The Glassblower of Murano (4 page)

For when she holds the glass heart in her hand she holds my
own heart there too.

He knew he may never see Leonora again, so this time
he leant against the church wall and let the tears flow, as
if they would never stop.

Still the music played.

Nora sat in the church of Santa Maria della Pieta and tried
to think of a word for what she was feeling. Enchanted?
Too reminiscent of old-world courtesies. Bewitched? No;
the word seemed to imply an entrapment by a malign
force.

But no-one has done this to me. I came here of my own volition.

She glanced left and right, at her unknown companions.
The church was packed - her neighbour, an elegant Italian
matron, sat so close that her red sleeve lay across Nora's
forearm. But Nora did not mind. They were all here for
the same reason, bound together, all - that was it; enraptured - by the music.

Antonio Vivaldi. Nora knew the soundbite version of
his life - a red-headed priest, had asthma, taught orphans,
wrote the Four Seasons. But he had never really troubled
her musical radar until now. She had found him too cliched
for her art-student trendiness - music for lifts and supermarkets, done to death. But here, in the warmth of candlelight, she heard Vivaldi played by live musicians, in the very
church where he had written these pieces, first rehearsed
them with his orphan girls. The musicians were all young,
studious looking Italians, all extremely accomplished, who
played with passion as well as technical excellence. They
had not pandered to tourist sensibilities by donning period
dress - they let the music speak. And here, Nora heard the
Four Seasons as if for the first time.

Oh, she knew that the church itself had changed - she
knew from her pamphlet guide that the Palladian facade
was late eighteenth century, added after the maestro's death,
but she felt as if the priest were here. She peered into the
candling shadows beyond the pillars, where keen locals
stood to hear the music, and looked fancifully for his red
head amongst them.

When Nora had arrived in Venice she felt unmoored - as
if she drifted, loosed from harbour, flowing here and there
on the relentless arteries of tourism. Carried by crowds,
lost in babel of foreign tongues she was caught in a glut
of guttural Germans, or a juvenile crocodile of fluorescent
French. Wandering, dazed, through San Marco she had reached the famous frontage of the Libreria Sansoviniana
in the Broglio. Nora fell through its portals in the manner
of one stumbling into Casualty in search of much needed
medical attention. She did not want to act like a tourist,
and felt a strong resistance to their number. The beauty
that she saw everywhere almost made her believe in God;
it certainly made her believe in Venice. But the city had
physically shocked her to such an extent that she began
to feel afraid of it - she needed to find an anchor, to feel
that she could belong here as a native. Here in the library
she would search for Corradino. Kindly, tangible words,
factual lines of prose scattered with dates would be the
longitudes and latitudes to bring her into safe harbour.
Here he would meet her like a relative at an airport. Let
me show you around, he would say. You belong here. You
are family.

The concierge at her hotel, a kindly, avuncular man, had
recognized her mental state in the manner of one used to
the effect of his city. It was he who had suggested the
Libreria as a good place to learn of her ancestor, and of
where she could view his work around the city. The short
answer Signorina, he said, was `almost anywhere'. Nora was
cheered by his familiarity with the name of Corradino
Manin; he spoke of him as a familiar drinking acquaintance. But as to what to see in the city itself his advice was
simple. He waved his hand expansively. `Faccia soltanto una
passeggiata, Signorina. Soltanto una passeggiata.' Just walk, only
walk.

He was right of course. From her pleasant hotel in
Castello, she had wandered the calli, losing track of time
and direction, and caring not at all. Everything here was
beautiful, even the decay. Rotting houses stood next to
glorious palaces, squeezed on either side by grandeur,
their lower floors showing tidemarks of erosion where
the lagoon was eating them alive. The stained masonry
crumbled into the canal like biscotti dipped in Marsala
but this seemed only to add to their charms. It was as
if they submitted with pleasure to the tides - a consummation, one devoutly to be wished. Nora wandered the
bridges, as enchanted by a string of washing hanging
from window to window across a narrow canal, or by
a handful of scruffy boys kicking a football in a deserted
square, as she was by the delicate Moorish traceries of
the fenestrations.

Nora resisted the notion of planning her direction. In
London her life had been mapped out for her, signposted
and marked down. She had not been lost, properly lost,
for many years. She knew exactly how to get around her
capital, aided, if need be, by the regimented, colour coded
tube map or the A-Z. Stephen, always a mine of information, had told her that when the tube map was designed,
the artist deliberately kept the distances between the stations constant, even though in fact they were widely different. This was an attempt to make the citizens of the
metropolis feel safe, to accept this weird, subterranean mode
of transport; to feel that they could move through exceptionally well-marked out quadrants of the city with
ease and security.

But here in Venice Nora's desire for spontaneity was
aided by the city itself. She had a map in the back of her
hotel guide - it was useless. Only two directions were
posted on the walls of the calli in ancient yellow signage
- San Marco, and Rialto. But, as the S-shape of the Grand
Canal dictated, these were often in the same direction. She
actually arrived in one piazza where a wall bore two yellow
signs for San Marco, each one with an arrow, each one
pointing in the opposite direction.

I am Alice. These are directions designed by the Cheshire Cat.

Her image of life through the Looking Glass became even
stronger, when, as the sun began to set, she decided she
really had better try to reach San Marco. But as she
attempted to follow the signs, they enticed her farther and
farther away, leaving her at last at the white arch of the
Rialto.

Nora stopped for a restorative coffee under the bridge.
She watched the tourists swarm across, anxious for news
like the merchants of old, clutching guidebooks and copies
of Shakespeare. She mentally removed herself from these
crowds.

I am no tourist. I am here to stay, to live.

Her life was packed up and held in storage crates in the
unlovely shipyards of nearby Mestre, waiting on the mainland, paid up for a month - the time she had given herself to get an apartment and a work permit.

She watched the vaporetti chug by, and thought of her
father. As a crowded boat stopped at the Rialto fermata she
watched a young man in the customary blue overalls leap
to the dock, coil the tow rope and pull the boat into its
mooring with the ease of long practice.

My father.

The idea was alien to her. The idea of her mother doing
anything so free as coming here and falling both in love
and pregnant, was also alien to her. She turned her thoughts
from her mother. She did not want to acknowledge that
she had been there first. She wanted this to be her odyssey.
`I'm not my mother,' she said aloud. Instantly, the waiter
was at her elbow, with a friendly questioning air. She shook
her head, smiling; paid, tipped, and left.

This time, she borrowed her strategy from the Red Queen
of the Looking Glass. She went the opposite way from that
instructed by the San Marco signs, and soon, sure enough,
found herself entering what Napoleon had termed, inadequately, `the finest drawing room in Europe'.

The sun was lowering, the shadows enormous. The
Campanile loomed over the square like the giant gnomon
of a sundial; the loggias housed elongated arcs of light.
Nora gazed aghast at the opulent bronzed domes of the
Basilica - such decoration, such grandeur, a trove of treasure looted from the east. Here Rome and Constantinople had
mated to bring forth this strange and wondrous humpedbacked beast, an entirely new creature, a dragon of coils
and spurs to guard her city. And, in contrast, the exquisite
wedding cake of the Doge's Palace, serene and homogenous,
iced with a filigree of white stone. Only here would the
Orologio, a clock made for giants, where golden beasts of
the zodiac roamed across its face instead of numbers, seem
fitting and in keeping. Nora felt as if she needed to sit
down. Her head was spinning. She opened her guidebook,
but the words made no sense - they swam before her eyes,
the black and white facts an irrelevance when faced with
this technicolour splendour. Besides, she had set herself
apart from the tourists at the Rialto and had no wish to
return to their number, guidebook glued to hand, eyes
flicking from page to monument like an inept newscaster
struggling between script and camera.

Why did no one warn me about this?

She had been told for years to come here by friends, art
tutors, even by her mother. No one could believe she had
never been before, as an artist, as a half-Venetian. But her
coffee by the Rialto had given her a moment of clarity.
She knew she had not been before because of her mother.
Elinor had had the Venetian adventure, and been cruelly
hurt. The Serenissima had thrown her back, found her
wanting. Nora had not wanted to come here and make comparisons, find echoes of that story, stand in her mother's shoes. She had wanted to make her own discoveries
of Italy - Florence, Ravenna, Urbino. All those champions
of Venice amongst her friends had told her that it was the
one place in the world that lived up to the hype. They
had all told her.

But those she charged with her ill-preparedness were
the artists, the writers.

Canaletto, why did you not adequately depict this place? Why
were you, in all your mastery, not able to describe this to me?
Why did you merely sketch, not capture the details of this beauty?
Turner, why couldn't you capture the sun bleeding into the lagoon
as I see it now? Henry James, why did you not prepare me for
this? Evelyn Waugh, your passages of praise were faint insults
when faced with the real thing. Thomas Mann, why leave ~o
much out? Nicholas Roeg, even with your cameras and your
celluloid, why could you not tell me either?

The young woman in the great reception chambers of the
Library explained to Nora in her precise and perfect English
that unfortunately she may not enter the inner sanctum
of the building. Visitors without reader's cards were, however, welcome to use the reference section. Nora produced
her passport and watched the girl write out a day-pass in
her neat round hand, and followed her, tingling, through
double doors to the left of the main doors, which whispered a greeting as they closed behind her. The books waited in the still and stuffy air, dust and warm leather
welcoming Nora with the familiarity of her student days.
An elderly man was her only companion. He looked up,
nodded, then dropped his bright eyes to his texts. The girl
offered a brief explanation of the catalogues and melted
away.

Nora began her search among the yellowing cards of
the catalogues. `Manin' offered a bewildering number of
entries, but she quickly realized that most of them pertained
to a Doge - Lodovico; or Daniele, a revolutionary lawyer
who had resisted the Austrian occupation of 1848. The
sun moved across the great windows before she found the
numerous references to Corrado Manin, and from a distant
shelf hauled down a huge tome of the kind that adorns
the coffee tables of the world, its photographs unloved and
un-looked at from years end to years end. Seated at a
leather covered table she leafed through its pages and was
dazzled - even the faded 1960s photography did little to
diminish what she saw there. Page after page of beauty,
intricacy and sheer majesty, the work made her drop her
head to her hands and prompted the old man to glance
at her with concern.

I came here to find a city cousin to give me an entree into Venice,
and I find instead a Master - a Leonardo, a Michelangelo.

Nora felt humility, inadequacy and pride in equal measure.
Her eyes rested at last on a chandelier of surpassing beauty and read the legend beneath. `Candelabro - La Chiesa di
Santa Maria della Pieta, Venezia.' Memory prompted her
- she had seen, pasted on the warm walls of the city, a bill
which proclaimed that tonight saw the beginning of a
series of concerts of Venetian music in their original set-
tings.The church of the Pieta had been listed. Nora quickly
replaced the book and headed out into the light, turning
right to the Tourist Information Office in the Casino da
Caffe'. She bought her concert ticket and headed for San
Zaccaria, stopping for a plate of pasta which she ate
watching the sun dissolve into the lagoon.

Now, in the church of the Pieta, she knew she had made
a good choice for her first night. The day had been such
a revelation, such an assault on her senses, that she needed
this time to just sit, to be forced into inertia for a couple
of hours. She sat, let the music creep in her ears, and tried
to collect her thoughts.

From the moment she arrived at Marco Polo airport she
had felt a loss of control - as the motor launch whisked
herself and her suitcase across the lagoon towards Venice
she felt buffeted, physically by the wind, and mentally by
her experience.

Since her waking in the small hours she had been in a
kind of trance, automatically going through the well
rehearsed motions of going abroad - taxi to the airport,
checking in luggage. The feeling of lightness and of no return, as, unencumbered by bags, she wandered through
the airport shops, all full of things she didn't need. In the
bookshop she picked up a novel with a reproduction of
Canaletto on the cover, and thought it strange that, by
noon, she would be walking in the very precincts that he
had painted. She put the book down - she had no need
for fantasy. She was entering her own reality of Venice.