The Last Gondola (19 page)

Feeling as if he had accomplished more than one meaningful task for the day, he sat at the café across from the hospital with a glass of wine and spent almost an hour in contemplation of the Colleoni statue.

42

“Useless!” Urbino exclaimed to the Contessa the next afternoon as the gondola moved slowly past the palazzi at the mouth of the Grand Canal.

A brightly colored Moroccan blanket with geometrical designs was drawn across their laps. Although the sun had been shining all day in a bright blue sky, only occasionally obstructed by fleecy clouds, the March air carried a penetrating chill.

“What is it,
caro?”

The Contessa spoke with the dreamy air of someone who was trailing her hand over the side in the water. It would have been an impossible feat on this occasion, however, since the two friends were as snug and sheltered inside the
felze
as two children who had sought out a secret place to shut away the world.

The Contessa gave Urbino a languid glance that would have better suited a hot day in August. “What is it?” she repeated.

“Thomas Mann.” Urbino indicated the book in his hand.
“Death in Venice.”

“And how is Herr Mann useless? He's always seemed full of earnest wisdom to me. Keep one's proper balance and all that. Which at the moment,” she added, as the gondola rocked from the wake of a motorboat, “seems admirable advice.” The gondola soon returned to a gentle cradlelike movement. “Thank God for our melancholy Gildo.”

Urbino turned the book to catch the light.

“Listen to this,” he said.
“‘Leaning back among soft, black cushions, he swayed gently in the wake of the other black-snouted bark to which the strength of his passion chained him… The gondolier's cry, half warning, half salute, was answered with singular accord from far within the silence of the labyrinth. They passed little gardens high up the crumbling wall, hung with clustering white and purple flowers that sent down an odor of almonds.'
And there's more.”

“Undoubtedly. It doesn't end until the poor man dies on the Lido. But I still don't understand.”

“He's done it all before! Mann along with the rest of them! They've used up all the words and images. How can any of us—you, me, or them”—he indicated two tourists with easels set up on the Riva degli Schiavoni—“how can any single one of us be original when it comes to Venice!”

The vehemence and suddenness of this outburst drew a surprised look from the Contessa. She said in quiet and measured contrast, “By making it our own. Isn't that what we've done all these years,
caro?”

But Urbino hardly heard her. “It leaves us feeling impotent,” he said.

“Leaves
you
in that unenviable position,” the Contessa came back with a smile. “It doesn't quite suit a woman, does it? Someone else might think you're going through a midlife crisis, but I'd say it has everything to do with Samuel Possle.”

“How well you know me.”

“How well we know each other. But what I don't know, Urbino dear, is what precisely it
does
have to do with Samuel Possle.”

Urbino was in a bit of a muddle over it himself. He attempted to give her the fruits of some recent meditations and in the process, he hoped, reveal something to himself.

“I've told you how it's been striking me that much of what Possle says sounds familiar,” he began. “As if he's speaking in code, or trying to test me, or amusing himself at my expense. Sometimes I think that it's just a pedestrian case of déja vu. Maybe all these things together, or alternately, or none of them.”

“Poor boy! But that doesn't go far in explaining what Possle has to do with Thomas Mann and impotence and originality.”

Urbino threw as desperate a glance in the direction of the Bridge of Sighs as the hapless prisoners used to throw out from its windows at the lagoon as they were led to their cells. He tried again to make himself clear to the Contessa as well as to himself.

“He keeps alluding to books and art and God knows what else that slips by me. But I've been remembering a lot of what he's said and linking it with other things. They're like echoes that keep coming back to me.”

“Allusions! Echoes! Links!”

“And it's not just
Against Nature.”
At his mention of the book, the Contessa rolled her eyes in mock exaggeration. “He carefully fed me the necessary clues about it so that I couldn't easily miss them. But there are other references he slips in ever so smoothly. I haven't traced them all and I probably can't, but what I do know is that many, maybe even most of them, are related to Byron.”

“The song,” the Contessa supplied. “ ‘We'll Go No More a-Roving.'“

“The song and other things. And what this has to do with Mann may be very little after all. It's just that as I've been sitting here reading the book, with Venice all around us, the idea occurred to me that Possle is a kind of thief. He takes the ideas of others. He doesn't just use them, but as you said about us, he makes them his own. And he wants to see if I can find him out. It's a game, but why?”

“He isn't doing anything wrong, is he?”

“It's as if I've discovered what a thief he is,” Urbino responded, “but not a conventional one. Maybe not one who's all that different from you and me.”

“A thief? Me? It's
my
clothes that have gone missing. They're hanging on someone else's back, possibly an outfit for every day of the week once I figure out what else might be missing!”

Urbino felt uncomfortable. He hadn't told her yet about the magazine clipping in Elvira's apartment or his attempts, unsuccessful so far, of linking the woman to his friend's lost personal items. He needed more time to think about them.

“What Possle is stealing,” he said, “are the ideas and words of others.”

“I see,” the Contessa exclaimed with evident relief. “Like Herr Mann?”

“I haven't come across examples of that, but, yes, like Mann. But as I said, it's Byron I'm more concerned about. Possle keeps coming back to him, and I need to find out why.”

“Byron! So now we have another possible motive behind these tête-à-têtes? Not to write his biography and not to look into some crime at the Ca' Pozza, but to spend hours identifying quotations from someone who's been dead for almost two hundred years?”

“Byron has something to do with it,” Urbino said, but the conviction ebbed from his voice when he added, “unless that is also a camouflage of some kind.”

“Don't you mean a lure?”

“That, too.”

Gildo was steering the gondola out of the Basin of San Marco and into the Castello district. If Venice is shaped like a fish, as any map immediately shows, the Castello is its tail. The gondola passed beneath the Ca' di Dio with its many chimney stacks and moved slowly toward the Arsenale.

In the closed cabin of the
felze
, so suited to the two friends when they were together and Urbino when he was alone, each of them dropped into a reflective silence. When the Contessa turned to Urbino a minute or two later, she said with a slight repentant air, “But forgive me,
caro
, I've forgotten about Elvira's son.
We've
forgotten it,” she emphasized. “Maybe Possle wants you to look into his death. It can't be pleasant for him to have Elvira shouting like a madwoman outside the Ca' Pozza about Benedetta Razzi having killed her son.”

“Possle is a man who's concerned only about what directly touches himself—and Armando,” Urbino replied.

The Contessa recognized the ambiguity in his statement and looked at him without saying anything for a few moments.

“But surely you don't think that Razzi is capable of murder. The only killing on her conscience is of someone else's pocketbook. It shows how detached from reality Elvira is to be accusing her. Look at her animosity against the Ca' Pozza, the way she was trying to keep you from going in.”

“I wonder, though,” Urbino said. “Elvira's lucid enough at other times.”

“Benedetta Razzi a murderer! Creeping around in her false eyelashes and a little dagger from her doll collection! Well, if I've learned anything from your—
our
—sleuthing, it's that nothing is what it seems.”

“Exactly, or close enough to it.”

“Patience.” The Contessa took the Mann book from his lap and put it on the carpeted floor where Urbino couldn't easily get it. “Let's wait and see what the next ploy of our thief of San Polo turns out to be. Fortunately, I have my
conversazioni
to distract me.” Her next one was on Saturday, the day after tomorrow. “As for you, don't forget your noble quest of my missing clothes.”

43

Why don't we walk from the Arsenale?” Urbino said. He made an effort to shake off the feeling of inertia that had dropped over him as they had discussed Possle and the Ca' Pozza.

The white crenellated walls of the Arsenale rose against the blue, cloud-filled sky. These days the old dockyards, formerly synonymous with the economic and military power of the Venetian Republic, were mainly a ship anchorage. Once a secret area where galleys and weapons were constructed, the Arsenale now was open to the gaze and the cameras of anyone who took the waterbus that passed through its cavernous space twice a day.

“You can pull up here,” Urbino called up to Gildo.

Their destination was not the Arsenale, however, but the Naval Museum overlooking the Basin of San Marco a short distance away. When Urbino had picked up the Contessa, she had informed him, rather mysteriously, that Gildo should row them there. “I have my reasons,” she had said.

Gildo brought the boat to the landing with more of a kiss than a tap against the stones. Urbino helped the Contessa onto the quay. After arranging with Gildo for a time that they would return to the gondola, Urbino and the Contessa walked across the quiet square. Nearby were the rope works where Habib would be showing his paintings.

As they crossed the bridge to the
fondamenta
opposite, they paused to look up at the Arsenale, with its lion-guarded gateway. No less a figure than Dante had been among those who had mused over the grim ironies of this factory producing floating engines of war for a republic proudly calling itself serene. At the land entrance were a bust of Dante and a plaque inscribed with verses from one of the cantos of
The Inferno
, which found an apt image of the punishments of hell in all the noise, activity, and boiling pitch of the Arsenale.

They proceeded slowly along the long
fondamenta
toward the Naval Museum. A young woman rowing a boat filled with bolts of fabric kept pace with them for a while until her efforts carried her beyond them.

Urbino restrained himself, not without difficulty, from quoting Dante's vivid words about boiling pitch which were written on the plaque. His criticism of the specter of the thief of San Polo, to use the Contessa's epithet for Possle, were too present to him at the moment to indulge in quotations and allusions himself. Yet it angered him to hold back in this way. It revealed how much he felt a victim of Possle's thefts.

Yes, he thought, as they paused at the water bus stop near the Naval Museum, Possle had taken something from him, and certainly more than Urbino had yet taken from the elderly man. The more he considered Possle's effect on him, the more he felt peculiarly violated, appropriated. Urbino held his own secrets close and seldom shared them. This commerce and contact with Possle was an unequal exchange. He wasn't accustomed to it, and it put him on edge as much as it did on guard.

In front of them were the waters of the Basin of San Marco, a deep blue except where the boats frothed them into creamy white. The long line of the Lido stretched in the distance.

“Here we are,
caro,”
the Contessa said as they approached an unassuming building with two anchors flanking its doors, “the temple of the Maritime Republic. Have you guessed why we're here?”

“I'm at a loss.”

“And you a man of such intelligence and imagination! Come on.”

A boisterous group of teenagers were exiting through the glass doors. Inside, Urbino bought their admission tickets, and they passed into a large space where tall windows looked out on the water.

“They're worth the price of admission in themselves,” the Contessa said with a mischievous smile. “We can both agree on that.”

He followed her gaze to two young men dressed in crisp white naval uniforms with white caps banded with blue. They were the museum attendants and stood with their hands clasped behind their back.

“But let's not linger,” the Contessa said. “There are some other exhibits I want us to admire.”

They climbed up to the next floor to a large glass case. Resplendent inside was a scale model of a carved and gilded ship decorated with flags and statues of men, women, angels, and lions. It was the Doge's ceremonial barge in which he conducted the city's annual marriage to the sea.

“The last
bucintoro
of Venice,” the Contessa pronounced. “I want you to contemplate last things this afternoon. You still don't know why we've come?” she asked slyly. “Up to the top floor then.”

Ignoring the other rooms, she guided him to one devoted to gondolas. She walked a little in advance of him with an unmistakable eagerness. They stopped in front of one particular exhibit.

It bore the label,
O GONDOLA DA FRESCO
, much less romantic in its English translation printed below of
SHADOW COOL TYPE
.

The extravagant concoction of carved armchairs, a heart-shaped seat, and gilded lions and tridents shone blackly as if it had a life of its own.

Urbino didn't need any more clues from the Contessa to identify it as Peggy Guggenheim's personal gondola. During her controversial years in Venice, it had conveyed her back and forth from her palazzo on the Grand Canal.