Chapter 3 #15
The vaporetto took us onto what my employer told me was the Grand Canal, though to me it was a misty passage from which phantoms appeared—of pilings, rusted gates, lampposts, once the carved head of some drowned god—like the morning’s remembered fragments of a lost, elaborate dream.
Soon we passed into the lagoon and entered the wider, choppier Giudecca Canal.
Here, nothing could be seen. Our boat sounded its foghorn, and from somewhere in the whiteness, another boat signaled back.
I heard the clang of a bell. We made a number of stops along the way, disgorging most of the tourists on board, leaving just my baronessa, myself, and a woman with dyed red hair and a tiny dog seated on her enormous bosom.
Our boat sounded its foghorn again. “Eccoci,” my employer announced, taking my arm to keep her balance, and I wondered how she knew our stop had arrived.
I could see nothing. Then, from within the fog, I caught a glow.
As we approached, I began to make out the stern gray form of a church emerging as if from a cloud and, set upon it, a light in the shape of a shooting Star of Bethlehem.
And then Venice itself came into view, alive with merchants hauling crates, a tourist crowd in red and blue, nuns and sailors and baby strollers and that star reflected on the water like an angel rising there.
Of course! How had I missed it? The paintings in the captain’s cabin, whose varying weather and costumes had me take them for different harbor towns, were in fact one and the same: They were all Venice.
Different moments in time, different facets—like a person you have known all your life.
Soon we were ashore, and I had barely glimpsed the great gray churches and Moorish castle walls of the palazzos before my employer led me to the interior of the city.
We turned into an extraordinarily narrow alley (“This street is not for our friend on the boat!” she commented) that emerged onto a small piazza, a kind of compass rose with alleys leading in all directions, some with signs Per Rialto and Per San Marco in curious U.S.
Army stenciling. “Never follow these,” my employer warned me, “they are the tourist routes.” A bakery displayed domes of Christmas panettone in dark blue paper and plain pandoro wrapped in clear plastic, ready to be shaken with powdered sugar, and some other cake labeled Focaccia Natale that looked nothing like what we had eaten in Recco.
We plunged into another dark crevasse, above which hung bedsheets in butterfly patterns and strings of electric lights, then crossed a canal and stopped before an ornate building.
The doorbell was a brass circle set inside a concrete one, in which a series of holes were punctured as in an old phone receiver.
My baronessa pushed the button, a woman’s voice came through, and we were buzzed inside.
There was a terrifying, clattering, windowless elevator, and soon we found ourselves being let into a dim room lined with bookshelves.
An elderly woman in a shawl kissed my employer on both cheeks.
Her stooped figure and bonnet of brown hair reminded me of my aunt Gwen.
“This is Benedetta,” my baronessa explained to me. “She speaks no English, but it is not necessary. She is the caretaker while Pippa is away.”
“This belongs to the principessa?”
“I always stay with her. Come to the terrace. The view is the same as when I was very young.”
I said I had not known her to be sentimental about the past.
She seemed insulted. “Me? Sentimental? Have you ever heard me talk about my childhood home? Not far from here, you know, but I never visit. Too much has changed. But this is something that does not change.”
We moved onto the terrace, and I was surprised; the fog was clearing, and the view seemed cluttered with television antennas and satellite disks and various pipes and cables festooning the spaces between the buildings.
But I cannot deny that the expression on her face was one of pleasure.
Perhaps the mess of things had always been there, the chimneys built in bell shapes or cubes or inverted cones, the terraces so clearly added on later, resting precariously on a few brick pillars, the laundry hanging everywhere to dry.
I could not see the canals, or the lagoon.
Just one church tower rising above, and a foreboding of storm clouds behind it.
She saw something else there that I did not.
“I must rest a little, and then I have a rendezvous at Florian.” She pointed to the stone clock in the tower. “Wake me when it points to six.”
I did not mention that the clock was hours, if not centuries, out of sync with the world.
When I came to wake her, I found she had already changed into her red silk suit and wore, as she had promised, her famous pearls.
I asked if I should change as well, and she said while it was always nice to be elegant, it would not be necessary.
“I am meeting someone; you are not. You will take me to San Marco, it is not so far, and then you will leave me. Come now, I am in need of your arm.”
Down we went and out into the little piazza like a compass, where green metal streetlamps hung from the corners of buildings, then crossed a canal over a twisted bridge, past little bars opening for the evening and workers already taking advantage of them, drinking wine in plastic cups along the water, smoking, laughing, and a shop of Neapolitan delights that drew me until I felt the pull of my baronessa’s hand on my arm.
There had been a storm while she rested, erasing the fog, and the stones were black and shining with rain.
Christmas lights glittered in the evening air.
We came to a street that was signed Per San Marco and, to my surprise, my baronessa led us there.
I suppose there was no helping it—that was where we were headed.
Here we met the crowds of tourists with gelato.
“The only thing tourists can think to do is have gelato,” my employer commented, then grinned up at me.
“They would never make it down our alley.” Impatient with the couples walking slowly hand in hand, blocking the way, and families trying to walk four abreast in a narrow street, and Germans marching along with backpacks and walking poles, she raised her cane in a feint of striking them.
“Venice is full of alpinisti this year. Are they heading for the Dolomiti? I can see no other reason for such enormous rucksacks!” She went into a litany of complaints but then added: “The only thing worse is old ladies like me.” From some radio above floated music that I recognized as Giacomo’s beloved Nina.
A crowd of teenagers, under siege by seagulls for their gelato cones, screamed all out of proportion to the danger, and I thought this would also irritate my employer, but she merely said: “High spirits!” She murmured it again—“High spirits…”—and I can only imagine she was remembering her own with Oscar in Istanbul and Capri.
“And here for you is San Marco.” As she said it, she pushed me slightly out into the open, then looked up at me like someone offering you a syringe of a narcotic, one they have taken many times themselves and developed a tolerance for, so their only pleasure is watching the ecstasy of your first time.
“It is best to enter from here,” she said quietly. “From the side. Then you can see the water, look.”
A flock of pigeons flew before us—I was reminded of Ghazel’s chickens, loosed from his arms and making a chaos of feathers—a flock of pigeons mixed with gulls like a concert of birds, and then the birds departed, revealing the long avenue to the water, which lay still darkened in places beneath storm clouds, in others shining from the sun like a bronze rubbed of its patina.
A tower stood erect before us, all in brick with a greenish pyramidal spire, on top of which some gilt archangel trumpeted.
Below and to the right, colonnades surrounded a piazza, wet with rain, and to the left the great basilica itself, like the window of a viennoiserie displaying iced domes and sugared biscuits trimmed in gold.
The scattered storm clouds caused shadows to lap against the stone and brickwork, but far away the clouds parted, and in that distant sun-glitter a masted ship stood in silhouette.
Gull shrieks and water-taxi growls. I walked in awe as she led me to San Marco’s southwest corner and from there along the more modest marble walls to a corner that seemed of interest to no tourists or guards.
“You will recognize this,” my baronessa said, holding her purse before her.
Nothing more than a rough purplish carving fitted into the wall of the basilica, forming an angle, and it was almost as if some heavenly creature had come down with a cake knife and taken a portion from the great building, revealing a cherry baked in by a tipsy chef.
It seemed to portray four nearly identical rulers with swords…
“Wait—”
“Such an ancient thing. I’m always surprised nobody notices.”
“Wait, is this…?”
I looked up at the Four Tetrarchs, older than anything in the city, standing in this forgotten corner of the piazza, unprotected, like four men waiting for a bus. Their swords were curiously parrot-headed and so, in a way, were their faces: the blank everyman expression of medieval tapestries.
My baronessa pointed with her cane. “See how it has been hacked away. And of course the missing heel…”