Against the Day (112 page)

“Not
necessarily. Sometimes more terrible—mortal, in pain, misshapen, even
taken apart, broken down into geometrical surfaces, but each time somehow, when
the process is working,
gone beyond
. . .
.
”

Beyond
her, she guessed. She was trying to keep up, but Hunter didn’t make it easy.
One day he told her a story she had actually already heard, as a sort of
bedtime story, from Merle, who regarded this as a parable, maybe the first on
record, about alchemy. It was from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, one of many
pieces of Scripture that early church politics had kept from being included in
the New Testament.

“Jesus
was sort of a hellraiser as a kid,” as Merle had told it, “the kind of wayward
youth I’m always finding you keepin company with, in fact, not that I’m objecting,”
as she had sat up in bed and looked for something to assault him with, “used to
go around town pulling these adolescent pranks, making little critters out of
clay, bringing them to life, birds that could fly, rabbits that talked, and
like that, driving his parents crazy, not to mention most of the local adults,
who were always coming by to complain—‘You better tell ’at Jesus to watch
it.’ One day he’s out with some friends looking for trouble to get into, and
they happen to go by the dyer’s shop, where there’s all these

pots with different colors of dye and piles of clothes next
to them, all sorted and each pile ready to be dyed a different color, Jesus
says, ‘Watch this,’ and grabs up all the clothes in one big bundle, the dyer’s
yelling, ‘Hey Jesus, what’d I tell you last time?’ drops what he’s doing and
goes chasing after the kid, but Jesus is too fast for him, and before anybody
can stop him he runs over to the biggest pot, the one with red dye in it, and
dumps all the clothes in, and runs away laughing. The dyer is screaming bloody
murder, tearing his beard, thrashing around on the ground, he sees his whole
livelihood destroyed, even Jesus’s lowlife friends think this time he’s gone a
little too far, but here comes Jesus with his hand up in the air just like in
the paintings, calm as anything—‘Settle down, everybody,’ and he starts
pulling the clothes out of that pot again, and what do you know, each one comes
out just the color it’s supposed to be, not only that but the exact shade of
that color, too, no more housewives hollerin ‘hey I wanted lime green not Kelly
green, you colorblind or something,’ no this time each item is the perfect
color it was meant to be.”

“Not a heck of a lot different,” it
had always seemed to Dally, “in fact, from that Pentecost story in Acts of the
Apostles, which did get in the Bible, not colors this time but languages,
Apostles are meeting in a house in Jerusalem, you’ll recall, Holy Ghost comes
down like a mighty wind, tongues of fire and all, the fellas come out and start
talking to the crowd outside, who’ve all been jabbering away in different
tongues, there’s Romans and Jews, Egyptians and Arabians, Mesopotamians and
Cappadocians and folks from east Texas, all expecting to hear just the same old
Galilean dialect—but instead this time each one is amazed to hear those
Apostles speaking to him in his own language.”

Hunter saw her point. “Yes, well it’s
redemption, isn’t it, you expect chaos, you get order instead. Unmet
expectations. Miracles.”

One day Hunter
announced he was switching to
nocturnes. Each twilight after that, he left his rooms and set out with his
gear, to put in a full night’s work. Dally switched her own day around to
accommodate. “And this Venetian light you’re always talkin about—”

“You’ll see. It’s nocturnal light,
the kind you need to run a greenblue glaze for. The night moisture in the air,
the blurs and beams and skyscatter, the lamplight reflected in the
rii,
above
all of course the moon
. . . .
”

She wondered sometimes what he would
have made of American light. She had sat adrift in insomnia for hours watching
fields of windows lit and lampless, vulnerable flames and filaments by the
thousands borne billowing

as by waves of the sea, the broken
rolling surfaces of the great cities, allowing herself to imagine, almost
surrendering to the impossibility of ever belonging, since childhood when she’d
ridden with Merle past all those small, perfect towns, longed after the lights
at creeksides and the lights defining the shapes of bridges over great rivers,
through church windows or trees in summer, casting shining parabolas down pale
brick walls or haloed in bugs, lanterns on farm rigs, candles at windowpanes,
each attached to a life running before and continuing on, long after she and
Merle and the wagon would have passed, and the mute land risen up once again to
cancel the brief revelation, the offer never clearly stated, the hand never
fully dealt
. . . .

Here in this ancient town
progressively settling into a mask of itself, she began to look for episodes of
counterlight, canalside gates into dank gloom,
sotopòrteghi
whose exits
could not be seen, absent faces, missing lamps at the ends of
calli.
So
there was revealed to her, night by night in ever more depressing clarity, a
secret and tenebrous city, down into whose ratinfested labyrinths she witnessed
children her age and younger being drawn, infected, corrupted, and too often
made to vanish, like a coin or a card—just that interchangeably held in
contempt by those who profited from the limitless appetite for young bodies
that seemed to concentrate here from all over Europe and beyond.

She was much more comfortable working
nights and trying to find someplace to sleep during the day. Nights had been
getting just too hazardous. She had of course been approached, and by some
mighty unwholesome customers, too, carrying on their faces scars as
certificates of their professional histories, and visible beneath black
suitjackets, Bodeo 10.4 mm pistols as evidence of their dedication to business.
The night predators came around, they whispered, they flirted, brought flowers
and cigarettes, respectfully keeping their distance, playing by a strict code,
until the prey, trembling against the pavement, engaged. Then the weapon which
had not been clearly seen, which had appeared only in tantalizing glimpses,
came out into the legendary moonlight, and all doubts, and most hopes,
vanished.

Dally made a point of being on her
feet till they’d moved on, which so far they had, the weather being on their
side, they only had to wait. One, Tonio, with a particular interest in Dally,
an English suit, almost accentless English. “I know so many of you, American
girls, out having fun every night, beautiful clothes, the Casino, the big
hotels, the fancydress balls at the palazzi. What can you see in this? sleeping
with the rats. Such a waste of a lovely girl.”

All she had to do was start asking
about the clothes, or what sort of room she’d be able to afford—she’d
overheard these exchanges—and without quite knowing the moment the stakes
of the game would’ve shifted to life and death, the hopeful young creature
would be enfolded in the irreversible darkness of midnight beneath the
foschetta.

It put her in a peculiar bind, her
feelings for the city undiminished yet now with the element of fear that could
not be wished aside, each night bringing new intelligence of evil waiting up
the end of any little alleyway. Hunter argued that this was why so many people
had come to love Venice, because of its “chiaroscuro.”

“Thanks for the news, easy enough for
you, I guess, but nights out here on the
masègni
are not quite as
romantic as they are for tourists.”

   
“You’re
calling me a tourist?”

   
“You’ll
leave someday. What would you call that?”

   
“Then,
when I do, come with me.”

The
noon cannon went off. A boatful of cigarette smugglers hastily tied up at the
canalside and began to unload their cargo. Bells began to peal across the city.
“Oh,
patrone,
”
she
said at last, “Beppo, you know, she’sa nota too sure
. . . .
” It did put a few new lines into his biography all right,
but then time began to pass again as usual, and one day the bora came, and the
first wine trains up from Puglia, and what do you know, he did not leave.

Winter was coming
on
, and Dally needed
someplace reliable to sleep during the day, the
fondamente
by now having
been long out of the question. She was making do in courtyards, student hovels,
back rooms of
osterie,
keeping on the go, but finally reluctantly, went
to Hunter for advice. “Why didn’t you ask?” he said.

   
“Why
didn’t I?”

His
eyes shifted away. “Nothing simpler.” And next thing she knew, he had fixed her
up with a room in the palazzo of the seminotorious Principessa Spongiatosta,
one of many acquaintances Dally hadn’t known about till now.

She
was expecting an older woman with ruinous features, a sort of human palazzo.
Instead here was this brighteyed dewdrop whom Time seemed not, or maybe, in
Time’s case, never, to have touched. There was a Prince, too, but he was seldom
around. Off traveling, according to Hunter, but there was more he wasn’t
saying.

What
intrigued Dally about the interior spaces at Ca’ Spongiatosta as she took odd
moments to drift around the corridors and anterooms were the rapid changes in
scale, something like the almost theatrical expansion from comfortable, dark,
humansize alleyways to the vast tracklessness and light of Piazza San Marco.
Dark red tiles, a portico in Roman Composite Order, giant decorative urns,
brown light, japonica, myrtle, geraniums, fountains, high

walls, narrow waterways, and miniature bridges incorporated
into the palazzo structure, too many servants for Dally to keep straight. There
might in fact be more than one of the Princess—she seemed to be
everywhere, and now and then Dally could swear her appearances were multiple
and not consecutive, though what went on at the corners of Dally’s eyes had
always enjoyed with her about the same status as dreams. Mirror tricks? Luca
would know. Wherever he was, and Erlys.

She
had news soon enough. One day a servant brought her a note. Who had come blowing
in to town with the bora but Bria Zombini. She was staying at a small hotel
across the Iron Bridge in Dorsoduro. Dally showed up in a frock the Princess
was kind enough to let her borrow. Bria was wearing highheeled shoes, just
balancing the inch or so Dally had grown over the past year, so they greeted
each other eye to eye. Dally saw this very selfpossessed young lady, her hair
up underneath a widebrim Parisian hat, flicking sweat off her upper lip and
going
“
Porca miseria!
”
same
as always.

They
linked arms and strolled down the Zattere. “Been everyplace,” Bria said. “Held
over by popular demand, couple crowned heads, you know, the usual. They’re all
about to sail back now, I’m supposed to meet them in Le Havre, happened to be
this side of the Alps and thought I’d look in.”

   
“Oh,
Bri, I miss you all somethin terrible, you know
. . . .
”

Bria
narrowed her eyes a little, nodded. “But Venice has got you, and you think you
want to stay over here now.”

   
“Thoughtreading,
these days.”

   
“Every
letter you sent us—ain’t that hard to see.”

   
“How’s
our Mamma doing?”

Bria
shrugged. “Guess she’s a lot easier to miss when there’s some distance in
between.”

   
“You
two
. . .
you’ve been arguing?”

   
“Hah!
She’s
not gonna be happy till I’m dead or out the door.”

   
“What
about Luca?”

“What
about him? He’s Italian, he’s my pop. Thinks I’m some junior nun’s got to be
kept behind a gate with a lock. So it’s two on one, swell situation, huh?”

   
Dally
ducked her head and looked up through her eyelashes. “Boys . . .”

“Boys,
men, what’s the difference, I’m supposed to ignore all the attention,
ma
via,
you know what they’re like over here.” Bria grinning so like the young
rogue Dally remembered that she caught the smile too, and before they knew it
their foreheads were together, stray hair wisps intermingling, third eyes
touching, and they were laughing quietly together, for no good reason either
could see.

   
“Well.
What do I tell them, you gonna be a remittance girl?”

   
Dally’s
laugh faded. “Oh
. . .
think not.”

   
“Why
not? Papa thought you might want to stay. He says he can afford it.”

   
“That’s
not it.”

“Ahh? Some gentleman friend, I
should’ve known. This Spongiatosta address.”

   
“Not
exactly.”

   
“Nothing,
uhm—” Wiggling both hands expressively.

   
“Ha.
Fat chance.”