I had spent so many years refusing to share the experiences and trying to avoid listening to the life stories of people I met, so many years on the defensive, avoiding them when they were about to activate the awful mechanisms of remembrance, keeping my distance from the useless load of confidences to which I was liable to be subjected at any moment – but now all these endeavours were going to ruin. As my own perceptions are not in the least trustworthy and often bear little relation to reality, and my temperament is by nature irresolute, my judgement leaning towards the irrelevant, I had, until then, accepted the opinions of others as being irrefutably true. This credulity of mine had saved me from the need to take difficult decisions, and had kept me out of harm’s way in a world only too full of pitfalls for the unwary, but, at the same time, it had turned me into a sort of ship without a compass, at the mercy of helmsmen with fanciful notions of their own. Now, after listening to Chiara and Giovanna Zanon, I discovered that ‘truth’ depends upon the point of view of the person speaking; I discovered that the private ‘truth’ of an individual may falsify facts, or fail to understand them, or may even tamper with them for his or her own benefit; I discovered that nobody is infallible, or omniscient, or even well-intentioned, and this last discovery confirmed me in my suspicion that perhaps this is perfect lucidity, as well as being a condition of constant despair.
While Chiara was dressing, I ran over in my mind the various duties I had put off since arriving in Venice: the visit to the Accademia, the retrieval of the ring, picking up my luggage, and breaking open the chest in which Valenzin may have kept his loot. I felt no sense of urgency as I made this recapitulation – it did not much matter that I was falling behind on my obligations, because Venice postpones events, slows down time, suspends it, and transforms it into a flexible substance, like dreams. I alternated this tally with speculation about the problem facing Chiara as she stood in front of her wardrobe: the careful choice she had to make of certain clothes in preference to others, which would then be left feeling disgruntled or resentful on their hangers, unable to satisfy their own desires or escape their lonely, celibate condition. Like those rejected clothes, I also felt strong desires, but remained celibate.
‘I hope you’re well and truly ready,’ Chiara warned me. At first I did not know if she was referring to the way I was dressed, because my clothes were in a dreadful state. ‘Gilberto is going to put you through the third degree.’
‘What do you mean, the third degree?’
‘He will make you defend your interpretation of The Tempest, and when you’ve done so he’ll refute it, point by point, and destroy every one of your arguments. That’s his method. He doesn’t spare anyone!’
The fact is he had already demolished me once, after our meeting in the police station. I played at feigning impregnability.
‘We’ll see who laughs last,’ I said. ‘Whose side are you on?’
Before she could prevent it I pulled her towards me and kissed her on the lips, not in the corner of her mouth, or formally on the cheek, but with a kiss that was much more exploratory, answering the call of her lovely mouth.
‘I have to remain neutral.’ She gave a laugh that fell to a whisper as her lips lost their neutrality, just as they had lost the taste of lipsalve in the shower. ‘I’m only going as a spectator.’
I took her face in my hands; it seemed to burn with all the fires of desire. I kissed her forehead with its incipient furrows, I kissed her temples that beat with a secret fever, I kissed the lids of her peasant-girl eyes, and her slightly biased nose, and her cheeks that had so often been wet with the relentless flow of her tears. I itemised every detail of her face, feeling that in some nebulous way I held the whole world in my hands.
‘We mustn’t keep him waiting,’ she said. ‘The later we are, the more obstreperous he’ll be.’
While we went down the Grand Canal in the taxi taking us to the Accademia, and as it sliced through the water like a knife, I began to believe myself master of the gentle harmony I had learned only a short time earlier from Chiara’s lips, which resounded from the façades of the palaces, under the arch of the Rialto Bridge, and in the outlets of the side-canals, where the cross-currents were at their strongest. Venice seemed to have been saved from inundation for one more year, but it had not recovered fully from the threat of ruin. The city appeared to breathe with that gasping sound that one might expect to hear issuing from the sodden, polyp-filled lungs of a drowning man as he returns to life. Only the bell towers rose to their full height in the midst of such frailty.
‘Have you visited the Accademia before?’ asked Chiara.
She had put her hand in mine, a gesture which had nothing neutral about it, and her fingers were closely entwined with my fingers, in the way that wax melts into a mould; it was a gesture to give me courage before I faced my dialectical confrontation with Gabetti. I shook my head.
‘It will seem a very tiny museum compared with the Prado,’ she said. ‘The advantage is that being small saves it from hordes of tourists. It was founded by a decree of Napoleon when Venice was ruled by the French and the collection was built up with paintings from the sale of Church properties.’
I observed the profile of its façade, eroded like the rest of Venice by successive invasions of men who had either venerated the city, or morally mutilated it – although, in fact, it remained impervious to domination. Foreigners had thronged to Venice and scarred it with their greedy talons, or they had done their best to deliver it from decadence; but Venice remained loyal to its ultimate destiny, which was to sink grandly into the lagoon, to become an underwater cemetery, with palaces as mausoleums, and large squares where the dead could walk. I should have liked to exclude Chiara from any part in the city’s fate, but Venice was an uncompromising rival.
The Accademia had been erected over an ancient Lateran convent, with that self-assurance of secular building in times of unbelief. The façade had been disfigured by a neo-classical porch that clashed with the Gothic style of the church beside it. A line of duck-boards provided access from the landing-stage.
‘There’s Gilberto all ready to teach you a lesson,’ Chiara whispered as the water-taxi drew alongside. She removed her hand from mine as if propelled by a spring. ‘I hope you won’t let yourself be bullied.’
Gabetti walked towards us across the duck-boards like an obsequious host receiving guests in the courtyard of his palace – although later he plans to serve them a banquet of poisoned food.
‘Good, Ballesteros, the great moment has arrived,’ he said by way of greeting. Although he refrained from smiling, his body moved with a detectable swagger inside his elegant suit. ‘Did you bring the torch, Chiara?’
A shaft of light dazzled him as he put out his hand to help us disembark; he gave Chiara a look that was midway between affection and a reproach.
‘All right, all right,’ he protested, but he was not seriously annoyed, as he shielded his face with his forearm. ‘Or do you really want to blind me?’
‘You blind?’ Chiara laughed with delight. ‘The day you go blind, all the paintings in Venice will go into mourning.’
Although he said nothing, it was clear that Gabetti was grateful for the compliment, and there was no longer any trace of a reproach in his expression.
‘You’re very privileged, Ballesteros,’ he proclaimed, as we crossed the duck-boards. ‘You’re going to see The Tempest in the museum at a time when there are no visitors, and under cover of perfidious night. The Tempest, whose true significance has eluded the greatest experts, will be revealed to you like a virgin in a bridal bed. What more could you ask for?’
‘He could ask you to be a little less pedantic,’ Chiara admonished him, breaking her promise of neutrality.
There were puddles in the hall of the Accademia, which made it look like the remains of a Roman naumachy. For the past few days, under Gabetti’s command, the museum employees had fought a valiant battle against the tides, and had finally won. The air had the narcotic, intoxicating odour that rainwater gives off when it soaks into stonework. In one corner of the hall, like the remains of a brawl, there was a pile of detritus left behind by the flood: weed still oozing a muddy liquid, and other odds and ends that the Venetians were in the habit of emptying into the Grand Canal.
‘I’ve given the caretakers the night off,’ said Gabetti, with that casual perfidy of an official who breaks the rules. ‘The poor fellows were on their knees, absolutely worn out, and with heavy colds that will take them a long time to get rid of. They’re paid a pittance, but when it comes to getting rid of the water they really put their backs into it.’
Gabetti had taken the torch, and he lit the way for us past walls covered in fungus. We went up a staircase that led to the art gallery itself, and the sound of our footfalls drummed in the corners like a hushed and guilty echo.
‘Does that mean you’ve left the museum without protection?’ I asked, genuinely scandalised. I was a very different man from Gabetti, and utterly punctilious in observing regulations. ‘That is irresponsible.’
I looked for Chiara to back me up, but all she did was shrug her shoulders. Gabetti gave a supercilious laugh that held more than a hint of arrogance.
‘Over and above the fact that I am granting you the privilege of visiting the museum without other people around …’ He allowed himself a note of nostalgia: ‘… now that Fabio has gone, there are no thieves of any consequence left in Venice.’
Through a gap in the staircase I could just make out the rectangle of dim light illuminating the shape of the main door – and offering free passage to any passer-by or unwelcome thief. We crossed a room with a moulded ceiling that was reserved for paintings of the trecento, solemn virgins reminiscent of Byzantine art, triptychs illustrating scenes from the lives of the saints, with their gilded backgrounds and that elaborate inlay work which distracts attention from the painting and draws it towards the frames. Gabetti flashed the light of the torch backwards and forwards across the multitude of saints, like a dutiful father checking that his offspring are sleeping peacefully. In the nearby rooms, the quattrocento was represented by Piero della Francesca, Andrea Montagna, and Cosmè Tura, amongst others: the faces depicted began to gain in expressiveness and in subtlety, early attempts at perspective began to appear in the compositions, and the backgrounds of the paintings were no longer limited to the monochrome of early icons.
‘As you can see, in the Accademia, we respect chronological order in the way the paintings are hung,’ Gabetti enlightened me. ‘If art experts weren’t so dense, and had a bit more commonsense, if they didn’t limit themselves to studying just one single artist or one single work of art, and removed their blinkers, they would realise that no new development in painting happens suddenly.’
Gabetti’s harangue had no need of a listener, or if it did need one, it was only in order to crush him with the brilliance of his intelligence, but I knew that in reality it was directed at me. He had taken the measure of my weakness in the way a skilled swordsman thrusts forward so that his novice opponent takes up the guard position, leaving his flanks undefended. The building of the Accademia also had its flanks undefended, and any burglar could assault it at will.
‘I don’t think that is true in my case,’ I said.
‘Take landscape, for example,’ continued Gabetti, who did not even give me a chance to defend myself, working on the ill-mannered principle of simply talking me down. ‘Those experts who claim to understand The Tempest roll their eyes and exclaim in ecstasy: “In this painting we see the invention of landscape! This is the painting in which nature becomes a major element for the first time!” Drivel! The painting of landscape was not invented at one particular moment, it was the result of a very long drawn out process. Flemish and German artists began to develop a taste for exotic backgrounds, and the fashion was soon imported into Italy. The men who commissioned work from Giotto and Mantegna used to insist that their work should incorporate the latest style, and, little by little, the background, which originally was of secondary importance, was elevated to become the main theme of the picture. Look at this Pietà of Giovanni Bellini, for example; it was painted roughly ten years before The Tempest, but in it the background landscape has already acquired an importance that, at the time, was almost irreverent.’
Behind the dead and gaunt figure of Christ, behind the aged Virgin who looked down at him with the classic expression of grief, holding him across her lap and raising his head by a few inches – just as I had raised the head of Valenzin so that he should not choke on his own blood – a city of gleaming chromaticism was depicted on the horizon, in the style of Dürer, its pointed spires rising above the surrounding countryside, its walls surmounted by crenellated defence-works, its churches transfixed by the evening light. We were in a small room, the size of a study, like the one in which Giovanna Zanon had cornered me with the excuse of obtaining my authentication of a Madonna and Child, also by Bellini; a provisional partition that did not reach the ceiling had been erected in the middle of the room, obstructing the view of The Tempest.
‘Voilà, my dear friend,’ announced Gabetti, ushering me through to the other side of the partition with an exaggerated bow. ‘Here you behold the cause of all your hard labour.’
I cannot deny that my first impression, made worse by the light of the torch, a light similar to that in an operating theatre which tended to bleach out the colours, was disappointing. The original of The Tempest seemed to have lost its subtlety of colour, and appeared much less darkened by time, as if photographs gave it a false tenebrismo: the sombre green of the trees had become too even, and the green in the clouds, which in the prints looked as if it was tinged with cobalt, acquired an almost phosphorescent appearance, rather like a neon sign; also, the mother suckling her child had a flesh colour varying between fair and pink and lacking the brownish shade that has persuaded some interpreters of the painting to identify her as a gipsy woman. My disappointment and bewilderment melted away when Chiara said:
‘Of course, a direct light of this kind is altogether wrong for examining a picture properly.’
‘Any sort of light will do for the sort of examination I am going to put Ballesteros through,’ interrupted Gabetti, who was already licking his lips in anticipation of the dressing down he was about to administer. ‘Isn’t that right, my dear friend? Imagine that you stand before a board of examiners who are about to judge your thesis; imagine that Chiara and I are two professors who are unwilling to accept your conclusions; imagine that, in order to convince us, you have to improvise a dissertation explaining the hidden theme that, in your opinion, Giorgione had decided on.’
At that time of the night, his voice echoed throughout the empty galleries, the labyrinth of corners and the blind passages which made up the Accademia. The torch shone on the canvas of The Tempest, distorting its colours, and then it swung round on me in a dizzying, pendular movement.
‘I find this an odd way of going about things. Anyway, if you really want to refute my hypothesis, you will have to work hard,’ I challenged him. I guessed that, behind the torch, Gabetti’s face took on a discouraged look. ‘I am sure you know about the propensity of the gods of Olympus for indulging in incestuous relationships. They knew nothing about the laws of genetics or man-made taboos, and fornicated freely with their daughters, the result of which was a race of defectives. Zeus tried by all possible means to sleep with his daughter Aphrodite, but his sweet words and magic spells were ineffective. Aphrodite would not give in to his attempts at seduction, so Zeus, in order to humiliate her, made her fall in love with a mortal.’
I stopped for a moment, worried that my explanation might be understood by Chiara as a witticism at her expense, but I could not detect any sign of discomfort on her face.
‘Go on, go on,’ insisted Gabetti.
‘Zeus chose as the instrument of his punishment the handsome Anchises, king of the Trojans, who was young and inexperienced – before the Trojan War turned him into an old man who had endured great suffering. One night as Anchises was sleeping in his shepherd’s hut up on Mount Ida, Aphrodite came down to earth dressed as a Phrygian princess, and lay with him on his bed of bear and lion skins. When they parted in the morning, Aphrodite revealed to him who she was, and made him swear to keep their encounter a secret. Anchises was horrified when he learned that he had defiled the honour of a goddess, an indiscretion that was punishable by death, and he implored Aphrodite’s forgiveness. She assured him he had nothing to fear, provided he never broke his oath. She also predicted that his son would be famous and commemorated by the poets. Anchises, carried away by the urge to boast, was not slow to break his word. A few days later, as he was drinking with friends at a banquet, he felt his tongue loosening. They were being served their wine by a very voluptuous girl who would still have been a virgin if Anchises had not exercised his droit de seigneur: although he was a decent fellow he was not one to renounce certain privileges that went with his position. One of his drinking companions spoke warmly of the girl: “Don’t you think that girl is even more desirable than Aphrodite herself?” To which Anchises incautiously replied, “Having slept with both of them, the question seems to me absurd, quite apart from being sacrilegious; Zeus’s daughter is far superior.”’
‘Aphrodite’s stipulation was very unwise,’ said Gabetti, who was leaning against a wall, but still kept the light shining on Giorgione’s picture. ‘We men love to boast of our triumphs; we can’t resist it.’
Chiara’s voice broke in through the darkness.
‘It would be better for everybody if you all practised a bit more discretion.’
I knew she was asking me to keep quiet about what had happened between us – the very little that had happened.
‘Obviously, Zeus was angered by his bragging,’ I continued. ‘If, until that moment, he had been carried away by spite in making his daughter consort with a mortal, the vanity of Anchises made him furious. He hurled a thunderbolt at the Trojan king with the intention of killing him, but his aim was bad, and it only struck him obliquely across the legs.’
‘Even the gods are fallible,’ said Gabetti, with the intention of expunging all solemnity and conviction from my discourse.
‘Partially fallible. The bolt injured Anchises so severely that from then on he could hold himself up only by leaning on a staff. As for Aphrodite, she gave birth to the baby she had conceived with the man who had broken his promise to her, called him Aeneas, and performed all her maternal duties such as breast-feeding the child, but she refused to have anything more to do with Anchises himself. Although the king of the Trojans wept and wailed, begging her to reinstate him in her affection, Aphrodite simply displayed indifference. She had lost all her previous ardour, and in fact she began to feel an aversion for him. It was only a half-hearted aversion, because the gods cannot permit themselves the luxury of emotions that are too effusive.’
Gabetti nodded appreciatively, but it was left to Chiara to draw the right conclusions from my story.
‘The naked woman, then, is Aphrodite suckling Aeneas. Her attitude suggests indifference towards the man who is watching her, and she does not even respond to his look. This could easily be the “half-hearted aversion” to which you alluded.’ I thanked her for seeing what I was getting at, with a discreet smile that had nothing boastful in it. ‘The pilgrim looking so sadly at her must obviously be Anchises, and his stick or staff must symbolise his punishment. Zeus, meanwhile, is discharging his anger from the heavens. In my opinion, Alejandro’s explanation seems very satisfactory. What do you think, Gilberto?’
Gabetti had switched off the torch, as if the objections he was about to make made him feel mean, and in need of the protection of darkness.
‘There is nothing satisfactory about it,’ he began. ‘First of all, it goes against all narrative logic, by which I mean against the natural sequence of events. How can you justify the fact that Anchises is already leaning on a staff when Zeus’s punishment hasn’t even struck him? The thunderbolt is still suspended in the air.’
‘But there is such a thing as iconographic synthesis,’ I protested, and my words resounded loudly through the deserted museum. ‘To take one example, we have looked time after time at paintings that represent Eve reaching up to pick the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge; she has still not yet committed her sin, and yet with her other hand she is trying to hide her nakedness. In other words, we find, all combined in one picture, the fall into temptation and the first consequence of the fall, namely the shame she feels at revealing her naked body. I could give you many other examples; it was a widely used technique, especially in the Renaissance when, in order to meet the requirements of their clients, artists incorporated two complementary scenes – and sometimes more – in one composition.’
Fights between boxers are decided by the weight of blows landed, and I had not flinched under Gabetti’s attacks which had been more fanciful than effective. It was now my turn to take the initiative and deliver the knockout. My opponent was slow to react, and his voice was no longer jaunty or over-confident.
‘I continue to believe that The Tempest does not contain any concrete theme, unless it be a feeling for emotional expression. Its fascination stems from the fact that it defies logic: the curious isolation of the figures, the storm which is brewing but doesn’t quite break.’ His enumeration of these details was designed to mislead, a defensive mechanism similar to that of a boxer who feints, and skips around the ring, trying to avoid an exchange of punches. ‘All right then, if you want to turn it into a puzzle you’ve got to get all the pieces in somehow. The broken columns, for instance, they are an important element in the painting, but you haven’t even mentioned them.’
This time I gave a cruel smile of triumph, which cannot have displeased Chiara, because the darkness that failed to conceal Gabetti’s pettiness allowed my triumph to blaze through.
‘Please, that really won’t do. The broken columns symbolise the love between Aphrodite and Anchises that has been destroyed.’
Chiara intervened at that moment, clearly coming down on my side.
‘Or maybe they could be a portent of the destruction of Troy.’
‘Quite right. Why not?’ I agreed. ‘That would strengthen my theory of the existence of iconographic synthesis: there would not be just two but three different events incorporated in the one picture.’
Although I appeared to have won, I was secretly aware that an unsolved mystery is always more enticing than its solution; mystery brings us close to the supernatural, while its solution is merely mechanistic. I was about to vent my spleen on Gabetti, when I thought I heard footsteps above our heads.
‘What was that?’
Gabetti switched on the torch and played it across the skylight in the ceiling of the room. Outside, the darkness seemed immutable and primordial.
‘Some bird nesting in the rafters. Don’t worry.’
A series of clandestine noises also reached us from the hall. Whoever was making them was trying to be stealthy, but unfamiliarity with the building made him trip on the stairs and brush against the walls. We could almost hear his heavy breathing, caused, probably, more by nerves than effort. I held my breath, and Chiara and Gabetti did the same, all three of us sunk in the unfathomable depths of fear. Possibly Gabetti was the least apprehensive, but it was his job to call belatedly on his courage, since it was he who had been negligent with the security of the museum.
‘I’m going to see what’s happening.’
He left us alone with Giorgione’s picture, alone also with the feelings of anxiety that were entering the very marrow of our bones. Chiara huddled against me, gripping me almost fiercely, hanging on to my raincoat, and pressing her face against mine – my unshaven beard must have been painful on her cheeks. Her body was seized by a fit of trembling, and I could feel her legs about to give way. Gabetti had reached the staircase and was shouting at the intruder: ‘Who’s down there? Who’s down there?’ – as if he was repeating a chant designed to exorcise a phantom. Again, he repeated the words: ‘Who’s down—’ But he was unable to finish the question. We heard a dull metallic noise as the torch fell down the stairs, before his body collapsed like a dead weight.
‘Wait for me here, I’m going to help him,’ I said, half-carrying Chiara over to the relative safety of a wall.
Before I could leave her side the glass in the skylight was smashed into a thousand pieces, and a vague shape pounced on me with a force that made me stagger and fall. The Accademia’s alarm bells began to ring, like the sirens of a factory on night shift, or church bells announcing the end of the world. A man, much more heavily built than I, grabbed me and pressed me down with all the weight of his body. The broken glass of the skylight gashed my back through my raincoat, pullover, and shirt, and tiny splinters dug into my skin – which had not received any prior training in fakirism. My aggressor held my head in both hands and started to thump the back of it against the floor. He had shapeless arms with bulging muscles and the huge hands of a stevedore, hands hardened from unloading bales of merchandise and in trading punches. I was losing consciousness with every blow. But as much as anything to impress Chiara – love inspires an absurd rashness as well as a ferocious competitive instinct – I made a great effort and thrust my hands up to grasp my assailant’s throat in order to strangle him, or at least make it difficult for him to breathe.
The alarm continued to screech, nearly piercing my eardrums, and re-echoing deep inside me like a throbbing tumour every time the back of my head was banged against the floor. With each blow, the splinters of glass from the skylight lacerated my scalp, and I felt as if they were penetrating the bone. Chiara fled, terrified, possibly to call for assistance, or possibly to help Gabetti, or possibly from sheer instinct of self-preservation. If I could have stopped to analyse my state of mind I would have found that it was hatred alone that kept me in possession of my faculties. My aggressor on the other hand gave no sign of distress, and only seemed concerned to finish the job off before the racket of the alarms brought the police in.
‘You bastard, I’m going to kill you,’ he breathed in my ear, in villainous Italian.
His mouth smelled of eucalyptus lozenges, and his filthy hair, which was slightly wavy, fell about his shoulders making him look like an ancient Assyrian warrior. His ear also was filthy, as far as I could make out as I dug my teeth into it. The lobe was pierced by at least two metal rings, and above these I discerned others the size of wedding rings, or small bangles, which had been inserted through the cartilage. I bit with cannibal voracity, and listened to his howl of an animal caught in a trap, while the warm blood spurted into my mouth, the gristle of his ear crunched between my molars, and the lobe was torn away by my front teeth. The earrings had a taste of iron, but it was difficult to distinguish between the flavour of the metal and the flavour of raw flesh. His blood filled my mouth, overflowed it, stuck in my throat, inflamed my gullet. Maybe it was its high alcohol content that intoxicated me with victory. The thug continued to howl, his shrieks even louder than the museum’s alarms, and they only ceased when he resigned himself to the loss of his ear lobe, and broke away from me. He gave a mighty leap which took him up to the skylight, and with a great effort hauled himself on to the roof. It occurred to me that in his flight he would leave a trail of blood that would be slow to disappear, because there was no longer any snow in Venice to absorb it. Still lying on the floor, I breathed in deeply the air filtering through the broken skylight, and spat out the bloody lump of flesh that was caught between my teeth. As I stood up I nearly crashed into The Tempest. My fingers actually touched it, but without damaging it, and I breathed in the smell of oil, which, in spite of five centuries having elapsed since it was painted, retained an almost abnormal freshness. The alarm bells ceased ringing.
‘Are you hurt?’
My eyes were getting used to the dark and I could make out Chiara’s features, which still bore the marks of fear. I felt proud of myself, but was much too weak to have any inclination to show off.
‘Just a few bruises,’ I said, ignoring the blood which matted my hair. ‘And your father?’
The exact relationship between these two was indefinable, but possibly paternity continued to be the appropriate link between them, if only because it encapsulated briefly, and decently, whatever other connections there may have been.
‘He’s all right. He lost consciousness for a few moments, but it was just a fright.’
‘A fright that nearly cost us our lives,’ I snorted. ‘Have the police arrived?’
I shook splinters of glass from my raincoat. As I walked, the floor emitted a rasping music.
‘He’s on the phone to them now, telling them not to come.’
An awkward silence reigned. Surprised, I weakly articulated the words: ‘What do you mean, telling them not to come? Two individuals break into the Accademia with the clear intention of stealing a picture, they assault us, and cause a lot of damage, and you really believe you can conceal this from the police?’
It was impossible to believe that the lips that justified Gabetti’s actions were the same ones I had kissed a few hours earlier.
‘Don’t you understand? If the press get hold of the news that the Accademia was left unguarded they will build up a huge campaign against Gilberto, and insist on his dismissal. Just imagine the shit they’ll throw at him.’
‘No more than he deserves,’ I pointed out, furiously.
Outside the room that had been the scene of my fight, the museum retained its atmosphere of a temple without worshippers. I could just hear Gabetti speaking in some remote office, that voice of his, skilled in prevarication and geniality, diverting the attention of the police, and advising them not to bother to extend their investigations to the area of the Accademia. ‘The alarms went off by accident,’ he professed, with that little laugh of his, the laugh of a plausible crook. I sensed in his words that he was dismissing me, that he was throwing me out. I sensed that his laughter was his way of celebrating my departure. I sensed, with growing regret, that I had ceased to exist where he was concerned – and maybe also where Chiara was concerned.
* * *
‘You can’t be trusted on your own. You’re a right mess – looks as if they tried to crucify you.’
Tedeschi had ordered me to lie face down on the bed on which he took his rest, that stately bed converted into a pig-sty with its fine linen sheets turned into something resembling sackcloth, and made stiff and filthy with dirt and dried urine. There was not even electricity in that abandoned palace which had been selected as the scenario for Fabio Valenzin’s death. The only light Tedeschi had came from an oil lamp that made his features look even coarser than by daylight and shed its oily illumination over the sheets, reducing all the stains to one uniform colour, softening their harshness.
‘Right, get your shirt off. Let’s have a look at those wounds.’
My shirt, slashed by the pieces of glass, was in tatters; it was nothing more than a rag in which the rips matched the gashes on my back, and stuck to the congealed blood like a second skin. Tedeschi stripped it off me with a not very gentle hand, making some of the wounds bleed again, and then he poured a stream of his fortified wine over my lacerated flesh.
‘Hang on, this is going to sting.’
His warning came late because the wine was already running into the gashes, disinfecting them with its high brandy content – not to mention the various germs with which Tedeschi had doctored it, through his saliva. Using a piece of cloth which was undoubtedly innocent of any of the prejudices of preventive medicine, he gave me a stiff rubdown, and with fingers worthy of a market gardener, began to weed out the splinters of glass. I buried my teeth in the pillow, and let him grub around, although I had considerable doubts about the effectiveness of his clinical techniques.
‘All the time I thought you were with Giovanna Zanon fucking the hell out of her, and here you are back with me looking like something the cat brought in,’ he said.
I still possessed a small reserve of humour.
‘And what do you think I’d look like if I really had been screwing that old witch? I’d bet anything she keeps a whip in the closet for beating the shit out of any man she gets into her bedroom.’
‘Well, it must be better to have a good hiding while you’re on the job, rather than a thrashing and no fuck at all, don’t you think? But seriously, Ballesteros, you shouldn’t get yourself into so many scrapes. The best thing you can do sometimes is to just sit tight and wait.’
There were pigeons sleeping in the mouldings of the ceiling, all puffed up, and with their heads beneath their wings, like mutilated monsters awaiting the shot that would awake them, and restore them to their full natural shape.
‘You haven’t done much sitting around either,’ I grunted. ‘Chiara, Gabetti’s daughter, told me you’ve been spying on her. Do you really think it’s right to leave the chest unprotected?’
Tedeschi completed his repairs to my back, and now he dowsed the damage done to the back of my head with another splash of wine.
‘I wasn’t spying on anybody. The fact is people are very suspicious – that girl must have thought I was a rapist or something of the kind, because she didn’t stop running until she’d given me the slip. I also had a snoop round Giovanna Zanon’s palace to see if you were giving any sign of life. Nothing at all. As soon as you get hold of a bit of cunt you forget all about your duties.’ Tedeschi’s coarse accusation made me angry, mainly because the day had not rewarded me with anything of the kind. ‘And there’s one thing we’ve got to do together – or did you think I was going to dredge the canal all on my own?’ The wine had softened the caked blood, and Tedeschi was searching for the gashes in my scalp. ‘Fucking hell, that bastard’s made mincemeat of your head. Does it hurt much?’
‘Christ, what do you think?’ I was beginning to despair of these rhetorical questions. ‘But I got my own back – I don’t think he’ll be wearing earrings any longer!’
I still had the taste in my mouth of the ear I had ripped off. Our voices woke a pigeon which stared at us unblinkingly, with its jet-black eyes.
‘Did you recognise him?’
‘What do you think? It was difficult to see very much. Gabetti had taken the torch with him.’ I spat out a stringy piece of meat which was still caught between two teeth – I did not know whether it was still there from my last meal, or from my brawl in the Accademia. ‘What I do know is that character was new to me; I hadn’t seen him before in my life. He was a big brute with arms like great hams. His breath smelled of eucalyptus and he wore earrings in both ears, and as for his hair, that made him look like a night-club bouncer. It was combed straight back, thick with haircream, shaved close at the sides of his head, and rather wavy.’
Tedeschi removed a dagger-like sliver of glass from the back of my neck, and showed it to me as if it were a gold nugget.
‘Now you’ll have to let your hair grow if you want to hide the scars you’re going to have on the back of your head,’ he maintained, pitilessly. ‘I’ve seen that character. He goes around with another one who is just as tough, except that he has a crew-cut.’
By now he had completed his emergency surgery, which he made clear to me with a playful punch in the face. As I sat up on the bed I had the feeling of having been sewn up, but with sutures that were likely to come apart at any moment.
‘The one with the crew-cut must be the one who met Gabetti on the stairs.’ Like the invalid who takes comfort in the ailments of the man in the next bed, I was pleased that Gilberto Gabetti had received his share of punches. ‘And what do you know about those two?’
The bedroom displayed the same ruined and charmless grandeur that I had had the opportunity of verifying by daylight, the only difference being that the oil lamp added to it the gloom of a wine cellar or a cave. Four or five dead pigeons, blood dripping from their necks, hung from the wall where they were speared on hooks.
‘They met up here once with Valenzin to discuss a deal,’ recalled Tedeschi. ‘Although usually he didn’t want me around, he asked me to be there on that occasion, and also asked me to keep my rifle loaded, just in case. Valenzin always had the wind up when he was dealing with thugs. However brave he was in the swindles he carried out, it melted away when he was faced with a mountain of hard muscle. Those types are the hangers-on of some rich bastard – don’t think they’re working on their own account, they’re as thick as two planks. Like Valenzin they used a sort of jargon that was difficult to understand; they talked about a “thingamy” when they referred to whatever it was they were negotiating about, and they only talked clearly when they got down to figures and the fact that payment would be by instalments. The “thingamy” can’t have been small beer because the figures they bandied about had a lot of noughts in them – the sort of money that’d take your breath away. When these louts left at last, Valenzin told me: “After this one I’m retiring, Vittorio. I really am going to retire.” But he said it without any of the bounce he usually had before one of his big stunts. He also sounded as if he was sorry about what he was up to. I don’t know whether this was because of the thought of retirement, or because he had scruples about it. But I don’t really believe that – Valenzin didn’t bother his head about that sort of thing.’
But I knew that, at least where love was concerned, he did have scruples; I knew that an inner sorrow filled him with a sense of impotence.
‘And you never found out what stunt he was working on?’ I asked, with the despair of someone who holds all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but is unable to join them together. ‘Did you ever find out if he managed to pull it off?’
‘No sodding idea.’ Tedeschi bared his rapacious teeth. ‘Who can say whether Valenzin was planning some sort of double-cross and the rich bastard sent his heavies to settle accounts. But to tell you the truth, I can’t believe Valenzin would be so crazy as to meet up with those characters all on his own, especially if he was planning to con them. You also have to ask yourself what led them to break into the Accademia in that bungling way. There’s probably no one like them when it comes to a punch-up, but they don’t have the brains to crack a museum. You can’t get into places like that by bashing through skylights and creating a racket that’s enough to wake the dead. I felt a bit dozy while I was waiting for you, but the alarm bells woke me up all right. The noise even drove the pigeons mad – the poor things’ll suffer from insomnia after that.’
In contrast to the pigeons, Valenzin’s chest continued to slumber, huddled under the bed, next to the chamberpot that Tedeschi had put back in its place.
‘Have you tried to open it? We might possibly find the explanation inside.’
‘Of course I’ve tried.’ He clicked his tongue, indicating irritation. ‘With skeleton keys, master keys, jemmies; I’ve even tried my gas stove, using it like a blowlamp. But nothing works. All I’ve done is scorch the leather. I decided against using more drastic methods because I didn’t want to risk damaging whatever’s inside.’ He paused for a moment, with an expression of incredulity, or at least suspicion. ‘Assuming, of course, that there is anything inside. It’s always possible that in the end, Valenzin decided against the stunt that was to pay for his retirement, or he gave it up on moral grounds, which may be why those idiots tried to do it themselves.’
The oil lamp emitted a circle of light over the floorboards, and extended the dim glow of its flame as far as the wall, fouling the air with a thick and eye-stinging smoke. In Venice, crime circulates through underground channels, like molten lava distributing its heat to every individual, although it measures the dosage it bestows on each: from bribery to murder, via theft, all the Venetians I had met shared in its warmth. The realisation left me depressed, and downcast. It filled me with the same feeling of dismay that must have assailed Yahweh when he was unable to find even ten good men in Sodom to merit his forgiveness.
‘The problem with you is you’re nuts on that girl of Gabetti, and you’re all screwed up because she won’t come over to your side.’ Tedeschi’s words were very mortifying. ‘What you’ve got to get into your head, my lad, is the fact that you’ve only just arrived here, while she and Gabetti are linked together in all sorts of ways.’
‘Gabetti is a criminal and a menace to society,’ I said, repeating the words I had heard from the lips of Inspector Nicolussi that morning. ‘God knows what tricks he’s getting up to in order to prevent the police investigating that robbery attempt.’
Tedeschi shrugged his shoulders. The flame from the oil lamp picked out the scars on his face, which might have been seen as an X-ray of his soul.
‘If he’s working a fiddle, we’ll soon hear about it,’ he said, with the stubborn impassiveness of countrymen who know from experience that time brings people’s misdemeanours to light in the same way that it ripens fruit and harvests crops. ‘The important thing is nobody should think they’re being watched. Don’t be in too much of a hurry; given time they all reveal their hands.’
They had already revealed them to me, at least in part, but what remained most powerfully in my mind in the midst of so much show was the impression that they were all playing with the same rigged pack of cards, making bids and finesses that hid the tricks they were really out to make. Tedeschi was suggesting I should become a passive spectator of the game, but there were certain matters that made it necessary for a spectator to intervene, in order to steal a march on the duplicities of the various contestants. Maybe I was the least suitable person for this job, because the many years I had spent being a docile and obsequious academic had made me insensitive to certain types of lies, or to the ambiguities implicit in people’s words. I told Tedeschi of the various discoveries I had made during the day, the uncertainties and contradictions of some of the things that had been said; I told him about the conversation I had overheard between Dina and Nicolussi, about Chiara’s sadness, and Giovanna Zanon’s malice.
‘Those two, Giovanna Zanon and her husband, have invited me to a fancy-dress ball they’re giving tomorrow night, to mark the beginning of Carnival.’ I repressed a shudder as I thought of myself wearing a plague doctor’s costume, similar to the one worn by Valenzin’s assassin. In order to ease the strain, I tried to make a joke of it. ‘It means I shall be able to find out if she really does keep a whip in her closet.’
Tedeschi knocked back the last dregs of the wine that remained in the bottle after his extravagant use of so much of it to treat my wounds. He also sat on the bed and started unbuttoning his shirt.
‘Well, just now we’re going to try to find that ring. I always enjoy a good dip.’
His torso was deeply tanned and without an ounce of fat; its lines were broken only by the ripple of powerful muscles. I felt embarrassed by my burden of surplus fat and spare tyres. My paunch was almost as slack and flabby as my understanding of real life. Tedeschi went to the window and scanned the little square, the sole inhabitant of which was the inadequate streetlamp accommodating a whole mortuary of dead insects. The water of the canal lay motionless as it concocted its poisonous brew of sewage.
‘Where would you say it fell, more or less?’
‘Just below the central balcony, in the middle of the canal.’
I recalled the downward trajectory of the ring; my memory clearly retained the image of its descent and even slowed it down, like the trail of a shooting star, before it was swallowed up in the water. Tedeschi leaned on the window-sill to study the terrain. His skin seemed impervious to the cold, as if it was coated with an invisible layer of whale oil. In my case, however, the damp air worked its way into the gashes in my back like vaporous iodine, and sent shivers down my spine. I pulled my raincoat tightly round me, although after my fight in the Accademia it was fit only for the ragman.
‘Let’s go down then.’
He took off his fisherman’s boots which were thickly spattered with mud, and also removed his trousers. He did not wear underpants and his phallus swung between his thighs like a pendant. We walked through the piano nobile, with its perspective of doors of diminishing size, which the darkness of the night made indistinct and like an interminably long corridor. The mirrors did not reflect us, possibly because they had given up their imaging function as a way of repudiating the crimes that had been plotted and carried out in that palace. How easy and convenient it is to close your eyes, how agreeable to let the wax grow in your ears, how gratifying to turn your back and not to lose your self-control, how pleasant it is to shun other people’s quarrels and decline all responsibilities. We went out into the square and, keeping close to the front of the palace, passed along the narrow sidewalk that Fabio Valenzin had followed while the blood poured from the wound in his chest. Before plunging in, Tedeschi stared hard at me.
‘You’re not going to cry off now, are you?’
I knew that it would have been very wrong to change my mind, or back out, now I had got him involved in this extraordinary task. The windows of the Albergo Cusmano were shuttered – a shuttered window is like an unsilvered mirror, or a man who turns his back on you. I imagined that in one of those closed rooms my luggage lay open, and my clothing stiff with cold. I also imagined Dina lying on her back, on her own bed – with all the darkness of the night centred on her pubis. By then she would certainly have discovered the theft of Valenzin’s chest, and her eyes would be huge as she lay there unable to sleep, just as they had been on the night before she murdered her husband – death by suffocation conceals death by poisoning, in the way that snow conceals the obscenity of blood – but then the need to be alert would have given her courage, now the need to be alert would be inspired by a feeling of helplessness, as well as that unavoidable sadness that caged animals suffer from.
‘Me cry off? Certainly not.’
The surface of the water came up to Tedeschi’s nipples and made them erect. His feet would be sinking into the slime at the bottom of the canal, the revolting consistency of which I had experienced a couple of nights before. He ducked down to get his eyes used to the murky water. When he reappeared to replace the air in his lungs, filthy with mud and weed, he reminded me of those Hindu penitents who bathe in the Ganges as a way of purifying themselves, and then return home with the same sins, and a garnish of shit on top. He dived repeatedly, seven or eight times; each dive was shorter than the last because his lungs were beginning to give out, just like my hopes (or fears) for the recovery of the ring. Perhaps the current had carried it away – except that the canal was not subject to currents; perhaps it had rolled all the way to the Adriatic to contract a symbolic marriage with the waves. Or perhaps it had never even existed.
‘I’ve got it! At last I’ve got the little bastard,’ mumbled Tedeschi, rising suddenly from his speleological exploit.
He held it between his rapacious teeth: it was a gold ring, very heavy, and still shiny in spite of having been buried in the filth of the canal. Tedeschi climbed up the bank, streaming with the jubilation that ancient bronze statues display when archaeologists draw them up from the bottom of the sea, and he spat out the ring at my feet. It was an ostentatious piece of work, ostentatious to the point of vulgarity; the seal was very large, even for a thumb, and was deeply chased. As I was about to bend down to examine it more closely, Tedeschi picked it up in his powerful hands. I noticed that his nails were cracked and split from so much scraping around the bed of the canal. With some difficulty, he read the inscription which ran round the chased surface of the ring:
‘Moriatur anima mea cum philistiim. Do you know what that means?’
The fact that Tedeschi was naked did not seem in the least indecent, because there was nobody there to stare at him, either lewdly, or accusingly. I dusted off my half-forgotten smattering of Latin, and translated, guided as much by phonetic similarities as by genuine conviction.
‘Something like: “May my soul die with the Philistines”, but I can’t see that the translation tells us much,’ I said.
‘Why not? Didn’t they make you read the Bible at school?’ he asked, with the exultation that one would expect from a dedicated student of the Scriptures. ‘That was what Samson shouted just before he pegged out. That whore Delilah cut off his hair and handed him over to the Philistines who gouged his eyes out and shackled him to a mill-wheel. Then they hitched him up to the pillars of the palace so that the mob could plague the life out of him, but Samson put his trust in God and he regained his strength. He shook the pillars, and the palace fell down and buried the Philistines. Look at the design on the ring. The reference is obvious.’
He handed me the ring so that I could examine the detail of the design carved in relief which illustrated the inscription: above a masonry wall there were two broken columns, very stylised, and without a base, exactly like the columns that feature in The Tempest, behind the pilgrim. I felt myself disturbed by a dark surge of fright, as its significance became clear.