I’m thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic, the only passenger with his reading light on in the business-class cabin as Tess dozes fitfully beside me, her closed journal on her lap, when for the first time since the Thin Woman visited my office I let my mind turn to what could possibly await me in Venice.
Yesterday offered such a variety of curveballs it’s been difficult to decide which to field first—my best friend’s terminal illness, the once-and-for-all failure of my marriage, or why an emissary suspected to be from an agency of the Church would offer me a pile of dough to visit—well, visit what? The only aspect of my expertise she specifically cited was my knowledge of Milton’s work. No, not even that. A demonologist.
Even here, in our floating Boeing hotel, I don’t feel comfortable following this line of thought, however absurd. So I return to my reading. A stack of books all belonging to what, in truth, is my favorite genre. The travel guide.
I am the sort of bookwormy fellow who has read about places more than he has visited them. And for the most part I’d rather read about them than visit them. It’s not that I dislike the far away, but that I am always aware of my own foreignness, an alien among natives. It’s how I feel, in varying degrees, no matter where I am.
Still, I’m looking forward to Venice. I’ve never been, and its fantastical history and storied loveliness is something I’m eager to share with Tess. My hope is that the beauty of the place will shake her out of her current state of mind. Maybe the spontaneity of this adventure and the magnificence of the destination will be enough to return the brightness to her eyes.
So I keep reading the blood-soaked back stories of the city’s monuments, the wars waged for land, for trade, for religion. Along the way I note the restaurants and sites that stand the best chance of pleasing Tess. I will be the most well-informed, customized tour guide for her that I can be.
The trip has already been sort of thrilling. Tess telling Diane about our plans just this morning (she asked few questions, the calculations of how all this would give her some unexpected time with Will Junger playing across her eyes), and then the harried packing, the trip to the bank for euros (the Thin Woman’s certified check cashing smoothly into my account), and the limo ride out to Kennedy, the two of us giggling in the backseat like school friends playing hooky.
Because there wasn’t time to call, I texted O’Brien from the airport. I debated over how much of the trip to tell her about. Describing the Thin Woman on a cell-phone keyboard in the first-class lounge proved impossible, as did the parameters of my “consultation” on a “case,” about which nothing has been revealed, other than my over-generous compensation. In the end, I wrote only:
Off to Venice (the Italian one, not the Californian one) with Tess. Back in a couple days. Explanation TK.
Her reply came almost instantly.
WTF?
I get up to stretch my legs. The jet humming and whistling, soothing as a mechanical womb. This, and the sleeping passengers on either side of me, give the odd impression that I am a transatlantic ghost, hurtling through space, the only wakeful spirit in the night.
But there’s another. An elderly man standing between the washroom cubicles at the top of the aisle, looking down at his shoes in the way of the politely bored. When I approach he looks up at me and, as though in recognition of an unexpected companion, he smiles.
“I am not alone,” he says in welcome. His accent charmingly Italian flavored. His face mildly lined and handsome as a commercial actor’s.
“I was reading.”
“Yes? I, too, am a lover of books,” he says. “The great books. The wisdom of man.”
“Just travel guides, in my case.”
He laughs. “Those are important, too! You must not become lost in Venice. You must find your way.”
“All the books say that becoming lost in Venice is among its greatest charms.”
“To wander, yes. But to be lost? There is a difference.”
I’m pondering this when the old man puts a hand on my shoulder. His grip strong.
“What takes you to Venice?” he asks.
“A job.”
“Job! Ah, you are a thief.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Everything in Venice is stolen. The stone, the relics, the icons, the gold crosses in every church. All of it comes from somewhere else.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s nothing there. No forest, no quarries, no farms. It is a city that is an affront to God, built solely upon man’s pride. It even stands upon water! Could such an act of magic possibly please the Heavenly Father?”
Despite the devout meaning of his words, his tone somehow communicates its opposite, a kind of undercutting joke. He isn’t the least concerned about the offenses of “man’s pride” or the displeasure of the Heavenly Father. On the contrary, such things excite him.
He looks over my shoulder at the slumbering passengers.
“The blessed innocence of sleep,” he remarks. “Alas, it no longer visits me with its comforts of forgetfulness.”
Then his eyes find Tess.
“Your daughter?” he asks.
All at once, I’m struck by the certainty that I’ve gotten this guy wrong. He’s not an elderly charmer making conversation with a fellow insomniac. He’s pretending. Hiding his true wants. Along with his reason for standing here, now, with me.
I consider various replies—None of your goddamn business or Don’t even look at her—but instead just turn and head directly back to my seat. As I go, I hear him enter the washroom cubicle and shut the door behind him. He’s still in there when I settle in my seat.
I pretend to read, keeping my eye on the cubicle door. And though I remain awake for the next hour or so, I don’t notice him come out.
Eventually I get up and knock on the door myself, but it’s unlocked. When I pull it open, nobody’s there.
Venice smells.
Of what? It’s hard to say at first, as it is an odor of ideas more than any particular source. Not cooking or farming or industry, but the stink of empire, of overlapping histories, the unbleachable taint of corruption. In the New World, when a city has a smell, you can say what it is. The sugary rank of an iron-belt paper mill. The roast chestnuts and sewer belches of Manhattan. But in Venice, our North American nostrils are met instead with the unfamiliar reek of the grand abstractions. Beauty. Art. Death.
“Look!”
Tess points at our vaporetto as it arrives to pick us up and take us along the length of the Grand Canal to our hotel. Look! is about all she’s said since we landed. And she’s right: There is so much to see, so many details in every building’s façade, there is a constant danger of missing new evidence of the astonishing. I am more than happy to follow her pointed finger, my daughter close to me, sharing the exhilaration of awakening to a different world.
We board the vaporetto and it chugs off, cutting through the chop of the other delivery boats and gondolas. Almost instantly we are out of sight of any evidence of the modern.
“It’s like Disney World,” Tess notes. “Except it’s real.”
So I point out some of the realities learned over my crash-course reading on the plane. There the gray Fondacco dei Turchi with its imposing, dead-eyed windows. And here the Pescheria, with its neo-gothic hall operating as a fish market since the fourteenth century (“Smells like some of the fish have been on sale since the fourteenth century,” Tess observes). Over here, the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi, where tax evaders were once imprisoned in the cellar.
In what feels like only a handful of minutes the Grand Canal narrows, and we pass under the Rialto Bridge, its span so weighted with tourists I worry it will collapse upon us in an avalanche of digital cameras, sunglasses, and carved stone. Then the canal bends and widens once more. We pass under the less burdened Ponte dell’Accademia and the course gives way to the larger Bacino di San Marco and, beyond it, the glinting breadth of the lagoon.
The vaporetto slows and turns toward the dock of Bauers Il Palaz-zo, our hotel. Brass-buttoned valets secure our boat, hauling our luggage inside and offering a gloved hand to Tess. Within an hour of landing we have been transported from the anonymous anywhere of an international airport to the almost unthinkable particularity of one of the finest hotels of Venice, of all Europe.
Tess stands on the dock, taking mental snapshots of the gondolas, the lagoon, the San Marco clock tower, and a stupefied me.
“Glad we came?” I ask.
“Don’t be dumb,” she answers, linking her arm around mine.
The Thin Woman wasn’t kidding around.
“This place is nice,” Tess confirms, noting the polished, brown marble floor of the Bauer’s lobby, the Bevilacqua and Rubelli fabrics draping the windows. “Who’s paying for this?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” I confess.
Once checked in, we go up to our room to freshen up. Up to our rooms, that is: two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and an elegant living room with eleven-foot glass doors opening onto a balcony overlooking the Grand Canal.
We shower, get changed, and head up to the rooftop lounge for lunch. From our table, looking one way we can view the lagoon, looking another the whole plaza of San Marco. It is, as the tour guide boasted, the finest vantage point in Venice. And the highest.
“You know what they call this restaurant?” I say. “Il Settimo Cielo. Guess what it means.”
“I don’t speak Italian, Dad.”
“Seventh Heaven.”
“Because it’s on the seventh floor?”
“Give the girl a kewpie doll.”
“What’s a kewpie doll?”
“Never mind.”
Lunch arrives. Grilled trout for me, spaghetti alla limone for Tess. We eat ravenously, as if merely looking about us the last couple hours has earned us fierce appetites.
“What’s that place?” Tess asks, pointing across the canal at the white dome and elegant columns of the Chiesa della Salute.
“A cathedral,” I say. “One of the plague churches they built in the seventeenth century, as a matter of fact.”
“Plague church?”
“They built it to protect themselves when a terrible disease—the Black Death—came to Venice. Took out almost half the population. They didn’t have the medicine to fight it at the time, so all they felt they could do was build a church and hope God would save them.”
“And did he?”
“The plague eventually lifted. As it would have whether anyone built a church or not.”
Tess twirls a new bundle of noodles around her fork.
“I think it was God. Even if you don’t,” she says decisively. Takes a cheek-bulging mouthful. Chews and grins at the same time.
That evening, tired but excited, we go for a short stroll along the twisting calles surrounding the hotel before bed. I have a better-than-average sense of direction (it comes with the travel-guide map study) and can see our course in my head: three jagged sides of a square and then back again. Yet shortly after setting out, the turns become unexpected, the lane breaking off into two smaller canalside fondamenta, forcing a decision—left? right?—I didn’t think I’d have to make. Still, I figure I’m holding to the idea of going around the square and returning to the Grand Canal, even if it takes us a little longer.
After half an hour, we’re lost.
But it’s okay. Tess is here. Holding my hand, oblivious to my internal calculations, my attempts to guess north from south. The old man on the plane was wrong. Being lost in Venice is as charming as the guide books say it is. It all depends on who walks next to you. With Tess, I could be lost forever. Then it occurs to me, with the sharp pinch of emotion, that so long as I am with her, I could never be truly lost.
Just as I am about to abandon my masculinity altogether and ask someone for directions, we come upon the doors to Harry’s Bar. Hemingway had his own table here for the winter of 1950. The guidebook returns this fact to me, along with the more useful recollection of the map of the area. We aren’t too far off. We probably never were. The Bauer is just around the corner.
“We’re home,” I tell Tess.
“We were lost back there, weren’t we?”
“Maybe a little.”
“I could tell from your face. It does this thing sometimes”—she hardens her brow—“when you’re thinking.”
“Your face does the same thing.”
“Of course it does. I’m like you, and you’re like me.”
The simple truth of her observation stops me, but Tess walks ahead. My guide, leading me to the hotel doors.
The next day my plan is to do a little sightseeing, visit the address the Thin Woman provided me in the afternoon, then wipe my hands of my official business and enjoy the evening and tomorrow with Tess unencumbered. Yet as we start out in a private gondola, Tess marveling at the long boat’s smooth progress through the chop, I begin to suspect my timing is a mistake. I should have gotten my work (whatever it is) over with first thing, because my speculation over what I have been asked to observe here has, even over breakfast, graduated to niggling worry. The strangeness of my assignment was sort of thrilling over the last twenty-four hours, a distraction from unwelcome realities. I could see the episode playing out as something to be retold in the lecture hall, a winning, screwball anecdote at conference wine-and-cheeses. Now, though, in the gold haze of Venetian light, the butterflies in my stomach have turned to warring wasps, churning and stinging.
What had the Thin Woman called it? A case. A phenomenon. Not the analysis of a discovered text or interpretation of verse (the only sort of fieldwork I might be expected to lend my expertise to). She came to me for my knowledge of the Adversary, one of the Bible’s many names for the Devil. Apocryphal documentation of demonic activity in the ancient world.
None of this, of course, can be discussed with Tess. So I play cheerful tour guide as best I can. All the while struggling to tell myself that this day is merely a little out of the ordinary, that I shouldn’t fear the unusual simply because it takes me out of my habitat of library, study, and seminar room. Indeed, maybe more days like this would have made me more present, as Diane had wished I’d been. Excitement makes you more alive.
But the fact is, as the morning sun rises to beat shadowlessly down on the old city, it feels less like excitement and more like fear.
• • •
We start at the Doge’s Palace. It’s a short walk from the hotel to San Marco, and once we step out onto the broad plaza, we take in the structure’s immensity from a distance. It’s true what one of the guidebooks said: the long arcade of columns on the building’s lower level lend the walled floors atop them the illusion of floating. I hadn’t expected the sheer size of it, the tons of stone, no matter how gracefully assembled, suggesting long-buried narratives of labor, injury, lost lives.
Among these lost lives, I tell Tess, were the condemned men brought here to be given a final chance at salvation.
“Why were they condemned?” she asks.
“They’d done bad things. And then they had to be punished.”
“But they were brought here first?”
“So the story goes.”
“How does the story go?”
I tell her about the column. The book said it was on the exposed side facing St. Mark’s Basin, opposite the island of San Giorgio. Count three columns in and there it is: worn around its marble base from all the prisoners and, over the centuries since, curious tourists attempting the impossible. The challenge is to put your hands behind your back (as the prisoners’ hands would have been bound) and, facing outward, step around the entire column. For the condemned, it was a cruel offering of potential freedom, as the myth holds that the task has never been achieved.
Tess thinks I should go first. I slip my fingers into my belt and get up onto the base’s edge. A single sliding step and I’m off.
“Can’t do it,” I say.
“My turn!”
Tess reverse-hugs the marble, faces me, grinning. Then she starts. Little shuffles on her heels, inching around. And keeps going. I stand there with my iPhone video camera ready to capture her fall, but instead she disappears as she circles the column. A moment later she emerges again, still shuffling around. Except now the grin is gone. In its place is a blank look I take to be severe concentration. I return the iPhone to my pocket.
When she’s made it all the way around to the starting point she stands there, looking out over the water, as though listening to whispered instructions from the lapping waves.
“Tess!” A shout meant to awaken her from wherever she’s gone as much as to celebrate her accomplishment. “You did it!”
She steps down. And with her recollection of who I am and where she is, her smile returns.
“What do I win?” she asks.
“Your place in history. Apparently nobody’s ever done that before.”
“And salvation. Do I win that, too?”
“That, too. C’mon,” I say, taking her hand. “Let’s get out of this sun.”
We walk across the already-crowded plaza to the basilica. The sun, aloof but scorching, makes even this short journey fatiguing. Or maybe the early rising after a long flight has me weaker than I figured. In any case, by the time we enter the cool of the cathedral, I’m feeling tilted, as though standing on the deck of a sailboat.
It’s partly an excuse to regain my balance when I stop to point up at the mosaic decorating the dome above us. The images tell the story of Creation: God’s invention of light, Adam in the garden, the serpent and his temptation of Eve, the Fall. There is an astonishing simplicity to the images, especially in the context of the building’s overwhelming, Byzantine architecture. It’s as though the builders intended to distract one from the real materials of faith, rather than depict them. Yet here, in this overhead pocket, is the familiar narrative of Genesis, laid out in an almost children’s book illustration, and the impact of it takes my breath away.
At first, I assume this is an aesthetic response: a man in awe of towering artistic achievement. But it isn’t the beautiful that transfixes me. It is the sublime. The unsettling presence of the serpent and its implications not only upon the iconic “Eve,” but the two real people pictured in the mosaic, a man and woman touched not by a symbol, but by a physically embodied evil. The green-scaled length. The forked tongue.
And then, in the hushed tomb of the church, the sound of a whisper next to my ear. The serpent’s eyes focused not on a girl holding out her hand for an apple, but upon me.
“Dad?”
Tess has her hands against my lower back.
“What’s wrong?”
“Me?” she says. “What’s wrong with you? I’m holding you up.”
“Sorry. Got a bit dizzy for a second there.”
She squints. Knows I’m not giving her all the details and determining whether she needs to hear them now or not.
“Let’s go back to the hotel,” she suggests. “We can have a rest before your meeting.”
She’s your child, the imagined O’Brien qualifies in my head as Tess leads me out into the piazza’s bustle. She knows more than you could ever hide.