Venice, May 1815,
a hundred and twenty-seven years since I lost him
What a ravishing morning!
For two weeks I’ve been cooped up in my den, watching from the entrance, as it’s rained and rained, and cheerless huddles have sloshed back and forth, all wet hemlines and squeaking soles. But today, the air is newly spun from the Adriatic, and clean again.
‘Buongiorno!’ comes a voice and a pair of boots approach, the porter from the customs house. ‘A surprise for you.’ He crouches and slaps down a pie on the cobbles before me. ‘Torta di fagioli!’ he boasts with a kiss to his fingertips. I pass my nostrils over it. Spinach and beans cased in pastry, only a few mouthfuls missing. The porter, who’s as straightforward as the barrels he unloads all day from the merchant ships, often comes to chat, and sometimes brings me treats, but rarely anything this enticing.
For me? I ask with a studied lift of my brow.
He laughs, scruffing my neck in his giant palms. ‘Si, mio signore, who never leaves his post, who sits all day watching the ships arrive. To your feast.’ He does a comical curtsy and goes.
I press my snout over the torta and inhale. I’ve barely eaten in days and I could wolf it straight down—but I’ll ration myself: a quarter tonight, a quarter tomorrow, enough for a week if I’m disciplined. I come out into the sunshine and cast my eye along the quay: a ship setting sail, another docking, half a dozen crewmen winching crates down to the quay. He is not amongst them. I inspect the cathedral steps: a young priest ascends and slips through the double doors.
There comes a playful bark and a familiar dog trots across the port. I nudge my treat out of sight. Sporco, as I call him, ‘the messy one,’ a local stray who often hangs about the customs house, bothering for scraps. He’s the sort of creature I might have avoided in that splendid time of my former life, when I was a courtier hound, when I might have found him a little too much of an animal, a slave to mechanical urges, the permanent want of food. But nowadays, I am equal with them all, except in one way of course. In any case, Sporco had a dreadful beginning, which I myself witnessed.
‘Muggy today,’ he says. ‘We’re still in spring, but it’s muggy, no?’
I don’t reply, for it’s not muggy in the slightest. He snouts the air, but doesn’t realize there’s a torta di fagioli sitting right behind me. I observe him down the length of my snout. When he was a puppy, his fur was golden, but years on the street have matted it into dirty clumps. He’s half my size, but has uncommonly large ears that point up quizzically, with tufts sprouting from inside them. He’s scruffy and smells of canals, but fine dark lines around his eyes give him a touch of Arabian mystery. And he smiles, always, like I once did.
‘Ah,’ he gasps. I presume he’s finally detected the torta and brace myself for an argument. From sheer persistence he usually wears me down until I give him half of what I have, or all of it. But something else has caught his attention—the appearance of another dog on the quay, a Dalmatian who passes from time to time with her master, each as sleek and self-regarding as the other. ‘She is dizzying, isn’t she? You see how she wants me?’ Sporco boasts, pushing his chest in her direction and swinging his tail in virile strokes. ‘She’s crying out for me that one.’
He couldn’t be further from the truth; the Dalmatian avoids him pointedly, often sailing past with a quip, ‘What a sad little dreamer,’ or, ‘I thought it was August again and the canals were stinking.’
‘You know where to find me. Don’t be shy,’ Sporco tells her, undeterred, as he is with every lady dog he badgers—and I’ve no idea if he has luck with any of them. He turns back to me. ‘That reminds me. What of La Perla? She hasn’t been by this morning, has she?’
‘No?’
‘Usually she’s been and gone by now, hasn’t she, her and Beatricia? But you haven’t seen her?’
‘No.’ I make a point of not meeting his gaze, to avoid one of his long-winded musings about the comings and goings of dogs in the morning. Though he is right: she hasn’t been. She and her mistress, Beatricia, almost always take their walk very early. La Perla is a nervy lapdog that has never once left her small city quarter, but who carries herself with such resolute primness, I can’t help but be a little fascinated by her.
‘Is that meat?’ Sporco says, finally spying my torta.
He tries to slip round me, but I block his way. ‘I’ve told you many times, my friend: I don’t eat meat.’
‘Right you are, right you are,’ he says, understanding nothing. He scratches his ear and I scratch mine.
‘How would you like it if someone chopped you up and cooked you?’
At that moment, there comes a soft groaning of metal. The weathervane on the tip of the customs house, a sea-goddess holding out a golden sail, is turning. With it, a curious pang shivers through me, the tiniest twitch of some bygone rapture, intangible and elusive. The sounds of the city seem to fade away, and I stare at the vane, unsure what is so strange; I’ve seen her pivot round a thousand times. Then I realize: she’s not turning with the wind, she’s shouldering against it, as if she had a will of her own. For a while, she holds firm, before there’s a crank and she rights herself once more.
‘Just a morsel,’ Sporco’s saying. ‘I’m half-starved I am. In three days nothing but fish bones. A couple of brutes have been stalking the wharves at night. Surly hounds from the coal yard.’ He impersonates them by pushing out his shoulders and baring his teeth. It’s almost impossible not to find him entertaining. ‘Those wharves are ours by right. There’s a pecking order. It is meat, isn’t it? Can you spare a morsel?’
‘No.’ I nudge my treat to the back corner of my den and set off.
‘Where are you going? Off on your travels?’
‘The torta is mine, you understand?’
‘Off on your travels, are you? Shall I come?’
‘No.’
He asks me every day and the answer is always the same.
‘Let’s play,’ he barks, blocking my path, ducking down and rolling his tufty brows. ‘Play! Come on!’ He thumps me on the snout, wheedling me with tricksy growls, before taking off around the quay in a figure of eight, and back to me. ‘Play! Huh?’
Part of me would like to. It seems decades have passed since I scrapped for no reason, for the thrill of bashing against another. But I’m too old for games and, besides, it’s better not to set a precedent. ‘Look, she returns, tuo amata. Now’s your chance.’ Sporco, flummoxed, glances from me to the Dalmatian and back again, his outsize ears pivoting in tandem. ‘Go on, before she gets away.’ He flies from the bridge in one leap and I escape across it and into the heart of the city.
I’ve lived so long in Venice, and seen it from the tops of so many bell towers—most particularly the Campanile in San Marco’s Square, the highest—I have a precise sense of its shape. In a lagoon of many far-reaching islands, Venice is the largest, a dreamy sliver of a city, a mirage, where land becomes sea and sea becomes land, as mysterious as the glass that’s furnaced in nearby Murano.
Venice itself is a fish-shaped island, marbled with canals and with a serpentine grand waterway bisecting it. The two halves are joined in only one place, almost in the centre of the mass, at the Rialto Bridge, a confection of white marble arches ascending and descending, on which there are shops, and almost always a heaving mass of activity.
Due south of it, at the edge of the water, are the principal institutions and buildings of the city, the doge’s palace—the giant cube of pink sugar—the old, Byzantine cathedral, the Campanile and the prison, all around San Marco’s Square. Whilst the new cathedral, my cathedral, lies opposite, on the southernmost slip of land.
Far east of the Rialto is the Arsenale, where the navy is stationed—whatever navy that may be, as there have been, in just fifteen years, variously a Venetian, French and Austrian one. North and west of the Rialto are the commercial areas, and the docks where most the ships come in from the mainland. It is to those that I head.
Though I live and spend most of my time in my den—the stone hollow in the side of the customs house, where rope used to be stored long ago—from it I have a view of the steps of the cathedral. If he comes, he will come searching for me there. It is where he told me to wait. But the northern port is the place where he and I first docked in Venice, and I’ve always thought that it would be miraculous if I could surprise him as he alighted from a ship. So I go to it every morning. I thread a time-honoured course around the maze of alleys and canal-ways to the fish market, turning north through the streets of Santa Croce and on to the port. The routine is sacrosanct. I’ve followed it day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade.
Occasionally I’m gripped by a need to visit other places, perhaps the Arsenale, or maybe one of the outer islands. But in general I’m too anxious to stray more than a few hours from my home.
I arrive at the harbour and head, as always, to a little terrace by a tumbledown church at the edge of the water. I’m about to sit when I remember the weathervane and, as I do, the euphoric throb comes again, like a door coming ajar, letting in a murmur of heat and light, before quickly pressing shut again. I stare fixedly across the lagoon towards the distant smudge of the mainland, alert, the fur on my back lifted, antenna-like. Along with these shivers of elation, the change in the weather, the guarantee of summer, I have a sense of optimism, of good things about to happen.
Unlike the quays close to my den, the western fondamenta, with its big skies and giant cranes, has more in keeping with the brash ports of northern Europe. Cologne perhaps, or Amsterdam. I stay much longer than I usually would, and even when I have the notion to leave, I find myself wandering along the quay instead, the image of the turning weathervane coming back to me time and time again. I watch a barge dock, its crew jumping ashore to hurriedly unload its cargo of boxes, whilst a supervisor in a top hat takes stock. The insatiable merry-go-round of trade and money. The boxes contain glass—I can hear it shiver as they’re set down.
Five times I pad back and forth, for what reason I have no real sense. The city chatters and sings behind me. Its perpetual out-of-kilter peal of bells swells and wanes. Occasionally funeral gondolas, with their mournful awnings and flying-eagle figureheads, set off from the pier heading for the ‘island of the dead.’ Sailors and harbourmen, finished for the morning, gather in clusters: bottles of ale are uncorked, china pipes are lit, trails of tobacco smoke curl up to the sky. Grey clouds roll in and it starts to get cooler, no longer spring-like. I feel idiotic for staying so long, thinking that something miraculous might come across the sea. Why, after all this time, would he come today? I’m hungry and I decide to return home to my torta di fagioli.
As I reach the little bridge that crosses to the city’s final promontory of land where I live, Sporco comes bounding towards me.
‘Quickly, quickly, something terrible has happened.’
Having just watched funeral gondolas processing across the lagoon, I get a shock to see one docked in front of a tenement that overlooks the side of the cathedral. An insistent barking comes from a top-floor apartment. It’s a voice I recognize: La Perla.
‘Beatricia, Beatricia, Beatricia,’ she’s crying.
On the pavement a body has been covered with a blanket. An undertaker is in conversation with two people I recognize: the hard-drinking son of La Perla’s owner and his efficiently unsociable wife. I don’t know the son’s name, but he’s one of those humans, cheeks permanently livid with irritation, who seem like they’ll hit you as good as look at you. Their presence there, the son already driving a hard bargain with the undertaker, along with La Perla’s desperate bays, can surely mean only one thing, that Beatricia is dead. Approaching and peering under the cover, my fear is confirmed: a polite sack of bones in a lace-fringed dress, a cobwebbed profusion of grey hair, all colour eviscerated from her face, even from her lips.
‘Is she?’ Sporco enquires, staying well back.
‘Yes. Gone.’
Sporco makes a pantomime expression of disbelief. ‘And what’ll happen to La Perla?’
I glance round at the son and his wife. ‘Si vuoi una buona sepoltura. If you want a good burial,’ the undertaker is explaining to them, ‘a plot on San Daniele—’
The son cuts him off. ‘Give me none of your sales talk. A hole in the ground is a hole in the ground.’ He bends down and reaches under the cover to unclasp a string of pearls from Beatricia’s neck, but his fingers are too thick for the job, and he has to tug it over the corpse’s head, leaving its hair sticking up.
I cock my ear to La Perla’s howling and take a deep breath, before passing on into the courtyard of her building. ‘What are you going to tell her?’ says Sporco, shadowing behind. I don’t know, but keep going. We go up three flights of stairs. At the top, hearing paws clip back and forth along the tiles inside the apartment, La Perla’s voice hoarse from constant wailing, my stomach gives a little lurch. She and her Beatricia have never left each other’s side. I know those first hours are the most unnatural, the overturning of everything, the absurd reality—unthinkable even a day ago—that you’ll never see your beloved again. I stand on my hind legs, push my paw against the handle.
‘Mamma!’ La Perla thrills as the door opens, skittering towards us. She halts when she sees it’s me. She peers over my head—but her mistress isn’t there either, just Sporco. Her eyes founder. I’m so used to La Perla being young, looking like a cotton ball, I often forget she’s past ten now, her tight white curls gone sepia with age.
‘How are you, Perlita?’ I ask softly, slipping in. A thousand knick-knacks crowd the little place, amidst the smell of urine and lavender.
‘How am I?’ she trills. ‘A fine question, I should say. Sick to my stomach I am. Have you seen my mamma, my Beatricia? They carried her away. Why?’ She could be one of those melodramatic actresses that so amused my master, only her tragedy is all too real. ‘Have you seen her?’ She returns her gaze to Sporco in the porch. ‘Who is that? He smells.’ She’s not so distracted that she can’t serve up an insult.
‘You know Sporco. My—’ for lack of a better word ‘—my neighbour.’
‘No,’ she replies grandly. ‘I don’t believe we’ve been acquainted.’
This isn’t true. She’s clapped eyes on him every day since he washed up in our corner of town three years ago.
‘Hello, La Perla,’ Sporco chances, entering gingerly. ‘What a beautiful place!’ Sporco has never lived in a house and rarely gets invited into them. ‘You have a fireplace!’ He dashes towards it, before remembering why we’re here and stops. ‘Are you bearing up all right?’
She pinches her nostrils, pads round him on the balls of her paws and sniffs, just very lightly, at his behind. When Sporco tries to sniff back, she scuttles away. ‘I’m fine, just fine. But you shouldn’t be here. My Beatricia will be back soon and she doesn’t like wild animals in the house.’ She jumps up on to a little pink armchair and nestles into it, old and frail.
For a while it has concerned me about what would happen if Beatricia dies. Her ageing had seemed to accelerate in the last year: she’d grown paler, unsteadier on her feet, almost unrecognizable from the vigorous talkative being that used to dart about the city. But I thought, I hoped, she had plenty of years left. Even so, I’d formulated a plan, as I often find myself doing, for the inevitable day. I’d decided, even if the son and his wife deigned to keep La Perla, which was unlikely in the extreme, that it would be too cruel to allow it. Sharing my den was out of the question: not for the inconvenience to me—though that would be considerable—but because it’s just a plain hollowed-out cavity, an utterly inauspicious place that smells of damp and rope—a residence that La Perla would deem far beneath her. Other options were limited. Despite her high regard for herself, La Perla’s never been particularly pretty to humans, is no longer young, and is as obstinate as she’s bad-tempered. In the end, I settled on the plan of taking her to the palazzo in San Polo, where an elderly foreign couple had accumulated a menagerie of abandoned animals.
‘La Perla, your mamma’s not coming back.’ The phrase drops out of me before I can stop it. Sproco freezes, mouth gaping. He stares at La Perla, waiting for her reaction. ‘There is no easy way to tell you, so I will just say it plainly,’ I continue, ‘your Beatricia is dead.’ Her eyes muddle and darken. Sporco looks from me to her and droops his ears out of respect. ‘We need to—to come up with a plan for what we’re going to do now.’
She blinks but says nothing.
‘La Perla, do you understand what I am saying? Your mamma—’
She sits up, stiffens her tail, bares her teeth—little nuggets of off-white—before leaping from the chair and nipping me hard. ‘Kindly leave. Nobody invited you in.’
Footsteps come up the stairs, the door swings wide and La Perla lets out a squeak as she’s thrust aside. The son and his wife stalk in. ‘The state of it,’ the husband puffs and his wife shakes her head in accord. ‘And that silly creature of hers too.’ The son scowls at La Perla, but gasps when he realizes there are two other dogs. ‘Fuori di qui!’ He swats Sporco towards the door and kicks him in the backside. ‘Pulcioso! Parassiti.’
La Perla runs one way and then the other, before scuttling under the pink armchair. When the son tries to pull her out, La Perla bites his hand. Furious, he turns the chair over, grabs her and throws her out of the door. She cartwheels down the stairs, bumping against the landing banister. I rear up and bare my teeth at the brute—but stop myself. A hundred years or more have passed since I’ve drawn blood. The son actually looks contrite, but hides it with a laugh. I leave and he slams the door behind me.
Sporco is helping La Perla to her feet. ‘I’m quite all right, thank you,’ she asserts. ‘No need to trouble yourself.’ She gazes at the door, the entrance to her home, just a plain timber slab, but one that has been essential to her entire life—and she’s still expecting a miracle, the poor soul.
‘Come on,’ I say and eventually she turns her back on it and we descend.
Going back to the quay, there’s no way of avoiding Beatricia. But better La Perla sees her, and understands her mistress is not returning. She stops in front of the body and pauses, before pawing the blanket from Beatricia’s face and revealing it to the midday glare. I brace myself for a scene. So does Sporco, his outsize ears doing a fretful caper. But La Perla just lifts her foot and prods the old woman’s cheek. Solid. I wonder how long she’s already sat with the body, and how much she comprehends the situation.
The undertaker and his assistant push through, load the body on to a stretcher and carry it off to their boat. Now La Perla will shriek, I assume, but she remains mute, watching Beatricia being loaded up as if she were some piece of furniture. I say very softly, ‘Perlita, do you understand what has happened?’ I press against her, so she can feel the warmth of my body, and her chest makes tiny kicks up and down. ‘You’re being very brave, but you don’t have to be, if you don’t want.’ After we’ve watched the black-sailed ship set off and turn out of sight, and still she’s made no response, I say, ‘Well, as it happens, I have a plan.’
Before leaving, I say to Sporco, ‘You go back home.’ His tail halts mid-air and begins to droop, until I add. ‘You can look after my torta until I return. Make sure it’s safe.’
‘Yes, yes,’ Sporco agrees enthusiastically, the hair about his shoulders puffing up with the pride. He goes, but comes back. ‘Goodbye, La Perla. See you again soon.’ He hazards one last attempt at smelling her behind.
‘Goodbye, sir,’ she says emphatically, avoiding him.
* * *
Crossing the city, La Perla trails a few steps behind me, head low, but otherwise continuing to show no emotion. I try to cheer her up, nodding at passing sights. ‘Look at that cat watching the singing gondolier.’ ‘You see that funny lady with a ship-shape hat?’ ‘What a family, marching to lunch in identical outfits.’ She doesn’t involve herself in my conversation. And for my part, I grow more anxious than usual at being away so long away from my den, and wonder again if the creaking weathervane and my curious pangs had any meaning.
The Mulhernes, the people I’m taking her to, are a wealthy couple that settled in the city in their middle age ‘for its art, its weather and its distance from the gossipers of County Cork,’ I heard the wife comment once. She’s tiny, always beautifully dressed in layers of silk and batiste, and as energetic as a clock spring, whilst her husband, a rangy, jovial mischief-maker, is blind. She acts as his eyes to the city. It’s been at least a decade since they discovered me, at the entrance to my alcove. ‘Poor creature, all on his own. What’s he waiting for?’ she said. ‘Someone coming on a ship? It breaks my heart.’ Her husband got down on to the filthy flagstones to cuddle me. ‘He’s ever so noble,’ he said. ‘Let’s take him home, my darling. Would you like to come home with us? You’re quite enchanting.’
It was tempting—they were clearly kind-hearted and the golden barge they arrived to church in, with its crew of smartly dressed attendants, suggested a luxurious home—but I didn’t go. Not then, nor on any of the subsequent occasions they tried to cajole me. They lived in the north of the city, too far from the cathedral to be practical for me. I did, however, occasionally take ‘lost causes’ to their door. Not dogs like Sporco, who are more or less happy on the streets, but ones like La Perla, who wouldn’t stand a chance anywhere else.
‘Isn’t it a paradise, Perlita?’ I say, once we arrive at the gates of the palazzo. ‘You don’t often find gardens like this in the city, do you?’ No reply. ‘And the Mulhernes, you couldn’t have kinder people. They’ll spoil you rotten. Dogs are their family. They adore them. Did I tell you about the food here? They have, I don’t know, three chefs? Tortine, ah, like you’ve never had. Rich pies with ricotta and mushrooms and all sorts. That’s right, you’ll have to watch it, Perlita, or you’ll get dumpy. You don’t want to lose that figure of yours.’
She pivots one eye towards me and holds it there. ‘If they’re so kind, why don’t you live with them? You don’t have a master or a mistress either. You don’t have a real home.’
Her barb catches me by surprise. I open my mouth to reply, but nothing comes out, so I push open the gate and motion for her to enter.
The gardens have got overgrown and I realize it must have been a few years since I was here. Then, it was an organized riot of colour, now lanky weeds and nettles have sprung up between the terraces, and long fingers of ivy have entrapped the company of statues. For a moment I fear the couple may have moved on—or worse—when, amidst an excitement of barks, a pack of dogs emerge from the house and straight away engulf us. La Perla makes a display of distress as two terriers and old Spinone take the measure of her.
‘That will do! Quiet, you rabble.’ An old man chuckles, shuffling forth, feeling his way down the steps. ‘Enough of your histrionics.’ I don’t recognize him for a moment. His hair has thinned to nothing, his ruddy cheeks hollowed and I’m reminded, as I so often am, how quickly time does its work, on humans and dogs and all. That is their curse, the opposite of my own: the never-ending ache of long life.
‘What is it?’ says his wife, bustling out, a vision of tulle in peacock colours. She takes her husband by the arm to guide him down.
‘Something has caught the attention of these monsters.’
‘Good grief,’ she says, spotting me. ‘He’s returned.’
The husband stops dead. ‘Who? Not our friend from the cathedral?’
‘The very same. How old must he be now?’
Being blind, her husband looks to where he thinks I am and holds out his arms. ‘Welcome, friend. Our valiant Robin Hood. Have you brought us something, as you used to, years ago?’
‘He has,’ his wife says, her face muddling at the sight of my companion. I fear she may reject La Perla, who’s hunched up like an old cat, with an expression that is more spiteful than frightened. I have in mind to tell her to stand straight and look more desirable, when the old man drops to his knees and, by luck, catches her in his arms.
‘She’s gorgeous, just gorgeous,’ he says as she tries to free herself. ‘We’ve room for one more, haven’t we, my darling?’
His wife gives a long-suffering laugh and rests her hand on the top of my head. ‘I’d prefer it was this one. Come inside all and let’s eat.’
I’m desperate to get back, but I go with La Perla into the palazzo to make sure she settles. Within, I find the same sumptuous pigsty I remember, a palace for animals, the entire piano nobile given over to their welfare, every priceless chaise and settee flattened, discoloured and furred by dogs and an assortment of other animals—cats, two rabbits in a birdcage and a parrot sitting on a perch by the window. (When I first came to the place, I was put in mind of Queen Henrietta Maria’s eccentric, unruly menagerie at Somerset House in old London.) The animals’ food is served up in grand, eccentric style in a string of mismatching china bowls in front of the fireplace.
‘I don’t like these people,’ La Perla asides to me, making a point of refusing her meal.
‘That’s not fair, Perlita, they’re very kind.’
‘So you keep saying. But I shan’t stay here. It doesn’t suit me.’
‘It will have to.’ The sharpness of my tone surprises her. I soften. ‘La Perla, this is a good place.’ I want to tell her that she won’t do better, that she’s old and difficult, too cowardly to scavenge for fish bones in the wharves and too fussy to eat them. I want to tell her how lucky she has been to have had Beatricia in the first place, when dogs like Sporco were tied to a pontoon post as a puppy and left for dead. ‘You’ll have a chance here,’ I say. ‘You’ll make new friends.’
She shows her teeth and before I know it, she’s bitten me on the ear, sharply, drawing blood. She runs to a corner to sulk. My heart could break for her, the smallness of her indignation, the tininess of her existence. Poor soul. I go to her and sit with her a while longer. The lady of the house is watching us, brows bunched together as she tries to fathom who or what I am.
‘Now, where’s the new arrival?’ her husband is saying, holding up a treat as he feels along the litter. I kiss La Perla on the nose. ‘You’re a good sort, La Perla,’ I say and leave the room.
Hurrying home for the second time in a day, I’m so preoccupied by visions of her in her new home, keeping her distance from everyone, being brittle if they try to be friendly, even as she is breaking to pieces inside, that I make a wrong turn and find myself in the street where half a dozen butcher’s shops are bunched together. I always avoid this loathsome thoroughfare, revolted by the stench of meat, by the blood-sloshed, offal-coated cobbles, but now I must pass along it or retrace my steps entirely. It’s more frenetic than anywhere. Humans, with almost savage end-of-day urgency, thumb coins into butchers’ palms and take hold of packets of flesh, as packs of wide-eyed dogs linger about, spellbound by the trophies that hang in every window. ‘Some of that would go down nicely,’ or, ‘What I’d give for a piece of it,’ they murmur to one another, eyeing up headless rabbits and bolts of fatty entrails stockinged in red string. I double my speed.
By the time I get back to Dorsoduro and crown the bridge before the cathedral, I’m morose to my bones. So often, even after all these years, the phenomenon of the view thrills me—two great churches separated by the mouth of the grand canal, the forest of masts and rigging in between, the ever-changing miasma of odours that sweeten the air, the galleons gliding away, the sheer possibility of it all—but not tonight. I’m beset with indefinable anger. I study the front of my cathedral, scowling at the pale flight of steps, the bronze doors shut for the evening, and it could be yesterday that my master and I stood in front of them, when the building was brand new, he chatting along to me. ‘And the stone is Istrian, no? You see how the marble dust catches the light?’
Sporco is waiting at the entrance to my den, lying with his head angled towards the place I stowed my torta. I know he won’t have touched it, in that way he can be trusted, but all the same I’m in no mood to be sociable. When he notices me approaching, he gets to his feet, tail spinning. ‘I kept an eye, just as you asked—all is safe.’ He licks his lips.
I push past him into my den and sink at the sight of it. It’s a prison: barely large enough to contain me, three decrepit walls that still smell, even after all this time of wet rope. This is how I live? This is what I have to show for myself? ‘Why don’t you live with them?’ La Perla had said before. ‘You don’t have a master or a mistress either. You don’t have a real home.’ She’s right. No matter the wonders I have seen, or the palaces I once lived in, I’m unrooted, a wanderer, a vagrant. ‘One day we’ll settle down. One day we’ll find a home,’ my master always promised. We never did. I have no home. He was my home. I paw the torta from the corner. This morning it had filled me with delight, but now it smells ordinary and stale. I slip down a mouthful, but all I seem to taste is the bile inching up from my stomach. Sporco’s shadow hangs over me and his tail slaps, infuriatingly, against the wall. I catch up another piece and swallow. What does my master look like now? Is he changed? Is his aroma the same? Midnight in a tall forest, stiff parchment paper and a whisper of pine sap.
‘It is meat, isn’t it? You can’t fool me.’
‘Get out! Out!’
Sporco skitters away.
‘A hole in the ground is a hole in the ground,’ Beatricia’s son had said earlier, pocketing his mother’s pearls. If he had love for her once, it was gone. I bite into a piece of pastry, chomping joylessly, before I remember, as I always try to, the phrase my master always used when things didn’t go our way.
‘Tomorrow we begin again,’ he’d say, sometimes over a trivial thing, a burnt dinner, or our coach getting stuck in mud, but other times, uttered in defiance, a call to hope, when something had shaken us to our cores.
I calm down, gradually, and a while later I look round for Sporco. He sits at a remove, hunched, ears wilted, eyes scooped together—no longer smiling. I should be kinder to him, for he is a lost soul too. ‘I am sorry, friend.’ I nudge the pieces of torta out into the open. ‘Here.’ At first he hangs back, but eventually his tail reanimates to a half-speed loop and he returns. ‘Eat,’ I say, stepping back. ‘Finish it.’ No sooner have I spoken, than a chunk has vanished down his throat, and another and another until it’s all gone and he’s lashing the cobbles clean.
Tomorrow we begin again.
A thought strikes me: that tonight, for once, I should treat myself. I should give myself a dose of splendour, of magnificence, to remember the old days. That’s what my master would do.
‘I shall sleep somewhere else this evening,’ I say to Sporco, hesitating before adding, ‘come with me, if you like?’ Sporco’s ears stick up.
* * *
We go to the opera house on the other side of the Rialto. I know it’s closed today, a Sunday, and also how to break in. Like La Perla, Sporco has barely ventured beyond the spit of land he inhabits, its little grid of streets and canals, and I have the sense, though he tries to hide it, he’s spooked to venture so far from home, halting whenever he hears footsteps approach and backing into the shadows, until they’ve passed.
We steal along a ledge beside a back canal and under a gate into a vaulted space at the rear of theatre where the scenery is kept. I come to the opera from time to time, mostly lingering in the piazza at the front, craning my ear to the thrum of music inside, but sometimes I enter when everyone has gone for the night.
The scene dock is perky with aromas of flax, cedar oil and varnish. A silvery gleam filters through skylight. Painted flats, as high as the room, lean against the wall, cycloramas of faraway places, mysterious in the half-light. There’s one of a turreted castle, nestled amongst white-tipped mountains; another of a terracotta palace rising up from an emerald jungle; a third of silver halls with onion-shaped roofs against an icy shoreline.
‘What are those?’ Sporco asks, tilting his head at them.
‘Those? Those are the realms,’ I say with pride. ‘All the places you can voyage to. Though some of them have been lost in time.’
‘The realms?’ he says, enjoying the sound of it in his mouth, and repeating it. ‘I like them, I do.’
‘The world beyond our sea is a more surprising place than you could ever imagine.’
Sporco’s gaze lingers on a backdrop of a pine forest in winter, a winding path disappearing into the snow. ‘This is where we’re sleeping?’
I lead the way along a passage into the auditorium. Half a dozen theatre chandeliers hang at head height, extinguished for the night, groaning under their weight, brass branches and festoons of crystal drops, fantastical jellyfish in a dark sea. We jump down into the stalls and pass up the aisle, Sporco ogling the stage set, an audacious vignette of ancient times, columns receding in a false perspective.
I will never forget my first time in an opera house, in Mantua, how my fur tingled at the sight of a thousand golden stalls honeycombed to the ceiling, every box a secret in itself: a conjuration, two, three or four humans in their own little plays; candlelight catching the glint of enrapt eyes and tremors of gilt thread, the thrill of scandal whispered behind hands. When the curtains opened and the music began—when I first felt the soar of bow on strings in that room—my insides ached with joy. The piece we saw that night was as strange and beguiling as a dream. A young shepherd, a lyrist, takes a ferry to a treacherous underworld in search of his bride. He meets a god king there who has a face of shadow and a crown of fire and plays a melody for him—to win back his beloved. When I was very young, I hadn’t understood music, it was just an incoherent babble, but that night in Mantua I grasped the advantage that humans had over our species, to create such marvels from contraptions of wood and metal, from mere thin air.
We go upstairs and nudge through a door into the royal box with its scent of beeswax polish, velvet, shellac. ‘Here we shall sleep,’ I say, nodding at the four silked armchairs. ‘Kings and emperors have put their backsides on those seats.’
Sporco giggles and in a flash he’s jumped up on one. He circles three times and drops down in a ball. He’ll be dirtying the fabric—artisans would have spent weeks working on the silk of that chair—but let him enjoy it. I mount the adjacent throne and survey the empty stage. The silence is surprising, the absence of water lapping against pier stones, a ringing, cushioned hush in its place. ‘We should stay every night,’ Sporco says and within moments his eyes are closed.
Yes, he is a lost soul like I.
I witnessed his abandonment. I woke at dawn, three years ago, at the entrance to my hideaway and noticed a young man waiting on a pontoon on the other side of the water. He was twitchy, kept looking at his pocket watch, a holdall slung from one shoulder and a bundle of books tied with rope from the other. A girl hurried on to the pontoon, excited and apologetic. She too had a travelling case, which he tossed into a boat, along with his own luggage. She was no more than fifteen, neat and timid, whilst he was older by a number of years, and had a kind of dishevelled self-importance.
I hadn’t seen the puppy—it had been enfolded under her cloak—but it yapped when she set it down, a bundle of gold wool skittering against its leash, a pup of five weeks. But the man refused to let him come. There was an argument, angry whispers echoing across the water. The scoundrel fastened the dog to a post and hastened the girl into the boat. It devastated her to have to leave her pet, but she was too in awe of the rake. My breath quickened as he jumped aboard and cast off towards the sea, pushing hard down on the oars.
‘No! Come back!’ I barked and the girl, eyes stung with tears, looked round to see where the noise came from. The poor puppy pulled against its leash, whining as his mistress vanished round the curve of the water.
I set off immediately for the abandoned puppy through the city, over the Rialto, double backing, all to arrive at a short distance from where I started. I untied his leash and asked if he’d like to come with me, but he just sat, confused, his eyes on the horizon. Eventually, I returned to my own lookout. He stayed for days, on the opposite side of the canal. After a while I found it too heartbreaking to watch and found myself looking in the opposite direction. The next time I dared peek, he was gone.
Two months passed before I chanced on him again. He had filled out into a dog, caked in dirt and reeking of the street. And, though he was surly and streetwise to begin with, I made a point of watching out for him. I never once mentioned the pontoon to him and, though I always hoped he had somehow blotted the memory from his mind, I knew it certainly must lurk there. Worse: it probably shaped everything in his life.
Indeed, we are all lost souls. He, I, La Perla. And it gives me no solace that I have been lost longer than any, a hundred and twenty-seven years since my master vanished on our trip to the cathedral.
At once I recall the golden weathervane and the abrupt twitches of joy I had this morning, and fear wildfires through me: What if he comes tonight? Of all nights, when I’m sleeping in another place. I sit bolt upright, resolved to return, then dismiss the idea, calling to mind the damp walls of my alcove. I’m being superstitious, that’s all. I sit back down and curl up to sleep.
‘Why, after a hundred and twenty-seven years, would he come tonight?’