Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (10 page)

“Come, Jessichka,” he says. “To the chapel.”

He leads me through rooms hung with huge, tarnished mirrors, rooms hung with immense, twinkling floriform chandeliers. He leads me through rooms full of Titians and Tintorettos, Giorgiones and Bellinis, Carpaccios and Veroneses, Guardis and Canalettos, Longhis and Luinis. He leads me under Tiepolo ceilings, past beds hung with ruby red damask, past beds hung with sapphire blue damask, past beds hung with emerald green damask. He leads me past the central courtyard and stair where, in the pit below, the no-longer-used Venetian wellhead can be seen growing moss and flowers in a damp, stony courtyard filled with classical bric-a-brac: the torso of a Graeco-Roman Venus, the head of a Hellenistic Zeus, the sarcophagus of an unnamed Roman patrician.

At last we arrive at what appears to be the grandest master bedroom suite of the palazzo: an immense, altarlike canopied bed supported by writhing columns made of some dark walnuty wood; a Tiepolo ceiling resplendent with androgynous angels and heavy-thighed mythological matrons recumbent on
schlag
like clouds, ascending above a pink candy sunset; a many-branched chandelier big enough to light a ballroom; and portraits of sixteenth-century Venetians hung about the room, ancestral witnesses to the pleasures, or the purgatories, of the bed.

Adjacent to this bedroom is a smallish antechamber or vestibule leading to a tiny chapel. The chapel has a Crivelli Madonna (apple-cheeked baby Christ, apple-breasted Virgin Mary in an archway hung with pears and apples). On the altar are golden candles and behind it, a red damask curtain.

“Look, Jessichka,” says Grisha, whereupon he pulls the curtain, revealing a window and beyond it a whole cavernous church below. “Voilà—they could sin
and
confess without ever leaving the bedchamber,” Grisha exclaims. “Shall we do the same?”

I am marveling at the convenience of the arrangement, and my mind is racing ahead to plots for films, mysteries, historical epics, that would hinge upon this proximity between bed, chapel, and church. But even as I dream of future plots, Grisha is aroused beyond anything my mere flesh could inspire by this odd combination of sensuality and piety—a combination evidently crucial to his sexual demons.

“Kneel, Jessichka—kneel!” he commands, pushing me down on my knees at the altar and pressing his now very turgid cock against my rear.

I swing around, laughing, only to see him unzipping and preparing to thrust his Soviet specimen into my mouth.

“Oh, Grisha—I didn't realize you were so religious!” I say, and then fall apart in gales of laughter. But Grisha is determined to have me, if not wickedly on the altar then at least decently on the bed. He drags me to it and begins clawing at me in what seems like a rape pantomime drawn from a B movie. I have played this scene before myself. And I know it has only three possible scenarios: the girl gets raped, the girl gets killed, the girl gets killed and raped. Rewrite the script! I command myself. That is your whole life's task, after all, to rewrite these hackneyed scripts and make them real, true, authentically heroic. Grisha is pinning me to the bed, but, like most bullies, Grisha is weak. He is big, but not agile. He has bulk, but he does not have the subtler martial arts at his command. I do.

A quick knee to the groin amazingly loosens his grip. A few well-placed kicks and I am already getting up and smoothing my silver jump suit, when a veritable parade of Beautiful People, led by Gore himself, enters, the bedchamber.

“Is this the position of poets in the USSR? On their backs?” asks our waggish freedom fighter.

“It is better than being on their knees before the balance sheet like bourgeois capitalist writers,” says Grisha, leaping off the bed and zipping his pants.

But I am already gone. I have taken off at a sprint down the labyrinthine corridors of the palazzo, under the Tiepolo ceilings, past the damask-draped beds, past the walls of great paintings, the gorgeous table of food, down the steps, past the liveried footmen, and out via a side door that gives onto a narrow
calle
leading to the Grand Canal.

At the end of the
calle
I can see the gondolas,
sandali
,
topi
, all the reproductions of historical craft—the great
Bucintoro
among them—already bobbing on the waters for the Regata Storica, which is about to begin.

Damn! I've forgotten the silver helmet and goggles, but there's little chance of my being recognized in this throng. I have an extra pair of sunglasses in one of the zipper pockets of my jump suit, so my incognita is prepared. Anyway, the
calli
are teeming with Venetians, some of them costumed for the various historical reenactments. I see young men in doublets and hose, their wigs slightly askew, young women dressed in sixteenth-century bodices and farthingales, their skirts hitched up as they run along the cobblestones.

Intermingled with them are kids in punk attire and matrons in polyester dresses, so that two epochs (or more) seem to be merging in the streets of Venice. It is the same on the Grand Canal, where boats from every era of Venetian history bob on the waters, awaiting their turn to race. Out on the streets are the hoi polloi, while the Beautiful People overlook the tumult below from their balconies, just as in Tiepolo's or Veronese's frescoes. Sometimes, one is thrown even further back in time, and the scene seems painted by Carpaccio, with gorgeously liveried gondoliers and fluffy little dogs (or big mangy ones) perched upon the prows to cheer their masters as they skim the waters.

One with the crowd now, having forfeited my perch above the Grand Canal among the worthies of the fashionable world, I am pressed into the
calle
with the screaming throng. Nobody recognizes me here. They are all intent upon struggling to the water's edge to have a better view of the regatta.

Jostled, elbowed, shoved, I am pushed almost to the end of the
calle.
There I stop, find a place to lean against the cool stone wall of a palazzo, and catch my breath.

Suddenly the face of a beautiful young man swims into my view. His hair is golden and hangs over his shoulders like a pretty girl's. His eyes are clear bright blue, his mouth red, his brow high, arched, imperious. He cannot be more than eighteen or nineteen, and he wears (or can I be imagining it?) the garb of a patrician Elizabethan: a lace collar with blackwork that rises at the back as if it had not quite made up its mind whether or not to become a ruff; a peasecod doublet; full, loose breeches of the sort the English called “venetians”; flesh-colored hose; and shoes of a pale natural color.

“Milady, you are welcome hither,” he says. “Shall we attend my friend?”

Startled, and yet not startled at all (it is only as if I have gone from the twentieth-century wings onto the Elizabethan stage and begun speaking Shakespearean English), I answer, “And who, pray, is your friend, Sirrah?”

“Why, Master Shake-scene, the upstart crow, the great—or soon to be great—Will Shakespeare. A wanton lad who prizes wenches but slights not lads. Like many a player, he hath the morals of a monkey, the lust of a lion, and the appetite of a tiger…”

“Doth he not have the heart of a lion as well?” I ask, astonished not to be more astonished.

“Ah, Milady, that remains to be seen. Come, will you meet my friend? He would fain meet you.”

“I have met your friend,” I say.

“In word but not in flesh,” says the young man. “'Tis very like reading about this watery city of sin and sensuality, yet never having been here. We, too, dreamed of Venice. But now that we are here, we find it quite familiar yet altogether strange—like unto the unicorn, which is almost a horse, almost a goat, and yet is compact'd of magic and of poetry in a strange, new way no mere mortal could guess at. For it is touched with the breath—and the brush—of the Muses. Do you not agree?”

I nod my head and stare into the young man's eyes, not quite sure whether in a moment he will not turn into a mere bit player in my life—a tourist disguised for a Regatta Day party, or the son of an old friend playing dress-up and picking me out of the crowd to tease me (for in Venice, on Regatta Day, one meets everyone!). But no, he seems quite the real thing—though who can tell in this city of mirrors and reflections, this city where past and present mingle most incredibly, where even our best contemporary chronicler of the place—I mean, of course, Jan Morris—has changed not only names but genders like some astounding present-day Orlando. Ah, Venice has that effect upon all sensitive souls: we change shapes, epochs, even sexes—bewitched by that
fata
(or is it
strega?
) manifest within the labyrinthine ways and byways of the city.

“Jessichka! Jessichka!” comes the echo down the
calle
. I whirl around to see Grisha Krylov waving furiously at me above the crowd, and then I whirl around again to find my fine Elizabethan dandy gone. Vanished into thick air. And I alone again, with Krylov in pursuit.

I am determined to flee him, determined to find my Elizabethan friend again—but it is no easy task negotiating the streets of Venice on Regatta Day. Every
calle
is packed with people, and it requires great agility, and no small amount of pushing and shoving, to elude a great, thundering, would-be rapist of a Soviet poet who is waving his arms madly and blowing consolatory kisses. But elude him I do, for Venice belongs to the Venetians on Regatta Day, to the working people of the city, and one can get lost in their ample collective bosom. The Beautiful People on the balconies are just so much window-dressing—the
glitterati
irrelevantly glittering—but it is the common people of Venice who love the regatta most, who know the names of all the
regatanti
and
regatante
, who cheer for the Regata delle donne (their mothers and sisters), the Regati degli Alberoni, the Regata di Pellestrina, the Regata dei Traghetti, the Regata dei S.S. Giovanni e Paolo, the Regata di Mestre, di Burano, di Murano, and so on. This is their
festa
, a day on which even Grisha Krylov might be swallowed up by a crowd, a day on which all Venice belongs to the beautiful, muscular gondoliers (and even their ugly brothers).

As the boats begin to race on the Grand Canal, it becomes apparent that Venice is not at all the city of glittering, famous foreigners it often seems to be (at least in the summer season) but a city of cheering shopkeepers, boatmen, cooks, waiters, dustmen, fishermen, maids.
This
Venice—the Venice that belongs to the Venetians, the Venice that belongs to the flourishing bourgeois of this most bourgeois of cities (despite its patrician past, and reputation) is, in fact, the true Venice (if there is such a thing as one true Venice). They are people with whom Shakespeare—if indeed he
were
here—would be very much at home, for he knew their like in London. They were his audience, his kinsmen, his friends.

I wander through the
calli
, along the
fondamenta
, through the
campi
of this city with the true Venetians on this their day of days, but nowhere do I find the young Earl of Southampton again (for that is who I presume he is). At one point I turn a corner into a
rio terrá
, a little filled-in street, and I think I see him, but it proves after all to be a slim, young American girl with long, blonde hair, an embroidered peasant blouse from Yugoslavia, loose black velour pantaloons, and pale tan ballerina flats on her slender feet. Perhaps it was she all along and I was merely hallucinating.

For I am not much more certain of my own sanity these days than I am of Björn's. I am feverishly suggestible in the best of times, and all these hallucinatory movies, my nightly immersion in Shakespearean studies, the anniversary of my mother's death, missing Antonia, these crazy crowds, these press conferences—not to mention the hot pursuit of Grisha Krylov—may have addled my already exhausted brain. Anyway, whenever I have been pressed to the breaking point in my life, I have generally retreated into the past. At Chapin I fell in love with ancient Greece and Shakespeare's sonnets, in college with Shakespeare's heroines. At the worst of times in California, when the frenzied high school competitiveness (I have a better car than yours, a better house than yours, a better body than yours) of the film industry began to get to me, I would take off somewhere, anywhere, and play Shakespeare. One gig, no matter how obscure or badly paid, with a real company of actors who all loved word-drunk Will as much as I did, and I would feel sane again, centered again. For I would know that it was the work that mattered, the word that mattered, and not who had the best deal, the best agent, the best car, the best house, the best body. So he had been my salvation many a time, and if ever I met him (even in a dream), I would want to repay that debt. Somehow.

The
regatanti
and
regatante
race on the Grand Canal (or Canalozzo, as the Venetians call it in their curious dialect), and I am tossed about the city on the tide of the crowd. At one point I find myself in a certain
campo
, crisscrossed by screaming Venetians, and there who should I run into but a passel of my fellow jurists—Carlos Armada and his girlfriend; Leonardo da Leone and his; Benjamin Gabriel Gimpel and his wife; Gaetano Manuzio; his wife, Elisabetta; and his mistress, Barbara. (Elisabetta and Barbara are walking arm in arm, one pondering the paving stones, the other examining the sky.)

“
Ciao,
Jessica!” waves Gaetano gaily.

Leonardo just scowls.

“I'm very cross with you, Signorina Pruitt,” he says formally.

Now, whenever anyone says they are cross with me, I cringe—as if I were still in kindergarten. In fact, I seem to fall forty years back through the rabbit hole of time and find myself
in
kindergarten again, with no escape in sight.

“Why cross with me?” I ask.

“Because of your Soviet friend and his shenanigans,” says Leonardo.