Passion (13 page)

Death in batde seemed glorious when we were not in batde. But for the men who were bloodied and maimed and made to run through smoke that choked them into enemy lines where bayonets were waiting, death in batde seemed only what it was. Death. The curious thingis that we always went back. The Grande Armee had more recruits than it could train and very few desertions, at least until recendy. Bonaparte said war was in our blood.

Could that be true?

And if it is true there will be no end to these wars. Not now, not ever. Whenever we shout Peace! and run home to our sweethearts and till the land we will be not in peace but in a respite from the war to come. War will always be in the future. The future crossed out.

It can't be in our blood.

Why would a people who love the grape and the sun die in the zero winter for one man?

Why did I? Because I loved him. He was my passion and when we go to war we feel we are not a lukewarm people any more.

What did Villanelle think?

Men are violent. That's all there is to it.

Being with her was like pressing your eye to a particularly vivid kaleidoscope. She was all primaiy colour and although she understood better than I the ambiguities of the heart she was not equivocal in her thinking.

'I come from the city of mazes,' she said, 'but if you ask me a direction I will tell you straight ahead.'

We were now in the Kingdom of Italy, and it was her plan to take a boat to Venice, where we could stay with her family until it was safe for me to return to France. In return, she would ask of me a favour and that favour concerned the re-possession of her heart.

'My lover still has it. I left it there. I want you to help me get it back.'

I promised her my help but there was something I wanted too; why had she never taken her boots off? Not even while we stayed with the peasants in Russia? Not even in bed?

She laughed and drew back her hair, and her eyes were bright with two deep furrows between the eyebrows. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

'I told you. My father was a boatman. Boatmen do not take off their boots,' and that was all she would say, but I determined on my arrival in her enchanted city to find out more about these boatmen and their boots.

We were fortunate in a fair passage and on that calm glittering sea the war and the winter seemed years away. Someone else's past. And so it was that in May
1813
I had my first glimpse of Venice.

Arriving at Venice by sea, as one must, is like seeing an invented city rise up and quiver in the air. It is a trick of the early light to make the buildings shimmer so that they seem never still. It is not built on any lines I can fathom but rather seems to have pushed itself out, impudendy, here and there. To have swelled like yeast in a shape of its own. There are no preliminaries, no docks for the smaller craft, your boat anchors in the lagoon and in a moment with no more ado you are in St Mark's Square. I watched Villanelle's face; the face of someone coming home, seeing nothing but the homecoming. Her eyes flickered from the domes to cats, embracing what she saw and passing a silent message that she was back. I envied her that I was still an exile.

We landed and taking my hand she led me through an impossible maze, past something I seemed to translate as the Bridge of Fists and even more unlikely, the Canal of the Toilet, until we arrived at a quiet waterway.

This is the back of my house,' she said, 'the front door is on the canal.'

Their front doors opened into the water?

Her mother and stepfather greeted us with the kind of rapture I had always imagined to have been the luck of the Prodigal Son. They drew up chairs and sat close by so that all our knees touched and her mother kept leaping up and running out to fetch trays of cakes and jugs of wine. At every one of our stories, her father slapped me on the back and went 'Ha Ha', and her mother raised her hands to the Madonna and said, 'What a mercy you are here.'

The fact that I was a Frenchman didn't bother them at all. 'Not every Frenchman is Napoleon Bonaparte,' said her father. 'I have known some good ones, though Villanelle's husband was not such a good one.'

I looked at her startled. She had never said that her fat husband was a Frenchman. I presumed her facility for my language had come with living around so many soldiers for most of her life.

She shrugged, her usual gesture when she didn't want to explain and asked what had happened to her husband.

'He comes and goes, like always, but you can hide.'

The thought of hiding the two of us, fugitives for different reasons, appealed enormously to Villanelle's parents.

'When I was married to a boatman,' said her mother, 'things were happening every day, but the boat people are clannish and now that I am married to a baker,' she tweaked his cheek, 'they go their ways and I go mine.' Her eyes narrowed and she leaned forwards so close that I could smell her breakfast. 'There are stories I could tell you, Henri, that would make your hair stand on end,' and she slapped me on the knee so violendy that I fell back in my chair.

'Leave the boy alone,' said her husband, 'he's just walked from Moscow.'

'Madonna,' exclaimed she, 'how could I?' and she forced me to eat another cake.

When I was reeling with cakes and wine and almost collapsed with exhaustion, she took me around the house and showed me in particular the litde grille with a mirror positioned at such an angle as to reveal the identity of any caller at the water-gate.

'We won't always be here and you must be sure who it is if you are to open the door. As a further precaution I think you should shave off your beard. We Venetians are not hairy and you will stand out.'

I thanked her and slept for two days.

On the third day I awoke to a quiet house and my room completely dark because the shutters were so tighdy closed. I threw them back and let in the yellow light that touched my face and broke in spears across the floor. I could see the dust in the sunlight. The room was low and uneven and the walls had faded spaces where pictures had hung. There was a wash-stand and a full jug, ice cold, and after so much cold and in this warmth, I could only bear to dip in my fingers and rub away the sleep from my eyes. There was a mirror too. Full length on a wooden swivel stand. The mirror was silvered in places, but I saw myself, thin and bony, with a too large head and a ruffian's beard. They were right. I must shave before I went out. From my window which overlooked the canal I saw a whole world going about in boats. Vegetable boats, passenger boats, boats with canopies covering rich ladies and bones as thin as a knife-blade with raised prows. These were the strangest boats of all because their owners rowed them standing up. As far as I could see, the canal was marked at regular intervals with gaily striped poles, some with boats butting against them, others, their gold tops peeling in the sun.

I threw the filthy water I used along with the remains of my beard into the canal and prayed that my past had sunk for ever.

I got lost from the first. Where Bonaparte goes, straight roads follow, buildings are rationalised, street signs may change to celebrate a batde but they are always clearly marked. Here, if they bother with street signs at all, they are happy to use the same ones over again. Not even Bonaparte could rationalise Venice.

This is a city of madmen.

Everywhere, I found a church and sometimes it seemed I found the same square but with different churches. Perhaps here churches spring up overnight like mushrooms and dissolve as quickly with the dawn. Perhaps the Venetians build them overnight? At the height of their powers they built a galleon every day, fully fitted. Why not a church, fully fitted? The only rational place in the whole city is the public garden and even there, on a foggy night, four sepulchral churches rise up and swamp the regimental pines.

I did not return to the baker's home for five days because I could not find my way and because I felt embarrassed to speak French to these people. I walked, looking for bread stalls, sniffing like a tracker dog, hoping to catch a clue on the air. But I only found churches.

At last, I turned a corner, a corner I swear I had turned a hundred times before and I saw Villanelle plaiting her hair in a boat.

'We thought you'd gone back to France,' she said. 'Mama was broken hearted. She wants you to be her son.'

'I need a map.'

'It won't help. This is a living city. Things change.'

'Villanelle, cities don't.'

'Henri, they do.'

She ordered me into the boat, promising food on the way.

'I'll take you on a tour, then you won't go missing again.'

The boat smelled of urine and cabbages and I asked her whose it was. She said it belonged to a man who bred bears. An admirer of hers. I was learning not to ask her too many questions; truth or lie, the answers were usually unsatisfactory.

We slid out of the sun, down icy tunnels that set my teeth on edge and past damp worker barges, hauled up with their nameless cargo.

'This city enfolds upon itself. Canals hide other canals, alleyways cross and criss-cross so that you will not know which is which until you have lived here all your life. Even when you have mastered the squares and you can pass from the Rialto to the Ghetto and out to the lagoon with confidence, there will still be places you can never find and if you do find them you may never see St Mark's again. Leave plenty of time in your doings and be prepared to go another way, to do something not planned if that is where the streets lead you.'

We rowed in a shape that seemed to be a figure of eight working back on itself. When I suggested to Villanelle that she was being deliberately mysterious and taking me a way I would never recognise again, she smiled and said she was taking me down an ancient way that only a boatman could hope to remember.

'The cities of the interior do not lie on any map.'

We passed ransacked palaces, their curtains swinging from shutterless windows and now and again I caught sight of a lean figure on a broken balcony.

'These are the exiles, the people the French drove out. These people are dead but they do not disappear.'

W
^r
e passed a group of children whose faces were old and evil.

'I'm taking you to see my friend.'

The canal she turned into was littered with waste and rats floating pink belly up. At times it was almost too narrow for us to pass and she pushed off the walls, her oar scraping generations of slime. No one could live here.

'What time might it be?'

Villanelle laughed. 'Visiting time. I've brought a friend.'

She drew in her boat to a stinking recess and squatting on a ledge of precariously floating crates was a woman so sunken and filthy that I scarcely thought her a human at all. Her hair was glowing, some curious phosphorescent mould clung to it and gave her the appearance of a subterranean devil. She was dressed in folds of a heavy material, impossible to place in colour or design. One of her hands had only three fingers.

'I've been away,' said Villanelle. 'Away a long time, but I won't go away again. This is Henri.'

The old creature continued to regard Villanelle. She spoke. 'You've been away as you tell me and I have watched for you while you were gone and sometimes seen your ghost floating this way. You have been in danger and there is more to come but you will not leave again. Not in this life.'

There was no light where we sat huddled. The buildings on either side of the water closed in like an arch above our heads. So close that the roofs seemed to touch in places. Were we in the sewers? 'I brought you fish.' Villanelle took out a parcel which the old woman sniffed before putting beneath her skirts. Then she turned to me.

'Beware of old enemies in new disguises.'

'Who is she?' I asked as soon as we were safely away.

Villanelle shrugged and I knew I would get no real answer. 'She's an exile. She used to live there,' and she pointed out a forgotten building with a double water-gate that had been left to sink so that the waters now lapped into the lower rooms. The top floors were used for storage and a pulley hung out of one of the windows.

'When she lived there, they say the lights never went out before dawn and the cellars had wines so rare that a man might die if he drank more than a glass. She kept ships on the seas and the ships brought home commodities that made her one of the wealthiest women in Venice. When others talked of her, they did so with respect and when they referred to her husband they called him "The Husband of the Lady of Means". She lost her means when Bonaparte took a fancy to them and they say that Josephine has her jewels.'

'Josephine has most people's jewels,' I said.

We rowed out of the hidden city into squares of sunlight and wide canals that hugged the boats eight or nine across and still left room for the flimsy pleasure craft of the visitors. 'This is the time of year for them. And if you stay till Augustyou can celebrate Bonaparte's birthday. But he may be dead by then. In that case you must certainly stay till August and we'll celebrate his funeral.'