“Help me turn the body over.”
Somewhat reluctantly, Edgardo approached Costanza.
“Lift her legs, and I’ll take the shoulders,” the physician commanded. Seeing him hesitate, she sneered. “It looks like you’re not very used to corpses . . . ”
Edgardo took the wretched girl’s feet. He made an effort and found himself looking at Costanza’s skinny behind.
Paying no attention to him, Abella started examining the rest of the body: shoulders, arms, back, legs, feet.
She was about to cover the body with the canvas again when she stopped, puzzled by a red spot that spread between the buttocks.
She bent down and, with two fingers, spread the flaps to fully expose the anus. “By the Hippocratic oath . . . ” She fell silent for a fraction of a second. “I’ve never seen anything like this before! Come closer, look.”
The scribe hesitated.
“Oh, I beg your pardon, perhaps I’m embarrassing you. I forgot you used to be a cleric. It is a sight, totally new to you, which could upset your sensibility.”
Stiff as a dried sea bass, Edgardo approached the Magister without saying a word.
“Here, look between the buttocks.” She seemed to be deliberately trying to provoke him. “You see, the anus has been sewn up very skilfully, by the hand of an expert.”
Because of his poor sight, Edgardo couldn’t really see what Abella was pointing at, so, without even thinking about it, out of habit, he went to fetch his eye circles and came close to the orifice.
“Can you see properly now?”
“Yes, it’s horrible, it’s sewn up like the gash of a wound.” He read the same terrible thought in Abella’s face. “You mean to say that—” he stopped, ashamed.
“I don’t know . . . It’s certainly the first hypothesis that comes to mind: that the murderer performed violence against nature.”
They both took a step back, almost as though trying to push the thought out of their minds.
“It’s monstrous, poor Costanza . . . ” Edgardo stammered. “But who . . . I can never believe that Alvise could have performed such an act. Besides, why then sew up the orifice?”
Abella puffed her cheeks, breathed out, and shook her head. “I can’t account for it. It’s as though the murderer wanted to put the body back together after death . . . I don’t understand.”
They remained without speaking, as though in silent prayer.
“I think our work is over,” Abella concluded.
They turned the body over again, then picked up the cloth to cover it once more.
“Wait.” Edgardo bent over the girl’s face. “I’m certain that she is already with God, illuminated by His love.”
He kissed her forehead and gently touched her cheeks and her lips.
It was just a second, the feeling of something hard: he thought he felt a swelling under her nose. He instinctively brought the glass circles close to his eyes and examined the nasal cavity.
As a matter of fact, there were two lacerations inside; small cuts caked with blood, as though a tool had been inserted into the nose.
How come? What could these unusually situated wounds mean?
“Have you seen something?” Abella asked, seeing him bend over the girl’s face.
“No, nothing . . . I was dazzled by her beauty, which has outlived death.”
Why had he lied?
“So can we cover her now?”
Edgardo nodded.
Why couldn’t he entirely trust Abella? What reasons did he have to doubt her?
The Magister stood before him and gave him a severe look. For a moment, he thought she’d read his mind.
“I want you to be totally honest with me.”
Edgardo stiffened, ready to take the blow.
“Do you think it really necessary to tell Magdalena the whole truth?”
XX.
LUPRIO
They buried her in a great rush. The sun had set only once since she had been found. Grimani said the corpse was decaying. That wasn’t true. Miraculously, Costanza’s body still looked as it had on the first day: luminous, white, with no nauseating smell; on the contrary, it had the scent of aromatic herbs.
They wanted to be rid of her, of her macabre presence that had brought so much sorrow into the house and Magdalena’s already devastated spirit.
Edgardo could understand his master wanting to have done with this business and go back to facing the future.
When he and Abella had reported, and lied about the results of the examination, Edgardo had realized with sadness that the only piece of information Magdalena cared about was her sister’s virginity. She hadn’t been raped, and that was all that counted.
Other observations that could cast doubt on Alvise’s guilt had been dismissed with total indifference; he saw that Magdalena wasn’t listening, lost in the maze of her own despair.
Edgardo was tempted to reveal the cruel truth, thinking this could somehow help Alvise, but then realized that it would only increase their desire for revenge. How could he prove that the garzone was unable to perform such a procedure? It would be useless, and the hatred generated by an act of such violence would have exploded uncontrollably.
During the ceremony in the crypt of San Zaccaria convent, on a late winter’s day stifled by an impenetrable cloak of hoarfrost dripping from the Istrian marble, Edgardo thought he could see in his master’s face a detachment he’d never noticed before. He got the impression that he was treating him with unusual coldness. He assumed this was due to the circumstances and the place, even though deep in his heart he feared that Tommaso, having been made aware of Edgardo’s doubts regarding Alvise’s guilt, somehow wanted to punish him and push him away. Edgardo felt guilty, as though he had disappointed him.
The same feeling he’d experienced when he’d let down his father’s hopes, when the latter had expected to have a son who was a knight and, instead, had gotten a deformed creature unable to fight.
So much time had passed since then, and yet the twisted game in his fragile soul was always replayed in the same way, ever more painfully.
Would he therefore never be free of the feeling of ineptitude that had shadowed him since birth?
Once night had fallen on this day of mourning, Edgardo retired to his room with the need to put some order to the confusion of thoughts and feelings stirring in his mind. He had a decision to make.
He put out the oil lamp and went to bed. His bones always ached when he lay down on the straw mattress.
The blackness of the night had erased all points of reference, and the only glimmer of light came from the collision of his thoughts, which generated lightning bolts and glows, and dragged him deeper into the eye of a devastating storm.
If he really wanted to prove Alvise’s innocence, he would have to oppose Tommaso’s will when the latter already seemed to have found the man responsible for the crime.
It wasn’t easy to go against the one he considered his benefactor. Besides, he would have to find a new culprit in order to make his certainty credible. He did not have much confidence in himself. He’d followed his intuition, vague feelings, convinced that he would bring Costanza back home alive, but instead . . .
Places and faces were muddled in a tangle with no head or tail: the Alexandrian merchant and his mysterious palazzo, the very pure glass he’d found in the storeroom, Tataro and the disappearance of his garzone Giacomo and, finally, discovering natron on Costanza’s body, which led back to glass . . . And now the unexplained sewing up of her anus and the cuts in her nose.
And then there was Abella, so tough and decisive, an expert in her art, capable of generous, unselfish acts—what was she truly looking for? Was she simply in the service of Magdalena, or did she have something to do with Costanza’s abduction and death?
His head was pounding and sleep w
as eluding him. He didn’t want to give up. He tried to resist the temptation although he knew that his willpower was more fragile than a newborn baby’s body.
He slipped out of bed, took a small purple glass bottle from his trunk, poured a few drops of thick liquid over an old sponge, and breathed the vapors in deeply.
Ah, opium, saving, heavenly substance, divine food, nectar of the gods, whirlpool of pleasure, providential light . . . The muddle of thoughts was immediately dissolved, his ailing feelings lit up with hope, and his anguish and sorrow vanished. He’d shaken off the burden of his actual life, and past failures appeared as no more than a bad dream after too much drink. He closed his eyes and finally fell asleep.
A flicker of light piercing through the roof tiles and the beating of an invasive seagull’s wings heralded the birth of a new dawn.
He woke up lucid and full of energy. In his clear mind, one thought shone bright. He had to go forth and carry on fighting. If there was one lesson he’d learned from his failures, it was that he must never flee before the enemy, not even when fear dwelled within him.
He went down into the inner courtyard. The servants were already at work around the well. Drawing water for the day was their first task. He found Nena in the kitchen, poking the fire. The air smelled of resin and smoked reeds. The wretched woman looked at him with surprise, fearing bad news.
“You said your son worked for a glassmaker two summers ago, didn’t you?” Edgardo asked.
Nena’s mouth mumbled a few senseless sounds, perhaps some kind of prayer, then the words took shape. “By the blessed Virgin, God almighty, Saint Mark who watches over the poor, Alvise is innocent. You know that. Alvise is a good boy, oh, blessed God.”
Edgardo shook her. “Answer me, Nena, where was this glassmaker’s foundry? I want to save your Alvise, do you understand that?”
The woman opened her mouth wide and, amid her sparse teeth, her tongue took a moment’s rest, then she continued. “By merciful God, by the holy Apostles, by the prayers of all the martyrs, I don’t know . . . I think in Luprio, near a salt pan . . . he was a good garzone.”
“In Luprio, near a salt pan?” Edgardo repeated. It couldn’t be.
As far as he knew, there was only one foundry in the district of Luprio, the one he knew well, the one that Segrado, the great master glassmaker, who had given him his precious eye circles, had rented from Zoto, the crystal maker.
He’d been keeping away from the district for many years, far away from memories, from the past . . . and now the past had returned. It was always this way.
They were all dead: Segrado, Zoto the crystal maker, his beloved Kallis, even though her ghost, in the body of the virgin of the beads, fueled the illusion of rebirth.
He was scared, but at the same time curious to discover how his heart would react to seeing these places again.
With Carnival over and the start of Lent, the appearance of the city had totally altered: the dark breath of poverty, hunger, and despair had penetrated everywhere, and with every step you took, you felt as though you were advancing into a decomposing body.
When he reached Rivus Altus, Edgardo rushed across the canal over the bridge made of cogs built between the shores.
That place, which only ten years earlier had looked like a flourishing market, rich with produce from the vegetable patches of the lagoon islands, had turned into a miserable market of the scarce crops that the countryside, invaded by the waters, still managed to yield. The cabbages, kale, and fennel displayed in the baskets were corroded by rot and mold.
The makeshift stalls gave off a nauseating stench from mounds of mussels and dead crabs. Eels, sardines, and even gobies were a rarity. There was still a great bustle, especially of beggars, bigots, penitents, and lepers, rooting on the ground in search of leftovers. Two cripples were arguing over a fish head snatched away from the paws of a cat.
The deprivations of the Year of Our Lord 1118 were striking violently the land of the wide rivers, and hunger prompted the poorest people to commit crimes in order to survive.
He walked past the little church of San Giacomo di Rivo Alto and ventured into the narrow streets and canals, into the district called Luprio.
How many times had he taken this trip? He thought he could have walked with his eyes shut, but noticed that the landscape had changed greatly. You could still see everywhere the ruins of houses that had collapsed during the earthquake the year before. Bridges thrown down into the canals had been swept away by the currents, and many paths submerged by high tides; sand banks and fords had taken over once luxuriant fields. He struggled to walk, his boots sinking into treacherous slime that, with his every step, gave off a sharp stench of moldy dung.
When he reached Campo San Giacomo di Luprio, he almost couldn’t believe his eyes. Every spot was overgrown; tall cordgrass concealed every path. Heaps of leaves, dried branches, and brambles were rolling around, dragged by the tramontana wind; alders and oaks, too leafy, were concealing the light, so that to reach the church you had to walk through a kind of forest.
The disaster hadn’t even spared the house of God. Part of the bell tower had collapsed, the portico outside the entrance was roofless, and the surrounding brick wall was full of cracks. A desolate sight that filled him with sadness: the city of Venice hadn’t managed to pick itself back up yet.
Just a little farther, and he would find Segrado’s foundry, the place that had witnessed the events that had overturned his life.
There, he had first met Kallis, watched Segrado’s attempts to discover the formula for crystal glass, and, from that very foundry, had received from Segrado the eye circles that had saved his ailing eyesight.
In the nearby salt pan, he had seen Kallis for the last time before she disappeared in the billows during the terrible storm that shook Venice and erased Metamauco in the Year of Our Lord 1106.
Afraid and anxious to discover how his heart would respond, he walked the last few steps.
He turned around a hut and . . . an excruciating pain, like the blow of a sword, tore through his chest. Almost nothing remained of the place he remembered.
The larch beams of the walls had snapped; only the skeleton remained of the roof, covered in thatch and reeds; the front door had collapsed, and the furnace had been razed to the ground.
Climbing over charred beams and mounds of soil, he made his way through the tall grass and entered what was once Segrado’s workshop.
For a moment, he thought he saw him at work, the bald bear, bare-chested, hairy-backed, handling the blowpipe with his huge hands, with Kallis’s help. Kallis, strong, decisive, wrapped in her amber-colored cloak, with those sharp eyes, full of pain and passion.
He rummaged in the ruins and searched around the fireplaces. There was no trace of natron. The only dust was the one brought over by the wind from the rubble. No sign of Costanza’s presence. How could anyone think that Alvise had kept her a prisoner and killed her here? This foundry hadn’t been active for a while. Another piece of proof that the accusations against the boy made no sense.
He went out and saw that the workshop of Zoto, the crystal maker, was also abandoned; of those times and those men there was nothing left.
He went toward the salt pan that bordered the foundry and was surprised to see that the blinding glow that used to reverberate from the basins was much weaker, and had turned from icy white to a sickly gray.
The reason for this became clear when he reached the edge of the dams. The muddy sea, which rules over all of Venice, as well as the islands in the west and in the north, had swelled out of all proportion in recent years, erasing everything. The water level had risen to the point where it had submerged small islands and fords.
The salt pan had turned into a huge pool: the glistening crystal just beneath the water surface produced splinters of light that flickered and chased one another, creating a cloak strewn with precious ge
mstones. The sea seemed dressed up for a celebration.
Edgardo could not enjoy this brilliant sight; his heart and mind were immersed in the past, in the memory of that final image, of Kallis bending over Segrado’s bloodied body . . . then her desperate flight, tossed about by the billows in the storm, before being submerged.
He looked up at the horizon: a thin blue line was caressing the lagoon, rippled by the wind, and, in the middle, there was a dark whirlpool joining the sky and the sea, which was coming fast, approaching the land like a messenger rising from the depths of the waters. He followed it, waiting for it to reach the shore and drag him into the eddy together with the memory of Kallis.
However, a few yards away from the land, struck by a blade of light, the whirlpool dissolved and dispersed in the air.
Edgardo hung his head: had God sent him a sign? Was it too early to put an end to his existence? He felt like praying, but couldn’t muster the courage to do so. He had no right to. God must still be very angry with him.
He heard a noise behind him. It was a boatman, dragging a sackful of grain toward the dominicum, the thatched hut of the watchman.
The old windmill had undergone a powerful transformation: with the waters rising, it had been turned into a watermill that used the lagoon currents to activate the grinder.
The watchman came out and took the sack.
“God be with you,” Edgardo called out to him.
The weary old man didn’t as much as grant him a look.
“Forgive me for interrupting your work,” Edgardo insisted. “I saw that old abandoned foundry. Do you know who owns it? I’d like to get it started again,” he lied.
The man looked at him with suspicion, undecided whether or not to reply to a stranger.
“I heard it once belonged to a man called Zoto, a crystal maker,” Edgardo persevered.
As though, by uttering that name, Edgardo had been endowed with credibility, the old man made up his mind to speak.
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