The journey, first to Paris and then through Switzerland and Milan and onwards to Venice, was for the most part pleasant, being blessedly free of many of the wearisome and often infuriating hindrances and misdirections that rail travel usually entails. One unsettling incident, however, should be recorded, since it would prove to have been in a small way prophetic of the mysteries and misfortunes I was subsequently to experience.
At the Gare du Nord, which despite the early hour was already crowded and noisy, I had made a timely stop at a tobacco kiosk, in order to stock up for the time that I would be away, since I had neglected to bring with me a sufficient supply of Hoyo de Monterreys, my favoured brand of cigar.
The vendor was a shifty-looking type, not French, I thought, though surely a Latin of some sort, by the look of him, perhaps, appropriately enough, an Italian. He made a great fuss over the counting out of the change, in what was a bare-faced attempt to cheat me, his customer, an attempt which his customer, I can assure you, promptly scotched. When I had extricated myself, and my money, from the villain’s clutches, I turned to find my wife gone from the bench on the platform where she had sat down to wait for me. I stood, with a fist on my hip and the box of cigars under my arm, and looked about for her, transferring onto her my lingering annoyance with the rascal at the kiosk. Where had the dratted girl gone to? She was nowhere to be seen.
In more familiar surroundings I would have waited calmly for her to return, but I am a less than easy traveller at the best of times, and the clamour and the smoke and the smuts in the air all round me in the station, along with the foreign accents and unfamiliar odours assailing me from all sides, had already made my temples ache and set my nerves a-jangle. In my over-stressed state I even began to wonder if I might be mistaken as to which bench it was I had left her at, and I walked first in one direction and then in the other, jostled and elbowed by the crowd, in hope of finding her waiting for me in another place. All the seats were occupied by cross and weary passengers, but Laura, with her unmistakable tumbling blue-black tresses, as heavy and shining as a bird’s wing—for me her hair was, literally, the crown of her loveliness—was not among them.
I went back and positioned myself at the kiosk, with the intention of going over again in my increasingly agitated mind the previous ten minutes, to discover if I could recall the exact spot where I had last seen my wife.
What would I do, I wondered wildly, if I should have lost her for good?
This appalling possibility immediately conjured up for me the image of the late Willard Rensselaer’s great broad bony face and piercing eyes, and the bristling whiskers that made me think of those cow-catchers, as I had seen them depicted in illustrated magazines, attached to the fronts of snorting American steam trains as they hurtled back and forth across the prairies, vast tracts of which, as I had no need to remind myself, had been purchased, or cavalierly annexed, more like, by my land-grabbing father-in-law—“Willard Rensselaer the Railroad King” was what the popular press had dubbed him, a tribute intended to be sardonic but which its target had thoroughly gloried in.
It shamed and annoyed me, I admit, that it was my father-in-law I had first thought of, and what the great man would say, and what he would do, were he living still and could hear how his son-in-law had been so inept and irresponsible as to mislay his daughter on the platform of a Paris train station.
Laura, of course, presently reappeared.
She had gone off to have a look about the place, as she told me, in an offhand tone that I found almost offensive, in the circumstances—could she not see how distressed I was by her having disappeared like that?—and had taken the opportunity to purchase, from a gypsy at a stall, a little lavender-scented cushion on which she might rest her head as our train rolled and rattled its way in a long arc southwards across the continent. I subdued my indignation, not without difficulty, and contented myself with remarking sharply that it wouldn’t do to delay any longer, since the train was on the point of departure, and then turned on my heel and strode ahead, at so swift a pace that Laura had positively to scamper to keep up with me.
The thought of this act of petty vengefulness, and others like it, were later on to fill me with remorse. If only I could be given back the time in which to cancel even one such instance, just one, I would have been, I believed, to some small degree comforted, in the time of confusion, fear, and ultimate disaster that, had I but known it, lay ahead of me.
It was evening when we arrived in Venice. Sure enough, on emerging from the railway station we found, as I had grimly anticipated, the gathering darkness draped with a dismal, freezing mist, in which the gas lamps along both stone banks of the canal glowed like the puffball-heads of dandelions.
The Palazzo Dioscuri, where our rented apartments awaited us, was far off, at the very other end of the Grand Canal, so the baggage-porter assured us, not without, as I noted, a barely suppressed smirk of malicious satisfaction—the churl would have no tip from me, that was certain.
Laura was all for taking a gondola. She had exclaimed delightedly at sight of these, to my eye sinister, craft, where they waited in a row at the quayside opposite the station exit, rearing and plunging their haughty, gilded prows, like so many glossy-flanked racehorses crowding at the starting-rope. In the end she heeded the scornful porter’s advice that since it was such a long way, and the gondola such a leisurely conveyance, we should content ourselves with the steam launch, or vaporetto, as the vessel is called in Italian. This was a blunt, ungainly craft, but it comfortably accommodated us and our numerous trunks and suitcases and hatboxes—Laura wasn’t one to travel lightly—and swung away from the dock with a sort of wallowing caracole and set off chuggingly upon the darkly swaying waters of the canal.
I was feeling distinctly put out by the fact that the business with the porter as to the question of transportation had been transacted entirely by my wife, whose command of the Italian tongue—she spoke several languages fluently, the result of her years at a Swiss finishing school—made me feel inadequate and hapless and, although I couldn’t believe she would have intended it, even somewhat belittled.
That nocturnal voyage along the narrow waterway was for me a strange and disquieting experience. Yes, it was novel, and of interest, to a degree, and the great pale palaces, illumined by flickering oil lamps and flaming sconces, should have been venerably impressive. Yet the lacy stone-work of those palatial façades, the delicacy of which Laura repeatedly called on me to admire, was, in my estimation, nothing more than the mark of a long-drawn-out terminal decay, particularly at the bases of the walls, where over the centuries the action of the tides had eaten into the very fabric of the foundations—if these edifices could be said to have any foundations at all, other than a few water-logged wooden piles—leaving them tattered and ragged, like the soiled and drenched hems of the petticoats of a succession of dropsical old ladies.
La Serenissima, indeed! was my sardonic thought.
My wife remarked the overarching stillness, saying it seemed to her the very essence of hushed romance; to me, every sound issuing out of those rank alleyways and skimming across the turbid expanses of intermittently and evilly glinting, oily waters was as a secret call, sly, suggestive, resonant with mockery and menace. The mist too weighed upon me heavily, making my lungs feel sodden and congested.
The porter was right, it was a long way. We disembarked at last by St. Mark’s Square, and there before us were the Doge’s Palace to one side and, to the other, the impressive though undeniably less than lovely, tall brick Campanile. Not two years later this tower was to collapse precipitately under its own weight into a pyramid of dust and rubble, only to be rebuilt later, in, unaccountably, all its former gracelessness.
It was fully dark by now, but in the great square, which, as I recalled, Napoleon had famously and felicitously described as “the drawing room of Europe,” there were many people about, couples, mostly, wrapped in capes and thick coats against the cold and damp. The vaporetto steamed away, the sound of its engine making a sort of splattery, syncopated drum-beat in the oppressively damp air, and suddenly, the porter having abandoned us, tipless and scowling, my wife and I were left alone on the quayside, with our luggage piled around us, quite at a loss as to what direction our destination lay in, or how we were supposed to get there.
Just then a figure stepped out of the shadows, or sidled, rather, a low, ruffianly type clad in a shabby, dark-green coat and leather gaiters. He approached us, removing his cap, and spoke some words of which I, to my frustration, understood not a single one—I had foolishly imagined that on arrival in Italy I would somehow acquire spontaneously, by a kind of linguistic osmosis, the ability to speak Italian. The way the fellow stood before us, hunched forward and twisting his cap in the fingers of both hands, was meant to convey deep respect, if not obsequiousness, but I was sure I could detect behind the elaborate show of servility a hint of amusement and sardonic ridicule.
He was called, as we would presently learn, Beppo; this, I supposed, and still suppose, was a nickname, or a clownish diminutive of some sort. He was older than he had seemed on first appearance; I had taken him for a young man, but now, when I looked at him more closely, I saw the hollows in his sallow cheeks and the fans of fine, deep wrinkles at the outer corners of his mouth and eyes. His hair, which I had taken for black, was more of a dull, dark-yellow tint, and peeped out in a fringe of greasy curls all around the rim of his cap. The foetor of his breath was all too detectable from a good yard off, and when he grinned—though what he produced was less grin than grimace—he showed that one of his upper teeth was missing at the left side, leaving a gap through which, lizard-like, he would now and then dart the sharp tip of a grainy, greyish-pink tongue. He had the air, I thought, not of a servant but rather of some disreputable trickster, a strolling minstrel, say, or a player out of the commedia dell’arte, acting the role of a partly comical, partly malignant menial.
Laura spoke, again in the vernacular, and the footman, or whatever he might be, bowed deep and replied volubly in a rapid, harsh singsong that was the opposite of my wife’s softly melodious Italian, so much so that they might have been speaking different languages—which to an extent they were, as I was to learn, for the Venetians have a dialect of their own, which they lapse into frequently. His strangulated raspings made me think that at some time in the past he must have suffered severe damage to his vocal cords, but as would soon and repeatedly be demonstrated to me, this was the tone of voice, grating and seemingly tinged with anger, of the male servant class of the city.
Now the fellow donned his cap again and slithered off into the shadows, and before I could enquire of my wife who he might be and what he had said to her, he reappeared, trundling a two-wheeled, flat wooden barrow, on which he proceeded to stack our luggage. He did the job so roughly and with so little regard for the bags that I thought to remonstrate with him, but, being without the necessary words, I had to hold my tongue, and again, and as would be the case so often in the days to come, I chafed sorely in my imposed and impotent muteness.
I wonder how much did my lack of Italian contribute to my downfall? I used to tell myself I was only imagining that people, including my wife, were talking about me openly in my hearing, comfortable in the knowledge that I would not understand a word of what they were saying; however, as I now know, I had not been imagining it at all.
The servant, laboriously pushing his barrow—what a pantomime he made out of the effort—led the way off to the left along the damp and glistening stones of the quayside, with us trailing behind him. I glimpsed him skirting a hump-backed bridge and veering abruptly to the right; when we caught up with him he was entering an alleyway the mouth of which was hardly wide enough for the barrow to pass through.
Here the only illumination was from a single rush-light set in a metal brazier high up on the wall halfway along. It seemed to me I had been transported suddenly into a more ancient, darker time, and I had a tingling sensation between my shoulder blades, as if in expectation of an assassin’s stiletto.
The well-travelled Laura, on the contrary, seemed already entirely at home in these exotic surroundings; she was, as I was compelled to grant, far the more commanding of the two of us, in circumstances such as we now found ourselves in, with servants to be dealt with, and directions issued—though she had the knack of making them seem not directions at all but merely friendly suggestions. What a clever creature she was. Aye, and in so many ways. I didn’t yet know the half of it.
As we walked along she linked her arm through mine, drawing my elbow tightly against her ribs and into the warmth of her side, and smiled into my face, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “Ah, my dear, isn’t it wonderful?” she whispered, sounding uncharacteristically animated. “Here we are at last, together, in Venice!”
Despite the enchanting force of her words, behind them I seemed to catch, as I often did in our moments of intimacy together, a suppressed, brittle note; the note, I couldn’t prevent myself from thinking, of a richly gifted actress, at the end of an over-long “run,” grown bored with her part but forced to sustain the warmth and glitter of her performance. As usual, I chided myself for entertaining such a disloyal thought. It was her natural way, I told myself, for her to seem ever a little distant, a little detached; it was part of that coolness of manner, as cool as the touch now of her hand on mine—she had unlinked my arm—which was another of the things I treasured in her, however paradoxical it may seem for me to say so.
Off at the end of the alley there rose up to face us a tall, blank building, sporting a broad, iron-studded door with an unlighted lantern dangling above it on a rusted hook. Here our cicerone stopped and turned back to address us.
“Il palazzo,” he called, in his hoarse voice, gesturing and grinning.
The wall of the Palazzo Dioscuri—it was the rear wall, I was presently to discover—as my wife and I approached it, advancing along the alleyway in the shivering rush-light, looked as tall and as broad as a cliff-face, and was blank save for a scattering of tiny square windows cut into the deep stone, no two of them ranged at the same level and all situated at varying distances apart.
Now, glancing up, I saw, or seemed to see, behind the glass of one of those deep-set apertures, the indistinct, glimmering outline of a woman’s face.
I could not be sure at the time, nor was I to be any more certain afterwards, that it was in fact a human visage I had seen; but whatever it was, I did see something, of that I was convinced, even if it was no more than the effect of a trick of the light, or of shadow, rather, for the alleyway was a place of shadows, which the flame of the bunch of oil-soaked rushes did little to brighten. By now, there was nothing I could think of that would have surprised or puzzled me; a full night and day of travel, by rail and ferry and rail again, and then, most recently, on board the pounding steam launch from the station, had left me in a state in which I was entirely susceptible to hallucination.
The strangest thing was that although I had no more than a glimpse of the face, or face-like image, at the window, I felt at once that I recognised it. In fact, I was convinced, in that fleeting moment, that the person, or phantom, looking down at me was someone with whom I was or had been at one time intimately acquainted, even though—and this is where the essence of the strangeness lay—I couldn’t for the life of me have said who she might be, or how it was that I should know or have known her.
All the same I was sure, as sure as I was of anything, that the spectral vision was in some way familiar to me, and, further, and even stranger again, that it was connected with the dream that had been plaguing me for so long, the dream of the empty room at twilight, and the wisp of silk on the table, and the darkling sea beyond.
Then the creature Beppo produced from some hidden recess about his person an enormous iron key and inserted it into the ravaged keyhole and turned it, with a grinding sound, and put his shoulder to the big square door and pushed it effortfully open.
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From Venetian Vespers by John Banville. Used with permission of the publisher, Knopf. Copyright © 2025 by John Banville.
