The Last Gondola (10 page)

If Urbino's memory was correct, this had been in the late fifties, shortly after Possle had bought the Ca' Pozza. He had gone by boat from Genoa, with so many valises that they had taken up an extra cabin, and according to—

“Yes, by boat in 1958, Mr. Macintyre,” Possle said, startlingly mirroring Urbino's thoughts. “The only way to travel, if one is obliged to. But now this is my only way; my gondola that goes everywhere and nowhere.”

He ran a hand against the black wood of the boat.

“You think you have the last private gondola in Venice, Mr. Macintyre. You can glide around all you want in the Contessa's gift, but it won't carry you as far as you really want to go. Not in these very, very different days of ours. No, Mr. Macintyre, this is the last private gondola in Venice. Forget about Peggy Guggenheim's. Mine was—
is
—the last.”

“I wasn't aware of that.”

“I saw to it, I tell you! I kept it in service three months after she retired hers. Peggy! A fascinating woman. She would let me unscrew the erect penis from the statue of the horseman on her terrace whenever she was expecting overly sensitive guests. One time I hid it under one of her bedroom pillows.”

Urbino was reminded of the magazine photograph of Possle next to the bronze horseman.

“We used to argue about the art she spent her money on,” Possle was saying with a shake of his head. “Not to my taste, but she had the last laugh. I took everything in my stride, even her insults. Ah, the tales I could tell!”

With this observation, which Urbino interpreted as not completely innocent or spontaneous, Possle closed his eyes. Urbino, who didn't want to break his reverie or risk distracting him from any revelations about the American art collector, remained silent and waited.

He let his gaze roam around the room and had an opportunity to take in more of its details. Clustered on the carpet in front of the gondola and on a long table to one side of Urbino's chair were small, squat pots of plants and flowers. Urbino didn't know much about horticulture, but he recognized the flowers as being exotic and of tropical origin. He wondered how they were able to thrive in this darkness and whether the scent in the air came from them.

Possle had now been silent for so long that Urbino began to wonder what he should do. Possle's eyes remained closed and his mouth was open. Urbino had a rush of fear that the old man had chosen precisely this moment and this occasion to bid farewell to his long life, but then he detected the slight rising and falling of his chest beneath the silk. Possle was asleep.

Urbino bent down to one of the flowers, a bright red hothouse bloom. What appeared to be dewdrops pearled some of its lush petals. He sniffed the flower. It had no scent. Another pot beside it held a yellowish plant shot through with silver. It looked like something that didn't grow naturally but had been constructed out of a piece of stovepipe. Casting a quick glance at Possle, who was still asleep, he touched the plant, expecting to find that it was artificial. Despite its appearance, it was real.

Urbino turned his attention to the small silver cage hanging from the ceiling behind his chair. He turned so as to be able to get a better view of it. On the floor of the cage was a dead cricket.

Just as Urbino was considering if he should remain silent, make a discreet sound, or get up and leave, Possle's eyes fluttered open.

“You probably think it's an old man's fatigue.” Possle shook his head. “It's a condition I've had since I was much younger than you are. How long was I asleep?”

“Only a few minutes.”

“Sometimes it's almost an hour. It can happen in the middle of a sentence, I warn you. I apologize.”

“I should do the apologizing. I've put a strain on you. My eagerness to meet you has made me forget to count the possible cost.”

Urbino, for the first time, was saying something that touched on his own interest in his host.

“You forget, Mr. Macintyre, that I was the one to invite you,” Possle retorted. “And as far as any possible cost is concerned, it's too early to reckon that up on either of our parts, don't you think? As Byron said, ‘those who would greatly win must deeply venture.' Are you fond of Byron?”

“Yes. That's from
Marino Faliero.”

An ambiguous smile played across Possle's face that once again deepened all his wrinkles on one side, while the smoother side of his face became even more so.

“A sad and tragic Doge. Beheaded, you know.”

A vision of the Ca' Pozza's nighttime figure rose before Urbino's eyes. He couldn't shake the feeling that Possle had intended his comment for just that reason.

“You haven't written a biography of Byron,” Possle said, as he continued to stare at Urbino through his large, black glasses.

“Perhaps one of these days. I've been looking around for another project. I need something new to turn my hand to.”

“You're still young enough to assume you have time for many projects. A marvelous luxury—or a comforting illusion. I've read all your books. I find them diverting. My favorite is Proust.”

“It's gratifying to hear that a man of your experience finds my books of interest. If I had known, I would have had my publishers send you a copy of each.”

“I'm surprised that you didn't think of that.” Possle paused for a beat, then said, “Let me see. I have the Proust book with me somewhere. Ah, here it is.”

He retrieved the slim mauve-colored volume from the cushions.

“I've marked a passage. Listen. ‘Inevitably, despite Marcel's appreciation of the beauty and secrecy of the city,'” he read in his wavering voice, “‘he finds himself somewhat disillusioned, and by the time he is about to leave, Venice is no longer an enchanted labyrinth out of
The Arabian Nights
but something sinister and deceptive that seems to have little to do with Doges and Turners. It doesn't even seem to be Venice any longer, but a mendacious fiction where the palaces are nothing but lifeless marble and the water that makes the city unique only a combination of hydrogen and oxygen.'”

This had been delivered in Possle's thin, sharp voice with its strange intonation and tremulousness. Urbino's own words had sounded somehow different from what he had written, although they were exactly the same.

Possle closed the book. “Is that how you feel now about Venice?”

“I was paraphrasing something Proust said.”

“I'm well aware of that. But tell me, do you feel disillusioned now? In this year of your life in Venice?”

“In some ways Venice has become more special than ever,” Urbino replied, expressing only a small portion of what was a very personal feeling these days about his adopted city.

“Since your return from Morocco, you mean, with your Moroccan friend.” Possle gave a nod of his purple-swathed head. “The enthusiasm of the young can help a jaded appetite, don't you find? I believe he has gone home for a visit. I hope it won't be for too long. You must miss him terribly. Your house must seem emptier than it used to be before he came to stay with you. But I'm becoming distracted, I fear. We were speaking about Venice and Proust. So tell me, my friend, do you also agree with Proust about Venice being sinister and deceptive and—what do you call it?—a mendacious fiction?”

Urbino, who was both uncomfortable and irritated by Possle's references to Habib, responded coolly, “There's something of that.”

“Of course there is,” Possle replied with a sly smile. “What else would one expect from a person of imagination like yourself, not to mention a person who has your other line of work? As for me, Venice has never disappointed. But our sherry has arrived.”

Armando entered with a tray and deposited it on the small inlaid table in front of the gondola. He poured the pale wine into two cups of translucent Chinese porcelain. He handed one cup to Possle, then the other, with considerably less ceremony, to Urbino.

“Thank you, Armando,” Possle said in Italian. “If we need anything else, I'll ring for you.”

Armando gave an almost imperceptible bow and left the room.

Possle raised his cup. “To deep ventures and a good death,” he said.

As Urbino sipped the dry wine, he was reminded of Poe's story of the man walled up by his enemy in a cellar filled with casks of Amontillado.

“Such a gentle wine for such a troubling story,” Possle said, yet again startling Urbino by the echo of what he had himself been thinking. “Ah, stories! One of my sorrows is that my eyes have worsened during the past few years along with my hearing. If only Armando might read to me, but as you've noticed, he's mute, though his hearing is very acute.”

“I see. I…” Urbino trailed off.

“You thought he was reticent, the ideal servant? He is that. And also once the best gondolier I could have wanted, even better than your Gildo.”

First Habib, and now Gildo
, Urbino thought. Possle wanted to make a point of showing him how much he knew about him.

“He became mute recently?” Urbino asked, choosing to show as little reaction as possible to Possle's reference to Gildo. “Since you retired your gondola?”

“No, long before I even had the gondola.”

“Surely muteness must have been a handicap for a gondolier.”

“Armando has no handicaps that I've ever discovered. Don't underestimate him. He could make all the warning cries.”

The air in the room began to feel more close and oppressive. Urbino set his cup down.

“Does Armando live here?”

“He's more at home here than I am. He has his little nooks and crannies everywhere. You might have noticed one of them in the entrance hallway. He thinks of himself as my silent Cerberus when he's there. We are well matched, the two of us. He has nowhere to go, and I can go nowhere. Alone together. We are most inseparable.”

He ran a hand slowly along the gleaming wood of the gondola. “Armando is part of my daily life,” he continued, “my double, my shadow, as someone once said of gondoliers. People either like their gondoliers or they hate them, Mr. Macintyre, and if they like them, they like them very much. Or, I might add,
too
much.” Possle looked in the direction of the
sala
with a faraway expression. “I prefer solitude, and so does Armando. We learn how to live from society. But solitude teaches us how to die; it has no flatterers.”

In what was by now becoming a puzzling and annoying pattern, Possle's observation about solitude and his earlier one about gondoliers carried a distinctly familiar ring.

“You're looking tired, Mr. Macintyre. Excuse me for drawing attention to it, old man that I am. I never had much patience when the old said I wasn't looking well. There seemed something ghoulish in it. Here. Take this.”

He held out his empty cup.

Urbino got up. A pleasant scent struck his nostrils. It was the scent that he had first noticed upon entering the room, but much stronger.

As Urbino reseated himself, Possle reached among the cushions. He held up a large crystal vaporizer. Perhaps the cushions contained an endless supply of items to amuse the old man, which he periodically withdrew like a magician dipping into a deep and voluminous hat.

“It's a combination of ambrosia, Mitcham lavender, sweet pea, extract of meadow flowers, tuberose, orange blossom, and almond blossom,” Possle recited. “That's what you're smelling. It allows me to wander in a constantly changing landscape and all while I'm in my stationary gondola. You can have more Amontillado, if you like. I only allow myself the one. I find I look forward to it much more that way.”

“No, thank you.”

“I wish I could offer you something more suited to your tastes. I'm inflexible in my routines. And being solitary, or relatively so,” he added with a smile, “I'm not accustomed to taking other people into consideration. That's why I hope you'll excuse me if I now put an end to our pleasant little visit.”

Urbino was taken completely by surprise and was not a little disappointed. Possle had been giving no signs that the visit was almost over.

Possle pulled a dark purple cord that extended from the wall and whose tasseled end was barely visible among the ubiquitous and encumbered cushions of the gondola.

“You're wondering why I asked you to come, only to dismiss you so abruptly,” Possle said. “But all in good time. For the moment you can assume it's only the whim of an old man. I think we've had a successful first visit, though, don't you? When shall I have you here again? Ah, I see from the expression on your face that it pleases you to hear that. But perhaps it would be better not to specify the date. I've always found that when I set up a rendezvous too far in advance, I feel that I should cancel it as the day and the hour draw close. Peculiar, but what else do you expect of a man who makes his voyages in a marooned gondola? Armando will show you out.”

Urbino barely had time to express his appreciation to Possle, when Armando appeared in the doorway like an apparition. Urbino threw a last glance back at Possle, lost in the cushions of his unusual divan.

He followed the silent Armando across the
sala
and down the shadow-filled high staircase. The door to the room where Possle had said Armando kept guard was now closed.

Armando left Urbino to collect his cloak himself and went to the heavy door. A symbol decorated the area above the inner lock, which Armando now turned. There was no bolt or other lock on the door except the one that corresponded to the large keyhole on the outer side.

The symbol consisted of a blue circle. In its center was a red-and-yellow eight-pointed star surrounded by yellow crescents. It had an air of the occult about it and resembled one of the heraldic emblems painted on the stern of the brightly decorated flat-bottomed boats of Chioggia. It struck Urbino as unusual in its combination of elements and even more so, perhaps, in that it adorned the inside of the door rather than the outside. It was as if it were warning the occupants not to venture into the world beyond the door instead of chasing away whatever evil spirits might want to enter.