The Art of Waiting (23 page)

The Outcast

Venice, November 1950

Isabella opened the bedroom door and stepped out onto the landing. The smell of cats hung stale and yellow in the air but she barely noticed it now after two years of living in the house of Madame Leroux. She crossed the landing, squeezing past the empty suitcases that were piled against the wall, and set off down the stairs. It was no easy task in the gloom to negotiate the stacks of books that lined the steps, but they were rarely moved and she knew the path between them well, only stumbling when drunk, especially troubled, or otherwise distracted. On this particular morning she was, unusually, none of these. She wasn't sure to what she should attribute the unaccustomed lightness of her mood, but she put it down to the change in the weather. The onset of autumn, the leaves loosening their grip, the layered mist above the canal, did not so much cause a lifting of her heart as a feeling of belonging. She would wake in the cold grey light of her room, most often unaccompanied, unlike in the old days, and would dress without paying any great attention to her appearance. She would take a deep breath before leaving her room, holding it in for as long as possible and preferably until she was out in the street and away from the nocturnal perfume of the house's feline inhabitants. Quite often, as she hurried towards the front door, she would be apprehended by the lady of the house. Madame Leroux had left Paris sometime in the 1920s, travelling around southern Europe by bicycle and by bus, finally finding herself upon the shore of the Bay of Naples. She had made her way up the spine of Italy, happily frittering away a significant portion of her large inheritance before arriving, as she had always intended, in Venice with sufficient funds
to purchase a small house and to deposit a hefty sum in the nearest bank. She then spent several months recovering from the rigours of her months on the road before relaunching herself into her various passions. Age had since tempered her and now, nearly thirty years on, she contented herself with the custody and protection of the local feline population. She was never quite sure how many of them lived under her roof at any one time – they came and went as they pleased – but the ones that lived in the streets nearby were no worse off than the ones that sheltered within her walls because each evening she would take her leftovers on trays of cardboard down to the square in the heart of the ghetto and the cats would twist their bodies into unearthly forms in greedy anticipation, wrapping themselves around Madame Leroux's legs as she lowered the tray to the ground, and every morning, after she returned from the fish market by the Ponte di Rialto, the scene would be repeated and the cats would breakfast on the scraps she had collected from the fishermen. When Madame Leroux's return to the house in the morning coincided with Isabella's departure, they would exchange pleasantries in the hall and Madame Leroux would let her gaze linger upon Isabella's departing grace as she hurried off down the quay towards Strada Nuova and the shop where she spent her days dispensing fine food from behind the delicatessen counter –
prosciutto di Parma
, its tastier cousin San Daniele, smoked
scamorza
cheese and the oozing white freshness of
burata
, wrapped in long green leaves and tied with a stem of grass.

Recent years had not been kind to Isabella and she regarded her thirty-seven years with weary eyes, bearing her body home each night on legs drained hollow by the drudgery of work, but she still possessed a handsomeness that teetered on the brink of beauty, a flicker that shone through the dreariness that had replaced the decadence of her youth. Her life had become mundane: days of unfulfilling work followed by nights rarely punctuated by the thrill of the unknown, and the unknown therefore never had the chance to grow into the comforting and the familiar. Even now, five years after the war ended, people who had known her then remembered
her above all for her last and least forgiveable indiscretion, and many who had not known her at the time had since been made aware of it by those who considered it their duty, if not to guide a lost sheep back towards the path, then at least to alert others to its wanderings. Even now she was aware of whispers and disapproving looks with which people stabbed her in the back as she went on her way. A nun had once placed a pale hand upon her as she passed.

‘Why do you do these things?' the nun asked her, squeezing her arm and smiling. ‘God doesn't want you to do this. God doesn't want it.'

‘Of course He does,' said Isabella. ‘Otherwise He wouldn't make me.'

‘Bless you, my child, for you are a sinner.'

‘Bless me, for I am merely following God's will, and my own.'

She had spent time with friends after the scandal, and then a short time on the street before Madame Leroux took her in like one of her cats and gave her a room at the top of the house, rent-free, and all in return for nothing but her gratitude and the knowledge that she had helped to save another stray. And she had also helped Isabella to find the job she still held at the small supermarket off Strada Nuova, and even now she took nothing as rent but the offcuts of cheese and ham that Isabella brought home from the shop each Friday evening and the pleasure of her conversation and her company.

In the evenings after work, Isabella would leave the shop and drop in at the bar a door or two down the street, owned by her friend Michele, and she would knock back a glass or two of red, then take a detour through the eastern end of Cannaregio and into San Marco. She would stroll through the streets and play a game with herself, scoring a point for every former acquaintance she passed and an extra point for any who acknowledged her presence. Occasionally she would recognise an old lover and one or two of them still stopped to talk, and for a short time she could pretend she was back in her heyday of 1940 or 1941, but then she would return to the house in the ghetto and the smell of the cats, and she would spend
the evening reading books on the stairs by candlelight or discussing with Madame Leroux the relative merits of Sartre and Rimbaud, and as the evening drew on the old French woman would allow herself a modest flight of fancy and imagine Isabella's elegant head next to hers upon a pillow in the night and she would look intently at the younger woman as the side of her face was lit up by the flames of the fire in the grate, but she never actually rose from her chair to embrace her, to quell the burning she felt inside, and instead she bore the cruel flame of unexpressed desire long into the night.

And then one evening in early December 1950, as Isabella idly counted former acquaintances and lovers in the streets round San Marco, she stopped to look at the multitude of sculptures, fashioned by the glass-blowers of Murano, that sat on the shelves of a shop on the corner of the square along from Caffé Florian. In the window, among the garish dolphins and sailboats and other unnecessarily colourful creations, a long black glass gondola, simple and dark and beautiful, floated on its fragile shelf of glass. She remembered the gondola that still lay tied up to the jetty behind the house she had shared with her husband not far from there, and at that moment she became aware of the sound of a violin from further along the square and she turned to look and saw the tall thin figure, motionless but for the slow jagging of the elbow and the tripping of the fingers, and she retrieved his music from the depths of her memory. She wandered across, stood a little way back and watched him as he played and then, as he finished his piece, she gently placed a coin in his tin.

‘Thank you,' said the man, and he bowed as she took a couple of steps back.

She looked at him, and he looked at her. She saw straight away that he recognised her and that he understood – where she had been and what she had become – and she recognised the same thing in him.

‘Isabella?' he said. ‘Is it really you?'

‘My dear Tintoretski . . .'

‘Oh, it's so good to see you,' he said, lowering the violin and taking a step towards her.

‘Is it really, Aldo?'

‘Really, Isabella, really. It's so wonderful to see you. You can't imagine how good it is.'

‘It's good to see you too, Aldo. Honestly it is. Where the hell have you been all this time?'

‘To hell and back. And to heaven somewhere in between.'

‘Same here, more or less.'

She smiled at him, something different to what he had ever seen in her before.

‘Listen, shall we go somewhere?' he said. ‘For a drink, I mean. One of the bars on the Zattere?'

‘Sure. Anywhere's fine by me, you know that.'

On the way they passed Casa Luca, or rather they passed by the place where Casa Luca used to be. The door was closed but the curtains were held open by elaborate lace bows.

‘This was Casa Luca,' Aldo said, glancing in through the sparkling glass of the window, all freshly cleaned. ‘My father's old place.'

‘Yes, Aldo, I remember it.'

‘Look what the bastards have done to it,' he said, almost out of habit, an instinctive reaction, synapses grooved by repetition, then a closing of his fists. But then the thought juddered to a halt and retreated back along the synapse from where it had come, and so he did not walk over to the door and throw it open and call out across the room towards Fausto Pozzi, did not shout and swear and hurl elaborate threats as to the inevitability of revenge. The death of the street musician had, it seemed, devoured his hatred.

‘Come on, let's go,' Aldo said to Isabella. ‘There's nothing for me here any more.'

They carried on down the quay towards the Zattere and found a table outside a café.

‘So, where do we start?' said Isabella when the waiter had gone.

‘At the beginning, perhaps?'

‘Oh, but that would take far too long. Let's start at the end and work backwards. And we'll miss out the boring bits.'

‘Have there been any?'

‘Well, of course, one or two. Not for you?'

‘Sure. But when you spend years on the steppe, just waiting for time to pass, you get used to nothing much happening. And most of what does isn't worth talking about.'

‘You can tell me, Aldo. If you want to . . .'

‘I thought about you plenty, you know.'

She turned to look at him. ‘During your time there? On the steppe?'

‘Yes, on the steppe. In the gulag.'

‘The gulag? Oh, Aldo, I'm so sorry. I had no idea. I would never have imagined.'

‘Imagination is a wonderful thing, you know. Sometimes in the prison camp I felt freer than I ever did on the outside. Nothing was real, so I dreamt up anything I wanted. But now here I am, back in reality again, and so I have to deal with all the memories.'

‘They can't all be bad memories,' she said.

‘I have both.'

‘But which are strongest?'

‘I don't know.'

‘You must.'

‘But how?'

‘Close your eyes, Aldo. What do you see?'

‘An angel.'

‘An angel?'

‘An angel in the snow.'

‘That sounds like a good memory,' she whispered. ‘Now open your eyes.'

He opened them and he saw her face close up to his now, her eyes darkened by the disappointments of her life but still showing him something he had never expected from her. Her lips moved a fraction, just enough to touch his own.

‘Close your eyes too,' he said, and she closed them and he studied for a moment the tiny wrinkles that edged the heavy lids, and he noticed the flickering of the eyeball beneath and the slight trembling of the lashes and a barely perceptible lifting of the brows.

‘What do you see, Isabella?' he asked.

‘Nothing.'

‘There must be something.'

‘Nothing.'

‘Open your eyes, dear.' He brushed her lips with his own.

‘Kiss me again,' she said. ‘But kiss me with your eyes this time, not just your lips.'

‘I can't. My eyes belong to someone else.'

‘After all this time?'

‘Yes, after all this time.'

‘Your angel? Your angel in the snow?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then just kiss me with your mouth.'

He kissed her long and hard and felt her mouth melting into his and her thoughts mingling with his own as they embraced, eyes closed in the cold, and the waiter hovered in the background with another bottle and when they opened their eyes their glasses were full again.

‘You meant more to me than the others, you know,' she said.

‘Really? How could that have been?'

‘Do you always need an answer?'

‘No, not any more. Nothing makes sense, remember?'

‘I taught you that,' she said.

‘Yes, you taught me that.'

‘Maybe that's why you meant more. You were untouched.'

‘Are you trying to embarrass me again?'

‘I didn't mean it like that, stupid. You're still untouched now.'

‘I don't feel that way.'

‘You are. You'll always be that way. That's why you're different, different from all the others.'

‘And you?'

‘Me? Untouched?' she said. ‘You
must
be joking.'

The bar closed and the waiter politely dislodged them from their seats and they wandered away along the canal past the boatyard and towards Accademia.

‘So where are you living now?' Aldo said as they stood upon the wooden bridge and watched the gondolas passing by beneath.

‘Do you remember that first night?' she asked, ignoring his question as if deciding whether to answer it. ‘We came along this way, remember, under the bridge in the fog?'

‘Of course I remember. I was absolutely terrified.'

‘Of what?'

‘Of you, of course.'

‘Terrified of me?'

She bared her teeth and lifted her hands and drew back her fingers in imaginary claws.

‘You were a little intimidating,' he said.

‘I was just testing you,' she said. ‘You haven't told me where you're staying now either, you know.'