The Lying Tongue (6 page)

At the end of that first day I fell into my bed, exhausted. As I lay there listening to the gentle ebbing of the water, with the moonlight shining through the slats in the shutters, I felt that I was in some kind of dream, a character in a surreal vision. I’d never met anyone like Crace before, and I could tell it would take me a while to get used to his strangeness. Over a simple supper of spaghetti with tomatoes, basil and Parmigiano, which we had at the table in the kitchen, I asked him why he had decided to come to Venice and how he had chosen this palazzo. Although he told me not to be offended, and from his manner he was far from rude, he refused to answer, saying that those kind of details were extraneous to my needs. The fact that he existed in the here and now, he said, should be enough for me.

I learned that it was better to wait for him to introduce a subject into the conversation. He adored talking about his art, and I enjoyed listening to him—and that night he told me about how he had amassed a great deal of his collection, buying pieces twenty or thirty years ago for next to nothing. The names he recited were certainly impressive. In addition to the works he had already described to me, he owned drawings and etchings by Palma Giovane, Domenico Brusasorci, Benedetto Caliari, and Domenico Tintoretto; and paintings by Paolo Veronese, Paris Bordon, Moretto da Brescia and Lorenzo Lotto, as well as a good deal of quite exquisite glassware by some of Venice’s finest craftsmen.

Over coffee he asked me about my art history degree, and I sketched out the arc of the course and its structure, chronology and theoretical stance. I tried to impress him by showing off my knowledge of Vasari, but he dismissed the writer of
Lives of the Artists
with a wave of his hand and a comment about how he had introduced biographical vulgarity into art history. He agreed, he said, with Cellini, who thought Vasari nothing better than a coward and a liar. By the way, had I read Cellini’s autobiography? I replied that I had not. It was great fun, he said, his eyes gleaming. He summarized it for me before outlining Cellini’s seemingly insatiable appetite for violence and how he had committed a series of murders in cold blood, events that he related in the book with unadulterated glee. He described an incident in which Cellini had tried to knife a man in the face, but after his victim suddenly turned around, he stabbed him under the ear instead. Crace thought this story hilarious, and as he laughed, his little reptilian eyes disappeared into the folds of flesh in his face.

“Cellini said that artists, unique in their profession, should stand above the law,” Crace said, finally catching his breath and studying me closely. “Free of responsibility and able to disregard the rules. Do you think the same thing, Mr. Woods? Please say that you do.”

Although I wasn’t quite sure what to say, I thought it best to agree with him. As I nodded my assent, he looked at me with what can only be described as an expression of affection.

“I can see that we’re going to get on splendidly,” he said.

It took me a week to clean the palazzo, and during that time I frequently felt as though, no matter how much effort I put into it, the apartments refused to relinquish their patina of dirt. It was like some kind of protective shell, a barrier that resisted any attempt to penetrate or invade it.

The ingrained dirt on the mullioned windows at the two ends of the portego seemed particularly stubborn, almost acting as a shield to distance Crace from the outside world. Using a rickety set of stepladders I had found in a cupboard in the kitchen I climbed to the top of the windows, took hold of my cloth and cleaning spray and started to attack the grime. Although my cloth got darker and darker, nothing seemed to be coming off the surface of the glass. But finally a small coin-shaped pocket of light shone through the window, growing and growing until the glass had cleared and I could see outside.

One side of the palazzo looked onto a street, separated only by a narrow stretch of water and a bridge, the other onto a much wider canal. A boat laden with oranges, grapefruits, limes and lemons glided by. A gondola, steered by a proud, haughty-looking man and seating a kissing couple, lolling about in the back with honeymoon happiness, slowly made its way past me before it disappeared around a corner. Across the other side of the water, an elegant dark-haired woman stood on her balcony smoking a cigarette. Everywhere I looked people were getting on with their lives, having an existence, while Crace immured himself in his palazzo, a self-imposed prisoner. But at least after I had cleaned the windows, Crace could see out of his gaol.

The vines in the courtyard, which were planted in a small patch of ground near the gate, had a life of their own, their tendrils weaving up and around the staircase in a determined attempt to invade the interior. It was almost as if they wanted to asphyxiate the palazzo, squeezing the life out of everything inside. As I cut through the woody stems that grew up and around the columns and the metal latticework, the whole organism seemed to shift and move in a stubborn effort to survive. The only way to defeat it, I found, was to cut it into as many small pieces as possible and then deposit them into black refuse bags, but even then the tendrils tried to snake and slip away.

Similarly the moss growing on the Corinthian column and the naked cherub in the center of the courtyard was stubborn and hard to shift. After I had tried, and failed, to remove it using a cloth, I had to resort to using an old chisel, which I had found under the sink, but the job was still laborious and time consuming.

I spent those first few days in a permanent sweat, stripping down to my vest and shorts as I tried to make the place look decent again. As I cleaned the interior, I disturbed ancient dust, flakes of skin and strands of hair, which I imagined belonged to those who were long dead. The dirt had a smooth, almost powdery texture to it, pulverized and softened by the process of time. I moved piles of books, cleaned Crace’s soiled clothes, carried pieces of furniture, swept, dusted, scrubbed and exterminated. Spiders had made their homes behind exquisite artwork, the frames being used as miniature proscenium arches on which to drape their webs, their own spectacular sets. In the kitchen, by the rubbish bin, I discovered a colony of ants that regularly feasted on the packet of sugar that Crace often left on the work surface. And in his bedroom, living between the dark, damp folds of his bed curtain, a few small toadstools had started to grow. Cockroaches lived in the bathroom, and wood lice often crawled out from under the Persian rug in the drawing room.

As I neared the end of the heavy-duty cleaning, I realized that not only had I not touched Crace’s study but I had not even seen it. By this point I had learned enough about him to realize he had a highly developed, if not obsessional, sense of privacy, and I thought it only best to seek his permission to enter the room. I put down my cleaning materials and, still wearing my vest that was now stained and mottled, walked down the portego and through the double doors into the drawing room, where Crace sat reading.

“Mr. Crace, I wondered whether I might be able to ask you something.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve nearly finished the cleaning now, but I realized I haven’t done your study. Do you want me to?”

He looked thoughtful for a moment and then resigned, defeated. “I suppose you’d better. It is rather a state. There is a good deal of correspondence on the desk, which does need sorting out at some point.”

He sighed, put his book down on the table, slowly stood up and shuffled toward me. As he passed, his bony hand brushed against my skin.

“Come with me,” he said.

I followed him out of the drawing room, down the portego into his bedroom and through the door at the end of that room, which led into his dark, windowless study.

“Is there a light in here?” I asked.

“Yes, just over there,” said Crace, pointing toward the outline of a desk by the far wall.

As I switched on the light, I saw that the desk was piled high with letters, some of which had fallen down onto the Persian rug below. Underneath the mass of correspondence was a mug covered in mold, a rotten apple core, a few screwed-up yellowed tissues and an ink pen. On a low wooden stand near the desk was an earthenware ink pot in the shape of a terrapin; underneath the layer of dust I could see that it boasted a fine yellow, green and beige sgraffito decoration. In addition to the bookshelves that lined the room, there was an open display case, a sort of cabinet of curiosities, full of
objets,
including a slipware flask in the form of a scallop shell; a blue and yellow bowl that showed a young shepherd boy on a mountainside being abducted by an eagle; a number of exquisite vases; a few miniatures, some surrounded by frames of silver or black velvet; a white marble relief featuring a young boy placing his left hand into a bowl of fire, which I think was a representation of Mucius Scaevola; an ornate pair of brass candlesticks and a triangular box with winged figures at each of its ends, which I took to be a perfume burner. Everything in the cabinet was covered in a thick layer of dust.

On the walls, papered in a blood-red fabric, there were a few old architectural plans of Palladian villas, their frames hanging at odd, tangential angles, and in every corner of the room stood towers of books, so unstable they looked like they might collapse at any moment. By the door there was a chest, similar to the ones in the portego, on which stood a bronze statue of a kneeling satyr holding a shell and, near it, a highly decorated, beautifully fluted marble urn.

“I don’t know where you’ll begin,” he said, gesturing with despair. “But I suppose you’ll have to start somewhere.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll soon have it sorted for you.”

“But as I said, ignore the correspondence until I’ve decided the best way to approach it,” said Crace, drifting out of the room. “It’s gotten so out of hand, I’m not sure what to do about it. I’m going to do some reading on the bed. Just shout if you need me.”

Leaving the letters to one side, I got to work straightaway, consigning the mug, apple core and tissues straight to the bin. I dusted each of the objects in the cabinet, taking care over each one, cleaned the Persian rug, swept the marble floor, tidied up the books and straightened the frames hanging on the walls. As I worked, I wondered how and when Crace had managed to do all his collecting; I presumed it must have been before he had confined himself; that or he had authorized a dealer to search for things on his behalf.

As I started to clean the chest by the door I noticed that its wood was fissured, dry and scarred. I fetched a tub of wax polish from the kitchen and carefully started to apply the sticky dark substance to the chest, massaging the mixture, which was the color of burnt sienna, deep into the wood. The polish stained the ends of my fingers a gangrenous black-brown, and for a moment it was as though my hands were those of a dead man.

I picked up the figure of the satyr, with its horns, pointed ears, beard, hairy legs and cloven hoofs, and examined it closely. The shell, which the creature held in its right hand, would, I guessed, most likely have functioned as an ink well, and although it was grotesque, there was something quite intriguing about it. I placed it back on the chest and reached for the urn, which I thought was most probably funereal, when I heard Crace’s voice.

“Don’t touch that. Leave it.”

“Sorry…so sorry,” I said, moving away, but not quite sure what I was supposed to have done.

Crace shuffled toward me, his head shaking with fury.

“Oh, I suppose it was my fault. I should have told you,” he said, trying to compose himself.

“Excuse me?”

“Oh, very well. I’d better tell you. There’s a gun—there—loaded—in that urn.”

“What?”

“It’s just for my own protection. Tiny little thing, so small you’d think it wouldn’t kill a fly. Never used it, of course.”

“I see.”

“So, I’m telling you just so you know it’s there.”

“Don’t you think it might be better if you kept it somewhere else, somewhere a little more secure?”

“What? Like a safe, you mean? I’m not going to wait around messing with a fucking combination lock while a team of burglars work their way through the palazzo and steal everything I’ve got.”

Crace sensed my anxiety and smiled.

“Look, don’t worry. It’s nothing.”

He lifted the lid of the run and reached into the vessel. His fingers had molded themselves around the gun, its surface decorated with mother-of-pearl.

“See? It’s nothing,” he said. “But if you want me to move it, I will.”