Acqua Alta

 

Kate Bullard Adams

It wasn’t the first time they’d been to Venice. They’d visited four, maybe five times before—neither one of them could remember—and twice they’d stayed for a month. But it was the first time she’d seen a tourist in San Marco taking a picture of the ground rather than the basilica or the campanile or, her favorite, the clock tower, whose blue-enameled face, studded with stars and the signs of the zodiac, softened the sting of time.

    She followed the angle of the camera and saw that it was aimed, on this clear, sunny day, at a shallow puddle of water near the basilica. High water. Acqua alta. But wasn’t that just in the winter? And this was June, almost July, as evidenced by the swarms of tourists and her sweat-damp blouse.

    She pointed the water out to her “counterpart.” At late middle age, calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend was ridiculous, and a tongue-tied hotel clerk had come up with counterpart, which seemed suitably mature, and suitably vague. And it made them laugh.

    With the dazed look that had become the norm, he nodded, then followed her toward the sculpture of the tetrarchs mounted on a corner of the basilica. They no longer felt the need to go inside the church—or the Doge’s Palace or the Frari or the Accademia. Instead, they sought out the particular places and details, like this porphyry rendering of the four Roman emperors, that were special favorites, old friends.

    On this day, tourists surrounded the tetrarchs, leaning against the walls on which they were mounted or sitting on the steps at their feet. Only when she raised her camera did the sightseers seem to realize they were near something special. They turned to look at the beautiful purplish red carving, the two pairs of rulers, whose stony faces and rigid postures offered no reaction.

    “Let’s get you in here,” she said, guiding him toward the tetrarchs. Obligingly, the tourists moved aside. “Smile,” she said, but his mouth hardly moved, and she tried not to think how much his stiff bearing and fixed countenance resembled the sculpture. “Got it,” she said, as she clicked the camera and froze them in time. “Back to the hotel?” At his nod, she turned to carve a path through the people and pigeons, skirting the occasional pool of water that rose through narrow weep holes, slowing her pace to match his. From atop the clock tower, the two bronze Moors—one old, the other, young—bent from hinged waists to strike the hour. His shoes scuffed like sandpaper across the worn stone of the square.

    When she’d first met him, he’d been something of a tetrarch himself. He was managing partner of one of Atlanta’s biggest law firms, and on her first visits there, she’d been dazzled by the trappings of his position: his office and his car, the people he knew and the parties they attended. Even more dazzling was his library, filled with favorite novels that he’d arranged alphabetically by author and that he pulled from the shelves with the same sureness of purpose that had made her say yes when, during his third visit to Savannah, he asked if she’d like to come to his hotel room after dinner. She didn’t leave until he checked out.

    That wasn’t her usual style. In her other relationships, including her marriage, intellectual compatibility had come first, then a gradual warming up to the physical part of things. And her first reaction to him physically had been one of dismay. “What have you done to me?” was her unspoken cry to the friend who’d set them up when she opened her door on that long-ago Saturday afternoon and greeted the heavyset man with the sleepy eyes and the thinning hair and the eyebrows whose hairs went every which way. He was dressed in slacks, a striped shirt, and a sweater vest that gave a graceful droop to his paunch. He looked very corporate and very conventional. And he looked very old.

    But then he held out an orchid, its spike laden with waxy white blooms. And then he introduced himself to her teenaged children without saying anything that embarrassed anybody. He made comfortable conversation throughout a long walk and during dinner at the restaurant where he had taken care of the reservation. Afterwards, when she played the new CD she’d bought just for that evening, they slow danced in the living room. And by the time he left, after he’d kissed her on the cheek and given her one more chance to breathe in his warm, gingery scent, she’d forgotten that he was nine years older than she was and realized with some surprise, and a little alarm, that she was sorry to see him go.

    The hotel was only a few bridges and a couple of campos from San Marco. In the old days, he’d have kept up with her, carried along by the current of people flowing through the calle, excited anew by this most improbable of places. How had this city, a mirage-like marvel of stone, wood, and brick, built its way out of the water? And would the water eventually win it back? During their previous visits, this impermanence, the sense of living on borrowed time, had caused them to pick up their pace. But his knees were bothering him, and she had to remind herself to slow down, and every so often they had to stop, breaking up the flow of people like a snag in a river. Their snag was a minor one, though, and passersby seemed hardly to notice. There was nothing special, she was starting to learn, about older people getting left behind.

    Their hotel had just reopened after an eighteen-month renovation, most of which had been cosmetic. The concierge, however, had made special mention of the huge holding tank beneath the ground floor that was upgraded to handle the water that had begun to encroach on the lobby. “The Grand Canal, we love,” he had explained, “when it is outside.”

    They loved the Grand Canal, too, and went out to enjoy it at the waterside bar. The boats! So many! Gondolas, their ferros glinting in the sun. Vaporettos zigzagging from one stop to the next. Delivery boats with cargo piled to precarious heights. Water taxis showing off their speed. The carabinieri, the trash boats, the ambulanza, the guardia di finanza—they’d even seen some kayaks near the Cipriani. And, miracle of miracles, they’d never seen any of them run into each other.

    He used to have a boat that he kept down in Florida. At one time, fishing had been his passion, and he told stories of going out into the gulf for swordfish or tuna, or simply dropping a line off the side of a bridge. They’d walked around several of the marinas in Savannah, and he’d picked up information about their policies and pricing. Politely noncommittal, she had smiled and said nothing. Maybe for that reason, the boat continued to sit in Florida. And finally, after years of renting slips and replacing dead batteries, he had sold it.

    Despite his estrangement from the water he’d once loved, the intricate bustle of the canal brightened his mood, and with the help of her Bellini and his Lillet, they engaged in something close to a conversation. She asked him questions. He

reminisced about his fishing expeditions out of Mexico, his Hemingway-esque adventures in the gulf. His hands, still big and supple, pulled marlin from the stream of memory. His narrowed eyes commanded some distant view. And through the soft scrim of Prosecco, she could see the man she’d fallen in love with, a lion lazing in the sun after a successful day’s hunt.

    They’d gotten the diagnosis about six months ago, two years after he’d retired and moved to Savannah. It didn’t come as a surprise. They’d known that something was wrong: the arm that began holding itself at a right angle; the big bold handwriting that started to disappear; the brain that couldn’t deal with a bank statement. But when he began falling out of bed, sudden crashes in the night that yanked her eyes open and hammered her heart, she did some research. There was something called REM Sleep Disorder. Sometimes it was a condition in and of itself. But usually, it was a symptom of something else. And usually that was Parkinson’s.

    They felt like they were handling it well. They went together to his appointments with the neurologist, and, despite the trembling limbs and frozen faces that surrounded them, they’d stayed all day at the Parkinson’s symposium. On the weekends they went to movies and got together with friends. They still lingered in bed on Saturday mornings, drinking coffee and looking out at the lemon trees before they made love. But during the week, in the evenings, when they sat down to dinner and it was just the two of them, it was hard to ignore how very little they had to say.

     In the early years, there’d been lots to talk about. She taught English at the college; he loved to read. He told her about the rare manuscripts he used to collect, the auctions he’d frequented in New York. She tried out new course material on him.

    Now, he didn’t have the concentration to finish anything longer than a magazine article, and she didn’t watch television, which took up more and more of his time. It didn’t take long to exhaust any scraps of news about the neighbors or their children, none of whom lived nearby. The cat provided only limited material.

    She fell back on music, and as long as she remembered to put on a CD before dinner, they had Bach or Debussy or Dianne Reeves to cover up the quiet. But if she forgot, the two of them were on their own. She’d secretly hope the dog next door would start barking. Or maybe the neighbor’s son would turn up his electric guitar. Otherwise, it was just the silverware clinking and the ceiling fan’s tick. And the maddening burst of sound when he chewed, the ragged obligatory stutter of an old sewing machine.

 While he rested at the hotel, she took the vaporetto to the Salute, the big Baroque wedding cake of a church that anchored one end of the Grand Canal. As close as it was to San Marco—just a few minutes away on the other side of the canal—the Salute was rarely crowded, and its spacious, dimly lit interior felt like a cool hand on her forehead.

    The church had been built in the 1600s as a tribute to the Virgin Mary for saving Venice from the plague. In honor of her intervention, it housed a painting called La Madonna della Salute, the Madonna of Health. But this madonna was not one of the fulsome, fair-skinned Marys who inhabited most of the other Venetian churches. She was a Byzantine icon brought from Crete with a long steep nose, umber eyes, and even darker skin. Also known as La Mesopanditissa, she wore a simple red gown and turban, and the child, really a miniature man, who sat upright in the crook of her arm had the same dusky skin and solemn gaze. They were eloquent in their austerity.

    On her previous pilgrimages, which had been in January, she had found the icon sequestered in a small room off the sanctuary. But today, illuminated by their gold halos and gilt frames, the mother and child were clearly visible, enthroned on the high altar in an open chapel on the other side of the church. She followed the ambulatory that curved around the petaled swirls of mosaic floor beneath the dome until she came to the altar, where an organist and a violinist were playing. She joined the small audience and studied the madonna in this different, grand setting.

    It was as if La Mesopanditissa had moved to Hollywood. Sculpted at the time of the church’s construction, the altar surrounding the mother and the child was a scene of high drama. Above their heads, an oversized Mary, draped in voluptuous folds of fabric, held a plump baby Jesus on her hip. With the help of a weapon-wielding cherub, cheered on by the patron saints, she drove out the cowering female figure of the plague. La Mesopanditissa and her son appeared politely unimpressed by these histrionics. Amid the altar’s frenzied swirl of stone, they seemed alone in a way they hadn’t when she’d seen them before in the small quiet chamber.

    If a kinship were to be found, it was with the wooden crucifix to their right. It was similar in its reserve, its frugality of expression. The finished body of Christ needed no embellishment. While La Mesaponditissa’s gaze was directed away from her grown son’s suffering, the man-child could glimpse it from the corner of his eye. He could see what was coming. It was only a matter of time.

    With a final flourish of the violinist’s bow, the concert ended. There was a smattering of applause. She got up to leave. On her way out, as was her custom, she stopped at the votives. She dropped a euro in the box, picked up one of the small red candles. It was difficult to light, its too-short wick hard to hold close enough to the neighboring flame. Finally, it caught. She took a long last look at the distant madonna. Salute. Health. A city saved. But not her own son.

    She left the church, walked down the broad cascade of steps. At the bottom, a beggar crouched, the pavement damp beneath his feet. She reached in her pocket for another euro. “Grazie, signora,” said a thin, wavering voice. “Prego,” she whispered in reply. She turned in the direction of the approaching vaporetto. There was no way of avoiding the vast pool of water in between.