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- Herausgeber: Bitter Lemon Press
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
The month, November. Glittering worldliness and dubious shabbiness overlap, passion and suspicion intertwine in a three-day Venetian adventure, bookended by the arrival of a plane and the departure of a ship. "Doyens of the Italian detective story, Fruttero and Lucentini, offer a perfect blend of the comedy of manners and the macabre…" Tim Parks, author of Hotel Milano
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praise forTHE LOVER OF NO FIXED ABODE
“Doyens of the Italian detective story, Fruttero and Lucentini, offer a perfect blend of the comedy of manners and the macabre; in short, very Mediterranean mysteries.”
tim parks, author of Hotel Milano and Italian Life
“Elusive, allusive, illusionary, Fruttero and Lucentini are a unique double act, challenging rivals or imitators. In The Lover of No Fixed Abode, the pair fashion a labyrinth full of shapeshifting and ambiguity, sometimes sinister, often hilarious, for which Venice in all its varying moods offers the perfect setting. Gregory Dowling’s lethally stylish translation captures both the Italian original’s super-cool urbanity and its uncannily authentic spirit of place.”
jonathan keates, author of La Serenissima: The Story of Venice
“An undiscovered gem, finally available in English… witty, moving and enthrallingly atmospheric.”
philip gwynne jones, author of The Venetian Legacy
“Finally in a vivid English translation, the classic imaginative Italian love story and mystery that brings 1980s Venice to brilliant life.”
david hewson, author of The Medici Murders
THE LOVER OF NO FIXED ABODE
Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini
Translated by Gregory Dowling
Contents
I
When Mr Silvera at Last Decides
1.
When Mr Silvera at last decides (look, look, Mr Silvera!) to loosen his seat belt and lean over his neighbours to get a view out of the window, Venice has already disappeared; all he sees is a distant fragment of aluminium-coloured sea and an immediate trapezoid of solid aluminium, the wing.
“The lagoon!” repeat the tourists in his and the other two parties that fill Flight Z114. “La lagune! A laguna!”
As ever, they find it indispensable to name rather than see the cities and temples and statues and frescoes and waterfalls and islands and all the lands and waters they are paying to visit. Look, look, the Colosseum, the Sistine Chapel, the Casbah, les Pyramides, la tour de Pise, the lagoooon… They sound like invocations intended to arouse imaginary entities, to make them exist for a few seconds before they slip out of the magic circle. Five or six of them naturally try to retain the lagoon for ever with their cine cameras and Instamatics.
Indifferent to these illusions, Mr Silvera settles back in his seat, his long legs stretched out obliquely in the aisle and a benevolently automatic smile ready to spring to his lips. When seen in profile, he is a man of about forty, tall and thin, with the sharp-cut features of a head on a medallion, the slightly rounded shoulders of a sportsman – a keen tennis player, for example – who at some stage, for some reason, gave up the game completely; or perhaps those of a chess player, curved by long meditations over the bishop. His thin, delicate, nervous hands suggest poker or roulette, but also skilled contact with porcelain, parchments, musical instruments; and with female stockings, with silk and lace and tricky necklace clasps. An unusual man, who is blandly (stoically?) doing a job that seems a little incongruous for him, somewhat menial. A group leader. A tourist guide and escort. They usually choose younger people; the other two parties on Flight Z114 are led by a French girl who never stops laughing and a stocky peasant type with a blonde wisp of hair over his eyes.
Silvera took charge of his party this morning at 6.15, outside the headquarters of Imperial Tours, the London travel agency for which he has been working for some time now. The coach journey to Heathrow Airport was sufficient for him to become acquainted with these twenty-eight people, or at least to slot them into his memory, which is prodigious and accustomed to making instantaneous classifications. The usual types, the usual clientele of Imperial: pensioners, small-time shopkeepers, small-time office clerks and artisans, all of recurring nationalities; mostly English and French, but also South American and Canadian, a few Scandinavians, two Jamaicans, two Indians, one Portuguese with an adolescent daughter whose large nocturnal eyes never leave Mr Silvera. Even the names are always the same: Johnson, Torres, Pereira, Petersen, Singh, Durand…
Flight Z114 has stopped off twice, at Brussels and Geneva, and picked up the other parties. At Geneva it also took on board three passengers whose flight to Venice and Athens had been cancelled: two Greek businessmen and an Italian woman who is now sitting across the central aisle from Mr Silvera.
A wide-hipped hostess bustles her way down this corridor, looking for any last paper cups to collect, and Mr Silvera instantly pulls in his long legs and smiles at her. But she remains peevishly sulky, absorbed in amorous fantasies or, more likely, thoughts of trade union squabbles.
Silvera makes the tiniest motion of a shrug, adjusts his smile by a thread, and the Italian woman, on the other side of the aisle, returns it. Passengers are no longer treated with respect reminiscent of grand hotels, with nursery-school solicitude, their mischievous, resigned eyes say to each other; but then what can one expect with this kind of tourist rabble? They should be thankful to be taken as far as Venice, considering the fares they have paid.
The machine touches down, brakes with a great angry blast and rolls to a halt along the edge of the lagoon.
“Well,” murmurs Mr Silvera, getting to his feet, “well…” His height appears to give him a vague superiority, which is belied by his threadbare tweed jacket, by the little holes singed into the front of the raincoat he is now putting on. The girl who keeps laughing is already at work with her party; the blonde peasant is instructing his horde, the most numerous, to remain calm and disciplined. “Well,” sighs Mr Silvera, pulling down his bag. He notices that his Italian neighbour is trying to reach her small case, pulls it down and hands it to her chivalrously.
“Thank you,” says the woman.
“Ah,” says Mr Silvera, his eyes far away.
Then he is swallowed up by his group, please, please, Mr Silvera, there are overcoats and scarves to be collected, bags to be extracted from the overhead lockers, packages to be retrieved from under the seats, impatient passengers to be restrained, slow ones to be incited. The Portuguese girl follows him with her head bowed, her eyes gazing up at him from beneath beautiful black lashes, and she too is “counted” at the foot of the staircase, where Mr Silvera and the two other group leaders stand in the wind, dividing up their flocks. But it is not she who is offered Mr Silvera’s hand when descending the final step. This act of homage (performed with melancholy detachment and an indefinable air of complicity) is for the Italian lady. “Thank you,” she repeats, gravely.
“Ah,” murmurs Mr Silvera, without looking at her. He moves off towards the airport buildings at the head of his flock, who all walk with their heads turned towards the aluminium expanse of the lagoon, since not a single cent of their cheap package fare is to be wasted. The French girl’s party has beaten them to the passport checkout and customs, but from there everything proceeds smoothly, since nobody checks anything, and soon Mr Silvera is beyond the barriers, coagulating his twenty-eight, preventing them from dissolving amid the toilets and the bar. “No, no,” he says indulgently, “no cappuccino, please, no vino.”
They go out into the wind again, and a few coaches are waiting at the entrance. But they disband towards the lagoon, which begins a few yards to the left and fades into a fuzzy horizon. Five or six slim motorboats with little flags fluttering at the stern are bobbing up and down among the seagulls, by a jetty. “Taxi?” asks one of the sailors. “Venedig, taxi? Taxi Venise?” he repeats, indicating a distant point over the waters.
A few yards further on, the blonde peasant’s party are dropping into a plump cabined boat, amid laughter and screams. A protest ripples through the massed eyes of the twenty-eight: And what about us?
“No boat,” says Mr Silvera firmly, “no boat, no barco, sorry.” The prices charged by Imperial, he explains, do not permit the sea approach to Venice, across the grey lagoon. For Imperial there is instead a fine Italian coach, all in red, which will cross the famous bridge.
“A famous bridge?” the twenty-eight say, consoling themselves.
Yes, the longest in Europe, lies Mr Silvera, hustling them back to terra firma. He will stay here another moment or two to check that their luggage has been correctly stowed on the porters’ boat and correctly dispatched to its destination.
Now he is left alone on the jetty and he gazes at the lagoon like a prince, a condottiere finally taking possession of it; or perhaps like one bidding farewell to it, who has lost it for ever?
One of the motorboats moves away from the bank, traces an elegant parabola in the water and heads swiftly towards Venice amid the shrieking seagulls. Next to the flag at the stern, for the last time, the Italian woman from Flight Z114 is standing: I am standing.
“Ah,” murmurs Mr Silvera. And he does not respond to my wave, he does not raise his hand, while his raincoat flaps in the November wind like a frayed grey banner.
Thus did I meet him, thus did I see him for the first and (so I thought) last time.
2.
I had attached no importance to the fact that Mr Silvera was a group leader, a tourist guide, escort or whatever you call it. He had naturally struck me at first glance amid that airborne rabble, and I had recorded him and his ancient medallion profile with an almost professional interest but without puzzling over him any further, without pausing to wonder how he had ended up among those clods who never once stopped calling out “Mr Silvera, Mr Silvera!” to him. I had filed him away in an imaginary auction catalogue under the heading Traveller: unusual, even a little mysterious, and had then gone straight back to my own business.
Now, I cannot say what impression he would have made on me if I had first conflated him with his profession (let’s use this term). Which of course is a perfectly fine one – don’t get me wrong – for penniless students who want to see the world in the summer (Rosy’s son and a daughter of my cousins Macchi have done it for years), but which, in November, when practised by adults with parties of that kind, can only be defined as wretched. Signor Silvera would have probably lost all credit in my eyes. I would have written him off with some commiserative murmur along the lines of “Poor guy, what a thing to have to do at his age,” or maybe, given his surname, “Just think, a poor Sephardi reduced to that level to scrape a living.” A failure, a down-and-outer, a bum. No man ever manages to rise above first impressions of that kind. And so: afterwards, things would have gone differently; they would probably never have gone anywhere at all.
But instead, thanks to my fortuitous and rather sleepy inattention, here I am, reflecting on my own profession (let’s use this term again) and finding significant points of similarity with his. It’s no less vagabond a profession. A profession in which one must ingratiate oneself with one’s clients in exactly the same way, swallow affronts and humiliations, be constantly ready with flattery, with placatory remarks and soothing comments for perfectly horrible people. It’s a profession which causes one to live and work alongside beauty, to seek it out, to evaluate it and to illustrate it with utter indifference – indeed, without even seeing it any longer. Maybe I exaggerate, but it strikes me now that the only difference between a tourist escort and myself is this: he gets remunerated with a laughable salary and an occasional petty tip, while they pay me with crackling cheques from prestigious banks.
Hence our separation: he off with his herd on the vaporetto, I in a motorboat to my hotel on the Grand Canal and the fiction of an olde worlde welcome: how are you, back as a Venetian again, did the journey go well, what weather eh, there’s some post for you, shall I prepare a Manhattan, a pot of Chinese tea? That sort of thing, all trotted out with an air of professional familiarity designed to make me feel at home even after an interval of months. And the old valet Tommaso, who handles the elevator with the gravity and solemnity of a chamberlain assigned to Louis XVI’s hot-air balloon, declaring as if to himself, “More beautiful than ever.” He too is a professional; he comes out with a phrase like this but lets you know it’s the grand-hotel translation of the vernacular “phwoar” or of some cruder expression that rises from his worn-out loins (but are they as worn-out as all that?).
I checked with a fleeting glance in the generous, omnipresent gilded mirrors, noting that they were equally professional. I saw (and immediately catalogued, without forgetting the “fine frame in contemporary style”) a Portrait of a Young Woman attributable to “Tuscan or Umbrian master of the early sixteenth century”, with the influence of Botticelli or Lippi on the one hand, Perugino on the other. Raffaellino del Garbo? Apart from the ensemble de voyage of Franco-Japanese school (Issey Miyake), the subject presented definite affinities with various Madonnas by this artist, as it did with the blonde and fascinating Lady in Profile which Berenson (with the subsequent agreement of my friend Zeri) attributes to him in Baroness Rothschild’s collection in Paris. The portrait was even more satisfying as Raffaellino, or someone on his behalf, courteously omitted the “AETATIS SUAE XXIV” and the age could reasonably be brought down to XXX or even less.
On the thick carpets we crossed paths with a party of Japanese visitors proceeding in silence and in double file, like schoolgirls. All men, all dressed in black. “At least they don’t give any trouble,” Tommaso remarked condescendingly.
“Do you get many out of season?”
“More and more of them, all year round. I don’t know, they say they’re tourists, but I reckon they come here to copy Venice. You’ll see, one of these days they’ll get round to making one of their own, a perfect imitation.” But he at once repented of his joke, which he must have cracked successfully innumerable times. “Venice can’t be imitated,” he declared with pride.
And yet his is an impression I have sometimes had myself, in this over-scrutinized city: as if all those millions and millions of admiring eyeballs had the same imperceptible and perpetual power of erosion as the waves, each glance a tiny grain of Venice filched, sucked away…
Without even unpacking, I phoned Chiara to get confirmation of my afternoon’s appointment. I was to visit a collection of pictures, which were old but of uncertain value, and if appropriate to try and ensure their sale to Fowke’s, the auctioneering firm I work for. Chiara is our local correspondent and I had already had the appointment confirmed two days earlier. But one never knows in Venice. In this city where haste is unknown, things can always get put off to the following Monday.
“Hello, Chiara? I nearly got stranded, but here I am. Are we still all right for three?”
With the anticipated disappointment (disappointment is the rule in this job) I listened to her saying that three was still all right but the pictures were anything but all right; various people had already seen this much-vaunted Collezione Zuanich and found it to be a mere collection of daubs.
“Authentically seventeenth- or eighteenth-century, I’m told, but daubs.”
“Who’s seen them?”
“More or less everybody by now. They’ve even sent someone from the Sovrintendenza, but it’s clear they’re not going to put any restrictions on them, it seems they’re minor stuff, ‘mere items of interior decoration’, as they put it. The only one showing any interest at the moment is Palmarin.”
“A wasted journey then.”
“I tried to let you know in Paris, but you’d already left. Anyway, now you’re here, don’t you want to have a look for yourself?”
“A look’s fine by me.”
“And then there’s something else, a tip-off about a villa in Padua, which comes from Palmarin himself. We’ve got an appointment with him for five o’clock, if that’s all right.”
“Fine by me too.”
I unpacked, had a quick shower, then phoned to get myself invited round to Raimondo’s, my greatest Venetian friend.
“Angel,” he said, “a sole with me. At once.”
“I can’t, I’ve got an appointment right away.”
“Dinner then.”
“I was counting on it.”
“What immense joy.”
Pronounced in his husky voice with its carefully flat, distrait, offhand tone, the hyperboles he continually uses never fail to make me laugh. He is a malicious gossip, a fierce fault-finder; but never at my expense, because I know his secret and am in a position to blackmail him. It was that time I came upon him dragging a heavy suitcase over a bridge to help an old German woman, somewhere near the Frari. He tried to get out of it by sighing, “What can I say, years of association with Scoutmasters in my childhood.”
“No, my dear, I own you,” I said, smiling mercilessly, “now I know you have a heart.”
His palazzetto in Ruga Giuffa, always full of multicoloured guests, is perhaps closest to the Venice of times past.
Down at the restaurant I ordered a sole out of sheer laziness and looked absently around, noting once again how impossible it is in Venice to see people who are individuals. All these people, knocking back Manhattans or Bellinis, including myself no doubt, looked as if they were there on behalf of some foundation, university, international association, great industry, great museum. I even expected the honeymoon couples to have identification tags on their lapels or expense-account receipts in their Gucci handbags.
And outside, the famous canal put on its usual parade of tourist figurines, all of them stuck inside the vaporetti as if in an album of elementary ethnology: a cargo of blonde Teutons and Scandinavians here, a clutch of Asian faces there, interspersed with dark bundles of Spaniards or Greeks, each party clustered tight around its Mr Silvera. Although I must in all honesty point out that I didn’t give a passing thought to Mr Silvera – and this strikes me as incredible, unforgivable – now I would like to know every detail, every fragment, every instant of those unrecorded hours (without me!).
But they can be imagined. They can mostly be reconstructed.
3.
When he has checked that the last of his charges has boarded the vaporetto (“Vite, vite, Madame Dupont!”), Mr Silvera pushes his way through the crowd and finds himself standing behind a group of Russians with shaven necks. The Portuguese girl sticks close to him, lowering her eyes and blushing when he turns to ask if everything is all right, tudo OK?
In every group there is always an adolescent who falls in love with Mr Silvera, always a pair of aged spinsters with inexhaustible energy, always a couple of quarrelsome spouses, always a hypochondriac, always a pedantic and grumbling know-it-all, always a nosey gossip. It is like travelling with a set of samples, thinks Mr Silvera, whose varied career has included experience as a costume jewellery salesman. The stones, models and metals change each time, but the necklaces remain necklaces, the brooches, brooches.
He has passed through Venice several times in his role as a group leader, but he knows the city well, having been there on previous occasions and in less superficial circumstances. However, Mr Silvera never talks about these other Venices of his, he keeps them strictly separate and makes no use of them in his present job. He could show the twenty-eight a less obvious palazzo, enliven a campanile with an anecdote, highlight a certain garden, illuminate a certain dome, but he restricts himself to the indispensable minimum: the Ponte degli Scalzi, Canale di Cannaregio, Fondaco dei Turchi, Ca’ d’Oro, Ponte di Rialto… He omits the Riva del Vin and, after a brief hesitation, also Palazzo Bernardo.
“Look, look, Mr Silvera, a real gondola!”
“Ah,” says Mr Silvera, “yes, indeed.” He knows the names of other local boats (gondolino, caorlina, mascareta…) but does not reveal them. Because it would be a waste of breath, he tells himself, because certain things are of no interest to anyone nowadays, least of all to his twenty-eight. But the truth is that this latent Venice of brocades, golds, purples and crystals cannot even be touched upon without a pang, and, more importantly, this has nothing to do with the schematic, impersonal Venice of Imperial.
Sant’Angelo, San Tomà, Ca’ Rezzonico, Accademia. The vaporetto passes from one side to the other of the Grand Canal, draws up, unloads thirty Danes, takes on thirty children on their way back from school, sets off again to the next landing stage with a prosaic, laborious jerk, like a water mule.
The party has to get off at San Marco in order to visit the homonymous piazza, the homonymous basilica and the Palazzo Ducale. But before they go to the Doge’s Palace, they must eat. Mr Silvera knows that if they do not eat at the established hour, they become irritable; if led back through the centuries to witness the fall of the Bastille, the sack of Rome, the battle of Thermopylae, at around one o’clock they would nonetheless begin to show signs of disquiet, to exchange meaningful glances. When are we going to eat? Surely it’s time to eat? And there would be at least one woman who would feel dangerously “empty”, and another more far-sighted woman who would open her bag and offer a biscuit, Mrs Gomez? Agradece un bombón, senõra Wilkins?
And both of them would turn reproving eyes on Mr Silvera, who would gain another minute with the Bridge of Sighs and Giacomo Casanova.
Since the twenty-eight confusedly believe Casanova ended up in this jail due to trouble with women and escaped for love of a woman, Mr Silvera leaves them in this belief, triggering a game that never fails in its effect: choosing the group’s Casanova, here, at once, right now, on the Riva degli Schiavoni. Amid peals of laughter that alarm the seagulls, the title is finally bestowed on Señor Bustos, a vivacious little man of about fifty, whose wife is inevitably more flattered than he is. The game will keep them happy till this evening, it will be resumed at irregular intervals over the next few days, it will enjoy a brief return of favour right at the end of the trip, and will then be recalled with pleasure by the party concerned. In a thousand years, perhaps the only thing Señor Bustos will remember of Venice is that fleeting companions dubbed him Casanova.
Mr Silvera gazes at the outline of the near and distant islands, the stretches of water which, like miniaturized oceans, are furrowed by minuscule prows in every direction, and he thinks aloud in Spanish: “A thousand years, this city is a thousand years old.”
Those close to him take this for a memorable item of tourist information and repeat it, deeply impressed: “Mil años! A thousand years!”
“Look, look, Mr Silvera! The pigeons!”
“Follow them!” orders Mr Silvera, who knows how to treat his groups. And so, following the flight of the thousand flapping pigeons, they reach St Mark’s Square (“Ooooh! Piazza San Marco!”), where Mr Silvera leaves them all to their reciprocal photographic rites to go and see to the only Venetian meal included in Imperial’s “package”.
He slips into an obscure sottoportico, automatically bending his head, takes two or three narrow alleys, going wrong only once, and in the distance finally espies the sign of the Triglia d’Oro, the trattoria-pizzeria in which two long tables should already be laid and waiting to receive twenty-eight customers. But one sniff is enough to tell him something is wrong: the alley is musty with thousand-year-old cooking smells, with a millennium of tourist menus, but it lacks the pungent, steaming, heavy tang of the immediate future. The Triglia d’Oro has changed its closing day, which has always been Monday. A notice hanging askew on the bolted door reads Weekly closure: Tuesday.
They have given no notification of this, they have sent no telex to London; a restaurant like the Triglia d’Oro does not send telexes to London or indeed anywhere else.
Mr Silvera stands there thinking, raises his eyes to the hanging signboard above which a seagull flutters, perhaps in search of edible refuse.
Agitated footsteps echo somewhere nearby, then come to a sudden halt. At an entrance into the alleyway stands the Portuguese girl, immobile and scarlet, her hands clasped tight but her head held high.
“Ah,” murmurs Mr Silvera.
Bronze and immobile with their long hammers, the two Moors on the clock tower are poised between one and two o’clock. Tourist parties on their way back from places of refreshment are beginning to flow towards the Campanile, the Palazzo Ducale, the Basilica. But as he emerges from the sottoportico into the brilliant windy shock of the piazza, Mr Silvera at once spots his own group, on the opposite side of the colonnade. It is seldom they venture forth and disperse. They are held together by lack of curiosity, timidity, ignorance of the language (Mr Silvera speaks an undetermined number perfectly, others he has learned and forgotten) and in this case by what they call “hunger”.
A kind of delegation advances towards him with a grim air of mutiny, but Mr Silvera is quick to raise his arms and show them the two clusters of swollen blue plastic bags dangling from his hands. “Food!” he shouts. “Drinks! Vino!”
Behind him, flushed and radiant, the Portuguese adolescent marches forward, carrying bottles of wine and two more bags stuffed full of sandwiches, pizzette and cans. Mr Silvera has taken advantage of her in just the way she, without knowing it, most desired: he disclosed to her the unforeseen organizational hitch, sought her help and advice, and together they entered a bar-rosticceria where, with Imperial Tours’ emergency funds, they bought sufficient refreshment for the travellers.
“Picnic!” shouts Mr Silvera. “Picnic!” Without saying so, he manages to give the impression that the picnic in Piazza San Marco is a wonderful surprise, a novelty specifically arranged by the agency. One or two people grumble, but without conviction. The idea on the whole attracts them; it is something they will be able to recount later.
Mr Silvera selects two women and a man as if at random (but he has already infallibly assessed them) and entrusts them with the complicated distribution of the victuals. Exactly like the pigeons, almost all the twenty-eight squat on the steps along the colonnade and start to peck at the improvised meal. Some seek paper napkins, some spill their wine or orange juice on their trousers, some take low-angle pictures of the memorable scene.
Mr Silvera leans against a column a few yards away. The Portuguese girl approaches him with a sandwich and a beer, but he counters her with a courteous refusal, no, thank you, I’m not hungry, I’ll have something later… He does not tell her that at that moment eating strikes him as a disgusting, desperate procedure; and yet when the girl returns to her father she bites into her sandwich with some reluctance, almost as if she were committing an act of treason.
II
The Little Oak Door, Which Was
1.
The little oak door – which was merely a little oak door stuck into a narrow, high facade, a patchwork of all possible tones of Venetian red – could well have given on to nothing more than three low rooms with an artisan hard at work repairing flat irons under a naked light bulb. The ramshackle wooden shutters had once been green. The windows were all framed in grey-stained, porous stone. And the whole campiello, a dozen unambitious houses, had the same flaccid, unserviceable air, as of a long-atrophied muscle.
Of course, the real entrance was supposed to be on the other side, from the canal, between rotten poles to which in bygone days the family gondola had once been moored. But nobody can afford similar luxuries today; nobody of Venetian origin, that is. A few rich outsiders, from Milan, the United States or Switzerland, indulge in such historical whims for a season or two and then abandon them for a more practical motorboat or go back to using a little oak door.
When one rings the bell, one gets the impression it has been broken for months, or that perhaps the whole system has been out of use for decades. No tinkle or buzz reached our ears when Chiara pressed the modern rectangle of plastic with the typewritten name Zuanich beneath it, but doubtless the summons had resounded within the deepest recesses of the building, startling a half-deaf old serving maid, who even now was dragging her swollen legs towards us along tenebrous corridors…
Instead we heard a swift succession of thuds, as of huge dogs bounding along an obstacle course, and the door was almost torn from its hinges by two tall, fair-haired and extremely good-looking boys in sneakers and sweaters: the grandchildren, whose father was dead and whose mother had remarried in America, as Chiara had already explained to me. They were studying in Milan and occasionally came here to visit their grandmother, who owned the collection.
Still gasping from the race, the two boys switched to instant formality, bowing to kiss our hands. The older boy was shaven close to the skull, while the other seemed covered in hair, with wild locks dangling from all parts. They led us into a huge entrance hall where the continual irruptions of high water had ruined the marble floor; and from there, up a staircase dignified by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century busts, we climbed to the upper hall.
Between distant doors, below the mythological frescoes of the vault, and beneath a coat of dust, long sofas waited for the dances to resume. A grey cat, with upright tail, was slinking calmly along under the coloured branches of the immense glass chandelier, but it scampered off when Chiara bent to stroke it. After another flight the staircase narrowed and the steps changed to rough stone. On a landing lay a dark sedan chair, its leather in tattered strips and the door held on by steel wire.
“What a pity,” said Chiara in a low voice.
“Yeah, sure,” said the older boy with total indifference.
An ordinary door gave onto a low-ceilinged corridor with numerous little windows. Then came a lumber room where chairs of various sizes were heaped in a tangle of broken legs and splintered backs. And finally, beyond a heavy moth-eaten puce curtain, we descended two steps and turned a sharp corner into another sort of antechamber, without windows or skylights, sparsely illuminated by a central light and furnished with a long table and two benches in painted wood. All around, on yellow plaster walls interlaced with dusty cracks, hung the collection; there were about thirty pictures, and they were arranged in single or double rows according to their sizes, which were fairly uniform, varying from a few inches to a maximum of three feet across.
“Well, I’ll go back down to my grandma,” the shaven-headed grandson said. He nodded towards his brother and towards two revolving floor lamps connected by long wires to two corner sockets. “He’ll help you to arrange the spotlights, if you want to see things better.”
We thanked him, and while the hairy one buried himself in a comic, we made a first slow tour of the room.
Nothing sensational, at least at first sight. And yet, again at first sight, less disappointing than Chiara’s information had led us to believe. Late, indeed very late Titianesques and Giorgionesques, Tintorettesques and Veronesians on the comeback, Bassanesques of the third generation but among which might be lurking – who could tell? – the gifted and industrious Padovanino, the fraudulent but at times inspired Pietro Liberi, the wayward Pietro della Vecchia or some other not dissimilar imitator of the great artists of the sixteenth century.
Nowadays this third-rate art, which its agents had had no qualms in passing off as “Veneto art of the golden century” onto distant and none too punctilious markets, was reacquiring a certain value – between thirty and sixty, even eighty million lire – on the more specialized Italian market. A couple of “Giorgiones” modified and corrected by Della Vecchia or some Titianesque beauty rehandled by Forabosco would go down a treat at Fowke’s auction house in Florence.
However, on our second round, without even the aid of supplementary illumination, all those apparently seventeenth-century works disguised as sixteenth-century ones began to reveal themselves as disguises in disguise. An insipid Gathering of the Manna and an overblown, mechanical Ecstasy of St Andrew; a ramshackle Martyrdom of St Stephen between two flutteringly chaotic Ascensions; luxuriant and titivating or dull and wooden portraits of Ladies and Gentlemen; swollen, rouged expanses of Venuses and Susannas Bathing in porcelain-tinted landscapes; a grim Mucius Scaevola on the altar amid vapid Madonnas of Loreto, in Childbirth, Giving Suck: these daubs no longer suggested Renaissance origins but revealed themselves as the work of crude hacks, pandering in rococo or even neoclassical terms to a long-established Venetian taste for forgery, plagiary and deceit.
The only thing one could admire in the collection was the consistency of the collector, probably some newly rich merchant, great-uncle or great-grandfather to the present grandmother, who, in forming his “patrician picture collection”, had been guided as much by inflexible aesthetic bigotry and a passionate veneration for “antiquity” as by an innate sense of economy.
The long-haired grandson realized we had come to a halt and raised his head questioningly. “Would you like more light on some of the pictures?” he asked. “Shall I turn the spotlights on?”
“Maybe better not.” It came out before I could stop myself.
He gave a slight shrug. From the comments of other visitors, he must have realized by now that the ancestral collection was worth little or nothing. “All the same,” he said, closing his comic and getting to his feet, “they’re still old pictures. And the Sovrintendenza hasn’t put any restrictions on them. It’s all stuff that can be sent abroad.”
The sceptical implication, which he had reached either by hearsay or maybe all by himself, was that things like that would fetch more if they were sold in countries as far away as possible. But the suddenly adult expression and the covetous, basely reverential smile that accompanied the words “old pictures” made me feel that it wasn’t a great-great-grandson who was turning on the spotlights but the great-great-grandfather himself, the businessman and improvised collector, illuminating his unredeemable “picture gallery” with oil lamps.
Although the inspection of the pictures, from our first to our last round, had taken no longer than an hour, when we asked the boy to accompany us back down we were numb with cold. But exposure to cold, dust and silence is the price one nearly always has to pay in this job, where old things – whether beautiful or hideous or just mediocre – seem to have a physical influence of their own, a permeating power which gradually bores into your fingers, legs and skin, makes you share in the rigidity of wood and iron, the frostiness of marble, and transmits to you the wrinkles and puckers of ancient canvasses and worm-eaten papers.
Moving like marionettes, we went down to the grandmother. Chiara had given me the impression she was practically gaga, and I was expecting some shrunken slobbering spectre with vacant eyes. But she could not be like that with two such strapping grandchildren. Even seated in front of a fireplace giving off the least possible heat the old lady maintained a ceremonial stateliness, with full, straight shoulders under a scarlet shawl, a haughty neck, beautiful wavy hair somewhere between fair and grey and a rosy, chubby face with the first hint of discreet wrinkles. “Have you come about the pictures too?” she asked clearly. “Please go upstairs if you wish, there are already two other people.”
The contents of an entire bijouterie hung from her neck, her ears and her wrists. She began to extol the “collection”, which the family had preserved with every care, even transporting it to Milan during the war, because there were no cellars in Venice and the Austrians could have broken the Duca d’Aosta’s front and got all the way here from Caporetto, the guns of which could even be heard. And so she herself, together with Domenico Sgravati, had packed them one by one in oilcloths and chests, and they had gone by gondola to the mainland and then in Uncle Alvise’s motor car…
“Shall I put some more wood on, Grandma?” the shaven grandson asked.
“Not for me, since I don’t feel the cold,” she said condescendingly. “But if you would like some…” Too much heat, she explained, was bad for one’s health and bad for the pictures too, which she kept upstairs in a special room without any windows, because light was dangerous too, it changed all the colours, that was what a relative from Trieste, someone who knew about these matters, had advised her years ago. And she had never moved them ever since, each one on its own nail, preserved there in the shade at the right temperature.
“But we’re not paintings,” grumbled the shaven one, poking the fire. His brother opened a little chest half full of wood and threw three or four pieces into the grate.
“Oh, these young people today…” sighed their grandmother in Venetian. Her grey-blonde head began a slow rolling motion, like a faulty doll, her exaggeratedly wide eyes turning towards a little oval table close by; on it stood photographs, in silver and tortoiseshell frames, of characters of various ages and attire, dating from the end of the previous century to the middle of the present one, but all so faded and indistinct that it was impossible to meet their eyes.
If one traffics with the past one will often come up against moments like these, pauses of stark, flayed sadness which are never easy to pass through. One gets caught and tangled in meditations, which, however repetitive and obvious they may be, are nonetheless oppressive. I stirred myself by glancing at the fire as it crackled away and I told the grandmother that I had already seen the collection, that I would have another look at my notes, and that if the pictures were of any interest to the auction house in Florence I would let her know.
“Fine, fine, please do so,” she said. “They’re worth a great deal, they even come to see them from London, from New York. La pittura veneta is the most wonderful of all.”
The shaven grandson led us to the lowly back door, recounting the usual complicated story of taxes, inheritance transfers, maintenance expenses, whereby the whole property had been nibbled away bit by bit: the estates, the country villa, the remaining shares, and now the collection, next the house itself…
I listened to him with compunction. But as I walked back across the ramshackle campiello I found myself thinking with an intense longing of the crystal towers of New York, each one of which mirrors the sharp, clear-cut nudity of its neighbours and whose splendour consists of the pure and shatterproof present.
2.
On the whole the Palazzo Ducale has been found to their taste; it has satisfied them, even if not as much as the narrow passage with tiny side windows – practically a segment of the DC-9 they had flown in on – in the middle of which Mr Silvera suddenly halted: did they know where they were?
“No, no, where are we? Où sommes-nous? Dónde estamos, Mr Silvera?” Only the Portuguese girl (whose name is Tina, or whose father at least calls her so) murmured in a tiny voice, after peering through the dust-begrimed windows: “Talvez o ponte…”
Just so: the famous bridge where those poor wretches sighed on their way to the jail, which it is one thing to look at from the outside but quite another to cross as if we ourselves were the condemned prisoners. On le goûte mieux, Mme Durand acknowledged on behalf of them all – one savours it better.
The prison itself was felt to be somewhat disappointing, after this prelude, as was the interior of San Marco, judged too dark. Why couldn’t decent lighting be provided? But the Pala d’Oro, over the Saint’s tomb, aroused particular perplexity and some dissension, since it was not entirely made of gold as the entrance ticket led one to believe. The twenty-eight are still keenly discussing the point as they follow their guide towards their next destination.
It is the artistic value that counts the most, observe the defenders of the Pala; and besides, although the overall slab is of silver, the gold leaf on it must weigh a fair bit, all told. But here opinions are divided and some say four, some seven, some even twenty pounds. What do you think, Mr Silvera? they ask. But Mr Singh and his wife still feel they have been cheated somehow, and their hostile muttering joins that of others who either did not agree with the picnic or are finding it not to agree with them now. And besides, it is cold and damp, with a wind that prevents even Mme Durand from fully savouring the view of the canals from the tops of the little bridges (and there are too many of these, with too many steps) Mr Silvera persists in crossing. How far is it now to this famous Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo? Couldn’t they have taken a vaporetto? And suppose it were to start raining? Something is going wrong and it is Mr Silvera who is to blame, several of them start to think, since he is not taking enough trouble to animate them, to cheer them up; instead he is absorbed in looking at things of no interest to anyone: windows with mouldering shutters, chipped doorways, shabby walls with little trees peeping over the top.
They cross the great square of Santa Maria Formosa, beneath a sky which, although it is still early afternoon, could hardly be more menacing and gloomy, more typically closed and low-season in aspect. But this merely serves to heighten the contrast with other passing groups, under better organization and leadership. The French girl’s group, for example, who come from the opposite direction, pass them cheerfully and animatedly, shaking multicoloured packages. “Murano!” they shout. “Souvenirs!” They would even stop to show them their purchases were it not for their leader, who spurs them on, laughing, raising her arms and tapping her watch: “Vite, vite, les enfants!”
The Imperial party members have slowed down and watch them walk away enviously. That lot will not only have had a proper meal laid on for them by their agency at a restaurant, but have also been taken to the famous island (where the best buys are to be had), not to this Santi Giovanni e Paolo, which nobody has even heard of. Mr Singh’s surly expression becomes surlier than ever, while his eyes shift from his wife, who has begun to gabble to him in an incomprehensible language, to Mr Silvera, at the head of the group. And suddenly his protest bursts out in a flow of syllables that are equally inextricable, strident and headlong but amid which the name of Murano stands out in a tone of open defiance and threat.
Mr Silvera walks a few more paces, then stops and turns. “Ah,” he murmurs. “Mr Singh.”
Instantly everyone is still, nobody moves an inch, but already Mr Singh is standing alone. Even his wife has left his arm. And the girl Tina, who has left her father’s arm, is practically kneeling on the wet ground in her blue jeans and transparent pink raincoat while Mr Silvera proceeds with his calm rebuke.
Have faith, says Mr Silvera, and do not forget that you and your companions are here for a very short time. Remember that other skies, other seas await you. Be satisfied for now with the square named after Saints John and Paul, with its famous church, its famous Scuola Grande di San Marco – now the Civic Hospital – and the even more famous monument to Colleoni. And who knows, before six o’clock, when we must be back on the Riva degli Schiavoni, we might have time to…
The overall sense of what he is saying is so plain, so luminously clear, as to obscure briefly the fact that the words are not English, nor French, nor Portuguese, nor Spanish. Rae Rajanâth Singh himself, the now contrite and stunned blasphemer, does not realize until the end that the man from Imperial Tours has spoken to him in his own tongue.
Now they are once again making their way down even narrower streets, shortcuts only Mr Silvera appears to know. And when they come out beside the sheer-sided mass of the church, in sight of the black condottiere on his horse, they do not even notice that it has begun to rain.
3.
The antiquarian business flourishes on ruins, grief and death, old Mandelbaum told me solemnly and raucously when I once went to see her in her famous mezzanine on Avenida Quintana, in Buenos Aires. But Chiara has never taken tea with Mandelbaum, has never seen her smoke those cigars of hers as black as her few remaining teeth, and refuses to acknowledge the frankly vulturine aspect of our work. Indeed, to counter what she calls my cynicism, she is always ready to robe herself in her missionary attire, to don her noble gown as a tutelary judge, as if the items of the collections we scatter around the world are poor people, survivors of massacres and famines, as if we always deal exclusively with well-equipped museums, incorruptible gallery owners, collectors of proven honour whose only concern is the good of the works.
On this occasion she was moved to pity as she thought of the disappointment awaiting the owner of those lovingly preserved daubs. “Lucky she’s half senile,” she said. “She’ll let the grandchildren deal with it and resign herself to what little they get out of it.”
“I get the impression she’s still the one who makes all the decisions,” I said in objection, thinking of my encounter with the old lady.
“Poor old thing, in any case. Lord knows what she thought she’d got there. It’s always the way with these old family collections, they get inflated ideas from one generation to the next, they imagine their attics are stuffed with Titians and Veroneses… It’s always the hardest thing of all for me when I have to explain that their priceless Lotto or Palma il Vecchio is only a copy, and a bad one at that, painted two centuries later. It really wrings my heart.”
Chiara is an excellent person and a fairly competent colleague and informant, but she lives for these – so to speak – emotions painted two centuries later. Her attacks of pity, enthusiasm, indignation, rapture all have a touch of daubery about them; they are all part of the cluttered rag-and-bone shop of her emotions. Even the “grand passion” which brought her to settle in Venice has never struck me as entirely genuine, one hundred per cent signed and authentic.
Somewhere or other she met this neo-something or post-something German painter, this Uwe of hers, and she walked out on her husband and her small children, came here to look for a house on an island in the lagoon, couldn’t find one, and now lives at the end of the Giudecca in a third-floor apartment with her artist who doesn’t sell, doesn’t exhibit, isn’t becoming anyone, and, in my opinion, doesn’t even paint any more but is supported by her, since she comes from a wealthy family and earns a little something with me. There are a hundred, a thousand such ménages in Venice: Danish sculptresses, English composers, Dutch photographers, Mexican poetesses, Guatemalan novelists, all shacked up with some companion in art and love whom they support or are supported by. They have given up “everything” (which is usually nothing) to come and live out their dream in the most romantic city in the world, and they don’t forget it for a single moment; like the tourists, they want to “squeeze” the last cent out of it: they have paid to be here, and Venice had better pay back in kind by way of hints, inspirations, exaltations and various sublimations.
Wandering around Venice with Chiara by my side I always feel off balance; it’s like walking with one un-heeled shoe (me) and one six-inch-heeled one (her). I’m not saying she gets everything wrong, but it is wearisome to have to share her ecstasies for every minor well head, roof terrace, chimney pot, or – as on that afternoon – a glimpse of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. “Stupendous. Stupendous. Incredible,” she breathed, coming to a halt in her emotion. No, she isn’t wrong, but the emphatic way she and people like her take complacent delight in these miracles end up making me intolerant of Venice itself.
