pace with the motorized hearse that led them. In front, the chief mourners stood rigidly in the thickening rain, all dressed in heavy black coats. Among rows of black umbrellas, one stood out, bright red, like an obscene gesture. Dark plumes hung bedraggled above the hearse, drenched in sea-spray and drizzle.
They hung back until the mourners had landed. Patrick had come full circle. It would not have surprised him to have recognized the faces in the procession, or to have seen one of them beckon to him, summoning him to the graveside.
The mourners wound their lugubrious way past tall, dark cypresses and frowning monuments of granite and marble. The bier was draped in black and gold and topped with winter flowers. At the front of the procession, a tall priest walked with his head bent, reading prayers from a rain-drenched book.
Patrick told the driver to wait and stepped off onto the landing-stage. He passed directly through the cloister bordering the church that stands guard over the entrance. Death began here, in the form of huge stone plaques, lovingly inscribed and less lovingly covered in graffiti.
The cemetery itself was carefully laid out. It dated from the end of the eighteenth century, when Napoleon had decreed that the dead of Venice be brought here for burial. It was a small city, an intricate maze of streets and lanes and passageways. Rain-sleek domes and gabled roofs and the pinnacles of dark mausoleums formed a jagged line against a slate-grey sky. Tall tombs of white Carrara marble towered over the modest resting-places of the middle-classes and the pitiful headstones of the poor. Gates of wrought iron led up to heavy, studded doors. But no one passed in or out, and there were no windows anywhere.
In the streets, no one played or laughed or sang. Here and there, visitors paused to read the inscription on a monument or bent to lay flowers against a gravestone. Patrick could not remember exactly where the Contarinis had built their family vault. He walked up and down the rain-soaked paths, growing more confused with every turn he took. The rain fell in a steady stream. Everywhere he turned, another vista of silent tombs opened before him. The blank faces of angels met his gaze, and Virgins of white marble, and Christ crucified in stone. He felt cold. Bitterly cold.
It took him a miserable hour, trudging from mausoleum to mausoleum, before he found the tomb. He turned a bend and saw it looming out of the rain at the end of a long pathway: a grey stone monument in the Roman style, flanked by obelisks and guarded by gaunt sphinxes with the faces of women.
As he approached more closely, he noticed that it had grown shabby from neglect. The fence surrounding it had rusted and fallen in places. Weeds grew where there had been grass. The steps leading to the door were cracked and overgrown. Perhaps he had made a mistake after all. But the family name was still there, carved in tall letters above the lintel:
CONTARINI.
He felt alone and terribly afraid. Involuntarily, he looked over his shoulder, back along the cypress-bordered path that led to the tomb. No one was there. A shiver ran through him. A regiment of ghosts had gathered round and were pressing against him, inhaling his breath, kissing his lips, licking his flesh for warmth. And on the dank, decaying steps Francesca’s ghost stood waiting with pale eyes.
He shook his head and was alone again. Nervously, he stepped up to the gate. It would not yield to his efforts: a heavy, rusted padlock held it solidly shut. He gave up and walked along the fence to a spot where several bars had broken away. Squeezing through, he found himself on spongy ground, among grasses that rose to his knees. As he approached the steps, his chest felt tight and his breathing grew thick and hampered.
Dio ha chiamato a se la nostra sorella Francesca...
He remembered the priest at Francesca’s funeral, assuring the mourners of everlasting life. They had gathered round the tomb, in no particular order, while the priest stood on the steps, facing her coffin, proclaiming the resurrection of the flesh in a house of bones.
Ma Cristo, primogenito di coloro che risorgono, trasformera...
Standing alone and unconsoled, waiting for her brothers to carry her into the tomb, Patrick had felt his faith melt away like mist fading across the lagoon. Afterwards, he had entered the mausoleum to join the line of friends and relatives filing slowly past the niche in which she had been placed. He had wanted to see her again, but the coffin had been firmly closed. The slab bearing her name and the dates of her birth and death was already in position. He had touched it and bent to kiss it when someone jostled him from behind and he stumbled forward, leaving her forever.
That night, her father had summoned him to his study and offered him money. At the time he had thought it simply a pay-off, a douceur like that paid to an awkward and undesirable suitor to see him out of a favourite daughter’s life. But Alessandro Contarini’s daughter was dead. There had been nothing crass or indelicate about the offer or the manner in which it was made: only arrivistes are clumsy in such matters. The wealth of the Contarinis went back centuries and their nobility even further.
‘Patrick, per favore, non fare l’orgoglioso. Please, Patrick, try not to be so proud. Accept my offer. You need a vacation, time to be by yourself, time to recover from your loss.’
The count’s words had been thoughtful, almost kind, but Patrick had sensed behind them the steeli-ness of an ultimatum. He refused the money, but left the next day. It had only been after his return to Ireland that he realized for the first time that he had seen none of Francesca’s family shed a tear during the whole of his short visit. He had never contacted them again, nor they him.
He thought the heavy door might be locked like the gate, but with a little effort it swung partly open. The door was made of cypress wood and set with panels of heavy bronze portraying scenes of classical and Christian life. Grave figures processed with palm branches or sacrificed at flower-decked altars. Both men and women were dressed in flowing Roman garments, pulled over their heads and reaching to their feet. High up, Adam and Eve crouched naked and guilty beneath the Tree of Life. Moses led the
Children of Israel out of Egypt. Abraham laid his only son on a high altar, bound as a sacrifice.
In another panel, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. And in the centre a group of weeping disciples laid the body of their crucified Lord in the tomb. It did not immediately strike Patrick that there was something very strange about that scene.
He had bought a small flashlight in a shop on the Merceria before looking for the water-taxi. Switching it on, he squeezed through the half-open doorway.
He found himself in a vast, unlit chamber hung with cobwebs. The beam of the flashlight swept steadily over the walls. Behind marble slabs, generations of Contarinis slept. In one corner, empty niches waited for their future inhabitants.
Slowly, he made his way from slab to slab, reading the inscriptions. He found the resting-place of Lucrezia Contarini, the aunt Francesca had been visiting when she died. Next to it Francesca’s mother Caterina had been interred: La Contessa Caterina Contarini. 25 Febbraio 1920 - 18 Marzo 1977. Hic jacet pulvis cinis et nihil: Here lie dust, ashes, and nothing. She had died six years after Francesca. Withered flowers stood in a dry vase beneath her faded photograph.
But however hard he looked, he could not find Francesca’s tomb anywhere. He started again at the beginning, systematically following the slabs, going from one to the next with the care of an archaeologist. Nothing. He felt his flesh go cold. It could not be possible. He had been here, his fingers had touched her name. With a trembling hand, he removed her photograph from his pocket. The slab was just as he remembered it. And there, just beside it, was the edge of another slab. Only a few letters were visible, but they were enough to tell him that the second tomb was that of Francesca’s grandmother. And that Francesca’s mother now lay buried in the niche where her own coffin had been interred. Hic jacet pulvis cinis et nihil.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Outside, the rain still fell in a steady stream. The cemetery seemed to have emptied of people, and as he traced his way back past weeping angels and the idealized busts and photographs of the dead, he noticed that the funeral cortege had already embarked on its journey back to the city. Venice lay hidden behind a grey curtain, separated from its dead by a wintry channel of rain-lashed water.
In the cloisters he found a young Franciscan monk who offered to take him to the sacristan. The original monastery of San Cristofero was long closed. Now a small contingent of working monks was attached to the island’s church, a building of severely classical appearance, designed by Coducci in the fifteenth century. The monks’ chief function was to smooth the path from Venice to the grave. They tended the cemetery and supervised the burials, greeting each funeral party as it arrived, stoical or weeping, at the landing stage.
