All the lost places, p.22
All the Lost Places, page 22
“What is it?” I asked through gritted teeth.
The old burning in my legs returned, the yearning to stretch them and run, run, run without stopping. But once again, I could not. This time confined not by walls, but by the holy limits of a holy isle, water bordering all around, me a blight upon it.
Those legs carried me into the cloister, courtyard bent on walling me in further. In the center of it, the wilds of hedges pruned into boxy lines. Even in its symmetry, the closest thing to a wilderness I’d seen since arriving here. I welcomed the dark. Plunged into it. Followed the path to the center of the courtyard . . . and fell to my knees.
Gladsome light? Pursuing, relentless, shadowing light—but there was nothing gladsome about this thing that pulled me down until I could smell the spice of the soil, feel the blades of grass upon my palm. In the distance, the singing continued.
“What?” I hissed into the earth. Bowed and ashamed, wishing to both hide from and deeply awake to the fact that I could no longer disappear.
“What is it you want from me?” I wanted to rail and ask of God, wanted to let all the questions loose. Why now? Why, when I was just weeks away from making enough of myself to rectify my wrongdoings? To make things right for the woman who bore me—to rise up and see Daniel Goodman become an actual good man? Why this reckless pursuit, this thwarting of the scales that were so close to being balanced, at last?
This shapeless force that pursued me here, it was either my past . . . or someone who knew entirely about it.
Lifting my face, I winced, swallowed back the hot rush gathering behind my eyes.
Deeper.
The word made no sense. But as a catalogue flipped through my consciousness of all the domes, all the art, all the saints and statues, and gilded everything that surrounded me on every side and made plain my own lack of shine, that was the word that stamped, like an imprint, on my heart.
Go deeper.
But where? There was nothing deeper. Venice had few subterranean levels. What few basements or crypts there were, all flooded.
How could I go deeper?
I picked myself up off the ground. I would not sleep this night and could not fathom what “deeper” meant, or how I was losing my sanity so swiftly in this place.
As I oriented myself to try and find my way back to my room, a soft light came from within one of the doors. It summoned me with its quiet glow, and I heeded the call, passing through one doorway and then another, up a staircase and into a room that reached in every direction. Climbing heights, domed and cross-pointed in its simple white. Length of the floor reaching, unfurling like a carpet until it collided starkly against a massive white wall that seemed to bleed emptiness into the room. As if it had been built solely for the purpose of something—and that purpose was entirely gone now.
Blank canvas.
“Welcome,” a voice said, and I noticed for the first time the monk, seated at a simple table that seemed out of place here. He worked at something with his hands, moving pieces around, arranging and rearranging.
I muttered a thank-you, feeling myself to be an imposter, and looked at the gapingly empty room. “What is this place?”
“Reficere,” the man relished his Latin, continuing his work as he explained. “To remake, to restore. Refectory.”
“The—dining hall?”
“Once upon a time, yes. Though built as much to house a work of art as a host of hungry men.”
I studied his work, recognizing the pieces of a mosaic in progress. Watching him turn a piece meticulously, search for another whose broken lines seemed made to match.
“Is it difficult art?”
“Difficult?” The man considered. “Mosaic . . . it is the art of empty spaces. Broken things, harvested as treasure and pieced together into something entirely . . . different. Old, but new. Broken, but whole.”
I gulped, and he looked up for the first time.
“Perhaps you know this art?”
I did not answer. Reached for a question to fill the silence. “And this is the art this place was built for?”
He laughed. “No,” he said. “Napoleon took it upon himself to take that particular work with him.” He gestured at the achingly white wall. “This space was filled entirely,” he said. “The scene of the great wedding feast, water turned to wine. It was too large to carry. So did they leave it here?”
The answer was heavy in the air.
“They sliced it. Piece by piece, carried it away to Paris where they stitched it back together with needle and thread. Piercing it with holes to make it whole.”
I felt the words piercing me too. “It . . . seems a shame,” I offered lamely. “For this space to just sit, empty.”
The man raised his brows in musing, continuing his work. He tipped his head to the left, then the right. “Forsi forse. Empty places . . . are not always lost places.”
The question clawed up my throat, determined to get out. An empty place lived inside me. And it seemed entirely, irretrievably lost. “H-how so?” I tried to sound nonchalant. But he looked up. Saw what I knew to be desperation in my eyes.
“Think of them,” he said. “The tomb, empty upon the third day. The cross, empty. Even the seams between these tesserae.” He gestured at the mosaic pieces. “Why are they empty?”
I shook my head.
He leaned in. “Life,” he said, and even in a whisper, the word echoed. “They make way for new life.”
“What—” I forced the words out, the question feeling entirely too tied to myself. As if I had been stitched to that sliced-up painting so far away. “What will become of this place?”
His silence was troubling. “Who can say?” he said at last. “It has been a refuge for exiles—Medici included. It has been a place of prayers. For a great many years now, there have been only few of us here, allowed to stay and keep this place in some small way, and to watch on as so much of the monastery has been transformed from a home for our brotherhood to a garrison for the brotherhood of soldiers. From a place that housed beauty and prayer to walls around weapons when our books and treasures were stripped away. One can only hope . . .” He trailed off, dark brows furrowed, hands moving pieces of clay pots and bits of glass into the form of a radiating sunrise over a mountain. “So I come, in the dark, to piece together things of hope from things of destruction.” The scrape of mosaic-upon-table passed a few moments.
I watched his hands move, my fingers aching, for the first time in many years, to move pieces—and make something. Perhaps I could no longer create something from nothing . . . but watching this man, his work of transformation, restoration, stirred something nameless deep within.
“Pictor Imaginarius,” he said, gesturing at me.
I was no Latin scholar, but knew enough to roughly translate that neither of those words applied to me. I could not imagine.
“Would you like to try? You seem to have the eye of an artist, a designer of images. Pictor Imaginarius.”
As if he had reached into my own past, harvested the broken bits, rearranged things, and offered them back to me.
And all I had to do was open my hands and accept.
But all I knew was the blank canvas.
Stammering an excuse and a thanks, I exited in a daze, feeling my own edges frayed like the canvas of that sliced painting. The edges of those broken pieces, moved by a master’s hand, until they uncannily matched together.
27
The Book of Waters
A Friend
In all his life, for all the richness of family he had been blessed with, there was one thing Sebastien had not known.
The gift of a friend.
Someone who was not tied to him by family but put up with him anyway. And more than put up with him, somehow . . . understood him.
In the days that followed, Sebastien became guide to Mariana. Venturing only to the henhouse the first day and making for her a place in the sun nearby where she could watch the feathered friends and be cheered.
The next day, strengthened by that sun, they ventured farther. First to the old stone arch that welcomed visitors over the seawall and onto the island, where she sat with bare feet dipped into the waters and smiled.
Then, on to the cattail forest. Where he asked after her story, how she had ended up in a boat in the lagoon, alone. She looked sheepish.
“I was never supposed to venture so far,” she said, and spoke of a favorite teacup she had rescued from the rubbish bin as a child. It was chipped and discarded but depicted a ship upon a wild sea. “I used to wonder where that ship was going.” There was a long pause. “My future is . . . There is not much in the way of wondering.” This, said somberly, but with determination. “And so I determined that I should at least venture out in a boat once, before all is said and done. I owed it to that little girl who used to live so far from the sea.
“And so I convinced my . . . my guardian that I could row the Grand Canal, perhaps also the Giudecca, and return safely. He has instructed me in many things over the years, and after much convincing”—she laughed—“much, much convincing, he allowed it. He was away when I departed, or he never would have agreed to let me go with the sky looking as it did. But I . . . rather welcomed it.
“So much so that I lost track, the lagoon pulling me farther and farther. It was foolish and yet—I wouldn’t go back. And then I couldn’t go back, for the storm pulled me farther than I ever intended.” The fear she must have experienced etched in her expression, until she looked around at the emerald sea of cattails. “And then it brought me here,” she said, her voice much brighter.
Mariana changed the course of conversation, coaxing from Sebastien accounts of his youth hiding among these rushes as if they were a fortress. “Hiding among the rushes,” she said, laughing. “Like Moses.”
At which he fell silent, not knowing how to tell her he quite literally had been found in a basket upon the waters.
She did not miss the odd shape of his silence and asked after it. Putting his story into his own words for the first time, Sebastien watched his tale meet first with puzzlement, and then with growing wonder.
“Giuseppe says I missed my fate by a mere six meters,” he said, finishing the tale.
“Do you wonder what would have happened? If you had drifted to the orphanage instead?”
“Sometimes,” he said, and grew serious. “But if I wonder that, I have to wonder about all of the other possibilities too. What if I had never been placed in the basket? What if the basket had not kept out water? What if a wind had carried me the other direction, out into the lagoon and out to sea?” He shook his head. “The wondering . . . If I let it, it could swallow me up, and then where would I be? Still here, but blind to all I’ve been given. No . . . It’s not a ‘what if’ that visits me.”
“What is it, then? I can see a question at your back. It follows you like a shadow.”
He couldn’t articulate it. The three words that followed at his heels felt like a part of him. He was ashamed that it still afflicted him—and perhaps more than that, didn’t know what he would be without that question, so much a companion had it become. Who am I?
Right now, he was here, with what seemed to be a friend.
In the days that followed, it was Mariana who became guide to Sebastien. Asking questions that channeled into the depths. Receiving, with her kind smile, whatever it was he had to say. Offering opposing views sometimes, agreeing views at others, and making the world an altogether fascinating place.
Friendship, he began to see, was something of a miracle. Built in the smallest of stitches, like Valentina’s lace. Each stitch a word, a look, the offering of a hand to help on unsteady ground. Small and almost imperceptible, these stitches, but all together . . . they wove a garment that wrapped a heart. Made one feel less alone and suddenly, somehow, visible.
As Mariana gained strength, they ventured farther from home on their expeditions, that cloak of friendship growing stronger by the day. . . .
———
Mariana was unsteady on her feet at first. She was clad in a simple frock of green that Elena had produced from a trunk and offered with curious care, as if the garment itself—even in all its island simplicity—was a treasure. It was the color of emeralds, and in it, Mariana seemed part of the island as she and Sebastien approached the ruins all covered in vines. Her long hair hung in gentle golden waves, all the way to her waist, and when she turned to peer over her shoulder, her sapphire blue eyes met Sebastien’s in a question.
“Signor Sebastien,” she said tentatively.
He would have laughed at the foreign and formal use of signor. It had never been used with his name—for he was a shadow in Venice. There to serve, and not be seen, by those who would be called signor.
But the phrase of respect tumbled off her tongue without a second thought, and the thoughtful pause that followed was so full of question, Sebastien would not intrude with a correction.
“How . . . or rather, why . . . is this place so hidden? I had thought this island abandoned, you see. I didn’t know any buildings survived here. The vines and shrubs do not reveal that there is such . . .” She ran her hands along the door of the old abbey, lowering her voice in hushed reverence. “Treasure.”
Her question sparked another in return. “You thought of our island?” It surprised Sebastien, for theirs was an obscure isle in the lagoon—not large or brimming with industry and inhabitants, such as Murano or Burano or even the Lido.
Mariana paused, as if deciding how to answer that, how much to say. “I am a student of Venice,” she said carefully. At the name of the city, she cast a furtive glance in its direction to the south. She furrowed her brow and shifted to face Sebastien entirely. “From my balcony, and with my telescope, there is very little that I cannot see. Islands, churches, bridges, boats . . .” Her smile creased with a fondness that ran captivatingly deep. Her love for this place, quiet, strong, abiding, was palpable. “I even know which gondoliers prefer which routes through the canals. In fact . . . I know it isn’t likely, but have you any brothers who ply the oar by trade?”
When Sebastien didn’t answer, she shook her head. “No, of course not,” she said. “It was silly of me to ask.” But then, with an examining sideways look at him, she asked, “Or a cousin, perhaps. Or very young uncle?”
“I have no such uncle or brother or cousin,” Sebastien said.
She looked wary, disbelieving. She began to walk slowly around the circle of stone seats. Steps slow, pausing to lay a hand on each of them. Sebastien’s footsteps followed, keeping the table always directly in between them so that he could see her, and she, him. She paused at the lone remaining wall, peering through its circular window.
“Not even him?” She pointed, and he joined her. Through the tangle of ivy growing over the outside of the wall, a fishing boat passed far from the shore, its solitary occupant studying the island.
It was strange. They rarely had anyone come so close or take such interest in their humble world. Sebastien narrowed his eyes, for there was something familiar about the way the man stood, though he could not make out his features. Foreboding trekked up his spine, and he could feel Mariana’s careful study of him.
“Not even him.” Sebastien shook off the odd sense for her benefit. “Probably just someone out to see Torcello.” The man drifted off, his gaze lingering too long for comfort in their direction, then disappearing around the bend.
“There is a gondolier who I sometimes see from my terrace. I’ve seen him only a few times, but the way you stand—and the way he stands—” She shook her head. “You’re very alike. Your faces too. I’ve never seen the boatman near enough to say with certainty, but—you’re sure you haven’t a twin?”
“I have no twin,” he said. “Or rather—I suppose it is possible, given the circumstances of my birth, but in all my years in and around La Serenissima, I’ve had the very good fortune to never encounter my own replica.”
His quip earned a smile that reached Mariana’s eyes, but it was quickly followed by a look of disappointment and puzzlement. He could no longer withhold her answer in good conscience, when it was his to give.
“Unless, of course, you count the reflection I discover in those dark canals whenever I am about my own work as a gondolier.”
Her attention snapped to him, eyes alive with surprise and scolding. “You, a gondolier? But . . . Venice is there”—she pointed to the south—“and you are here.”
“Right you are,” he said, reaching for the best way to satisfy her quite valid queries about this discrepancy, without opening the carefully sealed place where he kept his own unanswered questions. “I . . . have been very fortunate to grow up under the tutelage of some of Venice’s most accomplished artisans—and a gondolier, which he would proclaim is an art form too. He apprenticed me as a child and gave me my own Arte del Gondoliere.” He named the school that trained in history, landmarks, rowing in the style of Voga alla Veneta.
“The artisans are a dying breed, some say.”
“Sadly, there aren’t so many as there once were. But I can attest that though I am but an understudy to many of them, there is talent and craftsmanship enough to last far, far into the future, and it draws its strength and tradition by reaching far, far into the past. The hundreds of bridges in Venice, they are not the only bridges here. That’s what Elena has always said. The artisans are living bridges, and so much more.”
“But what you say makes no sense,” Mariana said. “These trades and arts, are they not passed down within families? Does not a man dedicate his life to the one art which shall be his? Are there not scuole in which to study, and guilds to which loyalty is owed, and standards, codes, oaths . . .” The mystery of it all teetered on the pause before her final question. “How is that you belong to so many?”
“Simple,” Sebastien said, though the answer was anything but simple. “Each of them is my family.” He went on, explaining his seasonal migrations among the isles and canals, the trades and arts. “They are the ones who took me in when I was a child. It is unorthodox, a guild that crosses trades and encompasses so many.” He gestured at the empty stone seats they continued to slowly circle. “But that is what makes them . . . remarkable. One of many things.”
