The Last Gondola (9 page)

It was colder inside the house than outside, much colder than was usually the case for buildings, even in Venice. It was as if a pall had dropped over Urbino. This surely was nothing but a superstitious impression, he thought, but it was not any the weaker because he recognized it for what it was.

The valet—for this was the title that Urbino now ascribed to the man as his mind, confused and irritated, searched for some aspect of normalcy about him—took Urbino's cloak and placed it on a mahogany clothes stand carved with gargoyles and lilies. Urbino was reluctant to relinquish it, given the chill in the building.

The man silently ushered him across the damp and musty lower hall. He had an almost stealthy step, and he held his scarred hands close to his sides. His stale and acrid odor was stronger than it had been this morning.

His form slashed by deep, dark shadows, he began to ascend the high stone staircase. Urbino stopped after taking a few steps. Perhaps it was a trick of perspective from where he was standing or his own heightened, almost painful state of awareness, but the staircase seemed tilted at a slight angle to one side. Urbino had a brief, disturbing moment of dizziness as the silent valet proceeded up the staircase. Everything, momentarily, became either black or white, without any color.

The valet stopped and turned his head. His hard features were set in disapproval. Urbino shook himself and followed him up the staircase. At the top a long
sala
opened out. There seemed a strange stillness over the room and, in fact, over the whole house itself. He halted a few feet beyond Urbino.

A Murano chandelier in a vaguely pagoda shape, with broken pieces of glass and missing beads, hung precariously from the ceiling. Faded full-length maroon drapes covered a bank of tall, glass-paned doors to the right of the staircase, that opened onto a loggia. Two windows with the same drapery faced the loggia from the far end. Heavy wooden chairs were lined up with their backs to the long sides of the room. Closed doors of impressive architectural design between the chairs led into more private chambers. One of these doors on the opposite side of the room was wider than the others, and contributed a sense of disharmony to the room.

Large portraits of centuries-dead men and women in chipped and broken frames and as dark as Tintorettos, but in no other way comparable to the great master, stared out at Urbino. Plaster peeled and flaked from the walls. An ormolu table with a cracked vase beneath one of the portraits completed the furnishings of the depressing room, which had once seen such legendary gatherings.

The man gestured roughly toward a chair. It was close to the doors that opened onto the loggia. Urbino understood that he was expected to seat himself and wait.

After proceeding with scarcely a sound over the bare
scagliola
floor, the man opened the wide door and entered the room beyond.

Urbino didn't seat himself. He went to one of the loggia doors. He calculated that the figure he had seen during his late night vigil had stood behind this one. He pulled the heavy drape to one side. Anyone standing here had an uncluttered view of the bridge.

He walked across the
sala
to one of the wide, high windows. One of its shutters was thrown open. Dust scattered through the air as he moved the drape blocking whatever air might come in. Down below was an overgrown garden enclosed with a high brick wall on two sides.

Urbino felt a prickling at the back of his neck. He turned around. The sinister valet stood only a few feet away, having traversed the hard, shining floor without a sound.

Urbino followed him to the wide door. It was now ajar. Warmth from the room beyond brushed against Urbino's face, but it somehow only made him feel more chilled. Keeping to his habitual silence, the valet turned away and vanished through a door at the far end of the
sala
.

21

Urbino stood in the doorway.

There were so many objects in the room to attract attention that at first he stared about him, almost without seeing anything at all. By degrees, however, the room resolved itself into a space much larger than Urbino would have expected it to be, familiar as he was with the plan of seventeenth-century palazzi. Usually the rooms off the
sala
were much smaller than this one was. Urbino, remembering what Rebecca had said about the interior renovations of the Ca' Pozza, suspected that two rooms had been combined into one.

Daylight had been banished. Shuttered windows opposite the door were covered in dark green drapery. Yet there was a deceptive form of illumination that came from a fire kindled in the grate to the right and from wax candles of different sizes and shapes and thickness, but all white, which were arranged on the floor, on scattered tables, and on the mantel. A large mirror in an elaborate carved and gilded frame danced with the reflections from the candles.

The heavy scent of the candles and the smoke in the warm room was threaded with another, more delicate one, which was reminiscent of a bouquet of flowers.

The walls, hung with portraits and still-life paintings, were a deep shade of orange. Books, bound richly in leather, were piled on the floor and stacked on a shelf beside the door. The ceiling, slightly domed, was covered in heavy Morocco leather and held an oval of royal blue silk resembling the sky. Silver angels floated against it. Suspended from the ceiling on a silver chain was a little cage of silver wire.

But all these details suddenly became inconsequential as he took in the startling and unpredictable object that dominated the far end of the room. It was a gondola. Not a replica of one, but a full-size vessel that, if it had been placed in the canal below rather than up here in this room, would have sailed as surely and truly as Urbino's own.

The black-painted gondola displayed before him in such an unlikely place had its curving
forcola
, ironwork
ferro
, and brass seahorses. It did not have a
felze
attached, however, and whatever sedan chairs it had once had, had been removed. In their place was a profusion of bright orange cushions that entirely filled the cavity of the boat from prow to stern.

The gondola was held steady with sawhorses and angled into the room prow first so as to accommodate all thirty-five feet. A block of small wooden steps stood in front of it to provide access. Hanging above was a scarlet silk canopy with festoons.

Two high-backed armchairs faced the gondola. A table with a carafe and two goblets of Murano glass stood between the chairs.

The gondola, so unexpected in a room, created a distinctly surrealistic effect along with the other décor and accoutrements. And to complete the picture, lying at full length in the gondola against the cushions, was the strangest person Urbino had ever seen.

The figure, dwarfed by the size of the gondola and surrounded by magazines and newspapers was still and unmoving. It seemed to be a part of the boat itself. Its garments were of red satin and purple silk and vaguely ceremonial in their cut. The small head was tightly swathed in purple silk, almost as far down as the wispy eyebrows, creating the effect of an Eastern turban. Around the thin neck hung a gold chain with a large odd-shaped talisman of some kind, embossed with a crescent. It weighed heavily against the silk shirtfront. The head reminded Urbino of the severed one he had seen held by the silhouetted person behind the door of the loggia.

The figure in the gondola resembled nothing so much as the preserved body of a saint dressed in fine clothes and displayed for some liturgical celebration. If Urbino had not been expecting to find a man—for surely this must be Samuel Possle—he would not have been able to swear absolutely, during these first confused moments, about its sex.

The dim, flickering light of the candles, some of which were on the poop of the gondola, revealed a frail body shrunken within its garments. Possle's face beneath the scarf was sharp and foxlike, dominated by small, dark eyes. One side of his face was much more wrinkled than the other.

Possle no longer looked anything like the photographs Urbino had seen of him or the young figure in his dream, but it was unrealistic to expect him to. The most recent photographs had shown a man in his fifties. And yet Urbino could not shake the feeling, strange though it seemed, that Possle had been the victim of an extraordinary and accelerated aging.

But something in the recluse's eyes, something keen and curious that flashed across the distance between the two men, told Urbino that the man was as hungry for life as he had been three, four, five decades ago.

Urbino had no idea how much time had passed since he had entered the room and begun to register all his impressions. It probably had been only as long or as short as a minute, but whatever it was, he sensed that Possle had remained silent in order to give him the chance to absorb all that he saw.

Possle's voice now broke in on his thoughts. “I bid you welcome to my house, Mr. Macintyre!” Possle said in English. “Enter freely and of your own will!”

These words sounded somewhat forbidding to Urbino's ears and if they had been intended to put him at his ease, they did not have the desired effect.

“Please take the chair closest to me. My hearing is poor.”

Possle's voice was thin and dry, with a strange intonation. It must have come from all the years of speaking and hearing another language. Urbino could detect no trace of Possle's southern origins in his voice, any more than, he was told, people could in his own.

Urbino allowed himself to be swallowed by one of the imposing armchairs, being careful not to disturb any of the candles ranged on the floor beside it.

“Look at me all you want, Mr. Macintyre. I'm a curious specimen, I know. All yellow skin and bones. So new to you, so old to me. So strange to you, so familiar to me. So melancholy to both.” The words were like an echo of others that Urbino had heard or read somewhere. They contributed to Urbino's disorientation since entering the Ca' Pozza.

“Those are the words of a sad lady,” Possle resumed. His small, dark eyes bore into Urbino. “Do you know who she is, Mr. Macintyre?”

“I seem to have heard the words before. A woman, you say?”

“Miss Havisham in
Great Expectations
. Which puts you in the position of poor little Pip.”

“But I see no wedding cake with cobwebs, Mr. Possle,” Urbino joked in an attempt to deflect the thrust of Possle's reference to Dickens's naïve and manipulated character.

Possle raised a hand, then let it fall back weakly against the cushions. “You are most welcome to the Ca' Pozza. May you come freely and go safely.” Again uneasiness crept over Urbino.

“Thank you for your invitation,” he said, in what he hoped was a hearty, sincere tone.

Possle's tongue darted out and moistened his lips. “I'm pleased that I was able to lure you out of your palazzo.” He regarded Urbino with a little smile that puckered up the wrinkled side of his face even more. He seemed to be gauging Urbino's reaction. “Veneto-Byzantine, it is, your little palazzo. I'm familiar with it, but I haven't seen it since you moved in. I never go out anymore, you see. I haven't gone out more than six or seven times since your first fateful visit to Venice, when you came and never really left.”

His voice seemed to gain more energy as he spoke, although it never lost its tremulous hesitation. “That was twenty years ago, I believe, add or take a few months, not very long after your divorce and the death of your parents in a car crash. You came home to your mother's native land, your beloved mother with her love for Raphael.” It was almost a mechanical recitation. Possle's small eyes searched Urbino's face. Then, in a different tone of voice, less conversational and more formal, he said, “America is our country, and Venice is our hometown.”

These words, like the others, sounded familiar, but Urbino couldn't place them either. At the moment, however, he was more concerned with how Possle knew things about him that few other people did.

“Perhaps you'll stay as long as I have,” Possle said, his eyes searching Urbino's face, “and eventually look like me. Ah, here is Armando.”

The valet, or whatever he was, stood in the doorway, his arms against his sides.

“C'est l'heure du thé,”
Possle went on, as Urbino felt more and more disinclined to speak, “but I'm not your Contessa even though it would be nice to offer you a flawless blend of Si-a-Fayoune, de Mo-you-tann, and de Khansky. Lovely names, don't you think? You can almost smell and taste the tea, can't you?”

Once again these words carried the trace of others with them. A smile, somehow both amused and disappointed, crossed the old man's face.

“I prefer something stronger,” Possle said. “Armando's not the type to make tea, are you, Armando? I always have some Amontillado at this time. Would it suit you as well? Good. Before you leave, Armando,” he said in Italian, “I need you to help me with my glasses. Our friend has the advantage of seeing me better than I can see him.”

Armando climbed the steps in front of the gondola, bent over, and rummaged among the cushions. He extracted a pair of glasses with large, black frames, and put them on Possle's face. He then rearranged the cushions and left.

“I would have proposed bourbon, but I gave it up many years ago. Ah, bourbon! A pleasant memory. Bourbon for the two of us. Two sons of the South. You from New Orleans, and me from Charleston. But you know that. I think you know many things about me.”

“And you, Mr. Possle, you seem to know some things about me.”

“I might not go out, but I'm not unaware of the world beyond these walls.”

Urbino shifted his position in the armchair, but all he succeeded in doing was sinking an inch or two more into it.

“You've lived in Venice a long time,” Urbino said.

“Almost since the year you were born! And the last time I was home, if either of us can call it that anymore, was many, many decades ago.”