‘One odd thing: the “proverb” quoted at the start of part two apparently isn’t, at least my Portuguese friend has never heard it. Yet I must have found it somewhere as it was in my commonplace book (no source quoted). It wasn’t until I was halfway through the third novel, earlier this year, that I discovered it was a saying of the Captain’s mother.’
I
It was not carnival time in Venice, yet strangely enough a kind of charivari spirit seemed still to move along the city’s narrow byways. Round the corner ahead you might hear the ghost of a laugh or a whisper of music, only to have it dissipate as you approached, or mutate into the soft plash of canal waters.
That the city is given to shades, and cannot escape its aura of being a place where time seems thin and stretched, is not a reason for the existence of such phantasms, any more than the human body is the cause or creator of its own internal organs—
Jo Da Silva put down her pen, her mind stuck in the groove of the movie Don’t Look Now, and walked over to the window.
Out of season, Venice had indeed slipped back into the past that it inhabited after the majority of the tourists had departed, and had become a village again. The stinks of high summer were gone as well, and a kind of comfortable melancholy imbued its misty vistas.
The apartment looked out on a small, terracotta-coloured piazza (or campo, if you wanted to be pedantic about it). Its usual tenants were visiting relatives in Australia, and Jo was not one to turn down the offer of a month’s free accommodation in La Serenissima; although she had done precious little in the way of the writing she had intended to knuckle down to in the week she had spent there. Its only drawback was her suspicion that the building harboured rats in its nether regions.
At the moment the campo appeared totally uninhabited, as if Jo were in a city on the moon, or perhaps in a de Chirico painting. It was almost completely filled up with shadows, and most of the windows in the other buildings that surrounded it were shuttered, like closed eyes. Potted plants made splashes of colour here and there.
Despite the direction of her last thoughts, she was not really expecting to see sinister little red-coated figures. The campo was so sleepy, in fact, that she was not expecting to see anything at all, which was why a movement in her eye’s corner made her jump.
Diagonally across the square, one shuttered window stood slightly ajar. The shutter, half open, folded in on itself, as it were, gave a glimpse of darkness behind; and something whitish fluttered there. Not a curtain, for it had solidity. Not a person, either — but why had she thought that?
Ow, I seen it wive at me out the winder.
More ghost stories in her mind! That was Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You. On second thoughts, she rather wished that particular tale hadn’t come to the surface.
. And I didn’t like it.
Jo ran a hand though her short hair and decided it was definitely time to go and drink a cup of espresso, and possibly a glass of grappa as well. Or, even better, have a caffè corretto and combine the two — she liked the idea that coffee could be ‘corrected’ by the addition of alcohol. Besides, she had to go past the building with the window to get to the bar, and could take, therefore, a closer look.
Out in the red-shadowed, deserted campo, her steps echoed hollowly. The shadows had put a chill into the square, although above her the sky was still a hazed blue, only just beginning to fade towards evening.
A dog came sniffing out of an alley, busy on its own affairs, and Jo smiled; she liked dogs, but wished this one would do something to earn its keep, firstly by going after the rats and then, probably, doing something to deter the supercilious white cat that she had seen slinking around the vicinity most nights, like a pathfinder from the Countess of Groan’s entourage. In Jo’s opinion it was white cats that should be witches’ familiars, leaving their black counterparts to bring, like chimney sweepers, luck where they would; silent and sneaky as all felines, to Jo the ghostlike pallor of the whites was far more suited to a supernatural role.Darkness creeps on cat feet, she thought, deliberately misquoting, and smiled to herself.
Now she was in the building’s shadow, she looked up. It was older — and grander — than she’d thought at first: almost a demi-palazzo, it could have dated from the eighteenth century, but Jo’s knowledge of architectural styles was sketchy at best. The window, on the top storey, was tall and possessed of a tiny balcony too small to sit on, but just wide enough for plant pots: indeed, others round the square were cluttered with flowers — the ubiquitous geraniums and petunias, whose hot pinks and reds clashed with the suntan-colours of the terracotta pots, and here and there a trail of magenta bougainvillea, like a Christmas paper chain.
Beside the front door, where now she stood, she saw a single bell-push — apparently the building had escaped being converted into apartments. After a moment’s hesitation, she pressed it, hearing its dim buzz deep inside, like a trapped insect, but there was no reply.
She was conscious, then, of being on a cusp, presented with a clear choice between two routes. Either she could forget a thing, or a nothing, seen out of the edge of her eye in a building kitty-corner to her life; or, like the egregious Franz Westen, go in pursuit of it.
It brought a wry grin to her face. She may have been suffering from writer’s block, but no one had ever accused her of lacking imagination, and nobody would ever say she was devoid of curiosity. And tending still towards feline metaphors, the significance ofthat was not lost on her.
Between the campo and the bar she had claimed as her own she passed a shop that sold masks, fantastical things of pasteboard and feathers and sequins and enamel, like an Ensor dream. Its window was always brightly illuminated, so that the colours of the masks gleamed in the hard bright light like phantasmagorical beetle-cases.
The Phantom of the Opera is here, inside your mind.
Jo shook her head to rid it of the irritating tune, but all she could think of as a substitute on the spur of the moment was poor mad Lucia, fluting ‘Il fantasmo!’; and the famous shot of Joan Sutherland, wild-haired in her bloodstained nightie, floated behind her eyes.
Reaching her destination, thoughts of corrected coffee drove out her introspection. Although the nameIl Bar Roberto was written on the window in fading paint, the establishment was presided over by a tall thin unsmiling woman with an intimidating moustache; she was generally known as La Strega — although no cats, black, white or otherwise, were allowed past her door. Under her aegis a number of young women who were too much like her in appearance (although mostly lacking the facial hair) not to be her daughters bustled about, serving customers, ministering to the espresso machine, and gossiping at the tops of their voices. In one corner a television with the sound turned down always seemed to be showing a football match, and usually a number of men were clustered round it roaring encouragement, or otherwise.
‘Does anyone live in the house on the corner?’ Jo asked one of the daughters, who shrugged her shoulders and shook her head at the same time. An older sister, passing with a tray of dirty cups and glasses, was more knowledgeable.