, barely able to take a breath, the air around him was so repulsive to me.

  “Let’s not be like this, eh,” he coaxed. “I’m off tomorrow and I just wanted to square things off with you, so that when I get back I can get all our stuff sorted out.”

  “What stuff?” I asked with a growing sense of unease.

  “You know the house and our shared property. I’ll need to sell the house and split it all up, so I just need to check that you’re okay with that.”

  “Okay?” I said, not caring how loud I was. “Okay? About you selling my house, the home your daughter grew up in and will come home to eventually? How can you be so callous, so unfeeling, so self-fucking-obsessed!”

  “Settle, Jane, settle everyone’s looking at us,” he murmured desperate to shut me up.

  “I don’t fucking care who looks at us, you despicable, egotistical moronic … oh just get out of here, leave,” I had officially lost it.