The Lost Diary of Venice Page 15

  “Enough! That’s enough, Joan.” Rose didn’t mean to sound so harsh. Outside, the birds lulled; for a moment the only sound in the kitchen was the slap of water against the steel sink basin. Rose turned the faucet off.

  A sudden crash and clatter—Henry had knocked his plate to the floor. He shot a panicked expression up at his mother. Instantly, both women turned to the mess, Rose bending to right the bowl, Joan snatching a roll of paper towels off the counter. As Henry watched from his chair, they scooped the slippery pasta up with their hands. By the time the ruined noodles were down the garbage disposal and the floor had been wiped clean, a careful and unspoken agreement had arrived to hold the evening together.

  An hour later the oven door opened, blasting dry heat. The pie emerged, flaky and golden, filled with bittersweet juice.

  * * *

  Rose gave up trying to keep the shop open through the university’s study and final exam weeks. She put a sign on the window, KNOCK LOUDLY, and propped the door to the back room ajar. Steadily, the number of completed pages grew: neat piles, all dusted, wiped, daubed, and mended. Fixated, she tracked Giovanni through his charts and diagrams, page after page of mostly indecipherable musings. From what she could gather based on her poor Italian, the text focused on a range of topics: proportion, color, perspective—proporzione, colore, prospettiva. A slim chapter seemed to address the planets; constellations scattered the margins. Andromeda, Ursa Minor. Lyra and Pegasus. Rose made a note to research what Giovanni might have known about astronomy. She lifted the next page.

  Sciographia. The word was written in calligraphy at the top of the parchment. Rose knew what it meant from the one psychology course she’d taken. Sciographia: the science of shadows. Her mind flickered to that second year of college; she could picture the carved-up wooden desk she’d sat in, nearly smell the tobacco-and-aftershave scent wafting from her professor as he paced the aisles, reading aloud from the textbook in a historical baritone. What was it Jung had said? That the shadow contains all the pieces of ourselves we reject and hide—and that the shadow must be confronted.

  “Easier said than done, Jung.” Rose reminded herself to maybe stop talking out loud so much when she was alone.

  Giovanni’s approach to sciographia was decidedly more practical. The chapter began with a list of colors, matching each with its complementary hue to be used when depicting shadows. Indigo for yellow, a touch of red in the shade cast by a green object. Indaco, rosso, verde. By the sketches that ran down the margins of the next sheets, Rose could guess that he was summarizing the different kinds of shadows: the darkness that lingers in the creases of eyes, the shapes cast by a body; how they bend and lengthen in the light. She turned the page.

  A man she knew stared up at her.

  A wave of recognition, swiftly replaced by disorienting confusion—like spotting her doctor in the grocery store squeezing avocados. Those eyes, inked hundreds of years ago, she knew those eyes. But from where? The figure regarded her with an expression so familiar it was as if they’d just seen each other.

  Then she realized: they had just seen each other. It was William.

  It was him, undeniably, yet not him. Over the course of two pages, Giovanni had drawn a series of small sketches with a ribbon of text running down the centerline, like the illustrated poems of Blake or a children’s book. And in every scene was an almost-William. The figure had a close-cropped beard, but unmistakably the same features, the same attitudes of expression. The only conclusion was that these were self-portraits—of Giovanni. How else could a looking-glass-world William be peering out at her from a treatise written in 1571?

  Rose took a steadying breath, then began to examine the images in order. Logical, methodical. Her grad school mantra, resurfacing like muscle memory.

  In the first sketch, Giovanni had drawn a woman who was half tree: branches forked from her shoulders, her arms reaching up among them, slender fingers sprouting leaves. Her hips barked into trunk. Where her feet would have been, she was planted in soil, a wayward root dangling off the edge of the page. Pale hair coiled over her breasts, and her face was downturned. Rose bent until her nose was nearly touching the page, scrutinizing the lines.

  It was the same woman as in the portrait. It had to be.

  From the upper edge of the page, an egg-shaped object was shown descending from turbulent clouds. Delicate ink strokes gave it depth, the impression of carrying weight. In the next scene, the egg had crash-landed at the base of the tree-woman, shell shards scattered among her roots. A single hand, splayed, poked out from a gaping crack. The tree-woman reached to grasp it, and in the following image, a winged Giovanni emerged from the wreckage of the egg—the tips of his feathers extending off the vellum, a whip of fabric modestly covering his lower torso.

  Down the margins of the second page, Giovanni and the woman appeared to be having a serious discussion, their heads bowed together. Then he spread his arms around her waist and dislodged her, roots whipping loose in a wild patterning. In the final scene, the tree-woman was depicted tall and blossoming, a pastoral landscape hazily filled in behind. The winged Giovanni crouched in her branches, holding her cheek in his palm, whispering in her ear; shadows suggested the warm light of afternoon. An overwhelming sense of intimacy pervaded the sketches. The text running down the center of the page pulled at Rose the way hieroglyphics did, promising a narrative.

  Barely aware of her actions, Rose carried the pages to the computer. Over the next hour, she wrestled with three different online translators until a passable English version emerged:

  Long before you or I may remember lived a being of [marvelous? miraculous?] composition. Half woman, half tree, she was planted in a barren field — (here Rose hadn’t been able to parse the calligraphy) the ends of the earth. She was beautiful and fair, yet her face was often sad. She was [declining? diminishing?] in that desolate place. One day she looked up and to her surprise saw a white egg — from the heavens. It fell and fell and fell, and, upon landing, the [creature?] inside pleaded for escape. The tree, being very good and kind, helped to free this one from its — Out came a man with the wings of an angel. So sweet are the — of fate that instantly the [knot?] of love was tied between them. The man prayed her tell him how he might repay her kindness. She begged for him to save her from that — place.

  As everyone knows, true love [bonds?] the will of the lover to the beloved. He wrapped his wings about her and — up into the sky. From far above, she spied a hilltop — in flower and stream. It was there he planted her, and in that fertile land she grew ever more beautiful. Forever after, the man would fly both far and wide, then return to rest in her branches to tell her of all — She would show him her blossoms and feed him her [harvest?] and together they were very happy.

  It reminded Rose of a parable, but without the moral lesson. What would William think? She’d send him a scan but knew he’d come in person to see it. Her heart quickened at the thought, and immediately she pictured Joan, her raised-brow, skeptical expression in the kitchen earlier that week.

  “He’s just a client.” It seemed less convincing stated out loud to an empty room. She had to break that habit…

  At the drafting table, Rose flicked on the lights to take a scan of each page. She noticed that, like the first portrait of the woman, these pages didn’t have any perforations to indicate that the sheets had been part of the original binding. Likely they’d been inserted into the book at a later date—

  Ding! The computer chirruped, interrupting her thoughts. The final scan had been rendered. This time, she wrote the first thing that came to mind:

  W—

  I just came across these sketches in the book (!!)

  Let me know if you’d like to see them for yourself?

  —R

  Sent.

  She rubbed her eyes. It was late; she didn’t want to think anymore. When she looked back at he
r screen, she saw a new message—not from William, but from Lucas, using his university email address. He must have tracked her down through the library system.

  Rose—

  A few books recently came across my desk that seemed potentially useful to your project. I’ve attached the details below.

  All my best,

  Lucas

  Synopses and citations ran in a list at the end of his message. They did seem useful. But how likely was it that so many books had just “come across his desk”? More likely he’d been bored and gotten interested in her project. Rose pictured the gangly librarian with his thick glasses and smiled despite herself, mentally scheduling another visit to the university. She stood, feeling slightly off-balance.

  After the glaring light in the back, the darkened bookshop felt like a child’s bedroom: slumbering shapes glazed in the amber glow of streetlights. She gathered her bag and helmet from under her desk and tiptoed over to Odin’s chair, ran one thumb across his whiskered cheek. Disturbed from dreaming, he gave a drowsy mew and stretched both front paws out. The fur of his belly was warm from sleep. When she took her hand away, he curled up again, burrowing his nose back under a paw.

  She biked home alone, with the stars white-hot and burning overhead.

  * * *

  “I know, but your claws might rip my dress.” The next day, Rose had decided to wear a dusty-pink work dress someone had once told her brought out the color in her cheeks. For his part, Odin had decided that he very much needed to sit in her lap. He yowled indignantly at the rejection. As recompense, Rose reached to scratch behind one ear, which he begrudgingly allowed.

  Then William was there, rapping the glass with his knuckles, pushing open the door. This time, instead of a cap or phone in his hands he carried a small Tupperware container, fitted with a red lid, which he held out as he walked toward her.

  “Figured since I was taking up your lunch hour, I might as well bring you something to eat….It’s a quiche, hope that’s all right.”

  “Oh! Thank you.” She reached to take the container from him; the bottom was still warm. “That’s so thoughtful, William.” The shape of his name felt good in her mouth. “Here, let me show you the sketches, I’ve got them all ready.” She set the Tupperware on her desk and headed back toward the workroom. He followed close behind. She was suddenly acutely aware of the air passing over the tops of her shoulder blades, where the dip of her dress left the skin exposed.

  “Oh!” Her hand slipped on the doorknob. She looked up and he was smiling down at her, standing close in the dim-lit hall. She grasped the knob again, swung the door open.

  “The pages are on the drafting table, just there.” She gestured inside.

  At once, he strode to the sketches. Looking over the images, he blew his breath out through his teeth in a not-quite whistle. She moved to stand beside him. He reached to even the edge of one sheet, and she caught the same scent as before, soil and warm grass.

  “This is almost surrealist. Look at the detailing in the feathers.” He bent closer. “Wait, is this the woman from the portrait?”

  “I think so. I compared little elements, like her mouth. Her jaw. Her chin, here.” Rose pointed to the most look-alike image. “And…you do realize that the man looks just like you, don’t you?”

  “Like me? Really?” William frowned at the figures.

  “Well, there’s a beard and, you know, wings, but—your eyebrows, your nose, your eyes. It’s you.”

  He straightened up, drawing a hand to a cheek as if measuring his own jaw against the one on the page. “You’re right. I’ll be damned.” He thought for a moment. “You think it’s Giovanni?”

  “I do. And I did a translation of the text too. It’s rough, I just used online translators, but you get the idea.” She picked up the printed-out page from the counter and thrust it at him. “I was just too curious not to know.”

  He didn’t respond, already reading. Rose fell silent. She watched his eyes dart across the lines, glancing down between sentences to follow along with the sketches, then looping back to reread the words. Finally, he looked up.

  “Well, it’s strange, but beautiful. And romantic: they rescue each other.” He reached to scratch the back of his head. “I think the ending is supposed to be happy, but it seems kind of sad to me. It doesn’t feel like they get to be together—not really.”

  “I had the same impression. And the way he drew their expressions, the shading…it all feels a little melancholy. Bittersweet.”

  “I suppose that’s how a lot of love stories go, though, isn’t it.” A statement, not a question.

  Rose nodded. “Orpheus and Eurydice.”

  “Lancelot and Guinevere.”

  Silence pressed down on the room. William broke it with a polite cough. “I wonder if they ended up together. Giovanni and the woman.” He was looking at the final scene.

  “I hope so.”

  “So do I.”

  “Even if they didn’t, at least they did here. That’s what I’ve always loved about art…it creates other realities.”

  “What do you mean?” He’d shifted so that he was facing her, one hip leaning against the table.

  “Oh, it’s like what we talked about at the gallery, with those Michelangelo sketches. No matter what their actual situation was, Giovanni could still create this world for them.” She gestured at the pages. “The art makes it real in its own way, doesn’t it? It keeps them alive, it keeps their experience—or the idea of that experience—alive.”

  “That’s a nice way to look at it.” He grinned, dimple threatening to show.

  Receiving his approval felt like stepping into a warm spotlight; when he smiled at her she couldn’t help but do the same. She didn’t know what to say next, though, so she turned instead to stare at the center table. The rest of the treatise sat in tidy piles, waiting to be scanned.

  “Do you think there’ll be more drawings?” His voice was oddly loud.

  “Actually, I’m almost finished cleaning all the pages well enough for the first layer of text to be translated. So, I don’t think so.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Already?”

  “I’ve put some extra hours in.” She could hear Joan’s voice in her head: That’s the understatement of the year. “For the undertext, I’ll need to do more work restoring the ink so it’s legible enough to render.” Anxiously, she clasped her hands together, tracing circles inside her palm with one thumb. “There’s something else, though, I should mention.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, the writing deteriorates as the book goes on. Pretty quickly.”

  “Deteriorates? Like it’s harder to see?”

  “More like it seems it was harder for him to write. The lines start to wobble. The letters get a little illegible.” She looked at him leaning against the table, at his open, quizzical expression. “I think he may have been losing his sight, William.”

  Pity and helplessness in equal measures darted across his face. “Seriously?” He rubbed a hand over his head the wrong way, causing the hair on top to stick up, like it’d done in the car when he’d driven her home. “Well, I hope it was old age. For an artist to lose his sight…Is there any way to know how old he was when he wrote this?”

  “Not unless we can get some definitive dates on his life, so…no. Not really. I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing for you to be sorry about.” He reached to touch the corner of one page. “Do you suppose that’s why he wrote the treatise? Kind of a final big project?”

  “It definitely could have been. As the book goes on, the writing gets shakier, but it also seems like he was writing faster. He forgets to cross t’s, for example. It took me a while to figure out what was happening on the page, but I think he was rushing to finish.”

  “Ugh.” William squinted up at the glaring light
s overhead. “I can’t even imagine what that must have been like. Well, that makes me understand why a treatise, at least. He probably wanted to record what he knew, what he thought. For posterity.” He crossed his arms, surveying the stacks of paper on the center table. “I get it, even if I still can’t believe it: a treatise on art, written by my…whatever he would have been.”

  “Before he died, my father worked on a book too. A survey of the classics. I think it’s natural to want to leave your ideas behind.” Rose felt a small tightening in the back of her throat.

  “I’m glad he got the chance to do that.” William’s voice had gone tender.

  “Me too.”

  Overhead, the lights shuddered and flared; without words, they left the room and made their way back through the shop. Rose paused at the door stoop. The day had gone chill: wind threaded around her body, passing through the thin fabric of her dress, coaxing out the curls at her temples. William stepped out onto the sidewalk, then hesitated, glancing down at her.

  “You’ll let me know as soon as the translation comes in?”

  “Of course.” A wisp of hair blew in front of her eyes. Carelessly, he reached out to tuck it back again.

  The sudden, rough softness of his fingertips against her ear. A gentle weight. So natural she didn’t startle, just shut her eyes at the touch, dissolving into the feeling.

  Then he pulled his hand back, turned, and walked away.

  From the doorway, she watched him go: both hands shoved deep into his pockets now, the curve of his shoulders receding down the sidewalk until he disappeared around the corner. He didn’t look back.