The Girl Behind the Mask (10 page)

Maria was more than happy to sit on the church steps in the sunshine while I went back inside to ‘confess’. I slipped into the booth. The priest’s mysterious new assistant opened the shutter between us.

‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.’

‘You haven’t even started yet,’ said the voice on the other side of the grille.

‘You’re a priest,’ I said.

‘I certainly own the outfit,’ said my friend. ‘How else am I supposed to gain access to such a devout young girl? Besides, I look good in it.’

‘Vanity is a sin,’ I reminded him.

‘Worse than pretending to be a man of God? I will be going to Hell either way. So, tell me, my dear. What are we to do with you? I was surprised to read your letter. Girls your age are usually only looking for a husband.’

‘The last thing I want is a husband,’ I exclaimed. ‘I want access to the kind of education that my brother expects as his birthright. I want the ability to chart my own destiny.’

‘Isn’t that up to God?’

‘I don’t believe God would want me to be ignorant.’

‘I believe you are right. Well, listen, dear Luciana. I can certainly help you. In fact, you can start right now. I have left a book for you beneath the chair you are sitting on. You will find a new book there whenever you come to confession. Tucked inside it will be my instructions.’

I groped beneath my seat for his first gift to me. I pulled out a common prayer book. ‘What? But it’s a prayer book!’

‘At first glance. Look inside,’ he said. I opened the book to find the content was altogether different from that I had expected.

‘The cover is loose. I shall use it to contain each new volume. It will keep you from having to explain your choice of reading to your chaperone.’

‘Of course.’

‘Now, I think you must go. A girl of your age shouldn’t have so much to say to a priest. People will start to be suspicious.’

I agreed. But before I left the confessional, I couldn’t resist leaning closer to the grille in an attempt to get a better look at him. He was leaning close too. Our eyes met. His were a very dark grey. I was reminded of the bear I had once seen at a fair in Turin. Though it had been behind bars, to me its eyes spoke of the wilderness and the joy of true freedom. Remembering the bear, I put my hand up to the grille. My new teacher matched my palm with his own. I thought I could feel his skin’s heat.

‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘What is your name?’

‘You would be shocked to hear it,’ he said. ‘And since I do not wish you to be prejudiced against me, for now you may call me your teacher. Now go. Please, go.’

I thanked him and ran to find Maria.

The book he has given me is an introduction to philosophy. I feared at first I would not understand it but he has marked several passages with notes of his own, designed to make things clearer for the novice. What luck that providence has sent me such a teacher. I promise I will be a good student.

But tonight I find I am wishing for something more than access to great works. Every time I close my eyelids, I can feel his gaze upon me. I can see his smile through the confessional grille. I feel myself falling into the darkness of his eyes. I feel myself wanting him to look at me. More than that, I want him to
touch
me, in ways I’m sure are not appropriate. I had better confess again first thing in the morning.

Chapter 15

Marco Donato had not been bored into retracting his invitation. His email in response to my explanation of how I came to be in Venice was kind and polite. He told me he wished he’d had more patience for study as a young man. He said he was in awe of those scholars who had the tenacity to bring the past back to life. His email encouraged me to think I really was welcome – in the library, at least.

My second day there, the same routine. The old retainer, bowed like a musical clef, opened the door to me at ten. We processed through the garden. I cast a guilty look at the denuded rose bush. So far as I could see, there were no new blossoms budding. Probably wouldn’t be for some time. But the fountain was still dripping and the sparrows were still bathing. Across the path, the marble lovers still gazed into each other’s eyes, adoring each other for all time.

Inside the library, I settled back down at the desk with my dictionary, my notepad and a magnifying glass. Some of Luciana’s handwriting was incredibly tiny. She crammed twice as many words onto a page as one might have expected. Perhaps she thought she would run out of paper before she ran out of things to say.

I read on. It really was a test of my translation skills. Not for the first time, I wished I had more of a talent for languages, but I was glad all the same that I had persisted with my studies. Little did my teachers know the romantic root of my passion for Italian.

I was fifteen years old and spending a school holiday working as an orderly at St Vincent’s, a private hospital near to my grandparents’ house. You see, for a while I had ambitions to become a doctor rather than a historian and my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to see the realities of healthcare up close.

That summer, a young Italian man who had been badly injured in a car crash was recovering in the hospital. Rumour had it he was driving a Ferrari and lost control of it as he raced down a country lane. The crash had left him broken and burnt. He was also mute through shock and lay with his face turned to the wall day after day. He didn’t speak to anyone but I developed a fantasy that if I spoke Italian to him, it would shake him from his stupor. One of the nurses told me I wouldn’t harbour such romantic thoughts if I’d ever seen the mess beneath the bandages that covered the poor man’s face. I assured her otherwise and every time I was sent in to fill the water jug in his room, I made sure to pause and mutter some banality about the weather in his native tongue.

For the first two weeks, he didn’t seem to hear me. He did not react to my presence in the room at all. Eventually, however, I grew bolder. I decided I would force him to notice me. I walked around to the side of the room he always faced and inserted myself between the bed and the wall on the pretence of picking up a stray tissue. He couldn’t avoid looking at me. Except he did. If I tried to get into his line of sight, he simply closed his eyes.

I don’t know why I didn’t give up. From my adult perspective, I can see that my determination to pull the poor man out of his well of unhappiness was nothing short of harassment. He’d been badly injured in a crash. He was thousands of miles from home. What reason did he have to feel appreciative when I bothered him with my appalling phrasebook Italian? But at the same time, I felt a strong, almost spiritual, urge to connect with him. Something fated. The nurses didn’t seem to have a great deal of time for him. One of them went so far as to say the unfortunate guy’s accident should be a lesson to us all. If he hadn’t been able to afford a Ferrari, he wouldn’t have been driving so fast. Sometimes, there were advantages to being ordinary.

I suppose the fact that he wasn’t ordinary was a big part of my fantasy too. The Ferrari, the riches and the glamorous lifestyle were still part of the dream for me. Despite the nurses’ gossip, it never occurred to me that my dream boy might really be facing a lifetime of pain. In my fantasy, he would recover fully. When the bandages came off, he would look like a model, with perhaps just one artful scar to remind him of how we had come to be together in our castle on a Tuscan hillside.

So I persisted and when he finally looked at me, five weeks into my campaign of kindness, his eyes, dark and sad, always swimming with tears, gave me enough encouragement upon which to build a dream of a whole life. When we were together, those eyes would swim with tears no more.

Naturally, when I went back to school in September, I transferred my teenage enthusiasm to a lad from the local boys’ school who would actually talk back to me. Still, I thought about the poor Italian from time to time. When he was recovered enough to be moved, he went back to Italy, I suppose. Assuming he did recover. I don’t even know which city he was from. The nurses had told me he would always be horribly scarred. He had suffered horrendous burns to much of his body. But at least he’d lived. Unlike his passenger.

Anyway, that’s why I decided to take up Italian. Out of a crazy notion that I could save a rich young man’s life with his mother tongue and he would shower me with gifts and love me for ever out of gratitude. It seemed especially poignant now that I found myself in a private Venetian library, translating an eighteenth-century teenager’s diaries. How naïve I had been to believe in such a romantic fantasy. How naïve Luciana seemed, too.

I couldn’t help but laugh at some of Luciana’s diary entries. There is nothing more dangerous or determined than a bored teenage girl. Her decision to write back to the stranger in the gondola had been a risk by anyone’s standards. I couldn’t wait to read on and discover how the situation unravelled now they had met face to face – albeit on either side of a confessional screen. But as before, I had only a couple of hours. At midday, the old man returned to remind me my time was up.

‘Excuse me,’ I said in Italian. ‘I feel so rude. I haven’t asked your name.’

‘I haven’t offered it,’ said the man. ‘But you may call me Silvio.’

‘Silvio,’ I echoed. It was not a name I would have expected. Silvio spoke of a young man with glossy black hair, entrancing every girl in town with his patter. Well, perhaps that was the way it had once been. We all grow old. ‘I’m Sarah.’ I offered my hand. Silvio accepted a handshake.

‘Have you worked here long?’ I asked.

‘All my working life,’ Silvio confirmed. ‘All my life. I was born here. My father was the boatman of this house.’

More and more interesting. What stories Silvio must be able to tell. ‘Has . . . has the house changed much since you’ve worked here?’ I dared to ask.

‘I have to take something off the stove,’ was Silvio’s response. ‘You know your own way to the door.’

Back at the office, I wrote an email to Donato as promised, paraphrasing the diary entry I had read that day. He wrote back to me, congratulating me on my translation skills. He asked how I had learned my Italian. I considered a fairly banal response but decided, for some reason, to tell him the truth.

I had a Florence Nightingale complex.

I regretted sending it. I hoped Donato would not think I was making light of the poor crash victim’s suffering. For the time I’d worked at the hospital, I really had cared for that man. Or thought I’d cared. My feelings for him were as genuine as an unsophisticated teenager’s feelings can be. I was relieved when I received a reply just a couple of hours later.

How lucky for that young driver you made such an effort to cheer him in his hour of need. You are obviously a woman of great sensitivity and I am sure he recalls your terrible accent with great fondness. Meanwhile, it sounds as though our Luciana is inviting trouble. What do we think of this ‘teacher’ of hers?

I wrote back:

For the moment, I think I will have to reserve judgment. He certainly seems serious about helping her gain access to the books she is unable to find at home.

Indeed, the next few pages of Luciana’s diary were occupied solely with her new academic pursuits. Having managed to persuade Maria – and her father – that she was going through the sort of devout religious phase teenage girls sometimes go through, Luciana was easily able to find a reason to go to confession at least every other day. Though she didn’t always find her own personal priest in the confessional, she always found something under the seat.

Luciana devoured the books her new friend sent to her. History, philosophy, politics and economics, all of them carefully disguised in the prayer-book’s cover so that she could read in front of Maria during the day. At night Luciana wrote in her diary, but she also wrote to her teacher, asking questions and questioning answers, passing messages inside the prayer book and by gondolier. Some of the letters were in the library’s collection and I matched them to the diary pages. It struck me that Luciana was a far better student than I had been at her age. Perhaps there was something to be said for keeping teenage girls locked away.

Meanwhile, I was establishing something of a pattern in my new life. Each morning I went to the library. In the afternoon, I typed up my notes for my thesis and for Donato. He continued to write back to me. I was surprised but very pleased. I hadn’t expected that he would really be interested in Luciana’s diaries beyond his polite initial inquiries, but it seemed I was wrong. He was very interested. What’s more, he claimed to have read many of the books Luciana ploughed through in between making her ‘confessions’. In fact, in many ways, Donato was more interested in Luciana’s studies than I was. What brought the papers to life for me was the domestic detail. Though Luciana’s thirst for knowledge was being quenched at last, she was still the same girl who had sat dreaming at her bedroom window. Her chaperone still vexed her. And she was developing an interest in her scholarly friend that went beyond the possibilities for educational enlightenment.

I smiled in girlish recognition when I read of Luciana’s annoyance that, on the one day her hair looked especially shiny, she had to give her confession to an old priest rather than her young friend. The matter was compounded by the fact that she hadn’t practised her confession that day. In the end, she thought about her hair and plumped for ‘vanity’. I wrote about it to Donato.