The Last Gondola

by Edward Sklepowich

  “I hope so,” Cipri said, as he seated himself in an armchair across from Urbino.

  “Although I shouldn’t speak for him, Eugene might want more Longhis. He had a hard time choosing which ones he wanted you to copy.”

  “I’m at his service,” he said, “and yours, too, although I know that you’re not interested in copies.”

  “But perhaps you could do a portrait of someone,” Urbino said casually. “My friend Rebecca Mondador, the architect. I’d like to give it to her as a gift. That is, if she has time to sit for you, and if you have the time to do it.”

  “Oh, I have the time!”

  “Let me speak with her first. The portrait should be nothing like the style of the one you did for my fellow countryman, Samuel Possle. The one of his wife, his ex-wife now. I’ve been a recent visitor to the Ca’ Pozza.”

  Cipri threw a glance at his wife. Her keen blue eyes beneath their black brows, the eyes that had so disconcerted the Contessa at the music conservatory, flashed with some emotion Urbino couldn’t identify.

  “I’ve seen the portrait on two occasions. Along with two other of your paintings. Copies of Moreau. But the portrait—”

  “Ah, yes, the Moreau copies,” Cipri interrupted nervously. “Can you believe that Signor Possle sent me all the way to Paris to do one of them, The Apparition? I even had an expense account. He was very generous. The other copy, the one of Salome, I had to do from reproductions. It’s not as good. Do you like Moreau, Signor Urbino?”

  “Yes. But about the portrait, unfortunately it’s hung in a rather dark room. But what I could see of it impressed me. It’s very good. And Mrs. Possle is extremely beautiful, or she was.”

  Cipri was growing increasingly uncomfortable. His wife uttered a few words that Urbino couldn’t make out.

  “Of course I don’t know how long ago you painted the portrait.”

  “Thirty-eight years ago.”

  “That is a long time, but even so, true beauty always leaves its traces, haven’t you found?”

  Cipri made no response.

  Urbino drank down the remainder of his espresso. Without asking, Cipri poured anisette into the cup as well as into his own.

  “Tell me, Signor Cipri, how well did you know Mrs. Possle?”

  “How well did I know her? But—”

  He looked at his wife again. Urbino now knew, too late, what Possle meant when he had said that Cipri had got the original of the portrait. Mrs. Cipri’s eyes were closed. She was swaying slightly.

  “Excuse me,” Cipri said.

  He helped Signora Cipri out of her chair and guided her across the parlor and through a door. He returned a few minutes later, closing the door behind him. He shut off the Todtentanz.

  “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

  “She’ll be all right. She’s changed so much since then.”

  “I only realized a few moments ago that she was Samuel Possle’s wife.”

  Cipri nodded.

  “Hilda. I married her eight years after I painted the portrait.”

  “I’ve only become acquainted with Possle recently, you see,” Urbino explained. “I know he was married to a German woman, a poet, but other than that…” He trailed off.

  “Hardly anyone knows that Hilda was married to Possle. We keep it to ourselves. It wasn’t because of me that they divorced. And, yes, she’s a poet. She still writes in German under her maiden name, Hilda Krippe. Some of her poems have been published recently. People come from Germany and Austria to see her.”

  He reseated himself, poured more anisette, and took a sip.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” he went on, “but she’s sensitive. She’s a very intelligent woman. Her mind hasn’t dimmed at all. But the body…”

  He shook his head and looked in the direction of the closed door.

  “She’s been feeling more poorly than usual. She was fine the day you saw us at the music conservatory, but she’s had a relapse since then.”

  Urbino considered what would now be appropriate. He could thank Cipri for his hospitality, apologize again, and take his leave, promising to let him know about the portrait commission.

  But instead, after sipping his anisette, he said, “If things work out, I might write something about Possle. One reason for coming here was to ask you for your impressions of him. I had no idea of your wife’s former relationship to him.”

  “But now you’d like to ask her some questions, too.”

  Cipri stated it so simply that Urbino was relieved that he could be more direct than he otherwise would have been. But he still needed to let Cipri believe that the main thrust of his questions was a biography of Possle.

  “Considering her reputation as a poet,” Urbino said, “she might like to have her say in anything I write about him. I’d respect whatever privacy either of you might ask.”

  “My wife will have to decide for herself. I’ll mention it to her when she’s feeling better.” Cipri glanced at the bedroom door, then leaned back in his chair. “As for me, I don’t have much to tell. I only went to the Ca’ Pozza for Hilda’s sittings and the unveiling and to discuss business. I haven’t seen Possle in over thirty years. He was kind and generous in his dealings with me.”

  Urbino was puzzled as to how he should take Cipri’s praise. Kindness and generosity didn’t seem to be among Possle’s strongest traits, but as Cipri said, he was speaking of the Possle of three decades ago. One would expect someone in Cipri’s position, married as he was to Possle’s ex-wife, to have less good to say about the man. In fact, any information, positive or negative, needed to be taken with a grain of salt, considering the animosity that might exist between them.

  “Possle never remarried,” Urbino prompted.

  “Marriage doesn’t suit some men. Not that it’s their fault,” he added, perhaps because of Urbino’s own bachelorhood. “Or the fault of women like Hilda either. He never had any cause to complain about her.”

  “I’m sure he didn’t,” responded Urbino, somewhat mystified but immensely interested.

  He decided to approach things from a different angle.

  “I’d like to interview his former gondolier, Armando Abdon. He’s still with him, but it could prove to be difficult with his handicap.”

  “There’s no reason he couldn’t write things down, but I’m not sure how much he’d be willing to tell you. He was devoted to Possle in those days, very devoted, according to Hilda.”

  He held Urbino’s eye for several beats, then looked away.

  “He still is,” Urbino said.

  “That doesn’t surprise me. But let me give you some advice. Go carefully with him. He’s easily offended. He never did anything to Hilda or me, you understand, but I know as well as I know my copying that he’s not someone you want to have angry with you.”

  Cipri’s words reawakened Urbino’s uneasiness about the man and the advantage that he might have over him since the last visit.

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Did you know his sister, Adriana?”

  “Slightly. She used to hang around the Ca’ Pozza. She had a crush on Possle, Hilda said. Maybe she had hoped to marry him before Hilda did.”

  “When did Hilda marry Possle?”

  “In the late fifties. But it seems that Adriana was sticking close to Possle five or six years before then.”

  This places the time close to when the Contessa was briefly acquainted with Possle, Urbino thought.

  “Adriana was lovely,” Cipri continued, “and with a beautiful voice, but she flew into rages over nothing. You wouldn’t want to cross her anymore than her brother.” Cipri appeared to have more to say about Adriana than he had implied a few minutes before. “She seemed emotionally unbalanced, but maybe I’m not the best judge. I’m not one of your wild, raging artists. I’ve always liked to do my work with a tranquil mind and heart.”

  “Did Hilda have any problems with her? Because of Adriana’s feelings for Possle, I mean?”

  “We’ve never talked ab
out her. I was probably wrong about the crush,” Cipri retreated.

  He looked at the bedroom door. It seemed now to be open a crack.

  “Do you know how she died?”

  “She drowned,” Cipri said, in an even lower voice than he had been speaking in so far. “Right here off the Lido when she went out sailing with Possle and her brother. Maybe there was someone else with them. I don’t know.”

  Urbino finished his anisette and got up.

  “I’ll tell Hilda that you’d like to speak with her,” Cipri said, as he accompanied Urbino out of the parlor and into the foyer.

  They stopped by a table. Its surface was littered with sheets torn out of a sketch pad, an Italian-German dictionary, keys, an old palette knife, and an assortment of pens and pencils.

  Urbino indicated the sheets. “May I?” he asked Cipri.

  Cipri nodded.

  Urbino picked them up. Each contained an ink portrait of a woman. Because of the portrait in the gondola room, he recognized her as Hilda, but a Hilda much younger and healthier, with a beatific smile. Clouds of hair framed her face.

  “They’re lovely. When did you do them?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  Urbino looked up at Cipri.

  “It’s the way she sees herself,” the artist said, “and the way I see her.”

  Urbino replaced the portraits on the table.

  “She still writes poetry, you say. Is there a copy of one of her books that she might let me borrow? I have a passable understanding of German.”

  “Let me see.”

  Cipri bent down by a nearby bookshelf and after a few moments extracted a slim paperbound book. He handed it to Urbino. “It’s one of her old collections,” he said. “You can have it.”

  “Thank you, and thank your wife for me.”

  On the book’s gray cover in black German Gothic script was printed “Byronic Inspirations by Hilda Krippe, privately printed in Munich, 1967.”

  “Lord Byron,” Urbino said.

  “Hilda has always loved Byron ever since she was a young woman. Before I met her, the only thing I knew about Byron was the Byron Cup,” he said with a little laugh. He was referring to the annual boat race along the length of the Lido in memory of the poet.

  Urbino thanked Cipri and slipped the book into his pocket.

  “Did Possle share Hilda’s love of Byron?” he asked Possle.

  “It was one of the things they had in common. He had a foreign friend who loved Byron, too. A tall man with a beard. He would sometimes read Hilda a Byron poem when she was sitting for me.”

  “Do you remember what the man’s name was?”

  “A strange name, but I can’t remember it. He was Armenian. Like the fathers on San Lazzaro degli Armeni.”

  53

  Urbino didn’t return directly to the boat landing. Instead he walked down to the beach to the shuttered Grand Hotel des Bains, closed until April. He seated himself on the stone steps of the verandah.

  Ghostlike ships drifted slowly along the horizon. A small plane droned over the water toward the low line of the Euganean Hills in the far distance. Bicycles and tandems passed in the road, and a mother posed behind a stroller while her husband took a picture of her and the baby. Two young couples were walking hand in hand on the hotel’s private strip of beach.

  Usually when he came to the Grand Hotel des Bains, his thoughts were full of Thomas Mann, for it was here that Aschenbach had fallen desperately in love with his Polish boy and had died in the snare of his obsession. But today Byron dominated his thoughts, Byron who had ridden along this same stretch of beach long before it became a bathing resort. Byron who may have written unpublished poems that were in Possle’s possession. And the same Byron who fascinated Hilda.

  He riffled through Hilda’s volume of poetry. The pages had already been cut. Ten poems, most no longer than twenty lines, haunted the pages in their Gothic script. He began to read. The German didn’t give him too much difficulty, although some words and phrases were unfamiliar.

  Not only did Byron inspire all of them, as the title said, but they also had a Venetian theme, taking as their subject some place or activity associated with Byron’s Venice years. The Bridge of Sighs figured prominently, as did his swim from the Lido up the Grand Canal and his love affair with La Fornarina.

  Hilda’s talent had the ability to create vivid, if derivative, word pictures, clouded by rich, suggestive allusions that made Urbino feel as if he were looking through a smoky glass into a more vital and meaningful past. A current of emotion, albeit muted and therefore all the more powerful in his opinion, ran from one poem to another.

  He sat there reading them, part of his mind searching for some connection between Hilda, the poems, and the strange events at the Ca’ Pozza, another part caught up in their spell regardless of their relevance to his present case.

  54

  Back at the Palazzo Uccello, Urbino called his friend Corrado Scarpa, who was a contact at the Venice Questura. He needed a copy of a report about a Lido boat accident that had ended in the death of someone named Adriana Abdon. He gave the approximate date. Scarpa would do his best and get back to him.

  Urbino then gave Rebecca a call and invited her to stop by that evening.

  “I’ll break out a bottle of the Henri Jayer,” he promised. “Consider it belated payment for the help you’ve given me about Possle.”

  “And a retainer for future help?”

  “Perhaps.”

  But once Rebecca had come and was seated in the parlor across from him, Urbino didn’t ply her with any more questions about the former renovations of the Ca’ Pozza. Instead he told her that Possle had invited him back for two more visits.

  “Good for you. So tell me, did I put you onto a good thing? Do you think it’s haunted?”

  She smiled at him over the rim of her wineglass.

  “Not in the way that’s usually meant perhaps, but there are plenty of ghosts that need to be laid to rest.”

  “That’s your job, isn’t it? Or I should say, it’s part of both your jobs. Don’t worry, I’m not going to pump you. I know when you’re pulling down the shutters.”

  “Not all the way.” Urbino gave her an affectionate smile. Then, far less lightly, he told her that the boy who had fallen to his death had been Gildo’s friend.

  Rebecca absorbed this in silence for several moments.

  “That brings everything closer to home, doesn’t it?” was her eventual response.

  “I suppose it does. But I don’t know quite what to make of it yet. Do you know if there’ve been any recent break-ins in San Polo?”

  “Things seemed to have calmed down.”

  Rebecca’s attractive face was full of questions.

  “You know how I like to speculate and turn things over in my mind,” Urbino said, as she continued to scrutinize him.

  “Do I ever!”

  “And you also know that I’m grateful for all you’ve done for Habib and me,” he said, in an abrupt, but tactical shift. “That’s why I’ve decided to have your portrait done. For you to have, not me. And no, not by Habib, but Lino Cipri.”

  It was Urbino’s way of making his lie to Cipri true.

  “A portrait? By Cipri? You’ve got something up your sleeve, my dear, but once again I’m not asking. The ego of even a thoroughly modern woman like me can take only so many rebuffs, and I’ve had more than enough from you over the years.”

  55

  “It’s irises today,” the Contessa said.

  It was Monday morning, March 18, and the two friends were on San Michele, the island of the dead in the lagoon.

  A small bouquet of violet irises stood on the austere grave of Serge Diaghilev, the impresario of the Ballets Russes. Next to the bouquet was one of the worn, moldy ballet slippers that always seemed to adorn the tombstone.

  The Contessa gave a shiver that the chill in the air couldn’t completely account for.

  “Irises die so quickly,” she said. �
�These will be gone by tomorrow. Let’s go.”

  Under the gray sky, they turned down a path toward the main part of the cemetery. Graves with Russian names, most of them women and some of them princesses, conjured up the ghosts of characters out of Tolstoy. The Contessa, dressed against the weather in a thick, gray wool coat, faux fur hat, and matching muff, looked very much in the Slavic spirit of the place.

  “Since one must be buried somewhere,” Urbino said, as they passed through the gate and left the Orthodox section, “Venice is as good a place for it as any, don’t you think?”

  “And what about Possle?” the Contessa asked. “I would guess that the two of you are of the same mind as far as that’s concerned.”

  “It’s not something that I care to ask him.”

  “You’ve been rather timid about asking him anything, it seems to me.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you knew about our last meeting.”

  Except for an account of his visit to the Cipris and his conversation with Gildo about Marco, Urbino hadn’t yet filled her in about other things. During most of the time Gildo rowed them across to San Michele, snug in the cabin beneath their blankets, she had described her conversazione on Saturday in more detail than she had done over the telephone.

  Now, as they entered an area with tiers of burial niches for the ashes of the dead, he began to tell her about his last visit to the Ca’ Pozza. He described his search through Possle’s rooms, but he didn’t tell her about taking the key. He was embarrassed, and he also wanted to figure out first what he might do with the key and with the copy he had made, or so he told himself. He did tell her, however, about the serpentine belt on the back staircase and about everything that Possle had revealed about the poems by Byron.

  He was coming to the end of his account as they drew near the Da Capo-Zendrini mausoleum with its statues of weeping angels. They halted.

  “I’m glad that Alvise isn’t here to see all the intrigues you’ve pulled me into over the years,” the Contessa said.

  “Or the ones you’ve pulled me into.”

  It was a particularly pointed reference, since one of Urbino’s cases directly involving the Contessa had come to a violent conclusion in front of the mausoleum a few years ago.