24

From the music conservatory it was a short walk over the Accademia Bridge to the broad embankment of the Zattere. Urbino headed there after leaving the Contessa, silently sending good wishes her way.

By the time he reached the Zattere, the clouds had started to disperse and sunshine was breaking through. Waiters at the cafés and restaurants were taking advantage of the change in the weather to set up tables on the pavement and on raft terraces that extended out into the wide Giudecca Canal.

The Zattere was an ideal place for a promenade even during winter since it faced south. Even on this less than ideal day, people passed back and forth, pushing baby carriages, carrying the morning’s marketing, greeting each other and stopping to chat for a few minutes. Many were elderly Venetians, who could always count on meeting a friend somewhere on the quay. It extended all the way from the Punta della Dogana near the Church of the Salute to the Santa Marta quarter by the maritime station.

Urbino stopped at one of the cafés to have a coffee. He stood outside drinking it and looked across the canal to the Island of the Giudecca. In late July the island was connected to the Zattere by a temporary pontoon bridge in celebration of the Feast of the Redeemer. This floating bridge allowed Venetians to make their annual pilgrimage across the Giudecca Canal to the Palladian Church of the Redeemer, which Venice had built in thanksgiving for having been delivered from the plague in the sixteenth century. The feast was one of fireworks and mulberry eating and bathing on the Lido at dawn. Urbino and Habib had thrown themselves into the festival last summer. They had been able to persuade the Contessa, who usually avoided the celebration like the plague itself, to join them, although she had drawn the line at the early morning rituals on the Lido.

As Urbino drank his coffee, he wasn’t thinking of the good times the three of them had had at last year’s festival, however, but of Possle. One of the photographs in the slick magazine had captured Possle crossing the bridge of boats in all his vitality. It was hard to reconcile that image with the one that was more firmly engraved in his mind now of the feeble old man in the gondola.

And yet however physically incapacitated Possle might be, he had displayed a sharpness of mind and a sardonic humor that had obviously been honed over the years. If they had impressed Urbino, they had also served to disconcert him, since so much of their force had seemed to be directed at him personally for motives that, at this early point, were obscure. And then there was the unmistakably hungry look in the man’s eyes.

Urbino was still upset with himself for not having taken more of an initiative with Possle, but he told himself that there would be time for that, or so he hoped.

He left the café and struck out along the Zattere toward the mouth of the Grand Canal. He stopped to watch a woman with her stool and easel, who was doing an acquatint of the Island of the Giudecca. She was German. Urbino praised her work, and they spent a few moments commenting on the view. Then he set out again.

His steps took him past the salt warehouses, where Biennale exhibitions were mounted, and past the villas of Milanese industrialists and foreigners. This had been a favorite walk of Ezra Pound, who had lived close by with his companion Olga Rudge. Perhaps on occasion Possle had accompanied the controversial poet on one of his promenades.

This thought, with all of its possibilities, was like oil on the fire of Urbino’s need to know more about Possle and to be the person who would open light into the unknown recesses of his life.

With his mind a swirl of scenarios and strategies now that he had his foot in the door of the Ca’ Pozza, Urbino reached the isolated point where the Giudecca Canal, the Grand Canal, and the lagoon all met. For the moment, he had the spot all to himself. He sat on a bench. A cold wind blew across the waters from the Adriatic, turning the weathervane statue of Fortune on its large golden ball atop the Customs House building.

Urbino gazed out at the swathe of greenish gray water beneath a sky of clouds and patches of blue. He sent some positive thoughts across the distance to the Contessa, who should be fully launched into her conversazione by now.

Although the scene before him was one of the most dramatic in Venice, tourists seldom sought it out. On one side the twin columns of the Piazzetta and the Doge’s Palace with its Gothic arcades caught the shifting light, while on the other, the Church of San Giorgio regarded the scene with all its cool and beautiful aloofness. Here, with the wind whipping in his face, it was easy to imagine that he was at the prow of a ship, sailing into Venice.

When this pleasant image was immediately replaced by one of Possle on the deck of the ship that had brought him back to the States for his last visit more than four decades ago, as the man had reminded him yesterday, Urbino got up from the bench with both amusement and impatience.

There was very little escape from his monomania, it would seem.