The Invisible Mountain (3 page)

Before Ignazio knew a thing about magic, or Uruguay, or women born from trees, he knew Venezia. He held Venezia in his body: the canals, vast, veinlike; the lilting brass of his language; the smells of brine and basil and freshly cut wood in his family home. Above all, he knew gondolas. It was the family business to make gondolas of every size and style. Arcs of wood leaned beside the window; he could trace them with his hands and eyes and know where he belonged. Their shapes could keep a person gliding on the surface of the water, he could not drown, he would not drown, surrounded by planks and prows, gondolas for fishing, for coupling, for heading to the market, and, most of all, gondolas for taking the dead to the tomb-ridden Isle of San Michele.

Gondolas linked Venetians to their dead. Gondolas linked Ignazio to his dead. A history of death and gondolas lived buried in the corners of his home. When Ignazio was eleven, his grandfather revealed the past as they sat alone in the workshop. Nonno Umberto was not usually loquacious. He spent long hours by the window, bony hands at rest, swaying in the rocking chair he’d carved as a boy. He stared out at the houses reflected on the water, at linens on clotheslines, calm, quiet, no matter how loud the shouts got in the kitchen. He was deaf. He pretended to be deaf. Ignazio was never sure which one was true. He came and sat on a low stool at Nonno’s feet, in search of calm or at least a pretense of it, and finding, one day, the telling of a story, slippery, secret, as furtive and as heated as confession.

Sun streaked the walls and fell on the skeletal boats around them. Nonno stared out the window. Ignazio stared out also, and he saw the old-time Austrians, big men with monstrous faces, wearing crowns, reclining in a gondola and laughing at beggars on bridges and shores. In the kitchen, the shouting continued, his mother, his father, a slap, a fall, more shouting.

Nonno went on: the revolution came. It was 1848. Venetians chased out Austrian rule. Umberto and thousands of others danced on the cathedral steps until the sun came up. The city churned with hope: freedom was theirs, they were independent, Venezia would be restored. For a year that was true, and then the Austrians returned. Cholera flared back up and burned across the city. Within six months, six of Umberto’s seven children had died of cholera. Four daughters and two sons. Only Diego survived (“your father, Ignazio; your father was the only one”). On the night that his last sister died, nine-year-old Diego went silent and said nothing for two years and thirty-seven days. On that same night, Umberto sat beside his silent son, empty as a rag that has been wrung over and over. The undertaker arrived, shrouded in black, his face masked in a hood with slits for eyes. He stared at young Diego through the slits.

“Don’t look at my son,” Umberto said.

“It won’t harm him.”

“Don’t look at him.”

The undertaker raised his hands. Umberto punched him and the man reeled back and Umberto punched him again until the hood lay flat and crushed against his head.

“May fever take your house,” the undertaker shouted. “May you all rot.” He stumbled out without the girl’s body.

That’s how Nonno Umberto told it. Ignazio listened, surrounded by wood chips, sure that Nonno was a liar. He could not accept his grandfather hammering at a gondola three days straight—when now his arthritic hands barely brought fork to mouth. He could not accept an angel perching anywhere. Nor could he see his own father, Diego, as the small boy mute with pain, when now he was the farthest thing from silent, the farthest thing from small. There always seemed to be too much of him: too much volume, too much hair, too many wine bottles emptying too quickly. Too much laughter at the wrong times (his laugh had claws; it unfurled sharply). He eclipsed everyone—Ignazio himself, his brothers, his sisters, his mother with her broad hips and bullheaded love, and Nonno, with his rocking chair, his window, his corrugated skin, the loosened hold on life that caused him to stop carving, stop trying to shape things, just let them float or sink in their canals.

Outside, their gondola sat, dispassionate, on the water. Ignazio stepped in last. The wind curled on the surface of the canal, and they glided along the water in silence. Diego turned to look at Ignazio with a strange expression, expectant, mocking. The thick bush of his hair blocked out the city behind him.

It was late, even for Venezia, but the house they went to brimmed with light, noise, and women. Red velvet drapes hung to the floor; wine poured freely; languid chords pushed out of an accordion; the women laughed and swayed and rubbed their bodies against men. Ignazio stood in a corner between a curtain and an ornate oil lamp and tried not to look at anyone. He wished the lamp would darken so he could melt into the wall. He stepped farther from its sphere of light, but his father approached, a girl on each arm. “Here,” he said, thrusting one toward Ignazio.

Upstairs, on the stale mattress, Ignazio’s hand shook as he touched the girl’s knee. It was cool and smooth. Her shoulder preened with freckles. Black ringlets fell around her face. She sat, half reclined, on the thin bed. He was afraid of her, uncertain, humiliated by the fact of his own fear. She drew his hand to the hem of her skirt and he did nothing and she rolled her eyes and reached to unbutton his trousers. Two minutes later, as he pushed into her body, he heard his father’s voice through the curtain to his left, grunting rhythmically, and realized that his father could hear him too. What if he made an audible mistake? He groaned in time, his sounds overshadowed by his father, and the girl lay still. She felt like a crushed peach, soft, moist, alarming. His father finished and Ignazio bit the girl’s neck to climax in absolute silence.

It began soon after that. The unraveling. When Ignazio turned thirteen, his voice deepened and his father broke his mother’s ribs. At fourteen, he went to the kitchen one night and saw a thing that itched his skin: his father, seated at the table, sobbing. He made no sound. His glass was empty. His chin dripped with snot and tears. Ignazio crept out and raced to bed, where he lay in the sea of Nonno’s snores, itching, until the sun returned.

One night, at the brothel, Diego shattered a chandelier and two wooden chairs. He was thrown from the building and told not to return. The next night, at his father’s insistence, Ignazio brought their gondola to dock at the brothel’s steps.

“Come with me.”

Ignazio shook his head.

His father stepped onto land, drunk, unsteady. He banged the brass ring against the gilded door. He yelled that he would enter. Three guards came out and punched him and then dragged him down the steps. They pushed him into the gondola, which swayed beneath the pressure.

Diego said, “You can’t—”

“Shut up,” a guard snarled. Ignazio could not see his face; his massive silhouette turned toward Ignazio. “Can’t you control your father? For God’s sake. For your family name.”

Ignazio felt a hot and creeping slime beneath his skin. He longed to leap into the dark canal and swim very far and never come back. He nodded and pushed the gondola out onto the water.

Six months later, on a cold winter night, Diego cracked his wife’s skull against the wall and loped outside. The canal growled under the wind. From the window of his room, Ignazio saw his father’s shadow teeter on the edge of the canal, then fall as if thrown from an invisible fist.

Ignazio spent the next five hours cleaning blood from the walls and the body.

Two days later, Diego’s body washed up at the front steps of a count whose gondola order had never been completed. He surfaced just in time to make the journey to San Michele with his wife.

The corpses crossed the water, thronged by the living. The sky was pale with shock. A fleet of mourners—sons, daughters, wives and husbands, children, great-aunts, uncles, drenched in black—rode their gondolas in an entourage behind the coffins. San Michele loomed before them, with its township of tombs, soaking in the prayers and wails that ebbed over the water.

Ignazio rowed numbly. The world was not the world but a mere painting of itself; apart; impenetrable; all the grieving people only brushstrokes; he in the midst of it, pretending to be real, wearing a life of someone else’s making. Only Nonno Umberto still seemed viscerally true. His breath labored as they disembarked, audible through the drone of Hail Marys. He leaned on Ignazio’s arm. He smelled of soap and vinegar and a bitter trace of sweat.

Sepulchral rows, priestly mutterings, aunts weeping, slate moved aside to lower caskets into ground. Ignazio watched the remains of his parents (man and wife, he thought, killer and killed) sink slowly, together, into the dark. The stone slab groaned as his brothers pushed it back into place, shutting in the dead.

“Ignazio,” his grandfather said. “Take me for a walk.”

“Your father,” Nonno said. He stared at the ground. “You can’t be like him.”

“No.”

“But you have to accept him.”

“He’s dead.”

“Exactly.”

Ignazio kicked a pebble. He nodded blankly.

“Are you going to leave?”

“Leave?”

“You know you can’t stay here.”

Ignazio felt transparent. He did know. Or he had wondered. His mother was gone; the family business was dead; his older brothers fought like vultures for its remnants; his sisters had married away. The house was a hull of shadows.

Nonno Umberto looked immensely tired. “You should go. Our name is cursed. And soon Italy will be at war again.” He bent in closer. Ignazio smelled the tang of his white hair. “Listen. I have a little money in the floorboards, and I’ll send you to the New World if you swear you’ll build something. Gondolas, maybe, or something else, something useful over there, something worth building. Anything. Swear.”

It broke, then, the canvas stretched over the world, and Ignazio was not numb, not in a painting after all: he stood in a raw, unfinished world, surrounded by the dead, exposing a fresh layer of living skin.

“I swear,” he said.

As they turned back toward the burial, Ignazio looked across the water at Venezia. The city sprawled in all its dense, corrosive beauty. Gondolas split the water with their motion, with their silence, with their prows that aimed at faraway lands, at long-backed rivers and broad-backed seas that led to God knows where, to something new.

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