Heaven Has No Favorites: A Novel (23 page)

That feeling intensified when she walked through the piazza. Something of the adventure of all beginnings was in it. She had no destination; she let herself drift and landed in the lower restaurant of Quadri, because she thought it lovely that a small eating establishment whose walls were decorated with eighteenth-century scenes and gold brackets should simply open out on the street. She ordered
scampi
, drinking a light white wine with it. Beside her, masked figures danced on the walls. She felt like them, as if she had escaped, had her face hidden behind an invisible domino, in the same mild intoxication of irresponsible freedom that every mask granted. A thousand beginnings lay before her in the roseate dusk, like the thousand narrow lanes of this city which was so fond of masks. Where did those beginnings lead? To unknown, unnamed new discoveries, or only to seductive, well-known pleasures from which you emerged with a hangover and an acute regret at having wasted on them the most precious thing there was: time? Yet it has to be wasted, Lillian thought, it has to be wasted thoughtlessly, in spite of everything, or else you are like the man in the fairy tale who wanted so much for his gold piece that he could not decide what it should be, and died before he made up his mind.

“What is going on this evening?” she asked the waiter.

“This evening? Perhaps you would like the theater, Signora.”

“Can seats still be had?”

“Very likely. There are almost always some seats to be had.”

“How do I reach it?”

The waiter began to describe the route. “Can’t I take a gondola?” she asked.

“Certainly. In the old days, people always did. It isn’t done so much any more. The theater has two entrances. It isn’t far to walk.”

Lillian took a gondola at the Palazzo Ducale. The waiter had been right; except for hers, only one other gondola was heading for the theater. It was occupied by an elderly American couple, who were taking flash-bulb photographs. They took a picture of Lillian’s gondola, too. “A woman ought not to be alone in Venice,” the gondolier said as he helped her step out. “A young woman still less. A beautiful woman never.”

Lillian looked at him. He was old and did not give the impression of offering himself as the needed medicine. “Can one ever feel alone here?” she said, gazing at the red twilight above the roofs.

“Here more than anywhere else, Signora. Unless you were born here, of course.”

Lillian arrived just in time, as the curtain was rising. The play was an eighteenth-century comedy. She looked around the theater in the muted illumination from the stage and the wings. It was the most beautiful theater in the world and must, before the introduction of electric light, have been magical with a host of candles lighting the painted balconies. It still was.

She looked at the stage. She did not understand much Italian, and soon gave up trying to listen. The strange feeling of loneliness and melancholy which she had had in Rome overpowered her again. Was the gondolier right? Or did the feeling come from the symbolic situation: that you could arrive at a place, listen to a play of which you understood nothing, and have to leave it just as you were beginning to catch some inkling of its meaning? Nothing serious was taking place on the stage—that much she could see. It was a comedy, seduction, deception, a somewhat cruel joke about a fool, and Lillian did not know what it was that so stirred within
her, that developed into a curious sob, so that she had to put her handkerchief to her lips. She did not realize until the feeling came again and she saw the dark spots on her handkerchief.

She remained sitting for a moment, trying to suppress it; but the blood welled up again. She had to go out, but she was not sure she could manage it alone. In French, she asked the man beside her to take her out. He shook his head irritably without looking at her. He was following the action of the play, and did not understand what she wanted. She turned to the woman on her left. Desperately, she searched for the Italian word for “help.” She could not think of it.
“Misericordia,”
she murmured at last.
“Misericordia, per favore!”

The woman looked up in astonishment. “Are you sick?” she asked in English.

Lillian nodded, handkerchief to her lips, and indicated by a gesture that she wanted to leave.

“Too many cocktails,” the blonde, elderly woman said. “Mario, darling, help the lady to get some fresh air. What a mess!”

Mario stood up. He supported Lillian. “Just to the door,” she whispered.

He took her arm and helped her out. Heads turned briefly. On the stage, the self-assured lover was just that very moment enjoying a triumph. Mario opened the door to the foyer, and in the bright light stared at Lillian. Before him stood an extremely pale young woman in a white dress, blood dripping through her fingers on to her clothes. “But, Signora, this is too much of an understatement. You are really sick,” he said in astonishment. “Shall I take you to a hospital?”

Lillian shook her head. “Hotel Danieli. Please—a car,” she choked out. “Taxi—”

“Signora, there are no taxis in Venice. Only a gondola, or a motorboat. You must go to a hospital.”

“No, no. A boat. To the hotel. There must be a doctor there. Please—just take me to a boat—you have to go back.…”

“Oh,” Mario said, “Mary can wait. She doesn’t understand a word of Italian anyhow. And the play is very dull.”

The pale Pompeian red of the foyer after the dark red of the curtains. The white of the stucco reliefs. Doors. Steps and wind; then a square, noises of plates and forks, a restaurant on the street, laughter and the bustle of diners. Past that to a dark, ill-smelling, narrow canal, out of which a gondolier and a boat appeared, like a ferry for crossing the Styx. “Gondola, Signora, gondola?”

“Yes. Quick, quick! The Signora is sick.”

The gondolier stared. “Shot?”

“Don’t ask questions. Draw up. Quick.”

The narrow canal. A small bridge. Walls of houses. The slap of water. The long-drawn-out cry of the gondolier at intersections. Moldering steps, rusted doors, tiny gardens with geraniums, rooms with radios and bare yellow light bulbs, washing hung out to dry, a rat balancing like a trapeze artist on the side of a house, the sharp voices of women, smells of onions and garlic and oil, and the heavy, dead smell of the water.

“We’ll be there in a moment,” Mario said.

A second canal, broader. Then the stronger waves and the breadth of the Canal Grande. “Shall we stop a motorboat?”

She lay on the rear seats, athwart them, just as she had fallen there. “No,” she whispered. “Go on. Better not change …”

The hotels, illuminated; the terraces,
vaporetti
, chugging, smoking, filled with passengers, motorboats with men in white uniforms—how terribly alone you were in the midst of the sweet tumult of life when you were fighting for it and when everything was transformed into a nightmare in which you struggled for breath. The rows of gondolas at their stands swayed on the reflecting water like black coffins, like black, huge water vultures striving
to hack at her with their metallic beaks—past all this, and then the
piazzetta
, a mist of light, spaciousness and stars, an area of brightness with the sky for ceiling, and under the Bridge of Sighs an unbearably sweet tenor singing “Santa Lucia” for a boatload of tourists. Suppose this were dying now, Lillian thought—lying this way, her head back, the rush of the water close to her ears, the scrap of song ahead, and an unknown man beside her asking again and again in English: “How are you feeling? Hold on another two minutes. We’re almost there.” But no, she knew that this was not dying.

Mario helped her out of the boat. “Pay for me,” she whispered to the doorman at the canal entrance of the Hotel Danieli. “And get a doctor. Right away.”

Mario supported her across the lobby. There were not many people in it. A group of Americans at one table stared at her. Dimly, she saw a face she knew, but she could not recall who it was.

The elevator operator was still on duty. With an effort, Lillian smiled at him. “All kinds of things happen in this hotel,” she whispered. “Didn’t you say so?”

“Don’t try to talk, Signora,” Mario said. He was a courtly guardian angel with a velvety voice. “The doctor is coming. Doctor Pisani. He’s very good. Don’t talk. Bring ice cubes,” he said to the elevator operator.

She lay in her room for a week. The windows stayed open—it was already that warm. She had not informed Clerfayt. She did not want him to see that she was sick. Nor did she want to see him at her bedside. This was her affair, hers alone. She slept and half slept through the days, heard the hoarse cries of the gondoliers until late at night, and the slapping sounds made by the tied-up gondolas on the Riva degli Schiavoni. The doctor came now and then, and
Mario came also. It was only a small hemorrhage, nothing very dangerous; the doctor understood her, and Mario brought her flowers and told her about his difficult life with elderly ladies. If only he could find a rich young one who would understand him. He did not mean Lillian. In a single day, he had seen through her and grasped her point of view. He was completely open with her and spoke with her as if she were a fellow-worker in the same vineyards as he. “You live on death the way I do on women who see their time running out,” he said, laughing. “Or to put it another way: You also see your time running out, but you have your gigolo who always stands by you. His name is Death. The difference is that he remains faithful to you. On the other hand, you play him false whenever you can.”

Lillian listened with amusement. “Death is the gigolo for all of us. Only most people don’t know it,” she said. “What are you planning to do later on, Mario? Marry one of your aging ladies?”

Mario shook his head gravely. “I’m saving. When I have enough, a few years from now, I’m going to open a smart bar with a little eating place. Something like Harry’s Bar. I have a fiancée in Padua who is a very good cook. Her
fettucini!
” Mario kissed the tips of his fingers. “Will you come with your friend?”

“I’ll come,” Lillian said, touched by his delicacy. He wanted to make her feel better by pretending to believe she would go on living, at least the few years until he had his place. Yet hadn’t she herself secretly believed in a little personal miracle? Hadn’t she believed that the very thing she had been warned against might turn out to be good for her? I have been a romantic sentimentalist, she thought. Like a child, I’ve expected that some mother-figure divinity would rescue me from every desperate situation with one good-natured slap on the backside. She saw Mario’s head against the window, in the rose-quartz light of afternoon, and thought of a remark she had heard an English racing driver make in Sicily: that
Latin peoples had no sense of humor. They needed none; they had long passed beyond that particular mode of facing up to life. Humor was a flower of cultivated barbarism; the eighteenth century had had little of it, but on the other hand had had a great deal of the
courtoisie
which chose to ignore what could not be assimilated. Those condemned to death in the French Revolution went to the block with exquisite manners. Not laughing; they went as if they were on their way to court.

Mario brought her a rosary that had been blessed by the Pope, and a painted Venetian box for letters.

“I cannot give you anything in return, Mario,” she said.

“I don’t want anything in return. It is good to be able to give sometimes, instead of always having to live on gifts.”

“Do you really have to?”

“My profession is too profitable for me to give it up. But it isn’t easy. It’s real work. What is so nice about you is that you don’t want anything from me.”

The face that Lillian had seen in the hotel lobby the evening of her hermorrhage turned out to be that of the Vicomte de Peystre. He had recognized her, and on the next day had begun sending her flowers. At first these came without a name; after a week he sent his card.

“Why are you in the hotel?” he asked, when at last she telephoned him.

“I love hotels. Would you like to send me to a hospital?”

“Of course not. Hospitals are for operations. I hate them just as much as you do. But a house with a garden, by one of the quiet canals—”

“Do you have one here, too? Like your apartment in Paris?”

“It would not be difficult to find one.”

“Do you have one?”

“Yes,” de Peystre said.

Lillian laughed. “You have homes everywhere and I don’t want one anywhere. Which of us will give them up more easily? Rather, take me out to eat somewhere.”

“Are you allowed out?”

“Not really. That makes a bit of an adventure of it, doesn’t it?”

It made it an adventure, she thought, as she went down to the lobby. If you escaped death frequently, you were reborn just as frequently, and each time with a deeper gratitude—so long as you dropped the idea of having a claim upon life.

Surprised, she stood still. That is it, she thought. That is the secret. Did I have to come to Venice, to this magical hotel with its afternoons of vermilion and cobalt blue, to find it out?

“You are smiling,” de Peystre said. “Why? Because you are tricking your doctor?”

“Not my doctor. Where are we going?”

“To the Taverna. We take the boat here.”

The side entrance of the hotel. The swaying gondola. A moment of recollection and of nausea, which swiftly passed as she stepped in. The gondola was no longer a floating coffin, nor was it a black vulture hacking at her with metallic beak. It was a gondola, dark symbol of an appetite for splendor so overweening that it had been necessary to pass a law that all gondolas must be black, because otherwise their owners would have ruined themselves on extravagant decoration.

“I know Venice only from my window,” Lillian said. “And from a few hours the first evening.”

“Then you know it better than I. I have been coming here for thirty years.”

The canal. The hotels. The terraces with their tables, white tableclothes and glasses. The slapping water. The narrow canal, like
a branch of the Styx. How is it I know all this? Lillian thought, for a moment depressed. Oughtn’t there to be a window with bird cage and canary coming along now?