Death in the Palazzo (6 page)

When her husband died almost twenty years ago, the Contessa found a large, thick envelope among his private papers. Written on it in his hand in Italian was:

For my beloved wife, Barbara

To be opened after my death

With fear and curiosity, the same emotions that she associated with the locked room, she opened the envelope. Inside were many sheets of paper. The top sheet bore the cramped handwriting that had become the Conte's near the end of his life.

My dear Barbara,

I hope I have not caused you much sorrow in our life together, for you have been the light of my life, my beloved English rose, as I call you. But I know that there was one time, when our marriage was very young, when I did, and I fear it has been a continuing sorrow. I hope you have forgiven me long before this. If you haven't, perhaps you will be able to do it once you've read this.

It's about the locked room on the second floor. It's been called the Caravaggio Room since the nineteen twenties when I was just a boy. I told you that I promised my father never to open it in my lifetime. I would have exacted the same promise from the son or daughter we never had, who would have inherited the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini.

I should have spoken about it to you long ago but the happiness of our life together made it more difficult to recount its sad history. I felt that its blight would fall on our marriage.

It's for you to decide what to do, now that I am gone and after you have read the following pages. Whatever you do, however, never sleep in the Caravaggio Room or have any blood relative of the family do so—or anyone you truly care about.

I love you with all my heart and will be with you forever.

The Contessa laid aside this page and began to read the others.

I am writing this in my forty-fifth year upon the occasion of my marriage. It is a time to take the measure of the past and to look forward to the long future I hope to share with my beloved wife. I hope and pray that our future will be blessed with at least one child and that this child will, in the course of events, inherit the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini. It is to this child that I address these lines, which explain in as full a fashion as I can remember them certain events of extreme importance to our family. I cannot trust that I will not be taken away suddenly by the will of God, or that my memory will not fail me.

There is a room on the second floor of the palazzo which has come to be called the Caravaggio Room. It has been locked since May of 1938, nearly twenty years ago, a day I remember very well.

Less well remembered, since I was only a boy of nine at the time, was the discovery made by my father, the Conte Amerigo, may God rest his soul, that eventuated in the designation “the Caravaggio Room.”

One winter—the year was 1922—my father made an unusual discovery in one of the rooms of the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini. The family had moved to this palazzo on the Grand Canal thirty years earlier. The previous owner, a man sadly without any heirs or immediate family, in my estimation a form of living death, fell seriously ill and was eager to make a sale to move to a warmer climate. My grandfather was in a position to meet this ailing man's rather outlandish financial expectations. The building in the San Polo quarter was sold and the family moved to the “new” Ca' da Capo-Zendrini. Our family finally had what they had wanted for centuries: a splendid palazzo, this one designed by Cominelli, on the Canalazzo.

Following the death of my grandfather, my father was taking stock of the palazzo from top to bottom. He was rummaging through one of the lumber rooms on the
pianoterreno
. He said that he had a premonition when he found a bundle wrapped in canvas in a trunk large enough to contain the body of a man.

When he unwrapped it, he found a painting of sixty-six by fifty centimeters. It was dark with age, and mold had invaded one whole lower corner. It was a portrait of a round-faced youth holding a mandolin, and with lipstick, rouge, and a white flower in thick auburn hair that resembled a wig. At first my father assumed, with good reason, that it was a young woman. On closer examination, however, he determined that it must indeed be a young man, strange though he looked with his makeup and in a green robe that slipped provocatively off one shoulder. This young man stared at my father with a mocking kind of smile.

For no other reason than that my father played the mandolin, he immediately liked the painting. Nothing identified either the name of the painting or its painter.

The next day my father took the painting to one of the good Armenian monks on the island of San Lazzaro in the lagoon. The monk was a man who loved art and who was a master at cleaning paintings. When he saw the painting, he blessed himself. “By our Blessed Mother,” he said, “this is either a Caravaggio or a devilish imitation. It could be very valuable.” The name of this painter meant nothing to my father, whose knowledge of art was limited to the great Leonardo and Michelangelo and the obscure painters of the portraits of the Da Capo-Zendrini family that hung in our portrait gallery. Neither did he care for its possible value. He wanted to hang it in the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini.

In due course the painting was cleaned by the monk. Then through his contacts in Florence and Rome, it was authenticated as a Caravaggio. Many impressive offers to buy it were made but my father refused them all without a thought and did as he had originally intended. The painting was installed in one of the bedrooms on the second floor.

I remember the excitement in the house. Family and friends came to look at the famous picture of the mandolin player in his makeup and wig. One old man said that it would have been more appropriate if it had been hung in our former palazzo in San Polo, since this building was near the Bridge of Teats. There, during the days when the city was a Sodom of the sea, courtesans often dressed as boys in doublet and hose to attract Venetian men into their rooms when they had no success exposing their breasts.

My brother Amerigo and I were the first to sleep in the room. We sneaked in late that night after the party was over and had our own fun. To say we slept, though, is not exactly true. We spent most of the night laughing and making up stories about the boy in the painting, and during some friendly fisticuffs broke a Chinese vase. Perhaps one of the maids noticed next morning that the coverlet had been disturbed, but no one ever said anything to us, and because we had broken the vase, we kept our silence.

When Amerigo died three years later of a disease of the kidneys that made his body swell, I looked at his bloated face in the coffin and thought of the boy in the painting. The mortician had even put a faint coating of rouge and lipstick on his face. I have often wondered if my father noticed the faint similarity in his profound grief over having lost his eldest son.

Perhaps I was the only one to make an association between my brother's death and the painting in what had by then come to be known as the Caravaggio Room. Certainly it was a childish fancy.

The room was put into occasional service and no one complained of anything more serious than a night of tossing and turning.

Then, two years later, Nonna Teresa, my father's mother, slept there. Her regular room needed to be repaired because of water damage.

Her maid, Giuseppina, found her dead in bed the next morning. The doctor said her heart, which had troubled her for the previous twenty years, had given out during the night and that she had died peacefully in her sleep.

Just because Nonna Teresa had died in the room was no reason not to use it again, of course. Death in those days almost always took place at home. Families couldn't become overly sentimental about the rooms where their loved ones breathed their last breaths. With rare exceptions they were put into use as soon afterward as was decent, given the demands of mourning.

A year after Nonna Teresa's death, my cousin Flora slept in the room. She chose it herself, precisely because of the Caravaggio, which she had heard so much about.

Flora was a beautiful girl of fifteen, a year younger than I was at the time. She was my father's grandniece, thus my second cousin, as such things are calculated. An only child just as I had become since the death of Amerigo, Flora lived with her parents in Naples. She would visit us for several weeks most summers, when her parents were obliged to make a circuit of the spas with an aged, wealthy relative. Flora was an asthmatic, and Venice, though subject to its own
malaria
, was within occasional reach of the cool breezes from the Dolomites.

Whenever Flora visited, my mother, who loved her like the daughter she hadn't been blessed with, would take her to her friend Don Mariano Fortuny's studio. There Flora would select whatever patterned fabric caught her eye while I wandered through the rooms and marveled at all the paintings of nymphs. On Flora's last visit she selected, after her usual pleasurable indecision, a lovely
pezza
of green silk velvet which reminded her of the robe of the boy in the Caravaggio painting.

That afternoon Flora and I spent in the conservatory of the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini. With its jungle of plants, smell of damp soil and fungus, and humidity, it wasn't the best place for someone with her affliction. But Flora, although she loved my city, was nostalgic for her own Naples, and she felt a kinship with the profusion of plants. I often thought that her name had created some mysterious link between herself and the blossoming world.

She would insist on inhaling the fragrance of the flowers and even take it upon herself to spray the roses, her favorite flower, with the special concoction kept on a shelf. My father had warned everyone in the house about this spray, made up by a young pharmacist in the Dorsoduro quarter, for it contained a deadly poison. Whenever one of the staff or my mother picked up the can, they wore gloves and covered their mouth. But Flora was fearless and deaf to my warnings. Perhaps her name gave her not only an affinity for the conservatory but also led her to believe that she had some special immunity to its dangers.

On that afternoon Flora and I read passages from books aloud to each other and played cards. My mother had gone to pay a visit to a friend in the Castello quarter. When she returned to find us in the conservatory and learned that we had been there for the whole of the afternoon, she berated me for encouraging Flora in such foolhardy behavior. Flora, after telling my mother that she shouldn't blame me for what had been her decision, retired to her room.

When the dinner bell sounded, Flora didn't appear. We waited for a few minutes, then my mother asked me to fetch her. Obviously the poor girl had tired herself out in the conservatory—this with a sharp look at me—and had fallen into a deep sleep.

I knocked on the door of the Caravaggio Room. When there was no answer, I knocked again and called for her, but still with no response. I opened the door slowly.

The room was dark. Flora or one of the maids had drawn the drapes so that whatever light was still available outside didn't penetrate the room.

I switched on the light. My eyes immediately went to the painting, which dominated the room more than anything else in it. The mocking smile of the boy in wig and makeup flashed at me. For a moment it seemed as if he was alive. I shivered. Then I saw Flora.

She was lying at the foot of the bed, grasping the piece of Fortuny material. I went over to her.

“Flora?” I whispered. She didn't respond. I looked down at her and knew that she never would again.

Her eyes stared up at me. Her mouth was open. Her lips were blue.

I remember very little after this. My mother and father came up. I was sent to my room. I sat there, stunned, unable to cry. Flora was dead.

Dead, the doctor said, because of an attack precipitated by her hours in the conservatory, smelling the flowers, breathing the oppressive air, and spraying the roses. But I didn't believe him. It wasn't that I didn't want to admit some responsibility for her death for not having discouraged her from staying in the conservatory.

No, Flora had died because of the Caravaggio painting. The smile of the strange-looking boy had told me that.

Soon what was only the fancy of a boy saying good-bye to his childhood became the talk of the family, and then of friends and neighbors, as they remembered the death of Nonna Teresa in the same room. The Caravaggio Room was “bad luck.” It had the “evil eye.” There was a “curse” on it. And it was all because of the painting of the young man, which was baleful in some way that couldn't be explained by reason.

I kept my own counsel, but had many nightmares. Some of them were of my brother Amerigo with the face of the boy with makeup.

Almost ten years passed. No one had forgotten what had happened in the Caravaggio Room. No—but the mind and the heart can become dulled and deadened with time. Even the face of a departed loved one dims over the years and the memory needs to be refreshed by looking at a photograph. This was the situation with my mother and most of our family and friends, but not with me and not, as I eventually came to realize, with my father.

My own uneasiness about the Caravaggio Room remained as keen as ever. There was not a time I passed its door—not locked, but always closed—that I did not think of Nonna Teresa, Flora, and my brother. I could feel the boy smiling at me behind the door.

My father's response was different, as befitted a man of his mature years and unusual sensibility. He was troubled as much—if not more—by his fear, and what it meant to him as a religious man, as he was by the room itself. In his youth there had been some expectation that he would enter a monastery. He was always a model of saintly, though never overly pious or self-righteous, behavior.

God, he had been taught, did not manifest His love or justice in heathenish fashion. Nor should a believer put any faith in the power of objects, except those blessed by Mother Church, like the miraculous body of Santa Lucia near the Ca' da Capo-Zendrini or the icon of the Virgin and Child at the Salute. In other words, my father's faith was at war with his cold fear of the room in which his mother and his grandniece had died.