The Glassblower of Murano - Marina Fiorato [11]
The young woman in the great reception chambers of the Library explained to Nora in her precise and perfect English that unfortunately she may not enter the inner sanctum of the building. Visitors without reader's cards were, however, welcome to use the reference section. Nora produced her passport and watched the girl write out a day-pass in her neat round hand, and followed her, tingling, through double doors to the left of the main doors, which whispered a greeting as they closed behind her. The books waited in the still and stuffy air, dust and warm leather welcoming Nora with the familiarity of her student days. An elderly man was her only companion. He looked up, nodded, then dropped his bright eyes to his texts. The girl offered a brief explanation of the catalogues and melted away.
Nora began her search among the yellowing cards of the catalogues. `Manin' offered a bewildering number of entries, but she quickly realized that most of them pertained to a Doge - Lodovico; or Daniele, a revolutionary lawyer who had resisted the Austrian occupation of 1848. The sun moved across the great windows before she found the numerous references to Corrado Manin, and from a distant shelf hauled down a huge tome of the kind that adorns the coffee tables of the world, its photographs unloved and un-looked at from years end to years end. Seated at a leather covered table she leafed through its pages and was dazzled - even the faded 1960s photography did little to diminish what she saw there. Page after page of beauty, intricacy and sheer majesty, the work made her drop her head to her hands and prompted the old man to glance at her with concern.
I came here to find a city cousin to give me an entree into Venice, and I find instead a Master - a Leonardo, a Michelangelo.
Nora felt humility, inadequacy and pride in equal measure. Her eyes rested at last on a chandelier of surpassing beauty and read the legend beneath. `Candelabro - La Chiesa di Santa Maria della Pieta, Venezia.' Memory prompted her - she had seen, pasted on the warm walls of the city, a bill which proclaimed that tonight saw the beginning of a series of concerts of Venetian music in their original set- tings.The church of the Pieta had been listed. Nora quickly replaced the book and headed out into the light, turning right to the Tourist Information Office in the Casino da Caffe'. She bought her concert ticket and headed for San Zaccaria, stopping for a plate of pasta which she ate watching the sun dissolve into the lagoon.
Now, in the church of the Pieta, she knew she had made a good choice for her first night. The day had been such a revelation, such an assault on her senses, that she needed this time to just sit, to be forced into inertia for a couple of hours. She sat, let the music creep in her ears, and tried to collect her thoughts.
From the moment she arrived at Marco Polo airport she had felt a loss of control - as the motor launch whisked herself and her suitcase across the lagoon towards Venice she felt buffeted, physically by the wind, and mentally by her experience.
Since her waking in the small hours she had been in a kind of trance, automatically going through the well rehearsed motions of going abroad - taxi to the airport, checking in luggage. The feeling of lightness and of no return, as, unencumbered by bags, she wandered through the airport shops, all full of things she didn't need. In the bookshop she picked up a novel with a reproduction of Canaletto on the cover, and thought it strange that, by noon, she would be walking in the very precincts