Hill Towns (28 page)

He laughed softly.

“In my world, you ought. No, I was just thinking…there’s a quality about you, something in your face. It hasn’t been there in the other women I’ve painted, or wanted to paint.

I don’t think innocence is the right word, but there’s something…like a new snowfall. Essentially still untouched. I was wondering why I was so drawn to that at this point in my life.”

I did not like the direction in which this conversation was sliding.

“Maybe you’re looking for a clean slate. Maybe you need to turn over a new leaf. Maybe it’s easier to paint…untouched faces. Less annoying character to have to fool with.”

“Don’t get prickly with me,” he said, beginning to paint.

“I didn’t say you lacked character. And you’re not easier to paint. I think…you’re the hardest portrait I ever tried.”

I sat silent for a time then. He painted furiously, restlessly, paced about, changed to a palette knife, worked fast with that. At some point I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the chair’s back. I hadn’t meant 230 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

to, but I felt myself drifting away, drifting. I was simply so tired….

I’m not sure what time the sounds began. I know that when they disturbed my light sleep, or whatever it was, the stabbing white had gone out of the light, and the water stipple on the ceiling was slower. I lifted my head, my neck stiff, and cocked it to one side, listening. I had never heard anything like the sounds before, and yet I knew them….

Sam had stopped painting and stood still, looking toward the closed bathroom doors.

“What on earth?” I said, turning toward the escalating sounds, and then I knew. Thrust and thump, thrust and thump, the quickening creak of springs, a high, thin keening, a lower moaning that grew and grew, sharp, muffled words—yes, yes, yes,
my God yes
!—a kind of dark crooning, a long hoarse cry, a pure high scream that rose and rose and rose and finally choked sharply off, as if cut by a knife. And then silence.

I had heard it all before: in a small dark room in a tiny house on a mountain half a world away, in the back of an old car, and, one last time, in the back seat of a car on the verge of a bridge swinging high over a rocky creek.

I put my hands over my ears and shut my eyes and rocked myself back and forth in the chair. After a moment, Sam came over and gently pulled my hands away.

“Why does that frighten you so?”

He was leaning closely over me. I could not look up at him.

“That’s how it sounded…that’s what they were doing, that’s how they sounded. My parents. I remember hearing that all the time until I was five. That’s how it sounded on the night they…the night they…”

HILL TOWNS / 231

“But doing it doesn’t frighten you, Cat. I don’t understand.

I mean, you and Joe, you do that…don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, thinking I was going to cry again. I was very weary of crying. “We do that. We do that all the time. But that sound…I don’t make that sound…”

“What sound do you make, Cat?” he said. His voice was so low that I could hardly hear it. I could feel his breath on my face, though.

“None,” I whispered. “I don’t make any sound. I never have. I can’t. I try, I make the motions, but no sound comes…Joe calls it the silent death….”

“Because if you make a sound, you can’t hear danger coming. That’s it, isn’t it? If you make the noise of love, that love will kill you?”

“Yes.”

He put his arms around me and pulled me to my feet. He bent his head down to mine, and I lifted my mouth up to his, and he kissed me, long and sweetly and softly, and then not softly anymore. Hard, warm, hot—his hands moved down my back and around and up to my breasts and then all over me, and I gave him back touch for touch, eyes still closed, blinded, breath-spent. Strange, his hands were so large, his mouth so hard without the softening brush of a mustache. His body was so very big. I could not get all of him into my arms, as I could Joe. Strange, strange….

When he finally took his arms away he was breathing as though he had been running, hard, and I could only stand staring at him, gasping like a fish pulled onto land. If I had not held to the back of the chair, I think my legs would have collapsed me onto the floor.

“Cat,” Sam said hoarsely, “I promise you now that before you leave Italy you will make a very joyful noise, 232 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

and it will be with me, and it will be a very far thing from killing you. But not now.”

“This shouldn’t have happened,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. We can’t…we can’t be together anymore. The painting will have to stop.”

“The painting can’t stop,” he said, and he smiled at me, a very sweet smile, a normal Sam smile. “But I promise you, too, that I won’t touch you again until you ask me. And Cat, you will ask.”

“I’ll sit for you, if I have your promise,” I said. “But not for a day or two. We need some time off, both of us. And Sam, I will not ask.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, “you will.”

When I got back to the Fenice, there was a note from Joe saying he and Ada and Yolanda had gone on to Do Spade, in San Polo, and for me to ask Sam to bring me.
Don’t come
alone
, Joe wrote,
you’ll never find it. You can’t handle it alone.

Sam knows where it is. Come with him
.

In a pig’s ass I will, I said to myself, still shaking slightly, still running sweat, still feeling the imprint of Sam’s hands on my body and my own arms hard around him. In a pig’s ass will I ask him. And I went up to Joe’s and my room, as dim and neat now as if no one had ever been in it, and stripped off my clothes and took a very long shower. And then I dressed and went downstairs and asked the desk clerk to draw me a map to Do Spade, in San Polo.

He was the one I liked, a slim, blue-eyed young man who looked like an American college student doing his summer abroad, except that his English, though good, was formal and heavily accented. He had heard Joe call HILL TOWNS / 233

me Cat, and now referred to me, shyly and with a smile to show that he meant no disrespect, as Signora Gatta. When I asked for Do Spade, he looked at me in surprise.

“Signora Gatta goes prowling tonight,” he said. “Are you sure it is Do Spade that you want?”

“I’m sure. Can I walk it from here?”

“You can walk it in—oh, perhaps twenty minutes or so,”

he said slowly, “but I wish that you would not. It is
oscuro
…hard to find. There is no sign, and it is not the best part of Venice for signoras. Not even
gatti
. You do not go alone?”

“No,” I lied briskly. “I’m meeting someone who’ll go with me, but I wanted to be sure of it. I’ve heard it’s very good, very…real Venice.”

“What is the real Venice?” he said. “Do Spade, it is a place for the—what? The porters and merchants around the Rialto.

A local place for workers. They are good men, most, but they are not used to seeing pretty
gatti
coming alone.”

“Thank you for being concerned, Alvise, but I won’t be alone.” I smiled, and took the map he had drawn, and went out into the last of the afternoon sunlight in the Campo Fenice. All at once I wished we were meeting there, at the Taverna; it looked gay and friendly in the slanting light, as familiar to me, now, as home. My place.

And then my skin prickled and my heart gave the profound, half-forgotten wringing twist that meant the fear had woken in its kennel and put its head out. I stopped, stood still for a moment. Then I turned and went back into the Fenice.

“Forgot something.” I smiled brilliantly at Alvise, and ran up the stairs rather than waiting for the elderly elevator, and rummaged in my bag until I found the nearly 234 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

full vial of Valium, and took two. Then I picked up Sam’s little pewter medal from the dressing table and dropped it over my head. Saint Zita came to rest once more, heavily, coldly, between my breasts. It made an oval lump under my striped jersey, but I did not care. It was as comforting as…a touch.

“
Sicuro
,” I whispered to myself in the mirror. “Safe.”

And this time I strode swiftly and purposefully through the campo and into the maze of small alleys that would take me to the Teatro Rossini, in the Campo Manin, the first of the landmarks Alvise’s map told me to look for. I did not did look back until I knew that the Campo La Fenice was lost to me. Then I slowed and looked about me.

The tiny
calle
in which I walked looked identical to the ones around the Fenice and San Fantin and the ones Sam and I had passed through on the way to San Geremia.

Miniature arched bridges, winding green canals, peeling soft red and blue and pink walls leaning close overhead, tiny
campielli
opening out for seemingly no reason at all, the inevitable covered wellhead centering each. Some of the alleys led nowhere, and some seemed to lead back to where—I thought—I had just walked. There were people all around me, but few carried cameras; I was not of them anymore. I had read something Henry James had written about “a narrow canal in the heart of the city—a patch of green water and a surface of pink wall…a great shabby façade of Gothic windows and balconies—balconies on which dirty clothes hang and under which a cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight of slimy watersteps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer smell, and the whole place is enchanting.”

Yes. It was enchanting. It was not the Venice I had HILL TOWNS / 235

seen so far, but it was still Venice, and enchanting indeed in the dying light. Enchanting in the old, original sense of the word: a place of magic, sorcery, incantation, witchery. A place that changed its shape and nature and with it, yours: enchanting. The hair on the back of my damp neck prickled.

I nodded stiffly to most of the people I passed, and some nodded back but others only stared, stared at the leggy blond American woman with the haircut of a boy, wandering alone through their
calles
and over their bridges. Several groups of men called after me, and one or two made as if to follow me, but I glared at them as Yolanda had taught me, and they faded away. Only their laughter followed me.

Where was the Campo Manin, the Teatro Rossini? I stopped in a tiny, silent
campiello
and studied Alvise’s map.

It was empty, barren, hot, and dim, but there was something in the shadows around the blank, closed doorsteps, shapes shifting, moving…cats. I looked harder. Many cats, slipping through the shadows, watching me, crouching patiently before bowls that had been put out for them. Not precisely feral, then, if not house pets, either: these cats were lean and wary but not starved. There were many bowls. The people of this other Venice cared for them, they were kind, they would not—had I been about to think it?—harm me.

Just around this corner and over a bridge should be the Campo Manin, and here it was. Not thronged with tourists and dinner-goers, as the Campo nearer San Marco were, but full of people strolling, talking, carrying bundles, sitting at scuffed plastic tables outside tiny
caffés
. Neighborhood people. Home people. I took a deep breath and felt my heart slow. The map worked. Next, beyond another warren of the
calles
and canals, the

236 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Fondaco di Tedeschi, where the main post office was, hard by the Rialto Bridge. I had been there, with Sam. My spoor was still on it.

And after that, simply across the Rialto straight down the Ruga degli Orefici to the Ruga Vecchio San Giovanni, and I would see the sign of the little Do Mori bar, and if I walked straight past it, there would be the few tables and chairs that belonged to Do Spade. It had no sign, but they would be there waiting for me. Joe and Yolanda and Ada and Sam.

I could do this.

I smiled at everyone around me, my heart beating high with success and only the scuttled remnants of the fear, and sailed out of the Campo Manin and back into the heart of this other Venice.

And into the dark. It was a dark that was more than the sudden dying of the light, which happens on the eastern rim of lands that touch the seas. East: I had forgotten just how very far east we were here. But it was more than that. It was a darkness of places where people have, for centuries, kept to their houses after nightfall, and those houses were high and close together and with only narrow slashes of windows, so that there was no light from them, only oblongs of lesser darkness. It was a darkness of old water, that moved in and out each day over doorsteps and around foundations and sometimes, in the winter
acqua alta
, over campos and courtyards, and always under the bridges, old themselves.

Old water, green and silent and always moving; wherever I went on the old, glistening cobbled alleys and
calles
, over the countless high bridges, I heard it, moving with me. The dark water of Venice, that night, was like the surf of my own blood. My footsteps rang over and around it, and finally with it. Blood and water, running

HILL TOWNS / 237

together. Up and over this bridge and that, down this alley and that, into this dead, lunar campo and that, back out, into another
calle
, over another bridge….

Where was the post office, the Rialto Bridge, the lights, the people of Venice? I could hear them, off on other streets, always just out of sight; I could see, not light but the diffusion in the sky, thickening now with fog, where light shone below.

But I could not find any of it.

I was lost.

I was lost. All right, stop and take a deep breath and hold Alvise’s scrawled map up to the pale night-light in the little greengrocer’s, long closed now. Breathe in and out, slowly.

And again. You are not lost. No one is lost in Venice; how can one be lost on a small island? Who said that to be lost in Venice is to be found? There are people all around you; you can hear their voices. Go to one of the places where they are and ask the way. Some one will point you there.

Don’t be afraid.

I am afraid. I am lost and my heart is going to stop, it will attack me; no one will find me; the wrong people will find me; someone is going to find me and hurt me. I must be very quiet. I must hear it coming.