The Art of Waiting (25 page)

Letters

Venice, December 1950

Aldo returned to Burano and gave the house its first proper clean since his return from Russia in July. He found a couple of brooms in the cupboard under the stairs and swept out the house from top to bottom, then brought water from the lagoon in a bucket and scrubbed the floors with the stiffest of the brooms. He evicted the spiders from their cobwebs and turned over the mattress and dragged it downstairs and into the garden and beat it with a stick. The neighbours' goats wandered over in expectation of something novel on which to chew, then withdrew amid the clouds of dust when Aldo raised his stick at them. The next day Aldo woke with a renewed sense of purpose. He walked past the church and when the kids kicked their ball at the back of his head he kicked it straight back at them. He caught the
vaporetto
to Venice and went straight to the canal to the rear of Isabella's old marital home. Sure enough, there it was, the gondola, still tied up to the jetty just as Isabella had told him the previous week. He could scarcely believe it after all these years and he unhitched a nearby boat and pushed himself across to it, jumping out onto the jetty and into the thing, the old girl, even rougher round the edges now than he remembered her. Even the oar was still there, tucked away in the belly of the boat, and he picked it up and poled the gondola out into the Canale Grande, everything coming back to him so easily, as if it were meant to be. He passed beneath the Ponte di Rialto and as he rounded the bend towards Accademia he noticed a grey-haired man in a pastel-yellow jacket waving frantically at him with an umbrella as if hailing a cab. He watched the man for several seconds and, as the gondola drifted nearer,
the woman at the man's side also began to wave, calling out across the short stretch of water that separated the quay from the boat. Suddenly it dawned on Aldo what they wanted, the mistake that they had made. Oh, what luck! Before they could change their minds, he turned the boat swiftly towards them, looking around to check that none of the officially licensed gondoliers were waiting at the pick-up point near the bridge. He swept in alongside the pair of tourists with a piratical swagger, barely resisting the urge to cackle like the brigand he knew himself to be. He looked at the pair of them and wondered what on earth the man was doing wearing a yellow linen jacket in wintertime. But the man's accent gave it all away – he was an American.

‘How much?' the man asked in broken Italian. ‘Half an hour? How much?'

Aldo plucked a figure from his head, then offered a second random sum for a whole hour.

‘Oh, that sounds very reasonable, Ken,' said the woman.

‘How long, honey? You want an hour?'

‘Well, it is our second honeymoon after all,' she said.

Ken held up a single digit while mouthing slowly and loudly in English, ‘One hour? Okay, one hour?'

‘One hour, okay, one hour,' repeated Aldo, grinning from ear to ear.

‘It looks a bit tatty, Ken,' the woman said as she was on the point of stepping aboard. ‘The boat, I mean. Do you think it's seaworthy?'

‘But we ain't going on the sea, honey.'

‘You can't trust these goddamned Italians, Ken. I bet these canals are deep, and you know I can't swim.'

‘Don't worry, honey. Just take a deep breath and relax and you'll float.'

‘Ken, you sure know how to compliment a woman. Sometimes I wonder why I married you at all.'

‘Too late now,' said Ken. ‘After almost forty years. Well, shall we, honey?'

She nodded and looked at Aldo and smiled politely and he offered her his hand as she stepped aboard, and when she tottered
he held her up and then sat her down on the bench. She was laughing at her own clumsiness and Aldo smiled at her in return.

‘Silly me,' she said.

‘Silly me,' Aldo repeated, a reasonable approximation, laughing as he did so. ‘Silly me.'

‘No, not silly
you,'
she said. ‘Silly me.'

‘Yes, yes, silly me,' he said, nodding vigorously, and she changed the subject swiftly to cushions.

‘Don't you have any cushions?' she said. ‘Cushions?'

She pointed to the seat and enunciated the word again with exaggerated deliberation and volume.

‘Ken, he hasn't got any cushions.'

‘Do you have any cushions? Cushions?' said Ken, stressing each syllable as if Aldo were an idiot, and the woman lifted her large bottom off the seat and made as if to place something beneath it in a way that made Aldo laugh.

‘No cushions?' she asked again, slightly embarrassed now by his laughter.

‘Ah, no, no,' Aldo replied in Italian. ‘No cushions today,
signora
. Not today,' and he pointed knowingly at the sky.

The couple looked up, looked at each other, then nodded and smiled uncertainly. Aldo nodded back.

‘What's he saying?' said the woman.

‘I don't goddamned know,' said Ken, and Aldo pushed the boat away from the quayside before they could muster any second thoughts.

Right, thought Aldo, let's keep ourselves out of public view, no point in breaking the rules in front of everyone. He took them up towards the Rialto bridge, then cut into one of the narrow waterways that led into San Polo.

‘Oh, this is so romantic, isn't it, Ken?' the woman kept saying, and each time she said it Ken nodded and smiled and patted her fat knee with his hand.

‘We've been wanting to come to Venice for so long, haven't we, Ken? Ever since we were courting.'

‘Were we ever courting, honey?'

‘Oh, Ken, don't be such an ass. As if you don't remember. Say, do you think he could sing us a song?'

‘Do these guys really sing?'

‘Of course they do, dear. Betty told me all about it, when she and Marvin came here last year.'

‘Oh, honey, Betty's full of bull. But I'll ask him anyway. Just for you.'

She smiled at him and he grinned back, raising his hand towards Aldo, snapping his fingers when Aldo failed to notice the gesture.

‘Hey there, signore gondoliero. Can you sing?' said Ken, beginning to hum.

Aldo looked perplexed.

‘Sing?' enquired the woman, letting out a few discordant notes, helping Ken out of his difficulty.

‘Ah, sing?' said Aldo. ‘No, no. Sing, no. Violin, yes.'

‘Violin? Did he say violin? Fantastic!' said the woman, nodding so enthusiastically that it seemed the boat might rock in time to the weight of her approval.

Aldo rested the oar in the well of the boat and stepped down and sat on the bench opposite the couple and removed the violin from where he had placed it under the seat. He played the most romantic tunes he could muster as the boat drifted along the narrow canal, the notes echoing up and down the tall walls of the houses, then losing themselves in the sheets that were drying overhead. An hour later Aldo waved goodbye to the happy couple back at Accademia, stuffed a wad of Ken's notes into his pocket, enough to repay Isabella a sizeable chunk of the cost of his trip to Rome, took the gondola into a side-canal and tied it up to a pole. He set off towards San Marco with the violin, his step suddenly lighter than it had been for years. Isabella met him in the square when she finished work.

‘I have something for you, Isabella,' he said.

He took the money out of his pocket.

‘What's all this?' she asked.

‘Your money.'

‘You didn't spend much in Rome, then?'

‘Oh, I did. I spent the money you gave me, nearly all of it.'

‘So where's this from?'

‘The gondola. I went back and got it today, and I . . .'

‘The gondola? You sold the gondola? Are you mad? How could you sell the gondola?'

‘Of course I haven't sold the gondola. I'd never sell the gondola. I took a couple of tourists out in it, Americans. Played the violin for them, a few romantic tunes . . .'

‘And they gave you all that?'

‘I know! Can you believe it?'

‘Aldo, you little villain!'

‘Rob from the rich, give to the poor.' He pushed the money into her hand. ‘Give to the ones you love . . .'

She looked at him.

‘Aldo, do you really mean that?'

He looked away.

‘Do you, Aldo? Really?'

‘Isabella, you've been so good to me.'

‘Aldo, come on, it's nothing. Nothing at all.'

‘If only you knew, Isabella. If only you knew . . .'

He tried to press the money into her hand again, but she pulled away.

‘I don't want your money, Aldo.'

‘It's not my money, it's yours. I owe you.'

‘No, you earned it, you keep it. Pay me back when you can. And you might have more money soon anyway. There's a little shop down the street from where I work, the one next to the pharmacy. You know, where they sell wine from the barrel? And they're looking for someone to help out a few days a week, part-time to start with. I put in a good word for you with the owner, Michele, an old acquaintance of mine. He said you should drop by tomorrow at two.'

‘Thank you, Isabella. Thank you yet again.'

‘Forget it. And in the meantime, spend your money on some glass for your windows and some sheets for your bed. And then I might just drop by and see you.'

The next afternoon, Aldo was waiting outside Isabella's shop when she returned from her lunch break.

‘Well?' she asked, half-smiling in anticipation.

‘I got it! I got it! I start on Monday.'

‘You got it? Fantastic! I knew you would, Aldo. I knew Michele would be good to you.'

Two weeks later Isabella visited the house on Burano. New panes of glass shut out the wind, impeded the cold, and the curtains that hung to the floor stopped the draught, and the sheets on the bed smelt fresh and new, and she woke the following morning in his bed, beneath the place where Katerina's photo was pinned to the wall. Aldo's new cockerel stood on the stump of an old tree outside and crowed in the dawn while chickens scratched and clucked around the kitchen door and Aldo went down and gathered up their fresh eggs. Then he boiled the eggs and took them upstairs in his bare hands, juggling their hot shapes as he got back into bed beside Isabella, and they shelled the eggs together and ate them beneath the sheets and then they kissed, hot yolk on their lips still, and then they took the boat back to Venice where Sunday crowds filled the streets and coins clattered into Aldo's tin as he played the violin in front of Caffé Florian.

It was some time since Aldo had last passed by the old family home on Fondamenta della Sensa and when he went there again in the darkness of a winter evening the house seemed abandoned and unloved. He stood on the small hump-backed bridge outside and looked at the walls of his old home. The shutters were open but there was no light inside and he went up to the window beside the front door and pressed his nose to the glass, peering through the gap in the curtains and into the room where his grandmother used to sleep on nights like this by the fire. A shaft of light from a streetlamp took the edge off the darkness and his eyes began to distinguish the outlines of grey shapes, the bare walls and bare floor and the
empty fireplace. Aldo's heart skipped a beat – the house was empty! The new owners must have gone away, taking with them all their possessions and their memories, and Aldo's own memories, having sought refuge in the walls in the intervening years, came spilling out again in a rush. He looked up and down the deserted quay and pushed his hand against the window. It ceded slightly to his pressure so he shoved at it harder but was unable to force it open so he tried the door, seizing the handle, pushing and pulling this way and that, but it too would not budge. He ducked into the alley and looked up at a small window in the side of the house. He gripped the sill and pulled himself up and peered inside. The door of the living room lay open and he could see the hallway and the foot of the stairs beyond. He dropped once more to his feet, pulled himself up again, closed his eyes, and butted the glass with the top of his head. The windowpane shattered and he hauled himself through.

He could smell ash in the grate as he dropped into the room and he sneezed as dust from the floorboards got into his nose. The old house echoed with the sound of his footsteps as he moved quickly through the rooms, searching the drawers and the cupboards. On top of a wardrobe in the small attic room he found a cardboard box and he shovelled out its bundles of papers, sifting through them in the moonlight, invoices from Casa Luca and business letters to Fausto Pozzi and old holiday postcards from the coast. And then he found the photographs: his mother and father when they were young; men unloading boxes of fish at the market; Luca and Aldo with Massimo and his dad, their hands full of wild porcini mushrooms in an autumn glade; Luca outside the trattoria in the old days; the house on Burano, Aldo's grandfather beside the door and the neighbours' goats – a different generation of goats – grinning idiotically in the background; Aldo, aged ten or eleven, his violin in his lap; Aldo again, older this time, after a football match, his face streaked with mud and sweat and his body caked in filth in the rain, just as it would be one day on the steppe; another of Aldo, proud and tentative in his new uniform, by the bridge outside the house, the day before he went away to war; and finally a photograph of Luca and Fausto
Pozzi, both men huge and imposing and deeply serious as they leant their elbows on the bar in Casa Luca.