EIGHTEEN
THE VOICE BECKONED but never grew closer. It stayed faint and far away. Mino would have followed that song anywhere, so desperate was he to find the woman singing. But he couldn’t move. Something fixed him in place, as if he were an insect pinned under a glass.
He was dreaming. He knew this feeling. He reminded himself that he always awoke. Still, the darkness frightened him. He knew where he was.
The wheel. Again.
He tried to scream. Nothing. He tried to move but could hardly breathe. If the singer would only come closer, he could ask for help.
The song ended, and behind a sudden glowing brightness, he saw Letta. Her beauty slapped him in the face. She appeared precisely as she had on the bridge that last day. She wore her blue cloak inside out. She wore the bright white mask he’d bought her. Her short hair was plaited, loose strands falling about her face. Behind the mask, her large, remarkable eyes were full of wonder. They looked just as they had when she leaned forward, holding his hand, to see the view of the Grand Canal.
Now she reached for him, and at the touch of her hand on his shoulder, he felt a terrible disparity. He was a boy, the same five-year-old who’d been abandoned at the Incurables. But she had grown, matured. She was a woman, responding to a small child in need of help.
Letta, he tried to say, but nothing emerged, and she looked at him as if he were a stranger. She opened her mouth, but the sound that came out was music. Her voice was a violin.
HE SHOT UP in bed. The moon hung low outside the window.
He touched his chest and arms to reassure himself of their size. Ana slept next to him, hands cradling her belly. When the sun rose, it would be their wedding day. They were marrying on the day of a grand regatta. Had he stayed on at the squero, this festival would have been as big as carnevale to Mino. But here in the inner calli of Cannaregio, they were far from the Grand Canal, and farther still from the Giudecca Canal, where most of the races took place.
He had never guessed his life would turn out this way. So much was because of Ana. Her face usually steadied him. But where was her grounding effect tonight?
If Ana was a candle, lighting the amount of space one needed to see, then Letta was a conflagration; she lit up the full night sky, but she burned all she touched along the way. Marrying Ana was what he wanted. Soon they would be a real family. Their child would grow up on love.
Still, Mino couldn’t forget how bright Letta’s face had been in the dream, and when he put his hand over Ana’s belly, he almost felt unfaithful.
Why this dream? Why now? Yes, he had been at the Incurables that afternoon, pretending nothing was wrong when Letta failed to show. Yes, he had wondered all evening whether Letta had heard of his wedding, of his child. But the dream seemed to be about more than Letta, and Mino couldn’t understand what it meant.
He needed to clear his mind. He rose, careful not to tug Ana’s covers or set his weight on the creaking floorboard, even though at this point in her pregnancy, very little roused her. He took his cloak, slipped from the apartment, and descended the staircase in his slippers.
Sprezz appeared as Mino stepped into a drizzly autumn chill. He rubbed the dog beneath his chin and they began to walk. They crossed the bridge at the bend in the calle, and soon they passed his violin shop. They kept going.
Mino missed Venice’s stillness. It could only be felt outside, standing motionless, in the middle of the night. Most nights he worked on his violins but never this late, and when he left his shop, he was always tired, hurrying back to the apartment, to Ana. He couldn’t remember the last time he had loitered on an empty bridge.
He peered into the dark water and saw his shimmering reflection in the moonlight and soft rain. A grown man, twenty years old next month, tall and muscular, his blond hair shining. He’d finally made something of himself. His life was respectable. But that wasn’t what Mino saw. He looked harder. He forced himself to see the truth:
Inside, he was still a boy abandoned by his mother. His heart was still as fragile as it had been when he awoke in the ospedale kitchen. He worried that he did not deserve his own child.
In the two years since he’d left the Incurables, he had not come near to finding his mother. She was a void, her elusiveness his deepest shame. Who were his people? Who gave him to this city and this life? His child would know Ana’s kin, of course, but Mino had no one to offer.
The baby had changed Mino’s understanding of himself. He wanted to earn the child’s esteem. He might spend his whole life trying to be half as good as his wife, but would he ever feel worthy?
An answer came to him like a boat along a current: he had dreamed of Letta because she had seen his mother at the wheel. She could tell him what she’d really witnessed that night. He was finally strong enough to listen. And perhaps in knowing how his mother left him, he would understand how to hold on to his child.
He had to find Letta, the one person who knew the truth.
CHURCH BELLS ON Sunday morning. A bottle of champagne. A cake Ana’s mother had baked with saffron. Eight varieties of sausage. Her sisters, her mother, the sestieri priest. Carlo, who had brought Carina. Ana in her second-best dress, as was tradition, with the waist let out for the baby.
That was their wedding. To Mino, it was perfect. The sun swept out from behind thin clouds after the ceremony, on their walk back to the sausage shop, which had the most space for dancing. Mino played a violin he’d just finished for Elizabeth and John. He played for an hour with intense devotion, and would not have stopped if Stella hadn’t begged to take over, insisting Mino dance with his bride.
Ana’s dress was white muslin with lace roses at the collar, and he felt the firm swell of her against him as they pressed and twirled. Mino had never danced before. With the gentle pressure of her hands, Ana taught him all he needed to know.
“I’ll teach our baby to play the violin,” Mino murmured, “if you teach her to dance.”
“Her?” Ana lips curved up.
Mino smiled. “It’s just a guess.”
“Ana,” Vittoria called from across the room. “We’re out of champagne. We’re going across the bridge to the tavern.”
Before Ana could argue, Stella had taken her sister by the arm, leading the entire wedding party out of the shop. As they walked, they passed groups of rowers, just back from the races on Giudecca. Mino used to watch the regatta from the roof of the Incurables. Today he watched his new family surround his new wife, making sure she was comfortable as they entered the tavern, patting the mound of her belly.
“You’re lucky.” Carlo sighed, joining Mino at a table as they watched the women. “I pray you’ll never understand the heartbreak that is my life.”
“Carlo,” Mino said, “I understand.”
Carlo looked at him and saw the truth Mino no longer tried to hide.
“Who was she?” Carlo asked, drawing nearer.
“She was everything, once.” He raised his shoulders. What else was there to say?
“Does Ana know?” Carlo looked worried.
Mino shook his head. “Why should she? It’s over.”
“A woman needs to know these things,” Carlo said, seeming amazed by Mino’s naïveté. “This kind of omission becomes a lie if you’re not careful.”
“Not to Ana,” Mino said. He caught her eye across the table, and she smiled.
“Don’t worry—no matter what you tell her of your past, she’ll hear what she wants to hear,” Carlo said. “Still, it’s better if you’re plain.”
“How do you know how I would tell it?” Mino laughed. “And why wouldn’t she hear it that way?”
Carlo thought a moment. “Have you ever tried to give a somber toast at a wedding?”
Mino shook his head. This was his first wedding. Ana’s mother had given the toast, which to Mino felt somewhat threatening but which everyone else found heartily amusing.
“Guests want to laugh at a wedding,” Carlo said. “Just as wives want to feel that all other women were but stepping-stones on their husbands’ paths to them.” He paused, looked at Mino. “What really happened between you and this other woman?”
“We were young,” Mino said. He placed a hand on Carlo’s shoulder and nodded to the back door. Carina was slipping out with the barman. Carlo started toward her, but Mino held him back. “I know what you don’t, Carlo. A heart can break and love again.”
Carlo smiled with more bitterness than Mino had seen in his friend.
“Maybe women can love again after a broken heart,” he said. “Carina? That is something she could do. Even Ana.” He nodded at the bride, now making her way toward them. “If one day, Mino, you fell into the canal, your wife would rescue another poor soul and stitch him into another prince.” He gazed at Mino intensely. “But fools like us? Once we love, it’s forever.”