The Remedy (46 page)
“So these are all the people you’ve painted? You and Antonio?”
She laughs. “No, these are just some of the women!”
And she walks to another cupboard, and flings open its doors. “And here are some more. And I’m not yet done.”
A fourth and a fifth cupboard are opened, all similarly stacked.
Valentine quails. He had not imagined such a work as raking through these sheaves. And he is already worried. What if looking at portraits is like sniffing at perfumes: after four or five the impression becomes blurred?
Cecilia Cornaro asks: “Are you sure?”
But what choice has he? He is determined to find his lover.
He sits at a desk and pulls three candlesticks toward him.
“How are they arranged?” he asks, wondering if some sifting might be done in advance. For example, perhaps blondes may already be separated from brunettes.
Cecilia Cornaro does not mitigate his task.
“By family, for the noblewomen and
borghese
, and by the names of their noble lovers, for the courtesans.”
He mislikes the last category, hopes that he does not need to look at such faces, or that he shall not find that of Mimosina Dolcezza among them.
“Family,” he says in a confident voice. “Let us start alphabetically.”
And so he works his way through the Golden Book of Venice, sees all that the city has to offer in the way of blue-blooded and middle-class beauties. He finds that he likes the strong, equine style of the Civran and Flangini women, but that the Mocenigos have too much chin and the Morosinis are too heavy-lidded for his taste. The Soderinis are appallingly plain. By the time he gets to the Vendramin ladies he is worn out with lips and eyes and noses, and he is getting frightened. So close to the end of the alphabet of noblewomen and still he has not seen the face that he is seeking, or has he indeed become blind with too much seeing and already passed her by? Worse, is she to be found in the folders of the courtesans?
But when he opens the Venier folder, his breath quickens. In his very first Venier he sees a slight resemblance to Mimosina Dolcezza. He holds it up to the light. It is not her, but there is some cousinly blood running in the veins of this woman. He picks up
another, and there it is again, that trace of her lineaments, something about the eyes and also about the nostrils.
Cecilia Cornaro, who has finished her sketch of the murderer, is watching him with interest.
“You have found something?”
“I think she’s a Venier.”
Cecilia Cornaro makes a low sound at the back of her throat; it seems to indicate that she is impressed. The Veniers, she tells him, are the bluest of the blue bloods.
He lingers over every Venier portrait. Of course it may be a long time since she was painted, so she could have changed. But how? These women are uniformly elegant, suave and well-informed of their own superiority. While they have approximations of her features, none of them has the febrile energy of Mimosina Dolcezza, and none has her vulnerability.
He asks Cecilia Cornaro, “How could a Venier lady end up as an actress?”
She too is mystified. “I never heard of such a thing.”
She bends over him as he looks, enlivening the search with scraps of personal history about the women she has painted. “Mistress of the French ambassador,” she observes, or “Lover of her sister’s husband!”
They seem a libertine lot, the Venier women.
Valentine detests the thought.
In the end he finds her. A piece of paper slips into his hand, just like any other, but it is she, Mimosina Dolcezza, real as life, though some years younger, and he has pressed his lips to it before he can restrain himself.
Cecilia Cornaro gently asks if she might see what he has found. He has whipped it up so quickly that she was not able to look.
When he hands it to her, the artist’s face darkens.
“This is one of Antonio’s, but I know it well. That is Catarina Venier, from nearly twenty years ago. She was a piece of work, that girl! A melodrama every minute, would never sit still, Antonio told me. You see the blurring round the chin. She changed her expression all the time. Every time he looked up, there was a different face there. He felt as if she was making fun of him. In the end he
asked for her parents to attend, and he begged them to discipline her. Like Antonio, I do not care to intervene with silly adolescent girls. It is too boring: They are all precisely the same in their affectations and they all know the same amount of nothing. Anyway Antonio explained to Ippolita and Carlo Venier that her bad behavior was their problem, not his.’
Valentine stares at the young face of his lover. He cannot bring himself to think of her as “Catarina.” And it is simply not possible that thirty-five is the age of Mimosina Dolcezza. That would make her just ten years younger than himself. He looks back at the sketch. Its lines are less certain than those of the other studies.
“This is not finished, is it?” he asks. She shakes her head, her expression muted.
“What happened in the end?” he wants to know.
“Ah, that is something I’m not likely to forget. Antonio often told the story. She made the most tremendous scene, an outrageous fit of hysterics, because her father asked her to wear a piece of the family jewelery She sneered at it, and screamed that it was ugly and she would never wear it. She said she hated diamonds. Then she clawed at her throat and ripped the necklace off her neck and threw it out of the window. It fell in the canal, and that was the end of it, of course.”
“And the end of the portrait too?” asks Valentine, flushing as he remembers the actress’s reticence when presented with his diamond brooches.
“Yes. Her father bundled her out of the room, and she was never brought back.”
“Do you know what happened to her? Did she marry?”
Cecilia Cornaro’s face is kind, but it is clear that she has information that will cloud rather than clear the mystery.
“Yes, she married, in a sense. She became a bride of Christ. Antonio told me that after that scene her parents put her into a convent and that she has never been seen in public again.”
“Which convent?”
“It must have been San Zaccaria,” she said in a hard voice. “It’s the richest one. That’s where the Veniers bury their living daughters.”
Take Conserve of red Roses, Lucatellus’s Balsam, each half a dram; Balsam of Peru 3 drops, mix.
It’s a prevailing Medicine against an inveterate Cough, and recent Consumption, Spitting of Blood, Dysentery, Contusion; and wheresoever the Vessels being opened, or broken bleed inwardly.
While he has gazed at women’s faces the tide has risen over the stones of the city and renounced them again. He walks back through the freshly baptized streets and he too feels reborn in this new state, a state of information. He knows who his lover is.
In London he has no eyes, he thinks, or at least dull, insensible organs in their place. In Venice, he sees so much more. It is as if the city speaks to him in a purely visual language, all the clearer because her spoken one is impenetrable to him. On this walk, illuminated by the night’s events, the salt efflorescence of the bricks speaks to him of perilous high waters that the young Catarina Venier once watched from her
piano nobile
window, and the black teeth of the loggias recount insupportably humid summer days when she took refuge there. There are salt-weeping bricks in London, and loggias too, but they are inscrutable, or passive. Valentine never notices them.
He turns the new truth over and over in his head, like a shiny coin in an impoverished hand.
He is not displeased—in fact, he is gratified—to learn that she is a noblewoman, although he finds it hard to believe. He felt so close to her: There was no distance at all. He has never mated outside his class, and had supposed the sensations would be different.
He did not feel instinctively deferential toward her, except in normal ways with regard to her femininity. Perhaps it is true, something he has always liked to believe: that there is a natural nobility in human beings that can transcend their births and circumstances. “Catarina” has proved the ephemeral nature of class by floating downward, he by rising upwards in his great material success.
It begins to rain without mercy, flaking down out of the wet heavens, so hard that small dogs must be carried, or else be swept away in the sudden rivers that still overflow the streets. His stockings are sodden, his shoes shipwrecked. He is breathing rain and choking on it. Rain is washing the pupils of his eyes faster than he can wipe it away with fingers so sodden that it is as if he is distilling teardrops from beneath his nails.
The downpour ceases abruptly, and instantly an impossible volume of birdsong is gushing from the stone city. It follows him all the way home, swelling in greeting as he enters the garden of his headquarters, nosing through the frisking butterflies still jeweled with raindrops.
Valentine takes the two portraits back to his room, and lies down on his bed. He has propped the papers up against a candelabra on the table, and he looks now from one to the other: a beautiful blonde girl and a dark, refined-looking man.
Of course they have nothing to do with one another. It was mere coincidence that placed them together in the room where Tom’s blood suddenly burst from his breast. Mimosina Dolcezza—Catarina, that is—had come to seek out her lover and a sweet reconciliation after a meaningless quarrel. The murderer had come to revel in the spectacle of his handiwork, and to confirm its efficacy.
And the girl in the portrait does not look much like a nun. He asks himself again: How could a Venetian nun become an actress? The scenario is so unlikely that he can find no possible logic to it. He longs to hear her own explanation: Now that he has got this far he is sure that face to face, lip to lip, in the quiet intimacy of their bedchamber, she will soon tell him the rest of her story. He has this cherished appointment to keep at the Black Bat when the mystery is solved. Soon, surely, the wait will be over.
He turns to the man’s portrait, so deftly rendered that he growls in his throat to behold it.
“I’ll see you whimpering,” he tells the face aloud.
The candle drops wax on to young Catarina Venier’s portrait. Swiftly he removes the candelabra and instead sets the two portraits up against the paper box that Dizzom has insisted that he bring with him, on the absurd hunch that it might provide a clue. “This box could be a message, too, or a clue in itself, you know,” he had suggested anxiously. Dizzom often has these portentous fancies; Valentine hates to throw cold water on them, even when they are as far-fetched as this one. So merely to please Dizzom he has brought the useless box. It is a white card creation with a blue woodcut that shows a church of some kind with an angel hovering above it. It once contained some marzipan cakes and the letter from “Catarina.”
And, he reminds himself sharply, that letter also concerns the whereabouts of his poor little ward, Pevenche.
Take fine powder’d Bark of Peru 1 ounce and a half; Balsam of Capive 2 drams; Sugar of Roses (dissolv’d in compound Wormwood Water) 8 ounces; with Mucilage of Gum Tragacanth make Lozenges, each weighing 2 drams.
The Communicator of these saith. Lozenges are a pretty pleasant sort of Medicine, and fit for delicate nice Persons, that must have their Palates complimented, as well as their Distempers cured. These are good in Hectic Fevers, Consumptive Coughs, difficulty of Breathing, and the like Symptoms.
Valentine Greatrakes goes looking in churches.
He knows that he should go straight to San Zaccaria, but he cannot bring himself to do so. It is easier to furnish himself with this simpler errand. Cecilia Cornaro has told him that San Zaccaria is the oldest and noblest convent in Venice: Smerghetto now informs him that its nuns are the most corrupt and venal, the worst whores and beanflickers. A fortress of hard, clever, hoity-toity women: An incontrovertible instinct tells him not to look for her there. If she indeed once upon a time escaped from the place, this will not reflect well on those charged with the operation of the convent. They will furnish him only with obfuscations and lies, humiliating him as much as possible in the process.
Meanwhile, he knows that the simple truth of family histories is usually written in stone, particularly in the case of nobles. He goes looking for tombs, hoping to find the “beloved father and mother of Catarina…” and a kind of priest who will be able to tell him
the whole story of the family. He envisions the gentle man, remembering the mother’s or the father’s funeral, unable to forget the beauty of the daughter…
Valentine Greatrakes is no great God-botherer, and has not previously frequented the Venetian churches. He now finds his head swimming with the peculiar detritus of their faith and their swooning smell of warm mice and cold stone. These buildings in no way resemble the bony London churches. Each one is a knick-knackatorium of saints’ fingers and toes encrusted in wax, silver, or glass. His eyes hurt under the burnished fanfare of precious metals. Slanting fingers of light poke his eyes and he walks into gilded candlesticks taller than himself and low-slung censers that have the unmistakably unchristian light of the Orient about them. The merchant in Valentine sees all these things melted down and turned to uses more practical than their current ones.
The Irishman in him aches to interrupt the dismal caterwauling of the choir with a decent bit of melody.
Would you ever think of putting a tune to it?
he thinks to himself while the Venetian fathers intone their rituals.
In church after church he forces himself to examine crypts and tombs, looking for the names of Catarina’s parents.
