The Glassblower of Murano (19 page)

That night, Giacomo returned at last to his house. It had
been the most painful day of his long life, and he felt he
would gladly go to sleep and never wake. He had reported
Corradino's death to the mayor of Murano, and a medico
had been sent to verify cause. The doctor had prodded
Corradino with great care, snipping hair and letting blood, a thoroughness which Giacomo knew had been ordered
by The Ten. In his dark robes and white mask with its
long, beaked nose stuffed with herbs to prevent infection,
the doctor looked for all the world like a vulture come
to feed on the carrion of Corradino. But, if one of their
great assets died, the Council always wished to make sure
there was no misadventure. Only the knowledge of this
prevented Giacomo from intervening to plead for his dead
friend's dignity. He kept his peace. But when the medico at
last released the body he seemed surprised that Giacomo
requested permission to fulfill the proper rites for his friend.
As the post-mortem was complete however, the doctor
saw no reason not to grant this whim and Corradino was
carried to Giacomo's house to be laid out.

Giacomo attended while the women he had paid made
Corradino ready. They cleaned his face, arranged his hair
and tied his feet together and his jaw closed. As candles
burned around them they sewed the dead man into sack
cloth, and Giacomo watched the face he loved disappear
into darkness as the stitches closed the shroud. With his
last glance of Corradino he thought how comely his son
had been, that his curls shone in the candlelight, the cheeks
held a faint flush and the lashes that lay across them were
still lustrous. It was almost as if he slept. He chided himself,
and, in a last act of leave-taking, Giacomo tenderly placed
a golden ducat over each closed eye. He gave away a
twelvemonth's wages without a thought. He had given the
boy everything: his home, his skills with the glass, and all the love his old heart could hold. Corradino had been his
heir in all things, so in place of an inheritance Giacomo
paid the fare for Corradino's final journey. He turned away,
his heart breaking.

At last two constables came to carry the body to the
boat which would take it to Sant'Ariano, the burial island.
Giacomo asked to come to the quay, but was prevented.

`Signore,' said the taller constable, his eyes shining with
sympathy behind their mask, `we have two cases of plague
to carry too. We could not vouch for your safety.'

So Corradino had gone, the constables had gone and
the women had gone, gratefully biting the coins that
Giacomo had given them for their trouble.

He was once again alone, as he had been the night before,
before all this sorry business had come to pass. He could
cry now for the friend - the son - who had gone. But
his tears had left him, and he felt nothing but a dry grief
for his loss. Once again he took up his viol, exactly as he
had done before his world changed. But all was not exactly
as before - there was a piece of vellum twisted in the
strings. Vellum that Giacomo would know anywhere - it
was the fine Florentine vellum of Corradino's notebook.
Giacomo remembered now, as his heart beat fast in his
throat, how he had pulled Corradino to sit down right
next to the instrument the night before. With shaking
fingers Giacomo slipped the note out from under the
strings. Corradino was not one for penmanship, as he had been untimely ripped from Monsieur Loisy's tutelage at
the age of ten, but these letters were clear enough. He had
carefully spelt out, in the middle of the page, the Latin
tag:

Corradino was no great reader - in fact the only volume
he knew well was the Dante from his father. But Giacomo
was a learned man, and had no need to search through
the volumes in his chamber for the meaning of the phrase.
It all fitted - the bloom on Corradino's cheeks, the shine
of his hair, the loving leavetaking of the night before.

Giacomo clasped the vellum to his heart before pressing
it gently between the pages of his own copy of Dante. As
he closed the book he smiled for the first time that day.

Corradino was still alive.

`Read this.'

The newspaper slapped down onto Adelino's desk in
front of Leonora. She could smell the acrid printer's ink
under her nose. Adelino turned his back and went to the
window, struggling with some emotion she could not yet
divine. Could it be anger? She supposed that the press had
bungled the ads, or misspelled something. Warning bells
only began to ring when she saw Vittoria Minotto's byline
and photo on the folded page.

My interview? No, worse.

"Hapless vetraioAdelino dellaVigna has spectacularly backed
the wrong horse for his splashy advertising campaign. In
an effort to flog the glass of his ailing Vetreria Della Vigna
on Murano, he recently introduced the Manin range, an
exclusive line of antique and modern glass. The range was to be sold on the back of famous maestro Corrado Manin,
known as Corradino, and his decorative ancestor Leonora
Manin, who lately became the first maestra on the island.
Our readers will remember, just days ago, the glossy ads
in these and other publications featuring the two Manins,
and our eyes have been assailed by the posters adorning
the walls of our fair city. But little did we know then what
this paper has been able to discover, with the help of one
of the master glassblowers of the fornace, Roberto del
Piero."

Leonora went cold.

Roberto.

Shaking, her sweating fingertips blurring the print, she read
on.

"`The whole thing is a joke,' says Signor del Piero.
`Corrado Manin was indeed a master glassblower, but he
was a traitor to the Republic and his craft. He was solicited by French spies and went to Paris to sell our secrets
to the French, who were then our greatest trade rivals.
Corradino single-handedly smashed the Venetian glass
monopoly. It would be laughable except for the fact that
the affair holds a sinister history for my own family. My
own ancestor Giacomo del Piero was Corradino's lifelong
friend and mentor, and yet Corradino betrayed him and
caused his death. He's a Murderer, not a Maestro"'

This catchy piece of alliteration had obviously drawn the editor's eye, as the words `Murderer not Maestro' formed
the subheading of the paragraph. Leonora swallowed and
read below.

"Signor del Piero's grievances are modern as well as
ancient. `I approached the advertisers with my own story.
Giacomo was Corradino's mentor - he taught him everything he knew Moreover, there have been del Pieros
working at the fornace ever since his day. I offered them
the opportunity to introduce a line of glass in my family
name, and they threw it back in my face. Clearly they
preferred this bimbo who's only been in Venice a few
months.' Signor del Piero is dismissive of Signorina Manin's
talents. `She can blow the glass a little, but really she's just
an English girl with no talent and a yard of blonde hair.'
Particularly hard, then, is the fact that after hundreds of
years of service to the glassblowing industry, the family's
run now seems to be over. `I tried to alert Adelino to the
truth, and his answer was to fire me. He'd rather keep his
precious bimbo because he needs her for his ad cam,
paign.

"We should stress at this point that this paper is not in
the habit of printing the vengeful vitriol of the wrongly
dismissed. We have been shown documentary evidence of
the treachery of Corrado Manin from what historians would
term a `Primary Source'.

"These revelations will be an undoubted embarrassment
to Signor della Vigna, who has been touting for business
with the aid of such copylines as `The Glass that built the Republic'. Such phrases must be ringing in his ears this
morning, and may explain why he has so far refused to
comment. Readers can expect to see the campaign withdrawn."

`Is this true? You're withdrawing the campaign?'

Adelino turned, his face bleak. `What else can I do?' He
took the paper from her hands and flipped over the folded
page.The black headline bawled out at her.`TREACHERY
ON MURANO: There flanking the type was the portrait
of ten-year-old, innocent Corradino, and herself, in her
vest and jeans by the furnace.

Then, all at once, of the sea of her thoughts one alone
surfaced and consumed her body:

I'm ,'oink to be sick.

She rushed from the room and through the fornace, to the
canalside where she vomited helplessly. How could she
know that Corradino had done the same, four centuries
before, the night before he became a traitor?

Leonora stood outside the University of Ca' Foscari in
Dorsoduro. She had come to meet Professore Padovani,
the only link in the city to her family, to her past.

She had come home the previous night, from the scene at
the fornace, distraught and upset, her nausea remaining with
her as she left Murano. Even the welcoming sight of the
night lights of San Marco did little to soothe her mood.
She left the island boat at Ferrovia and waited, as she rarely
did, for the number 82 vaporetto to take her up the Grand
Canal to the Rialto. As the vaporetto roared to a stop, and
the gateman expertly tied the boat, she thought of her father
for the first time in weeks. His presence here, his very existence, seemed ephemeral when compared to the relationship
she had with Corradino, dead for many centuries longer.
She felt clearly now how much she had relied on Corradino,
felt pride in him and even love for him. She could not have been more devastated by such accusations of treachery had
they been directed at her own father. She felt her father to
have been someone belonging to her mother alone - Leonora
had never seen him and Bruno had never seen her. Their
link was purely biological.

My connection to Corradino, paradoxically, seems much more real
to me.

And yet Roberto del Piero had struck at the very roots of
that cross-centuries bond. She felt vulnerable, exposed. Even
the sight of the silver palaces roosting in the twilight along
the canal did not give her the usual comfort. Autumn was
here, and the friendly frontages of the buildings had assumed
a shuttered look as the lifeblood of the tourist trade ebbed
away from their faces like a fading blush. The decorative
windows looked back, blank-eyed and uninviting now. She
wondered if Corradino had betrayed all this, of what secret
conferences he had had, what meetings he had held in these
very buildings. As she disembarked at Rialto and ducked
down the darkening calli to the Campo Manin her feelings
of unease multiplied - she began to feel hunted, followed,
to listen out for soft footfalls in the shadows. She felt tainted
by the slur on Corradino.

If he has done this thing, the city remembers and condemns me
too.

Leonora felt rejected by the stones that had lately welcomed
her. Even when she walked at last into the Campo Manin
she felt pursued. The beautiful shadows could hold ugliness
too.

Don't Look Now ...

She chided herself. For it wasn't a dwarfish red figure that
she feared, but Roberto del Piero. She had ended his career
at the fornace, and his family profession. He could, of course,
work elsewhere, but it was she who had cuckooed him
out of his nest.

She ran across the still-warm stones of the campo and
fumbled for her keys. In a childish game she felt she was
outrunning the unseen assassins.

If I can just reach my door ...

As she fitted the key in her lock she expected a hand to
pluck at her sleeve, or even clutch at her throat ... struggling with the latch she wrenched the door open and fell
inside. She backed the door closed and leaned in the dark,
breathing hard. Seconds later she left her skin as the phone
began to ring. Shaking, she moved into the kitchen and
picked up the receiver. But it was not the rasping tones
of a horror film cliche. It was him.

`Alessandro!'

She sank into a chair and switched on the lamp. As the pool of light spread and she listened to the longed-for
voice, the shades of her daymares fled.

He laughed at the fervour of her greeting.

`Detective Bardolino to you.'

`You passed!ff

'Yes.' Pride in the voice. `I have a week of orientation
here and then I start at division, back in Venice.'

She could not dampen his enthusiasm with her own troubles. Il Gazzettino was a local paper, and news of her humiliation or Corradino's reputation would not yet have reached
Vicenza. Plenty of time to talk of that face to face. She suddenly
felt terribly tired, and besides, a small sense of shame lodged
just below her heart would not let her tell this man of her
tarnished ancestor. While Alessandro talked about his weeks
away and the exam, Leonora felt the fear and panic abate.
She felt confident in the circle of his conversation as if protected by his nativity. Of course Corradino was no traitor. It
was not true. It was an ugly rumour perpetrated by his rival.
And what did it matter anyway? Corradino was long dead,
and his work lived on to testify for him.

But it does matter. I want to know for myself, to find out for
certain.

Something Alessandro had said floated back from memory.
`When we first met, you told me that you might be able
to help me find out more about my family ... my father.
Well, I'd like to, if you can make any suggestions?'

Alessandro considered. `When your mother and father
were together in Venice, did they have any friends or colleagues that may still be here?'

`There was someone. A lecturer at Ca' Foscari. I met
him when I was very little.'

`Can you remember his name??

`It was Padovani. I remember because my mother
explained to me that his name meant "comes from Padua".
She taught me an old rhyme ..