Una festa di nozze!
She opens her wide eyes a fraction wider. They are perfectly lined in pale blue and, at this moment, are empty and sad.
Then maybe an aroma with a certain weight, something ceremonial, yes?
I suppose so.
Do you have one of our perfumes in mind?
No.
We could begin with Hazard?
I’m looking, he says, for a scent that goes fast.
She puts down the flask she has just picked up and examines him: this black frog in leather who speaks like a foreigner and uses such odd phrases.
To lift her, he explains.
Then let’s begin with Bakhavis.
To give her a lift.
She chooses a flask from many on a table, sprays the back of her left wrist, rubs the skin with her other palm, and holds her hand under Jean Ferrero’s chin. He inhales.
I don’t know, he says, it’s hard to choose.
What is she like, your daughter, is she like me?
No. She’s your height, that’s all.
What colour hair does she have?
She changes it. When she was small, she was fair.
What about her voice, is it high or low?
It depends on what she’s saying … I want her to feel like a queen.
The ragazza dei cosmetici takes another golden flask and sprays her left arm well above the wrist. The signalman seizes her hand abruptly and raises it to his lips. One might suppose he was about to kiss it. Unfamiliar with the ritual gestures which accompany the sampling and choosing of perfumes in well-appointed stores, his actions are almost violent, but she is now amused.
More so, he says,
More what?
More mad! he says, still holding her hand.
Okay. Let me get our latest. It’s new this year and it’s called Saba.
Saba?
It’s fruity. With a lot of ambergris. It might suit her.
This time she sprays near the crook of her left arm. He lowers his face. And like this, her flexed arm almost surrounds his head.
Say you had a daughter and you loved her and you wanted her to have everything immediately, would you give her Saba?
She keeps her arm where it is and doesn’t answer. He shuts his eyes. The mystery of the exchange between perfume and skin exists even in a department store. For a moment, the two of them, ragazza dei cosmetici and signalman, dream their different dreams behind a screen which keeps out the world.
At last she says: Most girls would be very happy.
Only then does she disengage her arm.
I’ll take a small bottle of Saba.
Of perfume or eau de toilette?
I don’t know.
The perfume lasts longer when she puts it on …
Then both.
As she wraps the little boxes in golden paper and ties a bow in the ribbon with her seashell fingernails, she looks at the foreigner in his leathers and boots and says: You know something? My father doesn’t love me much. She’s lucky, your daughter … really lucky.
29
Water. Stagnant salt water, which protects the life of a city. Without it the city would drown in the high sea. For centuries Venice has learnt to live with the lagoon and its shifting sands, its dykes, its narrow channels for navigation, its salt and its strange pallor.
Zdena is sitting high above the water on the top deck of a motonave which has just cast off and is bound for Chioggia, forty kilometres to the southeast. Her gabardine coat is folded in a neat pile on her suitcase, placed on the bench beside her. She is wearing sunglasses, for the lagoon is pitilessly reflecting the hot sun.
Along the quayside, just beneath her, stroll thousands of tourists. Seen from above, they form, as they drift, two opposing currents, one going towards the Doges’ Palace, bone-white in the sunlight with its naked statues and carved loggias, and the other current flowing east past the notorious Hotel Danieli, whose green shutters and gothic windows hide salons and staircases decorated in gold and wine-red.
Although her skin is pale and her striped dress looks foreign, Zdena does not have the air of a tourist. She gives the impression of having taken this boat many times. Her small actions and gestures are all deliberate — as though she knows precisely what she is doing and where she is going. A ship’s officer who has noticed her because, with her high cheekbones and sad eyes, she is pretty, and, like himself, no longer young, wonders whether she’s a foreign engineer — on her way to inspect one of the old salt refineries — there is talk of them being renovated.
At present she is taking objects one by one out of her handbag and placing them methodically on her lap or on her folded coat. As the motonave gathers a little speed, a breeze stirs her hair so that one of her ears becomes naked like a boy’s. Perps she’s not an engineer, the officer in his immaculate white uniform decides, maybe she’s a dietician or a physiotherapist.
She takes out of her bag a keyring with a keepsake of a silver bear attached. A black diary. A small packet of Kleenex. A headscarf all screwed up. A stub of a pencil. An eraser. Some walnuts. From time to time she raises her head to take in the receding waterline of the city. A line like a signature known across the entire world. Venezia!
Beyond the Doges’ Palace soars the tall brick campanile on the Piazza San Marco. The previous tower constructed there foundered and collapsed in 1902, yet miraculously no one was hurt.
Beyond the San Giorgio Maggiore, on the island of Giudecca, far away, something is catching the light on the low wide dome of the Church of the Redeemer. It flashes like a message. A loose sheet of metal? Or the sun playing with the water somewhere? In its time, the Church of the Redeemer was a kind of tama, if I may compare such a noble edifice with the humble objects I sell.
It was planned in 1576, the result of a vow. Venice was being devastated by The Plague. A third of the population had already agonised and died. The Plague took the young as well as the old. Gruesome men, dressed as birds of prey and carrying a stick, crossed the bridges of the canals going from infirmary to infirmary. They were rumoured to be doctors who, to avoid contagion, dressed themselves from head to foot in oiled cloth or tarpaulin and wore black hats, spectacles, earpads, gloves, boots and, over their mouths, a contraption like a giant bird’s beak. They picked their way between the shivering bodies of the dying and, lifting up a blanket here or there with their stick, they sprinkled from their beaks on to the plague-ridden their powders and dried leaves. At night, like real birds, even vultures, the plague doctors vanished.
The vow, made in 1576, was that, if Christ in his mercy spared the rest of the population, Venice would build him another legendary church. Straightaway the City Council asked the great architect Palladio to begin drawing. The masons began cutting stones. Half the population survived. Four years later Palladio himself died. But the work went on and the church, built on a green field on the island of the Jews, the most beautiful church ever conceived by Palladio, was finished in 1592.
Zdena takes from her bag a hairbrush with minute white globules on the end of its metal darts, and draws it once through her hair before placing it on her coat. Next, her new Slovak passport. Ninon’s last letter. A purse she has set aside for Italian money with its fantastic currency of hundreds of thousands. A packet of aspirins. A powder compact. A photo of Ninon at school.
Until recently, the annual problem for Venice was drinking water. The wells and cisterns often went dry. And so water had to be brought in barges across the lagoon from the river Brenta. The barges followed the same lane through the shallow salt waters as the motonave is now slowly navigating. But the water barges came in the opposite direction.
Again Zdena raises her head, touches her sunglasses and gazes towards the southwest. The motonave is going too slowly to create a wake. The water astern simply undulates, and in it the seaweed moves like hair. The imposing Santa Maria della Salute, built opposite the Doges’ Palace on the very tip of the Island of the Trinity, is now the size of Zdena’s cigarette lighter laid flat on the Kleenex packet.