Adieu, Sweet Amarillis by Philippa Pigache

Author:Philippa Pigache
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781999867416
Publisher: Cross-in-Hand Press
Published: 2017-11-01T16:33:41.161000+00:00

CHAPTER 17

I have never returned to Venice, except in dreams. It is a city to dream of and a city made of other people’s dreams. A city haunted by the pale ghosts of her glittering past; of domino-clad ladies laughing behind painted masks; peachy breasts escaping from lace-trimmed bodices; of pennant-trimmed barges and muscular gallants in parti-coloured hose. The sighs of long-dead lovers echo in the narrow dripping alleyways, beneath slanting, hump-backed bridges, across stately piazzas and the oleaginous waters of the lagoon. There is nothing virginal in a first encounter with Venice. Her reputation has gone before. She is like some ageing courtesan in a Titian paintings, hugging the shadows that soften her faded beauty and smiling with melancholy at the remembrance of her glorious past, as she subsides, cracked and crumbling, into the polluted water of her canals.

Venice inspires the poet in us all, though doubtless everything I felt had been experienced, and probably recorded with more skill, before. At the end of those 10 days I folded up my Venice and laid her, interleaved with tissue paper, in a deep drawer at the back of my life never to be worn again.

We arrived at dusk with the setting sun behind us, bathing domes, towers and façades in flattering golden light. The platform of the railway station disgorged us without preamble upon the quay of the Grand Canal. Where the forecourts of other mainline terminuses bustle with taxis, buses and cars, Venice offered us the bobbing awnings of the motor bus and the tall, toothed prows of polished black gondolas.

Despite of the anticipation of the visual feast to come, what actually hit me first was the smell: a mixture of ozone, engine oil, and rotting vegetable matter. After the smell came the silence. Not absolute silence: there was a distant cacophony of clanging church bells, chugging motor boats, and a sing-song of voices shouting to one another. But compared with the deafening, motorised roar of a modern city, the place was rural. I could hear birds.

“Roly, caro, you’re here, you’re really here!” A small, dark woman rushed towards us as we emerged onto the quay. She wore red from top to toe with drifty things around her throat. She hurled herself at Roland like a demented poodle and he was forced to drop the suitcases he was carrying in order to catch her.

“Did you have a good trip? You’re on time. It’s so great to see you,” she bubbled.

“Satisfactory, I think one could say,” said Roland his eyes catching mine with a conspiratorial twinkle over the top of a scarlet beret.

“Anna,” he said, when he had managed to disentangle himself from the passionate embrace and the drifty things. “Anna this is Olga; Olga Rudge, concert violinist; she and Ezra Pound – the writer and composer – organise the concerts and study sessions. Olga; this is Anna Williams, singer.”

I found myself looking into the violet blue eyes of a woman, close to Roland’s age, with dark hair peeping out under her beret and a wide carmine mouth.

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