Realms of Gold Read online

  So that we would never forget the anger of the goddess, she commanded us to paint on the walls of our sanctuary an image of her breasts bursting with fire. On the ceilings we painted giant birds' wings, birds like those that hover over the dead, picking the bones so clean that they can be smudged with red ochre and placed beneath the earth in the houses where our people live— above the bones of our ancestors of countless seasons past.

  One night there was so much smoke in the sanctuary my hair was flaked with ashes and reeked of burning wood....

  He smiles, shaking his head in disbelief—deep purple prose right out of a romanzo by Gabriele d'Annunzio. He puts down the magazine to reflect on Bianca Fiore. Strange that this florid, excessive writing comes from such an unprepossessing, seemingly asexual woman.

  Bianca

  July 13. Venice. 2007

  Going to bed that night, Bianca Fiore thinks about Giovanni. When she saw his name on the guest list, she wondered what connection he might have to the Evans clan—or to the bride’s family. He is the most attractive man she’s ever met. In her entire life. She felt the blood rush to her heart when she first heard his mellow, intelligent voice. She likes everything about him, his carriage, his manner of dress. His English is perfect.

  She orders herself not to seem too enthusiastic or ask too many questions as if she were Barbara Walters conducting an interview. Take it easy, Bianca, you might scare him away, she keeps reminding herself. And he's an archaeologist too!

  She wonders if she should tell him about her reason for going to France, sure that he’ll understand the importance of the Vix Krater. Never having seen such an enormous bronze vessel from antiquity, she’d stood before it transfixed. Since then, whenever she has the chance, she drives to Châtillon-sur-Seine to have another look. “Ah, it’s you again,” the girl at the ticket counter comments when she walks through the door. She’s never told anyone about her obsession with the Krater and the woman who was buried with it, not even Sergio Battisoni, her boss at the magazine. She worries that he might want her to write about its discovery in the tomb of la Dame de Vix, but she isn't ready to--at least while she's working for Sergio. Some day she would find enough time and have enough money to leave the magazine to do some serious research. She would determine how and why this great ceremonial vessel made its long journey from the south of Italy to a Celtic hilltop citadel overlooking the Seine, eventually to be buried in the grave of a woman in the sixth century B.C. .Who was this woman, she often wonders, and what did she have to do with the Krater? Maybe she could write a saga about the Krater and its journey to Vix, but where in the world would she begin? In Southern Italy? She's never been south of Rome. Sure--it's time to go!

  *

  She is out of bed at seven, has her cappuccino and cornetto brought up on a tray, and waits. Don’t get your hopes up, she warns herself. At the stroke of nine, church bells clang in unison with the ringing phone. She lets it ring several times before answering.

  “I was just about to give up,” Giovanni says,

  She thinks she detects a sense of relief in his voice.

  “Oh—it’s you!” she replies, intent on her new “I couldn’t care less” approach.

  “Good morning. Bianca. Andiamo! Let’s have a coffee at Quadri.”

  Glancing at her watch, she thinks she’d better hurry if she intends to be sitting at Quadri at the very same minute of the very same hour the great Campanile collapsed before Nina Evan’s eyes the morning of July 14th, 1902.

  “It will take me about ten minutes.” she says. Even though she's ready, she doesn’t want to appear too anxious.

  “I’ll be waiting downstairs.”

  Before leaving the room, she finds her great grandmother Nina’s gold earrings zipped in the hidden compartment at the bottom of her bulging hand-bag along with her diary that her mother has only recently discovered in a secret drawer of an old Venetian desk. She brought the earrings and the diary because she wants a part of Nina with her in Venice. Today is surely the day to wear the earrings, she thinks, as she clips them to her lobes.

  When she strolls out of the lift, Giovanni seems surprised to see her at precisely 9:15. And indeed, up until this moment, precision has not come easily to her.

  Slow down, slow down, Bianca. He will probably see haste as over eagerness on your part, she tells herself.

  Giovanni is wearing chinos and a fresh shirt that matches his Viking blue eyes. In the bright sunlight she can see that his hair is already on its way to gray. If she hadn’t known he was Italian, she surely would have mistaken him for a Brit or an American. She drops her key in the box at the downstairs desk. The receptionist looks surprised when he sees them going out together.

  Giovanni stops at a kiosk to buy the Gazzettino, the Venetian daily newspaper, glances at the headlines, rolls it up and jams it into his jacket pocket. As they continue their walk he is silent. Finally he inquires, “Tell me why you didn’t like Venice when you were a child.”

  “It was mid July, hot and humid. And they were draining the canals. My stomach couldn’t take the putrid odor. Because I kept throwing up, we moved out of the Gritti, and my parents booked us into the Quattro Lanterne over on the Lido. You must know the hotel?”

  “Of course. Our family cabana was on the Excelsior beach—next to the Quattro’s cabanas.”

  “I remember how I couldn’t wait to check out the water. I took off my shoes and socks and waded around. Airplanes were skywriting and tossing out white balloons—compliments of Bel Paese cheese. Children jumped in to catch them as they floated down.”

  He laughs. “I used to be a champion balloon catcher.”

  She natters on out of nervousness. “When I was a child I used to find white balloons behind the bushes in Central Park. Once, when I tried blowing on one, my mother snatched it away and told me what a nasty, filthy thing it was and never ever to pick up one again.” She turns her eyes away, suddenly embarrassed by what she has so naively told him. She rustles around in her bag and pulls out her wallet to show him the photograph of her great grandmother. They stop in the middle of Campo San Maurizio while he studies it. “Did your great grandmother always dress this way?”

  “Yes, in contrast to my late grandmother and my mother, typical country club matrons always dressed chicly and never without their three strands of cultured pearls. The day this photo was taken, Nina was wearing one of her full, ankle length Santa Fe skirts and her favorite gold earrings my grandmother told me she was hardly ever without. She left them to me. Yet I’ve never worn them until today because I’ve always been terrified of losing them.”

  She pulls her hair back from her face and unclips an earring. “Here, have a look. Made from a late Byzantine coin—eleventh century,” she says, handing it to him.

  He turns it over in his palm. “Beautiful. Mint condition too, and so skillfully mounted it hasn’t been ruined. Tell me more about your beloved great grandmother.”

  She clips the coin back on her ear. “Although she was a painter, Nina sold very little of her work. A gallery in Paris gave her an exhibit in the early Fifties. Most of her paintings were burned when a fire destroyed her old house in Connecticut.”

  “Do you own any?” he asks, with what seems a great deal of interest.

  “Yes—a tiny watercolor, about the size of a file card—of the Campanile. I wish it were with me to show you, but it’s in my apartment in New York. My mother still has a few of Nina's large paintings, so if you're ever in Baltimore and would like to see them I can ask Mom show them to you.”

  He is silent as they walk through Via XXII Marzo, past a window of Fortuny style pleated silk dresses, a spectrum of colors from whiter than white to an intense magenta, dark as blood. He waits patiently as she checks out the window display. From the corner of her eye she catches a glimpse of Frette, the luxury linen shop. Whenever she walks down Madison Avenue past Frette, she stops to look in the window at beds made up with opulent linens, 100% Egyptian cotton percale sheets coole
r, smoother than the finest silk, bordered with sea foam blue or peach embroidery. Or beds heaped with lace-trimmed, weightless goose down pillows and rolls to tuck behind pampered necks. She is well aware that her aging foam rubber pillow crumbles like stale bread whenever she squishes it too hard, that she sleeps between slick, synthetic-smelling mostly polyester sheets that Luisa, her helper, buys for her on Houston Street, always trying to save Bianca’s money.

  Why, she ponders now, is there such a vast chasm between the way she lives and the way she yearns to live, between the way she looks and the way she longs to look?

  Since the skies are blue, bright and cloudless, Quadri’s tables and chairs are already set up for the usual weekend throngs, most of whom can’t afford to spend the eight Euros for a cup of coffee. Tourists are scattering birdseed to already overfed pigeons waddling and pecking in the Piazza. Although it is early in the day, guano stuck with feathers is spattered all around the pavimento. Her stomach does a turn.

  Giovanni chooses the table. When they sit down, she turns her chair sideways so she’ll have a good view of the Campanile, as well as of the bell-striking Moors over the entrance to the Merceria, the narrow shopping street that angles its way toward the Rialto Bridge. She surreptitiously checks both ears to make sure her earrings are still there.

  When she was fourteen, her grandmother had given her Nina’s bracelet of twisted gold chains, linked with seed pearls and dark blue enameled cylinder beads. She’d lost the bracelet a few days later and still reproaches herself for it.

  The waiter takes their order for cappuccinos. She hopes Giovanni hasn’t noticed that she keeps glancing nervously at her watch. By now it is almost 9:30 and she's suddenly sorry she hasn’t come here alone. Now she’ll have to share what should be a private moment with a stranger, however appealing, however interesting, and even with a family connection to Nina.

  "I hope you'll forgive me if I read a few pages from Nina's Venetian journal. while we sit here. "

  "Go right ahead. I have my newspaper, and besides, in a way, I feel as though Nina is part of my family history because she was my great-grandmother's friend,"

  "Of course--you have the photo you're going to show me." She fumbles around in her shoulder bag for the diary, sets it on the table and wonders what he's thinking as he watches her stroking its soft leather. She turns to the entry marked, Venice, 1902, excuses herself and begins to read.

  Venice, the 11th of July, 1902, my first visit to Venice

  After a week in Venice, I, Nina Evans, who have always preferred painting to writing—the eye before the word— intend from this day on to keep a diary of my most private thoughts. Ever since Father passed away last year, Mama has been sad, yet at least here in Venice she seems more cheerful. But how miserable I have been, breathing in the evil stench seething up from dark canals. This morning as I looked out from my balcony across to Ca’ Rezzonico, the palace where my favorite poet Mr. Browning once lived, I saw a filthy white wig tied with black ribbon afloat amidst the garbage. I was glad no one heard me gag.

  On July the 9th we boarded the Orient Express in Paris and arrived for the Feast of the Redentore, just before the yearly spectacle Mama was determined not to miss. As we neared Venice, a storm blew in from the Alps, hailstones and rain pelting the windows of our compartment, nature’s fitting welcome to this wet, dank place. When we stepped off the train at Santa Lucia Station, we were met by the Countess Bona Dea’s major domo, all done up in full livery with gold and crimson epaulettes. I could tell that Mama was impressed. The Countess is her old school friend, Margaret Norville, who has a pretty daughter, my own age. We have already become friends.

  At last, when the storm passed, surly porters, babbling in baffling Italian (the likes of which I had never heard at school), escorted us to the Countess’ gondola. We drew the curtains of the felze to keep the mist from our clothes and hair and to give us privacy, two women traveling alone. The ancient Palazzo Bona Dea, where we are staying, leans over the Grand Canal across from Palazzo Barbaro, owned by the Curtis family, old friends of Father’s. On arrival we found their gilt-edged calling cards. Mama fairly swooned with delight because Mrs. Curtis has invited us to dinner with Mr. Henry James, the famous writer.

  Bianca smiles inwardly. Even though she never knew her, she sometimes feels she loves her great-grandmother even more than her grandmother. Maybe even more than her mother. She turns the page.

  July 12, 1902

  How homesick I am for my cozy dormer bedroom, with its wisteria vine wallpaper and broderie anglaise curtains crisscrossed against shiny windowpanes. On the Fourth of July, Father’s family must have gathered for the annual clambake. I remember the vast lawns where I played croquet in my bare feet. Now, as I wriggle my toes, I can almost feel the stubby blades of grass tickling my soles. Here, behind the palazzo, there is a shady garden where grass grows rank and harbors furry black spiders and bugs that suck my blood, where lizards dart in and out of stone crevices so fast I wonder if I have really seen them.

  Mama scolds me every day for not yet unpacking my watercolors and brushes. I have yet to understand why I do not, as she does, find Venice the most beautiful and challenging of cities to paint. With its rose-copper streaked sky and rare nimbus light that sends poets into rapture, its imposing monuments and decayed palaces, Venice should be the joy of every painter. Strangely, for me it is not.

  Bianca looks up to find Giovanni gazing at her intensely. She blushed. "I'm being terribly rude," she says.

  "No, you warned me. I'm just admiring your intensity. Please continue."

  She turned back to her great-grandmother's journal.

  Same day after dinner

  This evening I wrapped my waist in a wide sky blue ribbon, then tied it into a big butterfly bow—not exactly a bustle, but at least a bit of commotion behind me as we made our evening stroll. I feel that in certain ways Mama does not like to see me growing up.

  Tonight we dined on the terrace of the Hotel Monaco e Canal Grande with the Countess Norville and the writer Gabriele d'Annunzio and his friend the actress, Signora Eleanora Duse. Duse’s eyes have purplish crescent moons beneath them. Her voice is soft and low. Every now and then she would toss her head back and laugh at Signor d'Annunzio’s witty remarks. But his eyes were always trying to pin mine to his. He made me so uncomfortable I could not enjoy the granzeola, spider crab picked out and served in its own round pink shell.

  During dinner my mind wandered off as I listened to the harsh cries of gondolieri, the high tides lapping the deck. As I gazed across at the church, Santa Maria della Salute, I wondered how many hundreds of thousands of wood piles have been driven deep into the silt to support what looks to me like a giant wedding cake.

  July13, 1902

  This morning as Mama and I walked across toward the Hotel Danieli to meet the ladies from the Towson Reading Club who will discuss The Flame of Life, Signor d'Annunzio’s scandalous new novel about Venice, I overheard the Countess Norville telling Mama that the book is about Mr. d'Annunzio and Miss Duse.

  At last I feel normal. This afternoon we took tea at Florian’s. While listening to arias from Rossini and Verdi, I opened my box of watercolors, unfolded my little easel and began to paint the tall brick Campanile that seems to me a sword thrusting high into the sky. Mama says my painting is charming, rather in the style of Mr.Childe Hassam, Grandfather’s friend. Tomorrow I shall certainly return to paint the four horses above the portals..

  July14, 1902

  After 8 o’clock Mass at San Marco. Another hot and humid day. I sit here writing. It is such a muggy morning, even my lightest batiste frock weighs heavy .

  Now I sit at Quadri, writing and sipping strong black coffee with lots of sugar, for the first time enjoying the bitter beneath the sweet. Meanwhile, Mama is shopping in the Arcades, most likely purchasing embroidered sheets and lace tablecloths for my trousseau. How I wish that I could convince her that, at sixteen soon to be seventeen, I have no interest in marriage. But
she persists in ordering fine linens wherever we go. If this makes her happy, then I am too.

  Mama is taking so much time shopping. Pennants droop on the tall bronze flagpoles in front of Saint Mark’s. There is not even the slightest breeze to unfurl them. I wait for the bronze Moor’s hammer to strike the quarter hour. Now I shall put down my pen to play my favorite game. Supposing.

  Bianca turns at least five blank pages before the writing continues.

  Vienna,

  September 14, 1902

  The kind lady doctor asks me to re-read my diary. Then she asks me to try my hardest to remember what happened that day.

  I seem to recall that I began, at that first strike of the hammer, to play my favorite game, Supposing.

  Supposing, I imagined, that the four bronze horses poised above the front portal were to gallop off into the sky—alighting on the clock tower where the Moor, hammer in hand, strikes the time on the massive bell. Supposing...the horses circle Saint Mark’s golden domes, flying over the flagpoles, higher, higher until they soar into the heavens circling the tall bell tower.

  I remember staring at the Campanile, staring hard. Then, right before my eyes, I saw it curve like a huge red snake, as bricks, thousands of bricks, collapsed in clouds of pink dust. I can still hear the Campanile’s bellow, the death cry of a huge, wounded dragon. What hadI done to it?

  I must have fainted. When I woke up, a man stood over me. Even though it was a warm July day, he wore a black silk cape, and, on his head, a wide-brimmed black slouch hat. But the strangest thing about him was that he had neither eyebrows nor lashes.

  Vienna,

  September 15 ,1902

  This morning my kind doctor advised me to take up my brushes again. “Paint the Campanile as you remember it after it collapsed on July 14, 1902, at exactly nine-fifty two in the morning,” she urged me.