13

For the remaining trip only occasionally did Urbino give his attention to the passing, familiar scene along the Grand Canal. At first he thought about his conversation with Nicholas Spaak. Was his story of his two trips to the Calle Santa Scolastica to be believed? Had what he had seen there—someone in a plastic mask standing outside the calle and someone else unmasked at the end of it by the canal—played a role in the death of Val Gibbon? Did Spaak know something more about Val Gibbon’s sexuality than he was willing to say? And did he really not realize that his mother knew about his own homosexuality? Or did he know, yet not want to acknowledge that she actually did, even to himself? And what about his sister? How much did she know about her brother?

There seemed to be no limit to people’s capacity, not to say their need, for self-deception. We wear masks as much for ourselves as we do for others, Urbino thought. Masks covered faces, and these days there were any number of examples of them. But the face could be the ultimate mask, one thrust not only at strangers and loved ones, friends and enemies, but also at oneself.

Much of his work as a biographer was to penetrate masks—in some cases to peel successive ones away—and to seek out the concealed selves behind them, yet all too often there was little that could be found. Proust, sounding a warning, had said that no one could truly say he knew another person. Urbino had little doubt of this. He was being particularly sensitive to it as he worked on his book on Proust in Venice, and now he reminded himself of it in reference to the deaths of Gibbon and Porfirio.

Because of the turn Urbino’s mind had taken as he sat in the stem of the vaporetto after Spaak had left, everything around him seemed to feed his thoughts—the water reflecting darkened impressionistic images of the reality above them, the veil of fog wreathing in, the palazzi stretching and curving like some long, deceptive escarpment or series of embellished masks on either side of the Grand Canal. Sitting there in the stern, Urbino for a few confused moments felt that he himself wasn’t moving but that an elaborate screen was being unwound on either side of him, giving the illusion of motion and of depth.

Inevitably, this sense of disorientation led back to his thoughts about the murder in the Calle Santa Scolastica, thus completing the circle.

What was true and unfeigned about the things he had been told so far? Even in the best, most usual of circumstances, when little except social discomfort was at stake, people pretended, exaggerated, indulged in mental reservations or outright lies. It wasn’t immoral except by the strictest of standards, and it certainly wasn’t villainous. But murder was an entirely different matter. Loss of face and loss of reputation were the least things for the murderer to fear.

As the vaporetto pulled alongside the San Marcuola landing, Urbino felt oppressed as if by a frieze of masks showering down upon him their lies and deceptions. Among these lies and deceptions were the ones biding the truth of a brutal murder. These had to be recognized and exposed, but as for the others, he would leave them where he found them.