‘I come from the city of mazes,’ she said, ‘but if you ask me a direction I will tell you straight ahead.’
We were now in the Kingdom of Italy, and it was her plan to take a boat to Venice, where we could stay with her family until it was safe for me to return to France. In return, she would ask of me a favour and that favour concerned the re-possession of her heart.
‘My lover still has it. I left it there. I want you to help me get it back.’
I promised her my help but there was something I wanted too; why had she never taken her boots off? Not even while we stayed with the peasants in Russia? Not even in bed?
She laughed and drew back her hair, and her eyes were bright with two deep furrows between the eyebrows. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
‘I told you. My father was a boatman. Boatmen do not take off their boots,’ and that was all she would say, but I determined on my arrival in her enchanted city to find out more about these boatmen and their boots.
We were fortunate in a fair passage and on that calm glittering sea the war and the winter seemed years away. Someone else’s past. And so it was that in May 1813 I had my first glimpse of Venice.
Arriving at Venice by sea, as one must, is like seeing an invented city rise up and quiver in the air. It is a trick of the early light to make the buildings shimmer so that they seem never still. It is not built on any lines I can fathom but rather seems to have pushed itself out, impudently, here and there. To have swelled like yeast in a shape of its own. There are no preliminaries, no docks for the smaller craft, your boat anchors in the lagoon and in a moment with no more ado you are in St Mark’s Square. I watched Villanelle’s face; the face of someone coming home, seeing nothing but the homecoming. Her eyes flickered from the domes to cats, embracing what she saw and passing a silent message that she was back. I envied her that. I was still an exile.
We landed and taking my hand she led me through an impossible maze, past something I seemed to translate as the Bridge of Fists and even more unlikely, the Canal of the Toilet, until we arrived at a quiet waterway.
‘This is the back of my house,’ she said, ‘the front door is on the canal.’
Their front doors opened into the water?
Her mother and stepfather greeted us with the kind of rapture I had always imagined to have been the luck of the Prodigal Son. They drew up chairs and sat close by so that all our knees touched and her mother kept leaping up and running out to fetch trays of cakes and jugs of wine. At every one of our stories, her father slapped me on the back and went ‘Ha Ha’, and her mother raised her hands to the Madonna and said, ‘What a mercy you are here.’
The fact that I was a Frenchman didn’t bother them at all. ‘Not every Frenchman is Napoleon Bonaparte,’ said her father. ‘I have known some good ones, though Villanelle’s husband was not such a good one.’
I looked at her startled. She had never said that her fat husband was a Frenchman. I presumed her facility for my language had come with living around so many soldiers for most of her life.
She shrugged, her usual gesture when she didn’t want to explain and asked what had happened to her husband.
‘He comes and goes, like always, but you can hide.’
The thought of hiding the two of us, fugitives for different reasons, appealed enormously to Villanelle’s parents.
‘When I was married to a boatman,’ said her mother, ‘things were happening every day, but the boat people are clannish and now that I am married to a baker,’ she tweaked his cheek, ‘they go their ways and I go mine.’ Her eyes narrowed and she leaned forwards so close that I could smell her breakfast. ‘There are stories I could tell you, Henri, that would make your hair stand on end,’ and she slapped me on the knee so violently that I fell back in my chair.
‘Leave the boy alone,’ said her husband, ‘he’s just walked from Moscow.’
‘Madonna,’ exclaimed she, ‘how could I?’ and she forced me to eat another cake.
When I was reeling with cakes and wine and almost collapsed with exhaustion, she took me around the house and showed me in particular the little grille with a mirror positioned at such an angle as to reveal the identity of any caller at the water-gate.
‘We won’t always be here and you must be sure who it is if you are to open the door. As a further precaution I think you should shave off your beard. We Venetians are not hairy and you will stand out.’
I thanked her and slept for two days.
On the third day I awoke to a quiet house and my room completely dark because the shutters were so tightly closed. I threw them back and let in the yellow light that touched my face and broke in spears across the floor. I could see the dust in the sunlight. The room was low and uneven and the walls had faded spaces where pictures had hung. There was a wash-stand and a full jug, ice cold, and after so much cold and in this warmth, I could only bear to dip in my fingers and rub away the sleep from my eyes. There was a mirror too. Full length on a wooden swivel stand. The mirror was silvered in places, but I saw myself, thin and bony, with a too large head and a ruffian’s beard. They were right. I must shave before I went out. From my window which overlooked the canal I saw a whole world going about in boats. Vegetable boats, passenger boats, boats with canopies covering rich ladies and bones as thin as a knife-blade with raised prows. These were the strangest boats of all because their owners rowed them standing up. As far as I could see, the canal was marked at regular intervals with gaily striped poles, some with boats butting against them, others, their gold tops peeling in the sun.
I threw the filthy water I used along with the remains of my beard into the canal and prayed that my past had sunk for ever.
I got lost from the first. Where Bonaparte goes, straight roads follow, buildings are rationalised, street signs may change to celebrate a battle but they are always clearly marked. Here, if they bother with street signs at all, they are happy to use the same ones over again. Not even Bonaparte could rationalise Venice.
This is a city of madmen.
Everywhere, I found a church and sometimes it seemed I found the same square but with different churches. Perhaps here churches spring up overnight like mushrooms and dissolve as quickly with the dawn. Perhaps the Venetians build them overnight? At the height of their powers they built a galleon every day, fully fitted. Why not a church, fully fitted? The only rational place in the whole city is the public garden and even there, on a foggy night, four sepulchral churches rise up and swamp the regimental pines.
I did not return to the baker’s home for five days because I could not find my way and because I felt embarrassed to speak French to these people. I walked, looking for bread stalls, sniffing like a tracker dog, hoping to catch a clue on the air. But I only found churches.
At last, I turned a corner, a corner I swear I had turned a hundred times before and I saw Villanelle plaiting her hair in a boat.
‘We thought you’d gone back to France,’ she said. ‘Mama was broken hearted. She wants you to be her son.’
‘I need a map.’
‘It won’t help. This is a living city. Things change.’
‘Villanelle, cities don’t.’
‘Henri, they do.’
She ordered me into the boat, promising food on the way.
‘I’ll take you on a tour, then you won’t go missing again.’
The boat smelled of urine and cabbages and I asked her whose it was. She said it belonged to a man who bred bears. An admirer of hers. I was learning not to ask her too many questions; truth or lie, the answers were usually unsatisfactory.
We slid out of the sun, down icy tunnels that set my teeth on edge and past damp worker barges, hauled up with their nameless cargo.
‘This city enfolds upon itself. Canals hide other canals, alleyways cross and criss-cross so that you will not know which is which until you have lived here all your life. Even when you have mastered the squares and you can pass from the Rialto to the Ghetto and out
to the lagoon with confidence, there will still be places you can never find and if you do find them you may never see St Mark’s again. Leave plenty of time in your doings and be prepared to go another way, to do something not planned if that is where the streets lead you.’
We rowed in a shape that seemed to be a figure of eight working back on itself. When I suggested to Villanelle that she was being deliberately mysterious and taking me a way I would never recognise again, she smiled and said she was taking me down an ancient way that only a boatman could hope to remember.
‘The cities of the interior do not lie on any map.’
We passed ransacked palaces, their curtains swinging from shutterless windows and now and again I caught sight of a lean figure on a broken balcony.
‘These are the exiles, the people the French drove out. These people are dead but they do not disappear.’
We passed a group of children whose faces were old and evil.
‘I’m taking you to see my friend.’
The canal she turned into was littered with waste and rats floating pink belly up. At times it was almost too narrow for us to pass and she pushed off the walls, her oar scraping generations of slime. No one could live here.
‘What time might it be?’
Villanelle laughed. ‘Visiting time. I’ve brought a friend.’
She drew in her boat to a stinking recess and squatting on a ledge of precariously floating crates was a woman so sunken and filthy that I scarcely thought her a human at all. Her hair was glowing, some curious phosphorescent mould clung to it and gave her the appearance of a subterranean devil. She was dressed in folds of a heavy material, impossible to place in colour or design. One of her hands had only three fingers.
‘I’ve been away,’ said Villanelle. ‘Away a long time, but I won’t go away again. This is Henri.’
The old creature continued to regard Villanelle. She spoke. ‘You’ve been away as you tell me and I have watched for you while you were gone and sometimes seen your ghost floating this way. You have been in danger and there is more to come but you will not leave again. Not in this life.’
There was no light where we sat huddled. The buildings on either side of the water closed in like an arch above our heads. So close that the roofs seemed to touch in places. Were we in the sewers? ‘I brought you fish.’ Villanelle took out a parcel which the old woman sniffed before putting beneath her skirts. Then she turned to me.
‘Beware of old enemies in new disguises.’
‘Who is she?’ I asked as soon as we were safely away.
Villanelle shrugged and I knew I would get no real answer. ‘She’s an exile. She used to live there,’ and she pointed out a forgotten building with a double water-gate that had been left to sink so that the waters now lapped into the lower rooms. The top floors were used for storage and a pulley hung out of one of the windows.
‘When she lived there, they say the lights never went out before dawn and the cellars had wines so rare that a man might die if he drank more than a glass. She kept ships on the seas and the ships brought home commodities that made her one of the wealthiest women in Venice. When others talked of her, they did so with respect and when they referred to her husband they called him “The Husband of the Lady of Means”. She lost her means when Bonaparte took a fancy to them and they say that Joséphine has her jewels.’
‘Joséphine has most people’s jewels,’ I said.
We rowed out of the hidden city into squares of sunlight and wide canals that hugged the boats eight or nine across and still left room for the flimsy pleasure craft of the visitors. ‘This is the time of year for them. And if you stay till August you can celebrate Bonaparte’s birthday. But he may be dead by then. In that case you must certainly stay till August and we’ll celebrate his funeral.’
She had stopped our boat outside an imposing residence that rose up six floors and commanded a choice place on this clean and fashionable canal.
‘In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.’
Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest.
‘Feel for yourself.’
I felt and without the slightest subterfuge moved my hand up and down. I could feel nothing. I put my ear to her body and crouched quite still in the bottom of the boat and a passing gondolier gave us a knowing smile.
I could hear nothing.
‘Villanelle, you’d be dead if you had no heart.’
‘Those soldiers you lived with, do you think they had hearts? Do you think my fat husband has a heart somewhere in his lard?’ Now it was me shrugging my shoulders. ‘It’s a way of putting it, you know that.’
‘I know that but I’ve told you already. This is an unusual city, we do things differently here.’
‘You want me to go inside that house and search for your heart?’
‘Yes.’
It was fantastic.
‘Henri, when you left Moscow, Domino gave you an icicle with a thread of gold running through it. Where is it?’
I told her I didn’t know what had happened to it, I guessed it had melted in my pack and I had lost the thread of gold. I was ashamed of having lost it, but when Patrick died I forgot to take care of the things I loved for a while.
‘I have it.’
‘You have the gold?’ I was incredulous, relieved. She must have found it and so I hadn’t lost Domino after all.
‘I have the icicle.’ She fished into her bag and drew it out as cold and hard as the day he had plucked it from the canvas and sent me away. I turned it over in my hands. The boat bobbed up and down and the seagulls went their ordinary way. I looked at her, my eyes full of questions, but she only drew up her shoulders and turned her face back towards the house. ‘Tonight, Henri. Tonight they’ll be at the Fenice. I’ll bring you here and wait for you, but I’m afraid to go in in case I can’t bring myself to leave again.’
She took the icicle from me. ‘When you bring me my heart, I’ll give you your miracle.’
‘I love you,’ I said.
‘You’re my brother,’ she said and we rowed away.
We ate supper together, she, me and her parents, and they pressed me for details of my family.
‘I come from a village surrounded by hills that stretch away bright green and spattered with dandelions. There is a river runs by that floods its banks every winter and chokes in mud every summer. We depend on the river. We depend on the sun. There are no streets and squares where I come from, only small houses, one storey usually and paths in between made by so many feet not so many designing hands. We have no church, we use the barn, and in winter we have to squeeze in with the hay. We didn’t notice the Revolution. Like you, it took us by surprise. Our thoughts are on the wood in our hands and the grain we grow and now and again on God. My mother was a devout woman and when she died my father said she was holding out her arms to the Holy Mother and her face was lit up from within. She died by chance. A horse fell on her and broke her hip and we have no medicine for such things, only for colic and madness. That was two years ago. My father still draws the plough and catches the moles that gash the fields. If I can, I’ll get home for harvest and help him. It’s where I belong.’
‘What about your brains, Henri?’ asked Villanelle, half sarcastic. ‘A man like you, taught by a priest and travelled and fought. What will you think about back with the cattle?’
I shrugged. ‘What use are brains?’
‘You could make your fortune here,’ said her father, ‘there’s chances here for a young man.’
‘You can stay with us,’ said her mother.
But she said nothing and I could not stay and be her brother when my heart cried out to love her.
‘You know,’ said her mother, catching my arm, ‘this is not a city like any other. Paris? I spit on it.’ She spat. ‘What’s Paris? Just a few boulevards and some expensive
shops. Here, there are mysteries that only the dead know. I tell you, the boatmen here have webbed feet. No, don’t smile, it’s true. I was married to one that’s how I know and I brought up sons by my previous marriage.’ She poked her foot in the air and tried to reach her toes. ‘In between each toe, you’ll find a web and with those webs they walk on water.’
Her husband didn’t roar and bang the water jug as he usually did when he found something funny. He met my eyes and gave his little half smile.
‘A man has to keep an open mind. Ask Villanelle.’
But she was tight-lipped and soon left the room.
‘She needs a new husband,’ said her mother, her voice almost pleading, ‘once that man’s out of the way . . . accidents happen very often in Venice, it’s so dark and the waters are so deep. Who would be surprised if there was another death?’
Her husband laid his hand on her arm. ‘Don’t tempt the spirits.’
After the meal was over and her father was snoozing while her mother embroidered a cloth, Villanelle led me down to the boat and we slipped black along the black water. She had exchanged her cabbage and urine boat for a gondola and she rowed standing up in their off-centre graceful way. She said it was a better disguise; gondoliers often hung round the grand houses hoping for business. I was about to ask her where she had got the boat, but the words died in my mouth when I saw the markings on the prow.
It was a funeral boat.
The night was chilly but not dark with a bright moon that cast our shadows grotesquely on the water. We were soon at the water-gate and, as she had promised, the house seemed empty.
‘How will I get in?’ I whispered as she tied her boat to an iron ring.
‘With this.’ She gave me a key. Smooth and flat like a gaoler’s key. ‘I kept it for luck. It never brought me any.’
‘How will I find your heart? This house is six storeys.’
‘Listen for it beating and look in unlikely places. If there’s danger, you’ll hear me cry like a seagull over the water and you must hurry back.’