Frail Barrier (11 page)

It gave an account of an exhibition in Munich of ancient Egyptian objects from Konrad Zoll's private collection. The exhibition had been arranged to coincide with a new production of
Aida
in which Zoll's friend, the tenor Zacharias Kellner, sang the role of Radames. Zoll, who, according to the article, had inherited a fortune as the only child of the banker Richard Zoll of Frankfurt, was described as a philanthropist and art collector who traveled widely and had special interests in ancient Egyptian, Islamic, French, and Venetian art. He had organized a campaign to come to the relief of an earthquake-stricken village in Algeria and had endowed a chair in art history at the University of Munich. In addition to his native German, he had been fluent in Italian, French, and English. The rest of the article described some of the items in the exhibit and their provenance.

The photograph accompanying the article showed a smiling, healthy-faced Zoll in black tie. He was holding up an agate bowl as the stout Kellner looked on. In the background were several men and women. One of them was the bald, tanned Nick Hollander. He stood close to a woman in her sixties who bore a striking resemblance to him. Urbino assumed that she must be his mother. Zoll and Hollander's mother had divorced five years ago. It would seem that the divorce had been more or less amicable since she had showed up at the exhibition.

Urbino started to reread the article. He held it at an angle to catch the illumination from one of the lanterns on the tower. He was interrupted by a loud voice that carried over the tops of the hedges. It was Gervasio, the contessa's major-domo.

‘Signor Urbino, there is an urgent telephone call for you.'

Urbino went inside the tower. He looked up the spiral of the stone staircase. The contessa had turned on the light switch.

‘Barbara?'

‘I heard him. I'm on my way down. I—'

A scraping sound echoed against the stones.

‘Are you all right?'

‘I'm afraid I twisted my ankle. But I'll be all right.'

Urbino went up the narrow staircase to help the contessa down. He supported her as she guided him out of the maze. Gervasio was waiting for them at the entrance.

‘Go ahead and take the call. Gervasio will help me. Take it in the
salotto verde.'

It was Natalia.

‘Thank God, Signor Urbino! What took you so long?'

‘What's the matter?'

Her voice was choked.

‘It's Albina Gonella! She's dead!'

Urbino was stunned. He couldn't say anything for a few moments.

‘Dead?' His heart was racing. ‘But I just saw her two nights ago!'

‘She's dead just the same. Heart attack, they say. And not just that, but the way it happened.'

Urbino heard her take a deep breath.

‘All alone she was. In a
calle
near her apartment. And in the middle of that storm we had. What are things coming to? Albina Gonella dying like an abandoned dog in the street! Who would have thought such a thing?'

‘This is terrible news. Poor Albina. She didn't complain about feeling ill but she did look tired.' He was silent for a moment, then added, ‘I helped her with her work that night.'

His sadness and shock were joined now by a stab of guilt. Apparently, Albina must have died only a short time after he had seen her to her door. Tears filled his eyes.

‘Didn't I tell you that slave driver at Da Valdo was working her to death? Why couldn't you have found some other job for her? I have to hang up now. I wanted to call you as soon as I learned, seeing as you're all the way up in Asolo with the contessa.'

Natalia gave a slight emphasis to ‘Asolo.'

Her meaning couldn't have been any clearer if she had used the verb of indolence itself.

The contessa, with Gervasio supporting her under the elbow, came into the
salotto verde
as Urbino was putting the telephone receiver down. Catullus, the contessa's Doberman, had joined them and was looking up at his mistress with an almost human solicitude. The contessa seated herself in one of the carved chairs and Catullus settled at her feet on the Aubusson.

‘What is it,
caro?
You look knackered all of a sudden.'

Urbino dropped into a chair.

‘Albina Gonella is dead.'

‘Dead?' the contessa repeated hollowly in a low voice after a few moments.

‘The night of the storm. Apparently of a heart attack. That was Natalia.'

‘Holy Mother of God! Albina!' Tears welled in her eyes and spilled on to her cheeks. ‘May she rest in peace.'

As she took out a handkerchief to wipe her eyes, her gaze strayed to the easel portrait of the Conte Alvise painted at the time of their marriage. The portrait captured him at his prime, around forty, handsome, vigorous, with black hair, blue eyes, and fair Venetian skin.

‘A fresh death brings back all the others,' she said in a low, choked voice.

‘I must have been with her right before she died.'

‘What do you mean?'

Urbino explained how he had met Albina at Da Valdo and walked her home.

‘She forgot her house keys at the restaurant. Giulietta let her in.'

He picked up one of the hand-painted ceramic
fischietti
on the marble ormolu-mounted table beside his chair. The whistle was shaped like a dove. He looked at it from several angles as if he was obliged to study it, but for what reason, he had no idea. He returned it to the table with the other bird and animal whistles.

‘You feel guilty because you were with her before she died,' the contessa said. ‘I understand. But what does that signify? You shouldn't feel that way, no more than I should have when Alvise died half an hour after I left his room.'

‘But you did.'

Instead of responding the contessa looked down at her gold bracelet with the intertwined letters
A
and
B
that Albina had so recently restored to her.

They remained in silence. Urbino got up and went over to the small bar concealed in the top of a Hepplewhite bureau bookcase. He poured out a sherry for himself and the contessa.

When he was seated again, the contessa said, ‘You couldn't have prevented her death. She had a heart attack.'

‘So it appears. No,' he added when the contessa gave him a surprised look, ‘I have no reason to doubt that she did, although I have every intention of finding out more. It's because of the keys that I feel the way I do. If I hadn't gone to Da Valdo, if I hadn't helped her, if I hadn't changed her routine, she wouldn't have forgotten them.'

‘And you think that's why she went out again? To get her keys?'

‘It seems logical. And when she went out she got caught in the storm, she might have lost her way, become frightened and … and then she died alone.'

But even as he worked this scenario out it didn't seem quite right.

‘Don't torture yourself,' the contessa said gently. ‘You're not responsible. You could just as much blame Giulietta for having opened the door for her. If she hadn't, you both would have gone back together for the keys, if that's why she went out again. Or blame the storm or the fact that she had to have a job that took her out at that hour of the night. Or blame life itself!'

They both became absorbed in their own thoughts. They sipped their sherry. The contessa patted Catullus's head. Urbino stared blankly at the pastels and miniatures by Rosalba Camera on the opposite wall, seeing none of their delicate beauty.

The contessa gave a sigh and got up. She took a few steps, limping slightly.

‘I don't think I did much damage. It should be all right if I put some ice on it.'

She blessed herself with the holy water from the
acquasantiera
by the door.

‘Poor, precious Albina,' she said. ‘I can't absorb it. I'll call Giulietta. She would appreciate some help with the funeral. They only had each other.'

Albina Gonella's funeral was celebrated in the Church of the Carmini between the Campo Santa Margherita and the Zattere only a few steps away from the Scuola where she had enjoyed
Così Fan Tutte
last October with Claudio and her sister. The ornate and somber interior of the Gothic church, with its wooden sculptural decorations and dark frieze of paintings high on the walls, made a contrast to the woman's simple coffin and drew even more of the mourners' attention to it.

Urbino sat in the same pew as the contessa, Giulietta, Oriana, Natalia, and Gildo. There were many others who had come to pay their final respects as well as some tourists who had wandered into the church with their guidebooks but were refraining from walking around. They stood quietly observing the ceremony from the small chapel with Cima da Conegliano's
Nativity
over the altar, probably secretly thrilled that their visit coincided with an authentic Venetian funeral.

Many of Albina's colleagues from Florian's were present as well as a waiter from Da Valdo, although Valdo himself was absent. Neighbors from Albina's quarter occupied two whole rows of pews. Or rather not quite two rows, for wedged in the middle of one pew were Romolo and Perla Beato, who lived in the much more fashionable part of Dorsoduro. Perla had once used Giulietta's services as a seamstress in the days before she married Romolo and worked as a nurse.

Giulietta, ashen and wearing a black dress trimmed in cream-colored lace, sat stiff and dry-eyed throughout the service.

Only two things surprised Urbino about the mourners. One was how few Gonella relatives were there, a mere three elderly aunts and uncles with one cousin, all from Treviso.

The other thing was the presence of Clementina Foppa. The
cartaio
had arrived after the Mass began. She sat by herself. From the way she kept staring at Claudio, who sang the
Ave Maria
and other hymns from one of the carved and gilded singing galleries, it was as if she had come for his performance alone. Perhaps she was taken with his resemblance to her dead brother, as Urbino had been when he had seen the death notice.

Claudio seemed oblivious to everyone and everything around him. The quality of his voice was not good this morning, but he more than made up for it in the depth of his emotion. The darkness of the church and Claudio's distance from the other mourners concealed what Urbino was sure were tears in his eyes, for he could hear them very distinctly in his voice.

After the service, during which the elderly priest delivered a short but eloquent eulogy to Albina, the priest and the mourners followed Albina's coffin to the funeral gondola.

As they neared the doors that opened on to the little square and the canal, they passed a wooden statue of the Madonna and Child on a throne decorated with cherubs. The figure of Mary, veiled and robed in white, looked like a bride. A scapular hung from one of her hands.

Claudio, his face drawn, had descended from the singing loft to be one of the pall-bearers. Silently, somberly, and wreathed by the fog drifting up from the canal, Claudio and the other men carried the coffin to the funeral gondola. They placed it on a canopied platform with black curtains.

The barge-like vessel, much larger than a regular gondola, was adorned with figures of a grieving angel and a lion and with an ornate double garland around the hull, all the details carved and gilded.

Claudio and Gildo, with their oars, took their positions immediately in front of the casket, with two other rowers behind it. The two friends could little have imagined that their rowing skills would have been required for this sad duty. The funeral gondola started to move slowly through the light fog drifting above the canal toward its destination on the cemetery island.

Two hours later Urbino and the contessa were walking down one of the paths of the cypress-clad cemetery island in the lagoon between Venice and Murano. It was a hot day with a gray overcast sky and an uncomfortably damp wind from the lagoon that blew wisps of low-lying fog against them. Urbino felt both overheated and chilled. The contessa walked without any problem, the injury to her ankle having proven to be minimal, as she had predicted.

‘At least we spared her this,' the contessa said.

She nodded toward rows of disinterred graves, surrounded by mounds of dirt, broken pieces of concrete, and withered flowers.

They were skirting the edge of a field where the graves were in the grim process of being dug up now that the dead's twelve-year tenancy was over. Many families rented burial space for only this brief period. They were usually less grieved by the inevitable exhumation than one might think. Most dead were soon forgotten, and space for them was a precious – and expensive – commodity.

The contessa had arranged for Albina to be buried in a perpetual grave with a space next to her for Giulietta, whenever her day might come. Their parents' graves had long since been dug up and their bones placed on one of the lagoon's ossuary islands used for this sad purpose.

After Albina had been buried, Urbino and the contessa had visited the Da Capo-Zendrini mausoleum. She had deposited a bouquet of flowers and spent half an hour unnecessarily neatening the area – unnecessarily because she made sure that it was well tended to once a week.

They were now going to make a visit that had become a ritual for them. It was to the grave of Diaghilev. The contessa's mother had been Diaghilev's friend and had always regretted being unable to pay her last respects to a man she had loved and admired. In memory of her mother the contessa visited the ballet impresario's grave whenever she was on the cemetery island.

Urbino and the contessa passed graves where men and women were cleaning the stones and tending to plants and flowers. They walked through an area of loculi where the dead were buried in walls. There was a movable ladder to give access to the higher graves. They paused at one tier of loculi. The contessa gazed up at one of the burial niches and said a silent prayer for the soul of a former maid who was buried there.