The little oak door – which was merely a little oak door stuck into a narrow, high facade, a patchwork of all possible tones of Venetian red – could well have given on to nothing more than three low rooms with an artisan hard at work repairing flat irons under a naked light bulb. The ramshackle wooden shutters had once been green. The windows were all framed in grey-stained, porous stone. And the whole campiello, a dozen unambitious houses, had the same flaccid, unserviceable air, as of a long-atrophied muscle.
Of course, the real entrance was supposed to be on the other side, from the canal, between rotten poles to which in bygone days the family gondola had once been moored. But nobody can afford similar luxuries today; nobody of Venetian origin, that is. A few rich outsiders, from Milan, the United States or Switzerland, indulge in such historical whims for a season or two and then abandon them for a more practical motorboat or go back to using a little oak door.
When one rings the bell, one gets the impression it has been broken for months, or that perhaps the whole system has been out of use for decades. No tinkle or buzz reached our ears when Chiara pressed the modern rectangle of plastic with the typewritten name Zuanich beneath it, but doubtless the summons had resounded within the deepest recesses of the building, startling a half-deaf old serving maid, who even now was dragging her swollen legs towards us along tenebrous corridors…
Instead we heard a swift succession of thuds, as of huge dogs bounding along an obstacle course, and the door was almost torn from its hinges by two tall, fair-haired and extremely good-looking boys in sneakers and sweaters: the grandchildren, whose father was dead and whose mother had remarried in America, as Chiara had already explained to me. They were studying in Milan and occasionally came here to visit their grandmother, who owned the collection.
Still gasping from the race, the two boys switched to instant formality, bowing to kiss our hands. The older boy was shaven close to the skull, while the other seemed covered in hair, with wild locks dangling from all parts. They led us into a huge entrance hall where the continual irruptions of high water had ruined the marble floor; and from there, up a staircase dignified by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century busts, we climbed to the upper hall.
Between distant doors, below the mythological frescoes of the vault, and beneath a coat of dust, long sofas waited for the dances to resume. A grey cat, with upright tail, was slinking calmly along under the coloured branches of the immense glass chandelier, but it scampered off when Chiara bent to stroke it. After another flight the staircase narrowed and the steps changed to rough stone. On a landing lay a dark sedan chair, its leather in tattered strips and the door held on by steel wire.
“What a pity,” said Chiara in a low voice.
“Yeah, sure,” said the older boy with total indifference.
An ordinary door gave onto a low-ceilinged corridor with numerous little windows. Then came a lumber room where chairs of various sizes were heaped in a tangle of broken legs and splintered backs. And finally, beyond a heavy moth-eaten puce curtain, we descended two steps and turned a sharp corner into another sort of antechamber, without windows or skylights, sparsely illuminated by a central light and furnished with a long table and two benches in painted wood. All around, on yellow plaster walls interlaced with dusty cracks, hung the collection; there were about thirty pictures, and they were arranged in single or double rows according to their sizes, which were fairly uniform, varying from a few inches to a maximum of three feet across.
“Well, I’ll go back down to my grandma,” the shaven-headed grandson said. He nodded towards his brother and towards two revolving floor lamps connected by long wires to two corner sockets. “He’ll help you to arrange the spotlights, if you want to see things better.”
We thanked him, and while the hairy one buried himself in a comic, we made a first slow tour of the room.
Nothing sensational, at least at first sight. And yet, again at first sight, less disappointing than Chiara’s information had led us to believe. Late, indeed very late Titianesques and Giorgionesques, Tintorettesques and Veronesians on the comeback, Bassanesques of the third generation but among which might be lurking – who could tell? – the gifted and industrious Padovanino, the fraudulent but at times inspired Pietro Liberi, the wayward Pietro della Vecchia or some other not dissimilar imitator of the great artists of the sixteenth century.
Nowadays this third-rate art, which its agents had had no qualms in passing off as “Veneto art of the golden century” onto distant and none too punctilious markets, was reacquiring a certain value – between thirty and sixty, even eighty million lire – on the more specialized Italian market. A couple of “Giorgiones” modified and corrected by Della Vecchia or some Titianesque beauty rehandled by Forabosco would go down a treat at Fowke’s auction house in Florence.
However, on our second round, without even the aid of supplementary illumination, all those apparently seventeenth-century works disguised as sixteenth-century ones began to reveal themselves as disguises in disguise. An insipid Gathering of the Manna and an overblown, mechanical Ecstasy of St Andrew; a ramshackle Martyrdom of St Stephen between two flutteringly chaotic Ascensions; luxuriant and titivating or dull and wooden portraits of Ladies and Gentlemen; swollen, rouged expanses of Venuses and Susannas Bathing in porcelain-tinted landscapes; a grim Mucius Scaevola on the altar amid vapid Madonnas of Loreto, in Childbirth, Giving Suck: these daubs no longer suggested Renaissance origins but revealed themselves as the work of crude hacks, pandering in rococo or even neoclassical terms to a long-established Venetian taste for forgery, plagiary and deceit.
The only thing one could admire in the collection was the consistency of the collector, probably some newly rich merchant, great-uncle or great-grandfather to the present grandmother, who, in forming his “patrician picture collection”, had been guided as much by inflexible aesthetic bigotry and a passionate veneration for “antiquity” as by an innate sense of economy.
The long-haired grandson realized we had come to a halt and raised his head questioningly. “Would you like more light on some of the pictures?” he asked. “Shall I turn the spotlights on?”
“Maybe better not.” It came out before I could stop myself.
He gave a slight shrug. From the comments of other visitors, he must have realized by now that the ancestral collection was worth little or nothing. “All the same,” he said, closing his comic and getting to his feet, “they’re still old pictures. And the Sovrintendenza hasn’t put any restrictions on them. It’s all stuff that can be sent abroad.”
The sceptical implication, which he had reached either by hearsay or maybe all by himself, was that things like that would fetch more if they were sold in countries as far away as possible. But the suddenly adult expression and the covetous, basely reverential smile that accompanied the words “old pictures” made me feel that it wasn’t a great-great-grandson who was turning on the spotlights but the great-great-grandfather himself, the businessman and improvised collector, illuminating his unredeemable “picture gallery” with oil lamps.
Although the inspection of the pictures, from our first to our last round, had taken no longer than an hour, when we asked the boy to accompany us back down we were numb with cold. But exposure to cold, dust and silence is the price one nearly always has to pay in this job, where old things – whether beautiful or hideous or just mediocre – seem to have a physical influence of their own, a permeating power which gradually bores into your fingers, legs and skin, makes you share in the rigidity of wood and iron, the frostiness of marble, and transmits to you the wrinkles and puckers of ancient canvasses and worm-eaten papers.
Moving like marionettes, we went down to the grandmother. Chiara had given me the impression she was practically gaga, and I was expecting some shrunken slobbering spectre with vacant eyes. But she could not be like that with two such strapping grandchildren. Even seated in front of a fireplace giving off the least possible heat the old lady maintained a ceremonial stateliness, with full, straight shoulders under a scarlet shawl, a haughty neck, beautiful wavy hair somewhere between fair and grey and a rosy, chubby face with the first hint of discreet wrinkles. “Have you come about the pictures too?” she asked clearly. “Please go upstairs if you wish, there are already two other people.”
The contents of an entire bijouterie hung from her neck, her ears and her wrists. She began to extol the “collection”, which the family had preserved with every care, even transporting it to Milan during the war, because there were no cellars in Venice and the Austrians could have broken the Duca d’Aosta’s front and got all the way here from Caporetto, the guns of which could even be heard. And so she herself, together with Domenico Sgravati, had packed them one by one in oilcloths and chests, and they had gone by gondola to the mainland and then in Uncle Alvise’s motor car…
“Shall I put some more wood on, Grandma?” the shaven grandson asked.
“Not for me, since I don’t feel the cold,” she said condescendingly. “But if you would like some…” Too much heat, she explained, was bad for one’s health and bad for the pictures too, which she kept upstairs in a special room without any windows, because light was dangerous too, it changed all the colours, that was what a relative from Trieste, someone who knew about these matters, had advised her years ago. And she had never moved them ever since, each one on its own nail, preserved there in the shade at the right temperature.
“But we’re not paintings,” grumbled the shaven one, poking the fire. His brother opened a little chest half full of wood and threw three or four pieces into the grate.
“Oh, these young people today…” sighed their grandmother in Venetian. Her grey-blonde head began a slow rolling motion, like a faulty doll, her exaggeratedly wide eyes turning towards a little oval table close by; on it stood photographs, in silver and tortoiseshell frames, of characters of various ages and attire, dating from the end of the previous century to the middle of the present one, but all so faded and indistinct that it was impossible to meet their eyes.
If one traffics with the past one will often come up against moments like these, pauses of stark, flayed sadness which are never easy to pass through. One gets caught and tangled in meditations, which, however repetitive and obvious they may be, are nonetheless oppressive. I stirred myself by glancing at the fire as it crackled away and I told the grandmother that I had already seen the collection, that I would have another look at my notes, and that if the pictures were of any interest to the auction house in Florence I would let her know.
“Fine, fine, please do so,” she said. “They’re worth a great deal, they even come to see them from London, from New York. La pittura veneta is the most wonderful of all.”
The shaven grandson led us to the lowly back door, recounting the usual complicated story of taxes, inheritance transfers, maintenance expenses, whereby the whole property had been nibbled away bit by bit: the estates, the country villa, the remaining shares, and now the collection, next the house itself…
I listened to him with compunction. But as I walked back across the ramshackle campiello I found myself thinking with an intense longing of the crystal towers of New York, each one of which mirrors the sharp, clear-cut nudity of its neighbours and whose splendour consists of the pure and shatterproof present.
On the whole the Palazzo Ducale has been found to their taste; it has satisfied them, even if not as much as the narrow passage with tiny side windows – practically a segment of the DC-9 they had flown in on – in the middle of which Mr Silvera suddenly halted: did they know where they were?
“No, no, where are we? Où sommes-nous? Dónde estamos, Mr Silvera?” Only the Portuguese girl (whose name is Tina, or whose father at least calls her so) murmured in a tiny voice, after peering through the dust-begrimed windows: “Talvez o ponte…”
Just so: the famous bridge where those poor wretches sighed on their way to the jail, which it is one thing to look at from the outside but quite another to cross as if we ourselves were the condemned prisoners. On le goûte mieux, Mme Durand acknowledged on behalf of them all – one savours it better.
The prison itself was felt to be somewhat disappointing, after this prelude, as was the interior of San Marco, judged too dark. Why couldn’t decent lighting be provided? But the Pala d’Oro, over the Saint’s tomb, aroused particular perplexity and some dissension, since it was not entirely made of gold as the entrance ticket led one to believe. The twenty-eight are still keenly discussing the point as they follow their guide towards their next destination.
It is the artistic value that counts the most, observe the defenders of the Pala; and besides, although the overall slab is of silver, the gold leaf on it must weigh a fair bit, all told. But here opinions are divided and some say four, some seven, some even twenty pounds. What do you think, Mr Silvera? they ask. But Mr Singh and his wife still feel they have been cheated somehow, and their hostile muttering joins that of others who either did not agree with the picnic or are finding it not to agree with them now. And besides, it is cold and damp, with a wind that prevents even Mme Durand from fully savouring the view of the canals from the tops of the little bridges (and there are too many of these, with too many steps) Mr Silvera persists in crossing. How far is it now to this famous Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo? Couldn’t they have taken a vaporetto? And suppose it were to start raining? Something is going wrong and it is Mr Silvera who is to blame, several of them start to think, since he is not taking enough trouble to animate them, to cheer them up; instead he is absorbed in looking at things of no interest to anyone: windows with mouldering shutters, chipped doorways, shabby walls with little trees peeping over the top.
They cross the great square of Santa Maria Formosa, beneath a sky which, although it is still early afternoon, could hardly be more menacing and gloomy, more typically closed and low-season in aspect. But this merely serves to heighten the contrast with other passing groups, under better organization and leadership. The French girl’s group, for example, who come from the opposite direction, pass them cheerfully and animatedly, shaking multicoloured packages. “Murano!” they shout. “Souvenirs!” They would even stop to show them their purchases were it not for their leader, who spurs them on, laughing, raising her arms and tapping her watch: “Vite, vite, les enfants!”
The Imperial party members have slowed down and watch them walk away enviously. That lot will not only have had a proper meal laid on for them by their agency at a restaurant, but have also been taken to the famous island (where the best buys are to be had), not to this Santi Giovanni e Paolo, which nobody has even heard of. Mr Singh’s surly expression becomes surlier than ever, while his eyes shift from his wife, who has begun to gabble to him in an incomprehensible language, to Mr Silvera, at the head of the group. And suddenly his protest bursts out in a flow of syllables that are equally inextricable, strident and headlong but amid which the name of Murano stands out in a tone of open defiance and threat.
Mr Silvera walks a few more paces, then stops and turns. “Ah,” he murmurs. “Mr Singh.”
Instantly everyone is still, nobody moves an inch, but already Mr Singh is standing alone. Even his wife has left his arm. And the girl Tina, who has left her father’s arm, is practically kneeling on the wet ground in her blue jeans and transparent pink raincoat while Mr Silvera proceeds with his calm rebuke.
Have faith, says Mr Silvera, and do not forget that you and your companions are here for a very short time. Remember that other skies, other seas await you. Be satisfied for now with the square named after Saints John and Paul, with its famous church, its famous Scuola Grande di San Marco – now the Civic Hospital – and the even more famous monument to Colleoni. And who knows, before six o’clock, when we must be back on the Riva degli Schiavoni, we might have time to…
The overall sense of what he is saying is so plain, so luminously clear, as to obscure briefly the fact that the words are not English, nor French, nor Portuguese, nor Spanish. Rae Rajanâth Singh himself, the now contrite and stunned blasphemer, does not realize until the end that the man from Imperial Tours has spoken to him in his own tongue.
Now they are once again making their way down even narrower streets, shortcuts only Mr Silvera appears to know. And when they come out beside the sheer-sided mass of the church, in sight of the black condottiere on his horse, they do not even notice that it has begun to rain.
The antiquarian business flourishes on ruins, grief and death, old Mandelbaum told me solemnly and raucously when I once went to see her in her famous mezzanine on Avenida Quintana, in Buenos Aires. But Chiara has never taken tea with Mandelbaum, has never seen her smoke those cigars of hers as black as her few remaining teeth, and refuses to acknowledge the frankly vulturine aspect of our work. Indeed, to counter what she calls my cynicism, she is always ready to robe herself in her missionary attire, to don her noble gown as a tutelary judge, as if the items of the collections we scatter around the world are poor people, survivors of massacres and famines, as if we always deal exclusively with well-equipped museums, incorruptible gallery owners, collectors of proven honour whose only concern is the good of the works.
On this occasion she was moved to pity as she thought of the disappointment awaiting the owner of those lovingly preserved daubs. “Lucky she’s half senile,” she said. “She’ll let the grandchildren deal with it and resign herself to what little they get out of it.”
“I get the impression she’s still the one who makes all the decisions,” I said in objection, thinking of my encounter with the old lady.
“Poor old thing, in any case. Lord knows what she thought she’d got there. It’s always the way with these old family collections, they get inflated ideas from one generation to the next, they imagine their attics are stuffed with Titians and Veroneses… It’s always the hardest thing of all for me when I have to explain that their priceless Lotto or Palma il Vecchio is only a copy, and a bad one at that, painted two centuries later. It really wrings my heart.”
Chiara is an excellent person and a fairly competent colleague and informant, but she lives for these – so to speak – emotions painted two centuries later. Her attacks of pity, enthusiasm, indignation, rapture all have a touch of daubery about them; they are all part of the cluttered rag-and-bone shop of her emotions. Even the “grand passion” which brought her to settle in Venice has never struck me as entirely genuine, one hundred per cent signed and authentic.
Somewhere or other she met this neo-something or post-something German painter, this Uwe of hers, and she walked out on her husband and her small children, came here to look for a house on an island in the lagoon, couldn’t find one, and now lives at the end of the Giudecca in a third-floor apartment with her artist who doesn’t sell, doesn’t exhibit, isn’t becoming anyone, and, in my opinion, doesn’t even paint any more but is supported by her, since she comes from a wealthy family and earns a little something with me. There are a hundred, a thousand such ménages in Venice: Danish sculptresses, English composers, Dutch photographers, Mexican poetesses, Guatemalan novelists, all shacked up with some companion in art and love whom they support or are supported by. They have given up “everything” (which is usually nothing) to come and live out their dream in the most romantic city in the world, and they don’t forget it for a single moment; like the tourists, they want to “squeeze” the last cent out of it: they have paid to be here, and Venice had better pay back in kind by way of hints, inspirations, exaltations and various sublimations.
Wandering around Venice with Chiara by my side I always feel off balance; it’s like walking with one un-heeled shoe (me) and one six-inch-heeled one (her). I’m not saying she gets everything wrong, but it is wearisome to have to share her ecstasies for every minor well head, roof terrace, chimney pot, or – as on that afternoon – a glimpse of Santa Maria dei Miracoli. “Stupendous. Stupendous. Incredible,” she breathed, coming to a halt in her emotion. No, she isn’t wrong, but the emphatic way she and people like her take complacent delight in these miracles end up making me intolerant of Venice itself.
This petty resentment can naturally be put down to my proud and hasty character, something I have always been criticized for, and to my pitiless aversion towards any kind of mawkishness, faults for which I can find no remedy. But it can also be put down to self-defence, the need to resist this famous fascination and ward it off: the fascination of time that flies and the worn stones (of Venice and elsewhere) that remain. One has no choice but to grow hard in this feline job where one must be forever poised to pounce, like the cat which now shot out of a grating in the narrow alley, causing Chiara to emit a terrified “oh!”, which in turn became yet another “Venetian” emotion to be hoarded.
And so from cat to cat, from canal to canal, from bridge to bridge, with her bobbing along on her high heels and me trudging earthbound under an unpleasantly rainy sky, in the murky dregs to which the light was reduced on the border of the day, we made our way to our second business appointment.
There was Palmarin in his elegant and well-furnished antique shop in Calle Larga XXII Marzo. There was his impeccable blue double-breasted suit with white pinstripes. There were his little hands, his brilliant shoes.
We peeped in on him through the window as he escorted a smiling Japanese tourist around his chests of drawers, large mirrors, wooden statues and inlaid tables. He looks younger than his sixty or so years and is of average height, slightly chubby, with thinning fair hair plastered over his scalp and divided by a broad straight parting. He hopes by these means, and with the aid of his colourless eyes, to give himself a German or Swedish look, nationalities that inspire confidence. The result of his efforts is that he reminds one of an ageing operetta actor in the role of the cuckolded baron; all he lacks is the monocle.
As an antiquarian he has no special flair, nor the means to pull off great coups. If a deal is too important for him, he tries to interpose himself as a sales rep and a mediator, but he is swayed by an ever-hopeful imagination: he sees fabulous opportunities and unbelievable bargains everywhere, which twenty-nine times out of thirty turn out to be nothing at all. However, since his exuberance occasionally results in something, Chiara keeps in touch with him. “You never know,” she had said to me on the phone this time, informing me about the villa in Padua.
The main nuisance is that Palmarin never gets to the point unless he has first engaged you on the private affairs of half of Venice, linking them all with the word “apropos”, which he probably sees as the height of nonchalance, the quintessence of that diplomatic skill for which the Republic was renowned.
We had barely entered the shop and he was already inundating us with his “apropos” to tell us about drug-crazed orgies, organized by the landlords of a well-known palazzo in Campo San Fantin. From these orgies, apropos of restoration work the Craig Foundation was carrying out in another palazzo, he passed on to the sensational encounter between Marietto Grimani and his wife Effi, who had found themselves face to face with their respective partners in Marrakesh, while she believed he was in Venice on his own and he that she was in Koblenz with her mother. And apropos of encounters —
Chiara, who cannot bear stories of conjugal infidelity unless motivated by overwhelming passion, interrupted him austerely: “Meanwhile, we’ve been to see the famous Zuanich collection. And I must say that —”
“Ah,” squealed Palmarin. “I was sure they wouldn’t turn out to be masterpieces! In fact I was hoping they wouldn’t. Because in that case, who would give me the billions I’d need to compete with you lot?” Apropos of which he here interposed fervent compliments in dialect on his two beautiful visitors and began to rub, or rather to stroke his tiny hands together with extreme delicacy, almost as if they were two precious pieces of porcelain he was afraid of breaking. “But such utter rubbish,” he said, “was a disappointment for me too. Even if one were to buy the whole lot en bloc, one would scarcely make more than a few million on them, ten at the most, without taking into account that such stuff does no good to the reputation of the gallery.”
“Whereas the villa in Padua…” I said, coming happily to the point.
Palmarin threw a quick glance into the street, as if to assure himself we weren’t being tailed. “Ah, that’s quite a different matter,” he murmured. And he explained in a low voice how the owner of the ancient villa, the Marchese De Bei (“an old friend, Nino, we’ve known each other for thirty years”), was toying with the idea of getting rid of it contents and all, he never went there, it was a burden, and there was probably a woman involved too, some young girl Nino had been seen with at Cortina. He was a widower and had an old lover, Marco Favaretto’s wife, but fifty’s a dangerous age; he, Palmarin, had lost count of the number of people he’d seen go right through their entire estate for some little bit of fluff!
Apropos of which I asked him if the villa could be looked over or not.
The next day, if that was all right by me. Tomorrow morning, at ten o’clock, we could meet up at Piazzale Roma and he’d be happy to drive us there in his own car, he’d arrange for Nino to let the caretakers know. And all this, he wanted it to be clear, was without any obligation on either side, all on a friendly basis: if things turned out successfully, he would leave it up to Fowke’s to fix some little flat-rate commission for him, otherwise he would be happy with one of my smiles…
“Apropos,” I said, after jotting down the appointment, “what happened to that Japanese customer who was here when we came in?”
We all three looked around. The man was standing in a corner next to a wooden Friulian Madonna, equally immobile, patient and wooden, and smiling at us.
Another iridescent flask, another large blue-black flower, another white swan with unfurled wings, takes shape magically at the end of the tube the master glass-blower twirls in his fingers, alternately blowing into it, retouching it and adding extra fusing droplets to it in the ruddy half-light from the furnace. And then the visitors, who thanks to Mr Silvera reached Murano not by vaporetto but in the glass factory’s own motorboat, are led into the showrooms.
Here, amid crystalware of every kind, vitrified flora and fauna are arrayed along the shelves, while beneath forests of chandeliers thousands upon thousands of imitation jewels sparkle in glass cases set on long tables.
“Attention, please!” Mr Silvera claps his hands by way of summons to his scattered group before they get mixed up with all the other customers, groups like themselves or isolated tourists who continue to arrive in the firm’s motorboat as it plies back and forth between Murano and the Fondamenta Nuove. Now then, Mr Silvera explains, each object is clearly labelled with its price: the price has already had the factory discount taken off it. But Imperial Tours have the right to a further discount of five per cent, or even ten per cent for more expensive articles. So when buying anything they should not forget to mention the agency’s name at the cash desk.
This announcement, which lends the Imperial clients a certain superiority over the other groups, is greeted with particular satisfaction. Señor Bustos and his wife go straight to a shelf where tiny gondolas, complete with gondolier and oar, are on special offer for a few thousand lire, while in Venice they would cost heaven knows how much. Mme Durand moves towards some little lions of St Mark in yellow and blue (much finer than other apparently similar ones, which were on sale in the city at the same price), while the Singhs and old Miss Gardiner begin to examine those articles of greater prestige and therefore more of a bargain (given the larger discount). One or two even display an interest in the chandeliers. But most of them rush towards the imitation jewellery and quickly disperse among the display cases.
Mr Silvera lights a cigarette and goes to the doorway to smoke it, gazing out at the rain, watching the number 5 vaporetti as they ply back and forth from the lighthouse, now and again looking down at his wet shoes, which could perhaps do with resoling. He would like to go and wait in a cafe, but there are none left in this area; the last few have given way to souvenir stalls, shops selling photographic material and postcards, illustrated guides and gifts. In the end he goes back into the large furnace room, where the master glass-blower is still at work but the spectators are now thinning out on account of the late hour and the rain. He lights another cigarette. He smokes, leaning against the wall in a dark corner.
C’est merveilleux, wonderful, prěkrásný; the visitors’ buzzing voices reach him each time the miracle of the flask, the blue-black flower, the swan with unfurled wings, is repeated at the end of the tube.
“Meu pae não quer que fume,” says young Tina. Her father does not want her to smoke. That is why she has come to smoke here, she says, displaying her cigarette with a tiny smile of complicity as proof of the fact that her father would not allow her to smoke. Which is not true, since a little while ago she was smoking happily in the street. And anyway she merely takes a few puffs and then throws it away in order to rummage in her bag, from which she draws out a packet of wafers. “Um biscoito?” she offers. “O senhor não comeu…” She would like to tell him off for not having eaten anything since this morning, but the supercharge of nonchalance she had built up within herself has now fizzled out and she is unable to complete the sentence. She is afraid he might refuse and above all that it might cross his mind that she perhaps bought those cookies (as is in fact the case) with the specific purpose of offering them to him.
Very kind of you, Mr Silvera says, however, and takes two. At this hour it’s just what’s needed.
But two aren’t enough, insists Tina, newly heartened. O senhor não comeu —
Another one, but no more, because it’s getting late now, they must be setting off, and besides, this evening they’ll be having dinner very early. But has she already bought something here? Did she find a nice souvenir?
Yes, her father bought her some diamond earrings, Tina says, laughing. She pulls back her jet-black hair to reveal two tiny discs of pink crystal, bound with copper wire. How do they look on her?
Mr Silvera takes her by the elbow and draws her into the light. Let’s see, he says, making her climb the two stairs leading into the showroom.
Very fine, he says approvingly. They look magnificent on her.
“Look, look, Mr Silvera!” intervenes Mrs Wilkins who, for just 8,550 lire, discount included, has bought a multicoloured pearl bracelet. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
It’s lovely and suits her very well, Mr Silvera says, complimenting her. And Miss Tina has chosen well, too, he says, inviting Tina to show her earrings.
“Lovely!” shouts Mrs Wilkins. She would buy them for herself, if they weren’t too dear.
The ones she bought were very cheap, but there are some bound with silver or even gold, explains Miss Tina shyly.
Ah, Mr Silvera says gravely to her, but they are only souvenirs. There’s no point in paying too much for souvenirs.
“Não,” says Tina, lowering her eyes, suddenly very sad.
Mr Silvera claps his hands and starts to gather his group together. “Attention, please!” He then entrusts Tina and Mr and Mrs Singh with the task of assembling everybody outside, where it is no longer raining, and goes to the cash desk to ask about the motorboat. Will it be possible, he asks, to have it for the return journey as well?
But the cashier tells him it will not. It is already too late for any more trips, quite apart from the fact that the Imperial clients have spent far too little. “You see?” she says, showing him the sheet where she has marked the party’s purchases. Nonetheless, she has already calculated the percentage due to the guide, and opens the cash desk to pay him.
“No, one moment, I’ll buy something myself now I’m here,” says Mr Silvera in perfect Italian. He turns round and goes back to one of the display case tables, looks around and then indicates something to the assistant. “No motorboat, sorry,” he announces when he joins his twenty-eight. “But from the famous faro – you see the lighthouse over there? – we can take the number 5 vaporetto, which goes all the way to the Schiavoni. Hurry up now! Vite! De priesa!”
When the 5 emerges from the Rio dell’Arsenale and deposits them at the far end of the Riva degli Schiavoni, setting out again half-empty towards San Zaccaria, it is almost half past six. It is also completely dark and has started drizzling again. Some of the group pause to open their umbrellas.
“Vite, hurry,” urges Mr Silvera, giving his arm to Mme Durand, who is nervous about attempting the slippery steps of the bridge. It isn’t far, he says, encouraging them.
They walk along the Riva San Biagio, past a row of moored boats, black and silent. There is hardly anyone around. In the basin of San Marco, which is being gradually enshrouded in a gentle mist, there is no movement apart from a ferry and a couple of motorboats heading towards the Lido, the lights of which can no longer be seen. The island of San Giorgio has disappeared as well. It is as if the low season has plummeted to a level of lowness beyond which there is nothing but total vacancy, the void.
It’s not already too late, is it? Although no one dares confess this doubt, many of them are beginning to dart hostile glances at Mr Singh, considered mainly responsible for the trip to Murano. “Não será demais tarde, senhor Silvera?” hazards Tina in a low voice as they reach the foot of another bridge. “O barco não será…”
Não, o barco has not left, o barco is waiting for us, o senhor Silvera assures her, helping Mme Durand up the last few steps and offering her his other arm. There the bark is.
A little further on, alongside the Riva dei Giardini, amid the dark shapes of lesser crafts, a beautiful white ship is moored, with all its decks and portholes illuminated, all its navigation lights blazing, and with a thousand bulbs rising in two brilliant lines up to the signal aerial. On the high prow, the name stands out in magical Greek characters.
“Basilissa tou Ioniou,” announces o kyrios Silvera with a suitable gesture towards la Regina dello Jonio, the Queen of the Ionian Sea, la Reine de la Mer Ionienne, in front of which several parties are already waiting to embark. (The blonde peasant’s group, passports in hand, are right now climbing the gangway.)
But beyond the ship and the lagoon, beyond the Adriatic and the Ionian itself with its green pearl, Corfu, Mr Silvera’s gesture conjures up even more wondrous and distant realms as far away as Crete, Rhodes and the fabulous isle of Cyprus, all of which Imperial Tours will reveal to the passengers on their unbeatable, all-included cruise. Venice, with her gondolas and pigeons, has been no more than an introduction, a simple though splendid prelude. The real journey begins now.
As it was raining when we left Palmarin, Chiara insisted on dragging me along (and at what a pace!) to another of her “holy sites”, Harry’s Bar, where nobody enters or leaves without everybody else’s head turning to see if they are somebody, and vice versa. We entered and were an instant cynosure. Chiara beat a path for me towards the only free table, exchanging salutations on all sides.
“I’m not entirely convinced by this Padua business,” she said, when we had settled. “Didn’t it strike you as a little curious?”
“Because of Palmarin’s very modest expectations?”
“Exactly. If there really were some bargain to be had, why would he settle for a tiny flat-rate commission? On other occasions he’s always asked for a hefty share of the profits, and signatures on dotted lines all round.”
It was odd, and we began to look for explanations. In Chiara’s opinion it was possible that Palmarin, as tortuous as ever, wished to show his goodwill and so was pretending to offer us a deal he had already concluded or that he had decided to conclude with someone else. After which, as he usually did in such cases, he would throw all the blame on the proprietor.
My guess, however, was that the marvellous De Bei furnishings were part of a package deal together with the wretched Zuanich collection, and that Palmarin, though prepared to buy this latter en bloc, had no wish to saddle himself with the former.
“And he thinks he can palm them off on us?”
“He’ll have a try. He’s a great believer in the you-never-know principle too, not to mention the better-than-nothing one…”
While we talked, Chiara continued to turn her head towards the doorway, every so often exchanging smiles and nods of greeting. The crowd was growing. Enormous Germans and double-door Americans sidled in and out, holding the door for their mink-clad wives. There was a good deal of noise and smoke, and I was beginning to lose the thread a little.
“We’ll find out tomorrow morning,” I said. “At any rate, you did well to — What’s the matter?”
Chiara’s eyes had widened for an instant and then immediately dropped to the small (though not all that small) crystal cylinder brimming with one of Harry’s Bar’s extremely dry Martinis. “Well, well,” she murmured. “Just look who’s here.”
Before she had time to tell me not to turn around I turned around, and my pupils were instantly filled with Anita Federhen, a woman (an Italian who had moved to Germany and was married to a German) who could never be accused of attempting to avoid attention. She wore a huge-brimmed scarlet hat with two long grey ribbons that dangled down behind her back, and a kind of plum-coloured velvet frock coat embroidered with gold foliage. She fluttered one black-gloved hand to me from the door.
“Why do you say ‘look who’s here’? She’s probably come about the Zuanich collection as well,” I murmured.
“Or for the Padua villa?” insinuated Chiara in a sinister manner.
“Anyway, we can’t ask her about it.”
“And she can’t ask us.”
Federhen, who has her own antiques business in Frankfurt, is a person one often finds oneself bumping into, and never with any pleasure. She’s very good; she has an eye for things and knows all the tricks of the trade. One could not say we are deadly enemies or bitter rivals or anything like that, but on several occasions, in several places around the world, we have whisked wonderful bargains from under one another’s noses, and I confess that my spirit of fair play does not extend so far as to make me fond of my opponent. And vice versa, I believe.
Naturally she came straight to our table, and we embraced one another in true sporting fashion. From her shoulder hung the enormous red patent leather bag she claims she managed to get a Swiss railway ticket inspector to sell to her after having plied him with drink. “Well, well,” she said, scrutinizing me. “It’s a small world.”
“And collections are getting rarer,” I said, with hypocritical frankness.
She shook her head, making her hat quiver and involving Chiara in her inquisitive glance. Ah, she said, we would never get her to swallow this. She couldn’t believe that two people like us were on the tail of old Madame Zuanich’s paintings! Didn’t we get a good look at the grandchildren, if truth were told? Now there were two lovely hunks worth getting one’s teeth into. Yummy yummy. If we managed to secure them for the auction in Florence, we mustn’t forget to let her know, she would see to it that the bids went up – way, way up. Well, ciao ciao, see you around.
Chiara watched as Frau Federhen climbed the staircase to the upper floor in swaying, operatic fashion. “Yummy yummy – well, really,” she said with distaste. “I didn’t know she was a sex maniac. Or is it just a pose?”
It was just a pose, I confirmed, to keep things simple. And it is true that Anita Federhen, according to a reliable source, is notable for her canine fidelity to her husband. Her only real mania consists in her antiquarian speculations, to which she devotes herself with the passion of the hardened, incurable gambler. But I, who have often played at the same table as her, believe I have discovered the secret behind her sporadic verbal outbursts, the curious fits of obscenity that seize her on occasions. They are by no means a pose. They are a kind of tic or nervous reflex, maybe an unconscious attempt to mislead her opponent, which affects her when the stakes are high and she holds a winning hand. I have never heard her make so many indecent remarks as on the occasion she entered into fierce competition with Colnaghi, Agnew and Julius Böhler for a Dutch still life still listed in Lady Dupree’s collection at Tissington Hall but which she had secretly already bought herself.
So, on this occasion too she had – or she thought she had – some aces up her sleeve. But what use was this knowledge to me, since I didn’t have the faintest idea what the stakes were?
The Queen of the Ionian Sea – which, on closer inspection, is perhaps not so large and not so white as it first appeared to be – is still moored at the quay, beside the dark mass of the Giardini. But the gangway and moorings have been removed, the towlines are taut, and in the saloon on B Deck, where dinner is about to be served, the passengers are clustering to look out of the windows. On the shore, a few passers-by stop to watch the departure. It is exactly eight o’clock.
On board, just after embarkation, there was some brief tension on account of errors made in distributing the luggage and assigning the cabins, but everything was sorted out happily; indeed, cordial relations have been established between the various parties. And a little while ago Mr Silvera took advantage of this to entrust his twenty-eight temporarily into the hands of the ever-smiling French girl, Mademoiselle Valentine, who has settled her thirty-five into a row of cabins on B Deck. As for him, he was going to have a little rest, he said after handing everyone the envelope containing the cruise programme and the forms to be filled in for the purser. He was looking tired and distracted again, Tina noticed.
Now the tugboat at the prow emits two short sharp whistles and then a third, while on B Deck the background music, which had broken off for a few seconds, starts up again with “O sole mio”. Imperceptibly, the ship begins to move away from the quay and the prow turns out to sea.
“Au revoir, Venise!” Mme Durand shouts, and is at once imitated by all the other passengers in their respective languages.
Nobody shouts in Portuguese, because the only two Portuguese on board are Tina’s father, who never speaks, and Tina herself, who is gazing at her reflection in the dark window and observing the two little discs of pink crystal bound with gold wire which she found in her envelope. What shall I do, what shall I say, how will I look at o senhor Silvera now? she thinks, without the courage to turn round, to look for him among the people now thronging back to the tables.
On the riva, still glistening from the rain under the occasional lamp posts, the gazers are dispersing as well. The ship, with all its festive illuminations, has turned in the canal and is now sailing away, parallel to the gardens. But by the time it reaches the tip of Sant’Elena it is already becoming hazy in the mist, and when it bears towards to the Porto di Lido it is no more than an opaque ghost, which soon evaporates entirely.
In front of the gardens there is nobody left now, except Mr Silvera; he leans on the railings, smoking, and then, after tossing away his cigarette, he too goes off with his battered suitcase.