Against the Day (111 page)

   
As
summer went along, she settled in. She watched the American girls, breezing
along the Riva without a care, so clean, starched, sunlit, and blithe, in their
middy blouses and boating skirts and eyes luminous beneath the brims of straw
hats, pretending to ignore the covetous gazes of naval officers, guides, and
waiters, laughing and talking incessantly, and she wondered if she had ever
stood a chance of becoming one of them. By now she was brown from the sun, lean
and agile, hair cropped into a drift of curls short enough to fit under a red
knit fisherman’s cap which also served for her night’s only pillow—she
dressed these days as a boy and escaped all male attention but the sort
directed at boys, though such birds of passage, usually in for the night or
two, were quickly set straight.

It was not quite the Venice older
folks remembered. The Campanile had collapsed a few years before and had not
yet been rebuilt, and stories about its fall had multiplied. There were reports
of an encounter in the sky, described by some as angelic. Street urchins and
lucciole
told of seeing, in a population of visitors not noted for its strangeness,
young men in uniforms of no nation anybody could agree on, moving among the
ancient watermazes like ghosts of earlier times or, some speculated, times not
yet upon us. “You’ve seen the old paintings. This has always been a town for
seeing angels in. The battle in heaven didn’t end when Lucifer was banished to
Hell. It kept going, it’s still going.”

This according to an English painter
type, maybe even the genuine article, named Hunter Penhallow, who had begun
showing up every morning on her
fondamenta
with an easel and a kit full
of painttubes and brushes, and while the daylight allowed, with breaks only for
ombreta
and coffee, worked at getting Venice “down,” as he put it. “You
have miles of streets and canals here, mister,” she sought to instruct him,
“tens of thousands of people, each one more interesting to look at than the
last, why limit it to this one little corner of town?”

   
“The
light’s good here.”

   
“But—”

“All
right.” A minute or two of pencil work. “It wouldn’t matter. Imagine that
inside this labyrinth you see is another one, but on a smaller scale, reserved
only, say, for cats, dogs, and mice—and then, inside that, one for ants
and flies, then microbes and the whole invisible world—down and down the
scale, for once the labyrinthine principle is allowed, don’t you see, why stop
at any scale in particular? It’s selfrepeating. Exactly the spot where we are
now is a microcosm of all Venice.”

   
He
spoke calmly, as if she would understand what all this meant, and in

fact, because Merle used to talk like this, she wasn’t
totally puzzled, and was

even able to refrain from rolling her eyes. Inhaling deeply
on her cigarette

stub, flicking it expressively into the
rio,
“That go
for Venetians, too?”

Sure
enough, it got her the onceover. “Take off that cap, let’s have a look.”
   
When she shook out her
ringlets, “You’re a girl.”

   
“More
like young woman, but don’t let’s argue.”

   
“And
you’ve been passing—marvelously—as a rough little streeturchin.”

   
“Simplifies
life, up to a point anyway.”

   
“You
must pose for me.”

   
“In
England—signore—so it is said, a model can earn a shilling an
hour.”

   
He
shrugged. “I can’t pay that much.”

   
“Half,
then.”

   
“That’s
twelve soldi. I’d be lucky to get as much as a franc for one painting.”

Despite
Hunter’s young, almost adolescent face, what she could see of his hair was
gray, nearly white, covered with a straw hat elegantly pinched and twisted out
of its original shape SantosDumont style, suggesting at least some previous
residence in Paris. How long had this jasper been in Venice, she wondered. She
pretended to squint at his canvases in a professional way. “You’re no
Canaletto, but don’t sell yourself short, I’ve seen stuff worse than this going
for ten francs, on good tourist days maybe even more.”

Finally
he smiled, a fragile moment, like a patch of fog gliding past. “I
might
afford
sixpence the hour, if. . . you’d act as my sales agent?”

   
“Sure.
Ten percent?”

   
“What’s
your name?”

   
“Most
folks call me Beppo.”

They
set up their pitch near the BauerGrünwald, in the narrow passage that ran
between San Moise and the Piazza, because every visitor to the city sooner or
later passed through here. Meantime at the
fondamenta,
he was sketching
or painting her in a variety of poses, doing cartwheels down the canalside,
eating a bleedingred slice of watermelon, pretending to sleep in the sun with a
cat in her lap, a scrawl of scarlet creeper on a bonewhite wall behind her,
sitting back in a doorway, face illuminated only from sunlight off the paving,
dreaming among pink walls, redbrick walls, green waterways, gazing up at
windows facing across
calli
so close you felt you could stretch and
touch but didn’t, flowers in front of it spilling over wroughtiron balconies,
posing for him both as a boy and presently, in some borrowed costumes, as a
girl. “You’re not too uncomfortable in skirts, I hope.”

   
“Getting
used to it, thanks.”

Hunter
had somehow fetched up here, demobilized from a war that nobody knew about,
obscurely damaged, seeking refuge from time, safety behind the cloaks and masks
and thousandnamed mists of Venezia.

   
“There
was a war? Where?”

“Europe. Everywhere. But no one seems
to know of it. . . here . . .” he hesitated, with a wary look—“yet.”

“Why not? It’s so far away the news
hasn’t reached here ‘yet’?” She let a breath go by, then—“Or it hasn’t
happened
‘yet’?”

He gazed back, not in distress so
much as a queer forgiveness, as if reluctant to blame her for not knowing. How
could any of them know?

“Then I guess you’re a timetraveler
from the future?” Not mocking, really, nor much surprised either.

   
“I
don’t know. I don’t know how
that
could happen.”

“Easy. Somebody in the future invents
a time machine, O.K.? Every crazy promoter both sides of the Atlantic’s been
working on that, one of em’s bound to succeed, and when they do, those
contraptions’ll just be common as cabs for hire. So
. . .
wherever you were, you must’ve hailed one. Hopped in, told
the driver
when
you wanted to arrive at, and
ehi presto!
Here you
are.”

“I wish I could remember. Anything.
Whatever the timereversal of ‘remembering’ is
.
. . .
”

“Well, looks like you escaped your
war anyhow. You’re here
. . .
you’re
safe.” Meaning only to reassure him, but his dispirited look deepened now.

“ ‘
Safe’
. . .
safe.” Whoever he was talking to now, it wasn’t her.
“Political space has its neutral ground. But does Time? is there such a thing
as the
neutral hour?
one that goes neither forward nor back? is that too
much to hope?”

Just then, not quite as if in answer,
from one of the royal warships anchored off Castello, the Evening Gun sounded,
a deep, songless chime of admonition pealing up and down the Riva.

It was about then that Dally started
carrying his canvases, easel, and other gear for him, shooing away the local
kids who were too importunate, in general taking care of what chores she could.

“. . .
Overnight
, during a match, Dr. Grace appeared
to me in a dream, ordered me to Charing Cross and onto the boattrain . . .”

   
“Yeah,
yeah.”

“. . . it was so real, he was wearing
whites and one of those antiquated caps, and knew my name, and began to
instruct me in my duty, there was a
. . .
a
war, he said, in ‘Outer Europe,’ was how he put it, queer sort of geography
isn’t it, even for a dream—and our country, our civilization, was somehow
in peril. I felt no desire to join in, no passion, quite the opposite. I have
been out on ‘adventures,’ I know that exhilaration, but it was simply not part
of
 
this
. . .
not available. You can see what I am, one more earnest
village athlete,

some amateur daubing, no depths to speak of. But there I was,
surrendering to a most extraordinary call from the grave, the massgravetobe of
Europe, as if somewhere ahead lay an iron gateway, slightly ajar, leading to a
low and sombre country, with an incalculable crowd on all sides
eager to
pass into it,
and bearing me along. Whatever my own wishes . . .”

He was staying in a hotel room in
Dorsoduro, with a restaurant downstairs. Morning glories wreathed among the
ironwork. “Figured you’d be in a
pensione,
there’s a couple of em just
up that li’l Rio San Vio there.”

“This turns out to be cheaper,
actually—the
pensioni
include
lunch, and if I stopped for that, I’d lose the best of the light, and if I
didn’t, I’d be paying for a meal I wasn’t eating. But here at La Calcina, the
kitchen’s open to all hours, and I can pretty much eat when I want to. Besides,
one has the company of eminent ghosts, Turner and Whistler, Ruskin, Browning
sorts of chap.”

   
“They
died there? How good can the food be?”

“Oh,
then call them ‘traces of consciousness.’ Psychical Research is beginning to
open these matters up a bit. Ghosts can be
.
. .
well, actually, look at them all.” He waved an arm up and down the
Zattere. “Every tourist you see here streaming by, everyone who plans to sleep
tonight in a strange bed, is potentially
that kind
of ghost. Transient
beds for some reason are able to catch and hold these subtle vibrational
impulses of the soul. Haven’t you noticed, in hotels, the way your dreams are
often, alarmingly, not your own?”

   
“Not
out where I’m sleeping.”

“Well, it’s true—especially in
these smaller places, where the bedstead tends to be of iron or steel, enameled
to keep away the
cimici.
Somehow the metal frame also acts as a
receiving antenna, allowing dreamers to pick up traces of the dreams of whoever
slept there just before them, as if, during sleep, we radiated in frequencies
as yet undiscovered.”

“Thanks,
have to try that sometime.” Beds and bedrooms, huh. She risked a quick lateral
flick of the eyeballs. So far he had suggested nothing you’d’ve called
improper, either to Dally or anyone else who’d come by in the course of the
day. Not that she was interested in him romantically, of course, he wasn’t her
type, though there were days, she had to admit, when
anything
was
her type, gnarled
fishermen, dimpled gigolos, Austrians in short trousers, waiters,
gondolieri,
a hungering she must discreetly take care of all by herself, and preferably
on late nights when moonlight was slim.

She
wondered if this “War” of his was responsible in some way for removing bodily
passion from his life. How long was he fixing to stay in Venice? When the bora
blew down from the mountains, announcing the winter, would he ride it on out of
town? Would she? In September, when the vino

forte arrived from Brindisi, Squinzano, and Barletta, would
he be gone in a couple of weeks as well?

One day, strolling in the Piazzetta,
Hunter motioned her under the arcade and into the Library, and pointed up at
Tintoretto’s
Abduction of the Body of St. Mark.
She gazed for some time.
“Well, if that ain’t the spookiest damned thing,” she whispered at last.
“What’s going on?” she gestured nervously into those old Alexandrian shadows,
where ghostly witnesses, up far too late, forever fled indoors before an unholy
offense.

“It’s as if these Venetian painters
saw things we can’t see anymore,” Hunter said. “A world of presences. Phantoms.
History kept sweeping through, Napoleon, the Austrians, a hundred forms of
bourgeois literalism, leading to its ultimate embodiment, the tourist—how
beleaguered they must have felt. But stay in this town awhile, keep your senses
open, reject nothing, and now and then you’ll see them.”

A few days later, at the Accademia,
as if continuing the thought, he said, “The body, it’s another way to get past
the body.”

   
“To
the spirit behind it—”

“But
not to deny the body—to reimagine it. Even”—nodding over at the
Titian on the far wall—“if it’s ‘really’ just different kinds of greased
mud smeared on cloth—to reimagine it as light.”

   
“More
perfect.”