So there it finally was — no longer in Mr. Themaat's books, but in the sun and the Adriatic sea wind. The white marble facade with the two superimposed temple fronts, as harmonious as a fugue: behind it the bare redbrick nave, with the gray cupola at the intersection. Of course he also took the vaporetto to see everything at close quarters and from inside, sailing across the spot where for centuries the Doge had thrown a ring into the water annually, to seal his marriage with the sea.
How could he be so fascinated by Venice when the city had so little to do with his Citadel? All things considered, Palladio's severe symmetries were completely out of place here too, because in Venice everything was precisely asymmetrical. The piazza wasn't an oblong but a trapezoid, the basilica was not on the axis; the windows of the Doge's palace did not reflect each other. Was he on the track of a law? Might it be that beauty was geometrically and musically calculable but that, in turn, perfection somehow diverged from it? Just as a straight line drawn with a ruler was always somehow less than a straight line when Picasso drew it without a ruler? Was there a difference between a dead and a living line? Should he perhaps start studying art history? But you couldn't study without your high school exams; besides, art didn't interest him at all for its own sake, but because of what was behind it.
On Ascension Day he took an excursion to the mainland, to Vicenza. With a mainly English group he visited the Teatro Olimpico, with its fairytale interior without an exterior, and all those other churches and palaces that he knew so well from the library at Groot Rechteren, under the P of Palladio. They were no longer framed by the silent white of the page, but turned out to be standing next to other buildings, in certain streets, full of the din of cars and scooters, where in the squares old gentlemen stood and talked indignantly to each other, and then walked on arm in arm, where fruit sellers cried and young pizza bakers tossed their spinning circles of dough in the air, to allow the laws of nature to do their work in the spirit of Galileo and Newton.
On the way back, the bus stopped at two other Palladian villas. First, just outside Vicenza, the Villa Rotonda: a vision in stone on top of a green hill, with its round central building another descendant of the Roman Pantheon, but now equipped with four entry doorways with staircases and Greek temple fronts, one in each direction — just as in families certain features suddenly recur double or fourfold.
There, walking across the marble, between trompe l'oeil frescos of pilasters and divine figures, making the interior look like an exterior, he first noticed the dark-blond woman in the party. While he looked at an illustration of Diana hunting with her breast bared and a black dog, he suddenly felt her eyes focused on him. In a long white dress, with her hair worn loosely up, and her head slightly bent, which made her smile and the look in her large brown eyes even more sensual, she was standing on the other side of the Rotonda, near a depiction of a swaggering Hercules. He found it unpleasant. It interrupted his concentration, and he tried to ignore it; but back in the bus, too, where he was sitting in the front seat, he noticed that she was constantly looking at the back of his head. She was fifteen or twenty years older than him, but even if she'd been young, he still wouldn't have liked it. Those kinds of things were not for him. He knew that for many boys and girls there was nothing else, that it existed mainly for Max and possibly for his father too; he was less sure about his Granny, and he didn't want to think of his mother at all in this connection. For him sexuality had as little meaning as sports — up to now at least. He felt it was something for people who wanted to reproduce, but he had no need. He was sufficient unto himself.
In the afternoon they drove from Padua along the provincial highway by the Brenta, lined with that unreal, poetic vegetation that only rivers create around themselves, which makes them sacred in innocent eyes. Not far from the river's mouth, as a conclusion to the excursion, they stopped at the Villa Foscari, nicknamed La Malcontenta. Because he felt overfed artistically, and also to escape the woman, he took only a quick look at the interior and then sat down on the grass under a weeping willow at the edge of the water.
He hadn't expected that she would come to him. Suddenly she sank down right in front of him, cross-legged, in a way that reminded him of the string puppet he had once had: when you pulled the string in its crotch, its arms and legs shot upward. She was sitting so close to him that he could smell her: a smell that reminded him of autumn leaves and which perhaps did not come from a bottle. Around her neck and wrists she had at least twenty gold chains and bracelets.
"Do you speak English?" she asked in English with a smile, but with a kind of German accent. When he sat up and nodded, she put a hand with long, slim fingers and red nails high on his thigh, no more than half an inch from his sex, and brushed her other hand through the hair on the back of his head. "Do you know how well that white lock of hair suits you?"
Before he could push her away, which he probably wouldn't have dared to do anyway, both hands had disappeared. Then her right hand came forward again.
"Marlene," she said. "Marlene Kirchlechner."
"Quinten Quist."
He shook hands with her and tried to withdraw his hand, but she kept hold of it.
"Your hand's tense," she said, still looking at him. "It's as though you don't really want to touch mine. Relax it."
At the same moment he realized she was right. He relaxed his muscles and only then felt the warm palm of her hand against his, which to his alarm produced warmth not only in his hand but in his whole body. She obviously saw what was happening, because as she let go of his hand, she leaned her head forward and looked at him with the same look as just now in the Villa Rotonda. Within a minute she had succeeded in confusing him completely. He wanted to hold her hand again and at the same time wanted not to want that. But the touching was suddenly over.
"How old are you, Quinten?"
"I'll be seventeen in two weeks."
She hesitated for a moment and looked at him. "Are you in Venice with your parents?"
"No," he said curtly. "I'm alone."
"So am I," said Marlene Kirchlechner. She lived in Vienna, she told him; she came here every year in May, to the place where she had been on her honeymoon with her dead husband — on the Lido in the Hotel Excelsior, always in the same suite, with a view of the sea. "What's stopping you?" she said as they sat together on the front seat as the bus drove across the embankment toward Venice, to the Piazzale Roma, the terminus for all motor traffic. "Come with me. There's a wonderful swimming pool; you won't find a pool in the whole of Venice. You can move in if you like. Where are you staying?"