The Glassblower of Murano - Marina Fiorato [4]
He is no pantomime villain. I can't demonize him, I can't even hate him. Damn him.
The house sale had given her freedom. She could now embark on her adventure, or her mistake. She had told no-one what she planned, not even her mother Elinor. Especially not her mother. Her mother had no love for Venice.
Elinor Manin was an academic who specialized in Renaissance Art. In the seventies she had gone on a tutor exchange from King's College London with her opposite number in Ca' Foscari at the University of Venice. While there she had rejected the advances of the earnest baby professors from Oxford and Cambridge and fallen instead for Bruno Manin, simply because he looked like he had stepped from a painting.
Elinor had seen him every day on the Linea 52 vaporetto which took her from the Lido where she lived to the university. He worked on the boat - opening and closing the gate, tying and untying the boat at each , fermata stop. Bruno twisted the heavy ropes between his long fingers and leapt from the boat to shore and back again with a curious catlike grace and skill. She studied his face, his aquiline nose, his trim beard, his curling black hair, and tried to identify the painting he had come front. Was it a Titian or a Tiepolo? A Bellini? Which Bellini? As Elinor looked from his profile to the impossibly beautiful palazzi of the Canal Grande, she was suddenly on fire with enthusiasm for this culture where the houses and the people kept their genetic essence so pure for millennia that they looked the same now as in the Renaissance. This fire that she felt, this continuity and rightness, did not leave her when Bruno noticed her glances and asked her for a drink. It did not leave her when he took her back to his shared house in Dorsoduro and bedded her. It did not even leave her when she found that she was pregnant.
They married in haste and decided to call the baby Corrado if it was a boy and Leonora if it was a girl, after Bruno's parents. As they lay in bed with the waters of the canal casting an undulating crystal mesh onto the ceiling, Bruno told her of his ancestor, the famous maestro of glassblowers, Corrado Manin, known as Corradino. Bruno told Elinor that Corradino was the best glass-maker in the world, and gave her a glass heart made by the maestro's own hand. It was all incredibly romantic. They were happy. Elinor made the heart reflect the light on to the ceiling, while Bruno lay with his hand on her belly. Here inside her, thought Elinor, was that fire, that continuity, that eternal flame of the Venetian genome. But the feeling faded as the modern world broke into theirs. Elinor's parents, not surprisingly, felt none of the respect for Bruno's profession that the Venetians feel for their boatmen. Nor were they impressed by his refusal to leave Venice and move to London.
For Elinor too, this was a shock. Her reverie ended abruptly, she was back in London in the seventies with a small daughter, and a promise from Bruno to write and visit. Baby Leonora spent her first months with her grandparents or at the University creche. When Bruno did not write Elinor was hurt but not surprised. Her pride stopped her from getting in touch with him. She made a gesture of retaliation by anglicizing her daughter's name to Nora. She began to appreciate feminist ideas and spent a great deal of time at single mother's groups rubbishing Bruno and men in general. At the Christmas of Nora's first year, Elinor received a Christmas card from an Italian friend from Ca' Foscari. Dottore Padovani had been a colleague