On the way home from the bakery, she stops to buy some salad and fruit. The pale rain is still falling limply, covering the pavements in a greasy sheen and raising a rash of pockmarks on the surface of the water. Sebastiano and his son huddle over their produce under the green awning jury-rigged from the masts at either end of the barge.
‘Eh, contessa! Take a look at this fennel! Fresh from Sant’Erasmo, the genuine stuff.’
Even though she knows he’s trying to make a sale, Ada can’t help feeling flattered at the way he calls her ‘ contessa ’, without a trace of irony or obsequiousness, the way people did when titles were just a fact of life, a description like the colour of your hair or eyes. So she orders some of his overpriced fennel along with the salad leaves, apples and grapes. It is while Sebastiano is weighing out the fruit that Ada catches sight of the figure fixing her with his moronic leer from the other side of the canal, his cloak billowing about him.
‘What’s the matter?’ says Sebastiano, looking up from the makeshift counter of slatted wooden boxes piled high with potatoes and lemons and tomatoes. Following her fixed gaze, he turns to look. The dead-end alley opposite is empty except for some scaffolding whose protective tarpaulin screen is flapping in the stiff easterly wind.
‘Are you all right?’ he asks, looking at her with barely veiled anxiety.
A wherry full of plastic sacks of sand and cement comes up the canal, its temporary foredeck of planks supporting a battered wheelbarrow and a cement mixer lying on its side. Going to the Pagan house, as Ada still thinks of it, even though Maria Pagan has been dead a year or more. Now some foreigner has bought the property and is paying a fortune to have it done up…
‘Carry la Contessa Zulian’s shopping home for her,’ Sebastiano barks at his son, a gangling youth wearing a jacket inscribed Washington Redskins, a single gold earring and a baseball cap turned back to front. The boy scowls and mutters something under his breath to which Sebastiano responds with a guttural monosyllable. Father and son sway back and forth as their barge heaves at its moorings under the swell of the passing wherry, pinching the bald tyres which serve as fenders. Ada Zulian recalls seeing a motor vehicle, many years ago, when her parents took her to the Lido. Waving away the offers of help, she tells Sebastiano she’ll pay him next week and trudges off, listing slightly to port, a bulging blue-and-white striped plastic bag in each hand.
On the stone pillar supporting the railing of the bridge perches a seagull with a bit of bloody liver in its beak. Ada carefully avoids looking it in the eye, lest she be beguiled. As she reaches the top step of the bridge, the gull tumbles sideways off the pillar, unfolding its wings and skimming the surface of the water before rising with a lazy flap to catch the wind which tosses it high above the houses like a scrap of paper.
‘Ada!’
At first she is loathe to look round, in case there is no one there. But when the call is repeated she recognizes the voice of Daniele Trevisan. There he is, leaning out of his window on the other side of the canal.
‘How’s it going?’ he asks.
Ada Zulian is suddenly overwhelmed by a giddy conviction that all this has happened before. Which it has, of course, years ago, before the war, before her marriage, when they were both young. Only then it was she at the window and Daniele below in the street, murmuring sweet nothings…
‘Are you all right?’ asks Daniele Trevisan, just as Sebastiano had earlier.
Ada grasps her bags and plods down the steps of the bridge, greasy from the rain. Everyone is always so worried about her! Ever since Rosetta suddenly reappeared, forcing Ada to go to ground among the lunatics on San Clemente, people have been overwhelmingly solicitious. She knows that she should be grateful for this show of concern, but in fact it rather gets on her nerves. In any case, what is she supposed to say? She knows all too well that it is impossible for her to discuss her real problems without all that solicitude dissolving in knowing looks and sniggers.
‘The place is full of ghosts,’ she mutters.
‘What?’
‘They should do something.’
Daniele regards her from his lofty perch with a gaze as unblinking as the gull’s.
‘Who should?’
Ada shrugs vaguely.
‘The authorities. I’m thinking of calling them, making a complaint.’
Daniele Trevisan waves his hands and sighs.
‘Come up a minute, Ada. Sit down and have a cup of coffee and a chat.’
She looks at him and shakes her head.
‘I must be getting home.’
‘Don’t call the police!’ he implores her. ‘You don’t want to start telling people you’ve been seeing ghosts again.’
‘There was mud on the floor,’ says Ada Zulian, but he doesn’t hear.
‘Keep the police out of it!’ insists Daniele. ‘If you need to talk to anyone, talk to me.’
Ada hefts her bags and goes on her way with a smile and a nod. Why is he so anxious that she should not phone the police? There is no doubt in Ada’s mind that she is dealing with something real. The other time, with Rosetta, there had never been anything tangible. How she would have treasured it, if there had! But she had always known at heart that the little girl she had so desperately called home night after night, until some exasperated neighbour finally denounced her to the police, had never really been there in the first place. That frail and vulnerable figure lurking in the shadows at the edge of her mind had always been as insubstantial as thought, and Ada’s frantic attempts to summon her nothing more than someone crying out in their sleep.
But this is different. She told Daniele two things, but as usual he only heard the one he wanted to hear, the one which fitted his idea of mad old Ada and her ghosts. He completely ignored what she said about the mud. But Ada has seen the mud. She has touched it and smelt it. She knows it’s real, and she also knows that ghosts don’t leave footprints behind them. So they can’t be ghosts, the figures who haunt her house and scuttle along the margins of her life. What, then?
She shivers as she edges along the canal and turns into a narrow alley leading to the back door of Palazzo Zulian, formerly reserved for tradesmen and domestic staff. Everything has turned topsy-turvy now that people have forgotten the use of boats. No one comes and goes by water any more except the dead.
The first thing she notices is the chair, fallen forward across the dull marble pavement. It is of some wood as dark and heavy as pig-iron, elaborately carved, centuries old, grotesque. It has stood there in the hall all Ada’s life. She would gladly throw it in the canal, but that is impossible. Her duty is to preserve the family heritage intact. Besides, she couldn’t lift the thing. It has moved, though, seemingly of its own accord. There have been many such incidents lately, objects seemingly coming to life in her absence like a flock of birds and settling back in a slightly different configuration. She has tried in vain to make out any pattern or purpose to the phenomenon. It is the very triviality of the whole thing which makes it so disturbing.
The staircase leading to the first floor is a shadowy tunnel burrowing upwards into the innards of the huge building. Ada clicks the switch uselessly. The bulb must have gone, like so many in the house. There are no servants now, of course, so she must get by as best she can until Nanni and Vincenzo call. At least her nephews have stuck by her, despite their frequent differences of opinion. Not that they’re particularly warm or cordial, but at least they drive over from the mainland to see her every once in a while. That’s something these days, when the young are worse than Turks…
She pauses at the top of the staircase, in the long hallway running the length of the building. Amplified by the bare vaulted expanse of the andron below, the lapping of wavelets against the disused watersteps fills the air, as though someone were swimming in the canal. For a moment it seems to Ada that she can hear something else, a whispering or rustling, somewhere nearby. Mice, no doubt. She has given up trying to keep them down since her cat died, and hasn’t the heart to get another. There have been enough absences in her life as it is.
Leaving her bags on the landing, she opens the door into the first of the suite of rooms on the canal side of the building, the only one still in use. The great space is dark, the shutters tightly fastened. Surely she opened them before going out? Or was that yesterday? A noise behind her makes her start and look round, but it is only one of her plastic shopping bags subsiding. An apple tumbles over the collapsed rim and rolls away towards the edge of the top step. Just beyond, at the bottom of the long flight of stairs, its long bony arm upraised and pointing at her, stands a skeleton.
