The Lying Tongue

W
herever I went I saw a question mark at the heart of the city. The first time was at the airport while waiting by the baggage carousel. I took out my guidebook, flicked to the map at the back, and the form seemed to jump off the page: the Grand Canal snaking its way through the saturated land, a constant interrogator.

I looked around and wondered what brought these people to Venice. A young Chinese man concentrated as he eased a new SIM card into his mobile. A pretty, dark-skinned woman took off her glasses, retrieved a small mirror from her jacket pocket and proceeded to drop fish-scale-thin contact lenses into her eyes. A bald man, his shaved head reflecting the harsh yellow glow of the airport lights, waited impatiently for his luggage, his eyes nervous.

I knew what I was here for. I smiled to myself as I compared my position with that of my friends back in London, preparing to start dull postgraduate courses or earning less than the minimum wage in one of the so-called creative industries. My best mate, Jake, had just taken a job as a junior on the diary page of a newspaper and was so poor he was forced to subsist on cheap wine and free canapés. I wanted something better.

In my final term at university I had told people, perhaps rather foolishly, that I was going to write a novel. London held too many distractions. All I needed was the time to write. And now I would have it.

A couple of months back, Jake had told me that one of his father’s friends, an Italian investor, was looking for someone to go out to Venice to help his sixteen-year-old son with his English. It was the perfect opportunity. The plan was to teach Antonio in the mornings, which would leave me the rest of the day to work on my book, which I had decided to set in Venice. After a half-hour conversation over the phone and a scurry of emails, I was offered the job. The money wasn’t great—around three hundred euros a month—but it came with a free room. I was due to start in a couple of days. I couldn’t believe my luck.

After retrieving my bags and slinging them onto a trolley, I walked out into the hot night. A pink moon shimmered in the sky. I followed the trail of people heading toward the water launch through a series of makeshift plastic tunnels that trapped the heat, so the air I breathed seemed to burn the inside of my throat. As I neared the Alilaguna stop, I could hear the lapping of the tide against the side of the dock. I imagined clear, refreshing water. What I saw shocked me: a liquid that looked more like tar, thick and viscous and covered with a slimy film brimming with debris. A dead pigeon floated on top of the water, its body undulating with the gentle ebb of the tide. A current swept its body toward the dock. It had no eyes.

I didn’t have to wait that long before a launch arrived. I bought a ticket on board and spent the next hour traveling through the dark lagoon. At the stop nearest St. Mark’s, I lugged my bags off the boat and stopped to study my map. That question mark again. I found the tiny street just behind the piazza and made a mental note of its location. I started to walk across the square. All around me I heard the constant clapping of pigeons; there was something faintly mocking about their tone.

The hotel was small and dingy. It smelt of stale tobacco and bad drains. The proprietor, a tiny, pasty-faced man with translucent skin, limp black hair and a large, overhanging top lip fixed me with his mean bead of an eye. He stretched out his right hand, covered by a black leather glove, and gave me the key to my room, number 23 at the top of the building. I smiled, climbed the stairs and opened the door. Old wooden beams crossed the ceiling of the room. Damp stains mottled the peach wallpaper. The bed linen looked like it hadn’t been washed. There was a cockroach in the miniature washbasin. But it would only be for a night. Tomorrow I would move into the Gondolinis’ flat near the Arsenale. And the day after, I would start work on my novel.

As my appointment with Signore and Signora Gondolini wasn’t until four in the afternoon, I had more or less the whole day to explore the city. After breakfast, I checked out of the hotel and arranged to pick up my luggage later. Although I had never been to Venice before I had a clear picture of it in my mind: an elaborate stage set floating on water, an architectural dreamscape. Yet the undeniable beauty of the city—the Venice I had seen in guidebooks and in films—was bleached out by the white-hot sun and eclipsed by the sheer mass of tourists. Tour leaders thrusting colored umbrellas high into the air tried to make their voices heard above the multilingual throng. The overweight wept sweat from every pore. Women clutching jaunty gold handbags and wearing their best costume jewelry attempted to maintain their composure while coming face-to-face with cloned versions of themselves. Many of the husbands looked unseeing, dead-eyed.

I pushed my way out onto the Riva and battled along the front. Map in hand, I crossed over the Rio del Vin and took a turn to my left, leaving the crowds behind me. I headed toward Campo San Zaccaria, where legend has it that one Michaelmas the devil appeared, and was about to take hold of a young bride and cart her off to hell when her husband scared him away by roaring like the lion of St. Mark. I didn’t know whether it was true, but I had read that each year young men came to the square to reenact the ritual in an attempt to guarantee the constancy of their future wives. I thought about Eliza back in London. I pictured her in bed with Kirkby. He had a broken arm, and I imagined him fucking her with his sling held close to his chest as if he were nursing a newborn baby.

I pushed open the wooden door of the church and stepped inside the darkened, cool interior. An elderly woman, head bent, eyes closed, kneeling beside a pew, mouthed a prayer to herself. Her paper-thin eyelids fluttered and twitched as if she had just stumbled from her bed, still dreaming. I walked around and stopped in front of Bellini’s
Sacra Conversazione,
or, as it was sometimes called,
Madonna and Four Saints.
While I was studying for my art history degree I had often gazed at this altarpiece in my textbooks. Now I took out a coin and placed it in the slot. Artificial light flooded the painting, illuminating the angel playing a stringed instrument at the feet of the enthroned Virgin and the infant Jesus, his little palm raised to bless the four saints below him. There was St. Peter with his keys and book, St. Catherine with the broken wheel, the scholar St. Jerome swathed in red, holding another thick book, and St. Lucy with a little jar that was supposed to contain her eyes, wrenched from their sockets by Diocletian. I imagined the little globes bobbing about in salty water, pupils dilating in confusion and fear.

When the light timed out, I walked past the altar that was said to contain the body of St. Zacharias, the father of St. John the Baptist, and down the right aisle toward the chapel of St. Athanasius. A man wearing large, dark glasses—bluebottle like—sat behind a desk. In Italian, I asked how much it would be to enter, but he did not reply; instead he gestured toward a sign that informed me that the fee was one euro. I gave him a coin and he waved me by. Ranged around the walls, above the fifteenth-century choir stalls, were a number of paintings, including a depiction of the birth of St. John the Baptist, an early work by Tintoretto; a scene of David with the head of Goliath by Jacopo Palma the younger; and, above the door, an image of a martyr being tortured, the saint’s eyes gouged out by a man holding what appeared to be a poker.

I wandered into the next chapel and admired the golden altarpieces by Vivarini and d’Alemagna and the frescoes of the Florentine artist Andrea del Castagno. Through a glass square in the floor I saw, at a lower level, some mosaics that had survived from the ninth century, and, walking down some stairs, I came to the crypt, now flooded by a couple of inches of water. The dank-smelling space, with its series of columns and arches reflected in the water below, felt oppressive, claustrophobic. I had to get out. I traced my steps through the chapels back to the main church and down the central aisle toward the front door.

I stopped for an espresso and studied my guidebook. I wanted to see St. Mark’s and the Palazzo Ducale, but I couldn’t face the crowds that gathered around the piazza so I decided to walk across to the Accademia. I took a series of backstreets, away from the main thoroughfares, down calles so narrow they never saw the sun, before I finally emerged near Campo Santo Stefano. I crossed the Accademia Bridge, pausing to take in the view of the Grand Canal, but as I came down the steps I saw a long queue curling its way out of the gallery’s door. I didn’t want to wait and couldn’t bear the thought of standing near all those people, so I opted to go to Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, another of the churches I had studied in my course, which was situated in San Polo, just to the north. As I walked through Campo Santa Margherita, I smelt the delicious aroma of frying garlic, fresh tomatoes and chopped basil. I checked my watch. It was nearly one o’clock—time for lunch. I sat down at an outside table of one of the cafés in the square, and after a cheap meal of spaghetti al pomodoro, I looked around me, relishing every detail. Two small boys squealed with delight as they played football in the square, the sound of the ball hitting the ground, an exact echo of my heartbeat. Housewives chatted with men in aprons selling octopus, prawns, spider crabs and fish from a series of canopied stalls. Young couples strolled hand in hand, feeding each other extravagantly colored ice cream, their lips mixing the flavors when they kissed. Everything seemed so alive, so new. And I could be part of it.

I had another coffee, paid my bill and made my way to the Frari. Inside the enormous, T-shaped church I heard the whisper of shoes across the marble floor and the muted murmur of a tour guide in the distance. I walked past the neoclassical monument to Canova, a pyramidal structure that contains the sculptor’s heart, to Titian’s
Ca’ Pesaro Madonna,
a portrait of Jacopo Pesaro waiting to be presented to the Virgin and child. The image, I had been taught, had revolutionized altar painting in Venice because of the artist’s decision to shift the Virgin from the traditional central position over to one side and also because of its humanity, the way Titian had invested the figures with a tender reality. As I studied the painting, moving back and forth to admire the rich blue of St. Peter’s robes and the harmonious nature of the composition, I felt unnerved by the image of a boy dressed in white satin situated at the bottom right-hand corner of the picture. No matter where I moved, the curious, accusatory eyes of the youth followed me, as if to tell me not to forget that one day, like him, I would be dead. Although I tried to appreciate Titian’s other masterpiece,
Assumption of the Virgin,
that dominated the high altar and the rest of the church’s treasures, tombs and monuments, I couldn’t concentrate. The face of that boy wouldn’t leave me.

Just after three o’clock, I started to make my way to the Gondolinis’. I walked down to the San Toma vaporetto stop on the Grand Canal and pushed my way onto a crowded water bus. I fought my way to the back of the boat and, just after the Accademia, I managed to find a seat at the stern. Sunlight turned the water to mercury and cast the buildings in a dreamlike hue. As the boat sailed away from the San Zaccaria stop, in the glass panels of the doors that separated the outside seating area from inside, I saw the reflected images of the Campanile and the dome of Santa Maria della Salute. The motion of the boat was beginning to make me feel a little nauseous, and as I stepped onto terra firma at Arsenale, I felt as though I was still on water.

I had been told that the family had a series of rooms in a renovated warehouse building just around the corner from the Corderia, the former rope factory. As I approached my new neighborhood, I noticed that the number of tourists started to decrease. I looked at my map to check the exact location of the street and then walked until I found the home of the Gondolinis, an enormous redbrick structure that overlooked a small canal. I pressed a buzzer and waited. There was no answer. I pressed again. Still nothing. I searched through my bag to find the email from Niccolò Gondolini. It was the right address. Perhaps the family was out. I held my finger on the buzzer and then pressed it a couple of times again in quick succession. There was a click and the door opened.

The staircase was dark. I reached out to find a light switch. As I did so, a man’s voice echoed from above.

“Adam Woods? Is that you, Adam? We are…up here.”

Niccolò Gondolini, I assumed. Perhaps he had been in the bath or on the telephone.

I climbed the wooden steps, occasionally stopping to feel my way along the wall until my eyes adjusted to the gloom. As I reached the second floor I saw a door that had been left open. I paused for a moment before stepping in. A man with his back to me stood by a far window, his form surrounded by blindingly bright light. I shielded my eyes from the glare.