‘The following week I left for Ravenna where I had some studies to make for a book I was writing and where I stayed two months. I heard nothing from my host, but I got a letter from his sister to say that he was ill with a wasting disease which the doctors could not diagnose and that the family was much worried because he insisted on going out at night in his gondola on journeys of which he would not speak but from which he returned utterly exhausted. I did not know what to reply to this.
‘From Ravenna, I went down to Greece and it was not until the following autumn that I returned. I had sent a card to Negroponte saying I hoped to stay with him, but had no reply. As I came down the Grand Canal a funeral was setting off in choppy water, by twilight, with the terrible plumes and emblems of death. I saw that they were coming from the Negroponte Palazzo. I landed and ran to the gates just as the last gondola in the procession was filling up with mourners and priests. I recognized the doctor and joined him in the boat, and as we rowed stiffly across the canal, dashed with spray and blinking at the stabs of lightning, he told me what he knew. Negroponte had died the day before. When they came to lay out the body, they found the bites: perhaps of some tropical insect? The doctor was vague. “The only such bites I have seen” he said, “were during the plague of Naples when the rats had been at the bodies. They were so bad we had to dust him down with talcum powder before we could let his sister see the body.”
Pursewarden took a long sip from his glass and went on wickedly. ‘The story does not end there; for I should tell you how I tried to avenge him, and went myself at night to the Bridge of the Footpads — where according to the gondolier this woman always waited in the shadow…. But it is getting late, and anyway, I haven’t made up the rest of the story as yet.’
There was a good deal of laughter and Athena gave a well-bred shudder, drawing her shawl across her shoulders. Narouz had been listening open-mouthed, with reeling senses, to this recital: he was spellbound. ‘But’ he stammered ‘is all this true?’ Fresh laughter greeted his question.
‘Of course it’s true’ said Pursewarden severely, and added: ‘I have never been in Venice in my life.’
And he rose, for it was time for them to be going, and while the impassive black servants waited they put on the velveteen capes and adjusted their masks like the actors they were, comparing their identical reflections as they stood side by side in the two swollen mirrors among the palms. Giggles from Pierre and sallies of wit from Toto de Brunel; and so they stepped laughing into the clear night air, the inquisitors of pleasure and pain, the Alexandrians….
The cars engulfed them while the solicitous domestics and chauffeurs tucked them in, carefully as bales of precious merchandise or spices, tenderly as flowers. ‘I feel fragile’ squeaked Toto at these attentions. ‘This side up with care, eh? Which side up, I ask myself?’ He must have been the only person in the city not to know the answer to his own question.
When they had started, Justine leaned forward in the car and plucked his sleeve. ‘I want to whisper’ she said hoarsely though there was little need for Nessim and Narouz were discussing something in harsh tones (Narouz’ voice with the characteristic boyish break in it) and Athena was squibbling to Pierre like a flute. ‘Toto … listen. One great service tonight, if you will. I have put a chalk-mark on your sleeve, here, at the back. Later on in the evening, I want to give you my ring to wear. Shh. I want to disappear for an hour or so on my own. Hush … don’t giggle.’ But there were squeaks from the velvet hood. ‘You will have adventures in my name, dear Toto, while I am gone. Do you agree?’
He threw back his cape to show a delighted face, dancing eyes and that grim little procurer’s smile. ‘Of course’ he whispered back, enraptured by the idea and full of admiration. The featureless hood at his side from which the voice of Justine had issued like an oracle glowed with a sort of death’s-head beauty of its own, nodding at him in the light from the passing street-lamps. The conversation and laughter around them sealed them in a conspiracy of private silence. ‘Do you agree?’ she said.
‘Darling, of course.’
The two masked men in the front seats of the car might have been abbots of some medieval monastery, discussing theological niceties. Athena, consumed by her own voice, still babbled away to Pierre. ‘But of course.’
Justine took his arm and turned back the sleeve to show him the chalk-mark she had made. ‘I count on you’ she said, with some of the hoarse imperiousness of her speaking-voice, yet still in a whisper. ‘Don’t let me down!’ He took her hand and raised it to his Cupid’s lips, kissing the ring from the dead finger of the Byzantine youth as one might kiss the holy picture which had performed a miracle long desired; he was to be turned from a man into a woman. Then he laughed and cried: ‘And my indiscretions will be on your head. You will spend the rest of your days….’
‘Hush.’
‘What is all this?’ cried Athena Trasha, scenting a joke or a scandal worth repetition. ‘What indiscretions?’
‘My own’ cried Toto triumphantly into the darkness. ‘My very own.’ But Justine lay back in the dark car impassively hooded, and did not speak. ‘I can’t wait to get there’ said Athena, and turned back to Pierre. As the car turned into the gate of the Cervoni house, the light caught the intaglio, throwing into relief (colour of burnt milk) a Pan raping a goat, his hands grasping its horns, his head thrown back in ecstasy. ‘Don’t forget’ Justine said once more, for the last time, allowing him to maul her hand with gratitude for such a wonderful idea. ‘Don’t forget’ allowing her ringed fingers to lie in his, cool and unfeeling as a cow which allows itself to be milked. ‘Only tell me all the interesting conversations you have, won’t you?’ He could only mutter ‘Darling, darling, darling’ as he kissed the ring with the ovarian passion of the sexually dispossessed.
Almost at once, like the Gulf Stream breaking up an iceberg with its warm currents, dispersing it, their party disintegrated as it reached the ballroom and merged with the crowd. Abruptly Athena was dragged screaming into the heart of the press by a giant domino who gobbled and roared incomprehensible blasphemies in his hood. Nessim, Narouz, Pierre, they suddenly found themselves turned to ciphers, expelled into a formless world of adventitious meetings, mask to dark mask, like a new form of insect life. Toto’s chalk-mark gave him a few fugitive moments of identity as he was borne away like a cork on a stream, and Justine’s ring as well (for which I myself was hunting all that evening in vain).
But everything now settled into the mindless chaotic dance-figures of the black jazz supported only by the grinding drums and saxophones, the voices. The spirits of the darkness had taken over you’d think, disinheriting the daylight hearts and minds of the maskers, plunging them ever deeper into the loneliness of their own irrecoverable identities, setting free the polymorphous desires of the city. The tide washed them up now onto the swampy littorals of their own personalities — symbols of Alexandria, a dead brackish lake surrounded by the silent, unjudging, wide-eyed desert which stretches away into Africa under a dead moon.
Locked in our masks now we prowled about despairingly among the company, hunting from room to room, from floor to lighted floor of the great house, for an identifiable object to direct our love: a rose pinned to a sleeve, a ring, a scarf, a coloured bead. Something, anything, to discover our lovers by. The hoods and masks were like the outward symbols of our own secret minds as we walked about — as single-minded and as dispossessed as the desert fathers hunting for their God. And slowly but with irresistible momentum the great carnival ball gathered pace around us. Here and there, like patches of meaning in an obscure text, one touched upon a familiar identity: a bullfighter drinking whisky in a corridor greeted one in the lisping accents of Tony Umbada, or Pozzo di Borgo unmasked for an instant to identify himself to his trembling wife. Outside in the darkness on the grass by the lily pond sat Amaril, also trembling and waiting. He did not dare to remain unmasked lest the sight of his face might disgust or disappoint her, should she return this year to the promised assignation. If one falls in love with a mask when one is masked oneself … which of you will first have the courage to raise it? Perhaps such lovers would go through life together, remaining masked? (Racing thoughts in Amaru’s sentimental brain…. Love rejoices in self- torture.)
An expressive washerwoman dressed in a familiar picture-hat and recognizable boots (Pombal, as ever was), had pinned a meagre-looking Roman centurion to a corner of the mantelpiece and was cursing him in a parrot-voice. I caught the word ‘
