The Glassblower of Murano Page 3

  The concierge at her hotel, a kindly, avuncular man, had recognized her mental state in the manner of one used to the effect of his city. It was he who had suggested the Libreria as a good place to learn of her ancestor, and of where she could view his work around the city. The short answer Signorina, he said, was `almost anywhere'. Nora was cheered by his familiarity with the name of Corradino Manin; he spoke of him as a familiar drinking acquaintance. But as to what to see in the city itself his advice was simple. He waved his hand expansively. `Faccia soltanto una passeggiata, Signorina. Soltanto una passeggiata.' Just walk, only walk.

  He was right of course. From her pleasant hotel in Castello, she had wandered the calli, losing track of time and direction, and caring not at all. Everything here was beautiful, even the decay. Rotting houses stood next to glorious palaces, squeezed on either side by grandeur, their lower floors showing tidemarks of erosion where the lagoon was eating them alive. The stained masonry crumbled into the canal like biscotti dipped in Marsala but this seemed only to add to their charms. It was as if they submitted with pleasure to the tides - a consummation, one devoutly to be wished. Nora wandered the bridges, as enchanted by a string of washing hanging from window to window across a narrow canal, or by a handful of scruffy boys kicking a football in a deserted square, as she was by the delicate Moorish traceries of the fenestrations.

  Nora resisted the notion of planning her direction. In London her life had been mapped out for her, signposted and marked down. She had not been lost, properly lost, for many years. She knew exactly how to get around her capital, aided, if need be, by the regimented, colour coded tube map or the A-Z. Stephen, always a mine of information, had told her that when the tube map was designed, the artist deliberately kept the distances between the stations constant, even though in fact they were widely different. This was an attempt to make the citizens of the metropolis feel safe, to accept this weird, subterranean mode of transport; to feel that they could move through exceptionally well-marked out quadrants of the city with ease and security.

  But here in Venice Nora's desire for spontaneity was aided by the city itself. She had a map in the back of her hotel guide - it was useless. Only two directions were posted on the walls of the calli in ancient yellow signage - San Marco, and Rialto. But, as the S-shape of the Grand Canal dictated, these were often in the same direction. She actually arrived in one piazza where a wall bore two yellow signs for San Marco, each one with an arrow, each one pointing in the opposite direction.

  I am Alice. These are directions designed by the Cheshire Cat.

  Her image of life through the Looking Glass became even stronger, when, as the sun began to set, she decided she really had better try to reach San Marco. But as she attempted to follow the signs, they enticed her farther and farther away, leaving her at last at the white arch of the Rialto.

  Nora stopped for a restorative coffee under the bridge. She watched the tourists swarm across, anxious for news like the merchants of old, clutching guidebooks and copies of Shakespeare. She mentally removed herself from these crowds.

  I am no tourist. I am here to stay, to live.

  Her life was packed up and held in storage crates in the unlovely shipyards of nearby Mestre, waiting on the mainland, paid up for a month - the time she had given herself to get an apartment and a work permit.

  She watched the vaporetti chug by, and thought of her father. As a crowded boat stopped at the Rialto fermata she watched a young man in the customary blue overalls leap to the dock, coil the tow rope and pull the boat into its mooring with the ease of long practice.

  My father.

  The idea was alien to her. The idea of her mother doing anything so free as coming here and falling both in love and pregnant, was also alien to her. She turned her thoughts from her mother. She did not want to acknowledge that she had been there first. She wanted this to be her odyssey. `I'm not my mother,' she said aloud. Instantly, the waiter was at her elbow, with a friendly questioning air. She shook her head, smiling; paid, tipped, and left.

  This time, she borrowed her strategy from the Red Queen of the Looking Glass. She went the opposite way from that instructed by the San Marco signs, and soon, sure enough, found herself entering what Napoleon had termed, inadequately, `the finest drawing room in Europe'.

  The sun was lowering, the shadows enormous. The Campanile loomed over the square like the giant gnomon of a sundial; the loggias housed elongated arcs of light. Nora gazed aghast at the opulent bronzed domes of the Basilica - such decoration, such grandeur, a trove of treasure looted from the east. Here Rome and Constantinople had mated to bring forth this strange and wondrous humpedbacked beast, an entirely new creature, a dragon of coils and spurs to guard her city. And, in contrast, the exquisite wedding cake of the Doge's Palace, serene and homogenous, iced with a filigree of white stone. Only here would the Orologio, a clock made for giants, where golden beasts of the zodiac roamed across its face instead of numbers, seem fitting and in keeping. Nora felt as if she needed to sit down. Her head was spinning. She opened her guidebook, but the words made no sense - they swam before her eyes, the black and white facts an irrelevance when faced with this technicolour splendour. Besides, she had set herself apart from the tourists at the Rialto and had no wish to return to their number, guidebook glued to hand, eyes flicking from page to monument like an inept newscaster struggling between script and camera.

  Why did no one warn me about this?

  She had been told for years to come here by friends, art tutors, even by her mother. No one could believe she had never been before, as an artist, as a half-Venetian. But her coffee by the Rialto had given her a moment of clarity. She knew she had not been before because of her mother. Elinor had had the Venetian adventure, and been cruelly hurt. The Serenissima had thrown her back, found her wanting. Nora had not wanted to come here and make comparisons, find echoes of that story, stand in her mother's shoes. She had wanted to make her own discoveries of Italy - Florence, Ravenna, Urbino. All those champions of Venice amongst her friends had told her that it was the one place in the world that lived up to the hype. They had all told her.

  But those she charged with her ill-preparedness were the artists, the writers.

  Canaletto, why did you not adequately depict this place? Why were you, in all your mastery, not able to describe this to me? Why did you merely sketch, not capture the details of this beauty? Turner, why couldn't you capture the sun bleeding into the lagoon as I see it now? Henry James, why did you not prepare me for this? Evelyn Waugh, your passages of praise were faint insults when faced with the real thing. Thomas Mann, why leave ~o much out? Nicholas Roeg, even with your cameras and your celluloid, why could you not tell me either?

  The young woman in the great reception chambers of the Library explained to Nora in her precise and perfect English that unfortunately she may not enter the inner sanctum of the building. Visitors without reader's cards were, however, welcome to use the reference section. Nora produced her passport and watched the girl write out a day-pass in her neat round hand, and followed her, tingling, through double doors to the left of the main doors, which whispered a greeting as they closed behind her. The books waited in the still and stuffy air, dust and warm leather welcoming Nora with the familiarity of her student days. An elderly man was her only companion. He looked up, nodded, then dropped his bright eyes to his texts. The girl offered a brief explanation of the catalogues and melted away.

  Nora began her search among the yellowing cards of the catalogues. `Manin' offered a bewildering number of entries, but she quickly realized that most of them pertained to a Doge - Lodovico; or Daniele, a revolutionary lawyer who had resisted the Austrian occupation of 1848. The sun moved across the great windows before she found the numerous references to Corrado Manin, and from a distant shelf hauled down a huge tome of the kind that adorns the coffee tables of the world, its photographs unloved and un-looked at from years end to years end. Seated at a leather covered table she leafed through
its pages and was dazzled - even the faded 1960s photography did little to diminish what she saw there. Page after page of beauty, intricacy and sheer majesty, the work made her drop her head to her hands and prompted the old man to glance at her with concern.

  I came here to find a city cousin to give me an entree into Venice, and I find instead a Master - a Leonardo, a Michelangelo.

  Nora felt humility, inadequacy and pride in equal measure. Her eyes rested at last on a chandelier of surpassing beauty and read the legend beneath. `Candelabro - La Chiesa di Santa Maria della Pieta, Venezia.' Memory prompted her - she had seen, pasted on the warm walls of the city, a bill which proclaimed that tonight saw the beginning of a series of concerts of Venetian music in their original set- tings.The church of the Pieta had been listed. Nora quickly replaced the book and headed out into the light, turning right to the Tourist Information Office in the Casino da Caffe'. She bought her concert ticket and headed for San Zaccaria, stopping for a plate of pasta which she ate watching the sun dissolve into the lagoon.

  Now, in the church of the Pieta, she knew she had made a good choice for her first night. The day had been such a revelation, such an assault on her senses, that she needed this time to just sit, to be forced into inertia for a couple of hours. She sat, let the music creep in her ears, and tried to collect her thoughts.

  From the moment she arrived at Marco Polo airport she had felt a loss of control - as the motor launch whisked herself and her suitcase across the lagoon towards Venice she felt buffeted, physically by the wind, and mentally by her experience.

  Since her waking in the small hours she had been in a kind of trance, automatically going through the well rehearsed motions of going abroad - taxi to the airport, checking in luggage. The feeling of lightness and of no return, as, unencumbered by bags, she wandered through the airport shops, all full of things she didn't need. In the bookshop she picked up a novel with a reproduction of Canaletto on the cover, and thought it strange that, by noon, she would be walking in the very precincts that he had painted. She put the book down - she had no need for fantasy. She was entering her own reality of Venice.

  On the flight, she still felt in control. She accepted with thanks her food and drinks, her courtesy magazine, listened carefully to the safety instructions. But the moment she landed Nora began to feel this new, but not unpleasant, helplessness. She realized that, in her futile, ludicrous daydreams, she had pictured the plane landing in Saint Mark's Square, on some futuristic runway. But the reality was almost as strange - Marco Polo seemed to be actually on the water, an island airport, surrounded by sea. She had not thought through the next stage either, but now realized that she would be taking a boat to Venice. Of course. As the driver handed her on board the rocking water taxi she contrasted the experience with the black cab and cheerful cockney driver that had taken her to Heathrow at six.

  Something else she had not realized. The boat soon reached a landmass and began to chug along a narrow canal. Nora knew at once this was not Venice itself, but heard a strange distant chime, like the fading resonance of a bell, calling to her. As if he read her thoughts the driver jerked a thumb at the ancient buildings and shouted briefly above the wind `Murano.'

  Murano. The home of Glass. The workplace of her ancestors. She felt a jolt as she passed the fondamente crowded with glass factories. The same fornaci, in the same places, housing the same skills that they had for centuries. She knew that the next day she would be back, to enquire about work. Instead of feeling afraid of her mad scheme, she felt suddenly sure. This was real, and she was going to make it work. The word destiny came into her mind. A silly, romantic word, but once there it would not leave. She clasped the glass heart around her neck and felt suddenly theatrical. She wanted to make some sort of gesture. She began to unplait her hair, and let the mass of it blow in the wind. She meant to salute Murano, but knew that, in truth, the gesture was for Stephen.

  She regretted the impulse when she had checked into her hotel, trying to comb the tangled mess into some sort of order in the mock rococo mirror in her bathroom. She looked so different to the way she had looked in her own mirror at four in the morning. She looked at her Venetian self in the Venetian glass. Her hair was wild, her cheeks ruddy from the sea breeze, her eyes shining with a zealot's light. The glass heart was the only constant, as it still hung from her neck. She thought she looked a mess - even a little crazy, but at the same time, rather beautiful.

  Someone else thought so too.

  He sat across the aisle from her in the church. Probably thirty or so, extremely well groomed like most Italian men, tall as his legs tucked uncomfortably behind the pew. And his face - before she realized, the thought had formed in her head.

  He looks like he has stepped from a painting.

  At once, she remembered her mother's story, was horrified that their thoughts had chimed in the same way thirty years apart. She turned away. But having thought it, she couldn't take it back. She looked again, and he was still looking at her. Her cheeks burned and she turned determinedly away once again.

  The music sweetened her thoughts and Nora focused her eyes on what she had come to see; the great, decorative glass chandelier that was suspended high above her head, looming out of the dark of the roofspace like an inverted crystal tree. Numerous droplets hung from decorative branches which seemed so impossibly delicate that they could hardly support their diamond fruits. Nora tried to follow each arm of the glass with her eyes, to see how it curved and turned, but each time she lost her place as the design bested her. Each crystal teardrop seemed to capture the candle flames and hold them within the perfection of the prism. She could hear, ringing in her head, the resonant note she had heard earlier as she passed Murano, but in another instant realized that this note was real, tangible. The glass itself was sweetly singing, the timbre of the strings and their vibrations caused every branch and pendant crystal to sound their own, almost imperceptible counterpoint. Nora looked at her pamphlet for information on this miracle her own ancestor had wrought. There was nothing, but Nora smiled to herself with what she knew.

  It was here when you were alive, Antonio Vivaldi.

  Then, as now, you heard your own compositions echoing back to you in this crystalline harmony. In point of fact, it was here before you were even born. And it was made by Corradino Manin.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Camelopard

  The great chandelier crossed the lagoon, hanging in the dark barrel. Submerged in water, swinging in complement to the waves, muffled from all sound and sense. The water that surrounded it was ink dark, but tiny motes of moonlight hit the prisms here and there, like single diamonds in pitch. The fluid was cushioning, safe, amniotic. Tomorrow the chandelier would be born into its purpose. Last night it had been completed. Tonight it waited. The barrel was lashed upright in the boat by so many ropes that the great dark mass looked to have been captured in a fisherman's net. The boatmen splashed and heaved their oars, singing an old song of the Piemontese. From inside the barrel, the chandelier began to sing too.

  Corradino ached, but he would not stop. The chandelier hung before him on an iron chain in a near-finished state, shining gold in the flamelight from the furnace. Its crystal arms reached out to him in supplication, as if begging for completion. One of its five delicate limbs was missing, so for the final time Corradino reached in the fire. Pushing his canna da soffio rod into the heart of the melt he rolled it expertly, drawing out a gather of molten glass, which clung to the end of his blowpipe. He began rolling the glass against a hardwood paddle, marvering it into the correct shape to begin its transformation. Corradino thought of the glass as living, always living. He had made a cocoon from which something beautiful could now grow.

  He took a breath and blew. The glass miraculously arched from his lips into a long, delicate balloon. Corradino always held the breath out of his lungs until he had made sure that the bubble, or parison, he had created was perfect in all dimensions. His fellows joked that he was such a
perfectionist that, were the parison not perfect, Manin would never take another breath in, and expire on the spot. In truth, Corradino knew that the slightest winds of his breath at the crucial heat meant the difference between perfection and imperfection, between the divine and the merely beautiful.

  He watched the glass changing, chameleon-like, through all shades of red, rose, orange, amber, yellow and finally white as it began to grow cool. Corradino knew he must work fast. He thrust the parison into the Porno to reheat it briefly, then began to manipulate it with his hands.

  Not for him the protective wads of cotton or paper that others used to save their skin from shriveling and blistering with the heat. He had long since sacrificed his fingertips to his art. They had burned, scarred and eventually healed smooth with no prints. Corradino recalled the tales of Marco Polo who had said that the ancient T'ang dynasty of China used fingerprints as a means of identification, and the practice had endured in the Orient ever since.

  My identity has become one with the glass. Somewhere in Venice, or far overseas, my own skin lies embedded in the hard silica of a goblet or candlestick.