“Are there floors above?” he asked, to change the subject.
She squinted at him. Finally she spoke. “Words are vain, I thought I’d never speak again, not even to my own heart, and here I am, doing it again. Yes, there’s a floor above intact; but above that, ruins. Lightning blasted the bell chamber apart, while I lay in that very bed.” She stood up. “Come on, I’ll show you.” Under her cape she was tiny.
She picked up the candle lantern beside her, and Carlo followed her up the stairs, stepping carefully in the shifting shadows.
On the floor above, the wind swirled, and through the stairway to the floor above that, he could distinguish black clouds. The woman put the lantern on the floor, started up the stairs. “Come.”
Once through the hole they were in the wind, out under the sky. The rain had stopped. Great blocks of stone lay about the floor, and the walls broke off unevenly.
“I thought the whole campanile would fall,” she shouted at him over the whistle of the wind. He nodded, and walked over to the west wall, which stood chest high. Looking over it, he could see the waves approaching, rising up, smashing against the stone below, spraying back and up at him. He could feel the blows in his feet. Their force frightened him; it was hard to believe he had survived them and was now out of danger. He shook his head violently. To his right and left the white lines of crumbled waves marked the Lido, a broad swath of them against the black. The old woman was speaking, he saw; he walked back to her side and listened.
“The waters yet rise,” she shouted. “See? And the lightning… you can see the lightning breaking the Alps to dust. It’s the end, child. Every island fled away, and the mountains were not found… the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea, and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living thing died in the sea.” On and on she spoke, her voice mingling with the sound of the gale and the boom of the waves, just carrying over it all… until Carlo, cold and tired, filled with pity and a black anguish like the clouds rolling over them, put his arm around her thin shoulders and turned her around. They descended to the floor below, picked up the extinguished lantern, and descended to her chamber, which was still lit. It seemed warm, a refuge. He could hear her still speaking. He was shivering without pause.
“You must be cold,” she said in a practical tone. She pulled a few blankets from her bed. “Here, take these.” He sat down in the big heavy chair, put the blankets around his legs, put his head back. He was tired. The old woman sat in her chair and wound thread onto a spool. After a few minutes of silence she began talking again, and as Carlo dozed and shifted position and nodded off again, she talked and talked, of storms, and drownings, and the world’s end, and lost love…
In the morning when he woke up, she was gone. Her room stood revealed in the dim morning light: shabby, the furniture battered, the blankets worn, the knickknacks of Venetian glass ugly, as Venetian glass always was… but it was clean. Carlo got up and stretched his stiff muscles. He went up to the roof; she wasn’t there. It was a sunny morning. Over the east wait he saw that his boat was still there, still floating. He grinned—the first one in a few days; he could feel that in his face.
The woman was not on the floors below, either. The lowest one served as her boathouse, he could see. In it were a pair of decrepit rowboats and some lobster pots. The biggest “boatslip’ was empty. She was probably out checking pots.
Or perhaps she hadn’t wanted to talk with him in the light of day.
From the boathouse he could walk around to his craft, through water only knee-deep. He sat in the stern, reliving the previous afternoon, and grinned again at being alive.
He took off the decking and bailed out the water on the keel with his bailing can, keeping an eye out for the old woman. Then he remembered the boat hook and went back upstairs for it. When he returned there was still no sight of her. He shrugged. He’d come back and say good-bye another time. He rowed around the campanile and off the Lido, pulled up the sail, and headed northwest, where he presumed Venice was.
The Lagoon was as flat as a pond this morning, the sky cloudless, like the blue dome of a great basilica. It was amazing, but Carlo was not surprised. The weather was like that these days. Last night’s storm, however, had been something else. That was the mother of all squalls, those were the biggest waves in the Lagoon ever, without a doubt. He began rehearsing his tale in his mind, for wife and friends.
Venice appeared over the horizon right off his bow, just where he thought it would be: first the great campanile, then San Marco and the other spires. The campanile… Thank God his ancestors had wanted to get up there so close to God—or so far off the water—the urge had saved his life. In the rain-washed air, the sea approach to the city was more beautiful than ever, and it didn’t even bother him as it usually did that no matter how close you got to it, it still seemed to be over the horizon. That was just the way it was, now. The Serenissima. He was happy to see it.
He was hungry, and still very tired. When he pulled into the Grand Canal and took down the sail, he found he could barely row. The rain was pouring off the land into the Lagoon, and the Grand Canal was running like a mountain river, it was tough going. At the fire station where the canal bent back, some of his friends working on a new roof-house waved at him, looking surprised to see him going upstream so early in the day. “You’re going the wrong way!” one shouted.
Carlo waved an oar weakly before plopping it back in. “Don’t I know it!” he replied.
Over the Rialto, back into the little courtyard of San Giacometta. Onto the sturdy dock he and his neighbors had built, staggering a bit—careful there, Carlo.
“Carlo!” his wife shrieked from above. “Carlo, Carlo, Carlo!” She flew down the ladder from the roof.
He stood on the dock. He was home.
“Carlo, Carlo, Carlo!” his wife cried as she ran onto the dock.
“Jesus,” be pleaded. “shut up.” And pulled her into a rough hug.
“Where have you been, I was so worried about you because of the storm, you said you’d be back yesterday, oh, Carlo. I’m so glad to see you…” She tried to help him up the ladder. The baby was crying. Carlo sat down in the kitchen chair and looked around the little makeshift room with satisfaction. In between chewing down bites of a loaf of bread he told Luisa of his adventure: the two Japanese and their vandalism, the wild ride across the Lagoon, the madwoman on the campanile. When he had finished the story and the loaf of bread, he began to fall asleep.
“But Carlo, you have to go back and pick up those Japanese.”
“To hell with them,” he said slurrily. Creepy little bastards… They’re tearing the Madonna apart, didn’t I tell you? They’ll take everything in Venice, every last painting and statue and carving and mosaic and all… I can’t stand it.”
“Oh. Carlo. It’s all right. They take those things all over the world and put them up and say this is from Venice, the greatest city in the world.”
“They should be here.”
“Here, here, come in and lie down for a few hours. I’ll go see if Giuseppe will go to Torcello with you to bring back those bricks.” She arranged him on their bed. “Let them have what’s under the water, Carlo. Let them have it.” He slept.
He sat up struggling, his arm shaken by his wife.
“Wake up, it’s late. You’ve got to go to Torcello to get those men. Besides, they’ve got your scuba gear.”
Carlo groaned.