Chapter 3 #19
I heard her sharp intake of breath, and just then I saw it, coming from the east and partially disguised by the darkness of the barrier island, a silhouette of two lugsails against the sunrise, the boat I recognized from the bronze sculpture far away in Tuscany, which I now realized I would never see again.
But what was the need to see it? For here it was, beyond all doubt: the Caprice.
Burning on the waters of the lagoon: a burnished throne of purple sails, the sun like beaten gold upon her deck, like silver on her fittings!
Twenty meters from bow to stern and crafted after the old two-masted trabàccolos that used to ply the waters of the Venetian lagoon, painted black but decorated, at the stern, with gods and sea maidens in white and red.
Her name was done in gold leaf—Caprice—and as soon as she pulled up, the skipper waved to my employer to come aboard.
He was a strongly built man, deeply brown, with a gray-streaked beard and a white kerchief tied on his head.
Around the boat I saw a crew of five or six.
Estelle appeared suddenly from the cabin, waving frantically.
I think I had never seen her so happy. The skipper threw a board down to the stones at our feet.
“You see how attractive he is,” my employer said, standing now with a smile on her face.
Estelle yelled to us in Italian but I could not make it out. She was holding something in her arms, and now I could see it was those able-bodied seamen Pushkin and Gorky.
“My trunks are all on board,” my baronessa said. “Along with your bag, I’m afraid. A misunderstanding with the porters.”
I thought of my visitor in the night. “Maybe they could bring mine ashore—”
She leaned toward me with a whisper, “This skipper will be trouble. Mark my words.”
“So we can say goodbye—”
“And our dear Oscar,” she said, patting her bulky purse, “will make the voyage after all! Along, I am afraid, with a disappointment.”
She opened the purse, and within I could see, beside the tin that must have contained our friend’s ashes, the purple toe of a Tetrarch.
“You will forgive me, but it lived so long with me, I thought it could live a little longer.” She sighed. “A last caprice! Now help me with this difficult part of going aboard the barca.”
I assisted her, as best I could, in traversing the board, which seemed none too stable.
I would have to grab my bag and return across this board in velvet slippers.
It was a slippery endeavor. My employer struggled along with her cane, a hand on my arm, until one of the crew took her hand and brought her on board.
I looked around; my duffel was nowhere to be seen.
The skipper approached my employer, kissed her on both cheeks, and she exclaimed:
“The vertigo! It is gone!”
She threw down her cane in triumph, then turned to me:
“You see? I am only really myself when I am at sea.”
She was in her place in the world. And I began to think, quite suddenly, of my own.
For it was as if I had delivered an important message to a remote king, who had read it and sighed his understanding, and now I would be out of the story and on my own to return from this foreign land to my home, which months or years of travel had made to me a distant place, or else continue on my journeys, somehow, in hopes of keeping in my veins this strangeness, this incongruity, which had become my ordinary life.
Estelle ran up to me and kissed me on each cheek.
“You’re going?” I asked.
“Yes, I’m going!” she said, grinning. She wore a gray padded down vest over an oilskin coat, a white scarf and hat; she was certainly dressed for a life at sea.
I shook my head. “You’re crazy! Both of you are crazy!”
She shrugged. “I have your painting aboard.”
“Thanks, I’ll take my bag and say goodbye.”
My baronessa’s mind was elsewhere: “Oh, we must be quick, the carabinieri are up early. We don’t want questions.”
And indeed two men in white sashes and red-striped pants were already walking down toward the water, for my employer had, unwisely but perhaps typically, made her arrangements within meters of their headquarters.
I saw them catch sight of us and hasten their walk.
Luckily, they were hefty fellows unused to great exertions, and so they were not making much headway toward our illegal berthing.
“Quickly now, time is made of gold,” my employer was saying. “They must pull up the board.”
“Hey!” I said. The sun had appeared again, like an actress peeking between the curtains to gauge the crowd, and light silvered the water all around us.
Gulls were fighting above. The two policemen were lolling toward us like characters from a Pulcinella show.
I felt dizzy. “What’s happening?! I have to—”
“Fate has placed your bag here, Giovedì. It seems to me one should follow fate.”
I looked around foolishly, as if my duffel would suddenly appear. “What? What?”
My former employer pulled her camel coat closer about her. “We will leave any moment and I think you should remain.”
“What?” I asked one final time, comprehending. “I can’t live on a…on a…”
“Why not?” Estelle asked, and my employer’s eyes asked the same.
“I have other plans, I have—”
“What are these plans?” my baronessa insisted. “You must consider how difficult it will be for us, only two women at dinner.”
Estelle said, “We do have the skipper.”
My employer countered, “It is always best to have an even number.”
It seems to me, even now, with the long expanse of years, impossible that she could have arranged the arrival of carabinieri to make the boat’s departure so urgent, but then again, her genius was in making life do her bidding.
For I understood that this very moment had been under discussion for a long time between the two of them.
I remembered the gleam of recognition in her eye the day I stole Oscar’s ashes.
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t.”
Estelle took my hand and held it.
My baronessa startled me by calling me by my true name:
“Geoffrey,” she said firmly. “Here we are in Venice. You are already aboard. Here we are, Geoffrey.” She paused a moment and looked me carefully in the eye.
I said, “And we won’t be back.”
She seemed surprised. “What are you talking about? It’s Venice!” she said. “Of course we’ll be back!”
I turned and watched the carabinieri making their absurd stride along the walkway, as slowly as if they were treading in high water.
It is hard to peer through the midnight ocean of time to see myself glimmering down there, so small and young and unformed, and understand I am somehow still that same person who came to those choices, the choices that have made me who I am.
What were my thoughts at that moment? What were my fears?
All I know is I turned to my baronessa and said—
“Mollate gli ormeggi!” shouted the skipper, and “Aye, aye, capitano!” called the crew, and the board was swept onto the ship, the motor started, and we were headed off into the lagoon with the police ashore, waving their hands.
My employer, as she said, seemed free at last of her dizziness and withstood the movement without a tremor.
It was some moments before I realized that I had chosen to join the voyage, although perhaps if I had asked Estelle (positioned now beside one of the furled sails, grinning into the breeze), she would have said I had made my choice long before.
I wondered what I had packed that might suffice for our first stop in Croatia, perhaps, where I would surely leave the party and find my own road, or for Greece or Egypt or Aden, for undoubtedly at some port I would step ashore, like a well-used crewmember, to find my own particular fate.
We sailed toward the sunrise, toward the barrier island of the Lido and the Adriatic beyond.
On the horizon, I could see three stars still clinging to the glowing sky.
“We will have to live frugally aboard,” I heard my employer saying. “There will be privations of persons and of pleasures. Here on the barca we are living off the sales of my property and art. There is enough, but no more! Let’s hope I don’t live too long.”
“Nonsense!” Estelle shouted in the wind.
My baronessa clapped her hands. “In barca,” she said, “italiano!”
Our young man, switching to Italian, laughing, said, “Coco, you will live forever!”
—
And so she did.
* * *