6

  When Stephen arrived off the airport bus in the Piazzale Roma, he had no idea where to go. The afternoon was chill and grey and empty. He had less than fifteen phrases in Italian and had never been out of Ireland before, and yet with the blind innocence of lovers, imagined he would find his way to Gabriella. He did not have an address for her or the slightest clue other than the name of her old music teacher, Scaramuzza, who he knew might be dead. He stood in the piazzale with his bag and waited until he could sense the unseen canal to his left, and then he crossed to the floating platform to await the vaporetto.

Venice on that January afternoon was unlike the pictures of itself. When the vaporetto came and took him in a steady tugging round the bends of the Canal Grande, Stephen saw the palazzi grimly shuttered against the winter and had a sense of the city turning its back on the progress of time. Greenly brown watermarks lined the lower walls of the buildings; the colour of everything was faded, there was a worn air of enormous fatigue in that winter afternoon, as if some long and brutal enemy had been exhaustively endured and barely defeated, leaving the stonework of the city itself cracked and dismayed in a way that to the summer tourists would seem antique and elegant with grandeur. Still, it was Venice. It was like nowhere else, and as the vaporetto moved down the green waters of the canal, the very frailty of the city, its watery divisions and myriad narrowly bridged islands, struck Stephen as being clearly the city of Gabriella. He could imagine her there. He could imagine the childhood she had described to him in those narrow ochre buildings that rose from the waters. He could see her as a girl and felt in the foolish hopeful way of the romantic that in some way he could heal her past by coming. He leaned on the side rail of the boat and watched the slender street-ways they passed as if he would suddenly see her.

He got off at the Ponte Accademia and found his way with the small tourist map in his guidebook to the Hotel San Stefano. His father had chosen it with the same purpose he had chosen Stephens Green: to remind God to keep an eye on his son.

After Stephen had settled in his narrow room and opened the shutters that looked out on the Campo San Stefano, he got a phonebook and checked the listings under Castoldi. He knew that Gabriella's parents were dead, but imagined that he might find one of her brothers or relations and learn where she was. On a small piece of paper he had written down the phrases he needed.

“Mi scusi, sto cercando Gabriella Castoldi.”

He rang seven different numbers and grew familiar with the exasperated tones of Venetian voices telling him he was calling a wrong number.

“Ha spagliato numero.”

“Gabriella Castoldi.”

“Chi e? Non I'ho mai sentita.”

By the following midday he had called them all.

There was no violin teacher Scaramuzza either.

It rained coldly. He had come ill prepared for the weather and wore a sweater beneath the blue suit his father had made for him while he walked through the chill city looking for her. He began after breakfast. He crossed the empty square of San Stefano, where no pigeons flew, and took different sestieri each time, walking through the labyrinthine alleyways, stopping to read carefully the posters of concert performances, and then pacing on while his symptoms of flu worsened. His nose streamed. The cold made his ears burn and his eyes water. Within five days of pursuit through the puzzle of the city, he was a shattered, wild-looking shell of himself. He imagined the awfulness of chance lurked everywhere, that he might miss the opportunity of meeting her if he stopped somewhere for lunch, that if he rested for the afternoon she might be that very day passing by the hotel. It was the madness of the unrequited, and in the city of Venice for ten days that January Stephen Griffin succumbed to it, walking from morning until night the twisted street system, where the sudden turns and blind alleys might have been invented for avoidance and secrecy.

For ten days Stephen searched for Gabriella. He asked for her and said her name at shops and fish stalls, and then, in desperation, visited damp candlelit churches, where he prayed that he might find her, until at last, his coughs choking in his chest and his body releasing a kind of rheumy film of sweat and anguish, he surrendered, took the vaporetto back up the canal, and returned to Ireland.