Lucia - Andrea Di Robilant [20]
Alvise left on a rainy morning. There were no tearful goodbyes: he slipped out of town leaving an affectionate note behind. If Lucia was hurt she did her best not to show it. She protested:
Well done, Mister spouse! You dump me right when we are having our best time together without even a word of warning? I forgive you because I understand. But it doesn’t mean your absence is less painful to me now that I have enjoyed your dearest, sweetest company…I thank you for everything, and at this anxious moment I can only wish you a safe journey, hoping God will protect you from the rain and other more dangerous hazards.
Florence seemed empty without Alvise. “It was strange to revisit some of the same places we went to without the company of my dear husband,” she wrote to him the first night they were apart. “I was assailed by such stirring memories. Enough now, when shall I see you again? It is all I can think of.” She was sharing the hotel room with her sister, the person she had been closest to all her life and from whom she would soon be separated.
Paolina doesn’t want me to write any more, she says she wants to sleep…After all that has happened, will I be able to sleep? I don’t think so. Not until I will be sure that you have safely arrived in Bologna and then in Ferrara and after that in Padua and finally in Venice…Adieu my beloved husband.66
Chapter Two
PALAZZO MOCENIGO
Lucia woke up in her sunlit bedroom at Palazzo Mocenigo. Her chambermaid, Maria, brought her a silver tray with a cup of hot chocolate and a note from Alvise. He was in the habit of leaving very early in the morning for a busy day of work, and though he usually took care to leave an affectionate line or two for his wife, she never quite knew when he might reappear. At times it was only a matter of a few hours before his gondola came gliding to the riva of the palazzo, but often enough he simply vanished, as he had done on that rainy morning in Florence, leaving only vague hints as to his whereabouts and when he should be expected home. The house messengers and gondoliers, however, always knew where to find him. So Lucia sent off a brief reply to his note: “I am just getting up, my beloved…Love me and come back to me quickly…I feel so lost when you are away from me.”1
They had been married over a month, but Lucia still felt very disorientated in the sprawling Palazzo Mocenigo. Upon returning to Venice after her four years in Rome, everything had seemed so immediately familiar to her: the shimmering profile of the palaces, the noisy traffic on the water, the raw smell coming up from the canals as the tide ebbed and flowed. So it was somewhat unsettling to be living in such a vast and mysterious house, where so many generations of Mocenigos had lived and died, and not at Ca’ Memmo, the smaller, more intimate palazzo further up the Grand Canal, beyond the bend of the Rialto, where she had grown up and which she had always considered her home.
On the evening of the Memmos’ arrival in Venice after the long journey from Rome, Lucia was whisked off with her sister to Santa Maria della Celestia, a fashionable convent next to the church of San Francesco della Vigna. Every day, she received a stream of chattering relatives in the parlour; when Alvise’s handsome face appeared through the wooden grid, she was always overcome by a flush of excitement.