Andreas (8 page)

The church was of brick, low and old: in front,
on the side facing the square, it had an entrance which was little in keeping with it; broad steps bore a colonnade of white marble, and a classical pediment with an inscription. In the Latin words some of the gilded letters were capitals. Andreas tried to read a date out of them.

When he again lowered his eyes a woman was standing some distance away, to the side of the church, looking at him. He could not quite make out where she had come from, for she was standing rather as if she had been on her way to the church, and had stopped irresolute, or perhaps startled by Andreas’s presence. He had heard no steps approaching or crossing the square, and he found himself wondering whether, with her respectable, simple dress, she wore house shoes, which had muffled her footsteps, then wondered at himself being occupied with the thought. For she was nothing more than an apparently young woman of the lower classes, with the black shawl over her head and shoulders, from whose pale, but apparently very pretty face two dark eyes were watching the stranger with a curious, and, unless distance deceived him, anxious fixity—with the same fixity, he felt, whether he now pretended to be studying the capitals of the Corinthian columns or returned the look. All the same, he had no reason to stay there, and he had already set his foot on the
lowest of the stone steps, thus withdrawing from the woman’s field of vision.

But when, raising the heavy curtain, he entered the church, the woman at the same time entered through a side door, and went to a
prie-dieu
standing near the altar. And now Andreas had the distinct impression that here was a woman oppressed by sickness, whether of the body or the mind, seeking relief from suffering by prayer.

He had now no other wish than to leave the church again as quietly as possible, for it seemed to him that the woman, now and then, looked anxiously round at him, as though he were an unwished-for witness of her painful solitude. Now in the church, compared with the square, which lay in the harsh sunshine, the light was dim; in the cool, stuffy air a faint smell of incense still lingered, and Andreas, who had no desire to pry, but merely to leave the place, certainly did not keep his eyes fixed on the woman perfectly clearly. However, apart from that, it was certain, he could have sworn, that she had turned, not to the altar but to his own self, with her hands clasped in entreaty, that she had even struggled to move towards him, but had been hindered, as though heavy chains lay about her body from the hips down. At the same moment he thought he clearly heard a moan: soft as it was,
it could not have been an hallucination. The next moment, certainly, he could not but regard, if not the movement, then any reference to himself as imagination, for the stranger had shrunk back into the
prie-dieu
and was perfectly still.

Without a sound he crossed the short space separating him from the door, and took pains to raise the curtain so little that no ray of the harsh light should disturb the holy twilight in which he was leaving the sorrower. As he did so his eyes involuntarily sought the
prie-dieu
again, and what he now distinctly perceived astonished him so much that he stood still in the folds of the curtain, breathless. There, at exactly the same spot, sat another woman—sat no longer, but was standing up in the
prie-dieu
; she turned her back to the altar, bent forward, then furtively looked round at him again. In her dress the woman did not greatly differ from the other, who must have departed with an almost incredible swiftness and stealth. The new one was dressed in the same dark, unassuming colours—Andreas, on the way, had seen the wives and daughters of the humbler townsfolk dressed thus in respectable uniformity—but this one wore no shawl. Her black hair hung in curls on both sides of her face, and her bearing was such that it was not possible to confuse her with the oppressed and grieving creature whose place she had taken
so suddenly and noiselessly. There was something impudent and almost childish in the way in which she looked round angrily several times, then peeped over her shoulder to note the effect of her look. She might just as well have been trying to frighten off an intruder as to awaken curiosity in an indifferent onlooker; it even seemed to Andreas, as he now finally turned to go, as though she had signalled to him behind his back with open arms.

He was standing in the square, a little dazzled, when someone came out of the church behind him, and brushed past him so quickly that he felt the air move. He saw one side of a pale young face, which turned sharply away from him, with flying curls which nearly touched his cheeks. The face was twitching, as if with suppressed laughter. The swift, almost running steps, the abruptly averted face as she brushed past him—all this was too violent not to be intentional, yet it looked rather like the mischief of a child than the insolence of a grown-up. Yet the figure was that of a grown woman, and the audacious freedom of the body was so strange, as she ran towards the bridge in front of Andreas, flinging her slender legs till her skirts flew, that for a moment Andreas thought it might be some youth in disguise playing a prank on him, the obvious foreigner. And yet again, something told him unmistakably that the
being before him was a girl or woman, as she herself came to a standstill on the little bridge as if waiting for him. In the face, which he thought pretty enough, there was a dash of impudence; the whole behaviour looked absolutely wanton, yet there was something about it which attracted rather than repelled him. He did not wish to meet the young woman on the bridge: there was no other way back into the street. So he swung round again, mounted the steps into the church, thinking that having now given the woman a definite sign of refusal, he would be rid of her. He found it strange enough that the other woman was no longer in the church. He went right up to the altar, glanced into the little chapels right and left, looked behind the columns—nowhere a trace. It was if the stone floor had opened and swallowed up the mourner, casting up in her place that other strange creature.

When Andreas again emerged onto the square, he saw, to his relief, that the bridge was clear. He went back into the street, wondering whether he had not, after all, missed Zorzi coming out, and whether Zorzi might have gone to look for him in the direction they had come from. A clean-looking house next door to the one with the brass knocker now seemed to him to be the right one, because the door was standing open. He went in, meaning to knock at some door on the
ground floor, ask for Nina, then go up himself and discover the artist’s whereabouts. He did so all the more quickly since he imagined that from about the second house after he had crossed the bridge, a light footfall and a swish of skirts had dogged his steps. From the entrance hall the stairs led upwards, but Andreas turned aside and went into the courtyard to look for a porter’s lodge or some other human dwelling. The courtyard was small, enclosed by walls, quite overgrown with vine-leaves to a considerable height: the loveliest ripe grapes of a reddish kind hung down into it, strong wooden posts supported the living roof; there was a nail driven into one of them with a bird-cage hanging on it. At one point in the vine-leaf roof there was a gap, big enough for a child to climb through. From that point the glow of the radiant sky above fell into the courtyard, and the beautiful shapes of the vine-leaves were sharply outlined on the tiled floor. This not very big place, half room, half garden, was filled with pleasant warmth and the scent of grapes, and silence so deep that Andreas could hear the restless movements of the bird which, untroubled by his approach, hopped from perch to perch.

Suddenly the careless bird dashed itself in terror against the side of its cage, the beams of the
vine-roof
rocked, the opening darkened abruptly, and over
Andreas’s head, at the height of a man, a human face looked in. Black eyes, with whites glittering in contrast, fixed his startled gaze from above, a mouth half open with strain and excitement, dark curls on one side slid down among grapes. The whole pale face was wild and tense, with a flash of satisfaction, almost childishly unconcealed. The body lay somehow on the light trellis of the roof, the feet were most likely hanging in a hook in the wall, the
finger-tips
on the top of a post. Then a mysterious change came over the expression of the face. With infinite sympathy, even love, the eyes rested on Andreas. One hand forced its way through the leaves, as if to reach his head, to stroke his hair, the four fingers were bleeding at the tips. The hand did not reach Andreas, a drop of blood fell on his forehead, the face above him turned white. “I’m falling,” cried the mouth … one moment had been the reward of unspeakable effort. The pale face was wrenched away, the light body jerked upwards, then slid back over the wall. How it reached the ground on the other side Andreas could no longer hear; he was running to the front of the house to cut off the mysterious being’s retreat. It could only be the house on the right; either she would come out of it, or she had jumped down into the courtyard and must be hiding there. He stood in front of the house door—it was the one with the
dolphin. It was shut and did not yield to his pressure.

He had already raised the knocker, when he thought he heard steps approaching within. His heart was beating so that those inside must hear it. Hardly ever in his life had he been in such a state; for the first time the inexplicable, a departure from any conceivable order, had singled him out, he felt that the secret would never let him rest: he saw the girl climbing up the naked walls, wrenching herself upwards by the crevices to reach him; he saw her, with bleeding hands, crouching in a corner of the courtyard, trying to escape him. His thoughts went no further: a rapid step approaching the door half robbed him of his senses. The door opened. Zorzi stood before him.

“For God’s sake, tell me who it was!” cried Andreas, and before Zorzi could answer, before he could ask, ran past him to the end of the passage.

“Where are you going?” Zorzi asked him.

“Into the courtyard—let me go.”

“The house has no courtyard: there’s a blank wall here, with the canal behind it and the garden of the Redentore monastery beyond.”

Andreas could not understand a word. He had lost all sense of direction; he told his story, and saw that he could tell nothing, that he had not the power to tell how momentous was the experience he had lived
through.

“Whoever the person is,” said Zorzi, “rest assured that if she ever shows herself in this quarter again, I shall find out who she is: she won’t escape me, whether she is a man in disguise or a street woman having some fun.”

Andreas knew only too well that neither the one nor the other was anywhere near the truth. He could understand nothing, yet, in his heart of hearts, rejected any explanation. How gladly would he have hurried back into the church, to find, if not his mysterious enemy and friend, the nameless, strange woman who climbed up walls to swoop down on her prey from above—then at the very least her companion; for now it seemed impossible that the two beings, one of whom had risen in the other’s place, like the glass of red and yellow wine in the hand of the conjurer, should be ignorant of each other. He could not imagine why he had not thought of the connection before. He felt how careless his search of the church has been; he ought to have been able to find a trace—a crack in a wall—a secret door. If only he had been alone, how eagerly he would have hurried back! The imperious need to seek and find would have urged him back again, and then again, a third and fourth time. It had often happened so: a letter mislaid—a key we know we have; but Zorzi
would not let him go. “Leave your climbing
man-woman
—you’ll see more than that in Venice—and hurry up to Nina. She’s expecting you. I can’t tell you all that’s been going on up there again. The Duke of Camposagrado, her protector, in a fit of rage and jealousy, stuck a rare singing-bird she had had sent to her by a Jewish admirer, Signor dalle Torre, into his mouth, living, and bit its head off. Then he was suspicious about the Hungarian captain and Nina, and had him thrashed half out of his life, and what’s more he seems to have got hold of the wrong man, and now the
sbirri
are after him, and have searched her lodgings. In fact, everything is upside-down, and that’s just the moment for a newcomer to get into her good graces.”

Andreas was only half listening. The staircase was narrow and dark; he hoped at every turn in it to see the strange woman appear, and even at the top, in front of Nina’s door, he half expected her to flit by. It now seemed beyond the possibility of doubt that a secret connection had existed between the two gestures—the imploring gesture of the mourner had been meant for him, just like the signal of the young girl. His excitement, his impatience to unravel the mystery of this being, was hardly bearable; she had, in some incomprehensible fashion, found the way to be alone with him for an instant: a high wall, perhaps
with water flowing below it, had not deterred her from doing what seemed impossible to any creature but a cat: the blood flowing from her fingers had not daunted her. She would find the way to him again, always, everywhere.

They found Signorina Nina on a sofa in a very easy, very pretty posture. Everything about her was light, and of a most charming, delicate plumpness. Her hair was as fair as bleached gold, and she wore it unpowdered. Three things, which were charmingly curved, and perfectly in keeping, her eyebrows, her mouth, and her hand, were raised to greet the entering guest with an expression of quiet curiosity and great friendliness.

An unframed picture was leaning with its face to the wall. There was a gash through the canvas, as though it had been slashed by a knife. Zorzi picked it up and looked at it, shaking his head. “What do you think of the likeness?” he said, holding out the portrait to Andreas, who had sat down on a stool at Nina’s feet. The portrait was such that a coarse eye would have been struck by the likeness. Nina’s features were there, but they looked cold and mean. In reality, her brows, with their faint upward curve, were charming because they were traced on a face which was almost too soft; a severe judge would have found her neck not slender enough, but in the set of the head on the
neck there was something enchantingly helpless and womanly. In the portrait the curve of the eyebrows was vulgar in its emphasis, the neck, cut through by the knife, was fleshy and lascivious. The eyes were fixed on the beholder with cold, insolent fire. It was one of those painful portraits of which it can be said that they contain the inventory of a face, but reveal the soul of the artist. Andreas felt a wave of inward aversion.