In the morning when he woke up, she wasn’t there. 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 wall 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 in 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 boathook 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. There 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 morning. "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," he 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.
"Maria says Giuseppe will go with you; he’ll meet you with his boat on the Fondamente."
"Damn."
"Come on, Carlo, we need that money."
"All right, all right." The baby was squalling. He collapsed back on the bed. "I’ll do it; don’t pester me."
He got up and drank her soup. Stiffly he descended the ladder, ignoring Luisa’s good-byes and warnings, and got back in his boat. He untied it, pushed off, let it float out of the courtyard to the wall of San Giacometta. He stared at the wall.
Once, he remembered, he had put on his scuba gear and swum down into the church. He had sat down in one of the stone pews in front of the altar, adjusting his weight belts and tank to do so, and had tried to pray through his mouthpiece and the facemask. The silver bubbles of his breath had floated up through the water toward heaven; whether his prayers had gone with them, he had no idea. After a while, feeling somewhat foolish — but not entirely — he had swum out the door. Over it he had noticed an inscription and stopped to read it, facemask centimeters from the stone. Around this Temple Let the Merchant’s Law Be Just, His Weight True, and His Covenants Faithful. It was an admonition to the old usurers of the Rialto, but he could make it his, he thought; the true weight could refer to the diving belts, not to overload his clients and sink them to the bottom….
The memory passed and he was on the surface again, with a job to do. He took in a deep breath and let it out, put the oars in the oarlocks and started to row.
Let them have what was under the water. What lived in Venice was still afloat.