The Girl From Venice Read online

  “When it comes to film versus the theater, yes, I guess I am,” she admitted. “Do you have a photograph of her?” Cenzo let her see a studio picture and Giulia suddenly sounded very young. “I don’t believe it,” she said.

  “She was beautiful,” Cenzo said. “She was wasted in Pellestrina.”

  “And she got to Milan? How did anyone discover her out here?”

  “It happens. Strange things happen to a woman who is truly beautiful.”

  “Like Beauty and the Beast. What was your wife’s name?”

  “Gina.”

  “How did anyone discover her? Was it a movie agent?”

  “As I said, someone who happened to be in Pellestrina.”

  “How does anyone happen to visit Pellestrina?”

  “Someone with family here.”

  “Like a brother?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You said there were three putti di mare. Three brothers. The younger one died, there’s you, and there must have been an older brother.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did your wife leave you for your older brother?” She had begun in jest but, midway, saw that she had stumbled on the truth.

  “I think that’s enough history for today,” Cenzo said.

  “What was his name?”

  “Giorgio.”

  “Giorgio Vianello, the actor? He was one of my mother’s favorites. Was he in love with your wife?”

  “You make them sound like a story from a romance magazine.”

  “That’s what it sounds like.”

  All of which made Cenzo the butt of the joke. “So, if I was the Beast and Gina was Beauty, what did that make Giorgio?”

  “Prince Charming.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” He lit a cigarette. “Okay, it’s my turn. Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “Just me. Father made a joke out of it. He called me his ‘fa­vorite.’”

  “I can see why. So, while the SS were rounding up all the Jews in the hospital, you hid in the laundry. Did they search for you?”

  “Of course. I told you, they had a list of names.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  “I worked my way down to the water and swam along the marsh.”

  “You’re a good swimmer.”

  “We used to have a summer house on a lake in the mountains.”

  “So you swam from San Clemente.”

  “Until I found you.”

  “And pretended to be dead. That didn’t show much trust.”

  “I don’t trust anyone.”

  “That’s wise.”

  The sky reverberated as a formation of Allied bombers headed up the coast. Resistance from German fighter planes had virtually disappeared, but there would be ack-ack bursting like night-blooming flowers.

  She had dark edges and angles that would probably scare off the average boy. Her eyes had a forbidding quality that was unnerving, and when he thought how she recited Byron’s “bubbling groan, / Without a grave,” he also had to consider the possibility that she had a sense of humor.

  Giulia asked, “Were you married a long time?”

  “Four months. I think it was longer for her than for me. She needed more than I could give her. You can’t blame her, not when she could become a movie star.”

  “And Giorgio helped her?”

  “He had connections.” That should have been explanation enough. He had started the conversation as a means of getting the girl to talk. Now the conversation had turned around. “Giorgio was a hero. When he was a boy, he was picked out of an aquacade by Mussolini himself and sent for special training. He learned to fly and to operate a one-man submarine. Once a year he would come by Pellestrina to have his picture taken and demonstrate that he had risen the common folk. He sank a British warship with a limpet mine, you know, all by himself. They made a film about it, The Lion of Tripoli. The movie ended in a homecoming scene with all the pretty girls in Pellestrina lined up on the dock to cheer as he landed his seaplane. Gina shouldn’t have been in the shot, because she was married, but there weren’t so many pretty girls in Pellestrina. Giorgio noticed her. I was myself flattered when he agreed to have dinner at our house. My mother was transported. Giorgio paid a lot of attention to Gina, but I thought that was the way movie people were. Outgoing, laughing all the time. Apparently, in the midst of that, they fell in love just like in the movies. He had the studio invite her to Turin for a screen test and a week after that I got a telegram saying she wasn’t coming back. She started making one film and then she was dead.”

  “And?”

  “I told you. A month later she was making a film with Giorgio in Milan when a bomb came through the roof.”

  “Were you happy?”

  “Not really.”

  Giulia insisted, “But you must have hated her.”

  “No.”

  “You would have taken her back?”

  “In an instant.”

  Giulia studied him. “You’re crazy. When I hate, I hate for good. So, what am I supposed to do now?” She set her jaw. “Hide in the sails like a putta di mare?”

  “If you want to.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  “Do you really want to know the truth about the putti—why we slept in the sails?”

  “Why?”

  “To avoid the cockroaches. Now you know.”

  7

  Cenzo’s mother and Celestina came after him with shawls flying like black hens running on the dock.

  “Please,” his mother said. “Don’t make any trouble.”

  “Do as your mother tells you,” Celestina said.

  “Tells me what?”

  “Nothing.” His mother sniffed as they passed women tatting lace. Lacemaking, knotting and re-knotting string into intricate patterns, was an art that demanded gossip. Pellestrina was a small pond and the slightest scandal created ripples. Sofia Vianello was accustomed to being a leader of idle speculation, not its object. At least Giulia was in the shack and out of the way.

  “Be good,” she begged Cenzo.

  “I am nothing if not good.” He had only come to the dock to replace his broken oar, but his sail was an announcement that he was coming ashore. When they reached the house, his mother ushered everyone into the kitchen and sat them around the table under a row of bronze pots that hung from the beams. Whatever his mother was up to, he wished she would do it quickly.

  He knew as soon as he heard footsteps on the stairs. They were highly polished footsteps, Cenzo thought. Giorgio Vianello was a man constructed of expensive parts: an English suit, a French pomade, a signet ring that suggested a noble family, white teeth, and an Errol Flynn mustache. He had not so much lost his Pellestrina accent as traded it for one more vague and elegant. People compared him to Clark Gable. In fact, he was not much of an actor, but he was a hero and he usually played a version of himself: a submarine commander, a fighter pilot, a wounded officer in love with a beautiful nurse. Prince Charming, as Giulia had said.

  “What are you doing here?” Cenzo asked.

  “Visiting my family,” Giorgio said.

  “Now that you’ve visited, you can go.”

  Sofia Vianello put four glasses and a bottle of wine on the table. “Sit, sit. Giorgio brought this good wine. It’s not every day I see both living sons.”

  Giorgio pulled out a chair for Celestina, who nearly swooned at the courtesy.

  “I’m not going to drink with him,” Cenzo said.

  “Suit yourself,” Giorgio said. “I’m drinking to my mother.”

  “Please.” Sofia filled the glasses.

  Cenzo would have gone, but he didn’t want it said he had been chased from his own home. Besides, he wanted to gather more clothing for Giulia. Although he would not drin
k any of Giorgio’s wine, he sat.

  “So, what are you now, a general at least?”

  “I’m sure he is,” Sofia said. “Look at him. They say Il Duce asks his advice about everything.

  “Mama, Il Duce has yet to ask my advice.”

  “Well, he should. Things would be going a lot better. Your brother Hugo would still be with us.”

  “To Hugo.” Giorgio raised his glass.

  Cenzo found himself forced to drink and Giorgio smiled as if he had taught a child a basic move in chess.

  “So, are you a general?” Cenzo asked.

  “No, I’m in the Propaganda Ministry.”

  “I would think that there wouldn’t be much propaganda at the end of a war.”

  “The opposite. There is more all the time.”

  “Why is that?”

  “It’s over.”

  “Did we win?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  That was the last thing Cenzo expected to hear from his brother.

  “The war is over and we lost?”

  “We’re down to our last few maniacs. Hitler has a new secret weapon. He always has a new secret weapon. He had rockets and jets but the other side has the Red Army.”

  “Has anyone told Il Duce?”

  “The man with the short straw.”

  “Who is that?”

  “No one will say.”

  “Will anything happen to you?” Celestina asked.

  “No. I was just a soldier following orders and later I was merely an actor reading a script. They’re not going to do anything to me.”

  Cenzo hoped not. He wanted the pleasure of personally strangling his brother.

  “If the war is almost over, why are the Germans still rounding up Jews?”

  “I told you, they’re maniacs.”

  “The SS is raiding hospitals. It makes no sense,” Cenzo said.

  “What do you care?”

  “Why are you here, really? It’s a little late to become a fisherman.”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “I’m dying to hear.”

  Giorgio refilled the glasses. “The war is over, or as good as, and we have to look towards the future. We’re going to need capable people to put Italy together again. Good, honest people untainted by the past.”

  “Do you know anyone like that?” Cenzo asked.

  “Oh, yes. You’d be surprised.”

  “In Venice?” Celestina was rapt.

  “Venice in particular.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m getting ahead of myself. All I can say is that, when the dust is settled, competent people will take over, us or the Reds.”

  “The communists?” Sofia asked.

  “I’m afraid so. We can only hope that true patriots see the opportunity and step forward.”

  “So now this is an opportunity,” Cenzo said.

  “Seen in the right light.”

  “You have always managed to do that.” Cenzo stood. “Well, I have to go now. Should I tell everyone that you have declared the war lost?”

  “I would deny it. I would never put our mother in such an embarrassing position.”

  “Spoken like a diplomat.”

  “Good to see you too,” Giorgio said.

  Cenzo resisted the temptation to ball his hand into a fist and hit Giorgio in the face. Perhaps Giorgio could win a fight—Prince Charming usually did—but Cenzo would have the satisfaction of forever altering Giorgio’s smile. That they could have a polite conversation and never utter Gina’s name was maddening, especially the way his mother was so prim a guarantor of good behavior and the way Celestina played her role as if she were in a Hollywood melodrama.

  “Cenzo,” Giorgio said, “I miss Gina as much as you do.”

  Cenzo left before he lost control. Giorgio had played his hand well. What claim did a husband have compared to the passion of a lover?

  • • •

  While Cenzo was gone, Giulia examined the shack. She was curious. When it came to literature or the arts he seemed virtually uneducated. But when it came to the sea, he was an encyclopedia. For her, the Lido was a playground of cabanas and amusement parks, of celebrities and socialites. The world of fishermen could have been invisible. She was beginning to realize that, for Cenzo, her world did not exist, while the lagoon teemed with life that she never had been aware of.

  “Such a precocious child,” had been the description that followed Giulia. “Such a handsome family.” All the Silbers were admired. Silber parties were soirees where wit flowed like champagne, composers entertained at the piano and tables glittered with silver, crystal, and candlelight. Adèle Silber wore Schiaparelli and Chanel and Vittorio Silber dressed like a financier in dark, double-breasted suits. It was ridiculous to compare Cenzo to them, yet here their daughter was in clothes most suitable for fishing.

  Up to the end, her father said that Italy was not another Poland or Hungary or Ukraine or France, because Italian Jews were Italians first. He was sure that Mussolini would stand up to Hitler and was humiliated when Mussolini capitulated to the Führer and began rounding up the Jews.

  Like Rapunzel, Giulia whiled away the time. She opened the two wooden lockers Cenzo had warned her not to touch. Each had a hasp but no lock. Why would they? she thought. He probably had nothing to hide. Inside the first box were ordinary watercolor sketches of sunsets, seascapes, fishing boats, and, defter than she expected, a dramatically beautiful woman with dark-blond hair.

  The second box had a jar of brushes, tubes of oil paint, turpentine, a metal lid used as a palette, and a painted scene of a fishing boat at sea. In the picture an American fighter plane was strafing the boat with fiery bullets. Two fishermen were drowning while another knelt on deck and prayed to a glowing vision of a Madonna. Giulia could tell the ship was the Fatima by the three cherubs on its sail. She studied the picture as if it chronicled a genuine miracle. The plane swooped down like the fury of God. The drowning man rolled his eyes. The Madonna watched with the equanimity of a doll.

  Sailing back to the shack, Cenzo wondered who was worse, him or Giorgio? And why did he feel that he, not Giorgio, was the Prodigal Son? He tied the Fatima to the shack’s ladder and was halfway in the door when he saw Giulia sitting cross-legged on the floor. She held shears and was surrounded by thick black clippings of hair.

  “What have you done?” he asked.

  She offered a smile. “I’m a fisherman.”

  “A what?”

  “A fisherman. Nobody’s going to see me, but if they do, this way they’ll think I’m a boy.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You know nothing about fishing.”

  “But I can look the part.”

  He walked around her. She had cropped her hair into a shaggy nightmare.

  “You wouldn’t fool a blind man.”

  “I thought it would help.”

  “You were wrong.”

  Her smile collapsed.

  “Did it occur to you that’s what they do to women who collaborate?” he asked. “That’s what you look like, a little collaborator. How is that going to help? If you’re so smart, think.”

  She curled up where she sat and choked back fury; he felt the constriction in his own throat. Giulia went down to the Fatima and Cenzo knew that if there had been any other place to go, she would have disappeared. Too late, it occurred to him that, for a proud girl, her hair was not a sacrifice lightly dismissed. A “Beast” she had called him. She was right, that’s what he was. He found her sitting in the stern, her gaze fixed in the direction of Venice. Other fishing boats passed by in the dark, intent on being first to market.

  “I wish my father were here,” she said.

  “I wish so too. He would tell you the lagoon is wider than you think.”

  “You’re
heartless. I can see why your wife left you.”

  He agreed. He hadn’t given her a chance. Besides, constant quarreling was exhausting. It wasn’t his picture of himself. He was ashamed.

  “I apologize. I’m sorry for what I said about your hair.”

  “It was a stupid idea.”

  “No, it was a clever idea. I was in a foul mood and I took it out on you.”

  “You can keep your apologies. I don’t want them.”

  “I was stupid.”

  “Tu es encore un ingrat et un fou.”

  “That sounds right.”

  “As soon as it’s light, I want you to leave me off,” she said.

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “I never want to eat fish again in my life.”

  “I understand.”

  “You’re very agreeable all of a sudden.”

  “The life of a fisherman is not for everyone.” Cenzo leaned against the gunwales to see the stars glimmer and shine. “Do you know the constellations?”

  “I studied them.”

  “That’s good, because you’ll never be lost at night if you know your constellations. That’s important at sea. Stars can be guardian angels looking out for you.”

  “You’re superstitious.”

  “All fishermen are superstitious. We need all the help we can get.”

  She hesitated. “I have a confession to make. I saw a painting in the locker you said not to look in. It was of a fisherman drowning. Was that your brother Hugo?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you paint that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he didn’t just drown, he was killed by American planes?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Do you hate them?”

  He considered the question. “When you switch sides in the middle of the war, it gets very confusing.”

  “It’s as if you have two versions of the truth?”

  “Just in case.”

  “I was serious about leaving. I can’t hide out in your shack forever.”

  “You could help around the boat. Everyone knows I’m short a crewman.” He ran his hand over her head. Although her hair looked spiky, it was as soft as silk. “I’ll introduce you to some fish.”