The Music of Bodies by Maxim Jakubowski

Author:Maxim Jakubowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2011-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

TAKE ME TO CARNEVALE

They had arranged to meet in a small cafe on the left hand side of Campo Santa Maria Formosa, right opposite the church and the hospital. It was February. It was Venice. A thin morning mist still shrouded the city, floating in from the lagoon, like a shimmering curtain of silk, half obscuring the old stones, the canals and the normal sounds of the floating city.

The connection had been made over the Internet.

He hadn’t even brought his laptop with him on this Venice trip, but the apartment they were staying in, which he had agreed to house-sit for friends travelling in India, had a computer in almost every room and a wi-fi connection and it had been, for both of them, almost too much of a temptation. Like allowing their fate to be decided by the vagaries of electronic availability.

Emma had been sitting on one of the sofas, half reading and half daydreaming, while he listened to music on his iPod. Right then the soundtrack by Nick Cave for The Assassination of Jesse James, he would remember later.

“I don’t know,” Emma had said, and he had known exactly the precise words she had uttered, just from reading her lips behind the threnody in his ears. It was something she often mumbled when things were not quite right.

He’d switched off the music and turned towards her.

“What is it?”

The green of her eyes emerged from a sea of sadness.

“You know...” she replied.

He knew. Oh yes, he knew. They were just going nowhere, and no earnest conversation could put them back on track. Even in Venice.

They had reached the city a week or so earlier, arriving at Marco Polo airport. To save money, they had not gone to the extravagance of taking a water taxi but, instead, the bus which took them across the Ponte Della Liberta to Piazzale Roma where they had caught a vaporetto down the Grand Canal to the Rialto Bridge stop and, following the map they had been emailed by his friends, had somehow made their way on foot to the apartment, dodging the customary labyrinth of small bridges and lesser canals.

By now they had seen a multitude of churches, several handfuls of Titian and Canaletto paintings, eaten too much exquisite food to jade the best of palates and suffered an indigestion of baroque and classical architecture and the silences between them were growing longer.

From their bedroom window, they could see St Mark’s Place and the Doge’s Palace and the Campanile across a bend in the Canal. But the weather was cold and humid and the old building’s heating was stuttering at its best and they’d had to wear sweat shirts most of the time both inside and outside.

Maybe he should have chosen the Caribbean where they could have lazed naked on a beach and the warmth might have seeped into their mood. But Emma had never been to Venice and he had promised her he would take her anywhere she wanted, and she was aware that Roberto and Marta had offered them the apartment here should they ever wish to visit.

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