The Glassblower of Murano - Marina Fiorato [69]
In his dream Corradino was on the Lido di Venezia, with his mother. The household were on a summer trip and the servants had roasted oysters on the beach while piccolo Corradino ran hither and thither in the surf, soaking his breeches with the whispering salt water. He was called to eat, and reclined on the blood-coloured velvet cushions with his mother's arm around him, her bosom smelling of vanilla. He tried an oyster for the first time, his eight-yearold palate first rejecting, then accepting the gelatinous creature as it slid down his throat. He tasted the oyster once it had left his mouth, and so began a lifelong partiality for this peasant food. The taste remained in the grittiness of the sand, left as a residue on his tongue, like sand washed up by a high tide; the acqua alta. In his dream he tasted the sand, the flesh of the oyster and the vanilla scent of his mother all at once, but when he woke at last, he knew he was far from the happiness of that day.
He felt the coarse sackcloth pressing on his face, planting a rough kiss on his lips like the greeting of his uncle Ugolino. Always bearded, it was ever a scratchy embrace - a traitor's kiss. Corradino struggled to breathe and turned his head slightly - it was better, but the stifling dark was hot and crushing and he was afraid. As his head turned he heard a metallic chink and felt two cold objects fall to the back of his head - the two ducat coins that Giacomo had pressed on his eyes after death, to pay the ferryman. He felt them move in his hair, cold metal for the dead sliding among the warm hair of the living. Perspiration soaked him in an instant as panic swelled in his throat and he fought the desperate urge to struggle and scream. They had not bound him, as they had promised not to, but they had no need - he could not feel his legs. A muffled scream escaped him once, then with a supreme effort he calmed himself. To keep the black panic at bay he began, for the next long moments, to remember with exactitude, with perfect detail, what the Frenchman had said.
`Corradino, have you heard of Romeo e Giulietta?'
Corradino was sitting in the confessional of his church, Santi Maria e Donato on the island of Murano. All the maestri worshipped here on Sundays. Religious observance was not required by the State, as the civic attitude was summed up in the phrase; 'Veneziani prima, poi cristiani' - `Venetians first, then Christians'. But the glassblowers were more devout than most, as they appreciated the gifts which elevated them above the common man. Corradino, in the arrogance of a great artisan, often had the blasphemous notion that he and God shared the same satisfaction in the creation of beauty. In his humbler moods he felt himself a tool or instrument of the Creator. Sometimes he listened to the words of the mass, but on other days he spent long moments marvelling at the Byzantine splendour of the mosaic that adorned the nave floor. He felt a respect and a brotherhood for the longdead-craftsmen who knew how to combine such abstract patterns with realistic beasts. In the universe of the mosaic nature was strange and sometimes inverted; here an eagle carried off a deer in his talons, there two roosters carried a helpless fox slung from a pole.
The mosaic is allegorickal - it describes my own existence to me. It is made of thousands of nuggets of glass just as my life is, and it depicts nature as it is and nature as it is not. Some of my daily life has remained the same, some is greatly changed.
Today he had come to confession as usual, but he did not confess to his usual priest. He realized as soon as the voice spoke in the warm dark that it was Duparcmieur.
They had never met in the same place twice, and no longer in Venice. The Frenchman had been a merchant on Burano where Corradino had gone to buy gold leaf, Duparcmieur's costume flamboyant enough to make him disappear in the spectrum of the multicoloured fishing houses. He had been a boatman who murmured to Corradino in low tones as he rowed the ferry between Venice and Giudecca. And now, he was a Catholic