The Glassblower of Murano Read online

  The Signorina must have a rental address in Venice, then after she had attained her living permit, or permesso di sog- giorno, she would then apply for the permesso di lavoro, or work permit. No, said another, she must be given her permesso di lavoro first, then have it ratified by her employer, then she would qualify to take rental quarters in the sestiere, then she could apply for a permesso di sogiorno.

  I want to scream.

  Nora's manner had metamorphosed over these visits from the friendly, slightly ignorant blonde demeanour that she had found all her life to work well with officialdom, to the hard-nosed, demanding manner of a harridan. The progress of her application, however, had stayed exactly the same, retaining its state of complete inertia.

  I have a recurring dream where I'm floating underwater in the lagoon, gasping for breath, but unable to swim to the surface because I'm bound with reams and reams of red tape.

  Today, a peerless autumn day, she entered the door of the police station with steely determination, her features brittle with counterfeit smiles.

  I have been in Venice for a full month. I need to get this sorted.

  The last month had passed with that strange elasticity which characterizes significant periods of life. On the one hand, the time had slipped by with a rapidity which surprised Nora. On the other, she could not believe that it was only four weeks ago that she had been living at Belmont, amid the detritus of her dead marriage. She had worked hard at the furnaces from that first Monday, when she had entered the fornace with an air of one going to school for the first time. She had bound her hair in a scarf and worn her oldest jeans in an effort to blend in as much as possible. It had not worked. The heat was such that in the space of half an hour she had shed the scarf and was working in jeans, bare feet and a vest top, to predictable comments from the others.

  But all in all, Nora's first day at the fornace was both exhausting and exhilarating. Most of the men were guardedly friendly, in a manner which made her suspect that they had been given instruction by Adelino. Two of the younger glassblowers, a goodlooking pair who seemed to be somewhat of a double act, were friendly and helpful and watched her progress with dark, appraising eyes. She left when the others did, congratulating herself on having made no major mistakes that day, and was gratified when her two young colleagues asked her to come for a drink with the others. Adelino was not with them, but thinking herself safe in numbers Nora followed gratefully along the Fondamenta Manin to a warmly-lit welcoming bar. The maestri were clearly regulars, as their `usual' ten Peroni beers sat ready on the bar like the green bottles of the song. Nora collapsed on the bar stool chivalrously proffered by Roberto and rolled her head around on her aching neck. She heard some of the gathered men joking about offering her a massage and she smiled along.

  I must get used to barracking and locker-room jokes; I must not be phased by it all. This is a man's world - always has been - and I have to learn to fit in. No princess behaviour.

  She pressed the cold bottle of Peroni to a forehead still hot and flushed from the furnace's kiss, and felt the welcome chill of condensation dripping to her cheek. She took a long cool slug of the beer and, as her lips touched the bottle and her teeth chinked the glass she thought of the continuity of the glassmakers' art. Here in her hand was the equivalent of the wares produced by Corradino and his colleagues, but now mass-produced, recycled, soulless and utilitarian. Above the bar MTV blared, interrupting her thoughts, and Roberto beckoned her to a small corner table which Luca had already secured. Nora sat, smiled, and answered their questions about London, Chelsea FC and Robbie Williams in that order. In turn, she discovered that both men were the sons of glassblowers.

  `In fact,' said Luca, `Roberto here has the longest glassblowing history of all of us here, even though he's the youngest'

  `But the most talented,' put in Roberto, his white grin mitigating the boast.

  `Actually, that's annoyingly true,' countered Luca. `Old Adelino is always blowing smoke up your arse.!

  `He says I've inherited the family "breath",' Roberto explained modestly to Nora.

  'Yeah,' said Luca holding his nose, `I think I know what he means. You stink.'

  Roberto cuffed Luca and they both roared with laughter. Nora shifted in her seat and suddenly felt very old. These boys were charming, but a bit ... immature? She dragged the conversation back to her point of interest and addressed Roberto. `Your family? They've always been in the trade?'

  `For ever. Right back to the seventeenth century, in fact. My ancestor, Giacomo del Piero, was the foreman of our very fornace back then.'

  The seventeenth century! Corradino would have been here too! Could the two men have known each other?

  `I suppose,' Nora began nonchalantly, suppressing her excitement, `that there were many different fornaci here then?'

  `No,' said Luca, who seemed slightly more intellectual than his colleague, `in those days, there was only one glass foundry on Murano. Venice was still a Republic so it was easier to control the monopoly that way. All the glassmakers in Venice lived and died here after the foundry was moved in 1291; actually they were threatened with death if they tried to leave, and if anyone escaped their families were imprisoned or murdered to force the fugitives to return. Luca paused to emphasise this ghoulish fact and took a swig of beer. `After the city state fell many more factories grew up here; there were about three hundred factories in the city then. But then Murano declined once the glass monopoly was lost and other nations learned how to make good glass. In 1805 the glass guild was abolished, the furnaces shuttered and the artists scattered throughout Europe.'

  `It's a very different trade now,' put in Roberto. `In Giacomo's time, all kinds of glass were made here, from the humblest bottle,' he waved his Peroni in an echo of Nora's own thoughts, `to the finest mirrors. Now, everyday glassware is made in huge bottle plants in Germany, or at Dulux in France or Palaks in Turkey. Our only lifeline is the quality market - the "art" if you like. Tourists are our only buyers, and our foundry only gets a small part of that market. Competition is fierce now. In fact,' here he looked speculatively at Nora, `you were lucky to be taken on.'

  Nora lowered her eyes as Roberto took a slug at his beer. She felt uncomfortable, almost slighted, but Roberto carried on.

  `So you could say Giacomo was the best back then,' he concluded, `as he was the foreman of the only factory.'

  She noticed how Roberto talked of ancient history as if it were no more than a heartbeat ago. `You speak of him as if you knew him,' she said, recognizing something of her own sentiments.

  `All Venetians do that,' said Roberto smiling. `Here the past is all around. It happened only yesterday.'

  Nora recognized the connection to his ancestor that she felt for Corradino, and this decided her; she would share her history. `This is all really strange, because my ancestor worked here too, around the same time. He must have known Giacomo. His name was Corrado Manin, known as Corradino. Have you heard of him?'

  Roberto's face went suddenly still. He exchanged a look with Luca. `No,' he said abruptly. `Sorry. Another Peroni?' He rose at once and headed to the bar without waiting for a reply.

  Nora sat stunned, her face tingling as if from a slap. What was bothering the man? She turned to Luca who bathed her in a charming smile. `Don't mind Roberto. He's a bit funny about his ancestor. Thinks he owns the fornace. He's always trying to get Adelino to raise his profile, and sell the glass on the del Piero name. Probably thought you were trying to muscle in.'

  `But ... I wasn't ... I didn't .. '

  `Really, it's cool. Forget it. Here he comes'

  As Roberto returned with three more Peroni Nora did her best to be particularly charming, flattering him with questions about glassblowing in an effort to atone for her gaffe, although she was still not entirely clear what she had done wrong. Roberto unbent and showed some signs of being mollified, but there was something else there too - as time passed he was getting heavily drunk. The hour was becoming late and Nora began to
fret about her boat back to Venice, when it suddenly occurred to her that Luca had gone to the toilet about twenty minutes ago and not come back. She glanced around the bar but he was nowhere to be seen, and moreover, all the other maestri had gone too. She recognized no one.

  Oh Christ.

  Nora sighed gustily. She was suddenly transported back ten years to St Martin's, when it had been her unhappy duty to shepherd maudlin friends home when they had had a skinful. Surely she did not have to do that now, at her age, for this drunken boy? She swore under her breath and took Roberto's arm, helping him to stagger outside. He swayed gently at the canalside, and she wondered if he was going to be sick, but then he smiled unsteadily and lunged towards her, planting his mouth roughly on hers.

  Nora's response was so Victorian it surprised her. She pushed him roughly away and fetched him a stinging slap which nearly sent him into the canal.That sobered Roberto up. His good looks disappeared as the handsome mouth curled into a sneer, and Nora suddenly felt afraid. `Come on,' he said, moving in once more. `You owe me something, you Manin slut.'

  Nora turned and ran.

  She didn't stop until she came to the Faro vaporetto stop, but the thought occurred that Roberto too would make his way here, as it was the nearest fermata on the island. Shaken and edgy, aware that she was the only one waiting, she hailed a passing water taxi and spent far too much money getting back to her hotel.

  The next day and for many others she reaped her reward. Roberto had done his work - none of the men talked to her at all now. She wondered what he had told them all about her that was so bad that even the affable Luca barely acknowledged her. Roberto either ignored her, or attempted to make her life difficult with little shows of petulance or spite. Her tools would go missing, her own small experiments in glass would be found broken. With growing incredulity Nora realized that she was being bullied. She began to feel the same dread that she had felt at school when she encountered the sixth form girls with too much eyeliner who called her `hippy' because of her long hair. She had never dreamed that a man could be so vindictive to a woman who had turned down his charms - she had assumed that after the incident she would merely drop off Roberto's radar. Sometimes she would feel a chill on her neck and turn to find him staring at her with such freezing hatred that she felt sure that there must be something wrong with him - something that drove him to hate her over and above sexual rejection.

  But what could it possibly be? I hardly know the man. Is he unbalanced?

  Now she had no-one, except a gentle soul called Francesco who would occasionally, unsmilingly, show her the proper way to do her work and then respond to her thanks with a shy nod. She knew they were all waiting for her to give up and go home. She saw Adelino occasionally when he came down to the factory floor, and welcomed his presence as she used to welcome the appearance of a teacher in those long breaktimes at school - she knew that, in his presence, the bullying would stop. She knew he checked up on her progress, but so far he had had no cause to speak to her about it.

  But in her lonely bubble, her own hermetically sealed vessel of silence, she knew her work was improving. In the absence of company or conversation the glass became her friend. She began to understand its ways in a manner she would not have done if she had been distracted with banter and conversation. Her duties at this stage were no more than to melt the gather, clear any impurities, and blow the occasional parison. She had no shaping or moulding duties beyond the most rudimentary, but did some cooling and reheating.Yet she began to see this compound of silica and sand as something living and organic. She understood that it breathed - taking in oxygen as hungrily as any living thing. It had moods - from the hot red, to the honeyed gold, to the crystal white. It had textures, sometimes as flowing as sweet syrup, sometimes as hard as tempered steel. She could well believe that in Corradino's time they made knives of glass - deadly, silent, clean.

  Corradino. She thought of him often. She felt as if the glass connected them, that it was drawn out between them until the connection were as thin and stretched as a cello string, yet it still resonated with a low, long note across the centuries.

  He is my companion while the others talk around me. I talk to him.

  By osmosis, Nora's Italian, already good, quickly became excellent. When her month's trial was complete she went to Adelino, who expressed pleasure at her progress and her wish to remain. But he was concerned that she had not yet obtained her work permit, and seemed particularly insistent that she get one, as if he himself was working to some undisclosed timetable.

  So back to the Police Station Nora went. As she entered the lobby she determined not to leave without her permit. She waitied patiently in the designated area reading endless leaflets and posters about the dangers of drugs, guidelines for motorized boats and street crime. When she was finally shown through to an inner office Nora sighed as she noted that the smart young officer that came to attend her was unfamiliar to her, and she prepared to repeat her entire saga again.

  This young man, however, despite his abrupt manner, seemed to have more of a clue than those that had gone before. He seemed fairly well acquainted with her case. She was so taken aback by this that it was fully half an hour before she realized that she had seen him before.

  Years later she could remember exactly the moment when she realized this. He was looking through her documentation and seemed to spot a discrepancy. He looked from her birth certificate to her application for a work permit and frowned slightly.

  `Signorina.' He shuffled the papers again. `Here on your application you have named yourself Nora Manin.' He stumbled a little over the foreign name. `But on your certificate of birth from the Ospedali. Civili Riuniti here in Venice you are named as Leonora Angelina Manin. Can you explain this to me?'

  `It's an abbreviation. Because I was brought up in England my mother gave me the English version of my Italian name.'

  The officer nodded, his eyes on the forms. `I see. But you understand, I will need you to fill in this form again with your given name.' He stood and pulled a fresh buff form efficiently from a nearby filing cabinet.

  Nora attempted to keep her rage in check. `Can't I just correct this form?'

  In answer the young officer located his pen, unscrewed the cap and laid it definitely in front of her.

  Nora seethed as she filled in the form yet again, calculating that it must be the fourth time she had done so, each time because of a trifling error such as this. Even worse, this form had already been signed by Adelino, so now she must ask him to do it again, which meant at least one more trip back here. Nora silently cursed the form, cursed the city, cursed the officer with the clean fingernails who was such a jobsworth that he had made her jump through this hoop. Finally done, she watched him check it through meticulously, hating him.

  `Gene,' he said finally. He handed the form back. As he did so he said, with his first hint of friendliness, `You know, Leonora is a much better name than Nora. And it is the right name for a Venetian. See,' he pointed to the Lion of Saint Mark, which adorned the top of Nora's form. `The Lion. II Leone. Leonora.' He raised his eyes to hers for the first time, and she placed him at last - he was the man from the Pieta, the one that had glanced at her in the Vivaldi concert.

  She wondered if he had recognized her too, before she registered what he had said about her name. It struck her that it was the exact opposite of what Stephen had said to her - that Leonora was pretentious and affected. Here it was not. Here it fitted. Here Nora was the strange name, an English name, a cause for comment. She was becoming a Venetian. She looked at the man who had invited this epiphany, and smiled.

  He returned the smile, then instantly the professionalism was back. He looked down at the forms again. `You are still living at the Hotel Santo Stefano?'

  `Yes:

  The officer took a sharp intake of breath, making that peculiar sound that, in any language, denotes great expense.

  `I know I'm looking for a flat at the moment' Nora felt the urgency bett
er than anyone. The money from the sale of Belmont was fast disappearing, and a month in a hotel hadn't helped.

  The officer looked thoughtful. `I know someone who could help you. My cousin is an agent for a number of apartments in San Marco. If you want, I could show you some. Maybe at the weekend? I'm off on Saturday?'

  Nora felt doubtful, memories of the evening with Roberto and Luca fresh in her mind. But this man was a public official. And she did need a flat. She was determined however, to plan future meetings in the safety of daytime.

  `What about 3 o'clock?'

  He nodded.

  `Where?' she asked.

  He got up to open the door for her. `How about the Cantina Do Mori? The Two Moors? In San Polo?'

  Where else. A little known, ancient, steadfastly Venetian drinking place. To a tourist, he would have suggested Florian's. She felt flattered. `Perfect!

  He held out his hand as she made to leave, and as she shook it he said, `I'm Officer Alessandro Bardolino.'

  She smiled again. `At the Do Mori, then, Officer Bardolino.'

  And Leonora Manin walked out of the Questura, once again without her permesso di lavoro.

  CHAPTER 8

  La Bocca del Leone

  The first time Corradino fled for his life to Murano went like this.

  The Manins were a powerful and wealthy family. They accrued a significant fortune from their mercantile interests along the Black Sea to the Levant and Constantinople. By the mid-seventeenth century they had attained considerable political power to match.

  The head of the family, Corrado Manin, lived with his twin younger brothers Azolo and Ugolino, in a grand palazzo in the Campo Manin, a square named in the family's honour. Corrado took a wife, Maria Bovolo, a woman of good character and even better connections. They had a son, also called Corrado, but known as Corradino, the diminutive form which distinguished him from his father. The family adored each other and the house ran like the well appointed merchant ships that had made the Manin fortune. There were many servants, a French tutor for little Corradino, and the Manin men were free to pursue their interests in the political sphere.