The Lost Diary of Venice Read online

  “As the flesh burns, so is the Spirit purified.”

  Corvino whispered the words to himself through cracked and bleeding lips. The clamor from outside was shearing the skin from his flesh, every shout a new fracture in his skull. Why so much noise? He couldn’t make out the words. Sliding to the edge of the bed, he placed one foot on the floor, then the other. Winced at the chill stone. The air itself seemed to vibrate in front of him, the way it sometimes did above a fire: wobbling apart, then back into place. His hair hung in strands stuck together with dried sweat.

  With jerks and starts, Corvino neared the window. He’d lost weight; his hip bones grazed the linen of his tunic, rough against his skin. The fabric had gone yellow in spots. When he reached the stone ledge, he grasped it with both hands. Below, the city was flooded with torches, flaming streets and canals burning the stars overhead into submission. The streams of light were gathering at the harbor—if he squinted, Corvino could make out the mast of an unfamiliar vessel rocking on the waves with ghostly pale sails.

  His attention was so focused on the ship he didn’t notice the crow crouched beside him.

  Corvino. The same, soundless voice.

  Corvino startled, one hand slipping from the ledge. With a twitch of its head the crow beckoned him back. The dry rustle of feathers. Corvino should have been alarmed, should have tugged his shutters closed, but he didn’t—he lacked all fear. Instead, a light-headed nothingness had come over him; his body weightless as a paper lantern.

  You belong with us now, Corvino. Other crows came then, winging around buildings, shadows streaking. As before, the first crow began to swell and grow. Corvino watched, hypnotized.

  You’re one of us.

  “I am?” Corvino’s voice was a rasp, scratching up his throat.

  You are. We have a gift for you, Corvino. The crow’s gaping black pupils were welcoming now—invitations into an endless, restful night. Corvino straightened his back. He tried to swallow but his mouth was dry, filled with grit.

  We have a gift.

  A sudden sharp pain in his shoulder blades. Something gouging his skin—the sensation of tendons being stretched and pulled. A wave of nausea that buckled his knees; Corvino cried out, grasping the ledge to keep upright. He twisted his neck to look behind him.

  Wings. Glossy, midnight wings extending upward, unfolding as he watched. Muscular wings. Strong wings. Wings so black they sheened purple, then indigo. Stiff feather and hollow bone. Corvino shifted his shoulder blades, felt the pinions adjust, responding like limbs. They were part of him now: his glorious new appendages.

  Fly with us, Corvino.

  You belong, Corvino.

  We are family, Corvino.

  The crows repeated his name in a persistent incantation. Corvino’s eyes glazed. Behind him, purple smoke came whispering in under the door. It snaked around his ankles, unfurling upward. He didn’t feel himself breathe it in, didn’t smell its faint acrid scent. He saw only the wings. Heard only the crow’s words.

  You belong now, Corvino.

  We are family now, Corvino.

  Trembling, Corvino raised one foot to the stone ledge. Gripping the window frame, he stepped up. The still-warm night air swept in around him. It smelled of cinder and sage and ruffled his feathers, breezing over his mantle. Below, the city stretched before him, veined by rippling canals, a maze of shifting reflections. As Corvino swayed on his sill, the murder of crows winged in great arcs, sweeping into his room and back out again—tracing dark ovals in the sky. They were playing.

  Join us, Corvino. Their voices merged, a chorus.

  You belong now, Corvino. Their shiny eyes, unblinking.

  We are family now, Corvino. Their hard beaks open, grinning.

  Corvino stepped out into the night.

  He felt only the soaring then—only the sensation of wind passing over his powerful wings. How naturally, how effortlessly they beat the air. He felt only the joy of flying alongside the others, heard only their cries of kinship.

  He did not feel the falling at all.

  He did not feel the stone.

  27

  ONE MONTH AFTER WILLIAM’S SHOW, a nondescript brown box arrived on Rose’s doorstep, the familiar return address of the translation agency stamped in the corner. The box was heavier than she’d expected; she set it down on the coffee table and got a pair of scissors from the kitchen to slice open the cardboard flaps. Inside was another box, glossy white. She lifted the lid. A thick stack of pages lay underneath, bound with quarter-inch white plastic rings, an envelope resting on top. Rose tore it open and slid out the folded note inside: a personal letter from the lead translator at the agency, written on the type of heavyweight stock used by people who appreciate paper. The cursive was immaculate, marred only by a small ink drop on the bottom corner.

  Never in my career as a translator have I seen my team so personally invested in a project…The note went on to thank Rose, to say the agency looked forward to working together again. Rose tucked the letter back into the envelope and tossed it on the table. Fumbling only slightly, she lifted the stack of pages and settled onto the new couch. That single purchase had launched a cavalcade of others—a dizzying buying spree in the wake of William’s show, which had culminated in two burly deliverymen wrestling a new bed frame into the master bedroom and Joan helping to hang her clothes in the large wardrobe, spraying lavender-scented air freshener in every corner, telling her what a good change it was, how proud of herself she should be.

  It had felt cathartic, the whirling burst of activity, not unlike a manic episode. The whole summer, in fact, was beginning to seem that way in retrospect: fuzzy and dislocated, like it’d all been a movie she’d watched, a series of scenes acted out by someone other than her. Or maybe that was the easiest way for her mind to grapple with the lingering uncertainty. It wasn’t that she was still holding out hope for William—how could she be? It was just that she still wondered, she still wanted to know: had it mattered as much to him as it had to her?

  Had it been real for him too?

  She couldn’t ask him, she’d never be able to ask him. And so, a new couch, a new ottoman, a new bed, a new rug, even a new coffee table. Now she felt like a stranger in her own home. She’d wanted change, she had, wanted the shock of the new like a dunk of the head in ice water. Something—anything—to jolt her back to her own life. She just hadn’t counted on it being so disorienting; it still took her a few seconds to sort out where she was when she woke up, to remember which bedroom door to open when she stumbled back from the bathroom in the middle of the night.

  It also made her realize—sitting alone in a rearranged living room, which, as Joan put it, was truly hers now—that new furniture wouldn’t solve the sensation of having been emptied out but not filled back up again, as if there were a different version of herself she was supposed to be becoming if only someone would tell her who and how. Instead, it was only absence now, her days composed of negative space: no one to care for or think of, no treatise to repair. No new distraction to give her some sense of meaning—until now. Taking solace in the fact that her mind would surely be occupied for at least the next few hours, Rose folded her legs up beneath her and found a comfortable nook among the cushions.

  She opened the first page. The book began with a sheet of instructions—how to download more copies, a reminder to sign up for the agency’s newsletter—followed by the title page. Would she finally be able to finish the story? What if it ended abruptly or didn’t answer all her questions? There’d been no clear indication of a conclusion, after all: the writing had simply stopped. Before beginning the first line, she made a quick pact with herself to read front to back. No skipping ahead.

  She turned to the first paragraph of script:

  The year is 1571. I write this to record what I fear may be my final year of sight.

  What followed was an
autobiographical narrative, documenting Giovanni’s training as an artist. The voice here was formal, as if written for an audience—so different from the excerpt she and William had pored over weeks ago. Undoubtedly, Giovanni had also read Vasari’s The Lives of the Artists; she wondered if he was mimicking Vasari’s structure, trying to insert his own chapter among those on Donatello, Raphael, Michelangelo. Still, she sensed an urgency in the language, as if he were trying to get it all down as quickly as he could. In broad strokes, he detailed his training in Milan, his development from early portraits of peasants to commissions for large-scale religious allegories. The only topic of the writing was his art: how he advanced his perspective, what subjects he sketched, the arrangements of his contracts.

  The reading went quickly, and soon Rose found herself midway through the stack. Giovanni had just finished documenting his move to Venice and career in the city, and here the journal seemed to catch up with him in time. When she reached the moment of Venier’s summons—the day Giovanni would have met the woman in the portrait—Rose noticed a shift in tone. Giovanni’s frank candor on every subject, from El Greco’s training to Veronese’s commissions, suddenly turned guarded. Where he once recounted conversations in full, naming participants and locations as if for posterity, now he jotted down oblique phrases, more notes to himself than anything else. Yet between the notes and the sketches in the margins of the book, it wasn’t hard to sort out what had happened:

  He’d fallen in love.

  Rose thought of the drawings Giovanni had made, how attentive he’d been to record even the smallest details of his muse. Her fingernails. The indents in her elbows. Her robe crumpled on the floor, the ribbons in her hair. If the woman were Venier’s courtesan, it made sense that Giovanni would want to protect her. Rose recalled a passage from one of the library books, which had noted—in what had seemed to her a senselessly casual tone—that Renaissance men who’d believed themselves cuckolded would often arrange for the woman in question to be beaten and raped. It was clear Giovanni had grown only more concerned after war was declared and the mood of the city turned unstable. He detailed the public shaming of Anzola (I believe they would have let her burn. This war has turned us to savages, all), and again Rose remembered the woodcut print of an accused witch at the stake.

  She shivered and began to quicken her pace.

  As she scanned down the lines, she realized she’d reached the place where Giovanni was describing the origins of the illustrated story of the winged man and the woman-tree. He’d written with such clarity that she could picture the candlelit table, the narrow face of the poet leaning into the glow. She began to wonder how faithfully William had reproduced Giovanni’s portraits in his paintings before chastising her mind, as she’d done every day since the gallery opening, the way a rider twitches the reins to keep a distracted horse on the path. No, Rose. You know better. She frowned and forced herself to focus on the sentences in front of her.

  As the diary continued, the translation began to contain ellipses where Giovanni had written so quickly that entire words were rendered illegible. She started to skim the pages, impatient to know how it ended. A fire in the Ghetto; the text began to fragment further. How could I not have known, how could she not have told me? Rose’s eyes flicked down the page. What had happened? What had the woman not told Giovanni?

  Jewess.

  Immediately, Rose thought of the images she’d seen in the archives: the yellow badges and hats, the crowded Ghetto. Appalling illustrations showing Jews as rodents and Christ killers. Giovanni was writing only a few decades before Shakespeare would have completed The Merchant of Venice. Rose thought of the shooting at a synagogue that’d been splayed across the front page of the paper not two weeks back. In late Renaissance Venice, anti-Semitism would have been considered not discrimination but a fact of life—part of the operating rules of society. A Jew engaging in an affair with the future doge? She would most certainly have been found guilty of provoking heresy. Had his muse been put on trial? Had she been burned? Rose sped down the next page.

  No. The text here was calmer, more lucid. Giovanni’s frankness returned, as if he no longer cared who might discover his writing. He even revealed the name of his muse—Chiara. Bright. Writing in retrospect, he put all the facts in order: the fire in the Ghetto, Chiara’s lashing at the hands of Corvino. Giovanni glossed over the escape, but it was clear they’d somehow spirited Chiara away.

  They’d been separated, after all.

  At the bottom of the page, a single last line:

  Daily, I revisit my memories of her. When I am sightless, sight of her will remain.

  Rose stared out the window, at the eggshell sky deepening into twilight. Her lungs felt constricted. She could understand why, could imagine the limitations of his options. In his place, she might have done the same: slink away to go blind in private, not wanting to turn her lover into a nurse. She recalled William’s question in the café: Was it worth them finding each other if they couldn’t be together?

  What would her answer be now?

  A crow flew across the rectangle of sky bounded by the window frame with an effortless flap of black wing. Rose glanced back at the book, turning to the last page. In the end, Giovanni gave no explanation of why he’d scraped away the diary. No grand conclusion to sum it all up, no hint of a reunion. Instead, his thoughts seemed to have turned philosophical, as if he were questioning life itself. Rose read and reread the final paragraph:

  As I face the fleeting nature of existence, I grow more convinced that the purest endeavor is that of creation. Certainly the physical body knows this, and strives as soon as it is able to perpetuate itself in the form of a child. Yet I believe the mind also seeks after eternity, desiring to preserve its perspective and thoughts. Increasingly, my attentions fix upon the idea of a treatise. I shall capture, to the best of my ability, my own knowledge and theories of painting. It will be my ultimate act of creation, an assurance that my life has perhaps been of value. I find comfort in imagining that long after I am gone to dust, I may yet remain connected to every man who reads what I have written.

  Rose considered those words: creation, connection. They were what she wanted too. The fragments she’d seen of William’s paintings sprang to mind, and she felt a sharp pinch in her chest. He’d created something from their experience, something tangible that other people could view and discuss, maybe even find inspiration in. He’d grown through it—he had whole canvases to show for it. She couldn’t end up on the other side with only a house full of new furniture.

  The idea of a survey on restoration fluttered to life again; that wild notion that’d been circling her mind for so long, looking for a soft spot to land. It’d take work, and lots of it. Research and planning, chasing down sources online, scheduling interviews. Rose thought of what that would mean: more nights in the back room, more hours hunched over a keyboard. More days spent alone.

  She didn’t want to do it alone.

  The realization was unexpected, as surprising as waking up and discovering that one eye had changed color in the night. She didn’t want to do it alone. Rose turned the idea over in her head, examining it from all sides, until a second realization arrived: she didn’t have to.

  * * *

  The reading room was quiet: the semester had reached a comfortable lull between the start of classes and fall midterms. As Rose descended the stairs, she watched Lucas’s face light up, one hand waving at her before he leaned over the service desk, beaming.

  “How are you? It’s so good to see you again, I was wondering when you’d stop back in!” His words seemed to be racing one another to get out. She couldn’t help but laugh.

  “It’s good to see you too.” He was wearing a forest green cardigan she hadn’t noticed before, a new purchase from his trip, maybe. “You’re looking dapper.” She watched color rise to his cheeks as he pulled on his cuffs and cocked his head self-consci
ously. Before he could respond, she rushed to continue: “I know we have a lot to catch up on, but I wanted to tell you: I have a new idea for a project and…well, I was hoping we could work on it together.”

  The expression on his face made it easy for her to imagine what he must have looked like as a young child on Christmas morning.

  28

  SEVEN MONTHS LATER, GIO SAT watching the shadows of clouds. He’d stationed his chair several yards from the house, where he could feel the sun sink away behind the row of cypress trees. On his knees rested the finished treatise. He glanced at it, through the red latticework that now patterned his vision, his own blood vessels revealing themselves in a final composition. He slid a hand down the outer edges of the papers, measuring with his fingertips the unevenness where he’d added two pages: the illustration he’d done of Ippolito’s story. He wanted her to have it—to remember the place where they were together, always.

  The man would arrive soon. A friend of Aurelio’s, en route to Milan, who’d agreed to bring a package along. Chiara would know what the book meant. He’d purposefully not scraped the vellum well so that she could see it’d been his journal. She’d find the sketches he’d done of her, be able to read the fragments in the margins. He knew she’d understand the message he was sending by scraping away the writing: that he was letting her go. Most of all, though, the book would prove that he’d finished his treatise. That he was a man who could keep at least one promise. When Aurelio had pressed the journal back into his hands, the day after she left, without doubt or reflection he’d known what he would do with it—just as surely as he knew that she’d see it was printed.