A shadow passes across Perina’s face; her gaze drops to the floor. Then she folds her arm into his and eases him toward the exit. I have been told, she says, that in his boyhood my brother was greatly inclined to solitude and melancholy. And that you were much to thank for lightening his disposition.
There’s a note of uncertainty in her voice: a concern she’s eager to dismiss. It sobers him like packed snow against his neck. I must confess, he says, that the years of struggle and sorrow have added weight to my own temperament. I can scarcely recall the playful youth you describe. But if I did anything to ease your brother’s brief bright path through the world, then I am honored to have done so.
She smiles under her veil. Moving him forward. Her eyes fixed on the stone floor. The nun, on her feet again, hovers behind them.
Perina gives his forearm a surreptitious squeeze. You’ll help me, she whispers.
I—will try.
The door swings open and the night comes in, airy and echoless. Belltowers and chimney-funnels and the edges of tiled rooftops cast black outlines against the western sky, while shadows rise in the streets below. The canal’s surface shuffles the left-behind light—blue heavens, orange lanterns—and Crivano slouches toward it, descending the convent steps. Halfway down he sags against the rail and turns back. Perina still stands in the door. Your cousin, he says. The senator. What did he say about me?
She’s surprised by his question, at a loss for an answer. Very little, she says. Nothing, really.
He only arranged our meeting.
Yes, she says. I asked him to do so.
The nun is behind her, one hand on her shoulder, the other on the doorframe. Perina’s veiled eyes are lost in the dusk.
Then how, Crivano says, did you first learn that I knew your brother? That I fought at Lepanto?
There’s a lengthy silence. A breeze rustles the crowns of the sea-pines in the churchyard. Dottore de Nis, she says at last. Dottore de Nis told me.
Good night, dottore, the gatekeeper nun shouts as she shuts the door. Do be vigilant in the dark.
53
The bolt slides home with an emphatic boom. In the ensuing silence, Crivano stares at the gray oak planks of the convent door until lamplight vanishes from the gaps between them. Then he takes a swift weary inventory—his parcel, his stick—and turns south, toward the church of the Apostles and the Rialto beyond. In the distance the belltower in the Piazza glows like a hot iron against the starry sky; Crivano can see pale flashes of night-birds around it, feasting on insects summoned by the fire.
When he comes to the Saint Sophia Canal he takes a few unsteady paces to the water’s edge, sets his burdens down, and parts his robes to piss, splashing the quay, tracing crazy patterns across the surface, nearly wetting himself. He wants to dwell on what he’s just heard but cannot: he needs to find Obizzo, to give him the news. He never should have come here. What perversity impelled him? Was it engendered in himself, or—somehow—by the crooked city streets, which seem willfully to frustrate his errands, to distract him with queer spectacles, strange musings, unfamiliar impulses? Even now each shuffling step toward the Rialto brings him no closer: he sees the Grand Canal flash between palace walls but finds no path that leads there.
In the campo of Saint John the Golden-Tongued he finally gives up, chooses a street he’s certain will connect him to the Mercerie, and emerges instead behind the German fondaco, at the Grand Canal at last, near the very spot where the new bridge spans it. Crivano hurries to the Riva del Carbon, searching the face of every idle gondolier in the hope of glimpsing Obizzo. When he’s nearly reached the Morosini house—where last night he half-listened to the Nolan’s lecture—he turns around again. The bridge is a needle-fanged maw over the water, its broad philtrum lit with torches; their phantom twins gambol in the waves below.
In the works of Thrice-Great Hermes, we read of the double essence of Divine Man, of how He looked down from the armature of the spheres and fell in love with Nature when He saw His reflection upon Her waters. Climbing the bridge’s sloped central pathway, Crivano spots a figure he recognizes leaning against the marble balustrade: the wart-footed streetwalker, alone, tired, probably hungry, but not in any visible distress. She’s looking down at the city: rows of inscrutable palaces, lanterns winking from black outlines of boats. The expression she wears is familiar from his janissary years; he saw it sometimes, albeit rarely, in the faces of peasants displaced by the sweep of armies. How wondrous, it seems to say, is this thing that destroys me.