Butterflies haunt this garden even in the cold months, the dark tops of trees smudged by a pale flutter of wings. Valentine thinks now of netting a roomful of them: When he finds Mimosina Dolcezza he will lead her there and let a million wings caress her before he touches her with a single finger or his lips. He shrugs away such thoughts immediately. He is here to avenge Tom, and further the business of the nostrum. Somehow he lets loose of consciousness, weaving plans for the bottled liquor.
Seconds later he is roused by a dangerous pounding. He is in the instant on his feet, dagger in hand and running to face his attacker. The hammering continues, and he flings open the door, to find no one waiting for him. Still bleared with sleep, still naked, he runs down to the garden. The vicious knocking seems to be coming from outside.
When he bursts into the garden, he sees the ground inexplicably glittering with stones like the diamonds he rained upon Mimosina Dolcezza.
He lunges all around himself with the sword, which strikes small hard objects but no human assailant.
Someone is attacking him with small, sharp missiles. They are landing on his goose-pimpled arms and neck where they commence immediately to melt.
His eyes adjust to the darkness. And then the revelation comes. There is no enemy here. It is yet another of Venice’s mystical phenomena: a hailstorm of a kind he has never seen before.
For the hailstones are not the crumbled pearls of his normal experience but large pointed shards of ice. They resemble nothing more than arrowheads or small daggers.
He glances up to see if he has been observed. It seems no one has woken in his own building. He spins around to look up at the window of the lovers. It, too, is blank.
Now that the shock is lessening, the cold has begun to sting his skin. He creeps inside and up the stairs, praying that no one has seen him at his ignominious work.
It is only when he reaches the warmth of his room that he notices the two streaks of black flowing down his breast. Two of the hail shards have struck him so hard that they have drawn blood.
In the full light of morning he mourns the hailstorm’s massacre of butterflies in the garden. Their corpses are everywhere, wetly smashed.
The couple in the Sotoportego de la Pasina haunts him.
During the day he comforts himself by denigrating their congress. He tells himself that he has witnessed yet another commercial transaction in this city where everything is for sale, and got up beautifully for a higher price. Her extravagant sighs and his Olympic postures are only what has been paid for, thinks Valentine, when he cannot avoid thinking about them.
But the next night he is pressing his nose against the window again, watching the same couple at their same sports, and he is forced to acknowledge a mutual passion, and yet more convincingly, a curiosity, that makes him conclude that they are real lovers. They are playful as otters and just as supple, but the looks they exchange are deep. Twice, he has witnessed the man weeping solely at the beauty of his mistress’s proffered thighs, and once, feeling more of a voyeur than at any other moment, he has seen the woman kiss her lover’s closed eyes.
From that night onwards he makes nightly trips to his window to watch over them. Yes, he is jealous, but he’s also taking succor. The incredible optimism of Valentine Greatrakes has yet again burrowed to the surface of his mind, against all the odds that in this moment comprise the deafening silence and inexplicable absence of Mimosina Dolcezza. Each act he watches is a promise of what she and he shall some day share once more. He wishes the couple well. He thinks of them indulgently. When they finally sleep he watches over them, to make sure that no harm befalls them.
He even makes them a present, as he cannot offer one to Mimosina Dolcezza. He sets the bemused truncheoni to catching the surviving butterflies in the walled garden, and cannot stop chuckling when he sees the lumbering balletics of these human Alps armed with tiny nets. It’s good to laugh; it unrolls the tightness of his belly. And when they have caught a dozen of the little beasts, he puts them in a large glass jar decorated with cupids, its lid pierced with holes.
The following dawn, he leaves the jar outside the door of the house where the lovers sport. He does not know if they will find his gift or not.
For him, it is enough to have made it.
• 4 •
A Cataplasm of Herrings
Take white Bryony Root new digged up (or if it be dried, then the powder of it) 2 ounces; black Soap 3 ounces; Pickled Herrings (or Anchovies) 4 ounces; Salt 1 ounce and a half, mix.
It’s to be bound to the soles of the Feet, and changed every 12 Hours, and is chiefly used where the Febrile Matter assaulting the Head, and oppressing the Spirits, causeth a Stupor or Sleepiness.
The lovers of the sotoportego are exceptionally active the next night, as if by way of acknowledging his gift. Valentine does not even pretend to sleep. Pressed against the window, he sees soft golden flickers swooping around their candle, and realizes that they have released the butterflies in their room.
His night broken by the couple, he is fit for nothing the next day.
Valentine takes a morning walk to the square and settles sleepily at a table that gives a vantage all over the Piazza. He orders coffee and fritelle, and, as an afterthought, an ale. His feet are raw swollen, distorted with blisters. Carriageless Venice always performs this assault upon his soles, and yet every time he forgets to take precautions. His nights standing at the window do nothing to relieve the damage. Fortunately Dizzom has inserted into his baggage a flask containing the efficacious Cataplasm of Herrings. Tonight he will bind up his feet with this paste, which has none of its boasted effects upon the brain but does in fact operate magnificently on sore feet.
Valentine aligns himself lizard-like in the winter sun, stretching out the afflicted parts. His feet may hurt but his cough has gone, the sore throat likewise vanished. He can feel all his hunched atoms stretching and opening out to the magnificent, imperious rays. In London he never thinks about the sun. Sometimes a rainbowed stripe of it passes across the newspaper he’s reading. On rare days the sunstruck Thames hisses blinding sparklers at him as he walks over London Bridge. It soon passes. And even if the sun shines on London, the chances are that it will not fall upon Valentine Greatrakes. He lives his life in the depository, in the vaults of bonded warehouses, inside carriages, theaters, and bedchambers. The sun rarely touches him there—but here in Venice he feels well handled by it. It is his companion wherever he goes and even when it sets, he knows that it has sealed a promise of its return inside his bones.
It’s as well that there’s sun, for nothing else offers to throw light on his dilemmas.
So far his inquiries about the actress have produced disquieting results. At the mention of her name, friends look searchingly into his face.
“Ma caro, come mai chiedi?” Why do you want to know?
When they read the eagerness in his eyes they grow sad, with that instant facility all Italians have for tragedy. They pat his hand with tender sympathy and say, “Clearly she’s no longer here. We must find you another woman.”
This is universally judged the safest way to respond to Valentine Greatrakes, as if his partiality for this particular actress will now automatically shift to another object of a similar shape. No matter that he protests, “But she just came back from London!” The reply is always the same, conclusive: “However, my friend, apparently she is no longer here.”
And the way forward to other questions is thus also blocked, delicately and firmly. An actress who is not available to perform is easily replaced with another lax-fibered lady. The names of other actresses are offered. Valentine burns with a cruel embarrassment. How much has he betrayed himself with these questions? He has compromised himself for nothing: There remains an utter malnutrition of information about her.
The truncheoni are sympathetic. They bring him flower girls, fish-girls, pastry girls, pigeon-roasting girls, seam-sewing girls, and are bemused when he sends them all away. They knew him once as a m
ost cheerful and vigorous fornicator, but now he just wants to droop about moonishly alone. In desperation they bring him a pouting little boy for it is well known in Venice that Englishmen disappointed in the female gender do sometimes incline toward the more robust pleasures of their own. But Valentine shows every spitting sign of outrage when he understands what the boy is for, and is heard to utter a number of terms that even Englishmen (of the salubrious suburbs, that is) would fail to understand.
After four weeks he has lost faith in his ability to simply happen upon the actress in Venice, even here in the Piazza where there are women of her height and shape and coloring to be seen everywhere. Some of the whores are superbly dressed but look saucily. The noblewomen are little different.
Now, sitting in San Marco, Valentine realizes that the parade of female flesh that passes him interests him less than the pigeons. He thinks that, unlike himself, the pigeons have a plan. From above, he is sure, the lacy trails of their droppings spell out messages for other, descending pigeons. There is something ineffably ironic in their curtseys. They follow certain humans with a clear satirical intention, mimicking important walks and snickering among themselves. At the edge of the Piazza, when their quarry mounts the shallow steps to depart, the pigeons turn and mince back to their compatriots, chortling, “Hey! That was a good one, was it not? Did you see that?”
After three sharp ales, ill-advised at this time of the morning, Valentine is somewhat in his altitudes. He knows that if he rises he will be struggling like a newborn gazelle, good meat for the pigeon parodists. Better to stay here a while longer.
A body could sit himself down in a worse place than San Marco square, after all.
Valentine smiles to himself. The downward-slanting eyebrows leap upwards, his jaw draws skyward as a laugh breaks out of him. People turn around to look at the handsome Englishman. Some women look wistful, wishing to share the cream of his joke. But Valentine sees none of them. The fact is that the comic portraits painted by the pigeons have given him an idea.
It is the nature of Valentine Greatrakes that he cannot allow a door to close without the light of another beckoning at him. He has just remembered that after his last visit (the last visit but one, he reminds himself) Tom raved of a portrait painter in Venice, an artist able to capture the essence of lovemaking on the skin. This wonder is a young woman, and of a noble family, who has been a lover of Casanova’s. She is in extreme request with all the nobility and beautiful women of the town.
Surely any woman in the flame of her youth would want a portrait to remind her of it? It seems a stroke of genius to Valentine, that he has recalled even the name of this Cecilia Cornaro, who must at this very moment keep in her studio sketches, if not—dare he hope?—an unfinished portrait, of Mimosina Dolcezza. The actress herself might even now be reclining on a divano while the painter takes her likeness at an easel. He leaps to his suffering feet, ready once more for work. All day, between his appointments and inspections in the cause of the Venetian nostrum, he muses on the idea of the portrait, and the more he thinks upon it the more he likes it.
An image surfaces in his mind, painful to recall. For he suddenly remembers how, so many weeks before, he and Mimosina Dolcezza had come upon an ambulant maker of portraits, who had set up his easel on the frozen Thames. Observing the man’s skill and delicacy—and not insensitive to his blue hands and thin face—Valentine had begged the actress to have her likeness captured.
Laughing, she had refused, and had suggested that he donate a little something to the starving artist in any case. He thought nothing of it at the time, except that it was yet another manifestation of her modesty and generosity.
But now he recalls her words, and they clout him achingly.
She said: “I would not leave you with a ghost of myself to console you.”
His duties with the Venetian nostrum occupy him until evening, when he makes another pilgrimage to the San Fantin theater, just in case: The Venetian casts are liable to change at any moment.
All through another performance of Armida Abandoned, he muses on this morning’s idea. Even as he leaves the fruitless theater, his pace is quickening. When the show is over, with not a sight of Mimosina Dolcezza, he calls to a gondolier and asks to be rowed immediately to the studio of Cecilia Cornaro.
It is all he needs to say: Tom was right—she is known to the gondoliers and therefore to everyone. The gondolier raises his eyebrow not at the request but at the late hour. Valentine chooses to find such punctiliousness trivial. A great artist, like a great businessman, surely keeps all hours, lest something unexpected be inadvertently lost.
And indeed, as they cross the water, the gondolier points out in the distance the milky splash of a chandelier aglow inside an upstairs window. Her studio turns out to be a magnificent palazzo on the Grand Canal, approached through three marble arches by the jetty.
The weather is mild. The air rustles against his cheek like a silk handkerchief. The moon dips in and out of clouds, foreshortening and lengthening the view. The studio of Cecilia Cornaro sometimes seems a breath away, sometimes a mile. All around them the night has flattened the façades of the palazzi, and the blackened arches of their water gates seem like the flicked tongues of enormous sea monsters lurking just below the water’s surface. A paunchy moon slaps clumsy brushstrokes of light across the canal.
The gondolier curses suddenly. The boat chops over a hidden obstacle, and is jostled from all sides with light nudges as if from large, hard-bodied fish. Blinded by the light from the artist’s windows, Valentine cannot at first make out what has happened. His eyes adjust to the lesser glow of reflections in the water, and he beholds a most extraordinary sight.
Someone, perhaps as a joke, perhaps as a living kind of poem, has released upon the water a full tide of masks. All around him bob the half-faces and feathered headdresses of papier-mâché people, all borne so swiftly on the current that it appears as if a strange aquatic tribe swims in formation down the Grand Canal, each on his or her back, empty eyes staring up at the moon.
Valentine chooses not to take this phenomenon as a warning, but an omen to the good. A hundred faces have forthrightly offered themselves to him, he thinks, a picturesque and romantic gesture: surely he shall—now this minute—find the one face he wants.
Leaping to shore, Valentine gazes up at the candlelight dancing in the black window panes. Yes, it is all as he imagined! He is so close to finding his mistress that it is almost laughable. He hoots with mirth, and the departing gondolier turns back to look at him strangely. The man cannot possibly understand: She must be in there, even now, her head held delicately in classic three-quarter posture, her unringed hands demurely in her lap.
He finds the water steps and hurtles up them, panting not just from exertion but with the emotion of this reunion. Should he gather her in his arms immediately? Should he simply stop at the door and give her a look that shoots through the heart? He is even thinking: I shall have myself inserted into this magnificent portrait. Cecilia Comoro shall paint us together, touching along every line of our bodies.
At this vision, of a matrimonial sort of portrait, he suddenly pauses on the penultimate step of the jetty. It is an absence of such trappings that has driven his mistress away from him. He will not be given a second chance. If he offers such a thing now then he must mean what it indicates.
Such a surge of joy constricts his heart, that he can feel the tracery of blood vessels rubefying. He takes another step upwards. The loneliness of the last forty days, of his whole life on earth, when Valentine thinks about it, is about to be terminated. So what does it matter if their lives are practically alien, one to the other? They have the rest of their allotted time to make up the discoveries.
Again he stops dead, stubbing a blistered toe against the last step.
Why not? It is exactly what he wants. In the last few seconds a sizzling marriage-fever has come upon him, and he knows it can be cured only by a nightly application of her skin against his,
and the lullabying of her sleep-sighs, and the surety of her company in the morning, every morning, until the end of his days.
If he cannot live unmarried to Mimosina Dolcezza, then he must be married to her. In the silent archway, in front of the swift silent water, he can hear just two things: his own hurried heartbeat and a banknote in his pocket that is crackling with the involuntary jitter of his legs. Crit! Snick! With each move, it sizzles with crude venality against his thigh. How can he get to his knees with this infernal noise as his accompaniment? He whips out the banknote and throws it into the canal, only too late remembering that it is a large one.
In the androne, the lanterns are swinging as crazily as his heart, their facets spreading roving contagions of black and white spots over two grandiose statues of men larger than life and caught in mid-swagger. The first and second doors are firmly closed against him but the third opens smoothly at a touch of his finger.
In a moment he is halfway up the palazzo stairs, biting his tongue with the effort of remembering to breathe. His hands prickle and he would swear he can smell gunpowder. When he bursts into the room, he immediately goes down on his knees, closes his eyes the better to concentrate, and clasps his hands together, preparatory to asking the all-important question, to which the answer is surely a foregone and happy conclusion.
Will you have me, then?
When he looks up he finds he is in a room lined floor to ceiling with love-flushed painted faces. Dilating among them are two living visages, those of a large striped cat and a small brown-eyed girl of about seventeen years, with voluminous auburn hair. The cat regards him with polite interest, and the girl wipes her beautiful but color-stained hands on a cloth, while looking at him with an avid and undisguised curiosity.
She is not Mimosina Dolcezza.