Death in a Serene City Read online

  “But we must know if she is shrinking,” the official had said. “After all, Venice is still sinking, a poco a poco,” he had added, referring to one of the many legends of the saint—that she was shrinking in direct proportion to the sinking of her adoptive city.

  But Don Marcantonio had given his usual reply:

  “The Church of San Gabriele has nothing to do with centimeters!”

  As the priest continued to rub the glass casket, Urbino imagined him saying over and over to himself as if it were a litany to the Virgin or the Most Precious Blood, “Nothing to do with centimeters, nothing to do with centimeters!”

  Several years ago Angela Bellorini, who did charity work in the quarter—mainly bringing meals to the infirm and recently widowed—had suggested to Don Marcantonio that a better-known Santa Teodora was sure to mean more money in the collection boxes. Urbino could still remember the look on the priest’s face when he had told the story—eyes wide, upper lip trembling.

  “No centimeters!” the old priest had shouted. “Never! They can say she will be as popular as Sant’Antonio in Padua or San Gennaro and his blood down in Naples! Never!”

  Urbino could easily imagine Don Marcantonio cursing against centimeters on his deathbed. And how far away could that be for a man his age? The Vatican and its officials would be forever, and Padre Marcantonio would not always be able to shelter his little saint from what he saw as impious violations. Urbino supposed it was even possible that some day Santa Teodora might be removed from the Church of San Gabriele for the malodorous corpse many had been saying she was since Vatican Two. Like Santa Filomena she might even end up struck from the roster of saints.

  Don Marcantonio’s labors were interrupted by the sound of one of the front doors opening and closing. He paused to turn around and watch Tommaso, the florist, come slowly down the nave with two urns of flowers, nodding to Urbino as he passed.

  “Aren’t you early?” Don Marcantonio scowled at the florist.

  “Just a little, Don Marcantonio.” Tommaso put down the urns, breathing heavily. He was an overweight man in his late forties. “I still have to deliver some flowers for Roberto’s funeral on Murano. There’s no one to help me.”

  The priest didn’t seem to hear him. He was looking down at the urns.

  “Roses in January! White roses! What will the Contessa think of next!” His voice had no admiration or approval but only irritation, which, along with piety, was one of his two dominant moods. “Santa Teodora makes no distinction between roses and—and weeds!”

  “But if our Contessa ever saw weeds in her urns—Dio mio!—we would never hear the end of it, would we?”

  “You certainly wouldn’t—and she might find her way over to Liberato at the Madonna dell’Orto and there would go your big bundle every year!” He bent down and reached for one of the urns from yesterday filled with bright purple flowers. “And you can tell the Contessa that these purple ones would have been more fitting for Septuagesima. She’s almost a month ahead of herself.”

  “Allow me, Don Marcantonio, they are much heavier than they look.” Tommaso moved the urns away from the glass casket. “The Contessa doesn’t choose all the flowers for the little saint herself, you know. These were my choice.” He touched one of the purple blooms gently. Then, almost to himself: “Still so lovely. They could last several more days.”

  “And so they will if you can arrange it! But hurry. We don’t have all the morning for this business.”

  “Sì, sì, Padre, but remember it’s all for the little saint.”

  “All for the little saint! That’s what the Contessa wants everyone to believe but some of us think differently.”

  Tommaso looked nervously at Urbino, then placed the urns of white roses in front of the casket. He walked a few paces away to look at his arrangement. He moved the urn on the right a fraction, then contemplated it all again.

  “Bellissimo!”

  “Sì, sì, bellissimo! Now just get these out of here so I can finish. Mass is in less than half an hour.”

  Tommaso picked up one urn, then the other, and bade good day to the priest. He nodded to Urbino again as he shuffled past beneath his burden. He seemed to want to get out as fast as he could but, perhaps knowing Don Marcantonio was watching, he put down the urns to bless himself at the stoup.

  The priest shook his head, a gesture that seemed to say that the man, like his flowers, was all for effect, and returned to his work with renewed energy.

  2

  IN one of the chapels on the other side of the church the misshapen figure of a man had been watching the early morning activity. Carlo Galuppi preferred this chapel to the others not because of its Madonna and Child in the manner of Gentile Bellini but because of its deeper darkness. If Don Marcantonio saw him, he would be angry. He should be in the vestiary waiting for the boys and preparing everything for Mass. Sacristans had their many duties and a pastor like Don Marcantonio made sure that his performed each and every one.

  Carlo was known as the Quasimodo of San Gabriele. Through one of those situations that could be taken as proof of either the startling symmetry of accident or the considered plan of Providence, Carlo was perfectly suited to Don Marcantonio’s crumbling old church. His ugliness was surely far less excessive than that of the Parisian bellringer and his hump was at times almost unnoticeable, depending on the clothes he wore and the way he carried himself. But then wasn’t this all as it should be since the Church of San Gabriele wasn’t anywhere near as impressively Gothic as Notre Dame? The one lonely bell that Carlo rang several times a day had none of the thunder of those in the great cathedral’s tower and the only chance of his becoming deaf from its sound was if he were to use his own huge head as a clapper—and there were some people in the parish who said he was stupid enough to do just that one of these days, and the sooner he did it the better.

  Now, as Carlo watched from the chapel of the Madonna, the dark shadows there mercifully smoothed out and concealed his irregularities. You might not even have noticed his large nose, slightly protruding teeth, and the brown, hairy wen on his brow. You might have thought, seeing him indistinctly as you went by, that he was only a large-boned, unattractive man who knew how to keep as still as a cat watching a bird.

  Surely, you might think, there was something more to be admired than feared in someone so large keeping so silent.

  3

  ALTHOUGH Urbino had noticed Carlo in the Chapel of the Madonna, he gave no indication. Why upset the man by showing him that his idleness had been observed? Carlo, almost as much as Don Marcantonio, was as sensitive about his duties at San Gabriele as he was dedicated to them. Only last month he had had an anxiety attack at Jesurum’s where he had asked the Contessa and Urbino to help him pick out a birthday gift for his mother. The large store with its vaulted ceilings had been crowded and it had taken them a long time even to get the attention of a clerk. Carlo had ended up rushing down the staircase into the late afternoon gloom and leaving them behind so that he could be back at San Gabriele to see if everything was in order for Sister Veronica and her tour group.

  As Urbino walked up the aisle, these thoughts of Carlo Galuppi inevitably led back to his previous ones about Margaret Quinton, for the sexton had watched over her Pomeranian in the vestiary whenever she had come to Mass, being sure it made as little noise as possible. The poor man had become frantic only the week before the novelist’s death when Dandolo had started barking—almost diabolically—during the Consecration. Margaret Quinton had hurried from her pew to comfort the animal but told the Contessa after Mass that the hunchback had required almost as much attention as had her Dandolo.

  4

  AS Urbino came out into the chill January air, Maria Galuppi, Carlo’s mother, was walking up the steps of the church. Although close to eighty she had a vitality that, if you didn’t look too closely at her heavily lined face and thinning white hair beneath which her scalp gleamed pinkly, might lead you to believe she was much younger.

&
nbsp; Five years ago he had almost decided against having her do his laundry when the Contessa suggested it. How could he impose such a physical burden on a woman her age? Surely there were many younger women who could do the job.

  “That’s just the point,” his friend had said. “There are too many younger ones who can, and all of them from the mainland. Maria is losing a lot of her clientele to them. What will become of her and Carlo? She would never accept charity.”

  And so Urbino had agreed although he still felt uncomfortable whenever she, instead of Carlo, picked up and delivered his laundry. Never in the past five years had the woman complained or accepted anything but the rather modest amount—modest at least from his point of view—that he gave her every month.

  “Good morning, Maria.”

  “Buondì, Signor Urbino. You are up and about early this morning.”

  She squinted a smile up at him.

  “I’m taking an early train to Padua.”

  “Two already left”

  Obviously she had a completely different idea of earliness.

  “I’m taking the rapido.”

  “The rapido!” She shook her head in disapproval but there was an unmistakable amusement in it. “How much faster? Five minutes? Ten? And for that you pay thousands of lire more!” She reached her hand out to touch his sleeve. “Listen to me, Signor Urbino, you must slow down, yes, you must slow down.” Then she added something in the Venetian dialect that he didn’t catch but was sure addressed in homely fashion the dangers of always being in a rush.

  Her advice was at odds not only with his temperament but also with her own active life so that Urbino had a hard time suppressing a smile.

  “I’ll try, Maria. I should know after living here that Venice is no city to rush around in—or away from, for that matter.”

  She nodded her head.

  “And remember, Signor Urbino, no matter how we rush it all comes to us in the end. Yes, with time it comes to us all.”

  With this sobering comment she went into the church as he held the door. He was about to strike out across the campo for the train station when the door opened. It was Maria again. She put her hand in the pocket of her old black coat and took out a ten-thousand lira note.

  “Here, Signor Urbino.”

  He was so surprised that he took the money without any hesitation.

  “When you go to the Basilica, you must do me a favor. Get a candle for my daughter Beatrice, put it with the others near the altar of Il Santo so the priests will light it.”

  How could he tell her he would be on a tight schedule in Padua and that he was going to be nowhere near the Basilica? His business in Padua was for his Venetian Lives series. There was a man near the Scrovegni Chapel who had known Ezra Pound during the poet’s years in Venice.

  “God bless you, Signor Urbino. You make an old woman very happy.”

  5

  THE Contessa da Capo-Zendrini leaned back against the maroon banquette in the Chinese salon at Florian’s. Outside was what Napoleon had called the finest drawing room in Europe although on this afternoon its charm was compromised by a chill, damp wind and pools of water reflecting a dull, leaden sky.

  “La poverina,” she said with a sigh.

  She put a languid hand to her nape in a habitual gesture. As usual there were no derelict locks. She was an attractive woman in her mid-fifties who looked a decade younger, not so much because of the subtle art which only a close scrutiny would have detected but because of the generous stamp that nature had given to her cheekbones and upward-slanted gray eyes.

  “To be so plain, poor thing, so gauche, and to come to such an end.”

  She sighed again and took a tea cake from the tray, looking at it from various angles before taking a bite. Everything about the woman—her aristocratic bearing, her stylish coiffure, her gleaming string of pearls, her subdued makeup, her tasteful suit and hat—made it clear that she was in no way the kind of person who could ever be either plain or gauche herself. She was displayed in one of her best settings here at Florian’s with all its mirrors and paintings under glass, its velvet, walnut, and marble, its bronze lamps and intricately patterned ceilings—and she knew it.

  “She also had a talent. Don’t forget that, Barbara.”

  “A talent, you say? Was it such a very great one?”

  Her intonation implied that only its greatness might compensate for the dead woman’s appearance and manner. She took a last bite of the cake and picked up another. As he watched her, Urbino sensed something other than hunger was responsible for her uncharacteristic appetite this afternoon.

  “Great enough, cara, to make me want to read some more of her books. I’ve read only one of her novels, A Green Paris.”

  “It was about Paris?” She seemed mildly surprised. “And to think she was writing another one about Venice when she died. You Americans are quite voracious, aren’t you!” she said, unaware that the adjective might just as well apply to her this afternoon. “She might have gone on to all the cities in Baedeker, Michelin, or whatever your poor American equivalent is. I’m convinced it’s partly because you Americans never had an empire. Look at the way you keep adding people to your Venetian Lives!”

  “How do you know she was working on a novel about Venice?” As usual he ignored her reference to his biographies, which she alternately accused of being dilettantish and voyeuristic. Now she seemed to have found another basis for criticism. He took a sip of Bardolino, tea not being his idea of a suitable drink at five in the afternoon despite the chill outside.

  “How do I know? You would have known yourself if you had spent more time with her. I know because I spent hours and hours with her, just the two of us. I also know because she borrowed books from my library.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “My dear Urbino, do you assume I tell you everything about my life?” She looked at him flirtatiously from beneath the long lashes that he still, after all these years, couldn’t be sure were false or not. “We women must have some secrets from even the best of you.”

  “I’m pleased to fall into that category, Barbara.”

  “You do—despite your youth and rather lamentable American origins.”

  “Thirty-six isn’t all that young, and I haven’t been in the States for almost eight years now.”

  She waved a much-beringed hand in the air. He was surprised to see that it didn’t hold another tea cake.

  “It doesn’t matter, caro. American you were born and American you’ll stay. You can live in the Palazzo Uccello for the next forty years and not change that. It’s indelible! In fact it’s the reason you’ve become so Italian—or should I say a veritable americano venezianizzato? You did it much more quickly than I—and I married into it! As for thirty-six being old, I take that as a distinct insult.”

  As she turned to look out at the Piazza San Marco, her face went slack and Urbino could see, even in profile, the tiny lines of concern.

  He followed her gaze. The sleet that had been coming down since he had returned from Padua an hour ago had stopped. The Piazza nonetheless still had a deserted look, even for early January. Only a few people were walking across the square or under the arcades, quite obviously native Venetians from their look and manner. On the opposite side of the Piazza an old waiter was cleaning the pavement in front of the café Quadri with a little broom and shovel while a group of expectant pigeons followed close behind. One of them perched on his shoulder and he seemed to be talking to it as he went about his work. A tall, thin young man muffled in several scarfs was pushing a cart of postcards, flags, and guidebooks toward the Molo San Marco.

  It was hard to imagine that in little more than a month carnevale would turn this whole placid scene into something more suited to the old days on San Clemente, the former island of the insane. All the more reason to appreciate the city now in its deepest serenity, a calm that might have been monastic except that even in fog and silence every stone spoke to the senses.

  Wh
en he took his eyes away from the scene beyond the windows of Florian’s, he saw that the Contessa was no longer looking at the Piazza. She was looking at him.

  “You look a little tired today, caro. Why not change your mind and come tonight?”

  “If I were tired—which I’m not, I assure you—shouldn’t I stay in and rest? It would be the best thing for me, I would think.”

  She gave him an exasperated look and picked up another tea cake.

  “Except that you wouldn’t really rest, would you? You would probably spend half the night poking around in other people’s lives or watching movies on that abominable machine of yours.”

  “They’re old films, classics, as you well know. A dozen were just sent from Milan yesterday. If there were such ‘abominable machines,’ as you call them, a hundred years ago, you can be sure Des Esseintes would have had one.”

  “Des Esseintes, Des Esseintes!” she came close to shouting. The waiter, tending to a nearby table, looked in their direction. “Am I never going to hear the end of that—that disreputable Duke of yours! The way you refer to him you would think he was a living, breathing person instead of some outdated character in a novel.”

  The Contessa was referring to Huysmans’s Against Nature, a French novel about a reclusive bachelor, after which, purged of its many decadent excesses, Urbino had patterned his own secluded life in Venice. When she had returned his gift copy during the first year of their friendship, she had said, “A better title would have been Pervasion.” She had refused to add it to her library or to keep it anywhere in the Ca’ da Capo-Zendrini.

  “Well, my friend,” she was saying now, “don’t you think it’s about time you laid the poor man to rest?”

  “Never! Since he’s one of the main reasons, in a manner of speaking, that we two are here with each other at Florian’s, it would be rather inconsiderate of me, don’t you think?”