The Glassblower of Murano (5 page)

On the flight, she still felt in control. She accepted with
thanks her food and drinks, her courtesy magazine, listened
carefully to the safety instructions. But the moment she
landed Nora began to feel this new, but not unpleasant,
helplessness. She realized that, in her futile, ludicrous daydreams, she had pictured the plane landing in Saint Mark's
Square, on some futuristic runway. But the reality was
almost as strange - Marco Polo seemed to be actually on
the water, an island airport, surrounded by sea. She had
not thought through the next stage either, but now realized
that she would be taking a boat to Venice. Of course. As
the driver handed her on board the rocking water taxi she
contrasted the experience with the black cab and cheerful
cockney driver that had taken her to Heathrow at six.

Something else she had not realized. The boat soon
reached a landmass and began to chug along a narrow
canal. Nora knew at once this was not Venice itself, but
heard a strange distant chime, like the fading resonance of
a bell, calling to her. As if he read her thoughts the driver
jerked a thumb at the ancient buildings and shouted briefly
above the wind `Murano.'

Murano. The home of Glass. The workplace of her ancestors. She felt a jolt as she passed the fondamente crowded
with glass factories. The same fornaci, in the same places,
housing the same skills that they had for centuries. She
knew that the next day she would be back, to enquire
about work. Instead of feeling afraid of her mad scheme,
she felt suddenly sure. This was real, and she was going to
make it work. The word destiny came into her mind. A
silly, romantic word, but once there it would not leave. She
clasped the glass heart around her neck and felt suddenly
theatrical. She wanted to make some sort of gesture. She
began to unplait her hair, and let the mass of it blow in
the wind. She meant to salute Murano, but knew that, in
truth, the gesture was for Stephen.

She regretted the impulse when she had checked into
her hotel, trying to comb the tangled mess into some sort
of order in the mock rococo mirror in her bathroom. She
looked so different to the way she had looked in her own
mirror at four in the morning. She looked at her Venetian
self in the Venetian glass. Her hair was wild, her cheeks
ruddy from the sea breeze, her eyes shining with a zealot's
light. The glass heart was the only constant, as it still hung
from her neck. She thought she looked a mess - even a
little crazy, but at the same time, rather beautiful.

Someone else thought so too.

He sat across the aisle from her in the church. Probably thirty or so, extremely well groomed like most Italian men,
tall as his legs tucked uncomfortably behind the pew. And
his face - before she realized, the thought had formed in
her head.

He looks like he has stepped from a painting.

At once, she remembered her mother's story, was horrified
that their thoughts had chimed in the same way thirty
years apart. She turned away. But having thought it, she
couldn't take it back. She looked again, and he was still
looking at her. Her cheeks burned and she turned determinedly away once again.

The music sweetened her thoughts and Nora focused
her eyes on what she had come to see; the great, decorative glass chandelier that was suspended high above her
head, looming out of the dark of the roofspace like an
inverted crystal tree. Numerous droplets hung from decorative branches which seemed so impossibly delicate that
they could hardly support their diamond fruits. Nora tried
to follow each arm of the glass with her eyes, to see how
it curved and turned, but each time she lost her place as
the design bested her. Each crystal teardrop seemed to
capture the candle flames and hold them within the perfection of the prism. She could hear, ringing in her head,
the resonant note she had heard earlier as she passed Murano,
but in another instant realized that this note was real,
tangible. The glass itself was sweetly singing, the timbre of the strings and their vibrations caused every branch and
pendant crystal to sound their own, almost imperceptible
counterpoint. Nora looked at her pamphlet for information
on this miracle her own ancestor had wrought. There was
nothing, but Nora smiled to herself with what she knew.

It was here when you were alive, Antonio Vivaldi.

Then, as now, you heard your own compositions echoing back
to you in this crystalline harmony. In point of fact, it was here
before you were even born. And it was made by Corradino
Manin.

The great chandelier crossed the lagoon, hanging in the
dark barrel. Submerged in water, swinging in complement
to the waves, muffled from all sound and sense. The water
that surrounded it was ink dark, but tiny motes of moonlight hit the prisms here and there, like single diamonds
in pitch. The fluid was cushioning, safe, amniotic. Tomorrow
the chandelier would be born into its purpose. Last night
it had been completed. Tonight it waited. The barrel was
lashed upright in the boat by so many ropes that the great
dark mass looked to have been captured in a fisherman's
net. The boatmen splashed and heaved their oars, singing
an old song of the Piemontese. From inside the barrel, the
chandelier began to sing too.

Corradino ached, but he would not stop. The chandelier
hung before him on an iron chain in a near-finished state,
shining gold in the flamelight from the furnace. Its crystal arms reached out to him in supplication, as if begging for
completion. One of its five delicate limbs was missing, so
for the final time Corradino reached in the fire. Pushing
his canna da soffio rod into the heart of the melt he rolled
it expertly, drawing out a gather of molten glass, which
clung to the end of his blowpipe. He began rolling the
glass against a hardwood paddle, marvering it into the
correct shape to begin its transformation. Corradino
thought of the glass as living, always living. He had made
a cocoon from which something beautiful could now
grow.

He took a breath and blew. The glass miraculously arched
from his lips into a long, delicate balloon. Corradino always
held the breath out of his lungs until he had made sure
that the bubble, or parison, he had created was perfect in
all dimensions. His fellows joked that he was such a perfectionist that, were the parison not perfect, Manin would
never take another breath in, and expire on the spot. In
truth, Corradino knew that the slightest winds of his breath
at the crucial heat meant the difference between perfection
and imperfection, between the divine and the merely beautiful.

He watched the glass changing, chameleon-like, through
all shades of red, rose, orange, amber, yellow and finally
white as it began to grow cool. Corradino knew he must
work fast. He thrust the parison into the Porno to reheat
it briefly, then began to manipulate it with his hands.

Not for him the protective wads of cotton or paper that others used to save their skin from shriveling and blistering
with the heat. He had long since sacrificed his fingertips
to his art. They had burned, scarred and eventually healed
smooth with no prints. Corradino recalled the tales of
Marco Polo who had said that the ancient T'ang dynasty
of China used fingerprints as a means of identification,
and the practice had endured in the Orient ever since.

My identity has become one with the glass. Somewhere in Venice,
or far overseas, my own skin lies embedded in the hard silica of
a goblet or candlestick.

Corradino knew that his glass was the best because he
held her in his hands, touching her skin with his, feeling
her breathe. He took up his tagianti shears and began to
pull a delicate filigree of curlicues from the main cylinder,
until a forest of crystalline branches sprang from the tube.
Corradino swiftly broke the blowpipe free, and transferring
the piece to a solid iron rod - the pontello - he began to
work with the open end. Finally running out of time as
the unforgiving glass hardened, he took it to the mother
structure and wound the new arm round the main trunk,
in a decorative spiral. There was no rough spot - no pontello mark - to remain, like an umbilicus, to betray the
origins of the limb.

He stood holding the arm while the final hardening
took place, admiring his work, then finally stood back and
wiped his brow. Although shirtless, as the maestri always worked, he still felt the burning of the furnace fires on his
skin from dawn till dusk. He wondered, looking at the
diligent workers around him, whether this profession were
a good preparation for hellfires. What was it that Dante
wrote?

`... tall flames flowed fierce,

Heating them so white hot as ever burned

Iron in the forge of any artificers.'

Corradino knew the work of the Florentine well. His
father had allowed all the family to bring one possession
- one most precious thing - with them from the Palazzo
Manin on the night they escaped. His father had brought
a precious vellum copy of Dante's Divina Commedia from
his library.

That was my father's choice. It's the only book I own. It's the
only thing that remains of my father.

Corradino banished the thought of him and turned back
to the punishing flames.

No wonder that, back in 1291, the Grand Council of
Venice had decreed that all glass-making should take place
on the island of Murano, because of the constant threat of
fire to the city. A blaze begun by the furnaces had more
than once threatened to engulf Venice. It had been a wise
idea to move the centre of production, for just a few years
back the English city of London had been all but destroyed
by fire. Not, mind you, that it had been started by anything as artistic as a glass foundry. The latest rumour among the
merchants on the Rialto had spoken of the blaze beginning in a pie-shop. Corradino snorted.

'Tis an English trait - always thinking of the stomach.

The London fire had meant good business here on Murano.
The English King Charles seemed to want to create London
anew, and fill his grand modern buildings with mirrors
and glasswork. There was, therefore, much demand from
that chilly capital for the work of Corradino and his comrades.

Although Corradino had finished the main frame of his
chandelier there was still much to do. It was growing dark,
and one by one, the fire-breathing mouths of the furnaces
were extinguished, doors closed, and his fellows left. He
called to one of the garzoni to a last errand, and as the boy
ran through the fornace, jumping over iron pipes and dodging
around buckets as the men worked, Corradino smiled and
thought the apprentices' nickname `scimmia di vetro' - glass
monkeys - seemed particularly apt.

The boy was soon back with the box. `Eccolo Maestro!

Corradino opened the long rosewood box. Inside were
100 small square partitions, all numbered, all lined with a
wad of flock wool. Corradino got to work. He took a
small pontello, much smaller than his trusty blowpipe, and
dipped it into the glass that lay, molten and unformed,
waiting, at the bottom of his furnace. He pulled out the rod which now resembled a lit candle. Waiting a moment,
he then plucked the glowing orb from the rod and began
to roll the glass in his palms, and then more delicately in
his fingers. When satisfied, he pulled out a string of the
glass to form a teardrop, and fashioned a delicate hook on
its end. He dropped the jewel he had made into the bucket
of water that rested between his knees.After a long moment,
he plunged his hand into the bucket and rescued the
gem.

His action brought to his mind the stories of the pearl
fishers of the East, stories that were brought back in the
days of Venice's mastery over Constantinople, way back in
the thirteenth century.

Do those boys who dive for pearls in the deep, striving for the
oysters while their lungs burst, feel the same satisfaction I do?
Surely, no: when they find a pearl, it is mere luck - a beneficence
of nature. When their brothers in the Hartz mountains in Germany
who mine for silver in the heat and dark of the hills, find a pure
seam of silver, do they feel as if they have created this treasure?
And you diamond miners of the Africas, as you prise a perfect
gem from the rocks, can you feel the pride that I do? No, for I
have made these things of beauty. God made the others. And now
in this world of men, in our seventeenth century, glass is more
precious than any of your treasures; more than gold, more than
saffron.

Dry instantly in the heat of the flames, the droplet Corradino had made was placed delicately in the compartment marked `uno' in the rosewood box. Even nestling in
the wool flock its diamond-like purity was not dulled.
Corradino sent up a silent prayer of thanks to Angelo
Barovier, the Maestro who had, two centuries ago, invented
this `cristallo' glass of hard silica with which Corradino now
worked. Before then, all glass was coloured, even white
glass had an impurity or dullness, the hue of sand or milk
or smoke. Cristallo meant that, for the first time, full transparency and crystal clarity could be achieved, and Corradino
blessed the day.

Corradino turned back to the making of his droplets.
He still had ninety-nine to make before he would allow
himself to return to his quarters for his wine and polenta
supper. He could not entrust this work to one of the
servente apprentices, because each one of the hundred droplets was different. In a move that had astounded his fellows,
Corradino insisted that each droplet, because of its position
on the chandelier, its distance from each candle, had to be
a slightly different shape in order to transmit the same
luminescence from every angle when suspended from the
ceiling of a church or palazzo. The other glassmakers in
the fornace and the boys used to gaze for hours on end at
the contents of Corradino's droplet boxes, shaking their
heads. They all looked exactly the same. Corradino saw
them looking and smiled. He knew he had no need to
hide his work - they could look all day long and would
not know how he did it. Even he did not really understand what his fingers did as he thought of where this particular
droplet would hang on the finished piece.