The Last Gondola (14 page)

“You're interested in the supernatural?” Then, realizing that this was a strange question to ask of someone who had been a former priest, Urbino clarified with, “The occult, I mean?”

“The supernatural, the occult, blood that solidifies and liquefies on command, weeping Madonnas, saints' bodies that never decay, and miraculous cures from slivers of the Cross and crumbs from the Last Supper! It's all the same. Something to occupy my mind with. Kind of an intellectual exercise. Like your own sleuthing, you might say, though in my case I've been trained not to spill the beans.”

“And the Ca' Pozza?” Urbino persisted.

“Nothing any more special about that place than about other buildings in Venice. Like the house with the carved angel near the Cardinal Patriarch's residence. The devil possessed the proprietor's pet monkey centuries ago, or so it was rumored. And then there's the Palazzo Mocenigo-Vecchio. People swear that Giordano Bruno's ghost walks through the rooms.”

Bruno was a Renaissance philosopher and alchemist who had lived in the palazzo and been burned at the stake.

A customer came in. Emo cut him several keys. When the man left, Emo picked up where he had left off.

“And the Casino degli Spiriti,” he said, naming a small, isolated building with a view of the lagoon and the cemetery island a short distance from his shop. It had been the venue of glittering literary and musical parties perhaps not much different from those that the Ca' Pozza had once seen. “Haunted, they say.”

Urbino nodded. He was familiar with the legend. “And what about the Ca' Pozza?”

“Maybe not the Ca' Pozza, but the Ca'
Pazza,”
Emo emphasized. “At least that's what one of my books said, Ca' Pazza, the House of the Crazy Woman. Supposedly Ca' Pozza is a corruption of Ca' Pazza.”

Urbino hadn't come across anything like that in his own research, but as Emo said, the parish had a special collection of books.

Pazza
meant “crazy woman” in Italian. According to the guidebook Urbino had in his own library, however, the Ca' Pozza was named after the
pozza
, or well, that had stood on the spot: the House of Fresh Water, the House of the Well. That was a far cry from what Emo was telling him.

“People used to believe the building was haunted by an insane woman,” Emo went on to explain. “She was killed by falling stones during the building's construction in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.”

“The seventeenth.”

“So you know the story?”

“I know that the building dates back to the seventeenth century.”

Inevitably Urbino thought, at this point, about the laughter and sobs he had heard when he was standing outside the Ca' Pozza in the middle of the night. If he were to tell Emo about them, the locksmith would slyly suggest that they were proof of the legend surrounding the house. Of course, now that Urbino knew what he did about Elvira, no matter what the explanations for the past haunting of the Ca' Pozza might be, the explanation for the mad cries and laughter of the past few months was quite reassuringly rational.

Urbino considered giving the ex-priest the benefit of these logical conclusions, but Emo's combination of irreverence and credulousness, both of which showed a vulnerability, deterred him.

Emo was staring at him as if he expected him to say something more about the Ca' Pozza. It only confirmed Urbino's decision to remain silent, at least for the time being.

The telephone rang. Emo answered it and went into a small area behind his shop to talk. Urbino looked around the small shop. Crammed though it was, everything seemed to be in its proper place.

“An emergency,” Emo said, coming back into the front of the shop and hanging up the phone. “Someone had his keys stolen and needs me to put in a new lock. Where would I be without house visits?”

Emo started closing up his shop. Urbino lingered a few minutes longer and said, “By the way, I've noticed that Gildo seems sad these days. He tells me that a friend of his died.”

Emo looked at him sharply.

“Are you concerned about Gildo, or is this about the Ca' Pozza?”

“What does the Ca' Pozza have to do with Gildo?”

But as he asked the question, the answer came to him before Emo responded. He had a quick vision of Elvira shouting and shaking her fist at the poop of the gondola where Gildo was maneuvering his oar when it had gone by the Ca' Pozza.

“As if you don't know. His friend fell from the building next door to the Ca' Pozza.”

30

At nine on Sunday morning, on the day of his next visit to the Ca' Pozza, Urbino climbed up from the attic to the
altana
perched on the rose-colored roof of the Palazzo Uccello.

There he found Gildo as Natalia had said he would. The slim young man was gathering the blankets, jackets, and scarves she had put out to air on the wooden terrace in the expectation of a day of sun and gentle breeze. But half an hour ago the day had changed abruptly. Dark clouds, driven in from the sea by a steady wind, were thickening above the city.

“I'll help you,” Urbino said.

Together they took down the items. They were already damp and in danger of blowing off the
altana
.

Many of the buildings in Venice had these wooden terraces attached to their roofs. They were as characteristic of the city's architecture as its covered wellheads, inverted bell and obelisk chimneys, and
sottoportici
. Originally they were built on the palazzi for the noble women to sit and bleach their hair in the sun, with the help of a special concoction that included powdered Damascus soap and burned lead. These days, however, they had more mundane functions, unless you were someone like Urbino who would often spend hours on the bench among the geraniums, dreaming and gazing across the roofs of the city.

Gildo was silent as he placed a plaid scarf in the wicker hamper.

“There's something I'd like to mention, Gildo,” Urbino began. “I had a talk with your uncle yesterday when I went to give him the check.”

Urbino mentioned the check because he didn't want Gildo to think that he had gone to see Emo to get information about him.

Gildo continued to remove the items from the racks. He didn't look at Urbino.

“I hope you know that I'm concerned about you. When I mentioned to your uncle that you were a little depressed lately about your friend, he told me that he died in a fall from the building next door to the Ca' Pozza.”

Gildo's head snapped up. There was a wounded look in his generous green eyes.

“Excuse me, Signor Urbino, but we should get everything off the
altana
.” His voice, usually slurred in the appealing Venetian manner, sounded stifled and unnatural. “I don't have much time. Remember that today is one of the days when I go to the Bacino Orseolo.”

“Of course, Gildo. And Natalia and I are delaying you with this task. We can talk some other time. Here, let me help you with that blanket.”

31

In the afternoon, to pass the time before he was expected at the Ca' Pozza, Urbino went to the Accademia Gallery. When he had been there three months ago with Habib he had been distracted, although pleasurably, by playing the role of an indulgent
cicerone
as he so often did with Habib. This afternoon he wanted to have a leisurely, solitary turn through the galleries to soothe his nerves. He expected to be temporarily carried away from the world beyond the walls of the Accademia.

But it didn't work out that way.

Carpaccio's
Dream of St. Ursula
, with the peacefully sleeping saint visited by an angel in her chastely ordered bedroom, a painting that Ruskin had lavished pages of praise on, reminded Urbino by cruel contrast of his very different, troubling dream. He had suffered from it again last night.

As for Giorgione's toothless old woman pointing to the warning words
Col tempo
written on a scroll of paper, it evoked nothing less than the image of Possle's aged face that had changed so much over time.

Another Carpaccio,
The Miracle of the Relic of the Cross
, seemed innocent enough until Urbino fixated on certain details. The old wooden Rialto Bridge carried his thoughts back to Elvira's erratic behavior yesterday morning. The blithe gondolas became superimposed with Possle's stationary one at the Ca' Pozza and, just as he was turning away, also whispered of Gildo's reticence about his friend's death.

Neither was there any relief in Tintoretto's spectral
Theft of the Body of St. Mark from Alexandria
. It wasn't so much that the turbulent sky made Urbino anxious about the storm that was soon to assault the city, but that the repetition of all the arcades and steps with their fleeing, ghostly figures spoke a language of danger and obsession, and all in the service of a supposedly noble intention.

Here in the Accademia he was wandering through a cavern whose decorated walls were looking at him with familiar eyes and emitting confused, but disturbingly appropriate, words and signs. When he found himself trying to search out personal meanings in other paintings, he decided it was time to leave. He still had time for a much needed drink before seeing Possle.

As he was heading for the staircase, someone called out his name jovially. It was Lino Cipri, in a flowing tie and a worn, black velvet jacket. He was copying Lorenzo Lotto's portrait of a brooding gentleman in his study, one of the paintings commissioned by Eugene.

Urbino was surprised to see Cipri since the painter had told him that he was usually home in the afternoon. But perhaps he was eager to finish the Lotto. Urbino looked back and forth between the original and the copy. He nodded in appreciation.

“You've managed to capture the salamander and the fallen rose petals exactly,” he said. “Eugene will be pleased with this one as well.”

“I hope so.” Cipri was visibly delighted with Urbino's praise. “Too bad you didn't stay for the
conversazione
. My wife and I were spellbound. The Contessa had us wanting more. It was like listening to music to hear what she had to say about those days, and there was a lot of participation from the audience.”

“It wasn't my choice that I wasn't there. She got my solemn promise to stay away. Stage fright, you know.”

“There was no need for her to be afraid. Maybe you'll come next time.”

Urbino paid Cipri a few more compliments about the Lotto copy and then left him to his work.

32

Urbino approached the door of the Ca' Pozza. Low, dark clouds raced above the roof of the building with a menacing air. The storm had held off so far, but soon it would unleash itself. He was about to ring the bell when footsteps rushed up behind him. He turned and confronted the face of Elvira.

She grabbed the front of his cloak with both her hands. “Don't go in, signore! Don't go in!” she shouted in rapid Italian. “If you enter, you won't return, not alive. No, you won't return!”

This version of the warning over the portals of Dante's Hell gave Urbino more than a momentary pause. He tried gently to pull away, but the woman's grip was firm.

“You're Signora Elvira,” he said, keeping his voice low and soothing. “Don't distress yourself. I'm in no danger.”

“You are, I tell you!”

She released him and peered into his face. She was almost the same height as he was. Her eyes glowed with a feverish fire. “You know me?” she asked in a soft voice. “I don't know you.”

“Let me take you home, Signora Elvira.”

“Home? I have no home. This building destroyed it. It destroys everything. It will destroy you! Don't go inside!”

With this repeated warning she dashed away down the
calle
beside the Ca' Pozza. On the pavement lay the yellow scarf she had been waving at the merchant in the Rialto. It was torn and soiled. Urbino slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.

To Urbino's surprise, the door of the Ca' Pozza stood open. Armando, clad in what was his habitual black, stood aside to let Urbino in. His dark eyes searched the quay with a barely concealed fury touched with fear.

33

The bone-chilling damp of the Ca' Pozza, more intense than it was outdoors and considerably colder than could be expected of even an old Venetian palazzo, settled down over Urbino again as soon as he stepped over the threshold. His awareness that he was in large part a victim of his own superstition didn't lessen the feeling anymore than it had on his first visit but, instead, seemed to increase it. Reluctantly, he took off his cloak and placed it over one of the gargoyles on the clothes stand.

The grim Armando, giving off his unwashed odor, conducted him across the lower hall, past the closed door of what Possle had called one of the mute's nooks and crannies in the silent house. The high staircase rose at its slightly tilted angle, or so it seemed once again to Urbino.

As they ascended through its heavy shadows, with Armando a few steps above him, the strains of music and a male voice suddenly shattered the silence.

“
‘So, we'll go no more a-roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be ne'er as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.'”

When they reached the long, dark
sala
, Urbino stopped to listen to the rest of the song. It came from the gondola room, whose door was thrown open wide.

“‘For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,

And the day returns too soon,

Yet we'll go no more a-roving

By the light of the moon.'”

Armando, who had continued across the
sala
, stopped at the door of the gondola room and waited for Urbino. His arms, with their scarred hands, were close against his sides. Under his scrutiny, Urbino crossed the
sala
and entered the hot, inert air of the strange chamber.