Deep and Silent Waters

Mamma had laughed, throwing back her head, her long white throat throbbing with amusement. ‘What ideas you come up with! Well, it’s in your blood. I wonder if you’re going to be an artist.’

‘Yes, that’s what I want to be. Would you like me to be an artist, Mamma?’

‘I want you to be whatever you want to be.’

He had forgotten that conversation until now. Memory stung, like grasping nettles growing along some dusty, forgotten byway. He flinched and entered the church of San Zaccaria, leaving behind the heat and the dust of the square for the cool, deep shade within.

When his eyes were accustomed to the shadowy light he wandered around, absorbing it all slowly, until at last he stopped in the north aisle, in front of Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child with Saints, the exquisite altarpiece that radiated serenity, a soothing balm to a fevered spirit.

Sebastian felt the painting’s calm invade his soul. He almost believed he could hear the music of the angel playing a viol while St Catherine, St Lucy, St Peter, and St Jerome stood around as he did, intent on the music.

Listening to that soundless music, his mind was absorbed in memories of his mother. She had brought him here on a fine spring day soon after his fifth birthday. He was already used to visiting churches and art galleries. Venice had so many of both and his mother loved pictures. She herself had painted, and knew everything there was to know about Venetian artists.

‘It’s by Bellini,’ she had said. ‘We’ve seen some of his paintings before – do you remember? No? Well, memorise his name, Sebastian. Giovanni Bellini. He was a great artist, you will see his work everywhere, and he came from a family of artists. One day you must learn to tell one from another. Giovanni is the great Bellini, of course.’

Sebastian remembered looking at the altarpiece, then up at her beautiful face, a fugitive gleam of sunlight in the gloomy interior turning her hair into a halo of gold and red, like the haloes of saints in missals and old paintings. The first time he saw Laura, on the cover of a magazine, he had felt a jolt of shock because, for a second, he had thought she was his mother: the shape of the face was so similar, the forehead, nose and jawline, and her hair was exactly the same colour as his mother’s, that shade of red-gold which Titian loved to paint, the gleam of sunlight seen through a candle-flame, the colour of a halo in a Renaissance painting.

Thirty years had passed since the spring day when he and his mother had visited this church, but in front of the Bellini now he could remember every second of the time they had spent there together. He could even remember the weather, the peculiar brightness of the sun through the new leaves on the trees in the square, the light on the canal, the sound of birds flying back and forth, nest-building under the eaves of houses. At five years old, he couldn’t remember last year’s spring: to him this was the first spring he had ever noticed, a pattern for all springs to follow.

When she had died, just over a year later, it had been a snowy February.

Why was memory so fitful and selective? He had never been able to remember who else had been on the boat; he could see only his mother. But she could not have been alone on the boat that day.

She had vanished into the blizzard, and a few minutes later he had heard a confused noise somewhere out there, on the Grand Canal. He had never been able to remember just what he had heard, only that it had frightened him. A violent jab of pain made him shut his eyes and put a hand to his forehead. Migraine. It must be the heat, and the disturbance of coming back here, after all these years.

Turning away from the altar, he walked out into the sleepy little square, turned left and began slowly making his way towards St Mark’s. A few minutes later he stopped dead. There was Laura, sitting in a street café with a glass in her hand. A shock of joy hit him. She was so lovely. That gilded hair, that face, its serene, smooth beauty, a Madonna’s face, pure and innocent – and below it a sensuous body that denied everything in the face, as Clea’s had. As his mother’s body had? Were all women the same?

You could never believe what you thought you saw. The eye is easily tricked, any film-maker would tell you that. Looking through the camera lense you could deliberately confuse the real with the illusory.

He stood, watching Laura, in the heavy, hot, somnolent Venetian afternoon. Flies droned past, footsteps echoed on the pavement, there was a dank odour from the canal. The smell of death.

All these years he had not wanted to return to Venice because he had known that death would haunt it for him. He had always had this uneasy feeling whenever he thought of the city: a brooding premonition as if doom awaited him there.

At times he had believed that he, too, would die here, that it was death that waited for him. How strange that he should find Laura again here, in this place. Even stranger that she looked as if she belonged here, had always been here, in this square, shade flickering over her face, her red-gold hair moving softly as she wrote postcards, bending over the table.

Sebastian began to walk towards her, his eyes fixed on her, but when he was a few feet from her table a hand grabbed his arm.

‘Signore! Signor Ferrese! Scusi, – mi displace …’ a rough, hoarse voice husked in his ear. Sebastian glanced round in surprise.

An old man, wearing the oil-stained navy blue jersey and ancient trousers of someone used to working on boats, stared back at him, smiling with a mouth half full of blackened teeth. Nearly bald, his skin wrinkled and weather-worn, the old man’s face had that slyness and secrecy which usually suggests a lack of any sense of right or wrong.

Sebastian gave him a wary, polite but distant nod. ‘Signore?’ He looked around, too, in case others were close to him; gangs of pickpockets operated in most tourist centres and he would not have been surprised to find that this man was part of one such gang and was trying to distract him until the others made their move.

Still in Italian, the old man said, the Venetian dialect salting his words, ‘You don’t remember me, Signor Ferrese? Look harder. It’s a while since we met, but you do know me, and I know all about you. I just want to warn you …’

Laura finished writing her postcards and pushed them into her handbag; the hotel would post them for her. Where was that waiter? When she had paid the bill she would have to rush, Melanie would be waiting.

Then, she heard Sebastian’s voice. At first she believed it was inside her head, an echo from the past, until another voice answered in low, muttered Italian.

They were a few feet from her, standing close together, Sebastian in pale blue jeans and a thin white cotton T-shirt talking to an old man, who looked like a tramp.

A few scraps of their conversation reached her, but her grasp of Italian was not good enough for her to understand much. Just a few words leapt out at her.

‘Morte …’ That word she did know: it meant death. ‘Morte violente …’ A violent death. She shivered. The old man must be talking about Clea. Wha

t was he saying? Her eyes riveted on Sebastian. She saw all trace of colour leave his face, his mouth harden, his face become a skull-like rigid mask.

‘Assassinio,’ the old man hissed, nodding insistently at Sebastian. ‘Si, si, assassinio!’ Biting her lower lip so hard that she tasted blood, Laura thought he must be accusing Sebastian of murder.