My last normal hours strike me now as being infinitely remote; I look back on them as if I were studying childhood photos in our family album. Is that me drinking a cup of dark tea in bed, calling Rome again to try and talk to my husband (who still isn’t there, who has left a message that he won’t be back till this evening)? Is that me talking to London and then receiving Palmarin’s phone call (no villa today, some annoying hitch, but could we discuss it again this evening at the Craig Foundation’s cocktail party)? Is that me reacting with an irritated frown to this ambiguous (not to say highly suspicious) procrastination? Me, really me, sweeping the newspapers from the bed, thinking how tedious it all is, what a waste of time, and now what am I going to do with all these empty hours?
An unforgivable question, in Venice. But I have never known how to make good use of pauses, of dead time. They vex me, disturb me. I know masses of people who function in completely the opposite way, who conceive of life as a cheerfully interstitial affair, who know how to squeeze the last drop out of the unhoped-for occasion, who leap aboard the fleeting moment. But since my life consists in continually seeking, recognizing and if possible seizing hold of what is rare or exceptional, it is perhaps inevitable I should find myself at a loss, incapable of any initiative, when tension slackens.
All this by way of explanation for the fact that I left the hotel driven by a sense of shame (but with a vague remorse that I hadn’t stayed in the room to write at least two overdue letters) and strolled at random among the pigeons, metaphorically dragging my heels. I found it difficult to adapt my pace, customarily purposeful and brisk, to the unusual condition of a woman at a loose end.
On such occasions clothes are always a possible resource; this too is practically work in itself, since the motive is rarely a joyful eagerness for acquisition but can usually be reduced to a kind of fiscal assessment bristling with calculations and comparisons. Are they getting longer? Are they getting shorter? Red is coming back. Grey has disappeared.
First the mannequins of a few celebrated “stylists” near Piazza San Marco, and from there a natural hop towards the narrow alley of the Mercerie, the most convenient street in the world for window shopping. If one thinks of the problem of crossing from one pavement to the other of – well, I won’t say Fifth Avenue, but even just Bond Street or the Faubourg Saint-Honoré – this is the real Paradis des Dames. If one remains in the middle, one’s eye can take in simultaneously handbags on this side, shoes on that, fur coats on the right and lingerie on the left, prices and all. What have Harrods and the Galeries Lafayette invented that had not already been put into practice by Venetian merchants?
Such thoughts passed through my mind as I ambled along, mentally converting the lire into dollars, the dollars into pounds, the pounds into Swiss francs. An absurd evening dress. A cardigan with strange pockets. A stunning jacket. Quite a nice bracelet.
Inside a lace shop I glimpsed Federhen’s nose, striking in profile, bending over the counter to sniff something. She too was at a loose end, then, and not in Padua with the traitor Palmarin. Reassured, as if a tacit armistice had been established between ourselves, I let myself be sucked further into the Mercerie between those reciprocally reflecting plate glass windows, that brilliant array of outstaring displays, where one can still perceive, as beneath an artist’s pentimento, the faint tinges of an oriental market.
Thousands of footsteps. For a while I found myself following a woman whom I thought I recognized and who was the wife (and quite a pretty lady too) of the German professor – the one who, at Raimondo’s last night, had persuaded me of Pordenone’s sublimity. She was swinging two showy plastic bags – one black and one lemon – with the names of two boutiques, and she veered between the windows, first zig then zag, with the air of one who knows exactly what she wants, finds it, pays for it and then bears it off in triumph to Munich. I was on the point of stopping her to ask what she had bought, seized by that craving which generally passes for feminine curiosity but which is rather the dread of having failed to spot the supreme skirt, the absolute shawl.
In the end I bought nothing, as had been predictable from the outset, and passing from the Merceria of San Zulian to that of San Salvador I followed the flow passively towards Campo San Bartolomeo, a curious place, perennially packed with loungers of all ages who stand around chatting and gossiping as in the plays of Goldoni, whose statue stands over them. Now it was warm, the sun was making an appearance, and a cafe had put out a dozen tables, all occupied already.
My memory of those fresco-type characters is indelible. Three obvious Venetian lawyers. A tourist family of ice-cream delvers. Two adolescents sipping drinks through straws. A well-muffled woman, maybe from Mestre or one of the islands, with large bags on the chair beside her, giving her emaciated daughter a good scolding. And looking beyond a circle of laughing Japanese tourists, beyond a couple of austere or exhausted northern spouses, my eyes finally met his.
And so, in the most underhand way, without anything that could suggest an extraordinary coincidence, a “sign”, some special intervention on the part of Fate, I saw him again.
He rose promptly, with the faintest suggestion of a bow and the hint of an inviting gesture (every movement of his, I noted later, had a kind of embryonic, perhaps symbolic quality of something that had either just begun or was about to end, to vanish). “Are you looking for a seat?” he said in Italian. He was three or four yards away and looked exceptionally tall amid those seated people.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in Corfu?” I asked him without moving.
“Ah,” said Mr Silvera.
At times I think that without that highly special ah of his, poised between evasiveness and regret, nothing would have happened. And at times of utmost dejection I have tried to reproduce it in front of a mirror: the tone, but also the expression of lagoon-like vagueness, the imperceptible arching of the eyebrows and the slight rotation of the hand that accompanied it. Ah… I would like to understand why this syllable should have proved irresistible. More than anything else, it strikes me as a matter of remoteness; as if that gently suspired vowel emerged from unimaginable oceanic rumbles, as if it were the last sonorous relic of who knows what distant tumults. The echo of a now indecipherable word. An evocation of enigmatic shades.
But I must be careful not to exaggerate, not to “overload” the picture, as Pordenone (even according to his fan from Munich) often did. In more sober terms, I should make it clear that the effect of the ah was not all that romantic; at that moment, the sense of yearning was not immediately perceptible or contagious. It was also, I was able to note, a pause of evasion, if not actually the ironic prelude to a lie.
When I was sitting by his side, he told me that his task consisted simply in accompanying the cruise passengers of Imperial Tours as far as the ship and ensuring they arrived safe and sound on board. After which he could go back to London.
“And do you start all over again then, do you set out for Venice with another group?”
“For Venice. Or for Madrid. Or Bali. It depends.”
“A nice life,” I said automatically.
“Isn’t it just,” said Mr Silvera, smiling.
And I realized: firstly, I had made a banal remark; secondly, this remark was condescending and offensive; thirdly, Mr Silvera was different – immensely different – from any ordinary, down-at-heel tourist operator. It was an instinctive but absolute certitude, almost a blinding flash. Which necessarily gave rise to the question I would never cease to ask myself afterwards: who was he? “I’m always on the move myself,” I said. “It gets rather wearing in the long run.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m a kind of flying antique dealer. I work for an English auction house.”
“A nice profession,” said Mr Silvera very seriously.
“Isn’t it just.”
The first look, the first kiss, the first night of love, are nothing compared with the first shared laugh. That is the decisive contact, the real turning point. Although right then all I thought was: Pleasant fellow, this Silvera.
He, meanwhile, after ordering my coffee, had pulled out a coin from a curious old wallet and was proffering it to me on the palm of his long hand.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Do you by any chance know anything about ancient coins?”
“No, no, numismatics is a separate branch. Mr Armitage deals with that side of things.”
“I just wanted an idea of how much it might be worth, in your opinion.”
I took the coin reluctantly, because in an instant everything had changed: I had before me a low swindler, a con man who wasn’t going to miss his chance with this passing wealthy lady and who was about to tell me the sad story of his life. That was who Mr Silvera really was. What’s more, an ingenuous, not to say stupid one, to think I might fall for it. Truly pathetic. “As a coin it looks beautiful,” I said, turning it over. It was about one inch in diameter and on its reverse side was marked with a cross, while the image on the obverse side was perhaps that of the lion of St Mark with its book. But the silver, obviously of low alloy, was too blackened for anything else to be clear. “And you have no idea what it is?”
“I know perfectly well,” said Mr Silvera. “It’s a Venetian silver half-ducat, known as a ‘half shield of the cross’ and put in circulation around 1650. A forgery.”
Once again the whole situation was overturned.
“A dud? And you let someone palm it off on you, like one of your tourists?”
“No, no,” said the ex-swindler, smiling again. “I didn’t buy it. I’ve had it with me for ages, and as far as I know it may have a certain rarity value now. A forgery, but a forgery of the time, coined by forgers of 1650. As you must know better than me, time can give value to anything.” He imitated blandly the tone and attitude of an auctioneer: “Base of candelabrum, Roman copy from Greek original. Starting price £5,000.”
Pathetic perhaps, but not without respect. A con man, but not without a certain subtlety. He was trying to palm off on me a modern imitation of an ancient counterfeit. The forgery of a forgery. If nothing else, he was paying some sort of homage to my intelligence with that double somersault. Well, smart old Silvera.
“And you’d like to sell it.”
“Well, I was wondering.”
I tried to encourage him down the classic path, towards the fork that would soon separate us to our mutual satisfaction: he with enough to buy himself, let’s say, an opportune pair of new shoes and I with the pleasure of having been able to give them to him without humiliating him. “I expect it’ll have a sentimental value for you,” I said, sympathetically.
“Not really, to tell the truth. I just… found it, I can’t remember where now.”
“And how much do you expect to get for it?”
“That’s just it, I don’t know. It may be worth very little. If you want it…”
“But I don’t know how much to offer you either.”
“Well then, I’ll give it to you.”
Highly embarrassed, hampered also by the coin in my right hand, I moved my hand towards my bag, not doubting that the “gift” was in essence an invitation for a return of favours, an ingratiating (and unfortunately not very well put) Just give me what you see fit. But he stopped me with a gesture which meant Don’t even dream of it, please, and I suddenly didn’t know what to do. “Why do you want to give it to me?” I asked.
“I just do.”
The game had undergone another shift, but amid my stupor I knew these rapid metamorphoses had nothing intentional about them; they were not intended to impress me, to disconcert me or to make me feel inferior. Ruling out the further possibility that Mr Silvera belonged to the tragic category of those who seek to make themselves interesting, there remained only one explanation: it was I who was failing to understand something.
“As a souvenir,” he specified.
I put the coin back in his hand and impulsively said something I would never have said, that I never had said to a perfect stranger: “You don’t look as if you’ve got much money.”
“Quite true,” admitted Mr Silvera. “But I’ve enough to keep me going for a while.”
We looked at each other. I recall my almost euphoric lack of embarrassment as another turning point. I realized I had broken the most elementary rules of good behaviour with that heavily personal and monstrously tactless remark of mine; and yet things with Mr Silvera had already reached such a point that everything seemed permissible, easy, normal, excusable, forgiven.
“I’ve an idea,” he proposed. “Let’s toss it in the air. If you win, I’ll keep it, and vice versa. Cross or lion.”
“Lion.”
The coin spun in the air and landed on the back of his hand. “Cross,” said Mr Silvera. “It’s yours.”
“Thank you. It’s a truly beautiful coin.”
And thus I broke another of the most elementary rules: never accept presents from strangers, never, never.
Mr Silvera does not know what to make of this first encounter; he would not be able to say what he expects from this unknown lady. Strictly speaking, he should not be expecting anything. Last night he left his gregarious and itinerant employment with no other immediate plan than that of granting himself a break, some breathing space. And this Venetian holiday (of which he knows no more than that it is illicit and could well be short-lived) should also appear to him as a happy opportunity to enjoy some solitude.
However, his overall desire is one of abandonment; he yearns for a state of buoyant and mechanical passivity, like that of a cork in a canal: floating, bobbing, an ever-ready companion of gondolas, motorboats, broken fruit cartons, but also of decrepit walls, seaweedy steps. That is why he welcomes this unexpected little scene in Campo San Bartolomeo. The casual nature of the encounter seems to match his condition as a bustling, unstable man, one who is, in a certain sense, casual. Or a man of surfaces. Someone who bumps into a good many people on his erratic drifting course and is accustomed to take (and leave) them as they come.
The impulsive offer of the coin must mean something; it must indicate a certain preference, a minimum of choice on his part. A choice that no doubt goes back to that first, brief contiguity on the plane. Even then, he could hardly help being struck by the happy relations between the cheekbones, nose, chin, lips, forehead and eyes of the woman now sitting by his side at a three-quarter angle to him. In a word: her beauty. Which she wears (this too is immediately evident) like a very light shawl, left to slip onto the back of the chair and hang there forgotten.
But this does not explain everything either. In particular it does not explain why Mr Silvera, who ought clearly to say goodbye to her at a certain point and go on his way, instead stays there in Campo San Bartolomeo, hearing all about Giovanni Antonio da Pordenone (a sixteenth-century Veneto painter whom the lady has brought up in the conversation, having “discovered” him only recently). What keeps him there are the easy, open, affable manners of his chance companion, who in turn gives the impression that she might simply break off her idle chatter and get up, say goodbye and disappear for ever down the close-meshed alleys of Venice.
In short, what is most important is how little importance the encounter has assumed right from the beginning. But there is more to it than that. There is something he has not realized so far, and which he would now like to explain to her…
The unknown woman notes a certain degree of distraction in his expression. “Am I boring you with my Pordenone?” she asks.
“No, no, on the contrary.”
“Then why are you looking at me like that?” she says, unflirtatiously.
“I was appreciating,” explains Mr Silvera, with a smile as thin as a blade of grass, “the fact that you are unique.”
“Oh really?”
“I wasn’t saying it by way of a compliment. ‘Unique’ in its literal sense. Alone. Single.”
“But I’m married.”
Mr Silvera shakes his head, explains that this is not the point. The women he comes across in his job, whether beautiful or ugly, young or old, nice or nasty, are always more than one. Never fewer than six or seven, sometimes twelve, fifteen… And gradually, by dint of meeting them in this fashion, one ends up having a collective, plural idea of what a woman is.
“A… multiple creature?”
“Exactly. Like one of those Indian goddesses, you know? With twenty-four sunburned arms, fifty-five fragmentarily varnished nails, two dozen swollen heels, a mass of laddered stockings.”
The singular lady laughs. “A monster, you mean.” She looks at her ten impeccable nails, which Raffaellino himself would envy her, and laughs again. She squeezes her wrists one after the other, as if to reassure herself there are only two of them. “And so you’re appreciating me for the pure and simple reason that I have no more than two arms and just one head.”
“A very lovely one, with beautifully styled hair,” Mr Silvera agrees mellifluously.
“Ah, you shouldn’t have said that,” she protests. “First I was unique, now you’re dropping me right back into the party again, with all those poor women obsessed with their perms and curlers.”
“I just wished to serve momentarily as a mirror,” he apologizes. “But if you care nothing for your hairstyle…”
She turns further towards him and lifts her hands to her hair, adjusting it with a few precise touches, with the air of one gazing at herself in a mirror. “All right,” she admits, “one’s hair matters as well. But I’m the educated sort, and Pordenone takes precedence for me.”
“How right you are,” says Mr Silvera approvingly, pulling out his wallet again because the waiter has come to take the money for the coffees.
And for an instant everything remains poised, as if the coin of a few minutes earlier had only now reached the apex of its parabola. Then, flip, one of the two must have won again (although it is not clear which) because the unknown woman finds herself being casually offered a visit to the cloisters of Santo Stefano, frescoed by Pordenone around 1530.
“I didn’t know, I’ve never seen them.”
“They’re allegories, putti, Biblical characters… In a pretty bad state, to tell the truth.”
“Do you take your tourists there?”
“Never. They’re hardly suited to visits en masse.”
They get up and move off through the city’s motley beauties, floating side by side as if at any moment they might be separated easily and irrevocably by an empty tin, an oar or a blue-painted pole.
It is not just an impulse of a sentimental kind, let’s say, that makes me mentally retrace, almost yard by yard, that five hundred yards or so from the fatal Campo San Bartolomeo to the enigmatic cloisters of Santo Stefano. My main motive is once again to understand, verify and check out every detail. What would I not give for the CIA, the KGB, to have kept us under constant surveillance, recording our every gesture, look, expression, with their hidden video cameras so that now, sitting in a darkened room, I could review the document over and over in slow motion. All around me, a team of experts with steely eyes and fat cigars would badger me with brusque and crucial questions:
“Why, in the first two hundred yards, do you turn your head towards him several times?”
“Purely out of politeness. He was talking, and I —”
“It’s not true. Have a look yourself: here… here… and again here, but neither you nor Silvera are speaking. He’s walking along with his hands in the pockets of that old coat of his, carefully steering his way through the passers-by, and he’s not saying a single word.”
“It must have been because I was struck by the way he moves among people. See that? He holds his head high, gazing far ahead of himself, and yet he manages not to come into contact with anyone. His pace is steady and regular, but with a capacity for minute adjustments that allow him to keep his distance from other people. Or maybe it’s the other people – do you see? – who move away from him, who flow round him like a rock in a river.”
“Are you claiming it was this that made you suspicious?”
“I just said it struck me. It made me think he was used to passing through crowds. I imagined him walking fluidly and intangibly along the alleys of a souk.”
“An obvious enough idea, with the job he was doing.”
“But I imagined… the contrary. I thought he was doing that job, which was such a strange one for him, just because…”
The experts scrutinize me with their steely eyes, chewing their cigars, but none of them comes to my aid, none of them helps me explain myself better. They suspect that if they were to encourage me to specify things, to define that first and vague fruit of my “imagination”, I would take it as confirmation. And it’s clear they’re not wrong. It is also clear nobody is prepared to confirm anything for me.
“Besides,” they say, fencing, “why along the alleys of a souk? Why not among the counters of Marks & Spencer or Rinascente?”
“I don’t know. At that moment I found myself thinking more of places like Baghdad, Antioch, Smyrna.”
“And not a ghetto? In Amsterdam, Krakow, or Venice itself? They had labyrinths of narrow alleys too, and a multicoloured crowd.”
“He talked to me about the Ghetto of Venice later. He told me it was the first one to be called that, and that it gave its name to all the others on account of a ‘getto’, an iron foundry, which was somewhere round there.”
“A conscientious tourist guide,” my examiners comment, indicating the screen, where, as we cross the rectangular Campo Manin, Silvera does not fail to point out the bronze monument to the great patriot and, on the left, the Calle della Vida, which leads towards Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo with its famous staircase.
Their irony is too easy, too crude to intimidate me. “Let’s get things straight,” I say. “I’m not denying that the ‘tourist’ aim of the walk was a pretext right from the outset. I’m not contesting the fact that our visit to cloisters of mediocre architectural interest, with frescoes by a second-rate painter, damaged into the bargain, involved a good dose of fiction – on his part in proposing it and on mine in accepting it. But as far as I was concerned —”
“As far as you’re concerned doesn’t interest us, dear lady. The reasons why you accepted his proposal are all too obvious. And banal, if you will allow us. No, the real point is another one, and you know it perfectly well. The point is: did you never ask yourself whether Silvera’s reasons might have been different? Did you never wonder whether that romantic fiction was not itself a fiction, and whether he might have had other aims? Wasn’t this – don’t look at us, look at the film – the doubt that can be read in your eyes in Calle della Mandola?”
On the screen, the busy little street we are proceeding along is indeed the Calle della Mandola. But I would not say any doubt can be read in my eyes. I have just closed my mouth again and my expression is more interrogatory than anything, as if I had asked a question. Which Mr Silvera, taking me by the arm to guide me through the throng, now answers with short and rather vague sentences, halfway between embarrassed and ironic, to judge by the movement of his lips and his smiles, which are thinner, more blade-of-grass-like than ever. His hand, which is delicately holding my elbow, every so often detaches itself to sketch a gesture, to prolong the perplexity of a syllable: Ah… An obvious, not to say banal, impediment in my throat prevents me from immediately answering the experts who are interrogating me.
“Do you remember what he was saying to you?”
“No… Or maybe I do, I think I do… During our conversation at the cafe, I hadn’t paid the usual compliments to his impeccable Italian, I hadn’t asked the usual questions about where he’d learned it, et cetera. But I had tried to switch from Italian to English and then to French – the only languages I can speak with any ease – with the vague intention of forcing him to reveal himself, to lay himself open in some way. An absurd attempt, given that I didn’t even know what his mother tongue was. Dutch, or German, or maybe Portuguese? I ended up by asking him as we walked along, and I think it was while we were walking past a second-hand bookshop.”
The film, with a rapid rewind, takes us back to the ancient Libreria della Mandola, where in the window case, underneath a sign that reads foreign books, volumes left by generations of foreigners are heaped in dusty, polyglot rows.
“Yes,” I say, pointing to our images reflected in the window and to my gesture towards the sign, “it was there that I asked him. I also asked him what other languages he spoke. But he answered evasively. His family was a highly composite one, he said. He had grown up in various countries, with relatives who spoke a bit of everything, and with his mimetic talent – he told me he had been an actor with a Brooklyn theatre company for a short time, travelling up and down the East Coast – he had ended up becoming ‘rather Babelic’, as he put it in English.”
The film is winding forwards, and we are now issuing from the alley into Campo Sant’Angelo, with the church of Santo Stefano in the distance. My escort looks as if he has concluded his explanation.
“And thus he managed to avoid telling you who he was, where he was from, and what he was really doing. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“I’ve already admitted that he answered evasively,” I say, growing impatient as Mr Silvera calls my attention to the tall campanile of Santo Stefano, probably to inform me that it is the most leaning one in Venice. “I’ve also admitted that the little tourist comedy was being played out by both of us, and although my triviality is probably of no interest to you, I might add that I was enjoying it. I was enjoying the idea of having a professional exclusively at my disposal: hired out like a gondolier, so to speak. Indeed, for a second – only for a second, I hasten to add – it struck me that when his services were over I could pay him for them. After all, I was already in his debt over the coin, even though it was a forgery. And I was certain that he wouldn’t be offended, he wouldn’t feel humiliated, because I judged him to be a man who was above certain things.”
“A fine phrase, a perfect description of a skilful scrounger, one used to living off women with the air of granting them some incredible privilege. As for his competence as a guide…” The malicious allusion remains hovering in the air.
We have reached Santo Stefano, and when we pass through the high doorway in the ornate Gothic style (by the workshop of Bartolomeo Bon) the recording breaks off.
The door into the cloisters, in the left-hand nave, was closed and the sacristan was not about; an ancient passing priest threw his arms open in a helpless gesture. But Mr Silvera knew of another entrance. The cloisters, he explained, belonged to the ex-convent adjoining the church and were now occupied by offices of the Corps of Engineers, and if he remembered correctly, one could get in from that side.
He remembered correctly. We returned to the Campiello Santo Stefano, crossed back over the Rio Sant’Angelo, and upon turning right found ourselves in front of the steps of another doorway, sixteenth-century this time, but with nameplates of contemporary offices (among which I noticed one for war damage). A soldier and a couple of civilians were emerging, and a female clerk was entering with a bundle of files. We too walked in without any problems.
The cloisters were square and architraved, with cold Ionic columns of the Renaissance and an ancient well in the centre. I looked at the four sides one after another. In the passageway behind the columns the walls were bare, with damp stains and peeling patches. Above the columns, separated by yards of yellowish plaster, there were two orders of windows. From a half-open one there came the clattering sound of a typewriter.
I checked all around again, took note of two waste bins and a broom leaning against a wall. But no fresco, nor anything that might recall a fresco, was visible on any of the surfaces of the cloisters of Santo Stefano.
We heard a telephone, its peal rendered unclamorous, undramatic by distance. I turned in puzzlement to Mr Silvera. “Ah…” he said.
More disappointed than surprised, Mr Silvera does not offer a single word of explanation for his error, does not attempt in any way to justify it. As a matter of fact (as he confesses to his companion, who seems more embarrassed than he is) he often makes blunders of this sort, he is an incorrigible and impenitent muddler. “But this time,” he says as they return to the doorway, “I really do resign my position as group leader.” Outside the door, having descended the four steps, he stops and turns towards her, as if about to shake her hand. “I do sincerely apologize,” he says. “But you see what comes from taking on non-authorized guides? If we should meet again, we will both have to be more careful.”
“But listen…” she says. She has automatically switched her bag from her right to her left hand, but she cannot bring herself to say goodbye. She considers the ogival, fifteenth-century facade of Palazzo Duodo, the bustle of people on the Ponte dei Frati, a group of pigeons on the parapet. Finally she takes one step, then another, in the direction of the bridge. “But listen,” she says, forcing him to follow her, “if these frescoes aren’t here, they must be somewhere else, mustn’t they? We can always go and look for them. Anyway, I’m your group and I don’t accept your resignation. Instead I’ll offer you a glass of wine, an ombra as they say here, and a couple of sandwiches because I’m hungry, in that osteria round the corner here in Calle dei Frati. Do you know that the same place used to be the ancient Scuola di Santo Stefano?”
Mr Silvera covers his face with his hands, laughs, and then takes her elbow. “You want to win hands down, don’t you?” he says.
A second pair of ombre has followed the first, of a well-chilled white wine, ideal with the weather that has set in. Over Campo Morosini, the vast square where they are strolling, there is now not a single cloud; the marble monument to Niccolò Tommaseo gleams under a dazzling sun. It is warm enough for summer.
“And it’s not midday yet,” says the no longer unknown lady, who has introduced herself formally with her name, surname, and even her special name “for friends”.
Mr Silvera has introduced himself as David Ashver Silvera. With his migratory life, he has never had the time to acquire any special names or sobriquets (but did he hesitate here?).
Stopping halfway across the square, she puts her bag down at Tommaseo’s feet and takes off her jacket to throw it round her shoulders. “By this time,” she says, “that ship of yours will have reached Piraeus at least. Just think how wonderful it must be down there in this weather!”
Mr Silvera replies that the weather – he deliberately uses the English word, avoiding the ambiguity of the Italian word tempo – is immaterial.
“Do you mean irrelevant?” his companion corrects him. “We don’t use immateriale in the same way as in English.”
The little snares of Italian, he apologizes; clearly it is not his day. But anyway – and she mustn’t think he’s relegating her to the tourist horde again – doesn’t she think this business of good or bad weather is becoming a fixation? Everyone hanging on the lips, so to speak, of the barometer or thermometer, everyone obsessed with the forecast as if it were a matter of life or death, so that grey skies or heavy downpours are considered a tragedy. “Whereas rain can be marvellous,” he says, “and so can wind, clouds, fog. Don’t you agree?”
She takes a large pair of sunglasses from her bag and puts them on. She raises her head to look at him demurely, from behind the blue lenses, as they move on again. “All right then, down with barometers,” she says, letting him lead her like a blind woman towards the shade of Calle dello Spezier.
In Calle del Piovan he pauses again to observe Mehmed II observing the castle of Scutari, in bas-relief on the facade of the Scuola degli Albanesi.
“But,” she says, changing her mind, “I don’t know, maybe the sun is a different matter for a woman. We’re more like animals.”
“Ah,” he says, laughing, “but this doesn’t give you the right to criticize the rain.”
“Heaven forbid. Nor the fog. I just meant that tourism and free time don’t necessarily have anything to do with my preference for a morning such as this.”
Mr Silvera has taken advantage of the new halt to take off his coat, which he folds with care. “With you as part of it, a morning such as this is perfect in any case,” he says with ostentatious gallantry, taking her by the arm again. “It’s unforgivable that I should be making you talk about the weather like a Berlitz phrase book.”
She starts laughing. “Well, I started it,” she says.
From the sunlight of Campo San Maurizio they re-enter the shade of an alley, then of a campiello, and re-emerge into the sun in front of Santa Maria Zobenigo, also known as del Giglio. The large hotel at the far end on the right is hers, and now she is doubly sorry she mentioned it over their snack. For a start it was a truly stupid gaffe, one for which she had already blushed when he, in return, had had to name an unknown little hotel (or wretched pensione, probably) somewhere near San Giovanni in Bragora. But now there is also the risk that he, like the unreliable group leader he is, will escort her kindly back to the hotel and dump her there, goodbye and farewell. He is undoubtedly the kind of person to do such a thing, she thinks in a fit of pique, suddenly offended by his stubborn detachment, by his obstinately mannered compliments.
And in fact Mr Silvera turns right, towards the hotel at the far end, which she is trying not to look at. “It was called Basilissa tou Ioniou, would you believe,” he tells her, with a tone of intimacy, almost of complicity, as if at last he were confiding in her. “The Queen of the Ionian Sea!”
“The ship for Corfu?”
“For Corfu, Patras, Athens, Salonika and so on… But it isn’t true that I was supposed to hand on that group of mine to another guide.”
“I don’t understand,” she says in surprise, raising her eyes and turning to look at him. “Do you mean —”
She is interrupted by the clatter of a little crowd, which emerges from the alleyway ahead of them in a compact bustling group. And she realizes that his hand, now holding onto her arm more familiarly, is pushing her in that direction and not towards the hotel, which is further to the left. The alleyway leads towards the landing stage of Santa Maria del Giglio, where the number 1 vaporetti stop.
“Come along,” says Mr Silvera, leading the way through the people who have just disembarked and who are still crowding the narrow alley.
When they reach the landing stage the vaporetto has set off again, but there is another coming from the opposite direction. “For San Marco and Lido,” the conductor says.
“Come along,” repeats Mr Silvera, leading her on board and then towards a row of empty seats at the prow. “You don’t mind your hair getting a little ruffled?” he says when they have sat down. “I must confess that this is the sole aim of this trip. I’m keen to see you with your hair blown about.”
“Ah. So all those compliments on my beautiful hairstyle were false?… But it doesn’t matter. What I was asking you was… You said you weren’t supposed to hand your trippers on to another guide. Do you mean you were supposed to board the Basilissa as well?”
“Yes. Well, I had already boarded it, actually, I’d settled them in and everything. But at the last moment it was too much for me. I picked up my suitcase and got off.”
“Why?”
“Ah…” he says.
The vaporetto has moved away from the landing stage. She looks at the triple facade of the hotel as it slides past on the left, while the breeze begins to play in her hair and she thinks that this number 1, piazzale roma–lido, is taking her unimaginable distances, much further than any port on the Adriatic, or even on the Ionian or the Aegean…
Sitting next to her in his loose tweed jacket with his slightly sloping shoulders and his sharp-cut medallion-type profile, Mr Silvera appears to her exactly as he had on that first occasion, on Flight Z114, besieged by his squawking group.
“A particularly troublesome group, it struck me?” she jokes, intrigued, but without daring to enquire further.
He now looks freer and more cheerful, as if that confession of his, like a schoolboy owning up to truancy, has lifted a weight off his shoulders. “No, no, poor things, far from it! Besides, they never change, you know? They’re always like little boys.”
“And girls. There was one, just behind you, who never took her eyes off you.” They both laugh. With one hand to her hair, while the vaporetto sails towards the Riva della Salute, she points with her other hand held out in front of herself. “Look, look! The Salute, the Dogana, the San Giorgio Maggiore! Look, Mr Silvera!”
“The Bacino di San Marco,” he announces when the number 1, continuing its zigzag across the canal, takes them back towards the Riva degli Schiavoni. He turns to look at her and delicately takes her wrist, to make her remove her hand from her hair.
“You want my hair blown off, not about,” she protests. “After all, there are conventions between people who have known each other for… well, what’s the time now?” she asks, trying to look at her watch without freeing her wrist.
“Il tempo,” says Mr Silvera, “is immaterial.”
They get off at Arsenale, walk along the silent and almost deserted fondamenta of the Rio San Martino, then through a maze of little streets that bring them unexpectedly out into Campo Bandiera e Moro. She remarks that in this area one always ends up in this square when one doesn’t know the way. Mr Silvera briefly takes up his role as guide again to tell her the square was once called della Bragola. The church kept the name, but transformed into Bragora.
“San Giovanni in Bragora. Of course,” says his companion.
But she knew, they both knew perfectly well, that if they got off at Arsenale they would end up at San Giovanni in Bragora. Which is where, although apparently difficult to retrace, his little hotel is situated, the one he moved into yesterday after abandoning the Basilissa. They return along the Calle del Pestrin, then back towards San Martino.
“Ah, there it is, do you see? Over there,” he says, turning into a little alley.
The alley ends in dark green steps, which descend into the water of a narrow canal. On the right there is a scuffed door with the sign pensione marin.
“There, do you see? From the outside it looks pretty wretched, but inside it’s not too bad at all,” he says as they enter. “In the lobby, there’s even a sofa with some old armchairs, a shelf with old books.”
“Ah, good.”
The landlady, jammed in behind the cash desk, barely raises her eyes as her client from the previous evening collects his key. There is nobody in the little lobby.
“There’s even an elevator,” she says, in a voice she had forgotten she possessed. In the bedroom, she puts her bag down on the bed and goes to the window, looks down at the lonely canal and the dilapidated wall opposite, with tufts of grass and fragments of marble still stuck between the bricks. “Not bad at all,” she says without turning, leaning back against Mr Silvera, who has taken off her jacket and now delicately removes her glasses.