Hill Towns (22 page)

A station attendant was just posting the train’s arrival on the platform board when we saw Sam and Ada sprinting toward us carrying light nylon hand luggage and a huge straw tote. Yolanda was with them, a porter following her with a large handsome Vuitton suitcase and two totes. She wore a long cotton skirt and espadrilles and carried a bottle of mineral water, as did Sam and Ada. Ada wore the same loose, floating black gauze, and Sam wore blue jeans and a shirt knotted at his waist, and the straw plantation hat jammed over his eyes. His ponytail was flying. I could have wept and laughed at the same time, with relief and simple joy at the sight of them. Here they were, my community.

“Here come the marines,” I said.

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“Everybody ready?” Sam bellowed.

I made an OK sign with my thumb and forefinger again, and Sam grinned hugely, and Joe and Colin collapsed into giggles like children. Behind Yolanda, her porter scowled darkly.

Maria and I looked from Joe to Colin.

“
Will
you tell us what’s so funny about that?” I said.

“When we get home,” Joe said, almost strangling on laughter, “then, dear Cat, I will tell you. But not before.”

Still frowning, Yolanda’s porter dumped her bags on the platform, gave me an affronted glare, and marched away.

Joe and Sam wrestled the bags aboard the train and then half carried Colin on. They found the Gerards’ compartment and settled them in and then found ours for us.

“Sleep well,” Ada Forrest said. “I’ve always loved sleeping on trains. And this is a nice, clean new one.”

“We will,” I said, and kissed her on both cheeks, as I was learning to do. “There’s no way to say thank you, but I intend to find one before this trip is over.”

“Letting Sam do the portrait is thanks enough,” she said.

Sam hugged me and Joe indiscriminately. He smelled as he had on the first night I met him, of sweat and gin.

“A, don’t drink the water,” he said. “Get some mineral water from the attendant. Brush your teeth in it, even. The other stuff is just for flushing. B, leave a call for an hour before we get in. It’s a madhouse when you come into Venice.

The guy will make you some first-rate espresso in the morning if you tip him enormously tonight. It’s worth it. C, sleep well. Or whatever. Everything is better on a train.”

He winked at Joe and kissed me on the forehead, and he and Ada went off down the corridor toward their HILL TOWNS / 179

own compartment. The train was beginning to move, slowly.

By the time we got the luggage wedged into our tiny cubicle and pulled down the overhead bunk, it was swaying and clicking along through the anonymous suburbs northeast of Rome.

We washed our faces, and brushed our teeth with mineral water the smiling, well-tipped porter brought, and struggled out of our clothes. I knew there was no hope of finding my nightgown in the piled-up luggage; we literally had to crawl over it, naked, to get into our bunks. Joe came into the lower one with me, and we lay close together, sandwiched in on both sides, rocking through darkness that was lit in brief, flying intervals as we ghosted through small stations and out into the darkness again. Joe reached over me and pulled down the shade.

“We’d never forgive ourselves if we didn’t,” he said.

“No,” I said, reaching up to pull him down over me. His naked back was smooth and very warm, almost hot. The compartment was cool, though. It was very dark for a long time, and in the dark we might have been anywhere at all, except that the deep rushing-rocking of the train took us with it, deeper and harder and faster than we ever went on the Mountain. If I had not been pressed down so hard by the weight of Joe’s body I might have arched completely up off the bunk at the finish. I felt my head snap back, and my mouth open, and I tasted the sweat and salt of the side of his neck, and bit it not so gently. He cried out with more than release when I did, and I think I tasted, along with the salt of his skin, the salt-sweet of his blood.

“A Roman fuck is not your ordinary fuck,” he whispered later, when his breathing slowed.

“No,” I said, still quivering all over.

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Much later, after he had struggled into the top bunk and I knew by the sound of his breathing that he slept, I reached over and let the shade up again and lay washed in moonlight, watching trees and hills and occasional old buildings and the arches of old, old, vine-covered bridges and culverts flash past and over me. The clack and sway of the train got into my blood, and I felt my breathing slide into the rhythm of the train. Just before I slid after it into sleep, I felt a sudden surge of fierce joy, the kind you seldom feel after childhood.

Ahead of us lay Venice, safe on its island, safe in its lagoon.

After that, Florence, the first of the hill towns. And after Florence, the hill towns themselves, the tall old hill towns of Tuscany. Safe, safe….

And all around me, my people, my community. Joe.

And Sam Forrest.

W
E CAME INTO VENICE AT DAWN, BUT AS SAM

HAD SAID, it was all of a frenzied hour before we had gotten ourselves off the train—Colin in a fireman’s carry made by Joe and Sam’s crossed arms, furious and hurting—and found our luggage. The morning was still and thick and gray. Even before we reached the quay, trotting alongside the mechanized baggage cart that bore our belongings and a sulky, flinching Colin, even before we left the gunmetal shadows of the station, we knew we were in the immense presence of water. Light danced its water dance on the metal roof of the baggage shed; we heard, instead of the blat of automobiles, the chugging and splashing of water traffic; we felt on our skin the slightly sticky slipcover of salt air; we smelled—a stronger, darker note under the complex rank exhalation of Venice in the summer—the sea.

We had been talking worriedly, while we waited for our baggage, of what to do about Colin. Venice, with its hundreds of tiny high-arched bridges, its twisting, nar 181

182 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

row
calles
, its solid throngs of summer tourists and absence of automobile transport, is no place for the handicapped.

Colin insisted he could walk, leaning on Sam and Joe, but his forehead was sheened with cold sweat, and his face was pinched and shrunken under its gold-leaf tan. Pain had aged and enfeebled him, and I thought that this, the first real helplessness of his remembered life, had frightened him. He said almost nothing and shook off Maria’s worried fingers.

I knew he was going to be difficult to help. Perhaps we could tip our boatman heavily to help carry him to our hotel in the Campo La Fenice. It was, Sam said, about a five-minute walk from the San Marco landing stage if we took the Number One vaporetto, the one we’d planned to take. Sam and Ada both said it was by far the best and cheapest way to see the Grand Canal for the first time. It was the worst sort of folly, they said, to hire a gondola for a trip from the train station to San Marco.

“You’d have to skip dinner for the rest of your trip,” Sam said. “They’re the modern Italian equivalent of highway robbery.”

I could not imagine that Sam and Ada Forrest worried unduly about money, but it was nice of them to think of Maria and Colin’s newlywed budget. Or, for that matter, our academic one. Trinity paid its department heads handsomely, but we were not, I knew, in the Forrests’ bracket.

Far from it.

Ada whispered something to Sam and he nodded, and she went in search of a telephone and came back in a few minutes smiling.

“The Europa and Regina is making up the living room of our suite into a bedroom for Sam and me,” she said. “It’s directly on the Canal Grande, no walking at all. And they’re sending the launch for us. This way HILL TOWNS / 183

Colin and Maria can have our bedroom where we can look after them, and Yolie can take their room at the Fenice. I’m sure the one they found for her last night is a broom closet.

This will be better all the way round. That is, if you lovebirds don’t mind sharing a bath. It won’t be bad; Sam takes very few.”

Sam grinned evilly at her.

“Oh, God, we can’t take your bedroom, Ada.” Colin groaned. “You didn’t come to Venice to share a bathroom and wait on me. Where would Sam paint Cat?”

“The rooms are absolutely huge,” she said. “Even the bedrooms have sitting areas, and everything overlooks the canal.

The light is lovely. Sam can set up his easel by one of the windows and we’ll still have enough room for a ball. I’m not going to take no for an answer on this, darling. You simply cannot manage the Fenice right now. You can lie on the chaise by the window and see all the Venice that’s worth seeing, and order gorgeous things from room service, and by the time we leave you’ll be able to walk much better.

You’ll be all ready for Florence. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“I hate the fuck out of this,” Colin said.

“What a perfectly gracious thing to say to Ada,” Maria said tightly. Her skirt and blouse were badly crumpled, and there were yellowish circles under her dark eyes. I thought of the minuscule bunks on the overnight train and suspected that the second night of Maria Gerard’s married life had not been what she might have wished it to be. She had doubtlessly slept in her clothes, if she had slept at all. I imagined that she sat up all night, wedged into the lower bunk with Colin’s injured foot propped in her lap, trying to buffer him against the sways and jostles of the train. At the very best, she might have dozed a little. No transcendent fly 184 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

ing, racketing love for her, as there had been for Joe and me.

I did not blame her for the irritation in her husky voice. Colin injured and helpless did not, for some reason, elicit compassion.

“It’s OK,” Ada said, smiling her little cat’s smile. She wore sea-green cotton today, in a pattern of polished swirls; it seemed to catch and throw back the sea stipple on the shed’s ceiling. Her hair was tied high off her slender neck, and the green fabric turned her eyes the color of ice in arctic seas.

Everything about Ada Forrest was cool on this thick morning.

“Well,” Yolanda Whitney said cheerfully, “I accept the offer of your old room at the Fenice, because I know the kind of

‘emergency accommodation’ they keep vacant, so you’ve got no choice. Don’t be a butt, Colin. Give your bride a break.

The Europa’s got the best view in Venice, and they’ll look after you like you’re Michael Jackson. You wouldn’t do half that well at the dear old Fenice.”

Maria smiled at her gratefully, and Sam gave her a small hug.

“Come on,” he said to Colin. “For you I’ll bathe once a day. Rest of the time you won’t know we’re there. Souls of discretion, we’ll be.”

“Better do it, sport,” Joe said. “You don’t want to get on the bad side of these ladies.”

“There’s no way we can afford that hotel,” Colin said ob-durately. “It was one of the ones we looked at when we planned the trip. Christ, we couldn’t even manage one night—”

“The room is courtesy of us,” Ada said. “Consider it a wedding present. After all, it’s already arranged; it isn’t costing anyone anything.”

“No. You’ve done too much for us. From now on I HILL TOWNS / 185

pay my way,” Colin said, and I thought it might actually be possible to dislike him if this side of him presented itself very often. But of course it didn’t; I had never seen it in all the years I had known him on the Mountain. Pain and disappointment, that’s what it was. Not the Colin I knew at all.

“Colin,” Ada said patiently, but with a very slight edge in her voice, “we are paying nothing for either room. The suite is gratis because Sam is…because Sam is Sam Forrest. We have stayed there often before, and the manager is an old friend. He owns one of Sam’s earliest Italian works. I don’t like to make a thing of this, but if it will ease your Yankee conscience I will tell you it is a matter of some pride to our friend, having Sam Forrest stay at his hotel. We would feel churlish trying to pay him for our accommodations; we stopped trying long ago. So you are not putting anyone out and you owe no one anything, and here is the hotel launch.

Let’s by all means get into it and get you settled and get a decent breakfast. I think we’ll all feel better then.”

I was liking her more and more.

“Then thank you, Sam and Ada,” Colin mumbled, not meeting their eyes. “Thank you again.”

He did not say anything else as the boatman and Sam and Joe propped him tenderly in the smart hotel launch, and he did not speak for the entire length of the Grand Canal. For once I could not fault him. One’s first view of it, coming out of the shadowy cave of the baggage shed on a mist-pearled early morning, literally stops the breath. We were well away and passing slowly between lacy Gothic loggias and striped mooring poles, past small, secret canals winding into shadows and who knew what else, past the fairy-tale palazzi in their

186 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

stained dress of soft, crumbling red and blue and pink and gold and white, past blade-prowed gondolas and barges and blundering vaporetti and sleek, low-rumbling private motor craft, before anyone said anything at all.

“Oh, my,” I said softly, on an indrawn breath. “Oh, my goodness….”

Venice remains to me now what it was that first morning: a city shimmering in midair, somewhere between sky and water. Atlantis risen. It is all movement and mirrors, illusion, mist, radiance, dapple and dance and diffusion. I never knew where I was in Venice, and I never knew with certainty which was the real city, the city of stone and flesh, and which the watery twin. The people I met in the dark
calles
were, I fancied, more often than not ghosts, and I am quite sure that many of the ghosts of Venice I took for real people, and nodded as we passed, and was nodded to in turn. Its opalescent beauty remains for me phantasmagorical and sucking, death at the bottom of it all, life at the bottom of the death. Who knows which Venice is real, or if any of it is? It dances in the air of its lagoon; it decays in the dark green of its water, it dies and is reborn hourly as the fantastic light changes. It is rich with treasures that were born elsewhere, with the plunder of a hundred kings and centuries; it seems to own none of itself but clings to each new eye and heart that is drawn down the great artery to its own heart as if to fashion for itself more sustaining flesh. I loved it; almost to my last day there, I did.