The Venetian Contract (33 page)

Feyra was shocked at the harshness of his words, but she felt she owed it to her mother, to her father, to defend their relationship a little.

‘Perhaps it is not so great a sin,’ she said, ‘if there is love in the case.’ She spoke carefully, looking down at her hands in her lap; so she did not see the fire leap a little in his eyes.

What she had said led Annibale to hope.

They had arguments, of course, and often found themselves violently opposed to each other in matters of medical practice. These they both enjoyed as much, if not more, than the matters when they were in accord. But such arguments never strayed into the personal, and were quickly forgotten.

One of their most furious disagreements was over the Ottoman practice of variolation. Feyra argued that engrafting small amounts of infected blood or other contaminated matter into a healthy patient ensured, in nearly all cases, partial or complete immunity to the full-blown disease, especially in cases such as the pox. She described seeing Haji Musa open four veins in the forehead and chest of a young boy, and insert into the wounds small amounts of mucus taken from a smallpox patient. The boy grew healthily into adulthood, despite every other member of his family contracting the disease.

Annibale argued that the practice was forbidden by the Catholic Church for good reason: that it killed as many as it preserved. He forced Feyra to admit that in some cases the inoculated patients died of the very malady the physicians had been trying to prevent. They returned to the subject many times, and never found the least agreement. Their arguments always finished in the same way. ‘Mohammed said that God did not create a sickness in this world unless he produced the cure as well,’ stated Feyra. ‘Might not the cure be found
within
the disease?’

Annibale would shake his head. ‘In reply to Mohammed, let me invoke Maimonides; he is credited with observing that the perfect doctor is one who judges it wiser to let well enough alone, than to prescribe a cure that is worse than the malady.’

Their other major disagreement was over whether or not patients should pay for medicine. Annibale abhorred the practice, citing Valnetti and his fellow profiteers, who benefited from people’s misery. He would quote the physician’s code which stated that doctors should work for their stipend, cover their expenses but not profit excessively from their medicines.

Feyra was more pragmatic. ‘But what if by selling medicines a doctor can provide better care for his patients?’

‘
I
fund this hospital,’ retorted Annibale sharply. ‘My funds are adequate; and I have no need of more.’

Here he did not entirely speak the truth.

The Cason hoard, which he had long since dug from the wellside and placed beneath the floorboards under his own bed, was dwindling alarmingly as the hospital reached its first anniversary. After this last conversation with Feyra Annibale climbed the stairs and took up the board.

He set the casket on his knee and fitted the little key from the chain about his neck into the lock. He ran his hands through the remaining gold, feeling the cold metal discs slithering against his fingers. There was now only a thin layer of ducats to gild the bottom of the box. He estimated that the coins would get him to Michaelmas, no more. He shut the lid with a thud and buried it once again beneath the floorboards, his worries along with it.

Feyra was changing.

Annibale was the first man she had ever met whom she did not want to keep at bay. When she was with him her coverings, those layers and layers that she lived beneath like the raw white heart of an artichoke, seemed laborious to her. At night she dreamed scalding, private dreams of taking off her clothes for him. Sometimes he would be there as she undressed, and he would take hold of her scarves and veils and wind her round and round like a Dervish, unwrapping the reams of diaphanous fabric until she was dizzy and exposed, standing completely naked before him.

Always she woke with burning cheeks, and knelt at once to pray, but no amount of prayer could rid her of the will. For the first time she understood the impulse that had driven her mother to ride away into the night with her father. But she was not a Venetian princess, she could not beckon an infidel sea captain across a ballroom with a lift of her white glove. She had to wait for him to beckon her.

And one night, he did.

They were sitting, as they always did, at either side of the fire. Feyra was peering at a woodcut by Andreas Vesalius,
trying to make sense of the Latin labels, when Annibale spoke. His tone was casual.

‘The Trianni girl, mother of little Annibale. Did you say she was with child again?’

Feyra lowered the woodcut. ‘Yes. Another babe to be born in the spring.’

‘They should have a house of their own. There are too many of them now in that cot.’ She was silent. ‘Insanitary, your friend Palladio would call it.’

She waited.

He leaned across the fire, towards her. He was very close. ‘Your house,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you would not be so sorry to leave it?’

‘It is … very cold,’ she murmured.

‘The roof is unstable,’ he added, his voice a warm whisper.

‘It leaks day and night,’ she whispered back, feeling disloyal to the faithful Salve who had made the roof entirely waterproof.

‘And the church bells?’

‘They wake me every hour of the night.’ She began to smile.

‘You should come and live here.’

She was silent, afraid to breathe. She wanted to be sure. ‘As your mistress?’ she whispered.

He was untroubled by her directness. ‘Yes. Will you come?’

‘Yes.’

Chapter 30

A
s Andrea Palladio walked up the fifteen steps to his church on Giudecca, his pleasure at the sight of the growing building was a little lessened by his own breathlessness.

He’d had a headcold and had been feeling wheezy all week, his chest tight and pressed. He’d left his house knowing that if he waited in for Cason’s Friday visit, the doctor would declare him unfit. Palladio just wanted to be at work. He had begun to acknowledge that this church would be his last building, and he wanted it to be his legacy.

His immortality and his mortality met each other, abruptly, on the steps. The wheezing in his lungs reminded him that he was sixty-nine. He could no longer blame the decades of stone dust he had breathed in, and not wholly breathed out again. He was getting old.

Zabato stuck his shock-head out of the doorway. ‘Master, may we continue? The light is dying.’

On the last step Palladio was brought up short by a sharp and sudden pain. Petrified, he staggered, his flesh suddenly freezing. It felt like a celestial hand was squeezing his heart, which leapt like a snared coney.
The light is dying
, he thought in a sudden panic,
and so am I
. Surely the Lord would not take His builder before he had completed His contract?

In a moment the pain was gone and Palladio could walk again, taking deep gulping breaths of relief. Zabato, ahead of him, had noticed nothing. As Palladio walked under the great lintel his heart slowed again but he still felt weak and sweaty. He had found of late that he was talking to God more, since he was building Him a house. It was not a spiritual dialogue, just a conversation, such as he would have with any great lord for whom he was building a dwelling. He’d had a hundred exchanges such as these with his friends the brothers Barbaro when he’d built their great villa at Maser, and he did not see that the Almighty should be any different. So he consulted his heavenly patron on the style of the pillars or the pavings of the pavimentum and did not expect an answer. But now he asked for something in return, his first prayer of supplication.

Give me time, Lord
, he prayed.
Only give me time
.

It was late afternoon by the time Annibale traced Palladio. He’d gone first to the house in the Campo Fava and rapped with his cane at the door with the golden callipers. The fat cook opened the door, and told him that her master had gone to the site of the church on Giudecca. ‘He’s there every day,’ she said, ‘him and Zabato come home like a pair of ghosts, so white they are with the stone dust.’

Annibale nodded, noted that Feyra’s septic measures of cleansing herbs and frankincense candles had been well maintained in the atrium, exhorted the cook to continue in this way, and left. It would be no trouble at all to go the Giudecca on the way home. He walked to Zattere in search of a
traghetto
, a spring in his step, and thought of Feyra.

As he stood steady in the boat looking ahead to Giudecca
he pictured her now as she looked when she crossed the green to the Tezon. She always looked straight ahead like a ship’s prow, the
Maria di Legno
again, never turning in her purpose. He thought of her skin, the colour of cinnamon, the amber of her eyes. He could not believe that by tonight she would be living in his house.

Ever since she’d told him the meaning of her name he’d become obsessed with her mouth, that strange, upside-down mouth, with the top lip a little fuller than the bottom. He wondered how it would feel if he was lying on top of her, his body cushioned by her body, his mouth cushioned by her mouth.

He was jolted from these thoughts by the bump of the
traghetto
against the jetty. Annibale tossed a sequin to the boatman, jumped ashore as lightly as a gleeman, and noticed the church for the first time.

As someone who had grown up with the topography of Giudecca, and had become used to the jagged ruins of the convent of San Sebastiano, the progress of Palladio’s church was striking. What an exquisite site for a church! Already it was the tallest building on the island, but as yet a rectangular stone prism without spire or campanile. Because of this, to Annibale’s eyes, the church resembled a temple of the East; an impression supported by the wide plinth at the entrance. The façade could be a temple of Jerusalem, a Parthenon of Athens or – he shivered with joy – a shrine of Constantinople. Annibale counted fifteen steps to the doors, and ran up every one.

Inside was a mess of earth and stone. There was a choking white smoke of dust and a deafening cacophony of stonecutters hammering and chipping and men shouting as blocks were raised by complicated winches and pulleys.

A cruciform pathway was marked off by pegs and parti-coloured ropes, and at the centre of this, where the Christ would have hung, stood Palladio and his shadow, that scruffy draughtsman fellow. Annibale beamed upon them both, forgetting his mask. When they saw him, Palladio smote his forehead.