All the lost places, p.9
All the Lost Places, page 9
Again, I didn’t know how to answer, but I was learning the man did not require much from me in the way of conversation. Indeed, it seemed he had raised himself internally to a boil, the pleasant but vehement popping of bubbles escaping in the form of words.
“Ah.” He swatted away the word like a fly. “But we are long done with Napoleon. You haven’t come for history lessons, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Yes?!” Up went the lines on his forehead.
“Well, not precisely, but I wouldn’t mind—”
Again he waved. “You are right. A new century has begun, and you are here to see it, young man. Not our history books.” He assessed me again, and this time one brow furrowed, while the other rose in tentative approval.
“I am Jacopo,” he said, and offered a grin that seemed to seal us as friends. “And what is your name?”
“Daniel,” I said. “Daniel Goodman.”
At this, he flung his face to the evening sky and released a laugh rolling with gravel and gusto.
My face burned, and I was thankful again that there was no one else aboard. I knew the irony of my last name, but how could this man know . . . ?
“Daniel!” he said, and this time his punctuating finger jabbed in my general direction. “In the city of lions!” His laugh waned as he shook his head, though his grin remained.
“I’m afraid I don’t take your meaning,” I said.
“Look around you, Daniel Goodman. There—” He pointed at a door knocker as we passed it, shaped like a lion with the gold ring hanging formidably from its mouth. “And there.” He slowed as we passed a statue in a courtyard—campo, I’d learned—a pair of lions stood guard at each side of an iron gate. One of them had his mouth open, a most formidable mail slot.
“And . . .” The man lifted his chin toward a bridge, where a scarlet flag hung from its railing. The flag was stitched in gold to depict a winged lion, sword raised in his great paw. The fabric rustled a caution as we approached, the tassel-like ends of it rippling one after another like fingers.
Despite myself, I gulped.
“Ha! It is alright, Daniel Goodman. Remember the fate of Daniel, after all. And I think you will find that your name is a most loved name in our city too. But all in good time, for there is much to learn here. Venice is history come alive! So. Daniel Goodman.” He said my last name as if it were two words—good man. It fell as a reminder that this was a chance to live up to that name for once. “Where are all of your trunks?”
I cleared my throat, looking at my lone black bag, which contained all my worldly possessions. “This is it.”
He released a low whistle. “You are like the monks, then. Is that why you wish to stay with them?” He knew my destination was the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, where an ancient monastery would be my home for the next month. “What other call has brought you to our most serene city?”
I cleared gravel from my throat and shaped the unfamiliar word into life: “Business.”
“You are a . . . let me think . . . banker?”
I shook my head, holding back a dry laugh at the irony of that.
“An ambassador, then.”
Again, no.
We entered a stretch of wider sea—or canal, rather. “The Giudecca Canal,” he explained. “It separates Venice from your monastery island, and beyond that? The open lagoon.” He nearly whispered the last three words, infusing the expanse surrounding the city with a sense of mystery not naturally belonging to the word lagoon. “Now. If you are not a banker or an ambassador, you must be a writer. They are a strange breed, you know.” He rounded his dark eyes as if describing a fabled sea creature that occupied the deeps. He assessed me up and down again, then gave a decisive nod. “Your Mark Twain was here not so very long ago.”
I laughed. “I’m no Mark Twain. And I’m no writer.” I had read Mr. Twain’s account of this place and was having trouble reconciling what I saw to his description of a place without poetry, needful of the moon to cover over its blemishes.
The buildings were old, certainly, and parts of them stained as Twain said. But the scars bore tales, and the tales bespoke depth. It held more than poetry. It held . . . hope.
Jacopo’s impassioned love for the city depicted a place very much alive. “So, what do you do here, then?”
“I’m here to find a book on my employer’s behalf. And I’m . . .” I hesitated, feeling every bit the imposter. “I’m here to make likenesses of some of the views around Venice.” I couldn’t call myself an artist. Perhaps someday. But for now, I was just a man with a pencil, some spare change for paints, and a second chance.
Jacopo did not share the same qualms. “An artista! Very good, and you wish to begin at the monastery? From there you can see across the Giudecca to San Marco Square, the Doge’s Palace. You can watch the boats come and go.” He named several of the places Mr. Wharton had listed for me to depict. But that wasn’t why I was headed to San Giorgio Maggiore.
“The monastery is just . . . where I’ll be staying.” It was a deal more affordable than the fashionable hotels and palazzos typical of those on their Grand Tour.
“You are a paradox, Daniel Goodman,” he said. “Very much like our city, I think. Something to impress on the surface, but mysteries within. Here you go.” He handed me a rope matter-of-factly. He slowed the boat and a columned white building rose from the blue. “Your monastery. Come!” He crossed the threshold of the boat to the quayside and tied the rope, gesturing for me to follow.
The building towered high above me in a classical façade. It had a peaked roof like the American churches, but instead of a steeple, a tall, four-sided bell tower rose from somewhere behind the church. Even the ground beneath us was adorned, stonework laid out in an intricate, expansive latticework of grey and white.
I moved toward the columns and placed my foot tentatively on the first step.
“Psssst!” Jacopo hissed from somewhere to the right. “This is the door for you, Signor Goodman.” I veered right, face heating at my mistake. Of course the gleaming church was not the building for me.
I approached where the white building joined with the stucco coral of the next building, plaster chipping and cracking away to reveal snatches of bricks beneath. The blue door opened slowly to Jacopo’s knock, and a monk stood enrobed in a dark wool tunic, hood hanging down behind him.
Jacopo, bless him for his effort, attempted a more reverent volume, but his internal boil remained. He spoke in Venetian first, then in English, for my benefit. “This is your new man!” he said and held out an arm toward me as if to say, behold!
The monk looked at me. I looked at the monk. Both of us with a look of masked horror for the implications of Jacopo’s words. We needed no translation. I raised a hand in an effort to show there was an explanation, that I was not freshly arrived to be transformed from the suited man of the world before him into a holy habit. This, I had practiced. “I am thankful for your hospitality,” I said.
“Ah,” the monk said, and with gentle creases around his smile offering welcome, he opened wide the door. Before I followed, Jacopo gripped my arm.
“You come and find me, young Daniel, when you need anything in this magnificent city. Jacopo knows!”
I nodded my thanks, and then stopped. “You don’t happen to know about a girl—a young woman . . . ?” It wasn’t likely, but I still felt I needed to make up for the fiasco on the platform. “She was . . . about this tall.” I motioned slightly above my shoulder. “Long dark hair and—”
I couldn’t picture her. I knew the facts of her, but that was as far as I could describe, other than that she had blown in like a bright place in my shadowed world and called herself something queenly. Elizabeth? Mary? “Victoria.” It came to me. “I think that was her name.” I was beginning to realize the foolishness of the question. “Never mind,” I said. “It would be impossible to find her again.”
“Ay, ay, ay,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “Which is it that you do not understand? That Venice is one great village, or that Jacopo knows it all? We are like a garment, and the canals and calli are the stitches that bind us together. Every corner is its own world, every sestiere with its own flavor, but together, we are all Venezia. Come. Do tell me your question. If I do not have an answer, I will throw you into the canal this moment.”
“You mean you’ll throw yourself in?” A brief image of Jacopo taking a swan dive floated in my imagination. “If you don’t have the answer?” I knew it was a joke but felt the need to assure him there was no need.
“No. I stay above the canal waters. Do you know what is in them?” He waved a hand in front of his nose. “No? Consider yourself lucky.” Jacopo was in the habit of answering his own questions. “I am not crazy.” He swatted me with the back of his hand. “I mean what I say, and I say what I mean, Daniel. So speak!”
With little choice, I took my life in my hands and obeyed, praying the man would indeed have an answer and that this day wouldn’t end with a tumble into the murky waters that, despite the glinting of sun upon waves, indeed held all manner of waste in its keep.
“Well . . . she would have been delivering a crate of books. And feeling very . . . passionate about them. She left one behind.” I failed to mention that it was my fault, that I’d caused the girl to explode in a cloud of pages. I patted my inside jacket pocket, which happened to be sized to accommodate a book—a very particular book—but which also now housed the unfortunate casualty of the train station fiasco. I tried to think if there was any other way to describe her. Where my mind’s eye was blind, I had begun to construct comparisons around things in an attempt to remember them by feeling, if not by image.
“She was sort of a—a gust of wind,” I said.
He threw his head back and laughed. “Ha! Vittoria.” He crowned her name with zest. “How is it you have already encountered the Garbin? I will take you to her tomorrow. The Number Two Line, remember.” He tapped his head and turned. Engulfed in a cloud of monastic chanting that floated from within the cathedral, the man lumbered off with a swing in his step and a whistle on his lips to his empty vaporetto, while behind me, stone walls that had stood lifetimes longer than I had been alive waited to give me shelter.
Within the empty walls of my room, for the first time since I’d stood on the beach with Mr. Wharton, I stopped. Stopped moving, stopped this endless forward motion by boat or foot or train, always in pursuit of a looming destination. And yet now that I was here, now that I sat upon the simple straw mattress and watched the day’s last breath filter in through the small window, I was overcome by the distinct sensation that this journey had just begun.
I pulled the scrap of paper from my pocket and, in the safety of solitude, opened it. I could almost hear the whisper of pencil scratches. One line each day, until they’d begun to form something. Some men kept tallies to mark the passage of time in the confines of their cells. I couldn’t bear it—I already stared at bars all the day long. Why would I wish to draw them too?
And so, each day I’d etched a single mark, a single element of a scene that I could barely glimpse from my window, until it became a landscape. A beach that stretched on, disappearing around a bend, boundless and waiting. I set it on my windowsill now, rudimentary against the dazzling sunset outside. Waves lapped, as if applauding the paper’s homecoming.
My bones ached to rest, and my body lay still in the simple bed, but my mind would not comply. Venice, in her tight tangle, seemed to beckon me to unravel some great mystery. I was skilled with locks, and knots, with entering forbidden places . . . but this was different.
I pulled out the only semblance of a key to this locked place that I had—the blue book of puzzle pieces. I set to work, scratching a pencil over a blank page as words took form and only deepened the mystery.
9
The Book of Waters
La Famiglia Fedele
It came to pass, many years ago, that a certain noble family produced, at last, a doge. “The Doge,” one might say, with all the venerated reverence the city’s leader deserved. France might say, “The King,” and England might say, “Her Royal Highness,” but Venice had her Doge. A duke, a leader elected, who would lead with wisdom until the end of his days.
If a family had a doge in their bloodlines, or even better, two—or heaven be thanked, three!—you can be sure they would educate you upon this needful fact upon meeting you for the first time. “The first doge in our family was very keen on oranges,” they might let slip handily. “Not like the other ones,” they might add, and let you formulate your own royal mathematics.
But then there were the Zanettis. A family whose roots went back to the very founding settlers. La Famiglia Zanetti had Venezia in their very veins. They faithfully championed their noble peers and made discourse among the Great Council and yet never, not in the hundreds upon hundreds of years of Venice’s reign, did they produce a doge.
When one must wait inordinately for something to happen, and then that much-awaited fate comes to pass at long last, it is relished, cherished, treasured, and more.
Paulo Zanetti, son of a son of a son of a son for generations back in La Serenissima, was at last elected Doge. It was, indeed, a role relished, cherished, treasured, and more. So much more, in fact, that the title of Doge seemed to pale in comparison to that of the emperors, kings, and highnesses of the world.
Mocked at times by the peers he had so long served, whose fathers his father had upheld and championed, an idea sparked. What would Venice do under the rule of something more than a doge? Something more powerful, something not dependent upon the Council of Ten or even the Great Council?
What would Venice do . . . with a prince?
A plan was made. A coup d’etat. It would cost the lives of those peers, but it would be for the better, he thought.
The peers did not agree, when in the city of secrets and spies, his plan became known.
The peers, in short course, executed him. And what was more, in a city of veneration and remembrance . . .
They erased him.
10
Daniel
I awoke amid a fog outside and a fog within. Heaviness lingered from the point of the tale where I’d laid down my pen.
Erased?
A man’s entire life, erased.
It was strange and yet unsettlingly familiar. Was I not attempting to erase parts of my own life? But no. They were spots that would not come out. I couldn’t erase. I must atone. Find the original book. Translate. Copy likenesses of buildings. Something I could do. Get paid. And last . . . make things right.
Every time I recited these things in my head they formed like links of distant shackles, giving a phantom rattle. I welcomed it. Sebastien Trovato had his midnight bell to remind him of his question. Perhaps the jingle of my shackles could be my own anchoring anthem: Atone.
The water was cold as I splashed my face from the pitcher on my basin and tried to formulate a plan for how to do that. It all came back to this Book of Waters. I was beginning to learn that its lack of an ending wasn’t the only thing profoundly puzzling about it. First, a baby on the water . . . now a traitor-king. Doge, I corrected myself. Scores of years apart, it seemed. Was it a book of fables? It certainly seemed the stuff of fairy tales.
But one look outside my window reminded me that I was standing upon an island that once never existed, in a land known for costumes and masques. A living pageant—or at least it once had been so.
Impossible to tell what was real here.
I opened my window, letting in a tumble of salt air. That was real enough, and the squawk of gulls pitching and diving was enough to shake me from my fog. Today’s mission was both simple and ridiculously complex: Find the missing original Book of Waters.
I’d been sent with a list of libraries and private collections to start with, places to inquire. But as I shrugged into my jacket and felt the weight of the book from the train station in my pocket, a different idea took form.
———
Two ferry rides, an ill-fated venture into the wrong sestiere. Directions from two boatmen and one bemused seller of trinkets, and at last—two and a half hours later than I’d planned—I stared at my destiny. Time was kept by bells, not man, and I was beginning to suspect it was because man could not be ruled by time here.
I stepped from Jacopo’s ferry onto the fondamenta and reached for my pocket to pay. Jacopo waved me off. “You don’t pay,” he said between his teeth and made to depart once more. He had other passengers, and his attempt to communicate subtly with exaggerated waggling of his dark brows was quite the show.
“But you deserve—”
“Ah!” He snapped his hand closed, like an animal clamping down upon prey. In this case, my words were the prey. Lines on his forehead rose, daring me to challenge him. “Are you the man in charge of this boat?”
“No, but I—”
“Mmm!” Again, the staccato noise cut me off.
“You do not pay, Daniel,” he hiss-whispered. “You are too . . .” He shook his head, mumbling low words in Venetian that I didn’t catch. Finally, he pushed out his lower lip and shrugged, as if he had made his point, and there were no adequate words to finish his sentence.
What was I? Too poor? How could he know. Too lost? So was every visitor here, by instruction of every travel guide in publication. Lose yourself in the maze of the calli and canals, they instructed. For there you will find the heart of Venice.
I realized my own brows were pushing in, in Jacopoean fashion.
“You look like you’ve lost something,” he said. “Those who search? Do not need to pay. It is my policy.” He raised a hand as if releasing a bird.
